\u201cClune understands that at any given stage of our lives, we are yoked to unprecedented subjectivities. Nicholas can\u2019t experience suffering outside his own any more than I can experience the pain of childbirth right now. This means compassion is a function of imagination, and watching Nicholas\u2019s empathy come robustly alive and calibrate itself against his panic and his parents\u2019 divorce, against art and friendship and sex, is thrilling.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201c\u2026an ambitious, at times magisterial, epic. Maximalist in tone and structure, it traverses whole swaths of twentieth-century history, from Japanese imperialism and wartime defeat to contemporary ecological disaster. But where much historical fiction is concerned with placing individual characters within the frame of a larger social context, Wildcat Dome\u00a0does something different: it moves beyond the linearity of history; beyond psychological interiority; beyond even the realm of the\u00a0human.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhere the apartment\u2019s open window in Territory of Light draws attention to the narrator\u2019s interiority\u2026Wildcat Dome steps through that window\u2014or indeed, the damaged door\u2014and into the world. But it hovers near the threshold between the \u201crather trivial, personal event\u201d (however violent or traumatic) and events of historical significance. On the one hand, it encompasses many decades of history and sends its characters around the globe\u2014from Japan to America, Europe, and elsewhere in Asia. On the other, it is an intimate story about a trio of social outcasts who witness a crime, the shadow of which they are unable to\u00a0outrun.<\/p>\n
What makes the novel both vivid and idiosyncratic is the way that Tsushima refuses to bridge this gap through the conventional tools of historical fiction, through the rendering of a holistic narrative arc and world. Instead, Wildcat Dome remains distinctly unruly in form. The novel skips through time, employing reminiscence and flashback, the intercutting of timelines, layering and simultaneity as the characters are drawn back into the past, to the question of what they saw, and what they did\u2014and did\u00a0not\u2014do.<\/p>\n
\u2026<\/p>\n
\u201comewhat surprisingly, the novel I thought of as I read Wildcat Dome was Salman Rushdie\u2019s Midnight\u2019s Children. Rushdie\u2019s novel, with its audacious, genre-defining magical realism, might seem an unlikely reference. But Wildcat Dome is a novel that teems with ghosts and phantom voices, and also uses its highly symbolic characters to navigate a critical period in the history of a nation. The distinction between the two is that Tsushima deploys the more fantastical elements of her story not in order to negotiate historical chronology, but to undo\u00a0it.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2013Katie Kitamura on Yuko Tsushima\u2019s Wildcat Dome<\/strong><\/a> (Harper\u2019s<\/a>)<\/p>\n \u201cWilliams\u2019s grand subject being himself, now we have a third memoir. Summer of Our Discontent takes a caustic look at Black Lives Matter from the lofty vantage point of his Parisian garret. At the outset, he tells us that the self-preening, race-mad identity politics of left-leaning liberals has fostered atomisation and precluded solidarity. As a consequence, the illiberal, unhinged right, now united behind Trump, has stolen a march on them. But from this not unreasonable edifice, Williams throws up an enormous scaffolding of enemies, which comes to encompass anyone and everyone engaging in some form or another of collective action. Ultimately, by the end, it appears that Williams\u2019s beef is not so much with Trump as with his leftwing critics.<\/p>\n This is a strange, muddled book. On the one hand, Williams emphasises the primacy of class over race in the US. George Floyd<\/a>, he says, was not your average African American: he was poor, unemployed, and had a criminal record. Horrific as his killing by a white policeman was, it was unduly racialised by BLM. Fewer than 25 unarmed black civilians are killed by police annually. Most black people will never find themselves in Floyd\u2019s shoes, Williams contends.<\/p>\n \u2026<\/p>\n \u201cHe concludes by suggesting that the left and right are just as odious as one another. The storming of the Capitol in 2021, he says, had a mimetic quality, the populist right \u2018aping\u2019 the \u2018flamboyant reflex\u2019 of the unruly left. With such invidious comparisons, and with such a dim view of collective action, Williams is unable to make the case as to how precisely his homeland is to move towards a post-racial utopia. Excelling in sending up bien-pensant opinion, he has no answers. Fixated on slagging off the left, he has marooned himself on an island of vacuity. So when he articulates a positive vision of the future, all he offers are new age nostrums such as \u2018reinvestment in lived community\u2019 and \u2018truth, excellence, plain-old unqualified justice.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n \u2013Pratinav Anil on Thomas Chatterton Williams\u2019 Summer of Our Discontent<\/strong> (The Guardian<\/a>)<\/p>\n \u201cDespite the overlap in life experience and subject matter, Dunne\u2019s voice on the page is worlds away from Didion\u2019s\u2014gregarious where she is laconic, coarse where she is prim, insecure where she is miles above worrying about the opinions of other humans. Compare her legendary response<\/a> to an aggrieved letter to the editor\u2014\u2019Oh, wow\u2019\u2014 to Dunne\u2019s many-thousand-word essay \u2018Critical,\u2019 recounting various slights in print against him and Didion.<\/p>\n \u2026<\/p>\n In her perceptive introduction to a new edition of Dunne\u2019s 1974 book Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season, Stephanie Danler begins a sentence about his career with the devastating clause \u2018Though largely unread today \u2026\u2019 While true, one imagines this would have particularly stung a writer who depicted himself wondering, early in this account, whether his death would merit a write-up in Time magazine. (Speaking of largely unread today \u2026) Dunne is at his best when overriding his hangups and explaining how things work, whether it be the teeth-grinding process of drafting a Hollywood screenplay, in his book Monster, or his pieces on sports, Los Angeles, politics and much else for The New York Review of Books<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2026<\/p>\n \u201cTo a contemporary reader, Dunne\u2019s lack of a hook\u2014an angle, as the Vegas denizens he encounters might call it\u2014is more striking than the genre agnosticism signaled by having \u2018memoir\u2019 in the subtitle. (A helpful designation for a book that is \u2018both real and imagined\u2019: fiction.) To an impressive degree, Dunne fails to find much in the way of the salvation he\u2019s looking for, or even drama, even when he finds himself set up for a sexual encounter with a 19-year-old named Teddi and decides to call his wife for advice. \u2018It\u2019s research,\u2019 Didion tells him. \u2018You\u2019re missing the story if you don\u2019t meet her.\u2019 He meets her, but thanks to his condescension (\u2018You ever read Gatsby?\u2019) doesn\u2019t get much of a story.<\/p>\n Vegas is all drift and repetition, a chronicle of killing time in an ugly, infernally hot place full of desperate liars. Dunne encounters terrible taste of every conceivable variety, from wall-to-wall homophobia and racism\u2014mostly reported, but striking in the volume of what the author deems worthy of passing on\u2014to lousy food, drinks, clothes and people. \u2018I needed to feed on some fantasies of my own,\u2019 Dunne writes in a typical passage, \u2018anything to erase the grotesqueries of the evening.\u2019 It\u2019s the best vaccination against 1970s nostalgia I\u2019ve ever received. Compared with this, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas reads as a colorful salute to a great American city.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"Summer](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Summer-of-Our-DIscontent-206x300.jpg\")
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