A collective of women ought to have a name, the way a mass of finches are a “charm,” or parrots a “pandemonium.” The struggle would be to find a term that accurately describes what an assembly of women can do together, and also how markedly different each woman—and group—is from the next. What word can possibly encapsulate the joy of women singing in harmony, the unease with which they might circle one another, the trust and distrust that can grow among their ranks?

In Agustina Bazterrica’s new novel, The Unworthy, women are quickly classified. The unnamed protagonist, who writes her story in secret from a former monastery, is one of the titular “unworthy,” a woman given shelter from the toxic, dusty, climate-ravaged outside world but granted no special honors besides, potentially, her survival. Above the monastery’s unworthy hover the “Minor Saints,” “Diaphanous Spirits,” and “Full Auras”—women who have, respectively, had their tongues sliced out, their eardrums punctured, and their eyelids sewn shut—all of whom are elevated (if you want to call it that) to a holy status. These are the “chosen”: With their mauled faces and special privileges (real meat and vegetables instead of the crickets the unworthy eat), they are simultaneously revered and loathed from the very start of the story. The “enlightened,” who hover over even the “chosen,” are locked behind a black door and never seen. Hierarchies breed a hell of a lot of sycophancy and resentment, and this one is no different.

Unlike the bunker in The Unworthy, this brand of female dystopia doesn’t exist in a vacuum. All-female communities tend to be weirdly polarized in the cultural imagination. They’re either paradigms of peace and love or bastions of PMS-motivated backbiting. Particularly in genre fiction, the lines can be very stark. In Herland, the 1915 novel by Charlotte Perkins Gilman—the author of the proto-feminist school-curriculum staple “The Yellow Wallpaper”—three male explorers discover a community in which women live and reproduce without men. They are awed by the women’s sense of harmony and fitness. Joanna Russ’s snarling 1975 novel, The Female Man, creates four societies. In one of them, women live without men—and without murder and sexual assault—and in another, the two sexes literally battle for dominance. The message of such stories is clear: On their own, women are free of the burden of violence and inequality.

The appeal of reading about female utopias has recently reached a new zenith. The novel I Who Have Never Known Men was published in 1995, but after its 2022 reissue, it has gone viral on BookTok and sold more than 100,000 copies in the United States. In the book, a group of women live in underground cages on a planet that some believe is not their own. They don’t know how they got there, but one day their guards flee for no clear reason, and they eventually establish a harmonious and cooperative society. There is sadness and death, but never real strife. Even when they must hurt one another—the narrator “know[s] what to do” with a knife to put her suffering sisters out of their misery—the bloodshed is compassionate.

[Margaret Atwood: Go ahead and ban my book]

This sunny side of dystopia stands at odds with a countervailing notion of women in isolation—the kind often perpetuated by novels set in boarding schools or convents—which dictates that woman’s natural enemy is woman. In the classic of the genre, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, most women trapped in a theocratic future America are forced to enslave or torture other women, but some of them actively enlist as foot soldiers in the effort. And outside the genre, girls in novels including Andrés Barba’s orphanage-set Such Small Hands and Mona Awad’s Bunny turn to cruelty when the walls close in on them.

On the surface, The Unworthy appears to fit squarely into this second canon. Yet Bazterrica’s world building and character development transcend this typology: The monastery is a hellhole masquerading as a shrine, and the women who walk its halls are both fiercely loyal and self-cannibalizing. In Bazterrica’s first novel to be translated into English, the similarly dystopian Tender Is the Flesh, human flesh is an industrialized commodity. In The Unworthy, she has similar preoccupations, focusing on how eagerly women might (proverbially) eat one another up. What stands out, though, is how readily she moves between the two opposing notions of what all-female communities can be. She shows us women pushed to extremes, who react with extreme behavior—but can they be faulted for that?

None of this is to say that The Unworthy occupies any sort of middle ground. The novel opens with malice: “Someone is screaming in the dark,” the unnamed narrator writes. “I hope it’s Lourdes. I put cockroaches in her pillow and sewed up the slip, so they struggle to get out, so they crawl under her head or over her face (and into her ears, I hope, nesting there, the nymphs damaging her brain).” Animosity is a founding principle of the story—and of the unworthy’s community. In this bunker run by the “Superior Sister” and an unseen, Wizard of Oz–like “He,” bloody punishments are so frequent that they have become the group’s currency. Women stick needles in one another’s nipples and are made to lie down on glass. They volunteer to walk on burning embers or take floggings with a cat-o’-nine-tails. Still, they are not only grateful to be there but desperate to climb the devotional ladder.

The group’s motto is “Without faith, there is no refuge,” which sounds like a standard religious tenet until you read it literally: If the women don’t commit, they will be without a home. The planet is essentially a desert. “The wars,” the narrator writes, “coincided with the disappearance of many territories, many countries, beneath the ocean.” The protagonist grew up in a world “that was degrading minute by minute. A world where water was scarce, and there was no school, no electricity. A world of floods, in which eight months of rain fell in less than an hour.” Bands of adults hunted packs of wild children. The novel’s rendering of global destruction goes beyond most climate fiction—there isn’t a drop of hope or a speck of verdure. No place can guarantee safety, but the Superior Sister implies that the holiness of the monastery’s “enlightened” inhabitants keeps it safe. It’s a tale as old as time: Pray to the right god, sacrifice in the right ways, and protection will encircle you.

[Read: The remarkable rise of the feminist dystopia]

Except the horrors keep coming, despite the unworthy’s muttered prayers. The narrator’s notes, which she keeps tied to herself underneath her tunic or tucked under wooden floorboards, document her transformation from partial believer to total apostate as tension inside the community ratchets up. Lourdes, she of the cockroach pillowcase, leads a campaign of terror worthy of Robespierre. The women turn on one another more and more. The dynamic unravels even further when a stowaway—who has dragged herself through a hole in the wall—is found at the monastery and deemed clean and worthy enough to join their community. Lucía, the newcomer, possesses a gift, and a moral compass, and the hierarchy of the place begins to shift.

Bazterrica’s story—so cinematically gruesome that it could have been written as a treatment for an A24-produced horror film—comes at a strange inflection point for women in this country. (It was originally published in her native Argentina in 2023.) During recent elections, the media have sometimes treated women as a monolithic voting block; some analysts have credited or blamed them for Donald Trump’s or Joe Biden’s electoral victories, regardless of the clear reality that they do not universally share one another’s hopes, fears, or best interests.

The Unworthy strips away the idea, implicit in I Who Have Never Known Men and its ilk, that women are inherently good stewards, that their leadership would bring humanity into some kind of karmic balance. It does so not because it disdains women, but because it sees them. Lourdes is dastardly but pathetic. Lucía saintly but carnal. The narrator possesses a kind of bravery that can’t be activated on its own. We learn that the Superior Sister “fought in the water wars, the most violent ones, in which the millenary tribes were bombarded, and that she defended her own until the very end, that she was a prisoner, a slave, that she escaped.” Or so we are told. What we know is that she grips her power like a cane that supports her whole weight.

Depicting women in all their complicated glory isn’t especially novel or valiant, but Bazterrica’s novel tries something that most writers shy away from. She makes manifest the rot inside every human, and the tendency to portray them as sinners or saints. She does so not by eschewing extremes, but by embracing them, putting her women in an unendurable situation and then watching their moral compass whirl about in some fictional version of the Stanford Prison Experiment. Ugly times create ugly behavior—unless, that is, you can muster your righteous fortitude and carry on in the right direction.

Decades ago, and probably extending well before that, there was a custom among middle-class Canadian families to send their sons out West to work on the railroad for a spell. The parents’ intention was not only to get the boys out of their hair for a while but also to toughen them up and introduce them to the ways of the world well beyond what would now be called their comfort zones. As it happened, one of my father’s sisters, Aunt Irene, was a vice president of the Canadian National Railways, a sprawling transportation network of trains, steamships, and grand hotels. It was as much a part of the Canadian national identity as the Bonanza star Lorne Greene and Hockey Night in Canada. Aunt Irene was a tall, thin, dignified woman. I don’t think I ever saw her when she wasn’t wearing a twinset and pearls. Family lore had it that during the final chapter of World War II, she had been the wire operator who sent word of Hitler’s death to news organizations across Canada. Afterward, she went to work for the Canadian National Railways, also as a wire operator, and rose through the ranks.

Egged on by my parents, I wrote to her, asking for a job. I was 19 at the time. As she described it in her letter back to me, there were two types of positions available. I could be a groundman, at $2.20 an hour. Or I could be a lineman, at $2.80 an hour. Like any sane person, I had a fear of heights and said that I’d like to get a groundman’s job, which I was told entailed lugging equipment to the linemen, who climbed telegraph poles all day. Aunt Irene told me to report to the Symington Yard, in Winnipeg. With only a dim idea of what I was getting myself into, I boarded a train heading 1,300 miles west, to the capital of Manitoba.

I stayed with my aunt the first night and reported to the railroad’s headquarters at 7 o’clock the next morning with a duffel bag of my belongings: a few pairs of shorts, jeans, a jacket, a couple of shirts, a pair of Kodiak work boots, and some Richard Brautigan and Jack Kerouac books, acceptable reading matter for a pseudo-sophisticate of the time. The Symington Yard was one of the largest rail yards in the world. On some days, it held 7,000 boxcars. Half that many moved in and out on a single day. Like many other young men my age, I was slim, unmuscled, and soft. In the hall where they interviewed and inspected the candidates for line work, I blanched as I looked over a large poster that showed the outline of a male body and the prices the railroad paid if you lost a part of it. As I recall, legs brought you $750 apiece. Arms were $500. A foot brought a mere $250. In Canadian dollars.

There were about 10 of us, and we were led to a room where a severe-looking nurse peered down our throats, checked our hearts, and then asked for urine samples. I filled the beaker to the very top by accident, and when the nurse attempted to pick it up off the table, she couldn’t help but spill a bit down her hand. Two of the tougher-looking recruits behind me thought this was funny, and one patted me on the back.

By the afternoon, I was on a train to a small town out on the endless Saskatchewan prairie—my head leaning against the window, my stomach aching from hunger—trying to think of a way that I could get out of this in a few weeks and go home. This was my parents’ idea of what I should be doing. Certainly not mine. A man with the big, meaty hands of someone who used them in taxing labor was sitting beside me. He had brought his own food, and out of a small pouch he pulled a roll that had been wrapped in waxed paper. His sandwich was like nothing I had ever seen before.

To me, a sandwich was something made of white Wonder Bread, with baloney or peanut butter and jam inside. But this was a round, soft roll, and the meat was thick and breaded. The man noticed me looking at the sandwich and quietly brought another one out of his pouch. He indicated that I should take it. I made a gesture to say, No, no, I couldn’t. But he just smiled and put it in my hand. I wasn’t sure if he spoke English. I unwrapped the waxed paper and bit in. It was breaded chicken with a glorious sauce. To this day, I don’t think anything I have ever eaten was as welcome or delicious. I thanked him profusely over and over, and he just kept nodding and smiling.

We pulled up to a siding, where the conductor said I had to get off. I did as I was told and stood by the tracks as the train pulled away. When it was gone, I looked around. The land was as flat as a billiard table and stretched for miles in every direction. On the siding was a collection of boxcars. A man waved to me in a menacing manner, indicating that I should get over to him, chop-chop-ish. I looked behind me and then turned back to him and gave a Who me? gesture. He nodded, and I hurried over and introduced myself. He said nothing. He was in his mid-40s and built like a refrigerator. His blond hair was short on the scalp. Enormous veins ran down his forehead and around his nose. He had terrifying bright-blue eyes and hands the size of a catcher’s mitt. His incisors were pointed, and one of his upper teeth was enameled in gold. He looked through me, pointed to a boxcar with windows on the side, and left. I walked over to the boxcar, climbed the steps, and opened the door.

It was a Saturday, not only a day off but also the day of new arrivals. Men of various ages and sizes were stretched out on the wooden bunks or settling in. There were eight beds on one side of the door and eight on the other. Nobody said a word, but a fellow who was lying down pointed a nicotine-stained finger in the direction of a bottom bunk at the back of the car. I thanked him and sat on the bed and looked around. I was the youngest in the group. Everyone was smoking. Everyone had a mustache. And everyone looked a lot scrappier than the people I was used to. The bed was as hard as the floor. There was a single pillow and a worn gray blanket that lay folded at the foot. As I was to learn in the coming days, all but one of the men had some sort of record—breaking and entering being at the bottom rung of achievement and grand theft auto being at the top. Petty thievery and criminal mischief were almost entry-level accolades. Working on the railroad may have been a hardening regimen for doughy middle-class boys; for others, it was a sort of French Foreign Legion way station between prison gates and semicivilized society.

We ate in what was known as the reefer car, a refrigerated boxcar. It was broken up into three parts. One part was the cold box, where ice and frozen meat and other provisions were stored; one part housed the kitchen; and the last part held a long communal dining table. On my first day, I sat down at the end of the table and was joined by a tall, fair-skinned fellow with curly red hair and a decent mustache. His name was Craig Walls. He wanted to be a writer and was taking a year off to earn money for his tuition at the University of Winnipeg. Canadian kids in those days tended to pay their own way through school. Annual college costs were in the $1,200 range, and therefore within striking distance if you worked in construction or on the railroad during the summer. There was a certain pride in the deepness of the blue in the blue-collar job you took. Construction was good. The railroad was better. Working in the oil fields of northern Alberta was the deepest blue of all.

Two others at my and Walls’s end of the bunk car became part of our circle, if you could call it that. One was a short, funny, wiry kid named Ernie, who had grand theft auto on his résumé. The other was Errol, a darkly handsome lady-killer. He had syphilis and said that it required him to have a small whisk device inserted into his penis at regular intervals to remove the thin scabs that formed there. I don’t know if he was kidding or not, but when he told us this, Walls and Ernie and I could barely speak. But it did make Errol seem awfully cosmopolitan.

The next morning, the newbies were called out by the fellow who had waved to me from the siding. He never announced the fact, but he was the foreman, and his name was Herb Harzbeck. He was German, and there was some talk among the vets on the crew that he had been in the war—on which side was up for debate. The vets called him “Squarehead” behind his back.

On the ground were piles of equipment for the newcomers. We were told to grab a set each. There was a big leather belt about four inches wide with slots for tools. There were also spikes attached to braces, with leather straps to hold them to your legs. These were called pole gaffs. The braces went from the instep to just below the knee. They strapped around the top of the calf and at the ankle, and there was another leather strap that went under the boot. After a few false starts, we managed to get the pole gaffs on and hobbled around a bit, the way skiers do with a new pair of boots. There was a pile of leather gloves with long gauntlets that came up almost to the elbow. We sifted through the lot, trying to find pairs that matched and fit. When we were suited up, Herb brought us over to one of the telegraph poles to show us how to climb: hands on either side of the pole; lean back, but not too far. And then drive the first spike into the wood. When that was set, drive the next spike in a little higher. Then the next one, and so forth. He was essentially walking up the pole, and he made it look easy.

It was not easy. I’d seen telephone repairmen back home climbing poles that had metal footholds all the way up, almost like ladders. But they wore safety belts that allowed them to lean back and fix whatever needed fixing. Here there were no foot grips. I asked Herb where the safety belts were, and he gave me a dismissive look. There were no safety belts. We took turns trying to climb the pole. There were a number of false starts and tumbles. I could get up maybe three steps before my arms gave out or one of my spikes didn’t dig in deep enough and I fell to the ground. This was all a terrible mistake, I kept thinking. At the end of the demonstration and my own feeble attempts, I worked my way over to Herb and said that there had been some sort of error—that I had signed on to be a groundman. “No groundmen,” he barked. “Just linemen.”

Over the next couple of days, my general fear of heights and my more specific fear of falling off a telegraph pole began to subside. I managed to climb a 20-foot pole. And then a 30-foot pole. I began to get cocky, and in an attempt to scramble up one of the taller poles, I slipped near the top and shot straight down. In my shock and embarrassment, I didn’t notice it at first, but I had torn the front of my shirt and ripped big patches of skin off my chest. One of the patches held the few chest hairs I had grown by this point in my life. Herb took me to the reefer car. He cleaned off the blood and put a block of ice on my chest, which eased the pain. Then he wrapped my chest in a bandage. The skin began to heal in a couple of weeks, and within months was back to normal. And lo, where there had been a few sprigs, something approaching actual chest hair began to appear.

[Graydon Carter: Christopher Hitchens was fearless]

That summer, I had been trying to grow my hair long. I wanted to be a hippie—or at least look like one. But one day, Herb motioned to me and Walls and made us sit down in front of him. He pulled an electric shaver out of his vest and shaved us to the scalp. Aside from the lack of a criminal record, which in this group was like working in a hospital without a medical degree, I wanted to stand out. There is nothing more parochial or bland than being a soft, white Anglican kid from Ottawa. I feigned being something of a Jewish intellectual. In this crowd, the mere fact that I had brought books singled me out as a great thinker. A few of the tougher hands took to calling me “Professor.”

Those telegraph poles you see alongside train tracks served two purposes back then. One was for sending telegrams. The other was to enable dispatchers to know where the trains were at any given moment. The telegraph wires would eventually wear out, and our job as linemen was to haul fresh wire up the pole on our shoulders, remove the old wire, let it drop to the ground, and then connect the new wire to the glass insulators on the horizontal wooden spars. Once we had mastered the fine art of climbing, we were ready to be put to use. We were awake at 5 a.m., and after breakfast we suited up and stood around anxiously. Even in late spring, it was cold on a Canadian-prairie morning, a few degrees above freezing. We would wear two or three layers on top to stay warm. A group of us would climb onto a motor car—not one of those contraptions from silent movies, with hand-operated seesaw locomotion, but a motorized cart with benches big enough for five or six men on either side. We would be dropped off half a mile apart, on the assumption that we could each cover half a mile of track before lunch.

Illustration by John Gall. Sources: Frank Lennon / Toronto Star / Getty;
Paul McKinnon / Alamy; New York Public Library.

On that first morning, I jumped off the motor car. There was already a climber half a mile behind me. And in minutes, one would be deposited half a mile in front of me. Other than that, it was just me and nothing but flat prairie. The new telegraph line had been laid out alongside the track. The poles up ahead looked to be no taller than 20 feet. It took me two or three attempts to reach the top of the first one. Like all the others, it was covered in creosote, a black, sticky, coal-tar coating that preserved the wood but stuck to gloves, jeans, and skin. I survived the first pole. I survived the second pole. In four hours, I made it to the spot, half a mile beyond, where the climber after me had been dropped off earlier in the day. The temperature had risen 30 degrees between sunrise and noon, and I had gradually started to remove layers of clothing.

The motor car appeared in the distance and came my way. It stopped to pick up other climbers, and then every few hundred yards or so, we’d stop and grab the clothes we had all discarded as the temperature rose. This was in the days before bottled water, and by the time we were picked up, we were parched. There was a big cooler on the motor car, and a ladle. I opened the top and saw that it indeed contained water, but not just water. The surface was awash with dead flies and bits of grass. I dipped the ladle into the cooler and gingerly managed to get it out without picking up any extras. The water was warm and fetid. But it was wet, and I learned to appreciate it. We returned to the railcars for lunch, then went back out for another four hours.

One morning, Herb threw a bunch of canvas hats on the ground. “Take them,” he said. We each grabbed one. The hats came with a fine mesh that fell from the brim onto our shoulders. They were mosquito hats. We were heading into a patch where the black flies were horrendous. Black flies are not like houseflies. Canadian black flies are the size of a thumb tip, and they bite. For three days, we lived in those hats. We never took them off. We lifted the netting when we were eating to make way for food. We slept with them on too. At night, the sound of black flies smacking against the mesh screens was unnerving.

Evenings were spent smoking, drinking, playing cards, and reading. Then the whole ordeal started again the next morning. Weekends were different. At sundown on Friday, we were given passes on the Canadian National trains and could travel as far as we wanted, as long as we were back at work and ready to climb at 5 o’clock sharp on Monday. On one of our first weekends off, Walls and I decided we’d try to make it to Winnipeg, about 600 miles to the east. I resolved to take a shower before leaving. The routine for this was highly labor-intensive. It involved going to the reefer car and chipping off a chunk of ice about half the size of a cinder block. You put the ice in a pail and then onto a stove to melt it. Then you took the pail and poured the water into a contraption that looked like a watering can and hooked it to the ceiling over the shower area. You pulled the nozzle down a bit, wetted yourself, soaped, and prayed there’d be enough water left to rinse off.

There were no sleepers available on that trip to Winnipeg, so they put us in the mail car, near the end of the train. We slept on sacks with the Royal Mail Canada logo on them. Old locomotives in those days had bunks right in the engine, and on a subsequent trip, Walls and I were allowed to sleep there. Meals were taken in the dining car. We were a pretty scruffy lot, so they usually sat us in the back, near the kitchen, where big, muscular men cooked up meals on long grills heated by gas jets.

[In Focus: Jack Delano’s color photos of Chicago’s rail yards in the 1940s]

By most Fridays, though, we were too worn out to travel. Saturdays were for writing home, reading, and the occasional water fight. The siding was equipped with dozens of fire extinguishers. They were big red canisters that you filled with water and then strapped to your back. There was a pump that you compressed with one hand, and a hose for the other hand. We’d load them up and divide into teams. Often it would escalate. During one fight, we climbed to the roofs of the boxcars and scampered across the tops the way gunfighters did in old Westerns.

During one such water battle, we noticed an enormous machine off in the distance. As it approached along the track, we realized that it was a vehicle maybe two stories high and two or three times as long as a boxcar. It crept ahead slowly, deliberately, replacing old track with new track. Half of its large crew loosened the rails in front of the machine. And the other half tightened the new rails down in its wake. As the machine got closer, it became apparent that this was a much rougher-looking crew than ours. We put away our water cannons and just watched as the machine made its way slowly by us.

The water cannons were always filled for emergency use. Often this involved putting out brush fires that started in the midday sun when what were called “hot boxes” went by. These were overheated axle bearings that could accidentally ignite the brush. We’d be sent out on motor cars to extinguish the flames. On my first fire call, the wind picked up, and the flames licked skyward and singed my eyebrows down to almost nothing. They grew back, but never as thickly as they had been before the fire.

We were advised to stand well clear of the ditches that border the rails when the Super Continental, the railroad’s gleaming passenger train, whisked by every day. One rookie hadn’t heard this bit of useful information, and on his first day, as the train sped through, he got too close. He was soaked and a bit more: Someone had flushed a toilet. Back then, there were no holding tanks on trains; when you flushed, the waste just emptied onto the tracks. The Super Continental came by at the same time every day. Often we’d make a pact to pull our pants down and moon the passengers.

Our cook got sick at one point and was sent home to Saskatoon. Herb announced that we’d each take turns cooking a meal. We had complained about the food when the cook was there. But with him gone, it deteriorated rapidly. I had never cooked a thing in my life. When my time came, I went to the reefer car to scout the provisions. There was a large leg of something, so I brought it to the kitchen. A coating of green covered parts of it, and I cut those sections off with a knife. And then I put the meat in the oven. I had no idea what temperature to set the oven at or how long to leave the meat there. I didn’t want to burn it, so I set the oven at medium heat and left it for three hours. I told Walls about this, and he told me I was out of my mind. We raced to the kitchen and opened the oven door. The meat had barely cooked at all. And given that it was about a foot thick, he told me that we would need another four or five hours at high heat. Dinner was late that night, and as we picked through the stringy, undercooked meat, I kept my head low to avoid the looks coming my way from my fellow diners.

Our pal Errol had a habit of heading into town to pick up local girls. One night he returned a bit drunk and fell into his bunk. The lights were out and he drifted off to sleep. Sometime in the middle of the night, the door to the bunk car was kicked open, and all of us inside were jolted awake. Three men stormed in with flashlights, going from bunk to bunk. When the light shone into my eyes, I covered them with my hand. The men continued to move down the car until they got to Errol’s bunk. Two of them grabbed him and hauled him outside. We couldn’t see much in the dark, but clearly they were working Errol over pretty badly. Then they left, screaming obscenities, and made their way, flashlights in hand, across the open field. Walls and I ran outside to see if Errol was okay. He was. But just. He had a broken rib and a black eye and was bleeding from the head. We woke Herb and he came and bandaged him up.

In the morning, we heard the backstory. It seemed that Errol had tried to pick up one of the men’s girlfriend, and she was up for his affections. He left the crew a few days later, and we never heard from him again.

I had signed on for six months, and as my tour of duty was coming to an end, I was still unsure about what I was going to do with my life. I’d had jobs before, but none like this. My parents weren’t alone in making sure their kids were busy during the summer, working at something, anything. An “allowance” was a thing we read about in American books and magazines. As a result, I was always digging around for pocket money. During winters, I had worked as a ski instructor at a local club and sorted mail at the post office over Christmas break. In the summers, I worked as a camp counselor and canoe instructor. I worked as an unarmed bank guard one hot summer, and I pumped gas.

Nothing I had done before, or pretty much anything I did after, could match the sense of accomplishment and sheer exhilaration of that half year on the railroad. I liked being around the crew, most of whom had endured hardscrabble childhoods and had just naturally gotten into a bit of trouble in their teens and 20s. When my stint was done, I packed my gear into my duffel bag and said my goodbyes to the other fellows. Walls and I kept in touch for a while, but in the days before the internet, this wasn’t easy. One day, a letter I had sent him came back with a stamp saying he had moved. A decade or so ago, I heard from a friend of his that Walls had died, which saddened me terribly.

Out on the line on one of my last days, just before dusk, I was preparing to get picked up for the trip back to the bunk car when I saw the Super Continental in the distance. I clambered up to a field beside the tracks to watch it go by. It was traveling slowly, and in the pink late-afternoon light, I could see into the dining car. There was a young couple seated inside. They were nicely dressed and looked to be having a good time in the amber glow of the table lamp by the window. Lonely, tired, and dirty, I felt a million miles away from the attractive couple. It was then that I resolved that, whatever I did, I was done with showering at the end of the week rather than the beginning of the day. It was time to get on with the life I envisioned for myself. I wasn’t completely sure what that was going to be. But I knew one thing: I wanted to be on the other side of that window.

This article was adapted from Graydon Carter’s new memoir, When the Going Was Good. It appears in the April 2025 print edition with the headline “On Track.”

*Lead image sources: Underwood Archives / Alamy; New York Public Library; Touring Club Italiano / Marka / Universal Images Group / Getty

Having recently found widespread recognition in the United States, one of Latin America’s greatest living authors has decided to challenge her newfound readers with a brilliant and bewildering novel about murder, castration, and the illegibility of poetry. Death Takes Me, by Cristina Rivera Garza, underscores the Mexican novelist’s intellectual depth as well as her formal playfulness, and confronts the way an environment rife with violence can shock citizens into numbness.

Rivera Garza teaches creative writing at the University of Houston and has lived for decades in the United States, but until recently, only a handful of her more than 20 books had appeared in English. That began to change in 2023, when she published her own translation of the work that would earn her a Pulitzer Prize, Liliana’s Invincible Summer, a fiercely political memoir about the life and death of her younger sister, who was murdered at age 20 by an on-and-off boyfriend.

The critical consensus in the Spanish-speaking world is that Death Takes Me, which was originally published in 2008, is among Rivera Garza’s best books—a sophisticated answer to Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 that elaborates on the Chilean novelist’s blend of gruesome violence and literary puzzles from a feminist perspective. Whereas Liliana’s Invincible Summer is emotional, sincere, and relatively easy to follow, Death Takes Me is cerebral, fragmentary, and disorienting. Translated by Robin Myers and Sarah Booker, the novel is ostensibly about a series of murders of young men in an unnamed Mexican city, but it often seems more concerned with the study of poetry and psychoanalytic theory than with detective work. At one point, Rivera Garza interrupts the narrative to reproduce a scholarly article that she may or may not have submitted to a real academic journal; at another, she inserts a number of experimental poems that she published under a pseudonym a year before releasing Death Takes Me. The book’s unabashed intellectualism is the product of Mexican literary culture, which tends to abide by the Cuban writer José Lezama Lima’s famous motto, “Difficulty is the only stimulant.”  

But readers willing to play by Rivera Garza’s rules can expect a reward commensurate with their efforts, the sort of anti-noir novel that a ghostwriting team comprising Jorge Luis Borges, Jacques Lacan, and Clarice Lispector might deliver in response to a publisher’s request for a true-crime number. Like the murders it recounts, Death Takes Me resists interpretation, inducing in the reader a disconcerting mixture of numbness and anxiety. Those familiar with Rivera Garza’s more recent work will soon realize that the book has another, more political dimension. Although it approaches the issue obliquely by reversing the gender of the victims, Death Takes Me is the author’s first sustained meditation on femicide—and perhaps a preliminary study for the memoir she would publish more than a decade later.

[Read: A novel that probes the line between justice and revenge]

In the novel’s opening scene, a literature professor by the name of Cristina Rivera Garza goes out for a jog and stumbles upon the castrated body of a young man. Yet in the weeks that follow, as she sits down for tense interviews with the female detective in charge of the case and dodges the obsessive pursuit of a suspicious woman who claims to be a tabloid journalist, the aspect of the crime scene that most preoccupies her isn’t the dead man but what she noticed on the wall of the alley where she found him. Using nail polish as ink, someone had scribbled a few lines by Alejandra Pizarnik, an Argentine writer who wrote cryptic poems and anxious diaries about language, sex, and death before dying by suicide in 1972 at the age of 36—and who is also the subject of the academic paper published within the novel. (The fictional Rivera Garza, we later learn, is affiliated with the same university where the author taught while she was writing the novel.)

The reader soon notices uncanny parallels between the professor’s work and the detective’s. It’s not a coincidence that the adjective nonsensical can apply to a gruesome murder just as well as to a work of avant-garde literature. Cops and critics are, in some ways, in the same business: that of interpretation. They pay close attention, notice details, find clues; they gather evidence and formulate theories; they make a case for their hypotheses. Their work is a search for meaning—an attempt to make sense of mysterious signs.

As the terrified residents of the city continue to stumble upon castrated bodies, there’s no question that the perpetrator of these murders is a serial killer: Poems by Pizarnik are found at each crime scene. That detail alone, the detective insinuates to the professor, is enough to mark her as the prime suspect.

The theory is soon put to rest, though, when Rivera Garza starts receiving strange messages from the killer, signed with the names of different female artists. The letters are full of clues that produce nothing: no leads, no real suspects—and no hope. The truth is that, in this city, catching the murderer won’t change much. “It’s been a long time since a man died,” the detective’s assistant observes about halfway through the novel. “So what?” the detective responds, in a tone that the narrator describes as listless and bitter. “Women and children die, too. Women and children and men are still dying, too.”       

Although the novel keeps the details of its setting ambiguous, it seems to take place in Toluca, an hour away from Mexico City—and the capital of one of the most violent states in the country. Hence, I think, the detective’s hopelessness: In a nation where the murder rate is five times higher than the United States’, her work is condemned to fail. The trope of numb despair as a response to unending horror is one of the hallmarks of 21st-century Mexican literature. Recent entries in this canon include Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season and Clyo Mendoza's Fury, but the seminal example—if we understand that a writer’s nationality does not dictate what literary tradition they belong to—is undoubtedly 2666. That novel’s long list of forensic descriptions of murdered women in Mexico, which stretches for dozens of pages, seems meant to induce in the reader a feeling not unlike the listless bitterness of Rivera Garza’s detective.

The discussions of literary theory that fill the pages of Death Takes Me—besides Rivera Garza’s academic paper on Pizarnik, the novel features lengthy sections about the work of French psychoanalysts—serve a similar function to Bolaño’s appropriation of coroners’ dehumanizing language: They evoke detachment in the face of violence. But if this tactic is aesthetically effective and politically powerful, it’s because of the anxiety that courses beneath, in this city where even the detective knows that her work is pointless.

[Read: A novel that boldly rethinks the border]

The real Rivera Garza, however, seems unsatisfied with the hopelessness that haunts the pages of her own novel. Death Takes Me appears to have been a stepping stone to a more explicitly political confrontation with violence—one that refuses resignation and demands justice. Shortly after the Spanish edition of Liliana’s Invincible Summer was published in 2021, Rivera Garza declared in an interview with El País that “all of [her] previous books” had been preparations to finally “be able to write this one about [her] sister’s femicide.” That last word is important. Since 2012, Mexican law has considered that murders of women who are killed “for reasons related to their gender” constitute a different crime from other homicides. This much-belated change in language was meant to reflect the reality that, according to the United Nations, an average of 10 women are killed each day in Mexico.

The legal recognition of the specificity of gender violence was a hard-won victory for the Mexican feminist movement—a struggle that Rivera Garza documents in her memoir. But the subject was already on her mind in Death Takes Me. The difference here, of course, is that it’s men who must learn to live in a country where they can never feel safe:

It was no longer a personal fear by then, but paranoia. A cloud of dragonflies. A pod of lobsters. Frenetic destruction. Young men would seek, and eventually find, new ways to protect their genitals … Old men would speak of other, always better times, now gone. Before all of this was happening. Before, when a man was safe … The world, in the aftermath of Four Castrated Men, would be different as a result of being so very much, or exaggeratedly, the same world where the Detective would fail once again.

The passage makes a political point, of course, but the implausibility of its gender reversal is also very funny; readers recognize just how common the inverse scenario is. Here lies the greatest success of Death Takes Me: For all the numbness and the horror and the cerebral discussions of poetics, it’s also full of humor. It may well be that the novel’s most important contribution to our moment is that it consciously rejects the language of witnessing, elegy, and moral certainty on display in many contemporary stories about trauma. Death Takes Me, instead, suggests that personal grief and political anger can find expression, too, through ambiguity and irony—and even laughter.

The director Bong Joon-ho’s new movie, Mickey 17, at first seems like a major pivot from his previous one, 2019’s Parasite. After winning Best Picture at the Oscars for the domestic (if gonzo) Korean black comedy, he’s following it up six years later with a lavish Hollywood sci-fi epic starring Robert Pattinson. But even though Mickey 17 is set in outer space about 30 years from now, its hero isn’t that different from those found throughout Bong’s filmography: a working-class schmo.

Mickey Barnes (Pattinson) lives on a starship, where he’s taken a position as an “expendable.” The vessel’s wealthy owners aspire to colonize the newly discovered, barren planet they’ve landed upon, Niflheim—so they have scientists subject Mickey to tests that will determine how it can be made hospitable. Every time Mickey dies on the job, which is often, the team generates another copy of him with a human-size printer. Then they put him right back to work.

It seems that to Bong, this scenario just sounded like the next evolutionary step of capitalism: one great and terrible leap forward from the contemporary setting of Parasite. When that film begins, the college-aged Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik)—whose family’s attempts to stay financially afloat are central to the grisly and constantly escalating storyline—tries to charm his way into a pizza-delivery gig to help make ends meet.

Ki-woo ultimately doesn’t get the job, but the director imagined what would have happened if he did: He “can get into a bike accident doing [a] delivery, and then immediately Delivery Boy 2 would take his place,” Bong told me in an interview (alongside his longtime interpreter, Sharon Choi). “There’s this endless train of delivery boys that can take his place. Three, four, five, six.” That cycle never comes to pass in Parasite, but its plausibility resonated with Bong when he was approaching Mickey 17: “His job’s not as extreme as dying, but he is just as replaceable, and I thought that really connected to Mickey’s situation.”

[Read: Mickey 17 is strange, sad, and so much fun]

Although Mickey initially sees being an expendable as a rare chance to escape his lackluster life on Earth, he comes to realize that the goal is to test his ability to survive—whether it’s against exposure to harsh environments, unknown viruses, or even floating into space and removing his gear. The cloning process ensures that even death won’t end Mickey’s fatal pursuit; he’s like a more literal version of Parasite’s hypothetically infinite delivery boys.

Bong was “immediately drawn” to the protagonist when reading the novel upon which the film is based: Mickey7, by the author Edward Ashton, which the director received when it was still a manuscript. (“I thought the number had to be a bit bigger,” he said regarding the title change.) “He’s like the powerless-underdog character type that I always love,” the director explained. “Things don’t work out for him. He doesn’t get help from society or the country. He’s kind of this loser-type protagonist.”

Mickey’s circumstances can be blamed, in part, on his high level of debt. Class consciousness drives nearly all of Bong’s features. Take Snowpiercer, his previous full-fledged sci-fi effort, which was also his first to be shot in English: It imagines a postapocalyptic future where all of mankind lives on an endlessly moving train. The poorest passengers toil away in cattle cars at the back. Parasite’s portrayal of these upstairs-downstairs dynamics is even more overt; the members of the struggling Kim household, who live in a basement-level apartment and juggle odd jobs, alight on a crafty employment scheme after encountering an ultra-wealthy family.

[Read: Parasite and the curse of closeness]

Meanwhile, Mickey is the most exaggerated example of the have nots imaginable; his life has been deemed meaningless by the upper-crust owners of the ship and their staff, who have no misgivings about using him as their sentient crash-test dummy. Every time Mickey dies in the name of their colonialist dreams, he experiences true suffering. Then he reemerges in shuddering jolts from the printer, like a giant, fleshy sheet of A4 paper. Sometimes, his new body nearly hits the ground, sliding out of the machine without anyone there to catch him.

Bong Joon-ho directs Robert Pattinson and Anamaria Vartolomei in Mickey 17. (Alamy)

For all the grand scale of Mickey 17’s dystopian setting, Bong sought ways to keep it feeling grounded. He wanted the spaceship in which Mickey and the other intergalactic travelers live to feel mundane and industrial; Niflheim, meanwhile, is a barren, frozen hell populated only by giant, buglike aliens. “This film feels like a story that takes place in a back alleyway, filled with pathetic human beings,” Bong told me of his depiction of the interstellar expedition. “It’s probably the first sci-fi film in history to have a shot where someone is squeezing their pimples,” he said, adding that “it’s almost like we can hear the characters mumbling to themselves.”

The utilitarian environments bring to mind those of Ridley Scott’s Alien and John Carpenter’s The Thing—two other sci-fi epics focused on ordinary people who are thrust into some extraordinary circumstance. Alien is an especially relevant touchpoint, as one of the earliest blockbusters to present toiling away in the cosmos not as an adventure but as a gig like any other. An initial conflict, before the eponymous evil creature even arrives aboard, revolves around whether investigating a distress signal is part of the crew’s employment contract. In Alien, “when we see the monster explode out of John Hurt’s chest, the whole atmosphere of that table, it always really stuck with me,” said Bong, explaining that “even within the spaceship, there’s a certain hierarchy—and so it’s blue-collar workers all together.”

The director similarly used his film’s futurist trappings to dial up the social examinations to surreal, even comical proportions. The chief villains are Mickey’s humorously flamboyant bosses: Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), a preening politician with delusions of grandeur, and his status-obsessed wife, Ylfa (Toni Collette). The couple’s brutal treatment of Mickey contrasts with their interest in populating a new world. “Humans will always be evil, as well in the future, and even when we make our way to space,” Bong told me with a chuckle.

[Read: Parasite won so much more than the Best Picture Oscar]

But Mickey’s experience with the Marshalls is a particularly cynical vision of humanity. “He’s constantly being printed out and sent out to all these dangerous missions,” Bong said, “but no one feels guilty about it, because they’re like, ‘Oh, that’s his job. His job is to die.’” Pattinson’s performance makes this horrifying lack of remorse legible. The actor affects a Looney Tunes–esque voice—which helps illustrate what a pushover Mickey is—but he also physically communicates how Mickey is carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. Bong referred to Mickey as “a character who finds himself in miserable circumstances, has zero self-esteem, and makes the same mistakes over and over again.” The director told Pattinson that he needed a voice befitting that description: “Obviously it can’t be like a Batman tone.”

Pattinson has never been afraid of big, goofy swings. Watching Mickey 17 reminded me of his turn in the 2019 historical epic The King, playing the dauphin of France, the oozingly pretentious son of King Charles VI. But the actor’s wildly diverting performance as Mickey was a huge risk in a movie whose mood is otherwise chilly. Bong said that “those 100 percent serious, weighty sci-fi epics” that a movie like Mickey 17 could resemble aren’t to his taste, however. “I need to somehow find cracks to infuse with humor,” he explained—like Pattinson’s seemingly mismatched approach.

He also found plenty of chances in the story’s first big twist—when an accident that leaves the 17th iteration of Mickey alive means that another Mickey (number 18) begins to coexist alongside him. Mickey 18 is meaner and more somber, allowing Pattinson to try out a completely different persona. This storytelling opportunity was also one reason Bong upped the character’s death count from the source material, searching for a more thematic number. “Once Mickey 18 appears, 17 goes through a journey of growth,” he said. “You can say that Mickey 17 is a coming-of-age film. And if you think about 18, a lot of societies, that’s when you become an official adult.”

The coming-of-age comparison is apt: Mickey 17 came to fruition as Bong stood at something of a crossroads in his career. Although he insists that the production was a smooth process, despite the release date shifting a few times, six years may seem like a long wait for his follow-up to Parasite. But the director admitted that the furor of that movie’s awards campaign—which culminated at the Oscars in February 2020—and the subsequent onset of the coronavirus pandemic were overwhelming. Adjusting to the pressures of newfound global fame can be a steep and isolating challenge, and that’s without the world locking down at the same time. “I would just remember coming back home for the first time in a while and just holding my puppy in my arms,” he said of the post-Oscars period. “It felt like we were in this strange vacuum state.”

Mickey 17 does seem like the kind of film to spring from that mindset. It’s bleak and intimate, but it’s also not without fits of puppy-cradling whimsy. “I just feel a lot of joy in coming up with these elements that are so not sci-fi in a sci-fi film,” Bong said. “As much as I love the genre, I always have this desire to betray it at the same time.”

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Photographs by Jake Dockins

Peter greeted me in the mostly empty gravel parking lot of a Mennonite church on the outskirts of Seminole, a small city in West Texas surrounded by cotton and peanut fields. The brick building was tucked in a cobbled-together neighborhood of scrapyards, metal barns, and modest homes with long dirt driveways. No sign out front advertised its name; no message board displayed a Bible verse. No cross, no steeple—nothing, in fact, that would let a passerby know they had stumbled on a place of worship. When my car pulled up, Peter emerged to find out who I was.

He hadn’t been expecting a stranger with a notepad, but he listened as I explained that I had come to town to write about the measles outbreak, which had by that point sent 20 people from the area to the hospital and caused the death of an unnamed child, the disease’s first victim in the United States in a decade.

Of course Peter knew why Seminole was in the news. He had heard that President Trump was asked about the outbreak here during a Cabinet meeting, and he told me that he didn’t like the attention. The Mennonites were being unjustly singled out. It wasn’t like they were the only ones who came down with measles. The coverage, he insisted, was “100 percent unfair.” He didn’t think it was just the Seminole area that had problems; he said that he had family in Canada and Mexico who had also gotten measles recently. I told him I’d heard that the child who’d passed away might have come from his congregation. He said that was true.

Peter dug the toe of his boot into the gravel. I asked him if he knew the family. His voice broke slightly as he answered. “That’s our kid,” he said.

Photograph by Jake Dockins

The first case in the West Texas outbreak was announced on January 29. The official tally in the region grew to six over the next week. By Valentine’s Day, it was up to 48. On February 26, news went out that a child had died; by that point, 124 cases had been confirmed across nine counties, making the outbreak the largest that the state had seen in 30 years. The official count now stands at just about 200, and another person who was diagnosed with measles just died across the border in New Mexico.

An outbreak—even one this big—should not have come as a surprise. Vaccination rates have dipped in many states, including Texas, since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. In Gaines County, where Seminole is located, the measles-vaccination rate among kindergartners is just 82 percent, well short of the estimated 95 percent threshold for maintaining herd immunity. Even that alarming figure would appear to undersell the local problem. Many children from the county’s Mennonite community, which numbers in the thousands, are unvaccinated, but they won’t get picked up in state tallies, because they are either homeschooled or enrolled in nonaccredited private schools, which are not required to collect such data.

Photograph by Jake Dockins

Even in the midst of a measles crisis, persuading parents in rural West Texas to vaccinate their children, or just to get tested for the virus, is an uphill battle. Zach Holbrooks, the executive director of the South Plains Public Health District, told me that he’s spent the past month trying to get the word out, particularly to the Low German–speaking Mennonite community. He asked three local churches if he could set up a mobile testing site on their property. They all refused. “I think there’s some sentiment that they’re being targeted,” he said, “and I don’t like the fact that they feel that way.” His team did create a drive-up testing site at a county events building next to the city park, and not far from the Masonic lodge. But he said that it gets very few visitors—about two or three a day. As a result, no one really knows the outbreak’s total size.

[Read: America is botching measles]

Help from the federal government has been slow to arrive. Weeks into the outbreak, the Department of Health and Human Services directed 2,000 doses of vaccine to be sent to Texas. But Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the newly confirmed HHS secretary, initially reacted to the outbreak by claiming that it was “not unusual.” Since then, he has repeatedly reminded the public that the decision to be immunized is a personal one, even while acknowledging that vaccines “not only protect individual children from measles, but also contribute to community immunity.” He has also claimed that good nutrition might be sufficient to protect people from the worst effects of measles. “If you are healthy, it’s almost impossible for you to be killed by an infectious disease in modern times,” Kennedy falsely told Fox News’s Marc Siegel in an interview last week. He’d had “a very, very emotional and long conversation” with the family of the child who had died, he said; and later added that “malnutrition may have been an issue in her death.” Local health officials told The New York Times that the child who died had “no known underlying conditions.” A spokesman for HHS declined to comment.

There are a half dozen Mennonite congregations in Seminole, according to Google Maps. Peter’s church isn’t listed among them. Aside from a nonprofit filing, it does not appear to have any online presence. I knew of its existence only because I’d met a Mennonite man from another congregation at a coffee shop that morning and asked whether he knew the family of the child that had died. He said he’d heard they were from this church. When I asked him where it was, he responded with a word in Low German. That turned out to be a nickname for a neighborhood a little ways outside of town. After circling county roads for a while, passing a mix of homes, horses, and farm equipment, I stopped and asked for help from a group of boys playing in a field with rocks and sticks. They pointed in unison. The church was just half a mile up the road.

That’s where I encountered Peter, a wiry 28-year-old man with an angular face who wore a dark-colored, Western-style shirt and jeans. His English was uncertain, and he spoke with a light German accent. Sometimes he responded to my questions with silence.

He declined to reveal his daughter’s name or the family’s last name. Peter was perplexed by the national news coverage, and he did not seem eager to draw more attention to his family and community. He gave only his daughter’s age: She was 6 years old. When I asked him to describe her in more detail, he waved his hand, said she liked what other kids liked. But as we stood in the parking lot, he told me the story of what happened.

Peter’s daughter had been sick for three weeks. The family knew it was measles. He said they took her to the hospital at one point, and she was given cough medicine. “That’s it,” he recalled. “They just say, ‘Go home.’ They don’t want to help us. They say, ‘It’s just normal; go home.’” (A spokeswoman for the Seminole Hospital District declined to comment, citing privacy laws.)

Photograph by Jake Dockins

It wasn’t normal, though. Her condition continued to deteriorate, so they brought her back to the doctors. “She just kept getting sicker and sicker,” he told me. “Her lungs plugged up.” Her heart rate and blood pressure dropped, and the doctors put her on a ventilator. “We were there Saturday ’til Monday, three days … and then it was worse, very bad.” Peter shook his head and stared at the ground. He said his daughter died on Tuesday night from pneumonia, which is a common infection in severe measles cases.

Peter’s daughter was not vaccinated. Mennonite doctrine does not prohibit inoculations or modern medicine in general, though I encountered plenty of suspicion among Mennonites I spoke with in Seminole. I met a father who said that he wanted to vaccinate his two daughters but that their mother didn’t think it was a good idea. A grandmother told me she knew of several children who had been given the measles vaccine and were “never the same after that.” A man who'd spent his career installing irrigation equipment said he was suspicious of vaccines in part because he believed that the government had lied about the origins of COVID.

Peter said that he has doubts about vaccines too. He told me that he considers getting measles a normal part of life, noting that his parents and grandparents had it. “Everybody has it,” he told me. “It’s not so new for us.” He’d also heard that getting measles might strengthen your immune system against other diseases, a view Kennedy has promoted in the past. But perhaps most of all, Peter worried about what the vaccine might do to his children. “The vaccination has stuff we don’t trust,” he said. “We don’t like the vaccinations, what they have these days. We heard too much, and we saw too much.”

During our conversation, several families arrived and went inside the building behind him. Mennonites are known for coming to the aid of fellow community members. Earlier in my visit, I’d heard a story about how Mennonites had paid off the mortgage of a young mother in the area whose husband had died in an accident. I asked Peter if he was getting enough support. He nodded: “Food, money—whatever we need.” Peter does construction for a living. He and his wife have four other small children. A couple of them appeared as we talked, grabbing at his sleeve, trying to get his attention. He leaned down to reassure them.

The death of his daughter, Peter told me, was God’s will. God created measles. God allowed the disease to take his daughter’s life. “Everybody has to die,” he said. Peter’s eyes closed, and he struggled to continue talking. “It’s very hard, very hard,” he said at last. “It’s a big hole.” His voice quavered and trailed off. “Our child is here,” he said, gesturing toward the building behind him. “That’s why we’re here.”

Peter invited me to come inside the church building. He walked over to the door and held it open. I entered a small, dark, airless room with about a dozen chairs. Peter’s daughter was lying in the middle in a handmade coffin covered with fabric. Her face, framed by blond, braided pigtails, showed no sign of illness. Everything was white: her skin, her dress, the lining of her coffin, the thin ribbons that formed little bows on the cuffs of her sleeves. Her hands were clasped just below her chest. Members of her family were seated all around. No one looked up when I walked into the room. The only sounds were the trill of someone’s cellphone alert and the dry, hacking cough coming from one of her sisters in the corner.

It’s easy to dismiss statistics, to forget what they represent. Before the measles shot was introduced in 1963, the number of deaths caused by the disease in the United States each year was somewhere from 400 to 500. The CDC puts the mortality rate for childhood measles at one to three in 1,000, with one in five cases requiring hospitalization. Thanks to vaccines, the memory of that suffering has largely faded from public consciousness, at least in the developed world.

What happened in Seminole, though, was a grim reminder. The day after meeting Peter, I visited the vaccination clinic across the street from the hospital where he had first taken his daughter. I had planned to interview people who were there to get their shots, but no one showed. It occurred to me that I was now at some modest risk myself. Families from Peter’s church had cycled through the visitation service the day before, sharing air inside that stuffy room amid their grief. Like a lot of people born before 1989, I’d gotten only one measles shot as a kid, so out of an abundance of caution, I rolled up my sleeve and got a booster. Later that day, I met up with Zach Holbrooks for lunch and asked him how many other people had gotten shots that morning. It turned out to be just one, and that one was him. He, too, had received just a single dose of the vaccine in childhood, so it seemed wise to get another.

Photograph by Jake Dockins

After lunch, I made the six-hour drive back to Austin, where I live, past the pumpjacks slowly bobbing for oil and the towering wind farms. There’s nothing I heard in Seminole that I haven’t also heard from crunchy liberal friends at home who choose not to vaccinate their kids because they believe that vaccines contain toxins that cause autism or that childhood diseases bolster the immune system. (For the record, the 1998 paper that purported to show a link between vaccines and autism has been retracted, and research indicates that contracting measles can degrade your body’s ability to fight other infections.) Nor are Peter’s views that unusual in conservative corners of the country. A recent poll found that nearly one-third of all Republican and Republican-leaning voters, for instance, think that routine inoculations are “more dangerous than the diseases they are designed to prevent.” That’s the gist of what I heard from multiple Mennonites I interviewed. They are far from alone.

At one point in the parking lot, Peter had asked me why his daughter matters to the rest of the country. I’d struggled in the moment to come up with an answer. For Peter and his family, the loss of their daughter is a private tragedy, one that would be excruciating no matter how she died. The fact that she died of measles, though, is a sign that something has gone wrong with the country’s approach to public health. Twenty-five years ago, measles was declared “eliminated” in the United States. Now a deadly crisis is unfolding in West Texas.

Before I left the church that day, Peter and I talked for a few more minutes. “You probably know how it goes when somebody passes away,” he said. “It’s hard to believe.” Peter told me he didn’t have anything more to say. Really, what more could be said? Something unbelievable had happened: A young father was grieving the death of his 6-year-old from measles.

In July of 2020, a little less than six months after COVID-19 sent much of the world into lockdown, I reviewed three newly released books about the coronavirus pandemic for this magazine. Six months is short in many contexts, but in publishing, it’s no time at all. I referred to these speed-demon titles as “quick-response art,” and wasn’t impressed. Literature is a fundamentally reflective endeavor, and as I wrote then, these books largely described what was happening, rather than thinking about it long enough to turn it into something different altogether.

This impulse is, of course, understandable. Describing something is a way to feel as if you’re in control of it, a sensation many of us longed for in 2020. Yet fiction that asserts too much control loses the possibility of transformation. The pre-vaccine period of the pandemic was a flagrantly uncontrollable situation, but even in much calmer situations, life is uncontrollable because it’s life. Something good or bad or neutral yet incomprehensible could change my existence at any moment: That’s the bargain of being human. Literature that doesn’t contain its own version of this deal—literature that tries to freeze-frame reality instead of transmuting it—is often boring, even alienating. Descriptive pandemic writing falls into precisely that trap.

[Read: The literature of the pandemic is already here]

I’ve continued to keep an eye on the literature of the pandemic as it emerges. I’ve read every COVID novel I’ve noticed coming out in the past five years, waiting for a truly great one, but so far, the ones I’ve read similarly overcontrol the experience of the pandemic. Some, such as Sigrid Nunez’s The Vulnerables, seem to want to use it to teach a moral lesson. (Look, it says of the odd-couple roommates who are its protagonists: We can connect across our differences.) Others, like Gary Shteyngart’s Our Country Friends, try and fail to make light of it; his satire of liberal elites sheltering in the Hudson Valley came too soon and was too burdened by its characters’ guilt at the relative ease of their experience. (I admire Shteyngart’s and Nunez’s other novels greatly. My disappointment, on reading both these books, was immense.)

The most common type of novel, though, is the one that’s mundanely descriptive of Life During the Pandemic—stories that feel as if they’ve been dredged from the author’s memories of it. We see this in Elizabeth Strout’s Lucy by the Sea, a novel that rises above a dull COVID-description opening to become wonderful by its end, and in Weike Wang’s Joan Is Okay, an intriguing character study of a socially inept doctor that descends into COVID description and loses its singularity and nuance. We see it in such novels as Deborah Levy’s August Blue, Michael Cunningham’s Day, and, most recently, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dream Count, which let the virus in around the edges, tossing in familiar details that don’t ever branch, warp, or transform into a fully-fledged literary reflection on that time. Nearly all of these novels concentrate on middle-class or wealthy characters, and nearly all, as the critic Katy Waldman has said, “seem to regurgitate the [pandemic] rather than illuminate it, with phrases buckling under the freshly smarting facts that they are asked to grapple with.”

[Read: The pandemic novel that’s frozen in time]

Of course, the pandemic also gave us a lot of fiction that wrestles neither with lockdown nor with much of anything else in the real world. Genres such as romance that allow readers to temporarily abandon life’s difficulties have exploded in popularity among adults. As Alexandra Alter writes in The New York Times, their “appeal during times of turmoil and uncertainty is obvious: Romance novels offer comfort and escape, and the stories often land on what fans call an ‘H.E.A.’—a Happily Ever After.” Indeed, an H.E.A. is the ultimate example of controlled reality: Anyone reading a romance knows that it’s coming.

I can’t knock the escapism trend too hard: We’ve all got to get away sometimes. Literary fiction, meanwhile, has taken its own turn toward the predictable, in the form of autobiographical novels that challenge the reader only to guess what’s true or who the bad boyfriend might be in real life. On this front, I agree with the scholar Anna Kornbluh, who writes in her wide-ranging contemporary cultural study Immediacy, published in 2024, that literature’s aggressive autobiographical turn “deflate[s] the power of writing to fabricate.” COVID-description novels do the same. I’d rather see a book that, far from trying to help its writer and readers remember how the pandemic really felt, turns its confusion and uncertainty into a theme or a style—that uses the pandemic as something to imagine with.

Of the types of storytelling I’d be excited to see, my guess is that we’ll see a great social COVID novel first. After all, the social novel was born to help readers process—and help writers protest against—overwhelming, awful phenomena: Classic examples include Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a novel-length outcry against slavery, and Victor Hugo’s portrait of the French poor’s struggles in Les Misérables. More recently, the novelistic show The Wire tackled the many cruelties of the drug war in Baltimore, taking a different perspective for each of its five seasons. And Adelle Waldman’s polyvocal 2024 novel, Help Wanted, flips constantly among viewpoints to convey the life-altering impact that career instability has on part-time, hourly laborers at big, Walmart-like companies that won’t give their workers set schedules. I’d love a Help Wanted–type novel that shows the pandemic’s pre-vaccine horrors permanently changing characters who work in an emergency room or a public school struggling over when and how to reopen. I don’t mean to suggest that a great COVID novel must necessarily be serious: The “Bring out your dead” scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail uses absurdity, the comedic opposite of satire, to make viewers feel the terrifying instability of living during the Black Death. Of course, the Pythons didn’t live through the plague themselves—and today, their sketch likely renders very differently for viewers who have undergone an experience of mass death. But such sharp-edged silliness might still be a useful technique to adapt in some form.

One impediment to the emergence of social COVID novels may be that many novelists are also nurses or cafeteria cooks or forklift drivers—a major problem in and of itself, though one that’s up to publishers rather than critics to solve—while authors who spent their lockdown days safely at home may feel uncomfortable writing about essential workers. Fair, but discomfort can be productive. So can leaving your desk. Waldman got a job at a big-box store in the Hudson Valley before writing Help Wanted. Research is an option; interviews are options; imagination is an option. All of the autobiographical novels of the past 10 years or so may have made us forget the potency of imagining things, but the case remains that writing compelling fiction requires you to unleash your subconscious. Setting a book in a world you don’t personally occupy—provided, of course, that you do your homework—isn’t a bad way to get there.

[Read: A big-box-store allegory]

The other kind of COVID literature that I’m eager to see is a great novel of the mind (by which I mean a great novel that takes place inside someone’s mind). Think Mrs. Dalloway, which, though it’s often taken as a completely interior book, is also about the First World War’s effects on English society. This type of storytelling will likely take longer. My guess is that a great interior COVID novel will either reject or undermine the self-controlling impulse that many pandemic novels thus far have suffered from, with its characters who are actively trying to manage their emotions and behavior. (One of the only pieces of COVID literature I’ve really liked thus far is Chris Bachelder and Jenn Habel’s book-length poem, Dayswork, which turns instead toward intellectualism and oddity; its speaker takes the pandemic as a reason, or an excuse, to give a Herman Melville obsession free rein.)

A contemporary example of this type of novel is Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, a doomy, unsettling tale that reveals itself, at its very end, to be about 9/11. Its protagonist, who aspires to sleep through a whole year with the help of psychiatric drugs, is patently not a stand-in for the United States, and yet her inner darkness, a source of both animation and rot, chimes with the violence of our national response to 9/11. As far as I’m concerned, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, which came out in 2018, is the only great 9/11 novel yet, and if it takes 17 years for a novel to find a comparably startling way to represent the pandemic’s traumatic effects, I won’t be surprised.

The most exciting fiction of all, naturally, would be the one I can’t yet conceive. I say this as both a critic and a novelist—and no, I don’t have my own COVID story in the hopper. All of my searching for a great pandemic novel has taught me that real literature about crisis has to come from more than anger or terror, more than the fundamentally self-centered impulse to say something or to add my memories to the general consciousness. I haven’t yet read the COVID novel I want, because I haven’t yet read one that truly submits to the uncontrollable reality of the pandemic, and the whole reason I want one is that I’m not there myself. After five years, I still can’t quite accept what happened. Whichever brave novelist manages to do so first will help the rest of us—and this time I mean the big us, not just writers—follow.

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The famous English club says the new venue will form the centrepiece of the regeneration of the Old Trafford area.

One response to the egregious, often cruel actions of the Trump administration is outrage. That’s understandable, but mostly counterproductive, and, worse, a reaction that Donald Trump’s supporters enjoy. Ice is more advisable than fire in this situation, and the situation is better assessed with a cold head than a hot one.

Broadly speaking, there are three streams of influence on the administration. Trump’s vindictive, amoral, autocratic, and ignorant personality is the most obvious one. No less important, though, is the influence of marginal intellectuals and podcast ranters, who provide ideas for an angry but empty man. These ideas range from the merely dangerous (the unitary executive) to the religiously authoritarian (Seven Mountains Dominionism, or Catholic integralism) to the deranged (let’s get to the bottom of the John F. Kennedy assassination, shall we?). There are, finally, the structural elements and conditions that brought us to this moment: the loss of manufacturing jobs to China and other countries, the pervasive failures of American governing elites, and the popular rejection of identity-driven policies.

This mix of influences holds true ofor foreign policy as well. Trump’s policy toward Europe, and specifically Ukraine, is motivated by his understanding of NATO as a mismanaged protection racket, his animus toward Ukraine, and his warmth toward Russian President Vladimir Putin. Alongside these idiosyncratic grievances of a man who cannot separate the personal from the public, however, are ideas that Trump has absorbed from those around him.

The so-called international-relations realists, and even the advocates of the “restrainer” school of American foreign policy, have the unrealistic notion that values should play no role in foreign policy and an unrelieved contempt for those who think otherwise. They are tempted to play at being Metternich. This was on display, for example, when Secretary of State Marco Rubio suggested to a journalist from Breitbart News that although the United States might not be completely successful at prying apart Russia and China, we could at least try to do so, apparently understanding as we do Russia’s interests better than Moscow does.

[Read: Helping Ukraine is Europe’s job now]

In this case, the secretary (not to mention his interviewer) forgot that the Nixon-Kissinger opening to China had coame at a time when Russia and China had waged a border war against each other and the Soviet Union was contemplating a preemptive strike on the Chinese nuclear arsenal. The tinhorn Talleyrands of Foggy Bottom might also have considered that suave statesmen do not announce to a crackpot news outlet that splitting the enemy coalition is the purpose of their European policy.

The idea—and it is an idea, though a very bad one—that the administration will make the United States safer by cutting a deal with Russia over the heads of our European allies is the kind of folly that only mediocre statesmen who think they are sophisticated tough guys can come up with. Such a deal would undermine America’s greatest international strengths—its alliances and its credibility—and reward two malicious powers whose hostility is profound, deeply rooted (in ideology and in fear of democratic contagion), and ineluctable. Or as my grandmother once said about someone who thought themselves clever, “Smart, smart, stupid.”

But it is also crucial to grasp the underlying forces at work here. Europe’s long dependence upon the United States for its fundamental security is untenable. This has been clear for a very long time indeed—so clear, in fact, that even as a naive, newly minted assistant professor, I understood it more than 40 years ago:

The greatest danger to the Alliance arises from the psychological relationship between the United States and an Old World dependent for its very survival on the arms of the New. As Raymond Aron has said, “By its very nature, Western Europe’s dependence on the United States for its own defense is unhealthy.” Once Europe had recovered from the devastation of World War II—let us say, for the sake of convenience, by 1960—the relationship of protector and protected was likely to evoke arrogance and condescension from the one side, resentment and irresponsibility from the other.

The eruptions of the Trump administration against NATO come in this context; conceivably, they were bound to come. Versions of the same critique, with much less vitriol, have been offered repeatedly, including by far friendlier administrations.

[Read: Trump sided with Putin. What should Europe do now?]

Deeper yet, European trust in a benign and protecting United States is the product of some selective memory. AlthoughWhile it is true that for nearly 80 years, the United States extended protection, including its nuclear umbrella, over Europe, let us not forget the bitter acrimony that has periodically beset the alliance. Furious debates over the rearmament of Germany, America’s betrayal of Britain and France during the Suez Crisis of 1956, mass hostility over the Vietnam War, the deep European antipathy to the deployment of intermediate-range nuclear forces to Europe, and American skepticism toward German Ostpolitik, not to mention the various perturbations of American economic and monetary policy, created repeated alliance crises. For that matter, this American visiting Europe in 2003, on the eve of the Iraq War, could not expect and did not receive an altogether pleasant reception.

The East European states have reason for warmer feelings towardabout the United States, which in the later stages of the Cold War did indeed help them with covert aid. But they are not entirely wrong to have felt abandoned by Washington before that and stymied in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse by American administrations that, rather than exploit Russia’s weakness, chose to appease the countryit, and were reluctant to admit them into NATO.

But the roots of U.S.-European tension are even more profound. Those 80 years of alliance were anomalous. Over a near quarter millennium, the relationship has been ambivalent. Most Americans descend from people who departed Europe in search of a new and better life. We are the people who left, and for the most part are glad we did. War with European powers occurred periodically, and could have been worse—France and the United States came close to blows over Mexico after the Civil War, and the lovely fortifications in Quebec City were designed to defend against American fleets. For their part, American leaders knew full well that the governments of France and Great Britain greatly preferred the Confederacy to the Union, and would not have been displeased at the breakup of, as it was then known, the Great Republic.

During the wWorld wWars, the United States exploited its European partners and allies. It demanded repayment of loans made in the first war in a common cause, and used its leverage in the second to break up Britain’s imperial preference system and speed up the collapse of the European empires. The Marshall Plan was magnificent, but it was also an act of self-interest. And from the American point of view, it was enough that thrice in the 20th century, the United States rescued Europe from what, viewed in the largest perspective, were three attempts at collective suicide driven by nationalism, fascism, and Communism.

Americans and Europeans have been different and remain so, even if it is now possible to get excellent wine, bread, and coffee in the United States and jeans and rap music in Europe. Their concepts of liberty, free speech, and the appropriate roles of government are not the same, as J. D. Vance noted at the Munich Security Conference, although he should have had the courtesy and good sense to emphasize how much we have in common, and acknowledge that the differences were none of his business.

[Read: ‘What the hell is happening to your country?’]

The cast of mind has ever been different. As Henry Adams said, “The American mind exasperated the European as a buzz-saw might exasperate a pine forest.” True enough, and the fact that English is now the lingua franca of Europe does not make American politics and culture any more transparent or predictable to those who reside on the other side of the Atlantic.

In the long run, a more normal kind of American administration will return. With it will also return productive and predictable relationships, cooperation, and friendship. But after the past two months, there cannot, and should not ever be, trust. One Trump administration was a mistake; two Trump administrations will be read, correctly, as a divergence that can never be repaired. The Atlantic alliance can be rebuilt, but its foundations will never be the same, and in some ways that is not an entirely bad thing. A well-armed Europe—even including, as the Polish prime minister has recently suggested, one with a larger group of nuclear powers—will be a good thing. A Europe free of its unnatural material and psychological dependence on the United States will benefit both sides.

As for the Trump administration, however, the mistrust should be of a completely different order. The man, the ideas, and the structural conditions have created a hellish synthesis, and Europe faces at this moment the utmost peril. If it frees itself of its psychological dependence, opens its treasuries, and unleashes the energy of its democratic societies, it can defend itself, including Ukraine. In the meanwhile, and with the deepest regret, I say that any European leader who believes any promise that comes out of the mouth of a Trump-administration official is a fool. For four years at least, you are in grave danger, because you simply cannot trust us.

Donald Trump wants to get back into the casino business. These days, the onetime owner of the infamous Taj Mahal casino is not interested in slot machines. He is set on a much newer kind of gambling: crypto. Yesterday, the president signed an executive order creating both a “Strategic Bitcoin Reserve” and a “Digital Asset Stockpile” made up of different kinds of cryptocurrencies. The bitcoin stockpile, which presumably will be the larger of the two, amounts to “a virtual Fort Knox for digital gold,” Trump said during a crypto summit at the White House earlier today. “‘Never sell your bitcoin.’ That’s a little phrase that they have. I don’t know if that’s right or not. Who the hell knows.”

There are reasons for governments to stockpile essential commodities. America has a Strategic Petroleum Reserve to protect against disruptions in the global oil market or for use during natural disasters or other emergencies. China’s strategic pork reserve helps the government keep prices stable, and South Korea recently had to pull from its strategic cabbage reserve during peak kimchi season. But a crypto reserve would serve none of these functions. The ostensible idea is that stockpiling crypto could help “drive economic growth and technological leadership,” as a fact sheet for the executive order states. But unlike oil or even cabbage, crypto does not serve the core functioning of society. It’s a volatile, highly speculative asset with little proven real-world application that regular old U.S. dollars can’t already account for. It’s hard to think of anything that would be less useful for America to stockpile.

“Strategic Bitcoin Reserve” is a lofty name for what Trump’s executive order actually has done: taking crypto the government already owns and counting it. Over the years, the United States has seized crypto assets as part of criminal and civil proceedings. The current value of bitcoin alone is estimated to be $17 billion. Why Trump seems set on pushing forward with this idea isn’t hard to see. The mere existence of something called a crypto reserve could benefit the president. Trump himself has gone all in on the crypto industry of late—even releasing his own memecoin, $TRUMP. On Sunday, he previewed his executive order on Truth Social: “I will make sure the U.S. is the Crypto Capital of the World,” he wrote. “We are MAKING AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

Many other powerful members of his administration have crypto ties. That includes David Sacks, a venture capitalist who is now Trump’s crypto and AI czar, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik. (Sacks has said he sold all crypto holdings prior to the start of the administration; Lutnick has agreed to divest his business interests by mid-May.) Elon Musk has previously indicated that he owns crypto assets, but hasn’t publicly addressed possible conflicts of interest since the crypto reserve was announced. I reached out to Musk, the White House, and the Department of Commerce for comment but did not hear back.

A government stockpile could boost crypto prices. In crypto-speak, the ethos of the industry is: “Number go up.” In plain English, that means pushing the price of crypto assets higher and higher. The way to do that is to find buyers who will pay more, a phenomenon sometimes called the “greater-fool theory.” Investing in something that is overvalued or intrinsically worthless might be the smart thing to do, if you can eventually find someone on whom to pawn it off at a higher price. A crypto reserve effectively turns the U.S. government into the next greater fool. Trump’s executive order also calls for the government to look into buying more bitcoin, a move that could push up the value of crypto. (Trump said that the actions taken to establish the new reserve would not cost taxpayers any money, but provided few details on how this would be achieved.)

Trump already has had an effect on crypto values. In his Truth Social announcement on Sunday, he named five coins that would be included in the stockpile: bitcoin, ether, Solana, Cardano, and XRP. This is exactly what you would not do if you wanted to efficiently and affordably assemble a government crypto reserve; naming the specific coins that the United States intends to later include in a stockpile should cause the prices to immediately spike. And that’s just what happened. The coins Trump mentioned shot up in value. Crypto holders had the chance to make a tidy profit selling off some of their coins—despite the fact that the stockpile in the end simply included bitcoin and all other crypto assets seized by the government, rendering the details in Trump’s posts moot.

Any government that trades in crypto raises concerns about how the currency could be used. Because crypto transactions can be done anonymously, they provide an almost unparalleled mechanism for bribery and corruption. Investing in crypto doesn’t mean a nation is using the currency as an illegal backdoor, but the problem is the difficulty in knowing if it were.

Now that the president has created a crypto reserve, he will want crypto prices to keep rising—otherwise the stockpile will be worthless. Driving the prices higher would require a steady stream of positive news. But the good news is already drying up, it seems. Trump’s executive order did not go over well with crypto traders, who were hoping that the government would do more than shift around the coins it owns: The price of bitcoin plummeted immediately after the order was announced.

At a certain point, even good news isn’t quite good enough. Buy the rumor; sell the news, as the old saying goes. Eventually, the U.S. government will be stuck with a bunch of crypto, searching for ways to drive the price higher and having no one to sell it to. If Trump keeps feeding the crypto hype machine, he may benefit—and the rest of us may be stuck with the bill.

The collision caused a fire in a busy shipping lane off the coast of East Yorkshire.