Winter 2019 – Page 2 – The Greene Street Review

As You Dislike It: “American Pastoral” in the Age of Late Boomerism

By Jake Goldstein

"American Pastoral" cover overlayed with "ok boomer"

It can be difficult, as young Americans, to empathize with the psychology of our parents’ generation. We seemingly live in two different worlds, and ours, by all accounts, is the real one: cynical and digital, disillusioned and nihilistic, sad and broke, an inherited mess made bleak by the countless transgressions of our older, wiser counterparts. We have a bone to pick, and it seems only reasonable given the present state of things. The globe is warming, the news is fake, we don’t get paid enough, and we’ll never own a home. When the climate apocalypse inevitably comes, we will die in the same small apartments we received our first meager pay stubs in; washing away in the Flood, we will take with us only our few worldly possessions and our final rent-checks, made out to Jeff, 62, who’s owned this block since the ‘80s and whose coked-out failure of a son blasts “The Eminem Show” late into the weeknight.

I Can’t Bring Myself to See it Starting: Mark Hollis and Talk Talk

painting of the garden of eden — The Garden of Eden by the Limbourg Brothers

By Joseph Barresi

I had a trundle bed in New Zealand. It belonged to my landlords and I slept on it in the basement room they had set up for their preteen daughter, until she developed a fear of living in a semi-detached space, darker and cooler, from her parents and younger brother upstairs. The bedroom was a soft pink when I moved in, and over three sunny late spring evenings in early December, I rolled white paint over it with my landlady, Kristi. It was just the trundle, there, under the bed, soft maple slats on its rollers. My landlords had taken the single futon mattress that had rested on the trundle for family guests that would occasionally visit. I would store miscellaneous shit in the gap between my mattress and the wood: half-dirty shirts and half-empty bottles of wine. They left, however, the heavy canvas curtains imprinted with the same four fairies in various states of repose and reflection, by soft shallow pools in verdant green shifting light. Two were brunette, one blonde, and one redhead. They wore Easter-colored dresses.

Phasers Set to Stunned: Perspective in “They Called Us Enemy”

By Hannah Bub

George Takei, Star Trek star turned activist, has written a graphic memoir whose relevancy radiates off the page. “They Called Us Enemy” follows the internment of Takei’s Japanese family under Executive Order 9066, and brings the injustices of the American government to the forefront of public consciousness at a time when children are currently in cages at our borders.

Hard-Wired Traumas: A Retrospective of “Neuromancer”

Book cover of Neuromancer by William Gibson.

By Thomas Lynch

Look, I’m not here to evangelize about some sci-fi book written in 1984 because it “predicted Trump” or something asinine like that. There’s a misguided tendency to review science-fiction purely based on its novelty when it is new and its prescience when it is old, and books like “Neuromancer,” which flirt with the literary, suffer as a result. Don’t worry, I’ll still be talking about “what it got right”—but it would be a disservice to “Neuromancer” to peg it as merely the novel which predicted what the globalized internet might look like. It’s a good novel, whether it invented the cyberpunk genre or not, and you should read it because it offers some valuable psychological insight into what the globalized internet might do to us as people.

“The Overstory” is a Planetary Call-to-Arms

By Zach Tomci

Imagine an organism billions of years old, constantly changing yet performing the same essential function throughout time. It is outside your window, lying under the cracks of sidewalks and producing the air you breathe in this moment. Through the lens of Richard Powers’s twelfth novel, 2019’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Overstory,” we are challenged to see the natural world in this mystical and reverent way. His story is immediately accessible and relevant, though it spans generations and takes place mostly in the 20^thcentury. It is a story undeniably human; it is a story about us. More accurately, it is a story about the dual existence of humanity alongside the natural world, which Powers argues is just as complex and divine as the gift of human life.

A Poet Reflects on Friendship and Hope in “What You Have Heard is True”

By Nicolette Natale

It begins with a stranger in a white Toyota Hiace with an El Salvador license plate, the car that pulls up outside poet Carolyn Forché’s house in California. It is the 1970s, and she is needed, the stranger tells her. El Salvador is about to go to war, and she needs to bear witness, to make people in North America understand.

The stranger is Leonel Gomez Vides, and he is central to Carolyn Forché’s riveting memoir, “What You Have Heard Is True,” a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for non-fiction. As readers we understand that Gomez Vides deliberately presents himself as a mystery; he is a man who has posters of both Che Guevara and Mussolini in one of his homes so as not to reveal his political leanings, at least on the surface level.

“On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” Reads Like A Daydream

By Minahil Salam

In 2014, Ocean Vuong’s poem, “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous,” was published in Poetry Magazine. It is a multi-part poem that focuses on particular life events and the gripping emotion behind them. In June, the author’s breathtaking novel of the same name was published by Penguin Press. The whole novel is addressed to the main character Little Dog’s mother (who cannot read), which positions it as a one-sided letter. A confession, of sorts, without the “audience” ever being able to read it. It is raw, intense, and honest.

Re-encountering “The Stranger”: A Review of “The Meursault Investigation”

The Meursault Investigation book cover By Cora Lee Womble-Miesner

Some authors can put their ear to a novel and hear what is being smothered underneath: the flip side of a coin, the antagonist’s backstory. In reimagining a book from a different perspective, an author can shape a new interpretation of a classic text. What “Wide Sargasso Sea” is to “Jane Eyre,” Kamel Daoud’s “The Meursault Investigation” is to Albert Camus’s “The Stranger.” Daoud lends a penetrating new angle to the philosophical novel by writing from the perspective of Harun, the brother of the Arab man that Meursault kills, voicing the aftermath of this death on their family and community and the torment caused by the victim’s unnaming in the media coverage and “memoir” that followed. In this impassioned retelling, “The Stranger” is not a novel, but Meursault’s own non-fiction recounting of his crimes which propelled him into fame, making him a household name, while Harun’s murdered brother, Musa, is ignored and forgotten by the public eye. The narrator denounces Meursault, saying, “If he hadn’t killed and written, nobody would have remembered him.”

“I Was Made to Make A Sound”: on Rachel Zucker’s multimedia “SoundMachine”

Cover of "Sound Machine" by Rachel Zucker

By Hannah Ho

You are sitting in a subway car on your way to work. This early, people are either clutching coffees with blank stares or are resting, eyes closed, sinking into themselves for just a little longer before having to face the day. Virtually everyone has headphones. Some absently nod along to music; you hear the muffled beat of the person next to you and, frowning, turn up your own podcast. Once above ground, you are greeted by the street’s cacophony of honks and sirens, brakes, and rumbling bus engines. A passing cyclist blasts rap from a speaker strapped to his backpack. You increase the volume another notch. Work: phones ringing, clattering keyboards, the ding of a microwave. On your way home, more sirens. The clamor of happy hour more fervent by the minute. You fall asleep to Netflix or maybe a guided meditation, depending on your mood.

“The Joker” is a Shallow Masquerade

By Sonali Mathur

“The Joker” is the most beautiful thing you’ll see this year. Not because of the depth of Joaquin Phoenix’s take on the supervillain or because of its nuanced portrayal of someone with mental illness, but because every one of Todd Phillips’s shots is so aesthetically pleasing, even the ones where Phoenix is kicking a trash can, being kicked himself, or shooting innocent people. Every shot is exquisite, in shades of red, green, brown, yellow, and black, so stylish I want to hang up stills from the film in my room.