!My friend's new book
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agk's diary
8 July 2024 @ 03:34 UTC
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written on Thinkpad X61/Model M keeb/hp vf15 screen
in muggy kitchen while daughter looks at fireflies
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This is a long typed-up version of the notes I
mailed to my friend Madeline. They were lost in the
mail. Glad I made photocopies!
Madeline and I have known each other for 23 years.
We aren't close friends, but pick-up-where-we-left-
off-after-long absences friends. She sent me a
typescript of her new novel for me to read and
comment on, followed by anxious text messages: "Is
it any good? Is it a book? Are we still friends?"
She wrote a bunch of short stories. Some were
collected in the small-press book *Valparaiso,
Round the Horn,* including my favorite, "The Big
Woman." A couple years ago Simon and Schuster
published her first novel, *Stay and Fight.* My
comments below are about her second novel, working
title *Noctiluca."
My comments below are in three parts. The first,
written right after I finished reading it on the
last page of the typescript. The second a letter
written a few days later, the third written 3 weeks
later. She wasn't home, so I waited and thought on
it some more, like I hope she'll do for me if I
ever finish anything and ask her to do a similar
task.
I'm archiving this correspondence with gopher so I
can find it if Madeline and I correspond further
about the new book, but also because I like reading
letters from Rahel (Levin/Varnhagen) to Goethe, and
between Malcolm Cowley and Faulkner. I like a close
reading of a good book, even a book I haven't read,
by a friend of the writer. Maybe you do, too.
You haven't read the book, and won't be able to for
a few years. Sorry. You can get *Stay and Fight*
from your library or your favorite bookseller. I'll
send you a photocopy of "The Big Woman" if you want
to read it and email me your mailing address.
---
May '24
I read your book in two whole nights. It's 2:10 AM
and I have to get up for work at four. It's steady
raining and rolling thunder outside. I have to pee.
Astonishing. Stunning. Like when you're in a cave
and suddenly the ceiling isn't four feet high or
ten feet, it's 150 feet and shining with gypsum
crystals.
The way your history refracts the present. The way
hippies are fascists. The way normal people are
freaks. The way children are totally children,
total aliens, but actually the wise ones sometimes.
This book is as good as *Stay and Fight* but more
mature, bigger, more mellow, less alienated. A page
turner and lit. Better than the stuff I recognize
as inspiring its parts, and its whole is better
than the sum of its parts.
It's honest, practical, humane, and lyrical. I
gotta sleep now.
---
Wed 29 May '24
Madeline,
Your new book is a page-turner, just like *Stay and
Fight* was. I wonder where you learned to do that--
are there tricks you learned before or in the MFA
program? I want to know. I don't like most fiction,
but yours makes me neglect sleep, promise myself
I'll close the book and my eyes after this chapter,
then have no more willpower than your character
Woody when the time comes.
I love the satisfying artistry of themes you weaved
through the book like fabric in a rug, print
making's specialized language, rugs, vagabond
romanticism, the ongoing conversation about
"violence," cooking and *The Joy of Cooking*, etc.
You juggled your biggest cast yet and juggled it
well. I was lost for a few pages when you flashed
back to Matt Mistlethwaite's childhood, but when I
regained my bearings I was totally floored by the
depth the chapter gave your story. And your black
characters gained as much solidity, history, place,
and complexity as your white characters by a
quarter of the way in.
Your characters are fabulous. The way you intro-
duced Jayden's mom during the counterprotest--her
teeth, her phone, her fire--goddamn. Matt Mistle-
thwaite turned out to be the strongest, most sur-
prising character in this book. We got to know him
as well as we got to know Randy in *Stay and Fight*
but he had the nuance and dimensionality of Aldi
Birch.
I was deeply satisfied immediately upon finishing
*Noctiluca*. A day or two after finishing the book
I was dissatisfied about some things I'd been
turning over in my head, which eventually I mostly
let go, and mostly was met with a satisfied feeling
again. Your new book leaves an impression.
Your writing can be read on a number of levels. On
the level of character, the only real weakness is
black characters early in the novel. At first it's
like when an illustrator whose default character's
race is white draws a black character with exactly
the same features as a white one but colors her in
to make her "black".
I can't put my finger on what was missing exactly,
but I think it came from you having a default world
and background of experiences which shaped a
character that is not a black world. You had to
construct it before you could endow them with it.
I noticed this uncanny racial valley whan you
signified their blackness with Woody's breast-
feeding narrative to distract the college girls
from their racialized interest in Leroi, Leroi's
fear of the house with the Confederate battle flag
contrasted with Woody's lack of fear, Angie's sass,
Sharon's--uh, whatever IDK, they just lacked the
texture and complexity you eventually built up.
This isn't a major critique. Your cast in this book
is your best ever. I never got characters mixed up.
Every one you loved on and made memorable.
On the level of plot, I already told you it works.
Rapt, I couldn't put it down. Tied up with a bow.
No complaints. Beautiful rhythm, interrupted only
by brief confusion at the beginning of Matt's back-
story.
On the level of cultural or social critique, it
also works. I recognize many conversations we had
sitting on a log in the clearing where you and Cusi
got married or whatever, conversations you probably
also had with lots of other friends as you earnestly
turned our world over, and your ethics and morality
over, in light of each other.
Some examples: Antiracists who might as well be
racists, volkish hippie nazi homeschooler moms from
Indiana moving into Appalachian counties and trying
to take over stuff that's uncomfortably close to
what we're into, Ambers who call every woman mama
who are an awful mix of great and horrible, how
hard it is for your body image and self esteem when
you have a blocked milk duct inflamed monster boob
and nobody helps you fix it, what to do about
attempts to recruit and organize racism in our
vicinity, what guns should be for and how much
safety they provide (turns out they're good for
rabid raccoons), noticing actually everybody's a
freak, not just us and our queerdo friends, etc.
Everything hits.
On the level of history and sociology your book's
at its most uneven. Matt's history and the history
of the community of Greenbriar are stunning.
Eloise's history and the history of hippie anti-
Klan/anti-nuke nearly incoherent militant
ambivalence is pitch perfect.
The who's-fucking-who in a small town and the
embarrassing family history of neglect in Woody and
Emma's family tree are uncomfortably real. Dev's
'70s girl gang is the absolute bomb. Sylvester's
tragedy, trainriding, and Skinheads Against Racial
Prejudice days are right on. The world of children
is solidly, surprisingly well told.
But the story of Nation Awake and the antifa which
all this perfection orbits left me dissatisfied.
We know how Leroi got involved. His background and
proclivities intersected with Food Not Bombs when
he was a teenager with his mom's cautious approval.
Rings true. Sylvester's story is perfectly satisfy-
ing. But the rest of the antifa who bust up the
white family picnic, hang around Lucky 13, and cook
in the park, while strong in character, lack
history. They're just *there*. It's not clear how
they got there, you know?
Maybe they were always there? Maybe because of the
internet? I wish their friend group/gang/whatever
was given the sociological and historical care you
gave Emma's family, Matt and Angie's community, and
Dev's local world. I don't want much exposition;
that might interrupt the book's addictive pace. I
just want hints to feed my imagination.
I think your antifas got ahistorical and auto-
chthonous because they're too familiar to you,
maybe you lack a theory of what they are, maybe you
don't problematize them more because it would bore
you to do, wouldn't hold your interest. Maybe all
you have are the insider critiques I liked so much,
and superficial outsider critiques (outside
agitators! tents all look alike! funded by Soros!)
--because they're too hard for you to really see
from the outside.
Your antifas are messy, but ultimately they're too
good. They're too straightforwardly a collective
protagonist. You wrote a polemic in their defense.
You say that despite some petty gang violence,
weird fabulous fashion, youth's disdain for
history, the contortions of anxiety and coolness,
they're an essential social good. I want that to be
less clear, even if it ultimately proves true.
Olive Tilford Dargan made a similar argument about
industrial unionism in Southern US textile towns to
the one you make about antifa. But she identified a
fundamental, tragic contradiction in her collective
social protagonist--just when we're cheering hardest
for her white hero, Dargan vividly illustrated the
hero's deepset psychological revulsion in the
presence of sister black unionist textile workers
massed in black spaces in the midst of a violent,
promising strike.
The revulsion, which the hero can't overcome,
undermines all her political convictions about
all-in unionism, and more than any other force the
union's up against destroys the possibility of
victory. Dargan's story is more moral and more
radical than yours. She doesn't ask us to emulate
the political growth of her heroes, she asks us to
transcend them.
I want your antifas to display a collective tragic
flaw that complicates them, or even forsakes their
political possibility, even as we cheer for them.
None of the flaws you give them strike me as
collectively, politically fundamental, or tragic,
enough.
Instead, your antifas illustrate your preferred,
familiar "Jerusalem" in the language of Gillian
Rose's great essay "Athens and Jerusalem, a tale of
three cities." You've heard me talk about it
before.
Rose critiqued the sprectre of perfect community
imagined in the ashes of the dream of communism
(she wrote in 1993), a community which imagines
itself the antidote to laws and reason ("Athens"),
imagined as fundamentally unjust--not to mention
administered by corrupt cops, courts, politicians,
architects, and white cishet men living within
late-stage racist heteropatriarchal capitalism
anyway. She said giving up on Athens and dreaming
of millenarian community prevents us from under-
standing the third city, the one we actually live
in.
Stasia's story is also perfectly satisfying, but
Nation Awake, similarly, is too mysterious and
maybe too powerful of a villian. Just like failing
to sufficiently tragically crack antifa's possib-
ility fails to invite us to transcend it, failing
to sufficiently demystify Nation Awake scares us
into complacency.
I admire that you gave them the same initials as
National Alliance and play slyly on "woke". The
name is perfectly convincing, and timely. It makes
me think of the Active Clubs. But their continuity
with the Klan in the county's history and the
paranoia about who in the local power structure
is with them or sympathetic is just too complete.
Are the cops Nations Awake nationalists, or at
least the one went to school with Sylvester,
arrested antifas at the white family picnic, came
to the secret cafe and Salt Soil Farm? Is Amber?
Is every mom from out-of-state who homeschools? You
had me walking around paranoid for a week before I
checked myself and remembered how socially and
numerically marginal white nationalists are outside
of prison.
I love the continuity with local history. I really
love the paranoia. I think paranoia's one of the
dominant rural affects. But I want you to crack it,
show its unreliability. I love the influx coming
through Stasia's farm for the whole ethnostate
project, but I want to see how it's limited by its
own contradictions, not just by antifa.
I want you to undermine it with its own inherent,
political contradictions, not just the goofiness of
its champions, by Stasia's manipulation of Woody,
her chud boyfriend, and her nothing of a son. What
dooms Nations Awake's preferred Jerusalem isn't
their human frailty. It's deeper than that.
The paranoia you sow makes race, which is racism,
the central American conflict. That's a solidly
middle-class class position; a little 1619 Project-
ish for my taste, but it will sell books.
I think Barbara Fields was the one who famously
wrote that slaveholders didn't own slaves because
they were racist. They held slaves because that was
how the propertied class reproduced their class
position. Racism was the ideology which--to use
Adolph Reed's dad's old saw--reconciled their
material interests with their need to see them-
selves as good people.
Similar things were written about the why of Jim
Crow by C. Vann Woodward, the historian who wrote
*Origins of the New South* and MLK Jr's "bible of
the freedom movement" *The Strange Career of Jim
Crow.* Woodward spent his career wondering why the
fiery preachers of interracial populism rapidly
transformed into the most rabid of racist agitators
in the 1890s through 1910s.
Adolph Reed did similar work on the post-Civil
Rights Act era as black mayors, police chiefs, and
politicians--many with "civil rights movement"
resumes--rose into roles as the front line admin-
istrators of systemic racism, at least in big
cities, in the 1970s and '80s.
You have a challenge if you want to make Nation
Awake more "cracked," tragic, human. As far as I
know, there are no good sources. Kathleen Blee did
great work on women in the 1910s and 1960s Klan and
1990s organized racists (skins, Klan, patriot
militia, sovereign citizens, National Alliance,
Aryan Nation, World Church of the Creator, Rahowa).
I don't know anybody who documented or analyzed the
messy internals of the movement in the US in the
2010s or '20s, the psychological and ideological
journeys of participants, the factions and cracks.
Except you.
I've seen work on Germany's AfD, Hungary's Jobbik,
Ukraine's Right Sektor and Azov Battalion, and
various affiliates and splinters from Al Qaeda in
central and West Asia and across the Sahel, but
other than maybe Szombati's book *The Revolt of the
Provinces* on Jobbik, not sure how much you could
use insights into European movements to understand
Nation Awake. They probably stan them boys though.
I think Nation Awake is dangerous but marginal. I
think ordinary racist white people (not organized
or committed, just casual and unquestioned) find
them distasteful, worry about their influx causing
trouble, driving up property taxes or rents, making
it cost too much to buy a house, taking over the
school board, or just being outsiders.
I don't want your book to force the manichean
George W. Bush choice: "Either you're with antifa
or you're with Nation Awake." People less noble than
Matt Mistlethwaite are against them. Why don't we
see those less noble people?
Hundreds came to the white family picnic. Where did
they come from? Only two of them--Stasia and her
scrubby mustache boyfriend--definitely live in the
county. What do the three who beat up Sylvester do
for work? Who organized the thing on campus, and
why wasn't it cancelled by run-of-the-mill on-
campus Gen Zs? How did it last long enough to get
any traction? Where does the gym teacher work;
where's he from?
There's no way there are hundreds of those jokers
in the area. They came from Indiana, just like the
local antifa's friends came from West Virginia,
Chicago, Western Mass, and Upstate New York or
whatever. There's, what, twenty-five Nation Awake
in the county? Fifteen? Ten? Not counting fellow
travelers like the cop or the old Klanny who sold
Stasia his farm. I bet, at best, there are slightly
more of them than WASP/SURJ-types. And I bet they
resent each other within their micro-community.
Lambert Straether (Corriente newswire/Naked Capit-
alism blog) analyzed the class composition of known
January 6th participants. They were mostly small
business tyrants like Stasia and Amber. They run
pool installation businesses, fight over the town
mowing contract, are independent electricians and
locksmiths and owner-operators.
They can't get any good help. They use racial
prejudice as a heuristic to guide hiring and
customer relations decisions. They resent reg-
ulations and taxation that hurt their bottom line.
They resent DEI telling them they have to abandon
their heuristic and hire people they think will be
unreliable, serve customers they think won't pay.
They want to run their kingdom--their business,
their family--as tyrants with nobody over them.
They want to run away and homestead. They want to
homeschool or control the school board. They want
to bravely, regrettably shoot and kill a home
invader while standing their ground.
All they want around them is the heaven of their
Jerusalem as promised in country songs (remember
Anne Tagonist's brilliant livejournal entry about
Sarah Palin and country music?). Their racism is a
class position. They aren't everywhere, even though
they do leak out of their class into cops, para-
medics, nurses who date cops, 4chan /b/tards and
/k/fags, Kiwi Farms incels, etc.
Woody is brilliant in that regard. He reminds me of
a less sinister Dylann Roof. I sent you an article
years ago for your research for this book about
Dylann--he grew up with a black best friend and
hung out with and gamed with black friends even
after he read a bunch of /k/ and wrote his mani-
festo, right up to the night before his mass shoot-
ing in the black church in Charleston. There's no
evidence he saw his friendships as inconsistent
with committed, revolutionary, murderous racism.
WASP is a class ideology, too. Guaranteed they work
in nonprofits, higher education, libraries. The
attorney probably does criminal defense or civil
litigation. Catherine Liu skewered that class
elegantly in her short polemical book *Virtue
Hoarders,* and Christian Parenti historicized and
utterly undermined their ideology in his longform
essay called something like "The Cult of the Privi-
lege Walk." You do a pretty good number on them,
too. I don't think you need any help there.
I think you know all this stuff about the relation
between class position and racial ideology at least
as well as I do. I just think your novel took an
easy way out with its antifa jedis and ewoks and
racist hidden Empire. I think you know I think
paranoia is a politically corrosive affect. Small
biz tyrants are wrong and thuggishly dangerous, but
also they have real grievances, and their appeal is
limited.
Your antifas, just like the ones I've known over
the last twenty-five years, are noble. I think (but
I'm not sure) their biggest folly is the paranoia
you give your reader, their myopic focus on their
half-hidden enemy and failure to understand the
social forces that produce their enemy and produce
them. Same folly as antifas I've known.
That myopia confuses you into thinking that
fighting the dozen or so organized racists in your
county will make your county suck less, make the
highschool you went to less racist and transphobic,
make the cops less racist and transphobic, make
your parents less racist and transphobic. And, I
mean, maybe in the long run it does, because of
the community you build against them shaping people
who over time end up in local positions of power.
But Jerusalems are inherently exclusive, bound by
tyrannies of traditional power. Do you in fact
replace one Jerusalem with another?
At times you rise to a vantage above identification
with your protagionists' paranoia and sweet,
earnest, noble magical thinking. You do that in the
stories about Dev's Noctiluca girl gang. It's sweet
and bittersweet how you balance it as a beautiful
expression of righteous anger that made Dev who
she became, so worthy of celebrating and rooting
for, with the understanding it didn't fix the
social forces the girls who formed it rightly
hated. I wish you'd been as clear about your
antifas' limitations, even if they weren't
vulnerable to having their kids run over by nazis.
Antifa's important to defend, I think. The fact you
defend it makes your book important. You keep
writing better versions of *The Monkey Wrench Gang*
like that. What I'm trying to express critically is
your defense will be stronger if they and Nation
Awake are less good, less evil, more silly, human,
pointless even than you made them, and despite
tragic collective internal contradictions, antifa
still worth being, still noble; Nation Awake still
worth punching, still base.
The more time passes since I read the book, the
less I'm bothered about the Antifa/Nation Awake
heroic manichean dynamic and the initial flatness
of your black characters, and the more I'm just
turning over in my head the your delicious charact-
ers. Years after reading it, Pearley, the Outside
Woman, "velvet piglet," the Mean Aunt, and other
leavings from *Stay and Fight* are inside jokes in
Evy's and my private language, used to discuss our
world. Your new book is richer in that sort of
stuff.
I loved your deft handling of the '30s and '40s in
the person of Matt, the '60s and '70s via Dev and
Eloise, the '90s in the person of Sylvester, and
now. I love the lore of the printing presses and of
multiflora rose. I love the wry critique of Mama
Ginger's people, WASP people, Leroi's mom, Stasia's
people.
I love that Salt Soil initializes to SS, and the
other sweet treats you flavor your writing with.
I like how you do peoples' reactions to Collins'
gender, and how Sylvester's sister calls him Sally
right at the end, and it's simultaneously weirdly
enlightening and totally doesn't matter. "Yeah,
people are mysteries. Don't think you're more
complex than my characters, or anyone. Everyone's a
world. The half hasn't been told." Your grasp of
human psychology and interpersonal relationships
produces lush, complex, satisfying stuff.
I think something else dissatisfied me after I
finished the book but I'm like 3,000 words into
this letter and whatever it was it's gone now. Your
new book is, as it currently is, an almost perfect
meal followed by a transient weird aftertaste or
some mild indigestion. You could probably improve
it some, but you don't have to.
Thank you for letting me read it. I need to see
more of you with or without your kids. I want to
see more of them, too, and so does [my daughter].
I miss you and crave our good conversations.
Anna
---
Tuesday 18 June '24
Dear Madeline,
I figured I'd hang onto all this til you got home.
Give me a chance to think about it some more. I
still like it. It ages well in my memory.
One thing that increased my enjoyment as I've
thought back on your new book is playing imagina-
tively with how it fits into your literary county.
No flattery intended, but no bullshit either, it's
the same kind of pleasure as reading some more
Faulkner when you already know your way around
Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, and know some of
the Compson family's secrets.
Knowing you, I like thinking about the way your
vantage on your fictional county changed over the
years as you became more settled in your real Ohio
River Valley county.
In "The Big Woman," your protag has such a tenuous
hold on the rented rural lot and the rented trailer
he occupies on it. That piece of land will never be
his in any sense that matters, and he knows it. No
one who intrudes on him is really intruding because
he knows he is an intruder.
So, him and his goat are always existentially
threatened by the neighbors, the land and wildlife,
the at-will, informal nature of his employment, the
instability and unknowability of all his relation-
ships, all new and barely there, his anxiety. He's
stable as a soap-bubble. He wants to belong, but
could be gone and completely forgotten any instant.
That alienated, eager position lets him and readers
get to know guys who burn plastic and cook meth,
babies like Bexley. He introduces us to that strata
of your fictional Ohio River Valley county. Aldi
Birch, of course, knows that strata too.
*Stay and Fight* is still an outsider's story, but
now the outsider owns land, and has tenant/land-
mates. The protagonist doesn't have ownership over
any local institutions like the library or the
cattle auction, though. She's like your new book's
Stasia, but without Stasia's considerable
resources.
*Stay and Fight*'s main characters' relationships
are few, defensive, and closely coupled. The
threats they feel are existential: sugar and screen
time ruining Pearley, neighbors, the school system,
social services, the land don't threaten "me" but
"us." The threat to "me" is only that the "us"
could self-destruct and leave "me" completely alone
and weird on a shitty plot of land in the country
with no car and nobody.
In your new novel your protags are the power
structure, at least one or two segments of it. This
is their town, their county. The outsider racist
influx (and I imagine the more general rural
gentrification influx) is the threat.
*Noctiluca*'s protags are on the other side of your
county's class divide or insider/outsider divide in
outlook from your earlier tales, even if none of
them have no more than one or two generations
there.
Each new tale you write throws what you wrote
before in the county into new light, increases the
complexity and nuance in the world. Sure, maybe
these new protags think Nazis hide under every rock
--every newcomer, every hidden history. That's how
they see from their position in the county. That's
how they harmonize their material interests with
their need to see themselves as good people.
I still want you to undermine the legitimacy of
their paranoia, at least a little. Same way in
*Stay and Fight* the kid with the magic shield's
grandma shows us readers there's a much bigger
world in the county than the protags can really see
or remember, a world that lets readers see that the
protags' understanding of their world is wrong.
You know, of course: there are people who agree
with your political position, persuadable people,
and unpursuadable or difficult-to-persuade
"enemies." We discover unexpected friends in
*Noctiluca,* but we forget the great majority
remain uncommitted, neither committed to the
Nations Awake idiots nor against them, never really
thought about it, never had to. People like all the
characters in your previous tales.
I still want them unhidden, exposed in your new
book. I love you and love your writing.
