Substack roundtable on the meaning of 'literary'

Plus a best-written nonfiction work of the century

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COMING SOON:

—The best-written books of 2024.

—November is the busiest month for literary prizes, so we’ll be featuring the best-written books from their shortlists, and also from the century’s previous winners of these prizes. To avoid sending you too many posts, we’ll leave the recent releases until December.

IN TODAY’S ISSUE

— The video recording of my discussion with Eleanor Anstruther and Samuél Lopez-Barrantes of what we mean by the term ‘literary’; of the demise of popular modernism, and the slow cancellation of the future; of Eleanor’s disco moves; and of Alexis Wright’s absurdist masterwork Praiseworthy. Thanks to those of you who joined us.

—‘Depression is the flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair. When it comes, it degrades one’s self and ultimately eclipses the capacity to give or receive affection’: the best-written winner this century of the National Book Award for nonfiction (this choice is part of our project to identify the best-written books of the century). This year’s winner will be announced on the 20th of November.

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WHAT DO WE MEAN WHEN WE SAY ‘LITERARY’?

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THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTION - THIS CENTURY’S PREVIOUS WINNERS

The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression by Andrew Solomon (2001)

Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert A. Caro (2002)

Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy by Carlos Eire (2003)

Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age by Kevin Boyle (2004)

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion (2005)

The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan (2006)

Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner (2007)

The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family by Annette Gordon-Reed (2008)

The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt by T. J. Stiles (2009)

Just Kids by Patti Smith (2010)

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt (2011)

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo (2012)

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America by George Packer (2013)

Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China by Evan Osnos (2014)

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates (2015)

Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi (2016)

The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia by Masha Gessen (2017)

The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke by Jeffrey C. Stewart (2018)

The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom (2019)

The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X by Les Payne and Tamara Payne (2020)

All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake by Tiya Miles (2021)

South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon To Understand the Soul of a Nation by Imani Perry (2022)

The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of US History by Ned Blackhawk (2023)

The best-written of these is

CHAPTER I

Depression

Depression is the flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair. When it comes, it degrades one’s self and ultimately eclipses the capacity to give or receive affection. It is the aloneness within us made manifest, and it destroys not only connection to others but also the ability to be peacefully alone with oneself. Love, though it is no prophylactic against depression, is what cushions the mind and protects it from itself. Medications and psychotherapy can renew that protection, making it easier to love and be loved, and that is why they work. In good spirits, some love themselves and some love others and some love work and some love God: any of these passions can furnish that vital sense of purpose that is the opposite of depression. Love forsakes us from time to time, and we forsake love. In depression, the meaninglessness of every enterprise and every emotion, the meaninglessness of life itself, becomes self-evident. The only feeling left in this loveless state is insignificance.

Life is fraught with sorrows: no matter what we do, we will in the end die; we are, each of us, held in the solitude of an autonomous body; time passes, and what has been will never be again. Pain is the first experience of world-helplessness, and it never leaves us. We are angry about being ripped from the comfortable womb, and as soon as that anger fades, distress comes to take its place. Even those people whose faith promises them that this will all be different in the next world cannot help experiencing anguish in this one; Christ himself was the man of sorrows. We live, however, in a time of increasing palliatives; it is easier than ever to decide what to feel and what not to feel. There is less and less unpleasantness that is unavoidable in life, for those with the means to avoid. But despite the enthusiastic claims of pharmaceutical science, depression cannot be wiped out so long as we are creatures conscious of our own selves. It can at best be contained—and containing is all that current treatments for depression aim to do.

Highly politicized rhetoric has blurred the distinction between depression and its consequences—the distinction between how you feel and how you act in response. This is in part a social and medical phenomenon, but it is also the result of linguistic vagary attached to emotional vagary. Perhaps depression can best be described as emotional pain that forces itself on us against our will, and then breaks free of its externals. Depression is not just a lot of pain; but too much pain can compost itself into depression. Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance; depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance. It is tumbleweed distress that thrives on thin air, growing despite its detachment from the nourishing earth. It can be described only in metaphor and allegory. Saint Anthony in the desert, asked how he could differentiate between angels who came to him humble and devils who came in rich disguise, said you could tell by how you felt after they had departed. When an angel left you, you felt strengthened by his presence; when a devil left, you felt horror. Grief is a humble angel who leaves you with strong, clear thoughts and a sense of your own depth. Depression is a demon who leaves you appalled.

Depression has been roughly divided into small (mild or disthymic) and large (major) depression. Mild depression is a gradual and sometimes permanent thing that undermines people the way rust weakens iron. It is too much grief at too slight a cause, pain that takes over from the other emotions and crowds them out. Such depression takes up bodily occupancy in the eyelids and in the muscles that keep the spine erect. It hurts your heart and lungs, making the contraction of involuntary muscles harder than it needs to be. Like physical pain that becomes chronic, it is miserable not so much because it is intolerable in the moment as because it is intolerable to have known it in the moments gone and to look forward only to knowing it in the moments to come. The present tense of mild depression envisages no alleviation because it feels like knowledge.

Virginia Woolf has written about this state with an eerie clarity: “Jacob went to the window and stood with his hands in his pockets. There he saw three Greeks in kilts; the masts of ships; idle or busy people of the lower classes strolling or stepping out briskly, or falling into groups and gesticulating with their hands. Their lack of concern for him was not the cause of his gloom; but some more profound conviction—it was not that he himself happened to be lonely, but that all people are.” In the same book, Jacob’s Room, she describes how “There rose in her mind a curious sadness, as if time and eternity showed through skirts and waistcoats, and she saw people passing tragically to destruction. Yet, heaven knows, Julia was no fool.” It is this acute awareness of transience and limitation that constitutes mild depression. Mild depression, for many years simply accommodated, is increasingly subject to treatment as doctors scrabble to address its diversity.

The Noonday Demon is Andrew Solomon’s National Book Award-winning, bestselling, and transformative masterpiece on depression—“the book for a generation, elegantly written, meticulously researched, empathetic, and enlightening” (Time)—now with a major new chapter covering recently introduced and novel treatments, suicide and anti-depressants, pregnancy and depression, and much more.

The Noonday Demon examines depression in personal, cultural, and scientific terms. Drawing on his own struggles with the illness and interviews with fellow sufferers, doctors and scientists, policy makers and politicians, drug designers, and philosophers, Andrew Solomon reveals the subtle complexities and sheer agony of the disease as well as the reasons for hope. He confronts the challenge of defining the illness and describes the vast range of available medications and treatments, and the impact the malady has on various demographic populations—around the world and throughout history. He also explores the thorny patch of moral and ethical questions posed by biological explanations for mental illness. With uncommon humanity, candor, wit and erudition, award-winning author Solomon takes readers on a journey of incomparable range and resonance into the most pervasive of family secrets. His contribution to our understanding not only of mental illness but also of the human condition is truly stunning.

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