The Best Book I Read This Year (and 13 Honorable Mentions): 2023

INTRODUCTION

Of the books I read in 2023, the following are my favorites. That doesn’t mean they were all published this year—only some were—but that they’re volumes from any era that I read and loved in the last 12 months. Thanks for supporting the newsletter this year.

—Darren

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The Best Book I Read This Year:

The MANIAC (Benjamin Labatut)

You could fairly ask why Chilean author Benjamin Labatut decided to write his first two books as novels when they’re just as well-suited to being essays—when they substantially are essays. Both titles, 2020’s celebrated When We Cease to Understand the World and this brilliant new volume, are about real-life genius scientists and mathematicians like Alexander Grothendieck, Kurt Gödel and Nils Aall Barricelli, who operated at the edge of madness, pushing the boundaries of knowledge, making numbers move in new directions, revolutionizing their fields as they forced us into the future, for better or worse. In an interview earlier in the year, the author explained his rationale. “Anything that comes out of a writer is fiction,” he asserted, a sophomoric statement from someone who’s such a sophisticated author. Sure, Edmund Wilson in writing To The Finland Station and Bram Stoker in turning out Dracula both made narrative decisions and used literary devices, but they did not do the same thing. There’s room for nuance, lots of room. Labatut further stated that fiction “doesn’t have to do with the imagination,” stressing his preference to work with historical figures and make use of their actual quotes, the literary equivalent of the found object in fine art, rather than create his own dialogue, believing this to be the higher path in general. It’s something like the inverse of the “history is a branch of literature” hokum. Labatut also has stated that there is not a single contemporary novelist who isn’t boring, not something he says in an arrogant, competitive way, but with deep sincerity. He’s wrong on all these counts, of course, and though his inclinations as an artist clearly work for him, they aren’t for everyone nor should they be. How can a writer as brilliant as Labatut be host to so many dubious ideas? Humans are inscrutable in that way. So are some machines, especially the increasingly intelligent ones that utilize Deep Learning.

Labatut’s book is told in three parts. The relatively brief opening section is a third-person account of the real-life tragic demise of Austrian-Jewish physicist Paul Ehrenfest, a compeer of Einstein, who in 1933 descended into madness as the Nazis descended on Germany, using a gun to murder his son, who suffered from Down syndrome, and himself. Overcome by the chaos in the world and in his head, Ehrenfest’s end was one where he was betrayed by a brain that was used to operating at the most dizzying levels of science. This first act serves as a prelude for the two parts that follow, one section about a human who seemed almost like a machine and the other about a machine that seems almost human.

When science was ruled in the first half of the 20th century by the Martians—Hungarian-Jewish scientists and intellectuals so brilliant they seemed to be from a different planet—there was one far beyond even the rest of these otherworldly geniuses. He was Janos Lajos Margittai Neumann, who was born into comfort in Budapest in 1903, the only figure among them of aristocratic lineage, a child prodigy with a shockingly elastic memory who would make good on every bit of his potential. As a boy he gravitated not only to books but also to machines, the more complex and challenging the better. His favorite was one that had influenced Charles Babbage in forming his concept for computers, the Jacquard loom, which could be programmed to create specific designs via punch cards. The contraption was brought home by his financier father for a spell, and no one knew it at the time, not even the cosmopolitan paterfamilias nor the brilliant child, but young Jansci, as he was called, was already practicing to usher the world into the age of atomic weapons and digital machines. He would rename himself “John von Neumann” after he moved to America at 30 to take a position at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study when the gathering clouds of Nazism began to storm. By that time he’d been for years widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest mathematicians on the planet, perhaps the greatest, and would ultimately make major contributions not only in that subject but also in quantum mechanics, computing, economics (the questionable gift of Game Theory), AI, deep learning, self-replicating machines and weapons of mass destruction. Additionally, some of his work prefigured the groundbreaking DNA research Watson, Crick and Franklin gifted to the world. Von Neumann would flit from topic to topic, collaborator to collaborator, the way a dilettante would, except that his profundity was routinely astounding, his contributions equal parts effortless and priceless.

Labatut details von Neumann’s life in approximately chronological order, writing something resembling a lightly fictionalized oral history as von Neumann is described in first-person chapters narrated by wives, siblings, his daughter, teachers (George Pólya), collaborators (Oskar Morgenstern), and peers (Richard Feynman). In one section, Pólya, who watched his pupil perfunctorily solve math problems that he and other distinguished faculty members tortured over for months, even years, to no avail, describes his student in foreboding terms: “What kind of boy is this? I still don’t know, but after that, I was afraid of von Neumann.” I haven’t researched every quote, but all of the ones I’m familiar with were taken pretty much precisely from print and audio interviews about von Neumann. It’s not that Labatut never tweaks material, but this is mostly a “nonfiction novel.”

The MANIAC of the title has at least two meanings. It’s an acronym for Mathematical Analyzer Numerical Integrator and Automatic Computer Model, a machine created in 1951 by Nicholas Metropolis, who based it on von Neumann’s previously developed architecture. It was a huge leap from its precursor, the ENIAC, able to store programs, and proved essential to the development of U.S. weapons science, as well as being a very slow, but decent player of Los Alamos chess. The other maniac reference is to von Neumann himself. His reaction to America’s devastating use of the atomic bomb— whose development he hastened in part through his mastery with punch cards that began with his childhood encounter with the mechanical loom—was very different from that of Oppenheimer, who never wanted such destructive force utilized again. In the post-war period, von Neumann exhorted the U.S. government to develop nuclear bombs and drop them preemptively on the Soviet Union, killing hundreds of millions and setting off a poisonous version of Pax Americana, replete with a world government run by the U.S.A. It was insane, “history’s greatest monster” territory, and the scientist’s work with dangerous weapons systems was likely what caused him to die at age 57 in excruciating pain from metastatic cancer that had spread to his bones and brain. As he lay dying, von Neumann was watched over by armed guards and American military figures, who feared the scientist might blurt out a vital secret that could be intercepted by an enemy state. Or perhaps he would share one final genius bit of information that could tilt the balance of the Cold War. At the end he was more an asset than a person, greedily sequestered in a tense, ghoulish mise-en-scène.

But von Neumann has never really left us, his work becoming the template for much of the modern world as well as some of its existential threats, perhaps ultimately making him immortal via machines the way Henrietta Lacks is in cells. In the final section of the book, Labatut shifts focus from the scientist to the spiritual descendants who picked up his work on automata and self-replicating machines. This segment reverts to third-person chapters, introducing us to Demis Hassabis, who was like von Neumann, a child prodigy, his bailiwick being chess, and one whose ultimate area of concentration, Deep Learning, was informed by his obsession with some of his predecessor’s unfinished manuscripts on the topic. In 2010, he founded a company in London called DeepMind, a concern without a specific end, which made it difficult to raise funds. Hassabis decided to prove his company’s worth by having it master the Chinese BCE board game of Go, a much more difficult assignment than chess, with many more possibilities on its field of play. AlphaGo, as the program was named, engaged in an insane number of games against itself, nearly five million in a 72-hour period, and continuously learned from its successes and mistakes.

The process allowed for improvement at an epic clip, and a best-of-five series was arranged with Lee Sedol, who was the ancient game’s genius modern champion, someone as revered in the world of Go as Carlsen is in chess. Sedol had sacrificed pretty much everything, even a basic education, to devote himself monomaniacally to the game, and no one doubted he would prevail, believing AI was a decade or two at least from conquering humans in this strategic struggle. Hassabis, however, believed otherwise, and he proved correct, as AlphaGo demolished Sedol in the first three games, deeply unsettling him. In defeat he tried to wax philosophical: “Enjoyment is the essence of Go. And AlphaGo is very strong, but it cannot know that essence.” True, though the machine seemed untroubled. The loss abbreviated Sedol’s brilliant career. He would play for roughly a year after his devastating defeat, then retire at 36.

But why did the computer react crazily to Sedol’s gambit the way it did? Nobody knows.

By contract, all five games had to be played even if the series had already been decided, which turned out to be surprisingly fortuitous for Sedol and perhaps humankind. The dejected champion forced himself into the room for game four and something spectacular happened. AlphaGo began to trounce Sedol once again, but the human representative, in desperation, made an incredibly unorthodox move, one whose strangeness can only be appreciated by aficionados. AlphaGo, which had never encountered the gambit in its millions of practice games, became unhinged, melted down, and began making puzzling and sloppy moves until defeated. Why did the computer react madly to Sedol’s gambit the way it did? Nobody knows. The double-edged sword of Deep Learning is that it trains itself and it’s near impossible for its developers to figure out what exactly has gone wrong when they don’t even know exactly what’s gone right. (It recalls a line from a hapless engineer in 1973’s Westworld when the robots go rogue: “They’ve been designed by other computers…we don’t know exactly how they work.”) David Silver, the system’s head programmer commented on the shocking turn of events, summing up the disquieting moment. “I knew after move 78, after like ten or twenty moves, that AlphaGo somehow became crazy, but I didn’t realize why.” Further explaining what happened to his computer program he also could have been describing Paul Ehrenfest and John von Neumann: “I think it searched so deeply, that it lost itself.”

AlphaGo’s game-four fubar could be a cautionary tale for Homo sapiens, as we move ourselves ever further into a society-wide digital machine of our own making, but one that we can’t control. No matter how well these increasingly powerful systems are designed or monitored, mistakes will occur, some potentially of the fatal variety. It’s not a lesson, though, we’re likely to absorb as we lean into the future, that’s not how competitive forces within societies and across societies operate. What Labatut has accomplished in his outstanding, sui generis second book is to connect the irrationality that can attend genius in both humans and computers. Whether we’re talking about people engaged in an arms race or chatbots experiencing “hallucinations,” the cumulative suggestion throughout is that too much genius encased in one body is always risky because humans are frequently haunted and machines always have ghosts.•

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Honorable Mentions

Crook Manifesto (Colson Whitehead)

In 1970s New York, when the city was still more Dickens than Dinkins, an era when the Bronx was burning and so were parts of Manhattan and Queens, furniture store owner Ray Carney is just trying to make ends meet and do right by his family, as he and his wife raise their two children in Harlem. Okay, maybe our hero established his retail outlet with ill-gotten proceeds his criminal father left stashed inside the dermis of his truck’s spare tire when he died. And perhaps he’s profited from his own extralegal activities, practicing his longtime side hustle fencing stolen jewelry and sundry other valuables, which enabled him to purchase a pair of neighborhood buildings when such acquisitions were still financially possible for an enterprising New Yorker. But in a metropolis so corrupt and broken, Carney is merely a humble middleman in the scheme of things, and connecting buyers to stolen watches and gems relatively small beer. He’s still more legitimate than most in that milieu, including police officers, judges and politicians, a surprising number of whom risk bleeding to death from paper cuts as envelopes full of bribe money continually pass into their palms.

By 1971, Carney’s actually been out of the game for four years, trying to go straight by focusing purely on his shop on 125th Street, dutifully peddling deluxe dinettes and rump-pleasing recliners, willfully rendering dormant the considerable skills he brought to his stealth trade. But whether he likes it or not, business is about to pick up. Wanting to score impossible-to-get tickets to a sold-out Jackson 5 concert at Madison Square Garden for his daughter, with whom he feels an awkward estrangement as she enters her teen years, Carney calls on some of the suspect characters from his not-too-distant past. He knows the tickets will seriously set him back, but the price is steeper than expected. After failing miserably on numerous fronts, he makes a last-ditch attempt at securing ducats by contacting NYPD officer Munson, an anti-Serpico who’s so crooked he could spy through a keyhole without adjusting his posture. With the anti-corruption Knapp Commission circling Munson and his impressive array of illicit schemes, the officer decides to go on one last spree, robbing an assortment of drug dealers and gambling-parlor proprietors, absconding from dens and lairs with wads of cash to fund his escape from the country before he winds up collared and cuffed. To conduct this risky business he impetuously decides to kidnap Carney and make him his “partner” in crime. Carney knows his life is in peril every second he rides shotgun with the trigger-happy cop, but he has to admit that his backsliding into criminality maybe isn’t completely unwelcome, that he still has the same itch that needs scratching—he enjoys the work. At any rate, he’s along for the ride, willing or not, and it’s a helluva trip, one that plays out against the backdrop of a frantic NYPD manhunt for the Black Liberation Army member who allegedly shot and killed an officer.

The above describes just the first section of Colson Whitehead’s brilliant, rollicking 2023 triptych novel that takes place during the bad old days of NYC. The middle leg of a planned Uptown New York trilogy, the volume that looks at the city in steep decline in the FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD days as told from a Black working-class perspective, it follows the combustible and often comedic adventures of Carney and his cronies. The troika began with 2021’s Harlem Shuffle, a novel set between 1959 and 1964 in the same environs. This book is separated into 1971, 1973 and 1976 segments, and the connective tissues are community, the hidden economy and pyromania.

The second section focuses on a young Black Manhattan hippie known as Zippo, who earned his sobriquet for his penchant of using disposable lighters to torch abandoned buildings not for money but for personal expression. Carney recedes into a supporting role in this elongated set piece about the firebug-turned-auteur, who leaves behind, perhaps, the art of arson after his uncle bequeaths him money he made from his ingenious invention of the ceramic toothbrush mount. Operating at first as an avant-garde artist from a Soho loft, Zippo decides to try his hand in the hot '70s film subgenre of Blaxploitation, directing Secret Agent: Nefertiti amid the urban decay. The lead of the genre pic is Lucinda Cole, the former star of a TV show about a nun that sounds something like a habit-friendly version of Diahann Carroll’s Julia. She’s a talented actress whose career hit the skids soon after the show’s finale, in part because no one in Hollywood of the era has much use for a Black female star, and partly because of her drug use. Co-starring is Pryoresque genius stand-up Roscoe Pope, whose album Memo From Dr. Goodpussy became a hit shortly after he signed his contract to co-star in the low-budget film he now considers below his station, but a movie contract that can get your ass sued if you don’t live up to it is still a movie contract that can get your ass sued if you don’t live up to it. Things on set don’t go smoothly, but they do go in interesting directions. When camera equipment is stolen, Zippo hires some menacing muscle, bringing in Pepper, a veteran handyman in the Harlem world of sudden violence and clandestine reconnaissance. When the leading lady suddenly vanishes in the middle of filming and all appears to be lost, it’s Pepper who’s dispatched to recover her, coming into contact with any number of kingpins and henchmen who would like to bury him and salt the earth above. Like the book in total, these scenes alternate between super-violent and ultra-hilarious, as plans continually go awry and improvisation becomes necessary.

Pepper, who used to run in some of the less-savory circles as Carney’s father, also plays a central role in the final section, which is set in U.S.A.’s bicentennial year, an unavoidable celebration regardless of how the country has treated you. (As one character sums up the mixed blessing of a nation: “That was America, melting pot and powder keg.”) Carney returns to the foreground as he retains Pepper to learn the identity of an arsonist in the Bronx who started a fire that caused the young son of a woman he knows to have serious lung damage. Whoever lit the match was likely doing so at the bidding of a landlord wanting to collect insurance money, an activity that became plague during that decade in NYC, leaving numerous low-income neighborhoods looking like war zones, actually turning them into war zones of a sort. In a novel that has not a word out of place, Whitehead describes the sort of culprit who’s being hunted: “The type of guys Pepper sought were single-occupancy men, hot-plate men, shitty tippers who never passed a pay phone without checking for errant dimes, and they dreamed of fire.”

Carney isn’t quite sure himself why this one particular illegal act in a city teeming with victims sticks in his craw, but he’s aware that his own father did an arson job or two in his day, so perhaps there’s some ancestral guilt. Or maybe he’s jealous of a smarmy Black politician who’s won the ardent support of his wife and daughter and may be involved in a scheme to cash in on the now-razed apartment building. Regardless, the matter is small potatoes to Pepper and he forces himself to conduct the investigation for a payday just until a better job he has lined up is to begin. The pyromaniac pursuit is somewhat more dangerous but far less interesting than that time he was hired to steal a secret recipe when two Harlem fried-chicken restaurants situated too close for comfort to one another fought a zero-sum game for preeminence. But Pepper, like every last survivor and striver in Harlem of the era, knows that beggars can’t be choosers: Work is work.

New York has been a tale of two cities ever since the First Great Migration during the opening half of the 20th Century, when Black citizens from the South moved in large numbers to Eastern hubs seeking a more level playing field. It may have been better, but it wasn’t exactly equal and remains so even in a city that’s now elected two African-American mayors. The raucous, ever-changing story of NYC has been told mostly through the works of white writers and the characters who resemble them, though not exclusively. Fran Ross and Charles Stevenson Wright are two Black authors who’ve created a rich pageant from the mean streets of the 1970s. Whitehead displays some of the qualities that those two predecessors applied to the city—Ross’s brazen comic chops and Wright’s mastery of a shocking sort of realism—but his book does something few novels about New York of the period try to do, clambering into the guts of the city’s machinery, clearly explaining why so many of the era seemed to be working counterintuitively against themselves, with landlords and lessees both stripping down and burning down NYC’s valuable stock of buildings. In these passages Crook Manifesto is more than atmospheric, becoming something of a systems novel, mixing fact into his fictional elements, telling big truths about causes and effects.

At the outset of the decade, the Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan encouraged President Nixon to adopt a strategy to heal racial wounds that he termed benign neglect, which strongly urged white Americans to stop trying to undo the damage the nation had done to its Black population. It was the worst and most pernicious idea of his career. In the first two thirds of his trilogy, Whitehead has turned out novels Dickens or Hugo would be proud to call their own, reminding us that neglect is seldom benign and that when you leave people with no path to prosperity, they’ll create their own. Or as it’s written not in this novel but in Corinthians: “There are different kinds of working, but in all of them and in everyone it is the same God at work.”•

The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century (Olga Ravn)

“My name is Janice and Sonia,” says a worker aboard a spacecraft exploring the planet called New Discovery at the far end of the universe. “I’m not one, but two.” Janice and Sonia, among other employees, some human and some humanoid, have been asked to file reports about their experiences on the job in order to allow corporate management to better comprehend unrest that’s arisen on the Six Thousand Ship during its long reconnaissance mission. Mutiny, terrorism, even civil war between those born the old-fashioned way and those biomanufactured may be on the horizon.

That’s the premise of Danish writer Olga Ravn’s very short and wonderfully strange 2020 novel about a crew of Earth-born humans and lab-grown humanoids working uneasily alongside one another on a spaceship a century or so from now. It’s an environment of biological heterogeneity when identities become multifarious, with life as we know it far more fecund, able to be remixed and enhanced by science. The story’s told in fragments, via staff reports, which serve as short chapters, some only a sentence long. The employee interviews incrementally portray a milieu both foreign and familiar, one that does not exactly compute, as humans who’ve become more like machines and machines who’ve become more like humans, fail to form a link. Maybe that’s not because they’re so different but because they’ve become so much more like each other but not exactly like each other? Perhaps they’re repulsed by the Uncanny Valley of it all? It’s a clever corporate satire, a minimalist space opera, and, most movingly, a love letter to the end of Homo sapiens. “I exist in this new combination of melancholy and joy,” says one human employee, realizing the intermittent sweetness of our species as it approaches its twilight, a gloaming occurring not only aboard the ship but most likely everywhere else as well.

“I heard Dr. Lund made one exactly like a child. But apparently its development went wrong, it killed a lot of chickens and smeared the blood all over its face.”

The first-generation humanoid workers were made not of fiberglass but of flesh, blooming like lilacs from purple pods made of biological material, injected with hormones, fed breast milk, and spoken to sweetly by nurturing humans during gestation. They look just like us but they are still Other. They were to be updated whenever they malfunctioned or went rogue, returned to the cooperative colleagues they were designed to be, but lately the humanoids have been disengaging from the updates. As one shares in a report, “I may have been made, but now I’m making myself.” Is that due to the ghosts that are in all advanced machines no matter how careful we are, or because their creator, Dr. Lund, has been secretly developing a second-generation version of these employees, stealthily introducing them into the workforce? It’s tough to say because outré gossip, otherworldly water cooler talk, is everywhere, and anything suggested is no stranger than the reality aboard the craft, with, for instance, its draperies made from biotissue rather than chiffon. “I heard Dr. Lund made one exactly like a child,” offers a humanoid about the scientist’s work. “But apparently its development went wrong, it killed a lot of chickens and smeared the blood all over its face.” Whatever the truth is, communication between the human and non-human workers has broken down, and the former fear the latter plan to murder them, which may not be mere paranoia.

The mostly depressed human staff members are further plagued by being in an outer-space environment completely unsuited to them, emotionally or physically, longing for the familiarity of home, and vulnerable to the smallest pinhole in their spacesuits when they dock and explore. “What have I got left other than a few recollections of a lost earth?” asks one of the unmoored workers when interviewed for a report. They’re given holograms of loved ones they left behind when they signed their contracts for the mission, but it’s of little solace. Easing things somewhat for them is that New Discovery is surprisingly found to have a valley that’s lush and living, with grass, trees, flowers, even ducks. It’s a reminder of the abandoned world they crave, and it somewhat mitigates their febrile sense of nostalgia. The planet’s greatest attraction, however, is a group of differently shaped and sized objects discovered in the valley which seem somehow alive, inorganic and organic all at once, oozing, pulsating and throbbing, even sort of communicating despite not talking. These objects are collected and brought on to the spacecraft, where they become the fixation of the human workers, who fetishize them and interact with them in ways that are most definitely sexual. The intercourse reads like extraterrestrial erotica, with fragrant liquid flowing from grooves, humans caressing the moist objects, placing them in their mouths. Sometimes the objects end up soaking wet or ejaculating resin. It’s kinky and funny and charming in its own way.

“You can’t cry. You’re not programmed to cry.”

“To us, the objects are like an artificial postcard from earth,” shrewdly observes one of the humans, naming the nature of these close encounters. But what’s been left behind remains palpable, even more so because these people have had to adapt their nature in order to keep up with their humanoid cohorts. They’ve been supplemented with “add-ons,” technological enhancements necessary in the modern workplace. (None of these supplementary parts are specifically described.) Humanoids meanwhile begin to take on human qualities, even ones that seem suspiciously out of place. “You can’t cry,” one is told. “You’re not programmed to cry.” Yet tears fall. The tension between the two groups is further exacerbated by the humans being mortal and the humanoids immortal, as they continually have their systems uploaded. It’s an uneven dynamic if there ever was one.

The humanoids are a mixed bunch, just like humans are. Some are vengeful and possess violent tendencies, hoping for the opportunity to kill their creators, their controllers, while others have empathy for those who made them. There are enough seeking revenge, however, and after an obliquely referenced terrorist attack occurs in the canteen, in which a handful of humans are murdered, it becomes clear that the corporation may need to terminate the mission. That will mean death for all the humans aboard, and you can imagine similar scenarios playing out on other missions, and on Earth itself. Time is running out, at least for us human animals.

The poet wrote that “the opposite of death is desire,” but sometimes desire is the very feeling that can lead to death, even death on an existential scale. How clever we are with the machines we build: cars that cough carbon into the atmosphere, weapons of mass destruction, AI systems that may decide to scrub Homo sapiens, even if they never gain consciousness. On one level Ravn’s novel is a specific story about life in its many forms aboard one spaceship, but it’s also a microcosm of a much larger tale about our species, a reminder that being too clever can feel very satisfying and can also get you killed.•

Scoundrel: How a Convicted Murderer Persuaded the Women Who Loved Him, the Conservative Establishment, and the Courts to Set Him Free (Sarah Weinman)

A forerunner to the more infamous violent vedette Jack Henry Abbott, convicted killer Edgar Smith became a cause célèbre while in prison in the 1960s, eventually winning release in 1971 with the help of a cadre of influential media figures, despite being pretty obviously guilty for the brutal slaying of a 15-year-old New Jersey girl, whose skull was caved in with a baseball bat and rocks. Primarily responsible for helping Smith rise from his electric chair was the resolute advocacy of William F. Buckley Jr., the conservative éminence grise and Apartheid apologist not normally known for his bleeding heart.

The controversial case is the subject of Sarah Weinman’s 2022 nonfiction account, which is a sensational piece of work, but one that doesn’t further sensationalize the painful chapter. Making easy reading of the tortuous intricacies of a murder trial and more than a decade of appeals is no mean feat, and the author renders it all very lucid. She previously penned The Real Lolita: A Lost Girl, an Unthinkable Crime, and a Scandalous Masterpiece, another title about a victimized young girl ending up a footnote in the story of powerful people, and in both cases asks the right questions, conducts probing research and presents convincing answers. There’s no lurid entertainment, no titillation, as you often encounter in lesser books about notorious crimes. Her aim is true, the work deeply humane.

Despite Buckley’s depiction of Smith as possessing a stolid disposition, the 23-year-old Jersey man had left a trail of disturbing crimes by 1957 when he murdered 15-year-old Victoria Zielinsky, whose lifeless body was discovered in a Bergen County sand pit. Clothes stained with her blood were retrieved by police from the Mahwah trailer Smith shared with his wife and infant daughter, and an admission of guilt followed the pre-Miranda interrogation. The killer quickly recanted his confession, saying that while he gave Zielinsky a lift, argued with her and struck her, he left the girl alive.

In court, his lawyer told a fanciful tale of the events and named the “real murderer” to no avail. It took the jury not even two hours to convict. After coming close to execution numerous times, his case was taken up with avidity by Buckley after they began a correspondence at the outset of the 1960s, the talking head initiating the relationship after seeing a local newspaper report in which Smith identified himself as a dedicated reader of Buckley’s National Review. (In a bit of unintentional gallows humor, the magazine editor enthusiastically offered the death-row inmate a free lifetime subscription.)

The tough-on-crime Buckley aggressively supported the then-doomed convict by penning an Esquire article is his defense, the aristocratic on-air personality foolishly referring to the raffish barfly Smith’s writing as “Victorian” and groundlessly describing the teenage victim as “flirtatious”; he subsequently used the paycheck from the piece to establish a legal-defense fund for Smith. Buckley also bolstered the condemned man by appearing on The Tonight Show and Today to make arguments for Smith’s innocence in his distinctive speaking voice—Weinman describes it as “mid-Atlantic,” but it sounded more like an odd mélange of sozzled Southern plantation owner and bumptious British patrician.

Even beyond the support granted by the National Review, Smith found allies in numerous TV, magazine and publishing players, especially Alfred A. Knopf editor Sophie Wilkins, who midwifed his written-behind-bars book about the case into existence as the two engaged in a platonic but passionate affair of sorts, flirting and fighting their way through a series of tumultuous edits, like the Liz and Dick of death row. It was a business deal that became an epistolary romance (with numerous non-conjugal visits added in) that became mostly a mess, with Smith manipulating Wilkins in much the same manner he had Buckley, though the literary collaboration was a big success.

Esquire and the New York Times Book Review saw fit to engage in some penitentiary chic, providing a platform for the fledgling jailhouse writer to pen auto-interviews from his cell (“Does being in prison have any advantages for a writer?” he asked himself), and Playboy hired Smith to review a book about the penal system. He was a felon and a freelancer. When Smith was freed from the Trenton prison in 1971 after his conviction was overturned, he was immediately whisked by limo to NYC to record a special two-hour edition of Firing Line.

The sociopath steadfastly lied throughout that TV appearance, and soon enough to publishers, journalists, passersby, pretty much anyone within earshot. But even as he was enjoying his post-release whirlwind of publicity, schmoozing in studios with Merv and Barbara, it was practically fait accompli he would once again act out violently. There were so many warning signs. His relationships, even the one with Buckley, became strained as he grew increasingly erratic and angry, his behavior exacerbated as his fame ebbed and money problems reached high tide. Five years after his release, Smith, now broke and desperate and living in San Diego with his new wife, kidnapped at knife point 33-year-old Lefteriya “Lisa” Ozbun with the intention of robbing her. When the woman struggled as she tried to escape from his car, he stabbed her in the chest. She survived, but Smith’s friendship with Buckley had finally expired. When the felon reached out to the pundit for further assistance while he was on the lam in Las Vegas, Buckley quickly placed a call to the FBI.

It was during the Ozbun trial that Smith confessed once more and finally to the Zielinsky slaying. He argued that he shouldn’t be held accountable for the girl’s murder or his latest crime because his sexual compulsion was uncontrollable, leading him to make rash decisions. It was a gambit aimed at securing a lesser sentence through a loophole in California law, and an odd one at that since the motive of his latest crime was clearly theft. The maneuver failed, landing him in prison for the rest of his days, every attempt at parole rejected. Unlike his teenage victim, Smith lived to a ripe old age despite six heart bypass surgeries, dying in a prison hospital at 83.

For his part, Buckley kind of owned up, still insisting he’d acted properly based on the information at hand at the time while acknowledging he was misled by Smith. Most of his fury was not self-directed as it should have been but reserved for members of the chattering classes eager to say “I told you so.” It was a non-apology apology, as it’s become to be called in our wired age’s constant flow of lesser media outrages and compulsory crisis management. The student of political science and history had somehow missed Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s aphorism, “Never ruin an apology with an excuse.”

Two years after the FBI nabbed Smith in Vegas, inmate Jack Henry Abbott wrote to Norman Mailer, beginning a correspondence, jump-starting the same cycle. It was Jimmy Breslin who warned his pal and former running mate that he was headed for a world of trouble when he championed the In the Belly of the Beast writer. It turned out just as awfully as the tabloid journalist prophesied, with the pugnacious novelist experiencing a rare moment of humility after his myopic reformer’s zeal led to even more tragedy. His mea culpa in the aftermath was more full-throated than Buckley’s, though it hardly mattered to Richard Adan, the 22-year-old waiter Abbott impulsively stabbed to death.

Why did the world witness two boldfaced figures who should have known better make such terrible errors of judgment with convicts who displayed some degree of native literary talent? In her introduction, Weinman quotes a National Review correspondent explaining how Buckley and the whole lot of them fell for the conman’s bullshit. “We were taken in, I suspect, by our unwillingness to believe that anyone who loved NR could be a savage killer.” It seems impossible it could be that simple, but hubris can cause people to look with their egos instead of their eyes, especially if they’re used to being lionized. That’s a truth that cuts across political lines, as much as Buckley’s weakness for a convicted child murderer may have shocked at the time. Then again, maybe it shouldn’t be so surprising that someone who had room in his heart for P.W. Botha and Joseph McCarthy could will himself to be blind to the crimes of a monster.•

The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune (Alexander Stille)

When I was a college student I happened to learn the startling story of the Sullivanians, a Manhattan-based psychotherapy cult that had seriously heterodox ideas about the nature of family. I was taking a reading-for-writers class at a New York university, and the professor was a brilliant and revered figure in the poetry world who had more than a passing resemblance to Dave Van Ronk. He spoke with enthusiasm about the sect, though I’m not sure if I ever learned if he’d been a member or if he was just sympathetic to its cause. At the very least, he knew an unusual amount about the group and was friends with some of its most famous alumni, including the singer Judy Collins.

In class, you knew you were in the presence of a significant intellect. He was as ambitious with discussions about early American literature as Melville was with his whale. A young actor was invited one week to perform the Grand Inquisitor monologue from The Brothers Karamazov, and wowed us all. The whole experience was dynamite. In the course of discussing literary themes, the professor shared a lot about his harrowing boyhood, telling us he’d been horribly abused by his mother. The nature of the abuse wasn’t spelled out, though you got the sense it was physical as well as mental. He told us that being so damaged during his childhood had led him to do some “absolutely awful things” in his adult life. It was another vague-if-chilling statement, and you could see he was deeply haunted. He carried with him a small, leather pouch full of pills, including, I believe, nitroglycerin, for his heart. He’d pop one quite often. An unkempt man who seldom washed, his odor filled the classroom each week. He wasn’t doing exactly well, but you could tell he’d been doing worse earlier in his life. This was stability and hard-earned wisdom for him, more or less, a man with a genius mind who’d survived tremendous tumult.

The professor’s extreme familial mistreatment led him to believe that children shouldn’t be raised by their parents, that they should grow up in some sort of collective. He was as sure of this as he was that all of us carry inside an abiding hatred for our parents, even if we’re sure we love them. When an older student in the class, who was hoping to do some writing during his upcoming retirement, said that he didn’t recall loathing his mom and dad, the professor told him without pause, “You’ve forgotten.” He was certain his reality was also everyone else’s, which is a dangerous thing to believe, a perversion of empathy. This anecdote might go part of the way to explaining how hundreds of educated professionals, musicians (the aforementioned Collins), writers (Richard Price), artists (Jackson Pollock) and critics (Clement Greenberg), found their way into the Sullivanians, a taboo-blasting, totalitarian cult which didn’t so much cross boundaries as never acknowledge the existence of any at all.

It’s all on record now in Alexander Stille’s detailed and frequently jaw-dropping 2023 nonfiction account of the shadowy sect that operated quietly in Manhattan for more than 30 years toward the end of last century. The group was named for the early Twentieth Century psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan, who believed that adult loneliness, which always seems to be “on the rise,” was a serious problem that could be addressed through what he dubbed “chumship,” which was essentially a strategy for adults to keep solitude at bay by maintaining many same-sex friendships outside of marriage. There would be no “bowling alone,” in the more recent popular sociological parlance. One of Sullivan’s students was Jane Pearce, a young psychotherapist married to a communist labor organizer named Saul Newton. Some years after Sullivan’s death, they decided to take his ideas about creating camaraderie among adults and use them to nuke the nuclear family.

When they founded the Sullivan Institute in 1957 in an Upper West Side building Pearce purchased with inheritance money, their express goal was to practice a “maverick form of psychotherapy” in order to re-engineer the nature of family in America. Their key tenet was that “the nuclear family caused most psychological problems” and must be destroyed. If they didn’t wind up convincing the entire nation to upend norms, they did manage for several decades to control the social, sexual and financial lives of hundreds of New Yorkers. It would seem a tall order in NYC, where distractions are many, but the mind can be made to be isolated anywhere. People remember Jim Jones for the mass suicide and murder of his followers on a remote settlement in Guyana, but he succeeded in keeping his minions under strict control in cosmopolitan San Francisco for a dozen years prior to the group opting for expatriation. Newton, a Marxist who had zero training as an analyst and idolized Chairman Mao, and Pearce, an alcoholic who drank vodka with her patients throughout their therapy sessions, would maintain control over their acolytes for a far longer span, ultimately leaving behind a noxious trail of addictions, sexual abuse of adults and children, and wrecked families.

How did they do it? How did they get so many doctors and lawyers and professors, who should have known better, to become subservient to a polygamous cult run by a malignant narcissist like Newton, who would demand female patients give him blow jobs during therapy sessions and then bill them for his time? Simply put, the cult leaders found a niche in the market and satisfied it, offering their followers vital things missing from their lives. A lot of adults really are lonesome, feel isolated and endure a lack of community. Many do have toxic relationships with their parents. Lots of them, especially when the institute initially opened, have a strong desire for greater sexual freedom. The Sullivanian leadership preyed on these pains and needs, and once they made their patients emotionally and financially dependent on the community, it could control them with the threat of expulsion.

The radical, left-wing commune also enjoyed the fortuitousness of perfect timing. Psychotherapy was in its greatest boom period in the 1950s in NYC, which reportedly had twice the number of therapists as in all of Great Britain, with seemingly everyone open to analysis. The following decade would also see an emergent counterculture that tried to remake the sociological landscape via aggressive experimentation with communes and alternative lifestyles. So there were plenty of newly opened minds to be exploited, with the golden age of New York psychotherapy running headlong into radical politics. Pragmatic details also smiled on the Sullivanians: Manhattan rents, especially on the then-dicey Upper West Side, were dirt cheap during the era of NYC’s steep urban decline during the Sixties and Seventies.

This allowed the members to live together in groups in same-sex, dorm-like apartments, which most of the non-celebrity members did. They would get therapy, go to their regular jobs during the day, and then return to these neighborhood bases for endless parties where the men and women would meet, alcohol would flow freely, and all were expected to make appointments to have “fuck dates” with as many members of the opposite sex in the group as possible. (There were some gay members, but this was an overwhelmingly straight sect.) No exclusive relationships were tolerated, as monogamous love was considered a bourgeois weakness. Women who complained about the command from on high to sleep with men they weren’t interested in were told by analysts to “shut your mouth and open your legs.” The easy access to sex was a Mansonesque lure, and the insta-friends ready to hang out, play sports and travel abroad together, was a huge attraction to many who felt adrift among the city’s millions. As Richard Price, who wrote and published his first novel, The Wanderers, while living as a member of the cult, said, “You [felt] drugged with—with hopefulness.”

It wasn’t exactly all fun, though. Since the single overarching principle of the group was that the parent-child relationship was evil, with all mothers possessing “an unconscious desire to kill their child,” such ties needed to be severed. If relationships were by their nature broken, the patients were told, they had to be broken off. Members of the Sullivanians were hectored during their often-abusive and endless psychoanalysis sessions (“forever therapy,” as Stille terms it) into writing their parents “Dear John” letters laced with expletives. (The same missives were mailed to siblings unless they happened to also be in the cult.) While it was truly a devout belief of Newton and Pearce that the traditional family, the “basic unit of capitalist production,” was destructive, these enforced apostasies likewise worked nicely as the type of isolating technique infamously employed in Scientology.

Patients were ordered to entrust care of children almost entirely to babysitters, boarding schools and other members of the community, to essentially give them away.

Perhaps more disturbing was the Sullivanian belief that children should never be raised by their parents, that they must be removed from the home and reared by others. “Children should have total free access to adults beyond their biological parent couple,” was how the sect phrased it. Patients were ordered to entrust care of children almost entirely to babysitters, boarding schools and other members of the community, to essentially not show them love, to give them away. Many of these kids, especially ones sent off to so-called “progressive” schools were badly neglected, barely learned to read, and suffered abuse, sexual and otherwise. (The children also endured sexual abuse from Newton and other adults in the group.) None emerged unscathed. “They thought biology was nothing,” a woman who grew up in the Sullivanian community tells the author. Female members who wanted to have a child had to get permission from Newton, who would then order numerous men to have sex with her until she became pregnant. This way, the father would be unknown and no family could form. If the woman or men refused, they were threatened until they conformed. Newton violating boundaries in this manner also allowed him to demonstrate his omnipotence, asserting his dominion of the others.

Insular sects generally display increasingly strange behavior as time passes, and the Sullivanians were no exception, especially after Newton consolidated his power by jettisoning Pearce from the inner circle after their divorce, as he moved on to another of what would ultimately be six wives. During the summers of 1973 and 1974, when members lived in group houses in Amagansett, the softball, sex and art classes took a backseat to pacifiers. In what was called internally “the summer of pacifiers,” a regressive trend spread among the adult acolytes in which they sucked on baby binkies, drank vodka martinis out of baby bottles and carried stuffed animals to “try to recoup stages of development they felt they had missed in childhood.” The Sullivanians also founded the Fourth Wall Repertory Theater, a political drama company, in the East Village, which unsurprisingly ended up an autocratic mess that produced less-than-great plays. (One of Saul Newton’s ten children quipped of the Sullivanians in retrospect that “they combined the worst of Marxism, psychoanalysis, and the musical theater.”)

Over the years, the sect’s paranoia grew to epic proportions, as the community came to view earthshaking events taking place in the outside world through the prism of their own odd experience. When the Three Mile Island accident occurred in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the members escaped en masse to Orlando, sure they would die otherwise, even though they were in no danger. (After the meltdown, members were assigned shifts to listen to news radio 24/7 to ensure they’d be able to escape in the buses they purchased for just such a future catastrophe.) When John Lennon was shot and killed outside the Dakota by a mentally ill fan, Saul Newton, who thought he was an equally significant cultural figure, was sure he was next and beefed up security. Whether it was Three Mile Island, the Fourth Wall Repertory Theater or Newton believing himself to be the Fifth Beatle, the wheels were clearly coming off the party bus by the 1980s.

Apart from some family members, no one came to the funeral of the monstrous man who’d tyrannized so many for so long, the spell finally broken.

That was the decade when custody battles began to come to court and defections of key recruits began to surge. Longtime members, even those who were likely being groomed to someday replace Newton, began to leave the cult, though some paid a price. A number of them were stalked and beaten in the street by their former “chums” still under the Sullivanian sway. The complicated parentage of children born to the cultists led some departed members to file lawsuits, with child custody battles playing out in public. A Joe Conason Village Voice cover story in 1986 about one such legal case was the beginning of the cult’s end. By the late Eighties, Saul Newton had dementia, and he died alone in a Brooklyn hospital in 1991. Apart from some family members, none of the cultists came to the funeral of the monstrous man who’d tyrannized so many for so long, the spell finally broken. The institute, under financial pressure even prior to all the lawsuits, dissolved the same year.

Stille’s book has been criticized by some for being “repetitive,” but I think it’s mercifully coherent, especially when you consider he was sifting through more than three decades of habitually outré behavior. His most illuminating section comes toward the book’s end, in a chapter titled, “The Reckoning.” One of the most vicious of the therapists, Ellen Barrett, who would dismantle her patients emotionally, agreed to be interviewed all these years later. In this passage you come to understand how her early life and her own abuse by Newton and his psychoanalytical goons prepared her to sink to their depths. It doesn’t forgive her wanton cruelty, of course, but it does make it more explicable. And you need to emerge from this type of volume with some degree of understanding, not just lurid details.

Some of the former members, while still badly shaken decades later by the experience, maintain dual feelings about the Sullivanians. In retrospect, they acknowledge that despite the horrors, the close friendships they formed with other cultists were incredibly meaningful to them, and a path to lifelong fellowship is something worth pursuing, even if it wasn’t pursued in a noble way by the powers that be in this case. As Michael Cohen, a patient, and then therapist, who was one of Newton’s chosen ones until he rebelled, says, “We asked all the right questions and got all the wrong answers.” Adults making terrible decisions with their own lives is unfortunate, but the Sullivanian cult was something far worse for the generation of children who were pushed away by their parents at the behest of a monster like Newton. Chris Pearce, who grew up in the cult never knowing who his real parents were, plays a significant role at the beginning and end of Stille’s story. He’s managed over time to attain some degree of closure, though any thoughts about his unusual childhood are understandably complicated. Being highly intelligent and tenacious, he eventually became a successful video animator and a university professor on the subject. It goes unmentioned in the book, but according to his academic bio, he’s currently working on an animated documentary about children raised by wild animals.•

The Factory (Hiroko Oyamada)

The word “factory” grossly understates the expansive nature of the gargantuan Japanese workplace at the heart of Hiroko Oyamada’s short, strange and spectacular 2013 novel, which works remarkably well as an existential office satire but also as a much broader statement on existence. The campus contains nearly a hundred cafeterias, an array of restaurants and supermarkets, a post office, a gas station, a bank, a hotel, a forest, a river, and even a bowling alley and karaoke bar, to service and entertain the seemingly endless employees who make up the massive corporation, its tendrils extending in every direction across the sprawling acreage. What does the Factory do? It’s not directly expressed, even to most of the workers it would appear, but you assume it does a lot of everything, its reach exceptional, though it’s not a particularly high-tech operation. Actually a lot of the jobs don’t even seem necessary. It’s the sort of enterprise that hires highly trained college grads and struggling professionals to do busywork, an El Dorado of employment in these uncertain times for white-collar workers under constant threat of being automated out of a career. It’s also a place where there seems to be little oversight or pressure. For instance, when the Factory decides to begin green-roofing its hundreds, probably thousands, of buildings, it hires a university researcher who specializes in bryology (the study of mosses), but one whose focus has solely been on taxonomy. He doesn’t know how to grow moss or grass or anything, and he’ll be a one-man department without any help, but his manager tells him to take his time (months, years, whatever) and learn methods “as he goes.” No rush, he’s told, no need for haste. The Factory will proceed at its own pace. It’s more than a company town or even a city—it’s its own world.

There are, however, some odd, foreboding flourishes at the Factory. Large black birds of an unknown species gather at the foot of the river that runs at one end of the campus, their numbers increasing annually at an alarming rate. The invasive coypu rodents that live off the greenery and discarded food are growing to surprising proportions, some appear to be more than six feet in length. Most unnerving of all, though, is the “Forest Pantser,” a shadowy, costumed figure who is said to pursue anyone who happens into the forest and tries to remove their pants by force. It’s not a sexual thing the workers are told, but they should still proceed with caution, since the Factory executives refuse to report the fiend, almost definitely an employee, to the police because they don’t want outside attention.

We’re introduced to three less-than-enthusiastic new hires as they’re ushered into this mixture of the mundane and the surreal by Mr. Goto, a middle manager who oddly always looks drunk and shabby, despite holding an important post at a corporation with an upstanding reputation. Ushiyama has held and quit a half-dozen unsatisfying jobs since graduation from college. She’s still young, but her résumé is looking sketchy, so she accepts a lowly contract position as a paper shredder, spending her days repeatedly feeding discarded forms into the maw of a hungry machine. A systems engineer who was recently fired gets temp work as a proofreader at the Factory thanks to his girlfriend who runs her own employment agency. The third worker is the aforementioned bryologist who tries to refuse Goto’s job offer and is further perplexed when he’s told he’ll be living in a home on the grounds. The academic could just walk away from the offer, of course, but he doesn’t.

The Factory workers, when they infrequently speak, exchange banalities, and anything beyond trite expressions about the weather and other prosaic topics often result in confusion and miscommunication. It’s like the cubicles and corridors have instilled a sort of aphasia, and the lack of comprehension isn’t aided by seating arrangements suddenly changing overnight, partitions being unexpectedly installed. It’s discombobulating, and the employees aren’t always sure if what they see or hear is real. During her soul-sucking toil rendering paper into scraps, Ushiyama (probably) mistakes something familiar for something fantastic. “Out of the corner of my eye,” she tells us, “I thought I saw one of the smaller women in Print Services holding a black bird by its wings, but when I looked again it was just a toner cartridge.” The proofreader is continually put into a soporific state by the nonsensical brochures, user manuals and other miscellaneous items he must peruse hour after hour, none of them making any logical sense. He comes to accept that “words are such unstable things.” Furufue, the bryologist, has periodic jousting sessions with Goto, perplexed that he’s stuck in a job where basically nothing is required of him. He doesn’t quit, though, nor can he goad Goto into firing him. His superior tries to make him understand that “a result-oriented approach simply doesn’t make sense in Japan.”

Oyamada deftly uses narrative tricks to create a disequilibrium in the reader, reflecting what the characters themselves are experiencing. She employs cinematic jump-cuts, which, without the aid of visuals, produces disorientation. At the end of one paragraph two characters are talking about getting a drink and in the next one of them is having tea with someone else, though you don’t realize immediately it’s a different person. Scenes that were left in limbo are abruptly picked up, and relationships between characters are initially left oblique, only to be revealed in a sideways, almost incidental manner. The use of chronology is also tricky. Events that appear to be happening at the same time are sometimes actually separated by years. It all feels vertiginous, alienating, even isolating. The employees themselves share that feeling of isolation, even though they’re never alone and could walk away from the Factory at any time. As one character remarks, “Being cut off from the world has nothing to do with physical proximity.” But if the scenes are jarring, they’re handled with flair.

In addition to just being eerily entertaining, Oyamada’s novel manages to simultaneously satirize the excess of both capitalism and socialism, no mean feat. Many of these folks have been cruelly downsized and now they’re handed brain-killing jobs that are purposely unfulfilling. But it’s a book obviously after a lot more than commentary on the dismal science. The author is asking the biggest questions in her tiny book, pursuing the metaphysical as surely as Kafka or Beckett or Melville. To varying degrees the employees of the Factory would prefer not to, but, really, it’s the workplace itself possessed by the nihilism of Bartleby. The Factory wants to just exist, desires only that time passes silently, and all it asks of its workers is complicity in exchange for a steady salary. It’s an acceptable life materially, and it’s menacing. The novel is body horror in a sense, the corpus being the corporation. As one old man who appears to have spent his whole adult life working and residing there warns a younger worker: “The factory is a big place, bigger than you know.”•

On the Edge of Reason (Miroslav Krleža)

At the heart of Miroslav Krleža’s haunting first-person 1938 novel is one of literature’s most memorable antiheroes, a rigidly stubborn lawyer in a backwater Yugoslavian burg who tells the brazen truth in an almost accidental aside at a boozy party, a bitter remark which insults his powerful boss, and then refuses to withdraw the slight even after his liquid courage dries up. The unnamed narrator, a bourgeois “top-hatted man” as he disgustedly calls his ilk, has played the same game as everyone else in his corrupt society while advising “pointless” firms selling chamber pots and fountain pens to Persia and other points on the map, suddenly is willing to become the ultimate pariah, to suffer scorn, trials, imprisonments, to cling to the one sincere thing he’s said in his life, that one thing that’s freed him from a lifetime of complicity. Then, in the aftermath, he begins aiming additional inconvenient truths at other sacred cows and all but seals his fate. If you have even a smidgen of nihilism in your heart—and every decent person does—you’ll be drawn viscerally to his catastrophic, self-inflicted free-fall from the comfortable class to the squalid subbasement.

One evening our 52-year-old lawyer is seated at a soiree hosted by his superior, the Director-General Domaćinski, one of many similar festivities he’s attended or thrown during his decades-long career. Everybody laughs at unfunny jokes and no one points out anyone else’s embezzlement or fraud or adultery. It is, as we’re told by our narrator, a “social game played according to fixed rules.” As the son-in-law of a quack doctor who grew rich selling a dubious “digestive tea,” the lawyer is familiar with the routine, and he’s gone along to get along like all his peers. But there’s something festering inside of him, a latent rebelliousness which he discovers in real time. It turns out he’s a bothersome man.

The Director-General, a redoubtable grandee of the region’s financial and civic matters, is entertaining the guests in his vineyard for the umpteenth time with his fondest anecdote, the one about how two decades earlier he shot to death four revolutionaries/suspected thieves on his property, how he’d killed them like dogs. How happy it makes him to remember this episode. The lawyer almost inadvertently emerges from the sheepfold when he declares in a nonchalant remark, which he practically whispers, that Domaćinski’s actions were “a crime, a bloody thing, a moral insanity.”

The accusation might have been missed altogether, spoken as it was in a barely audible tone, and life could have continued unaltered, but just as the lawyer was offhandedly murmuring the charge, the Director-General had coincidentally taken a pause in his raucous regaling and what was expressed was clear to all at the table. Domaćinski is flabbergasted and every member of his claque stunned. The Director-General demands clarification and the lawyer repeats his accusation. Screams, curses and recriminations are exchanged. Domaćinski angrily contends that he was acting in self-defense when he killed the intruders, threatens to shoot the lawyer, and when the narrator reaches into his pocket for a cigarette lighter, Domaćinski pulls out a revolver. The lawyer overturns a table of food and drinks to create a diversion and escape.

When it comes to escaping his trouble in the larger sense in the wake of his outspokenness, however, the narrator refuses all overtures, rejecting several entreaties to retract his statement and lower the temperature. You would expect that a lifelong coward would backpedal after his reflexive insolence, that a clearer head would prevail, but he won’t recant his “heresy.” Instead he doubles down. “There are moments in everybody’s life when it is possible to hear the wheels of one’s own fate squeaking,” the lawyer tells us, and this is just such a moment. It is the such a moment in his life. Our narrator decides to set on fire the careful facade he’s spent his life fashioning, to burn down the whole thing. Further complicating matters is the rampant gossip in the small town, which has greatly exaggerated his offenses and labeled him mentally ill, a murderous man fit for a straitjacket. It’s innuendo gone viral, and it provokes the lawyer into a string of screaming matches and fistfights with those who’ve mischaracterized him, which further feeds the trash talk about him.

It’s perhaps a surfeit of ego as much as a yearning for honesty that leads to the extreme downturn in his fortunes, the exhaustion of playing subordinate to powerful buffoons, but the truth, whatever the vehicle that brings it to our doorstep, is still the truth. There’s something of Thomas Mann’s tone in the novel, and the lawyer is kin with the matter-of-fact thief Felix Krull, but what he’s stolen isn’t money or jewelry, but unearned honor from one of society’s pillars. In doing so, he’s also sworn at society itself, kicked at its very foundations.

Citizens in any country will make many allowances to maintain some semblance of stability, helping the center to hold. A failed society is no mere game. So, it doesn’t matter that during the subsequent trial over the so-called slander—such insults were punishable by prison at that time in that country—the lawyer, representing himself, reveals that the Director-General was likely a traitor to his country during an earlier period of his life, was discharged from the military due to financial crimes, and shot all four of the interlopers in the back, suggesting he was in no imminent danger. He’s really masterful, but he’s really in trouble. Discrediting the popular narrative is abhorrent; it’s simply not done. The narrator also manages to get on the bad side of the very biased judge presiding over his case when he points out that he recently rejected the jurist’s overture when he requested his daughter’s hand in marriage.

His family, friends and colleagues abandon the now-disgraced lawyer after the impolitic remarks. His few confidantes in his new world are others who’ve been tossed aside by society: a prostitute who was scorned by her village at an early age after a boy wooing her committed suicide, and a cellmate who stole a watch when young and was never able to land another honest job. These are people who’ve been thrown away by others, while our narrator has willingly tossed himself headlong into the same pit. For all the trials and privations endures, he’s triumphed. He’s the loser with the capital “L” and he never has to make nice again.

In a sick society, the hero is generally viewed as a sociopath. He or she often is somewhat of a sociopath, which is the very thing that allows them to revolt. There’s a rich tradition of such recalcitrant figures in literature, a long list of the children of Ahab, too many to name them all. Heinrich von Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas had to be compensated for his losses. Franz Kafka’s Hunger Artist took his disappearing act too far. Herman Melville’s other inflexible infidel, Bartleby, preferred not to. Terence Rattigan’s Arthur Winslow had to clear his son’s good name regardless of the cost of the Pyrrhic victory. You can even hear very strong echoes of the voice of Krleža’s lawyer in Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, particularly in the early pages when Coleman Silk is explaining how he went from respected man to being laid low, also after a comment that caused an uproar. Roth revered and championed many overlooked Twentieth Century Eastern and Central European writers—he even served as the General Editor of the Writers From the Other Europe imprint that was established in 1976—so while I have no proof he read On the Edge of Reason, I would not be at all surprised.

Written when it was, just on the cusp of World War II, this novel was also in dialogue with the disaster that was forming on the global stage, as a cancerous nationalism had overtaken Germany, Italy and Japan, a dynamic that would bring about world war, concentration camps, relentless attempts at genocide. Vile choices were made. Some people spoke up, but they were condemned by the ruthless throng as traitors who should have kept quiet.•

McTeague (Frank Norris)

Frank Norris’ 1899 novel about several greed-driven grisly murders is a must-read book for scholars of American fiction, a mixed blessing that needs to be observed, due to the power of its storytelling and its place in literary history as one of the peaks of Naturalism, a pseudoscientific yet significant subgenre championed by William Dean Howells. The author, an American Zola who was also a bigot, turned out the magnum opus of his abbreviated life with this graphic melodrama tainted by anti-Semitism, a brutally operatic work.

McTeague isn’t the Barber of Seville but a Dentist of San Francisco, a simpleminded beast of a man who practices medicine despite lacking a degree or license. He’s “so coarse, so enormous, so stupid” in his own estimation, and a “huge, brutal fellow” as described by Marcus, his best friend, his only friend. The so-called doctor, who learned the rudiments of his trade while assisting an itinerant dentist working in mining communities, has a habit of yanking rotting teeth straight from the gums with his meaty fingers, as if Victor Frankenstein and his monster merged into one being, kept the abnormal brain, and focused on periodontics. Beyond coffee-joint meals with Marcus and semi-competently filling cavities, McTeague lives a bland routine, drinking steam beer and dully watching the city street life from the window of his Polk Street dental parlor, trying in vain to discern the meaning of human behavior, like livestock staring dumbly at the farmer and his plow.

His existence is enlivened, though, when Marcus’ cousin and love interest, Trina, has to spend weeks in McTeague’s chair to have her dental issues treated. The ersatz doctor is initially peeved at the young woman but soon comes to fancy her. After struggling to restrain himself from raping Trina while she’s rendered unconscious by ether, the towering tooth puller impetuously decides he’s in love with her and proposes marriage when she awakens. She’s aghast and begins to scream at this fearsome ape who wants to carry her away. The medical sessions continue, if awkwardly, for several days in the aftermath of her horrified rejection, until the work is completed.

McTeague, now lovelorn, is prodded by Marcus into revealing to him his feelings for Trina. The oddly pompous Marcus has a magnanimous moment, deciding to step aside for his friend, allowing the hulk to pursue the woman he thought he might marry. No one has asked Trina her opinion about this gentlemen’s agreement, but when she meets McTeague again soon thereafter at a picnic she’s magically done a one-eighty on him, encouraging his courtship. Something shocking happens after they become engaged, however: Trina, who’d reluctantly purchased a lottery ticket from the cleaning woman in McTeague’s apartment building, wins $5000, a small fortune. The sudden windfall, this great good luck, will slowly destroy them both as well as others in their orbit.

First, though, things aren’t bad for a while, as marriage works well enough, with Trina even helping her short-tempered, oafish husband to become marginally more raffiné, like a buffalo in a bow tie. They furnish their apartment nicely, entertain neighbors and enjoy the approval of being seen as respectable people, the doctor and his lucky wife. Yes, Trina’s unexpected lottery bonanza has awakened in her a surprising level of parsimony, encouraging her to cut any corners possible to make the capital grow, but there’s nothing wrong with being thrifty. It’s actually a commendable trait, isn’t it? With McTeague’s okay pay, her part-time job painting toys with non-poisonous paint (it’s actually really, really poisonous) and some interest on her fat bank account, the bottom line grows steadily, immensely pleasing her.

Marcus, however, has quickly transformed into a jealous maniac, believing the money would be his if not for his act of beneficence. He drunkenly flings a knife at McTeague in a barroom, nearly killing him. Another time when they are having a sporting wrestling match at a picnic, Marcus tries to bite off his pal’s ear, turning his white shirt crimson. It all really goes to hell, however, just before Marcus leaves San Fran to try to establish himself as a rancher, to live out his cowboy dreams, when he finally successfully stabs McTeague in the back, even if the knife is metaphorical. With a few words to the right authorities, Marcus wrecks the dentist’s career and precipitates a stunning descent for them all.

Trina’s love for her growing bank balance has reached l'amour fou levels at this point. With her husband out of work, she decides the couple must downsize again and again so she can continue saving money. Eventually they take up quarters in a disgusting hovel in which a rag-and-bone man just murdered his wife, the very woman who’d sold Trina her fateful ticket. McTeague, despondent over being idle, has his hair-trigger temper activated on a steady basis once he takes up drinking. He regularly batters his wife and bites her fingers, the horrifying monster in him having fully emerged. He steals some savings from her and runs off, but soon returns, a furious and penniless scatterling who wants more. Given the operatic nature of the work, liebestod would seem to be on the horizon, but the reality is far more insane than that. There’s dismemberment, blood poisoning, felonious theft, abandonment, alcoholism, even a vengeful battle to the death in—no subtlety here—Death Valley, the latter of which provides for one of the more memorable and grimmer endings in the entire American literary canon.

Among the cast of supporting characters is Zerkow, the aforementioned rag-and-bone man guilty of uxoricide. He’s sometimes identified as the most despicably anti-Semitic creation in literature (though I don’t think this character has anything on Fischerle of Auto-da-Fé, which was written by Elias Canetti, a Sephardic Jew). Zerkow is certainly one of the ugliest characters imaginable and not just because he’s a wife-killer. He’s someone who grows orgasmic just thinking of gold, who longs only for filthy lucre. You could argue that almost everyone in this novel is awful and greedy, but he’s the only one whose ethnicity is directly referenced in his behavior. When the cleaning lady becomes wedded to Zerkow, Trina feels bad she has married someone Jewish. It’s not only Norris writing anti-Semitic characters, but his own anti-Semitism being expressed, pouring out of his pen, and it’s an appalling failure of morality.

The bullshit race science Norris subscribed to isn’t nearly the end of scientifically challenged beliefs, as his admiration for the cruelty of social Darwinism informs this whole novel, positioning his characters as pit bulls ready to bite, lacking self-control and an ability to learn. Norris describes his titular character at various points with these phrases: “ape-like agility,” “animal cunning,” “obscure brute instinct,” “simple brute nature.” Naturalism views humans as animals prone to react, completely unable to resist when the right stimuli presents itself. It’s awfully deterministic, and thankfully it went WAY out of style after its early late-19th-century heyday. But as we sit here in 2023, there are prominent neurobiologists arguing that, in fact, we have no free will. Still seems a dubious fiction, though.

The closest parallel for McTeague in American lit is Eugene O’Neill’s 1922 expressionistic play, Hairy Ape, a stage drama about a dull-witted laborer depicted as little different than a gorilla in a zoo, not nearly the author’s best work but one which is revived regularly, actors and directors enamored with its bigness, its more-is-more aesthetic, its lurid thrills. Norris’ novel would be remembered no matter what for providing the source material for Erich von Stroheim’s seminal pre-sound film, Greed, but it will also continue to be read for its own merits: the visceral drama, elemental themes and the desert-like vastness of its ambitions.

“You can’t make small of me!” McTeague thunders whenever he believes someone is being condescending to him because of his limited intelligence, his inability to understand what’s obvious to others. There’s no making this ogre small, though, as there’s no way to dismiss the power of Norris’ beast of a novel despite its odious flaws.•

The School for Good Mothers (Jessamine Chan)

There aren’t many feminist novels that would be at home on the bookshelf of a cultural conservative, but Jessamine Chan’s assured 2022 debut is the rare volume that can be numbered among them. While the author explores the desire to control the female body, an unremitting right-wing goal in America, she also uses the tools of modern liberal ideology—the so-called nanny state, cancel culture, wokeness, etc.—tweaking and turbocharging them, to create a dystopia where the ethos and vernacular of modern progressivism are employed to guilt, entrap and imprison women. The writer’s creative decision is not to have these reformist reflexes co-opted by neocons and misused but rather to extrapolate them to an extreme conclusion, a dead end. Maybe this is intended as social commentary or maybe not, but it’s a central building block of the narrative. Folding together these polar political forces, Chan melds the seemingly immiscible deeply, painfully.

Jilted and exhausted Philadelphia single mother Frida Liu had a “bad day,” messed up, the way all parents mess up at one point or another. Forlorn, frazzled and seriously sleep-deprived, she left her beloved eighteen-month-old Harriet alone at home for more than two hours while making a coffee run and retrieving some files from her hybrid editorial job at Wharton. While she was away, something happened. Maybe Harriet cried loudly and alarmed those within earshot? Maybe her tight-knit neighbors just don’t like the New York City transplant of Chinese ancestry and took the opportunity to harass her? She’s faced bigotry before in her life, so it’s possible. Whatever it was, Child Protection Services was summoned and the baby removed. When Frida arrives at her doorstep, she is crossing into a brave new world, a fever dream, a complete nightmare.

Even prior to this world-rocking incident, 39-year-old Frida feared not living up to the standards of other women, despite being attractive and intelligent and doing her level best. She’s admonished for her laissez-faire attitude at the playground by other moms, helicopter parents of the Black Hawk variety. During her last trimester, she discovered her husband, Gust, was having an affair with a younger, well-to-do Pilates instructor, which brought about the dissolution of their marriage. Even her own beautiful child, whom she loves dearly, seems somehow beyond her grasp much of the time. The alien invasion is how she remembers a male friend describing her pregnancy. The creature, he called the growing human inside. It would be funny, but he’s not completely wrong, not where Frida’s fraught connection to the world is concerned. All these suspicions and rejections mirror the disquiet she feels within, confirming her self-doubt, and while questioning oneself is a survival instinct, it also can be a double-edged sword. “She always feels like she’s fucking up, but now there’s evidence,” we’re told.

Adding to the litany of females who make Frida feel small are the young, toned and efficient social workers she encounters who seem to her a new and better species, completely at ease with their technological accouterments and in their athleisure, lulus of unyielding bureaucracy clad in lululemon. You might expect the mother to be assigned parenting classes by Family Court and be subject to visits from CPS for a while, but as Frida soon finds out, the rules have recently changed. In a moment of moral panic, the state now defines its job as to “eliminate human error” by any means necessary, to improve nurturing at all costs. That means souped-up surveillance and “reeducation,” and it’s positively draconian. Charged with neglect and abandonment, the Family Court judge gives her no options but these: permanently surrender her parental rights and never see Harriet again or spend a year at an institute designed to improve mothering. It’s not a prison, she assures herself, despite the electrified fences. Frida hasn’t been traduced, exactly, but punished beyond all reason.

The remedial mothering school is a high-tech hellhole where political correctness is highly valued. Each mom is “gifted” the latest in robotics—a talking, humanoid child who resembles their offspring in superficial ways. They’re expected to teach their android babies the latest in liberal platitudes as they are constantly graded and degraded. The dolls record all they “see” and “hear,” the information relayed to a central system. Likewise gathering info are the omnipresent cameras and microphones, and, oh, the brain scans, we mustn’t forget the brain scans. The rules are arbitrary and seem aimed at obliterating self-esteem, the tormentors more women whom Frida can never please, and please them she must if she’s to ever again have a relationship with her daughter.

Much of what occurs in these pages contains all the hallmarks of psychological horror, with Frida, in her consistently hypnagogic state, encountering all manner of surreal situations, experiencing endless paranoia. Chan could have blurred the line between what her central character is perceiving and what’s actually occurring, but that’s not the course she chose. Instead she created a realistic portrait of an anti-utopia that may be slightly futuristic or perhaps is happening currently in a counterfactual, and she largely handles it very well.

The story does have its weaknesses. In creating her totalitarian world, Chan elides the inconvenient. If you’re wondering why, say, the Philadelphia Inquirer wouldn’t be up in arms over this gross mistreatment of citizens, keep wondering. In the school, the mothers hope one of their own who’s escaped has alerted the outside world about what is transpiring. Except so much of what has egregiously happened to these women has occurred in public hearings in courthouses. So Chan’s world is one not completely developed and won’t withstand too many questions; you just have to accept her vision. Also the characters beyond Frida are mostly narrowly drawn stereotypes, from her ex-husband to the other mothers in the reform school to her bureaucratic tormentors, almost all just broad indicators of race, ethnicity, sexual identity and class. In the macro, however, this is a potent work, one that deftly manages a scenario which could easily have been exploitation.

As the novel progresses tensely to its finale, two outcomes are possible for Frida: She defeats the soul-killing system and wins back her child or she doesn’t. Either conclusion could work and Chan manages the choice she makes with aplomb. Down to the final paragraphs, the novelist plays on the understandable fear that technology is permitting the state to gain too much control, to become a maze dotted with prisons, making sure her main character looks warily to both the left and right for traps that may await her.•

The Oppermanns (Lion Feuchtwanger)

It was in the autumn of 1940 when German novelist Lion Feuchtwanger, a Mark Twain devotee, had reports of his demise greatly exaggerated. Soon after France fell to the Nazis, news accounts began to circulate asserting the author had been beheaded by Third Reich henchmen. It wasn’t a stretch to think he’d be targeted by the National Socialists he’d criticized so aggressively from early in Hitler’s disgraceful rise, hence his 1933 relocation from his native country to Sanary-sur-Mer. If not for his clever, indefatigable wife, Marta, the writer certainly would have been numbered among the casualties rather than being able to ultimately make his way to America to become part of the German-Jewish cultural diaspora that settled in Los Angeles.

At the heart of Lion Feuchtwanger’s 1933 masterpiece, The Oppermanns, is the eponymous German-Jewish, Berlin-based clan known for their chain of furniture stores, which sells affordable tables and chairs of decent-if-not-overwhelming quality. Of the three brothers who’ve inherited the successful company from their father, only Martin is fully invested in making sure the concern keeps going. Edgar is a brilliant and innovative surgeon, while Gustav a writer and critic of minor stature, happy with his well-appointed home, modest place on the literary scene and pretty mistress. The novel focuses mostly on the latter sibling, Gustav, stubbornly childlike despite his intellectual sophistication, who refuses to accept the gathering storm about to engulf the nation. He’s reached middle age in comfort and refuses to accept the obvious, that his charmed life will soon be hammered by a storm.

The ceaseless anti-Jewish propaganda of the previous dozen years has grown into a monster by the early 1930s. (The author estimated that there were 18 million editions of anti-Semitic newspapers being published on a daily basis by the beginning of the decade.) As Hitler stunningly moves closer to grabbing the reins of the nation, the Oppermanns and other Jewish citizens are suffering the death of a thousand cuts. You can’t call what they experience microaggressions, the harassment enacted by faceless functionaries and Brownshirt bullies being more than a little harmful psychologically and materially. For example: The Oppermanns’ furniture company has special taxes levied on it because of their ethnicity. A doctor working for Edgar is refused a promotion because he looks like a “Jewish caricature.” (“There are now, in certain important circles, gentlemen who value an imposing appearance higher than genuine merit,” a sympathetic supervisor tells a despairing Edgar about the situation.) Even Edgar himself, who’s saved numerous lives with a new surgical method he’s pioneered, is derided in nationalist newspapers as a wildly irresponsible butcher experimenting on the poor. It’s the world turned upside down.

Perhaps the most viscerally painful of these thus-far nonviolent indignities occurs when a squeaky-voiced Nazi fanatic schoolteacher becomes enraged at Martin’s 17-year-old star scholar-athlete son, Berthold, for presenting a very reasonable class report that is, to his ears, “disloyal” to Germany. The schoolteacher Vogelsang wants to make sure the boys are inculcated with an “aryanized” education. When the boy delivers a lecture on his assigned topic of Arminius, a chieftain of a medieval Germanic tribe who scored a surprising military triumph over the Romans, Berthold opines that this victory isn’t such a great achievement because many of the gains made by Arminus were ultimately erased by the sweep of history. You can argue with this point, but certainly the boy doesn’t deserve to be continuously tormented by his abusive schoolmaster, who fetishizes any person or event that celebrates the martial virility of the nation. Beyond the specific plot point, the question of Arminius and his efforts becomes one that haunts the rest of the novel. Is it worth fighting when all will likely be lost anyhow? Is it better to rush to higher ground? Feuchtwanger seems to be on the side of pragmatism on this question, despite his own often dangerous commitment to countering the Nazis.

Soon hellfire is completely unloosed, the walls close in, doors are kicked in, as Jewish people and anyone supporting them become targets. After Hitler is appointed Chancellor, the Reichstag is set ablaze and the 1932 elections take place, the beginning of the so-called New Germany arrives, as does the lawless harassment, humiliation, detainment and torture of Jewish citizens. The violence has begun in earnest. Gustav signs a petition deriding Hitler which appears in a newspaper. It’s virtuous but foolhardy, bringing more attention to his extended family. You could call it brave except that Gustav still doesn’t seem to understand the danger, and continues to believe everything will be alright. It will not. He soon has to rush across the border to avoid being arrested and tortured, maybe killed. (Like Gustav, Feuchtwanger himself became an exile in 1933 soon after asserting that he wouldn’t leave his homeland, arguing that “Germany needs its intellectuals.”)

The stunning events alter the personalities of the brothers, at least initially, in surprising ways, with sober Martin becoming emotional and Gustav growing surprisingly pragmatic, though they all come to believe they were too slow to acknowledge the obvious, that they should have relocated their families elsewhere in Europe, or to Palestine or America. If the brothers and others in the novel are loath to believe what is happening, Feuchtwanger is amazingly prescient about this anti-Semitic nationalistic scourge when others still thought sanity would somehow prevail, despite all evidence to the contrary. It’s Mühlheim, a lawyer friend of the Oppermann clan, who lays out the next dozen years with harrowing precision: “The century of great conflict has just begun. It will be a century of destruction. The final generations of the white race will attack each other without mercy.” A wealthy, young non-Jewish jurist Bilfinger, who Gustav meets while hiding for a time in Switzerland, spells out the Nazi actions in a way that still reverberates when referring to any form of fascism: “They have smashed the standards of the civilized world to pieces.” Soon enough, the pacific nature of Switzerland has lulled Feuchtwanger once again into his myopia, and he makes a decision that will permanently alter his life.

German Nationalism of this period was grotesquely anti-Semitic, of course, but it was also very clearly a revenge of the mediocre, which is a facet of all fascist movements, whether it’s Nazism, Maoism or MAGA. As Goethe wrote, “There is nothing the rabble fear more than Intelligence,” and Germany was then rife with ordinary men who believed they’d been wronged, who longed for a supposedly glorious past that they thought had been stolen from them, and who were willing to do something about it, no matter how base or violent it need be. Feuchtwanger demonstrates how this dynamic, building for years, grew exponentially as Hitler inched closer to dominance, how the sickness of perverted nostalgia has metastasized throughout the land.

The Oppermanns came to prominence once more recently during Trump’s odious ascent, as it remains applicable to vile nationalism regardless of where it’s festering. As a lawyer friendly to the family remarks to Edgar, trying to wise him up, “Don’t forget…that our opponents have one tremendous advantage over us; their absolute lack of fairness.” But, of course, it was very specifically speaking to the rise of fascism in Germany, and it addresses the pre-WWII period in that country like nothing else does. If this novel was written in 2023, you would say, wow, did Feuchtwanger nail that 1930s period in Europe, how perfect a distillation of the madness and moral decay, the monsters and their menacing. That it was written 90 years earlier, just as German society was unraveling, is awe-inspiring. When John Hersey went to Japan to record the devastation wrought by Little Boy and Fat Man, the bombs had already dropped. Feuchtwanger was writing as projectiles of many kinds were falling all around him, exploding at his feet. But he offers no mere reportage, somehow transforming the horrors into great art.•

Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us (Rachel Aviv)

We tell ourselves stories in order to live, but what if we tell the wrong ones?

When the journalist Rachel Aviv was six years old, she stopped eating for reasons mysterious to herself and the adults in her life. Unable to be convinced or coaxed as the pounds began to fall away, she eventually landed in an in-patient program that treated childhood eating disorders, aimed at stemming the problem early. Her doctors inform the family that she’s the youngest person on record to be afflicted with anorexia. One of the older children she met while hospitalized was a beautiful girl named Hava, who was already ensconced in the milieu of the disease, eagerly wearing its uniform over her distressingly bony frame. She was likely on her way to being a “career” patient, someone who never breaks free from what’s plaguing her, moving in and out of institutions, on and off medications. Aviv was enthralled by Hava and other older girls in the program, wanted to emulate them, which would have exacerbated her situation, maybe made it chronic. At the end of her anorexia treatment, after Aviv began to regain weight, her therapists suggested to the family that the girl needed to be entered into a psychiatric facility for more observation and therapy. Aviv’s mother wisely resisted, feeling that further hospitalization might ingrain in her daughter a sense of being ill. She was likely right in this case to fear that cycle, that feedback loop, as diagnosis can be deliverance but it can also be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

As an adult, Aviv doesn’t believe she was an anorexic as a first grader. It’s all nebulous now, even after interviewing numerous doctors who treated her and looking at decades-old medical files, but she thinks she found her self-denial and the response it aroused in adults to be empowering, besieged as she was at the time by a sense of chaos after her parents’ marriage fell apart. But her feelings about the social dynamic she experienced during her institutionalized treatment were reawakened decades later when she reported for the New Yorker on hundreds of children refused refugee status in Sweden who began to suffer from some inscrutable sort of torpor, unable to even rise from their beds. It was labeled “Resignation Syndrome,” and the lethargy didn’t immediately lift when the government reversed course and granted them asylum; recovery took time. Why did this happen, and why did it spread in this one place in the world? In an age when chemistry is often thought to be destiny, Aviv wondered about the potency of the social context in regards to illness, if even the way a disorder is described can inform how patients experience their malady.

In Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us, Aviv’s provocative and wonderfully written 2022 nonfiction exploration of a handful of patients in the “psychic hinterlands,” she looks at how the stories we tell about mental-health issues, stories that have changed regularly throughout history, are often inadequate and sometimes just wrong. They work for healing some and probably worsen the situation for others, no one size fitting all. What makes this contextualizing exceptionally dangerous, though, is when erroneous stories crash headlong into serious mental health problems, the sufferers already particularly vulnerable. The definition of these illnesses, the story the medical establishment and the popular culture tell about them, can shape the way we experience sickness, perhaps classification itself turning some people into perennial patients.

The through line of all the cases Aviv probes is that each of the patients felt unable to measure up to standards in one or more key ways, believing they were failing in their role in the society-wide play, and mental illness helped them exit the stage. It’s not quite that simple, of course, but there does seem to be a pattern. Ray is a nephrologist who fell apart mentally when his business didn’t become an overwhelming success, retreating into narcissistic obsession; he’s treated solely with talk therapy even when it becomes apparent that medication may help, his needs deemed secondary to an institution’s traditional beliefs. Bapu is a woman in Pune bristling under traditional family structure which is constantly being reinforced by her many live-in in-laws, who gives herself more and more to mysticism and spirituality, finally running away to pray, worship and write. She is treated (very unsuccessfully) under a Western-style diagnostic framework which had come into vogue in India, assessed as schizophrenic and returned home. The diagnosis usurped her spiritual narrative, seeming to cause her further deterioration, her life becoming a series of daring escapes from diagnoses and conventional expectations. Naomi is a highly intelligent young Black mother who had a traumatic childhood in an Illinois housing project. During a psychotic break with reality, she impulsively attempts to kill her twin sons and herself. A leitmotif in her narrative is the unfortunate stories the medical establishment and penal institutions in America tell about Black citizens and their physical or mental pain. Laura is a Harvard student from an upper middle class background with “high expectations for social conformity” who becomes a victim of “prescription cascade” when her feelings of dread and emptiness—maybe the result of a borderline personality disorder or maybe not—overwhelm her. In each case, the narratives about illness these patients encountered seem to be a contributing factor to deepening and lengthening their sicknesses.

Hava, who is the heart and heartbreaker of the book, has her story picked up once again in the epilogue. In one of the journals she kept as an adult, she notes that her fellow anorexics who’ve broken free of the illness “attribut[e] their newfound life to God.” As Aviv notes, “they were able to move on, it seemed, because they had reoriented their lives around a new story.” They’d found a fresh narrative that was less injurious to them, and what exactly would better explain the modus operandi of something like Alcoholics Anonymous or any other 12-step program, which inculcates a methodical way to telling a new story about oneself. (Truth be told, though, the efficacy of these programs is also very poor despite the well-publicized anecdotal success.)

Aviv in no way is dismissive of the serious nature of mental health needs—quite the contrary—and isn’t agitating against either talk therapy or pharmacology. She’s merely working in opposition to neat summaries, while offering no easy prescriptions herself. I’m sure there are scientists who completely disagree with this book’s central point, who believe that none of the illnesses she examines are located in the psychic hinterlands at all. But that doesn’t track with the inability of some people to get better while others do. A taxonomy of mental ailments is a necessity, but shoehorning everyone into tidy categories is more convenient than constructive. It may just compound issues.

The British writer Mike Jay has demonstrated that mental illness is often expressed in terms of the era in which it’s experienced, arranged around cultural signifiers. In a London Review of Books essay, he wrote about how, in 1840, when Napoleon Bonaparte’s remains were laid to rest in France in an elaborate public ceremony, a quarter of all cases of mental illness in the nation were soon being diagnosed as delusions of grandeur, with the sufferers identifying as Napoleon. In a separate article, Jay focused on the nature of contemporary mental illness in a world guided by technology and inundated by cameras, a place in which we’re always, to some extent, onstage. It led many sick people to believe they were contestants on secret Reality TV shows. Clearly, information we consume, sensory or intellectual, can affect how we ail.

While reading Aviv’s book, the title of another kept coming to mind, and that’s Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, Lawrence Weschler’s profile of the installation artist Robert Irwin. That phrase is a reminder that using words to demystify can also delimit, creating boundaries that render us unable to comprehend beyond borders we’ve drawn, that once we name something, we have a better hold on it but it also begins to have a hold on us.•

Mr. President (Miguel Ángel Asturias)

The Latin American Dictator Novel that arguably pushed surrealism into magical realism several decades before Gabriel García Márquez and others popularized the literary device globally, Mr. President is Guatemalan writer Miguel Ángel Asturias’ most famous work and one that will retain currency as long as there are humans, because provided there’s more than one of us on this planet the possibility of authoritarianism remains. It’s no mere political tract or protest literature, however, as the stylistic flourishes, vivid melodrama and its earthy quality make it a compellingly readable classic. The author began the 13-year process of writing his book in 1922 while living in exile in France during a period when surrealists were in vogue and you can certainly see the influence. The book wasn’t published, though, until the late 1940s because of his homeland’s censorship codes. Unfortunately other dictatorships had followed the one that inspired Asturias’ novel, that of Manuel Estrada Cabrera, the totalitarian who reigned in Guatemala from 1898 to 1920.

“What an awful nightmare,” the character Miguel Angel Face remarks when awakening with a start from the horrors of the unconscious. “Luckily, reality is different.” In this novel though, nightmares and reality bleed into one another, as do inebriation and sobriety, humans and ghosts, even life and death. That’s because the cruel dictatorship of the unnamed President has birthed an arbitrary, discombobulating society, but also due to the novelist’s creation of a world where sensations and situations flow freely, unencumbered by strict categories and demarcations.

“Had it been a dream? The difference between dream and reality is purely rhetorical. Asleep or awake—which was it?”

The novel begins with a headlong, hallucinatory sprint through the privations of the homeless community of Guatemala City, in the neighborhood of Portal del Señor, which is inhabited by feral beggars left to scavenge and steal, walking like the dead, crawling like four-legged creatures. It’s a brutish, bravura opening, introducing us to an underworld in which there are no alms for the poor who are missing not only the basic sustenance of life, but often limbs and teeth and ears and eyeballs. In this scenario of vomiting dogs and alligator-shaped clouds, the impoverished street people are as cruel to one another as life has been to them. A blind woman living in this mess endures nightmares in which she’s been hanged and her flesh is besieged by flies. Far worse is what actually happens in waking life. Disease, hunger and random violence are ubiquitous, and there is little sleep, no peace, constant drunkenness. Saddest of all these unfortunate people is Pelele, a sickly mute man who’s tormented by all those around him about the grief he feels for his deceased mother. When he leaves the Portal del Señor one day for greener pastures, vultures aren’t content to wait for nature to take its course, attacking the ragged man, tearing off part of his upper lip.

Into one of these infernal nights strides Colonel José Parrales Sonriente, the merciless military careerist known as the “Man with the Tiny Mule,” who conducts the murderous handiwork of the President, terrifying the citizenry into cowering. He happens upon Pelele and screams “Mother!” at him, unable to resist squashing someone who appears to him a bug. The ragged man snaps, summons whatever energy remains in his body, and kills the Colonel with his fists and knees. Word travels fast and the other beggars soon know what happened. When they’re rounded up by the police, though, the motley lot is beaten until they agree to testify that the murder was committed by the retired General Canales and his lawyer, Abel Carvajal. Just one of the homeless people, a legless former soldier named Mosco, refuses to go along with the frame job, and he’s hanged by his thumbs until he’s dead, his torso subsequently thrown into a trash cart. Completely innocent of the murder, Canales’ only “crime” had been to once remark during a speech that “Generals are the Princes of the Army,” an immodest comment that angered the President. It was an improvised flourish, a throwaway line, and it sealed his fate.

In a time and place so diabolical, lorded over by an imperious President, the “father and protector,” a man of whims and wickedness and weapons, this one improvident boast sets into motion a cascade of calamities, destroying lives. It’s a farce by design. In this grim world a handful win, most lose, and all are prone to the caprices of a tyrant. “It’s a crapshoot, my friend, just a crapshoot,” explains Old Fulgencio, who sells lottery tickets on the city streets, describing life in a mercurial society ruled by unpredictable impulses. “The only law in this country is the lot-lot-lottery.” Even if you’re one of the favored few, you can navigate the rampant absurdities for only so long. Eventually your “friends” betray you or a small slight is avenged with outsize retribution and you face a tribunal of drunken officers who don’t listen to your protestations of innocence. Then you face the firing squad or are kept prisoner until death in a deeply dug hole.

That’s the lesson learned in brutal fashion by Miguel Angel Face over the balance of the narrative. The “favorite confidant” of the President, Angel Face is described as being “like Satan, both good and evil,” a man capable of treachery or largesse, though he’s as close to the hero of the novel as we have. He’s assigned by his boss with the counterintuitive task of helping General Canales escape arrest, the dictator believing the accused taking flight will make him seem guilty to the public. Angel Face does as ordered, putting Canales on a perilous path toward making it across the border. At the urgent request of Canales, whom Angel Face knows to be an honorable man, he secretly accepts another mission, to safely ferry the General’s young daughter, Camila, to his brother’s home.

In exile across the border, the General becomes, in his dotage, a revolutionary who plans to return to his homeland and end the menacing rule of the President. Meanwhile, lawlessness in Guatemala continues apace. Camila has been stashed for the time being with a woman who runs a bar. Rogues hum around her and Angel Face, trying to profit by sharing intel about their doings. It’s not to be unexpected, as information is currency to be sold or traded in this paranoid place. Sex workers snitch on generals who speak out against the President when they’re drunk, and secret police lurk everywhere, listening for useful tidbits when not committing murders per their orders. Despite their jockeying, it will end badly for almost all of them, except maybe for one or two fortunate lottery winners.

In part because of his burgeoning love for Camila, Angel Face begins to grow vulnerable, one thing you don’t want to be in this country of sharp knives. Not one of her uncles will offer shelter to the young woman, abruptly disowning her because they fear angering the President. Angel Face continues to hide the girl, which is risky, but when he impulsively agrees to marry the girl in an attempt to save her life when she becomes ill with pneumonia—a scenario where something like magical realism comes into play—it’s considered an outrage. The President and the dictator’s “favorite” is soon a target for those who had been his friends the day before, even for those whose lives he’d saved in the not-so-distant past.

Asturias’ aesthetic, both intellectual and operatic, features descriptive writing that’s consistently spectacular. He writes that a prostitute “smelled of beef broth when she didn’t smell of hair spray.” When Angel Face fleetingly considers murdering the President, he imagines him as a “pile of frozen meat with the Presidential banner across the chest.” Executioners are described thusly: “Puppets made of gold or salted meat.” It’s a carnivore’s dream. In more surreal moments there are lines like these: “The red trouser men take off their heads, toss them into the air, and let them fall.” Some sequences go far beyond even those gems, offering up incredibly visual and unexpected writing. In a five-page span there are two descriptive passages that pop the eyes. The first is a description of a piano player at a brothel:

A man dressed like a woman played the piano. Both he and the piano were missing a few keys. “I’m ugly, buggy, and boring,” he answered when people asked him why he painted his face. Not to offend, he added, “My friends call me Pepe, the young men call me Violeta. I wear a low-cut blouse, not because I play tennis, but to show off my lovey-dovey breasts. A monocle to look chic, and a frock to distract. Face powder—how shocking!—and rouge hide the smallpox scars on my face, there they are, and there they’ll be, scattered like confetti. I don’t pay attention. I’m my own piper.”

And the brothel madame, known as Gold Tooth, among other sobriquets, reminiscing about her grandmother:

“Fate had it that a parrot pecked an eye and left her one-eyed. I ended up grilling that parrot—I would’ve gladly roasted two—and gave it to a stray dog who was stupid enough to eat it and get rabies.”

It’s not easy to combine magical realism with fascist brutality, the former can dull the spiked edges of atrocity. Here, though, it just amplifies the nightmarish quality of the horror. One of surrealism’s major goals is to express something that’s more real than real, and Asturias is overwhelmingly successful in this effort.

While I was writing this review, journalist José Rubén Zamora, who has long written about government corruption in Guatemala, was sentenced to six years in prison for the charge of money laundering, though it seems clear his critical reportage about President Alejandro Giammattei was his actual “crime.” Poverty, police brutality and human rights abuses are threats waiting around each corner in any place that has fallen before a fascist, including contemporary Guatemala, echoes of Mr. President one century after Asturias began composing his masterpiece. It’s a book that will always be with us because of its greatness and because of our lack of the same.•

The Vaster Wilds (Lauren Groff)

A servant girl of about sixteen is gradually dying along with everyone else in an unnamed early seventeenth-century British colonial settlement in America which is clearly Jamestown, starvation and smallpox and the fierce winter claiming them with ferocity, when she decides to run away and take her chances. She estimates those odds as being slightly better than a certain demise, which is what she believes she’s facing in the nascent colony, the skeletal settlers having already been reduced to eating horses and corpses. She pulls on rugged boots she pilfered from a boy who recently succumbed, and steals a knife, a pewter cup and some rough fabric for blankets from the family she works for, heading determinedly into the freezing woods beyond the fort, knowing that a runaway murderess, as she refers to herself without explanation, will be hunted down and killed if caught by one of the vicious settlement soldiers. And if an armed pursuer doesn’t catch up to her, perhaps the elements or an animal or hunger or unfriendly Native people will. “I run toward the living, I run toward the living,” the girl says, in conversation with the terrible thoughts in her head. Recalling the memory of a map she spied briefly one day over the shoulder of the settlement’s governor, she decides she’ll travel on foot to Canada, hoping to meet a Frenchman there who’ll marry her and bring her back to Europe. A fleeting romance she had with a Dutch sailor aboard the ship that carried her to this terrible new world made her believe goodness possible, but she hasn’t fully grasped the proportions of her proposed journey.

A story of a child walking into the woods is obviously freighted with mythological heft, and the jacket flap of Lauren Groff’s bleak, pitch-perfect 2023 novel refers to this work as a “penetrating fable.” But it’s neither primarily a fable nor a postmodern reimagining of fables, à la Carter, Barthleme or Barth. It’s instead a survivalist novel as well as a philosophical one, the narrative much more an exercise in brutal realism, a nonstop existential crisis, more grim than Grimm, the girl no Little Red Riding Hood or babe in the wood. She’s as doughty as she is clever, not hesitant to gut a beast or twist the neck of a duck if it should aid her survival, but her path is unrelentingly harsh, and in a matter of several weeks she faces a lifetime of privations. There will be encounters with bears and wolves and hailstorms and starvation and assorted men who may mean her harm. (“For even a good man was more deadly than the worst of bears,” she tells us from her hard-earned experience). If she doesn’t divine the extreme length of her impossible journey, she knows her place, everyone’s place, in the universe. “The world, the girl knew,” we’re told, “was worse than savage, the world was unmoved. It did not care, it could not care, what happened to her, not one bit. She was a mote, a speck, a floating windborne fleck of dust.”

While the girl only has a piece of a map in her head, Groff’s omniscient narrator knows the entire landscape, often informing us when the central character has unwittingly had a close call with danger or has trudged unknowingly past a sanctuary that might have offered her respite from her struggles. In the hands of a lesser writer, the similarity of the challenges (e.g., surviving starvation each day) may have been monotonous. Here the variations on the challenges faced, and the perfect wording, make for unnerving, compulsive reading as the girl uses her wits as she continues her misbegotten journey. One long passage that stands out is her pas de deux with a former Spanish priest who was allowed to survive the slaughter of his fellow clerics by Natives, spared because he had befriended one of their tribe. He’s lived for decades as a hermit, having fashioned a home inside a giant tree, becoming shockingly feral, the hair on his face and head over-gown and matted. He’s no longer quite human, having made huge concessions to just survive, and he has malign intentions toward the girl, whom he scouts.

Her hardships are regularly punctuated by revealing flashbacks. We learn she was born in England to a prostitute mother and spends her first years in a cruel orphanage where the nuns named her “Lamentations.” She’s passed into servitude at age four when she begins working for a wealthy mistress who treats her like a “pet monkey” and calls her “Zed,” denoting her lowly status in life. As she grows, she’s used sexually by an assortment of boys and men of the house. She doesn’t possess any power to refuse consent, and her lack of agency extends to being taken from her homeland to the American wilderness when the mistress’ second husband, a sadistic minister, decides he is to become wealthy in the New World, misunderstanding the cruel indifference of maps the same way the girl subsequently will.

Men adventuring for treasure or experience is a hallmark of American fiction—and America itself, from a wealthy heir like Teddy Roosevelt heading out West in 1883 to prove his masculinity as a cowboy, to boys going off to war and “coming back men.” John Williams meditated on the topic in his 1960 novel, Butcher’s Crossing, in which a Harvard student in 1874 takes the Reconstruction Era equivalent of a gap year to go to a valley near the Rocky Mountains and participate in a perilous mass hunt of buffalo as a means of self-discovery, his enterprise ending in disaster. If anything, Groff’s novel is even more harrowing than Williams’, the key difference being that her female character wants neither challenges nor wealth but only freedom, something that’s escaped her since the beginning of her life. It’s danger forced upon her, not something she chose for sport or financial gain.

Even with the incredible hardships she endures, the constant dance with death, the girl believes the treacherous, solitary experience has allowed her to glimpse the greater meaning of life, finding enchantment in silent moments, like when she views a what resembles a glass forest in the aftermath of a freezing rain storm. Or when, in a rare serendipitous moment, she happens upon a natural hot spring to still her shivering body. She becomes convinced even in all her loneliness and pain that “it is a moral failure to miss the profound beauty of the world.” In these fleeting instances of zen, she believes she’s encountered divinity. “For I am a woman of good fortune,” she says, when closer to death than life. It echoes Anne Frank’s resolute “in spite of everything” declaration, and you can wonder if the girl, after all she’s faced, is delusional or wise, and you can ponder the same about any of us as we maintain hope as we travel through this often-harsh world.•

Black No More (George Schuyler)

What to make of George S. Schuyler, a Harlem Renaissance socialist who became a Rhadamanthine ultraconservative, an outspoken opponent of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement, a Libertarian, a contributor to John Birch Society periodicals, and a Goldwater voter? Maybe he was buzzing with the sort of restless intellect that caused him to take flight once again, willy-nilly, after landing on any -ism. Or perhaps he was just a talented misanthrope with contrarian impulses who couldn’t tolerate anyone, including himself, including people who reminded him of himself. By the mid-1920s, Schuyler’s journalism, criticism and essays were being lauded by H.L. Mencken, who had a coiled snake for a heart, who never met a man he didn’t dislike. It was no accident.

Schuyler’s acute cynicism is on full display in this audacious, often brilliant, satirical 1931 novel that is a sort of “Rappaccini’s Daughter” of race, about science remaking the “natural order” of things. It’s a take-no-prisoners tale of Dr. Junius Crookman, a Black scientist who’s figured out how to whitewash the nation, developing a blanching process that can turn Black people Caucasian in 72 hours. It’s not a pleasant medical procedure, but America’s abundant bigotry provokes citizens across the country to rush in a breakneck manner to take the three-day “cure” for dark skin, a crash course in whole-body vitiligo, seeking a “chromatic emancipation.” Patient No. 1 is Max Disher, a struggling Harlem insurance salesman who’s smarting from the rejection of a white Atlanta woman visiting New York, whose rebuff came with an N-word exclamation point. “It looked as though science was to succeed where the Civil War failed,” Max says, though he’s soon renamed himself Matthew Fisher and is using his newfound pigmentation to become a power broker for a Klan-like organization in Georgia, endeavoring to get its gutter-level leader elected President of the United States. To be fair, he’s willing to work for or against either party if it profits him materially. He’s an ardent amoralist whose only concerns are absolute power and filthy lucre.

If Max/Matthew utilized his newly alabaster identity to scam and steal, no problem. But everyone in this jaundiced novel is a selfish hustler of some sort, no one actually cares about anything but the bottom line, which undermines the satire because satire begins with truth, and that’s a lie. It coldly and derisively dismisses all the Americans who earnestly worked to improve the plight of Black Americans, who risked their lives and sometimes lost them. You can argue about the efficacy of any particular policy espoused by W. E. B. Du Bois or Marcus Garvey, both of whom are parodied in these pages, but the impetus for their work was sincere. They were responding as best they knew to an arrant emergency.

The novel is astute, however, in many ways. White Americans react angrily to the Black-No-More process undergone soon enough by millions of citizens, realizing that their so-called exceptionalism rests on the existence of those who are “lesser.” They fight desperately, legally and politically, to preserve the existence of Black people, whom they don’t like and don’t want near them, to maintain their societal advantage. Erasing the color line would mean, more or less, their own erasure.

Politicians are also at a loss when needing someone to pillory in election season to scare up votes. A Red Menace is good, sure, but nothing comes in handier than the fear of a Black Planet. You could also read this book as a prescient analogy for how one-way integration would ultimately attenuate Black society, with businesses and banks drawn down to nothing. In an especially clever twist by Schuyler, Black business owners who offer hair straightening and sell skin-lightening cosmetics, who hawk the “dream” of whiteness, are outraged by their customers achieving that end beyond belief, causing their livelihoods to vanish.

At the book’s absolute best, however, is the merciless skewering of the ludicrous and ever-shifting idea of race itself, mocking the folly of its true believers, with a brutal climax and devastating denouement. (SPOILER ALERT: We’re all mutts.) In these passages, Schuyler is a sort of Depression Era Voltaire, gleefully vicious in exposing the deceptions on which we’ve based our lives. But even Candide still had, you know, Candide, a foolishly optimistic naif who had to learn the hard way but who also possessed an innate decency. Black No More presents no such noble characters, none. Innocence can make us a fool, but the complete absence of it can cause us to curdle.

And Schuyler surely spoiled. He came to believe that Civil Liberties were more important than Civil Rights, somehow convincing himself the two could be uncoupled. In his characters’ willingness to do business with anyone regardless of how it impacted those in great peril, it appears Schuyler was subconsciously seeing his own future. There certainly seems to be a lot of projection going on, considering he ended up a willing tool of the wack-job racist Birchers and those happy to peddle prejudice as they aimed for the White House.•