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She works as a contributing editor at Harpers Magazine and is also a frequent contributor to The New York Times Magazine and Bookforum. Henson Template powered by Squarespace Christine Veronica West: Last Updated: today: View Complete Profile. Like many crime writers, Hughes is interested in appearances: the look of guilt and innocence, the shape of a violent scene. Our mission is to get Southern California reading and talking. But Hughes chose for herself a different challenge: a white woman, she would tell stories about and from the points of view of otherspsychotic men, black men, Spanish men, Native Americans; jazz musicians, fashionable women, soldiers, doctors. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, n+1, Vice, The New Yorker, Bookforum, T, and many other magazines. He never speaks; he slurs and snickers and smirks. Siya lang ang nag-iisang taong nagsilbing Pangulo at Pangalawang Pangulo ng . Read Full Review >> She works as a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine and is also a frequent contributor to The New York Times Magazine and Bookforum. Dorothy spends a lot of time. In the publishers note, Smallwood is compared to Sheila Heti, Rachel Cusk and Jenny Offill, and these comparisons arent incorrect. Ad Choices. Dorothy had once been a rising star, thanks to a published essay on Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, but after a decade in grad school she's gone stale, even as she can't imagine what else to do. Smallwoods work brings to mind that of Elif Batuman and Sam Lipsyte, writers for whom the form of the novel can feel like merely an excuse (and a fine one), a vessel to hold roving psychological and social observation. All of this is buoyed by Smallwood's luminous prose, which heralds the arrival of a real talent. Christine Smallwood is the author of the novel The Life of the Mind (Hogarth, 2021), which Time magazine named one of the top ten fiction books of the year. The party had gotten louder since Dorothy had been in the bathroom. Maybe weve been misreading, Melissa Broder isnt trying to be provocative. Get book recommendations, fiction, poetry, and dispatches from the world of literature in your in-box. Log In or Sign Up Cristine Smallwood See Photos Christine Smallwood See Photos Christine Smallwood See Photos Christine Smallwood See Photos Christine Smallwood Her first novels were patriotic thrillers about Nazis and European degradation, but by the mid-forties she had turned to crime stories about race and the American West. Her brilliant descriptive powers make and unmake reality. We enter another world, where a black man is being framed for a botched abortion and the murder of a white woman. But, then, this paragraph, like the rest of Smallwoods casually agonized and abundantly satisfying novel, provides the exact sort of thrill that can be found only through obsessive overthinking. Removing this book will also remove your associated ratings, reviews, and reading sessions. Time in this slim yet yawning book is slippery, catalogued by bloody expulsions in public bathrooms over about a month. Not Hollywood, not L.A., not the country, At 19, he won a local school board seat. Christine Smallwood is a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine and a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine. Its an unavoidable citation, a thesis statement of sorts in a book that otherwise avoids theses. The subject of her dissertation was depressive realism, and it analyzed the work of authors who represent different degrees of stuckness or woundedness, and different strategies for tolerating or rejecting ambivalence. (The term depressive realism is borrowed from the work of psychologists who have hypothesized that depressed people see the world more clearly.) Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, n+1, Vice, The New Yorker, Bookforum, T, and many other magazines. Densmore is a doctor, trained to penetrate the body and not stay on its surface. These pared-back moments allow for breath, space, the slightest inflection of humor and, most important, a rare glimpse of the narrator free from the anxiety of literary influence. In six letters, all the pieces rearrangea strangely uptight and bland character has become someone else entirely. The opening scene of Christine Smallwood's sharp debut novel, The Life of the Mind, finds her main character, Dorothy, locked into the stall of a public bathroom. She teaches a class called Writing Apocalypse. She is sure shes living at the end of something, or too many somethings to say. She insists on accompanying her best friend while she embarks on her own at-home abortion, possibly craving witness to someone elses experience of an ending. What is the meaning of this ingestion? Second- and third-guessing herself comes naturally. One day this would be Venice, she muses while drinking pia coladas with her mentor at the Venetian in Las Vegas. Like Ive tried to help other poor little girls that come crying to me. Dorothy also stumbles into her old grad school boyfriend, who, when they were together, had a kinky predilection for whispering Frank O'Hara poems into, well, not her ear. Illustration by Victor Kerlow. Only the unborn can be blameless and incorruptible. Minor Feelings and the Possibilities of Asian-American Identity. A young Clark Kent struggles to find his place in the world as he learns to harness his alien powers for good and deals with the typical troubles of teenage life in Smallville, Kansas. It bears noting that illegal abortion, of course, was evil, if not on the terms The Expendable Man understands it. Her bank balance delivers only panic; meanwhile, her best friend regards a ten-thousand-dollar couch as a steal. Christine Smallwoods debut novel, The Life of the Mind, advertises its intellectual side in the title. She thinks of losing the pregnancy as less than a trauma and more than an inconvenience., If you think Dorothy might be protesting too much, she would probably agree. The final scene of Smallwoods novel is perhaps the books most successful. At one point, she goes to Las Vegas to deliver a paper at an academic conference. Reference: MyHeritage Family Trees - SmartCopy: Apr 9 2023, 22:18:51 UTC; view all Sarah Margaret Smallwood's Timeline. Across the tracks there was a different world. She teaches up to four courses a semester at an elite university, all the while trying and failing to make progress on her dissertation, which, appropriately, happens to be about "female confinement and the Gothic novel." 3,561 posts. Anyone can read what you share. 0. She has worked in the City, journalism and as a tour guide, run her own consultancy, written four books on Italian food and travel and been involved in food . Even the sky at this moment was sand, reflection of the fading bronze of the sun. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. How, exactly, is one to fully inhabit ones experience at a time when three and a half billion of us are sharing our thoughts on the Internet, twenty-six billionaires hold as much wealth as half of the global population, and the climate disaster threatens to be the end of us all? To receive our newsletter with upcoming news and announcements, please enter your email address. By this I do not mean that she asks whyspecific motives are as mulish and unanswerable as sin. And by the final lines, though time still stretches before her, Dorothys desire for finality is externalized in such a subtle, quiet way as to seem nearly satisfying. The hiring climate had dried into a dust bowl. He and Ellen, backs to the desert, are driving towards their future. It wasnt that the miscarriage was such a big deal, Smallwood writes, or that she was broken up in grief about it; it was that she hadnt told her therapist she was pregnant, and didnt want to have a whole session about her tendency to withhold. She hasnt told her best friend about it either. Smallwood is a shrewd cultural critic, a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine. Smallwood is a shrewd cultural critic, a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and a contributing editor at Harpers Magazine. Age discrimination, Schiff reports major cash advantage over Porter and Lee in Senate race. She was born in the United States. Throughout The Life of the Mind, Dorothy is searching for an ending. Many in the group who emigrated to Corner Brook would have met Leja through their social and business lives in Riga. It is tempting to view the miscarriage as the central, reverberating metaphor of the novelfor Dorothys lost potential, or her inability to identify what that potential consisted of in the first place. Even of things that initially, and not all that long ago, felt like the end of other things. Morality, too, is a matter of contrasts. The real villain in this novelthe absolute limit of horror that blacks and whites together must combat, though the battle will never endis the death of the unborn. Venner is joined by two other suspicious minds: the blunt and gloomy, unfriendly Renner; and Marshal Hackaberry, who wants to avoid making the trial into a media spectacle for the A.C.L.U., and insists on everything being done legal. But he doesnt believe in Densmores innocence, either, and on its own, Densmores innocence isnt all that interesting, anyway. She has a PhD in Englis. The Life of the Mind captures Dorothy over the span of about a month and a half, roughly the length of time it takes her mysterious miscarriage to somewhat complete itself. (Hughes herself lived in Santa Fe for most of her life.) In noir, depth is often figured as fallennessthe fact of having a past. Christine Smallwood is the author of the novel The Life of the Mind (Hogarth, 2021), which Time magazine named one of the top ten fiction books of the year. One of the books emotional subplots concerns Dorothys now distant relationship with Judith, her dissertation adviser. The classic American fear that a black man would sleep with a white woman is here transformed into the fear that a black man would kill a white womans baby. Blackness is on the horizon, and Hughes drives the novel straight towards it. Unable to align the miscarriage with a narrative frame for her life, she doesnt talk about itnot with her respectfully distant partner, Rog; not with her buoyantly self-absorbed rich friend, Gaby; not with her therapist; not with the backup therapist shes sought out to discuss her need for a backup therapist. She has a PhD in English from Columbia University. Dorothy, an adjunct professor of English, is sitting in a public toilet, worried about her sixth day of bleeding after a miscarriage and ignoring a call from her therapist. All rights reserved. She vaguely recalled a time when wanting to do the job she had trained for did not feel like too much to want, Smallwood writes. Where style is manufactured or arch, a mask that distances, voice, despite being performed and constructed, is a tool of immediacy and intimacy. However, the duo is the parents of two sons and the family resides in Brooklyn. It wasnt triumphant. In a city, people were too busy with their own affairs to wonder about a strangely assorted couple. After the girl is found, he gets a visit from two detectives. This fall there had been none. Why live in the moment when you can dissect it like this? The Life of the Mind follows the perspective of a woman experiencing a medicated abortion, the result of a miscarried pregnancy. Each person with their disappointments, their millstones, their pleasures, their loves. The only recourse was to hide somehow, to deaden oneself to the cacophony of pulsing, repulsive existence.. (April 2023) Subscribe and save 50%! Difference is defined by oppositions of power, after allblack, white; accuser, accused. But even that scene moves; there isnt a moment when Smallwood feels bogged down, by grad-school cogitation or anything else. She's having a prolonged miscarriage, and is spending long intervals every day sitting and thinking on the toilet. She has started seeing a second therapist in whom she confided her doubts about the first therapist., Dorothy teaches two to four courses per semester, including one called Writing Apocalypse, at a private university whose list-price tuition was twice her annual earnings.. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. For fifty pages before the girl dies, a humidity of suspicion and paranoia hangs over the novel. She was too shallow to have an interior this deep, she considers as an ultrasound wand exposes her insides. Add to that the standard, petty humiliations of living in an animate meat sack furnished with a heart and an ego, and the answer is: often, we dont. His name in the papers is as good as a life sentence. She also holds a doctorate in English from Columbia. Christine Smallwood is a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine and a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine. Sylvester Burr Smallwood. (Things even sag a bit when Dorothy lands at an academic conference in Las Vegas and moves through the city and her human interactions there in a more conventional storylike way.) Christine Smallwood holds a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. AUTHORS, JOURNALISTS, USA JOURNALISTS' BIOS There is no cult so fervent in contemporary fiction as the cult of voice. Other people had jobs which kept them away from gum-lined troughs, Dorothy muses, beholding a university water fountain. Her reviews and essays have been published in The New Yorker, Bookforum, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, and Harper's Magazine. She lived in the epilogue of wants., When the novel begins, Dorothy is on day six of a miscarriage, taking a shit in the prized single-occupancy library bathroom, surveying the thick, curdled knots of string that come out of her. She seems to be in trouble, but even after he drops her at the bus station, hes the one looking over his shoulder. Here's Dorothy ruminating over her stuck position in life: Last fall there had been six job openings in her field. Back to People. I'm remembering them for other things as well. That last sentence is quoted prominently in the books jacket copy and likely in many other reviews of the novel as well. She holds a PhD in English from Columbia University and is a core faculty member of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, where she teaches courses on the nineteenth-century novel and other topics. It isnt that you must have had an abortion or a miscarriage or a pregnancy or even a vagina to be interested in reading Christine Smallwoods first novel; its whether you have the stamina to spend 230 pages inside a deeply analytical brain struggling to make sense of a body that is itself struggling to process what is happening to it. Dorothy's life, as much as we come to know it, is pretty ordinary. Christine Smallwoods dbut novel inhabits the abyss between what we think about and what we actually do. In the tightly calibrated world Hughes has created, black morality can only appear in contrast to something that readers, and the author, could paint as unquestionably immoral. Christine Smallwood's dbut novel inhabits the abyss between what we think about and what we actually do. The problem wasnt the fall of the old system, it was that the new system had not arisen. Join our community book club. The last lines find Densmore back in the car with a woman, the right woman this time. The problem of the twenty-first century is a problem of waste, the book scolds. And another telephone number. All rights reserved. In Smallwoods hands, even twilight is plenty bright. A French graduate, she lived and worked in Paris before settling in London with an architect. Thus, there are no clear details regarding her family (parents and/or siblings) whereabouts remain unknown. And another old woman. According to one report from the Guttmacher Institute, in New York City in the early sixties, abortion was responsible for twenty-five per cent of childbirth-related deaths for white women; for non-white and Puerto Rican women, it was fifty per cent. Christine Smallwood is a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine and a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine. Christine is around 31 years old although details regarding her age and the year she was born remain unknown. In addition to characters she creates climates that Densmore and Ellen must survive in. This is not to say The Life of the Mind is without sustained themes. I feared asking in part because I was already sort of stupid in this particular fashion, as were many people I knew, as is anyone whos great at analyzing their life but terrible at experiencing it. Also, she wrote the Harper's "New Books" column for several years. He is desperate to get to Phoenix. He was a devoted family man, loyal to his friends, and during his working life in Latvia and Germany developed key connections among the Latvians, Germans, Russians, British and, ultimately Newfoundlanders. The Life of the Mind is her first novel. She also holds a doctorate in English from Columbia University, and her writing about the academic world during the "decadent twilight of the profession" has the ring of truth. By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. Dorothy was like a janitor in the temple who continued to sweep because she had nowhere else to be but who had lost her belief in the essential sanctity of the enterprise.. He finally finds Doc Jopher, a white boozehound who lost his medical license for operating while under the influence, and who lives in a shack with his booze and his hound, Duke. As I once heard the mystery novelist and humorist Lisa Scottoline say, if it doesn't make you wince, it's not funny. Also, she wrote the Harpers New Books column for several years. Christine Smallwood holds a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. It would kill you to confront the agonies and joys pressed together in the crowd, in one single subway car, Dorothy thinks. The long and lonely country was the color of sand. Dorothy, as ever, tries hard to have a smart take on Las Vegas, yet the city's pleasure loving mindlessness defeats her. She's perched inside some kind of gigantic wheeled frame, dark eyes cast to the side, laughing at a private joke. She lives in the privacy of her own brain, silently adventuring on an inner tube through the roiling white water of her thoughts. Julia Ann Lee. Christine Smallwood is a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine and a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine. The Life of the Mind is about endings that dribble to a close, the inexorable erosion of dreams, the slow leak of youthful buoyancy. In this novel, any one characters psychological depth is arid compared to the interactions between them, how they test and threaten each other. In spring 2023, she will publish La Captive, a book in the Fireflies Press Decadent Editions series. The Expendable Man begins with Dr. Hugh Densmore, a U.C.L.A. She seems successful and, what's more, adjusted to successhappy, even carefree. The contrasts of heat and coolness, light and shadow, create the setting for stagey confrontationsaccusations, interrogations, discoveries, confessionsthat move the plot forward. His drawl was pornographic, Hughes writes of one interrogation. Its the perfect symbol for her moral economy. Continue reading the main story She paces circles around her own mind, a provocative but ultimately frustrating place, not a staging area from which to launch useful action. 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