Jane Yong Kim | The Atlantic

The Artist Who Captured the Contradictions of Femininity

2025-05-30T08:00:00-04:00

Observing a woman get ready to go out is, for many girls, an early glimpse at the ritualistic preparations that femininity can entail. For the artist Christina Ramberg, watching her mother getting dressed for parties—in particular, putting on a corset called a merry widow, which gave her an hourglass figure—revealed the extent to which the female form was a ruse. “I can remember being stunned by how it transformed her body, how it pushed up her breasts and slendered down her waist,” Ramberg later observed. “I used to think that this is what men want women to look like; she’s transforming herself into the kind of body men want. I thought it was fascinating,” she said. “In some ways, I thought it was awful.”

These dueling reactions, fascination and repulsion, come up in Ramberg’s paintings, which, especially early in her career, fixated on the artifice of the female body—all the different ways that women construct themselves, with the aid of the mass market. Her striking portraits of women’s body parts feature torsos strapped into corsets, feet shoved into high heels, intricately arranged updos. The images are crisp, flat, and slyly cropped or angled to never show faces. And although they’re sensual, they’re also depersonalized and often off-kilter; sometimes, hair is parted in unnatural directions, or skin is patchy. The dueling presence of unruly and taming forces in these paintings recalls the consumer products that divide women’s bodies into conquerable parts: the sprays that restrain, the undergarments that shape. As the artist Riva Lehrer puts it in one of several essays accompanying a traveling exhibit of Ramberg’s work, currently at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, “Without the face, the body must tell all.”

Photograph by Aimee Almstead

“Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

What it tells, in these paintings, is by turns sobering and playful—and never sanctimonious. Ramberg’s explorations began to take shape in the late ’60s, when she was a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago painting on small, cheap Masonite panels. She became affiliated with the Chicago Imagists, a loose grouping of figurative artists whose work tended toward the colorful, grotesque, and surreal (though, at times since its initial use, the label has seemed to result in a downplaying of the stylistic differences among its members). One of Ramberg’s teachers at SAIC and a mentor to the Imagists, Raymond Yoshida, was a deep pedagogical influence. He was an avid visitor of flea markets and instilled in students like Ramberg a love—and practice—of collecting items. Collecting, Yoshida said, was a way of establishing a pattern of “looking,” and Ramberg over time amassed hundreds of dolls that she displayed in her apartment. Her paintings of fragmented bodies are their own kind of collection—and their own pattern of “looking.”

Ramberg wasn’t unique in probing the commodification of female sexuality, though a particular blend of compositional rigor, sly humor, and curiosity gave an engrossing velocity to her paintings across the 1970s and ’80s. The period in which she developed as an artist was charged with contradictions, one that saw second-wave feminism cresting amid a cultural tug-of-war over sexual liberation. Gloria Steinem had by that point published her exposé about working undercover as a bunny at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Club; Playboy magazine, then headquartered in Chicago, hit the peak of its circulation in the early ’70s. (Perhaps ironically, Ramberg’s work occasionally appeared in the publication.) Cindy Sherman would, in the early ’80s, make her famed photographic series in which she posed as centerfold models, drawing attention to the mechanics of male attention.

Similar cultural shorthands are at play in Ramberg’s paintings. Her early work pulls from the brisk visuals of advertisements, the seriality of comic panels, the close crops of voyeuristic photography: These familiar elements initially draw viewers in, and might even seem to point toward a more standard indictment of the male gaze, or of consumerism, but Ramberg threw changeups that turned her paintings darker and more intriguingly complex.

One series, for instance, shows thick tranches of hair cinched into the shape of corsets, or possibly vases; the plaited tresses are sharp tricks on the viewer’s eye, a menacing yet sensual play on the controlling perfection that shapewear (or, perhaps, home decor) helps to enforce. The interplay between skin and fabric in some of her images also seems mischievous. Ramberg had an enduring interest in fashion—at 6 foot 1, she often made her own clothes—and rendered fabrics carefully. She might give a bustier a fine, pebbly texture, redirecting the viewer’s attention away from bare skin, while also perhaps nodding to how idiosyncratic personal taste can be when it comes to the materials we wear. In one image from 1971, a white fabric wound around a hand turns into a partial glove, snugly encasing just three fingers, leaving the other two free; with delicate humor, it hints at the thin line between what we wear and what we are.

In her journals, Ramberg once described an idea she had for a painting, in which the ruffles of an item of worn clothing would actually be painted as flesh. The implication of clothing as a type of skin is creepy but clarifies Ramberg’s intent: She seemed to be exploring the artificiality baked into how we show ourselves to others. In Ramberg’s wildest imaginations, clothing is no longer simply a mechanism that pushes up breasts or slims down a waistline; it becomes an authentic, even crucial, layer of self-presentation—as important to our sense of self as flesh itself.

The estate of Christina Ramberg

Probed Cinch, 1971

The estate of Christina Ramberg

Untitled (Hand), 1971; Untitled (Hand), 1971

The surreality of this idea expands the perimeter of our emotional response. With that hypothetical conflating of skin as fabric, or fabric as skin—the blurring of our core selves and the “layers” we put on for the world—Ramberg seemed to question whether most everything about ourselves might be constructed, and whether we are, in fact, what we construct. In all this, she was quite interested in hidden or subconscious desires. Her diaries, which she kept from 1969 to 1980, include sexual fantasies, and she describes dreams of bondage and illicit trysts. To Ramberg, like the complicated memory of her mother lacing herself into a corset, fantasies are ultimately generative—both productive and unpredictable.

Even in grief, Ramberg seemed to find solace in the affordances of fantasy. In 1973, when she was 27, Ramberg lost a baby that she delivered prematurely. Some of her female forms in this period shifted away from overt playfulness, while maintaining an openness to multiple readings—one 1974 painting titled Gloved shows an austere torso, this time wrapped in gauze that could be interpreted as either medical dressing or bondage wear. The ambiguity Ramberg painted into the fabric asks us to leave room for either possibility.

As Ramberg’s work changed over the years, the focus of her gaze shifted, too. Some of her later paintings turn women’s bodies into mechanistic objects—almost gridlike, compartmentalized structures. In one, a smaller body drops out of the bigger one, as from a factory assembly line. This seeming anxiety about women’s bodies as sites of productivity reminded me of Ramberg’s diary entries recounting her life. She described her days as a mother (in 1975, she had a child with her husband, the artist Phil Hanson), the aforementioned dreams and fantasies, the work she did in the studio. She documented everything in one place, sometimes using different-colored ink to differentiate between aspects of her day; but she didn’t cordon one part of her life off from another. The entangled accounts suggest that she saw everything she did—the chaotic overwhelm of it all—as her work.

The diaries also show a preoccupation with the constraints, and influence, of the domestic realm, the way that the details of the world around you can affect what you make, what you think about, what you see. To me, this is another example of Ramberg’s mode of “looking.” Her interest in fabric—as functional material, spiritual armor, generative art—seems distinctly connected to her interest in working with constraint, rather than trying to bust completely free. This philosophical inclination is apparent even in her later works, when she turned away from the female body: A sequence of quilted works celebrated the structure of geometric patterns, while a series known as her “satellite” paintings—a stark set of towers that nonetheless look vaguely torso-like—might be read as a stripped-down meditation on form and order.

Ramberg died in 1995 of Pick’s disease, which had led to early-onset dementia; she was only 49. By all accounts, she was someone who saw art as a practice, a form of cultural critique, a crucial community; her role as a longtime teacher at SAIC, she later said, kept her connected to “just beginning and deeply committed artists” and helped her balance “immersion in my own work.” Perhaps that sense of proportionality explains why her paintings, and the ideas she probed again and again through them, have maintained their acuity. With focused precision but no piety, she explored what happens when “the individuality of the person is lost to the demands of femininity,” as Lehrer puts it, all the while maintaining curiosity about the powerful psychologies that helped build those expectations. And in examining the entanglements between women and the world they are a part of, Ramberg seemed to understand, ultimately, that a little bit of strangeness can bring precarity to the viewer’s experience, and then expand it.

The Cult Classic That Captures the Stress of Social Alienation

2023-07-06T07:00:00-04:00

A gloomy young man feels deeply alienated from society. He is preoccupied with his inability to reveal himself to others but has learned to act the clown; he notes that, since childhood, he has “seemed to lack the qualifications of a human being.” He feels distant from his family and freely criticizes his friends. He trains his considerable wit equally on social norms—which he finds almost uniformly silly—and on himself, for his unease in navigating them. He treats his alienation alternately as a joke and as a life sentence.

A reader discovering Yozo Oba today might see in his ironic detachment and biting self-judgment the telltale signs of an antihero. His caustic first-person narration is the jolting spine of the novel he appears in: No Longer Human, by the Japanese writer Osamu Dazai. The 1948 book, which follows Yozo from childhood to adulthood as he unsparingly traces his (and society’s) failings, is a classic of modern Japanese literature; when it was released stateside a decade after its initial publication, The New York Times praised it, calling it a “self-prosecution,” a “damning narrative told in a conversational tone.” No Longer Human has since become a minimalist cult favorite, championed by artists and adapted into films and graphic novels; Dazai himself has also popped up as a character in popular manga series.

The author’s dramatic, troubled life—he died by suicide shortly before No Longer Human was published—no doubt affected the book’s reputation. But the novel’s sardonic self-awareness may be the more lasting reason it keeps finding a new readership. Though set in 1930s Japan, its themes are distinctly relatable, and its claustrophobic, almost performatively insular narration feels current, of a piece with novels of the past decade that have explored a lush psychological myopia. And its narrator’s pessimistic view of social humanity—which, for some, might also conjure Holden Caulfield’s angsty worldview—will likely strike a chord with readers facing the stressors of our era: the pressure to be genuine, the burden of creating a public persona, the feeling that you need to perform your life for others.

Seventy-five years later, No Longer Human still reads with an apt urgency. As the musician Patti Smith once put it, Dazai “wrote at the pace of a dying man, yearning for … the solution to an unresolved equation.” With the new translation of the novel’s prequel, The Flowers of Buffoonery, Dazai’s intimate, visceral writing now encounters a fresh audience. Taken together, the two works assert his mastery of the ironized confession. They also make clear a great paradox of his writing: For all his novels’ reputation as sketches of alienation, they’re equally potent as modern portraits of human connection.

Dazai was a practitioner of the “I” novel, the confessional mode of Japanese literature in which authors wrote stories based loosely on their life. Many of the basic beats of Yozo’s story—his lonely childhood, his fraught relationship with his wealthy family, his womanizing, his repeated suicide attempts, all of which he recounts with an almost masochistic bluntness in No Longer Human—trace back to events from Dazai’s own life. (The author’s first-person style is evident, too, in a story of his that was published in The Atlantic in 1955; stark and candid, it’s composed almost entirely of dialogue.) Yet it’s the rawness of Yozo’s perspective, not simply the similarities with his creator, that gives the book its force and its staying power. As Donald Keene, the book’s translator, writes in his introduction, “There is nothing of the meandering reminiscer about Dazai; with him all is sharp, brief and evocative.”

One of the mordant twists of No Longer Human is that Yozo, who describes himself as being in “perpetual flight from human society,” appears outwardly to be no less grounded in it than anyone else. Growing up wealthy but lonely in the remote north of Japan, Yozo is a sickly, brainy kid who feels at odds with his family and schoolmates. This is when he learns to play the clown, making people laugh to distract them from seeing his discomfort. He states that he doesn’t understand customs like eating communal meals or telling white lies in order to be polite. He alludes to being abused as a boy by family servants and not feeling like he could tell anyone; some scholars have interpreted the alienation he feels later in life as a product of this childhood trauma. As a teenager, he begins to see that girls are drawn to him, but their affection appears to only confuse him. He seems to have little impulse to develop real relationships.

Yet Yozo needs relationships: He’s a social loner, someone who sees himself as inexorably removed from the world, but who depends on others for survival and companionship. Yozo ends up in Tokyo, where he takes art classes and before long is drinking heavily, sleeping around, and skipping school. He has harsh words for many of those he interacts with, which Dazai contrasts with Yozo’s clear reliance on them. A Tokyo friend whom Yozo ridicules as a Dionysian fool teaches him how to live in the city on little money once he’s cut off by his family for his debauched lifestyle. A family acquaintance whom he describes as “contemptible,” meanwhile, gruffly takes him in after he attempts to kill himself. Despite the disdain Yozo has for the social infrastructure that surrounds him, it is obvious to the reader that he needs it.

If one manifestation of his perceived disconnection is an impulse to mock the people he relies on, another is his impulse to mock himself. Dazai’s choice to make Yozo his own worst critic feels particularly contemporary, even as it makes him an unreliable narrator. For instance, Yozo’s frank recounting of his reliance on the women (a waitress, a journalist, a bartender—hard workers all) who fall for him and become sources of booze or boarding is sad and bleak, his behavior easy to condemn. But Dazai hints that Yozo isn’t the monster he portrays himself to be. At the end of the novel is an addendum by an unnamed person who has found Yozo’s personal notebooks (which make up the bulk of the book), and who talks to a woman who knew Yozo. He was, she says, “a good boy, an angel.” Seeing him suddenly from someone else’s perspective, in such a different light, makes us wonder what else we might see if our vantage point shifted just a bit.

That glimpse is a rare one, though. A big part of what has helped the ornery and depressed Yozo endure over the decades is that Dazai lets us hear from him directly, in the first person. But this wasn’t always how the author conceived of his most memorable character. An earlier attempt at creating Yozo, The Flowers of Buffoonery, shows that Dazai initially wrote him in the third person, from more of a distance—still a pained young man, but less misanthropic, less removed from those around him. Though it’s a very different kind of story, the themes that Dazai would build on in No Longer Human are on fascinating display. And it reveals, too, how being lonely and being a social creature aren’t as far apart as they can seem.

Flowers isn’t a traditional prequel; no narrative chronology links the two books. It seems more like an earlier draft of the character and story that Dazai would return to in No Longer Human. But you can see traces of the eventual Yozo Oba, as well as the importance that Dazai accorded to relationships in his work. If No Longer Human plumbed Yozo’s individual psyche, Flowers widens the lens to encompass Yozo and his friends. The story has hints of alienation, but it’s mostly a portrait of young male companionship, by turns sarcastic and earnest, braggadocious and considerate.

The novella opens just after a disturbing event has taken place, but it unfolds almost lazily. Yozo, in his 20s, is recovering at a seaside sanitorium after a failed lovers’ suicide attempt. (The woman he jumped into the sea with died; he was saved by a fishing boat.) Two young men, his cousin and an art-school friend, come to stay with him for several days—essentially the duration of the story. The boys mostly avoid hard conversations and instead play cards and mug for pretty patients; their presence lends Yozo’s convalescence the screwball vibe of a boys’ getaway.

In Flowers, Yozo is not yet the knowing narrator of his life; Dazai, the author, is. He occasionally interrupts the novella he’s writing to directly address the reader, sardonically remarking on his hopes as a novelist (Will this story make him famous?) or questioning his characters’ development (Will readers like these young men?). The result is a brilliant live dissection of a work in progress. Dazai becomes an active intermediary between Yozo and the reader. We see Yozo not through his own eyes, as happens in No Longer Human, but through his creator’s.

The humor in Flowers is less acidic than in No Longer Human, but Dazai is still extremely good at highlighting the minuscule shifts and contradictions among characters, which has the effect of underscoring what they’re leaving unsaid. A hint of uncertainty permeates the story as the trio alternates between horsing around and administering comfort. “These boys never really argue,” Dazai writes early on. “Ever so careful with each other’s feelings, they tiptoe from one comment to the next, taking great pains to shelter their own feelings in the process.” Because they know “all kinds of expressions that could smooth things over,” and their friendships are built on a foundation of diplomacy, the novelist’s voice is necessary to explain to us what his characters are actually thinking. (When Dazai chooses to break the fourth wall, he is also, at times, hilariously brusque. Starting to describe the sanatorium’s setting, at one point, he interrupts himself: “Never mind. I hate describing scenery.”)

Dazai seems to relish the young men’s inability to speak openly about Yozo’s suicide attempt or about the police’s inquiry into the matter. Yozo says little of what he is really feeling; his emotional state is often opaque to the reader. One friend labors over how to talk with Yozo about his health and future; the other regales his friends with tales of his antics with girls, in lieu of having to discuss anything more serious. All this misdirection brings to mind an observation that Yozo makes in No Longer Human: that there must be “many pure, happy, serene examples of insincerity … of people deceiving one another without (strangely enough) any wounds being inflicted.” In Flowers, Dazai seems preoccupied with how human connection so often operates at the surface—suggesting that even when an interaction is glancing or momentary, it can have value and sweetness. That tactful, abashed mode of relating to others is one of the social qualities that the Yozo of No Longer Human scorns, but here, Dazai finds the humanity in it.

Through the young men’s freewheeling conversations, which the translator Sam Bett captures ably, Flowers ultimately explores the question of how to express oneself in moments of trauma, and what it means to offer support and companionship. In one revealing scene, one of the men asks the calm nurse who’s caring for Yozo to tell them a story before they turn in for the night. The request, coming from a grown man, only adds to the feeling that the trio is caught between adolescence and the difficult realities of adulthood, between telling juvenile jokes and communicating honestly about emotional pain.

That tension brings to life something Yozo says in No Longer Human. After his traumatic childhood incident, he recalls feeling unable to “appeal for help to any human being.” That dire, unmet need—to express pain, to trust that a cry for help will be received and acted upon in good faith—metastasizes, over time, into the conviction that there is a chasm between society and himself. In the modest Flowers, we can see the beginnings of how Yozo will relate to others as an adult. We see how his trauma will start to be compartmentalized, how friends will perceive only parts of his pain, and how, despite all of this, he will find people who accept him, because he needs them.

Flowers doesn’t match No Longer Human in emotional complexity and immediacy; it’s a slimmer, more modest work. Yet it is a key stepping stone on the way to the book that many see as Dazai’s masterpiece. The irony is already there, in the form of the novelist-narrator, who half-jokingly questions everything: the worthiness of the story, his motivation in writing, his quest for recognition. The heart is also there, and the urgency. What would change is the perspective. If No Longer Human, with its pronounced interiority, reads with a strangely contemporary flair, Flowers comes off a little old-fashioned—you have to look hard to detect the emotions under the surface. But to read it is to more clearly understand not just the person who feels alienated, but also the world that strains to see him.

Introducing an Expanded Books Section

2022-05-16T07:05:00-04:00

When Emily Dickinson encountered her first real book as a child, she experienced a moment of pure, joyful recognition. “This, then, is a book!” she exclaimed. “And there are more of them!” The Atlantic would go on to publish Dickinson’s poems; perhaps more important, it introduced her to a lifelong mentor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson. After Dickinson read his article “Letter to a Young Contributor” in the April 1862 issue of The Atlantic, she wrote to him, beginning a decades-long correspondence. Higginson would, eventually, help put together the first collection of her poetry. Looking back, I’m grateful for that early, elated meeting of reader and reading material. This, then, is a book!

Many of us have had that moment ourselves, that realization of a world existing—quietly, almost secretly—within a collection of pages. Reading about books can have a similarly revelatory effect. To read an essay about a writer’s work is to enter an intimate, three-person relationship among critic, author, and reader. It is a space of communion in which the book at hand becomes a shared object worthy of sustained and deep attention.

That quality of literature—and the criticism that helps make sense of it—is a large part of why we’re excited to be expanding books coverage at The Atlantic. Since its founding in 1857, this magazine “of Literature, Art, and Politics” has been home to great writing about the momentous books and literary debates of the day. It has championed generations of essayists and novelists and poets (though, in a huge oversight, it didn’t publish Dickinson until after her death). And it has run stories by James Baldwin, Kurt Vonnegut, Louise Erdrich, Alice Munro, and Lauren Groff, to name just a few. Building on this strong base, we’ll be bringing you more of what we’ve always done, as well as some new offerings. Expect more book reviews and essays—plus provocative arguments, reported stories, profiles, original fiction and poetry, and, of course, recommendations for your every reading need.

Why now? At first blush, books might not seem very apt at keeping up with the many challenges of our moment. But paradoxically, we might find ourselves turning more and more to books because they demand so much of our attention. Literature has a unique quality of slowing us down even as it widens our horizons. That makes it a particularly fantastic vessel for our era of distraction. Books are also a vehicle for the free expression of ideas, a value that this institution shares and that is under assault culturally and politically. One of the roles of The Atlantic, as our editor at large Cullen Murphy once said, is an obligation to tell “the big story that lurks, untold, behind the smaller ones that do get told.” Books serve this role too.

[Explore The Atlantic's latest book essays, criticism, fiction, poetry, and recommendations.]

The literary landscape today is full of such undertakings. Novelists are grappling, creatively, with the climate crisis, alleged predatory behavior, the future of work. Poets are taking on crucial questions of identity. Anthropologists are rethinking our assumptions about human social history, writ large. Earlier texts, too, when revisited, can offer historical context that resounds sharply decades later. Reading can show us, anew, the forces that shape our institutions, our beliefs, and our sense of self. It can expand the way we look at the world around us. At The Atlantic, our aim has been, and will be, to introduce readers to such books, old and new, and to engage with the ideas in them critically and inquisitively.

Reading can also, as Dickinson discovered, incite almost inordinate forms of joy. Many of my favorite books (and, I’d wager, many of yours) have no utilitarian use: They might, instead, feature invented languages that lay bare the audacity of the writer’s mind, or introduce sui generis characters who seem cut from whole cloth—and are simply magical in their charm or absurdity. They might stop us short to admire the clarity of a single sentence. And they remind us, in ways both big and small, of what makes us human. At a time when books are under threat across the country, reading and writing about literature—and in the process, perhaps better understanding ourselves, and others—become ever more important. I hope you’ll join us in that endeavor.

The Best Books We Missed in 2017

2017-12-29T09:30:00-05:00

Editor’s Note: Find all of The Atlantic’s “Best of 2017” coverage here.

“So many worthy books, so little space.”

I type those words all too often, and my colleagues on The Atlantic’s digital side, Jane Yong Kim and Sophie Gilbert, and I have now made a tradition of lamenting that predicament every year as the list-making season arrives. Working both online and in print, as we do, we really should revise the lament to include “—and not enough time.” To the many publicists who excitedly email me about the rich season of titles ahead, I’m always sighing about page constraints at the magazine. With only so many hours in a day to write and edit and so much to cover, the culture team online also looks longingly at books that deserve attention but don’t get it. We echo the message to reviewers who are eager to share their views of this or that author’s latest effort. If only we didn’t have to be so ruthless, we also say to authors themselves, a surprising number of whom come right out and ask: Can they expect any coverage in The Atlantic? The phrase, as I’ve admitted before, is sometimes a white lie, yet always the truth, too: Far too many notable books go unnoticed by us.

In the holiday spirit, now is a moment to mention a sampling of 2017 books we wish we hadn’t missed. We’ve asked their authors to pay it forward, and single out a few books themselves. What recent work has caught their expert eye? What book, however old, helped them write the one they’ve been busy promoting? —Ann Hulbert

Fiction

The Ninth Hour by Alice McDermott

Farrar, Straus, and Giroux

“His trouble was with time,” Alice McDermott writes at the start of her eighth novel, referring to a subway motorman—and husband and soon-to-have-been father—who commits suicide. That is not a spoiler: The young man’s death is what sets this time-haunted, mesmerizing book in motion. Set in early 20th-century Brooklyn, the novel follows his wife, Annie, and Sally, the daughter born some months later, as they make their way through days, years, and decades without him. The Little Nursing Sisters of the Sick Poor, who step in to help, do their best to impart the solace of “implacable routines” in a soiled world of endless suffering. McDermott wryly and wisely sees to it that they fail. Even for the nuns, and certainly for Annie and Sally—and for the descendants who figure as intriguing narrative voices—lives turn out to be shaped less by willed sacrifice than by the ebbs and flows of love. Time entraps and liberates, and in her inimitably evocative prose, McDermott spools out the past in bold and fascinating ways. — A.H.

The Unnamed Press / Atlantic Monthly Press / W.W. Norton & Company

Alice McDermott: Early in my career there was a notion—perhaps only a romantic myth—that first novels were meant to be investments in the future. Publishers, I was told, were on the lookout not only for blockbuster debuts, but also for work that offered the literary equivalent of Emily Dickinson’s thing with feathers: promise. I’m not sure anyone believes that anymore, but I still delight in reading fledgling novels that wink and shine with what’s to come. When the authors of these novels are former students, I’m more delighted still. Jessie Chaffee’s Florence in Ecstasy follows a young American woman, a recovering anorexic, as she tentatively reclaims her life—body and soul—during a stay in Florence, Italy. Chaffee’s prose is lovely, whether she’s describing the physical toll, and joy, of rowing on the Arno or the peculiar psychology of female saints who, in ecstasy, starved themselves for God. There’s an absorbing story here, a love story, a coming-of-age story, a gorgeous portrait of the city itself, its beauty and its decadence, but there’s also the thrilling glimpse of a brilliant young writer just setting out.

Lily Tuck’s brief seventh novel, Sisters, on the other hand, reminds a reader that experience, and expertise, has its privileges. Tuck writes with the steely-eyed assurance of an author who knows exactly what she’s doing—and an undercurrent of If you don’t trust me, to hell with you. The novel opens with a single sentence on an otherwise blank page: “We are not related—not remotely.” The unnamed narrator and the “she” of her obsession are, respectively, second and first wives of the same man. The story unfolds through a series of sharp, often oblique, vignettes of domestic life, told in a voice that is at once cool and furious. Jealousy as a corrosive passion is beautifully dissected here in Tuck’s signature style, which is always taut, precise, and, ultimately, unnerving.

As a woman who writes, I’ve done my fair share of complaining about the dead white males whose work formed, pretty much exclusively, the foundation of my literary education. With that situation duly noted, and, in the years since, amended, I’m now free to suggest that those guys were also pretty good. Joseph Conrad, for instance. As I considered the structure of The Ninth Hour, I reread Heart of Darkness just to observe, once again, how skillfully the narrative “we” that opens the book gives way to the sustained “I” of Marlow’s story. How willingly a reader is absorbed into the extended, vividly recollected, quoted, tale of Kurtz as told by Marlow, without ever once pausing to ask, “Wait a minute, how does he remember all this?” or “Who talks like this?” or, shades of overwrought writing workshops, “Is this supposed to be meta?” Never hurts to observe the effortless expertise of the greats, even as you hope to devise something new, and entirely your own.

History

The Taste of Empire: How Britain’s Quest for Food Shaped the Modern World by Lizzie Collingham

Basic Books

One of the most intriguing revelations in Lizzie Collingham’s newest book involves the humble Christmas pudding, that staple of festive British dinners. The dish—composed of dried fruit, sugar, spices, and brandy—unites ingredients derived from Britain’s colonies, symbolizing the nation’s global and commercial power. “To be a Victorian Englishman,” Collingham writes, “was to possess the power to eat the world.” The Taste of Empire is a fascinating history of exactly how food shaped and informed colonialism, and vice versa. From the East India Company’s pepper imports to the flourishing sugar trade in the Caribbean, food played a primary role in stoking the growth of the British Empire, often with horrific consequences. (At its peak in 1688, the British taste for sugar led to the enslavement of 20,000 Africans a year in the Caribbean.) Collingham explores these connections in compelling prose, making human stories central to her investigation. Her anecdotes about 17th-century Irish maids sweatily churning butter and Indian women grinding chilies in cooking spaces purified by cow dung bring the past to life in ways most historians can only dream of. — S.G.

Viking / 4th Estate / Oxford University Press

Lizzie Collingham: In 2017 my reading year began well when Tracy Chevalier’s novel At the Edge of the Orchard transported me to 19th-century Ohio and the frontiers of American settlement, a subject fascinating for a historian of empire. The quarrelsome Goodenough family are struggling to nurture an apple orchard in the Black Swamp and then, when their son Robert runs away, he takes us to post–Gold Rush California where he finds solace collecting seedlings in the serene gloom beneath the giant redwoods. Novelists create a different kind of conduit to the past than nonfiction writers but in Victorians Undone: Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum, Kathryn Hughes is equally skilled in her ability to imaginatively place her reader inside the Victorian body. Having in her last book dismantled the cozy image of Mrs. Beeton as a matron ensconced in her kitchen, in her latest, Hughes gives us an unvarnished picture of Queen Victoria as a spiteful, greedy, and smelly young woman. She explains the aesthetic behind the extravagantly bushy Victorian beard—worth growing for its ability to hide bad teeth and eczema even if it did tend to catch stray scraps of food. And she sets to rights an oft-repeated claim that the 19th-century murder victim Fanny Adams was a Portsmouth prostitute. In fact, she was an 8-year-old dismembered by her murderer and her memory has been passed down to us via sailors’ grisly humor—they named their canned meat Fanny Adams as it was cut into small pieces.

In Feast: Why Humans Share Food Martin Jones reveals how a careful reading of the distinct pattern of archaeological remains allowed him to reconstruct a series of meals in different places and times. Concentrations of broken barley seed around limestone basins in the remains of a Syrian kitchen tell us that 11,000 years ago the people of the Euphrates valley ate tabbouleh salad, just as they do today. And from the latrine of a Roman house in Colchester we can see that while the inhabitants enjoyed imported figs and dates, they also suffered from whipworms. His book inspired me to structure The Taste of Empire around meals and in each chapter to emulate the archaeological unpacking of the meaning of meals by asking what the circumstances were that made each meal possible.

Philosophy

Why Buddhism Is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment by Robert Wright

Simon & Schuster

The title leaves little doubt that its author is a big thinker, as you might already know from a list of Robert Wright’s previous books—The Moral Animal, Nonzero, and The Evolution of God. What you wouldn’t guess until you dipped into his latest undertaking is that he is also, as he puts it, “a naturally bad meditator.” (He is a former colleague, and I wouldn’t have pegged him as a meditator at all.) He shares personal experiences on his cushion and at retreats, but he doesn’t promise regular experiences of bliss. Wright’s form of enlightenment delivers a different mind-jolt: He makes the compelling case that modern psychological and neuroscientific theories about how our minds work corroborate the Buddhist understanding of how we fail to see our own and others’ wants and needs clearly. Never mind a path to Nirvana, a daily stab at getting distance on ourselves can help. Wright’s mix of conceptual ambition and humbly witty confiding makes for a one-of-a-kind endeavor—instead of a formulaic how-to book, a fascinating why-not-give-it-a-try book. — A.H.

Farrar, Straus, and Giroux / W.W. Norton & Company

Robert Wright: My favorite book this year was Draft No. 4 by John McPhee. I have to admit to a bias here. McPhee was my teacher in college, lo these many years ago, and this book is about writing. So part of the pleasure of reading it was being transported back to the seminar room where I first gathered the confidence to try to become a professional writer and where I learned lessons that would aid that endeavor. But the lessons themselves, from a master of the craft, are of value to any student of the craft. He’s a quirky master, a fact that makes the lessons more fun than you might guess on the basis of their common denominator: Write with integrity—in various senses of that word—and with care. Plus, there’s the generous supply of anecdotage you’d expect from someone who has now spent half a century at The New Yorker and who prepped for that gig by writing celebrity cover stories for Time at the height of its powers.

As for books that informed my book on Buddhist meditation: I read a number of classics on Buddhism, such as What the Buddha Taught by Walpola Rahula. But a book that was more valuable than many of them was Paul Bloom’s How Pleasure Works. Bloom emphasizes that the pleasure we get from things depends on the stories we tell about them. Someone once paid $772,500 for a set of used golf clubs and, apparently, got deep pleasure from them. Why? Because they had belonged to JFK. But, strictly speaking, it wasn’t the fact of JFK’s ownership that gave pleasure so much as the belief in it. Had the auctioneer mistakenly shipped a different set of circa-1960 clubs, the buyer would still have perceived a kind of presidential essence in them. Well, what works for pleasure works for pain: It’s often the stories we tell ourselves about things that make them sources of suffering. Mindfulness meditation is among other things a way to undermine these stories. Bloom’s take on the psychology of pleasure helped me see the link between even the more “therapeutic” uses of mindfulness—to sap the energy of anxiety, anger, and so on—and deep ideas in Buddhist philosophy, like “emptiness.”

Poetry

Calling a Wolf a Wolf by Kaveh Akbar

Alice James Books

One of the lovely things about Kaveh Akbar’s immensely thoughtful debut collection, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, is that its narrator is often in motion in some way, even when that movement amounts to stalled progress. Akbar’s poems—which explore addiction and arrested development and the starts and stops of desire—are psychic travelogues that are tiny and expansive at once. In the titular piece, set in a medical facility, the speaker recalls when it was that the compulsion he’s reckoning with first took hold: “I carried the coldness like a diamond for years … until one day I woke and it was fully inside me.” These are journeys that occur in interstitial spaces—between yesterday and today, or between I could and I will, or between death and life (“a body nearly stops / then doesn’t”). In “Portrait of the Alcoholic With Withdrawal,” I paused on the line “Everyone wants to know / what I saw on the long walk / away from you.” It’s a terrifyingly cogent observation, one that shifts perspective right at the end to emphasize how strangely different a personal odyssey looks depending on whether you’re outside or inside it, or somewhere in between. — J.Y.K.

Ecco / Farrar, Straus, and Giroux

Kaveh Akbar: While 2017 has been an excruciating year for so many Americans, it has also been a historically good year to be a lover of poems. At every turn I found a new bouquet of searching, vital poetry collections to help navigate an increasingly unnavigable living. One such collection, which I haven’t been able to shut up about all year, is Nicole Sealey’s Ordinary Beast. Sealey’s poems are irreducible, almost atomic in that way, with everything orbiting a nucleus of wonder—wonder at love, wonder at grief, wonder at language, history, and mortality itself. A poem called “The First Person Who Will Live to Be One Hundred and Fifty Years Old Has Already Been Born” opens: “Scientists say the average human / life gets three months longer every year. / By this math, death will be optional. Like a tie / or dessert or suffering.” Another, “Object Permanence,” dedicated to the poet’s husband, closes: “O, how we entertain the angels / with our brief animation. O, / how I’ll miss you when we’re dead.” It’s a rending work that alchemizes the strangeness of our being anything at all into exquisite, bone-hard language. The formal flourishes of the book—sonnets, sestinas, one long cento, and a palindromic invented form called the obverse—nod toward history and tradition, while charging headlong into an imagined and more miraculous future. My favorite Sufi prayer goes simply: “O Lord, increase my bewilderment.” Ordinary Beast seems to me a kind of joyous, magnificent reply.

Another book I’ve carried with me on my travels this year is Frank Bidart’s Half-Light: Collected Poems 1965-2016. Bidart has long been a titan of my personal canon, a lodestar poet whose voice and craft have so shaped my own it’s difficult to speak of a specific inheritance. Nobody breaks a line, or writes desire, like Bidart. Holding the entire body of his work at once in a single volume feels a little like holding the skull of a saint; I expect it to start hovering and talking to me at any moment, though I’m always newly shocked when it does. Wherever the year took me, I found Bidart had already been there and knew exactly what to say (and who to employ to say it—many of his best poems are written in the voices of others). While I grappled with the fallout of the U.S. national election, Bidart said: “To further the history of the spirit is our work: / therefore thank you, Lord / Whose Bounty Proceeds by Paradox, / for showing us we have failed to change.” While I worked through a month of bad depression, Bidart said: “Whatever lies still uncarried from the abyss within / me as I die dies with me.” I don’t mean to reduce the volume to its bibliomantic potential, but rather to speak to its breadth and depth and clarity. As one of our greatest ever poets of yearning, he has wanted everything we might want, and recorded that wanting with unprecedented vision. Federico García Lorca said the worst punishment one can endure is to “burn with desire and keep quiet about it.” Thank God Bidart never kept quiet. I don’t know where I would be today if he had.

Eka Kurniawan's Darkly Comic Tale of Boyhood

2017-09-15T09:30:00-04:00

The novel Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash opens simply, by stating its premise: The teenager Ajo Kawir has a bit of a hardware problem. His bird, as he puts it, “won’t stand up.” His friend Gecko knows what’s going on; it’s why he never invites Ajo Kawir to watch porn together or to “loiter in front of the post office and catcall the girls passing by.” Gecko’s father does, too; it’s why he takes his son’s friend to see a sex worker, and why he says things like, “Only guys who can’t get hard can fight with no fear of death.”

From the get-go in this story, the ups and downs of burgeoning teenage identity tangle with the warmhearted, if sometimes misguided, efforts of family and friends to solve deeply personal issues. Also from the get-go, the lens turns both inward, to Ajo Kawir’s thoughts, and outward, to a world too often preoccupied with the virility of its men. This latter focus makes sense, given that Vengeance is the work of Eka Kurniawan, the talented Indonesian author who was longlisted for the Man Booker International prize in 2016 and whose previous novels, Beauty Is a Wound and Man Tiger, have examined the deeply embedded effects of societal sexism.

With his new protagonist, Kurniawan wryly homes in on the young man’s insecurities and fixations. Ajo Kawir initially bemoans his fate. He tries all manner of wake-up remedies, from rubbing chili pepper on his penis to letting it get stung by bees. He begins to talk to it, cajoling and scolding by turns. Simultaneously, he is blossoming into a brawler ready to take on anyone with his fists, or a knife: “Even when cornered, he was the kind of fighter who’d let his opponent break his arm if it gave him the opportunity to break the other guy’s leg.” That inclination ends up getting the 19-year-old tasked with killing a gangster named Tiger.

The semi-comic, pulp-y framing lures readers into what becomes a poignant exploration of an adolescent mind lurching toward maturity. Because if the reactions to Ajo Kawir’s predicament are fairly sweet, the reason for it—seemingly, the horrific rape of a vulnerable woman by local police officers that the teen witnesses—is anything but. Ajo Kawir’s terror and guilt at watching, and at first feeling aroused by, tremendous sexual violence are matched in intensity only by his resulting anger toward influential men who see women as disposable. (His growing ability to exact physical revenge complicates the power dynamic as well.)

There’s no mistaking the moral stakes Kurniawan sets up, from the complicity of the bystander to the surrounding community’s internalization of individual violence. If the fable-esque set-up seems a bit heavy-handed, Kurniawan avoids that pitfall by wrapping his tale in warmth and candor. He captures the tender rationale of teens in the swell of adolescent transformation, showing (through the character of Gecko, who gladly loans his father to his friend) how intuitively empathetic young people can be toward each other. Ajo Kawir himself is a complicated mix of soul and physicality: He doubts his ability to satisfy a woman, even as he comes to a strange sort of peace with his body. He’s by turns forlorn, frustrated, and wise—and slowly his life unfurls in fascinating, rich ways.

Kurniawan’s unhurried, magical-realist style, which the author last used in Man Tiger—to tell the story of a man who has a female white tiger dwelling inside him—is a snug fit for the world of Vengeance. The early chapters are particularly electric, full of the sort of specialness that’s only possible through the whole assumption of kids’ perspectives, with their internal logic and low-to-the-ground vantage. And while characters aren’t fleshed out descriptively, they aren’t stick figures either. The sparseness means the occasional detail lands brightly: Readers learn in passing that Ajo Kawir devoured martial arts comics while growing up, as, apparently, did his crush Iteung, a fellow fighter he notices mimicking the language of the comics.

Vengeance is interesting formally, too: Its brief, cinematic scenes, not always chronologically ordered, build like stacked, occasionally off-kilter blocks, a visual Jenga. Kurniawan confidently drops in details without explaining them, sets readers down in medias res, and presents dream sequences as though they’re real, always shifting gears with ease. It’s to his credit (and to Annie Tucker’s simple but vibrant translation) that his experiments don’t create reader whiplash.

Such flash imagery helps bring to life the many, many fights Ajo Kawir lands in. If fists go up frequently in Vengeance, they also, it’s worth noting, belong to both enemies and lovers. A physical confrontation with Iteung leaves Ajo Kawir feeling “shattered to pieces,” while his foes get some poetic treatment as well. “Then a punch struck him squarely on the jaw,” Ajo Kawir dreams, of dueling with Tiger. “He felt himself flying, floating, and then landing on the surface of the water.”

Vengeance isn’t trying to show the fights’ beauty for beauty’s sake, but to illustrate how a boy might find them beautiful—freeing, wild, their own form of political identity and coalesced power, a way to not have control and be okay with that. That tension is, of course, part of the author’s broader point, tracing back to the rape Ajo Kawir witnesses: His yen for violence both proves and indicts the long reach of unchecked brutality. There is, Kurniawan suggests, a wisp of a line between selfish cruelty and righteous violence, between voyeurism and action, between a passionate embrace and a death grip.

In Man Tiger, Kurniawan masterfully played with time to tell a complicated family story from multiple sides. The point of that novel, as with Vengeance, is to show the insidious, trickle-down effects of men who wreak havoc with little consideration for those around them. Both works illustrate these knots of community, where propriety and rage and survival coexist, with a surprising amount of compassion—and illuminate the pain and learning of the next generation with tremendous grace.

The Sad, Ecstatic Passions of Carol Rama

2017-09-03T12:00:00-04:00

In 1945 in Turin, a solo exhibit of paintings by a young Italian artist was shut down. The works on display were propulsive with energy and psychologically driven: They depicted naked, often flower-crowned, women wagging their red tongues; defecating; copulating with snakes (or, perhaps deploying them as makeshift penises); and confined in psychiatric wards, wearing heels and nothing else. The delicate watercolors, tinged with pinks, greens, and crimsons, were interpretable as subtle stabs at Fascism and at societal responses to “deviant” female behavior. The police closed down the exhibit on opening day.

These paintings were the work of Carol Rama—and many of them no longer exist, either lost or destroyed. The incident of censorship is a footnote of art history but nonetheless marks an important moment for Rama’s career and, by extension, for artists like Cindy Sherman and Kiki Smith who would later be inspired by her. The shut-down would guide Rama’s aesthetic choices—she stopped making figurative pieces for years after, though hints of the human form remained in her abstractions—and would cement her reputation as an artist intensely interested in women as sexual beings, as medical curiosities, and as social symbols.

Rama—who died in 2015 at the age of 97—is getting some much-deserved recognition at the New Museum in New York City, with the most comprehensive exhibit of her work to date in the United States. (Other retrospectives have been staged recently in Venice and Barcelona.) Carol Rama: Antibodies represents an almost dizzying array of ideas, materials, and predilections across the artist’s six decades producing art: She used teeth, claws, burlap, and rubber; attached plastic eyeballs and syringes to canvases; and made paintings of disembodied breasts and testicles. She once crafted a bronze sculpture of a penis nestled inside a lady’s pump—in one fell swoop eliding the superficial distance between two trickily symbiotic symbols and poking some fun at Freud along the way. In all these works, Rama used womanhood as a lens for investigating anything from cultural norms and desire to illness and hysteria.

Of those themes, Rama’s interest in the interplay between health and society seems most enduring and deeply held. Italian asylums would be reformed in the ’60s and ’70s, but at the time that Rama was growing up, they were still clearinghouses for abuse, and for institutional perspectives that punished mental illness. Yet Rama, whose mother was committed to a psychiatric clinic when the artist was a child, saw it as a place of great vibrancy and liberty: Human bodies, to her eyes, assumed all manner of shapes and positions, seemingly with abandon. Or, as she would later say, “Madness is close to everybody.”

Nonna Carolina, 1936 (Carol Rama / New Museum)

The tension between freedom and constraint that the young Rama observed is evident elsewhere in the show, too: On a platform in the middle of one room are a couple of Rama’s “wedding dress” pieces: The garments—black sweater dresses with plush, red organs embroidered onto the chest—simultaneously flout marriage tradition and acknowledge the strange importance of costumes. In another work, a shiny row of human teeth gets repurposed as the spine of a beast perched on a man’s head: an animalistic portrait of the human psyche, joyfully unleashed yet inextricably linked to its corporeal host.

Those works, and many others, show Rama’s media-agnostic and voraciously curious approach to longstanding questions. If her watercolors of the ’40s provoke the most visceral and intimate response, Rama found a subtler sort of expression in the abstract pieces she pursued in the ’50s as she briefly joined up with the Concrete art movement and in the bricolage works of the ’60s that saw her create darkly emotive canvases affixed with animal claws and bits of fur—by turns abstruse and entirely tactile.

Spazio anche più che tempo, 1970 (Carol Rama / New Museum)

Rama’s rubber-based pieces—the gomme works of the ’70s—were in some ways even more subtle and count among her more intellectually interesting explorations. For these austere-looking but thematically complex works, Rama took inspiration from her father’s bike-tire factory, disassembling and flattening bicycle inner tubes to create mixed-media collages. While not figurative, many of these pieces bring to mind organs and veins. Occasionally, Rama molded the rubber, reminiscent of skin or casing, into anthropomorphic curves; at other times, she let the uncut circular tubes hang three-dimensionally from her canvases like protuberant bouquets.

La Mucca Pazza, 1998 (Carol Rama / New Museum)

The most stunning of the rubber works are those in her later mucca pazza series, Rama’s artistic response to the cultural fervor elicited by reports of mad cow disease. Intrigued by society’s need to turn the cows into both dangerous pariahs and mystical figures worthy of attention, she made a handful of simple compositions: She cut flesh-hued rubber into shapes reminiscent of udders, breasts, and testicles and placed them in a variety of positions on painted canvases. The symbolism is clear: The paintings, which she saw as “extraordinary self-portraits,” recall the longstanding social and literary archetype of the “mad” woman and embrace the fickle, politicized language of sickness. The series seemed particularly personal for Rama, who once referred to herself as a “premeditated lunatic” who painted “first and foremost to cure myself.”

Rama isn’t the only female artist of her generation to be awarded belated recognition in recent years. Her Italian compatriot Marisa Merz, who was part of the Arte Povera movement, as well as the Cuban geometric-abstractionist painter Carmen Herrera, have also received major retrospectives in the U.S. in the past two years, triggering familiar debates about delayed art-world celebrations of prodigious female talents. Similar conversations occurred in relation to the French sculptor Louise Bourgeois, who didn’t receive her first retrospective until she was in her 70s. For Rama, those early so-called “psychosexual” paintings and her difficult family circumstances—a mom who struggled with mental health, a father who killed himself—mean protofeminist and autobiographical frames have often been imposed on her work. (It seems no coincidence that broader appreciation initially came in 1980, with a reshowing of those original, censored watercolors.)

The artist herself appears to have had little patience for the industry’s late recognition; if few others acknowledged her decades of work, she herself did. Her studio in Turin, where she lived for most of her life, was meticulously arranged with collected objects and works, a suggestion that she cared about self-presentation and, perhaps, about preserving her own oeuvre. When she won the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale in 2003, Rama apparently posed the question, with some irritation: Why had it taken so long? She seemed to understand something that the Turin police of the ’40s did not: that, censored or not, her works would have a long and illuminating shelf-life.

Anicka Yi’s Strangely Persuasive World of Smells

2017-06-25T08:00:00-04:00

There’s a reason museum-goers pause at the entrance to Life Is Cheap, Anicka Yi’s current show at the Guggenheim. A faint scent greets them, emanating at intervals from a set of metal canisters positioned next to the gated entryway. It’s slightly antiseptic but sweet—not enough to be disruptive, but disorienting nonetheless. And so, the day I visited, it was common to see casual viewers take a moment to acclimate themselves, to figure out whether they were turned off by the perfumed odor hanging in the air, or charmed. Either way, to see the exhibit, you need to inhale.

The scent is, in fact, an artwork called Immigrant Caucus, and is made, according to the wall text, from “chemical compounds derived from Asian American women and carpenter ants.” If the description sounds odd or nonsensical, consider its creator. Yi, a Seoul-born, Queens-based artist who is crafting some of today’s most intriguing experimental art, is interested in the common psychology of smells: the sort of appointment viewing that unifies people in a space, while allowing for myriad interpretations. In the past few years, the artist has worked with a synthetic biologist to create a pungent piece made of microbial samples (swabbed from the cheeks and vaginas of women artists), filled a gallery with the scent of menthol, and fried up inedible flowers coated in tempura batter. With each project, Yi appears to be intrigued by olfaction’s ability to manipulate how people discern the things in front of them—by, in effect, the subtle invasiveness of smell.

In fiddling with perception, Yi operates at an intensely timely moment, when the language of persuasion plays out explicitly across newspaper opinion pages and on Facebook feeds. Her deep dive into the mind-altering possibilities of smells suggests a totally different way of taking up space and legitimizing a point of view (in this case, that of an ant, an immigrant woman, or some combination of both). Yi calls her work a “biopolitics of the senses,” and indeed she seems intent on cheerily debunking a variety of hierarchies—whether of gender or citizenship or cleanliness—through some strangely winsome world-building.

The Guggenheim show represents the culmination of Yi’s Hugo Boss Prize win in 2016 (edging out more established artists like Tania Bruguera and Mark Leckey). The set-up is simple: Two dioramas face each other in a cozy but high-ceilinged room. One, Force Majeure, continues a preoccupation the artist has long had with bacteria, in this case gathered and cultivated from sites in Manhattan’s Chinatown and Koreatown. A lively, moldy growth of varied colors—blues, greens, pinks, and marigold yellows—creeps over framed silk flowers and agar plates. Up close, the spotted surfaces remind you of high-school lab experiments. From afar, the colorful drips and dots create a delicate, living mural, a sly comment, perhaps, on what gets perceived as lovely, and why.

Anicka Yi’s Lifestyle Wars (2017), which incorporates elements including ants, glitter, aquarium gravel, and imitation pearls. (David Heald / Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.)

The walls of the other diorama, Lifestyle Wars, are essentially a maze filled with live ants; the same scent visitors are smelling is piped into the display. In the middle, a tangle of Ethernet cables, aquarium gravel, and imitation pearls create a graphic, black-and-white bizarro world reminiscent of the surface of a motherboard. Yi was apparently drawn to ants for their matriarchal societal structures, and the efficacy of their labor; the work as a whole suggests an intricate technological system, made up of both organic and synthetic parts. The scent connects viewers to the ants, a kind of invisible force that pulls everyone onto the same playing field.

Both pieces illuminate Yi’s interest in building rich, sensory universes that undercut common assumptions (for instance, that mold is disgusting, ants are tiny and therefore trifling, and art spaces should not smell of anything). Yi has tweaked such expectations before: In her 2015 show, You Can Call Me F, at the experimental art space The Kitchen, the artist used the stigma of disease and fear of contagion as metaphors for how society sanitizes women—cue the tampon and deodorant ads—by erecting quarantine tents alongside a “collective bacteria” created from women’s DNA samples. (Things went beyond metaphor, with a musky odor from the latter permeating the room over the course of the show.)

Yi’s extreme, almost academic, focus on her chosen themes could be off-putting, but it’s paired with a refreshingly humane curiosity. This sensibility was on full display in a video of hers included in this year’s Whitney Biennial. The Flavor Genome (2016) was a peculiar, gorgeous travelogue: Half-surrealist manifesto, half-documentary, the 22-minute fictive work follows a “flavor chemist” into the Amazon. A woman narrates the journey in ornate, quasi-scientific language, discussing the possibilities of a drug derived from a mythical flower that might be able to produce empathy in humans. (As Yi has said, “And if you take this drug you can perceive what it’s like to be a pink dolphin or an angry teenager.”) It was one of the more audacious and convincing examples of narrative-driven art that I’d seen in some time.

The bulk of Yi’s work (even The Flavor Genome, with its deliriously obsessive search for an elusive flower essence) underscores a desire to push back against a world that so prizes what the eye can see—and to explore, thoughtfully and with no small amount of joy, the lesser senses. This is a hard sell in the art world, as the concurrent show of mostly paintings by masters from the Guggenheim’s collection (Picasso, Modigliani, Kandinsky, and the like) makes eminently clear. But Life Is Cheap makes a strong case for Yi to continue deepening the singular story she’s been telling over the years.

With Immigrant Caucus in particular, museum-goers will grasp what Yi means when she says, “Smell is a form of sculpture because it has a lot of volume. Also, it collapses the distance that painting has built into it—it’s like, ‘Look, but don’t touch, and keep your distance.’” Smell is also a really good stand-in for intolerance of other sorts. Because smell is most certainly more than itself: It’s a thing that, as it pertains to humans, gets tangled so often and so much with ethnicity and identity and class: Who sweats? Who showers? Who works all day on their feet with no air conditioning? Who steps from temperature-controlled apartment to temperature-controlled cab to temperature-controlled office? Who handles fish? Who then eats in on a pristine plate?

And so, that scent being spritzed from the canisters in the Guggenheim does many things at once. It pulls from sites that are seen as gross (say, a toilet handle in Chinatown) and translates that grossness into something that is a little more appealing, a little more sweet, but that still, indubitably, retains something of its origins. And then it enters your nostrils.

The Best Books We Missed in 2016

2016-12-21T14:37:00-05:00

“So many worthy books, so little space.”

I type those words all too often, as I wrote in this space last year, and the year before, when the list-making season arrived—and nothing has changed this year. So I’ll sigh once more over the predicament. Again and again, I have to deliver some version of that message to the many publicists who excitedly email me about the rich season of titles ahead. I tell reviewers, eager to share their views of this or that author’s latest effort, the same thing. Ditto authors themselves, a surprising number of whom come right out and ask: Can they expect any coverage in The Atlantic? The phrase, as I’ve admitted before, is sometimes a white lie, yet always the truth, too: We have room for only 30 or so book pieces a year in the Culture File. That means an awful lot of notable books go unnoticed by us.

In the holiday spirit, now is a moment to mention a sampling of 2016 books we wish we hadn’t missed—including two that my colleague Sophie Gilbert had hoped to write about. (So many worthy books, so little time!) And the brand new culture editor on our digital side, Jane Yong Kim, weighs in on poetry, a genre we’ve been especially remiss in attending to. We’ve asked their authors to pay it forward, and single out a few books themselves. What recent work has caught their expert eye? What book, however old, helped them write the one they’ve been busy promoting? —Ann Hulbert

Fiction

George Baier IV / Penguin / Zak Bickel / The Atlantic

One of the questions Mona Awad’s 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl prompts, through a series of vignettes about the same woman, is how rich life might be if all the energy women expended in service of skinniness could be redirected toward more life-affirming pursuits. In high school, Lizzie is already conscious of her size, becoming more acutely so with every personal relationship. Later, as Beth, she starves herself into submission. But it’s as Elizabeth, married, slender, and miserable, that the toxicity of her obsession becomes most apparent. Awad tells Lizzie’s story from a variety of different perspectives and in different scenes, some deeply funny, some dreamlike, many tragic. Throughout, her prose is lively, while her insight into the often-baffling complexities of being a woman is touching and sharp. —S.G.

Vintage / House of Anansi

Mona Awad: Teva Harrison’s In-Between Days is an extraordinary graphic memoir about the author’s struggle with metastic breast cancer. Combining text and image, Harrison navigates the complex terrain of living with terminal illness in an intimate, honest, and remarkably brave voice that moved me deeply. The illustrations are particularly stunning, ranging from poignant titles like “Cancer Fraud” and “Trying on Small Talk” to truly heartbreaking ones such as “What I Want” and “Cancer Doesn’t Care.” There is great humor, vulnerability, fear, pain, life, love, and hope here. Like the greatest memoirs, Harrison goes right into the dark spaces and, in doing so, lets in the light.

American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis really made an impression on me, though I can’t say that I was consciously aware of it as an influence when I was working on my book. I think it’s a brilliant, very disturbing, and complicated portrait of a monster, who is at the same time a product of his culture and his age. Certainly my main character, Lizzie, is no Patrick Bateman, but I do think I was interested in exploring a kind of monstrousness, a psychosis that our body-image-obsessed culture can bring out in us. Another favorite is The Remains of The Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. Not only is it a wonderful story with an incredibly rich and nuanced first-person voice, but I love the way Ishiguro can create a narrator who is so blind to certain truths inside himself, truths that are available to the reader to recognize, but that the narrator can’t access due to his own psychological and emotional blinkers.

Criticism

Roderick Aichinger / Pantheon

In a fall when so much political commentary has so quickly come to look dated and deluded, it is especially thrilling to read cultural commentary that spans more than a decade and is anything but. Mark Greif writes in his preface that as a child “I taught myself to overturn, undo, deflate, rearrange, unthink, and rethink.” That protean persistence of mind drives his essays, most of which first appeared in n+1, the journal he founded in 2004 with friends. His title may suggest obstreperousness, but Greif is above all fiercely curious. Whether he has the notorious Octomom in his sights, or our obsession with exercise, or confrontations with the police, he delivers insights about 21st-century America that will take you by surprise. As a guide to “what we call ‘experience’ today and what we name ‘reality,’” as he puts it, Greif will help you unthink and rethink, and who doesn’t need to do that? This gathering of his essays could not be better timed. —A.H.

FSG / Punctum / Routledge / Scribner

Mark Greif: The best novel I read this year—Aravind Adiga’s Selection Day—was published in England and Europe, but won’t come out in the U.S. until January. In its primal triangle of rival brothers and a maniacal father, hell-bent on success in cricket in India, Adiga grips the passions while painting an extraordinary panorama of contemporary sports, greed, celebrity, and mundanity. As a literary master, Adiga has only advanced in his art since his Booker Prize-winning The White Tiger. Reaching back to books that could easily be missed because they came out just as 2015 was ending, I really admired Lester Spence’s sharp and mind-changing Knocking the Hustle: Against the Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics, a volume that’s both personally acute and analytically profound about black life and black insurgency in contemporary America. I’d recommend it to everyone. And a book that came out at the start of 2016, Ben Ratliff’s crystalline Every Song Ever, likewise dug under familiar categories of description—here, from aesthetics and music criticism—to open the reader’s eyes to truer visions of our artistic situation and experience.

As for older books that influenced me in writing Against Everything, there’s a long list of writers and thinkers to whom I wish I could pay tribute. But from within the literature of police sociology I read for my chapter on “Seeing Through Police,” let me just single out for praise the theorist and ethnographer Peter K. Manning, whose Democratic Policing in a Changing World (2010)—one exemplary title from his long career of superbly illuminating writings on police, security, and surveillance—would still be transformative reading for anyone who worries about police power and police integration into a fairer and better democratic social fabric.

Poetry

Peter Bienkowski / Copper Canyon Press

Ocean Vuong’s poems trace the sometimes messy contours of a life born of conflict and trauma, of a body animated by the love of mothers and strangers. Pulling from his family’s harrowing recollections of the Vietnam War, and from his own charged adolescent memories, he experiments confidently with different ways of expressing yearning. He places his subjects in bomb craters, on baseball fields, and even inside a ship-in-a-bottle, crafting live-wire imagery (“this is how we loved: a knife on the tongue turning into a tongue”) that gets at how weapons can be internalized, or foreign objects made familiar. Vuong, a 2016 Whiting Award winner, seems keenly aware of love as both a cost and an enduring extract of violence. His collection this year, with its impassioned pulse and shifting micro-geographies, offered me a radiant dose of just that insight. —J.Y.K.

HarperCollins / Wesleyan

Ocean Vuong: The book that remains on my desk, even after many re-readings, is Peter Gizzi’s Archeophonics, a National Book Award finalist this year and, arguably, his most ambitious and wildly thrilling achievement to date. The poems explore the world via sound: the way it disperses from an epicenter, touching hard surfaces only to return as an echo—changed, enriched, and bearing a history. “I’m just visiting this voice,” Gizzi begins, and throughout the collection it’s this notion of a transient self and of shifting speech that gives these poems their urgent currency. I have been carrying Archeophonics with me these past few months not as mere balm, but also as a trusty companion that might brush up against my own hard edges: “The old language is / the old language. It don’t mean shit. // It’s not where you begin / it’s how you finish.” For Gizzi, as long as language is used and rearranged, it can, despite its contradictions, pave a way forward and fashion an affirming architecture for the present. “I make sounds,” he writes, “[then] forget to die. I call it living.”

My family has a long history of learning disabilities, particularly dyslexia, and I myself came to reading quite late. But at 11, finally able to read at length on my own, I found the Scary Stories series by Alvin Schwartz. What immediately stunned me about the three volumes was how grotesque and surreal they were (despite their fourth-grade reading level). In one story, a boy, while digging in his backyard, finds a toe sticking out of the dirt. When he shows it to his mother she, without hesitation, tosses it into the pot of soup she’s making. The family goes on to eat the toe at dinner as though nothing is out of the ordinary. I learned later why I had such a strong connection to these stories. Schwartz had scoured books of folklore, collecting ghost stories and urban legends, some of them centuries old and originating from oral traditions. Because of its graphic nature, the series was, for years, at the top of the American Library Association’s list of most challenged books. But I grew up in a house rich with storytelling and Schwartz’s tales, in all their visceral, enigmatic brutality, echoed the ones my grandma used to tell of Vietnam. While I was writing Night Sky With Exit Wounds, these stories resurfaced as vital players from my formal reading education, serving as a testament to the imagination’s potential to transform violent and discordant histories into art.

Biography

Richard Blower / St. Martin’s Press

I kept wondering, reading Laura Thompson’s The Six, what the Mitford sisters might look like if they were coming of age in the 21st century rather than in the 1930s. Thompson’s meticulously researched, elegantly written book is a thorough history of one of England’s most eccentric families, gratifying to both Mitford enthusiasts and puzzled newbies. You might be familiar with Nancy, the eldest, and the author of Love in a Cold Climate and The Pursuit of Love, in both of which she sketched a hazily autobiographical account of her oddball childhood. But then there’s Diana (left her lovely husband for Oswald Mosley, head of the British Union of Fascists), Unity (friend of Hitler), Jessica (communist), Deborah (duchess), and Pamela (the quiet one). Thompson rifles through every skeleton in the Mitford closet while treating her subjects with great sympathy, even in their ugliest moments. It’s an artful history of a most enthralling family. —S.G.

Laura Thompson: Truthfulness is a peculiarly precious concept in these days of fake news, fake sincerity, and fake thought, which is why I particularly treasure the writing of Rachel Cusk. In both her novels and nonfiction she is fearless in saying what she means, rather than what readers might want to hear. She has been excoriated in some quarters for her books about motherhood (A Life’s Work) and separation (Aftermath), but the hysteria that she stirs up is of course a tribute to her honesty.

FSG

Her latest novel, Transit, is my book of 2016. It follows the brilliant Outline in being a series of encounters between the narrator—a writer, intermittently visible as she goes about her ordinary business—and assorted characters who in different ways offer her their story. That’s it. It is, as I see it, a literary quest to fathom the mystery of how to live. What is extraordinary is how this produces something so readable. Cusk is an admirer of D.H. Lawrence (as am I) and although, on the face of it, her extreme rigor with words couldn’t be more different from his vivid splurging prose, she has the same gift of making the numinous into something concrete.

I tend to prefer nonfiction that’s written by novelists. They know how to tell a story, what to emphasize and what to leave out. Nancy Mitford—also pretty fearless, beneath the aristocratic politesse—was a wonderful historical biographer, notably of Madame de Pompadour and Louis XIV, because she deployed all the same gifts that she used in her fiction: the entrancing authorial voice, the firm grasp of human motivation, the narrative flow into which research was so easily absorbed. So when writing my book about the Mitford sisters, I had Nancy in my head, not just as subject matter but as delightful inspiration. Rather as she, in turn, had been inspired by the words of her own biographical subject, Voltaire, who once wrote, “The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.”