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This week, my colleague Lily Meyer explored “what happened to the radicals.” In his article, he was writing about a plot type shared by several recent books, including the Oscar-winning film. One Battle After Another. These works follow aging revolutionaries who have left the war after being forced into hiding or choosing to raise a family; others are just tired of the struggle. Meyer’s essay reminded me of another classic story in fiction, which may seem to follow a different path but actually runs a similar course. You can call it “what happened to the followers.”
First, here are three new stories from AtlanticBook Section:
In some ways, the rebel-goes-to-seed story mirrors a plot found in 20th-century literature: that of the Everyman who has lost his youthful dream of pursuing happiness. Consider Rabbit Angstrom, the hero of a series of four novels by John Updike-each volume was written over a decade, as an old high school basketball event witnessed, and experienced, the decline of the middle-class American dream. Rabbit marries young, lives in the suburbs, eventually takes over his father-in-law’s car, and claws his way to success. He is patriotic by nature, and also entitled, selfish, and more than a little racist. The reader has many reasons to hate him, but they can also grow to love him—because Updike paints them so skillfully, but also because Rabbit’s journey is so ordinary. Who does not feel on top of the world at the age of 25, and tired and at least a touch disappointed 30 years later?
The writer’s journey is described by so many white, male mid-century writers—Philip Roth, John Cheever, Richard Yates—that it can feel like a story past its prime. But classics are always ripe for a revamp, and a recent book managed to make this one feel fresh. In the recent past Atlantic essayIsle McElroy called Jordy Rosenberg’s Day of Night “a haunting and dark portrait of a mind reduced by passion.”
Barbara, the novel’s narrator, resents her gender-nonconforming son even as she cares for him in his dying days. McElroy calls the novel, of which the author is a translator, “an autobiographical text from a marginal distance” — a story of prejudice told through the eyes of an outsider. Yet Barbara is more than a foil; Rosenberg charts the life of a woman who dreamed of rising in status, of moving from working-class Brooklyn to the Upper East Side on the arm of a surgeon. When this fails to happen—and her hopes of marrying the perfect daughter are dashed—Barbara grows resentful and ultimately delusional. The reader may be tempted to hate him, but he is very funny and very sad. And his story, like Rabbit’s, is universal: Life was not what he expected.
Most of Barbara’s dreams are superficial and retrograde. Her morals—along with her extreme rigidity about gender roles—separate her from her only child and place her in an inescapable state of disillusionment. The reader may see his loneliness as a desert but still mourns his losses. Meyer, in his essay, speculates that the “message that audiences really want” from stories of past revolutions is that “extremists cannot win.” The comfort and direction in Updike’s and Rosenberg’s work comes from realizing that in most cases, followers can’t win either.
How Long Can You Live By Your Morals?
Written by Lily Meyer
Stories about revolutionaries seem to attract readers and moviegoers—especially if they don’t end well.
What to Read
Other Mindsand Peter Godfrey-Smith
A philosopher of science wrote this book, so readers should expect some heavy intellectual lifting, but I promise it’s worth the effort. In Other MindsGodfrey-Smith—a lifelong, near-fatal diver from Australia and, more recently, a world-class underwater scuba diver and videographer—tries to understand the inner life of octopuses, not by watching them in captivity or for short periods in their habitat but from the perspective of someone who spent years in a reserve. the ocean floor. This book goes beyond analyzing their behavior: As a philosopher, Godfrey-Smith considers the nature of consciousness, using the evolutionary development of animals to theorize about the similarities between their minds and ours. At one point, in what felt like a long, long rant about cuttlefish, I realized I was actually reading an explanation for why animals, including us, die.. I was challenged again and again, scribbling away, sighing. If you are going to read one book this year, I would recommend this one. – Deb Olin Unferth
From our list: Nine books to reset your worldview
It will be out next week
📚 Attention: Writing about Life, Art, and the Worldby Anne Enright
Your weekend Read
All of us The Real Housewives Now
By Michael Waters
Like that Housewives formula has become part of the structure of pop culture, its ambiguous relationship with “authenticity” has accompanied the emergence of a beautiful idea in entertainment: that people’s private lives cannot be separated from their public achievements. The idea has now spread beyond the borders of TV. In a world of fractured attention spans, many celebrities have become accustomed to mining their personal dramas to stay on top of their viewers’ feeds. It doesn’t matter that the ratings are down on cable; as relevant today, as in 2006, it holds anyone still listening.
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