The decision to charge Houellebecq has been criticized as a freedom of speech issue; and so, to an extent, it is. French law in that respect differs somewhat from English, but doubtless his lawyers will have hours of lucrative fun arguing over the difference between inciting people to do something unspeakable and simply warning that society is moving in a direction where something unspeakable is likely to happen. Nearly 60 years ago Enoch Powell was in the same position over dire prophecies he made in his so-called “Rivers of Blood” speech.

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But this prosecution of Houellebecq provokes concerns that go far beyond freedom of expression. In just over 30 years as a novelist writing mainly about the misery of bourgeois French life, he has lifted up a number of stones and allowed some pretty unsavory things to crawl out from under them. In no particular order these include sex tourism, paedophilia, mental illness, rampant narcissism, family breakdown, betrayal, social alienation, self-hatred, nihilism, prostitution and, inevitably, racism. But then anyone who understands what French society is really like will find none of this surprising. It is not the mark of a happy country when the two people most likely to end up competing in the final round of next year’s presidential elections are Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Years of decadence and failure under the Fifth Republic — conditions about which Houellebecq has written extensively in all his novels — have led to an embrace of one form of extremism or another as a means to counter or, at least, manage them. That, if you like, is the end product of the society about which Houellebecq has spent all these decades writing.

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If he is not allowed to be himself, to express what he feels, his natural powers of observation will be suppressed. No-one sensible can defend incitement, but was the novelist really inciting anyone in that 2022 interview? Was he not merely simply presenting another aspect of a deteriorating society, in which the people have failed themselves through their willful decadence and whose traditional political class has not even dared to try to treat the underlying problems? Houellebecq’s lawyers have on his behalf issued a statement in which it is claimed he feels manipulated and exploited by those to whom he gave the interview. Maybe he does, but he should have seen it coming. Again, this is not simply about free speech: it is about a creative artist having the permission to express the depths of his creativity in order accurately to reflect his society or, in this case, his fears for his society. If others have chosen to exploit that then it may be, as the statement also said, out of greed — Houellebecq is probably France’s greatest and most famous living novelist and therefore big box office — but it might just as plausibly be that they shared his fears, and saw no reason not to share them with a wider public. In the present unhappy state of France this is inevitable.

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But then French writers have often courted trouble for displaying radicalism or for perceived insult. Molière scandalized polite society with Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme; Flaubert was rude about Norman peasants (and the middle class) in Bouvard et Pécuchet and quite shocking in Madame Bovary; Zola was prosecuted for criminal libel over J’Accuse; Céline was fascist but still one of the most glittering writers in the French canon. Houellebecq has long been in a distinguished Gallic tradition of saying the unsayable, but saying it beautifully; all that is shocking is that a feeble and gutless French state is once more trying to punish him for it.

I recall being in my office on a January morning in 2015, reading an article about Houellebecq in Le Figaro about his new novel, Soumission, published that day. The novel’s action was set seven years later at the 2022 presidential election. As usual, the two highest-scoring candidates in the first round contest the prize in the second: and Houellebecq imagines these to be Marine Le Pen and a fictional creation, Mohammed Ben Abbes, leader of the Muslim Fraternity. The leaders of the main parties, frozen out of the contest by their poor performances in the first round, meet to decide where to advise their voters to go. They agree that Mme Le Pen cannot possibly be allowed to win, and tell their followers to vote for Ben Abbes. He wins; France is Islamified. The anti-hero of the novel, a lecturer at the Sorbonne who, in true Houellebecqois style seems most attracted to his vocation because of the opportunity it gives him to sleep with his young female students, flees Paris for a time and wanders aimlessly around a country in ferment. Returning to his faculty — now part of the renamed Islamic University of Paris — he is welcomed back to his job by his (ethnically French, formerly Catholic) superior, who has himself converted to Islam and is very much going with the flow. He tells him Islam isn’t too bad, not least because he now had four wives, and the youngest is only fifteen.

Reading the Figaro interview, I looked up from my newspaper and saw something shocking happening on the television in the corner of my office. A news channel was relaying, live from Paris, the immediate aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo massacre. The coincidence of this horrific event and the publication of Soumission was not lost on the French media in the succeeding days. Once more, Houellebecq had shown he was not only a great novelist but a great prophet. However, the controversy over that magnificent book continues to this day.

It is a book that takes us to the heart of Houellebecq, and reminds us why for the sake of France and for those who, like General de Gaulle, have a certain idea of France, he must be preserved and allowed free rein. He said at the time that he was not attacking Islam: he was attacking the so-called custodians of France’s glorious culture for being willing to abandon it, which he was convinced they were. He was attacking, in that regard, not merely the cynics and self-servers of the political class, but many French people themselves, who took their way of life and their freedoms for granted. It appears that, still, no lessons have been learned. With luck Houellebecq’s lawyers will see him safe: but what this climate of suppression will mean for the mood of France in the imminent presidential election one dreads to imagine.

But what about Brobdingnag, the land of giants? Three hundred years after the publication of Jonathan Swift’s masterpiece, Brobdingnagian giants have had nothing comparable to Lilliput’s commercial success. I know of a singular exception: Gulliver’s Restaurant in Irvine, California, has advertised a Brobdingnagian prime-rib steak, its largest bone-in cut. Beyond this, who remembers Gulliver’s humiliation at the hands of creatures for whom he is a plaything?

Walking in a field in Brobdingnag, Gulliver tries to leap over a cow-pat, only to land in it: he has “found myself just in the middle up to my knees”. He is then “filthily bemired”. The joke is not just scatological. The man who had been a giant among the Lilliputians is now reduced to a tiny, helpless creature, unable to preserve even his bodily dignity. In another scene, Gulliver is placed close against the enormous bodies of the maids of honor and confesses that “a very offensive smell came from their skins”. Their skins appear “so coarse and uneven, so variously colored”, with a mole “as broad as a trencher” and hairs “thicker than packthreads”. As a midget, Gulliver sees what ordinary human vision edits out: pores, blemishes, hair and smell. He discovers the repulsiveness of the human body at close range. Scale turns beauty into grotesquerie, and human self-regard into a matter of perspective.

You wouldn’t see this scene in toyshops. In fact, the novel’s afterlife has been strangely selective: posterity has preserved the spectacle while avoiding its prophetic and satirical edge. Modern adaptations have sanitized Swift’s original text. The 1939 Fleischer cartoon, produced in competition with Disney’s Snow White, turns the Lilliput voyage into a colorful musical romance between rival kingdoms. In the 1960 movie The 3 Worlds of Gulliver, Gulliver extinguishes a fire in the Lilliputian palace by spilling wine on it, rather than by Swift’s less decorous method. In the original, the wine he has drunk “made the wine begin to operate by urine”; he voids it “in such a quantity, and applied so well to the proper places, that in three minutes the fire was wholly extinguished”. His giant’s intervention saves the palace but enrages the empress, since making water within the royal precincts is a capital offense. Gulliver’s salvific piss becomes a breach of etiquette leading to the charge of high treason.

Like Lilliput, Laputa, the flying island, has also enjoyed a colorful afterlife. Hayao Miyazaki’s celebrated Japanese animated film Castle in the Sky (1986) borrows Swift’s name and image, turning the floating island into a world of lost technology, robots and adventure. The change is revealing. Swift’s Laputa satirizes intellectuals so absorbed in abstract speculation that they lose touch with the practical world below. Miyazaki makes the image more enchanting, though his floating civilization retains a darker dimension: the dangers of technological power detached from ordinary human needs.

It is Gulliver’s fourth and final voyage, to the land of the Houyhnhnms, that left the strongest impression on my memory. It is here that Swift turns his satirical gaze most directly on humanity. This land is also home to Yahoos, who resemble human beings but are presented as filthy, greedy and aggressive animals. The Houyhnhnms, by contrast, are horses whose reason appears to have freed them from the passions, prejudices and delusions afflicting humankind. Gulliver admires the horses and recoils from his own species. 

Swift makes the contrast physical before it becomes philosophical. The Yahoos are not merely morally ugly: they are repellent to the eye and touch. Gulliver describes their coarse bodies, hair, claws and animal appetites, concluding that he had never seen “so disagreeable an animal”. Their bodies — and their “strange disposition to nastiness and dirt” — seem to embody the nastiness of their dispositions. The Houyhnhnms, conversely, possess a cleanliness and composure that Gulliver finds almost exemplary. Their very name, he learns, signifies “a Horse” and, in its etymology, “the Perfection of Nature”. The opposition is deliberately disconcerting: the creatures we call beasts display a natural grace and order, while the animal most like ourselves appears degraded.

The ugliness of the Yahoos makes visible the greed and violence that polite society disguises. They clutch and hoard bright stones, digging for them “for whole days” and hiding them in their kennels, anxiously watching lest their fellows discover the treasure. Swift’s master also describes their “undistinguishing appetite to devour every thing that came in their way”. The image reaches beyond the animal enclosure to human acquisitiveness, status competition and consumer culture. It gives the name Yahoo, later adopted by an early internet giant, a rather less innocent resonance.

The Houyhnhnms’ virtues are described in equally uncompromising terms. “Friendship and benevolence,” Gulliver says, “are the two principal virtues” among them; these are not restricted to intimates, but extend to the whole race. They preserve “decency and civility in the highest degrees”, while remaining “altogether ignorant of ceremony”. Their reason is not the egotistic cleverness of human argument; instead, it “strikes you with immediate conviction” because it is not “mingled, obscured, or discolored, by passion and interest”. This is the clean, austere elegance of a society apparently free from vanity, faction and self-deception.

Yet Swift does not allow the reader to settle comfortably into admiration. The Houyhnhnms’ rational order has a chilling aspect, particularly in its treatment of the Yahoos. They debate “whether the Yahoos should be exterminated from the face of the earth”; one advocate argues that they are “the most filthy, noisome, and deformed animals which nature ever produced”. The very clarity of the Houyhnhnms’ reasoning threatens to turn cruelty into policy. Read after the genocides and campaigns of ethnic cleansing that scarred the 20th century, the passage seems chillingly prophetic. Swift may not have anticipated these later horrors literally, but he exposed how the language of rational order can be used to justify the elimination of a population declared inferior. Swift’s rational horses are not a utopia for human beings to imitate; their perfection may require the suppression of sympathy, attachment and individuality. The cleanly ordered society is categorically inhuman. Gulliver’s final voyage is not simply an endorsement of rational horses over irrational men: it is also a warning about what happens when reason, purged of fellow-feeling, becomes an absolute principle of social organization.

The Yahoos also suggest that beneath our elaborate claims to superiority, we remain animals, driven by appetites and rivalries. Here Swift, the Anglican clergyman who served as Dean of Dublin’s St Patrick’s Cathedral from 1713 to 1745, anticipates the challenge that Darwin would pose more than a century later to believers everywhere: how secure is the boundary between human beings and other animals? Swift’s challenge, unlike Darwin’s, may have been theological rather than biological. But his questioning of the prevailing assumption that humanity ranks above animals because it was created in the image of God is startlingly prophetic.

In a New York Review of Books essay, “All of Us Yahoos”, Aaron Matz makes a useful case for taking Swift’s vision seriously. Reviewing Dan Sperrin’s history of English satire, Matz objects to the tendency to treat satire chiefly as a political intervention tied to particular rulers, parties and crises. Swift certainly had his political targets, but the fourth voyage, especially, confronts us with what he called the “great foundation of Misanthropy” on which he had erected the whole book. The Yahoos are more than coded references to political opponents. They raise the possibility that the vices Swift anatomized in public life — vanity, greed, self-deception — are inseparable from human nature itself.

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There is a distinctly Anglo-Irish edge to Swift’s misanthropic vision. In his magisterial biography of Yeats, R.F. Foster describes what he calls “the laconic, visceral, uncompromising edge of the Anglo-Irish mind”. Swift exemplifies that quality: his impatience with cant, his relish for exposing pretension, and his refusal to spare the society in which he himself was formed. Yeats recognized a related quality in Éamon de Valera, whom he compared to Swift as an emblem of Ireland’s “turbulent self-assertion”. In Swift’s case, this self-assertion takes the form of a satire so corrosive that it turns against humanity itself.

It is hardly surprising that this aspect of the book has proved resistant to the toyshop. A cuddly horse is easy to manufacture; a Houyhnhnm is another matter. Yet Swift’s horses have a positive resonance in Ireland. In August 1972, while my infant daughters were enjoying the pony rides at the Dublin Horse Show with their mother, I wandered towards the entrance and witnessed a scene that has stayed in my memory.

An ancient blue Rolls-Royce drew up, and an elderly man in military uniform helped a passenger out of the car. The passenger was Éamon de Valera, now President of Ireland, aged 90: the great surviving nationalist icon of the 1916 Easter Rising against British rule. The setting was striking. The formerly Royal, now simply Dublin Horse Show, had long been associated with Anglo-Irish society, its equestrian traditions and the ascendancy of horse-mounted Protestants. Here was de Valera, whose political career had been forged in opposition to the British Crown, arriving in a world that might still have seemed the preserve of his adversaries. This was 1972, the year of Bloody Sunday, when the divisions between nationalists and loyalists, Catholics and Protestants, Ireland and Britain, in Northern Ireland were being irrigated with blood.

While I do not believe horses possess magical powers, there is a sense in which Swift’s Houyhnhnms point towards future reconciliation. In Ireland, the horse occupies a shared cultural world, crossing boundaries of class, political allegiance and religious tradition. The spectacle of de Valera at the Dublin Horse Show suggested a form of coexistence that political argument alone could scarcely achieve. The animal world offered a zone of connection beyond the sectarian ideological quarrels through which human beings define and divide themselves. Swift’s Houyhnhnms invite a radical vision of this thought.

What if humanity’s capacity for reason does not make it the pinnacle of creation? What if our ideological commitments, our self-righteousness and our belief in progress are precisely what make us ridiculous? An even darker twist to Swift’s prophetic connection between humans and animals came three years after Gulliver. In his Modest Proposal, published in 1729, Swift took the connection to its reductio ad absurdum. The Irish poor, an enduring burden on the landowners, are treated as livestock, their children converted into a commodity for consumption by the better-off. The bureaucratic tone adopts the language of economic rationality to expose a society whose treatment of the poor has already abandoned elementary human decency.

In our own time, documented cases of trafficking in human organs for transplantation offer a grim echo of Swift’s satirical nightmare. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime, in its Global Report on Trafficking in Persons 2024, records 175 detected victims of trafficking for organ removal across 25 countries during 2017-23. Swift’s Yahoos and the proposed consumption of Irish infants may belong to different satirical registers, but both unsettle the distinction between civilized human beings and animals fit for exploitation.

Perhaps this is why the horses matter more than the merchandise. They force us to question the assumptions on which we construct our claims to superiority. Gulliver’s fourth voyage leaves us with an uncomfortable question: if we judge humanity by its actual behavior rather than its claims about itself, would we find much to distinguish us from the Yahoos?

Gulliver himself supplies a devastating answer. Thinking of “my family, my friends, my countrymen, or the human race in general”, he sees them as “Yahoos in shape and disposition, perhaps a little more civilized”, who make no other use of reason “than to improve and multiply those vices” found among their animal counterparts. When Gulliver returns home, he is so alienated from humanity that he prefers the company of horses. And yet, would we really wish to live in a society governed by the Houyhnhnms’ austere rationality?

John Gray’s Feline Philosophy offers a quieter counterpoint to Swift. Gray finds in cats a form of animal wisdom that has little to do with reason, at least as humans understand it. We need not choose between the Yahoos’ appetites and the Houyhnhnms’ austere rationality. Cats neither aspire to rule the world nor feel obliged to justify their place in it. Animals may flourish without our destructive rivalries or our grand schemes for perfecting ourselves. In this view, we have much to learn from creatures that are not forever trying to improve themselves, or the world, in their own celestial image. Gray’s cats suggest that the lesson of Gulliver’s Travels is less about becoming rational than about abandoning our conviction that humanity is the measure of all things.

The freshness and insouciance of her work shocked the elders of Érin, but the young were entranced. We had all read Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Molly Bloom’s soliloquy by torchlight under the bedclothes, but here was something new, a voice like our own saying in print the supposedly scandalous things we hardly dared to think. Yet the fact that hers were not what used to be called, with a snigger, “dirty books”, made them even more dangerous to the petty bigots who sought to control our lives, for in every page of her work, the prospect of freedom reared its handsome head.

The Sixties in Ireland were not as they were in America or the rest of Europe; we did not swing, or have summers of love, or let it all hang out — and if we had, it would have been summarily sliced off by a vigilante squad from the Legion of Mary. Yet there was a frisson in the air, and even an occasional direct poke in the eye of the powers-that-be; something was happening.

The event that Edna appeared in at the Gate was part of Project 67, a three-week series of politico-cultural “happenings” organized by a talented, colorful and courageous theater director, Jim Fitzgerald, and his friend Colm Ó Briain, who would go on to become one of the most influential figures in the arts in Ireland until his death in 2023. When Fitzgerald invited Edna to the inaugural gathering at the Gate, he urged her to bring some of her banned books with her, his intention being that they would be seized by Customs officials at Dublin Airport. Which they were, probably on a tip-off from Fitzgerald himself. The story got into the papers, of course, and provoked a splendid scandal. 

I remember vividly the excitement of being in the audience that night. There were readings by actors from various banned books, fiery speeches were delivered, rhetorical fists were shaken at the Censorship Board and its shadowy controllers. In the midst of it all, center-stage, Edna sat, on a plain kitchen chair, wearing a demure outfit of pale jacket, dark skirt, court shoes and a string of pearls. I see her there, to this day, in my mind’s eye, with her magnificent red hair wound into a gleaming swirl about her head, uttering not a single word but gazing before her and smiling serenely, Yeats’s Pallas Athene come amongst us briefly, in all her poise and beauty; her presence alone was a glorious provocation.

“Pity you weren’t backstage afterwards,” an audience member luckier than I said to me next day, after Edna had returned to London. “That woman has a great store of filthy jokes.”

We missed her in Ireland. I told her so, years later, when at a party one evening we had a long talk about the old days. She would have been a figure for us to rally round, an Irish Marianne. “But how could I have stayed?” she asked, in a rich contralto wail. “They would spit at me in my own village, and my poor mother hardly dared let me into the house. I was a pariah. I had to get out.”

I used to see her now and then, in London, but also on her rare visits to Dublin. I loved her high style, her sense of fun, her scurrilous humor. Above all, I admired her self-possession.

One day she and I were taken to lunch in Dublin on some pretext by the Arts Council. We went to the Shelbourne, which in those days was the place to be seen. As we were crossing the dining room to “her” table — “They keep it for me in case I might drop in, bless them” — I spotted at another table the playwright Arthur Miller lunching with his daughter Rebecca and her husband Daniel Day-Lewis. Edna, of course, swept past them without a glance. We seated ourselves, and while the Arts Council folk and I began an earnest perusal of the half-meter-high menu, Edna beckoned to a waiter, addressed him by his first name, and said: “I’ll have a piece of fish and a nice glass of white, not too cold.”

Thinking she had not noticed them, I mentioned to her in a whisper the presence in our midst of a theatrical legend and his legendary son-in-law. She paused a moment, then turned on me slowly those great depthless eyes of hers, and said, “Oh, yes?” in a tone that let me know, in no uncertain terms, that if the goddess Fama herself were to waft into the room at this moment, the first person she would approach would be the author of a clutch of highly acclaimed novels, a biographer of James Joyce, friend of the likes of Philip Roth, Robert Mitchum and David Owen, and one of France’s Commandeurs de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. So there.

Oh, but she was fun, and loved to poke fun, even, or especially, at herself. I am thinking of a reception in Paris years ago, given by the Académie Française for a large group of visiting Irish authors. It took place in one of the grander of the grands salons of the Institut de France, home of the Académie. My wife and Edna were talking together in a far corner, and at once point I noticed they were engaged in some sort of odd scuffle. I asked afterwards what had happened.

“We were talking away very pleasantly,” my wife said, “when Edna put a hand on my arm and whispered, “Oh, Janet, you’ll have to rescue me!”” What had happened was that her abundant tresses had got tangled in a metal light fixture projecting from the wall behind her. When she was freed, Edna took a restorative sip of champagne and said to my missus, “You know, everyone thinks that at my age this” — she shook her hair — “must be a wig, but at least now there’s one person in the world who can tell them it’s all my own.”

Speaking of champagne, Edna’s friend the Scots novelist Andrew O’Hagan tells of meeting her one day as she arrived back from a reception. The taxi rolled up, and Edna stepped out with her mouth set in the lines of a Greek tragic mask. “Oh, Andrew,” she breathed, “isn’t prosecco a curse!”

And then there’s Boston. It was in the Eighties, and there was a literary event at Harvard College, at which Colm Tóibín, Edna and I were scheduled to give a Saturday afternoon reading. The enormous lecture hall was full to bursting, but Colm and I had no illusions as to who among the three of us was the star attraction. Colm read first and was richly applauded. The audience was skittish — it was college, it was Saturday — and I thumbed through whatever novel of mine I was going to read from, and found a couple of what I judged to be the least gloomy passages. To my surprise, I elicited a few laughs from the crowd.

I finished, and took my seat in the front row, and after a well-judged pause Edna stepped up and positioned herself at the podium, looked down at me with a sweet smile, and murmured into the microphone, in her fruitiest County Clare lilt, “Oh, John, I wish I could be funny — like you”. The rafters rang with merriment, while I wished I could sink through the floor.

Edna and I were staying at the same Harvard hotel, and after the reading we met in the bar for a glass of wine. The art critic Robert Hughes happened to be in town also, and Edna would be giving him dinner here at the hotel that evening, and would I like to join them? I said certainly I would, since I had no other plans. “That’s grand, then,” Edna said, and went off to take a nap.

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I sat on in the bar with a book, and presently noticed that Bob Hughes was there also, at a table not far from mine. He had been latched on to by one of those professional Irishmen-in-America, let’s call him Ruari — tweeds, brogues, voice as loud as his suit — whom I heard say to Hughes, as they were parting, that he would see him later, at seven o’clock. Odd, I thought, since seven was also the hour at which Edna, Bob and I were due to dine.

I was still in the bar when she came down at about 10 minutes to the hour. I mentioned the exchange between Hughes and the bold Ruari, who was standing at the bar now applying his schtick to some other visiting celebrity. She studied him for a moment with a narrowed eye, then instructed me to “go in and mind the table”, and she would deal with the matter. 

I went to the dining room, found our place, ordered a “nice glass of white” à la Edna, and waited. After a minute or two she joined me, calm and queenly as ever.

“Well?” I asked.

“Well what, dear?”

“What about Ruari?”

She wrinkled her brow. “Ruari?”

“The chap in the bar I told you about, who was to meet Bob here at seven, for dinner.”

“Him? He’s gone.”

“But how did you get rid of him?’’

She sniffed, and gave an indifferent shrug.

“Oh, I told him to fuck off.”

We had a pleasant dinner, Edna, Bob and I. Hughes, I remember, was very proud of the tie he was wearing, the abstract design of which, when looked at from a certain angle, turned into a shapely, nude blonde. The shock of the bold.

Afterwards, Edna and I stayed on for a nightcap, reminisced for a while about the high times and low we had shared over the years, then called it a day. In the lift bringing us up to our rooms, Edna, in her Scarlett O’Hara mode, asked me what floor I was on, then sighed and added, “Not that it matters…”

The last time I saw her, we were in the Shelbourne again, having what we did not know would be our last glass of white together. She was as bright and mischievous as ever, though she confessed that she was much preoccupied with the prospect of death. Well, not with death, but rather with the arrangements for her funeral.

“Now, John,” she said, “in your books you’re always writing about these morbid matters, so I thought you’d be the person to consult. You see, I have a burial plot marked out for myself on a little island in a lake in County Clare. The thing is all arranged, and it’ll be a grand occasion. But here’s my worry.” 

She paused for dramatic effect.

 “I have,” she resumed, “an awful lot of relatives down there, you know, and they have an awful lot of children, which is lovely for them, and lovely for me, of course, but…” She paused again. “My worry is that all these young folk will turn up at the chapel with guitars and fiddles and tin whistles and all the rest of it, and start singing folk songs to send me on my way.” She was gazing at me soulfully. “How, would you say, I’d prevent that?” 

I laughed, she laughed, we laughed.

“Edna,” I said, “you don’t need to worry. It will never happen.” 

“Indeed? And why not, would you say, now?” 

I see her sitting there opposite me, under the Shelbourne’s big bright windows, wide-eyed, mock-solemn, a merciless tease.

“Because, my dear,” I said, “you are among the immortals.”

And she is.

When I was a university teacher in the pre-AI epoch, a student presented me with an essay which was entirely plagiarized from a celebrated critic except for the outstandingly intelligent bits, which had been deleted. With becoming modesty, the student said he knew he wasn’t up to much intellectually speaking and so dumbed down the essay he was hijacking. (“Plagiarism,” incidentally, comes from the Latin word for “kidnapping”.) I briefly considered giving him marks for humility. He’s now a fairly well-known actor, who like all actors survives by pretending that someone else’s words are his own.

Around this time there was an outfit in the United States called Intellectual Bullshit Inc, which would write you an A-worthy essay on any topic you wanted, from water imagery in the later Shakespeare to the vaginal structure of the flea, but also a B or C-level one if that seemed more suitable to your capabilities. They would even churn out a whole doctoral thesis on your behalf, at the cost of thousands of dollars. No doubt they’ve now been overtaken by AI, as one form of plagiarism yields to another.

What counts as plagiarism, however, isn’t easy to determine. The very word “research” suggests that you’re working on materials which are not your own. It’s also arguable that all uses of language are creative, even language which is stolen. You have to make sense of the stuff you’re pilfering. Language is governed by rules, but as referees and umpires are aware, applying a rule is itself a creative act, involving tact, discretion, intuition, appropriateness and so on. There are no rules for following rules. Rules have to be interpreted, which is one reason why football crowds sometimes become irascible. We also have to know when to bend the rules or throw them away altogether. We do this when we say “taught” rather than “teached”, but not these days when we say “I was sat” rather than “I was sitting”, which is ungrammatical but has become the norm. 

Even so, there’s a sense in which what we say is always borrowed from others. “I love you” is always a quotation, however sincerely one may intend it. All language is second-hand, reach-me-down, off-the-peg, and clichés are simply those bits of it where this is blatantly obvious. An entirely original utterance, like the message of an alien, would be incomprehensible. No writer before Shakespeare came up with the sentence “My salad days, when I was green in judgement”, but it only works because we’re already acquainted with the individual words. Much the same is true of human behavior. We become unique individuals by spontaneously imitating those around us. Identity is a matter of mimicry. We are all plagiarized versions of our parents, though we aren’t of course identical with them. Two individuals being exactly alike, such as identical twins, is spooky, raising the mind-bending paradox of how something can be both itself and something else. The truth is everything is shop-soiled, tarnished, woven out of something else.

The idea that there’s nothing new under the sun, a thought which is an instance of what it claims, can be disturbing. This is because most of us are instinctive Romantics who believe in originality, and the idea of originality is closely bound up with individualism. The idea that all individuals are incomparable is built deep into the modern psyche, even though it’s a highly dubious claim. Oscar Wilde, whose mission in life was to be that inimitable genius known as Oscar Wilde, could never be caught doing the same thing twice or filching a phrase from another author. He made himself up as he went along; and if he disliked Nature it was because it kept mindlessly repeating itself and was incapable of improvising. This is ironic, since the Irish Wilde spent most of his time imitating the British aristocracy — though one might claim that in his case imitation was the sincerest form of mockery. A later colonial writer, the novelist V.S. Naipaul, entitled one of his books The Mimic Men, as though colonies like his native Trinidad could be seen as mere replicas or simulacra of the imperial homeland. In the same spirit, James Joyce called Ireland “an afterthought of Europe”. On this view, colonies are botched imitations of the real thing. They are mistranslations, smudged offprints, faded facsimiles. 

It’s hard for us to think ourselves back into the neo-classical mindset that preceded the birth of Romanticism — a view of the world for which originality wasn’t rated at all highly. What mattered was the collective wisdom of humankind, not an idea that some bright spark happened to come up with at 3 o’clock in the morning. A belief which the great majority of men and women had held over many centuries wasn’t necessarily true, but there was bound to be something in it. God wouldn’t be so irresponsible as to allow us to get the world seriously wrong over vast tracts of time. (In fact, he allowed us to think it was flat for an embarrassingly long time.) Nor would he withhold from us the few fundamental truths essential for our salvation. What we held in common was what was truly valuable, whereas quirkiness and idiosyncrasy were morally displeasing. They were also for the most part trivial and tedious, whereas the normative and familiar could be fascinating. An imitation of Homer or Horace might be deemed far more precious than an artistic creation of one’s own. Originality was the preserve of the Almighty, who could conjure his handiwork out of nothing as no mere mortal could. To usurp his privilege in this respect was a form of blasphemy. Human beings had their own form of eternity, to be sure, but it was known as tradition. The way to live well was to plagiarize what your ancestors did, a process which stretched back interminably into the past and endlessly into the future. Only the hubristic or dim-witted could imagine that their petty individual resources could outweigh this immense store of collective knowledge. Such was the neo-classical vision of the world, one which has now almost entirely vanished. 

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How Salford made modern Britain

By Terry Eagleton

A number of Irish writers in the 19th century came up with some ingenious solutions to the problem of their nation being a poor reproduction of Britain. The Cork poet Jeremiah Callanan produced a number of English translations of Irish poems, but we don’t always know what Irish works they are supposed to be translations of. They are imitations without an original. His poetic colleague James Clarence Mangan writes “translations” from languages of which he had not the slightest knowledge, so that what seems to be derivative is in fact original. In any case, a translation can be as good as what it reproduces, or even better. The mellifluous “Vienna” is an improvement on the terse “Wien”. Besides, an inaccurate translation might convey the spirit of the original more fully than an exact one. Some other Irish poets indulged in what they called “anti-plagiarism”. This meant writing a poem modeled on an already published one, while maintaining that the published poem was stolen from the one you had just written. If the published work was in English and the new one was in Irish, this deftly reversed the colonial relation between the two nations, so that the larger island becomes a pathetic imitation of the smaller one.

The question of originality applies to politics in another sense too. Whatever revolution may mean, it can’t mean that everything we know stops and something entirely different starts. On the day after the revolution we would still need to pull up our jeans. Total social change would be inconceivable, since how would we identify it unless we retained some sense of what came before? We would simply confront an abyss between what we have now and a wholly different future, with no criteria to assess how the latter differed from the former. Besides, an alternative future has to be worked for, and it’s that process of recreation which bridges the gap between what’s present and what’s to come. We couldn’t speak of progress if there was simply one thing and then something completely different. The Boeing only represents progress over the Tiger Moth because both are aircraft. You can see Billy Connolly as an advance on Harold Lloyd because both are comedians, whereas the National Portrait Gallery isn’t an advance on a prosthetic limb. In this sense, all change involves continuity. At the beginning of the 17th century in Britain, people still burned witches, whereas by the end of the century they had established the Bank of England and the Royal Society; but what intervened between the two was a civil war, not a void.

All the same, the fact that there must be continuity in order to measure change doesn’t mean that all change must be incremental. It’s surely clear that modern capitalist nations aren’t able to participate in the global market while at the same time guaranteeing a decent standard of living for their citizens. They can’t, in short, sufficiently control the domestic effects of their own international operations, let alone adequately protect their people from the most devastating consequences of these forces. This is why they’re peculiarly vulnerable to the challenge of Right-wing populism, which like all proto-fascist movements denounces the global dimension of capitalism while supporting those who reap profit from it. Purely incremental change is unlikely to change this situation. The nation-state, which served the ruling classes of capitalism extremely well in its day, has now entered into conflict with the international interests of those classes, and is seeking to grab back some power for itself. If Starmerism lacked direction, as everyone from Blair to Burnham seems to believe, it’s because, given this contradiction, there’s ultimately nowhere for it to go. What we have instead is self-plagiarism, as the system carries on reproducing itself on the very brink of an alarmingly steep cliff. 

***

Terry Eagleton’s A Death of One’s Own will be published by Yale in September.

Though Burnham is probably unaware of it, there is in fact a striking literary precedent for his pro-North viewpoint in the figure of the 20th-century modernist poet Basil Bunting. An older, less accessible figure than Harrison, Bunting was one of the inventors of the idea of “the North” in the modern sense. Against the backdrop of the Burnham moment, and on the 60th anniversary of Bunting’s masterpiece Briggflatts — a milestone that has been met with oddly little fanfare — the example of his life and work is worth exploring.

Born in Tyneside in 1900, “amid rejoicings for the relief of Ladysmith in the Boer War”, Bunting, who would die shortly after the end of the Miners’ Strike in 1985, was a sort of avant-garde Forrest Gump whose life embodied the modernist century. Raised a Quaker, and sent to Leighton Park School in Berkshire as a teenager, Bunting divined early on that his Northernness set him apart from Edwardian England and its regional power dynamics. During one severe bout of homesickness, he wrote to his Leighton Park headmaster identifying a “grand underlying difference between North and South which makes people with Northern manners comfortable & easy to deal with, but people with the Southern manners… ‘impossible’ & hateful.”

This feeling of antagonism towards the English center would combine with Quaker principles to motivate Bunting’s refusal — on grounds of conscientious objection — to take part in the final months of the First World War, after a call-up when he reached adulthood in 1918. As Bunting’s friend the actor Denis Goacher later put it, the subsequent abuse he suffered as a “conchie” in Wormwood Scrubs, “colored all he thought about England, about the Establishment, the ‘Southrons’ as he called us… this experience embittered him for life”.

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By John Merrick

Bunting’s embrace of a cosmopolitan strand of literary modernism after his release from prison in 1919 was clearly in some sense the outcome of his rejection of English tradition. Crucially, he met the radical modernist provocateur Ezra Pound while playing a “swashbuckling kind of chess” in a Paris café in 1923. When Pound bailed Bunting from a Parisian jail a few weeks later after a drunk-and-disorderly episode, their friendship was firmly set.  

But in choosing to side with the strident anti-English experimentalism of the “Ezuversity” — a Pound-centered expat community based in the Italian seaside town of Rapallo — Bunting was further distancing himself from mainstream Anglophone literary culture. Though this was the creative making of his mold-breaking early poems (admirers included William Carlos Williams and W.B. Yeats), Bunting’s association with the uncompromising avant-gardism of the Pound school meant he was effectively blacklisted by the Thirties London literary set and its publishers. After some years of dwindling prospects — and a climactic 1938 quarrel with Pound over the latter’s Mussolinian fascism and antisemitism — Bunting stopped trying altogether. Over the next three decades, his life as a poet would be exchanged for work as a sailor, RAF officer, and journalist.

Bunting returned to the North East in the postwar years, where he worked unhappily at the Newcastle Evening Chronicle and seemed destined to retire in what the literary establishment deems to be “provincial obscurity”. But then, in the mid-Sixties, came a sudden declaration of independence. After a fateful encounter with the teenage poet Tom Pickard, a self-identifying “dole walla” from working-class Tyneside, Bunting became a leading figure in the Morden Tower poetry scene in central Newcastle. A repurposed room in the city’s medieval town walls, Morden Tower was developed as a countercultural “omphalos” by Pickard and his partner Connie from 1964. It would eventually treat its Geordie audience (in Bunting’s estimate: “half academics, half teenagers, with a sprinkling of thugs”) to live offerings by Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robert Creeley, and Alex Trocchi, among countless other beatnik luminaries.

In a country where London’s hold over literary discourse was and is hegemonic, the happenings at Morden Tower were in themselves a rare victory for Northern civic empowerment. But it was Bunting’s revitalized literary output after this Sixties awakening that would suggest an imaginative starting point for a new form of Northern regionalism — a mostly undeveloped entity prior to this point.

The sounding shot in this Northern rising was Briggflatts. A modernist “short long poem” loosely resembling T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Bunting’s masterpiece was published in the first weeks of 1966 — an annus mirabilis for radical English anomalies of all kinds. It quickly became a cause célèbre in the Anglo-American counterculture, and indeed in the more hidebound English literary scene that Bunting had hitherto been excluded from, bringing a passionate assertion of Northern English identity to a global readership.

In the mythopoeia Bunting elaborated in Briggflatts, “Northumbria” worked as a shorthand for Northern England as a whole. The unique stylistic texture of the poem, first announced in a memorable opening stanza, incorporates a modernist pastiche of Old English alliterative verse. Bunting uses this mode to evoke a pastoral idyll, ostensibly a remote corner of the Yorkshire Dales (the land around the seminal Quaker site at Brigflatts [sic]): 

Brag, sweet tenor bull,
descant on Rawthey’s madrigal,
each pebble its part
for the fells’ late spring.
Dance tiptoe, bull,
black against may.
Ridiculous and lovely
chase hurdling shadows
morning into noon.
May on the bull’s hide
and through the dale
furrows fill with may,
paving the slowworm’s way.

As the poem progresses, we abandon this youthful arcadia for a more epic regional canvas. Interwoven with a personal story of Northern exile and return is a Waste Land-esque collage of Northumbrian history: as well as the glimpses of early-20th-century Brigflatts in the poem’s opening section, we encounter the ghosts of legendary Border shepherds (the Wilsons and Telfers); the warriors of the ancient Welsh poem Y Gododdin (which is set mainly in what is now North Yorkshire); and the creators of the beautiful Lindisfarne Gospels. At the thematic heart of the poem, Bunting inserts a diptych embodying Northern good and evil: the vainglorious “last Viking king of Northumbria” Eric Bloodaxe, and his angelic counterpart Cuthbert (the 7th-century patron saint of the original Anglo-Saxon kingdom).

Having drunk deep from the well of Northumbriana while constructing this regional fantasia, Bunting would devote much time in his later years to a sort of pro-North cultural program. In a late-20th century context where Scottish and Welsh nationalist movements were surging — Bunting was a close friend of Hugh MacDiarmid, the militant godfather of the Scottish Renaissance — he tried to work out how far a Northern English analogue might be taken. In large part, this was a case of teasing out the cultural examples spotlighted in Briggflatts. During his brief Seventies tenure as president of the funding body Northern Arts — an organization founded by the controversial Newcastle politician T. Dan Smith, another ardent localist — Bunting put forward the Lindisfarne Gospels and other ancient northern landmarks (such as the Bewcastle Cross and the poetry of Wordsworth) as a basis for a distinctive Northern imaginary. 

But though Bunting’s focus was largely an aesthetic one, he would also take steps to make clear the wider political implications of this project. At the same time as the first substantial modern discussions around English devolution were gathering pace — culminating in the half-baked constitutional recommendations in the 1969 Redcliffe-Maud Report — Bunting would talk, only half-jokingly, about setting up passport control at the Humber. He offered discount rates for poetry readings inside Northumbria’s ancient boundaries, and spent much time researching historic rebellions like the 1569 Rising of the North as he sought to compose a follow up to Briggflatts (as it happened, no such work was forthcoming prior to Bunting’s death in Hexham in 1985, though a handful of shorter lyrics did see the light of day).

What to make of the legacy of all this? We should probably start by acknowledging the limits of Northern English devolutionary schemes that go too far down the road of nationalism proper. There were elements of essentialism and chauvinism — even if often tongue-in-cheek — in Bunting’s literary King of the North schtick, which his contemporary heirs would do well to avoid (Bunting’s late-period reading style, for example, was based on a rather affected old Northumbrian accent, which many listeners have found to be slightly ridiculous). Bunting’s “Northumbria” took in most of the North, but its southern border was the Humber-Ribble line (because of a rather arbitrary linguistic technicality). Such footnotes highlight a familiar problem with attempts to construct regional polities within more established national frameworks: the fact that no one can agree where the North ends and the South begins (let alone the yet more ambiguous Midlands). 

Nonetheless, Bunting’s vision for greater Northern cultural empowerment remains pertinent because the contexts that inspired it have not gone away. When it comes to literary publishing — and the same is true for culture and indeed politics more broadly — England is still an astonishingly over-centralized country. In an overwhelmingly urban nation, the vast majority of publishing houses, media organs, and political institutions are still based in just one of our dozens of cities (the so-called Big Five literary publishers, for example, are all headquartered in London). The fact that this reality has been exploited and worn-down to a cliché during a decade of chatter about the “left behind” and the “metropolitan bubble” does not mean that it is not still an urgent problem.

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By Alexander Poots

If Burnham’s critics are perhaps right to say that he doesn’t know exactly how to achieve regional devolution in the long term, then neither did Bunting. But then again, it is much harder to envision a fairer, more equal future than to be critical of the status quo. In the end, Bunting’s example reminds us that when it comes to imagined communities, it is the imagination that must lead the way. As a poet and lone individual (rather than, say, a prime minister with a large parliamentary majority), Bunting was inevitably circumscribed in what he could recommend when it came to plans for Northern political renewal. 

But his cultural assertions were surely enough. Writing to the Scottish poet Gael Turnbull in the late Sixties, Bunting described a “tree of life” carving on a medieval tombstone in Hexham Abbey:

“It is very beautiful, and if it really is as late as the 12th century, it shows how the life goes on, underneath all the suppressions and oppressions.… [This is] my kind of art: the firm line, the counterpoint, the essence, not the illusion, the intricacy, not the confusion. I want more of it, a Northumberland as fertile as any land you can mention.”

As these comments suggest, Bunting believed that in working out how to construct new political realities for the North of England — realities that might put an end all the “suppressions and oppressions” — we should take inspiration from the “firm lines”, “counterpoint”, and essential vitality of the artifacts buried in its deeper history. A “culturalist” suggestion this might have been. But there is surely something to be said for the idea that the starting point for political reform must be a realization of cultural heritage — in other words, of the collective consciousness that makes regional identity meaningful in the first place. 

In this light, all the cynicism directed at Burnham’s Northern cultural offering in recent weeks seems misplaced. Maybe he is onto something by kicking off his premiership by dad-dancing to New Order’s “True Faith”. There is a long, arduous road ahead for the devolutionary schemes that will likely define the Burnham government. But perhaps the new prime minister is right to grasp that a transformative political project must begin not with exhaustive policy documents, but with the sort of unifying, emotional, imaginative foundation for collective praxis provided by art, poetry, and music. Bunting at least would have agreed.

We think we want true stories; we don’t. We want good stories that just happen also to be true. This thought occurred to me repeatedly while reading James Lasdun’s The Family Man: Blood and Betrayal in the House of Murdaugh, which came out earlier this month. The titular family man is Alex Murdaugh, a lawyer from the South Carolina marshlands known as the low country, and who was convicted in March 2023 of the brutal murder of his wife and son two years previously — as well as various acts of fraud, money laundering, and conspiracy which were lesser in severity than felony murder, but comparatively astronomical in number. For his financial crimes, he is currently serving 40 years in federal prison, concurrent with a 27-year sentence handed down by the state of South Carolina. His murder conviction, however, was overturned earlier this year after it was revealed that Becky Hill, who served as county clerk during his trial and who had been planning to write a book about the case, had improperly influenced the jury.

I suspect that this latest development is deeply frustrating to Lasdun, who in addition to being a journalist is also a screenwriter, a memoirist, and the author of several novels. As such, he knows better than most that even the most shocking true story is nothing if it isn’t also told well. For Murdaugh to be granted a new trial adds one twist too many to a case that was convoluted enough as it was, not to mention throwing a wrench in the story’s final chapter. Once, The Family Man would have been a definitive account of the fall of the house of Murdaugh. Now, the ending feels premature, like walking out of a horror film too soon and missing the part where the killer comes back for one last scare — even if Lasdun suspects, as I do, that the second epilogue to this case is unlikely to be any more satisfying than the first.

It’s only in Hollywood that we can engineer such tidy, intentional conclusions to the most horrifying stories, in which the guilty party not only gets his comeuppance but delivers a scenery-chewing monologue explaining exactly how and why he did it. In real life, murder rarely coddles our narrative sensibilities this way. In real life, people are killed horribly and for no reason, and even the murderer himself will often confess bewilderment as to why he did it — that is, if he confesses at all.

But with the limitations of the true crime genre duly acknowledged, the book does succeed on its merits. At its best, The Family Man combines the soul of a satisfying procedural thriller with a Southern Gothic twist, including layered multigenerational intrigue and a haunting, vivid sense of place. No stone is left unturned in this exhaustive exploration of Murdaugh’s various schemes and foibles, which include not only a well-documented opioid addiction and a penchant for financial crimes, but other, much stranger schemes, like a botched suicide-by-hitman plot in which Alex was shot in the head by the ne’er-do-well cousin he’d asked to murder him as a favor.

Early on, Lasdun mentions the aesthetic similarities between the Murdaugh murders and the Netflix series Ozark, which are also the only similarities between them — and yet, there’s something to this, something about how much more captivating a crime becomes if it only takes place in the right setting. We watch as the wind whispers secret pathways through the grasses of the South Carolina marshland, as the sun sets blood-red behind a live oak draped in the gray lace of Spanish moss, and we nod: of course something like that had to happen in a place like this. It didn’t hurt that the cast of characters around Murdaugh all felt like archetypes themselves: the Prodigal Son, the Long-Suffering Wife, the Loyal Housekeeper, the Criminally Adjacent Redneck Cousin.

Strikingly, though, exactly what happened in this incident and why is a question the book doggedly investigates but never quite manages to solve — one of many, alas, which makes The Family Man absolutely terrific to read but somewhat frustrating to have read. Finishing this book feels a bit like spending the day alongside a man who is diligently wandering a massive beach with a metal detector. All that digging, and what is there to show for it? A handful of loose change; a couple of cheap, orphaned earrings; and behind you, a landscape full of holes that went nowhere.

For all this, the fault lies not with the book’s author, but its subject. You’d be forgiven for imagining Alex Murdaugh as a Hollywood-worthy villain, equal parts criminal mastermind and glad-handing good ol’ boy, so deranged by greed, by power, by sheer white-male entitlement, that he capped off a life of white-collar crimes with an act of unspeakable evil. But a conniving, low country King Lear, Alex Murdaugh is not — nor does he contain the gleeful con artistry of a Saul Goodman, the sadistic genius of a Hannibal Lecter, or the murderous greed of Jim Williams from Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.

The thread that ties all these iconic baddies together, the thing that makes them so compelling, isn’t relatability, exactly — or even humanity — but a sense of internal logic. The difference between a dull villain and a fantastic one is the difference between a character who is evil for no reason, and a character whose reasons for being the way he is are so legible that they practically leap off the page. We may not sympathize, but we get it. (The difference between a fantastic villain and an anti-hero is that we find those reasons sympathetic. Did John Wick really need to kill several dozen people to avenge the death of his beagle? Obviously, yes.)

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Alex Murdaugh, by comparison, is so bizarrely depthless that he seems barely there at all. His amoral grasping, his obvious narcissism, the way he spent over a decade robbing his clients blind while barely even trying to cover his tracks: all of this serves to make Alex Murdaugh more inscrutable as a person, and yet, at the same time, almost painfully uninteresting as a character. When it comes to the deaths of his wife and son, he has nothing but denials. But when it comes to the financial crimes of which he is verifiably, undoubtedly guilty, he is all confession and no explanation; he wanted the money, so he stole it, and comes up blank at the expectation that there could be anything more to it than that.

Why did he do this? He seems as bewildered by the question as anyone. “You know one of the saddest parts of this whole thing is they’re people that I still care about, and I did ’em this way,” Alex says, asked at trial about the people he spent two decades defrauding. If he did actually murder his wife and son — though he’s unlikely ever to admit it — one gets the sense that the story behind the slaughter would be not just similarly unsatisfying, but barely worth telling at all. The desire to complicate that narrative is palpable throughout Lasdun’s book. To accept that Alex Murdaugh is a mid-wit who killed his family for no compelling or legible reason feels offensive in its senselessness; how is it possible that a thoughtless impulse on one end can lead to such life-shattering devastation at the other?

And yet, there are sobering reminders everywhere we look that the worst criminals are rarely the worthy adversaries we find in fiction; mostly, they’re just lucky, until they’re not, and they get caught for the stupidest reasons. They forget to pay for parking, like David Berkowitz; they take upskirt photos of women at the grocery store, like Dominique Pelicot. Or, like the BTK Killer Dennis Rader, they taunt police with a message encoded on a disk that also, oops, contains their full name and address in the metadata. The worst part, perhaps, is that these shambolic mistakes don’t make their crimes more comprehensible, only more offensive. This is the guy who robbed a widow of her life savings; a woman of her dignity; a family of their loved one? This guy? This piece of low-rent garbage?

Perhaps this is why, in the end, The Family Man abandons the question of Alex Murdaugh’s possible motivations for killing his family, and instead simply tells us how he might have done it. This final chapter is more of a closing argument than a narrative ending: it paints an entirely persuasive picture of the who, the when, the where, and the what, the horrors of that evening juxtaposed against moments from the trial in which Alex denies having any hand in them. The why, though, remains a mystery: one we will likely never solve, but also, one whose solution would almost certainly prove disappointing. Because while we say we want true stories, what we really want are good stories — and the truth is, a story is only as good, as compelling, as the people in it.

The novel was of course J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, which had the unfortunate fate — as far as the huffing parents of 1951 were concerned — of being wildly popular and extensively taught in high schools (though some teachers were admittedly fired for assigning it). To date, it has sold more than 65 million copies. That it has never fallen out of favor should not surprise us: reading it is a matter of an afternoon, and it feels at points like reading one’s own teenage diary. The main character, Holden Caulfield, a 16-year-old scrawny virgin dropout in a deerstalker hat, is as queasily legible today as he ever was. In 2026, I would go so far as to say that his peculiar misanthropy, his wounded disaffection, his sentimental insincerity, is the internet’s house style.

Gen Z posters are all Salinger’s children. I suspect for a cohort with notoriously declining reading habits, Catcher is among the few “classics” they’ve touched. Its moral world is almost identical to the whinging of a Redditor: like them, Caulfield is confessional, digressive, accusatory, and self-pitying. His account of being booted out of prep school, then marauding around Manhattan in various states of desolation or drunkenness, is littered with “I means”, “and alls”, “or somethings”, and “I’m not kiddings”. He has a private taxonomy of “phonies”, and suspects, knows, that the world is rigged against him. He is a lone seer, a font of authenticity in a cruel and fake world. His delusions are now Gen Z’s.

The novel’s moral vocabulary maps clearly on to that of internet-native young people today: the worldview of TikTok, Twitter and Reddit — as well as darker, nicher places where true Holden chuds tend to congregate — is a bestiary of NPCs, normies, mids, soys, feds, goyslop and grifters. The politics and aesthetics of different corners of the internet vary wildly, but one theme is inextinguishable, whether it’s on an “Am I the Asshole” Reddit page or the comment section of a TikTok rant: the poster holds all the authenticity. Everyone else has sold out, or bought into social performance; everyone else is spiritually compromised. 

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In real life, this instinct is correct often enough: adults are grotesque, like the novel’s “perverts and morons” who cross-dress or spit water in each other’s faces, visible to Holden in the windows of the midtown hotel he runs away to after being kicked out of school. He’s also right that teachers often talk nonsense, expounding theories of the grown-up world which sound borderline fascist to teenaged ears; his history teacher Spencer bores him that “Life is a game, boy… that one plays according to the rules”. Seeing such aphorisms for the pap that they are doesn’t take extraordinary wisdom, but a dash of cynicism makes teenagers — and many of 2026’s failed-to-launch adults — feel like prophets. 

Adolescent eye-rolling is a shortcut to genuine insight, and many of the internet’s favorite voices are suspended in that sighing phase well into their forties. When Catcher’s Holden does it, we read it as the trademark of a developing mind: though he correctly diagnoses the status games of adults, the snobberies of the rich and the pretensions of the charming, we guess that when he’s older, when he’s well, he’ll learn to cope with these truths like the rest of us. But the internet feels no need to graduate beyond cynicism. 

Gen Z is the worst culprit: my generation — not just its blackpilled factions — is obsessed with exposing hierarchies or cabals, whether they relate to the sexual marketplace, the algorithm, Aipac, or nepo connections. We grew up in the shadow of 9/11, in the rubble of its attendant conspiracy theories; our first memorable news cycle involved a global financial crisis followed by years of political polarization, cynical electioneering and, when we were finally flying the nest, the crippling isolation of a pandemic. We were primed to crouch, to second-guess. Catcher, too, lies in the foothills of this paranoia. Everywhere Holden looks, phonies are “coming in the goddam window”; Hollywood, military men and parents are all agents conspiring against him. No wonder he looks so good for 75.

Today, the standard pose of the internet is pessimism packaged in irony. In 1951, this ennui was not yet the mass public style of teenagers. The novel’s swings between tear-streaked earnestness and knee-jerk deflection are the bread and butter of contemporary posting: Holden tells us he “feels depressed” or “went crazy”, then shows us something bitterly funny or gross. Even his red cap functions as a sort of edgelord avatar; it’s not his deerstalker but a “people-shooting hat”, he tells his dorm neighbor. Like an ironic gaming handle or meme-referencing profile picture, the hat is a costume of alienation. 

Holden’s great soft spot is the innocence of childhood, which he knows is slipping through his fingers as the adult world approaches. In some ways, the sentimentality of kids in Catcher is like the internet’s cat: the unknowing ball of tenderness that represents “me if you even care” is as sacred a symbol as the six-year-old boy Holden spots walking down Broadway with his parents, being ignored but mindlessly singing, in a sort of nursery rhyme, the Robert Burns poem that gives the novel its title. He says the sight “made me feel better. It made me feel not so depressed any more.” Salinger’s novel is about the uneasy transition between states of innocence and experience — the blank goodness of little children and the “phony” cynicism of adults. This, too, is why the internet loves cat videos: they are small oases in a land of division and gloom, talismans that keep out cheerless reality. You’ll notice I’m suggesting social media resembles the psyche of a fictional mentally ill teenager. This is deliberate.

Salinger once admitted that Catcher is about a “boyhood [that] was very much the same” as his own; “it was a great relief telling people about it”, he said. What he did not prophesy was that the feelings of his deeply unwell antihero would become a permanent cultural stance. Staring down the barrel of an impending depressive collapse, Holden insists he’s simply “going through a phase right now”. He cycles through a clutch of fantasies over a single weekend — he is a shot-up mob victim, a suave lounge lizard, a cabin-dwelling deaf-mute. Yet today, Caulfield’s volatile sense of self seems a little too familiar. These days, even fully fledged adulthood is pitched as a series of phases on an unending journey of growth and self-discovery.

Analogs of Holden can be found everywhere online — many twice his age. They, too, vault between aesthetic, ideological, political, wellness and spiritual phases. So did Salinger himself, a dabbler variously in Sufism, macrobiotics, Dianetics and Zen Buddhism (he was said to have brought reading lists on the subject to dates, which I’m afraid automatically limits my ability to like him personally). This is another of the novel’s great predictions: that more people would become experimental and unstable, trying on identities, cures and postures like Mr Benn in the costume shop. In Catcher it is impossible to imagine Holden settling into contented adult conformity; many modern readers might see his crisis not for the psychological collapse it is, but “the rational response to living under [insert complaint here: capitalism, the patriarchy, tyrannical colonialist curricula etc. etc.]”. 

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North West’s stolen childhood

By Poppy Sowerby

Because the novel is about a teenage boy, his preoccupations are timeless. He reads a magazine then worries that he might have “lousy hormones”; he worries about when he’ll lose his virginity, about whether his peers are outpacing him. He acts like an expert: “Girls. Jesus Christ. They can drive you crazy.” Really, like lots of dating gurus online, he knows naff all. Today he’d be fretting about low-T, cortisol, canthal tilts; he’d learn about sex not through the tall tales of his dorm-mates but from hardcore porn. In the novel he has a young prostitute sent to his hotel room: he feels aroused, scared, sentimental and disgusted. How like the porn-soaked discourse of the modern internet, where girls are mysterious and maddening, the cause of both rage and guilt. The difference is that in the novel, our sentimental screw-up is alone, and drives himself to lonely destruction. Today, whole forums would open up to counsel or compound his suffering. 

As in most spaces online, Catcher is not the testimony of a predator; he is more familiar and pathetic than that, a boy terrified by a sexual world he longs to be initiated into. Every time he sees “fuck you” graffitied on a wall, he longs to erase it. Once, at his little sister’s school, he does, so the children don’t “worry about it for a couple of days”. Really, he’s reacting to his own horror. He’s happiest in the company of his “kid sister”, or in a snowball fight. Like Zoomers today, exposed to the adult internet, he must feel he’s grown up too fast.

Catcher is not a period piece about mid-century adolescence; it’s more like a prehistory of the online male voice. Social media amplifies the loud and the self-obsessed, so its stars are necessarily teenagers, if only spiritually. “Phonies” are today’s NPCs; “hot-shots” are our nepo babies or chads. The swaggadocio of the streamer is Holden, holder of zero life experience, hoping to “wave a buck under [a] head-waiter’s nose… in New York, boy, money really talks”. But his real mission, before he is committed to an institution at the novel’s close, is to preserve innocence itself, catching children playing in his imaginary field of rye before they fall off a cliff. 

In 2026, equivalent solutions to internal decrepitude are everywhere on the internet: young men are called to save morality or humanity or the West. The prescribed morality varies but its ingredients are familiar: mending oneself is a civilizational mission and, like Holden’s child-saving fantasy, it counteracts perceived corruption — for example, of porn (among no-fappers), of seed oils (among clean-eaters) or of emasculating feminism (among redpill types). The instinct of many young men online is to transmute personal brokenness into evidence of a broken world: loneliness becomes decadence; mediocrity becomes victimhood of a conspiracy. In The Catcher in the Rye, that sort of thinking gets Holden sent away to the funny farm. In 2026, such delusions of grandeur are a mark of sanity.

In Facial Justice, England has been devastated by the nuclear armageddon of a Third World War in which most of humanity has perished. In the New State that emerges, beauty is rationed, envy criminalized, and an unseen ruler governs survivors through loudspeakers. Freedom has been exchanged for security, individuality for fairness, and politics for management.

The ruler is known as the DD, or Darling Dictator. He addresses the populace as “Patients and Delinquents” in the reassuring tones of a radio host. Equality and Envy — the two Es — are the positive and negative poles of the regime. If one citizen possesses what another lacks — especially female beauty, grace or charm — resentment follows, threatening social harmony. Physical differences that confer distinction must therefore be managed: women judged too attractive are “betafied” by surgery and compelled to wear standardized masks lest they provoke jealousy among their less favored sisters. Those judged too plain may be improved. The state does not abolish beauty. It regulates it.

What sounded absurd in the Sixties now feels oddly familiar. We inhabit a culture obsessed with facial images: filtered faces, injectable faces, algorithmically rewarded faces. We denounce beauty privilege while monetizing attractiveness on an industrial scale. Hartley, who was probably gay, though perhaps not sexually active, was described by Ottoline Morrell as a well-mannered, dull, fat man. He grasped that physical appearance would become political terrain.

His insight strikingly anticipated arguments about female appearance in Iran and other Muslim societies, long before words like hijab, chador and burqa entered the Western lexicon. In the Islamic Republic, female appearance has long been a matter of state concern. Compulsory veiling, morality patrols, regulation of adornment, suspicion of autonomous female beauty: these are not incidental features but part of a wider attempt to police the public sphere.

Veiling is usually justified in terms of modesty: protection against spiritual harm, challenges to personal space and privacy, and the potentially disruptive effects of the male gaze. Yet many educated Muslim defenders also present it in egalitarian terms. The veil, they argue, reduces the erotic and status competition generated by female display. This competition is not only between men. Women compete with other women in the currency of appearance and desirability; men compete for access to that currency and for the honor associated with controlling it. Hartley would have recognized the logic instantly. Beauty confers individual social capital. Therefore, like other forms of capital, it must be managed.

A woman may lose sleep over another woman’s eyelashes as easily as a man may lose his reason over her face. Hartley’s satirical observation is that envy, once treated as a political principle rather than a moral infirmity, can justify almost anything. If beauty wounds the unbeautiful, beauty must be corrected. If distinction generates grievance, distinction must be flattened. If desire unsettles public order, desire must be masked.

Iran also supplies a paradox Hartley would have relished. For decades Tehran has been one of the world capitals of cosmetic surgery, especially rhinoplasty. Nose jobs became so common that bandages themselves turned into status symbols, sometimes worn by women who could not afford the actual procedure. Alongside this ran a discreet market in hymenoplasty: the restoration of virginity through surgery in a society publicly committed to premarital chastity. Beneath official modesty flourished a commerce in self-presentation, concealment and bodily correction.

Hartley’s New State works by the same contradiction: moral severity above ground, restless vanity below. His heroine, Jael 97, is not liberated from beauty by the regime’s doctrine. She is made more conscious of it. The mask that is supposed to abolish comparison intensifies it. The women who have been betafied remain alert to gradations of face, figure and charm. They read one another’s defects and advantages with the acuity of prisoners studying rank. The more the state tries to abolish vanity, the more vanity migrates into coded signs, furtive glances and forbidden longings.

Michel Foucault, who famously enthused about the Iranian Revolution of 1978–79, saw in it a form of political spirituality: a revolt against the deadening managerialism of Western modernity. He was fascinated by a popular uprising that seemed not merely economic or ideological, but metaphysical — a revolt conducted in the name of sacrifice, martyrdom and collective transformation. What he seems to have missed was that rebelling against managerial discourse simply generates new management criteria. The Islamic Republic did not abolish bureaucracy. It sacralized it, bringing the body, the street, the classroom, courtship ritual and the female face under new forms of supervision.

Hartley, who came from a privileged background and despised proletarian aspiration, saw more clearly than Foucault how regimes will “discipline and punish” whatever their revolutionary provenance. They may govern not only through prisons and police, but through faces, clothing, shame, sexual codes and approved emotional display.

His insight gives Facial Justice a relevance far beyond Iran. It applies wherever appearance becomes a moral index; wherever language is policed less by law than by fear of social exclusion; wherever individuals learn to anticipate the judgment of unseen wokeism. Nobody commands; but everyone must comply. He anticipated the way contemporary, market-driven power prefers to regulate conduct without seeming tyrannical. His unseen dictatorship rules through announcements, inspectors, slogans and the mediated presence of loudspeakers. Citizens hear the Voice more often than they see authority embodied. Public life becomes a sequence of nudges, rituals and behavioral corrections. Hartley’s inspectors are not jackbooted thugs but smiling officials in magnificent flamboyant outfits. They cajole rather than bully. 

Similarly, Hartley’s language regime has many contemporary echoes. Citizens must navigate verbal booby-traps. Formulaic gestures accompany approved terms. One says the right thing in the right tone at the right moment, even though, as in most tyrannies, accepted speech may be coupled with hints of ironic disdain. Any formal slippage is not merely mistaken but morally suspect. Effective censorship works in this manner. If people internalize the code, the censor need not bother.

Facial Justice also anticipates the marriage of politics and therapy. In the New State, cinemas show murders and violent crime not for pleasure but as aversion treatment. Emotional responses are recalibrated by experts. Today’s equivalents are milder, but the impulse is recognizable: trigger warnings, compulsory sensitivity training, therapeutic disciplinary language, institutional concern with “harm”, “safety”, “trauma” and “wellbeing”. These terms may often be necessary and humane. Hartley’s warning is not that distress is unreal, but that once distress becomes a governing category, authority acquires a new moral vocabulary. The patient must be protected from himself; the delinquent must be cured of his delinquency; the citizen must be adjusted.

Hartley’s satire, though gentler than Orwell’s, has bite, with green, even hippyish conceits about nature in the nuclear wasteland. Flowers are scarce and revered because plants are believed to suffer. Trees too acquire an almost sacred status: to damage one is treated less as practical vandalism than as moral transgression. Plastic and synthetic replicas are safer and more manageable than living plants. This should be read as a warning against moral systems that lose proportion. Once politics becomes a competition in purity, absurdity is quick to follow.

Why did Hartley, best known for The Go-Between, write so bizarre a fantasy? One answer may lie in his old-fashioned Tory dislike of the leveling temper of post-war Britain: ration-book drabness, bureaucratic earnestness, the suspicion of privilege and excellence. But Facial Justice is more than a hymn of Waugh-like reactionary nostalgia, though there may be elements of such. It is also a protest against confusing resentment with justice.

Here the book still has relevance. Much contemporary rhetoric promises dignity but delivers flattening. We are urged to celebrate diversity while distrusting distinction, praise individuality while policing deviation, expand freedom while narrowing acceptable opinion. The contradiction is not accidental. Modern egalitarian culture often wants difference without hierarchy, identity without inequality, self-expression without offense, beauty without envy, and freedom without risk. These are admirable aspirations until they are made administratively compulsory. Hartley recognized that a society which cannot tolerate the wounds produced by comparison may end by mutilating the things compared.

The invisible ruler in Facial Justice gives the novel particular relevance to contemporary Iran. Richard Bulliet — Professor Emeritus of Middle Eastern History at Columbia University and one of America’s foremost scholars of Iran and Islamic society — recently reflected on the possibility that Mojtaba Khamenei, son of the former Rahbar, or Supreme Leader, may not just be avoiding public appearances for his own safety, having seen his father and much of his family wiped out in an American air strike. He may choose to remain unseen while authority continues to flow through networks of Revolutionary Guards, and other officials. In Shi‘ite political theology, absence need not mean weakness. The Hidden Imam is absent yet sovereign. His invisibility, like that of Hartley’s Darling Dictator, can deepen his mystique. The DD is heard everywhere, seen rarely, and therefore enlarged by imagination. Visibility can diminish rulers. Distance can magnify them.

Donald Trump is the opposite temperamentally. He craves visibility, camera angles, crowds, instant reaction. Yet Trumpism too depends on symbolic mediation: the staged gesture, the social-media blast, the prop on the desk. His approach is exemplified by the notorious red button joke: according to various accounts, Trump likes to toy with visitors using a red button on his desk. He presses it with theatrical gravity, lets alarm spread around the room, then a butler appears with a Diet Coke on a silver tray. According to Miles Taylor, a former senior official in Trump’s first administration, the joke is meant to display presidential power while making light of it. Whether apocryphal or not, such stories capture something psychologically plausible about Trumpism: immense authority staged as entertainment. 

The deeper danger, as journalist Simon Tisdall has argued recently, is that when nuclear-armed states behave impulsively, theatrically and without visible strategic discipline, they encourage precisely the proliferation they claim to prevent. If countries conclude that only atomic weapons guarantee survival, then brinkmanship becomes advertisement. Iran did not possess a bomb before the present war. After the US-Israeli bombardment, threats of stone-age annihilation and the endless deferment of diplomacy, Iranians may now conclude they really need one. Nobody goes after North Korea.

The red button joke is an emblem of personalized sovereignty reduced to theater. This is why I believe Hartley explains aspects of the present better than many fashionable theorists such as Michel Foucault. He saw politics moving beyond the old opposition between dictatorship and democracy into a stranger zone where democratic forms survive while behavior is increasingly managed; where equality becomes moral theater; where rulers may be hidden priest-kings or hyper-visible celebrities, yet both depend on symbolism more than statesmanship.

The deepest insight of the novel, however, is that catastrophe strengthens the appetite for control. Hartley’s New State is born from atomic devastation. Scarcity, trauma and fear make citizens accept rules they might once have mocked. Safety becomes sacred. After disaster, masks feel reasonable (remember Covid?). Hartley imagined what follows when catastrophe and triviality meet: a civilization rebuilt not on wisdom but on managed grievance. 

Orwell warned that power might one day stamp on a human face forever. Hartley suggested a colder, more plausible paradigm. Power would first improve the face, standardize it, veil it, correct it, cover it with something hygienic and approved — then ask us to smile behind the mask.

Naomi Kanakia, for example, probably doesn’t want me — a religious-minded, gender-critical writer — to review her book, What’s So Great About the Great Books?: Why You Should Read Classic Literature (Even Though it Might Destroy You), published on Tuesday. The book is a defense of the classics, written for the Left, and it has agonizingly cringe chapter headings such as “Aren’t the Great Books kinda problematic?” In it, Kanakia trots out all the usual progressive objections to the canon, including that Western novels can psychologically damage marginalized people, and that to say you like Great Books can be read as an endorsement of white men (the horror). The biggest problem with the great books, though, is the people who read them: Right-wingers, religious people, racists, and transphobes. 

Kanakia is a literary critic and author of several young-adult novels, and she writes the excellent literary Substack Woman of Letters. This book sprung out of a lifetime self-improvement (and enjoyment) project in which she read her way through most of a legendary “Great Books” list, The New Lifetime Reading Plan, by Clifton Fadiman and John S. Major. The process changed her life and her tastes, set her on a rigorous program of reading a wider range of classics, and had unexpected results (the promise to “destroy you” in the title is joking, but the books will change you, she cautions). In her case, several years spent reading the 18-book-long Sanskrit epic Mahābhārata, one of the longest epic poems in world literature, caused her, a secular American of Indian origin, to begin finding something “deeply true” in Hinduism; her Substack has mentioned that she now goes to temple. 

However, “the main reason I have trouble endorsing the Great Books is that so many transphobes also love them,” Kanakia writes. She is trans, and “transphobes” in her estimation include people who imagine trans rights are complicated, and those who feel that trans rights might be “up for debate.” (A note on pronouns: it has always been my belief that the usage of transgender pronouns is the provenance of the speaker, and should be decided as a relational matter between individuals. Despite Kanakia’s probable feelings about gender critics like me, a few years ago I had a friendly exchange with her on X, formerly Twitter, and I will refer to her as “her.”) 

All this would appear to be a political gulf too vast to navigate, and What’s So Great About the Great Books? would appear to be a niche product for a niche audience. But it is actually much more. In the same way Kanakia does not want people on the Left to miss out on the Great Books because of their politics, I do not want people on the Right to miss out on her great book because of their politics. 

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The topic of what books we should be reading and teaching is obviously a cultural flashpoint, with the “diversity” versus “tradition” camps well established, and horror stories abounding. Most recently, a professor at Stanford went public with the complaint that the university’s three-course general-education requirement includes, “with the partial exception of Frankenstein,” no literary classics in the Western liberal tradition. In addition, the Stanford scholar complained, “the syllabus assigns roughly 45 pages of canonical Western philosophical writing across the entire quarter, against more than 500 pages of contemporary work organized around identity, oppression, and indigenous ways of knowing.” These latter books, he says, are eminently skippable: “if these courses were electives, I would not recommend them; I would tell students to seek out the best courses Stanford offers in the humanities instead.” 

This trend in education, and the backlash against the trend, make Kanakia’s topic of vital significance to anyone interested in culture and education in America. If we want a return to the classics, what do we even mean? What are the Great Books? (They are a concept invented by a president of Harvard in the early 20th century, she tells us, which was only popularized in the 1930s; there’s no definitive list.) Is reading the Great Books really a return to ancient or classical tradition? (No, the classical tradition was almost exclusively to study Greek and Latin; popular-novel-reading represents a withering of tradition.) And can we really say any book is “great” in some kind of objective, existential way, or does that depend on the reader? (We actually can say so, though personal choice is always relevant, too.) 

Kanakia’s treatment of these subjects is wonderfully illuminating. And the extreme skepticism with which she approaches the concept gives her conclusion — that she loves these books; and that they are worth reading —  a beautiful force. What she’s really doing is taking on the haters of the Western canon, giving their arguments the strongest and most sympathetic possible interpretation, and then defeating them. The treatment should be highly satisfying for any lover of literature. 

For instance, in the chapter “Why not read other books that are equally beautiful but have better politics?,” Kanakia demolishes the idea that it’s possible for a book to be great and also politically correct. “If you’re asking for a book that can only be read as supporting one politically correct viewpoint, then you’re asking for a book that is lacking precisely the quality that makes the Great Books so great,” she writes. In any truly great book, she argues, the author has engaged courageously with thorny “moral, ethical, political and spiritual questions on the deepest and most rigorous level,” which means they have engaged with situations that are legitimately complicated, and they have portrayed the complexity. In her lovely phrase, she promises you’ll often see “the ghosts of other answers” within whatever answer a book produces. Authorial willingness to take on such fearless exploration is “integrity,” in her word, and it is the quality that more than any other defines a Great Book.

This is a reasonably good description of Kanakia’s own method. She is one of the best critics and literary Substackers around, and both are professions that require a person to be able see (or read) something and form an original opinion — not the consensus opinion, not an opinion you learned in school, but an opinion of your own. She has a rare talent for this, and also a rare talent for erudition without pretension. Her piece on New Yorker fiction is required reading for anyone who wants to understand the literary landscape today. Her willingness to take on establishment hits is estimable. And What’s So Great About the Great Books?, itself, is brave given her milieu and the cultural circumstances. 

Kanakia’s list starts with the Epic of Gilgamesh, and ends in 1958 with Things Fall Apart. It was originally published in 1960, but the new, revised version she is working from, published in 1997, offers an edited selection that includes more works of world literature. She took a casual, pragmatic approach, reading out-of-order, starting with works she considered easiest (in the same order I’d choose myself; maybe we all know “easy” when we see it): American realists and modernists, then British realists and modernists, then 19th century, then Russian …. The hard stuff — epics, philosophy, Old and Middle English and poetry — came last. 

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She doesn’t discuss particular works, except in the few cases she uses a text to make one of her larger points about reading and greatness. Her reading of Proust, for example, serves as the anecdotal material for a discussion of taste: what pleasure is she getting from this difficult-to-read book, she asks, and how does that pleasure differ from the pleasures of an unquestionably simpler one? Or, for another example, a snippet of Old English poetry is used to illustrate a point about diversity: when dealing with vast differences in time, to insist on racial diversity is essentialist and reductive. “It seems rather arbitrary to say that one people, the Anglo-Saxons, were white and therefore more similar to us, whereas another, the Chinese, were a different race and hence very different from us and more worthy of our study.” 

Throughout, she pulls in other writers and thinkers — Husserl on the “lifeworld” or Kant on the limits of human reason, for example — with a truly unusual and admirable simplicity and clarity. Kanakia may be a critic and a professional, but she is first and foremost a reader, and the book’s ultimate thesis is that the Great Books are for everyone — or can be.

It’s a shame, then, that her view of trans rights issues, and of the conservative and religious enemy is one of the few places she does seem unwilling to see complexity. She writes critically about Hillsdale College, a Christian institution that requires the classics of the Western canon as part of its core curriculum, because it “has a history of opposing LGBTQ rights and discriminating against LGBTQ students.” That she’s writing about Hillsdale at all is, in one sense, an example of her integrity and clarity of vision. She’s determined to speak the truth, including that the books she loves are championed by the Right. (“Is it really so surprising that they’d love Anna Karenina?” she asks. “Of course not … it’s an explicitly Christian book!”) 

But in another sense, the greater integrity would be admitting that, obviously, there is a debate over trans rights, and that people, including religious people, might have reasons for this that are more complex than “transphobia” — a fake word, used to simplify and demonize your opponent and win an argument, and thus not a word worthy of a great book.  

On May 15, the Commonwealth Foundation awarded prizes to five emerging writers — four of whom (named above) have so little by way of an online or print papertrail, someone hip to artificial intelligence might wonder if they even exist. Commonwealth has a partnership with the prestigious literary magazine Granta, based in Britain, which promptly published the stories on its website. Just as promptly, a college professor at Wharton, Ethan Mollick, suspected machine prose. Mollick ran one of the incoherently metaphored stories — “The Serpent in the Grove,” by Trinidadian author Jamir Nazir — through an AI-detection software and found that it was a 100% match for AI-generated text. 

Granta’s presumably human staff, the magazine says in a statement provided to UnHerd, did not read the stories beyond a copyedit. Though accusations have so far fallen on the shoulders of the unfortunate Nazir, my investigation into the similar schlock of three other finalists and their odd online histories raises discomfiting questions, as well.

For two of the finalists, DeMicoli and Miller, this contest marked practically their first hint of an internet footprint. Of course, as the traceless 20-year-old would-be Trump assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks proved two years ago, young people are abandoning the internet in droves. And we can all agree it’s likely that social media are on their way out. Besides, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize discovers emerging writers, and is it not brave to choose writers so emergent that there is hardly any evidence they exist, such as previous fiction available to Google, or social-media presences before 2025? No, so far this all marks a healthy, understandable civilizational development. But there are other reasons for concern.

How about that two of the pieces were graded 100% AI-generated on AI-detection software Pangram, and a third was graded 92% AI-generated? Is it possible that Commonwealth has spent nearly a week praising the literary value of AI slop, while Granta threw its brand behind the same? 

Commonwealth’s website leaves no room for doubt: these finalists were chosen from nearly 8,000 painstakingly sorted entries. The judging process was “robust,” the organization wrote in a statement provided to UnHerd: “Each story is assessed through a thorough process which involves multiple rounds of readers before progressing to the final judging panel. We select our judges for their expertise, passion for the literary community and strong backgrounds in writing.” 

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Round after round of scrupulous literary appraisal narrowed down to a select few writers of staggering talent. “Here are five writers who share an immense confidence of tone, announcing themselves from the very first line,” says jury chairwoman Louise Doughty, a novelist whose forthcoming memoir, On This Spot Fell One Tear of Love, bears the sort of title that hints at the faux-profound style the jury was keen to sniff out across the globe. 

“The style and content of each work may vary,” her statement goes on, “but what all our winning authors have in common is an ability to take their readers by the hand and lead them into a world where the characters are utterly believable, the prose assured, and the author has something important to say.” In other words, according to Doughty, the finalists are all doughty. Among these doughty and diverse voices are “a young woman whose henna art enables silenced women to speak, and a resourceful young sheep farmer.” Bahhh, get me to that sheep farm!

Doughty did not return UnHerd’s request for comment.

Contrary to her claims of utter believability, many non-professional readers found the assurance that these stories were written by humans utterly and immediately unbelievable. It was not a gambol through the sheepfolds that kicked off accusations about AI, but scenes in a room where the air “clung thick as porridge skin. […] No fan, no bulb, no hum — only the thin light slipping between warped boards and the breath of hills holding their heat like a secret.”

That’s a passage from Nazir’s “The Serpent in the Grove,” and it has the unmistakable cadence of AI slop: not W, not X, not Y — but, poignantly, Z. Anyone who has ever read a news tweet by Mario Nawfal knows this style instantly. If you want to understand why Caribbean Region Commonwealth judge Sharma Taylor calls this writing “sublime — precise yet richly evocative — conjuring vivid, lush imagery with remarkable economy,” let’s tip the scale with a further sampling of Nazir’s prose. “They called her Zoongie. Maybe it was a name; maybe rain took a shape and decided to keep it.” Ah yes, a quandary I can relate to: am I really Vincenzo, or did rain take a shape and decide to keep it? This is one of those Ocean Vuong-styled metaphors that sound like they mean something. Here’s another: “She had the kind of walking that made benches become men.” Now that, ladies and gentlemen, is a metaphor so incomprehensible you know it’s profound.

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According to the prize-winners’ page, Nazir hopes readers walk away from his tale “reflecting on the quiet consequences of choices we normalize.” A sentence that also means something, I think. Next to what many speculated was an AI-generated photo in his bio on Granta’s website, we learn that Nazir is a “prolific poet … particularly known for his love of poetry.” However, he’s taken an eight-year hiatus between publications, in which time he’s written pro-AI posts on Facebook, as well as LinkedIn. His last and only other literary footprint is a 2018 self-published collection of love poems, Night Moon Love. Of the eight enthusiastic reviews this book has received on Amazon, four reviewers had never reviewed another product, and the ones who had left reviews usually did so for items such as a junk game or cheap sneakers.   

Nazir did not return UnHerd’s request for comment, sent through Facebook. 

As for the other winners, Aruparayil has an Instagram account that was launched five weeks ago and a LinkedIn profile that had its first human interaction in 2025 and asks in its bio, beginning in lowercase, “what happens when a psychologist learns to zoom out, studies international relations, and adopts a fascination with startup ecosystems, public health, and venture capital?” Literary gold, apparently. 

Aruparayil’s LinkedIn profile may, of course, be real. The sentences in the profile frequently begin in lower case, yet her winning story, “Mehendi Nights,” was written in English (and not translated from a foreign language), and is flawlessly grammatical, nonsensically slop-ridden, and riddled with semicolons — another hallmark of machine prose. Like Nazir and DeMicoli’s stories, which are based on the personification of cities and landmarks (“the limestone remembers” and all that tripe), Aruparayil’s fictional city is one where “even the shadows seemed tired,” and the city itself “had a way of setting things ablaze when it could not understand.” The kind of writing one finds in self-published Romantasy smut on Amazon.

Nonetheless, Aruparayil’s online presence is the most robust of the four prize winners. She was a finalist for two literary prizes for Indian citizens in 2025 (the Deodar Prize and the Toto Awards; her name is on both of these organizations’ websites), and her bio on the Granta website notes that she was nominated for a prestigious PEN/Dau Prize for Emerging Writers and a Pushcart Prize. These last honors, however, may be misleading. Any publication can nominate a writer for a Pushcart Prize or a PEN/Dau Prize. Neither organization announces short lists or long lists, so the real honor is in winning the award, and the nomination in itself is nearly meaningless. Bill Henderson, the founder of the Pushcart Prize, told UnHerd that the organization does not keep records of the “thousands” of nominations it receives each year.

John Edward DeMicoli is the winner from Malta. His bio on the Granta site says that he has published “essays on Maltese culture and heritage” that have appeared in print and online publications. These publications are not named, and no other writing of his comes up in an internet search, either in English or the Maltese language. The bio also mentions a forthcoming novel to be published by Maltese small press Midsea Books, which did not return a request for comment by press time. Holly Ann Miller, on the other hand, has a private Instagram account, and only has one publicly accessible comment on an obscure photographer’s page, rubykawitiphotography. The rest of the comments on the photographer’s photos are generic-seeming comments from other private Instagram pages. Miller, for what it’s worth, was also apparently a runner-up for the 2025 NYC Midnight Short Story Competition and the AAASL Short Story Competition. 

In an e-mail to UnHerd, a spokesperson for the Commonwealth Foundation said that it had “confirmed that the writers do indeed exist! They are real people. The Foundation has had discussions with each author.” 

Again, this may be so. In a sense, it doesn’t matter if they’re real or not. Let us not repine, but instead laud Nazir, Aruparayil, DeMicoli, and Miller. Recall that I began by calling these personages heroes. Let me amend that a little. What’s possibly happened here is that someone has pulled off a brilliant hoax on the literary establishment — and that person is a hero. He or she has shown the arbiters of taste in the publishing-industrial complex to be frauds, and out of touch with the average reader, who is still able to tell the difference between slop and organic human voice, and who sides with the human, too. Hopefully, it is dawning just about now on the judges of Commonwealth that they can’t tell real writing from AI not because AI is so good at writing, but because they themselves are talentless hacks and slop addicts. 

But mark my words, besides hand-washing and under-the-bus-throwing — the second sentence of Granta’s prepared news release is “Granta editors have no control over the selection of the Commonwealth Prize stories, and nor are they involved in choosing the jury” — we are going to start seeing a lot of pieces about how this scandal proves not that the literary gatekeepers are mindless cogs in the publishing-industrial complex, but that AI is so scarily good, it will soon replace all creative jobs anyways. After all, many professional writers have been striding to center stage as of late to declare themselves proud queryers of robots, such as the Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle, who has shared that she she uses AI to “generate pushback on my column thesis, suggest trims when I’m over my word count, sharpen podcast interview questions.” Nobel Prize winner Olga Togarczuk recently admitted to using AI in her writing. Just imagine, how much better would Shakespeare have been if he had had a robot to turn to in creative crises?

What we actually have here is the final cloaca from the merging of two rivulets of spume and drool: the eradication of human literary voice via the publishing-industrial complex, and the three-decade-long imposition of the algorithmic voice of tech conglomerates on human writing and sensibility. In the early aughts, Google co-opted the main profit-stream of publishing: ad revenue. It became much cheaper for companies to advertise on Google search-result pages than in newspapers and magazines. Thus, with ad revenue slashed, such outlets had to start ranking high on Google through a practice called search-engine optimization to stay afloat and be read. 

The writer was not hooking a reader anymore with an anecdotal lede, but hooking Google’s algorithm, which prioritizes algorithmic styles of writing, styles of writing that a computer can understand and parse. We have been reading and writing in this medium for three decades, watching the birth of the one-sentence opening paragraph — a contradiction in terms — in journalism, and the extinction of voice and style across all genres. AI writing itself has been trained predominantly on this dumbed-down anti-style, which is why it strains so comically hard for metaphor. In the 1960s, when the inevitability of this future became clear to cultural commentators, the philosopher Marshall McLuhan observed that technology itself had become a medium of perception. After three decades of surveillance capitalism we can conclude that we have entered an environment in which the concept of the “audience” as we know it is no longer made up of humans, but of technology itself. 

The only reason AI has a chance of replacing mainstream writing (and hoodwinking “professionals”) is because for the last 30 years, algorithmic rules of writing have devolved the style and quality of most mainstream prose so as to be near indistinguishable from computer-generated writing. It has lowered us to such a point that the gap between man and machine is no longer so far to leap. Thus, in the “post-colonial” endeavor to pick diverse voices, the Commonwealth judges may have picked fabrications of the most malignant, surveillance capitalistic technology the West has ever conceived of. The medium is the message, and in this sense, the judges may have picked the only thing they can understand: the industrial rules of surveillance capitalism. Their cage.

And if all of these finalists are real, and their work is their own, their writing operates by the same rules, and is still trash. Of the five finalists — one of whom is the verifiably real Lisa-Anne Julien, who has been published since 2021 and appears animated and otherwise alert and not-computer-generated in videos — the overall winner will be announced on June 30. For my money, I like Nazir’s work the best.

The Young Vic’s current revival of Arthur Miller’s 1994 play Broken Glass and Howard Jacobson’s latest novel Howl seem at odds. One is a tragic portrait of desperate denial in the shadow of Kristallnacht in 1938, the other a dark comedy that unravels the absurdity of socio-political fault lines in present day London. The same question lies coiled at the heart of both: how do Jews process, survive, and make meaning of the antisemitism that is again becoming eerily ubiquitous? 

Broken glass has a deep resonance in the Jewish psyche. At the end of a wedding ceremony, the groom stamps on a glass, its shattering symbolizing the fate of the Temple in Jerusalem. The melancholy of destruction and exile haunts us even at the happiest moment of our lives. Then there’s the broken glass of Kristallnacht, the opening salvo of anti-Jewish violence perpetrated by Nazi paramilitaries — and it’s that image that lingers in the backdrop of Arthur Miller’s 1994 play of the same name.

In Broken Glass, Sylvia Gellburg, a Brooklyn housewife in 1938, wakes to find her legs paralyzed with no physical cause to be found. She has been reading the news obsessively, unable to look away from stories of anti-Jewish violence from Germany. Her paralysis, her doctor diagnoses, is psychosomatic, her body symbolically absorbing the collective trauma that American Jews around her choose to ignore. 

But Miller resists cookie-cutter moralities. He suggests something more multifaceted. Sylvia’s husband Philip is a self-hating Jew, proud of being the only Jewish employee at his firm, but secretly longing to sublimate his Jewishness and blend into WASP New York. He would rather not be Jewish at all. All the while, Sylvia’s paralysis becomes the symbolic expression of a community that cannot contend with its inability to recognize and stop its own persecution. Barbarism begins at home.

Theater’s greatest strength is always its audiences. There is no mediation, no screen to look away from or book to clasp shut if things get too intense. We cannot help but be confronted by what we watch. We are in the same room, breathing the same oxygen as the world conjured before us. But it is a two-way street. All the background noise melting in our minds from our daily lives echoes onto what we see on stage. It is what allows us to revisit and revive plays year after year, finding new meanings in what we watch. As the world changes, so does the art. 

There is usually a sense that when a theater dredges up a lesser-known work from the back catalog of a famous writer the play will need to prove its relevance. Death of a Salesman, for example, is a bona-fide classic whose dramatic worth speaks for itself and can be wheeled out without much directorial intentionality. The less popular ones need to reel its audiences in and Broken Glass’s hook is obvious.

British Jews have been destabilized not only by October 7, but by the subsequent rise in antisemitism, violence in Gaza, and the shrugging shoulders of indifference from non-Jewish friends and colleagues. Many sense a gulf between the duality of Anglo-Jewish identity and the question their future in Britain. So a new production of Broken Glass at the Young Vic should rattle all of us to the core. Why doesn’t it? 

The antisemitism of 1938 and 2026 may share ostensible similarities, but the fundamental strands of its DNA have evolved. To the modern antisemite, the image of the Jew is not one of wandering alienation, or of shtetl poverty. It is one of colonial violence, racism, insatiable blood lust. How would the Philip Gellburgs of 2026 try to assimilate and win the affection of their gentile colleagues? Perhaps they would drape a keffiyeh around their necks and declare themselves anti-Zionists, just as Philip must performatively distinguish himself from the other Jews as if to say there are Jews it is permissible to abuse, and they are not like me.

In 2026, then, Sylvia’s paralysis metastasizes into something more provocative. Perhaps Broken Glass chides us for failing to recognize burgeoning antisemitism in our own time. Or perhaps Sylvia’s paralysis can be flipped on its head: instead of images of dead Jews beaten up and bloodied on Berlin streets, we are bombarded with images of dead Palestinians, stuck in wrecked buildings or hounded out of their homes by gun-toting settlers. Like Sylvia, we, collectively, might be paralyzed, unable to prevent more horror, more bombs, more war, the death count always ticking up. The guilt persists, but now it is inverted, no longer about the suffering of Jews but about that of others.

We can find a sturdier answer to what Miller would make of antisemitism today not in Broken Glass but in The Crucible. His masterpiece has served as a theatrical Rorschach Test since it premiered at the height of McCarthyism. Its central mechanism maps the hysteria of accusation, the social contagion of fear, the destruction of the individual who refuses to collaborate. But its eternal relevance lies in how it applies with equal force across the political spectrum, wherever mobs bay for violence and crowds swarm with the thrill of self-righteous violence. 

Suggested reading

Christian Jew-haters are back

By Samuel Rubinstein

Humor is the tried and tested Jewish mechanism of metabolizing pain, and Miller for all his brilliance was not renowned for his sense of humor. His plays are anchored with unrelenting gravity, offering no door through which the audience might open to catch some air. Even Shakespeare understood the necessity of comic relief: the gravedigger in Hamlet who cheerfully philosophizes about death while digging Ophelia’s grave, or Macbeth’s porter, who drunkenly ponders the relationship between alcohol and erectile dysfunction whilst the meat grinder continues whirling. Shakespeare uses humor, not as ornamentation but as a structural necessity to release just enough pressure so that the tragedy can hit harder. 

Jacobson, by contrast, utilizes humor not as relief from the weight of darkness but as a way of exploring it. He is one of Britain’s foremost comic novelist, recognized with the Man Booker Prize for The Finkler Question in 2010, a novel that used wit as a scalpel to dissect the neuroses of British-Jewish identity and the self-consciousness of assimilation. His comedy reaches beyond examining the meaning of British Jewishness, to encompass modern masculinity, multiculturalism, intellectual vanity, and the stories we delude ourselves with to avoid confronting who we really are. Howl is an organic extension of that project, except the stakes feel higher now, and the silences after the laughter has passed echo louder. 

Howl directly grasps the nettle of post-October 7 anxiety and blurs the line between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. Behind the protagonist Ferdinand Draxler, a Jewish headmaster of a South London school, looms the inheritance of trauma from his mother’s survival in Nazi death camps, and ahead of him is his own daughter, a pro-Palestinian activist. At a chance encounter between opposite sides of a demonstration, she denounces her father as a colonialist Zio pig. Draxler starts to unravel into madness, crumbling under the weight of both history and the future. 

For Jacobson, the unbearable can be survivable precisely by refusing to treat it as such. One episode sees Draxler chance upon protesters gluing their hands to a portrait of Peter Paul Rubens’s Samson and Delilah at the National Gallery. Samson famously pulled down a Philistine temple, collapsing it upon himself and his captors, and is therefore complicit in genocide. That or, Draxler wonders, the protesters might have conflated Rubens, the Flemish artist, with Reubens the kosher deli on Baker Street. Soon it is clear that Draxler relies on wisecracks as medicine to soothe the pain of his fracturing relationship with his daughter. The pain of a family split down the middle has cleft his heart in twain, not just because they disagree politically, but because the gap between them is too insurmountable. 

The ancient Greeks insisted on pairing tragedy with comedy because they are two faces of the same truth. The truth for Miller and Jacobson is that the gravest danger antisemitism poses is not only violent persecution, but the splinters that shatter the self from within. Philip Gellburg destroys himself trying to dissolve into a society that will never fully accept him. Ferdinand Draxler is the mirror image, destroying himself by retreating from a society he refuses to accept. 

Or maybe the lesson from the Greeks is that however bleak it gets, we can always find room for silliness. Mel Brooks has a joke about Greek tragedians: a tailor asks an ancient Greek “Euripides?” The Greek replies: “Yeah, Eumenides?”

The novel is also a covert assault on ruling-class British ideology. Among other things, it’s a dark parody of R. M. Ballantyne’s Victorian classic Coral Island, in which a group of marooned children manage to pull through by sheer public-school spirit and backbone. Jack, the proto-fascist character in Golding’s version, is a hangover from this stiff-upper-lip heritage, but is one of the first of the boys to surrender to barbarism. Golding saw himself as something of an outsider in British middle-class society and was plagued by feelings of social inferiority. For all its literary renown, Lord of the Flies is an act of revenge on the Establishment.

The anti-humanist thesis which shapes the novel is familiar enough. Human beings are in the grip of dark, primordial powers which a skin-deep civilization is too feeble to restrain. Once that civilized veneer cracks, these malevolent forces will break through and play havoc with our moral idealism. Civilization is just a sublimated form of savagery. All this is a rather vulgarized version of Sigmund Freud’s view of the relation between ego and unconscious. But it’s also an outlook deeply influenced by the history of British imperialism, which involved a confrontation between so-called civilization and so-called barbarism. The most subversive moment in that history is recorded in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, in which the imperialists find a mirror of themselves in the so-called natives. The Other turns out to be as close as breathing. The stiff upper lip is a shield against the fact that there’s something sinisterly attractive about the chaos and bloodlust which the “natives” supposedly represent. Mrs Moore, the sensitive, humane middle-aged woman at the centre of E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, feels the vibrations of meaninglessness emanating from the Marabar Caves and loses her grip on life. Joseph Conrad, a naval officer like Golding, speaks in his novel Nostromo of the imperial project as being as pointless as trying to plow the sea. At the very moment when the colonialists need a robust identity in order to impose some order on a resentful population, they are overwhelmed by a sense of cosmic futility. They can only accomplish this project if they are far from home, but being far from home is also what can sap their faith in the enterprise.

This happens in a different way in Lord of the Flies. The terrifying beast which the boys fear is real enough, but it’s inside them, not out in the ocean or deep in the jungle. In promoting its bleak case about humanity, however, the novel stacks the cards in one flagrantly obvious way. The idea is to show that men and women will quickly revert to primitivism if the pressures on them are sufficiently powerful. But Golding’s characters are not men and women but children. And since children are only semi-civilized in any case, it’s no great surprise that they should take to sticking pigs and smashing each other’s glasses. Boys (even choirboys) will be boys. They will also be adults, but they aren’t yet. What if Golding had put the members of a Yorkshire brass band or a bunch of chartered accountants on the island? There’s no assurance that they would have behaved impeccably, but it’s unlikely that they would have torn themselves apart with such alacrity.

Novelists quite often stack the cards to ensure the results they want. Take, for example, George Orwell’s Animal Farm, a satire of Stalinism. The book shows how swiftly the project of building socialism succumbs to a brutal authoritarianism; but to illustrate the point it uses farm animals, and farm animals aren’t remarkable for their ability to engage in complex social or political operations, any more than children are. If you set your case up in a particular way, the conclusions you’re looking for will fall obediently out the other end.

Golding’s novel is an example of what one might call the Room 101 syndrome. In Orwell’s 1984, Room 101 is where you confront what you fear most, and how you cope with this terror is the ultimate test of who you are. The hero has an understandable aversion to having rats burrow through his cheeks, and breaks under this hideous prospect. He cries out to his torturers to do it to his partner instead, and the guilt of this betrayal destroys him. But why should how you act in a moment of extremity be taken to define who you are? A lot of us would betray anyone at all to avoid our tongue being chewed by rodents, including the odd babe-in-arms, but to claim that this reveals our “real” self is absurd. The extreme doesn’t necessarily define the norm. The belief that to press someone to their limit is to discover who they are goes hand-in-hand with the equally dubious claim that everyday existence is inherently inauthentic. Once you peel it away, you reveal the real thing. Once you put children in a situation where there are no civilized restraints, you find out how uncivilly unrestrained they are.

Jack Thorne’s vividly imaginative recreation of the book for television deletes its religious dimension. The dead parachutist on the islands, presumably the pilot of the doomed aircraft, is referred to in the novel as “a dead man on a hill”, a reference to Calvary, and the role of the child Simon (Simon Peter, Jesus’s right-hand man) is to bring the good news that there’s nothing to fear about it. Instead, he is murdered for his pains, as indeed was Simon Peter. Christianity, however, doesn’t maintain that human beings are irretrievably corrupt, whatever Golding may think. It rejects both the bright-eyed progressive view that we’re naturally selfless and compassionate, but also the sour-faced reactionary case that we’re a bunch of deep-dyed villains who can be saved only by a gratuitous act of divine grace.

It isn’t, however, a question of steering judiciously between these two different viewpoints. It’s rather a matter of grasping that they’re opposite aspects of a single situation. The very powers which allow us to forge genuine progress (healing the sick, feeding the hungry, and so on) are also the powers which enable us to commit genocide. It’s the self-contradictions of the human species which are at stake here. Because we have bodies of a certain kind (laboring, communicative, cooperative, and so on) we can develop technologies far beyond the capability of squirrels. This is why squirrels have no National Health Service, as far as we can tell. But it’s also why they can’t stockpile nuclear weapons. They can’t send vital resources (sacks of nuts, etc.) to less privileged squirrels overseas, but neither can they run secret torture facilities like the CIA.

More from this author

Jane Austen was no Romantic

By Terry Eagleton

The liberal tends to hold that once we’re allowed to be free, our better natures will flourish; the conservative believes that only by the strict application of order and discipline can anything morally valuable be squeezed out of our selfish, indolent make-up. Christianity is both a great deal more pessimistic than the liberal and considerably more optimistic than the conservative. The doctrine of the Fall, which has nothing to do with a divinely prohibited apple, suggests that we’re in a sorry mess, as a quick glance around the globe might confirm; but the Christian Gospel also holds that we have a capacity for self-transformation, and that if only we can let go of the present there’s a glorious future in store for us. It isn’t, however, attainable without passing through loss, deprivation, suffering and death, if only in symbolic terms.

For some progressive thinkers, neither world wars were supposed to happen. They seemed to be inexplicable disruptions of a history which had been marching upwards and onwards at least from the Victorian era, or even from the 18th-century Enlightenment. Charles Dickens may have scourged the evils of his age, but he thought it vastly superior to any previous phase of history. For some conservative thinkers, the Holocaust is eloquent testimony to the callowness of this vision of progress. Today, we are fearful about our future, but we tend not to ask whether a species capable of such atrocities really deserves to survive. If it’s finally wiped out by climate catastrophe or nuclear war, might not this simply amount to getting its comeuppance?

We should recall, however, that if a lot of men and women spent their time planning and executing the Holocaust, a lot of others gave their lives to bring the Nazi regime to an end. Besides, if Lord of the Flies is a parable of the darkness of the human heart, then it could give comfort to the malign forces its author fought against a few years before he came to write it. If violence and cruelty are built into our natures, then it might be that our responsibility for torture and murder is diminished. We are, after all, only being faithful to the kind of animals we are. But the Second World War wasn’t the result of human nature. It was the consequence of a complex set of historical factors, any one of which could have been different. There may have been no need for William Golding to give his crew orders to fire on the enemy. And if there hadn’t been, he may not have written the novel now showing on television.

This is a book of fiction that performs the service for which fiction is uniquely suited — detailing the contours of consciousness — while performing a rather unusual bracketing in a context of higher truth. It comes amid a wider renaissance in horror cinema and literature, with some of the best work often described as “post-horror.” Beginning in the mid-2010s, artists have taken up the genre as a means for exploring the irrational and ineffable dimensions of human life — or to poseideas that, stated overtly, would be seen as tactless or impolitic. This, even as they break its conventions or, as in Lee’s case, blend them with other forms. 

A “prisoner’s cinema,” as we learn in the title story — its longest and best — is the series of hallucinations a person’s mind will produce after he is kept for a prolonged time in complete darkness. In this story, a child rapist waiting on death row engages in a series of verbal jousts with the demon who encouraged him in his crime, and who continues to mock him as he waits out his last days. The moral lines seem clear here, yet the unconventional structure of this long story confounds the reader’s expectations, offering no easy resolution, and a twist toward the end adds a sci-fi element to horror that was previously mostly psychological or ontological. The result is terrifying: the suggestion that the human mind is the most fearsome demon of all.

More from this author

A Russian novel saved my mind

By Noah Kumin

As the line from G. K. Chesterton goes: “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.” The rational mind unbalanced, overheated, and off its tether is the true protagonist of these stories. Characters reason and use logic; they follow a flow of linked theses and fateful decision trees; they rationalize, or they victimize where they have been victimized. The result, far from making sense, is the most fetid tangle of human flesh this side of Hannibal Lecter’s pantry.  

In “Gods and Spiders,” a hypnotist returns a young man to the primal scene of his mother’s violent death at the hands of the Bosnian paramilitary. In “Lovecraft,” a philosophizing butcher allows a tenant who lives below him to tenderize some very suspicious meat as a form of stress relief. In “Lightning in a Cloudless Sky,” a disgruntled son of two newly dead parents bashes in the head of an intruding hoodlum. But the real brutality for this young man, Lee suggests, is internal: an animus between the protagonist and his brother that simply can’t be fixed. 

Lee’s compendium of gore is accomplished with subtlety and literary grace. “Never Find Us Here,” a story about a narcissistic young man who decides to volunteer for a day at the Salvation Army, keeps us on tenterhooks by sliding seamlessly between surrealism and psychology. And, as in the most crafty of short stories, an anticlimax serves as the perfect ending. Lee also has a knack for a good metaphor. He writes, for instance, of “the dark lips of ditches”: precisely the right word for the little mounds that might circumscribe a hole one has dug, turning it into a yawning black mouth. And the virtuoso vitriol that opens “Lightning in a Cloudless Sky,” — “They always have sallow skin, these whores, these meth-heads, wasted high-school beauties, soma-addled slack bodies, all with the same seeping sallow skin carrying Christ-knows-what proud strains of plague in their milky sebum . . .” — is mellifluous bile indeed.

But it is the moral stakes that set Lee’s writing apart. Literary fiction is a genre on the wane — like contemporary art and independent cinema. We suffer from a glut of writers and a dearth of readers, from a surfeit of publicity and a paucity of art. It is no coincidence that the successes over the past few decades have been the products of writers such as Michel Houellebecq, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and Elena Ferrante, who are earnestly grappling with the morality of how one ought to live in a society that offers fewer answers by the day. 

In this sense, the contemporary writer of fiction is no different from the pundit on X (formerly Twitter), but whereas the online pundit is incentivized to provide extreme approbation or condemnation, the novelist may take a longer view. Today the craft of the novelist may not be as remunerative as the pundit’s — a few mega-writers excepted. But by making abstract problems concrete and by playing both sides, so to speak, the novelist offers wisdom no pundit can match.

One can, for example, argue all one likes about what it means for society that some men rob, rape, or kill. But Lee, an editor at the religious journal First Things, has done something much more difficult and important: he has, through imaginative exercises, made such actions concrete. He has told us their tastes and smells. Only a moralist would bother to tease out the thread of immorality with such care. Who else would bother with the mental anguish of such people? Lee thus does the reader the service of taking him somewhere he never wanted to go. Complacency, that most common 21st-century sin, is not an option once you’ve entered Lee’s fictional world.

None of it is easy to read, and Lee has written of an author’s struggle with his subject, in the form of dialogues with the demon “Paul” in three linked stories that make up the series “A Briefer Epic.” In these stories, the demon taunts the author, sophomorically questioning his sexuality, or suggesting that his preoccupation with the dark constitutes evil in itself. The back-and-forth is often amusing, but the scaffolding feels unnecessary, since many of the issues come through in the stories. Moreover, a writer allowing a clever demon to argue against his project may tempt a few too many readers to side with the devil and put down the book. 

But this is a quibble. In an age where art veers between empty entertainment and empty formalism, it is a pleasure to find a new voice deeply interested in how we ought to live. For Lee, that question manifests as a preoccupation with what in our world is most horrific. As in the ancient tragedies, Lee offers a chance to purge ourselves by following his characters down the long path to hell, before we return to the blessed freedom of our day-to-day lives. It is a bracing and, in the end, ennobling trip. I look forward to the next time Lee will lead me to a place I don’t want to go.

New Bedford, Massachusetts is the first waypoint of Melville’s protagonist Ishmael on his route to Nantucket and the whale ship Pequod. “Nowhere in America,” Ishmael tells us, “will you find more patrician-like houses; parks and gardens more opulent, than in New Bedford… All these brave houses and flowery gardens came from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans. One and all, they were harpooned and dragged up hither from the bottom of the sea.” That is, they were built by whaling. New Bedford has changed a lot since Ishmael walked these streets. Few would describe it today as “patrician-like” or “opulent”, but the modern city’s takeover by Portuguese and Portuguese-speaking (particularly Azorean and Cape Verdean) seafarers resulted directly from the whaling boom of the early 19th century. And inasmuch as Ishmael’s spirit remains, they are the ones who guard it.

This year’s reading began in a museum gallery containing a half-scale model of the whale ship Lagoda, with room for little else. A brave subset of the 3,000 or so souls who would come in and out over the next 25 hours were crammed in — shank to flank, as Tom Wolfe might have put it — leaning against columns, spilling out the doors. Dog-eared copies of the book were clutched or splayed out on the floor, Post-it notes protruding like the spines of polychromatic hedgehogs.

Barely had I taken my own cross-legged seat when the first of 278 volunteer readers, a sonorous baritone, invited us to “Call me Ishmael”. The audience whooped. I scanned the room to size up my fellow travelers. About half looked like current or recent college English majors; about 70% were women. The rest were mostly older adults — both New England lifers and literary tourists. So much for the “end of reading”.

It is rare nowadays for such a varied group of people — they hailed from an array of backgrounds, speaking with a variety of accents — to come together around an artwork so completely foreign to our own time. In her memorable 2002 article “Against Presentism”, historian Lynn Hunt decries the “moral complacency and self-congratulation” that arise from our era’s collective sense of “temporal superiority”. In the two decades since, these tendencies have only grown worse. By the early 2020s, even America’s founding fathers found their achievements minimized or their memorials defaced because they lacked the moral clarity of the 21st-century world — even if their innovations helped build that world.

How extraordinary, then, at a moment when whales are a protected species and women run many of our largest industries, that these readers have dedicated 25 hours of their lives to understanding a man who inhabits an exclusively male world of danger, action and adventure, and who sees whale hunting as the noblest of human pursuits. In her essay, Hunt writes that “respect for the past, with its concomitant humility, curiosity, and even wonder. . . enables us to see beyond our present-day concerns backward and forward at the same time. We are all caught up in the ripples of time, and we have no idea of where they are headed.” It may be that great literature has a power to instill that understanding in us that even great historical writing lacks.

Admittedly, there were moments during the marathon when I sensed the presentist mask reasserting itself. For instance, when Ishmael postulates that perhaps he himself, and not a South Pacific cannibal like his “bosom friend” Queequeg, is the genuine “savage”, a cheer arose from the crowd. A young man behind me tittered: “That’s actually pretty progressive!” as though satisfying 21st-century progressives should have been among Melville’s objectives in conceiving the character of Ishmael.

We moved between venues as we cruised through the book at around 33 pages an hour. I was one of the lucky few to hear Father Mapple’s sermon on the Book of Jonah read out in the tiny Seaman’s Bethel where Melville set it. I squeezed into a pew, peering at the walls of the bethel which still bear the same memorial plaques Ishmael describes, commemorating crews lost in shipwrecks and whaling accidents around the world. Seeing these plaques, meditating on the boundless pain they represent, gave me a greater appreciation of Ishmael’s obsession with the Christian dichotomies of good and evil. Imagining the crew listening to the sermon, comparing themselves with the prophet Jonah, it became vividly clear that he was a way for them to salvage meaning from an unrelentingly dark and dangerous life where death came unannounced and gory.

At around dusk, we reached the most divisive of Moby-Dick chapters: the 32nd. “Cetology” is the first and longest of several chapters in which Melville disgorges his years of research on the biology of whales and commerce of whaling. In a charming display of Melville nerd-dom, the room cheered when the infamous chapter was announced, and gave a little chuckle when Ishmael introduces the chapter’s contents as “almost indispensable” to understanding the novel’s action (“almost” is doing rather a lot of work there).

How easily one forgets that an average American reader in 1851 would never have seen a photograph of a whale, nor had any sense of how to figure out which drawings or paintings of whales were realistic, and which fantastical. Novelists who write of things utterly foreign to their readers’ experience must be very specific. Even so, I overheard one young lady outside yelling into her phone: “Why does he put all this stuff in there if it has no direct relevance to the narrative?”

As night fell, we settled in for the true endurance test — 12 hours of the Pequod encircling the world and Captain Ahab sinking into madness. Through most of the night, the 220-seat theater where these passages were read was full. Couples and groups of friends took turns sleeping and keeping watch. It is funny how tempting it is to slip into nautical patterns of behavior with such engrossing source material to suggest them.

The sun rose. And then, finally, at noon, the words: “Chapter 133. The Chase — First Day.” The focus of one-and-all snapped back from the wandering expansiveness of the open ocean to Moby-Dick’s endgame. A few minutes later, Ishmael was clinging to a floating coffin on a vast disinterested ocean.

Aside from exhaustion, the prevailing feeling as we filed out of the whaling museum, clutching our marine-themed goodie bags, was bewilderment. Moby-Dick is a bewildering book, all the more when read in a single sitting. This might be because Melville, with his penchant for turning characters into archetypes and ephemeral moments into eternal principles, is writing to persuade all peoples and all eras at once. He seems to speak directly across the ages to a reader in our own time who has asked him a question. We can imagine the young woman at a meet-the-author event with Melville’s ghost at some swell Manhattan venue: Why, she demands, would any sane person voluntarily risk his life to prowl the world’s oceans in a wooden vessel to find, kill, and disembowel huge man-eating monsters and melt their flesh down into lamp oil? And why would they further pledge their allegiance to an even bigger maniac who had resolved to subdue the world’s single deadliest sea monster or else die in the attempt?

Melville knew that even in 1850, such shots across the bow of cool-headed reason demanded a passionate defense. Even among readers living near Melville’s farmstead in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, located multiple days from New Bedford by stagecoach, the whaling life would have seemed utterly foreign. And so, his narrator sets out to make the irrational inevitable: to convince us that for a man of his time, or indeed of any time, there is no work more honorable or more beautiful than whaling. The most unsettling thing about Moby Dick may be that even after we witness the White Whale’s slaughter of all Ishmael’s shipmates, we are still forced to admit that he has succeeded. That we (particularly we men) might never have the chance to live as fully or as deeply as Ishmael did.

When we read a little bit of a book at a time, we have a chance to dismiss or disqualify things that we read out-of-hand, due to their dissonance with our world. One of the chief benefits of reading a work like Moby-Dick in one sitting is the opportunity to swallow it whole — to bring into our minds an entirely different living world — dissonant with our own but rich with eternal knowledge that our world has forgotten.

There’s more in that dissonance than one can process in an evening, or perhaps even in a lifetime. But I take some comfort in the fact that Moby-Dick’s author felt exactly the same way about the ideas he advanced. Indeed, he reveled in the incompleteness of it all. “God keep me from ever completing anything,” Melville writes. “This whole book is but a draft—nay, but the draft of a draft. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!”

Yet what’s most fascinating about that world was how fragmentary, improvisational, and messy it appeared to the artists living in it at the time. Most of them didn’t have national or international renown, living sordid lives, scrambling to find patrons, collaborating on magazines nobody read, staging exhibitions that puzzled the public, and worrying more about ideas than fame or posterity. They were unafraid of experimentation, and willing to be misunderstood. They had little or nothing to do with universities, foundations, or established institutions. If they couldn’t find their way into journals, galleries, and publishing houses, they simply made their own. These artists deliberately opposed the contemporary world, even as they dragged it like a cadaver into the future with them. Their real allegiance was to the idea of the artist as a free agent in the world: they understood that their true audience was other artists; that the goal of art was to redeem a culture always on the brink of forgetting everything; and that most people, rich or poor, will always be far behind their own times.

By the end of its first quarter, the 20th century had already seen what many now consider its most groundbreaking artworks: Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase; Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring and Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire; Joyce’s Ulysses, T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, and Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. A quarter of the way through our own century, do we have a single novel, poem, composition, or work of art that can measure up to these? The answer is nearly always “no”. And if it’s ever “yes”, the examples offered are never really satisfying. Some might suggest the environments of Pierre Huyghe, or the films of Terrence Malick, or Helen DeWitt’s wonderful novel The Last Samurai. But as brilliant as they are, these works simply don’t have the same sense of having revolutionized the medium in ways unimaginable before them. There is far less distance between them and the modernism of Man Ray than there is between Man Ray and the paintings of someone like J. M. W. Turner, a century before him.

When future critics write the annals of our era, I suspect that what will actually strike them most is just how little has happened in our time. Rather than a litany of genius artistic accomplishments, it is much more accurate to see our moment as the height of industrial mass culture’s revenge upon art — a period in which creative industries, academic training, popular taste, assembly-line content production, and distribution technologies have fused into a monolith without qualities. The idea of artists as pioneers and outsiders has given way to a professionalized class within contemporary academic and media institutions. Yet with the arrival of each new digital technology, even these artists risk being taken out of the equation. What’s more, the characteristic experience of art in our time has become divorced from all previous eras in human history: there are few amateur art societies remaining; connoisseurship has been mocked almost out of existence, and patronage reduced to market speculation. For most people, art has next to nothing anymore to do with religious ritual, or even the pursuit of commonality and sociality. Audiences are now individual people behind individual screens — voyeurism is the ruling principle of the digital experience of art.

Everyone knows this: significant portions of these spaces are devoted to discussions about how miserable it is to be there. Even so, what most people seem to want from their media today is the chance to watch other people do things. The most consistent experience of anything resembling art is not happening in galleries, in the pages of journals, at the cinema, or in the concert hall. It consists of watching other people play video games, watching other people make food, watching other people listen to music. Those future historians will likely conclude that life in the first part of the 21st century was something that happened to other people. They will feel pity for the hundreds of millions of human beings whose yearnings were so thoroughly diverted from the world of sense into a state of passive surveillance.

Many of us now spend a majority of our waking lives trapped in a continuous flow of the possibility of experience, instead of experience itself. The revenge upon art is also revenge upon experience, since this is just what we do when we participate in the cacophonic theater of digital spaces — we take revenge upon the difficulty and pain of our experience. The aesthetic of our era is mostly a flight away from art, since art embodies all those things — real sex, death, history, feeling, pain — which we are desperate to escape. Plainly, the modern world has become too complex for us. There is too much news, too much noise, too much action — too much for any one person to handle. Our bodies rebel against their conditions through illness, fatigue, and depression: hence the common sentiment that interacting with serious art is just too difficult, that what’s really needed at the end of the day is mindless, numbing escape. Art must now compete with the universal desire for dissociation.

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We have of course been preparing for this escape for a long time. Our anti-art era reached its apex in just the past two or three years, with the arrival of machine-generated versions of visual arts, music, and literature. Whether by accident or design, the makers of these “artificial intelligences” have come close to achieving what many creative industries were tending towards anyways: the abolishment of the artists themselves. The endless scroll is now replete with machine-generated “art”, but so long as the average consumer is seeking to numb their reality, there’s no reason for them to care if what meets them are human- or machine-made images. If our hypothetical future historians are accurate, they will perceive that the dominant tone of our time is anesthetic, since the role of nearly all popular media now is a panacea, meant to assuage an underlying anxiety, but only worsening it in reality.

Anesthetic is a perfect term for a deeper reason, too. Given the meaning of the prefix “an-” (“without” or “lacking”), the word quite literally means “lacking aesthetic” — without feeling or perception. We’re living in a time in which the average consumer’s experience is in tacit collusion with a mass-produced media world that has successfully propagandized on behalf of hollowing out our aesthetic experiences — and which now has the technology to eliminate artists from the production of it. This revenge upon art has so far been successful for two reasons: first, a 20th-century mass culture created by the perfection of major broadcast technologies; and second, the aforementioned conversion of artists to a professionalized class of aspirational elites.

The development of radio and television in the 20th century created the largest interconnected mass culture in history. The values of this monoculture quickly combined with the centralizing and propagandizing dictums of the century’s globe-spanning states. Whether Soviet propaganda, or the leading US television networks, or TIME magazine, or The Times, the idea was the same: whoever reaches and sways the most people wins. Monoculture relied on technologies of mass persuasion, broadcasting from single sources to millions of listeners, readers, and viewers. And the people who experienced this world passed on those same values, creating the newer world of digital information. We on the internet today have inherited this idea that mass culture ought to exist, even though it would seem alien to most times and places in human history. The ideal only exists because of those broadcast technologies, because the point of the game being played through them was to monopolize the maximum amount of airspace and human attention.

The internet, however, is not a single medium, but a fabric of mediums. In its networks one finds broadcast technology but also telephonic and text-based technologies. Social media platforms were able to disrupt the original internet by essentially constructing sociality-themed meta-games in the midst of what was once a decentralized network of libraries, messaging systems, and sites. But where the 20th-century mass culture required many people tuning into a limited range of channels such as radio frequencies, television stations, even cinema screens, social media algorithms curate distinct channels for each user. This traumatic loss of collective experience has been partially substituted by the chaotic “public square” of those platforms. Yet creative industries and tech companies are still based on the old incentives, and have generally monopolized every digital outpost to deliver only their content to huge numbers of people.

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Our problem now isn’t a lack of cultural production, but too much of it. So much so that the vast majority of artists simply can’t compete with the tiny number of hugely popular names with the full backing of the media conglomerates. At the empty center of this era of over-production is what the critic W. David Marx has called the “Blank Space” — the name of his recent cultural history of the 21st century. Marx’s Blank Space deals above all with the force of “Poptimism” — a rising idea among many critics that their duty was to advocate for popular commercial products as an antidote to the hipsterism, snobbery, and elitism of the 20th century. As Marx argues, no matter how open-minded these critics thought they were being, the actual result of their rhetoric gave the media and the public carte blanche to reject high-minded art in favor of shallow pop culture, ceding the once-transgressive powers of the avant garde to a resurgent Right-wing often allied with the very tech companies who want to automate away cultural production. This has desiccated creative subcultures and made it harder for critics to get attention for unknown artists, while audiences themselves increasingly reject any attempt to argue for better art as aristocratic arrogance. As the saying goes: “Just let people enjoy things.”

However, part of this resentment against elitist critics also extends to the whole field of modern art itself — something Marx doesn’t consider. The mass culture of the late 20th century — which is what really made the radical art of the early century famous, reducing artists like Picasso and Duchamp to memes and flat cultural icons — continued to harbor at least some of the old oppositional avant-garde sensibility. Even popular artists could be respected for challenging and shocking their audiences. But over time, the paradox was simply too great: if the main imperative is to get as much content out to as many people as possible, then challenging or difficult art can only ever be in conflict with it. This is why Poptimism as an idea has been so deleterious: it preys on the part of the audience which rejects difficulty, which regards the old avant-garde attitude as snobbery, and dislikes critics because critics often tell them that what they like isn’t very good. Over the past few decades, we’ve seen exactly what happens when you combine a global mass-commercial imperative, the hamstringing of serious criticism, and the diffusion of physical countercultures into the internet. The result is the Blank Space: an alarming rate of technological change, ironically counterposed by an absence of novel artistic movements.

As a legible history of the past 25 years, Marx’s book encourages us to imagine something better — to imagine the return of physical subcultures, of serious criticism, and the development of something resembling an avant garde. But this is a forbiddingly difficult thing to do, since the place of artists has shifted so far from what it once was. On the one hand, there is the idea of the artist in popular culture — one which might sometimes contain the old ideal of aesthetic excellence at all costs, yet has for the most part given way to influencers, celebrities, and brand managers. On the other hand, there is the reality of artists within cultural institutions. Look at the blue chip galleries and recipients of huge foundation funds; the majority of “upmarket” authors published by the major houses; the poets who win major literary prizes; the young writers who work their way from unpaid internships to staff jobs; the people who run the arts non-profits. You will find an extreme bias towards upper-middle-class backgrounds and university educations. Looking at the biographies of emerging artist award winners and grant recipients, you might be bewildered by how many of these people have BFAs, MFAs, even PhDs in their area.

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This is the professionalization of the artist in our time. It is well known just how difficult it is to get published, or to get one’s work seen, without the right resume: a degree certification, specially curated portfolio, the requisite recommendations. The artist in this professional climate — whether a young composer, painter, poet, or filmmaker — faces an enormous bureaucratic barrier of entry to their field. Their style has to conform to a certain industry expectation, has to fit in with the current understanding of sales trends, and can’t risk offending or upsetting anyone at any step in that process. So, for decades, university programs have sprung up with the intention of training young artists for entry into these careers, in workshops and fine-arts programs designed to maximize their legibility at the expense of idiosyncratic style.

In our current environment, an artist like Man Ray — who turned down a university scholarship, working as a technical illustrator and taking classes at the Ferrer Center, an anarchist day school in New York — would get nowhere. But, of course, artists like Man Ray have never got anywhere in these environments. The early 19th-century Romantics rebelled against the school of Joshua Reynolds; the later Impressionists against the reigning Paris Salons; the fin-de-siècle Vienna Secessionists rebelled against the Association of Austrian Artists; Man Ray, Picasso, Duchamp and other avant-gardists rebelled against the ossified remains of those previous revolutionary styles. Today’s young creatives may want to think of themselves as a crusading vanguard, particularly regarding social justice causes, but, more often than not, they are themselves the producers of the stuffy bourgeois academic style which all great modern art movements have defined themselves by rejecting.

This state of affairs has only contributed to the suspicion that today’s creatives are hustlers and grifters making risk-free art. Where former eras regarded them as confusing freaks, even exiles, the public now sees them as poseurs and snobs. The undifferentiated style of these artists’ exhibitions, novels, poems, and compositions only reinforces the sense that their only audience is other professionals and academics. At the same time, as hemorrhaging industries concentrate more and more on sure-fire market successes, the professionalized caste is kept on life support solely by grants, residencies, foundations, and legacy media attention. Potential audiences drift further towards mass-produced slop and digital numbness, yet these artists still sand away every bit of risk, experiment, or novelty to make it in the shrinking creative industries. There is very little room in this equation for the creation of new artistic movements — and little incentive for anyone to want one.

So what is to be done about this? Well — many things. The first is to be clear about the situation, no matter how depressing. For the time being, the majority of the public is too distracted, numbed-out, and tech-addicted to respond to much art. Still, this is only a despairing thing from the point of view of that 20th-century monoculture. For most of human history, the production of culture was meant to exalt God, or give prestige to the ruling aristocracy. In the wake of the Romantics and modernists, the highest value became the creation of great art as the ultimate mode of human experience. When this becomes the ideal pursuit, even at a social cost, and the artist is understood as an essential outsider, public disinterest becomes the norm; it even becomes a sign of health. One of Man Ray’s consistent refrains was that whenever he noticed his work confusing someone, he knew he was really on to something.

We also have to admit that the current academic style is moribund. My generation — made up of young Millennials and elder Zoomers — has yet to produce a truly great novelist, poet, composer, or painter. And that is because too many have given up the time and energy that should have gone to their true education in formal history, to pursue professionalized academic tracks promising elite approval. As Marx pointed out, these careerist industries have left the old transgressive spirit of the avant garde to be subsumed by trolls and reactionary Right-wingers, who are themselves nearly incapable of producing art, their transgressions limited to stepping on liberal social norms and indulging in half-ironic bigotry. Not that progressives have fared much better: the last two decades of social justice politics produced no great art, with proponents largely choosing empty pieties over practical liberatory politics. Once elites figured out how to use the language of those movements, they quickly adopted it to police established class boundaries in the media, and plenty of artists adapted to the situation immediately.

What is clear is the need for secession. The need for greater numbers of serious artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers who exist outside of the academy, legacy media institutions, and the major creative industries. Artists who create their own smaller institutions, their own laboratories, their own publications, their own exhibitions — all with the clear intention of avoiding trends, embracing experimental collaboration, and rejecting the need for a large audience whatsoever. At the beginning, the only audience should be other artists. Artists need spaces outside the confines of the internet, even outside the confines of society. Yet much of what goes on now, in the burgeoning scenes of New York, London, or Paris, are only small magazines, artsy parties, and showings with an eye towards sexy contemporary issues. A lot of it only happens in conjunction with small presses, or on Substack.

These people certainly have the great avant-garde artists in mind — they yearn for the days of bohemia, for Paris between the wars, or the Künstlerhaus in Vienna. But so far, their attempts to forge new art scenes have been too much scene, and too little art. The point there is less to experiment and envision some genuinely new movement, and more to imitate the romantic social lives of older artists. Until these scenes take the collaborative process of art-making and art-theorizing as seriously as they do their parties and online publications, they will be transitory. What’s more, artists need to be far more sincere about mixing with different kinds of creatives. One of the most remarkable things about interwar Paris was just how many kinds of people mixed together — aristocrats, socialites, commercial artists, designers, filmmakers, painters, playwrights, poets. They didn’t segregate themselves by medium, only by the groups they’d dedicated themselves to (and even then those boundaries could be quite porous). Judgment and taste were the sole currency. Artists who didn’t measure up to their standards were quickly dismissed as kitsch-mongers. Today we mischaracterize this posture as elitist — but it is only elitist if it comes from an actual powerful elite. For artistic movements, strict standards are self-preservation, the only thing with any chance of revitalizing a calcified aesthetic culture.

The art of the future is not going to come from our current institutions and academies. Yet neither is it going to be purely Romantic, or purely modernist. It will have to emerge from the technical mastery of all forms that came before it. Artists will have to spend far less time seeking facile “personal expression” and more time practicing old-fashioned methods, understanding them inside and out — which is the only real way to imagine something beyond them. Only an intimate understanding of the history of an artform can really respond to the world as it is now, a world which has tried to take its revenge upon art by robbing artists of their role in society, and drowning the masses in assembly-line slop.

The new contemporary art will have to be part evangelism and part theater; the artists will have to be unforgiving preachers of the gospel of aesthetic excellence. They will have to be stringent in their commitment to experimentation and their rejection of the current style. For the sake of real creative freedom, they will have to reject positioning and political signaling (though this hardly means rejecting politics itself). What is needed, in short, is a theory of contemporary art which aspires once again to shock its audience, when it finds it — not merely to transgress against social norms, rather to shock people back into reality, back into the stream of experience. The role of the artist in the anti-art era will be the person who sees the world as it is — numbed-out, anxious, resentful, overwhelmed, half-asleep — and tries to wake it back up again, by whatever means necessary.

In 1924, the critic Charles Whibley wrote that a certain novelist would not be forgotten “until the hunting field, with all that it means and has meant to English life, is utterly abolished.” Perhaps he was right. The moment of abolition has arrived, and who but a small band of enthusiasts has heard of Robert Smith Surtees? His creations, displaying characteristic self-interest, have decamped to the works of better-known writers. Messrs Sponge and Jorrocks, his most celebrated offspring, are found in the pages of Virginia Woolf, Rudyard Kipling, Siegfried Sassoon, Evelyn Waugh and John Buchan.

None thought Surtees required any introduction. They assumed that his characters were as familiar as David Copperfield or Elizabeth Bennet. His best novels — Jorrocks’s Jaunts and Jollities, Handley Cross, Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour, Mr Facey Romford’s Hounds — seemed to have secured a permanent place in the minds of British readers. They had also attracted foreign admirers. Teddy Roosevelt enthused over “the immortal Soapey Sponge”, while the French critic André Maurois described Jorrocks’s Jaunts and Jollities as nothing less than “le chef-d’oeuvre du roman anglais”.

Robert Smith Surtees was born five months before the Battle of Trafalgar. He died two months after the opening of Charing Cross railway station. The second son of County Durham gentry, he set up as a London lawyer, though quickly succumbed to journalism. In 1838, he inherited the family estate, Hamsterley Hall. He stayed there for the rest of his life, hunting, shooting and writing. His books are often described as “sporting novels” because they’re notionally about hunting. But foxes were never his real quarry. Surtees was far more interested in running his fellow men to earth.

Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour (1852), the novel so loved by President Roosevelt, sees “Soapey” Sponge traveling around northern England. His goal is to hunt as much as possible without spending any money. In fact, he’d rather like to turn a profit. Sponge by name and nature, he secures tenuous invitations to country houses and then fails to leave. He eats, drinks, smokes and hunts. He tries to sell his troublesome horses, both handsome beasts with serious behavioral issues, for far more than they are worth. When not hunting, he spends hours scouring Mogg’s Ten Thousand Cab Fares, an exhaustive guide to London’s transport system. “It’s a book I never travel without,” Sponge explains. “It’s invaluable in town, and you may study it to great advantage in the country. With Mogg in my hand, I can almost fancy myself in both places at once.”

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Sponge’s travels allow Surtees to deploy battalions of venal, selfish, ludicrous and delusional characters. Many are unforgettable. Mr Jawleyford, one of the first to get sponged, is a case in point. Free with invitations, though outraged when they are accepted, he fills the walls of Jawleyford Court with portraits of himself. Ingratiating with the rich and powerful, he serves corked port to everyone else, and only rides to hounds if there’s a chance to hobnob with county bigwigs. Such an attitude to hunting is typical of most characters in the novel. Consider Mr Waffles, an epicene swell who views hunting as an opportunity to host lavish dinners and wear exquisitely cut coats. Or Mr Puffington, who becomes master of the Hanby hounds “because he thought they would give him consequence.”

Surtees knew that there was much more to hunting than the chase itself. Writing about huntsmen also meant writing about ostlers and eligible young women, coaching inns and ball rooms, grocers and gentry, horse-traders and dandies. Jorrocks himself is no drawling squire, but a Cockney grocer made good, who hunts because he loves it. This all chimes with a point that defenders of trail hunting have made time and again: that it’s much more than an activity. It is a community, stretching back through time, that provides meaning and belonging to a much wider variety of people than is commonly acknowledged. The communal aspect of hunting was appreciated long ago. In a 1680 poem called “The Fox-Hunting”, an entire village comes out to watch the chase. Excited mothers throw down their children, farmers cheer, and even the vicar gets involved: “A clergy-man I understand / Unto this sport was hasted / Having a psalm-book in his hand / And at the fox he cast it.”

Still, Surtees was a clear-eyed sort with no illusions about human nature. As Rob Williams, chairman of the R. S. Surtees Society, told me: “Mr Sponge loves hunting and very little else, but the people he meets mainly pretend to love it – because they think it lends them social ton or will help them with finding a wife.” Reading Surtees for the hunting scenes is like reading Patrick O’Brian for the naval battles — yes, they occur, but less often than you might expect, and they aren’t really the point of the enterprise. Surtees lavishes far more attention on the foibles of his infuriating, delightful characters than on hunting. But the hunt is always his point of departure, his gateway into broader human comedy.

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Take the moment that Mr Sponge and a friend write up the day’s chase for the local newspaper. Full of energy and enthusiasm, they sit down to compose their article. The procrastination begins at once. First, cigars are smoked. Next, dry ink is revived. Then they discover that the pens are “clotted up to the hocks with ink, or split all the way through”. Would you believe it, there’s no penknife either. After much discussion, a straight razor is found and used to achieve a writing point. Satisfied, the men sit down once more. Silence. How to begin? “‘Begin!’ replied Jack, ‘begin, oh, begin, just as you usually begin.’” The silence deepens. Eventually, a first sentence is dragged onto the page. But is it quite right? Was the pack splendid or stunning? And so it continues. “You don’t s’pose one’s pen goes of itself,” growls Soapey, a complaint familiar to anyone who has written anything longer than a tweet.

The real pleasure of Surtees is found in scenes like this. Small moments of human frustration, tightened into humor. There are many other reasons to read him. When Jorrocks rides down the Strand in full hunting rig, Surtees delivers the feel (and vanished Cockney accents) of early Victorian London by introducing a crowd of piss-taking newspaper boys: “My eyes, vot a swell! — vot a shocking bad hat! — vot shocking bad breeches!” This gift for atmosphere extends to the small struggles of daily life. Sponge and his acquaintances are on a constant quest for a warm room and good food. “Great was the noise of eating” is a typical Surtees line.

The writing is always clear. The plot, less so. No straight shots on the turnpike here, but stately tours along winding, tree-choked lanes, with the occasional need to jump a fence and hack across country. Surtees’s books are huge and meandering. Like Sponge’s horses, they set their own pace. Characters appear, have great attention lavished on their appearance and background, and then wander off for 200 pages. Some are never seen again. Storylines come and go, gleefully abandoned if it means time can be spent in Mr Jawleyford’s vulgar new gallery or plotting new job prospects with saucy grooms like Peter Leather. Surtees is made for dipping, each chapter offering a self-contained narrative and a return to a familiar, comforting fictional world.

When Charles Whibley wrote of the hunting field’s abolition, it was as a rhetorical flourish. A century later, both Surtees’s novels and long rural tradition have faded to the margins. When Labour’s ban on trail hunting goes ahead, England will become a little less lived in. For many, this will be good news. For others, it will be the end of a way of life. This is true of huntsmen themselves, but also the tailors and the hounds and the crowds that come out every Boxing Day. Any good anthropologist would include hunt saboteurs, too, who may find that they miss their own sense of purpose and community when the last horn sounds.

But Surtees would not approve of too much gloom. This is a good time of year to read him, especially if, like Mr Jorrocks, you require a period of quiet convalescence after “too much roast-beef and plum-pudding at Christmas, and prolonging the… festivities a little beyond the season allowed by Moore’s Almanack.” While it’s unlikely that he will ever be a household name again, the vanished England which Surtees wryly recorded and affectionately mocked remains an object of fascination for many. And, as Rob Williams points out, there will always be a market for “his relish in exposing cant and teasing the faux-pious.” The R.S. Surtees Society has kept his books in print, ready for another generation of readers. Like Mr Sponge, the novels of Surtees have proved adept at securing new, if tenuous, lodgings. Let’s hope the invitations never dry up.

I try to book a walking tour online. But it will only take bookings for two — so technically Jane Austen wouldn’t get on her own walking tour. I book another and, by the Pulteney Bridge, I meet a young American woman who is impersonating the heroine of a Netflix Christmas film. She bounces up in curls and bobble hat and duffle coat and announces she has just finished Pride and Prejudice. Her praise, though, is understated, baffled even. She understands that Austen is a brand now and Bath is a city of brands: Cos; Mountain Warehouse; the Romans. But my Netflix friend is still a seeking woman: an Austen heroine. We all are, and that’s the game. Austen offers not a portrait but a mirror, and a woman reads Austen not to find Austen, but herself.

The tour is guided by an ancient German émigré who lives in Chippenham and is also, I think, in his Sunday best. As he takes us round — the house in Sydney Place, which is in denial about being Austen-related, almost sulking; Trim Street, which was too rough for Austen; the house in Gay Street — he treats her like another edifice of the city. In his words, she might be an abbey or a Roman bath: you can just get in her.

He is filled with detail, not sensibility. I think of Charlotte Brontë’s criticism of Emma: “anything like warmth or enthusiasm; anything energetic, poignant, heart-felt, is utterly out of place in commending these works”. But Austen was English, and she spoke to the speechlessness of the English: Brontë was half Cornish and half Irish. So we stare at the house on Gay Street, and we do not talk about whether Mr Darcy would be a hot fuck, though I think he wouldn’t. All Austen’s heroes are duds, except Captain Wentworth of Persuasion (“you pierce my soul”) but it doesn’t matter what I think, because Austen wrote someone for everyone. Hilary Mantel was writing a novel about Mary Bennet when she died.

Austen had stupid children in novel form: the Bridgerton siblings of the novels, now a Netflix juggernaut. The Bridgerton tour is led by an angry man from Surrey who I doubt has read all six novels. This is testament to Austen’s reinvention as theme park: anyone can have a go on her. The Bridgerton novels take the Austen aesthetic and run wild, mostly with lilac. They are pleasing and mindless and they speak to those who travel to their idea of Regency England for the clothes, and the comforting truism that, here, women do not work. Empire line is easy to replicate and flattering. A big girl — Penelope Featherington, who featured in the TV version — can look as good as a slender one, or better. Bridgerton also gives us the sex Austen denies us. Martin Amis, who wrote that he “wouldn’t have minded a rather more detailed conclusion [to Pride and Prejudice] — say, a twenty-page sex scene featuring the two principals, with Mr Darcy, furthermore, acquitting himself uncommonly well”, would have liked Bridgerton.

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We fight our way through the Christmas market and our guide has a stand-off with carolers by the Colombian Coffee Company. We do a quiz as we follow him up Pulteney Street and the winner gets three out of 20 right and wins a bar of chocolate. This is Janeland as numbing out.

The true addicts are at the Jane Austen Centre on Gay Street, which has quotations from the novels on the back of the toilet doors. Austen lived a few doors up the hill at No 25, but when the centre tried to move to that house, the dentist tenant resisted them, which means people with toothache are stared hard at by Janeites, who then move on to the exhibition here. The door to the centre is manned by Henry Tilney from Northanger Abbey, who I always liked because he is funny. There is a male cast roving around the centre — Mr Bennet, Willoughby, Wickham — but they don’t dare have Mr Darcy for fear he might be groped by Janeites.

The gift shop sells a Pride and Prejudice photo casebook featuring hamsters in bonnets. Even hamsters can’t resist Jane. Or you can buy an Elizabeth Bennet bath duck or a Captain Wentworth Christmas decoration. Or Jane Austen bingo. Or, elsewhere in Bath, Jane Austen’s Christmas. Or Jane Austen’s Wardrobe. I meet a woman who has an Austen tattoo and another who reads Sense and Sensibility when, and only when, she is unhappy. Austen isn’t just an analgesic, of course, but she’s the best. Amis complains that she sets her bad girls loose, and this is “the limitations of her art” — Lydia Wickham, only 15, who believed in Wickham just as Lizzy did, is exiled without a tear — but you can hardly tell a (female) national novelist who to love, and who to push off the page.

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The Janeites pass through in a reverential hush because they are communing with a god. I meet young women who bonded through a shared love of the novels — she guided their friendship— women who go to Austen for her feminism and women who go to her for her femininity. This is Jane Austen as life coach. At the town bookshop, I find a compendium of her wisdom called Janesplains. All her writing is how-to-be-a-girl, among the things girls want — houses, clothes, and love. And they send letters of thanks: “Dear Jane, thank you for your writing”; “I’ve found my Mr Darcy! Thanks for sharing the blueprint”; “You’re the best!”

Of the true addicts, the very truest have tickets to the Yuletide Ball at the Pump Room: I heard the tickets sold out in eight minutes. I get there early and stand outside — no press is allowed; press is a modern intrusion — and stare through the window at women setting up the ballroom in a kind of trance. Their movements are over-deliberate, and over-graceful: they would pull the curtains on the world if they could. Soon, the guests gather outside in the mandatory Regency costume, alongside the drunks in Christmas sweaters, and when Christmas drunks approach them to ask them to take photographs for them the Janeites look astonished. It’s the intrusion. These women — all women, a few with hostage husbands — are clearly, though temporarily, not living in this world. The Janeites are the most functional of all obsessives and so, like her, are the most socially acceptable. They are racing back in time to 1812, but they pause to tell me that, “her stories relate to women even now”, or “I am here for the sarcasm”, or “She was a Feminist!” or “the characters learn from their mistakes”. The older ones love Persuasion, the purist’s favorite, because it gives a woman love late in life, and that is incomparable solace. (Anne was 27.)

As I leave, a round young woman in a red cape runs past me, ducks round the Christmas tree and sprints into the ball. She has flushed cheeks, is laughing with happiness and for some reason she reminds me of the woman dressed as an owl I met a furry convention many years ago. As a woman she was ordinary. But then I saw her as an owl with vast eyes — from a Coca-Cola bottle, she told me happily, which she painted — and, as an owl, she was a god. Both owl and Janeite in red cape have the same quality of power found and held. And I think that is Austen’s essential message: not love, not by itself, but self-possession.

You might think, then, that the best place for a writer to be is as far inside the language he is using as possible. But that’s not really true. The writer needs to feel language like a second skin, but if he pushes this too far, it will end up feeling more like a set of old clothes — too familiar to engage attention. If he’s too much on the outside of a language, by contrast, he will know its grammar and vocabulary, but not its rhythms, tones and textures. And so writers must be constantly engaged in a double act — they must pay attention to language, but also to the world it registers.

The playwright Tom Stoppard occupied that most privileged of vantage-points, being simultaneously inside and outside of a language. He inhabited English more fully and deeply than almost any of his artistic compatriots, partly because he came to it as an émigré. For the expatriate, language can never be taken for granted and Stoppard never lost a sense of its freshness and strangeness. He occupied this inside/outside position in his life as well as his art: lionized by the Establishment but never quite at home there. Those on the outside can sometimes see more than the insiders, and often in a satirical light, but as Oscar Wilde discovered, they may have to pay a high price for doing so.

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Wilde could never quite decide whether he wanted to join the English aristocracy or to put a bomb beneath the lot of them. Stoppard, who dined with Margaret Thatcher and rode to hounds, seems to have been plagued by no such dual alliance. But it does invade the language of his drama, as language is at once a taken-for-granted medium and an object on which loving care is to be lavished. Much English theater is marked by this ambivalence. One of the nation’s best-loved comedies, for example, is Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops To Conquer, which concerns the trouble which ensues when a couple of gallants mistake a private house for an inn. In a sense, Goldsmith himself was similarly confused, treating the public space of Britain as though it were his home, which it wasn’t (he came from County Kildare and studied in Dublin). And there were times when Samuel Johnson’s group, of which Goldsmith was a member, made his alien status abundantly clear to him. It’s hard, though, to see how “English” stage comedy would have survived without Irish immigrants: Richard Steele, Thomas Sheridan, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, J.M. Synge, Samuel Beckett, Brendan Behan… All of these men lived at the conjuncture between two cultures, allowing one to show up the strangeness of the other — and something of the same can be said to a limited extent of Stoppard.

The outsider or semi-outsider is always tempted to outdo the insiders at their own game, which is no doubt one reason why Tom Stoppard enjoyed a spot of grouse-shooting. This simultaneous baiting and imitating of the insiders was also true of Wilde, who was an English aristocrat in the way that only a non-English non-aristocrat can be. For him, imitation was both flattery and mockery. He acted himself far better than anyone else could have done, and, like Stoppard, frequented many a country house party, even though he believed that Ireland should rule over Britain and not vice versa. Joseph Conrad fled from revolutionary upheaval in his native Poland, rather as Stoppard was the child of parents in flight from the Nazis, and ended up as a sailor in the British merchant navy. One consequence of this transition was to remold him as a highly conservative pseudo-Englishman, patriotic and patriarchal, plus Anglais que les Anglais.

The same was true of TS Eliot, who was born in Missouri and became a Tory Anglo-Catholic in England. Eliot remarked of his fellow American, Henry James, that he was a European in the way that only a non-European could be, which also applies to Eliot. All these writers brought to a highly insular United Kingdom a range of experience to which it had been largely closed, and went on to produce major art on this basis. It’s one of the few forms of immigration of which the British have approved, though there are doubtless those among them who regret the fact that we outsourced our art to a bunch of foreigners for whom free verse is perilously close to free love. Other outsiders, notably James Joyce, passed disdainfully over the UK and headed straight for Paris. Authors such as Stoppard, Salman Rushdie and V.S. Naipaul belong to the tail-end of this tradition. If you hail from somewhere beyond Britain yet make a significant contribution to its cultural life, you’re as much in line for a knighthood as an MP who has served his time on all the right committees.

Tom Stoppard was no Anglo-Catholic Tory, though, but a mainstream, middle-class liberal. This was the social world in which he moved, which makes for a tedium far removed from the flair and brio of his plays. It was where he was most utterly unoriginal. He cherished the usual middle-class liberal pieties and was much exercised by the issue of freedom and censorship, though not conspicuously by such questions as poverty, unemployment and exploitation. There’s always something a little self-serving about artists championing freedom of speech. It’s a vastly important matter, to be sure, but one might be rather more persuaded of the fact if some of those who advocate it also turned their attention to political questions less bound up with their own lives. Stoppard had some urgent comments to make about political freedom, but none which we hadn’t heard before.

There’s one way, however, in which he flouted liberal pieties without anyone really noticing. He first came to fame with the magnificent Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, in which one of the jokes is that the eponymous characters are impossible to tell apart. This isn’t supposed to happen in British theater, preoccupied as it is by “character”. You have to have rich, complex, well-rounded, highly individuated characters if you’re to end up outside Buckingham Palace shyly displaying your gong. Aristotle, however, didn’t agree. In his view, what mattered in the theater was the dramatic action, on which, so he claims, character is a kind of “coloring”. No gong for him, then. He can even, he tells us, imagine a drama without any characters at all, a fantasy which Samuel Beckett would later put into practice.

Stoppard also transgressed the conventions of British theater with his passionate interest in ideas. The British don’t much care for ideas, which like cheese and wine are largely the product of freedom-loving foreigners — and which might encourage people to think in ways which end up endangering the stock market. They enjoy biography instead, since it’s more “human” to hear about what a great sculptor had for breakfast than to indulge in a lot of fancy aesthetic talk about their art. Stoppard’s Arcadia pushes against this prejudice as obstinately as it can — though I’ve seen members of the audience shaking their heads in bemusement. There are also times, however, when the humor and wordplay defuse the power of the ideas, rendering them more consumable. Like all good liberals, Stoppard knew when not to go too far.

Stoppard’s work is celebrated for its wit — a form of humor which it seems you don’t have to work at, and which is, therefore, more appropriate to the English gentleman than the honest bourgeoise. It can be a form of frivolity, but one that redeems itself from the merely vacuous by its agility of mind. It can be funny and coruscatingly intelligent; it can convert the serious into the sportive, but it can also be stinging, rapier-like, combining style and poise with a devious form of aggression. The gag, by contrast, is more impersonal, more capable of being passed from hand to hand and less expressive of a unique individual. We relish witticisms partly because they jolt us into thought, but also because they seem apposite, spot-on, hitting off a truth at a single casual stroke. Wit is the enemy of sentiment and empathy, laced with a hard-boiled quality which puts it a long way from the tear and the twinkle. Gags or jokes are sporadic events — but the wit or dandy is never off-duty. Their permanent mild amusement is possessed by those remote from the grind and rigor of this world, an everyday form of art admired for its well-crafted form as well as for its scintillating insight.

Aristotle speaks of the “great-spirited man”, by which he means not a hero but an individual whose life has gone supremely well. Virtue for Aristotle is a kind of success — not just success in the way Jack Nicolson might understand it (though Aristotle thought it included getting one’s hands on the best theater tickets), but also in the sense of having enjoyably fulfilled one’s powers and capacities. From the outside, this would seem true of Tom Stoppard. Yet all authentic achievement probably draws at some deep level on damage, anxiety and failure, so it’s fitting that the final work of this superbly accomplished artist should be Leopoldstadt, in which he poignantly explores his own Jewish origins. Not to know for sure whether you are a Jew — it is a hesitation between identity and non-identity which today’s so-called identity politics surely needs to confront.

She peppers her memoir with “why” questions, as if anxiously monitoring for things she might have missed. She also poses puzzled questions of her past self, though seems refreshingly untroubled by the answers. Of her temperament, she explains, “I was more interested in the paper people I could create than in doing deep dives into my own psyche, should such a thing exist”.

Being good at myth-making, the still fizzy 85-year-old seamlessly weaves her interpretative deficits into a vivid origin story: “One of my theories about novel writers is that they don’t know more about human nature than other people: they know less, and their novels are attempts to figure it out.” Her father was an entomologist; like him, she can’t stop mentally cataloging bits of the world, then cross-referencing. “If I watched carefully, I’d be able to find out how stuff worked, whatever that stuff might be. Sometimes it was mechanical devices, such as sewing machines. But usually it was people.”

But though minds were slippery things to master, in other informational domains Atwood was in her element. She relished learning about arcane codes and ciphers, then applying them. She became able to identify rare fauna and flora, read palms, do star charts, detect ghosts. For a time she did graduate work in English literature at Harvard, but the role of critically minded theoretician didn’t seem to fit; her interest in the world is much more practical. She loves building novels out of images and ideas, just as she also likes making dresses, cakes, puppet shows, comic strips, operettas, poems and jokes.

Though it isn’t clear where all that creativity came from, the practical bent appears to have been non-negotiable during an extremely adventurous childhood. Book of Lives cheerfully describes a dangerous existence in the company of intrepid parents and an older brother: living in remote parts of Quebec and Ontario, sleeping in tents, surviving near-drownings, casually seeing off snakes and bears, and always feeling cold. Any reader using a screen to bring up their child will presumably hang their head in shame.

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From her stoic Nova Scotian forebears, “Peggy” (her name at home) also inherited a now-unfashionable dislike of navel-gazing and self-pity. Her relatives would “think it bad manners to show off, to snivel and complain, or to express emotions to excess, or even at all”. Later on in life, she shows impatience with the depression of her husband, self-satirizing as “Ms. Fixit”. “Are you feeling better now? How about now? Look, we have a fondue pot! Doesn’t that make you happy?”. The marriage doesn’t last.

It is fun to cross-reference these personal insights with her novels. Like their author, the stories are madly creative; unsentimental and often macabre; crammed with fascinating empirical detail; fond of cross-referencing between domains. They are also short on psychological analysis, numinously infusing the natural world and manmade objects with unconscious feeling instead. Her most famous natural object is the female body: imagined as food (The Edible Woman); as decaying medical material (Bodily Harm), as breeding stock (The Handmaid’s Tale). The theme has made her enormously popular with feminists, a fact which she plainly experiences as a mixed blessing.

Certainly, Atwood is not an obvious candidate for leading the women’s movement. She loves chumming around with the male sex, and it takes until the account of her university days in her memoir to get a proper description of a female friendship. She has no truck with victimhood — the perpetrator of a grim sexual assault at graduate school gets a quick, heartfelt curse before the narrative moves on. And when, in the Seventies, a film director demands a “naked woman wrapped in cellophane” in a screenplay she is writing, she happily complies.

She is also markedly ambivalent about other women. Though she may not understand much about female psychology in detail, she is at least well aware of its toxic side. In Cat’s Eye, Atwood forensically detailed the brutality of nine-year-old girls to each other. In the memoir, we get the real-life version, with young Peggy as the hapless victim. She also knows from experience how envious and vindictive grown women can be. At one point, the protagonist of the dystopian The Handmaid’s Tale grimly accuses her absent mother, a second-wave feminist: “You wanted a women’s culture. Well, now there is one.”

Her political outlook is mostly liberal, which puts her at odds with the prevailing mood in modern progressivism — often to her credit. A big fan of freedom of expression, she introduced Salman Rushdie on stage shortly after the fatwa. She also signed the Harper’s letter against an “intolerant climate” in 2020. And she is very keen on due process, having no truck with the score-settling excesses of the #MeToo movement.

During this time, Atwood defended a University of British Columbia professor from what seems to have been a vicious witch-hunt. Afterwards, the witch-hunters tried to come for her as well, though she batted them off with her enormous fame, plus an acerbic essay entitled “Am I a bad feminist?”. In her memoir, she reflects that “when cults are at their height, fairness and human rights go out the window”, and is similarly critical of Trump’s lack of regard for legal process now.

Equally, though, she has been mostly silent on the authoritarian gender cult still operating in her Canadian backyard, except to disseminate some dodgy information about chromosomes and get annoyed when Hadley Freeman asked her about it. She has apparently reflected little about why chromosomally average teenage girls might be queuing up to get their sex organs surgically expunged. This has resulted in a lot of disappointed women shouting at Atwood on the internet. But there are suggestive clues to the blindspot in Book of Lives.

I would guess that Atwood can easily understand what’s wrong with the authoritarian coercion of people by outside forces — simply applying the mechanical model of “object x exerts force on object y”. But when it comes to minds that enthusiastically embrace damaging social norms inherited from the wider culture, it is quite possible she doesn’t really grasp the problem. Maybe this is because she is a classic liberal, uninterested in unverifiable claims about false consciousness; or maybe it’s because she struggles to place herself imaginatively within the mind of anyone sheep-like enough to succumb to social pressure — as she herself is manifestly not. And there is also the fact that in her work she often seems to exhibit profound unease about the female body. It’s part of what makes her artistic vision so compelling, even if it arguably compromises her politics.

I don’t really care about any of that; I like her books too much. But her memoir does rather undercut any flattering vision of The Handmaid’s Tale as a prescient forecast, peculiarly attuned to the authoritarian Right-wing future allegedly lying in wait for women, now that Trump is here. Atwood enjoys this image of herself as a far-sighted sage very much, referring to it several times. Perhaps it’s a small compensation for all those times her male pals laughed at her for not understanding something. But honestly, the idea that, in the near future, Western governments will need to use direct force to make women do market-friendly things against their own interests is now surely, definitively preposterous. The case of genderism — and surrogacy, and “sex work”, for that matter — shows that authorities only need to persuade enough women that certain activities are kind, or glamorous, or nobly self-improving; at which point, tender-hearted armies will rise up to ruthlessly punish dissenters themselves.

There is the time when you can hardly bear to go out, so heavy is the weight of shame that you cringe against walls and creep through the streets. Then you start to behave more normally but develop Post-Traumatic Embitterment Disorder (PTED). The affliction trails you everywhere, whining like an anxious dog. It pees in every corner and gets in your lap any time you have a drink. It barks at kind people trying to help you or licks their hands slavishly. You mustn’t feed it but you do. Sometimes fate hands it a bone. When two friends removed my name from the acknowledgments pages of their prize-winning books, my PTED howled until the neighbors woke up.

You have to get away from it. You have to get on. This year, I toughened up, got off the chair I had been cowering in for all these years, and painted my study yellow. The BBC reached out to interview me for a podcast. I didn’t wince; I am probably a good test case to talk about the culture wars. And then I was asked to take part on a panel, to do a couple of school workshops. I started to feel a little like my old self.

Along with the podcast, which was broadcast this week, I received an apology from my publishers, Pan Macmillan. I didn’t expect that, but I somehow found myself able to sit on my only faintly growling PTED and receive that apology calmly. I genuinely think Joanna Prior, the new CEO, is right to put what happened to me in the past. My grudges must somehow be put there too, or the PTED will dog me for life. What I needed, I have said, is a freer, saner discussion of the past.

So I’m starting again, here in UnHerd with another visit to my sensitivity readers. They seem to be rather fading from public consciousness. In 2021, they were a very hot topic and often all anyone asked me about the furore: writers genuinely feared a new board of censorship. Besides, the essay I wrote back then felt like the last good thing I wrote before I went into darkness. That was the last time I made a lot of people laugh.

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Though perhaps even that was unfair of me, a little cheap. The sensitivity readers were poorly paid freelancers and also sitting ducks. They had been set up with Pan Macmillan to solve a problem for them. Having apologized for the “emotional anguish” caused by my book, Macmillan then considered recalling and pulping all the copies in bookshops and giving the proceeds to anti-racism charities. When this seemed too drastic, they settled instead on a new edition of the book, one with the “harm”, that word of 2021, removed. No one in the firm had read the book, though, so they recruited experts to find the harm: sensitivity readers who specialized in racism, ableism and the Middle Eastern diaspora.

It was a huge assignment because it was retrospective. The three readers had to justify the internet response: find something in the book to equal the many claims of eugenics, racism and ableism. They also had to demonstrate their own worth and the point of their new profession. They set off on their journey keenly enough with many scornful points on the first few pages of the manuscript. Then they found themselves in a book which was not only essentially liberal but also absolutely mined, sentence by sentence, anecdote by anecdote, with irony.

Of course, the results were comical. Hyperbole was the only place to go. All praise had to be “fetishizing”; all criticism “demonization”. To compare a small child climbing a tree to a koala had to be “explicit animalization of the other”. Harm had to be found somewhere so one reader decided it was “harmful” for me to call myself a “soft target” because “this state of being a “target” is a real issue that minorities face daily, and being used so flippantly by a white person can wash the importance of that”. Another decided it was “harmful” to say that Scottish children are better than London children at spelling “wh” sounds — where, what — because of their accent. Even at the time the reasoning made me smile.

“The author states outright that… she is indeed comparing the two groups of pupils to assess who is ‘better’… Having it laid out in black and white that yes, your teachers do judge you, and yes, they find you lacking in comparison to others, can really hit people in the gut.”

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Lines such as those were, I thought (pace dear sensitivity readers), soft targets for me, fun for my essay. I believed the underlying ideas of the reads — that words could harm, that books must educate — were temporary notions that would pass and so worth attacking for those reasons.

Reading them now, though, I don’t find it all so funny. I am struck, rather, by the loneliness the reads express, the shadow of the pandemic over them all. Silence, in their view, is better than the wrong person joining the conversation. Stories should be confined to the therapy room, only spoken by one teller, never recounted, never adopted or adapted. Thoughts are types of mental illnesses — a savior complex, an identity crisis. No one can bear to read even the glimmer of a contrary argument. Malign prejudice is everywhere. Those are bleak as well as silly ideas, and yet how strongly they have stuck.

The readers, too, seem anxious to me now, rather than nasty. Or rather, nasty because they are anxious. They had been set an absurd task and were failing at it. The frustration shows in the way one reader becomes increasingly unmoored and incoherent as she progresses through the text, and abandons it halfway through.

Only a single reader made it all the way through the last chapter of my book. There he finds a series of infractions about the repeated use of the word “small” in relation to a Syrian child who has written a very grown-up sounding poem about war. Belittling stereotypes, he finds, “infantilizing” and “animalizing”. Granulation is so easy and shame so cheap. Why not read the poem, just once, and wonder? Besides, “small” is one of the glories of the English language, a word for “little” that we use for knobbly, close, personal things, a word infused with the tenderness we feel for pets and children but which can never be confused with lesser, or petty, a word that never carries scorn. Not to understand that — or to have put up barriers in the mind so you cannot hear it — seems so sad.

I wonder whether that reader still has a job. It’s certainly hard to believe anyone still employs him to write sheets of comments like:

“After initially stating that the radio debate spoke of compulsorary adoption, the end of the passage then, from the author’s voices, ponders whether compulsorary adoption is a tenable answer. (Thus I am merely flagging that this, abhorrent-to-some, mooted step is given potential credence by the author here)” (Sic)

Not because it is nonsense, or even because of the vibe shift, but because, since the advent of ChatGPT, no one writes like that. Which is both better and worse, because daft judgments may be combined with smooth, authoritative prose.

For example, last year, my student B, 25 and ridiculously gifted, sent his first novel off to a literary agent. A few weeks later, he received a surprisingly aggressive rejection letter accompanied by a reader’s report. His novel, the agent said angrily, represented women denigratingly. They all had low career aspirations and bad jobs. After so many years of supporting women in publishing, she wouldn’t be promoting that sort of stuff!

B was distraught. He felt, as he put it, that he was not just a bad writer but a bad person. He was also, justly, bewildered. His novel, set in a poor, post-industrial village, like the one he grew up in, did indeed center on women doing badly paid jobs. But they are not scorned: B’s delicate, ironical, deceptively flat prose opens up a whole landscape of their complex feelings. How can that element — the writing — have been missed? The reader had spent plenty of time on the book — that was evidenced by her lengthy summary. Then we tried putting the novel through ChatGPT and came up with exactly the same lengthy summary.

That was in 2024. AI had already learned to summarize, and the agent’s reader, very possibly a recent graduate, knew how to shame. Maybe by now the operations are combined. Who knows how many of the plethora of AI-powered test readers, which promise to “clean up your creative writing in minutes” and turn it into “a professional text”, have also absorbed sensitivity principles? I’m sure AI now could readily search a book and give certain phrases offense ratings. It would miss context and satire, but so did my sensitivity readers, every time.

Maybe, even now, texts are being morally improved and rewritten by one app and then read and rejected by another on even more delicate moral grounds without any human reading them at all. Maybe that’s what the British literary establishment will spend its last hours doing as their handsome Edwardian edifices burn to the ground and the episode of “Some Kids versus the Sensitivity Three” becomes a tiny footnote in the story of The End of the Book. Not reading but shaming. I wouldn’t be surprised. Except that I believe in B. He is a good writer. His images sing, his every observation and phrase is spry, jolting and surprising. AI will never recognize that, but humans will. B is also a poet, and I sometimes quote him Auden, lines from In Memory of WB Yeats (1939) which the poet, capricious in old age, later removed. They are about Time, which “worships language” and has no morals at all.

Time, that with this strange excuse,
Pardons Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.

I can imagine only too easily what my sensitivity readers would have said about that.

I don’t know what Time will make of my writing yet. I’m not as confident as I am for B. I hope soon I’ll be able to inspire him with confidence in the wholehearted way I used to. Not yet, because I am too stiff and too lacking in confidence myself. I think this is the last stage of cancellation: it’s something like scar tissue, numbness with threads of pain.

But since wrapping up those volumes, Knausgaard has embarked on a return to fiction with his “Morning Star” series, the fourth book of which, The School of Night, comes out in English translation this week. The same techniques from his autofictional works remain in this newest work: minute descriptions of monotonous actions, threaded with microscopic reflections in unremitting first-person monologue, peppered with long riffs on grand ideas of history, photography, family or the artistic ego. The reader is easily overwhelmed by Knausgaard’s exhaustive, solipsistic obsession with the moment-to-moment thought processes of his narrator — in this case a self-important young Norwegian artist who quickly turns out to be one of the most unlikeable, unsympathetic characters in recent fiction. “Meet Kristian Hadeland: you’ll hate him,” says one of the book’s taglines, and boy is that right.

The School of Night is an agonizingly self-aware Faust story, set mostly in a rundown Deptford, in late-Eighties Thatcherite London, with a leap forward to the present (or ostensibly close to it), later in the book. The story’s loose plot sees the young photographer Hadeland arriving from Norway to study, encountering a Dutch artist named Hans who may or may not be a demon of some kind, and negotiating a fall-out with his parents, his own growing egoism, the accidental murder of a homeless man, and the possibility that he has sold part of his soul without consciously realizing it. In the last third of the book — a cancel-culture critique that does little which wasn’t done in a far more incisive way in Todd Field’s 2022 film Tár — Hadeland falls from grace, then pays for his vague Faustian pact with the death of a loved one, shattering what little world he has left. All throughout, we are privy to the misanthropic spite Hadeland shows towards nearly everything and everyone he meets. But we’re also treated to a series of speculations on mirrors, alchemy, photography and Christopher Marlowe, whose play Doctor Faustus appears frequently, and whose occult Elizabethan brotherhood gives the book its name.

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These long topical disquisitions — which will be all-too-familiar to readers of the My Struggle books — are the most interesting parts of the book. They promise a proper reflection on our image-haunted, technology-obsessed world; a proper retelling of the Faust myth, for what is surely the most openly Faustian time in human history — when AI evangelists and tech billionaires quite literally warn of the Antichrist, and engineers brag about creating daemons in the data centers. And yet the book’s reflection never really leaves the level of chatter: instead it drifts like flotsam on the surface of a narrative which doesn’t seem to be capable of anything deeper than a long, slow drag through its narrator’s many attempts to achieve some greatness in his work, and avoid too much emotional entanglement with other people.

All of this happens, of course, in the same anti-style that has marred so much contemporary literary fiction, from Sally Rooney to Knausgaard himself, obsessed as it so often is with a numbly realist accounting of modern people’s narcissistic internal worlds. One would hope that a book which took for its subject the central myth of soul-killing technological and scientific progress — not to mention the occult nature of mirrors and man-made images — would depart at least somewhat from the most mundane contemporary forms of fictional narration. At the very least, it might craft for itself a proper style to reflect its key interests, or find a more expressionistic route to convey the eerie and fantastical aspects of its story. But with Kansugaard it just isn’t so. The man can apparently only tell a story in one way. At this point, I can think of no surer sign that the fixations of contemporary autofiction (and much fiction in general) are completely tapped out than the exhausting 500-or-so pages of The School of Night.

This is a shame, because Knausgaard is often an interesting thinker, with no small amount of insight into the peculiar character of our modern compulsions. In a cover story for Harper’s this June, entitled “The Reenchanted World”, Knausgaard bridged autobiography — his youthful introduction to computers, tending the garden in his London home, and a recent visit to Greece to meet the scientist James Bridle — with his trademark musings, to investigate what he describes as contemporary society’s “loss of the world”. The world, he writes, was for most of history a place that human beings might turn to, in escape — whether from God, death or self. But in the world we’ve constructed for ourselves, “everything addresses us”, all technology seems bent on abolishing the world and only further reinforcing self. And that’s not all: our technology has flooded us with an informational approximation of the same world substituted for the actual. As he writes, with no small sadness: “All the images I’ve seen of places I’ve never been, people I’ve never met create a kind of pseudomemory from a pseudoworld that I don’t participate in.”

Knausgaard’s general distaste for technology — and his quest to understand how science and mathematics might be used to complement our understanding of nature’s mystery, rather than reducing it — shares much with other vaguely Romantic critiques of contemporary scientism, like Iain McGilchrist’s recent books, or those of the venerable American iconoclast Wendell Berry, or Paul Kingsnorth’s recent polemic, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity. It helps to paint a picture of our era as one in which technology has run riot and escaped from our control. In one sense this seems all too similar to the first Romantic era. Then, as now, Enlightenment confidence in new scientific discoveries and technologies began to slide into the Industrial Revolution — beginning with what the Romantic poet William Blake called England’s “Satanic Mills”.

This end-of-Enlightenment period inspired the definitive modern Faust, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s huge two-part poetic drama. Along with Thomas Mann’s 1947 novel Doctor Faustus, Goethe’s play is mentioned in Knausgaard’s The School of Night — a tissue of Faust stories connecting the story back to Marlowe’s play, and the alchemical legends before it. But unlike the Romantic reaction against the Newtonian mechanistic view of the universe, or even Mann’s evocation of Nazism and the technological destruction of both world wars, Knausgaard’s Faustian story is too shallow to measure up. His most interesting ideas about cameras, mirrors and art can’t survive his insistence on that exhausting monologue, which only burrows further into the contemporary preoccupations such a Faust story ought to be criticizing. And besides, Knausgaard is simply too committed to the ambiguity of his scenario to make it a proper retelling of a myth. Quite simply, the novel could have used much more of the spirit of inquiry and immediacy that animated his Harper’s article. Or perhaps Knausgaard is constitutionally too personal and autofictional a writer to weave genuinely imaginative literature.

Regardless, the result is, if not quite a failure, at best half-done. The autofictional style — Knausgaard’s, yes, but really anyone’s — has simply run out of things it can do, and as The School of Night proves, is finally incapable of producing the kind of new myths we need to understand our moment. We live in an era of unprecedented acceleration and global instability. Much of our time is now spent staring at computer-generated golems cooked up by technological con-men, many of whom claim (without exaggeration) to be building a new kind of superconnected divinity. We have never been more in need of stories that speak to this insane reality — not to a continual literary addiction to the same single, narcissistic inner monologue, which one can after all already find multiplied across the internet, much of it made by machines. If Knausgaard’s novel shows us anything, it’s that the Faustian story is one of the most perennially relevant modern stories: somebody just has to figure out how to tell it again. When they do, it won’t be like this.

Today, one distinctive kind of bullshit is generated when a leading literary luminary (usually a novelist) is commissioned by a high-minded magazine (usually American) to pontificate at length on a political issue, or worse, cultural “moment”. The genre showcases the novelistic treatment of contemporary politics. And though the sentences are usually syntactically clear, and the articles, at first sight, apparently thesis-driven, the reader quickly remembers that appearances can be deceptive. The characteristic sleight-of-hand of this brand of bullshit is, under the pretense of heading toward a sophisticated conclusion, to assert virtually nothing at all. If there is artistry involved, it is the kind of artistry that consists in presenting completely banal conclusions as if they were hard-won insights, usually by burying them under a heap of diversionary material.

Zadie Smith’s latest essay collection, Dead and Alive, exemplifies the genre to a tee. It is a well-packed flower press of literary bull pats. Though better known as the award-winning writer of novels including White Teeth and On Beauty, Smith has found a new groove — or rut, depending on your point of view — in churning out think pieces for high-minded longform publications, on everything from the Middle East, to the 2024 presidential election, the immigration crisis, Stormzy, Tár, and the wayward political influence of Silicon Valley. Reading them is enough to make me wonder whether English students should not be educated in the style of firearms officers: provided with the basic skills of the trade only under the heavy proviso that they will hopefully never have to make use of them outside the classroom.

Dead and Alive? Even the title is faintly annoying. But Smith’s passing over the more naturally disjunctive “dead or alive” in preference for a title that needlessly flirts with inconsistency is wholly in keeping with the spirit of her essays. These, she admits, “tend to employ a lengthy and sometimes oblique way of thinking”. Smith is by her own admission suspicious of the kind of “clear, legible, ultimately deadening sentences” she associates dismissively with social media, certain styles of politics and journalism, and academic writing. She admires prose that is “serpentine, hard to parse”.

Of course to the uninitiated reader the effort to valorize unclarity and circumlocution might look like just that: the attempt to present as a stylistic virtue what is in fact a literary defect. And it’s an approach that’s got Smith into trouble before, most notoriously in March last year, when a New Yorker essay of hers, “Shibboleths” (re-collected here), seemed to many to draw several shaky moral equivalences between the norms appropriate to warfare and those appropriate to campus politics.

But that essay is a much more confused object than that parsing of it suggests, and quite representative of the collection in that respect. To her, Columbia University’s anti-Israeli protestors were both “heroic” and in the grip of motivations that were “cynical and unworthy”. In one critical posture, Smith finds the arguments of both sides vapid and politically impotent: “All of that was just rhetoric. Words. Cathartic to chant, perhaps, but essentially meaningless.” Then, taking up another diametrically opposed stance within the space of a few paragraphs, she grandiosely reminds her reader that, in this political arena, “language and rhetoric are and always have been weapons of mass destruction”. What, then, the reader is left thinking, does Smith think words are? “Unreal” and “meaningless”, or WMDs? They can’t be both, surely? Most likely, they are neither.

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Smith is in fact a talented draftsman of tendentious moral equivalences and assorted analogical relations of doubtful standing. Aren’t the “parallels between twenty-first-century climate denialism and nineteenth-century rationalizations of plantation slavery” vivid? Isn’t Elon Musk’s twitter algorithm a bit like Nazi propaganda, only more effective? Participating in the celebrations of England fans at the World Cup, Smith is reminded of “Nazi delirium” yet again. Uncontrolled immigration may seem to be a political problem, but aren’t “all human social arrangements… inherently problematic”? Almost always, these wild inter-connections serve to obstruct, rather than clear the way for, a developing line of thought. In fact, Smith is disarmingly upfront about her lack of argumentative ambition in Dead and Alive. “All I want to do is demonstrate what a certain kind of thinking looks like”: that kind presumably being vaguely paranoid, flighty, and easily morally distracted.

Sometimes, the intellectual morasses Smith traps herself in concern her own specialism — language itself. Possessed of the writer’s occupational hazard, she overestimates how many political and social problems are fundamentally linguistic in nature. On cultural appropriation, she writes: “What would our debates about fiction look like, I sometimes wonder, if our preferred verbal container for the phenomenon of writing about others was not ‘cultural appropriation’ but rather ‘interpersonal voyeurism’ or ‘profound other-fascination’ or even ‘cross-epidermal reanimation’? Our discussions would still be vibrant, perhaps even furious – but I’m certain they would not be the same.” To give Smith credit where it’s due, a world in which a phrase like “cross-epidermal reanimation” had successfully entered the popular lexicon would indeed be a very different one, perhaps unrecognizable.

When prompted, perhaps by an editor, or her own residual nagging sense that something recognizable as a conclusion is owed to the readers of her meandering think pieces, Smith’s response can be a superior kind of outrage that she should be called upon to affirm anything as vulgar as a settled position. She huffily concludes her Gaza piece: “Put me wherever you want: misguided socialist, toothless humanist, naïve novelist, useful idiot, apologist, denier, ally, contrarian, collaborator, traitor, inexcusable coward.” With the possible exception of “useful”, the risk is that the reader will take Smith up on her thoughtful invitation, and apply all of these, not exactly mutually exclusive, labels to her in light of her painful, self-regarding style of equivocation.

Smith isn’t even very consistent on the question of whether everything is complicated. You see, some things, according to her, are shockingly simple. Unfortunately, it’s the wrong things. Addressing a crowd of Extinction Rebellion protestors gathered on Tufton Street, London’s home of free-market think tanks, Smith denounces “common sense fiscal conservatives” (to her mind, apparently, anyone who thinks environmental factors should be balanced against economic interests in determining climate change policy) as unequivocally “evil”. Moreover, those “tech” bros who believe climate change should be met with technological innovations are “purely sociopathic and ideological”. The various protestors committing criminal offenses under the aegis of Extinction Rebellion, on the other hand, are bravely taking on a “level of personal sacrifice unimaginable to many of us”.

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Unimaginable, that is, including to Smith. She is quite adept at pulling off selective failures of imagination when the moment calls for them. When invited to commit “an arrestable offense” by her fellow protestors, Smith has, hilariously, to decline. Risking arrest or conviction, you see, would make flying to New York so much trickier, perhaps even “impossible”. In fact, despite declaring that she is “trying to fly less”, scattered clues in Dead and Alive suggest that Smith spends a lot of time in the air, suspended midway across the Atlantic. London, New York, Germany — then off to Austria to collect a literary prize and make some more remarks about the alarming “rightward turn” of politics. The metaphorical richness of this repeated image — the celebrity novelist, entirely ungrounded, resolutely detached from reality — seems not to register with her.

Those cascading frequent flyer points are not the only respect in which Smith fails to live up to her own evaluative ideals, nor in the end the most damning either. As she indicates in an early essay, the simple heuristic by which she is disposed to assess artistic work is the simple question, “Is it interesting?”. Yet, time and again, Smith falls hopelessly short of that standard. Should the reader go to the sometimes considerable effort of extracting her background political positions from the thicket of evasion and complication, virtually nothing beyond the boilerplate, politically preening and utterly unserious is to be discovered. Her incidental political remarks are sub-Guardian-esque.

The Tories “want us to return to a medieval feudal state” and are only interested in “making millionaires billionaires”. Stormzy is what a real “leader looks like”. Smith is bemused to see shoplifters on British high streets: “people seizing their reparations from global capitalism and walking straight out the door.” She lambasts Boris Johnson for “partying” while people’s “relatives died of Covid”. She uses the phrase “differently abled”, apparently without irony. Once or twice, she accurately senses that she is “irrationally attached to a nostalgic politics more suited to the past than the present”. She longs for the “glory days” of the NHS in the late Nineties. She is a sentimental pessimist about AI. She shuns social media — the glow of the iPhone screen is to her a “deathly Palo-Alto-late-capitalist-consciousness-colonizing-sickly-blueish-light”. Perhaps she is also vaguely aware that in the straight-shooting discursive world of online commentary, the wilfully “oblique” takes of literary luminaries might be more easily unmasked as the often irrelevant contributions they are.

As the reader may have come to anticipate, Smith can’t make her mind up on the question of whether artists and writers ought, actually, to be interesting. (One “myth” she suddenly seeks to puncture is that “the great writer is somehow inherently more interesting than other people. He has a unique consciousness, a special way of seeing. We reward him with a book contract. I don’t buy any of that.”) Unfortunately, simply releasing oneself, however contradictorily, from the obligation of being interesting is not a way of becoming so. In fact, it is a way of being quite dull. You can see why magazine editors might see it as an inspired commission to have a prized writer weigh in on current events: the promise that the drab materials of workaday journalism will be elevated under the novelist’s unpredictable, imaginative gaze. Of course, a danger is that the process leaves you with the vices of both genres, and the virtues of neither.

C.S. Lewis, the master of escapist fiction, was prophetic in warning against such noxious paternalism from authors. “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive,” he wrote. “It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.” Let’s hope Barbie director Greta Gerwig, who has been tapped up to direct the next year’s Chronicles of Narnia series, is taking note.

But in the meantime, we have the books, the first of which, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, was published 75 years ago today. When I read this to my son, it transfixed him in a way that all those morally improving Disney and Pixar movies could not — and in a way that I recognized too from my own childhood. The Narnia books are weird and archaic and they are far from comforting. But they leave unanswerable questions and imaginative territory to roam for a lifetime.

What would compel a child to climb into a claustrophobic wardrobe, full of moth-eaten coats and spiders, as apt a symbol as any for the human psyche? C.S. Lewis knew all too well. There are real and terrible things to escape from. And the land of magic, mystery and hope that Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy arrived in would soon reveal that it too was blighted. By facing up to this, conquering its climate of terror, the child would become an adult. If they didn’t pass into the dark and through it, they would remain infantilized.

This partly explains the backlash against Lewis. Two years ago, it was reported that the Government’s counter-terrorism unit, Prevent, had classified his works along with some by his friend J.R.R. Tolkien as potentially leading to “radicalisation”: the kind of wormtongue deception worthy of the villains of Narnia or Middle Earth. It demonstrates that, at its best, fantasy can be the mirror that shows us who we are and what we’ve become. But then, there is a long history of people taking leave of their senses when it comes to Narnia. The books have been banned in the US for being both too Christian and not Christian enough. One critic ranked the books (with delicious venom) as worse than 120 Days of Sodom or Mein Kampf. Being shot by all sides might indicate a writer is on the right track.

For his part, Lewis lambasted “those who do not wish children to be frightened […] Since it is so likely that they will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise, you are making their destiny not brighter but darker.” He knew of the existence of shadows from early in life. There is a spine-chilling passage in his memoir, Surprised by Joy, in which he recalls waking up one night with toothache when he was ten. He called out his mother’s name and she did not come. She was dying in another room. His father was never the same and sent Lewis off to a boarding school run by a deranged sadist. “With my mother’s death, all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life.”

As a result, Lewis developed a fear and mistrust of the adult world in those years — and it was well-placed. Scarcely more than a boy, Lewis was sent to the trenches. He was seriously injured in the Battle of Arras (he would have shrapnel, from a shell that obliterated a colleague, embedded permanently in his body) and, like Tolkien, he watched many of his friends die. “One cannot help wondering why,” he wrote to his father.

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe begins with war. The Pevensie children have been dispatched to the countryside, away from the Blitz and the apocalyptic madness of the grown-ups. They stay with a kindly professor in a house “full of unexpected places”. Yet the shadows have not gone. Lucy discovers a portal at the back of a wardrobe leading to another world. (Lewis dreamt this first glimpse of Narnia as a boy: a faun under a gas streetlamp in snowbound woods.) The children discover the land to be an ice-stricken police state, and they are called, reluctantly as in all heroic quests, to confront evil.

As I revisit it with my son, after more than 30 years since last reading it, the tale has an intriguingly archaic feel. A professor of Medieval and Renaissance literature, Lewis incorporated mythic and folkloric characters from various cultures — Greek, Celtic, Germanic — into his stories. At times, it’s akin to a bestiary: a hangover from a childhood spent dreaming of imaginary lands while stuck indoors. “I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstair indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books.” What brings the tale to life are the extremely vivid sketches of the children, their strengths, flaws and group dynamics, as well as clever inversions: the faun, for example, is more startled by the little girl than vice versa. It is also more dystopian than I remembered: the woodland spies, the ransacked homes and forced disappearances, the guilt and responsibility the children feel.

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The most disturbing scene, though, is when the villain, the White Witch, who has cast an endless winter on the land without hope of Christmas, comes upon a festive group of animals. They claim they’ve been visited by Father Christmas. She demands they recant, but a young squirrel insists it’s true. The White Witch waves her hand — “Oh don’t don’t don’t!” cries Edmund — and turns the merry party into statues. “It seemed so pitiful to think of those little stone figures sitting there all the silent days and all the dark nights, year after year, till the moss grew on them and at last even their faces crumbled away.”

The evil White Witch steals the show, of course. She promises the insecure, egocentric child regal status, but her abusive, narcissistic nature is soon evident. She convinces her victims it is they who bring wrath on themselves. She contaminates the minds of the young and naïve while masquerading as their benefactor. Lewis is clever in introducing her not as some tyrannical psychopath but a seducer that any of us could fall for. She appeals to the best in us — curiosity and desire for instance — and feeds off, warps and stunts these qualities. It is foolhardy to believe we would be immune to her charms.

C.S Lewis’s charms were quite another matter. On a pilgrimage to his haunts in Oxford, I met an older lady who had known him when she was a child. She twinkled at the mention of Narnia and was still clearly enchanted by his books. But when I asked her what Lewis was like. “Well… I thought he was a grumpy old sod.”

I laughed. I would have been disappointed with any other description. We know that Lewis loved a drink, could start an argument in an empty room and enjoyed doing so. He smoked like a train and cursed like a sailor. For a supposed conservative, he had anarchistic tendencies, as did Tolkien. In his wife’s eyes, Lewis was “a tough Ulsterman […] with the sort of views you expect of an Orangeman”. As a Republican kid growing up in Derry, I ought to have felt him to be an enemy. But few people ever gave me a more valuable gift than the maps at the start of the Narnia books. Similarly, I owed a debt to him: not just for the respite of escapism, but because it gave me a way of understanding the fortresses and threats around us.

In another of Lewis’s masterpieces, The Screwtape Letters, a demon counsels his nephew that only amateurs try to seduce people into being directly evil. The sophisticated malefactor makes them first believe they are unquestionably good or, in other words, superior. This is how the frost is born. The White Witch creates a sparkling winter wonderland that is really a bitterly frozen steppe where nothing but fear can flourish. For an eight-year-old, Narnia is a make-believe place. By middle age it’s recognizably real.

It’s fair to say that Kirk was not over-mourned in the liberal enclave of Bluesky. Elsewhere, though, he was very rapidly attaining a kind of MAGA sainthood — aided by the fact that his killer appeared to be motivated by animosity to Kirk’s anti-trans views. Anyone demurring from the public performance of mourning risked becoming a target of Right-wing rage. Within hours, Felker-Martin received a call from the comics publisher DC, canceling the series Felker-Martin had been working on and terminating their relationship.

That made Felker-Martin one of the many Americans to have been fired or disciplined for being insufficiently respectful towards Kirk. High-profile examples include late-night host Jimmy Kimmel (whose show was temporarily pulled) and the columnist Karen Attiah (who was sacked by The Washington Post). More concerning are the rank-and-file Americans, from hospital workers to restaurant managers, who either lost their jobs or faced formal sanctions: over 145 by The New York Times’ count in late September, and presumably more since then.

In the words of historian Timothy Snyder, from his 2017 book On Tyranny, by canceling Felker-Martin, DC was “obeying in advance”: intuiting what the powerful wanted, and delivering it. Other writers were quick to identify this as a sinister tendency. “It’s an absolute shame that DC fired Gretchen Felker-Martin for exercising free speech,” wrote the feminist author Roxane Gay on Bluesky. “Every writer here should be decrying this because we have to stand up for each other! This is ridiculous.”

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People losing their livelihoods for real or perceived political transgressions, however, is not a new phenomenon. It has been going on for over a decade — it’s just that, until very recently, the vast majority of the victims were identified with Right-wing politics, and so long as that was true, it didn’t strike those of Gay’s persuasion as an issue. In one egregious 2020 case, a worker for the San Diego Gas & Electric company was fired for making a “white supremacist gesture”: he had made the “okay” sign, unaware that it had recently been co-opted by the alt-Right. In another instance, a senior figure in the American Civil Liberties Union — which literally has one job: upholding the First Amendment — favored banning Abigail Shrier’s book Irreversible Harm, which describes the social contagion of trans identification among teenage girls.

But asked whether cancel culture existed in a 2021 interview, Gay replied robustly: “No, it does not. Cancel culture is this boogeyman that people have come up with to explain away bad behavior… I like to think of it as consequence culture, where when you make a mistake — and we all do, by the way — there should be consequences.” (It would be snide, but not inaccurate, to point out that Felker-Martin’s sacking is also an instance of consequence culture.) Another cancel culture unbeliever was Karen Attiah, who tweeted in 2022 that “‘Cancel culture’ anxiety is not about free speech. It’s about status anxiety.” Concerns about free speech, in other words, were really just concerns about who got to speak — a failure of the once-powerful to accept their new place in the hierarchy. The possibility that the hierarchy might change again and leave the Left on the losing side never apparently occurred.

The intellectual collapse of the liberal Left allowed the Right to monopolize the cause of free speech, even if that position was rarely taken in good faith. One of Donald Trump’s first executive orders in this presidency was titled “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship”; at the same time, federal websites were being cleansed of oldspeak terms such as “antiracist”, “trauma” and “hate speech”. This government-directed linguistic purge is more disturbing by far than the “soft” repression of Left-wing cancel culture, but it violates the same principle.

While leftist fury held the ascendance, “civility” was treated as a dirty word. “Tone policing” was a grievous sin. The space between politics and violence was intentionally narrowed. Anyone who held the correct beliefs could engage in the most vicious forms of speech with no consequences whatsoever. Like, for example, Felker-Martin. For as long as he has enjoyed a public profile, he has been vivid and explicit about exactly who he thought should be killed and how. But so long as those enemies were Terfs and so anathema to the US mainstream, Felker-Martin faced zero reputational cost for doing so.

In a statement to Wired magazine, DC’s editor in chief tried to present the firing as non-partisan, asserting that “the tone of Gretchen’s posts, not her personal views, was of concern for DC”. If that’s the case, I have to wonder whether DC had any awareness of Felker-Martin’s social media presence or literary output prior to Kirk’s death. Because, compared to much of Felker-Martin’s lurid and sexually inflected writing, “thoughts and prayers you Nazi bitch” is extremely mild stuff. Take this 2019 tweet about the journalist Jesse Singal (a regular target of Felker-Martin’s), the tone of which apparently left DC unperturbed:

“Cis people, fix your hearts* or die.

*Bind Jesse Singal with strong rope and bring him to the quarry at the edge of town. Give him to us alive and unspoiled. Leave, and no matter the sounds you hear, do not look back.”

The motivation for this bizarre bondage scenario is that Singal has reported consistently and fairly on the failures of child gender medicine. That, according to Felker-Martin, amounts to “politely trying to incite genocide”, and this in turn justifies whatever sadistic fantasies Felker-Martin may have. It’s a rationale that invokes a pet idea of the Left’s called “stochastic terrorism”, which maintains that dehumanizing language is a form of violence in itself. Like “cancel culture”, though, “stochastic terrorism” was politicized beyond usefulness: instances in which the Left itself could be dehumanizing never figured in the analysis.

Usually, I would try to argue for a separation between an artist’s social media and their art. But in Felker-Martin’s case, it’s hard to make that distinction because his fiction is very much in the same genre of inventing justifications for violence, and then imagining that violence in pornographic detail. Manhunt is the story of two trans women surviving in the post-apocalyptic remains of society after a zombifying virus has ravaged anyone with sufficiently high testosterone: the protagonists are engaged in a constant hunt for DIY HRT in order to avoid succumbing themselves.

But while the rabid men are dangerous, the true antagonists are the members of a Terf militia, who are dedicated to rounding up and executing any surviving trans women. And it’s when describing the Terfs’ deaths that Felker-Martin is most obviously excited. Imminent violence against women goes hand-in-hand with arousal in Manhunt. When the two protagonists first encounter the militia and are preparing for a confrontation, Felker-Martin writes of one: “Her cock was hard, tenting the front of her stupid cargo shorts.”

In the moral schema of Manhunt, women deserve punishment for holding disobliging beliefs about trans women, even when those beliefs are an accurate reflection of what the trans women understand about themselves. The Terf militia leader inveighs against “Men who take sexual pleasure in stealing our bodies. In wearing our skin,” and this is presented as one of the many misdeeds for which she will ultimately pay with her humiliating death. But given one of the trans woman protagonists elsewhere recalls a teenage crush on a girl with “a body she’d wanted more to hollow out and crawl inside than fuck”, is the militia leader actually wrong?

In one especially unpleasant scene, Felker-Martin imagines the militia leader executing a defector from her ranks by disemboweling her and extracting her uterus, holding it up for the watching crowd with the words: “No life without a womb.” The purpose of this scene is to demonstrate the endless depravity of what, in the book, are referred to contemptuously as “menopausal white ladies” or “sneering middle-class white women”. It vindicates the trans characters’ decision to “kill them all and piss on their corpses”.

The ultimate “sneering middle-class white lady”, from Felker-Martin’s perspective, is J.K. Rowling, and Manhunt acquired a burst of notoriety from one specific scene in which Rowling’s death is narrated. Within the world of the book, Rowling attempted to ride out the infection “at her castle in Scotland with a bunch of her rich girlfriends”. The “girl-power retreat”, however, rapidly goes south: one of the friends has PCOS (meaning she has higher than usual testosterone), which leads to her contracting the virus and starting a rampage that leads to the castle burning, killing all inside, Rowling included.

In response to outrage at this, Felker-Martin presented himself as a victim of misrepresentation. This is dishonest. The narrative takes pleasure in imagining Rowling’s death — the character who tells the story is “grinning evilly” — and the entire scenario is constructed as a Dante-esque punishment. Within Manhunt, Rowling is destroyed by her privilege, and by her apparently deluded belief in binary human sex. It is sadistic and disturbing, and almost none of the reviews noted this. Manhunt instead received supportive notices from NPR (“brilliantly imagined”), New York Magazine (“full of… messy, beautiful humanity”) and The New Yorker (“tender”).

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The fact that Felker-Martin is obnoxious, misogynistic and crass doesn’t mean he deserved to lose his job over a bad tweet. But, realistically, he only had that job because this is the kind of person and the kind of art — obnoxious, misogynist and crass — that the liberal culture of the last five years chose to celebrate. Manhunt is not a good novel: it lurches from scene to scene with little explanation of how you got there, and the characters are so loosely drawn that they blur into each other. This is not even James Herbert, and yet it was lauded by critics as though it were George Eliot. Felker-Martin could only have achieved cultural prominence in a milieu that prized rightthink above artistic quality.

Liking Manhunt was a test of allegiance to the cause. The more violence you could stomach, the more you were overcoming your unconscious transphobia; and (for female readers) the more you could find pleasure in the degradation of women, the more you proved that you weren’t a part of the despicable “cisterhood” who apparently deserved this degradation. His pattern of sexualized harassment against individuals such as Singal was ignored because, as a trans woman, Felker-Martin could claim the perverse privilege of the most oppressed.

Not content with fictionally destroying female writers, Felker-Martin also sought to trash their reputations. He was especially savage about Sandra Newman’s novel The Men, which like Manhunt was published in 2022, and described a world in which every person with a Y chromosome — trans women included — had mysteriously disappeared. This “repellent premise”, according to Felker-Martin, was “fundamentally transmisogynistic” (even though it is not very different from Felker-Martin’s own book, albeit with fewer scenes of misogynistic butchery). That charge fed into a broader denunciation of Newman’s novel. The Men was bombed with one-star ratings on Goodreads even before it was out; an author who defended Newman’s novel was punished by having her own book removed from consideration for an LGBT literary prize.

I wonder whether this is what Roxane Gay would class as “consequence culture”. There was no call for solidarity with Newman like the one Gay would later make for Felker-Martin: no declaration that “every writer” should “stand up for each other”. Newman was deemed on the wrong side of history, and so she was allowed to sink. The recent rediscovery of free speech is difficult to swallow from people who have spent the last 10 years or so either airily downplaying the threat from their own, or actively making it worse.

Felker-Martin did not agree with Kirk about very much, but they did share an essentially martial vision of the world. Kirk saw himself as a soldier for God, while for Felker-Martin, every disagreement is a war: “I have fuck-all time for a consensus.” This belief, that the only worthy way of life involves bloodletting, has been incubated on both sides of the American divide. Now, under Trump, the Right has the opportunity to crush its enemies, and it is doing so with relish, using techniques that the Left has refined. If this is how the Left rediscovers free speech as a universal principle, it’s been an expensive lesson, but a necessary one.

But a healthy culture needs other values too: it needs moral and aesthetic judgments that do not split along party lines. It needs to be able to say who is, and is not, a good person. It needs to be able to say what is, and is not, good art. Felker-Martin is the free-speech martyr that the Left of the last decade deserves: unpleasant, unsympathetic and almost impossible to defend.

“Featuring huge names from literature, comedy and beyond — including Roddy Doyle, Frank Skinner and Alan Titchmarsh — Jeeves Again, is the new anthology that reimagines Jeeves and Wooster through fresh eyes,” burbled the press release. “Jeeves Again is the statement publication for this 50th anniversary year, showcasing Wodehouse’s enduring legacy as a much-beloved and perennially relevant British Literary icon.” (Punctuation and capitalization all sic.)

“Featuring huge names from literature, comedy and beyond…” I marveled. “And beyond!” I exclaimed. “Statement publication?” I thought. The only statement that this makes, as far as I can see, is that we imagine that what made Wodehouse work was the Jeeves ‘n’ Wooster brand, and the reason that Alan Titchmarsh isn’t P.G. Wodehouse is that he hasn’t been allowed to write the characters — rather than the fact that nobody before or since has written comic prose like that, and the reason they haven’t is because it’s bloody hard.

Would we, on Mozart’s birthday, invite a cash-in tribute album where someone who used to be on EastEnders produced a piece for the harpsichord? I wondered aloud. “No, we would not,” I said to myself. “Jesus bicycling Christ,” I muttered. What a shitshow. So. I am in an awkward position. Many of the contributors to this book are people I admire. One or two I count as friends. I therefore say this, as Dame Edna would have put it, in a loving way: this is one of those projects that should have been strangled in its cot.

Some of the more acute of these writers have picked up on Wodehouse’s stylistic tics — the definite article where a possessive is expected, or the surprising verb of motion (“I trickled home”; we “biffed off”) — and the less acute have contented themselves with sprinkling the text with epithets such as “spiffing” and “dashed”, or populating the scene with “chaps” and “blighters”. We get, across these stories, a good number of aunts, hangover cures, bathetic classical allusions, over-elaborate metaphors and unsuitable fiancées. Wodehouse isn’t, to thwart the cliche, inimitable; but what makes him sublime is.

To be fair — and I detest being fair like sin, but critical self-respect demands it — this collection isn’t all bad. Nearly half the authors are in the “more acute” camp. Frank Skinner, John Finnemore, Andrew Hunter-Murray and Jasper Fforde just about get away with it, and sometimes even sparkle. Dominic Sandbrook cleverly dodges the challenge of the prose by presenting a series of spoof historical documents about the later career of Roderick Spode; Roddy Doyle yoinks the Jeeves-and-Wooster set up into his Irish comfort-zone (“Ah Jaysis, Jeeves”) with some elan. The rest are pretty much duds.

But it’s the principle underlying the whole project with which I take issue. It is very much of our time, and it is deeply misbegotten. It betrays the sort of thinking that sees the works of great authors — specifically, their characters and worlds — as intellectual property, aka what the suits call “eye-pee” (that stings!) to be infinitely exploited. That, as Bertie would put it, is where they make their bloomer. It isn’t the presence of Gussie Fink-Nottle, Bertie and Jeeves that makes Wodehouse Wodehouse: it’s the fact that sentence by sentence P.G. Wodehouse was among the finest half-dozen writers of comic prose in the 20th century. Nobody else could do what he did.

Yes, Jean Rhys set Wide Sargasso Sea in what would now probably get called “the Bronteverse”: but she was doing her own, very different thing. She wasn’t the contributor to a project lashed up by the Charlotte Brontë estate to squeeze a bit more dough out of the wind-lashed moor genre. Nobody would create a franchise extension of Lolita — “from the world of Vladimir Nabokov!” — by asking a collection of that book’s admirers to produce some new stories featuring Humbert and Lo, with cameos from that adorable rascal Clare Quilty. Without Nabokov’s prose, the world of Lolita is nothing, and without Wodehouse’s prose, Jeeves and Wooster are nothing.

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A common mistake — betrayed in the fact that nobody sane would think of doing this with Nabokov — is to assume that because something is popular fiction, or genre fiction, or comic fiction, the prose doesn’t matter. Sometimes, it doesn’t: Harlan Coben and Dan Brown are very limited stylists, but their thrillers work excellently. But often, it does. As witness, for instance, the disappointing results of Lee Child passing the Jack Reacher franchise to his brother. Lee Child makes what Lee Child does look easy, but it very much is not. And when it comes to comic fiction, even more than the literary type, prose is everything. Comic fiction is super difficult, and Wodehouse’s is at the absolute pinnacle of what has been achieved there.

Corporate interests will tend to see everything that makes money as reducible to IP: because, right enough, that is how the biggest entertainment products of our time do work. The special sauce of the Marvel, DC and Star Wars universes *is* the IP in the characters and worldbuilding. They’ve always been the products of diverse hands — many thousands of journeyman writers and artists, some sublimely talented and some much less so, have worked on comics, novels, films and whatnot based on these properties since the middle of the last century. Fans, and I include myself among them, will tend to read an X-Men comic very happily because we can be pretty sure at some point Wolvie will call someone “bub” and pop his claws (“snikt!”), or a ninja will show up, and this will tickle a small childish part of our soul in an agreeable way.

But to see all art in this way is corrosively reductive. It is to miss that special quality that differentiates art from IP. It is to see artists as “content creators” and art itself as fungible property, all the more monetizable when a franchise is taken over by celebrities with existing fanbases. It is to say, a couple of steps down the line, for that matter: “AI can do that for us.” It’s the school of thought that says “perfect for fans of…” Well. I’ll tell you what’s perfect for fans of P.G. Wodehouse: P.G. fucking Wodehouse.

Set mostly in and around a decaying manor estate in Wiltshire, where Naipaul and his wife Patricia Hale rented a cottage for 15 years, beginning in 1970, the overarching story traces the decline and ruin of the house and its grounds somewhat in the manner of classic 20th-century “Great House” novels by Evelyn Waugh, Ivy Compton-Burnett, and Elizabeth Bowen, in ways that both indulge and resist sentimentality.

What starts as a sustained piece of pastoral writing with bunnies hopping about upon snowy meadows, rogue deer nibbling at hedges, regular walks on the downs, anecdotes about pear trees, rose bushes, and a neighbor’s well-tended garden — becomes interlaced with more sinister visions of misshapen cows, mutilated horses, and even a murder in a nearby cottage. Into this evocation of the changing farming habits and the different classes and types of people coming into and out of the countryside during depressed Seventies England and up through the early Thatcher years, Naipaul also weaves the story of his own arrival on scholarship to Oxford from Trinidad, the early success of A House for Mr. Biswas and Miguel Street, and the burnout and exhaustion following a failed attempt to write a history of Trinidad that would lead him to the countryside where he’d live for most of the rest of his life.

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This second story of Naipaul’s own great expectations refreshes the initial traditional and belated tale of aristocratic decline by placing the whole book in the context of what Naipaul comes to understand as “that great movement of peoples that was to take place in the second half of the twentieth century… in which cities like London were to cease being more or less national cities; they were to become cities of the world, modern-day Romes, establishing the pattern of what great cities should be, in the eyes of islanders like myself”.

Holding the whole thing together at the level of what might loosely be termed drama, Naipaul slowly unfolds the passions and struggles of people from various classes associated with the manor and its still ample grounds: its gardener — “once there were sixteen gardeners, now only Pitton”, caretakers, chauffeurs, tenant farmers, along with his reclusive aristocratic landlord. The reader comes to know them much as Naipaul himself might have, diffidently at first — they are strangers doing something mysterious, an old man glimpsed tying bits of plastic bags on barbed wire fences — then they are known by their function — caretaker, farm manager, gardener etc — then soon by last name, “Mr. and Mrs. Philips”, “Pitton”, “Bray”, with the exception of the independent farmer who is always plain Jack. Then, over time, he comes to know them so intimately that he can relate their stories in ways that sometimes feel like a soap opera and other times like Wordsworth’s great elegies for the inhabitants of a countryside whose lifeways are threatened by the next wave of industrialization (“The Ruined Cottage”, or “Michael”). It’s one thing to write about rural life or little England and another thing to reproduce on the page the rhythms of that life, its languorous pace and gossip, and then sudden bursts of change, the minor alteration in the pattern like the death of one tree that heralds a major change. The reader is immersed as gradually and as thoroughly as the writer himself.

The real action happens through Naipaul’s style. Enigma derives its energy from being a work of great patience written at speed. The novel’s last printed words are the dates “October 1984-April 1986”, a rather tight 18-month period for a work of this intricacy, breadth and scope. Naipaul is probably fictionalizing to an extent, since what he likes to call “the material” had been building up over the years in notebooks. At the same time, the prose flows and skips with unexpected connections and shifts that lend it immediacy and urgency amid the stately procession of recollected moments. It’s a book that is always revising and correcting itself on the page, its judgments of people and places, and of the author himself. You can see how this works even the deceptively simple opening paragraphs:

“For the first four days it rained. I could hardly see where I was. Then it stopped raining and beyond the lawn and the outbuildings in front of my cottage I saw fields with stripped trees on the boundaries of each field; and far away, depending on the light, glints of a little river, glints which sometimes appeared, oddly, to be above the level of the land.

The river was called the Avon; not the one connected with Shakespeare. Later — when the land had more meaning, when it had absorbed more of my life than the tropical street where I had grown up — I was able to think of the flat wet fields with the ditches as “water meadows” or “wet meadows”, and the low smooth hills in the background beyond the river, as “downs”. But just then, after the rain, all that I saw — though I had been living in England for twenty years — were flat fields and a narrow river.”

Here, in this slow raising of the curtain, like the glints of the river, are nearly all the glimmers of what’s to come. There’s the emphasis on sight and the way it might deceive (the river above the land); the contrast with a bit of information, “the Avon”, that can prove equally disorienting, “not the one connected with Shakespeare”; and then the way that a single view is transformed not only through change of weather but change of experience in the sudden leap of the sentence beginning “Later” that also lets on that the narrator was once a stranger and remained an outsider.

“I saw what I saw very clearly, but I didn’t know what I was looking at,” Naipaul says towards the beginning, and so establishes the internal conflict between what the writer sees and what he thinks he knows that allows him to order those perceptions into a story.

Recalling his encounters with two black men on his initial passage to England, he writes: “In Puerto Rico there had been the Trinidad Negro in a tight jacket on his way to Harlem. Here was a man from Harlem or black America on his way to Germany. In each there were aspects of myself. But with my Asiatic background, I resisted the comparison; and I was traveling to be a writer. It was too frightening to accept the other thing, to face the other thing; it was to be diminished as a man… Thinking of myself as a writer, I was hiding my experience from myself; hiding myself from my experience.”

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This is a different-sounding Naipaul from the writer who became infamous for his contemptuous remarks about black people, fellow South Asians, and all sorts of former British colonial subjects in much of his non-fiction writing featured in publications like The New York Review of Books. The ugly Naipaul, the wounded man who wounds others, as James Wood observes, has come to dominate his legacy so much so that one-time admirers Abdulrazak Gurnah and Pankaj Mishra now state publicly that they can no longer read him.

The purpose of Naipaul’s multiple self-revisions in Enigma was not to apologize or disarm his critics, who existed even at the time he was writing it, but, as Naipaul puts it, “to bridge the gap between man and writer”, the crack that begins on that first journey across the Atlantic and widens. His account of the juvenile fiction, “Gala Night”, that he attempted to write about the ship journey, where he omits the racist incidents on board in the interest of conforming to an idea of “Literature”, is as painful and scathing as anything Naipaul wrote about anyone else. We can feel him trying to be a real writer by rewriting these mostly unconscious lies and distortions, much as Pinocchio becomes a real boy.

It is here, however, that the novel also falls short of the ambitious goal Naipaul sets for it, namely to reveal “The writer’s greatest discovery” that “man and writer were the same person”. For it turns out this apparently solitary narrator, living in a cottage on the broken estate, taking his long walks, devoted to the minutest observation of seasonal changes and shifts in the emotional climate and circumstances of those closest to him, has — in the actual life of the man who wrote it all down — been married all this time and been living with his wife, though also sometimes with his Anglo-Argentine mistress whom he liked to beat up, though not all of them together. Much of what is presented as independently arrived at observation about the lives of others most likely emerged, at least partially, in dialogue with Patricia Hale, who nowhere appears in the book’s pages.

This deliberate omission in a work that otherwise strives for unsparing, clear-eyed honesty can spoil the book for some people. I confess I find it adds to my appreciation for it. Our own age attaches so much importance to being right, even for writers of imaginative literature. It’s important to have demonstrated the right attitudes in advance, to never have anything shameful to hide. Naipaul in his own ways remains a captive of an earlier version of this: he still puts the writer of Enigma above everyone he writes about, including himself. But he couldn’t go all the way, he couldn’t, so to speak, land the last punch.

This last failure humanizes Naipaul in a way that his own self-castigations and revisions, recast as triumphs, do not. The perfect synthesis between writer and man, the great Romantic project of literature that Naipaul chooses to inherit while writing Enigma — to make literature at every point congruent with life — remains an impossible desire. No one can do it: not Cusk, not Knausgaard, not Lerner, not even Wordsworth or Naipaul. The failure is built into the project from the beginning, but the ruin is glorious and doesn’t even look like a ruin until you understand that Enigma of Arrival is also a book steeped in and punctuated by its many ruins. In other words, the color and quality of the failure matters. To have struggled so much against his own instincts as a judge, a semi-satirist, to have tried to write about a place and its people that he almost loved — to try to find a language in himself capable of articulating love, or, at least, compassion; to have done it so well in the cases of wounded horses, dying trees, men like Jack, Pitton, and Bray, and still to fail. Well, that’s encouraging.

Wallace came of age in Champaign, Illinois, where his father was a professor at the state university. With its elegant restaurants and lively bar scene, the college town acts as a commercial oasis in a pastoral sea. Wallace spent much of his adult life not far from Champaign, in Bloomington, another mid-sized city. It is here that he taught literature and creative writing at Illinois State University, and where he lived when he wrote many of his most profound stories, essays, and books, including his wild and gigantic masterpiece, Infinite Jest.

Bloomington is in central Illinois. Even if it’s only 130 miles from the bright Chicago lights, it could be in another sociological universe. Farms and barns decorate the landscape, as the highway slices through fields of grass and Indian plantain, and, as Wallace puts it, “the corn is as tall as a tall man”. Much like Champaign, Illinois State University gives Bloomington a separate identity from nearby villages, as does its status as a company town: it’s home to State Farm Insurance, which employs 67,000 people and brought in $5.7 billion last year.

The mid-Midwest contains contradictions, even in its appellative cliches. The region is the “Heartland”: where everyone from culture-war reactionaries, to nostalgic Leftists dreaming of the resurrection of the manufacturing base, locate their hopes for the country. Yet these vast flatlands are also “flyover country”: not so much politically, as both parties pander for its votes, but culturally. In the Midwest, and especially its rural hinterland, it is easy to feel as if New York and Hollywood, the cultural capitals of the republic, rotate in separate solar systems.

Taken together, this contradiction creates what Wallace referred to as a “brotherhood of loneliness” — detachment from the dynamism of American society, detachment from what one imagines as the discourse that directs social progress or societal decline. Despite his eventual return to the Midwest, the author confessed to resenting his “physical place in the great schema” when leaving for New England. Those who remain can feel a wide range of emotions, from bitterness to pride, but they are either bitter or proud about, as Wallace put it in his 1993 essay, “being away from it all”.

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The vast barrenness, oceanic flatness, and dot-on-a-map desolation was overwhelming when my wife and I, on a recent road trip to Bloomington, stopped 20 miles away in Pontiac for lunch at a Burger King. Aside from a few gas stations and fast food competitors, the windows of the restaurant offered angles on nothing. A couple of steps down from the soda fountain and waste basket, there was a table fit for one with an unused chair. Adorned in a white tablecloth, and decorated with an empty plate, clean silverware, and a folded American flag, it was a tribute to the “members of our Armed Forces missing from our ranks.” “The Missing Man Table,” as it is called, “symbolizes that they are with us here in spirit.”

It was like an image out of a David Foster Wallace story — a sad expression of deep, human loneliness, but as so often, not without a counterpoint. It is inside a franchise of an industry not exactly revered for its social conscience, and smack dab in the middle of garish advertisements for sugary and high-cholesterol food products, paper Burger King crowns, and palpable boredom and dread of low-wage workers. “The Missing Man Table” is an attempt at sincere, human connection, something Wallace cared and worried about, in an environment of commercialized entertainment, something he feared would devour the decency of his country and the dignity of his countrymen.

Wallace’s prescient concerns were clear in Infinite Jest. The novel’s biggest threat is something called “The Entertainment”, a video so hypnotically entertaining that it reduces even passive spectators to a catatonic state. Social media and smartphone addiction have degraded human life and community in ways that make “The Entertainment” sound plausible. More than that, though, Wallace wrote many essays and stories, on topics ranging from pornography to John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign, about how our bottomless appetite for entertainment, and technology’s ability to feed it, would transform the social compact, civic virtue — and any idea grander than momentary self-interest — into punchlines. The Pale King, his posthumously published novel about the IRS, which is mostly set in Peoria not far from Bloomington, presents public accounting as heroic: precisely because it is so boring. To overcome boredom, the novel suggests, is to open possibilities of sacrifice and service in the name of ideals that transcend momentary fixations of pleasure.

Given that everything has become entertainment, the social compact has been butchered by individualism and tribalism, and Donald Trump, a more vicious version of Infinite Jest’s ignorant lounge-singer-turned-president, is in the White House once more, the timing was perfect to visit Wallace country. After all, it is right in the middle of Trump country.

McLean County, home to Bloomington and its university, barely went for Kamala Harris, with the Democratic nominee earning 50.9% of the vote. Sections of Bloomington itself, however, supported Harris by margins ranging from 27 to 52 points.

But around the town is a sea of red. Its bucolic villages supported Trump by equally large margins as Harris’s support in the heart of the college town. The inversion of the vote captures the extremity of American division, making Barack Obama’s bromide regarding the “purple states of America” look like a bruise on the country’s fractured psyche.

As the endless bloviation about the severity of America’s political divisions imply, the ideological voter is himself creeping towards loneliness. Like no other period in recent history, political arguments sour friendships, tear apart families, and “sort communities”, in the words of Texas journalist Bill Bishop, into Left and Right. In a classic chicken-or-egg conundrum, one could ask if the loneliness that Wallace identified at the heart of the Midwest, and America more broadly, is responsible for this polarization, or is the polarization enhancing the loneliness?

Wallace’s diagnosis did not spare his own kind, the highly educated middle and upper classes of Gen X. He often wrote about the poisonous influence of the ironic detachment as a response to nearly everything. Those whose first instinct is to smirk and drop a witty one-liner in the face of tragedy or scandal will also find themselves unable to form deep social bonds, while also rendering themselves incapable of investing in a story or political project that transcends their own short-term desires.

In an essay about 9/11, written from Bloomington, Wallace describes walking over to an elderly woman’s house to watch “the Horror” on television. He feels a “sad” and “lonely” separation from “Mrs Thompson”, crying and praying in her modest ranch home. She has an innocence, Wallace writes, that he cannot himself entertain. He soon notices, for instance, some of the media’s cynical marketing ploys — every anchor has rolled up his sleeves — whereas Thompson and her prayerful friends take everything as presented. “Part of the horror of the Horror,” he explained, “was knowing deep in my heart that whatever America the men in those planes hated so much was far more my America… than it was these ladies’.”

Even on 9/11, Wallace was able to intuit that national tragedy would fail to unite people whose experiences and beliefs so vastly differ. The quiet separation that Wallace depicted would eventually morph into foaming-at-the-mouth hostility during the Covid-19 pandemic.

There is no way of knowing where the falsely named Mrs Thompson lived. Wallace identified her as a woman from his church — but by “church” he was obscuring the fact that he belonged to Alcoholics Anonymous. Their meetings took place around the corner from his house, at St. Michael’s Episcopal Church, a small house of worship with a fountain and flag outside. As for Wallace’s own home, it certainly doesn’t look like the place where someone would write one of the greatest American novels of the last century. It is currently occupied, but there is no acknowledgment that Wallace once lived inside. The same is true of his former office at ISU, which even now lacks a sign, photo or plaque commemorating his memory.

In a sense, that anonymity feels appropriate. “David felt safe here,” says Victoria Harris, a retired ISU English professor who was close friends with Wallace. Harris tells me that the author liked being close to his parents, and establishing good relationships with his students, but also that he enjoyed “being away from it all”. She adds that he preferred living in a quiet, “middle class” neighborhood — as opposed to more luxurious subdivisions nearer the city center. “I don’t pull an aw-shucks-regular-guy thing,” Wallace himself once told an interviewer, “[but] I treasure my regular guy-ness. I’ve started to think it’s my biggest asset as a writer.”

Wallace was in a unique position to use art and journalism to make sense of Middle America’s collapse into partisan rage and a mindless addiction to scrolling. The fact that he wrote a masterfully experimental novel from a tiny home in a normal Midwest neighborhood captures yet another duality in his work. Unlike most contemporary literary fiction, he didn’t write about the insect politics of Brooklyn, further pulling the art form out of the window of relevance of most Americans. At the same time, though, he enjoyed the reverence of the New Yorker set, giving him the potential to communicate to two different audiences.

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Yet as his absence at ISU implies, there is always the possibility that, had he not taken his own life in 2008, his country would now ignore him. America’s lack of cultural memory, and its continual erasure of history, creates a fragmented present where shared meaning is impossible to cultivate, and the dull hum of loneliness resonates from college campuses to roadside restaurants.

In recent years, journalists, scholars, and even Hillary Clinton have become worried about America’s “loneliness epidemic”, arguing that it fuels political militancy, undermines social cohesion, and contributes to violence. It feels utterly appropriate, therefore, that one of Wallace’s most popular ideas was that literature can and should make readers feel the spark of human connection. “I don’t know what you’re thinking,” he once told an interviewer, “but a piece of fiction that’s really true allows you to be intimate with a world that resembles our own in enough emotional particulars so that the way different things must feel is carried out with us into the real world. I think what I would like my stuff to do is make people less lonely.”

This, then, was a prophet of that deep American predicament, writing in his novels, stories, and essays about people, real and imagined, who separate from those around them and even the best parts of themselves. He linked their loneliness to misplaced priorities of attention, whether “The Entertainment” in Infinite Jest or the talk radio of the Nineties that attracted millions of listeners throughout the US, and was particularly popular in the rural Midwest — a medium of political infotainment that he ridiculed as “deeply, totally populist” but also “completely fake”.

As for Wallace himself, campus invisibility might also be explained by posthumous domestic violence allegations from his ex-girlfriend, Mary Karr, who claims that he stalked and once threw a coffee table at her. Because he is dead, of course, Wallace can’t offer his side of the story. One of his best books, a collection of short stories, mainly about misogyny, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, inevitably leads one to wonder if he battled his own demons, demons that brought pain to others, and would surely have made himself and others lonelier. Yet another irony, in a town and region full of them. In any event, now that Wallace is missing from our collective table, we’ve merely left room for more corporate chow, and fragile paper crowns.

The story follows Victor Ward, a vacuous and handsome male model swanning about Nineties Manhattan. Victor’s world revolves around the most inane concerns possible: clubs, paparazzi, celebrities. But soon, weird things start happening. People keep telling Victor they’ve seen him in places he hasn’t been: a hotel in Miami, a Calvin Klein show. Victor is offered an unusual new job: finding a girl he went to college with who has supposedly disappeared in London. He’s booked into a first-class cabin on the QE2, and here the narrative starts to veer sharply from the aimless frivolity of the opening sections.

In London, Victor finds the girl, another model. He falls in with her group of roommates, also all models. Victor is thrilled to be going to such cool parties with such hot people, blinded by their good looks and designer clothes. But it soon turns out these models are terrorists. Their cover is beauty and fame, and their crimes are violent and gruesome. On a party tour of Paris, Victor is blackmailed to stay with the cell, closely controlled by its leader, the supermodel Bobby Hughes, who “had a set of breathtaking abdominals before anyone was really paying attention to the torso, and he was probably the major force in starting that craze”. Under Bobby’s leadership, the group pulls off a series of major attacks all while air-kissing their way around the glitzy Paris fashion world. Everyone is being watched, everything is being filmed, people aren’t who they say they are, and Victor’s reality collapses in on itself, conspiracies layering and deepening.

The actual goals of the model-terrorists are never explained, and they aren’t the point. The spectacle is. The first order of business is aesthetics. During a bombing in Paris, Victor thinks: “It’s really about the will to accomplish this destruction and not about the outcome, because that’s just decoration.”

Yet Victor’s conscience haunts him. He tells Bobby he doesn’t want to be involved, that he’s not political. “Everyone is, Victor,” Bobby tells him. “It’s something you can’t help.” Bobby tells Victor he trusts him precisely because of his shallowness: “Because you think that the Gaza Strip is a particularly lascivious move an erotic dancer makes. Because you think the PLO recorded the singles ‘Don’t Bring Me Down’ and ‘Evil Woman’.” Stupidity has made Victor vulnerable, and ultimately dangerous. People who are political, who do have an agenda, have taken advantage of Victor because he’s distracted by surface glitz.

There are many more potential Victors out there today. In Glamorama, the allure of beauty stupefies people, turning them into the pawns of those who know how to manipulate it. The same is true on the internet, which has provided an incredibly powerful tool for politicization, even radicalization, cloaked in soft-focus lifestyle content or in quasi-ironic memes. It’s all too easy to be misled by a pretty face — or a fine set of abdominals.

It is now commonplace for dead-serious political ideas, even extreme ones, to filter into the mainstream on the basis of aesthetics alone. The “Trump Gaza” AI video that depicted the territory as a glamorous beach resort, which went viral when the President himself shared it, was meant as “satire” according to its creator. But in Trump’s hands it became a tool to normalize the idea of a full takeover of Gaza. The puerile imagery of belly dancers and golden statues sanitized the sobering reality of what this takeover would mean.

The Right has long understood the importance of looks. Roger Ailes used to evaluate potential Fox News hosts by watching them on mute. Trump’s career can be seen as a large-scale experiment in how far one can get in politics by putting image first. More so than any recent president, Trump has generated an instantly recognizable aesthetic, turning his agenda into an easily consumable visual brand. His movement is adept at using the internet’s visual language to promote his agenda through imagery that elides its gravity — one example is the Studio Ghibli-style AI cartoon of a crying Dominican woman being arrested by ICE, which the White House tweeted this spring. In sneering at his unsubtle tastes for glitz and gold, Trump’s opponents have missed that these tastes are what many Americans find aspirational, even beautiful.

The pull of beauty — of what we most want to look at — has come to determine in many cases which news events capture the public imagination, and which don’t. Aesthetically appealing images get attention, and attention is today’s most valuable asset. Luigi Mangione’s alleged killing of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was a particularly cinematic recent example, optimized to go viral. From the first grainy surveillance video, showing a peek of Mangione’s chiseled jawline, the internet was hooked. It’s true that Mangione’s story tapped into a deep well of dissatisfaction with American healthcare, but I’m not sure he would have become a beloved online figure if he didn’t happen to be good-looking.

Suggested reading

When I met Luigi Mangione

By Gurwinder Bhogal

It seems our culture can’t resist a handsome criminal. Jeremy Meeks, the “hot felon” whose mugshot for gun charges went viral in 2014, parlayed his fame into a modeling career after getting out of prison, walking in fashion week shows in Milan and New York. He now has nearly 1.5 million followers on Instagram. Even fictional killers can be influencers these days if they have the look: Ellis’s better-known protagonist, American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman, has recently inspired a cologne and a namesake Manhattan cocktail bar — on top of a wealth of memes.

While Patrick Bateman channels the nihilism of 4chan, Victor Ward embodies the insidious triviality of TikTok. In Glamorama, Ellis captured the feeling of scrolling through a social media feed long before such a thing existed: a barrage of decontextualized images, a flurry of brands and people and eventually ideologies. If the novel had been written today, Victor’s journey would take place somewhere in the endless scroll.

Just as Victor is sucked into a dark reality through his unquestioning participation in a culture of images, many people nowadays find themselves funneled into various ideological corners by what seems at first to be innocuous content tailored to their interests. Motherhood accounts are full of gauzy day-in-the-life videos that eventually turn out to be promoting free birth or Biblical submission to your husband. Men seeking lifestyle hacks find themselves swept up in the manosphere. People can and do become indoctrinated without realizing it, drawn in by an attractive veneer. “We’ll slide down the surface of things,” Victor often thinks in Glamorama.

The models in Glamorama understand that images define reality, and not the other way around. In a 1999 interview on Charlie Rose’s show, Ellis said he chose the fashion world as the setting for his story because “where would these terrorists want to unleash this conspiracy where no one else would look for it?… They’d do it in a world where image is truth, where surface is truth.” The terrorists operate from within a “beauty culture” that “feasts on insecurity” and “makes us act in ways I don’t think we normally would act”, Ellis said.

Today, beauty culture is even more pervasive than in the Nineties. The question is: how far will we go to keep up with it? “The better you look, the more you see,” is Victor’s catchphrase — and it takes on an increasingly sinister tone as the novel goes on. In Glamorama, beauty is a trap, a smokescreen that dulls our reason. It is a warning for the image-saturated world we live in.

Libman’s book begins with a family photo taken at Vienna Hauptbahnhof on 16 September 1938, just six months after the Anschluss, the Nazi annexation of Austria. In the window of a train shortly to depart are the author’s great-grandparents, Anna and Eugene, and their two daughters, Ada and Eva, all of whom escaped Europe for North America. Standing on the platform below them are 10 family members who stayed behind, and of whom only four survived past 1945. “This is the last photograph they’ll take together,” Libman writes. He recounts his own journey back to Vienna in his early 20s to meet a distant relative of his grandmother Eva, a woman from whom he receives a large bundle of photographs, letters, and other documents that had once been in possession of Eva’s uncle Max’s widow.

And yet The Third Solitude resists telling the author’s family history, tempting though it must have been to commit what W. G. Sebald, in The Emigrants, calls “a wrongful trespass”. The terrible, uncertain fate of Max, Libman’s great-grandmother’s sibling, practically calls out for novelistic speculation. All that can be ascertained is that he was arrested by French police while trying to reach Spain and put on a train to the Majdanek concentration camp. Libman learns as much from a 1947 “act de disparition“, a sort of belated death certificate issued by the French government. It reads: “Interned on 26 February 1943 at GURS; Transferred on 2 March 1943 to DRANCY; Deported on 4 March 1943 in the direction of LUBLIN-MAJDANECK (Poland).” As Libman explains, the vague “in the direction of” represents an official uncertainty about the location and manner of Max’s presumed death. He is not recorded (as he would have been) as having ever arrived at Majdanek. He “disappeared in the worst way imaginable”, Libman writes: “vanished in a question mark, in the space between one railway station and another, in the black ink of the words ‘in the direction of’.”

Libman’s restraint here is impressive. “Some memories are better left undisturbed,” he writes, adding: “How to stop speaking to our artifacts, stop breaking the shell for the sake of the nut, and instead let them speak to and through us: that is the challenge.”

It is a challenge he lives up to by wandering down a series of intellectual cul-de-sacs instead, chapter-length reflections on the varieties of nostalgia (“nostalgia is a defense mechanism against the ruthlessness of time’s passage”); on the self-mythologization of Québécois nationalists; on the peculiar history of the Jewish day school in Montreal that Libman, like his brothers and his parents, attended. What unites these seemingly disparate considerations is a skepticism towards the uses and abuses of history. The way, for instance, Québécois nationalists have feigned ignorance of the historical forces that brought them to Canada in order to see themselves as a kind of indigenous nation always threatened by the Anglo-canadien.

But, of course, the “black hole” at the center of The Third Solitude is the history of Zionism and the problem of Israel, a country Libman’s great-grandmother, Anna, described as a miracle, but which the author can only view with shame. Libman’s book is thus a contribution to a long tradition of intellectual rebellion, a millennial Jewish writer’s reckoning with the pieties and shibboleths of his education and the capture of Jewish life by political Zionism. Why, Libman asks, was it necessary for students at a Canadian Jewish day school to sing the Israeli national anthem or participate in the annual Israeli Independence Day rally? Why did almost all of the students, Libman included, visit Israel as part of a high-school fellowship? And why were Palestinians, let alone the Nakba, never mentioned?

The Third Solitude is a forceful protest against this seizure of Jewish life by Israel and political Zionism. And while Libman is never as rude or irreverent as Philip Roth, I was nevertheless reminded at times of Roth’s Nathan Zuckerman who, in The Counterlife, describes Israel as a militant escape from traditional forms of Jewish life: “All over the world people were rooting for the Jews to go ahead and un-Jew themselves in their own little homeland. I think that’s why the place was once so universally popular — no more Jewy Jews, great!”

One of The Third Solitude’s most memorable moments is Libman’s account of the time he went on the March for the Living, which every year brings Jewish students from around the world to Poland and Israel to study the history of the Holocaust. In Libman’s telling, however, an ostensibly important educational experience becomes a bizarre historical pageantry. It involved students singing old Jewish songs at the top of their lungs in the middle of a residential area in Kraków, as though Poland remained stuck in 1939-1945. “It was like going to the United States and insisting that everything was as it had been during the Civil War,” Libman writes. Later, during a trip to the Buczyna woods, where 10,000 people, most of them Jews, were killed and buried in a mass grave in 1942-43, Libman notices a plaque displaying the opening lines of the Israeli national anthem, the “Hatikvah”, as well as an Israeli flag. What, he wonders, has Israel got to do with the horrors that befell European Jewry back then?

This is organized remembrance, the monopolization of memory. “Holocaust is perpetually yesterday and tomorrow,” Libman writes, adding that this could just as well be the motto for the State of Israel, mired as the country is in a “presentist ideology” that cannot let the past be past, let alone dare to imagine the future. At the end of the book, Libman returns imaginatively to the arrival of Anna and Eugene, his great-grandparents, in North America in 1938, at a moment when different futures were still possible. “Concretely,” he writes, “they were the visions of Jewish life that had yet to be captured and assimilated into political Zionism: pluralistic belonging in North America, for example; or a global, secular socialism in which traditional cultures and languages were nurtured as syndicates; or even, in a bid to divert the already moving colonial-Zionist project toward a more humane direction, a non-theocratic, multi-national, democratic state in Palestine.”

Libman emphasizes the need to resuscitate some of those “vanished visions of the future”, not in the sense of turning back the clock, but as a reminder that the future, no matter what the presentist ideologues may claim, is something that can yet be created. What exactly this future might look like is beyond the purview of The Third Solitude, as perhaps it lies beyond the scope of any single person’s imagination. To recognize this is simply to accept that imagining a better future is one of our shared responsibilities, and that any political project that consigns us to a doom loop is not worth having. As Louis MacNeice once wrote: “What we are about to do / Is of vastly more importance / Than what we have done or not done hitherto.”

In 1954 Professor Ross, a latter-day Henry Higgins, published a lengthy essay called “Linguistic Class-Indicators in Present-Day English” in the Finnish philological periodical, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen. His argument was that aside from “minor points of life” — such as “the games of real tennis and piquet, an aversion to high tea” and “having one’s cards engraved (not printed)” — the only remaining class distinction in post-war Britain was spoken language. Today, he argued, a member of the upper classes was “not necessarily better educated, cleaner, or richer than someone not of this class”, he simply spoke differently. And thus to guide those keen to distinguish between the language spoken by “gentlemen” from those “persons who, though not gentlemen, might at first sight appear, or would wish to appear, as such”, Ross created the terms “U” (for upper class) and “non-U”.

The first part of his essay, “The Written Language”, is effectively a style sheet: how to correctly address an envelope and begin and end a letter; what to call, in correspondence, a Duke or a Lieutenant Commander; the correct use of “Esq”. “Knowledge of at least one initial of the recipient’s name is, of course, a prerequisite for addressing him with Esq.” The writer “will be in a quandary” if he does not have this information: “in these circumstances I myself use the Greek letter ø (as ø. Smith, Esq), but this is probably idiosyncratic.”  

Ross gets into his stride in the second part, “The Spoken Language”, which starts with pronunciation: U-speakers say “temprilly” rather than “temporarily”, “goff” rather than “golf”, and “tar” rather than “tire”.

Next comes an alphabetically ordered vocabulary list in which the middle classes are shamed. Here we find non-U “serviette” versus U “table napkin”, “toilet” versus “lavatory”, and “mirror” versus “looking glass”. While a U house must have a name rather than a number, the names of many houses are non-U: “Fairmeads”, for example, or “El Nido”. “U-children” and “U-dogs” eat their “dinner” in the middle of the day when their U-parents and owners are having “lunch”; “pardon” is non-U: the U response after belching should be silence. A non-U speaker cannot, Professor Ross argued, become a U-speaker, because the misuse of “one word or phrase” will give him away (“for U-speakers never make mistakes”).

Alan Ross was a U-speaker in a non-U university. Born in Brecon in 1907 and educated at Malvern College and Balliol, he worked during the war at the government code and cipher school in Bletchley Park. It was as an undergraduate that he lay the foundations of his study of English linguistic class signifiers, working on it for his own amusement while developing his lifelong interest in Finno-Ugric languages. Like Nancy Mitford, whom he met at a luncheon (“old-fashioned U”) in 1955, Ross was famously witty. He had employed in his article, he revealed to Mitford, the class distinctions made in her autobiographical novel The Pursuit of Love (1945). Fanny Logan, Uncle Matthew complains, is picking up “dreadful expressions” at school such as “note paper”: “What is this education? Fanny talks about mirrors and mantelpieces, handbags and perfume, she takes sugar in her coffee, has a tassel on her umbrella, and I have no doubt that, if she is ever fortunate enough to catch a husband, she will call his father and mother Father and Mother”. Uncle Matthew is famously unreasonable, but on this occasion even the conciliatory Aunt Sadie agrees with him. “Fanny darling. It is called writing-paper you know – don’t let’s hear any more about the note, please.” The case of the Mitfords proved Ross’s point. Far from being “better educated, cleaner, or richer” than their non-U neighbors, the single proof of their social superiority lay in their peculiar use of language: the Mitfords employed a vocabulary understood by no one outside the family circle, while the “Mitford voice”, even they admitted, was ridiculously posh.

Nancy Mitford responded to Ross’s essay with an essay of her own called “The English Aristocracy”, published in Stephen Spender’s Encounter (September 1955). The upper classes, she explained, did not use fish knives or put the milk in first when pouring tea. Silence, she agreed, was the U response to belching, as well as being “the only possible U response” to other “embarrassing modern situations”, such as being told “it was so nice seeing you” after saying goodbye. She would tear up any letter beginning “Dear Nancy Mitford”, rather than “Dear Miss Mitford” or “Dear Nancy”. To Ross’s vocab list, Mitford added “sweet” as the non-U version of “pudding”, “sofa” as opposed to “settee”, “glasses” and “dentures” as the non-U equivalents of “spectacles” and “false teeth” (U-speakers dislike euphemisms).

The September 1955 edition of Encounter sold out instantly. “U” and “non-U” became the buzz words of the day, and newspaper letters pages were filled with the responses of readers. “It is sad to find”, Graham Greene wrote to The Observer, “that by Miss Mitford’s exacting standard Henry James was often non-U in his correspondence. Frequently he allowed the “unspeakable usage” of writing to someone as “Dear XX”. Henry James, Mitford explained, “was an American”. Another letter to The Observer pointed out that Shakespeare had made clear, in Richard II, that in fact “mirror” was U and “looking glass” non-U:

King Richard: An if my word for sterling yet in England
Let it command a mirror hither straight…
Bollingbroke: Go some of you and fetch a looking-glass.

To this, Mitford replied: “It is probable that Richard II, like many monarchs, was non-U”.

It was Mitford’s idea to republish in book form a shortened version of Ross’s essay together with “The English Aristocracy” as Noblesse Oblige. “It seems like a natural for the Xmas market”, she wrote to Heywood Hill. Illustrated by O. Lancaster and entitled ‘‘Are You U?”, the volume also included a letter by Evelyn’s Waugh and other satirical delights such as John Betjeman’s “How to Get on in Society” (“Phone for the fish-knives, Norman”). Malcolm Muggeridge, editor of Punch, devoted almost an entire issue to the book. The magazine’s cover bore a mock coat of arms with the device “Snoblesse Oblige” and a coronet was printed at the top of each page.

Why does Noblesse Oblige continue to sell and make us laugh? One reason is that the English have always enjoyed the comedy of our intricate class distinctions, particularly those within what George Orwell called in 1920, “the lower-upper-middle classes”. Another is that Ross gave us a snapshot of the end of an era, after two wars had dramatically altered our social structures. England in the Fifties had a Labour government, and the Angry Young Men, disaffected offspring of the Bright Young Things, were documenting the new equality, which included the democratization of language. Four years after Noblesse Oblige appeared, academics were called to the witness stand at the Lady Chatterley trial to explain that the word “fuck” was not, in the right context, obscene, while the judge, Mervyn Griffith-Jones (U), caused nationwide hilarity when he instructed the jury to consider whether D.H. Lawrence’s novel was the kind of book you would “wish your wife or servants to read”.

Suggested reading

The rise of the posh roadman

By Poppy Sowerby

Noblesse Oblige has dated in the 70 years since its publication, but surprisingly not that much. Middle-class men are now less likely to play tennis in their braces, and we no longer have either (the U-pronunciation is “eye-ther”) jerries (U) or chamber pots (non-U) to contend with. But status anxiety is still with us. I wince at the word “toilets”, for example, and “serviette”, despite not coming from the top-drawer myself, and am always, like society decorator Nicky Haslam, on the look-out for things that are “common”. Haslam’s special-edition Christmas tea towel, “Things Nicky Haslam Finds Common”, include social crimes such as “side plates”, “Confidence”, “type-2 diabetes”, “Bach”, “Loving your parents”, and “Primrose Hill”. Remember the tabloid furore (the “e” in “furore”, according to Haslam, should not be pronounced) when Carole Middleton, mother of the Princess of Wales, said “pleased to meet you” to the Queen, rather than “How do you do”?  

Linguists today talk about standard Southern British English (SSBE), Estuary English (EE) and Multicultural London English (MLE) rather than U and non-U, but there is still a U way of speaking. The Queen’s English is now the King’s cockney, with public school boys saying “wanna”, “gonna”, and “wa’er”, while a 2025 update of Noblesse Oblige would include the U pronunciation “twenny-twenny five”. The copious use of the word “fuck” is now very much U. 

Mary S. Lovell writes in The Mitford Girls that Alan Ross, who died in 1980, “resented” Miford for “making fun of his serious academic thesis”. This is surely not the case, and Lovell offers no source for her statement. The whole notion of writing what Ross ironically called a “scientific” disquisition on upper-class lingo was parodic (“U-dogs”, for example). Trading on his celebrity, Ross produced three further books on the theme: What Are U? (1969), How to Pronounce It (1970), and Don’t Say It (1973). His grandson, Carne Ross, who resigned from the British foreign service after giving secret evidence to an official inquiry into the use of intelligence before the 2003 Iraq invasion, has since become an advocate for anarchism. “His accent”, writes Anthony Andrews in an interview with Carne Ross for The Observer, “is now faultlessly demotic, but he says it wasn’t always like that.” One-downmanship is the new one-upmanship.