Drawing together first- and third-person perspectives, critique provides languages to dissect, persuade, dispute, enlist, encourage, propose, invent, and imagine, so that others may do so as well. Through second-person address—such as that employed by the prisoner—critique may summon forth new solidarities and emergent communities. Working at its own pace, critique can reveal the ethical wellsprings of people’s political commitments, so they know better why they act and what they can hope for.
Writing in 1961, at the founding of the Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle) movement, Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais, two of France’s most significant postwar literary experimentalists, wondered to one another “how few words can make a poem?”
How did life originate? Scientists have been studying the question for decades, and they’ve developed ingenious methods to try to find out. They’ve even enlisted biology’s most powerful theory, Darwinian evolution, in the search. But they still don’t have a complete answer. What they have hit is the world’s most theoretically fertile dead end.
No, I don’t think readers weren’t interested. It’s that they were told not to be interested. The algorithms had already decided my subjects were not breaking news. Those algorithms then ensured that they would never be. When I took my final bow, the room was already empty.
Despite their differences, these essays come together to assert the value of the writer’s vocation. Whatever her subject or tone, Erpenbeck keeps coming back to how her work enables us to know the unknowable, especially in our ever-changing heads and hearts. “It takes an entire lifetime,” she contends, “to unravel the mysteries of our own lives,” and in that task we have no better tool than fiction, poetry, drama — or even memoir.
However strong your readerly constitution, it might feel like a peculiar time to pick up a book so mournful and gory. And yet, I went to it every day without dread, with, in fact, a gratitude that surprised me. It was the gratitude of not being condescended to.
In this age of anxiety about cultural appropriation and suchlike, kudos to Nick Hornby’s bold move in Just Like You. He narrates one half of it from the point of view of a working-class black man in his early 20s and the other half from the point of view of a 42-year-old middle-class white mother. And, what’s more, he makes a social comedy of the two of them falling in love, one that gently dramatises their differences of class, race and generation.
Through her celebration of nature—and herself—Nezhukumatathil explores how it connects her to family and has played a role in building her own; in particular, nature becomes a lens through which to view motherhood. Nezhukumatathil reflects on the generosity and resilience of her own mother, a doctor who worked at a hospital for the criminally insane and faced racism from inmates and their families. “How did she manage to leave it all behind in that office, switching gears to listen to the ramblings of her fifth and sixth-grade girls and their playground dramas, slights, and victories?” Nezhukumatathil wonders.
Before walking to work, and in still-falling snow,
my father in hat, suit, topcoat, and galoshes