5 Reviews You Need to Read This Week

Our feast of fantastic reviews this week includes Andrea Long Chu on Thomas Chatterton Williams’ Summer of Our Discontent, Walton Muyumba on Jamaica Kincaid’s Putting Myself Together, Rav Grewal-Kök on Elliot Ackerman’s Sheepdogs, Sue Halpern on Laila Lalami’s The Dream Hotel, and Kyle Paoletta on Richard Parker’s The Crossing.

“He has often imagined himself an heir of Baldwin; here, he could not sound more like Buckley. Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse offers a roughly chronological account of the past two decades, from the 2008 election to the protests for Gaza. But editorial indulgence has resulted in such a sludge of footnotes and block quotes that the eye must often dismount and continue on foot. The reader will find here no argument she could not have inferred from the titles of a dozen identical books on wokeness; nothing has been added but sentences.

…

“It may interest Williams to know that the left is perfectly well aware of how large corporations and their designated intellectuals have co-opted social justice since the summer of 2020. Recent books like Olúfemi O. Táíwò’s Elite Capture and Jennifer C. Pan’s Selling Social Justice both offer compelling (if limited) accounts of this process, whose absurdity rarely taxes one’s skills of observation. (Pan quotes a June 2020 tweet from the official Twitter account of a popular fruit snack: ‘Gushers wouldn’t be Gushers without the Black community.’) But Williams assumes that the institutional uptake of progressive ideas—the ones that yielded DEI programs, greater diversity in Hollywood, and Pride collaborations with designer brands—represents a win for the progressive left and not, as it almost certainly is, a net loss. As Pan observes, the same companies that created DEI departments in 2020 have ‘simultaneously engaged in tax evasion, union busting, and relentless political lobbying to roll back labor protections.’ Any good Marxist can tell you that the ruling class of any nation will frequently make social concessions as a way of buttressing its brute political power with moral credibility.

…

“When writers like Williams speak of social justice today, they are referring almost exclusively to the management of large companies, elite schools, and nonprofits backed by the wealthy. And why? Because critics of social justice tend to inhabit the exact professional milieu where social justice has been most thoroughly integrated with the endless pursuit of profit. It does not occur to Williams to ask why a Fortune 100 company would solicit a lecture from Thomas Chatterton Williams, a Black public intellectual who, just like Kendi, tells people how to feel about race for a living. The social-justice warriors whom Williams most despises are not looters or rioters. They are people he encounters in the literary magazines he admires, at the conferences he is invited to, and among his students and colleagues at Bard College; many of them are Obama Democrats whom he once regarded as comrades in the post-racial project. Liberal intellectuals like Williams have thus experienced the rise of DEI less as a generalized threat to the democratic order and more as a personal betrayal by the institutions that they had, until recently, believed it was their job to defend. What they fear most is that liberals like them have been seduced by illiberal habits of thought. In other words, the greatest danger is not the barbarians at the gate; it’s the barbarians safely behind it.

…

“One of the principal goals of the protests of 2020 was therefore to seize the means of expression: protesters were not exercising their right to speak freely so much as they were trying to amass a form of social influence that could meaningfully compete at a national level. In other words, they were starting a newspaper; what Williams hates is that people started reading it. The fact is that telling a voiceless person they have free speech is like telling a poor person they have freedom of money: Nice work if you can get it! Williams might respond that a person who finds their ability to speak curtailed does not thereby lose their capacity to think…But a thought without expression, like a soul without a body, is just as good as dead. Surely we cannot comfort ourselves with the idea that the brutal neck restraint that kept George Floyd from breathing nonetheless could not keep him from thinking. For in the end, we know it did.

…

“Another way to put this is that all social movements are also intellectual movements: They both contribute to and rely on the ideological groundwater of society. Williams would have us believe that someone who smashes a storefront window in Minneapolis or pitches a tent in Morningside Heights is engaged in the opposite of thinking. But the panicking ruling class wasn’t just interested in flattening the encampments or quelling the looters; it wanted to crush the ideas that these things represented.”

–Andrea Long Chu on Thomas Chatterton Williams’ Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse (Vulture)

“Kincaid was also writing for The Village Voice, Ms., and Rolling Stone, where she published essays like 1977’s ‘Jamaica Kincaid’s New York’ and ‘Antigua Crossings: A Deep and Blue Passage on the Caribbean Sea’ in 1978. These essays demonstrate, on one hand, that very early in her career, she’d identified the elemental music of her unique prose style (Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s introduction explains that Kincaid writes with ‘a driving, unremitting eye—though never without humor’) and, on the other hand, that in her Caribbean familial story she’d located the limestone foundation on which to build her future efforts in fiction and nonfiction. Kincaid had already begun cultivating an array of overlapping, perennial obsessions: matriarchal power and mothers (specifically her own), banishment and excommunication from family structures, the British empire, colonial literary education, Antigua, and travel.

…

“Kincaid iterates certain anecdotes and histories, both intimate and colonial, because her conception of the essay form demands a kind of elliptical experimentation, recycling expulsions, eras, poems, slavers, sailors, and crimes to reveal new layers of insight and truth.

Though Kincaid is most frequently identified as an accomplished novelist…her masterpiece may be her book-length travel essay about the failures of British colonialism and Antiguan postcolonial governance, A Small Place (1988). I have read the paperback copy I purchased in 1995 so frequently and closely that the book, which radically rearranged my mind, must be stored in an envelope to keep its loose pages contained. Not only does Putting Myself Together pick up threads from A Small Place it extends and amplifies the claim forwarded by her turn of the century books…that Kincaid is a master of literary nonfiction’s multifarious forms.”

–Walton Muyumba on Jamaica Kincaid’s Putting Myself Together (The Boston Globe)

“Ackerman shepherds his cast through a brisk and occasionally implausible plot. Though his tone is light, he regularly reminds the reader of the lifelong shadow war casts on the men who fight.

Late in the book, when the action has shifted to Kyiv, Uncle Tony notices that his waiter’s cheeks are disfigured by tiny black bumps: ‘pieces of fragmentation, as fine as sand, pushing their way out of his face.’ In these moments, it’s as if a different, more somber novel has emerged.

The most closely observed—and moving—passage in the book recounts the raid in Now Zad at the end of Sqwerl’s service. Many of its details match those revealed in a USA Today investigation of a 2008 night raid that Ackerman, then a decorated Marine captain, led into the western Afghan village of Azizabad in search of a high-ranking Taliban commander.

In both the novel and the report, Afghan fighters—many of them with day jobs as American security contractors—fire from the rooftops as the Marines penetrate a warren of mud-walled compounds. The Americans call in air support from an AC-130 gunship, whose 105-millimeter cannon does its relentless work. Daylight reveals a scene of devastation: Afghan corpses strewn in the rubble of collapsed buildings. The heavy death toll prompts a series of investigations. Later, a request under the Freedom of Information Act reveals Sqwerl’s real name, as it did Ackerman’s.

There’s a key difference, however. The casualties in the novel are all Afghan men. But in life, the United Nations found that 60 children died in Azizabad, along with 30 other civilians. Some truths are too grim, perhaps, for fiction.”

–Rav Grewal-Kök on Elliot Ackerman’s Sheepdogs (The New York Times Book Review)

“For good and for ill, El Paso del Norte has always played an outsize role in the continent’s economic and geopolitical life, one that extends far beyond the borderlands. So what can we learn from it? The late journalist Richard Parker tries to answer that question in The Crossing: El Paso, the Southwest, and America’s Forgotten Origin Story, a tender biography of his often-overlooked hometown. Calling El Paso ‘the unacknowledged cradle of American history,’ Parker focuses on the flexible multiculturalism of El Paso; he argues that its heritage as a Spanish settlement represents a better foundation for understanding contemporary America than the unyielding racial hierarchy of the English colonies.

…

“Reconciling this split-screen view of the Southwest—one of the nation’s most diverse regions on the one hand and fertile ground for Trumpism on the other—through the story of El Paso means interrogating how the city’s demographic and economic histories intertwined to produce today’s desert metropolis. If the counterintuitive political realignment of the US is visible anywhere, it’s in this city of stark sunlight and unembellished mountains, a place, as the novelist Dagoberto Gilb put it, where the truth is ‘not beauty-parlored well enough.’

…

“Parker died shortly after The Crossing was published. Since then, the book has taken on a feeling of legacy, representing both a fitting memorial to Parker’s extraordinary journalism career and his dogged love for El Paso. He, like so many Southwesterners, left home to search for opportunity, finding it as a foreign correspondent reporting from war zones in Latin American, the Balkans, and the Middle East. When Parker returned to El Paso on a reporting trip in 2018, he found it ‘a blue-collar, tattooed town, where trucks and trains rumbled north and south all day and night, against a skyline that was more refinery and railyard than skyscraper and green space.’ All told, ‘El Paso had among the highest illiteracy rates in America, the crummiest health care, and the most epic poverty.’

…

“If the Southwest is a model for the rest of the country, its demographic profile is only part of the story. At the same time we celebrate the diversity of America, we must contend with the damage wrought by decades of trade policies written by and for big business. What would happen if working-class El Pasoans celebrated their hometown as more than just another link in the supply chain? There’s no better place than the center of the border between America and our closest trading partner for laborers to reclaim their homeland’s historic status as a hub of human connection, regardless of what box they check on the census form.”

–Kyle Paoletta on Richard Parker’s The Crossing: El Paso, the Southwest, and America’s Forgotten Origin Story (The Nation)