WRITING |

Recent

America’s Ancestry Craze, on what we’re seeking when we search for our ancestors, for Harper’s

A Doubter in the Holy Land, on visiting Jerusalem and fearing a conversion like the one my mother once had, for the New York Times Magazine

Oy Vey, Christian Soldiers, on evangelicals’ Bar Mitzvahs, for the New York Times Magazine

Review of Nick Bilton’s Hatching Twitter, a history of the tweet and its creators, for the technology issue of the New York Times Book Review.

Cleaning Up on Christmas, on spending the holiday alone at my father’s place while visiting him, at Medium

Nobody’s Stranger, a Miami noir love story (Part One and Part Two), at Medium

Are You Trapped in a Muriel Spark Novel?, a list of clues, for The Toast

Joan Didion, profiled for Humanities (more)

My teeny NYT One-Page Magazine columns, in the New York Times Magazine

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Perennials

When the Flock Changed, novel-in-progress excerpt and Narrative Prize winner

The Rapture Meets My 40th Birthday, essay at Awl

Remembering Harry Crews, my former teacher, at Awl, and making his fried rattlesnake for the New York Times Magazine

Portrait of My Father, a recollection at Granta

Regarding the Insurance Defense Attorney, short story in Eyeshot and winner of the 2004 Irwin and Alice Stark Short Fiction Award

Conversations You Have at Twenty, essay, anthologized in Love is a Four-Letter Word, winner Second Prize, 2008 Narrative Love Story Contest, shortlisted in Best American Nonrequired Reading 2009

My Son Went to Heaven, and All I Got Was a No. 1 Best Seller, essay on Heaven is for Real, fundamentalism, and near-death experiences, for the New York Times Magazine

Ode to an Enchanted Hotel: My rendezvous with the haunted Biltmore, for Oxford American

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Essays, Opinions, and Interviews

On the Sunshine State and T.D. Allman’s scathing history of it, for Bookforum (print only)

Better Boundaries with Muriel Spark, at Awl

Another Thing to Sort of Pin on David Foster Wallace, for the New York Times Magazine

Some Company For Slow Writers, at Tin House

For Vassar or for Poorer, on the timelessness of Mary McCarthy’s The Group, for Bookforum

Doubt: A Syllabus, at Bookforum

Alison Bechdel: The Balancing Act, interview at Barnes & Noble Review

A Novel, Not a Memoir, essay (clarified here) at the LA Times

On Joan Didion’s Blue Nights, at Barnes & Noble Review

What Would Jesus Buy?, at Bookforum

Local Twitter Slang, And All That Jawn, at Awl

On Molly Crabapple’s “Altarpieces to the Revolution,” at The New Republic

Wave of the Future, my conversation with Chang Rae Lee about his latest novel, On Such a Full Sea, for Barnes & Noble Review

Conflict, from Warzones to Brownstones, a talk with Masha Hamilton for The Rumpus

Mess Up Your Mind, anthologized (print only) in What My Mother Gave Me

On the unparalleled Muriel Spark, at Barnes & Noble Review

When Your Shrink Dies: A Talk with Emma Forrest about Your Voice in My Head, at Awl

A Talk with Philip Connors about Fire Season, at The Paris Review Daily

Sarah Palin’s Planet Earth and the End Times and Legs, Scenery, and Amens, at Awl

Mat Johnson’s Pym: my choice for the 2012 Pulitzer, in the New York Times Magazine

After the Affair: On Jean Rhys and Ford Maddox Ford, correspondence with Alexander Chee at Granta

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Miscellany

Football and Nachos, the Texan Way, at Awl

Dear Abby, When I Was a Young Man, my (mortifying teenage) Tender is the Night fan fiction, at Awl

Culture Diary for the Paris Review Daily (part 2)

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Selected Older Fiction and Essays

Luke, fiction in storySouth, published 2002

Wartime in Williamsburg, essay in Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, published 2003

Post-Extraction, fiction in Swink, published 2004

Send Up the Clowns, in The American Prospect, published 2006

Confessions of a Cradle Robber, essay in When I Was a Loser, published 2007

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Selected Reviews and Appreciations

Appreciation of Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers, at NPR, and other contributions to NPR’s Books We Like

Review of Adam Levin’s The Instructions, at Barnes & Noble Review

Review of A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book, at Barnes & Noble Review

Review of Blake Bailey’s Cheever: A Life, at Barnes & Noble Review

Review of Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs, at Barnes & Noble Review

Review of Claire Keegan’s Walk the Blue Fields, in The New York Times Book Review

Review of C.E. Morgan’s All the Living, at The Second Pass

Review of Alan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader, in the LA Times Book Review

Review of Lilian Pizzichini’s The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys, at The Second Pass

Review of Richard Price’s Lush Life, in the Boston Globe

Review of Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project, in The Boston Globe

Review of Cate Kennedy’s Dark Roots, in the New York Times Book Review

Review of Ellen Litman’s The Last Chicken in America, in the NY Times Book Review

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The Begats

I’m increasingly interested in the prominence of household deities, or some kind of ancestor worship, in the history of almost every place and every religion — even Western Europe before medieval Christianity began to supplant ancestors with saints.

Household gods appear several times in the Old Testament. In Genesis Rachel steals her father’s household gods as she, her husband, Jacob, and her sister (and sister wife), Leah, flee her father Laban’s house. Jacob has spent many years in virtual servitude to Laban, and received little to show for it apart from one wife he wanted and one wife he did not particularly want. Laban comes after the caravan and searches it for his household gods, but Rachel, who’s sitting on the idols, says she can’t dismount from her camel because she has her period.

Many argumentative gymnastics have been performed over time in trying to reconcile this passage with Judeo-Christian monotheism but Susannah Rutherglen argues that Rachel took the idols for the most logical reason: they represent a connection to her ancestors, to her father and his forebears, blood relatives she’s leaving behind.

The family packs hastily while Laban is away, shearing his sheep. There must be a great deal of confusion, panic, and prevailing fear that the paterfamilias will suddenly return and discover their preparations.

For Rachel and Leah, the fear is deeper: they are suddenly leaving their home forever, going away to a place they have never seen. They pack essential things. Rachel seizes her father’s teraphim, the gods of the hearth, of the home she knows and with which she has bonds of family and domestic ritual. These gods probably represent the figures of Laban’s ancestors.

She conceals them from Jacob for several potential reasons. First, she has done something instinctual, for her own security and comfort, which Jacob has not explicitly instructed her to do. Second, such a theft, if discovered by Laban, would thwart the escape and lead to unspecified dire punishments. Finally and most importantly, the gods are Laban’s possessions, and they are probably deities representing the worship of ancestors; they thus run exactly counter to all of Jacob’s efforts to differentiate his things and his family from Laban’s. For the panicked Rachel, probably no single reason takes precedence; some uncertain combination of these motives conspires to make her conceal the teraphim.

Three days later, Laban finds Jacob and his convoy. He immediately shows his concern to lie more with the sudden breach of a family bond than with the fact of Jacob’s defiance. “Why did you not permit me to kiss my sons and my daughters farewell?” he asks (31:28). Interestingly, he seems to accept the reasoning behind Jacob’s departure: “And now you have gone away because you longed greatly for your father’s house” (30)—he understands the pull of the father because he himself is attempting to exert that pull. And he is constrained from doing violence to Jacob by a command from God: “It is in my power to do you harm, but the God of your father spoke to me last night, saying, ‘Take heed that you speak to Jacob, neither good nor bad’” (29). Laban has only one way of reclaiming his family, and that is by proving Jacob a thief of objects explicitly belonging to the house of Laban: the teraphim.

It is hard to say why Rachel conceals the teraphim by claiming to be menstruating; perhaps just because the ruse is ingenious, and because it works. I do not think it a coincidence, though, that Rachel’s trick involves her own blood-the one link to Laban that Jacob cannot sever. The objects and symbolism of family lineage are too strong here to be fortuitous: a man speaking to his blood daughter, who is about to go far away from him; the daughter, fertile because she is menstruating, the mother of the twelve tribes of Israel; her blood, which is half her father’s, concealing objects of reverence for one’s ancestors. It is difficult to imagine a more potent convergence of images centering on Rachel’s inextricable bond to the hearth and lineage of Laban, from whom she is about to be irrevocably separated.

The image above is of Chagall’s “Rachel Hides Her Father’s Household Gods,” from his series of Biblical lithographs.
01/21/15