The New Yorker – May 13, 2019

THENEWYORKER,M AY13, 2019 65

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been posed repeatedly through mil- lennia to no avail. Chiang’s materialist universe is a secular place, in which God, if there is one, belongs to the phe- nomenal realm of scientific investiga- tion and usually has no particular in- terest in humankind. But it is also a place in which the natural inquisitive- ness of our species leads us to ever more astonishing truths, and an alliance with technological advances is likely to en- hance us, not diminish us. Human curiosity, for Chiang, is a nearly divine engine of progress. That ethos guides “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom,” the conclud- ing story in “Exhalation.” Here, a young woman technician who’s ungenerous, if not outright dishonest, has an opportunity to become a more ethical person through her connection with a “paraself ”—that is, a “self ” that inhab- its a parallel universe. (“I imagined what a better person might do, and I did that instead.”) Again, we have an ingenious gadget, here a “prism,” that destabilizes the human world, casting doubt on what most people have taken for granted: the autonomy of the self. And, again, what might have been a dispir- iting prospect is, in Chiang’s hands, el- evating. The prism is a mechanism that allows people to view alternate branches of their lives—indeed, alternate selves— and so, as a side benefit, offers them the opportunity to emulate better selves. Typically, Chiang spends a good deal of time describing the science be- hind the device, with an almost Rube Goldbergian delight in elucidating the improbable: Every prism—the name was a near acro- nym of the original designation, “Plaga inter- world signaling mechanism”—had two LEDs, one red and one blue. When a prism was acti- vated, a quantum measurement was performed inside the device, with two possible outcomes of equal probability: one outcome was indicated by the red LED lighting up, while the other was indicated by the blue one.... In colloquial terms, the prism created two newly divergent timelines ... and it allowed communication between the two.

From technological ingenuity flows ethical intricacy. The stories in “Exhalation” are mostly not so magically inventive as those in Chiang’s first collection, but each is still likely to linger in the mem- ory the way riddles may linger—teasing, tormenting, illuminating, thrilling. 

BRIEFLY NOTED

The Parisian, by Isabella Hammad (Grove). In this début novel, a young Palestinian arrives in France at the outbreak of the First World War, to study medicine. Lodging with a professor, he experiences culture shock and an infatuation with his host’s daughter, but when he realizes that they see him as an object of curiosity, he leaves and mixes among Paris’s Arab intelligentsia. On his return to Palestine, he finds himself indelibly marked by his travels, set apart even as he participates in his homeland’s upheavals. Hammad uses the features of historical novels to cut through the fa- miliar dichotomies of West and Near East, placing his pro- tagonist in a rich web of families, political intrigues, and cultural exchanges, and subtly reconfiguring the literary tropes of “home” and “abroad.”

Feast Your Eyes, by Myla Goldberg (Scribner). Styled as an exhibition catalogue, this inventive novel charts the life of Lillian Preston, a mid-century street photographer, through a mix of personal letters, journal entries, interviews with friends, and commentary from her daughter. Lillian’s short career is dogged by poverty, single motherhood, an illegal abortion, and an obscenity trial; the cultural legacy of her remarkable, transgressive photographs is recognized only after her death. The catalogue format occasionally feels con- trived, but Goldberg offers a searching consideration of the way that the identities and perceptions of a female artist shift over time.

Mama’s Last Hug, by Frans de Waal (Norton). A noted pri- matologist takes aim here at the idea that animals operate merely on instinct and that humans have a monopoly on consciousness and free will. Maintaining that animals’ emo- tional intelligence has been woefully undervalued by science, de Waal cites examples from his studies of apes dis- playing pride, remorse, shame, disgust, and hope; human emotions, though more finely tuned, evolved from the same ancient set. Although the absence of language renders animals’ subjective experience inaccessible to us, de Waal ar- gues passionately that mounting evidence of their free will makes it unacceptable to demand definitive proof: for him, taking the measure of their wordless consciousness, and wordless pain, is a moral imperative.

El Norte, by Carrie Gibson (Atlantic Monthly). This history debunks the myth of American exceptionalism by revisit- ing a past that is not British and Protestant but Hispanic and Catholic. Gibson begins with the arrival of Spaniards in La Florida, in 1513, discusses Mexico’s ceding of territory to the U.S., in 1848, and concludes with Trump’s nativist fix- ations. Along the way, she explains how California came to be named after a fictional island in a book by a Castilian Renaissance writer and asks why we ignore a chapter of our history that began long before the Pilgrims arrived. At a time when the building of walls occupies so much atten- tion, Gibson makes a case for the blurring of boundaries.

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The New Yorker – May 13, 2019