Sep

27

2024

Mari Cohen (associate editor): The novelist Sally Rooney, as Dwight Garner put it recently, takes as her “primary subject . . . love in its various permutations, the minutiae of falling in and out of it. She writes as well about this topic as anyone alive.” In the past, I might have quibbled with him. Even as a Rooney admirer, I’ve always found her romance plots hindered by their reliance on hackneyed tropes: Childhood sweethearts dance around each other in adulthood; a young woman enters an electric affair with an older man. But in her new novel, Intermezzo, Rooney evades this trap by freeing her main romantic pairings from cliché—and by moving them slightly out of the novel’s center. Indeed, the most important relationship in the book is not that of a couple but of a pair of brothers, Peter and Ivan, who have weathered their parents’ painful divorce and, most recently, their father’s death from cancer, and who are negotiating how to approach the distance that has grown between them. Both are fiercely intelligent, but are otherwise a study in opposites: The elder, Peter, is a charming debater-turned-lawyer trying to conceal his depression, while the younger, Ivan, is an awkward competitive chess player adjusting to adulthood. Ivan falls in love with an older woman separated from her alcoholic husband, while Peter is juggling relationships with both a dynamic college-aged woman and the ex-girlfriend who pulled away after a devastating accident.

Rooney zooms in on these brothers with prose that is precise and rhythmic, her long paragraphs transmitting the winding nature of their inner worlds, how thoughts repeat and morph and collide. She experiments, gently, with form: Peter’s manic energy is captured by staccato, incomplete, backwards sentences—“A proliferation of feeling he thinks. Disorder of sentiment. Remembering the way his father would write out on lined paper the doctor’s instructions, spidery handwriting, names of medications”—while Ivan’s quiet anxiety is slow, drawn out, and sprawling: “For a few minutes Ivan lies on the bed not knowing what to think, what task to feed into his brain, to go on analysing past events, his own mistakes and regrets, the wrongs he has done to others or the wrongs done by others to him, or the confusing events in his life that seem to involve both kinds of wrong.”

Rooney, of course, is known as a novelist not just of the romantic but of the political. Off the page, she speaks forcefully about Palestine and about Marxism; in her first three books, characters regularly DM each other about the nature of capitalism, attend rallies, and contemplate the confines of class. Often, though, the characters’ political obsessions seem immaterially discursive, a sprinkling of brightly colored frosting that endlessly fascinates critics but remains on the novel’s surface. This mode accurately depicts how left politics operate in the lives of a certain set of young literary professionals (the milieu from which Rooney generally draws her main characters), but doesn’t have a lot more to say than that. In Intermezzo, the characters’ political preoccupations are less central. This, however, doesn’t feel like a retreat: It just feels honest, an unabashed embrace of Rooney’s clear interest in the minutiae of small-scale intimate relationships. In her 2021 Beautiful World, Where Are You, the tidy, domestic resolution of the love stories felt jarring after the characters spent the book emailing each other long meditations on the abyss of modern capitalism and climate change; here, the interpersonal relationships are less burdened by attempts to speak in a visionary political voice, more free to stand in their specificity. Along the way, Peter muses on how the realities of his job measure up to his ambitions to fight for justice, Ivan refuses to fly for the sake of the climate, and another character is evicted by her landlord; everyone’s life is, of course, structured by the realities of money and power and gender; the story, and thus the politics, speaks for itself.

Early in Intermezzo, Ivan’s love interest Margaret (the only other character, besides the two brothers, whose inner monologue is depicted) reflects on her first tryst with Ivan: “She has been contained before . . . by the trappings of ordinary life. Now she no longer feels contained or directed by these forces, no longer directed by anything at all. Life has slipped free of its netting. She can do very strange things now.” Throughout the novel, the characters struggle with how to cut open life’s netting, how to free themselves, and their relationships, from patterns and narratives that entrap them. They struggle toward a practice of love that is expansive and generous, that can help two brothers overcome years of mistrust and distance, that can hold partners together even in unconventional circumstances. It’s simple and yet complex; meticulous but alive; funny but deeply sad. It’s Sally Rooney’s best novel yet.

Raphael Magarik (contributing writer): I confess that I have only read the “Jewish” parts of Marxism and Form (1971), my favorite work by Fredric Jameson, the great literary theorist who died this week. That is to say, I have read the chapters on Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse, Bloch, Lukács—all but the chapter on Sartre, which is, at least for me, a hundred pages of impenetrable, gentile boredom. The names of these theorists are emblazoned on the book’s cover as if they were a musical supergroup, like Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Jameson was trying to explain and defend Hegelian Marxism, which promised that historical materialism could approach literary texts not as propaganda or morality plays, but as complex forms, in whose development we could chart the course of an evolving, universal history. Somehow, the book he ended up writing consists of a series of mournful vignettes about Central European Jewish intellectuals.

It’s hard to know what Jameson would have thought of this observation, not just because his origins were WASPy and patrician, but because he largely avoided personal reflection, even as he built a superstar career defending, often single handedly, Marxism’s claim to primacy among High Theories. But the Jewishness of Marxism and Form is no coincidence. It reflects the “elective affinity” Michael Löwy would later trace between early 20th-century Central European Jewish writers, barred by antisemitic prejudice from academic postings, and thus institutionally marginalized and driven toward a utopian, romantic mode of left-wing politics. Löwy’s student Enzo Traverso later studied a cohort of doubly “heretical” adherents of what he called “Judeo-Marxism,” who rejected the vulgar, dogmatic scientism of Karl Kautsky and the Second International, as well as Orthodox religiosity and post-war Zionism. Often rebels against both Jewish and contemporary left pieties, these Judeo-Marxists produced eccentric, offbeat theories, probed the arcane troves of Kabbalah and Christian mysticism, and tended more toward modernist experimentation than by-the-book socialist realism. Thus, if one wanted, as Jameson did, to find sources for a Marxism that was intellectually rich, thick with ironies and paradoxes, and critically adequate not just to proletarian novels and folks songs, but to Balzac and Beethoven (and then, in Jameson’s eclectic, catholic, and massive corpus of writing, to pretty much any cultural artifact whatsoever), then of course one would end up writing about Jews.

And despite Jameson’s ideal of objective impersonality, there are hints he was aware of his Jewish focus. A section epigraph in his chapter on Ernst Bloch reads, “Next Year in Jerusalem! —Old Jewish Prayer,” the single pithiest distillation of the utopian longing that animates Jameson’s whole career. More telling, perhaps, is the uncharacteristically personal turn with which he concludes his discussion of Marcuse, writing that despite the bleak, unrevolutionary conditions of mid-century American capitalism, “it pleases me for another moment still to contemplate the stubborn rebirth of the idea of freedom” in several minds, the last of which is that of Marcuse, the “philosopher, in the exile of that immense housing development which is the state of California, remembering, reawakening, reinventing—from the rows of products in the supermarkets, from the roar of traffic of the freeways and the ominous shape of the helmets of traffic policemen, from the incessant overhead traffic of the fleets of military transport planes, as it were from beyond them, in the future—the almost extinct form of the Utopian idea.”

In Jameson’s hands, the paradigmatically Jewish condition of exile undergoes a double metamorphosis, first into Marcuse’s estrangement from the land of his birth by the Nazi catastrophe, which either killed or uprooted nearly all of Jameson’s book’s subjects, and then second, into the existential predicament of the social theorist lost in post-war consumer capitalism, adrift in a history that seemed to have lost its plot. That predicament, and his oft-repeated, defiant insistence that nonetheless, one must not, could not, forget Jerusalem and the dream of a redeemed future, was, of course, Jameson’s great theme. So it pleases me, in spite of his studied impersonality, to point out that in 1971, Jameson had only recently left Harvard for the University of California, San Diego, where he overlapped with Marcuse for several years—and that perhaps here is an autobiographical clue that Jameson was a quiet devotee of our exilic tradition, which he reimagined as the melancholy condition of the left intellectual in an unfriendly historical moment, struggling to transform his nostalgia into hope for a future, into a yearning for a world transformed.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): After reading the critic Philip Lopate’s latest collection, My Affair with Art House Cinema—a lengthy compilation of reviews and essays that I devoured in just a couple of days—I was struck anew by how close I feel to his sensibility. It’s not just that Lopate is, like me, a Brooklyn Jew, or that we share taste in books and films. It’s that neither of us has the desire, or perhaps the ability, to ignore the failings of even those we admire. (The title of one of his previous collections, Against Joie de Vivre, is more or less my credo.) For instance, Lopate’s short book on Susan Sontag, whom Lopate respected immensely, speaks unhesitatingly of her snobbery and scorn for anyone not part of her exalted world. (I experienced this directly on a couple of occasions, when I encountered her at film screenings. Never have I felt so like Gregor Samsa as I did under her disdainful gaze. “Who,” her expression said, “is this bug impinging on my sight?”)

It is this refusal of hagiography that makes My Affair with Art House Cinema so worthwhile. Lopate, who is especially fond of Japanese and Chinese cinema like the works of Yasujirō Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi, also loves Akira Kurosawa, the most accessible of Japanese cineastes. But he readily critiques Kurosawa’s most famous film, Rashomon. “The fact that it is ‘iconic’ does not necessarily make it a masterpiece,” he writes, correctly identifying the various weaknesses that too many viewers and critics choose to ignore, such as the performance of Toshiro Mifune. Lopate even criticizes the work of friends, both filmmakers and critics. Yet unlike one of them—Jonathan Rosenbaum, who, he writes, “seems not to appreciate the difference between honesty and incivility”—Lopate never steps over the line into the land of churlishness.

He writes brilliantly about films both famous and lesser-known (including underappreciated works by prominent directors, like Ingmar Bergman’s Saraband) with great sensitivity for their writerly aspects as well as their strictly cinematic qualities. For those familiar with the movies he discusses, his readings are endlessly illuminating. But this book is also a wonderful guide to films the reader might have missed. While I had avoided Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty for reasons Lopate understands perfectly—a film that popular and critically acclaimed had to be crap—his case for it was so convincing that the day I read his review, my wife and I watched it. We were mesmerized for the entire two-hour-and-twenty-minute runtime, including the end credits. So consider this a recommendation not only of Lopate’s wonderful book, but also of the many films he so insightfully endorses.

This week’s double parshah, Nitzavim-Vayelech, continues a multi-week thread of divine warnings about the dangers the Israelites will face once they cross into the Land of Israel. These admonitions focus on the existential danger of coming into contact with the tribes already living in the land; according to the text, this encounter is liable to lead the Israelites to adopt idolatry and immorality, and thus to endure God’s unrelenting punishment. The Israelites, God explains, “will go astray after the alien gods in their midst, in the land that they are about to enter; they will forsake Me and break My covenant that I made with them. Then My anger will flare up against them, and I will abandon them and hide My countenance from them. They shall be ready prey; and many evils and troubles shall befall them.” The Torah is clear: Adopting the ways of the surrounding peoples will lead to our certain demise.

Rabbi Aharon Shmuel Tamares (1869–1931)—an underappreciated Polish rabbi and philosopher who has recently gained more attention following the publication of a translated collection of his writing—makes a direct connection between the Israelites’ penchant for adopting their neighbors’ practices and the rise of Jewish political nationalism, which he traces back to the Israelites’ entrance into the Land of Israel and their decision to appoint kings as rulers. “The Holy Spirit,” he writes, “began to be driven away and separated from [the Jewish People] by the gross spirit of ‘political nationalism’ which took their hearts. And as the Holy Spirit fled from the people, the imprint of the Torah also faded.” Thus, the “Jewish People fulfilled its intention to be ‘like all the nations,’ and performed its part: it saddled itself with kings. And the kings performed their part: they involved the nation in cruel wars, and thus the people [became both] killed and killers, slaughtered and slaughterers . . . All of it, the whole business, exactly as carried [out] in the surrounding nations.” Rabbi Tamares links this ancient politicization to the Jewish embrace of 20th-century nationalism in the development of political Zionism. In his view, “Zionism understood in this way should be spurned and discarded,” for it represented the most recent fulfillment of our parshah’s grim warning: Inspired by the nations around us, who saw nationalism as the highest embodiment of collectivity, we, too, took on a nationalist ethos, despite God’s disapproval.

Often, Jewish commitment to separatism is seen as a root cause of Jewish supremacy, especially as enshrined in Israeli apartheid’s legal subjugation of Palestinians. And indeed, verses like the ones in our parshah that prohibit adopting the practices of the people around us can lead us to believe that we are fundamentally different from and superior to others—chosen for a higher and more sacred purpose, unlike them. But as Rabbi Tamares explains it, Jewish supremacy is not the result of our attempts to be distinct, but rather the manifestation of our sameness. It is what emerges when we, despite the Torah’s many warnings, embrace the practices of rulers and kings, seek protection and safety in idolatrous ideologies and states. This reading suggests that to counteract and uproot Jewish supremacy, we need not shy away from the particularity of what it means to be Jewish, but should instead interrogate the places where we—individually and collectively—have internalized and replicated the ways of oppressive nations and empires.

Laynie Soloman is a teacher and associate rosh yeshiva at SVARA.