Alternating between particular and general experience in “The Wandering Lake,” Patty Chang demonstrates the power of arbitrary acts, executed with devotion, to produce their own truth. This is a guide to mourning; but Chang widens the scope to include political conflict and environmental degradation, and argues that, despite the losses we’ve incurred, we are still collaborators in the making of our worlds.
Books
The Pattern and Passion of ‘Phantom Thread’
The metaphor of couture is hard to avoid in a film so centrally involved with measuring and cutting and sewing, stitching and unstitching. The very visible boldness of the editing, the leaps and ellipses, keep the idea of cutting very much at the forefront. A crucial scene in which a wedding dress must be repaired overnight evokes both an emergency medical operation and the race against time to reshape a film in the editing room.
Peculiar Ground
Lucy Hughes-Hallett, prizewinning biographer and cultural historian, here turns her talents to fiction with a first novel, Peculiar Ground. The story begins in 1663 as the Royalist earl of Woldingham returns to his grand estate, Wychwood, following his exile during the upheaval of the English Civil War and the subsequent periods of the Commonwealth and Protectorate. In his absence, his cousin Cecily presided over the place, thus keeping it in the family. Now, even with the Stuarts back on the throne and his house and lands returned, the earl feels uneasy and has caused a great wall to be erected around the entire estate. His hope is to create his own little Eden, and to this end he has employed an ingenious landscape designer, John Norris, who is pushing forward plans for two great avenues of trees, a sequence of three linked lakes, and a prodigious fountain. Also in his employ are Robert Rose, an architect; George Goodyear, head forester; a man simply called Lane, the estate steward; and another, Armstrong, whose special care is game: deer and pheasant, chiefly.
But all is not well. A group of radical religious dissenters continue their heterodox worship in a meetinghouse on the grounds, a structure that has been built over a relict of the Romans, a mosaic depicting two boys with joined hands. The image possesses great, if highly mysterious, import. An old woman, accompanied by a young, rustic boy, flits through the woods. She is Meg Leafield and is thought to be a witch. One of the earl’s young sons drowns. Cecily dresses up Meg’s young companion in clothes similar to the dead boy’s, to whom he bears a striking likeness. Something very strange happens — and with that we leave the seventeenth century for some 300 pages.
The story next makes landfall in 1961, as we find that the estate has new owners, the Rossiters, whose son has also drowned. And, just to continue on this parallel track, the place is peopled by the descendants of the earl of Woldingham’s men. Once again we have a Goodyear and an Armstrong. A Hugo Lane is the steward or land agent and lives on the estate with his wife and children. An old woman called Meg is in circulation, up to a lot of witchy business in the shape of herbal nostrums and charms. A house party finds among the guests another Rose (this one a restaurateur, designer, and libertine). There is also an Anthony Blunt−style spy, a freelance journalist, a luscious young siren, and an enfant terrible. There are carryings-on. The wall surrounding the parklands still stands — but everyone’s attention is drawn to another one just going up in Berlin.
The novel goes on to give full throttle to the theme of walls and continues to dangle the notion that there is a parallel or even a connection between events of the distant past and those of the present. We follow the lives of the twentieth-century characters over ensuing years, the story making further stops in 1973 (an invitation-only pop concert on the walled estate) and 1989 (and the fall of the Berlin Wall), before returning to the seventeenth century, to 1665, just in time for the bubonic plague, the wall in this moment serving to keep fleeing Londoners, nearby villagers, and their attendant contagion out of the estate.
In the novel’s favor, I can say that it shows a fine sense of time and place in each venue, and there are some terrific set pieces: a battle against a raging fire, the experience and calamitous outcome of the storm dubbed the Great Wind of 1987 (here set in 1989), and the evacuation of plague-stricken London. A number of images are truly arresting, one being a waterfront street ending at a great wall of steel: the vast hull of a ship rising to inconceivable heights. There are, too, a couple of excellently drawn self-important characters, though their time on the stage is sadly brief. All in all, however, the story has an awful rattle of devices: the recurrent theme of walls, random echoes of the past, some portentous stories-within-stories, and that truly irksome mosaic — which is meant, it is suggested, to explain . . . something. Rather than pulling the story together, these literary maneuvers serve to diminish it, making it serve as a showcase, while the plot itself becomes a litter of miscellaneous parts. Perhaps next time — and I hope there will be one — Hughes-Hallett will leave these literary exercises behind and get on with the story.
Image of Bibury Court by John Menard via Wikipedia.
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Cashing In on Céline’s Anti-Semitism
Paris during the Occupation was a place of moral ambiguity, of cowardice, treason, and courage living side by side. Today, though, the morally ambiguous attitude of the publisher Gallimard has no justification. Its urge to re-issue the violently anti-Semitic prose that Céline himself did not want to reprint is questionable; its decision to do so quickly and carelessly was even more dubious.
Street Fighting Woman
With its economic instability, mass immigration, corrupting influence of money on politics, and ever-increasing gap between the rich and everyone else, our current era bears more than a slight resemblance to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, dubbed by Mark Twain the Gilded Age. There are also striking differences. Back then, larger-than-life radical organizers—Eugene V. Debs, Emma Goldman, Bill Haywood, and others—traversed the country, calling on the working class to rise up against its oppressors. Today’s critics of the capitalist order such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren seem tame by comparison.
Homeless in Gaza
In Gaza more than 60 percent of the population is under the age of twenty-five, and it is among the young that the deepest despair often takes root. Some are turning to radical Islam, others to drugs. As many as eighty suicides are reported in Gaza each month, according to local aid groups, many among the young. Most of Gaza’s younger generation have nevertheless remained remarkably resilient, preparing against the odds for a better future, while also making an effort to learn about their past.
Will the Court Kill the Gerrymander?
The Wisconsin redistricting case before the Supreme Court, Gill v. Whitford, underscores how the justices’ failure to act on gerrymandering when they last had the chance, over a decade ago, has warped American electoral politics almost beyond recognition. It has allowed Republicans to turn the last three elections for Congress and many statehouses into a strange simulacrum of competition, in which the parties compete vigorously for votes even though GOP control has often been all but assured from the outset. At stake in Gill is the question of whether election outcomes can be made once again to provide at least a rough reflection of the popular will.
Trump to Undocumented Teens: Give Birth or Get Out
At the core of the anti-abortion movement is the tenet that a fetus is a person whose rights need to be protected. The Trump administration is taking this argument to an absurd and cruel extreme. A fetus in the United States requires the full protection and support of American law. As for its undocumented, adolescent mother—well, if she wants her rights, she should leave the country.
The B&N Podcast: Kelly Corrigan
Every author has a story beyond the one that they put down on paper. The Barnes & Noble Podcast goes between the lines with today’s most interesting writers, exploring what inspires them, what confounds them, and what they were thinking when they wrote the books we’re talking about.
The bestselling memoirist Kelly Corrigan joins us in this episode to talk about Tell Me More, her thought-provoking new book, built around twelve brief phrases – like “I Was Wrong” or “It’s Like This” – that provide the essential lexicon for meaningful communication in our lives. It’s a meditation on life and meaning told through stories – funny, revealing, and in places raw with emotion – unfolded in a voice like that of a friend, sitting across from you at a table, telling you about her day in a way that invites you to talk about your own.
It’s a crazy idea: trying to name the phrases that make love and connection possible. But that’s just what Kelly Corrigan has set out to do here. In her New York Times bestselling memoirs, Corrigan distilled our core relationships to their essences, showcasing a warm, easy storytelling style. Now, in Tell Me More, she’s back with a deeply personal, unfailingly honest, and often hilarious examination of the essential phrases that turn the wheel of life.
In “I Don’t Know,” Corrigan wrestles to make peace with uncertainty, whether it’s over invitations that never came or a friend’s agonizing infertility. In “No,” she admires her mother’s ability to set boundaries and her liberating willingness to be unpopular. In “Tell Me More,” a facialist named Tish teaches her something important about listening. And in “I Was Wrong,” she comes clean about her disastrous role in a family fight—and explains why saying sorry may not be enough. With refreshing candor, a deep well of empathy, and her signature desire to understand “the thing behind the thing,” Corrigan swings between meditations on life with a preoccupied husband and two mercurial teenage daughters to profound observations on love and loss.
With the streetwise, ever-relatable voice that defines Corrigan’s work, Tell Me More is a moving and meaningful take on the power of the right words at the right moment to change everything.
See more books by Kelly Corrigan.
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Memories of Mississippi
I had done it. Deep in the South I had reached one of the towns central to an uprising that would sweep away legal segregation, bring the vote to black people in the thirteen states that had made up the Confederacy, and overthrow the system of racial oppression called Jim Crow that had been re-imposed in those states after the Civil War. Over my shoulder was a Nikon F reflex. “You got a camera,” James Forman—then SNCC’s executive secretary—said to me when we met at the Freedom House. “Go into the courthouse. They got a big water cooler for whites and a little bitty bowel for negroes. Go take a picture of that.”
Sig Nordal 