Clair Wills

My experience of reading Either/Or has been that, whatever you may be thinking, Batuman is always three or four steps ahead of you, not only on gender politics, but on history (the war in Ukraine worms in, unbelievably), American imperialism, orientalist tourists, the very different ways in which Ivy League undergraduates and Turkish hostel workers get to be ‘special’ – you name it. And she may well be several steps ahead on this, too. Nonetheless.

What might it mean​ for the way we think about abortion if we take seriously the problem of what fictional narrative – novels and stories and films – says about it, or doesn’t say, what it makes impossible to say? Can we tell stories about abortion that don’t get snagged on gendered assumptions about human nature and moral feeling, that think in different psychological terms, or not in psychological terms at all?

Shirley Hazzard in 1957

Shirley Hazzard​ liked to tell the story of how she got to know Graham Greene. A rainy morning in the late 1960s, a café on the island of Capri. She was doing the Times crossword. Greene and his friend Michael Richey came in from Mass at the church across the square and she overheard them at a nearby table fumbling for a line of Robert Browning’s...