Nonfiction Reviews

Ingenious

A Biography of Benjamin Franklin, Scientist

Richard Munson
W. W. Norton & Company ($29.99)

by Rasoul Sorkhabi

“Ingenious” is how the famed polymath Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) referred to industrious persons, including those in his own family. In sixteenth-century England, the Francklynes were farmers who owned land (though they were not aristocrats); Benjamin’s grandfather and great uncle were blacksmiths and his father, who sailed to America in 1683 at age twenty-five, ran a business making soaps and candles in Boston, where Benjamin was born in 1706—the fifteenth of seventeen children in the family. According to author Richard Munson, Franklin used the word “ingenious” seventeen times in his own autobiography; Munson has used it as the title of his new biography of the founding father that focuses on Franklin as a scientist.

Munson, whose previous books include biographies of Nikola Tesla and Jacques Cousteau, has reintroduced Franklin to our political discourse at a critical point in U.S. history: 2026 will mark the 250th anniversary of the ratification of the Declaration of Independence. The political history surrounding this landmark event is of course well known, but people often forget that the founding fathers were supportive of science and technology, believing them crucial to the progress of the nation. Franklin, in fact, was the first American widely celebrated for his science and inventions. As Munson states early in the book, he “faced the world with wonderment and systematic study—offering rich perspectives on the Enlightenment and the American experiment.”

Ingenious opens with Franklin’s iconic kite experiment in 1752; it was the culmination of his work on electricity and lightning. Franklin did not possess the modern understanding of electrons and electromagnetic radiation, though he was the first person to show that electricity is a flux from a “positive” to a “negative” charge. He also coined the term “battery” after building one by using multiple Leyden jars (the first device that could store an electrical charge), and after demonstrating that lightning is a form of electrical discharge, he invented lightning rods to protect high buildings from fires. Franklin’s 1752 book Experiments and Observations on Electricity Made at Philadelphia in America was a pioneering work highly popular in Europe, and arguably inspired others to continue to research electricity and develop the applications we all use today.

Coming from a poor family, Franklin did not have a full school education. He was, however, a voracious reader (his home library shelved 4,000 books) and a clever experimenter; Franklin’s first invention, according to Munson, was swimming flippers to speed up his favorite sport. After fleeing from Boston to Philadelphia at age seventeen, Franklin established himself as an innovative printer and a popular publisher (of the Pennsylvania Gazette and Poor Richard’s Almanack). His social inventions in Philadelphia blended the public good with his private gain; his Leather Apron Club and subscription library service were valuable contributions to the area’s intellectual life but also placed him at the cultural heart of the city. Theologically Franklin was a Deist, but he mingled freely with various religious denominations from Quakers to Freemasons. His appointment (with a trivial salary) as Postmaster of Philadelphia enabled him to sell his newspaper across the colonies and to source varied content. Franklin had a salesman’s sense for people’s needs and tastes; in Poor Richard’s Almanack he included catchy maxims (e.g., “Haste makes waste” and “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise”) to turn a yearly informational resource into a publishing phenomenon.

Franklin conducted his kite experiment at age forty-two, exactly halfway through his life; by then he was a wealthy man and could retire to devote the rest of his life to science and diplomacy. The middle chapters of Ingenious cover the second half of Franklin’s life and depict a man in his full glory—as a world-famed scientist and inventor, as well as a first-rank American diplomat who played a leading role in the Declaration of Independence in 1776, an alliance with France in 1778 (which Franklin’s popularity as a scientist in France helped cement), a peace treaty with Great Britain in 1783, and last but not least, the Constitutional Convention in 1787.

Franklin’s life spanned almost the entire eighteenth century. Ingenious reveals his paradoxical but good-spirited personality: He loved celebrity, and yet in his last will, he declared himself simply as “Benjamin Franklin of Philadelphia, printer.” He refused to seek patents on his inventions because, in his own words: “As we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously.”

Franklin’s death in 1790 in Philadelphia at the age of eighty-four was mourned in the U.S. as well as Europe. Munson remarks that perhaps the most symbolic tribute was given by the French printmaker Marguerite Gérard, who created an etching (“To the Genius of Franklin”) which portrayed old Ben as a Zeus-like figure and bears a Latin caption that can be translated as follows: “He snatched lightning from the sky and the scepter from tyrants.”

Ingenious ends by discussing how perceptions and writings about Franklin’s life and legacy have changed over time. Many have criticized Franklin because he owned slaves, was a womanizer, and fathered a son out of wedlock. Generations facing economic depressions have cherished Franklin’s virtues of industry and frugality. Political historians have highlighted Franklin’s key role as a founding father, and historians of science have focused on his scientific achievements. Readers interested in learning more about the latter may also find Benjamin Franklin’s Science (Harvard University Press, 1990) by I. Bernard Cohen and The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius (Basic Books, 2006) by Joyce Chaplin highly informative. Even (or perhaps especially) after 250 years, Franklin’s is a great life story to read.

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Thank You for Staying with Me

Bailey Gaylin Moore
University of Nebraska Press ($21.95)

by Nick Hilbourn

An essay collection both poignant and plainspoken, Bailey Gaylin Moore’s Thank You for Staying with Me is concerned with forgetfulness: how she is pushed to forget and re-remember traumatic events in her past.  As Moore writes in a foreword: “For a long time, I wished I had possessed some kind of step-by-step how-to guide for Being and navigating this world, but I guess the point of all this existential dogshit is to make our own blueprints.” This “blueprint” motif carries over into several chapters with titles drawn from instruction manuals (“How to Hold a Baby,” “How to Be a Daughter,” etc.), however Moore’s instructions are not guidance for the reader but rather a record of her method of detangling, bit-by-bit, a discombobulated knot of time—one that opens to reveal the absence at its center, which the author claims and renames on her own terms.

“Count The Beats” elaborates how absence haunts the Missouri countryside where Moore grew up: “The back roads here smell like forgotten slaughterhouses, where piglets cry for their long-gone mother and a father they never knew.” Hushed tones and cryptic language disguise the violence Moore witnessed. Ashamed of the attention that her own developing body could draw, she wants to become invisible in middle school: “I’d play the role of a jock, hiding underneath loose T-shirts as I inevitably became the woman I always thought I wanted to be.”

Later, as teenagers in a church youth group confess to sins such as smoking or drinking, Moore will say, “I lost my virginity, but I didn’t mean to,” unaware of how to communicate the starker truth: “A man raped me.” She wraps the trauma of rape in the facade of “sin,” something digestible to those around her with a fully understood “center”—and something resolvable by way of forgiveness. However, she is missing from her “confession,” both figuratively and literally: “I wasn’t there for my own testimony. I couldn’t stand to hear those words spoken by a pastor who, days prior, had edited my version to look like a call for forgiveness, a lesson of obedience and chastity.”

For Moore, being a woman often meant erasing herself and putting a self already prepared for her in its place: “I don’t remember much from this time, so there’s a hole in the narrative—a noticeable jump in time. Even in my thirties, I will still be working on forgiving this past self, trying to fill in the gaps.” These gaps may result from a societal assumption that a woman’s story belongs not to her but to the misogynistic forces which determine the dominant narrative (for example, the idea that her rapist was “just being a boy”).  The incomplete narrative of self that results is characterized by, as Marcel Proust writes in The Fugitive (as translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff), a “fragmentary, irregular interpolation in my memory—like a thick fog at sea which obliterates all landmarks.” Yet as this fog forces its way in and tries to occlude certain details of her life, Moore pushes back:

When I wrote about being assaulted at fourteen, I imagined it was more uncomfortable for the reader because of my inclination toward impassivity. Or: I thought it was more uncomfortable for the reader until an essay about my rape was published. The overwhelming accessibility of what happened to me at fourteen forced me to tear down a partition I constructed between myself and the world, as well as the wall I built between myself and self.

Here Moore gets at a key struggle in these essays: whether to allow herself to be defined by the exterior world or to engage her interiority in a dialectic with it. The latter choice requires that “uncomfortable” details be shared when discussing traumatic events, and generally, people want to feel comfortable, accepted, at home; however, rather than defining home as the tautological end of a journey, Moore imagines home in terms of moving toward something—not a topographical destination but an opening onto an already existing reality, or the untying of a knot to reveal an absence. While attempting to escape from trauma is understandable, Moore implies we should consider moving toward the past as a way to eventually overcome it:

“Hegel doesn’t want to reject or forget the past,” your philosophy professor said. . . . “We’re only capable of growth if we know what we are growing from.”

This looks like a spiral, this preservation being raised, inflated, and he drew a long seashell on the board, the lines twisting together as he reached the top.

One could visualize Thank You for Staying with Me in the shape of a seashell, too, moving simultaneously toward and away from a center while Moore transforms the gaps in her memory from nodes of panic to active spaces of re-creation. As Moore’s son says to her at one point, “We’re not dead, Mom. We’re just lost.” Her essays, which rawly address subjects like motherhood, assault, and sexism but also include reveries on the cosmos, vignettes on nature, and appreciative moments of common humanity, encourage readers to spend less time trying to bring everything to a center and pay attention instead to life’s continuous surprises.

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Strangers in the Land

Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America

Michael Luo
Doubleday ($35)

by Sarah Moorhouse

In October 2016, an “Open Letter to the Woman Who Told My Family to Go Back to China” appeared on the front page of The New York Times. Its author was Michael Luo, an American-born journalist of Chinese descent. In this letter, he expressed his amazement when, as his family was waiting outside a Korean restaurant in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, a passer-by, frustrated at having her way obstructed, screamed at them, “Go back to your fucking country.” Luo’s seven-year-old daughter was confused. “Why did she say ‘Go back to China?’,” she asked her parents. “We’re not from China.”

In Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America, Luo attempts to answer his daughter’s question. He offers a history of anti-Asian sentiment in the U.S. that chronicles the persistence of the disorientating demand “to go back to where we came from.” The book, which Luo presents as “the biography of a people,” focuses on the stories of individuals. It’s a compelling approach, and one which was evidently not without its challenges: Luo acknowledges that archival evidence detailing the specific stories of Chinese arrivals is limited. By combing primary sources and drawing on existing historical studies, however, Luo accomplishes an impressive feat. Arranged chronologically, his stories reveal how successive generations of Chinese immigrants sought belonging in America despite programs of systematic exclusion.

From Gold Rush-era San Francisco of the 1850s to the present-day streets of New York, Luo argues, Chinese immigrants have been made to feel like “strangers in the land.” He explains at the outset that one of the founding principles of America was the intention to celebrate the “multiplicity of difference,” yet hostility towards the Chinese has often been directed precisely at their difference—the language, mannerisms, customs and dress that mark their distinct heritage. A recurring detail in the book is the queue (the braid required to be worn by male subjects of China’s Qing dynasty), and how many arrivals cut it off to approximate a more American appearance. It rarely helped. In 1889, defending the upholding of the Chinese Exclusion Act, Justice Stephen Field described the Chinese as “impossible to assimilate with our people.”

The most interesting chapters of Strangers in the Land home in on a particular group of Chinese immigrants and then explore, through the stories of individuals, the friction that developed between them and native citizens. A chapter entitled “Lewd and Immoral Purposes” reveals the challenges faced by Chinese women arriving in the mid to late nineteenth-century. Until this time, the vast majority of Chinese arrivals to the U.S. were men seeking employment as laborers on the railroads and in Californian Gold Rush towns. Many of these men had wives and family in China to whom they intended to return after making their fortune. As Chinese communities became more established, however, women started to arrive.

Chinese women were met, Luo tells us, with “near-universal opprobrium,” and for one reason in particular: The bachelor demographic of Chinese quarters made prostitution a lucrative enterprise. Ah Toy, a woman from Canton who arrived in America at twenty years old, was an early adopter of the profession in San Francisco’s Chinese quarter; setting up shop in “a shanty in an alley off Clay Street,” she offered men “a chance to ‘gaze on her countenance’” in return for an ounce of gold dust. She began employing other female arrivals and opened brothels in at least two locations. Trouble began to brew as rival tongs (the secret societies that vied for influence in the Chinese immigrant community) sought to seize control of the burgeoning sex trade. City officials, meanwhile, delighted in finding a pretext to indict the Chinese community as “an alien, heathen people,” then collaborated with Protestant missionaries to push for an outright ban on the arrival of women from Asia. They all but succeeded: In 1870, a state law was passed that forbade Asian women from entering without proof of “correct habits and good character.”

Luo’s book makes clear that legislation which systematically excludes Chinese immigrants has been a recurring event. It reached its apex in 1882 with the Chinese Exclusion Act, a U.S. federal law that prohibited all immigration of Chinese laborers for a period of ten years and denied naturalization rights to Chinese residents. This was the first time that the United States barred a people from immigrating based on their race. Luo makes the reader feel afresh just how shocking this is by highlighting the zeal with which white Americans sought to oust Chinese people from their communities. Homes were burned, shops looted, men violently attacked. If the Exclusion Act did not exactly sanction such activity, it emerged from a similar underlying attitude.

Strangers in the Land is an important book, not least because it resonates uncomfortably with current headlines. The deportation of immigrants to penal colonies in El Salvador is just one instance of the alarming persistence of hostility and even violence as a strategy for reckoning with “difference.” As Luo puts it, his book is “not just the story of the Chinese in America; it’s the story of any number of immigrant groups who have been treated as strangers. It’s the story of our diverse democracy. It’s the story of us.” Belonging, Luo shows us, is a fragile thing, and it depends on respect and dignity. He dedicates his book to his daughters, hoping that they may find the belonging that continues to elude him. We’re left lamenting, however, how far there is still to go.

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Crumb

A Cartoonist's Life

Dan Nadel
Scribner ($35)

by Paul Buhle

So much time has passed since the brief golden age of underground comix that younger readers can be forgiven for not recognizing the word “comix” as an emblem of the late 1960s. Likewise they may not know much about the most significant American artist of the movement, Robert Crumb, who is more readily identified in France (where he has lived since 1991) than in the U.S. During the 1990s, the release of the documentary film Crumb stirred interest but also renewed old grievances. In 2009, Crumb’s masterful long form The Book of Genesis appeared, looking to many veteran fans of the cartoonist as an apotheosis (and indeed, given that the artist is now in his eighties, it is likely his final major work).

When comic historian Dan Nadel asked Crumb about writing a biography, Crumb not only agreed but made available an extensive archive, one that helps illuminate how a life journey so full of adventure can add up to something greater. The richness of detail and personal insights, including reverse-image self-insights of a near-confessional nature, in Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life offer a deeper and more nuanced view than even the artist’s most devoted fans could have guessed.

Many of us who have met Crumb, corresponded with him, or wrote about his work—my own first review of Crumb appeared in 1968—somehow lost sight of his uniqueness by the 1980s. We probably never understood a few key basics of his intentions, both artistic and personal: his dedication to music, for instance, and his anti-career ferocity in that world. Crumb learned to play several stringed instruments, and the Cheap Suit Serenaders that he formed played in California and beyond for more than a decade. He adamantly refused what other band members clearly wanted, which was to make the big time—he was escaping the big time, actually, in the way he knew best.

Crumb’s lifetime effort to deepen and improve his art offers another insight into how he is a more-than-modern artist. Imagine him in his adopted village in Southern France, abandoning larger reputation-securing works for individual pieces that would sell at a good price to collectors—very much in the mode of artists centuries ago. In that same village, he pitched into rebuilding historic houses for newly arrived friends to live in, and cleared paths to the nearby mountain so that they more resembled the same paths used by shepherds for centuries. Meanwhile he sketched away, finding for himself new details in the many ways to create.

We still have the familiar Crumb, of course, and every good reason to thank Nadel for giving us a close (and at times appropriately unforgiving) view of his world. Crumb’s family, for instance: his doomed brothers and his sister, all of whom he sometimes sought to help decades after they had left home; his father, a military veteran who slapped and insulted the boys, but ended up with a career of sorts, if never satisfactorily reconciled to his former wife and his children; his mother, divorced and daffy in old age, the strange and pathetic figure in the documentary film. In sobering ways, his family is a mirror of R. Crumb and vice-versa, but unlike his brothers in particular, he survives more or less intact. Nadel covers the mostly uncomfortable family territory assiduously and sympathetically.

Perhaps Crumb was not really, as was sometimes assumed, on the verge of suicide when he hopped on a bus from Delaware to Cleveland in the early 1960s, there finding a fast friend in another comics legend-to-be, Harvey Pekar. Perhaps he did not dive hopelessly into a bad marriage but rather stumbled into a relationship that lasted a fairly long time and only ended badly, with Dana Crumb broke as well as morbidly obese. As a good biographer should, Nadel unpeels one layer of contradiction after another. From Cleveland and a promising (if hackish) job drawing “funny” greeting cards, Crumb made his way up the artistic ladder just as the counter-culture era blossomed. LSD had a big effect on his work, especially in his recuperating of vintage vernacular images of American life earlier in the century—the budding artist indeed seemed to intuit the direction he was traveling. His comics, in mature form, still resemble the amateur efforts created with his brothers when they were kids together, crudely published and sold or given away.

Crumb moved to San Francisco in 1967 and remained in Northern California for over two decades; in Nadel’s telling, these years are full of little surprises. Amidst the dope smoking and love-ins, he and Dana deftly blend in by selling comics from a baby buggy; amidst the rush of assertive, sexually liberated women at that place and time, he also proves to be hopelessly adulterous, so much so that “adultery” does not begin to cover the subject. Still smarting from the brushoffs of his gangly puberty years, he both craves the offerings of women and feels resentful toward them; happily and also unhappily, he takes his solace and his revenge in his comic art. With the id uncensored and increasingly unleashed in his work, the world of underground comix becomes so tied up with Crumb that his comics would sell in excess of a half-million copies, ten times that of his most successful counterparts.

Attacked for good reason by up-and-coming women cartoonists creating their own feminist comix—Trina Robbins and Sharon Rudahl in the lead—Crumb lashed back at them repeatedly, sometimes first apologizing and then digging himself in further. Whether or not his desire to “ride” women with large posteriors pseudo-sexually is misogyny or not is debatable (his female defenders claim they find it sex-positive), but it is hardly any version of normality. In the ’70s, Crumb marries fellow artist, Aline Kominsky, who delivers him from much of his personal hell and into the melting pot of Jewish American culture. He does not learn Yiddish (let alone Hebrew) and feels no vibes for Israel (nor does Aline), but together they explore the contradictions of their shared life, often in humorous collaborative works; their union continues until Kominsky-Crumb’s death in 2022.

The strength of Nadel’s biography rests in no small part on an understanding of what Mad Comics and its creator Harvey Kurtzman meant to Crumb. In a 1977 interview, I asked Crumb how Kurtzman had influenced him and he responded that this is simply how art works: a young artist emulates a master although he feels it is impossible (or at least unlikely) to reach the latter’s level of genius. In the early 1950s Kurtzman and Mad Comics, assaulting Joseph McCarthy amidst the Army Hearings, ridiculed a wide spectrum of mass cultural developments as well as the cliches of mainstream comic art; Mad Magazine, the toned-down version that appeared from 1956 onward, was already something different, less intense, more appropriate for younger readers, and far less dangerous. Crumb wanted to become more dangerous, and he did: Snatch Comics, a 1968 anthology of super-pornographic stories edited by Crumb and including his work as well as that of cartooning comrades such as S. Clay Wilson and Victor Moscoso, assaulted almost every propriety, with Crumb going as far as his imagination could take him.

Weirdo, the magazine Crumb launched in the 1980s, helps mark the shift from the underground comix era to the “alternative comics” paradigm that succeeds it; it had no aim at financial success or particular artistic merit. Instead, it offered a lot of what would come to be known as outsider art, including some comics that could hardly be considered comics. His own gag pages recuperated one of the oddest features of old joke magazines, showing photographs of him engaged in a kind of 1940s pop culture ballet with women in leotards—no real violence, no real sex, yet everybody seemed to have a good time.

After the heyday of the San Francisco years, Crumb lived in Winters, California, in the woods away from the college town of Davis; there he and Aline raised a daughter and produced enough art to keep the family budget intact. Crumb’s work with the ecology-minded newspaper Winds of Change seemed to reflect his larger vision, but his splendid hatred of the rich, their luxuries, and their culture had nowhere to go in Reagan’s America. Making the move to France in 1991 was the final step in Crumb’s journey. Although Aline had the stronger impulse to live in a more beautiful and just society than consumerist USA (new housing “developments” had already grown closer to their home in Winters by 1981), it worked out perfectly for him—he finally got away from the fan-boys and fan-girls, successfully escaping as many of us might also have wished to do. It wasn’t a bad endgame for such a wild trajectory, an arc well summarized and honored in Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life.

Editor’s Note: Paul Buhle’s review of Existential Comics: Selected Stories 1979-2004 by R. Crumb, selected and with an introduction by Dan Nadel, appears in the Summer 2025 print issue of Rain Taxi.

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Loving Sylvia Plath

A Reclamation

Emily Van Duyne
W. W. Norton & Company ($27.99)

by Nic Cavell

Emily Van Duyne’s Loving Sylvia Plath is a five-star act of reclamation, eschewing the densely plotted brilliance of Heather Clark’s 2020 biographical masterpiece Red Comet (Knopf) to prioritize a communicable ethic of care. This refreshing take encompasses not only a vision of Plath as stubbornly vital in the face of her violent partner, the British poet Ted Hughes, but also the memory of Assia Wevill, one of Hughes’s lovers who took her own life (and that of her four-year-old daughter Shura) in a largely forgotten act that came not long after Plath’s own highly publicized suicide. Plath would stand among the giants of twentieth century poetry regardless of her suicide, Van Duyne concludes, and her apparent rival was no demonic femme fatale but a wry woman with her own voice—the first successful translator of Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai and someone who toyed with the Lilith myth as a copywriter for a groundbreaking commercial in the 1960s.

Both women, who wore colorful dresses that marked them like movie stars in drab, midcentury London, found their final resting place in Hughes’s hometown of Heptonstall, West Yorkshire, on barren land known as Brontë country. Hughes, an enormously influential figure in literary circles, has controlled the narrative about both women even since his death, flattening them into totems in support of his own epic narrative—to the extent that repeated revelations of the intimate partner violence Plath and Wevill sustained have been submerged in myths about their obsession with death and the inevitability of their demise. Hughes was buried in the famed Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey. Plath’s partisans have made the trip to Heptonstall to regularly efface Hughes’s name from her headstone, one of the few acts of reclamation available to them outside the official narrative in the decades following her death. Van Duyne herself carved Wevill’s preferred epitaph in clay and placed it at the site where her ashes and Shura’s ashes were scattered, granting Wevill the words in memoriam that Hughes had denied her: “Here lies a lover of unreason and an exile.” Newly available letters and sharp archival work by Van Duyne and other scholars have led to reappraisals of both Plath and Wevill.

Hughes’s focus on the tyranny of the natural world in his poetry belied an interest in fascism that animated his friendship with the Nazi sympathizer Henry Williamson; he had dreams in which he imagined taking orders from Hitler to leave Plath. In a letter to her psychiatrist Ruth Beuscher, Plath wrote of being struck by Hughes just days before her miscarriage. Enduring the humiliation of Hughes’s infidelity, she later repurposed the images found in his own poems, including “The Thought-Fox,” when she wrote about burning his letters at their rural home in Devon, which she likened to letting the dogs loose on a fox: “This is what it is like— / A red burst and a cry.” Wevill, keen to Hughes’s mythologizing tendencies, wrote a tongue-in-cheek commercial for Sea Witch Hair Dye which featured men in suits arriving at an island paradise to confiscate the secrets of hair sorcery from the witches, who reveled in their stewardship of this natural resource: “Was this the real location of Eden? The banished descendants of Eve?” In fact, both women influenced Hughes’s poetry in their lifetimes.

Van Duyne, writing to set the record straight on Plath and Wevill, is well positioned to accomplish that task, being a survivor of intimate partner violence herself (she lived with an addict who threatened to take custody of her son, she writes, before absconding with the boy one day and never looking back). It was Plath’s poems and will to create a multitude of worlds as a mother, writer, and lover that gave her the strength to pursue a life of her own and eventually marry a supportive partner with whom she had two more children. Like Hughes, Van Duyne sees Plath as a totem important to her narrative—albeit one who inspires feelings of hope rather than depths of guilt.

The research for Van Duyne’s volume was funded by a Fulbright scholarship, and in the course of it, she serendipitously discovered Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House (Graywolf Press, 2019). The book, in which Machado tackles queer intimate partner violence, presented Van Duyne with the revelation that although “the abused woman has certainly been around as long as human beings have been capable of psychological manipulation and interpersonal violence,” in recorded history she “did not exist until about fifty years ago.” Plath helped speak the archetype into existence with the help of feminists who championed her story and her groundbreaking second collection of poetry, Ariel (Harper & Row, 1965). Marital rape, however, has only been outlawed in the U.S. since 1993.

In retelling Plath’s story in ways that decode its violence, Van Duyne illuminates both the poet’s struggles and her own. Obscured so long by Ted Hughes’s own controlling narrative, the stories, intimacies, and revelations about Plath and Wevill in Loving Sylvia Plath deserve to be celebrated for their clear-eyed expansion of the living record of Van Duyne’s artistic forebears.

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A Book About Ray

Ellen Levy
The MIT Press ($54.95)

by Patrick James Dunagan

By far the most complete framing of coyote trickster artist Ray Johnson (1927-1995) to date, Ellen Levy’s A Book About Ray engages with the work of the artist on his own terms, or at least as approximate to them as possible. Given the often abrasive opacity of Johnson’s (non-)engagement with curators, critics, and scholars, this can’t have been easy. Levy herself describes her book as “not, or not exactly, a life story. This is an art story.” Some may think they know that story from John W. Walter’s 2002 documentary How to Draw a Bunny, however that film portrayed Johnson mainly as a mail art collagist, adding to the quizzical and cryptic sense of Johnson that had already given him cult-like art celebrity status. Levy’s book reveals more of Johnson’s work and investigates the overall drive behind it.

A Book About Ray progresses in roughly chronological order, though it also freely cycles forward and backward in time via artistic statements on recurring motifs and themes found in Johnson’s work. After early years of artistic output in Detroit, Johnson attended the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina in the late 1940s, and there he flourished—especially as a favored talent in Bauhaus artist Josef Albers’s classes, dutifully attentive to “the clear, wise, and constructive ideas” behind “the relational nature of color” Albers championed. That aptitude led to a November 1947 cover of the magazine Interiors by Johnson consisting of three rows of colored upright rectangular boxes full of polka-dots of varying size and color along with one row of rectangular boxes with parallel stripes of various colors running across them. His painting Calm Center (1951), a grid of squares each containing a plethora of colored lines that offer “variations on the square,” is also very much in the Albers vein, save that the square at center is solid black. 

Also at Black Mountain, Johnson established friendships with fellow student artists such as Ruth Asawa, who he heard speak of “the Taoism philosophy of nothing ness [sic] being everything-ness”; Johnson realized, “I feel that way.” It was at the college as well that he took up with a teacher, beginning the longest romantic relationship of his life with the married sculptor Richard Lippold (it ended in 1974). Leaving the school, Johnson followed Lippold to New York City; in the summer of 1951, they took up residency downtown “in the shadow of the Williamsburg bridge,” occupying individual studio spaces alongside Morton Feldman and John Cage (each of whom had also spent time at Black Mountain). Thus, from a young age Johnson was very much in the thick of the burgeoning New York City art scene, where he would remain even at a distance after moving out to the North Shore of Long Island in 1969.

In addition to the cover of Interiors, Johnson designed now-iconic book covers for New Directions, including William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain and Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations; the Rimbaud cover utilized a portrait of the poet, which Johnson would continue recycling by using it in several collages. In the New York art scene, Johnson knew Andy Warhol and there are significant associations between Warhol’s work and his own. This is particularly true of his use of portraits: Johnson often drew upon images of iconic cultural figures such as Marilyn Monroe, and in fact, pre-dates Warhol’s use of such images with works from 1956-58 featuring James Dean collaged with the Lucky Strikes cigarettes logo and Elvis covered in red wash and bleeding tears. 

Levy reports how “Ray and Andy were known to shop together sometimes for movie stills and magazines.” Johnson, however, did not share in Warhol’s loftier ambitions. His portraits of these stars “got progressively grungier” and always remained small; “made to be held in hand by their recipients,” they “speak volubly of the artist’s hand” in their making, as opposed to Warhol’s industrial, oversized mass screen prints. And as weird as Warhol’s reputation holds him to be, Johnson was even further afield. Factory participant Billy Name demonstrates this with a telling comparison, saying “Andy was still like a person” whereas “Ray wasn’t a person. He was a collage or a sculpture. A living sculpture, you know. He was Ray Johnson’s creation.” Art for and on art’s terms alone was always Johnson’s sole intention.

At the center of Johnson’s work are mutually unachievable co-existing wishes. As Levy describes, “Ray Johnson wanted to be famous, and he wanted to remain unknown, and he clung to the belief, whose absurdity he relished, that it was possible to be both at once.” Johnson enjoyed the dilemma of always choosing to have things every and any way he desired, regardless of the lasting impact upon himself, his work, or anything else. Nothing mattered less to him than what many others valued most—critical acknowledgement, financial success, and media attention. Not that he didn’t pay attention to such matters; he simply refused to directly pursue or be enticed by them. The introduction of these concerns into any exchange with Johnson regarding his work would immediately sour further discussion. Yet Johnson nevertheless would send unsolicited correspondence to gallery owners and museum curators, and he had shows and would lecture at art schools during residencies. To be seen and not seen. Chameleon. Enigma. Artist shapeshifter. Johnson was all of these. 

In his collages, Johnson constantly interchanged his own set of iconic figures and related symbols, creating exchanges of identity and associated possible meanings. As he announces, “One can pretend to be someone one is not. Children’s play. I’ll be you and you be me. Be my valentine.” There is implicit intimacy behind his work, only it is not necessarily personal: instead Ray Johnson was “a person who lived for art to a point where he convinced others, and perhaps at times even convinced himself, that any aspect of his life that could not be assimilated into his art should not be considered part of the Ray Johnson story.”

Johnson was “a creature and creator of networks,” and one of his first was what became known as the New York Correspondence School. Within what became a vast interlocking web, Johnson openly handed over the reins of creation to others, asking the recipients of collages and other materials he mailed them to work on them and then send them on to others he named, putting all involved on the spot. As Levy asserts, “To correspond with Ray Johnson was to assume the role of artist.” The fact that he was continually looking for opportunities to diminish showing his hand in any artistic activity brought tension into his correspondence, however. Artist-performer Jill Johnston states it plainly: “I didn’t correspond with Ray because he scared me. I found him kind of intense.”

Levy tracks each of the several altering forms Johnson’s artworks took shape in. Among the earliest series were the Moticos, which had the appearance of being “paper scraps” yet were “made things, artworks of a kind” that held meaning beyond any literal, physical manifestation. As he stated: “perhaps you are the moticos.” Johnson would send these works (which easily slipped into envelopes) to Correspondence School participants, and as a result, many of them ended up in the hands of art collectors and dealers without his knowledge, let alone any control over sales or financial compensation. Another important work was A Book About Death, “one of his strangest and most enigmatic projects. The ‘book,’ never constituted as such, consists of thirteen unbound prints designed one by one between 1963 and 1965, each mailed out as it emerged to various correspondents.”

Later came the bunnies—“his signature icon a crudely drawn rabbit-head”—issued with a seven-step set of drawing instructions under the heading “New York Correspondance School”; Levy notes that the “simplicity of its rendering suggests that the icon is rooted in the Duchampian ethic that held that everyone and anyone could be, in fact already is, an artist.” Near the end of Johnson’s life arrived the Move Stars, a series of images forming an “assemblage, laid out on the ground, of graphic images of bunnies and other icons,” each panel-like piece being “32 inches high. And vary from 7 ½ to 8 inches wide,” which Johnson arranged at various suburban locales around his local Long Island home, photographing them with dispensable one-click cameras. These were not seen by many until long after Johnson’s death, when “in 2019, Joel Smith, curator of photography at the Morgan Library, searched them out and went through them all and calculated that the artist had run through 137 cameras, from which he had printed over five thousand images.”

There’s not the space here to cover every aspect of Johnson’s work that Levy brings to light. Her book includes ample color images, scattered as if collaged at times across the pages, and care has been taken to have the book resemble an art object itself, an experimental risk which pays off. Levy’s eye-opening A Book About Ray mirrors Johnson’s elusive disappearances even as it highlights what made this unique artist the phenomenon he was.

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Henry Martin: An Active Ear

Selected Writings, Conversations, and Correspondences

Edited by Emanuele Guidi and Egidio Marzona, with text by Lisa Andreani, Jordan Carter, Luca Cerizza, Allison Grimaldi Donahue, Emanuele Guidi, Henry Martin, and Elisabetta Rattalino
Spector Books ($45)

by Richard Kostelanetz

The remarkable African American art critic, curator, and translator Henry Martin, who died at the age of eighty in 2022, finally gets to be the subject of focus in Henry Martin: An Active Ear. Martin, a native of Philadelphia, was an expatriate author; after attending New York University in the mid-1960s, he traveled to Italy and stayed there, marrying visual artist Berty Skuber and settling with her in the mountainous South Tyrol, where other Americans were scarce.

Martin made his living by contributing articles to magazines and translating Italian texts into English. He was a literary man who came late to art writing; the greatest influence on his prose was another Henry, surnamed James, from whom Martin learned the art of composing extended sentences in long paragraphs. The primary source of his enthusiasm for visual art was Marcel Duchamp, whom he discovered as a teenager in 1950s Philadelphia:

Marcel Duchamp first entered my life when I was fourteen or fifteen years old, surely before I was sixteen when I was old enough to drive. He connects directly to the old red bus at the stop on the corner of the road where my family lived, then a transfer to the green municipal bus somewhere inside the city, and finally the trolly through Fairmount Park to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which is a great fake Parthenon atop a great fake Acropolis that stares from a distance towards the center of the city and the statue of William Penn on the summit of City Hall.

Fortunately, one of Martin’s first jobs in Italy was helping the Milanese art historian Arturo Schwarz prepare The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (Abrams, 1969). This immersion explains, perhaps, why the most profound essays in An Active Ear discuss aspects of Duchamp, who became Martin’s principal teacher in modernist aesthetics as well as a touchstone he returned to for decades; with the Italian painter Gianfranco Baruchello (1924-2023), Martin wrote Why Duchamp (McPherson & Co., 1985).

Nearly all the other people whose work is discussed in An Active Ear descend from Duchamp; about pre-20th-century visual art, of which Italy has so much that is excellent, Martin says little. He favors post-Duchamp artists such as Ray Johnson (1927-1995) and George Brecht (1926-2008), not only in discrete essays but in extended probing interviews. Often does Martin reveal that he knows his subjects personally, not to boast but to give his commentary an intimate authority. Only one of his many subjects is African American: Fluxus artist and musician Benjamin Patterson (1934-2016), who likewise resided for a time in Europe.

Emanuele Guidi has constructed An Active Ear to be an alternative kind of biography; in addition to Martin’s essays and conversations, Guidi includes correspondence between Martin and his favorite subjects as well as occasional informal photographs. Of the last, my favorites appear as endpapers, with Martin holding a white bird (perhaps a dove) on his outstretched hand on the front spread and raising his middle finger beside two white guys on the back spread.

What further makes this book a de facto biography are five appreciations written by people who aren’t artists and a remarkably elegant foreword by John-Daniel Martin, Berty and Henry’s son. The only ungainly thing about the book is its format: the sans serif type and small margins make the reading experience challenging.

Henry Martin with Roue de bicyclette by Marcel Duchamp at Philadelphia Museum of Art, from Henry Martin: An Active Ear

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Patriot

Alexei Navalny
Translated by Arch Tait and Stephen Dalziel
Knopf ($35)

by Grace Utomo

For some, the difference between what if and what is is a single character. For others, it’s the gulf between silence and annihilation. Alexei Navalny, intrepid critic of Vladimir Putin and leader of Russia’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, chose the latter. Navalny’s memoir, Patriot, which blends traditional narrative, prison diaries, and social media posts, was released posthumously by his widow Yulia Navalnaya in October 2024 after the opposition leader was allegedly killed in one of Russia’s most brutal penal colonies. From surviving assassination by chemical agent in 2020, to 295 days of torture and solitary confinement during 2023-2024, Navalny remained steadfast in his dissent.

Although Navalny composed Patriot in spaces ranging from a tranquil asylum in Germany to a punishment cell above the Arctic Circle, the book’s tone is strikingly consistent. Its opening captures the author’s tongue-in cheek approach to both politics and memoir: “Dying really didn’t hurt. If I hadn’t been breathing my last, I would never have stretched out on the floor next to the plane’s toilet. As you can imagine, it wasn’t exactly clean.” Navalny describes his near-fatal poisoning—believed to have been ordered by Putin in response to Navalny’s carefully documenting Russian political corruption, as well as his two attempts to run for political office—with humor and irony without overplaying either.

As Patriot progresses, Navalny reveals that the memoir he’d begun writing to uncover the truth about his mysterious “illness” has morphed into something else: the saga of an unbreakable battle with the Kremlin. Navalny never doubts the truth will prevail, but his glasses are not rose-colored. He wrote to followers shortly before his death:

Nineteen years in a maximum-security penal colony. The number of years does not matter. I understand perfectly well that, like many political prisoners, I am serving a life sentence. Whether “life” is defined either by the end of my life, or the length of  the life of this regime.
   The sentencing figure is not for me. It is for you. . . . Putin must not achieve his goal. Do not lose the will to resist.

Notably absent from Navalny’s messages to supporters and prison diaries are details of what he endured during 295 days in solitary confinement—perhaps an indication of Navalny’s focus on the cause of Russian freedom and of his reluctance to proclaim himself a martyr.

Crucial to Patriot is Navalny’s sensitivity as a husband and father. Starvation and sleep deprivation should desensitize the most high-minded empath, but Navalny remains tender. Halfway through his imprisonment, he writes to his wife Yulia: “I hate glass. Because for six months now I’ve only seen you through glass. In the courtroom, through glass. During visits, through glass. . . I adore you, I miss you. Stay well and don’t get discouraged . . . As for the glass, sooner or later we’ll melt it with the heat of our hands.” This missive demonstrates Navalny’s resolution to lift others up, though a birthday message to his son Zakhar also reveals regret over the collateral suffering Navalny’s activism inflicts on his family:

    What sort of pathetic greeting is it to send a letter to your son on his fourteenth birthday? What kind of memory will that be of being close to his father?

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

    Let’s face it, you don’t get to choose your parents. Some kids get stuck with jailbirds.
    But it is on my children’s birthdays that I am particularly aware why I’m in jail. We need to build the Beautiful Russia of the Future for them to live in.

Few of Patriot’s readers in the U.S. will risk imprisonment, torture, or assassination for our ideals, yet Navalny’s call to unmask lies and elevate truth invites global application. This trenchant memoir might prompt us to ask ourselves: What are we doing today to make the world a better place tomorrow?

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

A Prague Flâneur

Vítězslav Nezval
Translated by Jed Slast
Twisted Spoon Press ($19)

by Allan Graubard

For those who enjoy strolling around a city they know well or don’t, which they live in or visit; who have no particular destination in mind; who wander at different times, drawn by places and people they encounter and which, for intimate reasons, captivate them, will find an ally in A Prague Flâneur. Its author, Vítězslav Nezval, founded the Czech Surrealist Group and was one of the leading poets and writers of the avant garde. A Prague Flâneur is Nezval’s paean to the city, his city, then on the brink of disaster: The Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia was complete by March 1939, soon after the publication of the book.

The flâneur, of course, comes to us from mid-19th century France. In The Painter of Modern Life, Baudelaire depicts the figure as a stroller who observes in poignant detail what he encounters in and around a city but who keeps his distance, preferring to represent the experience in solitude, visually or with words. Some eight decades later, Nezval reveals the legacy of the term anew. Inspired by Prague’s polyglot architecture, mechanized systems, distractions, crowds, and those rare spaces (streets, parks, playgrounds) that can transform the normal urban chaos we expect, enjoy, or endure, Nezval orchestrates the city’s analog—the book.

Nezval’s writing style mirrors the kind of critical-poetic journalism with which surrealists captured the currents of cities—particularly their marvelous, disorienting, delirious, or dreamlike aspects. A Prague Flâneur is replete with historical descriptions of this or that street, building, restaurant, or café, and how they played in Nezval’s life— from his days as a poor, hungry university student to his rise as a literary figure—as well as brief sketches of writers and artists important to him. As he describes it, Prague takes on a multiform, resonant charge, socially proscribed but personally invented.

After Nezval, others continued to revive the legacy of the flâneur as they conceived it. A decade on after World War II, the Situationists’ dérive (their drift through the city) provoked theoretical remarks on a new context: psychogeography, a term they coined and which, as things go, now appears as a sub-discipline of geography. Heightening the stakes for Nezval, though, are two pivotal events that bring an often-feverish poise to his writing: the immanence of World War II and the fate of the Surrealist Group.

The former stems from the September 30, 1938 signing of the Munich Agreement, by which England and France ceded to Nazi Germany the Sudetenland, then part of Czechoslovakia—a Hail Mary to delay the onset of war that Nezval knew would fail; the only question was when. Anxiety percolates through the book, sharpening its tempered edge. The planes that fly above Prague presage the battle to come. The country arms only to fall months later, betrayed by its allies.

The latter involves Nezval’s split with the Surrealist Group, the repercussions of which followed him and now cannot help but appear as subtext to the book’s exuberant, elegiac tone. The cause of the split was partly political: Nezval supported the USSR, despite the terror Stalin unleashed on his opponents. The majority in the group criticized Stalin’s hunger for victims, which included leading Russian poets and artists, Communist revolutionaries, and uncounted allies or bystanders. Most were put on trial, given sentences, exiled to the Gulag, or executed. There was no possibility of rapprochement.

Nezval’s recognition that only the USSR could mount a force equal to that of Nazi Germany and wage war against it to victory was true enough in retrospect. The other members of the group—whom, oddly, Nezval never names—re-organized and continued on. Perhaps for emotional balance, Nezval recounts his friendship with André Breton and Paul Éluard: the mutual esteem they held for each other, several experiences they shared in Prague, and something of their rich collaborations. A somewhat specious critique of psychic automatism follows, which allows Nezval to clarify how he would write from then on (faced with the immanence of war, cultivating the absence of intention was not something he prized). Be that as it may, when Nezval leaves his apartment, he enters a realm that he creates: the city as his avatar, with chance their conductor.

A Prague Flâneur lives up to its title in a fraught historical moment through which Nezval sought a way to live without sidelining in his writing the inspiration Prague gave him and that he now gives the reader: walking through it, loving and fighting in it, playing out his days and nights with a keen sense of what makes it all unique, even funny (a satirical escapade with an escaped crab its capstone).

This translation, finely done by Jed Slast, is of the rare, unexpurgated first edition with photographs by Nezval, which hit the streets in the fall of 1938, coincident with the signing of the Munich Agreement. Given the consequences of that agreement and the Nazi conquest soon to come, Nezval had the book pulled from its bookstores so that he could delete passages that might compromise him with Nazi authorities, including his celebration of Stalin and his cutting portrait of Hitler as a young agitator of the lumpenproletariat in seedy Berlin beerhalls. An appendix carries that content and the edits Nezval made.

Characteristically, Nezval ends the book with a brief paragraph that recalls the narrative’s through line. It has a solitary atemporal quality—not yet mythic, but almost so. Place it as the first paragraph in the book and it works just as well. Is it an ending or a beginning? For Nezval, it could be both:

Oh Prague, I turn you in my fingers like an amethyst. But no. I just walk, and I see in the magical mirror of dusty crystal that is Prague the animated expression of someone who is fated to find himself and to wander, to find himself through wandering. 

 

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2024-2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

Dead Weight

Essays on Hunger and Harm

Emmeline Clein
Knopf ($30)

by Olivia Q. Pintair

When Emmeline Clein began writing her debut essay collection, Dead Weight: Essays on Hunger and Harm, she originally planned to document female hysteria. Her subjects would be fictional and non-fictional women branded with that diagnosis by a misogynistic culture that pathologizes and fetishizes the pain it produces—women hallucinating into their wallpaper, sobbing in hospital hallways, and wasting away in the folds of Y2K tabloids. Her focus shifted, though, as Clein has said in interviews, when she realized how many of the figures she was researching shared struggles with disordered eating. As Clein began “to harmonize with a ghost choir” that includes medieval anorexic saints, anonymous Tumblr users, Ottessa Moshfegh protagonists, Simone Weil, Cass Elliot, Karen Carpenter, and many of us readers, the book transformed into an attempt to frame disordered eating within the context of the systems and industries that profit from it.

Tracing the cultural and medical histories of anorexia, bulimia, binge eating disorder, and orthorexia, Dead Weight undoes several tricks of the light. Through investigative reporting, criticism, and prose, Clein reveals that disordered eating is not a solipsistic malady; rather, it is an integral weapon of a racist, classist, and misogynistic society that depends upon the age-old lie that sick and sad young women are crazy, unreliable narrators. To undo that lie’s prismatic refractions, Clein shows us how common and culturally incentivized disordered eating is. Meditating on the casual gore of modern womanhood, she excavates the cultural, economic, and political underbellies of an epidemic wrought by and for a capitalist world. The result is a manifesto against “dissociative feminism” and the “lethal culture” that Western beauty standards empower.

Across Dead Weight’s thirteen essays, Clein navigates the rabbit holes of Reddit feminism, the aughts-era Tumblr-verse, diagnostic hierarchies, the eating disorder recovery industry, modern wellness culture, Ozempic’s arrival to mass markets, and the unsettling allure of bimboism. Her voice is sharp and familiar, moored to a sense of solidarity with the people living and dying along the faultlines she documents. In most autobiographical accounts of eating disorders, Clein writes, “the only way to survive seems to be renouncing your suffering sisters . . . I’m trying to find out what might happen if we blame someone other than each other and ourselves for a change.”

Clein quickly dispels any expectations for the nostalgic and bone-laden accounts of eating disorders that readers may be used to. Instead, she recasts the often isolating struggle as a collective one. In one essay, Clein explores how phases of capitalism mirror disordered eating patterns:

If bulimia was the eating disorder of Reaganomics and millennial girlbossery, and anorexia was the eating disorder of aughts-era austerity, [injectable weight loss] drugs might foster an eating disorder for a new age of technocapitalism, wherein we try to recast hunger as just another inconvenience we can eliminate with an app.

Elsewhere, Clein traces the normalization of eating disorders in a culture of ubiquitous commodification. “Eating disorders are good for capital,” reads one essay, which traces “the chain of money that leads from eating disorder treatment centers, weight loss companies, CBT companies, and pharmaceutical companies back to the same pool of investment capital.”

As Clein probes statistics and anecdotes, it becomes clear that disordered eating is not a mark of girlish insanity or vapid self-interest, but an apparatus of late capitalism. Women and femmes are peddled a beauty standard that remains a thinly veiled prerequisite for financial and social success, then are pathologized for trying to reach it. “Heroin chic is back,” The New York Post announced in 2022—Ozempic makes it easy now. As most anyone on the internet could attest, social media algorithms incentivize conformity and drain our energy to rebel. We seem to lose something when we follow their rules—and also when we don’t.

“I’m trying to be honest here: I’ve always wanted to live the kind of life that ends up in a story,” Clein writes, leveling with her audience. The women who starve themselves in books or on screen, she acknowledges, are often main characters, and maybe that is what the supposed trade-off is: Submit to the role, and you could be the heroine. But as Clein continually reminds us, those stories “are fiction,” repeated enough that they have become not only a cliché but also a narrative propping up several multi-billion-dollar industries and a conglomerate of mental illnesses with one of the highest collective death rates in the world.

For Clein, writing Dead Weight was an effort to humanize suffering people who, like the Victorian women drowning in white dresses in 19th century British and American literature, are usually romanticized in media but dismissed in real life. Like Simone Weil, Clein understands the visceral way in which the question of how or whether to eat is also a question of how or whether to be; the Self, as an experience and as an imagined ideal, is her primary interest. Early on in the book, she asks readers to picture the archetype of the “skinny, sexy, sad girl” as an ideal self that floats out at sea, “purring false promises from just over the horizon line”; she then points out that like those literary women whose misogyny-induced deaths are so predictably written as romantic inevitabilities, this archetype didn’t swim out to sea of her own accord. “Someone stranded her at the vanishing point . . .” Clein writes, “and they don’t want us to reach her because then we might save her, convince her she’s been lied to like the rest of us.”

Advancing toward the menacing clarity of that realization like a chess player, Clein refuses to talk down to her readers or underestimate their agency. She is interested in a political future beyond both the commodification of pain and the avoidance of it. “I have a question for bimbos and dissociated girls alike,” she writes in the collection’s coda. “How are we shaping our bodies and behaviors to become desirable to the most powerful, according to their value system?”

As Clein contextualizes her subject matter within existential questions about selfhood and solidarity, Dead Weight becomes relevant not only to those suffering from eating disorders, but to anyone trying to remain feeling and alive in a capitalist world that commodifies selfhood at the chaotic clip of a panopticonic auctioneer. The Self, Clein posits, is not an asset that should either escalate in perpetuity or submit to disappearance, but a synthesis of experience, alive insofar as it risks its own imagined stasis toward relationship and connection. Undermining narratives of our own isolation and insanity could destabilize industries that profit from them, Clein argues. “We don’t have to be solo heroines on lonely journeys; we can also be sisters and friends, side characters in someone else’s story . . . We can, maybe, even be the person who changes it.”

At the end of the book’s penultimate essay, Clein returns to consider the roots of her own suffering from disordered eating:

I watch my adolescent body get thrown like a pebble into a pond. The blame ripples out, past my therapist, another woman floating on her back in the water, into green fields of money and men. I see magazines filled with waifish models and . . . the Instagram ads . . .  offering me mental health quizzes and meditation for women apps and Gwyneth Paltrow’s Netflix show and diet tea. I see the eating disorder memes and weight loss progress Instagram accounts and slim, smiling influencers, and wonder how I could have ended up anywhere but at the bottom of the lake.

“It can be politically mobilizing to feel the weight of that pain,” Clein said in a conversation with Rayne Fisher-Quann published in Nylon; “it makes me want to be alive in order to try to change it in what little ways I can so that maybe some younger girl doesn’t have to feel this bad.” Ultimately, Dead Weight is an offering born of Clein’s commitment to doing that—to envisioning a world in which girlhood isn’t a minefield of diet trends, where genuine human connection renders dissociation unnecessary, and where bodies are land and not property. In this world, Clein dreams, the lake might not be a place where people drown or disappear, but an expanse where we might find each other. This is a world she can see, she promises—not over a horizon line, but somewhere closer.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2024-2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025