In Caroline Fraser’s nonfiction book Murderland, there are charts and metrics, there are photographs, and I wondered about how many other investigators and resources that Fraser must have pulled into her quest in order to develop this vast canvas—the very project she describes in this book’s opening, the effort to pull a thread of yarn from one tragedy to the next, as in a detective’s crime scene map.
Nonetheless, there are still the hours to stare down. To care for someone sick, even when joyfully, is to watch the painful inching forward of time, just as it is to watch the day fall forward on a Sabbath without electronic amusements. And to bear the breadth of literature can be exacting, but a labor that ultimately satisfies.
The genteel word “readers” is inadequate for the condition in which we self-declared readers find ourselves. “Consumers,” on the other hand, seems to me a better fit for the current moment. That word has become something of a catch-all, used ruefully to term any group, from college students to church members, who act entitled to receive something without any effort.
It has now, in 2025, been almost twenty years since the publication of The Year of Magical Thinking, writer Joan Didion’s prickly, spare nonfiction account of her husband’s unexpected death during New Year’s week in 2003. It arrived in the mail on a day I was home sick from work, and I lay in bed with my head pounding and read the whole thing within hours.
How do you write a book—or more broadly, create a work of art—that offers an image of protest, or lodges a social complaint, without such a work becoming a work of propaganda itself? There’s one in particular I’m thinking of, in these vexed times: the 2002 “nonfiction novel” Mrs. Paine’s Garage, by Thomas Mallon.
Despite some fifty years now of “experimental fiction,” the majority of current novels I’ve read still aim for the Roman arch structure—but fail miserably. I’m mostly thinking of books in the “blockbuster midlist” category, like Jonathan Franzen’s works. Like the painstaking ratchet of roller coaster cars up the incline, these novels develop complex action and character so meticulously that they are forced to cut loose in the final third, the cars careening downhill in the kind of ex nihilo zaniness usually reserved for the Marvel movie franchise.
I picked Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129 mostly because, at the time, the sonnet’s edgy tone about the drive to tamp down the earthly passions–—something I was personally dealing with at the time!-—cohered to my own struggles. I scrawled the poem in cursive on notebook paper over and over, trying to memorize it, and in memorizing it, it became a part of me—a part of my body, really
2024 marks the fortieth anniversary since the publication of the novel Bright Lights, Big City. It was the first book by Jay McInerney, and probably to his chagrin, the one for which he is still known the most. If you know anything about it at all, you probably remember the novel’s signature reference to cocaine as “Bolivian Marching Powder,” in which the twenty-something male protagonist, in the middle of an emotional breakdown, indulges on a parade of mirrors and in nightclub bathrooms.
The most amazing thing happened to me in the past few weeks. It was the kind of thing that I thought might never happen to me in exactly the same way, ever again: I fell in love with a book. The book was a novel, The Index of Self-Destructive Acts, by Christopher Beha, originally published in 2020.
Not finishing books is a recurrent habit in my life. I quit William Gaddis’s JR after only a few pages, which makes sense, but quit The Brothers Karamazov around fifty pages from the end, which doesn’t. As I write, I have been reading Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings since November 2016. I got a hundred pages in on a red-eye back from San Francisco, then quit until August of 2018, when I was on a vacation in a house with no WiFi.
More and more, I think, it’s this tyranny of concepts—the predetermination, pre-editing, and pre-thinking—that seem to plague our literature. Instead of opening the trap door to endless perspectives, endless transfiguration, this book, along with so many, seemed to end where it started.
All spring, I have been trying to re-learn to read. I’m in a book club with a group of women friends in my neighborhood—the kind of book club that focuses on the book, rather than the wine. (Caffeine, actually, is better with this group, because one must always be ready to heed to the sharp discussion.) This month, our book is Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom.
Everything is connected in the end. That’s the sober pronouncement made near the conclusion, on page 826, of Don DeLillo’s 1997 novel Underworld, in which the resolutely anti-modern, paranoid nun Sister Edgar arrives in the afterlife to find herself in an eternal cyberspace, instead of what she’d expected of heaven, alongside J. Edgar Hoover, her philosophical twin. The conclusion manages to be both ominous and incantatory all at once; grim and yet hopeful.
The one common theme of all these one-off volumes is: they represent a singular creative movement amid the lives of their authors, that is ultimately evanescent. They are the opposite of the books or careers that are like immovable boulders, or worse, business franchises. They produced something, and then they moved on. They are the living personification of Diana Vreeland’s purported fashion dictum, Elegance is refusal.
This overwhelming self-referentiality is exceptionally ironic given the emphasis of current mainstream discourse on marginalized communities and their importance of “inclusion.” I’m all for Inclusion, but in my own experience, the inclusion that seems to be on offer is the mere gathering of difference—not its dynamic melding. We are a basketful of sullen turtles, pulled into our shells, I guess.
Ever more there’s the problem of a “missing middle” where—like the firefighters unable to find affordable housing in the metropolia where they work—writers struggle to get published, find an audience, and get paid, let alone have the longevity to let a creative vision root and grow and be pruned and strengthened by contrapuntal conversation with an audience.
We are not living in an age of synthesis—let alone humility—in public dialogue, whether about art, literature, or religion, Rather, the dominant pose (and take note of how I framed that) is one of the endless, exhausting refinement of distinctions, the chopping up of this not that. If you’ve ever been the target of a long Twitter pile-on, you know what I mean.
When, exactly, did this grammar of grief emerge? In my lifetime, it would seem to be the daily pages of biographies of 9/11 dead published in The New York Times’s landmark project, A Nation Challenged. And the homemade posters of the missing that flocked the walls and telephones of the city.
The college admissions system today, I read somewhere, rewards not the “bright well-rounded kid” (abbreviated BWRK by admissions reviewers), but the “pointy” kid instead, by which is meant an outsize and distinctive feature—like innovating a patentable medical device, launching a business, or testifying before Congress. Three sports and extracurriculars are nowhere near enough.
A couple months ago I received a group text from a friend asking if we had seen the Maggie Gyllenhaal-directed film The Lost Daughter and saying how disturbed she was by its portrayal of motherhood. This friend is both a mother and a philosophy professor; the other two friends on the thread besides me are a writer and the vice president of government relations for a pharmaceutical firm. All of us are mothers. All of us were pretty disturbed/annoyed by The Lost Daughter.