Author: Brad Johnson

1
My parents collided on opposing bicycles outside the Radcliffe Camera. They were married on a grey Westminster morning. They ate grapes afterwards.

 

2
I remember my first encounter with a cathedral: the Parvis de Notre-Dame in the rain. I was a small pink anorak. I was looking at a skyscraper studded with kings. Unfathomable to me that a skyscraper should be so old.

(A fathom is the distance between the outstretched hands. I was a small pink anorak and I could not embrace the skyscraper of kings).

 

3
My mother was born on the Sahara’s edge:
blonde, with blue eyes in the dark hands
of the doctor who slapped her
to breath.

 

4
In 1986 my mother slowed to avoid but did not: instead bumping, and falling
almost as an afterthought.

 

5
My father was born on an island brushed by the hem of the monsoon.

 

6
In the beginning, the begetting. Leda, Mary, Igrayne, the Sabines, the mothers of Theseus and Heracles: blessed among women.
One of this story’s beginnings takes place in my grandmother’s nineteen-year-old body. This was a body into which the catechism had been carved so as to keep it blank. She knew nothing of men and their urges. We think.

 

7
room 10a of the British Museum: considered the sport of kings,

 

8
My grandmother was nineteen when she went down on her back
not knowing why –
the islands,
her hacienda on a hill,
and her pearls from the boy
who later gave her
two black eyes.

 

9
They tell me you would have married pink
to have a cook bring you rice, sticky in banana leaves;
had you not moved wetly
with the black-pearl boy who didn’t
really want you.

 

10
Two black eyes
held wet and shining
In the palms of the hands –

so you were sent away –
and came back with two black eyes
and a baby boy

 

11
(Portuguese Beach, Mendocino, 1997)
I was a mop of dark curls skinned soft with love. I was cramming my pockets with sea-glass until my yellow mac sagged. There was my mother, splintering the sun with her head, and there was my father walking silent on the sand.

 

12
Colossal marble statue of a recumbent lion;
carved with inlaid eyes
originally probably of glass

now missing.

13
The Lion of Knidos’s empty sockets would have held eyes of glass
to help ships off Halikarnassus
Weighing twelve tons,
it sits ironic in the inky heart
of London

an emblem of empire,
blind.

 

14
When the Wall fell my mother was twenty-one and she cried because this was the end of the world as she had always known it.

 

15
In the place where I grew up there were horses, thighs moving like nudity under their fur
the pigeons are clattering into the heights now
(in the British Museum there are shards of horse)
(in the British Museum there is a blind lion)
My grandfather collected lions.

 

16
Empires fall like milk teeth.

 

*

 

1
To the school: I am delivered. A three hour drive north, through a valed land replete with cathedrals. There is Amiens, with its traces of paint, still;
and Chartres of the windows;
Beauvais, unfinished – thrice its spire fell through; now it is braced with wooden beams: on crutches. It boasts the highest clerestory in Europe, it smells of mouldering stone.
Rheims where are buried the kings; Coulombs which boasts the pecker-piece of the Saviour.
Under the Channel, to burst forth near a hill where runs a horse white in chalk.
Past Dover, the cliffs, so famed for smuggling and the welcoming sight to those from Dunkirk (I remember that boat, smallest to answer the call.)
(Named Tamzine, it lies on the floor of the museum for imperial war).
The school is of flint and brick, it too has a cathedral.

At the boarding house, which is new, but built out of the ruins of the old infirmary ten centuries old, another mother is wearing a poncho. She asks where we’re from, how we got here. At my mother’s reply (the Eurotunnel) she says Oh well you will have come in under our land then.

I am unpacked and stowed away.

Later that night, the others start to arrive. There are five blondes in a total of twelve. There is lacrosse gear and lurid pink mouthguards. Their jeans are different from mine (tighter). I have never seen so many sets of big breasts. Their hair is midlength (it swishes). Their clothes are all somehow the same.

– Are you rich?
(The others wait politely for my reply)

 

2
What is a woman?
An invitation to interpretation.

What is a book?
An invitation to identify.

What is a cathedral?
A show of force.

What is an island?
A thing of limits,
which likes to think it knows
where it begins and ends
not bleeding into others
a tamper-evident opening
tear here
the egregious arrogance of this self-ensconcing country!

 

3
They were confirmed so as to be gifted hoops and cufflinks of white gold.
Common prayers.
They wanted to marry in squat flint churches, as if they were tourists, with big white dresses, as if they were cakes.
I do not want your noncommittal creed thank you.

 

4
Once a month came round
the zinc smell in the corridors, of all our clumping blood in bins.

 

5
In the run of evenings the flatline pallid blue shaded to plum and Bell Harry kept thrusting up:
centrifugal, unrenounced.

 

6
I am English en-lessoned. The teacher is teaching us ‘The Flea’.
This flea is you and I, and this
Our marriage bed . . . w’are met,
And cloistered in these living walls of jet
I think of a bed: one of those little beds, short and tight in stately homes. Thick-curtained against the cold. This seemed to me at the time of my buttressing in pinstripes, to be something rich and strange I wished to know.
buttress, n.: a structure of stone or brick built against a wall to strengthen or support it
buttress, v.: increase the strength or justification for; reinforce.
In the great age of cathedrals, flying buttresses were instated to counteract the lateral forces of high walls and naves, which would seek to burst open.
They were like ribs –
A universe so newly heliocentric. How afraid he must have been.
Then there was
Lay your sleeping head, my love, / Human on my faithless arm;
(how often I would think of that in the grey half-heart of a Wednesday dawning)

 

7
When the parents came, they were loud.
They came two by two in pairs of Sunday-lunching racists.
The fathers wore trousers the colour of rare meat.
(A hunk of roast beef seeping)
(banking on things in the city)
(with flats, useful for unfaithing.)
Their wives stayed at home, in the counties. Maybe they were lonely, and screamed
themselves hoarse in the cut-stone quiet of their houses.
These marriages seemed structures of mutual scorn.
Watching them made me flush hot with fear that this was coming for me and sent me knockkneed to hide.
Their days of barboured torpor; the cream-coloured afternoons –

 

8
One night, towards the end (when I could afford, increasingly, to laugh at them openly), at tea (never since have I called it that, for if there is one thing I hate it is a wasted euphemism):
dwarfs all look the same
what?
yeah, like, to the untrained eye, all Asians look alike
yes, it’s easier to differentiate between black people
I tugged hard on a sharp laugh
Stephanie is ethnic, this upsets her more
(I did it again, this red cord conversationally dangling)
(Their names, improbably, rhymed)
& no nurse came tap-tap running down the corridor to administer.

 

9
When the United States came knocking for its foothold in the ironically named Pacific in 1903
a member of my family sold some several thousand hectares near Subic Bay
for an airbase which would be named for the clean-jawed Clark.
wherefrom was eventually waged most of the bombing of Vietnam,
Cambodia, and Laos.
Historians refer to the base as having been a backbone of logistical support for Kissinger’s crimes.

Nine hours after what happened at Pearl Harbour,
Clark Field would be bombed by the Japanese and subsequently overrun
like time running over, like water flowing over a cup.
If you are familiar with the name Douglas MacArthur, hq’d here at the butting-place, you should know also of the names and their lilts, linked like a necklace of beads across the dateline
in the order of the dawn: Wake, Guam, Davao, Baguio.
MacArthur getting off lightly, giving his name to transit stops and avenues,
and us to this day gummy in our ignorance
of Guam.

 

These poems are taken from a full-length work titled Amnion. 

Photograph © Didier Jordana

The post Amnion appeared first on Granta.

Judy Garland and I spent a lot of time together last spring. For months on end she kept me company on subway rides, New York Public Library trips, and writing sprints at my desk. I was hard at work on my book, Judy at Carnegie Hall, a small tome on the 1961 concert the famed performer staged at the New York City institution. My book on the Grammy-winning double album, which captures what was then called “the greatest night in show business history,” made me intimately familiar with all 26 of the album’s tracks— from the instrumental “Overture” to Judy’s rousing rendition of “Chicago,” her fourth encore of the night. These songs became the soundtrack to my life for much of 2019 as I researched, wrote, and later proofread and copy-edited the final manuscript. 

When I needed a pick-me-up, all I needed to do was put on Judy’s first number, “When You’re Smiling (The Whole World Smiles With You)” and follow the song’s lead in grinning my troubles away. “When you’re laughing,” she sings, “the sun comes shining through. But when you’re crying you bring on the rain; so stop your sighing, be happy again.” The song is an apt opening number for an act that, despite featuring its fair share of broody ballads, depends on Garland’s unwavering optimism. Ever since, as a little girl, she’d sung about going somewhere over the rainbow where bluebirds sang, Garland has come to embody a shining beacon of sunny cheerfulness amid dreary doldrums. If Dorothy could make it all the way to colorful Oz and back home again, so could we weather whatever storms our tears bring on. 

I knew merely smiling couldn’t make all my troubles disappear. But hearing Judy’s voice could. Rufus Wainwright saw a similar kind of power in Judy’s live album. “Whenever I put on that record, that Judy Garland record, that concert,” he remembered, looking back at the months he spent listening to it on loop following 9/11, “everything brightened. And I just couldn’t help but sing along.” It’s what drove him to attempt the Herculean feat of putting on Garland’s concert in its entirety for a new generation of fans with Rufus Does Judy at Carnegie Hall back in 2006. Wainwright was right to hone in on the unbridled joy that runs through the 1961 album, which merely captured the energy of the 1961 concert itself. The cheers from the audience, for instance, give merit to Lewis Funke’s description of the concert in his New York Times review as something akin less to a live performance than to a revival meeting. 

Garland’s album scored what was, back in 2019, a transitional moment in my life as my husband and I began plotting our departure from New York City. The prospect of leaving the place I’d come to call home after more than a decade was daunting. Overwhelming, almost. It helped that I had Judy to keep me company. For many weeks my days were spent alternating between finishing a draft of the manuscript and packing up our apartment with precious little time spent wondering what was ahead. “Why should I care?” Judy sings at one point in one of the most jubilant songs on the album, “Life is one long jubilee, so long as I care for you and you care for me!” This was the Judy I keyed into last year, the one who made her acrobatic belts feel effortless and who’d turned herself into an icon of resilience. Her devil-may-care attitude was invigorating and helped make the choice to leave New York City without having settled on where we’d arrive feel less careless than it sounded. Our summer was as close to one long jubilee as we could make it as we spent time in Chicago, Austin, and Los Angeles, trying each city on for size. Judy would approve, I hope, of our current West Hollywood address, which is but a short drive away from her own Hollywood Star of Fame. 

Lately, all I hear are the darkened edges of Garland’s delivery: the melancholy that ran through her best performances.

But if sunny anthems like “When You’re Smiling” and “Who Cares?” helped me make peace with leaving New York City and saying goodbye to my friends, I’ve recently been revisiting the album through a decidedly darker lens. Last year, these life changes felt promising — necessary even. Judy’s infectious enthusiasm felt like fuel. Lately, though, all I hear are the darkened edges of Garland’s delivery: the melancholy that ran through her best performances, the sadness she conjures as she sings about heartbreak and loneliness, even the grievances she couldn’t help but make into punchlines in her banter. The sunniness is still there in numbers like “The Trolley Song,” but it’s her torch songs and sorrowful ballads which now occupy my mind. 

Titles like “Alone Together,” “How Long Has This Been Going On?” and “Just You, Just Me,” ring differently amid a pandemic that all but derailed what was to be a moment of celebration about getting Judy at Carnegie Hall out into the world. “I’m weary all the time,” Judy sings in “Stormy Weather,” before the lyric itself echoes such weariness with its repetition: “the time, so weary all the time.” But reading the words alone doesn’t do justice to Judy’s delivery. She stretches her syllables, making you feel the added effort it takes for her to go from one word to another. She doesn’t just sing about weariness, she embodies it. She had good reason to feel weary. For years on end, and after her Hollywood career came to a standstill, she’d had to book live engagements to keep debtors at bay, at times quite literally singing for her supper. There are moments in the recording when you can almost hear the audience wanting to lift Judy’s spirits; they cheer loudly after she bungles a note and clamor uncontrollably when she flubs a line. Inherent in those moments was the conviction that her moving performances were nothing more than cathartic insights into her troubled personal life. 

The sorrows Judy sang about then continue to rankle us precisely because they’re so familiar.

As I spend my days wondering how, if at all, we’ll make it past this pandemic and musing whether my own anxieties about my inability to properly launch my Judy book in a crisis that dwarfs such concerns, Judy’s lamentations feel more personal than ever. “I have a machine in my throat that gets into many people’s ears and affects them,” she recalled in 1964. “There’s something about my voice that makes them see all the sadness and humor they’ve experienced. It makes them know they aren’t too different; they aren’t apart.” That’s not quite as comforting as it sounds. The sorrows Judy sang about then continue to rankle us precisely because they’re so familiar. It’s hard not to listen to the Carnegie Hall record and remember how much Judy craved and feared being alone, apart from others. How days by herself in a hotel room was ultimately what cost her her life. It’s there in the way her voice breaks in “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and the way the crowd loses it when she hits and elongates the final note in what has to be one of the saddest lyrics ever written—a question many of us are asking ourselves while locked in our small apartments wishing we could be merry outside: “Why, oh why can’t I?”

Chronicler of the gay community Vito Russo once described Judy Garland as “an iron butterfly.” Her strength, he posited, was always laced with fragility; one couldn’t think about Judy’s resilience without somehow also calling up the frailty it kept at bay. Writing 20 years after Garland died, Russo mused instead about what it had meant for so many gay men to have clung to such a icon. (He even wondered aloud whether her death in 1969 had somehow caused the Stonewall riots. Answer: no.) “Her audience was never sure whether she’d fall into the abyss or soar like a phoenix,” he wrote, getting at precisely why certain men felt both so protective of her while also seeing in her a towering strength they themselves looked to. Until last year, this kind of assessment had been nothing more than an intellectual exercise for me. I’ve long been fascinated with how Judy once appealed to what one reviewer in 1967 had euphemistically referred to as “those boys in the tight trousers.” Now, though, I find myself enraptured with the potency of what that iron butterfly once stood for and what she keeps teaching us boys more than fifty years after her death. In the last year, Garland has been a comforting presence even as listening to her songs on loop can feel like its own form of masochism. She’s been both my rainstorm and my rainbow.

Now, though, there’s an added layer to finding solace and (dis)comfort in Judy at Carnegie Hall. The singer’s rousing renditions of songs like “Rock-a-Bye Baby with a Dixie Melody” and “Swanee” (“Swanee, Swanee, I’m coming back to Swanee! Mammy, Mammy, I love the old folks at home!”) for instance, conjure up a nostalgia wrapped up in visions of the South that, amid Black Lives Matter protests and images of toppled Confederate statues, feel even more insidious than they did last year when my research necessarily pushed me to reckon with the minstrelsy roots of those Judy staples. As bands like Lady Antebellum (now “Lady A”) and The Dixie Chicks (now just “The Chicks”) remind us, our musical lexicon keeps traces of deep-rooted racism alive. Garland is no exception. She was, after all, always dubbed the heir apparent to Al Jolson, a famed performer known as the preeminent practitioner of blackface on Broadway in the early 20th century: “There is Judy Garland. And there was Al Jolson. And then the mold is broken!” read The Hollywood Reporter in its review of the Carnegie Hall concert: “Ask anyone who remembers the days when ‘Jolie’ took over the Winter Garden runway and they will tell you that never since has a singer of songs been able to mesmerize an audience as Judy can.” 

In singing of bluebirds, she encouraged us to look away from the colorless lives laid bare before us. What place is there, in 2020, for such a call? 

And so I’m left with an album that last year made me giddy—at the prospect of possibility in ways both creative and professional—and which has soured as I experience it in a much different world than the one I hoped to reintroduce it to when I finished writing about it this time just last year. “One wanted to hold her and protect her because she was a lost lamb in a jungle,” Russo pointed out back in 1989 about Garland, “and yet be held by her because she was a tower of strength, someone who had experienced hell but continued to sing about bluebirds and happiness.” In singing of bluebirds, though, she encouraged us to look away from the colorless lives laid bare before us, a uniquely privileged move that can feel like an embrace of willful indifference. What place is there, in 2020, for such a call? 

To listen to Judy at Carnegie Hall—whether in anticipation of a cross-country move when its rousing cheers felt emboldening, in the midst of a pandemic when those same cheers feel like taunts from ghostly crowds, or now as a relic of a sunny vision of white America—is to experience firsthand why Garland is a figure that demands you speak in oxymorons, for that is the only way you can make sense of the contradictions she embodies and inspires in equal measure. She was both bluebird and phoenix, as much a balm as an irritant. But she was also an iron butterfly that could just as easily nudge you to go on as invite you to give up. Judy and I will continue to spend a lot of time together. Just yesterday, six comp copies of my book arrived and now sit tidily next to the original vinyl my husband got me ahead of my pub date to celebrate. We’ll continue to be together, not just “come rain or come shine,” as she sings, but ideally both. How else will we conjure up that rainbow of hers? 

The post How to Listen to Judy Garland in 2020 appeared first on Electric Literature.

King Lear is one of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies; indeed, some critics have considered it the greatest. It is certainly one of the bleakest. The plot and subplot deftly weave together the principal themes of the play, which include reason, madness, blindness of various kinds, and – perhaps most crucially of […]

The post A Summary and Analysis of William Shakespeare’s King Lear appeared first on Interesting Literature.

Writing a novel is a big deal.

It’s soul-consuming, and creating a feature-length work of fiction takes a great deal of time as well as dedication. 

But, you probably already knew that, right?

One of the most haunting thoughts for any budding novelist (the kind that wakes you up at night) is: will my idea support a lengthy work of fiction? Is it even worth writing at all?

You could argue that with the right level of care and development any acorn of an idea could flourish into a mighty work of fiction. But, in reality — some novel ideas are more viable than others.

While starting something that will eventually implode right in front of you on the screen after months of work is a daunting prospect, there are things you can do to test run your novel idea. And, we’re going to look at them here.

The core elements of a solid novel

Before you start to test run your story idea, it’s vital that you take some time to consider the very core elements of a solid novel.

Your novel should include:

A strong protagonist

Every great novel idea should accommodate a protagonist—or main character—that will compel people to keep reading as the story develops.

Check out these three tips for crafting a protagonist that will make your novel work.

A notable antagonist

In addition to an epic protagonist, almost every accomplished story features a notable antagonist or character that creates a sense of conflict at key moments in the plot.

Our guide to creating a compelling villain for your next story will help you get started. 

A clearcut goal or mission

For your plot to flourish from start to finish, it’s important to establish a clearcut goal or mission for your lead protagonist. Without a meaningful end goal, your idea might need a little more development. 

Naturally, all characters have abstract goals (journies or self-discovery or reaching dawning existential realizations, for example)—but if your story is armed with a physical goal or mission, it will go the distance.

Physical character goals include:

• Getting something physical.
• Causing something physical.
• Escaping something physical.
• Resolving something physical.
• Surviving something physical.

A strong setting

It’s no secret that a setting is pivotal to any successful story. But, when you’re writing a novella or novel, your setting must, almost, be a living, breathing entity that helps to bond the plot.

When you’re crafting your novel’s setting, you should ask yourself the following questions:

• Can my characters physically and emotionally interact with the space around them throughout the course of the story?
• Does my setting help to enhance my novel idea and give it direction?
• Are there elements or features that are likely to make my story stand out in its niche?
• Do I care about the story’s potential setting and will it motivate me to keep writing with pace and conviction?

If you’ve answered a staunch ‘no’ to any of these questions, it might be time to go back to the drawing board.

What to do before writing your novel

We’ve established the core elements of a successful novel idea (concepts that will give your plot meaning and direction). Now it’s time to look at the practical ways you can test run your novel idea before putting pen to paper or fingers to keys.

Create your storyline synopsis

If you’ve explored the core elements of a solid novel and you believe you’ve passed the test—good for you, it’s time to create your storyline synopsis.

For this exercise, your storyline synopsis is not a detailed account of the plot (you may not have fully developed your plot at this point, after all), but merely a one to two sentence summary of what your story is about. The who, where, what, and why, as it were.

Here’s an example of a synopsis for your reference:

The Silence of the Lambs: A young, ambitious F.B.I. agent must work alongside a manipulative, cannibalistic killer to help catch an active serial killer that is plaguing the nation with his heinous crimes.

Action: Write your storyline synopsis, taking the core elements of a solid novel into account. Once you’re happy with the outcome, step away for a day or so and read it again. Does it sound interesting and compelling to you? 

If the answer is no, you should go back and revisit your idea. You should also ask trusted friends or colleagues for their opinions on your synopsis—feedback is always invaluable to the creative process.

Research your niche

Does your synopsis jump off the page? Excellent, it’s time to start thinking about your niche or genre.

Looking at your synopsis and core elements, decide if you feel your idea fits into a particular niche or genre. Your idea could work as a sci-fi novel or a hard-hitting romantic tale for young adults—the choice is yours.

If your theme or subject does fit into a broad niche, conduct web-based research to understand your target audience and the scope of your potential novel category.

Here are tools and ideas to help you conduct valuable research:

• Use Google Trends and punch in key terms surrounding your novel’s potential genre to see what readers are searching for around the world. Here you will be able to see writers and novelists within a particular niche that are making waves and connecting with their audience. Read their stories and decide what you feel drives their success.
• Explore targeted hashtags across social media channels to see what books, stories, and authors are trending in your niche. #Bookstagram and #Bookish are good places to start.
• Visit independent bookstores or examine various book charts within your niche to see if your potential niche, genre or theme is an avenue you feel is worth pursuing.

Action: Take time to explore, research, and read. Document your discoveries to paint a clearcut picture of how people are interacting with novels and authors in your prospective niche or genre. 

Armed with this newfound information, pick a handful of books that are either performing well or that you respect within your niche. Decide whether your idea is too similar to these books and if so, search for an original angle that will offer a fresh perspective on a beloved or well-trodden theme. 

If you can place your story idea into a niche or genre and you have a unique angle to explore—you’re probably onto a winner.

Craft your elevator pitch

If you’ve reached this point, it’s likely that your novel idea is worth taking to the next level. But, before you give it the official green writing light, you should craft an elevator pitch.

Your elevator pitch is essentially a slightly longer, more detailed synopsis of your story that covers to the tale’s main protagonist, the primary conflict, what’s at stake, and a nod to the setting.

Here is the elevator pitch for my novella, ‘Not Every Room Has a View’:

“Samuel Jacks floats through his days venting a deep hatred for his industrial hometown to no one but himself, looking after his sick Aunty Mags, smoking endless piles of roll-ups, and making token efforts to write a novel that he’s probably never going to start, let alone finish. But then he meets an old flame and things start to unravel, fast. Can Sam make sense of the world around him and find inner peace or will he fall deeper into oblivion?

A mind-bending misadventure of love, lust, death, drugs, abandonment, and blurred realities, told through the eyes of a frustrated, fragile, bright, angry, and emotionally trapped young British male from the working classes.”

Action: Consolidating all of the discoveries and creative information from the previous steps, set aside ample time to craft a compelling elevator pitch. Again, step away and revisit it a day or so later.

Is your detailed synopsis enough to make you want to put pen to paper and explore your idea? Are your friends, colleagues or relatives intrigued? Great, go for it.

Writing a novel is a huge commitment but if you have faith in yourself and your idea, you will create something with depth and meaning. Test run your idea before writing your novel and you will know that it’s an avenue worth exploring.

Photo via GuadiLab / Shutterstock 

The post The Elements of a Solid Novel, Plus Steps to Take Before You Even Start Writing appeared first on The Write Life.

Rani had been out of work for over a year. She was unemployed and had just started receiving universal credit, a new state benefit and one that had caused huge controversy. While a state benefit that sweeps up daily living payments into one bundle might make sense in theory, in practice it takes at least eight weeks to process a first payment, (and in the pilot phase, almost thirteen), so it can be a testing time for anyone who doesn’t have savings or a redundancy package.

Rani had waited until her entire nest egg was exhausted before she applied for universal credit. She had decided that her diminishing savings and the fear of dependency on the state would together motivate her to find a job quickly.

There is, of course, an overwhelming feeling of despondency on Thursday morning when she attends the job centre for the first time. The previous week, she had read in a newspaper about an older man, a skilled labourer, who had committed suicide, leaving a note describing the deep shame he would feel in collecting benefits. The note he left was scrawled on the back of the letter from the DWP confirming that his claim had been approved.

When she’d arrived that day at the job centre to sign on for the first time, she hadn’t been sure what to expect. The office was situated off from a main road. It was a plain nondescript white building, with only a small green and yellow sign reading job centre on the door. Inside, it was quiet, with banners advertising apprentice schemes and computer skills workshops. There were three rows of desks, behind which were seated administrative staff or ‘customer agents’, who dealt with the ‘clients’. Rani noted that the entire workforce, from the security guard near the door to the administrators, and all the other clients were black. That is, except for the most senior supervisor, a white woman, in a grey blazer that marked her out, sitting at a single desk shielded by screens on two sides. Occasionally, she would step out to talk to a staff member, only to retreat once again to her cubbyhole.

The imbalance made Rani feel uncomfortable. She did not know whether it was coincidental or if this was representative of something more sinister. Do we find what we look for? She wondered. But she hadn’t come looking for anything.

Back home, after Rani had been job-hunting online for several hours, she decided she needed a change of scene, if only to go for a walk, to step away from the screen. She slipped on her Converse sneakers and brushed her hair, grabbed her purse and keys to the flat, and headed out for a coffee.

Jakob’s cafe in Hampstead was owned by a Jewish couple, Anthony and Sara. At lunchtime, there was often a queue reaching out of the door for their renowned salt-beef, mustard and pickle sandwiches, and rich salmon, dill and cream-cheese bagels. In the winter, they served bowls of chicken knadle and matzo balls, and at Hannukah, freshly fried jelly doughnuts.

Rani felt comfortable in Hampstead. There had always been a bohemian feel to the borough, populated by writers and actors, and it had a strong immigrant history. The Jewish population had begun to arrive from the early eighteenth century and, in the period between the World Wars, many Jewish refugees from Europe settled in NW London postcodes, where several congregations set up their own synagogues. As an Indian woman, Rani felt a particular affinity for the area. Karl, her best friend during her A levels, was Jewish, and they had once travelled together, backpacking across Israel.

Rani knew that, at 2.30 p.m., Jakob’s deli would be quiet before mums on the school-run dropped in to get cakes for their hungry children, and local couples dropped by for tea after their afternoon walks. In the mid-afternoon lull, there was always plenty of room to spread out on the red leather banquettes surrounded by green leafy palms. Rani especially liked the ferns sitting in an unused bath at the back of the cafe, their frilly tendrils relentlessly bowing up and down.

She was grateful to find the cafe empty save for a woman immersed in a paperback, drinking coffee at a small table. Rani ordered a latte and a strawberry crème-pâtissière tart. She took her order number, a white card with a six printed on it, clipped onto a wire stalk. Then she picked out and shoehorned herself into the farthest table of three in the corner of a long banquette, figuring that if anyone else came along, there was enough space for them to sit without having to squeeze by. She threw down her purse and the door keys, and they both bounced a little down the table, landing about a metre away from her. As she regarded the keys and the purse, the thought crossed her mind that this was not her home and she should not throw around her belongings. She thought of what her mother would say about being tidy, but left them there all the same.

Just then, a couple entered the cafe. They walked past the counter, thinking perhaps that there was table service. He was black and she was white. They were dressed casually, he carried a book and she had a fabric tote slung over her shoulder, branded with the name of a bookshop chain. They were talking animatedly, laughing. Inside Rani smiled; it was so nice to see people enjoying themselves, nice to see people in love. Rani especially liked to see blended couples. Her own partner was white and she was brown.

Immediately, she reached out for her keys and purse, embarrassed that they would think her slovenly. Her mother had always told her that she should be respectful of others, and so she pulled her property back to herself hastily.

The man and woman were stood some five metres away. The black man watched Rani’s hand reach out for her belongings, and he took his girlfriend’s hand and pulled her back. ‘I’m not eating here,’ he said. The woman hadn’t seen what had just happened. She was perplexed and followed her partner out. They would have the conversation outside the cafe, Rani knew this.

Rani felt distressed and, more than this, she felt the man’s distress. She didn’t know if she should run after them. It was difficult to get out from inside the banquette because, in trying not to inconvenience anyone, she had lodged herself into a tight corner. She was also halfway through the cake and wondered, if she rushed out, well, she hadn’t paid, and would the cafe owner run after her or ring the police? And, how would she start the conversation even if she caught them? In recognising what the man was thinking, would it sound like she was defending herself? How did one articulate the layers of history and anguish that she felt now ringing in his head – and in hers?

Rani was mortified. She felt misunderstood. She felt the rawness of the man’s wound, his pain and anger, and her own. And she felt a connection, a shared knowledge, that, had she been able to catch them at the door, she would never have been able to articulate. How do these feelings translate into words? She wondered.

It came back to her. At university, in freshers’ week, when her new neighbour said, ‘Hey, I thought you were the cleaner’. And again at her first job, in book publishing, when working late to show her commitment, the company’s managing director had walked past and said that same phrase, and laughed loudly, walking out of the office with his briefcase.

She remembered being in a department store at Christmas; she was twelve, and struggling with some gifts in the queue. Unable to move, she couldn’t see what was happening behind or around her. Then a lady pushed her and said, ‘You Indians don’t know how to queue’. Rani had felt misunderstood. She had been brought up to be polite, to have manners. She had always believed she was an ambassador for her little family unit, and that always thinking of how others perceive you, always being kind and humble, would get you through. Her mother had always said to her, ‘You don’t know anyone else’s story, always give them the benefit of the doubt. Always trust.’

She knew that she was the daughter of immigrants. When Enoch Powell made his infamous ‘rivers of blood’ speech, room-to-let and job adverts still read ‘no blacks, no Asians, no Irish’, and still her mother wore a sari every day when she went out shopping or to work. Rani remembered too, that when she was four she didn’t go to school for two weeks, because the National Front and the ‘skinheads’ were beating up Asians in the street. Then, one day, the headmistress of her school came round and said it was time for her to go back.

And she recalled still, that same year, at Christmas, they had been told to bring in their own plates for the school Christmas party – in Rani’s house, meal plates were the size of proper dinner plates, because in Indian households, you ate everything off the one plate, even if, as a child, you had small portions. When her teacher had seen the plate Rani had offered up to be put aside for the school Christmas lunch, the teacher had called her a greedy child. Rani was four, and she was tiny, a polite child; an ambassador for her family, she had thought.

Sat in the Hampstead café, Rani looked at Anthony, who was hovering at her table and wondered if she was going to able to finish the half-eaten fruit tart. On her visit to Israel with Karl, as a teenager, she would often be mistaken for a local, until once, when they had ventured deep into a quiet residential neighbourhood, a guy on the street stopped her and, in Hebrew, asked her for the time. She had not forgotten how his face paled and drained, when she had responded in English. In Israel, they were in the midst of the first intifada, everyone was ‘alert’, everyone was ‘paranoid’, and this boy had looked as if his entire world had been questioned in that one English utterance. How could he have read her so wrong?

Rani was still thinking about the man and the woman who had left the cafe. Feelings smacked around inside of her like fish caught in nets.

It came back, her father arriving home from hospital, his arm and fingers swaddled in a creamy white cloth trussed up in a sling. When the National Front was throwing stones at brown and black people, chasing them into alleys and breaking their bones, her father was working at an engineering firm, manufacturing industrial steel tubes; tubes which had rims the thickness of a man’s wrist, used in exploration and drillings shafts. Her father had decided that he wanted to stand to be the Union representative. He had represented workers and worked for a political party in Delhi. He put together his manifesto, he began to canvas the men at the plant; he stood up in the lunch-breaks and spoke about equal rights, labour laws and good working practice.  It became clear, through whispers and nudges, that many of the white men at the plant didn’t want him to stand. There were the eggs thrown at his front door, the telephone ringing every hour at home with no one at the end of the receiver; his son arriving home late, nose bloody, schoolbag missing.

It was too late to run after the couple who would have found another, more welcoming place by now, she thought. Rani began to trace her finger through white sugar grains that have spilled onto the tabletop. Perhaps he would not forget Rani nor this experience.

Rani reminded herself that the fear of being misunderstood, being misread, stalks all of us; not just immigrants like her father. It was, she thought, like trying on made-to-measure garments that have been tailored for someone bigger, smaller, rounder, thinner than you could ever hope to be.

She pondered why the afternoon had so permeated her body. She knew it was because she didn’t actually think about racism at all. She felt it, like a searing brand on her forehead when it happened to her or to someone she knew, and because all the words she has to say would cough out incomprehensibly if she tried, all she can do is try to breathe out the messy anguish from her jellied brain.

Rani noticed her iPhone suddenly light up, a text message flashed across the fascia. She saw the date and the time come to life; today was 25th January. She’d read an article that morning about the date. Twenty-five years since Eric Cantona, having been red-carded in the second half, had walked off the pitch at Selhurst Park and kung-fu kicked a National Front hooligan who had hurled racist abuse at him. She remembered hearing about that kick the first time round. It divided opinion. Yet, this one act had done more to raise awareness of racism in football than any other incident in the game, ever. She was on his side. That’s what Rani wanted to run out and tell the man walking away from Jakob’s cafe.

She looked at the white china plate, the remaining half of her tart had fallen apart, strawberry leaking its juice around the pastry case, its earlier appeal gone. The coffee, half-drunk, had a creamy brown skin. She nodded at Anthony and attempted a smile as he cleared away both on a brown plastic tray. From where she was sitting, she could see the door of the cafe. It was open and a group of school-kids are shuffling in; uniform shirts half tucked-in, ties askew, girls and boys, white and brown faces.

 

Image © Daniela Monza

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Displayed upright on my desk, as if it were a work of art or a rare book, is a cheap one-subject notebook with men playing football on its cover. I somehow ended up with it in a back-to-school haul in 1995. In third grade, I didn’t know the rules of football—and I still don’t—but I found the cover artwork irresistible: the players in red-and-white and gray-and-blue team colors popping off the green fieldscape, the classic, reassuring, masculine Americana sensibility. A little closeted gay boy, I was both petrified of all football fields yet taken in by this vision of boyishness as a style. The idea of football somehow enchanted me and horrified me. For 25 years, I’ve held onto that notebook, and now I consider it a haunted, prized possession, a weird, alluring ghost.

This is how I consumed The Bright Lands, John Fram’s savage, gorgeous debut novel about football, Texas, queer men, and their secrets: in three wild sittings, alternately gazing up at the specter of football in my own bedroom. Fram presents football as a queer phantom, a menacing force that pervades—invades—the outward heteronormative peace of Bentley, Texas. What initially looks like the picture of healthy teenage masculinity becomes a violence so dark it threatens to eliminate anyone who steps in its way. The Bright Lands is a surprising, disturbing, illuminating picture of American manhood.

Recently, I had the pleasure of talking to Fram about the queerness of football, Southern white hypocrisy, and the sometimes bleak, sometimes galvanizing cynicism of Gen Z.

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Logan Scherer: On its surface, The Bright Lands is a thriller with the disappearance of a small-town Texas high school’s star quarterback launching the novel’s increasingly unsettling events. As the off-kilter, subtly disturbing threats of this place seep into the reader’s consciousness, it becomes clear that there aren’t just sinister things going on in this town, that the novel itself is uncovering deeper truths about queer sexuality and repression. What made you turn to Texas football as a site for thinking about repressed sexuality?

It baffled me how a sport this homoerotic would be the centerpiece of all culture in Texas, a state that’s so afraid of queerness just crossing your legs the wrong way can get you crippled. 

John Fram: God, I wish I had a smarter answer to this, but ever since I was young I was fascinated by football because it was so damn erotic. It’s a tug of war between men in the best shape of their life, all of it punctuated by bodily collision and fueled by an intense, private energy on the field that us spectators see only flashes of in our seats. Even as a kid, it baffled me how a sport this homoerotic would be the centerpiece of all culture in Texas, a state that’s so afraid of queerness just crossing your legs the wrong way can get you crippled. 

I knew for a long time that I wanted to write a suspense novel with a queer hero at its heart, if only to fill a hole on my bookshelf where no such novel existed. However, in the course of writing it, I discovered that Joel, my protagonist, found the sport equally confounding. By allowing his point of view to inform the book—which is to say, by allowing a queer male gaze to notice the things most people choose to ignore about the sport—a wealth of material just started to bubble up.

LS: Which texts influenced you most—in both your setting up of this football backdrop and then total reimagining of it?

JF: If we’re talking about specific texts, H. G. Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights occupies a curious place in the imagination. While it’s primarily remembered as the basis for a (very good) soap opera, the book is actually a very angry autopsy of a toxic system and its traumatic effect on young men. The feature film adaptation comes closer to capturing some of this ambivalence, but nothing can quite prepare you for the rage that steams off the page. Bissinger clearly loves the boys at the center of his story, and the way the institution of the Permian Panthers sets them up and knocks them down is one of the great tragic arcs in American sports writing. 

So that was probably the most important text, in the sense that it validated my suspicions about the sadness and waste that seemed to haunt the teams where I grew up. Past that, I pulled on all sorts of Americana, both recent and older, always trying to capture that feeling of being trapped in a tiny town with too much sky: The Killers’ Hot Fuss, everything from Explosions in the Sky, and long hours with the great country stars of the last generation. Name me a better embodiment of Southern sadness and white hypocrisy than Kenny Rogers. I’ll wait.  

LS: Okay, you’ll definitely be waiting forever! I want to talk about the people of Bentley, Texas. Your novel has many memorable, nuanced characters who satisfy and totally subvert the expectations readers might have of the football-obsessed, demon-ridden townies, but the central character is Joel, a gay man who grew up in Bentley, moved away to Manhattan after being shamed for his sexuality, and now must come back to rescue his brother. How did you create Joel? 

JF: As I mentioned earlier, I’d always wanted to write a queer hero, and I realized that my memories of growing up in Texas could serve me plenty of material. However, I didn’t want to write an auto-novel, mostly because I’m not as smart as Rachel Cusk or Garth Greenwell and not as vapid as, well—you know who I’m talking about.

I wanted to write a suspense novel with a queer hero at its heart, if only to fill a hole on my bookshelf where no such novel existed.

So in terms of pure craft, I started giving Joel character traits that were the opposite of me. When I was writing this book, I was dangerously poor, so I made Joel comically rich. Because I never really had the money to cultivate a body, I gave Joel an Equinox membership and the chest to prove it. I found that by giving Joel just a touch of the Instagram life, I could get to something honest in him that I’d finally figured out about the glossy men who inspired him: he’s doing his best, just like the rest of us. By sinking him into an increasingly dangerous situation, he could turn all of the ambition and intellect necessary to cultivate a boutique New York existence onto a tiny town with lots of secrets. 

Of course, being who he is, he’s naive enough to think he can handle what he’ll find. 

LS: Your book at times feels hardboiled, revealing (no spoilers) a violent undercurrent of this strange small town, but amidst that violence is a tenderness that often moved me. There are so many heart-wrenching revelations around the frustration and tragic impossibility of queer male relationships in a rural place like Bentley. “Shame and love, while one might breed the other, could never truly be felt at the same time,” you write. For all its violence, to what extent, if any, is your book actually about love—failed, doomed, unreciprocated (or unreciprocable) love? Is there any possibility for happy queer love in Bentley, Texas?

JF: To give you a short answer: no, I don’t think it is. Bentley is (perhaps literally) rotten to the core, but it’s no different than plenty of places in this country. Queer love terrifies much of this country because it’s demonstrable proof that the old modes of living—wives under their husbands, childrens subsumed by their parents, whites over everyone else—can be broken and done without. 

Of course, certain people in Bentley, like everywhere else, recognize the way their neighbors would be mortified if they discovered who they are, so they hide their need. We die without contact, without honest connection; even a repressed queer person will search for an accidental brush with a nice arm, a drunken lull where the borders get blurry. So often, when we’re in the closet, this hunger for tenderness can quickly spill over into predation.

LS: So is escape the only option for people like Joel? 

While there’s a room for a certain type of homosexual man in rural America, he’s often expected to be a cartoon, to play up his queerness until he is so camp he is so alien, that he poses no tangible threat to that society.

JF: I think it is, yes. While there’s a room for a certain type of homosexual man in rural America, he’s often expected to be a cartoon, to play up his queerness until he is so camp he is so alien, so clearly differentiated from the society at large, that he poses no tangible threat to that society. Not that queens shouldn’t live their fantasy! But someone like Joel—someone who slips along the spectrum of sexuality—is too dangerous to ever find acceptance there. 

It’s funny, in researching this book, I followed the Instagram accounts and YouTube vlogs of a good two dozen football playing kids in Texas and discovered that Gen Z is both much savvier than us Millennials ever were and also far more cynical. Many of them are already worrying about money, hustling for opportunities, making plans and talking like characters in a rap (though it was a little disconcerting to speak with these same kids and realize that they were far from woke.) I think there’s something tragic about this: we Millenials at least had the pleasure of hoping for something great—the election of a black man, the curbing of the banks, a re-imagining of our role in the world—only to watch all of that be crushed.

These Gen Z kids, they know better. After growing up in the wake of the financial collapse, they know they’re on their own. It was fun to see the way that infusion of cynicism darkened my characters and gave everything in the text a nice noir edge, but man—I wish they weren’t so fucked. 

LS: Where—if anywhere—can this cynicism take us?

JF: I mean, zooming out a little, I think we need to be honest about the fact that our current political crisis is deeper than some spat about expanding Obamacare or asking citizens not to own military-grade weaponry. Large swathes of this country are still deeply in shock over a simple fact: a black man—the single most disposable type commodity in American history—was raised up over their white heads to become President of a country founded on slavery. I was in Waco, Texas on the day President Obama was elected and I remember the way memes of old lynchings were being passed around as palliatives.  

The immense upheaval since President Obama’s election is not some temporary indigestion. His election showed America that the old modes aren’t just fragile, but actively crumbling. This is terrifying to whites—especially poor whites—because they understand, perhaps better than anyone, that capitalism is a zero-sum game. This thought is anathema to liberals, but you simply can’t advance the economic and cultural interests of one group without circumscribing those of others. The old system was the only way these poor whites felt they could maintain a toe-hold in our society, and with that system crumbling, well: it’s a disaster for them, and they’re making sure it’s a disaster for us.

The post A Suspense Novel About the Queerness of American Football appeared first on Electric Literature.