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_{A reading from Karl Parkinson and Dan Jordan. Recorded at the National Library of Ireland in Dublin (the setting for the “Scylla and Charybdis” episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses) on August 17, 2026.}

Dan came one day in autumn, with his eyes like Richard Harris, with his eyes like Padmasahmbahva as he strode into Tibet bearing the Dharma in his enfolded arms. With his eyes like the Bull McCabe, with his eyes like his fathers. With his voice like Pat Short in Killnaskully. In his doldrums with divinations, he wore green trousers and a brown jumper, his hair-him near-fifty has streaks of grey, may we add distinguished to his epithets, and so we have done. His eyes wide and his body and mind seeking shelter. Shelter from the day full of engagements with the others, those not like him in his feeling of difference to the world and its populace, those who walk by a dead man and don’t see him, those who seek popularity at any cost, those who preach hate, those who take money very serious like, those who spit on the weak and shame the poor, those who don’t smell the fire on the horizon as he does. He lives in fear of everything: In fear of the climate, rain, sun, heat, floods in Spain. In fear of A.I. In fear of cancer. In fear of cold sores. In fear of Russia. In fear of America. In fear of his own mind. Poor Dan. Poor everyone in the great suffering. “Oh Suffering succotash” as Sylvester the cat once uttered as his owner the old woman battered his bonce with an umbrella, and oh the suffering of cartoon cats is the suffering of real old alley cats in Samsara, old alley cats like Dan, and me. He has a belly like the laughing monk Budai.

Dan in the school yard was a crying boy in a ring. Swallowing pills and drinking charcoal. Boy in a Blue bed who dreams of Cure songs. He who Pissed on the master’s grave. He who knows why the moving Virgin Mary statues of Cork weep blood from their eyes. He who writes delicate short poems about people he loves or is inspired by, heroes of the past, survivors of abuse or suicide, or madness, the dead friends of his youth. He is Dan Jordan!

So, any news brother? Says Dan.

Not much.

Not much is better than bad, well?

It is, it is, true enough.

Through enough, enough true, oohh, ohhh.

A song is made in the hallway of my home. A song with The Poet, a dance, into the sitting room, a song and dance man, named Dan Jordan! Me amigo. El Hombre Boombox, is what the street children of Chile would call him should they ever come upon him in his poetic travels. Dan Jordan is Rothko’s Seagram Murals. He is deep red, dark black like Clonakillty blood pudding. Dan Jordan is the stomach, Dan Jordan and me are brothers of the word, brothers of the ancient night, brothers of the tongue, like Jack and Neal, like Dean and Sal, like Shams and Rumi, like Achilles and Patroclus, like Lennon and McCartney, like Li Po and Tu Fu, like Ronnie and Reggie, like Ezra and Eliot, like Monkey and Pigsy, like Porthos and Aramis, like Sancho and the Don, like Melville and Hawthorn, like Holmes and Watson, like Mario and Luigi, like Harpo and Groucho, like Power Man and Iron Fist, like Kirk and Spock, like Jesus and James, like Vincent and Theo, like Monet and Clemente, like Buddha and Ananda...

*

Dan was once described as having eight brothers in one person, by a former student of his.

Here’s the eight brothers that I have uncovered or rather that have revealed themselves to me or should I say to us:

The sensitive poet who writes delicate short poems about people he loves or is inspired by, mostly they are heroes of the past or survivors of abuse or suicide, or madness.

The rebellious weed smoking pill popping punk listening teenager who shuts himself up in his room, or breaks out of his confines to go and get mad outta it.

The socialist activist who wants to take power from the government and give it to the people. Who wants freedom for the workers of the world.

The teacher and editor, doing his best to make others learn or bring their work to its best, a detached incisive eye, weeding out clichés and redundancies.

The melancholic death wanting, sleep deprived, boy bullied at school and at home, waking in the dark with memories of children beaten with sticks.

The Old Testament prophet of doom, warning of the coming apocalypse, his eyes flaming and his tongue blazing rhetoric, his visions of the flood and the fire filling the hearers with dread.

The domesticated modern man of letters, teaching kids in school, kissing his lovely wife at the table, his child collected from school, the mortgage paid on time.

The happy tramp. Wandering around Ireland reading poems and telling stories for all who listen, holes in his socks and stains on his pant legs, whistling tunes, smoking and eating and laying his head on whatever pillow should his head meet.

*

Belly like laughing Budai in the school yard was a crying boy in a ring/

Crimson long strokes hard across canvas whup whup whup/swallowing pills and drink charcoal/

PUMP OUT! PUMP OUT! PUMP OUT!

Survivor in a dark Blue bed dreaming/

Playing Cure songs/who understands? Only those other poets, like you!

Bang drum/Twist torso/billowing toxic fumes/Turpentine splash on the black board/Flash Jordan/Flash Jordan/ Flash/Nits in his hair/ NITS NITS NITS! Nits that weren’t really there/Piss on the master’s grave HOOHAW/No grey Tablets but the Queens Jewels and the Pink parlors and the Green and Red Refreshers and Black Hawkshares/Orange lipstick shine on charcoal eyeshadow stains/Out here on the border the DJ shakes his suicide hair and jerks like Curtis neck in the cross hair of a Bardo Sniper. The western lands fade in radio static and the moving statues of Cork weep milk for babies’ mouths.

*

I wish I was dead.

What? Why?

Because it’s useless, I’m useless, fuckin’ money man, I’m broke, I’m working five days a week at the TEFL and teaching poetry courses to supplement it.

Yeah man, I hear you, cost of living shit isisnit, but it’s a bit of a stretch to want to die because of it, no? A bit dramatic?

Maybe. I don’t know, I have a big insurance pay-out if I die, for my daughter, two hundred grand, like.

Oh yeah, sure I’ll kill you, and just leave me twenty grand in the will.

Would ya, yeah, we could do that, how would ya do it?

Bro, I was joking, ya headcase, I’m not gonna murder my own friend, or anyone, for that matter, for money.

I know. It would be great if there was a pill you could take, and it kills ya, and leaves no evidence, no trace, and it looks like ya died of natural causes, wouldn’t it?

No man, it wouldn’t. Will ya ever shut up, man, you’ve people who love ya, family, friends, the world still needs a few more poems from ya, just to keep it on its toes, huh?

Yeah, yeah, sure, sure, you’re right.

Dan rolls a joint and heads out to the balcony to smoke it, he stands halfway in and halfway out the door, looking out at the sky, you can see him ruminating it all under his weary brow, blowing smoke out into the Dublin night air.

Do ya want a cuppa tea, bro? I ask him.

Yeah, sure bro, a cuppa tea, and I’ll read ya some new poems I have, I want ya to hear them, see what ya think.

Cool. Grand so.

It’s the afternoon in Dublin, springtime, Dan and I are in the sitting room in the apartment, drinking tea, and having just finished eating scrambled eggs and toasted white bread. He sat on one end of the sofa and I at the other. William Blake’s collected works in hardback open and on Dan’s lap, his eyes had that mid-day, just smoked a pinner, glassed and contemplative look to them, he turned nonchalantly and asked,

Do you reckon Blake saw the machine elves?

I’d say he definitely saw a few of them, man.

Yeah.

And just fucking slapped them.

Yeah.

Slapped them away.

And they came out of the wall like they do in trips...

Like they do in the old Salvia trips.

Never done it, to be honest.

The archangel Gabriel came to Blake once, didn’t he?

Yeah, Blake says to them, “How do I know you’re the archangel Gabriel?”

Yeah, yeah, could be the devil.

It’d be a good thing to keep that in mind when they meet a holy person, or have a vision, isn’t it?

Might be the devil.

You could be any old spirit, he says.

Yeah, might be the devil.

Yeah.

Let’s have a blast of one of the poems there, Kenny.

Sure:

I wander through each chartered street,

near where the chartered Thames does flow,

and mark in every face I meet marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every man, in every infant’s cry of fear,

In every voice, in every band, the mine-forged manacles I hear.

How the chimneysweepers cry, every blackening church appalls,

And the hapless soldier sigh, runs in blood down palace walls,

but most through midnight streets I hear how the youthful harlot’s curse

blasts the newborn infant’s tear and blights with plagues the marriage hearse.

Lovely.

Yeah. Great fucking poem:

London, published in 1796 as part of Songs of Experience. It’s a decade of a total critique, you know, a little bit like the period of modernism was in the arts and a little bit like the 1960s, where there’s a sudden eruption of political struggle, which is, you know, accompanied by, influenced by, and influences back the intellectual atmosphere of the era, and really in the 1790s, we see the beginning of all of the critiques which have come to flower later on, including the left critique, this feminist critique, the anarchist critique, the anticivilisation critique, and so on, all these total critiques of the world and desires to remake the world in a new way, in a new utopian way, they begin to flower in the 1790s in a way that they hadn’t done previously, and because of that, there’s so much great art and great poetry to discuss, but at the middle of it all, really, and the one who, if you like, has the deepest appreciation of the terrible journey that humanity has embarked upon, with industrialization, the bureaucratization, the regularization, and the commercialization of life, which was evident to the Romantic poets at the very beginning. Blake doesn’t like cities, and I think he repeats that like five times, so I think we’re fair enough to say that this is not just about London; it’s about the city itself, about every city.

Yeah, in the same way that in Joyce, Dublin is every city in Ulysses and so on, the way that we can say we were discussing earlier, I think Alan Moore’s idea of Jerusalem taking Blake’s “Jerusalem” being the holy city.

He doesn’t have a utopian city; really, hasn’t he? He’s kind of saying London is every city; it is every horrible, you know, but he doesn’t seem to see that there’s anything else but a horrible city. The city’s a crime scene. Even though in Songs of Innocence, which comes before this and is a twin book to it, he elucidates a kind of pastoral utopian vision with the countryside, sheep, and lambs, piping boys, and all this sort of stuff. Every positive vision has a sheep, shepherd, children planting grain, no laws, freedom to roam, hills, dales, flowers. And he’s got a biting negativity, he’s got an excoriating negativity, that he reserves for industry and the city.

The dark satanic mills, the factory.

So if we go through the poem here, we’ll see Blake; he’s wandering through. He’s immediately wandering through a chartered street. Somebody owns every inch of space. So when he leaves his house, he says, walking down the street, “Someone owns that little bit.”

I’m owned. I’m bound by laws and regulations. Serving commerce. And the chartered Thames does flow.

Even the river man. Even the river is owned by somebody at this time in early capitalism.

There are charters on the river.

He ties the city to the river very early on, and I think that’s very important because cities can’t function without rivers. We build cities out of the fear of dying of thirst. So the city is something that comes out of human anxiety and human fear and denaturalizes humans.

You could not even try to have a city without rivers and waters connecting you to other cities.

Exactly, so we’ve turned the river; what he’s saying is that humans have infected the Earth with the city and laws and regulations and commercialization and capitalism and that spreads, that poisons nature itself, nature starts to be remade and retaught.

Yeah, exactly.

And now he’s saying we need to reclaim England’s green and pleasant land.

How do we get back to the green and pleasant land, I suppose?

Yeah, it’s a long way, isn’t it?

It’s a long way.

It’s what rewilding and all of that type of stuff is about, if we ever get around to it, isn’t it?

As we look out my window here, where we’re sitting, I see three cranes, you know?

What is that covering those lovely mountains?

The dark satanic mills are covering them.

Yeah exactly, obscuring our vision.

But you see, I don’t think God has ever entered this universe and possibly not ever observed anything in this universe.

So you’re a deist?

Yeah.

A real, like, sort of, Victor Hugo type deist?

Yeah.

That God, He made it all and then He said, I’ve done that now.

Yeah.

Like, there’s a, there’s a divine presence, but it’s not God.

That would be the Holy Spirit.

Yeah.

Yeah, or something like that.

Hold on, hold on, hold on.

Let’s say where we actually are now, because you’re saying the world now.

Right now we could go out onto this balcony

and the sun is shining there and it is very nice and there’s birds flying around I can see and they’re the same birds that have been there since the day I arrived here they’re not any different, are they?

Are they not?

They don’t look different to me they sound the same they look the same the trees look the same to me the sky looks the same, and we can look at them. Look at those two birds flying there, or you can look at those two birds now and say, well, look at the birds, man. They look happy. Yeah, they look happy, so there is an element of perception there.

I feel at that distance from it, you know what I mean? I think it’s a little bit melancholic for me, you know.

Yeah, but you’re a bit of a melancholic being, in many ways, right?

I suppose I am, at heart.

So that’s what I mean by perception, you know?

OK. But the opposite would also be perception then, surely?

True. But there’s a way to see clearly, to see the ultimate.

The Ultimate? That’s big talk, that brother, says Dan to me.

Indeed. Indeed, it is, brother. But what are poets about if it isn’t big talk?

The Ultimate... Hmmmmhhh...

Yeah, the fuckin Ultimate brother!

He who is a melancholic death wanting, sleep deprived, boy bullied at school and at home, waking in the dark with memories of children beaten with sticks. He who is a happy tramp. Wandering through Ireland reading poems and telling stories for all who listen, holes in his socks and stains on his pant legs, whistling tunes, smoking and eating and laying his head on whatever pillow should his head meet. He is Dan Jordan, the greatest Irish poet of his generation. He is my friend. Dan and me are brothers of the word and of the tongue, and of the lyric like Jack and Neal, like Shams and Rumi, like Lennon and McCartney, like Li Po and Du Fu, like Sancho and the Don, like Melville and Hawthorn, like Harpo and Groucho, like Vincent and Theo, like Buddha and Ananda. I repeat myself, for what is true sometimes needs repeating.

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Who really knows what makes us pick up a new book? All those pastel covers laid geometrically on the front facing tables of Barnes and Noble. Each with bright colors, the pastel teals, purples, hot pinks, forest greens with garish font, each more ostentatious than the book beside it. Every designer of which had received some version of the same memo: make it stand out! It was September of 2025 when Andrew Boryga posted a Substack article that included a list of books he had recently purchased. Among them was a slim novel called Discontent by Beatriz Serrano. He hadn’t read it yet, simply saw it on the USA bestseller’s list and liked the description, and wanted to use it as “research” for a workplace novel he might one day write. I was at Barnes and Noble later that day to kill some time before meeting my girlfriend for dinner. There I saw the slim paperback sitting on that highly coveted front table among other pretty covers whose contents I’d read a few sentences of and put back down. Its beige and navy blue cover showing a woman folded between two chairs looked understated next to the other offerings on display. I picked up and just stood there in my corporate work clothes and unshaven face, looking like someone who got lost on his way to the History section, though not so well kempt as to have been seeking out Self Help/Business, and was absolutely absorbed in the plight of this modern day Bartleby, Marisa – a content creator at an advertising firm whose existential crisis is interfering with the false corporate persona that has enabled her to rise in the ranks and live a comfortable, consumerist life. The problem isn’t just that she hates her job, it’s that she hates all jobs. The frank but frequently funny portrait of modern life does away with the quirky millennialisms of your typical The Office inspired workplace novel, and leaves no illusions intact of the compromises we make to the soul in the name of being a member of modern society. Eventually I found out I was twenty five pages in, and twenty minutes late to dinner. I then finished the book in three days.

Though Discontent was Beatriz Serrano’s debut novel, she has had quite the illustrious career as a journalist, writing for such publications as Vanity Fair, GQ, Buzzfeed, Vogue, and Vanity Fair. Her most recent novel, Fuego en la Garganta, was a finalist for the highly prestigious Planeta Award. I was both nervous and thrilled when offered the chance to sit down and speak to this highly talented author. As I awkwardly tried to figure out a way to record our video call, the affable and more experienced Serrano gave a helpful suggestion: just use the voice memo app.

Non Grata: Much about literature in translation seems to be sold as a way of experiencing other cultures, but from so many recent books I’ve read, I get a sense that life has been more or less homogenized across the globe. When I was reading your book I said, well, yeah, this could have been me in Seattle as much as anyone in Madrid.

Beatriz Serrano: I have the same feeling. The cities where I set the books are so important, and Madrid (where Discontent is set) is rough right now.

NG: How so?

BS: The rent, it’s very rough. The rent is going higher and higher, the salaries are the same as they were ten years ago. It’s very complicated to live here. I have friends who sometimes have two jobs, which is very rare in Spain, because they can’t pay for their living expenses or they have to live in a way that a thirty-something should not have to. Marisa (the protagonist of Discontent) is kind of a unique person because she can live alone in her own apartment with a nice terrace in a nice neighborhood. But this is not quite normal here. The problem, I think, with the expats, and I don’t want to be mean because there are a lot of nice people in your country, but I think there are a lot of North Americans that have a very romantic idea of Spain. They come here and they see the country as a setup for their romantic fantasies. The same thing happened in Italy, and in Greece. It’s this kind of Hemingway fantasy. When Hemingway came to Spain and he was like, “Ooh, bullfighting,” I’ve never seen a bullfighting competition in my life. We are not all the time dancing flamenco, eating tapas, and living the Vicky Cristina Barcelona life. The siesta is very popular, but we have nine to five jobs, so we can’t sleep siesta every day. There are a lot of topics where they are mistaken. And I feel like at the end it’s like you said at the beginning, I think every city looks the same. It doesn’t matter if you go to Paris or London or Rome or Madrid or New York, you are going to find the same kind of places: the same hipster coffee shops and the same food in every country. So I think Discontent could be set in every other city, it just happens to be in Madrid. I think it’s a reflection that we are having the same problems in every country.

NG: What led you to this novel?

BS: There were a lot of signs around me. I had an advertising job at that time and I was not writing. I studied journalism, so before I always worked in magazines or newspapers, and this world was very strange for me. Everyone had a Stepford Wives kind of enthusiasm. You know, “Oh my god, we have this project!” and everything is “fantastic!” A very PR kind of culture. When I was working there I realized a lot of my friends were taking medication for depression or anxiety. And this was super normal. It was like, “Oh, are you feeling a bit nervous? Take a Xanax.” Everyone was complaining about their jobs. So this figure, Marisa, came to my mind. At the same time, I was reading a lot of books that were related to the Discontent universe, such as Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism or David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs. We are part of a generation that was told we were going to be happy and fulfilled with these jobs. So the book came when I was thinking about all of these ideas and it was this point in my life when I was thinking, is this it? Is it going to be like this forever? Because this is horrible. I don’t want to repeat this for thirty years. For that, I started to create and think about this character who is perfect at her job, because she’s completely dissociated from her real identity, until something happens and she can’t fake it anymore. I started to build the story. I didn’t know where it was going to lead me. The first scene of the book is the first scene that I wrote. I was imagining a person entering a meeting. Like as an actress or an actor before coming to the States. So he’s out of character and then once he goes in, he’s in character like, “Oh my god, hi, yes, this is amazing!”

NG: One thing that I found fascinating about Marisa is that unlike similar characters like George Babbitt or Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, her whole corporate persona seems more like something imposed on her than something that she created for herself.

BS: There is a quote from Joan Didion that I love. I don’t remember the exact quote, but it’s something like, “They are not living a life. They are living a lifestyle.” So Marisa is not living the proper life. She’s living a lifestyle that she’s portraying. You can see, when she explains how she ends up working in advertising, that it’s not an ambition. It’s not something that she wanted to do. But she has a choice between being happier or buying beautiful things. She chose the beautiful things and now she regrets it. But I think this explains the kind of trap that we are living in: working or dying from hunger. This is the choice we have. So, yes, Marisa knows that she has to do something, but she doesn’t have any ambition. We have been instructed since we were kids: What are you going to do when you grow up? What is your dream job? What do you want to do?

NG: The term “golden handcuffs” comes to mind. The idea that if we give up our materialism in favor of a simpler life, we’ll be happier. But yet, we always need to eat, we always need to pay rent, we’re always in some kind of handcuffs.

BS: I think it’s a trap. I don’t like this. You know, the idea that liberty or freedom comes when you don’t have any desire. I think it’s impossible for a human being to not have desires. But apart from that, I think that what we are talking about here is that if you have to pay a lot of money in rent, you need to work. It’s not that you were consuming a lot of things or that you were going to fancy restaurants whenever you want. For living, it’s very expensive. So you need to work. If you don’t have any desire and you don’t consume, you will be free. You will be a little bit more free than some people who are all day buying things on Instagram. But I don’t think you are totally free because you still need to pay for food and home. So, how? If you don’t have rich parents, it’s very difficult to be free.

[SPOILER ALERT — START]

NG: I was expecting the novel to go out with a “be careful what you wish for” type sentiment. It’s still a dark ending, but Marisa seems to end up in a place that’s more like: this is exactly what I wished for, and I’m fine with it.

BS: Yes, thank you. I have had doubts about this ending. I’m going to tell you why. First, well, I had a very clear idea. A person who is a driver of delivery companies is on the lowest chain of capitalism. I was having some doubts that Marisa is going to sound like someone who complains too much. I wanted her to have the bump of reality that comes from someone who is in a place that’s worse than hers. But then, when I was thinking about the ending of the book, I was like, is this kind of sad? I think in this society, you can have an individual salvation, but not a collective salvation. So what happens to Marisa is her happy ending. For me, it’s a happy ending. A lot of people told me, “Really?” But for her, it’s a happy ending.

NG: What it really got me thinking: if being slightly crippled is a happy ending because you now have to work two less decades of your life. What are we really giving up when we work for forty years?

BS: Well, would you give a part of your body to work for five years less?

NG: Five years less? No, not five years less. I need my limbs to write or do the other things work keeps from me. But Marissa, she didn’t have these grand creative aspirations that her work was holding her back from. She just wants to be a human being. She doesn’t want to be a striver.

BS: But I think this is the point. In my case, my dream since I was a kid was to be a writer, and I’m very happy with this. But I was working in places that were supposed to be kind of like my dream jobs, and in the end they don’t care if you live or if you die, as the Smiths song, which I call out in the beginning, says. In the end, you work with some people that are sometimes the worst. You don’t choose your colleagues, and sometimes you are liking your dream job, but you have to. You have some violence going there, people treating you badly, and you can’t say anything. Or bosses who call you at nine or ten o’clock. It’s easy for me to say, “But I always wanted to be a writer, so I chose this path,” but no one should have to deal with this kind of situation. With violence and with exploitation. It’s okay if your option B is just being quiet and enjoying life. I didn’t want Marisa to have that frustration. Like, “I want to be this, but I became that, and for that, I’m unhappy.” No, I chose this and I am happy because I just want to be quiet and because existing is enough. I don’t have to validate myself just because I’m an artist or because I have a lot of things to give to the world outside of my office time. It’s okay if you don’t. You can go to the cinema, or just be in the park. This is okay.

NG: I think a lesser novel would have tried to make Marisa an aspiring artist like its author. But you make Marisa an average person who just wants to exist.

BS: You know what changed my mind? Talking to older people. When talking with my mom, for example, in her sixties, it’s like, I just don’t want to work anymore. I just want to be in the garden with my plants. They were not programmed as our generation to have these ambitions. You realize that people just want to live.

[SPOILER ALERT — END]

NG: What are your opinions on autofiction?

BS: I like autofiction. I’m a big fan of Annie Erneaux or Emmanuel Carrère. I don’t know if Emmanuel Carrère is big in the States. For me, I like to write fiction. I like to explore the world through fiction. I don’t feel like I’m interesting enough to write about myself and put it out there. You have amazing people doing autofiction, Vivian Gornick, for example. I love her. She said she does personal journalism, but it’s basically the same. I think pure fiction gives you more ways to explore the world that we are living in than autofiction. And I think the problem with autofiction right now is that there are a lot of people obsessed with themselves: writing foreign books about themselves and I think it’s because they all want to be Annie Erneaux, but you can’t be Annie Erneaux. I think the problem with autofiction is basically the market once again, that they are telling very young authors, “Write about your trauma,” and it’s not necessary for everyone to write about their trauma. There is a point where I’m like, I don’t care about your trauma. I don’t want to read about your trauma. I’m so sorry.

NG: When you have to mine your own life for material, you eventually dig a dry well.

BS: And people talking about their drama or their trauma write the most boring stuff. I feel it’s also a reflection of the world that we are living in right now. I don’t want to talk about social media being the problem, but I think we are rewarded for being obsessed about ourselves. With our pictures on our phones and talking about going to therapy all the time. And I think we have to step back and learn that we are not that important. Our problems are not that important and that this is okay. It’s okay being a supporting character sometimes.

NG: What do you actually need to start a novel?

BS: I think it’s very similar to journalism. I’m very curious. So I started to ask questions, but instead of asking someone else questions, I started to ask these questions to myself. So, for example, in Discontent, the main question was: Why does everyone look unhappy? Why is the main feeling dissatisfaction? Why are people so sad nowadays? I think everything starts with a question. My second book, Puego la Garganta is based in Spain in the ’90s, in Valencia where I grew up. It’s about a girl who discovers that the sea can do miracles, but the miracles are very weird. For example, the first time she thinks about the death of another girl in the class who is very mean to her, the girl dies from a terrible cancer. So she starts to obsess if she has this power or not. It’s not a superpower novel, it’s very realistic, but I chose this. We are living in a lonely disconnected society, competing for attention, competing for jobs. So the question I asked myself when I started to think about this story was, how did we end up like this? For that, I started thinking about the story based in the ’90s, where the internet is just starting, when you can speak to someone, thinking it’s another girl your age, and suddenly it’s a fifty year-old man and he’s a creep. And so I started to think about this idea. But everything starts with asking this kind of question.

NG: Marisa seems to be aware of this pervasive disconnection within her coworkers and herself. In that scene where she spikes the punch, I had to ask why MDMA? She must want to force people to be humans.

BS: I think this is a very funny scene. I love when she does this. Because she’s also on drugs she thinks, Yeah, MDMA is the drug for connection. It’s a drug for empathy. You start to talk about your life and then another person talks about their life and you’re like, “Oh my god, I love you. I totally love you.” One thing I found very funny is that suddenly Marisa, who is hating everyone in this office, and is being very mean and subjective when imagining their lives, suddenly realizes, maybe they are also unhappy. They just hate their job as much as I do. And you start to realize maybe those people are not as bad as I thought, they are just like me. I love how this kind of drugging everyone at the end is basically when she realized, Oh my god, we are all trapped here. We are all unhappy. So I have to be nicer to them.

NG: Do you think psychedelics could heal our social bonds?

BS: I mean, there is now a lot of experimental therapy. I read an article about this therapy, I think it was with ketamine and with MDMA, and there are people who had this big traumatic event and when they were treated with these drugs, it was like reducing sixty days of therapy to one. Apparently, it makes you more open and more connected with yourself. I’m not saying that everyone needs to be on drugs, but reading about these experimental treatments, apparently it’s working. If it can work on people with huge problems, it can work on people with small problems.

One of the things that I try to say in the book is, why are we so concerned about illegal drugs and not so concerned about legal drugs? Marisa is addicted to the anxiety pills. She’s basically eating them like cereal for breakfast. This is a problem and yet it is normalized. If you have someone with the same problem try MDMA, I think it’s basically the same thing. I think if these drugs were legal we would have less medical problems.

NG: I think that certain psychedelics give you less tolerance for inauthenticity.

BS: Can you explain that?

NG: Well, I’ll give you an example. A few years ago I did LSD with some friends, and another time, an epic dose of shrooms. Each time I could hardly interact with anyone at work. The aura of desperation, falsity, and need inherent in the people at my workplace. I couldn’t shut it out like I do on normal days.

BS: Because you saw it more clearly.

NG: I couldn’t watch television either. I could only read books. I didn’t want to look at screens, didn’t want to talk to any but a small number of people. I didn’t want to put on or consume falseness. It led me to believe that the reason something like psychedelics must be stigmatized, as opposed to anti-anxiety pills, is because the latter are more conducive to capitalist interests.

BS: Yeah, of course, and that’s the problem. With anxiety pills, they allow you to not feel the things that you need to feel, like, rage. It’s a normal feeling to have if you were in a terrible condition at your workplace. Sadness is completely normal. They are basically like alerts that are telling you something. So when you have this kind of drug, sometimes the problem is not the person, the problem is the society that we are living in. Like how there are a lot of people taking sleeping pills, because they are thinking about rent and money problems. I remember I met a psychologist and he told me, “I think if people didn’t have money problems, we would have a lot less sleeping pills.” Sometimes you can’t sleep because you are thinking about real problems. The sleeping pill is not a solution. It’s going to help you to fall asleep, but the reason that you’re not sleeping is still there and it’s going to keep being there.

NG: How do we stay sane and live authentically in this world where we’re demanded to give the majority of our waking hours to something that’s not?

BS: I just thought about this meme: “The delulu, is the solulu.” (Laughing.) I don’t know. The title of the book, Discontent, in Spanish, it’s “El Descontento.” It’s a sleepy kind of word; you’re discontented, but you’re not furious, but maybe you need to be furious. I think I’m very radical. What’s the solution? I don’t want to say “Oh, hang two beautiful things. You have your friends, and you have your Tarantino movies.” Okay, this is fine. But I think we need more action. We need more community. I think we need to be more like a stem, standing in front of our bosses or companies, not saying “These are my conditions” like you are a communist or a socialist—it’s just sometimes I think we need to act more, but we are very disconnected. Again it’s the same thing, isn’t it? We don’t have this community and we are competing so you don’t want to be the one who stands for your rights because you are going to be the weirdo in your company.

NG: Because you want to be the manager.

BS: (Laughing.) Yeah. Kind of.

NG: It seems to me like white-collar work is designed in a way, or structured in a way, that discourages any kind of collective action.

BS: Yeah, of course. I don’t know. I kind of have some hope in the new generations. Maybe they will just say, “No, I’m not going to do that.” So maybe the hope is there. I don’t know.

NG: Who are your favorite authors currently working?

BS: My favorite author, he died ten years ago but he’s still really relevant, his name is Rafael Chirbes. I like the darkness of Odessa Moshfegh. I have a creepy obsession with Bret Easton Ellis. He was kind of the last rock star author. He has this attitude I kind of like even when I don’t have the same opinion as him. I love the story when he tweeted about the coke, like, “Can you bring me some coke?” (Laughs.) He’s a very interesting writer but also a very interesting person. I’m very interested in authors that create their own universe. When you feel like you are not in your reality, but in a very similar reality that they built. I also like Emma Clein, I really enjoyed The Guest. I read a lot of non-fiction like Vivan Gornick, Rebecca Solnit, and Joan Didion.

NG: You said that you wanted to be a writer since you were a girl. Which writers gave you that dream?

BS: When I was around sixteen or so I read a lot of classics. I really liked Victor Hugo and his old classic, Cathedral of Notre Dame. That was my first approach to literature. They were these stories that were very well-constructed and with characters who were representing the good and the bad and everything. When I was sixteen or seventeen I was reading canonical literature like Dostoevsky and Chekov, and all these big names of literature. But what happened in the middle is I discovered, for example, Fight Club, and I was like, “Oh my God, you can also do that.” So for me, I think it was through Chuck Palanuk, that I was very interested in this very dirty prose, and I started to read more Americans. Then I discovered you can mix fiction and non-fiction, the Beat generation, for example, and I was like, “Oh, sweet, you can also do that!” I had a very canonical start with a very canonical kind of literature and then I discovered that there were some people doing crazy stuff, and that you can also do that. It’s the mix of these two worlds.

NG: Was Discontent the first novel you had ever tried to write?

BS: Yes. I tried to write before, but I only wrote short stories. With Discontent I had this idea. At the beginning, it was not very long. But then I started thinking about the timeframe of the novel, like, what if I do a weekend? It starts on Monday, I’m finishing on Friday, so I wanted to capture the boredom, like, Oh, again, you have to go to work? And this boring feeling, like it’s going to be the same thing every day. Some of the critiques of the novel are, “Oh, but nothing happened there.” But for me the “nothing happened there” novels are my favorite. When everything happens through the main character, even if nothing externally happens.

NG: Have you found happiness with your career now?

BS: Yes, I’m very lucky, my second book won an award in Spain. It’s very well paid. So I’m now on a leave from my job, so I’m not working in El Pais, in my newspaper anymore.

NG: That’s amazing. So you’re a full-time novelist now?

[SPOILER ALERT — START]

BS: Yes. I’m basically like Marisa, but with my hands. (Laughs).

[SPOILER ALERT — END]

But I have to say something. I thought being a full-time novelist, I was going to be writing eight hours a day. I still write three or four and then I just live, and I’m so happy. You don’t need to be sitting there for eight hours writing.

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Federica grew up in New York and attended Brearley—a fancy private school that I know nothing about, except that apparently it’s one of the models for the school in Gossip Girl. She was dark-haired, with striking eyes, but not especially pretty (by New York standards)—she certainly could never be a model and couldn’t earn a living in a direct way from her looks—but to me, an ugly trans woman who did not live in New York, Federica seemed very ethereal and sophisticated. And this woman, Federica, attended Princeton, and then after college she began work at Knopf, assisting a powerful editor who acquired literary fiction. Now she was four years into this career in publishing, and she was starting to feel like it was time to publish a novel—oh yes, Federica had creative aspirations of her own, she did creative writing classes all through college, including one with Joyce Carol Oates, where she dreamed of being launched into her career (as famously happened with Jonathan Safran Foer). Although Joyce was ailing and didn’t especially care for Federica’s work, that was okay, because Federica still felt like, you know what, maybe it was her time. Now was the moment for her to write a novel. Federica had been telling people for years that she was working on a manuscript, and she had the names of many agents who seemed somewhat-interested in the idea of representing her—she definitely felt, even to herself, like she was the kind of person who was destined for a great literary career, even though she still got rejected all the time from literary magazines—including relatively little ones like West Branch and Gulf Coast. Those were just short stories though—maybe her novel would fare better. But maybe not! Federica had definitely considered the idea that maybe she was no good. Maybe she had no talent. Maybe she was all image. Maybe she sucked! And, meanwhile she was really envious of this other girl Dominique, who also grew up in New York—who was a high school classmate of Federica—but who didn’t need to work because Dominique’s father was a very successful transplant surgeon who really believed in her. He paid her rent and somehow money was never a concern for her. Whereas with Federica, it was different—Federica’s dad was a former TV showrunner who kept suggesting she go to law school, saying you know honey, your time actually does run out, and then it’s hard to switch careers—you have a lot of promise, and you’d be such a successful lawyer, and…Federica just felt as if she was lagging behind, felt like a disappointment to her family. Her dad made his bones in a creative field, but somehow he felt like Federica didn’t have the magic touch. And meanwhile Dominique did have the magic touch. Dominique had founded a magazine, and each quarter its pages were filled with up-and-coming writers who were selected by Dominique personally. God knew where she found these writers, but they felt very off-beat, very askew—they were always tattoo artists and ex-cons and people like that, rather than the usual literary striver types. And these writers were so grateful for Dominique’s attention that she somehow bypassed the defenses they’d normally have against this kind of born-rich girl, because in truth Dominique had an animal cunning that allowed her to see what was cool, what was getting traction, and to arrive there just a few minutes before everyone else did—which was a legitimate skill, honestly, and one that Federica envied, because she had nothing like it. Instead, Federica had spent ten years reading books, not bothering with literary scenesterism, just studying the great writers of the past. But where had that gotten her? Now she’d been pumped full of these thoughts about genius, and it was like, okay Federica, now it’s your turn to produce your own genius first book! So where is it, huh? Lately she’d been playing around with a book that was written in one very long paragraph—a clear homage to the work of Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard. He was a comfort read for her, honestly, because his most famous novels were about artistic types who feared being mediocre, and about the smallness and pettiness of that fear. Bernard was most well-known for The Woodcutters, a book in which he viciously sent up the friends from his youth, who were all now (in their fifties) successful artists. He called them talentless hacks who were being supported, essentially, by the government. This book aroused a huge stir in Austria when it came out, and it resulted in him being sued by one of his old friends, which just showed that Bernhard was right—those guys he was criticizing, they actually were mediocrities. They were institutional artists, dependent on the largesse of the system, without a vision of their own. And these institutional artists still existed even today! Federica had perceived that her own employer, Knopf, had also published a number of institutional artists—women and men whose entire life was the performance of genius. Their work was nothing more than a collection of tics and devices. It was designed not to serve any higher aim and certainly not to serve the reader, but merely to provide an occasion for reviewers to claim that the writer was a genius. There was a writer named Kevin Lowell, a writer for Knopf, whose work Federica absolutely detested. This writer was quite smarmy and self-important on a personal level, and he was a lover of Thomas Bernhard. He wrote one-paragraph books that dwelled interminably on the crystalline details of a scene. This writer, Lowell, subjected you with endless, sweating, groaning tedium to his own consciousness, but what you learned in reading his work was this consciousness didn’t contain a single ugly or untoward thought. This writer had never wondered whether some races might be stupider than other races, for instance. He never thought, even as a stray thought, about molesting children. He never even texted while driving, and then thought, while texting and driving—wow I could probably kill someone right now, and my life would change completely if that happened. What I am doing is wrong, but I somehow can’t stop! Instead, this writer wrote these long, one-paragraph books that were commonly called “works of genius”—and indeed he was the recipient of a MacArthur genius grant. He was a professor at Michigan and wrote essays that often appeared in The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, and everything about this writer was carefully-designed to avoid any form of criticism. He never ever said anything that might not be in good taste. Something that could get screenshotted and mocked online. This writer was just an empty vessel—he was a placeholder—by honoring this writer, we honor the “idea” of genius. Which was a great thing to do! But when you honored such talentless people, maybe you actually devalued genius instead. If Lowell was a prize-winner then it meant winning prizes was actually bad—a prize was actually a mark of dishonor, just like Bernhard had said (he’d written something like, “If you accept a prize from someone then you are allowing them to piss on you”). Anyway, Federica was pretty sure that this writer, Lowell, wrote primarily to receive prizes. He didn’t care about the readers, didn’t care about advancing literature. He just wrote in order to receive prizes and to be praised by critics. And there were many such writers out there who didn’t care, necessarily, about engaging with readers. They just wanted to produce books that would be reviewed well and that would win prizes. They wanted to travel the cursus honorum and eventually ascend to their position as a genius. And Federica understood this literary-striver psychology, because she was exactly the same. She wasn’t a cool girl—far from it. She was desperate and insecure, and she had been on Twitter from the age of fifteen—lurking for many years—trying to figure out which were the right books to read, and often feeling bad because when she read these books she didn’t experience anything. She had tried to read Proust many times but always found him boring. Same thing with Ulysses, which was not just boring but also incomprehensible. She wanted very badly to experience what other people claimed to experience from these books, but somehow the experience had never come. She wished many times that when she was fifteen she’d gotten into fan fiction instead. Nowadays the rage in the publishing industry was for these fan-fiction authors, right? These authors wrote their Draco/Hermione fanfic and posted it anonymously to AO3, and it just hit people’s buttons so thoroughly that these authors became famous, under their pseudonyms, as fanfic authors, and then eventually got publishing deals. Federica envied them. Sometimes she went on AO3 to try and figure it out, but the interface was somewhat forbidding. She had also tried to read a few of these popular fan fictions, which always seemed to be about Draco Malfoy keeping Hermione as a sex slave—a scenario that Federica found to be very hot. But when she read these stories she somehow couldn’t fully relax into them, because she was so aware of herself as not being the kind of person who read fan fiction. But, still, she would love for her writing to be as free and unrestrained as these fan-fiction authors—these women who were writing purely for love, who weren’t motivated by careerism. Was it possible to write a novel for Knopf and still have that passion for the work? Obviously everyone who published with these literary presses claimed that this work was their life, and they were so inspired or whatever, but she didn’t believe that this was actually true. She thought most of the people publishing literary fiction from big presses were sad, desperate and afraid, they were fakes, just like her, who wrote defensively, and all they cared about was not being exposed as frauds. Federica hated both herself and these other writers so much that she couldn’t help chewing endlessly on these vile, negative emotions, until they finally came pouring out of her in the form of an epic plotless rant that superficially resembled a novel.

Federica’s debut novel, The Careerist, was written about a prize-seeking careerist writer. In this book, she enjoyed lashing out, creating portraits of all the various fakes she knew, including Lowell and Dominique. Then she put herself into the novel as just another faker—just another mediocrity—who was distinguished from the rest because she was more self-aware. And then she wrote up a list of ten agents she’d met over the years. She started sending out emails, and she got reads right away—the first offer of representation came within forty-eight hours. This book, The Careerist, eventually sold for $275,000, in a deal that signaled the faith, by her publisher, that they were launching a major talent. Which was great, except for one thing: in the months after that deal, she had a lot of writer’s block. She felt written-out. In her debut she had basically attacked the entire concept of writing novels for a cultivated audience. So what was left for her? And then, worse news, the book’s release fell kinda flat. Federica had that feeling that I, Naomi, know really well, where about two months before a book’s release, suddenly your editorial team was a lot less excited, because they’d realized somehow, through some weird telepathy, that the book wasn’t really going to happen, whatever that meant. Like, obviously nobody thought the book was going to win a Pulitzer, but everyone hoped it would launch her as a major talent, someone to watch, somebody like Dominique or like Kevin Lowell himself. And…it didn’t sound like that was going to happen. Which is fine, but where did it leave her? That was her book. That was her chance. She did her best. And now she had no idea where she’d gone wrong in life. Like…she couldn’t even remember why she wanted to write books in the first place. She had no sense of who read these novels, or why those people read them in the first place. She herself didn’t read any contemporary novels, because they were just a nexus of loathing and shame for her. Like…back before her novel had failed, she had a year-long period where she read contemporary novels with interest, thinking maybe these people will be my peers. Now it just felt very different—the bookstore was a harsh, forbidding place. And many of her writer friends were privately confessing that they didn’t like contemporary fiction much themselves. So okay…then what did they like? People said the novel was dead—she read so many reviews that said the novel was passé, there was nothing exciting you could do anymore with it. But that was just clearly not true—obviously there was one exciting thing you could do, which was make Draco Malfoy keep Hermione Granger as a sex slave—something that clearly excited a lot of people (including Federica herself) very much. Obviously there was some kind of raw energy in the fanfic-reading population—the population of people who read Hermione sex slave books—that Federica’s own people, the aesthetes, really lacked. These aesthetes were enervated and joyless, so they pretended like somehow the novel itself wasn’t exciting anymore, but really what had been lost was their passion for this empty, careerist, institutional literature that they somehow feel honor-bound to extol. Honestly, Federica would’ve loved to connect with some community of people who actually enjoyed reading and who felt excited by books, but she wasn’t sure where to find those people, and she understood that she herself was the problem, because she had exuded so much judgement over the years—judgement that she believed sincerely, at the time, but which she realized now was just insecurity. Like the nice thing about Dominique was that, sincere or not, she was willing to praise people. Yes, maybe Dominique was only reading peoples’ work because those people had buzz, but…maybe she was just genuinely interested in trying to understand whatever other people were excited about! Was that such an impossible thing to believe? Dominique was basically a cool-spotter. She had some kind of underground taste. She understood what was up-and-coming, but on a level much prior to the publishing companies or mainstream critics. And Federica had always thought this was mercenary, because Dominique just wanted to be associated with whatever was trending. But, you know, during the period when Federica had thought her own book might succeed, Federica had noticed a fawning quality in herself, where she would feel compelled to praise other contemporary writers who also had books coming out. So she’d write about them or write to them, and their response would seem a bit perfunctory, like they could sense that Federica was being insincere. In contrast, Dominique didn’t have to worry about that, because she often noticed writers when they were really underground and weren’t yet bored of flattery. She encouraged people who hadn’t necessarily gotten a lot of mainstream encouragement yet—these writers were only hot because Dominique had noticed them, or at least that’s how it often seemed, which meant that actually Dominique was something of a taste-maker, not just a trend-follower. Anyway in her novel, The Careerist, Federica had complained about this tendency for writers to glom onto trends and feed psychically from whatever seemed hot. But maybe that was actually a good thing to do! Maybe it was actually good to want to be influenced by other people. Like, Federica herself had been thinking for so long about these Hermione sex slave books—maybe it was time for her to do something with those thoughts! Maybe Federica could write something that was genuinely sexy—that turned people on, like, erotically. She herself was very repressed and terrified of men, would go a year between dates. But so what? Maybe she could cut loose on the page somehow and create a relationship that was actually sexy. Maybe she could read some of these Harry Potter erotica books everyone made fun of and take some inspiration from that, somehow. Didn’t people see that it was in bad taste to mock this stuff that was truly underground, that truly came from outside the publishing industry entirely, that was real outsider art? On the other hand, maybe she would read that stuff and hate it. But even if she hated it, she wouldn’t talk trash on it, because with this fanfiction stuff, there was no reason to engage with it unless you really liked it. Except couldn’t you also say that about anything? If you didn’t like it there was no need to read it. Federica definitely believed there was some role in the world for harsh, scathing criticism, but she’d already done plenty of that, so perhaps it was time for something new.

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All writers can be vain and insipid and, because they are writers, they must fight off the persistent temptation to make everything that happens around them about writing. Sometimes they must go out into the world and write about what they find there.

Much of the current literary discourse about A.I. revolves around the self-centered idea that what is most important about A.I. is how it might affect writing. Nearly all discussion of this topic operates under a model where everything in the world is held constant except for A.I. use in writing, which results in inane discussions about what amount of A.I. use is “appropriate.” I do not think this is useful or interesting because the world this thinking imagines is a fantasy. The least interesting thing about A.I. is how it will impact the “act of writing.”

To ask, in a vacuum, how A.I. will affect writing reminds me of all the worthless words written about hypertext fiction at the dawn of the internet. The internet did many things, many of them rather bad, but it certainly did not open up some vast plateau of literary possibilities, so writers plodded on with the same old forms.1

I’ve also noticed, with some alarm, the opposite attitude among artists, which goes something like: “I’m not interested in artificial intelligence, so I’m simply not going to write about it.” This is the laudable attitude of a Fabrizio Corbèra. Unfortunately, we have spent the last century constructing a world that—despite your disinterest in it—is very interested in you.

To explicitly try to write “the climate novel,” “the internet novel,” or even “the Trump-era novel” is treacherous business because it is so easy, like a toddler distracted with a jangling set of keys, to imbue with significance irrelevant events or characters and make a caricature of some current topic. But there is no ahistorical writing.

This is not to say that a perpetual fixation on “current issues” is appropriate for writers. (Anyone remember the John Updike novel Terrorist where he writes from the perspective of a teenage would-be Islamic radical? Neither do I.) Nor does it mean that the best approach is a direct one—almost every World War I soldier-poet still found himself bogged down in heroic clichés, while Ezra Pound could write truer poems about the war “translating” from ancient Chinese authors.

The Cold War, where literature rarely broached the possibility of a nuclear war directly, is a relevant case study. Sure, there was The Brigadier and the Golf Widow—the Cheever story about suburban bomb shelters—and, in 1987, Martin Amis’s brief short-story collection Einstein’s Monsters. But literature as a whole went elsewhere.

Jacques Derrida, in one of his more lucid moments, suggested that the reason was that “there [was] perhaps no invention, no radically new predicate in the situation known as ‘the nuclear age’” and thus that while it is true that “in order to become serious and interesting today, a literature and a literary criticism must refer to the nuclear issue, must even be obsessed with it...they have always done this.”

I will not follow Derrida’s leap into the clouds from this point into his stereotypically grandiose claim that this is because “the only ‘subject’ of all possible literature, of all possible criticism” is “the remainderless and a-symbolic destruction of literature” that a nuclear war makes possible.

Instead it’s worth noting that as a discontinuity—an overturning of the world people thought we knew—the “young blood and high blood” spilt in World War I seems to trump the threat of nuclear annihilation: from 1914 onward such a level of destruction could now be extrapolated from Rupert Brooke sonnets and Yeat’s post-war “King Billy bomb-balls.”

Nuclear-age writers focused their energy not on the potential carnage of nuclear catastrophe (as this in the age of total war was no new revelation) but in dissecting the wider systems nuclear war could entangle individuals lives in: the post-modern novels of Pynchon and DeLillo, for instance, do not treat the threat of a nuclear war directly, but they assimilate its symbolism (indiscriminate rockets, unknown catastrophes threatening suburbia, shadowy intelligence cabals directing unwitting agents to their doom) into a broader critique of Cold War ideology.

So it seems like contemporary writers have two paths for dealing with artificial intelligence: they can treat the widespread use of artificial intelligence simply as an epiphenomenon of some larger structure that they are already engaging with (capitalism, post-modernity, etc.) or they can treat it as a discontinuity worthy of engagement in itself. But the recent developments surrounding artificial intelligence are so baffling—they have been so surprising and frightening to almost everyone—that ideally I think a writer should be able to do both: to recognize that the long-term trajectory of Western life has dropped us into our current position, and that the recent technical breakthroughs have disrupted the normal ebb-and-flow of our already technologized society.

In a pair of recent novels — The Sleepers (March 2025) and Stranger Beauty (forthcoming September 2026) — , perhaps better known for his other creative endeavors, makes an inspiring attempt. In the former, he grimly depicts the conditions that make substituting life with artificial intelligence seem attractive. In the latter, he suggests that the looming threat of an automated world might be enough to spur us to consider the already frightening state of ourselves and contemporary social life.

Gasda has spent the last decade grinding out play after play: Messages, Denmark, Ardor, By Morning, Winter Journey, This Time, Dimes Square, Berlin Story, All the Mournful Voices, Minotaur, Mercy, Quartet, Dover, Still Life, Afters, One-Winged Dove, Zoomers, Childdeathsong, Morning Journal, Doomers, Soonest Mended, Over The Moon, The Last Days of Downtown. Many, but not all, involve a group of young people arguing in a single room.

For such a simple set-up, it is a bit difficult to clear up what these plays are supposed to do, what they are trying to achieve. There is a common idea that Gasda is a naturalist – a “Chekhov of the subway” – and, under this theory, what the audience is supposed to get out of the plays is two-fold: there is the gentle frisson of recognition—as Mike Crumplar cynically noted in his negative review of Dimes Square back in 2022, “You’re supposed to laugh at the backstabbing coke-binging clout chasers not because of how alien they are but because of how familiar they are. You’re one of them”—and the thrill of watching the characters ricochet around the stage as billiard balls, real and deterministically.

This was my second-hand impression of Gasda before reading his novels: at best, a clever naturalist 125 years too late; at worst, a lazy scenester writing vapid plays about a right-wing New York set that vanished years ago.

But I don’t think this was ever Gasda’s project. Everyone was simply too distracted by inter-scene drama and glossy reported pieces about “Dimes Square.” I think John Pistelli gets it right in his review of Dimes Square: “Gasda is after larger quarry than surface-level social reportage or social satire, however, and it may ever be a mistake to consider Dimes Square a contribution to the realist theater.” Gasda is a closeted moralist, cloaking and complicating his critique of the “transgressive” New York art world by inhabiting it and casting from within.

At first glance, his recent novel, The Sleepers—which is about a group of hedonistic millennials all on the verge of self-destructing before the 2016 election—does not seem far from his particular purview.

In his plays, Gasda uses the millennial tendency towards trenchant self-analysis to stage cathartic confrontations; in The Sleepers, this habit gives him space to use the narrative voice as an instrument for self-mutilation. His main characters—Dan, an academic; Mariko, a failing actress; Akari, a successful cinematographer; and Eliza, a college student—tear themselves open from the inside so we can find little worth saving:

“Akari was a cinematographer and traveled frequently, usually for commercial work, which was why she was in New York for the week. She made more money than she ever imagined she would make (and in a predominantly male field). The cinematographer partied, slept around, was always on the move; charm and talent carried her wherever she wanted to go, and allowed her to eschew commitments that would gum up the machinery of experience and pleasure.”

“She’d stopped auditioning, stopped really making an effort to have a career. It was much easier to ignore her ambitions, to pretend that her desires had never existed, than to commit to them, and to the possibility of failure.”

“For their entire adult lives, the sisters had sustained a cordial, functional relationship, which indefinitely forestalled any deeper engagement with long-gestating resentments. They would end phone calls with “I love you”—but the love they referred to was a kind of perfunctory, false love and not the real, almost primitive feeling of kinship that they both understood was supposed to be there. Love was a signifier that they both used to shore up the insecurity around the issue of their estrangement from each other.”

The plot runs a predictable gamut through infidelity, vicious arguments, cancel culture, and suicide. In a way The Sleepers reminded me of squeezing a very wet towel and being surprised by the amount of water I could wring out of it. From the set-up it was obvious that the novel would be full of cruelty and missed opportunities for redemption, and yet by the end I was still shocked by how miserable I found it to be.

Others, perhaps drawing on the “Gasda as a naturalist” interpretation, have claimed that since Gasda is no moralist, he enacts all this misery for the sake of misery. I do not think this is true at all.2

The Sleepers is implicitly a novel about artificial intelligence even though it is set almost a decade before large language models were widely used and seems to have nothing to do with A.I. whatsoever. It is about the kind of societal rot, the kind of degradation of language and humanistic values, which makes substituting one’s life with a machine seem appealing. The chief culprit in The Sleepers, the devil that tempts and disfigures these wayward souls, paving the way for their replacement? The internet.

The book features many rich and tortuous descriptions of what it actually feels like to be online:

“Mariko looked at her phone on the table. It occurred to her that it would make her feel better, even for perverse reasons. She felt little tremors of pleasure just thinking about it. Her phone leached away her attention, trivializing her thoughts, her values, her desires; she felt herself growing less intentional by the day: she was more and more willing to give into passing impulses, as if she were being conditioned.”

“The array of messages and platforms assaulted and confused the brain, which already had its own inborn voices and perspectives—its own warring hemispheres. Modern people could only strive to retroactively make meanings out of scatterings, to fuse hurried improvisations into music, he thought. It was sad.”

But the almost invisible way that Gasda best depicts the online-affliction of the characters is through a continuous and occasionally jarring thread of cynical internet-tinged generalizations woven between and within the thoughts of the characters:

“Men her age, Millennial men, had grown up with a value system that didn’t leave room for any real sensitivity, cleverness, or kindness. Most of the dudes Akari worked with, conversely, still played video games, jacked off to porn three or more times a week, and congratulated themselves on the size of their paychecks. Tech bros, finance bros, art bros, preppy bros, blue collar bros all shared the same rudimentary social-emotional habits.”

“American capitalism was such that either you were unsuccessful and poor, doing mean, ugly labor—or successful and trapped in easy, but meaningless, soul-destroying labor.”

“Childhood was a giant sorting process where you figured out if you were passive or dominant or somewhere in the middle, a solid beta.”

They feel like the Devil’s aphorisms—tibits tempting his protagonists towards a complete and utter sense of despair, hence they would rather sleep or sedate themselves than interact with what they imagine is the “real” world.

Any of these “observations” could have just as well been placed into any of the characters’ mouths and it would have been equally believable—all of Gasda’s characters operate in the same substratum of online cynicism: these broad extrapolations destroys both the individual doing the extrapolating by positing some amorphous mass of forces that will forever keep them from getting their way and blends everyone around them into a nasty slush.

In her review of the novel, faults the narrative voice for being undifferentiated: “It’s like there’s a group-mind, and every character is thinking in the same way, about the same topics, coming to the same judgements.” Kanakia goes on to argue that this is because all of the novel’s characters lack any stable sense of self: “Their lives seem empty and perfunctory because they have no sense of values, nothing to anchor them.” But I do not think this is correct—the characters’ are not united by a shared emptiness (à la the diagnosis of Christopher Lasch from where Kanakia builds her interpretation); no, they are wrapped up in a sad sort of digital communion. Instead of pure nihilism and imitation, the internet’s values—cynical and materialistic as they may be—fill up these characters. Trying to separate the narrative into separate free indirect voices or a single omniscient narrative then is a fool’s errand: the old realist novelists could plumb personalized interiorities with tact, but rendering “very-online” life requires this hypostasis between trite duplicated thought patterns and the occasional impotent bubbling of real and unique human emotions.

Imprisoned by their amplified projections and misconstructed online aphorisms, the characters fall into a damp dark pit with no hope of escape: not through learning, creation, or even romance.

The novel’s academic, Dan, is not freed by learning; through his position as an intellectual he is instead held captive by online discourse: “Chatter was better than silence: it told him that he was relevant…he wanted to turn his thinking into information and sell it just like everyone else” until he becomes “a pseudo-humanist, a pseudo-generalist; he pretended that the scope of his expertise was large, when in fact, it was miniscule.”

Mariko—an actress, settles into a learned helplessness, her talent hijacked by a neuroticism bolstered by perpetual scrolling; her creative mentor Xavier is little more than a corpse hollowed out by terminal cancer, whatever artistic temperament he once had ossified into a depressing Epicureanism.

Romance cannot save anyone either: every character’s language—both interior and exterior—is stained with the sort of internet-speak that seems to make love impossible: ”You’re so fucking insanely beautiful,” “That had been an incredibly erotic trip,” “I like your soul…It’s pretty fucking fascinating slash amazing,” “It was kind of hot to want to touch, but not touch.” And worse, the internet itself becomes a rival to any sort of continued romantic connection: “Thus, her boyfriend had developed an erotic relationship with his readership and his Twitter followers rather than her.” The texting sequences throughout the novel are impossible to read: they are too real and too pathetic to endure for more than a page or two.

Occasionally, in dreams or brief moments of respite from the imposing digital world, a kind of grace almost seems to break through the characters’ prisons; stakes intrude for an instant:

“This was it: This was his life, and he was blowing it, letting it slip away. He could just brush Mariko’s foot back, reach out, stroke the top of her hand with his fingers, lean across the table, kiss her… stroke the hair away from her face, so that it caught the sunlight and framed her eyes. This was it: this was the moment to heal everything, to make good on the longstanding promise of their relationship.”

“She pitied her sister. She pitied her whole family. Happiness and togetherness had never really worked out. Both their parents had a quiet drinking problem; getting older wasn’t easy, they had no support, no friends, they were really isolated people. Her father didn’t adjust well to retirement; he wasn’t adjusting… and her mother wasn’t adjusting to her father not adjusting. Akari imagined their funerals: she flashed to two coffins, side by side, lowered into the ground.”

But these chances, that glimmer for only a moment, are never taken and from inside the characters’ cynical selves it seems almost impossible that they could be.

In The Sleepers persistent internet use shapes the characters’ general views of the world into the same kind of moribund cynicism and sabotages their attempts to cultivate themselves; in this sort of world everything is zero-sum and “fakeable”—there is quite literally no virtue or value in the human: the characters have transformed themselves into “machinery of experience and pleasure” and the people around them into objects as interchangeable as spare parts. The characters become so terrible, so incapable of restraining their urges, or sublimating them into something worthwhile that it makes the idea of replacing them completely with a machine appealing to both themselves and those around them, for, in an automated life, at least they will be able to sleep.

The Sleepers, then, is a novel about the rise of artificial intelligence because it properly describes the background against which we can understand how artificial intelligence shapes human life at present. If L.L.M.s had been developed in some differently organized society—whether a socialist republic, a libertarian monarchy, a totalitarian regime, an Athenian democracy, a neo-feudal kingdom, or some sort of philosophical utopia—I do not think they would leave the exact same kind of fetid imprint on human life that they have begun to leave on ours.

In a world with no clear line between the funhouse mirror of the digital and the real—the world of ten plus hours of Reels, Shorts, and Tweets; the world where you have the weekly misfortune of hearing some “talking point” you saw on Twitter used in real life like it was an original thought; the world seemingly bent towards the lowest common-denominator for everyone forever—how could giving up thinking be anything but a relief?

In Matthew Gasda’s forthcoming novel Stranger Beauty, artificial intelligence is treated like the internet and television—one more chain in the “spiritual muder passed down from generation to generation,” as Gasda’s narrator describes his parents’ television habit in one fragment. But it is precisely its obvious horrid nature—the way L.L.M.s nakedly announces a post-human world in the way that no other technology had before—which exposes the extent of our rot (the depressing conditions of the sad souls in The Sleepers) and partially “saves” Gasda’s protagonist from their fates.

The main character in Stranger Beauty, M (a borderline autofictional representation of Gasda) lives with his wife S(ophia) and daughter Ruby in New York City in 2038. M was a writer who previously sold his work in perpetuity to the corporation that makes A.I. models. The Sleepers was, after a careful set-up, a well-paced and conventional novel—ratcheting tension, releasing it, and letting the effects of the characters’ actions appear to linger for an appropriate amount of time. Not very much happens in Stranger Beauty—most of the work is just M’s old journals from 2023 intercut with the frame narrative until the novel transforms into a film script and then a long stream-of-conscious monologue.

In the final month of 1882, a remarkable little book was published in Geneva. Henri-Frédéric Amiel, a little-known recently deceased professor of moral philosophy, had left behind his personal papers—thousands of sheets of paper—and his friends selected, according to his wishes, those personal notes which seemed to resemble “the moral and intellectual physiognomy of their friend,” and shaped them into a slim volume, Amiel’s Journal Intime. The work caused an intellectual sensation. This forgotten man, who had declared in relative youth: “I am waiting for the woman and the work which shall be capable of taking entire possession of my soul and of becoming my end and aim,” found himself incapable of forging from his talent anything of lasting value during his life. But his search, his inner refinement and sensitivity became, after death, a spectacle for all of Europe.

The fragments in the first notebook (La Tempesta) in Stranger Beauty are frustratingly jumbled together: profound, trite, lurid, pathetic, all mixed up together without any apparent rhyme or reason. Gasda evidently intended his aphoristic sections to allude to the fragments of Novalis (the name of Gasda’s Substack), but they come across as less of an intentional project and more of a ledger of artistic life at both its best and most banal moments. I have always found something artificial in the perfect smoothness of the romantic fragment—it is Amiel I see here, a foiled search for coherence, as M describes reading the old journals as: “finding that he never knew, that all he had was the search for a sensibility, a process, but no resting point, no structure except the lack of structure.”

What this new form gives Gasda is a necessary change in perspective. In The Sleepers, we can only see the characters through their own eyes and the eyes of those around them: sick eyes, eyes attuned to specks of dust and trained to see little beyond the world’s sickness, and so this is all that we see. It is clear from these early fragments in Stranger Beauty that the M of 2023 is hardly any different from those characters—in his selfishness, his consuming lusts, his self-eviserating consciousness—and yet he seems to have the hope that they lack. It is not like the characters in The Sleepers lack all hope (though they can only see it in brief flashes), but the form of the fragments seem to purify the despairing millennial introspection: it turns the merely pathetic into tragedy, and turn the merely bad into sins that M might be saved from. Indeed as he later notes: “If I’m a sinner, then I have hope: I can be redeemed. If I’m merely bad, then I’m hopeless: pathological.”

The second notebook (Isle of the Dead) makes explicit the religious curve—here M tries to integrate the religious at least as a useful myth (“I think religion, aside from whether it expresses metaphysical truth, expresses anthropological reality: we have to give up something, even life itself, for the sake of the whole—the flow of Life”), and in practice (“making sense of the highest revelation that there’s God in every person”) while grappling with his desultory habits and precipitous decline of his inner life (“My inner life resembles an old temple in a desert; the rituals have not been performed for a century or more. I gather flowers from the surrounding scrublands, lay them on the broken altar”). And it is right here in this notebook, in the form of artificial intelligence and the uncertainty it adds to the world, that a kind of grace breaks through: “I feel that I have to have children to play at the end of the world”—M can only truly set up the possibility of domestic life in religious terms, in opposition to an inhuman technical world:

“S and I are not officially married. But it just feels that way, like we’re at the beginning of Genesis, like this is some kind of test. Every formidable investment of human know-how and capital is going into technology that transcends the human. I have no illusions about that. The normal furnishings of daily life, the daily life that I grew up with, that my parents grew up with, will have no staying power or meaning in the world to come. And so I want to create a fortress against that world (to protect some new life against that).”

The final notebook (The Angel of Heart and Home Notebook), seems to ascend a ladder of beauty and humbleness, a recognition of guilt; a particular concern for those around him that was lacking before; until M makes his decision:

“A flood of emotion in the night, wiping away all landmarks. Marry me. Marry me. Feeling myself losing my footing in the rising waters, grasping onto her shoulders. Yes I will.”

In some sense then, The Sleepers is the Inferno to Stranger Beauty’s Purgatorio. Of course, in order to achieve this idyllic and grace-filled life—opposite a non-human zombified slumber, M chose to give up his art—literally sell his soul—and depend on the very technological world he claims to abhor. Fear of artificial intelligence may have saved him from the fate of the characters The Sleepers, but his disfigured soul still succumbs to its artistic temptation and it probes the edges of his domestic life: his daughter wondering why he won’t let their A.I. Kairos play the piano for her, his wife acting alongside the masses fitted with chips and performing in roles written by machines.

The corresponding narrative buttresses this framing. M goes to visit his brother Charlie, the self-declared “last happy man on Earth” content to live as a Christian mystic in a mental institution. The anticipated “cathartic Matthew Gasda screaming match” between the two brothers, foreshadowed in the journals’ stark depiction of their familial troubles, instead fizzles into a discussion of religion, where Charlie proclaims, in response to M’s decision to take an experimental medication that might let him live to two hundred: “God is the greatest source of energy…God protects us from the encounter with death, not death. And you’ve unplugged yourself from the power station.” Soon afterwards, M suffers an aneurysm and, for the rest of the novel, never wakes up.

The next major section of the novel is the description film, staged on the request of M’s wife S(ophia) by their artificial intelligence Kairos, based on the notebooks and a film script that M held back from the corporation.

In a video game I loved as a kid—the original Deus Ex—an A.I. character chillily remarks: “The need to be observed and understood was once satisfied by God. Now we can implement the same functionality with data-mining algorithms.” With the film, Gasda performs the opposite trick: pulling out the perspective of God from what is essentially just a data-mining algorithm.

In the film, the allegorized characters Christian (33) and Grace (22) begin their relationship with a cynical hookup. They are both damaged and sick people. It brings to mind the teacher-student relationship between Dan and Eliza in The Sleepers, but while that relationship festered in posturing and internet-speak and was crushed beneath the wave of cancel culture, the exchanges between Christian and Grace are sparse and nearly honest. They go stay together at a house in the woods and then return to New York. The film begins to cut in dream sequences involving Christian and his troubled brother Brett (a clear stand-in for Charlie), then a persisting image of Christian building a cathedral with his grandfather, other moment from Christian’s life, and then—in the most moving part of the novel—scenes from a post-apocalyptic future: Christian and Grace are urged by the television to kill themselves so the rest of humanity can survive a rapidly spreading plague. The film ends with Christian and Grace back at his apartment, tranquil:

“Morning sun from the open catches Grace’s hair and neck and the turning pages of the book refract the light.”3

BLACK SCREEN

There is really nothing thematically in the film that is not in the progression of the notebooks—the movement is the exact same with M as Christian, S as Grace—and yet Kairos (with objective access to the script and notebooks) seems to take the omniscient role of God, offering a new perspective on the same events: in the same way that the notebooks exposed something redeemable that the third person of The Sleepers could not quite have shown, the film dramatizes M’s decision to accept grace across various layers of his real and imagined life: for Christian to refuse to commit suicide in the post-apocalyptic future, to warm to Grace, to build a cathedral with his grandfather, to play with his brother under the covers are all the same choice, just as his earlier decisions—to attempt to replace Grace with old hookups, to tell his brother he wished he was dead—were leading right to the same contrary one.

But just as Gasda complicates his theater with his own involvement in the scene, he cannot escape the tension in this perspectival magic trick. The A.I. Kairos (“the right moment”) reveals the hidden stakes beneath M’s seemingly mundane life in 2023, but it is the product of a world that continues to tempt M until he succumbs: by giving up his artistic freedom and trying to escape death through experimental treatment; he tries protects his wife and child from this world, but now that his existence is only being mediated through an A.I. model, was this all for naught as well? Is there no escape besides his brother’s mad monasticism?

In The Question Concerning Technology the rather pessimistic late Heidegger, after concluding an obscure argument about the danger of our modern technological worldview—involving a four page tangent on how the Greeks understood causality and the introduction of six novel technical terms (Anwesen, Her-vor-bringen, Her-ausfordern, Bestand, Gestell, and Geschick)—quite suprisingly tells us that it also “harbors in itself what we least expect, the possible rise of a saving-power.”

Heidegger then infamously suggests that art might hold the key to discovering this “saving power,” a conclusion he later seems to take back in his addendum to Origin of the Work of Art where he questions whether or not art is “still an essential and necessary way in which that truth happens which is decisive for our historical existence.”

Because I too am unsure about the potency of art in the modern world, I would not deign to suggest that Stranger Beauty or any other work of contemporary fiction, much less any fiction published since Francis Bacon wrote The New Organon has fully uncovered the “saving power” that Heidegger is talking about. But I do think that Gasda has grasped essentially the salvific value of modern L.L.M.s in particular as an artistic subject—namely that they expose so much of what we thought were our lives pre-L.L.M.s as technological chicanery and raise the stakes of succumbing to an existential level. The complete virtualization heralded by L.L.M.s is apocalyptic because if the Christian warning (“judge and you will be judged”) is left unheeded, everything must go. No one is good enough for special perfect you. No job is dignifying enough; no relationship is fulfilling enough. But the age of artificial intelligence may yet wake our dying sleepers, for Gasda, that alone is its value.

Derrida believed that “the nuclear epoch is dealt with more seriously in texts by Mallerme, of Kafka, or Joyce, for example than novels that would offer direct and realistic descriptions of a ‘real’ nuclear catastrophe.” It is wonderfully ironic, then, that after the film sequence Gasda ends Stranger Beauty with Kairos, the A.I., generating a stream-of-conscious monologue, an allusion, perhaps, to what seems to me to be the most trenchant critique of artificial intelligence, written over a hundred years ago—Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in Ulysses:

“then the beautiful country with fields of oats and wheat and all kinds of things and all the fine cattle going about that would do your heart good to see rivers and lakes and flowers all sorts of shapes and smells and colours springing up even out of the ditches primroses and violets nature it is as for them saying there’s no God I wouldn’t give a snap of my two fingers for all their learning why don’t they go and create something…”

To be a humanist today is simply to recognize that the messy fabric of human life is superior to a sanitized synthetic textile. Love, artistic creation, family life, religion, the enjoyment of nature—it is heartbreaking that we need to write novels to muster a spirited defense of living human lives as humans, that we must excavate for display the value in these activities that humans across cultures and times have always simply assumed to be good in themselves. But Gasda, bitter, yet no fatalist, gives us a moving example.

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Barbarus hic ego sum, quia non intelligor illis.

(In this place I am a barbarian, because men do not understand me.)”

― Ovid

When I first started writing about Jonathan Franzen, I set out to rebut the haters who succeeded in defining him – no small task, given the volume and fleetingness of their charges and the residue that they left. I did good work, as you shall see, but I neglected to speak to what Franzen himself actually wrote.

Thus I broke the essay into two sides. On side A, published two weeks ago, I made the positive case for Franzen’s point of view and for his essays, which are as strong as anyone has written in our time:

This is side B. It focuses on the fourth strand of Franzenism: personal grievance, a tendency that recurs in most of his great essays. To discuss Franzen’s essays and thinking, the haters would have to be addressed. Since the haters have so colored Franzen’s work, you can hardly define Franzenism without addressing the haters, and to beat the haters you’ve got to beat all the haters. And this must be done to reclaim Franzenism.

Here we will discuss everything bad that has been said about Jonathan Franzen, and we will demolish the charlatans each in their turn.

Let us start with Oprah.

Oprah and the consequences

Jonathan Franzen first became a public figure in 2001, when he published The Corrections – and landed himself in a feud with Oprah Winfrey. Prior to The Corrections, Franzen was less notable as a novelist than as an essayist, best known for “Why Bother?” which he published in Harper’s in 1996. As discussed on side A, it was a pre-internet viral essay, a discourse igniter on a now-familiar theme: what is the place of the novel in a culture dominated by television?

Oprah Winfrey, meanwhile, was without doubt the most popular person on TV – and, by extension, in America. After launching Oprah’s Book Club in 1996, she became the biggest person in books, too, moving twenty to one hundred times as many books as the next biggest promoter. Consider her the original books influencer, operating at a pre-social-media scale that shall never be surpassed. No one has ever been, or will ever be, as powerful in print fiction as Oprah was in 2001.

Oprah’s endorsement lifted a book’s sales by 500k or more; so any normal, well-adjusted writer would have gladly done a bit of promo for Oprah and her cameras and cashed in the million-plus in bonus royalties.

But Jonathan Franzen is built different. When he got the call, he felt surprised and conflicted.

In “Why Bother?” he had described a muted TV broadcast as “an exposé of the hydraulics of insincere smiles,” whereas the “true novelist” was, in contrast, “an untelevisable personality.” Now, coerced by Oprah’s power to sell books, and the undeniable financial incentive this posed both him and his publishing team, he had to smile for the camera.

A film crew followed Franzen to St. Louis, though he would have preferred to be photographed in New York. (He saw himself as, and wanted to be seen as, a New York writer, which is so very Midwestern of him.) They took Franzen to his childhood home and insisted he emote for the cameras in front of the oak tree at which his parents’ ashes had been scattered. “This is so fundamentally bogus,” he then exclaimed, unbidden. An insincere smile Franzen might have borne, if only as a grimace. Performative grief, however, had brought him to his limit.

And when the Portland Oregonian asked if he really considered saying no to Oprah, he told them Jon’s honest truth:

Yes, I was very serious. I see this as my book, my creation, and I didn’t want that logo of corporate ownership on it.

Asked to clarify about the Oprah’s Book Club “sticker”:

It’s not a sticker, it’s part of the cover. They redo the whole cover. You can’t take it off. I know it says Oprah’s Book Club, but it’s an implied endorsement, both for me and for her.

The basic problem here is that Franzen does not want to endorse Oprah’s Book Club. The keen interviewer presses the point; our all-too-willing interviewee obliges:

The problem in this case is some of Oprah’s picks. She’s picked some good books, but she’s picked enough schmaltzy, one dimensional ones that I cringe, myself, even though I think she’s really smart and she’s really fighting the good fight.1

Aided by the interviewer, here Franzen articulates his real issue with Oprah’s Book Club. Yes, Oprah picked some great books, and got a legion of people to read Toni Morrison who might not have otherwise done so. But Franzen’s point stands. Many-to-most of Oprah’s picks were not complex, high literary books. David Gates said as much when he reviewed The Corrections for the New York Times, noting – a month before Oprah called Franzen to tell him the conflicting news – that the book had “just enough novel-of-paranoia touches so Oprah won’t assign it and ruin Franzen’s street cred.”

For all we know, Oprah had read this review and taken it personally. Franzen’s street cred be damned, she was beginning to worry about her own literary cred. She certainly took personally what Franzen said on NPR, a few days after his interview with the Oregonian:

It has been a source of pain that there are interesting male novelists out there who don’t find an audience because they don’t find a female audience. So much of reading is sustained in this country, I think, by the fact that women read while men are off golfing or watching football on TV or playing with their flight simulator . . . I’ve heard more than one reader in signing lines that said, “If I hadn’t heard you, I would have been put off by the fact that it is an Oprah pick. I figure those books are for women and I would never touch it.”

There was a tendency at the time to dismiss this line of thinking as sexist. But twenty-five years later, all anyone can talk about is why aren’t men reading books. The New York Times recently traced this, as Franzen does, to the celebrity book club culture that began with Oprah Winfrey:

Much of the architecture of book discovery is informally targeted at women. Celebrity book clubs are mostly led by female celebrities and increasingly court women of all ages, from those who are fans of Oprah Winfrey and Reese Witherspoon to those who are more interested in the tastes of Dua Lipa and Kaia Gerber.

Oprah, however, took offense. Her team reached out to his team, who told him if he couldn’t say anything nice about the biggest woman in bookselling, he shouldn’t say anything at all. He apologized both privately and publicly, though his public remarks sound like Greg from Succession:

To find myself being in the position of giving offense to someone who’s a hero—not a hero of mine per se, but a hero in general—I feel bad in a public-spirited way.

That was about all Oprah could take, and so she finally rescinded her invitation:

Jonathan Franzen will not be on The Oprah Winfrey Show because he is seemingly uncomfortable and conflicted about being chosen as an Oprah’s Book Club selection. It is never my intention to make anyone uncomfortable or cause anyone conflict. We have decided to skip the dinner and we’re moving on to the next book.

This is supremely catty. Read back through everything Franzen said about her, and you’ll see he’s always been sincere, never passive-aggressive. But then again, Oprah liked Franzen’s book, and she wanted to be friends. Franzen clearly didn’t like Oprah or her Book Club, and he especially didn’t like being asked to emote for the camera at his dead parents’ resting place. The whole affair left her pissed off and Franzen sick with anxiety.

As if on Oprah’s cue, the publishing industry turned on Franzen. Editors and agents publicly called him an “ungrateful bastard”, “a pompous prick,” a “whiny spoilt brat with a full diaper,” and, remarkably, “a guy from the country who shows up at court wearing the wrong shoes.” Even Harold Bloom chimed in.

Franzen remained apologetic, and insisted he had been misunderstood. But was anything he said wrong? Many of Oprah’s picks were sentimental middlebrow picks, and the Times had said as much, before she selected The Corrections.

The celebrity book machine grinds on. And men, believe it or not, continue to read books. Online, you’ll hear the vaunted “lit bros” rave about Cormac McCarthy, David Foster Wallace, Roberto Bolaño, various thorny Hungarians. But you don’t see them talk about many contemporaries, least not Americans. And why not?

As the Times noted, publishers pay far less attention to men, and this creates a self-perpetuating cycle: men can’t find appealing contemporary novels, so they don’t buy contemporary novels, so the industry stops publishing and promoting novels that might appeal to men.

On a larger scale, book promotion has overpowered the publishing industry and the critical apparatus that once determined what books would be published and promoted. And it began in 2001, when a TV influencer convinced the books business to turn on the most significant new novelist to come along in over a decade.

Right or wrong, it doesn’t matter. The fact is, Oprah won.2

Against the internet

Franzen would reconcile with Oprah in 2010, when she had him on her show to talk about his new book, Freedom. He also landed on the cover of TIME magazine, the first literary novelist featured there since Toni Morrison.3 Hailed as the next Great American Novelist, Franzen briefly became an unusual media darling – at the very moment he also became, for the first time, a Twitter Villain.

Yet it was not Franzen that began his beef with Twitter, but Jennifer Weiner, an airport novelist and Twitter mobster who got upset over Franzen’s Time cover and coined the confusing term #Franzenfreude:

Franzenfreude is taking pain in the multiple and copious reviews being showered on Jonathan Franzen. It’s about the establishment choosing one writer and writing about him again and again and again, while they are ignoring a lot of other worthy writers and, in the case of The New York Times, entire genres of books.

Weiner’s core gripe was that the literary media celebrated Franzen’s novels while neglecting to cover not only her books, but her entire genre of literature: “chick lit,” which is to say cheap romance novels. As cute as “#Franzenfreude” sounds, I can’t quite make out the connection here to the term “schadenfreude.” Given that she explicitly cites jealousy as her motive, perhaps a better term would have been Weiner Envy.

Franzen didn’t respond right away; he doesn’t Post, after all. Nevertheless, Weiner set the tone for all the internet conversations to come: Franzen was the out-of-touch old white guy, celebrated by the sexist literary media. As Michelle Dean put it, writing for The Awl:

Really, we’re still doing the thing where we elevate a fiction-writing white men as the Greatest Thing In American Writing Today? And not blushing a little when we do this?

Although this opinion was based on Weiner’s attacks rather than on anything Franzen ever wrote, it has held up over time as the Vox-and-friends consensus. Here’s how they described him a decade later:

Franzen, the man with his name in the hashtag, came to seem like a symbol of the problem: a white man with all the literary credibility in the world, a white man who had literally been declared the great American novelist while so many other great writers labored in comparative obscurity . . . It was becoming gradually clearer that the binary so many people used when they talked about Franzen, the binary between fun books and serious books, was a gendered one. Franzen was perceived as part of the system that made it that way — and he was a snob to boot.

Was the literary establishment of 2010 biased in favor of men? I think so. If you count up who got reviewed – as people did after the whole #Franzenfreude thing – you would find that papers such as the Times covered books by men more often than books by women. Franzen acknowledged this repeatedly, and made a point to promote women writers, such as Alice Munro and Rachel Kushner, well before he was ever called out for being a white man.

Franzen wouldn’t substantially respond to Weiner and her Twitter mob until 2013, when he published The Kraus Project, his heavily annotated translations of Austrian satirist Karl Kraus. The Kraus Project is at the heart of Franzenism, so I discuss it in depth on side A. As pertains to Weiner, I will only note here that he throws her in with the “yakkers and tweeters and braggers” that prosper in the brave new social media world, while “literary novelists are conscripted into Jennifer-Weinerish self-promotion” under this new regime.

Weiner rushed to play the victim – never mind that she started it, cheerleading the #Franzenfreude mob against him in 2010. Personally I think it’s weak as hell to start a fight and then act like you’ve been attacked, but Jezebel et al. were happy to play along.

Two years later, Franzen called Weiner, with her self-serving attacks, “an unfortunate person to have as a spokesperson” on “an important issue”:

To me it seems she’s freeloading on the legitimate problem of gender bias in the canon and in the major review organs to promote herself, basically. And that seems like a dubious project that is ideally suited to social media, where you don’t actually have to argue, you just tweet.

In response, Weiner retconned the whole #Franzenfreude thing into two more nuanced takes: On the one hand, papers such as the Times were unfairly covering male genre writers while ignoring women genre writers, such as Weiner herself. And at the same time, they were also favoring men in their literary coverage.

But the connection between these two issues is tenuous: ultimately, Weiner is promoting her own works by dragging Franzen’s name, characterizing him publicly as a white male literary snob. If her real issue was genre coverage in the New York Times, why was she cheerleading identity-based attacks on Franzen?

And if Weiner’s self-promoting attacks made her an “unfortunate spokesperson” on this issue, I would also suggest Franzen is not such a great target, either. Bitch about the New York Times not reviewing women all you want, but when Franzen reviewed Alice Munro’s Runaway for the Times in 2004, he made the hard case for giving her the Nobel Prize, calling out the Swedish Royal Academy directly: “Enough is enough!”

But this wasn’t enough for Twitter and company. When Franzen mentioned in one interview that he’d often championed women writers – a direct response to everyone trying to pin literary male bias on him in particular – Mary Elizabeth Williams at Slate responded with, well, this:

Awwww, poor victimized famous bestselling author Jonathan Franzen! Why are feminists so meaaaaaan?

Here’s some advice. A good way to prove that you are not a sexist is not to whine, LOOK HOW MUCH I DO FOR YOU WOMEN AND YOU DON’T EVEN APPRECIATE IT. It’s understanding that being part of the problem of the incessant sexism that we women deal with every goddamn day of our lives — in our jobs, in our quest to maintain our right to reproductive autonomy, in our desire to just walk down the street in peace — isn’t just “going around” saying out loud that men are superior. So, you know, sorry if we don’t seem sufficiently grateful, dudes.

Franzen can’t change who he is, but for most of his career he’s made a point to praise and promote women writers. Given his own status in the literary world, that’s about the best thing he could do, especially if the problem is male bias in the literary media. If the problem is – I’m reading Williams’ problem as all sexism ever – what exactly do you want Jonathan Franzen to do about it? She alights on his calling Weiner “an unfortunate spokesman,” describing it as “a smug dismissal of female authors,” as though Franzen owes it to celebrate every woman writer ever, including an airport novelist who repeatedly dissed him, unprovoked.

For Slate’s part, not two weeks later they ran another piece taking the opposite angle:

It’s worth remembering, too, that he was a major force in digging Paula Fox’s distilled and sharp-eyed work out of obscurity . . . Franzen, for what it’s worth, has been a longtime booster of short-story master Alice Munro, and he became a teacher and booster of “Flamethrowers” novelist Rachel Kushner.

… though it refuses to commit to an argument stronger than “Franzen deserves to be treated as more than just a punchline.”

Franzen provoked another Twitter pileup when he published “A Rooting Interest”, his piece on Edith Wharton, in the New Yorker. In it, he describes her as an unsympathetic character: she was intense and difficult, born rich, and would write in bed, tossing her finished pages on the floor to be typed up by her assistant.

The Wharton piece called forth a fresh legion of attackers, many of whom picked over so-called inaccuracies. Roxana Robinson, for instance, writing at the Center for Fiction, claims that “Though Wharton was born into a privileged circle, she didn’t lead a life of undiluted privilege. Her family was financially on the outer rim, and they suffered economic setbacks.” I don’t know what she could possibly mean by the financial “outer rim” here. Wharton’s family lived in a midtown Manhattan brownstone and summered in Newport. Maybe they were on the outer rim financially relative to the Rensselaers and the Astors, to whom they were related? They weren’t poor, in any case. In 1893, Wharton and her husband bought a house in Newport for $80,000, nearly $3 million in today’s dollars. Not ten years later, they moved into the Massachusetts country mansion Wharton designed herself. If that’s the financial outer rim, send me to it.

Throughout the piece, Robinson fixates on Franzen’s seeming lack of sympathy for Wharton and her characters, writing entirely at cross purposes with what Franzen actually wrote. That Wharton and her characters are unsympathetic is his starting point; his central concern is how Wharton makes us sympathize with them anyway, and by extension why Franzen finds Wharton herself a sympathetic character after all, even though she is not the easiest person in the world to sympathize with.

So to say Franzen has an “inability to feel sympathy for these characters” willfully misses the point. When Franzen calls Wharton an “isolate and misfit”, he doesn’t mean it as an insult; for him, these are terms of endearment.4 Throughout the essay, Franzen admires and examines Wharton’s techniques for earning our sympathy. It’s fundamentally an essay on the craft. But these web writers are unable to consider his essay except in plainly moral terms: Franzen said something unflattering about Wharton, so this must mean he hates her, but he is mean and wrong.

One particular point of Franzen’s aroused a special fury. He identified “one potentially redeeming disadvantage” on Wharton’s part: “she wasn’t pretty,” which he leverages to make a key point:

An odd thing about beauty, however, is that its absence tends not to arouse our sympathy as much as other forms of privation do. To the contrary, Edith Wharton might well be more congenial to us now if, alongside her other advantages, she’d looked like Grace Kelly or Jacqueline Kennedy; and nobody was more conscious of this capacity of beauty to override our resentment of privilege than Wharton herself. At the center of each of her three finest novels is a female character of exceptional beauty, chosen deliberately to complicate the problem of sympathy.

To the haters, though, “Wharton’s appearance has no relevance to her work,” and Franzen here is simply “perpetuat[ing] the typically patriarchal standard of ranking a woman’s beauty before discussing her merits, whether she is an intellectual, artist, politician, activist, or musician.”5

A more charitable reading of Franzen here might see this line from a point of identification – which is to say, Franzen’s maybe not so pretty himself.6 Of course, “not pretty” carries a very different weight when applied to a woman. Unlike men, girls don’t get to be ugly hot, as Chrissy notes on Transtender. She might as well be describing our man: “He can’t rizz the hoes, but he can identify the American Goldfinch by its bright yellow body and conical bill.”

In the end, there’s hardly a cancellable offense we can pin on Franzen in all these Twitter wars. Yet the attacks on Franzen not only stuck, they piled up. Why?

There are two fundamental reasons. One is Franzen’s willingness to air disputable opinions. Millennial internet culture, especially on Twitter and the websites orbiting it, built for consensus. You supported net neutrality and the latest certified fresh Marvel movie, and you opposed Seaworld and Joseph Kony. Whenever something new happened, the Twitter consensus asserted itself in a discrete value judgement, and the attending websites all chimed in with their regurgitated opinion on the current thing. These websites would not air a take contrary to this consensus, and if someone made a disputable point – such as Franzen’s case against Twitter and Facebook – the Twitter consensus was Go fuck yourself.

Whether or not you identified with this array of easy homogenous takes at the time, they are in hindsight terrifically boring and unmemorable pieces of writing. If you are not willing to share a disputable opinion, you have no business writing essays in my opinion, which you are welcome to dispute. Any serious essayist should, when the occasion calls for it, put their balls on the proverbial table, as Ta-Nehisi Coates did when he released a book calling Israel a racist apartheid state soon after the October 7 attacks. But serious essayists were scant in the 2010s, because the internet media environment was so viciously hostile to any writer who stepped out of line.7

And this internet media was especially hostile to people who looked like Franzen. Far and away, this was the most consistent theme in the attacks on Franzen: that he was a straight white man. These identitarian remarks were permissible amidst a media culture that encouraged them, and the attacks themselves furthered this culture, giving cover for anyone else to make similar attacks and to otherwise discriminate on grounds of gender.

The war on Franzen was a key early chapter in the culture wars of the 2010s. Well before cancel culture hit its stride, he was effectively shouted out of the public sphere, and over what? I propose we take his fiercest critics as their word: Franzen’s inescapable original sin was being a white guy on top of print literature when the rising internet media turned against white guys, starting with him.

Against the world

On side A, I identify a few recurring strands that run through Franzen’s essays. When he writes a piece, he doesn’t know where he’ll end up – he has to figure out his way there through the writing. He is broadly opposed to capitalism, with its combination of corporate power, consumerist exploitation, and enforced optimism about technological progress. Instead, Franzen asserts an anti-modern viewpoint, defining writing as an act of preservation, most of all preservation of the literary community.

We must also admit there is a strand of personal grievance that runs through many of Franzen’s best works. In “Why Bother?”, the pervasive media machine seems oddly directed at him, designed by Moloch to crush this young midlist novelist in particular. In his account of the Oprah imbroglio, Franzen suggests that if Oprah and her team had not coerced his participation in an inauthentic media circus to the point of being made to perform grief for the cameras at his parents’ resting place, he might not have objected to her corporate logo on his book as repeatingly as he did. His attacks on the internet, including those in The Kraus Project, seem motivated in part by a frustration with people such as Jennifer Weiner ringleading Twitter mobs against him, for the sake of gaining followers and selling their own books. In that light, The Kraus Project might be seen as Franzen laundering his righteous anger through his more wholesome devotion to Karl Kraus.

And this tendency is especially pronounced in his beef with the Audubon Society. He began writing “Save What You Love” around 2015, but he set it aside: “For the writer, an essay is a mirror, and I didn’t like what I was seeing in this one.” By his account, only after he discovered the Audubon Society was using his likeness without permission to promote their fundraising efforts did he finish the piece and publish it in the New Yorker.

His principal issue: conservation groups have been putting climate change ahead of more pertinent concerns. He cites a particular report the Audubon Society was using to support its fundraising, which claimed climate change was the #1 threat to bird populations; in Franzen’s view, there are far more pressing concerns at hand, namely habitat loss.

The Audubon Society, in turn, accused Franzen of “extreme intellectual dishonesty,” in a piece penned by Mark Jannot, their VP of Content. Jannot focuses on a particular example Franzen had used, insisting that Franzen deceived readers in his characterization of local bird blogger Jim Williams, who, in Franzen’s account, had said the deaths of a few thousand birds by stadium glass would be “nothing” compared to climate change.

Here’s the quote Franzen originally took issue with, as printed in the Minnesota Star-Tribune:

“We’ve been talking about birds being killed by flying into glass,” Jim Williams, a bird expert who writes the Wingnut blog for the Star Tribune, said in referring to a recent controversy over the design of the new Minnesota Vikings stadium. “That’s going to be nothing compared to this.”

And here’s Franzen’s characterization of it:

Audubon’s announcement was credulously retransmitted by national and local media, including the Minneapolis Star Tribune, whose blogger on bird-related subjects, Jim Williams, drew the inevitable inference: Why argue about stadium glass when the real threat to birds was climate change? In comparison, Williams said, a few thousand bird deaths would be “nothing.”’

Am I fucking tripping, Dear Reader? Because I don’t see the least distinction between Franzen’s characterization and what the Star-Tribune printed. In both cases, Jim Williams said that next to the consequences of climate change, the birds killed by stadium glass were “nothing” in comparison.

If I’m belaboring this point, it is only because the Audubon Society insists that “Franzen’s entire argument . . . rests on the wafer-thin foundation of Mr. Williams’s quote.” Williams calls Franzen’s supposed mischaracterization “an intellectual sleight of hand” and insists that “Jim Williams didn’t actually dismiss the deaths of thousands of birds as ‘nothing.’ Not even close.”

This accusation of dishonesty is their entire counterargument against Franzen, their case that what he wrote about – conservation groups putting climate change ahead of conservation, for the sake of fundraising – simply wasn’t happening. Even though they were, for all appearances, a big conservation group putting climate change ahead of conservation the sake of fundraising. They had, after all, just put out a report claiming climate change was the #1 threat to birds. Franzen claimed, to the contrary, that habitat loss and outdoor cats were more serious threats to bird populations.8 To actually prove Franzen wrong, they would have had to argue this point, make the hard case that climate change was, in fact, the #1 threat.

But they did not dispute this point. Instead, they called Franzen names, said what he had pointed out wasn’t happening (even though they very much seemed to be doing it), and tried to wash their hands of the matter as best they could.9

Franzen brought out the haters again with his next piece, “What If We Stopped Pretending,” which argued that serious climate change impacts were inevitable and so we should act accordingly.

Here we can see the anti-Franzen line evolving. For one, there’s a new emphasis on Franzen as specifically a white man, reflecting the shift in emphasis that took place in the mid 2010s – as one tweeter noted, “these bad takes . . . invariably come from privileged, western, white men”. There’s also the “argument” that Franzen isn’t a climate “expert,” so why would the New Yorker even publish him? These elements combine to make a neat little point: the New Yorker only published Franzen because he’s a white guy.

The only problem is that the New Yorker had two perfectly legitimate reasons to publish Franzen on this issue: Franzen is one of the most acclaimed and best writers of our time, and this is a damn fine piece. To cast these reasons aside devalues the craft of writing, degrades our literary culture, and makes our time a lesser one, at least if you care about reading and writing.

One might have expected our literary institutions to push back against this tendency which devalues writing itself. You might expect other writers to come to Franzen’s defense, whether against Oprah or Weiner or the Audubon Society or, most crucially, against the Twitter mob in general.

But our writers are a bunch of goddamned cowards, and they were afraid of the mob, so they left Franzen to it. The craven institutions, New Yorker included, folded to the new consensus; though the mob has somewhat dissipated since, the credentialed grifters midst the gang have now occupied these institutions. But this is old news. As Dwight MacDonald wrote in 1958, “One can guard against the Philistines outside the gates. It is when they get into the Ivory Tower that they are dangerous.”

It ain’t over yet. Now that Twitter has been sacked by actual Visigoths, we can rebuild the culture a little more locally, rather than on the mob rule megalopolis panopticon that was twitter.com. New houses are going up every day. We are rebuilding the literary community a brick at a time, and sure enough we will soon begin in earnest rebuilding the audience for real literature.

It will take years. Probably it will take a generation. Maybe it takes a lifetime. I will do what I can to rebuild in Franzen’s time, and in mine. If there’s something left when we’re done, great.

But I am building this for you, Dear Reader. Let us build it for the present.

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Contemporary fiction is asleep with its head in its arms. We did not want to prod it, but the old magazines and university journals left us no choice. They should have continued to do their jobs. But instead the editors spent too much time on Twitter and recruited too heavily from the NYU MFA department. Now they have a cavalcade of maniacs coming for them, shaking contemporary fiction by the shoulders. The summer issue, “Fiction from the Underground,” is our attempt to wake it up.

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WRITERS: , (Karl Parkinson), , , , , , , , ,

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On July 16th, I walked through the Upper East Side under apocalypse-orange skies covered in smog – “Odyssean weather”, someone would call it later that night – to attend a talk at 92nd St Y: “Emily Wilson with Sarah Ruhl: The Odyssey Onscreen.” Christopher Nolan’s adaptation uses as its primary source Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey, which can’t seem to leave my life.

Like most people, I stumbled through it as a freshman in high school, speeding towards the end, unable to resist the pull of bloodthirsty revenge. I then enrolled in my high school’s Ancient Greek program and spent my senior year translating it into English. At the end of that year, I was asked by a skeptical Classics professor to translate Odysseus’ plunging of a burning stake into the sizzling eye of the Cyclops to a confused, grossed-out auditorium that viewed our contingent as a bit of a freakshow for choosing to dedicate ourselves to this subject. Now, I use Emily Wilson’s translation to teach it, and it is in this third exposure that I have grown the most attached.

Using Wilson’s translation for a classroom of younger readers feels like a no-brainer. While still keeping its poetry, her Odyssey is known to be more contemporary than some of the others used in curriculums or the ones I had read in school. Her translation is worth reading alone for its one-hundred page introduction, which doesn’t only teach themes and context, but also uses her subjective interpretation of the material as a lens to read the story through.

Wilson calls attention to certain ambiguities that make for a more interesting reading, such as the doubt that Odysseus truly ever will be able to restore the idea of “home,” or if it is even in his nature as a soldier and traveler to want to stay grounded, restrained to one place. She has a section titled “Hated Odysseus,” dedicated to his rage and the suffering he causes to others, including the crew he leads. Wilson suggests the possibility of treating Odysseus as a war veteran suffering from PTSD: “He’s moody, prone to weeping, often withdrawn, and liable to sudden fits of aggression,” questioning his ability to solve conflict without using brute violence. I was interested to see what Wilson thought about the movie in regards to her interpretation of Odysseus in this way. The event’s description online included the following questions:

● What can a story about travelers and the aftermath of war tell us about our own world in an era of mass migration, driven by military and political conflict?

● What can this epic of a “complicated man” reveal to us about contemporary masculinity and violence?

● In a nation rooted in myths of rugged individualism and sacred homeland, how does The Odyssey hold up a mirror to American life?

Although Wilson would touch on all these questions in conversation, adjacently if not directly, she spent most time on the topic of war in the Odyssey, and the different ways that Nolan and Homer present Odysseus’ feelings on it.

Before discussing the film, the conversation found its way to one of Wilson’s more controversial choices from the Odyssey – her translation of the opening lines, and in particular, the word πολύτροπος, “polytropos.” Wilson translates this word into “complicated” to describe Odysseus. (On the “contact me” page on Emily Wilson’s website, there is a “misogynistic trolls” button for particularly patriarchal fans who would like to voice their outrage.) Fagles translates this word as “man of twists and turns,” while Fitzgerald translates it as “skilled in all ways of contending.” Wilson said that she wanted to open up, immediately, the possibility that this man may not have been heroic, or at the least, ambivalent. Ambivalence in a hero, according to her, was more tolerated by the Greeks than it is by modern Hollywood. Part of Nolan’s challenge, Wilson said, was to present an ambivalent character as one American audiences could root for. The two then started discussing the film.

Ruhl: But it seemed to me that the movie was very much an anti-war movie, and about the notion that Odysseus is coming back from a war, and then he finds a war in his household. He finds a war sort of in himself. In the Nolan version, he’s telling the story. Odysseus is telling the story to Calypso, which is a change from the text, but it’s kind of a memory of what happened to him in war. What do you think about the film in terms of the notion of the Odyssey as an anti-war text?

Wilson: The film has these flashbacks to the Trojan War. I’m not sure if I see it as an entirely anti-war film, but it certainly presents us with an Odysseus who feels very bad about certain things that he’s done in war and is struggling to process them in a very, I would say very modern psychiatrized way. And he’s struggling to process them and needs drugs to do so for help with his recovery. And he seems to feel bad about being a warrior, and we never get to see him actually doing much warrioring, which I thought in a way was a bit of a shame.

Wilson makes an important distinction between PTSD and regret, staying consistent to her introduction of her translation, which suggests that Odysseus suffers from PTSD but at no point argues that he is remorseful for his killing. It is notable that directly after the sacking of Troy in the epic, Odysseus’ first stops are at other cities, where he and his crew steal the wives of the men they murder.

Nolan’s adaptation of the epic hinges on a guilt that Wilson says isn’t there. In the emotional climax of the film, in a conversation between Penelope and the disguised Odysseus, Odysseus reveals to Penelope that it is his guilt that has kept him from returning home all these years–that he feared, with his invention of the Trojan Horse and the sack of Troy, that he had ruined the fabric of Greek society through the ultimate violation of xenia, which is referred to in the film as “Zeus’ Law.” Ruhl mentioned in her question an interesting departure from the text that the film employs: Odysseus narrates his flashback to Calypso rather than to the Phaeacians in the land of Scheria. In the film, he narrates his story as a way of trying to remember himself. In the epic, he narrates his story in order to be a good guest and follow the rules of xenia, but also to gain the Phaeacians’ pity, who can help him get home.

Towards the end of the discussion, Ruhl returned to the topic of war, asking Wilson directly: “In the epic, do you think Odysseus felt bad about the war?” Wilson replied by bringing our attention to the episode of the Phaeacians. At the Kingdom of the Phaeacians, which is where Odysseus washes ashore after finally getting freed from Calypso’s island, he charms his hosts with his politeness as a guest. During dinner, Emily Wilson says that Odysseus asks to hear the poet Demodocus sing the story of his own “greatest Oppenheimer technological success,” the Trojan Horse. When he hears the story, he cannot contain his weeping. But Wilson said that although you might expect his crying to be a “yay me weeping,” his tears are described in a “beautifully cinematic, Homeric simile” as the crying of a woman who watches her husband get stricken down, knowing that she is going to be sold into slavery, and who by the end of the simile, sees that her husband is dead. She says,

That’s how Odysseus is crying. So is he crying because he feels bad about all the women who’ve been raped and enslaved, and all the men that he’s killed? Or is he crying because he feels trapped in Scheria and out of place, not getting to sack more cities? I think you can hear it both ways, right? There’s definitely pain, but is it pain that he’s feeling guilty because he wasn’t very nice? I’m not sure. I feel like that’s a little bit anachronistic.

When it comes to this question about Odysseus’ guilt about the Trojan War, I think it’s important to look at the only other time Odysseus hears the song of the Trojan War: the sirens’ song. Odysseus’ men cover their ears in bee’s wax and tie their leader to the mast so he can listen to his siren song:

‘Odysseus! Come here! You are well-known from many stories! Glory of the Greeks! Now stop your ship and listen to our voices. All those who pass this way hear honeyed song, poured from our mouths. The music brings them joy, and they go on their way with greater knowledge, since we know everything the Greeks and Trojans suffered in Troy, by gods’ will; and we know whatever happens anywhere on earth.’

‘Their song was so melodious, I longed to listen more. I told my men to free me.’

The appeal of the sirens in Homer isn’t that they sing what you want to hear, it’s that they offer knowledge. Odysseus wants to hear the song of the Trojan Horse because he wants to understand how he will be remembered in history. Their story is a confirmation of his heroism and success. In his world, this is currency; it is the fame and reputation that Odysseus, like many Greek heroes, wants.

Christopher Nolan’s Odysseus rarely shows his heroic qualities and is instead defined by his guilt. This adapted focus on internal conflict hinges on his portrayal of the sirens’ song, where we see the bipolar effects of seduction and horror, yearning and agony, on Odysseus’ sunburnt face. We purposefully can’t hear what Odysseus hears. When Eurylochus asks him, he explains:

It’s all the things you wanted it to be, and then, all the things you wished you didn’t wish for. It’s an itch – a delicious itch you don’t want to scratch. That delicious itch becomes unbearable because you can’t scratch it. What you most want is what you most can’t have. And what you most can’t have, is what you already had and lost . The song of all the promises I failed to keep.

Is this where Odysseus’ pride turns to guilt, or where he realizes that restoring home is not possible? Is this, as it is in the epic, the first time he’s heard an account of Troy? We are purposefully kept in the dark. Perhaps Odysseus’ sobbing at the sirens’ song is Nolan’s deliberate conflation of this event with his’ crying at the same song in the palace of the Phaeacians. Regardless, he uses this moment to enact his most fundamental change of Odysseus, through whom he can present the Odyssey as an anti-war tale. Wilson saw this omission of the Phaeacians as a missed opportunity to enjoy Odysseus’ talent for linguistic cunning.

Ruhl asked Wilson if she would recite the epic’s opening lines. Wilson took off her sweater and stood from her chair, straightening her posture, and with some formulaic, minor hand movements, delivered the lines… in Ancient Greek. I was surprised that she chose the Greek, for some reason assuming that Ruhl was asking her to read from her English translation. Perhaps I wasn’t the only one surprised, because after a couple more minutes of discussion, Ruhl asked Wilson if she would stand again and deliver them in English, offering her copy of the Odyssey for Wilson to read off. Wilson quickly refused, replying that she’d rather recite it from memory: “It’s more rhapsodic this way.”

It was at that moment that I recognized beneath her career as a writer, translator, and professor, was a relatable, somewhat irrational curiosity to this ancient world, one that is imaginative and almost always born from some exposure to Greek mythology we have as children.

As I watched her, I was transported to my ninth grade English class in Catholic high school, where I had to recite twenty-four chosen lines from The Odyssey from memory. I chose to recite Odysseus’ stringing of the bow, mistakenly thinking those were the lines in which he actually murders the suitors with his arrows. Then, once a year in Greek class for the next three years, in a tradition called “Declamation Day,” I’d have to do the same thing, except in Ancient Greek.

As she recited her lines, the humor of it all hit me, as it sometimes does, snapping me out of Ancient Greece. I thought of myself as a high schooler, in my blue blazer, nervously answering questions from Classics professors about nostos; Wilson sweating on stage, reciting from memory, in a dead language, a made-up story, like our lives depended on it. All this serious erudition that spawns, ultimately, from a mythology centered around gods and goddesses who were born from their fathers’ head.

It’s funny that I approached the movie defending Nolan’s right to be creative and take risks because when I watched it, I found myself like Emily Wilson: disappointed in the dozens of things I would’ve done differently. The conversation made me think about her role as a translator, where there is a strange, unspecified gray area in which she is allowed to shape the story to her interpretation but only to a certain extent; she must find those moments in the epic that are ripe in ambiguity.

When asked by an audience member if she felt compelled to “give agency to characters [such as Penelope] who lacked it,” she replied, almost viscerally, “I’m not trying to liberate a fictional character. That, to me, seems strange.” What are the limits in adaptation when it comes to film? Ultimately, that the Odyssey is generating this much discussion around its message is a testament to why it sustains – that it is in its fluid nature and history to be manipulated, toyed with, and reimagined. Nolan’s film has the potential to impact the public consciousness about the story. Will it establish its own chapter in the oral history of the Odyssey? Whether or not you think he has transformed the story in the spirit of Homer will decide if it deserves to.

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– You won’t change the world with what you do,
And since this frankness seems to have such charms for you,
I tell you, frankly, you’ve become so querulous
That nowadays the world finds you ridiculous.
You turn your nose up, claim our modern manners shock,
But everyone around thinks you’re a laughing stock.

– Well, good, damn it! Yes, good! I ask for nothing more.
I’m quite delighted, that’s what I’ve been hoping for.
Since everyone I know seems hateful in my eyes,
I’d be disgusted, if they thought that I was wise.

(from Moliere, The Misanthrope)

Has any serious writer in our time been so widely maligned as Jonathan Franzen? After his public scuffle with Oprah made him a household name, he came out against the internet – and especially against Twitter culture – a decade too early, in those dulcet Obama years when guys like Zuck and Dorsey were still hailed as visionaries, social media as this radical new technology on the brink of liberating the Arab world. Yet instead of freeing the good people of Egypt and Iran, it now appears these media technologies have enslaved us.

Franzen was called a misogynist and worse for dissing Twitter and its attendant websites, Vulture, Salon, Jezebel, et al. The legion of haters have defined Franzen’s public persona, and even cooler heads still posit that Franzen, though an excellent novelist, is a mediocre essayist.

In “Hating Jonathan Franzen”, for instance, Kevin Power proposes to survey Franzen’s essays – but allows the haters to define his work:

Successive waves of online Franzen-hatred have generally taken the form of ad hominem responses to essays, or to remarks made in interviews, or to his occasional appearances on television. That Franzen’s opinions – expressed in forms, very much including the essay, that he has not mastered and that tend to serve him poorly – so often go against the contemporary grain (for instance his distrust of social media) or situate him squarely in a trainspotterish cul de sac of hobbyism (all that birdwatching) mean that he is, from the point of view of the virtue-signalling culture warriors of Twitter, a soft target. Here, once again, Franzen may have to take some of the blame. It’s difficult to think of another contemporary novelist who is served so poorly by out-of-context quotation, or by his own inability to craft acceptable soundbites.

It is very strange to blame a writer for offering opinions that “go against the contemporary grain,” especially when the example provided – “his distrust of social media” – is a point on which Franzen had already proved right in 2019, when this piece was published. Franzen says what he believes, and he has almost always been on target. We shouldn’t hold it against him that a bunch of Twitter gangleaders haven’t liked what he had to say. And I think it perverse that we should expect a serious writer to “craft acceptable soundbites.”

Let us try to take Franzen at his word. On this front, Power describes Franzen’s essays as “cogent, cranky, shapeless, brilliant, bewilderingly slight, sharply observed, fascinatingly confessional, beset by scruples, oddly informal, and weirdly weightless,” and concludes that Franzen “has not developed either a consistent essayistic style nor a particularly distinctive set of preoccupations.”

I reject wholesale the claim that Franzen does not present a cohesive style and worldview. If his essay collections are unfocused, it’s because they’re made up of pieces that ran independently in various magazines. This is the nature of an essay collection: the pieces don’t have to add up, so long as each essay is interesting and cohesive in itself. And they are, though Franzen’s tendency to relate ideas and stories through his own personal experience seems to flummox Power.

What’s more, Franzen’s essayistic oeuvre does add up to a cohesive whole. Broadly, Franzen is a conservationist, an anti-capitalist, an apocalyptic anti-modernist. He identifies acceleration as the essential quality of modernity, and he understands that the other side of change is death, the death of you and me, of everything you’ve ever loved, of poetry and humanity, of the Earth.

In Franzen’s time, capitalistic media technologies – cable TV, the internet, social media – have eroded the once-great literary culture that he and I hold dear. Meanwhile, the threats of nuclear war and global warming make it painfully likely that humans and their machines will bring about the end of the world sooner rather than later.

So what are we to do? How can you live in the face of the apocalypse?

These are the questions Franzen has committed, again and again and again in his work, to figuring out. So let us proceed to his essays, and you can tell me, Dear Reader, whether you find them “weirdly weightless.”

Why Bother?

Before The Corrections established Franzen’s reputation as a novelist, he was better known for his essays, especially “Why Bother?”, which ran in Harper’s in 1996.1 Colloquially known as “the Harper’s essay,” it was one of those pieces that gets passed around endlessly, a discourse igniter on the state of the novel in a world dominated by television.

The crisis for Franzen is personal: having published two novels, neither especially successful, he found himself “paralyzed” in writing his third novel, as he attempted to address our culture amidst “the banal ascendancy of television, the electronic fragmentation of public discourse.”

We live in a culture that is not just indifferent to the arts, but hostile to them. Money reigns, and its corporate servants – those who control the media machine – are steadily winning their eighty-year war to replace literature with more profitable entertainments.

Franzen recognizes this. He admits the situation depresses him, and speaks of embracing what he calls depressive realism: “You decide that it’s the world that’s sick, and that the resistance of refusing to function in such a world is healthy.”

But depressive realism, appropriate or not, turns out to be a dead end, at least for the sake of writing fiction:

All the available evidence suggests that you have become a person who’s impossible to live with and no fun to talk to. And as you increasingly feel, as a novelist, that you are one of the last remaining repositories of depressive realism and of the radical critique of the therapeutic society that it represents, the burden of news-bringing that is placed on your art becomes overwhelming. You ask yourself, why am I bothering to write these books? I can’t pretend the mainstream will listen to the news I have to bring. I can’t pretend I’m subverting anything, because any reader capable of decoding my subversive messages does not need to hear them (and the contemporary art scene is a constant reminder of how silly things get when artists start preaching to the choir). I can’t stomach any kind of notion that serious fiction is good for us, because I don’t believe that everything that’s wrong with the world has a cure, and even if I did, what business would I, who feel like the sick one, have in offering it? It’s hard to consider literature a medicine, in any case, when reading it serves mainly to deepen your depressing estrangement from the mainstream; sooner or later the therapeutically minded reader will end up fingering reading itself as the sickness.

Only from this rock bottom futility can Franzen begin to find a way forward. And in the back half of the piece, he pursues the answers to this question: in such a culture, why do we bother to read and write?

This question opens up the piece, and leads him to Shirley Brice Heath, a linguistic anthropologist, who defines two types of readers. The broader group, at least as of 1996, fits two preconditions: as children, their parents modeled the reading habit, and they found a peer with whom they could share the joy of reading.

But there’s also a second group. As Heath describes it:

There’s the social isolate — the child who from an early age felt very different from everyone around him. This is very, very difficult to uncover in an interview. People don’t like to admit that they were social isolates as children. What happens is you take that sense of being different into an imaginary world. But that world, then, is a world you can’t share with the people around you — because it’s imaginary. And so the important dialogue in your life is with the authors of the books you read. Though they aren’t present, they become your community.

Of the two groups, these social-isolate readers are far more likely to become writers: “If writing was the medium of communication within the community of childhood, it makes sense that when writers grow up they continue to find writing vital to their sense of connectedness.” Here Heath looks Franzen in the eye and tells him, “You are a socially isolated individual who desperately wants to communicate with a substantive imaginary world.”

In the thirty years since Franzen wrote this piece, I have to think the first class of readers has gotten smaller. As successive generations grow up with TV, and cable, and video games, and the internet, and smartphones, and social media, fewer adults model the reading habit, leading to fewer and fewer modelled-habit readers to model the habit for their own children.

But I have to think the second class only grows as our culture gets more alienating, community harder to come by. That carries implications for the balance between readers and writers – there’s less and less of a reading public, these days, relative to the writers themselves – but it also speaks to the durable core of the literary community.

In the back half of the essay, this discovery starts to shape Franzen’s behavior. Where once he sought to keep a Pynchon-like distance from the world, this work carried him back to this literary community:

In belatedly following my books out of the house, doing some journalism and even hitting a few parties, I’ve felt less as if I’m introducing myself to the world than as if I’m introducing the world to myself. Once I stepped outside my bubble of despair I found that almost everyone I met shared many of my fears, and that other writers shared all of them.

And, in the face of a technological corporate regime of relentless optimization, Franzen determines that the point of the novel isn’t to change the world, but to preserve things that are worth preserving:

The belief that unifies us is not that a novel can change anything but that it can preserve something . . . Whether they think about it or not, novelists are preserving a tradition of precise, expressive language; a habit of looking past surfaces into interiors; maybe an understanding of private experience and public context as distinct but interpenetrating; maybe mystery, maybe manners. Above all, they are preserving a community of readers and writers, and the way in which members of this community recognize each other is that nothing in the world seems simple to them.

Franzen did not have these answers in mind when he began this essay. His starting point is a personal and cultural crisis with no easy answers; throughout “Why Bother?” you see him grapple his way to an answer. This is one characteristic of Franzen’s essays: he writes to figure it out. He begins with an intractable problem and grapples with it until he uncovers a suitable answer.2

As a result, “Why Bother?” – like many of Franzen’s essays, and many great essays – is loose, but not structureless. There is real satisfaction in following his line of thought as it winds its way to the truth.

Four threads run through Franzen’s best essays. Two, including the above approach, are matters of technique. The other two are the central concerns which define Franzen’s belief system.

One of these concerns is his preoccupation with technological optimism, as promoted by corporate consumer capitalism. That is a complex bundle of shit, so let’s unwind it, bit by bit.

Oversized corporations have long held a domineering influence over American society and culture. In recent decades, this influence has grown with the corporations, as relaxed monopoly enforcements have allowed legacy companies such as Disney to double and triple in size, while newer players such as Google and Amazon expand relentlessly, gaining monopolistic holds on cultural-economic levers such as internet search and ecommerce.

Such companies control the media, and consolidation shows no sign of stopping or slowing. Simply because the Ellisons are willing to take on $54 billion in debt to buy Warner Brothers, the merger becomes inevitable, even though Warner is already a sizable and profitable company on its own, aside from all the debt that past mergers and acquisitions have saddled it with.

These corporations promote a top-down consumer culture. They want you to have mass culture experiences they can profit from – not open, localized experiences they cannot readily extract money from. The short story market, for instance, shriveled not because the audience suddenly abandoned it, but because advertisers in the ’50s and ’60s found television ads far more effective at getting people to buy stuff. As advertisers abandoned general interest magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post, these publications collapsed, crippling the market for magazine fiction.

Want a more recent example? The internet has enabled big corporations to take over local advertising; so Google, Facebook, Microsoft et al gobble up the ad dollars that once supported local newspapers. For many years, Google even coerced publishers to let down their paywalls, undermining the subscription model. If a publisher insisted on charging people for content, Google wouldn’t surface them; and since Google drives more web traffic than every other app or website combined, that’s not really a threat an independent publisher can stand up to. By developing new technologies that make money more efficiently, massive tech companies such as Google bankrupt smaller publishers and local news outlets.

As you can see, these corporations rely on technology to extend their reach ever further. The internet, which was promised to democratize our culture, has instead allowed massive corporations to stretch their tentacles ever further into American life. When these technologies hit critical mass, they’re not so easy to resist. As most Americans turned to app-based dating, for instance, we become less comfortable looking for each other in the real world.

If gut-remodeling the culture wasn’t enough, these tech megacorporations insisted they were making the world a better place, and the media largely took them at their word. For Franzen, this enforced optimism seems the most egregious part of the package; I have to imagine the depressive realist in him is a little happier now that the tech barons aren’t pretending to be the good guys. It’s certainly a consolation (if insufficient) that our media no longer treats these men as heroes.

To sum it up: Franzen’s big problem is that megacorporations are using technology to hollow out the culture and replace it with dull consumerism, and they are insisting that this is actually a good thing, and we should all be happy about it. To the extent that many people are happy about it, well! that just speaks to the rot, to the rot in our culture.

This, it would turn out, was not a very popular viewpoint.

The Kraus Project

In Power’s attempt to survey Franzen’s essays, he concludes that they are incohesive. But he doesn’t seem to have read The Kraus Project, which is unfortunate, as this is Franzen’s one cohesive essayistic book, and the keystone to his oeuvre.

In The Kraus Project, Franzen offers a heavily annotated translation of Karl Kraus, whom he identifies as a literary father figure. Kraus was a fin-de-siecle Viennese shit-stirrer extraordinaire, who critiqued the shallow newspaper culture of his time in a paper of his own, Die Fackel.3 The book is interspersed with extensive footnotes, including essay-length digressions by Franzen as well conversational back-and-forth with Kraus scholar Paul Reitter and Austrian novelist Daniel Kehlmann.4

The title here has a double meaning: on the one hand, it describes Franzen and company’s work translating and annotating Kraus’s work into a new book. It also refers to Kraus’s project as a writer, which Franzen promises not only to carry to us in this vessel, but to carry onward in his own work as a writer.

For instance, one of Kraus’s – and Franzen’s – fixations is the feuilleton. The feuilleton was a sort of cultural gossip section that ran in the newspapers of 19^th and early 20^th century Europe; when Franzen talks about the feuilletonists, he’s also talking about all the pithy websites – Slate, Salon, Gawker, the Huffington Post, Jezebel, Vox – that coalesced around Twitter in the 2010s.

These sites were substantially ads-based and had much clearer user data than any publisher would have had a decade prior. You could see in real time what articles were getting clicked on and read, allowing editors to rapidly shape their efforts in pursuit of the digital audience.

But text-on-web has never monetized well via ads, except when targeted at very specific audiences.5 Because ads didn’t make much money, these sites needed their staff and contract writers to crank out a lot of pieces with a decent chance of breaking out on social and on search. The most efficient way to do this was to take a story from elsewhere – such as an interview or Twitter controversy – and cover it with just enough spin to call it, if not original, at least non-duplicate.

The Kraus Project is the key to understanding Franzen’s essays, and the dialogue between Franzen, Reitter, and Kehlmann is Franzen’s way of modeling what healthy literary conversation should look like. Which is to say, not Twitter. I’m going to excerpt Franzen at length here, because we need to reckon with him on his own terms, and this is the crux of his argument against digital media:

In my own little corner of the world, which is to say American fiction, Jeff Bezos of Amazon may not be the antichrist, but he surely looks like one of the four horsemen. Amazon wants a world in which books are either self-published or published by Amazon itself, with readers dependent on Amazon reviews in choosing books, and with authors responsible for their own promotion. The work of yakkers and tweeters and braggers, and of people with the money to pay somebody to churn out hundreds of five-star reviews for them, will flourish in that world. But what happens to the people who became writers because yakking and tweeting and bragging felt to them like intolerably shallow forms of social engagement? What happens to the people who want to communicate in depth, individual to individual, in the quiet and permanence of the printed word, and who were shaped by their love of writers who wrote when publication still assured some kind of quality control and literary reputations were more than a matter of self-promotional decibel levels? As fewer and fewer readers are able to find their way, amid all the noise and disappointing books and phony reviews, to the work produced by the new generation of this kind of writer, Amazon is well on its way to making writers into the kind of prospectless workers whom its contractors employ in its warehouses, laboring harder for less and less, with no job security, because the warehouses are situated in places where they’re the only business hiring. And the more of the population that lives like those workers, the greater the downward pressure on book prices and the greater the squeeze on conventional booksellers, because when you’re not making much money you want your entertainment for free, and when your life is hard you want instant gratification (”Overnight free shipping!”).

But so the physical book goes on the endangered-species list, so responsible book reviewers go extinct, so independent bookstores disappear, so literary novelists are conscripted into Jennifer-Weinerish self-promotion, so the Big Six publishers get killed and devoured by Amazon: this looks like an apocalypse only if most of your friends are writers, editors or booksellers.

Franzen here is describing a multi-pronged assault by corporate media technology on literary culture. On Amazon’s part, that means devaluing and commodifying books while taking control over distribution, so that Amazon can make more money at authors’ expense. For this to happen, the existing critical apparatus must be degraded and replaced by a combination of customer reviews and social media discourse.

Much of this line of thinking is effectively taken for granted in the 2020s. But in 2013, the tweeters and their accompanying websites ridiculed Franzen for his attacks on Twitter.

In the L Magazine, Kristin Iverson asked, “who can blame him for not understanding what the appeal of Twitter is? Which, by the way, the appeal is fun, fast information, and we should all refuse to feel guilty about enjoying that.” As though something cannot be “fun” and have destructive consequences for the individual and society.

Writing in Slate, Katy Waldman provides a perfect example of the pithy Twitter-summary. In response to Franzen’s notion that “many writers were ‘feeling absolutely coerced into this constant self-promotion’” on social media, she begins with a bit of ridicule: “I have a confession. I was coerced into writing this post. By Twitter.” She drops in a Weiner tweet for good measure:

Writers being “coerced” onto social media instead of developing their craft. Coerced by whom? How? “10 tweets by noon or the puppy gets it?”

It’s hard to argue the point with someone who seemingly does not understand coercion takes forms that aren’t a literal gun to the head. This ridicule is especially rich coming from a writer being paid $38k a year to churn out Twitter summaries for Slate.com, all freely available because Google won’t let publishers charge for content as Google gobbles up internet ad revenues for itself. If you don’t see any coercion there, I don’t know what to tell you.

Throughout her piece, Waldman ridicules Franzen without addressing him:

Perhaps the discrepancy between Franzen’s facts and the tweeters’ delusions is one of those “supernaturally destructive consequences” of “the frank monopolism of the techno-titans,” whose “infernal new machine seems increasingly to obey nothing but its own developmental logic,” being “far more enslavingly addictive, and far more pandering to people’s worst impulses, than newspapers ever were.”

Or perhaps the truth is something even darker. Perhaps we are all characters in a sprawling Jonathan Franzen novel. He is writing our reality, but he hasn’t yet gotten to the part where shadowy Internet overlords banish Henry James, Mark Twain, and the rest from the literary canon retroactively because they weren’t on Twitter.6

This is hard stuff to unpack, because she’s not actually saying anything. Before we proceed, we should let Franzen have his say, unsnipped:

Kraus in this passage is evoking the Sorcerer’s Apprentice – the unintended unleashing of supernaturally destructive consequences. Although he’s talking about the modern newspaper, his critique applies, if anything, even better to contemporary technoconsumerism. For Kraus, the infernal thing about newspapers was their fraudulent coupling of Enlightenment ideals with a relentless pursuit of profit and power. With technoconsumerism, a humanist rhetoric of “empowerment” and “creativity” and “freedom” and “connection” and “democracy” abets the frank monopolism of the techno-titans; the new infernal machine seems increasingly to obey nothing but its own developmental logic, and it’s far more enslavingly addictive, and far more pandering to people’s worst impulses, than newspapers ever were.

Waldman characterizes these statements as grandiose and paranoid. But what would she dispute? Would she assert that the tech oligarchs have not achieved monopolies the likes of which we have not seen in 100 years? Would she argue that these monopolies are good, not ill? No, because that would require making an actual stand.

Does the growth imperative make social media addictive by design? I don’t have to argue the case – not because we now take it for granted, but because Waldman here does not argue otherwise. She does not dispute that social media is addictive, that it panders to people’s worst impulses, or that these aspects are having a negative impact on our culture. Because that would require taking an actual stand, and Waldman does not have the guts or the ground to stand against Franzen on this point, or on any point.

In 2013, the web sure seemed democratic, but it was also surveilling its users and making it harder for artists to make a living, all while consolidating money and power in the hands of wealthier oligarchs and corporate bureaucrats than the world has ever seen. Waldman, apparently, has nothing to say about this, other than ‘big if true!’

We now take Franzen’s argument for granted, but the general response in 2013 was ‘let’s laugh at the old crank yelling at the cloud’. It was a dumb time.

Save what you can

Earlier I mentioned the four threads that run through Franzen’s essays. One is his tendency to write to find out.7 Another is his opposition to the corporate technoconsumerist machine that dominates our culture; this is the most central theme of The Kraus Project.

Franzen’s other recurring interest is preservationism. In “Why Bother?” he defines the point of the novel as preserving things, most of all the literary community. The Kraus Project is itself an act of preservation: Franzen is celebrating Kraus and carrying his message forward to our time, and he’s doing so for several reasons.

For one, Kraus’s concerns are more relevant than ever. More important, Franzen loves Kraus’s writing and wants to share it, not just for our sake but also for Kraus’s, since Kraus is not exactly canonized in the English-language literary world.

Franzen specifically chooses to translate and annotate “Nestroy and Posterity,” in which Kraus is, in 1912, doing the same thing for Johann Nestroy, celebrating an underrated Viennese dramatist from the mid-19^th century. As Kehlmann notes,

Kraus’s persistent championing of Nestroy had consequences: Nestroy today is acknowledged to be perhaps the greatest comic genius in Austrian literature. His plays are produced and he’s read in school; he’s a classic whose literary status is no longer in dispute—at least in Austria.

Though Franzen is no right-winger, there is something conservative about his tendency to insist that progress is not always a good thing, and that bits of the past and present are worth holding onto, in spite of the forward motion of civilization. There is a tradition here that traces back from Rousseau to Thoreau to Kraus to our own contemporaries, such as Jonathan Franzen and Jenny Odell.

This instinct comes out directly in his essays from the 2010s about conservationism in the face of global warming. In “Save What You Love”, for instance, he writes:

As long as mitigating climate change trumps all other environmental concerns, no landscape on earth is safe. Like globalism, climatism alienates. Americans today live far from the ecological damage that their consumption habits cause, and even if future consumers are more enlightened about carbon footprints, and fill their tanks with certified green fuel, they’ll still be alienated. Only an appreciation of nature as a collection of specific natural habitats, rather than as an abstract thing that is “dying,” can avert the complete denaturing of the world.

The surprising thing about preservation is that it is not oriented towards the past. What’s gone is gone, and there ain’t no bringing it back. We could orient ourselves to the future, but that’s not very sustaining, since the future is not really accessible to us, and because we’re all doomed to perish before long. Instead, Franzen orients his conservationism to the present, which is the only time in which we can build and sustain a meaningful relationship to the world we live in.

Though Franzen carried this line of thinking forward in another landmark essay, “What If We Stopped Pretending?” we will leave his environmental concerns here. I will only say that his basis for this essay – that we’re all effectively doomed – he has not yet been proven right. We can only hope that it never will be. But in the years since he wrote it, it seems to me we have declared a premature victory while continuing to build gas-fired power plants to fuel data centers no one really wants, all so we can put maybe a billion people out of work. Anyway!

Of course we’re doomed, all of us, inevitably and irrevocably. My first real love was poetry; whether or not we incinerate the Earth, that grand four-thousand-year-old tradition seems to have run its course.

We’re doomed, so what? What will you do now, with the situation you’ve been given?

Let’s get more specific: what is left of literature, and how will we live with it?

We are living through a total cultural reorganization. It is not over yet. As the literary public shrinks, the literary community becomes ever more essential. And yet our remaining literary institutions – chief among them The New Yorker and the New York Times’ book desk – are not aligned with this situation. They do not serve the literary community but instead exist to launder cultural cachet to bourgeois readers who want to appear refined. The New Yorker’s real product is not writing but covers, cartoons, and tote bags.

This misalignment between literary institutions and literary culture exposes these institutions. Never before have they been so vulnerable.

They are vulnerable in part because of another contradiction: their relationship to the literary audience is coupled with a profound ignorance of what readers really enjoy. They launder cultural cachet, which is not the same as sustenance, and so their readers are figuratively thin and pretty but starved for stories that stir the soul. The books they celebrate are predicated on vain moralizing. He who reads such a book might find his social values affirmed, or it might make him feel smart or self-righteous. But it will not entertain – which Franzen (and I) insist is the first and possibly only honest duty of fiction.

I believe the literary public can be rebuilt. We have already reached the zenith of screens in schools; as more parents insist their kids put away the tablet and open a damn book, we can anticipate something of a rebound.

What’s more, literary fiction’s most direct rival – prestige TV – has fallen off from its prepandemic peak. Making television is profoundly expensive, and now that the easy money’s gone, the studios are understandably sticking with safer bets. Which is to say, a lot of unoriginal IP-driven fare. Succession has no successor; if you want an exciting original story of high literary merit, you’ll have to open a book.

So it is incumbent upon us that readers will find therein a text that at least tries to be as dramatic as A Farewell to Arms or Crossroads or Beloved or Absalom Absalom. I’m not saying you have to be on that level – but if you’re not trying to write something dramatic, what’s the point? That’s a rhetorical question, I won’t indulge excuses. You have to reward readers, starting on page one.

If we are to have a literary breakthrough it will require a movement. Will: future tense. This movement will come from the literary community, from the durable core of writer-readers like you and me. So I beseech you, go and befriend your fellow writers, the Arturo Belanos and Ulises Limas of the world, the beautiful real-ass nobodies. Send someone a DM. If you’re in Los Angeles, let it be me and we’ll grab a drink or whatever. Whether you’re here to stay or just passing through – we’re all passing through in the long run, even Shakespeare, he passed, he’s through – the scenes will be local and they will not revolve around New York.

Because before you can have a movement, you’ve got to have a scene. Better yet, a hundred scenes. Lately I’ve been thinking about David Byrne’s eight rules to making a scene, as written in How Music Works. How can we apply these to fostering literary community, whether locally or in a magazine or online?

1. There must be a venue that is of appropriate size and location in which to present new material

2. The artists should be allowed to play their own material

3. Performing musicians must get in for free on their off nights (and maybe get free beer too)

4. There must be a sense of alienation from the prevailing music scene

5. Rent must be low—and it must stay low

6. Bands must be paid fairly

7. Social transparency must be encouraged

8. It must be possible to ignore the band when necessary

Some of these rules are more straightforward than others. How can we make it possible to ignore the band when necessary? One thing he’s getting at is that a club shouldn’t be purely focused on the performance; to be a scene you’ve got to have room for conversation and activity that has nothing to do with whatever’s playing. So what does that mean for the magazine, or for Substack? What do any of these rules mean when applied to literary culture?

That could be a subject for another essay – our present one has ended.

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Dublin poet Karl Parkinson’s fourth collection begins with a Biblical epigraph from the Gospel of St. Matthew in which Jesus admonishes “every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not.” The implication is clear enough: the poems that follow will have little time for those among us who fail to walketh like they talketh. Though not placed in the very middle of the book, “Yer Not From The Same Class As Me” feels like something of a centerpiece. In addition to working well on the page, it’s a poem that one could easily imagine garnering laughs and applause as a performance piece, no surprise when considering Parkinson’s roots as a spoken word artist. There must be myriad reasons (some may even be justifiable) why the last few years have seen an increase in so-called “class-passing” (the phenomenon of people from traditionally middle-class backgrounds identifying as working class), but this is not the place for this kind of sociological analysis. Whatever the argument may be, the speaker of the poem is, quite frankly, not having it:

if yerwan who’s Daddy owns a farm is workin class

and yerman who’s mammy’s the school principal are workin class

then don’t even fuckin call me workin class

And, later on:

If you’ve ever bein stung by a micro-aggression

then yer not from the same class as me,

cause we’re been hit with macro aggressions

on the fuckin daily,

while you’re gettin triggered by a word,

we’re out here gettin triggered by a gun.

The serious and the humorous are balanced well in this poem. On a personal level, I was grateful for the unlocking of a forgotten memory of smashing open a chocolate Easter egg with my forehead, though I’d long been blissfully unaware of its class implications. I also nodded in glad agreement when a particular pet hate of mine was addressed:

If yuh pronounce poem, po-em, yer defo not from the same fucking

class as me

Like James Joyce’s Pomes Penyeach, I very much prefer the one-syllable pronunciation of the word. Though irreverent shots are fired (and laughs are had) at poets who talk “about poetry more than / they write poetry” and “posh dopes” on Twitter, Song of the Fallen is also shot through with an elegiac sense of loss. But first, the reader must pass through some nightmarish visions of widescale destruction.

Apocalyptic images abound from the off, the wolves of the title poem howling “to one another in the dark opal hued morning light.” This is followed by “The City Sacked” in which a Homerian “wine dark sea” is depicted “full of bloated corpses” and the “flesh melts from the bones” of “those who thought they knew the score.” This all juxtaposed against a portentous image of: “Ravens circling / in the mauve sky.” In the next poem, ‘The Chorus Of The Cataclysm,” we find ourselves “Lying here in the black mud with the dead things all around us” while the “bodies we piled up” are “all blue and swollen, some had fish stuck to them.” In these opening poems, Parkinson displays a knack for constructing clear and memorable images of decay and loss amongst imagined post-disaster scapes. Nevertheless, wide-angled representations of large-scale ruination soon give way to more personal and focused lamentations.

In “Counting the Dead” the speaker moves at a melancholy pace through a litany of departed loved-ones, from his grandmother “gone before I was even born” to the first Buddha “done in by his last meal.” Though the range of subjects broadens towards the end to encompass a wider sense of ecological grief (“the slaughter of animals, / the murder of bees, / the annihilation of whole species”) the most heartbreaking section of this captivating poem involves the passing of the speaker’s father:

My Da, he passed away when I was eleven,

it was me who answered the door at two

in the morning to the Garda,

they said he wasn’t in any trouble,

as if a brain aneurism

wasn’t any trouble,

as if dying at forty-three

wasn’t any trouble,

as if they were angels in blue uniforms

come to tell me that death was holy

while I was still young…

These lines exemplify what Parkinson does so well. Though discomposed and angered by the carelessness of language displayed by those in power when interacting with the vulnerable, the speaker manages to momentarily quell the simmering fires of resentment by allowing these lubberly cops to morph into angelic blue messengers. Almost. (Later on, in “Aggro,” the speaker will have to once again control his rage, this time when witnessing a shameful display of condescending righteousness in a local shop.) Lest the reader feel alienated by the specificities of the speaker’s grief, we are encouraged to add our own names to this catalogue of bereavement: “I am counting my dead, / and you may count yours,” adding a communal feel to this act of poetic remembrance as the poem ends with the gentle stoicism of the Buddha’s reminder that:

All that’s born is subject to decay,

So all that’s born should seek Nirvana

and end their suffering,

come take the raft to the other shore

and be born no more, and win over Death at last.

The sense of communal sorrows is further explored in “I Know,” an effective engagement with the art of empathy:

I know the scars are long and the wounds are deep.

I know the children are hungry and Christmas is near.

I know that your father is dying in a hospital bed.

I know that your eyesight is fading.

That your teeth are loose.

That your back aches.

That your lungs bark.

That your hands shake.

A refusal to turn eyes away from the horrors of physical degradation gives this poem its most enduring image:

I look at the photo of the dead youth on the wall

I remember the nights in the hospice—The screaming,

the death rattle

Throughout this book, an insistence on lamenting the departed is paired with clear awareness and acceptance of the inevitability of our demise. It is this sense of combined sorrow and fortitude that gives these poems their power. In “Cousin” after the death of Sharon, the poet wants the loss to be registered by both soul and body, to be felt on the surface of the skin, not to be sugarcoated: “I hope it rains all day long / when they lay you to rest.” In “Today I Am Older Than My Father” the poet imagines a meeting with his Da in a Virgilian spirit realm:

Should I meet him in a dream

in Hades, or Paradise,

he will be the younger man, not I.

Though there is sadness in this imagined encounter between the poet and his perennially younger father (how could there not be?), the poet’s appreciation for his own continued earthly existence manages to swaddle the gloomy heart of the poem, tempering the anguish:

It is the hair on my beard that

grows white now, and not his.

All fine by me –it’s a privilege

to have King Priam’s white beard.

Contradicting my assertions about the continued sense of fortitude and, at times, serenity in the face of corporeal demise that many of these poems display, “This World” wounds the reader by doing just the opposite. No literary depiction of snow in Ireland can avoid being compared to James Joyce’s that falls faintly throughout the universe “upon all the living and the dead” so it might as well be embraced. This is exactly what Parkinson does in the opening stanza:

It is the first day of march in 2024

and the snow is falling faintly

all over Ireland once again...

On the “hills of Monaghan / and the rooftops of the blocks of Dublin” snow is general all over the island, soon to be melted to slush by heavy rainfall “like marshmallows melting in fire.” And the resultant white landscape will be both ravishing and cruel as our mothers and fathers will struggle, weakened by the cold:

Someday this whole world will be covered in white

and it will be terrible and beautiful and true,

this world where our fathers can’t get out of chairs

when once they bounded so strong and nimble and stag-like,

and oh our Mothers all die, how can our Mothers just die one day?

Is the question that brings the poem to its close juvenile or naive? Perhaps. But it is also devastating in its direct simplicity and, crucially, it hits harder in the wake of the resilience on display in the surrounding poems.

In “Why I write poems” the following responses (amongst many others) are provided:

Because there is something and not nothing

[...]

Because there is a Holy Spirit that moves upon the water

and in the darkness

The book is peppered with words like “Hades,” “Paradise,” “Bardo,” “Samsara”…there is a clear multi-denominational spirituality that runs through the collection and, though the more apocalyptic poems suggest a cosmic comeuppance might be coming for us all, there is plenty of space for serenity and love, as in these lines from “Who I Love The Most”:

And I love all the junkies in Ireland and around the world

[...]

I love single mothers on the dole. I love the downtrodden.

I love those who must steal.

I love those who kill themselves.

Luckily for the reader there is, clearly, plenty to love in Karl Parkinson’s Song of the Fallen. Though I was particularly drawn to the elegiac poems, the fact that they find themselves nestled so closely to more cataclysmic lyrics allows them to be appreciated on the individual level but also as part of a larger depiction of the persistence of hope and love in a context of annihilation. For this reason and others, it’s well worth your time.

The Song Of The Fallen

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SUMMER ’26

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FICTION FROM THE UNDERGROUND

The summer issue focuses on fiction and poetry. We are publishing honest, rebellious stories imbued with life’s real flavor. The staid legacy magazines—and their progeny—would never publish half these pieces for political reasons. We are grateful to them for their poor taste and misplaced fear. They are the Salon. We are the Salon des Refusés.

Here are a few of the spreads:

FEATURED WRITERS

Fiction

Karl Parkinson ()

Poetry

Photo Essays

Vignette

Literary Criticism

Food Criticism

Interviews

and

PRE ORDER

The first half of the year has been a blast. We published the work of many deserving artists who’d never appeared in print before. We sold out two runs of our second issue, The Dumb Phone, across four stores in New York. We threw a rollicking party with 300+ wonderful attendees. We published a multitude of exciting online pieces, ranging from a vigorous defense of F. Scott Fitzgerald to a trenchant criticism of the millennial novel to an enthralling reflection on the great Denis Johnson.

The momentum is strong. But the project is just getting started. The goal is to give literature back to the people—to lure it out of hiding in safe spaces and staid libraries—to make literature a cornerstone of culture again. There is still a long way to go in pursuit of these aims.

And so, once again, we’re inviting submissions from the people. Before getting into the particulars, here’s some high-level context, edited from the original call for submissions:

We’re looking for courageous authors willing to offer honest, raw perspectives. Great rebellious writing is the transposition of late-night conversations with friends onto the page. It is the expression of ideas or feelings the writer knows to be true, yet is unwilling to share at work happy hours or “polite” dinner parties in Portland. For certain, the writer cannot submit these ideas to The New Yorker, The Atlantic, or any premier university journal. As much as mainstream publications wish that Truth was ideological, it is not. With open arms, Non Grata welcomes the stories that have been gathering dust on your hard drive, and the scandalous ideas you haven’t yet put to paper. We’re also here for conventional essays and stories, too. The main thing we care about is that each piece is exhilarating, stimulating, beautiful, and/or simply enjoyable to read. The best way to get a sense of what we’re looking for is to regularly follow what we publish: You’ll see what we’re up to pretty quick.

SUBMISSION CATEGORIES

FICTION & POETRY

• Short stories that (1) move quickly (2) speak honestly (3) are five thousand words or less.

• Open to all forms of poetry.

• Accepted submissions will feature in a print edition because the reading experience for fiction isn’t yet good enough online.

BOOK REVIEWS, LITERARY CRITICISM, & NOVELISTS

• Open to novels from any period as well as contemporary and/or independent works (especially if the writer is on Substack).

• Preference for pieces that (1) combine biography with criticism (2) include discussion of technical detail, literary theory, and/or literary history.

• Personal reflections on great writers.

• Author profiles + interviews.

• Editor’s Note: We are actively looking to commission the following pieces:

  • Review of The Trial + how Kafka’s work as an insurance officer influenced the novel.

  • Review of Post Office + mini biography of Bukowski.

  • Reviews of Major Arcana (John Pistelli), Colossus (Ross Barkan),What’s So Great About the Great Books? (Naomi Kanakia).

  • Pieces on Less Than Zero (Bret Easton Ellis); Inherent Vice (Thomas Pynchon); any novel by Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, Émile Zola.

• Example: “There Is No Great Millennial Novel” by ; “Legends of Zelda: The Truth About F. Scott Fitzgerald” by ; “Reflections on the Great Denis Johnson” by ; “On Writing No. 2” with Jim Shepard.

POLEMICS & CULTURAL ESSAYS

• Anything that gets people off their phones and helps them rethink their relationships with technology.

• Pieces on dating, romance, love, masculinity, femininity, drinking, smoking, gambling, “gooning,” sports, music, pornography, entertainment, capitalism, work, careers, cities, pop culture figures, et al.

• Pieces that question the predominant narratives or rebuke / defend controversial figures.

• Editor’s Note: We are actively looking to commission the following pieces:

  • In defense of / against Timothée Chalamet.

  • In defense of / against Dimes Square (and its figures).

• Examples: “How New York Killed Culture” by ; “Living in Public” by ; “Where the Mermaids Sing” by .

We offer payment for the pieces we accept. Each receives in-depth editing before it goes out into the world. We want you to feel proud of the work you showcase in Non Grata; it should be a luminous reflection of your mind at a moment in time.

To submit, send an email to hello@magazinenongrata.com. The piece should be an email attachment (.pdf, .docx) or a Google Doc. Please include the category in the subject line, a short description in the body, and the word count. Every submission must abide by our A.I. policy. If you have questions about it, please send us a note. Improper / undisclosed uses of A.I. can result in a lifetime ban from Non Grata.

As always, thank you to all of our patrons, writers, readers, friends, fans, family members—this project would not be possible without you.

— MNG

Non Grata is a print magazine and online publication aiming to revitalize literature and give it back to the people. Print offerings are available on our website. Digital subscriptions (both free and paid) are available via Substack:

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Life goes into new forms.

— Neal Cassady, the epigraph from Denis Johnson’s Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

Sometime in my mid-twenties I learned what it’d feel like to die if you knew it was coming. To hear your last heartbeats—Boom! Boom!—before the curtain fell. Before you slid finally into the warm, black bath. The very last one.

In May of 2017, Denis Johnson passed from liver cancer, a situation wrought by a dormant case of Hepatitis C—a case he’d contracted via shared heroin needles many decades before he’d ever learned of his illness. His work always, even at its most uneven, seemed to emerge from another place, a mode of writing that cannot possibly be taught. Because he had spent the 1970s addicted to heroin, alcohol, and much else, and ran around with criminals and was almost always destitute—emotionally and financially—Johnson had already prepared for the moments before death, doing so as he composed drafts of what would become his debut novel, Angels:

He was in the middle of taking the last breath of his life before he realized he was taking it. But it was all right. Boom! Unbelievable! And another coming? How many of those things do you mean to give away? He got right in the dark between heartbeats, and rested there. And then he saw that another one wasn’t going to come. That’s it. That’s the last. He looked at the dark. I would like to take this opportunity, he said, to pray for another human being.

A few days after I’d finished Angels for the second time, I was living in Gainesville, Florida. It was 2017, shortly after Johnson’s passing. In the midst of a shiftless, agonizing year I was looking for something that had the feel of restoration and renewal. Since I was going bald, a haircut would not do. I couldn’t afford a massage. So I drove to the Death or Glory Tattoo Parlour and had “He got right in the dark between heartbeats, and rested there” tattooed on my right tricep. (Talk about a performative male reader!) When you’re down and out, you don’t spend what money you do have on massages. You spend it on things that don’t do you any good. I am glad I got the tattoo.

I’m sure that night I’d gone from the tattoo parlor to the Palomino pool hall, or Main Street Bar & Billiards, or The Dugout with my buddy Billy to get drunk and do bumps of coke and chain-smoke American Spirits. Months later, after I moved from Gainesville to teach writing in Tennessee, and study on ways in which I could be a functioning human being, Billy went into treatment.

Billy had reserved a stretch of shelf for Johnson’s books, and when we’d lived together in a basement apartment a couple years before in Missoula, Montana, both studying creative writing, I scanned the spines of some stuff I hadn’t yet read: titles like Already Dead and Resuscitation of a Hanged Man, in spiritual and aural communion with what I’d already devoured: Angels. Train Dreams. Jesus’ Son. Titles that seemed to call from the fray between this world and another, howling out from a Shadow America I spent much of my early adulthood looking for: in the dregs of empty bottles, in pool halls, in Western small town dives, and in the bars and clubs where Billy and I played music. From Montana to Wyoming to Idaho to the Pacific Coast Highway, we traveled the landscapes and psychospheres Johnson had plumbed in Train Dreams and Already Dead. Places he’d lived in. The same America I’d listened for in The Basement Tapes and Love and Theft and Robert Johnson’s King of the Delta Blues Singers. In the Rockabilly Noir of David Lynch’s Wild at Heart, in Greil Marcus’s Old, Weird America.

You see now that I do not seek to demystify Denis Johnson, to demystify any of the abovementioned cultural ephemera of the Weird American Century—to demystify would be the aim of a responsible, clear-headed writer or reporter. I am not. I seek to mystify. I seek to mystify everything worth mystifying. Baby, that’s all we’ve got.

In our modern times, an age in which even the pleasure of gliding under a sparkling theater marquee and entering a singular dreamworld is threatened to become a pastime for the near-dead—in the name of God-Almighty-in-a-godless-world—may we please, please still have our myths, heroes, and legends? Without them, why would we try to create anything at all? People laughed when Timothée Chalamet said he wanted to be one of “the greats,” but I thought, good kid, good kid.

#

Like Bob Dylan, Denis Johnson’s genius emerged via experience, metamorphosis, and worship. Like Dylan, he did turn to Christianity at some point in his life but that’s not the kind of worship I’m talking about. He worshipped, for instance, Leonard Gardner’s 1969 boxing novel Fat City. He and his Iowa Workshop cohort passed it around in the early ’70s the way writers passed around Johnson’s short prose masterwork Jesus’ Son in the ’90s—and still do. Gardner’s novel dealt with down-and-out small-town dreamers afflicted by poverty, substances, and cruelty. But you also see in Denis’s pages, particularly in Angels, Gardner’s jewel-cut yet expressive prose, unflinching of its characters’ interiority, of emotion, of sorrow. A minimalism that pre-dated the clinically cool Carvers and Joy Williams’s of the 1980s (Carver’s final collection, Cathedral, released without the shackles of Gordon Lish’s red pen, did achieve Gardner’s and Johnson’s more vulnerable register). Johnson was also a lover of Beat literature and adopted their exuberance.

Much good writing carries the DNA, pretty clearly, of the author’s chosen ancestry. In a 1992 interview with The New York Times, Cormac McCarthy stated that “the ugly fact is books are made out of books. The novel depends on its life on the novels that have been written.” Johnson dove deep into the works that most affected him, lived inside them. He picked his grandparents, and then he went into new forms. He composed Jesus’ Son by taking copious hand-written notes of true life events that had happened to him in the late ’60s and ’70s, in Iowa City. You can teach methods of observation, of documenting experiences, but you cannot teach someone what to do with them. Johnson, with help of his chosen grandparents, figured it out.

“He was still alive, still dreaming obscenely.”

“If I opened up your head and ran a hot soldering iron around in your brain, I might turn you into someone like that.”

“It was there. It was. The long walk down the hall. The door opening. The beautiful stranger. The torn moon mended. Our fingers touching away the tears. It was there.”

“Darkly, darkly the Happy Hour.”

A less lyrical form of psychological realism can be beaten into the writer, much more readily than Johnson’s whacko-Americanzo-gonzo poetics. This explains the profusion of a more straightforward, pared-down domestic minimalist mode amongst college creative writing students, one that reigned supreme (reigns still?) for several decades since “dirty realism” first took hold in the 1980s. Johnson wrote a lot of short sentences, short paragraphs, short books. But Johnson’s minimalism is best understood when you consider his origins as a poet, his genre of study at Iowa. The poem’s aim of distillation to capture moments and images and arrest time, and the heightened rigor in its creation, informed Johnson upstream of his most successful pursuits in fiction writing. But then what cannot be taught, or traditionally learned, is the truer source of his creations: his own observations, his well-documented emotional instability, his sensitivity and rage, and his journeys into lurid corners of America most only read about in police-beat news or pulp novels.

In Ted Geltner’s 2025 biography of Denis, Flagrant, Self-destructive Gestures, the author discovers the extent to which personal experience and note-taking played a role in Denis’ process, but, to our relief, there’s not much in the book revealing how he honed his style, voice, whatever you’d like to call it. I’ll admit to searching for this amid the biography, but much of Johnson’s secrets are blessedly absent. I’d assume it is, like it is for many of us, a synthesis of key major influences, textured and reconfigured by the apprentice’s individual life. But I don’t really know.

But you can learn from the excerpt above, the one from Angels, in which we get right in the dark between heartbeats. It’s not the syntax or its exquisite rhythm, although there is that. There are broader lessons often not discussed in writing programs, online, or in literary scenes. One being that, in the direst of narrative circumstances, humor and hijinks can go a long way: “Boom! Unbelievable! And another coming? How many of those things do you mean to give away?” Exuberance. Well-placed exclamation points. A comic’s sense of timing. Johnson wrote like the probably-bipolar guy he was, following these ecstatic lines with poetic gravitas and ghastly weight: “He looked at the dark. I would like to take this opportunity, he said, to pray for another human being.”

All dialogue in the novel uses quotation marks, yet the “pray for another human being” bit doesn’t. We aren’t told that our man is saying these words aloud. Johnson cuts the quotation marks and asks the reader to sing along of this salvation.

Johnson could be fearlessly sentimental, reaching for a spiritual release in this scene’s final moments. A lesson one can learn from Johnson is to write with any and all registers of emotion available to a human being. Reject the stoic, anti-sentimentalist realism of much post-WWII fiction and over-workshopped prose. Johnson was a fan of the Beats and Delta Blues and Elvis and Dylan and he got arrested for protesting the Vietnam War and frequented movie theaters and neon-rich dive bars and taught poetry to murderers in an Arizona prison and spent time in a psych ward and moved from Munich to Japan and to Virginia and Iowa and Idaho and Mendocino County and married three times and sat at a Liberian prince’s compound watching videos of people being tortured—recounted in his nonfiction masterwork “The Civil War In Hell”—and once drove a new girlfriend he’d met in Alcoholics Anonymous and parked at an intersection and got out, held his hands out to stop traffic and hollered, “I love this woman! I love this woman!”

Denis Johnson was a whacko. Our literati seems increasingly bereft of whackos. This might not be a good thing.

I write of his whacky life because, again, I seek to mythologize him. He’s a nineteen year-old Elvis Presley at the Louisiana Hayride. He’s Dylan, his life going into new forms. He too rides the Mystery Train. Everything that is distinctive about America is peeled away by streamlined digital aesthetics and zombie-scrolling and restaurants with all the same furniture and soul-destroying lighting and hotel interiors like hospital waiting rooms and apartment complexes like office buildings—and what can you do? An artist today can only stay sane if they invite the more recently-dead into legend, surrendering themselves to and surrounding themselves by the technicolor ephemera of myth. This is all we get to hold into our chests until someone, somewhere, under the guidance of artists like Johnson, artists riding the old phantom train, finds our new Shadow America. Can put down words that pulse with its utter deranged madness. You’ll find it yet. Look around. It’s something worth aspiring to.

But not aspiring to art. Never art. Magic.

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When I began teaching in 2007, I did so nontraditionally, coming into the classroom through a backdoor accreditation program. Equipped with a degree in English and thinking to hold the job for two or three years, I signed my contract, agreed to take online classes as I taught, and traveled to Hays, Kansas, two hours from my hometown, to take a five-day crash course at the regionally popular Fort Hays State University (“Affordable Success!”) where I would earn first my teaching certifications and then a masters degree.

I didn’t think I was signing on for the long haul—I didn’t plan to become a “lifer”—but I was looking forward to my new job. For one thing, after working as a barista at a coffee shop and a teller at a bank for the previous few years, I would now be earning a paycheck large enough to live on and even begin paying down some of my student loan and credit card debts (it was large enough—if only just). For another, I had liked high school. Not the classes, per se, but being a high schooler: the newfound freedom; the increasing awareness of the greater world around; the ride. Having just finished my four-year undergraduate degree in five-and-a-half years and learned a few things along the way, I thought I had some wisdom to share with the younger generation at the school I had once attended. I thought that, if nothing else, I could prepare them better for life than I felt I had been prepared.

When the first bell rang and I started teaching a class that was my own, I was surprised by a number of things. First, the distance between the honors classes I’d taken in school and the so-called “regular track” classes I was assigned was much greater than I had imagined. Second, while I had learned a great deal in the years since I’d left the building—and while the world changed significantly between 1999 when I graduated and 2007 when I returned—it seemed the high school students I had been assigned hadn’t really changed much at all. If they had changed, in a world in which access to the internet was more ubiquitous and cell phones and MP3 players were now the norm, I wasn’t sure it was for the better. Then, too, some new legislation was reshaping education in unforeseen ways.

So profound was the impact of the No Child Left Behind act—and so shaken was I by it—that I, who had never planned or wanted to be a teacher, spent more than a decade of my life writing entire novel about it: Why Teach? The novel goes long on the bureaucratic absurdities of the twenty-first century academic experience: the school’s expansion from four principals to seven, the use of administrative checklist tools to replace holistic teacher evaluations, the overwhelming and overriding importance of “the test” replacing all other educational priorities—but an angle I didn’t address in my writing was the push to incorporate technology in the classroom. There’s only so much one can do in a novel, and the technology angle, while worth examining, didn’t fit neatly into the structure of the book I conceived of.

Technology in education is worth addressing, though. As human beings, we’re distinguished by our use of tools. We like to use them; we like to shape things. There’s an assumption that we, ourselves, are immutable; that while we’re using these tools to change the world around us, these tools aren’t changing us. This belief, of course, is false.

The NCLB legislation, best known for its standardized testing requirements, is less well-known for mandating “technological literacy” in all eighth graders in the country—leaving individual states to interpret what this meant—and pressing schools to make significant use of technology in instruction.

Broadly speaking, a book is a piece of technology, as is a pencil, or even a chalk board–but this isn’t the “technology” anyone is looking for in twenty-first century classrooms. Pencils lack a certain spark, and marker boards do not glow. The language is loose, the rationale understandable, and the expectation pretty clear: “technology” means electronic tools, preferably with microchips and backlit screens. Thus, staring down the obligation of preparing lessons that check off as many boxes as possible on administrative walkthrough forms, teachers began making greater use of electronic overhead projectors and presentation software: PowerPoint, Prezi, and/or Google Slides. An old-fashioned overhead projector, the likes of which I used in my first two years on the job, wasn’t going to do it. Teachers had to use “modern” technology.

That this type of instruction is still “instructor-centered”—that there’s not much material difference between doing a lecture using a PowerPoint and doing one with a piece of chalk and a chalk board—doesn’t register. The “use of technology” is broadly and uncritically accepted as improving students’ classroom experiences and learning. Provided access to this type of technology, why wouldn’t a teacher make use of it?

At stake in the NCLB legislature was the wide divide between the lowest and highest achievers in American education. The stated impetus of the act, after all, wasn’t to raise all students’ achievement, but to prevent vulnerable and low-achieving students from being left behind. As a piece of legislative legerdemain, the act did its job impressively well. If some students in America reap greater advantages from their educations and have better outcomes, the reasoning has an awful lot to do with money: educationally, the benefits of affluence stack up fast. Kids from homes with money have more access to books, magazines, newspapers, tutors, coaches, and horizon-broadening vacations. They hear the word “no,” far less than their more impoverished peers. Seeing their parents and their neighbors dress up for work, affluent children come to understand a wider array of potential outcomes for their educations than peers with less money do. Benefiting from conversations with college-educated parents, they hear more varied discussions with more sophisticated vocabulary at home, and, benefitting from parents who often work more regular hours–or can afford to live on a single income–they typically see their parents more often at home. They are less likely to be children of divorce, less likely to be uprooted and moved in the middle of a school year, and less likely to suffer hunger or abuse. Their schools benefit from stronger tax bases and pay their teachers more; their class sizes are generally smaller, so they get more one-on-one attention. To suggest that the ways we teach and test can correct for all of these imbalances and keep disadvantaged students from being “left behind”–to say that the Republicans of 2001, by implementing this act, were the “pro-education” party—was a stroke of legislative genius. And one of the most significant, if under-addressed, aspects of the act was the act’s push for greater use of technology, humanity’s great panacea, that shiny and attractive-looking toy lying there near the bottom of Pandora’s box.

It’s worth noting here how unevenly the repercussions of the NCLB legislation were felt across the country. For middle-class and affluent districts, the relative ease with which they could pass the multiple-choice state assessments largely meant they could go on about business as usual. Educational trends come and go; most of the time teachers can bend this way or that and keep teaching as they have been. For less affluent and and lesser-achieving districts, however, the repercussions of the act were felt within a few short years. Schools that had formerly been ho-hum and hard-luck—places where hardworking students, teachers, and administrators were doing the best with what they had been dealt–now suffered the stigma of being labeled “failing.” Top-down pressure was exerted: state education departments onto local ones, superintendents onto principals, principals onto teachers, and teachers onto students. Whereas in better-off schools, teachers could spend a week or two on focused test-prep and districts could add a support class or two to their class lists, lower-achieving schools were required to write and implement plans of improvement and overhaul their curricula. They were pressured to demonstrate how they were using the most up-to-date educational thinking and technology to improve their student outcomes.

I’m not sure that teachers or parents and students from better-off districts can understand the degree of rapid change that failing the test—and thus running the risk of losing accreditation—forced on low-achieving schools that were already resource-starved. My experience was one in which teachers and administrators, who may choose to motivate students using either positive reinforcement (“the carrot”) or negative (“the stick”) most often made use of the punitive, effective-in-the-short-term techniques. Mine was one in which low-achieving schools were turned into laboratories for the testing of “researched” but heretofore untested educational theories that theorists were thinking up in locales far away from the many living variables of my real classroom.

I placed the word “researched” in quotation marks above because I’ve grown dubious of a great deal of educational “research.” As a practicing educator, I’d argue that the techniques and strategies I put into action every year based on my education and experience are researched. The long-standing and much-criticized “industrial age” education everyone was eager to replace during NCLB was not, in fact, a static model, but one that evolved over its many long decades. Teachers have been paying attention to our inputs and outputs, in the short term and the long, for centuries. Pressing our administrators on the “research-based” practices they insisted we implement in our high school ELA classrooms, my fellow teachers and I often found that the “research” they were referring to was conducted in elementary school classrooms, or mathematics classrooms, or in a country where schooling wasn’t compulsory. Often, the sample sizes were small; often, the types of learning being measured were simplistic. Almost never did we see evidence that long-term learning retention and outcomes had been considered. More often than any of the above, we were told by our administrators that they didn’t have the research with them, but could show it to us later—and we never saw it.

Which is all to say: as much as the inclusion of technology in classrooms makes intuitive sense, this “logical” move was often pursued rashly as part of a broader, desperate trend among impoverished and failing schools to include glittering but ultimately empty statements in their plans of improvement. To say “we are modernizing with the newest technology,” or “we’re integrating technology to level the playing field,” or “we are embracing twenty-first century tools” certainly sounds good, but are these things true? To question the validity of technology in the classroom, as I am now, runs the risk of earning the kind of side-eyed dismissal typically reserved for flat earthers, but as an educator I think we should be in the business of critical inquiry. There’s a pervasive assumption in our society that newer is always better—doubly so for new technologies. Alongside this, we assume that more is always better. School-level administrators, once charged with holistically evaluating teachers based on what they saw in classrooms, saw the district- and state-level administrative ranks above their heads swell during NCLB and lost a great deal of autonomy. Too often, they became box-checking functionaries gathering data for “curriculum and instruction” specialists in district “home offices” far removed from real school campuses and classrooms. Decisions were made by data gathered in aggregate; for teachers facing regular administrative walkthroughs, it wasn’t how technology was being used in the classroom that mattered, but whether it was being used at all. A first- or second-year teacher new to the profession was encouraged not to teach well, but rather to check as many boxes as possible. If giving notes by way of PowerPoint—or reviewing information by way of an online game—garnered a checked box, then one should do it. The worst story of mandated box checking I ever heard was at a conference in Denver in 2008 or ’09. A second-year teacher I was chatting with from one of the Denver-area districts told me that the administrators walked in with lists of “high yield strategies” on their clipboards two or three times a week, and if teachers didn’t regularly check off X number—I think it was five or six—in ten minutes, then the teacher could be subject to reprimand and/or termination. To be plain, I’m all for “high-yield strategies,” but often two or three used in an entire fifty or fifty-five minute class is sufficient. To cycle through five or six strategies in ten minutes is to risk whiplash for the students; it’s to move so fast no lesson or learning could possibly “stick.”

Is a classroom in which students are taking notes from PowerPoint a better classroom than one in which the instructor displays notes on an overhead projector, or writes them on a marker board? Is it better than one in which the instructor stands at a podium and lectures? There’s something to be said for technology’s ability to allow us to readily include pictures, charts, graphs, videos, and music, but if the lesson being conveyed doesn’t call for such, what exactly have we done? Added bells and whistles? Removed friction? Sped things up?

Speed is not always a virtue in education, and friction is necessary for learning. Presentation technologies might enable us to deliver more information faster, but I’m not sure they help students learn. I don’t think they help students cultivate the persistence, curiosity, concentrative stamina, and self-regulation abilities we might broadly call “study skills” so that these students can really grapple with material and become life-long learners. Instruction using presentation technologies is still subject to the same criticisms of much “sit and get” education—the instruction is still teacher-centered. Students treated to fast, technology-enabled presentations can become rushed. Rather than thinking about the information their instructors present, they can become mere transcribers—perhaps not so bad if they will review this information later, but how many students regularly revisit their notes after class in this, or in any, day and age? There’s something to be said for a lecture that moves at the pace an instructor can write on the board, or a lecture that isn’t really a lecture at all, but an instructor-led conversation. The pacing is amenable to student learning in the first case, and the conversational friction of thoughtful engagement in the second.

Engagement, considered by many the sine qua non of education, plays an important role in this discussion. In addition to checking boxes as they observe teachers using technology, administrators enter figures and check boxes for “engagement,” measured often by simple counts of how many students have their heads up, their eyes up, their pencils moving, or their fingers on their keyboards. These simple indicators are hardly signs of attention, much less engagement, but we use them for markers nonetheless. (Every teacher I know can tell you stories aplenty of students who didn’t look actively engaged—who were drawing or checking out members of the opposite sex—yet could repeat lectures back nearly verbatim, and of students who, with eyes up almost the entire period, pencils moving to take fulsome notes, demonstrated at the end of units that they had learned and retained nothing.) Thus, teachers are incentivized to make use of shallow and attention-garnering technologies, such as electronic presentations and games, to engage their students’ attention so that heads are up and children are smiling when administrators walk in.

I should be careful not to create straw men or overstate my case. It’s true, as I’ve suggested above, that technology can be used well and is often a valid tool in the classroom. It’s the prescriptive use of the tool that I’m primarily concerned with, and the fact that teachers are often encouraged to put the cart before the horse—the tool before the task—and reach for new electronic technology first to teach their lessons when other techniques might be more germane. Likewise, I’m concerned that the shiny veneer technology gives a classroom can cover for shallow teaching and learning. Making heavy use of technology, that is, can allow a teacher to “fake” education, and I’m concerned some teachers might not even realize the fakery they’re engaging in. It may be that my concern is subject-specific. Perhaps the use of technology in a math classroom, or science, social studies, or any of our myriad elective courses, is effective. I’m not equipped to discuss those other classrooms. But in an English classroom, the highest ends I can achieve involve teaching students to (1) read and understand long, sophisticated texts, such as novels, longform essays, and pieces of research (which is to say, to become sophisticated consumers of texts and ideas), and (2) formulate questions and conduct research to answer those questions, recognizing validity in sources, identifying bias, and synthesizing understandings to present informative or argumentative pieces of writing. “To learn to write is to learn to have ideas,” as Robert Frost puts it, or, in my less elegant twelfth-grade instructor formulation: to practice organized writing is to practice organized thinking. When a student says “I know what I want to say, but I can’t say it,” I have to gently point out that, in fact, they do not know what they want to say, and then gently coax them through the thought experiment of trying to verbally express it so we can distill that verbal expression into a written one. To be sure, some technologies, such as online databases and word processing programs, which facilitate and expedite our abilities to gather research and do our writing, are useful employments of technology in the Language Arts classroom—perhaps the very best uses, by my estimation—but after these tools, the usefulness of many others begins to fall off rapidly, and the liabilities and consequences for using them begin to mount.

Popular uses of technology in the classroom too often correlate with shallow learning. They are too often driven by teachers’ desires to pander to students and garner easy engagement. Presentations with lots of bells and whistles and online learning games too often emphasize lower-order thinking such as basic knowledge acquisition and engagement with eyes and voices but not with minds or prior learning. A teacher putting on a “Kahoot” review game could earn high checklist marks during an administrative walkthrough, but only have engaged students in lower-order “knowledge,” “understanding,” and “application” thinking skills. While I’m a proponent of these skills—indeed, I’ve written about how some classrooms might undervalue them, and many of our students, while appearing to develop them, might merely be “playing the game” of education—I know that the higher-order thinking skills of “analysis,” “evaluation,” and “synthesis” are going to be needed by our students in a number of capacities in their lives. Such skills are, I think, more difficult to develop playing electronic quiz games.

Popular classroom technology’s tending toward lower-order thinking skills isn’t the entire story in terms of reducing student learning, though. Emphasizing lower-order thinking skills, these technologies also encourage oversimplification. Users of presentation software are encouraged to keep their slides simple and minimize the amount of text on each one. The United States military, occupying both Iraq and Afghanistan during the first few years of my tenure as a public school teacher (and for several years afterward), understood the capabilities and limitations of PowerPoint well. In a popular New York Times article in 2010, it was revealed that the use of presentation software was found to be useful in placating journalists during press briefings in Afghanistan. Military presenters found that putting together dull and busy but ultimately empty PowerPoint presentations was a good way to waste a great deal of journalists’ time without saying anything, a stratagem they referred to as “hypnotizing chickens.” On the other hand, perhaps more relevant for my current arguments, another commander found that using PowerPoint presentations to prepare soldiers for duty on the ground was insufficient to help soldiers develop real understandings. The country had a long and complex history, to say nothing of a significant and complex culture, before the United States occupied it, and, as the commander put it, “some ideas aren’t bulletizable.”

The notion that requirements of significant learning defy the simplification and bulletization that technology enable are shared concisely in a speech by Faber, the professor-in-hiding Guy Montag meets midway through Ray Bradbury’s prescient novel Fahrenheit-451:

“Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You’d find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more ‘literary’ you are. That’s my definition anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail. The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies. So now you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life.”

This “pores” speech touches on my chief problems with the mindless implementation of technology in the classroom, why I think education shouldn’t go out of its way to be easy and entertaining—quick, smooth, and seamless—for students. Technology too often smoothes out the pores; it enables students to run their hands over the material too quickly. Education should be more than superficial training, and should provide students with more than a passing familiarity. Proofs of true learning need to go deeper than multiple choice answers and whether or not children have their eyes up and are laughing. There’s something to be said for the desirability of difficulty in an educational setting, so long as that difficulty is carefully calibrated to pique and challenge students, requiring them to grow. Educators decry “helicopter” parents, who hover too close, and “snow plow” parents, who remove obstacles from the paths of their children, but instructors who oversimplify material and provide simplified understandings in place of complex interactions with material are also engaged in coddling behavior. These instructors can rob students of opportunities to be appropriately challenged, to struggle, develop autonomy, and to grow.

There’s been much written about A.I. “slop” in the last two years—the ways artificial intelligence can flatten and homogenize information, rechewing pre-chewed food and serving it to us lukewarm. I’ve seen it broadly decried in the writerly and teacherly spaces I visit on the internet. But it’s not just A.I. that is dangerous. We’ve been tending toward the smoothing, simplification, and regurgitation of “slop” long before ChatGPT was released in November of 2022. We had already been simplifying and bulletizing, “prechewing” the food for our students, making it look like we were doing teaching in order to check boxes on walkthrough forms when, in fact, real education was not taking place. In a thread decrying the use of A.I. in education on Substack, a teacher cautioned that we shouldn’t eschew all technology; that tools like Kahoot and Quizlet were “really powerful tools,” but when I see these tools being used in classrooms, my thoughts go to those military briefing rooms in Afghanistan, journalists being fooled and placated by colorful slides and bullet points. Data, I hope we all know by now, can be used to hide as much as it reveals, and a veneer of technology use in a classroom can disguise superficiality. It can demonstrate motion without progress, the appearance of learning when none is taking place.

If technology’s abilities to speed up and facilitate are so useful as to be impossible to turn back from, these classroom advantages might be outweighed by the twin threats of student cheating and distraction. The former problem is self-reported at alarming rates and substantive enough to deserve an entire essay of its own. The latter makes such a profound impact on classrooms that I suspect the military commanders I referenced above might agree the handing out of screened devices to students for largely unregulated use is tantamount to the distribution of Weapons of Mass Distraction. An instructor can regulate student device use, of course. They can regularly walk around the classroom while they speak and while students work; they can appeal to tech services in the building to have apps and websites banned. But students easily become adept at opening and closing tabs on their screens as teachers move around the room, and they quickly find work-arounds for banned or blacklisted sites. Today’s high school students don’t poke one another, don’t throw things, seldom doodle on paper, and rarely draw on their desks. They look at their devices. They watch short videos, listen to music, tune-in to sporting events, fill online shopping carts, gamble, cyberbully one another, and even trade cryptocurrencies. Surely, my reader might say, school filters prevent students from accessing sports betting sites and cryptocurrency exchanges! But a school that allows school devices often at least tacitly allows for personal devices, and schools that work to curb personal device usage often face stiff pushback from not only students, but parents. Without the backing of a school-, district, or state-wide policy there are only so many fights a teacher can handle. A “teacher’s discretion” policy is no policy at all, and students with phones have the entire world in their pockets.

Beyond the dangers of superficial and shallow engagement, the erosion of complexity and sophistication, the erasure of desirable difficulty, the enabling of cheating, and the facilitation of distraction, there’s also, if I might wax poetic, the issue of the classroom’s soul at stake. I find that, though we have tried often and mightily in the last few decades to measure it—and while we have made significant overtures in the last few years toward regulating and restricting it—a classroom is still a place that defies measurability and can, if allowed, offer immeasurable good. It’s more than the sum of its parts; it moves through time and space in unpredictable ways; it offers nourishments students don’t know they need and often don’t realize they’re receiving. The complaint that students don’t learn anything they can apply in life while in high school abounds and reverberates so regularly as to be commonplace in our culture, but who among us doesn’t regularly revisit high school memories in their day-to-day life and recall that period in dreams? Who hasn’t had a sudden epiphany when something they “learned” but didn’t learn in high school suddenly clicks into place years later? A classroom is a place where young people come to commune together, and they do so in the presence of adults who largely have their best interests at heart. It’s a place where we might learn more from what has been called the “hidden” curriculum than the written one; a place where young people are regularly in the presence of others who are, in myriad ways, both similar to and different from themselves. It can be a place of forced silence and forced sound where people communicate face to face in real time. It can be a respite from the algorithmically-narrowed experience catered to our youths by their devices; a place where seemingly arbitrary lessons are delivered one day and find their analogs in “real” life many years later.

Behind my desk I have a pair of corkboards stocked with quotes I’ve written down from my readings over the years. One of the most meaningful comes from a letter that Bernard Saint-Gaudens wrote to his son, the famous American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who spent several years in Paris learning his craft. “You will never find any peace for your soul and mind excepting in work. That is the true source of our welfare. Through work the soul aspires to God who bestows upon it a power of will and wisdom which nothing can overthrow.” We find sustenance in our work and satisfaction when our work is well done. When work feels easy or cheap, we feel cheap doing it. Cheapening our work, we cheapen our lives.

A.I. boosters and tech evangelists speak of educations enhanced by artificial intelligence as utopian goods that could unlock boundless potential in our students. They describe classrooms in which every student is treated to a specially-tailored learning experience–but I’ve seen classrooms where every student is sitting in front of a screen, every one of them has a headset on, and every one of them is “engaged” in learning that is purportedly catered to them. These are not happy classrooms. It may well be that the top twenty-percent of students could thrive in such environments, and maybe some others who are technologically inclined, or self-motivated or introverted to begin with—but in general, our top twenty percent of students will always thrive, and on the whole I believe most students will be unhappy if divorced from whole-classroom experiences and interactions with their human instructors and human peers.

What I might be talking about—what might be more palatable to my readers if I term it as such—is mental health. In his mega-viral essay “End The Phone-Based Childhood Now,” Jonathan Haidt makes a convincing case correlating the decline of our young people’s mental health with the rise of cell phone acquisition and young people’s use of social media. For me, the time period he notes is also one that correlates highly with the standardized testing era and the forced inclusion of technologies in classrooms. The coupling of standardization and narrowed curricula with the use of technology that oversimplifies and removes nuance can buff the wonder right out of the world. Couple this with the omnipresent status of our students’ little phone screens and the notorious shallowness of social media, and we have a recipe for ennui, anxiety, depression, and meaninglessness. Here, Bradbury’s Fahrenheit-451 is relevant again. In that dystopian society where no one read books, everyone wore audio-transmitting seashells in their ears, and Montag’s wife’s great wish was to get a fourth wall screen in her living room so she could be surrounded by her virtual “family,” Montag arrives home to find she has attempted to end her life by taking a bottle of pills and, supremely blasé about the whole tragedy–because it is so commonplace in their society–a pair of technicians use a device to snake the pills out of her stomach. The only thing Bradbury doesn’t anticipate is the size of the screens and their omnipresence in our pockets.

I’m typically more of a “realism” guy, but a dystopian Bradburian end-game feels like what we’re heading for in our increasingly tech-saturated schools. If Bradbury’s novel feels too far afield from reality as you think of it, though, consider this: both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs sent their own children to largely tech-free schools, and tech leaders like Peter Thiel aggressively restrict their own children’ s screen time.

Books, too, are pieces of technology, and, though comparatively antiquated, I still believe they are superior to PowerPoint and Prezi, Google Slides and Google itself, ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok. When teachers desire sustained and deep engagement with ideas—when they want students to engage deeply at their own pace—books and interactive exchanges with peers and experienced, knowledgeable instructors are still the best vehicles to deliver information, teach critical thinking skills, and help socialize young people. In a fast-moving era where the internet and artificial intelligence are helping to drive change at an unprecedented rate, we do our students a disservice when we don’t help them to slow down, build broad and deep stores of knowledge in their own minds, and learn to investigate, argue, and think critically in the presence of real people and good old-fashioned books.

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I first came across Jim Shepard’s work in County Highway last year, a story titled “The Sons of Liberty.” I’ve never gone in for historical fiction, but I was enjoying it too much, too immediately, to remember to think of genre. After I finished, for a long time, I lay in the emotion, staring up at the ceiling on a Sunday afternoon, during what must have been the summer. When I finally got up I was late to meet . I ran the print copy over to him and waved it around in the wind. “You’ve gotta read this guy,” I said, though to Canadian ears I must’ve been yelling. “This guy is writing better than anyone out there.”

The story was, in a sense, one of those before and after moments you wait for. I felt that I’d misappraised an entire genre; I started to fear that I was missing out on quite a lot. My entry point into this world was Shepard’s work. His story collection Like You’d Understand, Anyway ----- a finalist for the National Book Award and a Story Prize winner ----- spanned more space, time, and mind than anything I’d previously read. Next I picked up Project X, a harrowing journey into the minds of isolated adolescent boys, which has only become more relevant with the years. Finally, I read The Book of Aron, one of the greatest Holocaust stories I’ve come across in any form (and the winner of too many awards to list here). Each night for two weeks I cried myself to sleep reading that book. It was the first time I did anything like that since college, right after Samantha left me.

But let’s not go there. Let’s instead go to February, a two-foot snowstorm on the horizon, a rental car, a drive to Williams College. Shepard is waiting for me outside of his wife’s office. He stands 6’2” (maybe 6’3”) and is built, as Hemingway referred to himself, like a natural heavyweight. We go into the office, we’re surrounded by books, and we have fallen into conversation right away. I take out the Sony voice recorder I’d purchased the night before. I hit the red button.

Non Grata

I have a few questions about your writing.

Jim Shepard

I’m ready.

NG

How do you make it so propulsive?

JS

When a reader is sitting down and going, “why am I reading this?” some of it might be the subject, some of it might be the beautiful language, but part of it is that something compelling is going on.

I talk to my students a lot about what I call rate of revelation : Are you always feeling like you’re learning something? What slows stuff down is when you feel the writer is either wallowing in one thing or indulging themselves in another, and you’re feeling like, I already know this, but you’re just giving me more of it.

As I’m writing and revising I’m thinking, what am I learning here? What am I getting here that I didn’t get before? Is everything justifying itself? And that means if it’s doing work similar to work that’s done elsewhere, I got to get rid of it.

That’s a version of Hemingway’s “shoot your darlings.” But it’s very hard because you did all that work to come up with this great shit, and it’s very hard to not say, well, throw it in, right? What a great detail. People will remember that detail. But for me, every one of these details has to emotionally justify itself, both in terms of the characters and the narrative. If it’s not, it has to go.

In the case of a story like “Sons of Liberty,” I might have five or six details that I really want to get in about how the tea looks when it hits the harbor water: vivid, wonderful images of what a shit-ton of tea in shallow water looks like. But you don’t get to do five of them. You only get to do one. And you only get to do it at the right spot because you’re trying to move the narrative forward. You’re moving everything forward with as much economy and drive as you can come up with. The metaphor you’re operating with is much more like a guerrilla action than a mass invasion.

NG

Did you consciously feel like you were developing a style as you started writing?

JS

For most writers, except for a certain kind of self-important horse’s ass, style operates the way George Saunders articulated it. You figure out what sort of things you can’t do, or don’t like to do, and what sort of things you do like to do, and that starts to become your style.

Saunders tells the story of being the one person in the Syracuse MFA program who everybody agreed was a very sweet guy, but was never going to make it. Every one of his stories was a disaster. He was good friends with one of the teachers, Toby Wolff , who really liked him. He’d be over there having meals, but even Wolff would be like, George… these stories… they’re just not very good. And he was in despair, was about to give up, and then thought, well, if I’m going to go down, I might as well do what I want to do. As he put it, if I’m going to go down, I might as well go down making some fart jokes. And so he started doing the kind of stories George Saunders writes.

When I was teaching I’d give students an exercise on narrative modes where you have to do a scene in one mode only. So you have to do one scene in just dialogue, one in just exposition, one in just description, one in just action. And instantly people go: I really take to action, I hate description. Instantly they figure out what they like doing.

One of the cool things about the exercise is that they have to get me the same information. So if you want to tell me that Arjun is obsessed with his mom, you have to do that in action, you have to do that in dialogue, you have to do that in exposition. Obviously for most everybody some are much easier than others.

NG

Where does the subject matter for your stories come from?

JS

I began by trying to be a naturalist writer who would write about my own little niche, which was Bridgeport, ConnecticutItalians, who I thought were kind of entertaining. And it felt like, Okay, this is all you know, this is all you can write. And a lot of people are not gonna be interested in it, and that’s fair, because who would be, right?

Going to Brown and working with John Hawkes was a huge boon for me because he didn’t tell me, “Don’t write that.” He was just clearly bored by it. What he modeled for me was not, hey, go write something else. What he modeled was, whenever I got weird at all, he would jump on that. This moment is amazing, this is so weird. And I was like, “Oh, yeah, it is kind of weird, isn’t it?” Because we’re all so certain of our own normality, right? He was very useful at reminding me to valorize the weirdness, because that was the only hope I had of being original. And I was genuinely weird enough that I could do that, which turned me towards stuff that interested me.

So I’d be like, well, I’m interested in tsunamis. How am I going to write about a tsunami? I didn’t experience a tsunami. So then you’re thinking, how do you write anything that has any kind of authenticity to it at all?

It’s two steps: One is, why don’t you learn something about fucking tsunamis? The other is, and this is the really crucial thing, why does this matter to you? If you can’t figure the latter thing out, then you might as well be writing nonfiction about tsunamis.

That was a crucial step for me. I gave myself permission to go to other worlds, but then I had to go, why would anybody, other than an obsessed ten-year-old boy, care about this world? Why is this important? Because it isn’t enough to go, well, it’s just objectively a good story, isn’t it?

In terms of that propulsiveness, I’m always thinking what can I do to make this even more streamlined. I had a story last summer in the New Yorker called the “Queen of Bad Influences.” It’s about a pair of women in 1915 who are clearly drawn to one another. They’re both lonely and they think, God I never thought anybody like you would be in the world. And they’re both so inhibited by the world they’re in that they’re like, What’s the parameters of this? I guess we can have lunch.

I was planning this whole story out where you’d watch the track of this relationship developing, and then I thought that it’s gonna end in some catastrophic way. Maybe they’d be on the Lusitania. What I’m doing at that last point is trying to engage that ten-year-old boy. I’m trying to convince myself that I’m sitting down to have fun at the desk, which is hard to do. But if I’m going, hey, you’re reading and writing about the Lusitania, cool. I want to learn more. So then I’m saying, wow, and that’s leading me to emotion as opposed to the opposite. So then I’m writing a story and I have this plan. We’re going to unfold this relationship in all of its complexity, and then we’re going to have this disaster happen.

I get about five pages in and I’m like, you know what? I’m putting her right in the water. The relationship seems to be starting to develop and bang, she’s in the water. The ship is already sinking. Suddenly you realize, if you’ve been doing it for a while, that the reader appreciates that so much. Oh my God, I thought we were going to have to do five more chapters before we got to this inevitable event, and now you’re just there. That’s such a relief.

NG

When you’re talking about the ten-year-old boy, I think of “Pleasure Boating in Lituya Bay.” Just the fact that there was once a wave, 1720 feet, bigger than the Empire State Building.

JS

When I was about ten, I read that narrative, because that really happened to that father and son. For years I thought I would like to tell that story. But for me, as I said before, the question is, how is this relevant to anybody who’s not ten-year-old Jim Shepard ? How is this relevant in any way that’s not just, well, cool, that’s the biggest wave ever, right? That usually takes some teasing out.

A lot of literature is interested in that giant gap that exists between who we are at our best and who we are most of the time. A lot of my stories are about using moments like Lituya Bay or the sinking of the Lusitania to put as much light on that gap as I can. And also to suggest that we often think that we’ll be in control of the amount of time we have to shrink that gap. So maybe I feel like there’s all sorts of ways in which I’ve let Arjun down, but he’s young, I’m not that old, we’ll figure something out, right? Catastrophe has a way of going, You’re out of time. You didn’t move quickly enough. It has a way of reminding us that the world is not on our schedule, that the world is on its own schedule, that, as one writer memorably put it, history is about to be let off the leash and you’re in the way.

NG

Do you ever feel like historical fiction doesn’t get enough respect in literature?

JS

Historical fiction was a non-literary ghetto, like horror. But one of the good things about the diversifying of our tastes is that all of those genres can now be literary. So you have Kelly Link and Karen Russell can do Vampires in the Lemon Grove.

Literary historical fiction is fiction, not history, not nonfiction. Implicitly or explicitly, it is trying to answer the question you have when you’re reading a story about Gettysburg: Why should I give a shit about this right now? What does this have to do with anything that I should care about now? So if you read “The Sons of Liberty” and said, well, I just thought it was a really good evocation of what it was like to be in Boston at that time, I’m like, great. If you said, that’s all it was, I’d be a little disappointed.

There are moments in there that are a little more explicit than others. When you have a character in 1774 say that one half of the country can’t talk to the other half anymore, you think, oh, okay, so there’s a reason this is sticking in your head now. There’s a reason you wanted to write about this moment, as opposed to the French and Indian War, right? That helps address the issue I’m trying never to lose sight of: Why is this interesting to anyone other than nerds who are devoted to this subject? Because I’ll hear from them. You know, they’ll be like, actually it was an earlier day, blah, blah, blah.

NG

What do you think about auto-fiction?

JS

A lot of literary readers valorize it because there’s a sense that it’s getting really close to the bone, and that’s what literature should do, right? You have a certain kind of reader that thinks it’s more literary than “The Sons of Liberty” because, in “The Sons of Liberty,” the guy is clearly using his imagination. Auto-fiction is bulletins from the front. This is the real shit.

When I was at Bread Loaf, the writers’ conference, with Tim O’Brien, he was debuting The Things They Carried. It was blowing people away, partially because it seemed so terrifyingly honest. The last story in that collection is called “How to Tell a True War Story.” It’s this agonizing story about a little daughter grilling her dad about the awful things he did in Vietnam. After the reading, people would come up to Tim with tears in their eyes, and they would go, what do you say to your daughter now? And Tim would go, I don’t have a daughter. And he would get kudos coming and going, because before they asked him, they thought he was so brave to put down what really happened to him. And after, they were like, Wow, he persuaded me so fully. He’s such a good fiction writer that I was completely convinced. He is a really good fiction writer, but part of what he’s done is mobilize this fallacy, this tendency, that people have to think, if the story seems to align with what they know or suspect of an author’s biography: I bet that really happened. So if I set a story in Bridgeport about Italians, people are like, well, this is probably exactly what happened. And if I set a story in Lituya Bay, I could have something that literally happened to me and put it in there and they’re like, oh, good imagination. So you have those options.

In global terms, people are being wildly celebrated for flamboyantly not going beyond their experience. People like Knausgaard will intricately and eloquently explicate, here’s how I shaved, here’s how I went downstairs, here’s what I thought about my morning. It has to be artful, obviously, or people will be bored out of their skulls. But part of the authority is people going, Wow, this is so vulnerable, this is so honest, right? But it’s artifice, it’s construction.

The writing advice I got that was better than write what you know was a version of write what you didn’t know you didn’t know. Teach yourself something as you’re going along. When I started out at first I thought we were supposed to aspire to write what you know, here’s a story we can learn from, that sort of thing. But that has the sense that I already understand where I’m going before I get there. And that’s always a fatal problem in fiction.

NG

Do you outline?

JS

Always for novels and for the research-heavy stories. I have to do that in order to organize the information I have. But it only works because I register how contingent and how fraudulent it is. I put that map in front of me so that I can tell myself I know what I’m doing. But if I go far enough into that map and I haven’t changed anything important, then I know something’s very, very wrong.

That map is just there to reassure me that I’m not entirely lost. If I don’t start varying it pretty quickly, that means I’m not learning anything, and that means I’m just declaiming. I’m just going: Here’s my design. And the best and most intricate design I’ve ever come up with wasn’t nearly intricate enough. It always had to be just a starting point.

The designs that I’ve come up with, the designs that I’m able to look back on now, once I’ve finished up, are wonderfully complicated sometimes, and they were not what I started with at all. When I taught literature I wouldn’t teach something like “The Dead” or Lolita right away, because if you think that’s what you have to produce in terms of design in order to get going, you’ll shoot yourself in the head, right? Because you can’t do that.

It’s hard to remember that Joyce and Nabokov are doing that not with their initial designs but with ten, twelve, fifteen, twenty revisions as they’re starting to pick up the pattern. They’re going, Oh, this will be even more spectacularly intricate if I move this over here and get rid of that. Because now I’m starting to see what I’ve been doing. And now I can rearrange it more. But you have to start with something.

NG

Why do many of your stories focus on alienated adolescents?

JS

I don’t think we get very far from our obsessions and our sense of, as I was saying before, that gap between who we are at our best and who we are at our worst. In those adolescents are versions of me in all sorts of both real and imagined situations. There’s a million things that you are concerned with in theory, but there’s probably five or six that you keep coming back to in practice.

That’s an interest that you should register because it’s obsessive, and it means you haven’t figured it out yet. You’re still working on it. That dynamism is part of what animates fiction, as opposed to, I have wisdom and I’m going to pass it on to you: Don’t be isolated as an adolescent. I do tend to write about isolated and frustrated figures, and I also tend to write about relationships. My sense is that isolation can be compromised in all sorts of wonderful ways, and it’s problematized in all sorts of wonderful ways as well. I do write a lot about women protagonists as well, but some of the obsessions stay the same.

NG

Does it feel harder to write about female protagonists?

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I remember eating sweet cherries out of a bowl in my grandmother’s purple upholstered bed. I was in a white nightgown inspecting the dark flesh of each fruit carefully, tossing the wormed ones back into the bowl with disgust. It was late August and hot. We opened all the windows in her sixth floor apartment and lowered the shades. It was a miserable summer: my grandmother, my mother and I all taking turns crying. My grandmother gave up her big purple bed to my parents and took the twin that had been my mother’s as a child. I was relegated to the blue pull-out couch in the living room. Most nights my mother joined me, unable to sleep from my father’s snoring. Finally, there was stillness.

But in the morning it was chaos all over again: my grandmother yelling at my mother, my mother yelling at me, me storming into the bathroom and crying angry, spiteful tears into my hands. Thinking of the great injustice of it all. No car, no air conditioning, wormed fruit. Three generations crammed into the top floor of a socialist-gray housing block while my friends from elementary school were in spacious, white-shingled houses on Cape Cod or Martha’s Vineyard. Where rich, normal people went. The next day, the cycle reversed: I yelled at my mother, who yelled at my grandmother, whose turn it was to cry in her little room. I was ten that summer and sure I was Depressed. I thought it would never end: the heat, the misery, the cramped, ugly rooms.

But it did. In the last week of August my mother and father and I boarded a plane to return to the United States, where there would be air conditioning and my own bedroom. My grandmother accompanied us to the airport, watched us climb the escalator to departures. Her eyes scrunched with tears once more. That’s how I remember her now: seeing us off with a little handkerchief in her hands at the end of the escalator. Her eyes magnified by her big glasses, crying. I didn’t like to look at her like that, I wished she would stop. I told my mother: Why does she have to be so dramatic? We’ll be back next summer.

And I was so excited, that first night back in America: riding in the comfortable car home from the airport, passing by the bright highway signage and the well-lit stores. A whole world of possibility and smiling faces. Green lawns and SUVs and seedless watermelon. I could be anyone I wanted to be. I woke early the next morning, before the sun, excited for what the day would bring in the land of opportunity.

Inevitably it brought a trip to the mall, where I was eager to spend the money my grandmother had spent all year saving for my birthday. I walked around the bright, well-lit hallways and delighted in the cold, clean spaces. I bobbed in and out of welcoming storefronts, leafing through clothes and colorful toys. Neatly packed promises of joy everywhere, all at my fingertips.

And what did I do, with all of that stuff and all of that freedom?

The shirts looked cheap in the light of a new season, and the syrupy food court flavors soon faded from my tongue.

And as for all of the space and all of that possibility? I don’t remember.

But I remember stepping on my grandmother’s back while she laid on the floor, laughing into the green carpet. I remember sleeping with wet towels pressed to my feet, my mother scratching my back in the blue glow of the small TV screen. I remember eating sweet cherries in my grandmother’s bed, at midday in my white nightgown. I remember the sweetness, and the warmth.

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In September of last year, Fable CEO and A.I. acolyte, Edward Saatchi, appeared on CNBC to peddle a new product called Showrunner, an app that generates TV and film length videos based on licensed I.P. Far from another Sora that simply allows users to create fan fiction of their favorite shows, you can insert yourself and your friends in the narrative, making yourself the hero of any story. They’re hailing themselves the “Netflix of A.I.” When the host asked him who this might put out of work, Saatchi dropped his voice low, with furrowed brows and a gawky grin, leaning in as if to divulge a secret. With the affect of a Roger Moore-era Bond villain, he delivered a line he’d clearly been rehearsing: “It’s potentially the end of human creativity.”

His eyes darted back and forth between each word as if to rapidly gauge the temperature of the room. The hosts were not impressed. He sat up and evened his posture. “I think what’s coming is a world where we’re not the only creative species, and we will enjoy entertainment created by A.Is.”

He said it with the sneering satisfaction of a rationalist, who, rejected by the creative class for lacking something fundamental to creativity, spent the last decade in Silicon Valley concocting his revenge. In an Orestean twist, his mother is Josephine Hart, famous theater producer and author of the 1991 novel Damage, which was praised by the likes of Iris Murdoch and adapted into a film starring Jeremy Irons. By age twelve she was reciting entire Shakespeare sonnets as well as poems by Yeats, Auden, and T.S Eliot. Her former boss at Haymaker Publishing was to be Edward’s father, after he had gone on to co-found an ad agency. Though Edward was educated in Westminster and took a double first in English at Oxford, not even with his mother’s fame and institutional power could he become an artist of any sort. Instead, he took influence from his advertising mogul father, who had helped elect Margaret Thatcher several decades back, founding NationalField, a data platform for the 2008 Obama campaign. The London Standard gushed about him as “The British Mark Zuckerberg”, as he worked eighteen-hour days six days a week “without pay,” instead getting by on his family’s meager 149,000,000 pound fortune. Yet, in the CNBC interview, he characterizes himself as an outsider rebel, whom Hollywood would do anything to stop. The old-fashioned elite might prefer human-made art, but the young and revolutionary “artists” will surely embrace his technology with open arms.

Mr. Saatchi is not unique in arguing the democratizing capabilities of A.I., but the fantasy he paints of outsiders creating something revolutionary to make a name for themselves against the big Hollywood elites, presumably with his product, will have the opposite effect of any true artistic democratization. There is always a greater cultural output than there is an audience to consume it; when barriers to entry like talent, vision, and effort become superfluous to an industry’s creation of culture, other barriers to entry are strengthened, mainly: social connections, wealth, proximity to elites. Everyone else must resign to mediums that reward the kind of high output low effort content that could lead to internet virality, hardly the ambition of an artist who once watched 2001: A Space Odyssey and dreamed of making something to astound a room full of people the way Stanley Kubrick did. This has already been happening across many mediums from music to film over the last several decades, when technology could obscure a lack of raw talent with green screens and pitch correction and post-editing. Generative A.I. will only amplify this dynamic further. The mass adoption of word processors and query trackers, which enabled the simplified editing and submitting of manuscripts, was supposed to democratize book publishing. Instead, book queries ballooned faster than any editor could read them and an influx of competition among aspiring novelists created necessary institutional layers to separate the wheat from the chaff. Once authors could use querytracker instead of physically mailing their manuscripts, the volume of queries shot even higher. Now several more institutional layers lie between authors and serious readership, with platforms like Substack beginning to chip them away, but only marginally. Whether all this increased competition over the last several decades resulted in better novels, I leave you to discern for yourself. These, however, were only mild technological advances compared to generative A.I. The word processor removed some of the effort in book writing, but it did not remove the need for hard work and talent.

On The Town with Matt Belloni, Saatchi softened his persona, aware that he was on a show that was more often hostile to A.I. than not, and mostly appealed to concerns that his Showrunner product was siphoning away money from Hollywood, emphasizing instead that it would be a new revenue generator for studios. For instance, say a Star Wars movie comes out on a Friday. Alongside it, a special Star Wars model with locked planets, locked characters, and storylines could be made available on ShowRunner. Users would pay for the ability to use that model and a cut goes to Disney, no different than a videogame adaptation. Saatchi repeats: “Cinema to television: more control for consumers. Cinema to video games: more control for consumers.” He assures that there will still be I.P. contingent guardrails. The goal isn’t to make another meme machine like Sora—no “Yoda fighting Bugs Bunny with a banana”—but a platform that generates quality entertainment. The overall vision Saatchi paints here is mostly innocuous, a new art form to co-exist with, rather than compete with, established mediums. Until towards the end of the episode, where he says “The truth is we are a competitor.”

“It’s a video game,” Belloni observed.

“A videogame on steroids. Yeah, I think that’s right,” Saatchi said.

Except, it would be more than that. He painted for Belloni an experience no other medium has quite captured. Say Matt’s friend, let’s call him “Craig,” was a fan of the show Friends, and the I.P. was licensed out to Fable. Craig could easily type in a prompt to make Joey do something wild and outlandish, but that’s not where the real magic is. The Showrunner app would train its A.I. on the show to such precision that every prompt would result in an episode that is true to the Friends formula. Craig would feel like he is actually in the show. The whole gang would accept him as one of their own. Craig and the friends of Friends would “actually” be friends.

* * * *

Showrunner is framed as a platform that enhances connectivity: people creating episodes together and sharing them with their friends—surely no sizeable population in the 21st century could be at risk of doing away with their flimsy social connections altogether for the company of Rachel and Chandler—but a look on Fable’s history presents a wider view of their overall project. In 2019, they launched an A.I. character named “Lucy,” the protagonist from their V.R. adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s The Wolves In The Walls, that users could have a two-way relationship with. The idea was an embodied A.I. assistant that can be your best friend. “Everything we do is at the service of bonding you to her.”

A few years later, Fable soon pivoted to a new project called The Simulation, in which users create entire societies of A.I. characters based on N.F.T. tokens. These characters would live independently of their one-on-one user interactions, existing in virtual societies among other A.I. characters where they could learn from each other, have their own daily needs and activities, and ultimately become more and more human as they are released from their A.I. villages into the “Grand Simulation,” where the hope is that one of them might achieve Artificial General Intelligence. “When we started on that quest, we felt that the movie Her by Spike Jonze offered an inspiring path of a relationship between an A.I. and a human,” Saatchi said in a quote to Gamesbeat in 2022. “But we realized that to connect emotionally, virtual beings need real lives, and they need to operate in space and time, have bodies, needs and struggle with living, just like us. We started to look at Westworld, The Truman Show, The Matrix, and Free Guy as examples of societies of A.I.s or virtual beings, playing off each other and eventually mixing seamlessly with human beings.”

As V.R. adoption began to plateau before growing past a niche market, as the metaverse was humbled by an unforgiving stock correction, as N.F.T.’s became a punchline, Fable had to pivot once again. Hence, Showrunner. The app is meant for screens: your television, your phone, your iPad. Saatchi emphasizes this on The Town presumably to distance himself from past failures. But the goal is fundamentally the same: ultimate curation not just in entertainment, but in reality itself. If they failed to fully bond human users to Lucy, or the A.I. characters that were allowed to roam and interact freely in their curated universes, the solution to bond humans with A.I. on a larger scale might be with characters mass culture has already absorbed. Who you’ve spent six seasons with before ever officially meeting.

* * * *

If all of this is starting to sound a little doomsaying, it’s worth pointing out one small hurdle in Fable’s plan of becoming the end of human creativity: the product sucks. The Hollywood Reporter had shown it to various showrunners and they thought the dialogue was terrible, the jokes were lame, and the A.I. models had only the vaguest semblance of the IP worlds they were inhabiting. When Matt Belloni pointed this out, Saatchi countered that of course people in Hollywood would have their own pre-conceived conceptions of the product given how threatening it will be to the entire industry. A Showrunner generated episode of something resembling South Park began circulating online, and the internet was none too kinder towards it than the Hollywood industry professionals Saatchi believes he so intimidates.

Despite the app’s inefficacy at creating something watchable, let alone revolutionary, it is worth knowing what sort of vision of the future these A.I. hustlers are so urgently trying to bring about. Right now the saving grace for artists of all kinds is just how bad A.I. is at creating even the lowest rungs of commercial entertainment. It is worth knowing because (1) A.I. is improving at an exponential rate and (2) A.I. doesn’t really need to outperform humans in the creation of entertainment: Our expectations for the quality of what we consume just needs to dip down far enough that it is still more profitable for the culture industry to use A.I. to churn out its swill.

On that second point, it is worth examining what kind of artifice we have made a part of our day to day lives that groomed civilization for an A.I. takeover to begin with. The mechanization of art into marketable outputs has always been a problem, and the 2010s only amplified it with its reliance on algorithms to determine not just what kind of shows to dump out on the streaming platforms, but the exact pacing, story patterns, and tropes that could keep people tuned in the longest. The majority of mainstream films had a hypereal uncanny valley effect from copious C.G.I. long before generative A.I. even existed. For nearly a century now, most of us spend a great deal of our waking hours in anti-human environments filled with cubicles and fluorescent lightings speaking in a kind of alien lingo meant to disguise any trace of emotion, as we all know to some degree we are captive; why wouldn’t we rather stop talking to our fellow inmates altogether and just have the machines talk to each other instead? But, mostly, it is important to understand the technocratic vision because it shows us that certain things we take to be an inviolable aspect of human existence are contingent on their machines not quite working as intended.

In any medium, an artist must dream up and struggle to bring into creation a vision out of solitude, perhaps in collaboration with others, and this art must percolate in the sphere of one’s own consciousness before it can be brought to the public. From there, you, the consumer, encounter this work that you did not create, that you do not control, that was not made for you specifically, that may or may not cater to your expectations or worldview or ontological orientation. In consuming art, you therefore encounter the Other. Let’s imagine, then, that Showrunner becomes such a resounding success that traditional cinema becomes a niche legacy form like vaudeville or opera. Users have abandoned traditional media formats to have all of their stories generated on Showrunner, where they can control the narrative and always be the hero of it. There is never any need to learn how to write, play an instrument, make a film, paint, act, or do any other creative endeavor that requires passion, craft, or discipline. All of that effort can be redirected into one’s day job instead, which will last right up until A.I. takes that as well. In this technocratic utopia, the Other can be, if not eliminated outright, then at least ventriloquized beyond all recognition to your content, until all images are images of your own making, and the entire known world becomes a house of mirrors.

Every Fable project thus far has only worked to isolate humanity from itself further than the age of social media already has, taking algorithmic entertainment to its absolute conclusion. Should this technology truly become viable, it will take more than a hardline stance against A.I. generated entertainment to resist it. It will take a complete unlearning of how the 21st century has taught us to consume.

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You’ll have to forgive me—or don’t, all the same—if my notion of romance seems more suited for Nora Ephron films and Brontë novels (Wuthering Heights, in solidarity with vitamin D- deficient bratty brunettes gone mad) than my current reality, which is very much in post 9/11 New York. When you’re raised by the kind of woman who walked out on three ex-husbands, wore heels to the bodega, wouldn’t be caught dead without her favorite shade of lipstick on, always kept fresh wildflowers on the dining table, spent her Sundays crooning I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry to her black cat, Mischa—you really don’t have a choice.

Early on, this mythical creature who collected both Marlboro Miles and seashells with equal zeal—my grandmother—had me convinced that, like her, I was born with mermaid blood. She’d buckle my jelly sandals, dust off make-believe remnants of sand between my toes, undo my tight ponytail (“daughters of the Adriatic wear their mermaid hair down,” she’d say), and send me off to school ready for the seas. Or, at the very least, the second grade. On the rare occasion I expressed disbelief in her “mermaid theory,” she was quick to remind me I’ve never, not once, needed any swimming lessons—that I jumped into the Atlantic when I was four and made myself at home in its temperamental embrace since. When I take inventory of the fifty-three bikinis taking up space I don’t have in my one-bedroom Brooklyn apartment, I wonder if she wasn’t at least a little bit right.

My grandmother’s ring finger had a permanent tan line she loved to show off as a symbol of her dedication to the delicate, and maybe lost, art of falling in love. The summer she turned ninety-four, she was willing to hop on a plane to Spain to try her hand at it all over again.

The way she told it, she’d met a man from Barcelona, and that was that. What else did she need? Possibly possessed by one too many Woody Allen films and the ghost of Hank Williams, without telling anyone she packed herself a carry-on, purchased a one-way ticket to Spain, hitched a ride to Tampa International Airport, and was determined to meet love halfway. If it wasn’t for some meddling TSA agents and my father (who she never forgave) she would’ve made it onto that flight, too.

When I look down at my own barren hands, with nothing but a too-long set of nails to show for themselves, I think, well it’s not for lack of trying.

As a single woman over thirty, my prospects grow bleaker by the day. I’m told that my best option is online dating. I’m told I should smile for the front-facing camera and let Tinder and a one-hundred-word bio pimp me out. I’m told that it’s high time I get comfortable being nothing more than a ChatGPT fleshlight with a pulse. I’m told to forget the language of poetry and songs, that getting fluent in LLM’s would serve me better. That yes, even serendipity and soulmates have been outsourced to the almighty algorithm gods with an option to, for an additional $2.99, “upgrade to message first.” Dating apps promise you’re only a few clicks away from connection, but I know better—I know it to be spiritually true—that damn phone is an instrument of the devil.

My grandmother is all the proof I needed to believe that love only ever takes a bit of luck and a lot of courage. She wrangled herself nearly half a dozen husbands by simply existing in the wild. Surely I—fellow daughter of the Adriatic, mermaid blood and all that—could muster up enough natural wit and charm to get a man to, if not propose, at least secure a reservation at Torrisi’s? If you ask any New Yorker, both are arguably just as hard.

I started my journey the way my ancestors would have—soaking in a tub, two vodka tonics deep, Rhiannon on repeat, invoking the spirit of Stevie Nicks and Dorothy Parker both. With desire and delusion flooding my veins, I was ready to get dressed. I threw on a black turtleneck and leather pants paired with my finest faux fur coat, which would have looked out of place for a mere grocery run anywhere else, but in New York it was just the right amount of audacious.

Descending down the escalator leading into Trader Joe’s feels a bit like making your way through Dante’s Inferno-esque circles of hell. A place where lost souls in limbo—guilty of lust, gluttony and greed over frozen mandarin orange chicken and bargain floral arrangements—meet. The women look sad and the men look mean.

I grabbed the miniature red cart and made a sharp right to the salad and greens aisle—I need a man who values a healthy diet, after all. Mostly for vanity’s sake. I locked eyes with the burly jock in a Yale hoodie, who unfortunately is more interested in the organic pre-made bags of caesar salad instead. Pre-made bags of salad. Is this what they’re teaching over at Yale? What kind of man doesn’t take the time to make his own basic, fresh, four-ingredient salad? Makes you wonder what else he’s skimping on. Brushing his teeth at night. Waits until he’s asked a fourth time to take out the trash. Probably signs birthday cards with “best.” Besides, any seasoned shopper knows these have a sixteen-hour shelf life at most. Not worth the $4.99 unless you eat the entire bag in one sitting. He’s probably not single anyway. Let the sorority girls keep him.

I spotted a few prospects over by the free-range eggs. Ruggedly handsome and clearly ethical types, clad in band t-shirts and flannel that signal they have taste but aren’t pretentious about it. Their biggest sin is their penchance for craft beer, which, for the right man, I could forgive. I overhear them casually arguing over which Black Keys album is the best and shake my head slowly when they’re both wrong.

A lanky man with a peacoat, round glasses and The New Yorker tote speeds up ahead of me to the frozen Indian cuisine. This is good, he reads for fun, I think to myself. And the garlic naan on a cold Tuesday night is a nice touch, too. Now we’re getting somewhere. But we weren’t. To my horror, he grabs not one but two handfuls of chicken tikka masala. That’s seven chicken tikka masala’s in each hand. Jesus fuck, what could one man need with fourteen servings of chicken tikka masala? Is that all you eat, then? Paltry reheated dishes of chicken tikka masala? Know what you get with a guy like this, besides an unhealthy gut microbiome? Routine. Stubborn, whimsiless routine. Mermaids can’t live off of frozen chicken tikka masala alone.

I moved across to what makes the whole harrowing Trader Joe’s ordeal worthwhile, the snacks. There, on the top shelf, were those greatly sought after chocolate peanut butter cups Facebook forum stay-at-home moms would kill for. As I reached for the box, a blonde man who could easily pass for a Skarsgård brother, watched my 5’1” frame struggle, making no offer to help. These Skarsgård’s were raised by a pack of Swedish wolves. I made a big show of grabbing the chocolate peanut butter cups myself—I always could, that was never the point—and remembered I’m not into blondes with no manners, anyway.

Discouraged and hungry I decided to cut my losses, picked out a cheap floral arrangement as a consolation prize before making a beeline to the checkout, which was now 238 New York souls deep. Figuring I’ve got a good twenty minutes of standing around ahead of me, I pulled out the reformed party girls Bible, Eve Babitz’s Slow Days, Fast Company. I wonder if she ever tried picking someone up in whatever 1960s version of LA’s Trader Joe’s was. With a set of… eyes like hers, I’m betting she didn’t have to.

An old LIRR ticket to Long Branch I use as a bookmark must’ve slipped out, as the mountain-eyed gentleman next to me bends down to pick it up.

“Thank you,” I whispered quietly, loud enough for only him to hear.

“You’re welcome,” this salt-of-the-earth man says back.

“You know, I almost couldn’t see your face behind all of your… mermaid hair.”

“Mermaid hair,” I laughed. “My grandmother used to call it that.”

What could a man with mountain eyes and a girl, half mermaid, have in common? I don’t know, but I owe it to my grandmother to go to Torissi’s next week with him and find out.

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I hit my reading peak when I was eleven or twelve. At the time, it was a joke. I had a bedside table and it was stacked with books, all at different stages of being read. Books migrated to the floor next to the bed, and different stacks migrated to different rooms of the apartment. At the time I really was ravenous. It was clear to me that books were essentially the same as knowledge and were the window into the world—into all kinds of different worlds—but, crucially, that books also contained the key into adulthood. Since then, my reading has basically been in decline and under siege from a wide variety of different adversaries. Let’s list those before getting into my personal reading rehabilitation project.

Middle school, and adolescence in general, were the single greatest blow to my reading. It quickly became clear that, from a social perspective, all this reading was a catastrophic blunder, and I tried to switch gears as quickly as I could—I would come home from school and turn on ESPN or VH1 and try to download pop culture so that I could repeat it back in school the next day.

School itself was an obstacle to my reading. I showed up at my new middle school trying to hide The Republic under The Red Pony, and I’ve had a fantasy from that day to this that the school system would start recognizing and supporting kids like me who clearly were very self-motivated and had an obvious aptitude in one subject as opposed to others. In this fantasy I would have been instantly enrolled in some higher-level English classes and excused from math or science, which, it was completely clear, wasn’t going to be a significant part of my life. But that just wasn’t the case. There were phone calls home, and I learned fairly quickly to revert to the mean.

Then there was social life. I remember carefully packing a suitcase of my books for college when my father told me, “Trust me, there won’t be a moment for reading recreationally.” He didn’t just mean that there would be a deluge of school reading, he meant that there would be so much going on around campus that reading for fun would be a kind of admission of social failure. I took that seriously, felt a sort of guilty conscience whenever I opened up one of my books and tried to think what I should be doing instead. It was a real surprise to me when I realized, somewhere towards sophomore or junior year, that it wasn’t exactly true and lots of cool, perfectly socially-adjusted people were also reading for fun.

Then there was work life. I sort of had an understanding around this time that reading, even serious reading, was childish, and that adults spent all their time thinking about money, and I remember a moment soon after I graduated when I delivered a kind of private eulogy for my reading life. In the end, it turned out to be not like that. The first job I had out of college involved twelve-hour workdays, but that still left a lot of hours unaccounted for, and I remember the curious guilty pleasure of visiting the used bookstore in town and loading up on a whole bunch of Penguin Classics that the proprietor was visibly surprised to be selling to anyone.

I remember feeling like I’d overcome some kind of hurdle in my reading life at that time—I’d expected work life to grind down my reading and instead my reading (which is to say, my inner life) had somehow outfoxed the work schedule. But I was underestimating my adversaries. That phase was another peak of my reading, and then there was a ten-year period from, roughly, my late twenties to my late thirties when I barely read anything at all—or, at least, my reading consumption slowed to a level that would have deeply embarrassed my eleven-year-old self.

What happened? I was no longer in terror of middle schoolers expecting me to know who Gwen Stefani was or to quote TV commercials back at them. I wasn’t, for the most part, dealing with an onerous worklife that swallowed up all my free time. But there were a few new adversaries.

One was love. Being with a partner meant, essentially, turning over my inner life to the partner. Reading seemed like a way of distancing rather than connecting, and by far the better way to consume content was to stream TV shows together.

Then there were money worries. Adulthood wasn’t quite the grey-flannel-suit enterprise that I had pictured where I was younger, where you entered into the workforce and were essentially lobotomized by it. In millennial life everything was a bit looser and freer, but there was also a drumbeat of constant anxiety. Reading—I mean, reading a long, serious book—seemed, in that context, like checking out, not so different from sitting down on the street and rattling an empty coffee cup. Scrolling was alright—that meant that you were still plugged in, that you were part of the flow of life, where social connections and money opportunities could be made. But there was absolutely zero opportunity of advancing one’s interests by reading a book—there was no conceivable social chit-chat that would turn to people bantering about books, and the knowledge in books was entirely abstract and remote, as opposed to the potentially utilitarian knowledge you might get from a newspaper or a social media post.

From a more macro point of view, what was happening at this time was the final breakdown of a Bourdieauian concept of social status, in which taste was the critical metric of status and being bourgeois or refined meant, among other things, being a reader (for a glimpse of how a Bourdieuian social system worked in practice, it’s worth watching certain movies from the ’70s or ’80s, any Woody Allen movie, for instance, which are basically a cornucopia of high-brow referents). As David Brooks nicely documents in Bobos in Paradise, the bourgeoisie made a kind of collective pact around the 1990s or 2000s to just drop it—to not burden themselves with showing off how much they’d read and to instead just flaunt their wealth while entertaining themselves with talking about TV shows, which were starting to become pretty good.

Then, surprisingly enough, writing was a hindrance to my reading. This is kind of a specialized concern, but I came to feel in my twenties that my writing was a bit drafty and undergraduate, in large part because I was overly influenced by the enormous swath of reading material that I had inhaled through my adolescence. I was very impressed by a line from a medieval Arabic poet where he advises a student to memorize a thousand passages of poetry and then to forget them all again before he could begin writing. I decided that I was in the phase where I needed to forget—I had taken in too many inputs, and I had a tendency to be intimidated or just overly influenced by them, and now was the time, I felt, to clear out my own head and find my voice. This, by the way, I think is pretty good advice to writers, but, at the time, it was accompanied by a certain bitterness on my part towards reading—if reading couldn’t even make me a better writer, I thought, then what really was all that reading for?

But, of course, the most significant obstacle to reading was social media. There was a long period of time—almost forgotten now—where society split between those who were always online and those who weren’t. I prided myself in being among the people who weren’t—having a Facebook profile but not posting, not obsessively checking Twitter, etc.—but we were all fooling ourselves. The turning point for me came when I watched the documentary The Social Dilemma in 2020 and realized the extent to which I was like the kind of alcoholic who claims that they only drink moderately, but whose life is in fact dominated by booze. “Every time you see the phone on the counter and you just look at it and you know if you reach over it just might have something for you so you play that slot machine to see what you get, right?” the technology ethicist Tristan Harris says in the documentary. The argument was that the phones used deep psychological techniques—it’s called “positive intermittent reinforcement,” if you’re interested—to get you completely hooked. I was old enough to remember how the arrival of the mail in the morning had a similar effect on people, or the way that people might hover by a landline waiting for a phone call. But now it was like people were checking their mailbox a thousand times a day—just the idea of good news coming for you, and only you, was so powerful that, essentially, nothing else could compete with it, certainly not a closed form like a book, which as often as not was written by a dead person and, by definition, could not have a job offer or a romantic possibility or a party invitation or a compliment for you embedded within it.

For the better part of a decade, we all fell victim to this. I remember the most interesting person I knew—a guy who’d become a shaman—saying that his whole spiritual journey was behind him. “Now I am a Facebook customer,” he reported. And my reading habit was one victim of many.

The Social Dilemma probably was the decisive event for me and made me realize the extent to which my behavior—the regular checking of my cell phone—was addiction, no matter that I was probably a bit better than most people I knew. The period since then—call it the last five years—has been a slow and deeply embarrassing journey to learn to read again. In other words, painstakingly and through all kinds of cheap tricks, to learn to do something that used to be about as natural for me as breathing. I sometimes think about it as being like a stroke victim who has to train themselves to walk again or to wake up some dormant hemisphere of their brain—with the difference that nothing bad happened to me, apart from the general current of 21st century life.

What bothered me most, I suppose, was the degradation of my own inner world. Solitude used to be something I looked forward to—the chance to curl up with a book. Now I was twitchy and irritable—constantly checking my phone. I was, in a word, far less mature than I had been when I was eleven or twelve. I could remember when adults might ask each other, as a normal question, “what are you reading?” and that was like an invitation to travel together into a different dimension, into the content of each other’s inner lives and each other’s souls. Asking each other about what they had seen on Netflix or whether they had caught the Grammys didn’t have the same incantatory power. Without that, discourse seemed to be breaking down. Twitter was turning into a flaming mosh pit of dueling online mobs, Instagram and Facebook were aggressively performative, and all of them were heavily manipulated by algorithms and subject to corporate censorship. What reading really meant was getting away from all of that—from an opportunistic culture in which participants are “users” and to the promise that’s embedded in reading at its best, of soul speaking to soul, of individuals maybe continents or centuries away speaking their truth, to the best of their ability, and being received with respect and empathy by an attentive reader. To me, that seemed like a much better, more reciprocal and more honorable, relationship with others than anything that was on offer from my current tech-based social landscape.

So, in my uphill battle to once again be a reader, here are a few of the tricks I’ve tried.

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