In which we hear from Claire Gibson in Nashville, Tennessee.

It is astonishing to me—though it shouldn’t be—that the first great social novel of the Trump era has been authored by a young woman who grew up in India and emigrated to America to further her education. She has captured the dimensions of our moment with chilling precision: the deranged national lust for fame, the activation of tribal grievances, the political uses of sacrificial sadism, the gleeful nihilism that disguises our national despair.

A teammate’s girlfriend, a physical therapist who’d been watching the game, came over and handed me an unopened can of grape soda to hold as a plumb-weight, and then reached up under my pads and worked the shoulder until, after about ten minutes, it popped back into place. The pain retreated. I drank the grape soda and waited for the guys to get off the ice.

I’d wanted to fix in my mind

your face, wanted to fix,

at the coast, the slow drift

that separated us.

Outside my living room, the snow has gotten thicker, and through it I can barely see my son now playing football with the neighborhood kids: seven of them, all girls. My son is quarterback. Lined up across from him is the nose tackle, I guess is what you’d call her position. She’s crouched down and her fingers are twitching like she can’t hardly wait to knock the shit out of him.

It was good to create new routines. Fit my mind to a world bigger than myself, but smaller than the endless stream of stupidity and evil on Twitter and Politico, in the Times and on cable, in the Pew and Gallup polls I still consulted daily, though joining Scouts helped me check them less.

When we were very young, your forgiveness
humiliated me.

She doesn’t like to name what’s on her face: these sores, these blemishes, these zits. She hates that word, zits. She also hates the words bitch, whiz, and boobs. When Sam was tipsy sometimes—and that’s all he ever really got—he’d say, “Excuse me, I have to take a whiz,” which made Ally crazy-irritated. Those were also the nights he spoke rhapsodically about her gorgeous boobs, and suddenly this man she thought of as so funny, would be saying things like, “Your boobs are just so boobalicious,” and she’d feel sorry for herself, embarrassed she had married someone who, in all seriousness, used such a word.

Was it a cutting preserved from that briared-
over palace? Meanwhile, like alchemists,
small-time breeders were trying for gold.
That is, true yellow. These mostly poor
men of cloth and family businessmen
threw all their hopes into this enterprise. . . .