Stuff We Like
Benjamin Ladner
Quickly, the premise of Salvador Plascencia’s virtuosic first novel, The People of Paper (2005): Ten years after his wife left him, her intolerance of his nightly bedwetting finally outweighing her love, Federico de la Fe makes war to reclaim his subjectivity from the floodwaters of despair. Though flatly crushed for a time in the wake of his abandonment, de la Fe yet summons a martial resolve, as he recruits volunteers and devises strategy for a supernatural campaign, with headquarters in El Monte, California. His opponent in this fantastical war? A force-in-the-sky alternately identified as “Saturn” and “omniscient narration”—yes, de la Fe’s declared foe is the author himself. But what of this war—and why? Froggy, leader of the local street gang El Monte Flores turned footsoldier for de la Fe, is posed the same question by his peers; he answers by calling it “a war for volition and against the commodification of sadness”; whereas de la Fe himself explains, “it is a war against the fate that has been decided for us.” Fucking epic, right? >>
Culture Politics
Kevin Hilke
In January, The Nation published a discursive but fruitful memoiristic essay by Ted Solotaroff, who spent a career in political and literary editing beginning at Commentary in the ideologically tumultuous 1960s. It is illuminating for anyone interested in this period, when the nation’s intellectual heft began to swing decidedly to the right, a swing that determined the political and social structures of our own period, and so one instructive to those who wish to map, influence, or create the political and social structures of the future. Solotaroff gets us inside the heads of some of the people whose contingent decisions and actions set that formation in motion. While the first half of Solotaroff’s piece treats the politics of internecine midcentury literary-political editing, the second traces his relationships with his later writers—after his estrangement from the supercilious Podhoretz and much of the intelligensia that gathered around him—notably Cynthia Ozick and, hugely, the subjectively-unhinged critic, fiction writer, and jetsetting homosexual intellectual Alfred Chester, whose peripatetic life as a self-declared immoralist, vexed by poverty, alienation, and aberrant desire, ultimately made him into a searing and prescient queer moralist.
