28 The New York Review
Trump). As he wrote in the first pages
of his book, his intention has been to
“explain the Great Awakening through
the lens of populism.” Stoked often by
resentment at a status quo regarded
as hidebound, elitist, or institutional-
ist, populism encompasses ideologies
of the right as well as the left, though
Dickey highlights the salutary impli-
cations. For whatever its excesses, the
particular brand of revivalist popu-
lism he chronicles may resonate today:
it welcomed women as well as men,
the free and the enslaved; it helped to
motivate the antislavery ministry of
Samuel Hopkins, which eventually ra-
diated outward; and blacks and Native
Americans served as deacons or agents(though they were seldom considered
free or equal).
Most crucially, it challenged author-
ity—ultimately British authority. Cit-
ing Bryan as the nineteenth-century
heir of George Whitefield, and then
briefly touching on Patrick Henry, An-
drew Jackson, and Charles Grandison
Finney, the antislavery evangelist ofthe Second Great Awakening, Dickey
suggests in rapid-fire exhortation—
perhaps evangelizing himself—that
the Great Awakening was a popular
and inclusive uprising spearheaded
by Whitefield and his apparent dema-
goguery but by no means confined by
them. And that uprising presumably
made Americans of us all. QWomen Talking
by Miriam Toews.
Bloomsbury, 216 pp., $24.00
The Question Authority
by Rachel Cline.
Red Hen, 222 pp., $15.95 (paper)
The Testaments
by Margaret Atwood.
Nan A. Talese/Doubleday,
419 pp., $28.95
Crimes have a tendency to become not
just stories but genres, once we get too
accustomed to them. As more and more
stories of sexual assault have been made
public in the last two years, the genre
of their telling has exploded. One thing
we often do with narratives of sexual
assault is sort their respective parties
into different temporalities: it seems
we are interested in perpetrators’ fu-
tures and victims’ pasts. Whatever
questions society has about the perpe-
trators tend to concern their next steps:
Will they go to prison? What of their
careers? Questions asked about the
victims—even at their most charitable
(when we aren’t asking, “What was she
wearing?”)—seem to focus on the past,
sometimes in pursuit of understanding,
sometimes in pursuit of certainty and
corroboration and painful details.
One result is that we don’t have much
of a vocabulary for what happens in a
victim’s life after the painful past has
been excavated, even when our shared
language gestures toward the future, as
the term “survivor” does. The victim’s
trauma after assault rarely gets the at-
tention that we lavish on the moment
of damage that divided the survivor
from a less encumbered past. One of
the things that Margaret Atwood ac-
complishes in The Testaments—which
recently won the Booker Prize (shared
with Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl,
Woman, Other)—is enlarging our per-
spective by focusing on the aftermath
of assault. This engaging sequel to The
Handmaid’s Tale tempers the first nov-
el’s grim vision by supplying a parallel
text that reveals one of its villains, Aunt
Lydia, to have been a rebel in waiting.
The Handmaid’s Tail describes its
fictional dystopia, Gilead, as a male
theocracy with almost perfect powers
of surveillance over its female subjects.
What The Testaments proves—reassur-
ingly—is that Gilead’s hegemony was
not just incomplete but flawed from its
inception: someone was always in fact
keeping an eye on the Eye. The horror
of the Handmaids’ suffering, which in
The Handmaid’s Tale was somehow
both sanctioned and ignored, is some-
what mitigated by the revelation that it
was always being witnessed: strict re-
cords of abuses were being compiled.
The Testaments is a text that believes,
quite strongly, that dossiers show-
ing wrongdoing by the power brokers
matter. Its premise is that if the truth
is recorded, exposed, and circulated,
consequences will be meted out and
power will crumble.
This strikes me as an anemic opti-
mism. If Me Too (not to mention im-
peachment) has taught us anything, it is
that testimony does not dislodge power.
We careen from outrage to outrage in
a rollicking attention- deficit economy
that most perpetrators are able to
outwait or outshout. And even when
they don’t, no one can agree on how
revelations about past abuse should af-
fect the offender’s long-term treatment.
Soon enough, they return, and rarely
are they much resisted. Jeffrey Epstein
was entertained by powerful men after
his 2008 conviction for “procuring an
underage girl for prostitution” and so-
liciting a prostitute.
Me Too has altered such calculations
by amplifying the survivors’ claims, but
even now, after the public disgracing of
Harvey Weinstein and humiliation of
Epstein, the embarrassed professions
of regret from Epstein’s powerful asso-
ciates feel partial and crabbed. Wein-
stein was recently out at a downtown
comedy club. Many of Epstein’s allies
resent that their conduct is up for public
discussion at all. As for dossiers knock-
ing down corrupt institutions, well, to
take one recent example, Ronan Far-
row has alleged that NBC withheld the
Weinstein story because Weinstein wasthreatening to expose similar allega-
tions against one of the network’s own
stars, Matt Lauer. Rather than expose
both abusers, it kept them both safe.
We know all this now, and yet no power
structures have toppled. The men
who decided to protect Weinstein and
Lauer still have their jobs and their in-
fluence. Several of Weinstein’s accusers
are on the brink of signing a settlement
in which he will not have to admit fault
or pay a dime himself.Testimony did not seem to bring a
revolution. Yet there is something lib-
erating about this: if the legal system is
unresponsive, and power is not collaps-
ing, then why should testimonies be re-
stricted to the formats that the law or
journalistic standards require? What lit-
tle public understanding there is of a sur-
vivor’s experience labors under a heap
of clichés. The expectations we have for
how people should act immediately after
being attacked are as strict as they are
implausible (she should be beside her-
self, ideally sobbing, and go to the ER
at once to get a rape kit done, and deliver
a perfect statement to the police while
registering suitable pain and panic).
This is why Chanel Miller’s Know
My Name, in which she recounts the
experience of waking up to medical
personnel and police after being raped
while unconscious, is as educational as
it is literary. In describing the confusion
of reaching back to pluck a pine needle
out of her hair and being gently told she
can’t, because it’s evidence; of reaching
for her underwear and not finding it,
and blocking out what that means; ofnot knowing what happened and real-
izing that no one quite does—in finding
a language for bewilderments that few
people have put into words—her testi-
mony is crucial. So is her description of
what happened after. Our models for
the aftermath of a survivor’s journey
usually include revenge, despair, or the
fantasy that exposing the truth will pro-
vide a just outcome. Miller’s account
offers no such catharsis or closure; she
describes a jumble of conflicting men-
tal states that proceed along parallel
tracks and do not resolve.
When I read E. Jean Carroll’s account
of Trump’s raping her, my first thought
was that her book excerpt in New York
magazine represented almost a rebel-
lion against the genre of “the allega-
tion.” She included reflections a more
prudent (or more calculating) narrator
might have stripped out, like her pro-
visional willingness to endure a creepy
boss if a good steak was on offer, or how
pretty she found Trump when she ran
into him at Bloomingdales. That pecu-
liar text, which has haunted me since,
haunts me precisely because Carroll’s
self-presentation is funny, flippant, and
unconcerned with appearances. Her
final revelation—about what the ex-
perience has cost her—transforms the
tone. (Mary Karr achieves similar ef-
fects in The Liars’ Club.) What stands
out in narratives like these is a reckless
recognition that, even if the legal sys-
tem is worth a try (Carroll is now suing
Trump), justice is unlikely to follow ex-
posure—so candor is less of a risk.
What I have found myself hungering
for, in short, is literature that stretches
past legal testimonies and sentimental
appeals toward what, for lack of a bet-
ter phrase, I’m calling post-traumatic
futurity. What is the situation of sur-
vivors who saw the injury proven and
exposed—and maybe even punished—
and saw, also, that nothing much
changed? I am curious about their vi-
sion of things. I want to know how they
think things should be. In nonfiction,
we have Know My Name. In fiction,
we have books like Miriam Toews’s
Women Talking and Rachel Cline’s
The Question Authority.
Both novels are fictional treatments
of real events, both scramble the stul-
tifying formulas we apply to stories of
abuse, and both stretch out into subjec-
tivities that feel—if not always hopeful
or clear—singular and anchored in the
world as we know it. “It’s not like I think
there’s no such thing as a sex crime,” a
character in Cline’s novel says:“It’s just the way people think
they’re entitled to some abstractThe Post-Traumatic Novel
Lili Loofbourow
Miriam Toews in costume as the character Esther during the filming of Silent Light,
directed by Carlos Reygadas (left) and set in a Mennonite settlement
in Chihuahua, Mexico, July 2006CarolLoewen