Mount Vesuvius erupted on August 24, 79 CE, burying the 13,000 inhabitants of Pompeii and vicinity, a 700-year-old settlement that had evolved into a complex urban environment. The Vesuvius eruption is one of history’s iconic lessons on the mutability theme, and the excavation of the Pompeii-Herculaneum region, ongoing since the early eighteenth century, is one of the triumphs of archeology.

The scholars continue to dig and debate, says the Cambridge classicist Mary Beard in The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found, and the human story of those buried instantly under fifteen feet of pumice and ash remains hauntingly compelling. The site “offers more vivid glimpses of real people and their real lives than almost anywhere else in the Roman world,” says Beard: “the medical man who died clutching his box of instruments . . . the slave found in the garden of a large house in the center of town, his movements surely hampered by the iron bands around his ankles.” Even the streets and houses, now recovered in minute detail, preserve their human tales:

We meet unlucky lovers (“Successus the weaver’s in love with a barmaid called Iris and she doesn’t give a toss” as one scrawled graffito runs) and shameless bed-wetters (“I’ve pissed in bed, I haven’t lied / But, dear landlord, there was no chamber pot supplied,” boasts the rhyme on a lodging house bedroom wall). We can follow the traces of Pompeii’s children, from the toddler who must have had great fun sticking a couple of coins into the fresh plaster of the main hall . . . to the bored kids who scratched a series of stickmen at child height in the entranceway to a suite of baths . . .

Another legendary volcanic eruption is tied to this week, that of Indonesia’s Krakatoa on August 27, 1883, which killed 40,000 (perhaps many more) in a variety of elemental ways: superheated gas, molten rock, and tsunami. Simon Winchester’s bestseller Krakatoa: the Day the World Exploded, which tracks the catastrophe backward to earlier eruptions on the site and forward to the still-lingering regional aftermath, recreates the inexorable details of the volcano’s “paroxysmal phase”:

An immense wave then leaves Krakatoa at almost exactly 10:00 A.M. — and then, two minutes later, according to all the instruments that record it, came the fourth and greatest explosion of them all, a detonation that was heard thousands of miles away and that is still said to be the most violent explosion ever recorded and experienced by modern man. The cloud of gas and white-hot pumice, fire, and smoke is believed to have risen — been hurled, more probably, blasted as though from a gigantic cannon — as many as twenty-four miles into the air . . .

Krakatoa may have been the most violent modern planetary explosion, but surely the “volcano felt round the world” is the eruption of Indonesia’s Mount Tambora, throughout the spring of 1815. In The Year Without Summer: 1816 and the Volcano That Darkened the World and Changed History, William and Nicholas Klingaman describe the worldwide repercussions, which rippled beyond meteorological upheavals and agricultural disasters to altered migration patterns and religious revivals, and even impacted literary history. “We watch them as they approach from the opposite side of the lake,” wrote Mary Shelley of the extreme storms at Lake Geneva, “observing the lightning play among the clouds in various parts of the heavens . . . ” Driven inside by the unusually bad weather, Shelley and her famous friends entertained themselves with the ghost stories that helped to inspire her Frankenstein.

In Waking the Giant, the volcanologist Bill McGuire discusses the growing body of evidence indicating that, through our recent contributions to climate change, we are collectively creating an environmental monster of our own:

Many geological systems such as extant volcanoes, active faults, and unstable slopes are shown to be often critically poised so that even tiny external perturbations can be capable of triggering reactions in the form, respectively, of volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and landslides. In this light, it would be surprising indeed if the melting ice sheets, rising sea levels, and changing weather patterns that will undoubtedly characterize the coming century and beyond, did not go some of the way — at the very least — towards reawakening the slumbering giant beneath our feet.

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Earlier this summer — in a year marked by new record global temperatures — I toured some of the more exotic, outré, and far-fetched works of “Anthropocene fiction” that envisioned how humanity might imprint its often lethal image onto our home planet — even distorting other planets and the whole cosmos at large. After such visions as entire worlds clad in steel, and a solar system whose components were juggled about and reprocessed, the simple notion of Greenhouse Earth — the scenario where an unintentional and relatively tiny incremental change in average world temperature brings vast environmental and geophysical disasters and sociopolitical and cultural disruption and mass mortality — is now hardly science-fictional at all. Climate change is indeed the stuff of daily headlines, to an extent than when we encounter a recent front-page feature in The New York Times reporting on “climate refugees” in the USA and South America, the pairing of those two terms requires little in the way of explanation.

But the hard-edged Paris Agreement realities of climate change do not preclude science fiction focusing its speculative lens on the topic, any more than the reality of the atomic bomb dampened the power of A Canticle for Leibowitz or The Road. To the contrary, science fiction remains, as ever, the best tool for charting our path into such a chaotic future. Thus the birth of a newish subgenre of SF, what has recently been dubbed “climate fiction” or “cli-fi.” Though writers from Frank Herbert and Roger Zelazny to George Turner had by the 1970s used ecological awareness as an imaginative springboard, the awareness that human-created planetary warming was incontrovertibly real has made it a topic of urgency for many twenty-first-century writers.

Two new cli-fi anthologies represent the latest literary broadcasts from these shifting and still unfixed hothouse futures, while an ambitious novel from 2015 displays how cli-fi crosses boundaries into unclassifable literary territory as well. Finally, two recent works of nonfiction borrow SF modes of thinking to look at the grimly real issues human communities face as the result of our impact on the planet.

Current cli-fi might be said to owe a great deal to two voices. Kim Stanley Robinson contributed one of the first landmarks of the genre with his Science in the Capital trilogy (2004−7). And his outspoken, prominent comrade in the battle these days is Paolo Bacigalupi, with such novels as The Windup Girl (2009) and The Water Knife (2015). Depicting the harsh realities of a dog-eat-dog future of dwindling resources, Bacigalupi’s novels reflect the same world-correcting missionary impulses as Orwell’s 1984.

Along with over two dozen other writers, Robinson and Bacigalupi feature in Loosed Upon the World, the mammoth new reprint anthology of cli-fi from master editor John Joseph Adams. The oldest tale herein is 1990’s “Hot Sky” by Robert Silverberg, with all the rest reflecting twenty-first-century publication dates, thus making this volume reflective of the most current thinking on the topic.

Bacigalupi’s introduction sets the stern and Cassandran tone for the volume, as he registers his disbelief in, and moral objection to, any kind of techno-wizard solutions to our current climate chaos. His own story “Shooting the Apocalypse” kicks off the fiction, and inhabits that same water-starved American Southwest that he vividly conjured up in The Water Knife. Violence and the hardscrabble life prevail, with few if any heroes or solutions on the scene.

Written before the current Zika outbreaks, Toiya Kristen Finley’s “Outer Rims” looks prophetic in its depiction of a new disease as encountered firsthand by a hapless mother and her kids. Admittedly, this tight focus on small-scale stories, often domestic, shared by many entries here (Tobias Buckell’s “The Rainy Season”; Nancy Kress’s “A Hundred Hundred Daisies”; Jim Shepard’s “The Netherlands Lives with Water”; Jason Gurley’s “Quiet Town”; et al.) serves to drive home the emotional immediacy of climate change. But it also abjures, to some extent, the traditional mission of SF, which, as characterized in the famous lament by Neal Stephenson, was always to portray the doing of big things.

Sean McMullen’s bracingly mordant “The Precedent” does not shy away from this older mandate, although the Big Thing he concentrates on is a tearing down rather than a building up. In the year 2035, what amounts to the Nuremberg Trials of the Greenhouse Era are underway, with all the big-carbon-footprint sinners up for summary execution. McMullen captures all the self-righteous Year Zero fanaticism of the movement and yet does not proclaim either side the moral victors.

Alan Dean Foster conjures up almost a 1950s monster-movie vibe with his tale of insects on the rampage in “That Creeping Sensation.” Silverberg’s pivotal tale of iceberg harvesting — midway between Frank Herbert’s 1970 epiphany and the present volume — evokes Conradian Weltschmerz in his usual potent manner. Cat Sparks zeroes in on an outsider milieu with her “Hot Rods.” And Buckell and Karl Schroeder poke cleverly at the seams of macro-scale remediation schemes in their “Mitigation.”

The majority of these tales are narrowly limited to First World settings (“Staying Afloat” by Angela Penrose is a notable exception), but these assembled stories nevertheless bring enough variety, ingenuity, and compassion to the theme to convincingly and shockingly limn these early days of the new era, without necessarily illuminating any exit signs.

* * *

Jonathan Strahan assembles brand-new tales of the Anthropocene in Drowned Worlds, and even labels them as such in the book’s subtitle: Tales from the Anthropocene and Beyond. He thus makes his book one of the few to actually employ that pivotal descriptor, and the stories themselves follow suit by being totally on target and au courant, a testament to his editorial acumen and direction. There’s almost zero overlap with the authors in the Adams collection, and because these stories were deliberately commissioned around the topic, they exhibit a moderately tighter focus on the Ballardian Umwelt cited by Strahan in his introduction than do the Adams selections, which arose spontaneously, hither and yon, over the years.

Paul McAuley kicks off the volume nicely with “Elves of Antarctica,” chronicling the remediation efforts at the icecap, as seen through the eyes of a simple yet deeply empathetic worker named Mike Torres. Many small and subtle touches contribute to the tangibility of this future: “[He] tithed to the Marshallese Reclamation Movement . . . ” The story gives a hopeful spin to its inevitabilities.

Skipping around through the subsequent tales, we find other gleams of sunshine amid the wreckage. “Venice Drowned” by Kim Stanley Robinson shows the life of a tour guide amid the ruins of that city and a moment of his epiphany. “Let them [the scavengers] have what was under the water. What lived in Venice was still afloat.” In “Brownsville Station,” Christopher Rowe vividly posits a “linear city” arcing around the Gulf of Mexico, a habitat that shields its citizens from the environment. His viewpoint character is the “Young Conductor,” the crisis a fracture in the vital express train tube. Echoes of Lucas’s THX1138 flavor the mix.

All too often, only changes in the world during the Anthropocene future are considered, neglecting any parallel changes in our species, directed or spontaneous. But Kathleen Ann Goonan, superb mistress of biopunk, makes no such omissions, chronicling the family life centered on the matriarch Zoe Raphael-Aphrodite, “a mature tropical reef in the shape of a voluptuous woman . . . ” With her many hybridizing grafts, Zoe represents the “hopeful monsters” we must all become to survive. This tale, my personal favorite, strikes me as the apex of the book.

Equally bracing in another way, Jeffrey Ford follows the opposite, nihilistic path in “What Is,” surveying a kind of Cormac McCarthy dog-eat-dog landscape. “The New Venusians” by Sean Williams is a rollicking account of some rogue terraforming applied to Venus, as seen through the eyes of an elderly fellow and his feisty granddaughter. James Morrow’s wit and cynicism have never been more acidic than in “Only Ten More Shopping Days Left Till Ragnarök,” which follows some hapless tourists who opt for the Arctic travel package. And finally, Lavie Tidhar’s “Drowned” brings a mythological slant to the aftermath of civilization’s collapse, involving contradictory narrators and a disarming simplicity of language.

This well-wrought anthology marks a bold move toward not merely acceptance of Anthropocene realities, but taking charge of trends and forces and learning how to conduct eternal human behavior on new platforms and with new limitations and new possibilities.

* * *

If climate change brings us a wealth of fiction as exciting and bracing and unpredictable as by Claire Vaye Watkins did in 2015 with Gold Fame Citrus — well, I can’t realistically say that all the global chaos and suffering would be totally redeemed by such literary treasures. But we could at least call it a silver lining.

This masterful, affecting, surreal, and heartbreaking book takes place some twenty-five years into the future, in an era when California (that mythic realm once denominated by the triple allures of the title) is practically an unpopulated wasteland save for scattered raggle-taggle misfits, its bankrupt citizens carted away to evacuation camps, its multimillion-dollar homes abandoned. At first glance, the most obvious point of recent comparison for this scenario would be Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife. But whereas Bacigalupi went all Realpolitik and thriller and noir in his novel, Watkins takes an essentially Ballardian tack, delving more into “inner space” and bizarre emotional states while still manifesting acute attention to vivid objective correlatives, thick sensual and sensory details. And after all, whereas Ballard’s The Drowned World claims all the attention and influence nowadays, appearing in bright new editions, that author’s neglected The Burning World hosts not inconsiderable pleasures and lessons along an opposite axis.

Certainly the opener to Watkins’s book could not be more in line with the fetishes of the Sage of Shepperton. An abandoned mansion, an empty swimming pool, a beautiful young woman playing dress-up with the lost finery of the old resident, while her lover, a psychically scarred war veteran who shields himself from reality by a carapace of competence, stays busy outside, digging a latrine — this is pure Vermilion Sands, conveyed in a lush yet clinical prose to rival JGB’s own voice.

Watkins’s heroine is Luz Dunn, and she is utterly emblematic of her era. Born famously as “Baby Dunn,” she and her fate in a climate-change world were deliberately linked by the media with that of the Golden State. “The child has been adopted by the Bureau of Conservation, which embarks today on a heroic undertaking that will expand the California Aqueduct a hundredfold . . . ” Revisited by detrimental online fame throughout her upbringing, she has gone off the rails and ended up aimless and lost, living a refugee’s life with the ex-soldier named Ray — who loves Luz immensely — in the shards of the culture.

One night she and Ray descend to the city to hang out with the tribal gutterpunks and lowlifes who remain. There they encounter a mysterious toddler who, missing obvious parents, is being abused by the tribe. Ray and Luz abduct the child, out of a mix of compassion and a selfish desire for a motivating engine to their lives. After a time back in the starlet’s mansion learning the peculiar needs and abilities of the little girl they dub Ig, they embark on a half-assed hegira towards some nebulously dreamed better life.

On the road, Luz and Ray get separated, and Luz and Ig end up in the Amargosa, a newly formed realm of sand, “a dead swath of it blown off the Central Valley and Great Plains, accumulated somewhere between here and Vegas.” There they encounter the floating commune ruled by the slightly Mansonesque, slightly ridiculous figure of Levi Zabriskie. Amid this new “family,” Luz and Ig will experience strange tides of change and many freaky happenings, before Luz meets her ultimate, perfect apotheosis.

By shifting between the interior states of Luz, Ray, and Levi, Watkins inhabits their consciousnesses with depth and insightfulness. The three emerge as fully formed entities with all the perverse willfulness, for good or ill, that denominates our species. Lesser characters, such as Levi’s harem, receive a good helping of individuation as well. And Watkins is not shy about non-traditional methods of narration, such as the section that begins: “There are three ways to learn about a character.” Here, a portrait of Ray is assembled from lists and fragments. Another section purports to be the full text, with illustrations, of a naturalist’s book that Levi has written.

Watkins’s novel harks to a whole tradition of California apocalypses, starting with Nathanael West and going straight through George R. Stewart, Rudy Wurlitzer, Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Lucius Shepard, and — again — K. S. Robinson. Her depiction of the minds and attitudes of the remnant population, all of whom are seeking some twisted, debased, half-recalled variant of the “gold, fame, citrus” triad, feels indelibly accurate. And her insights into how a resource-deprived world would function, or malfunction, is keenly detailed. One feels every sand-gritted bedsheet and precious warm gulp of bottled water. Additionally, there’s a big riff on the automated nuclear waste depository at Yucca Flats and the “molemen” who live there that summons up images of Bradbury’s famous devastated automated house performing its senseless tasks in the absence of all humans.

But the paramount achievement of this book is the ironic elegance of its prose, its black-humored assessments of the human condition, its absurdist imagery and its incantatory fevered assaults on this sea change afflicting the world and the new rituals that arise therefrom.

Though it was the colony that moved across the desert, the reverse felt true. It wasn’t long before the swimming pool oasis left them — save for the water they drained from it, and the chairs, ropes, sheets of fiberglass, peels of tin and other salvageables they pried from it, and the algae, which Jimmer scraped from the bottom and dried for his concoctions. This was life at the colony: the solid, grounded, unyielding world getting up and walking away. Ravines, canyons, ranges, alluvial fans and gardens of boulders, all folded beneath them. They pilfered from abandoned Indian casinos and deserted truck stops. The sturdy was no longer something to hold on to.

Undespairing and defiant in the face of disaster, Watkins and her creations demand that we do not throw up our hands in defeat, but press on to find ways to go on living in a world whose changes even fiction has to accept.

* * *

Science fiction, of course, is not the only literary medium by which the Anthropocene is parsed. Several nonfiction books of late have begun to delve into the implications of this new era, and here we consider two outstanding recent titles as capstone to this survey.

Roy Scranton’s passionate yet clear-eyed screed, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization, is a kind of scientifically rigorous Tibetan Book of the Dead or Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind for our modern naked ape−dominated era. Curiously enough, despite its insistence on the essential value of humanist texts such as Gilgamesh for our survival, and despite being very much aligned with the core methodologies of SF, it stringently avoids mentioning any actual SF, except for a passing nod to Star Trek. Yet such an omission can be forgiven, for the book is almost science fictional itself.

What I mean is that Scranton plumbs the intersection of history and technology, culture and philosophy in the same manner that the best science fiction does, seeking to illuminate the hidden foundational assumptions of our culture, its virtues and defects, and to chart where these traits are leading us. It reads like a book that H. G. Wells might have written in the prime of his career as polemicist and educator.

Limning the science of our current and future predicament in vivid layman’s terms and exhibiting the same anti-techno-fix stance as Bacigalupi, Scranton holds up a hopeful torch for humanity’s adaptation to the unprecedented conditions of our altered landscape. “We humans are precocious multicellular energy machines building hives on a rock in space, machines made up of and connected to countless other machines, each of us a microcosm.” The vision might have come from T. J. Bass or Olaf Stapledon, and it should form a valuable springboard for future science fictional forays by novelists wise enough to heed Scranton’s insights.

In The Birth of the Anthropocene, Jeremy Davies clears away so much fog from the concept in such a readable and clear-eyed manner that there can be no excuse any longer for employing this neologism in sloppy fashion.

His introduction parses the several definitions of the term and plumps for one in particular: a hard-edge scientific description in line with the rigorous methodology of stratigraphic studies, as determined by longstanding scientific committees. If we are to believe that the Anthropocene is indeed a new era, then we must define it in the same way we have defined previous eras, pinning down its start to an accurate date universally acknowledged by an irrefutable set of markers.

But this insistence on scientific precision hasn’t gotten in the way of the book’s many touching and startling moments, nor its clarion call for practical measures to be undertaken. My favorite section, “An Obituary for the Holocene,” divides the Holocene, that earlier epoch that contains all of human history, into twelve sections of one thousand years each, Davies presents a capsule history of our species that is incredibly stirring and hopeful, further boosting his contention that the Anthropocene is not a disjunction so much as a natural transition, something to be adapted to, not feared. Ultimately, this is a book to inspire and educate, not alarm and frighten the reader. It really should be part of the new curriculum for all good citizens of this strange new world.

* * *

Perhaps we can sum up the necessity for and allure of cli-fi and its allied nonfiction by quoting author Cat Sparks from a recent interview on the topic. With her own cli-fi novel, Lotus Blue, due out soon, and nearing the completion of her Ph.D. in climate change fiction, Sparks has plainly devoted much intellectual energy to the topic and its themes. She remains unsentimental but optimistic about the literature and its ability to help.

Climate fiction definitely has a part to play. In my eyes the argument that art should be beholden to nothing and no one breaks down when it comes to a situation as dire as this one, where the one planet in the universe known for certain to harbor life is under threat of being rendered uninhabitable . . . What we need is people talking about alternative pathways. We need this in science, politics, government and we need this in art. Because people respond to art differently to the way they respond to facts and figures. Art has the power of becoming personal. Different media speaks to different people in different ways. Art encourages people to think and feel.

And, one might add, even to act.

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The central conceit of Ann Hood’s seventh novel should be as irresistible to book groups as wine and cheese: An empty-nester, at loose ends after her husband of twenty-five years leaves her for another woman, joins a local book club, looking for “the comfort of people who wanted nothing more than to sit together and talk about books.” The group’s theme-of-the-year requires each of its ten members to pick the book that matters most to them. Naturally, we expect their choices to reveal something profound about these characters, but in fact The Book That Matters Most is mainly about Ava North’s rediscovery of the power of literature to heal not just her latest heartache but a childhood trauma she’s long tried to ignore.

The book group, run with firm control by Ava’s friend and neighbor, a librarian who takes her role very seriously, is a motley mix, including a grieving widower; a local Providence, Rhode Island, actress who’s fighting breast cancer; and a young hipster in a porkpie hat. Even here Ava must navigate rueful reminders of her former, fuller life: She immediately recognizes the hyper-efficient mother who had made her feel inadequate at her daughter Maggie’s elementary school, and a young woman who used to babysit for Maggie — already a tenure-track professor teaching women’s studies in the English Department at Brown University. (Ava teaches French at an unnamed, presumably less prestigious local school.)

Hood is adept at creating vivid, sympathetic characters with a few quick strokes, but this is not an ensemble novel in which each group member’s story is explored in turn. What matter most in The Book That Matters Most are Ava’s family drama (past and present) and the chosen books, which add up to a sort of Literary Hit Parade: Pride and Prejudice, The Great Gatsby, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Slaughterhouse-Five, The Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Anna Karenina, One Hundred Years of Solitude. All familiar, all fiction, all stellar classics worth reading and rereading, and all selected by Hood with an eye toward extracting nuggets relevant to Ava’s particular situation.

As for Ava, she finds the assignment challenging: “She couldn’t even remember the last book she’d read that mattered at all. In fact, she purposely chose books that didn’t matter.” She comes up with the sole outlier on the list, a book in which she found consolation when she was eleven, after her sister and mother died within a year of each other: From Clare to Here, by Rosalind Arden, an author no one has heard of. It’s a fictional out-of-print novel created for Hood’s narrative, about a mother who loses one of her two daughters and decides to stay with her in the underworld, rather than return to earth with her living daughter. Part of Hood’s plot revolves around tracking down the book’s provenance.

Another, more effective strand involves Ava’s wayward twenty-year-old daughter, who after some rough teen years is supposedly “finally on track,” studying art history in Florence for the year. Alas, unbeknownst to her distracted parents, she ditches the program for Paris, with the vague idea of following in Hemingway’s footsteps and becoming a writer. Alternating chapters highlight the contrast between Ava’s gradual emergence from her post-split funk and Maggie’s harrowing journey into heroin addiction.

Hood, who has written movingly about losing her only sibling, a brother, in a household accident in 1982 and her five-year-old daughter to a virulent strain of strep twenty years later, is clearly no stranger to trauma. Loss and grief have been recurring themes in her novels, along with women struggling in stifling marriages to discover their own sense of self. Her 2014 novel, An Italian Wife, follows an Italian-born woman from the arranged marriage that takes her to America through the next seven decades. She bears seven children — the last of whom, the result of a passionate affair, she gives up for adoption but then spends the rest of her life trying to find. In The Obituary Writer (2013), the story of a 1960s suburban housewife chafing at the confines of her life converges with a parallel narrative about an early-twentieth-century obituary writer who lives in denial for years after the loss of her married lover in the San Francisco fire of 1906.

By comparison, the action of The Book That Matters Most is tidily compressed into a single year, excepting flashbacks to “That Morning” in 1970 when Ava’s sister Lily died in a freak accident for which her mother, aunt, Ava, and the police detective who failed to determine exactly what happened all blamed themselves. As in her earlier works, several plotlines converge neatly — though in this case, rather predictably.

Hood’s novel is meant to be a heartfelt paean to the power of literature to enlighten, soothe, and resonate personally. After reading The Great Gatsby, Ava says, “I had forgotten how a book can affect you.” She draws parallels between each classic and what’s going on in her own life. For example, the theme of “A return after long wanderings” in Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being mirrors her husband’s awkward attempt to patch things up between them. Later, reading Slaughterhouse-Five while trying to track down Rosalind Arden, Ava realizes that she’s becoming as “unstuck in time” as Kurt Vonnegut’s character Billy Pilgrim. And of course there’s plenty about Tolstoy’s unhappy families, each unhappy in its own way.

As these rather too-precise correspondences suggest, the impact of Hood’s unabashedly sentimental novel is repeatedly undercut by a lack of subtlety. She describes Ava’s response to From Clare to Here with typical mawkishness: “Could a writer understand how her book had saved someone long ago, when the world was a fragile, scary place and the people she loved weren’t in it anymore?”

Even before the pat, schmaltzy ending, everything is spelled out. The group’s literary discussions are often painful to read — stilted, simplistic, and didactic. Typical is the cancer patient’s defense of her choice of A Tree Grows In Brooklyn: “The novel shows us that strong values help us triumph over adversity.”

As I write this, there’s a part of me that asks how I, who love books and reading so much, can beef about a novel that makes a case for how much books matter. The answer is that I wish Hood had made a less cloying case.

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The “Gang of Eight,” an alliance of hardline Communists and military leaders, launched a coup against Mikhail Gorbachev twenty-five years ago this week, arresting the Soviet president on August 18, 1991 and then mobilizing the army for an old-style clampdown and housecleaning — a media blackout, flyers announcing a state of emergency, an order placed for 250,000 pairs of handcuffs and vacant prison cells. Within two days Gorbachev was able to reassert control, but the coup opened a significant crack in his already shaky initiatives for a new USSR based on increased decentralization and democratic freedom. Most analysts date the dissolution of the USSR to the “August Putsch” and wonder what Russia might look like today had it moved toward Gorbachev’s perestroika (reform) and glasnost (openness) rather than toward Putin and demagoguery.

In his just-published The New Russia, Gorbachev says that while he is still “stunned by the treachery of the people I placed in positions of trust,” he is not at all surprised by the “deluge of lies and libels” that continue to rain down from “the politicians now in power . . . looking for a scapegoat.” Nor is he repentant or apologetic:

Above all, what kept me going was the certainty that Perestroika had been and remained historically essential and that, having taken on a far from light burden, we were bearing it with the dignity it deserved. For all the mistakes and failures, we had led our country out of a historical impasse, given it a first taste of freedom, liberated our people and given them back the right to think for themselves. And we had ended the Cold War and the nuclear arms race.

Whether orchestrated by Putin and his apparatchiks or not, the demonization of Gorbachev and his policies continues to have at least a degree of street-level support, says Svetlana Alexievich in Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets. The 2015 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Alexievich’s most recent book is in the same hallmark style as her earlier work, in which her witness testimonies and other oral sources are crafted into powerful emotional histories. Some of the “SNATCHES OF STREET NOISE AND KITCHEN CONVERSATIONS” from Secondhand Time recall the early days of perestroika as “a time of great hope — at any moment, we might find ourselves in paradise”; but many other voices reflect bitterness, disillusionment, and vilification:

I hate Gorbachev because he stole my Motherland . . . Yes, we stood in line for discolored chicken and rotting potatoes, but it was our Motherland. I loved it . . . Someone felt the need to put an end to it. The CIA . . . We’re already being controlled by the Americans . . . They must have paid Gorbachev a tidy sum. Sooner or later, he’ll see his day in court. I just hope that that Judas lives to feel the brunt of his nation’s rage . . . Happiness is here, huh? Sure, there’s salami and bananas. We’re rolling around in shit and eating foreign food. Instead of a Motherland, we live in a huge supermarket. If this is freedom, I don’t need it . . . Now our parliament is lousy with criminals. Dollar-rich millionaires. They should all be in prison, not parliament. They really duped us with their perestroika!

In his prizewinning The Invention of Russia: From Gorbachev’s Freedom to Putin’s War, Arkady Ostrovsky apportions most of the blame for what has befallen Russia not to any politician or economist but to the fact that the country is unusually “idea-centric” and easy prey for any leader or group able to use the media “to conceal facts and construct an alternative reality.” And while the Bolsheviks were also pretty good at marketing their revolutionary narrative, the current crop of media manipulators have mastered the art of invention:

They are sophisticated and erudite men who started their careers during Gorbachev’s perestroika and prospered in Yeltsin’s 1990s but who now act as demiurges — creators of reality. The purpose of the show they have staged is to perpetuate the power and wealth of Putin and his elite, of which they are part. In doing so, they have stirred the lowest instincts and intoxicated the country with . . . aggression, hatred and chauvinism.

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In deep middle age, the Russell and Corrine Calloways have passed their peak. Or at least Russell seems to feel he has. The man once described as the Scott to Corrine’s Zelda, the Nick to her Nora, now stares at infomercials on TV in the middle of the night. He snores. He is subject to 3:45 a.m. panics of despair. Could it really be that his author, Jay McInerney, has reached his sixties?

With its wistful title, Bright, Precious Days is a continuation of Russell and Corrine Calloway’s life story, which began with 1992’s Brightness Falls and continued with 2006’s The Good Life. Like all of McInerney’s novels, it’s set in Manhattan, which seemed a good place to begin our interview. —Daniel Asa Rose

 

The Barnes & Noble Review: “Though the city after three decades seemed in many ways diminished from the capital of his youth, Russell Calloway had never quite fallen out of love with it, nor with his sense of his own place here. The backdrop of Manhattan, it seemed to him, gave every gesture an added grandeur, a metropolitan gravitas.” I must say, odes to New York don’t get much nicer than that. Women may come and go in your books, but the city is always there. Is it the most enduring love of your life?

Jay McInerney: The city is certainly the most enduring love of my life, and it’s been the backdrop for most of my other romances. I still get excited when I approach from the east or west and catch sight of the skyline.

BNR: The word bright consistently figures into your titles. (Bright Lights, Big City; Brightness Falls; Bright, Precious Days.) Do you mean to signal a moth-to-flame sensibility in your work?

JM: I think indeed it’s a question of moth to flame. It’s a reference of course to the city lights and the fact that my characters are drawn to them.

BNR: One thing you do particularly well is deliver pitch-perfect aperçus. “Kip believed his wealth entitled him to the truth, as if it were a commodity like any other.” Residents of the Hamptons “used this obscure term [jitney] for a public conveyance because the kind of people who could afford to live in both places either didn’t ride buses or, if forced to, would never identify them as such.” Do these come as easily as they used to? Easier?

JM: I think sometimes they come very easily and other times I have to work a bit on them. There is a certain fluency when one is in one’s twenties that perhaps fades a little with time. However, there’s a wisdom, we hope, that comes later in life. On balance it evens out.

BNR: From the get-go, you’ve brilliantly documented the glamorous-but-often-superficial life of fashionable New Yorkers. Do you think you’re chiefly a satirist or a celebrant of that world — that you’re extolling it, skewering it, or both?

JM: I think both. I think my sensibility oscillates between satire and romance but that the latter is ultimately the dominant note. Pure satire is ultimately, it seems to me, somewhat sterile. I can’t write too much about people I don’t care about.

BNR: I confess I sometimes grow impatient with your fascination for “bold-name faces”: characters dine at the sort of places “where, if you read Vanity Fair and watched Charlie Rose, you’d recognize some of the faces in the room, and if you were yourself one of those bold-name faces, you’d know everyone at the surrounding tables.” Why are your characters still so concerned with having the maître d’ know their names or the waiter, their favorite drinks? I understand it’s a way of keeping score, but why are such niceties still so gratifying to your protagonists?

JM: I was trying to enliven the hackneyed phrase: the chapter is written from Corrine’s point of view, and what she sees in the restaurant is faces, not names. I’m not particularly fascinated with boldface names, but most people on the planet seem to be, hence Access Hollywood, Page Six, TMZ, et al. In the case you cite I’m writing about a particularly celebrity-saturated, self-conscious restaurant frequented by New York media people. It’s a hothouse atmosphere — I didn’t invent it, but I’m describing that world and its obsessions.

BNR: Your protagonist quotes some lovely medieval poetry about romantic love. Do you yourself write poetry? Are you a secret romantic?

JM: I wrote poetry for many years; not so much in recent years. I’m not a secret romantic. I’m a romantic.

BNR: You write about a growing exhaustion with the “ridiculous circus” of New York social life: “the babble, the postures and gestures, the ambition and striving and yearning coiled therein . . . For a moment, he recognized how artificial it all was, but he, too, was part of it.” Yet I can’t quite see you moving to backwoods Maine. What’s the solution?

JM: Well, this opinion is Russell’s, not necessarily mine. I think as you get older the social whirl becomes less interesting. But as a novelist I remain interested in social life and all of its manifestations in Manhattan. Definitely not moving to the woods, though I do spend time in eastern Long Island writing, especially in the winter, when there are few New Yorkers around.

BNR: Toward the end of Bright, Precious Days, your protagonist wakes in a panic in the middle of the night. “It was increasingly difficult to avoid the conclusion that he was . . . a failure . . . [not] ‘beloved on the earth.’ ” Yet you wrote one of the signature books of the 1980s, which is still taught in high schools across the country. Doesn’t your continued success somewhat protect you from despair?

JM: I wish I could say success protected me from despair, but it doesn’t. Success doesn’t prevent you from waking up in the middle of the night in a panic, or worrying about mortality or the well-being of your children.

BNR: You were one of the first of your generation to be swept up into the literary pantheon: hanging with Norman Mailer, etc. Was it in any way a burden to have started with such a triumph? If you had not been tapped, would you have written different kinds of books? Would you recommend the experience to other young writers?

JM: I wouldn’t particularly recommend my kind of literary success to anyone; it was very disorienting in some ways, and perhaps I didn’t handle it as well as I might have. It was more of a surprise to me than to anyone, and there weren’t really any road maps to guide me, though in fact, talking to people like Norman Mailer, who’d gone through something similar, certainly helped. He was a great friend and mentor. Early success was the hand that was dealt me. I certainly couldn’t have predicted that success, but in the end I hope I learned from it.

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Into this summer of withering heat, political hysteria, and the potential unraveling of Europe comes Pond, a cool and curious dive into a deceptively small world. First published last year by an independent press in Ireland, the book marks the move by writer Claire-Louise Bennett from a series of essays and short stories, which have earned her critical acclaim, to the sustained voice of a collection. And what a voice it is.

In Pond you tumble down a rabbit hole into an unsettling realm of ultra-close focus. Here the minutiae of daily life — how best to chill a banana, why the ink in a pen has gone from black to green, the sounds of nature as heard from a certain picnic blanket — take on the weight of the universe. Our guide is an enigmatic young woman, the world she inhabits shaped in twenty short . . . stories? What they actually are — studies or chapters or literary etudes — is up for grabs.

There is no plot, no story arc, no characters to meet and learn about. There’s just Bennett’s voice and her singular vision. In pieces that range in length from a few sentences to more than twenty pages, with all but the final entry written in first person, you’re left on your own to figure things out.

Bennett never names her narrator, a onetime graduate student who has recently quit a Ph.D. program. She has left the city behind and taken up residence in a small stone cottage on the western coast of Ireland. The young woman speaks directly to us in rambling monologues, more than a little bit strange, always intense, and often wickedly funny.

When we first meet her it’s the banana that holds her attention. This leads to thoughts on the microclimate of a kitchen windowsill, which shifts to an analysis of the contents of a fruit bowl (“Pears should always be small and organized nose to tail in a bowl of their own”) and on to a discussion of the pros and cons of various breakfast options.

This pinpoint vision telescopes inward until it feels vertiginous. Bennett offers us mere breadcrumbs, the tiniest building blocks of plot — allusions to a string of lovers, the narrator’s realization that she likes sex only when drunk, an old letter so fraught she can neither read nor discard it.

You stumble a bit and waver: will you go on to the next sentence, to the next page? Yes, yes, let’s go on — the lovely writing, as precise and disorienting as the narrator, pulls you into its deceptively gentle current.

What with the remote cottage, the obsessive detail and the failed doctoral thesis, which lies abandoned in a shed (“Many of the pages loose, and I knew very well they weren’t in any order”), these at first look like writings of a woman in full retreat. It’s a surprise, then, in this close and closed-in world, each time the outside world enters.

There’s a speaking engagement our narrator accepts at an academic conference, a nearby neighbor whose house she often visits, and a lively summer party she throws because “I have so many glasses after all.” At the conference, the narrator gives a bold talk that shrugs off centuries of male perspective on the rhapsodies of love and presents it instead as “a vicious and divine disintegration of selfhood . . . ”

Afterward, as the conference participants chat, an academic bigwig looks down his nose at the narrator’s speech. Rather than being abashed, she goes in for a bit of bashing. She hopes he will trip and fall and cut his head with “just a trickle of blood so you don’t look inured, only stupid and a bit iffy.”

The narrator’s flight from academia turns out to mirror Bennett’s own change of direction. Instead of completing the postgrad work about which she says she felt tepid, Bennett moved from London to Ireland. She left the university behind but not her writing. In Pond, there’s a nod to her awareness of the experimental nature of her work, though with its assured style it seems more accurate to view it as an investigation.

“English, strictly speaking, is not my first language by the way,” the narrator tells us. “I haven’t yet discovered what my first language is so for the time being I use English words in order to say things. I expect I will always have to do it that way; regrettably I don’t think my first language can be written down at all. I don’t think it can be made external, you see.”

And yet, as Bennett shows repeatedly in the strange and exhilarating universe beneath Pond‘s surface, it can.

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In You’ll Grow Out of It, comedian Jessi Klein describes a trip to the Chanel counter at Barneys to purchase a blush brush. The brusque salesman, giving her the once-over, asks, “Can I speak freely?” Klein writes, “I hated him but I also felt like he was about to tell me the most important thing any human has ever said to another.” Speaking freely, the salesman declares, “Right now, your priority needs to be your undereye area.” This feedback leads Klein to a fierce rant on priorities — “forget paying your rent and maintaining your relationships. Put off charity work and don’t worry about voting in the general election” — but it also leads her to spend $150 on “a thingy of Chanel eye cream about the circumference of a bottle cap.”

Many of the autobiographical essays in You’ll Grow Out of It give hilarious voice to the ridiculousness of the pressures of femininity — and to how vulnerable many women nonetheless are to those pressures. The funny riffs often suddenly give way to sincere emotion, as when Klein, the head writer and executive producer of Inside Amy Schumer (she has also written for Transparent and Saturday Night Live), addresses her experience with infertility. The book also features plenty of sharp feminist critique. In a piece on why she hates baths, Klein’s jokes about 1970s Calgon commercials and Oprah’s love of bathing build to a clever, Virginia Woolf−inspired analysis, with the author concluding that “getting in the bath is a kind of surrender to the idea that we can’t really make it on land.”  I spoke with Jessi Klein about her book and comedy writing via email. —Barbara Spindel

 

The Barnes & Noble Review: Some of the essays, in addition to being very funny, are unexpectedly moving. Did writing a book allow you to express yourself in a different way than writing for television or doing stand-up?

Jessi Klein: Definitely. One of the things I enjoyed most about writing a book was the freedom to go off on tangents that aren’t necessarily hilarious but represent the kinds of things I think about. I’m a comedy writer and I love watching and creating comedy, but I also like having and expressing other feelings such as anxiety and hunger.

BNR: Writing for television is a collaborative process; writing a book is not. How do you compare the experiences?

JK: Well, being in a writers’ room is usually a pretty raucous, fun environment. Writing a book is more of a lonely slog. That is why I drank white wine through so much of it.

BNR: Many of the essays are about the absurdity of the expectations placed on women. Do you think of your comedy as political?

JK: I think of my comedy as personal, but the personal is political. I think that’s true, right? Yeah. It’s true.

BNR: You had a baby during the writing of the book. Are you interested in writing about motherhood, which, like femaleness in general, comes with its own absurd expectations?

JK: I read a lot of baby books when I was pregnant, and NOTHING prepared me for how bananas the entire experience is. There should be a 1,000-page book whose sole topic is how to deal with the trauma of even just looking at your breast pump for the first time. I’m happy to give it a shot at some point.

BNR: In the essay “How I Became a Comedian,” you reject the idea that you were brave for doing stand-up. But I’d describe some of these essays as fearless because, well, you’re revealing embarrassing things about yourself in a book with your name on it. Do you feel brave now?

JK: Well, I don’t feel brave, but I also don’t feel embarrassed by anything I revealed in the book. Acknowledging that you look at porn isn’t embarrassing. Voting for Donald Trump is embarrassing.

BNR: Did you have any models in mind while writing? What are some of your favorite books by comedians?

JK: I love the writing of Nora Ephron and David Sedaris and Cheryl Strayed. Moshe Kasher is a really funny comedian who wrote an incredible memoir called Kasher in the Rye  that I was blown away by.

BNR: With so many women creating amazing comedy, will the debate over whether women are as funny as men die anytime soon?

JK: Oh jeez, I really, really hope so.

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On my worktable are two photographs; one of the Dargle River on Ireland’s east coast, where I grew up, the other of nearby Killiney Beach, where my mother spent her youth. Both scenes are empty of people but filled with ghosts. When I look at them, I can feel the riverbank spongy under my sandals and hear the shush of waves collapsing on shingle, churning the pebbles. Every detail is imprinted for life because this is my native place. Anna Pavord knows the feeling. The Welsh-born writer had a similarly quiet start and she begins her new book, Landskipping: Painters, Ploughmen and Places, with a bucolic memory: gathering winberries with her mother on gentle slopes. “At the top of all three of the hills, the land flattened out and wide grass paths, kept open by the endless nibbling of sheep, led forward to the smooth cone of the mountain . . . Not sublime. Not even as beautiful as other places I discovered later in life. But resilient. And deeply familiar.” Pavord’s North Wales is not “a landscape to be given a capital L” like Snowdonia or the Lake District, and her wonderful book — as deceptively modest as the hillside just described — reveals why that is; how ideals of beauty were imposed on nature, most assiduously in the eighteenth century and most ecstatically in the Romantic era.

Landskipping, a title taken from the seventeenth-century word landskip, which derived from the Dutch landschap, covers a lot of ground historically and geographically. Journeying from prehistoric Stonehenge to the present, Pavord alights in the Scottish Highlands, the Lake District, Norfolk, Northumberland, Wales, and Dorset. As she vividly describes each region, she also introduces us to eighteenth-century travel writers like the nitpicking William Gilpin and nineteenth-century agricultural reformers such as the fulminating William Cobbett. She calls on painters and poets: Constable, Turner, Wordsworth, John Clare. Yet Pavord never seems hurried or, worse, plodding. An ideal travel companion, she dispenses her erudition deftly and engagingly, varying her pace and point of view with such agility that the land she surveys and the history she contemplates become equally tangible. Trudging across marshland, for example, she observes that “Until about 7000 BC, Norfolk was joined to mainland Europe by a North Sea landscape of forests, swamp and brackish pools . . . you could make out the shape of roots and whole trees, lying where they had fallen, pickled now to a crumbly softness.” She passes cottages built of ” . . . melting blocks of chalk . . . ” and retreats to a pub decorated with ” . . . the carefully stage-managed remnants of a civilization now vanished: walls hung with reed cutters, rick knives, spokeshaves.” Then out again into the rain. Would a visit to the harbor town of Wells be fun? “It might be, but not on the wet Sunday afternoon I was there, when only amusement arcades leered out of the greyness.”

There are echoes of Robert Louis Stevenson in the book’s companionably irreverent tone and of Laurie Lee in its lyricism, but Pavord’s own voice, direct and witty, is strongest of all. Lamenting the blurring speed of modern travel, for example, she writes, “I always salute Stonehenge when I pass it. Yet I feel bad storming down the A303 with Eric Clapton pounding on the car’s tape deck and a half-eaten Mars bar in my hand. It seems disrespectful to flash by like this.” Then she allows us a glimpse of the site as Turner painted it in the nineteenth century, “the enigmatic stones standing in silhouette on the horizon beyond.” Pavord loves this varied land — her childhood Wales, her Dorset fields — but with clear-eyed passion. “It is a fallacy that our landscape is an entirely natural phenomenon,” she explains in her chapter on agriculture, “the views that we croon over and write about, with too many adjectives, have very often been shaped by farmers.” No wonder she has a soft spot for agriculturalist William Cobbett, whose zealotry is one of this book’s delights. “To travel in stage coaches is to be hurried along by force, in a box, with an air-hole in it,” he huffed as he traveled on horseback in the 1820s, visiting farmers, extoling the swede, hating the potato, and skewering big landowners. (“The great, the big bull frog grasps all,” Cobbett wrote in 1823. “In this beautiful island every inch of land is appropriated by the rich.”) And the new suburbs? Pavord writes that “Sunninghill made him so apoplectic you wonder he could stay in the saddle: ‘a spot,’ he raged, ‘all made into grounds and gardens by tax eaters.’ ” (Imagine Cobbett’s delight when Pavord later remarks, “As an environment, a golf course is a fascist state.”) Equally charming are crotchety tourists like John Byng, who visited Tintern in 1781and wrote that he “entr’d the abbey accompanied by a boy who knew nothing, and by a very old man who had forgotten everything; but I kept him with me, as his venerable grey beard, and locks, added dignity to my thoughts.”

The history of tourism, of landscape painting, of revolutions in taste; the fact that Constable, when painting on rough sheets, “put wings” on any specks in the paper and made them “fly away as birds”; the thrilling description of a Lake District waterfall when “the whole leisurely bulk of the river is penned between jutting cliffs of rock on either side, wet with spray, green with moss:” Pavord folds all of this and more into a graceful, airy narrative that ends where it began, on a Welsh mountainside and with a final gesture. “I cast my mother’s ashes into the wind,” she concludes, “and waited silently as they whirled out over the glittering valley.”

Image:  John Constable, Yarmouth Pier (1822) via Wikiart

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With work by turns sensual, political, magical, and earthy, Pablo Neruda is one of the world’s most beloved poets, as well as an extremely well studied literary figure. That is why it was a tremendous literary surprise when, in going through Neruda’s archive in the years after 2011, archivists uncovered twenty-one unpublished poems and fragments written between the 1950s and Neruda’s death in 1973. This spring, the newly uncovered poems, translated by Forrest Gander, have been gathered into a beautiful edition entitled Then Come Back, from Copper Canyon. Poet Tess Taylor talks to Latin American historian Patrick Iber about what the new poems contain, the magical and gorgeous home where they were hidden, and how they help us see Neruda newly now.

Tess Taylor: As a poet, but not a Neruda or Latin America scholar, I read these poems and am struck again by just how pleasant it is to read Neruda. I feel his sensuality, his praise of the magic in ordinary things. I think of lines like “smithing the secret tin” or “settle your perfect hips here on the bow of wet arrows.” I love it when he calls his beloved “a secret hard-bodied dove.” I could read lines like that all day. But as someone deeply schooled in Neruda’s life and times, you read their contexts differently. Can you tell me about your experience of reading this collection?

Patrick Iber: I too was struck by the beauty of some of the poems: though they are unpublished, most of them don’t feel like leftovers. But it’s true that I couldn’t help but think about the life Neruda was living when he wrote them. The poems here were discovered among papers dating from the mid-1950s to 1973. That is the only part of the Neruda archive that still exists, because his third wife, Matilde Urrutia, kept it safe at the extraordinary house he built for her (known as La Chascona) when she was his mistress. That house still holds his archive, so the materials there reflect a particular time in his life. He had passed many of his most politically turbulent years there, until the final few, when he was close friends with the Socialist president of Chile, Salvador Allende, who was overthrown just before Neruda’s death. It’s safe to say that his poetry had also settled, as he had. So while the poems here are new and not derivative, their themes are often familiar. There are the love poems he is so known for, paeans to Chile’s beautiful geography, odes to concrete things. There is at least one revelation, in my view: an unusual reflection on telephones and communication.

As a poet, did any of these categories strike you as more skillfully rendered than the others?

TT: I saw that mix of categories as well. It struck me that we as readers were making enormous leaps across time and space — that Neruda, who was always conceiving full album collections, would not himself have ever conceived of this collection as a collection. Instead it’s made of our desire for Neruda, and our desire to piece together even the smallest bits that might have been lost. But even though it doesn’t move as a deliberate collection might, Neruda’s linguistic richness comes through so strongly and his salty praise of common people and things. I love that poem to the telephone, too.

But I want to back up. You’ve actually been to the archive where these poems were found. Can you describe it?

PI: La Chascona, the home where the archive is stored, is built into a hillside in Santiago, the Chilean capital. There’s a small stream running through the yard. The exterior is painted ultramarine blue, and parts of the upper house are shaped like the prow of a ship. It has an entirely unconventional design; there are few rooms that are box-shaped. I remember one room with a sloping, creaking wooden floor that recreates the feeling of being aboard a ship. Neruda was a helpless collector of objects (as a Communist, he was sometimes given a hard time about this bourgeois habit), and the house is full of the things he picked up on his travels around the world. My most vivid memory is a gigantic pair of shoes — designed like derbies, I think — but as big as snowshoes. One wonders what possible purpose their maker could have had in making them — perhaps that mystery is what Neruda liked about them too. The house was built for Matilde Urrutia when she was Neruda’s mistress (they later married), and there is a also a famous painting of Matilde given to Neruda by his friend the Mexican painter Diego Rivera, in which Neruda’s facial profile is hidden in Matilde’s hair, representing their secret relationship.

TT: A ship-shaped ultramarine house, a clandestine painting, artistic but perhaps unfunctional shoes. That sounds incredibly rich — like each of those things might be a figure for poetry itself. I love the image of the “helpless collector” — someone in the thrall of the aesthetic, which the poems show. And that helpless collector quality seems so in line with the archetype of the poet — at once wanting communal politics but also being in the thrall of specific aesthetic objects with particular aesthetic beauty. This also seems so resonant with Neruda’s life — especially this settled, late part you mention. I’m wondering if the poems offer any new glimpses into Neruda or confirm a rich vision that you already felt was there? And — what about the more political and early experiments do you miss?

PI: The archivist at La Chascona (Darío Oses, who wrote the introduction to this collection) told me it was Matilde who began to preserve his papers; no one did so for him in the 1920s, ’30s, or ’40s. And Neruda, oddly enough, didn’t preserve them well himself. As a result, we don’t have anything here from his experimental periods in the 1930s and 1940s that took him in different directions — more surrealistic and moody in the ’30s; and more triumphant and grandiose in the ’40s and early ’50s as he tried to produce poetry that would hasten the Communist politics that he favored. Of course, we have poems and writings from those periods, but no archive from which to discover new fragments.

To me, the poem in this collection that feels like it adds the most insight into Neruda’s life and personality is the reflection on life with the telephone. There isn’t a lot of whimsy in Neruda’s work, but there’s a kind of bemused irritation in that one that quickly shifts to a sinister register. (“I live trembling that they won’t call me / or that they will, those idiots, / my anxiety is medicationproof, / doctors, priests, politicians, / maybe I’m turning myself into a telephone, / an abominable, black-lacquered instrument / through which others communicate”) One can only imagine how annoyed he would have been in an ode to the smartphone. It’s also chronologically the last poem, from January 1973. I said earlier that Neruda seems settled poetically in this volume, but his life was hardly a relaxing one.

To give context to this telephone poem: 1970 was the year his close friend, the Socialist Salvador Allende, was elected president of that Chile after several unsuccessful attempts. In the United States, the Nixon administration (as other administrations before it had also done), maneuvered to keep Allende from taking office, and, once he did anyway, did its best to undermine Chile’s economy and ruin Allende’s presidency. In 1970, Neruda would have been excited to at long last have a left-wing president in office. Allende gave him the important job of ambassador to Paris — relations with Europe were especially important as Chile sought to mitigate the effects of U.S. hostility. Little doubt his phone was ringing constantly. It was a time of excitement, but not a peaceful one. Allende frequently called on Neruda for advice while president; some of those calls that troubled Neruda would have been from Allende himself. But by late 1972, both the poet and the president were despairing as Chile’s political situation deteriorated. In September 1973, Chile’s military bombed the presidential palace, and Allende committed suicide rather than surrender. Thousand of leftists were killed and tortured by the military government, especially in the first days.

Neruda died soon after — he had prostate cancer, but it used to be said that died of heartbreak. (He may also have been the victim of a medical assassination, since the military government feared the power of his voice.) I can’t help but think of all the work he was doing on behalf of Allende’s government when I read this, and how well he captures the transformation of hope into fear. For me, this is the poem in this volume with the qualities of a classic — it speaks powerfully and poignantly to its own time as well as to our own.

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Nicole Dennis-Benn knows that activism can be a dirty word. “It has such a negative connotation to so many people. But, you don’t have to be marching around with your fist in the air; activism can be very subtle. And that’s what I love about fiction, it’s not didactic. It opens up people’s eyes to individuals, it allows them to be voyeurs and they are changed by it.”

It is impossible to read Dennis-Benn’s debut novel, Here Comes the Sun, and not be changed. The book traces the stories of four Jamaican women fighting for selfhood and love in a country that is built upon their exploitation. Margot works at a luxury resort by day and, by night, sells her sexual services to the white male tourists who frequent the hotel. As a result of Margot’s choices, Thandi, her younger sister, is able to go to an elite high school where she can get a “proper” education, but she is isolated from her peers, who see her as too black and too poor. Delores, their mother, barely scrapes by selling her wares to tourists outside the hotels. Verdene, Margot’s secret love, has returned to Jamaica after being chased out by her community when she was discovered having sex with a woman.

Here Comes the Sun is beautiful and unsparing in its critique of the tourism industry and the ways in which racism, sexual violence, and homophobia warp the lives of the characters. It is a meditation on the possibility of hope and intimacy in the face of great adversity. It is also a rare opportunity to see marginalized voices at the center of a story, and Dennis-Benn takes care to give each character their full and nuanced humanity.

I spoke with Dennis-Benn over the phone about the transformative power of language, writing the books you want to read, and how breaking silences can save your life. —Amy Gall

 

The Barnes & Noble Review: What was the impetus for this book?

Nicole Dennis-Benn: I didn’t conceive of the idea for the book until I returned to Jamaica in 2010 and all these old feelings came up. I thought, I need to do something with that feeling. It was, mostly the Thandi story at first.

Thandi was a working-class student, and she did well and was given this opportunity to study in an elite school. Similarly, I grew up in Kingston, which was a working-class community, and then I went to an elite high school, and suddenly I was with girls who were the daughters of doctors and lawyers. It was like night and day. So finding myself and finding my identity was a struggle. And that’s when I started looking at myself as this darker-skinned girl, feeling ugly and stuck in comparison to my lighter-skinned peers, who were regarded as beautiful and had all this access that I didn’t have.

But, then I returned again in 2012 for my wedding, and I was exposed to a whole new world of the tourist industry and saw girls who were prostituting themselves out to these wealthy male tourists, and that was how Margot started talking to me. One of the girls I talked to said to me, “This is what pays my rent, this is what sends me to school.” She was doing it for survival. I couldn’t judge her for that. I said, let me make this into a story, instead. Writing fiction is how I deal with the world.

BNR: What was the research process like for this book?

NDB: I spoke to just one girl who was doing sex work, but in terms of other people working at the hotel, I spoke to hotel clerks, cleaners, landscapers. And then I would read excerpts of the book to them and they loved it. What was most rewarding to me was that they did not judge Margot. It was apparent that she was having sex with men to supplement her income because she wasn’t making much money at a hotel, so when it was presented to them that way, they understood and related. That felt really good.

BNR: That was one of the most beautiful things, to me, about the book. You gave such a full and nuanced humanity to people who are so often ignored or disregarded.

NDB: That’s why it’s so important to write from where we are. A lot of literature out of Jamaica is written by individuals who are from an upper class, so when you see working-class people on the page, they are usually caricatures. And I wanted to see myself on the page as a fully rounded out character. As Toni Morrison says, “You write the books you want to read.” So, I wrote those people because those people are my family, those people are me.

BNR: Speaking of which, has your family read the book?

NDB: They have. My mother, who is my most important reader, surprised me. She really loved it. At first I was worried because Margot is gay, and I thought she would only see that and dismiss the book. And she liked Margot and she even said to me, “I don’t like the way Margot is treating Verdene.” She could see their relationship as an actual relationship.

BNR: I know very little about North American Free Trade Agreement, but I assumed you chose to set the novel in the mid-’90s in part because of that agreement.

NDB: Yes, I chose the ’90s because that was when the tourism boom happened. At the time, the country was just finding out that our former prime minister, Michael Manley, owed the IMF billions of dollars, and people were scurrying around trying to figure out how to repay it. Tourism was one of the solutions. We also started importing more than exporting, and a lot of farmers suffered from that because they could no longer sell their own crops. So the poor became even poorer and the wealthier became even wealthier. When the resorts came people were also displaced to make room for hotels. All the fishing villages disappeared, and with them even more jobs. So, you have these beautiful, white, expansive beaches, but the people are gone. And it’s still happening.

BNR: All of the women in the book are subject to some form of sexual violence and shaming. Since the novel takes place in the mid-’90s, has the culture or legislation around sexual violence changed at all for the better?

NDB: Not at all. In Jamaica, the men who commit those crimes rarely get arrested. Women’s and girls’ bodies are looked at as unworthy, so there’s no accountability. In fact, a crime was committed two weeks ago where a three-year-old girl was raped and murdered, and the community members knew who did it and they were not telling the police. There was pressure from the police to turn this man in, but in our culture if you’re the informer and you talk to the police about anything, you’re looked down upon and shunned. Ultimately someone did turn him in, but these guys never get long-term prison sentences. And he will probably only get jail time because he murdered the girl, not because he raped her. The sad part is, I posted about it on Facebook and asked if there were any organizations in Jamaica that can help with this, and no one knew anything. That’s why I wanted to touch on that in Here Comes the Sun especially. That someone like Clover [who raped one of the main characters] can be walking around free and unbothered, but Verdene, a lesbian, is a witch and totally ostracized.

BNR: The relationship between Verdene and Margot is a central part of the book. How has the treatment of the LGBTQ community in Jamaica changed since the mid-’90s?

NDB: In the ’90s there were a lot of acts of violence, especially against men who were found to be gay. They would be murdered or would just disappear. Women would be raped. To be honest with you, it hasn’t changed. What has changed is the silence. The more we rely on tourism, the more fearful people become to speak out. Even the LGBTQ organizations in Jamaica are saying, “We’re fine now, don’t worry about us,” because a lot of foreigners were saying they weren’t going to come to Jamaica because of the homophobia, which just makes it worse for Jamaicans. It became “Close your mouth and don’t get in the way of us getting foreign money.” So you probably won’t hear the news stories any more because they are working hard to cover that up.

But, it’s also about class. If you are in the upper-class society, you are insulated. Everyone can know that you are a lesbian and gay person because you have the means to separate yourself. But working-class individuals live in such close proximity to each other, your neighbor knows everything that is going on, they can see into your gate, who is coming in, who is leaving, it’s much harder to hide.

BNR: Did you draw on your own experiences with your sexuality for the book?

NDB: I did. Margot really fought her attraction to Verdene. She couldn’t bring herself to admit it. She would never call herself a lesbian. And that’s something that is ingrained in the culture. Loving someone of the same gender is hard, because we’ve internalized so much hatred, it’s hard to let go of all that. For me it took years to get past it. It took coming to the U.S., for one, and realizing I can’t keep looking over my shoulder all the time. I couldn’t live that way. I had to let go of a lot of things. For me, thank goodness I had therapy, Margot doesn’t have that.

BNR: How did the character of Verdene come to you?

NDB: Verdene, more than anyone, was actually me speaking to me, saying, “You’re claiming a country” that does not claim you back. Verdene comes back to Jamaica from England and can leave if she wants to, but she stays because that’s where she was born and raised, and Margot is representative of that, too. She knew Margot, they grew up together, and she is in love with her, but still, the town and Jamaica itself don’t see her as worthy. I’ve done interviews with other out gay artists from Jamaica, and we’ve talked about how our country doesn’t want anything to do with us. Yes, they like us now because we are doing well, but we had to come to America for a reason. And it’s hard to deal with, it’s a homesickness that never goes away.

BNR: You went back to Jamaica for your wedding. How did you make that decision?

NDB: My wife is African American, so I got married in my wife’s country. But, then I thought, what about me, my whole identity is forgotten by my getting married in the United States. So, I decided we’d have the reception in Jamaica because I wanted Jamaica to be a part of our love. But we knew the only way we could do it is if it was in secret and no one would know. We didn’t expect the Jamaican media would get ahold of the story and leak it. And the reporting was very homophobic. And the news had comments sections, and so my wife and I would read the most horrible comments by people who were absolutely enraged and offended by our love. That was what prompted me to write my own story, which was picked up by Ebony and NPR, because I wanted to tell the truth. I wanted to give us both our humanity. We are two women in love, we aren’t witches.

BNR: You delved into such dark stuff: colonialism, sexual violence, etc. What did you do for self-care while writing this book?

NDB: I did a lot of journaling and talking to other people during this time. But also, not to be clichéd, I found writing this book to be a great purging, it was more healing than anything else. And it’s even more healing now that the book is being received the way it is. A lot of people at readings are coming up to me and saying, “Thank you, you said everything I’ve always wanted to say.” It really touches me that my story is speaking for those who never had a voice, who never knew they could speak that way.

BNR: You once told me that when you’re writing you have to be careful about what you read because you don’t want other books to influence your writing in the wrong way. What were you reading when you wrote this book?

NDB: I was reading a lot. Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Edwidge Danticat. I didn’t want the women I was writing about to fall flat on the page, I wanted them to have a roundedness, so I wanted to see how those authors tackled characterization. I read Elizabeth Strout, who wrote Olive Kitteridge, and she has this sense of place that I loved, she made New England a character in and of itself, and I wanted to do that in my book with Riverbank. Zora Neale Hurston I loved because of the way she used dialect. I toyed with the idea of doing my entire book in dialect instead of having an English narrator, but I’m not that courageous yet. Maybe with another book!

BNR: What is your favorite thing about language?

NDB: Language is transformative. Audre Lorde had this beautiful essay, “Transforming Silence into Language and Action,” and she says when we hold certain things in, that’s what really eats us up. I agree. Our silences need to be spoken. If they aren’t spoken, they can’t protect us. And that was what was so healing about Here Comes the Sun. I spoke it, and there’s no taking it back. You can’t unhear it.

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