In Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, the floors and walls are unsettlingly misaligned, leaving inhabitants never quite sure how much to trust even stable-seeming surfaces. But it’s not just the physical instability of homes that haunt Jackson’s work. In Jackson’s fiction, the real horror often lies in the manic loneliness of women so desperate for—even entrapped by the idea of—stable domesticity that they abandon their dying mothers, poison their fathers, and die by suicide rather than leave the places they’ve claimed as home.
On the occasion of publishing a brief collection of some of my older short stories—at the onset of the third decade of a century marked, so far, by our complete submission to market-driven technological distraction and surveillance—I am awash in a kind of nostalgia. Not for a better America. Not for my younger, healthier body and sharper memory, and not for the sweet innocence of my now eighteen-year-old daughter as an infant or toddler or opinionated eight-year-old.
What I miss is writing stories in which a life lived online does not figure—mostly.
More than once recently, I have lain awake counting the sirens going up the otherwise empty streets of Manhattan, wondering if their number might serve as a metric for how bad the coming day would be. But I know that none of my days could approach what Adm. Richard E. Byrd, the American arctic explorer, endured in 1934, when he spent five months alone in a one-room shack in Antarctica, wintering over the long night.
January 2020 was the 200th anniversary of the first sighting of Antarctica, by Russian sailors. Byrd’s account of his 1934 ordeal, “Alone,” published in 1938, has been sitting by my bedside; call it the ultimate experiment in social distancing. At the time, Byrd was already famous for having been the first person to fly over the North Pole (although some researchers have disputed that claim) and, later, over the South Pole. He had received three ticker tape parades on Broadway.
Breakfast is the least analyzed meal. With quarantine, it’s taken on new meaning. We’re no longer grabbing a coffee and a corn muffin from the minimart, hustling to work as if Vince Lombardi were chewing us out. Some of us are taking more care with it.
There’s a small literature of the meal. I’ve owned breakfast cookbooks I’ve never opened. (Breakfast cookbooks are always slightly ridiculous.) But there is also, if you’re alert to it, a lot to be gleaned from novels, biographies and memoirs about starting your culinary day.
In “Little Eyes,” Schweblin proves herself a master at conjuring portraits in miniature, each storyline illuminating some new aspect of the human ability to extract meaning and debasement from technology. Like pets, Schweblin’s robots become vessels for psychological projection — monsters filled with adoration, anxiety, disgust, malice and devotion. The effect of gazing into or out from their little eyes creates the unsettling effect of a mise en abyme, an infinite, unsettling loop that once activated, can be broken only by complete destruction.
Her latest book, “Old Lovegood Girls,” is a richly layered novel based on a lifetime of reflection on friendship and storytelling. In a culture obsessed with youth, it’s a welcome reminder that age and wisdom can confer certain advantages, too.
Like most of Godwin’s work, this is a novel about the lives of women, but Godwin writes women’s fiction that deconstructs the condescending presumptions of that label. Her new book is a brilliant example of the way she can don even the most ladylike concerns while working through issues of independence, power and artistic integrity.
Only language can free us of language, in other words. Fresh vocabularies are required, oddly angled adjectives and surprising sentence arrangements to startle us out of complacency. Ditch your inner chaperone, he implores. Breach the cordon sanitaire in your mind. Filth, he writes, is one possible passport, but so is openness to the unexpected encounter. “Toward what goal do I aspire, ever, but collision?” he writes, and he goes on to document flirtations with beautiful strangers, the purchase of a new pair of glasses, delving into the work of Hervé Guilbert, swimming alongside Nicole Kidman at a local pool, watching a cloud of white butterflies. “Being spellbindable is my fate,” he writes.
Gardens are also good places
to sulk. You pass beds of
spiky voodoo lilies
and trip over the roots