Carrying On

It’s been a month since the election, and the shock of it has finally died down. The result is still awful to contemplate, but at least I don’t wake up every morning feeling like someone close to me has died.

I spent a week in Iceland, which helped. I returned to the Iceland Noir literary festival.

I spent four days in Reykjavík attending wall to wall talks about books, surrounded by people who were viewing the U.S. at a distance and could therefore focus on literary culture rather than politics. Even the American writers attending the festival only referred to the event obliquely and gave every appearance of forging ahead with their own work, dodging obstacles as necessary.

It was a useful corrective for me, because I’ve been stumbling over recent events myself. As those who have been reading this newsletter can tell, I have long been interested in the interwar period and World War Two. I’d say that for a couple of years after 2016, I more or less lived in the 1930s in my head, I was reading and writing so much about it. One appeal of the period, I realize, was that it ended. The specter of Germany loomed for more than a decade, but it was attacked on two fronts and collapsed. One could keep that in mind as one delved into that dark time. I held onto the hope that the Trump era would have an equally distinct shape and represent a brief departure from normal U.S. politics. Now it feels open-ended and as if it will linger indefinitely. And as if it might affect my ability to dwell in and borrow from the past. Being in Iceland gave me the sense that I could get back there, and finish the story I’m writing set in that era.

I have been careful about the news I consume at the moment, trying to avoid becoming overwhelmed. For example, I didn’t pay too much attention to Trump’s worry-inducing cabinet picks—until some of the nominations started to implode. I think we have gotten an indication that the incoming administration will be subject to the usual political gravity, which is heartening.

There have been some changes to what I’ve been able to read and watch over the past month. I seem to be drawn to family dramas, which feel eternal, pointing to a continuity in ordinary life even through extraordinary times. I’m finally reading Anne Enright’s The Gathering, which has been on my list for years but never quite reached the top. It’s different than I expected. I knew it was about a family reacting to a death of one of their members, but there’s an oddness to it that I wasn’t prepared for, which nonetheless captures a certain familiar quality of memory. For instance, the way the main character describes aspects of her grandmother’s fleshy body or her rolled-up stockings reminded me very viscerally of what it was like to be a child in my own grandmother’s house.

In the days right after the election I watched the PBS Masterpiece series, MaryLand, about two sisters who discover that their mother led a double life. For whatever reason, the story was about the right speed for me just then. I liked the way the coolness between the sisters hid more roiling emotions, so that it had a surface calmness or smallness belied by its churning depths. It seemed to mirror the real life feeling of a surface normality about to be disturbed by abnormal politics—but only in a distant, reflective way.

The Iceland Noir festival has several themes related to darkness, but the main one is Nordic crime fiction, and I loaded up on mysteries and thrillers to get me through the next few months. Eva Björg Ægisdóttir participated in one of the panels of the festival. I read the first in her “Forbidden Iceland” series, The Creak on the Stairs, while on the plane home from Reykjavík. It was great, and managed to scratch the same family drama itch.

I’m not sure how everything else is going to go, but at least we have the realm of the imagination.