!My friend's new book --- agk's diary 8 July 2024 @ 03:34 UTC --- written on Thinkpad X61/Model M keeb/hp vf15 screen in muggy kitchen while daughter looks at fireflies --- This is a long typed-up version of the notes I mailed to my friend Madeline. They were lost in the mail. Glad I made photocopies! Madeline and I have known each other for 23 years. We aren't close friends, but pick-up-where-we-left- off-after-long absences friends. She sent me a typescript of her new novel for me to read and comment on, followed by anxious text messages: "Is it any good? Is it a book? Are we still friends?" She wrote a bunch of short stories. Some were collected in the small-press book *Valparaiso, Round the Horn,* including my favorite, "The Big Woman." A couple years ago Simon and Schuster published her first novel, *Stay and Fight.* My comments below are about her second novel, working title *Noctiluca." My comments below are in three parts. The first, written right after I finished reading it on the last page of the typescript. The second a letter written a few days later, the third written 3 weeks later. She wasn't home, so I waited and thought on it some more, like I hope she'll do for me if I ever finish anything and ask her to do a similar task. I'm archiving this correspondence with gopher so I can find it if Madeline and I correspond further about the new book, but also because I like reading letters from Rahel (Levin/Varnhagen) to Goethe, and between Malcolm Cowley and Faulkner. I like a close reading of a good book, even a book I haven't read, by a friend of the writer. Maybe you do, too. You haven't read the book, and won't be able to for a few years. Sorry. You can get *Stay and Fight* from your library or your favorite bookseller. I'll send you a photocopy of "The Big Woman" if you want to read it and email me your mailing address. --- May '24 I read your book in two whole nights. It's 2:10 AM and I have to get up for work at four. It's steady raining and rolling thunder outside. I have to pee. Astonishing. Stunning. Like when you're in a cave and suddenly the ceiling isn't four feet high or ten feet, it's 150 feet and shining with gypsum crystals. The way your history refracts the present. The way hippies are fascists. The way normal people are freaks. The way children are totally children, total aliens, but actually the wise ones sometimes. This book is as good as *Stay and Fight* but more mature, bigger, more mellow, less alienated. A page turner and lit. Better than the stuff I recognize as inspiring its parts, and its whole is better than the sum of its parts. It's honest, practical, humane, and lyrical. I gotta sleep now. --- Wed 29 May '24 Madeline, Your new book is a page-turner, just like *Stay and Fight* was. I wonder where you learned to do that-- are there tricks you learned before or in the MFA program? I want to know. I don't like most fiction, but yours makes me neglect sleep, promise myself I'll close the book and my eyes after this chapter, then have no more willpower than your character Woody when the time comes. I love the satisfying artistry of themes you weaved through the book like fabric in a rug, print making's specialized language, rugs, vagabond romanticism, the ongoing conversation about "violence," cooking and *The Joy of Cooking*, etc. You juggled your biggest cast yet and juggled it well. I was lost for a few pages when you flashed back to Matt Mistlethwaite's childhood, but when I regained my bearings I was totally floored by the depth the chapter gave your story. And your black characters gained as much solidity, history, place, and complexity as your white characters by a quarter of the way in. Your characters are fabulous. The way you intro- duced Jayden's mom during the counterprotest--her teeth, her phone, her fire--goddamn. Matt Mistle- thwaite turned out to be the strongest, most sur- prising character in this book. We got to know him as well as we got to know Randy in *Stay and Fight* but he had the nuance and dimensionality of Aldi Birch. I was deeply satisfied immediately upon finishing *Noctiluca*. A day or two after finishing the book I was dissatisfied about some things I'd been turning over in my head, which eventually I mostly let go, and mostly was met with a satisfied feeling again. Your new book leaves an impression. Your writing can be read on a number of levels. On the level of character, the only real weakness is black characters early in the novel. At first it's like when an illustrator whose default character's race is white draws a black character with exactly the same features as a white one but colors her in to make her "black". I can't put my finger on what was missing exactly, but I think it came from you having a default world and background of experiences which shaped a character that is not a black world. You had to construct it before you could endow them with it. I noticed this uncanny racial valley whan you signified their blackness with Woody's breast- feeding narrative to distract the college girls from their racialized interest in Leroi, Leroi's fear of the house with the Confederate battle flag contrasted with Woody's lack of fear, Angie's sass, Sharon's--uh, whatever IDK, they just lacked the texture and complexity you eventually built up. This isn't a major critique. Your cast in this book is your best ever. I never got characters mixed up. Every one you loved on and made memorable. On the level of plot, I already told you it works. Rapt, I couldn't put it down. Tied up with a bow. No complaints. Beautiful rhythm, interrupted only by brief confusion at the beginning of Matt's back- story. On the level of cultural or social critique, it also works. I recognize many conversations we had sitting on a log in the clearing where you and Cusi got married or whatever, conversations you probably also had with lots of other friends as you earnestly turned our world over, and your ethics and morality over, in light of each other. Some examples: Antiracists who might as well be racists, volkish hippie nazi homeschooler moms from Indiana moving into Appalachian counties and trying to take over stuff that's uncomfortably close to what we're into, Ambers who call every woman mama who are an awful mix of great and horrible, how hard it is for your body image and self esteem when you have a blocked milk duct inflamed monster boob and nobody helps you fix it, what to do about attempts to recruit and organize racism in our vicinity, what guns should be for and how much safety they provide (turns out they're good for rabid raccoons), noticing actually everybody's a freak, not just us and our queerdo friends, etc. Everything hits. On the level of history and sociology your book's at its most uneven. Matt's history and the history of the community of Greenbriar are stunning. Eloise's history and the history of hippie anti- Klan/anti-nuke nearly incoherent militant ambivalence is pitch perfect. The who's-fucking-who in a small town and the embarrassing family history of neglect in Woody and Emma's family tree are uncomfortably real. Dev's '70s girl gang is the absolute bomb. Sylvester's tragedy, trainriding, and Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice days are right on. The world of children is solidly, surprisingly well told. But the story of Nation Awake and the antifa which all this perfection orbits left me dissatisfied. We know how Leroi got involved. His background and proclivities intersected with Food Not Bombs when he was a teenager with his mom's cautious approval. Rings true. Sylvester's story is perfectly satisfy- ing. But the rest of the antifa who bust up the white family picnic, hang around Lucky 13, and cook in the park, while strong in character, lack history. They're just *there*. It's not clear how they got there, you know? Maybe they were always there? Maybe because of the internet? I wish their friend group/gang/whatever was given the sociological and historical care you gave Emma's family, Matt and Angie's community, and Dev's local world. I don't want much exposition; that might interrupt the book's addictive pace. I just want hints to feed my imagination. I think your antifas got ahistorical and auto- chthonous because they're too familiar to you, maybe you lack a theory of what they are, maybe you don't problematize them more because it would bore you to do, wouldn't hold your interest. Maybe all you have are the insider critiques I liked so much, and superficial outsider critiques (outside agitators! tents all look alike! funded by Soros!) --because they're too hard for you to really see from the outside. Your antifas are messy, but ultimately they're too good. They're too straightforwardly a collective protagonist. You wrote a polemic in their defense. You say that despite some petty gang violence, weird fabulous fashion, youth's disdain for history, the contortions of anxiety and coolness, they're an essential social good. I want that to be less clear, even if it ultimately proves true. Olive Tilford Dargan made a similar argument about industrial unionism in Southern US textile towns to the one you make about antifa. But she identified a fundamental, tragic contradiction in her collective social protagonist--just when we're cheering hardest for her white hero, Dargan vividly illustrated the hero's deepset psychological revulsion in the presence of sister black unionist textile workers massed in black spaces in the midst of a violent, promising strike. The revulsion, which the hero can't overcome, undermines all her political convictions about all-in unionism, and more than any other force the union's up against destroys the possibility of victory. Dargan's story is more moral and more radical than yours. She doesn't ask us to emulate the political growth of her heroes, she asks us to transcend them. I want your antifas to display a collective tragic flaw that complicates them, or even forsakes their political possibility, even as we cheer for them. None of the flaws you give them strike me as collectively, politically fundamental, or tragic, enough. Instead, your antifas illustrate your preferred, familiar "Jerusalem" in the language of Gillian Rose's great essay "Athens and Jerusalem, a tale of three cities." You've heard me talk about it before. Rose critiqued the sprectre of perfect community imagined in the ashes of the dream of communism (she wrote in 1993), a community which imagines itself the antidote to laws and reason ("Athens"), imagined as fundamentally unjust--not to mention administered by corrupt cops, courts, politicians, architects, and white cishet men living within late-stage racist heteropatriarchal capitalism anyway. She said giving up on Athens and dreaming of millenarian community prevents us from under- standing the third city, the one we actually live in. Stasia's story is also perfectly satisfying, but Nation Awake, similarly, is too mysterious and maybe too powerful of a villian. Just like failing to sufficiently tragically crack antifa's possib- ility fails to invite us to transcend it, failing to sufficiently demystify Nation Awake scares us into complacency. I admire that you gave them the same initials as National Alliance and play slyly on "woke". The name is perfectly convincing, and timely. It makes me think of the Active Clubs. But their continuity with the Klan in the county's history and the paranoia about who in the local power structure is with them or sympathetic is just too complete. Are the cops Nations Awake nationalists, or at least the one went to school with Sylvester, arrested antifas at the white family picnic, came to the secret cafe and Salt Soil Farm? Is Amber? Is every mom from out-of-state who homeschools? You had me walking around paranoid for a week before I checked myself and remembered how socially and numerically marginal white nationalists are outside of prison. I love the continuity with local history. I really love the paranoia. I think paranoia's one of the dominant rural affects. But I want you to crack it, show its unreliability. I love the influx coming through Stasia's farm for the whole ethnostate project, but I want to see how it's limited by its own contradictions, not just by antifa. I want you to undermine it with its own inherent, political contradictions, not just the goofiness of its champions, by Stasia's manipulation of Woody, her chud boyfriend, and her nothing of a son. What dooms Nations Awake's preferred Jerusalem isn't their human frailty. It's deeper than that. The paranoia you sow makes race, which is racism, the central American conflict. That's a solidly middle-class class position; a little 1619 Project- ish for my taste, but it will sell books. I think Barbara Fields was the one who famously wrote that slaveholders didn't own slaves because they were racist. They held slaves because that was how the propertied class reproduced their class position. Racism was the ideology which--to use Adolph Reed's dad's old saw--reconciled their material interests with their need to see them- selves as good people. Similar things were written about the why of Jim Crow by C. Vann Woodward, the historian who wrote *Origins of the New South* and MLK Jr's "bible of the freedom movement" *The Strange Career of Jim Crow.* Woodward spent his career wondering why the fiery preachers of interracial populism rapidly transformed into the most rabid of racist agitators in the 1890s through 1910s. Adolph Reed did similar work on the post-Civil Rights Act era as black mayors, police chiefs, and politicians--many with "civil rights movement" resumes--rose into roles as the front line admin- istrators of systemic racism, at least in big cities, in the 1970s and '80s. You have a challenge if you want to make Nation Awake more "cracked," tragic, human. As far as I know, there are no good sources. Kathleen Blee did great work on women in the 1910s and 1960s Klan and 1990s organized racists (skins, Klan, patriot militia, sovereign citizens, National Alliance, Aryan Nation, World Church of the Creator, Rahowa). I don't know anybody who documented or analyzed the messy internals of the movement in the US in the 2010s or '20s, the psychological and ideological journeys of participants, the factions and cracks. Except you. I've seen work on Germany's AfD, Hungary's Jobbik, Ukraine's Right Sektor and Azov Battalion, and various affiliates and splinters from Al Qaeda in central and West Asia and across the Sahel, but other than maybe Szombati's book *The Revolt of the Provinces* on Jobbik, not sure how much you could use insights into European movements to understand Nation Awake. They probably stan them boys though. I think Nation Awake is dangerous but marginal. I think ordinary racist white people (not organized or committed, just casual and unquestioned) find them distasteful, worry about their influx causing trouble, driving up property taxes or rents, making it cost too much to buy a house, taking over the school board, or just being outsiders. I don't want your book to force the manichean George W. Bush choice: "Either you're with antifa or you're with Nation Awake." People less noble than Matt Mistlethwaite are against them. Why don't we see those less noble people? Hundreds came to the white family picnic. Where did they come from? Only two of them--Stasia and her scrubby mustache boyfriend--definitely live in the county. What do the three who beat up Sylvester do for work? Who organized the thing on campus, and why wasn't it cancelled by run-of-the-mill on- campus Gen Zs? How did it last long enough to get any traction? Where does the gym teacher work; where's he from? There's no way there are hundreds of those jokers in the area. They came from Indiana, just like the local antifa's friends came from West Virginia, Chicago, Western Mass, and Upstate New York or whatever. There's, what, twenty-five Nation Awake in the county? Fifteen? Ten? Not counting fellow travelers like the cop or the old Klanny who sold Stasia his farm. I bet, at best, there are slightly more of them than WASP/SURJ-types. And I bet they resent each other within their micro-community. Lambert Straether (Corriente newswire/Naked Capit- alism blog) analyzed the class composition of known January 6th participants. They were mostly small business tyrants like Stasia and Amber. They run pool installation businesses, fight over the town mowing contract, are independent electricians and locksmiths and owner-operators. They can't get any good help. They use racial prejudice as a heuristic to guide hiring and customer relations decisions. They resent reg- ulations and taxation that hurt their bottom line. They resent DEI telling them they have to abandon their heuristic and hire people they think will be unreliable, serve customers they think won't pay. They want to run their kingdom--their business, their family--as tyrants with nobody over them. They want to run away and homestead. They want to homeschool or control the school board. They want to bravely, regrettably shoot and kill a home invader while standing their ground. All they want around them is the heaven of their Jerusalem as promised in country songs (remember Anne Tagonist's brilliant livejournal entry about Sarah Palin and country music?). Their racism is a class position. They aren't everywhere, even though they do leak out of their class into cops, para- medics, nurses who date cops, 4chan /b/tards and /k/fags, Kiwi Farms incels, etc. Woody is brilliant in that regard. He reminds me of a less sinister Dylann Roof. I sent you an article years ago for your research for this book about Dylann--he grew up with a black best friend and hung out with and gamed with black friends even after he read a bunch of /k/ and wrote his mani- festo, right up to the night before his mass shoot- ing in the black church in Charleston. There's no evidence he saw his friendships as inconsistent with committed, revolutionary, murderous racism. WASP is a class ideology, too. Guaranteed they work in nonprofits, higher education, libraries. The attorney probably does criminal defense or civil litigation. Catherine Liu skewered that class elegantly in her short polemical book *Virtue Hoarders,* and Christian Parenti historicized and utterly undermined their ideology in his longform essay called something like "The Cult of the Privi- lege Walk." You do a pretty good number on them, too. I don't think you need any help there. I think you know all this stuff about the relation between class position and racial ideology at least as well as I do. I just think your novel took an easy way out with its antifa jedis and ewoks and racist hidden Empire. I think you know I think paranoia is a politically corrosive affect. Small biz tyrants are wrong and thuggishly dangerous, but also they have real grievances, and their appeal is limited. Your antifas, just like the ones I've known over the last twenty-five years, are noble. I think (but I'm not sure) their biggest folly is the paranoia you give your reader, their myopic focus on their half-hidden enemy and failure to understand the social forces that produce their enemy and produce them. Same folly as antifas I've known. That myopia confuses you into thinking that fighting the dozen or so organized racists in your county will make your county suck less, make the highschool you went to less racist and transphobic, make the cops less racist and transphobic, make your parents less racist and transphobic. And, I mean, maybe in the long run it does, because of the community you build against them shaping people who over time end up in local positions of power. But Jerusalems are inherently exclusive, bound by tyrannies of traditional power. Do you in fact replace one Jerusalem with another? At times you rise to a vantage above identification with your protagionists' paranoia and sweet, earnest, noble magical thinking. You do that in the stories about Dev's Noctiluca girl gang. It's sweet and bittersweet how you balance it as a beautiful expression of righteous anger that made Dev who she became, so worthy of celebrating and rooting for, with the understanding it didn't fix the social forces the girls who formed it rightly hated. I wish you'd been as clear about your antifas' limitations, even if they weren't vulnerable to having their kids run over by nazis. Antifa's important to defend, I think. The fact you defend it makes your book important. You keep writing better versions of *The Monkey Wrench Gang* like that. What I'm trying to express critically is your defense will be stronger if they and Nation Awake are less good, less evil, more silly, human, pointless even than you made them, and despite tragic collective internal contradictions, antifa still worth being, still noble; Nation Awake still worth punching, still base. The more time passes since I read the book, the less I'm bothered about the Antifa/Nation Awake heroic manichean dynamic and the initial flatness of your black characters, and the more I'm just turning over in my head the your delicious charact- ers. Years after reading it, Pearley, the Outside Woman, "velvet piglet," the Mean Aunt, and other leavings from *Stay and Fight* are inside jokes in Evy's and my private language, used to discuss our world. Your new book is richer in that sort of stuff. I loved your deft handling of the '30s and '40s in the person of Matt, the '60s and '70s via Dev and Eloise, the '90s in the person of Sylvester, and now. I love the lore of the printing presses and of multiflora rose. I love the wry critique of Mama Ginger's people, WASP people, Leroi's mom, Stasia's people. I love that Salt Soil initializes to SS, and the other sweet treats you flavor your writing with. I like how you do peoples' reactions to Collins' gender, and how Sylvester's sister calls him Sally right at the end, and it's simultaneously weirdly enlightening and totally doesn't matter. "Yeah, people are mysteries. Don't think you're more complex than my characters, or anyone. Everyone's a world. The half hasn't been told." Your grasp of human psychology and interpersonal relationships produces lush, complex, satisfying stuff. I think something else dissatisfied me after I finished the book but I'm like 3,000 words into this letter and whatever it was it's gone now. Your new book is, as it currently is, an almost perfect meal followed by a transient weird aftertaste or some mild indigestion. You could probably improve it some, but you don't have to. Thank you for letting me read it. I need to see more of you with or without your kids. I want to see more of them, too, and so does [my daughter]. I miss you and crave our good conversations. Anna --- Tuesday 18 June '24 Dear Madeline, I figured I'd hang onto all this til you got home. Give me a chance to think about it some more. I still like it. It ages well in my memory. One thing that increased my enjoyment as I've thought back on your new book is playing imagina- tively with how it fits into your literary county. No flattery intended, but no bullshit either, it's the same kind of pleasure as reading some more Faulkner when you already know your way around Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, and know some of the Compson family's secrets. Knowing you, I like thinking about the way your vantage on your fictional county changed over the years as you became more settled in your real Ohio River Valley county. In "The Big Woman," your protag has such a tenuous hold on the rented rural lot and the rented trailer he occupies on it. That piece of land will never be his in any sense that matters, and he knows it. No one who intrudes on him is really intruding because he knows he is an intruder. So, him and his goat are always existentially threatened by the neighbors, the land and wildlife, the at-will, informal nature of his employment, the instability and unknowability of all his relation- ships, all new and barely there, his anxiety. He's stable as a soap-bubble. He wants to belong, but could be gone and completely forgotten any instant. That alienated, eager position lets him and readers get to know guys who burn plastic and cook meth, babies like Bexley. He introduces us to that strata of your fictional Ohio River Valley county. Aldi Birch, of course, knows that strata too. *Stay and Fight* is still an outsider's story, but now the outsider owns land, and has tenant/land- mates. The protagonist doesn't have ownership over any local institutions like the library or the cattle auction, though. She's like your new book's Stasia, but without Stasia's considerable resources. *Stay and Fight*'s main characters' relationships are few, defensive, and closely coupled. The threats they feel are existential: sugar and screen time ruining Pearley, neighbors, the school system, social services, the land don't threaten "me" but "us." The threat to "me" is only that the "us" could self-destruct and leave "me" completely alone and weird on a shitty plot of land in the country with no car and nobody. In your new novel your protags are the power structure, at least one or two segments of it. This is their town, their county. The outsider racist influx (and I imagine the more general rural gentrification influx) is the threat. *Noctiluca*'s protags are on the other side of your county's class divide or insider/outsider divide in outlook from your earlier tales, even if none of them have no more than one or two generations there. Each new tale you write throws what you wrote before in the county into new light, increases the complexity and nuance in the world. Sure, maybe these new protags think Nazis hide under every rock --every newcomer, every hidden history. That's how they see from their position in the county. That's how they harmonize their material interests with their need to see themselves as good people. I still want you to undermine the legitimacy of their paranoia, at least a little. Same way in *Stay and Fight* the kid with the magic shield's grandma shows us readers there's a much bigger world in the county than the protags can really see or remember, a world that lets readers see that the protags' understanding of their world is wrong. You know, of course: there are people who agree with your political position, persuadable people, and unpursuadable or difficult-to-persuade "enemies." We discover unexpected friends in *Noctiluca,* but we forget the great majority remain uncommitted, neither committed to the Nations Awake idiots nor against them, never really thought about it, never had to. People like all the characters in your previous tales. I still want them unhidden, exposed in your new book. I love you and love your writing. Anna