Character Studies
Having read one Rachel Cusk novel, and intensely disliking its flat narrative voice, I was grateful for Becca Rothfeld’s review of Cusk’s latest book, “Life of M” (Books, August 24th & 31st). Rothfeld’s analysis clarified my understanding of my own reaction. In books such as “Anna Karenina,” we encounter particular lives, lived in textured and convincing times and places. Though Tolstoy begins the novel by telling us that all happy families are alike, he ironically insists on tracing the obstacles his characters face. Nothing about them is abstract or general; as a result, we are with them. This is what fiction has offered us and can still offer us.
Julie Diamond
New York City
As someone who was once mesmerized by Cusk’s “Outline” trilogy, I read Rothfeld’s critique with interest and, eventually, embarrassment. Were the novels really so intent on narrowly subjectivizing the world? Were some of the lines really that cheesy? Rothfeld is right that Cusk’s project of dismantling personhood can leave us with a void that is actually personhood radicalized, and thus anything but insightful or liberating. But I wonder if she has missed what made the trilogy so meaningful to many of us: the novels’ sharp depiction of the existential drift and dread that overwhelm the self when the structures that constituted it collapse.
To me, the “Outline” trilogy remains an original meditation on the old adage that we don’t know what we’ve got until it’s gone. We want to believe that the structures of a life and a self are like muscles: after being torn, they grow stronger. Cusk suggests something harsher and truer. Our selves can shatter without the relief of annihilation, leaving fragments that remain recognizably ours but can no longer make a whole. And, when the self fragments, we become hungrier for meaning. We subjectivize the world and grasp at pseudo-philosophical pronouncements because they might contain what we now lack. The trilogy’s conversations enact this dialectic of disappointment and discovery. We tire of the grandiosity and then suddenly encounter an insight that cuts more deeply because it has been sharpened by the rubble.
All this is more moving when staged within the novels than when taken up as an external, reflexive attempt to dismantle plot and character. Rothfeld is right to ask whether anything is left after the demolition, and righter still to suggest that Cusk’s project has run its course. But the riveting middle of that journey was worth the disappointment of watching it peter out.
Edward Hahn
Columbia Heights, Minn.
Last Gifts
I enjoyed Alexandra Schwartz’s report about death doulas and the evolution of hospice care (“End of Story,” August 17th). A detail many readers may have missed was the suggestion by the doula Virginia Chang that her client Eleanor Lennard donate her brain to science, and Lennard’s enthusiastic response. As a neuropathologist with a long career in clinical and research practice looking directly at the postmortem human brain, I can attest that donations like this are extremely valuable. Clinical biomarkers and neuroimaging do not hold all the answers; many disorders—such as Alzheimer’s and some types of strokes—still require postmortem analysis for diagnostic confirmation. Such donations offer many other public-health benefits. (It’s also worth noting that these donations cannot be made simply by having “organ donor” on one’s I.D. but must go through either a brain bank or the National Institutes of Health.)
R. D. Folkerth, M.D.
High Falls, N.Y.
Fit to Print
Although I otherwise appreciated Zach Helfand’s dispatch from the Old News Newsstand, which sells outdated copies of newspapers, there was one word in the piece that stood out to me as old news (The Talk of the Town, August 10th). Describing the owner’s appearance, Helfand writes that he wore a “button-down, unbuttoned, over a wifebeater.”
As an editor, I have at times found it hard to keep up with the number of progressive-leaning changes that institutions such as the A.P. have introduced to English-language stylebooks in recent years, but if I’d seen “wifebeater” nixed, I would’ve calmly agreed. Sure, the term is evocative for American readers, but it deeply offends some—by implying that people who wear them are prone to domestic violence—and makes no sense whatsoever to people from other countries. I once had to explain the term to a Pakistani colleague in a newsroom. Coming from a place where domestic violence is an endemic issue, she was aghast, and rightly insisted that we go with “sleeveless undershirt.” The New Yorker might consider the same.
Ellery Roberts Biddle
Philadelphia, Pa.
If Aaron Reiss, the proprietor of the Old News Newsstand, really wants to specialize in the sale of stale news, he cannot responsibly omit the Los Angeles Times from his inventory. For a nominal sum, the paper each day serves up authoritative accounts of sports events that occurred as much as a day earlier, give or take. Perhaps that delay is the result of an idiosyncratic printing schedule. Some subscribers, of course, are unbothered that the L.A. Times delivers news more in the style of Pheidippides than Hermes. For that demographic, form is everything, and the paper acquits its pledge that every dog must have its daily.
Mark Steinberg
Los Angeles, Calif.
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