The New Gothamite Existential Drama

Raven Leilani, Luster: a Novel

Young Edie lacks direction in her life. She sleepwalks through a desirable but unfulfilling Manhattan publishing job, and despises her roommate. One day, desperate for connection with another human being, she answers a personal ad. That’s how she finds herself having an affair with a White man, twice her age, who feels stifled in his open marriage.

Front-cover copy calls Raven Leilani’s first book “a novel,” but that's somewhat misleading. It’s episodic, has only a vaguely defined through-line, and has more loose ends than a shoelace factory. Rather, it flows loosely, acrobatically, like a novel-length prose poem. Perhaps that explains the starkly divided opinions it has drawn from readers; your response depends on your willingness to immerse yourself in Leilani’s subtle undertow.

By her own admission, our first-person narrator, who is Black, has made some bad decisions. (She introduces herself as “Edie” very early, then never repeats it; she’s mostly a nameless cipher, even to herself.) She shits where she eats, has only a halfhearted commitment to her career, and frequently lets life happen to her. Accepting a wilful sexual relationship with a White man literally twice her age is painfully on-brand.

Appropriately, for somebody who spends copious ink regretting her past, Edie’s choices return to plague her. She loses her poorly-paid job, then her roommate, then her apartment. Trapped on a downward spiral caused by Manhattan’s “move up or move out” pressures, she caroms quickly through meaningless jobs, desperate for validation. To her horror, she finds temporary deliverance from the unlikeliest source: her boyfriend’s wife.

Leilani’s story moves forward, not by character or plot, but by theme. This perhaps reflects her narrator’s position: young, Black, female, and poor by city standards. Edie engages in ill-chosen sexual encounters, as much as anything, because they’re something to do. The novel’s title is deliberately ambiguous, reflecting the glamor Edie sees in her well-off boyfriend’s suburban life, but also her tendency to measure her life by sex.

Raven Leilani

Edie used to be a promising artist. But, like millions of art-school graduates, she shelved her talent when making a living became a higher priority. Finding herself suddenly sheltering with her boyfriend and her boyfriend’s wife, the phantom of imminent starvation temporarily abated, she rediscovers the motivation to create. However, she struggles to reconnect that motivation with the part of her that sees like an artist.

Anybody who’s taken grad-school creative writing workshops recognizes this: writers frequently create visual artists as narrative surrogates for themselves. Given the limited amount of biographical info available for reviewers, it’s tempting to wonder exactly how autobiographical Leilani’s story really is. If this isn’t a roman à clef for Leilani’s life, Edie at least represents the author’s attempt to organize and comprehend herself.

Eric, Edie’s boyfriend, is a library archivist; his wife Rebecca performs autopsies for the VA. They traffic in history and mortality, which warps their ability to communicate. Eric fails to remain hip and relevant (Edie repeatedly stresses his GenX credentials), while Rebecca sneaks off to secretly mosh at all-night metal concerts. Their household communications happen in weirdly coded language.

Meanwhile, Edie meets Eric and Rebecca’s Black daughter. The meeting isn’t exactly amicable. However, they quickly become a force in one another’s lives: Akila has a creative spirit undimmed by years of adult cynicism, while Edie has life skills necessary to teach Akila how to be Black in a world still organized for White convenience. The pair need, but don’t understand, each other.

Readers weaned on conventions of mass-market fiction, of unified story and of action rising to a climax, may find Leilani’s style confounding. Edie is timid and adrift, more acted upon than acting. Her story is segmented and episodic, and while something happens that arguably serves the climactic role, it’s disconnected from most of what came before. Again, this is less a novel than a prose poem.

This is compounded because we wonder how seriously to take Edie’s narration. Edie frames events to exempt herself from blame, even though the story indicates she’s partly responsible for her frequent setbacks. Though she’s prone to lengthy monologs explaining her backstory, she presents them with the dispassion of an archivist, which, in context, is ironic.

However, audiences willing to immerse themselves in Leilani’s storytelling, to let the narrative current carry them along, will find moments of intense clarity. This novel isn’t for everyone. But readers able to pause their egos, and follow Edie along her strange, often opaque journey, may find more than a little of themselves in her story.

Modern Violence and Modern Repentance

My mother and me. We're not great at taking photos, so awkward selfies are what we have.

My mother said something this holiday weekend that hasn’t always come completely easily to her lips: “I’m sorry.” But that could sound wrong. She’s never had difficulty apologizing if she did something wrong in the moment, like stepping on someone’s toes. In those situations, she could easily acknowledge the mistake, and try to make amends. That part has never been in question.

This time, she apologized not for something she did momentarily, but for something she believed over the long haul. It occurred in the context of describing an adventure I had when, a week before Christmas, I drove into Kansas City to attend a concert. She expressed admiration for my ability to remain calm and even-headed driving on some of America’s worst urban highways, something that’s always terrified her.

“I’m sorry for holding you back,” she said. “I’m sorry for projecting my fears onto you. The conflicts of big-city living were always so intimidating for me, I know that when you were younger, you wanted the kinds of experiences that only happen in big cities. That scared me so badly, and I projected that onto you, and I know that sometimes held you back. And for that, I’m sorry.”

My parents grew up in small, close-knit Nebraska towns like Ogallala and Hay Springs, amiable communities where people knew and trusted one another. Mostly. For those willing to conform themselves to community standards, Nebraska can be an inviting, friendly place. But Nebraska has also sometimes been intensely violent. When we returned here in 1992, Nebraska was also an overwhelmingly White state. And that, my friends, has never been a coincidence.

For all her willingness to embrace new experiences, my mother never particularly needed to interact with diverse communities until well into adulthood. Until my father commenced his Coast Guard career when they were approaching thirty, they’d lived in a succession of small- to medium-sized towns with White Protestant heteronormative populations. That limited experience with diversity continues to influence her thinking to this day.

Though registered Republicans, my parents hold distinct egalitarian views, at least on a person-to-person level. They believe racism, sexism, and economic injustice are wrong, and need redressed. But until recently, they saw these problems as essentially individual. They saw racism, for instance, as an individual White person dropping an N-bomb in public; when it comes to populations, they rationalized away practices like redlining and racialized mass incarceration.

Riot police in Baltimore, Maryland, April 27th, 2015

When confronted with entire neighborhoods, many more populous than the towns they grew up in, that were functionally segregated along racial, social, or economic lines, my parents faced a society that remained deeply unjust. And, like most White people, this injustice reflected on them. This created a deep moral disquiet within their souls, as you can imagine. But unlike today, they lacked a framework to understand this disquiet.

Today, we often describe practices like redlining, unequal educational access, and other forms of half-legal racism as “violence.” Same for sexism, genderism, and other forms of exclusion. I think my mother unconsciously recognized this violence, but lacked the terminology to understand it. Therefore, faced with the perception of violence, but no clear bloody noses, she perceived the violence as directed against her.

It’s easy to pooh-pooh the defense of “it was a different time.” Some White Protestant heteronormative people in past eras understood injustice on the ground, so anybody, the reasoning goes, could. But that’s like saying all Black people could overcome racism because Oprah did. Not everyone has the intellectual framework, moral backbone, or community support to escape their social context. My mother deplored unfairness; she just couldn’t always see it.

Therefore, to restate: my mother saw and understood that living in diverse American cities, driving the crowded city highways, and taking the economic risks to pursue an art career, as violent. Because, at least on a psychological level, it was. But because she couldn’t clearly understand who caused the violence, and who was on the receiving end, she internalized the violence around her.

A lot of White people probably did this, and believed, not unreasonably (in that context), that the violence was directed at them. As parents do, they wanted their children to avoid the crushing psychological pain of violence. Therefore they defend what limited privilege comes from a society that defines Whiteness, Christianity, and heterosexuality as “normal.” They arguably aren’t malicious; they just don’t see their part in the violence.

My mother only wanted to keep me safe. Unfortunately we can only remedy this violence by acknowledging it, walking into its source, and challenging it where it lives. At her age, my mother can only repent her part in perpetuating this violence. I’m still young enough to take responsibility and walk into the fire. In a very real way, her apology gives me the freedom to do so.

J.K. Rowling and Modern Inflexible Morals

A college acquaintance shared a milestone on Facebook this week: her grade-school daughter had read the entire Harry Potter series, in hardback, cover to cover, in under four months. Books this glimmering-eyed girl finished, not because some authority had assigned them, or because they provided some material advantage, but simply because the experience of reading brought her joy. This girl’s broad smile with her books was frankly an inspiration.

She shared this accomplishment the same week that Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling continued her years-long pattern of punching herself in the face on Twitter. Rowling, a longtime supporter of the Labour and Scottish National Parties, with their broad center-left positions, has cultivated an audience somewhat more progressive than the general population. Which makes this week’s tweets, frankly too distressing to reproduce here, even more upsetting to her core fans.

How to reconcile these two halves? On one hand, Rowling’s works encourage young people to sit patiently with a book, practicing skills of patience and self-discipline that aren’t always rewarded in today’s media-saturated culture of instant gratification. On the other hand, Rowling, once a darling of the economic left, has expressed opinions so reactionary, devoted fans have described her as “transphobic, hateful, harmful and factually inaccurate.”

Her works have attracted audiences of diverse ages for the same reason my friend’s daughter enjoyed them: they’re a pleasure to read. And I mean that on multiple levels. One can appreciate them as childlike diversions, the belief that a magical wonderland exists in parallel with the everyday banality around us. Or as modern parables of ethics, responsibility, and justice. Or as an attempt to reckon with Britain’s wartime history.

This complexity partly explains their appeal. My friend’s daughter probably enjoys these novels for reasons entirely her own, but by having read them, she opens herself to the nuance that comes from rereading them in her future. Like life itself, the interlocking layers of Rowling’s story permit events to reflect the reader back at herself. We, like Harry Potter, are constantly changing, constantly learning, and the story reflects ourselves.

I’ve written before that it's foolish to expect great artists to be good people. The churning mass of undigested trauma that usually turns humans into artists, also generally leaves lifelong scars on souls; the personal stench that follows time-honored authors, from Christopher Marlowe to Ernest Hemingway to [fill-in-the-blank] is inseparable from their creative process. Healthy, well-adjusted minds often aren’t prepared to wallow in the psychological refuse where art is conceived.

It’s tempting to spew time-tested bromides about separating the artist from the art. But in Rowling’s case, that’s virtually impossible. The combination of unprecedentedly popular novels and modern social media has provided Rowling a public platform almost unmatched in world history. The same Twitter feed she used to dribble out story revelations, she now uses to grandstand opinions which her audience finds execrable.

Thus I’m no closer to resolving the underlying conundrum. Like Orson Scott Card before her, Rowling herself lacks the underlying nuance and self-reflection embodied in her work. Both authors reassured youthful readers that their ability to navigate an innately abusive social order didn’t make them as bad as the world around them. Both authors encouraged readers to perceive themselves as something beyond the aggregate weight of their actions.

Yet both authors reduced themselves to slovenly caricatures. Both jettisoned their accrued cultural goodwill and chose to focus with laser-like acuity on forms of queer sexuality that, frankly, didn’t affect them that much. Their works remain in print, testimony to aspirational virtues that, sadly, the authors don’t seem to share. Youth, and former youth, who read and learned from these books, are left to wonder: what now?

By encouraging my friend’s daughter to perceive reading as a meaningful good in its own right, Rowling has accomplished something worthwhile. Today’s culture doesn’t reward slow, self-contained tasks like reading. Our economy insists anything worth doing should be monetized, while our technology and entertainment industries encourage instant gratification. In teaching a rosy-cheeked grade schooler to value reading, Rowling has encouraged her to be a deeper thinker and better person.

That accomplishment, however, cannot be read separately from Rowling’s odious opinions. She preaches a doctrine that insists some people are inherently untrustworthy and must be punished in advance, a position definitely more Voldemort than Dumbledore. Why, it’s almost like Rowling is neither all good nor all bad, neither saint nor sinner. This ambiguity is unacceptable in today’s stark moral climate.

Maybe that’s the lesson to take from this situation.

The Door That Opened Into Somewhere

Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

Young January Scaller lives a life straight out of a post-Victorian pulp romance: while her archeologist father globetrots for exotic artifacts, she lives with her father’s sponsor, in unparalleled luxury. Sure, she misses her father. But Mr. Locke’s wealth and connections have provided her an education unavailable to most mixed-race children. Then one day January stumbles through an impossible door into a world that shouldn’t exist, and wonders: what other worlds exist behind this one?

It’s possible to find the political metaphors in Alix E. Harrow’s first novel. The teenager’s discovery that her privileged childhood doesn’t reflect how others live; the ways powerful people preserve their power by feeding on others; the influence race has on how Americans interact with one another. But I prefer another reading. Harrow has written an American fairy tale, channeling our better instincts and higher ideals. We become ourselves, Harrow suggests, by rediscovering childhood wonder.

Mr. Locke holds a poorly defined role within The Society, a group of gentleman archeologists who pay actual credentialed academics to crisscross the world looking for trinkets. The Society doesn’t publish scholarship or compile information, however; it supports itself with a thriving black market in antiquities, turning other worlds’ legacies into cheap cash. January, whom Mr. Locke is training as his junior accountant, gets fleeting glimpses of this corrupt world, never enough to understand it.

Meanwhile, January holds onto fleeting memories of her father’s extravagant tales of distant lands and mysterious peoples. She also half-recalls an incident when she was seven, in 1901, when she wrote words on paper, and those words opened a door into an exotic, spice-scented world. Did she really make something magical happen by simply writing it down? Mr. Locke discourages such speculations. He’s a rationalist, and insists that only this world matters enough to study.

January actually occupies a world riddled with Doors. Mr. Locke and his society have another, ruder word for Doors. But whatever name, these Doors open onto strange and mysterious worlds of wonder and possibility, many of them magical. When a puzzling book hidden inside an impossible chest reveals to January that the door of her childhood was very real, she sees new opportunities opening immediately. Mr. Locke, however, sees a threat which must be stopped.

Alix E. Harrow

Harrow’s writing straddles the line between fantasy thriller and social parable. The aptly named Mr. Locke has no patience with doors; he uses money and connections to preserve the Earth he loves, making our world smaller, safer, and more immune to change. January, a half-caste child whose father trades in mystery and exoticism, misses the thrill of wonder she experienced in childhood, the power of believing that, somewhere, magic still happens. The conflict is generational.

This metaphor doesn’t limit Harrow’s writing, however. Her first priority is creating engaging characters in difficult situations. In January’s first-person main narrative, she first challenges powerful institutions from inside; when this proves fruitless, she crosses the boundary to rediscover the outside world she was born in, but doesn’t remember. Meanwhile, between the covers of her puzzling book, she discovers Yule Ian Scholar, whose puzzling memoir might hold the key to January finding her way home.

Themes emerge quickly: what does going home mean? Does it mean returning to the comfortable untruths we learned in childhood? Or does it require passing through painful, harrowing (pun intended) uncertainty in search of truth? Like L. Frank Baum’s Dorothy, or Thomas Wolfe’s George Webber, January’s life is plagued by homesickness; but she has only a vague, half-formed notion of home. She only knows that truth exists, and it doesn’t necessarily correspond with mere reality.

Harrow also emphasizes the ways human words create other realities. The Society uses arcane rituals, influenced by Scottish Rite Masonic traditions, to create a nexus of power which the rest of reality can’t see. (Late in the book, Harrow’s distrust of the Scottish Enlightenment becomes glaring.) Meanwhile, January uses words to reveal hidden truths and actually increase uncertainty. The Society sees uncertainty as chaos, but January sees uncertainty as opportunity. Which set of words prevails?

This novel presents a world seeking resolution. Is trust always better than paranoia, is certitude always better than doubt? Harrow, by day a scholar of American race history, has definite opinions on these questions, though she doesn’t lay them out prescriptively. Instead, she walks readers, youth and adult alike, through the turmoil of finding our own resolution. By the end, maybe we don’t have all the answers. But, like January, we now have better questions.

Rudolph the Dog-Earred Stereotype (Part Two)

Santa and Rudolph in Videocraft International's 1964 stop-motion Christmas special

Three years ago today, I wrote an essay entitled Rudolph the Dog-Earred Stereotype, claiming that the Christmas classic “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” was a call to action against Hitler. It went largely unnoticed at the time. Last week, I linked that essay on a popular meme-sharing group on Facebook, and it exploded. In under eighteen hours, it received three times as many hits as it received in the previous three years.

It also received several comments, many of them hostile. Nothing energizes Netizens more than having their opinions challenged, and apparently that’s what I did. The objections fall into three basic categories, which I will address in no particular order. Here goes.

• “Santa isn't enabling ablism, he's enabling antisemitism isn't the defense I think it was meant to be”

I never said Santa was enabling antisemitism, I said America in 1939 was enabling antisemitism, and Robert L. May, Rudolph’s creator, was calling on America to take a stand. Moreover, America definitely enabled antisemitism; the same year May wrote the first Rudolph coloring book on contract for Montgomery Ward, America turned away a shipful of German Jewish refugees, most of whom eventually wound up in Germany’s Holocaust camps.

It bears emphasizing that bigotry seldom begins at ground level. Scholars of race, history, and law, like Ibram X. Kendi and Michelle Alexander have demonstrated that bigotry doesn’t cause discriminatory policies, but rather, discriminatory policies cause bigotry. If “all of the other reindeer” were mocking and excluding Rudolph, it was because Santa, atop the North Pole power pyramid, created that environment. Thus it was on Santa to change it.

If audiences limit ourselves to reading art on the surface, we always miss the meaning. Yes, superficially, Santa encouraged bigotry against Rudolph. But Santa isn’t just Santa, he stands for powerful people everywhere: heads of state, religious leaders, media figures deciding which stories deserve reporting. Storyteller Robert L. May wanted these powerful people to change their harmful policies, hopefully before that catastrophic “foggy Christmas Eve.”

• “This is fuckin [sic] dumb. Why not write a book for adults who might actually get the point (if that was actually the case)”

I dunno, man, why do any authors ever write about important topics for children? Why did Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle In Time address spiritual malaise in a technological age? Why did Lloyd Alexander’s The Chronicles of Prydain deal with World War II issues in a medieval Welsh setting? Why did Suzanne Collins deal with economic inequality, climate change, and resistance to unjust authority in The Hunger Games?

Perhaps because children, from an early age, demonstrate a strong sense of morality and fairness. If we’ve learned nothing from the last two years, we surely agree that adults perform elaborate moral contortions in order to defend selfish interests while still thinking of themselves as good people. We’ve watched grown-ups use religion, pseudoscience, and a truncated form of history to justify racism, closed-door nationalism, and spreading a plague unchecked.

Children, historically, have used their innate sense of justice to goad adults into right actions. As Elizabeth Hinton writes, many acts of resistance to institutional racism during the peak Civil Rights Movement began in high schools and colleges. Media pundits and defenders of the status quo still use the stereotypical college liberal as their catch-all demon, because youth have strong moral codes, undistorted by economic pressures and adult cynicism.

This doesn’t mean children always know, or do, the right thing. On the small scale, grade-school students already show hostility to people groups whom adults around them shun or belittle. On the large scale, historian Jill Lepore records how some late hippie-era college activism crossed the line into light-beer Stalinism. That’s why children should read literature with a strong moral backbone, to help steer and modulate their instinct toward fairness.

• “tl;dr”

That’s on you, dude. Most of my blog essays run 750 words, which anyone with a healthy attention span should be able to read in about three minutes. I keep things brief because screen reading attenuates people’s willingness to stick with long or detailed content. As the above arguments indicate, I didn’t explain important points in enough detail; believe me, I could go much, much longer than I usually do.

In conclusion, I don’t expect my essays to change people’s deeply entrenched beliefs. Readers will often respond to challenged beliefs much like they’d respond to someone attempting to chop off their arm. But I do expect mature audiences to read what I said, not what they wish I said.