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'Time of the Child' is a marvelous blend of despair and redemption

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'Time of the Child' is a marvelous blend of despair and redemption

A village “on the western edge of a wet nowhere” populated by men who drink too much and women who smile too little. Throw in cows, an addled priest, an abandoned baby and a thick cloud cover of shame and you have the elements for a quintessential Irish story.

So quintessential, in fact, I’ve held off reading Niall Williams for a long time, despite hearing raves about his work. My skepticism, it turns out, was misplaced. I’ve just emerged from a Niall Williams binge with a belated appreciation for his writing, which invests specificity and life in characters and places easily reduced to clichés.

Time of the Child is Williams’ latest novel, a companion piece, rather than a sequel to, his 2019 novel, This Is Happiness. Both books are set in the rural village of Faha — a town in the far west of Ireland whose inhabitants, we’re told, possess “the translucent flesh that came from living in an absolute humidity.”

Time of the Child takes place in the weeks leading up to Christmas 1962 and opens — and closes — on a set piece of Mass at the parish church, where most of the village gathers. In between lies a story that feels, at once, realistic in its rough and comic everyday unfolding and mythic in its riffs on the grand themes of despair and spiritual redemption.

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Jack Troy is the town doctor and central character here. He’s a melancholy contained man who, we’re told, “carrie[s] himself in a manner that [the townspeople of] Faha might have summarized as Not like us.” Dr. Troy lost his wife and then the older woman he unexpectedly fell in love with, who’s now also dead. Keeping house for him is his 29-year-old daughter, Ronnie, the eldest of three sisters; the one who remained at home.

Ronnie, too, is a semi-enigma to the townspeople: Our narrator tells us that “Added to [her] reserve was not only the screened lives of all women in the parish at the time, but the marginal natures of all writers, for Ronnie Troy’s closest companion was her notebook.”

Dr. Troy has become haunted by despair and by a particularly heartrending question: “Why does no one love my daughter?” The answer, he fears, is his own glowering presence that may have repelled one especially promising suitor.

Inspired by what we’re told is a “mixed fuel of … brandy … [and] a parent’s fear of the unmade world after them,” Dr. Troy, uncharacteristically, resolves on a bizarre scheme to make things right. As the saying goes: “Man plans, God laughs.”

Instead of unfolding the Troy family narrative chronologically, Williams layers it on top of other simultaneous storylines, all of which are graced with language as bracing as salt spray from the chill Atlantic. We follow, for instance, the wanderings of Jude Quinlan, a 12 year old “on the rope-bridge between man and boy.”

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Jude’s father drinks and gambles and his mother, Mamie, possesses “the anxious look of one married to an instability.” Listen to how Williams moves fluidly from the mundane to the wider lens of the numinous in these snippets from an extended passage where Jude helps to unload a van full of Christmas toys for the town fair:

There were toy soldiers, kits for flying gliders, … skittles in a net, balls, bats. … dolls of one expression but many dresses, …

For Jude, carrying everything from the van … was as close has he would get to handling any of these things. He had no resentment or bitterness . Rather, from nearness to the marvelous something rubbed off on him …

The other thing, the one that only occurred to him years later when he would recall what happened that day, was that what he was carrying out of the van that December morning was his childhood.

For those who believe in such phenomena, Jude will be the instrument for bringing a miracle — a Christmas miracle complete with a baby and a virginal mother, no less — into this story. The other miracle here is a literary one: Time of the Child itself, which gives readers that singular experience of nearness to the marvelous.

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Fandom rules social media's cultural landscape in 2024

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Fandom rules social media's cultural landscape in 2024

Fans transformed Kenrick Lamar and Drake’s already very public spat into an even bigger social media phenomenon.

Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP


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Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP

The biggest trend in culture on social media in 2024 can be summed up with one word: Fans.

Major broadcasting networks and mainstream media, and in more recent years streaming companies, have had near-total control over entertainment habits. But now it’s the fans who are making an outsize impact on what Americans listen to, play, read and watch — through social media.

The new end-of-year reports released by social media companies including YouTube, TikTok and Spotify point to this overarching trend — Instagram did not produce a trends report this year.

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“When I look at these reports, I am struck by how much fan activity and fan-ish consumption and engagement is at the core of social media,” said Abigail De Kosnik, an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley who studies social media and fandoms. “All of these platforms are basically touting how much they were able to host creatives that could attract and inspire large fandoms, and how proud they were that so many fans are participating in liking, commenting, sharing and buying from these creative influencers.”

Making big cultural moments even bigger

One way in which fans exerted an outsized influence on culture in 2024 was through their “participation” in the ongoing controversy between Kendrick Lamar and Drake.

The hip-hop stars’ mutual accusations of domestic abuse, fathering illegitimate children etc. existed independently of social media, largely through the exchanging of diss tracks — attacking each other through songs.

But the spat was hugely amplified by fans dissecting every beat of it on Spotify podcasts and TikTok and YouTube videos, and through making their own related content.

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In one animated short from May, for instance, a cartoon Kendrick Lamar confronts a cartoon Drake about hiding a child he fathered. The Japanese-language video racked up nearly 2.5 million views on YouTube, and 3 million on X. All of this fan-created content seems to have increased the fan bases of both Kendrick Lamar and Drake.

“The moment turned into this global phenomenon because of the many ways that fans engaged with it,” said Gina Shalavi, a senior marketing manager at YouTube who leads the company’s culture and trends team. “They were creating content in the form of animations and reactions. And it actually got to a point where the artists were not only uploading their music directly to YouTube, but Kendrick Lamar even allowed reactors to monetize their content.”

From social media to full-fledged franchises

Fans also helped to transform native web content into full-fledged media franchises.

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In the case of The Amazing Digital Circus, a satirical indie animated web series for adults about a bunch of humans trapped in a virtual world, fans not only caused the show to become a social media hit in the space of just a few weeks, but also responded to each episode with a deluge of fan-created content including tribute videos, online commentary, new storylines and art. And then Netflix picked the series up for streaming.

“The fandom around the thing is just as important, if not maybe even more important, as the thing itself,” said Shalavi. “We saw 25 billion views of videos related to The Amazing Digital Circus. And this is not including viewership of the actual episodes themselves.”

The dark side of social media fandom

Not all of this “sideshow” content is positive.

The social media landscape also includes obscene videos related to the animated series The Amazing Digital Circus and bootleg merchandise on e-commerce sites such as Amazon.com such as unauthorized toys based on its characters. 

UC Berkeley’s De Kosnik said the social media companies’ end-of-year trend reports completely failed to address the more questionable trends within fandom — whether that’s offensive content or political disinformation.

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“The reports are really sort of like, ‘there’s nothing wrong with social media and it’s all great, because it’s all about fostering love and admiration and affection and laughter,” said De Kosnik, noting that even the reports’ design schemes convey this unmitigated positivity through bright colors and chunky graphics. “It would be ethical for these companies to reckon with the challenges that everybody knows are happening through social media.”

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Tori Spelling Talks About Mom Guilt, 'Their Lives Are Not Stable'

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Tori Spelling Talks About Mom Guilt, 'Their Lives Are  Not Stable'

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'Wait Wait' for December 7, 2024: With Not My Job guest Jim Gaffigan

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'Wait Wait' for December 7, 2024: With Not My Job guest Jim Gaffigan

This week’s show was recorded in Chicago with host Peter Sagal, judge and scorekeeper Bill Kurtis, Not My Job guest Jim Gaffigan and panelists Negin Farsad, Adam Felber, and Adam Burke. Click the audio link above to hear the whole show.

Who’s Bill This Time

Brain Rot Spreads; I Beg Your Pardon; Return of the Rainforest

Panel Questions

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Good For Sandwiches, But Good to Drink?

Bluff The Listener

Our panelists tell three stories about unusual side effects of common drugs, only one of which is true

Not My Job: Comedian Jim Gaffigan previews the Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me Gift Guide

Comedian and star of the new stand up special The Skinny, Jim Gaffigan, is quizzed about things you can buy for this holiday season.

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Panel Questions

Trouble Finding A Ride; The Mayor And His Breakfast

That’s Disrespectful

A new game based on stories from this week that featured the word “disrespectful.”

Limericks

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Bill Kurtis reads three news-related limericks: Bionic Pants; Chicken Scratch For the Soul; Mahi Mahi Milk Milk

Lightning Fill In The Blank

All the news we couldn’t fit anywhere else

Predictions

Our panelists predict, now that the Rainforest Café is back, what will be the next trendy theme restaurant.

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