“But the idea of privilege has moved many people to say things both nonsensical and appalling, and it is worth pointing out what is often ignored or willfully obscured: that privilege is by no means easy to describe or understand. Say, if you like, that privilege is an advantage, earned or unearned, and you will be apt to ask several important questions. Earned according to whom? Unearned signifying shameful or immoral? The advantage to be renounced or held onto? To what end? Whose? Privilege, the name of an endowment without which we would all be miraculously released from what exactly? Is there evidence, anywhere, that the attention directed at privilege in recent years has resulted in a reduction in inequality or a more generous public discourse? Say privilege and you may well believe you have said something meaningful, leveled a resounding charge, when perhaps you have not begun to think about what is entailed in so loaded a term. What may once have been an elementary descriptor—“he has the privilege of studying the violin with a first-rate music instructor”—is at present promiscuously and often punitively deployed to imply a wide range of advantages or deficits against which no one can be adequately defended.”
These clubs exist entirely online and almost entirely on Instagram — Belletrist has 160,000 followers and Reese’s Book Club has 390,000. Each month the actresses select a title for their fans to check out and offer their own opinions, discussion topics, and exclusive interviews with the authors — in addition to the chance for readers at home to feel like they’re following the novels alongside their celebrity idols. And for the chosen authors, the benefits are practically endless.
The two clubs have highlighted dozens of novelists, but two with particularly fascinating backstories — and post-book club journeys that feel fairy tale-esque — are Chloe Benjamin and the aforementioned Celeste Ng.
To read Lucy Mangan’s memoir of growing up bookish is to be taken back to a time in life when reading wasn’t merely a gentle pleasure or mild obligation but an activity as essential as breathing. Not any old breathing either, but deep, sucking gulps made all the more urgent by the terror that the oxygen could get cut off at a moment’s notice. Mum might shout that it was time to come down for supper, or Miss might tell you to go out and play in the fresh air with the other children. Worse still, you might come to the end of a book and have nothing left to read apart from an old bus ticket fished out from the pocket of your mac.
While Ball is willing to stick his neck out and write a narrative as plainly sincere as a medieval morality play, he also makes space for complexity, the flux of things, the slipperiness of truth and knowledge. Case in point: the novel's central hollow, which both allows Ball to write about his brother without diminishing his memory with words, and forces readers to participate in imagining him. The hollow is rich and generative, a lacuna of a kind Ball has mastered.