Deep Burn follows Martha Knox in the wake of the dissolution of her brief marriage as she impulsively takes up residence at an artist’s studio in a rural town in Kerry. Supported by Vinny, a charismatic Virgil to guide her through the circles of the art world, she establishes herself as a photographer. Her project: burning objects of sentimental or personal value and capturing the process in images. It is a taut artist’s journey viciously powered by the question of what is real — and what is not — in an industry supposedly predicated upon genuine expression. It is available at most booksellers, including Books Upstairs.

Our interview was, as always, conducted over e-mail and then edited for flow.

Brendan,

One of the aspects that captivated me most when reading Deep Burn was and continues to be Martha’s photography project. The objects she burns are of immense psychic weight, you do great work on the page for the reader to feel how heavily they have weighed on their carriers. When something so emotionally concrete is destroyed it ceases to exist and so, these people hope, does the baggage it carries. These objects go away. To then immortalize the exact moment of their destruction in a photograph is a reversal: the object lives on but only as an image, unburdened by its sentimental value, or else with that value transformed into something cathartic.

I know through our friendship (and an upcoming performance at the Cúirt International Festival of Literature) that you were/are a bit of a firebug. I’m curious what you personally make of fire as a transformational force. What is it that entrances us to it? Is it a purification? A destruction? What does Martha see in the flames?

James

James,

Fire has a hypnotic, transfixing quality. That’s its primary pull for me, and I guess for Martha. Humans can’t exist without the sun. For most of history, we’ve worshipped it. Fire is like your own personal sun. It always looks roughly the same, and yet is never the same twice, snowflake-esque in its uniqueness. It is an incredible pleasure on the eye. I think everyone can relate to this. And we all know the experience of being in a pub, say, and the stupid TV, even if its horse-racing or something equally dour, catching your eye. You have to make an effort to pull your eyes away. So there’s some primordial thing going on there, too, the mind’s need for sources of light. Mostly, though, it’s just beautiful, isn’t it?

When you start to make art with it, as Martha does, the viewer, and the reader, the curator, the gallerist, whoever, is implicitly asked (or asks themselves) what does it mean? Destruction, metamorphosis, rebirth. You can make fire do all kinds of metaphorical leaps and jumps. This is what makes Martha nervous. She wants to evade analysis of her work as much as possible, but knows it’s inevitable if she’s going to become an artist. Really, she and I are the same sort of person in that we just love fire, but in an art context, you’re forced to dig a bit deeper. That’s partly why she’d prefer to set up as a consultant or service provider as opposed to an artist. I think an artist working with fire, in the way that Martha does, exorcizing people’s bad juju, is a role more akin to a priest or wizard.

It’s only now that I’m writing ‘A Personal History of Pyromania’ (an upcoming live audiovisual essay for performance) that I’m really digging in to fire’s various meanings. There’s this farmhouse in Kerry, in Ballinskelligs, where I set the novel, and it’s kind of a bit run down, the land around it is poor, the car and tractor in the driveway are clapped out, but there is always smoke coming out of its chimney morning, noon and night. And there is always an enormous mountain of turf outside the house, right at the gateway, in full view of passersby. It occurred to me that fire in this context is sort of a status symbol. Is the permanently smoking chimney a kind of dying social signifier? Fire = heat. Fire = money. Fire, in an Irish context, in the context of turf cutting = land + labour.

In the novel it provides a source of destruction, purification, metamorphosis, rebirth. But that relies on the people who receive Martha’s service ‘having faith’ in her process. We’re back to religion again. Fire is great for that. Human sacrifices, lighting candles to remember the dead, etc. I went to a ‘Dawn Easter Mass’ once in another part of Kerry where the whole town goes to the local graveyard at 5am on Easter morning while it’s still dark and stands by the graves of their loved ones while the local priest delivers Mass over the PA. In the next field over is a huge skip filled with wooden pallets, a gang of lads pouring petrol on top. And at a certain point in the mass, the priest conducts a local widower who wields a burning sod of turf on a pitch fork to light the fire. “The almighty blaze will connect us with loved ones who have died and for whom we are here this morning”. Basically, he uses the fire for a bit of metaphorical resurrection. It’s mad. And brilliant.

In the end, I loved Martha and her work so much that I thought I’d try to become her. I got more into photography, and I’ve taken to burning fires in fireplaces of abandoned houses to bring about a sort of resurrection, too. Maybe just to think about the last time the fire was lit in those places, to reify their stories and histories. I’ve even burned and photographed an ‘emotionally significant’ object for a friend and photographed it, just like Martha does.

Last year I took up ceramics. I wanted to bring the world of the novel to life and make some of the significant objects that get burned. It seemed, in one way, like the opposite of what Martha was doing, because fire disappears things whereas making objects with clay brings them into being permanently. It occurred to me relatively late in the process that clay needs fire, it needs to be burned at over 1000° C. Fire becomes a source of memory again. Fire + clay = permanence.

Brendan

Brendan,

This is a novel about the artist's journey. Where some might venture towards some moralistic exceptional quality of the arts in the form of redemption, you chose instead to highlight someone searching for something real who, in the end, does not quite find it. The holy structure of the arts world turns out to be another farce of people making it up as they go along, but doing so convincingly, and to great personal profit. The only one seemingly left in the dark is sadly Vinny, whose artistic projects get more and more desperate for someone — anyone — to imbue him with validating purpose and anoint him an ‘artist,’ a task he eventually takes into his own hands.

You've spent considerable time in the arts as a writer, photographer, and a founder of Holy Show. It's safe to say that this world is one you know quite well. Do you find it as empty as Martha does?

James

James,

The novel takes art and its making out of the world we know — in Ireland say — and into the global art world, which really means to a place of capitalism on steroids. A place like this can be kind of alluring to an artist because someone else is going to do the work of hyping, selling, etc, and what you get in return, in theory, is lots of money, which for an artist means the ability to make and create the art they really want, forever. The great concern or worry for most artists is ‘how do I make this work’, or ‘how do I make art and also pay the bills.’ So if you can find someone to sell your work for wildly inflated prices, great! But this is a corner of the art world that most of us, back here in reality, will never really come into contact with at a personal level.

In the literary world, things are a bit more honest. A publisher produces a mass-produced object as cheaply as they can and sells as many units as they can for a tiny margin on each book. I also think humans are generally experts at telling and reading stories, so we can tell a good piece of literary art from a bad one pretty quickly, or at least we’re fairly confident about what we like and dislike. Art is a bit different. Many artists produce one-offs as opposed to something cheaply mass-producible. The gallerist then takes that singular object and pitches buyers a bamboozling story, often with bamboozling language, to inflate the importance and price of the artist and their work. Those kinds of stories (and sometimes that kind of art) are more difficult to read. The story a gallerist tells is less like a blurb or elevator pitch for a novel, and more like a business pitch for a new AI company. Maybe it will skyrocket, or more likely it will come to nothing.

I think that Vinny knows all this about the art world. He sees through it. And he helps Martha to use the farce to her advantage. But when she begins to succeed, far beyond his expectations, his ego kicks in. ‘The fat relentless ego’ as Iris Murdoch calls it. One part of his brain is telling him, ‘don’t worry, it’s all bullshit, just be happy for her’. But the other part is saying ‘Keep up!’ ‘Achieve greatness! Be somebody!’ Would it be true to say we can all relate to this? I can, certainly. I have a fat relentless ego that frequently wants a little more than it has. Sometimes a lot more. Even though I know I already have more than enough to be happy or content. Vinny ultimately falls victim to himself.

As for finding it empty, definitely not. I find it lush, rich, rewarding, full of interesting people, earnestly writing, devising, making great work, mostly at a modest scale i.e. not necessarily achieving international fame. Those writers and artists I know personally who have achieved international recognition deserve it. They’ve worked incredibly hard for it and also don’t really care about it. When I say ‘earnest,’ I guess I mean that the thing they care about most is the work itself, making it as good, original, interesting, thought provoking as possible. I set up Holy Show to showcase some of this, to whatever degree I could. There are so many good artists in Ireland at the moment across all forms. And the best work usually comes from the best people because people’s work usually reflects their personality... hilarious, deeply intelligent, deeply considerate. Artists who don’t take themselves too seriously, but do take their work seriously.

I guess for the novel, I dramatised the more cynical aspects of the art world. But the art world I know (let’s call it art land, or even arttown, instead of art world) is full of great work, and great people, and a handful of nutters and chancers.

Brendan

I first met Brendan years ago in the since-refurbished upstairs of Hodges Figgis for a book launch. Since then, we’ve become good friends and members of a writing group.

I had the pleasure of reading an early draft of Deep Burn and it was personally and artistically illuminating to read its final form and see how much it has — and hasn’t — changed.

You can find more information about Brendan, including his work and contact information, here.

-JSR

• I’m Right And You’re Wrong (And Also Stupid): A Closer Look at “Creation Lake”

• Masters of War: A Closer Look at “Falling Man”

• Monkey Business: A Closer Look at “Close to Home”

It was the year of an election. Two million brownshirts took to the streets, devoted to defending the interests of their burgeoning NSDAP party. Every instigated clash with Communist and Social Democrat paramilitary units on the streets of Berlin was then used as evidence by NSDAP deputies for the country’s dire need for a strong authoritarian leader to quell the chaos. Namely, their strong authoritarian leader. A single month of campaigning saw over 300 deaths and 1,000 injuries.

To construct a functioning government, President von Hindenburg was pressured to side with one of the two challenger parties with rapidly growing bases: the Communists (KPD), with their platform of social reform and wealth re-distribution; or the Nazis (NSDAP), with their platform of isolationism and staunch anti-immigrant nationalism. Underestimating their leader and influenced by conservative elites, Hindenburg aligned himself with the NSDAP and, in January 1933, Hitler was appointed Chancellor of the Weimar Republic.

On February 27, the Reichstag was set on fire. Hitler blamed Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutch Communist, and through the Reichstag Fire Decree suspended basic rights and facilitated the mass arrests of KPD members and deputies.

On March 5, following a campaign of violence and intimidation, the NSDAP secured a parliamentary plurality of 43.9%.

On March 22, the Dachau concentration camp opened to house more than 200 incoming political prisoners, most of whom were communists and social democrats.

On March 23, with KPD deputies having already been arrested or expelled, brownshirts filled the temporary Reichstag to intimidate deputies into voting in the Enabling Act, allowing Hitler to issue laws without parliamentary consent. They secured a two-thirds vote from the remaining deputies who had not been arrested or expelled, establishing an effective dictatorship and marking an end to the Republic.

In July, the Law Against the Formation of Parties was enacted and in November, another parliamentary election was held. There was only one party on the ballot.

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One year earlier, an election was held in the United States, where 1 in 4 Americans were out of work, 1 in 3 farmers had lost their land, and 9,000 out of 25,000 banks had gone out of business. Herbert Hoover championed American national individualism and self-reliance, warning that radical proposals would lead to socialism. Franklin Delano Roosevelt promised recovery through his “New Deal” program. Roosevelt won in a landslide. As war ravaged Europe, tensions mounted within a country focused on finding its footing in the wake of the Great Depression on their role in the conflict.

In February 1939, more than 20,000 people attended a pro-”Americanism” rally in Madison Square Garden, scheduled to coincide with George Washington’s birthday. The mood was jovial. A marching band played as the attendees took their seats. An enormous portrait of Washington stood on stage. The rally began with a rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” And then, the organizing body’s national secretary took stage.

“If George Washington were alive today,” he boomed, “he would be friends with Adolf Hitler.”

In the hours that followed, his fellow Americans were called upon to restore America to “True Americans.” The audience was warned against “Jewish world domination” and blamed the “oriental cunning of the Jew Karl Marx-Mordecais for the class warfare felt across the country.”1

And in all of this chaos, another figure. An aviator.

In May 1927, a pilot named Charles Lindbergh flew from New York Paris nonstop, the first ever solo transatlantic flight. President Calvin Coolidge presented him with both the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Medal of Honor. He was named Time magazine’s Man of the Year.

In 1930, President Hoover awarded him the Congressional Gold Medal.

In 1932, Lindbergh’s first-born infant child was kidnapped and murdered, a high-profile crime that captured the public’s attention. The international fame and admiration became near-mythic adoration.

In 1937, Lindbergh praised German aviation as being “without parallel.” He praised Germany’s “sense of decency and value” as being far ahead of “those of America.”

In 1938, Herman Göring, the head of the Luftwaffe, awarded Lindbergh with the Service Cross of the Order of the German Eagle with the Star.

Also in 1938, the first Kindertransport train arrived in Harwich, England. In total, nearly 10,000 children would be saved by the program, most of whose entire families would perish in the camps.2

In 1939, the MS St. Louis carried over 900 Jewish refugees to America fleeing Nazi Germany. They were denied entry and turned back to Europe. Over 250 of them were murdered in the Holocaust.

In 1940, Lindbergh became a prominent spokesperson for the America First Committee, an isolationist political group advocating against the United States’s entry to the Second World War.

In 1941, he delivered a speech titled “Who Are the War Agitators?” at an America First rally in which he named: “the British, the Jewish, and the Roosevelt Administration.” American Jews, he said, had “large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.” He spoke to the Jewish plot for global domination (antisemitic propaganda that traces back beyond the 18th century).

In 1942, just six months later, the Jewish-American author Philip Roth celebrated his 9th birthday.

In The Plot Against America, Roth re-contextualizes his New Jersey adolescence into a 1940 America that elects Charles Lindbergh president in a landslide victory. “Vote for Lindbergh, or vote for war.” As the Lindbergh administration takes root, the Roth family live through the country’s radicalization. The Office of American Absorption places Jewish boys in exchange families in the South and Midwest to “Americanize” them. Philip’s older brother Sandy is selected and, on return, calls his family “ghetto Jews.” Alvin, Philip and Sandy’s cousin, sneaks into Canada to serve in the British Army to fight the Nazis, and loses a leg. The United States all but endorses Hitler’s authoritarian regime.

Early during the administration, the Roth family travel to Washington D.C. and attract negative attention when Herman, the family patriarch, loudly declares the Lindbergh administration a stain on American history. He’s called a “loudmouth Jew” and they return to their hotel to find their bags packed and their reservation cancelled.

A Homestead Act is instituted to relocate Jewish families to the Western and Southern United States. A young boy in Philip’s class, Seldon, and his widowed mother are relocated to rural Danville, Kentucky. Many of Philip’s neighbors escape to Canada. Herman considers relocation for too long, and their window to escape closes.

As national tensions mount and the war continues on without America, President Lindbergh’s plane suddenly goes missing when returning from a political event. The Vice President assumes the presidency and announces evidence provided by the Nazis that President Lindbergh was actually killed by Jewish conspirators — the very same conspirators that killed his infant son. Prominent Jewish-Americans are arrested. Pogroms break out across the country, particularly in Homestead areas where Jewish families are isolated and outnumbered. Seldon’s mother is burned alive in her car during an antisemitic riot and Seldon comes to live with the Roth family.

The rioting finally ends when the First Lady Lindbergh makes a desperate public appeal on the radio. Franklin Delano Roosevelt runs as an emergency bipartisan presidential candidate and is re-elected. The Japanese attack Pearl Harbor and the United States enter the war.

All is, in effect, back on track.

Of the major and minor Roths I’ve read, The Plot Against America remains the most frustrating. The work put in constructing his counterfactual is legible on the page as a convincing scaffolding of American fascism. But what turns out to be the eponymous plot against America (in the disappearance of President Lindbergh’s plane) arrives like a pulling of a stopper, as if Roth didn’t have the stomach or heart to commit to the obvious end state of the world he had created: Nazi domination; him and his family in an American concentration camp; the fall of Europe.

Maybe in 2004, when the novel was published, Roth was pushing his hypothetical to its limit. Perhaps he couldn’t imagine a President that would direct federal operatives to invade domestic cities; who, after these operatives shot and killed a 37-year-old American citizen sitting in her car, would describe her as “very, very disrespectful to law enforcement”; a death which his Vice President would go on to call a “tragedy of her own making”; a President who would openly threaten to invade a NATO ally; who would proudly detain lawful residents in deportation camps; who would champion insurrection; who would classify political opponents as enemies of the state; and on… The deus ex machina of Lindbergh’s disappearance and Roosevelt’s emergency candidacy feels comforting in a novel that well earns its discomfort, especially unearned when read today.

But then, 2004 marked the midpoint of Bush’s Wars on Terror, nationalized spying on citizens via the Patriot Act, documented civilian torture in Abu Ghraib, and on… Roth was no stranger to precursors of American fascism, if not its outright emergence. I seriously doubt he thought the individualism of American spirit would save its soul.

Towards the end of the novel, Philip’s Aunt recounts an overheard conspiracy that Lindbergh’s son was never murdered but instead raised in Nazi Germany, held as collateral for Lindbergh’s continued co-operation with the Nazi-organized presidential campaign. When Lindbergh finally resisted, they disappeared his plane and had him kidnapped, hoping the Jewish conspiracy theory would further turn the United States against its Jewish population. The novel ends with Philip’s admission it is the most “unbelievable” explanation for Lindbergh’s disappearance, but “not necessarily the least convincing.”

This, more than anything, suggests the novel’s intent. Roth was not interested in documenting the complete counterfactual erosion of American democracy but rather the lasting mark a glancing blow reveals. Perhaps Roth was not documenting the eventualities of his time at all but instead predicting ours. The novel shows the extreme in one hand and the minor in the other, both equally demonstrative that — as Sinclair Lewis might have said — “when fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”

Or perhaps there is a simpler explanation. In an interview with Jeffrey Brown shortly after the novel’s release, he was asked whether the optimistic ending defined it as “a book of a fear or hope.”

Well, in a manner of speaking, it's an optimistic book. It imagines something that did not happen, and as you had said, could it have happened? And the answer is, sure, it could have happened, but it didn't happen, which tells you a lot about the country, this country… Yes, to know that this came to an end, that this nightmare came to an end. Yes, it was a comfort.3

Roth went on to describe the act of writing the novel as an act not of invention but of remembering.

I had a little slogan I would use with myself when I was writing this book, and from — if you want more falsification — I said to myself whenever I got stuck, which was frequently, "Don't invent, just remember."

So the easiest explanation for the final turn towards optimism is not one of intended comfort for the reader, but for himself while writing.

In the final pages of the novel, we read how quickly the country snaps back to normal. We’re forced to reconcile this familiar version of “actual” America with one in which, just a few pages earlier, Kristallnacht broke out in Detroit and Jews were forcibly relocated, torn out of their homes and lynched across America. The effect is pronounced: they’re the same America. One in the open. The other only marginally concealed. It has always been there. It will always remain.

In July 2025, the first group of immigrant detainees arrived to a detention center in Ochopee, Florida. This group included Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients, meaning that their residency in the United States was legal. They were “essentially packed into cages, wall-to-wall humans, 32 detainees per cage.” The detention center was named “Alligator Alcatraz.”4

“We’re under invasion from within,” Trump said to a room of high-ranking military generals two months later. “No different than a foreign enemy. But more difficult in many ways because they don’t wear uniforms. At least when they’re wearing a uniform you can take them out. These people don’t have uniforms. But we are under invasion from within. We’re stopping it very quickly.”5

That month, Greg Bovino, the so-called “deportation czar” and tactical commander of mass raid operations in American cities was asked how deportation officers decide whom to approach and rip off the street into unmarked vans.

“It would be agent experience, intelligence that indicates there’s illegal aliens in a particular place or location. Then, obviously, the particular characteristics of an individual, how they look,” he said to the white male reporter. “How do they look compared to, say, you?”6

In October, it was reported that the whereabouts of two-thirds of over 1,800 Alligator Alcatraz detainees could not be determined.

In December, ICE agent Jonathan Ross fired into the windshield of 37-year-old citizen Renee Good’s car in Minneapolis in an altercation described by the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security as “domestic terrorism.” Medical professionals were prevented from assessing her condition on the scene and she died, the fifth casualty of ICE metropolitan raids so far.

In a recent interview with Reuters, President Trump argued that “we shouldn’t even have an election.” Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked about his remarks during a White House Press Briefing. After calling the journalist a “left-wing hack,” she assured them that the president was, of course, only joking.

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The final pages of The Plot Against America, Roth invoke the story of Leo Frank, a Jewish man who in 1915 was accused of the murder of a 13-year-old girl and subsequently arrested and convicted on circumstantial and since-debunked evidence. Following a Supreme Court appeal decision, his sentence was commuted from death to life imprisonment. On August 16, 1915, he was kidnapped from prison by an incensed local gang and lynched at Marietta, Georgia, the girl’s hometown.

“To be sure,” young Philip muses, “the Frank case was only a part of the history that fed my father’s sense of danger in rural West Virginia on the afternoon of October 15, 1942.

“It all goes further back than that.”

I’ve been finding it difficult to write lately. But I managed this, at least. Some exciting announcements soon. Thanks for your patience.

-JSR

Human, Animal is an ambitious novel following dairy farmer George Calvert as he fights to keep the family business afloat amid his mother’s ailing health and troubled relationship with his youngest son, Tom. When animal rights activists break into the cowshed one morning and Tom appears to side with the protestors, father and son lock horns, and the family threatens to unravel. It is available at most booksellers.

Our interview was, as always, conducted over e-mail and then edited for flow.

Seth,

Thank you for agreeing to the interview. I just loved Human, Animal and it's a genuine treat to be able to get into it with you.

Some of my favorite books are told from multiple perspectives, leveraging their polyphony to create a patchwork filled by negative space. When one character stops, another starts, so as a reader we see the entire picture colored by nuance and bias. Some of my least favorite books are also polyphonic, failing because the voices meld or every perspective shift replays the same events without enough differentiation to be interesting.

What I'm getting at is, novels with multiple perspectives are hard! What gave you the confidence to tackle a novel that spans not only multiple voices but voices that change distinctively over the course of the novel (and one—no spoilers—which is tremendously different from the others)? What was the germ of an idea that grew into this novel and did you always know polyphony would be at its heart?

You and I both published debut novels which are, at their hearts, family stories that form backbones from dense philosophical grapplings of real moral questions: Jewish identity in my case; ethical farming in yours. It's worth noting we were published by the same publisher, Verve Books, and shared an editor as well, the indomitable Jenna Gordon. While my life greatly influenced Placeholders, it was mostly superficial: I found it easier to lift specific jewelry someone wears in real life as a shorthand for an aesthetic, even when the full character was not intended to represent that person as a whole. Human, Animal is full of such rich experiential detail that I feel obligated to ask: how much of this novel was informed by personal experience?

James

James,

I really like your framing of polyphony as both risk and reward. For me, it was less about confidence and more about necessity. While Human, Animal dates back to 2016, my first proper notes on it are from 2019, and begin:

Represent both sides of a polarised debate in terms of sociological factors, e.g. isolated, dense agricultural networks/remote family business – reinforcements of tradition, cultural ritual, resistance to change from the outside – versus globalised, connected progressives whose ideologies are reflected back in online echo chambers.

I knew from the beginning that the novel’s shape would emerge through contrast: distinct voices and registers, different moral perspectives, and emotional textures I couldn’t contain in a single narrator.

The hope was that, taken together, the pieces might create something fuller than any one voice could on its own, though I was obviously nervous that the perspectives would collapse in on one another. I wrote Tam to be deeply introspective and sometimes defensive to the point of pretension. George is a sensitive soul but repressed, his thoughts and feelings punching their way out of him in brusque, clipped sentences. Their narratives are subjective and immediate, where Stefan’s journal is the literary creation of a man aware that his writing might be intercepted, torn between the impulse to process and record his experiences authentically, and the instinct to shape his story through artifice, euphemism and omission.

As for the personal: yes, definitely, though perhaps more thematically than biographically. Like you, I found myself using a family story to work through deeper questions – in my case, about inheritance, identity and conflict resolution, as well as responsibility, complicity, and what we’re willing to look away from in the name of love or survival. Having Jenna at the helm was super reassuring. She completely understood what I was trying to do with my book, and has a way of getting to the emotional core of a story without ever asking it to be simpler than it is. I felt very lucky to have her guidance – and to share that publishing path with you and others who are also trying to write with moral seriousness, without (hopefully) being moralistic.

Seth

Seth,

I love how you've phrased this. Something I struggled with while writing Placeholders is that I, like you, was using two sides to an ideological conflict to better flesh characters and pronounce tensions while avoiding polemic but I had to recognize my own biases and that I of course had strong opinions of my own. At multiple times during the edit, I had to scale back "my" side of things for the benefit of balance. Did you ever find yourself needing to temper your own leanings in order to give the "opposing" viewpoint more weight?

Finally, after having had the pleasure of reading the novel, a question I can't help but ask: are you a vegan?

James

James,

Writing Human, Animal, I tried to resist the temptation to press harder on the points I personally agreed with, or to frame certain arguments more sympathetically than others. The novel is supposed to feel honest. It's not about trying to "win" the debate, but focuses instead on the characters' internal logic: what makes their beliefs feel necessary or inevitable to them. That goal helped me write with more curiosity and (hopefully) less agenda. It’s still a partial lens, of course – I don’t think true neutrality is possible, or even desirable – but I tried to create space for dissonance, and for the reader to form their own judgments.

I was really inspired by my research, for instance debates I'd watched where I felt sympathy for both sides. A fun example is the TV debate between vegan activist/former Made in Chelsea star Lucy Watson and family farmer Mat Carter, who's cornered into confessing on live TV that to slaughter his turkeys "humanely" (his word) he "slits their throats". It's riveting stuff.

You might recognise some similarities between this interview and the TV interview scene in Human, Animal!

And, sure, you can ask if I’m a vegan, but I’m going to let you down by sidestepping the question! I don’t think I’m very interesting, and my beliefs and opinions don’t matter much. I’ve spent so much time researching the ethical arguments around farming and animal rights, and yet I still don’t feel qualified to make pronouncements about them. But ethical contradictions fascinate me, especially those we interact with daily, and I hope there’s power in leaving them unresolved – in telling a story about characters with irreconcilable views and identities, who still find a way to come together.

Seth

I had the pleasure of meeting Seth for the first time in London during a showcase for Verve’s upcoming catalogue. It’s a pleasure not only to read about the book he was finishing at the time, but to see how well it’s done, and get to ask him about it.

You can find more information about Seth, including his work and contact information, here.

-JSR

• Masters of War: A Closer Look at “Falling Man”

• Monkey Business: A Closer Look at “Close to Home”

• With A Conscious Moral Purpose: A Closer Look at “What Belongs to You”

There is a type of novel that concerns a character, a set of characters, what have you, and the world they inhabit. The specifics aren’t always relevant except to say that they’re always unique. The novel may purport to focus on one or several points of change, but the chief concern of the reader is the wellbeing of character. It is a superset of the “summer of change” novel or the “anti-romance” novel or close to 90% of the non-airport fiction being published today. They’re typically but not always realist novels of the humanist or naturalist variety, meaning that they are concerned with reaffirming the beauty of life or reaffirming the beauty of nature or reaffirming the beauty of living in beautiful nature and often include sentences like, “This life, there is so much of it.”

There’s another type of novel that concerns an idea, a set of ideas, what have you, and how they speak to a theme. The ideas can be anything, but good “novels of ideas” will ensure that these disparate ideas all somehow correlate. And the best “novels of ideas” will ensure that this correlation is unexpected in obscure specificity. They might feature a man who teaches a Hitler Studies seminar and his wife, who works with the elderly and takes mysterious pills, who live in a town undergoing an airborne toxic event. And all of these disparate events might coalesce to form a thesis around how the anxieties of death sublimate into American suburban consumerism.

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Over 100,000 years ago, as Homo sapiens emerged from Africa into Europe, they encountered their genetic cousins the Neanderthal and Denisovan for the first time, alongside whom they would coexist until their extinction. The experience of the Homo Sapien was one of conquest: the superior being reigned supreme. But what of the Neanderthal or Denisovan? Were they frightened? Did they understand what was happening? What would it have been like to live alongside your evolutionary replacement, watching your introgressive obviation play out in real-time? This tension is central to Creation Lake, the latest novel by Rachel Kushner, what it means to live in the brief period of time after your means of obsoletion have been introduced but before you have gone extinct.

In more concrete terms, the book concerns Sadie Smith, a spy-for-hire tasked with destabilizing Le Moulin, an anti-state eco-anarchist commune in rural France fighting the rapid corporatization of the French agricultural industry. Their cause du jour: the displacement of water from underground cave networks into privately owned above-ground plastic “mega-basins” which will, in all likelihood, exacerbate regional droughts while also poisoning the water.

Kushner interpolates the shuffled chronology of Smith’s exploits with emails she intercepts written to Le Moulin by Bruno Lacombe, the commune’s hidden ideologue leader who has sworn off modern conveniences to live in a cave, a life more closely resembling the Neanderthals whom he reveres. This epistolary interjection allows Lacombe’s belief system to emerge, a philosophy which essentially boils down to lamenting the extinction of the Neanderthal. That they — and not us — should have been the ones to survive.

Neanderthals were prone to depression, he said. He said they were prone to addiction, too, and especially smoking.

Although it was likely, he said, that these noble and mysterious Thals (as he sometimes referred to the Neanderthals) extracted nicotine from the tobacco plant by a cruder method, such as by chewing its leaves, before that critical point of inflection in the history of the world: when the first man touched the first tobacco leaf to the first fire.

And so we arrive to the project of the novel. Consider the Neanderthal. Consider the Denisovan. Consider a time when 30% of French citizens were actively involved in agriculture. Consider the Union Nationale des Étudiants de France, and May ‘68, and the change these revolutionaries were able to effect. Imagine a world where things happen.

Now consider the Hominin turnover. Consider that only 3% of French citizens do the farming in their country today. Consider Le Moulin and other “revolutionary” groups modelled after an aesthetic rather than a cause. Consider the Schengen Zone, European multi-national enterprises, and the McDonald’s Big Mac. And in this constellation, consider the through-line: your extinction happening right in front of you. A world where the happenings only appear to transpire.

Let these contradictory forces linger with the forces they supplant, together, competing, and focus on the tension as it all plays out.

And it is that consideration which is most important. Kushner does not arrive to a conclusion, e.g. what to do in response to this, but focuses instead on the tension itself. It is the difference between the philosophical novel and the polemic. While both raise questions, only one is satisfied leaving it at that.

Here is Kushner from a 2021 interview with Heidi Julavits for City Arts & Lectures:

Art and the novel, they don’t [have a pretty particular political position and through-line], not in the same way. They aren’t about a message. They’re about moral doubt and moral complexity.

When asked by Julavits, “Do you resist novels that have messages?” Kushner responded, “I can’t think of a really good one that does have a message.”

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The novel was critically acclaimed and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. And it was famous for another reason, at least in the circles of the chronically online, which was how it was reviewed. At least, how one specific person reviewed it.

Creation Lake is a sloppy book whose careless construction and totalising cynicism come to feel downright hostile. As I read, I kept wondering, why did you even write this?

Brandon Taylor, the literary influencer with over 100,000 followers and a Man Booker shortlisting of his own (for his 2020 novel, Real Life) was, well, unimpressed. Writing for the London Review of Books, he took aim at Sadie Smith’s descriptive abilities.

Once begun, the espionage proves far more interesting than the deadened narration and ‘clever’ observations that comprise much of the Sadie sections.

And at Sadie Smith more generally.

I mentioned to a friend that I was having a hard time with Sadie as a narrator because she seemed stupid and unaware that she was stupid…

And at Rachel Kushner, for refusing to render the counter-capitalist subversives with empathy and compassion.

The main idea of Creation Lake is that the work the Moulinards are doing – trying to grow their own food, trying to build homes and barns and live on their own terms – is not really work because they can leave it at any point and do something else, meaning, probably, an email job in Paris… That’s the life they’ve chosen, and the novel’s unwillingness to make this the site of collision feels, again, like contempt.

And at Rachel Kusher, for not having written a book closer aligned to Émile Zola’s Germinal, which renders its counter-capitalist subversives with empathy and compassion.

I kept remembering the care with which Zola describes every part of the winches and levers that lower the miners into the shaft and bring them back again, and the way he unfolds the internal landscape of the coalface itself, allowing his readers to see the veins glinting in the dark. I thought of Zola and wanted to weep as I read Kushner struggling to describe a car going up a hill, or to advance her book beyond the momentary delights of Neanderthals having faces like Joan Crawford. It’s like, stand up, sister! Use your human mind!

This becomes the crux of Taylor’s criticism: he is disappointed that Rachel Kushner did not write an entirely different novel, one which centers characters and, through narrative imbued with naturalist and humanist sensibilities, makes the reader feel for their pain. Instead of all this blathering on about “Neanderthals and geography and economics and evolutionary psychology.”

The effect of ploughing through paragraph after paragraph of factoids about Neanderthals and geography and economics and evolutionary psychology was not that of encountering a great mind at work. Rather, it was as though someone had assembled some facts, given their sheaf of papers a shuffle and put them all into a novel so that some unsuspecting critic would hail it as ‘discursive’. This shoddy pseudo-thought is a blight.

Literary criticism, as in, actual literary criticism, is hard to find today. Sure, 500-2,000 word blocks of text get printed and circulated with that moniker, but those chunks of effusive praise are largely checkboxes in marketing strategy documents. Every summer features 25 “books of the summer,” a title bestowed by an author or critic who, surely by coincidence, has personal connections to the book’s author.

And so, credit where it is due, I respect and encourage the spirit of Taylor’s open disdain. But for one of the loudest properly critical reviews in recent memory to also be so fundamentally uninterested in the project of the novel it purports to critique is disappointing, least of all because the novel is not perfect. There are plenty of very valid issues to raise while meeting it on its terms.

For instance, does its ending deliver on the philosophical promise it presents? Or does it cop-out by giving its stoic narrative force, the backbone example of contemporary disaffection, a humanist glimpse of hope? There’s something very interesting about a novel that devotes its entirety to such a nihilist perspective. There’s something less interesting about a novel that ends with a hopeful turn.

The framework of a “novel of ideas” is predicated upon those ideas being tightly bound, fixed on a question that may not have an answer. David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest is a gargantuan novel concerned with addiction in its many forms and, once cracked, the reader understands that enormous passages about tennis are not, in fact, digressive at all. Don DeLillo’s Underworld is about the sublimation of collective guilt into moral decay in American culture. Zadie Smith’s White Teeth is about historical reckoning, particularly how Britain’s colonial past is inexorable from his multicultural present.

Like these novels, Creation Lake doesn’t do substantive work to ground its characters emotionally, and intentionally so. Does one feel for Hal Incandenza the way they feel for, say, Connell Waldron? Does one’s heart ache the same way? Probably not. When you set down Normal People, are you haunted by the confrontation of some cultural aspect of contemporary living? Again, unlikely. These novels set out to accomplish different things, and should be judged on their ability to do so.

In a marketplace saturated by humanist narratives, it is inevitable that novels of ideas will be misread, held up to a Zolaesque rubric they are not built to survive. Which is liberating in a sense. Write what you want. It’s likely to be misread no matter what it is.

I am exceptionally late to the “did you see what Brandon Taylor wrote about Rachel Kushner” party. But now that the smoke has cleared and I’ve finally had a chance to read Creation Lake, I’m happy to stir it up again.

-JSR

P.S. The photographs, taken with my trusty Olympus XA, are from a 2023 trip to a friend’s house in suburban Paris. Not quite Kushner’s “Guyenne,” but close.

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This past Saturday, on the sunniest day of the summer, a group of writers gathered in the dank snug of a Dublin pub to hear each other read from unpublished work. I decided to read from a novel-in-progress because I’d never read from it aloud. The book follows a pair of brothers who grow up outside of Boston in the mid-2000s. One of the brothers, Donald, has a boyish fixation on military aircraft. In the monomaniacal way that eleven-year-old boys tend to love things, he loves their circumstance, their attributes. And there is one airplane he loves most of all.

If Donald could see any airplane in person, it would be the Northrop B-2 Spirit heavy strategic bomber. It is his favourite airplane. It is his favourite airplane by a mile. He does not have a second favourite airplane. There is no point in having a second favourite airplane when your favourite airplane is the best one of them all, the Northrop B-2 Spirit American heavy strategic bomber. No other country in the world has as advanced an air force as the United States Air Force, and no plane in the United States Air Force fleet is as advanced a heavy strategic bomber as the Northrop B-2 Spirit. It keeps Donald, and everyone he knows and loves, safe.

None of us knew it, but at the exact time I read this passage, B-2s were being deployed from Whiteman Air Force Base on their first major bombing run since 2017. Some flew west, a Pacific diversion. Another seven flew east, over the Atlantic, and by midnight Dublin time, they had dropped fourteen 30,000-pound bunker-busting missiles on three nuclear targets in Iran.

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Now is the point at which you might be asking yourself, having read the title and subtitle of this post: when is this guy going to get to Don DeLillo?

Falling Man, published in 2007, concerns Keith Neudecker on the day of the September 11th terrorist attacks. We meet Keith walking out of one of towers, bloody and covered in grey soot, a briefcase in hand that does not, he discovers at home, actually belong to him. It is a daring book that tries to make sense of something incomprehensible by inhabiting the center of its experience. By looking from the inside out.

Falling Man follows Keith in the days immediately following the attacks, starting with his arrival to the apartment of his estranged wife. They try to make sense of each other, of themselves, while in the background, America does the same. True to DeLillo’s work, this is not a novel informed by narrative but by overlapping symbols, less interested in answering the questions they pose than examining their context.

Take, for example, the eponymous Falling Man, a guerilla artist who dangles from the sides of buildings dressed in a suit, posing to recreate those who jumped to their deaths from the World Trade Center.

Or perhaps Keith’s long-standing weekly poker game, which gradually escalated into a rigid affair of harshly abided rules: no food; no drinking; no smoking; no chatter. The friends came to love the ritual more than what was being ritualised until, one night, the structure ruptures under its own weight and they lift all the rules all at once. In the present, the game is cancelled. Half of the players were killed in the attacks.

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Or his estranged wife Lianne’s writing therapy group, whose members begin to succumb to their Alzheimer’s and slowly lose their ability to write. This thread relates to how Lianne, worried about developing the dementia that is killing her mother, begins performing brain teaser exercises. When she finally builds the courage to see a doctor, she is told that she is fine, but continues to find comfort in the brain teasers anyway.

Any one of these symbols could power a novel. They each provide a system and subvert it, leaving the reader to ponder, say, the efficacy of making art from trauma, especially national trauma. Or the sliding scale of autocracy. Or the comfort of ritualization. Or, in a fascinating exchange Keith has with a fellow survivor, how one can reconcile tragedy with faith in a higher power, especially tragedy caused by those who were, in their own horrible way, ultimately devoted to a higher power of their own.

Taken together, these overlapping symbols are debilitatingly DeLillian, this patchwork composite that says something about our ability—or inability—to cope as the world comes apart at its seams.

Falling Man concerns characters who take control amidst uncontrollable environments, no matter how minutely. A mother dies of dementia and her daughter tries to work out her brain. A husband survives a terrorist attack and begins an extramarital affair. An artist lives through national rupture and embodies the most traumatic icon of its suffering.

Notably, all of these actions becomes rituals of comfort where the ritualization itself becomes the comfort. The poker ostensibly at the heart of a convoluted home game becomes secondary in focus to the militant adherence to the home game rules themselves. There is no medical need for Lianne to perform brain teasers, but they provide her reassurance.

These are not cures, DeLillo seems to say. They are salves. Like the child who watches September 11th on a television screen and grows up to revere the military because militarism is an answer to a question of fear. Like the author who invents that child, trying to construct a system of coherence for a world that defies all rational understanding.

Because what does it mean to write about the sublimation of mediated militarism, the fetishization of national defence, and to go on to read that work aloud while, simultaneously, 420,000 pounds of explosives are dropped by the same plane you read about? While the President of the United States declares, for the second time in your life, a war in the Middle East? It becomes impossible to distinguish the aestheticization of politics from their interrogation.

An airplane is flown into a skyscraper. Does writing from the perspective of someone walking out of the stricken tower help to understand why it was struck? Or from the perspective of the man who hijacked the plane? I do not know whether these actions are palliative or escapist, acts of resistance or complicity. I do not know what it means to fictionalize a war as it unfolds in real-time.

All I know is that the writing doesn’t help. The poker doesn’t help. The brain teasers don’t help. But they distract. And perhaps the project at the heart of Falling Man is to wrestle with whether this coping is constructive or only evasive. Because these rituals might be the self-soothing gesture of a finger in your mouth. Or else a gesture of two fingers, planted firmly in your ears.

It is nearly impossible to discuss Falling Man without discussing its most daring formal conceit, which involves extended passages from the perspective of the ringleader of 9/11, the very real Mohamad Atta. Especially considering that the novel was published a mere six years after the attacks, its ending is one of the most brazen pieces of American fiction I have ever read.

-JSR

P.S. These photographs come from a family trip to Washington, D.C. this past May. And yes, that first photograph is a real photograph of a real portrait hanging in the actual White House. I know.

The Wardrobe Department is an incredibly written novel following Mairéad Sweeney, a young Irishwoman working in the wardrobe department of a London theatre company circa 2002. It is one of the strongest debut novels I’ve read and is available at most booksellers, including Books Upstairs.

Our interview was conducted over e-mail and then edited for flow, as I tend to use four sentences where one does just fine.

Elaine,

There's much to admire about this book. The characters are fully realized and lived in. The technical work on the sentence level is excellent. The narrative moves, both in terms of momentum and in that it literally moves from London to Ireland and back, geographical changes rendered as beautifully distinct milieus.

What struck me most is how confidently focused its central theme is, how concerned it is at every opportunity with the pervasive nature of gendered power dynamics. It appears in every conversation Mairéad has with co-workers, bosses, and — back home — her family. It's in the way she's asked to fix a costume at work or expected to cook the post-funeral breakfast. It's in the way she hopes her mother will say something to her father but doesn't.

Was this concern always central to the story you wanted to tell, or was it instead something that became clear through revision? Which is another way of asking: what was the seed of this story you felt most driven to write that flowered into this novel? And conversely, did you start with anything you thought was essential that ultimately didn't make it into the text?

James

James,

It's interesting that you picked up on the power dynamics immediately. The first scene I wrote where I knew I had a story is towards the beginning of the book, where one character says: 'Everybody talks. Everybody wants to talk.' That line of dialogue unlocked something for me. Being able to say what you want without fear of consequences is a position of power. Not everybody wants to talk. In some scenes of this novel, nobody wants to talk. I was listening to a radio interview between Seán Rocks and Jared Harris on Arena (RTÉ Radio 1) and Jared Harris said: 'People in power are always lying.' That struck me as both shocking and true. All genders, all backgrounds. When we are in a position of power, we lie to protect that position, to exclude others, and we lie to ourselves about why we are lying. I wanted to explore that.

As The Wardrobe Department is set in 2002, it was more likely that the person who owned the company or inherited the land or earned more money and had fewer caring responsibilities would be male, so I can see how it could be understood as a commentary on the limitations imposed by gender stereotypes. And the division of labour in the theatre is gendered. However, there are different forms of abuse of power in the novel, mirrored throughout by several characters, male and female. I find the binary of good guys and bad guys — the idea that someone is either good or bad — blocks the question of where does the desire to dominate come from? I've been asked a few times why there are no 'good men' in the novel. Isn't that interesting? The need for reassurance, so we can say, 'Well, I identify with the clearly defined good guys. There's no need for me to examine my behaviour or attitudes.'

The main character in my book, Mairéad Sweeney, is often wrong about other people’s intentions and she is quite biased when we first meet her. Suppressing uncomfortable questions does not make them go away and, in various ways, including her attitude to her own body, Mairéad starts to question what she has been taught, how selective was it, what was left out? If her colleagues do not know about her beliefs, what does she really know of theirs?

Did I start with anything essential that ultimately didn't make it in to the final text? Yes. About fifteen years of wrong-headedness. Making this story was a slow process.

Elaine

Elaine,

It's interesting you mention being asked about "good men" in your book, I've fielded similar questions around my novel, Placeholders, and found them to similarly reveal much more about the person asking or a broader social context than the book itself. As in — as you rightly point out — why does a question like this need asking?

Lately, I've noticed a trend in contemporary literary fiction that so long as a novel is well written, it is considered important. Art exists as a transmission of emotion, and these works are certainly art (or, at the very least, artful). The writing it taut, the narratives are lean, they're massively impacting. But whether because we live in such turbulent times — or because I'm an American and feel personally implicated in so much of that turbulence — I find myself increasingly drawn to books today that takes some kind of political risk, that serve to illuminate or confront something concrete. And I mean political very broadly here, just having to do with systems of power. I'm in the midst of editing a novel that will come out some time next year and have been accordingly concerned with the question of what this novel — what any novel — is really saying. Yet here you've written a novel that sacrifices none of its novelistic ambition with the social conflict at its heart. So, as a writer I have to ask: how?

Part of what makes Mairéad such a compelling character is how concrete her worldview is: relationships are largely transactional; vulnerability is weakness. It presents most acutely in her repression of thought, of feeling, of herself.

'He wouldn't stop asking personal questions. Why does he need to know what my parents do?' If a fella wants to know about the neighbour on his right, my dad would say, he'll ask the neighbour on his left. You did not share information, you concealed it. In case it was used against you.

The complicating factor is, as you point out, that she isn't entirely wrong. In the theatre, for instance, she is not free to say or do what she wants. There are power dynamics at play to do with gender but also experience and seniority. But also that nobody she works with sees the world in quite that same way. She is often appalled at the brash and open behaviour of her coworkers and friends. Especially early on, she sees this freedom as vulgar rather than liberating. The novel seems — to me, at least — to make the argument this has a lot to do with her Irishness. Mairéad is an Irishwoman living in London in the early 2000's with all of the alienation that entails. And that otherness is rendered beautifully and so distinctly from the scenes set in Ireland, after Mairéad comes back home. I don't know that I've ever read a novel that so clearly demonstrates the cultural differences (subtle and not so subtle) between the Irish and British, certainly not so closely juxtaposed. Did you find it challenging to get into the rhythm of London speech and mannerisms? Did you always know that she would come back to Ireland?

James

James,

These are turbulent times, as you say. Earlier this year, I read Omar El Akkad's One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. It's an extraordinary work of nonfiction, a profound act of articulation and speaking up. I mention it because it has changed my attitude and understanding of things, especially our abuse of language and how difficult it is to find the courage to call a thing what it is and not look away. He asks repeatedly about writing, ‘What is this work we do? What are we good for?’

In the context of the theatre world in The Wardrobe Department, the responsibility for calling out abuse is left to subordinate employees. The reader may already know that reporting workplace bullying or harassment in a precarious work environment means that it will not be stopped, it will get worse, and you will lose your job for speaking up. I think your character Róisín in Placeholders experiences something similar in her workplace? When I was researching this aspect of the story, after the #MeToo movement had gone global in 2017, I asked the theatre staff I was interviewing if they had witnessed or encountered bullying. The answer was an emphatic ‘yes’ from everyone. Which means that even if you do speak up, the next job will have the same problems. Allowing organisations to investigate themselves is ineffective. Those organisational structures have both enabled and tolerated bullying. If the current system does not recognise and address how it is being abused, that is the fault of the system. Or it’s possible the system is working exactly as intended and the promises for reform are superficial. We no longer tolerate adults hitting children. We don’t try to see both sides, or tell the child they are also to blame: we stop it. Mairéad has a pivotal moment in the story where she recognises similar patterns of behaviour occurring in her workplace and in her family. She realises that, although she may be the current target, she is not the cause, and says, 'His choice, not my fault.' This revolution in her thoughts is where she begins to turn her focus outwards.

I don't know if my novel is saying anything. It has no answers, only questions. In Hilary Mantel's The Mirror and the Light, her character, Thomas Cromwell, asks another character, 'Who told you this, and how long have you believed it?' It is an excellent question. I don’t know how to answer your question other than to say having the time to develop the story is what made the story.

The distinct parts worried me when I was writing it. There are three sections in the novel, like a three-act play, where you’re asking the reader to leave the world you’ve just introduced and come with you to a new setting. But I knew Mairéad had to go home at some point, if I was going to really engage with the emigrant experience. The separate worlds are only linked through her mind and body and she continues to live a half-life in whichever one she’s just left. I think many of us imagine our parallel life or lives, what would we have become if we’d made different choices at a certain point? Mairéad thinks about this all the time, it’s an essential part of her consciousness, her partitioned state, so I had to represent that. The editor I worked with on the text is English and has better grammar and syntax than I do. For example, I don't know how to use 'shall' in a sentence and I was grateful to be working with someone who did. There is a funeral scene in the Irish section. It's a cliché, in an Irish novel, to have a funeral scene, and I felt it had to earn its place. That's something I worked on, and was still working on, right up to the print deadline.

There is something I should say. I trust the reader to understand what’s not explicitly stated. Mairéad is white, educated, with European citizenship, able to cross borders freely and to work in London, where she is offered access to more opportunity, acceptance and healthcare than in her own country. She’s aware of the casual racism and intolerance in her family. There is a recurring choice between increasing barriers or attempting to recognise what brought them about. If Mairéad chooses to hold on to her anger, she will become more isolated. She is arriving onto the scene long after the story has begun and she has to figure out how to navigate her own way through.

That does not mean forgetting who she is, but she has a chance to create a new space and become more at peace with herself.

Elaine

One true joy of living in Ireland these days is living in a small country densely populated with some of the most talented authors in the world. Which is another way of saying that I hope to make this interview segment a regular part of the semantics newsletter, because it was an absolute pleasure getting to hear more from Elaine about her writing in her own words.

You can find more information about Elaine, including her work and contact information, here.

-JSR

P. S. These photographs are from a London trip in 2023. They were taken with my trusty Olympus XA at The Big Museum of Stolen Stuff. Or, as you might call it, The British Museum.

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My parents used to tell me this story about an experiment involving five monkeys in a cage. There's a ladder in the cage too, and hanging above the ladder is a banana. When one of the monkeys climbs the ladder to go for it, the scientists douse all five monkeys in ice water. This only has to happen once or twice for the monkeys to get the memo: leave that banana alone.

Then the scientists swap out one of the test subjects. The new monkey sees the banana and goes for it. As soon as they step on the bottom rung, the other four monkeys panic and attack him. Lesson learned. Touch the ladder, get beaten up. The scientists swap another monkey, and another, and continue until all five monkeys are replaced. And even though none of them know exactly what will happen if they ever do climb that ladder, none will let another try.

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Close to Home is the electrifying 2023 debut from the West Belfast native, Michael Magee. It is the tightly-scoped portrait of a twenty-something who, having followed the promise of secondary education as a way out of post-recession Belfast, finds himself pulled back in the same cycle of party-fueled financial precarity he left. The novel is punchy in that it starts with a punch: Sean assaults someone at a party, an act with ramifications both legal and psychological that unravel in the weeks that follow. Sean gets arraigned, sentenced, and slowly starts to seriously reconsider the direction of his life.

When it was published, the novel was often touted as being “about” West Belfast, or “about” the Troubles or “about” the ceasefire generation—children of the children of the conflict. But what I’ve learned most as a writer from this novel has more to do with contemporary masculinity more generally: how Magee tackles what a man is and the invisible barriers precluding these boys from growing up.

You hear anything about your man?

What man?

The man, the fella you hit.

He wasn’t a man. He was our age.

We’re twenty-two, Sean. We’re men.

Right enough, we were. But I couldn’t work out why the word still felt wrong.

It’s an honest investigation of the social force propelling so many young men towards self-destruction and self-sabotage—and yes, Magee does great work to situate the political particulars of this force, the trauma at its heart, interjecting cutting anecdotes from parents about life during the Troubles, how the pain radiates downward through generations—but it is still that general force that interests me most. Because context aside, it's somewhat universal (at least in the West), that thing that makes young men angry and violent, that turns midday pints into three-day benders, shirts ripped, noses bleeding.

Here’s something that might surprise you: the term “toxic masculinity” did not, as I’d assumed, come from feminist theory. It was coined by the “mythopoetic men’s movement” of the 1980’s. If that name has you imagining middle-aged dudes practicing vaguely appropriative Native American forest rituals in suburban woods somewhere, shirtlessly banging drums and screeching, a primitive regression to simpler times when “men could be men”… you’d be dead right actually, that's exactly what it was, well done.

The mythopoets were chiefly (pun intended) concerned with restoring the “deep masculine,” Jungian archetypal attributes they saw disappearing from modern society: brotherly solidarity as men; limited interaction with the home and women; strengthening of the father-son dynamic; healthy emotional expression. They distinguished this from what they called the “toxic masculine” which stands diametrically opposed to it. Men viewing each other strictly as violent competition. Hyper-fixation on women, as in, sexualisation and misogyny. Absentee fathers. Stoicism. Emotional repression with the exception of anger. All of the hallmarks of hegemonic masculinity. They would hate Andrew Tate is what I'm trying to say.

The world Sean inhabits is exactly what these mythopoets would call “toxic.” Every intermale relationship is underscored by the threat of violence and competition. Like when Marty, a childhood friend of Sean’s brother Anthony, gets dragged to the pub the night before an important early meeting that could lead to a steady paycheck. Anthony gets a round of pints and Marty refuses, then relents to just the one. Sean visits the men’s room and returns to a scene:

…a crowd of people had gathered around the snooker table and were chanting, Par-ty Mar-ty, Par-ty Mar-ty, Par-ty Mar-ty. Marty was up on top of the snooker table. He had his shirt unbuttoned and was dancing with his hands up in the air.

We got him, Anthony said.

What do you mean, you got him?

He picked up his pint and showed me how he had spiked Marty, with an E.

That’s him out for the week, he said.

Marty doesn’t make it to the interview. He never gets the job. It is not coincidental that Anthony’s focus on bringing Marty back down to his level intensifies with the opportunity to ascend it.

Magee makes clear from the start that Sean is different from the men around him. The degree that was supposed to secure an escape was in English Literature. So he shoplifts, sure, but it’s a Knut Hamsun novel under his arm. When he and Ryan run a scam in their local grocery store, it’s Sean who gets the food they need to live while Ryan gets the vodka. For all of his gruff bravado, it becomes clear early that Sean has higher aspirations than his environs. This subtle moral elevation is primarily accomplished by comparison, lifting one by relegating others, rooted as the novel is in artistic exceptionalism.

About halfway through the novel, Sean more firmly pulls the reins on his antics. This is in part thanks to the emergence of Mairéad, a childhood girlfriend of Sean’s who has recently graduated from a university in Belfast, and is similarly stuck in a cycle of abusive jobs with nowhere to stay, trying to get out. Sean is introduced to her university friends, a crowd distinctly unlike his own: posh artist types. They mean well and the worst fault of these Paul Simon-loving gallery-going yuppies is that they can be, in Sean’s words, “a bit much.”

And then, following the tracks of so many literary figures before him, Sean submits a short story to a local magazine. It gives him the hope that he can create something with his life. Something meaningful. Something that matters.

Namely, fiction.

It is to the novel’s credit just how satisfying Sean’s redemption is, especially how it resists sentimentality. We’re really rooting for him. But it left me wondering: what is so morally redemptive about the arts? The world of university students who discuss politics in the backs of candlelit bookstores is positioned in diametric opposition to those drunkenly dancing in nightclubs, dreaming of Australia. It is an idealized view of a space which in real life can be equally problematic, a different schema of violence that responds to a different system of weaponization.

What is definitively good about the new world Sean finds himself in is that he doesn’t drink or habitually do cocaine or hit people in the face. But this abstention coincides with class ascension and risks conflating the two. The version of this novel written two hundred years ago might have found Sean bumbling into a church instead of a bookstore, finding Christ instead of Ernaux.

This is the part where I make clear that Sean’s journey is well-defined in the history of literature: salvation stories have existed since Jesus (that’s a joke) and as for their arts-centered variants, Magee’s Close to Home is in the comfortable company of Dickens’ David Copperfield, Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist of a Young Man, and on.

W. Somerset Maugham himself inscribed his 1915 Bildungsroman Of Human Bondage with:

This is a novel, not an autobiography; though much in it is autobiographical, more is pure invention.

Here’s Magee, some hundred-plus years later, with a similar sentiment:

Part of the difficulty in writing this was gauging the distance from the material. I was swaying between memoir and fiction when I changed the narrator’s name from Mick to Sean, which allowed me to see Sean as a shadow version of myself and take the step back I needed.1

Novelists who found purpose in literature writing personally informed novels about protagonists finding purpose in literature is understandable. Who could possibly have a higher opinion of the transformative power of writing fiction than those whose lives were transformed by writing fiction, after all? And yet, despite its historical precedent, the cynic in me always finds slight difficulty reconciling this purported dichotomy. Sean and Mairéad are the only ones from their social circle who escape their cycles. Is it any coincidence that they’re also the only ones who have seen La Haine?

It turns out there never was an experiment with five monkeys, by the way, not the way my parents used to tell it. The closest I found was a study from 1967, when Gordon R. Stephenson was researching cultural acquisition of learned responses among rhesus monkeys. A monkey was exposed to an object that, when manipulated, “punished them.” Once they learned to avoid manipulating the object, they were placed into cages with naïve partners who had never seen the object before. Some of the trained monkeys exhibited “threat facial expressions while in a fear posture” when their naïve partner approached the manipulandum. One trained monkey actually pulled his partner away from the object during their interaction, as if to save them.2

The lesson of the original parable is metaphorically apt: we are the monkeys in that cage, looking up at a ladder we refuse to let each other climb. It fits nicely to describe the inherited trauma of Sean and his friends, the pain that belongs to them rooted in memories and history that don’t, that unknowable driving force separated by just a generation. But the truth is almost more apt, that they—and us—are trapped not with something as alluring as a banana but as deterring as a gun, partnered with those who have already felt its blowback. They are the only ones who can teach us how to put it down. And yes, writing might be the ladder, as it is in this novel. But maybe it is only a way to name the cage.

I’m in the middle of editing a novel and, while I’m working on a project like that, I have to be careful that everything I read is intentional: I choose books that have some component I admire whose mechanics I want to understand better at a sentence level. What Close to Home does so well is this examination of contemporary masculinity, men who have enough self-awareness to understand its problematic nature, but who are largely ill-equipped to change.

That has wound up being the gist of these essays more generally, really, analyzing the components that drew me to read or, as in this case, re-read novels that illuminate how to do something really well. Good artists borrow, great artists steal, and the best artists steal from Michael Magee.

-JSR

P.S. For those keeping score at home, these photographs come from Fota Wildlife Park in Cork. It was the first overnight trip I ever took with Sarah in 2019. Favorite moment: being told to get off a bench by a staff member so that a troop of lemurs could bounce past.

• Semiotic Weaponry: A Closer Look at “The Topeka School”

• The Moment As It Passes You By: A Closer Look At “Leaving the Atocha Station”

Garth Greenwell’s debut, What Belongs to You, is a triumphant and inventive work, a triptych concerned with desire and intimacy. Its unnamed protagonist, an English language teacher in Sofia, solicits sex from a hustler named Mitko in its opening pages. The courtship that follows takes them from bathroom stalls to apartments to computer screens, the real and virtual, culminating at a seaside trip during which the transactional nature of their relationship becomes aggressively clear, an altercation in which Mitko becomes violent. In the second section, the teacher receives troubling news about his father that leads him to revisit a painful childhood spent grappling with his sexuality, the familial rejection of which is correlated in memory to rejection of closeness and intimacy more generally. Mitko returns in the third and final section with the news he has contracted a sexually transmitted disease, that the teacher should be tested.

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In the hands of some writers, this arc might easily devolve into a Hays Code moral story: an American gets involved in a homosexual tryst with a sex worker abroad and is then punished with disease1; his “moral lapse” contextualized by the comparatively greater moral failure of his abusive father. But Greenwell is (thankfully) not among these writers. He is uninterested in moral statements as much as human experience.

Greenwell’s resistance to moral posturing in favor of emotional realism is in the tradition of—or rebellion against—a history of attempts to answer the question of literature’s purpose dating back as far as 1884.

On April 25, the English novelist Sir Walter Besant rose the steps of the Royal Institution and held a lecture, so declaring:

…the modern English novel, whatever form it takes, almost always starts with a conscious moral purpose. When it does not, so much are we accustomed to expect it, that one feels as if there has been a debasement of the Art.2

It’s quite a bold thing to declare that any literature not intending to teach a moral lesson is not only a failure but a debasement of literature itself. But the novel of 1884 was an entirely distinct technology from its modern counterpart: when the drunken villain fell (as all villains were obliged to do), all of drunkenness fell with him. This type of writing necessitates the flattening of characters into archetypes so the attributes (and therefore the lessons) become evident. In this type of novel, Mitko would surely suffer some terrible fate, if not outright death.

Besant’s declaration garnered its fair share of critics, none among them more passionate than Henry James, who took particular offense to Besant’s distinction between novels of character (inner change) and “incident” (external change).

What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?…

It is an incident for a woman to stand up with her hand resting on a table and look out at you in a certain way… When a young man makes up his mind that he has not faith enough, after all, to enter the church as he intended, that is an incident… The only classification of the novel that I can understand is into the interesting and the uninteresting.

This is what would become a foundational stance, the formation of a school of theory: that the “goal” of fiction (so much as one can exist) is not explicitly moral; that actions serve to reveal character. This, he seems to say, is literature’s true pursuit: not the action; not the character; but the revelation itself, how one informs the other. The novel as an exploration of human interiority.

Related to the moral novel is the social or protest novel, a more specialized technology which uses fiction to power a more pointed polemic. These are timely devices responding blatantly to popular issues of their times, defined by that same mechanism of flattening a multifaceted reality into something binary and easily reproachable. It is exemplified in Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Miss Ophelia’s Yankee reaction to her southern cousin’s defense of slavery in the sanctimonious, “This is perfectly horrible! You ought to be ashamed of yourselves!”

A spate of protest novels written against slavery and systemic racism informed James Baldwin’s essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel” in response. Some seventy-odd years later, we can see Baldwin make a defense not dissimilar to Henry James’s:

The “protest” novel, so far from being disturbing, is an accepted and comforting aspect of the American scene, ramifying that framework we believe to be so necessary. Whatever unsettling questions are raised are evanescent, titillating; remote, for this has nothing to do with us, it is safely ensconced in the social arena, where, indeed, it has nothing to do with anyone, so that finally we receive a very definite thrill of virtue from the fact that we are reading such a book at all… “As long as such books are being published,” an American liberal once said to me, “everything will be all right.”3

Baldwin’s qualm with the protest novel is its tendency to simplify the complicated nature of life into something that can be easily rejected. Where these works may seek to interrogate a social problem to raise support, they become aesthetic signifiers of self-congratulation, becoming substitutes—instead of incitations—for the hard protest work they hope to inspire. Or else, their writers simply know that performative resistance (as if reading a book about an issue and doing something about it are the same) is lucrative. Like, wildly so. But it is the simplifying itself Baldwin views as its most damning anti-literary act:

The failure of the protest novel lies in its rejection of life, the human being, the denial of his beauty, dread, power in its insistence that it is his categorization alone which is real and which cannot be transcended.

Or, in Henry James’s words, that “No good novel will ever proceed from a superficial mind.”

That Greenwell avoids the trappings of moralizing his protagonist’s journey is no small feat, particularly considering the nature of his protagonist’s affair and its physiological ramifications. In this way, the novel becomes a sort of anti-novel, diametrically opposed to the posturing that has preceded its patterns for generations. Mitko is neither the spurious urchin nor the virtuous prostitute. We see his calculating transactional nature alongside his flares of anger alongside his genuine joys and affection. He is, in other words, a human being. This is in itself a political statement: that the most flattened dynamics by time are ineffective, they do not hold against a more nuanced and representative view of life. There are no villains, not really.

One of the more notable ways Greenwell eschews these frameworks is his rich prose. Every physical touch is rendered with intensity and steeped in desire, contextualised by a history of starvation. We do not witness the teacher’s affairs with Mitko so much as inhabit them, they overflow with sensory information in a way many contemporary novels avoid entirely by “fading to black.” It was this explicitness that garnered the novel much of its well-deserved critical attention—and admittedly some confusion on the part of Greenwell himself:

The biggest surprise to me about the reception of my first book—other than the fact of there being any reception at all—was how much discussion there was about the sex in it. There isn’t very much sex in it! It said something about the culture of mainstream publishing in America in 2016 that a novel with maybe three or four pages of explicit sex between men could seem surprising.4

The roles of the novel’s characters are not ornamental; the sex is not salacious. Every aspect is designed to render something true and real and personal. It is a novel concerned with human experience that refuses facile alignments.

It’s not that I think explicitness is necessarily all that interesting in and of itself. Our culture is drowning in explicitness - thanks to the internet. And yet we suffer from a dearth of representations of embodiedness, by which I mean bodies imbued with consciousness…

Literature is the most powerful means we have for communicating consciousness… To write something, to make art of it, is to make a claim about its value.5

And so Greenwell’s literary pursuits inevitably lead us back to the question of literature’s purpose.

The whole point of art, for me, is to give us tools to explore feelings or situations or dilemmas that defeat our other ways of making meaning… I think art is the realm in which we can give full rein to the ambiguity, uncertainty, and doubt that we often feel we have to suppress in other kinds of expression—in our political speech, say.

This humanist realist view of literature does not, I think, preclude the ability of the novel (this one and, more generally, as a technology) to be a political vehicle, but I do believe James/Baldwin/Greenwell well articulate why it cannot serve as solely a political vehicle. Fiction requires something honest of its author in surveying the world around them. If the author has political preoccupations and is also bringing all of themselves to their work, those views will enrich the text. Their absence, by contrast, is evidence either of the author’s apolitics or else their artistic dishonesty.

The thing about surveying the world is that it is an uneven inconsistent place from any angle you examine it. To flatten those inconvenient complexities that make up life for the purpose of moralizing or politicizing reduces fiction to polemic and, in doing so, strips away all of the magic emotional accessibility that makes it literature in the first place.

Or, as Henry James puts it, the novelist’s “first duty is to be as complete as possible—to make as perfect a work. Be generous and delicate, and then, in the vulgar phrase, go in!”

Writing intimacy is one of the more challenging parts of writing, but taking a critical look at What Belongs to You reminded me how powerful it can be when done well. It was a pleasure to learn-by-reading from someone who has so clearly mastered its possibilities.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed reading this even half as much as I enjoyed writing it. After a week spent attending and traveling between Cúirt Festival in Galway and then Granard Booktown Festival in Longford, it was the exact kind of hard thinking I needed to reset.

- JSR

P.S. For those wondering, these photographs come courtesy of my Olympus XA and a recent trip to Lisbon last March, where the excited discovery of ginhija was trumped only by the discovery of its price.

I cannot recommend Perpetual Comedown enough. It’s absurdly brilliant, inventive, and available at most booksellers, including Books Upstairs.

Declan and I met at McGrattans for €5 pints and to discuss writing, literature, and why we can’t stop talking about Ben Lerner. In an attempt to subvert the logic of the traditional Q&A, we conducted our follow-up conversation in reverse. I sent my first email answering questions Declan hadn’t yet asked, and on, constructing our conversation backwards.

Wed, 9 Apr 2025 at 09:41

James,

I write to you aboard a Dublin Bus at 09:07 on a sunny midweek morn. First things first – there was a reason I chose McGrattan’s as the venue for our conversation, but my digressive tendencies meant I forgot to mention it at the time. My introduction to Ben Lerner came in the form of a five euro purchase of Leaving the Atocha Station from Chapter’s on Parnell Street. (The pedant in you may scoff and ask, ‘Is there another Chapter’s in Ireland?’ And I assure you there is, though its whereabouts elude me; I daresay there are variations of Chapter’s all over the world, stuffed with recondite texts and sports biographies alike, waiting patiently for sweaty hands to linger awhile and pick them up.) Anyway, that afternoon in 2022 I also picked up a copy of Miriam Toews’ Summer of My Amazing Luck, which likewise cost me a fiver, and as I handed over a tenner to the fashionably polite shop assistant I felt a prime satisfaction in the orderliness of our transaction. Two books, one tenner. My point is that, with McGrattan’s, I knew from past experience that they do €5 pints between 4 and 7 of a weekday, and it was this sense of tidiness – two pints, one tenner – that prompted me to bring us there.

Yada yada. My gambit: I think young men especially like Lerner so much because most writers are losers who write to approximate a feeling approaching victory, and young men who read and write are the losers of losers, and in all of Lerner’s novels you have these literary buckos who by all accounts should be losers, but due to a combination of linguistic flourishes, stoneface lying, ribald anecdotes and – crucially – sadboi indulgence, the novels slide perfectly into that space between victory and defeat, so that Lerner’s protagonists fail to win in a traditional, outright fashion, but do so with concessions, the primary one being (to me anyway) that they still remain losers to some undeniable extent.

Dx

Sun, 6 Apr 2025 at 21:07

Declan,

“Young man” reporting in: that and, obviously we’re suckers for white suburban teenagers rapping along to Tupac.

We talked about this over pints, but really good novels inspire me to write while really great ones inspire me to change careers. So, seeing as both of us plan to move out of the way to make room for more Lerner on the shelf, eulogize your bygone writing career—tell me what it was like writing your debut novel, Perpetual Comedown. Because I remember reading it for the first time shortly after we met at your launch (which feels like a lifetime and was, in fact, only two years ago) and thinking that I'd never read anything like it. I've had the pleasure of reading much more of your work since and the voice continues to be fresh and consistent. Did that take years to work out? Is that how your consciousness sounds inside your head?

Writing is a strange art because it's necessary. You can get by a lifetime without touching an instrument, a paintbrush, without singing a song. But you cannot live without language. I've found two types of writers: those who treat it with spiritual reverence; and those who treat it like a lawnmower with one too many buttons. Which are you? What do you love about writing, if anything? I ask because these days I feel like neither. There are novels that excite me, which are inventive and leave me recontextualizing the space I move through, works with something to say. But it seems we've passed an inflection point in commercialized literature where even the well-written novels feel a little light, a little empty, like the spaces between the sentences have become larger than the sentences themselves.

James

Tue, 1 Apr 2025 at 13:56

James,

In retrospect, Perpetual Comedown was a fluke in that it was a breezy experience with few roadblocks on the path to completion and publication. That has not been the same for anything I have written since or before and, potentially, ever again. While writing it, I felt as though I'd finally stumbled on a voice/character/milieu/approach/&c that allowed me to draw on 25% of my experiences and observations and 75% of my imagination, so that after a while I felt like I was method writing from Darren's POV, rather than filtering my words through him. I wish I could do the same in the multi-voice projects I've started since, but it hasn't worked out that way; for the most part I can't bring myself to care enough about the fictitious worlds I've created, so I abandon them before long. But, as you know, I'm retiring early from the writing life to become a tai chi instructor, so this answer will probably be out of date within weeks, let alone months.

I've been ruminating about empty books, on and off, for the past year. Often, I'll imagine myself rifling through a 300-page novel whose every page is blank, or walking into a bookshop only to find that every title I pull from the shelves – fiction, non-fiction, poetry, cookbooks, the lot – consists entirely of blank pages. And whenever I think of these blank books I feel calm. I imagine I hear waves, but very probably it's only the pages in my mind, flicking inexorably like roulette spokes. I don't know if this recurring image speaks to my waning belief in the power of words or an increasing disinterest in books more generally. Both thoughts surprise me. But I'm coming around to the opinion that I no longer believe I have anything of worth to say, hence my new career as tai chi instructor. All of which is to say that I think novels – to state the obvious – should arise from the author's need to tell that particular story in a hyperspecific way, and the novel, through the hyperspecificity of its language/voice/style, should transcend the potential of its opening 30/50/70 pages, as all good novels should.

It's very simple: I love language. Possibly too much. Often I love it more than character, psychology, plot, theme, drama and setting combined. And the reason I'm becoming a tai chi instructor is because I no longer find language as liberating as I once did.

What about you, what do you love?

Dx

Sat, 29 Mar 2025 at 17:27

Declan,

Lately, I've become uninterested in literature that isn't suffused with some kind of political thought: it indicates either an absence of politics in the writer (bad!) or failure of that writer to bring their entire selves to their work (worse!). And I mean political broadly, just having to do with power systems. Like you, Lerner loves language. Like, really loves it. And symbols and references and referents and all the rest. Poets, am I right? But he’s using that love to dissect systems, and that’s what keeps me coming back.

As to your question of what I love (which I view similarly as a question of what I hope to suffuse my work with right now): I guess I've become particularly interested recently in the idea of writing fiction about the impotence of fiction. I'm sure that's a side effect of living through what they call "interesting times" and feeling, like you, caustically pessimistic about my own ability to influence change through art.

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An aside, I'm reading The Idiot by Elif Batuman. I found this quote that relates to our conversation. In it, the main character's friend is trying to convince her to stop liking a mathematician who already has a girlfriend:

“…For you, language itself is a self-sufficient system."

"But it is a self-sufficient system."

“It's like you said: math is a language that started out so abstract, more abstract than words, and then suddenly it turned out to be the most real, the most physical thing there was. With math they built the atomic bomb. Suddenly this abstract language is leaving third-degree burns on your skin. Now there's this special language that can control everything, and manipulate everything, and if you're the elite who speaks it—you can control everything."

It's got something to say about the realization of the virtual. That's obviously something Lerner is also preoccupied with, it appears in each of his novels: the first (Leaving the Atocha Station) being so concerned with authentic experience; the second (10:04) with parenthood and conception and chronology; and the third (The Topeka School) with the invention of a certain type of destructive speech.

Interesting about your Perpetual Comedown experience, by the way. I read this thing about how humans have trouble recognizing their own voices in audio recordings because the acoustics as we speak are so bass-heavy—something about the bone density of our skulls, hearing from behind our own sinuses—I wonder if the same goes for writing, if we're blind to something that could be called "style" because we're inside of it while it's being produced.

I don’t know, maybe there’s a metaphor in there or something.

James

I hope that you enjoyed this linguistic experiment as much as we enjoyed creating it. It was a real treat to have such a high-minded conversation, record it, and then throw it out the window in an effort to piece it back together in the emails that followed.

You can find more information about Declan, including his work and contact information, here.

-JSR

P.S. These photographs (courtesy of my Olympus XA and its 45-year old flash attachment) captured the night of our initial conversation in every way: we entered McGrattans in daylight and ended up a few hours later outside Ismael’s chipper in absolute darkness.

👋 This is another in a series of monthly posts investigating books that have influenced my writing. In case you missed it, you can read the first here: A Closer Look At “Leaving the Atocha Station”

On April 12, 2025, I’ll be joining a panel with Elaine Garvey and Louise Hegarty (moderated by Lisa McInerney) at the Granard Booktown Festival. Tickets are available here.

My mother used to read me a children’s book about seven blind mice who find something strange by their pond. “It’s a pillar,” says the red mouse, having touched a leg. “It’s a snake,” says the green mouse, having touched a trunk. “No,” the yellow mouse says, having touched a tusk, “it’s a spear.” On the mice go, one at a time, each incorrectly concluding the shape of the enormous elephant before them.1

This is what we in the business call a metaphor.

Ben Lerner’s third novel, The Topeka School, takes a polyphonic look at prehistory: in the adolescence of the Adam Gordon of his first two novels, before he was a poet in Madrid or successful writer in New York; in contemporary right-wing weaponization of political speech; in the failure of linguistic technologies. It tells the story of a teenage Adam Gordon and his parents, Jane and Jonathan, psychologists who work at The Foundation, a loosely fictionalized psychological institute based on the real Menninger Foundation that Lerner’s parents worked in. The novel comprises alternating vignettes that hop through time and points-of-view.

Each character’s perspective gives Lerner a different angle to attack a specialized language. There is the “spread,” a debate technique utilized by Adam and his opponents to overload arguments into timed speeches at nearly incomprehensible speeds. Then the opposite, “flow,” a mental state found in grassy yards after high school parties, typing in the dull blue glow of a computer screen, a state more slipped into than intentionally achieved. Then there is the psychoanalytical language of The Foundation, designed to impassively dissect the most intense emotional experiences. What Lerner offers most is in aggregate; his elephant is the technology of language itself, the weight at which it trembles, the load that leads to total collapse.

Written during the first Trump administration, it's no mystery why one of the linguistic technologies Lerner pays particular attention to is political speech. It ought to relate—if only conceptually, optimistically—to the proliferation of intellectual ideas made in good faith. Lerner draws a direct connection between the high school debaters of the 1990’s to modern politicians they became: high schoolers playing dress-up on weekends, waking up early and hungover to don suits and debate the efficacy of capital punishment as a deterrent in otherwise empty classrooms. But unlike in Congress, there are rules, points, a determination of winners and losers.

Crucially, points are awarded for “dropped” arguments: a claim your opponent makes that you’ve failed to refute. Where this should incentivize thorough cross-examination of ideas, it instead incentivizes speaking as quickly as possible, encouraging debaters to formulate the most arguments rather than the best ones. Lerner details how, for instance, Adam practices speaking with a pen clenched between his teeth to strengthen his tongue (the same mechanism by which he is able to impress his white suburban friends by free-styling after a night of drinking and smoking crystal). Gordon’s extemp coach, Evanson, a Topekan champion in his own right, serves as an even blunter connection from this dress rehearsal to the real thing: the harmful rhetoric of modern populist politics.

Evanson was also a master of what would come to be called “trolling.” When Adam advocated the moral imperative of redistributing wealth to fund a welfare state, Evanson declared it, with a violent smile, a surprising argument for a Jew. When Adam grew furious, the wide-eyed Evanson clarified that he meant only that it surprised him that someone with such knowledge of the evils of tyrannical government would want the state to have the power to seize individual assets. (“Are you seriously suggesting I would make an anti-Semitic comment?” The sudden widening of the eyes, the animal mimicry of innocence, was one of Evanson’s signature moves.) But what Evanson really “meant,” Adam felt, was precisely to manipulate his emotions and show him to be a paranoid Jew.

The weaponization of speech by “trolling” is the intentional miscalibration of the technology: misusing a linguistic structure that assumes earnest transmission of ideas to intentionally transmit unacceptable ones, then using the assumption of good faith as an argument for mistranslation, which somehow more grievously faults the accuser than the accused. Or, as Lerner goes on to say, “Evanson was gifted at committing the plausibly deniable outrage, then taking tactical umbrage, claiming the high ground.”

The “spread” is another weapon which packs so many competing ideas as to inundate, a DDoS attack of arguments. It has the structure of logical argument but serves not as a vehicle of thought but incapacitation. In his final high school debate, after a successful career of “spreading” opponents, Adam faces one who uses the technique against him. Instead of following the proven tactic to refute as many arguments as possible in the time allotted, he attacks the very method, defending the institution of debate from the “spread” itself. It’s a moving passage—one his parents proudly witness—and both them and us, the reader, are convinced in the power of rationality and logic in the face of driveling nonsense. He loses, of course, 4-1.

“Flow” is the artistic converse of “spread”: it is language which is on its surface meaningless but packs immense personal power. Towards the end of the novel, in the wake of his mother’s storming out of the house after a fight with his father, Adam sits at her computer and begins to type.

He typed out fragments of what his dad had said, but now he organized and broke them roughly according to their syllables and stresses, something he’d been experimenting with in his poems… And so on. There was some kind of special power involved in repurposing language, redistributing the voices, changing the principle of patterning, faint sparks of alternative meaning in the shadow of the original sense, the narrative. The power was both real and very weak, a distant signal.

Prosody, Lerner seems to argue, may not be the antidote to semiotic weaponry. But it is at once a truer and weaker application of the same linguistic faculties.

The novel is not only concerned with successful applications of language, it is also concerned with its limitations. Early in Jonathan’s sections, we’re introduced to his experimentations with “speech shadowing,” an apt metaphor for the breakdown of language that we see throughout the novel.

I’d have participants don cumbersome black over-the-ear headphones and listen to a recording of a text I’d selected more or less at random (a driver’s ed manual I’d found discarded among other books on 109th and Columbus). As the subject parroted the recording, I gradually—almost imperceptibly—accelerated the tape; to my shock, I found that a significant number of the subjects would, past a certain threshold, begin to drivel, thinking all the while that they were repeating the recorded passage clearly.

This idea of failing speech returns again and again. Jane’s sections, for instance, detail her shifting relationship with Sima, another psychologist at The Foundation. Jane’s father is nonverbal and has been recently committed to a home, something she’s struggling with. As the line blurs between friend and therapist, and as Sima pokes at her relationship with her father, Jane arrives at a break-through.

Sima made a space for me to hear that there were depths beneath what I was saying that I hadn’t sounded yet.

Then something happened in that space her silence made: my speech started breaking down, fragmenting under the emotional pressure, became a litany of non sequiturs, like how some of the poets you admire sound to me, or I guess what Palin or Trump sound like, delivering nonsense as if it made sense, were argument or information, although I was speaking much faster than politicians speak; my speech was accelerating as if I were chasing after meaning as it receded; it was like I was having a stroke. Sima would go on to point out to me that I kept saying the word “training”—like I would say, “Why would my mom give that painting to Deborah, well, my training tells me—” and then break off midsentence and start talking about something else entirely.

Later in the novel, Adam calls home with news that his girlfriend has broken up with him and decided to stay abroad in Spain. As he oscillates violently between emotional states, we witness a similar semantic breakdown from Jonathan’s perspective.

But he went on, less about Natalia now than about the pointlessness of everything, phrases from his college reading entering his voice. He kept saying “instrumental reason,” which seemed apt to me because I thought the music of his language was overwhelming its meaning. At one point it was like he was speaking nonsense rhyme. All his vocabularies were colliding and recombining, his Topekan tough guy stuff, fast debate, language he’d lifted from depressing Germans, his experimental poets, the familiar terminology of heartbreak. And something approaching baby talk, regression. He wasn’t driveling, but, from our bedroom in Topeka, I pictured him wearing over-the-ear headphones in New York, receiving 180 words per minute in his left ear, speech mechanisms on the border of collapse.

Both Jane and Adam are experiencing their own sort of “speech shadowing:” internal voices speaking too quickly for them to process, language failing them entirely. The therapeutic technology of psychoanalysis is not equipped for the raw flood of Jane’s revelation. The logic of debate speech is ill-equipped to reason with heartbreak. There are, Lerner seems to say, limits.

Something that fascinates me about Lerner’s novels is how fundamentally un-novelistic they are. He seems unconcerned with narrative and plot as much as constructing constellations of related ideas, like these ideas on language. It is true I am less emotionally invested in his characters than in more traditional novels, and perhaps this is the cost of writing stories this way, but his through-lines are complex and thought provoking and the reason I so often return to his work. In interviews, Lerner has discussed his strategy—if that is the right word for it—in writing novels, particularly this one.

In The Topeka School which very much has a plot, what I was really interested in were these kinds of different theaters of extreme speech and how I could bring them in relation to one other—versions of extreme speech that I experienced like high school debate or white kids free-styling in the Midwest in the ‘90s or the pressurized language of therapy or the pressurized language of poetry—like how could I bring those theaters of extreme speech into relation and then bring that into relation to the kind of present and some of the fascist buffoonery that passes for public speech in the United States, right. So again it’s about creating an alignment between these different theaters or motifs more than it’s just about one paraphrasable story so I think a little more about patterning than plot but of course that kind of patterning is also a way of unfolding a story.2

The Topeka School was written throughout the first Trump administration and published in 2019. For me to be so drawn today to a novel that attempts to make sense of that discord—with particular focus on political speech—should be unsurprising to anyone whose primary residence isn’t under a rock.

Here is Lerner from an interview on Kansas Public Radio in 2024:

To a certain degree, what’s happening politically now is that language is not discourse, I mean people aren’t actually engaging in debate. It’s just these kind of signaling, right—of one sort or another, a kind of tribal signaling. And so that kind of shutting down of the communicative capacities of language is a real problem for sure.3

The novel insists that language is not abstract but can be made abstract intentionally and with devastating consequence. But it also seems to insist two things: first, that this weaponry co-exists with prosody, flow, beauty in the mechanisms of language as almost side-effects of their technologies; and second, that the same mechanism of abstraction which is so destructive can be reflected onto itself, can be used to dismantle its own weaponry.

The latter is particularly exemplified by the novel’s epilogue, where a present-day Adam Gordon attends an ICE protest during the first Trump administration. As his daughter draws chalk hearts around a fountain, he’s accosted by a policeman armed with military-grade riot gear, insisting that she stop. Adam uses his debate skills to disarm the man, underscoring the ludicrousness of the moment.

The cop, heavy, broad-shouldered, white, said to me: “We’ve let you all have your little protest here—but this can’t happen, this is a no.” “What can’t happen?” I said. And he pointed at Luna and the boy, who were drawing hearts and spirals on the ground with yellow and red chalk. “These kids are defacing government property.”

“I don’t understand,” I said innocently.

“What don’t you understand?” the guard said impatiently.

“I guess I don’t understand what government property is,” I trolled. “Is ‘government property’ like ‘public property’? Because I know we’re allowed to use this chalk—it washes away in the rain—on sidewalks.”

…Luna was drawing stars around her fountain. “Like this morning, before we got on the train, I told her that I wanted her to wear the high-tops with Velcro and not ones with laces, but—”

“This is the last time I’m going to ask you.”

“—you see the shoes she’s wearing. Do you have kids? Because I have no authority, is what I’m trying to say. I just have no authority over these kids. Do you have authority? Where does your authority come from again?”

The inclusion of this chapter is perilous. We've spent so long marinating in 90’s Topeka that it could be jarring to find ourselves in this present. It ties a neat optimistic bow that some, John Patrick McHugh reviewing for The Stinging Fly among them, found distracting:

What was said and shown in this chapter that we did not comprehend already? One supposes, that with this final chapter, Lerner sought to display positive community action, the happy ending of a single voice combining with others in protest at vile evil, an evil that loses this particular battle from the perspective offered to us in the book. And, perhaps, as a writer living in precarious and upsetting times, he felt obliged to offer hope (and who am I to criticise if one can take and enjoy this positivity, who am I to wish for a bleak ending in already bleak times?). But for a writer who is keenly aware of the absurdity of the Great American Novel, who obviously understands the failure and racial edge of such a notion, why does the conclusion of this book feel like the very earnest finale of a wannabe Great American Novel?4

The novel serves as a kaleidoscopic analysis of linguistic technologies with special attention paid to the precursors of modern populist speech. It is true, the novel paints a bleak picture of its future—our present—and truer still that this epilogue does present a hope uncharacteristic of the novel that precedes it. Lerner spends hundreds of pages detailing the mechanics of a gun pressed to our temples before finally letting us know that it can, with intentional force, be turned around. The semiotic weaponry cannot be dismantled but we can learn to wield it. John seems to view this as at worst optimistic pandering and at best unnecessary. But it isn’t a purely hopeful message: the weaponization is so pervasive it exists within us, too—there is nothing technologically separating aggressor from aggressed.

Here’s Lerner, again, in his own words:

The disaster of the Trumpian present was the moment in which I was writing the book but what I wanted to do was remember from that present my kind of adolescence in the 1990’s and the formation of my own voice including the way that some of those right-wing tendencies or the weaponization of language or political doublespeak or whatever is inside me, right, I mean it’s not just a kind of denunciation of the American from the outside, it’s an interrogation of the genealogy of my own voice.

And though the novel’s chief setting is in the center of America, what is so American about the linguistic epidemic it scrutinizes? To think of this as a uniquely American problem (one which only a “Great American Novel” can address) is to ignore many meaningful global elections and the leaders they've produced in the past ten years: Milei; Orbán; Meloni; Weidel; Bolsonaro; Johnson. Far from being redundant, I contend that the epilogue contextualises the zoomed in moment of the Reaganesque rhetoric haunting Midwest America by pulling the camera back. And yes, this dollying motion involves hope, too. That this use of language can be reclaimed is not a given otherwise; to see it play out is critical.

Only by showing us the up-close texture of skin on the leg, the smooth hollow knock on ebony, the shifting musculature of an elongated nasal passage, are we the reader able to fully appreciate both the macro and the micro, the intricacies of the elephant and the space it takes up. Its faculties and limitations.

And so ends the Ben Lerner biathlon. I can’t promise not to someday write about 10:04, his second novel, but I can promise that it won’t be next. I hope you’re all enjoying reading these as much as I’m enjoying writing them.

I’ve got a surprise in store for the next post: it’s not an essay.

Until then.

-JSR

👋 Long time no see! This hopes to be the first in a series of monthly posts investigating books that have influenced my own writing and the writing of my second novel, leading up to its publication next year.

Adam Gordon is suffering from writer’s block. He’s won a prestigious poetry fellowship in Madrid, allegedly to complete an epic narrative poem about the Spanish Civil War, but he’s struggling to engage with art, with what it even means to engage with art, as much as he’s struggling to face his own feelings of fraudulence: in his ability to write poetry; in his ability to speak Spanish; in his ability to engage, at all, with anyone or anything, especially history. The irony is two-fold: first, that the book’s prose is excellent, evidence in some meta-reflexive capacity that Adam’s artistic faculties are, in fact, all there (or, as he puts it late in the book, that “only his fraudulence is fraudulent”); and second, that while he wonders what is so special about him to have the authority to write about Spain, he lives through one of the most impactful elections in modern Spanish history.

On March 11, 2004, the Atocha metro station was attacked by al-Qaeda on the eve of a general election. After the bombing, in which thousands were injured and hundreds killed, Adam aimlessly follows the sounds of sirens until he sees the carnage first-hand and spends the rest of his day in his apartment, reading online accounts by American news publications detailing the helicopters he can hear chopping air above his building. He wonders how his physical proximity informs his inclusion in history and what it might offer to be a credible participant in it. It is the question he asks himself as he stares at the same painting every day, feeling nothing, or as he instinctively tells a romantic interest that his mother is dying to solicit pity.

This question of authentic engagement, whether with art or a political moment, and what that could possibly entail in practical terms, is central to the text.

That kind of anxiety about, you know, “Here I am, am I really here?” is, to me, the oldest—it’s like the fundamental question of the novel. In [The Charterhouse of Parma by] Stendhal, when Fabrice is wandering around the Battle of Waterloo he’s kind of wondering, “When do I know that I’ve participated in history? How close do I need to be to the guns to actually participate in history?” And that idea in the novel is kind of like, “What’s the value of my experience? How do I know when it crosses a certain threshold of authenticity?”1

The novel examines the self-conscious perception of one’s own perception and how that recursion precludes genuine participation. Adam Gordon’s preoccupation is chiefly with relationships. He is concerned with the strings connecting him to people and events and things more than the people and events and things themselves. His solipsism is a form of narcissism—if not an exceptional one, then at least a variety we all recognize in ourselves—the injection of self in the context of other. He is aware of the general election and its stakes, for instance, but is only curious about what it will provide him by way of experience.

Early in the novel, Adam visits Toledo with one of his romantic interests, Isabel.

On highways to Toledo we passed several tour buses full of what looked like Americans, digital cameras already in hand, and as we drew past them I expressed infinite disdain, which I could do easily with my eyebrows, for every tourist whose gaze I met. My look accused them of supporting the war, of treating people and the relations between people like things, of being the lemmings of a murderous and spectacular empire, accused them as if I were a writer in flight from a repressive regime rather than one of its most fraudulent grantees.

Once in Toledo, his sense of superiority falls apart when actively questioned.

“But why are Americans studying Franco,” she asked, gesturing toward a group of Americans being led around the Alcázar, “instead of studying Bush?” She said it as if every American tourist were planning a monograph on El Caudillo.

“The proper names of leaders are distractions from concrete economic modes.” I was trying to sound deep, hoping concrete and mode were cognates. My limited stock of verbs encouraged general pronouncements.

“Why aren’t you studying the American economic mode?” She was angry.

“You can’t study a mode of production directly.” And with my manner, I said, “I am delivering a fact so obvious it pains me.”

“I’m sure the people of Iraq are looking forward to your poem about Franco and his economy.” It was the first unkind thing she’d ever said to me.

Lerner makes a direct connection between awareness and the superiority it affords. Adam thinks himself “better” than these tourists, who he assumes know nothing of their complicity with the American empire (the same tourists that Isabel implies are just like Adam, all artists here to pilfer a foreign context for material). He claims his work has importance because of what it says about him to be working on something important. But when pushed to explain what is so critical about responding to Spain’s past instead of America’s present, which he is ostensibly better equipped to do as an American, he is exposed.

Adam has created a version of himself he thinks others will find more compelling: a poet with deep thoughts writing an important political poem about Spanish history. He uses his inability (or, at least, refusal) to speak Spanish as a tool to gesture at grand ideas, if only he were fluent enough to express them. He speaks about the superstructure of politics (e.g. “concrete economic modes”) to escape discussing the politics themselves. He does the same for art and his relationships, maintaining a layer of abstraction that lends (he hopes) an air of sophistication. But the distance is a defense mechanism which, as Isabel rightly points out, relegates his engagement to mere posturing.

In 1920, the Austrian-Jewish journalist and novelist Joseph Roth migrated to Berlin. Over the next thirteen years, his reportage from a city in the dwindling days of the Weimar Republic was eventually collected in What I Saw: Reports from Berlin, 1920-1933. Roth’s work gives us a uniquely fascinating view of the concerns of people who were unknowingly living through the rise of the Nazi Party. Most contemporary art and literature about the period fails to escape shortcomings inherent to the form: they linger on that which interests us the most, i.e. what will gain importance in time, and in so doing inject present considerations into the past. But Roth’s accounts are by contrast much more human. He is there, preoccupied mostly with bathhouses, entertainment, crime, all while, in the background of his life, the prevailing political context slides into fascism, the clues of its magnitude evident only to the reader of today, who knows what to look for.

Roth’s work is powerful and enduring precisely because it illuminates how undramatic that slide was, how life continued on. The book has become a warning only in retrospect and is charged with the political potential of what followed. It also serves as a kind of counterpoint to Adam Gordon’s concerns, to Leaving the Atocha Station as a whole: that narrative fiction can actually instruct political change, even when the work is not directly concerned with politics (i.e. does not become propaganda or a polemic). This, to me, is among the more interesting facets of the question Lerner’s novel raises: what does it mean to engage with a present moment through art, as in, what is its function?

In his introduction to Granta 165: Deutschland, editor Thomas Meaney defends the utility of narrative literature in times of political upheaval.

As long as people continue to hate reality, and do anything to defend themselves against it, realism will not have exhausted its possibilities. We [Granta] believe great literature is political, but not in the sense that is commonly meant: literature is most enduring, not when it is most saturated with political ideals, but exactly when it is not, and because it is not, it is.

The Charterhouse of Parma was published 186 years ago and the question in its text remains as relevant as ever, particularly through Lerner’s lens of political engagement. It is the question we ask ourselves from protests or else hunched over our phones watching videos of protests or else videos of protestors filming themselves participating in protests: “Here I am, am I really here?”

The novel ends with Adam’s participation on a panel of influential writers, where Lerner puts as close to a button on things as he can manage.

Elena, distinguished professor, directed a question at me: “Then why write at all?” She said it without malice, but I was unequivocally the addressee, and I was now required to respond, and against the backdrop of my memorized quip, my speech would seem all the more halting and confused. Any answer would do, cryptic or funny, but I was unable to locate my Spanish; time was passing and I’d parted my lips, but I could not formulate any response. Finally, I said: “I don’t know.”

I, too, do not know. I do not know what is so important about writing at a time when a sitting President off-handedly suggests deracinating an entire people for the purpose of riviera real-estate development; or when a South African billionaire grants himself access to the financial infrastructure of the United States, cutting jobs and slashing regulatory budgets for self-interest; or when the Alternative für Deutschland breaches a long-held parliamentary firewall and with it over 20% representation in the Bundestag, with sights on the Chancellory; or when in the next five years, either China or the EU will emerge as the dominant global force, all ties to the US severed by the bipolar volatility of its two-party system, the sun-setting of Pax Americana. I don’t know what writing—especially writing fiction—can possibly help, and perhaps it is true to say that it cannot help at all. But I feel, perhaps misguidedly, that it is important to soldier on not in spite of but because of its powerlessness to create change. As Adam puts it, “No writer is free to renounce his political moment, but literature reflects politics more than it affects it, an important distinction.”

In other words, literature is a lens, and if we are interested in the world around us then it our duty to point that lens at anything in need of magnifying. Because even if we do not understand the significance of our moment or else miss entirely what will eventually be seen as its most critical attributes, our participation by way of recording—like Roth—will still be charged with political potential over time. So long as we pay attention, it will end up in the work.

What I take most from this novel in service of my own writing is that Lerner’s debut only poses the one question and that there’s power in that simplicity2. Many novels ask about eighteen disjointed things simultaneously which all muddle together into an unfocused mess (my current work-in-progress included). And of course many, many, more novels don’t raise any questions at all, even ones people call “important literature.” Lerner makes clear his preoccupation with something tangible about the world and, without devolving into polemic, his novel is suffused with the thought. Reading it serves as a reminder that so long as we avoid holding the present at arm’s length from our work, it has value, and is worth doing. That it is “most enduring, not when it is most saturated with political ideals, but exactly when it is not, and because it is not, it is.”

I’m finishing a new novel! There’s not much I can say about it right now except that it has been incredibly influenced by the books I’ve read (and re-read) over the past two years, hence this new “Closer Look” series. Each month, I’ll write an essay on a facet of a book that has informed my new novel. And there might be some exciting treats along the way.

Until next time.

-JSR

P.S. Before I get called out, I am well aware that Leaving the Atocha Station takes place in Madrid while my photographs are from Barcelona. They are from a 24-hour solo trip that is still, regrettably, the only city in Spain I have film photographs of. If it helps your immersion, note with satisfaction that Adam Gordon describes La Sagrada Família as “the ugliest building [he] has ever seen.” This happens to be the only thing in the book I disagree with.

On that…

• Please consider buying it from a local independent bookstore. My favorite one in Dublin is Books Upstairs, and you can order online from them.

• If you’re in Dublin on September 26 (that’s tonight!), come to the launch at Hodges Figgis! 6-8pm, with many pints to follow at Doheny & Nesbitt.

• On October 3rd I’ll be in conversation with my friend and talented writer Declan Toohey at Books Upstairs. Please come if you’re in Dublin, it’s bound to be a great evening. And if you haven’t already, check out his novel Perpetual Comedown.

• I recently had the great pleasure of speaking to Hannah MacDonald on her podcast, A Pair of Bookends. We spoke about my favorite authors, homesickness, and Halloween and you can listen to our conversation here.

• Also out today is Eliana Jordan’s article on Placeholders for the Jewish Chronicle, in which we spoke about tensions inherent to American-Jewish identity, made especially apparent in light of the war in Gaza.

I was two years into my MFA program at the Bennington Writing Seminars when, for the first time in my life, I had the opportunity to work with another American-Jewish writer. Bennington works by “low-residency” model. Each month, you exchange a packet of writing with a mentor who, in return, writes a comprehensive letter responding to your work. Mentors are switched every six months. Graduation requirements include an expansive critical paper and a creative thesis of at least 100 pages.

It was important to me that my creative thesis be thematically cohesive, and at the time I’d been listening to Christine Hayes’s introductory course on the Old Testament she taught at Yale University (she’s a great lecturer, I highly recommend it). It was fascinating revisiting religious text as literature. I found parts surprisingly compelling, particularly when contextualized by Hayes. For one, the Bible is full of brothers: Cain and Abel; Jacob and Esau; Isaac and Ishmael; Moses and Aaron. I’d learned these stories in Hebrew School, of course, but I had never read them through the lens of storytelling.

Like, when Moses goes off to receive the Ten Commandments, the people he led to freedom feel abandoned and turn to Aaron for guidance. He’s hesitant at first—what brother in the shadow of a giant wouldn’t be—but the crowd is dogged. They call on Aaron again.

Come, make us a god who will go before us; as for this Moses, the man who brought us up from the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.

I couldn’t stop imagining Aaron in this moment. The brother whose piety you doubted has become a leader of the people you belong to. And, despite that doubt, or perhaps because of it, these same people turn to you by association in need. But what does one have to do with the other? How does Aaron feel in this moment? His brother is missing, maybe dead, and now he is being called on to step into a role that he doesn’t believe in. It’s a brilliant bit of character development (somewhat hampered by overwrought prose).

So, home for the first time in two years, Aaron’s story swirling in my head, desperate for thematic cohesion in my thesis, I wrote a story about a homecoming. I imagined an anti-Zionist returning home to his Conservative Jewish parents to ask for a place to stay for him and his pregnant (non-Jewish) girlfriend. He’s been estranged from his family for the five years since his younger brother died volunteering for the Israeli Defense Forces. I named the protagonist Aaron and his younger brother Moe, and titled it, “We Know Not What Is Become Of Him.”

At the end of the month I received a letter. In response to my story, my mentor wrote:

While you do good work in a short space here, this piece is less a story, I think, than it is a scene in a story. I say this not only because of its length, but because you do such great work layering in all these various complications—the Palestinian flag taunting the narrators mother and activating some atavistic fear of Jew-hatred; the narrator’s long absence; the ghost of the father; the shame of his addiction; the narrator’s apparent anti-Zionism. All of these elements are great, but they all build without consequence.

As an exercise—try adding another section to the end of this piece.

In the moment, I was upset. Of course it’s a story, I thought. What else could it be? I had worked hard on something and thought I was finished with it. I ranted to Sarah that he must be mistaken. The next morning, I read his letter again, re-read my story, and read his letter a second time.

He was, of course, correct.

Today my debut novel is being published. And there, squat in the middle of it, the fifteenth chapter, sits what has become of that short story. Only through ideating and iterating was I introduced to the voice of the novel’s other main character: Róisín. Through her I found an avenue to express the special sort of heartache that accompanies living in a foreign country, the inherent pride of having done “something” with one’s life that exists despite that pain. And I found a different type of story, one about love and grief and homesickness and, above all, how our relationships transform us. My mentor was right and what I thought of as something complete became a part of something greater.

What I’m left with is a novel about two people without a home who find each other and, in the relationship that follows, build something tangible from their lives. It is about what we can—and cannot—compromise in service to faith: in love; in religion; in family. It is about the walls we construct out of principle and what a mistake it is to build them. It is, above all else, a long time coming. And after two years of working on this thing, I am so proud to get to share it with all of you today.

Thank you, as always, for reading.