For “unfilmable” is often just code for “we tried and it didn’t happen”, an excuse for all the films trapped in development hell, such as John Milton’s Paradise Lost (Bradley Cooper was once lined up to play a hunky Lucifer), and the long-awaited adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. “Unfilmable” can also mean “we tried and did a terrible job”. Stephen King’s Dark Tower series is not unfilmable, but the 2017 take starring Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey might make you wish it was.
Abolishing the clock, like Sommarøy wants to, will only get us so far. Real liberation can only come with a new historical consciousness — by remaking Time, and with it, our whole way of life, anew.
So it is that two new satirical novels set in creative-writing programs, Lucy Ives’s “Loudermilk: Or, the Real Poet; or, the Origin of the World” and Mona Awad’s “Bunny,” engage with the chimera of “the real deal.” They are set, respectively, in a version of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a version of Brown University and are authored by graduates of those institutions. These books constitute a kind of institutional critique, to borrow a term from the art world, or an institutional autofiction, to adapt an existing literary term. On the one hand, the satirical tone of these novels tips us off that the institutions being portrayed are fundamentally defective. And yet the pages in our hands are tangible counterfactuals! Because isn’t the published novel—the material proof every candidate longs for—evidence of these institutions’ success? Here is the M.F.A. program becoming self-conscious, displaying both impatience with and anxiety over the criterion of authenticity.
At the start of her intelligent and moving new novel, Lost and Wanted, Nell Freudenberger sets her plot into motion by having her protagonist, Helen, receive a call from her friend Charlie. The strange thing is — and there’s no way to describe the setup without it sounding like the twist ending of a mediocre summer camp ghost story — Charlie’s dead. Her passing is very recent; her phone is missing; and the reader confronts a mystery. Is the caller a thief? A ghost? Someone from another dimension?
The New Me is a depressing novel. It’s about a depressed young American woman called Millie, who works in a depressing temp job, while spiralling into even greater depression at the prospect that the job might become permanent. It is also bleakly funny: “I think I’m drawn to temp work for the slight atmospheric changes,” Millie writes. “The new offices and coworkers provide a nice illusion of variety. Like how people switch out their cats’ wet food from Chicken to Liver to Sea Bass, but in the end, it’s all just flavored anus.”
Many of the acclaimed advances in modern fundamental theoretical physics have yielded no predictions that can be tested in the near future. But that is no reason to despair. Galileo said: “Nature’s great book is written in mathematical symbols.” It would be foolhardy not to read it.