[.article__paragraph--cap][.small-caps]These days, I feel[.small-caps] a kind of paranoid protectiveness about reading, as though it were a pleasure that powerful interests wanted to deny me. I’m not sure that such a conspiracy actually exists. It’s true that the overall plan of our economy seems to be “make everyone an overworked and underinsured contract worker with too many side hustles,” but that’s been obvious for a while, and maybe – with enough strategy – we can all turn that into a blunder for those powerful interests. But it’s not strictly true that this effort to impoverish everybody translates into an attack on reading, exactly. The one percent probably won’t care if, in ten years, I listen to the audiobook of Bleak House or The Communist Manifesto while I Uber their children from party to party, during the handful of hours between my first shift catching the errors in one AI’s output and my third shift catching the errors in another AI’s output.[.article__paragraph--cap]

Still, the idea that reading is under attack feels true. You go on social media and see easy-to-read, crowd-pleasing authors attacked as snobbish elites. You go to Barnes and Noble and see the store turning into a board-game-and-nerd-tchotchke store with a book annex. You ask about the local high school’s reading curriculum and, perhaps, you learn that Beloved has been banned, or that novels are off the agenda entirely.

Your Name Here, by Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff, constitutes one long cry of pain at this state of affairs. Or, actually, at a slightly older state of affairs. Though published last fall, it seems to have been largely complete by sometime near the close of the George W. Bush era. We were stupid then, too – boy, were we stupid! We sold ourselves on a barbaric war of choice and the deregulation of the banks, and we did it all without smartphones or front-facing camera video. Gen Z could never.

Judging by the text, and by DeWitt’s public statements, Your Name Here came about when DeWitt – the author of The Last Samurai, one of the handful of great novels published this century – met Gridneff, a journalist, while waiting in line at a bar. They exchanged contact information. He sent her an email, and she, some years later, responded, and he wrote more, and she decided that he was a writer of great ability, and Your Name Here is basically a series of meta-textual plots and schemes, which often mirror each other, designed to accompany his very good emails and render them publishable. So we read some of their correspondence, and then the correspondence between an author very like DeWitt and an author very like Gridneff, and some excerpts from the DeWitt-like author’s bestselling book Lotteryland (which reads a lot like a DeWitt novel, but not as good), and various other things, and what emerges is the story of a very weird book that everybody gradually gives up on while the Iraq War rages in the background. Again, DeWitt intends all of this as a pretext by which the Name author will introduce to the world a talented No-Name author. This was a strange error in judgment, from both a business perspective and an aesthetic one, because the portions of Your Name Here written by DeWitt are immaculately styled, funny, and engaging, and the stuff from Gridneff is deeply boring Gen X misanthropy. Nevertheless, Your Name Here is worthwhile for the fidelity with which it captures the feeling of being almost alone in a world where no one talks to you as though you had a mind.

In the 1930s – a decade that struck all its most sensitive observers, from Orwell to Auden, as unprecedentedly and apocalyptically stupid – Gertrude Stein beat the odds. Despite her already vast influence on the century’s prose style and her long record of publication, she had acquired a reputation as a scenester who wrote unreadable nonsense. And Paris apartments are expensive. So, working at top speed and intensity, she cashed in on her reputation as a scandalous Paris bohemian. Unlikely as it seems now, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas was an international bestseller. It promised gossip and it delivered, and nobody minded if it delivered a lot of painstakingly worded perceptions alongside the gossip.

Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife, by Francesca Wade, is extremely worthwhile as a case for Stein, as intellectual and cultural history, and as the story of a singular mind finding a way to make some sort of peace with the world. It’s true that that story begins, in Stein’s case, with “Inherit a decent amount of money” – a tactic not everyone can execute – but the family money wasn’t infinite, nor could it do everything Stein needed it to. (Wade tells us that the famous Stein-Toklas apartment, where Hemingway supped and Picasso held forth, hadn’t been deep-cleaned in two decades, till the Autobiography money started to flow. Imagine all the cigarette ash!) Money allowed her to buy Picassos, but the turn of mind that allowed her to see that Picassos were worth buying – and that caused Picasso to see her as a friend, not merely a patron – didn’t come from any allowance.

Wade’s book also nicely captures the texture of Stein’s impossible life in occupied France, and partially clears her of the charge, commonly repeated today, of Vichy collaboration. Though Wade doesn’t quite say this, Stein was something of an idiot in the oldest sense of the word: a person who doesn’t quite grasp the point of public life, a thoroughly private person. Such a person will tend toward the kind of non-systematic and self-frustrating conservatism that is sometimes called “non-ideological,” though it is an ideology in its own right, like anything. She kept or terminated friendships on the basis of whether she liked people or not. So she was happy enough to let the collaborationist Bernard Faÿ protect her Paris art collection for her while she hid in the countryside among neighbors who knew very well that she and Toklas were Jewish lesbians and didn’t really care. But she admired and supported the Maquis – how could she not, on aesthetic grounds alone, since they robbed the Vichy state and brought stolen bread to peasants, like characters out of Walter Scott? Likewise, she published in Resistance-affiliated journals of opinion and eagerly anticipated the Allied liberation of France. To understand why these behaviors seem inconsistent to us, she’d have had to follow the news. I do not consider all of this fully exculpatory; it only proves that Stein was no Ezra Pound. A genius can still be an idiot.

Wade’s biography is An Afterlife because Stein suspected – with a century’s hindsight, we can say she knew – that much of her literary existence would take place posthumously. Many of her works saw their first “publication” when they were added to the archive of her literary remains at Yale, which began acquiring her papers in 1937. So Wade gives us the story of the many scholars and critics who have spent the last eighty-odd years decoding Stein for the rest of us or insisting that she needs no decoding. This, the ongoing construction and reconstruction of Stein’s reputation, turns out to be a story of rivalries, thwarted passions, and mysterious disappearances nearly as enthralling as Stein’s own.

Speaking of reputations, Toni Morrison has, among canonical writers, one of the oddest. Cultural memory is too general and careless to do justice to the infinite particulars that make us love a great writer, and so every reputation is wrong in some way. And Morrison‘s current status as both a literary giant and an inspirational figure is, I suppose, the best such misreading we could hope for. For actually selling books, it’s better than the way people remember Henry James (a human bowtie) or James Joyce (an algebra problem) or for that matter Gertrude Stein (echolaliac). But it certainly doesn’t do justice to the profundity, the humor, the life, or the perversity of her novels.

I knew, within minutes of opening it, that I was growing to enjoy Namwali Serpell’s On Morrison from the candor, not unmixed with sarcasm, with which she addresses this problem. She dismisses, as Morrison herself did, the undiscerning habit, seen on T-shirts and in memes, of conflating Morrison with Alice Walker and Maya Angelou (sometimes Zora Neale Hurston gets thrown in as well). This is as though music fans were to put out a bumper sticker that said “Beethoven. The Beatles. Moby. Styles.” She brushes aside, too, the more justified but also at this point clichéd comparison to Faulkner, naming Nabokov as a more interesting comparison – before insisting that Morrison is, like these writers, beyond comparison.

Serpell incisively unpacks Morrison’s entire canon in all its technical and moral difficulty. For instance, she offers a stirring rereading and defense of Morrison’s easily misunderstood debut, The Bluest Eye (which shares its deeply troubling subject matter with Nabokov’s Lolita). The Bluest Eye, argues Serpell, is not an “identitarian sob story” but a bold modernist experiment: an attempt to frame a whole novel around the silence of its real protagonist. Serpell goes on to give us equally compelling readings of Morrison’s minor works. (I was thrilled to find in her another person who thinks Paradise somewhat underrated.) The book is not hagiographic; it takes the writing too seriously for that.

In this it follows the example of Morrison’s literary criticism, which I think is, like Paradise, undervalued. Here, too, Morrison gets read reductively: Serpell cites an obituary that describes her classic Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination as a canon-busting ’90s-style broadside against the authors it reads. This places Morrison on one side of a boring divide between conservative “apolitical” critics (we might call them Steinian idiots) who care solely about the aesthetic value of books and political readers who care about their moral and social value. But aesthetic value can no more be fully separated from moral and social value than can the beautiful from the true and the good. (In Christian thought, these three attributes are convertible, united in God’s simplicity; I can’t say that I fully understand what that means, any more than I fully understand the doctrine of the Trinity, but I do find myself unconvinced by any critic who tries to treat any one of these to the total exclusion of the others.) So Morrison is rightly scathing on, for example, Poe’s blatant racism, but her writing on even him is clearly a work of love. Reading Poe in his fullness means allowing him the dignity of being terribly wrong.

The idea that you can just be rid of the canon is a delusion fondly cherished by young people of all ideological stripes. It never works out if you actually do the reading. I picked up D. H. Lawrence in grad school, noticed all of the ways that he and his characters sound like fascists, and put him down again, confident that I had finally found a great writer who I could fairly dismiss as the product of hype. Then, years later, I chanced to read the opening pages of The Rainbow, with its vivid descriptions of the feeling of the miraculous weight of a lover’s body on one’s lap, and I realized that I couldn’t so easily be done with Lawrence. I read him some more, and I discovered that his misanthropy was only the beginning of the things wrong with him, and that his lush eroticism was only the beginning of the things he did well. Far from being done with him, I soon recognized that I would never even begin with him. Yet another great writer to carry or drag through life. Yet another miraculous, distinctive weight.

The weight that Morrison adds to my reading life is perhaps of a boringly predictable kind: I get paranoid about the status of a white person in her moral universe. (Perhaps a similar anxiety lies behind the tedious habit that white critics and interviewers had, during her lifetime, of asking when she’d get really serious and write about white people. As Serpell points out, she did write about white people – but also, she didn’t need to write about white people to somehow earn her place.) Though Morrison is generally anti-essentialist in her straightforward statements about race, a novel like Tar Baby seems to suggest that she at least believes there’s some sense in which blackness is “real,” which would seem in turn to suggest that “whiteness” is too (although maybe that doesn’t follow). She invests blackness with metaphorical significance, likens it to the infinitude of outer space, and so on, as though she wants to have her anti-essentialist cake and eat it too, all while denying that it exists. Sometimes Serpell seems to follow suit, as when she lists a bunch of specifically “black” traits of Morrison’s work that just sound to me like things anybody does. (“Gallows humor,” for instance – without gallows humor, this white kid wouldn’t have made it through the sixth grade.)

Reading from the outside, this can all feel a little cheesy, and it also tempts this white reader to despair. The picture of whiteness put forth by those who insist on its superiority makes me want to die of shame. Such a race, if it be one at all, is one that has not yet seen the light of civilization and that – as an Anglican clergyman once said of Australian Aborigines – seems incapable of receiving the gospel. Only the belief that race is a social construct, that we are all simply children of God punching our way through whatever circumstances we were born into, can offer hope.

That, and a close read of Toni Morrison, such as Serpell’s discussion of her 1983 short story “Recitatif.” In that story, Morrison gives us two characters who, from the details, can be imagined as either “black” or “white,” then withholds those simultaneously meaningless and all-consequential signifiers. Imagine each character each way, and the details seem to shift, but you also realize how basically stupid what you’re doing is. Racism comes to seem like any other sin, in Augustinian terms – a near-nothing that pervasively warps the world of things.

Your mileage on this take may vary. But don’t miss this book. It is, in 2026, a rare pleasure to read, from a Big Five publisher no less, a book this intelligent, that gives the reader, too, the recognition of attributing an answering intelligence to us. To be thus addressed feels like an act of love.

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