The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

I usually reserve this blog for posting reviews and thoughts about works of fiction. I make an exception in this case.

We Americans surround ourselves with myths about our country, myths that we learn early on from family, school, and our institutions.  Myths can be wonderful, unifying banners to gather and work under, but they can also serve the purpose of hiding shame and obscuring responsibility.  Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Project takes the singular institution of chattel slavery and holds it up to the light of the sun, like a glass gathering and concentrating its rays to burn away the mists of myth we have collectively been hiding in for over 400 years.  The 19 historical essays, along with the works of poetry and fiction interspersed between those essays, delineate the ways that chattel slavery, present from the very origins of our national identity, has shaped our founding documents, institutional structures, and social policies.  More importantly, the essays make clear that our national desire to hide our shame, to “get over” it, to dismiss and disown it, has denied us the ability to rectify the past wrongs and forced us to compound error and mistreatment upon error and mistreatment.

 

Each essay, written by a different historian or cultural critic, looks at one facet of America and examines the way our slavery has shaped and continues to shape our country.  The essays follow a chronological arc from 1619, when, a year before the pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, the first slave trade ship docked at Jamestown, to 2020 and the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.  They bear single-word titles, showing both the broad scope of that influence into every corner of American life. 

 

Even if you are familiar with a lot of the history present in these essays, there will still be a lot to learn, both in terms of facts and in terms of the connective tissue that links everything together.  While I found every essay worth reading, there were certain essays that punched me harder than others.  Matthew Desmond’s essay on “Capitalism” made America’s version of capitalism make sense in a horrifying, eye-opening way.  I sat with that essay for a long time, and read it to my wife immediately upon completing it.  Likewise, Carol Anderson’s essay on “Self-Defense,” and its look at the history of the 2^nd Amendment is a powerful look at history that my extensive education has never afforded me.  Wesley Morris’s “Music” is artful and accomplished, making connections and a cultural argument is hard to deny.  Ibram X. Kendi’s “Progress,” the penultimate essay in the collection, looks at how America has been using the idea that we are making progress in overcoming our past to excuse great horrors for as long as we have been a nation.

 

When I first flipped through the book and saw the timeline and fictional passages and poems between essays, my original plan was to skip past them and just stick to the essays.  But once I got to them I appreciated what they were doing, and how they interacted with the essays. They provide historical anchors and poetic, human voices that bring the larger issues and events through another vein into pumping heart of the book and the its readers. Instead of skipping over those sections, I slowed down and took them in, reading many of the poems and passages aloud to myself.

 

I imagine many will argue that this collection of essays should be required reading for the American people, and I agree with them fully.  In fact, I think it is a civic duty, an important way to become a fully informed citizen.  Hannah-Jones has given us all a gift to collect all of this knowledge into one book.  What Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States did for understanding labor in America, The 1619 Project does for understanding racism.  Don’t let the size of the book dissuade you from picking it up. The essays range from 10 to 30 pages, and they are written in compelling, straightforward language that easily carries you through the arguments. The last 100 pages of the book are acknowledgments, endnotes, and index, so there are only about 480 pages of essays and poems and timeline.

Super Sad True Love Story Is Super Okay

I have had a complicated reaction to this 2010 novel, the first of Shteyngart’s that I have read.  The writing is solid and dependable, but seldom surprising, beautiful, or striking. The comic elements are usually clever, seldom funny, and sometimes merely painful.  The social commentary is insightful but simple.  Through all of these reactions, I was never sure how much was coming from me and how much was coming from the novel itself.  Absurdist fiction can be hit or miss with me, and I haven’t figured out what makes a work fall into either category.  Whatever the reason, this book landed on the side of miss, but while it irritated me at times in the reading, I was always interested and hopeful that it might have more flashes of brilliance than potholes that make me grumble about the narrative trip.

The thing that I keep coming back to in analyzing my feelings are the main characters, Lenny and Eunice. Let’s start with Lenny.  Shteyngart seems to want Lenny to carry more weight than he can.  Or perhaps he wants to have a character we both like and dislike.  Or perhaps it’s something else altogether that I can’t sense because our aesthetic tastes are too different.  On the one hand, Lenny is eminently human. He’s insecure, scared of dying, scared of growing old, scared of becoming irrelevant, and scared of being alone.  He seeks the approval of everyone, whether he respects them or not.  But for all that, he’s also pathetic, ludicrous, and kind of gross.  He latches on the Eunice for every wrong reason, and it’s never clear what he’s attracted to in her, other than her looks. And of course, Eunice gets the same treatment, the same mix of humanity and absurdism.  And similarly, it’s never any clearer what Eunice sees in Lenny.  For a love story to work, we have to be invested in the lovers and their love.  While I was sometimes fascinated by them, I was never invested in them and never felt like I understood them.  They always felt like characters in a play, half real and half fake, held up by strings and wire, going through the motions as the storyteller dictated.

Part of the distance between me, the reader, and the characters might be the form the novel takes.  It’s an interesting idea to make an epistolary novel in which the two main characters seldom write to each other.  As a diary, Lenny’s chapters are unbelievable, especially in a world that doesn’t value writing.  That goes doubly for Eunice’s writings to her friends and families.  We are constantly told that Eunice doesn’t value the written word and then we see her embracing it fully as her medium of communication.  It seems to undermine the characterization of the world, unless of course the intention is to say that even as people reject the written word and alienate themselves from it they actually love and embrace it, that Eunice and Lenny are not exceptions, but what’s actually going on beneath the surface of America.  But that’s hard to believe, and it would take a lot of mental gymnastics to create a reading that would support that idea.

The epilogue is another odd choice. As with the traditional epistolary novel, this book attempts to present the collected writings of our main characters as put together, edited, and presented to the public in the form in which we just read them.  But to do so here is to take away any political punch the novel may have had.  The wrap up makes everything about Lenny.  Part of the charm of the novel in the context of the love story, the dystopic nightmare America that is just around the corner.  As I read the novel, I kept thinking that perhaps instead of the politics being a backdrop, the love story is a mere foreground detail to frame the political happenings.  But the epilogue mostly kills that idea, and it adds nothing but some semi-clever additional framing and a reason for the title of the book.  And if you ever thought that Eunice and Lenny were equal main characters in the narrative, the epilogue will set you straight.  This was always Lenny’s story first.  I find everything the epilogue brings to the book disappointing.

So Super Sad True Love Story is an awkward mix of a failed love story and a failed political parable.  I would say that I feel like it’s trying to do too many things at once, but I can’t even say that, because I believe that Shteyngart wrote exactly the novel he wanted to write.  These characters are presented exactly the way he wants to present them, and the political background is exactly as he wants it to be, making the stabs he wants to make and withholding the conclusions he doesn’t want to draw.  So I can’t fault the book for being exactly what it is, but I can say that it isn’t exactly for me.  I don’t feel the need to explore more of Shteyngart’s writing because I suspect we will continue to miss each other.  And that’s fine for both of us.