The Known World feels like a book that took a long time to write. The writing proceeds at a slow but churning pace. Jones meticulously ties each character to one another, to the land, to the curious circumstances of the “peculiar institution” of slavery. We are taught in school that slavery was a black and white affair, but Jones takes great pains to describe a human landscape where such distinctions are blurry: the most powerful man in Manchester County, William Robbins, dotes upon the two children he has fathered with his slave, Philomena; Oden, the Indian, exaggerates his cruelty towards blacks to maintain his tenuous superiority; and Henry Townsend, the gifted young black man at the center of this novel, acquires a plantation full of slaves from which discord flows, imperceptibly at first. The lesson is the messiness of slavery made real by the vivid lives of each character. Over the course of the novel, Jones sketches out each character, from birth to death, using deft flashbacks and flash-forwards that are scattered throughout like crumbs and give the book a marvelous depth. In this sense, the book reminded me of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. The book ends before the Civil War begins, and so the triumph of good over evil is not allowed to mitigate the brutal picture of slavery that Jones paints. Perhaps because it was so assiduously researched, this novel feels like history and it feels like life. Here’s hoping that Jones’ next one doesn’t take ten years to write.
Review: The Known World by Edward P. Jones
Against the Anti-Art Literati: On Roberto Calasso’s ‘The Art of the Publisher’
For the most part, publishing today, whether print or digital, lacks the overarching sensibility that only the good publisher provides.
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Dear Sugar: On Tiny Beautiful Things
A good psychoanalyst does two things: she listens, and she dissects.
In Tiny Beautiful Things, a collection of her advice columns, Cheryl Strayed does both adeptly. The thing is, she’s never met the people she’s scrutinizing, and she’s far from a trained psychoanalyst. In fact, Strayed writes, “I’ve only seen a therapist a handful of times in my life.” It’s a shocking revelation.
The columns in the book were originally written for The Rumpus under the pen name Sugar, and Strayed’s identity was concealed until February. In the book, the pieces are presented in five groups, interspersed with short Q&As with Strayed.
Like every advice column, each piece here is in two parts: the letter someone sent in and the reply Sugar wrote back. Only here, the letters are long affairs -- usually paragraphs, sometimes pages. If you want to read Sugar’s words, you must read her advisee’s story first.
But the real listening is in Sugar’s replies. Most people who write in use an alias -- Stuck, Mourning and Raging, Wanting -- which Strayed repeats throughout her letters, a reminder that she’s writing a column, yes, but she’s also writing it to you, letter-writer. It’s the affection of a mother, or a lover, saying your name over and over again. But it’s charged with an undercurrent: this isn’t, in fact, your name. It’s the question or lack that drives your existence.
“I could put most of the letters I receive into two piles: those from people who are afraid to do what they know in their hearts they need to do, and those from people who have genuinely lost their way,” Strayed writes in one letter. It’s the former that yield the most interesting and thoughtful responses. Strayed finds the worm buried at the bottom of a pile of dirt, pulls it out like a thread, and slices it open. The innards of the innards: that’s where she starts. As Sugar puts it, “This is where we must dig.”
Often, she quotes letters back at her advisees, showing them what they’ve already told her. One young woman, about to lose her job, asks Sugar whether she should take a prostitution gig in order to pay the bills. “You don’t need me to tell you whether you should accept this offer. You need me only to show you to yourself,” Strayed writes. “Every time I think about him touching me I want to cry, you say. Do you hear that?” Or, in another letter: “The sad but strong and true answer is the one you already told yourself.”
Sugar forces us to swallow sometimes painful realizations about what we want, who we are, and what we therefore must do -- or, if not that, the choices we must make. She also lays bare the impossibility of controlling what isn’t ours to control. To a woman contemplating inviting her abusive father to her wedding in the hopes that he’ll be different, Sugar writes, “Oh, but baby girl, your father is not going to do anything you want him to do because you want him to do it. Not one damn motherloving thing! You simply didn’t get that kind of dad.” You simply didn’t get that kind of dad: this is a slap. Some things you don’t get to pick.
The honesty is far more comforting than shallow promises would be. Sugar can handle what’s real in us. Psychoanalysts are meant to act as containers for their patients’ emotions and subconscious thoughts, modifying frustrations so patients can handle them -- the type of thing a detached or emotionally fragile mother can’t do. Sugar has this capacity, if (obviously) not the knowledge of her letter-writers that analysts have of their patients. If she can handle our treacherous secrets without disintegrating, maybe others will accept us in our entirety, too. Maybe we can even accept ourselves.
Strayed’s letters were written anonymously, but this doesn’t prevent her from divulging incredibly personal details. We learn that her father was a “destructive force,” that her mother died young, that her grandfather sexually abused her. Her past has included theft, heroin, an abortion, a divorce. We learn that she now is married with two children, that she’s content, that her husband cheated on her, but that they transcended that horror. And we know that, by now, she knows herself pretty damn well.
Sigmund Freud wrote: “The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.” Sugar? No. Aside from the anonymity, she’s anything but opaque.
Well, sort of. Sugar seems to have had more experiences than any human we’ve ever met, like some sort of omniscient goddess. This is its own form of opacity. But on a literal level, yes, she’s sharing heaps of personal information. How do we reconcile her analyst-like aura with her revelatory tendencies? More to the point, how does she come across as listening to readers with her entire being if her response often features herself?
These stories are not written for their own sake, but as a way to explain human complexity. The details of her past theft comes out as a means of empathizing with a writer ashamed of the same. Sugar describes her husband’s infidelity to help a fiancée with a stark, black-and-white view of marriage consider nuance. This is the type of meaning-making any personal essayist or memoirist should aim for, of course -- and, notably, Strayed is both -- but it’s all the more explicit and obvious in an advice column. Strayed’s story is, in its way, a mirror.
One of Strayed’s most vital messages -- which her revelations of past lapses are meant to show -- is that being a real, whole person means being imperfect. Sugar models this not only in her history, but in her letters, too. Once in a while, she doesn’t offer the empathy we so seek. She falters.
One woman writes in, distraught that her parents will no longer be helping with her student loans. She writes that she is angry, but that she feels selfish about it; more importantly, she writes, “My relationship with my parents has always been rocky to the point that I’ve come to realize I’ll never get any emotional support from them,” and “I wish my parents would see me for the vibrant woman I am.”
Strayed replies by describing the 16 jobs she’d had by the time she graduated from college. She writes, “You need to stop feeling sorry for yourself.” Her letter focuses on the woman’s responsibility for her own (financial) life.
This is valid. But perhaps Strayed’s own complexes about her financial history are clouding her judgment here, because her focus is misplaced. This letter isn’t, at root, about the money. It’s about emotional neglect -- the woman has literally written that she wishes her parents could really understand her. The monetary support was just a feeble stand-in, and now it’s gone.
Sugar’s error here -- her rare failure to unearth the nugget at the center -- in fact helps us better understand her point. Sugar is good enough, but not perfect, as a person or an advisor. Which is exactly what she’s been trying to tell us all along.
Her Body, Herself: On Dylan Landis’s Rainey Royal
There are the makings of an explosive novel here, but Landis, having set the bomb in place and struck the match, declines to light the fuse.
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A Tiny Inheritance: Edmund de Waal’s The Hare With the Amber Eyes
1.
I have rarely trusted an author as implicitly as I trusted Edmund de Waal, after reading the preface to his book, The Hare With the Amber Eyes. The eponymous hare is carved out of ivory, and fits in the palm of your hand. It is one of a collection of 264 such figures, called netsuke in Japan, where they were carved, now owned by de Waal.
The netsuke collection was passed to de Waal from his great-uncle Iggy, who inherited it from his parents, who received it as a wedding gift from their cousin Charles Ephrussi, who collected them in Paris in the late 19th century, when japonisme was all the rage. The Hare With the Amber Eyes is therefore the story of the Ephrussi family, filthy rich bankers from Odessa who sent their sons and grandsons to Paris, Vienna, and London to establish a financial empire.
As de Waal says in the preface, “It could write itself, I think, this kind of story. A few stitched-together wistful anecdotes, more about the Orient Express, of course, a bit of wandering round Prague or somewhere equally photogenic, some clippings from Google on ballrooms in the Belle Epoque. It would come out as nostalgic. And thin.”
De Waal is a professional potter, and his impression of any environment - even a remembered or imagined one - is very tactile. When he enters a room, he notices its objects, their textures, who must have made them, and when. When he thinks of the netsuke’s previous owners, he wants to know where they kept the collection, how often they picked up the carvings and rolled them around in their fingers. He will have no nostalgic, sepia-toned portraits of Charles Ephrussi dandying around Paris. He looks into the past, at his great-grandfather’s cousin, and wonders: if this man bought these carvings a century ago, and I’m holding them in my hands, how are we connected?
2.
Charles is a fine man to be connected to. Even as a Parisian transplant, living on Rue “New Money” Monceau, he worked his way to the center of fashionable society. He loved art. He collected it - Manet, Renoir, Degas - and wrote about it, as the editor of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts. His rooms in the Ephrussi household were carefully curated, ever in flux and a la mode.
Charles was known to be one of two models for Proust’s Swann - “the lesser it was said, of the two” - and intimately connected to Proust himself. I have a soft spot for Proust - I think anyone who has read his novel feels proprietary towards the world of it. Finding him and a version of Charles Swann walking around in de Waal’s family history was like bumping into an old friend. Ephrussi and Proust were friends. Charles advised him on his translation of Ruskin, let him use the library at the Gazette, and invited him to the Rue Monceau to see his collection.
Descriptions of Charles’ paintings, and of his cameo in Renoir’s Boating Party (he’s the one in back in the top hat) make it into Proust’s work, but there’s no evidence in his writing or letters that he saw the netsuke, although a simple timeline would suggest he did. Among Charles’s impressive collection, the netsuke were an anomaly. Japonisme had been fashionable for a few seasons, but Charles seemed to retain a fondness for them. When his younger cousin Viktor Ephrussi was married in Vienna, he sent the entire collection, in its vitrine, as a gift.
Charles and Viktor were each the youngest boy in their family - the boys that weren’t groomed for finance. From among Charles’s noteworthy collection, sending Viktor a case of odd, whimsical figures - the ivory hare, the persimmons, the turtles, the peasant woman, a coiled rope - seems like a wink. “You might find these interesting,” I can hear him say. And indeed, as the mighty Ephrussi dynasty was scattered and depleted throughout the 20th century, the netsuke were kept close to the chest - hidden by a family servant while Nazis plundered the rest of the collection, given to Iggie, Viktor’s shy, sensitive son, and finally to de Waal.
We can never know the people who came before us, but we can own their dining tables, walk the streets they walked, put the Japanese knick-knacks they bought in our pockets, and infuse them with meaning. De Waal frequently carried the hare with him while he traveled to Paris, Vienna, London, and Tokyo researching the book. While hunting down the details of their lives, he had a constant reminder that it was a story leading to his own.
3.
After having fallen in love with Charles Ephrussi while reading The Hare With the Amber Eyes, I learned that a painting he owned, Renoir’s Two Sisters, now hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago, across the street from my office. I stopped by after work one night to look at what Charles looked at. I got up close, examining the brush strokes, imagining him standing in his rooms in Paris showing it to Proust. Or perhaps the two of them in a different corner, discussing translation, while the two sisters watched silently. What does this mean, my brain struggled to conclude, what am I feeling? It was free night at the museum, which shares an ambiance with a mall food court, so the mystical me-Charles-Proust connection eluded me. But I was satisfied to know that the life of Renoir’s painting now included both Proust and myself. This may be why we love to keep things, and pass them on. As the netsuke do for the Ephrussi family, the objects that survive are what prove that we’re part of each other’s stories.
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Transforming Florida: On Sarah Gerard’s ‘Sunshine State’
Gerard’s writing has been described as “unflinching,” but perhaps the better terms are “generous” and “patient.” Her patience is what gets her close enough to her subjects that she can round them out, exhibit their complexities, and her generosity is what keeps her from mocking them.
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