The sliding doors of a supermarket open into a dilemma: Though one may find comfort in the grocery store’s order and abundance, its high stakes can also provoke anxiety—after all, this is the place where we trade hard-earned money for sustenance. “Everything was fine, would continue to be fine, would eventually get even better as long as the supermarket did not slip,” Don DeLillo’s narrator Jack Gladney observes in White Noise, commenting on the structure that supermarkets, with their rows of neatly ordered products, impose on his chaotic life. Thirty years later, Halle Butler’s protagonist in the novel Jillian enters a gourmet grocery store on a whim because “there were delights there.” The prices are so out of her budget that she has to give herself a pep talk before buying anything. “I mean, I work all the time,” she mutters. “This is why I work, isn’t it? I’m a hard worker. I can buy this cheese. It’s just cheese, I guess.” But it’s not just cheese.

In the latest of her books to be translated into English, Annie Ernaux, the 2022 Nobel laureate in literature, takes the big-box store as her subject. She trains a careful eye on her local Auchan—a combined supermarket and department store—in Cergy, France, a middle-class suburb about 20 miles outside Paris. From November 2012 to October 2013, she recorded each of her visits to the store in a diary. The finished product, Look at the Lights, My Love, published in France in 2014, is an indictment of modern consumerism and the way it robs the individual of their autonomy.

Through observation and analysis that feel nearly anthropological in their detail, Ernaux argues that our shopping habits are determined not by personal choices, but by factors that are frequently outside our control—our financial situation, our location, what products we have access to. Supermarkets were supposed to be great equalizers, democratizing food access, but they have instead become a microcosm of contemporary consumer malaise. Ernaux’s departure from the intensely intimate relationships that are the focus of much of her previous work might feel unorthodox at first. But as her gloomy portrait of the big-box store begins to form, it becomes clear that this book isn’t so different from her others: Her interest lies less in the store itself than in the way it serves as a site for interpersonal interactions.

[Read: The year I tore through Annie Ernaux’s books]

Ernaux begins to find her trips, as a recurring action, overwhelming and dehumanizing. The result of living in a society driven by profit is not abundance; it’s people being sorted into classifiable categories by what kinds of products are within their reach, stripping them of their individuality and depriving them of their dignity. “Here, as nowhere else, our way of life and bank account are exposed,” Ernaux writes in a February 7, 2013, entry:

Your eating habits, most private interests, even your family structure. The goods deposited on the conveyor belt reveal whether a person lives alone, or with a partner, with a baby, young children, animals.

Your body and gestures, alertness or ineptitude, are exposed, as well as your status as a foreigner, if asking for a cashier’s help in counting coins, and consideration for others, demonstrated by setting the divider behind your items in deference to the customer behind, or stacking your empty basket on top of others.

Much of Look at the Lights contemplates the etiquette customers observe while grocery shopping. Simple choices—how many items one takes to the self-checkout, whether one follows the rule against reading in the magazine aisle—are reflective of one’s respect, or lack thereof, for spoken and unspoken conventions. Ernaux’s observations are ruthless. Musing over the spectacle of men “lost and defeated before a row of goods,” she recalls a radio program in which two male journalists in their 30s remarked, almost with pleasure, that their mothers did their shopping for them—“having remained, in some way, infants.” Though she’s not without empathy, Ernaux is brutal in her appraisal of other customers—in particular those who show little regard for their fellow shoppers. In one scene, she watches a woman leave the checkout line slowly to find a replacement shopping bag, moving at a pace “that one suspects is deliberate”:

The atmosphere of disapproval is palpable before this person who takes her time with no concern for that of others. Who flouts the implicit rules of consumer civility, of a code of conduct that alternates between rights—such as refusing an item that turns out to be defective, or double-checking one’s receipt—and duties—not jumping the line at the checkout, always letting a pregnant or disabled person go ahead, being polite to the cashier, etc.

Ernaux keenly observes the way these norms are upheld or tested. On December 5, 2012, the author recounts “the perversity of the self-checkout system,” where the blame normally assigned to slow cashiers is instead directed at customers. Instructions must be followed to a T for fear of a robot-voiced reprimand from the machines and the scorn of other shoppers. On March 14, 2013, Ernaux leaves a copy of Le Monde in her cart and gets an earful from the checkout clerk because she declined to wrap the newspaper in plastic upon entering to identify it as purchased outside of the store. “I have just been put in my place for not having considered hers,” Ernaux muses. “Among the seven million working poor in France, many are cashiers.” The solidarity is striking, though perhaps not surprising in light of Ernaux’s support of the French workers protesting President Emmanuel Macron’s plan to raise the nation’s retirement age earlier this year.

Photograph by Brian Ulrich / Robert Koch Gallery

The guiding principle of a store like Auchan is that everyone can get what they want, whenever they want, quickly. In practice, the supermarket is no freer of class hierarchies than the world outside it. For instance, Auchan’s bulk-sweets aisle is riddled with signs prohibiting on-premises consumption. This wards off theft, theoretically, but to Ernaux this action is inherently classist—“a warning meant for a population assumed dangerous, since it does not appear above the scales in the fruit and vegetable area in the ‘normal’ part of the store.”

Normal, of course, is relative. In fact, Auchan has no typical customer, just typical times of day that different people shop. Early-morning patrons tend to be organized-yet-leisurely retirees; mid-afternoon belongs to the middle-aged, or to young people with children. After 5 p.m. is the province of high-school students and mothers with their school-aged children, and from 8 to 10 p.m. Ernaux encounters university students and “women in long dresses and headscarves, always accompanied by a man. Do these couples choose the evening for reasons of convenience, or because at this later, off-peak hour they feel less as if they’re being stared at?”

Everyone has a place in the store, so long as they know their place in the store. Ernaux spotlights the considerations that people—especially those on the margins—make when engaging in the mundane, necessary action of grocery shopping. Those with less money, of course, must be more judicious in their choices. “This is a form of economic labor, uncounted and obsessive, that fully occupies thousands of women and men,” she writes.

Ernaux is greatly concerned with “the humiliation inflicted by commercial goods: they are too expensive, so I’m worth nothing.” But what makes Look at the Lights a work of art, rather than a manifesto, is the sheer sensuousness of Ernaux’s language. This is not to be confused with sensuality—which the author is renowned for—but is rather the subtle visual, auditory, and tactile details that fill the pages and lend firsthand credibility to the argument this slim work makes. Reading it, one can almost hear the crunch of fresh ice hitting the fishmonger’s stall, or imagine the apologetic smile and eye roll of a woman telling Ernaux that “sardines with hot peppers are not for me!”

[Read: A better way of buying—and wanting—things]

Experiences such as these are, for Ernaux, the only redeeming quality of the one-stop shop; by describing them, she reanimates a shared humanity that consumerism has flattened out. Contrasting a stray shopping list left in a cart with one’s own, as Ernaux does, might strike some simply as nosiness; but seeing oneself in another’s choices is radical in its quiet way. In one scene near the end, Ernaux cuts up an Auchan rewards card, incensed at the condition that self-checkout users must present it or be subject to random inspections by store workers to make sure they’ve paid for everything. In the hands of a less skilled writer, this might come across as vapid or performative. In Ernaux’s telling, the gesture feels reasonable and justified.

Given the relentless critique that Ernaux sustains for most of the book, the last few pages take a surprising turn, reading as something of an elegy for these same big-box stores. Though places like Auchan emphasize class divisions, they at least have the effect of bringing different kinds of people into one shared space. As the world embraces online shopping, curbside pickup, and apps that ferry out personal shoppers to buy groceries, we’ll lose out, in yet another way, on the sorts of human, serendipitous encounters that Ernaux describes. Meanwhile, inequality, as rampant as ever, will now be hidden behind screens.

There will be 10,000 torchbearers to carry the Olympic flame as it passes through some 60 French departments ahead of the 2024 Games, Paris Olympic ...

Great Britain's three-time Olympic champion Adam Peaty says he wants to be happy before he goes to Paris 2024 in search of another gold medal.

Listen and subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google | Pocket Casts

Coffee shops, churches, libraries, and concert venues are all shared spaces where mingling can take place. Yet the hustle and bustle of modern social life can pose challenges to relationship-building—even in spaces designed for exactly that.

In this episode of How to Talk to People, we analyze how American efficiency culture holds us back from connecting in public, whether social spaces create a culture of interaction, and what it takes to actively participate in a community.

Hosted by Julie Beck, produced by Rebecca Rashid, edited by Jocelyn Frank and Claudine Ebeid. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado, and engineering by Rob Smierciak.

Build community with us! … via email. Write to us at howtopodcast@theatlantic.com. To support this podcast, and get unlimited access to all of The Atlantic’s journalism, become a subscriber.

Music by Alexandra Woodward (“A Little Tip”), Arthur Benson (“Charmed Encounter,” “She Is Whimsical,” “Organized Chaos”), Gavin Luke (“Nadir”), Ryan James Carr (“Botanist Boogie Breakdown”), Tellsonic (“The Whistle Funk”), Dust Follows (“Willet”), Auxjack (“Mellow Soul”).

Click here to listen to additional seasons in The Atlantic’s How To series.

Host Julie Beck: I think what I’ve observed in public spaces, especially in my neighborhood, is really just a hustle and bustle. And people are going somewhere specific to do something specific with specific people. They’re sort of on a mission.

Eric Klinenberg: Efficiency is the enemy of social life. What kind of place would allow us to enjoy our lives and enjoy each other more than we do today? What kinds of things would we need to reorient our society around?

Kellie Carter Jackson: You know, people say, like, misery loves company. I don’t think that is true. I think that misery in a lot of ways requires company; it requires kinship. It requires community. So that you are not isolated in your pain.

Klinenberg: What kinds of things would we need to reorient our society around?

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Beck: I’m Julie Beck, senior editor at The Atlantic.

Rebecca Rashid: And I’m Becca Rashid, producer of the How To series.

Beck: This is How to Talk to People.

Rashid: Though I normally am not making a friend at the café, recently there was a girl that was working on her laptop. She noticed I was, too. We started chittin’ and chattin’, and after a few weeks of running into each other so many times at the café, she finally—slightly awkwardly—asked yesterday, “Hey, do you mind if I get your number if you maybe wanted to get a drink?” Very friendly, sweet sort of way of fighting through the awkward.

Beck: I’m so impressed! Of course, people do connect at cafés like you literally just did. And, you know, in Paris or whatever, they may be happy for people to linger and chat all day. But I think the connection that’s happening in those spaces, like, that’s not the purpose of the space; that’s a byproduct. Perhaps a welcome byproduct, but like the point of the space is to make money. The point is to sell you something.

Rashid: It’s a business.

Beck: They’re selling you a coffee; they’re selling you a sandwich. There are several cafés in D.C. that I really like that just don’t offer Wi-Fi, or they give you a ticket where you have like a couple of hours of Wi-Fi after you buy something. And I get why they’re doing that, because they want the customers to cycle through, and they don’t want people taking up tables all day when they could get a fresh paying customer in there.

That may well be good business sense. But if those are the only spaces that you have to maybe just mingle and get to know people that are in your neighborhood, what are the spaces where you can just have friendly mingling, and that’s the point?

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Beck: Eric Klinenberg is a researcher who is really into all of these questions that we’ve been talking about. He’s a professor of sociology at New York University, and he’s an expert on city infrastructure and urban life.

He wrote this book called Palaces for the People in which he talks about this concept called social infrastructure. That is essentially the physical spaces that are available to the public that are designed to facilitate these social connections.

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Klinenberg: If you want to have a transit system like a train, you need an infrastructure to carry the train, right? The rails, for instance, There is also an infrastructure that supports social life: social infrastructure. And when I say social infrastructure, I’m referring to physical places. They can be organizations; they can also be parks. Physical places that shape our capacity to interact.

When you have strong social infrastructure, people have a tendency to come out and linger. And if you live in a poor neighborhood where the social infrastructure is strong, if you’re older, if you’re more frail, if you’re very young, you might spend more time sitting on the stoop in front of your home. You might have a bench that you spend time on, that’s on your street. There might be a diner where you go every day.

And what that means is there are people who are used to seeing you out in those public places on a regular basis. And when it’s dangerous outside, someone might notice that you’re not there. And they might not even know your name. They might just know your face. Maybe they know where you live. They’re used to seeing each other in the public realm.

I grew up in Chicago. And in 1995, just before I was about to start graduate school in sociology, there was a heat wave that hit my hometown and lasted just a couple of days. But the temperatures were quite extreme. It got to about 106 degrees. Chicago did what it always does when there’s a heat wave: It turned on air conditioning everywhere you could go. And the power grid got overwhelmed. And very soon the, you know, electricity went out for thousands of homes.

At the end of this week, in July, Chicago had more than 700 deaths from the heat. And this was the pre-pandemic time. So people dying in a city in a couple of days seemed like an exceptional thing. We hadn’t gotten numb to it yet. I was really curious about what had happened, and the first thing I did was I made these maps to see which people and places in Chicago were hit hardest. And at first blush, the map looked exactly like you would expect it to look. The neighborhoods that were hit the hardest were on the south side and the west side of Chicago. They were the historically segregated Black, poor, ghettoized neighborhoods.

Beck: Right. Chicago’s extremely segregated.

Klinenberg: And when there’s a disaster, you know, poor people living in segregated neighborhoods will fare the worst. So I looked a little more closely at the map, and I noticed something that no one else had seen—which is that there were a bunch of neighborhoods that were located right next to places that were among the deadliest neighborhoods in Chicago. But this other set of places wound up being extraordinarily healthy.

Beck: So these were neighborhoods that were geographically really close to each other and shared a lot of characteristics, but they were having really different outcomes?

Klinenberg: Matching neighborhoods. Like, imagine two neighborhoods separated by one street—same level of poverty, same proportion of older people. The risk factors that we ordinarily look for were equal. But they had wildly disparate outcomes in this heat disaster. That’s the kind of puzzle that you live for when you’re a social scientist.

Klinenberg: And so, what I observed is that the neighborhoods that had really high death rates, they looked depleted. They had lost an enormous proportion of their population in the decades leading up to the heat wave. They had a lot of abandoned buildings. Even the little playgrounds were in terrible shape, not well-maintained.

And across the street in the neighborhoods that did better, the public spaces were much more viable. They didn’t have abandoned homes. They didn’t have empty lots. There were community institutions, grocery shops, coffee shops, a branch library, places that anchored public life.

In those neighborhoods in Chicago, people knocked on the door, and they checked in on each other. And as a consequence, if you lived in one of these poor neighborhoods that had a strong social infrastructure, you were more likely to survive the heat wave. People in the neighborhood across the street, the depleted neighborhood—they were 10 times more likely to die in the heat wave. And that difference was really quite stark.

Beck: So you said when we talk about regular infrastructure, we’re talking about what carries the train, right? So what carries the train of our relationships? What are the actual railroad tracks?

Klinenberg: Think about a playground, for instance. We know that one of the core places that families go to meet other families in their neighborhood is a playground. All kinds of socializing happens when parents or grandparents or caretakers of all kinds are pushing a swing and looking for a companion, someone to talk to.

Those conversations at the swing set often lead to a shared little break together on the bench or maybe to a picnic and then a playdate, and then two families getting to know each other and communities growing. If you took playgrounds out of American cities and suddenly there was no playground, our social lives would be radically different.

We act as if, you know, in the Old Testament, on the fifth day, God said, “Today I give you the playground and the library,” and it’s our birthright to spend time in them. We forget that these are achievements. These are human inventions.

We built giant parks, theaters, art spaces. We created a good society based on a vision of radical inclusion. Not quite radical enough. People have always been left out of our public spaces. There’s no history of this idea that is complete if it doesn’t pay attention to how racial segregation works and how racial violence works and how gender excluded some people from some public realms. All of that stuff is there in the history of public space. I think in the last several decades, we’ve kind of come to take all these places for granted.

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Beck: What is the connection between having places to just hang out and vibe and having a community rally together and support each other in an emergency like a heat wave?

Klinenberg: Well, one doesn’t necessarily lead to the other. You can have places where people hang out and vibe and don’t get active and engaged on important civic matters. I generally argue that public spaces and social infrastructure—they’re a necessary condition for having some sense that we’re in it together, and we have some kind of common purpose. But they’re by no means sufficient. And so that has to do with programming; that has to do with design; that has to do with this feeling of being part of a shared project. And some public spaces give us that feeling, and others really don’t.

Beck: Yeah. I’m curious about the mechanics of how that even happens. I feel a bit of a divide, where being in public is for being active and relaxing is for home. And so much of the public space around me is bustling—people are engaging in commerce, or they’re just walking from here to there, and there are no opportunities to slow down and talk to each other. And I don’t know that we would. Does that make sense?

Klinenberg: Yeah. I mean, it makes perfect sense, because efficiency is the enemy of social life. You tend to enrich your social life when you stop and linger and waste time.

And in fact, one of the really striking things, I think, for Americans when we travel to other countries is to see the extent to which people all over the world delight in sitting around: the culture of the souk or of the coffee shop or the wine bar or the plaza.

Beck: Oh, yeah, the five-hour dinners in France. Like, you can’t find that waiter to get your check. You know?

Klinenberg: (Laughing.)

Beck: He’s gone.

Klinenberg: Because the point is not to pay the check. The point is to be there. And it’s hard for us to come to terms with just how forcefully the ticking clock shapes our capacity to take pleasure in social life.

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​​Rashid: It’s interesting that you see the no Wi-Fi on the weekends as a way to cycle people out of the space. I thought that was the café or coffee shop making a grand gesture in favor of relationship-building.

Beck: Oh. I guess I’m just more cynical than you. But I think it’s because they need to make money. I go to the public pool with friends. I get books from the library. There is a very hot ticket at our local library, which is like a semi-regular puzzle swap that they do. Oh, and my partner and I, we’re very cool.

We go and we swap puzzles with the community. But I don’t feel like I am really building new relationships or getting to know my neighbors at these places, or even at these events. Like, I love these resources. I don’t want to lose them. I enjoy them, but I just kind of use them by myself or with people I already know.

Rashid: Yeah. And I think the norm of keeping to yourself is only fueled more by things like social media and being able to look away and be on your phone. And it’s interesting how just that shared physical presence with people also doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re closer.

Beck: Yeah, just because you go to the café doesn’t mean you’re going to look up from your phone.

—

Beck: Do you think that to some degree we’ve replaced our relationship to social infrastructure with social media?

Klinenberg: I think of social media as like a communications infrastructure. It definitely helps us to engage other people. It’s a kind of impoverished social life that it delivers in the end.

Think about how life felt in April of 2020 when we were in the beginning of the pandemic, because we were all in our homes cut off from each other. We were talking to each other all the time, right? But we were physically isolated, and we were miserable. So that’s life where social media is social infrastructure.

Beck: I do wonder whether there is an individualism that is also affecting our living choices and the way that we engage with the social infrastructure.

Klinenberg: I discovered that the United States is a laggard, not a leader, when it comes to living alone. Living alone is far more common in most European societies than it is in the U.S. It’s more common in Japan. It’s more common in France and England. Scandinavian societies have the highest levels of living alone on Earth, and Germany is higher than the United States.

And what I learned about doing this research is that what really is driving living alone is interdependence. When you have a strong welfare state, and you guarantee people the capacity to make ends meet without being tethered to a partner who they might not want to be with.

Beck: Do you think, then, that solo livers rely on social infrastructure more?

Klinenberg: They do. They’re more likely to go out to bars and restaurants and cafés and to gyms, to go to concerts. I just published a paper in a journal called Social Problems with a graduate student named Jenny Leigh, and we interviewed 55 people who were living alone in New York during the first stage of the pandemic.

We talked to them about their experiences. And it was really interesting. Like, they talked very little about social isolation, and they didn’t complain that much about kind of conventional loneliness, like lacking people to talk to. But they felt physically lonely; they felt physically isolated.

And they really missed the kind of familiar strangers we see when we spend time in a neighborhood who just give us a sense of where we are and that we belong. They felt [an] acute kind of pain that was slightly different than the pain of the common conversation we had at the time.

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Klinenberg: One of the problems we have now is most cities, suburbs, towns in America have public libraries there. There’s neighborhood libraries. The building is there. And the buildings are generally not updated there. They need to have new HVACs. They need new bathrooms. They need new furniture, let alone new books.

Some are still not accessible to people in wheelchairs. I mean, there’s all kinds of problems with libraries, just physically, because we’ve underinvested in them. But libraries, unfortunately, have become the place of last resort for everyone who falls through the safety net.

Klinenberg: If you wake up in the morning in an American city and you don’t have a home, you’re told to go to a library. If you wake up in the morning and you’re suffering from an addiction problem, you need a warm place. They’ll send you to a library.

If you need to use a bathroom, you’ll go to a library. If you don’t have childcare for your kid, you might send your kid to a library. If you’re old and you’re alone, you might go to the library. We’ve used the library to try to solve all of these problems that deserve actual treatment.  

And how many times have you talked to someone who said, like, it’s basically a homeless shelter. What’s happened is we’ve stigmatized our public spaces, because we’ve done so little to address core problems that we’ve turned them into spaces of last resort for people who need a hand. And as we do that, we send another message to affluent, middle-class Americans, and that is: If you want a gathering place, build your own in the private sector. So we have a lot of work to do.

Beck: It’s really interesting to me to hear about the ways our environment either encourages or discourages interaction and community-building, because I think on some level I’ve always felt like if I don’t have that ideal sense of community that I really want, then it’s my fault for not trying hard enough. How much of this is just on the government? And there’s not much we can do besides, like, pestering aldermen.

Klinenberg: I think it’s on us to build the political institutions that we want and also to build the public places that we need. So, one of the miracles of American life is that we have these public libraries in every neighborhood.

Nobody would support the idea of a library if we didn’t already have it. It’s like a utopian socialist fantasy, the library. And the miracle is that we have them. If you think about the American public-park system, the public schools, like: We built all these things.

The reason so many of us feel like it’s so hard to hang out and enjoy the companionship of other people is because the signals we get from each other and from the state and from the corporate world tell us that we’re freakish and weird if we want that kind of collective experience. Everybody knows happiness is in your phone. It’s at the $22 cocktail bar. It’s at the $9 coffee shop, the $14 ice-cream cone. Those are the things that are supposed to give us pleasure.

And I think we need to start to imagine what a different kind of society might look like and how to rebuild public spaces that are the 21st-century version of the 20th-century library. What are the kinds of places we’d like to design so that we could be with each other differently?

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Beck: Another important piece—back to actually finding community in these spaces—is people acting on the opportunity to connect that they present. It’s hard if I’m going to the puzzle swap, and no one’s talking to each other. I mean, I’m guilty of going in and grabbing my puzzles and getting out and not really making a big effort to chitchat and make a new relationship there.

And it’s hard to feel like you’re just taking that on yourself to try to make that happen. It’s also: Do you see people welcoming you? Do you feel comfortable going up to someone to strike up a conversation? Do you see other people mingling? The design of a place can totally encourage or discourage interactions, but obviously so can the behavior of the people in the place.

Rashid: Right. Like, the friend I made at the café is kind of a rare occurrence, because normally people in the café are working, reading, or, as you’ve said before, with people they already know.

Beck: And the social norms of a café are going to be different than the social norms of a public pool or a local sports team or a church. In a café, everyone kind of has different agendas, like Becca’s out there making a friend. But, like, some people are just reading a book by themselves or having that one-on-one lunch with somebody. But in a church, for instance, like generally speaking, there’s a norm that we want to be in community with each other. We have shared values, and we’re here to connect.

Jackson: My church has been everything to me, because those relationships have just been so transformative and so deep. Every single highlight of my life, although like the church, my church has been there for me.

Beck: Kellie Carter Jackson is a historian and a professor from Wellesley College, and we recently spoke about the culture of care in her community. So in her life, she’s found that places like the church and her kids’ school have smoothed that path to building those deep relationships of support, because both the spaces themselves and the people in them have been welcoming.

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Beck: Do you feel like finding a church in the new places where you’ve moved to? Has that helped in getting to those deep relationships quickly?

Jackson: Yes, absolutely. I will say that when we lived in North Dakota, almost all of my friendships either came from the military or the church that we were going to. People were just so warm and so kind. And, you know, you would join like a Bible study group or a mommy-and-me group, and those became fast friendships.

When my husband was going through extensive training, he was in Memphis. He was out of town for like three months. And I was overwhelmed by three kids. They did a meal train and just brought—I hate cooking! [Laughter.] And so my church small group was like, “Hey, how can we take off some of the burdens since Nathaniel’s gone? What can we do?” And so, just to know that people would go the extra mile for you when you’re really taxed is huge.

Beck: Yeah. I guess I see, you know, church as sort of a natural gathering place because it has those kind of communal values built into the institution. How does your faith sort of influence your approach to community with your neighbors?

Jackson: I think that I have always tried to model what it means to be a good neighbor regardless of my neighbors’ religious affiliations. I grew up in the church, so my parents modeled for me hospitality. We always had people over at our house all the time. We have a big family; I’m one of seven. So it’s like, what’s one more? What’s six more? What’s 10 more?

(Laughter.)

Beck: Just bring ’em on in.

Jackson: Bring them on in. That is how I show my friendship, show my love, show my care. It is by making you feel welcome and by giving you a place to rest. And it does not always extend to people we know. Like, when I think of neighbors, I think that extends even into my kids’ school. So my six-year-old had a real hard time because not only had my mother-in-law passed away, but her great-grandmother had died as well. So we had like two big losses—a mother and a grandmother—in about a three-month period.

Jojo is my middle child’s name. Jojo was just distraught by it. Like, she cried for 30 minutes, and I couldn’t calm her down. I sent her teacher an email, and I said, “Hey, Jojo’s having a really hard time. I sent her to school with a picture of her grandmothers. She might keep it in her backpack; she might take it out. But I just want you to know, like, this is what’s going on.”

Beck: Yeah.

Jackson: And her teacher did something—gosh, sorry I’m getting emotional …

Beck: Aw.

Jackson: Her teacher saw her with the picture … and she said, “Jojo, do you want to share that with the classroom?” And so she got up in front of the classroom, and she talked about her grandmothers and just who they were. And the fact that her teacher gave her space to do that—it just meant, like, I don’t know her teacher very well, but I know that she loves my kid. And I know that she created space for my kid when she was having a hard time emotionally, and that she would do that for any kid. I am always overwhelmed by just the goodness of neighbors, and people’s capacity to provide comfort during hard times.

Beck: I mean, I think there’s so much go-it-alone-ness, um, in our culture a lot of the time. And like, sometimes you can get by with that. Like, it seems lonely, but like, you can do it, and—

Jackson: Can, but should you?

Beck: Yeah. But when you are in such a place of intense grief, like, it becomes very clear that you can’t.

Jackson: You can’t, and you shouldn’t. I mean,If I hear one more person say “God won’t give you more than you can bear,” I will want to punch them. But I think that we have these clichés that are so empty. You know, just giving people the freedom to feel what they feel, to act upon those feelings without feeling judged, to be heard. You know, most people just want to be heard.

You know, I think in the Black community, we care for one another. There is this idea of kinship. This idea that whether you are blood related or not, this is your auntie, this is your uncle, this is your cousin, this is your fam. That we see each other, that we recognize each other’s humanity, that we show up for each other. There is something about that familiarity of Blackness that connects people, that is both spiritual and cultural. And so, if you grew up in the church, I think those ideas are fortified for you of how you should show up and care for other people.

Beck: I mean, how do you get to that place with neighbors and people in your community without a church?

Jackson: I think it’s tough.

Beck: It is tough.

Jackson: I think it’s not impossible. I mean, there is something about a shared set of values sometimes that comes from the church, that allows making friendships to be a little bit easier. But if you don’t have that, sometimes I think that trust can be an issue. Like, I’ve had to let people know who are outside of my faith: You can depend on me; you can trust me. I’m not going to judge you. That our home is welcome to anyone, of all backgrounds.

Because I think people can sometimes be skittish around people that they think are religious. And I never wanted anyone that I connected with to feel like that.

I had a friend who was in graduate school whose mother passed away, and I remember reaching out to her, sending her food or a gift card—like, how are you doing? How are you feeling? You know, here’s some literature that helped me, because my siblings had passed away maybe about a year before. And she was a little startled, actually, by my response, I think. Because she said, you know, I grew up in a community of atheists. She said, we just don’t have a practice or tradition. That the idea of bringing food or, you know, sort of like ongoing care was not something that was a part of her tradition.

So regardless of people’s faith, my job as a good neighbor is to help shoulder some of that weight, so you don’t have to carry it all on your own. So I try to remember important dates. I try to remember names, which is why when I meet new people, “Oh, man! Okay, give me more capacity!”

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Rashid: So, Julie, where do you go to build community, or at least feel this sense of community in a shared space?  

Beck: I don’t feel like just sitting out on my front porch, if I had one, or going to a café or going to a specific place is going to make community come to me.

I feel like talking with both Eric and Kellie kind of made me realize that you need both the design of a place and the intentions and the values of the people who are using that space.

The sort of post-college secular world particularly doesn’t feel set up for just spontaneous, easy connection in the same way. If you just have an impeccably designed space where people don’t want to connect, then, like, I guess what you have is the Apple store. And if people really want to connect, and they don’t have anywhere to go to do that, then they’re going to struggle as well.

And even though this is kind of a frustrating takeaway, honestly, it feels to me like if you want that deep, interconnected sense of community outside of a church or a college or an institution that’s built to help you find it, you kind of have to swim against the current a little bit—and find a way to make it for yourself.

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This episode was produced by Rebecca Rashid and hosted by Julie Beck. Managing Editor Andrea Valdez. Editing by Jocelyn Frank and Claudine Ebeid. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Our engineer is Rob Smierciak.

Paris St-Germain's Sergio Rico is in a "serious condition" in hospital after a horse riding accident, his club says.

Sigmund Freud had a rule. However irresistible the temptation to burrow into the inner life of kings, prime ministers, and tycoons, he wouldn’t analyze famous contemporaries from afar. It just wasn’t right to rummage around in the mind of a subject who didn’t consent to the practice. But in the end, he found one leader so fascinating and so maddening that his ethical qualms apparently melted away.

From the distance of the present, it’s almost impossible to imagine that Woodrow Wilson was the one public figure whom Freud felt compelled to put on the couch. But that’s because the current prevailing image of the early-20th-century president—an enforcer of white supremacy, an enemy of civil liberties, a man preserved in sepia photographs as an unsmiling prig wearing a pair of pince-nez—is so remote from the near-messianic character that he cut in his day.

When Wilson arrived in France at the end of 1918, one month after the armistice that ended the Great War, he was greeted by adoring crowds hanging out of windows, crowding sidewalks, and chanting his name. “An immense cry of love,” read the six-column headline in Le Petit Parisien. That tableau followed him to every European city he visited. What he represented was, in fact, redemption: the promise of eternal peace and the dawn of a new world order.

Of all the politicians of his day, Wilson most clearly envisioned the better world that could emerge from war, built on values of self-determination and democracy. He not only had the best plan for realizing his high ideals, but he also possessed an acute understanding of what might go wrong if the Allies allowed their sense of grievance to drive them to impose harsh terms on the vanquished. Wilson’s failure to make good on these bloated expectations was the source of Freud’s fascination and fury, as it was for a generation of intellectuals.

[Read: The racist legacy of Woodrow Wilson]

Some of the animosity that Freud and other critics aimed at Wilson was unfair: After dinging him for negotiating a treaty they regarded as dangerously misguided, they turned around and chided him for his inability to shepherd it through the U.S Senate, an institution he had carefully studied during his long, celebrated career as a professor. That failure was further evidence, they argued, of Wilson’s abominable statesmanship. He refused to make concessions to his critics, even when that was clearly his only viable choice. And in the end, unable to achieve the purest form of his plans, he bizarrely instructed the Senate to reject a modified version of the treaty altogether. More than any of his enemies, he was responsible for shattering his own dreams. The Senate’s failure to ratify the treaty was one of the greatest embarrassments in the history of the presidency.

Wilson’s inexplicable choices, his extreme stubbornness, demanded a psychological explanation, perhaps one that scrutinized childhood traumas. This was Freud’s business, and he couldn’t resist. Eleven years after the Senate rejected Wilson’s treaty, the world’s most famous psychoanalyst began writing a long study of Wilson’s mind, in collaboration with the American diplomat William C. Bullitt, who had been one of Wilson’s aides. At Freud’s urging, Bullitt went back and interviewed a slew of Wilson’s closest friends and advisers so that the pair could devise their own intimate theory of Wilson’s failures. What emerged was a scathing indictment of Wilson, whom they depicted as neurotic and self-sabotaging, in what was a polemic masquerading as dispassionate biography.

Their book, Thomas Woodrow Wilson: A Psychological Study, has a life and afterlife nearly as complicated and fascinating as its subject. The manuscript sat unpublished for nearly 35 years. When it finally appeared—in 1966, long after Freud’s death in 1939—the doctor’s daughter Anna, a fanatical guardian of her father’s reputation, worked to discredit the final product. (She even managed to tweak a draft of a review panning the work that ran in The New York Times—and succeeded in persuading the book’s publisher, Houghton Mifflin, to nix a preface to the book written by one of Freud’s disciples.) The controversy over the book was such that The New York Review of Books covered it with vituperative essays from mid-century powerhouse intellectuals such as Erik Erikson and Richard Hofstadter. Many of the critics doubted that Freud played a meaningful role in the production of the manuscript, because some of its interpretations deviated from Freudian orthodoxies, and the prose was clunkier and more repetitive than in his masterworks. The doubts stoked in those reviews have hovered over the book ever since.

Patrick Weil, a researcher at both Yale Law School and the French National Centre for Scientific Research, has written a lively book about the book, The Madman in the White House—a work of archival digging that digressively caroms across subjects, from Paris in 1919 to interwar Vienna to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Washington. Even if his attempt to defend the lasting value of Freud’s book isn’t entirely convincing, he has written a vivid shaggy-dog story about a curio that illuminates the possibilities (and perils) of studying the psychological soundness of presidents—a discipline as relevant as ever.

What makes Weil’s book most compelling is that he has a charming, somewhat caddish central character in Freud’s co-writer, William C. Bullitt: a swashbuckling diplomat, a successful novelist, and a bullheaded political operator who habitually provoked controversy.

As a 20-something, Bullitt traveled to Paris as part of Wilson’s entourage, sitting by the president’s side as he presided over negotiations that would end the war. Wilson’s alter ego and closest adviser, Colonel Edward House, stocked the American delegation in France with bright young Ivy Leaguers, but Bullitt received the most exciting assignment of the lot. In early 1919, House furtively dispatched him to Moscow to explore a deal with Vladimir Lenin that would establish American diplomatic relations with the Bolsheviks. That trip ruptured Bullitt’s relationship with Wilson. Word of his mission to Russia leaked and was blasted in the Daily Mail, which accused Bullitt of working on behalf of Jewish interests seeking to bolster the Communists. The British publicly distanced themselves from his efforts. When Bullitt returned with the outlines of agreement, Wilson kept canceling their appointments. (Wilson claimed he had a headache.) The whole effort awkwardly withered.

Cut off from his access to Wilson, Bullitt resigned from the administration—and wrote a letter listing the many reasons that he considered the president’s peace negotiations a disaster. Anticipating what would be the main lines of criticism from John Maynard Keynes and Walter Lippmann, Bullitt accused Wilson of abandoning his high ideals. He had allowed the other victorious Allied nations to impose unnecessarily harsh terms on the vanquished. The emerging peace settlement transgressed the slogan that Wilson had promised would guide their thinking: “Peace without victory.”  

The resignation of a 28-year-old aide would not have normally grabbed global headlines. But Bullitt, with his flair for spectacle, testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and bluntly accused Wilson of lying about what took place at Versailles, dramatically wielding Wilson’s own typewritten notes as evidence. It was a public turn that profoundly wounded the treaty’s prospects of being ratified in the Senate. And in the days that followed Bullitt’s testimony, Wilson complained of more “blinding headaches, breathing difficulties, and exhaustion.” His physical deterioration progressed: drooling and the drooping of the left side of his face, followed by the paralysis of half his body. His stroke was so severe that the aides feared his imminent death and considered how they might replace him. Physically, politically, and perhaps cognitively, Wilson no longer had the capacity to fight for his treaty. He never recovered.

Bullitt’s anger toward Wilson was itself worthy of psychoanalysis—and, in fact, Bullitt found himself in Vienna in 1926, knocking on Freud’s door and asking if he would take him on as a patient. Bullitt’s marriage was crumbling, and he had lost his sense of professional purpose. Apparently, Freud recognized his name and agreed to admit Bullitt to what the diplomat called the “sacred couch.”

The relationship wasn’t a straightforward doctor-patient one, and their long conversations would invariably circle back to their shared animus toward Wilson and their mutual disappointment in his ineffectual leadership. The former president was the unevictable tenant squatting in Bullitt’s mind, and he used his sessions to hash out the contents of a play that he was writing about Wilson. Bullitt dedicated the script, which never made it to the stage, to “my friend Sigmund Freud.”

Four years into their relationship, Bullitt described a book he wanted to write about the leaders who populated the Paris Peace Conference and their personalities. He asked if Freud might want to write the chapter on Wilson. Despite his principled reservations about analyzing public figures, Freud loved the idea. Bullitt sensed an opportunity and suggested that Freud’s chapter become the whole of the book. Freud agreed, on the condition that Bullitt perform the donkey work of compiling the raw material that would allow them to sketch their shared analysis.  

As they began researching and writing the book, Freud told him, “I hope one result of the publication of this work will be your reintroduction to politics.” But it was precisely Bullitt’s reintroduction to politics that scuttled the publication of their work. Just as they finished their collaboration in 1932, Bullitt told Freud that he worried that the book might undermine his chances for a job in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s incoming administration. Publishing a scathing portrait of the previous Democratic president, a president whom FDR revered, might be received as evidence that Bullitt was a loose cannon. His caution was rewarded. Roosevelt named Bullitt the first American ambassador to the Soviet Union.

From his perch in Moscow, Bullitt mentored George Kennan, his deputy, and befriended the novelist Mikhail Bulgakov. In 1935, he hosted perhaps the most famous party in American diplomatic history, a spring festival that included an aviary in the embassy’s great hall, white roosters in glass cages, a menagerie that included goats, a banquet table covered in a lawn of emerald-green grass, and a baby bear that sipped champagne. (The bear vomited on a Soviet general.) Bulgakov, who attended, used the party as inspiration for a memorable set piece in The Master and Margarita.

In 1936, after three years of aggravating back-and-forth with Stalin—Bullitt described him as “a wiry Gipsy with roots and emotions beyond my experience”—Roosevelt rescued Bullitt from Moscow and relocated him to Paris, where he remained ambassador until the Nazi invasion. Bullitt styled himself as Roosevelt’s roving emissary in Europe—and made it his mission to serve as Freud’s protector once the continent became a dangerous place for a famous Jewish doctor. After the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938, Bullitt pushed German diplomats to let Freud leave—and he dispatched the American chargé d’affaires in Vienna to rescue their manuscript before the Nazis had a chance to rifle through Freud’s study. When the Freud family finally departed on the Orient Express, the State Department supplied a bodyguard to watch over them.

Despite his diplomatic skills, Bullitt frequently said the undiplomatic thing. He began to regard FDR as hopelessly soft on communism and dangerously duped by Stalin. Estranged from the administration, he became a brash freelancer. Toward the end of the war, he enlisted in Charles DeGaulle’s Free France army. (He was run over by a vehicle during fighting in Alsace and spent two months in the hospital.) And in the aftermath of the conflict, his commitment to the anti-communist cause took him to Taiwan, where he advised Chiang Kai-shek. Back at home, he adopted Richard Nixon as his foreign-policy protégé.

Only at the very end of his life did Bullitt’s thoughts return to releasing the Wilson book into the world. Weil suggests that Bullitt spent decades dithering over publishing it, because he harbored misgivings about some of its sensational conclusions.

Weil’s speculation is grounded in his sleuthing. He tracked down the long-lost versions of the book, following the scent to a box filled with drafts in an archive at Yale. What he discovered settles some of the old debates about Freud’s authorship. Weil found the good doctor’s signature on each chapter of the manuscript, evidence that he considered himself the book’s intellectual co-owner.

[Read: How Sigmund Freud wanted to die]

But after Freud’s death, Bullitt kept on editing. As he prepared the text for publication, he cut some of its most incendiary claims. He culled passages about Wilson’s teenage masturbatory habits and excised sections implying that Wilson was a latent homosexual. (One of Wilson’s aides would share his bed on the president’s speaking tours, but he also testified that there was never any hint of sex.) In effect, Bullitt was trying to save the book from the embarrassing excesses of Freudianism.

Still, the work remained an unabashed expression of Freudian theory, placing Wilson at the center of an Oedipal drama. The president appears in its pages as a hopeless neurotic trying to best the father he revered and resented. The book argues that Wilson cast his father as God—and himself as Christ, a long-suffering servant. This accounts for Wilson’s tendency to accuse his closest confidants of betrayal, and for his sanctimony.   

Weil struggles to make a compelling case for the interpretative value of Freud and Bullitt’s book. But in describing the manuscript, he also damns it by calling attention to its tenuous claims. For example: Wilson’s overbearing father was a Presbyterian minister—and as a teenager, Wilson idolized British prime ministers, especially William Gladstone, whose speeches he memorized; as an academic, Wilson argued that American presidents should behave more like their counterparts in the U.K. It was a theory he tried to turn into practice: Once he became head of state, he initially styled himself as a parliamentary leader. Freud and Bullitt trumpet this fascination with becoming prime minister as evidence of his desire to be a more important minister than his father, one-upmanship in his Oedipal struggle.

To the extent that Weil has a larger point to make, it’s that the character of political leaders matters. It’s hard to disagree with that. Certainly, recent American history provides a disturbing confirmation of the importance of presidential temperament. But, as Freud and Bullitt’s book illustrates, it can also be a distorting obsession. The focus on presidential character tends to overstate its importance and to encourage what’s been called Green Lanternism, the idea, coined by the political scientist Brendan Nyhan, that a president could accomplish more if only they tried harder.

The psychological approach can flatten the career of a politician. If Wilson had a self-defeating Christ complex, how, then, is it possible to explain the many domestic accomplishments of his first term? More bizarrely, Freud and Bullitt downplay Wilson’s stroke, which clearly incapacitated him at a crucial moment in his presidency and exacerbated his stubbornness. His mental and physical deterioration remained dangerously out of public view, and the constitutional system faltered in its attempts to compensate for his incapacity and limit the damage he inflicted in his deteriorated state—an object lesson in how not to deal with an impaired president.

Even though Weil hints at his own quibbles with the thesis of the Freud-Bullitt collaboration, he doesn’t voice those objections very loudly, because they would diminish his justification for writing this book. But Freud should have never violated his own rule.

Air travel between Paris and regional hubs such as Nantes, Lyon and Bordeaux will now be banned.

France will deploy 35,000 security and military personnel to protect the Paris 2024 Olympic Games opening ceremony from threats including drone attacks.

Summer is when lovers of books feel freest to read without restraint—lying on a beach, swinging on a porch, or perching on a stoop at the end of a sweaty day. The Atlantic’s writers and editors want to help in this endeavor, and so we’ve selected books to match some warm-weather moods: Maybe you want to transport yourself to another place, or to take a deep dive into one topic. Perhaps you have a yen to feel wonder about the universe or rediscover an old gem. Some readers just want to devour something totally new. Here are 20 books you should grab this season.

Transport Yourself to Another PlaceHeat Waveby Penelope Lively

The pleasure of Heat Wave is its slow, mesmerizing drama. Set in the English countryside over a hot summer, Lively’s slender novel introduces us to Pauline, a divorced editor in her 50s who has opted for an existence “rich in carefully nurtured minor satisfactions.” Among those satisfactions is the freedom she feels in her summer cottage, unleashed from London, her partner, and her office job. Staying next door—and buzzing at a different frequency—are her daughter, Theresa; her son-in-law, Maurice, a smarmy, up-and-coming writer; and their toddler. With a gimlet eye, Pauline observes Theresa’s unhappiness and Maurice’s shifty egotism, the amalgam of repression and delusion that seems to hold their relationship together; as she fixates on them, she thinks back on her own marriage. Lively’s wry prose captures the mundane clarity of Pauline’s life among the wheat fields and the way that a maternal ache, when left to its own devices, can crescendo. Never has a mother-in-law’s judgment seemed so deliciously understated—and so devastating in its conclusion.  — Jane Yong Kim

Toy Fightsby Don Paterson

The Scottish poet Don Paterson is kind of a genius. His poems are ferocious, his critical writings are chatty or witheringly technical or both, and he’s also produced—who does this?—several collections of aphorisms. (“Anyone whose students ‘teach him as much as he teaches them’ should lose half his salary.”) And now a memoir, Toy Fights: It covers God, guitar, origami, breakdown, and Dundee, Scotland, the poet’s hometown, “dementedly hospitable in the way poor towns are,” he writes. It was a place where, once upon a New Romantic time, you could encounter beautiful Billy Mackenzie of operatic popsters The Associates: “He had the attractive power of a 3-tesla MRI scanner, and if there was as much as a paperclip of susceptibility about your person, forget it: you’d find yourself sliding across the room as if you were on castors.” The prose is fizzing-brained, hyperbolic, and it has a hyperbolic effect: It makes you want to delete everything you’ve ever written and start again, this time telling the truth.  — James Parker

Love in Colorby Bolu Babalola

Babalola’s story collection updates and retells romantic myths and fables from a bevy of cultures, tossing a reader into the richly imagined world of characters from Egypt or Nigeria, then sending them to her version of Greece or China. (She also has some fun with history: Here, Queen Nefertiti runs a club-slash-criminal-underworld-headquarters, where she punishes abusive husbands and protects vulnerable women.) The characters and scenarios can feel a tad archetypical, though that is understandable given her source material. But the stories are just fun, and none of them is long enough to drag. Many of them end with a new couple on the precipice of a great adventure. And in each encounter, love is neither an uncontrollable fever that sneaks up on a person, nor an inevitable force that shoves a couple together. It’s a kind of shelter where artifice can be abandoned—the result of careful attention that does away with illusions and misconceptions.  — Emma Sarappo

Friday Blackby Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

My first exposure to Adjei-Brenyah’s work was in a crowded, airless classroom where he read aloud a passage from the title story of his collection, Friday Black: “It’s my fourth Black Friday. On my first, a man from Connecticut bit a hole in my tricep. His slobber hot.” In the scene, the employees of a big-box retailer face down a horde of (literally) rabid shoppers lured by deals that are (again, literally) to die for. Each story in this brutally absurd, original book, Adjei-Brenyah’s debut, similarly whisks the reader somewhere unexpected: an amusement park where customers can legally fulfill violent racist fantasies against Black actors; a courtroom where a George Zimmerman analogue explains why he was justified in murdering children with a chain saw. But these summaries don’t capture the alchemy that Adjei-Brenyah performs. Friday Black presents a warped reflection of our own reality that feels both horrifying and clarifying.  — Lenika Cruz

Take a Deep DiveThe Kennedy Imprisonment: A Meditation on Powerby Garry Wills

Come join the cult of Garry Wills, the greatest of all American political journalists. His books smuggle the psychological acumen of a novelist and the insights of a first-rate cultural critic into exegeses of the most familiar figures in American history, whom he somehow interprets anew. The first book that members of his cult will thrust into your hands is Nixon Agonistes. By all means, read it. But in the pleasure-seeking spirit of the season, take The Kennedy Imprisonment and plant yourself under an umbrella. It’s a riveting critique of the first family of 20th-century liberalism, a work that, among other things, scrutinizes the sexual and drinking habits of the Kennedys. Not fixating on Wills’s baser insights is hard. (For example: Jack’s womanizing was born of competition with his father’s philandering. Or: The Kennedys acted more like English aristocrats than Irish immigrants.) But really those are just enjoyable grace notes, because the book is, in the end, a deep essay on that irresistible intoxicant—power.  — Franklin Foer

Travels in Hyperrealityby Umberto Eco, translated by William Weaver

Imagine you’re taking a road trip across America—but forgoing the country’s natural splendors for its manufactured ones: Disneyland, wax museums, amusement parks. Oh, and your guide on the journey is an Italian semiotician with a roving intellect and a keen eye for the absurd. That’s Travels in Hyperreality. Eco’s travelogue collects 26 dispatches, mostly written in the 1970s during the author’s visits to the U.S. In the essays, the theorist and novelist plays a classic role: the foreigner who is alternately amused and appalled by American maximalism. (A famously kitschy roadside inn, in Eco’s rendering, resembles “a nuptial catacomb for Liza Minnelli”; Disneyland is “an allegory of the consumer society” whose “visitors must agree to behave like its robots.”) But Eco’s postcards from the past are also infused with insight—and a sense of prophecy. They explore, in technicolor detail, what Eco calls our “faith in fakes.” Travel the country long enough, his trip suggests, and it becomes difficult to tell where the landscape ends and the dreamscape begins.  — Megan Garber

The Last Whalersby Doug Bock Clark

Like an anthropologist determined to get lost in the world of his subject, Clark, a journalist, went to live on a remote Indonesian island in the Savu Sea a decade ago so that he could get as close as possible to the Lamalerans, a tribe of 1,500 people who are some of the last hunter-gatherers on Earth. Their various clans subsist mostly off the meat of sperm whales, when they manage to harpoon and kill the large animals. Clark goes out to sea with them on their hunting boats, becomes emotionally involved in their conflicts, and sees firsthand the way modernity, in the form of cellphones and soap operas, encroaches on their isolated community. In the book, Clark recounts the lives of the Lamalerans with a deep respect, while also spinning a wondrous, thrilling story out of their struggles to balance their traditions with all that entices them to step outside their communal way of life.  — Gal Beckerman

Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945–1955by Harald Jähner, translated by Shaun Whiteside

Two of the most unavoidable presences in German life after Hitler were rubble and a disproportionate number of women. Bombarded ruins were everywhere. Cities like Frankfurt that managed to quickly remove them would flourish. Others lived with the mess and stagnated. Women did most of the cleanup, as part of bucket brigades, because of a postwar imbalance in the population—many men never returned home from the front. For every 1,000 German men in 1950, there were 1,362 women. This is the off-kilter society dissected in Jähner’s highly readable cultural history. What makes his book so fascinating—and so poignant—is the relative banality of his subject: a country of one-night stands and wild dance parties, with little recognition of the atrocities it had committed. In fact, Germany largely wallowed in self-pity. Rendered with irony and based on skillful scholarship, Jähner’s book describes both a democratic rebirth and a moral evasion, uncomfortably and inextricably linked.  — F. F.

Feel Wonder About the UniverseFranciscoby Alison Mills Newman

Mills Newman originally published Francisco, based on her life and love affair with her eventual husband, the director Francisco Newman, in 1974; the publisher New Directions rereleased it earlier this year. It’s told by a young Black actor in California, and the eponymous character is her lover, who is obsessively working on a documentary. The narrator is dissatisfied with Hollywood and her career, but she’s hungry for everything else life offers. She is a wise and insightful reader of people, and she and Francisco hang out with a lot of them, up and down the coast of California. Mills Newman’s novel feels like a long party, punctuated by difficult questions: about white standards of beauty, what it really means to be a revolutionary, how to be an artist, and how to be a woman partnered with a man. In the decades since it was published, Mills Newman has become a devout Christian and come to reject elements of the novel. These include, as she mentions in a new afterword, the “profanity, lifestyle of fornication, that i no longer endorse”—adding another layer of complexity to this curious, short book.  — Maya Chung

Elena Knowsby Claudia Piñeiro, translated by Frances Riddle

Elena Knows is a mystery novel, but it’s certainly not a traditional page-turner. It follows the narrator, Elena—a stubborn, cynical 63-year-old woman with Parkinson’s—over the course of a single excruciating day. She’s traveling by train to reach someone she believes can help her find her daughter’s killer, but the journey is near impossible: Even when her medication is working, she can’t lift her head to see where she’s going or walk without great effort. As her pills wear off, she risks being stranded wherever she happens to be at the time. Still, Elena’s not meant to be pitied; she’s flawed and funny and irreverent. (Her name for Parkinson’s is “fucking whore illness.”) Piñeiro’s book is smartly plotted and genuinely suspenseful, but her greatest achievement lies elsewhere: She describes Elena’s minute-by-minute experience so meticulously that I was almost able to comprehend—even just for a moment—the incredible multitude of perspectives that exist in this world at once. And isn’t that the point of fiction, after all?  — Faith Hill

My Menby Victoria Kielland, translated by Damion Searls

The universe is a live wire in the hands of Byrnhild, later called Bella, later called Belle Gunness, in Kielland’s short, electric novel. Her book reimagines the real Gunness, a late-19th-century Norwegian immigrant and early American female serial killer, as a woman overcome by yearning. Belle can’t shut her eyes to the dazzling, splendid world; in Searls’s translation, the thoughts running through Belle’s head are breathless. “All this longing, this dripping love-sweat, it stuck to everything she did,” the narration frantically recounts. From the first pages she craves a blissful obliteration that can be found only through intimacy. After she moves from Norway to the American Midwest, her desire curdles into something more delusional that threatens everyone in her orbit—especially her lovers. Kielland gives readers scarce glimpses of lucidity as the novel takes on the tone of a dream. Belle has “the northern light tangled around her ribs”; she feels “the wet grass grow in her mouth.” Empathy slowly turns to horror, though, as it becomes clear that nothing can fill up the canyon inside her except an ultimate, bloody climax.  — E. S.

The Afterlivesby Thomas Pierce

The Afterlives is set in the near future, in a town full of holograms; the plot involves a haunted staircase, a “reunion machine” meant to reunite the living and the dead, and a physicist who argues that everything in existence is roughly 7 percent unreal. And yet, the protagonist—a 33-year-old loan officer named Jim—is a thoroughly normal guy. Even as the book’s events spin off in strange, supernatural directions, its real focus is on Jim and his developing relationship with Annie, a high-school girlfriend who’s recently been widowed; when they’re offered the chance to try the reunion machine, the story is less concerned with the details of that futuristic technology than it is with Annie’s grief and Jim’s quiet, persistent love for her. No matter how surreal things become, Pierce implies, people will keep moving forward in much the same way, living humdrum little lives together, wondering and hoping in the face of existential mystery. Our desperate curiosity about the afterlife is really about this life, and the people in it we don’t want to give up.  — F. H.

An Old GemMrs. Dallowayby Virginia Woolf

Woolf’s 1925 fourth novel, Mrs. Dalloway, is made for summer reading or rereading, overflowing with vitality. “What a morning—fresh as if issued to children on a beach. What a lark! What a plunge!” Clarissa Dalloway thinks as she sets out to buy flowers on a June day in London. An upper-class English woman in her early 50s, she is preparing to throw a party with her husband that evening, not yet aware that two people she once loved passionately will be there. Woolf slips in and out of Clarissa’s consciousness, “tunneling” (her term) into other minds, too, as the day unfolds. The most notable of them belongs to Septimus Smith, a young World War I veteran who hallucinates, hears voices, and speaks of suicide—and yet who is, like Clarissa, a celebrant of life in all its abundance: For him, death offers the only way to preserve his vision of plenitude. Treat yourself to a beautiful supplement as well, The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway, full of notes, photos, and insights, and edited by the critic Merve Emre. But first, just pick up a paperback and dive into Woolf’s daring experiment to find out whether “the inside of the mind,” as she put it in her notebook, “can be made luminous.”  — Ann Hulbert

Her First Americanby Lore Segal

The originality of this love story between two outsiders in 1950s New York City, Carter Bayoux and Ilka Weissnix, cannot be overstated. Bayoux is a middle-aged Black intellectual, a former United Nations official who seems to know everyone and can opine on every topic; he is also an alcoholic at the bottom of a deep pit. Weissnix is a 21-year-old Jewish refugee from Vienna who can barely speak English when the book begins, unsure if she has been orphaned by the war. The story of their affair is also a story about Ilsa’s American education: She learns from Bayoux how to function at the margins, how to succeed by charming, how never to lose a sense of one’s own distance from the center. The more she grows into her independence, though, the further he sinks, until it’s clear that he can’t be saved even as she begins to build a life of her own.  — G. B.

The Stone Faceby William Gardner Smith

Following the path of James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and Chester Himes, a Black American émigré arrives in 1950s Paris to find an existential freedom in the city’s cafés and bars, a space free of white leering and judgment. Simeon Brown, an aspiring painter and the protagonist of Smith’s deeply underappreciated novel, grew up in Philadelphia, where he suffered a brutal racist attack that left him blind in one eye, an incident that haunts him. While abroad, his reprieve from racial animus dissolves when he befriends a group of young Arabs struggling against France’s colonial atrocities in Algeria. These young men see Simeon as benefiting from a kind of whiteness, insofar as he’s free from the racial violence of their state. But Simeon’s Black expat friends believe taking up the Arab cause risks the very freedom they all came searching for. Trapped by a dizzying moral question, Simeon is forced to confront the shifting realities of identity and racial allegiance as he fights the personal demons that have followed him across the ocean.  — Oliver Munday

Hotel du Lacby Anita Brookner

Hotel du Lac is technically a vacation novel. On the page, though, it’s much cooler and more dispassionate than that description implies. When Edith Hope, a 39-year-old romance writer, arrives at a Swiss hotel as fall begins for a period of self-imposed exile, the landscape is gray, the gardens are damp, and everything in her bedroom is “the color of overcooked veal.” Edith has committed a sin that Brookner withholds until midway through. Suffering through dreary evening dinners with the Hotel du Lac’s similarly compromised guests is her uncomfortable penance, until she receives an offer that forces her to think about how she really wants to live. The novel, Brookner’s fourth, drew uncharitable responses after it won the Booker Prize in 1984. But there’s fascinating, bracing tension amid the book’s women, each deemed unfit to be anywhere else: Monica, whose aristocratic husband bristles at her eating disorder; the narcissistic, flamboyant widow Iris Pusey and her stolid daughter, Jennifer; the elderly Madame de Bonneuil, deaf and desperately lonely. Edith can’t quite bond with any of them—she’s too brittle and skeptical for sisterhood—but each woman shades a different kind of existence that throws Edith’s final decision into sharper relief.  — Sophie Gilbert

Devour Something Totally NewThe Guestby Emma Cline

Alex, the protagonist of Cline’s second novel, is an escort in her early 20s, desperate to evade paying both her New York City back rent and a menacing ex-boyfriend to whom she owes an apparently hefty sum of money. She’s been spending time on Long Island’s East End with her much-older boyfriend, Simon, who dumps her shortly after the book begins. But Alex doesn’t want to return to the city, where the only thing that awaits her is her debt. So she whiles away the week until Simon’s Labor Day party, where she plans to win him back. She’s broke, with a busted phone and nowhere to stay; she survives only by taking advantage of everyone who crosses her path. Some of her victims: a group of rowdy young house-sharers, an unstable teenage boy, a lonely young woman who thinks she’s found a new friend. Alex, a blatant (and terrifyingly skilled) user of people, maintains a chilly distance from each of them, even as she sleeps in their beds, eats their food, and takes their drugs. As the novel closes in on the party, Cline creates a feeling of sweaty anxiety—though her protagonist never panics.  — M. C.

Quietly Hostileby Samantha Irby

No one describes the human body quite like Irby. She’s a poet of embarrassment: Her confessional style is frank and unashamed about all of its possible fleshy or sticky causes. (Straightforward lines like “Yes, I pissed my pants at the club” abound.) The discomfiting yet universal phenomena of aging, being ill, and having your body let you down are Irby’s most reliable subjects, and anaphylaxis, perimenopause, and diarrhea all get their moments in Quietly Hostile, her fourth essay collection. But the book is also a receptacle for her wildest dreams, such as what she would say to Dave Matthews if she could meet him backstage, or a self-indulgent meditation on how she would rewrite original Sex and the City episodes (fueled by her time as a writer on its reboot, And Just Like That). When she wants to, Irby can evoke grief without blinking: She recounts, for example, her final, painful, conversation with her mother. But her writing about the great transition from being “young and lubricated” to middle-aged is reliably moving in its own way, and consistently hilarious.  — E. S.

The Wagerby David Grann

The dramatic story of the 18th-century shipwreck of the HMS Wager seems almost ready-made for Grann, the best-selling New Yorker writer famous for dynamic narrative histories, such as his previous book, Killers of the Flower Moon. When the British ship gets shredded traversing the treacherous waves and rocks of Cape Horn on a quixotic mission to search for and plunder enemy Spanish boats, the survivors find themselves stranded on an island off the coast of Patagonia. What happens next can be neatly summed up by the fact that Grann has used a quotation from Lord of the Flies as part of his epigraph. His dogged search through ships’ logs and other contemporaneous accounts of the disaster and its mutinous aftermath has turned up the kind of sterling details that make his writing sing; he is also interested in the way these events were recorded and then recounted, with many different people trying to shape the memory of what happened. Grann simultaneously reconstructs history while telling a tale that is as propulsive and adventure-filled as any potboiler.  — G. B.

The Late Americansby Brandon Taylor

A small, quiet act “had the indifference of love,” Taylor writes near the end of a chapter in The Late Americans. In this scene, a couple is on the outs; they each seem to feed off of needling the other. Yet even as the relationship fissures, Timo makes sure Fyodor gets home safe, driving behind him as Fyodor walks, unsteadily drunk, through the Iowa City night and back to his cold, blank apartment. Their distant togetherness echoes across the novel, where young poets, pianists, meatpackers, and aspiring investment bankers are clumped on and around a university campus, teetering through graduate courses, financial strain, hapless affairs, and the casual dread of not quite knowing their place in the world. The connections between Taylor’s multiple protagonists seem alternately random, doomed, and deeply romantic—much like the conditions that tie them to their creativity, and that keep them moving elliptically, tenderly, toward coming of age.  — Nicole Acheampong

Before the documentary Nuit et brouillard (“Night and Fog”) was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 1956, French authorities censored a still image that appears in the film. In the photo, an unnamed man stands at the far left side of the frame, keeping watch over a wooden building and a scattered crowd of people. A fake beam has been drawn just over his head, concealing … something.

In the uncensored version, released many decades later, we see that what has been blocked is a jaunty rounded cap. It’s called a kepi, and any French civilian would have recognized it as part of the uniform of the French police. The officer is guarding prisoners at Pithiviers, a transit camp 50 miles outside of Paris where Jewish deportees were put on trains for concentration camps farther east. He’s not a Nazi guard or member of the SS, but there he is, aiding and abetting the Reich.

Night and Fog was one of the earliest works of its kind—a dogged, revelatory Holocaust film that showed Nazi atrocities in all their horror, down to the fingernail-scratch marks left on the ceilings of gas chambers. In exchange for covering up the kepi, preventing the French from seeing one of their own blithely supervising genocide, censors ruled that the documentary could keep its final scenes of dead bodies being pushed by bulldozers, like road rubble, into massive pits. Night and Fog’s director, Alain Resnais, considered the quid pro quo sufficient for his purposes.

[Read: What it feels like when Fascism starts]

In the 1950s, would the French have been surprised by the notion that “ordinary” people had allowed or encouraged the extermination of the Jews? The war had ended only 10 years earlier; they had lived through it. They knew which neighbors had acted with cowardice or bravery, and that most, really, had lived somewhere between those two extremes. France had undergone a purge of Nazi collaborators and Vichy supplicants under its postwar leader General Charles de Gaulle, but its results, we now know, were wildly ad hoc; some perpetrators were released and others were shot in the head. De Gaulle’s insistence that good people and bad people had already been sorted, and that the French ought to forgive one another and move on, clamped down on conversations about ambiguity. Uncertainty itself was banished.

More than three-quarters of a century later, the witnesses have nearly all died, and Holocaust stories are told at a remove of three generations or more. Anyone who writes about the war must now wrestle with the idea that sometimes the facts are diluted, lost, erased, enhanced, and flat-out wrong. They also must acknowledge that a limited set of categories has come to define the people who lived in such morally compromising times: victim, villain, or hero. But what of those stories that can not be labeled as either valor or evil? Perhaps we venture only warily into this territory because degrees of culpability are so hard to parse out: Who was acting under duress, and who willingly exploited their countrymen? Who kept silent out of fear, and who was “just following orders”? This group of people might be harder to capture in retrospect, but understanding the nuance of their wartime experience is important if we ever hope to grasp how humanity holds up under the most grotesque of psychological conditions.

Burkhard Bilger didn’t know until his late 20s that his grandfather Karl Gönner had been a Nazi—a party chief, in fact, in a small village called Bartenheim in the Alsace region of France, “the great fault line of Europe,” which has at various moments in history been part of neighboring Germany. After the war, Gönner’s Nazism wasn’t discussed in the family: Bilger’s mother and her siblings were children of the war and their reticence was common for Germans at the time, who hoped to quietly bury their nation’s ugly past. For Bilger’s family in particular, with a former Nazi as their patriarch, the urge to stay mum may have been preservational. They’d been taught “never to ask questions,” he explains in his new family memoir, Fatherland. “The answers could only be dismal or self-incriminating—or worse, self-justifying.”

Bilger himself is an American. He was born and raised in Oklahoma, where his family moved in 1962, partly to escape the postwar misery of Germany and its 17 billion cubic feet of rubble. Despite frequent visits to the enchanting, almost primeval Black Forest where his parents had grown up, he didn’t attempt to parse his grandfather’s murky past until 17 years ago, when his mother, Edeltraut, received a packet of letters from a German relative. The letters, he writes, were from Gönner’s days as a Nazi occupier in Bartenheim, and they “turned his story inside out again.” So Bilger, by then a staff writer at The New Yorker, went digging.

The major animating concern of his research—years spent rooting around in town-hall basement archives, finding and interviewing elderly witnesses who knew Gönner—was figuring out what kind of Nazi his grandfather had been. A repugnant ideologue? A practical agnostic? Was it a mistake he regretted? A desperate move to keep his family alive? Without Gönner around to answer such questions, Bilger had only the records of war and contradictory accounts of hazy memories. So in Fatherland he builds a narrative that admits to its holes, that doesn’t shy away from its incompleteness while it still makes an effort, with the materials at hand, to understand life in wartime and the kind of people whose actions occupy that gray zone of morality.

Fatherland has a mission to give the widest, most generous view of the suffocating and enraging conditions in which its figures operated. In other words, Bilger is attempting a bold, nearly impossible experiment: to see if the reader can find sympathy for a Nazi—one who held chalk instead of a rifle, one who may have saved more lives than a conscientious objector. One who also happens to be his flesh and blood. He lays out the limited details he can find that might justify, or at least explain, why an ordinary man might stay committed to Hitler’s regime.

Gönner was born in 1899 in Herzogenweiler, a hilltop town so bedraggled by the lingering inequities of the feudal system and the collapse of the local glass industry that by the time he was 11, fewer than 100 citizens remained. He wanted to be a priest but instead was drafted into the German army for its last big push across the Western Front, where he lost an eye in 1918 at Liry, near the Somme. He returned home, physically and psychologically battered, too faithless to enter the priesthood and too incapacitated to return to the engineering work he’d left. Teaching was the only field that seemed viable, but he returned to a Germany of such rank economic misery that he had to beg for a working stove in the one-room lodgings he was assigned at his first teaching job at an elementary school. Gönner had been born with little and now could hope only for less. As Bilger writes, “All that was left of his faith, after the war, was a hunger for order and justice.”

Then Hitler arrived. Elementary-school teachers—the least prestigious, most impoverished sort—were intended to act as cogs in the führer’s propaganda machine, which declared that young boys were the raw material that would bring Germany back to prosperity and their teachers the force that would shape them. Gönner signed his party-membership card in May 1933, believing Hitler’s claims that “no one shall go hungry! No one shall freeze!” We know he wrote in 1932 that he had “an open commitment to National Socialism,” and that he attended two rallies at Nuremberg, though Bilger, for all his hearty research, can’t turn up much evidence of what Gönner thought as the Nazi Party evolved in the late ’30s into a runaway freight train of hate, murder, and continental ruin. But he notes that Gönner’s “principles were increasingly untethered from Nazi policies” and presents evidence that he began to perform small acts of passive rebellion.

[Read: The children of the Nazis’ genetic project]

In March of 1942, after a year and a half working as a schoolteacher in occupied Bartenheim, he was given the official and weighty title of Ortsgruppenleiter, or “town leader,” which carried a strange kind of responsibility: The job was to liaise with Nazi officials, to file reports on suspicious villagers, to hand out fines for saying bonjour in the street. The particulars that Bilger turns up about Gönner’s interactions with locals, including French Resistance fighters, his landlady, and the town mayor, sketch an image of a man hemmed in by the existential and practical impossibility of his role.

Gönner didn’t report on villagers when they slaughtered a pig without party approval, or kept an illicit radio, or sang “La Marseillaise,” the French national anthem. The mayor’s son tells Bilger, “Your grandfather could have denounced my father a hundred times, and he never did.” Another man, one who would later hold great sway over Gönner’s fate, told Bilger’s mother that “it was because of Gönner that no family from Bartenheim had been deported. That no one had died in a camp.” A pupil lays out the ultimate contradiction: “He was a Nazi, but a reasonable one.” But he did sign every letter “Heil Hitler” and recruit boys to the Hitler Youth. He acted as the embodiment of the party in Bartenheim. He resisted and relented. The unanswerable philosophical inquiry that floats atop all of Fatherland is whether “passive resistance” in the face of a life-threatening force like Nazism ought to be categorized as a moral victory or failure.

Bilger’s approach is satisfyingly holistic. Complicating the plot is part of his intent. His broad history of Alsace situates Gönner in a region that was passed back and forth between the German and French several times in his life, a place where many of the citizens spoke only German and allegiance to any one nation wasn’t guaranteed. And the blurriness wasn’t only geographic. Alsace is an ideal setting for studying the various human impulses at work in a time of self-preservation: Some residents displayed great courage, hiding neighbors who had escaped from being forcefully conscripted into the German army, while others arose early that first morning of the occupation to greet the Nazis with cigars and chocolates. Most simply tried to get by, to avoid notice, to wait out the food rationing and random searches—in the meantime, they did what they could to survive.

The categorical imperative at work in Holocaust literature, the need to define good actors versus bad actors, is understandable—no event in recent history has cast so much of humanity into a kaleidoscope of black and white. Cultural depiction has followed the same pattern. There are the portraits of Hitler and his henchmen in films such as Der Untergang; the wide, valuable range of material depicting the genocide of the Jews, including Schindler’s List and Elie Wiesel’s Night; and the heavily documented heroics of foreign forces and resistance fighters—the volumes written about the coders at Bletchley Park, the 101st Airborne, the uprising at the Warsaw ghetto.

But what Bilger shows is how the forces moving against ordinary citizens—the threat of their own deportation, torture, or murder—could turn them into the most unimaginable of all war-battered Europeans, meek preservationists fighting individual wars for their own lives. They may have had soft spines or children to protect. Perhaps they simply didn’t know how to rise up; perhaps they were too self-concerned to care; perhaps they simply consoled themselves that the stories of evil done in their name couldn’t actually be real. As for himself, he explains, “I told myself that I would have done better. That I never would have joined the Nazi Party, never followed Hitler or left my family behind. But then everyone tells themselves that. The more I learned about life in occupied France, the more I could see soft spots in my own character, the ethical give.”

In the immediate aftermath of the war, justice came swooping down on collaborators, perpetrators, and a slew of others caught up in the mix. Gönner, for his part, ended up in a dank French prison before authorities determined his “classification”: They landed on Minderbelasteten, or “less responsible,” and then Entlasteten, “exonerated.” The French, Bilger writes, referred to the enterprise as L’épuration sauvage, the “savage purification”; nearly a third of a million people were charged with treason or collaboration. Evidence wasn’t necessarily available or explicit; there isn’t always time for legal documentation in a war zone. And over the five years of war, it was hard to discern who had resisted so passively that their behavior now looked accommodating or downright treacherous.

The fog of war also applies to citizens. In 2003, the writer and actress Anne Berest's mother, Lélia, received an unsigned postcard with only four words written on it—Ephraïm, Emma, Noémie, Jacques—the names of her grandfather, grandmother, aunt, and uncle, all of whom had died at Auschwitz. Fifteen years after the postcard dropped in their mail slot, she paired up with her mother to investigate who might have sent it, and whether it was meant as a threat or a memorial. Her novelized family memoir, The Postcard, narrates Ephraïm, Emma, Noémie, and Jacques’ life and death, Berest’s grandmother Myriam’s war spent in hiding in a neglected mountain cabin, and the detective role that Berest, like Bilger, took on to trawl town-hall archives for clues. After she relays their tragedies, Berest wants an answer similar to the one Bilger is seeking: How much culpability does that silent middle bear for the erasure of her family’s story, their possessions, their lives?

Berest’s book is a hit in France—it’s sold more than 300,000 copies and landed on the list of finalists for the Prix Goncourt. But the trouble with The Postcard is that she’s labeled it fiction and so it’s impossible to discern what facts Berest really gathered from old documents and French bureaucrats and which ones are her invention. The story is real, its outlines real, and surely, its pull on Berest is real too. But for a writer who is desperate to understand her ancestors, to learn what threads carry through from their lives to hers, concocting this jam of a story, dosed with sugar and cooked over a hot flame, is a strange and discordant decision. The same flavors emerge, but it’s chemically transformed.

I read The Postcard in tandem with Fatherland, as a sort of counterpoint. What could each book offer as a way of breaking through the haze? They share the same bones: both authors kept in the dark about their grandparents’ wartime lives, both handed cryptic documents that kick-started years-long research, both uncomfortable with the fog that hovers over their ancestry.

The Postcard—perhaps because its author writes herself as incredibly unschooled on the Holocaust, asking her mother painfully obvious questions about the war—never quite rises to the occasion. But in its most revelatory moment, Berest drives with Lélia to the cloistered country village from which her family was seized. She describes their encounters there as stilted and suspicious, as if the locals had been fearing this reckoning with their wartime behavior for decades. The current owner of their family home practically spits at them, demanding they call before they visit. Eventually they lie their way into another home, that of an elderly gentleman called Fauchère who was given their ancestors’ pigs when Ephraïm and Emma were taken into custody. Sitting in his living room is Emma’s rosewood piano. Fauchére begins to show them a photograph of their family home, one they know was lifted right off their family’s wall.

[Read: Is Holocaust education making anti-Semitism worse?]

Confusion reigns. Fauchère doesn’t quite discern their real identities, and they don’t know quite how he ended up with these items, their items, of dear sentimental value. What’s clear is that Fauchère’s glaze of plausible deniability is what allowed him to drape their piano with his own knickknacks. Berest never finds out how it came into his possession—whether through greed or ignorance—and the piano isn’t mentioned again. But a version of his name is French slang for “thief.” Berest offers him as just one link in the long chain of citizens standing at the edge of guilt.

There’s a scene from Band of Brothers that’s stayed with me for more than 20 years. The series felt dear to me because it depicted the Airborne: My own paternal grandfather jumped with the 82nd into Holland, where he was hit with shrapnel in Arnhem, just by that bridge too far. He was paralyzed and died of his wounds a few years later. All my life I’ve seen reminders of  his heroism in American war films, felt my own third-generation connection to the deadly glory of war. So when, still in high school, I watched the episode in which Dutch resistance fighters march some female collaborators in the street and shave their heads to shame them, I never questioned the women’s guilt as people who had chosen the wrong side, who had sided with evil. These women, a member of the resistance explains to American troops, had sex with Nazis for the advantage. I blithely believed in them as easily categorized monsters, as clearly as the Airborne were heroes. But as Bilger explains, his grandfather’s landlady in Bartenheim, a single mother, gave Gönner lodgings for the desperately needed rent money—and because she didn’t have much of a choice. She suffered the fate of a shaved head and a mauled reputation, despite no evidence that she’d slept with him or even given him a friendly nod. Was she a traitor or a survivor? Or something in between?