wsj piece on Marlon James

today on Insta from wsj magazine -- 

“I don’t know if this is a book I would have written without therapy,” our 2026 Literature Innovator, Marlon James says of his latest novel, “The Disappearers.” ⁠
⁠
The 55-year-old author is known for mining the most painful parts of his upbringing in Jamaica to create visceral, often violent, uncompromising fiction. But “The Disappearers” is the first time he’s unloaded the baggage of the creative process in a shrink’s office. ⁠
⁠
Set mainly in Kingston, Jamaica, between 1988 and 2005, the book follows eight men in the aftermath of a ruthless homophobic attack while secretly rehearsing a play. James’s characters—all closeted gay men and strangers to one another—contend with their trauma in silent, vengeful ways, some disappearing from the country altogether. (Homosexuality is not outlawed in Jamaica, but sexual acts between men are criminalized there.)⁠
⁠
“There’s no question that anger fueled a lot of what’s in the book,” he says.⁠
Having spent his childhood and most of his adult years in the closet, James found himself mourning the full life he could have lived “if I had a gay 30s instead of a Christian 30s,” he says. His therapy sessions raised questions like, “What does it mean to take your anger from childhood all the way into adulthood? Is that a kind of cancer?” ⁠
⁠

Read our full profile of Marlon James at the link in bio or on wsj.com.⁠

my skepticism was in overdrive in earlier posts ---  perhaps I apologize---would therapists say my skepticism was really homophobia  and other discontents related ?  

does copying this post from Emmet Stinson really go here next??  he's Aussie on X  lit prof 

@EmmettStinson

·

11h

I'd prefer publishers focused on literary qualty, not politics, because they are mostly bad at the latter, better at the former. A huge % of excellent writers historically are not on or of the left, and I don't know why we'd want or expect them to be.

this is not quite true for me these days

@roryisconfused

·

Oct 22

As a grown man I no longer have ‘nightmares’, where I’m scared by something, but rather ‘sadmares’, which cause me to wake up filled with an incredible and inexorable sense of melancholy and loss

in fact had a nice dream last night, Nicholas and I were trying to decide whether to go to a conference on and with John Lukacs and maybe someone else, was it Girard or Burke. Issue was whether they would be too old to be saying anything of value to the conference.

big excitement on X for a new site that will educate us all about Napoleon and his age---in tweets no longer than our attention spans can manage in under three minutes per scan

hmm be careful, a site honoring Napoleon must be a fascist, monarchist, far right thing, no?

upsetting talking with Dick last evening. He has his parents to worry about, and now, after six months, Afrodita is bothered by having them live in their house, but they are locked into that situation for now. Dick can drive them to Florida where they are better off but his free sister refuses to help with them. The other sister and her husband are in Mexico visiting with their son and his Mexican-indigenous wife who is legal in the US but fearful ICE will not recognize her as such. Meanwhile Afrodita is in Skopje where her father's behavior is even more of a problem. She paid $200. basheesh to get a state hospital doctor to take a look at him. Maybe get him into the insane asylum hospital there. He wanders, waits for Jesus to show up with money, watches for it on tv and computer, walks around town on his own, steps in front of traffic, lost and demented or some variant. Aging, wow, what a drama.

All the chickens are now in the back yard. Ladder up on Dennis's house. Bela working on her fan letter to Suja Massey. X tweets talk about a big protest weekend in Paris coming up. Assume the kids are safe and being safe there in the 15th. Think so. How the separation is going is yet another area we will not ask about, for now.

Last third of Fruit Fly. Fascinating and irritating in its way. Or am I not slowing down to really enjoy it

went looking for more advice---this from Jon Malysiak -- "Did I admire

All Them Dogs as much as Douglas Stuart’s fellow Booker-longlistedJohn of John ? No. Nor did I find it as gripping or psychologically nuanced as Josh Silver’s Fruit Fly , another gritty urban crime drama with a gay central protagonist. That White’s novel made the longlist while Silver’s did not strikes me as genuinely puzzling. Booker recognition is hardly an exact science, but of the two, my vote would have gone to Fruit Fly. 
ai calls it satirical thriller  ----  new tag for me  

mirror books

 22 October Friday  morning   on page 104 and up to chapter 21 in Fruit Fly.  I know it is ridiculous to think of this novel as a mirror to The Disappearers, but look, gay guys and trauma.  Trauma is the big word these days, Hannah and Dennis two summers ago, here on Rogers Street, apprised me of that in their indirect ways.  Fruit Fly is totally different of course in so many ways, and yet you have the novel within the novel, the multiplicity of voices, the lies and deceptions, somehow to british literary agents had back emails with one another, hey I've got this Jamaican writer, omg I've got this british street gay who wants to write his story.  

Are all novels, is the novel as lit form, always somehow about trauma, or all of lit and art.  Iliad, Odyssey, Mahalbarata, bible, what else is new.  Sin and death now reshuffled under trauma and therapy, trauma and addiction.  

So far Fruit Fly is harder to read, easier to read.  Snappy, trendy voices.  Short paragraphs.  Too peppy to have the smooth narrative meditative meander of Stasiuk and Handke.  "go gay go sad go dark"  motto for disappearers as well  ok I'm stretching too much 

Bela trying to dictate a fan letter to Suja Massey     Colin on his way to do a piano session 

almost 5  finished chapter 35  it is intense and frantic, strange and funny, satirical, yes, and other things---

as different from marlon james as possible and yet he would get it ----  

reset the beneficiaries on the schwab sites  also got an email from Rick saying he had done the same

talking about money makes you feel like you have more of it---or are more comfortable having for the moment enough of it.  illusory or not.   Article about air quality and dementia in wapo but not able to open it, gift from geo   yes it is on apple news  and yes it is not as striking as promised  ---  but it helps my 

sense of the air in Abq vs here and how much I love being there vs being here---in terms of overall sense of body and health, mood and mind    nasal passages and breathing  

in the book we are now at the point where two mothers appear in the stories  --

I-89

 day off splendid.  perfect sun and air.  trees everywhere all russet and dark pinks.  drove long way around, skirting new london, to lebanon.  expensive meal at cappadocia cafe but enjoyable.  lamb in sauce on bread with pizza-like edges crust.  chocolate and cream torte. turkish coffee.  oh, and, ta da---sour cherry mimosa--prosecco and flavors.  Walked a wee bit on both sides of the corner.  Mostly drove all day and loved it.  Way back drove up to Rick's address just past the village of Croydon, well, east of there up and down over a few hills.  They have a long steep drive up from the dead end of the road and turning around I could glimpse tiny bit of the house;  big windows and deck facing toward lake sunapee.  They must be able to see it, otherwise why go up so high on the steep hillside?  This was the route more or less to taking David to KAT when he was 12-15?  every summer, every day for two weeks or so.  So enjoyed seeing the landscape through those memories.  Nice to do a different route.  A few months ago I didn't want to go to wrj for any reason.  Today I was happy to go there and enjoy the cafe.  No shopping, no errands and not even reading any of the books I had with me.  

Bela and Rachel had a good swim and lunch.  Bela tuckered, been sleeping away the afternoon.  Hope it is not too much for her or for her valve.  No call from Gilani yet, will call his office tomorrow to ask.  Call from DHMC records explaining that I need to call Brigham and get them to disentangle Va's identity in their twisted records before they can release her shunt info to Dr Culler to see if an MRI is possible legally as well as medically.  

Did I drive into that road of Rick's address seven or so years ago when we first met and they talked about building their house there?  I have that sense that I had indeed been there before.  Dream like, vague memory like.  

Started into Fruit Fly.  Handke's was Fruit Thief.  Different as night and day.  Few more pages also in Brenner's Diabelli, first story about the orchestra minion behind the orchestra's conductor.  

secret passage

166  "The space of this photograph hypnotizes me, and all my traveling has had only one purpose: to find, at long last, the secret passage into its interior."   Andrzej Stasiuk, On the Road to Babadag

this is the sort of line, essay, voice, I've been missing   Sunday late afternoon.  Sweet "party" visit with Pattie, K & C earlier;  They were so pleased to have gotten photos with Chris Pappas at the dem hdqtr on main street before they got here.   

Monday

bright, warm, 1 pm lunch  pool day tomorrow day off tomorrow  drive?  so lovely the trees and air and light but need walking   just strolled walmart for first time in 10 days   woman and her son (college) asked me if I were all right on way out into the parking lot and then she said I was strong, stronger than her, I was carrying my bags in both hands, did I look that wobbly?  most likely she was too shy to say how much she was admiring my luminous indigo pants  

"In a moment the low sky closes like a door, and everything is gone.  That's why I rush to make these trips, why I'm so avid for details that will soon vanish and need to be re-created out of words.  I don't know why all this is, and I lost the hope, long ago, that I would find an answer.  Therefore, to be safe, I write down everything that happens, substituting consistency for justice and meaning."  197  On the road to Babadag

by the way in this used copy of the book there is a ticket, a Juror Badge from the Superior Court of Santa Cruz County Report Week: 02/22/2022  

"This is what haunts me---this extra being that everyone can do without, this superfluity that is not wealth, this hiddenness that no one explores, secrets that, ignored, are lost forever, memory that consumes itself." 195 

"But it's great, in the middle of winter, to say "Fuck this, I'm going to Abony, that hole in the centre of the Hungarian lowlands . . . . I'm going from one nowhere to another." " 188  

Danilo Kiš  appears "To travel means to live" he wrote in 1958 quoting Hans Christian Andersen

(why then did I sigh earlier over an email from Sage's Michelle saying they have a similar Med cruise for next September 2027  ---  of course we should sign up for it, no?   But at least tomorrow I'm plotting to drive to a Capadocia Cafe in the sunshine and go the long way over and maybe even back.   

on Kiš's father's project---"If such a book were published, all travel would become pointless, would be replaced by reading."   Ah, so, there!  now we're talking!!!!

Stasiuk  born in 1960  Stasiuk admitted that he "always wanted to write a Slavonic On the Road and place it in a quite geographically limited and historically complicated space

In Stasiuk's own words, "[t]here is no individual, human story in this book [...]. I wanted rather to write about geography, landscape, about the influence of material reality on the mind".^[2] Jadąc do Babadag received the Nike Award for the best Polish book of 2005

withdrew to the small hamlet of Czarne in the Beskids, a secluded part of the Carpathian mountain range in the south of Poland. Besides writing, he spends his time breeding sheep. Together with his wife, 

writer, then, good deal like Handke so far as landscape and materiality   "mystical marriage 204

everything should begin on square one "Back to square one.  Which is where everything should begin.  That's what it depends on, on the imagination, which draws no conclusions.  Memory, meteorology, visions."  205   Now there's a wonderful bumper sticker or yard sign!! (to replace the dumb science is real created by a Madison librarian).  

Memory, meteorology, visions.  That explains why the evening news is as it is, not money!! ha

"To ease the dreariness of inland sailing, I pretended

inland sailing  so, driving all around where ever is a good thing; sanctioned by the Stasiuks of our literary culture   

230 "I always play the idiot, but reality wins, as usual." 

a brit rave

 from Insta  Patricknessbooks  UK  "

patricknessbooks

Finally finished the Booker long list and yes, I’m afraid THE DISAPPEARERS really is that good. Best book on the shortlist by miles. It won’t win - that NY Times rave did it zero favors - but it terms of ambition, execution, polyphony, history, guts, heart, sex and life, nothing else on the list touches it. And WHAT a tonic to read a masterpiece about gay men by an actual gay man, and not someone else using us as therapy sex puppets. What a writer, what a novel. Not for the faint hearted, but real art never is."  

return to normal and ordinary in Stasiuk's travel essays

indigo and cacao;  my ceremonial beverages and current obsession with indigo pants from India, Industry of all Nations--

Rick and friend were in a tiny tent up on Aconcagua in a blizzard for three days; never made it quite to the top of the mountain -- 

Stasiuk's essay on Albania.  Holy cow.  A country gone insane and on into anarchy--in 1997 no less.   I had read someone else's travel account about Hoxa's huge palace before.  

Rupert sent a reply note from my reply to his note earlier ----  he must be in his mid-late 60s by now --- 

"

we're good.

i do 2 days a week for exeter uni, one to one tutorials helping with
academic writing.
sue is 0.5 art at a 6th form college

hope Virginia is ok. say hi.

do you think there will be a blue bigteback re. trump?
wont he fight if he loses?

from here it all seems crazy, but i guess boris was the same.
without guns of course.

feeling old and tired and cold but otherwise fine.

R

------

Stasiuk describes men driving around town in circles to kill time.   Makes me think of my days off---go to White RvrJct to have rotisserie lamb at Tuckerbox?  Or stay here and wander through walmart, m basket and main street?  One may be coming up on Tuesday, so decide soon!!!

now we can get back to alternating among various books.  Done with big tomes for a while. 

oops  by chance  "His father, Samuel Ray Delany Sr. (1906–1960), ran the Levy & Delany Funeral Home on 7th Avenue in Harlem, from 1938 until his death in 1960. "

"source" of Jordan Brown maybe--?  line is from wiki on Samuel R Delany 

ok finished

 8 pm  Bela finishing her book also.  Just finished my book.  Eddy and Matt Chin reunite.  Mattachin society.  clever clever clever  allegory after all, all of it   allegorical history memoir by imagination

"under the weight of so much shock and sorrow."  final words  opening "So this boy just walks in smelling of Lip Smacker . . . "

have to sleep on it and say more tomorrow  

Sat morning

Ayad Akhtar, new American writer to me.  Noticed also a new Spanish one; Carlos Maleno. Who shall I read next?  Akhtar would be new---first Am pakistani I would have read.  Highly praised, eight years older than David.  No, I did read that Afghan-Am writer some years ago,  Hoseini?  Kites?  

What to say about James?  Our Jamaican Dickens.  Choral director: huge cast of characters, wide screen opera, multiple voices, queer compendium to answer H Ellis, etc etc.  Gives us a big menu from which to choose.  Bothered? by the ending---are we to imagine that Eddy and Matt live together happily ever after?  If not, why the "full circle" effect; survivors meeting at last, come circle of history making for a satisfying if not conclusion then at least "circle"? of affection, attraction, interest? trauma history meaning?  they "see" one another, at least.  Knowing rather than unknowing.  

Evasive because as much admiration I miss the personal, warmth, voice, presence, companionship of Aciman or Handke, all my fave sorts of wandering observers. James as director is way too sure of himself, in total control, queen over it all.  May he reign supreme.  (gee, no kings marches everywhere again today) could it be charged with being a queer fascist survivor tale in some twisted way?  Titus the kingly director of the play that calls forth the demonic destructions, the horrors of british-jamaican other hatred.  Queers not Jews as scapegoats for supreme order.  Oh, Zelensky yesterday on tv gave a sublime chuckle response to journo question if he is Tp's scapegoat.  

I want to read Zadie Smith's review of the novel.  Or Pete Buttegeig's.  Has there been a LRVB piece already?  

Mars-Jones  : "Mars-Jones praises the raw, polyphonic energy, violent visceral impact, and distinct character perspectives throughout the novel.  He criticizes the Oxford-set framing letter section as unconvincing. He notes that the introduction of the fictional reggae star Streggeh Don functions as an unexamined caricature of pure evil, which slightly compromises the novel's overall realistic truthfulness." 

would agree with all three nits  ---  sure to be others from other readers.  Has anyone done a theory of the unreliable reader who dances with the unreliable narrators in post-modernist lit experiences?  I think of myself here---how I willfully focus in on and pull out from the text any sub-text I wish to find there no matter what the text-director says are the only words on the page.  The author does not control how I may mis-read as I wish.   Sure, plenty of critics have done that.  Bloom even?  Sontag.  others I've forgotten about.  

he's not even close to being as good as Patrick White or Peter Handke or Michael Lentz!  The Oxford stuff was as clichéd as possible, and boring.  Same for many passages throughout, one's interest went up and down, in and out.  Ok, I got all of the subtext I was hoping for; it is a compendium fully educational in that sense.  Will it help any younger people down the road?  Doubt it, really.  The fears and frights still seem local and personal, no matter how fully re-imagined and spread out into many characters.  His ear for voices and dialects is incredible and masterful.  Especially in the mob scene, especially in most of the ostensible interviews.  

I wanted to be up on the latest, biggest nyc book buzz and now I am.  Was it worth the slog?  I'll let Dennis guide me on that one, but in many ways I think not.  I am not saying omg I must go forward and read every single thing he has published.  Perhaps I will go back and do that with Patrick White, but no, I've read his best and one at least of his worst.  

Bela has created a social for tomorrow, cookies and visits.  

note from Phil  --  

I was having lunch with an old (79 years old)  lady-friend when she said she thought she was having a stroke.  Then she “froze” for a minute and could not respond.  I immediately paid our bill and got her back into my car and drove her home to her house in Va.  I then struggled to get her back in her house, then called 911.  An ambulance came in about ten minutes and took her to a nearby hospital, where she remains because whatever happened to her has totally destroyed her short term memory.   Five minutes after a conversation she has no memory of having that conversation.  Doctors are trying to figure out what happened to her and what can be done about it.

 

Which scares me because my memory is declining (although nothing like what just happened to my lady-friend), and I have no nearby family…..The  80s aint fun.

 

Hope you guys are okay…………I was having lunch with an old (79 years old)  lady-friend when she said she thought she was having a stroke.  Then she “froze” for a minute and could not respond.  I immediately paid our bill and got her back into my car and drove her home to her house in Va.  I then struggled to get her back in her house, then called 911.  An ambulance came in about ten minutes and took her to a nearby hospital, where she remains because whatever happened to her has totally destroyed her short term memory.   Five minutes after a conversation she has no memory of having that conversation.  Doctors are trying to figure out what happened to her and what can be done about it.

 

Which scares me because my memory is declining (although nothing like what just happened to my lady-friend), and I have no nearby family…..The  80s aint fun.

 

Hope you guys are okay…………

Friday

 Rick brought Claudia Cardona --    his wife.  Beautiful and delightful.  We enjoyed chatting with her.  She went off to Marshalls and we went over a few things with Rick.  

have not read any today.  About forty pages to go.  Fictional history, historical fiction.  Documentary drama.  I'm so unused to reading this kind of novel of late.  

Rick gave me an A for my computer skills, navigating the document box, dropping in files from tiaa.  Yay.  Made my earlier school anxiety dreams worthwhile, I guess.  I enjoyed the fact that he really enjoyed the embue ceremonial cacao and took home the bag I gave him.  He told us about his wandering around Argentina and Patagonia and Chile when he was 24.  Ended up with a group of nine travelers from all over.   One of them became a famous mathematician who just went through a big crisis with the founder of ChatGPT.  The AI system tried to steal the guy's solution to a huge math problem.  

Rick was in Argentina in 2008 when he was twenty-four.  Two years after college at UVA. Now he's 44.  Looked up some records about his grandmother, in her will she left her one cow to her free slave, provided he stay on the property with it.  The huge shift in personal wealth over the past hundred years.  We are part of an experimental generation in the history of wealth management.  No one knows if it will last, how it will evolve.  Rick loves reading about all of it.  

here it is---popped right up in easy search --  "But hours before OpenAI’s formal announcement came an explosive claim from the NYU mathematician Tristan Buckmaster, who had been working on the problem for years before OpenAI got involved, and was close to publishing his own solution. "  memorable name---Tristan Buckmaster,

yes, I haven't decided yet what to make of "Havelock Titus.  had to check because I was going to say Havelock Ellis---is that the source of the name?  of course--why not?  "Havelock Ellis (1859–1939) was an English physician and pioneer sexologist who co-wrote Sexual Inversion in 1897 with John Addington Symonds, marking the first medical textbook in English on homosexuality." 

guess I just got my second A+ of the day!!  Titus sounds more roman emperor.  

the book goes on for too long.  I'm missing the personal warmth of a companion narrator as in Handke.   

page 554  16 of the month  here today is the 16th of October   this long crazed rant by Jorden with Streggeh Don tied up is gratuitous, too long, even boring  ---   

finished that part  Part 2 next   for tomorrow   skimmed ahead in the acknowledgments  Salman Rushdie

and Mary Karr   I remember her name, her memoir-novel about shit that happened to her, forget exactly what, 40 years ago?  she had blip of fame for it ---  still waiting curious to see what Dennis will say about it, too bad Phil couldn't have opined either   --- he might say it be too gentle, after all  not bataille enough, not genet enough    bomboclat  

446

 Thursday 15 Oct

now on 446  back to being dumbfoundedly admiring of this monster of a book; a grandest of operas by great diva queen of queens writer who, yes, is getting himself into the pantheon of the books he has read, he has read them all, Genet, well, gee, no mention of either Gide or Bataille, so . . . hmm  Now in the second to last section, covering fifty years of the main guy's life through letters to his friend and pimp? Mark.  surely pimp is metaphorical, mm  

gorgeous day, sun and golden leaves in breeze.  day after, no two days after our trip to cmc for the cat scan

going to meet Gigi for lunch at yamas, both of us looking forward to the dry lamb kebab pita 

still a gorgeous afternoon   great lunch, Gigi in fine form.  Paul was 22nd member of his family to attend Bowdoin College---something like that.  On his father's side a shoe factory, on his mother's side a textile mill.  Maine aristocracy.  Who knew?  

Nice sense of relief in the book to finally have Havelock Titus telling us the full story in his best queen british jamaican letter writing prose.  Did James "get that" from Antunes?  No.  Faulkner?  anyone else; sometime others have done it but no matter.  James at the peak of his powers and in full command of the work of genius coming forth from his loins.  

made it

down to cmc and back yesterday in the rain and fog; place looked so empty and quiet.  Woman talking loudly in the hallway to friend on her phone filled me in.  cmc bought a year ago by hca, largest chain of hospitals in the world; hdqtrs in Nashville.   Bela inside about half an hour and they took her early.  Valet parking worked fine.  All smooth.  Back for lunch by 2 or so.  Still---strong ptsd depression reaction in me.  Wanted to be in dhmc instead, snobbery for sure.  Probably would have had same reactions.  Hospitals anywhere everywhere.  Whole process.  I texted Sarah that if it were moi I would shift the process to dhmc; snobbery no doubt but the patient must be comfortable.  Ok, when will Gilani telephone us with results and his suggestions and recommendations?  Week?  Will there be a procedure at all?  When?  Meanwhile?  

Spent twenty minutes figuring out again, each month, how to pag nm gas bill.  That co also just bought; will it change the online payment and terrible web site?  

Nothing scheduled today.  Hooray.  Launder sheets; wear cool new vest from 32 bar blues.  Mail in the absentee ballots.  Read more of Disappearers.  Trying not to react against it.  Meaning I'm about two-thirds through; do I always tire of a big book at this point?  Is my admiration for it still as strong as at the start?  It is remarkable and amazing and as so many have said "visceral" as well as much else.  Dissertation wars will figure the queers against the post-colonialists, all about Jamaica and the Brits, the native and the empire.  We watched a few episodes of The Jewel in the Crown.  Jamaica was never the jewel but it must have been a good cash cow for a good while.  Could look up a quick history.  Richest island in the Caribe?  

the hardback book just too heavy, give me neck ache gotta get it over with on page 375  yes tired of Jordan Brown and the book; it be too long, gonna say it, neh matta how uncool that be to say such shit when new yorker said it equal to ulysses or some'n like dat 

no not Ellison, James makes clear enough, Toni Morrison, so then, Ellison through Morrison, 

students ever

 Bela wrote about two French movies we loved the other night:  Etudiante and Marguarite's Theorem, even though it was about higher math.  "These films reminded Bob and me of our work on our doctoral dissertations:    Countless hours of work:reading ;researching;discussions with advisors;writing and endless rewriting of texts;  FIniSHING dissertations;defending them and then publishing papers. We wrote on our favorite subjects, Bob on the work of KennethBurke and I on the work of Spanish author; Valle-Inclán.  The reward for all our work has been recognition by scholars in our fields and some published papers .

  Both movies have happy endings in which the characters end up with their true loves. The big difference for us was we did not wait until the end to find our true loves. since they were there all along and our still are while we write the rest of our lives.

va

James makes the reader feel like a student in beyond higher ed.  By 295 how much we have learned we cannot even list.  "... I am fooling myself that I can murder anybody.  I am a faggot, and playing roles is what faggots do.  Eighty percent of the time I've screwed men I wasn't even me."  A book to study over and over because the language hides-reveals continuous looping.  A book you feel you have read before, more than once, and have never read.  

bingo   they just escaped by running through the sewers flowing with shit and water, meet a tall guy in cut off shorts and bathing suit, long rose red hair.  Now I get it---have not had such a reading experience since Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.  The Disappearers  Bingo !!  now I can start writing my review though I'm only on page 325