[{"id":17401,"date":"2026-08-11T10:15:54","date_gmt":"2026-08-11T14:15:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/clereviewofbooks.com\/?p=17401"},"modified":"2026-08-11T10:34:08","modified_gmt":"2026-08-11T14:34:08","slug":"wg-sebald-silent-catastrophes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wg-sebald-silent-catastrophes\/","title":{"rendered":"One Misfortune After Another: On W. G. Sebald&#8217;s &#8220;Silent Catastrophes&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-large\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"819\" height=\"1024\" data-attachment-id=\"17407\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wg-sebald-silent-catastrophes\/sebald_website\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Sebald_Website.png?fit=900%2C1125&amp;ssl=1\" data-orig-size=\"900,1125\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"Sebald_Website\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Sebald_Website.png?fit=819%2C1024&amp;ssl=1\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Sebald_Website.png?resize=819%2C1024&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-17407\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Sebald_Website.png?resize=819%2C1024&amp;ssl=1 819w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Sebald_Website.png?resize=240%2C300&amp;ssl=1 240w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Sebald_Website.png?resize=768%2C960&amp;ssl=1 768w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Sebald_Website.png?resize=374%2C468&amp;ssl=1 374w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Sebald_Website.png?resize=851%2C1064&amp;ssl=1 851w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Sebald_Website.png?resize=390%2C488&amp;ssl=1 390w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Sebald_Website.png?w=900&amp;ssl=1 900w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 819px) 100vw, 819px\" \/><noscript><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"819\" height=\"1024\" data-attachment-id=\"17407\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wg-sebald-silent-catastrophes\/sebald_website\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Sebald_Website.png?fit=900%2C1125&amp;ssl=1\" data-orig-size=\"900,1125\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"Sebald_Website\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Sebald_Website.png?fit=819%2C1024&amp;ssl=1\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Sebald_Website.png?resize=819%2C1024&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-17407\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Sebald_Website.png?resize=819%2C1024&amp;ssl=1 819w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Sebald_Website.png?resize=240%2C300&amp;ssl=1 240w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Sebald_Website.png?resize=768%2C960&amp;ssl=1 768w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Sebald_Website.png?resize=374%2C468&amp;ssl=1 374w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Sebald_Website.png?resize=851%2C1064&amp;ssl=1 851w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Sebald_Website.png?resize=390%2C488&amp;ssl=1 390w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Sebald_Website.png?w=900&amp;ssl=1 900w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 819px) 100vw, 819px\" \/><\/noscript><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\"><br><strong>W.G. Sebald |<\/strong> <em>Silent Catastrophes<\/em> <strong>| Random House | March 2025 | 544 Page<\/strong>s<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In 1985, a small publishing house in Austria, Residenz, brought out <em>Die Beschreibung des Ungl\u00fccks<\/em> (<em>The Description of Misfortune<\/em>), a collection of literary criticism by an obscure but controversial scholar working at the University of East Anglia\u2014W.G. Sebald. The book was a departure from Residenz\u2019s normal fare. The essays were academic, in form if not in tone, and largely biographical. They focused exclusively on Austrian writers, several of whom were also published by Residenz. These included Thomas Bernhard and Peter Handke, close contemporaries who also shared with Sebald a taste for provocation. A few years earlier, during a conference on Alfred D\u00f6blin, he had denounced the author of <em>Berlin Alexanderplatz<\/em> as a protofascist and necrophiliac. One of the author\u2019s sons was in attendance. Despite D\u00f6blin\u2019s Jewish heritage and his persecution by the Nazi government, Sebald viewed him as thoroughly compromised, due to the graphic violence depicted in his novels and his sympathies with the German revolutionaries of 1918\u2014armed politics of any kind laid the trackway for concentration camps. So Residenz had on its plate something considerably spicier than the usual bland gruel of university <em>Germanistik<\/em>. For its complicity in the Nazi project, Sebald believed that the literature of German-speaking peoples, both in its study and in its practice, had to be remade. This was far from a novel conclusion for writers of his generation. As young children, not yet complicit in the wrongdoing of their elders, they experienced the Second World War primarily through Allied bombing campaigns and subsequent return of paternalistic authorities\u2014fathers, uncles, mayors, teachers, professors\u2014all of whom were guilty of crimes on an unimaginable scale. This was the generational conflict that animated Bernhard\u2019s and Handke\u2019s work. But Sebald took up their provocations and channeled them toward a novel but sweeping set of conclusions. His Austrian peers and predecessors were at once sufferers of a pervasive mental sickness within bourgeois life, diagnosticians of that sickness, and a tonic against its most deleterious effects. Six years later, Residenz published <em>Unheimliche Heimat (Strange Homeland),<\/em> a follow-up collection that further elaborated his thesis. But it was also a kind of valediction. Though Sebald would continue to teach and fulfill administrative duties at the UEA for the remainder of his life, by 1991 he had largely abandoned formal academic writing, not that he was constrained much by its conventions in the first place. The interim was productive in other respects, with a collection of poetry, <em>Nach der Natur (After Nature),<\/em> and a novel, <em>Schwindel. Gef\u00fchle (Vertigo),<\/em> appearing between the essay collections. These books display the qualities of Sebald as a mature writer, his elliptical blend of fiction, memoir, travelogue, and essay. Begun in private, to stave off professional frustration, this \u201cpotting shed\u201d writing would, in less than a decade, come to define Sebald as a world-renowned literary figure. But this was merely trading one misfortune for another, and his rising fame put a strain on his academic obligations as well as his health. Since his premature and sudden death by heart attack in 2001, Sebald\u2019s gloomy intimations regarding the literary life, speaking for both himself and others, have taken on the force of prophecy. Nevertheless, his scholarly writings deserve more exacting scrutiny, since, in at least in their information-giving capacity, they are confounded by the doomsaying that makes him otherwise such a compelling writer<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>Silent Catastrophes<\/em>, published last spring by Random House, combines Sebald\u2019s two books of criticism on Austrian literature into a single, convenient, if somewhat unwieldy volume. Translated by Jo Catling, one of Sebald\u2019s colleagues at the UEA, it will likely strike more casual readers of Sebald, at least those without a background in German studies, as simultaneously more straightforward and more obscure than his better-known work. <em>A Place in the Country<\/em>, a 1998 essay collection also translated by Jo Catling, covers a similarly obscure range of authors, but with a salutary focus on Sebald\u2019s own formative experiences, such as reading the beloved humorist and almanac writer Johann Peter Hebel. But personal circumstance informed his academic interests no less than his \u201cpotting shed\u201d writing. Until he met Sebald in 1983, Residenz\u2019s editor, Jochen Jung, believed that the writer was Austrian himself\u2014who else could have written about the country\u2019s literature on such intimate, often hostile terms? Sebald had also cultivated that assumption among his UEA colleagues, sometimes telling them outright that he was Austrian. Linguistic as well as geographic proximity might have given this fabrication the ring of truth. Sebald\u2019s childhood village of Wertach is within walking distance of the Austrian border. He grew up speaking the local Allg\u00e4u dialect, which is largely unintelligible to the rest of Bavaria, let alone Germany, but can be understood in the neighboring Austrian regions of Tirol and Vorarlberg. There is also temperamental affinity to consider. As the title of the first collection indicates, no other national literary tradition epitomized misfortune better than the one next door:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The high incidence of ill-starred lives in the history of Austrian literature is, to say the least, somewhat uncanny. Raimund\u2019s premature phobia of dying, Nestroy\u2019s fear of being buried alive, Grillparzer\u2019s bouts of depression, the case of Stifter, Schnitzler\u2019s references on almost every page of his journal to his fits of melancholy, Hofmannsthal\u2019s feelings of alienation, the suicide of poor Weininger, Kafka\u2019s fourty-year-long tactical withdrawal from life, Roth\u2019s addiction to alcohol, Horvath\u2019s apparently so logical end\u2026<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote has-text-align-left is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">An impressively miserable lot, to be sure, but once Sebald advances from the general to the particular, distortions emerge in his gloomy but picturesque vision, though in ways that are unlikely to register outside the academic context in which the essays first appeared. As personal interpretations, as notes toward an individual style, they are a triumph. As reports of actual people, as diagnostic instruments for the all-too-real misfortune that befell Austria, the essays sometimes come up short, sometimes spectacularly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">By misfortune, Sebald <em><\/em>means, above all, the lives of Jewish writers. Of the fourteen or so figures profiled in <em>Silent Catastrophes,<\/em> nine have such ancestry to varying degrees. <em><\/em>The cultural excellence of the secular, bourgeois German-speaking Jewish population in Austria is well-trodden territory. Sebald\u2019s innovation is in characterizing this excellence as an essentially provincial rather than a cosmopolitan phenomenon. As he imagines them, the Jewish communities in Prague and Vienna were no less confined than a minuscule Alpine village. Franz Kafka, inevitably, is the representative figure here. Sebald demonstrates how the haunted atmosphere in <em>The Castle<\/em> is achieved by playing up elements already present in rural Bohemia, \u201ca dark desolate wintery landscape stretching away in the twilight of mock suns, timeless, as in a dream.\u201d Along with a flair for dramatic summaries, Sebald also possesses a workman\u2019s eye for the mechanics of storytelling. He makes much of <em>The Castle\u2019s<\/em> protagonist K. owning a handgun in early drafts of the novel. A novelistic bent is also evident in Sebald\u2019s essay on Elias Canetti, where the writer\u2019s aversion to food is treated at length. Canetti\u2019s notebook entries on the subject would not be out of place in the mouth of Jacques Austerlitz or another of Sebald\u2019s morbidly obsessive protagonists:&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Ever since I saw a human stomach, nine-tenths of a human stomach, within less than two hours after it was cut out, I know even less why we eat. It looked just like the pieces of meat that people roast in their kitchens, it was even the size of an ordinary schnitzel. Why does like come to like? Why the circuitous route? Why must meat incessantly go through the bowels of other meat? Why must this be in particular the condition of our life?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Alongside Kafka and Canetti, Sebald also profiles Jean Am\u00e9ry and Joseph Roth, noting a particularly strong attachment these writers felt to Austrian culture, over and above their Jewish heritage, before the country was absorbed by the Nazi Reich in 1938. Roth died only a year later, in Paris, from pneumonia and the effects of alcohol withdrawal; Am\u00e9ry\u2019s fate was more protracted. He died by suicide in 1978, a consequence of his torture by the Gestapo and imprisonment at Auschwitz. It\u2019s a dynamic still at play in contemporary life, though thankfully with less severe consequences: the heritage of so-called Western culture preserved and perpetuated by the very people it ostracizes. In many ways, Sebald would find the cultural landscape of 2026 depressingly familiar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">As its presence in the title <em>Strange Homeland<\/em> would indicate, the German concept of <em>Heimat<\/em> is an essential (and essentially troubled) concept. It runs through Sebald\u2019s life and work like a vein of dark ore. Following Germany\u2019s defeat, nationalism, especially the pan-Germanic variety advanced by Adolf Hitler, was replaced in schools and mass media by a pastoral localism that was, at least on its surface, untainted by associations with the former regime. Cinemas were filled with <em>Heimatfilme<\/em>, sentimental movies about village life set in the Alps or the Black Forest, far away from the cities leveled by Allied bombing campaigns. In primary school, Sebald was taught <em>Heimatkunde<\/em>, local geography and history, two abiding preoccupations, by Armin M\u00fcller, a beloved teacher who became the model for Paul Bereyter in <em>The Emigrants<\/em>. Like his fictional counterpart, M\u00fcller was persecuted as a <em>Mischling<\/em> or \u201chalf-breed\u201d for his Jewish ancestry <em><\/em>under Nazi Germany\u2019s racial purity laws. Learning of this later in life, the apt-pupil Sebald felt an enormous ambivalence toward his education, but it could not be discarded at will like so many turnip tops. Instead, he turned the perversion of <em>Heimat<\/em> into a theory of literature. It is the very status of outsider, so Sebald argues in <em>Silent Catastrophes<\/em>, that allows one to write so perceptively about provincial life.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But who counts as an outsider? This is an especially salient but fraught question in Sebald\u2019s treatment of \u201cpathological cases,\u201d writers suffering mental illness and unresolved psychological trauma. Much like the subject of <em>Heimat<\/em>, there is a close connection here with Sebald\u2019s fiction and academic writing. The schizophrenic poet Ernst Herbeck, whom the Sebald-narrator visits at a nursing home in <em>Vertigo<\/em>, is also featured in <em>Silent Catastrophes.<\/em> The material poverty of Herbeck\u2019s life, so he argues, necessitates a minoritarian view of the culture surrounding him, exemplified by the totemistic depiction of animals and the bricolage-like methods by which the poet assembles logically incommensurate elements. If this interpretation of Herbeck\u2019s work seems theoretically overdetermined, too dependent on the theories of Deleuze and L\u00e9vi-Strauss, it is rather sober compared to Sebald\u2019s treatment of Adalbert Stifter, the nineteenth-century giant of <em>Heimat<\/em> literature, who goes through a bizarre reckoning. It is indisputable that some kind of mental pathology was an abiding and malevolent force in the Stifter household. An adoptive daughter, Julia, ran away multiple times and was eventually found drowned after a final attempt. Stifter, who suffered from depression and extreme fluctuations in weight, died in an emaciated state by slitting his own throat. And yet there is no hard evidence to claim, as Sebald does, that Stifter was a pedophile, and the textual evidence he musters, passages in fiction, do not stand out in context. By our contemporary standards, Stifter places a disturbing emphasis on the sexual innocence of young girls, but he is far from an extreme case, at least compared to Edgar Allan Poe or Lewis Carroll. By Sebald\u2019s standards, Charles Dickens is a demonstrable pedophile as well. It\u2019s a bizarre charge especially in light of Sebald\u2019s treatment of the Viennese essayist, Peter Altenberg, who took intimate photos of young, sometimes visibly prepubescent girls and wrote autobiographical accounts of seducing them. This pathology is entirely neglected by Sebald in his essay on the writer. Instead, he focuses on Altenberg\u2019s frugal living habits and refusal to travel outside the narrow confines of Vienna and the Salzkammergut. Why confect such unwholesome details with Stifter? Some of Sebald\u2019s own preferred medicine\u2014biographical criticism\u2014might serve to clarify matters. Stifter was a lifelong favorite of his mother, Rosa, his maternal grandfather, Joseph Engelhofer, and of Sebald himself. The claim of pedophilia upset Rosa, a foretaste of the embarrassment and social isolation she would experience as a result of the fictionalized portrait Wertach in <em>Vertigo.<\/em> It could be that an uncomplicated appreciation of Stifter ran counter to Sebald\u2019s desire to expose and confront the pathological elements of Austrian society. It could also be that Altenberg\u2019s pedophilia was sufficiently well-known as to make him an unsuitable target for tendentious criticism. Stifter\u2019s turbulent life, in a mental, physical, and social sense, rendered him unable to live conventionally, a profound lack that is, so Sebald argues convincingly, reflected in the eerily harmonious world of his supposedly realist fiction. But it\u2019s a gross exaggeration to claim that Stifter\u2019s unease in aristocratic circles, a conventional feature of his bourgeois background and his occupation as a private tutor, qualifies him as an \u201cinternal exile.\u201d&nbsp; And yet, as perverse as his reading of Stifter is on some details, on the whole it is not destructive. Rather, it highlights what makes him such a strangely compelling writer when so much of his contemporaries\u2019 writing strikes us as dull and saccharine. Behind the ostensibly placid fa\u00e7ade of Austrian society, a profound sense of loneliness and insecurity follows Stifter\u2019s child (and childlike) protagonists through their ceaseless travels, their desire for knowledge, like an invading alien intelligence guiding them, in the absence of conventional plotting and narrative stakes, toward rapturous experiences of nature so profound as to be apocalyptic. But poetic as it is, the intensity and intensely personal nature of Sebald\u2019s reading distorts, erases, and even falsifies important particulars about Stifter, as it does for other authors that Sebald profiles. Among a professional readership, which was the sole readership Sebald had at the time, such problems were spotted immediately, but Catling is circumspect about his academic controversies in the introduction, alluding to them only indirectly. Certainly, it is not within the translator\u2019s remit to confirm or deny an author\u2019s claims in detail. Nevertheless, Stifter\u2019s canonical status, in conjunction with the English-speaking world\u2019s general unfamiliarity with Austrian literature, gives <em>Silent Catastrophes<\/em> an aura of <em><\/em>veracity and moral authority that it did not have when the books were in their original German publication. But these decades-old academic disputes, narrow as they are, cut against the bland postmortem image of Sebald as a literary saint. It takes a brazen head\u2014not to mention a degree of professional irony\u2014to write, \u201cIt is well known that a pronounced pedagogic talent often goes hand in hand with repressed paedophiliac desires. This, no doubt, will also have been true of Stifter, who appears to have been, or aspired to be, a \u2018begnadeter Lehrer\u2019 (gifted teacher).\u201d&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Though scholarly breadth and polemical weight are present in abundance throughout <em>Silent Catastrophes<\/em>, the elegant monotone of Sebald\u2019s mature style is notably absent. This is not due to any lack of skill on the part of Catling. Her work on <em>A Place in the Country<\/em> could measure up against any of Sebald\u2019s more celebrated translations. The uneven reading experience is mostly due to the utilitarian character of academic prose and the difficulty of presenting it to a general audience. But in one respect, <em>Silent Catastrophes<\/em> is considerably easier to digest than Sebald\u2019s fiction: There are no long untranslated passages. The Czech in <em>Austerlitz<\/em>, for instance, is likely to be just as unfamiliar to the reader as it is to the narrator. The difficulty of the passages mirrors the protagonist\u2019s difficulties in recovering a language that was stolen from him in early childhood. Further explication would have betrayed the memetic function of the prose\u2014not understanding is the point. Catling makes the sensible choice of providing English translations of French and Italian passages when they appear, though the apparatus of brackets and endnotes doesn\u2019t make for a smooth reading experience. Take, for instance, this concluding passage in the essay on Hugo von Hofmannsthal\u2019s unfinished novel <em>Andreas<\/em>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It is profoundly appropriate to the fetishistic tendency, which conceals the libido precisely where no one would think of looking for it. Only in such images is it possible\u2014in the most painful way imaginable\u2014to see restored the joy [<em>Gl\u00fcck<\/em>] of those better times from which we believe we have lapsed. \u201cNessun maggior dolor\u201d [no greater suffering]\u2014as Hofmannsthal also noted for his <em>Andreas<\/em> novel\u2014\u201cche ricordarsi del tempo felice\u2014nella miseria.\u201d&nbsp;<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The footnotes appended to this passage trace the quotation from Hofmannsthal to Dante\u2019s <em>Inferno<\/em>: \u201cThere is no greater suffering than to remember happy times\u2014from a state of misery.\u201d This very Sebaldian dictum is blunted somewhat by having to go to the back of the book\u2014there are two endnote sections, one for Sebald and one for Catling\u2014to fish out the English translation and its provenance. The distracting presence of brackets invalidates any general case to be made against in-text translations or footnotes, as does the inconsistency of the apparatus, since footnotes are used in an essay on Thomas Bernhard, where they are uniquely unhelpful. Long quotations\u2014for Bernhard, this means a sentence or two\u2014are reproduced in small font at the bottom of the page, not ideal for the explication of a difficult writer.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Already disgusted by experiences as a German university student, Sebald grew increasingly jaded about the state of higher education in England as well. Catling\u2019s introductory notes provide some vivid anecdotes in this regard, especially regarding his very professorial disgust with administrative matters. \u201c<em>Eine ungute Sache<\/em>,\u201d he would say habitually, \u201ca dreadful business.\u201d He was outraged by the austerity measures inaugurated by Margaret Thatcher, but these developments did not elicit any public protest from him, save for a passing reference in the <em>Rings of Saturn<\/em>. As vociferously critical as he could be regarding the pathologies of his native and adopted cultures, this stance did not redound to any easily legible political position. Indeed, Sebald is quite ecumenical in <em>Silent Catastrophes<\/em>, noting with approval that Bernhard and Handke\u2019s opposition to Austrian society is unburdened by left-wing politics. If we can use his attack on D\u00f6blin as a guide, aversion to revolutionary violence might be a factor in this quietism. This would be unproblematic but for the emancipatory claims Sebald makes about his method of criticism: \u201cWhen, with a fixed stare, Melancholy considers once more how things could have come to this, it becomes clear that the mechanics of hopelessness are identical to those which drive our knowledge and insight. The description of misfortune contains within it the possibility of its overcoming.\u201d But overcome how? Communism is out of the question, of course, but so are liberal regimes shorn of their social democratic elements. And what would overcoming look like? A sort of answer comes in the form of Peter Handke\u2019s 1986 novel <em>Weiderholung (Repetition).<\/em> In it, a man of mixed Austrian and Slovenian heritage, Filib Kobal, makes a trip on foot over the mountains into what was then a unified Yugoslavia, searching for his lost elder brother. The parallels between <em>Repetition<\/em> and Sebald\u2019s fiction are strong and numerous, from the narrator standing in for the author, from their unhappy portraits of childhood immediately the Second World War, down to their rich descriptions of Alpine landscapes. Once the Kobal crosses the border, the novel becomes a pastoral idyll, suspended in time, preoccupied with the particulars of orchard keeping or the grammar of the Slovene language.&nbsp; Kobal discovers himself in this picture postcard landscape, one very similar to Austria, except without the troublesome presence of all those the Austrians: \u201cWhat delights Kobal most about the crowd on the streets of the Yugoslavian cities \u2018was what it lacked, the things that were missing: the chamois beards, the hartshorn buttons, the loden suits, the lederhosen: in short, no one in it wore a costume.\u2019\u201d For Sebald as well as for Handke, this lack of Austrian folk culture, this apparent lack of a <em>Heimat<\/em> outside the vessels of language and landscape<em>,<\/em> has political as well as aesthetic weight. Presented as it is in <em>Silent Catastrophes<\/em>, <em><\/em>this attitude is marginal marginal, one propounded by outsiders against the dominant culture, but it\u2019s actually quite a common attitude in German-speaking lands, even held by those with otherwise conservative cultural politics. This apparent contradiction is buried under the provincial maxim: \u201cEverybody does it the wrong way, except for us.\u201d I vividly remember having conversation with a stranger on a train while I was on my way to a Carnival celebration in the Austrian town of Bad Aussee, deep inside the mountainous region of the Salzkammergut. My companion agreed that the bright Commedia dell\u2019arte\u2013influenced costumes in Bad Aussee were quite respectable, much better than \u201cthe silly yodelers in lederhosen.\u201d We were surprised then to see, as we stepped onto a platform to change trains, a group of yodelers dressed in lederhosen. I laughed, charmed by the coincidence, but my companion was livid and trudged away without a word. For him, it wasn\u2019t a laughing matter, just as it was for Sebald. \u201cKitsch is the evil value in a system of art,\u201d he writes, and its lack, along with the lack of guilt from the Second World War, provides for him, as it does for Handke, a vision of paradise. But it is precisely here, in this Yugoslavian idyll, that Handke banishes himself from the status of moral writer, at least by Sebald\u2019s standards. What are we to make of Handke\u2019s \u201cotherwise\u201d in light of his denial that genocide occurred in Bosnia at the hands of the Serbian armed forces? What are we to make of this \u201cotherwise\u201d in light the eulogy Handke delivered at President Slobodan Milo\u0161evi\u0107\u2019s funeral in 2006? These were actions undertaken within Sebald\u2019s lifetime, but I have yet to come across anything in the copious academic literature about the two authors that would indicate how Sebald might have felt about the matter. There are many possible reasons why he might have been disinclined to criticize Handke, whether it was from a stance of anti-interventionism or active political partisanship, or whether it was from a sense of literary or generational kinship\u2014this reviewer can\u2019t know for sure, at least with the information at hand. What is striking is that Sebald, who was otherwise quite willing to stoke controversy, sometimes on the flimsiest of pretexts, chose to sit this particular controversy out. No minor academic squabble, Handke\u2019s involvement in the Yugoslav Wars became a volatile subject again by his winning the Nobel Prize in 2019. But reading the scholarly literature, you would be forgiven for thinking that the whole sordid affair just didn\u2019t exist.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In any case, it\u2019s an object lesson in the ethical as well as epistemic limits of Sebald\u2019s interpretative method. As an enabling condition for his own creative work, the criticism of <em>Silent Catastrophes<\/em> is an unqualified success. Given the horrific guilt of society he was raised in, it would have been impossible for Sebald to write uncomplicated narratives about the subjects that had mesmerized him since childhood: local history or geography, provincial authors writing about peasant life. He needed to dig deeper, to excavate what was worthwhile from the heaps, or rather mountains of sentimental kitsch that surrounded him. He succeeded, but not without cooking the books a little. His horror of academic complicity in Nazism gave his attacks on <em>Germanistik<\/em> a moral and political weight, but this was undercut by a tendency to exaggerate and fabricate details that suited his agenda. Fiction proved a far sounder vessel for such editorial interventions. Sebald could conscience pastoral literature, so long as the landscape was colored according to his palette, bereft of folkloristic detail, filled with people very much like Sebald himself, constantly intimating disaster, fundamentally at odds with their culture, even if the record states otherwise. With a writer of such stature, even at this early period, the information-giving function of criticism can be suspended, replaced with the appreciation of a criticism that is, in itself, of literary-historical interest. But Sebald\u2019s account of Austrian literature is, at critical points, gravely distorted. For outsiders, for <em>Ausl\u00e4nder<\/em> to gain a more accurate picture of Austrian literature, another, more reliable narrator is needed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An impressively miserable lot, to be sure, but once Sebald advances from the general to the particular, distortions emerge in his gloomy but picturesque vision&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":259091335,"featured_media":17407,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_wpcom_ai_launchpad_first_post":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1368],"tags":[3358,3356,2901,3357,3355],"class_list":["post-17401","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-review","tag-matthew-spencer","tag-random-house","tag-review","tag-silent-catastrophes","tag-w-g-sebald","pmpro-level-required","pmpro-level-1","pmpro-level-2","pmpro-level-3","pmpro-level-4","pmpro-level-5","pmpro-level-8","pmpro-level-6","pmpro-level-9","pmpro-level-7","pmpro-level-10","pmpro-has-access"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>One Misfortune After Another: On W. 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Spencer","date":"July 6, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"\u00c9ireann Lorsung | The Century | Milkweed Editions | 2020 | 144 Pages \u201cInclusivity in American systems comes with the price of domestication.\u201d - Fady JoudahRecently, I heard Hanif Abdurraqib correct himself\u2014\u201cI shouldn\u2019t say we.\u201d Instead of speaking generally, which often makes it sound like you\u2019ve been around the block\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Essay&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Essay","link":"https:\/\/clereviewofbooks.com\/category\/essay\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/Lorsung_Website.png?fit=960%2C1200&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/Lorsung_Website.png?fit=960%2C1200&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200 1x, 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Denial: On Devyn Defoe\u2019s &#8220;Burnside&#8221; and Douglas Coupland\u2019s &#8220;Generation X&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-large\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"819\" height=\"1024\" data-attachment-id=\"17385\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/clereviewofbooks.com\/on-devyn-defoes-burnside-and-douglas-couplands-generation-x\/defoe_coupland_website\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Defoe_Coupland_Website.png?fit=900%2C1125&amp;ssl=1\" data-orig-size=\"900,1125\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" 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srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Defoe_Coupland_Website.png?resize=819%2C1024&amp;ssl=1 819w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Defoe_Coupland_Website.png?resize=240%2C300&amp;ssl=1 240w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Defoe_Coupland_Website.png?resize=768%2C960&amp;ssl=1 768w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Defoe_Coupland_Website.png?resize=374%2C468&amp;ssl=1 374w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Defoe_Coupland_Website.png?resize=851%2C1064&amp;ssl=1 851w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Defoe_Coupland_Website.png?resize=390%2C488&amp;ssl=1 390w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Defoe_Coupland_Website.png?w=900&amp;ssl=1 900w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 819px) 100vw, 819px\" \/><noscript><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"819\" height=\"1024\" data-attachment-id=\"17385\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/clereviewofbooks.com\/on-devyn-defoes-burnside-and-douglas-couplands-generation-x\/defoe_coupland_website\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Defoe_Coupland_Website.png?fit=900%2C1125&amp;ssl=1\" data-orig-size=\"900,1125\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"Defoe_Coupland_Website\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Defoe_Coupland_Website.png?fit=819%2C1024&amp;ssl=1\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Defoe_Coupland_Website.png?resize=819%2C1024&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-17385\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Defoe_Coupland_Website.png?resize=819%2C1024&amp;ssl=1 819w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Defoe_Coupland_Website.png?resize=240%2C300&amp;ssl=1 240w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Defoe_Coupland_Website.png?resize=768%2C960&amp;ssl=1 768w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Defoe_Coupland_Website.png?resize=374%2C468&amp;ssl=1 374w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Defoe_Coupland_Website.png?resize=851%2C1064&amp;ssl=1 851w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Defoe_Coupland_Website.png?resize=390%2C488&amp;ssl=1 390w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Defoe_Coupland_Website.png?w=900&amp;ssl=1 900w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 819px) 100vw, 819px\" \/><\/noscript><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\"><strong>Devyn Defoe |<\/strong> <em>Burnside<\/em> <strong>| Astra House | August 2026 | 258 pages<\/strong><br><strong>Douglas Coupland | <\/strong><em>Generation X<\/em><strong> | St. Martin&#8217;s | March 1991 | 165 pages<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">On July 7, three satellites designed to detect wildfires launched into orbit from Vandenberg Space Force Base, on the coast north of Santa Barbara. That same day, the son of a Real Housewife of Orange County started an accidental fire in the hills of Ladera Ranch that burned seven acres. (He has since been enrolled in a fire safety course.) On July 8, dry lightning moved across the Sierra Nevada on monsoon wind, and forecasters warned the whole range was primed to catch. It\u2019s the middle of summer, peak California fire season\u2014that uneasy stretch when neighbors exchange numbers, pack getaway bags with doomsday conviction, and then, as the cellphone alarms recede, slip back into blithe denial.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Denying fire danger is a skill that the young adults of Sacramento native Devyn Defoe\u2019s debut novel, <em>Burnside,<\/em> have mastered. The novel takes place in \u201cthe bowl,\u201d a half-derelict pocket of Northern California. If anyone who lived there cared enough to characterize it, they would call it dystopian. Haze drifts through open windows. Whole districts turn to smoke, but the town\u2019s inhabitants ignore their scratchy throats and continue \u201cacting as if it was normal summer weather.\u201d But maybe acting isn\u2019t the right word. In Defoe\u2019s California, post-fire conditions <em>are<\/em> normal summer weather.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Fire has always had a place in California novels. Thirty-five years ago, a casually set conflagration formed the climax of Douglas Coupland\u2019s <em>Generation X<\/em> (1991), which portrayed 1990s America through three friends\u2014Andy, Dag, and Claire\u2014who drop out amid the bungalows of Palm Springs. In Coupland\u2019s novel, fire briefly interrupts isolation and brings people together. In Defoe\u2019s darker tale, catastrophe has become so ordinary that it barely interrupts anything at all.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The distance between these two novels measures the distance America has traveled in the intervening years. A striking contrast concerns the ways we process information and communicate. In <em>Generation X<\/em>, the characters draw close to each other through telling stories. In <em>Burnside<\/em>, the stories have been replaced by rumors.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Storytelling requires a foundation of trust. Andy, Dag, and Claire distrust consumer culture,<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">distrust the boomers who handed it to them, distrust the future they inherited. But they trust each other. That allows them to escape together into imaginary spaces. They conjure lush, parallel worlds and embellish their own pasts. Playful mythmaking becomes a form of intimacy, a means of digesting reality without submitting to it, and everyone is in on the joke.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>Burnside<\/em> asks what happens when that shared understanding collapses. In the thirty-five years separating the novels, new information technologies have altered both how stories travel and the relationships they sustain. Storytelling once implied reciprocal roles: a teller who told, a listener who could respond. In its place now is an endless flow of sensationalized headlines, posts, and updates\u2014information arriving faster than anyone can verify it, from sources no one can place.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In that flood, stories become rumors. They gather force through repetition rather than accuracy. Rumor keeps <em>Burnside<\/em>\u2019s atomized world in motion, but it cannot produce the intimacy and recognition that storytelling once did. Inundated with fragments and estranged from one another, its characters are left to believe either everything or nothing they hear.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The novel orbits the retelling of a single encounter between September, the narrator\u2019s roommate, and a local homeless man named Burnside. While September is sitting at a caf\u00e9, Burnside suddenly grabs her wrist, cutting her with his nails. In her first account to the narrator, there is nothing distinctive about his appearance. His voice is difficult to make out, though he does apologize. The narrator has seen Burnside before. She recalls watching him use a lighter to read a comic book in the dark, accidentally setting the comic book on fire. He lowered his ear toward the flames, listened for a moment, and then gathered his belongings and walked away. September\u2019s response is immediate: \u201cHe\u2019s an arsonist too?\u201d&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Like any story passed from person to person, September\u2019s account shifts each time it\u2019s retold. What is initially murky and unknowable takes on intention and detail. An incidental scratch becomes a deliberate, catlike swipe. The accidental fire becomes arson. She grows convinced he\u2019s stalking her. After she ends up with his wallet, the narrator suggests that he may simply want it back. She snaps: \u201cYou weren\u2019t there. You don\u2019t know what he was like.\u201d&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Before long, Burnside is blamed for murders, fires, and the ambient instability of life in the bowl. Known to frequent local caf\u00e9s, he becomes the target of an informal campaign organized through social media stories\u2014unverifiable dispatches designed to spread and expire. The baristas chase him out, only for him to return the next day. Just one proposes a simpler explanation for his persistence: \u201cCould it be\u2026that he just wants to get out of the smoke?\u201d&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">While September\u2019s encounter spins off into endless online mutations, Andy, Dag, and Claire are stuck confronting a single, shaky script. They have inherited the tidy post-war promise: work hard, and a life will arrange itself around you\u2014linear, sequential, ending somewhere worth reaching. By the time they get to Palm Springs, they know the promise is false. They are exhausted by office culture and consumer habits that have failed to make them happy, resentful of the world their elders handed off like \u201cskid-marked underwear.\u201d By trading ornate, competitive tales in the desert, they grieve the old story, dream up replacements, and mock the media monoculture still peddling its archaic vision of success.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>Burnside<\/em>\u2019s characters have no equivalent wreckage to sift through, because they never inherited a single future to lose. What they inherited was apocalyptic weather, pandemic shutdowns, precarious gig work, and algorithmic echo chambers selling rival destinies. In other words, too many stories for any to feel convincing or worth grieving. The narrator recalls spending much of high school convinced that the world had already been swallowed by \u201ca giant yawn.\u201d Instead of inventing alternatives, they spin explanations for lives that were never likely to unfold differently.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">September\u2019s boyfriend swears that his two broken arms are all that stand between him and a career as an architect\u2014a \u201ccosmic waste\u201d\u2014despite never having sketched a single building. In <em>Generation X<\/em>, cosmic waste is embodied by the yuppies who traded their talents for money\u2014people who spend their lives following a myth to its dead end. September\u2019s boyfriend does the reverse: He doesn\u2019t waste his life believing in a myth; he believes the myth that his life is already wasted.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Rumors in <em>Burnside<\/em> exist in the present tense. Events and the speculation about them unfold at once, leaving the characters to decipher a world still taking shape\u2014a task made harder by their distance from one another. Characters cross paths constantly without ever really connecting. At a friend\u2019s funeral, separate cliques gather around the same loss without meaningfully intersecting. The narrator admits, \u201cI learned everyone\u2019s jobs and everyone\u2019s names and the names sounded fake and the jobs might have been also.\u201d&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Names hover loosely, failing to correspond to the people and places they describe. Characters drink wine at the \u201cbarbershop\u201d and coffee at the \u201cfish shop.\u201d The local bus, known as the \u201cratbus,\u201d is infested with raccoons. The narrator has no name. September may or may not be named September. Other figures appear simply as \u201cthe actor,\u201d \u201cthe DJ,\u201d or \u201cthe antifascist.\u201d&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Reading <em>Burnside<\/em> can feel like arriving halfway through an inside joke no one intends to explain. People exist more like profiles than characters, stripped of the context needed to cohere into full selves. They are the residue of stories distilled to the few details that survived their retelling.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Coupland\u2019s characters are not profiles. They have no audience but each other: no feed, no followers, nobody watching from outside the circle. Inside that circle they say things that land, that require a response. <em>Burnside<\/em>\u2019s characters live before unseen onlookers, on platforms that reward the most digestible version of a self, and so the stories they tell about themselves become harder to revise or outgrow. One man spends months converting his van into a home and posts instructional videos of the process online. When his parents die suddenly in a car accident and he inherits their actual house, he still spends nights in the van. Even this upheaval cannot fully move him, because a narrative of his life is already in circulation.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That difference in audience also changes the kind of distance the characters can maintain from their own lives. The ironic aesthetic of <em>Generation X<\/em> signals that its characters know the game is rigged, and satire of that kind requires a target. Coupland wrote in the last years when it was still possible to imagine that the culture\u2019s problems could be traced to bankers, yuppies, and boomers.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Defoe\u2019s characters can\u2019t locate an equivalent object. When the same event generates incompatible accounts depending on which feed one follows, irony loses its purchase. The narrator of <em>Burnside<\/em> doesn\u2019t attempt it. What she practices is closer to dissociation, a flattening of experience. Where Andy moves through Palm Springs with a sly, self-aware wit, she moves through the bowl with a blankness that occasionally tips into the surreal. The world doesn\u2019t feel rigged to her; it just doesn\u2019t feel like much.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That blankness has a material floor. In Coupland\u2019s California, dropping out still seems possible. Andy and Dag are bartenders; Claire works at a department store. It\u2019s the kind of job Coupland famously named the \u201cMcJob\u201d: \u201ca low-pay, low-prestige\u2026no-future job in the service sector.\u201d The work bores them, but it bankrolls a life organized around friendship and leisure. They can quit, find another job, head to the desert, reinvent themselves in Mexico, become nuns, hoteliers, or something stranger. Read from 2026, the faith that a service job could finance such freedom feels almost utopian.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Defoe\u2019s characters work similarly absurd jobs but to very different effect. September waits tables at a cowgirl-themed \u201cbreastaurant,\u201d while the narrator invents inventory numbers for a bookstore\u2019s \u201caudience of invisible people.\u201d As with Coupland\u2019s McJobs, the work is tedious, but it barely pays basic expenses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Along with the transformation of stories into rumors, the contraction of economic opportunity has foreclosed the choices. Opting out is no longer an option. There is no outside left to enter. One young woman announces she is running away to Portland, only for her stolen car to be found just outside town, coated in dust and facing the wrong direction. Whether she changed her mind or met some darker fate is never revealed. Her attempted escape never develops from rumor into narrative.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Today, a follower can watch someone online for years, learn the shape of their life, and remain, in every way that once mattered, a stranger. In 1991, \u201cfollowing\u201d usually meant trusting a person enough to go wherever they led. <em>Burnside<\/em> closes on the modern sense of the word: September\u2019s<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">group surrounds Burnside, a man they have observed and narrated without knowing. Replaying the novel\u2019s opening scene, she grips the narrator\u2019s wrist, and the narrator trails her home because no other path seems possible.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>Generation X<\/em> ends with Andy leaving for San Felipe to join Dag and Claire in a half-imagined hotel venture, following the two people he trusts most toward a future none of them can fully articulate. On the drive, he and a group of strangers pull off the highway to watch what looks like a mushroom cloud but turns out to be farmers burning stubble. The moment is \u201crestful\u201d and \u201cunifying,\u201d a flash of wonder that makes people smile at one another before they move on.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Back then, fire still had the power to stop strangers in their tracks and turn them toward one another, to make even a false alarm an occasion. Today, it\u2019s hard to say which fantasy is quainter: aimless thirty-somethings fleeing to Baja, or a driver braking to admire farm-field smoke.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In Generation X, the characters draw close to each other through telling stories. 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