Tales of Life

Nearly a century ago, Jewish American writing was in itself a genre of national literature: As Vivian Gornick writes, “The experience of being Jewish in America became metaphorical in the hands of a multitude of writers” and “this writing changed the American language and galvanized imaginative storytelling around a postwar world badly in need of newly invigorating voices.” Of the writers mastering and honing this genre, many think of Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and Cynthia Ozick, but Gornick considers a third, sometimes overlooked, figure in this month’s Books and the Arts. Bernard Malamud, she insists, was an equal to his peers—if not at times surpassing them in skill and insight. But he offered something else too: Rather than the story of assimilation, Malamud often sought to document the “homegrown shtetl Jews living in Brooklyn and the Bronx, those paralyzed by poverty and ignorance, and touched them with a kind of literary magic that sent the metaphor diving into depths hitherto unreached.” The people in his stories may have been “perishing for want of material security, but they also desperately” contained the desire to be “alive within themselves. Emotional deprivation…is what twists each and every one of them out of shape”—and yet, as Malamud demonstrated, it could also be what twists each and every one of them to life as well. “Without an inner life, human existence remains primitive—infantile and primitive,” Gornick concludes. “Malamud’s gut understanding of this equation is beyond heartbreaking.” Read “The Magic of Reading Bernard Malamud”

Mysteries of the Living

The first season of True Detective came out in 2014. It was a prior epoch of prestige television and the show remains today one of the touchstones of a new age of peak TV: among the first auteur-helmed (Nic Pizzolatto), movie star–driven (Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson) series that changed the stakes of television making. A decade later, the series has returned—titled True Detective: Night Country—and its new showrunner, Issa López, faces a challenge: to not only make a riveting piece of genre television but one that transcends the clichés of high-production values and self-seriousness that now plague prestige TV. Jorge Cotte asks in his review for Books & the Arts: “Can Night Country…give us something bracing and different that still feels like True Detective?” Lopez’s answer, he finds, is as startling.#Offering a negative image of the first season, it “begins with missing men rather than a woman dead and displayed” and it “trades the sprawling swamps and twisted trees of Louisiana for the blank, withholding darkness of the Arctic.” Yet, in this blank, withholding darkness, Lopez finds much that is worth illuminating. As the story of detection unfolds, we realize that the mysteries she and her protagonists are seeking is not who did what but who we are and who we want to become. Like a Raymond Chandler detective story, Cotte notes, Night Country ultimately wants to turn its audience’s attention away from the mysteries of the dead toward those of the living. Read “The Unanswered Questions of “True Detective””