The books we returned to this year for insight, comfort and enjoyment.
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The New Yorker staff read hundreds of new books this year, picking out the most noteworthy and rounding up the best books of 2022 so far. (Stay tuned—we'll continue to update the list through the end of December.) The magazine's writers revisited works they'd previously read. The reasons varied: the selection might have been linked to an upcoming article or inspiration for a family wedding – or perhaps the book just happened to be sitting near the author's desk. Whatever the reason, these works of fiction, prose and poetry have become relevant once again in 2022, at once fresh and familiar during a tumultuous year.
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Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson is reportedly quickly writing a memoir of his time in Downing Street, having decided not to step back into the Tory leadership at least until he has maximized the profit potential of his previous chaotic tenure as the UK government leader. As he decides which of his former colleagues to throw off the bus—Johnson loves buses—and which of his character's many failings to tackle, Johnson will no doubt have in mind the golden rule of parliamentary memoirs: the "Diaries (Diaries) of Alan Clarke, a minister in Margaret Thatcher's government. Throughout this tumultuous year in British politics, I've been dipping into Clarke's Diaries, the first volume of which was published in 1993, just three years after Thatcher's fall. He describes this event in moment-by-moment detail that could be cut and pasted into an account of more recent events: “The Party is essentially out of control. Mutinous. The world is not ready for divisions. Dissenters are getting bolder with little spontaneous TV slots.” Clarke's book is valuable not only for its chronicle of political machinations but also for its self-restraint: "The trouble is, I just love the House of Commons," he writes. "I'm drawn to the gossipy, club-like, constitutional atmosphere and I also love the delicious karate confidence that being an MP gives me." I'm not sure I'll be able to bring myself to read Johnson's final memoir. I certainly won't contribute to his royalties by paying for it. But if his book is to have any lasting value, it will be because Johnson, like Clarke before him, recognizes—or perhaps simply betrays—the extent to which his political career was driven not by high ambition for public service. but from the lower, irresistible impulses of vanity. —Rebecca Mead
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I wasn't smart enough to “Glyph” my first round. It was a few years ago, in graduate school, and I, like any graduate student, had a well-spring enthusiasm for the seemingly apocalyptic purpose of criticism and theory. “Erasure,” the usual entry to Percival Everett (the author of more than thirty books, more than twenty of them novels), seemed long to me—a classmate pointed out, however, that perhaps this other novel, his tenth, for an infant who has language but refuses speech may also help answer any questions I had at the time. I followed the suggestion and bought the book and read it and laughed and laughed and finished and put it away.
“Glyph” is about – to the extent that Everett's work entertains this intention – Ralph, a baby with an IQ of over 400 who can read and write and narrate (with borderline-unbearable intelligence) and is kidnapped when his genius becomes apparent. I returned to Glyph late last year and in the middle of this year to help me think, this time, about the opposite of revelation – knowledge as a kind of disillusionment, when the smart stuff of social science and cultural theory it gets boring. Little Ralph is Black, by the way, and that information is given just like that, in the first quarter into the novel. "Have you assumed at this point that I'm white?" Ralph asks. "It's not important if you don't want it." FYI looks like a bold, barbed invitation to impress the tribe – as we're used to – despite its striking looks, which is related as an afterthought. The race isn't trivial, but it's not very interesting either, and it's definitely useful for baby Ralph. The greatest drama in the novel is the hilarity of a caper, which is itself cut and sorted into an Everett schematic. Make no mistake, I'm still not smart enough for Everett, but I am wise enough to put aside this psychodrama in favor of the pleasures of reading. —Lauren Michele Jackson
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Next April will be the fiftieth anniversary of Pablo Picasso's death, and this anniversary has given me the opportunity to revisit 'Loving Picasso', a wonderful collection of journals, memoirs and letters by Fernande Olivier, Picasso's first great love, who I recently read and wrote about Françoise Gilot. They met in the summer of 1904, when Olivier was twenty-three and Picasso a few months younger. They both lived in Bateau-Lavoir, an artist-filled shantytown of a building in Montmartre that has acquired a mythical aura through its association with Picasso, and fair enough, when Fernande first visits his studio, she finds them “amazing » canvases of the Blue Period, then in full swing. (He also finds Picasso's pet, a tame white mouse, "living in the drawer of the table and lovingly tending to it.") But while Olivier's writing is essential to understanding the young Picasso's work and character—practically at first glance, she diagnoses him with the "mixture of hardness and softness, balance and imbalance, will and weakness" that will characterize him throughout his life – it is also notable as a self-portrait of an indolent young woman who, through a strange combination of instinct , of courage, passivity and luck, was freed from domestic misery and launched into the heart of the golden age of the Parisian bohemian lifestyle. Born out of wedlock, Olivier, like Jane Eyre, was raised by an evil aunt who favored her own daughter; at eighteen, she began a disastrous marriage to a man who beat and raped her, eventually fleeing to Paris, where she began immediately engaged with a sculptor and presented herself as one of the most famous artist models of her time. It was the fate of Picasso's many muses to be known primarily through his eyes. How nice that she returns to this account and accompanies Fernande as she brings herself to life on the page. — Alexandra Schwartz
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For a long time, I kept the opening paragraph of the first chapter of Dickens' Bleak House typed above my desk. "London. Michael's term has recently ended, and the Lord Chancellor sits in Lincoln's Inn Hall,” read the opening lines. "Irresistible November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had just receded from the face of the earth, and wouldn't it be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, about forty feet long, croaking like an elephantine lizard on Holborn Hill.' I found it fascinating – the phrasing of the date; the cinematic look; the sure, quick, dash of a dinosaur in Victorian London; the confused estimate of its hypothetical length, with that sensible 'about'.
John Mullan's The Artful Dickens: The Tricks and Ploys of the Great Novelist is a book I bought when it came out in 2021 and have been digging into it repeatedly over the last year. It helped me understand what Mullan calls "qualities of formal inventiveness" for which Dickens is not always appreciated. But it also offers a master class in descriptive writing techniques, especially at the sentence level. Mullan, a British academic and journalist, devotes his opening chapter, "Fantasising," to Dickens's frequent, unique use of the phrase "as if." "No respectable literary novelist," he writes, "would ever imagine" this strange dinosaur along the lines of "Bleak House." "The Dickensian as if is the phrase, more than any other, that unlocks the novelist's fantastical vision of the sheer paradox of reality." Journalists, too, are often called upon to find the strange in the ordinary. It would be so wonderful to do it with an ounce of Dickens's brew—in the nineteenth-century sense of the term and in our own. —Margaret Talbot
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Lately, a lot of people I know around my age—I'm in my thirties—are returning to the classics they read too boringly, too sloppily, or too studiously in school. This probably has something to do with the pandemic. (Everything has to do with the pandemic.) It can result from the endless, exhausting, puffing, democratizing grind of junk media that, we all know, erodes attention spans and shortens our lives. But it's also because a lot of what's left is really good. For me, this year, the revelation hiding in plain sight was Tolstoy. Over the summer, on a whim, I picked up an old paperback of "Anna Karenina" (a novel I admit I don't remember much from the first time I read it) and was blown away from the first page. It felt like a novel I'd been searching for among the new releases—pure yet ambitious, funny yet empathetic, pluralistically generous and historically intelligent—had landed in my lap from a hundred and forty-year fall. As a reader, I was surprised at how ageless Tolstoy's sensibility seemed: his human and social portraits are so finely tuned that, but for the sharpest period details, they could have been written in the last decade. And, as a writer, I admired his simple yet radical technique. The novel is, in broad terms, an exercise in patience. (It takes eighteen chapters before we meet the title character. Tolstoy seems to think of society almost as a set of bicycle wheels, and traces the character's spokes as they converge and turn.) Yet sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, the book is lean and exciting and bright. What James Joyce exclaimed about Tolstoy more than a hundred years ago – "He is never dull, never silly, never tired, never pedantic, never theatrical!" – seems more real than ever and no less an amazing feat. On this reread, I was haunted by Tolstoy's strangely beautiful multi-chapter scene of Konstantin Levin mowing his field with a scythe: an intimate portrait of the agony and wonder of the graceful work of a writer who knew both. — Nathan Heller
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I'm not sure how Kennedy Fraser's 1996 essay collection Jewel and Silence first came into my hands, but it has become one of my most read, over and over, books. I come back to it every few years, and in the intervening years I give it away. I've replaced my copy four or five times so far, and I always seem to have more than one version in my apartment, depending on when friends decide to return or borrow it. It's my take-a-dime book. It's also the book I first turn to when I feel like I've forgotten how to write (which is alarmingly often, for someone who makes a living at it). Fraser wrote for that magazine for many years – she took over the New Yorker's fashion beat in the seventies and eighties, then turned to writing sweeping profiles and essays about women who led complicated and complicated lives. Fraser's fashion writing is full of color and curiosity, mischief and meticulous detail. Her profile of the Japanese designer Issey Miyake, who died in August 1983, has one of my all-time favorite opening lines: “It was one of those New York days when the Hudson River smells like Maxwell House and the sea. ” This fall, I found myself flipping through “Ornament and Silence” almost every week after feeling my brain struggle to crawl out from under a heavy post-COVID-19 fog. There are some writers whose sentences bring you back to life and make your mind overheat with envy—Why can't I write like that?—and Fraser, with her beautiful adjectives and bursting syntax, always makes me want to do better . The essay in the collection I reread most often is “Going On,” a profile he wrote of the Russian writer Nina Berberova when Berberova was ninety-one. It is a remarkable chronicle of an uncompromising life, but also a sad meditation on aging. I love Fraser's descriptions. For Berberova, he writes, "there was something almost talismanic about her femininity." He writes that "the library containing Nina's works is a yeast of biological enterprise." A yeast library! Only Fraser would think of that phrase. I keep re-reading the book to try and figure out her formula, but it still seems magical to me. —Rachel Sime
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Anyone who knows me knows not only that I love Los Angeles, but that I love to read about Los Angeles, particularly the city's dark underbelly and darker underbelly. (That old chestnut!) I've been through many of the genre's more or less predictable offerings – Eve Babitz's 'Eve's Hollywood', Joan Didion's 'Play It as It Lays', Brett's 'Less Than Zero' Easton Ellis, Dorothy B. Hughes' "In a Lonely Place," Julia Phillips' "You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again," Danny Sugerman's "Wonderland Avenue" — and so my main feelings as recently devoured Gavin Lambert's The Goodby People from 1971, surprised no one had ever recommended this gem of an LA novel to me, along with the happiness that I had now, at least, finally come across it. (For that I have to thank the new and very fine McNally Editions imprint, which reissued the book earlier this year.) Lambert was a British screenwriter who arrived in Hollywood in the 1950s to work with director Nicholas Ray (who he was also at one point his lover). By the time of his death in Los Angeles in 2005, Lambert had written several screenplays, several biographies (including one of his close friend Natalie Wood) and five novels, including "The Goodby People," which consists of three interrelated, long stories, in which an unnamed Lambert-esque screenwriter serves as narrator, taking readers on a journey through the saloons and squats of late 1960s Los Angeles. The Vietnam draftee, a fugitive who pursues a perceived mystical connection with an elderly actress – they all wander half-invisible in a world torn between old-Hollywood grandeur and grotesque bohemia. Lambert's tone is detached but soft, casual without feeling. "When it was all over, I felt a mixture of relief and disappointment," reports the narrator, of a hippie rock festival by the ocean. "The violence of the ritual gave way to a pointless detachment. The question seemed to be written on many faces, where can we go now?' —Naomi Fry
In September, my partner and I took it upon ourselves to find a poem to recite at his brother's wedding. The timing of the ceremony—the couple, M. and J., were approaching ten years together—had a sweetly paradoxical quality, sudden and belated. A phrase popped into my brain: "precipitation and pragmatism." It belonged to a poem called "The Shampoo," by Elizabeth Bishop:
The still explosions on the rocks,
the lichens, grow
by spreading, gray, concentric shocks.
They have arranged
to meet the rings around the moon, although
within our memories they have not changed.
And since the heavens will attend
as long as we
you've been, dear friend,
precipitate and pragmatic;
and look what happens. For Time is
nothing if not amenable.
The shooting stars in your black hair
in bright formation
are flocking where
so straight, so soon?
—Come, let me wash it in this big tin basin,
battered and shiny like the moon.
Published in 1955, 'The Shampoo' was probably a love poem for Lota de Macedo Soares, Bishop's partner. I always heard something deeply familiar (and strange) in his subtle oblique rhymes. The poem feels peaceful: the concentric circles of lichen suggest harmony and eternity—rings of moonlight, perhaps, or sound waves spreading out from that great echoing basin. The unsolved question (why do meteors hurtle away and where?) is the only source of tension.
Like love and people's lives, shooting stars are ephemeral. But the speaker's command (“Come”) is a salve – she promises to care for her lover despite the ravages of age. A few years ago, my partner and I went with M. and J. to Japan, where we visited several onsen or hot springs. When I re-read 'The Shampoo' it was as if I had slipped into one of those baths again. In the comfort of water was the comfort of dissolving things. —Katie Waldman
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"It is surprising how easily everything falls apart," wrote Viktor Kleberer in his diary on March 10, 1933, as he observed the dissolution of the Weimar Republic and the imposition of the Nazi dictatorship. Lion Feuchtwanger's methodically terrifying novel The Oppermanns, published in late 1933, recounts this collapse from the perspective of a well-to-do German-Jewish family. At the beginning, Gustav Oppermann, the blasé intellectual of the tribe, is celebrating his fiftieth birthday. Looking at the forest around his house, he hears, in the distance, the blows of an axe. Feuchtwanger writes, "He liked sound; rhythmic beats emphasized stillness." The story of the Oppermanns is an awakening of people who interpret ominous signs from afar, until, for some of them, it is too late. Nothing is more human than this inability to believe the worst, and Feuchtwanger describes it with an exquisite blend of detachment and empathy.
Feuchtwanger, who once rivaled Thomas Mann and Franz Werfel in popularity, has fallen quite out of favor as, of late years, none of his novels have been published in this country. McNally Publications has happily brought it back into circulation, reissuing James Cleugh's English translation of 'The Oppermanns' in an edition revised by novelist Joshua Cohen and annotated by historian Richard Evans. Feuchtwanger's rendering of prose remains clumsy in places, but honors the legendary power of storytelling. The best sequences depict the systematic corruption of the Nazis in a Gymnasium or an elite high school. Nothing I've read this year is as heartbreaking as Feuchtwanger's evocation, in a sharp burst of stream-of-consciousness writing, of the last, desperate thoughts of an ostracized Jewish student.
The question that haunts "The Oppermanns" is eternally relevant: what kind of resistance is possible against ruthless power? Gustav turns from complacency to a form of activism that even members of the underground tell him is foolish. In the end, he worries that his actions were useless. Feuchtwanger is too strong a writer to give a mildly reassuring answer. But the implication of the final pages is clear: in the great theater of history, useless gestures count. — Alex Ross
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With a sense of foreboding about the future of American democracy last winter, I read a book I had never looked at and had actually completely forgotten about, Richard Goodwin's memoir, Remembering America. It made me feel a little better, because Goodwin thought the country had gone to hell in 1988, and we know we survived at least another thirty years. Maybe we'll get lucky again. Goodwin is the Goodwin of Doris Kearns Goodwin, but, before they married in 1975, he worked in the White House for John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson as a speechwriter and political adviser, particularly, under JFK, on Latin American affairs. Goodwin was a true New Frontiersman, a Kennedy idealist. He remained after the assassination, writing some of LBJ's most famous speeches, including his address to a joint session of Congress in March 1965, two weeks after Bloody Sunday in Selma – the "we shall overcome" speech.
Six months later, after Johnson sent the Marines into South Vietnam, Goodwin resigned. He became a confidant of Johnson's nemesis, Robert Kennedy, but, in 1968, RFK was also killed and Goodwin left politics. He was entitled to feel that the dreams of his heroes had been passed down by their successors, Johnson and Richard Nixon. There's actually a lot more to the Richard Goodwin story than that. As a young lawyer-investigator, for example, he broke the story of the quiz-show scandals (and was sickened by the way network bigwigs managed to deflect blame). For ten years he was on top of the world. And then, as it happens for all of us, the world turned. —Louis Menard
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It Can't Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis's satirical novel about an American demagogue turned dictator, was a bestseller when it was first published in 1935. In 2017, on the day of Donald Trump's Inauguration, Penguin Modern Classics released a new edition and became a best-seller again. Even so, it's the kind of book, like "Conflict is Not Abuse" or "Bowling Alone," that is invoked more often as a title than as a text—you hear the phrase and assume, rightly or wrongly, that you can get the point. without having to crumple the wrapper. (I don't think it's too bad to say that the "is" is American fascism and the "can't" is ironic.) Reading it for the first time this year, I found it a stranger, nastier book than I expected: sometimes ill-conceived; sometimes prescient; often hilarious, almost always intentional. (When it came out, Malcolm Cowley called it "not much of a novel"; Clifton Fadiman, in this magazine, called it "one of the most important books ever published in this country"; it is possible that both had right.) The subject matter is bleak, but the tone is motley and irreverent, veering from the realism of realism to camp notes in the camps. There are secondary characters named Effingham Swan, Senator Porkwood, Honorable Perley Beecroft and Dr. Hector Macgoblin. The fictional demagogue (modeled on Huey Long, the real-life Louisiana demagogue who probably would have run for President, against FDR, had he not been assassinated) is named Berzelius Windrip-Buzz for short.
Who could be expected to take any of this seriously? And yet Windrip's fifteen-point platform, a combination of Herrenvolk populism and Trojan horse totalitarianism, still sounds awfully familiar in places. Excerpts from his campaign memoir, "Zero Hour," capture the timeless art of fake populism; and, when Wintrip holds a rally in Madison Square Garden and a gang of pro-Wintrip militants riot and start beating bystanders on Eighth boulevard, the scene comes as close to evoking the unpleasant feeling of a Proud Boys brawl as anything I've read. The novel's protagonist is Doremus Jessup, a swashbuckling journalist with a heart of gold (and a thin veil of cover-up surrounding Lewis), who laments "that eternal enemy: the conservative operators of privilege who denounce as 'dangerous troublemakers' any threatens their fortunes; who jump in their chairs at the bite of a gnat like Debs, and swallow a camel like Wintrip intolerably." Not the most sophisticated, perhaps, polemical, but sometimes subtle times call for subtle prose. — Andrew Marants
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Teaching ensures a certain percentage of re-reading books. (Semesters come and go, but a syllabus is forever.) So, over the past few years, I've read Sophocles' Philoctetes probably half a dozen times, in preparation for class, and the work sticks well... sort of slips in the mind. my. Philoctetes is abandoned on a desert island by his fellow Greeks because of a terrible wound—the other warriors can't stand his scream and foul smell—and then, after a long, desperate period alone, he suddenly recovers. There is so much in "Philoctetes" that changes as the reading body grows older and more fearful. To read it is to think about illness, endurance, the way we isolate our sick, and the gift (or lie) of a secret blessing.
My class was reading Philoctetes when my students were sent home in March 2020, and I remember feeling that there was some kind of promise in the play. Just like the exile on Lemnos, the pandemic isolation would pass and, in the end, our return together and our healing would surely be the same thing. This year, however, "Philoctetes" was not so comforting. We are not cured, although we pretend to be. (Wound? What wound?) I also remember when we were all on our desert islands, vowing that when we left them we would make a different world. But Sophocles knew it wouldn't work that way. Once Philoctetes re-enters the Trojan War, he and his new friend Neoptolemus do terrible things, and his strange, God-untouched, wild decade is quickly forgotten. Who remembers 2021? As I feel it removed from my memory, I re-read "Philoctetes" and imagine its rocky, desolate shore. — Helen Shaw
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This spring, I was asked to write an essay on screwball comedy, which, as I noted to my editor, is my default genre for making sense of most sexual and intellectual interactions between men and women. I began by re-reading Stanley Cavell's classic study Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage in the following way. Every evening for a week, after I put my kids to bed, I'd watch a movie—almost all ninety minutes long, which is the perfect length for me, since I can't stay awake longer—and then I'd read the chapter about it . It was the most delightful week of my life, filled with the unfairly beautiful, outrageously charming leading ladies of “The Lady Eve”, “It Happened One Night”, “Bringing Up Baby”, “The Philadelphia Story”, “His Girl Friday” ”, “Adam's Side”, “The Awful Truth” — and their men. I feel justified in denigrating the men because Cavell's reading of the genre focuses on women and their wise, charming, romantic rants. Both threaten the couple's intimacy and negotiate the utopian terms on which it can endure. "Something apparently internal to the work of marriage causes trouble in heaven—as if the marriage, which was to be ratified, needed to be ratified," Cavell writes. “Well, marriage has its frustrations – call it its inability to tame sexuality without discouraging it, or its stupidity in the face of the conundrum of intimacy, which repels where it attracts, or the puzzle of ecstasy, which is violent while it is tender, like the leopard lying down with the lamb."
Comedy's strange mixture of violence and tenderness offers a solution to the conundrum of marital disillusionment. I think of Henry Fonda holding Barbara Stanwyck's leg (was there ever a more beautiful leg in the history of legs?) while she talks about how much she dislikes beer, a scene that is at once perfect, hilariously pure, and unbearably sexy; voice in which Katharine Hepburn exclaims "David!" in "Bringing Up Baby" and the sinking feeling in my stomach when he chose Cary Grant's character in "The Philadelphia Story" over the rude but sweet reporter played by Jimmy Stewart; the cuckoo clock, with Grant's miniatures and by Irene Dunne, whose jingles mark the couple's reconciliation at the end of The Awful Truth. And I think how much each of these cries or gestures means to us when described to us in Cavell's peculiar style, the passionate expressions with which a critic turns what gives him pleasure into what gives pleasure to his reader . I never got around to writing the essay; life got in the way. But I always think of leopards and lambs, the secret of enduring marriages, and the refuge of laughter. —Merve Emre
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It has never been more important to understand the times we live in, as they are threatened by cruelty, stupidity and fraud. For this reason, I returned to an important book published in 1946, immediately after the defeat of fascism. My choice to re-read, one hopes, can serve as a useful guide to the problems of our time and… anyway. PG Wodehouse's Joy in the Morning, largely written in 1940 and completed in the following years, is his most underrated novel and arguably his best. (Robert McCrum, his biographer, states that it is “regarded by a fervent minority as his masterpiece.”) I returned to it this year to see if it had lost its luster.
He hadn't lost her. Like Jeeves, in fact, he still shimmered. The Happenings at the wonderfully named—and beautifully written!—Steeple Bubbly must rank even with The Code of the Woosters and Right Ho, Jeeves as the best writing of Wodehouse's long (perhaps too long) graphomaniacal career. (“Woosters,” published in 1938, is the novel that presents his brilliant take on fascism.) “Joy” might even be the best place for a Wodehouse novice to start—Wodehouse wrote in a publisher, has just finished it, and rather racy of him, that "My Art flourishes like the family of an Australian rabbit" — and surely S. Bumpleigh (as he might have put it) Wodehouse admirers should go to read it again. It also includes one of Wodehouse's best, most compelling openings, showing his ability to write a long, sweeping sentence that never loses the reader:
After the thing was over, when the danger had ceased to loom, and the happy fees had been distributed in heaping handfuls, and we were driving home with our hats on the side of our heads, having shaken the dust of Steeple Bumpleigh from our tyres, I confessed to Jeeves that there had been moments during the recent proceedings when Bertram Wooster, though not weak, had come very close to despair.
"With a touch, Jeeves."
"Certainly affairs had developed a certain menacing tendency, sir."
—Isaac Chotiner
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Italo Calvino's fine novel Invisible Cities is not the most obvious source of spiritual guidance. I first read it in Jeffrey Eugenides' "The Marriage Plot," where it's played for laughs in a campus satire about insufferable liberal arts students. The book takes the form of a fictional conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, who has invited the Venetian explorer to describe his vast and declining empire. He responds with an atlas of Escher-like vignettes that would confound any police officer, describing everything from a city that looks different depending on whether you arrive by land or sea to a spiderweb metropolis with catwalks suspended in space, where life is more certain because its inhabitants "know that the net will only last so long." The novel's delight is not only its inventiveness—Calvino's acrobatic ability to weave worlds out of a few thin threads of language—but also his vision of a reality too complex for Hahn's accomplished ambitions. I keep the book near my desk. Sometimes I read a random city for inspiration, like a tarot card or takeaway fortune. The passage I return to the most, however, comes at the end, when the desperate emperor—who sounds like a lot of us these days—asks Polo why he bothers with so many distant cities when the current of history is pulling them all into the same hell. The explorer's response is a defense of care for the concrete, and one of the best responses to cynicism I know: "The hell of the living is not something that will be; if it is, it is what is already here, the hell where we live everyday, that we form by being together. There are two ways to avoid this. The first is easy for many: accept hell and become part of what you can no longer see. The second is risky and requires constant vigilance and concern: search and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of hell, is not hell, then make them endure, give them space.' —Julian Lucas
*Cover photo: Illustration by Andrew B. Myers
Source: newyorker.com