Ben Lerner’s new novel, “10:04,” which comes out in September, holds up his fiction to his meta-fiction—or just abandons the pretense of fiction, depending on how seriously you take jacket copy. Lerner is still identifying and tagging the clock-stopping epiphanies he can’t seem to escape. His emotional attention to events is military grade, strong enough to render a hairline crack of the psyche in fat strokes. Those events include selling a story to this magazine and then using the paycheck from that to help inseminate his best friend. If neurosis writ small and fraught sperm don’t say beach reading, what does?
“Dialectics of Nature” was a collection of notes that Friedrich Engels worked on between 1872 and 1882. A manuscript was collated and first published as a book in 1927, long after his death. (A pdf of the 1940 English edition is available here.) For the English preface, J. B. S. Haldane wrote that “one reason why Engels was such a great writer is that he was probably the most widely educated man of his day.” “Widely educated” doesn’t make you a scientist, not even if you co-wrote “Das Kapital.” Everyone involved knew this about the philosopher and his passions, and here is just one disclaimer from the preface: “There are statements which are certainly untrue, for example in the sections on stars and Protozoa.” This manuscript wouldn’t make it past a junior agent now, thanks to the many public battles fought over books that have straddled the border of reporting and imagination. In this case, this kind of prudence would be a shame—a voracious public intellectual should be taking a whack at electricity and primordial matter and anything else that isn’t tied down. Engels was friends with several scientists, and corresponded extensively with them. He took notes on almost every scientific question of the day, when lines between the empirical and the spiritual were fuzzy. What is force? How can energy be quantified? What is existence? The epigrammatic nature of his notes mean that even the most gnarled concepts—no, I don’t understand more than half of this book—are written up casually. One passage that compares ants to humans in an attempt to understand how the brain processes light rays ends like this: “In any case we shall never find out how chemical rays appear to ants. Anyone who is worried at this is simply beyond help.”
—Sasha Frere-Jones
Since I am working on a book in the first person (notice how I can’t bear to say the “m word”), I am rereading lots of different memoirs this summer. I started with Patti Smith’s “Just Kids,” which is almost as ethereal and shamanic and transporting as its author. Next up was “The Year of Magical Thinking,” which is awfully hard to put down—it’s really pretty incredible that Joan Didion was able to make a harrowing exploration of grief and loss a page-turner. (But then what else would you expect? They don’t call her Joan Didion for nothing.) I wanted to check in with somebody young and male so I went back to Dave Eggers’s “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.” It holds up. Dude has a lot of mojo (though the endless self-conscious notes at the beginning are as irksome now as they were when the book came out; I wonder what he thinks of them now). Joyce Carol Oates’s “A Widow’s Story” is utterly gripping. (I can’t believe how many italics she uses. Read it and you will see what I mean. Oates loves italics almost as much as she loved her late husband—and she really, really loved her late husband.) Then, for a treat, I have also returned to Nora Ephron’s “Heartburn”—technically a “novel,” but whom are we kidding? I first read this book when I was a twenty-two-year-old in Kathmandu, killing time in a bookstore because the flights out had been cancelled all week. It would be difficult to overstate how comforting it was to me at the time when this familiar, funny, Jewish narrator from my part of the world came off the page and told me all about her bourgeois disasters. Like everybody else, I felt that she was my arch and insightful new best friend when I read that. Fifteen years later, I profiled Ephron for The New Yorker and got to know her just a little. I was surprised by how much her death saddened me a few years ago—by how frequently I found myself thinking about her in the months that followed. Reading this book has made me miss her again, and reminded me of how intimate the (imaginary? real?) relationship between reader and writer can be.
—Ariel Levy
Although I won’t be taking it to the beach (the print is just too small), I’m planning on reading Martha Nussbaum’s “The Fragility of Goodness.” I’ve been working on a book about people with a very demanding sense of their moral duty, and these people tend to plan their lives very carefully, so I think it’ll be a useful corrective to read a book about a view of morality that takes into account just how much of existence is outside our control. Also, I think Nussbaum is a beautiful writer.
—Larissa MacFarquhar
My return to the United States a year ago coincided with the release of “This Town,” an alarming portrait of our politics. It was a bit like embarking on a vacation in Italy with the modern mafia book “Gomorrah.” I greeted my new neighbors warily. This summer I’m reading to decode the ecosystem I now inhabit or to reëxamine places that consume the other half of my attention (China, etc.).
“Decoded: A Novel,” by Mai Jia. The author, a former People’s Liberation Army intelligence analyst, has a huge following in China. His first English translation is well done. It was first published twelve years ago, and the narrative ranges back to the fifties, but the themes endure: a cryptographer, a secret department, a disappearance.
“Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism & Wrecked the Middle Class,” by Ian Haney Lopez. When I returned to West Virginia earlier this year to write about its particular brand of conservative politics, I consumed a lot of talk radio and came to recognize a subtext that is charged with fear and resentment about the loss of some kind of America. Lopez, a Berkeley law professor, digs into the new vocabulary of racism.
“Big Money: 2.5 Billion Dollars, One Suspicious Vehicle, and a Pimp—on the Trail of the Ultra-Rich Hijacking American Politics,” by Kenneth Vogel. In an age when a hundred of the richest donors give more than five million regular contributors, we often think of those huge givers as motivated by ideological commitments or the strategic pursuit of influence. Vogel evokes their plainer impulses, the fact that some have come to regard American government as “political fantasy camp,” a chance to pull the puppet strings and see what happens. (Disclosure: My father is founding editor of the publisher, PublicAffairs.)
“Family Life,” by Akhil Sharma. I am looking forward to this autobiographical novel about a family’s arrival in the U.S., a swimming pool accident, and the pain of settling in. An immigrant story for our age.
—Evan Osnos
I am reading, as I often do, antiques, at the moment “The Aeneid,” in Robert Fitzgerald’s translation. “I sing of warfare and a man at war,” it begins. The period when the world had not yet been so thoroughly apprehended is fascinating to me, a marvel I never get tired of. The sun went down and the darkness was pitch black, and people believed that every gesture of nature was caused by a god. Monsters were everywhere, too, along with beggars and old women who were really gods hiding their divinity in order to lead humans to make poor choices, or, at other times, protecting them from harm. The whole apparatus of the unconscious enacted not just in dreams, but in actual life. Fogs protecting Aeneas from sight so that he can hear what others are saying. The Trojan ships burning on the shore. The whole terrible story of the Trojan horse. The writing is so ardent and beautiful, and the most powerful effects are achieved with such simplicity.
When I finish, I would like to read again “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey,” also in Fitzgerald’s translations. I am drawn to Julian Jaynes’s belief that human consciousness begins sometime in the period between the two poems. The people in “The Iliad” are god-inhabited, and in “The Odyssey” they are not.
—Alec Wilkinson
Photograph by Martin Parr/Magnum.
