A Neo-Bernhardian at work. Source.

“But often the Past does not disappoint us; often it assists us in our quest to become our highest selves. For in the Past there have been many men of genius; and, inasmuch as the man of genius has come nearer to being continually conscious of his relation to the Over-Soul, it follows that the genius is actually more ourselves than we are.”

—Chester Noyes Greenough, The Harvard Classics Vol. 51/Philosophy V. (Emerson), 1914

Back in 2017, when I first devoted myself to reading as many books as possible and logging each of these books on a spreadsheet, because what else is there to do when you’re twenty-two and fresh out of college and you feel like life is finally yours to live, I read Open City by Teju Cole. It’s the fifth book I logged on that spreadsheet, and I’ve logged 1,663 books (and counting) ever since, so it’s fair to say that Open City occupies an upstream, formative position in whatever my self-directed literary education has turned out to be.

I loved Open City, and still do. It was like nothing I’d ever read before. I admired the tightly controlled yet still somewhat rambling cadence of the text, as well as the multi-layered density of the narrative itself. In the way that Cole portrays the probing, roving mind of his protagonist, who flaneurs around the streets of New York musing about art and history and literature and theory and his own life and the web of connections between all these phenomena, I glimpsed reflections of my mind, or at least my mind as I hoped it would someday become. Open City did for me the thing that literature is meant to do: turn the strange familiar and the familiar strange. I saw the city where I’d grown up in a new light, and developed a deeper understanding of what novels could achieve. Though I might not have posed it to myself in these terms, I have no doubt that almost ten years ago some inward part of me began churning away, trying to figure out how I would one day create my own version of such a novel, how I too could pitch my voice the way that Cole had pitched his.

Later in 2017, I read Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald, probably because something on the internet told me that if I liked Cole, then I’d love Sebald. At that point, I was ruined for life.

Here was an obvious antecedent to the voice that had thrilled me just months earlier, the same voice I’d found so original and wholly formed. There were differences between this voice and that one—reasons why Open City stands as a great novel on its own merit, and why Austerlitz and Sebald’s other work nonetheless surpass it1—but the lineage was unmistakable. What I’d seen in a new light was cast in a newer light still, colder and starker than before. Now I understood that while Cole might have been offering his own unique interpretation of Sebald, and applying a Sebaldian lens to different settings and themes, he was in a sense doing Sebald, the way someone might do an impression of public figures that everyone on earth can sort of do an impression of2. I understood, in a way that I had never previously understood, that out of an accumulation of such impressions, stacked atop each other and twisted into new shapes, art marches forever onward.

This is a fairly basic point, but a lot of fairly basic things feel like revelations when you’re twenty-two.

In 2018, probably because of some other if you like X then you’ll love Y thing I saw on the internet, I read Correction by Thomas Bernhard, the first of multiple Bernhard novels I’ve read ever since. In 2020, having already read The Trial and The Metamorphosis and other more famous work by Franz Kafka, I read The Castle and Amerika. In 2021 I read the collected short fiction of Robert Walser, as well as Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy. In 2023 I read Motley Stones by Adalbert Stifter. Earlier this year I read Michael Kohlhaas by Heinrich von Kleist. Throughout all that time I also read everything published by both Sebald and Cole, tracing the junctures where their voices intersected and diverged, and the processes by which each writer came to sound more like himself. On and on these voices echoed, shifting in tone and altering in volume yet never fading away. I learned, and am forever learning anew, that there’s always more of the chorus to discover.

While I now tend to view Open City as a gateway, I can’t help but dwell on what I’ve lost since reading it nearly a decade ago. These losses go beyond thinking less of Open City itself, which I do, even if I still think it’s a great novel. Compared to back then, I no longer find myself as excited while reading any book, even those that I love, because part of me is always wondering where this latest voice came from, or recognizing in its tenor echoes of other voices I’ve heard before. And when, as Open City did, a newly encountered book spurs me to think about my own writing, it’s no longer enough for me to consider how I might gear my voice toward a similar pitch. Now I have to ask myself what additional qualities I might bring to justify my work’s existence. Now I find myself wondering which aspects of my voice truly belong to me, and whether those aspects are enough to keep me from sounding too much like anyone else.

*

Last month, Naomi Kanakia published a mammoth survey of Thomas Bernhard’s life and work. It’s an extremely thoughtful, engaging piece of literary criticism, and not just due to the fact that Kanakia read everything Bernhard ever published—a heroic feat, given that while I’ve found value in each Bernhard novel I’ve read, I’ve also been glad, in a way that doesn’t apply to my favorite authors, to reach the end of each of these novels. Beyond the sheer volume of her effort, Kanakia offers multiple fascinating insights into the nature of Bernhard’s work, particularly a theme that’s long captured my interest: the mini-movement of contemporary authors who are, to varying degrees, doing Bernhard.

I touched on this demi-genre in two of my earliest Substack essays, where I first examined Bernhard’s appeal to potential imitators and offered my own stab at doing Bernhard, and then had AI write a Bernhard imitation with the same premise as mine, as an experiment to see whether adhering to a distinct framework can help make AI-writing less shitty3. Kanakia’s take on this rash of Bernhard imitators, whom she dubs the ‘Neo-Bernhardians,’ is more positive than my own:

“Oscar Dorr4, writing for House House, [states]: ‘...directly aping a great writer in hopes of piggybacking on their genius is simply ineffective, a waste of talent. It makes for a bad read.’

I thought a long time about whether I agree with this statement, and I have to say...I do not think so. I believe what the Neo-Bernhardians are doing is good and praiseworthy, and is no different from what Bernhard himself—or any great author throughout history—has done.”

Kanakia argues that whatever one thinks of the Neo-Bernhardians, they’ve discovered a distinct style of writing they’re passionate about, and built that style into a formalized demi-genre that’s evolving in interesting directions. This is more than many of current literary fiction’s most highly praised authors have done, and so these Neo-Bernhardians shouldn’t be dismissed just because they’re imitating a familiar voice. In the grand sweep of literary history, Kanakia claims, Neo-Bernhardianism will likely continue to incorporate new elements, gathering momentum until someone from the movement’s ranks manages to break through into the mainstream, in turn setting off a new movement, and surely counter-movements beyond that. On and on the voices go.

I don’t necessarily disagree with many of these premises, but as I stated in a comment on Kanakia’s article5, my own take on Neo-Bernhardianism is a bit harsher.

In my comment, I noted that as something of a Neo-Bernhardian myself6, I found writing like Bernhard easier than writing like myself, in my own voice. Part of the impetus behind this essay was to expand on what I mean by easier.

To me, easier carries two-fold weight. I mean not only that writing like Thomas Bernhard is easier than writing like yourself, whatever that entails, because writing like someone else is always easier than writing like yourself, given that applying a pre-existing literary framework narrows the number of decisions that you as a writer need to make, lending the story you’re trying to tell a shape that you don’t have to do the work of determining, but also that writing like Thomas Bernhard specifically is easier than writing like other writers, easier than choosing another narrative voice from amid literature’s panoply of narrative voices, not merely due to the distinct qualities of Thomas Bernhard’s narrative voice, the flowing sentences and italicized repetitions that lend his prose, which is now your prose, the unmistakable rhythym that leads every last commentator on Thomas Bernhard, every last one without fail, to note the musical quality of Thomas Bernhard’s narrative voice, and to reference Thomas Bernhard’s musical training in his youth, but also due to the patina of serious literature that this narrative voice endows upon your work, a seriousness stemming in turn from the demands that such a structure ipso facto places upon a reader, the lack of paragraph breaks that cause the text to assume upon the page an imposing heft, transforming before the reader’s watering eyes into a sustained scream, a mountain rearing vertiginously toward the heavens, a great oozing magma of words signaling to the reader that you, the Neo-Bernhardian writer, are a serious writer of serious literature, all because you can do a pretty credible job of writing like a writer whom a lot of other writers are currently trying to write like.

Shit, my bad. See how easy it is to slip into all that?

As I noted in my comment on Kanakia’s article, it’s fun to write this way, clearly—more fun, I would wager, than it is to imitate other writers. That funness is linked to the fact that Bernhard isn’t the most difficult writer to imitate, and that he boasts a style conducive to rapid production, so you automatically feel accomplished as you sit back and watch your word count rise, but it goes beyond that. There’s something inherently satisfying, at least to me7, about aping Bernhard’s florid language, his reflexive scorn, his genuinely funny self-loathing. There’s a reason why we haven’t seen a new generation of writers imitating other writers with idiosyncratic prose styles, Nabokov or Woolf or McCarthy or whomever. Beyond Bernhard’s mood being more uniquely suited to our vitriolic, polemical times, those other writers are way harder to imitate8.

I come down more harshly on the Neo-Bernhardians in part because I can’t shake the feeling that they’re taking the easy way out. Beyond the reasons just mentioned, there’s an additional structural component to this feeling, which is ultimately a matter of prose-preference. Over the course of a Neo-Bernhardian novel, or even just a plain old Bernhard novel, I begin to miss the rigorous shaping of distinct paragraphs and tight sentences, a varied cadence that, at least to my inner ear, sits at the heart of so-called good writing9.

But beyond mere mechanics, the deeper problem is a matter of spirit.

Take Mark Haber. He’s the Director of Acquisitions and Marketing at Coffee House Press, a wonderful publishing house, and previously served the operations manager at Brazos Bookstore, an independent bookstore in Houston. This is a man who’s devoted his life to literature in a more profound and concerted way than I ever have, and I genuinely admire him. He has also, as the author of Reinhardt’s Garden, Saint Sebastian’s Abyss, and Lesser Ruins10, made it his mission as a writer to emulate Bernhard’s prose and thematic concerns across a range of settings and scenarios that, while not explicitly covered in Bernhard’s oeuvre, aren’t far removed. Haber’s novels constitute a series of obsessive narrators recursively examining the simultaneous absurdity and exaltedness of art, with their monologues revealing an inner mania fomented by unshakable quests for unreachable truths.

All of this strikes me as an excellent mission for a writer to pursue, and I’ve found value in all three Haber novels I’ve read, which makes it all the more baffling that he seems so content to pursue these themes via a path already trodden by another man. I can’t, as Kanakia does, simply claim that Haber has found his niche and leave it at that, and I don’t know if I’d go so far as Dorr and say that imitating Bernhard to this degree is a “waste of talent,” because Haber is clearly a talented writer, and I’d rather read him doing Bernhard than a lot of writers doing themselves. So I guess I come down somewhere in the middle, which is to say that the notion of a writer who’s content to let his voice—the means by which he announces himself to the world, the most individual and idiosyncratic tool in any writer’s arsenal—sound identical to someone else is just, I’m sorry, so fucking weird to me. I truly don’t get it.

If you’re breaking into standup comedy, isn’t there something inherently sad about aspiring to become a Rodney Dangerfield tribute act11? Who gathers his friends to practice in his childhood garage with the intent of forming a cover band? Why isn’t Michael Haneke’s shot-for-shot Americanized remake of Funny Games considered a masterpiece on par with his original film? And if you’re an intelligent person who cares about literature and has thoughtful contributions to make to the canon, wouldn’t you want those contributions to stand a little more fully on their own?

Maybe that’s just the arbitrary standard I’m imposing based on what I seek to do in my own writing12, or what I like to see as a reader. And Lord knows that while this might be my own personal Substack, my views do not dictate the ways of the world. Still, I do think there’s something self-defeating about such faithful imitation. It seems like an unbridgeable limitation, a fatal lack of artistic vision. Which brings me to Happiness and Love.

Released in 2025, Happiness and Love is Zoe Dubno’s take not only on the Bernhardian narrative voice, but a specific Bernhard novel, Woodcutters. Probably the ur-Bernhard novel, and my own favorite, Woodcutters relates the inner monologue of a miserable guest at an artistic dinner party in 1980s Vienna, conveying his abnegating thoughts as he shit-talks the hosts, the other guests, himself for going there in the first place, and the society that holds them all together. It’s a very funny novel, containing illuminating and even rather moving meditations on art and death, and the protagonist’s misanthropy is more relatable than I’d care to admit.

Dubno transposes all of these inputs onto contemporary New York, crafting a takedown of the new-school arts scene. Surely, I thought, this would be a bridge too far, a death-knell for the Neo-Bernhardians. To borrow the old master’s style is one thing, but to apply this style to the exact same plot as an extant novel, just with the details lightly scrambled, was almost flagrantly easy to dismiss. At least Haber concocts new(ish) landscapes in which his Bernhardian prose can be set loose13. But this, this so-called Happiness and Love, was little more than a stunt, a paint-by-numbers exercise. I don’t even care about Bernhard like that, despite all that I’ve written about him, and even I was offended. How dare Dubno? I mean really, how lazy can you be?

Then I actually read the book.

*

I’ll cut to the chase: I liked Happiness and Love more than I thought I would. Not because of the ways in which the novel adhered to Bernhard, but for the ways in which it tried to break free from those strictures. I wish it had done more of that. I wish it had been more able to do that. And therein, I think, lies Neo-Bernhardianism’s ultimate shortcoming.

Essentially, the aspects of Happiness and Love that I most enjoyed were elements that Bernhard was generally less concerned with in his work: psychological insight, pathos, and the specific details—the texture of a world—that lend any novel, even those from the avant-garde, a certain degree of realism. In other words, the typical Bernhardian structure had been run through an MFA fiction filter14, bringing it closer to the patterns and concerns of a traditional novel.

Your mileage may vary in terms of whether this is a good thing; I probably wouldn’t have expected too much if you’d told me this was what Dubno had set out to do. Yet it yields positive results. There’s a genuine sadness and depth to the character of Rebecca, the dead actress at the periphery of the crew populating the Downtown Manhattan artistic dinner party, and the center of the narrator’s circling thoughts. Rebecca helps pull the narrator outside herself, grounding the work with what feels, at least at times, like real people—no small thing in a Bernhard-inflected novel, where most figures, narrators included, are constructs by design.

I also thought that the novel succeeded in replicating certain strengths of traditional Bernhardian narratives. For example, Happiness and Love offered incisive commentary on the artifice and careerism of so-called creative lives, and how far these lives remain from true substance, from anything that could be said to resemble meaningful art. If at times the figures at the artistic dinner party feel like caricatures, or the narrator’s mental jeremiads against such self-evidently loathsome people seem like shooting fish in a barrel, well, Bernhard wasn’t exactly known for subtlety or restraint, either. Many times throughout Happiness and Love, when I felt like things were dragging or running a little over-the-top, I asked myself whether these conclusions were all that different from what I often feel while reading the old master himself, and I couldn’t really come up with a clear answer.

Where Happiness and Love slips, at least for me, is in the tension that emerges between the more traditional novelistic elements that Dubno seems determined to introduce and the formal constraints she’s imposed upon herself. While this tension might lead, in other hands, toward interesting (or potentially unsuccessful) metafictional directions, in this case it mostly results in somewhat uneven prose. On a sentence-to-sentence level, Dubno doesn’t adhere to strict Bernhardianism; while her writing remains clear, it’s often far more clipped than Bernhard’s baroque elaborations, with transitions between past and present that seem, in their abruptness, to be calling out for the paragraph breaks that Dubno willfully refuses. And when, compared to Woodcutters, Dubno engineers a larger role for the actress in whose honor the artistic dinner party is being thrown, the resulting monologues between the actress and her interlocutors feel a bit clunky, both in the way they’re transcribed within the text’s rigidly Berhardian style, and in the deux ex machina-like purpose they serve in the narrative at large.

In the end, I didn’t think the voice of the novel was as finely honed as it could have been—not merely in comparison to Bernhard, which is a tough ask for any writer, but even in comparison to other Neo-Bernhardian novels. Say what you want about Mark Haber, but he’s truly committed to his impression, and it doesn’t waver. For Dubno, there seems to be a desire to stick to the Bernhardian voice even as she feels a tacit urge to tell the story a different way.

While reading the novel and formulating these thoughts, I had to stop myself. Was I just doing the most obnoxious possible thing a critic can do—namely, telling a writer “I wish you’d written this in a way that aligned with my subjective preference for how such a story might hypothetically be told, rather than following your own vision?”

Well, yes and no. On the one hand, I am kind of doing that, yeah. But on the other, I do think there’s a deeper point to be made that, as presently conceived, Happiness and Love gets in its own way. In all Neo-Bernhardian novels, the voice is something of a pose, and runs the risk of coming across as self-conscious; in Happiness and Love, by virtue of the fact that the novel imitates not only Bernhardian prose but also Bernhardian plot, cracks begin to show with the introduction of more traditionally novelistic elements, and the pose becomes more obvious.

It doesn’t help that at one point roughly halfway through the novel, Dubno lampshades the pose she’s adopted, seeking to mitigate this weakness by calling attention to it. As the narrator reflects on one of the various mediocre artists in her Downtown Manhattan circle, she describes a style of work that ought to strike readers of Happiness and Love as familiar:

“His paintings were done in the style of old master portraits, but the models were holding contemporary objects. Instead of a milkmaid holding a jug of milk, a model with a fashionable mullet haircut was holding a carton of oat milk and wearing orange Crocs sandals. In one painting, commissioned by Dior, the sitter wore head-to-toe Dior couture.…what on earth was the artist doing—what was his idea? The painter had made no aesthetic progress since the old master paintings that hung beside his, and there was no conceptual idea, really, beyond we now have different things than before15.”

I imagine that Dubno intended this passage as her version of one of the sly metafictional winks that I mentioned earlier, but it struck me as less sly than insecure. For all the sophistication of the apparatus Dubno arranges, all the accuracy of her references and the specificity of her scorn, by choosing to riff upon both a style and a plot devised by someone else, Dubno’s message amounts to little more, in the end, than we now have different things than before. Here are the foibles and phoniness of today’s art crowd, same as the foibles and phoniness of yesterday’s art crowd. And if the central theme of both Happiness and Love and Woodcutters is the fundamental hollowness of both the dreck that passes for art and people who pass off this dreck as art, what does it mean if a novel meant to castigate such fakery is itself a simulacrum? Sure, maybe you could say that’s the point, that the whole venture is intended as something of a meta-level joke, or at least a meta-level joke that’s simultaneously trying to make a more serious statement. But if that’s the case, then making this statement with a borrowed voice feels like less of an indictment and more of a retreat. If Happiness and Love is any indication, Dubno has the spirit to help dismantle the status quo and build something new in its place, but for now all she has to offer are the same old stories.

*

So what is to be done with all these Neo-Bernhardians? Are we as readers (and writers) doomed to forever choose between the Habers of the world, earnest craftsmen content to labor in the old master’s shadow, and the Dubnos, who strive in some ways to escape that shadow yet find themselves semi-willingly trapped?

Of course not. Plenty of writers have already devised their own solutions, achieving what’s in my opinion a pleasing synthesis of Bernhardian prose or themes with enough original elements to keep the text fresh and interesting. But that’s no fun to come right out and claim, because then there’s no controversy.

Whenever a diffuse group of novels get bandied together as an emerging genre, there are bound to be a few inconvenient examples that slip through the cracks. I haven’t seen these novels being discussed as frequently amid the Neo-Bernhardian discourse, and I’m sure there are many more out there that I’m unaware of. For the time being, here are a few books that, at least to me, point the demi-genre in some promising future directions.

Around the same time I read Happiness and Love, I read Eurotrash by the Swiss author Christian Kracht. This was the first novel I read from Kracht, whom I’d long been eager to check out. With a (media-exaggerated) reputation for provocative statements, and a predilection for contrasting the spiritually empty decadence of the West with the supposed holiness of the Global South, I was expecting something like a Mitteleuropean Houellebecq. That wasn’t entirely off the mark: Eurotrash opens with a narrator who’s basically a lightly fictionalized version of Kracht bemoaning, for fifty-odd pages, the blinkered and benighted state of modern Europe, a land whose sickness he finds mirrored in the microcosm of his family, a collection of sexually deviant war profiteers now dwindled down to just himself and his elderly alcoholic mother.

So yeah, whole lotta Houellebecq in there. But as I read on, another voice swiftly rose to the forefront of the narrative. You can probably guess whose.

While the sentences were shorter, and while there were more gaps in the text, more whitespace in which free associations could flow in, the whole time I read the first third of Eurotrash, I thought to myself that the narrator was essentially Murau, the protagonist of Bernhard’s final novel Extinction, shifted forty years into the future and 300 miles west from Wolfsegg to Zürich. Both the fictionalized Kracht and the thinly veiled Bernhard explore, to an obsessive degree, the darkness of their homelands at large and their homes in miniature. Though the tone of Eurotrash is more melancholy and less full of invective than Extinction, and while the prose remains consistently artful, I found myself, reading that opening section, a little bored. This had been done before, and Kracht seemed to be trying too hard, too unsubtly, to do it again. At times amid his musings, the fictionalized Kracht made the subtext overt, as in this reflection:

“It was as if for decades I’d been trailing along the verge of enormous malice and was simply unable to make it out, as if within my assumptions lay only further assumptions, as if I’d been stricken by a disease of the morphic field, a cruel perfidy radiating from the past. As if it had been put into my mind that the circumstances of my childhood and youth were in some way special or extraordinary, when in reality they were steeped not only in bourgeois mediocrity—for that I’d have been able to accept—but also in profound menace.”

Yeah, we get it. It was almost as if all that stuff was going on, because it was. Show don’t tell, ya know?

But then, with greater haste than Murau, who pontificates for more than half of Extinction before enacting his inevitable nostos, the fictionalized Kracht does what any good boy ought to do and visits his mother. From there, thanks to both the originality of the mother herself, who’s one of the more finely drawn and memorable characters I’ve encountered in my recent reading, as well as Kracht’s ability to build an enigmatic, funny, and tight scene—never really Bernhard’s cup of coffee—the narrative opens outward. By sending the narrator and his mother on a roadtrip together, Kracht breaks free of the Bernhardian mode that grips the opening portion of Eurotrash, casting the Neo-Bernhardian novel in a new shape while still maintaining echoes of that familiar voice.

Another telling contrast between going full Bernhard and offering a thoughtful update of his style comes to us from exiled Salvadoran writer Horacio Castellanos Moya. Back in the 1990s, incensed by the corruption and violence and ignorance of his native land, Castellanos Moya penned a little book called Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador, which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. A Bernhardian screed condemning everything under the Salvadoran sun, the novel was passed around that country’s literary underground, prompting book burnings and death threats for Castellanos Moya and his family, and ultimately forcing the author to flee the country. So never let it be said that the Neo-Bernhardians lack real-world impact! Hopefully Dubno doesn’t have to flee Downtown Manhattan anytime soon.

As a political document, Revulsion is impossible to not admire. It took true courage to write, and Castellanos Moya deserves praise for marshaling his art toward noble ends. As a book, I felt like I got the gag after a few pages. Like Haber’s faithful imitation, I once again found myself a little bored by how closely Revulsion hews to the familiar formula, even if that closeness is by design. There was a novelty to seeing Bernhard projected onto a new context, but that novelty wore thin across the course of so many Bernhardian repetitions, and I found myself far more interested in the new context being railed against than the railing itself. Basically, as fun as it is to hear Thomas Bernhard slander pupusas16, I’d rather listen to a voice that sounded a little more organic to its Salvadoran world.

Fortunately, Castellanos Moya also wrote the excellent novel Senselessness. Set in an obfuscated and nameless Central American country in the aftermath of Civil War, Senselessness relates a writer’s descent into madness as he works on behalf of the Catholic Church to sanitize a report on the army’s extermination of that country’s indigenous population. Darkly funny and deeply wrathful, Senselessness throttles every institution it can get its blood-soaked hands on. In strenuous sentences and unbroken paragraphs that recall Bernhard without devolving into pastiche, Castellanos Moya reaches an ideal midpoint between voice and context, elevating form without sacrificing impact. The novel recalls both the most politically powerful sections of Bernhard’s oeuvre and another classic example of Latin American Neo-Bernhardianism, Roberto Bolaño’s By Night in Chile, which I’ve written more about here. Bolaño, by the way, was a supporter of Castellanos Moya, and my copy of Senselessness contains a lovely blurb from him. Here’s hoping that Senselessness achieves a similar stature in the anglosphere as many of Bolaño’s Bernhard-inflected, deeply political works.

Finally, to spin Bernhard in a completely different direction, I have to plug a weird little book that I have a great deal of affection for, Adam Ehrlich Sachs’ The Organs of Sense. A romp through Enlightenment-era Europe starring G.W. Leibniz, a blind astronomer, and a cat, The Organs of Sense puts its own batshit inflection on Bernhard’s volcanic voice. Of all the books discussed in this overlong essay, this is the one that best reflects, and builds upon, the musicality and absurdity of Bernhard’s prose. This is another way of saying that Sachs has the most fun with Bernhard, treating him not as a canvas for examining the failings of art or lamenting the state of the world or inveighing against political establishments, but as an amusing and slightly unhinged medium by which to narrate the goings-on of various amusing and slightly unhinged characters. That’s not to say that The Organs of Sense is a frivolous novel; threaded throughout the text are themes of reality and illusion, with the blind astronomer’s life story serving as a case study for the key question of epistemology: how can we claim to know that which we claim to know? At the same time, the novel also contains a page on which Sachs, by his own admission, was trying to include the word glockenspiel as many times as possible.

As seen from these novels, and surely many more that I haven’t yet read but will hopefully get to some day, the question of whether Bernhard’s voice can be successfully updated is moot. Multiple authors have already made meaningful iterations on the template he provided, working close enough to the source material that the inspiration remains obvious, but deviating just enough to shift the Neo-Bernhardian movement forward. So if we accept as a premise that this synthesis can be done, then only one question remains: how?

*

I will once again cut to the chase: I don’t know.

There is, clearly, no magic formula. Some of the books discussed in this essay stick too strictly to a Bernhardian narrative voice, and falter due to a lack of originality; others strike out on their own, an admirable effort in itself, but falter due to the precise nature of their diversions. If there’s any consistent theme that’s emerged, beyond my overreliance on humorous asides in footnotes, it’s that strict formal adherence to a given writer’s style produces a novel that may be admirable for the accuracy of its impression, but ultimately fails to further literary conversation or linger in readers’ memories. At worst, this adherence smothers the original elements that might help a novel stand more securely on its own.

In contrast, the writers who managed to make the most worthwhile contributions to Bernhard’s legacy focused less on imitating the late author’s voice or structure, and more on using those elements as a foundation from which to explore and expand upon a particular theme within Bernhard’s work. For Kracht, that theme is the decline of Europe; for Castellanos Moya, it’s political invective; for Sachs, it’s epistemological absurdity.

In short, for Neo-Bernhardians, or any writers looking to emulate any great literary voice, something new must be brought to the table. This is another fairly basic point, and one which, now that I’m thirty-two, no longer strikes me as revelatory. But basic doesn’t mean easy. If it were so easy, after all, then everyone would do it. Which brings everything back to the quote at the top of this essay, about what we ultimately want from our geniuses.

All writers, to one degree or another, wear their influences on their sleeves. Whether they’re swayed by a particular writer or a general movement, echoes of other voices will sound in their work no matter how much effort is made to suppress them. There’s nothing wrong with that; it’s an inevitability for any artform. It’s what I learned nearly ten years ago, when I read Open City and Austerlitz, and it’s a lesson I learn afresh with each new book I log on the spreadsheet.

But to accept the premise expressed in the aforementioned quote—to believe that someone out there is closer to the truth you want to express than you are, and therefore better equipped to tell the story you’re seeking to tell—is to give away the game. You probably aren’t going to measure up to the geniuses who inspired you to write in the first place, but in order to create art, artists have to labor in ignorance of that reality. We have to operate under our own self-imposed delusions.

Because there’s something unsatisfying, something unavoidably small-minded, about ceding too much of your voice to an inspiration. More than a lack of creativity or daring, this surrender evinces a lack of maturity. There’s a reason why imitation is typically a young writer’s game, a hallmark of a voice that’s not done developing. It’s a phase that writers ought to grow out of. At the risk of sounding equally immature, the antidote to this line of thought can be found in the work of another Teutonic literary icon: “Today you are You, that is truer than true/There is no one alive who is Youer than You17.”

So rejoice, Neo-Bernhardians of the world! You’re free to experiment, free to push past the boundaries of form, rather than merely applying that form to your own milieu. You’re free to produce novels that I, a reader who already has a predilection for Bernhardian narratives, might be less likely to enjoy than your imitations, but more likely to respect. Not only are you free to do these things, you’re actually required to do so. Like him or hate him, that’s what Bernhard did.

And yes, in moving past your inspirations, you’ll lose a bit of the magic that accompanied your earliest encounters with the voices that stirred your soul. You’ll discern the mechanisms behind those voices, and the other voices that those voices are emulating, and the points where the voices that once seemed so infallible begin to strain. Whatever magic you’ll make for yourself might not be an adequate substitute for that initial thrill of discovery, and you might not make magic at all. It won’t be easy. But while you’ll be further from genius than ever, you’ll be closer, even if just a little, to whatever it is that only your voice can say.

Looking up from the depths. Source.

Of all the scraps of meaning I glean from the books I read, all the qualities of these books that I may or may not remember, only recently did I begin to consider how much sympathy a book inspires for its author.

This is, I think, an odd, somewhat irrelevant rubric for reading. I’ve never picked up a book because I hoped or expected to feel a particular way about the stranger who wrote it. Toward a book itself, sure, but authors have typically remained almost incidental figures, mere vessels for the words within.

Maybe it’s a matter of the type of books I tend to read. I don’t gravitate toward confessionals or memoirs, and have little interest in tales of odds overcome or triumphs over tragedy. I predominantly read fiction, and while I recognize the hazy, occasionally non-existent line between so-called works of art and so-called real life, I would never mistake a fictional narrator for an author, even in cases when everybody knows that an author is more or less writing about himself.

Nor am I much persuaded by spectacular, almost cosmic misfortune. I’ve always found quiet unhappiness—the way we learn to live alongside our disappointment, the way our circumstances fail to change—far more affecting than out-and-out emotional devastation. Yet even when a book captures this kind of sadness with artfully exacting precision1, I don’t transfer the resulting sympathy onto that book’s author. And I’m certainly not seeking out either narrators or authors who would be described, if given a single choice of adjective, as sympathetic.

All of this is to say that I’m not sure I’ve ever felt worse for an author on a basic human level than I did after reading I Wished by Dennis Cooper.

I Wished is a novel, sort of, that serves as both a reframing of and metacommentary on a preceding Cycle of five novels by Cooper. Both I Wished and each entry in Cooper’s five-novel Cycle are about the same thing. Pretty much everything that Cooper has ever written, from other novels to short stories to screenplays, is also about that same thing, or at least contains seeds of that same thing within some kind of more expansive, dressed-up plot. The thing that all of this art is about, the thing to which Dennis Cooper has devoted his life, is his friend George Miles.

Dennis and George met when they were fifteen and twelve, respectively, in Southern California in the late 1960s. Over the next decade they shared a friendship and sexual semi-romantic relationship that eventually petered out when Dennis went to live in Europe and George’s mental illness worsened. Between houses abandoned and bridges burned and letters lost, Dennis and George fell out of touch. One night, while staying with his family, George shot himself in the head. Dennis found out about George’s death ten years after the fact, and has been writing about his friend, in one form or another, ever since.

I don’t know why George’s death cast such a long shadow over Cooper’s life, and neither does Cooper. If he did, there would be no books. It seems safe to say that George represents something to Cooper, that he stands for innocence and beauty and everything in this world that must be and all too often isn’t protected, but it might be more accurate to say that George represents the world itself—not merely an ineradicable truth about the world but the very substance of it, the physical matter, the dirt beneath Cooper’s feet. When people do bad things to each other, when they display their infinite capacity to violate innocence, George is both the victim and the perpetrator. Conceived in such terms, there’s no story worth telling that can’t be conceived as a story about George, no gap in the various narratives Cooper crafts through which he could possibly escape this thread, even if he wanted to, which I’m not sure he does.

It’s Cooper’s refusal to look away from the source of his pain, his determination to explain his fundamentally inexplicable obsession with that pain, that renders I Wished so terribly sad. That, and the tone with which Cooper speaks to the reader: the emotion he’s able to convey in this tone, the depth of sorrow he makes no attempt to conceal.

Early on, and again at the book’s close, Cooper addresses the reader directly, examining his motives for I Wished. Here he is in the book’s very first sentence, attempting yet again to explain why he is the way he is:

“I started writing books about and for my friend George Miles because whenever I would speak about him honestly like I am doing now I felt a complicated agony beneath my words that talking openly can’t handle.”

As Cooper teases out the nature of his agony, using fiction as a mediating device—a method that, unlike talking openly, allows him to both dissect and withstand the pain—he explores the loneliness of his obsession, as well as the loneliness of obsession at large. Try as he might, all the art in the world can’t make George real to a person who didn’t know him, and worse, the people who did know George have never shown an interest in Cooper’s art. No one in George’s family or circle of friends has ever attempted to contact Cooper, either to tell him that his pain is shared, or to issue a cease and desist for writing novel after novel in which various fictionalized versions of a real person, someone the knew, are subjected to sadomasochistic torture. Cooper finds this lack of contact a little strange, though it pales in comparison to the strangeness of everything else about the situation.

Despite devoting the better portion of a prolific career to George, Cooper still feels that he hasn’t done enough for his friend. He feels that the reactions those works have garnered, all the sympathy from readers like me, have been for him, Cooper, and not George. He wants to honor his friend and he wants to analyze and possibly resolve his agony and he wants someone else who knew George, someone else who might share in what he’s going through, someone who might even begin to understand it, to find him.

“I want to know that all my love for [George] is worth it or find someone who’ll convince me he was no one much, or who’ll say ‘He never mentioned you,’ or that he referenced me offhandedly enough that it’s clear I didn’t mean that much to him, and that’s the hope, and that’s the fear, and I know that’s only semi-interesting to read, but it’s very hard for me to even do this.”

It’s possible for me to imagine a thoughtful reader, approaching I Wished in good faith, who isn’t much persuaded by this mission. But it’s hard for me to imagine that this reader and I would agree on the meanings we glean and the qualities we remember from the books we read.

As hinted at in that last passage, Cooper senses that not all readers might be as kindly disposed toward the story of some random dead guy as I am, and responds by turning George’s life and afterlife into something at once both universal and absurdly idiosyncratic. Throughout I Wished, characters much like Dennis and George are subjected to a series of elaborate metaphors, with their constantly mutating relationship gradually becoming a palimpsest of desire itself. The book is on one hand a chronicle of Cooper’s lifelong fantasies concerning George, the world, and himself, and on the other an oblique meditation on longing for something impossible, something you know you’ll never obtain. Even as I was reminded at all turns of Cooper’s misery, I was also reminded of the perverse pleasure of continuing to want that unobtainable object, the ways in which unfulfilled yearning comes to constitute its own comfort.

Cooper draws an intricate, multi-layered map of his obsession. As elsewhere in Cooper’s fiction, George is never just George, but rather a complex, somehow exhilarating panoply of identities. Within I Wished alone, George is killed and reborn as an object of desire by sources as disparate as his own father, Santa Claus, Nick Drake, John Singer from The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, John Wayne Gacy, and the landscape artist James Turrell. Each of these iterations bear traces of the others; no vision of Cooper’s love for George stands wholly on its own. What emerges is a composite picture of this love, as well as a guide to the process and psychological motivations by which an artist might attempt, over the course of a lifetime, to make art out of material that resists such transformations.

In assembling these multiple mirror images of his desire, these lenses through which his desire might be better understood, Cooper reconfirms the essential inexpressibility of obsession. We can say what it’s like, we can conjure up monumental prose to convey the scope of it, but we can’t say why: why this, why so much, why so endlessly. We can’t make people understand our obsessions, and we can’t make people care. Cooper recognizes the impossibility of this task and pursues it anyway, because he couldn’t do otherwise, and I can think of no mission in art or life more admirable than that.

“What I feel is not something I can capture, other than to say, Look, I’m another writer who is obviously in love and who has lost my way linguistically. How do I make you care, since no one cares that much about another’s love.…This is a novel that only wants to really, really matter to [George] in the hope that, if it does, that’ll mean he loves me too because he knows I could do anything I want right now, and I wrote this.”

When I read I Wished, marveling over its bizarre structure and despairing over its author’s pain, I thought, a little wishfully, a little foregone with the pathos of it all, that I had never anything like it. Then it occurred to me that, specific as I Wished might be in its narrative style, esoteric as it might be in its plotlessness and plaintiveness, I had seen this story before.

*

The first words one encounters upon reading Inland by Gerald Murnane—an epigraph provided by, of all people, Ernest Hemingway—picks up right where I Wished leaves off: “I believe that basically you write for two people; yourself to try to make it absolutely perfect…Then you write for who you love whether she can read or write or not and whether she is alive or dead.”

Inland, a novel every bit as knotted and recursive as I Wished, begins with an extended fable about a Hungarian author writing pages for and about an unseen but deeply longed-for female editor who lives on the great grassy plains of America. This story segues into a seemingly different yet actually continuous narrator waxing poetic about the Australian suburbs and beaches of his childhood. Eventually these recollections come to rest upon a girl known briefly in the narrator’s youth, a girl whose abrupt disappearance all those years ago gave rise to an obsession that’s haunted his life forevermore.

All of Murnane’s work is difficult to describe and even more difficult to summarize, but Inland exists in its own rarified sphere of abstraction. This is a book in which, as Murnane frequently repeats, no thing is just one thing, and no place is just one place. It is a book of worlds within worlds and dreams within dreams. Insofar as it’s about anything, Inland centers itself around yearning. Over the course of the novel, this yearning winnows its focus to the girl known in the narrator’s youth. Eventually it comes to light that, at a moment the narrator initially failed to register, the girl died. As this yearning focuses, it also intensifies, becoming a yearning so powerful that the yearner sees the yearned-for object everywhere, in infinite imagined variations. By transcribing these iterations, tracing the junctures at which they merge, the narrator attempts to write the dead back into life again, a holy and doomed gesture by which he might at last prove his love.

In other words, while Cooper and Murnane take different roads to get there, they’re traveling toward the same destination.

Though Murnane is often dismissed as an overly cerebral writer, a craftsman or a technician, his work frequently achieves moments of startling emotional power, both in Inland and elsewhere. What Murnane is not, however, is direct. He prefers the oblique route, opting not to explain the motivations of his fiction within the bounds of this fiction itself, and certainly not with the bluntness that Cooper employs in I Wished. As Murnane frequently instructed his students of writing, he’s learned to trust his obsessions, and let them stand on their own.

What Murnane does do, thankfully, is comment extensively on his own work. In his typical hall-of-mirrors fashion, Murnane’s Last Letter to a Reader comprises a series of essays, one on each of his published books, plus a final essay on Last Letter to a Reader itself. The essay on Inland concentrates on the formative images, experiences, and sensations from which the novel emerged. Chief among these inspirations is a 156-word passage from Hungarian writer Gyula Illyés’ People of the Puszta, a work of narrative anthropology about the world of Illyés’ childhood. The passage in question relates the suicide of a young girl who drowned herself in her rural village’s sweep-arm well following some unspecified violation. To hear Murnane tell it, something about this anecdote struck his very soul, rendering the girl in the well an earthly avatar of feelings he’d long been carrying around inside:

“I’m not about to report that I knew even then that the personage who had come to life in my mind would one day find her way into a work of fiction….[But] I find it hard to accept that certain images and certain feelings were not always part of my awareness: that I was a thinking and feeling being for nearly forty years without the stark shadow of a sweep-arm well falling every day across my mental vision.”

So fierce is Murnane’s devotion to this vision that, as with many of his obsessions, he did end up composing a fiction with the drowned girl at its heart, both to answer the question of why the anecdote meant so much to him and to come as close to meeting the girl as time and space allow. He wrote Inland to bring the girl to life:

“[I] did what any angry, baffled child or a character in a fairy-story might have done. The child might have daydreamed his way into the setting of a book in the hope of mingling with the characters; the fairy-tale hero might have stepped through a page of text as though through a door to a place where characters were persons after all.”

Just as Cooper time and again imagines George in different guises,Murnane transforms the girl in the well, who assumes many shapes both in Inland and throughout the rest of his work. In various pieces of fiction she is herself, different girls Murnane knew when he was young, one or another girl-cousin, a woman glimpsed on a train, or his recurring image of a dark-eyed dark-haired reader of good faith. Insofar as Murnane’s oeuvre serves as one man’s attempt to explicate the contents of his mind, it also constitutes a five-decade archive of that man’s efforts to draw closer to what is never not on his mind: her, the girl in the well, in all her many forms. It’s a feat that, at least with Inland, Murnane feels he achieves:

“What I truly hear persuades me that I’ve arrived at last at the end of my impossible journey: my delusional, literal-minded enterprise. I have penetrated not only a book and not only a paragraph. I have reached the heart of a word itself. What I hear is a hollow-sounding echo. I am inside the well.”

*

While Murnane reaches a sense of closure—not necessarily within Inland itself, but at least afterwards, reflecting back—I doubt that Cooper will ever arrive at a similar place. This lack of resolution underscores an important distinction between each author’s obsession. Cooper knew George, intimately at that; whatever George has come to represent to him, this meaning originated from a tangible point. In contrast, Murnane’s longing was self-admittedly nebulous, and found an outlet in the story of the girl in the well, rather than starting there. No matter how formative this story proved to Murnane, no matter how many times he felt compelled to return to it, the girl in the well presents a far blanker slate than George. Because the girl could have been anything, Murnane made her everything. If she exists almost entirely as a figment of Murnane’s imagination2, then he can imagine himself into something like reconciliation.

For Cooper, this reconciliation lies forever out of reach. He seeks an affirmation of his love that only George could possibly provide. Even proxies for this affirmation, people who knew George, are not only insufficient in themselves, but uninterested in contacting Cooper. Unlike him, these people have either moved on or realized they can’t bear the pain of their loss. The fact that Cooper fully understands the fruitlessness of his predicament is another layer atop his tragedy:

“I wrote the books thinking George would read the Cycle and go, ‘Wow, you think I have so many possibilities, you find me so inspiring, you wanted me to die young so much more spectacularly than the boring way I wanted to, you must love me, I mean you’d have to, and I must love you too, how could I not after all the work you’ve done, and I do,’ but he killed himself before the first of them was even published.”

If there’s consolation to be found here, it’s in the inexhaustibility of George as a muse, the infinite tribute Cooper can assemble at his altar. From another way of looking, this dynamic sounds like a Sisyphean curse, and yet as Cooper carries out his neverending task there’s a sense in which this task becomes the thing that sustains him.

To me, the truth may well lie in the conclusion of a particularly touching chapter toward the end of I Wished, in which Cooper, dispensing with metaphor, tells the story of how he and George met.

It happened at a school dance. George is high on something, and Dennis assumes the role of his protector, not yet knowing it’s a role he’ll be playing for the rest of his life. George places his feet atop Dennis’ feet, so that they’re mirroring each other’s movements, going at the same pace, and in this way they walk together out into the night. They sit in an athletics field behind the school and stare at the stars. They look at each other’s faces. Dennis thinks about a lot of things that he’ll continue thinking about forever. Eventually, George comes back from wherever the drugs took him and sees Dennis, really sees him, for the first time.

“‘I looked at you for a really long time,’ George said, ‘but I still don’t know you.’”

Cooper and Murnane, each in his own way, have looked for a really long time at things they’ll never truly know. Whatever they’ve seen, whatever they claim to understand, it’s the looking that makes them who they are. On the surface it’s difficult to imagine two more different writers, two more different men, but in this essential aspect they’re about as similar as two people can possibly be. Both men are animated by a longing for something or someone that can’t be attained; each chases the longed-for object across landscapes, books, worlds. Both men, Cooper in James Turrell’s Roden Crater project and Murnane in the Hungarian girl’s well, imagine themselves sitting in the pit of the earth, surrounded by their longing and their effort to turn that longing into something else, and staring up at the distant sky, trying to understand.

But there’s another consolation for Cooper, a consolation that Murnane expresses both in Inland and the rest of his oeuvre. All things are possible in the world of fiction. So long as there’s a mind to perceive another human being, it’s as if that human being never died. And so in cycle after cycle these writers revive their obsessions, returning time and again to the source of their pain, because in this way, in only this way, the people they love can live.

“At first while I was writing I thought of those people as though they were all dead and I myself was alive. At some time while I was writing, however, I began to suspect what I am now sure of. I began to suspect that all persons named or referred to in the pages of books are alive, whereas all other persons are dead.

When I wrote the letter which was the first of all my pages, I was thinking of a young woman who was, I thought, dead while I was still alive. I thought the young woman was dead while I remained alive in order to go on writing what she could never read.

Today while I write on this last page, I am still thinking of the young woman. Today, however, I am sure the young woman is still alive. I am sure the young woman is still alive while I am dead. Today I am dead but the young woman remains alive in order to go on reading what I could never write.”

Note: while I’ve been a fan of Murnane for some time now, I can’t claim to have stumbled onto Cooper on my own. All credit for that discovery goes to my wife, whose taste in literary matters, as with her taste in pretty much everything else (except men, obviously) remains immaculate. I’m grateful to her for letting me co-opt her thing for the purposes of this essay, as I’m grateful that her thing and my thing are so complementary. Most of all, I’m grateful to her for helping me understand exactly how Cooper and Murnane are capable of such intense and internal love.

How lists are compiled, I assume. Source.

When I began thinking about how to explain the prevalence of rankings within literary culture, the endless proliferation of lists that claim to offer one or another sample of history’s greatest books, I was tempted to blame the internet. Upon deeper consideration, this seems lazy. The compulsion to build hierarchies, to impose arbitrary yet passionate order onto our experiences and perceptions, has likely been with humanity since we first encountered the Obelisk and started bashing each other over the head. Surely the internet has made both the compulsion and the bashing worse, but I’m not a skilled enough sociologist, or really an anything-enough sociologist, to trace the precise mechanics of this exacerbation. Suffice it to say, perhaps also lazily, that ranking everything under the sun might just be an inevitable byproduct of our daily, lifelong attempt to make sense of a nonsensical world.

Still, the question remains: if we take literary listmaking as a feasible exercise, much less a useful one—if we believe that something as vast and subjective as literature can be served up on a platter, all nuances sorted, all intricacies revealed—then why are more and more of these platters served up every day, when we’ve surely already eaten our fill?

Ideally, it’s because each new list and revised set of rankings expresses its maker’s idiosyncrasies, rather than constituting a minimally varied repetition of the same entries found in every other roundup. Ideally, in his attempt to formulate a personal canon, the Ranker displays meaningful deviations from the general canon, underscoring blind spots in our received wisdom and elevating unduly overlooked items to their rightful place in the limelight1.

Again: ideally. In practice, congratulations to Middlemarch or Ulysses—you guys are still the GOATs.

There’s nothing wrong with listmaking as a means of clarifying your own preferences, or advocating for neglected masterpieces, or even, perhaps especially, railing against the world’s abundant supply of overrated dreck. What troubles me isn’t so much the arbitrary nature of these sorts of rankings—that’s a given, and any worthwhile list alludes at some point to its own futility—but how these rankings might be received.

If you’re the sort of person who invests a lot of time in ranking abstract matters, and believes that abstract matters can in fact be ranked, you might also believe that by checking off individual items from a list purporting to contain the essential elements of said abstraction, you’ll eventually be able to check off2 the abstraction at large. By reducing an entire field into a discrete set of inputs, rankers impart the sense that said field can be mastered: if five or ten or a hundred of these inputs are perceived, or even just registered, dimly and without any undue thought, then a diligent pupil can be said to know this field, and therefore be done with it.

Perhaps you think I’m overstating the matter. If someone reads the so-called greatest books of all time for the sheer love of reading, or out of a genuine desire to expand his horizons, that seems unquestionably good. However, I encounter more and more people in my daily life, both in the physical world and online, who seem to think of learning not as a journey, but as a means to an end. Rather than honing a distinct sensibility, these people would rather follow an externally constructed program, attempting to build by brute force a functioning sense of taste.

You can make the case that everyone has to start somewhere, and that lists are an appropriate launchpad from which to develop a personal rubric of what does and doesn’t suck, and I’m not sure that this case would be wrong. But something within me rebels against any method that even inadvertently gamifies the perception of abstract matters, or prioritizes consumption over comprehension. Seen through this lens, even thoughtfully crafted lists strike me as a manifestation of the relentless utilization, the omnipresent drive to optimize, currently corrupting modern life at large.

For it strikes me, upon reviewing various lists, that both Rankers and Consumers of Rankings only occasionally have edification in mind. More prevalent within the List-Making Industrial Complex, I think, is a certain insecurity: the Ranker is desperate to assert the supremacy of his taste, while the Consumer is fearful of going his own way, lest he miss something essential. Both parties are terrified of being caught out in their ignorance, of having their opinions revealed as unfounded, or worse, being outed as having no real opinions at all.

Despite the inherent flaw of ranking things that can’t be ranked, doing so remains a fundamentally human activity, and a semi-reliable source of fun. This is where the Internet comes into play. Rankings drive traffic, incite vitriol or validation, launch a thousand takes and counter-takes. I’m as guilty as everyone else; I’ll click that shit almost every time, and each time I do, the world grows a little stodgier. Any individual list might yield value, but there’s far greater value in discovering that resonance for yourself, rather than trodding the shortest path between you and something that someone else considers good.

Because what’s lost in a list-driven world, an optimized world, is the spikiness or slight unshapeliness that often renders a certain piece of art more memorable than its ostensibly more list-friendly counterparts. If your sole priority is to consume what the esteemed authorities have decreed to be fit for consumption—which, again, really does seem to be the way that more and more people are operating—then you’re going to miss out on the jagged staging grounds in which artists teased out or expanded upon the themes on display in those smoother, better-lauded works. You’ll float right past the messy moments in which artist after artist wrestled with something altogether more difficult to put into words.

A great soundtrack or a memorable playlist is far more than a regurgitation of songs you’ve already heard, and which everybody more or less likes. The A-sides get all the attention, the radio play and the marketing dollars, but it’s the B-sides that get discussion flowing, and linger longer in memory. It’s the deep cuts that define taste, and keep artistic discovery shuffling along.

In that spirit, here are a few of my favorite literary B-sides: books that aren’t regarded as their author’s greatest work, and therefore most likely won’t make any set of so-called definitive rankings, but nonetheless mean a lot to me, to the point that they surpass, in my opinion, their better-known counterparts.

In other words, here’s a bunch of stuff I like—which is, of course, all that any set of rankings will ever really be.

*

Roberto Bolaño, By Night in Chile

This might be a product of my bias against sprawling kitchen-sink novels, or the fact that I haven’t read each of the approximately 800 novellas that Roberto Bolaño left scrawled on motel stationery and/or smeared in his own feces in a Mexico City alley, but for my money you’re not going to encounter a more gripping piece of literature about the limits of literature’s powers, or a bleaker examination of how art’s lofty ideals can be warped toward sinister ends, than By Night in Chile.

This book makes me want to indulge in every blurb cliche in the, uh, book. It’s funny and frightening in equal measure; the scene where everything turns (no spoilers) is one of the more unsettling passages I’ve ever read, a true descent into darkness. Plus, if any prose deserves to be described as whatever ‘incantatory’ means, it’s what Bolaño pulls off here, a semi-Neo-Bernhardian rant that elevates the form to new heights while maintaining both a lyrical register and psychological acuity.

By all means read The Savage Detectives (fun but honestly not super memorable IMO) and 2666 (also brilliant, also terrifying, but overstuffed and a bit flabby, and praised to high heaven in part for the sheer tragic posthumous effort of it all, rather than internal consistency). But if you’re looking for a book that deserves to be on a list of all-time greats, and isn’t weighed down by the portentousness that arises when an author aims for such lists, I suggest you take a spin through the haunted-house mind of Father Urrutia.

And yes, I am aware that repping BNIC is about as safe a contrarian literary take as one can offer, given that the book has garnered praise from the likes of Susan Sontag (this isn’t one of the books she blurbed that’s currently lining the library in hell), and that no less of a normie than James Wood also believes it’s the best thing Bolaño ever wrote, which is almost enough to make me change my mind. But as you’ll soon see, not all of my alternative choices are so critically accepted…

J.M. Coetzee, Foe

Speaking of safe takes, I’m not sure whether I’m actually prepared to put Foe above the holy trinity of Waiting for the Barbarians, Life & Times of Michael K, and Disgrace. But I really do think it’s almost right there.

For me, two things lift Foe into S-tier Coetzee status: first, the finely honed precision of Coetzee’s prose, which in his incredible run through the Eighties managed to retain whatever sense of artistry he later discarded in favor of sounding like the world’s most soberly written philosophy textbook3; second, the way that Foe manages to predict, and in my opinion more effectively articulate, so many of Coetzee’s later concerns, including autofiction, narrative abstraction, the homogenizing effect of translation, and the morally tenuous role of the author.

Upon Foe’s release, critics took Coetzee to task for offering such an oblique, abstract treatment of Apartheid. Sure, he would end up tossing said critics a bone with Disgrace, which addressed Apartheid in spectacular fuck-me fuck-you fuck-everyone fashion, but this is J.M. Coetzee we’re talking about—did you expect him to tell us what he really believes? Foe represents Coetzee at his most baroquely defiant: the novel’s final few pages, a dreamlike sequence that abandons concrete explanation in favor of pure association, might just be some of Coetzee’s finest work, and one of the few scenes he’s ever crafted that could be accurately described as ‘beautiful.’

Anyway, I wish I were hardcore enough to tell you that Coetzee’s best book is actually Elizabeth Costello, but alas, that one stays in the ‘actually kind of underrated if you give it a chance’ bucket. So read Foe, and then read Coetzee’s Nobel lecture, which is another one of the best things he’s ever written, even if it was met by the Swedish Academy, and pretty much everybody who’s ever fired up the YouTube clip and listened to Coetzee drily describe decoy ducks, with a resounding va4?

The other underrated S-tier Coetzee novel? Summertime. It’s his best work post-Disgrace, but y’all ain’t ready to hear that yet.

Don DeLillo, Mao II

Time for a truly hot take: Mao II is DeLillo’s best novel. Not White Noise, which was damaged not a whit in my eyes by that dogshit movie. Not Underworld (see my previous stipulation about kitchen-sink novels). Not even the typical sleeper pick for ‘most underrated DeLillo novel,’ Libra. All of those books are great, but Mao II is better.

This opinion prompted a snort of derision from my DeLillohead friend, who’s read everything the man has ever written, even Ratner’s Star, so I know I’m onto something here.

The calculus is simple: Mao II is the best DeLillo novel because it is the most DeLillo novel. It is pure uncut religious cult art world metafiction terrorism Downtown New York Scene goodness, all in a tidy package with not a page or sentence wasted5. It is also, I would wager, the most prescient DeLillo novel, which is kind of like being the most anodyne Ian McEwan novel—a very tough feat. In Mao II’s equating of literary creation and political destruction, in its vision of the emerging shadowy counter-terror state, and in its portrayal of the inequality that’s come to define American cities, a sheltered wealthy coterie living in parallel to squalor, Mao II is a more insightful statement on contemporary life than nearly all contemporary novels.

Then 9/11 happened, and reality caught up to DeLillo’s mind, and he was, alas, never the same. I am not here to insist that his best work is secretly Cosmopolis, but Zero K is actually quite solid. Even my DeLillohead friend would agree.

Kazuo Ishiguro, The Unconsoled

Back in 2017, when Kazuo Ishiguro won the Nobel, confusion reigned for several reasons: the relatively small scope of his oeuvre, the relative middlebrowness of said oeuvre, the sneaking suspicion that the committee didn’t bother reading Nocturnes, which is a truly bad book. As for me, I was mostly confused that the Nobel committee’s official announcement of the prize compared Ishiguro to Kafka, a writer whose fable-like absurdity and eminently clear existential despair seemed quite different from Ishiguro’s highly mannered, hermetically sealed narrators.

Then, in 2019, I read The Unconsoled.

If I’m being a bit wishy-washy with some of these other books, let me leave no doubt here: The Unconsoled is superior by a wide margin to everything else that Kazuo Ishiguro has ever written—and, given that his next novel is something called Miss Lambert Steps Aboard Danger6, anything that he seems likely to write in the future. It stands sui generis in his catalogue, a fascinating 540-page fever dream of artistic anxiety, Ishiguro’s ‘fuck you’ to everyone who ever tried to put him in a box. Forget what I’ve said (twice now) about not liking big sprawling novels: for this one, I make an exception.

The plot isn’t the point, so let’s just say that The Unconsoled reads like David Lynch directing a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode written by Franz Kafka. I really do hate nonsensical grab-bag descriptors of this nature, but I also stand by the novel being exactly like that. And yet, despite its absurdity, The Unconsoled builds to an emotional catharsis on par with any of the other subtly devastating denouements for which Ishiguro is known. There’s an ineradicable sadness at the core of the novel, which offers trenchant commentary on our inability to ever truly really know other people or ourselves, along with poignant observations on how past bonds are forever slipping away. These sentiments endow the novel with real weight, saving it from being more than an experiment, or a middle finger to the establishment.

So you can keep The Remains of the Day, which is in fact a major achievement, and continue clinging to Never Let Me Go, which is vastly overrated, and not only because it seems to be the most commonly cited book in literary agents’ ‘What I’m Looking For’ pages, like no shit you want an elegantly written yet easy to read genre-bending novel that yields both a movie adaptation and a fucking Nobel prize7. You should by all means read The Buried Giant and even When We Were Orphans, because Ishiguro is better when he’s being kind of weird and shaggy-dog, and do check out An Artist of the Floating World, which, much like Libra, is probably the most common “but his real best book is” answer for Ishiguro. But don’t be fooled: The Unconsoled outshines them all.

Look no further than the fact that the critics detested it. My old friend James Wood, so aligned with my opinion on By Night in Chile, even claimed that The Unconsoled “invented its own category of badness.” Well, he can invent his own category of sucking my dick.

David Malouf, An Imaginary Life

I’m sure David Malouf would have loved that lead-in.

I rarely encounter discussions of David Malouf in the Broader Discourse, even after his death earlier this year, though maybe he’s more popular in his native Australia. He was a man and a writer of somewhat old-fashioned sensibilities, an unabashed Europhile who downplayed his queer identity, and his status as something of a holdover might limit his appeal. But the man was also, occasionally to his detriment, incapable of writing an inelegant sentence. In ways both grand and minute he applied his painterly eye and capital-N Novelistic world-building to his native land, capturing a sweeping panorama of Australian history and culture.

Except for that time when he wrote a weird-ass little masterpiece about the exile and death of the Roman poet Ovid. Naturally, this happens to be his best work. Sorry to all three fans of Remembering Babylon or The Great World who might read this essay.

Beyond the beauty of Malouf’s prose, which achieves a luminous quality throughout An Imaginary Life without veering too far into the purpley territory that can characterize his other work, what really endears this novel to me is its level of abstraction. Alone in unfamiliar territory at the edges of the world, amid an apocalyptic landscape and a nearly neanderthalic society, Ovid’s plight takes on its own form of mythos, serving as a timeless parable of alienation. Without truly constituting metafiction, the novel encapsulates a writer constructing a world in which a writer is constructing a world, and I’m a sucker for shit like that, as evidenced by the presence on this list of Coetzee, whose Waiting for the Barbarians owes just as much of a debt to An Imaginary Life as it does to Dino Buzzati’s The Tartar Steppe, as well as one author still to come.

Haruki Murakami, The Elephant Vanishes

That author is not Haruki Murakami.

Unlike the other authors on this list, I don’t particularly like Haruki Murakami’s writing. Whatever book by Haruki Murakami you read first will probably end up being your favorite, because it’s the same god damn fucking spaghetti jazz lost cat secret portal bullshit every time. With the possible exception of Paulo Coelho, Murakami is probably the go-to author for non-readers who want to signal that they have attempted to read something quote-unquote deep, both because of Murakami’s flat, perfectly legible prose, and because his single ever-recycled plot—local loser secretly spectacular, hijinks ensue—mirrors the fantasies of terminal adolescents the world over. At least ten percent of Murakami’s success is due to those slick glossy covers, which do look great on bookstore shelves, while another ten percent is due to people being weebs. Norwegian Wood hits hard when you’re sixteen, and then it’s time to get over yourself.

All that being said, The Elephant Vanishes is actually quite good.

It’s not simply a matter of being a short story collection, a format that sharpens Murakami’s writing, giving him less room to spin out multiple plotlines and digressions, though that definitely helps. The stories in The Elephant Vanishes are only occasionally supernatural, which makes for an enjoyable contrast with his usual magical muddles. Instead, throughout the collection Murakami conducts himself like a Japanese Raymond Carver, putting an intriguing spin on midcentury minimalism. When his surreal elements intersect with Carveresque emotional compression, as they do in the collection’s title story, they make for wistful little vignettes that reveal both the strangeness and sadness of everyday life.

What’s more, the story Sleep, a powerfully unsettling piece of writing on its own merits, also contains the only non-creepy, recognizably human female character that Murakami has ever written—i.e., the only woman who isn’t either a spunky 12 year-old girl with abnormally large breasts or a mysterious older woman with dark secrets and abnormally large breasts. This thread of misogyny and general skeeviness throughout Murakami’s work was explored at length in a worthwhile interview between Murakami and novelist Mieko Kawakami, and hopefully pointing it out will win me back whatever brownie points I’ve lost by not profiling any books by women in this essay8.

Gerald Murnane, Landscape with Landscape

On that note, let’s discuss a book that one contemporary reviewer described as a “feminist reader’s nightmare,” helping to consign said book to both a lifetime of undeserved obscurity and a spot on this list.

One day I will write the true song of my heart, by which I mean the sort of tribute that Gerald Murnane deserves. One day, maybe, I’ll be able to explain exactly what he means to me, and why. You can see the name I’ve taken on this platform: the man is a significant figure in my life. It’s honestly a little embarrassing.

Until I find the time to write that essay, which will most likely run in excess of twenty thousand words, the best I can do is to state that Murnane serves as both an exemplar of my ideal writerly style, with chiseled sentences that meticulously trace the infinite dimensions of the human mind, and a personal inspiration, a paragon of uncompromising devotion to a singular and exacting artistic vision.

While The Plains and Inland are generally regarded as Murnane’s masterworks, nobody talks about Landscape with Landscape, the book published in between. A series of six novella-like short stories linked by a conceit so clever that both Murnane and I are shocked no one’s stolen it9, Landscape with Landscape explores, broadly speaking, the travails of attempting to create art in a society poorly disposed toward said creation, and how the fictions we build in our heads eventually begin to supercede the world commonly held to be real.

To put it another way, if you read a single book this year in which an Australian colony in Paraguay—unbelievably enough, a real historical thing—comes to serve as a dazzlingly complex metaphor for both a father’s attempt to save his son from a mysterious illness and the act of writing itself, make it this one.

Why doesn’t the story in question, The Battle of Acosta Nu, or Landscape with Landscape at large, occupy its rightful position in the eyes of the world as one of Murnane’s greatest pieces of writing? To hear Murnane tell it, thirty years onward in an introduction to a reissued edition of Landscape with Landscape, the problem lay in one of Substack’s most reliable punching-bags: the fickle philistinism of the publishing industry, and literary culture at large.

After agreeing with me that Landscape with Landscape is “a piece of writing at least as dense and accomplished as The Plains,” Murnane details how the novel came to nonetheless earn the dubious distinction of the “most brutally treated” of his books. Following a laudatory initial review in the Age, an inexplicable hatchet-job in the Bulletin set off a counterwave of groupthink, freezing out Landscape with Landscape from readers who might very well have loved it. Per Murnane, even those who had previously praised the novel were forced to change their tune:

“Toward Christmas, the Age filled a couple of pages in its books section with lists compiled by its reviewers of the books that had most impressed them during the past year. My reviewer of six months before, she who had filled three columns of unstinting praise for Landscape with Landscape, did not include my book in her list. The lesson that I got from this was that I should never expect any reviewer to stray too far from the herd.”

When we talk about the canon, the collective output of list after list, we speak only rarely of the books excluded from those hallowed halls. A small outcry here, a plea for justice there, and then time flows on, smoothing away rough edges, rounding art into uniformity. Sometimes, as Murnane notes, it doesn’t take much time at all—six short months, perhaps even less. But the pain lingers. Even all these years later, with Murnane having assumed at least a share of his true place in the literary pantheon, he hasn’t forgotten the damage done by a list.

*

And there we have what seems to me a fitting conclusion for the case against literary rankings, and the conundrum these rankings entail. If lists can erase outstanding art from collective memory, then we place far too much power upon them. Yet how else can we seek to remember and pay tribute to the art that moves us? What better means do we have of reviving forgotten and overlooked art from its untimely death?

In the end, lists are both the enemy of meaningful art and their best hope of salvation. I suspect that this conundrum, much like lists themselves, has been with humanity from the start, and will be with us to the end.

Until that end arrives, we’ll proceed as we’ve preceded: building the canon, lambasting the canon, rebuilding the canon, tearing it down once more. It’s best, I think, to view that discourse from a distance, and tune it out as best you can. Read the lists that come from a place of true intent, and read the books on those lists, and then read more, a lot more, more than you ever thought possible. Because when all is said and done, the only list that really matters is the one you make for yourself.

And this one, obviously.

Mary, c. 1947. By Saul Leiter. Accessed here.

On August 4th, 2023, I boarded a bus in West Los Angeles to visit my friend and his girlfriend in the city’s northeastern suburbs. The bus was just the first leg of a two-hour trek; it would take me to Koreatown, where I would transfer to the heavy rail line that would take me Downtown, where I would transfer to the light rail line that would carry me the rest of the way.

Throughout my journey across Los Angeles, during those hours on the bus and the train and the other train, I read My Face for the World to See by Alfred Hayes.

I was visiting my friend and his girlfriend because they’d recently moved in together, sort of. The apartment next door to the apartment where my friend’s girlfriend had lived for the last seven years had become available, and so my friend had moved into that apartment, meaning that he and his girlfriend were now neighbors, with a pair of abutting apartments in which to spend time together and apart.

I was looking forward to seeing my friend, who was my only friend in Los Angeles. I was looking forward to spending time in those distant, rarely visited neighborhoods, and finding out what there was to do on the other side of what was still somehow the city where I lived. I wanted to get to know my friend’s girlfriend better, as she figured to play an important role in my friend’s future, and therefore my own. Their semi-cohabitation was a big step for my friend, who throughout our young adulthoods had led a peripatetic existence, a rootlessness that mirrored his sense of hopeless, hapless romanticism. Following the collapse of the relationship that had brought him to Los Angeles, my friend had spent the last several years living out of his suitcase in a series of increasingly smaller and more squalid short-term rentals. It had been a dark time for him, but now it seemed that he had solved his problems of love and lodging in one fell swoop.

I was also crossing Los Angeles to spend the weekend with my friend and his girlfriend because at that point in my life I found myself with a lot of time on my hands, and few things with which to fill that time. The woman for whom I’d moved to Los Angeles had been away from the city for over a month and figured to be gone for much longer, an absence that lent its indefiniteness to everything else in my life.

It’s difficult, looking back, to recreate my state of mind on that day, August 4th, 2023. I don’t mean difficult emotionally; my life is much better now than it was then, and looking back inspires neither remorse nor longing. I mean that I’m not sure whether I perceived on that day that everything was on the verge of change. I don’t think I did. But I also think that if someone had told me what would happen next, I wouldn’t have been all that surprised.

I’m not sure, in other words, whether during those two hours on the bus and the train and the other train, while I read My Face for the World to See as station by station Los Angeles melted away, I was aware that I was staring through a dark glass into my own life. But that’s how I think of it now.

*

My Face for the World to See concerns a doomed transaction—a more accurate term, I think, than relationship—between two wayward, lonely people in mid-century Los Angeles. The nameless protagonist is a moderately successful screenwriter with a semi-estranged wife back in New York; the transactee is an aspiring actress, similarly unmoored, also nameless. The novel begins as he saves her from what’s likely a suicide attempt, and things only gets darker from there.

It’s an old story, and its two central characters are aware of their roles. Events proceed ineluctably. There’s more reflection, more commentary, than there is action. The narrator relates his perspective on the proceedings with endless qualifications, fine-tuned tracings of feelings and thoughts about feelings, yet all this contemplation does nothing, saves no one. It fails even to make the narrator more known to himself. One night, as he hears the woman moaning in her sleep, he inwardly laments the whole troubled affair. When he wakes in the morning and the woman is gone, it’s because, as she tells him later, he had been moaning in his sleep. You seemed to be suffering, and it was awful…There must be someone, or something, you hate very much.

Even here, in a statement so stark, everything is qualified. Seeming suffering; someone or something. Even when this self-knowledge arrives, all the narrator can do is shrink from its glare. I? He asks himself. A pause on the telephone. Her voice asking if he’s still there. Scene.

What saves the novel from unoriginality, at least for the most part—there’s a touch of staginess to the finale, a psychological patness avoided elsewhere—is the intricate, exacting quality of Hayes’ prose. To so closely examine a world so lacking in pity, to trawl so deeply through a soul at such bleak remove from that world, is something that other iterations of this familiar story might gesture toward, yet rarely achieve. But Hayes is a more meticulous stylist than other authors telling this familiar story, and the result is a more acute, oblique take on the standard romantic potboiler, one whose tightly coiled construction mirrors its characters’ inner states.

It’s also, as you might have guessed, exactly the sort of book in which a young man traveling through Los Angeles in a fog of emotional disconnect might find an uncomfortable degree of significance.

*

During the years I lived there, one of the things that always struck me as odd about Los Angeles was how far you could travel within the city’s sprawl, through a range of realities imposed patchwork onto geography, only to find, when you reached wherever you were going, a setting virtually identical to the one you’d left behind.

Sunbaked stucco houses and strip-malls. Mountains to the north, avenues stretching endlessly south. Liquor stores and laundromats and strip malls and strikingly beautiful churches, butcher shops and auto body joints and taco stands. Forever in the distance a line of spindly palm trees framed against a postcard-perfect sky.

I didn’t have a car, didn’t even have a driver’s license until I’d lived in Los Angeles for a year and a half, and after that I still didn’t have a car, so if I wanted to go anywhere, I took the bus. Sometimes the train. Sometimes, if I was going far enough, the bus and a train and another train.

Over time I came to the conclusion that public transportation, for all that it presents as something of an oxymoron within Los Angeles, is the best way to see the city, and to gain a sense of how people there actually live. It’s not a matter of witnessing the city’s so-called grimy underbelly, or seeing something real. Beverly Hills is real enough, as tangible a point on the map as any other. I went there sometimes too, if only to get my wisdom teeth removed.

Riding public transportation in Los Angeles is instrumental to understanding both the city’s scale and its transformation or lack thereof across that scale. It was the best means I ever devised to make myself understand that Los Angeles isn’t like the movies, or even the movies about how Los Angeles isn’t like the movies. Sitting on the bus revealed that for most of the citizens of Los Angeles, life in that mythical city was like life in any other place. There was work to be done, work that existed far beyond the realm of make-believe, and people needed some way of getting to where such work was performed.

Whenever I rode the bus or the train in Los Angeles, I would think of various scenes from movies or television shows featuring people driving around Los Angeles, mediated moments I’d half-absorbed and now half-remembered, an amalgamated blur that one day, without my ever imagining that such a thing might happen, had become the backdrop of my life. All that media had left me unprepared for the reality of living in Los Angeles, the vastness and the nuances within that vastness. Media at large could never possibly capture the truth of a place that simultaneously defied description and escaped attention, yet sometimes a singular piece of media managed to hold up a mirror to my perceptions, articulating aspects of the city that I’d noticed but not yet put into words.

Sometimes I would sit on public transportation in Los Angeles and lapse into a liminal, half-awake state, a fugue not unlike lying in bed in the morning and dimly registering the world reconstructing itself around you, objects assuming their shape for yet another day. In such moments I would think about the people in Los Angeles, people like me, and I did not feel, or at least I did not think I felt, superior to the things which concerned these people. I would think about the gulf that lay between the world for which Los Angeles is known and the world I saw on the bus and how I belonged to neither of these worlds, not really, and how this was a pretentious and self-indulgent thing to think, how it was my own problem, how the fault, most likely, was in myself. I would think about how I knew next to no one in the city, and how the irony of Los Angeles was that despite all its strivers and yearners, most of the people there, like most people in most places, didn’t want to be known. They weren’t particularly evasive, nor did they make any particular effort to seclude themselves: there was just something invisible, I found, about everybody who lived in the town.

I would ride the bus with all the other invisible people and I would think about these matters. In each moment when I rode the bus and thought about such matters, I was alone.

When I wasn’t thinking, I was reading. Sometimes I was thinking while I was reading. Other times I was neither thinking nor reading; other times I’d just look out the window and let my mind wander. I couldn’t, of course, look out the window at the same time that I was reading, but while I traveled through Los Angeles reading My Face for the World to See on August 4th, 2023, I felt as if I was simultaneously reading and looking out the window, perceiving the words without losing sight of the world. I felt as if I was looking straight through what I would have otherwise noticed had I been looking out the window, the stucco houses and strip malls and churches and shops, and seeing everything and everyone that these places typically concealed.

*

My Face for the World to See isn’t exactly obscure, though dubbing it a cult classic seems like an overstatement. Most of the essays, analysis, and reactions I can find online tend to focus on the same narrow band of elements. The novel is presented as a dark fable about Hollywood, an immaculately styled treatment of certain tropes. Again and again, comparisons are made to both film and literary noir. Some writers draw links between Hayes, himself a moderately successful Hollywood screenwriter with roots in New York, and the nameless narrator; others make comparisons between the nameless narrator and the mostly nameless narrators of Hayes’ other novels, the similarly jaded and jilted men haunting The Girl on the Via Flaminia and In Love and The End of Me.

But none of these analyses dwell at length on two sequences within the novel that I can still remember reading nearly three years after that day on the bus, a pair of passages in which the novel, otherwise more or less realist, slips into a sort of fantasy, and the nightmare gripping the protagonists surfaces into life, or life itself veers into the realm of nightmare.

The first of these sequences occurs roughly one third of the way through the novel, as the protagonists begin to grow used to each other, if not exactly comfortable. The woman, who’s hinted at a prior illness, a distress that the narrator senses is ongoing, reveals the nature of her affliction. Over six-and-a-half pages, her story is interpolated through the narrator’s voice.

Everything stems Proust-like from a shard of glass.

The woman, already teetering, sensing her career going sideways or not going anywhere at all, prone to staying up all night drinking and listening to records in her apartment, lighting candles and letting the shadowy room fill with smoke and crawling into bed in the arid hours of the morning and staying there until the afternoon sun burns its way through the blinds, finds one day in her cafeteria dish of stewed prunes a shard of glass. She takes the glass as a sign, proof of the sinister forces she’s long since suspected to be guiding both her life and the world. There are men, she tells the narrator, who tells us, men who work for the Studio, emissaries of the powers that be, and these men are watching, always watching, always putting women like her to the test. Each setback and indignity is carefully designed to gauge whether these women have what it takes to be a star, whether they can bear the weight of their dreams. And so the woman begins to eat and to walk and even to breathe very carefully, believing herself to be under constant surveillance by these men. She scans the gossip rags for clues, tips for how to behave, how to survive. She endures all this because she is absolutely certain that one day a limousine will draw level with the curb outside her squalid apartment, a darkly gleaming chariot that will carry her to the men who had subjected her to such trials, and who will then reward her faith. From that fateful meeting the limousine will carry her onward into the hills, to a beautiful house that was now hers, a beautiful life that was now hers, hers at last after all those years of suffering.

The sequence, surrealistic yet entirely believable in its derangement, descended abruptly and held me in its thrall. All at once I’d been plunged into a horror novel. I would have been tempted to call the passage a flight of fancy were it not executed with Hayes’ typical poise, a narrative control that accelerates and intensifies without losing its grasp. It’s a paranoid vision to rival anything from DeLillo, as powerful a meditation on the pursuit of fame that I’ve encountered in literature. In its insinuations toward the malignant side of the entertainment history, the legions of powerful men testing the legions of yearning women in ways both subtle and severe, in its suggestion that fame, and the wealth that fame secures, is the sole saving grace available to the likes of the average person, in its portrayal of the slow-boiling yet pernicious grip of conspiratorial thinking, how easy it is to slip and how far there is to fall, the sequence is as relevant a commentary on the present as it is of Hollywood seventy years ago.

The sequence is also, despite the fact that it explicates themes at the heart of the novel, a profoundly incongruous piece of writing within said novel. I believe it’s this incongruity that causes the sequence to go uncommented upon amid broader analysis of My Face for the World to See. Like the narrator, people don’t quite know what to do with it.

As for the narrator, he listens carefully to the woman’s story, registering the limits of his sympathy, the nagging thought in the back of his mind that her account is a little too convenient, a little too theatrical, to be believed. He sits with the woman in the wake of her unburdening, reflecting on how something is now expected of each of them, how the air of expectation smothers the room. As they draw closer to each other, he thinks of Baudelaire. He knows it’s a bad idea that will come to a worse end, and yet, as always, he does nothing to stop it.

The second sequence occurs roughly two thirds of the way through the novel, as the long-prophesied end slouches slowly into view. The couple has gone to Tijuana to take in the bullfights. The woman is radiant, sparkling. Enlivened in a way that the protagonist hasn’t yet seen. She enjoys dressing up, going somewhere, being seen somewhere, everything they don’t do the rest of the time. Then the battle begins.

I almost want to quote the whole thing, all five pages, just as I wanted to quote all of the woman’s paranoid delusion, so as to not sell short the hypnotic violence of the text. Suffice it to say that things don’t go as planned. The bullfight is so much worse than she had imagined, so much crueler. She tries to bear it—the entire passage is a chronicle of her attempt and ultimate inability to bear what she had been so determined to see—but she can’t stand the noise, the visceral immediacy, the blood. It’s all too public, too overwhelming. It’s no longer just an idea.

With the same merciless prose by which he flays his human victims, Hayes chronicles, in parallel with the woman’s collapse, the bull’s undoing: fluids bubbling forth, pieces cut away. He keeps one eye trained on the rapturous crowd and the harsh beauty of the ritual even as the woman grows pale, even as she sweats and retches and begins to cry. Throughout the scene, Hayes channels his voice through the narrator, and then through what seems to be the woman’s own mind but rendered in the third-person, and then through a figure who at first seems to be narrator again, describing what he’s seeing as the woman sits suffering beside him, but who then, as more bulls are brought out for slaughter, as the whole senseless spectacle begins again, appears to be no one, a figure abstracted from both him and her, a spirit floating above the crowd. The woman screams, slumps, screams again, vomits. The voice returns to the man’s body. The vomit spread in a dark stain at her feet, and all around us the crowd was standing and shouting, and down there it went on and on.

Several times throughout the passage, the narrator repeats that the woman is sick. What he doesn’t say, what Hayes never makes explicit, is the resonance between this sickness and the amorphous illness mentioned earlier in the novel, in the only other passage that resembles this one. For a writer as deliberate as Hayes, this must be a sign. The illness of the first passage and the sickness of the second are tied together, one a manifestation of the other. While the first passage traces how the woman destroys herself for fame, the second passage views that destruction from the outside, through the eyes of the audience for which she debases herself. The vast amphitheater of the bullfight, with its sensory overload, its foulness, its fundamentally public nature, everyone seeing and being seen, is a sort of inverted Hollywood. The spectacle playing out in the dust is the system at work, grinding up all the pretty young women waiting for limousines while everyone applauds.

When the woman gazes into the ring and sees the beast being massacred—the indignity she knows all too well, the flair to the savagery that lets everyone call it art, rather than what it really is—she’s looking at herself. It’s the same fantasy, the same fugue, now reflected in a funhouse version of life. She sees blood. She vomits. On and on it goes. The end draws ever nearer.

This being a novelistic treatment of a bullfight, a reader’s mind might be drawn toward Hemingway, but in terms of both broader narrative context and prose style, I believe that this scene possesses a more fitting, and altogether less expected, literary sibling. Though I hadn’t yet read it on August 4th, 2023, I felt a jolt of recognition a little more than two years later, when I picked up David Wojnarowicz’s Close to the Knives.

At the end of that book, at the end of his life, Wojnarowicz recalls going with his partner to a bullfight in Mexico. In a postscript to a text filled with death, others’ and his own, Wojnarowicz describes an experience strikingly similar to Hayes’ vision, using details and language and a propulsive narrative intensity that, while entirely original, recalls My Face for the World to See to an almost uncanny degree.

Here once again are the heat and the light, the shocking colors, the brass music and the cries of the crowd, the elegance of the matador and the swollen lolling tongue of the beast. In both books much attention is paid to blood, endless blood, descending in streams and sheets and dribbles from gaping wounds and panting mouths, clinging almost invisibly to the matador’s cape.

While Wojnarowicz makes the metaphor explicit—the pain I feel is to see my own death in the bull’s death; a projection of my own body’s nerve endings and nervous system onto the body of that exhausted and enraged animal—Hayes only drops hints. As the bull is broken down, as its life leaks away, the woman too suffers, she was exhausted with the stiffening of her stomach and her breasts and her spine, that stiffening as she tried to resist the impact of each successive episode on the sand in the hot and partially shaded ring. Wojnarowicz is the bull, and the violence being done to them is AIDS, is America; the woman is the bull, and the violence being done to them both is fame itself.

As I wrote previously, the woman’s descent into madness, and the bullfight’s descent into savagery, receive only occasional mentions in the roughly two-dozen essays and articles about Hayes’ work that I can find online. Some of these essays and articles are little more than plot summaries, yet even these plot summaries often fail to mention what are, to me, not only the most powerful sections of My Face for the World to See, but the keys to the novel’s meaning, the secret behind its power.

AnnaBookBel alludes to the woman’s precarious mental health; Swiftly Tilting Planet mentions ‘Hollywood’ 15 times, and ‘a disastrous trip to Mexico,’ but doesn’t go into detail. The Penciled Page mentions both the paranoid delusions and the bullfight, contrasting the latter to Hemingway, but these mentions are in the service of a fairly exhaustive recap, without much commentary on what each scene might signal. Stuck in a Book shies away from the novel’s more shocking moments, dismissing the bullfight as “an inelegant distraction to the flow of the narrative,” which seems to me to miss the point entirely.

In longer, less Tumblr-y essays, these sequences are treated as more than just components of a book report, yet remain, to my reading, underexplored. While these surveys of Hayes’ life and career offer different conclusions on Hayes and his work, they draw largely from the same limited well of scholarship on Hayes, particularly historian Alan Wald, who in a book on the ‘Literary Left’ described Hayes as “[Dark], Dantean, witty, conscious to imperiousness that he personified a new sort of ‘young generation,’ the lyric poet of the New York working class, the strike front, the writer of sketches that bite into memory.” This quote finds its way into a triptych of late-2010’s Hayesography: a blog post by Woody Haut, a Los Angeles Review of Books essay by Alex Harvey, a London Review of Books essay by Lucie Elven. Other details repeated across these essays, a reflection of each writer working with the same narrow band of facts to illuminate Hayes’ shadowy status, include: details of Hayes’ emigration to America and his early work as a newspaperman and his time in Italy during World War Two and his film credits and his authoring of ‘I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night;’ the same excerpt from Hayes’ early poem ‘In a Coffee Pot;’ the same anecdote (featuring Mel Brooks!) about Hayes getting fired from a Hollywood studio; the same quote about the narrator’s face being sad from In Love; the same quote about discovering the woman’s secrets from My Face for the World to See; the same quote about Los Angeles being full of people scheming to become more famous or more rich than they already were from My Face for the World to See; and the same joke about writers’ brains from The End of Me, which Harvey liked enough to name his essay after. Ultimately, each writer produces a distinct reading of Hayes’ oeuvre: Haut finds that he prefers Hayes’ noir novels and the screenplays; Harvey decrees that Hayes “perfectly capture[s] the texture of midcentury American life”; Elven, who conducts a particularly thorough review, praises Hayes’ writing as finely wrought, but ultimately dismisses him as a misogynist and something of a sellout, especially given the curdled, bitter nature of his later work, which has perhaps rightfully faded into obscurity1.

Other writers focus their attention on Hayes’ legacy-defining trilogy. In Harper’s, David Ulin breaks from the established meta-narrative to highlight his own personal favorite quotes and moments of meaning from Hayes’ bleak trilogy, though he passes only briefly over My Face for the World to See’s animating conspiracy. Writing about the novel for the Guardian, Nicholas Lezard hits upon the woman’s madness—she has constructed a world to account for her failure, and reality is only a paper-thin membrane which could dissolve at any moment—but doesn’t mention the bullfight, therefore failing to explicate the nature of the system that implanted and exacerbated this madness. In his introduction to the NYRB edition of My Face for the World to See, David Thomson notes the would-be actress’ instability, and the “magnificent, remorseless” scene of the bullfight, but doesn’t link the two, doesn’t push deeper. Andrew Lipstein, in the Rumpus, takes a long time to say that the meaning of Hayes’ work lies in its meaninglessness, its resistance to metaphor. He reads My Face for the World to See as all surface, a set of references to other genres, other lives. Perhaps it’s inevitable that a man determined to see this lack of meaning in a novel of such depth ends up providing, via his own interpretation, correspondingly scant meaning.

The best of these analyses, in my opinion, is a long essay in the New York Review by Vivian Gornick. A comprehensive examination of Hayes’ life and his mid-century trilogy, Gornick labors valiantly for Hayes to assume his rightful place in the American canon. Her essay analyzes the factors that informed Hayes’ sensibility: his left-leaning politics, his steeping in dimestore fiction, his wartime experiences, the rise of noir in both Europe and the United States. These factors, Gornick argues, produced a writer skeptical of the acquisitiveness that defined post-war America, and which found a natural outlet in both Hollywood’s physical setting and the product it manufactured. Central to this sensibility, central to each doomed love affair in each successive novel, is the voice that Hayes painstakingly cultivated, the voice of a man lost in his own self’s wilderness, altogether unable to believe in the reality of what surrounds him.

Here, then, is the closest that any of these analyses comes to the thread I find so jarring and so compelling within My Face for the World to See: the intrusion of nightmare into everyday life, the strangeness behind life’s fragile veneer that makes life itself faintly unbelievable. But even Gornick doesn’t mention the shard of the glass or the torture of the bull.

She does, however, describe more or less exactly what happened to me on August 4th, 2023, when I reached the end of My Face for the World to See, the dismal terminus toward which the book and I had been heading all through our journey across Los Angeles:

That night she cuts her wrists in the narrator’s apartment. He calls his friend Charlie the Fixer. Together, the two men get her half-dead body into a car, drive to her apartment, dump her, call a doctor, and go off to Romanoff’s, where they will be sure to be seen by dozens. The reader sits staring into space.

*

For my part, I stood staring into space.

When I reached the northeastern suburb of Los Angeles that lay at the far end of the bus and the train and the other train, I still had a few pages left to read. I got off the train and stood on the platform as the crowd flowed on without me, and in a shady spot amid the golden late-afternoon light I reached the end of another sort of journey.

After I read those final few pages, after I learned the fate of the man and the woman, the darkness that had all along been waiting for them, I put the book away and stood there, blinking something back. From the platform I could see the suburb’s main street, the quaint shops, the restaurants and bars filling up for the evening. Happy hour was beginning. People were sitting outside, drinking in the sun. A cloud of noise floated back to me as I stood alone on the platform, the amorphous happy buzz of people living life.

I started to walk.

Alfred Hayes died in relative obscurity. A few more middling Hollywood credits, a few lesser novels, work that remains hard to find despite his somewhat elevated profile. Attached to Hayes now, amid whatever mini-revival he’s enjoyed over the last decade, is the inherently dubious reputation of a writer’s writer, which seems another way by which people express a faint sense of disappointment, as if Hayes did less in the end than he could have, and received less in the end than he deserved.

As I passed from the commercial stretch of that small suburb to quiet tree-lined streets not all that different from the streets of my own neighborhood, two hours and twenty miles and one short novel in the past, I don’t believe that I had any inkling of the empty months stretching before me, months of riding the bus or the train toward one or another destination, casting my gaze between the blur of a window and the stolid unreality of one or another book. I’m not sure whether I believed, in some innermost place, that my relationship was as good as over, that in essence it was already done. It would have been easy, having only recently emerged from Hayes’ vision, to believe it. All I can be sure of is that as I walked those streets on August 4th, 2023, I was searching the placid exteriors of everything I saw for signs of the nightmare below.

What would have been difficult to believe, on that walk or afterwards, is that when those empty months passed I would meet the woman whom I would come to love more deeply than I’d known myself to be capable of, the woman whose love would reveal the inadequacy of everything that had come before. If I sensed a warning in Hayes’ work, if on some subconscious level I grasped how his world applied to mine, then I don’t think I perceived how the fever would break, how the nightmare would recede, and how life would have love in it, real love, rather than mere cruelty.

But I haven’t forgotten the power of that nightmare. I will be aware forevermore of the marginal barrier separating Hayes’ world from mine.

Still blinking back that other world, I ascended the steps of the building where my friend and his girlfriend lived. I wasn’t sure which of their neighboring apartments they would be in, so I pressed both buzzers simultaneously. As if they’d rehearsed it, the doors swung open in parallel, and then there they both were, grinning ear to ear. It was like something from the credits of a sitcom. Cue the laugh track, fire up the canned applause.

Staring past them, into each apartment’s shadowed interior, I thought of the woman’s body laid on the couch, bleeding out as the doctor walked through the night. I thought of the narrator on the top step of Romanoff’s, steeling himself to enter the room full of his Hollywood peers, all those people for whom nothing is ever enough. I thought of the silent pact he makes at the end of the book, how in exchange for his own salvation in the eyes of the law, the narrator condemns his soul to hell.

My friend and his girlfriend smiled at me, and I smiled back at them. They said how good it was to see me. They said that we were all about to have so much fun. I mumbled something, still hiding my eyes. For a moment longer we stood together in the light, then they turned from me, stepping toward the shadows, and I followed them inside.

Young W.G. Sebald photographs himself in a mirror. Via Celluloid Wicker Man.

One month ago, when I first arrived on Substack, I kept my eyes open. I looked for anything in the algorithm that seemed to hint at some elaborate meaning behind appearances.

I had come to Substack for a specific purpose. It was not a unique purpose, but it was, nonetheless, mine. I wanted and still want to build a following for my writing, to disseminate said writing, to make connections with other writers, and to use the audience and connections I acquire in this digital space to help get my writing published in a physical form. I don’t mean big-five branding and a splashy advance, my face on dust jackets in airports; I just want to find a few people out there—even, possibly ideally, at a small press—who believe in my work and are willing to print it.

I don’t expect this to happen overnight, or without a lot of hard work and frustration etc etc. On some level I don’t really expect it to happen at all.

In the meantime, a meantime that might stretch into eternity, there are other benefits to being on Substack. Sometimes I enjoy reading people’s work, and pondering the ideas that this work sparks within me, seeds that might grow into essays like this one. And there’s something exciting about participating, even peripherally, in a community structured around a shared love of literature, a vast salon somewhere out on the margins. It’s a romantic, even thrilling notion. Who wouldn’t want to be a part of something like that, provided it were true?

When you join Substack and tell the algorithm that you’re interested in literature, publishing, essays, culture commentary, and other nonsense like that, it recommends a certain type of writer who writes in a certain way. Such a writer is dismissive about the state of the publishing industry, having been beaten down by said industry, yet despite this bitter streak he maintains lofty ideals about literature, and an earnest belief in its potential. His work evinces a grand sense of purpose; right here on this piddly little platform he’s assembling unified theories of art, life, and everything. Together, writers of this kind are fighting the establishment by building a new establishment, with all the rules that any establishment demands.

None of this is bad, necessarily. In many ways my heart is with these writers, or at least it should be. If nothing else they’ve summoned the wherewithal to make names and occasionally even semblances of a living for themselves via their Substack presences, which is no easy thing, as I’m finding out. Many of them have achieved the dream that I’m trying to achieve—a loyal following, a small press to call home—and so it becomes difficult to parse whether my skepticism emerges from genuine ideological opposition or plain old envy.

Part of me feels like I should end this essay here. Surely it’s good that people care about the same thing I care about. Surely any differences are just a matter of taste, and it’s not worth spinning out thousands of words about why my subjective preferences are better than anyone else’s.

And yet.

More than the notion that the current literary landscape is a wasteland—false from the perspective of big publishers, which continue to find ways to turn profits, but tautological from the perspective of any overtly ‘literary’ writer trying to gain a foothold within this landscape—what bothers me is the tone that many of these Substackers have adopted. I can’t help but read this tone as a pose, though it’s probably just the way these writers are, and no more of a pose than whatever it is that I do when I write.

Still, due to some strange mix of nature and nurture, I’m not well-disposed to the kitchen-sink breathlessness with which many of these Substack writers diagnose and denounce contemporary fiction. It feels like someone ranting in my face about why ranting in my face is the future of communication. There’s an odd combination of jadedness and earnestness to such writing, along with rather startling certainty: about the self, naturally, but also about which things are good and which things suck.

Yes, I’m aware that expressing this attitude paints me as a stick-in-the-mud, a company man. Thoroughly lame. One of them. My sympathy should lie with the underdog—I too have been spurned by the Establishment, I too have come to Substack with nothing but a handful of stories and a dream—but alas, I’ve been molded by this Establishment, and still crave its approval. To hear Substack tell it, both my stories and my dream bear the mark of things that suck.

Though I agree with many, if not all, of the critiques that these writers levy against the status quo, I’m not enamored of their solutions. It might just be because their preferred brand of literature, and therefore their writing, is not my own. As I wrote previously, these writers tend to believe that the only writing worth writing is writing that entails a lot of writing. They yearn for sprawling books in the old novelistic tradition with earthy unclean sentences that plumb the murky depths of the soul; they decry the flat, myopic minimalism of modern fiction. Such fiction, they proclaim, is small writing, written by and for small minds. The prevalence of this fiction is a direct reflection of the Systemic Mediocrity that holds modernity in its grip, and therefore, like the Mediocrity itself, this fiction is a form of evil. And as we know, evil in all its forms must be defeated.

In case you think I’m exaggerating about the apocalyptic tone that some of these essays take, I promise you I’m not. Then again, if you’re deep enough in the Substack weeds to find the likes of me, then you probably already know the sort of thing I’m talking about.

*

To make all of this rambling a bit more concrete, and to break out of the reliance on generalized synthesis that I dislike in essays1 both on Substack and elsewhere, let’s examine an example of this phenomenon, as seen in this essay by a writer with the pseudonym of Krug2.

Beginning with the caveat that said essay is “much ‘stupider’” than what he tends to write on Substack, which is probably why I can claim to understand it, Krug lays out a generalized case against what can be broadly categorized as the MFA Novel—which isn’t, under the framework by which Krug understands literature, a novel at all.

To hear Krug tell it, MFA Novels run contrary to the Grand European Tradition. Within this Tradition, novels functioned as expansions of consciousness, revealing fundamental truths about mankind’s shared condition. To be a novel, in other words, a novel-shaped object needs to discover something, to shed light on the human experience in ways that only a novel can.

It’s a high bar, but why should we not hold art to a high bar? Why should lovers of literature settle for less?

In contrast, sayeth Krug, MFA Novels are too concerned with the petty and uninteresting lives of their authors to discover anything. According to the four condemnations Krug lays out, such novels:

1. Lack Style (brittle minimalist television prose from brittle minimalist television souls)

2. Lack Action/Imagination/Power (the narrators of these so-called novels, much like the authors who created them, tend to be passive wimps who favor contemplating doing things over actually doing them)

3. Lack Essence (identity politics REEEEE)

4. Lack Ideas (insofar as these novels offer thoughts about the state of the world/mankind, said thoughts are muddled, trite, and devoid of philosophical/interdisciplinary overlays)3

I think there’s a great deal of merit to these critiques. There are some self-admitted blanket statements, sure, but on the whole it’s true that the most critically acclaimed and generally talked-about examples of recent literary fiction tend to be minimalist, reflective, politically correct, and accessible, rather than maximalist, imaginative, transgressive, and baroque.

Part of me suspects that there’s always been a similar gap between work that pushes boundaries and work that garners mainstream plaudits, and that people like Krug have always been complaining about this gap. However, it’s also true that these days there’s less room for experimentation compared to previous literary eras, and that literary experiments are less likely to receive critical attention, or to be held up by Art Knowers as works that represent the era in which they were written. The margins are thinner. As a result, many writers who want to make their own marks on tradition are being left out in the cold4.

Another part of me, reading these critiques, feels called out. Naturally, I wouldn’t claim that my own writing lacks style, action, essence, or ideas, but many of Krug’s epithets nonetheless hit a little too close to home. Prose-wise I do tend to rein things in a bit, especially compared to the great gabbers whom Krug and most of this Substack set seem to favor5. My writing is often a means of processing events that have happened to me, meaningful moments from my life and the recurring thoughts that trace patterns across these moments. Insofar as I express political sentiments in my work, they’re not terribly far outside of the mainstream, though I do say ‘retard’ more than polite company would allow. And it’s been a while since I brushed up on my Kierkegaard, or consciously tried to work philosophy (or any other discipline) into a short story6.

I haven’t gotten an MFA, and have no interest in doing so, largely due to the same factors that Krug and others cite: an aversion to excess education, a boredom with the politics involved, a fear of the circlejerkiness of it all, a sense that I’m better off just doing the work myself. Also, I don’t want to starve to death. But as I’ve written about before, I’m a product of the same Mediocrity Industrial Complex that Krug rebels against. For all my life I’ve let mediocrity rub its clammy hands all over me.

Reading Krug’s critiques, and seeing so many others on Substack echo these critiques, I began to wonder whether I’m part of the problem—not just in my role as a member of the corporate world, which is a given, but even in my writing, which I’ve always viewed as an antidote to that other world. What if the thing that’s supposed to save me from mediocrity is actually further propagating that mediocrity?

My alarm bells really started ringing when Krug took Leaving the Atocha Station to task:

“Ben Lerner’s debut (which I could not finish) begins with the narrator contemplating a man who is moved by a painting. Lerner’s stand-in feels nothing himself, and he spends his time neurotically meditating on how so [sic] other man is able to feel so much. It isn’t clear to me how someone with such a small inner world can enlarge my own to a significant degree. And I feel a similar way with every young male MFA ‘novelist’ that I come into contact with. They’re not just weak but also pretentious (in the bad sense) and annoying. This is a topic for another essay, however.

Perhaps I’m too harsh—and I can’t bring myself to finish most of these books to be perfectly honest—but it seems to me that most of the time the MFA novel just mirrors back the writer’s own tedious and uninteresting life. There are no great adventures, either in the physical world or in the writer’s imagination, and therefore no real possibility for genuine growth.”

Well shit. A lot of my writing involves neurotic meditation from narrators who want to be moved by art, but more often than not fail to be so moved. The gulf between artistic ideals and mundane reality is a space from which many of my day-to-day thoughts, and therefore much of my fiction, emerges.

Is my inner world woefully small? Are my literary concerns pretentious (in the bad sense)? Am I, as I’m pretty sure Krug is implying by calling male MFA novelists weak and annoying, actually super fucking gay?

Perhaps. But as I wrote before, at the point where I probably should have ended this essay, I think it’s more a matter of taste.

Krug addresses taste in a footnote for a separate essay, stating:

“I will write more on the concept of taste in the future, but I take it that taste has to do with our own interests and sensitivities. For example, I am not especially sensitive to minimalism and am extremely interested in flashy styles. What I find subjectively interesting is different, however, from the different from the [sic] variations in height between values. In my view, a clear style is preferable to an awkward one (all things being equal), but minimalism and maximalism lie on the same plane, even though they are incompatible with each other. This requires a much more detailed exposition of my axiology, which will hopefully be available soon7.”

So there you have it. I am sensitive to minimalism, and many of the folks on Substack are extremely interested in flashy styles. That’s just the way it is. Another good place to end this whole meander.

Or maybe not. Because no matter what our own subjective interests and sensitivities guide us toward, it’s objectively important for writers (or really anyone) to maintain internal consistency, both in our own writing and in our criticism of other’s writing.

For example, in the same essay in which Krug takes Lerner to task for crafting the sort of small-hearted narrator who would rather contemplate the nature of feeling something in relation to art than just feel the damn thing, he praises Bellow for “lampoon[ing] the impotence of the intellectual mind.” Thus, the gap between how an ostensibly intellectual mind perceives itself and how that mind actually functions in the world appears to be a worthy subject for true fiction. But maybe it’s only okay to plumb this inner void if your style is flashy?

Additionally, in a paragraph/footnote combo within his essay denouncing contemporary writers (I’ve put the footnote in parentheses), Krug does identify one potentially interesting avenue for the MFA Novel: not as a movement in itself, but as a subject for a more elevated type of writer.

“The MFA writer, as a model, as an ‘archetype,’ is a lonely and pathetic figure that neither raises us up nor brings us down. Such a person produces work and garners praise, but ultimately does nothing of any real importance. (This is actually an area that is ripe for discovery. What a strange system we have… These nobodies roleplay as geniuses while decrepit institutions prop them up for financial gain and political influence. A real genius could find much here to discover, I think.)”

I couldn’t agree more! In fact, I know a novel about the foolishness of all those supposed geniuses who are given grants and held up for praise by various cultural apparati, but are in reality somewhat lonely, pathetic figures. It’s called Leaving the Atocha Station.

Reading an excoriation of a book that the excoriator admits to not even finishing, an excoriation concerned not with the book itself so much as what the excoriator takes the book to represent, it becomes difficult, at least for me, to believe that Krug and others like him hate Ben Lerner’s work so much as they hate the idea of Ben Lerner, Ben Lerner as an avatar for something they already know they detest.

This dismissive spirit hardly jibes with the evenhandedness with which Krug concludes his essay on his preferred literary mode, Personalism8: “This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be critical, but it does entail that we ought not impose our own subjective tastes onto those around us.”

On the surface, this is a fine dictum in life and in literature, but in practice it will lead to pretty tepid versions of both. Also, Substack would cease to exist. (Whether that would be bad is another question.)

So how are writers meant to impart without imposing? MFA Fiction has an advantage here, given its tendency toward understatement, but per Krug’s definition such fiction has no message to impart anyway, other than perhaps I know the right people. Still, even fans of maximalist literature would have to acknowledge, I think, that their favorite books are often about as subtle as a bag of hammers.

Some might reject this prioritization of subtlety, claiming that it’s extraneous to True Literature, a product of the same trends smothering the life out of contemporary writing. Yet in at least one sense, Krug’s Personalism essay agrees that writers ought to apply a deft touch:

“In this way, the genius (and Calvino is a genius if ever there was9) never consciously intends his message, nor does he instruct. His moral view of the world will, necessarily, be expressed in his work, but this is not a preconceived idea that is willed into being. Ideally, it’s the natural result of his moral tenor imprinting itself on the material of his work.”

While certain books might achieve a delicate synthesis between the contours of a fictional mind and the tenor of an authorial voice, that balance is rare. Most books, no matter the literary movement from which they emerge, are mid. I’m inclined to say that maximalism, with its showiness, its constant calling of attention to itself, its 12-foot neon sign flashing NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL WRITING, achieves midness more often than minimalism, but that’s just a matter of preference10.

It takes a rare writer to reveal the inner workings of a mind, and through that mind make a statement about the world that’s oblique yet no less decisive for this obliqueness, rather than crafting a voice that mumbles its way down well-worn paths or yammers on in Sweeping Pronouncements. Any work in any style, minimalist or maximalist, MFA Fiction or Grand European Tradition, fails when it begins to operate primarily as a set of preconceived ideas and instruction rather than literature.

So while I agree with much of what Krug says about the shortcomings of contemporary novels, and though I believe he crafts thoughtful essays about the merits of his favorite writers, I can’t quite get behind his theories of fiction, or perhaps any theories of fiction. After all, just because you’ve theorized long and hard about what fiction ought to be doesn’t mean the results will achieve what you want them to.

But again: there’s no guarantee that anything I do is worth a damn either. I’m still stuck in the same sandbox as all the other writers craving mainstream appeal, peddling our semi-autofictional stories about how art fails to illuminate our boring little lives. I’m still playing it safe11. And no artist worth liking is worth liking because he’s safe.

*

So if contemporary fiction is broken, and the algorithm-approved alternative doesn’t appeal, where does that leave me?

One potential answer—which, as with many answers, also doubles as a warning—came to me via the writer Brandon Taylor. Perhaps not coincidentally, Taylor is one of the airbrushed authorial specters in the AI-generated image appended to Krug’s takedown of MFA Novels12. So of course I would draw inspiration from somebody whom a certain corner of Substack already dismisses as a hack.

I haven’t read Taylor’s fiction, so I can’t comment on how he coheres or fails to cohere with the type of work that Krug broadly categorizes and intensely loathes. All I know about Taylor is that he wrote what strikes me as a very thoughtful essay about Rachel Cusk, W.G. Sebald, and certain traps into which so much writing, including my own, can fall13.

There’s no direct link or reference between Krug’s essay and Taylor’s essay, apart from Taylor’s yassified apparition, but I view these essays as being in partial dialogue with each other. In examining Cusk’s Outline Trilogy and her impact on recent fiction, including the work of his own students, Taylor’s acute critical eye examines several of the themes Krug identifies in his polemic, adding critical frameworks and concrete textual analysis.

Both essays, at any rate, made me stop and ask myself what I was doing with my writing, which is to say my life at large. So that seems worthy of further exploration.

After summarizing the structure of Cusk’s Outline Trilogy, in which all manner of people divulge stories from their lives to an oddly disembodied central character who reveals comparatively little about herself, with these anecdotes from strangers and loved ones and everyone in between serving as a sort of piecemeal plot, Taylor conducts a close reading of a brief paragraph from Transit, the Trilogy’s middle child. This paragraph, he posits, exemplifies not only Cusk’s unconventional narration style throughout the Trilogy, but the underpinnings of an entire literary philosophy, one that in my view is congruent with, but ultimately distinct from, what Krug and others might classify as “MFA Fiction.”

To quote Taylor quoting Cusk:

“It was growing dark outside, and the rain against the salon’s big windows looked like ink running down a page. The traffic crawled along the blackened road beyond. The cars all had their lights on. Dale was standing behind me in the mirror, lifting long dry fistfuls of hair and then letting them fall. His eyes were moving all over my image with a devouring expression. His face was somber and I watched it in the glass.”

In his analysis, Taylor traces the multiple layers by which this passage, and the Trilogy at large, achieve their alienating effect: the shift from imperfect to perfect tense, the shift from seeming third-person to nebulous first-person, the shift in POV from the documentary-style narration to Dale the hairdresser watching Faye to Faye watching Dale watching Faye. Each of these shifts is achieved, naturally, through a mirror: all through the scene, the mind is watching the world, which is but an extension of the mind, reflect back unto itself.

Both Cusk’s trilogy and MFA Novels more broadly are preoccupied with notions of perception and the act of perceiving. The central narrative presences in novels of this sort are often paper-thin proxies for their authors, while these central narrative presences’ perceptions and reflections, which are really just shoddily disguised vehicles for the author’s perceptions and reflections, constitute these novels’ only driving force.

As Taylor writes, and as Krug would likely concur with, “I now find first-person narrators so mediated that they even mediate their own experience of reality and consciousness back to themselves…It seems unfair that what [sic] we so often focus on that external aspect without showing equal consideration to that vast inner terrain that gives shape to the external aspect.”

Taylor concludes with an injunction—wise in my view, and surely something else that Krug would agree with—that writers must be mindful of what they mediate, and why. To copy Cusk without careful consideration, or to blindly imitate the brand of contemporary fiction that parallels Cusk’s coolly detached bourgeois female narrators passively reflecting on events without ever intervening in their flow, is to unwittingly encode a certain remove into your work. In its most egregious cases, this substitution of received wisdom for genuine personal style results in work that’s not only bloodless for being an imitation, but bloodless in all the ways that Krug and others impugn MFA Novels: stilted, insular, false, inconsequential. Little more than a pose.

But what if that sense of remove is how one genuinely perceives the world? What if that hall of mirrors, that endless perceptual dance, is just what life feels like right now?

*

As I wrote previously, I spend a lot of time in my own head. I’m always building maps of meaning and trying to place myself upon those maps, or pondering the discrepancy between where I ought to be on said map and where I really am. Cusk’s work, and work in a similar vein, often resonates more deeply with me than other kinds of fiction because within their multiple modes of mediation I recognize minds much like my own.

Krug and other Substackers express a desire for writing that breaks free of these mental shackles, that transcends the plastic world through pure adventurous spirit. I think in the right hands, wedded to the right mind, that sort of literature is a beautiful solution. But that isn’t how my own mind or my own writing works. I direct my thought, and therefore my writing, toward the quiet moments when the gulf between myself and the world is either bridged—through art, through love—or when that gulf, if still present, can at least be adequately conceived. When I can look across all that distance and gauge that I’m not on the other side, but at least I’m no longer lost.

Whether a writer embraces MFA Novels or the Grand European Tradition might come down to their belief in the power of fiction to bridge that gulf. Taylor touches on this in his essay, which positions Cusk as a literary descendant of W.G. Sebald, another writer whose work has resonated deeply with me. Beyond similarities in style (direct, clear, what admirers would call ‘chiseled’ and detractors would call ‘dull’) and tone (what admirers and detractors alike would call ‘melancholy as shit’), Cusk’s Outline Trilogy and Sebald both, to paraphrase Marco Rubio, dispel with the fiction of fiction itself. Gone are the trappings of plot and character, the stage directions of filmscript fiction; gone is the sense I often feel as a writer that all of writing is an exercise in moving characters through space, which mirrors the sense I often feel as a living breathing human that all of life is an exercise in moving my body through time.

Both Cusk and Sebald—and, if I may be aggrandizing enough to put myself in their lofty company, myself—find something embarrassing about these trappings. I believe it’s this embarrassment that separates MFA Novels from the Grand European Tradition, or from the hundreds of dudes on Substack doing Cormac McCarthy impressions and calling it the future of literature. Some writers love the whole artificial edifice of storytelling, expansive prose that constructs scenery and then chews upon it, and some writers are repulsed by all that—maybe because they’re lazy, maybe because they’ve drunk too deeply from the minimalist well, but maybe, in the best cases, because that mode of writing doesn’t reflect how they make their way through the world.

Sebald expands on this notion of fiction’s embarrassing qualities, and defines his own authorial vision, in a 1997 interview:

“But what I’m trying, fairly consciously beyond that, is to precisely point up that sense of uncertainty between fact and fiction, because I do think that we largely delude ourselves with the knowledge that we think we possess, that we make it up as we go along, that we make it fit our desires and anxieties and that we invent a straight line of a trail in order to calm ourselves down. So this whole process of narrating something which has a kind of reassuring quality to it is called into question. That uncertainty which the narrator has about his own trade is then, as I hope, imparted to the reader who will, or ought to, feel a similar sense of irritation about these matters. I think that fiction writing, which does not acknowledge the uncertainty of the narrator himself, is a form of imposture and which I find very, very difficult to take. Any form of authorial writing, where the narrator sets himself up as stagehand and director and judge and executor in a text, I find somehow unacceptable. I cannot bear to read books of this kind.”

Much of the comparatively maximalist Grand European Tradition, with its narrative exuberance and infinite supply of stories within stories, provokes a reaction in me similar to what’s being described by Sebald, who elsewhere in the same interview chastises novels wherein “we are subjected to the rules and laws of fiction to a degree which I find tedious.”

The roots of this embarrassment go beyond mere preference, beyond the standard-order boredom with the recurring tropes and recycled plots into which nearly all fiction can be sorted. It indicates a fundamental lack of faith in fiction as the sort of humanistic discovery mechanism that Krug and others believe the novel to be. Within the void where Sebald et al operate, all fiction can do is shed light on its own inadequacies, underscoring the extent to which, to paraphrase another Sebaldian work of fiction, we’ve ceased to understand the world.

It’s easy to see how such an overtly anti-fiction stance—or, less charitably, such a pose—evolved into the navel-gazing semi-fictions of MFA Novels at large. As Lauren Oyler notes in a not altogether positive survey of Sebald’s influence on contemporary writing:

“In his 2001 review of Austerlitz, Michael Hofmann wrote that it was startling that ‘books without much pretence of character or action, but where the role of story is taken by thought or reading—or even more starkly, by the memory of thought or reading—could catch on at all.’ But in surveying [Sebald’s] contemporary influence, I don’t know if it’s so surprising…Sebald represents something deeper about the postmodern intellectual situation. He formally captures the experience of the academic observer, the reader, the writer, the figure who is often in proximity to history, deeply aware of being trapped or ‘complicit’ but who, rather than being directly affected, experiences it through stories, images, and research. Unlike contemporary novels, such as Jenny Offill’s Weather or Kate Zambreno’s Drifts, that depict this figure as almost circumscribed by their knowledge, engaged in a fraught search for a tidbit that will assuage, or at least relate to, a personal crisis that is ultimately the core of the narrative, Sebald represents the scholarly existence as vital; the research produces the meaning of the fictions, which, lacking a central focus, become testaments to the possibilities and the limitations of the work of art, to what it can and can’t achieve.”

To which I once again nod my head and say yes, that’s how it is for me. But do I only feel that way because I’m a product of the Mediocre Machine—a system designed to leach us of feeling, to erode our sense of wonder at fiction’s transformative potential?

All I can say in my own defense is that narratives of reflection in which clear yet recursive prose parallels the contours of a narrator’s thoughts inspire me more than narratives in which all the questing is external. Both are narratives of discovery; both say something about the human condition. Why should it be a strike against one form of fiction that it largely occurs within a narrator’s head? Is that not where most of life is experienced? Is it not true that life, more than a Pynchonesque caper or a McCarthyesque manichean struggle or a Nabokovian parlor game or a Bellowvian bellow, resembles something like the Outline trilogy: people coming to you at random and dispensing equally random information, leaving you to wonder what you’re meant to do with so many unasked-for inputs, what these glimpses into other lives might mean? We feel this estrangement not merely thanks to the internet and social media, hyperreal filters within the everyday that bring us snatches of information from all across the world and then force us to devise our own frameworks to stitch that information together, but within our unmediated daily lives, as we interact with those we meet, or even those we love. People come and go, time marches on, and all that remains, more often than not, are memories we’ve invested with a meaning that’s somehow obscure to us, stories we’ve clung to as a means of defining both all those other people and ourselves.

Or, like Sebald said when advising his students on writing, “none of the things you make up will be as hair-raising as the things people tell you.”

Of course, as I’ve written before and will surely write again, it all comes down to disposition. Oyler, who isn’t wholly given over to Sebald’s sort of fiction, notes that his work often strikes her as “posturing and needy,” which is pretty much the same thing I would say about the other side14. You can’t convince everyone. And there are valid reasons why Cusk, Sebald, and others might strike readers as hollow.

Though he goes unmentioned in Taylor’s essay on Cusk, I view her as a literary descendant of not only W.G. Sebald, but another austere and foreboding initialed author who’s also a personal hero of mine, J.M. Coetzee. I’m far from the first to make this comparison; the New York Times does so in the very first blurb in my edition of Outline, which doesn’t help me beat the allegations of being a simp for mainstream middlebrowism. In addition to Coetzee’s prose style, Cusk has inherited his doubts about the power of fiction. Coetzee too is a minimalist by nature who’s flirted with autofiction, though his powerful imagination and philosophical rigor likely shield him from charges of belonging to the dreaded MFA cohort.

In a 2002 essay printed in the collection of literary criticism Inner Workings, Coetzee, like Oyler, praises Sebald while simultaneously dinging him for “dead patches and moments of empty portentousness15.” And like Taylor, Coetzee notes that Sebald’s characters exist in a fog of melancholia because “they are labouring under the burden of Europe’s recent history, a history in which the Holocaust looms large. Internally they are racked by conflict between a self-protective urge to block off a painful past and a blind groping for something, they know not what, that has been lost.”

To Taylor, Cusk’s evocation of Sebald misses the mark because her characters, in their altogether comfortable lives, are operating under nothing like the psycho-emotional weight of the Holocaust. The fog of melancholia in which they move is therefore unearned; to bring things full circle, it’s no more than a pose. When Taylor sees his students aping Cusk’s reflexive hall-of-mirrors mode of perception, embracing it without any seeming irony, he sees them writing at a two-fold remove, doubly void of both context and emotional weight.

I don’t want to trivialize the Holocaust, or worse, defend more shitty MFA writing. I can only claim that in a world where profound suffering is often experienced at an oddly stilted remove, where the future is bleak and uncertain, where our systems have failed us, where art fails us more often than not, I think that a Cuskian retreat to one’s own mind, or a Sebaldian stripping away of fiction’s many marionette strings, can be an emotionally and intellectually honest literary treatment of said world, and a continuation, rather than a negation, of the novel’s historic status as an instrument of humanistic discovery.

*

When I was at my Elite Institution of Higher Learning, being trained in the ways of the Mediocre Machine, I took a three-part course on the History of English Literature. As far as such courses go, I think it was pretty good. Despite the impossible task of summarizing the sprawling history of an ever-changing abstraction into discrete units digestible for addled and distracted young minds, I learned a few things. Later I would develop my own frameworks of meaning, later I would discover books that opened my mind far wider than anything that had been on the syllabus, but who’s to say that the framework I’d been given wasn’t the very thing that equipped me to branch out on my own?

In the three-part course’s final lecture, at the end of literary history, we turned our eyes toward the future. Our revered professor, a highly influential and accomplished mind within the world of literary theory, gazed down at us from the lectern and told us the point of everything we’d spent the last year learning.

He said there wasn’t one. Literature was fun, engaging. A fine way of passing the time. But it didn’t do anything, didn’t mean anything. Lest we forget, it literally wasn’t real.

With that, our literary education concluded. We filtered back out into the world, both more and less sure of what we claimed to know.

Not long afterwards, following an illustrious career, the professor retired. And not long after that, news broke that the professor had been a frequent harasser of women in his orbit, to the point that once, in an effort to ward him off, a grad student whose house the professor had talked his way inside had sicced her dog on him, forcing the professor, who had a debilitating fear of dogs, to flee into the night.

I don’t bring up this anecdote to discredit the professor’s conclusions about literature, or the Elite Institution of Higher Learning for employing him. I bring it up because it feels all too apropos that I will forever associate literature’s inherent meaninglessness, the idea that the words for which we live and die actually amount to nothing, with the image of a learned man running through darkness, the hounds of hell nipping at his heels.

Perhaps the professor, like Cusk and Sebald and a legion of MFA writers and me, felt a certain embarrassment about devoting his life to something that isn’t, in any tangible sense, real. Perhaps he felt the same need to apologize for this devotion, and to make light of it, that I do. All my cheeky footnotes and equivocating asides, all the statements like the one I’m making now, are no more than the tic-like manifestation of that embarrassment. I’d probably be better off saying things with my chest, embracing literature and all this spilling of ink about literature’s meaning with my whole heart, rather than retreating to the same old ironic remove.

Yet this embarrassment extends to much of my life, straight down to my soul, and if I want to follow any notion of Personalism, then this embarrassment must be acknowledged. This embarrassment certainly extends to Substack, a place that makes me cringe more often than not, both for myself and others. I can’t help but view most of what the algorithm brings me, all these earnest efforts to build community and make our thoughts known, as just so much bowing and scraping. It feels like an insult for writers to have to resort to such methods in order to achieve our dreams, but that’s how things are. The world is an insult. Literature, even if it isn’t real, has taught me that well enough.

In the end, I don’t really believe that literature is meaningless, or at least no more meaningless than the other methods by which human beings take comfort and attempt to define ourselves. I also believe that literature, whatever it means or fails to mean, should be broad enough to include those who believe in its power and those who have their doubts: the MFA cohort and the Grand European Tradition and everyone in between, kumbaya huzzah forever. But that sort of universalist sentiment is even more boring than the trappings of fiction that Sebald rejected. Literature might mean something, but that kind of bland, equivocating sentiment doesn’t. And it certainly doesn’t drive views on Substack. For that, you have to attack.

If there’s anything I do enjoy about being on this platform, it’s figuring out how the scraps of information I encounter here fit with my own stray thoughts and ill-defined notions to form a jagged yet cohesive whole. I enjoy teasing out these connections via writing, and will always enjoy filtering my thoughts into words, even when these words describe their own failure to properly transcribe the thoughts to which I’ve attached them.

When MFA Novels probe that gulf between intended and actual meaning, when they illuminate even some small degree of that darkness, I believe that such novels earn their place at the completely arbitrary table of True Literature. If all that ironic distance is just a pretense for another voiceless, airless, bloodless novel about a bunch of artsy wastrels in Brooklyn, then sure, throw it on the slagheap. But let’s not pretend that said slagheap isn’t littered with crap from all sorts of movements, or that fiction which doubts its own power isn’t a valid creative response to a world forever on the brink.

So I’ll tweak my algorithm and try to get over myself—the solutions, I suppose, for everyone in this day and age. I’ll search for works of passion and vision across ideological lines, knowing that a clear voice is hard to find. I’ll continue loving literature, even for all of its failures, even for all of my failures, and I’ll continue being embarrassed as I create literature of my own, but I won’t feel ashamed. Shame only comes from being too embarrassed to try.

That’s what I’ll tell myself, anyway, as I run deeper into the night.

The 1970 New York Knicks. NY Daily News via Getty Images. Accessed here.

Sometime around 2017, when I was home for the holidays, my father and I watched the New York Knicks blow a fourth quarter lead. It was an ugly, predictable affair. As my father had once texted me after a different, more or less identical loss, Knicks died like dogs down the stretch. Stalled car on train tracks. Because only the Knicks can get my dad to text like Rorschach from Watchmen.

As we sat in the dimming glow of another letdown, another reason to feel stupid for caring, I asked my father whether he thought the Knicks would win another championship during his lifetime.

My father had been a teenager during the fabled runs in 1970 and 1973, listening to games on the radio and clipping photos from the morning newspapers to put in his scrapbook. At the time I posed the question about an additional championship, the Knicks had been losers for nearly half a century, while my father was a healthy man in his early sixties. By most reasonable estimates, he had another twenty or thirty years of fandom left to serve.

Looking me straight in the eye and speaking flatly and without hesitation, my father said no. No, they wouldn’t. The Knicks would remain what they were. They had won long ago, and that had been nice, but it wouldn’t happen again—not in his lifetime, and maybe not in mine.

The worst part wasn’t that he said it so quickly, without even pretending to consider the alternative. The worst part was that I knew he was right.

We sat for a moment, watching the mournful pageantry of the post-game commentary. Then my father turned off the TV, and we sat in the dark.

*

I don’t believe that a lifetime of Knicks fandom has determined my preference for a certain type of literature—bleak, repetitive, without much of what could commonly be described as a point—but I imagine that it’s made me more amenable to such stories. If Kafka had been an NBA fan, he would surely have been drawn to the Knicks, and not just because the team is owned by a giant cockroach.

Amongst Knicks fans of my generation, born too late to remember the dashed hopes of 1994 or 1999, growing up in the era of Isiah Thomas’ personal and professional disgrace, drifting through adolescence amid the false promise of Carmelo Anthony, entering adulthood under the wayward free-agency whiffs of the late 2010s, it’s become something of a sport, a game within a game, to remember the players we were once foolish enough to believe in, or the memes who provided flickers of light in the darkness.

There were the players who never amounted to much in New York, but found success elsewhere. You’d think a team could do something with Jamal Crawford, David Lee, Trevor Ariza, Zach Randolph, and Danilo Gallinari, something other than trading them away, but alas.

There were the fan favorites, the bright spots. Nate Robinson was fun, Jeremy Lin was inspiring. It didn’t lead to victory, but we knew it wouldn’t. That wasn’t the point. Dead dogs, stalled cars.

Then there were the desperation cases, where you gazed into the abyss and your mind, so as to not be driven mad by such emptiness, convinced you that something was there. God help me, I believed in Frank Ntilinkina. Langston Galloway showed me something. Allonzo Trier flashed here and there. The streets will never forget Ron Baker, shot maker. You could have convinced me that Chris Copeland would be a key part of the future. If I ever see Kyle O’Quinn, I’ll buy him a drink. If I ever see Pablo Prigioni, I’ll buy him two.

Absent that two-week Linsanity run, the best point guard I ever saw play for the Knicks was the corpse of Jason Kidd, and per my memory he missed the last 40 shots of his career. For years of my life, my hopes for rested on the slim shoulders and degenerative knees of Kristaps Porziņģis. Shit was grim.

But sports and nature both abhor vacuums, and slowly, painfully, things started turning around. You would have been forgiven, in those heady COVID days, if you didn’t see signs of this comeback. Julius Randle, while a fine player, didn’t inspire a great deal of confidence as a signature free agent; Tom Thibodeau, while a fine coach, had flamed out of his last several positions, and was a certified retread, rather than an exciting new voice. But lo and behold, that iteration of the Knicks achieved respectability. A winning record was secured, the Playoffs were reached. After eight years in the wilderness, we’d made it back to mid.

On the eve of that first Playoffs game, shortly before Trae Young stomped on my heart, I searched the last Playoffs game on YouTube and watched a moment I hadn’t seen since the day it happened. There was Roy Hibbert’s big stupid vertical arm stuffing Carmelo at the rim, sending both the ball and the Knicks organization spinning backwards into oblivion. I had thought that other people wouldn’t remember this moment, which represented the farthest I’d ever seen my team go, but if my Knicks fandom ought to have taught me anything, it was that I was never alone in my misery. Every comment on the video was from a Knicks fan saying the same thing: this was where it had all gone wrong.

Then, another lesson that I should have already learned, it looked like things would continue to go wrong. After Trae & Co. dispatched the Knicks in five games, with Randle displaying the postseason disappearing act for which he’d come to be known, the Knicks didn’t make it back to the Playoffs the following season, leading my father and I to predict that Thibodeau was on the way out.

That summer, the Knicks acquired Jalen Brunson. Naturally, I was disappointed. I’d wanted Donovan Mitchell; they’d gone out and gotten the wrong undersized guard. This is yet another reason why I’m not a GM, though I maintain that I’d still do a better job than Isiah Thomas.

Under Brunson’s stewardship, I began to get better acquainted with an unusual phenomenon: the Knicks proving me wrong in a good way. Each season they drew a little closer to the ultimate prize. Losing to the Heat, who went on to a cameo appearance in the Finals. Racking up injuries and losing to the Pacers. Making it to the Eastern Conference Finals for the first time in my cognizant life and losing to the fucking Pacers again, this time on some Tyrese Haliburton bullshit that made me stand in my bathroom with the lights off until I could face my girlfriend like a normal human being. New heroes emerged, new moments were etched in history. It was, by any conceivable definition, a golden age.

But disappointment was still the norm. It was wonderful to watch competitive basketball, and to root for a cohesive team, but the name on the jersey was the same. In the end, I agreed with what my father told me that night in 2017. These were the Knicks. Of course they weren’t actually ever going to win.

*

Another benefit of being a Knicks fan, beyond an appreciation for depressing literature, is an omnipresent skepticism toward anything good. Sports movie shit is for other teams, luckier people. We’re savvier than that, and better off for it. It’s better, after all, to know what’s in store for us. Better not to be fooled, not to be hurt.

In the first round of this year’s Playoffs, when the Knicks went down two games to one versus the Atlanta Hawks—Trae Young’s old team, another iteration of the same torture—it was disappointing, sure, but also comforting. This would be another season in which our preconceived notions were affirmed, and the fickle temptress of hope was once again warded away. Even in my doomerism, I thought that the Knicks would come back against the Hawks, but stood no chance against the Celtics or the Pistons, much less whatever juggernaut came out of the West.

What happened next will always defy rational explanation. There is simply no universe in which that Knicks team, in which any Knicks team, would proceed to rattle off a 15-1 record while setting postseason records for efficiency, point differential, comebacks, heart attacks. Yet we appear, by all observable signs, to live in such a universe.

Down against the Cavaliers, down even more against the Spurs, I sensed the swift arrival of the only Knicks I’ve ever known. This time the pain would be repeated on an unprecedented scale, a new high-water mark for this exercise in prolonged distress. I was staring at a Knicks team designed for the express purpose of upending my conception of what the Knicks could be—a team that pulled ahead in the fourth quarter, rather than fading away; a team where each player executed his role to perfection, rather than taking plays, quarters, games, seasons off; a team built through successful trades and productive free agents, rather than whatever Steve Mills did all day; a team guided by excellent guard play, rather than Emmanuel Mudiay or Alexey Shved—yet still I didn’t believe. Until the job itself was done, I had to tell myself that the Knicks were done. It was the only way for me to make sense of what I was seeing.

When the Knicks prevailed against absurd odds in Game Four of the Finals, taking a 3-1 lead over the Spurs on a play that looked like and felt like and might as well have been the Hand of God, it was clear that they were a team of destiny. There was a crack through which my doubts could creep, a slim possibility that the whole spectacular run was simply a set-up for the cruelest joke yet, but I knew on some level that I didn’t believe that anymore. I believed the other, scarier thing: that this was real.

Game Five played out according to the same script as the rest of the series: the Knicks fell behind, looked hopeless, all was lost. This time Brunson, who had struggled in earlier games, brought them all the way back. If anything, I was worried that he had sprung the comeback too early, that the Knicks were better off continuing to play from behind. Even as the tide shifted and victory rounded into sight, I searched for reasons to doubt, aware that I wasn’t ready for what lay on the other side of that doubt—a world in which, somehow some way, there was no choice but to believe.

In the final minutes, as the Knicks missed just enough free throws to keep the Spurs in the game, I sat in an armchair, all but vibrating, breathing as deeply as I could. At long last I let myself imagine what I would do when they won. I thought I might join what seemed like the entire city and run out into the street and scream, and that this scream would carry within it all of the doubt and all of the pain of my own life as a Knicks fan and the empty years stretching on behind me back to 1973. I thought I might dance around the living room, call my father, howl out the window.

But none of that happened. I didn’t have a chance to scream, to dance, to do anything. Instead something was done to me, something over which I had no control. When Anunoby hit a free-throw to put the Knicks up by four with eight seconds and no timeouts left, I began to cry. Really the crying descended upon me, and really it wasn’t crying so much as sobbing, lying there trembling as sounds leaked helplessly out of me. The buzzer rang, the dream was set in stone. The Knicks had proved my father, me, everyone, wrong. I lowered my head into my hands and wept.

I lay there for a while, still watching, still crying, watching the players crying and crying some more, texting and receiving texts, basking in what remained even then, minutes after the clock had hit zero, a sense of disbelief. Outside cars honked and engines revved and people cheered and fireworks popped. Eventually, when I felt I could face it, I went out there and joined the madness, already thinking, right there in the front of my mind, about how I would never see anything like this again.

*

I walked around my neighborhood. It was a warm night, a sneak preview of summer, and everyone in the world was outside. We all flowed around together, dizzy, giddy. It was easy to believe that something beautiful had happened. It was easy to believe anything.

What struck me as I circled the streets, observing watch parties and fellow wanderers, great euphoric crowds and lone pockets of joy, were all the children celebrating out there. They were in the midst of something I’d never known, something I hoped they would remember for the rest of their lives. Even as I lived the moment for myself, I found myself living vicariously through them.

I thought about how these children had been spared. They wouldn’t have to live the life I’d lived in the world where I’d lived it; they would never know the pain I’d known, never endure the suffering I’d endured. Things would be better for them than they’d been for me.

I truly walked around thinking such thoughts about the children I saw, as if we’d won a war or cured cancer. It moved me that for these children, caring about the Knicks wouldn’t have to be a lesson in futility, or a perverse form of abnegation. It could be fun. It could be, miraculously enough, a source of pride.

Much of what I felt on behalf of those children was wishful thinking, a salve for my younger self. Who knows what any of this will mean to those children, or what they’ll remember? Maybe we’re in for another fifty-three years of darkness, and that late-spring night long ago will one day seem just as distant and bizarre as games on the radio and scrapbook newspaper clippings.

But even if that’s the case, there was this. It happened. I saw it. We all saw it. We can claim it for as long as we need to claim it, cling to it for years. When I lay sobbing in the armchair, my tears flowed from relief as much as anything. A weight had been removed, the same weight all those children would never have to lift.

It sounds hyperbolic, corny, it sounds like something you’ve heard before, and on some level it is all of those things, but as I can now personally attest, it only seems that way until you feel it. And then, afterwards, it’s as real as anything else.

Even amid a citywide celebration, amid all these thoughts of the future and the past, it struck me that I was taking a pretty negative view of fandom, the sort that only a Knicks fan could contrive: victory not as happiness but freedom from burden, an excuse to care a little less for the rest of your life. Maybe there isn’t any joy to loving something, only pain’s eminently temporary absence. Maybe that’s all joy is.

Yet what did I see as I walked through those streets, thinking about the nature of the pain, if not joy? And as I walked, and as I wept, and even now as I write these words, I had, and have, and will have whenever I think of that night, the biggest, dumbest smile forevermore on my face.

Life Underground, Tom Otterness. Accessed via Travel Essayist.

In 2001, when I was seven years old, one or another department within the New York City government contracted the sculptor Tom Otterness for a series of public installations. Suddenly his roly-poly creatures were everywhere: springing up in subway stations, dotting playgrounds and parks. These sculptures weren’t my first exposure to art, but they’re one of the first examples of art that I can remember liking.

I probably didn’t think very hard about Otterness’ work when I was seven years old; I probably just thought that all the little guys crawling out of manholes and detaching their own heads were funny. With their rotund physiques, and knack for mischief, these imp-like sculptures likely reminded me of characters from other children’s media, cartoons or fairy tales. I’m not sure whether I perceived that, like the best of such characters, these sculptures held up a funhouse mirror to the world of adults, but I’d like to believe that from the presence of certain archetypes (brutal policemen, puny peasants), from a recurring focus on coins and moneybags, from the violence that seemed to simmer just beneath the surface of so much supposed playfullness, I understood, in whatever terms by which I understood art as a child, that these sculptures held a certain meaning. I’d like to believe I understood that Otterness was trying to say something, if not quite what that something was.

When I was older, already an adult, I learned that in 1977, long before he filled my childhood with whimsy, Tom Otterness had adopted a shelter dog, tied it to a stake, and filmed himself shooting it. The resulting clip, once looped, was turned into a video project called Shot Dog Film1, then distributed in some seedy Times Square theaters and a few punk art exhibits. There was a small outcry, or whatever passed for a small outcry in 1977, before everybody moved on. Otterness never faced any criminal charges. Less than a quarter of a century later, he was planting his sculptures all throughout the art capital of the world.

The controversy resurfaced in 2004, thanks in large part to inveterate hater Gary Indiana2. Hardly an advocate of some proto-version of cancel culture, in his denouncement Indiana mainly seems offended by the fact that Otterness isn’t a good enough artist to deserve allowances for his past:

“Tom Otterness [is] a sculptor of limitless nonentity despite his demonstrated skill at conning public-art commissions and taste-impaired collectors into making him rich. Mr. Otterness, once upon a time, adopted a dog and then shot it to death for the fun of recording his infantile, sadistic depravity on film. I’d like the New Museum’s visitors to keep that in mind while looking at this creep’s work. Mr. Otterness isn’t one of those special exceptions deserving the adage ‘Lousy person, terrific artist.’ Lousy both.”3

The moral case against Otterness is clear-cut, but if his art can be condemned in equal measure, then it’s necessary to understand Otterness’ vision, or lack thereof. If his sculptures held meaning that even a child could begin to grasp, then what on earth was Shot Dog Film trying to say?

Per Otterness himself in 1978:

“The dog film…is about fucking someone, getting fucked by someone…running over someone; defeating someone; being defeated.”

This is, I think, a fairly psychotic thing to say about shooting a dog in the name of art, but then again you probably need a fairly psychotic reason to do that.

Fast forward to 2008, when Otterness began losing commissions (and therefore moneybags) over his misdeed, he sounded a very different tone:

“Thirty years ago when I was 25 years old, I made a film in which I shot a dog. It was an indefensible act that I am deeply sorry for. Many of us have experienced profound emotional turmoil and despair. Few have made the mistake I made. I hope people can find it in their hearts to forgive me.”

I’m not bringing all of this up to make a pronouncement on whether Otterness deserves that forgiveness, or to wade into the morass of the lousy person, terrific artist conundrum. That sort of essay has been written many times before, and will be written many times forevermore4.

I’m bringing it up because I can think of no better metaphor for growing up, or for what it feels like to be alive right now, than learning that the guy who made the silly little sculptures you loved when you were a kid also once filmed himself shooting a dog.

*

My fiancée is not a nostalgic person. She focuses on the present, on the tangible. What she thinks about at night is what she’ll wake to in the morning.

I have no interest in sharing any personal details about my fiancée in this or any other essay, but suffice it to say that things have not always been easy for her—certainly not as easy as they’ve been for me, or for most of the people I know. But while this lack of ease may have something to do with her aversion to nostalgia, ultimately I think it’s more a matter of temperament than biography. She perceives looking backwards as indulgent, even weak.

As someone who might otherwise be inclined toward nostalgia, her attitude has called my own nostalgic tendencies into question. It’s forced me to ask myself what, if anything, is the point of all that looking back.

I notice this looking back—reflexive, compulsive, treated almost as a sign of virtue—in both my immediate circle of friends and the broader nexus of people roughly my age that I encounter across the internet, social media, news, anecdotes, and however else I form conclusions about the world these days. There seems to be a vast collective longing for the recent past, our semi-vanished youth. Implicit in this longing is what’s implicit in any longing: that the object being longed for is better than whatever object is presently at hand. Not necessarily more feasible, not more edifying, perhaps not even wholly preferable, but better, even if only because the object being longed for isn’t here for us to see its flaws up close.

This longing is distinct from the longing for childhood that seems to afflict many Millennials as they grow older. I’m not talking about how a healthy portion of my generation is obsessed with kiddie shit, or how kiddie shit has correspondingly become a multi-billion dollar cornerstone of the cultural economy, and therefore a perfectly socially acceptable passion for ostensible adults. Nor am I talking about how a certain type of Millennial seems to treat his own childhood, and the experiences of any children he encounters or creates, with the sort of reverence typically reserved for religious ritual5.

I’m talking about the people who wax rhapsodic about 2016 being the last normal year, or see fit to mention how 2019 represented the pinnacle of their lives. People who treat the summer of Pokemon Go, or whatever was going on in 2019 (everyone discovering White Claw?), as twin golden ages before different darknesses ensued. Never mind that in 2016 everyone was mostly talking about how many celebrities were dying and what a shitty year it was, or that in 2019 the same guy who ruined 2016 was in charge and wreaking havoc.

I recognize that Trump’s first election and the pandemic are signal events for my particular slice of adulthood, and I don’t mean to imply that what came in the wake of those events was preferable to what preceded them. What annoys me about this nostalgic impulse, to say nothing of the commodification of that impulse within the cultural sphere at large, isn’t the sentiment behind it, so much as the lack of perspective it evinces. This lack of perspective isn’t solely political, though I do find the politics of both these nostalgics and others—say, a group devoted to the nebulous idea of making something great again—myopic and self-serving.

What such nostalgia lacks is historical perspective: the nostalgic’s awareness that by lamenting the way things are now, and pining for how things were then, he’s taking part in a generational cycle stretching back to the dawn of civilization.

Granted, the Millennial iteration of this cycle features dramatic demarcations to signpost when things were better and when things were worse, but there are always such demarcations to be found in history. There are always abrupt junctures at which things get worse, or hazier periods when things slowly begin to get better, or abrupt junctures at which things get better, or hazy periods when things slowly begin to get worse. It all depends on where you draw the lines. Eventually, as you cast your gaze across longer and longer stretches of time, through periods that culminated in junctures and junctures that fizzled away into periods, that gaze becomes less clear. In the end all you’re left with are group after group of people claiming that both their lives and the world used to be better, which is another way of saying that both their lives and the world used to be different, which is another way of failing to say that the world only seemed better because their lives used to be different.

The time being nostalgized likely wasn’t any more special than any other time. It just happens to be the particular time that those nostalgics identify as their own.

To put it another way: claiming that there used to be only cute bronze imps, but now there’s only the dog getting shot on loop forever and ever, ignores the fact that the hand that made the imps is the same hand holding the gun.

*

One useful model of the nostalgic mindset comes to us from, of all people, Michel Houellebecq.

In an essay for Granta6, Houellebecq memorializes his late friend, the writer Benoît Duteurtre. It’s a heartfelt piece of writing, one that might surprise readers who associate Houellebecq with polemics and misanthropy. Like his fellow continental malcontent Thomas Bernhard, I’ve always found Houellebecq’s work to possess a potent emotional core, a genuine sadness beneath all the diatribes about women and Muslims and EU agricultural policies. Just because the world is shit, Houellebecq seems to be saying, doesn’t mean it has to be. Just because he’s long since felt the pain of living in a shit world doesn’t mean it doesn’t still hurt.

Here’s Houellebecq, that bitter husk of a man, on nostalgics:

“But the nostalgic is not a reactionary, a word that has become a mark of infamy, and it’s wrong that [Benoît] sometimes got called one. The reactionary wants to turn back the clock; the nostalgic knows full well it’s impossible. And yet this is where things get so surprising and beautiful. Because there’s something not entirely sad about nostalgia. It goes hand in hand with the incongruity that you sometimes feel in life. It comes with a strange smile, half resigned, half ironic.”

That bit about nostalgia being not entirely sad is, to me, the key to the whole game. If nostalgia, like that one scene from Mad Men contends, means ‘pain from an old wound,’ then nostalgics get off on massaging that wound, pressing down on it, seeking pain and release in the same gesture. Reminding yourself of the wound is far more comforting than dealing with whatever caused the wound in the first place.

I can’t deny that the present is bleak enough to warrant an affectionate glance at the past; I can only state that the past has always been less comforting than we remember.

If anything’s changed about this particular present—and again, I’m not sure, in the macro-historical sense, whether anything has—it might be that much of the cruelty formerly concealed behind facades is now on full display. The dead dogs have always been there, hidden behind the imps, but now each day we’re faced with the shooters bragging and holding the carcasses aloft. Of course, such people have been here before, and will be here again.

The biggest change, the biggest break with the immediate past, is something endemic to both my immediate circle and wider generational zeitgeist. The main reason for the Great Look Backwards, in my opinion, is because we Millennials happen to be one of the generations handpicked by fate to have things worse than our parents.

Even the most jaded Millennial can acknowledge that life, in aggregate, has gotten easier over the course of many centuries. But this progress isn’t linear. We know that instinctually, even if we don’t review history for reminders. We just never expected to be the ones caught in a downswing. We never believed that it would happen to us.

Broadly speaking, my Millennial cohort are the children of Boomers, God’s chosen generation. No comparably large subset of a particular social class in human history had it as easy as American Boomers. Millennials may well be number two on the list, but it’s a long fall from the top, and it’s hard to maintain perspective when you know you’re moving in the wrong direction. It’s difficult to wrap one’s head around the starkness of the contrast, the speed with which the highs have given way to the less highs.

As Otterness’ imps could have told us, it all comes down to money. Millennials can no longer rely upon the sureties that their parents enjoyed; the same sort of existence that once seemed to guarantee stability now yields only precarity. And yes, I recognize that for many American Boomers and American Millennials, a good life was, and is, far from a guarantee. But it’s also fair to say that for a large swath of American Millennials, those who were led to believe that they could enjoy a life equal or superior to the lives of their parents by following the rules and doing as those parents had done, things have turned out differently.

The fact that many of these Millennials are creatives supported in their artistic lifestyles by the largesse of parents who built prosperous foundations during an economically opportune era, enabling these creatively inclined Millennials to enter an otherwise prohibitive field and shape said field in their own image, infusing culture and cultural commentary with voices simultaneously privileged and disadvantaged, voices above all nostalgic for times that they barely or never knew, is no coincidence. There’s a reason this mindset feels pervasive in the media we consume.

Millennials draw from a poisoned well so as to not die of thirst. They look backwards at things they never had because it’s easier than looking forward into the void they stand to inherit. So sure, here’s Pokemon Go. Here’s Harambe. Here’s life before masks. Here are the things we once assigned meaning, and to which some of us assign meaning still, if only as a substitute for the meaning missing everywhere else. Here are the imps, crawling up from underground. They look so happy, playacting adult life. Even the one being eaten by an alligator is smiling.

*

When I was several days into writing this essay, a piece of media that exemplifies the trends I’d been laboring to describe came across the conglomeration of content that constitutes my feed.

In The Cut, Amil Niazi chronicles elder-Millennial angst. Her essay begins with the sentence “I’m tired,” and hits all the familiar notes from there: the job market is a mess; creative careers are a dead-end; even careers once regarded as stable are beset by profound challenges; the elder-Millennial demographic has suffered through wars and recessions and pandemics and now faces yet another crisis; we have to work much harder for a fraction of what our parents took for granted; AI exists. The mood is grim.

By the end of the essay’s third sentence, Niazi is reminiscing about being 22. She faced similarly uncertain prospects then, but things were different, by which she means better:

“But I still had a nearly bottomless sense of hope about the future. I was young, hungry, and ambitious, and I was more than willing to trust the process. My rent was cheap, entertainment was the price of a pitcher of beer and a pack of cigarettes — both of which I could pay for with $20 — and I had very little to lose. If worse came to worst I could always move in with my mom, and I did!”

It’s telling to me that the featured image chosen for this essay is the title character from Wall-E, a movie that came out when many of the people chronicled in said essay were children. In the image, Wall-E gazes wistfully toward the horizon in a world filled with garbage. From this angle, maybe from all angles, he looks something like a tiny bronze imp.

Niazi’s essay is emblematic of a certain ethos, one that might just be the defining ethos of this historical moment, at least amongst the sort of people who concern themselves with reading and writing essays that attempt to define this historical moment7. I do find there to be something self-indulgent and defeatist about this ethos, something unappealing about its combination of entitlement and learned helplessness, but my snottiness doesn’t make the economic charts less true, or people’s pain less real.

Because what’s accomplished, really, by reminding people that they’re part of an endless intergenerational cycle? What use is that to them? If my coworker were laid off due to AI, I wouldn’t tell her that four out of five male babies born in 1920 in what’s now Belarus were dead by 1945. If my friend expressed reservations about having kids because of climate change or wealth inequality or any number of valid reasons for such a concern, I wouldn’t calmly explain to him that Aboriginal Tasmanians also decided not to bring more children into the world, but only because they were being hunted for sport by European settlers.

I have no desire to inform everyone that others have had it worse, that things will be good again, that hard work can be its own reward. That’s Boomer shit. It might be true, but it sounds foolish at a time when most people feel like everything is falling apart.

Yet I also believe there’s something to be gained when we recognize that looking backwards is part of human nature, and that history, the same history we tend to ignore in favor of a sanitized past, is in some senses an infinite chain of backwards glances. And there’s something to be gained from understanding that when we look back, we often fail to see things clearly.

When Niazi looks back on her 22-year-old self, or when I look back on my 22-year-old self—living in a basement apartment, working my first job, scribbling short stories, grappling with how to fill the time that was all at once my own, utterly unmoored, occasionally happy, occasionally sad—we know on some level that we’re not seeing our best selves, but rather versions of ourselves with more possibility still in front of us, more chances for things to turn out differently.

We (or really just I, because I can’t assume anything on Niazi’s or anyone else’s part) shouldn’t then fool ourselves into believing that the world in which those past selves lived was better than the world as it is now. Certain things hadn’t happened yet, but it was still the world. Boomers’ wonderful lives were built on the horrors of World War Two, then maintained on exploitation and exclusion, atrocities at home and abroad. There have been imps to amuse us, but there’s also always and forever a dog being shot. And one day, believe it or not, people will long for right now, too.

We don’t miss the world of yesterday, not really, or if we do then we shouldn’t. We don’t even miss the ourselves of yesterday8. What we miss is not knowing about the dog. We miss being able to pretend that the dog isn’t there. But I think most of us would admit that it’s better—not easier, but better—to no longer pretend.

And while we’re no longer pretending, nostalgia doesn’t actually mean ‘pain from an old wound.’ It means ‘the pain of returning home,’ which is something that Don Draper, for all his bullshit, knew a thing or two about.

Speaking of bullshit, while nostalgia certainly signifies something real, or at least something that most people generally understand, as a formal concept it’s a bit of a mess. It’s not an Ancient Greek word, for one thing, though it combines two words from Ancient Greek. Some Swiss guy invented the term in 1688. Originally it described the life of mercenaries, soldiers of fortune who yearned for their native land severely enough to suffer physical symptoms. The phenomenon that we now apply to TV shows we used to watched, or something mildly fun that happened the other week, entered the world as a disease.

*

In 2008, when I was fourteen years old, right around when Tom Otterness was apologizing for shooting a dog thirty years earlier, Louis CK went on Conan O’Brien’s late-night show and delivered his Everything Is Amazing and Nobody Is Happy monologue.

Prior to writing this essay, I hadn’t watched the monologue in a long time, but elements of it had stuck with me9. I recalled it being a takedown of a shortsighted, overly comfortable social class, people equipped with gadgets but lacking in sense. This was the (network-friendly) sort of content for which CK was once known and revered: not merely funny, but morally instructive.

Later, of course, CK shot the proverbial dog10. But all of that was still years away when he sat on Conan’s couch and talked about how weird it is that poor wifi connections make people grumpy.

Rewatching the monologue, it struck me as surprisingly quaint, though I suppose that since it was delivered nearly twenty years ago, it’s just a product of its time. I’d forgotten that it had been delivered all the way back in 2008, a year when Obama was on the ascendancy, when a long dark age appeared to be ending and hope seemed right around the corner. In retrospect it feels appropriate that a defining comedy bit of that era would focus on small-stakes subjects, like people getting frustrated at flight delays despite the technological marvel of flight.

But that interpretation is only true if, as per usual, retrospect misses a few key details, such as the fact that 2008 was also the year of a cataclysmic economic collapse. I had forgotten that the monologue begins with acknowledgement of this collapse, and CK joking that it might be a good thing, that people might have to be shaken out of their complacency and reminded of what real suffering looks like11.

Today we have technology far beyond anything CK mentions in his monologue, but the notion that this technology ought to make us happy seems more absurd than ever. Any voice within the AI discourse advising us to just take a moment and remember that we’re getting worked up over a miracle would be rightfully dismissed.

If anything, the world now resembles whatever a young Tom Otterness was trying to say by shooting a dog: fucking someone, getting fucked by someone, running over someone, defeating someone, being defeated. But again, it’s not just a matter of now. That’s always been the world. Joy and beauty and love are possible in such a world, sure, but they’re no one’s birthright. Certainly not ours.

And so, as I’ve spent the last four-thousand words saying, if we insist on looking back, we should do so with clear eyes. Even if we want to focus on the imps, we should recognize that they too live in a violent world, a world modeled after ours. We don’t need the dead dog to know that, but it helps.

When I try to picture what someone looking back with that sort of gaze might see, I think of the poem High Windows by Philip Larkin. It’s not a comforting poem, because Larkin was not a comforting or comfortable man, but it’s beautiful nonetheless, at least to me, because it manages to find amid that lack of comfort something more substantial than longing. It finds, or I find within it, the truth behind the pain of returning home.

The narrator, a gloomy older man much like Larkin, much like Gary Indiana and Michel Houellebecq and Louis CK and probably Tom Otterness too, considers the sexual freedom of the younger generation, and decides that they must be happy. Then, gazing further, he thinks about his younger days, and what the generation before his own must have thought about him in turn, and how that prior generation must have judged his generation’s religious freedom as a mark of happiness. Seen this way, history is little more than “everyone young going down the long slide/To happiness, endlessly.” But Larkin’s narrator, like my generation, like anyone, knows that this can’t be the case. Unhappiness persists. Man hands on misery to man.

What does this perspective yield him, or me, or you? Where, amid such a world, can we find comfort? And when you look back that far, far enough to understand yourself as part of history, a link in the infinite chain, what is it, I wonder yet again, that such a clear gaze really sees?

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:

The sun-comprehending glass,

And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows

Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

Yasunari Kawabata at his writing desk. He’s not mentioned in this essay; I just love this photograph. Via History of Literature Pod (@historyofliteraturepod on Instagram).

“For his words did not come in a rush; they came with such pathetic slowness, considering the man was a writer by trade, you would have drawn the conclusion, watching him, that a writer is one to whom writing comes harder than to anybody else.”

—Thomas Mann, Tristan, 1903

It’s poor form to begin an essay by apologizing for that essay’s existence, but I’m truly sorry to be bringing yet another Substack essay about AI into the world. On some level I don’t want to write about AI any more than you want to read about it, but like I said, only on some level, because here we both are.

There’s a good chance that your various feeds are as glutted as mine with AI content, by which I mean both content talking about AI and content that was created by AI, as well as the content talking about AI that was created by AI. And if, like me, you spend one-third of your life in the cold fluorescence of the corporate world, then AI, in the form of so-called solutions, is probably being force-fed to you several times per day.

Given both the ruthless unceasing integration of AI into all aspects of our lives and, still more tediously, the ruthless unceasing discussion about that integration, I don’t blame anyone for glossing over yet another screed on the subject.

So again, sorry to mention it. But AI is on my mind because it’s in my life, having wormed its way into my daily routine to an extent that would have shocked me mere months ago, but which now inspires only a faint frisson of unease.

The sudden proliferation of AI features and AI content and AI content about AI features is fueled, I think it’s safe to say, by the self-perceived needs of the broader white-collar business community. As such, I only use AI tools for work, because these tools have been built for the sort of work I perform: tangible, sequence-based, intended for profit. If I did not perform the sort of work I perform at the sort of company where I perform it, I would not be inclined to use these tools. I’m certainly not inclined to use these tools for anything I actually care about.

That’s not the case for many people, who happily integrate AI into many aspects of their personal lives. I would be curious how many of these eager adopters, these people using AI for productivity purposes, or even for their genuine passions, have neither cultural ties to nor financial stakes in the broader white-collar business community. I would be curious how many of these people place little value in the ethos that this community esteems: a way of life, if you can call it that, that prioritizes efficiency, innovation, and the perpetual insistence, to all those who can be made to listen, that you are in every moment becoming more efficient and more innovative than you have been in every previous moment.

It’s my hope that because I’m both ideologically and geographically surrounded by this sort of person, the AI discourse is almost entirely confined to the world I inhabit. To put it another way, I really hope that only corporate drones and the favored media institutions of corporate drones are talking about AI this much, and that everyone else has better things to do.

But alas, that isn’t the case. The youth are talking about AI, given that a lot of them are trying to fuck it; parents are talking about it, given the former point; people with all manner of non-corporate jobs are talking about it, because they want to know what will happen to them in the society that’s currently emerging; every single writer on Substack is offering multiple takes on how AI will affect fiction, literacy, the publishing industry, the future, the present, you.

I hope that, unlike my fellow corporate drones and Substackers, most people are ignoring AI and pouring the greatest share of their effort into things that provide them with a sense of ownership and accomplishment. Because as someone within the broader tech industry, I can confirm that AI has already come for the things that no one gives a shit about, which turns out to be much of the drudgery that supposedly keeps the world turning.

AI Does Boring Things So You Don’t Have To is hardly the most insightful take, but to my eye the discourse around AI hasn’t fully explored the implications behind this truism. We hear rapturous speculation about what the world could look like with so much busywork automated and so much time made free, or warnings about big tech’s efforts to forge a Permanent Underclass (i.e. forcing white-collar Americans to face economic hardship), but fewer sources stop to ponder what it means that we’ve a built a world where so much human effort is directed toward activities that no one gives a single flying fuck about, tasks carried out just so somebody somewhere can see that something’s been checked off a list.

The world we have now, a world where people feel such profound alienation from what they spend most of their time doing, is the only sort of world in which AI can flourish. And no matter what the prognosticators say, I don’t believe we’ll be entering a different sort of world anytime soon.

In a similar vein, much of the discourse around AI, at least in certain circles, concerns the technology’s impact on writing. What will happen, we’re asked, to the Sanctity of the Written Word?

From my perspective, nothing. Nothing fundamental. People already don’t care, and now they’ll have even more reason not to.

The battle is over, and writers lost long ago1.

*

On that cheery note, let’s turn to the quote at the top of this essay.

This characterization of the writer as a plodding dimwit, the antithesis of a crisp and seamless machine, comes to us from Nobel laureate and elegant pederast Thomas Mann. While his equating of writing with slowness was originally meant as a joke, according to this genuinely interesting deep-dive into the quote’s origins, Mann deployed the sentiment unironically many times throughout his life, standing by his assessment that a writer is someone who finds writing more difficult than other people do.

Regardless of how true this definition might be, it reveals the instructive blend of insecurity and self-regard that sits deep in the heart of every writer. We recognize that writing is something any literate person can do, and that telling a story, any story, has a lower barrier to entry than nearly any other act that can be construed as creation: cooking, visual art, music, dance. There’s a reason why English is considered a soft major, and English majors (including yours truly) soft people. On any objective level, this central point must be conceded.

If anybody can do something, then those who base their identity and livelihood on doing that thing must contrive certain standards around how that thing is done. Thus, the marshaling of words to amaze or enthrall, or even just to entertain, is treated as an almost supernatural act, a feat that not just anyone can accomplish.

There’s truth, of course, to the notion that not just anyone can author a masterpiece, but my own personal sense is that the deification of The Writer amounts to a marketing gimmick at best and cultishness at worst. I’d wager that many people with less formal training about how they’re ‘supposed’ to write are more effective at it than many people who claim to have all the answers, but that’s an essay for another day.

At any rate, there’s something nice, something affirming, about the notion that writing is meant to be difficult, that this difficulty is a mark of superior discernment, and that the more difficult you find putting pen to paper, the better suited to it you are. Under this framework, writers absolve themselves of any blame for their struggles; such struggles, it follows, are evidence of mastery.

I do think there’s a sense in which Mann’s quote, however tongue-in-cheek it might be, is accurate. If I were given the choice to read a book that an author labored over for ten miserable years or a book that flowed freely from mind to page, give me the book that wrecked the author’s life. Writers seem to generally agree with this train of thought: one commonly cited rubric for the quality of a book is the sense, however nebulously gleaned, that its author had to push herself to her absolute limits, going beyond what she previously held to be possible.

Günter Grass once said he didn’t write at night because it was too easy for him. After the sun went down, the words flowed too freely. As someone who thought The Tin Drum could have used a few more rounds of edits, I think it might have also been a bit too easy for Günter by daylight, but I get the sentiment, which is basically just a practical application of Mann’s dictum. Maybe it’s a German thing2.

At the same time, I’m not sure whether there’s any consistent truth to the notion that struggle-books are actually better (by which I mean, as everyone always means by better, ‘more liked by me’) than books that entered the world without much fuss. Difficulty might be a sign of the writer’s inability to get out of her own way, while ease might indicate a clarity of vision. As with so many romantic notions about art, we (by which I mean, as everyone always means by we, ‘I’) might just want this idea to be truer than it is.

More than difficulty per se, the mark of a book that I truly love, of writing that I can’t stop thinking about, is that it produces within me a sense of awe—a wordless displacement that, if translated into speech, might amount to a single word: how?

When I read, I want to find myself in the presence of a remarkable mind. I want to see the world in a way that I’ve never seen it before, but now that I’ve heard it described that way, I can’t understand how I ever managed to miss it. Maybe the writer’s ability to see the world in such a way was extracted at great personal cost, or maybe the writer was just on a fundamentally different plane. Maybe it came to them like breathing.

I don’t necessarily want a book that was difficult for its author to write. I want a book that I can’t imagine anyone being able to write.

To throw yet another quote from a German guy at you, here’s one from the painter Max Liebermann that puts a nice little bow on this sentiment: “Whenever I see a Frans Hals, I feel the desire to paint, but when I see a Rembrandt, I want to give it up.”

When I read a book that seems beamed in from a mind attuned to another world, a Landscape with Landscape or a The Last Samurai or a Close to the Knives, I think about how if you gave me a million years and a billion sheets of paper, I could never do anything like that. I would never even know where to begin.

No AI writing has ever inspired that response in me. But that’s not what it’s there to do.

*

Several weeks ago, my fiancée and I visited a hipster coffeeshop. It was the coffeeshop’s opening weekend, a sunny spring Saturday, and the new arrival had attracted quite the turnout. We stood in line for about half an hour. The coffee was fine, if not exactly worth the wait. The interior of the coffeeshop was artfully laid out with all the trappings of a venue catering to exactly the sort of people who would wait thirty minutes for a cup of coffee. Blonde wood, abundant natural light. Plenty of merch for sale. Behind the counter, trapped in plastic, a record spun in place. Everything and everyone looked smooth and clean.

Sitting there with my nine-dollar, thirty-minute coffee, I thought it would be funny to write something about this place, and places like it, and what the existence of such places said about the people who enjoyed them, and what it meant about me that I didn’t enjoy such places and such people, even though I went to these places and was one of those people. Because I had recently read (to stick with the Teutonic male theme) Extinction by Thomas Bernhard, this writing project naturally coalesced in my mind as a rant, a Bernhardian rant. Not the most original premise, in that it’s a complete rip-off, but I thought it would be funny. So I wrote it.

Then, for the sake of comparison, I asked AI to write it too.

I’ll share both versions of this project in my next two posts, along with some commentary on each. For now, the point I want to make is this: I felt no joy in the assemblage—you can’t really call it writing—of the AI piece. When I had the final product, I had the final product. A task had been executed. What I was meant to learn from either the task or its execution wasn’t clear.

I’m not claiming, in any definitive or informed capacity, that AI will never be capable of producing writing that inspires a sense of wonder, or captures a fundamentally different way of seeing the world. I’m not a scientist, because that shit was hard. I’m an English major.

However, it’s worth emphasizing that AI functions, on a practical level, by recycling existing writing and existing thoughts and existing structures, then packaging this synthesized slurry as something ‘new.’3 Under these constraints, it’s hard to imagine such a system producing a book that seems impossible for anyone to have produced, given that various others have already produced this book’s constituent parts. But it was once similarly hard to imagine that things would go as far as they’ve already come.

Beyond any technical considerations, I doubt that AI will achieve this end for more self-fulfilling, subjective reasons: namely, because the sort of people who care about literary fiction (all five of us!) are generally the sort of people who will read anything generated by AI with great skepticism, if not outright disdain, and will therefore be disinclined toward the same emotional reactions they reserve for human writing. As with most things, people will refuse to see what they’ve staked their happiness on not seeing.

More to the point, I don’t think that AI writing is really meant to provoke such reactions. Much like the blonde wood and the natural light and the spinning record and the perfectly serviceable coffee, I think the writing that people ask AI to perform is meant to summon a veneer. Something that both literally and colloquially gets the job done.

To refute Mann once again: AI writing isn’t empty because it’s easy, but because it’s boring.

If anything, the rise of AI writing has laid bare a societal devaluation of voice: not only in the artistic sense, which writers have been complaining about since time immemorial, but in the business sense, which I think is a newer phenomenon. There was a time, maybe, where writing was a form of branding, and branding was meant to create difference. Now the tools that contribute to brand-building are designed for sameness. Scroll LinkedIn for as long as you can bear it and you’ll notice that everyone is perfectly content to speak in the same voice, which of course isn’t their voice, or anyone else’s voice, or really a voice at all.

This non-voice is shared by both the brands and the human beings behind them, though to be fair, it’s harder than ever to tell the difference.

What’s lost in a world where it’s okay or even preferred to sound like everyone else is the sense that how we sound is a reflection of how we think. If how we sound has nothing to do with the contours of our thought, if it isn’t even a reflection of thinking as such, then I can only repeat that the battle was lost long ago. Amid a business culture, which is to say a general culture, that claims to value hard things, it’s clear that writing, or any form of self-expression, isn’t among those things. Writing is one of the first things that can be outsourced, stripped away.

And honestly? That’s not just sad—it’s a tragedy.

If all of this sounds pessimistic (remember, it’s coming from a guy who wrote a Bernhardian rant because he had to wait awhile for some coffee), then keep these two palliatives in mind.

First, I’d rather live in the world I’ve just described than the world that I sometimes fear to be our reality: one in which people view AI writing as not merely good enough, but genuinely good. A world where people don’t consider anything of value to have been lost because they truly don’t see the difference.

Second, and more importantly, is this: regardless of whichever world we’re in, we can still learn something. Amid our present purgatory, the writing that does create difference, that casts reality in a new light, stands out as all the more special.

Maybe this kind of writing will be held in greater esteem as it becomes rarer, maybe there will be a vast social realignment in which distinct voices reclaim their rightful place, but I’m disinclined to believe that, just as I’m disinclined to believe that the true mark of a writer is how much he struggles.

What I do believe is that amid a world of such sameness, a world where we know exactly how so much of the writing we encounter is being produced, it’s enough to reflect on the writing that makes you ask how? It’s enough to sit with that sense of wonder for a while, to appreciate it, and to ask yourself, if you’re so inclined, how you too could ever begin to create something that moves others as much as you’ve just been moved. And then it’s plenty more—no matter how hard it might be, no matter whether it’s day or night or Hals or Rembrandt—to try anyway.

Gary Schneider poses for Peter Hujar. Image excerpted from the Bonn iteration of Peter Hujar: Eyes Open in the Dark, published by Konig Books, via John Douglas Millar (@johndouglasmillar on Instagram).

One evening not long ago, my fiancée and I visited the Museum of Modern Art for an event featuring the writer Andrew Durbin and the photographer Gary Schneider. Durbin was in the midst of a promotional tour for his latest book, The Wonderful World That Almost Was, a dual biography of the Twentieth Century artists Paul Thek and Peter Hujar. Schneider, as Hujar’s peer, friend, and occasional photographic subject, was on hand to provide insights on the Great Man’s life and work, along with personal reminiscences of not only Hujar but, as alluded to in Durbin’s title, the wonderful world that he and Hujar inhabited.

After an introduction from Durbin, Schneider lectured the audience on eight contact sheets captured almost half a century earlier, during a session in Hujar’s East Village apartment. Armed with nothing but a laser pointer and memories, Schneider explained the invisible elements undergirding the images projected on the screen: the story of how he had made Hujar’s acquaintance, and come to serve as his model; the thoughts and impulses that had influenced his various poses, the subtle subterranean transformations from frame to frame; the technical aspects of Hujar’s method, the almost mathematical machinations by which he’d mastered his art.

Throughout the evening, Schneider amused the audience with digressions and self-deprecating asides. Like a popular professor, he interspersed anecdotes with facts, so that we barely realized how much we were learning. But while Schneider was often quite funny—you can only be so serious while circling a laser pointer around a magnified image of your own semi-erect penis in front of a hundred people—an elegiac tone seeped into his remarks from time to time, and at certain moments he was nearly overcome by emotion. In these moments everyone in the audience seemed to remember, all at once and with great force, that Schneider was telling us about his dead friend.

Those moments also revealed a deeper truth about why we’d all gathered there that evening. The event, like the book it was meant to promote, was a form of mourning. This mourning extended beyond Hujar and Thek, beyond so many others, to encompass the world that all those dearly departed people had built together. We were mourning for that world because even though it existed within living memory, even though its survivors still walk among us, it now seems to have vanished completely, as if it had never been there at all.

Toward the end of the evening, during a somewhat listless Q&A in which both men seemed to be still dwelling on what had come before, still grappling with ghosts, Durbin said something that stuck with me. It wasn’t a profound remark, or a particularly original one, but it helped in its offhand way to clarify some questions I’ve been grappling with lately.

Durbin was talking about art, Hujar’s art and Thek’s art and his own art, trying to put into words what all that art could possibly mean, whether it meant anything, and he said that art is about making a space for thought. Clearing room for contemplation. Building a zone slightly outside of life so that life can be more deeply processed, if not quite understood.

Sitting in the darkened auditorium, watching two men on a stage discuss a wonderful world that almost was, I managed to reach a different understanding about the world that is. I understood that in my day-to-day life, the portion of life to which I devote the largest share of my time and effort, I was not making space for thought. I understood, in fact, that I was doing the opposite: creating space for un-thoughts, for thoughts of no consequence, thoughts actively detrimental to thoughts of consequence. I understood, as I had never before understood, that I was living in bad faith.

And then I understood that I wanted things to change.

*

This would typically be the part of the essay where I tell you a little about myself. You will note, however, that this page is anonymous. Though it might seem otherwise, especially in this era of excessive personal divulgence, I promise I’m not withholding any essential information, because there’s nothing about me that’s essential.

It doesn’t matter who I am. It doesn’t matter what I do. You know me. Maybe you are me. Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?

Thankfully, my name isn’t actually Clement Killeaton. An imaginary marble to anyone who knows where that name comes from without having to look it up.

The main thing you need to know about the real me, for the purposes of this essay and other writing to come, is that I work a bullshit corporate job. Something to do with answering emails and attending meetings and managing projects and kicking things up and down the chain of command. It pays pretty well, but I’m resentful of the fact that it doesn’t pay even better. I am grubby, small-hearted. Knowing that won’t save me.

Like many people out there right now, I’m pretty sure my job could be done by a mildly impressive machine. Maybe soon it will be. Maybe little of value will be lost.

My job does involve writing, which in some ways makes it preferable to jobs that don’t, but this writing concerns subjects that don’t matter to me, and which I believe shouldn’t matter to anyone, so in other ways I’d prefer not to do that sort of writing at all. Broadly speaking, both the writing and the job revolve around strategies for selling people things they don’t need. It’s not the most blatant way of destroying the world, but it plays its part.

They call this kind of work thought leadership, which is hilarious, but also meaningless, and more than a little sad.

Here are a few other facts about me that you probably could have guessed.

My parents invested a lot of money in my education, and so I received a very good one. I treated this investment with the seriousness I felt it deserved. I worked hard; jumping through hoops might not be the most complex endeavor, but it is hard work. As a reward for some particularly impressive hoop-jumps, I was permitted entry to an Elite Institution of Higher Learning, from which I graduated a little early, not that it’s ever mattered. My GPA outperformed even the generous grade inflation standards of said Elite Institution, but I don’t think that’s ever really mattered either.

After graduation I found a job in a lucrative industry, and in the decade or so since then I’ve maintained employment, advanced my career, built savings, moved to an enviable neighborhood in an enviable city, and acquired a life partner, all while committing an astonishing zero felonies.

As if I didn’t already have enough going for me, I am a man. And yes, though I did quote Invisible Man several paragraphs back, I am, shocker, extremely white.

I say all this not to brag (whoop de doo), or to lament my lot in life (give me a break). I merely want to provide context for why I too am making a Substack, an act that strikes me as annoying, in that it’s another way of insisting that my voice deserves to be heard, a particularly insufferable sentiment given everything you know about me.

The context is this: the balance of my time on earth is spent dismantling space for thought, and now, here, I want to do the opposite.

The deeper context is this: my job disappoints me, many aspects of my life disappoint me, the world as it is more than disappoints me, but reading and writing, and thinking about reading and writing, and otherwise doing things that could be broadly construed as art—these things do not disappoint me.

Well, sometimes they do. Maybe even most of the time. But sometimes they manage to do the opposite. Sometimes these things make me happy.

The even deeper context, the context that I generally try to avoid thinking about, but could no longer avoid thinking about as I sat in the darkened auditorium listening to Durbin and Schneider discuss a wonderful world that almost was, is that the time I spend away from these things, the time I spend erasing these things, is wasted. And if that’s how I spend most of my time, then I am wasting my life.

I could say that I feel empty because I direct most of my efforts toward empty institutions, but that places the blame for my malaise on those institutions, which is a copout, because everyone knows that those institutions are vampires, and in the end I’m the one who’s volunteered myself for the vampires’ service. I’m bowing to the pressures of mainstream conventional success. I’m choosing security. It’s a choice.

Unavoidably, it is a choice.

I’m not brave enough to do what Hujar and Thek and Schneider and Durbin and all my heroes and all the people I want to be do and have done, which is to pursue their art by any means necessary.

I could perform the whole handwavey sidestep shuffle about the conditions for artists now versus the conditions for artists then, in the wonderful world that almost was, but that’s another copout. Sure, it was easier to pursue art back then, but it was never easy. Many times during his remarks, Schneider noted how poor everyone had been in that supposedly wonderful world, how much of a struggle it had been just to survive.

And then, of course, there’s the fact that they didn’t survive. Hujar and Thek and so many others died like something out of a nightmare, their lives torn off unfinished, senselessly undone. During his lifetime Peter Hujar never achieved the success and recognition he deserved. After a promising debut in the art world, Paul Thek closed down his days bagging groceries, like Kurt Warner in reverse.

Material conditions aside, socioeconomic trends aside, notions of community aside, everything boils down to that eternal, pesky matter of choice. They had day jobs too, the citizens of that vanished world, but what was it that they truly lived for? Where was their energy spent?

I don’t have to look back to that world. People are still choosing, despite the state of things, despite living in far greater precarity than I’ve ever known, to pursue art. Every day they choose it. Every day I’m choosing not to.

All this isn’t to say that I haven’t tried, in my own secure, hoop-jumping way, to build a space for thought. By any fair assessment I’ve done at least a portion of the necessary work.

I write every day, because that’s the part that I can control. In the decade or so since graduating college, those days have added up to roughly two dozen short stories and eight novels, with two more currently in progress. I’ve submitted my short and long fiction for publication or agent consideration four hundred and fifty-five times.

Three hundred and three times I have been rejected.

One hundred and one times I received no response, but surely they’ll get back to me any day now.

Forty four times I have withdrawn a piece of fiction due to that piece of fiction being one of the seven pieces of my fiction that have been accepted for publication by one or another outlet. I’m grateful for each of these outlets, but they are minor stars within the literary firmament. The publication of my fiction in these outlets has led, near as I can tell, to nothing.

Cautiously and with a 1.5% success rate I’ve dribbled my writing out into the world, as if by dint of persistence, by doing the work like I’ve always done the work, I could build a bridge from the world in which I felt safe, the world of steady paychecks and ostensible meritocracy, to the world where I wanted to be. A world I saw as wonderful. A world that never was.

It seems silly now, but I must have believed that like every other door through which I’ve passed, this door too would open readily before me. Possibly, despite all evidence to the contrary, I believe it still. After all, here I am.

And here you are, too.

*

A few weeks after my fiancée and I went to the event featuring Durbin and Schneider, we once again ventured into Midtown for an evening of art. This time we were several blocks and a world away from the Museum of Modern Art, at the Art Students’ League of New York, where my father’s Painting From Life class was having its annual show.

Extensive restorations were being made to the building’s exterior. A gap in the scaffolding led to an entryway, a space stark and blank as the open mouth of a bandaged face. Waiting for the elevator, I heard one man ask another whether he’d had any bookings lately. No, the second man answered, but that was alright.Then he asked the first man the same question, and the first man said no, things were scarce, no. Things were very scarce right now.

Next to us all, on a bench outside the bathroom, an old man slept with his head tilted back against the wall. I could see straight down into the darkness of his throat.

When the elevator arrived, it took us first to the basement, where we waited for a moment amid the airless industrial hum, then up to the second floor, where we walked into a high-ceilinged room filled with people and light. Strung from the walls of this room were paintings, watercolors, sketches, sculptures. In the back, far off through the scrum, I could see two paintings that I knew at once to be my father’s. I recognized the bright stolid colors, the models rendered sharper than life, their faces austere and unsmiling.

The same models that my father had painted were portrayed in other pieces of art all along the wall, transmuted through the varied visions of my father’s classmates. Now softer, now older, now tired, now younger again, now seen from a slightly different angle or in a slightly different moment, they remained through all these changes no one but themselves.

Some of the models were there in the room with us, their faces strange yet familiar, like faces glimpsed in dreams. One man wore the same gray beanie in which my father and others had painted him. He walked around with an expectant look, like he was waiting to be recognized.

There’s not much you need to know about my father, either. For most of his early life, whether via the comics he made as a child or the portraits he painted as a budding art student in college, he created things. There was a lull in this creation after he graduated from college, a lull that stretched into a void spanning the years he spent at his stable yet spiritually unfulfilling job, decades during which he contented himself with just a small project here and there, brief scenes tossed off and forgotten. When I went to college, he started taking classes at the Art Students’ League as a means of filling his suddenly abundant time. More than a decade later he’s signed up for multiple classes, and the League provides both his greatest passion and his most enduring community.

My fiancée and I waded through the crowd, toward the spot where my father stood waiting. When we got there, he introduced us to his fellow artists, to people I supposed were his friends. They stood in a small circle clutching paper plates heaped with the cheap snacks that were the only fare available that evening.

My father made a joke about artists and free food. A few of those artists laughed with their mouths full.

In my parents’ apartment there are dozens of my father’s paintings. Some hang from the walls, while most are stacked on the floor. These paintings portray the same faces and the same naked bodies gathering in the same studios year after year. I don’t know enough about painting to determine whether his classes have made my father any better, but he feels that he’s learning. He describes to me, unprompted and at length, how he’s refining the technical aspect of his method, yet the products of this method mostly strike me as iterations of the same thing.

No matter the model, the faces on each canvas resemble one another. It’s my father’s style. Each face looks a little like my father’s face, and therefore a little like my own.

I don’t know what will become of my father’s art. Many times my father has offered me a painting to display in the home my fiancée and I have made together, but something always stops me from accepting. They’re too close, these paintings. They seem like a warning.

Standing in the gallery at the Art Students’ League, searching for something to say, one of my father’s fellow artists leaned close to me. In a voice I could barely hear for all the noise in the room, he noted rather shyly that I looked like my father. Then he asked, as if such a thing were genetic, whether I also paint.

My father laughed and shook his head. No, my father said. No, he doesn’t paint. He writes.

*

And so, in a way I’ve never done before, I’m going to do what my father said I do. I’m going to write, for an audience, about things that matter to me.

Apart from that simple, impossible goal, I don’t know what I’m doing here, what I’m trying to build. Even the word build feels grandiose. All I can say for certain is that I’m trying to create a space for thought. I’m trying to reclaim what I spend most of my time pushing away.

This isn’t the first time I’ve tried to create a space for thought, but it’s the first time I’ve made any real effort to create a space where others could join me, and bring thoughts of their own. I hold no illusions that this space will ever amount to what was created by Hujar and Thek and all the others long since gone, or what Durbin and Schneider conjured up in a bubble of time that night in the darkened auditorium. It won’t even amount to the collective efforts of all those artists huddled together in that vast bright room filled with cheap food and half-realized dreams. But it will be more than what I would otherwise be doing, and maybe that’s enough.

As for why you should watch this space, as my thought leadership training told me to say, I’m not too sure about that, either. Maybe because this essay resonated with you. Maybe because you too are disappointed with the world as it is. Maybe because you too are trying to make the leap from that world into another one.

If so, I hope that this can be a space for you, too. I hope that by sharing my essays, stray thoughts, fiction, and whatever else ends up here, I’ll encourage others to do the same. I hope that together we’ll contribute to something just outside of life, a place from which we can reach a new understanding of what life entails.

My grubby little heart rebels against these sorts of sentiments, but we have to start somewhere, so why not try something new. Isn’t that what artists do?

And who knows? If enough of us try something new, if we try in some small way to live like those who inspire us, what a wonderful world it might still become.

Thank you for reading. If you’re so inclined, please subscribe.