This is the first newsletter from Critical Mass, The New Republic’s new culture vertical, launching in May.
These past weeks, the clarion call on my nerdy corner of social media has been “Buy books!” The current crisis threatens not just the fragile ecosystem of independent bookstores but publishers big and small, the writers of both those fat thrillers everyone buys at airports (no one’s flying anywhere!) and chapbooks of poetry. When we “buy books!” we are performing something close to a sacrament. In our world, money sanctifies everything.
But: Do you feel like reading? I don’t mean staring, slack-jawed, at your phone (my Screen Time tells me I could have instead watched Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles every day last week). I mean reading a book. I am not in the mood, but I have to read, because I have kids, and part of the Life Is Beautiful routine I’m performing for their benefit is bedtime stories.
I recently read them the 1976 novel Abel’s Island, by William Steig. I’ve long loved his work but didn’t know until recently that in addition to his seminal picture books, Steig had written a handful of works for older readers—still featuring his charming illustrations but longer, more complex, even darker than his work for young children. Abel’s Island tells the story of Abelard Hassam di Chirico Flint, a grand little mouse of independent means (“My mother has provided for me”). While picnicking with his wife, Amanda, he is swept away in a freak storm and finds himself marooned on an island.
Like Gilligan’s, Abel’s clever schemes fail to get him home, but the island is a kind of paradise. The mouse forages meals and finds meaning in solitude. He even discovers the solace of art: He molds clay into sculptures of his beloved and other mice, and eventually stumbles upon a book left behind by some day tripper, losing himself in the narrative. I hadn’t known, when choosing this as a bedtime read, how salient it was for this period, our days marked in fanciful or just comforting meals (may I recommend Samantha Irby’s stepmom casserole?), our books and crayons and paper airplanes a diversion and a consolation. |
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The mind always looks for patterns (perhaps all the more so when bored or stressed), but the very night I started Abel’s Island with the boys, I picked up Malicroix, a 1948 novel by the French writer Henri Bosco (a new edition, in a translation by Joyce Zonana, has just been published). The book takes place at the start of the nineteenth century. A man, Mégremut, receives word that his eccentric great uncle has died and named him his heir. But there’s a catch:
Mégremut will come to the island and live in my house. He will have full use of everything, as much on the island as on the mainland. My man, Balandran, will serve him. Mégremut pledges on his honor to live on the island without leaving it for three months from the date of his arrival. This term completed, he will find instructions in a letter, destined for him alone and placed by me in a location known only to Balandran. Having read the letter, he will, if he judges it acceptable, complete the mission I entrust to him. But as of now, he should know that I have set aside a task for him.
As I read about Mégremut, I couldn’t but think of Abel. Here’s how Bosco writes about the river that protects his late uncle’s island:
Often, sudden thrusts of waves swelled the oily surface and it foamed, roaring. Beneath the visible surface, you could sense an invisible, furtive river—slower and heavier, dragging the dense waters of the heaviest rains along its viscous alluvial bed—slowly animated by a secret current and the downward suck of treacherous chasms.
Here’s how Steig conjures the river that sweeps away Abel, clinging to the nail in an old board:
Then, with no advance notice, the boat tilted vertically and shot downward on what he was sure was a waterfall. Plunged deep in the water below, he fought against drowning; then, still hugging his nail, he rose slowly into a maelstrom of churning river, gasping for indrafts of air.
Both novels are about solitude, and the anticipation of salvation. Despite the Poirot-worthy setup, Bosco’s book is about a mystery of a different order: “I know how to wait, even with a pure waiting that awaits nothing, whose only goal is waiting. Time no longer passes; it has duration, but with no perceptible breaks. From then on, nothing is slow; there is no boredom, only rest.” I wish I had this monastic ability. My kids have been asking me lately what day it is; I have to think before I’m able to answer them. Perhaps by next week, I’ll reach this other side, in which there is no boredom.
Bosco’s book is stranger than I’d anticipated. “Islands favor the moon,” someone warns him as his residence on the island is about to begin. “Dreams form over water, peopling it with unreal, captivating shapes; and if you dream too much, Sir, you will never leave this isle of magic.” I’ve read elsewhere that we’re all having strange dreams at this moment; if for some reason you aren’t, Malicroix approximates that experience. Consider that either an endorsement or a warning. |
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 | | Another of my recent reads is Woody Allen’s memoir, Apropos of Nothing. It’s a disappointment, even if you look past the scandal that has come to define Allen. Celebrity is so distorting that few artists who attain it are still able to look thoughtfully at themselves. Perhaps we shouldn’t expect artists to account for themselves in autobiography. While reporting on the strange circumstances surrounding the publication of the book, I watched Barbara Kopple’s 1997 documentary on Allen, Wild Man Blues. It’s surprisingly intimate, and though clearly made with its subject’s approval, it’s still far more revealing a portrait of Allen. (Frustratingly, the film doesn’t seem readily available via any streaming service, but I hope one day it will be easier to see.) |
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| What is art, and who gets to be an artist? Kyle Chayka’s review of the critic Jerry Saltz’s book How to Be an Artist is a thoughtful rumination on the big questions: “The problem is that art-making is about much more than just the image, and it’s never quite possible for everyone. |
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| This conversation with the writer Ishmael Reed is bracing, so much more honest and meaty than the typical chit-chat with a famous person. |
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| While I’m kind of maxed out on pandemic news and coverage, I found the journalist Rachel Dodes’s account of her husband’s experience with Covid-19 riveting. |
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| I enjoyed this look at the life and career of the photographer Peter Beard, who died recently. |
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| Be warned: This essay made me so angry. Violet Moya writes about her experience as a retail worker, showing how corporate entities decline to care for the people in their employ. An infuriating but important read. |
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| I have my health so I’m not complaining, but among the things I miss at this moment is the ability to go and see art. I’d hoped to go to Boston to see the Lucian Freud self-portraits, and I’d absolutely planned on visiting the Met Breuer’s look at Richter. Seeing art is an experience digital technology cannot replicate, but there is something comforting about the beauty of David Hockney’s work. Even if we can’t see it in person, it’s nice to know he’s still at it. |
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| Those who are in the mood to read books are talking about using this period to tackle the big ones—I suppose, if you’re not holed up with kids to care for, you have nothing but time. For the past couple of years, though, I’ve mostly been drawn to very short novels. They’re like heated love affairs; you’re drawn in, then liberated after a day or two. Here’s Michelle Dean on a recent favorite. |
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| This is the first of a regular column I’ll be doing in newsletter form. I’ll write about books mostly, but also other stuff. Subscribe! Tell your friends! Email me, at ralam@tnr.com!
—Rumaan Alam, Contributing Editor |
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