Reviews

Henri Michaux wrote prose poems. Henri Michaux described paintings produced by metal patients. Henri Michaux documented his experiments with mescaline and LSD. Henri Michaux wrote explorer’s descriptions based on his travels. Henri Michaux created characters like Plume. Henri Michaux painted.

The Belgian-born French experimentalist produced a large body of work. Darkness Moves brings together some of his best writing starting from 1927 and running to the end of his life in 1984. Darkness Moves also includes 29 works of art.    

What is Michaux all about? He conveys his intent across two lines in A Dog’s Life, a piece from his 1929 publication My Properties: “I can’t just leave a word with its original meaning or even its form,” Michaux writes. Like many poets, he questions and reshapes meaning, yet not always with beauty or understanding in mind. “There may easily be thousands of sentences in a chapter and I’ve got to sabotage every one of them. It is absolutely essential to me.” 

I dipped in and out of Darkness Moves over three months. A lot of Michaux’s work didn’t land with me. The explorer’s descriptions are silly. I don’t like Plume. The trip reports bored me. Yet a few pieces did land. I found them incredibly powerful. I’ve copied those below along with a few notes. To break things up, I included a few of Michaux’s artworks; they are not related to the writing.

TOWARD SERENITY

He who does not accept the world builds no house in it. If he is cold, it’s without being cold. He is hot without heat. If he chops down birches, it’s as if he were chopping down nothing at all, but there are the birches, on the ground, and he takes his agreed-upon wages, or else he only takes a few punches. He takes the punches like a gift without any particular meaning, and he goes on his way, without being surprised.

He drinks water without being thirsty, he sinks into the rock without harm. Under a truck, with a broken leg, he looks just the same as usual and thinks of peace, of peace, of peace so hard to reach, so hard to keep, peace.

Although he has never gone out, the world is familiar to him. He knows the sea quite well. The sea is constantly beneath him, a sea without water, but not without waves, not without vastness. He knows the rivers. They run through him constantly, without water but not without languor, not without sudden rapids.

Hurricanes without air rage inside him. The immobility of Earth is also his. Roads, cars, flocks go through him endlessly, and a great tree without cellulose but quite hard ripens inside him like a bitter fruit, bitter often, sweet rarely.

Living thus at a distance, always alone at the rendezvous, without ever holding a hand in his hands, with a hook in his heart he thinks of peace, of that cursed throbbing peace, all his, and of the peace that is said to be above that peace.

Notes: Toward Serenity suggests that one must first accept the imperfections of our world to live in, be affected by and change it. The “he” here refuses to engage with reality. He takes shelter in the inner hollows. In turn, he does not know how to feel, because it is not cold without being cold and hot without heat. Experience and understanding are deprived of essence. Yet it is with a “hook in his heart he thinks of peace, of that cursed throbbing peace,” because he experiences that peace at a distance. Ensconced in the space within, the outer world reflects a false serenity.

VISION

She was washing her hands in soapy water, when suddenly it changed into cutting crystals, into hard needles, and the blood (as it has the knack of doing) flowed out and away, leaving the woman to her own devices.

A little while later, as often happens in this century so obsessed with cleanliness, a man came in, and he, too, intended to wash up: he rolled his sleeves all the way up, covered his arm with foamy water (it was real foam now), deliberately, attentively—but dissatisfied, he broke it with a sharp blow on the edge of the sink, and began to wash another, longer arm that grew out of him immediately, as a replacement for the first one. It was an arm softened by a more abundant, silkier down, but once he had soaped it up thoroughly, almost lovingly, suddenly he gave it a mean look, suddenly dissatisfied, he broke it, “Hai!”, and yet another one that grew out of in its place, he broke that one in the same way, and then the next one and then another one, and then yet another one (he was never satisfied) and so on up to seventeen—for in my terror, I was counting! Then he disappeared with an eighteenth that he preferred not to wash but to use just as it was for the needs of the day.

Notes: Using violent imagery, Michaux derides the pursuit of purity and perfection. Soap lathers on impurities. Grotesque measures fail to wipe them away. The narrator watches in terror: “for in my terror, I was counting!” Vision comments on the growing availability of affordable commercial soaps in France in the 1930s that eventually gave way to a hygiene offensive. 

THE LOCK-EATER

In the corridors of the hotel, I met him walking around with a little lock-eating animal. He would put the little animal on his elbow, and then the animal was happy and would eat the lock.

Then he would walk further down the hall, and the animal was happy and another lock would be eaten. And so on for several, and so on for many. The man was walking around like someone whose home had expanded. As soon as he opened a door, a new life would begin for him.

But the little animal was so hungry for locks that its master soon had to go out again and look for other break-ins, so that he got very little rest.

I did not want to ally myself with this man. I told him that what I liked best in life was going out. He looked blank. We weren’t on the same side, that’s all, or else I would have allied myself with him; I liked him but he did not suit me.

Notes: The Lock-Eater carries Jungian undertones. The hotel may represent the distant parts of self that remain foreign to the narrator. The stranger embodies curiosity. And the lock-eating animal reflects the desire to open unopened doors within. The stranger cannot open the locks himself but rather through the primal urge of this small animal. Each opened door begets a new life; it’s enthralling and exhausting. 

The narrator does not want to become this curious stranger. “I told him that what I liked best in life was going out.” He abhors the inward journey. The narrator is choosing the safety of the known. The narrator seems like the “he” in Towards Serenity, in this case unable to accept or explore his inner world.

VOICES

I heard a voice in those unhappy days and I heard: “I shall reduce them, these men, I shall reduce them and already they are reduced although they don’t realize it yet. I shall reduce them to so little that there will be no way of telling man from woman and already they are no longer what they once were, but since their organs can still interpenetrate they still think themselves different, one this, the other that. But so terribly shall I make them suffer that there will no longer be any organ that matters. I shall leave them only their skeletons, a mere line of their skeleton for them to hang their unhappiness on. They’ve run enough! What do they still need legs for? Their movements are small, small! And it will be much better that way. Just as a statue in a park makes only one gesture, whatever may happen, even so shall I petrify them—but smaller, smaller.”

I heard that voice, I heard it and I shuddered, but not all that much, because I admired it, for its dark determination and its vast though apparently senseless plan. That voice was only one voice among hundreds, filling the top and bottom of the atmosphere and the East and the West, and all of them were aggressive, wicked, hateful, promising a sinister future for man.

But man, panicky in one place, calm in another, had reflexes and calculations in case of hard times, and he was ready, although he might generally have appeared hunted and ineffectual.

He who can be tripped up by a pebble had already been walking for two hundred thousand years when I heard the voices of hatred and threats which meant to frighten him. 

Notes: While Michaux published Voices in Facing the Locks in 1954, he wrote this earlier in the wake of World War II. He writes here of hate. A singular voice wants to reduce humanity to tiny skeletons. The hate here doesn’t belong to a single individual; it’s the collective hate of humanity projected right back on to us. “That voice was only one voice among hundreds, filling the top and bottom of the atmosphere and the East and the West, and all of them were aggressive, wicked, hateful, promising a sinister future for man.” Yet man(kind) “had reflexes and calculations in case of hard times.” Yes, there’s a calculus and mortal machinery by which we endure through hate, a mechanism for perseverance.  

POETRY FOR POWER

I. I AM ROWING

I have cursed your forehead your belly your life
I have cursed the streets your steps plod through
The things your hands pick up
I have cursed the inside of your dreams

I have set a puddle in your eye that can’t see any more
An insect in your ear that can’t hear any more
A sponge in your brain that can’t understand any more

I have frozen you in the soul of your body
Iced you in the depths of your life
The air you breathe suffocates you
The air you breathe has the air of a cellar
Is an air that has already been exhaled
been puffed out by hyenas
The dung of this air is something no one can breathe

Your skin is damp all over
Your skin sweats out waters of the great fear
Your armpits reek far and wide of the crypt

Animals stop dead as you pass
Dogs howl at night, their heads raised toward your house
You can’t run away
You can’t muster the strength of an ant to the tip of your feet
Your fatigue makes a lead stump in your body
Your fatigue is a long caravan
Your fatigue stretches out to the country of Nan
Your fatigue is inexpressible

Your mouth bites you
Your nails scratch you
No longer yours, your wife
No longer yours, your brother
The sole of his foot bitten by an angry snake

Someone has slobbered on your descendants
Someone has slobbered on the laugh of your little girl
Someone has walked slobbering by the face of your domain

The world moves away from you

I am rowing
I am rowing
I am rowing against your life
I am rowing
I split into countless rowers
To row more strongly against you

You fall into blurriness
You are out of breath
You get tired before the slightest effort

I row
I row
I row

You go off drunk, tied to the tail of a mule
Drunkenness like a huge umbrella that darkens the sky
And assembles the flies
Dizzy drunkenness of the semicircular canals
Unnoticed beginnings of hemiplegia
Drunkenness no longer leaves you
Lays you out to the left
Lays you out to the right

Lays you out on the stony ground of the path
I row
I row
I am rowing against your days

You enter the house of suffering
I row
I row
On a black blindfold your actions are recorded
On the great white eye of a one-eyed horse your future is rolling

I AM ROWING

II ACROSS OCEANS AND DESERT

Effective as coitus with a virgin girl
Effective
Effective as the absence of wells in the desert
Effective is my action
Effective

Effective as the traitor who stands apart surrounded by his men ready to kill
Effective as the night for hiding objects
Effective as the goat for producing kids
Tiny, tiny, heartbroken already
Effective as the viper

Effective as a sharpened knife to make a wound
As rust and urine to keep it going 
As shaking, falls and bangs to make it wider
Effective is my action

Effective as the scornful smile for raising an ocean of hate in the breast of the scorned man, an ocean that will never dry up
Effective as the desert for dehydrating bodies and toughening souls
Effective as the jaws of a hyena for chewing the unprotected limbs of corpses
EFFECTIVE
Effective is my action

III. TO ACT, I COME

Opening the door inside you, I have entered
To act, I come
I am here
I support you
You are no longer abandoned
You are no longer in difficulty
Their strings untied, your difficulties fall
The nightmare that left you haggard is no more
I am shouldering you
With me you place
Your foot on the first step of the endless stairway
Which carries you
Which brings you up
Which fulfills you

I appease you
I am spreading out sheets of peace in you
I am soothing the child of your dream
Surge
Surge in fronds on the circle of images around the frightened woman
Surge on the snows of her paleness
Surge on her hearth… and the fire lights up again

TO ACT, I COME
Your thoughts of thrust are supported
Your thoughts of failure, weakened
My strength is in your body, slipped inside
…and your face, losing its wrinkles, is refreshed
Sickness no longer makes its way in you
Fever leaves you

The peace of vaults
The peace of flowering prairies
Peace comes back into you

In the name of the highest number, I am helping you
Like a smoking crater
All the heaviness rises off your overburdened shoulders
The wicked heads around you
Venomous observers of the miseries of the weak
Can see you no longer
Exist no longer

A crew of reinforcements
In mystery and a deep line
Like an undersea wake
Like a bass chant
I have come
This chant takes you
This chant raises you up
This chant is animated by many streams
This chant is fed by a calmed Niagara
This chant is entirely for you

No more pincers
No more dark shadows
No more fears
There is no more trace of them
There is no need to have them
Where pain was, is cotton
Where scattering was, is solder
Where infection was, is new blood
Where locks were is open sea
The carrying sea and the fullness of you
Intact, like an egg of ivory.

I have bathed the face of your future.

Notes: Poetry for Power is, for me, the most powerful piece in this collection. In the afterward, Michaux wrote of channeling his hatred for one man onto a single page only to realize that the hatred had outgrown the man. In I AM ROWING, the power of repetition creates the feeling of a relentless, mechanical labor. He moves from cursing his enemy to attacking his enemy, then on to the world abandoning his enemy until the enemy starts to attack himself: “Your mouth bites you. // Your nails scratch you.” He is rowing against his enemy.

Michaux focuses on effectiveness in ACROSS OCEANS AND DESERT. I’m not sure what to make of this passage. Perhaps he speaks of how powerful he rows, enough to carry across different landscapes.

In TO ACT, I COME he adopts the voice of a powerful internal ally. “I am shouldering you.” Now he helps. “Where pain was, is cotton // Where scattering was, is solder // Where infection was, is new blood // Where locks were is open sea.” He comes to raise you up, the fullness of you. 

The middle section doesn’t do much for me, but the first and last hit hard. If someone cursed you with such force, you would fear for your safety. He writes with true hatred. And if someone came to raise you up with that chant, you would grow wings and remain indebted. 

POST-THOUGHTS

The most penetrating, the most disarming, most indigestible emotion of my life was when I heard my heart on the electrocardiographic loudspeaker (I wouldn’t swear that is the correct term!).

“That’s my heart? That pump with no bite, no get-up-and-go!”

Embarrassed, I looked at the simple, kindly technician who seemed to pay no particular attention to it. Heart after heart filing by all afternoon did not dispose her to be full of reflective attentiveness.

For me, everything was becoming clear, and intensely discouraging. That smooth, slow, dutiful, dull thing—that was what was controlling my slumping life, and I uselessly perked it up and nagged at it, at the mercy of fatigue, of insomnia, but stubborn, too.

A heart with no real kick, not made for action, not made for “pointed” work and occasionally a sort of hesitation in its pumping sound, a dull, secret turnaround: a bad sign. Me, bound to that thing forever! If you gave that cursed motor to the most brilliant mind, what would become of it?

Any study of psychology and self-analysis should begin in this way, it seems to me. In a word, I was discovering cardiomancy. Hidden behind the newcomers, I listened to the sounds of the hearts being recorded around me. There were hearts of many kinds. Some of them very striking, as I would have liked mine to be, hearts for an epic, if the time was right. Others were “cavaliers.” After a few lively ones, another appeared all muffled, uncertain, which I wouldn’t have wanted in my chest or my life for anything in the world; muffled, but without giving the impression of a double bottom, as mine did.

My heart made me think, irresistibly, of a cistern.

P.S. If there is a Karma and a natural expiation in some future life, the legacy of a defective heart would be among “the most avenging, expiating legacies.”

Notes: This piece is a reflection, not a prose poetry. It relays Michaux’s feelings about hearing the beat of his heart. I find it sad and entertaining in equal measure. His heart beats with a whimper, not the thud of a striking fist. He wishes his heart carried the beat for an epic. It’s the kind of reflection that a poet would have. 

To wrap this up, here are a few other lines from the collection that I quite like.

From The Letter

We could not recognize ourselves in the silence, we could not recognize ourselves in the screams, nor in our caverns, nor in the gestures of foreigners. 

From the afterword of A Certain Plume

The greatest fatigue of the day and of a life may be caused by the effort, by the tension necessary to keep the same self through the continual temptations to change it. We want too much to be someone. There is not one self. There are not ten selves. There is no self. ME is only a position in equilibrium. (One among a thousand others, continually possible and always at the ready.) An average of "me's," a movement in the crowd. In the name of many, I sign this book.

Notes: This is Michaux reflecting on what he’s trying to convey in his work. This speaks to me. We are anchored to a body that runs a baseline operating system for personality, but that personality splinters into myriad forms of self. We are different people. 

From Magic

I am so weak (or rather, I used to be), that if my mind could coincide with anyone at all, I would immediately be subjugated and swallowed up by him and completely dependent on him; but now I keep my eye on it, I’m attentivte—dogged, rather—at being always, very exclusively, me.

Thanks to this self-discipline, now I have more and more chance of never coinciding with any mind at all and being able to move around freely in this world. 

Better still! Now that I’ve come to be so strong, I would gladly challenge the most powerful man alive. What would his will matter to me? I have become so sharp and circumstantial that if I were right in front of him he wouldn’t be able to find me.

Notes: There are times where I feel I am not my own man. In those moments, I want to follow this path, powered by self discipline to become strong. 

“You do not describe the past by writing about old things, but by writing about the haze that exists between yourself and the past.”

In Blinding, that haze takes the form of “mole-like wanderings along the continuum of reality-hallucination-dream.” Mircea Cărtărescu tends toward dream and hallucination, taking readers on a journey that is often hard to follow and, despite rich language, lacks for me the connective tissue that defines great stories.

“The dream highways would abruptly pour onto reality’s thoroughfare,” Cărtărescu writes. In this case, dreams flood the thoroughfare, often with body horror. At least two people get their balls ripped off in the first part of the book.

Cărtărescu puts forward relatable reflections like this: “I had always hoped my life would go differently than anyone else’s. That it would have a meaning, a meaning that perhaps I couldn’t grasp, but that was visible from somewhere high up, like a pattern in an immense field. Nothing ought to be accidental.”

And he is right to say that “We live in two media, just as a tree lives in both the air and earth, its branches aerial roots, and its roots underground branches.”

Yet his exploration leaves a bit to be desired. “I am a voyeur of my own childhood and youth, trying to understand what is happening behind the blinds, running from one window to another, misreading what I see in the shadows,” he writes, before bridging to one of the many sexual references in the book: “mistaking an elbow for a breast, mistaking a dress thrown over the back of a chair for exposed buttocks, mistaking black branches against the window for lovers flopping onto the bed.”

Cărtărescu generated a lot of hype with Solenoid and Blinding. He is skilled, but his work just doesn’t ring my bell.

“Everyone starts at the beginning of the road, and the world is in an endless state of childhood.”

With Season of Migration to the North, Tayeb Salih proves that simple writing can be beautiful. Hardly a word in this book would challenge a middle schooler. Yet the writing is beautiful. The translation played a big part. Denys Johnson-Davies proved that translation can carry beauty across language and culture. What an excellent read.

Season of Migration to the North is an anticolonialist narrative. It follows an unnamed narrator who returns to Sudan after earning a doctorate in England for a thesis on the life of an obscure western poet. His studies kept him away for seven years. Upon his return, he meets the protagonist, a quiet man called Mustafa Sa’eed.

At first, Mustafa passes as a quiet, land-working migrant from another part of Sudan. One drunken evening, he betrays his past by reciting poetry in English. Perplexed, the narrator soon seeks him out to learn his true identity.

“Thus Mustafa Sa’eed has, against my will, become a part of my world, a thought in my brain, a phantom that does not want to take itself off. And thus too I experience a remote feeling of fear, fear that it is just conceivable that simplicity is not everything.”

It turns out that Mustafa is the product of colonial education: “We teach people in order to open up their minds and release their captive powers. But we cannot predict the result. Freedom – we free their minds from superstition. We give the people the keys of the future to act therein as they wish.”

As a fatherless boy, he went to Cairo to study. Success sent him to London, but never with feelings of love. “Behind me was a story of spectacular success at school, my sole weapon being that sharp knife inside my skull, while within my breast was a hard, cold feeling – as if it had been cast in rock.”

In London, he established himself as a respected scholar. He published. He taught. People respected him. Yet he cared for nobody. “This is a fact in my life: the way chance has placed in my path people who gave me a helping hand at every stage, people for whom I had no feelings of gratitude; I used to take their help as though it were some duty they were performing for me.”

That would be enough to make him troubling. It also turns out that Mustafa was a womanizer. Some of his ex-lovers committed suicide. “There is a still pool in the depths of every woman that I knew how to stir. One day they found her dead. She had gassed herself. They also found a small piece of paper with my name on it. It contained nothing but the words: ‘Mr Sa’eed, may God damn you.’”

Mustafa also murdered a woman he married in London. The victim’s name was Jean Morris. Time and again, Jean Morris denied Mustafa before they finally came together in a marriage of farce. You might read Jean and Mustafa as allegories for their respective cultures.

Mustafa tells the narrator: “Everything which happened before my meeting her was a premonition; everything I did after I killed her was an apology, not for killing her, but for the lie that was my life.”

This is where the cultural clash really cuts through: “Everyone who is educated today wants to sit at a comfortable desk under a fan and live in an air-conditioned house surrounded by a garden, coming and going in an American car as wide as the street. If we do not tear out this disease by the roots we shall have with us a bourgeoisie that is in no way connected with the reality of our life, which is more dangerous to the future of Africa than imperialism itself.”

Shortly after the narrator learns all this, Mustafa presumably drowns in the Nile, leaving him with unanswered questions about his identity and, surprisingly, the responsibility of caring for Mustafa’s current wife and two sons. In passing, Mustafa also entrusts him with a key to a locked room in his house; nobody knows what’s inside.

Mustafa’s widow, Hosna, is later pressured to remarry. She refuses and tries to appeal to the narrator. Against her will, she is married to Wad Rayyes. When he attempts to forcefully consummate the marriage, she kills him and then takes her own life.

Only after this does the narrator enter the locked room. Inside, he finds Western literature, poetry, newspapers and art. He discovers Mustafa’s published works from his time in London, as well as more recent scraps of poetry and other fleeting projects. He receives this like a blow, the impact of outside influence. He wants to burn it all down.

The narrator laments: “He wants to be discovered, like some historical object of value. There was no doubt of that, and I now know that it was me he had chosen for that role. It was no coincidence that he had excited my curiosity and had then told me his life story incompletely so that I myself might unearth the rest of it. It was no coincidence that he had left me a letter sealed with red wax to further sharpen my curiosity, and that he had made me guardian of his two sons so as to commit me irrevocably, and that he had left me the key to this wax museum.”

The real trouble, though, is that the narrator, educated in the west, sees Mustafa in himself, especially upon entering the room: “I struck a match. The light exploded on my eyes and out of the darkness there emerged a frowning face with pursed lips that I knew but could not place. I moved towards it with hate in my heart. It was my adversary Mustafa Sa’eed. The face grew a neck, the neck two shoulders and a chest, then a trunk and two legs, and I found myself standing face to face with myself. This is not Mustafa Sa’eed – it’s a picture of me frowning at my face from a mirror. Suddenly the picture disappeared and I sat in the darkness for I know not how long listening intently and hearing nothing.”

Mustafa, his passing, and Hosna’s suicide, along with uncertainty about his place in the world, push the narrator to his limits. He questions his sanity. At the end of the book, we find him floating on his back in the Nile, halfway between north and south. He resolves to rid himself of Mustafa’s lingering presence and to stand as an individual in his own right.

“Though floating on the water, I was not part of it. I thought that if I died at that moment, I would have died as I was born – without any volition of mine. All my life I had not chosen, had not decided. Now I am making a decision. I choose life. I shall live because there are a few people I want to stay with for the longest possible time and because I have duties to discharge. It is not my concern whether or not life has meaning. If I am unable to forgive, then I shall try to forget. I shall live by force and cunning. I moved my feet and arms, violently and with difficulty, until the upper part of my body was above water. Like a comic actor shouting on a stage, I screamed with all my remaining strength, ‘Help! Help!’”

What a book. It’s easy to see why The Shipping News won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award, along with several other awards. Upon finishing, I added the rest of Annie Proulx’s books to the ever-growing list I plan to read one day.

The Shipping News traces the life of Quoyle, who was “a failure at loneliness, yearned to be gregarious, to know his company was a pleasure to others,” but often fell short. He’s the kind of guy who “never had the right things.”

We meet Quoyle in middle age. Through a chance encounter with soon-to-be friend Partridge, Quoyle takes on a job writing about public works for a newspaper. He’s third-rate at best. The managing editor, Punch, keeps Quoyle in work during the school year and out when students are available. In the interim, Quoyle takes odd jobs.

Quoyle isn’t all bad. “Punch had noticed Quoyle, who spoke little himself, inspired talkers. His only skill in the game of life. His attentive posture, his flattering nods urged waterfalls of opinion, reminiscence, recollection, theorizing, guestimating, exposition, synopsis and explication, juiced the life stories out of strangers.”

While working at the paper, Quoyle meets and marries Petal. She sucks. While Petal gives Quoyle two daughters, Sunshine and Bunny, she doesn’t respect him one bit. Petal openly sleeps around. Quoyle loves her anyway. Then she dies in a car accident with someone she left Quoyle for.

Eventually Punch lets him go for good. Partridge connects Quoyle to an opportunity at a newspaper called The Gammy Bird in Killick-Claw, a fictional, storm-battered town in Newfoundland. Quoyle’s aunt Agnis convinces him to move and take the job for a fresh start. They go together, with Sunshine and Bunny in tow.

Killick-Claw is unforgiving. “Spring starvation showed skully heads, knobbed joints beneath flesh. What desperate work to stay alive, to scrob and claw through hard times. The alchemist sea changed fishermen into wet bones, sent boats to drift among the cod, cast them on the landwash. [Agnis] remembered the stories in old mouths: the father who shot his oldest children and himself that the rest might live on flour scrapings; sealers crouched on a flow awash from their weight until one leaped into the sea; storm journeys to fetch medicines—always the wrong thing and too late for the convulsing hangashore.”

At The Gammy Bird, Quoyle reports to the managing editor, Tert Card. “The devil had long ago taken a shine to Tert Card, filled him like a cream horn with itch and irritation.” Quoyle gets two assignments from newspaper owner Jack Buggit. First, he must write an article about a car accident for every issue, regardless of whether there was an accident. The paper keeps an archive of photos for when there aren’t fresh accidents. Second, he must write about the ships that come into and leave the port.

It’s a bad assignment. “Have you noticed Jack’s uncanny sense about assignments? He gives you a beat that plays on your private inner fears. Look at you. Your wife was killed in an auto accident. What does Jack ask you to cover? Car wrecks, to get pictures while the upholstery is still on fire and the blood is still hot.”

Further along in the story, Quoyle takes a risk by writing a longer piece about a ship called Tough Baby. It once belonged to Hitler. His newspaper peers fear he’ll get reamed out. Jack, owner of The Gammy Bird, loves it and wants more. “Thirty-six years old and this was the first time anybody ever said he’d done it right.”

Quoyle eventually takes on the role of managing editor. The stories tug along. “And so it went, stories of cargo ships beset by ice, the Search and Rescue airlift of a sailor crushed in power-operated watertight doors, a stern trawler adrift after an explosion in the engine room, a factory freezer trawler repossessed by the bank, a sailor lost overboard from a scientific survey vessel in rough seas, plane crashes in the harbor, plaques awarded to firemen and beauty queens, assaulting husbands, drowned boys, explorers lost and found, ships that sank in raging seas, a fishing boat hit by an icebreaker, a lottery winner, seizure of illegal moose meat.”

Along the way, Quoyle falls in love with Wavey. Fear keeps romance at bay. Quoyle loves the memory of Petal. Wavey bears the mental scars of the deceased spouse who abused her. When Quoyle first tries to kiss Wavey, it falls to shambles. “Quoyle lay in the heather and stared after her, watching the folds of her blue skirt erased by the gathering distance. The aunt, the children, Wavey. He pressed his groin against the barrens as if he were in union with the earth. His aroused senses imbued the far scene with the sea beyond. All the complex wires of life were stripped out and he could see the structure of life. Nothing but rock and sea, the tiny figures of humans and animals against them for a brief time.”

Yet they find a way through it in the end and marry. “For if Jack Buggit could escape from the pickle jar, if a bird with a broken neck could fly away, what else might be possible/ Water may be older than light, diamonds crack in hot goat’s blood, mountaintops give off cold fire, forests appear in mid ocean, it may happen that a crab is caught with the shadow of a hand on its back, that the wind be imprisoned in a bit of knotted string. And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery.”

It recalls what Partridge tells Quoyle early in the book: “Everything that counts is for love, Quoyle. It’s the engine of life.” 

Proulx seduced me with pacing, prose and punch. She writes in fragments and punchy sentences. Rarely an obscure word. Seldom a compound sentence. What seems simple is really hard work on Proulx’s part. She told a fantastic story in a way few could have. 

Among my favorite lines:

On Killick-Claw: “There’s two ways of living here now. There’s the old way, look out for your family, die where you was born, fish, cut your wood, keep a garden, make do with what you got. Then there’s the new way. Work out, have a job, somebody tell you what to do, commute, your brother’s in South Africa, your mother’s in Regina, buy every goddam cockadoodle piece of Japanese crap you can. Go off to look for work. And some has a hard time of it.”

On Fate: No one could stop the hand of fate. Jesson was born to be drowned. 

On Life: One of the tragedies of real life is that there is no background music.

On Love: Used to say there was four women in every man’s heart. The Maid in the Meadow, the Demon Lover, the Southhearted Woman, the Tall and Quiet Woman. 

While I’ve outlined some of the larger plot points, there’s a lot more to The Shipping News. It’s a dark book, tragic in many ways. I constantly felt for Quoyle and was thankful that much of what passed happens to him and not me. 

One additional touch that I loved is that nearly every chapter opens with an illustration of a knot and a quote from The Ashley Book of Knots. They tied the story together beautifully.

What is Mating about? I’ll look at it on the thematic, narrative and structural levels before sharing quotes and other observations. Note that I approached this reflection in a different manner than others. Instead of writing everything, I recorded an audio note, transcribed it and then made a few adjustments.

The Thematic Level

On a thematic level, the primary theme of this book is love. What brings two people together? What draws them closer to one another from that initial attraction to something deeper? What is it that you find attractive in another person? What do you learn about yourself through love? When do cracks start to form? How do you spackle over and repair those cracks? What are the things that push people apart? How do you pick and choose your battles? When does love end? Who decides when it’s over? 

The book is very much an exploration of love on a deep thematic level. In this case, that means the attraction between the protagonist—we never learn her name—and her love, Nelson Denoon, referred to as Denoon throughout the book. The focus is on their relationship.

There is a second love story here, and that is the love story between Rush and his intellect.

The protagonist is a PhD student working on her thesis. She is hyper-intellectual. Denoon is anti-academic while being deeply intellectual. He seems smarter than a lot of people who operate within academia. To write characters like that, you yourself have to be incredibly intelligent. You cannot fake that convincingly. Norman Rush writes these characters in a very convincing way. When they talk about things that are high-minded, things that sound academic, they are convincing and persuasive. I think that is the second love story here. It's Norman Rush’s love for knowledge, and also his love of his own intellect. And, really, I think Rush cut Denoon in his own image.

The second theme is Africa. Norman Rush and his wife, Elsa, worked as co-directors of the Peace Corps in Botswana from 1978 to 1983. Rush has a deep and intimate knowledge of Batswana and of Africa. He really brings the reader to Africa. He brings you down on the ground and the characters in the book experience some of the things he experienced. In particular, there is the solo trip across the Kalahari Desert and what goes through your mind during that journey. In an interview, Rush spoke of taking a trip like that himself.

In a memorable passage from that section, he writes of how the trip pushes the protagonist’s mind to the limit: I was doing a thing I had been warned not to do in the desert: I was reviewing my life. Actually I was thinking about an aspect of my life, to wit, who would miss me the most if I was reported lost. Also I was thinking in general about how easy it would be to vanish physically in the Kalahari, how quickly you would turn into dust and be distributed, the usual. I had been advised by people like the lion man to keep my consciousness in my surfaces, my skin and eyes and ears, my legs, to be a scanning mechanism and nothing else while I was in the desert.

Another example is Rush’s observations on Africa. This is where we get into that love of his own intellect as seen through his characters. Early in the book, when the protagonist meets Denoon for the first time, he is giving a lecture to a group of people. He is talking about socialism in Africa. Is it something that will benefit people? His argument is that it's not. He makes five points. 

There is another important theme as well, and it leans into what the novel is about on another level. That is Tsau, the matriarchal society Denoon has built. It's a society run by women. There are men in this society, but they are outnumbered. There is a collective approach to governance that is unique and shared. The men do not have a say.

During a debate, Denoon underscores the problem with patriarchal societies and the impact it has had on women: Nelson was masterly. He drove home two theses. One was that despite apparent differences every society can be analyzed to show that women are in essence being shaped to function as vehicles for male imperatives and the physical reproduction of male power. He didn’t carry this thesis into its most perfected form, in which he shows that in strictly biological terms man is a parasite on woman. This would have been too much for Harold; The second thesis was that because of the history of crushing and molding of women, men have no idea what women are or what they might be if they were left alone.

Tsau explores what would happen if they were left alone, mostly. That doesn’t mean Tsau wouldn’t balance out. But it would lay the foundations for something different.

It was Denoons’ position that gender imbalance was structural and it would self-correct down the line, but only at a point when female primacy had been established as normal.

Late in the novel we learn that elephant herds are matriarchies, which creates a nice parallel with the experiment in Tsau.

Elephant herds are matriarchies from which all adolescent males are expelled and only a handful over time allowed to return and function as adult companions. The females are careful to keep the males they let back in outnumbered and cowed, and they rather cavalierly exploit the satellite expelee males who mope along after the herd, using them as guards and sentries. 

The Narrative Level

If we look at the narrative level, it's simply a love story between the protagonist and Denoon. The protagonist has moved to Africa to do her thesis, her PhD. She has been there for quite some time. She is deeply rooted in Africa, has connections to the land and to the people, and is very interested in what is happening there. Her thesis is about whether agricultural cycles and seasonality have an impact on birth rates. When food is abundant, are they more likely to conceive? That is what she is studying.

It turns out that because food is imported and people do not have to rely on the land so much in Botswana, it's not something she can really test anymore. It's not an issue in the same way. That puts her in a difficult situation. She is about to leave Africa. She feels dejected. There is no hope for her thesis. Around this point she hears of this Denoon guy. Early in the book, she talks about her three relationships in Africa before Denoon, and it's through the last relationship, with a guy who is actually a spy, that she hears about Denoon and the project he is building. Nobody knows where it's. Nobody knows where he is. He kind of pops up every now and again.

By some magic, she winds up at a party and meets Denoon there. That is when he is giving the lecture and talking about socialism in the African context. His soon-to-be ex-wife actually introduces the protagonist to Denoon with the aim of bringing them together because she recognises that the protagonist is exactly the type that would interest Denoon. We do not understand exactly how or why she knows this, but she does. It’s a childish act on the ex-wife’s part, but she’s out. She sees it almost as a selfless act, this kind of uniting.

When the party ends, everybody goes their separate ways. The protagonist doesn’t  know if or when she will see Denoon again. She doesn’t know where he stays. She asks around. It’s not until she bumps into Denoon’s ex-wife a second time that she finds out where she might find him. She makes her way to him. They meet briefly. It's surprising for him, but not unwelcome.

The protagonist asks Denoon if she can come and participate in or observe his project. She knows about the secret project he has. Denoon says, thank you, we would love for you to come, but you cannot. They split and The protagonist goes back to Gaborone. Somehow, she finds out where the project is located. It’s in a place called Tsau. She has to take a solo trip one hundred miles across the Kalahari to get there. When she arrives, she has to make up stories about how she got there, why she is there, how she found the project. She tells people she is an ornithologist, and they work it out. She gets to stay. There is a vote among the women and they vote that she can stay. 

The protagonist and Denoon form a relationship over time and it's accepted by the society. That is how they come together, and the story explores the relationship from there against the backdrop of this project, Tsau, this society. Again, this is the matriarchy he has coordinated with some help from the government, ruled by women, organised by women. He obviously plays a big role himself, but the women are able to outvote him. He is not a governor or anything. He is just trying to build a utopia of sorts. He himself is a feminist. That plays a role. Against that backdrop, he and the protagonist work through their relationship.

The Structural Level

Structurally, what is interesting about the novel is that the protagonist and Denoon do not meet until about a third of the way through it. Up until then, though, you know two things. You know that she is going to meet Denoon, and you know that their relationship ends, because she speaks about Denoon quite a bit before then. She talks about moments they had, things she learned from him, the way he made her feel, how she felt about some of the things he did and said, and she wonders where he is now and what he is up to because it's a thing of the past.

Before they even meet, you know that it ends and you know a lot about him. You are also anticipating the meeting because she is going through her previous relationships and you know that those are the relationships she has to get through before she gets to him.

It's not very complicated, but it's structurally interesting because within that first third, she might be talking about the present moment and then reflecting on something that happens later in the relationship compared with that moment. That is quite interesting as well. Definitely enjoyable.

A Novel of Ideas

Mating feels like a platform for Rush to share and explore a wide range of his personal ideas through his characters. There’s not a lot of runway to explore every idea, which makes you wonder if they’re fully formed or just surface-level ideas that sound interesting. Yet he’s clearly smart. And the ideas are interesting. Here are a bunch that stand out. 

When the protagonist first meets Denoon, he’s giving an impromptu lecture on socialism in the African context. Here are four of the five points he makes against socialism:

Cost number one is that since you have lost the use of the market, which allocates everything gratis, you must set up a mechanism to allocate things by command. And you must pay people to do that, a lot of people.

Number two is that under socialism you are going to have to lay aside money to buy technology, ever newer and better technology, from the market states. And forever. Because under socialism unfortunately there is no invention, that is to say innovation.

Three is a cost you will never see in a Boso pamphlet and is the cost of suppressing possessive individualism. One could say socialism is an annual, but possessive individualism is an iron perennial. This is a cost superadded to the costs of dealing with general crime, which has not gone away yet in any socialist country. I am referring to the cost of suppressing a novel class of activities designated as economic crimes, such as giving people the death penalty for speculation or hoarding.

Four. Whatever idea you might have, one might have, about giving Botswana a socialist industrial economy, remember that it, and all of Africa, is an agricultural economy. Show me a socialist country and I will show you a net food importer. Even now you see, we are living on gift food from the West.

Academics from an anti-academic.

One of the more entertaining examples relates to the impact of importing Kung Fu movies:

Possibly the dumbest thing the Boers ever did was allow kung fu movies into the townships. They thought they were letting in cultural trash to distract the masses. Mark my words, someday somebody will trace the influence of kung fu movies on the liberation struggle and it will be substantial. Because kung fu movies, which are in fact trash, nevertheless teach over and over again an important lesson: you’ve got to get revenge. Christianity says you don’t, the reverse, and for years the educated black leadership went with that. But here comes something else, a set of brilliant how-to illustrations that says to young men Join into groups, use your bare hands against the enemy, the corrupt kung fu clubs that support the gangsters or the evil dynasty, accept discipline and adversity, team up, never give up, avenge your brothers. And by the way, here and there include women as fighters.

The protagonist relays most of Denoon’s thoughts and ideas. Here’s one about why Denoon believes leisure travel is useless: 

For someone who had traveled everywhere, Denoon was peculiarly scathing on people who liked to travel. Of all the enthusiasms, the one for sheer travel was the one he claimed to find the most boring. You could rarely if ever get a travel buff to tell you one thing of interest, he would say. They can tell you the names of the places they’ve been and the number of places they’ve been. If you’re lucky they can tell if some place was fabulously cheap or criminally expensive. The quintessence of it was something Robert Louis Stevenson wrote, to wit, I travel not to go anywhere but to go, which was imprinted, fittingly enough, on the paper the Banana Republic wrapped your purchases in. Nelson was against recreational travel. It was his puritanism. If your work compelled you to travel, that was fine. Then you could enjoy it, presumably. But he hated tourism and thought people should stay home and make their own backyards interesting enough to hold their attention.

And, of course, Denoon touches on religion. 

And his most recent recensions on religion, to the effect that the taproot of religion is perennial irrational individual self-hatred, had been especially trenchant to me. Religion might originate through thunder and lightning and wondering what the stars are, Nelson had been saying, but once it gets rolling it’s about self-hatred, which is why religions crossculturally always exalt and beatify people who continually hurt themselves or allow others to hurt them.

A View On Relationships

The relationship between Denoon and the protagonist is the throughline in Mating. It’s rare that a male author writes a strong, convincing female protagonist. Rush does it. Here the protagonist delivers a more eloquent version of a common complaint:

I had to realize that the male idea of successful love is to get a woman into a state of secure dependency which the male can renew by a touch or pat or gesture now and then while he reserves his major attention for his work in the world or the contemplation of the various forms of surrogate combat men find so transfixing. I had to realize that female-style love is servile and petitionary and moves in the direction of greater and greater displays of servility whose object is to elicit from the male partner a surplus, the word was emphasized in some way, of face-to-face attention. So on the distaff side the object is to reduce the quantity of servile display needed to keep the pacified state between the mates in being. Equilibrium or perfect mating will come when the male is convinced he is giving less than he feels is really required to maintain dependency and the woman feels she is getting more from him than her servile displays should merit.

The protagonist speaks of the importance of humour in a relationship.

Causing active ongoing pleasure in your mate is something people tend to restrict to the sexual realm or getting attractive food on the table on time, but keeping permanent intimate comedy going is more important than any other one thing.

Perhaps the most human element cuts through in two examples of little games the protagonist and Denoon play with one another in small moments. 

A byproduct of one of our personal games, called Filling in the White Spaces in the Dictionary. We satisfied ourselves that there was nothing in English for the sound except shrill blast, which was two words. Everything should have a name, according to Denoon. Decadence is when the names of things are being lost.

And another:

Somehow this led to a Ping-Pong competition re completions of the phrase The band can’t play ‘cause dot dot dot. We had gone through the simple completions like ‘cause a strumpet stole the trumpet, or a bum stole the drum, and were at about the level of Jean Arp stole the harp, or a wily crone stole the xylophone. I wanted to spring on Nelson that the band couldn’t play because Vera Bruba Ralston stole the tuba for Halson. Since he knew nothing about movies he was sure to assert Vera Hruba Rlaston was a nameI made up.

Final Word

Mating made for a wonderful read. I highly recommend it and plan to read his other novels.

I appreciate Jungian psychology. Yet I find it easier to approach Jung through the generations of analytical psychologists who followed him. Jung’s writing can feel overly academic, and his ideas sometimes seem less refined than those who came after.

James Hollis offers the most practical applications. Murray Stein does an excellent job simplifying and clarifying Jung’s thought. Marie-Louise von Franz, Jung’s disciple, is hard to beat when it comes to exploring the ideas in depth. Others have much to offer, but these are my favorites.

I go through phases with Jungian psychology. I’ll blast through ten books in a couple of months, take a year off, then return. I’ve just started another phase, this time with Anthony Stevens, who has written on dreams, symbols and Jung himself. I chose The Two Million-Year-Old Self because of its parallels with behavioral biology and evolutionary psychology.

The book itself was hard to find. I ordered a used copy that once belonged to a doctor in California. A note inside reveals she first read it in 1994, then again in 1997, 2008 and 2012 before eventually buying a new copy. Nearly every page is highlighted and annotated. Total mess. I love that.

The book centers on archetypes, the most controversial element of Jungian psychology. Jung described them as a living system of reactions and aptitudes rooted in the collective unconscious that shape life in invisible ways. That formulation is a bit much for most people. A more accessible explanation is that archetypes are not inherited ideas but inherited possibilities of ideas.

Stevens argues that the archetypal endowment with which each of us is born guides the human life cycle: birth and being mothered, exploring the environment, wariness of strangers, play within the peer group, initiation into adulthood, establishing social rank, male bonding for hunting and out-group hostility, courtship, marriage, child-rearing, participation in ritual, assuming mature responsibility and preparing for death. Jung captured the idea neatly: “Ultimately, every individual life is at the same time the eternal life of the species.”

Archetypes are universal, inborn patterns of thought, behavior and imagery. The rebel, the sage, the hero, the magician, the mother, the father. Interpretations vary across cultures, but recognition does not. One culture can recognize the archetypes of another.

In the first section, Stevens builds a biological case for archetypes. He draws parallels with imprinting, with the innate mechanisms that allow children to acquire language and other species-specific behaviors.

As Jung insisted, the archetype “is not meant to denote an inherited idea, but rather an inherited mode of functioning… a ‘pattern of behavior.’”

The second section turns to dreams. Years later, Stevens published a major work on the subject, Personal Myths. I plan to read that next.

One detail stood out: a 1958 study comparing the dreams of 223 college students in Tokyo with those of 250 students in Kentucky. Across more than 7,000 dreams, researchers found striking similarities. A more recent comparison between Japanese and German dreamers found overlap as well.

Why the similarities across geography and generation? Stevens offers a concise line: “Great civilizations come and go, but the human psyche goes on grappling with the same issues, generation after generation.”

It reminded me of a quote from Thornton Wilder’s The Eighth Day: His midnight reading of the great historians confirmed his sense that Coaltown is everywhere—though even the greatest historians fall victim to the distortion induced by elapsed time; they elevate and abase at will. There are no Golden Ages and no Dark Ages. There is the oceanlike monotony of the generations of men under the alterations of fair and foul weather.

In the third section, Stevens argues that the “two million-year-old self” suffers in modern life because our environment no longer satisfies our evolved needs. The further our upbringing deviates from the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, the greater the risk of pathology.

To understand contemporary psychiatric disorders, Stevens suggests we must examine how Western society frustrates archetypal needs: weakened kinship bonds through migration and mobility, family disruption, inadequate childcare structures, the loss of myth and ritual, alienation from nature. These conditions generate stress, insecurity and distortion.

He then proposes five laws of psychodynamics. This is where he loses me. I agree with the first two. I can entertain the others in specific cases, but applying them universally feels like a stretch.

First Law: Whenever a phenomenon is found to be characteristic of all human communities, irrespective of culture, race or historical epoch, then it is an expression of an archetype of the collective unconscious.

Second Law: Archetypes possess an inherent dynamic, whose goal is to actualize themselves in both psyche and behavior.

Third Law: Mental health results from the fulfillment of archetypal goals.

Fourth Law: Psychopathology results from the frustration of archetypal goals.

Fifth Law: Psychiatric symptoms are persistent exaggerations of natural psychophysiological responses.

I enjoyed the book, but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it broadly. I am, however, keen to read Stevens’ work on dreams.

Austerlitz bored me. While Sebald had the ingredients to produce a great novel, the meditative pacing made reading this a slog. For a book about place and memory, it’s hardly memorable and will not stay in place on my bookshelf. 

In short, the story follows an architectural historian who encounters and befriends the solitary Jacques Austerlitz in Antwerp during the 1960s. Through their conversations, we come to understand Austerlitz’s history. As a young boy, his parents sent him from Czechoslovakia to the UK in 1939 to escape Hitler’s sweep across Europe. He grows up with no recollection of his past. Only after his foster parents die does he begin to uncover it, piecing together fragments through visits to places that seem to awaken buried memory.

Sebald best conveys the central theme of memory in this passage:

I already felt in my head the dreadful torpor that heralds disintegration of the personality, I sensed that in truth I had neither memory nor the power of thought, nor even any existence, that all my life had been a constant process of obliteration, a turning away from myself and the world. 

Yet time, more than memory, emerges as the novel’s most interesting theme. Early on, the narrator questions its nature:

If Newton really thought that time was a river like the Thames, then where is its source and into what sea does it finally flow? Every river, as we know, must have banks on both sides, so where, seen in those terms, where are the banks of time? What would be this river’s qualities, qualities perhaps corresponding to those of water, which is fluid, rather heavy, and translucent? In what way do objects immersed in time differ from those left untouched by it? Why do we show the hours of light and darkness in the same circle? Why does time stand eternally still and motionless in one place, and rush headlong by another?

And in the final third, he edges toward something like eternalism:

It does not seem to me, Austerlitz added, that we understand the laws governing the return of the past, but I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form ot stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like, and the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead, that only occasionally, in certain lights and atmospheric conditions, do we appear in their fields of vision. 

And in the last third of the novel, he appears to embrace eternalism:

Or I felt, as I was saying, said Austerlitz, as if my father were still in Paris and just waiting, so to speak, for a good opportunity to reveal himself. Such ideas infallibly come to me in places which have more of the past about them than the present. For instance, if I am walking through the city and look into one of those quiet courtyards where nothing has changed for decades, I feel, almost physically, the current of time slowing down in the gravitational field of oblivion. It seems to me then as if all the moments of our life occupy the same space, as if future events already existed and were only waiting for us to fund our way to them at last, just when we have accepted an invitation we duly arrive in a certain house at a given time. And might it not be, continued Austerlitz, that we also have appointments to keep in the past, in what has gone before and is for the most part extinguished, and must go there in search of places and people who have some connection with us on the far side of time, so to speak?

Sebald implies a profound metaphysical claim: that time is not a river but a landscape. That past and future coexist, and we wander through them, sometimes stumbling into rooms we once inhabited and meeting people we once knew.

When do artists produce their best work? Early in their careers, powered by youthful energy, or late, after mastering their craft? I find the best work often comes early, before expectation narrows imagination.

Such was the case for Thornton Wilder. In 1927 he published The Bridge of San Luis Rey, earning the Pulitzer Prize at just thirty years old. It remains his best-known work and was adapted for film three times. While such acclaim might have disincentivised lesser writers, he committed himself to mastering the craft.

Wilder’s early fiction asks whether there is a grand design in life, an exploration fueled by hope and the desire for certainty. Wisdom and experience drive his late fiction, which asks a harder question: How do we find meaning in the face of uncertainty?

The Eighth Day takes up that later question. Published when he was seventy, the novel won the National Book Award, a testament to its ambition even if it never surpassed his earlier fame.

Set in Coaltown, Illinois, The Eighth Day follows John Ashley, who is convicted of murdering his neighbor and rescued from execution by masked men days before his death. He escapes to Chile under a new identity, while his family remains behind to endure the consequences of his absence. The novel moves between doubt and belief, its ambition set early in Dr. Gillies’ speech on the eve of a new millennium:

Nature never sleeps. The process of life never stands still. The creation has not come to an end. The Bible says that God created man on the sixth day and rested, but each of those days was many millions of years long. That day of rest must have been a short one. Man is not an end but a beginning. We are at the beginning of the second week. We are children of the eighth day.

Faith in Various Forms

Each character in The Eighth Day grapples with their own interpretation of faith. The question of faith looms largest for John Ashley, the character least likely to confront it. Convicted of a murder that he did not commit, Ashley accepts the outcome without protest or despair, signaling his faith in a grand design. 

Like most men of faith John Ashley was—so to speak—invisible. You brushed shoulders with a man of faith in the crowd yesterday; a woman of faith sold you a pair of gloves. Their principal characteristics do not tend to render them conspicuous. Only from time to time one or other of them is propelled by circumstance into becoming visible—blindingly visible. They tend their flocks in Domremy; they pursue an obscure law practice in New Salem, Illinois. They are not afraid; they are not self-regarding; they are constantly nourished by astonishment and wonder at life itself. They are not interesting. They lack those traits—out bosom companions—that so strongly engage our interest: aggression, the dominating will, envy, destructiveness and self-destructiveness. No pathos hovers about them. Try as hard as you like, you cannot see them as the subjects of tragedy. 

Wilder does not romanticize men and women of faith. They are not tragic figures; they simply act as though guided by an invisible order. Even as prison guards taxi Ashley to the execution chamber, he does not view himself as a victim.

Across the novel, faith operates beneath consciousness: Men of faith and men of genius have this in common: they know (observe and remember) many things they are not conscious of knowing. They are attentive to relationships, recurrences, patterns, and “laws.” There is no impurity in this operation of their minds—neither self-advancement nor pride nor self-justification. The nets they fling are wider and deeper than they are fully aware of. 

The faithful recognize that there is a pattern but do not claim to know what the pattern is. They are moved by and move with mystery. Yet Wilder does not confine faith in God. He allows for an atheist view whereby people value the ideals associated with a higher power that was created by man: 

I don’t believe in God. I believe that those celebrated men and women—Mary of Nazareth and her family—are now each a pinch of dust, like all the billions of men and women who have died. By the representation of such beings are man’s greatest achievements. 

Wilder positions this as an achievement precisely because belief becomes a balm for those in need: Who can count the prayers that have ascended to gods who do not exist? Mankind has himself created sources of help where there is no help and sources of consolation where there is no consolation. 

The novel ultimately separates faith from theology. One may believe in a personal God, a universal abstraction, or nothing at all. Yet faith persists as the human need to orient oneself toward meaning: It’s a bad thing to force God on a man who doesn’t want one. It’s worse to stand in the way of a man who wants one badly. 

Suffering Not In Vain

No one in The Eighth Day is spared suffering. Ashley loses his family. Beata bears the weight of survival. Their children grow into hardship. Even the Lansing family suffers in the aftermath of accusation and loss. Suffering becomes the condition through which each character grows. 

When God loves a creature He wants the creature to know the highest happiness and the deepest misery—then he can die. 

Wilder frames suffering as a form of fulfillment. Those who have not suffered have not lived. 

Suffering seldom remains private: Suffering is like money. It circulates from hand to hand. We pass on what we take in. 

Breckenridge Lansing, for instance, verbally abuses his wife, Eustacia, when physical discomfort pushes his limits. Their son George suffers the insult on her behalf. Pain begets pain. Yet this emerges as the true source of wisdom: Only those who have suffered ever come to have a heart that is wise. 

Wisdom, in Wilder’s late vision, is not acquired through triumph but through endurance. Where his early fiction strains toward metaphysical assurance, this novel rests in the authority of experience.

The Wisdom of Age

At 70 years old, Wilder brought a wealth of life experience to The Eighth Day; that includes the recognition that youth requires hope before it can endure truth: 

It is the duty of men to lie to the young. Let these encounter their own disillusions. We strengthen our souls, when young, on hope; the strength we acquire enables us later to endure despair as a Roman should.

Age tempers that hope with clarity: Hope, like faith, is nothing if it is not courageous; it is nothing if it is not ridiculous. The defeat of hope leads not to despair, but to resignation. The resignation of those who have had a grasp of hope retains hope’s power.

Even so, the older voice still speaks promise into youth: You are young. You are not happy now because you have not yet discovered the work to which you will give your life. Somewhere in the world there is a work for you to do, to which you will bring courage and honor and loyalty. For every man there is one great task that God has given him to do. I think that yours will demand a brave heart and some suffering; but you will triumph. 

The promise of vocation animates youth, even as suffering awaits. And yet the wise understand how fragile such hope is: When we are talking soberly to the young we are moving in evanescent landscapes, in corridors of dreams, abysses on either side. 

The Search for Meaning

Meaning in The Eighth Day is neither affirmed nor denied. The novel refuses to guarantee design, yet it refuses despair as well: We cannot understand now what has happened to us. Let us live as though we believed there were some meaning in it. 

Doubt is not abstract; it’s personal. Towards the middle of the book, one character questions the meaning of his own actions to no avail: Why does each of us do what we do—the petty, the favored, the aggressive, the meek? Always there lurked the fear that one’s own view of truth was merely a small window in a small house. In the face of so important a concern any contempt poured on oneself was incidental. 

The novel portrays another response to uncertainty: His parents were both forty when he was ten—that is to say they were beginning to be resigned to the knowledge that life was disappointing and basically meaningless; they were busily clutching at its secondary compensations: the esteem and (hopefully) the envy of the community in so far as they can be purchased by money and acquired by circumspect behavior, by an unremitting air of perfect contentment, and by that tone of moral superiority that bores themselves and others but which is as important as wearing clothes. 

In the absence of visible design, some retreat into reputation and moral superiority. Wilder offers no final revelation, only a spectrum of responses. The arras may contain a pattern; it may not. What matters is not certainty, but the posture one adopts in its absence.

It is precisely on that note that Wilder ends the book. There is no answer to the big questions about life and meaning, just a variety of experiences and faiths in different forms:

There is much talk of a design in the arras. Some are certain they see it. Some see what they have been told to see. Some remember that they saw it once but have lost it. Some are strengthened by seeing a pattern wherein the oppressed and exploited of the earth are gradually emerging from their bondage. Some find strength in the conviction that there is nothing to see. Some

The sentence trails off because the question remains open. Creation has not ended. We are still in the eighth day.

I learned of The Buffalo Hunter Hunter from the year-end episode of Mapping the Zone. In the podcast, four friends discuss the works of Thomas Pynchon. They took a break in the final episode of 2025 to champion their favorite reads of the year. And here we are.

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is a Native American vampire novel. It’s not the sort of book that I would usually read, but I enjoyed the historical undercurrent and admired the research that went into making it feel authentic to Native American culture.  

Stephen Graham Jones ultimately wrote a revenge story. A good quote sets the stage for the story early in the book: The depravity of man’s heart knows no floor, and everyone in this hard country has a sordid chapter in the story of their life, that they’re trying either to atone for, or stay ahead of. It’s what binds us one to the other.

In this case, the pastor Arthur Beaucarne (aka Three Persons) is bound to Good Stab (the Native American vampire) through atrocities committed in the past. For that, he must pay. 

I love the irony of that pastor who feels guilty for eating too much bread but has erased from his mind the role he played in massacring Native Americans. It’s also interesting that Good Stab seeks absolution—and revenge—in the “napikwan’s” house of prayer. Where else could he go? 

While the book didn’t deliver a long list of memorable quotes—I didn’t expect it to—I appreciate this line for how close it cuts to the wisdom of James Hollis: We don’t choose the shape or meter of our struggles, however. uOur duty, insofar as this aging pastor can tell, is to simply endure them, and, when and if opportunity arises, overcome them.

I laughed out loud towards the end of the book when Good Stab referred to a sturgeon as a boss fish. It definitely seemed out of character, but why not?

Now, this narrative could go in several directions from here, a few of which I’ve already expired, or will soon, in other stories, Kit Schluter writes in The Rooster Man, a short in his 2024 collection titled Cartoons. I think the way I’d like for it to end, however, is for something completely absurd and unexpected to interrupt the continuity of the story. 

Shortened from the original, this passage captures Schluter’s approach to storytelling. Absurdism defines each story in the collection, some which are complemented by Schluter’s bizarre illustrations. 

In The Little Children of Heaven, a nurse gives the protagonist a plate of lightly salted children after he wakes in a hospital in the afterlife. In Imaginary Children, the protagonist converses with a heartbroken piece of bacteria that’s the father of everyone on earth. In The Little Pencil That Could, a pencil who fears paper convinces a boy to visit his mom instead of writing her a letter. In An Umbrella, an umbrella navigates criticism and insecurity before the story becomes something else entirely.

Cartoons isn’t a book of ideas, it’s a book of imagination. You press on to see just how absurd the stories get. You wonder what’s going on in Schluter’s mind. And when you reach the end, you discover a silent invitation. Schluter provides several lined pages where you can write your own absurd story and boxes for your own absurd drawings. There aren’t instructions, yet the message is clear: You’ve explored my imagination, now it’s time to explore your own. 

Schluter simply says, Now it’s your turn. 

So it is. 

Speak to a veteran and they’ll verify a maxim of war: You might make it home, but the battle never ends. Tim O’Brien has been fighting the Vietnam War since completing his service in 1970. He traded the rat tat tat of gunfire for the clickity clack of the typewriter, chasing the ghosts of memory across the page. 

O’Brien first wrote of the war in his memoir If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home. In Going After Cacciato, he flips from fact to fiction. O’Brien wrote the memoir to remember and the novel to reimagine. The novel is a tale of escape. A fantasy, really. Exactly what every soldier dreams about.

Let’s get this out of the way O’Brien’s short story collection The Things They Carried is much better than Going After Cacciato. It’s one of the best short story collections of all time. The stories are raw and real and rereadable. Few collections hit so hard. 

Released 11 years earlier, Going After Cacciato stands out for many of the same reasons. The absence of flare sets O’Brien apart. He uses simple words and short sentences. In isolation, any line feels basic. Knit together, the simple elements engender sophisticated storytelling. O’Brien’s mastery likely has roots in the war, where quick, clear communication can make the difference between life and death. That restraint gives him room to attempt something stranger than realism.

Told from the perspective of American soldier Paul Berlin, the novel follows his squad as they search for Cacciato—a squadmate who has gone AWOL. Where? To Paris, of course! Cacciato abandoned the squad to walk to Paris. 

It’s unclear whether anything in the story actually happens. Did Cacciato really exist? Did he abandon the squad? And did they pursue him? Or did Paul Berlin imagine it all from the observation post? 

When Paul Berlin watches two people debate in Delhi, for instance, this throwaway passage keeps both possibilities alive: Briefly Paul Berlin slipped back to his observation tower along the South China Sea. Partly here, partly there. Hard to tell which was real. 

While both possibilities hold weight, the further I get from the novel, the more I think Paul Berlin imagined it all. The way Paul Berlin describes Cacciato, for instance, makes him sound like someone imagined without the mind of a creator: There was something curiously unfinished about Cacciato. Open-faced and naive and plump, Cacciato lacked the fine detail, the refinements and final touches that maturity ordinarily marks on a boy of seventeen years old. The result was blurred and uncolored and bland. You could look at him then look away and not remember what you’d seen. 

And then there are all of the close encounters. Paul Berlin nearly catches Cacciato in the jungle. Paul Berlin spots Cacciato amongst a group of monks in Mandalay. Paul Berlin finds Cacciato’s address in Paris. The result is always the same: he’s never there. 

While Cacciato may not be memorable, several parts of the story are unforgettable. Three stand out for me. The first is a debate between Doc and Captain Fahyi Rhallon about whether soldiers operate with purpose. Doc says they don’t. The Captain disagrees. They debate in an underground dancehall as people swing and sway around them.

In another standout passage, O’Brien sends a clear message: We sent a bunch of kids to war without a sense of purpose. The passage includes a brief comparison to World War II, where the objectives were clear in a way that was never true for those fighting in the Vietnam war. 

They did not know even the simple things: a sense of victory, or satisfaction, or necessary sacrifice. They did not know the feeling of taking a place and keeping it, securing a village and then raising the flag and calling it a victory. No sense of order or momentum. No front, no rear, no trenches laid out in neat parallels. No Patton rushing for the Rhine, no beachheads to storm and win and hold for the duration. They did not have targets. They did not have a cause. They did not know if it was a war of ideology or economics or hegemony or spite. On a given day, they did not know where they were in Quang Ngai, or how being there might influence the larger outcomes. They did not know the names of most villages. They did not know which villages were critical. They did not know strategies. They did not know the terms of the war, its architecture, the rules of fair play. When they took prisoners, which was rare, they did not know the questions to ask, whether to release a suspect or beat on him. They did not know how to feel. Whether, when seeing a dead Vietnamese, to be happy or sad or relieved; whether, in times of quiet, to be apprehensive or content; whether to engage the enemy or elude him. They did not know how to feel when they saw villages burning. Revenge? Loss? Peace of mind or anguish? They did not know. They knew the old myths about Quang Ngai—tales passed down from old-timer to newcomer—but they did not know which stories to believe. Magic, mystery, ghosts and incense, whispers in the dark, strange tongues and strange smells, uncertainties never articulated in war stories, emotion squandered on ignorance. They did not know good from evil.

My favorite scene plays out at The Majestic Hotel near the end of the book. Written like a stage play, Paul Berlin and his Vietnamese love interest, Sarkin Aung Wan, each state their case. She appeals to love, he appeals to duty. 

Sarkin Aung Wan’s statement includes the following passage: It is easy, of course, to fear happiness. There is often complacency in the acceptance of misery. We fear parting from our familiar roles. We fear the consequences of such a parting. We fear happiness because we fear failure. But we must overcome these fears. We must be brave. It is one thing to speculate about what might be. It is quite another to act on behalf of our dreams, to treat them as objects that are achievable and worth achieving. It is one thing to run from unhappiness; it is another to take action to realize those qualities of dignity and well-being that are the true standards of the human spirit. 

Spec Four Paul Berlin: I am asking for a break from violence. But I am also asking for a positive commitment. You yearn for normality—an average house in an average town, a garden, perhaps a wife, the chance to grow old. Realize these things. Give up this fruitless pursuit of Cacciato. Forget him. Live now the dream you have dreamed. See Paris and enjoy it. Be happy. It is possible. It is within reach of a single decision. 

Yet it’s a decision that Paul Berlin cannot make. In his words:

Perhaps now you can see why I stress the importance of viewing obligations as a relationship between people, not between one person and some impersonal idea or principle. An idea, when violated, cannot make reprisals. A principle cannot refuse to shake my hand. Only people can do that. And it is this social power, the threat of social consequences, that stops me from making a full and complete break. Peace of mind is not a simple matter of pursuing one’s own pleasure; rather, it is inextricably linked to the attitudes of other human beings, to what they want, to what they expect. The real issue is how to find felicity within limits. Within the context of our obligations to other people. We all want peace. We all want dignity and domestic tranquility. But we want these to be honorable and lasting. We want a peace that endures. We want a peace we can be proud of. Even in imagination we must obey the logic of what we started. Even in imagination we must be true to our obligations, for, even in imagination, obligations cannot be outrun. Imagination, like reality, has its limits. 

Paul Berlin’s purpose is his obligation. And his obligation is to the soldiers in his squad. While they cannot find purpose in the war, they have found it in the obligations they have to one another.

You will die and be forgotten. Unless you’re famous, the forgetting takes no more than two generations. You live on in the memories and stories that people share when you’re gone. That’s ultimately what you leave behind: A story.

In Yours Truly: An Obituary Writer’s Guide to Telling Your Story, James R. Hagerty argues that your friends and family members don’t know your story, at least not the way you might expect. Time after time, Hagerty interviewed friends and family members of the deceased only to find that they knew very little about the dearly departed. It is for this reason that Hagerty suggests that you should tell your own story. It’s best to do it now.

A year ago, I came up with a similar idea. In the end, I told people, your life will be reduced to 600 words or less in the back of a newspaper. That will be the story of your life. If you want to understand your life story, write your obituary as though you were to die tomorrow. In 600 words or less, what’s your story? What did you achieve? What were the highlights? Where did you overcome adversity? Who did you love? And what impact did you have on other people? 

With that to hand, I suggested writing a second version as though you lived a full life, dying of old age. What do you want that story to be, I asked. Looking at both obituaries side by side, what are the biggest differences? Importantly, what do you have to do differently to make the obituary of your full life into your story?

The idea is that you should take these two obituaries out on your birthday every year. In the case that you die tomorrow, how has the story of your life changed? Are you happy with it? And does the story of your full life hold up? Have you made progress towards realizing that story? Or have your ambitions and values changed in a way that warrants rewriting the story?

I call this The Obituary Project. The trouble is this: I’ve talked to several people about the value of this project but I’ve never actually done it. Writing your obituary is hard. It’s one of the projects I’ve committed myself to in 2026. 

I turned to Yours Truly for guidance. Hagerty offers practical advice. First and foremost, just start. If you try to perfect your story, you’ll never get through it. Secondly your obituary should answer three core questions: What were you trying to do with your life? Why? And how did it work out? 

Hagerty puts forward a list of questions to ask when writing an obituary—yours or someone else’s. The questions span everything from What are your earliest memories? And who were your first friends? To What was it like the first time you fell in love? And what advice are you most eager to give to young people? There are over 30 questions in total.

While Hagerty’s advice will take obit-writers a long way, I feel Dan P. McAdams offers better advice in The Stories We Live By. McAdams’s approach to the life story interview seems more thorough and, removed from the context of death, less grim. The biggest difference comes down to meaning. Hagerty writes about people he didn’t know after they were gone. In that case, you can only ever shape a story. McAdams writes to surface meaning in people’s lives. The aim is to help people understand why their life matters and reshape the narrative when necessary. I wrote more about that here.

The two approaches can work together. I will incorporate both when writing my obituary lest someone else do it for me.

People die in the name of democracy. Some go to war. Others fight in smaller conflicts. And others still do little more than speak out against authoritarianism and pay the price.

While it’s debatable whether a two-party system with elected officials constitutes a true democracy, most people prefer the illusion of majority rule rooted in “people power” over rule by an iron fist. Those who grew up in democracies might take it for granted. Those who did not may romanticize it. 

In May 1980, scores of South Korean students died for the cause. Military dictator Chun Doo-hwan had come to power following a coup six months earlier. True to form, Chun arrested opposition leaders, closed all universities, banned political activities and suppressed the press. The foundations of a better future felt further out of reach, especially for younger generations.

The student-led Gwangju Democratization Movement sought to counter Chun’s oppressive rule. They demanded liberty in its various forms: democratization, freedom of the press, freedom of speech and freedom of association. You might consider these “the basics.”

Pro-democracy protests quickly escalated into the ten-day Gwangju Uprising. Chun deployed the military to suppress demonstrations through force. The uprising began when the military shot at, killed, beat and tortured Chonnam National University students demonstrating against martial law. A week and a half later, the uprising came to an end.

The government put the official death toll at 165. Anyone who disputed these figures was liable for arrest. Decades later, historians estimate as many as 2,300 victims.

In Human Acts, Han Kang explores the Gwangju Uprising and its impact on society. The book takes shape as a series of short stories that provide different perspectives on the uprising. In the first story, we follow as the protagonist searches for his friend’s body in the wake of the massacre. In the second, we get the friend’s perspective in the immediate aftermath of his death, as his corpse is piled among others and his soul leaves his body. 

The remaining stories move forward in time. In the third, we meet an editor who, five years after the uprising, struggles with trauma and censorship in her work. In the fourth and fifth we get perspectives from those who were tortured, both struggling many years later. We meet a mother in the sixth story; three decades after the uprising she still struggles with the loss of her son.

The final story comes from Han Kang herself. Written in 2013, she writes of how researching the novel put her into a nightmare-driven depression. Han tells of having left a wedding shortly after the ceremony because she couldn’t endure the presence of other people, their smiles, the cheerful mood, all while she was knee deep in tragedy. 

Initially, I considered abandoning the book. Han wrote the first story from the second-person perspective, which rarely works. With the exception of Bright Lights, Big City, which I haven’t read, I cannot think of any celebrated work of fiction written in the second person. There’s a reason for that: It rarely works. I’m glad that I pressed on. Only the first story takes on the second-person perspective. The rest come from the first- and third-person perspectives. On their own, each story is strong. Together, they send a powerful message about the long-lasting impact of tragic historical events.

Human Acts is a personal book written on behalf of a nation. On a personal level, Han was born and raised in Gwangju. On a national level, it was a dark story long overdue for exploration. Han’s fiction made the horror of the past approachable though no less painful. It’s not surprising she won the Nobel Prize. 

While I have no connection to South Korea, the book resonated because it’s now very easy to imagine something like the Gwangju Uprising happening in the U.S. As I write, the media is on fire with headlines about ICE killing a second protestor. Once again, the narratives clash. Protestors are being labeled “domestic terrorists.” Right-wing aggression is pressure testing American liberties like freedom of speech and freedom of association. It’s not to imagine a third shooting in the near future and many more afterward. What sad, strange times.

Why do we weep once we know that everything will be alright? We weep because the only way everything could ever be alright is in fiction. We weep because what we've seen can't be true, no matter how badly we wish it were. We weep at the truth.

The truth is that I’ll never reclaim the time that I wasted reading The Instructions. I chose not to stop; that’s on me. Perhaps I put too much stock in the 4.1 rating on goodreads. Why do I put so much credence into the opinions of strangers? Why should I care whether someone I don’t know and will never meet likes a book? My tendency to care about what people think of me worries me more. Maybe there’s a larger issue at play…

The Instructions follows Gurion Maccabee across 1,030 pages as he grapples with a messiah complex and fights as frequently as possible. The book would have been much better at half its current length. Instead, we waste time wading through Gurion’s thought process in passages like this:

If you know your mom is a great killer, and you think of your mom as a great killer, and you know she would kill for you, not just metaphorically, but really end lives for you, without hesitation, you don't want to make her sad and worried because how can you repay her for all the things she's willing to do? You can't.

And this:

Being humiliated only makes it easier to restrain you. And being restrained makes it possible to torture you, for the unrestrained cannot be tortured; the unrestrained can only be fought. So to be restrained is to be unable to fight, and to be humiliated is to be readied for torture. To know you have been readied for torture is to await torture. And to await torture is, itself, torture.

And then there are bizarre passages like this, which make more sense in context but still don’t make the book any more enjoyable:

Don't you feel as though you could love everything starting tomorrow, and everything could love you, if only you took an action to set into motion the coming of our new tomorrow and its tomorrow and that one's tomorrow? Shotgun loaded hand on the pump and no matter who you damage you're still a false prophet, but we drink chocolate milk and then we get muscles and smash down the droves with fists like hammers and then we pump the fists in the air for victory. I be the prophet of the doom that is you. You are the mess in messiah.

Look, you can’t publish a 1,000+ page book unless people see something in it. I’m sure The Instructions has its merits, but they were lost on me. My experience put me off reading any of Adam Levin’s other work. 

Thomas Pynchon defies narrative. He explores ideas through dozens of characters and sprawling plotlines, shifting from the Riemann Hypothesis to cartoon characters in the same paragraph. Each Pynchon novel tests the reader in a different way. Sometimes you’ll understand what’s happening. Other times you won’t. But you’ll find something beautiful, entertaining or thought provoking on every page. 

Pynchon published Vineland 17 years after his award-winning masterpiece Gravity’s Rainbow. The book polarized critics. Some welcomed what they called “Pynchon lite.” Others were less generous. In a letter to a friend, David Foster Wallace said Vineland made it seem like Pynchon did nothing but smoke pot and watch cartoons for nearly two decades.

Filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson ranks among Pynchon’s biggest fans. PTA turned Inherent Vice into a feature-length film and cited Vineland as the inspiration for One Battle After Another. He did that with Pynchon’s blessing, making him one of the very few people to have met the famously reclusive author. 

With the exception of V, I’ve read all of Pynchon’s other work. I like Against the Day most of all followed by Mason and Dixon. While Vineland doesn’t cut close, I still enjoyed it and feel it’s a good entry point into Pynchon for the uninitiated. Instead of writing about the plot, I’ve highlighted a few of my favorite passages from the book. Like I said: Some are beautiful, others are entertaining and others still are thought provoking. I’ve categorized them accordingly.

Entertaining

Working in a corporate environment, the sentiment of this sentence feels all too familiar: It was bickering raised to the level of ceremony. (9)

A funny way to characterize and convey a character’s feelings: He looked old enough to’ve been through it before, but who knew, maybe this was his maiden voyage into the green seas of jealousy. (59)

Before joining The Sisterhood of Kunoichi Attentives, the character DL learned martial arts from a character called Inoshiro Sensei. Oh, the things she learned:

She learned how to give people heart attacks without even touching them, how to get them to fall from high places, how through the Clouds of Guilt technique to make them commit seppuku and think it was their idea — plus a grab bag of strategies excluded from the kumi-Uchi, or official ninja combat system, such as the Enraged Sparrow, the Hidden Foot, the Nosepicking of Death, and the truly unspeakable Gojira no Chumpira. Despite the accelerated schedule, some of the moves Inoshiro Sensei taught FL would only make sense ten years or more from now — requiring that much rigorous practice every day for her even to begin to understand — and until she did understand, she was forbidden to use any of them out in the world. (127)

In Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex, Cal argues that feelings are too complex for single-word labels like "sadness" or "joy." He describes emotions as blended states, such as "the happiness that attends disaster." This line in Vineland made me think back to that idea from Middlesex: Ralph never thought of the look on his face as the helpless stare of an older man through a schoolyard fence, but as more the alert beaming of a micromanager. (132)

The increasingly relatable thought of an old man watching kids play through a schoolyard fence, reflecting on how quickly life passed and how far away youth seems, crushed me. 

Animals and inanimate objects sometimes express themselves in Pynchon’s works. The episode of Byron the Bulb in Gravity’s Rainbow has been widely celebrated. Byron is an anthropomorphic eternal lightbulb who fights against the Phoebus cartel. The cartel controlled the manufacture and sale of incandescent light bulbs in much of Europe and North America between 1925 and 1939. It took over market territories and lowered the useful life of such bulbs, which is commonly cited as an example of planned obsolescence.

There’s nothing nearly as complex in Vineland, though this passage made me laugh out loud. DL gets kidnapped. Her car gets left behind, wondering where she went: They took her with a matter-of-factness that made her feel like an amateur. Her little car was left alone in its space, sometimes, across miles and years, to call out to her in a puzzled voice, asking why she hadn’t come back. (135)

Here Pynchon writes of a couple who fell in love under the influence and fell out back in reality: They’d been married, as a matter of fact, during a classical sixties acid trip, in which it became beyond clear to them both that in some other world they had been well acquainted. In this one, however, they only seemed programmed for unhappiness. One would find the other across a room and both would gaze awhile, sick with betrayal, remembering the deep and beautiful certainty beyond words, wondering why they should only have had a glimpse and where it might be now. (159)

The characters Frensi and DL were once part of a revolutionary guerilla film unit called 24fps. It makes me think of citizen journalists who capture some of what’s happening on the streets: They went looking for trouble, they found it, they filmed it, and then quickly got the record of their witness someplace safe. They particularly believed in the ability of close-ups to reveal and devastated. When power corrupts, it keeps a log of progress, written into that most sensitive memory device, the human face. Who could withstand the light? What viewer could believe in the war, the system, the countless lies about American freedom, looking into these mug shots of the bought and sold? (195) 

Several passages in the book speak to the destruction that man has wrought on the environment. In this case, we get a fantastical story about parrots that adapted, especially amid the coming of humans and disappearing of trees:

They saw these birds, kept drunk and quiet on tequila for days, ranked out in front of the great ghostly eighteen-wheeler, bundles of primary color with hangovers, their reflections stretching and blooming along the side of the trailer. Soon there was scarcely a house in Vineland that didn’t have one of these birds, who all spoke English with the same peculiar accent, one nobody could identify, as if a single unknown bird wrangler somewhere had processed them through in batches — “All right, you parrots, listen up!” Instead of the traditional repertoire of short, often unrelated phrases, the parrots could tell full-length stories — of humorless jaguars and mischief-seeking monkeys, mating competitions and displays, the coming of humans and the disappearance of the trees — so becoming necessary members of households, telling bedtime stories to years of children, sending them off to alternative worlds in a replaced and upbeat set of mind, through after a while the kids were dreaming in landscapes that might have astonished even the parrots. (222)

Beautiful

You’ll find Pynchon’s most beautiful writing in his longer works, flashes of brilliance amid the chaos. While there are several in Vineland, I’ll call out just three short passages that were beautiful in different ways.

Here, I love the ideas that hidden structures or forces guide us through cities after sunset: He bounced from one Honolulu bar to another, allowing himself to trust to the hidden structure of night in a city, to a gift he sometimes thought he had for drifting, if not into intersections of high drama and significant fortune, at least away, most of the time, from danger. (61)

Inoshiro Sensei reflects on what he taught DL: This is what he felt he had to pass on — not the brave hard-won grace of any warrior, but the cheaper brutality of an assassin. (127)

And here, a comment on the irresponsibility and irrationality that overcomes peoplewho fall for one another: It was right at the steepest part of his curve of descent into irresponsibility, or, as he defined it at the time, love, with Frenesi Gates. (226)

Thought Provoking

One of the central tenets of narrative psychology is that we are the stories that we tell about ourselves. A passive stance would be to give into what the past has made of us. An active approach focuses instead of what we make of the past. I sometimes struggle to rewrite my own narrative. This passage resonated.

Sure, she knew folks who had no problem at all with the past. A lot of it they just didn’t remember. Many told her, one way and another, that it was enough for them to get by in real time without diverting precious energy to what, face it, was fifteen or twenty years dead and gone. But for Frenesi the past was on her case forever, the zombie at her back, the enemy no one wanted to see, a mouth wide and dark as the grave. (71) 

Coming back to work—and everything else, really—this landed like a reminder that it’s hard to do anything if you don’t delude yourself into thinking it’s meaningful in some way: You’re supposed to allow yourself the illusion that what you do matters. (93)

Pynchonian paranoia in the computer age underpinned by commentary on God’s indifference to our existence:

If patterns of ones and zeros were “like” patterns of human lives and deaths, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long string of ones and zeros, then what kind of creature would be represented by a long string of lives and deaths? It would have to be up one level at least — an angel, a minor god, something in an UFO. It would take eight human lives and deaths just to form one character in this being’s name — its complete dossier might take up a considerable piece of the history of the world. We are digits in God’s computer, she not so much thought as hummed to herself for, to be dead or living, is the only thing He sees. What we cry, what we contend for in our world of toil and blood, it all lies beneath the notice of the hacker we call God. (91)

At the The Sisterhood of Kunoichi Attentives, the Head Ninjette tells DL’s partner a story about the Garden of Eden. I confess that I used AI to analyze this passage. The key takeaway here is that the Ninjette’s story reframes part of Genesis as a powergrab. Eden isn’t “fallen” by women; it’s rewritten by men. Power enters history by rewriting origins. Control begins by naming, sorting, and moralizing. And once a system creates damage, it assigns a caretaker. It’s an interesting analysis that brings to mind the rewriting of history in America right now.

This is important, so listen up. It takes place in the Garden of Eden. Back then, long ago, there were no men at all. Paradise was female. Eve and her sister, Lilith, were alone in the Garden. A character named Adam was put into the story later, to help make men look more legitimate, but in fact the first man was not Adam — it was the Serpent. 

I like this story, said Takeshi, snuggling into his pillow.

It was sleazy, slippering man, Rochelle continued, who invented good and evil, where before women had been content to just be. In among the other confidence games they were running on women at the time, men also convinced us that we were the natural administrators of this thing “mortality” they’d just invented. They dragged us all down into this wreck they’d made of the Creation, all subdivided and labeled, handed us the keys to the church, and headed off toward the dance halls and the honky-tonk saloons. (166)

One of my favorite passages of the books comes when Vato and Blood — characters who sing a parody version of the Chip n’ Dale theme song using their own names — pass through a sacred area where the Yurok Native American tribe once lived. The Yuroks were different from other Native American tribes in interesting ways. For instance, Yurok doctors were almost exclusively women; in other tribes, men tended to hold such positions. 

Here, we learn about the woge — prehuman, immortal spirits who created the world, established culture, and invented medicine, but left for the high country or ocean when humans arrived:

They took the North Spooner exit and got on River Drive. Once past the lights of Vineland, the river took back its older form, became what for the Yuroks it had always been, a river of ghosts. Everything had a name — fishing and snaring places, acorn grounds, rocks in the river, boulders on the banks, grooves and single trees with their own names, springs, pools, meadows, all alive, each with its own spirit. Many of these were what the Yurok people called woge, creatures like humans but smaller, who had been living here when the first humans came. Before the influx, the woge withdrew. Some went away physically, forever, eastward, over the mountains, or nestled all together in giant redwood boats, singing unison chants of dispossession and exile, fading as they were taken further out to sea, desolate even to the ears of the newcomers, lost. Other woge who found it impossible to leave withdrew instead into the features of the landscape, remaining conscious, remembering better times, capable of sorrow and as seasons went on other emotions as well, as the generations of Yuroks sat on them, fished from them, rested in their shade, as they learned to love and grow deeper into the nuances of wind and light as well as the earthquakes and eclipses and massive winter storms that roared in, one after another, from the Gulf of Alaska.

For the Yuroks, who had always held this river exceptional, to follow it up from the ocean was also to journey through the realm behind the immediate. Fog presences glided in coves, dripping ferns thickened audibly in the gulches, semivisible birds called in nearly human speech, trails without warning would begin to descend into the earth, toward Tsorrek, the would of the dead. Vato and Blood, who as city guys you would think my get creeped out by all of this, instead took to it as if returning from some exile of their own. (186)
Speculation about which book(s) on Yurok mythology Pynchon has on his shelf often points to the work of Erik Erikson who studied the Yurok people in Northern California alongside anthropologist Alfred Kroeber to link cultural settings with childhood training patterns. I cannot access Erikson’s work, but I do have Kroeber’s book, Yurok Myths, which likely provides the basis for the story of the woge told while Vato and Blood are driving. From Kroeber:

The woge are small humanoid beings who reluctantly yielded the earth to mankind. There is an eerie sense of nostalgic sadness and loss whenever the woge are mentioned in Yurok myths. Inevitably, the woge withdrew into the mountains or across the sea or turned into landmarks, birds, or animals in order to escape close contact with newly created man. Yet the woge are still present in some sense, and they are depicted as being glad to be called upon (in ritual formulas and the like). 

Near the end of the book, there’s another reference to Yurok mythology. A bit of desk research yields the following details on how the Yuroks thought of the dead: The dead were thought to go "below" where the dead Yurok had to cross a river on a boat. If the boat tipped over, the corpse was revived on earth. Once the river had been crossed, however, return was impossible. The dead were ascribed to three types of afterlife: those killed by weapons went to "the willows," forever dancing and shouting in a war dance; thieves and "contentious" persons went to an "inferior place"; and a rich, peaceable man went to "the sky."

In Vineland, Pynchon blends Yurok mythology with his own imagination, inviting us to imagine what happens if the boat were smashed: As he drove, Vato told an old Yurok story about a man from Turip, about five miles up Klamath from the sea, who lost the young woman he loved and pursued her into the country of death. When he found the boat of Illa’a, the one who ferried the dead across the last river, he pulled it out of the water and smashed out the bottom with a stone. And for ten years no one in the world died, because there was no boat to take them across. (379)

What a way to end.

Jeffrey Eugenides won me over with Middlesex. I’m a sucker for sharp prose and multi-generational family sagas; this novel delivers.

I read it six months ago and can’t comment on it as intelligently as I’d like, so instead I’ll share my favorite idea and my favorite passage.

Favorite Concept

Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in “sadness,” “joy,” or “regret.” Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, “the happiness that attends disaster.” Or: “the disappointment of sleeping with one’s fantasy.” I’d like to show how “intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members” connect with “the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age." I’d like to have a word for “the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for “the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.” I’ve never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I’ve entered my story, I need them more than ever. I can’t just sit back and watch from a distance anymore. From here on in, everything I’ll tell you is colored by the subjective experience of being part of events.

How accurate. Single words do not capture emotions the way that hybrid emotions do. At the risk of confusing people, this is worth trying. 

Favorite Passage 

In my favorite passage, around 238 pages into the book, Eugenides summarizes the family history—and the protagonist’s gene mutation—with incredible skill. It’s a large block of text worth reading several times over:

The bedroom grows still. Inside my mother, a billion sperm swim upstream, males in the lead. They carry not only instructions about eye color, height, nose shape, enzyme production, microphage resistance, but a story, too. Against a black background they swim, a long white silken thread spinning itself out. The thread began on a day two hundred and fifty years ago, when the biology gods, for their own amusement, monkeyed with a gene on a baby’s fifth chromosome. That baby passed the mutation on to her son, who passed it on to his two daughters, who passed it on to three of their children (my great-great-greats, etc.), until finally it ended up in the bodies of my grandparents. Hitching a ride, the gene descended a mountain and left a village behind. It got trapped in a burning city and escaped, speaking bad French. Crossing the ocean, it faked a romance, circled a ship’s deck, and made love in a lifeboat. It had its braids cut off. It took a train to Detroit and moved into a house on Hurlbut; it consulted dream books and opened an underground speakeasy; it got a job at Temple No. 1 . . . And then the gene moved on again, into new bodies . . . It joined the Boy Scouts and painted its toenails red; it played “Begin the Beguine” out the back window; it went off to war and stayed at home, watching newsreels; it took an entrance exam; posed like the movie magazines; received a death sentence and made a deal with St. Christopher; it dated a future priest and broke off an engagement; it was saved by a bosun’s chair . . . always moving ahead, rushing along, only a few more curves left in the track now, Annapolis and a submarine chaser . . . until the biology gods knew this was their time, this was what they’d been waiting for, and as a spoon swung and a yia yia worried, my destiny fell into place . . . On March 20, 1954, Chapter Eleven arrived and the biology gods shook their heads, nope, sorry . . . But there was still time, everything was in place, the roller coaster was in free fall and there was no stopping it now, my father was seeing visions of little girls and my mother was praying to a Christ Pantocrator she didn’t entirely believe in, until finally—right this minute!—on Greek Easter, 1959, it’s about to happen. The gene is about to meet its twin.

As sperm meets egg, I feel a jolt. There’s a loud sound, a sonic boom as my world cracks. I feel myself shift, already losing bits of my prenatal omniscience, tumbling toward the blank slate of personhood. (With the shred of all-knowingness I have left, I see my grandfather, Lefty Stephanides, on the night of my birth nine months from now, turning a demitasse cup upside down on a saucer. I see his coffee grounds forming a sign as pain explodes in his temple and he topples to the floor.) Again the sperm rams my capsule; and I realize I can’t put it off any longer. The lease on my terrific little apartment is finally up and I’m being evicted. So I raise one fist (male-typically) and begin to beat on the walls of my eggshell until it cracks. Then, slippery as a yolk, I dive headfirst into the world.

“I’m sorry, little baby girl,” my mother said in bed, touching her belly and already speaking to me. “I wanted it to be more romantic.”

“You want romantic?” said my father. “Where’s my clarinet?”

How good is that!?

Critics hail Of Human Bondage as a masterpiece. It’s Maugham’s opus, they say. While it certainly ranks among the influential 20th century Bildungsromans, I say it sucks. Much of my ire comes down to the insufferable protagonist, Philip Carey.

Philip rejects the religion his surrogate parents push upon him. Good! Philip aspires to be an artist in Paris and fails. Great! Philip pursues a relationship with Mildred. Game over! Mildred whips this spineless little weasel around for two-thirds of the novel. Philip’s inability to stand up for himself made me cringe. Perhaps Maugham imagined Philip as a masochist. 

Mildred is insufferable, and Philip in turn for his unwillingness to get rid of her. If only he treated her with the disdain that he laid out on the lovely Ms. Carey: But her tears were partly tears of happiness, for she felt that the strangeness between them was gone. She loved him now with a new love because he had made her suffer.

The movie poster says it all. 

I much prefer William Boyd’s approach to the Bildungsroman in Any Human Heart and The New Confessions, both rare examples of pop fiction that stay with you after the final page. On the literary side, Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is hard to beat. You might place John Irving’s The World According to Garp in the middleground between them.

Now, Of Human Bondage isn’t devoid of substance. Several passages offer the reader something to reflect upon. One in particular stands out for the way it captures what a Bildungsroman is all about: He did not know how wide a country, arid and precipitous, must be crossed before the traveller through life comes to an acceptance of reality. It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched, for they are full of the truthless ideals which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real they are bruised and wounded.

Here, too, Philip’s realization conveys what we might expect the protagonist to pursue in a Bildungsroman: It seemed to Philip that there were three things to find out: man’s relation to the world he lives in, man’s relation with the men among whom he lives, and finally man’s relation to himself.

When Philip observes an elderly couple approaching the end of their story, it lands like a warning to the rest of us who are at various stages of our real-life Bildungsroman: Two quiet little people: they belonged to a past generation, and they were waiting there patiently, rather stupidly, for death; and he, in his vigour and his youth, thirsting for excitement and adventure, was appalled at the waste. They had done nothing, and when they went it would be just as if they had never been.

While I didn’t like the book overall, I most enjoyed Philip’s time in Paris, struggling to be an artist. He ultimately realizes and accepts that he will be nothing other than a second-rate artist and thus gives up his dream. Still, that section yielded three of my favorite quotes:

First on what a painter paints: A good painter had two chief objects to paint, namely, man and the intention of his soul.

Next on how a painter paints: We paint from within outwards—if we force our vision on the world it calls us great painters; if we don’t it ignores us; but we are the same. We don’t attach any meaning to greatness or to smallness. What happens to our work afterwards is unimportant; we have got all we could out of it while we were doing it.

And finally on what a painter captures: In Paris he had learned that there was neither ugliness nor beauty, but only truth; the search after beauty was sentimental. Had he not painted an advertisement of chocolat Menier in a landscape in order to escape from the tyranny of prettiness?

One passage stood up above all else. Several searches indicate that Maugham came up with this parable himself. Good work, old boy. The parable ultimately suggests that meaning changes over time and, really, that life is meaningless. But we must live on. 

Philip remembered the story of the Eastern King who, desiring to know the history of man, was brought by a sage five hundred volumes; busy with affairs of state, he bade him go and condense it; in twenty years the sage returned and his history now was in no more than fifty volumes.

But the King, too old then to read so many ponderous tomes, bade him go and shorten it once more; twenty years passed again and the sage, old and grey, brought a single book in which was the knowledge the King had sought; but the King lay on his death-bed and he had no time to read even that, and then the sage gave him the history of man in a single line: it was meaningless whether he was born or not born, whether he lived or ceased to live. Life was insignificant and death without consequence.

I swear Jonathan Safran Foer referred to Here I Am as his first adult novel in an interview, but for the life of me I cannot find it. Whether he said it or not, the divorce-driven narrative played out by identity-seeking characters yields his most mature novel yet, but not necessarily his best. I prefer Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

The writing shines in Here I Am. Foer excels as crafting beautiful sentences and creative insults. Across this novel and all the rest, his writing speaks to the human condition. Here, for instance:

All happy mornings resemble one another, as do all unhappy mornings, and that’s at the bottom of what makes them so deeply unhappy; the feeling that this unhappiness has happened before, that efforts to avoid it will at best reinforce it, and probably even exacerbate it, that the universe is, for whatever inconceivable, unnecessary, and unjust reason, conspiring against the innocent sequence of clothes, breakfast, teeth and egregious cowlicks, backpacks, shoes, jackets. 

Who among us hasn’t wondered whether some invisible karmic ledger governs the long string of repetitive, predictable days that amount to a lifetime? Sometimes the universe is with us, other times it’s against us. Whether the counterforces are within our control or not, Foer reminds us that only we can do something about it. 

Nothing goes away. Not on its own. You deal with it, or it deals with you.

Which brings us to the core problem: All too often, we blame our problems on people around us or the world at large. Pinning our problems on others doesn’t solve them. And we’ll never win against the world. When we cannot solve our problems—when they really are outside of our control—the solution requires a shift in perspective in the vein of Viktor Frankl. 

The problem was the world. It was the world that didn’t fit. But how much happiness has ever resulted from correcting the record on the culpability of the world? 

Spread across the novel, these thematically consistent insights cut to the heart of what it’s like to be human. As does this passage in which Jacob reflects on his wife’s hobby:

Her homes were just stupid little exercises, a hobby. She and Jacob would never have the money, nor the time and energy, and she’d done enough residential architecture to know that the desire to wring out a few more drips of happiness almost always destroyed the happiness you were so lucky to have, and so foolish never to acknowledge. 

We always want more and we’re fast to overlook what we have. This, too, is part of human nature. More often than not it’s desire itself that we want, not the object that we claim to covet. How often do we stop, look around and tell ourselves, yeah, I have everything I need?

What the protagonists in Here I Am needed was space. So they divorced. Wellness by Nathan Hill is a more exacting divorce novel. Here I Am aspires to do too much by tying divorce together with themes of Jewish identity. Yet, Here I Am is more fun to read. While it’s more mature than Foer’s earlier works, he retains the playful ness that made his earlier works so enjoyable.

The Origin of the Brunists begins with Giovanni Bruno, the sole survivor of a mine disaster that killed 97 of his co-workers, and the apocalyptic cult that forms around him. In truth, Bruno is almost incidental. He appears rarely and barely speaks when he does. The novel is less about the man than about the town and how easily people lose themselves in belief.

I read this a year ago, so consider this a micro throwback review. Much of the plot has faded, but one line has stayed with me: True knowledge is the discerning of pattern, and wisdom is its right interpretation. That idea feels central to the book’s current of meaning-making and misreading.

Robert Coover, who died in 2025, had a remarkable ability to slip in and out of his characters. One moment you’re inside one mind, the next you’re inhabiting another. It’s a difficult technique to pull off without disorienting the reader. He does it with ease.

A famous author once said he wished that he had written Gilead. It struck me as the highest form of flattery that one writer can bestow upon another. For the life of me, I cannot remember who made the comment, but it persuaded me to buy the book.

Gilead takes the form of a letter. Nearing the end of his life, 76-year-old Congregationalist minister John Ames writes a letter to his seven-year-old son. Ames reflects on his past, faith, and the history of his family. While the book didn’t do much for me, Marilynne Robinson’s prose and storytelling are praiseworthy. 

I’m writing this long after completing the book. I cannot recall the details. Instead of a review, I’ll call out a few of my favorite lines.

Less than 10 pages into the book, Ames delivers a truth that’s lost on us all from time to time: A little too much anger, too often or at the wrong time, can destroy much more than you would ever imagine. Above all, mind what you say. ‘Behold how much wood is kindled by how small a fire, and the tongue is a fire’ — that’s the truth. (7)

Still within the first 10 pages, a sad truth about human relationships: You can know a thing to death and be for all purposes completely ignorant of it. A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension. (8)

Further along, something relatable: I’ve developed a great reputation for wisdom by ordering more books than I ever had time to read, and reading more books, by far, than I learned anything useful from, except, of course, that some very tedious gentlemen have written books. (45)

On the same page, Ames makes reference to Proverbs 27:7. I love the way the proverb is worded: “The full soul loatheth an honeycomb; but to the hungry soul every bitter thing is sweet.” There are pleasures to be found where you would never look for them. (45)

Not exactly comforting this one: There are three parties… even to the most private thoughts — the self that yields the thought, the self that acknowledges and in some way responds to the thought, and the Lord. (51)

Here, Ames writes of guilt. While this feels about right, I believe shame is worse than guilt. You can atone for guilt, but shame is a weight on the soul: It has been my experience that guilt can burst through the smallest breach and cover the landscape, and abide in it in pools and dankness, just as native as water. (93)

Another zinger: People who can see right through you never quite do you justice, because they never give you credit for the effort you’re making to be better than you actually are, which is difficult and well meant and deserving of some little notice. (112)

Here, What Ames says reminds of Mark Twain’s line on how the worst things in his life never happened to him: Our dream of life will end as dreams do end, abruptly and completely, when the sun rises, when the light comes. And we will think, All that fear and all that grief were about nothing. (118)

On communication: This morning you came to me with a picture you had made that you wanted me to admire. I was just at the end of a magazine article, just finishing the last paragraph, so I didn’t look up right away. Your mother said, in this kindest, saddest voice, ‘He doesn’t hear you.’ Not ‘He didn’t’ but ‘He doesn’t.’ (162)

Jung argues that we should embrace our fears and anxieties. We’ll come out better for processing them. Ames is more poetic: The worst eventualities can have great value as experience. And often enough, when we think we are protecting ourselves, we are struggling against our rescuer. (176)

Light in the darkness: What is the purpose of a prophet except to find meaning in trouble? (267)

On fear: He was expounding the wonders of the larger world, and I was resolving my heart never to risk the experience of them. (268)