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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/interviews/live-once-never-better-conversation-cynthi-ozick/"></div>At what point, and by what pronouncement, does an author pass into the higher, holy realm of canon? By whatever mechanism it works, it has failed Cynthia Ozick. Though she enjoys enviable renown among her readership, Ozick readers are an eccentric clique: devotees who are shrewd but uncynical, who prefer the voluble lyric to the stark, spare line, and who unembarrassedly esteem beauty above all other literary qualities. Ozick is most widely recognized for her novel The Shawl and for her many books of criticism, which rival Harold Bloom’s in quality of thought and quality of prose, though across a career spanning more than six decades, she has released numerous story collections and six novels. Her seventh, Antiquities, will be released this April.
Rather than finally cementing her reputation, no doubt, Antiquites will be, like the six excellent novels before it, joyously received by those already initiated to Ozick’s genius while failing to receive the fanfare it deserves.
Antiquities purports to be a memoir, but it’s a memoir frustrated by the irresolution of memory. The summary narrative its fictive author proposes and ultimately abandons is disrupted by discursions that grasp, abortively, after the central mysteries of his life. 
Cynthia Ozick responds to questions about some of the central mysteries of her own life. We corresponded by email.
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Antiquities is a book of old age — its predation, disappointments, but also the sublime power of memory, which can drum from the obscure and half-forgotten the resonance of myth and can cantillate the name of an old lover like a hymn. What do the young not know about aging that they ought to?
This melancholy evocation of old age is itself movingly hymnlike. But look: it stops too soon. There can be far more. Barring irreparable disability, zeal is unquenchable, the thirst for a fiery awareness of both history and the tumultuous world as it is. And for the writer, the pen (the computer) is the staff of life.
It may be that the young ought not to know about aging and ought not to be obliged to know. What the young know, and definitively feel, is that they are immortal: this is the innate law of youth. When I am irritated by, say, reviewers who review the fact of longevity in lieu of reviewing the book, I stop to think: but I in my confident immortality once did that too. It&#8217;s a long time before the imperiously urgent lines of Andrew Marvell —
<blockquote>At my back I always hear
Time&#8217;s wingèd chariot hovering near</blockquote>
— will ring out as more than mere poetry.
Memory is both a trove of signifiers howling about the great unknowable and a collection of moments that metonymize a life. Reflecting on a life saturated in literature, how do your memories of what you&#8217;ve written differ in kind and register from the memories of what you&#8217;ve done outside the page?
Here you remind me of the sources of Henry James&#8217;s famous &#8220;germ&#8221; of a story. Seated at a lavish country house dinner, goes the legend, James would listen raptly to the anecdote of his neighbor at the table, but would turn abruptly away as it approached its climax. He had no interest in the real-life denouement; he meant to be free to invent his own.
But I am burdened by a self-imposed condition that grows out of fear masking as diffidence. I flee to the safety of outside-the-page; any hint of the autobiographical stops me cold. Beyond an occasional memoir-like essay (they are very few), I cannot — cannot, as if verboten — make use of an actual happening, particularly one in which I may figure as an active participant. Memory is flooded with confrontation and drama: there&#8217;s surely a story in it! A decades-long friendship turns repellent: there&#8217;s surely a story in it! This may be why the germ that lures me comes in the form of an idea rather than an incident; the idea begets both the incident and its players.
You once quipped in an interview that when you hear the word “spiritual” you reach for your luger. It seems clear to me that were it put to you, which is the greater god, literature or Yahweh, you’d quote Henry James before Leviticus. Do you differentiate between the spiritual and the numinous? And do you think a writer can produce a truly great novel if their investment in literature is purely secular, if literature is anything less to them than the human Scripture?
Spiritual, numinous, mystical, Gnostic — whatever you wish to call it — what it comes down to is God-is-in-me. The self as part of the Creator. The Creator as equal to his creation; creation as a substantive element of its maker. Magic and miracle: incarnation. Fusion; anti-distinction. The whirlwind power of imagining.
All this swirls in the writer&#8217;s free and antic and wild and often contrary realm: the realm of unrestraint. But none of it applies to what you name, off-puttingly, Yahweh, when what is really intended is Torah: the moral life of distinction, of hierarchy: that this is not that, that good is not wicked, that man is not God. And that civilization means restraint.
Over the years, in your work and in your interviews, you’ve said many things, made many pronouncements on what you feel it means to be a Jew. Do you think that being and considering yourself to be a Jew has made your life — your day-to-day life and your imaginative life as a writer — better? 
What a difference between being a Jew and &#8220;considering yourself&#8221; a Jew! The first is simply a fact of birth identity, the second a philosophical proposition. The first (setting aside how society may or may not define you) may be easily ignored or discarded. The second is the pursuit and enactment of a set of powerful ideas, ideas recorded in texts: Scripture and centuries of analytic commentary, both ancient and ongoing. And also: a series of intellectual and pietistic movements, a literature in many languages, from Yehuda Ha-Levi in the Spanish period to Isaac Babel and Kafka.
This is why Judaism is not merely a matter of attending a house of worship on the Sabbath and hearing or delivering a sermon, though it is this too. But it is also a community of study. You could say that however diluted or discarded one&#8217;s adherence to Jewish ideas may be, a characteristic of even everyday Jews is an attraction to learning, in whatever form that may take. During what we call the Dark Ages, when literacy was confined mainly to clerics and all others could neither read nor write, and the reading of Scripture by the populace was actively discouraged (hence the Protestant Reformation), every ordinary Jew was taught to read from earliest childhood. This included women, who though barred from advanced Hebrew learning, read moral and Biblical tales, and even popular romances, in the Yiddish vernacular. Even amid burnings of Talmud and unimaginable persecutions of every variety, including periodic expulsions and massacres by Crusaders, the mediaeval era was not intellectually Dark for Jews; and Maimonides was immersed in grappling with Aristotle.
The Jewish project draws me, interests me mightily — despite feeling hollowed-out by the Holocaust? Despite the current pervasive upsurge of antisemitism and the scandal of outright antisemites thriving in Congress? Despite the 100-year siege against the renewal of sovereign Israel?
A Talmudic reply: Turn it and turn it: for everything is in it.
You’ve said that among all your books, you love Trust the best. Despite containing some of your best writing and some of your most luminous characters — Allegra, the sprightly, tempestuous socialite casting about for meaning; Enoch, the grave tallier of the concentration-camp dead, an atheist given to prophetic aphorism — the book is not widely read. Do you believe that the book is in fact your best, or is your love for it the sort of love we reserve for the accomplishments of our youth?
I used to joke (it&#8217;s a bit stale by now) that if anyone could prove to me to have read Trust in full, I would have a gold medal struck to reward the stalwart. &#8220;And,&#8221; I would admit, &#8220;I have never had to do this.&#8221; Trust, ostensibly my first novel, occupied seven years in the making. But there was an earlier one, Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love (after Blake), also consuming seven years, equally ambitious in length, but left undone. My present sense of &#8220;loving&#8221; Trust is not that it succeeds as a novel, but that I have never written better sentences. And unhappily, it has often been pointed out — as an indictment — that Henry James&#8217;s influence is everywhere. (My defense is that I have never perpetrated an &#8220;as it were&#8221; or a &#8220;hanging fire.&#8221;)
The abandonment of ambition and of the life of the mind is a theme common to a few of your novels. In Heir to the Glimmering World, Mitwisser, the singular scholar of an ancient, erased sect of anti-Talmudic Jews, gives up his dream of documenting the philosophical flirtation of their leader, Al-Kirkisani, with the Bhagavad Gita. By the end of The Messiah of Stockholm, Lars, formerly the only book reviewer in the city with a fiery passion for great literature, is penning trifles. In The Puttermesser Papers, Puttermesser quite literally loses everything, going from a cabbalistic and political powerhouse to a dead nobody. The Cannibal Galaxy follows the ersatz teaching career of an astronomer who abandoned the stars. Petrie in Antiquities never finishes his memoir, never fathoms his father’s motivations, never penetrates the secrets of his boyhood confidant, Elefantine, instead retiring thoughtlessly to an apartment to while away his remaining days. What is this abdication evidence of?
Hm. I never noticed that the notion of &#8220;abdication&#8221; runs through so pervasively. It does seem that the most highly ambitious lives, driven to reach the peak of Everest, end in disappointment. But disappointment isn&#8217;t willful abdication, and writers, I believe, never do abdicate. Henry Roth stopped and became a chicken farmer; but then he began again, in daring force. Delmore Schwartz endured the defeat of insanity, not abdication. No abdication followed the public failure of Melville&#8217;s majestic Moby-Dick; after it came the sublimely mysterious &#8220;Bartleby the Scrivener.&#8221; And so on and so on. Even George Eliot&#8217;s hollow Mr. Casaubon never abdicated!
Everyone proselytizes to their friends about new TV shows; only literary people push books. Do you think most people capable of enjoying literary fiction? What do you think keeps them from engaging with it?
We are all in thrall to plot, the unexpected and often exciting turnings of events that call out from every source of life: the pageantry of a royal wedding or death; the romances and disintegrations of the lives of movie stars and rap eminences; the never-ending drama of domestic and international politics; the latest local murder or distant genocide, or publicly willed pursuit of genocide; and every old or newly invented storytelling machine. Literary fiction is among the oldest of such machines: then what differentiates it from all the others, so much so that we&#8217;re drawn to ask what keeps people from engaging in it?
A conjecture: the word that stands before &#8220;fiction&#8221;: literary. Story alone, plot alone, mesmerizes, enchants, appalls; but all this can come into being without being Literature, and what is Literature if not language, language in the sense of art?  The reader of literary fiction is the reader who seeks out, and reveres, the power and weight and rightness of words. Absent this, all the other story machines will be universally taken to be good enough.
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We Live Once and Never Better: A Conversation with Cynthia Ozick

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These Monstrous People: Talking with Stu Watson about Communicatingroups

These Monstrous People: Talking with Stu Watson about Communicatingroups

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/birdsong-south/"></div>Nature illustrates. It does not lecture. While the strangeness of the world may be tempered by knowledge, nature itself is not accountable to our comprehension of it: it simply is, without explanation. Insofar as there are lessons to be learned from the structure, patterns, flora and fauna of the natural world, they are learned through connoisseurship. The ornithologist confidently answers when asked what kind of bird is that, but the amateur naturalist, sensitive to and sentimental about the bluebird family nesting in the oak outside her kitchen window, may have the advantage when asked — childlike, but not naively — what does a bird mean? 
Margaret Renkl is an amateur naturalist, formally schooled in poetry. She is a regular contributor to The New York Times, where she writes about the landscape of the American South with the sort of maternal pride and affection the region has all but lost claim to, mired as it is — as we are (I’m a native Tennessean) — in regressive politics and wounded provinciality. Her debut memoir, <a href="https://milkweed.org/book/late-migrations">Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss</a>, is a collection of remembrances about her family life in Alabama purled with observations about the rich economy of plant and animal life in her suburban Nashville yard. Each chapter is brief, rarely longer than three pages. Her prose is crisp and efficient, her tone a sustained aria: with every fact, story or perception shared, her tenor is the same — how wonderful the world and strange our place in it. She is, one imagines, a fan of Mary Oliver.
Over the course of hardly 200 pages, Renkl ages half a century: her parents lead their lives, grow old and die; marriages are made; children are born; children grow up; and life trots on as if at a gallop. Meanwhile, within the same span of pages, a rat snake winters beneath Renkl’s porch. Red wrens are troubled by starlings, who are themselves stalked by hawks. Mealworms are fed to bluebirds by human hands, and the moral implications of the food chain are briefly considered. Renkl pays her Nashville yard as much attention as she does the entire span of her own life. The effect is that Renkl herself, her family and all the supporting cast of their lives, seem no more permanent than the migratory birds who alight on the shrub-hung feeder once a year on their journey elsewhere. Human life seems no less natural than the lives of other animals: every creature here is nesting in the same yard.
By keeping her chapters concise no matter the subject — the story of her grandmother being shot by a lunatic stranger is given just shy of a page and a quarter — Renkl mimics the winnowing effect of memory. What does anyone remember from their childhood so distinctly as to deserve a full ten pages? Her reminiscence feel small enough to turn over in your hands yet often weigh heavy with grief. Even her fond, plaintive memories are saturated with the simple loss that attends the passage of time: it’s sad to be so far from one’s happy childhood. But the companions of grief and loss are love and possession. Renkl describes a life of doting fathers, rambling backcountry outings and loving marriages. If sadness saturates Late Migrations it is because Renkl has lived a life worth mourning.
Renkl is a Southerner as thoroughly as she is a naturalist, and Late Migrations is a story of the South. The entire action of the story takes place between Alabama, South Carolina, and Tennessee, save for an ill-fated sojourn north to graduate school in Philadelphia, where Renkl is rattled by the ceaseless roar of traffic, humiliated and irritated by her post-structuralist cohortmates, none of whom, it’s fairly implied, has the good southern sense to call King Lear a tragedy and Susan Sommer workout tapes something less deserving of scholarly attention.
It may be a caricature — the dormouse Southern lady scandalized by the hubbub and incivility of Yankee culture — but Renkl’s duly embarrassed by her inability to thrive outside of her Southern harborage. She is embarrassed but, ultimately, resigned to her fate as an irredeemable Southerner.
What does it mean to be irredeemably Southern? It means that Renkl can structure a chapter around the phrase, “Blessed is the,” use it as anaphora — blessed is the weary mother, blessed is the fatherless father — and not be accused of Hallmark sentimentality. We talk like that down here. It means that Renkl finds herself lounging on a porch more often than that, that family is the anchor and lodestone of her life, that religious or not Jesus is always waiting in the wings. But more than anything, to be a Southerner means to love this land and not another.
However, even in a book as personal as this, it would be myopic to speak of the South without touching on the specter of racism that haunts this region. Renkl does so well, which is to say, without the presumption of knowledge or authority. In Montgomery, 1985, purely by chance, Renkl is pulled into the 26 celebration of the Selma March. She writes, “More than three decades later, I can still exactly recall the smile on one older woman’s face as she reached out to grab my sleeve and pull me into the throng of marchers. I can still smell the damp clover in the median. I can still feel my burning cheeks and my thumping heart. But no matter how joyful, how hopeful, I suddenly felt — no matter how desperately I wanted to — they were singing a song I didn’t recognize, and I couldn’t add my voice to theirs. I could not sing along.”
Tight as this collection is, and short as each chapter is, readers are left with only an impression of Renkl’s life, each tiny story suggesting that a hundred others could be told to fill the space between any two. In that way, Late Migrations is something of a Pointillist autobiography. And the book isn’t without a visual element. Collages made by the author’s brother, Billy Renkl, appear alongside certain chapters, illustrating an element — plant or animal — discussed within. Half fairy tale etching, half Joseph Cornell box, the collages are a visual simulacrum of the text — dreamlike, self-consciously old-fashioned, melancholy, lovely.
Cherish the dirt, cherish your father, forgive your mother because the only appropriate attitude to adopt towards life is awe. The world is imperfect, always listing deathward, but is worth inhabiting just the same. The fragility of life, human and otherwise, as evidenced by Renkl’s accumulation of losses — parents, grandparents — by the dwindling population of monarch butterflies that no amount of zinnias freshly planted about one’s yard can begin to rectify, cannot overwhelm the heavy joy of living nor snuff out the hope that through careful attendance to the commonplace majesty of life, living itself might be rightly exalted.
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Birdsong of the South

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/banal-infected-ben-marcuss-notes-fog/"></div>Across two novels and three short story collections, Ben Marcus has pioneered an aesthetic that if rendered as a thesis statement might read: the banal is always infected by the malignant. A writer and champion of audacious, inventive prose, Marcus’s 2005 essay in Harper’s, “Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life as We Know it: A Correction,” issued as a rebuttal to novelist Jonathan Franzen’s 2002 essay, “Mr. Difficult,” remains the benchmark defense of uncompromising, literary prose in modern times — times, Marcus argues, hostile to ambitious literature. Marcus’s own prose has evolved considerably over his three story collections, though his fidelity to, as he wrote in Harper’s, “engrave the elusive aspects of life’s entanglements, to represent the intensity of consciousness, to produce the sort of stories that transfix and mesmerize” is steadfast. 
Much of Marcus’s fiction is categorized as speculative, though that term carries with it an air of smug perceptiveness, of the seer who alone divines what stalks the horizon. Marcus’s fiction feels less speculative than gnostic; the commonplace is rendered fantastic, monstrous through his characters’ failure to comprehend or even meaningfully engage with their world — everyone here is subject to circumstance like pawns in the hands of an indifferent god — and through Marcus’s prose, which refuses to endow this world with logic. Everything happens as if only by authorial hand, and so, say, the bickering of an unhappy couple assumes the wastrel drama of Beckett: these people don’t know who they are, where they are, why they are fighting. 
Marcus’s new collection, Notes from the Fog, is the most traditionally realistic entry into his canon. With the exception of one experimental foray, all of the stories feature the traditional elements of plot, character, and setting, and all are concerned with foundational adult experiences — marriage, parenting, and work life. It’s clear to longtime readers of Marcus that these are his preoccupying themes — the atrophy of family life, the brand of ugliness, the dread and boredom of the office. However, in Marcus’s world, reality is a malign, suspicious thing. He takes issue with the term itself in the Harper’s essay, ironically juxtaposing it to his own “experimental” work, protesting, “If literary titles were about artistic merit and not the rules of convention, about achievement and not safety, the term ‘realism’ would be an honorary one, conferred only on writing that actually builds unsentimentalized reality on the page, matches the complexity of life with an equally rich arrangement in language.” Here, the complexity of life is matched with language that baffles, frustrates, and elevates notions of what is frightfully real and of what, uncannily, can be. 
Marcus is a connoisseur of anxiety — degrees, types — and his stories rarely indulge in anything sunnier. But anxiety is not cynicism, and it’s clear that Marcus cares about his subjects. Despite a total lack of moralizing in the stories themselves, Marcus is a powerfully moral writer. The narrator of the first story in the collection, “Cold Little Bird,” is a father struggling to connect to his suddenly cruel, standoffish son. He consoles himself, unconvincingly, that “[children] push you away to see how much it would take to really lose you.” Writers do the same. How bad a marriage can you write before it breaks? What share of soul can your characters forsake for work and go on living? How pathetic can you write a father before it’s pointless to call him a man? A writer tests the limits because he fears the tipping point, and Marcus’s preoccupation with these themes demonstrates how seriously he takes them. The black hole at the heart of these stories, the lack of insight, self-determination, and sympathy allowed to these characters, argues forcefully for the need of those qualities these characters lack.
In mood and tenor, the work-centric stories conjure the malaise of 2:00 p.m. on a Tuesday, suffered under the florescent lights of an office ripe with the scent of industrial carpet; only the reader soon comes to learn it’s really 2:00 a.m., that the lights are radioactive, the carpet is emitting a toxic vapor, and that someone, many people, have deliberately orchestrated these elements. Four of the 13 stories are set in and around Thompson Lord, a medical research lab specializing in such perversities as nutrition-emitting computer screens (that disfigure the test subject), identity-altering powdered inhalants (tested on unwitting employees), pills that regurgitate themselves, and snake oil lotions that do many awful and off-prescription things. The company name is familiar to longtime readers of Marcus from his most idiosyncratic work, the formally rigorous 1995 collection The Age of Wire and String. A collection composed of short taxonomic vignettes with corresponding glossaries of neologisms, the book feels like an anthropological survey of a world that seems to correspond — by broken mirror, through foreign idiom — to everyday suburban life. The word “thompson” appears in one of the glossaries as an honorific meaning supreme leader. The vignette in which the word appears is titled “Religion.” What is technology to us now but ersatz dogma? Who are our kings?
The frightful thing about the Thompson stories aren’t the products themselves but how passively the employees submit to testing. Permanent disfiguration, total loss of self, and much bodily pain register nothing louder than grumbles. The parallels with the real-world consuming public and our tolerance of upending technologies) are many, and it’s to the book’s credit that each instance of submission feels genuine and frightful even though they’re all as inevitable as the line around the Apple store each time an iPhone is released. The plausibility of some of these products — mood-altering lotion, for one — is unnerving too, chiefly because it highlights how strange the products we already covet are. If Marcus described a device, a pocket-sized tracker that maps the geographic, financial, and social topography of your life, capturing every move, purchase, and communication you make and then monetizing that information by leveraging it into deeply researched, psychologically targeted advertisements seamlessly imbedded into the virtual landscape of the device, a landscape you’ve been acculturated to use for most of your purchases and communications, would you recognize the device as an iPhone? It leaves you wondering how strange, really, mood-altering lotion is compared to what we already consume. Even the most bizarre and dangerous of these goods come across as believable, not because we’re likely to see them on the market but because ours is a society that rewards and embraces innovation unthinkingly. We may not be able to make radioactive, nutrition-emitting computer screens at the moment, but if we could, someone would sell them, and many would buy them.
In one way or another — never an unworried way — most of these stories are concerned with family. Some families laze under an oppressive brume of apathy while others prickle with terror, and always something transcendently dreadful stalks unspoken, unspeakable. In “Blueprints for St. Louis,” a couple, professional memorial architects, talk past one another as though each were already dead to the other, failing even to listen attentively to themselves, while sketching out their submission for a monument to be placed at the site of yet another incident of mass violence. The couple’s past success and consequent intimacy with memorial commissions leads one of them to find it “hard to view any other kind of design commission — for a vanilla-white office building in their own downtown Chicago, for example — as anything other than a future headstone, a kind of sarcophagus that would briefly house living, glistening people before they were lowered into the earth or scattered out over the lake in a burst of powder. If you were an architect, you designed tombs, for before or for after.” The marriage fairs poorly.
Fathers remain ineffectual or absent. Or disappeared, as in “A Suicide of Trees,” which details the aftermath of an investigation into the unexplained vanishing of a patriarch. Resonating with “The Father Costume,” a novella-length story appearing in Leaving the Sea, the final paragraphs of the story imagine the absent man as a costume to be undressed, torn at even, if only to see whether there’s flesh underneath:
Nathaniel Hawthorne said that each question we ask is a costume for fear. We spend a lifetime getting out of costume, removing layer after layer, but most of us, he says, run out of time. We die too soon, still wearing the mask, the cloak, the cape, the paint on our faces. What can we do for our friends but help them along in this endless, complicated disrobing? … Piece by piece we take that man apart.
Questions are posed: why did you leave? What am I to you? What is a father to anyone? Marcus offers no answer other than this: a father is a thing that fails. A father himself, Marcus seems less cynical about fatherhood than consumed by anxiety that no one can live up to its monumental responsibilities.
The most nightmarish story of the lot, “Omen” follows a childless husband secreting himself around the neighborhood during a flood evacuation, laying the groundwork to kidnap a young girl. “What you’re trying to do is make yourself whole. Which it’s stupid to think another person’s bones can’t help you with.” Whatever he has on the mind, whether rape or parenting, it’s a sinister acquisition: she’ll have no say in it. 
Women get their say too. Yet the female narrators navigate a different flavor of anxiety than their male counterparts, characterized more by frustrated yearning than outright desperation. They haven’t been hoarding happiness from the men. Mothers are separated from their children by death; sisters are separated from their brothers by wealth and high crimes, and while sex is more possible for them than for the men — Marcus’s male narrators tend to be physically repulsive — it’s transactional, perfunctory. No perspective is privileged in a Marcus story; no person wise, and only the unloved make it out alive.
“Precious Precious,” the second story in the collection, marks the first of Marcus’s collected short stories to feature a female narrator. About half of the stories in the collection are narrated by women. Ida, a Thompson Systems tech, who’s adrift within the company, lost among her coworkers, one of whom is forever arranging liaisons in which he can’t perform (she doesn’t much care one way or the other), others of whom chastise her and every other childless woman within earshot about the transformative virtues of motherhood:
People with kids tended to look at Ida with a mixture of envy and derision, which wasn’t so different from how she looked at herself. Right now one of them had singled her out. “I say this as a friend, as someone who just, like, completely loves you, I mean just as you are. You are amazing. Really. But you are nothing without kids. I’m sorry, it’s true. I’m so sorry!” 
“Hear, hear,” a few of them said. “Well put.”
All of the women in Notes from the Fog are fighting and failing to justify to themselves the simple fact of their existence. That passage continues:
She looked down at her hands, made little fists, held up her fingers as if she’s never seen them before. Hadn’t one of the big-time philosophers thrown himself from a window in order to prove that he existed?
But formlessness doesn’t mean heartlessness, and while moments of genuine sentiment — unclouded affection, love — are rare in Marcus’s world, they only ever exist between a mother and her children. “The Boys” follows a nameless woman who travels to the home of her recently deceased sister to, ostensibly, put in order those things that must be put in order after a death. Her dead sister’s husband is nearly catatonic with grief, incapable of assuming responsibility, even for his suddenly motherless boys. He asks her to take them in. It’s clear that she will, but in the scene before her plans for them take shape, she walks the boys to their bus stop, chats with them about the possibility of moving in with her. The youngest boy asks whether their mother will be there, wherever it is they might be going. 
“No, honey, she won’t.” 
“Someone at the funeral tried to tell me where she is, but it was hard to picture.” 
“I know. I can’t picture it either.” 
“Does it have a name?” 
“It might. Should we make up a name for it?” 
He made a face. “I don’t like to make up things. I’m not a baby.” 
“Okay.” 
“I want to know the real name.”
I found myself telling them that I would try to find out. I would look into it. I promised that I would do my best but that it might be very difficult.
“There is no real name,” the big one told the little one. “She’s gone forever.” And the little one whispered that he knew that, he wasn’t stupid.
I kissed them both and they ran off to the bus, and when they got on, they rushed to the back and pressed their faces against the glass, waving at me.
Heaven is formless, hard to picture, a fantasy, an adult lie. It can’t even be named. But for a while, a few years maybe, until the boys reach their teens and become, as the narrator’s own teenagers, “so grown-up, so gone from me in every way,” the generosity of pretending things will turn out all right is still possible — a somber grace. 
In these stories, motherhood isn’t, as Ida’s coworker chides her, the exclusive font of content and meaning in one’s life. It doesn’t unburden you of circumstance, nor does it save you from the drudgery of being yourself. But it has its moments. And it’s a hell of a lot better than being a father.
A few stylistic quirks pop up for the first time in this collection, and a few have carried over from the earlier ones. Like in Marcus’s 2014 collection, Leaving the Sea, the stories that open and end the collection are written in a looser, more conversational style, heavily peppered with curse words and stylistic haws, while the interior stories feature tighter, more abstract prose. It’s unclear what to make of this choreographing, whether it’s a peculiarity of Marcus’s personal tastes or whether he’s attempting something like a peeling of the costume with the boggled mind and broken heart at the core. It’s hard to believe that Marcus’s prose could unwittingly slip from the austere rigor of The Age of Wire and String to the colloquial tone at play in the opening and closing stories here, as though his own tastes are so capacious that both styles are just as appealing to him. I suspect Marcus of a sort of epistemological inversion: the outer stories are told such that the common is made strange, while the inner stories are strange tales that concern, one learns upon close reading, the common. How to best know a thing? First inhabit it. Then look at it from the outside. Implied in that idea is the belief that Marcus finds the less immediately surreal stories no less realistic than those with plots and mothers and fathers. Unique to this collection, Marcus’s characters routinely indulge in sardonic repetition. “Kipling Kipling Kipling.” “…the boys the boys the boys…” “Afraid afraid afraid.” “…holy holy holy…” Much that is said bears repeating or resists interpretation and so cannot be fathomed, only repeated. And then, too, everyone is very, very, very tired. 
The title of this collection neatly summarizes the position Marcus takes as a writer, the psychic location where he sets up camp. Marcus has inhabited the fog, has populated it, his whole career: the brume of anxiety, indifference, and incommunicability that hangs over everything human. His prose shines a light no further than just beyond our reach. 
“It should concern us more than it does — how little we know, how little we are trying to find out,” he writes in the titular story. What does Ben Marcus want us to know about our world? That it’s stranger than imagined, as strange as imagination, and that nothing’s so strange as the everyday? I think so. But I don’t know for sure. Maybe he doesn’t know. Maybe he just wants to say something true about us while we’re still here. 
“You’ve driven by houses like ours, and maybe you’ve wondered just how the surrender happened inside.”
We have wondered. And so has Marcus. But he hasn’t told us. And he isn’t going to. Still, he has something to show you.
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The Banal, Infected: On Ben Marcus’s Notes from the Fog

The Banal, Infected: On Ben Marcus’s Notes from the Fog

blind-spot

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/witnessing-miracles-teju-coles-blind-spot/"></div>“There is more in the world,” Teju Cole writes in his latest book Blind Spot, gesturing to Hamlet’s famous lament. The heaven and earth of Cole’s philosophy is local and seasonal. Structured as a book-length series of pairings of photographs coupled with text, we are given to consider several hundred images of day-to-day life from across the globe — happenstance corners, detritus and, occasionally, people and things that inhabit the world without spectacle or choreographed meaning. At this moment, in the first text-image pairing, we are with Cole in Tivoli, where spring has doubled the earth: “Everything grows, both what receives the light, and what is cast by it. There is more in the world, all of it proliferating like neural patterns.” <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/witnessing-miracles-teju-coles-blind-spot/#more-4797" class="more-link">Read more</a>
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Witnessing Miracles in Teju Cole&#8217;s Blind Spot

Witnessing Miracles in Teju Cole&#8217;s Blind Spot

zero-and-one

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/philosophy-life-death-ryan-rubys-zero-one/"></div>Anxiously self-aware teenagers the world over ask themselves why life is worth living, and forthwith tumble into a crisis. Life cannot be lived with purpose or grace, they swear, until the Gordian knot of this dilemma is resolved. Years later, recalling the question and crisis, mortification necrotizes in the gut: how fatuous it all seems now, the urgent, naïve philosophizing of our youth.
But then, as adults, we are always elliptically asking ourselves the question. What we prioritize and the decisions we make all betray something of our answer, which is, whatever it is, the unconscious organizing principle of our lives.
Unconscious though it may be when deciding which job to take, or the frequency with which we exercise, we hunger still to confront the crisis directly. When we look to literature and philosophy for wisdom this is the question we’re looking to address. And yet, sensitive to accusations of pretention, literature rarely spells out the issue. In one of the few notable exceptions, Lily Briscoe asks herself in To the Lighthouse:
What is the meaning of life? That was all — a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.
Add to that list of exceptions The Zero and the One, the debut novel by translator and essayist Ryan Ruby, which takes this question as its central concern. A propulsive murder/suicide mystery that asks not who or how, in what room or with what weapon but why — why kill oneself? Why not?
Setting, characterization, and plot are deliberately stock — a campus novel with the the pomp and odors of Oxford. The brash outsider intellectual. His reluctant, retiring friend. There is a murder and/or suicide — the question of on who takes responsibility for this death animates much of the book. There is a troubled woman entangled in an illicit relationship. And up until the book’s closing pages, these elements develop with rollicking speed, great interest but no surprise — through one year, three cities, and a single death, the astute reader can guess with near-perfect accuracy the trajectory of every relationship. Yet in what may seem a coda, but is in fact the necessary conclusion to all this seemingly predictable development, the reader is left to puzzle over a final sequence that uncomfortably conflates into a grotesque of violence, vile servility, intellectual obsession, unwavering loyalty, and absolution.
What the hell has happened?
That question leads back to the original: why is life worth living? Zach, our brash outsider intellectual, ultimately determines that it isn’t. And to that end, he enlists Owen, the reluctant, retiring friend, to help him execute a suicide pact. The pact is bungled: Zach dies, Owen does not. Owen flies to New York to attend Zach’s funeral. There he meets Vera, Zach’s troubled sister. Secrets are revealed, lives are changed. These are the facts, but they disclose only the what, not the why, and everything, even facts thought firmly established, is liable to be undermined by the elusive why.
The Charon of Zach’s death drive is Hans Abendroth, an early 20th century philosopher drawn with such realism, readers will rush to purchase his back catalogue on Amazon (they’ll find nothing).  Each chapter of The Zero and the One, Ruby’s novel, begins with an aphorism from Abendroth’s recondite masterpiece, The Zero and the One (Null und Eins, in the original German). Mix the self-satisfied despair of Nietzsche with the dour stateliness of Schopenhauer and round it all out with a mystic’s disinterest in being understood, and you’ll get something close to Abendroth, whose work provides Zach intellectual enticement or exculpation to die and provides for the reader a kind of intellectual teaser at the beginning of each chapter. Take, for instance, the titular aphorism:
A Warning to the Children of Sun, Earth and Moon — Nothingness added to Being is not oneness, but duality. But as nothingness is chronologically primary to Being, Being has never been the One. Only nothingness is oneness, wholeness, harmony and totality. Being is the name for the operation that irreparably divides the Zero in Two. Our desire to recover our lost wholeness is the desire for death.
No one dies in the proceeding chapter — the aphorisms serve a subtler function than simple foreshadowing; rather, insofar as a psychological backstory is provided for Zach’s death wish, it’s provided here. Ultimately, the reasons he wants to die are, like any human truth, only hinted at. And it is the questions left unanswered that prove the most compelling. What is love? In what degree and fashion does love differ from transgression? In what degree and fashion does friendship differ from subservience? Why is life worth living?
The Zero and the One can’t answer that question for you, but it will, critically, force you to ask the question again. This is a rare book — a compulsively readable page-turner that is actually, unapologetically, smart.
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Philosophy of Life and Death: Ryan Ruby&#8217;s The Zero and the One

Philosophy of Life and Death: Ryan Ruby&#8217;s The Zero and the One

Austin Adams is a writer from Tennessee. His work has appeared in T Magazine at The&nbsp;New York Times, The Offing, The Millions, and more. He recently completed his first novel.