Johanna Fateman's Excellent "Good as Hell"

Johanna Fateman (Photo from Los Angeles Review of Books)

Johanna Fateman, who reviews art shows in The New Yorker’s “Goings On About Town,” has a terrific essay in the current Bookforum. It’s titled “Good as Hell,” an account of her experience listening to an audio version of Philippa Gregory’s The Red Queen (2010) while in coronavirus self-quarantine. Here’s a sample:

Or, sometimes, I wouldn’t completely follow along. I’d instead let Beaufort’s story—her many humiliations and her long, convoluted crawl to victory and vengeance—become a steady nightmare in the background. I’d doze off, losing the thread, then jolt awake at a note of alarm in the reader’s voice, a loud siren outside, or a spike of dread from nowhere. Then I’d put on a mask made from a T-shirt, and orange kitchen gloves, and stand in the doorway of the bedroom—the sickroom—gripping my phone in case it was time to call 911. I’d listen for the rise and fall of a breath, then another, and another, until it seemed safe to take myself back to the couch—to the desolation of Pembroke Castle, that is, or the slaughter at Tewkesbury Abbey. My phone, now held more loosely in my hand, conveyed the medieval horror calmly.

Fateman’s artful blending of her personal situation (“when nights in New York grew more cinematically wretched and scary: sleepless, ambulance sirens nonstop”) with “the intoxicating gloom of Gregory’s medieval Europe” is fascinating. I enjoyed it immensely.