Cinemorphosis

Tag: book-reviews

  • The First 48 and the Search for Truth

    The First 48 and the Search for Truth

    The finest television dramas I have seen over the last twenty years have all revolved around crime. The Wire. Breaking Bad. Better Call Saul. Justified. Fargo. Rectify. That last series remains criminally overlooked. It deserves to stand beside the others in television’s pantheon. In my view, it is one of the greatest shows ever made.

    What these crime dramas share is not merely murder, drug trafficking, corruption, or law enforcement. They share a darker and more unsettling premise: human beings are not naturally reasonable creatures. Left to our own devices, we are capable of astonishing selfishness, cruelty, irrationality, and self-destruction. We require guardrails—family, community, moral codes, social expectations, religion, friendship, duty—to keep us from driving straight into the ditch. Remove those restraints and entropy takes over. The result is a Bosch painting come to life: chaos, degradation, madness, and suffering spreading outward from a single bad decision.

    Crime stories force writers to confront the largest questions human beings can ask. What is justice? Can evil be redeemed? How much corruption can a person tolerate before becoming corrupted himself? Is there a point of no return? How do you preserve your sanity after staring directly into the abyss? How do you maintain faith in the value of human life when surrounded by sociopaths who treat other people as disposable objects?

    Given my immersion in fictional crime, perhaps it was inevitable that I would eventually tumble down the true-crime rabbit hole. Over the past year, I have consumed an embarrassing number of crime documentaries and docuseries. Among them, The First 48 stands apart.

    The premise is simple: homicide detectives in cities such as Atlanta, Tulsa, Miami, Memphis, New Orleans, Cleveland, Minneapolis, Dallas, and Kansas City race against the clock to solve murders during the critical first forty-eight hours after a killing. Some suspects are criminal masterminds. Most are not. Many possess the strategic sophistication of a raccoon trapped in a garbage can.

    The detectives, meanwhile, perform a strange form of civic triage. They comfort grieving families. They persuade reluctant witnesses. They canvas neighborhoods. They interrogate suspects. They sift through surveillance footage. They survive on cold pizza, convenience-store coffee, and whatever fragments of sleep they can steal before the next phone call drags them back into the darkness.

    What strikes me most about these shows is not violence.

    It is truth.

    More precisely, the absence of it.

    Every case begins buried beneath layers of deception. Witnesses lie. Suspects lie. Friends lie. Family members lie. People lie reflexively, habitually, and often for no discernible reason. The default setting seems to be: conceal, evade, distort, deny.

    A detective asks a simple question.

    The witness responds as if he has been asked to surrender state secrets.

    Only when the evidence becomes overwhelming—when the walls close in and every escape route has been blocked—does the truth begin to emerge.

    Watching these detectives, I am struck by the almost spiritual nature of their work. In a world thick with confusion, self-interest, manipulation, and darkness, they devote enormous portions of their lives to pursuing a single objective: finding out what actually happened.

    They sacrifice evenings with their families. They sacrifice sleep. They sacrifice peace of mind. Day after day, they stare directly into humanity’s ugliest impulses and insist that the truth be uncovered, that the dead be given a voice, and that justice be given a chance.

    Perhaps that is why crime stories continue to hold my attention while so much other television feels disposable. The stakes are existential. The conflict is ancient. Truth versus deception. Light versus darkness. Order versus entropy.

    Once you become absorbed in that struggle, it becomes difficult to care very much about who got voted off the island.

  • The Astrology Queen and the Ghost Daughter

    The Astrology Queen and the Ghost Daughter

    In Rachel Syme’s “The Star-Crossed Recluse Who Brought Astrology to the Masses,” she examines the improbable rise of Linda Goodman, the woman who transformed astrology from a fringe curiosity into a cultural phenomenon. Before Goodman, astrology occupied the margins of American life, an embarrassing diversion for eccentrics and mystics. After Goodman, it became mainstream entertainment, a cosmic personality test for the masses. Her books sold tens of millions of copies by offering readers an irresistible promise: the universe had you in mind. Your zodiac sign explained your personality, your appearance, your virtues, your flaws, your romantic prospects, and perhaps even your destiny. Goodman didn’t merely sell astrology. She sold the comforting idea that the stars were paying attention.

    Syme argues that the strangeness of Goodman’s life is captured beautifully in Colurmey Ann LaFaive’s biography Follow the Signs: Searching for Linda Goodman, America’s Forgotten Astrology Queen. LaFaive first encountered Goodman as a teenager and adored her books. Yet the deeper she dug into her subject’s life, the more Goodman resisted easy admiration. She was not merely eccentric but genuinely perplexing. An oddball visionary, a successful entrepreneur, a seeker, and at times a deeply troubled woman, Goodman inhabited a reality in which ordinary boundaries between belief and fantasy seemed remarkably porous. Nowhere was this more evident than in her refusal to accept the death of her daughter Sally. Although authorities ruled the death a suicide, Goodman became convinced that her daughter remained alive somewhere in the world. Whatever fate had befallen the body found in the apartment, Goodman believed it belonged to someone else. The real Sally, she insisted, was still out there.

    Born Mary Alice Kemery in Morgantown, West Virginia, Goodman displayed an appetite for the mystical from an early age. She embraced occult ideas with enthusiasm, believing in fairies, druids, hidden wisdom, and unseen dimensions. After marrying, having two children, and divorcing, she supported herself as a single mother by hosting a radio program called Love Letters from Linda. There she read letters from soldiers separated from their loved ones and soothed listeners with a voice that projected warmth, reassurance, and hope. Long before she became an astrology celebrity, Goodman had already discovered a gift that would define her career: the ability to comfort anxious people.

    Her conversion to astrology occurred during her second marriage after reading a book on the subject. The experience altered the trajectory of her life. Goodman immersed herself in astrology, teaching herself how to construct charts and interpret celestial patterns. She began offering consultations in Manhattan, and demand for her services steadily grew. Then, in the late 1960s, she published Linda Goodman’s Sun Signs. The book became a runaway bestseller and effectively launched mainstream astrology into American popular culture. Goodman had discovered a formula as powerful as it was profitable: tell people that the cosmos has a special explanation for who they are, and they will eagerly listen.

    Success, however, did not bring stability. After divorcing her second husband and moving to Cripple Creek, Colorado, Goodman received the devastating news of Sally’s death in Manhattan. From that moment forward, her life took on the quality of a fever dream. Faced with a suicide note and evidence that convinced everyone else, Goodman remained unmoved. The body was not Sally’s, she insisted, but a double. Dreams convinced her she alone understood the truth. She wandered Manhattan in a state of near delirium, sleeping on the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral and pleading with detectives to reopen the case. Eventually she hired a man claiming to be a former CIA agent and pursued leads in Maine, where Sally had once acted. The investigation grew increasingly bizarre, culminating in confrontations with Sally’s former associates and threats designed to silence anyone who questioned Goodman’s theory.

    It is here that LaFaive’s biography becomes most compelling. Rather than offering a reverential portrait of a beloved cultural icon, she confronts the contradictions that made Goodman both fascinating and troubling. Goodman was capable of extraordinary intuition and extraordinary self-deception. She brought comfort to millions while remaining unable to accept devastating truths in her own life. LaFaive ultimately concludes that her book is, in some sense, a failure because she could not construct a neat, unified theory of Linda Goodman. Yet Syme suggests that this failure is precisely what makes the biography succeed. Goodman remains elusive, contradictory, and mysterious. She emerges not as a saint, a fraud, or a visionary, but as something more interesting: a deeply human figure whose life, like the constellations she loved to interpret, resists being connected into a perfectly coherent pattern.

  • The Gospel According to Fran Lebowitz

    The Gospel According to Fran Lebowitz

    To stay young, I don’t just need a healthy body—I need a mind that isn’t turning into attic storage. My role model in this department is Fran Lebowitz, the humorist who travels the world armed with nothing but her brutally honest intelligence. Her worldview is diamond-cut: she adores New York and despises technology. She refuses to drive a car, touch a smartphone, or even acknowledge a laptop’s existence. Writer’s block? She treats it like a houseguest who overstays for a few decades. Talking is her chosen weapon, so potent that publishing books has become optional.

    Fran is an atheist—not the timid, hedging kind, but a certifiably confident one. She has no worries about the soul, no anxieties about the afterlife, no guilt about her misanthropy. Her biggest spiritual concern is locating a decent bagel.

    Her lack of religiosity hasn’t hindered her friendship with Martin Scorsese, the Catholic titan of cinema. They linger in New York together, trading stories about the old city and reveling in their shared devotion to art—and to complaining eloquently about everything else.

    My mind would be far less cluttered if I possessed Fran’s secular serenity, but I’m built more like Scorsese. I’m a tormented soul, forever plunging into questions about sacrifice, guilt, depravity, and redemption. I couldn’t live like Fran even with a decade of training. I’m hopelessly Marty. But at least I can imagine that if I ever met Fran, she wouldn’t dismiss me for my melancholic leanings. She might dismiss me for my mediocrity or any bland remark that escaped my mouth, but at least her reasons would be earthly.

    To spend an hour at dinner listening to Fran Lebowitz would be a balm—more philosophically satisfying than any bestselling thinker’s 700-page tome. It will never happen, of course. But fortunately, I can find Fran Lebowitz on YouTube. 

  • French Kiss and the Death of Romance: When Below Deck Became a Funeral

    French Kiss and the Death of Romance: When Below Deck Became a Funeral

    Lionel Richie’s memoir Truly apparently shocked a reviewer who couldn’t fathom how a man who wrote love ballads for The Commodores and crooned “Hello” into the hearts of millions might secretly doubt the existence of love. If the critic wants evidence, there’s no need to psychoanalyze Lionel; just watch the single most soul-evaporating hour of television I’ve ever endured: Below Deck Mediterranean, Season 10, Episode 8—“French Kiss.”

    Normally I treat Below Deck like a sushi boat of human dysfunction: the ostentation, the vanity, the moral anemia. It’s a circus, and I laugh at the performers. But this episode wasn’t a circus. It was a funeral for romance. The premise is already laughable: a 47-year-old bachelor named Joe “auditions” several women to be his wife. He speaks to them like he’s onboarding interns at a failing startup. He uses phrases like “I need your input” and “I’m sorry you find this challenging,” as though he’s gently disciplining HR for mishandling toner orders.

    The beloved stewardess Aesha started off as the show’s only beacon of naive hope. She snacks on popcorn and chirps, “Watching people find love before my eyes—how could I be anything but happy?” By midpoint, that optimism has withered. She, like the viewer, recognizes the obvious: there is no love—only a clumsy negotiation between bored women and a man who reeks of conditional stock options.

    The contestants have the haunted eyes of veterans who’ve survived multiple seasons of “influencer courtship.” They aren’t seeking affection; they’re calculating ROI. Joe himself looks twenty years older than his claimed 47. He carries the aesthetic of a divorced CFO who hasn’t smiled sincerely since the recession. He is oily without passion, exhausted without wisdom—exactly the kind of man who believes communication is a spreadsheet. Instead of a heartbeat, he has a lexicon of “deliverables.”

    His problem, though, isn’t age or looks—it’s the dead chill of someone who sold his soul years ago and is now smug about the deal. He assumes that murmuring corporate jargon at the women like an AI trained on LinkedIn posts will hypnotize them into matrimony. It doesn’t. They recoil. They see a man who mistakes “calm negotiation” for charisma, and professionalism for intimacy.

    Bravo should have buried this episode in a vault. It is the franchise’s Everest of bad judgment. Aesha says as much near the end, visibly deflated, calling the whole experiment depressing. And then comes the exit: Joe limps away from the yacht, placing an arm around one contestant who tolerates him the way one tolerates a damp dog during a neighborhood walk. The moment the cameras cut, you know she’ll ghost him with the velocity of a SpaceX launch.

    If you adore Lionel Richie but want to taste the sour, loveless void that haunts his darker thoughts, skip the therapy and watch “French Kiss.” Romance will die before your eyes, and you’ll understand exactly why a man who wrote “Endless Love” now wonders whether love exists at all.

  • What True Crime Teaches That Fiction Won’t

    What True Crime Teaches That Fiction Won’t

    For the past few months, I’ve been devouring true crime docuseries with tireless fascination. The more I watch, the deeper my appetite grows—not for gore, but for the raw human stories that unspool behind every case. There is, of course, a price for such voyeurism. Nearly every episode revisits the same dark origins: homes scarred by domestic abuse, children numbed by neglect, and adults who turn to drugs and alcohol to quiet the pain. Whole worlds of criminality form around these wounds—ecosystems where cruelty becomes normal, even rational.

    Then there’s law enforcement. Most detectives and officers I see in these stories are decent, sharp-minded people pursuing justice through an endless fog of human wreckage. They face so much depravity that it exacts a psychic toll. They carry the collective sorrow of others, walking the earth with hearts cracked open by everything they’ve witnessed.

    There’s a strange repetition to these lives of crime—an awful sameness—but also a singular fingerprint on each story. Some criminals are narcissists, intoxicated by their own chaos. Others are the broken offspring of violence, haunted by demons they now unleash on others. Many strike out in panic, wielding a mallet where a scalpel would have sufficed.

    I’m reminded of Tolstoy’s line: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” I’d transpose it this way: All paths to decency share a pattern—discipline, love, structure—but the paths to ruin twist in countless variations, each marked by a wound that never healed.

    This is what keeps me watching. Too many fictionalized crime dramas can’t resist the tidy seduction of redemption—some tearful confession, some sentimental coda of forgiveness. True crime spares me that. It denies me comfort. No background music softens the horror, no clever dialogue redeems it. These stories show the human condition not as we wish it to be but as it is: excruciating, broken, and endlessly complex.

    In that sense, I find myself siding less with Steven Pinker’s optimism and more with Robert Kaplan’s realism. Pinker argues that humanity is improving—that violence is receding and irrational behavior is on the decline. Kaplan, in Wasteland: A World in Permanent Crisis, sees something else entirely: that the struggle between good and evil is eternal, and evil often enjoys the advantage because it fights without restraint and acts as if it has nothing to lose. Kaplan isn’t a pessimist. He’s a realist.

    If I’m to prepare for life, I’d rather confront the world as Kaplan does—without illusion, without sentimentality, without anesthetic. Pinker’s optimism feels like comfort food for the mind. Kaplan, like true crime, gives me the bitter taste of reality—and that’s the kind of nourishment that lasts.

  • Zosia Mamet and My Personal Reading Revival

    Zosia Mamet and My Personal Reading Revival

    It’s rare that I fall in love with books these days, but when it happens, I’m grateful because reading reminds me of my glory days, the early 80s when I consumed books with ferocity, imaginative pleasure, and obligation like a bodybuilder taking protein powder and creatine. Three major factors have curtailed my reading of books: One, I’ve grown so cynical over the years that I’ve come to the belief that 99% of books are in actuality just a short story or essay with padding. An author has an intriguing idea, and they sit down with their agent and cook up a book that is mostly chicanery with a dash of substance. 

    Then three days ago, I heard actor Zosia Mamet talking about her memoir Does This Make Me Funny?, a collection of essays, with KCRW host Sam Sanders, and I was so struck by her depth of wit, intelligence, and moral perspective that I immediately bought her book, or I should say the Kindle eBook version of it. Even more rare than buying books as intellectual property, it is even rarer that I buy a hard copy of something, unless it is a kettlebell training book or a cookbook like Miyoko Schimmer’s The Vegan Creamery. 

    Getting most of my books on Kindle speaks to the second reason my reading has diminished. The physical act of reading is unpleasant. Holding the book, turning the pages, getting into a comfortable position, attenuating my eyes to the various font sizes. I find the whole thing disconcerting and unpleasant, like trying to figure out the seat positions, buttons, and levers of an unfamiliar car. The most comfortable forms of reading are either sitting at my desktop and reading the Kindle on a 27-inch screen or reading while sitting in bed with a 16-inch laptop.

    The third reason I don’t read as much is that the Internet and its attention economy have fried my brain over the decades. The attention muscles inside my cortex have atrophied to a woeful state. 

    But occasionally a rose grows out of the cracks in the cement sidewalk, and such is the case with Zosia Mamet’s memoir, as witty, deep, self-deprecating, and salient as the author speaking to Sam Sanders three days ago. Reading the memoir is to connect with someone for whom her writing voice and the core of her being are the same. The result is something distinctive and salient, something that recoils and then snaps forward to leave its literary fangs inside you. Isn’t that what writing is supposed to be about? Nabokov was like that. So was Kafka. And so is Zosia Mamet.

    I detest some confectionary celebrity memoir reeking of privilege, superfluousness, and mediocrity. None of that is in Zosia’s collection of essays. 

    As we read in Jancee Dunn’s New York Times article “At Least Zosia Mamet Can Laugh About It,” the core of her book is about her mental, physical, and spiritual health. Coming from a family that is deeply entrenched in literature and the arts is a double-edged sword with excruciating pressure to live up to superhuman expectations causing Zosia’s thorn in her side to be the constant sense that she is falling abysmally short. 

    Like the best comedia, she opts out of self-pity for humor as she does a deep dive into her anxiety, depression, body dysmorphia, anorexia, and anhedonia, and all the self-destructive behaviors she succumbed to in order to overcome these afflictions. Because she knows that body dysmorphia is a delusion that hijacks her brain, she says about herself: “I am often an unreliable narrator of my own reality.” 

    Which in a nutshell is the human condition: Can we trust ourselves or are we getting duped by our own fake narrative? 

    What tools from our emotional toolbox can we use to be more reliable? Perhaps comedy is one of them. Think of our irrational states: overcome by maudlin self-pity, vanity, and grandiosity, we spin grotesque narratives about ourselves that compel us to behave in ways that are ridiculous and often result in self-sabotage. Perhaps comedy is the antidote. Perhaps comedy distances us from our preposterous self-mythology and helps us in the arduous process of self-reinvention. That’s the sense I’m getting from Zosia Mamet’s very necessary book, a book that has no padding at all but has been made from a brilliant mind with blood, sweat, and tears. 

  • Florida Fever Dreams and Katrina Floodwaters: Future Writing Prompts I Can’t Quit

    Florida Fever Dreams and Katrina Floodwaters: Future Writing Prompts I Can’t Quit

    I work obsessively hard to develop essay prompts for my college students. When they prove effective and resonate with the students, I am gratified beyond words and will keep the prompt for perhaps too long. I have an assignment about a diet writer Rebecca Johns who in her essay “A Diet Writer’s Regrets” explores the irony and misery of gaining weight while dispensing weight-loss tips in her women’s magazine articles. Her inability to execute her own advice becomes an opportunity for my students to explore the notion of free will when it comes to weight management, especially now that GLP-1 drugs are proving that dependence on technology can be so much more reliable than aspirations toward self-agency. The students’ essays over the last four semesters have been truly engaging, revealing either their own weight-management torment or a friend or family member’s. 

    One problem, though, with an essay prompt is that as it gets used semester after semester some of the essay components, such as the counterargument-rebuttal section, start looking the same. I suspect the previously written essays become in some form or other available to the new batch of students, and for this reason, I think even the best essay prompts have a limited shelf life. 

    Another challenge with creating essay prompts is that you don’t really know how they will land with the students until you actually try it out. For example, I was very enthusiastic about my freshman composition class’s first assignment in which they write about the crisis of young men who lack a sense of belonging and purpose and how in their vulnerable state they become vulnerable to the deceptions, manipulations, and false claims of bro influencers. We studied the Liver King who is said to have made over a hundred million dollars and in his caveman cosplay, he was simply too ridiculous and grotesque for my students–all athletes–to take him seriously. He proved so absurd that whatever gravitas I was trying to squeeze out of the assignment just felt like a joke. While millions of men followed their organ-eating cult leader, my athletes were not impressed, and I felt that my essay prompt suffered for it. As a result, I doubt I’ll do that one again.

    Looking ahead, I’m thinking of Florida as less of a physical place and more of a mental fever swamp where I can explore the notion of freedom in its immature and mature incarnations. The TV comedy series It’s Florida, Man and the documentary Some Kind of Heaven about a hedonistic senior citizen home could be an effective exploration of the perils of perpetual adolescence. To avoid making the essay prompt nihilistic, I am leaning toward a contrast essay in which the students explore a more healthy kind of freedom as Cal Newport advocates in his message of “deep work”–the idea that focused work is essential to flourishing and self-fulfillment. 

    Another topic that possesses me is Hurricane Katrina, the idea that a natural disaster was made into a man-made catastrophe through neglect and reckless disregard for the people of New Orleans. This ignominious chapter in American history is a powerful window into red-lining, government corruption, and media misinformation. The riveting documentaries Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time (Hulu) and Katrina: Come Hell and High Water (Netflix) convince me that I will be exploring Hurricane Katrina next semester. 

    My challenge with Katrina is making sure the story doesn’t collapse into pure tragedy. To balance the devastation, I need to highlight the unique culture of New Orleans—the joy, the tight-knit families, the music, food, and resilience that define the city. The message I want to leave students with is that, despite catastrophe, New Orleans has a distinctive soul that continues to draw the world to its city.

    I suspect even after I retire in less than two years I will still sniff out writing prompts. Coming up with essay prompts is my addiction, and this addiction isn’t going away anytime soon. 

  • Richard Brody vs. the Algorithm: A Critic’s Lament in a Post-Print World

    Richard Brody vs. the Algorithm: A Critic’s Lament in a Post-Print World

    In his essay “In Defense of the Traditional Review,” New Yorker critic Richard Brody goes to battle against The New York Times’ editorial decision to shift arts criticism—from the long-form written review to short-form videos designed for a digital audience. It’s a cultural downgrade, Brody argues, a move from substance to performance, from sustained reflection to algorithm-choked ephemera. The move may be pitched as modernization, but Brody sees it for what it is: intellectual compromise dressed up as digital innovation.

    Brody’s stance isn’t anti-technology. He concedes we can chew gum and walk at the same time—that written essays and short videos can coexist. But his core concern is that the center of criticism is the written word. Shift the balance too far toward video, and you risk gutting that center entirely. Worse, video reviews tend to drift toward celebrity interviews and promotional puffery. The fear isn’t hypothetical. When given the choice between a serious review and a clip featuring a celebrity making faces in a car, algorithms will reward the latter. And so criticism is flattened into entertainment, and standards dissolve beneath a rising tide of digital applause.

    Brody’s alarm resonates with me, because I’ve spent the last four decades teaching college writing and watching the same cultural drift. Long books are gone. In many cases, books are gone altogether. We assign short essays because that’s what students can handle. And yet, paradoxically, I’ve never seen such sharp classroom discussions, never written better prompts, never witnessed better argumentation than I do today. The intellectual work isn’t dead—it’s just found new vessels. Brody is right to warn against cultural decay, but the answer isn’t clinging to vanished ideals. It’s adaptation with integrity. If we don’t evolve, we lose our audience. But if we adapt wisely, we might still reach them—and even challenge them—where they are.

  • The Portrait of the Artist as a Sweaty Young Man

    The Portrait of the Artist as a Sweaty Young Man

    The Portrait of the Artist as a Sweaty Young Man
    by Jeff McMahon

    Jeff McMahon was supposed to be a titan—or so he believed. His father, a man so dominant he once stole McMahon’s future mother from none other than General John Shalikashvili with the cold-blooded finesse of a Komodo dragon, radiated command like a halogen lamp. In the long shadow of that military bearing, McMahon sought to carve out his own myth—one barbell at a time.

    As a competitive Olympic weightlifter and golden-era bodybuilder in the 1970s, McMahon sculpted not just muscle, but identity. He was a Greek statue in motion, a walking promise of masculine potential. But while others were flexing in the mirror, he was gasping for air in a high school locker room, undone not by physical strain, but by panic attacks, a Nabokov fixation, and a Kafkaesque obsession with grammar. This was not ascension to Mount Olympus. This was implosion.

    The Portrait of the Artist as a Sweaty Young Man is a semiautobiographical novel in two acts. The first unfolds in the sun-drenched, protein-soaked Bay Area of the 1970s, where McMahon trained alongside a tribe of emotionally stunted muscleheads. The second takes place decades later, when he emerges as a reluctant intellectual—still jacked, still haunted—teaching college writing in a desert town where ambition goes to die and office politics are played with knives.

    Told in the second person, the novel is both an interrogation and a darkly comic trial of McMahon’s younger self—a character he observes with a mix of horror, sympathy, and disbelief. This is not a story of triumph, but the brutally funny autopsy of one. With merciless wit and an eye for the absurd, McMahon dismantles the treacherous myth of transformation and the masculine delusion that biceps can shield one from existential despair.

    For Gen X and Boomer men raised on Schwarzenegger and Bukowski, now softening into middle age and Googling blood pressure medication, Sweaty Young Man punctures the performance-driven culture of the gym, the classroom, and the self-help aisle. What begins as a memoir of obsession and physicality ends as a meditation on identity, shame, nostalgia, and the slow, bewildering shift from symbol to person.

    This is McMahon’s offering to the younger man he once was—the sweaty, striving, half-mad lifter who believed that heroism could be bench-pressed. He was wrong. But he was trying.

    And that’s where the story begins.

  • Joyface and the Gooseberry Lie

    Joyface and the Gooseberry Lie

    In the short story “Gooseberries,” Chekhov builds a quiet indictment of false contentment. The story opens with Ivan Ivanich, a veterinarian, and his friend Bourkin, the schoolmaster, soaked from rain and flushed from vigorous exercise. There’s a rugged, life-affirming joy in their discomfort—an honest happiness born from movement, exposure, and the humbling vastness of the natural world.

    This raw joy stands in mocking contrast to Ivan’s brother, Nikolai, a man who has spent years grinding away at bureaucratic tedium, nursing a fantasy of rural bliss. His goal? To retreat to the country and become a minor land baron, surrounded by gooseberry bushes and sycophantic peasants. Ivan, ever the clear-eyed cynic, knows this is no pastoral ideal—it’s a death wish in disguise. He describes his brother’s dream as “six feet of land,” a nod not to acreage, but to a coffin.

    Drenched and weary, Ivan and Bourkin seek shelter with their friend Aliokhin at his mill. There, Chekhov offers fleeting pleasures: the warmth of hospitality, the intimacy of shared conversation, the sensual revival of a hot bath. These are the real joys of life—ephemeral, yes, but earned and communal.

    And then the story pivots. Ivan launches into his monologue about Nikolai, who finally escaped the city by marrying (and then outliving) an “ugly old widow,” purely to fund his pastoral delusion. The transaction is grotesque in its coldness—he’s not marrying for love but for the deed to a fantasy. When the widow dies, he buys his estate, plants twenty gooseberry bushes, and gorges himself in bloated isolation.

    Ivan visits and is appalled. His brother, the red dog, and the cook—all puffed and pampered—look like livestock awaiting slaughter. They have the physicality of pigs and the spirituality of corpses. Nikolai dotes on his gooseberries with religious fervor, insisting on his happiness. But Ivan sees through it. This isn’t happiness—it’s Joyface, a self-inflicted psychosis, a desperate mask slapped over a hollow life.

    What horrifies Ivan is not merely his brother’s delusion, but its implication: that many of the world’s so-called happy people are just as corrupt, just as morally dead. These are the bloated rich, insulated from suffering, convinced of their own virtue while causing quiet devastation to the world around them.

    To witness such delusion is to lose faith in people altogether. Ivan begins to spiral into misanthropy, seeing humanity not as a noble species, but a swarm of narcissists chasing comfort, stroking their chimeras, and calling it joy.