“I will never see telephone poles the same way,” Mary Ann Gwinn said, sotto voce. I nodded my assent, reminded of how economically Biss had transformed that mundane object into something sinister.
Now Graywolf Press has reissued Biss’ penetrating essay collection — a wise and welcome decision. In a moment when geography seems to have a stranglehold on political sensibilities, “Notes From No Man’s Land” delivers nuanced regional dispatches from New York, California and the Midwest. And for both editions, a telephone pole stands sentinel on the cover.
Rutherford B. Hayes called the installation of a White House phone “one of the greatest events since creation.” But other citizens angrily chopped down telephone poles as intrusions. In Oshkosh, Wis., the mayor ordered the police chief and fire department to dismantle them.
In other spots – Belleville, Ill.; Pine Bluff, Ark.; Purcell, Okla.; Springfield, Ohio – the new structures were adopted for lynching. Mobs and murderers lynched black men from telephone poles in all but four states.
A reader of Biss — or Isabel Wilkerson or Ibram X. Kendi — is better equipped to ponder news of violence against black bodies, less likely to respond with an incredulous “this is not our country.” Looking back less than a decade, some of Biss’ words can seem prescient.
Rereading that passage puts one in mind now of Steve Bannon, and the title Bob Woodward gave for his book on the current president.
Biss — best known for her excellent 2014 book “On Immunity: An Inoculation,” which explores the mythic, scientific and cultural soup around vaccinations — is a 41-year-old professor at Northwestern University.
A child of a poet and a doctor, young Eula grew up in rural upstate New York. Both parents seem to undergird her clear eye, crisp wording and unpretentious sentences. “No Man’s Land” samples remarks from neighbors and husband, sprinkled with a bit of Herman Melville, Marilynne Robinson and Toni Morrison. But mostly, Biss is worth quoting.
Other entries — and Biss’ serious jones for Joan Didion’s versions of California and New York — are less successful, although her unvarnished frankness on the loneliness of New York City remains a standout of its ilk.
White women, as a demographic cohort, tipped the election to Donald Trump. Biss is an unusual one for having spent decades pondering her whiteness, a preoccupation she doesn’t like to attribute to her multiracial family. Families, inspected across time and marriages, are ipso facto multiracial.
Biss probably made the right choice in leaving journalism.
And yet this is a writer whose unorthodox approach awakens fresh delight. There is nothing of the scold in her; her insights are startling and sly, even if we long to argue some of her points.
“Only something that continues to hurt stays in the memory,” Frederick Nietzsche wrote in his book “On the Genealogy of Morality.” Biss seems to want our national pain to hurt more productively.
Perhaps “Notes From No Man’s Land” will be a lasting contribution to the cause.
Karen R. Long is the manager of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, part of the Cleveland Foundation.