Weekly Readings #177 (06/23/25-06/29/25)

in a broken world

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

🙏🏼

As you can see above, my new novel Major Arcana continues to move onward and upward in the world. This week I went on the great Beyond the Zero podcast to discuss the novel, along with my other work, my Substack presence, my gateway books and desert island books, my role in the Bruce Wagner revival, and more: please listen here. Thanks to Ben for having me on the show! You can order Major Arcana in all formats—print, Kindle, and audio—here and in print wherever books are sold online.

The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers, continues in the meantime. Right now, we are well embarked on Shakespeare Summer. This week, I posted “At War ’Twixt Will and Will Not,” a long hot episode on what is perhaps at once the Bard’s filthiest and holiest play, the sexually dystopian problem comedy Measure for Measure. I argue that Measure for Measure should be taught in high schools in place of the less compelling Romeo and Juliet and Julius Caesar to interest students in Shakespeare, except that the libs would judge it terminally problematic for its sexism and heteronormativity and use of sexual assault as plot device and possible Christian conservatism and whatever else, while the cons would more simply ban it as groomer porn. The play’s own satire on all puritanical attempts at cultural control anticipate this; great art is usually, one way or the other, against the law. Next week, the greatest art: Hamlet. For episodes on literary topics ranging from Homer to Joyce, please see the the College’s ever-expanding archive. Thanks to all my current and future paid subscribers!

I mentioned on my Beyond the Zero appearance that I was about to read The Unmapping by Denise S. Robbins, a Substack-Summer-adjacent novel released earlier this month.¹ For today, then, a few words about that book and related matters. Please enjoy!

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All Over the Map: Denise S. Robbins’s The Unmapping and New Cartographies of the Novel

Here is a theory about one major difference between “genre fiction” and “literary fiction,” or between “mass culture” and “high culture,” or between “pop” and “art,” or however you’d like to draw the boundary line.

Because the modern artist is alienated from society, high literature and high art take as normative the alienated perspective of this bohemian black-clad outsider, this descendant of Hamlet, Faust, Baudelaire’s flâneur, Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, and more. The high-art novel either stars an alienated hero (from Young Werther to Sula Peace) or views a normal hero through the ironizing lens of alienation (from Emma Bovary to Rabbit Angstrom). From the viewpoint of its internal exile, our civilization deserves to die for its mediocrity, for its crime of marginalizing the artist. The upholders of civilization, by contrast, whether police officer or soldier or physician, receive the artist’s scorn. Novels written by such exiled artists, it is no coincidence, attract other exiled artists as their often almost exclusive audience, thus drawing the social distinction between the literary and the non-, between what is read by a coterie and what is read en masse. Pop narrative, on the other hand, addressed as it is to the broadest possible audience, tends rather to celebrate as heroes those who preserve this civilization: the defenders of the city or the nation or the planet. Pop protagonists are detectives and doctors, lawyers and superheroes, not alienated artists. When pop protagonists are alienated—when they are vigilantes, for example, or too-brilliant and therefore rogue cops or surgeons—it’s only because they know better than others how to save us all, because they can do the official job better than the officials can, because they can be the heroes we need.

I first had this idea years ago when it occurred to me that Ulysses and Dracula are one another’s inverse: both novels narrate the outsider’s odyssey through the modern city, the experimental novel from the outsider’s perspective (with the alienated artist lending the support of his awesome but useless erudition and poetic style) and the pop thriller from the perspective of civilization’s upholders (aided not by any artist and his boho liberal-arts learning but rather by the stacked normativities of old-time religion, cutting-edge science, and info-age media).

I never wrote my theory down—perhaps it’s crackpot—and forgot about it until I read Denise S. Robbins’s new novel The Unmapping.² We no longer live in Stoker’s 1897 or Joyce’s 1922. We no longer draw any of these boundary lines—between pop and art, between insider and outsider, between estranged artist and solid citizen—as starkly as we once did. We have synthesized the alienated and un-alienated perspective, have learned to inhabit and even uphold our civilization as if we were also the rebel army besieging it, a paradoxical condition I have labeled “subaltern empire.”³ Accordingly, The Unmapping is both an art novel and a pop novel,⁴ its characters at once professionals and outsiders.

The Unmapping is a sweeping ensemble piece about a mysterious disaster that befalls contemporary New York City: all its structures are becoming unmoored, buildings moving each day at four AM from neighborhood to neighborhood, the Empire State Building all of sudden on Coney Island. Our dual protagonists are Esme and Arjun, who both work for the city’s Emergency Management Department and are therefore on the front lines of the crisis. The public calamity intersects with their personal lives, the novel knitting the public to the private, as the novel of all forms is best suited to do. Esme’s relationship with her fiancé Marcus, a paranoid journalist running from a troubled religious past, is coming to its crisis, while Arjun, who recently immigrated with his father from Delhi, feels ever more anxious and alone in America away from his home and family, not to mention that he’s also besotted with the engaged Esme.

While Robbins immerses us in these flawed but appealing characters’ eminently sympathetic struggles, the novel nevertheless canvasses a much wider territory. It encompasses characters from all over New York City, not to mention the company-town-turned-cult in Wisconsin where the unmapping began as well as Arjun’s native Delhi. With this national and finally global ambit, Robbins’s unmapping is a conceit ample enough to cover all threats to civilization past and future.

Robbins acknowledges that her novel’s mixture of modes has proved polarizing for some readers. In this case, going by Goodreads reviews, its non-admirers judge The Unmapping to dwell too much on private matters and not enough on the public emergency. The realist novel sits uneasily inside the speculative one, the novel of bourgeois life abraded by the novel imagining the end of the bourgeois world. In our age of mixed genres, readers show up expecting a lot of one genre and are disappointed when they get what they regard as too much of another.⁵ The literary landscape, too, has become unmapped. If The Unmapping has the pop factor of brisk narration, suspenseful pacing, and mostly likable and relatable characters, it is most the literary novel (most committed to at least unsettling if not shocking the bourgeoisie) in its magical realism, its persistent refusal—reminiscent of Kafka or Borges or García Márquez or Saramago—to reduce its titular event to scientific explanation, even as it goes into impressive and thorough detail about the practical consequences such structural motility would entail, as for instance, when an unmapped building’s severed gas line causes an explosion or another building threatens to shift into the East River.⁶

Several characters broach climate change as a shadowy cause of the disaster several times in the novel, but Robbins doesn’t insist on a single etiology, as this might limit the reach of her metaphor. Overall, and perhaps inevitably, the narrative most seems to evoke the pandemic and its disturbance not only of our lives but of our very way of thinking. Robbins negotiates our epistemic crisis with sympathy rather than outrage. Esme’s conflicts with Marcus about expert authority do not lead us automatically to sympathize with her perspective, especially because Marcus can draw on a history oppressive enough to make anyone distrust power as such—

“Everywhere you go, people tell you to ‘believe the science.’ Why? Because the people in power say so. Trust the science once meant trust the doctors who are secretly trying to end your existence. Ask Black women in North Carolina in the 1960s. I’m sure they were told to ‘trust the science’ before they were put under the knife and medically sterilized.”

“So now you don’t believe in science?”

“I believe in science. I believe in the scientific process of asking questions.”

“But what about climate change?”

—and the novel moreover credits both the presence of the marvelous in our lives and the power of religion to lend people meaning and purpose. With a subplot about a lost black teenager and the activist movement he inspires, Robbins also takes into her account the divisions and inequalities that inspire so much mistrust in the first place. And yet, the city’s (fictional) mayor is portrayed almost as sympathetically as the lost teen, if in a more comic key. Robbins scrutinizes authority and organization without dismissing them. It’s a more socially sensitive narrative than Dracula with its slavering and predatory eastern immigrant—here the threat is not located in a person or group who may be scapegoated but rather in an impersonal event—but we are, as in Stoker’s novel, invited to sympathize with those who come together to fight for collective life and its rational organization.

We are all alienated, The Unmapping implies, and must all come together to undo our alienation as best we can. As in all artistically successful novels, Robbins encodes her theme at the level of form. Authority returns not only in the story, but in its telling. The novel is narrated omnisciently, albeit with individual characters’ perspectives given in close third person and confined to demarcated subdivisions within chapters. Over and above this, however, Robbins’s narrative voice sometimes takes on a witty life of its own, refusing to sink quiescently into the characters’ minds:

In the coffee shop down the street, a young man prepares for a five o’clock opening. No need to know his name; there are too many names already. In any given day, there are hundreds. Thousands. They never stick. The stories, though, they’re like glue. Coffee man—can we call him a man? He’s just on the outside of eighteen, but “boy” feels inaccurate, too young for all he’s been through. He’s on his way to becoming a real man, somehow.

In other words, The Unmapping is another revenge-of-the-narrator book.⁷ The novel’s master trope is the city as anthill or body or organism, the world as disrupted but resilient ecosystem, salvageable as long as its constituent elements work to rebuild it.

He goes outside and nearly steps on a massive anthill. There are thousands of little ants swarming around the dirt pile in between two concrete slabs, running around like their lives depend on it, completely unaware of the massive being with a sneaker that could easily smash their home to smithereens. What kind of ants are stupid enough to build a home in the middle of the sidewalk in downtown Manhattan? He thinks about stomping on it just for some relief. But he crouches down instead and watches the ants work. He admires their delicate walk up the steepest slopes and the way that when he puts a finger in their path they change course immediately around it. How did they survive the storm? Arjun imagine their homes must have been washed away with the rains, if not blown off in the wind. And now look: Just one week later, their home is as big as ever.

With such a vision, with such need of new maps, how could a novel do without an authoritative presence capable of surveying the entire territory? Our postmodern phobia of grand narratives has evidently been cured by the threat of total chaos.

It is hard to say when things started turning around for the better. Is it possible to pinpoint a particular moment when everyone stopped running around trying to live in a broken world and started instead trying to fix it?

1. It’s true that Denise interviewed me for Major Arcana—that’s how we made one another’s online acquaintance—so please refer to my earlier apologia for writing about the work of associates. As said at the link, I don’t really consider these reviews, but in this case, since The Unmapping relies on an air of mystery about its eponymous disaster and about its large cast of characters’ interrelation, I will go light on summary.

2. Mary Jane Eyre noticed that I’ve cited Chesterton in two of these recent reviews. Anyone else might therefore stop citing Chesterton out of embarrassment. I am both a contrarian and a lover of symmetry, however, so I will cite Chesterton a third time to complete a trilogy or trinity. He expressed a similar idea to mine about popular fiction—about what we might call its municipal-heroism-as-cosmic-principle—in his essay “A Defence of Detective Stories”:

There is, however, another good work that is done by detective stories. While it is the constant tendency of the Old Adam to rebel against so universal and automatic a thing as civilization, to preach departure and rebellion, the romance of police activity keeps in some sense before the mind the fact that civilization itself is the most sensational of departures and the most romantic of rebellions. By dealing with the unsleeping sentinels who guard the outposts of society, it tends to remind us that we live in an armed camp, making war with a chaotic world, and that the criminals, the children of chaos, are nothing but the traitors within our gates. When the detective in a police romance stands alone, and somewhat fatuously fearless amid the knives and fists of a thieves’ kitchen, it does certainly serve to make us remember that it is the agent of social justice who is the original and poetic figure; while the burglars and footpads are merely placid old cosmic conservatives, happy in the immemorial respectability of apes and wolves. The romance of the police force is thus the whole romance of man. It is based on the fact that morality is the most dark and daring of conspiracies. It reminds us that the whole noiseless and unnoticeable police management by which we are ruled and protected is only a successful knight-errantry.

3. Hence the recent pre-eminence of dystopian fiction, the one popular genre that, like the art novel, enshrines the rebel rather than the sentinel. This is no coincidence since dystopian fiction grows out of aspects of modernism in the fictions of Orwell and Huxley, both of whom pit art against totalitarianism. Much controversy over Orwell on Substack this week, with Henry Oliver denouncing him as too much the anti-civilized rebel to matter in the present and Anthony Marigold defending him as disciplined prophet who still furnishes a model to the writer. I lean toward Marigold’s side of this argument in general. Orwell is an amazingly powerful writer, absolutely persuasive in the moment you’re reading him, and this is no small achievement, nor are his gadfly provocations less relevant today than they were almost a century ago. But I do agree with Oliver that Orwell’s confecting a virtuous politics out of his contingent aesthetic prejudices in “Politics and the English Language” is highly unpersuasive, even a bad influence on literature as it implies that there is some unique magic in simple diction, that the apparently unrhetorical is not a form of rhetoric, that a seemingly transparent style is not also a style. Ironically, it is as a stylist that Orwell can be best appreciated and defended. Marigold, on the other hand and in much in Orwell’s spirit, labels his own work “unpretentious,” a priority echoed by the calculatedly casual “Um, Duh” in his headline. I was going to say that if I had a floral surname like “Marigold,” I would be even more pretentious than I am, but then “Pistelli” is not only the phallic “pistol” but also the vulvic “pistil,” so never let it be said that we don’t contain multitudes. God protect me from ever writing anything unpretentious! I don’t even want to read anything unpretentious. If you’re bad, pretend to be good; if you’re good, pretend to be better; assume a virtue if you have it not; and all who strive can be saved!

4. This boundary crossing is consistent across many Substack Summer books, each of which is undeniably a literary novel while also maintaining connections beyond bohemia in an attempt to keep the literary novel vital: Stop All the Clocks with its techno-thriller suspense plot; Major Arcana and Glass Century with their scarcely concealed nostalgia for the old middlebrow family saga and their overt or covert comic-book elements; and even The Sleepers, the most stringently “literary” of them all, with its reminiscence of prestige indie cinema and HBO drama.

5. Contemporary cinema also illustrates the age of mixed genres. Here, for example, is my ballot for the New York Times’s greatest 21st-century films, as solicited by an anonymous reader of my super-secret Tumblr:

Mulholland Drive is the one film on everybody’s list. That so strange and disturbing a work should also be so universally acclaimed suggests the folly of trying to predict what will succeed in the arts based on simplistic metrics of past success or an under-estimation of the audience. Mulholland Drive came in second on the Times’s official list behind Parasite, a film I disliked on my only viewing for what I found to be its slickly ineffable ugliness of spirit, a mismatch of form and content, and which I have no desire to revisit. If I am culpable for neglecting the Korean renaissance, global cinema’s banner event of the century so far, however, then please feel free to add to my list—swap it in for one of the two Ballerina Gothicks, two perhaps being one too many—either Oldboy (common popular choice, its potential ugliness of spirit mythified rather than condescended to by its unforgettable stylization) or Poetry (elite arthouse choice, its ugliness of subject matter transfigured by its lyrical humanism of approach).

6. Lincoln Michel’s observation obtains here: for all the debates about autofiction, autofiction remains marginal, and this is rather the age of mixed-genre fiction. Kazuo Ishiguro testifies to the same in his 20th-anniversary introduction to Never Let Me Go, narrating his induction by a younger generation of writers into a world beyond strict realism:

For instance: Alex Garland (who’d then recently published The Beach) and I began a pattern—still continuing today—of meeting for rambling, informal lunches in North London cafés, and I soon noticed how he, without self-consciousness or posturing, often cited writers like J.G. Ballard, Ursula K. Le Guin, and John Wyndham. It was Alex who drew up for me a list of the most important graphic novels I had to read, introducing me to the work of important figures like Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. Alex was at that time writing a screenplay that would become the classic 2002 zombie dystopia film 28 Days Later. He showed me an early draft and I listened in fascination to him discussing the pros and cons of various ways forward.

Some will say—in some moods, I will say—that this signals a regression to less mature modes than those bequeathed us by The Great Tradition of ethical realism, while others will say—in other moods, I will say—that realism always was the enervating aberration, and that we are returning to what everyone before the middle of the 18th century took for granted about the necessity of marvelous adventure to narrative or drama. Even the works of the ethical realists, anyway, are built on more or less hidden armatures of myth and saga. Every great novel is a fairy tale, as Nabokov taught us.

7. This reminds me to mention a small and now-deleted contretemps I had on Substack Notes with Brandon Taylor about his review of Ross Barkan’s Glass Century and my riposte last week. I said I’d read some narratology and write about it today, but I’ve failed to read narratology once again, as I always do. I will regale you instead with a bratty passage from my doctoral dissertation where I explain why I’m too cool to read narratology:

For the remainder of this essay, I will use “covert narration” as an umbrella term to cover several different rhetorical strategies. It includes “focalization” or “restricted viewpoint,” in which a third-person narrator reports only on what one character thinks and observes. I also include what Hugh Kenner famously labeled “the Uncle Charles principle,” in which the third-person narrator borrows the kind of language he or she uses from the character being discussed (see Kenner, Joyce’s Voices chapter 2). Finally, and in defiance of most narratology, I also include “free indirect discourse” and “stream of consciousness” narration, in which the novel’s language unmoors itself entirely from its basis in third person narration to present its characters’ own unmediated internal monologue for extended sentences. If I use Chatman’s term “covert narration” more loosely than he and other narratologists would, it is because I do not want to sacrifice to the letter of over-specificity the spirit of its deployment; the purpose of covert narration and its panoply of techniques is to create a nimbus of uncertainty about where the inner life of the character’s language ends and the outer life of the narrator’s social, rhetorical writing practice begins. The uncertainty itself interpellates the reader as critic. To attempt to pin the technique down in each case with precise taxonomies is to be paradoxically imprecise about the destabilizing effect it is meant to have on readers.

In a footnote—you can really say what you mean in footnotes—I put my refusal to read narratology in even stronger words:

The upshot is that these devices, for which narratology has a symptomatically bewildering diversity of names, generate an interpretive gap—exemplified by the Beckettian/Foucauldian question, “Who’s speaking?”—into which the reader must venture. Thus, I do not aim at narratological precision in trying to determine, say, where free indirect discourse ends and stream of consciousness begins, but rather am more concerned to explain why these ambiguities exist and what is their effect.

The dissertation in question, ironically, offers a vigorous defense of third-person limited narration against its (largely Marxist) detractors who prefer a more robustly omniscient realism capable of mapping the whole of society rather than of the individual consciousness within it. Eventually, if one lives long enough, one will take every position as the discursive ground one stands on becomes more and more unmapped.