The Maris Review, vol 20
More and more it seems that Neil Gaiman has been a textbook case of the kind of Bad Man for whom sexual assault and abuse of power is never just a one-off or even a five-off event.
What I read this week
Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner
I don’t think Creation Lake quite replaces The Flamethrowers as one of my all-time favorite books, but damn, it’s up there. The novel follows a spy named Sadie (her name for her current assignment, anyway, to foil an ecoterrorist group living communally in the French countryside) who is beautiful and crafty and cunning and also believes that a few glasses of wine makes her a better driver (unreliable narrator alert). We’re with her as she manipulate her subjects and attempts to get clear reads on them, and we kind of watch and wait to see how much Sadie reveals of her “real” self (I just used ironic quotes, so here’s a line from Sadie: “the literate and the not so literate both love quotation marks”) to… herself and to us.
Creation Lake is swiftly paced, almost like a thriller, yet it still feels languid in the best possible way. You’ll want to stop and savor the prose and all of the profundities that Kushner throws at you. A joy.
The Hypocrite by Jo Hamya
It feels like lots of writers have tried to tackle the post-MeToo, post-“woke” landscape of interpersonal relationships, but this novel does it with more nuance than most. Can a book ooze with nuance? Not how that word usually works, but I’m sticking with it in this case.
The title character in The Hypocrite is the kind of famous author who thinks racism is a problem for white men in the publishing industry. His daughter Sophia has written a play about his sexual proclivities and his and his small-minded views on the world. We see his immediate reactions to watching a staging of that play, interspersed with Sophia’s own recollections of a summer she spent in Sicily with her father as a teen.
Or is the title character in The Hypocrite Sophia herself? She’s young, white, privileged, and entitled. She gets to express her own point of view through her art, which she gets to make.
The Hypocrite elegantly shifts between points of view to reveal the blind spots of both of her characters.
The father most reminds me of the beleaguered professor character in Julia May Jonas’s Vladimir who’s gotten MeTooed and doesn’t quite understand what he’s done. If what used to be acceptable behavior is no longer, where does that leave the dinosaurs who had only played by the rules they were given?
On post-MeToo era bad men
I’d seen some Twitter posts about Neil Gaiman, primarily in response to a new podcast from the British media company Tortoise with Boris Johnson’s sister, Rachel (?!?), leading an investigation into various sexual assault allegations against him. It was difficult for me to put aside how weird and gross it is to present these allegations as an entertainment property, so maybe I wasn’t paying as much attention as I should have been.
It wasn’t until I saw Instagram stories from the community on xoxopublishing about young women in publishing being warned about Gaiman that it all sounded so familiar. This was the whisper network going full throttle. Many of us in books and film and comics revered this man, and some of us knew to steer clear of him. More and more it seems that Neil Gaiman has been a textbook case of the kind of Bad Man for whom sexual assault and abuse of power is never just a one-off or even a five-off event.
I know that the Pamela Pauls of the world fear that we’re pushing MeToo too far, that we can’t try sexual assault cases against poor, defenseless men in the media. Fine, I’m not asking for condemnations (yet), but what I didn’t expect was… crickets.
It’s infuriating to me that, even as more and more victims come forward, most US media has stayed away from the story entirely (good job, Rolling Stone), even publishing-centric media (Book Riot is a notable exception). The people who have worked with him and warned each other over the years deserve better. I’m not asking for public disavowals or the cancelation of book contracts (Netflix just canceled Neil Gaiman's Dead Boy Detectives, which may or may not be related), but if US media won’t reckon with these allegations (for now), at the very least they could acknowledge them.
This is newsworthy. Revealing that a famous and well-loved author paid out one of his victims and made her sign an NDA is newsworthy. How can US media mostly ignore it? Where is the coverage?
A nice reminder to read Magical/Realism
New releases, 9/3
My Lesbian Novel by Renee Gladman
Horror for Weenies: Everything You Need to Know about the Films You're Too Scared to Watch by Emily Hughes
We’re Alone: Essays by Edwidge Danticat
Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner
see above!
Colored Television by Danzy Senna
Madwoman by Chelsea Bieker
Small Rain by Garth Greenwell
Death at the Sign of a Rook by Kate Atkinson
YUP, women in publishing have been warning each other about him for years, I have joked that it’s part of the welcome packet on your first day as an editorial assistant. I feel like the silence is an indicator that we still have an issue with protecting men we like over women they’ve hurt. Neal has created so many fandom darlings, people want to pretend it’s not happening so they can still squeal over Good Omens.
It feels like emphasising Rachel Johnson and ignoring the excellent co-lead on the story Paul Caruana Galizia is part of the ongoing snowjob. Gaiman has hired powerful lawyers and PR firms to put this story down, and it's largely fandom not being willing to put up with the silence that's kept the story alive at all. That and another woman coming forward every couple weeks, each story more horrifying than the last.
If you're interested, there's links list capturing reporting and responses: https://muccamukk.dreamwidth.org/1678972.html?style=light