Our new episode is on the topic of censorship, have a listen here. In it we discuss why all forms of censorship are bad, then decide to ban Clarice Lispector for being an unexciting writer. Also discussed: poisoned solidarity, Roger Lancaster, Orhan Pamuk, Jon Ronson, Ryan Boudinot, Barbara Ehrenreich, Judy Blume, Mark…

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After chatting about censorship, we discuss Clarice Lispector and decide to ban her and her terrible books. Also discussed: poisoned solidarity, Roger Lancaster, Orhan Pamuk, Jon Ronson, Ryan Boudinot, Quentin Tarantino, Barbara Ehrenreich, Judy Blume, Mark Twain, Bret Easton Ellis, Anthony Burgess, Harold Bloom, Nabokov, Toni Morrison, Tipper Gore and the Parents Music Resource Center, Leonora Carrington, the recent death of John Crowley, his novel Little, Big, le wokisme, outlaws, violence, dissidents, dimwits, nonces, moralists, ninnies, whiners, losers. The concluding poetry reading is Dylan Thomas’s “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower” and the concluding music is Debussy’s “Beau Soir.”

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This episode is about you and your ambition. We don’t like what we see. We think you need to step it up.

In this episode: Morgan Bassichis, his one-man show Can I Be Frank, about Frank Maya and ambition, also Latronico’s Perfection, Georges Perec’s Things, Oulipo, tortured geniuses, Philip Roth, Gen Z and cringe, Honor Levy, writing with feeling, Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style, Madeline Cash, Geese, envy, Deresiewicz and The Death of the Artist, careerism, haiku, Kobayashi Issa, masochism, Edward Bernays’s Propaganda, and Ted Hughes.

If you missed our last episode, click here.

And to my reading and text-lovers: worry not. I have not passed irretrievably into the purely audio world of podcastery. I continue to write. Quite a lot, actually. I’v…

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Also: Howard Norman, hearing from listeners, Cass Sunstein’s weird review of Obsession, movie rental stores like Kim’s Video (NYC) and Videodrome (Atlanta), literary density, the short story ‘Many Worlds’ by Ayşegül Savaş, the stylistic weakness of contemporary New Yorker short stories such as ‘Many Worlds’ by Ayşegül Savaş, the stylistic weakness of past New Yorker short stories such as ‘Cat Person’ by Kristen Roupenian, major podcast success, the 1%, our 6000 listeners (!), the secret pessimism of southerners and the secret optimism of northerners, Berlin Alexanderplatz, Alfred Döblin, magical realism, German expressionism, The Confessions of Nat Turner, the “ownership” of stories, sensitivity readers, the excellent editing of Meg Storey, wabi-sabi, ‘Evangeline’ by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ‘Live blindly and upon the hour’ by Trumbull Stickney.

In this one we discuss UK fashion magazine Harper’s Bazaar and the winning Kavyta Kay story, apparently written using A.I. We also talk about why you’re a baby if you don’t read Cynthia Ozick, gatek…

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My hope is that recent even…

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By the way, The Insufferable Bastards is now available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.

Enjoy!

Episode the 2nd

Though we had a different recording ready to go, Alanna and I quickly got together for an emergency episode regarding yet another literary A.I. scandal. This one involves UK fashion magazine Harper’s Bazaar, which awarded Kavyta Kay a prize for her story Back and Forth. We also discuss prize judge Ruth Ozeki, gatekeeping, the 86 (!) countries in which we have listeners, poetry, Jamaica Kincaid, Joseph O’Neill.

Also Derek Walcott, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, curry leaves, the diaspora, Kenneth Koch, more culture pots, wood damp and trousers, school bullying, teaching in prison, the PEN America Prison and Justice Writing Program, cricket, Jewishness, Lawn Guyland, The Tenants by Bernard Malamud, A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid, I Married a Communist by Philip Roth, The Puttermesser Papers by Cynthia Ozick, Gina Berriault, memento mori, “Ode to my Twenties” by Kenneth Koch.

We also discuss Pan by Michael Clune, Milkman by Anna Burns, Paul Theroux, VS Naipaul, the rise and fall of wokism in lit, Long Island, New Hampshire, that amazing Guardian Best Books List, hot bowls of culture, the libs, the leftists, the rightists, Vance v. Rubio, jasmine, Michael Derick Hudson and Best American Poetry, dirty creeks, artificial intelligence (AI), Salinger, who we really are, world travel, Asia, Trinidad, parenting, Ocean Vuong, how to save the children, the meaning behind names, publishing, literature, books and having the courage to say the thing.

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From the start, the best thing about The Art of Cruelty is that, like a university survey course, it overwhelms with historical and artistic references. This makes sense a bit, since Nelson is a professor of English at USC; she taught a course on the art of cruelty for several years. Like an overstimulated undergrad, the readerly brain is exposed to more about performance artists, drama theory, recent art history, and torture methods than one can ever have wanted to know (regarding this last, look up the definition of a “Palestinian hanging,” also known as a strappado, to get some sense of what the book contains). I found myself looking into the writers, filmmakers, performers and photographers named on every other page, eager to have immediate contact with all the beguiling, bizarre and blood-soaked artwork she describes. The book is worth a read simply as a compendium of art monsters going back to Artaud. (It is, somewhat inexplicably, a postwar concern she pursues so she does not go back much further than that to, say, Goya or even Kafka.)

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Beyond this, however, it’s decidedly a failure as an analysis of its subject. The trouble begins with the thesis itself.

There isn’t one. There are “questions” she pursues. These questions involve everything above, below and around cruelty, but often not cruelty itself. In the first two pages, she moves from Nietzschean cruelty swiftly to technological brutality, to postmodern alienation, to ordinary injustice, all in a manner that suggests she is hoping, like a three card monte dealer, you won’t notice the prestidigitation. After offering thumbnails of Michael Haneke, David Graeber, and Grant Kester, she briefly delves into the moral-spiritual dangers of over-contemplating cruelty by way of Trilling, Walter Benjamin and the Buddha—all this by page 7.

And yet: she never actually faces or defines cruelty. For a book like this one, this would seem to be important. After all, what is it, exactly? How does cruelty differ from, say, mere violence? And does it, indeed, always involve physical pain (my answer, apparently not hers, would be a decided No)? The most interesting cruelty to me does not involve physicality at all, but reading this book you would think the only kind of cruelty in existence involved razors, stakes, daggers and bullets. She also never makes a satisfying clarification of the relationship between art and cruelty. Is a photo of a murder scene, placed in a frame and set in an art museum, cruel? If so, why? In what way? Is an abstract painting of wounds or torture cruel? Again, why? Are Shakespeare’s plays cruel, or are his characters cruel, and if true in either case, is Shakespeare himself cruel? Was cruelty the point? Is Antonin Artaud cruel—is the theater of cruelty, in fact, cruel? I don’t know.

I read a whole book on this topic and I can’t answer any of these questions better than you. Her idea of cruelty seems to include anything that is edgy, ugly, bloody, political, defiant, even just unkind or unappealing. You charge into the reading experience with a false impression that the book is going to analyze a tradition in art that seeks to represent cruelty as subject-matter. But the opposite is true: it seems to show, rather, how some art exists to sort of make you feel uncomfortable, used and abused. The book might have been better titled The Cruelty of Art.

But the reason Nelson never differentiates between cruelty and suffering, cruelty and gore, cruelty and X, is because the premise of her book would fall apart. It is only by conflating all of these ideas that the book can exist. There is really no reason, for example, to discuss the paintings of Francis Bacon on her terms unless she can broaden the field sufficiently. His wonderful yet unnerving paintings are indeed shocking, strange, off-putting, violent and sometimes ugly—but cruel? I just don’t see how this is so.

The same is true of Sylvia Plath, whom she also discusses, and the works of David Lynch, Paul McCarthy, Diane Arbus, and others. These folks and their works are weird and wild, but I never quite got on board with “cruel.” By the end of the book one begins to feel that any sort of work that isn’t a Hallmark movie or a children’s book and involves gruesome imagery can probably, in Nelson’s estimation, be conceived of as an avatar of human cruelty. I struggled to see how most of the works she discusses, with a few important exceptions that I will discuss later, can be thought of as relating to cruelty at all.

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Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty

Fundamental to the book is her understanding of Artaud.

Antonin Artaud founded the so-called Théâtre de la Cruauté, the founding text for which was The Theatre and its Double first published in the early 1930s. Nelson sets about wringing her hands and shaking her fists, vexing over what the mystical Artaud could have possibly meant by cruauté. But in her excessive perplexity she obscurifies the topic, making it harder for us to understand Artaud than need be. She winds up making him out to be obsessive about the word “cruelty” and in constant defense of its use—when, in fact, there were several other possible titles for his theater project. He considered, for example, Theater of the Absolute, then Theater of Ordeal. He strongly preferred the Alchemical Theater until, at the last moment, he was persuaded to change it. His lifetime spent explaining cruelty to his critics came, then, as a matter of chance.

Given this, several claims of hers I think are easily refutable, especially after reading Artaud’s essays. For example, she writes that “cruelty meant whatever Artaud wanted it to mean.” This is true, naturally, since he invented it—just not in the capricious way she means. It’s wishful thinking on Nelson’s part, in fact. The essence of his theory is fairly straightforward: Artaud believed that violence and even evil were the basic element of all life (not just human life) on earth. The point of the theater, he claimed, was to apply the “transcendent principles” hidden beneath peaceable ordinary life and expose this rotten, diseased substructure. Evolutionarily, biologically, cruelty is foundational. “[E]vil enjoys permanent rule,” as he put it. Kindness, decency, hope—these are aberrations. God and goodness were willed into being in a universe defined by violence and destruction.

His theater was meant to communicate this idea. But it had “nothing to do with sadism or blood,” he wrote, but rather it “extends the frontiers of that which we call reality” and “revitalize[s] the very meaning of life.” Life devours life. Not as an ethical choice, but as a matter of natural necessity. The bird devours the worm; the fox devours the bird; the wolf devours the fox. There is simply no moral question in these acts of killing: life depends upon it happening, upon the existence of death, upon cruelty. As he once said: “Tout ce qui agit est une cruauté.” All that’s quick is cruel. His theater was a method of moving beyond this to a “clinical moral clarity.”

Seen this way, Artaud’s work and thought become clearer and more interesting. Seen Nelson’s way, however, he is reduced—as her friend says after hearing Nelson attempt to define his theory—to being simply “a lot like Hollywood.” This friend’s insipid statement reflects a failure of Nelson’s ability to communicate ideas clearly, a weakness that haunts the book and seems to haunt her work in general.

Nelson Hates Cruel Art

There are plenteous instances in life where the term cruelty is simply insufficient. The book being what it is, Nelson freely delves into issues like Abu Ghraib, capital punishment, rape, fascism, genocide. But to sweep these under the heading “cruel” feels profoundly lazy, even insulting to victims as well as to the dead. To call someone like Hitler merely cruel, for example, is to make of the history of violence and genocide a kind of humorless parody. It is this inherent weakness in the term itself that drives her to examine more extreme art, the stuff that goes beyond cruelty.

Nelson tells us repeatedly—implies, suggests, even says outright—how uncomfortable violent art makes her. She seems to have been laid out flat by a single viewing of Fernando Meirelles’s famously shocking and brutal film City of God. One can’t imagine her watching it again. Kara Walker, a visual artist, uses silhouettes to render a cartoonish version of life under slavery. The work is a paragon of cruelty, I would say, and the best example in the book. Walker’s smiling pickaninnies are depicted in the most gruesome fashion, involving images of rape, torture, shit, and much else. In this way Walker explores the ultimate human cruelty—chattel slavery—but the coup de grace here is that she then over-personalizes the work in a way that seems to render herself cruel. In displaying her “cotillion of horrors” Walker blithely discusses her erotic desire for “white boys” and lambasts herself (“you insufferable cunt”) for being such a successful artist. All of this feels awful, and Nelson calls her work a “weird combination of narcissism, self-critique, and historical hyperbole” and also “seriously annoying.”

Nelson also gives halfhearted, unconvincing defenses of Plath’s easy use of words like “fascist” and “Jew" in her poetry. There is a good discussion to be had on this topic, but it does not appear in this book. You get the feeling, basically, that she more or less doesn’t approve. Nelson also discusses the work of someone named Pope.L, who to me appears to be a sociopath with next to nothing to say. In his piece “Hole Theory” he writes to viewers: “This is a painting of Martin Luther King’s penis inside my father’s vagina” and he goes on: “I think one must say in all honesty, ‘Boy, that Martin Luther King Jr. sure had a big vagina.’ This, I think says something. … [it] places him in the lived moment of contraries where we all have to deal.” Okay.

To this statement from Pope.L, Nelson responds: “I agree: this says something. What on earth it says, I have no idea. I like it, though, because it bothers me, and I’m not sure why.” Right.

I know why: it’s junk art work. The claim that she admires it is more than unpersuasive. It’s disingenuous. Anyway, I can live without Pope.L’s shallow, spurious pensées on MLK and wish Nelson had been brave enough to admit she felt the same. And is Pope.L’s work cruel? I have no idea. But by now I no longer care.

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Cruelty and Laughter

One valuable thing the book gave me, despite itself, was a definition of cruelty that I think I can live with. How it differs from violence, pain, suffering, and all the rest.

In the reading, the notion of amusement kept coming to the surface. For example, when Marina Abramović performs her Rhythm 0 in 1974, standing stock still on a small stage in Galleria Studio Morra in Naples, Italy, as guests were invited to use a set of 76 tools to do anything they wanted to her body, I imagine waves of nervous laughter erupting. At the start, some strangers merely touch her, offer her flowers or water, but very soon they were stripping off her clothes, harming her until she bled, and carrying her naked body around the room. In images of the event, you can see the men (and the worst of it seems to have been male-initiated though, interestingly, Abramović herself says that the women offered up ideas) smiling and laughing as they dream up awful things to do to their willing victim. They seem, also, a tad bored and agitated by the lack of direction and the sourceless pressure put on them to act. I was reminded of being a teen boy, in a pack of other teen boys, when some poor sap was experiencing embarrassment. The laughter preexisted in us, a nervous twitch even before it burst forth from us, as our horrible little natures spilled out into open cruelty, and we laughed at some unfortunate soul suffering as he struggled to escape whatever public humiliation had descended upon him that afternoon. Since he wasn’t us, we were eager to help him suffer. And glad to have the opportunity to be entertained.

Cruelty to me has something to do with this. With laughter. Without laughter, cruelty is only violence, meanness, suffering, or pain. To kill a child is not merely cruel, it’s monstrous. But to do so laughing—this is cruel. To burn a village or commit a rape, this is savagery, brutality. To do so while laughing, this adds a thin layer of cruelty over top of the barbarity.

In Greek myth, Hephaestus traps his unfaithful wife, Aphrodite, in bed with Ares, god of violence and cruelty. As the caught lovers struggle futilely to escape, laughter can be heard from heaven: the gods are having a grand time watching the humiliation of the naked adulterers from Mt. Olympus. The origin story of cruelty to me is this combination of humiliation plus laughter. Violence and bloodshed are not needed—only suffering and glee.

I suppose Abramović puts in a piece of evidence for Artaud’s side of the argument. Given a blank slate and a guarantee of zero repercussions, the human animal seems to be set to revert to a basically wicked state of nature. Ready with his random tools, he starts harming and humiliating at will.

I do struggle, often, to agree that man’s fundamental essence is of generosity, kindness, patience, love. At the same time, however, I don’t cede to Artaud. His dramatic theory was considered basically inapplicable, and anyway I believe he confused the cruel nature of existence with the somewhat more complex, ambiguous nature of man. Man, really, is both and more. And perhaps at bottom his ultimate essence is one, merely, of laughter.

Also, sometime in the next few weeks, I will have a piece out in a large UK literary biweekly. It’s a short piece but I’m quite proud of it. I will post it here for readers, along with a new subscriber deal.

Thanks for reading!

Living in Fantasyland, USA

Have things gotten more fantastical in America as of late? Maybe so. Maybe not.

In the 1890s, a sickly man arrived at the famed Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan. This massive complex was known across the USA for treating common ills with radical new cures: water baths, light baths, cold air baths—all kinds of baths, really—and regimes of so-called dietetics. Patients came from all over and included the rich and famous of the day, like Thomas Edison, Amelia Earhart, and Henry Ford. After undergoing some mechanotherapy, and presumably inspired by his surroundings, the unwell man had a midnight flash of inspiration—a vision for a cereal recipe that would cure appendicitis. Once he left Battle Creek, he went home and created this product. He put it on the market, it became popular, and he made a fortune. Seventeen years later in 1914—in a turn of fate too on-the-nose even for a Netflix melodrama—the now-rich breakfast food inventor came down with a bad case of, what else, appendicitis. When his magic cereal didn’t cure him, he shot himself in the head.

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I’ve written about Halldór before, here, and I continue to find him fascinating. If you want more, I’d suggest you pick up his most famous and best novel Independent People and maybe, if your Icelandic whistle be whetted, the excellent biography of him by Halldór Guðmundsson.

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On Halldór Laxness

In 1970, the year A Parish Chronicle (Archipelago Books; February 10, 2026) was published to significant acclaim, Halldór Laxness was entering the final phase of an enviably long and rich creative life. A world-renowned playwright, novelist, polemicist, humorist, activist, he now turned to the narrower traditions of memoir, essay, and, as some of his closest friends began to pass away, obituary. The locus of his poetic energy was reorienting toward reflection.

By turns Catholic, secular, Taoist, his volatile spiritual pursuits, as a 68-year old Nobel Prize-winning literary elder, became muted or forgotten. A former commitment to Marxism, and his defenses of Communism under Stalin, had long receded, and he’d been increasingly critical of the USSR throughout the 1960s. But now, as the neoliberal era loomed, a central tenet of this socialist universalism—the idea that industrialization and innovation were necessary for a free and flourishing society—was up for revision, too. He became sharply critical, even dismissive, of mechanization and other such developments. He turned toward conservation. With the onrush of modernization, the sheepherding country folk of his beloved national backwater had become a population of car-driving bourgeois, with Reykjavik a fully electrified tourist destination. He complained in an essay, “War Against the Land,” that companies paid to develop energy resources were “given the opportunity to destroy or lay waste those special places which … are not just dear to Icelandic hearts, but are also famed throughout the world.” He contributed his voice to protests of Vietnam and of corporate power. He remained as vocal and brilliant as ever, yet some essential fire in him had cooled. Though he wouldn’t die until 1998 at the age of 95, the very short A Parish Chronicle, along with God’s Good Gifts (1972), would be among his very last novels.

In the Iceland countryside of Laxness’s youth, a story went around of a woman named Guðrún Jónsdóttir. A person of no religious faith, she’d nevertheless been entrusted with the regular task of retrieving loaves of fresh bread for the parish priest. One such loaf had been baking in the heated sands near a natural hot spring, and she sallied off with a bread bucket to get it. But an unusually dense fog had settled over the river valley that day, and on the way back she was lost. For four days Guðrún wandered the forests, the hills. Tired, delirious, frightened, she eventually, after scratching out her last will in the mud, lay down on the forest floor to die. When at last she was found, it was said that not a crumb of the six-pound loaf in the bucket had been touched. This is the so-called ‘Story of the Precious Bread,’ published in local Icelandic newspapers in 1888, Laxness claims, in the very year that Mosfell Church was dismantled.

“Weren’t you terribly hungry?” Laxness asks Guðrún in the Chronicle.

“I don’t think a person needs to be eating all the time,” she replies. “It’s a bad habit.”

“You didn’t care if you lived or died, as long as the bread made it?”

“What you’ve been entrusted with, you’ve been entrusted with.”

“Can one never to be too devoted to one’s master?” he asks.

“Can one ever be faithful to anyone but oneself?”

The woman’s elliptical responses are ironic and humorous, Laxness’s trademark, but also evasive. Guðrún, it would seem, like Laxness, had no real masters. Yet she’d been notably brave and selfless in her protection of the Precious Bread, while declining praise for it by implying that her nature was as fundamentally self-interested as anyone’s. Why? One could say she appears to be, above all, a stubborn individualist, lobbing back at her interviewer the replies of a contrarian spirit.

In fact, she is above all Icelandic. This is important. To the extent that she has a master, it is Icelandic life and land. The will she painstakingly scraped out in the woods recorded only that her three small lambs should be given to Mosfell Church. Later, the Precious Bread, which she nearly died protecting, she fed to horses.

Her honor, with the bread, is tied to reverence for place, not its people nor their gods or beliefs, but to territory. When locals finally found her in the woods, it was said that Guðrún did not recognize them. She ran off screaming. She fought them, refused food, and hollered that the men were robbers. It took some time before she slowly began to recognize them as countrymen whom she saw daily and knew somewhat well. Having thus revealed a weakened connection to her own neighbors, and no love at all for the transformative ideological forces whose waves of cultural change led to the removal of the church, the Guðrúns of the modern world express their commitment not to religion or community, but only to Icelandness: its fields, horses, churches, land, lambs, and bread.

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Between Truth and Myth

It is difficult to communicate to the uninitiated the precise appeal of Laxness.

Like Iceland herself—provincial, isolated, remote, wondrously beautiful—his confounding charms don’t quite become apparent until you make the effort necessary to confront them in person. Every other writer who praises Laxness tells a story of having a novel of his, usually Independent People, first foisted upon them like some ominous or unwanted magic periapt, a humble or even ugly mystic object that later proves to transform the reader. The workmanlike writing, deliberately unremarkable, doesn’t gleam with the usual tricks of literary voice or thrilling action, yet by tale’s end it will have ensorcelled you. Entering his world is not like embarking upon a sea adventure or dashing romance; it’s more like passing under a lychgate into a dewy church side meadow for a stroll. At a distance, you see the galvanized horizon, rural parishioners, half-buried bones, boiling hot springs, misty crofts. It all seems bucolic, but common. Then, upon returning to your home, you find you do not recognize the door. Looking in the window’s reflection, nor do you recognize your own face.

Laxness said about writing Chronicle: “I was looking backwards to the origin of the novel, to how it started as a chronicle, or an imitation of a chronicle. The novel is edited history or the imitation of history.” This novella has, like many of his works, a hard time remaining a novella. There is no arc. It has no stable plot, barely a story. The inherent desire of Laxness, raised as he was on the study of ancient Nordic myth, was to return to some kind of originating conception or set of foundational Ur-tales. In Wayward Heroes, for example, he does this by retelling the myth of the Fóstbrœðra Saga from the Poetic Edda, which gives the book a grandiose quality, something a few degrees more epic than a simple novel. In Independent People, dense and stubborn Bjartur suffers constant hardship, and even betrays those closest to him, all so he can remain rooted to his little farm, his tiny piece of Iceland. This was Laxness’s most novelistic work, and therefore his most popular, but even so the writing in it ties itself to the grander mysteries of myth and time in a way that seems to transcend what we English readers think of as novelistic.

Think of pitching A Parish Chronicle to a modern publisher: the brief tale, told from a local reporter’s perspective, of 19th-century farmers forced to dismantle and, 75 years later, rebuild a tiny church in the Mosfell Valley. The narrator jumps from anecdote to anecdote, inserts himself, swearing that all this is true and on record in the archives, but then freely moves to set pieces and scenes more befitting a realist novel. We know, or are at least told, that under the Mosfell Church sit the bones and skull of ancient national poet and hero Egill Skallagrímsson, but enticing legends do not seem to motivate the local farmers, Olafur and his son Bogi, who are trying to save the church. Nor does any sense of religious devotion. They wobble in their positions on the matter when beseeched by opposing petitioners; the final petition to save the church ends up with just two signatures on it. As we wonder about why, exactly, anyone cares at all about this church, and as rising tensions threaten to become physical violence, the effort to save it simply dies with the 19th century, and the religious authorities are successful in dismantling and moving it to its new location.

Meanwhile, we enter into the lives and stories of locals—bedridden Finnbjörg, long-suffering Ash-Lakí—folklore of Icelandic daily life that loom meaningfully yet ambiguously over the frame narrative of the church chronicle. It’s not until the very end of the book that the tiny chapel (“11 ells and 11 inches in length from gable to gable, making it 7 meters in modern reckoning. The width measures 9 cubits and 12 inches from wall to wall”) is rebuilt upon its rightful spot much later in 1965.

His other novels, though richer and longer, are about similarly ordinary things: land, sheep, farms. Myth, faith, family. Iceland. His work doesn’t fit niftily into any marketable categories. Not today, and not back then. Yet, for decades Laxness was popular in America. His books sold in huge numbers and were optioned in Hollywood. Starting in 2008, ten years after his death, Archipelago Books began publishing Philip Roughton’s excellent translations of his lesser-known works. There are four so far. We should all be grateful to them. I’ll tell you why.

Laxness was a genius. He is up there in the company of other great Modernists, Faulkner and Joyce. In terms of bringing uniquely to life a strange and mystical world, and enriching that world with pathos, he is unmatched. Iceland is his Dublin, his Yoknapatawpha. If we imagine a spectrum, with one end occupied by Joyce’s Dublin (geographic) and the other end by Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County (invented), Laxness’s Iceland would exist as some admixture between these. Despite his constant references to newspapers, sagas, his claims of journalistic research and interviews, his oeuvre exudes a mysticism that makes it both real and not, earthbound and fantastical at once. In his telling, Iceland is simply a place deserving of the reverence of his concerted poetic attention, and in making constant mention of some written record or another that would prove his stories “true,” the reader becomes all the more incredulous, another dubious Icelander before the tall tales of Laxness and his idiosyncratic countrymen. You’re in the room with them, smirking with Halldór as he interviews Guðrún about her just-so story of the Precious Bread, or listening perplexed to the legend of Ash-Laki and the trunks full of money found in his home after his death. Icelanders are a people only very lately swept up in the common chaos of global modernity, he seems to say, and they are amused by the notion that an island race of rustic hicks such as they are should consider themselves modern at all. He seeks, above all, to record in his books this ironic detachment. The provincial Zen of the Nordic peoples. Both here and not. Real and unreal. Present and eternal.

Laxness’s fiction seems to lay ever in wait for the worm to turn, for the inevitable collapse of the international order, the shift that will deliver humanity back to the remote life of the Medieval period, when Icelanders knew and worried only about their sheep, their hot springs, their fish, their tiny churches, and where they can exist once again in the shadowed reality that exists between truth and myth.

For Whom the Bell?

At the time the church was finally returned to Mosfell and Chronicle published, the attitudes and cultural life of Icelanders has been reshaped somewhat. Laxness might have said that his kinfolk were now a lot more like Americans.

… the first automobiles were being imported into the country, including new marvels to this nation of farmers who had worked with the same implements since the year 900—around the time of the bizarre, wondrous manifestations called the Fróðá Marvels. Soon, surrounded by these new, uncanny inventions, no farmer recognized himself any longer, and the poets began lamenting their loss of identity in print. One fine day, Stefán drives a car that he himself owned up to the homefield wall at Hrísbrú and parks it there, not trusting it in the mire out front of the farmhouse. Cars that came to this country back then were apparently rattletraps, at first, having been transported from Canada, where they’d seen far better days. Once here, they stopped running, particularly on thoroughfares. Their drivers walked backwards pushing these vehicles up hills, down which they’d immediately roll, in keeping with the law of gravity. Yet everyone admired automobiles and began to believe in them—Stefán Þorláksson the most. For many people, they replaced Írafellsmóri and those poor old sheep and schnapps; for some they replaced the identity they’d lost. It was thought a great idea to drive a car on Sundays from Reykjavík all the way east to Þingvellir, 50 kilometers, to buy a bottle of belch water.

The above-mentioned Stefán Þorláksson begins using his windfall of inheritance to buy up and start selling Black Death schnapps to foreigners for 400 krónur per bottle. His bumpkin avarice not yet satisfied, he also auctions off the boiling water from his hot springs, a natural energy source, to the metropole of Reykjavík for huge sums. His motto “Buy, buy, no matter the cost” stands him in good stead and he rakes in profits. With this new wealth, he buys up all copies of the book Biographies of Remarkable Horses in Húnavatn County, causing a shortage of this important local reference. He also purchases cars, sewing machines, snowplows, refrigerators and other gadgets for which “all you had to do was press a button and they would do everything themselves; horsepower by the thousands.”

Yet despite the new “numbness in the nation’s brain, which is the curse of modern times,” Stefán does not, ultimately, lose his Icelandness. He donates his goods to locals, and gives away the sewing machines. He gives people horses, money, and land. He shows up with his snowplow to clear the drives of farmers in winter for free. Meanwhile he sits at home paging through horse biographies. And when he dies, it is found in his will that this non-religious man has left his great wealth to Mosfell for the rebuilding of the old church.

Ever since the church was dismantled in the previous century, the issue of where the church bell ended up remained a mystery. The demolition crew of three carpenters were asked whether they had seen it as they were taking down the structure, a task that took less than one afternoon. They respond in the confused, contradictory manner of true Icelanders:

After a bit more prodding, all three men began contradicting themselves, changing their statements over and over. Finally, each of them had spoken for and against all conceivable possibilities in this matter and declared under oath that there had both been and not been a bell.

Decades later, when the ill and elderly Finnbjörg finally dies, the muck in the mire of Hrísbrú must be cleared away to make way for her funeral. Olafur and his son begin digging and scooping through the “sizable dung heap and gutter that was overflowing with semiliquid manure” until, deep down, their shovels clang against something hard. It’s the bell.

Joyous, they find the bell’s clapper in one of Finnbjörg’s chests, then retrieve the chalice that she’d given to Guðrún for safekeeping. It seems the sickly and immobile Finnbjörg, abed for 18 years, and herself not exactly a devoted Christian, had somehow been magically protecting all of the Mosfell Church inventory all the while.

Was she really ill?—this question, [Stefán] said, he’d often asked himself later. Or maybe everyone was ill but her? Those innumerable women in Iceland who lay bedridden for eighteen years, was there anything wrong with them apart from being too strong to take part in the misery and stupidity that everyone else in this country took for granted and consoled themselves with or even rejoiced in, like beggars and their boils? He said that the air of modesty, composure, and purity that emanated from that woman he had later sought but never found in any other woman, despite having driven incessantly all over the country his whole life.

In the new church at Mosfell, now heated, electrified, and newly paneled with expensive wood, the cleaned and polished bell is hung in the choir and the old silver chalice placed on the altar. No one knows where the bell initially came from; it could have been smelted back in the year 1000 or earlier, so old that it was possibly lost or left in dung heaps multiple times. Yet there is “no doubt that this bell reverberates with a sound from ancient times.”

Everyone from the stories told in A Parish Chronicle are long dead: the parishioners, the petitioners, the farmers, the old dying ladies. Stefán’s wealth is absorbed by his nation, delivered back into the volcanic land to revitalize its traditions. What remains now is Mosfell heath, its church, and its bell—and, of course, Iceland. And in another 1000 years, when all the automobiles and refrigerators and power lines have rotted away, when the global imposition of ideology and war and religion and international order have long vanished, there Iceland shall remain.

The New Year—it’s not only a time of change. It’s true that Janus was the twin-faced Roman god of doorways, and his name is where we get our month of January. The myths also tell us he had one face for sunrise and another for sunset. This is a rather interesting, darkly resonant picture—an unstable god of daily change, constantly switching masks. Content one moment, terrifying the next. A tad unsettling, really. Not a trustworthy deity. And more human than heavenly.

His main charge, however, was not just gates and passages but as god of war and peace. When the doors of the Janiculum were open, it was said to be a time of war. When closed, peace. Famously, the doors were said to have remained shut for just one brief period. And when the drums of war began inevitably to beat again, the elderly king Latinus stubbornly refused to reopen the gates, so “Juno herself, descending from the skies, smote the doors with irresistible force, and burst them open. Immediately the whole country was in a flame. The people rushed from every side breathing nothing but war.”

That’s how quickly things can turn to shit. Even when you resist and make your reasoned pleas, fate will bring about the inevitable and drop new horrors right in your innocent lap.

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So what is all this happy nonsense about change, resolutions, transformations? Do you alter yourself, become a better or different person, as you pass under that arch or transom? Isn’t life a journey through an exponential expansion of infinite doorways, opening and slamming closed by the trillion with every step you take? The chance to change passed you by long ago, my Muse, deep backward into 2025 or before, when you knew that you were beckoned to begin the gradual process of enlightenment. Now, in this moment, you remain what you are. And you can only carry your old self—flaws, failures, triumphs and all—unthinkingly into a new context. Different surround, different air, different music playing maybe. But same you.

The only question is, when the Janiculum gates are blown open by force, will you fly around with the mob of your brethren, breathing war?

I admire impotent old Latinus. He made the attempt. Against all odds, he refused to carry out the ceremony. He failed, of course. And Turnus and Mezentius took over, notorious for their cruelty and savagery. A new age of war began. The Janus gates were open. And so it goes.

I get him. I get why Latinus did it. In fact, it’s why I write.

If you didn’t get a chance to read them, here are the pieces I’m most proud of this year. There was my essay on Saul Bellow at The Metropolitan Review and a piece on Stanley Elkin at RealClearBooks. Earlier in the year was my pan of Ocean Vuong that started it all. I also plan to expand my popular Fantasyland series. Read them for the first time or enjoy them anew.

I have other plans to write pieces on the untranslated work of French writer Jean-Pierre Martinet, a newly translated novella by Halldor Laxness (out in February 2026 from Archipelago), and perhaps a big piece on the Lebanese writer Elias Khoury. I’ve also been unsuccessfully shopping around a 4,000-word essay on the death of character in American fiction. Do call me if you want to publish this.

But that’s it, really. I continue my other massive book projects, praying that the largest one be finished for good this year. And I appeal to the gods and goddesses that I find agents, editors and readers for them. About money or fame or success, I really don’t care a wit. But, as they say, if you want to make God laugh tell him your plans. Maybe I’ll be cursed with publication and a large marketing budget. That would so awful.

I am what I am. And so are you. May the Janus gates remain closed for you this New Year.

Time was, Stanley Elkin was a go-to for the MFA crowd. I recall the titles of his works rolling off many a young writer’s reverent tongue back in the 1990s and 2000s. Even if you hadn’t read him, which I had not, his reputation preceded him in such a way that you never quite forgot that funny, old-timey name—four trochaic syllables like a so…

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The Invisible Official

Ned Drucker, in brown jacket and pale blue tie, a tatty brief clutched in one hand, hustled up the three granite slab steps that addressed the double-doored entrance to Easton Public High School. Embossing the lintel above his head was a frieze, an elaborately carved American bald eagle, also of granite, which spread its green-gray wings and pressed one vast, watchful stone eye toward the grassy front quad with its towering single maple tree. Beneath the maple stood hundreds of students chatting, or sneaking cigarettes, as they waited for the toll of the morning bell, at which point they would migrate like prisoners through the bottleneck beneath the eagle’s eternal wings and into the school. “You!” said a voice. The gray-haired secretary in the front administrative office waved at Ned. He turned hard left, forced by this action to pass a large beveled mirror that hung on the wall beside a corkboard smothered in paper bulletins. Some of the bulletins were haphazardly taped to the glass. He didn’t look into the mirror.

“What happened to your hand?” said the secretary with disinterest.

“Accident.” Ned didn’t address his loosely bandaged thumb, which hurt very much and was covered in nappy tape, dark red at the tip. But when he scratched at his tangled beard, the secretary got a healthy glance at the monstrosity.

“Chase wants a meeting.”

“When?”

“Later is better. After lunch?”

“Ethan Pederson?”

“No, no,” she said, shuffling papers. “The other one...”

She waved her hand about in the air, her mind already on other things.

Ned nodded, for he understood her meaning. He wandered off toward his office.

~

Ethan Pederson, a junior student, had been expelled the previous day. The charge was roughhousing on school grounds. It was Ned who’d received the call later that night—late last night—on his home landline no less—from Mary Pederson, the boy’s mother. She was hysterical. But Ned hadn’t yet given much thought to the incident. And why should he? The life of a senior-class humanities teacher who’d recently been given part-time administrative duties at a big and sprawling school, he thought walking the empty corridors, is highly preoccupied. He’d heard of the case of the Pederson kid, of course, but as things go it was ordinary hijinks—schoolyard stuff, horseplay, a matter of hormones. Not to mention that Ned had plenty of other things to worry about. But schoolteachers gossip far more about student intrigues and affairs than any parent can imagine, and that afternoon in the teacher’s lounge Ned had been called upon by a gang of colleagues to give his view of the Pederson matter. The reason for the inquisition, Ned had surmised, was that the other boy with whom Ethan had been fighting had once been in Ned’s class. Ned knew that boy rather well, in fact.

His name was Arnold White, a tall boisterous tough kid in a white t-shirt who’d read surprisingly well into his Chekhov, earning a solid B in Ned’s course and even a bit of Ned’s respect. A rough young guy, and indeed something of a bully, but handsome, and getting serious, finally, about his life now that he was so close to graduating after being held back a year. His drop-out girlfriend was pregnant, of course. His father worked as a construction hand. He lived in one of Easton’s two small backwater trailer parks, and this was a large part of the reason why Ned had so empathized with the underdog senior. Like most teachers, Ned did have his preferences: he tended toward the hearty, the confident, the beat-down-but-optimistic, the swaggering crotch-punching troublemaker lowbrow types. He couldn’t help this. The bullies, they made him feel young, alive. He would never admit this to anyone, but he was fairly sure the other teachers, after a glass of wine or three, would concur. Quiet, troubled, nice boys and girls were a dime a dozen, and if you got too involved with them all you learned was that they were agonizingly in need of attention in every aspect of their squalid little lives.

When Ned had intoned in the teacher’s lounge the day before, “I don’t have an opinion on the Pederson matter,” the others had urged him to come clean, to speak up. They’d insisted that, if he felt so indifferently about it, he simply couldn’t have all the facts at his disposal—not as theyknew them anyway. “Possibly not,” Ned had added. “But why should I care to find them out?” Ethan was an intelligent kid, bespectacled, unwashed, puny, bony and covered in acne, in love with natural history and dinosaurs, and he’d never once caused any teacher or student a single bit of trouble in his time at Easton High. Yet he’d been expelled for five days by the zero-tolerance man, Principal Chase, chucked out just the same as his aggressor, Arnold White. This was the new policy at work.

But as the teachers beseeched Ned, what resulted only was this realization: with his new title as part-time assistant to the vice principal—which came with a slight pay raise, a small office, and an etched name plate—his presence in the teacher’s lounge now smacked of implicit power imbalance, like a duke on caparison horseback appearing at a child’s birthday party. So he’d left the lounge that day, vowing to eat alone from then on, in his new office, which happened to be located in the damp, disused, pre-war eastern wing of the school beneath the old Voc-Tech. There, at least, he could enjoy some privacy.

Ned had come home that day uncommonly tired. Later in the evening, when he’d picked up the phone, he found himself telling the lively Mary Pederson that there was little he could do for her, that he hadn’t been there to witness the incident, and that anyway he wasn’t vested with any powers to reverse disciplinary action...

“No, Teacher,” she said. “You don’t get my meaning. I’m wondering if there is more we can do.”

“What can you mean by that?” he asked.

“What happened was perverse. Arnie White is twice my son’s size—he has arms like tree trunks—and my Ethan the one getting expelled! But, okay, I accept that. I want my boy to get his licks, you see...”

Ned had to be careful. Parents were as erratic and machinating and sensitive as students, often more so. And he wouldn’t simply admit that Ethan’s expulsion for taking a beating from Arnold White was grossly unjust. Which it was. But Ethan wasn’t the first, and he wouldn’t be the last student, to be subjected to Principal Chase’s medieval rulings.

“The regulations are clear in this respect,” he said. “For any incident of fighting on school grounds, both parties are expelled. It’s the way it is.”

“I hear you. My Ethan,” she continued, “he’s not generally a courageous kind of a person, you know, but very, very practical. He sits around the house, he’s very—” She was reaching for the word.

“Somewhat passive.”

“Yes. Passive. Bookish. His father was embarrassed of him. But now he’s blown up, got his blood up here, you see, and he won’t go outside because he’s afraid Arnie White’ll be waiting for him with a brickbat. He’s abandoned his computer and he crawls around the house. It’s the most energetic I’ve seen him since before his father left.”

“I don’t think I’m the man to speak to about this, Mrs. Pederson. I have no power here.” He picked a spec of lint from the lapel of his pajama shirt. “And I’m not sure what you’re asking me to do.”

“I want my boy to get into a decent college, have a decent life, sure,” she said. “But he’s a goody-goody. Never been disciplined in his life. But tough discipline helps to make a man less—what do you say?—less passive.” She was breathing into the phone. “It’s shaken him up, livened him up. Made him take a look at his life.” A pause. “The two of those boys should finish this thing between them. Do you get me? They should finish it.”

“I’m afraid I don’t get you, Mrs. Pederson. You may come in and speak with Principal Chase about the matter any time.”

He hung up.

~

The next afternoon, after morning classes, while taking his lunch alone in his office, Ned drew up what information he had on Ethan Pederson on his computer. He hadn’t slept well.

As it turned out, he was a recent transfer student, so recent that there was no photograph of him on his intranet profile, just a full name and a smattering of details. According to his birthdate, he’d skipped a grade. Or possibly two. Also ... Easton High was his third school in as many years. That was interesting to note. And also, he and his mother apparently lived in an apartment on Tanning Lane, which was a middle-class address for their town, if he recalled correctly, so Ned knew they were dealing with a kid who probably didn’t go hungry. Troubled, maybe, but not hungry, as some undeniably are, unfortunately.

None of which mattered anyway. Ned had nothing to do with the issue.

He gathered his brief and his books and walked around outside in back of school grounds, where there was a rear emergency door to the main building. He entered and began making his way down the now-crowded halls, toward the stairwell to his classroom, to the sound of hand slaps and shouts and fast-moving babble from the streaming jumble of pimply teenagers. In the overflowing school, helpless little Ethan had probably felt as insignificant as a single goldfish at sea, or one of his prehistoric insects alone in some primordial garden. Or as helpless, often, as Ned himself had felt. Ned could often enjoy being a teacher, yet he actually didn’t like being seenat all; that was the thing he struggled with most, the seenness, the clean unscathed little furtive quiet teen eyes tracking his movements down the corridor. He wanted above all to be the invisible official, a stealthy agent of silent, effective service and justice to the higher good. Unnoticed. An unacknowledged hero to his kids. He adored those kids, in his own way, in thisway. This was why he took up the offer to assist the vice principal.

The job of looking after children did not get harder with these new responsibilities, there was just more of it to do.

He’d begun to think lately of the early days, in his mid-twenties—back when teaching had seemed so very simple—when there were fewer students, fewer rules, and when the carefully manicured spread of the massive rear athletic field, which now glowed luminous green in the shining New England sun, had been a useless vestigial forest with a mud floor where students had used to sneak off to kiss among the birch and flowering maples. Time had changed all these things. And everything had changed everything else. After Principal Chase came on board three years ago, the old school was repainted, the grounds rolled flat in a hurry, everything filled in, made orderly, efficient, scrubbed clean, with no waste permitted, and the students now were lither, smarter, taller, stronger—like quarter-horses—more beautiful and less tolerant of incompetence as they sprinted about like gazelles from class to club meet-up to sporting event and back home again.

It was exasperating, actually. Innocence was gone. There were fewer and fewer of the rough-and-tumble types that Ned had so enjoyed.

The tides eventually wash away continents, Ned’s father had used to recite. His father had been a poet, a minor poet. Time transforms all, etc. The little river town of Easton had been transformed, too—of course it had. As had the nation itself, perhaps. Across this nation, the Principal Chases of our world had been hatched and were moving into every corner to busily reorder all domestic territories for efficiency, productivity, decrying unnecessary costs at every turn, and spilling out in crowds over the new ruins of late-stage empire, consolidating the wreckage. But if Ned disliked politico-social hypothesizing of this type, well, he also disliked the Principal Chases.

The bell blared for late afternoon period. And the anonymous, quickly depopulated halls fell quiet. Doors clapped shut, one by one, down the long corridor. Ned turned into his classroom, taking in his own door creakily behind him.

~

Later, during a free period, Ned Drucker went down to Chase’s office, as requested.

“I don’t have much use for you,” Principal Chase was saying. “You’re very little use to me, or to Vice Principal Eustus. Awarding you the office and the additional duties was a cost-cutting measure I’d dreamed up, but I tell you we’re not sure if it’s working out at this point. What have you done with your new role, anyway? Anything?”

“I’ve done what I can.”

“Hm.”

“But teaching takes up a lot of my time.”

“I knew that was a risk,” said Chase, standing up to approach the back window, where he uselessly adjusted the blinds and then sat again with his great weight behind his desk. “But I wagered you could handle it. I suppose I was wrong.” He sucked at his teeth. “Was I wrong?”

“I’ve barely begun,” said Ned. “I need more time.”

Chase nodded without expression. “I tell you, I feel trapped. It’s a nightmare. We’re thinking of eliminating your role completely. We’d have to hire somebody new, of course. A stuffed-shirt specialist. The student population is exploding, and we need someone who can keep their eye on the ball—on many balls, all going at once. And we don’t have the budget to just hire people whenever we feel like it. I care about these kids, and I want to do right by them. Do you hear me? This is about them.” He made a brief fist, then brought his hands together to form a clump of sweating, interlaced fingers. “They’re the future of this country.”

“I’ll try harder,” said Ned. “I’ll do the best I can.”

Chase didn’t respond to this. “Before you go. We have an issue,” he said, “regarding one of your students. Arnold White.”

“Yes.”

“Tell me about him.”

“He’s a troubled kid, but not dumb. He’s been dealt a difficult hand. I understand why he was expelled.”

“Obviously,” said Chase, wiping sweat from his temple. “But he got a B in your class. Isn’t that right? Speak up.”

“Yes, a strong B.”

“I’m very concerned about graduation rates here at Easton High as well as the—I shall say—the composition of our student body? And Arnold White has been held back one year already. Isn’t that so. But he passed your class, and he passed shop and gym with flying colors, of course. Turns out he’s not so bad in Spanish either. But he failed science. He failed his math course, again. He’s failed or nearly failed many things, despite great effort. Now. Arnold White is on the verge of graduating from Easton High, just right on the very verge of it. But the boy needs a bump.” Chase lowered his nose at Ned, placing both palms flat on the desktop. “But only a small bump, of course. Just enough to obtain a D average.”

“What do you propose?”

“All he needs is an A-plus in your class, and he’ll have his D average, and the boy can graduate. That’s all that’s needed. And not an A, mind you—an A-plus. I’ve done the math on this one.”

Ned sat, quietly considering. He didn’t disagree with Chase’s reasoning, necessarily, he simply hated Chase, the man himself, with such fire that any indictable wrong, any provable sign of corruption or rule-breaking that came to light, gave Ned pleasurable sparks behind his eyes, hope that one day Ned could use this information to crush Chase, crush him and bury him, so as to register at least one measly victory for the ordinary aboveboard people all around Chase, whom the skilled bureaucrat drew in close as he consolidated his puny grip on power.

“What do you say?” said Chase. “Don’t be a brute! The boy needs our help. Be kind!”

Ned waited. He imagined suffocating Chase in one of the boys’ room toilet bowls, as the students cheered him on.

He shifted in his seat. Chase said something more. Ned stood up. They shook hands. Ned had one last class to teach, which he did in a mild haze.

~

At the end of the day, Ned sat in his dark little office, peeling back the tape from his bloody bandage. Revealed beneath it was a ghastly thumb, all bruised blue around the joint and mangled and sorrowful looking, the fingernail half severed and all dark red with a blister, and a long gash down the center of the flesh, a bloody ravine that led from thumb tip halfway down to soft edge of the palm. Ned didn’t have the spiritual connection to his own body in the way he supposed others did. The injury—which he’d sustained when the bathroom mirror was suddenly smashed to pieces as he stood in a towel preparing for the day—hurt like Hell. If there had been some way of quickly, painlessly removing the digit, Ned would have done it. Blood made him ill, and the other noxious stenches of the human body, methane, sulfur, lipid, bacteria, urine, cum, sweat, acids, the roiling enzymes and mucus and hormones living in saliva, these literally made him squirm and spit and shut up his eyes.

As he finished applying a fresh bandage, Ned detected a gentle rumble at the door, as if someone were in the hall waiting for him, but before he could respond, a small, athletic figure burst into his office, leaping into his midst. Stinking of chemical perfume and faintly of pot smoke, in a blond bob and a collared dress coat, a woman marched forward and leaned over his desk. It was Mary Pederson.

“You and Principal Chase,” she shouted, “you two thought you could get away with it, didn’t you?”

“Pardon?”

“Don’t play stupid. You helped him! Arnold White!” She was enraged, hands up in the air, shined crimson nails flared. Ned felt instantaneously caught out, terrified, watching in his mind as his entire career as a teacher retreated helplessly behind him, like an object seen through the window of a speeding train.

“Calm down. That was an entirely unrelated issue. An issue of graduation rates.”

“Unrelated how!”

Ned stood up and closed the door behind her, then walked back around and beseeched her to take a seat, which she did.

“What, you let the criminal go and you jail the victim—is that how things work around here now?”

She began to weep.

Confusion came over Ned; he knew Mary Pederson couldn’t have known about Arnold White’s grades and Chase’s request. He stared at her with his head titled to one side, considering this.

“Tell me what you’re talking about.”

“I came in here today to talk to someone about my son. And who do I see chatting up a girl, in the hall after class—Arnold White! So I ask him, aren’t you expelled? And he gets all meek, he must have thought I was an administrator at the school. So he pulls out an official-looking sheet and hands it to me. So, I read it. It says his expulsion was revoked, scrubbed from his record!”

“That can’t be.”

“It’s true!” she said. “ ‘Clemency allowing attendance to all classes until the end of the year’!”

“I didn’t know.” Ned’s heart was desperately trying to escape his body, his mouth dry and bitter and burning. When he pressed his hand to his forehead, moving to massage his temple with a thumb, he screeched out in pain. He thought he might faint.

“Jesus. All the teachers here look like shit, but you look by far the worst.”

“I’m sorry. I’m having a difficult week.”

“Are you!” she said. “What about my son? You all think you can just let the boy who beat the piss out of him go, and I won’t find out about it?”

“I didn’t think that at all. I had no idea he was allowed to attend classes.”

“Well, what are you going to do about it? Don’t be a monster to my son.”

“I don’t have anything to do with your son,” he said. “I don’t know the boy.”

“How not!” she said. “You’re an administrator here, aren’t you?”

“I’m something like that, Mrs. Pederson. But I mainly teach. And I don’t control what the principal chooses to do. If you’d like to handle this, I suggest talking to him.”

“I went to his office. He’s gone for the day. Fat ass.”

“I thought you were happy Ethan was being disciplined.”

“But it’s unfair. Are you crazy? What do you have against my son?”

She positively gleamed with righteous anger. Ned could see who was on the right side of this thing now—and it wasn’t him or Chase or even the two boys. Clearly, in an effort to help Arnold White graduate, Chase had offered him a rare forgiveness regarding his short-term expulsion, probably with the requirement that he have no more disciplinary issues. But what was perfectly reasonable from Chase’s perspective, Ned could see, was an undeniable, unconscionable crime to Mrs. Pederson. And rightly so.

“I can help you. I will.”

“Oh, will you now?”

“I can talk to Principal Chase. We can do it together.”

Mary Pederson shot to a stand, her red face bunched up as if she might cry again. She drew back, in pure disgust:

“I don’t want your help—you puny little kitten of a man!”

And she turned and bolted out of the office, the thumps of her sneakers echoing down the hall, terminating in the wheeze of a far double door, which swung open and slammed shut behind her.

~

Driving home, Ned decided the thing to do, to save his soul, to be able to sleep again, was to pay a visit to Ethan Pederson. He could explain; they could chat. He remembered the address. He thought he even knew the building. Easton was not a very big town.

In his mind, he was composing a blistering resignation email he would send to Principal Chase that night, filled with subtle indictments and cunning sub-textual devastations. For sure, he was going to quit his role as assistant to Vice Principal Eustus. But, inevitably, the option to retire early from teaching altogether was also there. Staying on as a teacher, he could retire in ten years. But ten more years of teaching, a job he once loved, now seemed like a senseless waste of time and life, a grueling eternity culminating in suffocating unfulfillment and humiliation. The whole practice of education was like some berserk gizmo now, a wasteful scheme feigning at improving the citizenry. Failed, failed—and Ned had only added to the failure.

Passing the center of town, Ned was pleased by the day’s remaining brightness, the late sun lighting up the big statue that stood across from the courthouse. The figure was a tall stone rendering of Reverend William Wheelwright, founder of the town of Easton some 260 years ago, holding aloft an open Bible and, in his other arm, a baby child. Though this statue had been funded and put up decades before, only recently had the town begun regularly to bathe it—it stood at the center of the main traffic circle and often became grimy with exhaust fumes and graffiti—and plant colorful flowers around its base. The streets, too, had been repaved. The candy shop and the café were bustling with local business and, down Water Street, Ned saw that they were busy repainting the front of the old shoe seller, as well as the next-door wine shop, a pleasing shade of deep maroon.

Ned turned right, heading away from his neighborhood, toward the outskirts. The long Route 101 was crowded on either side by thick forest, old farm country, and Ned passed a small lake surrounded by split-rail fences. There was even a white farmhouse out there, hay bails. He never had time to enjoy these things, though day-tripping tourists often came through in summer. Up ahead, after a few minutes of pleasant driving, was Tanning Lane.

It was not as he’d remembered it. What in his mind had been a street lined with fetching middle-class homes and friendly communities had deteriorated to a degree that he could hardly fathom. And he realized: the old trailer parks were near here somewhere too. If Easton had a wrong-side-of-the-tracks, this area was it.

Tanning Lane went on for a while, getting worse and worse, the houses more slumped and dilapidated, as the sky’s light waned, and the energy seemed to go out of the day. Here the apartment building, which looked like nothing more than an ordinary unpainted dumpy little house, appeared. Behind it was more forest, and on the other side of that forest, less than a half-mile away, would be the two trailer parks. So, it was clear why Ethan Pederson hadn’t wanted to leave his house—Arnold White only had to make a pleasant ten minute walk through the woods to stand terrifyingly at the boy’s door.

Ned parked in the street. He got out of his car.

Just one memory came back to Ned Drucker then, suddenly. At a parent-teacher meeting, three years back, Ned had found himself provoked beyond all rationality at the temper of the conference and, standing up among a roomful of his peers, he’d broken his silence to passionately, madly defend the incoming administration to a crowd of incredulous parents, shouting about the future of their children, their safety and needs: physical order, moral order, spiritual order, all of it. The budgetary issues were very important, he insisted, and maybe a new tack was required to get things in line. Yes, maybe Principal Chase was our man. The words flew out; he could hardly recall his own meaning by them. Listening to this, the other attendees seemed primarily surprised to see Ned there at all. One woman leaned to the side, and Ned could see her lips asking her frumpy husband: Who is this man? Once done with his speech, Ned had plopped down in his collapsible chair in a hot sweat, as if stupefied. He marveled then at his own inexplicable behavior. The words seemed to have emerged miraculously from his mouth, sailing out of him in the absence of any compelling force, like an endless harlequin kerchief called forth from a stage magician’s empty fist.

As Ned made his way to the house, Mary Pederson emerged on the porch. Alone, she stood on the jamb, leaning back, one arm extending into the still-open door. Ned saw that she was urging forward her son, Ethan, who at last appeared there, the eternal long-suffering victim in all this, leaning one small shoulder hard into the wall, almost embracing the wood, seemingly attempting to vanish into it. The boy was diminutive, stunted almost, malnourished, looking younger than his fifteen years. He had a black eye and wore an arm brace, and with his split lip it looked like Arnold White had bruised the kid up pretty good generally. Short, wearing thick new glasses, nerdy, shy, yes, and funny looking with red hair, and appearing like a small and scared or confused animal—but no more than other students Ned had known in his years of teaching. In fact, Ethan looked altogether healthy. He seemed all right, after all that had happened to him.

With relief, Ned advanced toward the porch. The house’s unlit windows loomed in darkness, seeming empty inside, and getting closer to the well-kept shrubs one could see within them nests and tent bugs and spiders and large areas of what looked to be small-scale blight browning the leaves. As Ned leapt up the steps, he felt an impulse to genuflect, to fall to praise of Mary Pederson as a strange figure of calm dignity, a semi-deity more competent, kind, strong, more restrained and gentle than he.

“Say hullo to the man, Ethan.”

Ned reached out to shake the boy’s limp hand. But shivering Ethan Pederson, with his suspicious nervous one-eyed glare, rapidly withdrew with his little hand back into the house before Ned could touch him, asking his mother in a retreating whisper just who the odd man was. Who was he, who was that man? And as the boy disappeared, Mary Pederson, leaving off to pursue her child with her singular and unswerving devotion, disappeared too, dropping shut the heavy front door, which fell closed in Ned Drucker’s expectant face like a judgment.

~

Read the text here at Hobart.

To tide you over, here is a new series of mine, which I’ve been planning for some months now…

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