Mercury is Margot Livesey’s eighth novel, and just like the previous seven, it is completely different from its predecessors. Her books have been peopled by a most variegated lot, among them an evil child, a lunatic, a blackmailer, an amnesiac, a control freak, a couple of ghosts, and, last time, in The Flight of Gemma Hardy, a mid-twentieth-century version of Jane Eyre. Now we find ourselves sucked deep into the lives of an optometrist, his equestrian wife, and their two children.

Scottish-born Donald Stevenson was brought to this country by his parents when he was ten, a temporary move that turned permanent. It was wrenching, above all because it separated him from his best friend, a boy he finally stopped writing to when he had to admit that he wasn’t coming back. Throwing up barriers, we discover, is Donald’s way of dealing with painful emotions. Now he’s a grown man but once again in a state of shuttered bereavement, this time for his father, who died fairly recently from Parkinson’s disease. We learn that Donald has, in fact, shaped the last several years of his and his family’s life around his father’s decline. He moved them all to be closer to his parents, gave up the medical discipline of ophthalmology for optometry with its shorter, more predictable hours, and visited the increasingly disabled man as often as possible.

On the distaff side of this tale is Donald’s wife, Viv, who left a well-paying job in mutual funds to run a stable with her friend Claudia, a business she loves though it pays peanuts. Like her husband, she, too, has a devastating loss in her past, that of an adored horse who had to be put down as a result of her own mistakes in training. Now she has fallen in love with Mercury, a beautiful thoroughbred boarded at the stable and owned by a woman called Hilary. Hilary, not a horsewoman herself, is glad to have someone exercise the creature, which has come to her via an inheritance with its own tragic details.

Other crucial characters spin off their own little side plots, all of which converge on the fateful main one. Claudia, Viv’s partner, is involved with a married man; Hilary, the owner of Mercury, falls in love with Jack, one of Donald’s former patients, now blind. There is also a young stable girl, Charlie, who has become as smitten with Mercury as Viv has — and that cannot bode well.

While Donald flounders in grief, Viv becomes increasingly intoxicated by the dream that she can redo the past and train a champion: “I was going to ride him to victory . . . I was going to fulfill the promise of my second life.” She neglects her family, throws around money they cannot afford to spend, and becomes paranoid that harm will come to the horse. Those fears grow as she detects that someone has visited the horse in the night. Still, Viv loses sight of what should be the most disquieting fact of all: Mercury does not actually belong to her. Step by step, Livesey brilliantly assembles a truly painful and frightening picture of delusion. A sequence of fateful acts follow, leading to tragedy and a terrible moral conundrum.

Most of the novel is presented as an account written by Donald after the fact, but as he is the most judicious of narrators, he includes a long letter from Viv. This allows her to offer her version, one that fills in emotional detail — not Donald’s strong suit. His manner of narration has a nineteenth-century Caledonian air, one marked by a knell of dark foreboding. He points to incidents that would turn out to have dire repercussions and to the signs he missed of coming disaster. He was blind, he sees now, to what was going on around him. It is a failing made almost ludicrous considering that his prize possession, his totem, really, is a model of an eye, twelve times the size of an actual one. “[W]e think we see with our eyes,” he explains to a patient, “but really we see with our brains.”

In addition to sight — or lack of it — the novel’s other governing motif is Mercury, the implications and connotations of which are thoroughly unpacked by the diligent Donald — he’s that kind of guy and Livesey is that kind of writer. There’s Mercury the horse, the swiftest of the gods and their messenger, and mercury the element that, as Donald reminds himself, is a poison that causes death and — yes — blindness. And there is Mercury, the planet and part of a system of bodies, each affecting the others. Donald gets all this going, trying to figure out, in his weirdly analytic way, how to understand his life and that of those around him.

These strands of allusion and connotation — some as subtle as gossamer, some as conspicuous as a hawser — contribute to the novel’s deftly manipulated tension. I cannot in good conscience reveal more of the plot. I came to this story in a state of innocence, and I feel that its terrific power depended in great part on the gradual unfolding of unlooked-for events. So, I leave this pleasure for you to experience in its unadulterated form.

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By 2015, the international community pledged to reduce adult illiteracy rates by 50% compared to 2000 levels as part of the Education for All (EFA) goals. While the number of illiterate people has fallen over the past 15 years, UIS [UNESCO Institute of Statistics] data show that 757 million adults still lack basic reading and writing skills . . . Two out of three illiterate people are women — one generation after another.

—from the latest UN report on literacy

I was unable to save the names and numbers of contacts on my phone before taking the literacy course because I couldn’t read or write, but now I am very happy because I can save them without asking anyone else for help.

—from one of the 62 Kurdish women who recently graduated from a three-month, UN-sponsored literacy program

September 8th is the fiftieth anniversary of International Literacy Day. The first quotation above indicates that, after a half century, one of the UN’s primary goals when the institution was founded in 1945 remains elusive. The second quotation indicates the sort of progress that is being made — other women in the same Kurdish group expressing hope that they can now get a job, drive a car, read about world events, and break the cycle into which they and theirs were born: “I am now able to help my children practice reading and writing during their summer holidays to prepare them for the new school year.”

In A Path Appears: Transforming Lives, Creating Opportunity, Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn offer case studies of initiatives in literacy and other fields of social change that have proven worthwhile, instructive, and inspiring. At the organizational level, for example, Kristof and WuDunn highlight the exemplary success of John Wood’s “Room to Read” program. As Wood describes in his Leaving Microsoft to Change the World and Creating Room to Read, he went from being a high-flying business executive with a wild, one-off plan — getting his friends to donate books so that he could take them, on the backs of yaks, to a remote Nepalese village — to being the founder of an organization that, over the last eighteen years, has distributed over 10 million books and constructed over 1,500 schools in needy regions. One of Kristof and WuDunn’s individual success stories describes the transformation of the orphaned South Sudanese refugee Paul Lorem from unschooled refugee to Yale graduate, literate in five languages. Putting his degree in economics to use, Lorem now heads Tanuru Farms, a company offering help and opportunity to small-scale growers in Kenya.

Having begun his education by sitting under a shade tree forming letters and numbers in the dust with his finger, Lorem could serve as poster child for Adam Braun’s The Promise of a Pencil: How an Ordinary Person Can Create Extraordinary Change. While a student studying under a Semester at Sea program, Braun travelled widely; at each stop, he and his classmates collected souvenirs — Braun’s eventually inspiring his literacy mission:

Some saved shot glasses with the names of cities etched on them in local languages. Others bought a hat or saved a beer bottle. A few took pictures of Beanie Babies in front of famous landmarks . . . Before I got on the ship, I had decided that I would ask one child per country, “If you could have anything in the world, what would you want most?”

The answer “a pencil” propelled Braun to found the “for-purpose” organization — he feels that “nonprofit” is an unhelpful negative — Pencils of Promise, which now builds schools and trains teachers worldwide.

The aha! moment that inspired Jacqueline Novogratz, founder and CEO of the venture philanthropy firm Acumen Fund, came while jogging the hills of Kigali, Rwanda. In The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World, Novogratz describes looking up from her run to see, among the banana-laden women and playing children, and as Joe Cocker’s “With a Little Help from My Friends” played on her Walkman, a small emaciated boy wearing a blue sweater — her blue sweater she confirmed, donated to a Virginia charity a decade earlier, her name still on the label.

Novogratz attributes the success of her Acumen Fund — over fifteen years it has invested almost $100 million in “patient capital” in India and Africa — to those she was able to help and who in turn helped her:

It is from them that I gained the confidence and sense of possibility that sustained me. They allowed me to believe we could — and therefore must — create a world in which every person on the planet has access to the resources needed to shape their own lives. For this is where dignity starts. Not only for the very poor, but for all of us.

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One of John le Carré’s boyhood memories is clutching his mother’s hand while waving to his father, who stood high up behind a prison wall. Ronnie Cornwell was a charming rogue, a confidence man who ran frauds and visited jails all over the world. He once sent the teenage le Carré to St. Moritz to talk a hotel manager out of an overdue bill — “and while you’re there, have yourself a steak on your old man.” Yet his love for his sons overflowed in guilty tears, and his longest con was to finagle expensive private educations for them. (He later sent a bill.) As for waving to him in prison, however, Cornwell insisted that le Carré had misremembered. Cornwell had done a stretch at Exeter Jail, yes — but everyone knows that at Exeter you can’t see into the cells from the road.

Is the memory real? This question in various forms drives le Carré’s remarkable memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life. Le Carré began his career working for British intelligence and went on to revolutionize the intrigue genre with over twenty intricately wrought novels, like Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and The Constant Gardener. Now eighty-four, he finds that pure memory is elusive “after a lifetime of blending experience with imagination.” He believes what his father said, but he also knows that after that remembered day, a part of him never saw Cornwell wearing anything but a convict’s uniform. One of the most haunting scenes of the book recounts the way the otherwise exuberant Cornwell would stand meekly at doors, waiting for them to be opened. As a prisoner, he had not been able to do this himself. And yet this memory is filtered as well: it comes secondhand, from le Carré’s mother, who abandoned him in childhood and was an enigma thereafter. It, too, is clouded by time’s opaque haze.

The Pigeon Tunnel is an episodic rather than a chronological memoir, jumping from scene to scene in le Carré’s fascinating life. The deeply affecting chapter on Cornwell is not merely the best part of the book, it may well be the best thing le Carré has ever written. Other sections are less personal. Le Carré avoids writing about his marriages, friendships, and children, focusing instead on the relationship between his work as a spy and his chosen life as a novelist. The two careers have much in common with one another and with his father’s line of work, he asserts, not least because they involve a complicated relationship to the truth. “To the creative writer, fact is raw material, not his taskmaster but his instrument, and his job is to make it sing.”

Parts of this book sing a little too much. Fans of le Carré’s intricate novels will recognize here his jargon-filled, world-weary dialogue and suspect embellishment. Such dialogue fills the chapter on spymaster Nicholas Elliott, who interviewed the traitor Kim Philby after Philby defected to the Soviet Union. Similarly, le Carré seems to make a good story even better as he recounts trying to collect a debt for his father from the Panamanian ambassador to France at age sixteen. He writes that the ambassador’s wife, “the most desirable woman I had ever seen,” played footsie with him under the table and then nibbled on his ear as they danced into the night. Such print-ready scenes are evocative but not entirely believable, and once again implicate the fraught relationship between memory and the creative act. Le Carré’s biographer Adam Sisman contends that le Carré “enjoys teasing his readers, like a fan dancer, offering tantalizing glimpses, but never a clear view of the figure beneath.”An air of mystery suits a thriller writer — especially one who used to be a spy.

The Pigeon Tunnel shows that le Carré is at his best not when he renders scenes or snappy dialogue but when he simply observes. He has a marvelous eye. His diplomatic cover in the 1960s required him to escort dignitaries from place to place, including translating for a German politician meeting with Harold Macmillan. The British prime minister’s “patrician slur . . . was like an old gramophone record running at a very low speed,” le Carré writes. “A trail of unstoppable tears leaked from the corner of his right eye, down a groove and into his shirt collar.” Le Carré briefly describes his great-grandfather, “whom I remember as a white-bearded D. H. Lawrence lookalike riding a tricycle at ninety.” Best of all is a surreal meeting with Yasser Arafat, which occurred while le Carré researched the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for a novel. As they embraced, le Carré sized up his man, whose brown eyes were “fervent and imploring.” Arafat’s famously patchy beard “is not bristle, it’s silky fluff. It smells of Johnson’s Baby Powder.”

The meeting with Arafat illustrates a central concern of le Carré’s working life: his commitment to research. It is an ironic preoccupation for a self-confessed fabulist. Although his early spying looms large in the public imagination, le Carré has gathered far more material for his novels during civilian trips to dangerous places. Many of the memoir’s chapters recount these adventures. He spent time in the eastern Congo and Khmer Rouge Cambodia; he interviewed Russian oligarchs and Middle Eastern terrorists. In every town he tried to find the watering hole where spies, diplomats, journalists, and men of fortune sought comfort and camaraderie. These settings and characters worked their way not just into his fiction but into his consciousness; they have set his novels apart from all other stories of intrigue. “An old writer’s memory is the whore of his imagination,” he confesses, late in this book. And among John le Carré’s many talents, a splendid imagination looms large.

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The names alone are calling: Acadia, Gates of the Arctic, Grand Teton, Big Bend, Glacier, Yellowstone, Yellowstone, Yellowstone. National parks so gobsmackingly scenic that you know they are Heaven’s door—or the Big House door in the case of Alcatraz Island, which has been left unlocked for years now. You take that deep breath—once you are off the access road, out of the parking lot, and nary a gift shop in sight—something that partakes of both wonder and well-being floods the system.

There are dozens of national parks in the United States. Some are historical/memorial—Gettysburg, the César E. Chavez National Monument, our friend Alcatraz—but most are of the nature-sublime school. They are picture perfect, pitch perfect: “The lark’s on the wing, / The snail’s on the thorn…All’s right with the world.” Not so fast. Yes and no. David Quammen’s Yellowstone: A Journey Through America’s Wild Heart and Terry Tempest Williams’ The Hour of the Land: A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks are in the dissection business. Unsurprisingly, they find the essence of sublime. They also find the rot that both fed and feeds the sublime. Everything has to eat, and everyone has an opinion about what should and shouldn’t be eaten.

National parks may be destinations for us tourists, but in fact they are borderlands. Borderlands, by nature, are haunted, beguiling, and fraught. Political borderlands are a case in point, and so are the cultural/physiographic borderlands of parks. Yellowstone is part of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. But that ecosystem, which sounds so vast, is “an island in many respects,” writes Quammen, evoking the island biogeography of Robert H MacArthur and Edmund O. Wilson, “an ecological island, surrounded by a sea of human impact. It’s an isolated landscape.” Species preserved by it include grizzly bear, elk, bison, and especially wolf, and “when they step off the island, they generally die.” Bang. The park is one thing, he writes, but it needs its surrounds, the great lowland ranches that have served as a buffer and wintering grounds for many of the park’s animals. Today, those ranches are disappearing into sprawling suburbs and vacation homes. This is bad news for the GYE: the “creeping crisis” of habitat loss and migration-corridor bisection.

But all parks must contend with this cultural “where civilization and wildness meet,” writes Williams, “‘the border area where two patches meet that have different ecological composition’…These edges create lines of tension.” She is 2,600 miles away from Yellowstone in Acadia Nation Park, Maine — which is, in fact, an island. This wildness is very much on Williams and Quammen’s minds; in many national parks it is a paradoxical state, a cultivated wild: “wilderness contained, nature under management, wild animals obliged to abide by human rules,” or there may be retribution. Humans have left their fingerprints everywhere, from wholesale population displacement—the abomination of American Indian removal—to the greed of the Northern Pacific Railroad that was instrumental to creating Yellowstone, to the decisions of which resident animals were welcome and which were not.

“Can we preserve…a gloriously inhospitable landscape, full of predators and prey, in which nature is still allowed to be red in tooth and claw? Can that sort of enclave be reconciled with human demands and human convenience?” asks Quammen. Wolves, mountain lions, and coyotes got the thumbs down; there was a fatwa issued on skunks; grizzlies were hunted until the spectacle of their feasting at dumps pumped up tourist dollars. Griz became a cuddly, like dolphins and pandas. But bison and grizzlies are not housebroken: Lance Crosby ran afoul of a grizzly and her cubs last year. “The sow, after killing and partially eating him (not necessarily in that order) and allowing the cubs to eat too, cached his remains beneath dirt and pine duff.” Hunted to extinction, wolves had to be reintroduced to Yellowstone, to great fanfare and opprobrium. “Occasionally they preyed on livestock…reawakening among ranching communities a vehement wolf-hatred that had lain dormant for decades, like a deep, sore memory of a blood feud.” And wolves are wanderers. Border? What border? Bang.

Williams and Quammen are crack writers of different stripes, though both are tough, curious, and possess a razory sense of humor. Both know when to get on a high horse, and when to get off. Williams makes a “poetic crossing” through a dozen parks, monuments, seashores, and recreation areas in The Hour of the Land, a poetic crossing, she quotes from Edward Hirsch, that “follows the arc from physical motion to spiritual action…into another type of consciousness, a more heightened reality. It is a move beyond the temporal, a visionary passage.” The greatness here lies in her spirit’s palpability. Williams’ hunger for intimate engagement with nature has found her in tight corners, learning “early on we live by wild mercy,” with the scar from 136 stitches running down her forehead to prove it. Unless it kills you, physical pain is nothing compared to fear, and neither compares to the experience when “fear moves out of panic toward wonder.”

Quammen—though he is more the teacher you always prayed for: the artful exegete—too, has felt the experience. Out tagging wolves with Dick Smith, who leads the wolf project in Yellowstone, Quammen closes on a darted wolf, “groggy and helpless, but he was magnificent. ‘Look at those eyes,’ Smith said. ‘That’s wild. This is what our world is trying to do away with. Right here, that look. We want to keep that look. That’s what Yellowstone is all about.’” (The photographs that accompany Quammen’s book are so startling, they appear to be computer-generated images, but they are not. There is a reason National Geographic is known for its photography: photographers blessed with talent, patience, and good fortune. The photographs in Williams’ book, fewer but no less arresting, are in moody black-and-white.)

Williams burns with her convictions: how American Indian reservations and national parks—surprise!!—walk hand in hand; to the schizophrenia of killing a bison to save an elk, or killing a bear if you trespass its personal space; that “wilderness is not a place of privilege, but rather a place of probity, where the evolutionary processes of life are free to continue”; or the Bureau of Land Management does the bidding for the energy companies. Viewshed? What viewshed? Quammen introduces us to governmental ignorance and corruption, and general human folly as regards to practices within the park (like fire suppression), like a quiet assassin, using a thin-bladed knife rather than a shotgun. The two approaches, in these four hands, work their magic on our awareness through zest, heat, and cool.

Yellowstone and The Hour of Land are rich in history—well-versed history and too often a grim history—and brimming with vignettes of the writer’s personal experiences. Neither book is a eulogy, nor a dramatic song of praise. Both are cleared-eyed as to prospects, both are protective, and both have celebrated Edward Abbey, whom Williams references for his “civil disobedience, or more to the point, wild obedience—a guide to finding one’s whole self in relation to wildness,” a nod of “‘democratic vistas’ that your brother Walt Whitman urges us to embrace.”

This park idea—“confused, inchoate, in some ways cynical at the start,” writes Quammen, “was a good idea that has gotten better, a big idea that has gotten bigger over time.” But national parks cannot be diminished or encroached upon, though the BLM (Abbey called it the Bureau of Livestock and Mining) may try. “When habitat is constrained as a small area,” like in selling off those large ranches around Yellowstone, “animal populations remain small, and small populations tend to wink out, over time, owing to accidental factors such as disease, fire, hard weather, and bad luck,” Quammen notes. The answer is more space, more habitat diversity, more life. “Bigger is better.” How odd and rare to hear those words applied to the environment, and how sane.

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The Moscow-Washington “Hot Line” (or “Red Phone,” though it never was red) became operational on August 30, 1963, when the United States sent a first test message — the standard “the quick brown fox . . . ” to which the USSR replied with a poetic description of a Moscow sunset. A Cold War icon, the hot line was the direct result of the Cuban Missile Crisis, during which exchanges between the Kremlin and the White House sometimes took dangerously long to send and decode. In bilateral agreement that the world deserved better than to be blown up by slow messaging, the two superpowers moved swiftly to a secure teletype system, now replaced by email.

One of the most unsettling chapters in hotline diplomacy occurred during the volatile later stages of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when President Nixon, according to the memoirs of many close to him, was too drunk or too depressed by his Watergate troubles to take command, or not trusted to do so by his secretary of state and national security advisor, Henry Kissinger. It was Kissinger who handled the back-and-forth on the hotline, keeping Nixon isolated until, as commander-in-chief, the president had to make a statement to the media — one that made things far worse, as Kissinger saw it. “The crazy bastard really made a mess with the Russians,” he tells White House chief of staff Alexander Haig in an October 26, 1973 telephone conversation.

Kissinger: First we had information of massive movement of Soviet forces. That is a lie. Second, this was the worst crisis since the Cuban missile crisis. True, but why rub their faces in it . . .

Haig: How about the rest of it. Disaster.

Kissinger: Yes, a disaster of something that is already a disaster. We are getting a hot line message tonight . . .

Recent books on Nixon and Kissinger draw different lessons from the Yom Kippur crisis, when Kissinger and a handful of his associates, none of them elected, took control of the hotline and the nation. In Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power, Robert Dallek describes the crisis, which Kissinger managed to turn into a personal diplomatic victory, as a failed opportunity to realize the inherent dangers in an administration that malfunctions at the highest level:

The fact that the crisis ended without a Soviet-American military confrontation and with a groundbreaking agreement by Egypt to hold direct talks with Israel to rescue its Third Army, which was still surrounded, represented a significant gain for Nixon’s foreign policy. The Yom Kippur War then became not a cautionary tale of the need for an engaged president but a reinforcement of the belief that a weakened president could rely on skilled subordinates to effectively manage an overseas crisis.

The prospect of an under-informed or loose-canon president, allowing or requiring others to shape policy or control damage, looms over several recent books. Greg Grandin’s Kissinger’s Shadow: The Long Reach of America’s Most Controversial Statesman begins with a Kissinger statement Grandin reads as his guiding principle: “The West requires nothing so much as men able to create their own reality.” This mind-set, Grandin ominously notes, is what makes “Kissingerism without Kissinger” alive and well today.

In Worldmaking: The Art and Science of American Diplomacy, David Milne examines nine thinker-politicians who have had a dominant impact on “the intellectual history of U.S. foreign policy.” Milne portrays Kissinger, one of the nine, as a man “combining genuine insight with reckless bellicosity, seminal diplomatic achievements, and vivid illustrations of how an amoral worldview can lead to immoral outcomes.” But the fundamental conclusion for Milne, especially with the 2016 election upon us, is that foreign policy and the diplomacy needed to execute it must be based on informed historical perspective rather than personality-driven promises and perspectives:

Ultimately it is through studying history and aspiring towards objectivity — it is the trying that counts, for its achievement is impossible — that foreign policymakers can study dilemmas, contexualize threats, compare their magnitude to resources available, weigh humanitarian and reputational imperatives, and offer appropriately calibrated responses.

 

Image: Mock “Hot Line” from the Jimmy Carter Library and Museum, via Wikipedia.

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Focus: The Secret, Sexy, Sometimes Sordid World of Fashion Photographers marks Michael Gross’s return to the arena that he explored two decades ago in Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women, his big-selling authorial debut, for which he drew on a fifteen-year run covering the fashion beat for outlets like the New York Times and New York magazine. Then Gross decided to shift gears. “As appealing as it was to spend three months a year sitting next to runways, getting paid to watch the most beautiful girls in the world walk back and forth,” he says, “I wanted to stop, and to write about, in an uninterrupted way, what I thought of as the world of the American aristocracy.”

Over the ensuing two decades, Gross generated four lengthy books on the One Percent through the prisms of real estate (740 Park: The Story of the World’s Richest Apartment Building; House of Outrageous Fortune: Fifteen Central Park West, the World’s Most Powerful Address: and Unreal Estate: Money, Ambition, and the Lust for Land in Los Angeles) and art (Rogues’ Gallery: The Secret Story of the Lust, Lies, Greed, and Betrayals that Made the Metropolitan Museum of Art). For good measure, he found time to write a synoptic cultural history of the Baby Boom by interweaving the stories of such varied signifiers as Mark Rudd, Marianne Williamson, and Nina Harley (My Generation: Fifty Years of Sex, Drugs, Rock, Revolution, Glamour, Greed Valor Faith and Silicon Chips) and an unauthorized biography of Ralph Lauren (Genuine Authentic: The Real Life of Ralph Lauren).

In 2014, Gross, again looking to pivot, mentioned to his agent over lunch a friend’s decision to abandon an authorized biography of Richard Avedon — who had suggested to Gross that he write Model — in the face of pressure from Avedon’s heirs.

“I had the lightbulb-over-the-head moment to take Model, turn the camera around, and point it at the guys behind the camera rather than the girls in front of the camera,” Gross said in his East Side apartment. “I immediately knew that I wanted to write about the fascinating culture of fashion photography, which has been dominated by gay and straight men who are fascinated with women in some way or another. And I had my next book.”

Gross rediscovered numerous interviews with fashion photographers, taken during the process of “over-reporting” Model. Piggybacking on this “gift from God,” he wrote a 600-page draft, then pruned to a publisher-mandated 400, following the imperative that “anyone who wasn’t part of the forward motion of the core narrative spine had to go, even though it meant that women and photographers whom I admire are under-represented.”

The final product is a tightly written, exhaustively researched, chronological account of the ways in which such high-profile photographers as Avedon and Irving Penn, Bert Stern and David Bailey, Bruce Weber and Stephen Meisel — to name a short list — intersected with the gatekeepers of the fashion business and magazine publishing, from the days after the Second World War until the digital revolution irrevocably altered the playing field at the end of the twentieth century. As is his custom, Gross skillfully juxtaposes the idiosyncracies, peccadillos, and debaucheries of his protagonists — sometimes teetering on the precipice of Too Much Information — with the shifting cultural and economic milieu in which they functioned. —Ted Panken

 

The Barnes & Noble Review: Fashion became your beat around 1980.

Michael Gross: I started when I was a history major at Vassar by co-writing a series of mystery novels with a fashion model detective character who fought back against icky men. Thus, I entered the world of models. That led me to start writing about fashion in the early ’80s, which led me to Photo District News, where I got a column on fashion photography, which led to Manhattan Inc., where I got a column on fashion, which led to the New York Times — and boom, suddenly I was important, with access to the inner sanctums.

BNR: What drew you to fashion?

MG: I wrote about rock ‘n’ roll for ten years, and rock stars dated models. So models were peripheral parts of my world. Rock stars wore fancy clothes. I became aware of fashion that way. And I got to know girls who knew about fashion. One pretty girl showed me my first copy of British Vogue back in the days of Bea Miller, and I became aware of these pictures that were amusing, shocking, stimulating. It was simultaneously the visual thing of liking fashion pictures and the hormonal thing of liking the girls who appeared in them. Instead of becoming a model fucker, I married a fashion designer, and I segued into writing about fashion. Model was the period at the end of the sentence. It wasn’t consciously a bridge-burning book, but it got a lot of people angry at me.

BNR: Because there was so much “dish,” as people say?

MG: “Dish” is stuff that’s unsourced, that’s “we hear.” Model was obsessively sourced. I would say it was reporting without concerns that constrain a beat reporter. A beat reporter needs to go back to the same people, over and over again. If you burn all your sources, then they will not talk to you, and you will cease to function as a beat reporter. I saw what fashion did to the people I sat with in the front row. I used to draw pictures in my notebook of frowning women. Ten or twenty years of that turned them into something less than enthusiastic participants in the circus. Bitter and unhappy, getting older while the girls on the runway stay young, unable to wear those clothes because they’re cut for twelve-year-olds — for a thousand reasons. I loved the subject matter and the people, but I didn’t want to be beholden to those people. I am not constitutionally fit to be a beat reporter on a single beat for my entire life.

BNR: Your father, Milton Gross, did that.

MG: My father was a sports reporter his whole life, yes. And died young.

BNR: You embarked on this project after a twenty-year hiatus from fashion, although I assume you remained cognizant about developments.

MG: Any normal human being would look back and ask, “Do I regret leaving?” I paid enough attention to know that I didn’t. Every season, I go to at least one fashion show, never more than two or three, just to remind myself how glad I am not to be doing it all the time. I was in the front row at the moment that the fashion world began to change from what it had been, which was a cottage industry, to what it became, which was a form of entertainment. During the twenty years since, I missed the complete and total end of that era, and the conquest of the world of fashion by what I saw enter the tent.

BNR: Describe the dynamics that engendered that change.

MG: Big brands. Big money. Lots of attention. The end of fashion as an elitist preoccupation, and its evolution into a form of mass market entertainment. It’s really that simple.

BNR: What connects Focus with your prior books?

MG: I am interested in deconstructing carefully constructed images, whether I am writing about the model business, in which what we see is the finished product of the perfect picture; or Ralph Lauren, in which what we see is the perfectly manicured world of Polo; or the lives of the rich; or the Metropolitan Museum, which is a seething cauldron of all of the worst aspects of mankind, but what you see is the best of mankind. How did this get to be? What’s going on beneath the pretty surface? That’s what connects them all.

BNR: There are a lot of pairings. Avedon and Penn. Brodovitch and Liberman. Meisel and Weber. Anna Wintour and Diana Vreeland or Liz Tilberis.

MG: Conflict always drives narrative. I didn’t impose those narrative conflicts. All I did was clear away the sand to look at them a bit more carefully. Anna Wintour: besides her professional conflicts, the magazine business changed since the days of Vreeland, and Anna has been as commanding a presence to fashion magazines since the ’80s as Avedon was to fashion photography in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s. A certain amount of creativity, but more than anything, I think, the will to be number one. When you are number one, people will try to scale the mountain and knock you off, which inevitably means conflict.

BNR: “Sordid” is in the title, and you document louche behavior throughout the timeline in considerable detail.

MG: I wake up in the morning, and before I have my cup of coffee I read the New York Post, and then, once I’ve had my cup of coffee, I read the New York Times. I like both ends of the spectrum — tabloid and broadsheet. I have worked in both environments. What I do well that perhaps confuses a lot of people is: I do both. I am just as interested in the loftiest, most intellectual ways of looking at my subjects as I am in getting down at ground level and seeing how people who are very influential — fashion designers who create ads that promote certain ways of living or wealthy people who pull the strings of the economy or of government — really behave. What drives them? What is their motivation? What creates these people who express their power and influence in the world? There is a mistaken notion that if you’re writing about the nitty-gritty of human behavior when it gets a little funky, you’re engaged in writing gossip. You’re not. I don’t do anything but accurately reflect the behavior of the people I’m writing about, without being afraid of talking about the stuff that’s a little louche. The reality of human behavior is captivating. Tacitus wrote about people’s behavior.

BNR: How did you decide on proportion within the strictures of 400 pages?

MG: I left a lot out. When I was writing about rich people, I’d always say that I spared the children and I tried not to go into the bathroom. But then again, there were all the people who went to the bathroom not to go to the bathroom but to snort coke — and then you had to go to the bathroom with them! You try to use your judgment, and when, in the case of someone like Bill King or Bert Stern, the misbehavior actually takes over the individual narrative, then, to be responsible, you include the misbehavior and you accurately describe it.

In the book, Bill King represents the ’70s and the ’80s, when the fashion business was devastated, decimated by AIDS. Bill King was an extreme case of decadent behavior of the sort that was quite popular in the ’70s and ’80s, and yet, as extreme as he was, many people indulged in the same sort of behavior, and many paid the same sort of price for their indulgence.

BNR: It’s a disparate cast of characters. Do you see common characterological traits?

MG: A fascination with the moment. A fascination with gesture and mannerism. A fascination, whether it’s negative or positive, with women. And over all of those (because it kept coming up; it wasn’t something that I imposed; people kept talking about it), a kind of erotic voyeurism. The act of photography is, at its best, an act of voyeurism. No, you’re not looking through a peephole in the ceiling of the voyeur’s motel. You’re looking through a camera and a lens. But a separating, a distancing happens when you look through a lens, and it becomes a form of voyeurism. And voyeurism, for good or ill, is a form of worship, and worship sometimes is uplifting and sometimes is derogation.

BNR: Presumably, each photographer that you examine signifies broader cultural currents in the period in question.

MG: I felt that each of them, in their unique and individual ways, best represented their moment.

BNR: How was Richard Avedon the best representative of his moment?

Avedon represented the moment when fashion cut the cord to formalism. He was still more of a couture sensibility than a street sensibility. But for the first time, pictures breathed. Avedon was ceaselessly curious, broadly knowledgeable, so open to stimulus. His photographs become a vessel, and culture pours into the vessel in one end and is moderated, mediated, and comes out as an image that is incredibly representative of the times. Avedon so dominates this book because Avedon was driven to dominate his field for longer than anyone else. The guy died with his boots on, more than fifty years after his first pictures were published. That is a remarkable career in which — to cite Alexei Brodovitch — the average lifespan is that of a butterfly.

BNR: Bert Stern?

MG: The image on the cover of Model is a Bert Stern photograph of David Bailey and Veruschka: model dominant, photographer lying on the ground. It inspired the famous still from Antonioni’s movie Blow-Up, in which it’s photographer dominant, model (also Veruschka) lying on the ground. Originally, Bailey was going to be the photographer for the ’60s, not Bert Stern. I didn’t know that Bert Stern had been one of the three most important fashion photographers in the world in the early ’60s. There’s a reason why. Bert Stern became a speed freak and destroyed his career, and all he was known for any more were his photos of Marilyn Monroe. But I was told by a friend who knows much more about fashion photography than I that I had to do Bert Stern. I discovered was that this was a fascinating life, a case study in self-destruction. He was an important photographer who took a lot of great fashion pictures — more journeyman than genius, but a journeyman who ascended to the top of the heap. But what made him so fabulous was his extraordinary embrace of the lifestyle that brought him down. And his story had never been told.

Bert Stern represented the apogee of the fashion photographer during the mid-’60s, when the fashion photographer became, as Bert Stern himself put it to me, “a thing.” Bert Stern became “the thing.” He became THIS guy about whom Antonioni based a movie, Blow-Up, along with Bailey, the two other members of the English trinity — Bill Duffy and Terence Donovan — and Bill Helburn.

BNR: I was intrigued by your account of the impact of European fashion magazines and photographers during the ’70s, and of Bensimon’s reign at Elle.

MG: There were two main strains in the ’70s. There were the quirky, weird, erotic, dark pictures of Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin, and a little bit of Chris von Wangenheim, who was kind of Newton Light; and these long lens, outdoor, quick-and-easy, snapshot-style photographers who were French and scored with a lot of models. I covered the Frenchies in great depth in Model but hadn’t done Bensimon. However, I had written a profile on Bensimon fifteen years ago for Talk magazine. The story never ran. Talk‘s publisher was Ron Gullotti, who was formerly the publisher of Vogue. The editor was Tina Brown, formerly the publisher of Vanity Fair. Both came out of Condé Nast. It was told to me that Gullotti did not want to run a story that affirmed the fact that this little French magazine called Elle had put the fear of God into Vogue in the ’80s and the ’90s, had caused the ascension of Anna Wintour, caused the ascension of Liz Tilberis, caused the entire fashion magazine industry and fashion photography to change. That was happened at the moment when Condé Nast fired Diana Vreeland, and Vogue went from selling 400,000 copies a month to 1.2 million copies a month under Grace Mirabella, who put out a magazine full of happy snaps that extolled the new, sexually liberated, empowered woman. The huge irony was that the representatives of this new, empowered woman were the very girls who were being used as dartboards by these horny swordsmen who were dominating fashion photography, even though they weren’t particularly great photographers.

I defy you to find a Gilles Bensimon photograph that could stand on a museum wall next to an Avedon or a Penn or a Newton or a Turbeville. But Gilles Bensimon ran Elle. I quote an executive at the company that published Elle: “Gilles is Elle and Elle is Gilles.” He is the only fashion photographer who ever stood astride that world in that way — the primary photographer on a magazine that he ran. Having said all that, Bensimon was incredibly important to the story of modern fashion photography.

BNR: Bruce Weber receives a very sympathetic treatment. You emphasize his centrality to the shift in creative impetus from the fashion editorial side to such clients as Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein.

MG: Weber entered the industry at the moment when the epicenter of creativity ceased to be the magazines, and, for a brief period of time, became all about the brands. This was also the literal moment when I began writing about fashion photography, and some of the first things I ever wrote were about Weber. He created the image of Ralph Lauren and of Calvin Klein. He embodied the moment when the advertiser became so important.

But apart from Weber’s pivotal role in the development of the business of fashion photography, the underlying messages of his photographs represented a huge change. Very few fashion photographers can be said to have changed the world. Bruce Weber changed the world. Bruce Weber showed men as sex objects. Bruce Weber allowed women to wear men’s underwear. Sounds stupid, but Bruce Weber was on the cutting edge of a cultural change that is still playing out. I write that if you start with Bruce/Caitlin Jenner on the cover of Vanity Fair and work your way backward to where that started in terms of visual imagery, it starts with Bruce Weber photographing Jeff Aquilon with his hands down his tighty-whities for Details, a renegade, out-of-the-mainstream little fashion magazine at that point (it wasn’t yet a Condé Nast magazine). Those pictures changed everything.

It was Bruce Weber who shot a campaign of transgender people for Barneys New York. It was fashion photography not only engaging with its moment, but being right out front and saying a moment is coming and it’s important — pay attention. Bruce Weber dragged society into a world in which gender was recognized as fluid, not binary. Bruce Weber is the first person to put that conversation in the mass market. He was also the first photographer to do those conceptual portfolios that all told a story and added up to something. He was perhaps not the first photographer to create a troupe around himself. Avedon did that. But Bruce Weber certainly perfected that, and made it a leitmotif of his career. You don’t get to keep doing that kind of work for 40 years if you’re not doing great and important work.

BNR: And why Stephen Meisel?

MG: The ultimate postmodernist fashion photographer. He’s a magpie. He picked up this, picked up that, stole from Avedon, stole from Stern, stole from everybody, threw it in his fertile little mind, mixed it all up and came up with something quintessentially new and Stephen Meisel. I wrote a critical piece about Meisel when Sex, the Madonna book, came out. But over time, I saw how strong he was. Meisel’s photographs grab your eyeballs. His name is unquestionably first on a list of the photographers who mattered most in the ’90s.

BNR: Then, at the cusp of the millennium, digital technology supersedes film, and a seismic shift occurs.

Digital changed the tools. Digital changed the science. Digital changed the product. Digital changed the medium — the medium was magazines and advertisements, and suddenly magazines were facing existential threats. Digital changed retailing. Digital changed communication. Digital changed brand marketing. Digital changed the fashion business. Economically, fashion was ceasing to be a cottage industry and was becoming an international phenomenon, which is also driven by the Internet, driven by digital, driven by the fact that an image is transmitted to the entire world instantly. Digital changed the process. You snap the shutter, the image appears on a screen. It’s instantaneous.

The switch from film to digital changed all of these things at once. Let’s not say “digital.” Let’s say technology caused a break. An era ended and a new era began. Some photographers were able to adapt. Other photographers didn’t. Fashion photography continues. It’s different. Magazines continue. They are different. The fashion industry continues. It’s different. Even though there are a thousand bridges over that divide, there’s a divide. There are people who hate it. There are people who celebrate it. There are people who look at it and think, “Mmm, this is interesting.” I’m probably in the third group.

You mourn the end of something that you loved. I love black-and-white photography and fashion photographers of that half century — their expertise, their wonkiness, their craft. It spoke to me. The cold computer-assisted graphic illustration that is masquerading as photography today doesn’t. It’s a different craft. The primacy of individual creativity has been lost. Now it’s imagery by committee.

It comes back to the question of what’s next. I’m optimistic. I persist in believing there’s someone out on the street right now with a cell phone taking the next great fashion photograph. We just haven’t seen it yet — or it hasn’t jumped out of the flood of 7 trillion digital images that we now all see all day long.

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Of the nearly 2 million youth experiencing homelessness in the US, over forty percent identify as LGBTQ even though LGBTQ youth make up only eight percent of the total population. Though they make up such a large percentage of homeless youth, LGBTQ youth are significantly more likely to experience victimization and harassment than their cisgender and heterosexual counterparts. One in five transgender women report having experienced homelessness at one time or another in their lives and many would prefer to sleep on the streets than face the discrimination and violence found in some shelters. Ryan Berg, author of No House to Call My Home, is all too aware of these staggering numbers. His book, which was published last year and appears in paperback this August, chronicles the years he spent as a caseworker in two group homes for LGTBQ youth in New York City. The memoir revolves around the stories of eight youth who whose struggle to make ends meet is compounded by the trauma and abuse they experienced at the hands of their families and communities. It also demonstrates, on a heartbreakingly intimate level, how systemic racism, economic injustice and the failures of the government and the foster care system intertwine to make mobility, safety and financial stability nearly impossible to attain for homeless youth.

In 2015, No House to Call My Home won the Minnesota Book Award for General Nonfiction and the ALA listed it as one of their Top 10 LGBTQ books of the year. However, Berg says he continues to be surprised by how little news coverage and mobilization he’s seen around LGBTQ youth homelessness in general.

“Where’s the community outrage?” he wondered. “People often don’t want to read about tragedy unless there is redemption in the end? Then we need to create that redemption. If we mobilized half as much and showed half the ingenuity as we did in the fight for marriage equality, the LGBTQ community, and their allies, could make a real impact on LGBTQ youth homelessness. These young people have had to face enough indignities. They shouldn’t have to face erasure and neglect from their own community.”

Despite the lack of media attention, Berg continues to receive requests to speak nationally about the book and about youth homelessness. He uses these opportunities to do stage something very different than the traditional literary reading.

“In each city I visit I invite community organizers, service providers and youth to join me. I encourage a community conversation about the unique challenges that that city is facing in relation to LGBTQ youth homelessness. I find that people are typically wanting to engage. They have questions about how communities can begin to fill the gaps in services for young people.”   The readings also give young people who have had experiences similar to those of the book’s protaganists the chance to speak with Berg and share their stories. It is this kind of intimate connection that makes Berg feel like the work he’s doing is worthwhile. “Recently, a high school student came up to me after the reading. She told me her parents refused to accept her identity. She came home one day to find that they had moved away without telling her, leaving her homeless. She said she saw herself reflected in the story I read. Not only in the family rejection, but in the resiliency… She said, ‘I just wanted to thank you. I feel so invisible in my life. Listening to you felt like being seen.’ If this book touches one young person and helps them rediscover their value, I feel it has done its job.”

The release of Berg’s book has also changed his relationship to writing in ways that he didn’t expect. Initially, he says, he had no interest in journalism, but, after No House to Call My Home, he found himself writing more op-eds and short essays about the LGBTQ homeless youth crisis. “I learned over time that the work I do in direct service and my writing life are not mutually exclusive. In fact they’ve become intrinsically intertwined. Each influences the other. Both are done through the lens of social justice. My youth work is about taking actionable steps to evoke change in my community; my writing (hopefully) is about how the power of stories can become transformational and build empathy and understanding for those of us who have historically been marginalized.”

Since the book’s publication, there have been some positive strides in training child welfare professionals to pay attention to the “unique needs and challenges faced by LGBTQ youth,” and more data is being collected on the dangers that LGBTQ homeless youth experience. But, Berg cautions, there is much that remains to be done. The Runaway Homeless Youth Act, for instance, which would have provided crucial government funding for street outreach, shelters and transitional housing and “is designed with LGBTQ cultural competency in mind”, was introduced in January of 2015 but never passed the Senate.

Berg now works at Avenues for Homeless Youth in Minneapolis. Their GLBT Host Home Program is a unique, nationally recognized model because it remains small and volunteer run, circumventing many of the systems that created such disfunction for the youth in his book. The host home program matches GLBT-identified and ally adult hosts with GLBT-identified homeless youth. Unlike traditional foster care, the hosts are not paid to house youth and youth choose the host they would like to be paired with based on an application the host fills out, not the other way around. One of the young people Berg works with at Avenues is a writer and was excited to connect with a published author. “I’m trying to help her find creative writing classes that suit her needs. She blogs and writes beautifully. The fact that we have writing in common seems to strengthen our bond a bit. We can talk about the craft of writing, and I don’t think she has anyone else she shares that with.”

Ultimately, Berg hopes that No House to Call My Home will continue to carve out a space for homeless youth in which they feel safe enough to write their own memoirs. “Personal narrative is a corrective to history, a way for marginalized populations to resist erasure. We tell our stories and collectively we reshape the narrative.”

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Did the thing, person, or idea you most believed in let you down? Has virtual reality begun to seem more meaningful to you than the life you are leading? If so, have you thought about trying to sort out those issues — perhaps after you’ve reached the next level in World of Warcraft and swiped through one more round of Candy Crush? Or are you too distracted by the presidential election and your woeful personal finances to hold a thought, much less make a plan? Welcome to the human condition, in the United States of America, circa now.

Not since the 1996 and 1997 double-header of John Updike’s In the Beauty of the Lilies and Philip Roth’s American Pastoral has a novel emerged that presents a more comprehensive and perceptive portrait of the personal and political American psyche than Nathan Hill’s wise, rueful, and scathingly funny début, The Nix. The book is set largely in 2011, as a demoralized midwestern college professor named Samuel Anderson — who wastes upward of forty hours a week slaying dragons and orcs on the MMORGP (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) World of Elfquest — must confront three real-world crises at once. A vacuous slacker student wants to get him fired; his editor has told him that if he doesn’t deliver the novel he was paid to write a decade ago he will be sued (“Declare bankruptcy, move to Jakarta” the editor coldly advises); and, most unsettling of all, Samuel’s mother, Faye, who vanished from his life two decades prior, has reappeared at the eye of a media hurricane, branded a homegrown terrorist.

A month before Faye quit the family in 1988, she had warned Samuel about an ominous sprite she had learned of from her dour Norwegian father. That sprite, the Nix, is an alluring creature that “usually appears as a person” and bewitches young people, whom it carries off to their doom. The moral of the Nix myth, according to Faye, is: “The things you love the most will one day hurt you the worst.” Thanks, Mom. Twenty years on, Samuel has no idea of the history his mother carried with her before he was born. But, in the manner of another grim Norse myth Faye shared with him, the “drowning stone,” a fragment of his mother’s past had weighed her down until she succumbed to its force and disappeared. Slowly, her buried history emerges, as the novel dips back into the 1980s, to Samuel’s bereft middle school years, when he became friends with a tough, charismatic kid named Bishop and fell in love with Bishop’s beautiful violin prodigy sister, Bethany; and from there, back to the 1960s. Like a long-exposure photograph, The Nix slowly brings out psychic landmarks that have remained on the national landscape for half a century, asserting their uneroded presence through the blur of change.

The skyscraper among these landmarks — which include the civil rights and women’s liberation movements, the Vietnam war, the rise of electronic media, and the precariousness of the middle class — is the turbulent 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. At that convention, Walter Cronkite (who appears as a character in Hill’s novel) was so incensed by the violence against citizen protestors that he said on national news, “The Democratic convention is about to begin in a police state.” Seeing a security officer slug his colleague Dan Rather on the convention floor, Cronkite indignantly exclaimed that the Chicago police were “a bunch of thugs.”

To mollify irate viewers and his bosses, Cronkite had to atone for those remarks by giving a softball interview with “cream-puff questions” to Mayor Richard J. Daley, who supported the cops and abhorred the radicals — as did much of the American public. Cronkite (with an assist from Hill’s imagination) reflects, “It turns out that for every poor kid shown getting his head drubbed by a nightstick, CBS gets ten phone calls in support of whoever held the stick.” The protest is a drop of water in a bucket, the protest movement is that bucket; “Drop that bucket into Lake Michigan: that’s Reality,” he thinks. Samuel’s “quiet and guarded” mother turns out to have been one molecule within that drop, one of the thousands of young people who were attacked in Chicago by cops with billy clubs and tear gas, as the whole world watched. Her parents and relatives were among the watchers who applauded the attackers.

But Hill does not lead with the events of 1968; he begins long after its smolder might be thought to have winkled out, in 2011, with a tiny eruption of the radical protest spirit. A white-haired Chicago schoolteacher in her sixties has been caught on camera flinging a handful of gravel toward a pro-gun, anti-abortion, anti-immigrant Republican governor (and putative presidential candidate) named Sheldon Packer, as he strolled through Grant Park with his entourage on a “glad-handing, baby-kissing” campaign appearance. Sensationalist copywriters instantly flood media screens with the alarming flag: “TERROR IN CHICAGO” and produce the headline “RADICAL HIPPIE PROSTITUTE TEACHER BLINDS GOV. PACKER IN VICIOUS ATTACK!” During a tense meeting with his editor, Samuel catches this clip on an airport TV, endlessly replaying. Looking up at the screen at the “Packer Attacker,” he recognizes his vanished mother. Soon, a photo from the August 1968 Chicago riots will emerge, his mother front and center. Was his mother a radical hippie? A prostitute?

With the help of an “epic” fellow World of Elfquest player known as Pwnage — a morbidly addicted gamer who subsists off frozen meals from 7-Eleven and prefers Elfquest’s digital snowy mountains to the “real places in his life” — Samuel begins to put together the pieces of mother’s past. If he can reconstruct the puzzle of who she was, Samuel might finally get the closure he needs to forge an authentic life outside of Elfquest (and see what his childhood crush, Bethany, is up to). In the meantime, how can he keep his mother out of prison, now that the media’s 24/7 real-life MMORPG has cast her as an arch-villain more fearsome than any orc? Hill pulls all of these players, these decades, these personalities into an organically unfolding saga that, in its unpretentious, empathetic narration, recalls the voice of John Irving — as in The World According to Garp or The Cider House Rules.

There could be no better moment for a politically concerned American to read The Nix than during this election year. To achieve peak irony, actually, the novel ought to have appeared in time for the recent presidential conventions, since the sustained firepower at its core comes from that other convention, twelve elections ago, where the clash between police and citizenry, and between conservative and progressive Americans, erupted with more fury than it had since the Civil War. Still, as Hill shows in this book, time is more fluid now than ever before, as cameras, screens, digital manipulation, and the Internet have erased the stamp of time, removing the primacy of the “now.”

When he was young, Samuel lost himself in the pages of the Choose Your Own Adventure stories. The Nix liberates him by pushing him to a more exhilarating and arduous task: claiming, and choosing, his actual reality.

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By now you’ve heard of Colson Whitehead’s sixth novel, The Underground Railroad. It’s Oprah Winfrey’s most recent choice for her eponymous book club. As you read this, Whitehead’s novel is sliding into the top spot of the New York Times bestsellers list. This must be something of an oddity: Oprah’s blessing has compelled so many American readers to buy a literary novel about a runaway slave girl, that the book has become a large scale cultural commodity.

Whitehead must be satisfied and intrigued simultaneously. He is, after all, a superb novelist worthy of wide attention and a great “scholar” of the American language of advertisement and commerce, — i.e. capitalism. His novels seem to tell us: be wary of American hype and the way it can promote, beautifully and powerfully, bright emptiness and elegant trash. They’re also saying: hype can obscure or mask what is truly beautiful and powerful about the thing under spotlight. Behind the hype here is Whitehead working as master craftsman.

The Underground Railroad’s fifteen year-old-protagonist, Cora, escapes from the Randall Plantation in Georgia. Running alongside Caesar, another fugitive from the plantation, Cora steals away to South Carolina. They ride there in a ramshackle railcar attached to a locomotive that runs through a dugout railroad tunnel several hundred feet below ground. Here, Whitehead turns the historical, figurative Underground Railroad, the surreptitious freedom routes, into a real freedom machine.

Throughout Railroad Whitehead maintains his trademark dexterous, loose prose style while heightening its efficiency. Always adept at drawing fascinating scenes, his set pieces here come off with dazzling precision. Early in the novel, for example, when a young man named, Blake, a new slave to the Randall Plantation, tramples her prized garden and replaces it with a house for his dog, Cora understands that her response must demonstrate more than anger.

Her first blow brought down the roof of the doghouse, and a squeal for the dog, who had just had his tail half-severed . . . Her second blow wounded the left side of the doghouse gravely and her last put it out of its misery. She stood there, heaving. Both hands on the hatchet. The hatchet wavered in the air, in a tug of war with a ghost, but the girl did not falter.

Cora’s quick hatchet job is the opening clause of her message to Blake; she delivers the second clause with her eyes: “You may get the better of me, but it will cost you.”

Cora also knows how to make her eyes inscrutable with vacancy: to be understood is to be found out, and the consequences of that are disastrous. Following James Randall’s sudden death, his brother, Terrance, announces that their neighboring farms will become one plantation. Big Anthony, one of James’ slaves, uses the upheaval of the transition to attempt an escape. When Big Anthony is captured, Terrance punishes him in a manner meant to shame the devil and Simon Legree.

Over two days, Big Anthony is tortured publically. On the third day, he’s “doused in oil and roasted,” while Terrance’s guests look on sipping spiced rum and he addresses the slaves of the newly conjoined farms. Laying out the new rules and performance quotas, Terrance moves through the group, making appraisals. When he turns to Cora, he slips his hand into her shift, cups her breast, and squeezes. In the moment, Cora doesn’t move. “No one had moved since the beginning of his address, not even to pinch their noses to keep out the smell of Big Anthony’s roasting flesh.” In rapid succession, Cora detaches herself for the lurid spectacle, realizes “she had not been his and now she was his,” and decides – secretly and instantly — to join Caesar, who has already approached her with a plan for escape.

With those scenes Whitehead establishes a brutal, vicious world wherein violence rises as easily as breathing. In this world, any bit of physical freedom is luxurious enough to seduce fugitives into lethargy. When Caesar and Cora arrive in South Carolina, they find themselves in a kind of parallel South, one in which they receive new names and positions with a labor and housing organization aiding runaway slaves. Life here is orderly and almost utopian by comparison to the suffering on the plantation. Offered opportunities for education, work, and money in an apparently serenely segregated new society, they come to enjoy freedom’s pleasures. Of course, their confidence blinds them to potential trouble.

Cora takes a post in the Museum of Natural Wonders performing in large-scale, live-action dioramas. The new museum displays a series of habitats illustrating critical events and scenes from American history, including “Scenes From Darkest Africa,” “Life on The Slave Ship,” and “Typical Day on the Plantation.” In rotation with two other young women, Cora acts out these three vignettes during her workday.

One afternoon, as a group of white children examine her performance in the Ship scene, Cora returns their gaze, considering the “many inaccuracies and contradictions” in all the habitats and their effects on “the white monsters on the other side of the exhibit at that very moment, pushing their greasy snouts against the window, sneering and hooting.”

She’s reminded of a young boy on the Randall Plantation who’d been trained to recite the Declaration of Independence. Though she doesn’t understand all its language, she realizes that

…the white men who wrote it didn’t understand it either, if all men did not truly mean all men. Not if they snatched away what belonged to other people, whether it was something you could hold in your hand, like dirt, or something you could not, like freedom. The land she tilled and worked had been Indian land . . . Stolen bodies working stolen land. It was an engine that did not stop, its hungry boiler fed with blood.

Cora’s ruminations distill a central strain in African American literary intellectual and political thought from Harriet Tubman to James Baldwin. In Between The World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a version of this claim in his arguments about “The Dream,” the advertisement-quality American placidity that thrives on the plundering of black bodies. Whitehead gives Cora a voracious and capacious intelligence in this novel. Her psychological self is fully intact. She notices the world and digests them critically. Cora even notices that the dioramas make her the spectacle. Though she’s not roasting alive, there’s violence in the doctored, dishonest history promulgated in her museum performances.  Her critique is affirmed when she comes to learn more about the way the outwardly benevolent South Carolina project ultimately plans for her body. The move from plantation to industrial modernity is not, as it turns out, a journey toward a straightforwardly better world.

But Cora’s problems turn out to be even more urgent: a slave catcher named Ridgeway trails her in hot pursuit. Especially skillful and philosophical about his chosen profession, Ridgeway is driven to capture Cora because years earlier, he’d been unable to find and return her mother, Mabel, to the Randall Plantation. His repeat appearances in the story bring to mind a stray character out of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, a personification of the chaos and brutality deeply embedded in American history.

When she learns that Ridgeway has arrived in the Palmetto State, Cora escapes to North Carolina, this time alone on the clandestine transport line. But North Carolina doesn’t offer any comforts, only a more draconian race code and fresh spectacles of black dehumanization.. During the this sequence Whitehead openly improvises on Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of Slave Girl, tucking Cora away in an attic compartment. Through a peephole in the crawlspace, Cora watches the townspeople gather in the square for their weekly “coon show” and accompanying violence. At night, with her host, Martin, she discusses the contingent relationship between European immigration to the South and black degradation in and out of bondage. “Whether in the fields or underground or in an attic room,” Whitehead writes, “America remained her warden.”

Cora makes it out of the attic and finds haven in yet another state, but must free herself twice more before the novel’s end. Each of the long sequences that cover Cora’s experience in a new place – South Carolina to Indiana — is marked at it’s opening with language from wanted posters for fugitive slaves. The rewards are for $30-$50. In lieu of riffing on advertising or pop culture, Whitehead uses these posters to remind us that it’s really American capitalism chasing after Cora.

In a late passage, Whitehead’s omniscient narrator notes that an endless roster of black bodies have generated America’s economy:

List upon list crowded the ledger of slavery. The names gathered first on the African coast in tens of thousands of manifests. The human cargo. The names of the dead were as important as the names of the living . . . [O]n the plantations the overseers preserved the names of workers in rows of tight cursive. Every name an asset, breathing capital, profit made flesh.

Cora, like the other slaves, runaways, and free people of color we meet throughout Underground, is as much a product of early American consumer culture as she is a producer of the materials – cotton, rice, tobacco – that become consumable goods. Whitehead recognizes this irony – that black people have been products within and generators of American economy — as central to African American identity.

There are moments throughout the work when Whitehead invokes in his own voice Toni Morrison’s lyricism or Edward P. Jones’ oracular vision for his characters’ futures, perhaps just to remind us that he knows the tradition that he’s extending. There are touches of Frederick Douglass and Ralph Ellison too. More importantly, Underground Railroad emerges from Whitehead’s specific oeuvre. He’s developed Cora so that her fierceness and courage are evident to readers even before she imagines her own freedom – she must come to learn her own mettle through trials. In other words, Cora is the mater familias for Whitehead’s protagonists: Lila Mae in The Intuitionist, J in John Henry Days, the nameless neologician in Apex Hides the Hurt, Benji in Sag Harbor, and Mark Spitz in Zone One.

Strangely, Zone One resonates throughout Underground Railroad from Whitehead’s predilection for underground railway systems to the final, riotous scenes of mayhem in both works. Taking in the North Carolina town at dusk, Cora notices that “the whites wandered the park in the growing dark.” To her eyes they are ghosts “caught between two worlds: between the reality of their crimes and the hereafter denied them for those crimes.” Cora’s description sounds like Mark Spitz describing zombies. What if we thought of nineteenth century Southerners who found sustenance in lynching bees as skels and stragglers, rabid, flesh-hungry zombies and those beings caught between human life and zombification, respectively?

To me, the most startling realization about The Underground Railroad is that its successful sales numbers will mean that with each purchase, Cora will be born into slavery, endure the Randall Plantation, liberate herself, endure capture, ride the subterranean railroad into ever dangerous northern spaces, witness rampant murder, and limp in pursuit of freedom all over again, ad infinitum.

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I’ve long been drawn to lost books, hidden books, books that reverberate through an author’s career like subterranean bits of code. Kurt Vonnegut’s Canary in a Cathouse, Lynne Tillman’s Weird Fucks, Patti Smith’s Witt or Ha! Ha! Houdini! — each reads to me as a secret message, highlighting (or so it seems) a set of elemental concerns. This is especially the case with Jack Kerouac’s Old Angel Midnight, a prose poem (or a cycle of prose poems) written in five notebooks over three years, from 1956 to 1959. Partly, it’s the provenance: When I was a young reader, just discovering Kerouac, Old Angel Midnight was — along with Some of the Dharma, San Francisco Blues, and other then-unpublished works — the stuff of legend, a manuscript that seemed essential in some sense to the author’s canon but only marginally available if at all. Inspired by his friend Lucien Carr (the original title was Lucien Midnight), the text was published in two installments during Kerouac’s lifetime, parts 1−49 in the Spring 1959 issue of Big Table and the remaining 18 sections in Evergreen Review in 1964. It first came out in book form in 1973. My initial exposure came via snippets cited in biographies by Ann Charters and Gerald Nicosia, the latter of whom called it perhaps “the closet thing to Finnegans Wake in American literature,” although, he concluded, “the ultimate failure of the piece is due to its being too successful an imitation, for it lacks the original conception that distinguished the majority of his works.

Nicosia has a point: Old Angel Midnight is a pastiche (homage, even) to Finnegans Wake. But it is also something more than that, a tone poem, an extended stream of consciousness that aspires — Kerouac was nothing if not ambitious — to channel the breath of creation itself. “Friday afternoon in the universe,” the book begins, “in all directions in & out you got your men women dogs children horses pones tics perts parts pans pools palls pails parturiences and petty Thieveries that turn into heavenly Buddha — I know boy what’s I talking about case I made the world & had Old Angel Midnight for my name and concocted up a world so nothing you had forever thereafter make believe it’s real.” I fell in love with it the first time I read the words. Partly, it’s the felicity of the set-up, Friday afternoon in the universe, “workinmen on scaffolds painting white paint & ants merlying in lil black dens & microbes warring in yr kidney & mesaroolies microbing in the innards of mercery & microbe microbes dreaming of the ultimate microbehood which then ultimates outward to the endless vast empty atom which is this imaginary universe.” (There’s something accessible about this vision yet also cosmic, which is, of course, the whole idea. We tend to think of Kerouac as a road warrior, desperate for kicks and experience, but this is a misreading that deflects his actual concerns. His subject, rather, is consciousness, “the point of ecstasy,” he notes in On the Road, “that I always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm.” In Old Angel Midnight, he achieves this by stripping away even the loosest frame of narrative. “I’ve been finally doodling with an endless automatic writing piece,” he wrote to the novelist John Clellon Holmes in 1956, “which raves on and on with no direction and no story and surely that won’t do tho I’ll finish it anyway while doing other things . . . ”

Those “other things,” it turns out, are instructive, if only in what they suggest about Kerouac’s creative state of mind. Old Angel Midnight comes out of a run of odd work, ancillary (but not really), poetic more than narrative. It was directly preceded by The Scripture of the Golden Eternity, his attempt to write a Buddhist sutra, and before that by the long poem Mexico City Blues. During this period, he also wrote Some of the Dharma and two short novels, Visions of Gerard — about his older brother, who died in 1926 at age nine — and Tristessa, a love song of sorts for a Mexico City prostitute. All of these works are impressionistic, even the fiction, and all of them deal directly with the tragedy and transcendence of being alive. “Dying is ecstasy,” he writes early in Old Angel Midnight. And then: “I’m not a teacher, not a sage, not a Roshi, not a writer or master or even a giggling dharma bum I’m my mother’s son & my mother is the universe — ”

What we’re seeing is a shift away from storytelling toward something more like the direct transcription of experience. This suggests, I think, a key tension in Kerouac: the Buddhist intention, on the one hand, of being in the moment, juxtaposed against the writer’s intention to set it down. Kerouac knows everything is ephemeral, that we and all that surrounds us, “[t]he Mill Valley trees, the pines with green mint look . . . [t]he little tragic windy cottages” will disappear. It’s the source of his sadness, but also of his inspiration; his work represents a sustained attempt at self-preservation despite his understanding that nothing, really, can be preserved. That’s what makes Old Angel Midnight so vivid, because it is an attempt to record something close to pure perception, even as it recognizes the impossibility of the task. “Silence in my window now in the fullmoon of haiku,” Kerouac intones, “which goes OO yellow continent in a birdbath, April full moon which rattle the goldroom little death chair that never will collapse.”

Here, we get close to what I admire best about the book, its embrace of sound, of rhythm and music, of literature as aural in the most specific sense. As such, Old Angel Midnight is a record of listening, of hearing beyond, or beneath, language, of seeking to engage a cosmic beat. It’s not the only work of Kerouac’s to attempt this; his 1962 novel Big Sur ends with a long poem called “Sea: Sounds of the Pacific Ocean at Big Sur.” Yet like the fiction that contains it, “Sea” is an unconsoling effort; “But these waves scare me — ” Kerouac admits. “I am going to die / in full despair — ” Old Angel Midnight, on the other hand, is about acceptance . . . or better yet, about presence, about pause. It’s encoded in that opening gambit, Friday afternoon in the universe, “timeless to the ends of the last lightyear it might as well be getting late Friday afternoon where we start so’s old Sound can come home when worksa done & drink his beer & tweak his children’s eyes — ” That’s vintage Kerouac right there, down to the beer and the sentimentality, “but that’s alright,” he reassures us, “because now everything’ll be alright & we’ll soothe the forever boys & girls & before we’re thru we’ll find a name for this Goddam Golden Eternity & tell a story too.”

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