APRIL 2024

Comic voyage

with two Irishmen

into the abyss

NIGHT BOAT TO TANGIER
By Kevin Barry
255 pp. Doubleday. $25.95.

In the desolate ferry terminal of the Spanish port of Algeciras, two battered old Irish drug smugglers, Maurice Hearne and Charlie Redmond, await the appearance of Dilly Hearne, Maurice’s long-vanished daughter, rumored to be traveling that night between Algeciras and Tangier. As they wait they drink, hand out fliers describing the missing young woman, attempt to menace or charm other passengers and trade melancholy banter in the high-low style of philosophical clowns out of Beckett or Jez Butterworth. Above all, they reminisce, drifting back through their vivid lives as partners in crime, intimate friends and treacherous rivals.

Their extremely talented creator, Kevin Barry, has a fine instinct for the sweet spot where the comforting familiarities of genre blend into the surprises and provocations of art. His first novel, “City of Bohane,” was a tale of post-apocalyptic gang warfare, featuring a splendidly realized city in the west of Ireland populated by stylish hoodlums (women as well as men) pursuing operatic passions and bloody vendettas, and written in an invented Gaelic argot that was somehow effortlessly understandable as well as beautifully expressive.

In an author’s postscript, Barry listed James Joyce, Anthony Burgess and Cormac McCarthy as influences, but also acknowledged “Deadwood” and other HBO shows. He seems to have intuited that if television could get ahead by learning from the novel, then the novel might push back by learning from television.

“Night Boat to Tangier” (which was on the long list for this year’s Booker Prize) is, on the face of it, a slighter production than “City of Bohane.” There’s less in the way of verbal and narrative pyrotechnics. And for a little too long it trades on archetypal gangster-character tropes — dangerous volatility, sentimental tenderness — without constructing situations that justify their display (for instance, an interlude with a young guy whom the pair suspect of knowing Dilly’s whereabouts cuts straight to the men’s noirish threats and the boy’s fearful evasiveness without building any plausible reason for either).

Back story is where novels often sag, but in this case it’s where the book hits its propulsive stride. Around 40 pages in, a series of excursions into the men’s pasts starts to fill us in on their intimately linked criminal and romantic histories.

The detours have the nonlinear, emotion-drenched agility of memory, moving by association through powerfully evoked moments in tense bedrooms, piratical bars and dubious neighborhoods in Irish or Mediterranean cities. Barry has a great gift for getting the atmospheres of sketchy social hubs in a few phosphorescent lines.

There isn’t much psychological or (God forbid) moral analysis, so if you like your dark deeds illuminated by Dostoyevskian insight this might not be the book for you. But the sheer lyric intensity with which it brings its variously warped and ruined souls into being will be more than enough for most readers. It certainly was for me.

James Lasdun’s most recent novel is “Afternoon of a Faun.”

Aging dope dealers confront their horrors

By Alan Warner, NPR

Charlie Redmond and Maurice Hearne are Cork drug dealers, former big-time suppliers and users. Now into their 50s, their black money is squandered; they have done and could still do terrible things. “The years are rolling out like tide now. There is old weather on their faces, on the hard lines of their jaws, on their chaotic mouths. But they retain – just about – a rakish air.”

It’s October 2018, and Charlie and Maurice find themselves keeping vigil at the Algeciras ferry terminal in southern Spain, where the night boats to Tangier depart and dock. This place has the clear contours of purgatory, perhaps one that Charlie and Maurice deserve. It is a Hades crossing point, a portal to dread.

Yet what these two horrors of men – and they are, by their own confession, flawed fellows – are carrying is a cache of missing person posters; desperately, pathetically, they are trying to find Dilly, Charlie’s 23-year-old daughter. Dilly fled Ireland after the death of her mother to join new age travellers, moving on queasy and confounding ley lines between Spain and north Africa in ways Charlie and Maurice struggle to fathom.

They have not seen Dilly for three years, but they have street intelligence of her whereabouts, often gleaned by intimidation. They are still tenacious, menacing, solipsistic guys, but their chances are slim and their wait at the terminal is the temporal anchor of a book that deftly pivots elsewhere.

As the two men exchange a supple flow of defeated banter and craic, we see that they are cut straight from the toxic cloth of Beckett; an iPhone Hamm and Clov, they play out their own endgame, one urging the other to utterance in all the glory and vinegar of Irish disillusion:

Personally speaking, Maurice? My arse isn’t right since the octopus we ate in Malaga.
Is it saying hello to you, Charlie?
It is, yeah. And of course the octopus wasn’t the worst of Malaga.
…. They look into the distance. They send up their sighs. Their talk is a shield against feeling.

 To avoid plot spoiling, let me say that what we assume is a two-hander crime novel swells with plenitude into an emotionally crushing panorama of two friends gone wildly astray, punished by regret but with their grim solidarity intact – so far. This is not a journey devoid of dark humour; there are back-breaking moments of mirth, as well as real madness and love (this is complicated, since Maurice’s love was for Charlie’s wife, Cynthia).

The novel puts a great deal of procedural crime fiction into perspective as puerile and exploitative fluff. For here is a meticulous, devastatingly vivid portrayal of serious crime and its real consequences: the waste, the insane risks, the threat of demonic violence, the punishing paranoia and the vulgar glut of cash reward packed into dodgy real estate or money laundering ventures. Most of all, though, the toll is taken on the human soul itself.

Barry, winner of the Impac Dublin literary award for City of Bohane and the Goldsmiths prize for Beatlebone, is a clairvoyant narrator of the male psyche and a consistent lyrical visionary. The prose is a caress, rolling out in swift, spaced paragraphs, a telegraphese of fleeting consciousness: “The roads after the rain were black, sliding tongues and gleamed.” “The cold white moon speaks highly of the coming winter.”

Here is the creepy, nosing landlord of a west Ireland cottage where Charlie and Cynthia try to hide out from dangerous men: “There was a papery film, like mothskin stretched over his eyes. He slithered about making goldfish gasps as if traumatised by an otherworld invisible but to his eyes.”

Barry’s sensibility is eerie; he is attuned to spirits, to malevolent presences, the psychic tundra around us. But what distinguishes this book beyond its humour, terror and beauty of description is its moral perception. For this is no liberal forgiveness tract for naughty boys: it is a plunging spiritual immersion into the parlous souls of wrongful men.

There is scant chance of anything as vulgar as redemption down by the Tangier ferry for Charlie or Maurice; after all, who is young Dilly really running away from? Yet it is impossible to finish the novel without loving and caring for each protagonist in all their verbose fallibility. We could pray for Charlie and Maurice – and wow, they need it.

18th Century shipwreck ignites historical controversy

Jennifer Szalai is the nonfiction book critic for The New York Times.

THE WAGER: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

By David Gann | 329 pp. | Doubleday | $30 | Boyz selection March 2024

Still, at least battles conjure the possibility of victory. Actually getting to battle would be another matter entirely. Sailors’ logbooks helped Grann reconstruct the incessantly arduous journey itself. The basic act of navigation routinely introduced errors and risks. Sailors relied on “dead reckoning” — dropping a knotted line into the sea to estimate a ship’s speed and using a sandglass to estimate time — further honing (or distorting) those approximations with a dollop of intuition. And of course the weather was another source of enormous uncertainty and danger. The ships in the squadron lost sight of one another while rounding the notoriously deadly Cape Horn, with its “pulverizing” current and waves that can stretch nearly 100 feet into the sky.

But the terrors of the natural elements seem cinematic compared with the daily horrors that Grann describes. Typhus erupted again, making its way through the ships’ tight quarters as lice crawled from one seaman to another. Then the men lucky enough to survive typhus faced the prospect of another illness that turned their skin blue and made their teeth fall out. Old wounds reopened, bones that had broken and mended long ago suddenly dissolved again. Some of the men lost their minds, shaking with delirium. “It was the great enigma of the Age of Sail,” Grann writes — the ghastly disease otherwise known as scurvy. A deficiency of vitamin C killed more mariners than all other threats combined.

And it only gets more relentless from there. By the time the Wager breaks apart on some rocks and the men must fend for themselves on inhospitable terrain, you realize that the miseries they have already endured won’t prepare them for the miseries that are about to come. You see the men starving, thieving and turning on one another. The Wager’s captain, David Cheap, apparently decided that only rigid rules and brutal punishments could keep everything from falling apart — a strategy that clearly didn’t work out as planned. The castaways were saved at several points by Indigenous people, the Kawésqar and the Chono. But the Wager’s men couldn’t bring themselves to stop referring to their saviors as “savages.”

After all, the white men in this book were agents of empire. They may have turned to murder and cannibalism — or what they would obliquely call “extremities” — but the Wager’s mission assumed the righteousness of Britain’s imperial expansion, an attempt to take Spain’s colonial plunder for itself.

Grann is well aware of this, and he ends “The Wager” by drawing our attention to the bigger picture, even as the authors of the journals and books he consulted rarely depicted themselves as part of the imperial machine. Their struggle for survival consumed them; reading about their struggle for survival intrigued me — as Grann, the consummate narrative architect, must have known it would. Considering the ignominy of their cause, getting so invested in their immediate suffering elicited some momentary forgetting. “It is precisely such unthinking complicity,” Grann writes of the Wager’s men in the final pages, “that allows empires to endure.”

There were moments while reading David Grann’s new book, “The Wager,” about an 18th-century shipwreck, when it occurred to me that the kind of nonfiction narratives The New Yorker writer has become known for share something essential with a sturdy ship. A vessel freighted with historical controversy, tangled facts and monomaniacal characters needs to be structurally sound, containing and conveying its messy cargo. It should be resilient yet nimble enough to withstand the unpredictable waters of readers’ attentions and expectations. Only an impeccable design will keep everything moving.

Whether Grann is writing about the search for a giant squid or the presidential campaign of John McCain, you get the sense that he doesn’t dare to set sail with a narrative until he feels like he has gotten the fundamental structure right. When he worked on “Killers of the Flower Moon” (2017), his superb book about a spate of murders of Osage people in the 1920s, he struggled with the welter of research he had accumulated until he read William Faulkner’s “Absalom, Absalom!” for the first time. The three narrators of Faulkner’s novel helped Grann realize there could be three points of view in his own book — each section revealing another layer to the story, assembling a three-dimensional portrait from official records and what Faulkner called “a few old mouth-to-mouth tales.”

The structure of “The Wager” is simpler, though the material that Grann has to work with is again unwieldy. He sets up his story as a mystery, beginning with an old-fashioned author’s note on how, even if he did not “see firsthand the acts of deceit and murder,” he had made his way through “the participants’ conflicting, and at times warring, perspectives.”

On Jan. 28, 1742, a battered vessel carrying 30 men washed up on the shore of Brazil. The men were survivors of the H.M.S. Wager, a British man-of-war that had left England nearly a year and a half before, part of a squadron that had been tasked with capturing a Spanish galleon filled with treasure. They explained that the Wager had run aground on a rocky island off the coast of Patagonia, and recounted setting out on a boat cobbled from the wreckage that would carry them the nearly 3,000 miles to Brazil.

It’s the kind of inspiring chronicle that would make for a rousing maritime adventure. But this is a David Grann book, and so he gives us something more. Six months after the arrival of those 30 castaways in Brazil, another battered vessel came ashore, in Chile — and the three castaways on this second boat said that the men who landed in Brazil were not the brave and honorable men they pretended to be. “They were not heroes — they were mutineers. 

The rest of “The Wager” pieces together what happened, or at least seems to have happened. (I won’t give away the ending, though after both sets of castaways returned to England, the leading figures published their dueling accounts and were summoned to a trial by court-martial.) Yet despite the evident deliberation that Grann put into setting up the story just so, the question of whether or not there was a mutiny quickly appeared to me, almost 300 years later, beside the point. Yes, everyone from the shipwreck had his particular tale to tell, whether out of vanity or self-preservation. But Grann is so skillful at describing the men’s physical ordeals at sea and on land that their quarrels over the naval code pale next to the startling fact of their survival.

Aside from a typhus epidemic that delayed the squadron’s departure, the voyage of the Wager seemed to start promisingly enough. Grann presents a fleet of gleaming wood and billowing sails, a manifestation of imperial ambitions. The ships were loaded with provisions and livestock, and the men enjoyed plentiful food and camaraderie. But any journey like this was bound to be perilous. There were the obvious dangers of battle: ambushes and gunfire and wooden ships that could go up in flames. A table in the midshipmen’s quarters was dedicated to amputating limbs.

David Grann is an award-winning staff writer at The New Yorker

His newest book is The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder. With the twists and turns of a thriller, it tells the true saga of a company of British naval officers and crew that became stranded on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia and descended into murderous anarchy. The book explores the nature of survival, duty, and leadership, and it examines how both people and nations tell—and manipulate—history.

Grann is also the author of Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, which documented one of the most sinister crimes and racial injustices in American history. Described in the New York Times as a “riveting” work that will “sear your soul,” it was a finalist for the National Book Award and a winner of the Edgar Allen Poe Award for best true crime book. It was a #1 New York Times bestseller and named one of the best books of the year by the Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly, Time, and other publications. Amazon selected it as the single best book of the year.

The book has been adapted into a major motion picture directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Lily Gladstone, Robert De Niro, and Jesse Plemons, which will be released in the coming months. For middle schoolers, Grann has also released Killers of the Flower Moon: A Young Reader’s Edition, which the School Library Journal called as “imperative and enthralling as its parent text.”

Grann’s first book, The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon, was #1 New York Times bestseller and has been translated into more than twenty-five languages. Shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize, it was chosen as one of the best books of 2009 by the New York Times, Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, and other publications. The book, which the Washington Post called a “thrill ride from start to finish,” was adapted into a critically acclaimed film directed by James Gray and starring Charlie Hunnam, Sienna Miller, Robert Pattinson, and Tom Holland.

One of Grann’s New Yorker stories, The White Darkness, was later expanded into a book. Mixing text and photography, it documented the modern explorer Henry Worsley’s quest to follow in the footsteps of his hero, Ernest Shackleton, and traverse Antarctica alone. The story is currently being adapted into a series for Apple starring Tom Hiddleston.

Many of Grann’s other New Yorker stories were included in his collection The Devil and Sherlock Holmes, which was named by Men’s Journal one of the best true crime books ever written. The stories focus on everything from the mysterious death of the world’s greatest Sherlock Holmes expert to a Polish writer who might have left clues to a real murder in his postmodern novel. Another piece, “Trial by Fire,” exposed how junk science led to the execution of a likely innocent man in Texas. The story received a George Polk award and was cited by the U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer in his opinion regarding the death penalty. Several of the stories in The Devil and Sherlock Holmes have also served as source material for feature films, including “The Old Man and the Gun” with Robert Redford and Sissy Spacek, and “Trial by Fire” with Jack O’Connell and Laura Dern.

Over the years, Grann’s stories have appeared in The Best American Crime Writing; The Best American Sports Writing; and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. His stories have also been published in the New York Times Magazine, Atlantic, Washington Post, Boston Globe, and Wall Street Journal.

In addition to writing, Grann is a frequent speaker who has given talks about everything from Killers of the Flower Moon and the importance of historical memory to the dangers of complicity in unjust systems, and from the art of writing and detection to the leadership methods of explorers, such as Ernest Shackleton.

Grann holds master’s degrees in international relations (from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy) and creative writing (from Boston University). After graduating from Connecticut College, in 1989, he received a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship and did research in Mexico, where he began his career in journalism. He currently lives in New York with his wife and two children.

February 2024

READY PLAYER ONE

By Ernest Cline

374 pages. Crown Publishers. $24..

A future created from artifacts of the 1980s

By Janet Maslin

The New York Times

Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One” is a book filled with references to video games, virtual reality, ’80s pop-culture trivia, geek heroes like E. Gary Gygax, and funny-sounding cult items like Frobozz and Raaka-Tu. Yet it works for people who like books without pictures too.

Mr. Cline is photographed on the jacket standing in front of an open-flapped DeLorean, like the one in “Back to the Future.” He looks a bit like the filmmaker Kevin Smith, one of the few people on the planet who may be capable of catching all of Mr. Cline’s geekoid references. (Mr. Cline himself wrote the screenplay for the 2009 film “Fanboys,” about unusually fanatical “Star Wars” devotees.) Another is the science-fiction writer John Scalzi, who has aptly referred to “Ready Player One” as a “nerdgasm.” There can be no better one-word description of this ardent fantasy artifact about fantasy culture.

With its Pac-Man-style cover graphics and vintage Atari mind-set “Ready Player One” certainly looks like a genre item. But Mr. Cline is able to incorporate his favorite toys and games into a perfectly accessible narrative. He sets it in 2044, when there aren’t many original Duran Duran fans still afoot, and most students of 1980s trivia are zealous kids. They are interested in that time period because a billionaire inventor, James Halliday, died and left behind a mischievous legacy. Whoever first cracks Halliday’s series of ’80s-related riddles, clues and puzzles that are included in a film called “Anorak’s Invitation” will inherit his fortune.

Halliday was “the video-game designer responsible for creating the Oasis, a massively multiplayer online game that had gradually evolved into the globally networked virtual reality most of humanity now used on a daily basis,” Mr. Cline writes. Part of what has made Oasis so attractive is that real life on an impoverished, resource-depleted Earth has grown increasingly grim. So the characters in “Ready Player One” spend their time as avatars bewitched by online role playing. They live as shut-ins and don’t know one another in the flesh. Art3mis, the hot-looking blogger and warrior who becomes the novel’s heroine, may actually be an overweight middle-aged guy named Chuck.

The book’s narrator is a school kid named Wade Watts, whose parents at least had the foresight to give him the alliterative name of a superhero. But Wade’s real circumstances are not exciting. He lives in a tall block of stacked mobile homes and escapes to an abandoned van to adopt his online persona. He goes to school because he has to; his video console and virtual-reality visor will be taken away if he flunks out. But his school avatar is often seen slumped at its desk, sleeping. That’s because Wade is busy being an alter ego called Parzival. Like Art3mis he spells his name funny because the other spellings are already taken.

Wade is obsessed with “Anorak’s Invitation,” not least because there’s something fishy about it: the extras seen with Halliday have been digitally borrowed from old John Hughes films. There’s no knowing what actually happened to Halliday. But Halliday’s knowledge of 1980s trivia was so thorough that Wade is determined to match it. (As a full-time gamer he is competitive by nature. And what else has he got to do?) So he knows everything about every episode of “Family Ties” and every coin-operated arcade game. “Ready Player One” takes its title, sentimentally, from the phrase that signaled the start of games from that era.

In “Anorak’s Invitation” Halliday mentions one of his sentimental favorites, the Atari game Adventure, and the Easter egg that its creator, Warren Robinett, incorporated into it. And now it’s time to start looking things up, if you are hooked by Mr. Cline’s premise but unfamiliar with his huge frame of reference. An Easter egg is a secret sign or clue or whatnot that may be embedded in a game, and Halliday has deliberately created an occasion for egg hunting. A great many egg hunters, known as “gunters” for short, do nothing but try to find Halliday’s eggs. Reader, ask yourself: Would you be interested in Wade’s story if you weren’t sure he was smarter than all the other guys?

Because Wade needs at least a few friends, he bonds with Art3mis and three other avatars. They become known as the High Five when they start racking up high numbers on the cosmic scoreboard. Mr. Cline describes their progress with a winking appreciation of the culture clash that ensues when Wade, a humble schoolboy, reaches the Tomb of Horrors to lock antlers with Acererack the Demi-Lich from Dungeons & Dragons. But “Ready Player One” crosses a line here, when its virtual-reality fetish leads it into Dungeons & Dragons for real.

The book gets off to a witty start, with Wade and his cronies slinging insults about one another’s knowledge of fantasy films and using ’80s-vintage movie quips like “Don’t call me Shirley.” (From “Airplane!” of course.) And if they are capable of arguing endlessly about “Star Wars” trivia, they’re also living in a 27-sector virtual-reality world arranged like a Rubik’s Cube and where the “Star Wars” and “Star Trek” realms are right next door to each other. (See “nerdgasm,” above.) So the breadth and cleverness of Mr. Cline’s imagination gets this daydream pretty far. But there comes a point when it’s clear that Wade lacks at least one dimension, and that gaming has overwhelmed everything else about this book.

Still it will be interesting to see how “Ready Player One” becomes (as is planned) a movie based on a book about songs, TV shows, games and movies. And when lines like “Continue your quest by taking the test” are said out loud.

Ernest Cline

A review of Steven Spielberg's 2018 movie

The Whistling Season

By Ivan Doig

Review by Sven Birkerts

The New York Times

July 2, 2006

IN "E Unibus Pluram," his darkly diagnostic assessment of the state of contemporary fiction, David Foster Wallace brought himself right up against the breakwall of irony. Is there any way to write nowadays, he asked, that can escape the taint of knowingness, of wised-up cynicism? Though he was mainly focused on representation of aspects of our media-saturated reality, these days the question relates to all literary practice.

After such exposures, such knowledge, what sincerity? Pondering the outlook for fiction, Wallace concluded: "The next real literary 'rebels' in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction."

Wallace, writing in the early 1990's, probably did not have Ivan Doig in mind. But in fact the description fits Doig perfectly. Untrendy, reverent, the author of seven previous novels and a widely celebrated memoir, "This House of Sky," Doig has in recent decades established his standing, along with William Kittredge and Tom McGuane, as a presiding figure in the literature of the American West. He himself repudiates the regional tag, proclaiming in a note to readers posted on his Web site: "I don't think of myself as a 'Western' writer. To me, language — the substance on the page, that poetry under the prose — is the ultimate 'region,' the true home, for a writer."

I understand and second the impulse, though I would add that the language, the "poetry," is so in thrall to the particulars of place, mainly the Montana of his birth and younger years, that the distinction collapses. As the sentences create the intimacy of locale, we find that the ends overshadow the means — we are very much there.

Doig's new novel, "The Whistling Season," is of a piece with its predecessors. It is, like most of his books, set in rural Montana, and though the author uses a somewhat more recent historical platform — the narrator, Paul Milliron, is looking back from the vantage of 1957 — the main story unfolds over a few seasons in 1909, when Paul was a boy.

The premise is simple — indeed, so simple that part of the suspense is in wondering how Doig will manage to fill out a whole novel with so few dramatic complications. Oliver Milliron, a recently widowed father of three boys, answers a newspaper ad from a widow in Minneapolis seeking employment. "Can't Cook But Doesn't Bite," is the woman's headline tag. Oliver, a wry man with a love of language, can't resist: he takes the bait. When Rose Llewellyn's train arrives, however, he discovers he will have to chew more than he thought he had bitten off, for she has brought a companion — her brother, Morris.

Like everyone else in his family, Paul is startled — first by Rose: "This mourner of Mr. Llewellyn, whoever he may have been, was all but swathed in a traveling dress the shade of blue flame — Minneapolis evidently did not lack for satin — and there did not seem to be an ounce extra anywhere on her pert frame." (The "sprung rhythm" feel of the prose is characteristic.)

Morris, the surprise, is something else again: "He was lightly built, and an extraordinary amount of him was mustache. It was one of those maximum ones such as I had seen in pictures of Rudyard Kipling, a soup-strainer and a lady-tickler and a fashion show, all in one. Almost as remarkable, he was the only bare-headed man in Montana, the wind teasing his dramatically barbered hair."

Rose and Morris are the principal catalysts of the novel, though what they catalyze is hardly large-scale. Rose, as feisty and willful as she is charming, takes over housekeeping duties (whistling all the while); Morris, owing to the sudden elopement of the community's one teacher, is appointed to the post. The familiar seasons of work, home life and lessons in the classic one-room schoolhouse continue, only inflected now by the presence of these spirited eccentrics. And what events transpire do not revolutionize so much as deepen our basic understandings. One of those events could be surmised from the moment Rose extends "a smartly gloved hand."

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Doig's writerly ambition is less in plotting than evoking, and it is his obvious pleasure to recreate from the ground up — or the sky down — a prior world, a prior way of being. The land and its people — the family, the neighbors — are laid out before us with a fresh, natural openness. We get uncluttered space, the no-nonsense solidity of things, a close-up registering of weather and the movement of the sun (and, under Morris's tutelage, the stars in the night sky and the once-in-a-lifetime coming of Halley's comet).

Studying his surroundings, Paul notices the "smooth-buttered plain leading to Westwater," and, nearer, the "round rims of shadow on the patch of prairie where the horses we rode to school had eaten the grass down in circles around their picket stakes." Earth-seeking writers like Willa Cather and Norman Maclean come to mind.

But this is, as Doig reminds us, not the world beheld directly, but rather captured in the "Rembrandt light of memory, finicky and magical and faithful at the same time." So faithful, I would say, that at times it seems the nuances of things are better known through the distillation of memory than through immediate observation.

Paul, in 1957, is a man coming to the end of a long career as an overseer of Montana schools. What connects the inhabited past to the present, narratively anyway, is his current mission: he has been charged with announcing the mandated closing of the state's remaining one-room schoolhouses. America is now in the era of Sputnik and ramped-up modernization; the old life is falling to the blade of progress, a loss beyond all but artistic reckoning.

"The Whistling Season" is quiet and unassuming throughout. If the novel carries any shock it is of contrast with the past. Could people have ever been that . . . unmodern? That straight-up, or straight-on, or at least compounded of such seemingly simple ingredients? Even where we find chicanery and vile behavior — there is a bit — it's chicanery and vileness of the old sort; we almost pine for it.

This takes us back to Wallace's point about the limits of irony and the possibility of 'single-entendre' virtues. Is a novelist like Doig simply writing past the circumstance of the now, high-tailing it back to a time before the Fall (whichever Fall we prefer, 9/11 being the latest by common consensus), escaping deeper engagement with the cultural now? Or is this in fact a triumphant reclaiming of terrain through a leap of imagination?

The care Doig takes with language suggests to me the latter — this is a deeply meditated and achieved art. But I also suspect many readers will have to keep fighting off the ironist's defense, a hip condescension toward what seems just too decent to be real, too good to be true.

Sven Birkerts is the author of five books of essays and a memoir. He edits the journal Agni at Boston University.

October 2023

An antidote to hip condescension toward the decent

Master storyteller and mentor who inspired genius

Faulkner's homage to his mentor, Sherwood Anderson

In 1924 WILLIAM FAULKNER was a young man who had written some poetry but no fiction. With the money he had saved while working as postmaster of the University of Mississippi he had gone to New Orleans, and there he met Sherwood Anderson, the author of Winesburg, Ohio, who was then at the height of his success. Anderson had a germinal effect on Faulkner, and it was the example he set as a dedicated artist that started Faulkner writing novels — novels which would eventually lead to the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949. Prompted by a memory of the man and his work, William Faulkner here describes those early days.

The Atlantic Monthly, June 1953

An appreciation

by WILLIAM FAULKNER

ONE day during the months while we walked and talked in New Orleans — or Anderson talked and I listened — I found him sitting on a bench in Jackson Square, laughing with himself. I got the impression that he had been there like that for some time, just sitting alone on the bench laughing with himself. This was not our usual meeting place. We had none. He lived above the Square, and without any especial prearrangement, after I had had something to eat at noon and knew that he had finished his lunch too, I would walk in that direction and if I did not meet him already strolling or sitting in the Square, I myself would simply sit down on the curb where I could see his doorway and wait until he came out of it in his bright, half racetrack, half-Bohemian clothes.

This time he was already sitting on the bench, laughing, He told me what it was at once: a dream: he had dreamed the night before that he was walking for miles along country roads, leading a horse which he was trying to swap for a night’s sleep — not for a simple bed for the night, but for the sleep itself; and with me to listen now, went on from there, elaborating it, building it into a work of art with the same tedious (it had the appearance of fumbling but actually it wasn’t: it was seeking, hunting) almost excruciating patience and humility with which he did all his writing, me listening and believing no word of it: that is, that it had been any dream dreamed in sleep. Because I knew better. I knew that he had invented it, made it; he had made most of it or at least some of it while I was there watching and listening to him. He didn’t know why he had been compelled, or anyway needed, to claim it had been a dream, why there had to be that connection with dream and sleep, but I did. It was because he had written his whole biography into an anecdote or perhaps a parable: the horse (it had been a racehorse at first, but now it was a working horse, plow carriage and saddle, sound and strong and valuable, but without recorded pedigree) representing the vast rich strong docile sweep of the Mississippi Valley, his own America, which he in his bright blue racetrack shirt and vermilion-mottled Bohemian Windsor tie, was offering with humor and patience and humility, but mostly with patience and humility, to swap for his own dream of purity and integrity and hard and unremitting work and accomplishment, of which Winesburg, Ohio and The Triumph of the Egg had been symptoms and symbols.

He would never have said this, put it into words, himself. He may never have been able to see it even, and he certainly would have denied it, probably pretty violently, if I had tried to point it out to him. But this would not have been for the reason that it might not have been true, nor for the reason that, true or not, he would not have believed it. In fact, it would have made little difference whether it was true or not or whether he believed it or not. He would have repudiated it for the reason which was the great tragedy of his character, He expected people to make fun of, ridicule him. He expected people nowhere near his equal in stature or accomplishment or wit or anything else, to be capable of making him appear ridiculous.

That was why he worked so laboriously and tediously and indefatigably at everything he wrote. It was as if he said to himself: “This anyway will, shall, must be invulnerable.” It was as though he wrote not even out of the consuming unsleeping appeaseless thirst for glory for which any normal artist would destroy his aged mother, but for what to him was more important and urgent: not even for mere truth, but for purity, the exactitude of purity. His was not the power and rush of Melville, who was his grandfather, nor the lusty humor for living of Twain, who was his father; he had nothing of the heavy-handed disregard for nuances of his older brother, Dreiser. His was that fumbling for exactitude, the exact word and phrase within the limited scope of a vocabulary controlled and even repressed by what was in him almost a fetish of simplicity, to milk them both dry, to seek always to penetrate to thought’s uttermost end. He worked so hard at this that it finally became just style: an end instead of a means: so that he presently came to believe that, provided he kept the style pure and intact and unchanged and inviolate, what the style contained would have to be first rate: it couldn’t help but be first rate,

At this time in his life, he had to believe this. His mother had been a bound girl, his father a day laborer; this background had taught him that the amount of security and material success which he had attained was, must be, the answer and end to life. Yet he gave this up, repudiated and discarded it at a later age, when older in years than most men and women who make that decision, to dedicate himself to art, writing. Yet, when he made the decision, he found himself to be only a one or two-book man. He had to believe that, if only he kept that style pure, then what the style contained would be pure too, the best. That, was why he had to defend the style. That was the reason for his hurt and anger at Hemingway about Hemingway’s The Torrents of Spring, and at me in a lesser degree since my fault was not full book length but instead was merely a privately-printed and -subscribed volume which few people outside our small New Orleans group would ever see or hear about, because of the book of Spratling’s caricatures which we titled Sherwood Anderson and Other Famous Creoles and to which I wrote an introduction in Anderson’s primer-like style. Neither of us — Hemingway or I —could have touched, ridiculed, his work itself. But we had made his style look ridiculous; and by that time, after Dark Laughter, when he had reached the point where he should have stopped writing, he had to defend that style at all costs because he too must have known by then in his heart that there was nothing else left.

2

THE exactitude of purity, or the purity of exactitude: whichever you like. He was a sentimentalist in his attitude toward people, and quite often incorrect about them. He believed in people, but it was as though only in theory. He expected the worst from them, even while each time he was prepared again to be disappointed or even hurt, as if it had never happened before, as though the only people he could really trust, let himself go with, were the ones of his own invention, the figments and symbols of his own fumbling dream. And he was sometimes a sentimentalist in his writing (so was Shakespeare sometimes) but he was never impure in it. He never scanted it, cheapened it. took the easy way; never failed to approach writing except with humility and an almost religious, almost abject faith and patience and willingness to surrender, relinquish himself to and into it. He hated glibness; if it were quick, he believed it was false too. He told me once: “You’ve got too much talent. You can do it too easy, in too many different ways. If you’re not careful, you’ll never write anything.” During those afternoons when we would walk about the old quarter, I listening while he talked to me or to people — anyone, anywhere—whom we would meet on the streets or the docks, or the evenings while we sat somewhere over a bottle, he, with a little help from me, invented other fantastic characters like the sleepless man with the horse. One of them was supposed to be a descendant of Andrew Jackson, left in that Louisiana swamp after the Battle of Chalmette, no longer half-horse half alligator but by now half-man half-sheep and presently half-shark, who—it, the whole fable — at last got so unwieldy and (so we thought) so funny, that we decided to get it onto paper by writing letters to one another such as two temporarily separated members of an exploring-zoological expedition might. I brought him my first reply to his first letter, He read it. He said:

“Does it satisfy you?”

I said, “Sir?”

“Are you satisfied with it?”

“Why not?” I said. “I’ll put whatever I left out into the next one.” Then I realized that he was more than displeased: he was short, stern, almost angry, He said:

“Either throw it away, and we’ll quit, or break it and do it over.” I took the letter. I worked three days over it before I carried it back to him. He read it again, quite slowly, as he always did, and said, “Are you satisfied now?”

“No sir,” I said. “But it’s the best I know how to do.”

“Then we’ll pass it,” he said, putting the letter into his pocket, his voice once more warm, rich, burly with laughter, ready to believe, ready to be hurt again.

I learned more than that from him, whether or not I always practised the rest of it any more than I have that. I learned that, to be a writer, one has first got to be what he is, what he was born; that to be an American and a writer, one does not necessarily have to pay lip-service to any conventional American image such as his and Dreiser’s own aching Indiana or Ohio or Iowa corn or Sandburg’s stockyards or Mark Twain’s frog. You had only to remember what you were. “You have to have somewhere to start from: then you begin to learn,”he told me. “it don't matter where it was, just so you remember it and aint ashamed of it. Because one place to start from is just as important as any other. You’re a country boy; all you know is that little patch up there in Mississippi where you started from. But that’s all right too. It’s America too; pull it out, as little and unknown as it is, and the whole thing will collapse, like when you prize a brick out of a wall.”

“Not a cemented, plastered wall,” I said.

“Yes, but America ain't cemented and plastered yet. They’re still building it. That’s why a man with ink in his veins not only still can but sometimes has still got to keep on moving around in it, keeping moving around and listening and looking and learning. That’s why ignorant unschooled fellows like you and me not only have a chance to write, they must write. All America asks is to look at it and listen to it and understand it if you can. Only the understanding ain't important either: the important thing is to believe in it even if you don't understand it, and then try to tell it, put it down. It wont ever be quite right, but there is always next time; there’s always more ink and paper, and something else to try to understand and tell. And that one probably wont be exactly right either, but there is a next time to that one, too. Because tomorrow America is going to be something different, something more and new to watch and listen to and try to understand; and, even if you cant understand, believe.”

To believe, to believe in the value of purity, and to believe more. To believe not in just the value, but the necessity for fidelity and integrity; lucky is that man whom the vocation of art elected and chose to be faithful to it, because the reward for art does not wait on the postman. He carried this to extremes. That of course is impossible on the face of it. I mean that, in the later years when he finally probably admitted to himself that only the style was left, he worked so hard and so laboriously and so self-sacrificeingiy at this, that at times he stood a little bigger, a little taller than it was. He was warm, generous, merry and fond of laughing, without pettiness and jealous only of the integrity which he believed to be absolutely necessary in anyone who approached his craft; he was ready to be generous to anyone, once he was convinced that that one approached his craft with his own humility and respect for it. During those New Orleans days and weeks, I gradually became aware that here was a man who would be in seclusion all forenoon — working. Then in the afternoon he would appear and we would walk about the city, talking. Then in the evening we would meet again, with a bottle now, and now he would really talk; the world in minuscule would be there in whatever shadowy courtyard where glass and bottle clinked and the palms hissed like dry sand in whatever moving air. Then tomorrow forenoon and he would be secluded again — working; whereupon I said to myself, “If this is what it takes to be a novelist, then that’s the life for me.”

So I began a novel, Soldiers’ Pay. I had known Mrs. Anderson before I knew him. I had not seen them in some time when I met her on the street. She commented on my absence. I said I was writing a novel. She asked if I wanted Sherwood to see it. I answered, I don't remember exactly what, but to the effect that it would be all right with me if he wanted to. She told me to bring it to her when I finished it, which I did, in about two months. A few days later, she sent for me. She said, “Sherwood says he’ll make a swap with you. He says that if he doesn’t have to read it, he’ll tell Liveright (Horace Liveright: his own publisher then) to take it.”

“Done,” I said, and that was all. Liveright published the book and I saw Anderson only once more, because the unhappy caricature affair had happened in the meantime and he declined to see me, for several years, until one afternoon at a cocktail partly in Now York; and again there was that moment when he appeared taller, bigger than anything he ever wrote. Then I remembered Winesburg, Ohio and The Triumph of the Egg and some of the pieces in Horses and Men, and I knew that I had seen, was looking at, a giant in an earth populated to a great—too great—extent by pygmies, even if he did make but the two or perhaps three gestures commensurate with gianthood.

He influenced a generations of America's greatest writers

It is often forgotten that Sherwood Anderson was a major influence on many of the giants of modern American literature. Among the most prominent were William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, who

were personally mentored by Anderson. At the beginning of their careers, he took each fledging author under his wing providing critical assistance with their early writing and supplying valuable introductions that boosted their initial efforts to be published.

Faulkner later honored his mentor with a dedication to him in the first of the Yoknapatawpha novels: “To Sherwood Anderson through whose kindness I was first published, with a belief that this book will give him no reason to regret that fact.”

By contrast, Hemingway’s allegiance to Anderson was overridden by his arrogance. After acknowledging “his first pattern [of writing] had been Winesburg, Ohio,” in later years Hemingway paid homage to his early champion by publishing a nasty parody depicting the older writer as pretentious — an act that sabotaged their long friendship.

After Anderson’s death in 1956, Faulkner called him “the father of my generation of American writers and the tradition of American writing which our successors will carry on.” Indeed, Anderson’s simple

narrative tone, precise unsentimental style, and Midwestern colloquial settings would continue to inspire and shape the work of American authors— Thomas Wolfe, Studs Terkel, Carl Sandburg, Edmund Wilson, and Norman Mailer, among many others. Winesburg was an all-time favorite of John Steinbeck, whose early short story cycle, The Pastures of Heaven, is said to be modeled on it. In a 1951 letter, Steinbeck wrote that “Sherwood Anderson made the modern novel and it has not gone much beyond him.”

One notable fledgling in the wave of 20th century writers who fell under the influence of Anderson was 24-year-old Ray Bradbury. Years later, reflecting back on his early quest for his own framework, tone and writing style, Bradbury exclaimed, “I was stunned by [Winesburg’s] dozen characters living their lives on half-lit porches and in sunless attics of that always autumn town. “Oh, Lord,” I cried. “If I would write a book half as fine as this, but set it on Mars, how incredible that would be!” Bradbury

succeeded, and as he notes in his preface to a later edition of The Martian Chronicles “It was Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio that set me free.”

In addition to The Martian Chronicles, countless American short story cycles that have become contemporary classics can trace their lineage back to Winesburg, Ohio, including Louise Erdrich's Love

Medicine, Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, and Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. Anderson’s work continues to serve as a model of excellence for 21st -century student writers, according o writer and literary critic Alan Cheuse, “Among the Americans, Sherwood Anderson and Faulkner

teach you how good writing can be and how good it must be, and that it’s possible for Americans to write in American English, to make art in America.”

Hemingway worshipped, then mocked his mentor

By Jim Stovall

JProf.com

Even if you are the most avid Ernest Hemingway fan on your city block or country road, chances are you have not read his novel The torrents of spring. The novel itself is probably not worth reading, but the story behind it is worth knowing because of what it tells us about Hemingway the human being.

And the story is not a particularly uplifting one.

We should first start, however, with Sherwood Anderson, one of the Great American Writers of the early 20th century. Anderson is mostly remembered for his book of short stories, Winesburg Ohio, in which he examines the isolation and loneliness found it American Life during the first decade of the 1900s. The stories were most likely written in 1915 and 1916, and the book was published in 1919. It was one of the earliest works of what came to be known as the modernist movement in American literature

The book was well-received critically and established Anderson as one of the major authors of the Chicago Renaissance that included Theodore Dreiser, Edgar Lee Masters, and Carl Sandburg. The book was written in a style that deemphasized to plot and instead put its major reliance on the development of the characters within the story. The people and places in the story were realistically rendered. The book deliberately steps away from the romanticism that imbued many 19th-century novels.

As such, it was seen as something new and fresh, and Anderson was, in the eyes of many, a breakthrough author. Anderson wrote in a straightforward, simple manner with nouns and verbs and only minimal use of adjectives and adverbs.

Anderson was part of a cadre of writers and artists in and around Chicago that later became known as the Chicago Renaissance. It was into that milieu that a young Ernest Hemingway, fresh from his experiences in Italy during World War I, entered hoping to become a well-known writer. Anderson read what Hemingway had written and realized something of the potential of the young author. He advised Hemingway and his new wife, Hadley, to go to Paris, a place that Anderson knew well and where he had many artistic friends. Hemingway, he said, could live there cheaply and learn his craft. Anderson also armed Hemingway with letters of introduction to people such as Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein.

Hemingway followed Anderson’s advice and went to Paris. Anderson continued to champion Hemingway, and in 1925 when he was ready find a publisher for a set of short stories, In Our Time, Anderson was more than happy to help. Anderson himself was looking for a new publisher for his latest novel, Dark Laughter. He landed a contract with Boni and Liveright, and he encouraged that publisher to take on Hemingway as well. When that happened, Hemingway gave Henderson full credit for “getting my stuff published.”

Hemingway quickly grew disillusioned with the publishers and their anemic — at least in his mind – efforts to promote his book. He had been working on a novel based on his experiences during the war, and he and others who have read it considered it to be very good. He wanted to place it with a publisher that he felt would give it the attention that it deserved.

The problem was that in a standard author’s contract such as the one he had signed with Boni and Liveright, there was a “right of first refusal” clause. That means that the publisher can publish the next work of the author if it chooses to do so. If the publisher chooses not to accept the work, the author is free to take the work to another publisher. F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose publisher was Simon & Schuster and whose editor was the famous Max Perkins, told Hemingway that this should be the place for his next novel.

But how to get out of Hemingway’s contract?

Fitzgerald and Hemingway cooked up a scheme whereby Hemingway would write a short novel that savagely satirized Sherwood Anderson and his novel Dark Laughter. The publishers, they felt, would not be able to accept such a book. Hemingway followed through with the idea, and in ten days he wrote the 28,000-word novel, The Torrents of Spring. When he sent the manuscript off to Boni and Liveright, the publisher did as he expected and rejected it.

Hemingway was thus free to find a new publisher for this and subsequent books, and that publisher was Simon & Schuster, which proceeded to publish The Torrents of Spring but was really after Hemingway’s first great novel, A Farewell to Arms.

Ironically, Dark Laughter became a best-seller, the only work of Sherwood Anderson to achieve the status.

Anderson continued to encourage young writers such as William Faulkner until his death in 1941. Today we remember him as much for that encouragement as for the works he himself produced.

An image of Clyde, Ohio, Anderson's home town and a model for Winesburg, from the Paris Review

December 2023 - The Whistling Season by Ivan Doig

More from Faulkner on what Anderson taught him

“I learned that, to be a writer, one has first got to be what he is, what he was born; that to be an American and a writer, one does not necessarily have to pay lip-service to any conventional American image… You had only to remember what you were.”

- William Faulkner on Sherwood Anderson's wisdom.

August 2023

Finding escape in the familiar: the world of Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker

Most writers like to imagine they're doing something a little different – in some modest way perhaps challenging the conventions of form or having their characters articulate some observation that hasn't been articulated before.

Riddley Walker is a work of such colossal and devastating invention it makes other novels look weedy by comparison. As a reader you're inclined to laugh out loud at its mind-blowing audacity. As a writer you're tempted to turn off the computer and go back to bed.

It's been a long time since I read it. Whoever recommended it warned me that it would take a dozen or so pages to get the hang of it and they were right. The story is told in the first person but phonetically, so you quickly work out that the best way of making sense of this fractured language is to say it aloud and, in time, to hear it spoken in your own head.

"Like Ive said it stayd qwyet all day we dint hear nothing nor there wernt no lerting from the dogs. A little too qwyet I thot it wer. Qwyet with may be eyes and ears in it waiting for us to make our move."

At first, the story – packed full of wild dogs, spears and superstition – combined with the way it's delivered, seems medieval. But the more that boy's voice chatters madly away inside your skull, the more you appreciate that this tale is set in the future – a future in which things have gone mightily wrong.

I'd be lying if I claimed to remember all the details. What I remember is a boy on a perilous journey through a sort of reconfigured, re-imagined Kent, doing his best to solve a riddle. But what made the book so memorable was that, as a reader, I was called upon to reassemble the text and try and solve the riddle, giving me the sense that I was in on the creation of the text itself.

A year or so before his death I saw Russell Hoban discussing the book at a packed venue. I remember he talked about the composition of each of his novels as an unpredictable journey. Sometimes, he said, he'd end up in the Big Rock Candy Mountain; sometimes he'd wind up in the middle of a desert.

Towards the end of the evening a member of the audience asked Hoban why he thought Riddley Walker was so immensely popular. Hoban thought for a while. "Well," he said, "probably because it's such a bloody good book."

Amen to that.

Mick Jackson's new novel is 'Yuki Chan in Brontë Country' (Faber)

Steven Riess recommends this Riddley Walker Study Guide

Casting a new light on the high court's shadow docket

July 2023

By Jennifer Szalar

The New York Times

THE SHADOW DOCKET: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic,

by Stephen Vladeck

“Because Y is a crooked letter”: The first time I heard a parent saying this to her child it took me a few beats to understand what she meant. The boy had been asking, “Why?” about a perceived injustice — an order to leave the playground before he was ready. The mother’s response was simply a poetic variation of that old standby “Because I said so.” No explanation was forthcoming because none was needed. Mom was laying down the law. The kid had to obey it. Case closed.

I was reminded of this episode as I read Stephen Vladeck’s important new book about the Supreme Court, “The Shadow Docket.” The title draws a direct contrast with the so-called merits docket that we usually associate with the court, which includes extensive briefings, comprehensive oral arguments and written opinions that are signed by the justices, detailing their reasoning. But merits decisions turn out to be “only a small sliver” of the Supreme Court’s output, Vladeck writes. All the soaring rhetoric and painstaking legal analysis amount to little more than 1 percent of the court’s decrees.

That’s right — almost 99 percent of the court’s decisions take place on the shadow docket, a term that was coined in 2015 by the conservative legal scholar William Baude for those orders that aren’t subject to the “high standards of procedural regularity set by its merits cases.” Orders on the shadow docket are, in Vladeck’s description, “unseen, unsigned and almost always unexplained”: the juridical equivalent of “Because I said so.” While such summaries aren’t new — they arose over the last century as a way to help the justices manage their growing caseload — Vladeck argues that they are being deployed more frequently and in increasingly novel ways. The shadow docket doesn’t just serve as a neutral realm of routine case management; instead, “the court’s new conservative majority has used obscure procedural orders to shift American jurisprudence to the right.”

Vladeck, a professor at the University of Texas School of Law and an analyst at CNN, chronicles how the shadow docket came to be. He traces the development of a generally weak Supreme Court in the antebellum era to one that by the early 20th century had expansive discretion to decide which cases it wanted to hear (and which it didn’t) by granting (or denying) what’s known as a “writ of certiorari” as part of its shadow docket. But it was capital punishment, he says, that really gave rise to the shadow docket as we know it. The finality of an execution meant that all appeals needed to be fully resolved before a person was put to death. A prisoner seeking emergency relief from the court could petition for an expedited ruling, arguing that an unlawful execution would cause “irreparable harm.”

All of this sounds straightforward enough. But as Vladeck shows, just what constitutes “irreparable harm” — and, by extension, an “emergency” — has turned out to be a matter of interpretation. The one-term Trump administration sought emergency relief from the Supreme Court a whopping 41 times. (Compare this with the 16 years of the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, when solicitors general sought emergency relief a grand total of eight times.) In fact, “shadow docket rulings from the Supreme Court would clear the way” for federal executions to resume under Trump by vacating a lower court’s stay or injunction.

Vladeck is a conscientious guide through the legal thickets, taking care to show exactly how the conservative members of the court have used the shadow docket to expand religious liberty and crush reproductive rights. Almost 10 months before the Dobbs decision was handed down in June 2022, the court’s conservative majority refused to block Texas’ ban on abortions after the sixth week of pregnancy, despite the fact that the ban was in flagrant violation of Roe. Justice Elena Kagan wrote a blistering dissent lambasting “this court’s shadow-docket decision making, which every day becomes more unreasoned, inconsistent and impossible to defend.”

With “The Shadow Docket,” Vladeck has taken it upon himself to translate the court’s deliberately cryptic orders and legal technicalities into accessible English. Perhaps inevitably, though, his subject matter can get so convoluted that it forces him to write mouthfuls like this: “Justice Alito had issued an administrative stay to temporarily prevent a different district court’s administrative injunction against a Biden administration immigration policy from going into effect until the full court could rule on the Justice Department’s application for a stay pending appeal.” I had to read that sentence so many times my eyes were watering.

But at least Vladeck (unlike the court) is trying to explain to us what is happening. He also takes pains in this book to be as fair and methodical as possible, since even the term “shadow docket” has triggered the ire of some of the conservative justices (“catchy and sinister,” scoffed Samuel Alito; “catchy but worn-out,” complained Brett Kavanaugh). Vladeck is upfront about his own views, saying when he agrees with a merits decision and when he doesn’t. Yet even disagreement is preferable to the bewilderment generated by the shadow docket, which typically leaves the public in the dark not just about why the justices decided as they did but also about which justices did so. We can discern their identities mainly in instances when justices who disagreed with the ruling have signed public dissents.

This is “Because I said so” taken to another level. And as such, the promiscuous use of the shadow docket connects to larger questions of trust. The conservative justices have tended to bristle at public criticisms of the court, insisting that they are working in good faith and in the public interest, going so far as to suggest that any criticism is a partisan attempt to delegitimize the institution. Vladeck counters by arguing that he wrote this book precisely because he cares about the Supreme Court, which seems to operate under the delusion that it can maintain trust while denying “the legitimacy crisis that the justices’ own actions have precipitated.”

This legitimacy crisis has obvious implications for democracy. After all, only a die-hard authoritarian (or maybe an exasperated parent) will insist on a trust that is unconditional and utterly mindless — something to be taken for granted instead of earned.Write your text here...

June 2023

The Riders Come Out at Night

By Maurice Chammah

The New York Times

It’s been more than two years since protesters filled the streets of America’s cities, since we all saw the video of a police officer’s knee on George Floyd’s neck. And yet killings at the hands of law enforcement, by various metrics, continue at a steady pace.

Set aside for a moment the debates about crime rates and the calls to abolish the police (or, at the other extreme, to place officers beyond criticism). Ask instead what it would take to hold police accountable for abuses, in a minimally satisfying way, and what role civilians can or should play. How many protesters went on to join a citizen oversight board? How many knocked on doors for district attorney or sheriff candidates who promised change?

And how long until we witness the next George Floyd, and another cycle of outrage, reform and backsliding?

It’s hard not to ask such cynical questions after reading “The Riders Come Out at Night: Brutality, Corruption, and Cover-Up in Oakland,” an exhaustive case study of policing in the Bay Area city by the reporters Ali Winston and Darwin BondGraham. “More has been done to try to reform the Oakland Police Department than any other police force in the United States,” they write, arguing that the racially mixed city of less than half a million holds “parallels for other communities that have struggled to reign in the coercive arm of the state.”

The main parallel seems to be: True reform is nearly impossible. By zooming in geographically, but also stretching out their timeline — the town had a racist mayor who unleashed police officers against Chinese immigrants back in 1879 — the authors conjure a sense of chronic tragedy. A culture of corruption and violence keeps flourishing despite repeated good faith efforts to stop the bad apples, who continue to show up, generation after generation, to spoil the barrel.

The book’s title calls to mind the night riders associated with the Ku Klux Klan, but it’s also a metaphor that feels fresher than the one about apples: “Night” represents the moments when the public lets up on scrutinizing the police. Yet the “Riders” of the title were also a group of real cops. In 2000, a rookie officer in Oakland named Keith Batt found himself in training under Clarence Mabanag, who collected misconduct complaints “like baseball cards” and worked with a coterie of sadistic officers. Oaklanders accused the Riders of an astonishing range of violent acts, as well as of falsifying reports, planting evidence and using racial slurs. When Winston and BondGraham suspect we may still reserve a shred of sympathy for these men — who were, after all, facing daily danger in high-crime areas — we get a detailed account of them shooting dogs. And bragging about it.

Their fellow officers mostly failed to speak up — to do so was to risk being labeled a snitch and becoming a target for retaliation. But a month after joining the force, Keith Batt did speak up. (He also quit his job.) Thanks in part to his testimony, some of the Riders were brought to trial on criminal charges. But defense lawyers portrayed them as merely following orders “to be aggressive.” None were convicted. One fled the United States and was reportedly last seen in Cancún, Mexico. Some jurors may have embraced the idea that the officers suffered from “noble cause corruption” — they had gone too far, but only in the service of a good cause. Winston and BondGraham argue that the trials “established a narrative inside the department that the Riders were innocent, and that the scandal was really about politicians giving cops marching orders and then abandoning those same officers once their ugly methods became public.”

The city of Oakland was already paying out millions in local taxpayer dollars every year to settle misconduct cases. As criminal proceedings against the Riders got underway, a couple of enterprising social justice lawyers also mounted a class-action lawsuit on behalf of 119 people — all victims, the lawyers claimed, of the officers’ abusive or illegal behavior. The Oakland Police Department settled the case and agreed to make a series of reforms under the supervision of an independent monitor, an arrangement that may soon end after roughly two decades.

Journalists who give crooked cops the book treatment — most recently in “We Own This City,” “I Got a Monster” and “Jimmy the King” — tend to look backward at what made scandals possible. Winston and BondGraham spend more time on history than most, drawing a line from Oakland authorities’ racism toward Asian immigrants in the 1800s to their Ku Klux Klan ties in the 1920s and onward to high-profile police killings in the rest of the century.

“When reforms do happen, they are rarely incorporated into an agency’s culture, which is often driven by a reactionary ethos passed down through generations of rank-and-file cops,” they write. “Resistance to change imposed from outsiders, especially civilians, is baked into police culture in the United States.” And yet the authors make a case for civilian oversight by presenting civilians — civil rights lawyers, community activists, grieving parents of those killed by police — as the heroes of their stories.

While Winston and BondGraham treat some episodes with a granularity that may be of interest only to Bay Area residents, in a way this is a strength of the book: You cannot accuse these reporters of importing outside narratives to fit this community. Every city contemplating the future of its police force could use a book like this.

“The Riders Come Out at Night” includes some familiar names, which serve as anchors for nonlocal readers and reinforce the notion that Oakland’s history is relevant to the national story of 20th-century urban neglect, crime and heavy-handed policing. We learn about the tragic rise and fall of Huey Newton, from Black Panther Party co-founder hounded by the police to crime boss. We learn how Robert Mueller, then the U.S. attorney for Northern California, declined to prosecute the Riders or investigate the department, for reasons that may have had to do with the demographics of the Riders’ victims — mainly Black Oaklanders with histories of drug use and crime. Finally, we learn how Jerry Brown, the mayor of Oakland during the Riders’ trials, joined 1990s Democrats in promoting policies that “were even tougher on crimes” than Republicans’ own.

The opportunism and hypocrisy are often galling if not surprising, but the authors break newer ground by chronicling what happened after the monitor came in. Other city police departments have faced similar oversight through “consent decrees,”usually at the behest of the Department of Justice, and their record of success is mixed.

In Oakland, even a progressive police chief, working with the outside monitor, failed to transform the department’s internal culture, leading in 2015 to a shocking scandal in which numerous officers sexually exploited the same young woman. One of the officers committed suicide. His wife had died a year earlier, following an altercation with her husband, and while her death was also ruled a suicide, Winston and BondGraham appear to share her family’s skepticism of that explanation.

Elsewhere in the book, we see officers violate policy during a traffic stop and manhunt, putting their own lives at risk. These passages underscore a point that isn’t made often enough in our current, polarized moment: Dysfunction and corruption among officers aren’t just bad for the community, they’re bad for the officers themselves. Perhaps this insight may offer hope as we strive for a vision of public safety that doesn’t ask more of police departments than they should be expected to deliver, but does ask more of the public. If we agree the police can’t police themselves, then they need us.

Maurice Chammah is the author of “Let the Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty” and a staff writer at The Marshall Project.

Ali Winston and Darwin BondGraham

Oakland Police in 2012. Photo by Ali Winston

May 2023

Sea of Tranquility

By Emily St. John Mandel

This month's title

Here's what we're reading for May

A novel of art, time travel, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon five hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.

Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal--an experience that shocks him to his core.

Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She's traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive's best-selling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him.

When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the black-skied Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.

A virtuoso performance that is as human and tender as it is intellectually playful, Sea of Tranquility is a novel of time travel and metaphysics that precisely captures the reality of our current moment.'

Emily St. John Mandel

Emily St. John Mandel was born and raised on the west coast of British Columbia, Canada. She studied contemporary dance at the School of Toronto Dance Theatre and lived briefly in Montreal before relocating to New York.

She is the author of five novels, including The Glass Hotel (spring 2020) and Station Eleven (2014.) Station Eleven was a finalist for a National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, won the Morning News Tournament of Books, and has been translated into 34 languages. She lives in NYC with her husband and daughter.

Everything You Need to Know About Emily St John Mandel

Recommendations for future books? Suggest them on the "Books we recommend" page:

Listen to Ishiguro's 2017 Nobel acceptance speech

Sir Kazuo Ishiguro OBE FRSA FRSL (born 8 November 1954) is a Japanese-British novelist, screenwriter, musician, and short-story writer. Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan, and moved to Britain in 1960 with his parents when he was five.

He is one of the most critically-acclaimed and praised contemporary fiction authors writing in English, having been awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature. In its citation, the Swedish Academy described Ishiguro as a writer "who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world".[1]

His first two novels, A Pale View of Hills and An Artist of the Floating World, were noted for their explorations of Japanese identity and their mournful tone. He thereafter explored other genres, including science fiction and historical fiction. He has been nominated for the Booker Prize four times, winning the prize in 1989 for his novel The Remains of the Day, which was adapted into a film of the same name in 1993. Salman Rushdie praised the novel as Ishiguro's masterpiece, in which he "turned away from the Japanese settings of his first two novels and revealed that his sensibility was not rooted in any one place, but capable of travel and metamorphosis".[2] Time named Ishiguro's science fiction novel Never Let Me Go as the best novel of 2005 and one of the 100 best English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005. He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for the 2022 film Living.

Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro

Remains of the Day

By Kazuo Ishiguro

A contemporary classic, Remains of the Day is Ishiguro's beautiful and haunting evocation of life between the wars in a Great English house. Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017.

April 2023

Remains of the Day

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