But New York City’s intellectual landscape is increasingly split between two warring scenes, divided by geography, aesthetics and politics. Which of these prevails could affect whether America shifts right or remains where it is.
In Brooklyn, the borough associated with the “hipster” revolution from the late 2000s, writers energised by the Bernie Sanders campaigns in 2016 and 2020 retain their faith in left-wing politics through new “small” magazines. But on the island of Manhattan, a self-consciously transgressive artistic and literary scene is brewing downtown. In podcasts, plays and literary journals, a different sensibility is being elaborated. Scornful of the “woke” sanctimony of Brooklyn-based media, some flirt with alternative ideologies, while others claim not to be interested in politics at all.
The Wise View, with its conservative acceptance of the status quo, stands in the way of a greater societal commitment to finding out what aging is, and slow it down, halt it, or perhaps even reverse it. Thankfully, we find ourselves at a turning point in history where the old stories in praise of human mortality are beginning to lose their grip. We are less willing to see death as a just divine punishment, less certain of an afterlife, less inclined to accept that everything that happens by nature is thereby good, and we are no longer certain that nothing can be done about death. We are beginning to allow ourselves to openly admit what our actions already say: namely, that we want youth and life and that we hate aging and death. A rebellion against death is brewing.
When Sara, one of the protagonists in “Yerba Buena,” was a girl, she and her family used to play a game. They started with a blank piece of paper. Each person in turn would begin to sketch, slowly building the scene. As Sara and her brother watched, “their father moved his pencil, faint lines that turned — as if by magic — into places and things they recognized.” Suddenly, there it was: an entire world, familiar yet strange, and within it, a story.
This, too, is how Nina LaCour, who won a Printz Award for her young adult literature, weaves together her first adult novel. Chapter by chapter, she switches between perspectives to craft a quiet love story about two young women in Southern California who are figuring out what it means to build a home and to choose to invite someone to share in it.
In the introductory note to “The Foundling,” Ann Leary suggests a conundrum. How could an “early feminist” like Margaret Sanger — a pioneer of reproductive freedom, a tireless activist for progressive reform — proclaim in 1922 that “every feebleminded girl or woman of the hereditary type, especially of the moron class, should be segregated during the reproductive period” and expect modern-thinking people to agree with her?
Sanger doesn’t appear in “The Foundling,” but her ghost haunts its moral landscape as the fictional Agnes Vogel, a psychiatrist whose crusade for women’s rights and social reform propels her to the directorship of the Nettleton State Village for Feebleminded Women of Childbearing Age, a public asylum founded to sequester “unfit” women so they don’t breed others like them. If that description rings of dystopian satire, it’s not. Leary was inspired by the experience of her own grandmother who, in the 1930s, at the age of 17, worked as a stenographer for the director of a similarly named institution in rural Pennsylvania.
What do we owe the ones we love, really?
There are many moments in “Nightcrawling,” the fierce, lyrical debut novel from the 2018 Oakland Youth Poet Laureate Leila Mottley, that prompt shades of this question. How do we divvy up our successes or our shortcomings? When personal well-being is inextricably linked with the collective, then abandoning others in order to find it constitutes a type of betrayal. Either we owe our people nothing, or everything.
The novel’s chapters alternate between Yu-Jin’s perspective in the years leading up to her death and Min’s attempts to understand what happened afterward. As the voices build, they slowly reveal a powerful story about the pressures experienced by young adults living in Korean society.
When he finally gets back to his "live audience — that unwitting congregation of fail-safe editors" with a 72-city tour in the fall of 2021, he describes a world that is no less unscathed by COVID than he is by his father's life and death. It's a world that has gone as topsy-turvy as the title of the book's final essay, "Lucky-Go-Happy": a "divided, beat-up country...weary and battle-scarred. Its sidewalks were cracked, its mailboxes bashed in. All along the West Coast I saw tent cities." Also, Help Wanted signs, belligerent passengers harassing flight attendants about mask mandates, and angry graffiti ("Eat the Rich") on boarded up storefronts. Coming from a writer who can find twisted humor even in a "massively difficult" father, this dark view is sobering.