Well, will the “Natalie Portman novel” be any good?

Plus a deeply sympathetic AI user case study

Based on how quickly a bajillion people started fighting in my replies over whether the Trojan Horse canonically appears in The Iliad, The Odyssey, or Aeneid (<-the most correct answer as it turns out; my apologies to Professor Ted Tarkow your efforts at Mizzou fall 2011 were apparently for naught) I do believe the classics discourse is alive and well in this nation!

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The room-temp gossip in the publishing world is that the incoming Rachel Cusk novel, Life of M, is about the actor Natalie Portman — at least, according to UnHerd, which is sort of like an older, British-er The Free Press-type of situation. (Between this link and the next, it seems it’s a slow summer in the lit world — both Life of M and Emma Cline’s Switzy are more than a month away!)

The parallels between the “M” character and Portman do sound convincing, but I’m curious if this info actually whets anyone’s appetite to read the book. (For the record, the review of the book itself is quite positive!) But the novel-as-secret-celebrity-character-study premise alone doesn’t really do it for me personally, as someone who thought the celeb interview bit in All Fours was the weakest part. To make even a thinly-veiled fictitious celebrity work, you’re going to have to spend a lot of time world-building out the nature of their fame and ubiquity first; otherwise why wouldn’t I just read fanfiction or like…. @popcrave?? Give me a real fake person (celeb profile) or a fake fake person (fictional character) to care about, but not a fake real person please!

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Elsewhere in literary tidings: Not one for resting on her laurels re: critiquing the spiritually Dimes Square novelistas in Look Mom, I’m a Hegelian E-girl from February, Grace Byron tackles Emma Cline’s upcoming Switzy, and a bit of Moshfegh by way of “It-girl” novelists’ masculine revisions in HouseHouseMagazine. It is interesting to wonder how critically acclaimed female authors might get taken more seriously, especially if they made their name writing about cool hot girls in the first place — that is, will they still call you a hot girl writer once you put Harvey Weinstein-esque older dudes in your cross-hairs? (AKA the opposite of Natalie Portman??)

These dramatizations of men don’t avoid the debates about women novelists or “commercial” fiction, but they do reflect the productive tension of their construction. They dissect the pressures of authorship in a world where many believe literature is headed towards a cliff. By inhabiting the world of men, Cline and Moshfegh are able to examine the pressures of womanhood from the opposing side. They are relief sculptures, portraits of lack. Bucking the pressures and labels put on contemporary fiction is a Herculean task that doesn’t guarantee aesthetic depth or freedom to, perhaps only freedom from.

Seems…maybe no. A shame that there are only two genders in literature…

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Three pieces I recently read in The New Yorker felt in direct conversation with each other on the inadequacies of human connection. The first, Jessica Contrera’s portrait of a single mother and her daughters relying on chatbots, initially appears to be a predictable (if worrying) depiction of regular people relying on AI for emotional/therapeutic support. It initially made me think of Katy Waldman’s review of the lost art of the bromance, which at one point analyzes the nature of friendship (à la Jackass) as a kind of mirror to the self, which doesn’t sound unlike using AI trained on our whims and preferences to reflect back what we want:

Many of the men and women in McCarthy’s and Smith’s books suggest that the consummate friend is a kind of augmented second self. The terms they use are reminiscent of the mid-century psychoanalyst Helene Deutsch’s concept of an “ego-ideal,” an older peer whom young girls idolize and identify with. The worshipful wish expressed by same-sex crushes—“That’s what I want to be like,” as Deutsch phrased it—is less about possessing an object than about transforming oneself into a different kind of subject.

But Contera’s piece on the family quickly turns into something more existential. I keep thinking about the scene halfway through in the church basement, where the mother, Roschelle, attempts to share a major piece of her family’s story with fellow congregants — AKA, the kind of bid for genuine connection that’s supposedly the gold standard of humanity, the thing that AI skeptics like myself like to preach about being so much better for you than talking to an Amazon Alexa.

But as the scene makes clear, the central problem is that our attempts toward human connection often leaves so much to be desired. People, lest we forget, have a pretty overall hard time meeting each others’ emotional needs. What can anyone say by way of small talk to a mother who has suffered such a loss? In an instant, the appeal of AI chatbots seems irresistible, if not totally necessary: How could we possibly expect our fellow imperfect humans to be able to tend to our greatest pains?

After all, as Amanda Petrusich reflects in her essay about grieving her husband’s death: “Spending time with a grieving person is exhausting. It requires enormous amounts of patience and generosity. After a while, people get tired of your bottomless melancholy.” Petrusich’s essay goes on to explore the personal and social challenge — or “problem” — of grief, which includes the debate among mental health professionals about how to categorize bereavement properly (is it a “normal state”? Is it a “disorder”?) and various solutions for “solving” it in some form. I’m sure it’s not a spoiler alert to tell you that no one has really figured it out, not for themselves and not for the rest of us.