Whenever I read a novel about immigration, I recall a scene from the 2006 Italian film Nuovomondo (released as Golden Door in English). At the turn of the 20th century, a young Sicilian woman who will soon marry a “rich American” presents two postcards, supposedly from the United States, to a village elder. The first depicts a man holding a wheelbarrow that contains a massive onion, so large that it dwarfs both the wheelbarrow and the man.
In July of this year, a U.S.-based company called CrowdStrike released an update for its widely used cybersecurity software, inadvertently triggering a massive system crash. In the hours that followed, what has since been described as the “largest outage in history” affected nearly every facet of our global society. On X, the phrase Leave the world behind went viral.
Justin Torres’s debut novel, We the Animals, quickly became a cultural phenomenon when it was published in 2011, the kind of novel that appeared on social-media feeds and celebrity reading lists. The book is a marvel—it is slim and ferocious, and proceeds at a relentless pace, as if exhaled in a single breath.