One unicorn is just, well, one unicorn. Gather a herd together, and they form a Blessing of Unicorns upon your weekend! This week, meet some new books, several author interviews, and some thoughts on the complexities of history.
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Congratulations to Jeff Bilbro on his new book, which I am looking forward to reading! You should read his essay about it this week at Current. Also, enjoy this excerpt at Front Porch Republic and Ben Myers’s review at The Gospel Coalition. A review at Current is coming later this fall.
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Christmas is early this year. A new GK Chesterton essay has been found and is to be published for the first time.
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Sarah Selden reviewed Samantha Harvey’s Booker Prize winning novel, Orbital, for Orange Blossom Ordinary (Current Contributing Editor Elizabeth Stice’s newest venture). A taste:
In 1922, James Joyce shook the literary world by publishing Ulysses. Despite its 700-page length, the novel’s plot is limited to a single day in Dublin, Ireland. Three years later, Virginia Woolf published another landmark modernist novel that takes place in a single day: Mrs Dalloway. Through these limited timelines, Joyce and Woolf were both able to explore the human interior in ways that had not been done in literature before, from episodes that take place completely in an outhouse in Ulysses to the interior horrors of shellshock in Mrs Dalloway. Both these novels also pioneered the free-indirect discourse style as well, causing readers and writers alike to reconsider what constitutes a novel.
Nearly 100 years later, Samantha Harvey continues this tradition with her Booker-longlisted Orbital. This novel also stretches the parameters of the genre as it follows a day in the life of four astronauts (Chie, Pietro, Shaun, and Nell) and two cosmonauts (Roman and Anton) living aboard the International Space Station. No exact date is given, but there are many references to the aging space station and the fact that it will soon be decommissioned and crash into the Pacific, setting the novel in the late 2020s. It explores the characters’ deepest thoughts, fears, and most human of moments as they pass through 16 orbits around the earth on a single day of their nine-month mission. Harvey’s style is reminiscent of Joyce and Woolf’s in its distinctness—many reviewers have noted the novel’s lack of plot and propensity to drift between characters’ perspectives without warning. The novel’s narrator also makes a curious seventh character that drifts in and out of the narrative, often interjecting as the text transitions between the inner worlds of the human characters. Through this exploration of space and style, Harvey gets at the very heart of what it means to be human in just 207 pages.
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James R. Wood’s essay “The Autonomy Trap” in the newest issue of Plough, themed around Freedom, is powerful, heartbreaking but beautiful. A taste (but you need to read in full to understand the bigger story that brought him to this conclusion):
That is the freedom for which Christ has set us free: the freedom to love. I found this in Christ and the community created by his cross (Eph. 2:11–22). What I needed was not freedom from others, retaining an easy opt-out clause for every relationship. What I needed was a relationship with the one who is “nearer to me than I am to myself,” as Augustine said, and whose love frees me to know and be known by others, a freedom that leads to mutual service (Gal. 5). I needed freedom in fellowship, not freedom from commitment and obligation. I am so glad I have found it in the church. It’s what I pray for others, what I desire for everyone whose grasped-for “freedom” has gone sour, whose lack of tether has led them to the end of themselves. You are not your own; you are not alone.
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I appreciated this conversation of two historians I very much respect: read Chris Gehrz’s interview with Dixie Dillon Lane about her book on homeschooling, under contract with Eerdmans. Watch this space for another interview with Dixie about this book project, coming here at The Arena next week!
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Another wonderful interview I recommend this week, this one between two writers and poets: Steven Knepper interviewed Marly Youmans (whose novel Maze of Blood is on Current’s 100 Books of the 21st Century)!
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An excellent essay from Obbie Tyler Todd (and I’m looking forward to his forthcoming book, The Beechers—we’ll be covering it at Current!): “People Are Complex. So Is History.”
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Speaking of historical complexities, Michael Lucchese reviewed Miles Smith’s new book at Public Discourse this week (and check out the interview with Miles on this blog that Dan Williams did earlier this summer).
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Joel J. Miller reviewed Armand D’Angour’s fun addition to Princeton University Press’s fun series of “how to” books: a collection of excerpts from Aristotle on Innovation: An Ancient Guide to Creative Thinking. The series, Ancient Wisdom for Modern Living, asks a modern Classicist to put together a collection of excerpts from ancient authors, forming a theme—such as How to Eat Well, How to Be a Bad Emperor, How to Tell a Joke, How to Win an Election, and How to Keep Your Cool.
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Yesterday, we ran a brief list from Current writers of books they’re looking forward to reading this fall/early winter. Agnes Howard highlighted Christine Rosen’s new book, The Extinction of Experience. As it happens, James M. Patterson interviewed Rosen this week for the Law & Liberty podcast.
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Beatrice Scudeler, whose work is always well worth reading, wrote for Public Discourse about “Loving Both Mother and Child: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Case for a Maternal, Pro-Life Feminism.”
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I reviewed a thought-provoking new book about egg freezing: “Freezing Dreams and Selling Lies in Family Unfriendly America.” A taste from my argument:
We are living in an age of apparent contradictions. On the one hand, U.S. birthrates are at an all time low, well below replacement rate. And yet, “between 2009 and 2022, nearly 115,000 healthy women in the United States underwent egg freezing.” Annually, their numbers swell, rising by 95% in some clinics during the 2020 shutdown. If people are choosing to have fewer children than ever, why are they investing so much in reproduction-enhancing technology?
For half a decade, journalist Natalie Lampert investigated the recent egg freezing boom and what it means for our society’s view of women, fertility, and motherhood. She reports her results in her new book, The Big Freeze. Ultimately, the story she uncovers presents a sobering addition to journalist Timothy P. Carney’s argument that America today is deeply Family Unfriendly.