Appliances and Modern Literature

Also: Joseph Epstein on bookshops, Alan Cornett on Russell Kirk’s ghost stories, A.N. Wilson on England’s historians, and more.

Oct 18, 2023

This past Saturday I installed a new dishwasher in our kitchen. Our old one broke over a year ago. I do my best to help in the kitchen—make dinner, do the dishes—but most of this work falls to my wife, a longsuffering woman if ever there were one, who must put up with my procrastination and lack of handiness, which results in things like doing dishes by hand for a year.

The kids are now mostly out of the house, which made washing dishes for a year a little easier. There was also something a little nostalgic about washing dishes by hand—at least for a few days.

This isn’t the first time we’ve gone without the queen of modern kitchen appliances. We didn’t have a dishwasher when we lived in Switzerland for six years, and we didn’t have one for a couple of years in the States. We lived in downtown Raleigh at the time in a bungalow on Cleveland Street that was both lovely and dilapidated. The place was infested with mice and mold, but it had big windows, high ceilings, a huge wraparound porch, and a fig tree in the back yard. I was working as a visiting lecturer at Chapel Hill—which meant I got paid when classes made, and didn’t get paid when they didn’t make—and doing termite work in the summer to put food on the table for four young kids. My wife worked evenings at a local college library. All this to say, the place didn’t have a dishwasher, and we couldn’t afford one. When my grandparents visited from Washington, my grandfather felt so sorry for my wife he bought a portable dishwasher that hooked up to the sink.

In any case, after a year of “nostalgia,” I finally got my act together and replaced the dishwasher. It took me six hours—and didn’t work at first—but after another two hours of fiddling, it started humming and sloshing like a dream.

This whole episode made me wonder if there were any scenes in modern literature of a hapless husband trying to fix a sink, install a dishwasher, or replace a toilet? I couldn’t think of any offhand, but there had to be some, right?

I did a little book-worming and came across this title: “All-Electric” Narratives: Time-Saving Appliances and Domesticity in American Literature, 1945-2020. It is apparently “the first in-depth study of time-saving electrical appliances in American literature.” I’m not surprised.

From what I’ve read so far, the most interesting thing in it is the table of contents, which gives a nice make-shift list of stories and novels that make some reference to modern appliances. The rest appears to be mostly worthless. In the introduction, for example, the author, Rachele Dini, begins with a reference to Donald Trump’s complaint about new eco-friendly dishwashers not using enough water (“I’m approving new dishwashers that give you more water so you can actually wash and rinse your dishes! Without having to do it ten times . . . Anybody have a new dishwasher? I’m sorry for that . . . It’s worthless . . . ”) and goes on to remark that “Trump’s appeal to ‘remember the dishwasher’ in this fascistic promise of a return to a previous imperial splendor was thus premised on the racialized, gendered, and classist narratives long used to promote the ‘all-electric’ home and its gadgets.” If it’s fascist to want a dishwasher that works, I guess we’re all Nazis now.

But the table of contents did remind me of Ray Bradbury’s classic story “There Will Come Soft Rains” about a world in which there are only appliances left—at least briefly. Some other works listed were: Jack Kerouac’s The Town and the City, Dharma Bums, and On the Road; John Cheever’s “Clementina” and The Wapshot Scandal; Richard Yates’s The Easter Parade; Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time; and Philip K. Dick’s “The Adjustment Team” and Ubik.

She also lists Don Delillo’s Underworld. I couldn’t remember any modern appliances in Underworld, but I never made it past page 60.

In other news, Joel J. Miller talks to Alan Cornett about Russell Kirk’s ghost stories: “Dr. Kirk’s ancestors were spiritualists who conducted seances and such. The old house (that burned down in the 1970s on Ash Wednesday) was also haunted by several ghosts, some of which Dr. Kirk himself saw—as well as some of his daughters when they were young. He was a firm believer in the supernatural. He began writing ghost stories when he was a doctoral student at St. Andrews in Scotland as a means of supporting himself. His story ‘There’s a Long, Long Trail A-Winding’ won a Hugo Award for best short fiction. He gave up his family’s spiritualism but held to his belief in the supernatural.”

David Engels spends an afternoon with Michel Houellebecq: “It was not easy to meet with Michel Houellebecq. After a quick initial acceptance, the process of scheduling an appointment dragged on. He had retreated after the uproar surrounding his allegedly Islamophobic statements in a conversation with Michel Onfray and the scandal that erupted after he was filmed having sexual intercourse with two young Dutch women for an artistic project. Both affairs weighed heavily on him, and he decided to wait for the publication of his diary Quelques mois dans ma vie (A Few Months in My Life) before opening up to the press again. When we finally met, we spent a solid five hours together on the terrace of Brasserie Le Coche. Michel Houellebecq was in the mood for conversation . . . ”

In case you haven’t heard, Louise Glück has died. She was 80 years old: “Her death was confirmed Friday to the Associated Press by Jonathan Galassi, her editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux.”

Meet the American publishers of Jon Fosse’s books: “From the street, Adam and Ashley Nelson Levy’s house in the hills here above the San Francisco Bay looks like a house. When I visited last Friday afternoon, a team of workers was noisily applying new stucco to the exterior walls, but the driveway was just a driveway, the door a door. Could this really be the headquarters of Transit Books, the American publisher of Jon Fosse, the Norwegian novelist and playwright who won the Nobel Prize in literature the day before? Even in this age of publishing industry consolidation, we still sometimes speak of publishing ‘houses,’ but the term is obviously a holdover from an earlier era. Transit Books, which now releases about a dozen titles a year, having slowly ramped up since its founding in 2015, may be the only Nobel-adjacent American publishing ‘house’ that is like any other on its street.”

Joseph Epstein on buying books in a bookshop: “Acquiring books off the Internet is not the same as shopping for them in stores filled with books. Acquiring a book online is a transaction. Buying one in a bookshop, a serious bookshop, is an experience.”

In praise of the grocery store: “When I was going to college, I worked off and on for several years on the night crew at a Sunflower Food Store in Cleveland, Mississippi. We came in an hour before the store closed and began unloading the trucks that arrived from the company’s warehouse, and we left before the store reopened the next morning. I stocked the baking, grain, and pasta aisle and then, near the end of each shift, spent an hour or so either sweeping and mopping the floors or burning paper and cardboard packaging in the incinerator room, where the temperature often reached 140 degrees. Unlike a lot of guys on the crew, I always assumed the job was temporary, that I would move on to greater endeavors. But I actually came to like the work and developed a sense of pride in it, and I learned a lot—not just about the grocery business—from the manager, an exacting taskmaster named James Williams.”

A history of the partisan press:

As printing presses improved and paper became cheaper in the 1830s and 1840s, however, publishers saw that readers could provide a major source of revenue. The era of the party press evolved into the era of the penny press as a new generation of publications aimed to sell to the masses, which meant selling to readers of all political persuasions. Many papers maintained partisan commitments, but they became better known for sensational crime stories that drove newsstand sales. The invention of the telegraph also hastened the demise of partisan journalism because the wire services wanted as many newspapers as possible to buy their articles. They began to invent a mode of reporting that tried not to take sides.
By the first decades of the 20th century, many journalists spoke of objectivity in political reporting as an ethical obligation. A lot of them meant well. Yet the media of the day still had loud critics. Mostly they were liberals who thought the press was too conservative and favored Republicans. As New Deal liberalism became the country’s reigning ideology, however, this dynamic reversed.

A. N. Wilson on historians of England between the wars: “For years, Heffer has been chronicling our island story since the accession of Queen Victoria. He has also been patiently editing the millions of words of Chips Channon’s diaries. It is hard to imagine anyone better qualified to tell the story of the 1920s and 1930s.”