Esmé Weijun Wang, _The Collected Schizophrenias_

 IN ARTHUR FRANK’S The Wounded Storyteller, he notes that much the greater part of the available literature on most illnesses comes from observers who are studying it, typically aiming at a detached objectivity, and that we would benefit from having more complementary subjective accounts from people who actually have the illness, describing it from the inside.

Schizophrenia may be a case where the objective presentation and the subjective experience vary most bafflingly. The illness itself is not very fully understood. Wang’s title alludes to the tendency of the illness’s very name to undergo periodic revisions, to say nothing of its treatment or its diagnosis. As she mentions in the book’s first essay, diagnosis of schizophrenia depends not on any straightforward yes-or-no lab test, like cancer or tuberculosis, but on sets of criteria that change from one edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual to the next. 

The Collected Schizophrenias has thirteen essays from someone who has the illness, whatever exactly it is—how it feels like subjectively, how people respond to you, how it is represented in our culture, what hardly anyone understands about it. Regrettably, describing the book that way makes it sound like a twin of Elyn Saks’s The Center Cannot Hold (2007), and it isn’t at all, although I’m not sure how to identify the difference. Wang’s book is...more baroque, perhaps? More writerly? More millennial? More post-Foucault? I don’t know. They are quite different, and both worth reading.

Wang mentions Saks’s book in passing, but does not say much about it. I’d be curious to know what she thinks of it.

Tangential remark: without my intending it, 2020 has become a year in which I read several autobiographically inflected books by Asian-American women: Victoria Chang, Trisha Low, Cathy Park Hong, and this one. I wonder if some sort of wave is occurring. 

Don DeLillo, _The Silence_

 I’VE READ THREE reviews of this—by Andrew O’Hagan, Michael Gorra, and Joshua Cohen (which feels fitting, an A-team novelist getting A-team reviewers)—and all three spent a bit more time on DeLillo’s standing, the DeLillo corpus and the DeLillian cosmos than they did on The Silence.

I can understand why. DeLillo looks to be one of the definitive American novelists, even the definitive American novelist of his generation, so any new arrival in his canon naturally prompts reconsideration of his whole canon, the mapping of connections to Underworld or White Noise, and so on.

I wonder, too, if any of the three would have been hard-pressed to meet their word count had they been restricted to writing about this book and only this book. Because it is (a) brief and (b) relatively uneventful.

Brief: just over a hundred pages, but small pages with generous white space. I think William Shawn would not have blinked at publishing the whole thing in one issue of the New Yorker back in the day.

Uneventful: a couple is returning to New York City from Europe with plans to watch the 2022 Super Bowl that evening with another couple, who will have a guest, a former grad student of the wife, who teaches physics. But all goes awry when the World Wide Web goes down all at once all over New York City and perhaps all over the world. There will be no watching of the Super Bowl—also no online shopping, finding of recipes, Zoom, or Spotify. We do not find out what caused the Silence, nor what its consequences will be, as the novel ends on the evening in question.

Have to admit, DeLillo touches a nerve. So much of life has migrated onto the internet and into the cloud, and with COVID, even more of it did—plenty of us are not even seeing our families in person this holiday, and internet connectivity is our sole consolation. So what would we do or could we do if the whole world of the Internet just abruptly vanished? On that score, in making us ponder the scenario, The Silence is at least thought-provoking.

But DeLillo does not speculate what would happen, beyond our being dumbfounded and paralyzed. The novel ends:

Max is not listening. He understands nothing. He sits in front of the TV set with his hands folded behind his neck, elbows jutting.

   Then he stares into the blank screen.

Hari Kunzru, _Red Pill_

 HARI KUNZRU’S FICTION seems more “literary” than “genre” to me, and is as cerebral as any reader could hope, but he certainly has a deft way with genre fiction’s tropes. In White Tears, Charlie Shaw’s “Graveyard Blues” made a neat synecdoche for white America’s exploitation and appropriation of African American culture, but it also made a dandy MacGuffin with which to send Kunzru’s characters on elaborate journeys through hazards and revelations.

Red Pill is similar. Any novel that invokes Heinrich von Kleist, Joseph de Maistre, and the Wannsee Conference is cerebral enough for me, and the novel’s central preoccupation is a grave one—the novel’s over-arching preoccupation is the extent and power of the far right intellectual networks of our time. So...cerebral and serious...but also as brisk a page-turner as one could ask. Pynchonesque in its inquiry into almost invisible forces of oppression, yes, but in the sprinter’s mode of The Crying of Lot 49 rather than the marathon of Against the Day.

Red Pill’s unnamed narrator is an independent scholar, someone who researches and writes but has no college or university position to provide a steady salary. It’s a none-more-precarious way to make a living, I imagine, but our narrator has caught a break. His book on the idea of taste got some notice, and so he has a six-months grant from an institute in Germany to complete his next project, a book on the construction of the subject in lyric poetry.

Which sounds like a even more dated, wheezier idea than the idea of “taste,” as another fellow at the institute rudely points out. The “lyrical subject’? Who are we, Lionel Trilling? Our narrator seems blocked, actually, no longer sure of the validity of his own project. He self-medicates by binge-watching a cop show—in which, eerily, one of the cops starts quoting French reactionary philosopher Joseph de Maistre.

What the hell? Forget about the lyric subject. The narrator has to track this down. And that’s the novel, basically. Along the way, he and we the readers have plenty of occasion to wonder whether he (like Oedipa Maas in Crying of Lot 49) is actually on to something or is losing his mind. 

Did I mention the novel is set in 2016? That might give us a clue.

Sulayman Al-Bassam, _The Al-Hamlet Summit_

I FOUND OUT only last year that there are several modern Arab adaptations of Hamlet. I am only familiar with this one and with Forget Hamlet by Jawad al-Assadi, and they differed in a interesting way. They both set the play in contemporary circumstances (as a good many productions of the original do these days), and both use Hamlet, Laertes, and Ophelia as representing the options and potentialities of the younger generation (which is also a pervasive theme in the original, I would say).

Al-Assadi makes Laertes more assertive and more militant than Hamlet, an intellectual who shies away from commitment and action. This works reasonably well—Hamlet is famous for his dithering and indecisiveness, after all. What interested me is that al-Bassam does it just the other way around. In The Al-Hamlet Summit, Hamlet is the one calling out and standing up to the corruptions of the compromised older  generation, and Laertes has been co-opted into serving the interests of the powerful. This works well, too—works better, maybe. Laertes, for all his heat and momentum, lets himself be turned into Claudius’s agent. He’s a nobler, more sympathetic Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, someone who succumbed to power’s promises.

Definitely worth a look, and a useful reminder of what a fertile imaginative seedbed Shakespeare’s play has been. 

Simon Hanselmann, _One More Year_

 ANOTHER INSTALLMENT IN the annals of Megg the witch, Mogg her feline familiar, their uptight and much put-upon flatmate Owl, and their trainwreck-on-two-legs friend, Werewolf Jones. 

One extended episode gives us a glimpse of the quartet and some of their other friends as they were in their last year of high school, an era some them recall as blissful and others recall as hell on earth. But mainly it's just Megg, Mogg, and perhaps one of the others in four rows of three identically-sized panels per page, sitting on the couch, watching television, and getting stoned.

"I'm so perfectly buzzed," says Mogg at one point, under a vast night sky. "I never want to leave "Drug World." Can we never leave?"

"...No...," Megg answers. Then, as if quoting someone, she says "'One More Year.'"

Megg and Mogg are the objective correlative of one of the less advertised truths of drug culture. The good, decent, hard-working people of the world look at them and think they're derelicts. But they don't care what we think. As in they really don't care what we think. That, oddly enough, is their superpower.

Jillian Tamaki and Bill Kartapoulos, _The Best American Comics 2019_; Vera Brosgol, _Be Prepared_

 THE 2020 ONE must be out already, although I haven't seen it. The 2019 volume was not one of the very best, but was still enjoyable. 

The memoir/autobiographical vein is well-represented (Sophia Foster-Dimino, Jerry Motiarty, Lauren Weinstein), but there are also some items that are quite far from being realist or representational (Xia Gordon, Noel Freibert, Erik Nebel). An excerpt from Nick Drnaso's prize-winning Sabrina appears, but we also have some self-published entries by E. A. Bethea and Jed McGowan.

The real find, for me, was an excerpt from Vera Brosgol's Be Prepared, which I promptly acquired in order to read the whole thing. 

In this graphic memoir, the 11-year old Vera, daughter of Russian immigrants, struggles to fit in with her new small town America peers but has high hopes when she learns of a summer  camp devoted to Russian language and (pre-Bolshevik) Russian culture. Here, at last, she hopes, she will find her community. Hopes are dashed minutes after her arrival, and dashed again repeatedly for good measure by cliques of older girls, arrogant entitled boys, and the horrific stench of the outhouses. 

You half expect that all this will be redeemed--Vera will make a good friend, discover unsuspected abilities, connect with the outdoors, or all three, and it will turn out to be a wonderful experience. And she does make a friend, discover new abilities, and connect with the outdoors (seeing a moose in the wild one night), but no, she does not really have that great a time, and she is immensely relieved when her mother says no, Vera does not have to return next year.

Summer camp can be a great thing, and most kids love it or learn to love it, but still it's great to have a candid, crisply drawn, and moving account from one of the kids who did not love it.

Zadie Smith, _Intimations_

 NOT TO BE mistaken for Smith’s next essay collection, I take it, as it does not include “What Do We Want History to Do to Us?” nor the astonishing “Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction.” It’s a short book (just under 100 small [7” x 5”] pages) of short essays or sketches written in the earlier days of the pandemic. 

Nonetheless, not to be missed. The great thing about Smith is that she sweeps us up to the intellectual heights for one beat, then huddles with us down in the trenches the next, as if she is the seminar room and out on the street at exactly the same time, as if Susan Sontag tried to do standup comedy and turned out to be really good at it.

The title essay is a gem—well, the whole book is a gem, worth including in toto whenever the next collection of essays occurs, but that collection definitely ought at least to include “Intimations,” which is mainly a list, with short, sometimes cryptic explanations, of people to whom Smith feels indebted and for whom she is grateful.