Weekly Readings #168 (04/21/25-04/27/25)

whispers of immortality

A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.

This week my new novel, Major Arcana, was officially released from Belt Publishing. You can order it here and wherever books are sold online; you might also, if you’d like to get it legitimately for free, ask your public library to order a copy; you might finally purchase it in bulk and leave it in hotel drawers. Thanks to everyone who bought it and everyone who will buy it. Thanks to everyone who wrote about it or will write about it. Thanks to everyone who came to the Pittsburgh release event on April 17, and thanks to everyone who will come to the event at the Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research where I will appear with Ross Barkan, Matthew Gasda, and Julius Taranto on May 8. What follows is a round-up of interviews, reviews, and more, in case you missed any:

• “Tarot, Superheroes, and the Great American Novel”: A rave review coupled with an insightful interview about the book by Denise S. Robbins for The Chicago Review of Books:

  Blending a freewheeling, deeply moving narrative with intellectual and artistic debates, Major Arcana follows graphic novelists, dreamers, and lovers of big ideas through chaotic but deeply felt lives.

• “Major Arcana”: This is a fun and casual live conversation held on release day about many aspects of the novel with Substack’s own Mary Jane Eyre; we talk about my influences, Catholic aesthetics, the future of love, sex, and nature, a way out of culture-war polarization, the erotic power of ugliness, the meaning of magic, why manifestation works, and more.¹

• “An Interview with One of the Most Generous Critics on Substack”: Naomi Kanakia provides a kind introduction to my work and transcribes a friendly, revealing conversation we had over Zoom:

  Whatever you think novels ought to be, Major Arcana is at least within spitting distance of that thing. Which is kind of shocking, because I’m used to very-online literary figures writing things that are more overtly dismissive of form. In Pistelli’s case, the ambition isn’t to destroy or remake the novel, but to rejuvenate it.

• “Fiction: ‘Major Arcana’ by John Pistelli”: The great Sam Sacks leads the fiction section of the Wall Street Journal—how far we’ve come!—with a review of Major Arcana, balancing admiration for its ambition with a genial skepticism toward the novel’s rather polemical or even barbaric maximalism:

  Mr. Pistelli explores the consequences of such hubris, but his real interest lies in the daring and ambition of myth-making. “Major Arcana” has the characteristics of a superhero—or, rather, antihero—epic. It’s grandiose and declamatory, as well as bloated and pretentious. The author favors in-your-face stylistic affects (sic), the most inescapable being the decision to honor Simon’s rejection of pronouns whenever he’s the subject of the text… Still, it should be remembered that I am a national-newspaper critic, the very definition of an establishment² gatekeeper. What kind of outsider novel would this really be if I found it easy to like?

• “Let’s Get Real About Queer Sex”: Mary Jane Eyre returns with a typically wise and wide-ranging essay for The Republic of Letters that reads Major Arcana alongside the aforementioned Naomi Kanakia’s The Default World³ as exemplars of sexuality in our time:

  Speaking about psychedelic experiences, John Pistelli’s Major Arcana, newly out from Belt Publishing, is a true revelation of the collective unconscious. The results are not always pretty, from crossdressing homosexual rapists to nullification surgery. But in the words of one of the novel’s protagonists, the gender-deviant turned gender-abolitionist Simon Magnus, it is “both dishonest and dangerous to deny the horror squirming underneath everything — underneath everyone, no matter what they’re wearing or if they’re otherwise discriminated against or whatever.”

• “Book Review: Major Arcana by John Pistelli”: Gnocchic Apocryphon puts the novel in the context both of my earlier work, creative and critical, and of the magical war between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison whose lurid glare colors my own narrative:

  It could perhaps be argues that the act of placing the word "Major" in the title of John Pistelli’s fourth novel is an act of manifestation of the sort that his nonbinary-ish influencer protagonist would encourage from her online viewers, but the fact remains that Major Arcana is a significant step up from his earlier fictions, and one of the most exciting books of 2025 thus far. […] Major Arcana is a deeply Morrisonian text even as the text within within a text belongs very clearly to Alan Moore’s influence, and it is moreover a Morrisonian text which seeks to work a kind of countermagick on Morrison’s vision at its most threatening.

More reviews and interviews—I’ve spoken to everyone but Jeffrey Goldberg so far—will appear in the coming days and weeks. After that, I’ll dial down the self-promotion. Maybe.

Speaking of self-promotion, I continue to add to the ever-expanding archive of The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. We’re now in the midst of a sequence on modern western world literature in translation from Goethe to Borges. This week, I posted a new episode, “The Stage Is Empty,” a guide to the revolutionizing of the modern drama accomplished around the turn of the 20th century by Henrik Ibsen and Anton Chekhov. These two, I argue, are only “realists” in a deceptive and contingent sense; really, they assemble onstage the paraphernalia of realism to get it into one place and then clear it away, thus preparing the void of modernism shortly to devour the boards in the likes of Samuel Beckett, himself the subject of a 2024 episode. Next week: further adventures in modernism with Proust, part one. Thanks to all my present and future paid subscribers!

For today, two short pieces. In the first, I resume the unlikely role I assumed a few weeks ago, that of guide to recent Canadian cinema, and review Cronenberg’s latest; in the second, I think about the origin of the writer in a childhood interest in other arts and sciences. Please enjoy!

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Shroud Atlas: In Cronenberg’s Reliquary

The Shrouds trailer

There is much to love in The Shrouds. For all the “human interest” about its meditation on the director’s own grief after he lost his wife, it barely feels like a late work. The old imaginative verve is there, and our auteur didn’t have to get old to get interested in the frailty of the flesh, his most characteristic topos, as I know because I saw The Fly when I was about six years old, and am still recovering. A character even metafictionally quips to the protagonist, “You’ve made a career out of bodies.” Of Cronenberg we might repeat what Eliot rhymed of John Webster:

Webster was much possessed by death	
And saw the skull beneath the skin;	
And breastless creatures under ground	
Leaned backward with a lipless grin.	  

At the film’s heart is Karsh Relikh,⁴ a former maker of “industrial films” turned impresario of a new kind of cemetery, GraveTech: one where an app connects the mourner to the eponymous surveillant shroud in which their deceased loved one is wrapped beneath the earth so the process of decay can observed on the mourner’s phone. The conceit is ingenious, capped mordantly with the funereal high-end restaurant at the center of the GraveTech cemetery. It’s reminiscent of early Cronenberg at his most inventive in the likes of Videodrome and Naked Lunch, and of late Cronenberg with his intensely literary sources and interests, his treatment of Freud and Jung, his adaptation of DeLillo, his collaboration with Wagner, and his interest in the future, early and late, to include his previous film, the startlingly heartening dystopic parable of plastic consumption, Crimes of the Future.⁵

I would have liked The Shrouds more, actually, if it had felt like late work, if it had tried to do less, to exhibit not so much unwholesome vitality. As perhaps a commentary on our era of complexity and conspiratorialism, its plot is impossible to summarize, even if one could separate the characters’ realities from their delusions. This film’s crisis begins when the grieving Karsh observes bone growths on the corpse of his beloved wife, Becca, who died four years ago from cancer. This leads us into a labyrinth involving Becca’s paranoid sister, with whom Karsh has an affair centered on her sexual arousal at the thought of conspiracy; the sister’s ex-husband and Karsh’s tech-support assistant, consumed with erotic jealousy and with political paranoia of his own; a would-be client of Karsh’s, a dying Soros-like magnate, and his beautiful blind wife who seduces Karsh; Karsh’s seductive rogue A.I. assistant Hunny, who may be the brother-in-law’s malware or else an incarnation of Becca; Becca’s oncologist, with whom she had an affair before marrying Karsh, and who has disappeared to Iceland; Icelandic eco-terrorists committed to ensuring that everyone is cremated; and a possible Chinese plot⁶ to use Karsh’s shrouds to surveil the planet.

If the above sounds like too much for a two-hour film, it is—not that I would have preferred to see it extended to three or four hours. With Sam Sacks’s pejoratives no doubt ringing in my ears, I probably would have just jettisoned the political conspiracy and focused the film on the double love triangle among Karsh, Becca, and the doctor, on the one hand, and Karsh and his brother- and sister-in-law on the other, a study of sexual jealousy where the ultimate suitor you must fear will woo your bride is no less than death itself, with the doctor as death’s embassy in a time when we can no longer quite trust the medical profession. CCP plots, A.I. avatars, and Hungarian billionaires seem to me to overcomplicate what might have been a starker and therefore more moving liebestod.

Novelists, playwrights, and filmmakers don’t like to admit this all the time, but, just for once and just between us, a plot is only an excuse, an alibi, a mere and slender thread on which to hang the images of what has to be a poem before and after it is anything else, whether novel or play or film. Cronenberg is one of the few directors whose poetic images have so much integrity that his films barely need any plot. Karsh donning the shroud while alive, his flesh dissolving to sinew and muscle and bone on the screens before him; his wife in a dream being summoned to an assignation with her lover-doctor to have more parts removed from her ample body; the blind lover justifying her presence in the film by gently, hungrily palpating Karsh’s leonine face—these images are worth all the Chinese conspiracies in all of pulp fiction. Cronenberg’s reliquary at its best is more a gallery than a labyrinth. As it is, unfortunately, The Shrouds is entombed in its own complexity.

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Notre Musique: The Personal Origin of Literature in the Other Arts

Amadeo Modigliani, The Cellist (1909)

Just as I was preparing this Weekly Reading, an anon wrote in to my super-secret Tumblr with the following thought:

I recall C. Hitchens saying that the reason he never tried his hand at fiction or poetry was that he, unlike all his friends, had no musical capacity at all and was incapable of describing a musical event in an educated way. And yet I was shocked to read that Nabokov, the supreme stylist, “hated” music. Can’t think of it as anything other than the typical Nabokovian provocation...

While I certainly don’t hate music, I am totally incompetent at and uneducated in it, and yet, unlike Hitchens, I can turn a phrase and spin a yarn. Hitch, come to think of it, could also turn a phrase and spin a yarn, just in the form of journalism rather than fiction or poetry, thus disproving the whole idea that fiction and poetry rely on a musical gift. It occurs to me that no child wants, exactly, to be a writer, not even a child interested in the other arts. A writer is an adult thing to want to be, an adult thing to imagine being.⁷ I didn’t want to be a writer until my teens. Before that, I wanted to be a visual artist, until I hit the natural limit of that talent around the same time I discovered my way with words. The trace of my desire to be an artist can be found in critical remarks like the ones found in the final paragraph of the movie review above. Notice I don’t mention the film’s haunting score or the performances of the actors, just the imagery. Like Nabokov—see his afterword to Lolita—I conceive of my novels as sequences of master images I use the plot to gather and join, as if I were building a cathedral just to have somewhere to put my gargoyles. Architecture is frozen music, as they say, and so the plot is akin to music, not that I can compose music, but the “music” of phrases and sentences is, it seems to me, purely metaphorical, an independent value not quite related to musical value as such, or perhaps at best it is another route to the music for those of us deaf to the notes.

1. Don’t miss MJE’s thematically appropriate t-shirt. Relatedly, a friend asked me what a Major Arcana “swag bag” would contain. I replied:

• Random Rider-Waite-Smith card

• Random Thoth card

• They/them pronoun badge

• Black covid mask

• Lead holder loaded with a soft lead for drawing

• Blank comics-layout journal

• Red lipstick

• Ginger chews

2. Meanwhile, in “establishment” literature, Ben Lerner and the New York Review of Books are publishing poetry in 2025 that sounds like a parody of what Honor Levy and Co. were writing in 2020, “egirl poetry,” as someone quipped:

                                                      So why not put feelers out
On stolen land, throw your feelers in the air
If you’re a good listener, a parasite cool with light choking
The whole language approach to reading instruction
Like the serotonin imbalance theory only gains
Power when debunked. And yet it would be radical
Self-care to gaslight seahorses about gut health now

I may be pretentious—in fact, I am, and proudly; “assume a virtue if you have it not,” as Hamlet told his mother—but at least I’m not a whole half-a-decade late to the zeitgeist.

3. Adam Pearson’s review of Glass Century by Ross Barkan begins by identifying his book and mine as belonging to a movement:

There’s a sense of heightened stakes when the most influential people on literary Substack release their most hyped novels a month apart. With John Pistelli’s Major Arcana, and Ross Barkan’s Glass Century dropping at the bullseye center of the 2020s, the question lingering in every author’s mind, whether Substack can exist as a self-sustaining literary ecosystem for its top novelists may soon have its answer. These two, along with Matthew Gasda who will release Sleepers the same day as Glass Century and Noah Kumin whose Stop All The Clocks arrives in June, have been the central figures of what has long been speculated to be an emergent new romanticism in the literary world. The degree to which each of these writers personally accepts the label varies as much as the romantic elements within the novels themselves. Glass Century in particular shares far more DNA with Balzac than Blake, and though I have yet to read it, I’d be quite shocked if the same were true of Major Arcana. And yet, why not think of it as a unified movement? Even if its present state is more aligned in its objections to contemporary literary trends than any obvious aesthetic sensibilities, they are in closer conversation than many movements of the past. If the simple conception of “Romanticism” as a “thematic development that turns away from contemporary forms of fiction and develops its own contrasting kind” is good enough for Northrop Frye, it’s certainly good enough for the rest of us, even it remains to be seen if a “contrasting” form emerges.

I didn’t read beyond this paragraph in the review because I’m a third of the way through the suspenseful Glass Century myself and am trying to avoid spoilers, but this has been an interesting test of the power of a movement, which I wrote about here in the context not of the Romantics but of the modernists, to generate discourse about and interest in individual texts and authors. It turns out it’s easier to capture the citadel of culture, or the fiction page of the Wall Street Journal, with an army. On the other hand, unless I have not been admitted to the inmost group chat or something, this has all been far less coordinated than I used to imagine such things were when I was purely on the outside and annoyed by what I took to be cryptic maneuverings. The Marxists are right and the conspiracists wrong: convergent interests, not secret plots, really do explain everything. Anyway, and speaking of Marxism, based on Udith Dematagoda’s Lukácsian review of Glass Century and conversation with Ross—which again I skimmed to avoid spoilers—I wonder if it doesn’t make more sense to speak of the New Realism: Ross’s social realism, Matthew’s psychological realism, my magical realism. And finally, let us widen our lens here. This literary renaissance launched from Substack began, I would say, a year ago, with the three novels I reviewed last spring: Udith’s Agonist, Naomi’s The Default World, and Vivienne by Emmalea Russo. Demonstrating the basic honesty of this “scene” or “movement,” its house organ, The Metropolitan Review, panned two of those—see here and here—in ways I personally found to miss the point, but then that’s criticism, and, as Oscar said, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. I did my own apologia for writing about these books in my essay on The Sleepers, and will be writing about Glass Century, probably next week, and Stop All the Clocks shortly after that.

4. In almost the same shot where this punning surname is revealed, Karsh says that the shroud technology is “encrypted,” and then adds, “Pun intended.” I wonder if this is Cronenberg’s comment on the decline of film critics’ intelligence.

5. Please see my comments on Crimes of the Future here. For a darker take on the present and future, see my piece on Cronenberg fils’s film, Possessor, including its Canadian context. And while I enjoyed Brandon’s more recent film, the Ballardian tropical-tourist-gothic Infinity Pool, I don’t have much to say about it, as it wears its themes proudly.

6. While this plot is possibly (and possibly not) a delusion of the characters, I was still startled to see such latter-day neo-Cold-Warrior ideation at all in this type of “cultural product,” cosmopolitan and ironical. Then again, I had to make a pilgrimage to downtown Pittsburgh to see the film. On the way, I passed the famous Benedum Center for the Performing Arts, where a spectacularly, surprisingly huge and diverse crowd was massing to see Shen Yun, which I only know about from an old Red Scare episode. Maybe we really are going to war with China.

7. An exaggeration for effect. Cronenberg wanted to be a writer before he wanted to be a director, hence perhaps the occasionally exaggerated plotting of his films, which sometimes works, as when he makes more sense of Naked Lunch than Burroughs did, and sometimes doesn’t, as in The Shrouds. I wanted to be not so much a visual artist as an all-around comic-book artist-writer, thus my thinking of word and image as a unity: of imagery as visual language, and of literature as always, even when it least appears to be, an ekphrasis.