After escaping a cult and crafting a new identity in high school and college, I felt grateful to America. Earning that degree gave me a concrete feeling of having my feet on solid ground, something that no one could take away from me. In the span of six years, I’d gone from confused and penniless to someone with options. My idea of America had changed completely, from “Babylon the Whore” to “Land of Opportunity,” and I wanted to give something back. The images of 9/11 had always stayed with me, and I thought of that day as the day I became an American. So I accepted a commission into the United States Army, thinking that a three-year commitment would be a small price to pay for the education I’d received and the freedom I felt lucky to have.
Nobody can ever prepare you for what it feels like to get off the bus on the first day of basic training. You have not had a wink of sleep in 72 hours, waiting for hours and hours at airports and bus stations, in transit with other recruits who are just as clueless as you are. You get off the bus in the middle of the night and are greeted by yelling drill sergeants, their broad-brimmed brown hats something that you will learn quickly to fear. It is all a blur of standing in lines, doing push-ups till you fall on your face, and so much yelling. The rigid structure and total control felt so very familiar that a single question rang through my head: “Did I just join another cult?”
I listen to them at night, the neighbors making love. They don’t always make love. Some nights they fuck. Some nights they screw. Some nights they bang. Some nights it’s more about her. Some nights him. It’s never equal because it never is. Some nights it’s not night but I usually go to sleep afterward because after coming comes shame.
But when I can’t sleep, when I am out of sleep and there is only shame, I listen closer. Nestled in a tiny crook of my tiny apartment that is not mine, in my tiny building that is not mine, beside my open window adjacent to their open window, our sounds walled in by the airshaft. He asks if she picked up soy sauce and she says she got tamari and he says he likes soy sauce and she says you don’t know the difference and he says I got a promo code for the rental car, 20% off, and she says that’s fucking amazing, and he says it’s not like your sister’s going to stay married to this assclown and she says don’t start please don’t fucking start we’re going, and there is silence and it is in the silences that I feel every pulse in my body. It is in the silence that I wait for the silence to end and it is everything.
If journalists tell us the news of the world, it falls to artists to make sense of that news. Indian writer Amitav Ghosh is eager to take up the challenge.
“Gun Island,” his ninth novel, deals with two of the biggest issues of the current moment: climate change and human migration. But it’s not homework. Ghosh is mindful of his task as a novelist — to entertain. The confidence with which he shapes a good, old-fashioned diversion around these particular poles is instructive. Escapism has its virtues, but a book unafraid of ideas can be bracing.
There's occasionally a burst of talk about "new adult" as a channel that could exist between the inland lake of young adult fiction and the wide-open ocean of books written for adults. It could be sexier and edgier than young adult but still about teens or early 20-somethings working out their feelings! It's a topic that comes and goes without gaining much traction.
Meanwhile, Mary H.K. Choi is quietly defining new-adult literature with her modern explorations of how relationships help young people figure out who they really are. Her new book, Permanent Record, is not especially edgy or sexy, but it does feel precisely like that confusing period between high school and adulthood where so many of us flail around, trying to figure out what we actually want from life.