Cultish by Amanda Montell

  If there’s someone that can make linguistics cool and fun, it’s Amanda Montell. I previously read her book Wordslut, which was a fun breakdown of ‘profane’ language. Cultish retains a similar accessibility and lets Montell’s lively voice shine. It is a contemporary examination of the language games cult leaders play in order to manipulate their audience.

Montell begins the reflection essentially with what we think of as “actual” cult leaders. She gives an account of Jim Jones and the Jamestown massacre, for example. She draws on personal accounts, archival recordings, and other scholarship to explain how Jones was able to maintain such control over his adherents despite the obvious lies and contradictions. Montell describes how language operates to prevent deep consideration of ideas. For Jonestown in particular, I appreciated how Montell drew on the work of Sikivu Hutchinson to explore the narrative of how Jim Jones drew on progressive ideology to manipulate people and ultimately deploy racist stereotypes to his advantage.

There are a few elements that re-emerge across different contexts. In addition to dehumanizing ‘out groups’, Montell identifies the “us vs. them” structures that give cult adherents a sense of belonging they might not otherwise be experiencing. The us/them and in/out group mentality at the core of cults serves to elevate some at the expense of others. This also leads to ‘purity tests’ that give validity to the cult followers’ experience. At the same time, cults operate on the principle that there is always another layer of purity that adherents can never achieve.

The most memorable case study for this is scientology. For instance, in scientology (and other cult-like settings), words are given new meanings that become a kind of code to those “in the know.” Again, that is able to contribute to an in-group and an out-group. We see this in all kinds of places; different communities have their own lexicon. What is different about scientology is that if a member is found to have used a word incorrectly, they are subjected to rigorous “testing” (re-programming) until they demonstrate that they now have the accepted understanding of the word. I found that section pretty compelling because it seemed the most codified and controlled use of language of the different groups in question. 

Despite other cult-like settings not being as interventionist, necessarily, in their adherents’ use of language, there are certain patterns that emerge. One chapter of the text is focused on Multi-level Marketing schemes and another focuses on fitness crazes, like spin and Bikram yoga, and Montell highlights how formulaic their messaging can be. Montell is pretty funny in creating fake outreach messages of a woman trying to recruit for her MLM. As entertaining (and informative) as it is to explain the patterns in the #girlboss dialect, Montell is also pretty sympathetic to those folks that get duped. She highlights the research that shows how cult adherents are not necessarily ignorant but that they hold a more optimistic disposition.

One of the most useful elements of Montell’s analysis of language is her commentary on “thought-terminating clichés.” Those are all those phrases that are designed to make people stop reflecting. Statements like “it is what it is” stand out as an example that encourages people to just stop thinking. Montell touches on the Trump cult briefly, but I can’t help but think of “thought-terminating clichés” like Make America Great Again as a response to any challenge to critical thinking.

Amanda Montell is a special voice in contemporary discourse. I think she’s such an accessible writer that writes in a fun and engaging voice about contemporary issues. The topics she’s addressing are deep and academic, but are delivered with such clarity that readers are made to feel welcome within the complexity of the discourse. I think I liked Wordslut a bit better, but Cultish is more broadly applicable across contexts.

Happy reading!

Ru by Kim Thúy

  Kim Thúy is a writer of beautiful books that work through a series of resonances. Each book is a series of connected sketches that read like prose poems. Being Thúy’s first book, Ru lays the foundation of Thúy’s special magic.

Ru is the story of a Vietnamese family whose lives are forever disrupted by war. The central character’s family has their home occupied by Communist soldiers and flee by boat through Malaysia, where they lived in a refugee camp, before moving on to Montreal. The novel recounts vignettes from their lives and the characters they meet along the way. The book hops between the present and different pasts, often in a free-associative Proustian way. For example, the narrator recounts going to a lotus pond in a suburb of Hanoi where “there were always two or three women with bent backs and trembling hands, sitting in a small round boat, using a stick to move across the water and drop leaves into open lotus blossoms” (40). Lovely description aside, the passage continues that “They would come back the next day to collect them one by one before the petals faded, after the captive tea leaves had absorbed the scent of the pistils during the night. They told me that every one of those tea leaves preserved the soul of the short-lived flowers” (40). The passage ends there, but the following page (chapter?) begins that “Photos could not preserve the soul of our first Christmas trees” (41). We jump from the past to the present around a concept: preservation of the soul. Visually, there’s enough of a contrast between a lotus and a Christmas tree, the latter of which whose “branches gathered in the woods of suburban Montreal, stuck in the rim of a spare tire covered with a white sheet, seem bare and lacking in magic, but in reality they were much prettier than the eight-foot-tall spruce trees we have nowadays” (41). I’m a little bit stunned by the way Thúy cleaves contrasting ideas together through a more metaphorical or conceptual connection. This is one example, but most of the text operates with this associational approach.

The character studies throughout the text are opportunities to form rich portraits while also offering philosophical insights into the human experience. Often, we hear about the behaviour of a character and the passage culminates with some reflection that sums up the core of the person. One agèd character passes away but “he hadn’t grown old before he died. He had stopped time by continuing to enjoy himself, to live until the end with the lightness of a young man” (59).Another character is particularly severe and “all the fun of childhood slipped between her fingers while, in the name of propriety, she was forbidding her sisters to dance” (62). These observations feel both particular and universal and hover on that horizon in a touching way.

The vignettes throughout the novel also stand out as cautionary tales or flash fictions that would fit in something like The One Thousand and One Nights. In one vignette, the narrator is in a cube van on the way to pick strawberries or beans and her mother tells her the story of another day labourer who would wait for her employer across the street every day. The narrator’s grandfather’s gardner would bring her a treat for breakfast every day and one morning he fails to appear. She keeps waiting and he keeps failing to appear. The story becomes a more tragic tale where the woman brings the narrator’s mother “a sheet of paper darkened with question marks, nothing else” (71) and then the mother never sees her again, “She disappeared not knowing that the gardener had asked his parents in vain for permission to marry her” (71). As it turns out, the grandfather had accepted the gardener’s parents’ request to send him away and “no one told [the day labourer] that the gardner, her own love, had been forced to go away, unable to leave her a letter because she was illiterate, because she was a young woman travelling in the company of men, because her skin had been burned too dark by the sun” (71). The vignette works as a standalone tale, but also picks up on some of the broader themes of displacement and loss that resonate throughout the text.

In another vignette, Thúy’s symbolism rings out. The narrator discusses Monsieur An, who was nearly executed. She talks about how “the days followed one another like the links of a chain—the first fastened around their necks, the last to the center of the earth” (86). The idea of links in a chain feels significant for the structure of the novel as a whole, but also Monsieur An “felt his chain getting shorter when the soldiers took him out of the ranks and made him kneel in the mud before the fleeting, frightened, empty gazes of his former colleagues, their bodies barely covered with rags and skin” (86). The idea of chains securing people in place and the impact of them being severed serves as an interesting juxtaposition to the unmoored freedom of refugees who have lost everything. The meaning of freedom, the significance of freedom, is uneven across similar characters. Monsieur An felt “the hot metal of the pistol” against his temple, and “in one last act of rebellion he raised his head to look at the sky” (86). In that desperation, he sees all the shades of blue in the sky equally intensely and experiences a Platonic dazzling “almost to the point of blindness” (87). Then, “at the same time, he could hear the click of the trigger drop into silence [...] That night, the shades of blue that he’d seen earlier filed past his eyes like a film being screened over and over” (87). After surviving, he feels that “the sky had cut his chain, had saved him, freed him, while some of the others were suffocated to death, dried up in containers without having a chance to count the blues of the sky” (87). The idea of the chain being severed gives him complete freedom but also gives him commitments: “every day, then, he set himself the task of listing those colours—for the others” (87).

The narrator takes away the message that Monsieur An “taught [her] about nuance” (88) and then jumps to another central figure in her life, Monsieur Minh, who “gave [her] the urge to write” (88). She describes how he took being a delivery man very serious and how “he was saved not by the sky but by writing” (88). She talks about the books he had written during his time at the re-education camp, “always on the one piece of paper he possessed, page by page, chapter by chapter, an unending story” (88). There’s a replacing of his senses through writing: “without writing, he wouldn’t have heard the snow melting or leaves growing or clouds sailing through the sky” (88). I like the idea of hearing the snow melting but “nor would he have seen the dead end of a thought, the remains of a star or the texture of a comma” (88). I love that phrase: “the texture of a comma.” It gives writing such a sensual dimension and that same character then recites words in his personal dictionary “like a mantra, like a march toward the voice” (88).

As the book comes to a close, Thúy reflects on the power of stories themselves. Running through the text there is reference to a pink bracelet and then it turns into a reflection on time and truth. It has been long lost and “absolutely no one will know the true story of the pink bracelet once the acrylic has decomposed into dust, once the years have accumulated in the thousands, in hundreds of strata, because after only thirty years I already recognize our old selves only through fragments, through scars, through glimmers of light” (139). In the final pages, then, she reflects on the thirty years of Vietnam rising like a phoenix from “its iron curtain.” It’s in the final pages where the artistic vision of the text is given a clear articulation:

“Alone as much as together, all those individuals from my past have shaken the grime off their backs in order to spread their wings with plumage of red and gold, before thrusting themselves sharply towards the great blue space, decorating my children’s sky, showing them that one horizon always hides another and it goes on like that to infinity, to the unspeakable beauty of renewal, to intangible rapture” (141).

The idea that the individuals are both alone and together is similar to the vignettes and the resonances between them throughout the novel. There’s also reference to vibrant colour and decorating “my children’s sky,” which recalls Monsieur An’s near-execution. There’s always another horizon, always another layer. The critical optimism of the text shines through, that there’s an “unspeakable beauty of renewal”, even if these memories are borne from wounds.

The final passage remarks on the legacies that feed into the book, into history, into truth: “it is true all the way to the possibility of this book, to the moment when my words glide across the curve of your lips, to the sheets of white paper that put up with my trail, or rather the trail of those who have walked before me, for me” (141). The narrator comments on moving “in the trace of their footsteps as in a waking dream where the scent of a newly blown poppy is no longer a perfume but a blossoming: where the deep red of a maple  leaf in autumn is no longer a colour but a grace; where a country is no longer a place but a lullaby” (141). I love the way Thúy allows for these near-synesthesiac supplantations and imbues colour with metaphysical significance. Laying out the philosophy after having so thoroughly demonstrated it closes the book beautifully, where the final line seems to speak for the whole book: “And also, where an outstretched hand is no longer a gesture but a moment of love, lasting until sleep, until waking, until everyday life” (141).

Happy reading!

The Private Lives of Trees by Alejandro Zambra

I’ve been on an Alejandro Zambra kick, and after reading his Chilean Poet a few weeks ago, I’m returning to one of his short fictions, The Private Lives of Trees, a one hundred page novella that explores similar themes to his other works: family, parenthood, time, memory, the act of writing.

The initial premise of the story is that Julián is at home with his stepdaughter Daniela waiting for his wife Verónica to come home from class. As he waits, he watches a soccer game from years earlier where he vaguely remembers the ending and reflects on the stories he tells Daniela where trees are central characters. He thinks about how he and Verónica met and he thinks about Daniela’s future when she will one day turn 30.

There’s a seeming omniscient eye that hovers over the tale, like in Samuel Beckett’s short stories or in Haruki Murakami’s After Dark. This writerly omniscience provides a passage early on in the texts that casts a shadow, perhaps the shadow of death, over the rest of the novel:

“But this is not a normal night, at least not yet. It’s still not completely certain that there will be a next day, since Verónica isn’t back yet from her drawing class. When she returns, the novel will end. But as long as she is gone, the book will continue. The book goes on until she returns, or until Julián is sure that she isn’t going to return. For now, Verónica is absent from the blue room, where Julián lulls the little girl to sleep with a story about the private lives of trees” (6).

The text’s premise rests on this out-of-text construction that knows when the novel will end. Like in other of Zambra’s works, the line between fiction and reality is fraught with odd divisions. Here, we are pitched the idea that either Verónica will return or she won’t—something that the narrator would presumably know about yet expresses doubt or ambivalence to the issue. Partway through the novel, Julián develops some hypotheses. In the first, his wife faces two blown tires and is walking down the highway in search of help in the middle of the night. In the second, his wife is underneath her teacher, entangled in an amorous tryst from which she’ll never return. No one version is given primacy.

Zambra then does something interesting with time and fiction. His central character presents some options of what will happen to his stepdaughter in the future. He leaps to her life in five year intervals, which are not impacted by the loss of her mother. Whether or not she returns, Daniela’s life plays out the same way with her at thirty reconnecting with her father and dating a man named Ernesto. Julián’s fictions then blur around temporally; she “will” be living a certain way, but then she is, and then she was, and the verb tenses get jumbled so that even astute readers are left uncertain regarding what happens or will happen in reality and what is part of her stepfather’s stories.

This blend of temporal shifts is something that gives Zambra’s work its subversive power. It continually pushes at its own boundaries. Even when it comes to the private lives of trees, the stories that Julián tells Daniela as bedtime stories, there’s also a part about him in real life getting a bonsai tree that serves as a symbol of his own writing process. He writes hundreds and hundreds of pages and then scales back, eventually curating 40 pages of a novel, possibly composed of other peoples’ voices as they pass the window. This selective process gives shape to his own manicured writing. Yet, it’s worth pointing out that Zambra has another short novel called Bonsai which retains enough parallel here to cast doubt on their self-sufficiency as texts à la Beckett or Paul Auster (who is specifically referenced and derided in this text).

Throughout the book, I couldn’t shake the metafictional note that it ends when Verónica comes home or when Julián stops believing that she will. In the final pages of the novel, we return to the present (rather than the fast-forward of Daniela’s possibly-fictional life) and Julián is taking Daniela to school and it seems her mother has still not returned home. Her English teacher bombards them and says how Daniela needs to step up her efforts. Julián goes on an anti-imperial rant to voice his distaste for English. The English teacher schedules a parent-teacher interview for the following week. The novel ends with Julián taking Daniela’s hand lovingly and saying that they’ll have to study English more. She agrees but says she has to get to class. Her stepdad gives her a kiss and then lets her go. The end. To me, that implies that that is the moment he realizes that Verónica is never going to come back. We’re left with that ominous feeling of her absence but at the same time consoled by his clear love for his stepdaughter, making it seem as if the mother’s disappearance is immaterial. It’s an unusual sort of end, a precariously happy ending that sustains an ongoing mystery.

The Private Lives of Trees demonstrates some of Zambra’s tenderness towards characters and stylistic charm. Perhaps Chilean Poet spoiled me—as I mentioned in my review for it, I consider it essentially perfect—but The Private Lives of Trees is a good novel that just doesn’t quite hit the same heights. It’s very good, and well worth the afternoon it will take you to read it, but Zambra is operating in the shadow of his own greatness and that is a demanding task for any author. It may be apocryphal, but Joseph Heller was apparently once asked how he felt that he had never written a book better than Catch-22, to which he responded that nobody had written a book better than Catch-22. I feel a bit of that same spirit operating here.

Happy reading!