Christopher Schroeder

Category: reviews

  • Half-Way Is Enough?

    I agree with others who assert that Hamnet is a moving movie but wonder whether it works as a story.

    This movie, which offers an account of Shakespeare’s family play, focuses on his wife Agnes (Anne). As such, it becomes in this adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel by Chloé Zhao and O’Farrell a story about the passion between a reputed forest witch who is alienated from her foster family and a Latin tutor who is repaying his father’s debt.

    Agnes (Jessie Buckley) later refuses to join Will (Paul Mescal) in London where she convinced him with her brother’s help to go because she fears for the health of their twin daughter Judith. However, their other twin Hamnet is the one who dies before Will can return, and her grief is compounded when Will returns to London where he develops a different play, which Agnes eventually recognizes as an account of their shared yet different sorrow, and a testament to Will’s love for her.

    Such a movie — artists whose work matters more, children who die — usually bores me, but this one has several moving scenes that brought me back to my own relationships, which the best stories often do. Moreover, its direction (Zhao) combines with compelling cinematography (Łukasz Żal) and powerful lead performances to establish an almost mystical mood, and an intoxicating joy, that makes their loss, and its threat to their marriage, all the more moving.

    I am most interested in this depiction of the connection that can exist between married couples, and thought it is a compelling corrective to the account of Will’s and Anne’s (Agnes’s) marriage that I had been given in grad school. Little about their lives if memory serves is reliably know, so this fictionalized account is as good in my opinion as any other. Moreover, it refocuses the attention afforded this canonical author, which I’ve never understood, on the relationships that could have sustained and inspired him, and as such serves as a reminder of their significance.

    Regardless, I think this movie flirts with melodrama — Agnes inspires both the author of this play and the audience at its premiere — but never makes good on such suggestions until its end. Agnes initially suspects that her son’s memory is being exploited by his father, and her husband, but later realizes that it’s a tribune to his life and their grief.

    Agnes is so entranced at its conclusion in part because she discovers that her ability to see visions has been restored. She actually can see her son leave this world and moved into the next one, and she reaches for the hand of the actor who plays Hamlet, and in so doing motivates the entire audience to reach out to him.

    That is a powerful scene but also the place where this story unravels at least for me. Will’s motivation while ambiguous is presumably his own existential questions, and that in this account informs Hamlet’s family soliloquy yet never reaches a plausible resolution.

    The betrayed in Will’s new play are the son (Hamlet) and his father (King Hamlet), and the betrayer is his mother and the wife (Gertrude). In contrast, Will cannot completely be the betrayer after he was encouraged by Agnes earlier in the movie to establish a London life, and yet Agnes hasn’t quite betrayed Will by insisting upon what she as a mother thinks is best for their sickly twin daughter Judith.

    That bothers me more than the misrepresentation of Hamlet’s famous soliloquy, which seems more complicated than the simple contemplation of an existential question that is widely regarded to be. In contrast, I think it’s more a consideration of contingency and chance, and the difficulty in such conditions of defining duty, but such complexity is lost in the oversimplified suggestions of this movie.

    Perhaps in the end such scrutiny is unwarranted, and unnecessary. Without it, this movie is the story of a lost woman who finds acceptance and love in someone who would become one of the most famous people in the history of humanity. Who wouldn’t want such romance, especially at this time of the year?

  • Like Lukewarm Leftovers

    I needed some time to adjust to Paul Kingsnorth’s (2025) latest book Against the Machine and found it useful but ultimately unsatisfying.

    Kingsnorth in a seeming synthesis of his thinking criticizes what he calls The Machine and offers what he considers ways to retain our humanity. He considers the emergence of this mindset, which he considers synonymous with the West, and specifically its exchange of place, people, the past, and prayer — the four Ps — for science, the self, sex, and screens, or the four Ss, before suggesting how to respond.

    In preparation, he suggests the interrelation of emotion and reason for example and laments the reported loss of a fan’s son to gender reassignment (62-63 and 168-169). He also reports some of his own reactions, such as relocating to the Irish countryside where he plays chess by candlelight and resisting the requirement whereby everyone owns a smartphone (111-113 and 304).

    He recommends near the end that readers resist the left-hemisphere approach of the modern mind and develop the ability to attend with the right-hemisphere, which conceives of the world not as a “mechanism” but rather an “organism” (268, 271). He also recommends technological self-control and “reactionary radicalism,” which rejects The Machine moral economy, and its colonization, and endorses one based upon “community bonds, local economies, and human-scale systems” (280).

    I appreciate the way Kingsnorth offers a larger context with his account of The Machine. He isn’t satisfied to concentrate on the challenges of artificial intelligence although he does offer an alarming one. Rather, he places digital technologies in a continuum of not just Enlightenment mentalities, the Industrial Revolution, or even the eleventh century Fen Tigers but also “a 1,500-year civilization” of “‘Christendom’” (5).

    Such an account is a useful reminder that all technologies emerge and evolve, and that this emergence and evolution are important aspects of understanding their effects and articulating informed responses. Even so, it seems to offer a somewhat selective account that ignores other arguably essential elements of this context.

    Digital technologies could be considered for example part of a larger history of technological development, which incudes the invention of literacy for example or farming, that enhances the abilities of humans to trust others and coordinate efforts (Wright 1999, e.g.). Such accounts needn’t ignore the costs Kingsnorth cites or even negate his recommendations, but these could avoid dismissing these developments as completely detrimental.

    Nonetheless, this book encouraged me to reconsider my perspective and defend these beliefs, which is certainly welcome and undeniably useful. Moreover, its account of the past and present could be correct, in which case humanity might be in much more trouble than I realize, or want to recognize.

    The problem as Kingsnorth admits is that he cannot prove his account although this challenge hasn’t prevented others from attempting to do so (e.g., Pinker 2011 or 2018). At such moments, a better option when offered a range of selections might be opting for a more appealing one, which might not be right but could be more motivating.

    That in the end might be the most useful part of this book. For example, it describes shatter zones, including online spaces where we can use The Machine tech to resist its colonization, and distinguishes between raw and cooked barbarians, or those who resist from outside or in-but-not-of The Machine (Kingsnorth 2025, 290-291 and 304-305).

    Kingsnorth suggests that cooked barbarians might discover one day that their limits cannot keep them from being poisoned. At such moments, they would have to look for sustenance outside The Machine if they want to live to fight another day.

    Such moments could also make some of us wonder whether we’ve been cooked too long.

  • Making the Most

    I can understand the appeal of Olga Dies Dreaming by Xochitl Gonzalez as the 2025 One Book One Chicago selection but nonetheless wanted more.

    This 2022 novel, which is Gonzalez’s first, tells the semi-autobiographical story of a wedding planner named Olga along with her politician brother Prieto as they confront in their adult lives an absent mother who prefers political activism and a late father who as an addict died from AIDS. It’s the first in what Gonzalez calls a Brooklyn trilogy — the second, which was published in 2024, is Anita De Monte Laughs Last, and the third, which will be released this spring, is Last Night in Brooklyn, and reportedly includes familiar characters, such as Olga’s boyfriend Matteo.

    Chicago Public Library Commissioner Chris Brown told the keynote event audience that Gonzalez is the first Puerto Rican author to be selected in the twenty-five years of the One Book One Chicago program, which is obviously appealing. Puerto Ricans, who initially came to Chicago from New York in the 1930s, have been central to the city (e.g., Barrio Borikén) and the country (e.g., the Young Lords).

    Gonzalez’s first novel definitely draws upon her ethnic identity, or at least her mother’s contribution — she is also Mexican-American from her father’s side although she was raised by her maternal grandparents. Gonzalez actually wanted to write a book about Puerto Rico and colonialism but decided to make such a book more accessible, and more appealing, as a novel.

    Another appeal could be the way it resembles at times a telenovela. Such stories, which might be less prominent in Puerto Rico than for example Mexico, can be widely found, and thus familiar. These telenovela conventions can be recognized in the lost-and-found love or the feuding-mothers-and-daughters themes for example or the fairytale-like ending for both Olga and Prieto.

    Both aspects for me are partly why I wanted more. Gonzalez, or her editor, seems unaware of the sections or scenes, such as the letters from Olga’s mother Blanca or a conversation between Olga and her ex-boyfriend Reggie, that seem more like political primers or even mansplaining. Moreover, the conclusion seemed too inconsistent, and too convenient, after conflicts confronted by Olga, Prieto, and others, such as Matteo.

    Other readers at least at the One Book One Chicago events I attended had more to say about these characters than the plot. None at one for example seemed to agree that this novel is an older woman’s coming-of-age story, which its publisher suggests is its primary appeal. Such an account would also be consistent with the title, and the allusion to “Puerto Rican Obituary” Olga, who “dies dreaming of a five dollar raise” in a powerful poem by Pedro Pietri.

    This Olga doesn’t die, but her evolution is unclear, and ultimately unbelievable. How mature was she if in late in the story she is willing to use her sexuality to exploit her wealthy, and ex-boyfriend, Dick to help Blanca’s political goals, especially when she knows about Matteo’s concerns about trust and abandonment? What happens after the assault that convinces her at the end to bail on her plan to snitch anonymously on her mother’s political activities?

    These limitations loom larger in the context of other characters, such as Olga’s Tita Lola who collaborates with Olga’s cousin Mabel to expose Blanca’s perfidy. So where was Tita Lola when Olga was relying upon Blanca’s surrogate, and best friend, Karen? And why wouldn’t Tita Lola have been at least some support for Prieto as he confronted his sexuality, especially when his secrets made him even more vulnerable?

    I would be more chagrined if my dissatisfaction were merely the quality of this selection, which would be embarrassingly stereotypical. Rather, I wonder about this selection in regards to the dual One Book One Chicago goals of enlightening Chicagoans and creating community.

    One enlightenment possibility could be the way that Olga and Prieto grapple with their diasporic cultural identity. Such syncretic identities based upon my observations can be quite complicated, and certainly relevant to many Chicagoans, and this novel could offer insights that never quite materialize. Neither however seems to understand even at its end what they think being Nuyorican means or even committed to continue coming to terms with it.

    Some readers I admit connected with this theme in this book. Several acknowledged in a discussion group I co-moderated for example that this selection made them think about resistance in South Korea from where they had emigrated. That however seemed less from anything in the book and more from the thoughtfulness these readers brought to it.

    Community I suppose can come from any shared reading with the right readers even if they agree on the limitations of such a text, which was certainly a minority opinion. At a discussion, my co-moderator gave it the highest rating for example while I offered a more middling one.

    I know that choosing a One Book One Chicago selection is challenging. I also believe that my collaboration with those who administer this program has been perhaps the most significant service in my opinion of my academic career, and something I hope to continue even after retiring.

    Perhaps that passion produces unrealistic expectations, which could be why this otherwise appealing selection seemed disappointing.