Plus: Schattenfroh; Patrick Modiano; Car Nuts
| Today in The New York Review of Books: Martin Filler dreams of department stores; Anahid Nersessian reviews Michael Lentz’s dystopian novel Schattenfroh; Ruth Margalit examines Patrick Modiano’s corpus; a poem by by Khaled Juma; and, from the archives, a look at the auto industry. Can Printemps New York recapture the commercial sorcery of glamorous department stores like Wanamaker’s, Barney’s, and Bloomingdale’s? Michael Lentz’s novel Schattenfroh portrays a dystopia in which consciousness itself is just another commodity. Patrick Modiano’s grand theme is memory in unsettled times, with the characters in his novels caught between a mysterious past and a discordant present. Free from the ArchivesOne hundred and twenty-six years ago today, a man named Henry Hale Bliss was struck by a taxicab on New York’s Upper West Side. When he died the next day, he became the first pedestrian ever killed by a car in the United States. In the Review’s July 22, 2021, issue, Peter C. Baker wrote about our country’s “disastrous pedestrian fatality numbers”: In 2010, 4,302 American pedestrians died on public roads, an increase of nearly 5 percent from the year before. The death count has risen almost every year since: in 2019, the most recent year for which statistics are available, 6,205 pedestrians were killed—the equivalent of a full Boeing 747 going down every month.
“When I bring up the worsening pedestrian fatality crisis, people confidently opine that it surely has something to do with our damn smartphones and their attention-sucking powers.... Yet pedestrian death rates vary widely from place to place, primarily in correlation with road conditions. But to acknowledge this would be to shift responsibility away from each individual’s decisions in the moment and onto public policy as an agent of the public good.” “Rather than trying to say what an instance of free speech is for, we’ll do better to ask what an act of suppression is for.” “The death of the suburban novel…may be of interest primarily to academics and literary hobbyists. The death of the middle-class society from which it sprung, on the other hand, is a national tragedy.” Special Offer
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