My friends, more schooled in these matters, reminded me that a breakup text was better than being “ghosted,” a practice that, when I learned of it, seemed worth bringing the guillotine back for. One friend asked if I had a “breakup plan.” A what? I found a worksheet on Etsy, seemingly modelled on a birth plan, only instead of “I may want a walking epidural,” the options to numb the pain included “start a side hustle.” Before I knew it, I was lost in a corner of the Internet populated by breakup coaches, heartbreak dietitians looking to replace the classic pint of ice cream with anti-inflammatory popcorn, and get-over-him getaways. The Chablé hotel, at its Yucatán and Maroma locations, offers a program called Healing Heartbreak, in which newly single guests can undergo a full-body exfoliation treatment to symbolize the “scrubbing away of the past.” When Al Green sang “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart,” the question was rhetorical. Now there’s the Mend app, which leads users through a seventeen-module online course that will “turn your breakup into a breakthrough.” At StrIVeMD, which has locations in Ohio, Illinois, and Texas, Dr. Syed Ali advertises ketamine injections as breakup therapy, claiming that they can provide relief from heartbreak-induced depression and anxiety within hours.
It had been nearly ten years since I’d last been on the dating market, and I felt like I had slept through some kind of revolution. I met my now ex-husband in 2015, at a friend’s birthday party. We sat on opposite sides of a long table at a Burmese restaurant, and I noticed him across the din of gossip and requests to pass the tea-leaf salad. We parted last summer, after many months of what one could call deliberation but was mostly me pleading to be free. My marriage had been everything I thought I could ask for: sturdy. I just didn’t feel particularly tended to. At first, I thought that was O.K. I was a grownup; I didn’t need anyone to take care of me. In time, I just started to feel more on my own than seemed right for someone who wasn’t actually on her own. After it ended, as I was still trying to understand how I had got caught up in a mess of my own making, I met someone really, really hot. He had a face you could not help but project all of your fantasies onto—when I showed his picture to a friend, she said, “Ooh, he looks like he reads.” He made films and lived in Chinatown, near a funeral parlor that hired a marching band to process down the street as part of the service. The last time I saw him before he sent me that text, we were in his kitchen eating pastries when we suddenly heard the brass horns. “It must be someone rich,” he said. “This is lasting a long time.” I did not know then that I was listening to our swan song.
First published in English two decades ago under the title Not Before Sundown, this novel was named one of the top 10 Nordic books. Now smartly retitled as Troll: A Love Story, and with only the odd reference to Windows 98 and CD-Roms to show its age, Finnish novelist Johanna Sinisalo’s debut feels fresh and bright.
Edwin Frank vows in his introduction to this book to try to do for the fiction of the last century what the critic Alex Ross’s landmark book The Rest Is Noise did for its music. He is as good as his word. This is the most engaging imagining of the progress of the 20th-century novel you will read. Frank brings serious erudition to the task – in his day job he is editorial director of New York Review Books and has for 25 years edited its eclectic classics series which breathes new life into half-forgotten or out-of-print treasures. Though he has a fine critical judgment, Frank writes as an enthusiast at least as much as an academic, trusting his taste, always alive to the stories he is telling and the arguments he makes.
It brings home that monetary systems constitute a pyramid of hierarchical claims, held together by a political contract that is constituted by legal codifications, material claims and social practises –without being reducible to any of those pillars. In other words, money is all kind of things. And if it is one thing, it is political.