Parul Sehgal

At 23, F. Scott Fitzgerald — a sudden celebrity with the success of his first book, “This Side of Paradise” — told the press that his ambitions were to write the greatest novel of all time and to stay in love with his wife forever.

Fitzgerald died young, at 44. In the years left him, however, he produced an abiding American classic, “The Great Gatsby,” and never stopped loving his wife, Zelda. And as St. Teresa of Ávila wrote, “There are more tears shed over answered prayers than over unanswered prayers.”

Despite their mutual preoccupation, the Fitzgeralds’ marital unhappiness was legendary, and proved to be the great quarry for Scott’s literary imagination. In photographs, the couple resembled each other, with soft faces, sulky mouths; they looked like bad, beautiful children — and behaved with joyless destructiveness, smashing up everything in arm’s reach. There were appalling scenes at airports, hospitalizations, suicide attempts. Their daughter was sent to live with Scott’s literary agent. Friends grew leery of giving the couple their home addresses. In 1930, Zelda was first hospitalized after a breakdown (the diagnosis was schizophrenia but there is now a prevalent belief that she suffered from bipolar disorder) and she would remain institutionalized for much of her life, dying in 1948, in a hospital fire.

Various versions of the couple’s letters have been published over the years, but “Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda” claims to contain the fullest collection of Zelda’s side of the correspondence. The editors, Jackson R. Bryer and Cathy W. Barks, write that “the new letters, placed chronologically with those collected previously, allow us to view their relationship in a more evenhanded manner than heretofore has been possible.”

Did your eye snag on “evenhanded,” as mine did? Suspicious little word; it’s only ever deployed with partisan intent. But there are only partisans when it comes to the Fitzgeralds’ marriage — or any marriage, for that matter. There is Hemingway’s opinion of Zelda as a succubus envious of her husband’s talent and determined to lead him to ruin. More recent perspectives on Zelda cast her as a proto-feminist heroine, one of the lost women of history, like Dorothy Wordsworth or Alice James, whose gifts were overshadowed by the famous man in her life. In the case of Zelda, there was outright appropriation — Fitzgerald famously lifted passages from her letters and diaries for his fiction — and when Zelda wanted to write a novel based on her breakdown (later published as “Save Me the Waltz”), the same territory he was exploring in “Tender Is the Night,” their marriage combusted.

This collection has been marshaled with the hope of rehabilitating Scott’s reputation, to portray him as a victim, too — of his alcoholism — and as more supportive of Zelda than commonly believed. The editors and the Fitzgeralds’ granddaughter Eleanor Lanahan, who contributes an introduction, want absolution for Scott, but where is he in this book? His letters are wan and few compared to Zelda’s, often dictated to a secretary. He was never a dazzling letter writer — far too querulous and carping and always, you sense, warming up to ask for a loan. His correspondence, Gore Vidal once said, ought to be preserved, not published.

Read this book for Zelda, even if you’re weary of the cultural obsession with her. Better yet, if you’re disinterested entirely, as I was, and perplexed by the cultural fascination (in recent years, there have been four novels based on her life, and three major biopics are in the works).

I had a vague sense of her as the prototype for Fitzgerald’s lovely, reckless heroines, and that he had cribbed material from her, including Daisy Buchanan’s line in “The Great Gatsby,” upon learning she had given birth to a daughter: “I hope she’ll be a fool — that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.” I was anticipating someone doleful, distracted — not this funny, hard-boiled observer of her own life whose letters read like short stand-up sequences. From an early note to Scott: “You know everything about me, and that’s mostly what I think about. I seem always curiously interested in myself, and it’s so much fun to stand off and look at me.”

She remains this way: arch, amused, self-mocking, writing parodies of the kind of simpering love letters expected of young women. “Men love me cause I’m pretty — and they’re always afraid of mental wickedness — and men love me cause I’m clever, and they’re always afraid of my prettiness — One or two have even loved me cause I’m lovable, and then, of course, I was acting.” She has no secondhand impressions or turns of phrase — everything she writes and thinks feels tart, original, lightly distressing.

A great many of these letters were written while Zelda was institutionalized. At first glance it seems obscene to deem them “love letters,” these pleas for pocket money and visits, her desperation for meaningful work. “Lonesome,” she writes four times in one short note, and again in letter after letter. “I’m so lonesome all the time.” “It’s desperate to be so alone.” “Terribly lonely.” She demands to be let out of the institution: “Please. Please let me out now.” “Every day more of me dies.” “The longer I have to bear this the meaner and harder and sicker I get.”

But then, a mercurial shift in mood. “Do you still smell of pencils and sometimes of tweed?”

Ardor is her mode, and Scott her “sungod.” “Don’t you think I was made for you?” she writes. “I feel like you had me ordered — and I was delivered to you — to be worn. I want you to wear me, like a watch-charm.” In these letters — mostly written from institutions in Switzerland, North Carolina and Maryland — she sat in her room, yearning for and conjuring up her husband: the way he held his cigarettes (“way down, wedged between your fingers”), his smell (“the delicious damp grass that grows near old walls”), the look of his wrist emerging from his sleeve.

Her life never creeps into the letters; little can be gleaned about the institutions in which she often made her home. She scarcely mentions her doctors or treatments, which were reportedly barbarous. She doesn’t inquire about the world, the war, her friends. She croons only one song — “darling, my dearest”; “dearest, my love.” “If you will come back I will make the jasmine bloom and all the trees come out in flower,” she writes. There will be clouds to eat, and bathing “in the foam of the rain — and I will let you play with my pistol.”

They never did very well when he did come back, however. Her symptoms, including intolerable eczema over her whole body, would worsen; there were bitter fights. Their love flourished mainly in these letters, full of her intense longing for nights of “soft conspiracy,” for Scott at the seaside all “salty and sunburned,” his legs sticking together in the heat.

It’s a peculiar fact that “The Great Gatsby,” a fairly bitter, even furious novel about class and disillusionment, murder, bootlegging and corruption, is so often remembered only for its parties and shimmering love story. Strange, too, is the misapprehension when it comes to Scott and Zelda. We recall their raucous early days, their extravagant unhappiness, but after reading these letters what strikes you is their steadiness, a shocking word to apply to them. They could not handle early success, Bryer and Barks write, and after a point they did not live together. Fitzgerald took up with writer Sheila Graham in his final years. But that bond with Zelda proved stubborn and sturdy, and survived it all. In their last letters, they are still loving and vexing and shoring each other up. “Happily, happily foreverafterwards,” Zelda once wrote. “The best we could.”

‘Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald’

Edited by Jackson R. Bryer and Cathy W. Barks

Illustrated. 400 pages. Scribner. $22.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/books/dear-scott-dearest-zelda-fitzgerald-love-letters.html" id="c260cac4-36a8-3bee-ae0b-f6c7b743388a">The New York Times</a>.

(Books of The Times)

A Stubborn and Sturdy Love in the Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald

This was a lament, not a boast. How austere advanced mathematics can seem to the layperson — a confluence of the intimidating and the irrelevant. It’s easy to forget that math has been vaunted as a source of pleasure, even consolation. In the Symposium, it is described as a source of the most sublime eros, second only to the Platonic ideal of beauty. Late in life, Thomas Jefferson reported that its contemplation was a balm against the despair of aging.

Karen Olsson’s beguiling new book, “The Weil Conjectures,” arrives as a corrective, describing mathematics — its focus, abstraction, odd hunches, blazing epiphanies — as a powerful intoxicant, a door to euphoria. She twines her arguments around the story of the Weil siblings: André and Simone, the philosopher and secular saint — “the only great spirit of our time,” according to Camus.

The precocity of the Weil siblings is the stuff of legend. At 9 years old, André was tinkering with doctoral-level math. By 12, he had taught himself Sanskrit, become a proficient violinist and taken his younger sister’s education in hand. The pair spoke to each other in rhyming couplets and Ancient Greek. Their idea of play was to recite long passages of Racine and Corneille aloud to each other, with any errors earning a hard slap across the face. (That’s one alternative to “screen time.”)

When Simone, barely into her teens, felt hopelessly outpaced by her brother, she contemplated suicide. “I didn’t mind having no visible successes, but what did grieve me was the idea of being excluded from that transcendent kingdom to which only the truly great have access and wherein truth abides,” she later wrote. “I preferred to die rather than live without that truth.”

Her genius was for the moral imagination, for empathy so extreme it flirted with self-erasure. At 5, she gave up sugar in solidarity with French troops stationed at the front of World War I. It’s not merely that she was preternaturally attentive to the suffering of others, she was determined to cast her lot with them — to live without heat and keep strict rations, to fling herself into factory work and volunteer in mines and fields — often with disastrous results. Her parents, marvels of forbearance, frequently had to swoop in to save her from her noble, quixotic ambitions. In 1936, she made it to the front lines of the Spanish Civil War, posing as a journalist. She could barely handle her heavy gun — and promptly stepped in a pot of boiling cooking oil. The skin came off her foot along with her sock; she required weeks of convalescence and care.

“The Weil Conjectures” takes its title from a series of propositions written by André that led to the development of modern algebraic geometry. “The word ‘conjecture’ derives from a root notion of throwing or casting things together,” Olsson writes. To the story of the Weil siblings, she adds her own infatuation with mathematics, which she studied briefly in college before turning to fiction (she is the author of two novels). Those years spent swotting away at equations retain a special sheen in her memory: “We were a small band of students giddily, exhaustedly trekking through an abstract moonscape,” she writes. “The egos, the insecurity, the unabashed nerdiness! I miss it still.”

As a “midlife mother of two,” she is perplexed to find herself returning to math, watching university lectures online, finding comfort in the steadiness of numbers “given our present-day world’s particular instabilities and alternative facts.”

The book unfurls effortlessly, loose and legato. There are no real revelations — the subjects are well-known and long dead. There are no stakes; there is no suspense. I was riveted. Olsson is evocative on curiosity as an appetite of the mind, on the pleasure of glutting oneself on knowledge. André “gorges himself” on mathematics and Sanskrit. Simone crawls between her books arrayed on the floor, “leans over Descartes like an animal drinking.”

What’s curious is that we never learn why she was reading Descartes so intently (or that he later became one of her prime philosophical sparring partners). There are slow pans of André at his desk, his cat perched on the edge, but we are rarely privy to the work itself. Olsson remains breezy on the finer points of their intellectual interests, perhaps to keep the narrative from being bogged down.

The glamour of mathematics is what excites her, its colorful stories. The book advances in fragments, historical divagations that drift by, smoothly as clouds: Hippasus of Metapontum supposedly flung off a ship for his discovery of irrational numbers, or the unearthing of the Rhind papyrus of 1700 B.C., one of the oldest mathematical documents, with an insuperable opening line: “Directions for Attaining the Knowledge of All Dark Things.” Olsson is drawn to anecdotes that emphasize the role of beauty and chance. Why do we represent the unknown with x? Credit René Descartes’ printer, who was running out of letters while producing copies of the treatise “La Géométrie.” X, y and z remained, and the printer settled on x, the least used letter in French.

If there is an x in this book, it is Simone Weil.

For all of Olsson’s skill at untangling knotty mathematics, she is baffled by Simone, insensible to her charisma and put off by her prose — “awfully high in fiber,” she describes it, and lacking in style. It is a freakish version of the thinker she offers us, a gaunt catastrophe in wide skirts. “The more I learn,” Olsson writes, “the more I begin to wonder whether his sanity somehow implicated his sister’s extremity, whether in the Weil family, the two roles were divided between them: He would be the great mathematician, and she would come unhinged.”

The issue of Weil’s mental state has long preoccupied and divided her biographers. She died at 34, from tuberculosis, aggravated, it is said, by prolonged malnutrition from restricting herself to children’s wartime rations. “Unhinged” is a crude diagnosis, especially in a book that gives short shrift to her work and influence. From “The Weil Conjectures,” it’s difficult to discern how rich and various her life truly was; or to grasp her political shrewdness and the intellectual concerns and the style that has irrigated the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Iris Murdoch, Giorgio Agamben, Elizabeth Hardwick, Susan Sontag.

The mathematician Henri Poincaré, a mentor to André, imagined that thoughts lived in the mind like static particles, “as if hooked to a wall,” Olsson writes. Thinking liberated them and allowed them to crash into and attach to one another. Her book is full of such moments of connection, combustion and surprise. And if x goes unsolved, there is something apt and beautiful there, too. For all the riddles of mathematics, there is also the ordinary and eternal mystery of other people’s minds.

“The Weil Conjectures: On Math and the Pursuit of the Unknown”

214 pages. Farrar, Straus &amp; Giroux. $26.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/books/review-weil-conjectures-math-karen-olsson.html" link="null" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

Two brilliant siblings and the curious consolations of math

(Books of The Times): At the 1994 reception for the prestigious Kyoto Prize, awarded for achievements that contribute to humanity, French mathematician André Weil turned to his fellow honoree, film director Akira Kurosawa, and said: “I have a great advantage over you. I can love and admire your work, but you cannot love and admire my work.”

None of this, we understand, counts as a betrayal of his expectations.

“Say hi to Major Ellie,” he introduces himself. “My whole C.V. could fit onto two lines: one man, 637 missions, a few thousand tons of the finest explosives deposited in some of the world’s most evil places. Some hits. Some misses. Current status: lost.”

Ellie is dupe, villain and victim in Mohammed Hanif’s “Red Birds,” which depicts a universe populated exclusively by the dupes, villains and victims of America’s forever war, along with a few charlatans, people driven mad by grief and, to my great unhappiness, one talking dog (talking animals are up there with precocious children in my annals of literary sins).

It is the bleakest, most mournful book by an author celebrated for his barbed tongue and high silliness. A former fighter pilot with the Pakistani army and longtime BBC correspondent, Hanif made his name with his Joseph Heller-influenced burlesques about the horrors and hypocrisies of war. “A Case of Exploding Mangoes” (2008), shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, lampooned the assassinated Pakistani president, Gen. Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, lavishing upon him, among other humiliations, a spectacular case of anal worms. In “Our Lady of Alice Bhatti” (2012), Hanif excoriated violence against women — “a sport older than cricket but just as popular” — but with slapstick instead of sanctimony. (Hanif is also a contributing opinion writer for The Times.)

With “Red Birds,” he explores the entanglement of aid agencies and the war machine. Ellie is taken in by the refugee camp he intended to bomb, in an unnamed country. He becomes the casual captive of a teenager named Momo, who hopes to use him to recover his brother, Ali, who has gone missing — perhaps sold to the Americans. The moral center of the book is Momo’s very depressed and philosophical dog, Mutt, who has a broken leg, a brain fried from a near-fatal electrocution and the ability to sense the ghosts circling the camp.

Hanif’s writing has always been anchored in Pakistan, and in a very Punjabi sense of humor. Here it floats free, leached of color and all local detail. For the first time he plays with parable — and what an exciting departure it might have been.

Instead, we get an alarmingly sloppy and choppy ghost story. The Americans sound incongruously British. There are welters of pronoun confusion, and the pacing is all wrong. There’s a bog of exposition to wade through at the beginning, and when Ellie and Momo finally meet, the story picks up for a page only to shudder to a halt. These characters don’t speak to one another; instead, in rotating monologues, they soliloquize, each making the same point repeatedly: Ellie reflects on the endlessness of the forever wars, Momo dreams of money, Mutt philosophizes. When a moment of climax arrives (the only real plot point) and the characters storm an abandoned hangar, rather than escalation or revelation, we get chaos, a supernatural flurry of action. This isn’t a spoiler. Trust that I have no idea what happens — flapping wings and much shouting were all I could register.

Criminally — for such a savagely funny writer — the jokes don’t land. The worst lines belong to the benighted Mutt, who ought to have suffered enough: “Paw on my heart,” he is forced to say. “Woof off.” Gladly.

The Hanif I remember comes to life in his social critiques. “If I didn’t bomb some place, how would she save that place?” Ellie says of an American development worker at the camp. “Make them orphans, then adopt them, that’s how the world goes.” These electric observations are all too infrequent, however, and they can’t enliven a narration that always returns to characters parroting their few key points.

What’s gone wrong here? When a writer this conspicuously talented makes so many elementary, inexplicable errors — and, more seriously, when he jettisons his style, his moves — something is happening, something that merits not censure but a closer look. A painful transformation is afoot.

Wrestling with the novel, I began to feel I was reading less a document about trauma than a document of trauma. The story is weirdly repetitive. Characters reintroduce themselves to us every time they appear, unnecessarily reminding us of their particulars. The narration is listless until it turns furious and then it collapses, lost and weary. The book behaves like a grieving person.

From the first page, there’s an intimation that the novel is animated, in part, by private sorrow. In 2013, Hanif wrote a nonfiction book about the enforced disappearances in the Pakistani province of Balochistan, “The Baloch Who Is Not Missing Anymore and Others Who Are,” published by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. In 2015, his friend, the human rights activist Sabeen Mahmud, held an event on the disappearances at her community space in Karachi. She was killed on her way home. “I don’t think I or any of my colleagues have recovered from that shot,” Hanif has said. Mahmud supplies one of the epigraphs to “Red Birds” — a little line asking the audience to silence their phones, presumably before the gathering that night.

Hanif made his name writing some of the boldest satire of his generation. What happens when satire begins to seem like a statement of impotence, when it loses its power to shame? What lies beyond it? And what happens to a writer when he recognizes the limitations of his favorite form? This novel isn’t riddled with mere flaws but heartbreak.

“I think the novel is set in a war-torn, devastated, half-forgotten place,” Hanif said in a recent interview. “That place is my head.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="f7917251-e93e-4206-9e9b-d29bc5f16f54" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/14/books/review-red-birds-mohammed-hanif.html">The New York Times</a>.

A savagely funny writer shows a bleak side

(Books of The Times): A man is falling from the sky, falling slowly, like a petal. He lands on the sands of an unknown desert with his torn parachute, more dead than alive. There is no sign of his American fighter plane, its American bombs. He is frighteningly calm.

In her extraordinary new book, “No Visible Bruises,” Rachel Louise Snyder reports on what the World Health Organization has called “a global health problem of epidemic proportions.” In the United States alone, more than half of all murdered women are killed by a current or former partner — 50 women every month. Domestic violence cuts across lines of class, race and religion; it is the leading cause of maternal mortality in cities including New York and Chicago, and the second leading cause of death for black women nationwide.

A United Nations report in 2018 put it starkly: The most dangerous place for a woman is her own home.

Domestic violence lurked in the background of every piece Snyder reported, as an investigative journalist for public radio, from Cambodia to Honduras. “An unfortunate fate for the unlucky few,” she used to think, “a matter of bad choices and cruel environments. A woman hard-wired to be hurt. A man hard-wired to hurt.”

Grievous, common errors. This book, winner of the prestigious J. Anthony Lukas Work-In-Progress Award, takes apart the myths that surround domestic violence, many of which Snyder herself once believed: Restraining orders and shelters are always effective responses. Abusers never change. Visible signs of violence point to the greatest threat.

Far from being a private or isolated act, domestic violence — or “intimate partner terrorism,” as Snyder prefers, arguing it more accurately describes the psychological dynamics — has links with mass shootings and is a direct cause of homelessness for more than half of homeless women. She powerfully dismantles the question of why women seem to stay in violent relationships: “We mistake what we see from the outside as her choosing to stay with an abuser, when in fact it’s we who don’t recognize what a victim who is slowly and carefully leaving actually looks like.”

Like Michelle Monson Mosure. At the heart of “No Visible Bruises” is the story of the 2001 murder of Mosure, a Montana woman, and her two children by her husband, Rocky Mosure, who then turned the gun on himself. Michelle was barely a teenager when she met Rocky. He was older and volatile; he began to control how she dressed and where she went. He began to beat her in front of their children.

And then there was the rattlesnake. Rocky supposedly kept one in a cage in the living room. He threated to slip it into her bed while she slept, or drop it in with her while she showered.

In secret, Michelle took classes and planned an escape. She ran away only to return, filed charges only to recant — behavior that might look weak or mystifying, but Snyder reveals how carefully she was trying to assess the risks to her and her children. She was trying to placate Rocky until she felt safe enough to make a move. She was relying on the tools that had kept her alive.

We meet others making these terrifying calculations. Snyder travels to shelters and along with the police. She encounters so many women, so many hollow-eyed children. There’s an immediacy in these scenes, the raw, ragged tension of people exhausted by fear, that recalls Donna Ferrato’s portraits of domestic violence in “Living With the Enemy.” I read Snyder’s book as if possessed, stopping for nothing, feeling the pulse beat in my brain.

What did I miss? What could I have done? Michelle and Rocky’s parents churn over these questions obsessively. Snyder wants us to share in them, make them our own. There is so much that can be done; for all the suffering in the book, it is also full of actionable changes.

Domestic violence initiatives, after all, are fairly new in this country; until the 1990s, we had more animal shelters than women’s shelters. Snyder takes us through the history — how the O.J. Simpson trial and the passage of the Violence Against Women Act, in 1994, transformed the understanding of domestic violence — and up to the series of steps that can save lives today. Prosecute cases without the victim’s help, as we do murder trials. Treat restraining orders like DUIs and keep them on file, even after they have expired. Train clergy members and doctors to recognize and respond to domestic violence. Promote battering intervention programs. Choking nearly always precedes a homicide attempt; teach police to recognize the signs, and instruct doctors to assess women for traumatic brain injury. And, of course, there is the near-unanimous recommendation from law enforcement and domestic violence advocates: “You want to get rid of homicide?” a retired forensic nurse asks. “Get rid of guns.”

In its scope and seriousness — its palpable desire to spur change — this book invites reflection not only about violence but about writing itself. What kinds of reportage really move policy? What kinds of narrative — what sorts of tone, structure, examples — can stoke a reader’s outrage and then translate that outrage into action, keeping it from curdling into cynicism or despair?

This is the interesting paradox of this particular genre. Books that want to raise an alarm don’t always aspire to literature, but to be effective — to persuade — they must be literary; they must be obsessed with matters of rhythm, form and language. “Silent Spring” is a toxicological examination of 19 chemicals, but we recall it for its beauty and precision, for its eerie prelude, in which Rachel Carson conjures a poisoned, silent world that once “throbbed” with the music of birds.

Snyder is the author of a study on the costs of fast fashion, “Fugitive Denim,” and a novel, “What We’ve Lost Is Nothing.” She brings all of fiction’s techniques to this new book — canny pacing, an eye for the animating detail and bursts of quick, confident characterization. There is a fullness and density to every one of her subjects — the former prison guard turned restorative justice advocate, the notorious pimp who now holds anti-violence classes for abusers. She glides from history to the present day, from scene to analysis, with a relaxed virtuosity that filled me with admiration. This is a writer using every tool at her disposal to make this story come alive, to make it matter.

‘No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us’

This article originally appeared in <a id="06735a28-9315-4632-8d50-f446ba21677f" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/07/books/review-no-visible-bruises-domestic-violence-rachel-louise-snyder.html">The New York Times</a>.

An extraordinary new book dismantles the myths that surround domestic violence

(Books of The Times): Between 2000 and 2006, 3,200 U.S. soldiers were killed in combat. During that same period, in the United States, more than three times as many women died at the hands of their husbands and boyfriends.

She has no way of knowing that she stars in a book that is part of a wave of its own: “#MeToo novels,” they’re called, these disparate stories of sex and power suddenly regarded as timely, and read through the lens of an unfolding movement — with happy results, I’m about to argue (irritating Nunez’s teacher, I imagine, and rather surprising myself).

It does not feel reductive to read fiction through this prism, nor will you find the numbing sameness Nunez’s narrator deplores — in fact, these books deliver us from numbing sameness. They are remarkably various, and they trouble debates that traffic in certainties. They come laden with confusion, doubt, subtlety — is it excessively earnest to call it truth?

The original “Me Too movement” was created by civil rights activist Tarana Burke in 2006, out of her work with young women of color who had experienced sexual abuse. Since the sexual-assault allegations against Harvey Weinstein broke in 2017, the term has been adopted as a rallying cry for survivors of all kinds of gendered violence. The “#MeToo novel” shares this range; it has been applied to everything from Lisa Halliday’s “Asymmetry,” with its gentle May-December romance, to Édouard Louis’ autobiographical novel “History of Violence,” which recounts a rape and attempted murder.

There is Anna Burns’ “Milkman,” set during The Troubles and awarded the 2018 Man Booker Prize (“I hope this novel will help people think about #MeToo,” the judges’ chairman said). See also Pat Barker’s “The Silence of the Girls” (called “an ‘Iliad’ for the age of #MeToo” in a review in The New York Times), Miriam Toews’ “Women Talking” (a “Mennonite #MeToo novel”) and Idra Novey’s “Those Who Knew” (“the definitive #MeToo novel,” according to Entertainment Weekly). Reissues, like “The Street,” a 1946 novel by Ann Petry, are included in the category, as well as a rare #MeToo novel by a man, James Lasdun’s “Afternoon of a Faun.”

Recent feminist dystopias imagine the further erosion of reproductive rights (Bina Shah’s “Before She Sleeps,” Maggie Shen King’s “An Excess Male,” Sophie Mackintosh’s “The Water Cure,” Leni Zumas’ “Red Clocks”). Several books feature charismatic, predatory teachers, including Nunez’s “The Friend,” Susan Choi’s “Trust Exercise” and Kate Walbert’s “His Favorites.” There are revenge fantasies (Naomi Alderman’s “The Power”), romance and young adult novels that grapple with consent — even a #MeToo western.

The best of these books are heretical where narratives of sexual violence are concerned. “A History of Violence,” “His Favorites,” “Asymmetry,” “Trust Exercise,” “Those Who Knew,” “The Silence of the Girls,” “The Friend,” “Women Talking”: Their titles run together in my mind, like the fragments of a rumor I’ve heard too many times before, but the books topple conventional stories of heroes and victims. They exist as reminders of the kind of touchyethical explorations the novel makes possible.

Adrienne Rich once wrote that Virginia Woolf’s style — that detachment and banked rage, that light, calculated charm — revealed a woman who never forgot she was being overheard, and evaluated, by men. Reading the flood of public writing about #MeToo in recent years — the op-eds and testimonies — I’d occasionally experience a prickly feeling of recognition. Here again, I’d think, was writing that stemmed from outrage, and often shame, but remained impeccably well-mannered and sure of itself, almost legalistic in structure and presentation. Necessarily, perhaps — women must constantly perform credibility.

“The whole long arc of justice now crashing down that we call #MeToo has been about whether women may be in possession of facts, and whether anyone will bother to hear out those facts or believe them or, having believed them, allow those facts to have consequences,” Rebecca Solnit has written. These pieces often felt preoccupied with their imagined reception — straining to appease, convince, console — conscious of being overheard, in Rich’s phrase, but this time by women as well as men.

Not these novels. They occupy the backwaters where the writer need not pander or persuade, and can instead seek to understand, or merely complicate, something for herself. They are stories about inconsistencies and incoherence, stories that thicken the mysteries of memory and volition.

In “Trust Exercise,” a woman called Karen (not her real name, she tells us) confronts her youthful relationship with a much older man and finds she cannot arrive at any comforting conclusions. She feels victimized but also entirely responsible. Her feelings for young women in similar situations are “violently mixed”; “these young women who made a bad judgment and now want to blame someone else.” She wants them to shut up but hates them for their silence; she wants them to move on but cannot forgive them if they refuse to take revenge. Where does this leave her? What should she do with her pain? (I advise against following her example. Mostly.)

“We all make our own choices,” a character in a play in “Trust Exercise” says. “Do we?” responds another. “Milkman,” a stream-of-consciousness novel dictated by a young, isolated woman stalked by a shadowy paramilitary figure, asks what sexual consent might mean to people who have never had any experience of control: “I did not know intuition and repugnance counted, did not know I had a right not to like, not to have to put up with, anybody and everybody coming near.”

#MeToo is a moment full of reappraisals — of beloved artists, public figures, ourselves. How do we respond to this feeling of unmooring? By tightening our grasp on what we have always known? By jettisoning one set of scripts for another? In “Women Talking,” based on a true story, the women and girls living in a fictitious Mennonite colony in South America called Molotschna discover that men from their community have been drugging and raping them for years. They gather in a hayloft, and decide what to do: Stay, leave, fight. Over the course of the novel, much of it written in dialogue of the plainest possible language, they ask what separates justice from punishment. They re-examine every one of their premises: “When we know something we stop thinking about it, don’t we?” one character says.

It’s a habit of mind this woman is talking about — a habit of skepticism toward the self, the ability and willingness to change your mind. These novels offer a kind of training in this way of being. They are full of narrative tripwires that force us to pay attention, reassess our reflexive responses, revise what we think the story is about. “His Favorites” has a circular structure, with vertigo-inducing shifts in time. “Trust Exercise” has odd, double-jointed sentences that flip between points of view; Karen refers to herself variously as “I,” “she” and “we” — experiencing herself as both subject and object. In “Milkman” there are no names at all — characters are “Somebody McSomebody” and “longest friend” — and only a few proper nouns.

In several of these books, there is a fundamental confusion about what we are reading in the first place — is it a novel within a novel? Who is narrating? Do they have a right to the story? A striking number of these books — “The Friend,” “Asymmetry,” Trust Exercise,” “Afternoon of a Faun” and “Those Who Knew” — all involve a parallel plot, in which the story of a relationship, either lopsided or abusive, is juxtaposed with the story of a character who draws upon the experience of another in their own writing, often a tell-all.

As an acting exercise, the drama teacher in “Trust Exercise” would turn off the lights in his classroom and have the students find their way around by touch. He’d watch them, talk to them: “Is that some other creature with me, in the darkness?”

The answer, of course, is always. “We’re none of us alone in this world. We injure each other,” Choi writes. “You’re choosing for another when you make choices. We overlap. We get tangled.” We’re all here together, in the dark.

This article originally appeared in <a id="785308ed-30f3-445c-94cc-9517f33e0e6e" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/books/novels-me-too-movement.html">The New York Times</a>.

#MeToo is all too real, but to better understand it, turn to fiction

(Critic's Notebook): In “The Friend,” Sigrid Nunez’s 2018 National Book Award-winning novel, the narrator, a writing teacher, grumbles about her students’ personal essays on sexual violence. Always the same nouns, she complains to us (scar, bruise, blood), always the same verbs (choke, starve, scream). The dull, depressing sameness of these stories. Their horrifying number.

Ann Petry’s first novel, “The Street,” was a literary event in 1946, praised and translated around the world — the first book by a black woman to sell more than a million copies. It is the story of a catastrophe in agonizingly slow motion. A mother and her young son living in Harlem in the 1940s are ground down by poverty and the bitter racism and constant predation in their neglected neighborhood.

“Streets like the one she lived on were no accident. They were the North’s lynch mobs,” the mother, Lutie, thinks. “The method the big cities used to keep Negroes in their place.” The book was greeted as a female counterpart to Richard Wright’s “Native Son,” a new classic of social realism and one of the early (and only) glimpses into the lives of black working-class women. Its author was feted and photographed and made utterly miserable.

Petry experienced celebrity as a kind of spiritual theft.

“My soul was no longer my own,” she recalled to The New York Times in 1992. “I was a black woman at a point in time when being a writer was not usual, and I was besieged. Everyone wanted a part of me.”

She fled Harlem for her hometown in Connecticut, where she lived in seclusion until her death, at 88, in 1997. The threat of exposure still loomed, and she destroyed her letters and other pieces of writing, and remained ambivalent whenever her work was reissued: “I feel as though I were a helpless creature impaled on a dissecting table — for public viewing,” she wrote in her journal.

The Library of America recently published “The Street” in one volume along with Petry’s 1953 masterpiece, “The Narrows,” and a sampling of her critical writing, edited by Farah Jasmine Griffin, a professor of English and African American Literature at Columbia University and the author of “Harlem Nocturne,” a group biography of radical women artists in the 1940s, including Petry. Read together, these works by Petry reveal, with fluorescent clarity, the through line between the life and the work — an intimate knowledge, and horror, of surveillance.

“In ‘The Street’ my aim is to show how simply and easily the environment can change the course of a person’s life,” Petry once said.

It is impossible not to connect her own childhood to that privacy she found crucial for self-preservation. Her family was one of four black households in small-town Connecticut and faced routine harassment. She was ordered to leave a public beach as a child, and pelted with stones as she walked to school, where white teachers refused to instruct her. These experiences of feeling scrutinized, even hunted — and her observations of Harlem from her time writing for Adam Clayton Powell’s newspaper The People’s Voice — course through her fiction. The fact of American racism is so large and encompassing it finds personification in her novels as the elements themselves, the winds that assault the characters, the fog that blinds them.

“She never felt really human until she reached Harlem,” Petry says of Lutie. Only there, “away from the hostility in the eyes of the white women” and the “openly appraising looks of the white men,” can she feel free — if only for a little while. Mrs. Hedges, who runs a brothel in their apartment building, takes a covetous interest in her. Worse, there is the building’s sinister super; “she could feel his eyes traveling over — estimating her, summing her up, wondering about her.” He wants her terribly, and sneaks into her bedroom when she’s out, to fondle her clothes. When rejected, he coolly decides to “fix her good” — how convenient that she has such a vulnerable young son.

Petry’s characters are watched constantly but cannot themselves see. In the first scene of “The Street,” Lutie struggles to read a “for rent” sign in the middle of a gale; in “The Narrows,” a black man and a white woman meet in the middle of a dense fog, each mistaking the race of the other.

It is just the beginning of their troubles. The novel is often (and naïvely) described as an interracial romance between Camilo, a white heiress, and Link, a black war veteran. A pact of assured mutual destruction is more accurate. They cannot recognize each other’s humanity. To Camilo, Link is inexorably his race; to Link, Camilo is a beautiful machine, “a racehorse or an airplane, all the essential parts in the exact right place.” They have been designed to destroy each other.

Petry wrote unabashed protest art, in the mode of Steinbeck and Stephen Crane.

“It seems to me that all truly great art is propaganda, whether it be the Sistine Chapel or La Gioconda, ‘Madame Bovary’ or ‘War and Peace,’” she wrote in her essay “The Novel as Social Criticism,” which is included in this volume. “The moment the novelist begins to show how society affected the lives of his characters, how they were formed and shaped by the sprawling inchoate world in which they lived, he is writing a novel of social criticism whether he calls it that or not.”

This Petry — the surprisingly pugnacious practitioner-critic rising to the defense of her own work, as social realism was falling out of fashion — might be my favorite of all her registers, but she does her writing a slight disservice. Her work endures (despite her own efforts) not merely because of the strength of its message but its artistry.

“Sometimes when a writer is regarded as ‘before her time,’ we don’t quite understand that the same work is still right on time,” novelist Tayari Jones has written in praise of Petry.

Petry will always feel on time. Her kind of talent will always feel startling and sui generis: The music of her sentences and their discipline; her unerring sense of psychology; the fullness with which she endows each character, which must be understood as a kind of love; the plots that commandeer whole hours and days. (I am writing this review in a swivet of shame, in fact, in the baleful eye line of an unwalked dog, unwashed dishes, unanswered emails.) Her work endures not only because it illuminates reality, but because it harnesses the power of fiction to supplant it.

806 pages. Library of America. $35.

This article originally appeared in <a id="c152ba6a-86e0-44f9-9f6c-17412dd3d5f0" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/16/books/review-street-narrows-ann-petry.html">The New York Times</a>.

Realism reissued, but still right on time

(Books of The Times): Not all who hide wish to be found.

The elders dismissed their complaints or blamed them on “wild female imagination” — until it was discovered that men from the community had been creeping through windows at night, sedating whole households with bovine anesthetic and raping the women. At least 300 female members of the colony had been attacked, from toddlers to grandmothers. When the eight culprits were put on trial, in 2011, the women were forbidden from testifying; their fathers and husbands spoke against the defendants instead.

“I felt an obligation, a need, to write about these women,” Canadian novelist Miriam Toews has said. “I’m related to them. I could easily have been one of them.” Toews was also raised in the sect — “rigged for compliance,” she has put it — and is descended from the same Mennonite group as the colonists in Bolivia. Her celebrated novels are haunted by her upbringing, but she has never written with such heartbreak, or taken such sure aim at fundamentalism and its hypocrisies, as she does in her new book, “Women Talking.”

The novel is set in the aftermath of the crimes. The men have left for the city, to raise and post bail for their brothers. Eight women from two families gather in a hayloft. Forgiveness is dictated by the religion; the women know they must absolve the men or face expulsion, even damnation. They have two days to make a decision for the female members of the community. Should they stay and forgive? Unfathomable; a 3-year-old was raped and infected with venereal disease, an old woman so savagely attacked her teeth crumbled. Stay and fight — but with what resources? Leave? Impossible; they cannot read, they possess no maps and they cannot think of abandoning their sons. The women comfort and snipe at one another. One woman, impregnated in an attack and beset by morning sickness, keeps vomiting into a bucket. They smoke, sing hymns together and weep.

Did I mention the book is funny? Wickedly so, with Toews’ brand of seditious wit. Angela Carter wrote that Grace Paley’s women were made of “flexible steel”; your average Toews character is equal parts Silly String.

In her novel “A Complicated Kindness,” one sets her bonnet on fire while smoking a cigarette and has to be dunked in a water barrel. In “All My Puny Sorrows,” a woman giving a eulogy is interrupted by her toddler, who opens the urn and scoops the ashes into his mouth.

Many of Toews’ books are steeped in family grief. “Swing Low” is a memoir told in the voice of her father, who killed himself in 1998, stepping in front of a train; her novel “All My Puny Sorrows” is based, in part, on the story of her older sister, who killed herself in the same way 12 years later. But (somehow) these stories are delivered with a mouthful of ash and a lopsided grin, a stubborn sense of the absurd that recalls Philip Larkin and Lorrie Moore — that feels like proof of life.

“My father died beside trees on iron rails,” Toews wrote in “All My Puny Sorrows.” “He had 77 dollars on him at the time and we used the money for Thai takeout because, as my friend Julie says about times like this: You still have to eat.”

The women in the book (named after Toews’s family members) do not relate the story; a man does, one of literature’s more reluctant narrators. He introduces himself in a paroxysm of apology: “My name is August Epp — irrelevant for all purposes, other than that I’ve been appointed the minute-taker for the women’s meetings because the women are illiterate and unable to do it themselves.” He sits listening, taking notes as furiously as he can, his eyes filling with tears.

August is a man in love. His family was expelled from the community long ago (his father was discovered teaching the girls to read). He has returned for a woman — Ona, considered a spinster and made pregnant by a rape. Along with her sisters, Ona has been raised to be silent and submissive — like animals, the women themselves note, as they begin to question everything in the hayloft. Is coerced forgiveness genuine forgiveness? How can it be blasphemous to protect their children? “By staying in Molotschna,” one argues, “we women would be betraying the central tenet of the Mennonite faith, which is pacifism, because by staying we would knowingly be placing ourselves in a direct collision course with violence, perpetrated by us or against us. We would be inviting harm. We would be in a state of war.”

It is, August thinks, “the first time the women of Molotschna have interpreted the word of God for themselves.”

Their fractious, fumbling conversations take them from trauma to the foundations of democracy and the nature of knowledge as they discuss how to form a new society, salvage their religion and live with their pasts: “When we have liberated ourselves, we will have to ask ourselves who we are.”

One wishes, at times, that the voices were more individuated. The book recalls “12 Angry Men,” with its characters in a closed room fighting to come to one decision, but few of the women emerge distinctly enough for there to be any drama in their evolution. It’s the chorus that interests Toews, not character, the etiology of violence and the structures — not merely the personalities — that perpetuate it.

The ethical questions the women quarrel over feel strikingly contemporary: What are the differences between punishment and justice? How do we define rehabilitation; how do we enforce accountability? (To see these questions explored with such complexity and curiosity, with such open grief and that rogue Toews humor, makes me long for more novels reckoning with #MeToo and fewer op-eds.)

In her foreword, Toews writes that the book is “an act of female imagination,” echoing the phrase used by the elders in the Bolivian colony to dismiss the reports of the raped women. She’s not merely reclaiming the phrase but gesturing at something greater. Female imagination can produce a novel, but it has also always been an engine of migration — that insistence that another world, another life must be possible even if for some future, longed-for generation.

Up in the hayloft, Ona asks the women if they know about the yearly sojourn of butterflies and dragonflies. It takes so long, it is “often only the grandchildren who arrive at the intended destination.”

Publication Notes:

This article originally appeared in <a id="f405a8ed-d0e1-40b0-8d0f-b472c39faa3c" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/02/books/review-women-talking-miriam-toews.html">The New York Times</a>.

In 'Women Talking,' Miriam Toews ponders punishment and justice after horrifying crimes

(Books of The Times): They were called the “ghost rapes.” In 2005, Mennonite women living in a secluded colony in Bolivia reported waking up bleeding, with dirty fingerprints on their bodies and fraying rope around their wrists.

His interlocutor replied, “They’d do that, too if their agents could fix it.”

Truly, all things come to pass. Essayist David Shields has written a new book, “The Trouble With Men,” which he describes as “a short, intensive immersion into the perils, limits and possibilities of human intimacy.” More bluntly, it’s about sleeping with his wife — and addressed to her. “Do I love you? Do you love me? What kind of marriage do we want?” he asks her. “Do you like making love with me? Do you love making love with me? (Don’t answer.)”

Despite the broad diagnosis promised by the title, the focus is narrow, personal — and frank. Shields breaks the sound barrier for indiscretion. He quotes Harold Brodkey: “I don’t see the point of privacy.” (Fittingly, Brodkey’s other appearance here features him trying to pick up Shields at a gym in 1983.)

The book is structured as an investigation into Shields’ own psyche and particular tastes. He is masochistic to his marrow — not just sexually. “I check the Mariners score on my phone, hoping they’ve won but needing them to lose.” He relishes his negative reviews. His entire career owes something to his desire for punishment. “Throughout various books, I’ve quoted and ‘misquoted’ hundreds of sentences, without ‘proper’ attribution — in order to advance a particular literary, aesthetic and philosophical principle but also as a way to be ‘bad’ and get spanked (for being bad)?”

Alas, he has been more frequently celebrated instead — for works, like “Reality Hunger,” that railed against lumbering, outmoded narratives (the novel) in favor of fleet new forms: fragments, rafts of sampled quotations, blurred genres. “The Trouble With Men” reprises this method; much of it is a collage of quotes, from his touchstones like Seneca and literary critic Leslie Fiedler but also Reddit, porn chat rooms and Bernie Madoff’s mistress.

In the past, I found Shields’ project occasionally impressive and more often exasperating. He’s fatally attracted to the manifesto and strident pronouncements on life and literature. But in this latest work, some of his masks and bombast fall away. He is wry and self-deprecating. (That quote from Larkin — I got it from Shields.) This book had originally been conceived as an email exchange with writer Brenda Phillips, but Shields realized that “the gulf was simply too wide: She’s so much better looking than I am — and as a result has had so many more sexual experiences — that we had next to nothing to talk about.”

For the first time, this writer becomes good company — thankfully, for we have to travel a long way with him, deep into the labyrinth of his past. “How did I get wired this way? I don’t get it,” Shields writes. Did he learn to eroticize what hurt and frightened him as a child? (Yes.) “As a little kid, I would start every morning by promising myself (and inevitably failing to live up to the promise), Don’t cry today.” His father was a manic-depressive and “ECT devotee,” in and out of mental institutions; his mother mocked him, hit him, hated him and taught him to hate himself. He unwraps all his wounds, all the conceivable sources that nurtured in him this perplexing desire to be humiliated: childhood bullying, his stutter, germ phobias, acne and high, feminine voice. “Was I breast-fed?” he pesters his bewildered 80-year-old father. “Method of potty-training?”

“No one is ever cured of anything; that much seems obvious,” Shields writes. “Which brings me to you.” This “you” is his wife — a woman Shields describes as painfully and thrillingly indifferent to him. “Do you think it’s possible that I’ve enlisted you to cure my heart by killing it?” he writes, before accusing her of mild crimes: She refuses to hold his hand in public and is excessively practical. On one occasion she failed to keep an embarrassing secret of his.

“The Trouble With Men” is unabashedly queasy. Reading about Shields’ lust for Pippa Middleton ranks among the more depressing literary experiences of my life. But it’s curious that he doesn’t reckon more with what it means to expose himself (and his wife) so openly — is it another bid for humiliation? Nor does he reckon with the fact that there is almost always something preening and aggressive in the act of enumerating of one’s own weaknesses. “I’m always the poor pup who loses,” Shields whimpers — like all the top dogs apparently: “Was there, by the way, any ‘major’ modernist writer — Kafka, Woolf, Proust, Mann, Joyce, Eliot — who wasn’t flagrantly masochistic?”

I don’t want to be too hard on Shields, not least because I suspect he would enjoy it. I often found this book beguiling, and moving. There is always the temptation, in writing about sex, to sound superior, arch, immune to its power. But Shields writes from a place of genuine curiosity and confusion. He is ridiculous and brave, he never conflates sincerity with genuine candor, and he poses the kinds of questions that only ever bring trouble (and are the only kind worth reading about) — about sex, self-knowledge and the “theater” of our wounds. Can we recover from who we are? Would we want to?

“My mother reviled me,” Shields writes. “I can feel that in every footfall. My half-brother’s mother adored him, which has made him fat and sassy and self-satisfied and happy. Poor bastard.”

‘The Trouble With Men: Reflections on Sex, Love, Marriage, Porn, and Power’

139 pages. Mad Creek Books/The Ohio State University Press. $18.95.

This article originally appeared in <a id="4953a65e-e795-40d5-a4f4-f7ab787df87d" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/19/books/review-trouble-with-men-david-shields.html">The New York Times</a>.

A writer gets candid about marriage and humiliation in 'The Trouble With Men'

(Books of The Times): “I can’t understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems,” Philip Larkin once complained. “It’s like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife.”

<h1>All literature is literature in translation. There is no mother tongue. All of it migrates out of the body, out of a tangle of sensations and intuitions, obscure rancor and desires; we hunt racks of ready-made language for words that might fit.</h1>

Mitchell S. Jackson is the author of a sharply drawn novel, “The Residue Years,” and a new memoir, “Survival Math.” Questions of translating his experience have long preoccupied him. “I’m not writing for white people, to inform them on black lives,” he has said. Nor does he want the reader to be dazzled by the instability and violence of his childhood and miss the “bounteous love” that is as much his legacy.

Jackson’s work is set in Portland, Oregon, one of the whitest big cities in America, scarred by a long history of racist violence and intimidation. The black community Jackson grew up in was small and straitened, hit hard by years of redlining. He writes about a lifetime of losses and near escapes, his mother’s crack addiction and his own drug dealing.

It’s an American story Jackson tells, nesting his own among others — that of the first black man thought to set foot in Oregon (Markus Lopius) and those of the friends and relatives whose lives Jackson depicts in interspersed “survivor profiles.” He includes poems woven out of lines lifted from the Declaration of Independence and the Emancipation Proclamation.

Exuberant maximalism is his mode. The digressions have digressions. There are pages of garrulous footnotes. Every story veers off into a lesson — on the history of the Bloods and Crips, the invention of whiteness and crack cocaine, the composition of plasma and the cultivation of apple trees — some sections only tenuously knitted into the narrative. The detours recall the hectic narrative nonfiction of the ‘90s and early aughts, by writers like Dave Eggers and David Foster Wallace. I’d forgotten how much I didn’t miss it.

Jackson tells us so much, but it’s the omissions that are deafening.

There are patterns in his reticence. He begins a personal story, he opens a wound — and when we expect emotion, he floods us with information. The elaborate architecture of the book can feel like an exercise in misdirection, especially when Jackson turns to his treatment of women.

He introduces his concept of “The Men on the Scale” — players, users of women. He has been such a man, he says, but he alludes only vaguely to how he harmed them. Instead he includes “victim statements,” testimonies of his behavior from five former partners. They describe being cheated on and lied to, coerced into abortions, feeling too traumatized to date again. “I blamed me,” one writes. “I wasn’t pretty enough. I wasn’t light enough.”

These stories shimmer with pain. But Jackson doesn’t linger on them. He’s impatient to talk about victimology instead. He wants to discuss Don Giovanni, Lord Byron, writer Chantal Thomas, Steven Pinker, Frantz Fanon, Picasso, Simone de Beauvoir, psychologist Grazyna Kochanska — all in two pages. He wants to tell us about history’s great Lotharios.

There have been a slew of new books that have reckoned powerfully with manhood and masculinity and their intersections with race and sexuality. Among the best I’d rank “How to Write an Autobiographical Novel,” by Alexander Chee, “Air Traffic,” by Gregory Pardlo, “Amateur,” by Thomas Page McBee, and “Heavy,” by Kiese Laymon. They are very different books, but all exhibit the two qualities that Orwell said made him a writer: “a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts.”

Jackson has the facility, but what does he force himself to face? Too often, a strong protective instinct takes over. He writes, of the men he grew up with, some who dealt drugs or pimped women: “Though their foibles weren’t the crux of what I used to compose, best believe not a single man I mentioned has existed in my life beyond critique. And that’s all sorts of apropos, since I too am a flawed human striving, striving.”

The syntax turns knotty and tortured here; it trips over itself. It’s as if Jackson has remembered he’s being overheard, and by readers who might summarily condemn these men. He retreats to a safer bank — aren’t we all just imperfect human beings? On other occasions he takes cover behind the abstractions of the pulpit. “Ours is a revolutionary era of gender fluidness and sexual equality and same-sex parents and girls doubtless need fathers, too,” he writes. “However” — however!— “this is my beating heart: Boys need fathers. Boys need fathers — period, exclamation point.”

This is stale writing — period, exclamation point. It is beneath Jackson. Not only because it so casually dismisses same-sex and single parents, but because it misses the pungency and wisdom of the scenes, the richness and beautiful uncertainties of the voice he inhabits, when he seeks to depict and not merely sermonize.

The retelling of his first foray into drug dealing is indelible. “I kept faith, stood out in the shadows among others determined to clock a dollar. It was frightening and exhilarating all at once. It was near ineffable seeing that world demystified, witnessing firsthand the landscape, which by that time my mother had been roaming for years. There was also a part of me that half hoped I’d see her.”

He does, eventually. I will never forget their encounter. What a book this might have been had he stayed in this register a little longer, had he stayed with all that is “frightening and exhilarating,” and let us truly encounter him.

‘Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family’

Illustrated. 315 pages. Scribner. $26.

This article originally appeared in <a id="25780769-a475-49a3-a0b5-ddacd2365237" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/05/books/review-survival-math-mitchell-s-jackson.html">The New York Times</a>.

'Survival Math' opens some personal wounds but leaves others hidden

Mitchell S. Jackson is the author of a sharply drawn novel, “The Residue Years,” and a new memoir, “Survival Math.” Questions of translating his experience have long preoccupied him.

She knew, but she didn’t participate — not fully. She participated, but she didn’t know — not everything. She was a bystander. She was an anomaly.

The full role of white women in slavery has long been one of the “slave trade’s best-kept secrets.” “They Were Her Property,” a taut and cogent corrective, by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, examines how historians have misunderstood and misrepresented white women as reluctant actors. The scholarship of the 1970s and ‘80s, in particular, did much to minimize their involvement, depicting them as masters in name only and even, grotesquely, as natural allies to enslaved people — both suffered beneath the boot of Southern patriarchy, the argument goes.

Jones-Rogers puts the matter plainly. White slave-owning women were ubiquitous. Not only did they profit from, and passionately defend, slavery, but the institution “was their freedom.” White women were more likely to inherit enslaved people than land. Their wealth brought them suitors and gave them bargaining power in their marriages. If their husbands proved unsatisfactory slave owners in their eyes, the women might petition for the right to manage their “property” themselves, which they did, with imaginative sadism.

How have so many historians gotten it so wrong?

According to Jones-Rogers, they have not been listening to the right people. “They Were Her Property” draws on the customary sources — letters and other documents from slave-owning families and the like — but radically centers on the testimonies of formerly enslaved people in interviews conducted by the Federal Writers’ Project, part of the Works Progress Administration.

From these stories, Jones-Rogers brings an unseen world to life: of white women’s instruction in domination, a process of grooming that began in infancy. WPA interviewees recount threats, abuse and whippings administered by white children. “It didn’t matter whether the child was large or small,” one woman said. “They always beat you ‘til the blood ran down.”

“They Were Her Property” joins a tide of recent books — among them, Sven Beckert’s “Empire of Cotton,” Edward Baptist’s “The Half Has Never Been Told,” Walter Johnson’s “River of Dark Dreams” and Caitlin Rosenthal’s “Accounting for Slavery” — that examine how slavery laid the foundation of American capitalism, including the invention of financial instruments such as bonds that used enslaved people as collateral. Jones-Rogers writes, “If we examine women’s economic investments in slavery, rather than simply their ideological and sentimental connections to the system, we can uncover hitherto hidden relationships among gender, slavery and capitalism.”

Previously invisible sectors of the market are illuminated, many created and controlled by white women. Historians long asserted, for instance, that Southern women used wet nurses only “as a last resort,” but the testimonies of formerly enslaved people — and advertisements from the 18th and 19th centuries — tell a different story. The practice appears to have been widespread. One woman recalled that her enslaved mother always gave birth at the same time as her mistress, so she would be available to nurse the white baby. “These recollections make it clear that enslaved women were giving birth on a routine basis. But what often remains unexplored is what led to these constant conceptions,” Jones-Rogers writes. Some were “undoubtedly the result of sexual assault.”

In horrifying, meticulous detail, this book illustrates the centrality of violence to capitalism. Baptist argued the same point in “The Half Has Never Been Told.” It was sheer brutality that dramatically increased the cotton yield between 1800 and 1860, he wrote. No new technology or innovation surfaced in those years, but constant beatings, sexual abuse and waterboarding had become common practices. In that era, “white people inflicted torture far more often than in almost any human society that ever existed.”

Jones-Rogers reveals how the violence of slave-owning women especially could go unchecked, particularly when the victims were black children. She gives the example of Henrietta King. As an 8- or 9-year-old, King was accused of stealing candy. Her mistress wedged King’s head under a rocking chair. For about an hour, she rocked back and forth on King’s head while her young daughter whipped her. King’s face was mutilated. For the rest of her life she was unable to eat solid food.

King lived, though. There are, somehow, even more painful stories in this book. Many of Jones-Rogers’ findings give credence to historian Thavolia Glymph’s claim that enslaved people faced significantly more physical violence from their mistresses than their masters.

Jones-Rogers is a crisp and focused writer. She trains her gaze on the history and rarely considers slavery’s reverberations. They are felt on every page, however. It is impossible to read her on “maternal violence” — the abuse of black mothers and babies during slavery — without thinking of black maternal mortality rates today. This scrupulous history makes a vital contribution to our understanding of our past and present.

“White Women as Slave Owners in the American South”

Illustrated. 296 pages. Yale. $30.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/26/books/review-they-were-her-property-white-women-slave-owners-stephanie-jones-rogers.html" id="a7abd329-179c-38dc-a70a-3a7bf9f51dac">The New York Times</a>.

Reconsidering the Master's Wife

<h1>“Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments,” Saidiya Hartman’s exhilarating social history, begins at the cusp of the 20th century, with young black women “in open rebellion.”</h1>

A revolution in intimate life seethed in the dance halls, rented rooms and reformatories of New York and Philadelphia, in the women’s prison in Bedford Falls, New York, and the Jim Crow railway cars on the Atlantic line. Young women, two or three generations removed from slavery, discovered the city — its promise of sensation and adventure — and tossed out the narrow scripts they had been given. They claimed sexual freedom, serial partners, single motherhood — or opted out of motherhood entirely. They quit their demeaning jobs and went out dancing instead. They fell in love with each other.

Long before the Harlem Renaissance, Hartman writes, “before white folks journeyed uptown to get a taste of the other, before F. Scott Fitzgerald and Radclyffe Hall and Henry Miller,” these women were reconceiving the possibilities for private life.

Their efforts often brought only censure and arrest, the attentions of the missionary or the social reformer. Hartman discovered many of her proudly “errant” subjects in police blotters. Vagrancy laws tightly restricted free movement, and black women were routinely harassed or confined on suspicions of future criminality, on charges like “failed adjustment” or “potential prostitute.” “Few, then or now, recognized young black women as sexual modernists, free lovers, radicals and anarchists, or realized that the flapper was a pale imitation of the ghetto girl,” Hartmen writes. “They have been credited with nothing: they remain surplus women of no significance.”

And how they leap off the page. The cast of characters includes A’lelia Walker, whose mother, Madame C.J. Walker, was one of the first American women to become a self-made millionaire. Tall, imposing, terrifically rich and fond of carrying a riding crop at all times, A’lelia was notorious for soigne sex parties. There is Edna Thomas, a stage and screen actress who, at one such sex party, met Lady Olivia Wyndham, a distant cousin of Oscar Wilde, and memorable in her own right — she once cut her herself on the head and then flung herself down a flight of stairs in order to be looked after by a particularly adored nurse. (How reasonable I suddenly appear to myself.) Thomas and Wyndham lived together in Harlem, famously content for decades; newspaper articles praised their “firm friendship.”

We meet communists and chorines, anonymous women gazing into shop windows. There are the female inmates at Bedford, abused to the point of torture, who initiated a strike with the only tools they had: their voices. They sang and screamed for months in 1919, and again the following year. We see anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells as a young woman refusing to give up her seat in a first-class train car, and a 14-year-old picked up for prostitution who called herself Eleanora Fagan (after her grandmother) and who would later be known as Billie Holiday.

“Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments” is a rich resurrection of a forgotten history, which is Hartman’s specialty. Her work has always examined the great erasures and silences — the lost and suppressed stories of the Middle Passage, of slavery and its long reverberations.

Her rigor and restraint give her writing its distinctive electricity and tension. Hartman is a sleuth of the archive; she draws extensively from plantation documents, missionary tracts, whatever traces she can find — but she is vocal about the challenge of using such troubling documents, the risk one runs of reinscribing their authority. Similarly, she is keen to identify moments of defiance and joy in the lives of her subjects, but is wary of the “obscene” project to revise history, to insist upon autonomy where there may have been only survival, “to make the narrative of defeat into an opportunity for celebration."

Hartman is most original in her approach to gaps in a story, which she shades in with speculation and sometimes fictional imagining — a technique she has used in all her work but never quite so fully as in this new book.

One bravura sequence opens with the photograph of a young woman walking in what appears to be an alley. We enter the world of the image — it comes to life — and we follow the woman through the neighborhood, looking over her shoulder at the slant of the sun in a stairwell, the Sunday hats and dresses, other women passing by holding packages tied with string. Hartman lets us see the world and then hear it: “the guttural tones of Yiddish making English into a foreign tongue. The round open-mouthed sounds of North Carolina and Virginia bleeding into the hard-edged language of the city.” From sound she turns to smell, the “musky scent” of bodies dancing close together in a saloon, and, finally, to touch. She describes a stranger’s hand grazing the reader’s own, as we pass each other in a courtyard.

This kind of beautiful, immersive narration exists for its own sake, but it also counteracts the most common depictions of black urban life from this time — the frozen, coerced images, Hartman calls them, most commonly of mothers and children in cramped kitchens and bedrooms. The women were forced to pose for these photographs to receive financial assistance, and the photographs, in turn, were “marshaled as evidence in the case made against them by the social workers and the sociologists.”

Against these images, Hartman is able to lay her own — of dashing women in top hats, laughing cabaret dancers on a rooftop on a clear day. She pushes past the social workers, the psychologists, the policemen and the scandalized moralists standing in our way to reveal the women for the first time, individual and daring. “Look in awe,” Hartman enjoins us, pointing out a woman — and how can we not? There she is, leaning “halfway out of a tenement window, taking in the drama of the block and defying gravity’s downward pull.”

‘Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval’

Illustrated. 441 pages. W.W. Norton &amp; Co. $28.95.

This article originally appeared in <a id="a407a67b-2210-4563-90dc-f39bb6debb0b" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/19/books/wayward-lives-beautiful-experiments-saidiya-hartman.html">The New York Times</a>.

Long before the Harlem Renaissance, Hartman writes, “before white folks journeyed uptown to get a taste of the other, before F. Scott Fitzgerald and Radclyffe Hall and Henry Miller,” these women were reconceiving the possibilities for private life.

Parul Sehgal

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