The philandering figurehead of the “pro-family party” hasn’t just sired five kids by three women: before an all-female audience last night, Donald Trump declared that he is also the “father of IVF.” How’s that for an October surprise?
This off-the-cuff comment was perhaps meant to assuage any concerns that Republicans would try to ban a procedure that 86 percent of Americans want to protect. The GOP is treading carefully around the issue this election season, and Nina Pasquini examines the line they’ve taken, laying out the policies that would make IVF more expensive, more error prone, and more dangerous for those who get it.
Meanwhile, Susan Bernofsky reviews Fatma Aydemir’s novel Djinns, in which a lost child haunts both the parents who remember them and the siblings who don’t. And in the imagined world of Chantal Clarke’s “Persistent Antagonism,” an alternative model of procreation carries its own perils.
“The family novel is a framework for a heartbreaking, formally experimental examination of identity in which a six-part structure mirrors the divisions diaspora makes between generations.”
“She thought of the way she ate a bowl of blueberries, starting with the largest and firmest. As the options grew fewer, she became less picky. The mushier ones tasted just as good as the big, firm ones, though obviously a few were rotten.”
“Jameson’s insistence that criticism is a narrative act can be seen as, precisely, a compromise—a compromise with postmodernism, and with the arousing premise that to reimagine the world is in some degree to recreate the world.”
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