At the beginning of The Sentence, Louise Erdrich’s darkly funny and wickedly brilliant new novel, an Ojibwe woman named Tookie faces a long prison term for illegally transporting a dead body. She looks up the word sentence and stares miserably at “its yawning c, belligerent little e’s . . . its hissing sibilants and double n’s, this repetitive bummer of a word made of slyly stabbing letters that surrounded an isolate human t.” Her American Heritage Dictionary seems appropriately titled, especially… [Read more]

Among all the artists of the New York School, that brilliant and quarrelsome group of postwar painters and poets, Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011) stands out for the apparent ease of her artistic process. … Pollock, Rothko, Willem de Kooning must be good, because look what they paid in depression, alcoholism, and self-doubt. Frankenthaler’s stunning canvases challenge this equation and refuse its mean-spirited, capitalistic terms. Too pretty, too privileged, too much plain sailing? Who decides?

https://4columns.org/phillips-julie/fierce-poise

I’ve been posting fewer reviews here lately, partly because I’ve been reviewing less (and writing more! I’ve really almost finished my second book). But it’s also because I’ve been working differently. I used to write my reviews for Trouw in English, then give them to my partner, Jan van Houten, to translate into Dutch. That was a fairly time-consuming process with a lot of consultation back and forth. In the last few years my language skills have gotten good enough that I’ve started writing my Trouw articles in Dutch, which Jan and I together turn into more grammatical, more stylistically sophisticated Dutch.

That means I don’t have an English version to post here. I keep saying I’m going to back-translate my work, but mostly I don’t get around to it.

So here’s a link to my most recent piece in Dutch, on “Huckleberry Finn.” It’s the kickoff to a series on Great American Novels, to run between now and the election. Rereading “Huckleberry Finn” this time, I was struck by Mark Twain’s cynicism. Are ordinary white Americans really that greedy, gullible, and violent?

“One reason why the novel remains popular in America is undoubtedly that Twain fulfills the reader’s desire, even–or maybe especially–in an egalitarian society, to feel better than everyone else. The naivety, avarice, wanting to have an identity, wanting to be right*–it all comes back in the feud between Trump and his opponents.”

The rest is here: https://www.trouw.nl/recensies/huckleberry-finn-gaat-in-feite-over-donald-trump~b6b60053/

I also did the second in the series, “O Pioneers!,” coming up on Saturday, September 5.

*in Dutch “gelijkhebberigheid,” “greed for possessing rightness.”

Can you write an autobiography and leave yourself out? Can you be everywhere and nowhere in a narrative, or slip out of it like you would quietly exit a party? Provocatively, Rebecca Solnit has organized her new memoir around moments when she felt that she was not fully present in her own life: was not being seen or… [read more at 4Columns]

For pure reading pleasure ‘The Testaments’, Margaret Atwood’s long-awaited sequel to “The Handmaid’s Tale,” lives up to every bit of the considerable pre-publication hype. Atwood’s original dystopian novel, published in 1985, ends like a Cold War thriller: the main character, Offred, escapes from Gilead, the Christian theocracy where as a “Handmaid” she is held in reproductive slavery. In the new book Atwood resumes the page-turning pace as she describes a plot by a small group of women, working together, to bring Gilead down.

Gilead returned to the public imagination, and “Handmaid” to the bestseller lists, after the 2016 US election and the Women’s March that followed. A TV series based on the book was then already in production; its 2017 release boosted book sales even more, while the red cloaks and white caps of the Handmaids became symbols of feminist protest. All this makes the new publication a major event. “The Testaments” is being released at an all-night book presentation in London, with appearances by literary stars from Jeanette Winterson to Neil Gaiman, plus extras dressed as Handmaids. The book has already been shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

In the new book, as in the series (which I haven’t seen), the initial shock at the eradication of women’s rights has given way to resistance. Gilead itself is settled, the powers of its fundamentalist police state consolidated. Given the current pressure on women’s rights in the US, you might expect Atwood to have adjusted Gilead to reflect current events; but she hasn’t added in a populist demagogue or concerns about migration. This makes “The Testaments” less topical, but also less prone to clichés and easy answers. Atwood was criticized after the first book came out for leaving out questions of race, but Gilead apparently remains an all-white society.

“The Testaments” wears its social critique more lightly than “Handmaid.” It opens 15 years or so after the events of the first book, and consists of the first-person recollections or testimonies of three women. Two of them are too young to remember a time before Gilead, and see it not as a nightmare but as a given. Not knowing their true relationship to the repressive state, however, puts them more at risk than they know.

One of them, Agnes, can’t help feeling nostalgic about her childhood in Gilead. “I imagine you expect nothing but horrors,” she remarks, but as a Commander’s daughter she felt only “loved and cherished.” A little wary, maybe, since girls are taught in school that they are “snares and enticements” for men whose further actions will be entirely their fault. Still, she works cheerfully at her embroidery and flower arranging. She’s never seen a book and doesn’t know there was a time when schoolgirls were taught to read.

Then, at thirteen, she is informed of her impending wedding. At first she doesn’t resist this arranged marriage except with “some moping and fretting…though since I pursued these activities alone in my room they had no influence.” Ultimately she takes more decisive action.

The second character, Daisy, grows up in free Toronto, knowing Gilead only from the news, until her parents are revealed to belong to the anti-Gilead resistance. A series of dramatic events then lands her across the border and in the hands of the dreaded Aunt Lydia, a chief strategist and anti-feminist ideologue of the Gilead regime.

It is Aunt Lydia, Offred’s old nemesis, who provides the surprising third testimony, revealing a career of expert flattery, blackmail, and torture in the service of securing influence–and with it her own safety. Power relations among women are a classic Atwood theme, and one she deploys masterfully in “The Testaments.” From schoolgirls to wicked stepmothers, all her characters, consciously or not, are fighting to move up in the social order. It’s a good thing, too, she suggests, for women to occupy themselves with obtaining power, because the only way out of Gilead is over the fallen bodies of the enemy.

Part of the pleasure of “The Testaments” is in the fresh encounter with themes at the heart of Atwood’s work. It echoes “Cat’s Eye” and “The Robber Bride,” those masterly studies of female friendship and betrayal. Along with “Alias Grace,” “The Blind Assassin,” “The Year of the Flood,” and her funny and endearing “Lady Oracle,” it navigates coming of age, showing subtly and movingly how girls play games with adult roles, putting on and taking off selves like suits of clothes. It’s telling that Daisy grows up in her parents’ second-hand store (a classic Atwood setting) and that each of the main characters in “The Testaments” is living under an assumed name.

“The Testaments” doesn’t have the emotional depth of its predecessor, with its intense focus on power, identity, and the sexual self. (Neither sex nor love has a part in the sequel.) But to read it only as a dystopian adventure story or a guide to current events is to underestimate the breadth of Atwood’s literary gifts. Part of Atwood is acting as an Aunt Lydia, a canny, self-aware manipulator of the plot. Another part invites us to think about the nature of freedom. Yet another is busy reinventing herself once more in the costume shop of literature.

Trouw, September 10, 2019

Sometimes a word or phrase enters the language that you didn’t know you needed until it was there. Intersectionality, mansplaining, and emotional labor bring social relationships into focus. Hashtags stake out categories… [read more at 4Columns]

In the summer of 2014, the talented young Mexican writer Valeria Luiselli and her husband put their kids in the car and drove from New York City to southern Arizona. Because they were applying for green cards, they couldn’t leave the country, but on the road they could get close, literally and imaginatively, to the uncrossable US-Mexico border. [read more at 4Columns]

By his mid-twenties, the artist and illustrator Edward Gorey had already settled on his signature look: long fur coat, jeans, canvas high-tops, rings on all his fingers, and the full beard of a Victorian intellectual….Among the obvious questions for a reader of Gorey’s biography are: Where in his psyche, or in the culture, did all those fey fainting ladies and ironic dead tots come from? And, not unrelatedly: Was Gorey gay? [read more at 4Columns]

The narrator of Sheila Heti’s new novel Motherhood is in an agony of doubt. She’s in her late thirties. Does she or doesn’t she want a child? Why can’t she make this life decision? When she thinks of having a baby she balks. She’s afraid of giving up her freedom, and besides, how could she and her partner raise kids in their mouse-infested little writer’s apartment? But when she decides… read more at 4Columns

For 4Columns this week, I wrote about Mary Beard and her terrific feminist essay “Women & Power.” Thank you to the unnamed friend whose advice I mentioned, and to another uncredited friend for her wise comment on #metoo. The rude references to body parts are (almost) entirely my own. You can read the review here.