These six fresh reads, handpicked by our staff, might be enjoyed by a warm hearth—or tucked into the stocking of someone you love.
So, okay, perhaps an epic poem published over three centuries ago doesn’t scream “crowd pleaser.” Let me assure you, however, that Orlando Reade’s new book—fully titled What in Me Is Dark: The Revolutionary Afterlife of Paradise Lost—has something for the English Renaissance freaks (me) and merely Milton-curious alike. The book takes shape as a wide-spanning compilation of and commentary on the works of various revolutionary figures, placing names side-by-side that might at first appear odd and incongruent: Thomas Jefferson and George Eliot, as well as Malcolm X and Jordan Peterson, to name a few. “Revolutionary” becomes a disconcertingly fluid container—complicated throughout the text by an authorial voice that is inclusive of both the regressive and the radical ideals these figures embodied. The resulting work is a multivalent argument for the past’s reverberating potential to speak to our present moment.
It is probably apparent that What in Me Is Dark is a difficult book to categorize. You might see it described online as “experimental nonfiction,” or a “hybrid” of criticism, biography, and personal writing. I think this is part of its appeal. The academic analysis is kept loose and accessible by the book’s narrative quality, while the competing narratives are bounded by their orbit around the epic. Structurally, the essays swivel between what could be described as an A plot—the connection between Milton and the biographies/writings of each subject—and a B plot—the major events of Paradise Lost itself (recapping and analyzing plot points, from the opening in Pandemonium, to Satan’s flight through Chaos, to Adam and Eve in the bower, and so on). The subjects and excerpts are addressed in chronological order; the first essay places Book I of the poem alongside the oldest secondary source featured, Thomas Jefferson’s commonplace book. If at first I found the back-and-forth between subject and poem to be slightly jarring, even arbitrary, I came to appreciate how my mind was being pushed to make meaning out of the relationship between A and B: Reade is constantly asking his reader to re-examine the poem through the eyes of each figure and the lens of their lived experience.
“George Eliot Sees Her First Man,” for example, considers how Eliot’s allusions to Milton in Middlemarch address gaps in education and opportunity felt acutely by the female characters and their author alike. Reade traces the evolution of Dorothea Brooke’s comparisons between her aging husband, Casaubon, and Milton: first glowing, as husband-mentor and genius, then deflated, as marital deadweight and temperamental has-been (“Dorothea had thought that she could have been patient with John Milton, but she had never imagined him behaving in this way”). “For Eliot,” Reade proposes, “Milton represented not only the heights of achievement but also the way that men have prevented women from flourishing.” He then switches from A to B: now offering a romantic scene from Book IV of Paradise Lost in which Eve announces to Adam, “With thee conversing I forget all time / All seasons and their change, all please alike.” The shift feels sudden, but really Reade is landing on the same topic of marital expectations. Eliot certainly saw through the poem’s paradoxical desire for a female partner who is both an equal conversant companion and subservient follower, a major blind spot in the minds of great thinkers such as Milton that bled pervasively into Eliot’s time. The overall effect of this structure is propulsive, not unlike a good documentary—abandoning one sequence just as the music swells and the tension peaks.
As powerfully as Reade connects the dots between Milton and his famous admirers, the portion of the collection that arrived with the greatest solidity and poignancy for me was actually its conclusion, which borrows not from any well-known politician or novelist, but from the writer’s own life. In this final essay, “My Students Teach Me About Disobedience,” Reade looks back on the impetus for the project, a class he taught to students incarcerated in a New Jersey state prison half an hour from Princeton University where he was completing his PhD. Against this blunt reality, it’s as if the book finally addresses its own existence in a theodicean reckoning that is completely appropriate to Paradise Lost:
As we looked at the literature of the past, they were respectful but not reverential. They weren’t reading in an abstract, academic way, they were reading in the context of their whole lives, as something that might help to explain why we had ended up where we were, and this was why they couldn’t relinquish the idea that poetry had something to do with the inequalities of the modern world.
Milton’s own artistic vision was not quite the polite, puritanical, or socially popular one we might readily ascribe today. In addition to his poetry, he produced deeply political writings, including a 1649 treatise advocating for the literal death of the monarchy, for which he was nearly executed himself a decade later when the king returned to power. By the time Milton was actively composing his epic in the 1660s, the democratic world order he had made every effort to actualize was collapsing in on itself. He had lived through civil war and emerged tired and disillusioned, having witnessed his country succumb once again to the “deluge of this epidemic madness,” as he described the king’s celebrated re-ascension. Which, you know, is a sentiment that might hit home for some readers. It does for me. I think it does for Reade, too.
—Kate Bailey, Editorial Assistant
In the summer of 1988, Iran Air Flight 655 was struck down by two surface-to-air missiles launched from the U.S.S. Vincennes. The Navy warship had allegedly mistaken the commercial flight’s profile for an Iranian F-14 Tomcat. With the Navy’s military and civilian distress signals unanswered, the plane—carrying 16 crew members and 174 passengers, including 66 children—disintegrated as soon as the first missile hit. This act of violence is the chief inheritance of Martyr! protagonist Cyrus Shams, whose mother Roya was on board that fateful day, “just shot out of the sky. Like a goose.” Almost three decades later, Cyrus, now a recovering alcoholic and drug addict, finds himself passing the years in a small Indiana college town, “living the poems” he has yet to write. In the ragged wake of his parents’ deaths—his father, Ali, dying a few years after sending his son to university—Cyrus reckons with his conception of martyrdom, surveying the lives and contributions made by some of history’s notable poets, intellectuals, and revolutionaries (like Ferdowsi, Hypatia of Alexandria, and Bobby Sands), while also wrestling with a desire to end his own life:
You break up with a shitty partner, quit eating bread, delete the Twitter app. You cut it out, and the shape of what’s actually killing you clarifies a little. The whole Abrahamic world invests itself in this promise: Don’t lie, don’t cheat, don’t fuck or steal or kill, and you’ll be a good person. Eight of the ten commandments are about what thou shalt not. But you can live a whole life not doing any of that stuff and still avoid doing any good. That’s the whole crisis. The rot at the root of everything. The belief that goodness is built on a constructed absence, not-doing. That belief corrupts everything, has everyone with any power sitting on their hands…What can I make of being here? And what can I make of not?
When a renowned painter named Orkideh announces her final project Death-Speak—an installation where visitors of the Brooklyn Museum are invited to chat with the cancer-stricken artist in her last days—Cyrus heads to New York in an attempt to decouple the achingly bound variables of grief and time, goodness and intentionality. “It seems very American to expect grief to change something,” Orkideh eventually tells him. “Like a token you cash in.”
Martyr! is a polyphonic novel. Akbar situates Cyrus among a chorus of muse-like speakers: his mother, his father, his best friend and sometimes-lover Zee, and his reclusive Uncle Arash, a man forever marred by his experiences as a foot solider in the Iran-Iraq War. The narrative darts through time, too—leaping from Roya boarding the flight to Dubai in 1988 to Roya in 1970s Tehran, from Cyrus, still using in 2015, to Cyrus, finally clean, in 2017. Cyrus’s third-person perspective, fully immersed in a sort of only-right-now objectivity, suggests that the “delicious primacy of the present”—an addict’s ideal he once savored like a lozenge—can make for a dangerous, if not dishonest, way of storytelling: You cannot tease out the finer threads of life and story when you’re still tangled up in them; your story is not meaningful just because you decided to tell it at this very moment. (Captain William C. Rogers III, who oversaw the missile attacks launched by the Vincennes, was awarded the Legion of Merit for his exceptional conduct and outstanding service as a commanding officer in 1990. There was no mention at the time of Flight 655 or the 190 passengers who did not survive.)
What is the difference between individual tragedy versus loss on a societal or historical scale? What distinguishes a mistake from a massacre, a victim from a martyr, a nation from a marketplace, a symptom from a cause? Cyrus—whose father died after years of sifting through chicken shit on a chicken farm, who white-knuckles his hold on sobriety, who always seems to be vibrating with the discontent of self-discovery and subsequent self-hatred—leans on the sturdy platitude that it is not necessarily what you say but how you say it. My mother died. My mother was murdered. I’m sober. I’m struggling to stay alive. Language, then, has the potential to become its own empire—a force that insists upon itself, a narrative that demands to be told and retold. When Napoleon I was in exile on the island of Saint Helena, he wrote that history is a set of lies agreed upon. Cyrus proves such liberties of language, the way we tell the story of a person or a place, can be either a tool or a weapon. The same blade that tills the earth also harvests the wheat. Truth is a razor’s edge that cuts both ways: myth carved in history, history carved in myth.
—Luke Gair, Associate Editor
Nestled deep in the Adirondack Mountains, the idyllic Camp Emerson—owned by the strange and storied Van Laar family—is where the wealthy send their children for a summer of outdoor enrichment. When Barbara Van Laar goes missing from her bunk in August 1975, the mystery of her vanishing brings back memories of her brother, Bear, who disappeared from this same mountain fourteen years earlier.
Liz Moore’s The God of the Woods explores complex themes of womanhood and class division, adding nuance and texture to familiar conventions of the mystery novel. Tropes like the sage detective and the unproven rookie, or the monied, image-obsessed family and their rebellious daughter, are reinvigorated by the technical strength of Moore’s prose. These tropes are made new by her ability to poignantly capture emotional depth with such authenticity, whether the character is a prolific serial killer or a negligent yet pitiable mother. In the span of just a few sentences, Moore communicates so much about the internal worlds these characters inhabit:
A range of competing emotions rose inside Alice. One was fear: there would be hell to pay when Peter saw this. But some other emotion was present, too. And at last she realized, with a pang, that it was jealousy. Never once in Alice’s life had she ever felt the freedom to do something like this. To simply decide—I’m going to paint a mural today—and then undertake the project.
Alice, the Van Laar matriarch, is scared of her husband and furiously jealous of her daughter. Barbara is unabashed, eschewing her family’s values and sense of propriety. Yet beneath all this rebellion and spunk, what Barbara seems to feel most at her core is loneliness. She paints an entire mural on her bedroom wall, and her mother doesn’t even notice until well after its completion. Alice has conformed to societal ideals of femininity but is unhappy because she has no freedom; Barbara has chosen the path of freedom but is unhappy because her family constantly tries to stifle her, molding her to society’s expectations. Throughout The God of the Woods, it is rare for a character to experience only one emotion at a time. No feeling is ever fully realized, either. Although this might risk confusion or underdevelopment, I found that it actually works to Moore’s advantage. So rarely in our lives do we ever feel one thing at a time, or fully process why we’re feeling it. This, perhaps, is part of the equation that explains how Moore’s motley cast of characters feels so dynamic.
Moore pulls her narrative thread through the perspectives of both the Van Laars and the Hewitts—the working-class family who serves as groundskeepers of the estate and run the camp. However, the long-entangled relationship between the two families is best understood through the eyes of characters with a third-party perspective:
What will she do now, wonders Judy, if the Hewitts lose the camp? If the Van Laars cut them out entirely, as they’ll no doubt do, snapping the thin thread that has stretched for decades between the Hewitts and Peter the First? And she answers that question herself: They’ll be fine. The Hewitts—like Judy, like Louise Donnadieu, like Denny Hayes, even—don’t need to rely on anyone but themselves. It’s the Van Laars, and families like them, who have always depended on others.
The Van Laars look down on the Hewitts, seeing them as nothing more than names on a payroll sheet, despite their long acquaintance. They don’t fear a potential betrayal by the Hewitts because the Van Laars believe that their employees are easily controlled by money. This sense of superiority can even be seen in the landscape, as the Van Laar mansion looms menacingly over Camp Emerson, where the Hewitts reside.
One might assume that the Van Laar’s enormous amounts of wealth would make them self-reliant, unsinkable. But in reality, growing up with that much wealth has stunted them, resulting “in some absence of yearning or striving.” (The Van Laar manor is aptly named Self-Reliance.) A few generations prior, Peter Van Laar I paid his working-class neighbors to build the house for him. With each passing decade, the Van Laars have become more reliant on the hard work of those below them on the economic ladder, resulting in an estate and camp that they haven’t the first clue how to run. And so, once the Hewitts finally decide to betray the Van Laars confidence, it is the Van Laars who have the most to lose. As Detective Judy astutely describes in the aftermath of this decision: The Hewitts will find other work. But the Van Laars will never find another family who knows the Adirondack Mountains as well as the Hewitts do.
Minutiae and mystery pulse at the heart of this novel. After reading The God of the Woods, I felt found, and I’m willing to bet you will, too. With a book told from eight different perspectives jumping through five points in time, you’re bound to find a piece of yourself in one (or more) of these characters.
—Brighid Griffin, Assistant Editor
It’s the holiday stretch from the day after Christmas until the end of the year that I love the most, because the office is essentially closed, work is at its quietest, my kids are on vacation, and the days are dedicated to hanging out with family. For these reasons, I love giving books as gifts—books that a person can dip in and out of with the highest degree of pleasure, whose content can be shared in small bites. A great book to gift, then, is the Penguin Reference Dictionary of Symbols, an eleven-hundred-page tome full of remarkable information. For instance, look up adam and you will learn that:
In Jungian analysis Adam symbolizes cosmic man, source of all psychic energy, most frequently associated, in the shape of the wise old man, with the archetypal father and ancestor, the image of the old man, of unfathomable wisdom, fruit of long and bitter experience.
You can imagine how much my children love hearing factoids like this!
And since I’m often belly-full during this week, in a boozy, postprandial, pre-nap state, I also enjoy picture books. Consider the remarkable compendium by former New York Magazine savant-editor Adam Moss, entitled The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing. It contains conversations with writers and artists such as Sofia Coppola, Wesley Morris, and Twyla Tharp. Each entry is interspersed with pictures and photographs of working drafts, initial forays via napkin drawings, notebook notations, text messages—all the detritus that attends and accrues during each artist’s working method—so that you might ponder, say, the opening page of Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, which in its proto-stage had a working title of Mr. Dalloway, this material interspersed with Moss’s several interviews with the novelist and footnoted with observations that, of themselves, could be the stuff of a great craft seminar. It is one of the most beautiful, fascinating, and generative books I have encountered in years.
Another being writer Jonathan Lethem’s gorgeous Cellophane Bricks: A Life in Visual Culture. Lethem, the genre-bending author of the inarguable classics Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude, has for decades been taking readers on one of the wildest, most original journeys in American letters. But some may not know his early training was in the visual arts, and his lifelong interest in its multifarious, variegated mediums is on glorious display here. Lethem, like me, is a native New Yorker; a favorite chapter of mine is “Graffiti and Comics,” which is populated with astonishing photographs by Blake Lethem of tagged subway cars and handball walls and includes Lethem’s musings on the scholar of New York City’s subway system, Philip Coppola, who has, like some demonically obsessed scrivener, been hand-copying the art inked and sprayed on what is perhaps the most vast subterranean gallery on the planet.
—Adam Ross, Editor