Problematic is a word currently deployed rather in the way, in Victorian times, cloths were draped over naked statues. When we designate a person, or an event, or a text problematic, we simultaneously indicate its impropriety and choose, politely, to gloss over the details. Signifying disapproval, the word, in its delicate obfuscation, relieves us of the need to specify exactly what disturbs us. As it deflects, it reflects our incuriosity, and the presumed incuriosity of our interlocutors: you need not pay attention, we suggest, because problematic is all you need to know.
At 70, Vladimir Nabokov’s most famous book, Lolita, is decidedly problematic. It is, after all, a novel narrated by a pedophile, kidnapper, and rapist (also, lest we forget, murderer) who tells his story from prison, who relates his crimes with a pyrotechnic verbal exhilaration that is tantamount to glee, who seduces each reader into complicity simply through the act of reading: to read the novel to the end is to have succumbed to Humbert Humbert’s insidious, sullying charms. Framed by the banal platitudes of John Ray Jr., the fictional psychologist whose foreword introduces the account (“‘Lolita’ should make all of us—parents, social workers, educators—apply ourselves with still greater vigilance and vision to the task of bringing up a better generation in a safer world”), Humbert’s exuberant voice seduces the reader, even as so many of the novel’s characters are foolishly, sometimes fatally, seduced. What are we doing, when we read this book with such pleasure? What was Nabokov doing, in writing this unsettling novel?
Many answers to Fermi’s “paradox” have been proposed: Maybe alien civilizations burn out or destroy themselves before they can become interstellar wanderers. But perhaps the simplest answer is that such civilizations don’t appear in the first place: Intelligent life is extremely unlikely, and we pose the question only because we are the supremely rare exception.
A new proposal by an interdisciplinary team of researchers challenges that bleak conclusion. They have proposed nothing less than a new law of nature, according to which the complexity of entities in the universe increases over time with an inexorability comparable to the second law of thermodynamics — the law that dictates an inevitable rise in entropy, a measure of disorder. If they’re right, complex and intelligent life should be widespread.
All at once and much to my surprise, I am old. I did not expect it, and it is not what I expected. The world in which I worked, struggled, dreamed, and loved now regards me quite differently than it did even ten years ago. Abruptly, I’m one in a large minority that is often ignored, frequently disdained, and regularly segregated.
Ben Markovits’s quietly excellent new novel begins with the most mundane of middle-class crises. The book’s narrator, 55-year-old law professor Tom Layward, is taking his youngest child to university. For Tom and his wife Amy, the major tasks of parenting are about to vanish in the rear view mirror. The question is: what’s next?
It’s a moment of change and re-evaluation for any couple. But within Tom and Amy’s marriage an unexploded bomb is ticking. Tom tells us in the first paragraph that, 12 years earlier, Amy had an affair. He managed his heartbreak by making a deal with himself that he would leave when his youngest went to college.
If “The Impossible Thing” were a song, we’d call it a banger.
Like Miley Cyrus’ “Flowers” or Kendrick Lamar and SZA’s “Luther,” Belinda Bauer’s 10th novel is a pure pleasure machine, all the moving parts of which are designed to delight. It took a while for “The Impossible Thing” to come together, apparently — previously a book-a-year writer, Bauer has taken four years since “Exit” — but, holy mackerel, was it worth the wait.
But for those with the patience to read multiple accounts of the same failed errand and prepared to appreciate (perhaps to identify with, at least a little) the sometimes terrifying, often bleak and desperate visions experienced by travelers in the dark, this journey into a bedeviled night will repay the effort.
Thomas Jefferson devised his own special way to stay focused on this radical yet simple message of Jesus. He decided, Pagels tells us, “to ‘correct’ the gospels by cutting [the miracle stories] out of his own Bible with scissors, leaving intact only the teachings that he found rationally comprehensible and morally compelling.” On display at the Smithsonian, his Bible is an extraordinary example of the drastic measures sometimes required to stay focused (the cut-out sections of his book are reminiscent of CIA-redacted documents)—an even greater challenge today in our digital media-saturated world. Books like Pagels’s go a long way to help us achieve this focus.