With a couple of fairy tales under their belt, most children have a grasp of the basic formula. Danger appears, a solution arises, safety returns. Jack must escape the giant, Hansel and Gretel the witch. The real uncertainty, writes Rebecca Solnit in an essay on fairy-tale narratives, lies in the method: “You know, more or less, that the heroine will survive, but how exactly […] is suspenseful”. It is this interest in how, rather than what, that motivates her latest collection of essays.
At its best, Solnit’s writing finds creative paths to familiar locations. This collection gathers essays written over the past five years, published mainly in Lit Hub and the Guardian. The strongest still hold up. “The Storykiller and His Sentence” is as compelling now as it was on first publication in March 2020. In an imaginative route to a foregone judgement, it unveils the hypocrisy of Harvey Weinstein in surprisingly lyrical terms. Eschewing the matter-of-fact language that saturated headlines in 2017 – “abuser”, “predator” – Solnit fashions him as a “malevolent god, deciding whose voice and vision would live and whose would die”. We know what she will say, but we do not know how.
Elsewhere, her paths are more predictable. Of her last collection, Orwell’s Roses (2021), she regrets that reviewers failed “to recognize [its] structure or internal cohesion”. That criticism will not be levelled at this collection. Argumentative routes recur throughout the essays, often to the detriment of Solnit’s call for unexpectedness. In “A Truce with the Trees”, a tender tribute to a Milanese violin that has been played since 1721, she invites us to reconsider how we view frugality, associating “magnificent culture with material modesty”. Citing the violin as an emblem of both thrift and cultural richness, she contends that “the world we need to make in response to climate change can feel like one of abundance, not austerity”. This is an interesting logical route, a refusal of the well-trodden path – that is, until it recurs as the argument of a later essay, “Climate of Abundance”.
Solnit concludes her book with a prayer. It is a beautiful page of writing. The force of the collection’s strongest moments rolls into her bidding: “They want you to feel powerless and to surrender and to let them trample everything and you are not going to let them. You are not giving up, and neither am I”. This unflinching address to the reader, after pages of self- explanation, makes for a potent send-off that delivers countless challenges to received thinking.
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