The New Yorker - USA (2022-01-31)

(Antfer) #1

THENEWYORKER,JANUARY31, 2022 35


For a time, he spent his nights in a
sleeping bag on the cliffs near campus,
overlooking the Pacific, then shower-
ing in the gym. (“I felt like I lived on
a fifty-million-dollar estate,” he told
me.) When he and Lisa had the first
of their two sons, in 1989, he became a
stay-at-home dad, writing during nap
times. The couple bought a house in a
progressive Davis development cen-
tered on a sprawling village green and
a community garden. Robinson cooked
for potluck dinners and tended his gar-
den plot; he adopted the habit, which
persists, of doing all his writing out-
doors, on his front patio, shaded by a
tarp, year-round. He eavesdropped on
Lisa’s scientific phone calls, listening
as she and her colleagues scrutinized
and revised their findings about pesti-
cides in the water. They were passion-
ate, sometimes exasperated, but also
collaborative, careful, truthful—a model
society of their own.
He read the philosopher Bruno La-
tour, who studied how scientists worked
together. Latour’s “actor-network the-
ory” held that it wasn’t just individual


researchers who mattered but the web
in which they were embedded; the
web could contain other scientists but
also nonhuman entities, such as ma-
chines, treaties, institutions, historical
events, even elements of the natural
world. (In “The High Sierra,” Robin-
son argues that the mountains them-
selves are “actors” in a network: they
created “Sierra people,” who formed
the Sierra Club, which catalyzed the
American environmental movement.)
In the work of the literary theorist
Gérard Genette, Robinson discovered
the idea of “pseudo-iterative” writing,
in which novelists describe what we
do each day with a level of specificity
that is not quite sensible. A narrator
might say that, every morning, she eats
a yogurt smoothie while doomscroll-
ing newsfeeds on her phone. Such a
statement may not be literally true—
surely not every morning—but routines,
loosely grasped, can reveal something
about how the world is constructed;
our small daily actions, in aggregate,
suggest systemic facts.
In the Victorian era, social novels,

by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gas-
kell, and others, awakened us to pov-
erty and injustice. Modern “natural-
ists,” like Émile Zola, took a scientific
approach, following the causal chains
of everyday life, which might link a
kitchen stove to coal miners working
underground. Robinson brings these
traditions to bear on our future prob-
lems, combining them with an unusual
narrative style designed to dramatize
civilizational transformation. “The
Ministry for the Future” contains chap-
ters that describe the daily habits of
geologists and encamped climate ref-
ugees; one chapter is narrated by a car-
bon atom, and another by the mar-
ket—both actors in the networks that
shape our world. Other chapters are
oral histories of the sort one might find
in the work of the Belarusian journal-
ist Svetlana Alexievich, showing how
ordinary people could have their atti-
tudes reshaped by climate disasters.
The goal is to capture what the liter-
ary critic Raymond Williams calls a
“structure of feeling”—an invisible scaf-
fold, unique to its period, on which our
emotions hang. In our current struc-
ture of feeling, a narrator suggests, the
order of things is experienced as “un-
just and unsustainable and yet mas-
sively entrenched, but also falling apart
before your eyes.” Like glaciers, struc-
tures of feeling shift with time—that’s
how we so readily distinguish between
the nineteen-sixties and now.
Such shifts coalesce slowly, one re-
alization after another. In the years
since Robinson wrote his Mars nov-
els, for instance, the prospects for hu-
man habitation on that planet have
changed. Among other things, NASA
missions have found perchlorates in
the Martian soil—chemicals that are
toxic to humans even in small quanti-
ties. Martian dust is so pervasive that
avoiding contact with the poison may
be impossible. In an essay titled “What
Can’t Happen Won’t,” from 2015, Rob-
inson concluded that the settlement of
Mars was unlikely anytime soon. “Au-
rora,” a novel he published the same
year, envisions an interstellar ship on
a mission to settle a moon of a planet
orbiting Tau Ceti, a nearby star. When
the settlers reach their destination—
a rocky world plagued by constant
winds—many are killed by prions in

BROWNFURNITURE


Don’t throw out that old chair!
Someone said yes there,
listened to Brahms while it rained,
fell asleep over “Das Kapital,”
told a small child about King Alfred and the cakes.

Don’t be fooled by the dining table,
discreetly silent under its green cloth.
Momentous events occurred there,
all of which it remembers perfectly.
A terrible silence was broken over cake,
and three aunts sang a song about Romania.
Not your aunts? Not important. They were there.

Your living room’s still making history.
All night the sofa
gossips with the Turkish carpet,
which boasts to the glass-fronted bookcase
about the fantastic voyages of its youth.

These things remember so that we can forget.
Who will love the old
if not the old?

—Katha Pollitt
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