Revisiting the Life and Legacy of Eugene V. Debs
Addressing this historical narrative, American Socialist: The Life and Legacy of Eugene V. Debs, authored by former Jacobin editor Shawn Gude, offers a crucial and timely corrective. The book illuminates the myriad forces that shaped America’s foremost socialist evangelist, while also detailing the exceptional, concerted efforts deployed by his political opponents to crush him and his burgeoning movement. Along the way, Gude’s biography reveals a deeper, perhaps more sobering truth: that in the United States, the overarching story of socialism is very frequently the story of the intense opposition waged against it.
As Gude describes it within the pages of the biography, Debs possessed a singular brand of political rhetoric that artfully fused nationalist and Christian mythology with Marxist theory, evoking both the spiritual ethos of Christ and the fiery righteousness of the abolitionists. It proved to be a potent ideological brew that appealed powerfully to crowds wherever he took the podium. During an era of political oratory that frequently made unlikely stars of unassuming speakers, Debs projected an energy that made photographs and printed transcripts seem pale by comparison. To audiences sitting in packed halls, listening to him felt akin to experiencing an electrical current. Eugene Debs would spend the remainder of his life spreading the gospel of this new political religion, earning comparisons to Jesus Christ from both his dedicated followers and his harshest critics alike.
The international socialists who initially inspired Debs at the dawn of his political conversion were wildly excited about the untapped prospects for the American labor movement. How far, they wondered, might a nation go that possessed no ancient kings to depose, no deeply entrenched feudal hierarchies to uproot—a country so young, iconoclastic, and rich in natural resources? Witnessing the sheer brutality of the pushback from corporate and political powers proved to be a profound disillusionment, matching the harsh realities of the nation’s mines and mills. While the ultimate promise of American socialism remains unfulfilled, the country has continually proven to be a place where almost anything can be resisted, rethought, and reinvented. Politics can be reinvented, and capitalism itself remains subject to contestation. Ultimately, the story of Eugene V. Debs, told with meticulous care by Gude, suggests that true reinvention will not emerge from a single charismatic leader, no matter how inspiring, but rather from the collective resistance and joyful community built by ordinary people, as highlighted by Joanna Scutts in her review for The New Republic.
Rediscovering Barbara Trapido’s Domestic Classic
In the realm of fiction, rediscovering lost or underappreciated gems often provides some of the greatest reading pleasures. Writing for The New York Times, critic Dwight Garner turns his attention to Barbara Trapido’s novel Brother of the More Famous Jack, a work that has long deserved a wider and more vocal audience.
Describing the reading experience, Garner notes that the verbal sparring on display throughout the novel is exceptionally sharp—literate, funny, cruel, and eccentric in equal measure. Acknowledging that he quickly grew attached to the endearing novel and felt chagrined to have to climb out of its narrative world, Garner emphasizes that while the book is ideally short, it creates a charmed parenthesis within the daily grind that makes readers wish they could permanently inhabit its pages.
The novel bears an awkward and notoriously difficult-to-remember title—an allusion to the talented painter Jack Yeats, brother of the famous poet William Butler Yeats—which may have historically hindered the book from securing the broad readership it richly deserves. Yet, with its return to availability, critics argue that the literary community should have been talking about Barbara Trapido all along.
Garner admits a special affinity for novels that center on young people growing up within narrow cultural circumstances—houses devoid of abundant books or walls adorned with paintings—who nevertheless sense the possibility of another way of living. These protagonists frequently find an expanded world by being befriended, or nearly adopted, by unconventional and urbane figures. Noting that this trope mirrors his own life story, Garner compares Trapido’s work favorably to Willa Cather’s One of Ours. Brother of the More Famous Jack stands proudly as a brilliant ornament within this specific literary tradition.
The dialogue within the novel operates at a level reminiscent of Tom Stoppard. The characters spar relentlessly, a dynamic that serves as their primary vehicle for expressing affection. Ultimately, Garner characterizes the novel as a pocket classic—a work that takes human life seriously, earns its emotional resonance, and manages to befriend the reader without ever slipping into sentimentality.
Meghan O’Gieblyn and the Architecture of the Soul
Moving from fiction to memoir, critic Rhian Sasseen evaluates Meghan O’Gieblyn’s latest book, Will and Attention, in an incisive review for The Baffler. The human soul, Sasseen observes, is an old-fashioned term that swirls with the patina and shine of an antique object. To take such a concept seriously in an era defined by nihilism and disenchantment often risks marking a person as potentially unserious—someone overly committed to abstraction, favoring emotional resonance over cold logic and material reality. This contemporary skepticism is mirrored in our daily instruments, from the computers we type on to the smartphones we endlessly scroll, which rely entirely on binary systems of zeroes and ones.
Yet, in O’Gieblyn’s memoir, the soul—functioning as a shorthand for the vast human consciousness and the broader humanistic intellectual tradition—refuses to be so easily dismissed. Set largely against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, the book traces the author’s abrupt and frightening relapse into alcoholism, juxtaposed against an unexpected flirtation with Catholicism years after she had formally renounced religion to embrace atheism. In this sense, the memoir is fundamentally an exploration of obliteration in its various forms: the psychological blotting out of the self that occurs when substance abuse obscures a person’s life from their own view, much like an indistinct reflection in a fogged mirror, contrasted with the ego-destruction of the individual when brought face-to-face with the divine.
Throughout the book’s pages, O’Gieblyn successfully trains her authorial gaze inward to examine the twinned problems highlighted in her will, encompassing the concepts of free will and the deliberate choice to change our lives, and the attention we devote to rigorous self-examination and our surrounding environment. Drawing upon intellectual touchstones such as French philosopher Simone Weil, German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, and Catholic theology, O’Gieblyn crafts an addiction memoir that manages to transcend the traditional confines of the genre. The result is a salient exploration of the complex varieties of care and attention we owe both to ourselves and to others.
O’Gieblyn demonstrates a sharp awareness of the ironies inherent in recovery and personal stability. She recognizes that once a certain equilibrium has been reached in life—a steady relationship, a thriving career, or the freedom to travel—boredom inevitably creeps in. From that quiet boredom often emerges a destructive willfulness, an irrational urge to dismantle the very happiness one has worked hard to construct. Reflecting on the broader cultural conversation surrounding addiction, Sasseen notes the common trap of viewing such struggles strictly through the binary lens of disease or moral choice. By anchoring her personal narrative in a long historical lineage of human philosophical inquiry, O’Gieblyn’s expansive work successfully sidesteps these reductive pitfalls.
Madeline ffitch and the Complexity of Community Resistance
In children’s literature and adult fiction alike, stories that balance moral clarity with narrative complication are rare treasures. Writing for The Atlantic, critic Lily Meyer explores Madeline ffitch’s sophisticated and intellectually complex novel, Avalon, Rise. Slyly funny at every turn, the novel directly addresses the timeless theme of facing evil with unwavering courage. Much like the classic children’s tale Abiyoyo, Avalon, Rise makes a compelling case on nearly every page that opposing malicious forces—in this case, the unwelcome arrival of white supremacists in a small town—is an absolute necessity. However, the novel simultaneously suggests that standing up to those who threaten a community is never a simple or easy endeavor.
ffitch maintains this delicate narrative balance largely by avoiding any heavy-handed interest in demonstrating moral purity, either for herself or her characters. Avalon, Rise does not demand that its figures execute the precisely correct maneuver at every turn. Consequently, the novel achieves a rare narrative feat: it maintains a distinct, unyielding sense of right and wrong without ever becoming preachy or didactic, evolving instead into an exploration of how genuinely confusing and difficult it is to attempt to be good.
By weaving various literary touchstones into the overarching narrative of the town of Avalon defeating its modern-day giant, ffitch constructs a layered story that articulates a clear ethical viewpoint without hammering the reader over the head. While adult fiction rarely masters this specific stylistic alchemy, it remains a gold standard in children’s literature. ffitch explicitly nods to these classics within Avalon, Rise, referencing works such as Abiyoyo, Frog and Toad, Herschel and the Hanukkah Goblins, and The Dead Bird. Each of these foundational books demands that characters confront difficult situations with courage, wrapping mundane tasks and emotional complications in a cloak of mischief, humor, and delight.
Ultimately, Avalon, Rise demonstrates a profound understanding of human nature. It recognizes, as the best children’s literature does, that when you are a small, fallible, and confused person, everything feels intensely exciting yet overwhelmingly difficult. Simultaneously, it understands what every great adult novel knows: that getting people to work together toward a common goal is an immense challenge, regardless of how high the stakes may be. By fusing these two clear yet complicated insights together, ffitch has produced a remarkable work of contemporary fiction.
Tom McCarthy and the Topography of Bureaucracy
Rounding out the week’s literary reviews, critic Max Callimanopulos examines Tom McCarthy’s latest novel, The Rhyl Poster, in a review for The New Yorker. While many writers tend toward increasing inarticulacy and minimalism as their careers progress—noting Samuel Beckett’s late-career trade in lonely phrases and flinty fragments—McCarthy is moving in the opposite direction. A distinct intellectual geekiness first announced itself clearly in his 2021 novel, The Making of Incarnation, which featured Feynman diagrams, Fisher kernels, Prandtl tunnels, and hyper-converged-infrastructure systems. That specialized terminology has now forcefully asserted itself across McCarthy’s prose.
The Rhyl Poster is saturated with references to networks, spreads, channels of association and disclosure, avenues, angles, vectors, eddies, and contrafluvial vectors. Readers find themselves intellectually adrift, navigating a narrative where the primary takeaway is that the European legal system is vast and immensely complicated, and that McCarthy possesses a formidable vocabulary designed to convey that complexity.
At a glance, one might squint and catch the structural bones of a legal thriller—imagining a John Grisham paperback rewritten by experimental French author Georges Perec. Yet, upon closer inspection, The Rhyl Poster shares nearly identical DNA with McCarthy’s previous novels. While repetition and reenactment serve as the twin engines driving McCarthy’s fiction, Callimanopulos notes a slight sense of disheartening familiarity in reading about male protagonists engaged in fruitless attempts to construct an overarching infrastructural master-meaning out of their contemporary moment.
Navigating the text can induce an irritating sensation that the author is hovering overhead, quietly chuckling at the reader’s dutiful annotations and exasperated marginalia. McCarthy’s novels have a well-documented habit of preempting critical pushback—evidenced by lines like his opening to the eventless novel Satin Island: “Events! If you want those, you’d best stop reading now.” Yet The Rhyl Poster pushes beyond these standard impulses, at times appearing almost engineered to deflect the conventional pleasures associated with reading. Packed with dense jargon, the sentences threaten to overwhelm the reader with their elaborate banality, while the plot feels simultaneously frantic and empty.
Reflecting on the reading experience, Callimanopulos notes that where reading Remainder felt like stepping into the cool, quiet space of an art gallery, engaging with The Rhyl Poster resembles stumbling into an overflowing junk shop cluttered with objects the author has collected across his career. Yet, paradoxically, the book begins to grow on the reader only after the final page has been turned and the volume set aside.
At some point, a writer so deeply committed to a single formal method must confront what remains to be done with it. Within the novel, a character named Stanton reflects on document-smuggling, concluding that it constitutes a topographic rather than a spiritual drama—a phrase that might just as easily describe McCarthy’s entire literary career. Having rarely shown deep interest in the inner emotional lives of his characters, McCarthy appears in the final chapters of The Rhyl Poster to be attempting to move past them altogether. While he may never write another novel as clean, spare, and immediately accessible as Remainder, the novelist who once drew inspiration strictly from the curated spaces of the art world seems to be finding his way toward a different kind of book: one that abandons the impulse to X-ray institutional bureaucracies and instead simply looks directly at the world.
