“Our cultural seismology is being revealed,” said Anthea M. Hartig, the director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History of the events. Of these three earth-shaking events, she said, “The confluence is unlike most anything we’ve seen.”
Museums, she said, are grappling “with the need to comprehend multiple pandemics at once.”
I have felt the pangs of pandemic-induced boredom as badly as anyone. In the World Series of Staring Contests I am currently leading my easily distracted cat in a best-of-999 series 131-49. But even I never considered “driving” across the country on Street View. Surely, I thought, Schultz had achieved some kind of Pandemic Boredom God Mode.
But Schultz is not doing this out of boredom. At least, not nearly as much as I would have expected. He’s clicking his way across the country as a sort of research project.
Throughout, you feel in the safe hands of a storyteller dedicating their talent to our pleasure. The Liar’s Dictionary is a glorious novel – a perfectly crafted investigation of our ability to define words and their power to define us.
Watts’s novel is best read as a call to start seeing beyond finite empathy economies. It plays with the idea that understanding ecological and personal catastrophes through each other is something cringey and then challenges that cringe’s gendered stakes. The Inland Sea doesn’t assert the equivalence of climate catastrophe and the guy who doesn’t call, but allows them to exist in concert. The large crises of the novel are shot through with smaller pains — indignities and heartbreak and badly inserted IUDs that serve as micro indices for other kinds of harm.
Lacey is such a talented writer that she casts a certain spell, even when that spell is distant and difficult to tune in.
The book bears the massive responsibility of preserving Sarah’s legacy, but it also asks the reader to bear some responsibility for understanding Sarah’s complex humanity. Any addict can imagine herself in Sarah’s place: Now it’s the nonaddict’s turn. This kind of imaginative empathy seems particularly crucial as people continue to die of opioid overdoses all over the country. So read “The Heart and Other Monsters” and start seeing addicts as human. It’s all on you now.
My grandmother pours salt
into my right palm, places thin slivers
of garlic in my left. She explains