But literature is a domain often regarded, however snobbishly, as antithetical to the sorts of stimulations available on MTV. What’s more, the lofty, cerebral associations of the written word did not align with the channel’s bawdy reputation. The knowingly provocative music video for Duran Duran’s 1981 single “Girls on Film” initiated what critics regarded as a catalogue of garish smut. As early as 1983, journalist Steven Levy described MTV in a Rolling Stone cover story as “the ultimate junk culture triumph.” The channel won a Peabody Award for its 1992 “Choose or Lose” programming, which sought to mobilize young voters, and succeeded in its aim—at MTV’s inaugural ball, newly elected president Bill Clinton declared, “I think everybody here knows that MTV had a lot to do with the Clinton–Gore victory.” Still, the channel’s efforts to achieve something so serious as heightened political awareness were widely lampooned.
But MTV did not cower before mockery. And though its faltering start augured an uncertain future, the brand’s imprint, MTV Books, ultimately captured the hearts of its target audience of elder millennials who kept their dog-eared copies of The Perks of Being a Wallflower close and lovingly at hand. I was among them. A fickle fan of MTV’s television programming, I wondered whether MTV Books could offer me the nourishment I only occasionally found in the channel’s prodigiously splashy media. It did. And, in so doing, it secured my allegiance to that hell-raising colossus that loomed at the back of my generation. MTV Books was the MTV I wanted.
Determined to disseminate his ideas, Galileo published an imaginary, biased conversation in vernacular Italian that ostensibly weighed up geocentrism and heliocentrism, but provocatively voiced the pope’s own arguments through an obtuse Aristotelian called Simplicio. Although a version of Galileo’s model eventually claimed victory, the pope won that round of the battle by sentencing him to nine years of house arrest. Some 300 years later, contemplating the innovations of relativity and quantum mechanics, the German theoretical physicist Max Planck pronounced that ‘A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.’
With its sweeping and incisive vision, its proof that you can trap lightning in a bottle, “Companion Piece” shares the best qualities with the quartet to which it plays companion, offering a clever, erudite and humane portrait of our intense contemporary moment. Leaping from mythology to etymology, history to literature, she also makes the granular elements of daily movement the stuff of life-sustaining art. She shows, again, what exceptional fiction can do in troubled times that nothing else can.
Steve Toltz’s fabulously impressive third novel, following the 2008 Booker-shortlisted A Fraction of the Whole and 2015’s Quicksand, cannonballs straight into heady existential questions, magicking up a vision of human life at once generous and absurd while wearing its considerable ambition lightly. Very lightly. A few pages in, realising that the story is told in a compulsively jokey, determined-to-impress voice with even the dialogue consisting entirely of well-timed one-liners and off-the-cuff aphorisms, I groaned: “Oh Christ – 400 pages.” But a headstrong novelist sets the parameters of their own realism, and soon the style clicked. Once it did, I struggled to keep track of how much there was to admire in Toltz’s relentlessly lively sentences, offbeat insights and unfaltering narrative energy.
Humans love a good, old-fashioned morality tale told from the perspective of an animal. “Watership Down,” “Animal Farm,” “The One and Only Ivan”: These beloved books, and so many others like them, take life’s toughest challenges — death, belonging, fear, loneliness — and make them a little easier to swallow.
Joining the menagerie is Shelby Van Pelt’s “Remarkably Bright Creatures,” an ultimately feel-good but deceptively sensitive debut about what it feels like to have love taken from you, only to find it again in the most unexpected places. The best part? It’s narrated by Marcellus McSquiddles, a giant Pacific octopus who cannot only think and feel as humans do but also pick locks, squeeze out of his tank at the aquarium to go on late-night snack runs and serve as the town’s secret matchmaker.
Even if we ourselves haven’t experienced parental loss at a young age, we recognize the driftlessness and yearning of young adulthood. But it’s not merely its relatability and poetic nature that makes We Do What We Do In The Dark so notable—its artful narrative structure creates a profound reading experience.
This is called In Love because Amy and Brian are in love, and what she ends up doing for and with him is an enormous act of love. Never have I read a book so full of compassion and hope amidst such ethically complex decision making. How it can be so life affirming is testament to the writer's ability to express such an experience. Incredible.