Five years ago, in the middle of writing The New Earth, I became fascinated by Uwe Johnson’s 1700-page novel Anniversaries: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cesspahl, originally published in German between 1970 and 1983 and finally translated in full and published by NYRB Classics in 2018. Johnson, an East German writer who fled to West Germany in the late 1950s, lived and worked in New York from 1966-68, and Anniversaries is based, in microscopic detail, on the life of a German expatriate woman he met there. It’s a novel consumed by dailyness: Gesine, the single mother of a young daughter, reads The New York Times on the subway to work every morning, and Johnson reproduces headlines and articles from the Times verbatim. It’s the beginning of the descent into all-enveloping chaos in Vietnam, and Gesine is a keen, if detached, observer of how the war is warping American society.
I only managed to read about 300 pages of Anniversaries, because the pace is excruciatingly slow and I had too much else going on, but I loved the idea of what Johnson was doing: a novel told at the pace of the daily news, which is (at least for those of us who follow the news) probably the defining punctuation of our lives: the way we track our days. The Latin word punctum means “a point,” which gives English “puncture” and “punctual” in addition to “punctuate.” In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes used it to describe the arresting, often accidental detail in a photograph that pricks the eye and makes the image hard to forget:
The punctum should be revealed only after the fact, when the photograph is no longer in front of me and I think back on it. I may know better a photograph I remember than a photograph I am looking at, as if direct vision oriented its language wrongly, engaging it in an effort of description which will always miss its point of effect, the punctum. Reading Van der Zee's photograph, I thought I had discerned what moved me: the strapped pumps of the black woman in her Sunday best; but this photograph has worked within me, and later on I realized that the real punctum was the necklace she was wearing; for (no doubt) it was this same necklace (a slender ribbon of braided gold) which I had seen worn by someone in my own family, and which, once she died, remained shut up in a family box of old jewelry (this sister of my father never married, lived with her mother as an old maid, and I had always been saddened whenever I thought of her dreary life). I had just realized that however immediate and incisive it was, the punctum could accommodate a certain latency (but never any scrutiny).
Anniversaries takes the news-as-novel to a kind of formal extreme that makes it very daunting to finish; in a way it reminds me of Day, Kenneth Goldsmith’s 2003 conceptual poem that consists of copying every character of a single day’s edition of The New York Times, including the ads, the page numbers, the stock quotes, as a single text. The result is 904 pages long, and it’s not clear that anyone (including the author) has ever read it from beginning to end.
In The New Earth I wasn’t interested in that kind of literal capturing of a durational process (I had other formal experiments to worry about). Instead I wanted to capture a family living in the day-to-day shadow of the news at a dark moment in history: April to August 2018, or what seemed at the time to be the darkest part of Trump’s presidency, before he lost control of Congress in the November 2018 elections. I’d originally intended the novel to be set in 2013, the tenth anniverary of Bering Wilcox’s (and of course, Rachel Corrie’s) death in occupied Palestine, but after the 2016 election it became clear to me that I had to set the novel during the Trump administration, when the global dehumanization of refugees, migrants, and occupied populations was (I thought) reaching a kind of historical crescendo, the way that in 1968-69 the world seemed to have reached a turning point that would undo the present order—in the US, in Europe, in China, in Vietnam.
Of course, I didn’t know what would happen next. I wrote the majority of The New Earth in the period in which it was set, as Uwe Johnson began writing Anniversaries by retyping articles from the Times as they appeared on the newsstand. I finished the first draft in the spring and summer of 2020, working furiously through the chaotic early months of the pandemic, when it was clear the world was undergoing yet another violent shift. I always intended for the novel to be raw and jarring, ragged and chaotic, and for its tone to be a kind of invigorated despair, as the Wilcox family is shaken out of its 15-year state of torpor and forced to confront one another by a state of national, and familial, emergency.
There are the superlatives—Gaza has been the deadliest conflict for children in decades; the deadliest conflict for journalists, for aid workers; “the worst deliberately inflicted famine in modern times”—and then there are the pictures of starving children, headless children, families burned alive, Israeli soldiers gleefully setting fire to mosques, posing with women’s underwear. There are the convulsive protests and encampments all over the world. None of it, seemingly, has made much of an impact. Israel’s leaders are acutely aware of how fast the global outrage cycle rotates, and they’ve made a winning bet, at least so far, that the ongoing genocide will be normalized and routinized in the “ongoing horrors” category of world affairs. Zionists often cry out, in their own defense, that they’re being held to a higher standard than, say, the Saudis in Yemen, or the Assad regime, or Myanmar’s military, which is a way of saying those are their peers: Israel aspires to be another genocidal regime the world does nothing about.
But the genocide in Gaza has done one thing: it has cleaved the US liberal/progressive/left coalition in two. On one side are the liberals and centrists who will tell you nothing matters more than keeping Trump out of office, and, of course, that even given “the ugly realities of the occupation, Israel has the right to defend itself.” Progressives and leftists, on the other hand, recognize that Biden and his enablers, including Kamala Harris—more than any administration since George W. Bush, more than any Democrat since LBJ—are directly responsible for the slaughter of massive numbers of civilians, most likely upwards of 50,000 casualties, a calculated and organized act of population elimination that doesn’t look likely to stop any time soon. It’s a new frontier of necropolitics, the organized and efficient politics of mass death, and there’s no better illustration of it than the image of Netanyahu receiving a standing ovation in Congress in July while he vows to “finish the job.”
This liberal/left split has emerged as two different ways of relating to the news, or thinking about what “the news” is. Those of us who are paying close attention to Gaza follow Twitter or Instagram or Telegram or Signal accounts, plus Al Jazeera or other similar channels, that give us minute-by-minute updates and images recorded by Palestinians on the ground, who may or may not be reporters as such. Since October 7th, that has been the principal form of news in our lives. Ordinary liberal news consumers, relying on NPR, The New York Times, and the BBC, might not even hear a single mention of Gaza in a day. The Israeli government has done everything in its power to censor and blockade news coverage within Gaza, with very little outcry from its pseudo-democratic allies in the West.
Often these days I think some variation of one thought: the emergency of 2018 is still going on, has in fact gotten much worse, but a new kind of torpor and denial has set in. There’s a feeling of slipperiness about these days, a marked lack of punctuation, as the Supreme Court has legalized unchecked authoritarian presidential power and blown up the legal basis for government regulations, while the Democrats go on suppressing discussions of Gaza at every turn: the whole rationale for Western liberal democracy seems to be sliding away. When someone asked me at my paperback launch (on July 10th) how my thinking has changed about the world since 2018, I replied that if I were writing The New Earth in 2024 I’d be thinking more along the lines of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, Giorgio Bassani’s indelible novel about the last days of a wealthy Italian-Jewish family before the beginning of World War II.
In other words: in 2018 in the US the liberal/left political opposition was outraged, energized, and (at least superficially) unified. Six very long years later, the party in power—the institutional Democratic party—is in locked in a state of oblivious complicity and denial, and the antifascist left, as in Europe in the late 1930s, is isolated and marginalized. The images coming out of Gaza get worse and worse, the implications for global politics get more and more dire, and Democrats—now swept up in a swoon of enthusiasm over Kamala Harris, the less-bad alternative—don’t seem to care. There’s no punctum. The images don’t penetrate.
Readers of The New Earth will remember that the second-to-last section of the novel (the scene of Winter and Zeno’s marriage in Maine) is titled “America is Dead.” I wanted the reader to feel a sense of absurdity about that statement, which both can and cannot be true. On the one hand, the land called the United States of America was here before European colonization and will always exist no matter what political formation(s) temporarily control it. On the other, the great right wing project of undermining American democracy at its core, and replacing it with a permanent authoritarian state ruled by a white minority—first outlined and planned in the 1970s by visionaries like Paul Weyrich—is now closer to realization than it was when Trump was in office in 2018. Israeli ethno-nationalism, of course, is a mirror image of what the Republicans want. You can’t support one and not the other. Which is why the mainstream Democrats of today are busy with their own version of authoritarianism—embracing bans on asylum seekers, bulldozing encampments of unhoused people, militarizing police, and, at every turn, suppressing and condemning protests against the Gaza genocide.
It's a terrible thing to write a highly pessimistic novel and later realize it wasn’t pessimistic enough, but I’m afraid that’s what’s happened to me. To put it another way, the worst nightmare of The New Earth—the fatal collision of Palestinian genocide and American democracy, fatal for both sides—is happening, but in a compressed, collapsed, suffocated form, in which it feels like there’s no longer any air with which to speak, let alone tell a story. Uwe Johnson wrote his novel of 1968 over thirteen years, and left it (at least according to some sources) unfinished when he died in the early eighties. I’m glad my novel of 2018 is complete, so I’m not tempted to revise it. It stands on its own, like any account of the past, out of reach.
(Photo by Chris Bentley/Here & Now)