Tuesday or September or the End, Hannah Black

Not so long ago, a dear friend of mine died suddenly and unexpectedly. In the days after, I scrolled through his various social media pages, I guess just wanting to talk to him. He would occasionally post about books he’d read (most of which I’d never heard of — that’s the kind of brilliant and eclectic thinker Daniel was; he had this roving and capacious sense of curiosity, but was also the rare person who would actually do the homework and really learn about stuff), and so I decided that a fitting way to honor his memory would be to read something he recommended, and so I bought myself a copy of Tuesday or September or the End. Daniel described it as “a fascinating, dense, 132-page rumble that will blow your socks off,” which is pretty much exactly right. It’s awesome. It’s a fairly astonishing, and also frequently hilarious, work of speculative fiction that is a kind of allegory of the 2016 presidential election and the pandemic. Plus, aliens.

It wasn’t until I was halfway through that I looked up the author and realized that she is the same Hannah Black who wrote the (infamous?) letter to the curators and staff of the Whitney biennial demanding the removal and destruction of Dana Schutz’s painting of Emmett Till. This might make you think that you can guess the political slant of the novel, but I wager that it’s rather more complex and interesting than you are suspecting. The real point is that it should remind you that Hannah Black is an artist, and this is an art book, published by Capricious Press (this also makes it hard to find: I lucked out and got a copy from the MIT Press Bookstore, but it’s possible that I got their only copy? Notably, they have another book of hers listed but it won’t be available for preorder until 2079). I can’t help but think that this is why it is so brilliantly, dazzlingly, bizarrely creative — mainstream presses would never go for it. This also means that it feels different — like, the paper, the binding, there’s something slightly off. It’s great.

What I loved about the book was how the most outlandish parts were the ones that were identifiably real, whereas the parts that were invented seemed almost mundane in comparison. The alien subplot — strangely moving — is not the main point, nor does it seem all that bizarre, in comparison to, say, society shutting down and people finding themselves locked in their houses for weeks on end.

Formally, the book is clearly drawing on allegory — most of the characters have animal names, for example, such as Bird and Dog (one of the presidential candidates is named Moley Salamanders, which is just so right somehow), and there’s obviously a satirical bent, but it’s not always clear where it is directed. And though it’s a lacerating read in many ways, and absolutely excoriates the present, it also offers a really poignant image of a possible future. I recently read Abolish the Family by Sophie Lewis, which is similar in this regard — in both books, there’s a genuine hopefulness about the possibility of something else, and a really stirring depiction of the faintest inklings of what it might look like, without ever losing touch with the very real badness of now. But even though it takes you through a reckoning with the awfulness of the present — Black mentions in an interview that she worried that she was being “pointlessly hurtful” to the audience — it’s somehow… very fun to read. I don’t know. Maybe it helps to be reading it when you’re already feeling very depressed. But I loved it. I can hear Daniel’s voice so clearly in my head, saying “wasn’t it great?” I wish I could talk to him about it.