Chris Beha’s latest novel, The Index of Self-Destructive Acts, is out today. It’s great. It follows multiple characters in a story of personal, national, and social decline. The two main ones, I suppose, are a Nate Silver-like journalist named Sam Waxworth, who moves to New York to make it big, and an old-guard opinion and sports writer who is fired after a racist remark at a baseball game.

The title is obviously the key. Waxworth believes numbers demystify everything—not just baseball and politics—but all of life. Everything can be explained in terms of cold calculation—except, of course, our bizarre ability to screw things up. If Christians have a problem of evil (i.e., Why did a good God allow evil in the first place, and why does he continue to permit its existence?) atheists like Waxworth have one, too. Why do supposedly rational animals inexorably do things that harm them and others? As Waxworth asks himself at the end of the novel: “If he’d now gotten things catastrophically wrong, he told himself, that only meant there were greater lessons to be learned. But why? he suddenly asked himself. That is, why do we have to keep getting things wrong? If we really learned from our mistakes, shouldn’t we make fewer all the time? We weren’t just occasionally irrational. Something in us wanted to be irrational. Something wanted, perhaps, to be wrong.”

The Index of Self-Destructive Acts inhabits the same world as both What Happened to Sophie Wilder and Arts and Entertainments, Beha’s previous novels, which are all linked in some way to a group of friends at St. Albert’s School. Sophie is probably my favorite, but Index is a close second. Get it and read it.

In other news: The winners of the Pulitzer Prize have been announced. They include The New York Times’s Nikole Hannah-Jones, who runs the Times’s ahistorical 1619 Project. Way to go, team. Here are the other winners.

A sickness unto death: “A new memoir by George Scialabba, an unsung giant of criticism, is a gripping portrait of life under the spell of depression—and also a model of true intellectual inquiry.”

Is John Carey the “last public critic”? Well, of course not, but don’t let that stop you from reading Leo Robson’s piece on the man in The New Statesman: “Carey is himself a strange mixture – avuncular but deadly, amiable yet formidable, the donnish author of an essay called “Down with Dons” that ends with a tribute to a famous don. He is a champion of high literature who has limited enthusiasm for the major work of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, and a lifelong inhabitant of what he has dismissed as “the sheltered islands of the scholarly, the professionally bookish and the metropolitan”. And his professional activities were driven by opposing impulses. In his memoir The Unexpected Professor, he recalls that he spent the second half of the 1960s working his way through Victorian literature, writing the chapters on Renaissance prose for Christopher Ricks’s history of English-language literature, translating and annotating De Doctrina Cristiana for Yale University Press’s Milton’s project, and editing every-thing apart from Paradise Lost for the series ‘Longman Annotated English Poets’. He also started contributing book reviews for the New Statesman and producing a short guide to Milton, which he hoped would be lucid and funny. These days, Carey, who is 86, knows where his priorities lie. ‘I more and more feel: what’s the point of writing a book that no one’s going to read?’ he told me in February, during a four-hour conversation at his house, just outside Oxford.”

What we get wrong about Machiavelli: “The Renaissance thinker wasn’t as diabolical—or as original—as we often assume.”

A vice president at Amazon quits because of how the company treats whistleblowers: “In his letter, Bray cited Amazon’s decision to fire warehouse workers like Bashar Mohammed and Chris Smalls, who tried to organize workers over safety issues, and were reportedly let go for violating the company’s quarantine and social distancing rules. In a leaked internal memo, Amazon leadership discussed trying to smear Smalls in the press as ‘not smart or articulate’ and make him ‘the face of the entire union/organizing movement.’”

Van Gogh’s books: “Much has been written about Vincent’s astounding artistic evolution, over a period of just ten years. In his passion for books lies part of the energy and creative tension that flows through his art. Faithful friends, sources of inspiration and consolation, safe harbors in rough seas—for Vincent books were all this and more.”

Photo: A view of Neuchâtel

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