I grew up in a house filled with books. Many of them mysteriously old and impenetrable. Ornately bound sets of Dickens, Gibbon, Francis Parkman, Macaulay. But there, magically, sandwiched among those ancient tomes, but actually accessible to me, resided a complete series of 1900s-era boys’ books my dad and his brothers had doted on and dogeared when they were ten-year old kids like myself: the fifteen-volume Dave Porter series, “by” Edward Stratemeyer.
Ann Patchett’s new novel, Whistler, is centered on its own “probable impossibility,” one quieter, subtler than those in previous novels, but which proves arguably more powerful. This latest novel is astonishing not for the surprise of protagonist Daphne Fuller reuniting with her estranged stepfather, Eddie Triplett, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but for the novel’s affirmation of the endurance of gentle love through decades of absence, for its celebration of the probable impossibilities life sometimes deals us.
I was pretty lonely as a child. We lived far from town, surrounded by endless rolling wheat fields and tangled pockets of forest. The roads were mostly dirt. Certain trees, abandoned houses, and all sorts of interesting empty places became nearly as important to me as living, breathing friends. Some approximation of all that had to make it into my story. Places have meaning.
I find myself writing a lot about the feeling of things coming an end, and so the worlds in the stories inevitably share some characteristics. Things are always breaking down, or are right at the point of breaking down. I don’t try to link the stories or sketch out all the rules, so there’s not much true world-building going on outside the pages. But I wouldn’t disagree that a lot of the stories could share a single imaginative landscape.
About a year ago, a friend recommended to me Tove Jansson’s 1972 novel The Summer Book, saying it was the most perfect piece of writing he’d ever experienced. So of course I bought it right away—but have just now gotten around to reading it. Yes, it’s extraordinary—and unlike any other fiction I’ve read. It’s not really a novel in the usual sense. It’s a serious of vignettes, from two to twelve pages each.
This post is about the decisions we’ve made that led to the full and complex stories our lives have told. We made these decisions, or so we believe. But maybe we didn’t. It could be that they were made by some other force or agency and occurred beyond or outside us, fatefully, through no conscious choice-making of our own. There are literary examples that help to explain what I’m getting at, one from Ernest Hemingway, the other from Henry James.
Many people get introduced to the Jewish writer and Holocaust victim Anne Frank via her “Diary of a Young Girl” in a middle school literature class. But my own first impression of Anne came from her less well-known “Tales from the Secret Annex,” which deviates from the tone and material of her Diary in that it is a collection of mostly fictitious anecdotes and sketches.
I got interested in captivity narratives when I first read Mary Rowlandson’s in a graduate class. (Captivity narratives are the personal stories of those who have been captured by an enemy. Sarah’s voice in this story is one of those.) Mary Rowlandson was an English colonist who was captured by Native people in 1675 during King Philip’s War and held for ransom. Her account became what was really the first American bestseller.
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.
My question throughout my reading of these three very different treatments of Hitler, has been: What theme—if any—unifies them, beyond the scandal of their subject? I suggest that that theme has to do with each work’s willingness to picture Hitler dramatically, as a figure of tragedy.
Cervantes played with the tradition of chivalric romances, just as Shakespeare echoed (on at least one occasion, in Hamlet, mockingly) the Latin plays of Seneca. These authors reveal a paradoxical pattern in literature so consistent as to approach the status of a law: We go forward by looking back. The new literary experience is founded in literary memory.
Flannery O’Connor’s 1948 short story “The Barber” opens with this line: “It is trying on liberals in Dilton.” The fictional town of Dilton is set in O’Connor’s native state, Georgia, where the conservative party—with its Jim Crow segregation laws—was very popular with white Southerners in the mid-twentieth century. As the story continues, we witness a political confrontation between Rayber, a college instructor in the town, and his barber.
In this story by John Colman Wood, “Though the character’s body and brain no longer existed, somehow her consciousness lived on. “[S]he must tell her husband about this. He would be interested in her experience of death, for she was pretty sure, from their discussions over the years, that he thought consciousness died with the body.”
A few years ago, I stepped back and wondered why I liked reading so much. There have always been some standard answers—usually with some buzz words or ideas pulled from someone else—but I’ve wanted to make an answer of my own, or at least one pertaining to my interests, habits, and loves. When I started a consistent, daily writing habit about a year ago, I felt the need to understand why I loved reading, stories, characters, novels, and any literature.
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.
Below I give you the first paragraph of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral —a book that creates its main character and its theme only to undermine both. The paragraph is a gift to a close reader because it enacts all this creating and undermining within just its own short compass. Conceivably, you could savor just this paragraph, claim you’d read the whole book, and walk away with a good conscience.
I’ve been reading Mojtabai ever since, as her slim and potent novels have appeared at intervals over the years. Even if we concede that every interesting writer is in a sense sui generis, Mojtabai has had a career that distinguishes her as one who follows her own path. In some respects, she could be said to have had an anti-career, as stubbornly resistant to literary fashion as to the imperatives of the marketplace.
William James said belief is what we actually attend to, as opposed to what we simply profess. On those terms, I must be the world’s most devout follower of Cees Nooteboom’s novel Rituals (1980), which I read again recently on a long flight home. I’m haunted by these languid, philosophical pages. I keep going back to try to understand the haunting.
Ernest Hemingway said he wrote on “the principle of the iceberg”—1/8th above the surface, 7/8th below. For him, less is more, the meanings more powerful because they’re not stated, but implied. That’s why Hemingway has been praised for his art of omission, knowing what to leave out. It’s why the novelist Anthony Burgess honored him for teaching writers “how to use the silences between words.”
One day for reasons unknown I was struck with this image of a boy riding with his father along a back country road. When I put myself in that boy’s shoes, I couldn’t help but see from the perspective of my own boyhood, which put them in North Carolina, and made the boy’s father a Vietnam combat veteran—someone big, powerful, and dangerous, as my stepfather was (or at least that’s how I saw him at the time).