East Coast Jazz-Age Gothic Extravaganza

Riley Sager, The Only One Left: a Novel

The mansion known as Hope’s End has enough terrible stories to make Disney’s Haunted Mansion look sedate and staid. Amid the waning Jazz Era, a shocking triple homicide left an entire family of Back East elite dead and mutilated. Now Lenora Hope, the only survivor, paraplegic and mute, has decided to tell her story. Working through an outdated manual typewriter, she begins unloading on a poor nurse unprepared for everything.

This is Riley Sager’s seventh thriller under this byline, and eleventh overall, in only fourteen years—a veritable assembly line of paperback chills. Working at such a pace, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Sager uses genre stereotypes. Diving into this novel, I quickly recognized allusions, some more overt than others, to Edgar Allan Poe, Daphne du Maurier, and D.H. Lawrence. And that turned out to be just for starters.

In 1983, Kit McDeere knows the Hope’s End murders as merely a lingering urban legend. Pursued by her own demons, Kit accepts a caregiver job for Lenora Hope, mostly because she can’t find anything else. When Lenora proves to be, not a daffy patient just winding down, but a crafty schemer ready to divulge secrets she’s kept hidden since 1929, Kit simply isn’t prepared for the mass of horrors dumped in her lap.

Once lavishly appointed and luxurious, Hope’s End has become a time capsule of Gatsby-era nostalgia. Lenora’s dwindling household staff preserves the house, but also basically keeps her prisoner inside an upper-story suite overlooking the Atlantic. Kit gets drawn into the building’s faded grandeur, but also into Lenora’s story, which she types painstakingly with only her left hand. The secrets, and the decaying house, take on labyrinthine proportions in Kit’s mind.

Sager emphasizes the contradiction between the house’s aspiration, and its condition. It’s beautiful, but also literally falling apart. This proves to be a metaphor for the agreed-upon fictions that keep everyone behaving politely toward one another. The staff’s autocratic matron, Mrs. Baker, works hard to maintain the illusion that nothing has changed since 1929. This illusion becomes harder and harder to maintain.

Everything exists on multiple levels. Just as the house is a metaphor for the gentlemen’s agreements binding polite society together, the dirty secrets Lenora wants to divulge are metaphors for the traumas people need to express, but can’t. Kit reads Lenora’s long-buried secrets and becomes a crusader for justice denied for over fifty years, but that’s a metaphor for the doubts and self-blame she can’t address within herself.

Riley Sager

Within these interlocking symbols, one rule of mass-market fiction is: the more assiduously characters believe something on Page One, the more thoroughly they’ll find their expectations inverted on the closing page. We readers have become accustomed to twist endings and big reveals. Therefore, authors will wedge multiple twists into the narrative, because they know we’re keeping suspect lists and testing them against accumulating evidence.

Yes, Sager does that too. I mentioned three novelists above whose work Sager channels. As the story accelerates, though, it becomes increasingly clear Sager expects his readers to know story boilerplates mostly from Hollywood, and his narrative assumes a three-act structure familiar from Syd Field screenwriting manuals. I started noticing narrative conventions pinched from filmmakers like Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, and Robert Aldritch.

I don’t say this to disparage Sager’s storytelling… except when I do. In later chapters, Sager’s chapter breaks start occurring on big plot reveals or cliffhangers, sometimes so pointed that readers can practically hear the soundtrack orchestra playing a dramatic flourish. Seasoned readers start observing what film critic Roger Ebert called his Law of Conservation of Characters: every named character serves a purpose, and if we don’t know it, we just don’t know it yet.

Individual readers will decide whether this bothers them. The novel’s filmic qualities give it a galloping pace that keeps readers curious, wanting to have our unresolved questions answered. We find ourselves genuinely caring about these characters, and hurting when they’re disappointed. But as cantilevered revelations start accumulating, they start straining readers’ credulity. We start wondering, sometimes out loud: could they really keep such secrets for fifty-four years?

Probably not.

Readers’ ability to enjoy this novel will match the degree to which they’re able to remind themselves it’s a novel, not reality. If readers can enjoy the allusions to classic Gothic romanticists of yore, and the movies they may still have gathering dust in their VHS collection, they’ll probably lose themselves in Sager’s contrivances. The minute we start asking questions about plausibility, we’ll yank ourselves abruptly out of the book.

What Forgiveness Is, What Forgiveness Is Not

Lysa TerKeurst, Forgiving What You Can't Forget: Discover How to Move On, Make Peace with Painful Memories, and Create a Life That’s Beautiful Again

Forgiveness is one of the most necessary, and one of the most difficult, aspects of the Christian experience. When neighbors, enemies, and earthly powers affront us, the Gospel calls us to forgive generously; but our human impulse is to nurse grudges and seek vindication. Essayist Lysa TerKeurst found this in her personal life, when her husband’s infidelity nearly imploded her marriage. So she went in search of what the Bible actually says about granting forgiveness.

I find myself divided about TerKeurst’s findings. Her conclusions are biblically sound, extensively sourced, and balanced by personal experience. She found that, whenever she couldn’t bring herself to forgive, her resentments turned malignant, wounding her far beyond the original transgressions she suffered. When she opened herself to the experience of Christlike forgiveness, she didn’t need to excuse the harm done, or compromise her boundaries. She just stopped carrying her old resentments around in her pockets.

However, I quickly noticed several elements missing from TerKeurst’s exegesis. For starters, though she describes insights she gleaned from her therapist, she cites nothing from science, and little from any extra-biblical sources. She name-drops St. Augustine, C.S. Lewis, and Charles Spurgeon in the text, hardly rigorous scientific sources. Her insights come mostly from personal anecdotes, and her text reads more like a memoir than therapeutic guidance. She assumes you can learn from her personal journey.

I also noticed the near-complete absence of one word from TerKeurst’s text: “repentance.” I don’t recall that word appearing until an appendix. Christians must frequently forgive someone who hasn’t repented or sought to amend their transgressions, because it’s more important to stop carrying that stone ourselves. But I’ve frequently observed that powerful people demand forgiveness before they’ve demonstrated a whit of repentance, placing the burden of transgression on the one wronged, and excusing the transgressor.

We’ve seen this recently in churches. Floods of accusations, not only against religious leaders who have socially or sexually abused their parishioners, but also against church institutions that papered over the abuse, have revealed decades of unhealed trauma. Insurrectionists bearing Christian insignia besieged the American government, then urged voters and legislators to “just move on.” Forgiveness has become an obligation the powerful impose on the masses, not a gift freely given to us by Christ.

Lysa TerKeurst

TerKeurst’s larger text contains important pointers and tools to enact forgiveness in our lives. Again, she roots these insights on her personal experience rather than larger psychological research, but pause on that. Her suggestion to, for instance, begin the forgiveness process by writing down the original transgression, and its long-term impact. After reading TerKeurst’s direction, I applied this exercise myself. I found that crystallizing the hurt into words makes it manageable, not vast and insuperable.

She also expounds about what forgiveness is not. Though TerKeurst accepted the struggle to reconcile with her husband, reconciliation isn’t an obligatory component of forgiveness. Sometimes Christians must unburden ourselves of others’ transgressions, but that doesn’t mean allowing those who hurt us back into our lives unconditionally. There’s a wide gulf between forgiveness, and being a doormat. TerKeurst dedicates an entire chapter to creating and enforcing boundaries to ensure the offender doesn’t hurt us again.

Perhaps the greatest shortcoming in TerKeurst’s reasoning reveals itself in one fact: after this book shipped, her husband returned to old habits, and she reluctantly admitted her marriage was over. I don’t say this to gloat. Rather, I want to emphasize the White Protestant fondness for forgiveness, separate from repentance, has consequences. God is loving and merciful, but God is also just, and Christians who elide the need for repentance miss part of the journey.

In the New Testament, the Greek word metanoia is variously translated as both “repentance” and “conversion.” In either case, metanoia signifies a transformation of mind, a complete reorientation of outlook in service of a renewed life. Metanoia doesn’t happen instantaneously, and it isn’t something someone professes verbally. Rather, repentance makes itself known in a life realigned to serve higher goals. Apologizing and accepting responsibility are good first steps, but repentance comes in a reorganized life.

Don’t misunderstand me. Though TerKeurst purposes to write a self-help book, she actually gives us a good memoir of spiritual struggle, one which yields valuable insights, even if—we now know—her struggle wasn’t complete. If we read it that way, we have plenty to learn from her experiences. But one of the necessary lessons is that forgiveness without repentance creates a downward spiritual spiral. Don’t carry burdens unnecessarily, but don’t rush to forgiveness either.

For the Kingdoms of the Earth

“And you will cry out on that day before the king you chose for yourselves and he will not answer you on that day.”
—1 Samuel 8:18, Robert Alter translation

Artistic representation of King David

Samuel, the Hebrew leader who oversaw Israel’s transition from the age of judges to the age of prophets, specifically warned Israel what would happen if they selected a king. The monarch would seize and redistribute the best farmlands, a massive injustice to an agrarian society. He would seize Israel’s farm implements to reforge them into weapons of war. Kings would spend tax revenue on palaces while farmers squatted in huts.

This maintains a pattern recurrent throughout the Bible, the declaration that power hierarchies are inevitably unjust. To theistic minds of the post-Bronze Age Levant, human hierarchies seize power that belongs uniquely to God. As Robert Alter writes in his extensive footnotes, the God of Samuel was explicitly a Hebrew deity, and had literal political dominion over Israel and Judah. Power belonged to God; humans could only act as God’s deputies.

God’s sovereignty worked well while Israel remained poor, agrarian, and simple. A loose confederation of hill-dwelling tribes working the land with bronze implements, Israel needed little, and God provided commensurately. But the Levant witnessed the rise of political empires like Assyria, Babylon, and Egypt. Straddling the footbridge between Africa and Asia, the Levant became a necessary possession for any empire hoping to expand.

It's easy to forget, centuries removed from the “Divine Right of Kings,” that king isn’t originally a political title, it’s a military rank. Kings occasionally made and enforced laws, time permitting. But civilian laws basically existed to organize the population for military purposes: strong sons for recruitment, tradesmen to make arms, crops to resupply the front lines. As I’ve written before, the political state exists fundamentally to bolster the military.

We’re witnessing this in our time. As Israel’s pummeling of Gaza continues after over a year, international Jews loom large among those protesting the violence. While the Israeli state channels national resources toward killing despised outsiders, those who define themselves according to Jewish traditions and values are among the state’s most vocal opponents. The cleft falls along loyalty to the state versus loyalty to Judah.

As Samuel prophesied, King Saul became tyrannical and paranoid—but not without reason. As his military needs became increasingly prominent, he needed constant resupply of resources. Though Saul didn’t undertake many significant military adventures away from the Israelite homeland, his defenses against Egyptians, Philistines, and other flatlander empires became increasingly costly. In the end, Saul died defending the homeland.

Benjamin Netanyahu, acolyte
of his country's secular Priesthood

Meanwhile, as Saul became increasingly despotic, David became increasingly popular. The description of young David in 1 Samuel seems remarkably like a combination of Robin Hood and Joan of Arc, a folk hero rallying common folk against the occupying despot. David roams the Levant, gathering followers, but notably never attacking God’s anointed king. Only when Saul’s own overreach gets him killed, does David’s rabble army seize power.

My childhood Sunday School tracts always depicted this David: not necessarily rebellious, but certainly young, a friend to commoners, active and popular. The David described in 2 Samuel barely exists, because the longer David holds power in Israel, the more he resembles Saul. He’s arguably worse than Saul, because at least Saul died manning the fortifications. David instead sends others to fight, staying home himself and having sex with generals’ wives.

International Jews lived in diaspora for two millennia before Zionists reestablished the state of Israel. Jewish tradition holds that, eventually, the Israelite homeland will return, but throughout scripture, that’s always in the future. Diasporic Jews suffered massive oppression for centuries, and in places still do; but they didn’t have to absorb the moral compromise of governing an earthly kingdom. Now some do, and that’s made them massively unpopular.

Consider other world leaders chosen for their outsider status. Barack Obama and Boris Johnson both achieved national power by promising to break with stultifying political conventions. Both accomplished mere shadows of what they promised. In America, Republicans running on anti-statist platforms, like Kevin McCarthy, Paul Ryan, and Donald Trump, all needed to compromise their values to actually govern.

Oh Samuel, you warned us. Kings may require power to defend us, but power will always turn the powerful into the instruments they hated. And now it’s too late, we can’t return to our hill-country farms and our uncomplicated agrarian lifestyles. Because we, too, have become what we once hated: subjects of an occupying force that values only itself.

Autopsy for an Institution

Vice President Kamala Harris

Conventionally, political parties conduct postmortems following every Presidential election. These self-reflections especially matter after a loss. If parties and their voters can accurately identify what led to the outcomes, they can reverse their losses later. When Mitt Romney failed to unseat Barack Obama in 2012, the Republican National Committee determined their message was insufficiently inclusive. How that led to the pugnacious, bigoted Donald Trump, I cannot figure.

In 2024, Democrats lost the Presidency and the Senate. The House of Representatives remains uncalled, but a Democratic upset appears unlikely. After a campaign anchored on promises to hurt POC, queer people, and dissidents, American voters decided they preferred that over a Democrat with a proven, but workmanlike, track record. With a stranglehold on American government, Republicans stand poised to unleash epoch-making pain on ordinary citizens.

Democrats probably won’t begin their postmortem until January, between the Congressional and Presidential inaugurations. However, I believe it’s necessary to commence now, while feelings remain high. Why, with so much at stake, did millions of Democratic voters stay home? Trump gained almost no absolute numbers following 2020; his majority margin apparently consists of Biden voters who sat out the Harris campaign and didn’t vote at all. How did that happen?

(There’s no concrete evidence of voter fraud; the difference apparently consists entirely of voter apathy.)

Edit: in light of new evidence, it appears that Trump did not win an outright majority. Though he came first in the popular vote, continuing counts indicate that he fell short of the 50% threshold.

Though every election has its own character, one recurrent thread remains evident throughout my lifetime: Democrats desperately want to prevent another 1968 Democratic National Convention. Bipartisan anger at Lyndon Johnson’s mishandling of the Vietnam War, coupled with Hubert Humphrey’s general unpopularity, caused streets to erupt in violence. The brutality made the Democrats look slovenly and dangerous, which handed the general election to Richard Nixon.

Former President Jimmy Carter

Beginning arguably with Jimmy Carter, the Democrats began fleeing their legacy with FDR’s New Deal and Johnson’s Great Society. Teddy Kennedy primaried Carter from the Left for exactly this reason. Unfortunately, this challenge fractured the Democratic coalition and helped hold the door for Ronald Reagan. In autopsying their 1980 drubbing, Democrats decided their lesson was that they needed to tack harder to the center and abandon the New Deal.

Thus commenced the Democrats’ centrist fixation, beginning with Walter Mondale’s historically milquetoast 1984 campaign. 1988 should’ve been Gary Hart’s year, until he imploded following the notorious Monkey Business photo, kicking the nomination to Michael Dukakis. But Mikey-D proved inept and subjected himself to multiple humiliations, giving us the only time since World War II that the same political party won three consecutive Presidential elections.

Dukakis, a self-identified “liberal,” tanked in 1988, but centrist Bill Clinton won in 1992. To this day, many Democrats insist that this proves voters prefer centrists. Democrats decided they needed, again, to chase the center and abandon the New Deal. I’d contend that Democrats’ 1992 victory reflects less a centrist at the top of the ticket, than the absence of Lee Atwater from inside the Republican National Committee.

Moreover, though Bill Clinton won twice, he never carried a majority. He probably wouldn’t have carried the plurality if Ross Perot, a former leading Nixon donor, hadn’t split the fiscal conservative vote twice. Facing a visibly fatigued George H.W. Bush in 1992 and an unsmiling Bob Dole in 1996, Clinton was less the popular choice of the 1990s than the candidate Americans could live with. Which isn’t saying much.

Failed candidate Michael Dukakis

Al Gore won a razor-thin majority in 2000, but lost the procedure. But like Clinton, Gore never got the majority. Both Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004 appeared starchy and joyless on camera, which shouldn’t matter, but does. Since campaigns today are highly visual endeavors, driven by television and YouTube, candidates need visual dynamism, which Barack Obama, for all his many faults, had.

Obama, another centrist, won two straight majorities, the first Democrat to do so since FDR. But consider his opponents: John McCain and Mitt Romney, who ran two of history’s greatest room-temperature campaigns. Hillary Clinton, another centrist, got more airtime for her frequent verbal gaffes than her policies. Clinton lost to the more entertaining Donald Trump, who only lost reelection after shitting in the metaphorical swimming pool on national TV.

2024 could offer Democrats the opportunity to shed the illusion of the phantom centrist voter, but it probably won’t. The party squandered precious momentum chasing crossover voters who have probably never existed. So here’s my postmortem, not only for the Democrats, but also for the entire United States:

Doing what we’ve done for fifty-six years hasn’t worked. Let’s change course before it’s too late.

Anatomy of the Un-Free Mind

Jason Stanley, Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future

Fascists, of both the small-f and large-F varieties, have a curiously adversarial relationship with history. Their entire political movement depends on myths of past national greatness, which is almost always presented as lost, but which they promise to restore. But they generally despise historians, and attempt to squelch nuanced or conflicting narratives. Briefly, they adore the idea of history, but despise the practice, especially if it requires any self-reflection.

Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley has written multiple books about how fascists, propagandists, and spin doctors use language and knowledge to strangle public discourse. This book’s title appears to promise a look at how authoritarian regimes rewrite history generally, but in practice, it focuses primarily on academia. Stanley examines how regimes inculcate a spirit, not only of ignorance, but also incuriosity, among citizens at a formative age.

First, tempting though it might be, Stanley stays substantially clear of large-F Fascists. He talks somewhat about Hitler, less about Mussolini. But he mainly focuses on current strongman authoritarian regimes, especially Putin’s Russia and Netanyahu’s Israel. He spends some time on the British colonial empire in Africa and India, his father’s scholarly specialization. And he unambiguously aims his harshest criticisms as Donald Trump’s American brand of anti-intellectualism.

In Stanley’s telling, fascists begin by constructing the purpose of historical education. Their reasoning starts from an intended conclusion—instilling a love of country and an adherence to hierarchy—and retrospectively determines how to achieve that goal. This means having institutional control of textbooks, administration, and personnel. Conservatives have made firing educators and replacing trustees a cornerstone of their recent campaigns.

The process of controlling the historical narrative closely resembles the process of creating imperial colonies; this isn’t coincidental. Autocrats create a hierarchy that, they contend, has always existed. They instill a central imperial language, and make it illegal to speak indigenous languages; not for nothing did British colonialists force the Kikuyu of Kenya onto reservations, exactly as America did to its native population. Because indigeneity is necessarily anti-authoritarian.

Jason Stanley

Here, I wish Stanley went more into how administrations silence history among adults. He describes how administrations use schools to prevent passing local autonomy and traditional identities onto the next generation. But how, other than armed force, do autocrats control adults? Stanley is vaguer here, perhaps because academics began committedly studying the process only after the atrocities of World War II. Traditional knowledge disappeared quickly, and I’m unsure how.

Mythical history looms large. That might mean presenting Germans as the genetic descendants of ancient Greece, as the Reich did (they’re not), or how schoolbook history presents George Washington as blameless, honest, and certainly not a slaveholder. Either way, it presents an innocent past that enthrones the dominant population as necessarily deserving power. This mythic past presents history as a constant decline from prelapsarian goodness, which politics must promptly reclaim.

Many critics respond by insisting that “classical education” counters authoritarian overreach. But Stanley insists that there’s no single magic machine. Classical education can empower intellectual curiosity and resistance to tyranny, if teachers focus on the questions the ancients raised, and if teachers address ways that our morality has changed. But authoritarians love using “classical education” to teach mindless adoration for the dead, which only compounds state-centered mythological ignorance.

Although Stanley focuses on history, he acknowledges this applies to all disciplines. He quotes Toni Morrison, who wrote that choosing the canon of literature is very much about choosing the national culture. When science serves the purpose of politics and industry, rather than inquiry and discovery, scientists always arrive at state-sponsored conclusions. The conventional liberal arts can improve human experience, or it can tie us to autocrats. Fascists know this.

Stanley makes no bones about his motivation. Donald Trump used executive authority to propound a national history curriculum that elided slavery, native extermination, and crackdowns on organized labor. The most extreme forms of American conservatism use the same techniques of historic erasure used to justify Putin’s imperialism or Britain’s conquest of India. Informed, politically invested citizens have a responsibility to reclaim history, both its glories and its tragedies, for the commonwealth.

This breakdown is chilling, certainly for those of us who believe in learning and inquiry, but hopefully also for anyone who just has kids, or loves a free society. Knowing history isn’t just a moral good, it’s a commitment to liberty and democracy; when governments decide what citizens may know, they control electoral outcomes. But the darkness notwithstanding, Stanley’s breakdown assures us that ignorance can be resisted. If we try.