Gessen’s novel steps into three lives, watches them passively, and steps back out with only slightly abated passivity. Resent it as I do, Gessen’s book resonates somewhere with me.
New Orleans lives and still breathes. It stays up all night dancing. It best showcases the problems and hopes most relevant to the United States today, and despite how old it sometimes look, it constantly stays young at heart.
It’s a very idiosyncratic thing, this compulsion to revisit a story so often in close succession. It isn’t systematic, it’s the impelling of magnetic force – a desire, almost a need, to imprint the very words into my mind, absorbing their content into heart and being.
