New Jesus

Reading
time 15 minutes

an American writer who was born and raised and Oakland, California. He is a citizen of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma. His first book, "There There "(2018), was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and received the 2019 American Book Award.

I.

My niece Tina was visiting us from the mountains for the summer and couldn’t understand that we just walk in water now. It’s not a big deal, but Tina is young and entitled and one of these new mountain elevation people who don’t see eye to eye with us sea-level dwellers, we the coastal flooded. The first day she was here her socks got soaked and she sneezed excessively in the evening to the point that I thought she was trying to make us feel bad.

“You can’t make yourself sneeze, Herold,” my wife Dolorothie said to me. “You can if you yank nose hairs out, that makes me sneeze,” I said.

“She wasn’t yanking nose hairs out with tweezers while we weren’t looking to make us feel bad,” Dolorothie said, looking out the kitchen window like there was something wrong out there, but what was wrong was in us, was me.

“You don’t need tweezers, you can do it with your fingers, you just have to simulate tweezer-grip by putting your fingernails together and yanking.”

“Yanking?”

Dolorothie was right, of course. Tina’s feet had just gotten too wet, and the cold in Oakland seeps into your bones, the moisture gets through, she’s used to high mountain air, thin against human skin it can’t penetrate, so yes, Tina had maybe caught the beginning of a cold, but wasn’t she emphasizing the sneezes in an unnatural way? This made me distinctly upset, this not knowing if she was leaning into her sneezes or if she really was getting sick.

I should clarify about how much water we walk in. It’s not as if we always walk in water, it’s that the tide has risen, comes higher when it comes. There’s not always water we have to walk in but it’s there more often than it’s not. We’d wanted to leave, but couldn’t aﬀord to just up and go. We got used to it, got used to the storms and floods and the heat, got used to knowing the end of the world had finally arrived not with a bang but a whimper, or a series of minor disasters. Actually too many people call it the end of the world when the world, the earth, would be just fine without us, better oﬀ actually, give or take an era or eon or age or whatever amount of time the world might need to get over us.

We hung Tina’s socks out on the drying line in the backyard, and I told her she’d be better oﬀ not wearing

Information

You’ve reached your free article’s limit this month. You can get unlimited access to all our articles and audio content with our digital subscription. If you have an active subscription, please log in.

Subscribe

Tommy Orange:

an American writer who was born and raised and Oakland, California. He is a citizen of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma. His first book, "There There "(2018), was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and received the 2019 American Book Award.

Publish date: 18.09.2020

Also read:

Tadeusz Dołęga-Mostowicz:

is a Polish novelist, author of “The Career of Nicodemus Dyzma” (1932), which was serialized in newspapers and became an overnight sensation.

Written in 1932 by Tadeusz Dołęga-Mostowicz, The Career of Nicodemus Dyzma is a classic Polish novel of the 20th century and one of Polish readers’ all time favourites. It depicts the rather fortunate rise to power of a man from nowhere (the titular Nicodemus Dyzma), who by sheer luck and opportunism reaches the top tiers of public administration. The novel’s lasting grip on the imagination of the reading public can be seen in the way that the protagonist’s name has since become a proverbial way to refer in Polish to the type of crude opportunist who has a tendency to fall upwards through society with the help of trickery, public acquiescence and a handful of good luck.

Published now for the first time in English, the book admittedly gained some wider notoriety in the English-speaking world as early as the 1970s, when some critics pointed to the strange similarities between its plot and that of Jerzy Kosiński’s novel Being There. Some even went so far as to accuse Kosiński’s novel of plagiarism. While the book is certainly a brilliant and poignant satire on the political life of interwar Poland (with its omnipresent corruption and nepotism), its focus on an unskilled and ill-equipped parvenue’s ascendancy to the top governmental ranks certainly has a more universal appeal – one which has been only gaining relevance in recent years.

I.

Also read:

So Much Cash!

Login

Register