Dan

I loved this book for its honesty and willingness to explore its ideas without fear of sounding ridiculous. For example: How does a husband adapt to his wife's rape and trauma in terms of his own desires for her and the threat he himself may pose to her for violence, sexual or otherwise? How can a liberal minded white woman react to her assault by an unidentified black man without demonizing any black man passing by on the street?

It explains so well why so many victims of rape wish to remain anonymous and decline to press charges (if the option is even available to them), in part because they wish to maintain their identity as non-victims to their friends, families, and the wider world. For so many, the wounds remain internal and we are unknowingly surrounded by sufferers of sexual violence and living in places where it has happened.

I can understand why some of the book's willingness to risk being off-putting might succeed with some readers at being so. From my perspective as someone who has not personally been assaulted, it was helpful to have a reporter from the same perspective exploring how one attack rippled out through the lives of his wife, children, friends, and community. There are many levels of privilege (a white family, living in Hyde Park, summers in Vermont) and thankfully they are discussed with openness and self-consciousness, with understanding of how sexual violence, violence, poverty exist elsewhere (public housing in Chicago; Bosnia).

Kalven and Evans did not ultimately flee the city. The reason I heard of him and his book (which is from 1999, 11 years after the assault) was because he was part of the successful agitation to have the dash-cam video of the police murder of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald released to the public in 2015.

A childhood Dahl fan, after catching a sampling of Dahl's adult short stories as a young adult and particularly the two concerning Uncle Oswald (“The Visitor” and “Bitch”) which are both lousy, I was never motivated to read the Oswald novel. (Oswald seems to have gotten his name–at least in print–not long after the JFK assassination, if you want to read anything into that.) After reading the recent NYRB essay about Dahl's life and works, I thought I might as well get this one from the library and give it a quick run through. I also knew some details of the main plot, Oswald's scheme to retrieve, cold-store, and then sell the sperm of famous men, and that one of the men was Marcel Proust. So as a Proust fan I was curious what Dahl's portrayal of him would be.

It turns out that it is not as shitty as his worst work, but pretty close. Some of it is amusing. The best level on which the book works is as the story of an extremely stupid caper. Unfortunately the caper is rather simple to pull off, and more or less occurs the same way with every individual they steal the sperm from. Dahl (or his editor) seems to realize this and starts skipping through them quickly instead of fully narrating them all.

Dahl seems to be fascinated with the idea of a chemical that could cause a man to uncontrollably rape the nearest woman, and to think that this concept contains a lot of comedic potential, as a prank played on the very stuffiest, most respectable of men. In “Bitch” this is a perfume and in the Oswald novel it is an ingested powder. In this comic universe, arousal works on a scale something like a dog's supposed bite threshold; pass the threshold of too much arousal and one simply proceeds to violent rape. One gets a hint of Dahl's sexual inclinations when he has Oswald the lothario relate his preference to only sleep with a woman once, in a bender-like fashion, and then part ways sexually forever, no matter how satisfying the one experience was. Dahl seems to not contemplate (or at least doesn't have his narrator Oswald do so) that the arousal-rape powder is a gender-flipped portrayal of a date rape drug, replacing numbness/incapacity with uncontrollable sexual aggression, but that the mission in effect still involves a woman going around and raping George Bernard Shaw, Sigmund Freud, etc., any time she gives the man the drug.

There is some effort made at historical plausibility. It seems like the year of the caper, 1919, was chosen to allow Dahl to include his thoughts about as many Great Men of the early 20th century as possible (obviously it couldn't have taken place during the war); Proust died in 1922, Puccini in 1924, etc., Renoir in late 1919 itself. To quibble with some aspects of the Proust chapter, it portrays him as anti-Semitic (at best debatable; Proust himself was half Jewish by lineage and writes at length about anti Semitism and the Dreyfus affair within his novel), and Oswald is knowledgable about his writing about homosexuality, which he didn't really pursue until the fourth volume of In Search of Lost Time, published in 1921 and 1922, the year he died.

The introductions are valuable even if you read some or all of the Atlantic essays when they were written. In particular the reparations and mass incarceration essays merit close reading that is more practical in a book than in a magazine. I think in 2021 Coates' effect on national politics on the basis of these essays may even be underrated. In part because he has consciously stepped back from continuing to make the argument and others have picked up his work and carried it forward. But he got these arguments into one of the biggest megaphones pointed at the liberal elite world. He acknowledges the many debts to the prior work of others and the way that his platform allowed him to amplify and present the observations they had made before, in ways they were not given the same opportunity to do. But from his perch, he made terrific use of it.

I started by skipping the Cosby and Michelle Obama and Malcolm X essays, but then I went back and read it all. Those are not as good as the rest, particularly Cosby (a failure as an essay, he admits, but a success as a first step to more writing at that magazine). It is interesting to track his growth as a writer instead of only having a book of his most refined work.

I read three of these four stories previously in a different compilation, none of which was very good. Switcheroo tries to back out of being nothing but an extended rape fantasy with its “twist” but doesn't really succeed. The only one I hadnt read was The Last Act and when I grabbed this from the library after reading the recent NYRB essay on Dahl I thought I might as well read it to be thorough. It's bad.