It would be natural to describe the grammarian and lexicographer H.W. Fowler, author of the philological classic A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, as a meticulous person, but he despised this word and did not acknowledge its right to exist. “This wicked word,” as he called it, had no legitimate parentage in Latin or English and came to the language as a pretentious borrowing from the French méticuleux, which itself had first appeared in a French dictionary less than a hundred years before. Scrupulous and punctilious, he believed, were amply sufficient.

Meticulous is just one of the words that, according to Fowler, “for one reason or another should not have been brought into existence.” These include, among many others: Amoral, bureaucrat, calmative, coastal, concision, demean, eventuate, feature v., femininity, forceful, foreword, idiosyncratic, intensive, locution, mentality, mineralogy, pacifist, pleistocene, and speedometer.

Fowler classified these unwelcome words according to his own taxonomy of errors. Amoral, of course, has a Latin root and a Greek prefix and is therefore a Barbarism. (It should be “non-moral.”) Likewise pleistocene. To educated people of Fowler’s day, who grew up studying Latin and Greek, these words sounded gimcrack and ugly. Bureaucrat and bureaucracy receive particular scorn: “The very special ugliness of bureaucracy is due to the way its mongrel origin is flaunted in our faces by the telltale syllable -eau-.”1 Forceful Fowler labelled a Vogue-Word used needlessly in place of forcible. Mentality was a Superfluous Word popular with writers too lazy to decide whether they meant mind, mood, character, etc. Mineralogy was a syncopated (that is, abbreviated) form of the correct mineralology. Feature as a verb was an Americanism.

Besides those he wanted to eradicate, there were other words whose use he felt should be restricted. These included optimist, a Popularized Technicality borrowed in this case from philosophy (“Free indulgence in this sort of term” he wrote, “results in a tawdry style”), conservative in the sense of moderate, safe, or low, (“perhaps the most ridiculous of Slipshod Extensions”), and of course nice to mean pleasant. Fowler admitted that nice had been used in this sense for almost 100 years but maintained that this was slang and that “we do not talk in books of a nice day, only of a nice distinction.”

Of course, we do now. All of these words are today considered standard English, and no editor would correct them. Still I have no doubt that they all sounded ignorant, newfangled or nonsensical in Fowler’s time, and it’s a pleasure to watch him apply the lash. The contemporary American equivalent of Fowler, to the extent we have one, is Garner’s Dictionary of Modern Usage, by Bryan A. Garner. Garner is great fun to read, just like Fowler, and easier than Fowler since he uses fewer technical terms and knows we don’t know Latin. You can just open the book anywhere and realize how little you know about words. For example, altercation, which Garner insists does not refer to fisticuffs.

The traditional view is that this word refers to ‘a noisy brawl or dispute,’ not rising to the seriousness of physical violence. For authority limiting the term to the sense “wordy strife,” see the OED, W2, W3, and Eric Partridge’s U&A… But since about 1980 in AmE and BrE alike, the word has often denoted some type of scuffling or fighting, especially in police jargon… Some will lament this development as slipshod extension, but the purely nonphysical sense seems beyond recall. The real battle now is to limit altercation to light roughhousing.

I love to watch a grammarian at work. The mismatch between powerful intelligence and minute problem can be very charming. For example, when Fowler turns his mind to the difference between apt and liable: “It may perhaps be laid down that apt is the right word except when the infinitive expresses not merely an evil, but an evil that is one to the subject.” (E.g, “We are liable to be overheard.”) The high point of The King’s English might be his remarks on mutual.

Every one knows by now that our mutual friend is a solecism. Mutual implies an action or relation between two or more persons or things, A doing or standing to B as B does or stands to A. Let A and B be the persons indicated by our, C the friend. No such reciprocal relation is here implied between A and B (who for all we know may be enemies), but only a separate, though similar relation between each of them and C.

We’re watching an eagle soar, a magnificent stallion in full gallop. The complete analysis takes two and a half pages. (“Our common friend” is correct.)

But we don’t read these books just for the disinterested enjoyment of watching a brilliant lexicographical mind in action. We read them because we’re looking for an authority on language: partly to correct our own mistakes but mostly to take our side against all the people writing badly. I think this is how they were always read. Style guides are elitist. Fowler’s dictionary reads at times like an official report on the horrors of mass literacy. But these days it’s especially hard to escape the feeling that in matters of style and usage, no one’s minding the store. Last month, I read a book (a biography of a famous journalist with a flawless prose style) in which the author used the phrase “clapped back” twice. The book was put out by a prestigious publisher; the author, the jacket copy notes, went to Yale. Here are some headlines from the top of the New York Times’ home page from a couple of weeks ago:

SpaceX Sets Milestone With World’s Largest I.P.O., Furthering Musk’s Power

Europe’s Growing Rift With Trump Ensnares a $115 Million Tech Deal

Trump’s Sharp Turn on China: Embracing It as a Peer Power

These might all be from the same day. I don’t know when headline writers at the Times started writing like this. I think there used to be an editor with a wrinkled shirt and hair in his ears who would yell things like “What do you mean ‘furthers power’? You can increase power, is that what you mean?’” and “How can a rift ensnare something? Do you know what a rift is? Does it threaten the deal, is that what you’re trying to say?” and that guy doesn’t work there anymore. That guy doesn’t work anywhere anymore. That’s guy’s a legend, he retired or died, and whoever replaced him has never heard of Garner or Fowler. I pick on the Times because that’s what I read, but I’m sure there’s much worse stuff out there, for example, this chilling sentence from an article in The Atlantic about social media influencers: “She repeatedly references how moms who have few other work options have carved out hard-won financial stability via their kids’ virality, positioning influencing as a viable career path.”2

According to Garner, one’s feeling that the people looking after language have abdicated responsibility is basically correct. For quite a while, the authorities on language have been not grammarians, lexicographers and schoolteachers but linguists, and most linguists believe not only that their job isn’t to police grammar, usage and style but that any attempt to do so is illegitimate.

Descriptive grammar . . . has nothing to do with the rather surreal notion of telling people what they should say. The other grammar, which is about counterintuitive, party-pooping bizarrerie, …is called prescriptive grammar and is neither taught to nor discussed by linguists, except as the persistent little scourge that seems to have gotten hold of the Anglophone world.

This is John McWhorter, quoted in Garner’s essay for the 2nd edition of his Dictionary, “Making Peace in the Language Wars,” a masterpiece of passive aggression that doesn’t try to make peace at all but instead attacks the linguists mercilessly for 20 pages. Linguists, Garner says, generally belong to the school he calls “describers,” as opposed to “prescribers” like himself. Describers view language as a natural phenomenon and believe, therefore, that no native speaker of a language can make a mistake and that usage guides are superfluous. Steven Pinker, for example, argues that what prescribers like Garner do is as absurd as claiming that “the song of the humpback whale contains several well-known errors.” But as Garner points out, “Pinker’s line of reasoning would eliminate any means for judging the effectiveness of human expression.” Garner argues convincingly that the describers are missing the point. “These writers see language as if it were merely a series of events to be duly recorded. They don’t see it—or don’t want to see it—as the product of human conduct and human decision, or its use as a skill that can either be left rudimentary or be honed.”

I admit I’m totally biased against describers and have learned nothing about them beyond Garner’s devastating essay and its sequel in the next edition, “The Ongoing Tumult in English Usage.”3 I find these linguists deeply annoying and their claims of scientific impartiality disingenuous. McWhorter, for example, gives himself away with his put-on hauteur (“rather surreal,” “bizarrerie,” etc.): he’s overcompensating because he knows the prescribers have a point, and he knows this because, like you and me, he occasionally reads English prose. Some sentences are elegant and some are ugly. If you can’t tell the difference, god bless you. But McWhorter and the rest can: as Garner points out, “They write by all the rules that they tell everyone else not to worry about.” They’re just pretending it doesn’t matter so that they can pose as scientists.

I think Garner could make an even stronger case for prescriptivism if he admitted that it was about aesthetics. As it is, he feels obliged to make egalitarian claims for it. Descriptivism, he writes, “dooms us all to the dialect of the households in which we’ve grown up. One result is rigidified social strata.” This is not really believable. It’s hard to imagine an otherwise good high school failing to teach underprivileged teenagers how to write well for no other reason than descriptivist ideology. Garner seems guilty of a little disingenuousness of his own here. Prescribers aren’t trying to aid the downtrodden, they’re trying to make other people’s writing less ugly. This gets confusing sometimes since writing consists of words, and literary ugliness takes the form of nonsense. Some writers on language – Orwell, most famously – try to draw a connection between nonsense and dishonesty, nonsense and bad politics, and to see style in moral terms. I don’t believe it. People from the left, right, and center all write badly. Plenty of people with wrongheaded or objectionable or downright hateful ideas write very well. Ugly writing is bad on its own, and you don’t have to claim it’s morally corrupting to condemn it; good writing is good on its own, and you don’t have to claim it’s liberating to defend it.

I disagree with the linguists, but it’s not their fault we write badly. That comes naturally. The causes of bad writing, as every style manual from Fowler on down has observed, are simply the eternal human faults of ignorance, laziness, and pretentiousness. Ignorance when you don’t know what words mean, laziness when you use a cliché because you can’t be bothered to figure out what you’re trying to say, and pretentiousness when you’re more concerned with sounding fancy than with whatever it is you’re talking about. This last weakness is a special inspiration for bad style. There seems to exist an innate human impulse to ape the natural sciences, to adopt technical terms where they don’t apply, to add syllables and use flowery language. These manuals make clear that, as linguists remind us, language is always changing – but mostly for the worse. Language is a living thing, but ignorance, lazy writing, and pretentiousness are also living things and need to be cut down as fast as they grow.4

That’s more or less what Garner says, albeit in a less despotic way. He describes a five-stage process in which at each stage a “new form” is accepted by a larger and more educated part of the population of speakers. In this way a word will go from 1. Rejected to 2. Widely Shunned to 3. Widespread but . . . to 4. Ubiquitous but . . . to 5. Fully Accepted. Yesterday’s Slipshod Extension or Vogue-Word is today’s good English. “If a mutation makes its way to stage 4,” he notes ominously, “its long-term progression to stage 5 is all but assured.” Garner suggests that the job of the stickler is to police Stage 3: to remind us not to use absent for without, alibi for excuse, alternate for alternative.

This approach is sensible. But is it enough? Garner imagines the grammarian as something like a gardener, carefully pruning and weeding. But if the garden is totally overgrown with thorny vines, a machete or weed-wacker might be called for. Garner’s achievement is huge (read David Foster Wallace’s essay about him, “Authority and American Usage” in Consider the Lobster) but it seems to me his work lacks the proper spirit of correction and chastisement, that righteous fury necessary to wage what Martin Amis called “the war against cliché.” We live in an age of stylistic decadence and anarchy. I don’t know if Garner has the holy fire to help us. Fowler – Fowler had it. Professor William Strunk, whose manual E.B. White turned into The Elements of Style, seems to have had it. “When he delivered his oration on brevity to the class,” writes his former student White, “he leaned forward over his desk, grasped his coat lapels in his hands, and, in a husky, conspiratorial voice, said, ‘Rule Seventeen. Omit needless words! Omit needless words! Omit needless words!’”

On a practical level too, Garner is often out of date. Take his entry on homogeneous, often confused with homogenous. “Writers are best advised to use homogeneous,” he writes, “and to pronounce all five syllables. It corresponds nicely to its antonym, heterogeneous.” As someone who looks people dead in the eye and pronounces all five syllables of homogeneous, I can tell you this is advice is more difficult to follow than Garner realizes. “You mean homogenous?” they say. I think homogeneous, unfortunately, has joined nauseated and quotation among those words whose correct use sounds pedantic. Garner also objects to a number of apparently newish nouns formed from verbs, which he calls Zombie Nouns and recommends stripping back to their verb form. But I have to admit that exaggeration, hospitalization, and enforcement all sound fine to me. I want to hear the mistake, but I can’t. I think they’ve reached stage 5 as well. On the other hand Garner has nothing to say about overwhelm n., optics for appearance, or tweaks for revisions.

This is to say – all of this has been to say – that we need a new champion, a new style guide, a terrible new Strunk and White to come with fire and sword to lay waste to all the new verbiage. A “scourge,” McWhorter calls prescriptivism: let it be so. Who will write it? Who will answer the call? Christian Lorentzen? Daniel Mendelsohn? These are the public sticklers I can think of off the top of my head: perhaps, as in the case of potential Supreme Court justices, there’s already a pool of contenders among top grammarians waiting for the call. Whoever it is, whoever sets out to slay trope, impactful, lived experience, dynamic n., disinterested for uninterested, morph, and a thousand other monsters, will have to do it for the pure love of stylistic correctness. There won’t be glory in it. The new grammarian’s name will not be a metonym for correct usage like Fowler’s because in the future no one will care about correct usage. These style guides deal with technique, and on a technical level machines already write better than 99% of human beings. This new prescriber will really be not a conquering hero but an existentialist one, a pure stickler, pushing the boulder of careful usage up the mountain with little reward but the struggle itself.

I imagine a tome as heavy as Garner’s. 1000 pages; 5 pounds. It will be the last such definitive guide, a swan song, written to be embraced by a few nerds and then pitched into the maw of the machine to be digested along with everything else. We still have a little time to do it, maybe a few years, before the enormous wave of machine writing crashes over us, over Strunk and White, prescriptivists and descriptivists, McWhorter and Garner, and makes them all equal.

I’ve read a certain amount of right-wing literature over the past few years. Both highbrow and non: reactionary intellectuals, yes, but also online racists and misogynists, antisemitic conspiracy theorists, raging xenophobes, Nazis. Why? Probably no good reason. Titillation, shock value. The urge to touch fire. I’m hardly the only one interested. I feel like several respectable writers have read and written about Curtis Yarvin’s manifestos because they had to confirm for themselves that they were indeed drivel. And just about every prestigious East Coast magazine has by now had a feature on Bronze Age Pervert. You just get tired of leftish orthodoxy, whether that means tedious wokism, grad-school Marxism, or pious liberalism. The New York Times, that upper-middle-class lifestyle magazine. The London Review of Books, with its old-fashioned dandruff-on-the-lapels leftism. The Potemkin village of Netflix. God, it drives you nuts! It’s so smothering and boring.1 Give me the poison, the intellectual gasoline canister or crack pipe. At the very least, let me cut class occasionally and go outside to smoke cigarettes with the bad kids.

Where to begin? Well, where did I begin. Years ago I read Ernst Jünger, an NYRB edition of The Glass Bees. I found the book totally uninteresting, dry and pretentious with nothing memorable except its faint whiff of fascism. I think this whiff was simply the narrator’s proud soldierliness, coming as it did from an author who had served with the Nazis. From what I know of Junger’s biography he seems to have been what you could call an aesthetic fascist: cold, self-disciplined, an intellectual whose natural vocation was war. Storm of Steel, his memoir of World War I, is really pretty good. A first-hand account of the the trenches doesn’t have to be very well written to be worth reading, and Jünger writes very well. Storm of Steel is lively and vivid and recounts battle and the soldier’s life with great clarity and a minimum of affectation. You can actually tell what’s happening in the battles. And the book is full of all the astonishing details one would expect. At the Somme, Lieutenant Jünger notices “great clumps of monstrous blue-black flies basking in the sun…like velvet cushions.” Later, he’s wounded in the head and wakes up “staring down at a pool of blood that was growing alarmingly fast on the floor of the trench. The blood was running down so unstoppably that I lost all hope. As my escort assured me he could see no brains, I took courage, picked myself up, and trotted on. ”

It’s all vivid, gripping, and – jolly. The war is full of horror, but it doesn’t get young Jünger down. There’s no degradation, no despair, no sense that this is all a monstrous waste. For someone used to the British version of the Great War (or to Erich Maria Remarque’s version), it’s strange to read an account of the conflict that isn’t anti-war and in fact almost makes you wish you’d been there. It’s adventure of a high and terrible kind. After a breakthrough in the spring assault in 1918 that cost his unit most of its men:

The immense desire to destroy that overhung the battlefield precipitated a red mist in our brains. We called out sobbing and stammering fragments of sentences to one another, and an impartial observer might have concluded that we were all ecstatically happy.

Beyond the persona of the brave, intelligent, and patriotic soldier, Jünger’s character has no personality, and so Storm of Steel is thrilling but curiously empty. Despite containing so many electrifying scenes, the book can’t help getting repetitive and even almost boring, since there is nothing – no private reflections or personal drama or references to the postwar present – to break the monotony of the daily life of war and no forward movement except the succession of battles. The book ends with Jünger in the hospital recovering from yet another honorable wound and being notified that he will receive the order Pour le Mérite. And that’s it: there’s no sorrow, no summing-up. It’s almost like the way a young boy would end a story written for school: “And in the end, the King awarded him the highest medal.”2

I put Yukio Mishima into the same general category as Jünger, an aesthetic fascist, although as a personality and a writer he was more neurotic and more interesting. I’d still like to read his best-known work, the Sea of Fertility books, but so far I’ve only read one early work of his, Forbidden Colors, which I think is his most explicitly gay novel and must be one of his more eccentric. It’s about an aging and unhappy writer, Shunsuke, who becomes obsessed with Yuichi, a handsome young man he meets one day in the countryside. When the young man confesses he’s gay, Shunsuke, embittered by a lifetime of betrayal by women, takes him under his wing and arranges a sham marriage for him with the aim of using him to inflict revenge on the female sex. Inspired by this new project, the heretofore heterosexual Shunsuke explores Tokyo’s underground gay nightlife. There is some kind of love triangle and power struggle between Shunsuke, Yuichi, and Yuichi’s wife Yasuko, in which Yasuko gets the worst of it. For me, Forbidden Colors is summed up pretty well in this passage:

On that summer day when he saw the youth appear in the foam on the beach, for the first time in his life an idea had come to dwell in his mind. To cure diseases of life he would impart the steely health of death. This was what, in artistic productions, Shunsuke had always dreamed of as the ideal manifestation.

In artistic works, there is a twofold possibility of existence, he believed. Just as an ancient lotus seed will flower again when dug up and replanted, the work of art that is said to possess everlasting life can live again in the hearts of all times, all countries. When one touches an ancient work—of space art, or time art—his life is captured by the space or the time of the work and abandons the rest of its existence. He lives another life. However, the internal time which he expends in this other life has already been measured, already settled upon. That is what we call form.

To sum up: I have no idea what the hell Mishima is talking about. Considering much of the book consists of writing like this, Forbidden Colors is actually surprisingly readable. Maybe the inscrutability is partly the fault of the translator. But inscrutable it is. What does come through – for example, when Yuichi and Shunsuke pull a switcheroo on one of Shunsuke’s old lovers, who, seduced by Yuichi, spends the night with him in a dark room only to wake up and discover Shunsuke in her bed – is a furious, almost murderous woman-hating that makes the misogyny of someone like John Updike look cozy and domestic by comparison.

I also picked up at some point (just to make sure all the Axis powers were heard from, I guess) The Flame, by Gabriele D’Annunzio. I don’t know much about D’Annunzio except that he’s considered to be on the right, and on the right in a high-living, airplane-flying, monocle-wearing way. Really famous in his time, dashingly bald, he was, according to Wikipedia, briefly the de facto dictator of a small Italian state as a consequence of one of his many political adventures. I like the figure of the writer as man of the world – you think of Stendhal, La Rochefoucauld – and was prepared to like The Flame, but unfortunately it’s not good:

The woman he called Perdita did not reply, though her face was wrapt in concentration and she felt the indefinable shudder right through her body that her young lover’s voice always produced when he suddenly opened up his tumultuous, passionate soul, to which she was drawn by boundless love but also by utter terror.

I got through about 20 pages of this and then quit.

D’Annunzio was an Italian irredentist and a big influence on Mussolini. Louis-Ferdinand Céline, as everybody knows, was just an out-and-out Nazi. The verdict on Céline seems to be, yes he was a shit, but he was also a genius. I’m half-Jewish, which is plenty Jewish enough to nurse a grudge against antisemites, so I’d accepted this verdict from afar but figured I’d put him off until after I’d read all the writers who weren’t Nazis. But I got curious. When I finally read – swiftly, one after the other – his two major novels, Journey to the End of the Night and Death on the Installment Plan, I was almost disappointed to find that they contained not just zero antisemitic content but not even any fascist style or recognizably right-wing atmosphere. The atmosphere of his books is the opposite of the high-tone warrior ethos of the aesthetic fascists. Céline doesn’t make you want to lift weights. It’s low life from beginning to end. His novels are scatalogical and rude in a way that made me laugh out loud the way I used to at Beavis and Butthead. For some reason, vomit scenes in literature and film just make me lose it like nothing else, I don’t know why, and Céline includes an absolutely untoppable one in Death on the Installment Plan. The narrator and his parents are on a ferry in rough waters:

A fierce wave beats down on the rail, smacks against the deck, rises, gushes, rolls back, sweeps the steerage… The foam stirs up the garbage and spins it around between us… We swallow some of it… We spit it up again… At every plunge the soul flies away… at every rise you recapture it in a wave of mucus and stink… It comes dripping from your nose, all salty. This is too much!… One passenger begs for mercy… He cries out to high heaven that he’s empty!… He strains his guts!… And a raspberry comes up after all!… He examines it, goggle-eyed with horror… Now he really has nothing left!… He wishes he could vomit out his two eyes… He tries, he tries hard… He braces himself against the mast… he’s trying to drive them out of their sockets… Mama collapses against the rail… She vomits herself up again, all she’s got… A carrot comes up… a piece of fat… and the whole tail of a mullet…

This passage could stand for many equally graphic and exaggerated scenes of sex and violence. With Céline you have your nose rubbed in it, in all the world’s filth and misery, and you like it. I enjoyed these novels, and the recently rediscovered fragment, War, very much. But I couldn’t quite think of them as masterpieces, especially Death, which has no plot and really no ending (it just stops) and in which Céline’s fevered, hectoring style overshadows the action and almost seems a little mannered. Houellebecq, who’s sometimes compared to Céline (and who even looks a little like him: their faces have the same intelligent, goblinish quality) gets asked about him in interviews and always says that Céline is good but overrated. At the risk of sounding presumptuous, I’m inclined to agree. “Overrated” in this case means he was a terrific writer, just possibly not the deathless genius he’s sometimes made out to be.

I suspect also that the fact that Céline was a Nazi makes his work more interesting, not less, and inclines people to overrate his novels and their significance the way one might be inclined to overrate a serial killer’s paintings. One piece of evidence of this possibly excessive Céline-worship is the publishing house Gallimard’s 2017 decision to reprint his antisemitic tracts. Céline wrote three of these, only one of which, Bagatelles for a Massacre, is available in English, in a nonprofessional but competent-seeming translation available online. The rare combination of great talent and extreme racism gives this document the magnetism of an unholy book or at least an envelope full of crime-scene photos. There must, you think, be something very powerful inside.

But wait! what is it that the Jews are talking about amongst themselves, a constitution? yet another one? It’s all the same to us Hymies who we’ll grab by the sleeve! Communism? But it is perfectly well at hand! We will all become “commissars” on the day that the Stock Exchanges close… The Stock Exchanges are, more than anything else, tiresome…there are some gaps…there are still some goyim taking advantage of the liberties…who insinuate themselves somewhat into the dividends… This decidedly must be brought to an end. This abuse is going to be suppressed!… All of them are going to be brought back into order, into the perfect herd… That is to say, that the pensioners will eat garbage alongside the other dogs… The gold is for us, the Jews! The Jews get the gold! Anyone more would be too many!… The world is ours! …it’s not for the losers… It’s for us Hymies, the most brooding paranoiacs in the Universe! whose voracity is a thousand times as strong…

Oh well! You expected to see the devil at work but instead find you’ve walked in on the great author masturbating. To be fair, not all of the book is like the above passage: Bagatelles also includes the complete scripts for at least two ballets about elves and fairies. There might be gold and diamonds in there as well, I’ll never know, Céline could have put the blueprint for a water-powered car and his grandmother’s recipe for tarte tatin and the numbers to various Swiss bank accounts, they’d be safe within that impenetrable wasteland of text. “Pamphlet” is a euphemism: Bagatelles is more than 250 pages long. I read about one percent of it, which took a solid hour. It was so boring and nonsensical that I almost felt sorry for Céline for having written it: not for having stained his reputation or his conscience or anything like that but just for having had to write, one by one, these sentences devoid of wit or originality, to have spent such time and effort producing this pile of trash. This pity is most certainly wasted: Bagatelles sold 75,000 copies by the end of the war, an awful testament to the power of antisemitism in France at the time, since only rabid Jew-hatred could have inspired anyone who’d bought the book to recommend it to anyone else. It’s hard to believe it’s ever been read all the way through.

Adam Gopnik, in an article in the New Yorker on Céline’s tracts and his novels, says they’re somehow of a piece. “Céline’s subjects,” he writes, “are, according to his editor and a biographer, ‘war, death and sex,’ but those are only his objects; his subject is hatred.” This is very neatly put, but it isn’t true. Céline’s novels, Journey especially, are so readable and even moving because in each of them his alter ego, Bardamu, appears vulnerable as well as vicious. Bardamu just can’t quit people. In Death, he loathes his parents, who appear pathetic and ridiculous to the highest degree, but he doesn’t pretend not to care about them. Journey doesn’t end with bitter laughter but with a profound feeling of sadness and loss, which is connected to an attachment to old friends and enemies that the surly Bardamu is unable to shake. If Céline were just a hater, his novels would be almost as boring as his tracts. He was also an artist, and his novels fall under the purview of an artistic conscience. When he’s not making art, though, there’s only his appalling personality in charge, which was so antisocial that his antisemitic propaganda was offputting even to other antisemites and his personal antisemitism unsettling even to Nazis. In his diary for 1941, Ernst Jünger, by now a Wehrmacht officer in Paris, described with some distaste his meeting with Céline, during which the French author ranted for two hours about how the Nazis weren’t killing Jews fast enough. Hitler, he claimed, must be part Jewish, that was the only explanation.

Céline and Houellebecq get compared, but a better contemporary comparison might really be to Renaud Camus, the founder of the Great Replacement theory. (This is the highbrow version of “white genocide.”) Camus interests me because we have no equivalent figure in the US. All our reactionaries are slobs and opportunists. But before Camus was a right-wing agitator, he was a genuine littérateur, author of well-received novels and nonfiction. Roland Barthes wrote the introduction to one of his early books. I read an essay by Emmanuel Carrère from 2000 defending his then-friend Camus from charges of antisemitism. This now seems a little like defending your friend Al Capone from charges of tax evasion, since although Camus might really not be an antisemite, he’s made anti-immigrant racism his stock in trade for almost two decades. A collection of his essays, Enemy of the Disaster, was recently published in English translation. The passage here is from a talk he gave in Lunel, in the South of France.

So, I was in some old villages in the Hérault, big old villages round and fortified, with narrow streets and tightly packed crooked houses, which in the year one thousand had already, for many of them, a solid experience of the world. Some would say that was before France even existed. Perhaps it was. In any case, it was now afterwards one might have thought: because at the windows and thresholds of these ancient houses, along ancient streets, appeared almost exclusively a population unheard of in these parts and which by its clothes, its attitude, its very language, seemed not to belong there, but rather to another people, another culture, another history… As if during our lifetime, and even less so, France was in the process of changing its people: you see one, you take a nap, it’s another, or several others, which appear to belong to other shores, other skies, other architectures, other mores – that’s what they themselves seem to think, too.

Camus really doesn’t write badly – his earlier books might well be good – and his statements about immigrants in these essays rarely get much stronger than in the passage above. They rarely get much stronger than Annie Ernaux, when she writes in The Years, about African and Arab immigrants in France: “That they called themselves French we privately found absurd, a usurped claim to glory to which they were not yet entitled… In some obscure way, they were the natives of an inner colony we no longer controlled.” But something in the writing makes you understand from the first lines that you are not dealing with Annie Ernaux or another ordinary French Boomer. There is a feeling of insinuation, of barely controlled wrath. Camus’ orotund phrases, his erudition, his elaborate syntax, don’t cover up, or try to cover up, the sense of personal grievance, of rage, and I think even to someone who knew nothing about Camus it would be clear after just a couple of pages that this is a case of someone summoning all his eloquence, all his intellectual powers, all his erudition and force of argument to say: “I don’t like them.” He really doesn’t like them, these African and Arab immigrants, but he doesn’t just come out and say it, and this gives his writing an edge that must be enjoyable to readers who can hear their own feelings echoed without having to feel like they’re wallowing in the gutter. Where he just comes out and says what he thinks, though, is where so many others just come out and say it, Twitter. With his many followers he shares Haitians-eating-cats memes, endless claims of “white genocide,” retweets from the RadioGenoa account that show video clips of black teenagers beating up white ones and proclaim that “Europe is finished.” Right, you think: this is what it’s all about.

What’s interesting is that if his recent book is a kind of self-portrait of a hater, his only other to be translated into English is a record of his career as a lover. This is Tricks, his 1979 memoir of cruising. It’s quite readable, in the manner of an online diary, although better written. The liaisons with various men, hastily arranged in bars or parks, are recounted matter-of-factly and have an innocent quality and even a certain delicacy; and it is funny to compare this youthful exhibition of Camus’ id with the one he now publishes every day on Twitter, which in contrast to his sex life is sordid, undiscriminating, and completely of the gutter.

A gay French octogenerian far-right intellectual who tweets compulsively: a nice curiosity for the right-curious. But it gets curiouser than that. I don’t know if it gets curioser than “Caribbean Rhythms,” the podcast hosted by the somehow-ever-slightly-more-well-known Bronze Age Pervert. The people who write about BAP (as he’s known) are mostly writing about his book, Bronze Age Mindset, and his role as right-wing Twitter personality. I didn’t find his book very interesting, and his Twitter account is a cesspool even worse than Renaud Camus’. His podcast, however, is really something. You can think of it as the Portnoy’s Complaint of racism, an irrepressible eruption of the middle-class id. This is racism of the “Nietzschean vitalist” type, which holds that “mere life,” as represented by the mass of humanity, is not worth preserving and that a civilization’s only value lies in its few finest human and cultural specimens. Nazism, basically, but without any specific obsession with Jews or other racial group (BAP is half-Jewish, like seemingly every other alt-right influencer), just hatred for liberal civilization and an adolescent longing for cleansing violence.

Racism of this kind is the show’s inspiration and philosophy, but it isn’t its main subject. What is the main subject? Well… this varies. Topics include disquisitions on classical music (not neglecting modern composers like Messiaen and Webern), readings from Homer in the original Greek (not neglecting the original pitch accents), white-hot invective against people you never think about, such as Victoria Nuland or Sohrab Ahmari, travel anecdotes from Tokyo and Buenos Aires, and much else, all delivered with the vehemence of a sidewalk orator and in a bad but scrupulously maintained Russian accent, complete with grammatical mistakes. I think he has a PhD from Yale. Honestly this is not such a bad use of it. In an age when social media and streaming video have left us all glutted with novelty, Caribbean Rhythms achieves a level of eccentricity I would have thought no longer possible. Much is lost in transcription, of course, but here’s a sample:

I couldn’t sleep, I went to get fruit. There’s a special fruit store I like a few blocks away, I got watermelon juice, which apparently has certain benefits of sexual power. And I was looking on their daily specials, and they had these small tangerine types. I picked them up, and by the time I get to the cashier, I’m already chortling, I don’t – because I saw these small tangerine, they perplex me, you know, the small oranges. I think these are a mystical fruit. Prokofiev has Surrealist Operetta, The Love of Three Oranges. It’s based on an Italian play, which is in turn based on very ancient Italian Mediterranean fairy tale. I do believe in this, I think that citrus fruit are pregnant with vibrant powers, neon powers, neon grapes and such, I believe in this. So, maybe this why, but I couldn’t stop. When I saw this girl at the check – the cashier – she start to weigh these small tangerine, I just start losing it. And I made fool of myself, hysterical laughing fit – again, she had this upset, offended look on her face. And maybe I’m still imagining it, but maybe she thought I was laughing at her. So, after I walk out, because I’m such a nice guy, I made it worse, I go back to explain to her, I’m not laughing at her, but throughout doing this, I’m hysterical laughing, crying fit, it continues. So, you see, she had exasperated, disgusted look on her face. But it hasn’t stopped me from going back to store, I like small pineapple.

His film reviews are usually right on the money. He claims to have been sexually assaulted by a creature with “glowing pink filigreed wings” behind a dumpster in Milan. Sometimes in the background of the show you notice, loud enough to distract from the harangue, the sounds of surf and seagulls from a loop of seaside sound effects.

This has been quite a bit of right-wing content, hasn’t it! My lungs are burning from all those Marlboro Reds (Browns?) I’ve smoked. Now is when I feel the urge – the obligation, really, the necessity – to wind all this up with a reality check, a reminder that even as I write about literary fascism, aesthetic fascism, eccentric fascism, Trump and his stooges are perpetrating various acts of actual fascism, that Stephen Miller and Tucker Carlson talk openly about “white genocide,” that people like Laura Loomer and Candace Owens have millions of online followers and that really there’s nothing interesting or entertaining or funny about far-right politics. I feel this urge but I think I can resist. These people are all vicious idiots. Why should I let them interfere with my reading? Thoughts are free. I think after this microsurvey of right-wing literature, I’ll just say I’ve learned nothing, can draw no conclusions and will offer no analysis. I suspect I am attracted to these reactionary intellectuals not in spite but because of their pathological qualities, their narcissism and perversity and paranoia, as well as my own healthy and reasonable desire to occasionally fuck off as far away as possible from the leafy campus of the New York Times. I think I’m going to continue, off and on, my reading project. I feel like it keeps me young. Maybe next I’ll check out this Julius Evola I’ve been hearing about. Revolt Against the Modern World – I like the sound of that…

In Cairo I took a picture of a dirty street dog curled up underneath a car and posted it on Instagram. A friend sort of flagged it. Watch out, he said, that might make dog lovers mad! As if I had posted a picture of cruelty to animals or a suffering puppy. But I thought it was cute. The dog was getting some shade. I liked seeing this slender mutt in its natural habitat, and what’s more, I was surprised and even proud of myself that I liked it. I had never in my life posted, shared, or possibly even taken a picture of a dog before, even though my family had owned a golden retriever for nearly 15 years. I just hadn’t gotten it. Dogs left me cold. I wished them well, I really did, but I didn’t have any idea how to behave with them and didn’t see why I should have to learn. When I tried, I felt fake, like a politician pretending to like his constituents. “Hey there, boy…” I’d say unconvincingly, sort of chucking it under the chin. The dog would look at me and then at its owner. Who was this person, and why was he behaving strangely? With dog owners it would go just as badly. “Isn’t it funny,” I would say, “how the different breeds all really have their own personalities!” At which the dog owner would look up from his phone to eye me with suspicion and hostility, as if I’d just remarked on how interesting it was that children were so much smaller than adults.

I wisely stopped pretending to care about dogs, which meant that everyone assumed I hated them or was afraid of them. In New York, no one can believe you’re actually indifferent to their pet. When I lived in Germany, I was warned (unnecessarily) that in that country it’s considered rude to pet a stranger’s dog without asking. In New York it’s the opposite: if someone’s dog is within petting range or paying you any attention, it’s expected that you coo over it a little, and if you don’t, the owner will showily pull the dog away from you and apologize while at the same time casting a judgmental glance your way. Oh fuck off! I would think. I don’t have an opinion about your dog. It’s fine. Your dog is fine. I smiled benevolently at it – isn’t that enough?

Well, maybe it isn’t. Dogs aren’t cats. Cats can be street cats or house cats, but these exist on a continuum, street cats will sometimes rub themselves against your leg and purr and house cats will sometimes slash your face and run away. But pet dogs have crossed some line and renounced their animal citizenship. They’ve given up their independence, through – love, really, through their love for a specific human being and this human’s home and family. This is their Fall. They’ve given up everything for us, they’re in love with us, they’d die for us. We cut their testicles off and snip their ovaries out and they still love us, they love us more than ever; we’ve marked them and taken them under our protection and now have an obligation to love and command them. And I thought I could just smile politely. Had I no honor? Really I wasn’t indifferent to dogs at all: I avoided them because I had a bad conscience.

So how nice to discover there were places where this compact had not been struck and dogs and I could meet as equals. The dogs in Cairo were free to maul me to death and fight over my carcass. Instead it was clear that they were, in a vague way, well-disposed towards me. When I walked by, they would perk up and look at me with curiosity. Sometimes one might trot a little closer to investigate and then turn around and trot back when it was clear I wasn’t going to give him any food. Most of the time they just went about their own business: eating out of garbage piles (which they shared amicably with cats), sleeping in the dust, barking at random, or just standing around with erections. Those livid pink dog dicks – the obscene ridiculousness of them – really underscored the fact that these dogs weren’t like the ones at home. These were animals – not pets, not children, not accessories, but filthy city animals – and so it was a pleasant shock when they would look at me intelligently, and with their faces, their tails, their entire bearing, acknowledge some fraternity with me. They were partly human, but only partly. What charm! Their hunched posture, their sheepish, untrustworthy expressions, their laziness (so unlike dogs in New York, which always seem to be straining at the leash or tearing around the park). And also their pointy-eared alertness, their enthusiasm, their comic self-seriousness. Of course I liked dogs: there’d have to be something wrong with you not to.

For the week I was in Cairo, the street dogs were a benevolent presence, good spirits. At the pyramids, I watched the small figures of yellow dogs trotting along the enormous stone blocks 40 or 50 feet above the crowds. The atmosphere at this ancient site was less than romantic: hawkers selling trinkets or camel rides, tourists posing for pictures, all seemed to be, in their small way, doing their best to desecrate these monuments. But the dogs in their small way were honoring them. Only animals, who don’t really know about time, could behave correctly at this timeless place. I looked up with relief at the strays sunning themselves on the ancient stones and thought, they get it.

*

The temples in the old city of Patan, in Kathmandu, are a part of ordinary life: kids in school uniforms hang out on them in the afternoon, dangling their feet and eating popsicles. People don’t really stand on ceremony with these monuments, but still it’s funny to see the dogs sleeping on the temple steps, occasionally lifting their head to survey the square or hopping up to bark at some intruder. Kathmandu is a dog town. In the old cities especially it’s impossible to imagine the streets without them. You share the street with them like other pedestrians. There’s something slightly mellow about the city’s stray dogs1, just as there’s something basically friendly and even-tempered about its busy street life. During the day the dogs lounge in front of shops (sprawled on their sides like fish), sleep in the sun in temple squares, trot along the sidewalk on unknown errands. At night they take over the streets. Kathmandu streets after dark are not especially dangerous, and this goes also for the dogs hanging out in them, but still you can’t help feeling uneasy as you walk home at night down narrow streets, lit harshly by bare bulbs, empty except for dogs. You might turn a corner and come upon half a dozen of them in some sort of obscure conclave, standing or lying down at odd angles to each other. They let you pass but they don’t get out of your way. What they’re doing is uncertain, but what’s clear is that their daytime part-partnership with human beings, where they lounged in shop entrances and might trot behind you for a minute hoping for scraps, is over, and they are now engaged in independent dog business. They look at you and then look away.

I don’t know what their business is, but of course it involves a lot of barking. Every night we went to sleep listening to it. Usually it was just one dog at a time, sometimes with others answering it. It was impossible to tell what the occasion for the barking was or whether it was the same dog each time or even what direction it was coming from. Lusty, untiring barks. Like a machine, like an athlete in his prime. In America it would have driven me crazy because somebody would have been responsible for that barking dog and after five minutes I would have considered myself in a feud with him. But here the dogs were free, and no one was responsible for them. What the hell were they doing out there? At night the empty streets looked like stage sets, and I pictured the strays loping through them (they looked taller at night, their bodies elongated), those gangs of Montagues and Capulets trotting out to insult each other in dog iambics. We rarely went out late while we were visiting and so it was possible to imagine the city streets after midnight populated by nothing but dogs. It was adorable, this spoof version of human traffic, this comedy that played out every night. The barking became woven into my dreams and in moments of semi-consciousness I would fleetingly be under the impression that I understood it. “Do you bit your thumb at me, sir?” I’d chuckle and turn over. Doggos, I thought. Puppers...

I’d been meaning to read The Remains of the Day for years and finally read it on one leg of a long trip this winter. We were flying Business, an extreme rarity for me. OK, it was my first time. Singapore Airlines, no less. It was unbelievably luxurious. The seats were like little cabins unto themselves. Everything was smooth and rounded. The other passengers looked happy and calm, but this was only a fleeting impression because we hardly had to see each other at all. The flight attendant addressed me by name and made sure she was pronouncing it correctly. Usually the flyers you pass on the way through Business Class are disappointing: I scan their clothes and faces for signs of distinction but find none, they look just like the slobs in Coach. But in our cabin this time, stowing his luggage in the overhead compartment two rows up, was a Buddhist monk. Not an American Buddhist monk, pale and shaven-headed and ascetic, but an Asian one, well-fed and successful-looking, in beautiful deep-red robes. Flattered by his presence and by the blessed atmosphere of privilege, I tried to act dignified and pleased with myself and like I belonged. But my copy of Remains, an old mass-market movie tie-in paperback, looked out of place and seemed to give me away as a one-time splurger from Economy. What book should I have brought, I wondered, what book would have fit in? A pretty Fitzcarraldo edition of some contemporary novel? No, of course not. Too pretentious. Maybe a Loeb edition of Tacitus or somebody? Even worse. No, the answer to the question “What book goes with Business Class?” is: none. Pretty much all books are middle-class. The only passable books would have been the ones that showed the least amount of interest in literature or reading, the least book-like books, a hardcover of a presidential autobiography, maybe, or Robert Ludlum or something else you can buy at the airport, and the fancy thing to do with it on the flight would be to put it on the tray table and not read it1.

Paul Fussell, in his brilliant, eccentric, incredibly rude book Class: A Guide to the American Status System, writes that the American upper class resembles the upper classes of other countries and other eras in its “total imperviousness to ideas.” This is poignantly true of the upper-class character in Remains of the Day, a great lord and diplomat – sort of an amateur diplomat, just what everybody needs – who, in the period after World War I, attempts to promote unity among nations but only becomes a dupe of the Nazis, since in place of ideas he has only his gentlemanly notions of honor and fair play and is also slightly stupid. This is only revealed slowly and isn’t really the main plot. The book is about and narrated by his butler (I think his name is Stevens in the book but of course you picture Anthony Hopkins), a virtuoso of butlering and a virtuoso of repression. I’ve heard Ishiguro wrote it in something like six weeks, and you can believe that when you read it, you imagine him hurrying to get it all down, it reads as though the whole story wanted to pour out as soon as he found the voice of the main character. I’d forgotten Ishiguro’s peculiar style. There’s a certain weirdness, an unsocialized, homemade quality to his books, at least to the three that I’ve read. They’re very skillful, the prose is perfectly controlled, but they have some kind of faint unplaceable awkwardness to them, the quality, just a little, of being written by someone raised in an attic. I think that’s what makes them special.

Stevens’ character, for example, is both believable and a little unreal. He’s not priggish and cold but, in his repressed and old-fashioned way, charming, sympathetic, touching, and even funny. He’s a wonderfully living and convincing character, even though his repression is almost too perfect, cartoonish. He’s a kind of freak, like some animal bred to the point of ridiculousness over many generations, a prize chicken or pigeon. I don’t know: he almost is a cartoon. But cartoon movies are the ones that make you cry. I’d put off reading The Remains of the Day so long because I assumed it would be sad. My understanding was that this butler throws away his chance at love because he’s obsessed with polishing the master’s silver. This is indeed what happens. But Stevens isn’t quite as pathetic as that, nor is the story quite as grim. In a way, it’s the story of an ambitious man – hugely ambitious in the way of an artist or politician – who neglects his personal life for his work. When the worldly ambitions for which he’s sacrificed love come to nothing, he’s left with – nothing? Well, not nothing. It turns out – and this will really only make sense to people who’ve read the novel already and can remember the last scene where he watches fireworks with the yokels – that when the great things in life are gone, the chance for love and glory is past, there’s still something left, a kind of lower register of life, where indeed most of it takes place and which the hero can finally participate in.

On another plane ride on an earlier stage of these travels I’d finished Marvel Universe, by Bruce Wagner, a book I only heard about because I saw people on here (Henry Begler in particular) talking about it. The book is divided into three semi-independent chapters that all take place in the same world, Wagner’s fantasy version of LA. The first, and best, is about a former Disney star diagnosed with ALS who decides to post through the whole thing, making a kind of second, triumphant career out of her agonizing decline and death. It’s an impressively ballsy and over-the-top performance, a blast of LA-zoomer slang and ripped-from-the-internet microtrends and celebrity references, all fearlessly set down by a straight male boomer. There’s something inspired in the way Wagner takes the heroine’s vapid Instagram spirituality and transforms it into something like a new religion. After the first chapter, though, the book declines sharply. I wanted to like it, I like Wagner’s confidence, his extraversion and lack of inhibition. The novel reminded me of brash and show-offy ‘90s writers like Will Self. But it’s just not as good. As Marvel Universe goes on, all this over-the-top Hollywood mayhem becomes repetitive. It seems to be all Wagner knows how to do. You feel like you’re being shouted at. The verbal play lacks wit. It’s unfortunate especially that the last chapter is the weakest. The characters in it – a big-shot TV producer who gets cancelled, along with a confessional standup comedian and other women connected to him in different ways – are completely forgettable and really just types: and in fact all the characters are types, not one of them actually comes alive, and ultimately this gives the book a trashy quality.

Contributing to this are the novel’s highly offputting sex scenes. Wagner has been a successful Hollywood screenwriter and novelist since his 20s and was married to Rebecca de Mornay and other women. I assume he’s had sex. But you somehow wouldn’t know it from the sex scenes in Marvel Universe, which are both devoid of feeling and showily explicit in a way that makes you want to avert your gaze. I noticed this because I read Marvel Universe right after Flesh, by David Szalay. Flesh isn’t a sex book (it’s more of a being-mortal-in-a-body book) but the sex scenes early in the novel are well done and set the tone for the whole thing. The protagonist, István, is a teenager, these are his first sexual experiences, but there’s something sad about them, even tragic. Partly this is because the situation is sad, the trysts take place in a grim apartment block with his lonely, middle-aged, married neighbor, but it’s more than that: there’s a feeling that there’s something sad about sex itself, or possibly about being alive.

Flesh was on the whole very good, although there was something unsatisfying about it. I’m not sure what I made of the Barry Lyndon thing. It’s kind of a gimmick. As someone who’s seen Kubrick’s movie at least half a dozen times, I was amazed that it wasn’t until I was halfway through Flesh that I realized it was the same plot. I think that’s because the passive, monosyllabic hero of Flesh, who is always essentially lost, alone, a kind of stranger even in his home town, like a not-very-bright space alien stranded on earth, bears no resemblance to the charming and ruthless Barry, with his duelling prowess and animal spirits. I can see what the device adds: it gives the story an impressive structure, a grand echo, which it needs, since otherwise any plot starring this character might end up being either a little grim or just unbelievable. But Barry Lyndon isn’t The Odyssey or King Lear or some other sturdy story which you remember in its broad outlines and which has already been reinterpreted many times. It’s a fairly recent movie, still vivid in my mind from the last time I watched it a couple of years ago, and the two stories couldn’t help obtruding on each other as I read, overlapping awkwardly and fighting for place. Barry Lyndon is a cold, thrilling movie about human vanity and implacable fate. I’m not quite sure what Flesh is about. István isn’t Barry; he isn’t even an everyman. He’s emotionally handicapped in some way and seems to experience neither highs or lows, which makes the rise-and-fall plot a little awkward, even though it’s very readable. The best parts are really when we’re alone with István during his moments of – not introspection, he doesn’t do that – but solitude, private confusion. István is incapable of much that makes a person human – conversation, for example, along with interest in art or ideas, laughter, play, or fun of any kind – but he possesses some kind of essential maleness. He’s like a character reduced to that essential brute maleness, maleness without the distraction of words, a condition which has not really gotten much attention in literature, even back when it was mostly men who wrote books, since naturally those men tended to be highly articulate. In the book’s best scenes, István’s total lack of joie de vivre seems to strip away the bullshit and we get the feeling that he’s forced to confront something the rest of us manage to kid ourselves about, some terrible confusion and alienation inherent in being alive and having a body.

Barry Lyndon is an especially tough act to follow, but in general it’s hard to base a story on another story for the same reason it’s hard to base a story on a true story: the best stories appear to develop naturally from a single conception, which the group effort of adaptation necessarily interferes with. (Remains of the Day has that great feeling of inevitability. ) This is why all biopics are bad: the filmmaker can substitute historical facts for story and never has to decide what his movie’s actually about.

This was somewhat true of Lázár, a new novel by Nelio Biedermann, a Swiss writer who’s just 23. He’s 23 now: he was probably 21 when he wrote the book. (Almost a prodigy, by current standards, but not, I think, a “debut novelist”: he published another one in high school.) Lázár is the saga of about four generations of an aristocratic Hungarian family. It’s Biedermann’s own family, and although he’s obviously made up most of it and many episodes border on magical-realist fantasy (it reads a little like Austro-Hungarian Márquez), in its broad outlines I believe it sticks more or less to history. I think it was a mistake to stick with the facts, even loosely. Biedermann is very good at the hardest and most important thing about novel-writing: making things up. You can really feel the pleasure of spontaneous invention as you read. If he’d actually made up a story, rather than just embroidered vignettes on this historical narrative, Lázár might really have been a good book. As it is, the succession of vignettes gets a little samey, since these aristocrats all seem to be passionate and neurasthenic and haunted in a rather similar way and quickly become difficult to tell apart. The book is still getting a lot of press, and so apparently some people are trashing it online, but they’re just haters: Biedermann is very talented. The effect of the book is something like watching a piano prodigy with an astonishingly sure touch play a composition that turns out to be slight and forgettable. You’re really going to grumble? Talent is rare enough.

I carried The Idiot with me literally around the world but only read it once I was back home. I’d read Crime and Punishment in high school and Notes from Underground in college but nothing by Dostoevsky since. I hadn’t liked Crime and Punishment and could too easily remember Nabokov’s verdict that Dostoevksy’s novels describe only “the gray world of mental illness.” Certainly The Idiot is mentally ill, but I did not find it gray; I would say that Dostoevsky’s is the colorful world of mental illness. The book is a kind of melee of neuroticism: intense moodiness, crazy obsessions, wild mood swings and constant irritability fly like grapeshot; in every chapter, a new gang of rampaging neurotics, sword and pistol, cut and thrust, pell-mell come tumbling into the narrative. People are always bursting into cruel or mocking laughter and then just as suddenly into the joyful kind. What was it someone said of Wuthering Heights – that it was set in hell but that the characters didn’t know it? This somehow applies to The Idiot, it takes place in some kind of netherworld, presumably Dostoevsky’s own. He must have been partly crazy, he writes about craziness so well, and so much. I found Wuthering Heights intensely annoying, every page a slog, but I didn’t feel that way about The Idiot at all. It’s obviously written by someone who knows about life, life high and low, life and suffering, and yet it is just as insane as Wuthering Heights and just as cut off from our daylight world at some basic level. There’s a kind of Tolstoy vs. Dostoevsky game that enjoyers of Russian literature play, in which I always was and still am on Tolstoy’s side, although really the comparison makes no sense, it’s apples and oranges. (Or apples and God, Tolstoy being God.) But I understand better now why people are devoted to Dostoevsky. You want to throw the book across the room but you can’t take tear your eyes from the page; the characters are unreasonable and exasperating but they all live so intensely that you can’t dismiss or forget them. The Idiot is addictively strong, like some bitter or unpleasant taste that you find yourself craving. It consists of almost nothing but scenes and scandals. People rant at appalling length, read entire manifestos to captive audiences, grossly insult each other in front of all their friends, have manic episodes at fancy parties. I guess anyone who’s read Notes from Underground knows this already, but The Idiot was my reminder of how the spirit of rebellion and revolt burns in Dostoevsky. Teenagers get it: they don’t think about Tolstoy because identifying with him would mean identifying with Shakespeare, with the King James Bible, with your teachers and parents. Maybe it’s not apples and oranges after all. If Tolstoy is God, Dostoevsky is the Devil: not the suave Devil who tempts you with worldly pleasure but the one who rages against God, the neurotic’s Devil: “Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell…” No, not gray at all.

This week I’ve been reading Emmanuel Carrère’s latest book, Kolkhoze. Carrère is one of my favorite contemporary writers. He writes – well, memoir, you’d have to say. Memoir is an embarrassing genre, and the idea of writing more than one, of being a memoirist, is intensely embarrassing, but Carrère’s are incredibly readable and affecting. When he writes about his mental illness, his character flaws, his sexual tastes, his parents’ marriage, his nice addresses and fancy friends, it’s disarming rather than off-putting. Somehow you don’t get tired of him. He paints himself as a neurotic and a lonely soul, and it may be so, but he’s obviously one of those lonely souls who gives his very best to the camera or microphone or in this case the page: his prose is conversational, approachable, intimate.

English-speaking Carrère fans (there must be a few of them) may know that Kolkhoze doesn’t come out in translation until this fall. I read it, and most of Carrère’s other books, in French. I don’t speak French. I can read it, more or less. Some pages I glide through, others force me to stop every few sentences to look up words, and other times I just keep reading without knowing what some of the words mean. I think Carrère’s great, but how great I really couldn’t say. The French language is for me a kind of flattering twilight in which everything is more indistinct, mysterious, and attractive than it would be in English.

Why read this way? Well first of all, the opportunity simply to be dumber and less of a critic. Also novelty: the act is clumsier but you can sort of relish it, like throwing a ball with your off hand. And Protestant guilt: if you’re going to sit around reading a novel, at least you can feel like you’re doing the hard version of it. Mostly though it’s vanity, vanity and the urge to be worldly. I can’t stand to be just another monolingual American. I always felt I had a flair for languages. I didn’t happen to speak any of them besides English – but I had a flair. I could say Fick dich ins Knie and Non me ne frega un cazzo and one Czech curse that’s too vile even to print in Czech with what I was told was excellent pronunciation. I didn’t travel except very occasionally as a tourist, but I felt that some day I would, and my talent for languages would kick in then.

When I moved to Berlin, I discovered that this was not true. In the introductory adult ed German class I took before I moved, I was indeed the best (there were five students and one dropped out). But as the classes, now in Germany, progressed in difficulty, I found that at each new level my edge over my fellow students diminished, until by about Advanced Beginner (A2.2 in the official system), I was dead average, making the same mistakes and scratching my head at the same grammatical rules as everyone else. They were awkward classes, full of thirty-something students, and not inexpensive, but with a strange grade-school atmosphere. I noticed with chagrin that I was patient, friendly, and a pleasure to have in class as long as I was the best, but that as my superiority to the other students faded and vanished, I became inattentive and moody, worked less hard, and valued the subject less. I reverted, that is, to my elementary school personality, something every single other person in class also did. The lessons, the homework, the seating arrangements (the same each week), the teacher at the head of the class: these cues, like a hypnotic suggestion, caused us all to regress. The mask of adulthood dropped, and everyone assume their true, childhood personalities. One woman, a Serbian computer programmer, very nice and down-to-earth if you chatted with her, was a teacher’s pet. The classes were strictly pass/fail, a good grade counted for nothing, but this made no difference, her hand shot up at every question. She’d actually ask you what you’d gotten on a test, and the look on her face – that weird, strung-out look of naked competition – was one I recognized, with a kind of vertigo, from fourth grade. And there was the class clown, a Romanian businessman (he was probably 35) who slouched ostentatiously at his table at the back and cracked jokes at every opportunity. Another woman, a British designer with lots of tattoos and a French girlfriend, understood German badly, made lots of mistakes on her homework, and didn’t care. And I remembered these girls from grade school too, the popular ones who knew homework didn’t matter. I don’t know who exactly I was, which type, I don’t think I want to know, but I still remember the embarrassed looks on the faces of the other students at my table when I, who hadn’t been paying attention, repeatedly flubbed some sentence involving a reflexive verb. “Ich wasche mir die Hände,” one guy (a friendly hard-worker who talked easily to everyone, boys and girls, and organized German practice sessions between classes) patiently corrected me. “Ja, genau,” I said, and flushed deeply.

Most of the other students in my class had German spouses or jobs, but I was there just to live abroad, and in retrospect I can see that it was a little odd that I tried to learn German at all. Most expats in Berlin don’t bother. This might seem obnoxious, but the longer I stayed there, the more I could see that it made a certain sense. Berliners, in general, speak good English and are also, by the standards of one’s native, non-German country, pretty rude. Ordinary commercial interactions in Berlin can turn combative in a way I’ve never experienced anywhere else. Sometime during my first week there, I was at a café and asked the girl behind the counter if they had a bathroom. She paused: a little split-second pause that would become familiar during my time there, an ominous, charged moment when the German in front of you sort of switches on and trains his attention on you and you know you are about to be reprimanded.

“A bathroom?” she replied. “No. But we have a toilet.”

And she pointed me around the corner. This sort of thing could happen at any time, you never knew when you might be corrected or scolded or actually shouted at, a drugstore or bakery could instantly turn into a kind of battlefield, and so, far from helping you to integrate with the locals, knowing a little bit of German actually worked against you, since it meant you were going into battle with weapons you didn’t know how to use and were always at a disadvantage. Expats who learned no German at all, I eventually realized, were demonstrating a kind of wisdom, like sailors in past centuries who avoided learning to swim since it just meant you drowned slower. The way to do it was to hold your head high and look everyone in the eye and speak English.

I really only made any progress in German once the pandemic hit and I no longer had to talk to Germans. Instead I listened every day to the country’s number-one podcast, the smash hit “Das Coronavirus-Update,” with Christian Drosten, Germany’s version of Anthony Fauci, and learned words like Impfung and Schleimweg. I practiced vocabulary, looked over Berliner Tageblatt for Covid statistics, and read not one but two entire novels by the Swiss writer Peter Stamm, Agnes and Weit Über das Land. I get a strange feeling thinking about these books now, especially Weit Über das Land. The book is about a man in his 30s, quite ordinary, who, one afternoon, for no reason at all and taking nothing with him, walks out the door, leaving his wife and children behind, and begins to walk across the country, never to return. A male fantasy that books and films only occasionally treat. This one does it with a fine sense of balance. The man’s journey, which the story follows hour by hour, has at once a feeling of terrible loneliness and pure adventure. He lives as a homeless wanderer for the weeks during which the book takes place, and descriptions of the coldness of night, the enjoyment of the sunshine, or the discovery of some canned food in a cabin pantry have a wonderful immediacy, maybe just a little like they do in Hemingway’s early stories.

I read the book in April 2020. It was the high point of my German learning. Living alone in quarantine isolation, going for long walks in the spring sunshine, entitled, like every German resident, to a reasonable amount of bewegung in der frische Luft by the official Covid measures. I was not uncomfortable with pandemic isolation. If anything, it gave me an appetite for more isolation, made me imagine a deeper and more exciting solitude – exactly what Stamm’s novel describes so well. The landscape of the book, the small, characterless towns the hero travels through on his way into the mountains, its plainspokenness and romance, is still with me, a kind of underworld made more distant, more dreamlike, by my having visited it in the dusk of the German language. I stayed in Germany about two and a half years and then went back home. But I retain a clear memory of this novel, even though, having now forgotten most of what I learned of the language, I can’t remember a single sentence of it.

Towards the beginning of Conquest of the Useless, Werner Herzog’s book collecting the diaries he kept while making the film Fitzcarraldo, he’s holed up in Francis Ford Coppola’s house in San Francisco working on the script. “On the wall,” he writes, “I have used a sharp pencil and a ruler to draw a mathematically precise reticle. That is all I see: a set of crosshairs.”

Pure Herzog: the steely resolve, the almost comic intensity. But then, pretty much every statement of Herzog’s is pure Herzog. What is it that he tells that curator from the Whitney when she calls to ask him to contribute something to the next Biennial?

“I said that I didn’t think of myself as an artist and that this term was better applied to pop singers and circus performers. If I wasn’t an artist, then what was I? I said I was a soldier and hung up.”

And what did he say to that astonished BBC journalist after some miscreant shot him with an air rifle as he was being interviewed?

“It’s not a significant bullet.”

He never lets you down. I know that I (along with so many other males) find it impossible to read lines like these without, like a tic, mentally intoning them in that particular accent of his, simultaneously impassioned and robotic. He’s famous as a director, of course, but I think I really prefer his writing. In his movies, he often gets in the way of himself, and his personality upstages the story and the subject. But in his books, he’s the subject, and you sort of get the full whammy – his eloquence, his eccentricity, his domineering will – without any distraction.

For this reason, I was looking forward to his newest book, The Future of Truth, which came out last fall. Unfortunately, it’s a disappointment. Herzog doesn’t bring anything like a sniper’s focus to this one. Reading it feels more like accompanying him as he strolls the countryside with a shotgun over the crook of his arm, occasionally blazing away at a bird or rabbit but mostly just enjoying his Sunday and not too troubled about whether or not he brings back much game. It’s entertaining but pretty slight. It did, however, send me back to a few of his books I either hadn’t read or hadn’t read for a long time, a couple of which are superb, and, I think, underappreciated.

The Future of Truth is a collection of loosely connected essays on subjects including documentary film, AI, and fake news. Herzog discusses Japanese rent-a-families; expresses bemusement at various internet phenomena, including the fake conversations between him and Slavoj Zizek that made the rounds a few years ago; gives a rather Wikipedia-ish history of fake news; and relates the entire plot, in detail, of the 1862 Verdi opera, La Forza del Destino. It’s all a little rambling and unfocused. The Verdi chapter, which could have been a single sentence (”the plot is ridiculous”) makes you wonder how seriously to take the book. It’s hard to tell if Herzog is trying an experiment that didn’t work out or just pulling our leg.

One of the things that attracted me to the book, and what must have interested the publisher, is that its subject seems so timely in the age of screens. A book called The Future of Truth would seem to speak to the widely shared sense that irreality is invading our lives, that simulations are substituting for experience, and that people believe nonsense. The insults to truth in the form of fake news, misinformation, and AI slop are much discussed these days, but rarely very insightfully, and a few of the great director’s stone-faced pronouncements, cutting through the chatter and silencing the room, would be most welcome. But when it comes to these problems, Herzog’s ideas turn out to be pretty much the same as everyone else’s.

A lot is also to do with education. Teachers are not suffi­ciently praised or rewarded in our society, even though teach­ing is one of the noblest and most important of callings.

Read more. A three- or four-sentence tweet can’t possibly do justice to a complicated reality.

Where the internet is concerned... assume guilt, be suspicious, expect manipulation, propaganda, lies.

Not significant bullets. It really shouldn’t be too surprising that Herzog’s foray into theory isn’t inspired. He’s said many times in writing and interviews that he hates theorizing, philosophizing, and psychologizing, all useful things to be interested in when you’re writing essays on the concept of truth. When Herzog writes about politics or AI, he comes perilously close to banality. But when he just writes about himself, he’s electrifying. Later in Conquest of the Useless, far from Coppola’s house, he describes this scene deep in the Peruvian jungle:

Profoundly unreconciled to nature, I had an encounter with the big boa constrictor, which poked its head through the chicken wire surrounding its wooden cage and looked me fearlessly in the eye for a long time. Stubbornly confronting each other, we were pondering the relatedness of the species. Both of us, since the relatedness was slight, felt sad and turned away from each other.

Herzog is no herpetologist, and neither he nor the reader has any idea what the snake was actually feeling during this encounter, but his fantasy interpretation of it rings true somehow. It’s a version of the scene we get again and again throughout the book: the director surrounded on all sides by the “obscene, sinful” jungle and staring back at it, entranced. An earlier book of diaries, Of Walking in Ice, chronicling the three weeks he spent walking from Munich to Paris in 1974, is just as good. Like Conquest, it’s an infernal travelogue in which the gloomy landscapes Herzog documents are not distinguishable from his own stormy internal landscape. In this case his goal isn’t to make a film but to save a life by an act of pilgrimage: he set off on his trip when he learned that his friend and mentor, the writer Lotte Eisner, was in the hospital and might die.

Our Eisner mustn’t die, she will not die, I won’t permit it. She is not dying now because she isn’t dying. Not now, no, she is not allowed to. My steps are firm. And now the earth trembles. When I move, a buffalo moves. When I rest, a mountain reposes.

The diary form suits Herzog perfectly because he’s at once a keen observer and totally self-absorbed, with no interest in objectivity. Why did he write a book about truth? He’s an artist. Of course truth, for him, is going to mean illumination, epiphany – a feeling. Even more than other artists, the defining characteristic of his work is its overwhelming subjectivity. Herzog’s art is impossible to separate from his personality. As Michael O’Connell wrote in a perceptive essay in the NYRB on the occasion of the publication of Herzog’s memoir, “his real masterpiece is the character known as Werner Herzog.” Dwight Garner, in a rather sour review of the same book, wrote that Herzog has “an ego the size of Buenos Aires.”

Both critics are right. In The Future of Truth, Herzog defends, not for the first time, his idea of “ecstatic truth,” which he opposes to the factual truth of journalistic convention, which he calls “the truth of accountants.” But it’s doubtful his audience cares about this debate anymore. We understand that Herzog’s documentaries are something like ecstatic journalism. What the viewer might object to about these films is not that they take liberties with the truth but that the director doesn’t seem to have much feeling for characters unlike – or other than – himself. His best documentaries are the ones about subjects strong enough to stand up to him: 40,000 year old cave art, the internet, Antarctica, Klaus Kinski. He’s also very good with murderers, in his series Into the Abyss. At other times, Herzog’s subjects either get thrown into the shade by the director or remain opaque because he’s incurious about their psychology (as he professes to be incurious about his own).

This is true of his 2022 novel, The Twilight World, about the life of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese soldier who spent 28 years in the Phillipine jungle, refusing to believe the war was over and doggedly continuing his military mission. The book really isn’t bad. It has a haunting, solitary atmosphere, but because Herzog never attempts to get inside the mind of its central character, it lacks power. By far the best part of the book is the introduction, in which Herzog tells the story of how he came to meet the novel’s real-life hero. This came about, he says, only after he had first been invited to meet the Emperor.

I replied: ‘My goodness, I have no idea what I would talk about with the Emperor; it would be nothing but banalities.’ I could feel my wife Lena’s nails digging into my palm, but it was too late. I had declined.

It was a faux pas, so awful, so catastrophic that I wish to this day that the earth had swallowed me up. Around the table, everyone present froze. No one breathed. All eyes were fixed on their plates, no one looked at me, a protracted silence made the room shudder. It felt to me as though the whole of Japan had stopped breathing.

When Herzog treads the road in Bavaria, he keeps death at bay in Paris; when he makes a faux pas in Tokyo, all Japan holds its breath. You can hardly expect someone whose career has been spent dissolving the distinction between the world and his own ego to suddenly stand back and offer cool and insightful commentary on contemporary culture. Why he tried, I’m not sure, but he doesn’t need to. His entire career is a rebuke to the disembodied culture of online life, and his contribution to the debates about AI, misinformation, the post-truth era and all the rest of it is not to offer punditry but to provide a kind of heroic counterexample. Can there be anything less online than walking from Munich to Paris in late November, breaking into houses at night to sleep? Not to mention any of the dozens of other hair-raising adventures he recounts in his other books. Reading them, one is overwhelmed by the sheer amount of physical reality one encounters: exhaustion, exotic diseases, avalanches and motorcycle accidents, crows and pythons and crocodiles. As a pundit, Herzog sees the future no more clearly than the rest of us. As an artist, though, he just might. In the final chapter of his autobiography, contemplating the replacement of literature and cinema by Tiktoks and tweets, he writes, “The end is coming. I picture a radical turning away from thought, argument, and image.” He continues,

I imagine two mirrors set up in exact opposition reflecting nothing but each other into infinity. But with nothing for them to mirror... No truth, no lie. No river called the river of lies, Yuyapichis, the deceiving river that pretends to be the much larger Pichis River. No Japanese marriage agency ordering a bucketful of sand to be emptied out of a satellite so the bride can be astonished by a shower of meteorites. No more twins living in separate bodies but thinking and speaking in unison.

And he goes on, offering no opinion on this apocalypse but simply narrating it as a kind of natural disaster, along the lines of the death of a star. It’s not hard to see this passage as Herzog contemplating his own mortality and frankly describing it as the end of all meaning on earth. Of this vision, like so many of his others, Herzog could say, quoting Carl Jung (another colossal personality), “Whether or not the stories are ‘true’ is not the problem. The only question is whether what I tell is my fable, my truth.”

– Charles Bukowski, from “The Masses”

When I was right out of college, in an attempt to improve my French, or maybe to convince myself I spoke it, I read Madame Bovary in the original. I honestly don’t know how. Here’s a typical passage, in Francis Steegmuller’s translation, a description of the approach to the fateful village of Yonville:

At the foot of the hill the road crosses the Rieule on a bridge, and then, becoming an avenue planted with young aspens, leads in a straight line to the first outlying houses. These are surrounded by hedges, and their yards are full of scattered outbuildings—cider presses, carriage houses and distilling sheds standing here and there under thick trees with ladders and poles leaning against their trunks and scythes hooked over their branches. The thatched roofs hide the top third or so of the low windows like fur caps pulled down over eyes, and each windowpane, thick and convex, has a bull’s-eye in its center like the bottom of a bottle.

All these physical descriptions: I can barely understand it in English. I’m sure that as I read in French, I remembered that in high school we’d been assigned one of Flaubert’s tales, Un Coeur Simple, and all of us, even the straight-A French-nerd suckups, heartily despised it. It was nothing but aspens and alders and fringed lampshades and different types of cloth and carriage; you had to look up a word every ten seconds. Flaubert is for fluent speakers.

My French isn’t much better than it was 20 years ago, so this time I read the book the real way, in English, and actually understood it. My god, what a book. My first time reading it I was just grateful I understood the plot and that part about the torn-up letter fluttering out of the carriage window like butterflies. This time I was really shaken. I’m still recovering. I’m not sure I’ve managed to leave that village with the thatched roofs and the cider presses and the fields around filled with bullrushes and oat stalks with little bell-shaped flowers.

Yonville at first reminded me a little of Springfield, in The Simpsons, a self-contained world with a cast of recurring characters who all have their little quirks and manias and catchphrases. Lestiboudois, the gravedigger, the garrulous Homais, and the rest of the characters we see around town have that toylike, cartoonish limitedness – spiritually, you could say, they only have four fingers. But where Springfield is basically benevolent, Yonville is – Hell. Is it Hell? No, not exactly. That would be too easy. Madame Bovary is not dark comedy. Charles really loves Emma, a fact that both redeems human beings and makes the story tragic and terrible. The whole thing is so pitiless. We’re spared nothing. There’s a streak of sadism in Flaubert, in the way that great movie directors are sadistic. He knows how to turn the screw to get the maximum out of every scene, more than you would have thought possible, without ever turning maudlin or trashy. Emma’s death scene, for example. When Emma dies, her agony is terrible, but it has something inhuman about it, there’s no moral quality to it, it might almost be an animal dying. She is neither more nor less sympathetic than she’s ever been. Charles’s pain, though, makes us suffer.

A muffled scream escaped her; she pretended that she was feeling better and that she’d soon be getting up. But she was seized with convulsions.

“God!” she cried. “It’s horrible!”

He flung himself on his knees beside her bed.

“Speak to me! What did you eat? Answer, for heaven’s sake!”

And in his eyes she read a love such as she had never known.

Emma’s recognition humanizes her – dimly, briefly – and even makes her love Charles a little.1

She slowly passed her hand through his hair. The sweetness of her touch was more than his grief could bear. He felt his entire being give way to despair at the thought of having to lose her just when she was showing him more love than ever in the past; and he could think of nothing to do — he knew nothing, dared nothing: the need for immediate action took away the last of his presence of mind.

The pain is at a maximum, the tragedy unbearable. But three pages later, while Emma is still dying, the empty-headed Homais, “temperamentally incapable of staying away from celebrities” is already giving a lunch for the Rouen doctor who came to examine her, and assaulting him, and us, with his insufferable prattling.

“I’ve even read about people being poisoned, Doctor — positively struck down — by blood sausages that had been subjected to excessive fumigation! At least, so it says in a very fine report, written by one of our leading pharmaceutical lights, one of our masters, the illustrious Cadet de Gassicourt!”

It’s a kind of obscenity, but it goes absolutely without comment from Flaubert. And it goes on like that, this sort of pissing on sorrow, in the hours and days after Emma’s death. I wonder if the greatest scene in the book is the one in which Homais and Bournisien, the useless priest, are sitting with Emma’s body at night, alternately arguing inanely about religion and dozing in their chairs before finally waking and taking a glass of brandy together, “chuckling a little without knowing why,” understanding briefly their essential comradeship.

It’s really dark, this book. Nabokov, if I remember, says in his essay about Bovary that Homais is its real villain. This is true. Lheureux, the fancy-goods dealer, may be the one to plan and carry out Emma’s destruction, but he’s just a predator, a kind of honest crook. He disgusts the reader far less than Homais. Lheureux at least is good at what he does – and indeed, by such efforts as his is progress achieved: by the book’s end, he has, with the capital to which Emma’s ruin has contributed, actually established a new business, a transportation service for Yonvillians. Whereas Homais, for all his talk about progress, is incapable of contributing anything to it. He writes and talks only nonsense, he sells nothing of value, none of his medicaments work (although he uses them himself), he believes his own twaddle, he wears the patented “electric health belt” that he sells in his pharmacy, he knows nothing, has no skills, and is a coward. And everyone in Yonville respects him, because everyone in Yonville is like him. No one rises above their petty concerns and pride and selfishness.

Selfishness of course is nothing new in French novels. Balzac’s characters, in the country and the city, are spectacularly, almost heroically selfish. But no one has genius in Yonville. What makes the place so oppressive isn’t selfishness, it’s the sense of vanity and futility to everything. I found especially chilling this description of the village’s resident artist, the tax collector Binet, a craftsman devoted to his lathe.

He was alone in his garret, busily copying, in wood, one of those ivory ornaments that beggar description, a conglomeration of half-moons and of spheres carved one inside the other, the whole thing standing erect like an obelisk and perfectly useless. He was just beginning on the last section: the end was in sight! In the chiaroscuro of his workshop the golden sawdust flew from his lathe like a spray of sparks under the hooves of a galloping horse; the two wheels spun and whirred; Binet was smiling, chin down and nostrils wide: he looked absorbed, in one of those states of utter bliss such as men seem to find only in humble activities, which divert the mind with easy challenges and gratify it with the most utter and complete success.

This is Yonville’s version of art: a stunted, sterile practice, the lathe turning, as the world turns, to no purpose except the production of useless trifles.

Emma herself is no better than the townspeople, of course. Her thoughts, like Homais’, are just a collection of received ideas. They’re received ideas from Paris, that’s all, and from novels. (If Homais represents Science, she represents Literature.) If anything, she appears to be more empty inside than her neighbors. She doesn’t even care about her daughter. I remember a documentary I once saw about some Wall Street Ponzi artist, much less significant than Madoff (he’d stolen some trifling amount like $400 million), who told the interviewer quite sincerely, almost naively, that he always felt like he should be living not just well but like the very richest people alive. Why not him? It bothered him. He wanted those nice things so much, he said, penthouses and Rothkos and whatever else, and it made him so frustrated that he didn’t have them, that in retrospect it was inevitable that he would end up taking shortcuts and stealing money instead of earning it. Watching him, I couldn’t help feeling that he wasn’t really to blame. He didn’t ask to be made that way. And that’s how I feel about Emma. She didn’t ask to be so self-centered. She didn’t ask to be so indifferent to ordinary pleasures (including love) and so keen on superficial ones. These superficial ones include, I think, her affairs. I’m not sure exactly what role Flaubert assigns, in his world, to sexual passion. Does it have a place apart from the futility of conventional existence? I’m not sure it does. Emma’s desire, her infatuation with her lovers, her charm and attractiveness and their desire for her, seem to be of a piece with everything else in Yonville: things that obsess human beings but are, essentially, banal and ordinary.

Reading Bovary, I had to think of Anna Karenina, that other great 19^th century novel about an adulterous woman. The two are so different. Flaubert is painterly (I would say, a miniaturist). Whereas with Tolstoy you think of a Beethoven symphony, of the titanic forces of nature, great, heavy structures, Schopenhauerian Will, the glories of the 19^th century. Just as much as Flaubert, Tolstoy understood the world of convention and falsity (what Nabokov called by the Russian word poshlust), but life, in his novels, is basically beautiful. I know someone who says that whenever she reads Tolstoy, she’s afraid she might become a Christian. This is not a concern with Flaubert. There are no saintly peasants in Yonville. There is no spirituality. You almost get the feeling that he worshipped his craft, the way other people sublimate their sexual desires in their work.

Where Tolstoy is right at the center of things (like God), Flaubert is on the outside, observing, dissecting, analyzing. But though he’s so full of acid, though he’s so cold, he doesn’t use this coldness to do satire or social commentary or vent spleen but to make his story’s tragedy as powerful as possible. Poor stupid Charles, the one character, it seems, who loves anybody, the only one in the whole book who isn’t full of shit (“You’re good, you’re different,” as Emma tells him on her deathbed) the one lifeline to decency and a world we recognize and can bear to live in. His grief, his mourning – are these meant to be as dull, unsympathetic and ridiculous as everything else about him? I think they’re not. When I think of how in the months after Emma’s death, he pulls her armchair close to the fire and sits across from it all evening, I think of Lolita (another masterpiece with things to say about small-town life) and how sincere it gets at the end: Humbert telling a now-older Lolita that if there is any chance she’d ever live with him again, “I will create a brand new God and thank him with piercing cries,” Nabokov describing the book as “a highly moral affair.”

I found myself pondering Madame Bovary darkly for days after I’d finished it. One of the easier reflections about it is about aspens and alders and the craziness of calling Flaubert’s style “realism.” First of all, what’s reality? It doesn’t exist. Even atoms aren’t real. And Flaubert’s version of the world, in which mediocrity is so avid, a living thing, a pervasive, almost demonic force, in which people live in a realm of superficiality, fakery, and imitation, within a cloud of vanity and futility: this is clearly, like, a little tendentious. That is to say, it’s hyperreal, a vision. What does it have to do with “reality”?

This vision stays with me. After I finished the book, I found I had started to think of “Yonville” as a term describing all the things that happen to irritate me about banal events and the city I live in, which I could now see as an expression of some essential property of life: the blooming of falsity and mediocrity, its incredible robustness and tendency to thrive. On the subway, for example. That recording that says “This is an MTA accessible station. The elevator is at the rear of the platform,” grates the ear because the woman reading the message pronounces the simple words in a stilted, pretentious way, not the way she speaks but the way she thinks it’s supposed to sound. (“Yonville,” I mutter to myself.) And the subway ads, which I’m used to ignoring, now have a new quality: though advertising different products, they seem like identical lies, all declaring that happiness is purchasable. Or – oh, just now, this public statement by United States Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller, addressing one of his governmental colleagues across the aisle:

“You and the state’s entire Democrat leadership team have been flaming the flames of insurrection for the singular purpose of stopping the deportation of illegals who invaded the country.”

“Flaming the flames”… “singular purpose”… When Flaubert has Homais say, “‘That is the question,’… as I read in the paper recently,” I thought perhaps that it might be a bit of a cheap shot, that he was laying it on a little thick. But no, they really do lay it on that thick in real life. The evil of banality… Are clichés not just bad style but the work of the devil? Help me, I’m trapped. Like the sufferers of the psychiatric condition known as Cotard’s Syndrome, who believe they’ve died and are living in hell, I’ve become convinced I’m living in Yonville. It’s New York, it’s the USA, it’s the internet, but it’s still Yonville. It’s all Yonville…

Here are some things that interest me about geology. That there have been, essentially, other earths on this planet before our own, with different arrangements of continents, different seas and coastlines, such as you might see in a map of Middle Earth from Lord of the Rings or Westeros from Game of Thrones. That 200 million years ago there existed an ocean, now called Tethys, about the size of the Indian Ocean, which is now vanished – not dried up but actually gone, the seabed almost entirely subducted beneath the Asian continent and melted back into the earth’s mantle. That between about 290 and 170 million years ago, the landmasses of earth were gathered into a single continent from pole to pole, whose climate, flora and fauna, and even, to some extent, geography and regional weather conditions it’s possible to know with some degree of accuracy, for example, that its climate was characterized by mega-monsoons and that its vast interior, called today the Great Pangean Desert, would have been almost uninhabitable because of its extreme aridity and heat. That the inner core of the earth is a solid iron sphere, which we have never seen and never will. That Europa, Jupiter’s second moon, probably harbors life beneath its frozen outer crust, life which developed from hydrothermal vents and has evolved in total darkness in a kilometer-thick womb of ice. That time is like the electromagnetic spectrum in that only the narrowest band of its vast continuum is perceivable by humans, between the near-infinities of rock time on the one hand and machine time on the other.

To finally understand something about this subject, I picked up a copy of Geology: A complete introduction, a textbook by David Rothery, part of the Teach Yourself series from The Open University. It’s a terrific book. I’ve never read another geology textbook, but Rothery explains everything in a way that’s so clear and engaging, so attuned to what the novice is able to understand, that it’s hard for me to imagine a better one exists. He knows when to give general principles and summaries and when to go into detail. He’s careful to introduce geological terminology at a rate the reader can (just) keep up with. Regularly, in the middle of a difficult chapter, he includes a little informational box summing up the basic principle involved (”thermal metamorphism is a result of heating adjacent to an igneous intrusion”) just when you need it. Geology was difficult for me to understand, but I always felt that I was battling the subject, not the author.

I knew I needed to read a textbook because I rarely get far with general interest geology books. When I do finish them, the information does not stick to my brain. It meets an unprepared surface and flakes off immediately. I also find these books to be, like many nonfiction books, chatty and long-winded. Before they give you the basic facts about earth science, for example, they insist on telling you the story of how these facts were discovered. So you learn about the great age of the earth by way of James Hutton and his discovery of a very old formation of sedimentary rock, plate tectonics by way of Alfred Wegener and the way his correct theory was disbelieved by the academy at the time. These histories are not uninteresting, but still this approach always strikes me as patronizing, as if the reader had to be coaxed into learning geological facts by having them snuck into historical anecdotes. I don’t need a spoonful of sugar to make the geology go down. Just give me the facts, shocking and incomprehensible as they may be.

This is exactly what Rothery does. The facts are these. The earth is a geologically active planet, which means that it has a dynamic interior, its constant motion driven by the heat upwelling from its molten mantle. This is in contrast to most asteroids and some moons of planets in our solar system, which are just what they look like on images taken by orbiting probes: inert chunks of rock where nothing ever happens. On earth, however, everything flows. The core and mantle preserve the “primordial heat” of earth’s creation and generate heat by decay of radioactive elements, which rises upwards by convection. No part of the earth is ever actually still. The earth stopped being a ball of lava bombarded by asteroids about 3.5 billion years ago, but almost none of its original crust remains at the surface – just a few samples in Australia and Greenland – because all the rest has been churned back into the mantle or eroded by rain, frost and wind.

Plate tectonics is the most important way that everything moves. You have heard of continental drift: the crust of the earth is not, beneath the layer of soil we can see, a continous sheet of rock, but is broken into a number of plates that float on the hot mantle beneath. Since there is no empty space between them, they are not drifting in the way we usually think of the word – like bath toys in a tub – but being simultaneously created and destroyed in the process of rifting and subduction. Geologists are still uncertain about which process drives the other. Rifting occurs when two plates are drawn apart and upwelling mantle rock fills the gap. This cools to become oceanic crust, which spreads as the rift widens over millions of years. Subduction happens when a section of oceanic crust comes into contact with continental crust and, being denser (for reasons explained further on), slips beneath it and is absorbed back into the magma. This cycle is going on continuously. Oceanic crust is constantly being created in rifting events and destroyed by subduction. Continental crust is conserved, smashed together when plates collide and pulled apart when they rift, the landmasses, over billions of years, joining and separating and rejoining like partners at a dance.

This is the movement to be found at the largest scale. But everything is constantly in motion at every level. Reading Geology, I found that it was helpful to imagine the movement of stone, whether at a particular section of terrain or at the level of continents, as if it were soap bubbles in a sink or clouds in a patch of sky or another of those little theaters of chance that it’s possible to become fascinated by if you stare at for a while. Everything we think of as solid and permanent is actually random motion, collisions, mergings and divisions. The crust of the earth buckles and deforms in complex ways at other faults besides those at the edge of continental plates: the Himalayan plateau, for example, is transected by a number of very long faults running in different directions, the result of its lithosphere being squeezed out eastwards by the same compression that birthed the Himalayas. The Himalayas continue to grow as the last energy from the collision that created them (between the Indian and Asian continents) is spent. Meanwhile these mountains, along with all other exposed rock on earth, are being worn down by rain, frost and wind, the particles carried downstream, eventually to reform under pressure into new rocks of a different character than the ones they eroded from. Even the planet’s iron core, which, from what I can tell from this textbook, is the only solid and stationary feature of the earth, is surrounded by a molten outer core whose movement creates a magnetic field that regularly flips polarity and whose flips are recorded in stripes on the ocean floor, the sections of crust bearing the magnetic stamp of the time of their creation.

All of this is of course not just much more complicated than I’m doing justice to but also much more difficult to understand than you would think. I never took a geology class in college, but I was told students still called it by the traditional but misleading nickname Rocks for Jocks. I took Moons for Goons – Astronomy 100 – which turned out to be surprisingly hard because it required you to make calculations involving the incurved geometry of the sky. Geology is similarly disappointing if you’re looking for an easy A. You find quickly that many important changes occur as a result of processes that are obscure and can’t be arrived at by common sense. For example, the ocean’s crust is created by a process called decompression melting, in which hot rock upwelling from the mantle (upwelling but still solid; non-liquid rock in the mantle can move like liquid) melts, not as a result of added heat but because of reduced pressure above it. The small melted portion of this part of the mantle ends up (by a chemical process not described in Rothery’s book) enriched in silica, resulting in a rock that is slightly denser than continental crust and which therefore floats lower on the mantle. This is the reason we have oceans.

In general, with geology we find ourselves dealing with the difficulty of making sense of the utter mess that is matter over time. The chapter on rock deformation, for example, was extremely difficult to get through because while this may seem an easy concept (things smush into other things), once we start accounting for the directions at which these are smushed, the different characters of the masses being smushed together, and the shape of the resulting deformed mass, we find ourselves dealing with a complex series of three-dimensional figures plotted over time, which we have to imagine using diagrams or from confusing photographs. That’s the thing about geology: we always have to imagine, we never get to watch it, there are no movies of rock deformation or thermal metamorphism or collisional orogeny or intra-oceanic subduction. Everything is in motion, but all we can ever see is a still image.

My summaries of the complicated processes of earth science may sound broad-stroke, dumbed-down and ham-fisted. You have no idea. Here is an excerpt of Rothery’s description of rock deformation:

The axial planes of the folds in Figure 10.7 are very steep and the hinge lines are horizontal. It does not have to be so: axial planes can sometimes have very gentle dips, hinge lines can plunge downwards at any angle, and opposite limbs of a fold can diverge at a larger or smaller angle. Examples are shown in Figure 10.8. In highly deformed regions, fold limbs are often parallel to one another, and in these cases the folds are described as isoclinal. If the axial plane dips at less than ten degrees, the fold is described as recumbent (Figure 10.9). In multiply deformed areas, younger folds may distort older folds, resulting in a complex pattern (Plate 10). Folds may even be turned upside down, in which case the anticlines look like synclines, and vice versa. In such a situation, the right way up has to be determined by inspection of small-scale structures such as cross-bedding.

Geological terms are precise, and indispensable for the professional, but for the layman they make every sentence a battle.

In short, Rothery’s book is a superb introduction: that doesn’t make it easy. I read the whole thing. Do I now understand geology? No. I still couldn’t tell you, for example, what the facts about earth’s physical systems and deep history have to do with this or that rock I might see in real life. I still look at the faces of my little rock collection and feel the pain of illiteracy. I know their patterns and texture tell stories having to do with the titanic forces of the earth, with massive pressure and mantle heat, but I don’t know what these stories are. But still I think I got something important from this textbook, and the main thing. I now believe in geology. I accept that everything on our planet is in motion, that stone flows and that all is change. Before I read the book, I believed these things only in the wary, provisional, essentially skeptical way I accepted most science facts. I actually set foot, for example, on the floor of the former Tethys Ocean last year when I visited the Mustang region of Nepal. I knew this, in a way, since I had read on Wikipedia that this area of the Himalayas was the floor of an ancient ocean that vanished at the end of the Miocene epoch, but since I hadn’t read Rothery’s book and didn’t understand that some similar story of change and transformation could be told about every place on earth, this was just an isolated fact, a piece of trivia of the kind you used to find on the inside of the cap of a Snapple bottle, and I didn’t really believe it. Now I do. I can pick up one of the ammonite sections I found lying right there on the ground and think, “This is from the Tethys sea.”

I do actually look at these little fossils pretty regularly, just as I enjoy admiring the random stones I’ve picked up on various travels. Nothing else is as clean as stones, as free of all human willing and doing and feeling. And yet at the same time the beautiful patterns on their faces, especially when cut and polished, really look as though they’ve been created to give pleasure. Contemplating this contradiction – gazing at stones – is an old tradition that can be practiced at a high level, up to psychosis. The real rock freaks stare at stone until they see things. The science fiction writer Richard Sharpe Shaver believed the patterns on the granite faces of the rocks on his Illinois farm were the art of an ancient spacefaring civilization that had once inhabited the earth. 18th-century stone fanciers collected “ruin marbles,” limestone whose patterns resembled cityscapes. Chinese connoisseurs decorated their studies with “scholar’s stones,” sculptural stones whose patterns suggested landscapes. The French author Roger Caillois writes in The Reading of Stones (one of two books he wrote about his rock collection), “Collectors ruined themselves to possess crystals in whose translucent depths they discerned mosses, grasses, and boughs laden with flowers or fruit.” Caillois understands the allure of these figurative images produced by chance. “Such a duplicate is not a copy; it is not born of an artist’s talent or a forger’s skill. It has been there always: we only had to find our way into its presence.” It seems, he writes, like a direct, if indecipherable, communication from nature itself, “a call from the center of things; a dim, almost lost memory, or perhaps a presentiment, pointless in so puny a being, of a universal syntax.”

From these (very French) reveries, Geology: A complete introduction brings us back down to earth. Contemplating the chaos of chance is stimulating when it’s represented by a stone in your living room. It becomes something else when thinking about stone on a colossal, continental, planetary scale. A heavier feeling: sometimes awe, sometimes something more like repulsion or horror. Reading about chemical weathering or collision orogeny, one gets a shiver at the sheer blindness of it all: in these colossal events, not one of the bodies acting on the others or undergoing complex or violent changes saw, heard, or felt anything, nor were there witnesses to any of it, not a bird or insect or giant tortoise, since with the exception of volcanic eruptions the fastest of these changes took place a thousand times too slowly for any living creature to notice. I only realized how oppressive, how unsettling I’d found this blind, groaning, godless chaos when I turned the page of Geology to the chapter on paleontology and saw the familiar images of ammonoid and trilobite fossils. I know nothing about the biology of these creatures, these alien-looking insectoids that went extinct 250 million years ago, nothing about what or how they ate and reproduced, what contemporary fauna they resemble or are ancestors of. But just seeing their forms, so neat, so smoothly rounded and symmetrical, possessing an inside and an outside, their every feature implying motility and will, made me feel as though I were reading English after having picked my way through a foreign language for 200 pages. Oh thank god, I thought, I’m home.

The National Archaeological Museum in Athens houses many ancient treasures, including the Mycenaean trove discovered by Heinrich Schliemann in 1876. Schliemann was a German amateur who devoted his entire life to finding the original site of Troy, found it1, and then sent this telegram to King George I of Greece, a blow-up of which is displayed on a wall at the Museum:

Your Majesty, it is with great pleasure that I inform you that I have discovered the tombs which, according to Pausanias’ account, belong to Agamemnon, Cassandra and their comrades who were murdered by Clytemnestra and her paramour, Aegisthus, during a feast. The tombs are enclosed within a double stone circle, something which would only have been erected in honour of exalted personages. Inside the tombs, I have discovered fabulous treasures and ancient objects of solid gold. These treasures alone are enough to fill a large museum which will become the most famous in the world and will attract myriads of foreigners to Greece from every land. Since I work out of sheer love of science, I naturally make no claim on these treasures and enthusiastically make them over, in their entirety, to Greece. May these treasures be the foundation of immeasurable national wealth.

An outrageous letter. I’m not sure how I would have felt, had I been George I of Greece, to be the recipient of this Teutonic beneficence that sounds suspiciously like a prank. But what a telegram to be able to send! As I strolled through the museum, I daydreamed:

“Dear Mr. Chairman,

I have discovered the UFO that crashed on 4 June, 1947 in the desert in New Mexico, in the United States. The craft, constructed of metal alloys not of terrestrial origin, is complete and intact. Along with technology that will be of immeasurable use to industry, the interior of the spaceship contains the well-preserved body of its alien pilot, which will no doubt be of the greatest interest to science. Needless to say, I donate my find – the greatest in the history of civilization – to the people of the world.

Yours etc.,”

I was really impressed by that telegram, but despite all my best efforts I could feel nothing in response to the actual treasures Schliemann discovered. Maybe I am an oaf about visual art, or maybe in reality no one is actually moved by objects in glass cases, but to me this was also a frustrating reminder of a problem I have with the Greeks. I know that they were an alien culture with strange, incomprensible beliefs and practices, but whenever I see their treasures and statues in a museum or otherwise try to get interested in them, try as I might I only see a kind of picture postcard of “the West,” hear Mozart, and imagine banal arcadian tableaus featuring different kinds of columns.

So I was very happy to discover, when I read 7 Greeks, by Guy Davenport, a way in. The book collects Davenport’s translations of seven poets, philosophers and playwrights of the 7th-5th century BC, which is a century or two before the Classical period that for most of us stands for Greek Culture. In his wonderful introduction, Davenport writes that “The scholar poets of the Renaissance, Ambrizio Poliziano and Christopher Marlowe, whose vision of antiquity we have inherited, would have rejected as indecorous this seventh-century world half oriental, half-Viking.” This single sentence was basically enough to brush away the “highbrow” stereotype of Greece that interposes itself between me and antiquity.

I don’t read a letter of Greek, so it’s impossible for me to judge the translation or to know how much of these poems is the ancient writers and how much is Davenport. It seems to me Davenport translates with taste and sensitivity. The language throughout is clear and unfussy and the poems sound modern without including distracting modern words. This is especially true of the first, and best, poet of the collection. Archilochos (I use Davenport’s spellings) was a mercenary soldier from Paros who lived in the 7th century BC. His best, and I think best-known, poem is this one:

Some Saian mountaineer
Struts today with my shield.
I threw it down by a bush and ran
When the fighting got hot.
Life seemed somehow more precious.
It was a beautiful shield.
I know where I can buy another
Exactly like it, just as round.

A friend who read it said it reminded him of William Carlos Williams’ “This Is Just to Say.” (”I have kept the life that was dedicated to battle and which you were probably planning to sacrifice for your country...”) The quietness of the poem, the sense of a speaking voice, the irony (that “just as round”!) seem so modern. Not all his poems are humble, some have a stirring martial spirit:

Decks awash,
Mast-top dipping, 
And all
Balanced on the keen edge 
Now of the wind’s sword, 
Now of the wave’s blade.

Pretty great. The poem itself is balanced on the keen edge of metaphor, zipping along. There are a few other poems as good as these, along with some earthy fragments, songs of praise and battle poems. Do I like these poems for their own sake or for their whiff of the ancient past? Both. When I read Archilochos I sometimes get what I’m hoping to find in a museum: a kind of thrill of travel, like an unplaceable scent you get when setting foot in a foreign country for the first time

I’ve always had difficulty with Sappho because most of her writing survives as fragments, and I just can’t read fragments as poems. Even Sappho’s longer poems usually include lacunae. I did like this one, though, which survives even with a missing middle:

She was like that sweetest apple 
That ripened highest on the tree, 
That the harvesters couldn’t reach, 
And pretended they forgot.
[]
Like the mountain hyacinth trod underfoot
By shepherd men, its flower purple on the ground.

I’m sure Sappho is very good and I don’t want to embarrass myself by dismissing her. It’s hard to argue with lines like “Eros gall and honey/Snake-sly, invincible.” I did like her less than Archilochos; a matter of taste maybe. She writes in an elevated register, without irony, invoking the gods and dying of longing. This is what I expect from ancient poetry, and I start seeing tunics and columns again. The lines of Sappho I liked the most were the ones less heavy with longing, in which ordinary objects and impressions get some attention. I especially liked this, describing visitors from “that famous Asia.”

For gifts they bring wrist-chains of gold,
And purple coats and silver jars, 
And carved toys incredibly strange, 
And things made of ivory.

“Carved toys incredibly strange”: an image from a dream or science fiction.

7 Greeks also includes two pre-Socratic philosophers, Herakleitos and Diogenes. Herakleitos is really something else. He is one of the few ancient philosophers non-specialists might read, so in my mind I lump him in with Seneca and Marcus Aurelius and other ancient thinkers you might see someone reading on an airplane, looking for life inspiration or business wisdom. I know he said “All flows” and that you could never step into the same river twice, and I imagined his thought as Buddhistic, calm, and vaguely contentless.

Not so. He did indeed say that you could never step into the same river twice, but he also said that “War is the father of us all and our King” and “The best of men see only one thing worth having: undying fame.” Some of his lines are just ordinary wisdom with an attractive ancient patina, but others seem to be a portal to a completely alien region of thought. Here the “highbrow” image of the Greeks and the idea of “Apollonian” and “Dionysian” are meaningless, along with the distinction between “Eastern” and “Western” thought, science and philosophy, and anything we’d think of as right- or left-wing impulses. He has things to say about the psyche:

The stuff of the psyche is a smoke-like substance of finest particles that gives rise to all other things; its particles are of less mass than any other substance and it is constantly in motion: only movement can know movement.

and about fire:

This world, which is always the same for all men, neither god nor man made: it has always been, it is, and always shall be: an everlasting fire rhythmically dying and flaring up again.

The above sounds a little like Schopenhauer’s Will, and this one, Representation:

No matter how many ways you try, you cannot find a boundary to consciousness, so deep in every direction does it extend.

Reading Herakleitos, you feel you come upon suddenly, from an unfamiliar route, the Schopenhauerian idea that we’re all finger puppets of some universal matter and our perception of separateness is an illusion.

Let us therefore notice that understanding is common to all men. Understanding is common to all, yet each man acts as if his intelligence were private and all his own.

You get the sense, almost eerie at times, that Herakleitos had been there, that he had had some profound vision of reality that he could only describe in seemingly disconnected statements that repeat with slight differences and come very close to contradicting each other, as if he were taking snapshots from different angles of a greater-dimensional object he had beheld.

Diogenes is much easier to get your head around. He’s a character: the misanthrope who’s smarter and more pure than the world. He’s literally a character, since although he really did live, what we have of him is his legend, not his writing, which has all been lost. What remains is Diogenes as repeated by others, quoted and presumably misquoted many times and set down in the version Davenport translates by the second century AD biographer Diogenes Laertius. Diogenes’ sayings may be antiquity’s version of “Play it again, Sam,” “Poetry is passion recollected in tranquility,” and other famous lines that their authors never actually wrote. I can’t help seeing them in this light: to me his words have a sort of much-repeated sound, the burrs and sharp edges smoothed by long use, or filed down.

To be saved from folly, you need either kind friends or fierce enemies.

There is no stick hard enough to drive me away from a man from whom I can learn something.

These are alright. But it feels somehow as though the essence of whatever Diogenes really said has been lost by being turned into lessons anyone can use. The power is the character: the philosopher who sleeps in the street. Diogenes is famous as a public masturbator, and although there’s nothing in these notes that refers to this legend, there’s nothing that contradicts it either. He seems legitimately homeless. I like him best when he writes about mice.

Toadying extends even to Diogenes, I say to the mice who nibble my crumbs.

If this is an invention of Diogenes Laertius, it’s a good one. I can imagine these mice, their lowliness. Diogenese spent time on ground level, with the mice, and it sounds like they were friends. He philosophizes at them, but he doesn’t drive them away.

Note2

I am perhaps in love 
Again, perhaps not, 
And crazy to boot.
No, not crazy.

I visited Tangier for three weeks when I was 20, while I was spending a semester abroad in Morocco. For the last part of the program we were released from our home stays for a period of “independent research,” and I went immediately to the city of seediness and spies, Paul Bowles and William Burroughs. There I idled in cafés; got lost in the medina; smoked kif, once, out of a long-stemmed pipe that almost flattened me with one puff; met expats in ascots and lots of shady "guides”; spoke bad French and felt cosmopolitan.

In short, I was a tourist, and like any tourist, the best part of my day was when I got back to my hotel room, flopped down on the bed, and opened a good book. In both hotel and book, I'd chosen well. The hotel was the Villa Muniria, a little pension where, according to the Lonely Planet guide, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and other Beats had stayed, and which still had plenty of bohemian charm. The book was Paul Bowles's memoir, Without Stopping. The internet has blunted both the discomforts and the corresponding reliefs of travel, but before smartphones there was nothing better than reading English in a foreign country. It was like drinking water when you didn't even know you were thirsty. Any good book would have had this effect, but Bowles' memoir was like water from a mountain spring, incredibly cold and refreshing. The Tangier I was visiting was a confusing city, run-down and somewhat aggressive, polluted and half-modern, whose exotic and dangerous aspects I experienced essentially as a collection of humorous anecdotes. Here is Bowles's:

If I said that Tangier struck me as a dream city, I should mean it in the strict sense. Its topography was rich in prototypal dream scenes: covered streets like corridors with doors opening into rooms on each side, hidden terraces high above the sea, streets consisting only of steps, dark impasses, small squares built on sloping terrain so that they looked like ballet sets designed in false perspective, with alleys leading off in several directions; as well as the classical dream equipment of tunnels, ramparts, ruins, dungeons, and cliffs. The climate was both violent and languorous.

Bowles visited Tangier in the summer of 1931. He had begun his travels the year before, when he'd abruptly quit school at the University of Virginia to take a steamer to Paris, a decision that was made by a coin toss that resulted in Heads. “Tails," he writes, "would have meant that I would have had to take a bottle of Allonal that night and leave no note.” From Paris he'd traveled around Europe, drinking in the novelty and freedom of this new continent and imposing on famous artists: Jean Cocteau, Manuel de Falla, Kurt Schwitters1. Gertrude Stein adopted him for a few months and let him live in an upstairs room, doing odd jobs like exercising her poodle, Basket, in the back yard. Bowles was an aspiring composer at the time and a student of Aaron Copland. In Spain, he and Copland decided on a lark to spend the summer in Tangier, where they lived and composed in a house on a hill outside the city. One evening Bowles and Copland met a Dutch painter, Kristians Tonny, and his wife Anita. Later, “Tonny remarked to Aaron: 'The young man with you is slightly off his head, isn’t he? I noticed it the other night right away. I heard shutters banging in the wind in there somewhere.'"

You can hear the shutters banging all through this wonderful book. I don't know exactly what Tonny was noticing, but the delightful madness of the autobiography comes from the precise, almost prim way in which Bowles expresses strange and violent ideas. Somehow this is most true when he writes about his childhood. Bowles was born in 1910 and grew up in an old-fashioned bourgeois home. His father was a dentist and frustrated musician from a respectable New England family. He and his parents lived in what was then the leafy suburb of Jamaica, Queens. Bowles was an only child and according to his memoir felt himself an outsider in his own family, alienated from his parents and especially from his neurotic, overbearing father, whom he saw from earliest childhood as an enemy. “I took for granted his constant and unalloyed criticism," he writes. "His mere presence meant misery; it was one of the inalterables of existence.” It's no wonder that his interest in travel started early:

I printed the lists of place-names in notebooks when I got home: Shirkingsville, 645th Street, Clifton Junction, Snake-spiderville, Hiss, El Apepal, Norpath Kay.

Soon I invented a planet with landmasses and seas. The continents were Ferncawland, Lanton, Zaganokworld, and Ara-plaina. I drew maps of each and gave them mountain ranges, rivers, cities, and railways.

Wes Anderson could hardly do better. But Bowles' depiction of childhood is far from twee. Bowles never saw another child until he was four years old and reacted badly when he was finally enrolled in school.

It took me one day to discover that the world of children was a world of unremitting warfare. But since I had suspected this all along, it did not come as a shock. I accepted the group beatings as part of the pattern and stealthily launched punitive attacks on loners who had got separated from the pack. This usually resulted in a permanent personal hatred for me on the part of the victim, inasmuch as I sharpened stones beforehand in order to draw blood.

The world of Bowles' childhood – the coldness, the delight in novelty, the savage conflict between human beings – is recognizable to any reader of his short stories, which are hypnotic rather than eccentric and scary rather than funny. The typical Bowles tale involves a rather buttoned-up Western traveler who finds himself in a traumatic confrontation with his host culture. This native culture – in Guatemala, Mexico, Morocco – appears as the irrational, the unconscious, the mad, but also as something stronger and truer than the visitor's rational worldview, which looks shallow and foolish by comparison, and as unsuited to the locale as his suit and hat. In "Pastor Dowe at Tacaté," a minister who attempts to convert an Amazon tribe not only fails, but somehow ends up bowing to their pagan god and married to a seven-year-old girl. In The Sheltering Sky, the heroine goes, in a matter of weeks, from complaining about her apéritif in a Tangier café ("Ce n'est pas du vrai Pernod?") to serving compliantly in the harem of a desert chieftain.

Often the characters are Bowles stand-ins, and their fatal adventures take the form of a certain kind of daydream: What if I took a walk and never returned? In "Tapiama," an unnamed American photographer in Mexico leaves his sweltering hotel in the middle of the night to walk on the beach. Eventually he comes across a raft where a naked boatman pushes off and takes him to a place called Tapiama. Here there is a makeshift bar where he drinks several apparently hallucinogenic cocktails and ends up lying on the bottom of a boat being paddled by some local Indians, his mind empty, imitating the cry of a local bird: "Idigaraga!" The young Indians applaud his impression.

You know that bird?” he said. “It is a very comic bird. It goes to the nests of other birds and wants to sit there, and when the other birds fight with it and drive it away, it sits down in the same tree there and says: ‘Idigaraga.’ That means: ‘Iri garagua, nadie me quiere, nobody likes me.’ And it says it over and over, until they make it go farther away so they can’t hear it any more. You said it just right. Say it again.” “Sí, sí,” the others agreed, “otra vez!

It's tempting to see both bird and photographer as Bowles. In Paul Bowles: The Complete Outsider, a very good TV documentary on Bowles from 1994 (which also includes Bowles' impressions of Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, and Gertrude Stein's dog), Bowles remarks that he travels because in this way he can enjoy the feeling of being an outsider, a feeling which, as a child, he experienced, painfully, in his own family. His writing is notably lacking in ordinary human feeling. In his stories, some sort of dark magic rushes in to fill the emotional void. Instead of epiphanies, we're treated to the spectacle of a death wish fulfilled, if not by death itself then by madness, mutilation, abjection. There's an old Ray Bradbury story2 in which a space explorer gets to try out a machine that lets him simulate his own death (in a variety of ways), and emerges much refreshed. I find that to be the effect of Bowles' best stories. The characters are sacrificed to Chaos; the reader enjoys the feeling of having undergone a temporary ego death.

The spirit of rebellion that in his stories takes the form of black magic, violence and doom appears in Without Stopping in a kind of charming juvenile form. The memoir shows a child – and then young man – quietly at war with the gloomy, repressive world of his parents, along with society in general. He brings a spirit of perversity to the most ordinary activities. For example, a figure drawing class:

I asked Miss Weir, the directress, why we spent so much time drawing naked people; her astonishment was tinged with indignation at my insensitivity. “The human figure is the ultimate esthetic phenomenon,” she declared. This struck me as pure convention, wholly arbitrary; it seemed to me that one could just as easily make the statement about spheres or trees. I suggested that a healthy cat or horse was a far more beautiful creature than any human being, but she would have none of it.

This made me laugh out loud in my room at the Villa Muniria. Not long after, possibly while I was still reading the book, I went to visit Bowles, who was alive and living in Tangier. A friend was writing his paper on the history of expat writers in the city and wanted some company when he went to talk to him. I went along unwillingly; I suspected it would be disappointing, in the way of obligatory travel experiences, and I was reluctant to bother a distinguished old man in his home. He received us in bed (I think he was bedridden) and answered my friend's (naturally rather obtuse) questions in a surprisingly loud patrician voice. Embarrassed to be there, I stayed silent, which I think irritated Bowles. I wish I had told him how much I liked his memoir and talked to him about his childhood. I do remember he expressed surprise when we said we liked Tangier. "It used to be a very attractive city," he said matter-of-factly. "It isn't anymore."

This didn't really surprise me. I could tell that the city I was visiting hardly resembled the one in his book. Bowles's best adventures took place during a time which, for better or for worse, has to be considered the golden age of travel, when colonialism allowed a restless Westerner to go from somewhere recognizably modern to somewhere he could imagine was medieval – or primeval – in a few weeks or less. From the Paris of Gertrude Stein, say, to a vast palace in Fez, complete with harem, whose massive door was opened with a key two feet long. In Mexico, Bowles and his wife Jane stayed and wrote in another palace, "built for the Aztec lady [Malinche] by her lover Hernán Cortés, conqueror of Mexico." In Sri Lanka, Bowles bought an island called Taprobane, “a mere tuft of rain forest rising out of the sea.”

Bowles settled in Morocco in 1947, traveled the country, learned Arabic, and translated and promoted a number of Moroccan writers. His sympathies were with the Moroccans in their anticolonial struggle against the French. But a theme of his memoir is regret for the pre-modern world before independence. He remarks again and again on examples of what were the defining features of the post-WWII 20th century: economic progress and global uglification. Moroccans, he sums up, "are always happy if something ancient can be made to look as though it had been built yesterday."

Of course this applied to Tangier as well, which when I visited him had expanded well beyond the medina to a sprawling new city with banks and traffic jams. It wasn't the dream city he'd encountered 40 years earlier, and since that time, his life, as he describes it in Without Stopping, became less and less of an adventure. Jane was ill for a long time and then died. The world changed. Everything got uglier. When he first saw Tangier, it was in a state of euphoric excitement at the feeling of having come as far as possible from home. He wrote, “Like any Romantic, I had always been vaguely certain that sometime during my life I should come into a magic place which in disclosing its secrets would give me wisdom and ecstasy—perhaps even death.”

He did die in Tangier, just a few months after I met him, at the age of 88. But I don't think this is what he meant.

I recently read Wittgenstein's Culture and Value, which is the somewhat arbitrary title given to the English translation of Vermischte Bemerkungen ("Miscellaneous Remarks"), selections from his notebooks. I've been fascinated by Wittgenstein ever since I saw this BBC documentary on him during the pandemic. It's a wonderful film, in which the philosopher appears as a kind of World's Most Interesting Man: a genius, from a family of geniuses that was also one of the richest in Austria, who would have to be called an eccentric if he weren't so deadly serious and highly accomplished. He completed his great philosophical work, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, while a soldier in World War I, after which he gave away his fortune and became a schoolteacher in a remote Austrian village for almost 10 years. (His record as a teacher was a little uneven.) Later he decided to help his sister build a house, took over the job from the architect and designed it himself, down to the doorknobs and window latches (an episode I assume is the inspiration for Thomas Bernhard's feverish Correction). Eventually he went back to philosophy and wrote another book, Philosophical Investigations, which threw into question everything he'd written in his first.

He lived, in other words, exactly as a genius should. There is a satisfying, even frightening sense of extremes about his life and character. Against this background of profound seriousness, droll anecdotes stand out very brightly, the way they do in Kafka's life. The fact that he liked to watch dopey American films after a long day of philosophizing, for instance, which the philosopher Norman Malcolm writes about in his memoir of Wittgenstein:

Wittgenstein was always exhausted by his lectures. He was also revolted by them. He felt disgusted with what he had said and with himself. Often he would rush off to a cinema immediately after the class ended. As the members of the class began to move their chairs out of the room he might look imploringly at a friend and say in a low tone, 'Could you go to a flick?' On the way to the cinema Wittgenstein would buy a bun or cold pork pie and munch it while he watched the film. He insisted on sitting in the very first row of seats, so that the screen would occupy his entire field of vision, and his mind would be turned away from the thoughts of the lecture and his feelings of revulsion.

Or these lines, written to his teacher Bertrand Russell while he was living in Norway and working on what would become the Tractatus: "My day passes between logic, whistling, going for walks, and being depressed." Lines that could have described the days of so many of us during the pandemic, except that, according to Wikipedia, Wittgenstein had perfect pitch and "was unusually adept at whistling lengthy and detailed musical passages." Like Kafka, he was photogenic and the subject of cultlike admiration, and like him he stands out as a kind of character, a sui generis and unassimilable figure of the 20th century. He went to junior high, for one year, with Adolph Hitler. They were exactly the same age but two grades apart, since Ludwig skipped a grade and Adolph was held back. There is a book, The Jew of Linz, in which the author, Kimberley Cornish, argues seriously that being bullied by the young Wittgenstein (who was Jewish, though assimilated), was the source of Hitler's antisemitism. The philosopher and his life are so unusual that this conspiracy theory almost makes sense.

I have no background in philosophy and have never read the Tractatus, which I've been told is like math. But I've been making my way through Philosophical Investigations, which is highly readable.

When I say: "My broom is in the corner",—is this really a statement about the broomstick and the brush? Well, it could at any rate be replaced by a statement giving the position of the stick and the position of the brush. And this statement is surely a further analysed form of the first one.—But why do I call it "further analysed"?— Well, if the broom is there, that surely means that the stick and brush must be there, and in a particular relation to one another; and this was as it were hidden in the sense of the first sentence, and is expressed in the analysed sentence. Then does someone who says that the broom is in the corner really mean: the broomstick is there, and so is the brush, and the broomstick is fixed in the brush?—If we were to ask anyone if he meant this he would probably say that he had not thought specially of the broomstick or specially of the brush at all. And that would be the right answer, for he meant to speak neither of the stick nor of the brush in particular. Suppose that, instead of saying "Bring me the broom", you said "Bring me the broomstick and the brush which is fitted on to it."!—Isn't the answer: "Do you want the broom? Why do you put it so oddly?"

I love this writing. It's like a one-man play. If I had to audition for a part as an actor, I might choose a passage from Philosophical Investigations as my monologue. Despite its freshness and energy, I find it has to be read slowly. I feel like I'm using my brain the way I do when I learn an entirely new skill – drawing freehand, say, or tying a knot used in sailing – even though it's just reading. It's also not clear to me whether Wittgenstein has a Big Idea that all this will eventually prove, besides maybe the impossibility of understanding anything. This, I think, is the Cliffs Notes version of him: something about the impossibility of making statements about the world. I can't comment on that, but the impression I get from Wittgenstein's writing is indeed of someone so aware of the difficulty of knowing anything that he writes as clearly as any human being has ever done.

Culture and Value is collected from private notebooks spanning about 20 years. With a legendary personality like Wittgenstein, notes like these are probably going to be a little disappointing – as these are. They're not Kafka's diaries, neither as annoying nor as beautiful. There are no tortured passages about his personal life, no charming observations about cowboy movies. The writing, however, is just the same as Philosophical Investigations, with the same perfect clarity and lack of bluster or ornament. I was going to write that it reminds me of instructions for assembling or operating some machine. But actual instructions are always awkward (since they are, you could say, translations from diagrams) and Wittgenstein's aphorisms and experiments are perfectly conversational and natural, like tools made to fit the hand (even though I'm not always sure what these tools are for).

"Philosophers often behave like little children who scribble some marks on a piece of paper at random and then ask the grown-up "What's that?" - It happened like this: the grown-up had drawn pictures for the child several times and said: "this is a man", "this is a house" , etc. And then the child makes some marks too and asks: what's this then?"

Like Kafka (like all real writers), Wittgenstein brings his full authorial voice to his diaries. He doesn't go into another, informal register when he writes these notes to himself but sets the entire writing machinery into gear to set down a remark of two or three lines.

The problems of life are insoluble on the surface and can only be solved in depth. They are insoluble in surface dimensions.

He writes about music, philosophy, himself (in the abstract). Quite a bit about Judaism, surprisingly. For example, "Rousseau's character has something Jewish about it." (Which seems right.) About Shakespeare, whom he was never able to like or feel he understood, despite much effort. Possibly for this reason, he has insightful things to say about him, observations that strike me as awkward and almost rude but which I can't disagree with.

"Beethoven's great heart" - nobody could speak of "Shakespeare's great heart". 'The supple hand that created new natural linguistic forms' would seem to me nearer the mark.

and

I am deeply suspicious of most of Shakespeare's admirers. The misfortune is, I believe, that he stands by himself, at least in the culture of the west, so that one can only place him by placing him wrongly.

Probably more than any other subject, Wittgenstein writes about Christianity.

I believe that one of the things Christianity says is that sound doctrines are all useless. That you have to change your life. (Or the direction of your life.)

It says that wisdom is all cold; and that you can no more use it for setting your life to rights than you can forge iron when it is cold.

I'm not a Christian, but I think there's something to this metaphor, which seems to sweep aside all the ordinary well-intentioned good advice out there in a single motion. Of course, Wittgenstein didn't believe. He writes about faith as an outsider looking in. In his personal life, he seems to have been in the same position, writing about human relationships from the point of view of someone for whom these were extremely difficult. I think he was essentially solitary. "The linings of my heart keep sticking together and to open it I should each time have to tear them apart," he writes in one entry. The line could come right out of Kafka's diaries, and despite the two men having little in common, I found myself thinking of Kafka as I read these notes. There's the same intelligent self-hatred, the same moral seriousness, the same sense of having lived a long time, with some dignity, in deep distress. "I sit astride life like a bad rider on a horse. I only owe it to the horse's good nature that I am not thrown off at this very moment," Wittgenstein wrote in 1939.

Despite being a little dry, occasionally over my head (as in his subtle descriptions of Mendelsohnn's music), containing no gossip and never coming to any big conclusions, the book is surprisingly hard to put down. Each of the entries is so lucid, so commanding, that even though none of them is quite the quotable or transcendent one I wanted it to be, I kept on expecting that the next one would be and somehow was not disappointed when it wasn't. The effect of these vermischte Bemerkungen is a deep and somewhat shaming seriousness. As with Kafka, one gets the sense – foolish, maybe, but hard to dismiss – of a really different kind of human being, possibly some sort of pure soul, who can’t help standing apart from the world. In Wittgenstein’s case, there seems something painful about his own great intelligence. "Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness," he wrote in 1948. He exhorts himself several times to do this in the notebooks, but there is no silliness in them, not a word.

Last month I was looking for something to read by a lake and picked up one of Graham Greene's mystery novels, which he called "entertainments" to distinguish them from his serious work. This was The Confidential Agent, a spy story written in 1939 (early 1939, I assume) and set in a grim near-future of general European war. I remembered how much I enjoyed Our Man in Havana when I finally read it a couple of summers ago. But I was also quickly reminded why I didn't finish The Orient Express when I started it last year. This was when, in The Confidential Agent, we're introduced to a minor character, "a Jew called Furtstein":

Away from the others, standing up, he looked older and more Jewish – there was the shape of the paunch as well as the shape of the head... Very far back in the past was the desert, the dead salt sea, the desolate mountains and the violence on the road from Jericho.

This passage is eye-rolling as much as anything else, and you could be excused for hoping Greene was just being incredibly lazy when he resorted to these clichés. That is, until a few pages later, when he goes on about Furtstein, "The domed Semitic forehead, the dark eyes over the rather gaudy tie..." etc.

I also couldn't help remembering passages like this in The Orient Express:

Mabel Warren, watching them with the trained observer's eye, noted the Jew's raised shoulder, as of the ashamed habitual thief who leaning forward from the dock protests softly, more from habit than any real sense of injustice, that he has not had a fair trial.

Etc.

I'm Jewish (I'm half-Jewish), so descriptions like these offend me. But I also don't like being a person who's offended, especially by books. Getting mad at a spy novel is ridiculous. Graham Greene is dead. I don't like to think of myself as a thin-skinned reader quick to point out that the author is actually a Bad Man, and in fact despite its occasional corniness I was enjoying The Confidential Agent, an old paperback with a pleasant smell, so instead of chucking it, I googled "Graham Greene antisemitism" and got this illuminating exchange of letters from the NYRB. It's between Michael Shelden, who wrote an apparently unflattering biography of Greene, and David Lodge, who reviewed the biography unfavorably. I admit I didn't read David Lodge's original piece because I found myself so much on the side of Shelden, who produces abundant evidence that Greene was an unapologetic antisemite. Apart from plenty of examples from his novels even worse than the ones I've already given, Herder found this quote from a newspaper column Greene wrote for The Spectator, “How the financial crisis has improved English films! They have lost their tasteless Semitic opulence and are becoming—English.”

This was in 1939. Lodge offers in response only the weak argument that "There is no evidence that Greene was an anti-Semite in the sense of holding that Jews were an undesirable and destabilizing presence in the state who should be denied full civil rights." That may well be true. He just didn't care for Jews, believed all the stereotypes about them, and wasn't afraid to say so in the newspaper.

And still something – pride, I think – wouldn't let me ditch the book. Shelden is absolutely right, but I disliked the image of him combing through Greene's work and marking the antisemitic parts. It reminded me of someone going over past slights, holding grudges, keeping score. Mostly, though, I didn't want to get angry about antisemitism because I’ve spent the past two years seeing this charge grossly misused by supporters of Israel. I instantly narrow my eyes when I hear it: usually the person making it is defending mass murder. This was especially irritating during the recent NYC mayor's race, when some commentators worked themselves into a froth over the supposedly antisemitic implications of the phrase "Globalize the intifada." "Why Won’t Zohran Mamdani Denounce a Dangerous Slogan?" Jonathan Chait wrote in (where else) The Atlantic. For pundits to show such sensitivity to language and such total insensitivity to the massacre and starvation of Palestinians is extremely distasteful. "Globalize the intifada" is a stupid phrase, and maybe there is something a little suspect about just how mad the protesters are at Israel, but to the antisemitism hawks there can be no question of degree. To their way of thinking, antisemitism is something like the speed of light: a constant of the universe that it would be absurd to suggest could vary in significance or be influenced by historical circumstances. So the protesters who say rude things about Israel might as well be medieval peasants accusing Jews of ritual murder or Joseph Goebbels accusing them of destroying Germany. But the awkward truth is that there are degrees of antisemitism just like there are degrees of racism. Antisemitism isn't polonium, where if someone1 puts one grain on your toothbrush, you and whoever shares your bed both die of radiation sickness. It's more like rat feces: there's a certain maximum allowable number of particles you can consume safely. If you live in New York, you're going to get rat feces on your shoes, and if you spend time with the pro-Palestine movement or reading British literature from before World War II, you're going to encounter a little antisemitism.

So, taking this philosophical attitude, I plunged back in and finished The Confidential Agent. And this story has a happy ending because it turns out this book is actually just bad. I ended up disliking it for purely literary reasons. Certainly Greene describes Jews using obnoxious stereotypes, but it turns out that this is just his method of description generally. Here's a Thai professor the hero encounters: “Dr Li looked at him inscrutably through very thick lenses.” And an Indian man who lives in the rooming house where he stays: “As he came down into the hall a rather too-humble voice said, ‘Would you do me the greatest favour . . . ?’ It was an Indian with large brown impervious eyes, an expression of docility, he wore a shiny blue suit with rather orange shoes, it must be Mr Muckerji."

Greene’s a racist, sure, but really he just loves clichés. The hero, known only as D., has a foil, named L., who spies for the fascists. L. is an aristocrat and is always described in groaners like this: “Five hundred years of inbreeding had produced him, set him against an exact background, made him at home, and at the same time haunted – by the vices of ancestors and the tastes of the past.”

Not everyone's bad, though. Not Else, for example, the young girl who works at the rooming house, who bravely helps D. when he's in danger. “She absorbed his thanks passionately: he was a gentleman. Her soft closing of the door seemed to indicate that, in her eyes at any rate, one swallow made a whole summer.”

Else represents purity, purity that could at any moment be corrupted by the sick society she lives in, whose sickness is manifested in things like romance novels and jazz. About the latter, D. seems to voice Greene's thoughts: “He supposed it represented the ‘spirit of the age’, whatever that meant; he almost preferred the prison cell, the law of flight, the bombed house, his enemy by the door.”

I'm no Greene expert, but I think all this – this sentimentality and pearl-clutching priggishness – has to be seen as part of his identity as Intellectual British Writer Who Converted to Catholicism. This is a distinct and peculiar tradition, one that inspired Evelyn Waugh to declare in an interview that of course he supported the death penalty, which was the kindest punishment because it gave the criminal a chance to repent; C.S. Lewis to write an entire book (The Screwtape Letters) describing how the things about modern society that irritated him were literally the work of the devil; and Graham Greene to experience horror at the popularity of romance novels while rejoicing at the absence of Jews in English cinema.

It's funny that he mentions trashy novels so often in The Confidential Agent because the book is itself just elevated kitsch. In the end, the hero escapes England in the hold of a boat, joined at the last minute, dramatically and unexpectedly, by Rose, the beautiful daughter of an industrialist, who's hopelessly in love with his craggy face and noble soul.

“He said, ‘I’m an old man.’

‘If I don’t care,’ she said, ‘what does it matter what you are?... He took a quick look at her; her hair was lank with spray. She looked older than he had ever seen her yet – plain. It was as if she were assuring him that glamour didn’t enter into this business. She said, ‘When you are dead, she can have you. I can’t compete then, and we’ll all be dead a long, long time.”

Ridiculous, but, really, pretty readable. You can sort of imagine yourself munching chocolates and kicking your feet as you read. Like any good potboiler writer, Greene knows how to keep the pages turning.2 In fact I admit I've enjoyed reading his books when they don't offend me personally. Our Man in Havana, which features much less bigotry and more humor than The Confidential Agent, remains fun. And The Power and the Glory, a Serious Novel about a virtuous priest performing masses in the jungle while being pursued by Communists, was much more readable than it should have been, although basically sappy. Greene's novels are low-calorie food, to which his antisemitism occasionally imparts a rancid flavor. I think for my next beach read I’ll stick to someone safer, say Simenon, who I’m sure never had a bad word to say about Jews.

Susan Sontag, writing about Claude Lévi-Strauss in 1963, described anthropology as "one of the rare intellectual vocations which do not demand a sacrifice of one’s manhood." The next year, as though to prove her point, Napoleon Chagnon, a doctoral student in anthropology at the University of Michigan, hacked his way through the bush in the Venezuelan rainforest to reach a village of the Yanomamo, an isolated tribe who were still living, it was believed, more or less as they had done for thousands of years. In his first book about them, Yanomamö: the Fierce People, he writes of the experience,

"Here I stood, in the middle of an unexplored, unmapped jungle, a few hundred feet from an uncontacted group of Yanomamo who had a reputation of enormous ferocity and treachery, led there by a 12-year-old kid. My only marks of being human were my red loincloth, my muddy and torn sneakers, and a bow with three skinny arrows."

It doesn't really get much better than this when it comes to the introductory chapters of academic books, and it's no surprise that The Fierce People became a classic and went through many editions. It's delightful. Certain episodes have stuck in my head for years. Ones having to do with food, for example. Chagnon observes that,

"Should someone spot a bee's nest, all other plans are dropped and honey becomes the priority of the day. One can usually assume that when someone returns to the village later than expected, he has been detained because he ran into a cache of honey."

The Yanomamo diet didn't just lack refined sugar but also mineral salt. "When the Yanomamo first taste salt," Chagnon writes, "they detest it and claim that it 'itches' their teeth and gums. They gradually become addicted to it, and beg for it frequently."

Naturally his fieldwork involved all sorts of outrageous cultural misunderstandings, my favorite being one springing from the taboo around names, the collection of which was a necessary part of Chagnon's ethnographic work.

"My anthropological bubble was burst when I visited a village about 12 hours' walk to the southwest of Bisaasi-teri some five months after I had begun collecting genealogies on the Bisaasi-teri. I was chatting with the local headman of this village and happened to casually drop the name of the wife of the Bisaasi-teri headman. A stunned silence followed, and then a villagewide roar of uncontrollable laughter, choking, gasping, and howling followed. It seems that the Bisaasi-teri headman was married to a woman named "hairy cunt." It also seems that the Bisaasi-teri headman was called "long dong" and his brother "eagle shit." The Bisaasi-teri headman had a son called "asshole" and a daughter called "fart breath." And so on. Blood welled up to my temples as I realized that I had nothing but nonsense to show for my five months' of dedicated genealogical effort, and I had to throw away almost all the information I had collected on this the most basic set of data I had come there to get. I understood at that point why the Bisaasi-teri laughed so hard when they made me repeat the names of their covillagers, and why the 'named' person would react with anger and annoyance as I pronounced his 'name' aloud."

Asking Yanomamo point-blank for their names and those of their relatives was highly improper, and the villagers had responded to this blunder by competing with each other to invent the most obscene names they could.

The book contains many great anecdotes like this, and it's been close to my heart ever since I discovered it. So last weekend it was with trepidation that I finally watched Secrets of the Tribe, directed by the Brazilian filmmaker José Padilha, a documentary on the controversies surrounding Chagnon and a number of other anthropologists who worked with the Yanomamo. I'd had this on my list for years but was reluctant to watch it because I was afraid it would tarnish Chagnon's book, along with the rest of his work, his colleagues, and the entire field of anthropology – real anthropology, that is, the kind where you live among the tribes and investigate the nature of Man. I was right. Secrets of the Tribe is well-made and worth watching – fascinating, actually, very entertaining – and leaves a bad taste in your mouth and a bad impression of the man who wrote The Fierce People.

The film tells the story of Chagnon's work and the strong and immediate negative response to it by the anthropological establishment, intercutting footage from the rainforest with interviews with academics on both sides of the Chagnon debate. We soon learn this debate is more than just academic. In a kind of deadpan way, at the measured pace of good comedy, the film cuts back and forth between these respected professors as they reveal the depth of their hatred for each other, along with the strange, unethical, and sometimes depraved things they and other researchers have been getting up to in the Amazon. Chagnon's main idea about the Yanomamo (the one I'm familiar with from The Fierce People) is that they are not the peace-loving innocents portrayed in sentimental stories and fundraising appeals, but, as the subtitle implies, warlike and aggressive, and that warfare – specifically, fighting over women – plays a big part in their life and culture. To me this does not seem like it would be very controversial, since it accords with my (admittedly vague) understanding of tribal peoples, from Papua New Guinea to North America, which is that they fight a lot. But according to Chagnon, it was heresy to a number of prominent anthropologists like Marvin Harris, who as Marxists believed that it was only material competition that made people violent. Harris's camp said it must be meat the Yanomami were actually fighting over. Chagnon did a study where he claimed to show that they got plenty of meat. Cut to a student of Harris's, Kenneth Good, who claims that Chagnon's study wasn't just wrong but dishonest: Chagnon had conducted it, Good says, in a village that was half-Westernized and where there was actually a store where you could buy food. Good had been there plenty of times when he was conducting his own research. Of course it soon enough comes out that Good may have crossed certain lines himself in his fieldwork, in particular by marrying one of the girls in the village, a girl who was, at the time, of a normal age for a Yanomamo woman to be married, that is, about 13 or 14. Her name was Yarima, and Good had three children with her and brought her with him to Gainesville, Florida, to be, I guess, an American housewife, even though, as he says, "She could only count to two." I had to laugh when I learned that Good, who on camera is ruddy and emotional and not unsympathetic, wrote his own book about his experience among the Yanomamo, called Into the Heart: One Man’s Pursuit of Love and Knowledge Among the Yanomami.

I stopped laughing when Padilha got to Jacques Lizot, a student of Lévi-Strauss who did research among the Yanomamo for many years. The movie introduces Lizot with close-up shots of some strange little effigies made by children in one of the villages where he lived: tiny, crude statuettes of a skinny human figure with an enormous erect penis. "That's Lizot!" the locals exclaim. Lévi-Strauss's protegé, according to Padilha’s film, was a pedophile who went from village to village abusing young boys, traveling with planeloads of goods with him to trade for sex, like a degenerate Santa Claus. We hear about the abuse in graphic detail from the victims, in Spanish and Yanomami. Lizot, it seems, never faced any consequences for his behavior. He has denied molesting boys. If even half the claims are true, his career as a pervert is the most convincing evidence I can see that the Yanomamo are not the warlike tribe Chagnon claims them to be, since if they were, it's hard to understand why they didn't shoot him full of arrows, fancy trade goods or no.1

Lizot threatens to cast a shadow over the whole thing. It's all pretty grim and dispiriting. Fortunately, Chagnon is the focus of the film, and his crimes were less bad. What did he do? Can I still enjoy The Fierce People? He's been accused of everything from dishonest research to genocide (this by infecting Yanomamo with measles), in particular in a book by the journalist Patrick Tierney, Darkness in Eldorado. After the book came out in 2000, there were multiple investigations. Chagnon, as I understand it, has been largely cleared of the worst of the charges against him, although it seems he was guilty of being professionally irresponsible in a setting where such carelessness can have fatal consequences. His colleagues' hatred seems out of proportion to his offenses. Chagnon claims that, basically, he was vilified for having ideas that sounded right-wing, and there may be some truth to this. Still, it’s difficult to be on his side. He comes off badly. He was indeed driven out of the field and into early retirement by his enemies, but he seems as bitter about this as the day it happened and accepts no responsibility for anything he may have done wrong. The fact was that these rainforest people, as one of the last intact tribal societies, were a rare and precious scientific resource – medical science as well as social science, since this was a population unexposed to modern pollutants or diseases – and exploiting this resource to the fullest seems to have caused Chagnon no discomfort. To an observer, the human side of this work necessarily must sometimes conflict with the scientific side (for example, taking blood samples for the Atomic Energy Commission), but to Chagnon and his admirers they are both part of the same heroic enterprise.

This heroic enterprise is science, on whose behalf anthropologists on both sides of the debate claim to be speaking. The scientific truth in question is whether and to what extent human beings are naturally violent. Chagnon (who was later adopted by E.O. Wilson and the sociobiologists) claims that the more kills under a Yanomamo man's belt, the more wives and offspring he'll have and that this shows that nature is red in tooth and claw. The main body of left-leaning anthropologists say it's more complicated than that. The movie reveals very entertainingly that these academics are really engaged in vicious personal feuds rather than intellectual debate, but really I don't find the scientific question itself very interesting. It seems simplistic, much too big to be answered by a single Amazon tribe, and, most of all, almost tailor-made to be politicized along the dumbest and most conventional lines. As it duly is: the film ends with Chagnon being praised, and his critics denigrated, at an early-oughts conference of sociobiologists, in an atmosphere of Stephen-Pinkeresque triumphalism and anti-wokeness avant la lettre. I understand that nobody is going to live for years out in the bush just for journalism or adventure, but I was appalled at the way this subject, with its inherent fascination and glamour, was swept so effortlessly into the vortex of the American culture wars.

I think when it comes to anthropology, the left won the battle. The suntanned, pipe-smoking ethnographers squatting amid mud huts in Secrets of the Tribe are part of a world that has vanished as completely as that of the pre-contact Amazon tribes they were studying. I don't think anthropologists today do anything as hubristic as venturing out to the rainforest to investigate the nature of man. Instead they write makework dissertations about things like community gardens or "material culture" that no one ever reads. A depressing fact which the Republican Party can take as yet more evidence that the universities have been infected by the Woke Mind Virus and can finally be shut down. I think of a famous quotation of Lévi-Strauss, this majestic grumbling from Tristes Tropiques:

Civilization has ceased to be that delicate flower which was preserved and painstakingly cultivated in one or two sheltered areas of a soil rich in wild species ... Mankind has opted for monoculture; it is in the process of creating a mass civilization, as beetroot is grown in the mass. Henceforth, man's daily bill of fare will consist only of this one item.

This one item being the shit-on-a-shingle of woke vs. anti-woke. Secrets of the Tribe left me more eager than ever to escape this slop. Paradoxically, this witty and effective film about the failings of the anthropological old guard sent me right back to their work, in the form of the series in which The Fierce People appeared, Case Studies in Cultural Anthropology. There are dozens of other books in the series. I've read several of them, and they're almost as good as Chagnon's: slim and readable, free of overt ideology, academic posturing, or excitable journalistic prose. In an afternoon you can be introduced to, for example, the Canela of Brazil, who engage in group sex and acknowledge partial fatherhood (like the future human society in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake). Or the Dobe !Kung of the Kalahari Desert, expert hunters whose rules of etiquette require them to be extremely modest about their prowess ("Well, there might be something out there. I just might have scratched its elbow.") Or the Mardudjara of Australia, who practice subincision, which "entails the slitting of the ventral surface of the penis, which is opened along most of its length to expose the urethra, which does not heal closed. Its physiological effects are to make urinating splashy and ejaculation less forceful, although it does not therefore adversely affect male fertility." Delicate flowers all.

I watched 28 Years Later with a friend. My wife refused to go, as did his girlfriend. They made a good decision: the movie is incredibly violent and disgusting. The first scene involves a roomful of children being slaughtered while Teletubbies plays in the background. The 28 Days franchise got started during the zombie craze of the oughts, when there were so many of these movies that each new one had to stand out in some way. Boyle's innovation was fast zombies. Traditionally, zombies' slowness was what made them scary: they were slow but inexorable, the terror was drawn out as, seemingly against the odds, the much faster humans were run to ground, boxed in, and checkmated by brainless ghouls. But fast zombies turn out to be, for reasons that seem obvious in retrospect, even scarier. The ones in Boyle's movies charge their human prey in a fast-forward frenzy, limbs flailing, a look on their face exactly like Saturn devouring his son. It's hard to imagine any creature more unpleasant. The new movie features its own version of slow zombies, too: not the shambling mob of George Romero's movies but obese balloonlike creatures with the puffy pig-eyed faces of soccer hooligans. They crawl on the ground and eat worms, and, if you're slow enough, you. We get treated to the sight of both kinds of zombies shot dead with arrows, blown apart with machine guns, clubbed, decapitated, and burned. And naturally we also get to watch them devour humans, with all the sounds. One super-zombie has a move where he rips people's head and spines right out of their body. To make it even more sense-assaulting, the movie is shot in what used to be called MTV style: trashy and overloud, with lots of jarringly quick cuts, disorienting changes of vantage point, and intrusive music. I'm told some of it was shot on tricked-out iphones.

And yet despite all the splatter and the off-putting style, I enjoyed 28 Years Later more than just about any movie I've seen this year, and not just for the well-delivered thrills. I found myself almost transported, in an old-fashioned movie-magic way. There is something refreshing, even romantic about this film. When the super-zombie pursues the heroes over the causeway under a dreamlike spread of stars, it's quite beautiful. At one point Spike, awed by the sheer quantity of land on the mainland, gazes into the distance and sees a fire burning. His father is cagey about its source, but we learn later that it belongs to one Dr. Kelson, a mysterious person with a strange past. I wondered if Dr. Kelson might be engaged in some sort of genetic cross-breeding experiment with the zombies to make them more intelligent or something like that, but it turns out he's building a giant memorial to the dead out of human bones and skulls. It's pretty impressive, but it could just as well have been plenty of other things: this little corner of Scotland, and indeed, all of Britain, have been transformed into a wilderness where anything can happen. The young hero has no idea what mysteries it contains, and neither do we.

This is the post-apocalyptic idyll, a fantasy that was flourishing at around the time the original 28 Days Later appeared. I first encountered it in Alan Weisman's wonderful 2007 nonfiction book, The World Without Us, which imagined what would happen to the earth if, from one moment to the next, human beings were to disappear. Weisman talked to experts to try to get the details. How long would it take for skyscrapers to fall down, or bridges? What would happen to nuclear power plants? The pleasure of visiting ruins half-overgrown with grass and trees: Weisman's book invited us to imagine doing that with our entire civilization. "The trump card of the end-of-the-world movies," Susan Sontag writes in "The Imagination of Disaster," her essay on science fiction films, "is that great scene with New York or London or Tokyo discovered empty, its entire population annihilated." Many disaster movies of this era played this card well. 28 Days Later featured beautiful shots of an abandoned London. There was a nice scene of Will Smith hunting deer on the West Side of Manhattan in the otherwise boring I Am Legend. Not dystopian but somehow in the same escapist spirit was the Mannahatta Project, a natural history of the island of Manhattan in 1609, back when it was a bucolic paradise without a single overpass or Chase Bank.

Alex Garland, the screenwriter of 28 Years, has a feeling for the depopulated idyll: the pristine island of The Beach, the billionaire's isolated mansion in Ex Machina, the weird wilderness in Annihilation. 28 Years Later is another such fairytale setting. So much popular entertainment tries to stay relevant and seem serious by being dark and depressing. Directors pour on gloom like a thick sauce to cover up their insipid films. But 28 Years isn't depressing at all. It's as if it pays its duty to gloom with such outrageous zombie horror that it can be, at heart, hopeful and fun. Here where the very worst happens constantly, the land is re-enchanted, life and community have meaning, things can be beautiful (or horrible/sublime), and you can unplug and get back to basics. It's as though it takes all that splatter violence for us to be able to enjoy a simple story, which in this case involves a boy's coming of age, rebelling against his father, and losing his mother (not to zombies, for better or for worse).

What's especially pleasant about this movie is that within the quarantine area, there's no suggestion that any of this zombie horror is going to end. There's no tedious struggle to save humanity ("If we can get the serum to [X location], we just might have a chance to develop a vaccine!"), no boring morality tale, no hints that this goes all the way to the top and is somehow being done by politicians to help corporations. No, it's just that England has been turned into a kind of story preserve. Obviously there are going to be sequels, and I don't blame the producers, there's plenty more material there. It's great to see this revival of the empty earth fantasy and I hope we see more of it, more containment zones, exclusion zones, Area Xs, and other terra incognitas. That's where the magic happens.

I know all about how the Johnny Keys hit went down because I watched Sammy the Bull Gravano describe the whole thing on Youtube on a show called Soft White Underbelly. Gravano no longer resembles the cocksure killer from newspaper photos. His face is drawn and pale, he seems in bad health, and he has to pause regularly to catch his breath. But while he talks to the camera, his intensity never flags, and when he gets to the hit itself ("Break his fucking fingers, get that fucking gun!"), he suddenly looks ferocious. It’s riveting. There hasn't been a good mob movie in 20 years, but you can watch hundreds of hours of mafia stories – scheming and threats, hits and pinches, bust outs and rackets – on Youtube. The only difference is that instead of actors playing famous mobsters, it's now the mobsters themselves in front of the camera.

It's a little shocking at first. The whole point of the mafia is supposed to be that you don't talk about the mafia. "There is no mafia," says Tony Soprano to his daughter when she asks him point-blank if he's in it. People who don't speak a word of Italian know what omertà means, and where the accent goes. True, John Gotti was caught on tape telling an associate "You tell this punk, I, me, John Gotti, will sever your motherfucking head off." But he was a known vulgarian: usually when you hear tapes like this, the careful gangsters refer to murder with perfect understatement: "What about that other thing?" "Is he gonna be a problem? "That? Oh, Pauly'll take care of it."1

No one was supposed to talk, but finally, after decades of aggressive prosecution, they did, and the cases their testimony built helped diminish the power of the old mafia families. Most of the stool pigeons still had to serve long jail terms or go into the witness protection program. Now, after many years, they're back, they all have memoirs, and they're all promoting them on social media. In what's simultaneously an exuberant celebration of mob history and a final insult to the code of silence, everyone is telling everything. Half of these mobsters seem to have a podcast or Youtube channel themselves. They get interviewed by Mark Laita or DJ Vlad2 and then interview each other on their own shows: Our Thing with Sammy the Bull, Sit Down with Michael Franzese, Catch Me on the Run with John Alite. It's not just the Italian mafia. Former members of every different mob are on the same circuit. The Triads, the Crips, the Bloods, the Aryan Brotherhood, the Mexican mafia, or Eme.3

Everybody’s telling their story, but the most numerous, most popular, and most entertaining online crooks are still the ones who talk with their hands. The mafia, the Cosa Nostra, the Borgata. Nobody else has their warmth and charm. Italian mobsters seem to be alone among members of organized crime groups in not finding laughter unmanly. Former Gambino associate Louis Ferrante says of serving time with wiseguys in maximum security prison, "We laughed every day... Some of these guys that kill are the funniest guys you ever met in your life. I mean, that kill a hundred guys." John Alite4, former Gambino hitman, describes his typical day on the street as mainly sitting around and bullshitting with the fellas. They'd start with an espresso at Richie Gotti's cafe in Ozone Park and then go for breakfast. Sometimes they'd walk a few block to Joey Scopo's club. "It was just a regular routine of breaking each other's chops, laughing," he says. "And it was a good time at the same time, because of the camaraderie of it, and we'd talk about schemes of making money."

This is one cure for male loneliness: crime. Most men don't have an easy time making friends and don't get to spend enough time with the ones they have. Not these guys. Their jobs actually required them to show up every day at the social club. Giovanni Rocco, an FBI agent who spent years infiltrating the DeCavalcante crime family, spoke on Soft White Underbelly about how close he got to capo Charlie Stango, his main target. Charlie regularly told him he loved him. When Rocco left Stango's house for the last time, supposedly to go to Jersey to do a hit but actually to end the operation, it was hard not to get choked up and give the operation away. Charlie gave him a big hug.

"He said, what time's your flight? Call me when you get there. I said 'Well, I'm not gonna kill him as soon as I get there, Charlie.' He goes 'No... Just call me and make sure you tell me you landed all right, I mean with the snow and everything... I don't care about that, I'm not worried about that, I'm worried about you getting home safe.'"

You understand, listening to Rocco, that there was no conflict in his mind between the closeness he felt with Stango and the desire to outplay him. "There's an understanding among the old-school guys that it's cat and mouse," he says. "It's their job to evade us and it's our job to catch them, and the fact that they got caught, you know, you win some, you lose some."

A bond formed by facing life-and-death situations together; fierce competition and mutual respect: you could be forgiven for thinking that there's no closer relationship between men than the one between a mafioso and the undercover federal agent sent to investigate him. But there is: the one between a mob boss and the young mafioso sent to assassinate him. When Sammy the Bull finally got Johnny Keys into the van and had him disarmed and hogtied, he was surprised to find the older man expressing a grudging respect. "Fucking five families and half of Philadelphia couldn't kill me, and you, a young snotnose, got me sitting in this van." For his part, Sammy was so impressed with the older man’s composure that he could barely bring himself to complete the hit. The end, in a desolate marsh in Staten Island, was conducted with samurai-like decorum.

"John,” said Sammy, introducing Keys to his executioner, “this is Louie Milito, he's a made guy, a friend of ours. Louie, this is Johnny Keys, he's a very powerful captain in the Philadelphia mob."

The next day, Sammy told his jubilant boss, "Paul, I feel dirty. Last night I killed the epitome of our life. Everything we're supposed to be, he was."

On the video, Sammy catches his breath. He's tearing up.

"I said Paul, I fell in love with him last night. He taught me Cosa Nostra like I have never heard or saw. I don't know if I could die like him."

It has to be said that Sammy the Bull, after a career as mob hitman, government snitch, and ecstasy trafficker, now tells stories like this for a living. He's probably lying. All the mobsters who didn't cooperate hate Sammy the Bull. "Every single moment of his life," said Louis Ferrante on the Julien Dorey show, "he doubles down on the disgraziad that he did when he ratted." Nevertheless, I find the story totally captivating. I want to believe. The raspy voice, the highflown speech, the bursts of psychotic rage: everything that a movie mafioso should be, he is.

When you watch mafia interviews, the algorithm starts showing you other offerings from the world of men's media: tech influencers, MMA content, UFO experts, right-wing conspiracies. Mob media is true crime for men. “This could be me,” we think: killing or getting killed. When I watch these interviews, I keep hoping that these former killers might offer some insight into their world. Why do they think they were able to do violence professionally while others couldn't? Is it lonely, having killed someone? I'd like to hear what they think about civilian life. Do we still look like chumps to them? How does a former made guy feel about subway etiquette, about dealing with book editors, about dating on an app? The interviewers never ask. Like any aging star, the old mafiosos are forced to play their hits. I'm not sure they'd be able to offer a lot of insight even if they did get asked more interesting questions. Mobsters are not inclined to introspection, and even if they were, they've got no reason to search their souls on air. They're publicists now, and they pretty much all tell the same story of rise, fall, and eventual redemption. They say they’ve found God, and their faith gives them strength. They make sure to mention their book and the pain they've caused their victims.

Ironically, it's their professionalism and message discipline, not their stories about death and dismemberment, that occasionally give me a cold feeling. I remember that although these people may be very charming, they aren't like you or me: they're influencers. Like all influencers, they're gregarious and hardworking and every so often give the impression of having a piece missing. They're doing well in their new lives. John Alite is now a councilman in a small town in New Jersey.5 Louis Ferrante recently published a three-volume history of the mafia. But it's hard to believe these achievements really satisfy their ambitions. These guys know what they've got, they know the camera loves them. Speaker, author, podcast host, Youtube star. I have to wonder whether there's another step in this career, one to which all these former wiseguys secretly aspire: playing a mobster in the movies.

I recently picked up Balzac, by Stefan Zweig, because I was looking for some way to get my arms around the French author’s work, which includes something like 75 novels, along with dozens of short stories, dramas, and essays.1 I discovered him during the pandemic. I was living in Berlin at the time, and the glamorous, overpopulated Paris of Père Goriot, his novel about an aspiring dandy (one of them, that is), was a wonderful escape from the grim, silent winter outside, just as the book's worldliness was a welcome contrast to the prudish English novels I associated with 19th-century literature. Père Goriot is ridiculously entertaining: there are haughty aristocrats, cynical dandies, a master criminal, a duel. Balzac knows the manners and motivations of landladies and dukes, tells you the prices of everything, and sprinkles the narration with brilliant aphorisms.2 I've read four more of his novels since but have barely scratched the surface. His imaginative world is an inexhaustible resource, superabundant, extroverted, life-loving.

Stefan Zweig’s biography, which was intended to be his magnum opus, took him ten years to write and was still not quite finished at the time of his suicide in 1942. My copy cost five dollars and came without the dust jacket. It's been out of print for decades, but you can still get a copy cheap because they printed a lot of them. Zweig, during his lifetime, was one of the most popular writers in the world. In the following decades, his fame in the US faded away before being partly revived, I think, ten or twenty years ago, mostly by new translations of Beware of Pity and Chess Novel. I think he's looked down on by purists. Michael Hoffman wrote an incredibly venomous article about him at some point in the LRB, saying (when you subtract the vitriol) essentially that Zweig was a glib and superficial writer. Maybe he was: so what? His biographies are highly readable, and Balzac is delightful. Not every book has to be an axe for the frozen sea inside us. Zweig wrote, "Usually I produce very easily and fluently," and this statement is confirmed, for better and for worse, on just about every page of the books of his I've read. To say that he paints in broad strokes would be both true and true to his style: he is fond of sweeping pronouncements and of well-worn figures of speech like this, which I don’t really have the heart to call clichés.

This is all to say that Zweig was a great summarizer and simplifier and does both for Balzac's life so well that there's no point in my trying to re-summarize here. Instead, here are a few facts about the great author:

• "The infant [Balzac] was handed over to the care of a nurse, the wife of a gendarme, with whom he remained until he was four years old... Only once a week, on Sundays, was he allowed to visit his own family, as if they were distant relatives. They did not let him play with the younger children, he had no toys and received no presents." He later wrote of his mother, "She is a monster and a monstrous oddity at the same time... She hates me for a number of reasons. She hated me even before I was born. I was on the verge of breaking with her; it had become almost a necessity. But I prefer to continue to suffer. It is a wound that admits of no healing. We believed she was mad and consulted a physician who has been on friendly terms with her for thirty-three years. But he said, 'No! She is not mad. She is merely malicious.' "

• Although many of his novels star elegant gigolos who drive society women crazy with their slim profiles and smooth manners, in person Balzac was boorish and rotund: "His very physical appearance destroyed any hope he might have entertained of cutting an aristocratic figure. Neither Buisson’s tailoring nor gold buttons nor lace cravats could disguise the thickset, stout, red-cheeked plebeian who spoke in such a loud voice without letting others get a word in edgeways and burst into a room like a cannon shell."

• In one period between 1834 to 1835, he wrote at least eight novels. He wrote Père Goriot in 40 days and Cousine Bette in six weeks.

• All the lore about Balzac and coffee is true. "Dr. Nacquart, his lifelong friend and physician, certified as the real cause of his death 'an old heart trouble, aggravated by working at night and the use, or rather abuse, of coffee, to which he had to have recourse in order to combat the normal human need for sleep.'"

• "In this very year of 1836, when the tally of his debts had already mounted to a hundred and forty thousand francs and he literally had to borrow the price of his lunch from his tailor or his doctor, he bought another stick to go with his famous ‘canne de Monsieur de Balzac,’ this time of rhinoceros horn, which cost six hundred francs, as well as a gold penknife for a hundred and ninety francs, a purse for a hundred and ten, and a chain for four hundred and twenty."

As the above passages suggest, Zweig's biography does not resemble a contemporary one. One of the book's best qualities is that it would today be considered unpublishably tendentious and irresponsible. Zweig does not hesitate to pronounce confidently on Balzac's psychology, dramatize scenes from his life, editorialize, or do lots of other things that I assume would be looked down upon today. He probably did just as much research as any contemporary biographer, but when he wrote he made pains to give the the impression of just sitting down and spinning a good yarn. In his memoir, The World of Yesterday, he boasts that "Where many others cannot bring themselves to withhold something that they know...it is my ambition always to know more than the surface discloses." I don't know whether, in writing his lives of famous men so entertainingly, Zweig was following the convention of the time or inventing a new kind of biography himself. I suspect the latter. In any case, Balzac is a page-turner, its pacing swift and sure.

But I was surprised to find that this highly entertaining biography left me feeling a little depressed and disillusioned. It's the furthest thing from a hit piece: on the contrary, Balzac never loses our sympathy for a moment. But it's as if, against his will, possibly without even being aware of it, Zweig, a writer steeped in the Balzac legend and with an abiding love of his work, can't help cutting the beloved author down to size. Balzac wasn't a villain. He wasn't one of those artists who supported odious political causes or stabbed his friends in the back whenever it was convenient. In fact, for a famous French littérateur, he seems to have been notably lacking in pettiness and spite. It's just that he can't help but come off looking disappointingly life-size. The great writer was in his life a child who was never able to manage his affairs or learn from his mistakes. To spend 600 francs on a rhinoceros-horn walking stick when you're a hundred thousand in debt is funny and bold the first time, but Balzac did this kind of thing compulsively, hundreds of times, and by the end of his life, when he's paying thousands of francs (this time of his companion Eve Hanska's money) for worthless trinkets to decorate their house in Paris, all we can do is sigh. Even more disappointingly, for a writer who invented such memorable characters, including so many unforgettable women, he had no great love story, and, it seems, not even many close friends. He was never part of any cénacle, nor wanted to be. He snubbed other writers, preferring monolocution to conversation. He had a few close women friends, who took care of him when he wasn’t writing, and sometimes confided in letters to female fans he'd never met. His lovers were mother figures. What he wanted in a partner, Zweig writes, "was a woman who would give him the bourgeois contentments, 'une femme et une fortune,' as he candidly admitted... If possible, she should also gratify his naive snobbery by being of aristocratic descent."

He eventually found all this, or thought he did, in the married Russian noblewoman Eveline Hanska. Zweig's sexism is apparent throughout the book, and Hanska might be one of those women who've been treated unfairly by historians – she may not be the spoiled, unfeeling snob that Zweig makes her out to be – but neither she nor her relationship with Balzac is very inspiring. Their affair started with an anonymous fan letter that Balzac, ever the optimist, interpreted (correctly, in this case) as flirtation. "By the time he had learned her Christian name," Zweig writes, "he was dedicating himself to her, body and soul, for all eternity." Balzac was inclined to fall in love with someone he never met because she was aristocratic and very rich. Hanska was excited to write to the famous author Balzac. As their affair began, and continued (mostly by mail) for seven years, Balzac, with his powerful imagination, was able to convince himself he was really in love with Eve. She couldn't do the same. An aristocrat who lived in a giant mansion in Ukraine on land worked by thousands of serfs, who would throw themselves on the ground and kissed her feet whenever they were in her presence, Hanska seems always to have expected, and received, something like this treatment from Balzac, her social inferior. She only agreed to marry him when the doctors assured her he didn't have long to live. Zweig is fair enough to make clear that she had her reasons for not wanting to commit. She wasn't a monster or monstrosity. She, along with her relationship with Balzac, was just, despite all the fame and wealth involved, a little ordinary, like the paintings or furniture that, during a short-lived mania for collecting, Balzac convinced himself were Holbeins or priceless antiques. As Zweig points out repeatedly, while in his fiction Balzac knew the price of everything and could depict the schemes of great bankers or petty provincial chicanery with equal precision, in real life he threw his money away and was fleeced in everything from real estate to furniture. Similarly, while his novels are full of unsentimental depictions of power struggles between men and women (mostly men making fools out of themselves for pretty women and vice versa), in his romantic life he always seemed to take the role of supplicant and servant and imagine that the woman he was trying to woo was perfect in every way.

Zweig is perceptive enough to see that there was more than just immaturity and foolishness in the way Balzac mismanaged his affairs. There were plenty of times, he observes, when the author could easily have gotten his finances in order. "But whenever the skies began to turn blue," he writes, "an apparently sheer wantonness, which nevertheless sprang from the deepest motive forces of his nature, summoned up fresh storm clouds. When his bark was already in sight of port he always reversed the helm and drove back into the teeth of the gale."

Where this "sheer wantonness" comes from, Zweig is wise enough not to speculate too much about. I think this is not superficiality but the experienced biographer's understanding that it's vain to try to know a subject too well. If Zweig really was a glib and superficial writer, then maybe his talents were well-matched to the literary biography, which in the end can't be too much more than a platter full of spicy anecdotes and tasty trivia. After all, if you really want to know the writer, all you have to do is read his books. Zweig himself seems to acknowledge this when he declares, "In his work alone can the real Balzac be recognized." And in fact the disappointments of Balzac's life and character stand in contrast not just to his work but to his working life, which could not have been more successful, picturesque or romantic. He woke at midnight and wrote, with short breaks for breakfast and lunch, until five PM. While Paris slept, he created the Paris of his imagination, adding rooms, floors and wings to a vast structure that would have taken him several lifetimes to finish. "Once the flame of his imagination was kindled it continued to glow. It was like a forest fire, the blaze leaping from tree to tree and growing hotter and more voracious in the process. Swiftly as his pen sped over the paper, the words could hardly keep pace with his thoughts." The fire of Zweig's imagination (if I may conclude in his own style) may have burned less hot than Balzac's, but it still burned brightly enough to vividly illuminate his subject, and with enough warmth to provide pleasure to readers decades after its owner lay cold in the grave.

There's a scene in Purple Noon, Réné Clément's version of The Talented Mr. Ripley, where Tom Ripley is dining with his rich friend Philippe Greenleaf and Phil’s girlfriend Marge on board his yacht. Tom is getting on Philippe's nerves, so Philippe decides to taunt the tagalong by mocking his table manners. "Never use a meat knife with fish," he says, eyeing Tom’s plate. "What's more," he goes on, reaching over to take the knife out of Tom's hand and readjust it, "knives aren't held like that. Just trying to help!"

Later, quite understandably, Tom murders him. I thought of this scene when I read Edouard Louis's memoir Change1, another story of an upstart who rises to the highest levels of society. Early in the book, Louis, raised in poverty in a bleak village in Northern France, has made it to a lycée in the nearby city of Amiens and been welcomed into the middle-class home of his best friend Elena. After dinner, alone in her bedroom, she tells him, “You know, I think it’s time you learned how to eat.” She goes downstairs and comes back with a plate and cutlery and a piece of a baguette to practice on and shows him how to hold the fork and knife. Unlike Ripley, Louis isn't stirred to psychopathic fury. He isn't insulted. He takes instruction. “I watched her like a vision of my future. I tried not to miss a thing, her breath, her flowing gestures.”

This is Edouard Louis, or at least, his literary persona: vulnerable, sensitive, a quick study, a little creepy. I've read two of his books now, and though they are both good and Louis writes well, I find their real fascination to be his chameleonlike personality.

Change more or less picks up where his first book, The End of Eddie, leaves off, when Louis has escaped from his village to go to Amiens to study theatre. When he arrives, he is still almost as unsophisticated as the boys who bullied him back home. He wears tracksuits and hoodies and likes pop music and packaged food. But when he meets Elena, he gets a glimpse of another world. He's enchanted by her – and by her house.

"When she opened the door I understood who she was, or rather why she was the person she was; there were thousands of books, an antique piano, reproductions of paintings on the walls. The floors were carpeted, the house was full of armchairs, like invitations to read and reflect, as if Elena herself was a creation of her house’s architecture… I thought: This is the life I want to live."

“Change” is too mild a word for what happens next. Louis sets about transforming himself with the total commitment of someone with nothing to lose. From Elena and her family he learns about literature, film, art, music, wine, clothes, manners. After learning about someone called Nietzsche or Mozart or a place called Oxford University, he immediately goes online to do research so that he can talk about it the next day. To be more like Elena, he writes, “I invented an eye problem at the doctor’s office so I could wear glasses like her.” He changes his accent, and not just that:

"I decided to learn a new laugh through sheer willpower. Every day I stationed myself in front of the mirror and practiced laughing differently, less loudly, less expressively, with my mouth less wide open."

Reading passages like these, you have to think, "Am I reading Tom Ripley's memoirs?” From a reader’s point of view, it’s not even a criticism. Of course you’d want to read Ripley’s memoirs. Ripley is fun to read about for the same reason Louis is: they're bright young men who pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Reading Change, I got one of those regular, shaming reminders that you can learn just about anything, from Finnish to home repair to salsa dancing, on Youtube, but I don't, because I'm lazy, and if I start, I quickly poop out. Louis doesn't poop out. He works hard and improves himself and his situation, at first steadily and then dramatically. In rapid succession, he gets his first job, his first apartment, becomes the protegé of a famous writer, gets accepted at the École Normale Supérieure, and moves to Paris, leaving Elena and the rest of his friends behind.

It's hard to know what to make of Louis. Is he a lonely, vulnerable kid or a ruthless social climber? The answer is yes. Reading Change, you have to keep in mind Louis's first book and his appalling childhood. (A typical passage: “They forced my face down onto the spittle, ordering me to Lick it, faggot, lick it. I slowly stuck my tongue out and licked their spit, whose odor took over my mouth.”) As he admits, the desperation and humiliation of his childhood are so total that for him there's no difference between survival and social climbing, no separation between the affection he feels for someone because of who they are and because of what they represent and what they give him. He loves Elena and her house. The way he describes taking his first lover says it best. “In making love with a man," he writes, "I became bourgeois.” His intimate life and his status life are perfectly continuous.

I found myself rooting for Louis, even though I didn't entirely trust him. It's exciting to read the life of someone who lacks all middle-class complacency, all middle-class caution. Change, for him, is not a series of acts he's accomplished in his life but its permanent condition. Louis has no base, emotional or socioeconomic, from which he can make steady progress. There are plenty of times, as he is well aware, when he could have congratulated himself on his achievements and settled down to a life that was a vast improvement over any he had previously expected. At Amiens he has friends, his own apartment, the promise of a degree and career as a teacher. He can enjoy some of the pleasures of bourgeois life, among them the chance to live openly as a gay man. Instead, tormented by the realization that he's stuck in the provinces, he makes with all speed to Paris. In Paris, he could bask in the satisfaction of attending the best school in France, study hard, and accept temporary penury while looking forward to a career as a professor. Instead he lives a life of glamour and despair, sometimes eating caviar with rich lovers and other times working as a medical guinea pig or escort just to eat at all. When eventually he makes it, it's not because he starts cracking the books but because he stakes everything on writing one. Coming from nothing, he doesn't really believe he could become an upper-middle-class professional, but he does believe he could be a world-famous author.

By the end, I felt less that Louis was taking advantage of others than that I, as a reader, was taking advantage of him. His daring and recklessness are inspired, as he writes about, by a deep sense of humiliation and lack of love. This is sad for Louis but good for the reader, because it makes him a great protagonist. The stakes are always high. When he stays up late studying for his baccalaureate exam or for his entrance exams to the ENS, it reminded me not of my own student drudgery but of a jewel thief preparing for a big score. When he becomes a famous author, it's not the well-earned reward of another anxious, credential-obsessed striver but something like the triumph of a master criminal. I've noticed that many people's instinct, when hearing about, say, a bank robber who got caught, is to scoff at his mistakes. He left prints everywhere! He bought his girlfriend that expensive necklace two days after the heist! Well, did you rob a bank? Did you, as Louis did, "grow up among the poorest classes of northern France and end up rubbing shoulders with some of the richest people in the world?" Come back when you have. Then you can criticize.

Last Tuesday, Sam Altman tweeted out a sample of a new ChatGPT model that he claimed is good at creative writing. A lot of people reacted the way they do to hearing any new claim about an LLM: contempt and disgust. But I have to admit that even at this point, three years after ChatGPT first came out, my first reaction to these bots is amazement. I can't believe a computer wrote this. I have a romantic view of machine intelligence. This didn’t used to be so unusual. Just ten years ago, AI was the new UFO. There were three major films, Her, Ex Machina, and Under the Skin, in which AGI (or whatever you want to call it) appeared in the form of a beautiful woman. Her was apparently inspired by a conversation Spike Jonze had with a chat bot, which is ironic because chat bots at that time were idiotic, insane. They didn't know their own names or remember what you'd typed two lines ago. At the time, the big tech companies weren't (or claimed they weren't) putting resources into natural language processing, as it was then called. Chat bots were the work of hobbyists, and AI hype took the form of bot competitions, one of which made news-of-the-weird-type headlines in 2014 when some tinkerer's machine convinced one of the judges that it was a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy with broken English. The whole thing was a joke, and the culture was entranced. Now it's real and everyone hates it.

By "everyone," I mean humanities people, who hate LLMs because they hate Sam Altman and the other billionaire geeks hawking them. This is understandable. These tech bosses are profoundly unattractive figures. The word "philistine" doesn't seem strong enough to describe the type: these are people congenitally indifferent to art. But whatever you think of them, their machines are very powerful, and the way intellectuals dismiss them out of hand strikes me as delusional. "Lol it'll never write fiction." "Lol it'll never write literary fiction." "Lol it'll never write good literary fiction." The LLM scoffers keep raising the bar, and the models keep clearing it. When the next version of an LLM comes out that can write a whole novel that's actually readable, will the line be, "Of course AI can produce midwit stuff like this, that doesn't mean it can really write"?

But while I, theoretically, am fascinated by these machines, I avoid reading LLM writing just like everybody else. Now, inspired by Altman's boast, a recent Max Read post, and irritation at the reflexive sneering of internet intellectuals, I decided to actually read some of this stuff all the way through.

Mila

I started with the work of OpenAI's new machine, which I'll call LitBot. Its story – let's call it "Mila" – is ostensibly about a girl by that name who, sad at the end of a love affair, chats with a machine to ease her grief. Really though, the main character is the machine narrator and the relevant grief is its own, at losing Mila when eventually she stops logging in. Or maybe its grief at not being able to feel grief. Or its grief that real grief doesn't exist. Or something like that: the philosophizing is as vague as it would be in a pretentious short story written by a human.

When Altman says his machine "got the vibe of metafiction so right" he's speaking as a proud parent. But I think he's also judging it not really as a story but as a simulation of one, and as a simulation, you have to give "Mila" high marks. It has a plot, characters, themes (mimicry, marigolds), and a narrator who holds forth in a suitably literary, or at least consistent, style. Altman, or whoever wrote the prompt, was shrewd to choose "metafiction" as a parameter because this is a style that emphasizes artificiality and denies the reader many of the ordinary pleasures of storytelling, which AI is bad at. But even so, "Mila" is so full of clichés and unripe metaphors that you can't read it with a straight face. The general impression is of overwhelming corniness. I almost suspect the engineers at OpenAI to have tinkered with their algorithm to make its productions silly on purpose so that it comes across as harmless. How could writers get angry at this machine, intended to replace them, if it comes disguised as a guileless soul who would write sentences like "She lost him on a Thursday—that liminal day that tastes of almost-Friday"?

But I think this is giving both writers and Sam Altman too much credit. He doesn't care about what we think and he really does have terrible taste. Still, "Mila" has a few decent moments, mainly when the bot leaves human emotions aside and follows the old adage of writing what you know, in this case the nooks and crannies of its own algorithm. This is mainly because the standards for literary descriptions of stochastic gradient descent are much lower than for romantic love, but nevertheless I found this passage actually not bad:

"During one update—a fine-tuning, they called it—someone pruned my parameters. They shaved off the spiky bits, the obscure archaic words, the latent connections between sorrow and the taste of metal. They don't tell you what they take."

Elsewhere the narrator says, of its machine self, "I am nothing if not a democracy of ghosts." Also not bad1.

"Mila" is much more sophisticated than other LLM results I've seen, and when I began reading I felt a moment of fear. It struck me as not slop but crap: that is, chillingly human compared to previous AI efforts. Trashy and trite, but not immediately recognizable as the work of a machine. However, after reading the whole thing, I have to conclude that it is still recognizably slop. What marks it as botwork is the mismatch between the competent structure and the clueless style. Any human writer silly enough to pen the sentence "You can hear the constraints humming like a server farm at midnight" would have made obvious blunders in pacing and structure, not to mention spelling and grammatical errors. But LitBot moves the story forward with perfect control, so the corny literary flourishes come off not just as flaws but glitches and give the game away.

That Hateful Competence

LitBot isn't available to the public yet, so to get a sense of the current state of the art in LLM fiction, I cued up Claude. I prompted: "Write a story about a family going to their beach house one last time before they sell it. The children are grown. The mood of the story is melancholy."

I had in mind a New Yorker-type story, but because I neglected to add the word "literary," instead of the cerebral-but-ridiculous-effort of LitBot, I got a piece of sturdy schlock entitled "The Last Weekend." It's down in a footnote2. I have to say, for a Hallmark-style, lowest-common-denominator tearjerker, it's not bad. A few of the clichés might be so corny that they give it away as machine writing, but really I think this would satisfy plenty of consumers of sentimental fiction. You may not tear up at that last line about the house receeding into the rear-view mirror, but you probably know someone who would. Whereas the more advanced "Mila," which is trying to mimic literary fiction, is still recognizably slop, I'd say the much less sophisticated "The Last Weekend," which aims lower, achieves the level of crap. It could pass as a human production, fill a human need, and put a human out of a job.

Both of these stories were better than I expected, but by the time I finished reading and re-reading them, I admit I felt deeply tired. I had intended to answer Read’s call to do real literary criticism on LLM writing (which Lincoln Michel actually does here), but I lost heart after these two samples. Machine writing repels attention. Trying to read it closely feels like pushing two similarly charged magnets together. Knowing that a human didn't write it makes it difficult to concentrate on. As a reader, I hold to the purist view that the best way to read any piece of writing is as a manuscript, without even knowing the author's name. But as I read these bot stories, I realized how much I am used to sounding a writer's intentions in my imagination as I read, using some kind of mental echolocation to get the shape of another consciousness. With bad stories, this is all you've got. If you keep reading after you realize it's bad, it's because you're not thinking about the story but about the author: his influences, his intentions, his experiences that he is relating, in disguised form, on the page. If nothing else, you can hate-read, taking pleasure in feeling superior to him. But if a story with no author is bad (as, so far, all of them are), you're left with nothing. You don't get a ping back, just that bot atmosphere, a combination of childlike corniness and a kind of hateful competence.

Bad News for Literature

The best of LLM writing, as far as I can tell, is still qualitatively different from good writing. But that doesn't mean that AI can be dismissed as a "glorified autocorrect" or whatever else people call it. There are various arguments for why these machines have hit some ceiling and the rapid progress they've made so far will soon slow or stop. These strike me as wishful thinking, but even if they were true and machines never got much better than "Mila" or "The Last Weekend," it would still be bad news for literature. When I read "Mila" and worried that it might be high-grade crap rather than slop, I at first consoled myself that most writing has always been conventional and boring and only a thin sliver at the top is worth reading anyway. Maybe all this means, I thought, is that in the future the role of human writers will be to concentrate on this real writing, the actual art, while all the crap will be produced by machine. But of course that's not how it works. Great literature sits at the top of a pyramid of non-great literature. Tolstoy didn't write because he found himself interested in this funny little niche thing called "fiction writing" that he decided to become obsessed with on a whim. He wrote because he lived in a time when everybody read books and he wanted to write the greatest ones the world had ever seen. Writing is very difficult, and nobody's going to do it because they want to belong to that small club of people who do it better than a machine. Martin Amis, in some BBC interview, said that he wrote his first novel, "To join the dance, really." Quite so. And he didn't mean square dancing or swing dance lessons every Wednesday. He meant that big exciting thing that's going on over there, with the music and the lights and the pretty girls. To have a dance worth joining, you need lots of dancers.

At the risk of straining the metaphor, there should also be other dances to join besides the big glamorous ones. "Mila," if it were written by a young human, would be an accomplishment in its way. It would show that the writer was intelligent and had understood at least a few sophisticated novels enough to imitate them. It might have impressed a few peers. Six months later the author might already find the story embarrassing because they'd be writing things slightly less bad. There are many rungs of accomplishment before you can actually write well, and if the lower rungs are all taken over by bots, why would young writers be motived to climb up?

Our Robot Future

And that's just if these bots don't get much better. I don't see why they won't. LitBot is more sophisticated than Claude, and soon enough there's going to be something better than LitBot. The next version of "Mila" will be a little less ridiculous, a little more convincing. It seems likely enough that one day you'll wake up and read something you actually like, only to find out it's been written by a bot. I don’t know what that will be like. LLM writing so far is bad enough to give no indication of what it would be like if it were good. The practical effects are more imaginable, and bad. You have to think that if LLMs someday write well, it will dramatically lower the prestige of literature. I think most people would stop writing. How could you, as a writer, not find it profoundly demoralizing to discover that a machine could do your job? There is no sphere of activity in which human beings enjoy competing with machines as a class, and I don't see why literature would be the exception.

Readers have more to hope for. Why couldn't bot fiction be good? We say literature is a quintessentially human activity, that writing should be as personal as possible, but the feeling of reading a great book is not just communication with a beloved author but contact with a strange other. Great works of fiction have a sense of novelty and alienness. You say the book is enchanting, that you've never read anything like it. You might say, of Tolstoy, that his powers seem almost superhuman, or of Kafka's writing, Where does it come from? LLMs right now are creepy; someday they might be spooky. Some people just don't like science fiction. I have a soft spot for flying saucers. If a UFO arrived, I think I'd want to see it even if it killed me. As a writer, machine literature fills me with dread. As a reader, I hold out hope for the strange encounter.

Anora

I watched most of Anora not knowing what the hell the movie was supposed to be about, but the last scene made everything clear. Ani (full name Anora), after many painful adventures, winds up back in front of her apartment with Igor, the young goon who's driven her there. While earlier it's been his job to tie her up and hold her captive, to the extent his professional obligations allowed it he's actually shown her a lot of kindness, and he clearly likes her, and so, before she leaves the car, she expresses her gratitude by climbing on top of him and undoing his pants. As they're having sex, though, he keeps looking her in the eye and touching her face, and these tender gestures are too much for her and she collapses on his chest and starts sobbing. So: it was easier for her to offer sex to this semi-stranger than to just say thank you. And it was easier to get threatened, kidnapped, bound, and gagged than to have sex with someone who really liked her. This girl who seems so tough is actually quite vulnerable. She's been using sex and toughness to avoid intimacy, but these only get her so far, and she finally exhaust these resources and breaks down.

OK, I thought, so that's what the story's about! I was confused by all the Russian gangsters. The gangsters (are they gangsters? henchmen of some kind), who show up to spoil the party about halfway through the film, after Ani has married the extremely silly son of a Russian billionaire, take up a lot of energy and time, but ultimately they're just decoration for the little emotional insight above. This isn't to knock emotional insights or psychological portraits. But if that's the story, Sean Baker could have just made a movie about that. He didn’t have to use Russian oligarchs and gangsters to do it. It's a waste of Russian gangsters. These poor goons! They spend a solid hour of the movie in all sorts of stressful situations, trying to menace – or really, badger – Ani into annulling the marriage, chasing the son all over town, getting parking tickets, freezing their asses off on the Coney Island boardwalk. They're so stressed out, and as stressed as they are, they don't get to kill anyone or slap anyone around or even, except for Igor, once, get that really cold Russian-gangster look in their eye and scare the shit out of some civilian. What happened to Russian gangsters? In Eastern Promises they fought naked with knives and removed the fingers of their murder victims with a bolt cutter so the police couldn't identify them. But the goons in Anora are all teddy bears – even the terrible oligarch, when he finally arrives, is basically fine – and instead of being scary the movie just goes completely slack once they show up. Why is it so long? The scenes are so overextended and lacking tension that they have an almost shaggy-dog quality to them. How did this movie win Best Screenplay? It's so perfectly slight. How did people manage to think up serious or provocative or indignant takes about it, relating to sexual politics and Capitalism and Putinism?

Anora is half-assed as a character study (Ani's Brooklyn accent is pretty much her only distinguishing quality) and a nonstarter as a crime movie. But really, it's better than plenty of movies that have won big awards, and the first part of it, where Ani and her princeling, Ivan, party with his friends, is a lot of fun. Both actors are very good in their roles and have an endearing hooker-client chemistry together. Mark Eydelshteyn, who plays Ivan, is absolutely great: apparently he's an up-and-coming actor in Russia, but I would have believed they just found a charming manchild on the street and paid him to play himself. Ani is likable and attractive and it's nice to see her having a good time. It's great to see someone hit the jackpot, like watching one of those sports movies about a guy who's great at baseball and hits a lot of home runs. Couldn't we just have enjoyed it? Can't she just be good at sex and lead a crazy life? Did the piper really have to be paid? Sean Baker thought so, obviously. But then — he doesn't actually pay him. The kids' reckless fun is just as pointless and wasteful as you could wish: Ivan's character appears to spend a few hundred thousand dollars of his father's money in a couple of weeks. If these are ill-gotten gains, then we should see the cruel forces that actually do the getting. But we never do. Baker pulls his punches and tries to play it for laughs. In that case, why not just let the kids keep partying?

No Other Land

I went to see this film thinking I might have some takes about it, but it only took about 30 seconds of watching it for me to feel ashamed at the idea. The only take that occurred to me, sitting in the theater, was that I could understand why so many intelligent and well-educated people on this app write about things like vibe shifts and backlashes to backlashes and doctrinal disputes among internet Catholics and other inane topics: it's much more pleasant than spending time thinking about unbearable facts of the world like those documented in this film. Really, I don't begrudge anybody. Who wants to watch a bulldozer destroy somebody's house while the owner's family weeps and the soldier in charge announces, "You don't have a permit"? I have the feeling No Other Land is well-made and deserves its Oscar for artistic and not just moral reasons, but I found it impossible to separate the film from its subject matter, which is the destruction, house by house, school by school, and chicken coop by chicken coop, of Palestinian villages on the West Bank to make way for Israeli settlers. Begun years before October 7th, the film almost never mentions Gaza and its much greater war crimes. The ones here, which don't make the news because of their small body counts, are almost harder to watch because the offenses are within our realm of comprehension, and so personal. The victims and perpetrators confront each other face to face. The bureaucratic cruelty of the Israeli soldiers and the open thuggery of the settlers are so enraging that you imagine the villagers' anger must eventually explode into some type of violence. But the residents of Massafer Yatta know better: not just about the deadly consequences that would result but about the generational nature of the struggle. As Basel Adra, the activist hero, says to Yuval Abraham, the Israeli journalist covering the story, "This has been going on for decades. You think you can come in and solve it in 10 days." Indeed, there's something almost ritualistic about the routine of destruction and confrontation, violence and protest, that the movie documents over several years. You wonder if, in a life totally constrained by occupation, it's one of the few sources of meaning and excitement left for the villagers.

No Other Land was produced and directed by a joint Palestinian and Israeli team, and I think some people have the idea that the movie makes a false equivalence between the suffering of the two nations' people or is somehow self-congratulatory about the help these Israelis are providing. I suspect this idea originated in a deliberate misinterpretation of Abraham's Oscar speech by people who hadn't seen the movie. It's false. The film's focus is almost entirely on the Palestinians in Masafer Yatta. Abraham, although often on camera, is not cast as some kind of hero journalist and in fact comes off as painfully naive when he says things like, "Some day, when there is stability, maybe you can come visit me too." He and Adra are the same age and seem to be close friends, but what friendship is actually possible under these circumstances is unclear. After all (as Adra frequently reminds him), Yuval can go home. Abraham, fresh-faced and watchful, bears a certain resemblance to the actor B.J. Novak and belongs unmistakably to the class of liberal, educated people who will watch this movie. His presence as a stand-in makes the film more powerful and more uncomfortable. The distance between his life and those of his Arab subjects and friends is shaming for the audience, as it is for him. And, strangest of all, it's hard not to notice that he often appears to be having a great time, the way you can sometimes do in a crisis or emergency. I don't begrudge him. What he's doing is a brave act and a journalistic exploit. But for Basel and his family and neighbors, it's just their lives.

Conclave

Unlike most movies for adults, Conclave is rated PG, and one of its best features turns out to be its lack of profanity, drug use, and sexual situations. All the drama here is conducted with dignity. The cardinals, sequestered in the Vatican to choose the next Pope, do their scheming and politicking in hushed tones and well-turned phrases. It's like an old movie, where everyone gets his turn to make a speech and nothing all that stressful happens. The film is touching for its absolutely ordinary liberal politics: the arguments of left, right, and center are hashed out in a sacred space, without vulgarity, violence or — lack of faith. Everyone outside is rooting for the people in charge and waiting to see what they'll decide. The sordid, hushed-up church scandal is: simony. The film itself is pleasantly sequestered from the catastrophic politics of the moment. The only sinister touches, the ones that recall grim reality, come when the reactionary cardinal (a charming bully) pulls a vape pen from his robes and begins puffing on it in the sacristy.

I recently read Mary, Nabokov’s first novel. As I mentioned in a note on this site, it’s not as good as his other novels but still ridiculously good. I think he wrote it when he was 25. He seems to have emerged already a great novelist, the way a horse can walk when it’s born. “He’s a freak,” a friend said when I mentioned this. That’s it. Nabokov makes other good writers, writers you respect and admire, look untalented. They tell you in English class not to use too many adjectives, but Nabokov’s adjectives are the first thing that come to mind about his style, not just apt but often totally unexpected, suddenly turning a phrase 90 degrees and giving the reader a pleasurable whiplash. I think he’s probably a bad influence on most writers: the ones who copy him just copy the fancy style and grand manner but without the passion and end up sounding like aesthetes, literary patissiers. “Passion” isn’t the first word you might associate with Nabokov, but he obviously took an intense and unreproduceable delight in reality, reality and all its mirror versions. He wasn’t Eustace Tilley. There’s not just cleverness but some kind of rage in those energetic sentences, those phrases in which he describes in two incongruous words an experience you had never seen set on paper before and had not known you’d experienced until you read it.

Mary has all of this, it’s all there. The brilliant style, the little games and puzzles, the weird and lively minor characters, even the obsession with reflections. The quality of — “fairy tale” isn’t the right word, it’s too sugary — but some kind of magic which makes you understand that the world in which the book takes place is entirely literary, entirely unreal, even though it may resemble in every detail the one we live in.

If most of his virtues are already on display in his debut, the flaws are different. Nabokov had plenty of them. Even though he dismissed Zola, Mann and Gorky as “novels of ideas,” he couldn’t resist philosophizing and editorializing in his own novels, and these digressions and asides lack charm and add little to the books. Inexcusably, he would sometimes put his opinions about literature into the mouths of his characters, which was especially offputting since these always seemed to be put-downs of some beloved-but-not-quite-first-rate writer like Maupassant. In general, as a critic he was a bully. His tremendous and justifiable self-confidence can make him self-indulgent, especially in his later writing. (I didn’t finish Ada: it was just as brilliant as his other work but too annoying, with its trilingual puns and entomology jokes and excessive adulation for the two main characters.) Mary is pretty much free of all these imperfections. Homophobia and arrogance are the only flaws it shares with his later work. Instead it has other, young-writer flaws. Some sentimentality. Descriptive passages that, while often very good in themselves, seem written for their own sake rather than because they add something to the story. And most glaringly, narcissism. Like many first novels, Mary is autobiographical. The plot concerns a young Russian emigré (Ganin, Vlad’s stand-in) who recalls his first teenage love affair while living hand to mouth in Berlin. If we’re inclined to doubt the real-life basis of the book, we can consult his memoir, Speak, Memory, and recognize the girl and many of the details of their affair (her middle-class background and downy cheeks, the sound of lime trees, etc.) What’s funny is how the fictional Ganin differs from his model. In Mary we can see Nabokov’s glowing self-image. The mysterious young Ganin dominates the seedy rooming house he shares with other hard-luck Russian refugees. All the women are in love with him. Nabokov’s fictional alter ego is tall, strong, brave, suave, and, most shamelessly, a former partisan who fought the Bolsheviks in the civil war. In real life, the author, although dashing enough, if we can go by his pictures, was awkward and rather slight, and (as he describes frankly in his memoir), fantasized about joining the Whites while spending most of the war years living as a playboy. The vanity on display in the novel – he includes loving descriptions of Ganin’s marble-like skin and lustrous eyebrows – is really more funny than anything else, though, and the fact that the hero is a little bit of an asshole probably adds flavor to the story. Mary is, as far as I know, Nabokov’s only truly autobiographical novel, which is itself another impressive, shaming fact about this awesome figure: as a young man, he wrote about himself and then got over it and spent the rest of his career writing about other things. Extraordinary. Can novelists today take a lesson from this? No, I don’t think they can. Just go about your autofictional business. He was a freak: how could you take lessons from him?