All year I’ve been waiting for Obama to flex his narrative muscles, to tell the story of his presidency, of his Administration, to tell the story of where our country is going and why we should help deliver it there. A coherent, accessible, compelling story—one that is narrow enough to be held in our minds and hearts and that nevertheless is roomy enough for us, the audience, to weave our own predilections, dreams, fears, experiences into its fabric. [...] But from where I sit our President has not even told a bad story; he, in my opinion, has told no story at all. I heard him talk healthcare to death but while he was elaborating ideas his opponents were telling stories. Sure they were bad ones, full of distortions and outright lies, but at least they were talking to the American people in the correct idiom: that of narrative. The President gave us a raft of information about why healthcare would be a swell idea; the Republicans gave us death panels. Ideas are wonderful things, but unless they’re couched in a good story they can do nothing.

What do you think? Is Diaz on to something here? Is the lack of presidential narrative part of what’s hampering Obama?

Via.

Set in modern-day Morocco, the novel concerns the coming-of-age of Youssef el-Mekki, a young man struggling to establish his identity and livelihood in the slum of Hay An Najat while seeking the father he long thought deceased. What he finds is more than a genealogical chart and what readers find is more than just a compelling story: Secret Son is a mirror in which our own modern age is reflected.

In the nascent years of the 21st century, in a neighborhood full of “merchants peddling their wares from rickety bicycles” and the “stink of old, refried sardines,” Youssef and his friends face the usual array of nineteen-year-old anxieties. They hang out nervously on street corners, smoke cigarettes, seek the attention of young women, and fret about admission to the university, which everyone — especially Youssef’s mother — believes is the ticket to success and freedom from their lot in the slums. Youssef escapes the pressures and grime of the neighborhood in the local movie theater until he must return to his own world “where heroes and villains could not be told apart by their looks or their accents.”

Much of the rest of his world, however, he finds easily distinguishable: the Mercedes-and-Marlboro crowd; the headscarf-and-beard faction; the Marx-and-Lenin group; the Berbers and Saharawi. Youssef watches the different cliques at school wondering how he could “know, as easily as everyone else did, which group was his.” The cliques and clans all seem a common part of youthful angst, akin to America’s Freaks and Geeks. But this is not Middle America: The challenges of youthful self-identification and justice in Morocco don’t play out at the local mall or in suburban basements. And to choose one side or the other results in far more than mere temporary gain or loss of social status.

Laila Lalami / photo copyright: Laila Lalami

In addition to these universal anxieties of looming adulthood, the boys of Hay An Najat — and elsewhere in the Islamic world, the author seems to suggest — face the compounded pressures of class and poverty, conditions from which escape is as much a dream as Brad Pitt’s pretty face projected in 10-foot scale. Enter the Party, an Islamic fringe group that soon takes over the Star Cinema as its “Oasis” headquarters in Hay An Najat, and begins handing out “tents, blankets, [and] sacks of flour” and building a soccer field where once there was trash. As in other parts of the Arab world, the local “Party” serves a civic purpose, closing the gap between the people and their needs by offering extensive social and community services that the official government does not. Like Hamas in Palestine or the Taliban in Afghanistan, the organization makes their presence indispensable to the neighborhood residents, providing a stabilizing infrastructure that over time may result in loyalty to the Party.

Hatim, the leader of the Party, and its followers, the Partisans, begin to quietly woo Youssef and his friends with the kind of power and recognition they cannot attain elsewhere in society. When Youssef is injured in a university protest, he finds himself the lead story in a Party-published paper, the story told slant despite Hatim’s comforting reassurances. “Don’t worry, my son,” he says, an endearment bestowed upon all the young men of Hay An Najat, the secret sons of the Party.

Lalami’s authorial position on the role of the Party is subtle and sympathetic, neither demonizing Hatim nor patronizing Maati and the other young followers he inculcates with his anti-government diatribes. Lalami’s ability to walk this line is made easier because she paints the neighborhood’s desperation so clearly, beginning with the flood that opens the novel, forcing people into the street to save their meager belongings and introducing the empty promises of government officials. She shows that the government is negligent and there are real needs to be met, needs that in reality may be met by the Party. Couple this with the impressionable young male characters, who dart after power like fish after a flashing lure, and we begin to understand the allure of the Party despite our better instincts, as do many of the characters themselves. Lalami wants readers to understand how forces like the Party take hold within a community and how seeming altruism turns to ideological vengeance and violence.

Against this backdrop, Youssef seeks out his biological father, whom his mother has kept secret. Through a chance encounter, Youssef discovers that his father is a wealthy business leader in Casablanca with roots in left-leaning politics. Nabil Amrani at first embraces Youssef as the son he never had and installs him in a posh apartment, grants him a job at one of his hotels, and promises Youssef a future he thought he would never have. Amal, Nabil’s daughter only 6 months older than Youssef, is a secondary character with immense narrative clout. She serves as a provoking counterpart to Youssef, equally torn between an indescribable loyalty to her privileged past and family and a yearning to craft a future on her terms — not those of her father or her country. Youssef’s loyalty and yearning for independence takes on a wholly different form.

Youssef abandons his home in Hay An Najat and lives the high life for months, dreaming of a boundless future and watching his father. In a lovely, long passage, we see Nabil through the eyes of Youssef, examining him as one would examine a stranger from another world. Youssef observes “ . . . He never took a nap after lunch. The cigarettes he smoked were red Dunhills. Whenever he commented on an article in the newspaper, which was often, he used words like déontologiquement. . .he stared at beautiful women . . .he never went to mosque . . . ” We learn as much about Nabil as Youssef does, but begin to suspect what Youssef does not. Blinded by his father’s luxurious lifestyle — to which Youssef now has access — and mesmerized by the habits, mannerisms, and convictions of his newly-found father as only a son can be, Youssef cannot see his father’s essential and deeply flawed character. As Youssef fully embraces his flashy new lifestyle, we begin to more closely watch the narrative unfold, looking for what feels like inevitable disappointment.

After a series of life-changing rejections, Youssef is forced back to Hay An Najat. Bitter rejection soon turns to angry revenge for Youssef and his friends, left behind in the slums while he flourished, and Lalami’s plot and complex characters ripen into something more powerful than one might first imagine. Through Lalami’s restrained but powerful description, we gain an almost palpable knowledge of Youssef’s burgeoning anger, knowledge essential to understanding the future events of the novel. By stepping beyond even the third person and adopting a more universal authorial voice in the following passage, Lalami offers a clearer sense of Youssef’s emotional trajectory. She writes:

His anger took many shapes: sometimes it was soft and familiar, like a round stone that he had caressed for so long that it was perfectly smooth and polished; sometimes it was thin and sharp, like a blade that could slice through anything; sometimes it had the form of a star, radiating his hatred in all directions, leaving him numb and empty inside.

Lalami vacillates between a third person omniscient narrator and this even more expansive narrative voice to offer a greater perspective on her characters and the societal positions they maintain. In another example of her narrative ventriloquism, Lalami deliberately retells several scenes from different perspectives. Although it sounds like a trick plucked from Fiction 101, in her narrative, the effect is not heavy-handed or amateurish. She gets away with what could be a gimmick in part because the narrative does not depend on the technique to reveal essential information about plot and because she does not rely on obvious duplications of scene or dialogue. Furthermore, the scenes do not appear in back-to back chapters or side-by-side in some hackneyed attempt at technique, but rather are spaced unexpectedly between other scenes with up to 30 pages between them.

In one of several such scenes, we witness the initial dinner between Nabil and Youssef, first from the perspective of Nabil and then from Youssef. The third person point of view is still distant enough to allow a reader to enter the scene and sympathize with the character, as well.

From Nabil’s perspective:

Youssef cut a small piece of crayfish and examined it carefully before placing it in his mouth.

“Do you like seafood?”

“I’m not sure,” Youssef said looking up, his eyebrows knitted in a quizzical frown.

Nabil’s thoughts wondered helplessly to Amal.

And then pages later from Youssef’s point of view:

When his plate of crayfish arrived, he stared at it, unsure where to start. He managed to slice off an edible piece; he made a mess of it.

“Do you like seafood?” Nabil asked.

Perhaps I cut the crayfish the wrong way, Youssef thought. He felt his cheeks redden. “I’m not sure, “ he said frowning.

We see Nabil, selfishly distracted by thoughts of his daughter, while Youssef wants only to please him and to fit in to this foreign society. In another key scene, Nabil’s daughter Amal visits Rachida, Nabil’s former lover and Youseff’s mother. The scene is played first through the eyes of Rachida and then, in what seems to be weeks later, the scene appears again through the perspective of Amal. The effects of these alternating points of view illustrate not only the individual character’s unique perspective but also the comparable perspectives from both sides of the class divide. The result is an empathetic position most fiction writers seek but fewer attain.

Through Lalami’s subtle execution, we see each character struggling with similar questions of identity, justice, and loyalty, whether in a mansion or a whitewashed shack: Nabil, longing for his estranged daughter while talking to his heretofore unknown son, and Rachida, mourning her own lost innocence through Amal’s own blamelessness. By crafting such parallels within her narrative, Lalami encourages readers’ compassion while illuminating the complex roles each character plays in society and, even more pointedly, in Muslim society. Each is, in some way, a victim or a pawn, an actor or a liar, a son or a daughter, a mother or a father.

In Secret Son, Lalami slips behind the headlines of terrorism into a real world occupied by men and women of all social strata who have sought their dreams and no matter their income or stature, have found those dreams unattainable and beyond reach.

The story of Secret Son is ultimately, too, the bold articulation of something that most readers will have heard over and over since Sept. 11 — how young men in far-off places are being lured into a life of Islamic fundamentalism, for whom jihad and the dismantling of Western culture is believed to be the key to freedom. Secret Son shows readers the path a young man can follow to an inadvertent life in the world of terror, in which joining the Party and sipping tea in the Headquarters is only the first of many initiations for a young man such as Youssef. Through Lalami’s story, readers tread in the footsteps of a young man on that path, see the turns and the crossroads, and feel the weight of his changing world as he moves along the course.

Further Resources

- Via the New York Times, here is the first chapter of Secret Son.

- On the author’s website, you can read an excerpt from Lalami’s debut novel, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits.

- Lalami’s website also includes links to her essays, short stories, book reviews, and other writings.

- Here is a Powell’s interview with Lalami (conducted by Dave Weich).

- Read “Inventing the Past,” which was adapted from a conversation moderated by Colum McCann and featuring Arthur Japin, Laila Lalami, Imma Monsó, and 2007 PEN World Voices Festival.

- Listen to Laila Lalami talk about her new book on The Bat Segundo Show.

- Here is a link to two videos featured on Laila Lalami’s website. In the first one she reads from her first novel, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, as part of the Authors@Google series, in Santa Monica, CA, on March 19, 2008. The second shows Lalami discussing what makes good writing, in a short video produced by the University of California Riverside, where she is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing.

- In this video (via YouTube), Lalami discusses Secret Son:

- And here, also via YouTube, is the book preview for Secret Son:

Jeffrey Rotter / photo by Margaret McCartney

Let’s just get it out in the open now: the title of Jeffrey Rotter’s first novel, The Unknown Knowns, is an allusion to that Donald Rumsfeld speech
of linguistic loop-de-loops that would have driven George Orwell crazy. The book, which looks askance at our modern take on “Us vs. Them,” tackles the ontological questions presented by our vague and shadowy paranoia, but ups the ante considerably beyond the present moment in history to the personal crises that drive all good stories.

Jim Rath is a diorama builder by trade, comic-book fanatic by heritage, and a manchild by way of emotional maturity. As the novel opens, Rath has all but ruined his marriage to his long-suffering wife, Jean, with his fixation on Nautika, an underwater matriarchal paradise of aquatic apes, or Nautikons, that he believes evolved in parallel to humans. Rath’s foil is federal agent Les Diaz, who is on a mission from the Department of Homeland Security to protect the swimming pools and water parks of America from terrorist attacks. Through Rath and Diaz’s intersecting paths, Rotter presents the reader with a viscerally disturbing dilemma: can we trust ourselves? By turns darkly funny and chilling, The Unknown Knowns also contains marvelous passages that capture Jim Rath’s flights of Nautika-inspired fancy, which are so sincere and overblown it’s hard not to like the guy, in spite of his self-navigated path toward destruction.

Jeffrey Rotter’s writing has appeared in numerous publications, including McSweeney’s, the New York Times, and Spin, and he received his MFA in fiction from Hunter College. Here, the South Carolina native discusses the social risks of homemade clothing, museums as metaphors, the parallels between As I Lay Dying and reality T.V., and the ways in which imagination can change the world – for good and evil.

Interview

LEE THOMAS: Your book opens with a voice – Jim Rath – painting a vivid portrait of a remarkably difficult thing to describe: water. So convincing is his voice from that moment forward, it’s difficult to know which part of Rath’s perception is reality and which parts are tied to his fantasies of the underwater kingdom of Nautika. This is a book that subverts flights of imagination, but also succumbs – sometimes gleefully – to them. What about imagination interested you?

JEFFREY ROTTER: I think all writers have an ambivalent relationship with imagination. We owe everything to this mental asset. But it’s also the thing that got us beat up when we were kids. I remember making my own shirt and wearing it to class at my new school in 6th grade. This was at the height of preppydom. It was possibly the dumbest act of public creativity I’ve ever undertaken and I was justly mocked for it. Imagination ruined me for society, but it also made my life meaningful.

I recently read an article about the neuroscience of imagination. The claim is that huge imaginative leaps occur because the brain periodically breaks down and fires off random cascades of neurons. The author compared it to a collapsing pile of sand, which I think is really poetic and feels exactly right. So in some ways imagination is a systemic failure—a controlled failure, but a failure nonetheless. I like that idea.

Also I find it pretty silly that a greater value is placed on “dirty realism” than on more “speculative” fiction. This is, of course, a fairly recent phenomenon, and it’s part of the same trend that motivates reality TV. But just as Fat Camp is no more real than a sitcom, so literary realism is no more genuine than well-made fantasy. Empathy for a character requires a leap from reality no matter whether she’s an Idaho housewife or a molecule. Both require that the writer embrace an alien reality to make the reader feel something. I can get as choked up reading Cosmicomics as I can Housekeeping. In The Unknown Knowns I enjoyed blending political fictions—which we’re supposed to accept as fact—with the unabashed make-believe of Jim Rath’s undersea civilization. In the end there isn’t much difference.

You put the reader in the position of arbiter between multiple unreliable witnesses. The story is very rooted in the government’s maneuvers post-9/11, but the question at the heart of The Unknown Knowns seems much more basic than “Can we trust our government?” It’s more: “Can we trust ourselves?” That’s a sticky question for the novelist.

I don’t think of this as a political novel. I’m not politically astute enough for that. You’re right; it’s about larger questions of trust. And, of course, we can’t trust ourselves, but we don’t have much choice. Jim Rath is a diorama builder by trade. In a rare moment of reflection close to the end of the novel, he compares the world to a museum. Each of us builds his or her own museum of the world that filters out the noise from what we value most. So Jim’s world is a Museum of the Aquatic Ape, and every artifact relates to that. Similarly, Diaz lives in a museum of jihad, in which every gesture is a threat and every institution a point of entry for terror.

The Unknown Knowns is, in part, about competing misapprehensions of reality. Our visions of the world—as crazy as they are—become unreliable only when they cross paths with someone else’s. That’s when the instability begins, and that’s where fiction thrives.

In an interview with the Columbia, SC Free-Press, you said you wanted Jim Rath “to have the brain of Stan Lee, the spirit of Elaine Morgan, and the poetic voice of Kenneth Koch.” Since you mention Lee, I assume you are, to some extent, a Marvel man. What other comic books or graphic novels have influenced you?

During my formative nerd years, the 1970s, Marvel had the weirdest titles. DC represented the post-war sensibility. Superman was impervious to almost everything; he was the ultimate immigrant who made good; he was upbeat and so American. Marvel’s heroes represented the fallout from the fifties and sixties. The Fantastic Four were victims of the space race. Spider-Man was poisoned by radiation.

I can’t say I’ve continued to follow comics in my adulthood, and I haven’t read enough graphic novels to speak intelligently about them. But the idea of superhero as victim of society resonates with me. Jim Rath is that kind of superhero, without any of the super aspects.

There are the two obvious central characters – Rath and Diaz – but there is also a third: Jim’s wife, Jean. Rath and Diaz fall victim to their own fantasy worlds, but Jean is an actual casualty of someone else’s delusions. In some ways it feels like a gross failure of imagination. Do you think the current climate – political or social – feeds this kind of lack-of-empathy-until-it’s-too-late? What role does fiction play in the landscape?

The collateral havoc these two delusional guys wreak is pretty awful. People are injured. Jim’s wife is abandoned. A lot of the actual pain is in the periphery, because Rath and Diaz manage to mask theirs with fantasy. Jean doesn’t have that option. She lacks the imagination and she becomes a victim of someone else’s. I hope readers feel her loss.

I don’t think there’s anything new about our lack of empathy. That our president is mocked because he values empathy in a Supreme Court justice is pretty disturbing. And I think there is a Conservative ethos that encourages self-importance; you see it all over pop culture, from first-person-shooter videogames to Twitter to the health-care debate. But I suspect people aren’t any more solipsistic than they’ve always been. We’re pack animals who are trying desperately to pretend we’re fancier than that.

What role does fiction play in all this? Judging by book sales, a pretty diminished one. But I do think if fiction has a moral value, it’s about helping readers understand what it’s like to be someone else. To let them inside someone else’s museum.

The tradition of the road trip, the odyssey, the idea of leaving home, looms large in American literature. In As I Lay Dying, Faulkner made certain there was no going home again for any of the Bundrens. Travel itself played a role in changing character. Jim Rath’s road trip feels a bit like a crazed, once-noble general blazing through battles as he fights a war that has already been lost. Are there “travel novels” that you admire? Do you think there’s something about the idea of setting forth that appeals to American writers particularly?

If I were a cynical person, I’d say that travel is simply a device for ordering a novel. A writer can manage plot points and the tension between them as if they were destinations on a map and the interstates between.

I’m really happy you mentioned As I Lay Dying. It’s one of my favorite books (although I prefer Absalom! Absalom!). I agree that the Bundrens can’t return home, but for all the trials and mental anguish they suffer, it’s also a classic American round-trip. Anse picks up his false teeth and a new lady, and they drive home. Everything changes but nothing does. In that sense it feels very American, in a reality-television way—the whole concept of epiphany is so cheapened that it becomes a punch line.

When I started writing The Unknown Knowns I’d just finished reading Don Quixote (I faked my way through it in college). While I can’t say I enjoyed the book, it certainly made an impact. These days you can’t write a novel without explaining to death a character’s psychology, but Cervantes doesn’t bother with motives. Quixote is on two lousy road trips—psychological and physical—but by the time we meet him, the mental ship has already sailed. He’s nuts from page one. Don Quixote’s psychological journey has already played out in other novels, in all those romances that he now takes for reality.

Likewise, Jim Rath’s delusions are rooted in other books, 70s comics and Elaine Morgan’s aquatic ape titles. As a contemporary reader with a pretty limited experience of Wolfram von Eschenbach or whatever Don Quixote was supposed to have read, I find the source of his madness kind of perplexing. That’s why I interspersed Jim Rath’s story with scenes from the imagined world that motivates his stupid behavior.

Keeping with the idea of travel: The physical elements of the journey – hotel rooms, bad food, indoor pools – are key to creating a mood, a place and a psychic space for Rath and Diaz to interact: they’re displaced from reality and also from a rooted daily existence. What is the relationship between their displacement and their insatiable need to keep moving, especially since there is something oddly static about checking into a motel room night after night?

Yeah, I like the idea of travel without any real movement. That’s what vacation has become. We go halfway across the country to stay in a hotel that’s a perfect clone of the one down the street. Only the theme of the cheeseburger changes. It’s pretty trite to say, but all these chain stores and hotels and churches do reinforce a feeling of dislocation. And when you’re dislocated any old delusion can start to feel like an acceptable reality. Why do you think people do such freaky shit in malls and government offices? I think that’s what happens to Jim Rath and Les Diaz. For different reasons they lose a sense of America as a concrete place, so they substitute it with a fantasy world. And the fantasy world comes back to bite them.

Talk to me about the cool pages from Jim Rath’s notebook on the Museum of the Aquatic Ape website. Artist’s renditions?

from Jim Rath's notebook

No, they aren’t artist’s renditions. The pages from the notebooks are my half-assed attempt to draw something in a Jim Rathian style. I do make drawings, though. Mostly maps. Peter Carey, the director of the MFA program at Hunter, taught us all to sketch whatever physical space we intend to describe, so I drew fairly detailed maps of the waterpark and Nautika. The practice is incredibly helpful for spatially brain-dead people, which describes most writers I know. It’s also useful when your characters need to find the bathroom, or a visitor to an undersea city needs to know where to penetrate the plasmalike walls of an ontogenic spire.

So, what are you working on at the moment?

Thanks for asking. I’m working on a mini comic about Jim Rath’s further adventures in the aquatic city of Nautika. My wife, Margaret McCartney, is a really talented illustrator and textile designer. She’s doing all the drawings. I’m also finishing the manuscript of a new novel, about phantom islands, alligator capture, a ghost, and a boy who can’t grow up.

Atlas of Nautika / courtesy of the Museum of the Aquatic Ape

Further Resources

- Read an excerpt from The Unknown Knowns, and consider buying your copy from a local indie bookseller.

- Visit the website of the The Museum of the Aquatic Ape for a diorama tour of Nautika, Jim Rath’s notebook sketches, and more.

- Watch Elaine Morgan expound her theory that humankind evolved from aquatic apes at the 2009 TED conference.

- Read further about the neuroscience of imagination in David Robson’s article “Disorderly Genius: How chaos drives the brain.”

- Make a playlist of Jeffrey Rotter’s “favorite anti-government philippics”.

On Slate, John Dickerson considers how Obama’s reading choices reflect on him. (Thanks to Anu for sending me this article.) Meanwhile, some critics — leaping on the fact that Obama had previously read and quoted from Hot, Flat, and Crowded, and that he later referred to it being “on his nightstand” — seem to think there’s something weird about reading a book twice, or reading it slowly over a long period of time while you RUN THE COUNTRY and have to read a million other things. **Sigh.**

According to Brooks (and his analysis of several studies about C.E.O.’s), the “greater psychological insight” and “feel for human relationships” that novels encourage in us are liabilities in leaders; he tells us that “[w]arm, flexible, team-oriented and empathetic people are less likely to thrive as C.E.O.’s. Organized, dogged, anal-retentive and slightly boring people are more likely to thrive…the best C.E.O.’s were not the flamboyant visionaries. They were humble, self-effacing, diligent and resolute souls who found one thing they were really good at and did it over and over again” and “All this work is a reminder that, while it’s important to be a sensitive, well-rounded person for the sake of your inner fulfillment, the market doesn’t really care. The market wants you to fill an organizational role.”

Um, since when does being sensitive or good with people stop at “inner fulfillment”? As you’ll see if you dare to stumble through this article, its logic doesn’t really add up. A “humble” person often *is* a good listener, one who isn’t “resolute” about doing the same thing over and over again. And where is this “flamboyant visionary” whose bane is empathy? [OK, maybe here. But Reverend Billy's run for NYC mayor is much, much more about raising awareness for issues than it is about trying to actually win...he's no wannabe C.E.O. And one of the most successful politician-C.E.O.s out there, Mayor Bloomberg himself, turns Brooks' argument to stone again and again by advocating visionary (and if not flamboyant, certainly flamboyant-friendly) policies.]

Brooks gets especially affronted about the supposed evil moral influence the government (namely our warm-and-fuzzy, listening, novel-reading president) is having on businesses by, um, bailing them out — but where was all this indignation when big businesses were ruthlessly and illegally imposing their will on the government and the American people during Bush’s presidency? Some especially articulate refutations to this editorial are here and here.

Also on Slate, Kitty Burns Florey attempts to diagram the candidate’s sentences.

“…The more the diagram is forced to wander around the page, loop back on itself, and generally stretch its capabilities, the more it reveals that the mind that created the sentence is either a richly educated one—with a Proustian grasp of language that pushes the limits of expression—or such an impoverished one that it can produce only hot air, baloney, and twaddle.”

Of this gem, she writes:

“…it’s not English—it’s a collection of words strung together to elicit a reaction, floating ands and prepositional phrases (”with that vote of the American people”) be damned. It requires not a diagram but a selection of push buttons.”

They had come of age in such places, those island prisons—during the Nazi occupations, during the civil war, throughout the fifties, and now—and now some were growing old there.

This issue, “Political Future,” also features fiction, nonfiction, or political-literary commentary from the likes of José Saramago, Thomas Franks, Francine Prose, Wallace Shawn, Cynthia Ozick, Dorothy Allison, Charles Baxter, John Barth, Junot Díaz, George Saunders, Lydia Davis, Lydia Millet, and others.