The audience for true crime narratives is disproportionately female and white, a fact some researchers have accounted for by claiming that women consuThe audience for true crime narratives is disproportionately female and white, a fact some researchers have accounted for by claiming that women consume brutal stories to glean survival tips. The hosts of last summer's surprise hit podcast My Favorite Murder explain their fascination as a self-soothing anxiety response to being ground down by the constant threat of gendered violence. I don't totally buy it. I think the white female reader of true crime is actually interested in power--the more transgressive, the better. Savoring the gory details is a way of approaching the smelly heart of the thing that has been held out of reach for our whole lives. It's a soft psychology axiom that the most violent people are the most fearful, after all; it would only make sense to find some kinship or fascination for someone like me, like many women, who have struggled to metabolize a lot of fucking fear. But I also suspect that reading about cults/serial killers/rapists might be a way to sublimate race anxiety by investing in other kinds of violence, centering whiteness by centering its particular strain of fear.
Such fascinations are at the heart of this novel, in which 14-year-old Evie Boyd escapes her becalmed pre-boarding school summer by forging her way into a Manson-esque cult. Russell, the leader, is only nominally the object of her obsession, though; Suzanne, the group's dead-eyed, ride-or-die queen is the actual subject of Evie's infatuation, and everything Evie does that summer (including stealing from her mother's pocketbook and accepting assignations with Russell) is done to please or impress Suzanne. In fact, Evie sits out the novel's fictionalized version of the Cielo Drive murders only because Suzanne had dismissed her that night.
Evie lives with the knowledge that she would most likely have been a willing participant in those murders save for whatever quirk of Suzanne's mood that day spared her. The book makes the argument again and again that 1960s girlhood is about waiting for your social cues so you can produce the desired performance, and that people who yearn to be seen and accepted will do ugly acts to keep any love they find, making them a prey to manipulation.
"The Girls" is incredibly eloquent and voluble on gender, but completely disavows race, a staggering omission when you consider that Charles Manson's entire objective, in making bad pop songs and ordering celebrity murders alike, was to cause a race war. He wasn't just grooming women to join his ranks in order to satisfy his ego, enact sexual violence, or develop an audience for generic messianic ramblings. He was carrying out a white supremacist project in which the ultimate goal was white sovereignty. I know, I know, "The Girls" is fiction. But in a book otherwise so faithful to a widely recognized historical touchstone, what does it mean that race is the only major omission?
This year, lots of white writers of a certain generation or odiousness (ahem, Shriver) whined publicly that critiques of cultural appropriation basically amounted to thought-policing and that white writers can and should occupy any racial or cultural identity they wish to through their characters, for all writers are pro-truth, pro-human, blah blah blah blah! That is a disgusting white supremacist idea, and here's why: 1) It presumes a white tyranny over POC bodies, even and maybe especially imaginary ones 2) It presumes that the only way to write about race is by occupying POC bodies, implying that whiteness is not even a race but rather a default and also that white access to POC bodies is never to be questioned 3) It divests itself of the responsibility to address white supremacist myopia as endemic to white stories that claim to not be about whiteness--according to this disposition, nothing is ever about whiteness, because there is no about to about about.
Evie walks away from her near brush with serious criminality stunned by how easily she might have done violence. This, it seems, is the book's major revelation. But how much more powerful would it have been if it had contended with implicit white supremacist violence as well? Post-election hot takes scold that the left has been deaf to white working class pain, as if that pain isn't itself born of the colonized imagination. Thanks to its prominent erasure, "The Girls" ends up investing in a fantasy of white victimhood--the one in which it is possible to avert personal catastrophe and bear responsibility for nothing....more
I love books that take seriously the parts of the country generally lambasted, scorned, and ignored (which makes sense, because I'm from one of these I love books that take seriously the parts of the country generally lambasted, scorned, and ignored (which makes sense, because I'm from one of these places). I also love books that get at the really bad underbelly of addiction--and I don't mean the seediness so much as the spiritual death articulated in deadened relationships and self-hatred. And I love a page-turner, especially one that delivers character depth and gorgeous writing along with the watertight plot. This book hits me where I live (in the best possible way).
"The More They Disappear" begins with the assassination of Marathon, Kentucky's Sheriff Mattocks and follows second-in-line Harlan Dupee's investigation, switching POV to check in on other town players: the deceased sheriff's son, who's pushed into running against Harlan for his father's vacant office, the town doctor and his son, the kid beauty pageant star who outgrew her parents' approval when she turned out to be a size 12 rather than a 4. The plot runs like a dream. I won't say more about it here, but it really chops the wood and carries the water.
Most of all, though, I want to praise the human observations evident in the dialogue, the lean little moments of attention that flare up and get it right, time after time after time. This book gets middle-of-nowhere hopelessness right. It gets withdrawal right. It gets the net of small-town gossip exactly right. What is it like to hate your body while you're wolfing down a fast food burger? This book gets it right. This isn't showy writing, exactly; the sentences unfold without gesturing to themselves or trying to wring some feeling out of the reader, which is noteworthy in a year where lots of the talked-about novels traded in sentence fragments and strove to gild each moment with a few worn tropes. It's tough to write a book like this. I think it requires the writer to put a lot of trust in the reader. I, for one, appreciate being trusted.
Especially right now, following an election where a lot of people voted out of fear and despair, going against their own interests and (please god) their best selves, stories like these are crucial because they make a connection between addiction as a private suffering and addiction as a public health issue and political force. Addiction, whether it's pills or booze or gambling, makes the world one-sided, and in a one-sided world, all kinds of desperate actions seem necessary and self-protective. Fear fed on itself makes it easy to screw everyone else and split. In a world run that way, the heroes are the ones who look with clear eyes and don't deceive themselves. Harlan Dupee is just such a man, and so is this author....more
If you're looking for aesthetic diversions while encamped at your parents' 250-acre rural farm for a summer of reading and writing before moving on toIf you're looking for aesthetic diversions while encamped at your parents' 250-acre rural farm for a summer of reading and writing before moving on to grad school for major leagues reading and writing activities, let me suggest dipping into the heavily annotated books at your local and increasingly religious small-town university for one hilarious joyride. Yes, writing in library books is tacky enough, but what if the marginalia attempts doggedly to make a case for the Castle, Kafka's emblem of hamstrung bureaucracy, as instead a manifestation of god, and all useless petitions to the Castle on behalf of K., the land-surveyor stymied by large-scale mismanagement, as unanswered but rapturous prayers? It's tempting to at first categorize this as a sadly limited scope for reading the work of a master, some problematic hiccup in the design of higher ed in the service of religious belief rather than some secular belief in knowledge, and maybe it's because I've read the book with this weird voice in my ear the whole time, but now I'm not certain that's the case. Or, most troubling of all, I can see a way for this note writer to make a good argument based on an analogy aligning the Castle with god as well as I can see a myopic and ultimately failed argument.
There comes a point in grad school 鈥� and I'm assuming this is true across most of the English-related disciplines in which classes resemble American Gladiator-style combat over sets of books 鈥� when you realize that the brightest person in the room makes their arguments not always based on personal conviction but rather on perversity. This isn't devil's advocacy, really, but an exercise in applying their rhetorical acumen to increasingly difficult topics in order to demonstrate control, because if it's pulled off, the stance has the added benefit of making everybody else seem wrong and dull while the interlocutor looks dazzling, able to make connections nobody else is even aware of seem obvious. I won't claim to having been the brightest person in the class, but I have been guilty of employing this technique. Trust me, it works, but it's not very satisfying. Doubt is a successful technique for thinking, but it becomes overwhelmingly sad (yes, I mean feelings-wise) to spray doubt onto everything you encounter just for the sake of attempting to control it. I could doubt that the previous reader of Waynesburg University's copy of The Castle caught any overtones of sardonic critique of massively powerful governance, or I could doubt my own automatic assumption that a religious reading of Kafka is bound to distort the book in order to arrive at a predetermined conclusion. One of these is more interesting 鈥� and more generous.
I mention all of this because rhetoric and apparent truthfulness are the object of nearly every interaction in The Castle. Doubt is the hellish and self-abnegating substance that makes for woe; it's possible to see K. and the others as subjects of exactly the kind of grad-school battle described above. The real question, for my money, is why they choose to stay in the village and endure it. If I were the one writing in the margins, I would have written "So just leave, then! Cripes!" as often as the ghost reader wrote "Night prayer! Aha!" during a fruitless ten-page-long discussion between K. and an undersecretary. Somehow, this makes a "god=the Castle" analogy a little more apt, if kind of radical for the educational institution this book was borrowed from. My final recommendation is that borrowed and with puzzling, theological side discourse is really the way, the only way to read this book. Two embattled thumbs up....more
This book is so smutty that I should have thought better of reading it at work on a slow day. Some passages 鈥� especially those in which Arno, the protThis book is so smutty that I should have thought better of reading it at work on a slow day. Some passages 鈥� especially those in which Arno, the protagonist, freezes time so he can write a dirty story tailored to one momentary subject of his infatuation or another and hide it within reach so that she will find it when he unfreezes time 鈥� test the limits of what one could consider public reading material. The rest of the book considers Arno's unusual abilities from a charmed philosophical distance, but there's no doubt that when this book gets dirty it gets real durty.
Like many of Baker's other novels, "The Fermata" makes use of an unconventional narrative pace, but what could read as foppish or annoyingly smarmy is instead character-driven, and better yet, driven by a very intelligent, observant character. I guess that's the source of the charm, which is why I consider the outr茅 turns "smutty" rather than "filthy" 鈥� because really, smut is a non-threatening grade of human vagary motivated by humility rather than gonzo boners (or at least it seems so to me).
I know others have voiced concerns about the book's lackadaisical morals regarding undressing and examining women who are frozen in time, and if my grad school punch-card hasn't already been revoked, saying that I find those moral quandaries to be ultimately less than crucial here would certainly do the trick. Still, I think the problem most germane to this kind of story isn't what a man does with the power to stop time but how he rationalizes its presence in his life. Arno is a terminal temp, living comfortably but without the garnishes we usually expect to accompany a nearly middle-aged life, but more crucially, he is alienated by the skill he can't share and the attitudes it grants him. Though these particular details are fantastical, in practice they really aren't so different from how so many of us (or myself, anyway) approach adulthood.
And yet, and yet. Such an elegant metaphor could turn nihilistic. The story takes a fairly conventional romantic narrative arc in its last act, one that's reaffirming but not wholly convincing. I found it a little rushed and dissatisfying, but I was still glad Baker didn't turn this effervescent novel into a time-altering update of "The Trial."
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