2020 Book Reviews: July to December

Starting with most recent…

If you can read only one of the books reviewed here this year, please let it be Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson. Lauded as “an instant American classic,” Caste delivers an arresting and immersive investigation into the reasons why people are compelled to classify, distinguish, and separate individuals into groups of arbitrarily scaled worth. Encompassing the vast array of physical markers which antecede hierarchical assignment and separation (i.e., race, religion, surname, etc.), the book offers “caste” as a transcendent blueprint for understanding the subconscious code, the silent infrastructure, of our divisions. “Looking at caste,” Wilkerson tells us, “is like holding [a] country’s X-ray up to the light.” It reveals the broken bone that we thought we’d healed; the insidious cancer we thought we’d beaten.

Early on in Caste, Wilkerson explains that “the human impulse to create hierarchies runs across societies and cultures,” predating even the idea of race itself. As such, we can see examples of caste in almost any place, at almost any time in history. Focusing on the caste systems of India, Nazi Germany, and the United States, Wilkerson ratifies the universality and predictability of caste, drawing out the eight “ancient principles” or “pillars” which mark every man-made system of hierarchical division. Regardless of origin or belief, Wilkerson writes, all caste systems (1) Manipulate and exploit “divine will,” using legend and scripture to justify human ranking; (2) Rely on genetic heritability, meaning membership in a given group is inherited, primordial, and unalterable; (3) Construct endogamous firewalls between groups, thereby precluding legitimate family connection and any “sense of shared destiny”; (4) Hinge on the belief in the “purity” of the dominant caste and vilify the castes below it as “unclean”; (5) Trap members of the lower castes in nets of subservience based on their perceived and socially codified “inferiority”; (6) Collectively dehumanize members of the lower castes, stripping them of their individuality while rendering them “a single mass of undifferentiated bodies”; (7) Use terror as an instrument of enforcement and cruelty as a means of control; and, (8) Frame members of the upper caste as “inherently superior” — and thereby inherently deserving — of their privileged station.

For each of the eight pillars of caste and their corresponding “tentacles” (i.e., status threat, unconscious bias, scapegoating, psychological intrusion, etc.), Wilkerson’s analysis is unapologetically exhaustive and honest, and the effects can be painful. For Wilkerson’s investigations into India and Nazi Germany, there is some comforting distance, which leaves the American reader feeling horrified, yes, but not necessarily *personally* culpable. The Indian caste system, an intricate fretwork of thousands of subcastes, or jatis, which fall under the four principal varnas, Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya, and Shundra, and an excluded fifth varna, known as Dalits or Untouchables, goes back thousands of years, predating any European conception of race. Its organization of individuals by surname may seem to the American reader nonsensical, almost dystopian, as if imagined by an alien planet or an inconceivable future. For different reasons, Nazi Germany’s caste system feels equally foreign and inexplicable. “How could people believe such gross illogic? How could people execute such horrific, monstrous deeds?” we ask ourselves, dismissing the conditions which precipitated the Third Reich as somehow alchemically specific to Germany and thus unrepeatable — or even impossible — under any other national or historical context. 

As she unveils the American caste system, however, Wilkerson forces us to look right into the mirror, to look right at the x-ray of our national soul, delivering a diagnosis that will dumbfound and sadden. Taking us back to colonial Virginia, she identifies the exact conception of our caste system, at which point African workers were consigned to a separate, unequal, and altogether “unhuman” rank of people based on the color of their skin, the American decoy for caste. For more than a quarter of a millennium, slavery stood as one of the country’s most predominant institutions — so powerful that it threatened national deconstruction, triggering the deadliest war ever fought on American soil. Wilkerson explains that, after the war, slighted members of the dominant caste worked to restore their sovereignty through a “reconstituted caste system,” devising “a labyrinth of laws to hold the newly freed people on the bottom rung ever more tightly.” Cunning, adaptable, and well-resourced, this system, Wilkerson tells us, has never truly died. Like a chameleon, it has camouflaged itself under the deceptive cloak of a “post-racist society,” shapeshifting from the “cross-burning, epithet spewing” racism of the past into the subconscious and structurally abstruse racism of the present.

Yet even as she discredits the notion that caste is a “solved” or vanquished chapter of our nation’s history, Wilkerson demonstrates incredible empathy for the reader. She understands why we might feel compelled to create distance between the past and the present — how the very act of acknowledging a racist present, a present to which each and every one of us is beholden, could make us feel uncomfortably guilty or ashamed. Throughout Caste, Wilkerson anticipates this guilt and this shame. She reminds us that we do not have any control over the circumstances of our birth, nor can we be held “personally responsible for what people who look like us did centuries ago.” Nevertheless, we are responsible for “what good or ill we do to people alive with us today.” America, she metaphorizes, is like an old house, battered by countless storms and floods, festering with centuries worth of mildew and mold that will not go away, no matter how hard we try to turn a blind eye. We did not design this house. We did not erect its walls or lay down its studs. We did not install its rickety pillars or uneven joists. But we are the old house’s heirs; we are its current occupants. We are the ones responsible for fixing it now.

If this fixing is to be effective, Wilkerson writes, it must be intrinsically empathetic and, by extension, intrinsically free of shame. As opposed to trying to generate distance between a categorically racist “them” and a nobly unbiased “us,” Wilkerson suggests that we reframe racism as a scaled continuum — as a graded spectrum which infects each of us to varying degrees, depending on our own levels of exposure. And as opposed to responding to caste with loud-voiced pity or self-focused shame, she suggests that we listen humbly, cultivating a “radical kind of empathy” so as to understand people’s “experience from their perspective, not as we imagine we would feel.” “If each of us could truly see and connect with the humanity of the person in front of us,” she writes,   

“It could begin to affect how we see the world and others in it, perhaps change the way we hire or even vote. Each time a person reaches across caste and makes a connection, it helps to break the back of caste. Multiplied by millions in a given day, it becomes the flap of a butterfly wing that shifts the air and builds to a hurricane across an ocean.”

I hope that we can all have the courage to be that radical bridge, that air-shifting flap, that Wilkerson so beautifully imagines. Just think about what a better world we could have; just think about what a better home our “old house” could be.

When it came out in 2018, Sally Rooney’s Normal People rocked the world as what was then-described as “the first great millennial love story.” For a year, it remained the most critically praised book in the United Kingdom. It won the British Book Award and the Costa Book Award and was longlisted for both the Man Booker Prize and the Women’s Prize for Fiction. Together with her debut novel, Conversations with Friends (2017), it has catapulted Rooney to full-fledged stardom, positioning her as the definitive “voice” of her generation and, some say, the Jane Austen of our time.

In reading Normal People, it is not hard to see why Rooney has received such praise. The book is an electric page-turner, centering on the lives of two teenagers — Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan — who share an unlikely but irresistible connection. Though they hail from the same small town of Carricklea, Ireland, the characters of Connell and Marianne could not be more different. Mythically one-part jock, one-part closeted literary genius, Connell is the king of his and Marianne’s high school; within the confines of their provincial hometown, he is beloved by all and “always gets what he wants.” Marianne, meanwhile, is the school pariah, vituperated as “ugly” and incomprehensibly “self-absorbed.” As a misunderstood rich girl, she is in the world but not of it; she moves around as “a protective film, floating like mercury.” Later, at Trinity College Dublin, the dynamic between Connell and Marianne summarily and consummately flip-flops. While Connell flails, finding himself unable to rely on the characteristics and structures that once made him so “golden,” Marianne blossoms into a “glamorous” and “formidable” queen bee who is adored and envied by all.

The way Rooney explores how these shifting dynamics and corresponding power struggles affect Connell and Marianne’s relationship is absolutely brilliant — and absolutely spot on. At times, Normal People feels so real that it’s almost invasive; as if Rooney has somehow sifted through our memories to usurp and retroreflect our own experiences and heartbreak. Much of this relatability stems from the accessibility of Rooney’s prose, which comes off as fresh, witty, sharp, and yet undeniably gentle. As the so-heralded “Salinger of the Snapchat generation,” she has such an authentically millennial sensibility, though she manages to balance this temporally specific discernment with transcendent layering and introspection, seamlessly interweaving Facebook-era dialogue with disquisitions on Emma and The Communist Manifesto.

Yet for all of its resonance, there were so many facets of Normal People — particularly around Connell and Marianne’s relationship — that I personally found very difficult to understand. Critics have praised both Normal People and its popular Hulu adaptation as “a love story to cherish,” but to frame Connell and Marianne’s romance as even remotely aspirational is to ignore its troubling — and progressively pathological — dysfunction. For one, Connell and Marianne do not talk to each other. Ever. Time and time again, they prove that they are more than willing to surrender their relationship to arbitrary social structures or in exchange for personal invulnerability, sometimes almost willfully misinterpreting the other in order to feel “protected” within the known parameters of their own shame. With this, Normal People becomes not so much a love story as a treatise on shame — specifically, on how shame can adulterate, cheapen, and destroy love. With Marianne, her shame is clearly developed and understood. Tragically, she is a victim of domestic abuse and feels that, as a result, she is inherently “a bad person, corrupted, [and] wrong.” As she questions what is wrong with her (“I don’t know why I can’t be like normal people”), she acquiesces to the worst kinds of relationships, expectations, and treatment, all of which she assumes she “deserves” as punishment for “the evil part of herself.” With Connell, shame is there, perhaps in equal measure, but it is harder to grasp. Though he comes from a loving family, he is deeply insecure about his socioeconomic status and convinces himself that he “doesn’t belong in [Marianne’s] world.” While he fits the bill of the archetypal “nice guy” and professedly loves Marianne, he consistently proves that he willing to betray “any confidence, any kindness, for the promise of social acceptance.”   

What results from Marianne’s and Connell’s shame is not a “will-they-won’t-they” love story, as the book is so often marketed, but rather a gratuitous cycle of self-oriented longing, transient gratification, and masochistic pain. At times, Connell and Marianne’s breakups feel random and indecipherable, with their shame offered as what can appear like a retrofitted, inadequate, if however narratively convenient explanation. At other times, their reunions feel massively out-of-step with the deep shame they purportedly feel. The book’s ending is perhaps the most illustrative example of Rooney’s somewhat contradictory depiction of shame. Critics have used words like “sweet,” “redemptive,” and “hopeful” to describe the final scene of Normal People, but to me it came across as rushed and incredibly painful, reflecting not the “egalitarian” reciprocity of first love but rather the relentlessness of shame – the ruthless way it makes its victims feel permanently unlovable and intrinsically unworthy of others’ energy and time. 

Stemming from this perceived egalitarianism, many critics have lauded the book as a neo-capitalist romance, drawing from Rooney’s own identification as a Marxist and her “belief that without constraints we can actually love each other.” “The book’s characters have different things at different times: money, social capital, looks,” wrote Annalisa Quinn for The Atlantic in her 2019 review, and “the novel suggests the possibility of a setup in which these advantages are shared and redistributed according to need.” Yet, in my view, Rooney’s so-called “Marxism of the heart” is fundamentally problematic. Connell and Marianne’s relationship may indeed be a Marxist “utopia,” but it is a utopia that confuses an equal distribution of love and respect with an equal distribution of power. There is equity, yes, but only insofar as Connell and Marianne have equal power to hurt and “reign over” one another. Throughout Normal People, Rooney herself acknowledges this false equivalency between love and power: “There’s always been something inside [Marianne] that men have wanted to dominate, and their desire for domination can look so much like attraction, even love,” she writes midway through the book. Later, Rooney exposes the “shy” Connell as one of these men, describing how his desire for power has polluted his love for Marianne:

“What is the missing element, the excluded part of the story that explains what upset them both? It has something to do with their history, he knows that. Ever since school he has understood his power over her. How she responds to his look or the touch of his hand. The way her face colors, and she goes still as if awaiting some spoken order. His effortless tyranny over someone who seems, to other people, so invulnerable. He has never been able to reconcile himself to the idea of losing this old over her, like a key to an empty property, left available for future use. In fact he has cultivated it, and he knows he has.”

Certainly, if Normal People is a “Marxist love story,” then it should be read as a warning — not a presumed advertisement — for Marxist philosophy. Marxism hinges on the belief that people can envision and build their own “ideal” future, independent of any political aid, mediation, or interference; it imagines a world in which production is based solely on meeting collective need, discarding any notion or desire for individualistic profit. As written, however, Connell and Marianne’s romance is intrinsically individualistic and transactional – they make decisions not for the betterment of society (or even each other), but for their own gratification and advancement. Rooney gives them the freedom to make the right decisions for themselves and other people, but they consistently choose wrong. When Connell is with his college girlfriend, Helen, for example, he feels like “an impossibly heavy lid has been lifted off his emotional life and suddenly he can breathe fresh air.” He “thinks the aspects of himself that are most compatible with Helen are his best aspects: his loyalty, his basically practical outlook, his desire to be thought of as a good guy.” Yet even though Helen is ostensibly the better choice for Connell, he sabotages their relationship, indulging in an ongoing series of inappropriate transgressions with Marianne that stretch and ultimately break Helen’s trust.

In my opinion, if anything is to be seen as purely and productively “Marxist,” the benefits of equality must exist in harmony — not in mutual exclusion or alternation. In Normal People, however, the so-called “equilibrium” experienced by Connell and Marianne is too spaced out, too disjointed, for it to be ever praised as “utopian” or even exemplary. While exquisitely written, theirs is a love story that we should learn and hopefully grow from — not aspire to.

Do you ever feel like books have a way of coming into your life at just the right time? Have you ever encountered a story that unearths an ostensibly uncharted — though transcendently known — part of yourself or your journey? This is how I feel about Traveling with Pomegranates, Sue Monk Kidd and Ann Kidd Taylor’s joint memoir about their mother-daughter excursions to Greece, Turkey, and France. Though in different ways, Sue and Ann start their shared journey from a place of intense loss, each feeling that they are on the precipice of a dark, alien abyss. Haunted by the “small, telling ‘betrayals’” of her body, Sue is grappling with the “death” of herself as a young woman, sensing that something is over or “lost.” She yearns to write a novel (what would become The Secret Life of Bees), though she cannot shake the feeling that her dream amounts to merely a “whimsy, hope, impulse, [or] silly conceit.” At 22, her daughter Ann has spent the past few years in a cocoon of understood (yet untested) safety, “quietly organizing [her] psychological orbits” around a boyfriend who breaks her heart. As a recent college graduate, she emerges from this cocoon unraveled, shaken, and rejected, desperately trying to find a world to which she belongs.

Lodged deep inside these individual battles is a shared yearning for renewed and re-strengthened relationship. As a mother, Sue struggles to love in a way that is free of interference or enmeshment while Ann, enamored by her mother’s example, hopes to uncover and build an identity that is hers — bound but free, inherited but owned. What results is a “strange purgatory” of sorts in which both Sue and Ann feel uncomfortable with and distant from one another. Though outwardly close, they find themselves preoccupied with the surface-level pleasantries and frivolities of life, unable to unlock what is deep and true.

What thus starts out as a fun mother-daughter trip becomes a pilgrimage of rediscovery and rebirth. From the cathedrals of Paris and southern France to the ancient sites of Athens, Ephesus, Paliani, and Eleusis, Sue and Ann enwrap themselves in a sibylline journey of past and present, uncovering in the Mourning Athena, the Black Madonna at Le Puy-en-Velay, the Virgin of the Myrtle, and the Grotte Chauvet symbolic analogues — as well as instructive templates — for their own individual and mutual renewal. Central to Sue and Ann’s story of renewal is that of Demeter and Persephone, antiquity’s most famous mother-daughter duo. In the Greek myth, which Sue and Ann rediscover on their trip to Eleusis, the beautiful maiden Persephone is abducted by Hades, lord of the dead, who brings her to the underworld. Bewildered and bereaved by the loss of her beloved daughter, Persephone’s mother, Demeter, the goddess of grain, harvest, and fertility, vengefully scours the earth, rendering it a desolate, unyielding wasteland. With no other choice but to intervene, Zeus eventually orders Hades to return Persephone to her mother. Yet in all of his cunning, Hades tricks Persephone into eating a handful of pomegranate seeds, thus guaranteeing her return to the underworld every winter. 

With the start of each spring, however, Demeter and Persephone reunite. Out of this powerful rejoining or heuresis, Persephone emerges not as the naïve, “untested” girl but as a conscious woman, tragically — though perhaps necessarily — “transfigured by her experience.” At the Telesterion in Eleusis, Sue and Ann write, pilgrims from across the ancient Panhellenic world would travel thousands of miles to reenact the story of Demeter and Persephone through the so-called “Rites of Eleusis” (or “Eleusinian Mysteries”). By experiencing a figurative descent to the underworld, or kathodos, followed by a figurative resurrection to “new life,” or anados, the participants would leave Eleusis reborn and forever freed from the fear of death.

Through their travels, Sue and Ann each experience their own kathodos and anados and, ultimately, their own shared heuresis. Though as separate individuals, they come together as a mother and daughter, indelibly bound by a transcendent love for each other and a transcendent trust in life after death, in all of its forms. In their story, the reader is able to identify countless moments of connection and understanding, regardless of gender, age, experience, or vocation. Certainly, while we may not always be able to literally “travel” with pomegranates, haven’t we all lost ourselves in search of the “right” profession or in devotion to the wrong partner? Haven’t we all buried a dream in which part of ourselves dies too? Haven’t we all experienced a loss that cuts us so deeply that we fear we may never see the light of day again? And haven’t we all yearned for a rebirth that leaves us with a greater understanding of God, each other, and ourselves?

In reading Traveling with Pomegranates, we are able to not just witness such a rebirth, but to profoundly understand what such a rebirth can mean for the relationships that matter most to us. Hopefully, we will all have the courage, patience, and compassion to endure our own kathodos — our own “holy dark” — to experience this rebirth for ourselves.

Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Anne Applebaum begins her newest book, Twilight of Democracy, with a party. The night is December 31, 1999, and Applebaum and her husband are hosting a lively coterie of friends at Chobielin, a small, ramshackled house in northwest Poland, to help ring in the new millennium. Per Applebaum’s description, the party must have been an absolute ball, with guests firing blank pistols in the air “out of sheer exuberance” amid an entertaining soundtrack of Eastern and Western tunes. Representing a motley crew of journalists, civil servants, and diplomats, Applebaum writes, the party’s guests were different though united in their faith in Poland’s future — a future that they all hoped would be safeguarded by democratic checks and balances and a commitment to the rule of law.

Twenty years later, Applebaum tells us, many of the party’s attendees are not on speaking terms, with half having remained loyal to Poland’s classically anti-Communist “right” and half having defected to the country’s nativist Law and Justice party, co-founded by twin brothers Lech and Jarosław Kaczyński in 2001. Applebaum writes that since winning a slim majority in 2015, the Law and Justice party has trended toward dangerous illiberalism, taking over the state public broadcaster, sacking thousands of civil servants, firing army generals, disparaging and defunding cultural institutions, and repeatedly violating the constitution. Harnessing existential resentment toward Jews, Islamic immigrants, and the “rainbow-colored ‘plague’” of homosexuality,” the party has fostered a culture of deep division and discrimination, indulging in nostalgic fear-mongering as well as “alternative facts” to sow, authenticate, and institutionalize prejudice.

In Twilight of Democracy, Applebaum globalizes Law and Justice’s seemingly “unique” penchant toward authoritarianism, exposing the neofascist illiberalism which guides several burgeoning political parties in the West (i.e., Victor Orbán’s Fidesz party in Hungary, Santiago Abascal’s Vox party in Spain, and Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party in France) as well as the governments of the United Kingdom’s Boris Johnson and the United States’ Donald Trump. With eloquent and persuasive urgency, she identifies what these political movements have in common. They begin, she tells us, with not necessarily an idea or ideology but a person – a funny, charismatic celebrity who seeks power and fame. With said person at the helm, the movement rises to power by attacking institutions, trivializing democratic ideals, and galvanizing nostalgia for a “simpler” past as it corroborates wild conspiracy theories, fixating on institutional or demographic scapegoats which pose some sort of threat to what is “normal” or “good.” Once in power, the movements back this nationalistic scapegoating with government action while violating constitutional norms and exerting undemocratic control over education and the arts. Capitalizing on anger, division, and existential nihilism, they inspire and standardize hyper-partisanship, breeding distrust of “normal” politics, “establishment” politicians, professional experts, and “mainstream” institutions.

Building on nearly a century of research, Applebaum reveals not just why — but how — authoritarianism can so easily replace democracy. The roots of this change, she tells us, are not political, historical, or specific to the global “East”; rather, they are tied to a deeply human and profoundly universal preference for homogeneity and order and, by extension, an aversion to pluralistic complexity, tolerance, and debate. Citing the French writer Julian Benda, who in the 1920s accused both Marxists and fascists of betraying “the search for truth,” Applebaum frames this “authoritarian predisposition” as not a political ideology but an intrinsically human “frame of mind” that can find resonance on the right as well as on the left. Indeed, whereas right-wing ideologues tend to espouse a nationalist and/or fascist manifestation of authoritarianism which harmfully idealizes the “simplicity” of the past, vituperates academia and the arts, encourages xenophobic prejudice, and ascribes a country’s problems to “moral depravity, decadence, and secularism,” left-wing ideologues tend to champion a form of Marxist authoritarianism which harmfully represses freedom of speech, rejects meritocratic advancement, and denounces “the destructive force of capitalism” in favor of socialistically inspired equality. Regardless of its ideological origins, the pull toward authoritarianism capitalizes on the same instincts and breeds the same results, creating a world in which difference is replaced by intolerance, nuance is replaced by absolutism, and idealism is replaced by nihilistic doom and gloom.

During the U.S. presidential election of 2016, argues Applebaum, the anti-bourgeois, anti-establishment politics of the old Marxist left met and mingled with the right’s “despair about the dire moral state of the nation” — an interaction which found its voice in the “restorative,” “proto-authoritarian personality cult” of Donald Trump. During and after the election, Trump awarded credence to left and right variations of anti-Americanism, validating disdain for the “Establishment” (“Their victories have not been your victories; their triumphs have not been your triumphs”) as well as evangelical anguish over the country’s moral deterioration (“the crime and gangs and drugs,” etc.).  

With well-examined insight, Applebaum describes the ways in which Trump has successfully actualized much of the authoritarian rhetoric of his campaign. Marking a significant departure from historical precedent, he has 1). Maligned civic and cultural institutions, berating American generals as “a bunch of dopes and babies,” American intelligence as “the deep state,” and American universities as hotbeds of “radical left indoctrination”; 2). Violated the rule of law, prohibiting executive branch officers from surrendering documents or giving testimony related to impeachment while politically coercing members of the federal workforce; 3). Fueled racially rooted fear and animus, joining others in blaming the decline of “the America we know and love” on a factually unsubstantiated invasion of “thieves, murderers, [and] rapists” and an “overrunning” of American suburbs with “low income projects”; and 4). Indulged in conspiratorial thinking, arguing that George Soros “owns” Black Lives Matter, accusing Joe Biden of taking performance-enhancing drugs, and honoring members of QAnon — who believe that Democrats are pedophilic Satanists — as “people who love our country.” 

Oftentimes, when Trump’s neofascist behaviors are called out, the response resembles the following: “Trump is unethical and immoral, sure, but everyone is unethical and immoral” (or, alternatively, “Trump is unethical and immoral, but the liberal media is biased”). As it so happens, this rhetorical fallacy — known as “whataboutery” or “whataboutism” — actually takes its lead from Trump, who often uses American wrongdoing to justify his admiration of Vladimir Putin, charging his opponents with hypocrisy as he maintains, “There are a lot of killers. You think our country’s so innocent?” While there is certainly value in addressing American wrongs and American hypocrisy, Applebaum writes, such whataboutism creates a pernicious moral equivalence between Soviet-style dictatorship and American democracy, undermining our faith in the ideals of our founding while giving the president license to break the rules and win at all costs “just like everyone else.” By equalizing democracy and authoritarianism, it rejects the long-held notion that we are a model of workable, sustainable, and reproducible democracy, thereby eliminating any reason to defend or adhere to our democratically beholden values in the first place. 

While there are a few things that Applebaum leaves unaddressed in Twilight of Democracy (i.e., the future of the electoral college, how to cultivate a patriotism that honors without idealizing its past, etc.), no other book that I’ve read provides such a clear and helpful framework for understanding how we got here — or how we are going to get out. Ending on an optimistic note, Applebaum suggests that democracy can be restored: “Together we can make old and misunderstood words like liberalism mean something again; together we can fight back against lies and liars.”

As part of this fight, Applebaum again encourages circumspection of any singular roadmap, rule book, or “didactic ideology” that promises immediate recovery or consummate restoration: “There is no final solution, no theory that will explain everything.” In doing, she reminds us that we are all fumbling through the darkness, all endeavoring to sift through the cacophony, complexity, and uncertainty of our modern era. And though we try, in this sifting, to discern what is right, we are all unavoidably susceptible to hypocrisy, prejudice, self-interest, and “silver bullet solutions.”

All what we can do is embrace the darkness for what it is. All what we can do is resist the temptation of authoritarianism’s seductive but delusive light. All what we can do is keep seeking the truth.

Sanaë Lemoine’s debut novel, The Margot Affair, tells the story of Margot, the love child of acclaimed stage actress Anouk Louve and French presidential hopeful Bertrand Lapierre, who have been carrying on a secret affair for the past two decades, raising their daughter in a clandestine series of “stolen moments.” Set in Paris, the novel opens the summer that Margot turns seventeen: She and Anouk are sitting side-by-side at a small café, overlooking the Luxembourg Gardens, when they see something that threatens to expose — or at least seriously destabilize — their precious “arrangement” with Bertrand.  

Having ascended into the highest echelons of Parisian society, marrying into one of the city’s wealthiest families and becoming the country’s Minister of Culture, Bertrand has always sought to conceal his double life, tucking Anouk and Margot away in a tiny apartment to avoid any stain on his “polished persona.” Though he is a workaholic and a people pleaser, perpetually “conscious of labels,” he is idolized by Margot, who assumes that she is her father’s “chosen one.” By contrast, Margot feels “repelled” by her mother Anouk, who always seems like she has something better to do or someone more interesting to be with. Complaining that Margot has become spoiled and foolish, she sets unexplained boundaries around their relationship, strictly maintaining that “a mother is not a friend.”   

For years, Margot has believed that, despite these imperfections, she and her mother are Bertrand’s “better” family – that is, until a certain fated encounter. Tired of existing in the shadows of her father’s life, she succumbs to the temptation to “tear [her] world open by its seams,” revealing a powerful and potentially lethal secret to a stranger she (mistakenly) thinks she can trust.

Born in Paris herself, Lemoine brings the city of Paris to life in The Margot Affair, describing its gardens, sidewalks, and corner cafés as one would an impressionist painting. As a recipe and cookbook editor, she appeals to our palettes, too, sparking our taste buds with a carte of delectable French cuisine — a tomato and fennel tart layered with parsley pesto; a caramelized pear custard sprinkled with shards of toasted almond; and a sumptuous panini topped with specks of oregano clung to melted cheese. Though seemingly immaterial, Lemoine’s focus on food gradually emerges as one of the novel’s major themes, reflecting our broader human relationship with appetite, hunger, and indulgence. Fitting the mold of the quintessentially Parisian bon vivant, many of Lemoine’s characters indeed take “great pleasure” in their food, devouring whatever is placed in front of them without any heed to their weight, as if they are “oblivious” to their bodies, with some even going as far as to hoard at the expense of others. That said, many others approach their food from a place deprivation: They weigh themselves at the start of each morning and manage each and every bite with meticulous “discipline”; they starve themselves to fit into their clothes — and into the world around them.

At times, Lemoine’s focus on appetite can become rather dark, particularly as she treads into cannibalistic territory, though I ended the book absolutely blown away by her ability to connect our hunger for food with our hunger for relationship, acceptance, and love. For her entire life, Margot has been forced to silence the latter, living in a constant state of postponement and anticipation, drawing comfort only from the belief that she is filling a need in her dad’s life – that she is making his famished, colorless life whole. But the truth tells a far different — and far more heart-breaking — story.

Margot’s response to the truth can be occasionally hard to stomach. Rejecting the transparency she’s always craved, she morphs into what Lemoine describes as a “mass of contradictory selves,” unable to resist the feeling of controlling what others know and don’t know about her. Yet thanks to Lemoine’s tender prose and deep, anthropological insight, Margot’s coming-of-age is not something we can judge her for, at least not for long. She is, after all, just a kid trying to be seen; she is just a daughter seeking to be fed.

Brit Bennett’s second novel, The Vanishing Half, tells the story of twins Stella and Desiree Vignes who grow as inseparable “halves” — like “one body split in two” — only to disappear from each other, their destinies severed by race. Their story begins in the sleepy, Southern town of Mallard, “named after ring-necked ducks living in the rice fields and marshes.” Undiscoverable on a map, Mallard feels to the reader like an alternate universe, moored not by a permanent sense of place but by a vision of successively increasing “lightness,” with each generation becoming whiter and whiter — “like a cup of coffee steadily diluted with cream.”  

Here, in this universe beguiled by lightness, Stella and Desiree live like princesses, their “skin the color of sand barely wet.” Nevertheless, the twins yearn for the world beyond. Their small-minded town bristles at their dissatisfaction, unable to comprehend how anyone could ever want something more: “You can escape a town,” the townspeople say, “but you cannot escape blood.” Not long after the book begins, Stella and Desiree defy this, disappearing from Mallard and eventually from one another, with “Stella becoming white and Desiree marrying the darkest man she could find.” The twins who seemed inseverable are now completely disembodied, each proving that they can “choose” their race just as readily — and just as subjectively — as their race can “choose” them.

With profound emotion and creative finesse, Bennett paints a picture of the next fifty years, journeying from Mallard to New Orleans, Beverly Hills, and New York City. As it broadens, The Vanishing Half becomes less a tale about race and more a dissertation on the mutability and transience of identity. As she describes the black woman who pretends to be white, the transgender college student who painfully wraps his chest, or the actress who becomes “invisible so that only the character shines through,” Bennett universalizes the theme of identity, but never in ways that feel expected or hackneyed. Each time, the exercise of reidentification provokes a new thought and ushers in a new loss, as if the characters are slipping away, vanishing into a new world where everything — even love itself — is a lie.

The Vanishing Half is one of the most buzzed about books of 2020, and for good reason. At times, it feels like a fantasy, enwrapped in colorful, chimerical inexplicability, and yet at other times it feels like the realest thing imaginable. Perhaps Bennett intended for the latter. In a way, perhaps we are all Stella and Desiree, separating from the world and each other, manufacturing new identities, slipping into an unrecognizable “half” of our former selves. And perhaps the world is Mallard — like a duck swimming blithely along, its outward appearance belying the chaotic truths that clamor underneath.  

“How do I feel about 1941?” diarist Olivia Cockett wrote in late 1940, responding to the “December Directive” from Mass-Observation, a nationwide project launched in 1937 to capture humdrum details of everyday British life. “I stopped typing for two minutes to listen to an extra noisy enemy plane,” she answered,

“It dropped a bomb which puffed my curtains in and made the house shiver…and now the guns are galoomphing at its back. There are craters at the bottom of my garden, and a small unexploded bomb. Four windows are broken. Can see the ruins of 18 houses within five minutes’ walk. Have two lots of friends staying with us whose homes have been wrecked. About 1941, I feel that I shall be damned glad if I’m lucky enough to see it all.”

With phlegmatic poignancy, Cockett’s response marks a fitting midpoint to The Splendid and the Vile, Erin Larson’s stunning account of Winston Churchill’s leadership during the Blitzkrieg, the Nazi’s “lightning war” campaign on the United Kingdom. Lasting from September 1940 to May 1941, “the Blitz” killed 45,000 civilians in the span of just eight months, leaving survivors feeling traumatized and hopeless, if not “damned glad” that they’d been lucky enough to stay alive.   

Though the Blitz began in the fall of 1940, Larson begins his book in the preceding spring, a season trailed by unwelcomed realizations and “bleak expectations.” The Germans, he tells us, had developed bombs that could annihilate entire city blocks; their planes had grown larger and could fly higher than ever before; and warcraft production in the UK was operating under a rather lackadaisical schedule. Assistance from the Americans, meanwhile, was seeming more and more like a precarious gamble, hinging on an increasingly isolationist Congress and an increasingly hand-strapped president.   

In this “darkest” of hours, Larson writes, Churchill emerged as a leader ideally and singularly suited for his time. Valuing candor, ingenuity, and efficiency, he surrounded himself with undeferential experts who challenged the “tried-and-true” and pushed him out of his comfort zone. More importantly, he was a master in “the art of being fearless.” By both his rhetoric and his example, he helped the British people “feel loftier, stronger, and, above all, more courageous,” single-handedly transforming “the despondent misery of disaster into a grimly certain steppingstone to ultimate victory.” “It is rather frightening how terribly they depend on him,” wrote his daughter Mary, observing how indispensable her father was to the preservation of British morale. Reluctantly, the Germans made the same observation, too, crediting the protraction of the so-called “short war” to Churchill’s resilience: “When will that creature Churchill finally surrender?” questioned Joseph Goebbels, Nazi’s propaganda chief, in the fall of 1940. “This man is a strange mixture of heroism and cunning,” he followed up near the end of the Blitz, adding that “if [Churchill] had come to power in 1933, we would not be where we are today.”  

As he does in his other books (i.e., The Devil in the White City, In the Garden of Beasts, etc.), Larson does a phenomenal job in interweaving the emotional with the analytic, crafting a story that completely draws you in, heart, mind, and soul. Leaning into human interest, he infuses his historical account of the Blitz with fascinating details regarding Churchill, bringing to life his incredible sense of humor and his many hilarious idiosyncrasies, encompassing everything from his preferred attire (red dressing gown, helmet, and slippers with pom poms) to his devotion to his beloved cat, Nelson, named in honor of the Napoleonic war hero.

What I believe makes The Splendid and the Vile so remarkable, however, is not necessarily its “cinematic detail” or emphasis on Churchill’s inner life, but rather its timing — or, perhaps more accurately, its prescience. When Larson sat down to write a book about Churchill’s leadership during the Blitz, he could have never anticipated that, a month into the book’s publication, we would be hurled into another global disaster, creating a particular appetite for historical comparison and perspective. There are several ways, indeed, in which Larson’s description of the Blitz mirrors our present struggles with COVID-19, presenting what can seem like an eerily reminiscent stream of dangers, interruptions, and inconveniences. A crucial difference, of course, is that “safety” during the Blitz was not a matter of behavioral self-actualization, as it is with COVID, but rather luck, and “luck alone.” No amount of rule-following, hiding, or mask-wearing could protect the people of Britain from “death from air” — it was unpredictable, rapid, and entirely indiscriminate.    

Another crucial difference, I believe, is that the people had someone like Churchill to lead them. In this portly and peculiar “Bulldog” of a man, the people of the United Kingdom were blessed with a leader who personified not only “the art of being fearless,” but also the art of being present in times of crisis. Certainly, the Bren light machine gun Churchill kept in the trunk of his car was not a propagandic gimmick, nor was his vow to fight until he was found “choking in his own blood upon the ground” an empty or hyperbolic promise. He would be there for the people of Britain until the very end, no matter how fearful the risk or grave the cost.

I am so grateful to Larson for reminding us what true leadership looks like. Here’s hoping we get some of it in the years to come.

In her 2017 memoir What Happened, Hillary Clinton describes her acceptance of Bill Clinton’s marriage proposal as “the most consequential decision of my life.” “I said no the first two times he asked me,” she reveals, “But the third time, I said yes. And I’d do it again.”

In Rodham, novelist Curtis Sittenfeld imagines a parallel universe in which Hillary made the “consequential decision” not to marry Bill, delivering a provocative thought experiment on how her life — and our country’s political landscape — may have been different if she had remained Hillary Rodham. As in real life, Bill and Hillary’s love story in Rodham starts off sweet: The thick-accented Arkansas farm boy sweeps her off her feet, and they develop a special, transcendent connection while at Yale Law — that is, of course, until he is unfaithful. For years, Hillary equivocates on whether she can trust Bill and eventually leaves him, though with lukewarm and heavily prodded conviction. “The margin between staying and leaving was so thin,” the fictional Hillary reflects. “Really, it could have gone either way.”   

In Sittenfeld’s alternate reality, Bill Clinton’s life changes drastically after their breakup. Without Hillary, he becomes something of a sex-obsessed maniac, whose political ambitions are truncated by scandal. Meanwhile, Sittenfeld’s Hillary charts her future as a single woman. Without a husband’s career to consider, she is able to launch her political career much sooner than real-life Hillary (in 1992’s “Year of the Woman,” to be exact), though her life is far from perfect. Haunted for decades by what she calls a “gaping hole of loneliness,” she remains emotionally tethered to Bill and indifferent to other men, rarely dating anyone for more than a few months. She is also trailed by many of the same biases and assumptions as real-life Hillary: Even when not married to Bill, she is still villainized as cold, elitist, unapproachable, fake, and power hungry. 

Surprisingly, several of these attacks against the fictional Hillary are warranted. While presumably fond of Hillary, Sittenfeld does not take a hagiographic approach to her reimagination; instead, she depicts a deeply flawed woman who will do practically anything to get ahead, even if it means silencing or impeding other women. While fictional Hillary’s motives for political life are ostensibly pure (she yearns to be “a vessel and a proxy” for women’s advancement), her means are often callous, exploitative, and grossly transactional. Though fictionalized, this depiction lends frustrating credence to decades-old and misogynistically charged assumptions about Hillary (i.e., that she is fake, calculating, power-obsessed, etc.). It also recasts Hillary’s decision to marry Bill as inconsequential, insofar as it affects her own electability.  

While there were so many things I loved about Rodham, the alternate world Sittenfeld imagines for Hillary can often feel like an oversimplified and overdramatized parody of our own. But perhaps, in a way, this was Sittenfeld’s intention — to expose politics as a receptacle for ego and a nursery ground for moral ambivalence, independent of any “consequential decisions” one makes in his or her personal life. Perhaps the question we should be asking, indeed, is not “What if Hillary Rodham hadn’t married Bill?” but rather, “What if Hillary had never gotten into politics at all?”  

At the start of Chapter 13 of his book, How to be an Anti-Racist, Ibram X. Kendi recounts a conversation with a former teacher, Temple’s Professor Ama Mazama:

“It is impossible to be objective,” Mazama instructed her students, her tone confident and conclusive as she revealed the “simple idea” that would fundamentally reshape Kendi’s worldview.

“If we can’t be objective, then what should we strive to do?” Kendi asked.

“Just tell the truth,” said Mazama. “That’s what we should strive to do. Tell the truth.”

In How to be an Anti-Racist, Kendi faithfully follows Mazama’s directive, exposing the painful fissures of our racist society with unalloyed and unequivocal honesty. Race, Kendi tells us, is a social construct that has been predicated on subjective bias, self-interest, and power — “the power,” he writes, “to categorize and judge, elevate and downgrade, [and] include and exclude.” Leveraging this power, society’s “race makers” have been able to sort distinct men and women into monolithic groups in ways that intertwine the individual with certain perceived behaviors, beliefs, and cultures, leading us to focus on the “mirage” of race as either a). a surrogate for individualization or b). a pardon for structural inaction. 

Kendi’s antidote to all of this comes in the form of “antiracism,” a step beyond what he calls a mere “awareness of racism.” Antiracism, Kendi explains, provides an updated framework with which to think about race, helping us to recognize racism more readily, understand its harm more fully, and more effectively contribute to a just and equitable society. In recognizing that racism exists in all of us, Kendi tells us that the process of becoming an antiracist is “always ongoing,” requiring a multi-faceted grasp of “biology, ethnicity, body, culture, behavior, color, space, and class” as well as a willingness to constantly reexamine the way we think about race. As such, Kendi argues, the term “racist” can and should be thought of less as a personal “pejorative” and more of as a “description” that calls out, contextualizes, and corrects certain behavior. “The only way to undo racism,” Kendi writes, “is to consistently identify and describe it — and then dismantle it.”  

One of my favorite aspects of Kendi’s How to be an Anti-Racist is his unambiguity — he gets straight to the point, no matter how uncomfortable it might make you feel. With a clear and direct style, he prefaces each chapter with a series of definitions, boiling down such complex terms as “racist,” “assimilationist,” “ethnic racism,” “colorism,” etc. to their barest, most consumable core, before diving into more complete — and more complex — explanations. With this balance of clarity and depth comes an abundance of “aha” moments: Each of Kendi’s chapters is bound to afford the reader some new, transformative insight, whether that be about the distinction between human “culture” and human “behavior,” the deracialization of behavior, or the curse of racially charged expectations.  

I also really connected with Kendi’s vulnerability. With the understanding that “the heartbeat of racism is denial, [and] the heartbeat of antiracism is confession,” he courageously owns up to the racism that exists within himself – an admission that helps us readers react more honestly and less shamefully to the racism in our own selves. Growing up, Kendi felt “afraid of the black body”; traversing the hallways of his high school, he would avoid bumping into people, making eye contact, and stepping on shoes, all in the fear that one of his black peers would personate some sort of racialized behavior. Later on, Kendi embraced the beauty of his identity and heritage but in ways that made him hate white people. In assuming all white people to be aggressive, greedy, prejudiced, and self-centered, Kendi tells us, he fell into racism’s ugly trap, viewing people solely by their membership in an arbitrarily constructed group as opposed to who they are as individuals.

The criticisms I have of How to be an Anti-Racist aren’t as much “criticisms” as they are a wider entreaty for more inclusive and less unilateral dialogue on the subject of race. As Jia Tolentino has pointed out, the “how to” nature of Kendi’s book gives it something of a “boot campy” feel, yielding a misleading sense of discomfort akin to taking a freezing shower, swallowing cough syrup, or going to the dentist. The journey to becoming an antiracist, says Tolentino, should be joyful: “To deepen your understanding of race…should make you feel like the world is opening up, like you’re dissolving into the immensity of history and the present rather than being more uncomfortably visible to yourself.”

In my opinion, the “how to” nature (and, not to mention, incredible market success) of Kendi’s book is also problematic in that it has the potential to singularly position Kendi as the definitive voice on what it means to be a racist and what it means to be an anti-racist. While Kendi’s book is exceptional, it is not perfect. As he predicates so much of his book on the distinctions between “Blackness” and “Whiteness,” for example, he never lucidly or cohesively explains what said “Blackness” and “Whiteness” actually are (or at least what he perceives them to be). Likewise, in rejecting well-intended assimilation as a suppression of Black culture (“The minority assimilated into the dominant culture, not the other way around,” he writes, quoting Obama’s Dreams from My Father), he doesn’t necessarily clarify how his proposition of racial disintegration will facilitate an authentically and sustainably anti-racist future. To be antiracist is to nurture difference, yes, but how do we ensure that this difference doesn’t obfuscate or trivialize our shared humanity?

These minor critiques aside, Kendi’s How to be an Anti-Racist is an excellent book that should indeed be read. Yet let us not treat it as an elixir to be gulped down with no space for introspection or reexamination. Our conception of the “truth,” in the words of Professor Mazama, is as subjective as it is changeable, demanding our close, full, and eternal attention.  

Nearly three years ago, on October 23, 2017, I had the privilege of attending a book talk with author Ron Chernow on his (then) recently published biography of Ulysses S. Grant. During the talk, Chernow defended the much-discussed length of his book (disclaimer: it’s more than 1,000 pages long!), reframing his exhaustive approach to biography as an exercise not in wasteful tautology but in genuine and important discovery. His task with every book, he said that evening, is to thoroughly “probe the silences and evasions” and to uncover “the character revealed under the pressure of circumstance,” no matter how long many years, or how many pages, it takes.

With Grant, Chernow proves the wisdom and the efficacy of his no-stone-left-unturned approach. To his contemporaries and even some of his closest friends, Ulysses S. Grant was indeed a perplexing, near-paradoxical enigma. During the Civil War, newspapers lauded him a military genius, yet his “nondescript face” and “unadorned” dress, often caked with mud, rendered him indecipherable from any common man in any common crowd. As president, he governed with courage, conviction, and diplomatic finesse, yet his struggles with alcoholism hung like a specter over his administration while his characteristic naivety often made him a pitiable plaything for duplicitous cronies, awarding him the long-standing (albeit profoundly unfair) reputation of a clumsy, corruptible drunkard.   

There are many who have criticized the length of Grant, but I believe it is only through such exhaustive excavation that Chernow allows us to really get to know the man behind the myth — the character dislodged, finally, from all the politically fueled perjuries and fables of his time. Jettisoning storied fictions concerning Grant’s “butchery” and stupidity, Chernow recasts him as a feverish reader, a dazzling raconteur, and a “steadfast protector” of the small and weak, dating all the way back to his schooldays when he’d go toe-to-toe with schoolyard bullies. Far from the “butcher” Confederates villainized opposite their demigod, Robert E. Lee, Grant was a gentle, devout Methodist and a devoted family man who pined for his wife and children whenever they were apart. He loved animals so much that he couldn’t bear to hunt or eat fowl, remarking, “I could never eat anything that went on two legs.”   

Perhaps more than any other facet of his character, Chernow lends critical perspective to Grant’s drinking. In applying our modern-day diagnosis of alcoholism as not a “personal failing” but a chronic and often genetically inherited disease, Chernow discards the long-held picture of Grant as the indulgent, bacchanalian boozer, revealing instead the truth of his painful addiction and, in the end, the glory of what was arguably his greatest triumph. Anyone who has been touched by alcoholism will greatly appreciate the way Chernow handles Grant’s addiction and will surely cheer when, at long last, he conquers his demons and renounces booze for good.

With such a thorough and attentive unshrouding of the man Grant really was, Chernow unearths a deeply misunderstood genius and a deeply underestimated hero. With an encyclopedic knowledge of warfare, able to recapitulate in detail the campaigns of Napoleon, Frederick the Great, and Julius Caesar, Grant was a mastermind of the battlefield. Drawing upon his mastery of psychology and his pliant, improvisational approach, he was able to exploit his enemies’ weaknesses and strike at the exact right moment while fostering an impenetrable “sense of unending activity.” Unlike Lee, who was narrowly focused on his home state of Virginia, Grant as Commanding General of the Union Army embraced a comprehensive strategy aimed at unequivocal Southern capitulation, with a command encompassing unprecedently vast terrain and hundreds of thousands of men. And unlike many of his colleagues who maintained a safe distance from actual combat, Grant regularly fought alongside his men, inspiring them with his presence and courage.  

Yet it was what Grant did for freed slaves, Chernow argues, that most entitles him to “an honored place in American history.” Endowed with an innate sense of justice, Grant came to embrace abolition as not a peripheral byproduct but as a fundamental and essential motive of the Civil War. As Brigadier General, Major General, Lieutenant General, and ultimately Commanding General of the entire Union Army, he served as a protector and advocate for runaway slaves, employing them as teamsters, cooks, hospital attendants, and nurses while envisioning fully franchised citizenship for African Americans long before many of his contemporaries. “He was always up with, or in advance of, authority furnished from Washington in regard to the treatment of those of our color,” wrote Frederick Douglass of Grant during the war. Once president, Grant emerged as “the single most important figure behind Reconstruction,” heralding a precursor to the Civil Rights movement that vouchsafed a vision of biracial democracy while ensuring the rights of African American citizens to vote, hold office, own land, and achieve literacy. During his eight years in the White House, he made it his principal mission to realize the goals enshrined in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, signing into law bills that protected African American rights while systematically crushing efforts by white supremacist groups to resuscitate the antebellum status quo.  

When I finished Chernow’s book, which concludes with Grant’s passing, in the words of his wife Julia, “as a soldier dies, without fear and without a murmur,” I couldn’t help but cry. After weeks of absorbing Chernow’s deep and expansive retelling of Grant’s extraordinary life, his death begets a strange yet unmistakable sense of personal loss, conjuring the feeling of losing a friend or, better yet, a hero, at once misunderstood, undervalued, and yet sorely needed. Certainly, in reading Grant, one is inclined to recognize in its pages something of a mirror, reflecting another time in which our “great experiment” too hung in the balance, its foundations quaking under the intersecting mantles of hatred, cowardice, and fear. As president, Grant was saddled with the Civil War’s violent and chaotic “afterbirth,” a reign of white supremacist terror that engulfed the Southern half of the United States, threatening the country as much as — if not more than — secession itself. With thousands of African Americans being murdered across the South, Grant acted with courageous and aggressive conviction, beseeching Congress to prioritize legislation that would institute criminal penalties for denying citizens their rights and endow him as president with the power to send in federal troops if states did not act on their own. Responding to what they saw as a violation of states’ rights, conservative Republicans and Democrats critiqued Grant’s actions as despotic, dubbing him “Kaiser Grant,” while apotheosizing the Confederacy — and its standard bearer, Robert E. Lee — as the most noble and gallant of “lost causes.”  

Today, 135 years after Grant’s death, we still find ourselves entrapped by these same tensions and delusions, needing, in a critical, almost desperate way, a “Grant” of our own. The writer T. J. Stiles has said that “we read biography to know a life but also to ratify our conviction that the individual matters.” Indeed, in the case of Grant as revealed, explained, and masterfully ratified by Chernow, the individual in question not only matters. He, in the end, may be necessary.

It is an admittedly strange and likely futile exercise to “review” a book as weathered and beloved as Wuthering Heights. So much has been written about Emily Brontë’s classic novel, by people far smarter than I, and I doubt I have anything new or inventive to say about it here. But, as I attempt to reflect on my personal experience as a humble reader, I can and must admit that it was NOT the book that I was expecting. For as long as Wuthering Heights has been in my general consciousness, I assumed it to be a passionate love story, moored (pun intended!) by the handsome, brooding, mysteriously seductive Heathcliff, a role made Hollywood-famous by the likes of Laurence Olivier, Richard Burton, Ralph Fiennes, and Tom Hardy. In reading the book, I was shocked to discover that Heathcliff is not the Tom Hardy of my dreams but rather a categorical villain, evil to the core and completely devoid of any positive human feeling. Certainly, the “love” Heathcliff and Catherine “Cathy” Earnshaw share when they are young is seemingly sweet, yet as it is never acted upon, it remains an infantile, self-indulgent, and lustful dalliance. As the couple gets older, this immaturity is only corroborated by the melodramatic language they use to describe their love — a language which seems to far surmount the love they actually feel.   

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is one of my all-time favorite books, which made me excited to read her sister Emily’s Wuthering Heights. The love shared between Charlotte’s titular Jane and Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre is real, deep, and steeped in a surprisingly progressive conception of sexual equality. But, as Pauline Nestor has written, “Emily,” unlike her sisters, “was no feminist” — “As tempting as it may be to read her character in such a light,” she argues, “Emily’s strengths were personal and idiosyncratic, not underpinned by any shared ideology or sense of a common cause.” While reading Wuthering Heights, I certainly felt tempted to ascribe feminist “cause” to many of Emily Brontë’s characters and plot devices. The book has a noticeable preoccupation with physical boundaries with its many allusions to doors, gates, locks, keys, etc., and the two Catherines seem to both feel an acute sense of imprisonment: “What irks me most is this shattered prison… I’m tired of being enclosed,” laments Catherine Earnshaw; “She was forbidden to move out of the garden, and it fretted her sadly to be confined to its narrow bounds,” Brontë writes, describing Catherine Linton.

Nevertheless, my research shows that these allusions, powerful though they may seem, do not represent some coded feminist manifesto. Wuthering Heights is as Gothic — and as apolitical — as they come. Its setting — “a perfect misanthropist’s Heaven” where “nobody decent came near” — is decidedly supernatural, filled with rumored ghosts, changelings, and vampires. We never quite know where Heathcliff comes from (“I declare he is that strange acquisition my late neighbor made in his journey to Liverpool — a little Lascar, or an American or Spanish castaway”) or even what he is, whether that be a vampire or the devil himself (“He’s not a human being,” affirms his wife Isabella). With its focus on childhood and its fascination with the natural world, a menagerie of larks, becks, brooks, and moors, the book occasionally slides into the Romantic genre, evoking something resembling Blake, Burns, or Coleridge, but then — poof! — someone’s been bitten or knocked to the ground, and the delightful reverie is over.

As someone who is typically not enamored with Gothic lit, I struggled to enjoy Wuthering Heights. So much of it, to be honest, did not make any sense to me. Madness seems to come out of nowhere, beautiful women are drawn to sickly, dyspeptic, diabolical men they barely know, and the narrator, Nellie Dean, is as reliable as a middle-school gossip.

But perhaps, in a way, that is the very genius of Wuthering Heights. With an unreliable narrator, we as readers are left with far more questions than answers; we are never quite certain of what the truth actually is. That might explain why we keep coming back, just like Mr. Lockwood, to Cathy and Heathcliff’s story, just to hear it one more time.