capsule reviews
joan acocella, annika norlin, cube
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The Bloodied Nightgown (Joan Acocella, 2024)
There was a time in my life where I was trying to make myself figure out an “essay collection” I could conceivably sell and during this time I found any essay collection I tried to read sort of unbearable even to be around.1 However, when I ceased (at least for the time being) to try to put together an essay collection, I once again found them pleasant to read. I do think the essay collection is an odd vestigial form—like the Greatest Hits album is in the world of Spotify and “This is…” playlists. There’s an expectation now that some of the essays in an essay collection will be written for the book, or that perhaps the book will consist entirely of new essays, but then what makes an essay collection conceptually distinctive from a book made up of chapters? These were the questions that used to haunt me. But now I am free.
For instance, re: vestigial qualities, this essay collection gathers up Acocella’s pieces from over the years but I could, of course, simply type “Joan Acocella” into the New Yorker search bar. But I never did type Joan Acocella into the search bar. And in the future, when super-intelligent rats rule, who’s to say they’ll even know how to use the New Yorker website archives. I guess what I’m saying here is that a book like this does anchor the otherwise ephemeral world of writing in magazines.
Anyway, the essays are great. I read them before bed over several days and they were an excellent way of saying “I have entered into the time of leisure that is not yet the time of sleep” to myself. The title essay is about Dracula, but every essay in it is interesting. I particularly enjoyed the essays about Edmund Gorey, Angela Carter, Louisa May Alcott, and Andy Warhol.2 The last of these was somebody I never had a lot of interest in, frankly, but I did after reading Acocella’s piece, or at least Acocella revealed to me why it was worth being interested in Warhol.
One thing Acocella is refreshingly unwilling to do is pretend her essays are about people who were flawless geniuses; here she is on Angela Carter:
In February 1992, she died at home, at the age of fifty-one. She was young, and she had had only a few years of absolutely first-rank work, but that is true of many writers, including some of the greatest. She had her time, and it was wonderful.
One day I’ll write a proper post about it but my favorite biography of all time is Sylvia Townsend Warner’s book on T.H. White, and part of what makes it so good is that she is frequently scathing about White’s actual work. She obviously considers him worth her time and your time—otherwise why would she write the book?—but he still produced a lot of work she thinks is not that good, and she will say so. Since critical judgment often polarizes—and is rewarded for so polarizing—around the superb and the awful, I notice when somebody refuses to do it.
I am sorry that I only came to Acocella’s work posthumously; I would have been too timid to write her a fan note, but I wish I had the opportunity.
The Colony (Annika Norlin, 2023, trans. Alice E. Olsson, 2025)
This book follows a woman who’s fleeing the big city because she’s so burnt out from working a series of dead-end jobs, and, in so fleeing, she stumbles on an odd group of hippies. It is… fine. “What if our phones are making us sad and anxious, yet we still must engage with the world instead of retreating into community?” That’s the book.
Two-thirds of the way through The Colony, I realized that the problem I was having with it was that I knew too well what was what. I knew this was a book about an idealistic commune resisting contemporary civilization and I knew it would end with civilization vindicated and the commune disbanded. There was just no way the back to nature cult had a chance. It was going down. And indeed… down it went.
A novel that involves explicit ideological arguments—as this does—feels drained in some ways if you know, in advance, the right answers. You know a certain kind of ecological nihilism will lead nowhere, because it’s predetermined that it can’t. There’s no story here if the cult is right. There’s no true alternative to contemporary society, even if you dislike it and its phones, and even in the imaginative realm of a novel.
I’m sounding slightly more down on this book than I actually feel. It is, as I said, fine. I had a good time reading it. Norlin attempts a somewhat ambitious use of multiple points of view here and it works. It’s getting adapted into a miniseries which I’m sure will also be fine. But intellectually, it was very exasperating, even though I don’t myself have any particular sympathy with the group portrayed.
I’d always assumed that this movie would be too gory for me, but when I thought about it, low budget horror from the nineties can really only get so gory, so I decided to give it a shot.3 Indeed, gore-wise, Cube is mostly fine. The worst death is probably the second one (which involves acid).
Cube—a movie about a group of people who are stuck in a cube—hovers somewhere between a fine movie and a really good movie. In some ways it’s the definition of a movie that’s “better than it has to be,” without ever being as good as it could be. The cube is made up of other cubes, some of which are death traps and some of which are safe, and the characters proceed by trial and error in figuring out how to tell which is which and if there’s any way to escape. They go back and forth between believing they must have all been put in there for a reason and thinking it’s meaningless.
There’s a scene where one character is revealed to have designed part of the cube and he basically says that the cube was built by the government for no reason—the collective effort of hundreds of contractors who had no concept of what they were working on—and the government is probably putting people in the cube to be tortured to death just so they can pretend it has a purpose and the money spent on it wasn’t wasted. That scene is great. Nothing else matches its energy. But I had a fun time, so I can’t really say I don’t recommend it.
On my recent trip to MoMA my thought looking at the Warhol was: do I hate this? This question remains unresolved.
This belief does not apply to low budget horror from the seventies. Eighties, it depends.
loved reading your reaction to joan acocella-- i first encountered her work as an intern at fsg, where my supervisor asked me to type up these very pieces w/acocella's line edits (!) into a word document. (in retrospect, still my favorite way that i've ever discovered a writer -- as i was copying her words, i was like, wow, this woman is a REALLY good writer.) and as someone who at the time was much more into the world of books (over magazines/online pubs), i do think that the book publication did bring me in as a new reader of her work, even if this was not the most conventional way for this book to reach a potential audience... it's like the definitive example of a good essay collection to me
On Warhol - I'm a big fan, but the difference between his best work and his worst work is really huge. I once saw a Warhol show at the Dali Museum in St. Peterburg, FL that was all terrible, made me wonder why he had any reputation at all. The Warhols on display at the Art Institute of Chicago (at least the last time I was there) are great. They have a painting of an electric chair that is really powerful, and doesn't come across in the reproduction on their website.