“When Terry Tempest Williams’s mother was dying, she told her daughter that she was leaving her journals to her, with one condition — that Williams wait until after her death to read them. Williams honored her mother’s wish and when she finally opened the journals she was shocked to find that every one of them was blank.”
Hannah Gersen reviews Terry Tempest Williams’sWhen Women Were Birds.
Jamaica Kincaid is annoyed. She spent 10 years writing a novel about the passage of time and everyone seems to think it’s a roman à clef about her marriage — and a vengeful one, at that. At a recent Manhattan reading at Symphony Space, she introduced her new novel, See Now Then, by explaining (among other things) that it was not about a divorce, that none of the characters in her book obtain a divorce, nor do they talk about divorce, nor does the word ‘divorce’ even appear in the book’s pages. Referring to a particularly exasperating review she said, ‘It is almost as if the person describing the book has read another book entirely.’
“We use time-lapse photography to witness the things we can’t see in real time — the blooming of a flower or a tree coming into leaf. Kincaid uses the form of the novel to illustrate the things that Mrs. Sweet could not see in her own life, flipping through the ordinary moments that make up Mrs. Sweet’s mostly sweet existence — moments spent gardening, moments spent nursing her son, moments spent driving her children to school, moments spent in a little room off of her kitchen, writing — to reveal the larger story: that of a disintegrating marriage.”
One Woman’s Place in Time: Jamaica Kincaid’s See Now Then by Hannah Gersen
Mad Men is about to disappear from our lives once again, leaving us to grapple alone with our complicated nostalgia for an era when men were men, women were secretaries, and alcoholism was glamorous. These books give a closer look at the era, offering a vision of Midcentury Manhattan that goes beyond Cheever and Yates. (Although Cheever and Yates are a great place to start, if you haven’t already.) Read them to tide you over until the next season or to fine-tune your predictions for this week’s series finale
I was getting annoyed at the way Occupy Wall Street was being covered — as if it was insane to gather in a public space and protest. As if it had never happened in America before. Wasn’t the whole point of passive resistance to just be there? To not make any demands? As I tried to come up with a good parallel, I found myself thinking of Bartleby, the Scrivener, Herman Melville’s short story about an office worker, Bartleby, who decides out of nowhere that he doesn’t feel like working anymore, but continues to show up at the office every day. Bartleby’s idleness baffles and then infuriates his boss, who begs Bartleby to give some reason for his behavior. But Bartleby refuses to disclose his interests, and over the course of the story, his needs become so few that he dies of starvation. It’s a bleak, mysterious story, and as I returned to my copy to reread it, I was stilled to rediscover its subtitle: “A Story of Wall Street.”
Hannah Gersen, for The Millions, on October 11th, a full month before Melville’s novella was read aloud as part of the Occupy movement’s demonstrations in Zuccotti Park.
Photo Credit: Richard Grayson
This post is part of our “Best of 2011” series, which highlights exceptional original pieces that have been published on The Millions this year.
Source: themillions.com
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