I’m not going to write my second-person essay in the second person versus you’re not going to write your second-person essay in the second person. You tell yourself you’ll change it later. You’ll get a first draft done this way, because it’s easy, it feels right, flows better like this. Then I’ll change it back. She’ll change it back. You will. Or maybe no one will.
Recently it seems I can’t write anything that isn’t second person. It has caught my voice and won’t relinquish it; I begin everything with the gorgeous vagueness of you and then go back over it, painstakingly switching the you to she, or I, or whatever. And the fact that it could be whatever is what makes the you so alluring. You don’t have to make up your mind, or announce that you’ve made up your mind, with a you. It’s what writing can do that film cannot: introduce a character purely in terms of action, without giving them a face or body or gender. Even a bodiless voice-over in film has a gender. In writing, you can exist for pages, saying things, doing things, changing things, and nobody has any clue who you is. Sometimes that’s useful and sometimes it’s an easy way out of doing the hard work of creating character. Either way and both ways, I’m stuck on it.
Hunter asked if I was hungry. I nodded. He picked up a container of half-and-half from the bowl at the center of the table. He swiveled himself around and with unerring accuracy, he lobbed the small container at the barman some eight meters away. It hit the man in the side of the head. The barman looked over immediately at Hunter but, instead of being angry, he nodded. In a moment, a waitress arrived at the table and Hunter proceeded to order food. The ordering took a little time. Hunter kept thinking of things to add. Occasionally he fired a question at me about what I liked to eat, but didn’t wait for my answer. Meanwhile another waitress brought drinks.
And then Hunter asked, “Why do you want to be a writer?”
What makes this sex writing bad is not the writing itself but the revelation of each author’s poorly drawn erotic landscape, in which an overabundance of insisted-upon excitement corrodes and obscures the possibility of intimacy. In this realm of unrivaled joining, they conceptualize the other, the desired one, the obscure object, the lover as flat and dim, a mere surface upon which the protagonist’s fantasies and self-absorbed interiority are projected. A refusal to examine the experience of the other is not only an artistic failing, but a moral one, that perpetuates the restrictive sexual mores that punish everyone, artist or not.
Iceland is a country riddled with stories of elves (smaller, human-like creatures with pointy ears), ‘hidden people’ (interdimensional human-like beings, called huldufólk in Icelandic) and fairies (if you’re thinking Tinkerbell, you’re not far off). They’re believed to be peaceful creatures, co-existing alongside humans and indulging in the same day-to-day activities, including fishing, farming, raising families and – if the legends are any indication – occasionally lending a helping hand to humans who otherwise would die without intervention.
The 10 years since the global financial crisis have been plagued with increasing anxiety about inequality and economic security. The brutal and far-reaching economic collapse, deep recession, and slow recovery have puzzled economists. Macroeconomists have been fending off criticism for not foreseeing a financial crisis of such epic scale.
During the 20th century, the West suffered from two major economic crises. Each of these brought about a major revolution in economic thinking. After the 2008 financial crisis, no such shift has taken place. Economists are still using many of the same tools built to address the same questions as before. When is the revolution?
We sticklers are in fine fettle (cliché!) this holiday season. One guy hates “’Tis the season,” and he’s right: ’tis overused. I get pedantic about the placement of the vocative comma in “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen.” The song is not a suggestion to “merry gentlemen” to rest but an imperative to gentlemen to “rest merry.” Someone on Twitter admonishes those who claim that the spelling “Xmas” takes the Christ out of Christmas: X is not just a soulless abbreviation (say, for Xanax) or the unknown quantity in an algebraic formula (Let x equal what you will) but the Greek letter chi, which looks like X, which is rendered in English as “Ch,” which is the first letter of the Greek spelling of “Christ” and therefore Christ’s initial—Christ is the X in Xmas. So shut up.
“I think hell’s a fable,” the famous professor proclaimed—a surprising declaration not only because it was made in the late sixteenth century, when very few people would have dared to say such a thing, but also because he was at that moment in conversation with a devil to whom he was offering to sell his soul. The professor in question was Doctor Faustus in Christopher Marlowe’s great Elizabethan tragedy. Bored with his mastery of philosophy, medicine, and law, Faustus longs for forbidden knowledge. “Where are you damned?” he asks Mephastophilis, the devil whom he has conjured up. “In hell,” comes the prompt reply, but Faustus remains skeptical: “How comes it then that thou art out of hell?” The devil’s answer is quietly devastating: “Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.”
Did Marlowe, a notorious freethinker who declared (according to a police report) that “the first beginning of Religioun was only to keep men in awe,” actually believe in the literal existence of hell? Did he imagine that humans would pay for their misdeeds (or be rewarded for their virtues) in the afterlife? Did he think that there was a vast underground realm to which the souls of sinners were hauled off to suffer eternal punishments meted out by fiends? It is difficult to say, but it is clear that hell was good for the theater business in his time, as exorcism has been good for the film industry in our own. In his diary, the Elizabethan entrepreneur Philip Henslowe inventoried the props that were in storage in the Rose Theater. They included one rock, one cage, one tomb, and one hellmouth, the latter perfect for receiving a sinner like Faustus at the end of act 5.
As readers, we know all novels are fiction, but sometimes we forget. We get swept up and lose track, believing on some level that it’s true. In Diane Setterfield’s you won’t forget that you’re reading a story—its language and framework are almost constantly calling attention to the story’s story-ness—but you probably won’t mind, either. It’s a corker of a story, full of moody elegance, as a good Gothic should be.
There is a Borges story about a map so exact, so precisely detailed, it grew to the size of the place it depicted. The map had become the territory.
“Anniversaries,” Uwe Johnson’s oceanic, nearly 1,700-page masterpiece, performs a similar trick. Originally published in Germany, in four volumes between 1970 and 1983, it has been translated into English in full, for the first time, by Damion Searls. It is a novel that swallows reality — as noisy and demanding as the world itself.
The soldier who comes home from the war is one of literature’s most venerable figures, dating at least to Homer and Aeschylus. The veteran in “The Long Take” is Walker, a Canadian who, after the Nazis are defeated, washes up first in New York and then Los Angeles. Like the travails of Odysseus and Agamemnon, his tale is mostly told in verse—a medium rarely used in novels, and hardly ever this successfully.
It’s entirely possible that there are happy, well-adjusted people who never traffic in regret or ponder what their lives would be like if they’d accepted a certain job offer years ago, had married A instead of B or had planned their financial futures differently. If they exist, these living-in-the-moment individuals are not to be found in the Palo Alto of “Come With Me,” Helen Schulman’s strikingly original, compelling and beautifully written sixth novel.
Time travel stories are seldom really about time or travel, and Joyce Carol Oates’s 46th novel is no exception. Audacious, chilling and darkly playful, her thought experiment about belonging and otherness is quick to ignite, but admirably slow to reveal the full extent of its dystopian proposition.