Empathy Read Free

meaning; a meaning of a different register. So many have stressed Schulman’s political and radical involvements that I think it worthwhile to note an equal or greater commitment to poetry, to evocation, to the domain of the word.
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    In another chapter, Schulman names the many varieties of silence in a bravura display of - well, it’s the good old-fashioned Walt Whitman /Frank O’Hara “list poem.” As I say, every chapter takes a different format, but in all of them I rock back and forth on my heels
marvelling at Schulman’s imagination, and her keen insight into every weird form of human interaction:
    When the phone stopped ringing she perceived a peculiar silence. One of many. Which one? There is a silence of perception. It wasn’t that. Thoughtless silence? Forced silence? Chosen silence? Silence because you’re listening. Fearful silence. Because the radio’s broken. Hesitation. When you don’t say it because you don’t want to hurt the other person. Enraged silence. When you don’t say it because it’s not going to do any good. Waiting. Thinking. Not wanting to be misunderstood. Refusing to participate. Self-absorption. When a loud sound is over. Shame.
    I wonder if this meditation could have come from a wish to expand on the enormously effective, yet somehow strangely prescriptive, slogan we then lived by, that “SILENCE = DEATH”? In another passage, Anna reflects that while “SILENCE = DEATH” may be true, “Voice does not necessarily equal Life.”
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    Schulman’s other forte is trendspotting. Born in the wrong era, she would have been an excellent practitioner of Mass Observation. “Doc’s focus moved away from the hopeful and on to the fact that more and more people on the street were opting for nonfunction at an increasingly early age. So many men and women stick needles in their arms.” These aren’t facts per se, since they’re reported from Doc’s point of view, but they feel as though they’ve been observed. Anna considers options for success in 1991: HIV counseling, hospice work, teaching English to Russians. Trendspotting is Sarah Schulman’s fingerprint, and you can see it running right through all her work. If, as has been suggested, Jonathan Larson was influenced by
People in Trouble while writing his musical Rent, for me the smoking gun is the detail about all the people synchronizing their watches to take their meds all at the same time. Nobody but Sarah Schulman would have commented on this, or even noticed the beautiful heartbreak of it. One might disagree with her social analysis, or marvel at how different life is on the Lower East Side than here in San Francisco, but like most people, I only notice trends when they jump up and kick me in the face. But just because she covers the big picture doesn’t mean she has no eye for the telling human detail, the particulars. Indeed, the tension in her writing derives largely from her ability to sort of play each vision off of the other. Anna mourns the future that never came, the tomorrow promised by yesterday’s futurologists. “The Weekly Reader had said that by 1990 she’d be flying around with jet packs. People would speak Esperanto and wear high-topped sneakers as they suited up for lift-off.” Variants of these predictions do transpire in Empathy , but with significant differences. If not by jet pack, Anna does fly around, most notably on a nightmarish holiday to Djakarta, which she recalls in a soliloquy to Doc halfway through the book; it is Empathy ’s single longest setpiece and, I think, the emotional crux of the novel. It’s not just the East Village, or New York, or North America, that our lack of empathy has distorted to the point of madness; the divorce from feeling has infected even the most faraway, nearly “innocent” places. Anna’s journey, accompanied by a thoughtless girlfriend,