John F. Healy—is not merely huge but
piquant and readable. Of bees, for ex-
ample, he writes:
The bees have a wonderful way of supervis-
ing their work-load: they note the idleness of
slackers, reprove them and later even punish
them with death. Their hygiene is amazing: ev-
erything is moved out of the way and no refuse
is left in their work areas. Indeed the droppings
of those working in the hive are heaped up in
one place so that the bees do not have to go too
far away. They carry out the droppings on stormy
days when they have to interrupt work.
As evening draws in, the buzzing inside the
hive diminishes until one bee flies round, as
though giving the order for “lights out,” and
makes the same loud buzzing with which rev-
eille was sounded, just as if the hive were a mil-
itary camp. Then suddenly all becomes silent.
How wonderfully, punctiliously factual
that is, but also with a subtle moral. Read-
ing the Elder’s work, you come to feel
that you know him. In fact, however, he
told us almost nothing about himself.
That, no doubt, is the reason that
Dunn chose to concentrate not on him
but on his nephew. Pliny’s letters, as pub-
lished in his lifetime, ran to nine vol-
umes, and a tenth was added after his
death. (Here, too, there’s a Penguin Clas-
sics abridged edition, this one translated
by Betty Radice.) In them, we learn pretty
much everything about this man’s pub-
lic life, and also a lot about the other
well-placed Romans whom he corre-
sponded with, such as the historians Tac-
itus and Suetonius, not to speak of the
emperors he served, Domitian and Tra-
jan. Pliny went to work as a lawyer at
the age of eighteen, and he had other
vocations as well. He was a poet, a sen-
ator, a public official. But in all his jobs
he seems to have landed in the second-
or third-best spot. The law court he
worked in was the one that handled civil
cases—wills, inheritance, fraud—not the
juicy murders and other foul deeds for
which the Roman Empire is famous.
Later, he was appointed to a public office,
but as the Curator of the Bed and Banks
of the River Tiber and of the City’s Sew-
ers. Is that the job you would have wanted
in imperial Rome? Later still, he was
sent, as Trajan’s imperial legate, to
Bithynia (northern Turkey), where his
main responsibility was to inspect the
colony’s finances. He wrote long letters
to Trajan, asking whether he should do
this or that. The letters took two months
to arrive in Rome, and the answers took
THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY 17 &24, 2020 89BRIEFLY NOTED
Love Unknown, by Thomas Travisano ( Viking). This literary
biography of Elizabeth Bishop underscores the aptness of her
epitaph: “All the untidy activity continues, / awful but cheer-
ful.” Bishop’s poems, which Robert Lowell called “unrhetor-
ical, cool, and beautifully thought out,” belie the turbulence
that marked her life. The outlines of that life are well known:
her father’s early death, her mother’s mental illness, her drink-
ing, her sojourns in Key West with her lover Louise Crane
and in Brazil with Lota de Macedo Soares. (Intending to visit
Brazil for a few weeks, Bishop stayed for nearly fifteen years,
a decision partly prompted by the gift of a blue-eyed toucan,
which she named Uncle Sam.) But the accounts are parsed
with particular insight by Travisano, a Bishop specialist, who
assiduously traces the influence of the life on the work.Usual Cruelty, by Alec Karakatsanis (New Press). Every day,
some half a million people are kept in jail merely because
they can’t afford to post bail. As the author of this passion-
ately argued book points out, this reality contravenes consti-
tutional law yet is almost taken for granted by the legal pro-
fession. To challenge judicial practices that are “simultaneously
illegal and the norm,” he founded an organization that has
sued abusive judges and jailers in more than a dozen states.
Here, Karakatsanis sets out the moral and political philoso-
phy that drives his work—that criminal law, and the manner
in which it is selectively enforced, is a reflection of “power,
racial bias, and economic self-interest.” His vision is radical:
a post-carceral society, in which imprisonment is “a narrowly
tailored remedy of last resort.”The Black Cathedral, by Marcial Gala, translated from the
Spanish by Anna Kushner (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Set in
Cuba, this novel follows a black evangelical family’s effort
to build “the temple of end times” in “a neighborhood of for-
gotten black people and desperate white people.” A futuris-
tic, stained-glass-windowed building is planned, but a series
of murders halts construction and leaves the site and the
town cursed. By telling the story from the perspectives of
various people in the community, Gala achieves an oral-his-
tory-like effect, producing a profound, and often humorous,
meditation on how desires—religious, sexual, financial—
clash in a small-town environment.This Is Happiness, by Niall Williams (Bloomsbury). This ele-
giac novel is as unhurried as its setting: Faha, a village in
western Ireland, “unchanged since creation” until, in the late
fifties, electricity arrives. The narrator, now elderly, reminisces
about that time; having come from Dublin as a teen-ager, to
live with his grandparents after the death of his mother, he
conceived a hopeless passion for three sisters. “We spend
most of our lives guarding against washes of feeling, I’m
guarding no more,” he promises. The novel’s description of
a lost rural life style, and the gaps between a young man’s ro-
mantic expectations and the inescapable letdown of reality,
is comic and poignant in equal measure.