In A Woman Loved (Graywolf Press), Russian-born French author Andreï Makine uses one writer’s obsession with Catherine the Great to ask how history affects individuals, and if it is possible to escape its pressures. After a first short film receives favor from the Politburo, screenwriter Oleg Erdmann throws himself into his new project, a movie about Catherine, with a monomaniacal fervor. The challenge is immense: how to capture the struggles for political dominion and her succession of lovers within a condensed time span, and without running afoul of the censors who will control the project’s viability? Oleg researches her life obsessively, surrounding himself with charts outlining the metrics of her 36-year rule as tsarina and alienating his lover Lessya in the process. Catherine’s overthrow of her husband in a coup and her many dalliances, vetted first as they were for sexual health and rewarded generously for their service in her bed, makes her particularly ripe for sensationalism even as her amorous exploits were no more extreme than those of her contemporary Louis XV. Yet each lover seems to have been truly adored, even as the affection they return is more based on worldly considerations than on romance. The vision of a more private Catherine, a woman desperate to feel loved, beckons to Oleg from the shadows of history.

Of German origin himself, he feels connected to the young German princess who would later morph into the Enlightenment era figure who seems so hard to grasp. Not just the history of Catherine but his own family’s history seems at stake here. His own future as a writer hangs in the balance as well, including whether or not he will ever escape life in a communal apartment enlivened only by occasional shifts at the slaughterhouse to fund his research. Lessya’s contempt comes not only from her sense that the subject matter is too unwieldy for a movie but also from her desire to choose a partner who can find success or notoriety, depending on whether they work with or against the authorities. Success and what it costs is a running theme in the novel: every epoch demand a certain type of behavior, which necessarily involves sacrificing other values on the journey.

Finally vetted by the State Committee for Cinematic Art, filming is assigned to a veteran director and the scenes of Catherine’s life are transposed against the history of the times she lived in, portrayed with as much balance and sensitivity as Soviet politics will allow. No longer is Oleg waiting for his depressive flat mate to finish boiling her tea before he can make coffee; now he has his own apartment and his lead actress, Dina, as a girlfriend. Oleg also strikes up a romance-tinged friendship with the German playing the older Catherine, an actress named Eva Sander who shares his vision of the tsarina. All seems to be falling in place, until the sudden death of Brezhnev throws Oleg out of favor as the technocrats on the SCCA try to read the way the wind is blowing. The Soviet world has begun to end, but the novel skips over its unwinding to jump twelve years forward, from 1982 to 1994. The device has the effect of throwing the reader into a dizzying world of change, approximating what the citizens of the former USSR must have felt themselves at the abrupt transition.

Part III begins in the hospital, with Oleg recovering from an attack after the small magazine where he worked is raided by thugs whose bosses are unhappy with how they have been represented in its pages. Gone is the repressive SCCA, but gone too are ready funds for filmmaking, or even government money for painkillers in the hospital wards, unless a cash bribe can make them flow. Oleg looks back at the intervening years with rising disgust: his time filming videos commissioned by oligarchs to celebrate their rise to wealth, the death in poverty of his former director, Dina’s steady appearance in crass commercials in order to support her former orphanage. On his discharge, he recommits himself to Catherine; not any longer to capture each event, but to find somewhere a space where she can be outside history. There was one lover, Lanskoy, who Eva theorized did truly love the Empress, perhaps even to the point of finding a way to travel in secret together abroad. Oleg digs for proof, avoiding this time the urge to ennoble the wars and intrigues around the tsarina with a larger purpose. The unremarked death of a former flat mate crystallizes his desire to seek out only intimate, private moments, but in this harsh new world intimacy lacks the ability to stand up to assault, and Oleg spirals down into alcohol and illness.

He is only brought back from the brink by an encounter with an old SCCA ally who went through imprisonment with Oleg’s father, and then by reuniting with an old slaughterhouse colleague, Zhurbin. Newly wealthy and looking to start a successful TV program with the money from his ventures, he ropes Oleg into writing a series on the life of Catherine. Sensationalism and its profits have taken the place of ideology, with ratings as inflexible a master as the former regime was. Like Dina, Zhurbin has bartered a compromise, trading seriousness of tone for the ability to send his innocent young daughter away to a boarding school where she will be sheltered. While Oleg balks at the increasingly scandalous tone and even briefly resigns, the impending arrest of Zhurbin on trumped-up tax fraud charges causes him to come back on board. He uses the opportunity to apply for a trip to Germany, and once there visits Eva Sander. What might have been between them reawakens when they discuss Lanskoy and the slim possibility that Catherine was able to escape her role as stateswoman to travel with him. Almost without discussion, Eva and Oleg agree to trace the steps of the couple’s putative journey, searching also for the lost unfinished film of Catherine’s life that Eva worked on long ago with an Italian director. With Eva Oleg finds at last a measure of calm, outside of the struggle to succeed or the temptation to give up entirely; like Catherine, he too ultimately desires only to be loved.

Dizzying scenarios fly at the reader from the very first lines, and they hardly slow down over the course of the novel. And yet despite grappling with a vast amount of information and addressing serious questions about history, the novel manages to never feel overwhelming or over-burdened. Its tone switches from an initially formalist intellectual discussion of how to create art and understand history to a searching investigation of how to create personal meaning in a world that demands compromise at every turn. Complex and tender without sentimentality, it is quite a feat. It is perhaps Makine’s own experience of morphing from a homeless political refugee into an acclaimed writer that gives his depiction of Oleg’s ascent to fame and subsequent disenchantment its clear-eyed compassion, just as Makine’s cosmopolitan background gives him the ability to telescope out on two wildly different historical periods. The skilled work of his long-time translator Geoffrey Strachan is another asset. Taken together, it turns what would in other hands be a novel of almost labyrinthine complexity into a masterful, wise romance whose ultimate purity stems from its rejection of the distracting corruptions of power.

Andreï Makine is a Russian-born French author whose novels include Dreams of My Russian Summers (1995) which won the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Médicis.

Geoffrey Strachan was awarded the Scott Moncrieff Prize for his translation of Dreams of My Russian Summers. He has translated all of Andreï Makine’s novels for publication in Britain and the United States.

Susan Neiman’s lively treatise on the how modern society celebrates the trappings of youth and rejects the stigmas of adulthood, Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), doesn’t limit itself to finding the incentives to be found in embracing the march of time. Early on, Neiman acknowledges that the ‘why’ of growing up is dependent on the ‘what’ of growing up, which is vague at best and slippery across generations, a by-product concept dependent on the century and continent:

It’s fair to ask whether philosophy can say much at all about a process as diverse as coming of age. Philosophers trade in general truths – some still seek necessary or universal ones – but even a little empirical date reveals that growing up is very particular…French historian Philippe Ariès argued that early medieval Europeans had no concept of childhood; not until the twelfth century were children considered notable enough to be portrayed in paintings, and even then they were simply depicted as smaller-sized adults, with no difference of feature or expression

That far flung past is almost unimaginable by the current standards of Western civilization, and what is at stake in the book is very much a first world problem. The children and young adults in less prosperous nations, those who make our clothing in factories, work in fields, or do other forms of labor to scrape by, probably don’t have as much time to consider whether they should stop playing video games in their parents’ basement and take on more of life’s responsibilities. Even in America, where the words ‘citizen’ and ‘consumer’ are interchangeable, the act of consuming being the primary function of babies, the luxury of being able to choose whether or not to “grow up” is very much a post war product. As the 2013 documentary Teenage addresses, the concept of the “teenager” wasn’t even invented until after World War II.

Seeking to expose the deepest roots of our current crisis of adulthood, Neiman looks to the Enlightenment by putting the writings of Immanuel Kant, Jean-Jacques Rosseau and others in conversation, building her ideas from there:

Coming of age is an Enlightenment problem, and nothing shows so clearly that we are the Enlightenment’s heirs, whether we acknowledge that heritage or not…In an age where traditional social roles began to loosen, the Enlightenment could begin to care about individual human development for its own sake – though political concerns were never very far in the background.

Why Grow Up? astutely shows how notions of progress and development from the Enlightenment might be applied to our understanding of what adulthood means today. It also makes clear the concept of adulthood being the navigation between the “is” and the “ought”, what the world is actually like versus what we as individuals think it should be like. If at times the focus of the book seems to narrow a bit far in to, say, Kant’s arguments about the limitations of David Hume’s account of experience, Neiman also acknowledges that philosophy might provide a way to some answers, but not all of them. “For Kant, by contrast, philosophy’s role in helping us grow up is precisely the opposite. It will not console or soothe you; it is practically guaranteed to make your life harder.”

Neiman understands the spiritual value of childlike wonder, the magic in the fact that a baby’s first encounter with a simple utensil can provide that new being with more awe than a grown-up might get from listening to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. For an ‘adult’ equivalent, think of the character Cameron Frye in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, staring enrapt by Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. Neiman makes the point, though, that with that sense of wonder also comes a bundle of other less grand sensitivities, and maybe gaining experience and getting used to the world around us is not something to shun, but to embrace. Once firmly planted in adulthood, she argues, “[h]owever wrenching…experiences can be, they no longer have you feeling on the edge of abyss, watching the void between is and ought open before your eyes. You have seen it before, which means you’ve begun to get used to it.”

Growing up isn’t so bad, even in a modern Western culture—obsessed with image, self, and expressing ideas in the shortest, tackiest ways possible—that sometimes seems determined to lock everyone into a state of permanent adolescence. Neiman is careful to suggest a number of reasonable prescriptions for the problem at hand (education, work, travel, and one should also maybe not spend all day on the Internet), but not offer a single, simplified cure-all. There is no one single path to adulthood, and the attempt to find one’s own path is as important a step to being a grown-up as any. Navigating such a path requires continual conversation with the self, much like the conversation Why Grow Up? engages in. What a luxury to be able to have that conversation at all.

Susan Neiman is the director of the Einstein Forum. Her previous books, translated into many languages, include Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy, The Unity of Reason, and Slow Fire: Jewish Notes from Berlin. She also writes cultural and political commentary for diverse media in the United States, Germany, and Great Britain. Born in Atlanta, Georgia, Neiman studied philosophy at Harvard and the Free University of Berlin, and was a professor of philosophy at Yale and Tel Aviv Universities. She is the mother of three grown children, and currently lives in Berlin.

Poet and playwright Deborah Levy staked out the territory of post-modern alienation with a vengeance in her first two novellas. 1989’s Beautiful Mutants and 1993’s Swallowing Geography (Bloomsbury) still thrum decades later with disdain for an increasingly confused free market world. Levy switches perspective and setting as if changing the channel, ceaselessly and compulsively searching for a transmission whose humanity hasn’t been corroded. Her prose veers from dreamlike reverie to bald aggression in the turn of a sentence, never resting.

In Beautiful Mutants even the successes are casualties: the high-powered wealthy Banker is shaken at night by her sobs before arising to do her boutique shopping in the morning, while the rest of the characters labor in the lower ranks or drift aimlessly on the sidewalks. Being outside this value system doesn’t result in meaning, and no escape seems on offer. The Anorexic Anarchist, the Poet, the Innocents: their individual withdrawal from the rat race makes them mere witnesses to its depredations.

Around them the zoo burns with its animals turned to ash, a woman working on the ‘meat belt’ in a processing factory loses her hand, the macabre and the lyrical pile up and cry out with urgency. Lapinski, an immigrant to London from the Soviet Union, sits at the center of this whirlwind, seemingly undaunted by the cold calculations of her former friend the Banker or the hallucinogenic statements of the Poet or the violent misogyny of her upstairs neighbor. Her world is a sequence of impressions, and Lapinski’s power resides in her ability to accept that there is no rhyme or reason to them.

Swallowing Geography centers on the writer J.K., another woman at home with uncertainty. A nomad on assignment, not even her lovers are given access to who she truly is. The one connection of any authenticity is with an old friend dying of AIDS, who writes to her from his sickbed as he recedes from the world that she is wandering. The news blares against the backdrop of his letters, broadcasting the breakup of the USSR and the offensives of the Gulf War, and J.K. imagines the young men at war in the desert as she passes from airport lounge to distant hotel. She dreams of taking root in a place only to pack her bags again, as if the geopolitical turbulence elsewhere has infiltrated her own psyche.

Levy captures an era whose logic is still with us today: winner-take-all capitalism with no spoils for the lower classes and increasing, pointless consumerism at the top, a continuing military presence, even a lingering opposition of East and West. Individuals are an afterthought, powerless in their limited sphere and increasingly unable to anchor themselves in a firm identity. Levy’s works are also markedly feminist, not through a strident declaration but in the markedly small role given to romance in the lives of Levy’s narrators. Men appear as neighbors, as friends, and occasionally as objects of desire or scorn, but there is no room amidst the complications of life for anything so boring as a marriage plot or even more than a passing affair, inevitably abandoned.

Her characters, while having a strongly sexual side, define themselves on their own terms to a degree that remains relatively rare. Perhaps the difficulty of establishing a conventional, settled, content life has this as its upside: that no one can hold you to an image of who you ought to be. Bloomsbury’s re-issue of these two works together allows for a deeper appreciation of Levy’s distinctive sensibility, unsettling though it is.

Deborah Levy’s family emigrated to London from apartheid South Africa when she was young. A poet and playwright as well as a novelist, her recent book Swimming Home was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. 

Set twenty years in the past, Stacy Wakefield’s debut novel, The Sunshine Crust Baking Factory (Akashic Books), comes at an opportune time to look back at the heyday of the practice of squatting, both in the US and Europe, and consider what has become of it. The verdict is perhaps still a long way out on the ultimate effectiveness of the loosely organized Occupy movement, but, if nothing else, it is the most recently visible manifestation of the legacy of squatting. By combining sit-in political visibility with weeks-long land appropriation, Occupy Wall Street became part of the tradition of squatting as a means of protest. The residential squatting brought to life in Wakefield’s novel is its own kind of political statement, but one that is made in everyday life choices.

In the mid-‘90s, nineteen-year-old Sid has finally moved to New York City after so many trips down from Connecticut to see punk shows at the fabled community-oriented arts center ABC No Rio. Enamored with how the squatting scene in the Lower East Side seemed to embody the pervading DIY ethics of the day, Sid wants in. She is connected enough to get a part time job selling band T-shirts at ABC No Rio shows, but every one of the existing squats in the neighborhood is filled. Actual estimates suggest that during that time there was anywhere from 500 to 1,000 squatters spread out around the East Village and Lower East Side in over 30 buildings. That figure isn’t much compared to the estimated 30,000 squatters that lived all across London in the late 1970s and 1980s—when it was fairly normal for young people in artistic trades to claim a spot in an unused residence—but it’s enough to deserve notice. 

Ten years too late for lower Manhattan, it turns out Sid is right on time for North Brooklyn, though it doesn’t seem that way to her at first. In recent years a modest four-family building near Rodney Street and South 1st would probably sell for somewhere in the area of one million dollars, but twenty years ago Wakefield actually spent a summer living in a squatted building on that intersection that serves as the model for the novel’s titular setting. Demographically speaking, the LES and North Brooklyn are now essentially one long neighborhood with a river running through it, but Sid’s first impression is one of an enormous divide.

Following her friend Donny’s tip about the old factory, there Sid finds her new roommates. Mitch, who first established the squat, works manual labor and often speaks with his back to people. Skip is a street bookseller and poet who somehow doesn’t know much of anything about punk, straight edge, or even the definition of the word ‘celibate’. Eddie is “six months clean and counting”. Sid has brought along Lorenzo, a punk rocker from Mexico who leads a band called Disguerro and has come to leave his mark on the NYC scene. Lorenzo is adept at exploiting Sid’s unrequited crush on him, Sid less so at keeping that crush from affecting how she handles her new living situation. 

Every character in the novel is something of a “type”, but Wakefield does a fine job of keeping them from being one-dimensional. At some point between the first and the last page, the reader will find reasons to like and dislike all of the main players. Skip, for example, who makes such an unimpressive first impression, endearingly comes alive when he reads at a poetry night, only to disappoint again later on. Even Sid has her irritating moments, and Lorenzo isn’t a 100% jerk – just a 99% one. Brisk as the story is, the characters—at least some of whom are composites of people Wakefield met while squatting – are immediate and rub up against you in familiar ways, especially if you lived through the ‘90s and knew people who lived this lifestyle.

As the title suggests, the most vivid character in the book is the factory itself. The first floor with its dingy corners and refuse piles, the nascent 2nd floor art space, and Mitch’s tidier third floor dwelling – you can practically smell the place, for better or for worse. The old factory holds different potential for each of its inhabitants. It is a white canvas for them to project their individual dreams on. Sid wants an alternative society, Mitch wants as little to do with any kind of society all together, and the factory holds both of those promises for them. Both in Sid’s interior monologues and conversations among the house members, Wakefield shows the spectrum of squatting’s allure.

The notion of “squatters’ rights” has at times been a little romantically exaggerated by some, at least in the US and Britain (certain parts of Europe have perhaps been more relaxed). Yes, if you managed to prove continual occupation of a disused building for a certain amount of time, you could eventually make a claim to live there, but those periods of time were long and could be arduous to uphold. In general, squatters’ rights have had more to do with limitations on the way people can be physically removed from residences, and less to do with one’s actual right to claim an empty building for themselves. Sadly, in recent years, what rights squatters could claim have come under attack. In 2012, Weatherley’s Law made squatting in a residential building a criminal offense in England. Last year, the state of Michigan created similar laws: landlords now have greater power to physically remove occupants, and squatting is a misdemeanor first offense, felony second offense. It might seem logical that Detroit would consider offering up its 40,000-plus abandoned buildings for a squatter’s price to encourage young artsy types to come repopulate the failing city, but Detroit is a complicated situation to say the least. 

If it had ever been a squatter’s paradise, Wakefield illustrates that New York City in the 1990s was a complicated situation as well. All it takes is a small fire in one room of the Rot Squat building in the East Village, and the demolition crews come chasing behind the fire engines at the behest of Giuliani. When Sid’s own situation at the factory starts to feel untenable, she briefly takes up with another loose group of squatters from Manhattan intent on claiming an abandoned theater a few stops further into Williamsburg under the J train on Broadway. After only two weeks of doing what they can to fix up the impressive space and lock out the prostitutes and drug addicts (a move that at least a couple of them do seem to rightfully acknowledge is ideologically problematic, hypocritical even), it turns out that the edge of Bushwick isn’t quite ready for prime time yet.

Wakefield doesn’t shy away from the looming gentrification that shadows her story and consumes New York City, San Francisco, and other metropolitan areas today. Ever since the children of white flight began rejecting suburban malaise for the appeals of density, it has followed: first comes the fringe creative types, then comes the more well-off creative types, then comes the real money. Squatting certainly had a moral legitimacy in its positive use of derelict buildings, and though the dream might have been short-lived for many, at least it was lived for a time. Still, Wakefield occasionally teases at the writing on the wall with her (possibly) unwitting characters. As Sid recounts of walking in Williamsburg with her friend Raven in the summer:

The weekend was really hot, and I took Raven down to Kent Avenue where we climbed under the fence past the trash pile to the hidden, disintegrating pier. She spread her arms wide to encompass the city floating over the dark river.

“This is so rad!” she cried. “In the city there’d be a gazillion yuppies walking their dogs here.”

Just you wait, Raven.

Stacy Wakefield published her first nonfiction book about squatting, the underground classic Not for Rent, in 1994. Her debut novel is The Sunshine Crust Baking Factory. Wakefield is cocreator of the photo/essay book Please Take Me Off the Guest List with Nick Zinner and Zachary Lipez. She grew up in the Pacific Northwest and lives in Brooklyn and the Catskills with her husband, musician Nick Forte.

ODE TO A DYING CITY

Vivian Gornick’s elegiac memoir, The Odd Woman and the City: A Memoir (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), is a kind of ode to a liberal, intellectual New York that no longer exists – and one she knows she never can or will leave. As she wanders the city like a flaneur with her best gay friend Leonard, observing the changing city and faces, she muses on past loves, past friendships, and literature. She writes, in one of many lovely passages:

“Of these treks of ours, the character of time-and-often changed as we walked. The concept of “hours” evaporated. The streets became one long ribbon of open road stretched out before us, with nothing to impede our progress. Time expanded to resemble time in one’s childhood, when it seemed never to end, as opposed to time now: always scarce, always pressing, always a fleeting marker of one’s emotional being.”

And a walk with Gornick is pleasant journey – a New York where time is of little essence and life is filled with former radical feminists, book dealers, lots of talks about literature in tall velvet chairs, dinners at the homes of psychoanalysts, and solace and truth found during 9/11 in the “minimalist prose of French and Italian novelists of the fifties and sixties.”

It is also a New York that Gornick can’t leave. In some ways, the book is almost a counter argument to Joan Didion’s Goodbye to All That – a reason for, rather than against, the city that never sleeps, despite all its inevitable disappointments, loneliness, and broken promises. Gornick writes of New York’s magnetic pull on her:

“It’s the voices I can’t do without. In most cities of the world the populace is planted in centuries of cobblestoned alleys, ruined churches, architectural relics, none of which are ever dug up, only piled one on top of another. If you’ve grown up in New York, your life is archaeology not of structures, but of voices, also piled one on top of another, also not replacing one another.”

The Odd Woman and the City is filled with brief but penetrating insights such as this, fleeting as city life itself. And though it makes for a lovely read – ideal for idle, dreamy, paging through on the subway – it comes with just a word of warning. Don’t expect to find a city that looks like this today.

Vivian Gornick‘s books include Approaching Eye Level, The End of The Novel of Love, and The Situation and The Story. She lives in New York City. 

Per Petterson’s I Refuse (Graywolf Press) is, as the title suggests, a novel concerned with egoism and repression. It is also about suffering, and the two protagonists, Jim and Tommy, suffer similarly for their self-centeredness—they are middle-aged, alone, and miserable. Tommy has a vague career in finance: he works with “money that barely existed, that was liquid and flowing this way and that at random,” and is paid “an embarrassingly large sum of money”—he lives alone in a mansion on an island in the middle of a fjord and was once engaged but “drew back at the last minute.” He drives a Mercedes, drinks too much, and takes pills for blood pressure. Jim, a former librarian (as Petterson was), has been on sick leave for a full year (this is possible in Norway) after collapsing into a shoe rack mid-panic attack (an event made tortuously literary with long breathless descriptive phrases and doctor characters oblivious to mental health—this brand of convenient subtlety is endemic to the novel and wearying). In the year, his anxiety has devolved into a full-fledged depression. He lives alone in a two-room flat, has fallen further into sex and nicotine addictions, and contemplates suicide. His only happiness is fishing on a bridge at daybreak. He drinks too much and takes pills for his condition.

Both Jim and Tommy are mired in themselves—and in what they once were to each other. They grew up best friends in the 60s, in the nowhere-ville town Mørk, an archetype of blue-collar bible belt Norway so technologically remote and backwoods-y that home telephones are American dreams (though, oddly, every Mørkian seems to have a television). It is a brutal, backward town where bibbers and bumblers beat their children and women, grind through manual labor, and worship a Christian God because “there was nothing else.” “The thing about Mork,” Petterson wants us to believe, “was that it could have been anywhere.” It is in this void of sameness, Jim, who never knew his father, and Tommy, whose mother abandoned him and his three siblings to their father, a garbage man and vicious abuser, find one another. They are different—thus they become aligned and inseparable. They share in the horrors of their childhood (and it is horrible—Petterson makes us intimates, too), they bear them together. But they grow up and apart. Tommy works a full time job at a saw mill, Jim is a star student—their friendship is strained and finally, as Jim grows ill and finally attempts suicide, ruptured, along with whatever defense against these demons their love provided.

It is precisely those demons, long-repressed and long-torturing, that emerge in the “present” the novel takes place in, as Tommy, by chance, drives down the very bridge Jim fishes on, and they meet, for the first time in thirty years. What emerges in the following hours is, for them, in a very real sense, the novel. That is, the novel is their lives, there is no distinction—the novel is a representation of the consciousness unpacking the moment of reunion. As is such, I Refuse is, formally, a strange book. At first blush, it seems entirely whimsical and even sloppy—key exposition is repeated endlessly, characters repeat phrases from chapter to chapter like refrains, clichés such as “everything was different” and “everything had to change” riddle sentences, many of which are strung out exasperatingly by “ands” and dependent clauses begging for a period. For that reason Petterson’s sentences are tricky to get a handle on— not because they are grammatically complex or verbose, but because they don’t seem to ever resolve. He is always indeterminate. Similarly, he flits freely and willingly between first- and third-person narrations, sometimes going over the same event twice or even three times—once as an objective observer, again as the “I” who experienced it, again as another ancillary “I.” Supporting actors get one or two chapters to themselves and go no further—Siri, Tommy’s younger sister, gets to close out the novel. If the attempt is high-art parallax à la Ulysses, it doesn’t usually appear that way. It appears almost accidental, like an error, or a bad draft. To an American writer and reader rooted in a type of academic-conservative contemporary tradition that demands sentence diversity and “round” characters, that makes cliché anathema and “control” apogee, such choices are odd, almost unsettling. Is the book bad? Is it well-written? 

Petterson does not have those roots and does not belong to that tradition. He is interested in something less confectionary, is more involved in texture and tone and depth than intellectual precision. He isn’t even interested in writing good sentences per se—his sentences are not refined, though they are rarified. What he seeks is emergence, a coming-to-life, and he does so relentlessly. The New Yorker’s literary critic James Wood has said, “[Petterson’s] sentences yearn to fly away into poetry; it is rare to find prose at once so exact and so vague,” and he is correct—Petterson is a rare stylist whose prose, like the best poetry, is impossibly fragile. It exists only in contradiction—it always isn’t. To launch definition at the work is to lose contact with and thus shatter its vision, or let it go (a crime of which these words are necessarily and consciously guilty). But there is always that something to contact, it is immovable, and it is precisely the intensity of this presence that makes the book so achingly personal, so animated, however “imperfect” it is. Because there is that suffusing the pages, the repetition and perspectives and cliché are not empty, but rather embolden the book’s humanity like paintbrush strokes embolden a painting’s color. And this suggestion of depth—the becoming-of those depths—is Petterson’s power. His tableau is rigorously aesthetic and alive.

The question then is this: is it worthwhile to read a book whose brutality and repression and anger is so personally expressed, so expressive? I Refuse is humorless. The men, and the men get the overwhelming bulk of treatment here (though Petterson is not a bad writer of women), are disintegrating into stews of old-fashioned vice and despondence—their destitution, monkish in its extreme Christian ethos, is so felt. As Jim says, repeatedly, “You had to make yourself worthy, that was the point.” But: how to create worthiness out of a self that is fundamentally unworthy? The novel’s hopelessness is so thematic it is almost absurd—are people that miserable? Of course, they are, but they are rarely portrayed so honestly in the novel, rarely portrayed as that miserable. Yet Petterson’s egoists are grotesque, but real. Their final epiphanies are slight but monumental. If I Refuse is limning some depth of misery no other book limns, it is not only worthwhile, but necessary—but whether it really opens new horizons remains to be seen. It might. It might also be true that many, after a hundred pages of drudgery and hopelessness and anguish, brutal egoism, and a circular ethos demanding of the flesh an impossible transcendence, they will shut the book and toss it aside, saying, “No—I refuse.”

Per Petterson won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for his novel Out Stealing Horses, which has been translated into forty-nine languages and was named a Best Book of 2007 by the New York Times Book Review.

Don Bartlett lives in England and works as a freelance translator of Scandinavian literature. He has translated, or co-translated, Norwegian novels by Lars Saabye Christensen, Roy Jacobsen, Ingvar Ambjornsen, Kjell Ola Dahl, Gunnar Staalesen, Pernille Rygg, and Jo Nesbo.

Money, religion, sex, intrigue: Mario Vargas Llosa delivers all of these in his new novel, The Discreet Hero (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), as befits a Nobel prize-winning author who stated at the beginning of his career that he wants to create “total novels.” Set both in the provincial Northern town of Piura and the bustling capital of Lima, its main characters operate in milieus that are wildly different and yet share a central concern: how to protect their successful businesses from existential threats.

Felicito Yanaqué, the novel’s besieged heart, was born in abject poverty and rose out of it on the labors of his untiring father, who imparted only one piece of wisdom to his only child: ”Never let anyone walk over you, son. This advice is the only inheritance you’ll have.” Felicito profited from his father’s example, and builds a well-respected transport company by heeding it. So when he receives an extortion note demanding protection money, acquiescing is an impossibility, no matter the consequences. He reports the threat to the police (including Sergeant Lituma from the 1966 novel The Green House and 1993’s Death in the Andes, who continues to be woefully out of his depth) and stands firm even as the criminals go so far as to set a fire at his office and to kidnap his younger mistress, Mabel. Despite the toll the situation takes on his health, Felicito is incapable of compromise. As his story spreads in Piura, he becomes infamous in the town as a lone symbol of resistance against an increasingly criminal society.

Meanwhile in Lima, the widowed insurance magnate Ismael Carrera becomes the center of an even greater public spectacle upon marrying his housekeeper and disinheriting his two sons, known locally as “the hyenas”. He does so in the utmost secrecy, enlisting as witnesses only his trusted driver and his employee Don Rigoberto, from The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto (1998).  Following the ceremony, Ismael and his new wife Armida leave the country immediately on their honeymoon, leaving the hyenas behind to file for an annulment on grounds of senility. Dissipate and greedy, they have already spent the early inheritance settled on them and are furious at the idea of being shut out from the estate. Armed with a team of lawyers, they bring accusations of Ismael’s senility before the press and attempt to bribe and torment Don Rigoberto into testifying to Ismael’s incompetence. Armida ends up at the center of this dispute after Ismael’s sudden death, ultimately fleeing to her home town of where else but Piura to escape the attention.

Amidst these two unfolding dramas, Don Rigoberto’s teenaged son Fonchito begins telling strange tales of a man named Edilberto Torres, who constantly appears next to Fonchito as he goes about his life in Lima: now materializing on the bus, now on the school bleachers. Edilberto knows a great deal about Fonchito, but his own identity is a mystery. His appearances seems to change Fonchito’s character, driving the boy further inward, and yet when physiatrists and even priests are consulted they agree that Fonchito is exceptionally well balanced, concurring that the teen is neither lying about Edilberto’s existence nor in the grip of a hallucination. The dual trials of Fonchito’s mysterious acquaintance and the hyenas’ persistent attacks rob Don Rigoberto of his pleasure in life.

Indeed, the sons depicted in the novel are almost universally harbingers of strife. Ismael’s bold re-marriage is almost solely motivated by an urge to prevent his reprobate offspring from inheriting his company or his wealth, while Felicito’s troubles all stem from the machinations of his eldest son, who he raised as his own despite the fact that another man was clearly the child’s father. Even Fonchito’s perfect manners and emotional maturity do not keep him from being a constant worry to Don Rigoberto, albeit on rather different grounds than in Notebooks. The trials and tribulations caused by this new generation reflect a larger uneasiness about modern Peru, from its newly scandal-mongering 24-hour media to the increased opportunism and lawlessness that has come with the rising fortunes of the country’s urban centers.

Next to these trappings of the modern era, the equally destabilizing element of faith looms. Neither Felicito nor Don Rigoberto are themselves believers, but they still devote a great deal of attention to the spiritual world. Felicito has for decades relied upon the “inspirations” of his good friend Adelaida, a mix between a witch and a healer who sometimes receives premonitions, despite the fact that she is generally suspicious of tales of saintly visions. Without pretending to know their provenance, Felicito has always followed the advice of these insights.  His position recalls that of Sergeant Lituma in Death in the Andes, who was equally unable to rule out the power of spirits in the high sierra. Don Rigoberto too is drawn to engage with unworldly speculations. The visitations of Edilberto Torres drive him to his copy of Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, searching for clues that Torres is none other than the devil. An old school friend of his seems to suspect, to the contrary, that Torres may be an angel; or perhaps after all he is only a product of an over-active, even malicious, imagination. The novel ends on a wink that leaves open all of these possibilities without settling on any of them.

Even the biographical details of such recurring characters as Sergeant Lituma and Don Rigoberto have an unsettled feel. While recognizably themselves, some aspects of their past bear more of a general than an exact resemblance to the details given in previous books. Dialogue in the novel also causes a constant sense of dislocation. Interrogations about conversations held earlier are interspersed with the conversation at issue, with no demarcation between what was said earlier and how it is being retold in the framing scene. Unlike in the overtly magical work of Vargas Llosa’s contemporary Garcia Marquez, however, the line between what the reader can trust and what should be discounted is always hazy. Vargas Llosa creates a world that is immediately recognizable, only to shift the goalposts when the narrative begins to be comfortable and familiar. Without compromising on the plot, he indicates that there is more happening here than the simple mechanics of a whodunit.

In some ways, this is an explicitly moral novel, albeit a very humorous one, engaged with fundamental questions about what constitutes acceptable behavior and highlighting how rare it is for someone to behave with principles in a world that pushes for expedience and holds money and power superior to all else. Gray areas proliferate even within this framework, however, from the complicated dynamics of Felicito’s marriage, supported by duty rather than love and laced through with deception on both sides, to Ismael’s intent vengefulness against his sons, which may even contribute to his early death. Vargas Llosa judges his characters, it seems, not by their private acts, which are motivated by a blend of good and bad but should be understood rather than castigated, but rather by their public actions.

The implicit critique of society that comes from selecting Felicito and Ismael (and perhaps even Don Rigobertio to a degree) as “discreet heros” overlaps with the more sadistic vision of the recent Argentinian film Wild Tales, which depicts a culture gone off the rails and starkly divided between the wealthy and the poor, where the demands of life can be enough to cause a kind of temporary insanity and malaise. Europe and its civilized cultural centers appear to Don Rigoberto and Ismael as an escape from this climate (perhaps modeled after their largely expatriate creator), a belief Armida picks up after Ismael’s sudden death and even imposes upon her sister and brother-in-law, none other than Felicito, but it’s hard to be sanguine in the world of Vargas Llosa. He excels at creating an atmosphere of unease—even if it is an unease by turns jocular, earthy and cultured—and the reader of The Discreet Hero can expect to find their assumptions and complacency challenged.

Mario Vargas Llosa was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010 “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat.” He has been awarded the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world’s most distinguished literary honor. His many works include The Feast of the Goat, The Bad Girl, and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter.

Edith Grossman has translated the works of the Nobel laureates Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel García Márquez, in addition to Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote. 

Welcome to Braggsville (William Morrow) is the story of D’aron Little May Davenport, valedictorian of Braggsville (“The City that Love Built in the Heart of Georgia, Population 712”) high school and t UC “Berzerkely” undergrad. Davenport and his three idealistic best friends and Cal classmates are the “4 Little Indians,” so dubbed after placing dot-party stickers (place the dot where you want to be touched) on their foreheads like bindi. Their minds newly opened to structure and power and theory by Chomsky and Zinn, they decide, for a class called “American History X, Y, and Z: Alternative Perspectives,” to performatively intervene in Braggsville’s annual Civil War Reenactment by reenacting a lynching during the battle. The 4 Little Indians—Charlie, Louis, Candice, and D’aron, black, Asian, female, and white, respectively—go to Braggsville, where their insular, neat academic ideals meet the messy world of prejudice and law. 

Braggsville is first-rate satire; as such, it is, to steal an idea I thought I first read in Lolita (a Cambridge-educated cousin of Braggsville and intriguing reference point) fruit salad of ideas, a perfect example of the form. A phrase certainly found in Nabokov speaks to T. Geronimo Johnson’s work closely: “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.” Johnson is indeed an ingenious and fancy prose stylist. His seemingly bottomless capacity for allusion is outshined only by his prodigious knowledge of the lexicon that foregrounds those allusive territories. That is to say, with murderously authentic ease he dances—and it is a dance, an art in motion—between Deep South cant, police interrogative, cultish euphemism, Ebonics, college humor argot, academic liberal-ese, legal-ese, and other “lects”. 

One gets the feeling these myriad, fruit-salad voices are not allusive at all, there is no implicit distance-making in them, rather they are evidence of a contemporary world exactingly, transcendently represented from its inside. Coordinately, on every single page, there are instances of craft and phrase as flamboyant and incandescent as anything in Lolita, but without so much attention paid to contrivance and refinement. Johnson’s writing is organic, rough & tumble, downhome, more explicitly comedic. You know the famous sonorant entrée into Lolita; here is Braggsville’s plosive start:

D’aron the Daring, Derring, Derring-do, stealing base, christened D’aron Little May Davenport, DD to nana, initials smothered in Southern-fried kisses, dat Wigga D who like Jay Z aw-ite, who’s down, Scots-Irish it is, D’aron because you’re brave says Dad, No, D’aron because your daddy’s daddy was David and there was mines who was named Aaron …

The sentence goes on, as many do, in a twined ivy of voices, a dense thicket of association and language, often abstruse and on the whole, surprisingly surreal and modernist. Think of Southern Gothic writers like Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor crossed with David Foster Wallace and, of course, Nabokov. In Braggsville, such disparate, dissonant voices find a home under the wide embrace of the American Absurd.

As it must be with great art—and Welcome to Braggsville is, mostly, great—the means are suited perfectly to their end, and vice versa. Johnson writes enthralled by clashing hermetic discourses, in many tongues, because he wants to annihilate their linguistic exceptionalism, atomize the boundaries with force. Because this is his mission, this is how he must write. His narrator, not a killer of humans like Humbert Humbert, is a third-person murderer of the symbolic: a firebrand iconoclast, for which no one, or thing, is untouchable. Political correctness, the no-touch of language, is the enemy, and the not-so-subtle prejudices given warm shelter underneath.

The town of Braggsville, which ends up taking the novel’s main stage too often (the stage itself takes the stage for about fifty pages—there’s a sort of emptiness about that stretch, no matter how lush the language with which it is presented), is a manifestation of that unsubtle exceptionalism, with its de facto segregation (the black population literally lives in a forest that whites superstitiously fear) masquerading as equilibrium. The strongest moment in the entire book is an interrogation of three of the Indians by the Braggsville sheriff. Fugue-like, each voice emerges as a linguistic theme, but themes retrenched in safe discourses in the suppressing face of the sheriff’s authority. We feel the walls closing in, the injustice of a system that makes appearances criminal. Equilibrium isn’t equal, Welcome to Braggsville needs you to know—and in the heat of its satiric fervor, we learn.

T. Geronimo Johnson, born and raised in New Orleans, received his M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and his M.A. in language, literacy, and culture from UC Berkeley. He has taught writing and held fellowships—including a Stegner Fellowship and an Iowa Arts Fellowship—at Arizona State University, the University of Iowa, UC Berkeley, Western Michigan University, and Stanford. His first novel, Hold It ‘Til It Hurts, was a finalist for the 2013 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction. Johnson is currently a visiting professor at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He lives in Berkeley, California.

The first story you encounter in See You in Paradise, J. Robert Lennon‘s electric book of short stories is “Portal.” As easy as it seems to dismiss the idea behind the story--a family of four discovers a literal portal in their backyard that takes them to alternate universes--it’s impossible ignore and even more difficult to shake once you’ve emerged on the other side of it. Lennon drops pieces of the alternate universes into casual narrative conversation as if he were describing weather conditions or a interesting news story he overheard at work:

“the second time we went through, we thought we were in old-time England, on some heath or something...the third time we went through we ended up in this crazy city...guys selling stuff, people zipping around in hovercars, drunks staggering in the streets, cats and dogs and these weirdly intelligent looking animals that were sort of like deer but striped and half as large.”

Ultimately, the family ends up crossing over into hell, albeit briefly, and emerges mentally scathed. The world has become more unsettling as we march indiscriminately toward the end: ”crowds of people with no faces, a world where the ground itself seemed to be alive, heaving and sweating.” See you in paradise, indeed.

Lennon’s paradise is, of course, our very own. The world--our world--that he painfully recreates and stakes out in each story is some version of our perceived paradise; a place where everything feels, smells, and tastes too good to be true. Often, it is too good to be true, as in the titular story that places an unsuspecting victim on a tropical island, but it’s exactly as good and true as it seems. The only conflict is our unwillingness to accept what’s around us at any moment without constantly feeling as if the rug will be pulled out from under us. It’s existential dread at its utmost and real. 

But that’s how it goes with the human condition. We live in an incredible, unimaginable world where science routinely facilitates miracles, weather patterns emerge in all their destructive glory for us to witness, and happiness resides in a single embrace from a loved one or a distant voice on the phone. And yet, our misery makes us complacent and terrified of what we behold once we open our eyes.

Misery takes many forms in See You In Paradise, whether it’s the single listed form of “The Accursed Items” (e.g., “The houseplant that will not die"), the self-imposed distance between family members in “Portal” and “The Future Journal,” or the physical time capsule a family discovers on their last vacation together at Lake Craig, New York, in “Total Humiliation in 1987.” Forget men leading lives of quiet desperation as Thoreau once told us; in modernity the mass of men and women lead lives of quiet ineptitude.

This wide-ranging collection that spans much of Lennon’s brilliant career is most potent when it addresses our denial of death. The book begins with a family seeking a new way to feel alive via a discovered portal in their backyard and ends with a story where someone’s mother holds a party where the main attraction is the family dog being euthanized. If See You In Paradise weren’t shot through with gallows humor and utter realism at every turn, it would be far too much to take. Partly because it’s difficult to believe in the actions Lennon’s characters choose, and partly because their actions seem all too familiar.

The two crucial stories that stick like a knife in the back are “Zombie Dan” and “The Wraith”; both stories that tackle a figurative death and a literal resurrection.

“Zombie Dan” resurrects in title character from the dead once science discovers a way to enact “revivification” on certain deceased individuals. “You were never, in any circumstances, supposed to call them zombies,” our narrator tells us. “This was, however, the most commonly employed term.” As Dan, our zombie guide, is revivified, his strange behavior begins to affect all those around him, including his own mother who paid for his revivification and then hires his pseudo-friends to kill Zombie Dan again. Zombie Dan’s only crime, besides a little twitchiness and some slurred speech patterns, is that all of the truths he buried pre-revivification come flooding back and spew from his mouth with wild abandon. As it turns out, the truth makes a lot of folks uncomfortable, especially when it’s best kept in the grave.

“The Wraith” inverts this resurrection theme slightly. In a hilarious and biting political commentary, a wife is driven to depression and suicide by the presidency of George W. Bush. ("Abu Ghraib made her vomit, and when Kerry lost, she burned her own hand on the stove top on purpose.") But, as it turns out, she doesn’t quite die; she kills one half of her spirit. The other half wanders the house as a mud-colored wraith while she cheerfully goes off to work every morning. Eventually the wraith goes in search of carnal knowledge and the character’s actions become stranger and more gruesome. Until we’re released, blessedly, from the story’s maniacal grip.

Every finished story in See You In Paradise is akin to a little release, a little death, for the reader. As one story ends, you’re never quite sure you have the strength or the mental fortitude to carry on to the next one. But Lennon’s icy humor, a mixture of George Saunders, Kurt Vonnegut, and John Updike, is charged with potential energy. It never fades and the momentum runs restlessly from point to point. It’s painful to witness at times--this human folly that he so accurately captures--but it’s the type of pain that reminds us of the blood running under our skin. The type of pain that, once you’ve experienced it, you’ll pay any price to feel it once more. 

J. Robert Lennon is the author of seven novels, including Familiar, Castle, and Mailman, and a story collection, Pieces for the Left Hand. His fiction has appeared in the Paris Review, Granta, Harper’s, Playboy, and the New Yorker. He lives in Ithaca, New York, where he teaches writing at Cornell University.

Uncertainty and indecision are not limited to any specific demographic, but they are both central to adolescence. Whereas later in life they can lead to wheel spinning, on the path to adulthood they’re just as likely to serve as driving factors. At that age, an action is going to be taken one way or another. If it isn’t guided by reason, impulse will have to do.

For the most part, however, Emma, the seventeen-year-old protagonist of Kate Axelrod’s debut novel, The Law of Loving Others (Razorbill), isn’t an “impulsive” person by nature. Her life drifts further and further into uncertainty as things progress, and her response is, naturally, to look for ways to regain control.

The story takes place over a winter holiday break. Emma and her boyfriend Daniel have driven back to New York from the boarding school they attend in Pennsylvania. Daniel lives in the city in an apartment on Central Park with two parents who allow him a certain level of adult sophistication. Emma’s home is a not-too-far train ride north in Westchester, her upbringing lacking only in relativity to Daniel’s high level of privilege. They don’t come from different worlds; their experiences are just separated by a matter of degrees, or at least they were.

Not long after coming home, Emma notices something off with her mother. As her mother’s behavior quickly becomes more and more erratic, Emma’s father has to place her in the hands of professional care. It comes to light that Emma’s mother has suffered bouts of schizophrenia in the past, but the most recent episode occurred so far in the past that Emma was too young to remember it. Emma is surrounded by people – her father, Daniel’s mother, other friends and family – who reassure her that her mother will be okay with some readjusting of her medication, though Emma is skeptical.

They also do what they can to dismiss Emma’s concern about her mother’s mental illness being hereditary, but early on Emma falls victim to the endless rabbit hole of Internet sites dedicated to determining what health problems you have. Axelrod’s depiction of Emma’s obsession with these sites calls out the quite real modern problem of misinformed self-diagnosis. The jab, if even intentional, is subtle, and Axelrod’s portrayal of Emma—and the way she chooses to cope with the various issues encroaching on her life, including occasionally burning herself—is unflinching but empathetic.

As the uncertainty in Emma’s life extends from her mother into her relationship with Daniel, stability seems to be moving further away by the hour. When Emma becomes involved with a friend of a friend whose brother is staying in the same facility as her mother, she is thankfully spared any moralizing, both from those around her and the narrative itself. Axelrod doesn’t just refuse to judge, she shows how natural and understandable Emma’s choices are.

That isn’t to say that her actions don’t ultimately have consequences, but Emma’s world is a considerably different place from that which bore Anna Karenina, the Tolstoy novel that provided The Law of Loving Others with its title. Of much more importance is how Emma perceives herself, her own circumstances, and that she finds the hope in what to teenage eyes could only seem like a hopeless situation. Axelrod vividly captures the emotional peaks and valleys of that fraught age with nuance and the knowledge that level ground lies ahead.

Kate Axelrod was born and raised in New York City. She has a B.A. in Creative Writing from Oberlin College and a Masters in Social Work from Columbia University. She has written for Nerve.com, Salon and various other publications. She lives in Brooklyn and works as an advocate in the criminal justice system. This is her first novel.

Nietzsche, Clones, “A Guide to the Cinema Tarot,” oh my! Like Oz, there is something mysterious, a little frightening, and wondrous about the realm of Elaine Equi. In Click and Clone, her latest published collection, inversions of and excursions from expected physics abound on every page: here, we find “A Woman Trapped in an Aerosol Mist” living “in a clock in a corner of the future”; and there, “The Necessary Troll” “beneath a bridge on a box of jasmine tea imported / from an imaginary country in an undisclosed century.” We’re not in Kansas anymore … or are we? In our preposterous world of gaudy waste and scattered self, there is something profoundly true about Equi’s poetry, something real in its cohabitation with the fantastic. With HD vision and tuneful humor (I laughed aloud in more than one coffee shop reading her) she waxes future perfect. And she’s been doing it for a while now: her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, and numerous volumes of The Best American Poetry. It was a pleasure talking poetry with her.

I wanted to ask first about Click and Clone. The first poem in the collection, “Follow Me,” begins, “The flower breathes / the window’s perfume. // The wall opens / its door.” These might be considered “imagined” perceptions – in “reality” the flower is perfumey, the door’s opening belongs to itself. Do you consciously set out to interrogate the distinction between imagination and reality in your poems?

I thought it good to start the book with some kind of reversal of how we normally look at things – i.e. imagination being inside, reality, outside. I was thinking of how technology opened up a new kind of imaginative space – the virtual – that was real, but not necessarily concrete.

“Click and Clone” is, to me, one of the more mysterious poems in the entire collection in that its morsels of wit and almost-tactile image (“Caught in the layer cake / of an ancient argument”) are familiar to your poetry, yet the poem as a whole seems unique. What about this poem is representative of collection?

I think this poem captures the spirit of cloning in a general way. “Click and Clone” sounds like an updated version of “cut and paste” – importing snippets of language from one context and dropping them into another. I often use asterisks to connect lines that are related but not in obvious ways. The art of the splice calls attention to how your mind connects disparate elements. It highlights disjunction, as well as continuity.

What is the draw of the clone as an image?

Clones seem kind of tired as an image – played out. I wasn’t thinking so much of real clones or the scientific possibilities of cloning. Mine are more like clones in literature and cheap sci-fi novels and movies. Their ability to perpetually start over, their unflagging energy, masks a place of profound exhaustion. Also clones don’t create, they repeat. That quality of recycling everything seems very prevalent today.

That reminds me of one my favorite poems in the collection, “Progress Report,” a sort of mock office assessment extolling institutional wastefulness. You write, “Technology, we’ve learned / should be balanced with human folly / in order to malfunction / in the optimal way.” Is our “human folly” that we believe we really can be indefatigable?

As humans, we have so many follies – greed, intolerance, hubris – it’s hard to choose just one, and when you couple them with technology, the results can be unpredictable, to say the least. I’m glad you like the poem. It’s slightly exaggerated to make a point, but also pretty autobiographical. I’m slow, vague, and lackadaisical by nature. During the Industrial Age, people had to keep up with the new pace of the assembly line. In the Information Age, the feeling of being rushed all the time has multiplied exponentially. I hate it.

Your poetry has an incredibly deft and sure touch with Information Age material that young poets often shy from, out of fear its inclusion will somehow dilute a poem’s “poemness” – I’m thinking of Hollywood film, plain speech, specific mention of social media, etc. Why do you think this perception exists?

Gee, I’d say poets today go much further than I do in terms of including pop culture and “non-poetic” sources. Look at Flarf. I actually watch movies and TV a lot less than I used to. They seem kind of boring.

But even so, Flarf has been firmly relegated to the avant-garde. Why do you think it’s considered radical, or perhaps a form of Futurism?

I don’t think it’s the practice so much as the intention that makes Flarf radical. Many people could collage found language (even from the internet) and it wouldn’t be considered Flarf. It’s the attitude or intention to provoke/annoy/outrage the audience that reminds me of Dadaist or Futurist art.

“Popular poets” à la Longfellow are almost non-existent today, for many reasons – but you’ve been reviewed in Entertainment Weekly, been called, in that same review, “one cool dude.” It’s not every poet that is associated with either notion. What about your poetry do you think suggests “cool?” Is it something you work against or with or regard indifferently?

I do try to be cool – more in poems because it’s easier to get away with than in real life. But I think a lot of poets are cool. Rimbaud, Baudelaire, the Beats, the New York School. Why else would commercials for Levis quote Whitman?

I certainly agree they are cool; but I guess what I mean is poetry is not “cool” in a commercial sense; it is not a “hot commodity.” Does it bother or frustrate you that poetry is often appropriated for the ends of commercial cool seemingly without accruing any for itself?

It doesn’t. I like any intersections of poetry and pop culture and am more amused than irritated by them. I’d hate for poetry to be stuck in some art-ghetto. I’m more of a populist.

Nietzsche makes several appearances in the collection. Wherefore the Ubermensch?

Aphorisms are one of my favorite forms, and I enjoy, in particular, the way many philosophers use them. Not just Nietzsche, but also the Pre-Socratics and Wittgenstein. When I do read philosophy, it’s often as poetry—for the language more than the ideas. I like Heidegger too. His sentences are wonderfully disorienting, more repetitive and circuitous than even Gertrude Stein’s.

There are a bunch of prose poems in the collection.

I’m a great appreciator of a good sentence. I like to read novels and essays. Prose poems allow me to indulge in the pleasure of sentence making and discursive thought without too lengthy of a commitment. When I write poems, my method of composition is usually more atomistic. I favor scraps, fragments, short phrases.

Has your writing methodology changed in the last three or four years? In all the years you’ve been writing?

I still write all poems with a pen in a notebook.  What makes my writing change and evolve are the different traditions that I see my poems in conversation with.

How does your work-in-progress Sentences and Rain, compare (so far) thematically to Click and Clone?

I’m happy to announce that Sentences and Rain will be out in October of 2015 from Coffee House Press.  To circle back to your first question, I do consciously play with the balance of reality and the imagination, in different ways in different books. This new one feels more grounded in clarity rather than fantasy. I’m influenced by the Surrealists, but I’m also influenced by the Objectivists, and am constantly recalibrating and remixing those seemingly incongruent positions. As I say in the title poem: “The rain/ waters/ the sentences.// The words/ grow taller,/ more supple.// The sentences/ previously/ too dry// now bend/ and reach/ toward meaning.”

Elaine Equi is the author of many books including, most recently, Click and Clone from Coffee House Press. A new collection, Sentences and Rain, is forthcoming in 2015. She teaches at New York University and in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at The New School.

WHEN POST-PREGNANCY IS A HORROR MOVIE

When we meet Ari, the narrator of Elisa Albert’s new novel, After Birth (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), it is a year following her son’s birth, and she hasn’t quite shaken the damage it has wreaked on her identity. Ari, a feminist scholar, and her husband Paul, a professor, are academics that have recently relocated from the city to a college town in upstate New York, in a move worthy of a New York Times Style Section article. But according to Ari – whose caustic, self-aware voice registers somewhere between Sylvia Plath, Kathy Acker, and a Lena Dunham character – contrary to what many might think, ”this is not a cool town. No espresso, no hand-spun textiles, no vintage shops. This is not one of those secret hipster hideouts. Sweet enclaves where you can find well-dressed arty fuckers with kids named Zenith, Phoenix, Fidel; this is not one of those. This is murdered corpse of a town. This is a decline-of-the-empire town.” (154)

And though the wealth of food co-ops, college students, and nearby loft parties might suggest otherwise to an impartial viewer, the reality is beside the point. In this novel – which is largely focused on the year following the birth of Ari’s son and the havoc it has wreaked on her sense of self – the town is a character in its own right. It acts as an external manifestation of the “murdered corpse” that Ari feels like post-birth. For while Ari’s love for her child is real and overwhelming, she is also filled with a rage and resentment that opportunities once open to her have come to a close.

That darkness briefly seems to lift upon the arrival of the nine-month pregnant Mina, a once famous riot grrrl rocker type and now a poet, who has just moved to town. Ari, desperate for the cool and self-assured woman to become her friend, finally succeeds at befriending her when she helps Mina through the challenging months after birth. It is here, where Albert’s scathing treatise on pregnancy and womanhood begins to lose a little steam. Instead of focusing on the complicated relationship between two different, strong women to illuminate something interesting and new in the way Mary Gaitskill did so impressively in Two Girls Fat and Thin, Albert uses Ari’s friendship with Mina as a jumping off point to explore the many complicated and fraught relationships Ari’s had with past women in her life.

While Albert excels at dissecting these relationships marred in jealousy and pettiness – from Ari’s mother to her adult best friends – the relationship with Mina ultimately feels flimsy; a mere plot device that could have become something much more. Still, that’s not to undermine After Birth’s undeniable raw power. In a particularly powerful passage, Ari thinks resentfully, “No one gives a crap about motherhood unless they profit off it. Women are expendable and the work of childbearing, done fully, done consciously, is all-consuming. So who’s gonna write about it if everyone doing it is lost forever within it?”

It is in moments like this that Albert hits on something fundamentally true about new motherhood that most of us are too afraid to explore, for risk of seeming selfish or unappealing. These rage-filled feelings may exist elsewhere if you really hunt for it – anonymous chat threads, a paragraph in a magazine article, a brief glance at a friend’s face, maybe even your own head – but After Birth is singular in its willingness to embrace the all-consuming fury and occasional disappointment of new motherhood so openly. To date, it is the only book I’ve read that acknowledges that the shift from pregnant woman to mother is as much a gestation period as the pregnancy itself. And for this reason alone, I’ll likely be recommending it to a lot of women who have gone through it – and to the ones experiencing it now, perhaps with just a fair bit of warning.

Elisa Albert, author of The Book of Dahlia and a collection of short stories, has written for NPR, Tin House, Commentary, Salon, and the Rumpus. She grew up in Los Angeles and now lives in upstate New York with her family.

Is there a right way to be happy? The foremost strength of An Amorous Discourse in the Suburbs of Hell (And Other Stories) does not lay necessarily in the beauty of Man Booker Prize shortlisted author Deborah Levy’s writing, but rather in the pertinent idea behind the collection as a whole, and in the way that she inventively poses such questions, without answers, within the framework of a conversation. This playful, conceptual work uses dialogue to tackle big and ever-relevant questions. The conversation feels current, yet, An Amorous Discourse in the Suburbs of Hell was originally published in 1990 (this is the first US edition), further illustrating the seemingly everlasting applicability of this topic.

The conversation happening in Discourse occurs between a caustic, unsatisfied angel and an overly complacent suburban man. They are an unlikely pair, but perhaps that is what makes their love affair so entertaining. She is feverish and desirous. He is tame and docile.  She is looking for “a clang! a clamour! a new expression!”, while all He desires is “A little garden/ Someone to love/ Enough to get by”.  Notably, “she” is all lower case, while “He” starts every line with a capital. Punctuation is the primary tool that Levy uses to differentiate between the two characters respective personalities, which can be problematic at times.

He and she are having a philosophical argument, and possess wildly differing opinions about what happiness is and can be. Odd then, that the poetic voice feels consistent throughout the text. Levy relies on grammatical artifices to delineate these two characters, without changing their tones or manners of speaking. One might suspect that both voices echo Levy’s own, and that Discourse puts Levy in conversation with herself.

We’re all in a type of tug of war with ourselves. We want wild romance and spontaneity, but also crave security and stability. We want to “Enjoy peaceful walks/In appropriate clothing”, without abandoning our sense of adventure. We want to “dance on a nervous scorpion/ dance on the eyelash of a bull”, but what if that means sacrificing a good night’s sleep? Managing these dueling qualities of our nature is one of life’s definitive balancing acts. Levy cleverly illustrates that maddening dichotomy, and to top it off, she does it with verve.

Deborah Levy writes fiction, plays and poetry. Her work has been staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company, and she is the author of highly praised books including Beautiful Mutants, Swallowing Geography and Billy and Girl. Her novel, Swimming Home (2011, And Other Stories) was shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize, 2012 Specsavers National Book Awards (UK Author of the Year) and 2013 Jewish Quarterly Wingate Prize, while the title story of her most recent work of fiction, Black Vodka: ten stories, was shortlisted for the 2012 BBC International Short Story Award. In summer 2013 Notting Hill Editions will publish Things I Don’t Want to Know – her non-fiction book on George Orwell’s Why I Write.

Shane Lindemoen is boldly going in the direction of great Sci-Fi authors before him.  Blessed with the talent and the work ethic to create freshly-imagined worlds, time-twisting plots, and fantastical characters that light up the page, and with an award-winning debut novel, Artifact, making sonic waves, the future is bright for this writer, who took time to answer the following questions for KGB.

Tell us about your writing life.  What got you interested in being a novelist, and what draws you to the Sci-Fi/Fantasy genre?

The biggest draw for me was the escapism. I hit the genre stuff hard in high school, leaning more toward science fiction. I liked how crazy it could be while staying grounded in realism. Like a lot of people, my Rubicon was Star Trek. The writing started because I very much wanted to be a part of subverting all the negative things in life with the positive. I wanted to slink in undetected beneath the paranoia and fear that people have for the future, to slide in under the politics and religion of it all, and do my small part in inspiring goodwill and hope. That’s science fiction to me: a way to get people thinking about surviving extinction, and about overcoming so many meaningless differences and obstacles that have held us back for so long.  Writing was this platform for sharing a thousand dreams and a thousand ideas in a way that wouldn’t trigger any of that hate. It became a way to flank cynicism and catch it off guard. Because maybe, just maybe, I could reach that one kid who’s going to grow up fascinated in the things I’ve written about, and invent a warp drive or something. That’s the power of science fiction. That’s why it’s the most important genre in literature.

Congratulations on Artifact and its Gold 2014 National Independent Publisher Book Award.  The novel has a complex, futuristic plot, but it also hinges on age-old quests for knowledge and, ultimately, human survival. How did you conceive of this imaginative scenario, and what were the challenges creating something set in the future but with timeless ramifications.

Thanks for the good words. Artifact came from a confluence of odd events. I finished re-reading Illium by Dan Simmons for the umpteenth time, and he used a passage from Proust’s Search for Lost Time, volume III, The Guarmantes Way, that I couldn’t get out of my head:

“People of taste tell us that Renoir is a great 18th century painter. But in so saying, they forget the element of Time, and that it took a great deal of time, even at the height of the nineteenth century, for Renoir to be hailed as a great artist. To succeed thus in gaining recognition, the original painter, or the original writer proceeds on the lines of the oculist. The course of treatment they give us by their painting or by their prose is not always pleasant. When it is at an end the practitioner says to us: ‘Now look!’ And, lo and behold, the world around us (which was not created once and for all, but is created afresh as often as an original artist is born) appears to us entirely different from the old world, but perfectly clear. Women pass in the street, different from those we formerly saw, because they are Renoirs, those Renoirs we persistently refused to see as women. The carriages, too, are Renoirs, and the water, and the sky; we feel tempted to go for a walk in the forest which is identical with the one which when we first saw looked like anything in the world except a forest, like for instance a tapestry of innumerable hues but lacking precisely the hues peculiar to a forest. Such is the new and perishable universe which has just been created. It will last until the next geological catastrophe is precipitated by a new painter or writer of original talent.”

This was at a time when I noticed an alarming characteristic of my book and movie collection: I had tons of books focusing on the end of the world. Books ranging from Wells and Vonnegut to McCarthy and Orwell, and countless others in between. I have religious texts ranging from various iterations of the Bible. I have the Qur’an, and the Mahabharata, and the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and the Book of Mormon, all prophesizing some kind of an end. I have a whole section of my movie library devoted to zombie fiction. I have movies like Terminator, Children of Men, AI, The Matrix, Mad Max, and Sunshine.  It worried me deeply: did this reflect my own taste? Was I that obsessed with the end of civilization, or had I just tapped into some preexisting globalized zeitgeist? 

Shortly after this, a group of(religious people) began coming to my door once per week to debate, handing out pamphlets depicting the entire planet being consumed by apocalyptic fire, telling me that the end of the world was a certainty, and that the only thing we can do is find god before it all comes crashing down. And I wondered if Proust was right? If we, right now, are creating reality through the expression of our dreams, like Renoir created the culture of his day through his art. If we are indeed these walking reality machines, could we bring about the end of civilization as a result of some massive confirmation bias? Are we pulling visions of the future straight out of our darkest nightmares? Is it possible to then go the opposite direction, and dream a future of light and prosperity and peace? I wanted to answer those concerns with something. Something that would counter it all, or cancel it out. I wasn’t sure what that was going to look like, but I knew I wanted it to be positive and hopeful.

I can’t honestly say that I started the project with those overarching themes in mind, but I was told at some point that art has a tendency of freeing itself from the vision of its creator, and becoming its own thing. I know that writers are by nature the prime-movers of their own, internal universes, but there comes a moment amidst the various plot threads when things can only break one direction, where you lose control of the narrative to the story itself. That’s what happened to me by the midway: I lost it, I went “batshit crazy” with it, and by the end I had this monster lying before me packed with a million ideas.  At first I worried that I was spreading this story thin, or that I was extending the themes too far, hopelessly trying to fit as many ideas as I could into a single narrative. In the end, I didn’t see this as a major problem, because the ultimate goal wasn’t in conflict with the method in which the story was told, which was sort of convoluted and choppy by design. I rationalized at the time that the thing I was worried about was probably the same thing the forerunners of the artifact in my story worried about when they created it. So, to me, the aesthetics and the structure and the plot ended up fitting perfectly. It was a strange mess of a narrative, and the reader got to witness this fractured, disjointed story organize itself into a single coherent thought near the end.

What’s your writing goals moving forward?

My next thing is a Sci-Fi story, currently titled Eigengrau, about a crew of astronauts on a rescue mission to Saturn. As they get closer to Saturn everything unravels eerily similar to the events that led up to preceding expedition’s disappearance. It’s basically about evolution and the singularity, and about humanity’s endless war against the unchangeable, deterministic concepts of time, fate, and destiny.  So, more genre stuff. Written with homage to all the books and movies I loved as a kid: Humans dropped into extreme situations,all centered round autarchical philosophy and subverted optimism.  The structure of Artifact was fractured on purpose, and this time I want to tell a more linear story. But even that linearity only lasts so long. I guess you could say I like writing about the weird gray fringes of epistemology, since the nature of human thought is sort of inherently allover the place. Even though I’m trying to keep things simpler for the reader, I can’t seem to break free from wanting to write the kind of stuff that really captures my attention. Possibly to my detriment, I can’t seem to not write selfishly.

We’ll see if it works again. We’ll see. . .

Shane Lindemoen (with guitar) is an award winning novelist from Minnesota.  He can usually be found in two places: www.shanelindemoen.org, and www.secretlaboratory.org. 

Careening through Paul’s head are tricycles mounted by clowns. Their makeup is runny, pasty white augmented by skin tone stripes. Their laughter is malevolent, scraping Paul’s eardrums raw. The shrink’s waiting room is cold. Outside the temperature is 93 degrees Fahrenheit. The circles under Paul’s arms are drying, his armpit hair still wet but cooling.

No one comes out but the receptionist picks up his phone and says she’ll see him now. Paul gets tangled in his messenger bag as he rises. The strap was curled around his legs, habitual in a city where thieves are bold enough to run down the street grabbing cellphones right out of people’s texting hands.

The office is bright with sunlight. The shrink’s hair, neatly bunned at the nape of her neck, shines white-hot in the rays streaming through the window behind her. She is too young. Paul is too old.

Hello, Paul, she says. The clowns do wheelies on their tricycles and leave the stage, leaving caged lions behind them. Paul chooses the chair. The couch is low and demeaning.

He says nothing. His hands are clasped loosely in his hands, his legs crossed womanishly. He isn’t flexible enough to do this comfortably. The pain in his thighs provides a focal point around which to organize his thoughts.

There is nothing this woman can do for him. He has been fired again, his journalistic integrity questioned by the neighborhood paper’s buff boss. The man works out in his own office, for chrissake. He had those little five pound barbells in his hands while he was firing Paul. Paul had hit on boss’s assistant at an office gathering only to find out she was gay. She didn’t look at him as he left her boss’s office.

The shrink catches Paul’s eyes and raises her eyebrows. The lions in his head are roaring now. The tamer comes out with a chair and opens their cage. They come out one at a time, soldiers obeying the commanding officer. The chair is entirely unnecessary.

I’m unhappy, Paul says. This is an oversimplification but it works as a starting point. The shrink nods to go on. She’s one of those. The silent ones. Paul’s ex-lover recommended her. You know I know Madison, he says. The shrink nods again. Does it matter, Paul asks.

No. I am your therapist during this hour.

But I shouldn’t talk about her.

You may talk about whatever you wish to talk about, Paul.

Her use of his name grates. The lions are dissolving into mist. The tamer is an illusionist now, taking off his signature red coat and donning white gloves. Paul wishes he’d get on with it, but magician types are so dramatic, twirling their hands and whirling their capes.

Paul’s regrets are stacked high, a pyramid worthy of Egypt. The pinnacle sits in low-hanging clouds. Paul can never put a finger on it. He suspects the blocks shift themselves around when he sleeps, changing their order and prominence from the inside out and back in again.

I got fired, Paul says.

What did you do, Paul?

Journalist. Well. That might be a big word for it.

Is there a better word you can think of, Paul?

Local paparazzi. Nagging the barely famous for barely relevant details about their barely lived lives.

The shrink smiles. She doesn’t ask why he was fired. Paul doesn’t say. There is nowhere further to lean back, the chair is soft but doesn’t bend. It cuts into his back when he tries. The illusionist is sawing a woman in half. Her face is alternately Madison’s or the shrink’s. Her body is neither’s.

How much is this costing me, Paul asks.

My fee is three hundred dollars per session. Your insurance may cover part of it. We’ll need to check, Paul.

Paul doesn’t like this we. The office will check, but this woman will get paid either way. He on the other hand will have to fork over this ludicrously high fee, he will have to balance his budget and cut down on alcohol, food, entertainment, life. The shrink will not have to do any of this. File papers, maybe. Then again, maybe he just won’t come back.

The clowns are back, on mute now. Paul sees their wide-open mouths, their heaving chests, but he can’t hear even the squeaking of their rusty tricycles. They should learn new tricks.

I hate my life, he says. Another bald statement.

This time the shrink says, Many people do, Paul. Why do you hate yours?

Because.

Because I’m unemployed, middle-aged, divorced, I don’t see my kids as often as I should be allowed to, my ex-wife is a bitch, my ex-girlfriend is a bitch, I need to make rent, there’s a recession on, newspapers are folding, print is dying, I’m an old hack from an old regime and no one will hire me unless I learn how to use Wordpress, my underwear is too tight, my lightbulbs aren’t eco-friendly, I spit my gum out on the ground, I don’t buy Seventh Generation brand cleaning stuff because it’s expensive, my farts are contributing to the greenhouse gas emissions rate, my parents are going senile and my brother is working for Legal Aid and doing some good in the world, I’m not cool enough for the neighborhood I live in, I’m going to have to start using Viagra soon if anyone even deigns to sleep with me, I go out to gay bars to make myself feel better sometimes, I’ve got a circus in my head, my palms sweat all the time, my A/C is broken and it’s hot as hell this time of year, I can’t sleep because I have nightmares about my daughter getting knocked up by her thirteen year old boyfriend, my socks all have holes over the pinky toe, not even the big toe, the pinky toe, and I haven’t finished a novel in fifteen years. And I’m bored.

Christ, I am so fucking bored.

The shrink takes notes during this little speech though she keeps her eyes steadily trained on Paul. They are brown and should not be so cutting, but they are chef-knife sharp. The acrobats have come out now, though the clowns are still pedaling lazily around beneath them. The acrobats fluidly lurch and tumble and mock fall out of the air, always catching themselves on a piece of silk hanging or a hand held out by one of their own.

The shrink looks at her notes now. Paul waits. A grin is spread across his face which he fails to notice or put away.

There’s a lot that makes you unhappy, Paul, the shrink says. Paul nods. But you know, I notice that a lot of these things are behaviors of yours. You don’t dislike yourself, Paul, but the things you do.

Paul doesn’t know what to say. He looks at the shrink’s face. She has been smiling, close-lipped, since his arrival. This feels inappropriate, like going to a funeral in a onesie.

Does Miranda talk about me, he asks after some time has passed.

The shrink shakes her head and shows some teeth. You know I can’t tell you that, Paul. I am each patient’s own therapist and no one else’s during that patient’s hour.

Paul can’t deny this. She is unequivocally his therapist at the moment. Charging him five dollars a minute. There is a rancid flavor in his mouth.

Oh yeah, and I have acid reflux about four times a day, he says. The shrink doesn’t note this down, which he finds disrespectful. The acrobats are doing something choreographed now, swinging in tandem and making shapes with their bodies. The clowns are gone. The illusionist stands underneath, though, waving his arms, as if he is controlling the airborne tumblers. Maybe he is.

The shrink’s mouth is very red. Paul notices this even though he is staring into her eyes intently, trying to see which one of them will break the gaze first. He does, of course.

The shrink says, what are you looking for, Paul? Why did you decide to come see me?

Something shifts under him. Was that an earthquake, he asks.

No, the shrink smiles. When someone slams the door in this building the whole thing shakes. I apologize for the distraction.

Um, Paul says.

It’s perfectly safe. I’m told that this is how buildings are built now to survive earthquakes. I don’t really know how it works but I trust the contractors. She laughs a little bit and the sound ripples outward. It sounds vaguely familiar to Paul. Maybe she laughed on the phone when he made the appointment. No. That was the secretary.

If you say so, he says.

Paul, let’s get back on track. What do you think being here can do for you?

He says nothing. He uncrosses his legs and recrosses them the other way.

Because as a therapist, I want to help you. I need to know what you’re looking for, what you expect to get out of this, so that I can find the best way to talk to you.

This feels a lot like a job interview. Paul straightens in his chair. You know the way bosses talk these days, asking you how you can contribute to the company, what special skills you have, he asks the shrink. She nods. He continues. None of that matters, because when you’re hired all they do is give you orders anyway, make you dance the hula or wear polka dots on Fridays and then get pissed when you don’t follow them to the letter and then also get pissed when you don’t show initiative, which means working overtime for no pay, which is technically illegal and if I knew any lawyers who weren’t scumbags I would sue the pants off these bosses. And the kicker is the yuppies do the extra work because what else have they got to do with their life straight out of college with no money. They’re like rats, sniffing for stories, plugged in or whatever they call it. I’m a better journalist than all of them combined, I broke the factory conditions story back in ninety-eight, I got that interview with the hookers on skid row, but they get the work because their faces look better on the online editors’ page. 

You seem to be very frustrated, Paul. Very angry.

Paul rolls his eyes.

No shit, he doesn’t say. He looks down at his lap. Paul’s head begins to feel fuzzy. The acrobats are spinning in circles on their silk hangings, faster and faster. The illusionist claps his hands and they let go, falling, crashing into the ground which is revealed to be a pool of perfectly still water. The illusionist is standing in an island in the middle of it and the waves lap against his black pants, soaking them. The acrobats are swimming away, switching places with the lions. Can lions even swim? Paul wonders.

The shrink murmurs, Paul? Where are you right now?

I’m right here, what the hell is that supposed to mean?

You seem lost in thought.

Yeah, I’m thinking about how much this costs and how much I miss the smell of my kids’ heads after they shower even though they haven’t had baby smell since my wife and I were together—my ex-wife I mean—and I’m thinking how stupid this whole thing is, being here, and I don’t know how you’re supposed to help me.

Turtling his neck down gives him a view of the space underneath the desk where the shrink’s legs are. They contrast her neat button down shirt with the color folded down demurely and the gray pullover sweater vest on top of that. Her legs are encased in bright yellow stockings and her shoes are red and white and vaguely shiny. They seem too big for her feet. Faintly, Paul hears the squeaking of wheels.