Welcome to 2011! What do we call this decade, anyway? Who will win the Super Bowl? What will become of health care reform? How many New York City snowplows does it take to screw in a light bulb?

Some questions are impossible to answer. But we asked our favorite writers an easy one: What book will you read on New Year’s Day? Here are their answers—it’s the Rumpus’s third annual Reading in the New Year:

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2666, by Roberto Bolaño – Doug Dorst

THE ACCIDENT, by Ismail Kadare – Michelle Richmond

THE AIR WE BREATHE, by Andrea Barrett – Robert Boswell

ANNA KARENINA, by Leo Tolstoy – Robin Romm

THE APPOINTMENT, by Herta Müller – Laura van den Berg

AT HOME: A SHORT HISTORY OF PRIVATE LIFE, by Bill Bryson – Mary Roach

BLOOD HORSES: NOTES OF A SPORTSWRITER’S SON, by John Jeremiah Sullivan – Maud Newton

BOTH WAYS IS THE ONLY WAY I WANT IT, by Maile Meloy – Cornelia Nixon

THE BURNING PLAIN, by Juan Rulfo – Joshua Furst

THE CALL OF THE WILD, by Jack London – David Vann

THE COLLECTED STORIES, by William Trevor – Margo Rabb

CROOKED LETTER, CROOKED LETTER, by Tom Franklin – Skip Horack

DEATH ON THE INSTALLMENT PLAN, by Louis Celine – Darcie Dennigan

THE EASY WAY TO STOP DRINKING, by Allen Carr – Kim Addonizio

THE END, by Salvatore Scibona – Brock Clarke

THE EVOLUTION OF BRUNO LITTLEMORE, by Benjamin Hale – Lan Samantha Chang

FOREIGN BODIES, by Cynthia Ozick – Margot Livesey

A FOREIGNER CARRYING IN THE CROOK OF HIS ARM A TINY BABY, by Amitava Kumar – Karan Mahajan

THE GOSPEL OF ANARCHY, by Justin Taylor – Jami Attenberg

GRYPHON: NEW AND SELECTED STORIES, by Charles Baxter – Peter Ho Davies

HOW TO LIVE, OR A LIFE OF MONTAIGNE, by Sarah Bakewell – Carl Phillips

HUNGER, by Knut Hamsun – Lucy Corin

IN A STRANGE ROOM, by Damon Galgut – Paul Yoon

THE INVISIBLE BRIDGE, by Julie Orringer – Edward Schwarzschild

JUST KIDS, by Patti Smith – Marilyn Chin

LADY LAZARUS, by Andrew Foster Altschul – Will Allison

LIKE YOU’D UNDERSTAND ANYWAY, by Jim Shepard – Lisa Dierbeck

LUCKY JIM, by Kingsley Amis – Lauren Grodstein

MADAME BOVARY, by Gustave Flaubert (transl. by Lydia Davis) – Daniel Handler

THE MORAL OBLIGATION TO BE INTELLIGENT, by Lionel Trilling – Andrew Winer

MR. PEANUT, by Adam Ross – Keith Scribner

OBABAKOAK: STORIES FROM A VILLAGE, by Bernardo Atxaga – Matthew Iribarne

“One of the 600 books I have being written for me…” – James Frey

PLEASURE, by Gary Young – Jennifer Richter

THE POSSESSED: ADVENTURES WITH RUSSIAN BOOKS AND THE PEOPLE WHO READ THEM, by Elif Batuman – Padma Viswanathan

THE PROFESSOR AND OTHER WRITINGS, by Terry Castle – Peter Rock

THE REVENGE OF THE RADIOACTIVE LADY, by Elizabeth Stuckey-French – Porter Shreve

ROOM, by Emma Donoghue – Daniel Stolar

THE SPOT, by David Means – Daniel Orozco

TELL ME A RIDDLE, by Tillie Olsen – Melanie Rae Thon

TITUS GROAN, by Mervyn Peake – Edward Carey

TRAVELS IN SIBERIA, by Ian Frazier – David Goodwillie

THE TWIN, by Gerbrand Bakker (transl. by David Colmer) – Lydia Davis

THE UNIVERSE IN MINIATURE IN MINIATURE, by Patrick Somerville – Hannah Tinti

THE VICE CONSUL, by Marguerite Duras – Rebecca Solnit

A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD, by Jennifer Egan – Matthew Pitt

WIDOW, by Michelle Latiolais – Elizabeth Tallent

WITHIN A BUDDING GROVE, by Marcel Proust – Mark Slouka

WORLD’S FAIR, by E. L. Doctorow – Andrew Altschul

YOUR FACE TOMORROW: FEVER AND SPEAR, by Javier Marías – Matthew Zapruder

YOU THINK THAT’S BAD, by Jim Shepard – Stephen Elliott

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If you’ve read Mark Slouka’s books of fiction—the story collection Lost Lake (1998) and the novels God’s Fool (2002) and The Visible World (2007)—you know that, in his heart, he’s a cartographer. He maps the relationship between the present and the past, detailing the emotional topography, shading out those zones where the borders between memory and history, fact and fiction, have become porous. The Visible World, which Booklist called “almost unbearably poignant” addresses the almost unbearable need of the living to piece together the stories of our pasts, even as the truth of those stories remains, inevitably, inaccessible. The New York Times called it “a delicately imagined and beautifully rendered novel.”

But there’s another side to Mark Slouka, as any regular reader of Harper’s knows. Here Slouka plays the role of a canary in the coal mine, or a Jeremiah howling into the American bazaar: “Mend thy ways!” In frequent essays and meditations, he provides incisive, sometimes blistering analyses of American politics and culture. He was a blunt and passionate critic of the Bush administration and the war in Iraq, and has recently taken aim at the failure of American higher education to produce informed citizens, as opposed to “workers.” The concerns of his fiction—our need to connect past and present, and to distinguish truth from the lie—are just as central to his nonfiction.

Slouka’s new book, Essays from the Nick of Time, collects many of those Harper’s pieces alongside others, several of which were reprinted in the Best American Essays anthologies. He is a contributing editor of Harper’s and a professor at the University of Chicago. Rumpus Books editor, Andrew Altschul, caught up with him last week, just as Essays from the Nick of Time was arriving in bookstores.

***

The Rumpus: The title of your new collection refers to Thoreau, and yet these essays are anything but throwbacks or nostalgia pieces. What is it about Thoreau that feels so relevant and urgent to you?

Mark Slouka: In his critique of the basic tenets of capitalism, Thoreau may well have been the most radical writer in American history. I sometimes think that if copies of Walden started really selling, Lawrence Summers would have an aneurism. In this age of entertainment and mindless acquisitiveness, I can’t imagine anyone more dangerous to the status quo, or necessary.

Rumpus: What was so radical about Thoreau?

Slouka: Thoreau, as quaint as it sounds today, proposed a notion of value divorced from the marketplace; today, in the Age of Economics, when everything from cancer medications to the survival of species is subject to cost-benefit analyses, that’s pretty radical.

Rumpus: You quote Thoreau in the epigraph, where he speaks of “standing on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future… to toe that line.” Is that what the essays in Nick of Time are meant to do?

Slouka: In part, sure, though there’s more than one line. In some of my essays it’s the political moment, which I can’t ignore, as much as I’d sometimes like to; in others it’s the line between memory (or history) and narrative, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. I guess as a writer I’m drawn to the places where forces converge.

Rumpus: There’s also the line between fiction and nonfiction, or fact, a line you’ve crossed in both directions throughout your career. Sometimes, as with essays like “Hitler’s Couch,” which deals with the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, you cover territory you’ve also written about in your fiction. What is the difference, for you, between writing fiction and writing nonfiction?

Slouka: To be honest, I’m less sure of that line than I’ve ever been, not because I don’t believe that there are no facts, that everything is ideology, perspective. To the contrary, I believe that history is as empirical as a brick—certain things happen; the door slams, the fist comes down. It’s just that it seems to me that once the moment has passed, it automatically enters the dominion of fiction.

I can’t tell you anything about myself—why I got married, what I had for breakfast this morning—that isn’t a story. So, aside from certain conventions of voice, a certain stance toward “fact,” I’m not sure the line exists. One side bleeds into the other all the time.

Rumpus: Essays from the Nick of Time is divided into two sections: “Reflections,” which are generally personal in their subject matter, and “Refutations,” which are more political or cultural. Here’s another line to toe—but here, too, it gets blurry.

Slouka: Feels a little bipolar sometimes, but there it is. The truth is that I long to move permanently into the sanctuary of fiction, to breathe nothing but the pure ether of the imagination, but keep getting drawn into the battle by what I see going on around me: By the rise of the idiocracy, by the damage we’re doing to our world, by the increasing role of naked propaganda in American politics… which brings me back to Thoreau, who was once described as being torn between wanting to celebrate the world, and wanting to fix it. As I said in my introduction to the essays, that’s a rack I recognize.

Rumpus: It’s unfashionable on the left to refer to “battles,” isn’t it? Don’t you worry about being mistaken for a member of the Tea Party?

Slouka: Ouch. Hadn’t occurred to me, really. Still, I’ll take the risk because I think there is a battle taking place, and we (those of us on the so-called progressive left) are getting our asses handed to us. Back in 1970 I saw two guys in a fight in Central Park, which left a big impression on me. One guy—a big, handsome kid with long, flowing hair, kept getting punched in the face—hard. He’d fall, bleeding, but before he stood up again, he’d take a pocket comb out of his back pocket and smooth his hair. I was twelve years old. It made me physically ill to watch it.

The kid with the comb, it seems to me, is the Democratic Party, and it makes me no less ill to watch today. Of course, to make the analogy realistic, the guy doing the beating would have to pick the fight, accuse the one on the ground of hurting his fist, then sue him for compensation.

Rumpus: The essays in The Nick of Time go back as far as 1993, before “creative nonfiction” had been fully defined or embraced as a literary form. How did you describe to yourself what you were doing? Were you interested in or aware of working in a new genre?

Slouka: I had no clue what I was doing. I just knew I’d rather run barefoot over broken glass than continue doing the same academic writing I’d been doing. I also knew that some things that had happened to me were things I wanted to write about, and that I couldn’t write about them without questioning their “authenticity”—that is, without making my reading of those events part of the story. Which opened the door, I guess, to certain “fictional” techniques.

Rumpus: That’s the tradition of “nonfiction novelists” like Norman Mailer and Truman Capote, and also novelists like E. L. Doctorow, who continually works that territory between history and invention. Is the future of literary writing a gradual conflating of these categories?

Slouka: Possibly, though I’m less than thrilled about it, if only because conflating the two can be such an easy out, a sloppy backhand to the problem of history. Done carefully and right, it can point out the inherent limitations of the genres, their instability, make us more aware, for example, of how nonfiction borrows constantly from fiction.

That said, I think more or less “pure” examples of the genres, whatever they are, will be with us for a long time to come.

Rumpus: A number of the essays deal specifically with our concept of time, often suggesting that it is changing or mutating. At the same, um, time, much of your fiction involves the ways we invariably have to reconstruct the past out of incomplete or misleading memories. What do you think is the source of your fascination with time and memory?

Slouka: A lot of it has to do with the fact that I was the only child of storytellers who didn’t like each other; my father would tell me one story—of how he met my mother, say, or how they escaped occupied Czechoslovakia—and my mother another, diametrically opposed. My formative years were spent swimming around in this soup. It’s a wonderful way to raise a writer—or a schizophrenic.

Rumpus: Actually, that seems pretty similar to how we all live now—every story has its denial, every explanation or policy gets blasted as a lie by cable news.

Slouka: Precisely. This ghettoization of information—one version for our side, another for the other—is one of the biggest issues we face. It’s getting to the point where certain individuals (Beck, Limbaugh, Hannity, et. al.) can say anything at all, subvert any known fact, and they’ll be believed.

I read today that certain individuals aspiring to national office are talking about a “second amendment solution,” should things not go their way on election day. I wish there was a second amendment solution for idiots.

Rumpus: And yet in the essay “Arrow and Wound,” you say that “Every retelling is inevitably a distortion, but… we can’t help but tell the truth”?

Slouka: What I was referring to, actually, was emotional truth, the idea being that we reveal ourselves, continually and everywhere, by what we do, what we say, even more importantly by what we don’t, by our silences.

In terms of politics, I’d like to think so, but I don’t. Oh, the truth will rise to the surface eventually, but what troubles me is how much harm can be done before the truth is made visible. In America, we tend to think that belief trumps knowledge—that what you “feel” in your gut is more important than what you know. I don’t agree. To tease out the truth from the fabric of lies and half-truths that surrounds us requires a certain degree of intelligence. Which is bad news for us, alas.

Rumpus: You addressed this in “One Year Later,” an essay about the aftermath of 9/11, where you resist the view, commonly voiced after the terrorist attacks, that “everything was different now” and suggest that Americans need to take a hard look at our reluctance to read and understand history. I’m guessing you didn’t get a lot of fan mail for that one?

Slouka: Funny about that one. I actually thought, in all due humility, that it was a good piece, respectful of the tragedy we endured but willing to set it in context. As you suspect, not many shared my view then—though maybe predictably, I’ve been getting more letters with every passing year that say, basically, that I got it right. So who knows? What was that about the truth needing time?

On the other hand, there’s the contrarian part of me that says if you’re a writer and you’re getting fan letters, you probably didn’t do your job.

Rumpus: Getting back to the “second amendment solution,” when you add to that the recent violence at Tea Party events—Joe Miller’s bodyguards handcuffing a reporter, Rand Paul’s supporters stepping on a woman’s head—it’s hard to understand why there’s not more of a public outcry. To me, this stuff seems uncomfortably close to fascism.

Slouka: Close? The boot to the face—particularly when the victim is in no position to defend herself—is, essentially, a fascist impulse. I make jokes about “second amendment solutions” and such because these remarks are made by ignoramuses who are also capable of arguing that masturbation is adultery, but there’s no law that says ignoramuses can’t be dangerous. Au contraire.

There’s been a fascist whiff in the air for the better part of a decade, maybe more. And it’s been stronger in our past. Hell, my neighbor here in Brewster wants to torture a terrorist—seriously, thinks waterboarding is a joke, never heard of the Spanish Inquisition. He teaches high school.

Be afraid. Better still: Be alert.

Rumpus: Now there’s the Slouka we know and love! In “Coda: A Quibble,” written in 2009, you warned that the public’s apparent wisdom in electing Barack Obama shouldn’t be mistaken for a general improvement in our ability to make good decisions. Already you were worrying that “we haven’t changed at all, that we’re as dangerous to ourselves as we’ve ever been.” Do you see any reason to hope that we are changing?

Slouka: You mean for the better? Christ, I know I should put a happy face on this—hell, I want to put a happy face on it—but I just can’t. Sure, there are signs—the return of some kind of environmental movement over the last decade, for example—that should give us hope. But then there’s the guy I met in the Motel 6 swimming pool who basically ended a conversation about immigration policy by saying, “If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for me.”

As a nation, we’ve always had a certain fundamental decency—or dullness, maybe—that we could fall back on. It may save us again. But my fear is that we’ve been sitting in the pot like the proverbial frog, growing hotter and stupider, for a long time. Our eyes are bulging. It will take a massive effort to jump out.

Rumpus: Well. Last question: We’re doing this interview on Saturday, but it will run on Wednesday, the morning after Election Day. With that in mind, would you care to make any predictions?

Slouka: There will be some bright notes—here in New York, for example, Andrew Cuomo over “Raging Bull” Paladino—but the overall view from sea to shining sea looks grim. I’m always ready to be pleasantly surprised, but I’m keeping the Kevlar handy.

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“The Long Haul” is dedicated to exploring the paths writers have taken, and the choices they’ve made, the indignities and frustrations as well as the joys and rewards of the writing life. What follows is the second essay in the series, this one from Rumpus Books Editor Andrew Altschul

**

With all due respect to Mark Twain, I’ve spent eight summers in San Francisco, and for coldness and misery none of them holds a candle to the winter I spent in Stone Ridge, NY. That was the winter my post-adolescent fantasies of literary glory, academic esteem, international jetsetting, and Rolodexes full of stunning, sophisticated women died a slow, hypothermic death, buried under 130 inches of combined snowfall, the worst upstate winter in fifty years. That was the winter I came close to alcoholism, closer still to clinical depression, not at all close to finishing a publishable novel. That was the winter—how the memory still burns!—I lost a minimum-wage job I really needed for playing the Beastie Boys’ “Brass Monkey.”

It was the end of 2000. I was thirty-one years old and had just moved back to the U.S. after two years in Latin America—first in Peru, then in Mexico—and everything I owned fit comfortably into a handful of boxes in the back of my shitty Ford Probe. I had a few dozen books, a backpack full of clothes, and my dog, Jack, a five-year-old mutt I’d gotten in graduate school and had dragged around Southern California and then down to San Miguel de Allende and back again—a four-day drive during which she endured dilapidated motels, punk rock played too loud on the car stereo, a freezing K.O.A. campground somewhere in Tennessee where I hope never to return, and my regular fits of violent self-pity. Peru had been a dream-come-true—until it wasn’t; Mexico had been a bust from the start. Before that, I’d tossed away a carefree life in San Diego as if it were the cellophane on a cigarette pack, for reasons I hadn’t yet fully figured out.

Where the hell was I now?

Stone Ridge is two hours north of New York City, secreted away somewhere between New Paltz and Kingston. The joke about New York being a large state with the city at one end, Buffalo at the other, and Alabama in the middle, starts to make sense right around Stone Ridge, where the summer homes of a few Manhattanites face off with small farms and shotgun shacks, where creeks babble through backyards, where the only intersection sports a dentist’s office, one restaurant (closed October to April), and a rickety building that bore the name of a hotel (long defunct) but housed only a small, grimy bar with blown Bud and Coors signs in the windows and the same three motorcycles parked outside year-round. If you blink while driving through Stone Ridge, you’ll find yourself in other, smaller towns with names like Kerhonkson or Cairo (pronounced “Care-O”), where churches and second-hand stores sit next to cornfields and the man who sells you cigarettes at the gas station reminds you of the movie Deliverance. In summer, they give tours of some of the quaint old colonial homes in Stone Ridge. But this wasn’t summer.

What was I doing here? Good question.

I suppose it was a process of elimination. I’d worn my way through a stack of possible lives since leaving grad school. I’d lived in eight apartments since 1995, setting up my futon and desk in each, spending a few months writing every morning and doing whatever I had to do in the afternoons and evenings to make rent, until the restlessness cropped up again and I made arrangements to sell everything and start over. I’d been an editor for a third-rate music magazine, a composition teacher, an ESL teacher, a translator, a bartender for one night, a layabout, a gringo discoteca-prowler, a reluctant salesman for a Mexican city guidebook. I had a grand total of two short-story publications, a novel-length MFA thesis that I’d continued revising despite knowing it was shit, a bit of teaching experience under my belt—but no wind in my sails, only the fast-ebbing tide of the twenty-something bravado that had seen me through grad school and the fading possibility of doing something more promising (Can you say, “law school”?), with my life. And the dog.

My last remaining friend from high-school lived with his wife in Kerhonkson. They had a friend who had a friend who owned a small house in Stone Ridge she never used. When I wrote from Mexico to say I couldn’t cut it down there; that the job I’d been promised was a bust; that in nine months I hadn’t made a single friend or been on a date; that I spent six hours a day writing and the rest watching the unbearable melodrama of the Bush v. Gore election aftermath; that I couldn’t go back to San Diego, just couldn’t stomach that feeling of surrender—my friend, Mike, bless his heart, said: “I’ve got a great idea.”

What I hadn’t said was that I felt lost. I felt like no one at all—like someone who had been someone, with friends, an apartment near the beach, a girlfriend, regular enough work, but who had not been satisfied with any of those things and so discarded them and became no one. I wanted to come home, but I had systematically made sure I had no home to come back to. I had erased myself.

“I’ve got a great idea,” Mike said. So I came.

**

Andrew Altschul

I moved into the house on the day after Christmas. It was small but comfortable enough, sparsely furnished, on maybe a quarter acre. Through bare trees I could see the houses on either side—though I never saw anyone going in or out—and a motionless brown field across the road. I was not allowed to use the master bedroom, so I set up my desk in the tiny second bedroom and slept in an attic-like room up a dozen stairs from the kitchen, with slanted ceilings too low to stand up and a mattress on the floor. That weekend Mike helped me drive a dozen stakes into the backyard to fence off a small area for Jack to run in. The house was quiet and clean, with room enough for one person (and one dog) to live. That first night I lay awake under the sloped ceiling and marveled at the country silence, and also at the way one life could be replaced by another radically different life with whiplash speed. Something in me had always been drawn to that idea, a romantic belief in the necessity of changing your context, gaining experience, carpe-ing every diem, never getting too comfortable or attached. I took satisfaction in that idea now, but that night I also started to hear the yawning silence that is that idea’s unmistakable counterpoint.

I probably don’t need to say that I was also broke.

Then the snow came.

A couple days after I moved into the house we got about two feet, the low steel sky divulging every last flake as if too exhausted to hold it anymore. When it started I ran outside with the dog, who’d never seen snow, and frolicked for half an hour, but by nightfall I was looking out the window in disbelief as it just kept coming. My car was disappearing, the field across the road was disappearing, the house was groaning like an old man under the weight of it. I held a mug of tea and shivered, as though the freezing temperatures had snuck inside—later I realized they had snuck inside, as the house’s ancient oil-burning furnace had conked out. So I found a flashlight, went out to the garage and lifted the trapdoor down to a very dark, cobwebby cellar, shuffled across the dirt floor and bumped my head on the low beams and tripped over roots and an old metal bedframe and god knows what else looking for the furnace. I gave myself a first-class case of the creeps—it was The Blair Witch Project down there, only colder—and when I did find the heater it must have been the power of prayer that got it started again. The furnace would shut down every three or four days that winter; sometimes, if it happened late at night, I’d just wrap myself and the dog in sleeping bags and blankets and wait it out until morning.

**

I woke up to one of those crystalline winter days when the sky is painfully blue and sunshine clamors off the snow and lifts the heart with its bright clarity. The field across the road gleamed like polished bone and the dog hopped joyfully through the backyard, burying her face in the high powder and sneezing and getting herself good and covered before racing inside to stand next to me and shake herself off. I made a cup of strong coffee and sat down at my desk and looked out at the still world, every branch and twig with its high white crest, and thought, This isn’t so bad. I got to work.

I’d started writing a new novel during my last days in Peru, plugging away at it all through Mexico. My plan was to finish a draft by the summer. I was discovering something new in my voice: an energy that was unfamiliar and addictive; it was that energy, the language itself, that was drawing me forward, opening the story to me slowly but steadily, showing me where to go. E. L. Doctorow says writing a novel is like driving at night—you can only see a short distance ahead, but you can make the whole trip that way—and often I felt like I had the high-beams on and around each curve they were revealing something surprising and inevitable, a world of humor and emotion and complexity I couldn’t have found on my own. For the first time I wasn’t distracting myself with daydreams of a big advance, prizes, standing-room-only readings full of stunning, sophisticated women. I was just writing.

An author's best friend

I spent those first days establishing a routine, two long sessions of writing separated by lunch and a walk with the dog. I liked to take her to the junior high school half a mile down the road, unclip her leash and let her race around the athletic fields, churning up snow behind her. It was so quiet out there, windless and bright, and I’d stand in the middle of the field and blow into my hands and the physical pleasure of the stern landscape would struggle against my sense of total isolation, of standing somewhere out on the edge of the world. I thought about all the people I knew—other writers, teachers, friends in California, in Peru—and how none of them had any idea where I was right now, in which country, how they couldn’t have imagined me here in this distant, snowy place. Only Mike knew, but I hadn’t seen him since he’d moved me in, and in fact I would see him only two or three times that winter, and never again at the house—his wife didn’t much care for me; his cats definitely didn’t care for my dog; he was having marital difficulties I could sense only vaguely. In short, the world and everyone in it was continuing on with its own troubles and preoccupations, and if I felt alone out there in icy Stone Ridge it was an aloneness of my own assiduous making, and alone was how I would have to ride it out.

There was the matter of an income to attend to. Writing unpublished novels while wearing pajamas does not pay well, so I started making calls and sending emails in search of work. Before leaving Mexico I’d emailed several colleges in the Hudson Valley about part-time gigs teaching composition or, ideally, creative writing. A few had sent encouraging replies, asking me to get in touch once I’d arrived. Now, however, the news was not good. SUNY New Paltz was fully staffed for the spring semester. Bard College didn’t reply. The department chair at Vassar claimed to be impressed by my MFA and teaching experience, but the classes never materialized. As New Year’s approached all I’d managed to rustle up was one Intro to Literature class at Ulster Community College, a mile from my house, that would pay $1,700 for the semester. To put it in Mexican slang: I was fucked.

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The 1990s began for me on a frozen December morning in Providence, RI. Shivering in my car while waiting for the windshield to defrost, I turned on WBRU and heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit” for the first time; by song’s end I was thrashing around in the driver’s seat, pounding on the steering wheel so hard I didn’t even hear the DJ name the band. Something had ended—cracked to splinters and discarded in a pile of INXS, Edie Brickell, and Peter Gabriel CDs—and if those of us in our teens and 20s hoped Nirvana would deliver us from a decade of soulless, corporate dreck, we couldn’t have imagined the wholesale cultural shift that ensued in those short years before Kurt Cobain’s death. There was no going back.

By then I was living in San Diego, editing a music magazine, hanging around in the punk clubs with sweaty, exuberant bands banking on rumors San Diego was to be “the next Seattle.” By mid-decade, it was becoming clear this was wishful thinking; more broadly, the release of Bush’s song “Everything Zen” and its ilk signaled the co-optation and degradation of the music, in accordance with the law articulated by philosopher Eric Hoffer: “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”

But while the mass media were focused on Seattle, something much more interesting and durable was happening just south of there, in Olympia. Centered on Evergreen State College, and a handful of female musicians who formed loud, uppity bands like Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, and 7 Year Bitch, the Olympia scene was a “matriarchy” and the birthplace of the Riot Grrrl phenomenon. Riot Grrrl, as described by Marisa Meltzer in a new cultural history, Girl Power: The Nineties Revolution in Music, was either a radical political statement or it wasn’t, either a cultural uprising or a mere fashion trend, a definable musical style or an empty catch-all for any female performer who mouthed the shibboleths of “girl power.” Meltzer never quite irons out these contradictions, but in trying she gives a comprehensive and highly readable cultural history of a decade that upended all the paradigms for female performers.

Marisa Meltzer

Olympia was to the Riot Grrrl movement what Paris was to modern art: a crucible and, almost immediately, a lost Eden. Though the term was apparently coined in Washington, D.C., it was a convention held by K Records in 1991, featuring an all-female night titled “Love Rock Revolution Girl Style Now” that served as the movement’s flashpoint. The bands proliferated, as did the fanzines and the “manifestas.” It was, according to the ‘zine launched by members of Bikini Kill and Bratmobile, an “angry grrrl rock revolution which seeks to save the psychic and cultural lives of girls and women everywhere.”

What followed was an all-American story of outsized hope, sexist condescension, and media hype, followed by media dismissal, infighting, and the eventual blurring beyond recognition of the original idea. Meltzer illustrates the viciousness of male-dominated media outlets, like Melody Maker, which memorably suggested that “the best thing any Riot Grrrl could do is to go away and do some reading and I don’t mean a grubby little fanzine.” She also deftly points out the ways in which Riot Grrrl’s message was directed not only at the patriarchy but also at an earlier generation of second-wave feminists. In their plaid skirts and torn stockings, their barrettes and combat boots, with words like “rape” and “whore” scrawled across their midriffs, these artists fought for a wholesale change in strategy for female empowerment. They eschewed the earnest conferences and campfire singalongs and constitutional amendments in favor of a furious, creative, and sexual energy. They would achieve power simply by taking it and daring you to try and take it back.

Still, Hoffer would not have been surprised at the ways the movement undermined itself and lost momentum. Meltzer points to a 1992 media blackout by the Olympians as a critical error that opened a space for mainstream culture to distort the values and aesthetics of Riot Grrrl. She details the many ways in which political urgency and spontaneity devolved into shtick—for instance, the legendary throwing of a used tampon into the crowd at the 1992 Reading Festival by L7’s Donita Sparks, which soon became a tired gesture, with one member of the band Lunachicks pre-smearing a tampon in lipstick, for later crowd-tossing at that night’s show.

More tragic—or predictable—was the evolution in the performers themselves. Meltzer traces a somewhat debatable lineage from Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna to Alanis Morissette and Fiona Apple, to the Spice Girls, Avril Lavigne, and (believe it or not) Hannah Montana. “They were angry, but so much more acceptable (read: pretty and unthreatening),” Meltzer writes of Morissette and Apple, and quotes X’s Exene Cervenka scoffing, “Tori Amos straddling a piano bench—is that empowering women or is that Penthouse-ing women? I don’t know.”

Bikini Kill

This preoccupation with insiders and outsiders, with whose politics are pure enough, arises in most movements. But Meltzer’s book can fall prey to the same disease she diagnoses. She spends a lot of time mapping the movement’s geography, distinguishing founding mothers from poseurs and arrivistes. Courtney Love and Hole, in this telling, were not riot grrrls but “angry womyn” or purveyors of what Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore termed “foxcore,” as were L7, Pop Smear, Babes in Toyland, and the earlier incarnations of PJ Harvey. Spice Girls and Christina Aguilera are dismissively labeled “pop tarts.” Elsewhere quibbles over, for example, how many r’s there are in grrrl, and fixation on pointless coinages like “manifesta” and “porta-jane” serve as distractions from the narrative, as they did within the movement itself.

Meltzer’s attitude toward latecomers like Lavigne and Britney Spears is understandably confused, one moment insisting they belong in this chronology of ascendant girl power, the next reassuring the pre-postfeminist set that they needn’t be taken too seriously. “Feminism without the activism,” is her indictment—and for sure, it’s an accurate one—but these artists did find enormous fame, wealth, and respect, at least among listeners not too concerned with their political bona fides. (“The Spice Girls changed British culture enough for Girl Power to now seem completely unremarkable,” one commentator observed.) Still, within a context of Riot Grrrls and feminist trailblazers it’s hard not to see the Spice Girls, Pussycat Dolls, et. al. for the frilly, opportunistic, male-created pawns they were.

Maybe that’s the reason Girl Power has so much trouble focusing on the music itself. Meltzer was undoubtedly caught up in the scene, cutting her teeth at Berkeley’s famed all-ages club, 924 Gilman Street, moving to Olympia “at least partly because of riot grrrl superfandom,” and at one point living in the same building as Kathleen Hanna. She attended living room riot grrrl shows, Liz Phair and Ani DiFranco and Juliana Hatfield concerts, and a Spice Girls reunion, and memorably travels to the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, a precursor to the Lilith Fair. But though she makes it clear the riot grrrl culture fascinated and shaped her, we’re never invited to actually listen to it with her, to sit in that winter car while the music cuts through our frozen souls like a hot chainsaw. What enabled riot grrrl and grunge to bring about cultural change was its irresistible force—the music was loud and dangerous and ecstatic and dirty and it had killer hooks and it made you want to writhe on the floor or jump around your basement playing air guitar or hurl yourself into another moving body or fight or fuck or just laugh at how fucking cool it was, how fucking unexpected—and Girl Power doesn’t do enough to convey how the “revolution” of its subtitle actually felt to those of us whom it saved.

As a result, Meltzer’s book reads as more of a longitudinal culture study than a music history; riot grrrls are a stalking horse here for the broader but perhaps less urgent question of female visibility in the music industry. By the end, as Meltzer grows maudlin while watching pre-teen girls at rock and roll camp, the days when Olympia shook with yonic rage seem distant indeed, almost abstract. This is maybe the unwritten ending to both Girl Power and to Riot Grrrl itself, the epitaph for a movement that was thrilling while it lasted: Looking back now, it’s so hard to remember it.

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Rumpus Books asked some of our favorite writers what they will be reading as we leave the aughts behind and sally forth into a new decade. Here, then, is the second annual

THE CONVALESCENT, by Jessica Anthony – Laura van den Berg

THE ANTHOLOGIST, by Nicholson Baker – Andrew Foster Altschul

THE BOOK OF HAPPINESS, by Nina Berberova – Matthew Iribarne

WAYS OF SEEING, by John Berger – Stephen Elliott

FROM A TO X: A STORY IN LETTERS, by John Berger – Melanie Rae Thon

THE NUTSHELL STUDIES OF UNEXPLAINED DEATH, by Corinne May Botz – Maud Newton

MS. HEMPEL CHRONICLES, by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum – Lucy Corin

NOTEBOOKS 1951-1959, by Albert Camus – Andrew Winer

AN ORESTEIA, by Anne Carson – Lili Taylor

BULLET PARK, by John Cheever – Nick Taylor

1989: BOB DYLAN DIDN’T HAVE THIS TO SING ABOUT, by Joshua Clover – Juliana Spahr

THE DEAD FISH MUSEUM, by Charles D’Ambrosio – Keith Scribner

TOTAL OBLIVION, MORE OR LESS, by Alan DeNiro – Hannah Tinti

ERASURE, by Percival Everett – Sarah Shun-lien Bynum

THE BLOOD OF THE POET: SELECTED POEMS, by William Everson – D.A. Powell

THE COLDEST WINTER, by Paula Fox – Lydia Davis

TESTS OF TIME: ESSAYS, by William H. Gass – Ron Hansen

THE TORTURER’S WIFE, by Thomas Glave – Catherine Brady

THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT, by Robert Goolrick – Cornelia Nixon

DOROTHEA LANGE: A LIFE BEYOND LIMITS, by Linda Gordon – Rebecca Solnit

CASE SENSITIVE, by Kate Greenstreet – Rick Hilles

LORDS OF THE SEA, by John Hale – Jim Shepard

THE ROAD HOME, by Jim Harrison – Shawna Yang Ryan

THE LINE OF BEAUTY, by Alan Hollinghurst – Alexander Chee

ARCTIC CHILL, by Arnaldur Indridason – Robert Boswell

LIT, by Mary Karr – Kaui Hart Hemmings

LIT, by Mary Karr – Nora Pierce

THE GIRL WHO KICKED OVER THE HORNET’S NEST, by Stieg Larsson – Stacey D’Erasmo

EDITH WHARTON, by Hermione Lee – Daniel Orozco

THE EXECUTIONER’S SONG, by Norman Mailer – Joshua Furst

YOUR FACE TOMORROW, by Javier Marías – Rabih Alameddine

YOUR FACE TOMORROW, by Javier Marías – Daniel Handler

ASTERIOS POLYP, by David Mazzucchelli – Eric Puchner

A GATE AT THE STAIRS, by Lorrie Moore – Mary Roach

THE STONES OF SUMMER, by Dow Mossman – James Frey

TOO MUCH HAPPINESS, by Alice Munro – Margot Livesey

BLUETS, by Maggie Nelson – Peter Rock

NEW AND SELECTED POEMS, by Mary Oliver – Margo Rabb

THE CANNIBAL GALAXY, by Cynthia Ozick – Jason Roberts

CHICAGO: A BIOGRAPHY, by Dominic Pacyga – Peter Orner

THE INTERROGATIVE MOOD, by Padgett Powell – Brock Clarke

MODEL HOME, by Eric Puchner – Edward Schwarzschild

THE RADETSKY MARCH, by Joseph Roth – Daniel Alarcón

AUSTERLITZ, by W.G. Sebald – Ethan Canin

ACHILLES IN VIETNAM, by Jonathan Shay – Nick Flynn

RAYMOND CARVER: A WRITER’S LIFE, by Carol Sklenicka – Don Waters

THE STORY OF THE NIGHT, by Colm Toibin – Aaron Shurin

ANNA KARENINA, by Leo Tolstoy – Andrew Sean Greer

THE TEN YEAR NAP, by Meg Wolitzer – Robin Romm

THE WAVES, by Virginia Woolf – Carl Phillips

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Rumpus original art by Lucas Adams.

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**

Who says short stories are going out of style? Sure, editors at the big publishing houses have been saying for years that “short story collections don’t sell.” Sure, it’s harder than ever for debut authors to publish books of short fiction. But at independent publishing houses and innovative journals like One Story, short fiction has been undergoing a renaissance, and here at the Rumpus we’re dedicated to covering work by talented storytellers like Lydia Millet, James Lasdun, Jennine Capó Crucet and many others.

Now we’d like to introduce Madras Press, a new publishing house that publishes individually bound stories and novellas and distributes the proceeds to charities chosen by the authors. Founder Sumanth Prabhaker describes Madras’s titles as “stories that are often arbitrarily ignored by commercial publishing outfits, whether because they’re too long for magazines but not trade-book length, or because they don’t resemble certain other stories. These are clumsy, ill-fitting stories made perfect when read in the simplest possible way.” Among their first offerings is “Bobcat,” a new story by Rebecca Lee. Proceeds from “Bobcat” go to Riverkeeper, an organization committed to protecting the ecological integrity of the Hudson River and to safeguarding the drinking water supply of New York City and the lower Hudson Valley. The Rumpus welcomes Madras Press and proudly offers an excerpt from “Bobcat.”

**

Ding-dong. I took a deep breath. The Donner-Nilsons were here. Kitty Donner came in first, looking pretty in her pale, reserved way. I was ashamed that immediately I compared her to the paralegal, whose looks were almost insanely good. Certainly this was another problem—though secondary—with your husband having an affair like this; everybody would constantly be comparing you to this other woman. Kitty was actually a formidable and special person—she was intelligent and watchful, she had a real empathy about her that made her connect quietly but nearly instantly with people; you could trust her to take your side. At the office, sitting in our sterile conference room, I generally thought of Ray in a somewhat holistic way, as a brilliant legal strategist and funny colleague—a crowd-pleaser, really—an essentially good-hearted man with an unfortunate personal problem on his hands, but now, tonight, walking behind his wife in her strange, boxy, black-and-red kimono dress down our tiny entrance hallway, it became clear that he was simply a cheater; it was just basic and stupid. What felt to him to be a genuine and essential stirring, a deep response to beauty, was really just life having its way with him. If one of the things people do is establish a civilization out of nature, a way out of the chaos, then Ray was failing at being a person, falling back into the glut of the physical world. He’d been fooled by life. It had triumphed over him. I wanted to call it out to him, over his wife’s head, Hey Ray, life has triumphed over you.

Rebecca Lee

I was interpreting each of Kitty’s movements through the lens of what does a woman do who perhaps senses but doesn’t yet know her husband is having an affair. But she was a tentative woman anyway, so it was hard to say what she knew or didn’t know. I had always found her sort of moving, actually, as it was possible to see her perpetually struggling to move past her hesitation. She sat down a little awkwardly since her kimono dress came open both at the neck and the legs. While she was rearranging herself, she looked at me and also put her hand on her stomach. “Oh I forgot about your baby,” she said. “It’s wonderful; there’s so much in store for you.”

John came in from the kitchen with the terrine, which looked, perhaps, not great. A terrine really does need to be great to be not awful—it is meant to evince a perfect melding of disparate entities—the lion lying with the lamb, the sea greeting the land, and so forth. John placed it on the coffee table, and looked at me worriedly. I saw a flicker of alarm cross Kitty’s face. Once John and I had been at a dinner party in Manhattan and the hostess had served us an opening dish of fox meat, so I knew how Kitty felt. (Later that night John had quoted the beautiful Jane Kenyon poem as we drove home along the FDR—Let the fox go back to its sandy den. Let the wind die down. Let the shed go black inside.)

As John began passing out little dishes for the hors d’oeuvres, I turned to Kitty. “We’re not prepared at all. We just found out yesterday at our Lamaze class that we’re supposed to have a theme for our nursery.”

“Theme?” Lizbet said. “What do you mean, theme? Like man vs. nature?”

“How about ‘Alienation in the technological age’?” Ray said.

“Hollywood under McCarthy?” Lizbet said.

“It’s going to be Winnie the Pooh,” John said, which was true. Everybody seemed a bit dejected that John was closing down the joke so early, but he made a recovery. “Winnie the Pooh and the Reconstructed South,” he said. And then suddenly Frances out on the balcony was rapping on the glass door, making big surprised eyes at John, the sort of look that I’ve actually only seen wives make at their own husbands. John went to the door and conferred with her in whispering voices.

And then he returned to our guests, apologizing. “You’ll have to forgive my editor for skipping the appetizers; there is a Salman Rushdie proposal floating around the city today, to various editors, and she is trying to get a copy of it sent here tonight.”

“A novel?” I asked.

“Memoir,” he said. “About the fatwa.”

“No kidding,” said Lizbet. “There’s a book you’d want to read.”

Everybody’s minds filled with it—Salman as a small child along the banks of the Ganges, running, rising as a student at Oxford, his ascension as a literary star in England, and then the terrible fatwa raining down, followed by years in hiding. I had actually seen him give a reading, at an ACLU conference in Atlanta, soon after 9/11. The person introducing him had said, to a very hushed, still shell-shocked crowd, We are all Salman now.

**

Rebecca Lee is the author of the novel The City Is a Rising Tide. She teaches at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington.

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**

Simoom
by Anna North

When my sister’s baby was born with no legs, just little toes coming out of her hips, and my brother went out for a drink and came back with viral meningitis, and my father started raving about a railroad yard, my mother blamed the wind. And when my father left and my mother too went crazy and carved into every wooden surface of our house a name that wasn’t hers or his, a name I’d never heard before, I asked what she was doing. She made me get down the dictionary.

“Simoom,” I read, “a hot, wet wind prevalent in Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Syria.”

I looked up at her as she ground a double “o” into the cupboards.

“We don’t live in Syria, Mom.”

She hit my knuckles with the flat side of the knife. Later I went down to the river and watched the ice break into chunks and roll downstream. It was the third of January and fifty-nine degrees. Even the birds were killing each other. I stomped on the slushy ground to break up a scrum of Canada geese; they flew off screaming like pigs. On the feathered ground lay the last one, flayed and heaving. I knelt to look at her.

“My sister’s baby has no legs,” I said, “and my brother’s cooking in his own blood. My dad left and my mom is carving up our house with a word I can’t pronounce.”

The hot, wet wind blew a gust in my face. The goose lifted up her head and made a sound like the memory of a goose. I saw that she wanted me to kill her.

“No way,” I said. “Too much of that already.”

I held her in my arms and I took her home, where my mother had carved everything there was to carve. We put the goose in the bathtub and wound her around with toilet paper. We lit a candle next to her head. My mother and I took turns watching her that night. In the morning she was dead, but the wind had stopped, and my father came home smelling like coal and dust and rubber. At first we thought he’d lost his speech; then we gave him oatmeal and he began telling the old jokes again. My brother’s fever broke that morning too. By nightfall he was sitting up and drinking broth from a mug.

My sister’s baby was the only one of our family who didn’t survive the simoom. She died in the evening, silent, while we were looking in the Bible for her name. We buried her and the goose at sunrise, just before the snows came back and locked up the ground again.

**

Anna North’s fiction has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, where it was nominated for a National Magazine Award. Her nonfiction has appeared in such publications as the San Francisco Chronicle and the SF Weekly, and she is a regular contributor to Jezebel.com. For more great flash fiction, download Fivers, Vol. 1 for your phone.

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A Special Offer from Rumpus Books!

If you’d like a free copy of Fivers: Flash Fiction for the Phone, act now by grabbing one of these promotion codes—or send an email to info@moulinarn.com while supplies last!

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Steven Soderbergh’s new movie combines porn’s storylessness with the brutality and bad improv of Reality tv, in an assault on complexity and honesty.

As the dominant mode of 20^th and 21^st century western literature and art, Realism has always had problems. One need only survey all the various prefixes and modifiers—social, hyper-, magical, sur-, dirty, hysterical, et. al.—with which it has coupled to begin to wonder how faithful this lover can be to its professed mission of representing human life and relationships in an authentic way. Serving so many masters, the suspicion is that Realism in fact serves none particularly well, instead bending promiscuously to the will of any dominant social or political aesthetic that will buy it a drink and a meal, pour its bubble bath, pay for its taxi home the next morning. This is why dictators always come for the artists first: They have the means to tell the masses how the world “really is,” and thereby affect people’s expectations, attitudes, and longings, a power that is crucial to tyranny’s project of total control.

Still, Realism has some attractive qualities, one of them being its determination, in whatever hyphenated flavor, to rescue the unique from the generic, the particular person or situation from the masses. Realism privileges the concrete over the abstract; whatever it believes the world is like, it sets out to demonstrate this through individuals and their struggles with, or against, their environments, their fellow men and women, themselves. Stereotype is the sworn enemy of Realism, and narratives that confirm prejudices and received wisdom, that validate generalities and clichés, are failures, however skillfully constructed or entertaining they may be. Anna Karenina doesn’t jump in front of a train because she’s a woman (i.e. unintelligent, fickle, premenstrual)—she jumps in front of a train because she’s Anna Karenina, and even the most absurdly hyperbolic of David Foster Wallace’s protagonists is a masterpiece of quirks, memories, and singular desires unmistakable for any broad, blunt sketch of “how people are generally.”

This raises a problem for aspiring artists who happen to be untalented, unimaginative, bigoted, immature, or just generally lazy, those writers—and any undergraduate creative writing instructor knows they are legion—who rely on stereotypes and use narrative to express deeply cherished but deeply false views of the world, whose preferred response from their audience is a solemn nod of agreement, rather than a brow furrowed in thought. Oversimplification goes hand in hand with the moralizing urge that is so strong in adolescents, and these writers can count on approval from equally naïve and intolerant readers: “This character is so mean to his wife, I’m glad that North Korean missile hit his car!” or “She knows she shouldn’t do drugs, so she totally deserved to get date raped!” That literary journals, film festivals, and publishing houses still attached to Realism discriminate against such crap has always seemed cruelly unfair to its creators—like Republicans, they insist on their right to be judged right, even when they are flagrantly, stupidly wrong.

Starting in the mid-1990s, television began to rectify this imbalance, moving beyond Realism to create a narrative mode in which stereotype rules the day, the vindictive prejudices of the ignorant govern the story, and no one ever has to rethink what they’ve been told about life. This genre goes by the poisonous name of “Reality,” its arrogance and coarseness suggested by its refusal to even admit that it is an –ism, a representation: “This is how the world is. Case closed.”

For various technical and economic reasons—most prominently the fact that bad writers and actors usually come cheaper than good ones—Reality has successfully colonized all of network television, and begun campaigns to take over cable and film as well. Steven Soderbergh’s new movie The Girlfriend Experience is a smashing success when judged by this standard. Built around pornstar Sasha Grey, The GFE combines prominent features of pornography (storylessness, implausible characters and situations, a world seen in two dimensions or fewer) with the distinctive techniques of Reality (amateur players, bad improvisations, pseudo-documentary structure used to no purpose, a near-religious belief in the brutality, selfishness, and unredeemable superficiality of human life) in a full-frontal assault on the complexity and honesty audiences once looked for in independent films.

Grey plays Chelsea, a high-end escort in New York who provides her clients not just sex but the “girlfriend experience”—a term which apparently means she will eat the meal they buy for her, sleep in the five-star hotel room they rent, and listen to their secret fears and desires, every last one of which involves the acquisition of money. (That a girlfriend, or a boyfriend, might, say, help balance a checkbook, give advice, disagree with pigheadedness, express any needs of their own, or do anything beyond the ornamental, seems not to have been considered by the providers or consumers of the “experience.”) She conducts this business with no visible affect beyond a cryptic half-smirk which might indicate either terrible acting skills or deep emotional damage but which in Soderbergh’s film indicates nothing at all—it’s a given, a MacGuffin, Reality’s insistence that humans don’t actually feel, they act.

Chelsea documents her encounters in a diary that pays more attention to clothing brands and prices than to what actually transpired between the two parties (an almost perfect analogy with the concerns of Reality in general). Then she shares take-out and painfully banal chit-chat with her live-in boyfriend, a likable bimbo named Chris (played by Chris Santos) who works as a personal trainer and spends most of the film trying to hustle up more work. There is no discussion whatsoever of what brought these two together, nor of what it is about Chris that makes this situation tolerable to him, just as there’s no background to Chelsea’s career choice; aside from the agreed-upon rule that she may not spend the weekend with a client, her chosen profession is as uncontroversial in the bounds of their relationship as if she were a waitress or real estate agent. Here, as elsewhere, The GFE mistakes implausibility for radicalism—Look how modern and liberated we all are!—refusing to provide any expository foundation for its premise, insisting that this is just how the world is.

The plot is childishly slight and offensively priggish. Chelsea believes that she has fallen in love with a client and breaks the no-weekends rule, despite Chris’s threat to invoke the nuclear option; as any reader of Victorian cautionary tales can predict, the client turns out to be just another jerk, and Chelsea is left alone to regret the foolishness of her desires, while Chris jets off to Reality’s Mecca—Las Vegas—where he may freely spew misogynistic observations and inspect the wares of other quasi-prostitutes. In the final scene, we see Chelsea fallen to a lower rung of prostitution, motionless in the embrace of a right-wing Jewish diamond merchant who spouts off neo-conservative Zionist propaganda while ejaculating, fully clothed, yarmulke included. I shit you not.

What is the purpose of this Jewish character, this collection of filthy stereotypes that no serious artist would attempt? What is the purpose of a female protagonist whose only personality traits are her interests in sex and money but who is too stupid to see the piano plummeting toward her head? Or of the uniformity of the film’s lizardy men, every one of whom is obsessed with money, hates and fears women, is uninterested in fidelity, and can love only the things he owns and controls? Are we to sympathize with Chris, to pity him, or to share a smirk with him at the realization that, yes, indeed his girlfriend was nothing but a prostitute? Is Chelsea a plucky girl who charts her own course in a world controlled by men, or just a dopey narcissist who gets what’s coming to her? What does this film really think of its characters? Like a Neil LaBute film (see In the Company of Men), it loathes them, loathes everyone who wanders into its frames. It can’t imagine a human being with any integrity or nobility of character—or any character at all—and it mistakes its own narrow worldview for reality and then imposes that Reality on the rest of us.

It’s hard to overstate how easy, how lazy a stance this is, or how irresponsible. But this is perhaps the main goal of Reality: to re-enshrine the stereotypes that late 20^th century art diligently debunked, to the consternation of unthinking people everywhere. No longer should the masses have to trouble themselves with unpredictability or complexity in the ways they interact with others; no longer should salespeople (and in Reality, everyone is selling something) be forced to see their customers as individuals rather than demographics. Men are unfaithful predators whose only true passion is buying and selling things. Women are all prostitutes, who want money and control but lack the talent and imagination to achieve these things and so rely upon deception and sex. They are fucking machines, fucking machines with websites—though they need men to build those websites for them. And all people—male or female, black or white, rich or poor—are to be avoided and feared, because they care about nothing but themselves.

In this way, Reality confirms the things “we all know.” It treats us all as moral children, indulging our self-regard, encouraging simplicity and its accompanying vindictiveness. Things rarely turn out well in Reality, nor do we want them to—most of its inhabitants are so repulsive we hope they’ll catch a disease and die. Where art teaches empathy, an ability to see the world from another person’s perspective, Reality preaches survival: everyone’s perspective is the same, everyone is after the same scarce resources, so it’s every man or woman for themselves.

Looked at this way, The GFE’s many stylistic irrelevancies make more sense—as further distraction from the adolescent nastiness of the story. The narrative unfolds in nonlinear fashion, a mainstay of postmodernist storytelling but one Soderbergh uses reflexively, not to bring out aspects of the story that would be obscured in a traditional telling but simply to disorient, to lend an illusion of dynamism and breadth. The intermittent scenes in which a journalist is interviewing Chelsea about her vocation and her relationship with Chris lead nowhere, add up to nothing other than another opportunity to demonstrate that all men want is to penetrate women. As in most Reality television, scenes would appear to have been written only in summary, blocked-out fashion, arguments outlined, motivations written on cue cards; the actors, if that’s the proper word for them, are left to interpret and improvise—as a result every scene is wooden and slow to develop, the dialogue is dull, every jab or riposte is a cliché or an aphorism, the choreography and physical chemistry inferior to what most pre-teen girls can accomplish with Barbie and Ken.

But here, too, what seems to be a flaw is actually a point of pride: In Reality we don’t need Laurence Olivier or Katherine Hepburn, we don’t need talented “elites” to write our scripts and shove complicated ideas about human nature down our throats. The medium is the message, as Marshall McLuhan showed us, and the message of Reality is that we are all actors, all writers, all of our opinions and abilities are as good as everyone else’s. Reality wants us to understand that the performers can’t perform, the writers can’t write, so as to better discredit and discard the function of true art and artists. They aren’t Real people: Olivier wasn’t better than you or me—just luckier; Toni Morrison’s ideas are no more important than David Duke’s.

What is at stake here is a reconfiguration of the relationship between art and audience, product and consumer, and The Girlfriend Experience does great work in further tearing down the barrier that once separated the tale from the ego to which the tale is being told. However trashy or fantastic the films and soap operas of the past were, however obsessed with the characters we became, very few people ever “believed” them to be anything other than stories, representations, artifice. The lengths to which Reality goes to convince us that there is no artifice, far from the rhetoric of democratization it sometimes espouses, has as its real goal the elimination of precisely our ability to know when we are being told a lie and when we are seeing something real. The usefulness of this project hardly needs laying out: If the populace can be stripped of its ability to distinguish between the real and the scripted, then it is much easier to gin up support for, say, phony wars fought against vulnerable countries, marketed and packaged like entertainment, “rolled out” at the beginning of a new season. It is much less likely to doubt the words of the generals who defend that war, or to suspect that they aren’t the same generals actually fighting it rather than retired hacks collecting consulting fees from defense contractors. If we “know” that everyone is uncontrollably greedy, we’re happy to acquiesce to trillion-dollar bailouts for executive malfeasance—men are just irresponsible, distracted by their constant need to destroy and humiliate women, so who can blame them for tanking the world economy? Boys will be boys!

It’s this last issue that shows up as a kind of fetish in The Girlfriend Experience, in which every character is fixated on the financial crisis, desperate to find a way to protect their own interests from the global collapse. There are incessant references to the 2008 presidential candidates and their proposals, including a plug for McCain from the Zionist diamond merchant and a phony headline that seems to predict some kind of kickback scandal bringing down the Obama presidency. At first, this tedious fixation comes off as quirky, a kind of showing off: Look how fast we can slap a timely film together when we don’t have to bother with real actors or writers! But it turns out that this obsession with economic matters is essential to the film’s sophomoric theme that we’re all slaves, all shamelessly chasing after money, the personal trainer just as much as the prostitute. Money is the great moral equalizer—we all have to get our share, so there’s no difference in our methods, nor in the damage our chosen methods might inflict on others. On the one hand, this is merely the kind of “wisdom” frequently achieved by high school students clustered around a bong. But on the other, it’s a profound and terrifying revelation of the nature of the Reality universe, in which all of us, every last one of us, is a whore.

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original art for the rumpus by ilyse magy

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