Weekly Readings #175 (06/09/25-06/15/25)

America's margins

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

Almost two months after its publication, my new novel Major Arcana continues to receive attention: everything from the breathless accolade to somewhat repulsed fascination.¹ If you’d like to know what this salutary disturbance in the literary field is all about, you can order Major Arcana in all formats (print, Kindle, and audio) here and in print wherever books are sold online. I will highlight a few new responses here.

First is an interview with the perceptive Theodore Anderson of NewCityLit. I had a great hour-long phone conversation with the perceptive Theodore, and in this transcript and condensation I clarify a few points about the novel’s themes and context. I will just quote the interview’s generous introduction here:

“Major Arcana” is an expansive novel anchored by two protagonists a generation apart: Simon Magnus, a once-famous comic book writer whose disturbing and transcendent work led him to a position as a permanent adjunct professor; and Ash del Greco, one of his students, an online occultist with a spiral-scarred face and a conviction “that the human mind is superior to the totality of the real.” Written by John Pistelli, a professor (most recently at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities), literary blogger and novelist, “Major Arcana” was originally serialized on Pistelli’s Substack in weekly installments released over eleven months.

His novel works backwards from and then back through a staggering opening: a public suicide—of one of Simon Magnus’ students, videoed by one Ash del Greco—on a university campus. Thorough and lush, the narrative moves through decades, through childhoods and parents’ childhoods, delving into multiple consciousnesses to imbue fiction with the overwhelming texture and causality of the real. Dealing in art, dysphoria, tarot, manifestation, magic, experimental and classic literature, as well as suicide, “Major Arcana” is a great contemporary novel of America’s margins.

In the venerable New Statesman, George Monaghan considers the whole congeries of transatlantic male novelists taking this summer by storm. He amusingly contrasts the bombastic rhetoric of the Americans with the humble reticence of the Britons; then, proving that bombastic rhetoric usually works just the way the rhetor wants it to in this fallen world of ours, he places Ross Barkan and me at the center (or centre) of things:

Then we have two books resembling late-20th-century American “everything novels”, of near-Victorian scale. English teacher John Pistelli’s Major Arcana is a well-told ricochet that starts with a vibrant suicide. Three-pieces-a-week political columnist Ross Barkan’s unflaggingly bright New York saga Glass Century involves three generations of a family, five decades of world events, and 600 pages. These two contains the half-dozen’s highest descriptive and emotional moments – and not just because they are the only ones unabashed about trying for them.

Speaking of men, my publisher Anne Trubek looks back on Major Arcana a year after the book deal and, after assuring readers I received no gender-based affirmative action, considers what the novel’s mode of production might mean for Substack in relation to fiction:

What interested me about Major Arcana vis a vis Substack is that it was originally serialized. If you read it, you will notice how each chapter as a certain wholeness, a form, one that is based on its original publication as standalone chapters (that were also part of a whole). The novel contains the traces of its own production. I find that an enormously fascinating aspect of the work, and one that it will carry into the future, much as “cliffhanger” has become an integral part of literary works due it its roots in how suspense can be built, and comes from the ending of a Thomas Hardy novel.

Finally, one Moo Cat contributes a long, insightful essay² reading Major Arcana through the lens of a 2013 album of the same name by the indie band Speedy Ortiz (note the comic-book-derived name). While not exactly liking her,³ our bovine-feline critic nonetheless offers a great reading of my own favorite character, Ash del Greco, as the synthesis of all the novel’s other characters:

Ash del Greco has some of the best parts of Major Arcana and some of the worst. These 35 pages (what Valerie Stivers contemptuously called “backstory”) is the best part. All of the accumulated genius and neuroticism of del Greco’s four parents (Simon Magnus, Diane del Greco, Marco Cohen, and Ellen Chandler) is synthesized in various ways in one character, and this section lays it all out there: she’s got Magnus’s ambition and attraction to darkness, del Greco’s tendency to be utterly subsumed by others (Ari Alterhaus and Jacob Morrow), Cohen’s misanthropy, and Chandler’s deadpan irony.

But enough about Major Arcana! (“Enough! or too much!” as the poet said.) This week, The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers, entered a new phase, a veritable Renaissance, a summer of Shakespeare and Milton. We began with “Of Imagination All Compact,” both an introduction to the Bard’s life and times and an original reading of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.⁴ In that episode, among other things, I renew my polemic against alternative Shakespeare authorship theories, a topic also raised in last summer’s Invisible College series on Joyce’s Ulysses, available in the College’s ever-expanding archive. As I write on the eve of Bloomsday, I encourage anyone embarking on Ulysses anytime soon to use that archive as your guide. Thanks to all my current and future paid subscribers!

For today, a link round-up with commentary. Please enjoy!

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Peak Link: This Week, This Platform

Renata Cogui, Hyperlink 09 (2020)

My fellow authors on this platform are writing extensive essays on the direction of literature, culture, and politics more quickly than I can read them. Meanwhile, I feel uninspired in those areas right now, content to hide out with my complete Shakespeare. All eras are rightly said to be transitional eras; I can’t help but sense, however, that we are in a more transformational and transitory moment than usual, in (pick your weary commonplace) the calm before the storm or the eye of the hurricane. The event horizon of the black hole we’re about to be sucked into ripples darkly on the distance, but I can’t see over that undulating rim, that agitated frond of the catastrophe. While we await the apocalypse, then, which I could mean in as innocent a sense as “revelation,” here are some links to a few of the essays that have circulated lately with interpolated commentary of my own.

First, at The Republic of Letters, Mary Jane Eyre, using Matthew and myself as evidence, identifies the figure of “the Romanticon”:

The Romanticon avoids explicit political identification. He (most Romanticons are assigned male at birth) prefers to discuss higher things. He is probably straight, maaaybe heteroflexible, but cool with the gays. Not into drugs, but doesn’t make a big deal about it. He likely had some sort of religious upbringing, for which he is mostly grateful, even if he is no longer observant, preferring to follow what Oscar Wilde called “the Spirit of the Christ who is not in churches.” He is not afraid that Jungian archetypes imply some sort of the metaphysical fascism — he considers them to be mere “philosophical toys,” like Freud’s images of the mind and Plato’s Forms to be used in the kinds of glass bead games which he finds increasingly tiresome. He is probably named Mark or Luke or something similarly apostolic. He doesn’t go to therapy. He likes his bourgeoisie the way he likes his women: petite. In general, he prefers the small and the local: the seminar room, the family restaurant, the independent bookstore. (He might even make an eco-socialist case for Palestine.)

I don’t mind a big city, I’ve just never been able to afford to live in one; I don’t mind bigness in general, though I do appreciate the unique aesthetic virtues, the urban pastoral, offered by mini-metropolises of the Pittsburgh or Dublin or Florence type. No eco-socialism here, however. I am an aestheto-individualist instead. “Eco”-anything always seems like a needless slur on the human to me, and anyway, “the art itself is nature.” But otherwise, sure, “Romanticon,” why not? The left, both center- and far-, still looks pretty moribund to me, so it’s probably still a choice of “cons” for now.⁵

Also at The Republic of Letters, Lillian Wang Selonick writes acutely about “worldbuilding” and its discontents.

The rise of worldbuilding is a distinct but related corollary to the growing dominance of nerd media in popular culture. Like many passionate nerds who grew up reading science fiction in the ‘90s and earlier, I have a chip on my shoulder when it comes to genre. For the first half of my life and many decades before I was born, speculative fiction had been relegated to the ghetto of genre in American literary life. The mainstream literary establishment in this country has long condescended to writers and readers of science fiction, decreeing a sharp divide between them and those of “serious” literary fiction.

This essay should be read in tandem with Henry Begler’s fine piece on the social realist novel redux:

History is moving again. It’s not exactly that the novel is moving with it. As one of the authors I discuss below once told me, the novel is in fact becoming so marginalized that it doesn’t really matter what you do anymore, the writer can practice his art as he chooses, safe in the knowledge that the chances of making it are small and the rewards if he does are more modest than ever. So space for outward ambition has, counterintuitively, been opened up, and perhaps that, as well as the massive social changes afoot, accounts for the signs I have seen of a recent turn away from self-interrogation and towards examining the great wheel of society upon which we rise and fall. Kafka in his journal once quipped that on the handle of Balzac’s cane was inscribed “I break all obstacles,” while Kafka’s cane would have to be inscribed “all obstacles break me.” I wouldn’t want to live without either writer, but it seems fair to let the Balzacs have their say for a while.

Just as Biblical literalism is not archaic but ultra-modern, an application of Enlightenment assumptions about verifiable fact to previously allegorical readings of scripture, so science fiction and fantasy’s “worldbuilding” is an imitation of the social realist novel, which built the bourgeois world in words, itself an imitation of the historical novel, which sought to rebuild the pre-bourgeois world in words. First Scott; then Balzac; then Frank Herbert. As a paid-up modernist, a devotee of Joyce and Woolf and Faulkner more than I am of Scott or Balzac or Herbert, I can’t help but think more attention is required both to the psyche that intends to build and the words the builder uses as material. (Hence Henry’s implication that social novels including interiority are more interesting than ones without.) Despite Lillian’s brilliant attention to the division between “literature” and “genre” using the counterintuitively redemptive figure of the ghetto, this division runs through both sides.⁶ It may separate Joyce and Woolf from Balzac and Scott, but may also separate Le Guin and Delany from Clarke and Herbert.⁷

Naomi Kanakia, meanwhile, demonstrates what all this discourse is even for when she asserts that literary culture needs and is rapidly receiving a fandom of its own, which we might read as its own redemptive “ghetto” in the sense Lillian uses the word above:

For a long time, highbrow culture didn’t really have a fandom. All the fan activity happened offscreen—at readings in New York or in the pages of literary periodicals. Now that’s different: there are a large number of people on Substack, and on TikTok, who are reading and discussing highbrow literature.

I’d say these fandoms have been developing, if inchoately, over the last decade. There’s not a single literary fandom, but several and sometimes dueling ones. Substack-novelism is the latest, but brodernism and literary-it-girlism preceded it. Literary-it-girlism may have been the first, and we may have been premature to mock the publicists who were sending out first novels with bottles of nail polish circa 2019. Literary historians may say the current literary period, The Norton Anthology of American Literature’s not-yet-existent Volume F, began with My Year of Rest and Relaxation.

To say “fandom” is to say “Katherine Dee,” so please see her skeptical remarks on that panic article in the New York Times about AI psychosis.⁸ Not that AI isn’t causing psychosis, but all new media (including the novel, when it was new) does—that’s Katherine’s point—and probably in people who were going to be psychotic anyway.

But what we might be witnessing is the convergence of a centuries-old belief—that consciousness can reshape reality through will and word—with a technology that makes that belief true in a way that not even the internet did.

We can reshape reality through will and word—why on earth would you bother to write a book if we couldn’t?—but you have to be strong-willed in the first place to handle this idea at all. Speaking of psychosis, I am totally open to the idea that interdimensional entities are coming through the AI, but interdimensional entities are just more entities, like those in this dimension, whom I would not allow to tell me what to do.

1. Ross’s appearance last week reminded me that I still have a paid subscription to Bret Easton Ellis’s podcast, so I’ve been catching up on old episodes. In one, Bret’s guest Lili Anolik, Babitz elegist and Didion skeptic, observes that only polarizing art lasts. Whatever passes smoothly through a throng of unanimous admirers also passes smoothly out of memory. (I think Nietzsche said pain is more memorable than pleasure.) Critical controversy is canonical survival. Even attempts to assassinate certain works just entrench them still more thoroughly. You say we should stop discussing Heart of Darkness because it’s racist, but how racist is it, and in what way is it racist, and does it do anything to subvert that racism, and are you sure it’s even racist in the first place? We’re going to have to discuss all that for another century.

2. There are many ways to distinguish a review of a work from an essay on a work, and the boundaries are obviously porous. But we might generalize and say that a review is intended for someone who hasn’t yet experienced the work, while an essay will likely be most rewarding for someone who has.

3. A novel is an impersonal artifice, unlike a memoir or lyric poem, so one doesn’t take criticism personally. Perhaps the most personal element of a novel’s reception for the author, however, is the observation of how readers respond to different characters. I think of Gasda’s amusement at the wounded defenses of Dan in The Sleepers offered by Dan-like readers, whereas, no doubt because Brother Matthew and I emerged from similar class-ethic-religious-regional milieux, I take for granted that Dan is contemptible. (He’s slightly too contemptible even to be the anti-hero of a novel, but the sisters, Matthew’s women in love, take up the slack. Here is a subject for an essay that hasn’t yet been written: Substack Summer’s recrudescently male novelists with their gallery of defeated men—Simon Magnus, Jacob Morrow, Dan, Saul Plotz, Avram Parr—and triumphant women—Ash and Diane del Greco, Akari and Mariko, Monas Glass and Veigh.) And so with my readers’ ambivalence about how much time I ask them to spend with Ash del Greco, Major Arcana’s smartest character, the one who can see around almost its every corner as if she knows she’s in the book. She owns the novel’s second half, and then, via the literary magic of retrocausation, she’s revealed always already to have owned its first half, too. I meant Simon Magnus to be unlikable according to contemporary manners and mores, and he’s also too simple, simple Simon, a paper monster readily reduced to Freudian fable. But surely Ash del Greco, the novel’s most complex figure but also a sort of cartoon character, an unfathomable abyss and a bouncing glyph, not to mention something of my Portrait of the Artist as a Zoomer Enby Girl, is delightful! Not every reader agrees, however, and so literature reveals us, readers and writers, to ourselves.

4. Shakespeare criticism is so extensive I doubt my reading is original, but, for what it’s worth, I interpret Helena’s femcel despair as the play’s neglected emotional coeur, or at least the coeur of this lyric-festive comedy’s problem-play element. I also consider Theseus’s famous speech, when read against Theseus’s skeptical intent, to be something of a Neoplatonic aestheticist manifesto on Shakespeare’s own part. (That is speculative, of course, but speculative interpretations are one advantage of taking a shadowy author for one’s subject, which is why I don’t know why anyone would even want a figure more definitive—the Earl of Oxford, Francis Bacon, Mary Sidney, etc.—than the obscure man from Stratford.) Re: Shakespeare criticism, I am versed in its marquee names of the last three centuries—Johnson, Coleridge, Hazlitt; Bradley, Knight, Frye; Greenblatt, Kermode, Garber; etc.—but not in what goes on or what has gone on in the minute annals of the learned journals. (I recall an AP teacher in high school recommending a journal called The Annals of American History to us for a research project. More sophomoric than we were—we were juniors, in fact—he cautioned, “That’s with two Ns.”)

5. Three big “whither the left?” pieces this week: here, here, and here. With apologies to their authors, though, I have no direct response for the moment, or perhaps ever.

6. This is obviously too simplistic, as any essay on Scott, Balzac, or Herbert would instantly reveal—all three of these know, for one thing, that what we call “history” is textually constituted, and not one had to wait to be told that obvious truth by a postmodern theorist—but it’s good enough as a provocation in a link round-up and not devoid of truth anyway. Is it pedantic as well as being reductive, however? I see a plague of pedantic comments on this platform—people rushing into comments sections to demand, “Why haven’t you mentioned Berlin Alexanderplatz or Hermann Broch?”—but pedantry is also in my own repertoire, I’m sure. While some omissions can be disqualifying, I believe critics, like novelists, should be granted their donnée, which is to say the canon upholding their argument. If one wrote about Hermann Broch rather than Tom Wolfe, one would have written a very different essay, but how productive an observation is that really? Of what George Eliot (but why always George Eliot?) labeled “the tempting range of relevancies called the universe,” we all take our portion based on inclination and interest. The critic’s inclination and interest is the secret object of the reader’s own curiosity about the critic, hence Oscar Wilde’s definition of criticism as “the only civilized form of autobiography.”

7. My adolescent SF favorites—Robert A. Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison—are intermediate figures on the “genre” side between realism and modernism, what we might call “YA modernism.” (I probably wouldn’t endure Heinlein or Ellison today, but I still find Bradbury very readable and pleasurable.) B. D. McClay reviewed Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land this week:

I think it really can’t be overstated what a drag the back half of this book is to read, when the plot has no stakes whatsoever and we’re just living through speech after speech after speech. Even the orgy scenes are really just moments in which people get to make speeches.

On the other hand, the thing about this book, much like Starship Troopers, is that I can’t quite shake the feeling that Heinlein is a chauvinist pig who nonetheless likes women in a basic way that makes him feel sort of harmless to me.

As a concession to Major Arcana skeptics, I should say Stranger in a Strange Land was my very favorite book when I was 12 years old and probably left an indelible mark, whether stain or beauty spot I will leave you to judge, on my aesthetic. (Invisible College listeners will be interested to know Heinlein got the speechifying ideologue habit from George Bernard Shaw.) As for Starship Troopers, though, I found it hideously unpleasant and could never finish it, a social structure like the army—or the futuristic garrison state—being totally anathema to my slack sensibility even when I was a child. I think that one was inspired by Kipling, not Shaw, but has none of Kipling’s sparkle and charm.

8. For a pro-AI right-wing perspective, see this essay, which compares AI’s effect on the universities to print culture’s disarticulation of the medieval church, i.e., the cathedral. Time will tell. Speaking of right-wing perspectives, a fascinating comment was left this week on one of the posts linked above. It accused this entire corner of Substack not only of receiving money from Peter Thiel (my checks keep getting lost in the mail; maybe DOGE cut the postal service) but of being a reactionary cultural project run out of Trump’s Justice Department. This is true, I admit. One person reads this newsletter every week before you do, and that person is Pam Bondi.