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DECEMBER 2, 2019

4 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

15 THE TALK OF THE TOWN
Steve Coll on bombshells at the impeachment hearings;
Mike Nichols remembered; Charles Ray’s city walks;
married to the Mets; the Karl Lagerfeld economy.
PERSONAL HISTORY
David Sedaris 20 Hurricane Season
Of repairs and family.
SHOUTS & MURMURS
Susanna Wolff 25 The Perfect Engagement Photo Session
BRAVE NEW WORLD DEPT.
Brian Barth 26 The Defector
Silicon Valley’s ethics denounced by one of its own.
PROFILES
Amanda Petrusich 34 Ecstasy and Ruin
Beck is back.
ANNALS OF JUSTICE
Jennifer Gonnerman 42 The Interview
Negotiating the arbitrary world of parole hearings.
FICTION
Roddy Doyle 54 “The Curfew”
THE CRITICS
BOOKS
James Wood 59 The long shadow of Margaret Thatcher.
Hilton Als 66 How Joan Didion rewrote American womanhood.
69 Briefly Noted
THE ART WORLD
Peter Schjeldahl 70 The art of the Iraq wars, at PS1.
MUSICAL EVENTS
Alex Ross 72 ECM’s fiftieth anniversary and its star string quartet.
THE THEATRE
Alexandra Schwartz 74 “The Inheritance.”
THE CURRENT CINEMA
Anthony Lane 76 “Knives Out,” “Kind Hearts and Coronets.”
POEMS
Sophie Cabot Black 38 “To Burn Through Where You Are Not Yet”
Fabián Severo 56 “Sixty”
COVER
Kadir Nelson “Art Connoisseurs”

DRAWINGS Gahan Wilson, Sofia Warren, Trevor Spaulding, David Sipress,

Roz Chast, Amy Hwang, Drew Dernavich, Emily Flake, William Haefeli, Liana Finck,
Brian Hawes & Seth Roberts, Pia Guerra & Ian Boothby SPOTS Ivan Brunetti
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Commemorative
Cover Reprints
Search our extensive
archive of weekly
covers dating back to
1925 and commemorate
a milestone with a
New Yorker cover reprint.
newyorkerstore.com/covers
CONTRIBUTORS
Amanda Petrusich (“Ecstasy and Ruin,”
p. 34) is a staff writer and the author
of “Do Not Sell at Any Price.”
Gahan Wilson (Cartoon, p. 18), who
died in November, contributed to The
New Yorker for more than forty years.
His many books include “Gahan Wil-
son’s Out There,” a collection of car-
toons, which came out in 2016.
Jennifer Gonnerman (“The Interview,”
p. 42) became a staff writer in 2015.
She is the author of “Life on the Out-
side: The Prison Odyssey of Elaine
Bartlett.”
Brian Barth (“The Defector,” p. 26) is a
journalist based in Toronto. His work
has appeared in the Washington Post
and National Geographic, among other
publications.
Roddy Doyle (Fiction, p. 54) will pub-
lish a new novel, “Love,” in June, 2020.
David Sedaris (“Hurricane Season,” p. 20)
has contributed to The New Yorker since
1995. His most recent book, “Calypso,”
came out last year.
Betsy Morais (The Talk of the Town,
p. 18), who was previously on the mag-
azine’s editorial staff, is the managing
editor of Columbia Journalism Review.
Fabián Severo (Poem, p. 56) is an Uru-
guayan poet. His collection “Night in
the North,” translated from the Por-
tuñol by Laura Cesarco Eglin and
Jesse Lee Kercheval, will be published
in the spring.
Hannah Goldfield (Tables for Two, p. 13),
the magazine’s food critic, began con-
tributing to The New Yorker in 2010.
Kadir Nelson (Cover), an artist, has
received Caldecott Honors and the
Sibert Medal. He also illustrated “The
Undefeated,” by Kwame Alexander.

Sophie Cabot Black (Poem, p. 38) has Hilton Als (Books, p. 66) won the 2017
written three collections of poetry, in- Pulitzer Prize for criticism. He is a pro-
cluding “The Exchange.” fessor of writing at Columbia.

NEW ON THE NEW YORKER TODAY APP

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by the cartoonist Liana Finck. Go to the cartoons tab of the
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2 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2, 2019

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THE MAIL
RADICAL INJUSTICE
Adam Hochschild, in his piece about
America’s deportation of radicals, a hun-
dred years ago, points out that the “most
violent anarchists were largely Italian-
American” (“Obstruction of Injustice,”
November 11th). He cites an attack on
Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer,
the perpetrator of which is presumed to
have been Carlo Valdinoci, who was as-
sociated with a cell of anarchists in New
Britain, Connecticut. As a counterpoint
to the example of Valdinoci, my great-
uncles, Joseph and Erasmo Perretta, lived
in New Britain during that time of anti-
immigrant fervor. The brothers were ac-
cused of murder in June, 1918; convicted,
after forty-two minutes of deliberation,
in October; and hanged, after lost ap-
peals, on June 27, 1919. The Hartford
Courant reported that because “both
[were] anarchists” the state did not re-
quire “a decided motive for the killing,”
even though no charges of sedition or any
other illegal activity had been brought
against them. Our family maintains
that the brothers were innocent, and the
scar of their execution remains. For all
we know, they were Galleanists, “apos-
tles for peace,” or simply two Italian
immigrants in the wrong place at the
wrong time.
Jean P. Moore
Greenwich, Conn.
As a retired U.S. Department of Labor
historian, I was gratified that Hochschild
singled out Louis F. Post, an Assistant
Secretary of Labor, for his heroic role in
stymieing the efforts of A. Mitchell
Palmer and J. Edgar Hoover to illegally
deport thousands of aliens. Perhaps un-
surprisingly, Post was also a staunch
advocate for African-American rights.
He was a founding member of the
N.A.A.C.P., in 1909, and he played a
crucial role in the establishment of the
Division of Negro Economics in the
Labor Department, in 1918. That tem-
porary wartime office was the first fed-
eral agency devoted specifically to the
interests of African-American workers.
Then as now, brave federal employees
joined others of conscience in standing
up to the brutal and illegal treatment of
immigrants by rogue federal officials.
1
Judson MacLaury
Sacramento, Calif.
HEAD GAMES
Nick Paumgarten, in his piece on play-
ing ice hockey, writes evocatively about
the risk of concussion and other inju-
ries (“The Symptoms,” November 11th).
Learning from football, hockey has
begun to clean up its act, significantly
minimizing body contact and focussing
more on demonstrations of skill. In-
stead of taking runs at players and get-
ting into fights, as Paumgarten describes,
there is a new emphasis on positive at-
titudes and good fun. Still, Paumgar-
ten, who is a great writer, should not
TURN YOUR
be playing hockey, or any sport that
offers the possibility of body or head CONCERN
contact. Although I understand his de-
sire to keep playing, he should proba-
bly shift his competitive instinct to
INTO IMPACT.
something safer, like tennis.
Barry Moline
Sacramento, Calif.
As Paumgarten’s competitor and occa-
We can help
sional teammate, I agree with him about
the potential costs of playing ice hockey.
maximize your
It doesn’t seem particularly rational, es-
pecially for middle-aged guys like us,
charitable giving.
to keep lacing up for the midnight game
when we have to be at work by nine
the next morning. But, ultimately, the
sport is about camaraderie. When two Contact Jane at
teams line up on the ice after the game
to shake their opponents’ hands, one by (212) 686-0010 x363
one, it represents a rare moment of com- or giving@nyct-cfi.org
munity in these fractious times. For me, for a consultation.
that sense of fellowship is somehow
worth the risks.
Steven Geovanis
Brooklyn, N.Y.
•
Letters should be sent with the writer’s name,
address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to
themail@newyorker.com. Letters may be edited
for length and clarity, and may be published in
any medium. We regret that owing to the volume www.giveto.nyc
of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter.
THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2, 2019 3
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NOVEMBER 27 – DECEMBER 3, 2019

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

The New York-born playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis writes in tender, funny strokes about the loud-
mouthed and the down-and-out, from Rikers Island inmates (“Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train”) to a retired cop
(the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Between Riverside and Crazy”). His new play, “Halfway Bitches Go Straight
to Heaven,” in previews at the Atlantic Theatre Company, is set in a women’s halfway house. John Ortiz
directs a cast featuring (from left to right) Liza Colón-Zayas, Elizabeth Canavan, and Elizabeth Rodriguez.

PHOTOGRAPH BY PARI DUKOVIC

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to outstrip dread. In “Camelid in the City,” a companied by hypnotic electronic scores.) In

ART
“Garry Winogrand: Color”
Brooklyn Museum
Winogrand once defined a photograph as “what
something looks like to a camera.” Keep that
in mind when viewing this fiercely pleasur-
able, if somewhat flawed, show, consisting
mainly of hundreds of digitally projected Ko-
dachrome slides, most from the nineteen-sixties.
Winogrand, the all-time champion of street
photography, died in 1984, at the age of fifty-six.
He is most famous for his hyperkinetic shots
of unaware pedestrians, taken with high-speed
black-and-white film. The relatively long ex-
posures required by color film steered him
to subjects more static: people seated rather
than walking, or at a beach instead of on the
street. The problem here is that Winogrand
didn’t take digital images; he took color slides.
Sixteen sequences of big digitized images,
projected onto the walls of a long room, go
by at clips that pander to present-day atten-
tion deficits. Winogrand worked fast, but to
absorb the results takes time, first to register
the subjects and then to have the form and the
drama, the intelligence and the beauty, of his
vision sink in.—Peter Schjeldahl (Through Dec. 8.)
prehistoric mammal perches on the banks of
the East River, which is rendered as a flurry
of acid greens; the camel’s yellow-and-orange
hide echoes the glinting lights of the Manhat-
tan skyline in the distance. Ayhens favors pic-
torial games in which interiors and exteriors
flip; in the captivating watercolor “Downstairs
Deluge”—an endearingly wobbly grid made of
bridges and buildings, rippling currents and
clouds—it’s hard to tell whether the surging
water flanking a skyscraper is reflected in its
glass façade or flooding its floors.—Andrea K.
Scott (Through Dec. 20.)
Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg
Bonakdar
CHELSEA Entering a gallery to encounter a field
of enormous painted epoxy flowers feels a
bit like landing on the outskirts of Oz—but
Dorothy’s poppies weren’t being assailed by
diabolical pollinating birds. In their first solo
show in New York since 2013, this Swedish duo
exhibits four of their phantasmagoric stop-mo-
tion animations, whose characters hail from a
strange, hand-modelled realm. (They’re ac-
AT THE GALLERIES
one nonnarrative piece, titled “How to Slay a
Demon,” a train of monstrous lovers approaches
a supine woman, from whose point of view
the action is seen. The fluffy clouds in “This
Is Heaven” belie the attendant grotesquerie;
in one scene, a ghoulish protagonist plucks
piglets from a sow’s teat in order to nurse in
their place—a picture of fecundity, avarice, and
aggression typical of the show’s nightmarish
nursery-rhyme themes.—J.F. (Through Dec. 20.)
Alina Szapocznikow
Hauser & Wirth
UPTOWN The radical final decade of this Polish
sculptor—who survived the Holocaust as a
teen-ager only to have her life cut short by
cancer, in 1973, at the age of forty-seven, while
living in Paris—is the subject of a sprawling,
revelatory show. (It’s a coda, of sorts, to MO-
MA’s lauded 2012 Szapocznikow retrospective.)
The vestiges of classical figuration surface in
fragmentary objects, which combine Surrealist
influence with a macabre strain of Pop and
often incorporate casts of her own body. A
group of haunting lamp sculptures reveals an

“Urban Indian”
Museum of the City of New York
This concise exhibition, subtitled “Native New
York Now,” gives equal weight to memorabilia
and art works—from local flyers protesting the
Dakota Access Pipeline to “Hanging Out on
Iroquois and Algonquin Trails,” a mixed-media
sculpture by Pena Bonita, in which burlap bags
filled with shredded money and strings of beads
bear the names of New York City streets. In a
short film completed this year (and co-produced
by Rebecca Jacobs and Nate Lavey), Louis Mof-
sie discusses the Thunderbird American Indian
Dancers’ forty-first annual midsummer pow-
wow, at the Queens County Farm Museum, and
the evolution—and endurance—of traditional
dance forms. Ancestral craft meets feminist
experimentation in a quilt made by women from
the Onondaga Nation territory, upstate, for the
Spiderwoman Theatre, an indigenous-women’s
troupe founded in the nineteen-seventies. In a
1987 videotape, the poet Diane Burns, whose
parents were Chemehuevi and Anishinabe, In 2000, an autistic boy wandered across Hong Kong’s border into mainland
delivers a withering rebuke to settler-colonial- China and was never heard from again. In 1981, workers were buried alive
ist landscapes as she strolls through desolate in quick-drying cement during the hasty construction of a film center in
stretches of the Lower East Side while reciting
her “Alphabet City Serenade,” drawing parallels the Philippines—a twenty-five-million-dollar boondoggle of the Marcos
between Manifest Destiny and urban gentrifi- regime. Between 1837 and 1887, hundreds of Seminole, Kiowa, Cheyenne,
cation.—Johanna Fateman (Through March 8.) and Apache people were incarcerated in a Colonial-era fort on the northeast
coast of Florida. These disparate histories haunt Cici Wu, Yason Banal,
Olive Ayhens and Sky Hopinka (respectively) in “Miffed Blue Return,” an engrossing
COURTESY THE ARTIST AND 47 CANAL

Bookstein
UPTOWN If the American modernist Florine Stett-
heimer had crossed paths with Greta Thunberg,
her paintings might resemble the colorful, com-
posite works of this Brooklyn-based artist, who
brings a charmer’s touch to climate concerns.
Ayhens has been working (mostly under the
radar) since the nineteen-seventies, when the
American Pattern and Decoration movement
held sway; its influence lingers in her recent
kaleidoscopic paintings, where whimsy tends
omnibus of moving-image works at the 47 Canal gallery (through Dec. 20).
Wu’s wistful 16-mm. film “Unfinished Return of Yu Man Hon” imagines
the disappeared boy as a grown wanderer of the in-between; in a grace note
of magical realism, he rides a ferry with a white cow. Banal’s installation
(pictured) conveys the noxious pageantry of the Marcoses’ art patronage
through a colorful cacophony of live feeds and closed loops. Hopinka’s
two-channel video “Cloudless Blue Egress of Summer”—pairing footage
of the sea, the fort, and the prisoners’ drawings with text, voice-over, and
a hypnotic score—is beautiful and quietly devastating.—Andrea K. Scott
THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2, 2019 5
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inches, and her selections have an equally

R. & B. classic form. She specializes in tracks whose
machine-generated melodic lines unfurl grad-
ually, building a constantly shifting landscape;
their smoky tones and insistent bass patterns
suggest both the celestial and the earthbound,
often simultaneously. She opens and closes
the evening at Public Records; the Polish
d.j. Blazej Malinowski performs a live set
in between.—Michaelangelo Matos (Nov. 29.)

Jeff Tain Watts Trio

Made in New York Jazz Café
Defiantly propulsive, Jeff (Tain) Watts, the
onetime percussion power behind the bands of
both Marsalis brothers, can rattle the walls of a
club—and the sidewalk in front of it—should he
feel the need. But he’s also a deft and sensitive
accompanist, a role that he intermittently takes
at this new Brooklyn club as part of a rangy
trio that includes the guitarist Paul Bollen-
back and the bassist Orlando le Fleming.—S.F.
(Nov. 29-30.)

Arlo Guthrie
The label TDE is known for its preëminent hip-hop roster, which includes Carnegie Hall
such stars as Kendrick Lamar and Schoolboy Q, but its R. & B. silver bullet In 1965, the story goes, Arlo Guthrie was
spending Thanksgiving with friends when
is the singer SiR. The Inglewood, California, native—who performs on he took out the trash and found himself jailed
Dec. 3, at Brooklyn Steel—makes the kind of music that sounds as blissful for littering—an arrest that would ultimately
as the endless-vacation aura of his home town. “Chasing Summer,” his help the folk princeling avoid the draft.
The incident led to Guthrie’s most beloved
sophomore album, from August, traces the ebbs and flows of relationships; creation: “Alice’s Restaurant,” a discursive
from steamy highs to callous lows, it conveys love in the language of an eighteen-minute talking blues that forever
Everyman. His writing shines against woozy neo-soul backdrops that wed the singer to Thanksgiving. His annual
date at Carnegie Hall stretches back to 1967,
proudly wear jazz’s influence, and his velvety voice imbues even his most but Guthrie claims that it will terminate this
unsentimental lyrics with subtle tinges of romance. That duality remains year, with a wish for “younger generations to
the anchor of SiR’s style: at once modern and traditional, rude-and-crude take the torches we carried.”—Jay Ruttenberg
(Nov. 30.)
swagger tucked inside grown-and-sexy mystique.—Briana Younger

interest in both industrial materials and the
commodification of the female form—illumi-
nated breasts or mouths with parted lips, made
of polyester resin, are mounted on gooseneck
pipes or presented in ice-cream dishes. In the
“Souvenir” series, photographs—including a
childhood snapshot and images of the model
Twiggy and a Holocaust victim—appear spec-
tral beneath layers of resin. Throughout the
exhibition, the artist directly confronts themes
of trauma and mortality, underscoring histo-
locale a few blocks away, Moran employs his
long-standing Bandwagon trio, a daringly inclu-
sive ensemble—with the bassist Tarus Mateen
and the drummer Nasheet Waits—that exem-
plifies the multidirectional, go-for-broke spirit
of the most compelling modern jazz.—Steve
Futterman (Nov. 26-Dec. 1.)
KEY!
Knitting Factory
Kompakt Night
Elsewhere
Founded in Cologne, Germany, in 1998, the
label Kompakt has one of dance music’s most
immediately recognizable sonic stamps; its
releases are perched between flickering mini-
malist techno and airy trance, with strands of
disco infused into even the most wigged-out
material and polished to a glimmer. Michael
Mayer, one of the label’s co-founders, d.j.s
in much the same invigorating manner. He

1
ry’s imprint on personal, embodied experi-
ence.—J.F. (Through Dec. 21.)
NIGHT LIFE
Musicians and night-club proprietors lead
complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in
advance to confirm engagements.
Equal parts tastemaker and trendsetter, the
rapper KEY! has quietly become one of the most
influential artists to emerge this side of 2010.
His earlier work signalled a swelling tide of
Atlanta hip-hop that supplemented the city’s
trap-music legacy with more idiosyncratic el-
ements. Those innovations were foundational
in hindsight, but KEY! is ever evolving; two
recent releases, “777,” from last year, and “SO
headlines this showcase, which also features
the Kompakt artist Rex the Dog, whose re-
cent single “Vortex” spotlights a shamelessly
cheesy melody rendered with vintage-sounding
bleeps.—M.M. (Nov. 30.)
Alanis Morissette
Apollo Theatre
ILLUSTRATION BY JEREMY LEUNG

Jason Moran & the Bandwagon
Village Vanguard
Since September, the pianist and composer Jason
Moran has been applying his conceptual gifts
to a mixed-media art exhibition at the Whitney,
performing in mock re-creations of iconic jazz
venues. For this engagement, at another famed
EMOTIONAL,” from June, showcase his ver-
satility as he begins to garner long-overdue
acclaim.—Briana Younger (Nov. 29.)
Mary Yuzovskaya
Public Records
The Russian-born, Brooklyn-based techno
d.j. Mary Yuzovskaya plays only vinyl twelve-
Alanis Morissette’s 1995 album, “Jagged Little
Pill,” struck something so deep in the nine-
ties Zeitgeist that it now feels inextricable
from that era of angst-filled alt-rock. Though
it continues to divide critics, the five-time
Grammy-winning release is still revered as
a classic—so much so that it was recently
adapted into a Broadway musical, opening
on Dec. 5. Three nights before the show’s cur-
tain, Morissette performs an acoustic version

6 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2, 2019

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of the record in a one-night-only engagement
at the Apollo Theatre.—Julyssa Lopez (Dec. 2.)
Sam Amidon / Xylouris White
Le Poisson Rouge
On Sam Amidon’s latest EP, “Fatal Flower
Garden,” he explores a snippet of “Anthology
of American Folk Music,” the fabled six-album
dive into the musical underbelly of the twenties
and thirties. Amidon may seem a placid ambas-
sador for such sounds, yet, given his upbringing
in Vermont bohemia and his immersion in folk,
the music lives in his bones. He splits this bill
with Xylouris White, a dazzling lute-and-drums
duo with its own deep-rooted tradition (Cretan
folk) and hippie heritage: its lutist, George
Xylouris, grew up accompanying his dad, the
lyre virtuoso Psarantonis.—J.R. (Dec. 3.)
Berhana
Elsewhere
Berhana hinted at the easy coolness of his
alt-R. & B. sound on “Grey Luh,” a laid-back
ode to longing that piqued the interest of the
creator of “Atlanta,” Donald Glover, who fea-
tured the song on the show last year. The cameo
gave Berhana a whoosh of momentum that
ushered him into his studio début, “HAN,”
from October. The album is configured like a
plane ride through his influences, with in-flight
1
announcements that pop up between touches of
soul, disco, and Japanese funk.—J.L. (Dec. 3.)
CLASSICAL MUSIC
Daniil Trifonov
David Geffen Hall
For Daniil Trifonov’s first appearance as the
New York Philharmonic’s new artist-in-resi-
dence, he plays the lone, ecstatic piano con-
certo by Scriabin, another epochally accom-
plished Russian pianist; Jaap van Zweden
conducts, with Tchaikovsky’s luminous Sym-
phony No. 5 as the program’s other half. Near
the end of his four-night run, Trifonov shows
off his version of a lazy Sunday afternoon,
appearing at the 92nd Street Y with the Phil’s
in-house quartet (Dec. 1 at 3). They’ll play
string quartets by Mozart (K. 387) and Ravel,
and give Trifonov’s own Quintetto Concer-
tante its New York première.—Fergus McIntosh
(Nov. 27 and Dec. 3 at 7:30 and Nov. 29-30 at 8.)
“The Queen of Spades”
Metropolitan Opera House
The fresh-voiced Wagnerian soprano Lise Da-
vidsen arrives for her Met début after winning
the Operalia vocal competition, in 2015, and
nabbing a rare exclusive recording contract
with Decca. Tchaikovsky’s “The Queen of
Spades,” a stormy work with startling emo-
tional swings and dense orchestrations, is a
sensible vehicle for Davidsen’s gifts, providing
her with moments to shine without forcing
her to carry the show alone. She takes the role
of Lisa, a woman driven to desperation by
her love for the deranged gambler Hermann,
played by the tenor Aleksandrs Antonenko;
Vasily Petrenko conducts.—Oussama Zahr
(Nov. 29 and Dec. 2 at 7:30.)
Concerts on the Slope
St. John’s Episcopal Church
The cellist Benjamin Larsen started Concerts
on the Slope, in 2012, as a forum for young
musicians to present thoughtfully curated pro-
grams. In the series’ home base, at St. John’s
Episcopal Church, in Park Slope, Larsen and
his colleagues present a concert of string quar-
tets by American composers. Robert Sirota’s
“Wave Upon Wave” is the third in his trilogy of
quartets; at the time of its première, Sirota said
that it “is about our fears, our hopes, and our
prayers that we will triumph over the forces of
darkness which threaten to overwhelm us.” In
that vein, Samuel Barber’s Quartet in B Minor
offers its middle movement, the nearly anthe-
mic “Adagio for Strings,” as a monument to
grief and catharsis.—Hélène Werner (Dec. 1 at 3.)

“Noël”
RECITALS St. Ignatius of Antioch Church
Ravenous consumers of Christmas fare can
sample something new in this concert of festive
Baroque music, played by the American Classi-
cal Orchestra. Corelli’s sumptuous “Christmas
Concerto” has storms and shivers and a choco-
late-box ending. Scarlatti’s “Cantata Pastorale,”
for which the soprano Nola Richardson joins
the players, was written with feasting Popes and
cardinals in mind—its orchestrations are rich,
but the “fortunate shepherds” sound a little
prim. The carolling “Symphonie des Noëls,” by
de Lalande, evokes something more pungent and
profane: medieval dances, laced with hints of
the donkey and the manger.—F.M. (Dec. 3 at 7.)

Talea Ensemble
Americas Society
The omnivorous, invaluable Talea Ensemble
presents the première of an evening-length
work by David Adamcyk, a Canadian com-
poser, installation artist, and sound engineer.
Adamcyk describes “Father, My Father” as a
reflection on the #MeToo movement from
a father’s perspective; the piece involves an
immersive audio collage of recorded poems,
It’s the time of year when holiday festivities and retail bustle leave tranquillity texts, and interview fragments that represent
in short supply—which makes the pianist Ashlee Mack’s already attractive different ages and perspectives, played in alter-
nation with segments of live music featuring
concert an even more alluring prospect. Mack, who performs on Dec. 2, on the incisive soprano Lucy Dhegrae. Admission
ILLUSTRATION BY LUCY JONES

what would normally be a dark night for the Stone at the New School, plays is free, but reservations are strongly encour-
James Romig’s “Still,” a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize. The hour-long aged.—Steve Smith (Dec. 3 at 7.)
piece, inspired by the painter Clyfford Still’s radiant color-field abstractions,
moves through forty-three continuous iterations, played gently and slowly; its Ensemble Connect
alternating sparseness and density develop with the naturalness of breathing. Weill Recital Hall
An excellent recording, issued last year, is proof that Mack is a compelling Ensemble Connect, a versatile Carnegie Hall
and sure-handed advocate for this contemplative piece.—Steve Smith house band made up of young professionals

8 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2, 2019

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DOCTORS WITHOUT BORDERS REPORTS

BACK FROM THE CONFLICT IN YEMEN
The global humanitarian
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W hen a country
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the Doctors Without medical-treatment
Borders aid effort in centers supported by by all factions , leaving care created by this parties to the conflict also
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says, “every day that them—extend far beyond the edge of collapse. Yemen prior to the “We are witnessing
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is a day spent witnessing the conflict has displaced and provides support Doctors Without falling short,” Rado
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company today. In “George Balanchine’s The

TAP DANCE Nutcracker,” fun and coziness are tinged with
terror, and the world of the imagination is
just as real as the Biedermeier furniture and
the dancing children.—Marina Harss (Nov.
29-Dec. 1. Through Jan. 5.)

Noche Flamenca
Joyce Theatre
“Entre Tú y Yo” (“Between You and Me”),
Martín Santangelo’s evening of Spanish fla-
menco, is a stripped-down exploration of love
in its various guises, expressed through solos,
duets, and ensemble pieces. The company, led
by Soledad Barrio, a dancer of burning inten-
sity, is a real unit, made up of four dancers,
two guitarists, and three singers. There’s little
more to it than this: dancers responding to
the words of the songs, the rhythm of palmas
(handclapping), and the urgent call of guitars
and the human voice.—M.H. (Nov. 26-27 and
Nov. 29-Dec. 1.)

The Chase Brock Experience

Theatre Row
The premier tap dancers Jason Samuels Smith, Derick K. Grant, and the Fresh off the social-media-fuelled success of
now single-named Dormeshia have been friends and colleagues for decades. the young-adult sci-fi musical “Be More Chill,”
the choreographer Chase Brock brings back his
In their gold-standard production “And Still You Must Swing,” which gets 2008 production of “The Four Seasons.” Set to
its New York début at the Joyce Theatre, Dec. 3-8, that shared history glows, the eponymous Vivaldi score, it’s a tale about
as does what they’ve been up to all these years, mastering tap like very few global warming that’s both bright and gloomy,

1
broadly comic and apocalyptic.—Brian Seibert
others. Now in their thirties and forties, these hoofers are in their prime, still (Nov. 29-Dec. 2. Through Dec. 8.)
technically unassailable but more refined than younger guns, with deeper
access to the fruits of experience and the knowledge of how to express that
experience elegantly. The show is intended as a reminder of tap’s historical THE THEATRE
link to jazz, and the three dancers, accompanied by a jazz trio in electrifying
solo improvisations and tasty unison routines, resemble a classic tap act.
(Camille A. Brown, in a guest appearance, gestures even further back into A Christmas Carol
African-American history.) But there is nothing retro about the evening. In Lyceum
reconnecting with tap’s past, these dancers push tap forward.—Brian Seibert The Dickens classic receives a warm, solici-
tous production, directed by Matthew Warchus
(“Matilda”) and adapted by Jack Thorne (“Harry
Potter and the Cursed Child”), with a wild-
participating in a two-year residency program, tery Sonatas.” Telemann’s seven-movement haired, wild-eyed Campbell Scott as Ebenezer
turns a welcome spotlight on the distinguished overture-suite “Burlesque de Quixotte” caps Scrooge. (His father, George C. Scott, played
composer Shulamit Ran. Her handsome “Bach- the evening with the daring adventure and the role in the 1984 movie.) The topnotch cast

Shards” is matched with the Bach work it
was designed to partner—Contrapunctus X
from “The Art of Fugue”—and her melan-
choly, haunting “Lyre of Orpheus” prefaces
Messiaen’s sublime “Quartet for the End of
Time.”—S.S. (Dec. 3 at 7:30.)
Orchestra of St. Luke’s
Merkin Hall
Program music in the Baroque period was
vivid and emotional, meant to express the-
atrical contrasts through variances in tex-
ture, harmony, and key. The Orchestra of
1
peaceful repose that characterize the sprawling
epic.—H.W. (Dec. 3 at 7:30.)
DANCE
New York City Ballet
David H. Koch
This time of year, Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker”
music becomes ubiquitous. It’s easy to roll your
eyes, but, once you sit in the theatre and hear
the first notes of the overture, a thrill inevi-
includes the delightful Andrea Martin, impishly
foreboding as the Ghost of Christmas Past, and
the golden-voiced LaChanze, as a reproachful,
Caribbean-inflected Ghost of Christmas Pres-
ent. Scrooge’s misery gets a passionate backstory
in scenes with his drunken, angry father and
a lost love. In a modern twist, when Scrooge
decides to turn it all around, his ghosts implore
action over fantasy, and the ensuing feast set
piece becomes a giddy free-for-all. Tiny Tim is
played alternately by Jai Ram Srinivasan and
Sebastian Ortiz, both of whom have cerebral
palsy; at a recent matinée, Ortiz brought the
house down with his natural depiction of gen-
erous humanity. Arrive early for pre-show live
ILLUSTRATION BY CHRIS KINDRED

St. Luke’s continues its chamber-music season
with works by Baroque-era composers from
England, France, Bohemia, Germany, and
Italy. Some are famous, others not as well
known, but all summoned their talents to
paint pictures in sound. The last movement
of Rameau’s Concert No. 4, from “Pièces de
Clavecin,” offers a charming portrayal of the
Rameau household, and Biber vivifies the
Crucifixion in a selection from “The Mys-
tably kicks in. Boris Asafiev, an early-twen-
tieth-century Russian musicologist, called
it “a symphony of childhood”: many of the
sensations we feel as children—fear, extreme
excitement, an attraction to things we don’t
understand, the desire to grow up and the
simultaneous desire to remain a child forever—
are reflected in the music. The choreographer
George Balanchine understood this and made
a ballet, in 1954, that is still performed by the
music and to catch clementines and cookies
tossed by performers to theatregoers, nearly
every one.—Shauna Lyon (Through Jan. 5.)
The Half-Life of Marie Curie
Minetta Lane Theatre
It’s hard to beat a dynamic duo, and the two
brilliant ladies in this Audible production,

10 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2, 2019

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Marie Curie (Francesca Faridany) and Hertha
Ayrton (Kate Mulgrew), might very well be
invincible. Written by Lauren Gunderson
and directed by Gaye Taylor Upchurch, the
play tells the story of Marie and Hertha’s
friendship—and Hertha’s attempts to help
Marie recover from a career-wrecking scan-
dal and save her from her self-destructive
impulses. “Radium is a cold heat, a dark light,
a force of nature,” says Marie at the opening
of the play, which serves plenty more poetry
alongside a delirious amount of wit. Occa-
sionally, the characters are subordinated to
the themes—feminism, scientific inquiry—
and the way the show accordions the women’s
final decades into its last few minutes is a bit
disorienting. But the delectable performances
by Faridany and Mulgrew—the latter with
enough warmhearted spunk to envelop the
entire theatre—give a radium-worthy glow
that even Marie would admire.—Maya Phillips
(Through Dec. 22.)
History of Violence
St. Ann’s Warehouse
The German director Thomas Ostermeier’s
production of Édouard Louis’s autobiograph-
ical book (adapted by Ostermeier, Louis, and
Florian Borchmeyer) starts with a crime scene,
then slowly walks us back to what prompted
its investigation—a sexual assault that takes
place toward the end of the show and whose
clinical brutality, audiences should be warned,
is upsetting. Édouard (Laurenz Laufenberg)
is a gay student in Paris, trying to escape his
working-class roots—he has even changed
his name. An encounter with Reda (Renato
Schuch), a handsome but self-loathing Ber-
ber man, prompts a reckoning for Édouard.
Ostermeier is among the most brilliant the-
atre-makers of his generation, and this pro-
duction, from Schaubühne Berlin, sports his
signature kinetic energy and imaginative use
of live video. What American audiences may
find even more discomfiting than the stage
violence, however, is the show’s moral and
political ambiguity—this is not a world of
black and white. In German, with English
supertitles.—Elisabeth Vincentelli (Through
Dec. 1.)
Pumpgirl
Irish Repertory
Abbie Spallen’s play, which débuted at the
2006 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, is the
latest in a number of works on New York
stages (“Little Gem” and “Molly Sweeney”
among them) with multiple characters but
no dialogue—just monologues, delivered
in rotation. This three-hander, directed by
Nicola Murphy, features Labhaoise Magee as
Pumpgirl, who works at a small-town filling
station in Northern Ireland; Hamish Al-
ILLUSTRATION BY ELEANOR TAYLOR
lan-Headley as Hammy, a stock-car driver
at the local track; and Clare O’Malley as
Sinead, a mother of two living in the town es-
tates. We quickly learn how these three lives
are intertwined, and Spallen paints a grim
picture of a society driven by hard times, with
people who are brutalized, angry, and des-
perately unhappy. The mood is unremittingly
dark as the actors passionately portray their
solitary pain. The playwright’s poetry leans
heavily toward the olfactory: the smells of
petrol, sweat, onions, and alcohol converge
and linger.—Ken Marks (Through Dec. 29.)
Slava’s Snowshow
Stephen Sondheim
Back in New York City after a gap of eleven
years, this beloved show, created (and some-
times performed) by the virtuoso Russian
clown Slava Polunin, brings to Broadway
an element of anarchy rarely seen since the
Marx Brothers moved to the movies. Don’t
expect dialogue, narrative, or even much in
the way of themes; the clowns themselves, in
their adorably silly yellow or green costumes,
are the only real through line. Instead, it’s
an anthology of comic bits, many of them,
despite the title, entirely unrelated to snow.
Maybe it’s best thought of as a study in par-
adox: simultaneously tender and obnoxious,
melancholic and riotous, pivoting from min-
imalism as forlorn as anything in “Waiting
for Godot” (the first gag alludes to suicide)
to full-blown, crowd-pleasing spectacle, espe-
cially in the famous, genuinely overwhelming
blizzard finale.—Rollo Romig (Through Jan. 5.)
The Underlying Chris
Second Stage
With such works as “Thom Pain (based on
nothing)” and “The Realistic Joneses,” Will
Eno has built a reputation as a cerebral, ab-
surdist playwright for whom the meaning
of life may well amount to an impenetrable
joke. His new piece is among his most acces-
sible; it follows the title character from cra-
dle to grave through a series of brief scenes.
The hook: as the decades pass, actors of vary-
ing sexes and races play Chris (the name is
short for Christopher or Christine). Kenny
Leon’s fluid direction, Arnulfo Maldonado’s
smart set, and a wonderful ensemble help
OFF BROADWAY
unfurl the action smoothly. Yet the show, as
funny and touching as it sometimes is, strug-
gles to amount to more than a conversation
starter. Is Eno saying that we all have a core
1
personality, unaffected by gender or race?
Discuss.—E.V. (Through Dec. 15.)
MOVIES
Atlantics
The French director Mati Diop’s first feature—
set in her father’s home town of Dakar, Sene-
gal—unites a wide array of ideas and genres with
her intensely sensory artistry. A young woman,
Ada (Mame Bineta Sane), and a young con-
struction worker, Souleiman (Ibrahima Traoré),
are in love, but her parents have arranged for
her to marry a rich businessman named Omar
(Babacar Sylla). Cheated out of his wages by a
government-connected company, Souleiman
heads for Spain in a rickety boat that capsizes
in the ocean. Then Omar’s house catches fire,
and, when a diligent police inspector (Amadou
Mbow) suspects Souleiman—who’s believed to
be dead—of arson, the romantic and political
melodrama takes a metaphysical turn. Diop
films the characters and the city with a tac-
tile intimacy and a teeming energy heightened
by the soundtrack’s polyphony of voices and
music; she dramatizes the personal experience
of public matters—religious tradition, women’s
autonomy, migration, corruption—with docu-
mentary-based fervor, rhapsodic yearning, and
bold affirmation. In Wolof and French.—Richard
Brody (In limited release and on Netflix.)
A Beautiful Day in the
Neighborhood
If last year’s documentary about Fred Rog-
ers, “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?,” left you
Some dramatists write—repeatedly,
almost compulsively—about where
they’re from. It’s hard to separate Au-
gust Wilson from Pittsburgh or A. R.
Gurney from Buffalo. The thirty-
eight-year-old playwright Samuel D.
Hunter, who grew up in Moscow,
Idaho, has used his native state as a
recurring canvas in plays such as “A
Bright New Boise,” “Pocatello,” and
the gorgeous drama “The Whale,”
about an obese man confined to his
apartment in northern Idaho. Hunter’s
newest work, “Greater Clements,” is
set in a fictional Idaho mining town
long past its heyday. Judith Ivey plays
the proprietor of a mining museum
that is about to close. Davis McCallum
directs the Lincoln Center Theatre
production, in previews at the Mitzi E.
Newhouse.—Michael Schulman
THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2, 2019 11
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wanting more of that singular figure, with his
cozy knitwear and matching homilies, Tom
Hanks is here to help. Starring as Mr. Rog-
ers in Marielle Heller’s new film, Hanks not
only re-creates every quirk of the character’s
gestures and speech but prevents what could
have been the mushiest of fables from sliding
over the edge into sentimentality. The story
turns on the plight of Lloyd Vogel (Matthew
Rhys), a journalist who is sent to interview
Mr. Rogers and finds himself revealing the
cause of his scars, both physical and emotional.
This redemptive encounter is played out in
a low and subtle key; Heller, as she proved
in “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” (2018), has
become something of a specialist in damaged
souls. With strong support from Susan Kelechi
Watson, as Vogel’s wife, and Chris Cooper, as
his sad and loutish father.—Anthony Lane (Re-
viewed in our issue of 11/25/19.) (In wide release.)
Queen & Slim
Though the dramatic connections of this
political romance, written by Lena Waithe
and directed by Melina Matsoukas, are often
thin, the movie offers ample symbolic power.
In Cleveland, two young black people, nick-
IN REVIVAL
named Queen (Jodie Turner-Smith), a lawyer,
and Slim (Daniel Kaluuya), a retail employee,
are ending an uneventful first date when a
white police officer (Sturgill Simpson) pulls
them over with brazenly hostile intent, lead-
ing to a tussle in which the cop starts shooting.
Slim gets the officer’s gun and kills him in
self-defense. The pair, not yet a couple, take to
the road in search of safe haven; the incident
is big news, and, during stopovers in several
Southern towns, they discover that they’ve be-
come instant folk heroes to many in the black
community. Some episodes in their flight are
formulaic; other scenes, such as ones involving
other officers, prove more surprising; and
some sequences merely generate imagery.
Nonetheless, the pain, the passion, and the
urgency at the movie’s core emerge forcefully
and movingly. With Bokeem Woodbine as
Queen’s tough, wounded, and devoted uncle
and Karen Kaia Livers as a bartender in the
know.—R.B. (In wide release.)
The Report
Adam Driver, looking paler and more intense
than ever, plays Dan Jones, an investigator
who is asked by Dianne Feinstein (Annette
Bening), of the Senate Intelligence Com-
mittee, to work on a study of the C.I.A.’s
Detention and Interrogation Program. The
project consumes years, eats away at private
lives, and, upon completion, is met with stub-
born resistance from officials who disagree
with its findings and demand that it be cen-
sored accordingly. (The full document has
never been released.) The film, written and
directed by Scott Z. Burns, takes its cue from
the stern dedication of its hero; the result
feels pressurized, disheartening, and fraught.
Flashbacks to the torture described in the
report are at once grisly to behold and, unlike
the ill-lit bleakness of the office scenes, oddly
superfluous to the movie’s cause. The cast
includes Tim Blake Nelson as a frightened
whistle-blower and a formidable Ted Levine
as John Brennan.—A.L. (11/25/19) (In wide
release and on Amazon Prime.)
Shooting the Mafia
At the age of forty, Letizia Battaglia, who’s now
eighty-four, became the first female photog-
rapher in the Italian daily press; this candid
and passionate documentary portrait, directed
by Kim Longinotto, shows that Battaglia has
always lived at the turbulent crossroads of
history. Born and raised in Palermo, Sicily,
Battaglia escaped her domineering father by
marrying at sixteen, and then escaped her
oppressive husband by taking lovers, with
melodramatic consequences. Finally on her
own, she became a journalist before turning
to photography at a time of unprecedented
Mafia violence, which became her subject and
her obsession—and resulted in death threats.
Her coverage of the murder of judges led to
a new career in politics. Longinotto cannily
juxtaposes Battaglia’s photographs with both
news footage and clips from fictional films and
shows the photographer in conversation with
men in her life—asserting the unity of sexual,
political, and creative freedom, and observing
the patriarchal violence of traditional families
and Mob families alike. In Italian.—R.B. (In
limited release.)

The Song of Life

This daring and rhapsodic silent melodrama
from 1922, directed by John M. Stahl, fuses
mighty currents of passion and detailed so-
cial visions in its intricate and extravagant plot
(from a story by Frances Irene Reels). Decades
after leaving a desolate Western outpost—and
her husband and child—to seek glamour in New
The South Korean director Hong Sang-soo launched a career of deft narra- York, the elderly and destitute Mary (Georgia
Woodthorpe), facing eviction from a Lower
tive manipulations with his first feature, “The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well,” East Side tenement, is taken in by a young cou-
from 1996, which screens in Lincoln Center’s series “Relentless Invention: ple living downstairs, David (Gaston Glass), a
COURTESY CHO HEE-MOON/KOREAN FILM ARCHIVE

New Korean Cinema, 1996–2003,” on Nov. 27. His tale of four characters struggling writer, and Aline (Grace Darmond),
whose work in a music shop keeps them afloat.
whose lives intricately intertwine was written by four different screenwriters But, like Mary, Aline pines for excitement and
and then largely improvised by the actors; the effect is a cinematic game of luxury, and her chance encounter with an urbane
exquisite corpse. A young man, a failing novelist, takes advantage of a young executive sparks scandal. Working with a script
by Bess Meredyth, Stahl conjures stark anguish
woman who loves him—an aspiring actress who edits his work—and has and bitter conflict with an avid, quasi-docu-
an affair with a married woman whose jealous husband, a businessman, is mentary view of the teeming and boisterous
also unfaithful. Hong’s view of desperate middle-class strivers and their New York neighborhood, which endows the
drama’s astounding coincidences with an air of

1
deceptions, betrayals, and humiliations is laced with domineering cruelty authenticity and destiny.—R.B. (Anthology Film
and casual violence. The action spans two cities (Seoul and Jeonju), and Archives, Dec. 3.)
Hong films it with probingly acute angles that split the difference between
documentary-like observation and theatrical tableaux. Few filmmakers so For more reviews, visit
frankly confront the ruthless trio of art, lust, and money.—Richard Brody newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town

12 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2, 2019

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1
TABLES FOR TWO
Il Fiorista
17 W. 26th St.
The other night at Il Fiorista, a new
restaurant in NoMad, a burly, bearded,
and surprisingly poetic server caught a
request for a cocktail recommendation
and dived for the end zone. “This one’s
like running down sunlit streets in Tus-
PHOTOGRAPH BY AMANDA HAKAN FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE
cany and throwing confetti in the air,”
he said. “And that one’s like getting into
a new car and driving through smoky
hills with citrus turns.”
Il Fiorista (“the florist,” in Italian) is
not a subtle place. Well into November,
a large potted hydrangea tree sat on the
sidewalk beside the entrance. Inside, din-
ers are met by an enormous table topped
with a towering arrangement of budding
branches, plus botanical-themed prod-
ucts and bouquets for sale.
Both food and drinks follow suit, with
almost every dish and cocktail featuring
some combination of leaves, herbs, seeds,
berries, and blossoms. Tequila is mixed
with flowering coriander, sesame, lime,
and acacia honey for a tart margarita-
adjacent concoction called Sparkle. Gin,
which is made from juniper berries and
other botanicals, might fit the bill on
its own, but the Jitterbug Perfume adds
hibiscus, rose hips, and camomile for
good measure.
I found little to fault among the
tipples that I tried, except that the rye-
based Drunken Sunflower, which is al-
legedly flavored with toasted sunflower
seeds, turmeric, and popcorn shoots—
tiny sprouts that grow out of popcorn
kernels if you soak and plant them—
tasted mostly like whiskey. (Not much
of a complaint.) The food was more of
a gamble.
Il Fiorista—which bills itself as an
“education center” (there are workshops
covering subjects like wreath-making
and flower fermentation)—is the brain-
child of an Italian couple, a former law-
yer and a former private-equity investor
who moved to New York in 2017 with
no prior restaurant experience. They had
the good sense to hire a chef, Garrison
Price, from Il Buco, one of New York’s
best Italian restaurants, and his pastas
are wonderful. Saucy stewed lamb with
sage and sweet, oily chunks of eggplant
mingle with fluted torchio, a short shape
that evokes an unfurling rose. Chewy
house-made squid-ink anelli (stubby
tubes) are slick with a gently smoky chili
oil and strewn with sautéed calamari
and fennel.
Everything else is hit or miss. Hewing
too closely to the floral theme can mean
missing the garden for the flowers, so to
speak. A salad of purple chicory, topped
with rye bread crumbs that were seasoned
with dried geranium, tasted a bit like
potpourri. Seeded crackers, which came
with a sunflower-seed dip, had a slightly
slimy texture and made me think of bird
food. The grass-fed steak with flowering
marjoram, green chili, and sweet-potato
leaves, though admirable from a sustain-
ability standpoint, was so lean and mild
in flavor that I found myself wishing that
someone had offered the cow some bacon.
But I very much enjoyed the sweet-
potato sourdough, which actually tasted
of sweet potato and came with cultured
buttermilk, dyed green with nasturtium
leaves and pooled on top of cultured
butter. The cool, tangy escabeche of
plump mussels, tender new potatoes,
and cabbage, finished with flowering
dill, is worth ordering. At lunch, the
poached-tuna salad is a fun spin on a
niçoise, with coins of pickled carrot in
place of olives, whole anchovies coiled
on top of soft-boiled egg halves, and
extra-crunchy gem lettuce dressed in an
umami-rich fennel-pollen vinaigrette.
Daytime is perhaps the best time
to eat here; the beautiful dining room,
designed by the architect Elizabeth
Roberts, with a psychedelic pastel motif
hand-painted on the walls by the artist
Leanne Shapton, is especially lovely in
natural light. On a recent afternoon,
a woman eating alone seemed beside
herself with pleasure. “I just love the
concept!” she said, relishing a glass of
white wine and a slice of angel-food cake
topped with grapefruit curd. A server
with Pre-Raphaelite red curls wandered
dreamily through the room, tucking
stems into vases. (Dishes $14-$28.)
—Hannah Goldfield
THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2, 2019 13
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THE TALK OF THE TOWN
COMMENT
IN THE LOOP
n July 29, 1986, at the King David
O Hotel in Jerusalem, Vice-Presi-
dent George H. W. Bush met with Ami-
ram Nir, a counterterrorism adviser to
the Israeli government. Nir briefed Bush
in detail about the latest doings in a
shadow foreign-policy scheme autho-
rized by President Ronald Reagan. With
Israel’s help, the United States had se-
cretly sent arms to Iran, in the expec-
tation that American hostages held by
Iranian proxies in Lebanon would be
released. Reagan had pledged never to
negotiate with terrorists, yet Bush had
endorsed the operation and, according
to a retired Air Force general who was
involved in it, was “very attentive, very
interested” in Nir’s update. That No-
vember, news broke about what became
known as the Iran-Contra scandal,
which eventually led to the indictments
of fourteen Administration officials.
Early on, Bush spoke about his role in
a manner that was “at best misleading
and at worst a lie,” in the judgment of
Jon Meacham, his authorized biogra-
pher. Secretary of State George Shultz
remarked privately that Bush was get-
ting drawn into a “web of lies. Blows
his integrity. He’s finished, then.”
In the unravelling of White House
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDA
malfeasance, there comes a time when
the bonds of omertà dissolve and the
reckonings of high-level conspirators
begin. In the case of Donald Trump’s at-
tempt to bully Ukraine into investigat-
ing Democrats for his political gain, that
juncture seemed to arrive last week, with
the testimony of Gordon Sondland,
Trump’s Ambassador to the European
Union. Sondland had earlier given a
closed-door deposition to the House In-
telligence Committee, which is conduct-
ing the impeachment inquiry into Trump.
Last week, in public, he set out to clar-
ify the “bigger picture” on Ukraine. He
explained, “We followed the President’s
orders” while carrying out a wide-rang-
ing effort to strong-arm Ukraine’s Pres-
ident, Volodymyr Zelensky, into aiding
Trump’s reëlection. Was there a quid pro
quo? “The answer is yes,” Sondland de-
clared. His remarks were replete with
such lines for the ages. One in particu-
lar seemed certain to jolt Vice-President
Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike
Pompeo: “Everyone was in the loop.”
Pence and Pompeo have sought to
evade accountability in the Ukraine
affair. Pompeo is reportedly consider-
ing a Senate run in Kansas next year;
both men are seen as eventual contend-
ers for a Republican Presidential nom-
ination. Since September, as sundry rats
on Trump’s foundering ship of state
have scurried for dry ground, Pompeo
and Pence have addressed the Ukraine
matter tersely, protected in part by White
House stonewalling of House subpoe-
nas for documents and testimony. Sond-
land’s appearance has made their at-
tempts at political finesse considerably
more difficult.
Sondland is a Trump-lite figure who
made a fortune in hotels and donated
a million dollars to Trump’s inaugural
committee before the President ap-
pointed him to the ambassadorship. In
that role, he joined the Administration’s
attempt, earlier this year, to persuade
Zelensky to announce investigations
into former Vice-President Joe Biden
and his son, Hunter, and also into sup-
posed coöperation between the Dem-
ocrats and Ukraine during the 2016 cam-
paign. Hunter Biden served on the board
of Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company,
when his father was Vice-President;
both Bidens deny any wrongdoing.
Fiona Hill, who, until earlier this year,
served as the Trump Administration’s
top N.S.C. expert on Russia, forcefully
testified on Thursday that claims of
Ukrainian electoral interference are a
“fictional narrative.”
To undermine the Democrats,Trump
asked Sondland to work with his per-
sonal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and Sond-
land duly attended meetings with Ze-
lensky, while coördinating with the U.S.
Embassy in Kyiv and the White House.
Throughout, his boss at the State De-
partment, Pompeo, “knew what we were
doing and why,” Sonderland testified.
It was already clear that, as the campaign
THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2, 2019 15
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to pressure Ukraine intensified, Pompeo
had failed to stand by the U.S. Ambas-
sador there, Marie Yovanovitch, whom
Trump fired in May. (Pompeo has said
that she was not fired for “a nefarious
purpose.”) Sondland provided new ev-
idence—excerpts from four e-mails that
he wrote to Pompeo and others between
July and September—which showed
that he kept Pompeo updated on the
back-channel operation. Beginning in
July, the Administration withheld hun-
dreds of millions of dollars in congres-
sionally approved military aid to Ukraine.
Several diplomats and N.S.C. officials
have testified in the inquiry that the
suspension was designed to coerce Ze-
lensky; Sondland’s e-mail excerpts sug-
gest that Pompeo may have been briefed
on this part of the pressure campaign.
(A State Department spokesperson said
that it was “flat-out false” to suggest that
Sondland had told Pompeo that Trump
had linked the aid to investigations.)
Sondland also testified about Pence’s
role—in particular, about a meeting that
DEARLY DEPARTED
FIVE FRIENDS
ne recent Wednesday, the lunch-
O time patrons of Marea, on Cen-
tral Park South, had the opportunity
to do four double takes in a row, as
Cynthia Nixon, Christine Baranski,
Glenn Close, and Whoopi Goldberg
swanned in, one by one, and sat at
a corner booth. It was a reunion of
sorts, or, as Nixon called it, “a bitter-
sweet treat.” Five years ago on that day,
the four had gathered at the restau-
rant to celebrate with the director Mike
Nichols on his eighty-third birthday.
It turned out to be his last: he died
two weeks later, after a heart attack.
“We were sitting just there,” Baranski
said, pointing. “It was the four ladies
of 1984.”
She was referring to the year that
Baranski, Close, and Nixon starred in
the Tom Stoppard comedy “The Real
Thing,” which Nichols directed on
Broadway. By then, he was well into
16 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2, 2019
he and Pence had with Zelensky on
September 1st, in Warsaw. At the time,
Pence told reporters that the aid was
being held up because of “great con-
cerns” that he and Trump had about “is-
sues of corruption,” but he offered no
specifics. Pence had denied publicly that
the delay had anything to do with
Trump’s reëlection bid. Sondland’s tes-
timony undercuts that assertion; he re-
called that he “mentioned” to Pence in
Warsaw that he “had concerns that the
delay in aid had become tied to the issue
of investigations” into Trump’s domes-
tic opponents. Pence’s chief of staff has
denied that this conversation took place.
Pence and Pompeo are hardly alone
in having forged Faustian bargains with
Donald Trump, or in having gambled
that they will somehow survive his heed-
lessness and serial disloyalty. Clever
and ambitious politicians do occasion-
ally outlast complicity in Presidential
scandals. In late 1986, George Shultz
warned George H. W. Bush to stop
misleading the public about Iran-Con-
his career as a hitmaker. “I always said
that that production was like taking
the Concorde to Paris,” Baranski said.
They traded stories of directorial
miracles. “We were having trouble with
the second act,” Close recalled, “and he
came in one morning and said, ‘I know
the problem: the furniture’s in the
wrong place.’ We rearranged the fur-
niture, and everything fell into place.”
At another rehearsal, she went on,
“Mike said, ‘If you ever get lost, drown
in each other’s eyes.’”
Nixon, who turned eighteen that
year, remembered one of Close’s scenes
in “The Real Thing,” in which her hus-
band roots out an affair that she’s been
having. “Mike had her eat a candy bar,”
Nixon said, “so that by the time she re-
alizes she’s caught she’s got a mouth
full of chocolate. She’s trying to feel
guilty, but she’s not, really. So it’s this
great metaphor—this delicious candy.”
“He had that wonderful ability to
see what wasn’t there,” Goldberg said.
While “The Real Thing” was playing,
Goldberg, who was not then well
known, was doing a solo show in Chel-
sea, and Nichols went to see it. One of
her characters was a dope fiend who
visits the Anne Frank House. “He came
tra before he destroyed his chance to
succeed Reagan as President. Bush bris-
tled, but took the advice and lay low;
he won the White House in 1988. These
are darker times. The Republican Party,
because of its capitulation to Trump,
is headed for a moral and political ac-
counting. The President’s racketeering
scheme in Ukraine is likely to inflict
lasting damage on the reputations of
all those at high levels of his Admin-
istration who have participated or stood
by mutely.
Witness by witness, the case for
Trump’s impeachment is strengthen-
ing. Yet the political equation in Wash-
ington remains at a stalemate. If the
Democratic-controlled House does im-
peach the President, the Republican-
controlled Senate still looks set to ac-
quit him. The Ukraine dossier—and all
that it continues to reveal about Trump’s
indifference to the Constitution—seems
headed for the voters. A year from now,
we’ll know their verdict.
—Steve Coll
backstage, and he was weeping,” Gold-
berg recalled, then broke into a sotto-
voce Nichols impression. “He said, ‘I
was on the last boat out of Germany
when I was a child, and so this story
of yours took me to places that I hadn’t
thought about in a long time.’ ” He
offered to bring Goldberg’s show to
Broadway—a gamble that would launch
her to stardom. “I said, ‘I should tell
Glenn Close, Christine Baranski,
Cynthia Nixon, and Whoopi Goldberg

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you, I can really suck badly.’ He said,
‘Do you suck often?’”
The ladies cracked up and sipped their
Arnold Palmers. (All four are featured
in “Life Isn’t Everything,” Ash Carter
and Sam Kashner’s new oral history about
Nichols.) More stories followed. Nixon
recalled leaving “The Real Thing” to do
Nichols’s production of the David Rabe
play “Hurlyburly,” in a sweltering black-
box theatre in Chicago. “They had a ter-
rible air-conditioner that was loud,”
Nixon said. In the penultimate scene,
William Hurt’s character learns that his
friend Phil, played by Harvey Keitel, has
died. “What Mike did was, the moment
where Bill said, ‘Phil’s dead,’ they turned
the air off.”“There was a vibrational shift!”
Baranski exclaimed.
Then “Hurlyburly” moved to Broad-
way, two blocks from “The Real Thing.”
One night, Nixon joked to Nichols
that, if the timing worked just right,
she could shuttle between theatres and
do both plays simultaneously. “He said,
‘We’ll call your agent in the morning.’”
For a few months, during her first se-
mester at Barnard, she did just that.
She quit when she worried that she
was failing geology.
“Mike was really pissed,” Nixon re-
called. “He wrote me a note that ba-
sically said, ‘Good luck in college. I
hope whatever you go on to do, you’ll
look back at this time with this rag-
gle-taggle group of players and think
of us fondly.’”
The ladies cracked up again. “Cyn!”
Baranski squealed in sympathy. “Oh,
he was just being Mike.” Pissy Mike,
they agreed, was brutal but witty.
“His favorite thing to say was ‘Beautiful
and dangerous, like Rio de Janeiro,’ ”
Baranski said, savoring each word. Days
after Nichols died, Goldberg miracu-
lously received a birthday note from
him. “I just thought, Well, if anybody
was going to come back from the dead
to send me a note on my birthday, he’d
be the one to do it,” she said.
Desserts arrived. The foursome softly
sang, “Happy birthday, dear Mike.” At
that final birthday lunch, Close remem-
bered, he talked about the importance
of love: “Love, kindness, and luck.”
Baranski looked across the room and
said, “My sense is he would have spent
another hour or two at that table.”
—Michael Schulman
1
VISITING DIGNITARY
WALKING AND TALKING
right and early on a recent Satur-
B day, Charles Ray, the Los Angeles
sculptor, stepped out of the Four Sea-
sons Hotel, and walked west on Fifty-
seventh Street. Ray, who is sixty-six, was
in town for the opening of a show at
the Hill Art Foundation, in Chelsea. At
the luxuriously spare nonprofit space,
his enigmatic sculptures—a life-size alu-
minum mime stretched on a camping
bed, a sterling-silver mountain lion about
to maul a dog, an apple core wrought
in gold—were presented alongside Re-
naissance and Baroque bronzes, among
them three Christs, which were selected
by the artist from the collection of the
hedge-fund billionaire J. Tomilson Hill
and his wife, Janine. The curatorial gam-
bit threw into relief the solemn, even
spiritual quality of Ray’s pieces, which
can take fifteen years to complete.
Turning north onto Madison Ave-
nue, his pace was measured but steady.
“I walk a lot,” he said. Fourteen years
ago, his aorta was replaced during open-
heart surgery, after which he started
walking ten to twelve miles a day. “I get
up at 2:30 a.m., leave at three, and I’m
back home around 6:15, and then I have
breakfast, swim for an hour, and go to
the studio,” he said. If there’s time later,
he’ll walk some more. He used to walk
in the dense darkness of the Santa Mon-
ica Mountains—“I had a flashlight, and
it was really beautiful. I would see wild
animals, even strange people”—but it
made his wife, Silvia Gaspardo-Moro,
nervous. Now he walks from Brentwood,
where the couple lives, to the Santa Mon-
ica Pier and back. He also has a route
in every major city he has shown in. “I
have one in Paris, in Madrid, in Tokyo,”
he said. He never misses a day. “In Chi-
cago, I have a nice route that I do along
the lake, even when it’s twenty below
zero. You have to know how to dress.”
Ray is spindly, with a mass of gray
curls, rimless glasses, and the slight,
kindly stoop of a man who makes an
effort to meet his interlocutor halfway.
Each of his sculptures involves a lengthy
process of thinking and tinkering, over
the course of which its materials might
change, and its scale might shift. “I spent
three years looking at details on a sculp-
ture that I was working on, including a
toenail,” he recalled. “And I asked Sil-
via, ‘Will anyone ever notice the slight
changes I’m making to this one thing,
the subtleties?,’ and she said, ‘No, but
the meaning in these details adds up
over time, like an ecosystem.’”
He went on, “There are no big rev-
elations as you’re walking, but over the
yearscape the temporality of this regu-
lar action puts things in a more inter-
esting perspective.” A siren shrieked in
the distance. “Sometimes I wonder, How
much longer can this go on? I keep
thinking, Well, I’ll keep on doing this,
and then I’ll die, you know?” He laughed.
Sculpture is similar. “It makes you see
your entire temporal shape.” He sketched
a few quick strokes in the air, like the
chalk outline of a body.
Across the street from the Met Breuer,
formerly the Whitney, Ray paused. “This
is my alma mater,” he said. He has par-
ticipated in five Whitney Biennials. His
eyes scanned the concrete façade. “For
my generation, brutalist architecture
meant that we had left home,” he said,
“since that was the style of so many uni-
versity buildings.” He began walking
again, carefully skirting an overzealous
jogger. The city was waking up.
On his New York route, Ray always
tries to stop at the Metropolitan Mu-
seum, where he spends at least an hour
looking at sculpture. It was a little after
ten, and the museum was already teem-
ing. “Lately, I’ve been trying the wings
that are emptier,” he said, “like the Cy-
prus section.” But this time he headed
toward the popular Greek and Roman
galleries, where he stopped before a
Greek stela memorializing the death of
a child, from the fifth century B.C.
“I think this is one of the most pro-
found pieces,” he said, taking in the
carved marble figure of a girl, draped in
robes, her face turned down toward two
doves in her hands. “Look at the orches-
trated elements of the form, in the bril-
liant here-ness of the sculpting!” His voice
fell to an excited whisper. “The one part
that isn’t a relief, where there’s a gap be-
tween the figure and the slab, is where
the girl’s lips touch the bird’s beak!” He
THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2, 2019 17
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gestured toward the small space. “She’s
dead, yes, but there’s breath, there’s
pneuma, there’s birdsong! ” He took a step
back. “Looking at this makes me feel
like it’s O.K. to die, because when I’m
1
dead that space is still going to be there.”
—Naomi Fry
MILESTONE DEPT.
MASCOT LOVE
ll the love in the world, as we know,
A won’t get the Mets to the playoffs.
But when one season ends another be-
gins. Mrs. Met, for her part, refuses to
frown. (A humanoid with a giant base-
ball for a head, she is stamped with a
permanent toothless smile.) The other
night, she directed her attention to next
spring’s recruits: not ballplayers—brides.
In the Foxwoods Club, upstairs at Citi
Field, she hosted a wedding expo, with
some eighty venders offering “every-
thing you need to plan and prepare for
“There—now I’ve taught you everything I know about splitting rocks.”
your perfect day,” including florists,
travel agencies, limo services, personal
trainers, and a light-up robot on stilts.
Mrs. Met has a lot in common with
her spouse, except that she has hair and
eyelashes. Their relationship began in
the mid-sixties, when she was going by
Lady Met. (Her first name is Jan.) In
the seventies, the pair started showing
up at games together; each earned a hun-
dred bucks plus all the hot dogs they
could eat. Pretty soon, Mrs. Met got her
new title (and, no kidding, the woman
inside her married the man in the
Mr. Met head). A few years later, the
team phased them out; then, in 1994,
Mr. Met returned, stag. According to an
official team statement, “Mrs. Met has
been busy taking care of her family at
home in Flushing, Queens, and work-
ing part-time as an event planner.” (Other
reports indicate that fans in the stands
had been grabbing her legs.) When Mrs.
Met rejoined the team, in 2013, she’d gone
from being a redhead to a brunette.
At the expo, she stepped out in party
attire. Whereas at games she suits up in
uniform and wears a ponytail, for eve-
ning she lets her hair down in a perky
bob and wears a little black dress; her
shoes are wedges with bows. For a “first
dance” showcase, she did the hustle with
an instructor from the Fred Astaire
Dance Studios to “Shut Up and Dance.”
(Mr. Met was off for the night.)
At booths, wedding service providers
made their pitches and suggested ways
of catering to a Mets-obsessed guest list.
Sarah Margaret, an officiant, had a ce-
ramic Mets apple on her table. “This
could be on your altar,” she said. A sand
ceremony—bride and groom pour two
separate vials of sand into a vessel—in
orange and blue could also be arranged.
“I’m interfaith,” she said. “You want faith,
you want spirituality, you want the Mets?
I can do that.”
David Schwartz, a magician, had an
idea for a Mets-themed wedding. “I
would ask people, ‘Who is the best Mets
player of all time?’ And then I would
read their minds.”
Where would Joanna Kuther, who
plans “custom honeymoons,” send Mr.
and Mrs. Met on theirs? “On a cruise,
for sure,” she said. “They need to get out
of New York and see the world.” What
if they roll overboard? “They’ll just float.”
True diehards can get hitched at Citi
Field. “When are you getting married?”
Manny Ortiz, a Mets event-sales coör-
dinator, asked a bride-to-be. He sched-
ules weddings on days when the team
is out of town; there was no seventh-
inning vows package being offered. Nor
can ceremonies be held on the field;
couples stand atop the visitors’ dugout.
“Your guests sit in seats behind the dug-
out,” Ortiz explained. “There’s a static
message that goes up on the screens—
we can customize it for you.” In lieu of
an aisle, the bride descends concrete
steps. Afterward, a reception can be held
in one of the stadium’s dining venues.
It was the first wedding expo Mrs. Met
had hosted, and it seemed like a hit. Some
five hundred people attended—brides
and grooms in Mets outfits, many ac-
companied by patient parents. A pair of
Pete Alonsos (his jersey was blue, hers
white) chatted up a guy in a suit and a
GAHAN WILSON, APRIL 9, 2007
blue-and-orange tie about his combo ser-
vice as an officiant-slash-photographer
(during the ceremony, his teen-age son
takes the pictures). The groom’s dad stood
by holding their swag bags. “My son’s a
Yankees fan,” he said. “But his fiancée,
she loves the Mets. So here we are.”
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Mrs. Met made the rounds, greeting
fans. She does not speak. When asked
where she got married, she pointed down
to indicate “here.” Citi Field? A nod.
Uh, wait, so, how long have you been
married—the wedding wasn’t at Shea?
Mrs. Met shook her head and covered
her face with her big white-gloved hands.
“Have there been multiple Mrs. Mets?”
a bride wondered aloud. “You never hear
about the Mets divorces.” As it happened,
the original couple that filled the mas-
cot suits called it quits after twenty-five
years. But getting married is kind of like
rooting for the Mets, isn’t it? The slogan
1
is “Ya gotta believe.”
—Betsy Morais
PARIS POSTCARD
THE LAGERFELD ECONOMY
hen Karl Lagerfeld died, in Feb-
W ruary, “fashion and culture lost a
great inspiration,” Bernard Arnault, the
C.E.O. and chairman of L.V.M.H., said.
A handful of businesses in Paris also lost
a major patron, a one-man stimulus pack-
age who for decades had primed their
margins and their creativity. The Lager-
feld District: a quilted clutch of bonnes
adresses along the Tuileries and the gar-
dens of the Champs-Élysées, not far from
the headquarters of Chanel, where he
was the creative director. The collapse of
the Lagerfeld economy wasn’t cata-
strophic—Colette, one of his favorite
boutiques, had already closed, in 2017—
but his absence continues to be felt on
shop floors around the city’s central ar-
rondissements. “Karl liked to say that he
was eleven per cent of our business,” Dan-
ielle Cillien Sabatier, the director of Gali-
gnani, the bookshop on the Rue de Rivoli,
said the other day. When a visitor asked
if the figure was accurate, she didn’t cor-
rect it. “He was certainly our No. 1 client.”
Lagerfeld went into Galignani once
or twice a week. In a replica of his office
that he once exhibited, shopping bags
from the store cover every surface. “Once,
we changed colors, from dark blue to
light blue, and Karl said, ‘Oh, it’s the blue
of Lanvin,’” Sabatier recalled. “I said, ‘No,
it’s the blue of my eyes.’” An author and
publisher himself, Lagerfeld was a bib-
liophile of epic appetite. (Practically a
bibliophage, he is said to have torn the
pages out of thick paperbacks as he read
them.) He bought French books, En-
glish books, books of poetry, signed books,
first editions, monographs, everything
he could find on the Wiener Werkstätte.
“Our booksellers knew the themes of his
fashion shows long before they hap-
pened,” Sabatier said. “Sometimes we
were thinking, This is awkward, what is
he preparing? He’d buy dozens of books
on astronauts, and, months later, there’d
be a rocket at the Grand Palais.”
“Karl Kaiser,” the French journalist
Raphaëlle Bacqué’s biography of Lager-
feld, has been a recent best-seller at Gali-
gnani. Near the fine-arts desk, there is a
little shrine to him: a framed portrait, a
photograph he took of a model posing
in front of the shop’s windows. He might
have been a monster boss (“I have no
human feelings,” he once claimed), but
he was apparently a peach of a customer.
“He was very nice to everyone,” Sabatier
said, pointing out another framed pho-
tograph, of Lagerfeld’s blue-cream Bir-
man cat, Choupette, her head poking
out of a Galignani bag. Lagerfeld had
shot it for a window display and then
given it to Sabatier for her office. She
and several of her colleagues attended
his memorial service. “I think it was real
luck to come across such an incredible
personality, and to see him in such sim-
ple conditions,” she said.
A few doors down, at Hilditch & Key,
shirtmakers since 1899, Philippe Zubrzy-
cki, the store’s manager, lit up when La-
gerfeld’s name was mentioned. Monsieur
Lagerfeld, he said, ordered around a hun-
dred and fifty made-to-measure garments
a year: nightshirts, kimonos, the white
button-downs with collars like neck braces
that had been his signature look since he
lost ninety-two pounds over the course
of a year by drinking protein shakes and
eating nothing after 8 P.M. “He also or-
dered sleeveless ones, for painting,” Zub-
rzycki said. A client of long standing, La-
gerfeld had cycled through different looks.
At one point, when he was spending time
at a château in Brittany, he had a taste
for billowing shirts made in taffeta.
“Sometimes he’d put in an order for fifty
pieces and, over the weeks, the order
would grow,” Zubrzycki said, acknowl-
edging that Lagerfeld’s patronage was
“fairly consequential.” Lagerfeld sent
sketches for his orders by fax or courier,
but he was open to suggestions from
Hilditch & Key’s salespeople and tailors.
“He loved when we made propositions,
and often he’d say, ‘Oui, bingo! ’”
Lagerfeld’s florist was Lachaume, a
hundred-and-seventy-five-year-old fam-
ily business on the Rue du Faubourg
Saint-Honoré, where Marcel Proust went
each morning to purchase an orchid for
his buttonhole. Caroline Cnocquaert and
Stéphanie Primet, its sister proprietors,
responded immediately to a reporter’s
invitation to talk about Lagerfeld, writ-
Karl Lagerfeld
ing, “With great pleasure, he was our
dream client!” The first time Lagerfeld
came into the shop, in 1971, he bought
“a very beautiful big white rose” from
their grandmother, Giuseppina. An hour
later, the sisters recalled, Yves Saint Lau-
rent showed up, asking their mother, Co-
lette, for exactly the same flower. When
iPhones came out, Lagerfeld gave one
to each sister, so that he could send them
texts and images (“That was his word,
rather than saying ‘photos’”). He hated
holidays, when his ateliers were closed,
and would take advantage of the fact that
Lachaume stayed open, sending mes-
sages or coming in to chat. Cnocquaert
and Primet had been very sad when La-
gerfeld died, but, they said, “let’s think
of the future, that’s what Monsieur La-
gerfeld did.” They’d have their memo-
ries, they said, of his incredible orders.
“We created thousands of bouquets!”
—Lauren Collins
THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2, 2019 19
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PERSONAL HISTORY
HURRICANE SEASON
After the storm.
BY DAVID SEDARIS
row up in North Carolina and it’s
G hard to get too attached to a beach
house, knowing, as you do, that it’s on
borrowed time. If the hurricane doesn’t
come this autumn, it’ll likely come the
next. The one that claimed our place—
the Sea Section—in September of 2018,
was Florence. Hugh was devastated,
while my only thought was: What’s
with the old-fashioned names? Irma,
Agnes, Bertha, Floyd—they sound like
finalists in a pinochle tournament. Isn’t
it time for Hurricanes Madison and
Skylar? Where’s Latrice, or Category 4
Fredonté?
Florence, it was said, gave new mean-
ing to the word “namaste” along the
North Carolina coast.
“Are you going to evacuate?”
“Namaste.”
Hugh and I were in London when
the hurricane hit, and was followed al-
most immediately by a tornado. Our
friend Bermey owns a house—the Dark
Side of the Dune—not far from ours,
and went over to check on the Sea Sec-
tion as soon as people were allowed back
onto Emerald Isle. He found our doors
wide open—blown open by the wind. A
20 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2, 2019
large section of the roof had been ripped
off, and the rain that had fallen in the
subsequent days had caused the ceilings
on both floors to cave in, the water drain-
ing, as if the house were a sieve, down
into the carport. Bermey took pictures,
which looked so tawdry I was embar-
rassed to share them. It seems that rats
had been living in the second-floor ceil-
ings. So there were our beds, speckled
with currant-size turds and tufts of
bloated, discolored insulation.
All the interior drywall would need
to be replaced, as would the roof, of
course, along with the doors and win-
dows. We were left with a shell, essen-
tially. Had ours been the only place
affected, it might have been easy to have
the repairs done, but, between the hur-
ricane and the flooding, thousands of
homes had been either destroyed or se-
verely damaged—and that was just in
North Carolina.
Our other house, luckily, was rela-
tively unscathed. It’s next door to the
Sea Section, and when it came up for
sale, in 2016, Hugh disregarded my ob-
jections and bought it. His argument
was that if he didn’t get it someone would
most likely tear it down and construct
the sort of McMansion that has become
the rule on Emerald Isle rather than the
exception. The size of these new houses
was one thing—eight bedrooms were
common, spread over three or four sto-
ries—but what came with them, and
what you really didn’t want next door
to you, was a swimming pool. “It hap-
pened to us ten years ago,” moaned my
friend Lynette, who owns an older, tra-
ditionally sized cottage up the street
from us. “Now all we hear is ‘Marco!’
‘Polo!’ over and over. It’s like torture.”
The place that Hugh bought is an-
cient by Emerald Isle standards—built
in 1972. It’s a single-story four-bedroom,
perched on stilts and painted a shade
of pink that’s almost carnal. Like the
Sea Section, it’s right on the ocean, but
unlike the Sea Section it’s rented out to
vacationers. At first, Hugh went through
an agency, but now he does it himself,
through a number of Web sites. Our
friend Lee across the street rents out his
place, Almost Paradise, as do most of
our Emerald Isle neighbors, and all of
them have stories to tell. People leave
with the pillows and coat hangers. Peo-
ple grill on the wooden decks. They
bring dogs regardless of whether or not
you allow them, and small children,
meaning all sorts of things get flushed
down the toilets: seashells, doll clothes,
dice. And, of course, people complain
about absolutely everything: The TV
only gets ninety channels! There’s some
missing paint on the picnic table!
Lee once got a comment from a renter
ILLUSTRATION BY TAMARA SHOPSIN
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that read “I was shocked by your out-
door shower.”
“I was thinking, How surprising can
it be?” he told me. “I mean, you’re at the
beach, for God’s sake. Then I went out
to wash up, and when I touched the
handle for the hot water I got thrown
clear across the room.”
Hugh bought the second house with
everything in it, and, although it’s a bit
heavy on the white wicker, the furni-
ture is far from awful. He drew the line
at the art work, though. It was standard
fare for a beach house: garish pictures
of sailboats and sunsets. Signs reading
“If You’re Not Barefoot, You’re Over-
dressed” and “Old Fishermen Never
Die, They Just Smell That Way.”
If he wanted to, Hugh could work as
a professional forger. That’s how good he
is at copying paintings. So for the rental
house he reproduced a number of Picas-
sos, including “La Baignade,” from 1937,
which depicts two naked women knee-
deep in the water with a third person
looking on. The figures are abstracted,
almost machinelike, and cement-colored,
positioned against a sapphire sea and an
equally intense sky. Hugh did three oth-
ers—all beach-related—and got a com-
ment from a renter saying that, although
the house was comfortable enough, the
“art work” (she put it in quotes) was defi-
nitely not family-friendly. As the mother
of young children, she had taken the
paintings down during her stay, and said
that if he wanted her to return he’d defi-
nitely have to rethink his décor. As if they
were Hustler centerfolds!
“C an you believe that woman?” Hugh
said, almost a year after the hur-
ricane hit, when we arrived to spend a
week on Emerald Isle. It was August.
The Sea Section was still under con-
struction, so we stayed at the rental
house, which he was calling the Pink
House, for reasons I could not for the
life of me understand. “It’s just such a
boring name,” I argued.
“It really is,” my sister Gretchen
agreed. She’d pulled up an hour before
we had, and was dressed in a fudge-col-
ored tankini. Her long hair is going sil-
ver, and was gathered in a burger-size
bun, not quite on the back of her head
but not on top, either. She had turned
sixty earlier that week and looked as if
she were made of well-burnished
leather—the effect of age and aggressive,
year-round tanning. The skin between
her throat and her chest had gone crêpey,
and it bothered me to notice it. I cannot
bear watching my sisters get old. It just
seems cruel. They were all such beauties.
“Calling this the Pink House is just
nothing,” she said.
The best name, in my opinion, con-
sidering that the rental was next to the
Sea Section, was a choice between the
Amniotic Shack and Canker Shores.
Both had been suggested by a third party
and were far better than what I’d come
up with.
“And what was that?” Gretchen asked,
opening a cabinet in search of a coffee
cup.
“Country Pride Strong Family Pep-
permill,” I told her.
“Not that again,” Hugh said.
“It’s not a pun, but I think it has a
nice ring to it.”
Hugh opened the refrigerator, then
reached for the trash can. Renters aren’t
supposed to leave things behind, but
they do, and none of their condiments
were meeting his approval. “It sounds
like you just went to the grocery store
and wrote down words.”
“That’s exactly what I did,” I told him.
“Well, too bad. It’s my house and I’ll
call it what I want to.”
“But—”
He tossed a bottle of orange salad
dressing into the garbage. “But noth-
ing. Butt out.”
“C-R-A-B,” Gretchen mouthed. I
nodded in agreement, and made pinch-
ing motions with my hands. It can some-
times be tricky having Hugh around
my family. “What is his problem?” each
of my siblings has asked me at one time
or another, usually flopping down on
my bed during a visit.
“What is whose problem,” I always
say, but it’s just a formality. I know who
they’re talking about. I’ve heard Hugh
yell at everyone, even my father. “Get
out of my kitchen” is pretty common,
as is “Use a plate,” and “Did I say you
could start eating?”
I’d like to be loyal when they com-
plain about him. I’d like to say, “I’m
sorry, but that’s my boyfriend of almost
thirty years you’re talking about.” But
I’ve always felt that my first loyalty is
to my family, and so I whisper, “Isn’t it
horrible?”
“How can you stand it?” they ask.
“I don’t know!” I say. Though, of
course, I do. I love Hugh. Not the moody
Hugh who slams doors and shouts at
people—that one I merely tolerate—but
he’s not like that all the time. Just enough
to have earned him a reputation.
“Why did you yell at Lisa?” I asked,
the year that three of my sisters joined
us for Christmas at our home in Sussex.
“Because she came to the dinner table
with a coat on.”
“So?”
“It made her look like she wasn’t stay-
ing,” he said. “Like she was going to
leave as soon as her ride pulled up.”
“And?” I said, though I knew exactly
what he was saying. It was Christmas
dinner, and it’s a slippery slope. One
year you wear a down coat at the table,
and the next you’re dressed in a sweat-
suit eating cold spaghetti out of a pan
in front of the TV. My sisters can say
what they will about Hugh’s moodiness,
but no one can accuse him of letting
himself go, or even of taking shortcuts,
especially during the holidays, when it’s
homemade everything, from the egg-
nog to the piglet with an apple in its
mouth. There’s a tree, there are his Ger-
man great-grandmother’s cookies, he
will spend four days in an apron listen-
ing to the “Messiah,” and that’s the way
it is, goddammit.
Similarly, he makes the beach feel the
way it’s supposed to. A few years back,
he designed a spiral-shaped outdoor
shower at the Sea Section that we found
ourselves using even in the winter. He
grills seafood every night, and serves
lunch on the deck overlooking the ocean.
He makes us ice cream with fruit sold
at an outdoor stand by the people who
grew it, and mixes drinks at cocktail
hour. It’s just that he’s, well, Hugh.
When I get mad at someone, it’s usu-
ally a reaction to something he or she
said or did. Hugh’s anger is more like
the weather: something you open your
door and step into. There’s no dressing
for it, and neither is there any method
for predicting it. A few months after we
met, for example, he and I ran into an
old friend of mine at a play. This was in
New York, in 1991. We thought we’d all
go out to eat, then Hugh offered to cook
at his apartment. Somewhere between
the theatre and Canal Street, his mood
darkened. There was no reason. It was
THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2, 2019 21
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• •
like the wind shifting direction. The
making of dinner involved a lot of mut-
tering, and, when my friend sat down
to eat, his chair gave way, causing him
to tumble onto the floor.
I apologized, saying that the chair
was already broken, and Hugh contra-
dicted me: “No, it wasn’t.”
“Why would you say that?” I asked,
after my friend had hobbled home.
“Because it wasn’t broken,” he said.
“It doesn’t matter,” I explained.
“The point was to make him feel less
embarrassed.”
“Too bad,” Hugh said. “I can’t hide
who I am.”
“Well, it’s really important to try,”
I told him. “I mean, like, really, really
important.”
“ L etHugh
me ask you two a question,”
said to Gretchen and me,
on our first afternoon at the Pink House
in August. He opened the sliding glass
door to the deck and invited us to sit
on the rocking chairs out there. The
nails that held them together had been
weeping rust onto the unpainted wood
for so long that I put a towel down so
as not to stain my white shorts, and got
snapped at for it.
“Now, please.”
I took a seat. “Ready.”
“O.K., do you think those are rick-
ety? That’s what the renter who hated
the paintings called them.”
22 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2, 2019
I settled in and swayed as much going
side to side as I did going back and
forth. “Yes,” I said. “ ‘Rickety’ is proba-
bly the best word for this, possibly fol-
lowed by ‘kindling.’”
“This one, too,” Gretchen said.
“Well, you’re just spoiled,” Hugh told
us. “There’s nothing at all wrong with
those rocking chairs.” He stormed back
into the house, and I heard the click
that meant he had locked us out.
“Goddammit,” Gretchen said. “My
cigarettes are in there.”
Lisa and Paul and Amy couldn’t
make it to the beach this time. It was
sad being on the island without them,
but at least it left fewer people for Hugh
to crab at. “If you want to raise your
voice to someone, you might consider
the contractors,” I said in the living
room the following morning, looking
next door at our empty driveway, and
not hearing what I heard coming from
other houses: the racket of hammers
and Skilsaws.
“Why don’t you call them?” Hugh
asked. “I filled out all the insurance
forms. I see to all the bills and taxes, so
how about you take care of something
for a change?”
I didn’t respond, but just sighed,
knowing he wasn’t serious. The last thing
Hugh wants is me taking care of some-
thing. I wouldn’t have paid him any
mind, but Gretchen was in the room. I
don’t like seeing my relationship through
her eyes. That said, I do like seeing my
family from Hugh’s vantage point. To
him, we’re like dolls cut from flypaper,
each one of us connected to the other
and dotted with foul little corpses.
“What is with men adjusting their
balls all the time?” Gretchen asked, star-
ing down at her phone.
“Are you talking about someone
specifically?” Hugh asked.
“The guys that I work with,” she said.
“The landscaping crews. They can’t keep
their hands away from their crotches.”
“It could be due to heat rash,” I sug-
gested, adding that touching your balls
in public is now illegal in Italy. “Men
did it to ward off bad luck, apparently.”
“Hmmm,” Gretchen said, turning
back to her phone. “I was in a meeting
a few weeks back, and when I took one
of my shoes off a roach ran out. It must
have been hiding in there when I got
dressed that morning.”
“What does that have to do with
anything?” Hugh asked.
I rolled my eyes. “Does it matter? It’s
always time for a good story.”
“Your family,” he said, like we were
a bad thing.
That afternoon, I watched him swim
out into the ocean. Gretchen and I were
on the beach together, and I remem-
bered a young woman earlier in the
summer who’d had a leg bitten off, as
well as a few fingers. Squinting at the
horizon as Hugh grew smaller and
smaller, I said that if the sharks did get
him I just hoped they’d spare his right
arm. “That way he can still kind of cook,
and access our accounts online.”
It’s hard to imagine Gretchen’s boy-
friend crabbing at anyone. She and Mar-
shall have been together almost as long
as Hugh and I have, and I can’t think
of a gentler guy. The same can be said
of Paul’s wife, Kathy. My brother-in-
law, Bob, might get crotchety every so
often, but when he snaps at Lisa for, say,
balancing a glass of grape juice on the
arm of a white sofa, we usually think,
Well, she kind of deserved it. Amy’s
been single since the mid-nineties, but
I never heard her last boyfriend, a funny
and handsome asthmatic, yell at any-
one, even when he had good reason to.
Gretchen and I had been on the beach
for all of twenty minutes before she did
what she always does, eventually. “I went
online recently and read all sorts of hor-
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rible comments about you,” she said la- the middle of making dinner”—as if I’d mer, I’m lucky to get fifteen in, and even
zily, as if the shape of a passing cloud asked him to name all the world capi- then I really have to force myself.
had reminded her of it. tals in alphabetical order. I feel as though I don’t like to aimlessly wander, espe-
I don’t know where she gets the idea I’m always complimenting him. “You cially in a place where thunderstorms can
that I—that anyone—would want to look so handsome tonight.” “What a appear without warning. I need a desti-
hear things like this. “Gretchen, there’s great meal you made.” “You’re so smart, nation, so I generally go to a coffee shop
a reason I don’t Google myself, I really so well read, etc.” It’s effortless, really. near the grocery store, usually with a cou-
don’t want to—” “I don’t want to give you a fat head,” ple of letters to answer. Back and forth
“A lot of people just can’t stand you.” he’ll tell me, when I ask for something I’ll walk, making three or more trips a
“I know,” I said. “It’s a consequence in return. day. When Hugh and I lived in Nor-
of putting stuff out there—you’re going “My head is, like, the size of an onion. mandy, he heard a local woman telling a
to get reactions. That doesn’t mean I I’m begging you, please, enlarge it.” friend about a mentally challenged man
have to regard them all.” He says I get enough praise already. she often saw marching past her house.
But it’s not the same thing. He wore headphones, she said, and looked
eez, I thought, sprinting back to the “O.K.,” he’ll say, finally. “You’re per- at pictures while talking to himself.
J house over the scorching sand and
wondering which was worse—getting
sistent. How’s that?” That, of course, was me, but they
weren’t pictures I was holding. They
snapped at by Hugh or having to en- like coming to Emerald Isle in May. were index cards with that day’s ten new
dure what Gretchen was doling out. Al-
though it’s true that I don’t read reviews
I It’s not too hot then, and most every-
one in my family can take a week off.
French vocabulary words on them.
In Sussex not long ago, an acquain-
or look myself up, I do answer my mail. Ditto at Thanksgiving. August, though, tance approached me to share a similar
A few months earlier, I’d been given is definitely something I do for Hugh, story. Again I was identified as men-
two hundred and thirty letters sent to a sacrifice. The heat that month is bru- tally challenged, this time because I was
me in care of my publishing house. I tal, and the humidity is so high my glasses picking up trash and muttering to my-
had responded to a hundred and eighty fog up. At home, in Sussex, I’d happily self. Only I wasn’t muttering—I was re-
already, and brought the remaining fifty be walking twenty-two miles a day, but peating phrases from my Learn to Speak
to the beach, where I figured I’d see to at Emerald Isle, at the height of sum- Japanese or Swedish or Polish audio
ten a day. Most were just what I’d al-
ways wanted: kind words from strang-
ers. Every now and then, though, a com-
plaint would come along. I’d like to say
I brush them off, and I guess I do, in
time. For days, though, and sometimes
Making Marvels
months, I’ll be bothered. For example, SCIENCE & SPLENDOR AT
a woman sent me her ticket stubs, plus THE COURTS OF EUROPE
her parking receipt, demanding that I
reimburse her. She and her husband
had attended a reading and apparently
objected to my material. “I thought you
were better than that,” she scolded,
which always confuses me. First off, bet-
ter than what? I mean, a clean show is
fine, but no finer than a filthy one. Me,
I like a nice balance.
That aside, who doesn’t want to hear
about a man who shoved a coat hanger
up his ass? How can you not find that
fascinating? “What kind of a person are
you?” I wanted to write back.
Sometimes after a hard day of angry
letters or e-mails, after having an essay
rejected or listening to Gretchen tell me
how much a woman she works with
thinks I suck, I’ll go to Hugh and beg
him to say something nice about me.
“Like what?” he’ll ask.
“I shouldn’t have to tell you. Think
of something.”
Through March 1 metmuseum.org #MakingMarvels
“I can’t right now,” he’ll say. “I’m in CCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCC

The exhibition is made possible by Gerhard Emmoser, Celestial globe with clockwork (detail), 1579, Austrian, Vienna.
the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation. TheTHE
Metropolitan
NEW Museum of Art, GiftDECEMBER
YORKER, of J. Pierpont Morgan,
2, 1917.
2019 23
 UPLOADED BY "What's News" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws
program. “The woman who saw you said,
‘I just hope no one tries to take advan-
tage of him,’” the acquaintance told me.
On Emerald Isle this August, it was
German I was muttering. I might have
picked up an occasional bit of trash, but
I wasn’t carrying any equipment, just
ziplock bags of hot dogs or thick-cut
bologna to feed the snapping turtles in
the canal.
We’d been at the beach for four days
when I noticed a great many ant colo-
nies in the dirt bordering the sidewalk
between the strip mall the CVS is in
and the one the grocery store is in. The
ants were cinnamon-colored, hundreds
of thousands of them, all racing about,
searching for something to eat.
“Excuse me,” I said that afternoon
to the guy behind the counter at the
hardware store. “I was wanting to feed
some ants and wonder what you think
they might like. How would they feel
about bananas?”
The man’s face and neck were deeply
creased from age, and the sun. “Bananas?”
He took off his glasses and then put
them back on. “Naw, I’d go with candy.
Ants like that pretty good.”
I bought a bag of gummy worms
from beside the register, bit them into
thirds, and, on my way back to the house,
distributed them among the various col-
onies as evenly as I could. It made me
happy to think of the workers, present-
ing their famished queens with sugar,
and possibly being rewarded for it.
“You’re out there feeding ants candy?”
Hugh said that night at the table, when
we were all discussing our day. “They
don’t need your help, and neither do the
stupid turtles. You mess these things up
by feeding them—you hurt them is what
you do.” It wasn’t what he said that con-
cerned me but, rather, his tone, which,
again, I wouldn’t have noticed if my sis-
ter weren’t there.
“Well, they seemed pretty happy to
me,” I said.
Gretchen patted my hand: “Don’t
listen to Hugh. He doesn’t know shit
about being an ant.”
his was a relatively short beach trip.
T Renters were arriving on Saturday,
so the three of us had to have the house
clean and be out by 10 a.m. Gretchen
left a bit earlier than we did, and, though
I was sorry to see her go, it was a relief
24 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2, 2019
to escape her judgment regarding the
life I have built with Hugh. As it was,
whenever anything good happened
during that week, whenever he was
cheerful or thoughtlessly kind, I wanted
to say, “See, this is what my relationship
is like—this!”
It was a three-hour drive to Raleigh.
I had work to do, so while Hugh drove
I sat in the back seat. “Just for a little
while,” I said. I must have fallen asleep,
though. After waking, I read for a bit,
and the next thing I knew the car wasn’t
moving. “What’s going on?” I asked, too
lazy to sit up and look out the window.
“I don’t know,” Hugh said. “An acci-
dent, maybe.”
I righted myself and was just attempt-
ing to hop into the front seat when Hugh
advanced and tapped the car in front of
us. “Now, see what you made me do!”
“Me?”
I don’t know anything about cars, but
the one he’d hit was bigger than ours,
and white. The driver was husky and
pissed-off-looking, with the sort of large,
watery eyes I’d expect to find behind
glasses. “Did you just hit me?” he asked,
walking toward us. He bent to exam-
ine his bumper, which seemed to be
made of plastic and had a pale mark on
it, possibly put there by us.
Hugh rolled down his window: “I
maybe did, but just a little.” The man
glared at what he probably assumed was
an Uber driver making extra money by
taking people to the airport, or wher-
ever that gap-toothed dope in the back
seat was headed. He gave his bumper
another once-over, then the traffic started
moving. Someone honked, and the man
got back into his car. “Hit him again,”
I said to Hugh. “But harder this time.
We need to show him who’s boss.”
“Will you please shut up,” he said.
“As a favor to me. Please.”
hen we first got news that Hur-
W ricane Florence had all but de-
stroyed the Sea Section, I felt nothing.
Part of my indifference was that I’d ex-
pected this to happen. It was inevitable.
Then, too, I wasn’t as attached to the
place as he was. I wasn’t the one who’d
be contacting the insurance company. I
wouldn’t be dropping everything to fly
to North Carolina. It wouldn’t be me
picking turds off our beds, or finding a
contractor. In that sense, I could afford
to feel nothing. After looking at the pic-
tures that Bermey had sent, I shrugged
and went for a walk. At dusk, I returned
and found Hugh in our bedroom, curled
up with his face in his hands. “My house,”
he sobbed, his shoulders quaking.
“Well, one of your houses,” I said,
thinking of Florence’s other victims.
Some, like Hugh, were crying on their
beds, far from the affected area, while
others were on foldout sofas, in sleeping
bags, in the back seats of cars, or on cots
laid out like circuitry in public-school
gymnasiums. People who’d thought they
were far enough inland to be safe, who’d
had real belongings in their now ruined
houses: things that were dear to them,
and irreplaceable. The hardest-hit vic-
tims lost actual people—mates or friends
or family members swept away and swal-
lowed by floodwaters.
Then again, this was something of
a pattern for Hugh. So many of the
houses he’d lived in growing up had
been destroyed: in Beirut, in Mogadi-
shu, in Kinshasa. He’s actually sort of
bad luck that way.
I put my arms around him, and said
the things that were expected of me:
“We’ll rebuild, and it will all be fine.
Better, actually. You’ll see.” This was
how I always imagined myself in a re-
lationship: the provider, the rock, the
reassuring voice of wisdom. I had to
catch myself from saying, “I’ve got you,”
which is what people say on TV now
when they’re holding a distraught per-
son. It’s a nice sentiment, but culturally
speaking there was only a five-minute
period when you could say this without
sounding lame, and it has long passed.
I do have him, though. Through other
people’s eyes, the two of us might not
make sense, but that works in reverse as
well. I have a number of friends who are
in long-term relationships I can’t begin
to figure out. But what do I know? What
does Gretchen or Lisa or Amy? They
see me getting scolded from time to time,
getting locked out of my own house, but
where are they in the darkening rooms
when a close friend dies or rebels storm
the embassy. When the wind picks up
and the floodwaters rise. When you re-
alize you’d give anything to make that
other person stop hurting, if only so he
can tear your head off again. And you
can forgive and forget again. On and on,
hopefully. Then on and on and on. 
 UPLOADED BY "What's News" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws
SHOUTS & MURMURS
THE PERFECT ENGAGEMENT
PHOTO SESSION
BY SUSANNA WOLFF
Click! Flash!
Oh, my God, you look so surprised.
You should see your face! Luckily, you
will be able to see your face, because
I’m the photographer your fiancé paid
to hide in the bushes and take pic-
tures of this intimate moment in your
relationship.
Actually, you looked way more sur-
prised when I jumped out of the bushes
than you did during the proposal, so
can we just do that bit again? Yeah,
you—give him back the ring. You—
get down on your knee and . . . go! More
shocked! Pretend that you didn’t see
this proposal coming the second he
suggested going for a sunset walk on
the beach while wearing slacks, a sport
coat, and, what are those, Hush Puppies?
O.K., I think we’ve got the proposal
moment covered, now let’s do some
general couple photos, because the only
pictures of the two of you are vacation
selfies or ones of you wearing stupid
fake mustaches in photo booths at other
LUCI GUTIÉRREZ
people’s weddings.
You know in movies when a griz-
zled detective who got out of the game
after his wife was brutally murdered is
asked to do one more job, and he con-
templates his decision while staring at
a breezy, joyous photo of said brutally
murdered wife? That’s the kind of photo
we’re aiming for here. Something that
says “Happiness is fleeting, but at least
we got a picture.”
And, even if neither of you is mur-
dered by the first man you sent to prison,
you’ll need all these faux-candid pho-
tos for the wedding Web site that you’ll
create, for some reason.
But first let’s make sure that the
groom-to-be has enough stuff in his
pockets! Do you have one of those giant
Android phones? Of course you do.
Let’s get that bad boy in your front
right pocket, and let’s move your mon-
ster wallet to that front left pocket. We
could easily take this stuff out of your
pockets so that you’d have a smooth
silhouette in these posed photos, but
let’s immortalize those khaki-clad
lumps instead.
Stand together. Now put your arm
around her waist, and then I want you
to take your newly diamond-laden
hand and gently rest it between his
stomach and his sternum. Right in
that upper-tum area. Why there? Be-
cause it’s the only place you can put
your hand that says both “I have sex
with this man” and “I do all the things
his mother used to do for him right
up until I took over.” You want every-
one who sees this picture to know that
this is your guy and that you bought
him his underpants.
Now give it a pat. A little lighter.
Your wifely upper-tum-pat pressure
should be somewhere between burp-
ing a baby and when you gently palm
the purse you hung on a hook under
the bar in a crowded restaurant, just to
make sure it’s still there. But also keep
your fingers weirdly flexed to show off
the ring!
Let’s get a kissing one! Maybe a
tidy, sexless peck and then a realer,
juicier smooch? Excellent—both are
disgusting!
How about we try a jaunty piggy-
back ride? Or, sure, a visibly effortful
piggyback ride. I want to immortalize
your sausage fingers digging into her
knee-pits as you try desperately not to
drop her. And, you, try to turn that
look of terror into one of whimsy. Or
maybe affectation? It’ll all look the
same on Instagram.
Do you mind if I take a video, too?
Something brief and haunting that he
can play on a loop if the murder sce-
nario I mentioned before plays out. I
know it seems morbid, but I’ve been
taking awkwardly staged engagement
photographs for a long time now, and,
in my experience, it’s good to get it just
to be safe.
Oh, the sun is setting—I’ve got the
perfect pose for this! Each of you hold
out a hand in the shape of half a heart
and then press them together to frame
the sunset. What makes this the per-
fect engagement-photo pose is that
no one will be able to tell that it’s you
two. If you hang this in your house, it
will look like you just left the photo
that came in the picture frame when
you bought it. Only you’ll know that
you paid a lot of money for it.
All right, I think we’ve got enough.
Now that it’s pitch dark, how about
the three of us take a romantic hike all
the way back to the parking lot to-
gether? I promise I won’t murder you.
Ha ha. But, if I do, at least you’ll have
these engagement photos. 
THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2, 2019 25
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BRAVE NEW WORLD DEPT.
THE DEFECTOR
How one of Big Tech’s earliest investors became one of its most fervent critics.
BY BRIAN BARTH
oger McNamee started his career in
R 1982, as a twenty-six-year-old ana-
lyst at the investment firm T. Rowe Price.
The personal-computer revolution was
just beginning. He invested in Electronic
Arts (now a leading video-game maker)
and Sybase (a pioneering database firm),
among others, eventually running one
of the most successful funds in the in-
dustry. In 1991, he partnered with the
venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins,
where he listened to pitches for Netscape
and Amazon. He invested in those com-
panies, too, and a few years later he co-
founded Silver Lake Partners. The busi-
nesses in Silver Lake’s portfolio now
produce two hundred and thirty billion
Roger McNamee has denounced Silicon Valley’s “authoritarian” privacy policies.
26 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2, 2019
dollars in annual revenue and employ
three hundred and seventy thousand peo-
ple. In the early two-thousands, McNa-
mee helped create a private-equity firm,
Elevation Partners, which invested two
hundred and ten million dollars in Face-
book in 2009 and 2010, two years before
it went public.
If the founders of Big Tech were a
family, McNamee might be its eccen-
tric uncle. A longtime guitarist who still
plays some fifty shows a year, he has
toured for more than two decades with
an evolving cast of venture capitalists,
technologists, and career musicians such
as Pete Sears, of Jefferson Starship. On
tracks like the stoner anthem “It’s 4:20
Somewhere,” by his band Moonalice,
McNamee performed under the stage
name Chubby Wombat.
McNamee has mentored many of the
people who have transformed Silicon
Valley. In 2006, when Facebook was a
two-year-old company with less than
fifty million dollars in annual revenue,
McNamee advised Mark Zuckerberg to
turn down Yahoo’s offer to buy it for a
billion dollars. (It’s now worth more than
five hundred billion.) Not long after-
ward, he encouraged Zuckerberg to hire
Sheryl Sandberg. His acquaintances have
included Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, who
was an investor at Silver Lake.
McNamee saw the tech industry as
an experiment in creative and profitable
problem-solving. He grew unnerved by
its ethical failures only in 2012, when
Uber came to him for investment capi-
tal. He decided that Silicon Valley had
changed. “These guys all wanted to be
monopolists,” he said recently. “They all
want to be billionaires.”
McNamee was convinced that Face-
book was different. Then, in February,
2016, shortly after he retired from full-
time investing, he noticed posts in his
Facebook feed that purported to sup-
port Bernie Sanders but struck him as
fishy. That spring, the social-media-fu-
elled vitriol of the Brexit campaign
seemed like further proof that Face-
book was being exploited to sow divi-
sion among voters—and that company
executives had turned a blind eye. The
more McNamee listened to Silicon Val-
ley critics, the more alarmed he became:
he learned that Facebook allowed fa-
cial-recognition software to identify
users without their consent, and let ad-
vertisers discriminate against viewers.
(Real-estate companies, for example,
could exclude people of certain races
from seeing their ads.)
Ten days before the Presidential
election, McNamee sent an e-mail to
Zuckerberg and Sandberg. “I am dis-
appointed. I am embarrassed. I am
ashamed,” he wrote.
Recently, Facebook has done some things
that are truly horrible and I can no longer ex-
cuse its behavior. . . . Facebook is enabling peo-
ple to do harm. It has the power to stop the
harm. What it currently lacks is an incentive
to do so.
Within hours, both Zuckerberg and
Sandberg sent McNamee cordial re-
ILLUSTRATION BY MARC PALLARÈS
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plies, assuring him that they were al-
ready working to address some of the
issues he’d raised, and dispatched a Face-
book executive, Dan Rose, to talk to
him. Rose told McNamee that Face-
book was a platform, not a publisher,
and couldn’t control all user behavior.
Since leaving the investment world, Mc-
Namee had been looking forward to
being a full-time musician. But Rose’s
dismissiveness rattled him. “They were
my friends. I wanted to give them a
chance to do the right thing. I wasn’t
expecting them to go, ‘Oh, my God,
stop everything,’ but I was expecting
them to take it seriously,” he said. “It
was obvious they thought it was a P.R.
problem, not a business problem, and
they thought the P.R. problem was me.”
McNamee hasn’t spoken to Sandberg
or Zuckerberg since. (Both declined to
comment for this article.) He now re-
fers to Zuckerberg as an “authoritarian.”
As Russian election interference be-
came increasingly apparent, McNamee
published a series of op-eds—in the
Guardian, USA Today, Time, and else-
where—arguing that the social-media
business model thrived on divisive rhet-
oric: the more extreme the content, the
more users shared it; the more the al-
gorithms amplified it, the more ad rev-
enue was generated. McNamee also
scheduled meetings with policymakers,
investors, and Silicon Valley executives.
He and Nancy Pelosi, now the Speaker
of the House, had been introduced some
twenty years earlier, by the Grateful
Dead drummer Mickey Hart, and Mc-
Namee set out to expand his network
of Washington contacts. As lawmakers
prepared for hearings about Russian
meddling, in the fall of 2017, McNamee
put together a curriculum for them,
which he jokingly called “Internet Plat-
forms 101.” Adam Schiff, a member of
the House Intelligence Committee, had
been focussed on foreign manipulation
of social media, but, in a meeting, Mc-
Namee urged him to consider a broader
problem—how the platforms were sow-
ing discord among Americans. “Roger
was really ahead of the curve,” Schiff
said. “Time has borne out his warnings.”
McNamee’s zeal for diagnosing prob-
lems soon evolved into a mission to de-
vise a solution. He argued that piece-
meal regulation would never get to the
root of the problem: mining users’ pri-
vate data for profit. In February, 2019,
McNamee published “Zucked: Wak-
ing Up to the Facebook Catastrophe”—
part memoir, part manifesto. He then
embarked on a book tour that has turned
into an ongoing public-shaming cam-
paign. He has taken his message to book-
stores, breweries, high-school gymna-
siums, and college campuses. He esti-
mates that he’s made his pitch to more
than three hundred audiences in the
past year. “I have a hippie value system,”
McNamee told me recently. “I’m always
going to speak truth to power.”
McNamee is not the first Silicon
Valley insider to become a critic of the
tech industry, but he may be the most
strenuous. Kara Swisher, a co-founder
of the tech-news site Recode and a
New York Times columnist, recalled,
“Whenever I would say negative things
about Facebook, I’d always get a text
or a call from Roger.” Now, she contin-
ued, McNamee is “sort of shunned” in
the Valley. Last winter, Bill Gates told
Forbes, “I think what Roger has said is
completely unfair and kind of outra-
geous. They’re blaming Mark for ev-
erything.” Swisher thinks the Valley has
been eager to portray McNamee as “off
the rails.” As she sees it, “He’s a little
wacky, but he’s not crazy. The more they
make fun of him, the more I’m, like,
He’s one-hundred-per-cent right.”
Among some skeptics, however, the
profit McNamee has accrued from the
technology that he now urges us to re-
nounce makes him difficult to trust.
One view of McNamee is that he has
the gravitas of a man willing to admit
that he was wrong. (“Shame on me,”
he told one interviewer.) Another is
that, having successfully ridden one
wave, he is trying to ride another.
arlier this year, I met McNamee for
E breakfast in Baltimore, where he
was speaking to the staff of his former
employer T. Rowe Price. In 2011, the
company had invested a hundred and
ninety million dollars in Facebook. “A
lot of people are mad at me,” McNa-
mee said, in a hotel on the waterfront.
On his speaking circuit, he wears baggy
suits, clunky black shoes, and round
glasses. Before his book tour, he trimmed
his shoulder-length curls. At the hotel’s
restaurant, a hostess greeted us and po-
litely asked for McNamee’s name.
“Why do you need my name?” he
barked. The woman stuttered a reply,
but McNamee cut her off. “Can we just
get a table?”
He turned to me with a smirk. “Pri-
vacy!” he stage-whispered.
McNamee is not a kombucha kind
of Californian. He ordered a Diet Coke
with his eggs and toast. As we ate, con-
versation veered from the civil-rights
movement, which he says inspired his
tech activism, to the number of Grate-
ful Dead shows he attended before Jerry
Garcia died (two hundred). Describ-
ing the arc of his career, McNamee at-
tributed his business success mainly to
“dumb luck.” Talk turned to Bono,
whom he met through Sandberg in
2001, and with whom he co-founded
Elevation Partners. “Bono said to me,
more than once, ‘Your superpower is
you’re not motivated by money,’” Mc-
Namee told me. “That’s the only rea-
son I could do this.”
McNamee rattles off a frighteningly
long list of things that he believes have
been “Zucked”: “your vote,”“your rights,”
“your privacy,” “your life,” “everything.”
So far, the public is less alarmed. A re-
cent Pew Research Center poll found
that around half of Americans think
that the tech industry is having a pos-
itive impact on society. (However, this
view is on the decline: in 2015, seven in
ten thought so.) Earlier this year, Goo-
gle and Amazon came in second and
third in a survey of millennials’ favor-
ite brands. In general, people are more
concerned about the behavior of banks
and pharmaceutical companies, and
most Americans have yet to meaning-
fully change their habits as tech con-
sumers. McNamee’s message resonates
most with a few relatively insular groups
of worried citizens: parents who mon-
itor screen time, socialists who decry
West Coast inequality, academics who
study algorithmic bias.
At this year’s Truth About Tech con-
ference, held in April, at Georgetown
University, I found McNamee slumped
in a chair clutching a Diet Coke. “This
is my fourteenth city in fourteen days,”
he said. Jim Steyer—brother of Tom
Steyer, the hedge-fund billionaire
turned environmentalist and Presiden-
tial candidate—arrived and embraced
McNamee. Steyer, who has a blond
mane and a California vibe, heads the
THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2, 2019 27
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kids-and-tech advocacy group Com-
mon Sense Media. (In one of its re-
cent P.S.A.s, featuring the Muppets,
Cookie Monster eats a smartphone.)
“What Roger is doing is so inspiring!”
Steyer told me.
After listening to a roster of high-
powered speakers—the Massachusetts
senator Ed Markey, commissioners of
the F.T.C. and the F.C.C., and the at-
torney general of Washington, D.C.—
McNamee descended to a basement
room where Peter Lord, a vice-presi-
dent at the software company Oracle,
which is worth nearly two hundred bil-
lion dollars, had the innards of an An-
droid phone splayed out on a table. Mc-
Namee told me, theatrically, “You can
stay, but this is off the record.” Lord re-
garded me sternly. (I later found most
of what Lord discussed in a YouTube
video of a talk he gave last year.) A tan-
gle of wires led from the disassembled
Android to a laptop, where data from
the phone’s sensors appeared, updating
each second. This amount of data, Lord
explained, gesturing at the screen
clogged with numbers, was routinely
collected on each of Google Android’s
approximately two billion users.
A technician picked up a small black
component and waved it in the air. The
numbers on the screen danced accord-
ingly: this was the phone’s baromet-
ric-pressure sensor, sensitive to changes
in elevation. Androids are commonly
equipped with a gyroscope, an accelerom-
eter, and a magnetic-field detector; their
sensors can calculate heart rate and
count steps. This constant flow of in-
formation allows your phone to track
whether you’re sleeping or awake;
whether you’re driving, walking, jog-
ging, or biking; whether you’re in the
Starbucks on the ground floor or the
lawyer’s office on the tenth. Lord de-
livered a TED-like slide presentation,
which included creepy quotes from Eric
Schmidt, the former Google chairman:
“We can more or less guess what you’re
thinking about.”
For Oracle, the privacy wars have
provided an opportunity to stand up
for users’ interests while also advanc-
ing its own—in particular, by drama-
tizing the vulnerabilities of its rivals. If
Google is broken up, Oracle is better
positioned to thrive. During the past
two years, Oracle has given the same
28 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2, 2019
presentation that McNamee and I re-
ceived to lawmakers and regulators,
who, Lord said, were “clearly frustrated”
by what they learned.
All modern smartphones—includ-
ing iPhones—contain hardware that
monitors users’ activities and locations.
But McNamee and many experts argue
that Androids are unique in the extent
to which they collect and retain user
information. Much of this data is col-
lected even when a phone is off-line,
then uploaded to Google’s servers and
integrated into an archive that includes
your search, Gmail, and Google Docs
history. The Android platform finds in-
formation in your apps and your online
activity, and often makes this informa-
tion available to third parties, like ad-
vertisers. A user agreement also gives
Google Assistant the right to record
conversations that occur within earshot
of the device’s microphone.
Using digital profiles to predict and
influence our behavior is at the heart of
Google’s and Facebook’s business mod-
els. In “The Age of Surveillance Capi-
talism,” published earlier this year,
Shoshana Zuboff, an emerita professor
at Harvard Business School, warns of a
“rogue mutation of capitalism,” in which
tech behemoths surveil humans, and
eventually control them. McNamee
speaks often about surveillance capital-
ism, and credits Zuboff with informing
his views and with bringing academic
clout to the cause of Silicon Valley re-
formists. Like Zuboff, he uses phrases
such as “behavioral modification,” and
he speaks of Google Street View and
the Stasi in the same breath. McNamee
was alarmed by reports, in early No-
vember, of Google’s partnership with
Ascension, a nonprofit health system
that has access to millions of patient
profiles—a development that, he said,
“should trouble everybody.”
It’s notable that the dust jacket of
McNamee’s book attacking Facebook
includes blurbs from three of the Val-
ley’s biggest names: Marc Benioff (a
co-C.E.O. of Salesforce), Bill Joy (a
co-founder of Sun Microsystems), and
Vint Cerf (currently Google’s “chief In-
ternet evangelist,” who is often referred
to as the “father of the Internet”). Ri-
valries in Silicon Valley once revolved
around technological prowess, consumer
allegiance, and profitability. Now com-
petition is for moral superiority, a fight
that McNamee has found himself in
the middle of.
cNamee sees his defection from
M Silicon Valley as nothing more
than a return to his roots—an identity
that mixes camp and sincerity. When
I asked him to say more about his value
system, he referred me to “Get To-
gether,” a nineteen-sixties Youngbloods
anthem. (“Come on people, now/ smile
on your brother / Everybody get to-
gether, / try to love one another right
now.”) McNamee’s father, Daniel, was
an investment banker and the presi-
dent of the Albany chapter of the Urban
League, a civil-rights organization. His
mother, Barbara, was an active femi-
nist in the sixties. At the age of twelve,
McNamee became an anti-Vietnam
War activist, volunteering for Eugene
McCarthy’s Presidential campaign; in
high school, he backed George Mc-
Govern. In protest of the Iraq War and
other policies during the George W.
Bush Administration, he refused to cut
his hair. When President Obama was
inaugurated, he celebrated with a trip
to the barber.
Travelling around the country,
McNamee carries a guitar case and a
knapsack embroidered with the word
“Zucked.” (He handed out custom-
made “Zucked” M&M’s during his tour
until they ran out.) He used to pack as
many as seven devices while on the road;
now he carries just one iPhone, clipped
to his belt. On his left wrist, he wears
several leather bracelets: one for Black
Lives Matter, another commemorating
the March for Our Lives. On most days,
he dons a purple undershirt—“the color
of inclusion,” he told me.
Silicon Valley companies have al-
ways talked about building a better
world. In “From Counterculture to Cy-
berculture” (2006), Fred Turner, a pro-
fessor of communications at Stanford,
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charted the history of “collaboration

between San Francisco flower power
and the emerging technological hub of
Silicon Valley.” McNamee hopes that
this utopian fusion of culture and tech-
nology can be harnessed again, this
time for reform.
After the Truth About Tech confer-
ence ended, McNamee gave a happy-
hour presentation to employees of a
Baltimore-based investment-manage-
ment firm. “Give up your Android
phone,” he told an audience of around
a hundred fund managers wearing busi-
ness casual and drinking craft beer. “This
is our agency. This is our free will.” He
joked, “When do you check your phone
in the morning? Is it before you pee or
while you’re peeing? Because that’s
pretty much the range!”
McNamee offers himself as a case
study in how to be Google-free. He
uses DuckDuckGo, a search engine that
presents itself as a privacy-oriented al-
ternative to Google, and he has largely
renounced Gmail, Maps, Docs, and the
company’s other apps. In two months,
he slipped up only once, when he “I shouldn’t tell you this, but we offer the flu shot.”
watched a music video on YouTube,
which Google owns. He argues that
Facebook should be used for staying in
• •
touch with friends and family, rather
than for political debates, which the start bad-mouthing the company: “If bridge Analytica obtained user data
platform alchemizes into screaming the stock goes down, you know what? through duplicitous means, but similar
matches. “Outrage and fear are what I deserve it!” data sets are widely and legally available;
drive their business model, so don’t en- micro-targeting is commonplace on
gage with it,” he told me. “I was as ad- t the core of McNamee’s concerns nearly all political campaigns.
dicted as anybody, but we have the power
to withdraw our attention.”
A is Internet companies’ use of what
he calls “data voodoo dolls”—digital
The question, as McNamee sees it,
is how to wrest back control for the
His life is made easier by the fact profiles they develop for each user. Echo- people behind the profiles. One of the
that he has relatively few complaints ing Shoshana Zuboff ’s arguments, he most popular answers is that antitrust
about Apple, which he praises for tak- claims that these profiles are “effectively law should be used to take on Big Tech’s
ing steps to protect user privacy. Since an extension of yourself,” and that it power. Elizabeth Warren, who has met
2017, the company’s Safari browser has should be “no more legitimate to trade with McNamee and called him “one of
blocked third-party cookies, one ubiq- the data in a data voodoo doll than it is the clearest voices” on tech reform, has
uitous tool for gleaning personal data. to trade someone’s kidney.” McNamee made the breakup of tech giants a cen-
And its new Apple Card, unlike many is especially fervent about micro-targeted tral part of her campaign. Bernie San-
other credit cards, including American online political ads. For those critics ders has pledged to press the antitrust
Express and Mastercard, does not share who preach the perils of social media— issue if elected; Joe Biden has said that
transaction history with third parties. whether from academia, like Zuboff, or he will investigate it. In March, Mc-
But some audience members were Capitol Hill, like Adam Schiff—the Namee was invited to give a lecture at
skeptical. A woman raised her hand. 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal is the Department of Justice’s antitrust
“Are you still on Facebook?” she asked. the quintessential example of how peo- division. In the following months, the
McNamee barely let her finish. “It’s ple can be turned into puppets. By col- D.O.J. and the F.T.C., along with var-
worse than that!” he said. He uses his lecting data from Facebook without user ious state legislatures and congressio-
profile to promote his book, and has consent, the company was able to iden- nal committees, announced antitrust
only recently begun to off-load his Face- tify micro-populations of voters, then investigations aimed at Facebook, Goo-
book stock. It wouldn’t have been a serve up customized ads encouraging gle, Amazon, and Apple.
good look, he explained, to sell and then them to vote for Donald Trump. Cam- There is some bipartisan support for
THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2, 2019 29
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tech reform. The Republican senators
Marco Rubio (who sponsored a bill au-
thorizing the F.T.C. to devise data-pri-
vacy regulations) and Josh Hawley (who
co-sponsored a bill with Senator Mar-
key to improve online privacy protec-
tions for children) are among the most
outspoken advocates. But Adam Schiff,
now the chair of the House Intelligence
Committee, speaking about his col-
leagues across the aisle, told me, “I think
their agenda is to change what they
think is unfavorable content.” In par-
ticular, he suspects that Republicans
may be trying to crack down on the
supposed “pro-progressive” bias of social-
media companies. (There is no evidence
that such bias exists.)
Several data-privacy bills circulating
in Congress draw inspiration from Cal-
ifornia’s Consumer Privacy Act, which
goes into effect on January 1st, and from
Europe’s recently enacted General Data
Protection Regulation. Such laws ex-
pand consumers’ control over their data
and give them new legal tools for hold-
ing companies accountable. Many pri-
vacy advocates, including McNamee,
argue that they are critically flawed.
Under G.D.P.R. rules, companies must
ask users to opt in before their data can
be processed by third parties—but, as
soon as consumers consent, it’s more or
less back to business as usual. And the
rules are relatively loose when it comes
to metadata. Even if the contents of a
phone call are protected, the time of the
call or the parties involved might not
be. This is more revealing than it seems:
as a memo by the Electronic Frontier
Foundation notes, a tech giant that
doesn’t know your name might still
“know you called a gynecologist, spoke
for a half hour, and then called the local
abortion clinic’s number later that day.”
McNamee believes that antitrust
action will be effective only after com-
prehensive privacy reforms are en-
acted—otherwise, it will simply create
smaller companies that behave in the
same ways that the big ones do now. “I
want to prevent the data from getting
into the system in the first place,” he
told me. The reform that would really
have teeth, he says, is one that would
“ban all third-party commerce in pri-
vate information—financial informa-
tion, location information, health in-
formation, browser history, scanning of
30 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2, 2019
e-mail.” Companies would be allowed
to collect data needed for their services,
but nothing else: a wellness app could
store your height or your weight but
not the location of your gym—and none
of this information could be shared
with Facebook. The idea, McNamee
explained, is that you could log a work-
out without then being bombarded by
ads for nearby Zumba classes.
As Tim Wu, a law professor at Co-
lumbia, has pointed out, few of the cur-
rent proposed policies would have any
effect on whether a company can col-
lect private data, only on how it can be
used. Under McNamee’s plan, most of
Google’s and Facebook’s revenues would
disappear overnight, since nearly ninety
per cent of both companies’ money
comes from ads. (Tech companies that
don’t depend on targeted-ad revenue
would remain relatively unaffected.) As
with the effect of prohibition on the
booze industry, this would entail a rad-
ical reënvisioning of the playing field.
ven some critics of Silicon Valley
E find this blueprint of tech reform
too extreme. Cindy Cohn, the executive
director of the Electronic Frontier Foun-
dation, which has been advocating for a
strict national privacy law for decades,
said, “I’m not opposed to it in principle,
but I think that there are a lot of prac-
tical problems.” She notes there would
be valid legal defenses against a ban on
third-party commerce, along with trade-
offs to consider—like limiting advances
in A.I., which, for now, relies on vast data
sets to train machine-learning programs.
There are other proposals that might
redefine online privacy norms without
wholly reinventing them. Tristan Har-
ris, a former Google ethicist and the ex-
ecutive director of the Center for Hu-
mane Technology, said that most people
“would never say a doctor or lawyer
shouldn’t have access to information
about us, or that they can’t monetize
something in their relationship with us.
We say they have to monetize it in align-
ment with our best interests.” Instead
of a ban, Harris argues for extending
the fiduciary duty of doctors, lawyers,
and other professions to include Inter-
net companies, legally binding them to
act exclusively in accordance with their
clients’ well-being.
He also proposes a tax on income
derived from targeted digital ads, an ap-
proach endorsed by the economist and
Nobel laureate Paul Romer. In theory,
this would encourage tech companies
to adopt business models that rely less
on personal data, and the tax would be
progressive, so as to favor smaller busi-
nesses. Harris likens the monetization
of user data to the extraction of fossil
fuels: “These are the most profitable
business models but also the most pol-
luting.” Alongside a tax on polluters, he
proposes subsidizing alternatives—plat-
forms that have made commitments not
to stoke outrage.
Tech reformists like McNamee are
generally focussed on the biggest actors.
But Ben Thompson, a former Microsoft
and Apple employee who now runs the
tech-industry analysis site Stratechery,
criticized Apple’s new Tracking Preven-
tion Policy (a stricter version of its pre-
vious anti-tracking regime), which he
sees as a P.R. move that will dispropor-
tionately burden smaller companies like
his own. Meanwhile, he noted, Apple
has failed to disclose its more egregious
privacy violations; in July, the Guardian
revealed that contractors had listened to
some Siri recordings without user con-
sent, as part of quality-control protocol.
“A fundamentalist attitude that declares
privacy more important than anything,”
Thompson wrote, is akin to a “rebellious
youth fleeing religion.”
As fears about privacy invasions and
electoral intrusions mount, tech com-
panies are tempting scapegoats. But the
algorithms they use may not be as
powerful as we think. Antonio García
Martínez, a tech columnist and former
product manager at Facebook, argues
that the media has exaggerated the im-
pact of targeted political ads. Before
Cambridge Analytica, he told me, every
tech journalist “had to write the Face-
book privacy piece, like, once a year at
least. Now it’s one a week.” A recent
study of targeted advertising, published
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in Marketing Science, analyzed fourteen
data brokers and found that they cor-
rectly surmised the gender of targeted
consumers only forty-two per cent of
the time; they would have been better
off flipping a coin. Another group of
researchers concluded that targeted ads
net only four per cent more revenue
than random ads do. Contrary to con-
ventional wisdom in Silicon Valley, com-
panies don’t need to target consumers
to make money. (This is the premise of
DuckDuckGo, which serves up ads
based on keyword searches, rather than
on user profiles.) It also implies that
McNamee’s dire warnings about behav-
ioral manipulation may not be entirely
sound. McNamee’s oft-repeated claim
is that surveillance capitalism under-
mines democracy by manipulating users’
habits and choices, but his rhetoric effec-
tively cedes agency to tech companies:
we’re helpless unless Silicon Valley agrees
to change its ways.
n a Monday morning in April,
O McNamee arrived in Toronto for
a brief Canadian stop on the “Zucked”
than using data collection to determine
whom to sell microwaves to. McNamee
wonders if Soros’s perspective would be
different if he’d worked in tech. “George
thinks the enemy is China,” Balsillie
said. “We’ve seen the enemy, and the
enemy is us.”
One of Balsillie’s primary targets is
Sidewalk Labs, a subsidiary of Alpha-
bet (Google’s parent company), which
has proposed building a community
“from the Internet up” on Toronto’s wa-
terfront. Conceptual plans for the proj-
ect include “building raincoats” that
spring out like giant canopies over urban
plazas, and a tunnel system for trash
collection by robots. But the backbone
of the twelve-acre development is a
network of sensors and other data-col-
lection infrastructure. According to a
leaked internal Sidewalk Labs docu-
ment, “the majority of the negative press
coverage is rooted in an anti-global
tech giant narrative being spun by . . .
Jim Balsillie.”
In this shifting terrain, tech compa-
nies are jockeying for position, which
often entails striking out at competi-
tors. Oracle’s alarming—or, to some,
alarmist—messaging about Android’s
data collection is just one example.
Microsoft often portrays itself as the
wise elder among younger competitors.
The company has already been through
antitrust proceedings, and, because it
doesn’t depend on targeted-ad revenue,
it is relatively unthreatened by limits on
data collection. At an event in Septem-
ber, Brad Smith, the president of Mi-
crosoft, said, “I think the first aspect of
democratizing data is recognizing that
it belongs to individuals.” In January,
Twitter users stumbled on Microsoft’s
Project Bali, a beta-stage initiative to
create a “data bank” that would allow
users “to visualize, manage, control, share
and monetize” their data. (The Project
Bali Web site has since been removed.)
McNamee hopes to exploit companies’
rivalries for the public interest. Silicon
Valley, he argues, is in “the trust busi-
ness—if you lose the trust of the peo-
ple who use the product, you are done.
You never get it back.” And, though he

tour. I joined him for breakfast with Jim

Balsillie, a billionaire philanthropist and
the retired co-C.E.O. of the Canadian
company behind BlackBerry, who has
recently joined the tech-reform move-
ment. In part because of BlackBerry,
Toronto is sometimes described as Sil-
icon Valley North.
In the summer of 2018, Balsillie and
McNamee met with other tech experts
at the Hamptons estate of George Soros,
to discuss the fate of the liberal world
order. They had both advised Soros on
the speech he gave, earlier that year, at
the World Economic Forum, in which
he called Facebook and Google a “men-
ace,” painting a picture of “a web of to-
talitarian control the likes of which not
even Aldous Huxley or George Orwell
could have imagined.”
Recently, Balsillie and McNamee
split with Soros on a key point. Soros Dr. Seuss (Theodor Geisel), It’s our first... don’t you think it looks like George?, calendar illustration, 1937.
Estimate $10,000 to $15,000.
fears that weakening Western tech com-
panies would allow authoritarian re-
gimes like the Chinese government, Illustration Art
which actively exports its surveillance December 10
systems, to leapfrog the rest of the world.
Christine von der Linn • cv@swanngalleries.com
For those in Soros’s camp, using sur-
veillance to crack down on dissent—as Preview: Dec 5 & 6, 10-6; Dec 7, 12-5; Dec 9, 10-6; Dec 10, 10-12
the Chinese government does among 104 East 25th St, New York, NY 10010 • tel 212 254 4710 • SWANNGALLERIES.COM
Uighur Muslims—is a graver concern
THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2, 2019 31
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insists that his own career as an investor
is over, he believes that regulatory inter-
vention paired with consumer demand
could help create “the next big thing”—
an opening not only for the ethically
minded but also for the profit-seeking.
Apple may be best situated to seize
this opportunity. In the talks and meet-
ings I attended, McNamee touted Ap-
ple’s pro-privacy stance nearly as often
as he dramatized Google’s trespasses,
exhorting his audiences to use Apple
products. The amiable breakfast with
Jim Balsillie turned briefly awkward
when McNamee insisted that Balsillie
stop using his BlackBerry, which runs
on Android, and buy an iPhone. “You
need to get off it,” McNamee snapped.
“Like, today.”
I asked McNamee whether anyone
had ever accused him of being a shill
for Apple. “These are facts! A shill is
somebody who spins things that aren’t
there,” he said. “Not everything at Apple
is perfect. But on the privacy thing Tim
Cook is really walking the walk.” As is
the case with Microsoft, Apple’s busi-
ness model doesn’t rely heavily on mon-
etizing data, which makes it easier for
the company to promote itself as pri-
vacy-friendly. In January, outside the
Consumer Electronics Show in Las
Vegas, a billboard announced “What
happens on your iPhone, stays on your
iPhone”; in July, an Apple ad above the
Sidewalk Labs headquarters in Toronto
read “We’re in the business of staying
out of yours.”
And yet there’s no question that, by
putting computers in our pockets, Apple
ushered in the surveillance age. Research-
ers have found that iPhones send a steady
stream of personal data to third parties,
much as Android phones do. The com-
pany is also a pioneer in Bluetooth bea-
cons, tiny devices used by retailers which
glean data from phones as people move
about in public spaces. Apple’s use of
Chinese subcontractors has led to spec-
ulation that the company’s products are
at risk of being compromised by the
Chinese government—a prospect that
flies in the face of Apple’s reputation
for being virtually unhackable. In Au-
gust, Google researchers exposed a large-
scale iPhone breach that, according to
anonymous sources who spoke with the
Web site Tech Crunch, was initiated by
the Chinese government in order to
surveil Uighurs. Google’s blog post about
the incident, which failed to mention
that Android phones had also been
affected, described “mass exploitation”
of iPhones. In a tersely worded response,
Apple criticized Google for “stoking
fear among all iPhone users that their
devices had been compromised. This
was never the case.”
The tech-reform movement can be
hard to take seriously when some of the
most prominent activists are also some
of the most prominent tech-company
shareholders. McNamee’s insistence that
Facebook and Google engage in “mali-
cious behavioral modification” runs the
risk of sounding like conspiracy-speak.
And his proposed ban on third-party
data commerce could result in excessive
pressure applied in the wrong place.
While we waited for our food to
arrive, I asked McNamee and Balsillie
whether they were the best candidates
for bringing about meaningful change
in Silicon Valley. “Excuse me?” Mc-
Namee said, spreading his arms and
leaning toward me across the table.
“Who better to criticize than the peo-
ple who participated in it?” He went
on, “My attitude is: have at it, dude.
When a better messenger shows up,
I’m going to be in the front of the line
cheering them on.”
Balsillie told me that Silicon Valley
stalwarts often discount Shoshana Zu-
boff and other scholars as “academic
eggheads”: “When someone like Roger
or me says, ‘Here’s how we share this
issue,’ it allows those people to be bet-
ter heard. They can say, ‘We’re not rag-
ing socialists, because, look, there’s a
capitalist over there.’” Zuboff, who was
one of Balsillie’s professors at Harvard,
seems to welcome the defectors. “Folks
like Roger and Jim now see the ele-
phant,” she said in an e-mail. “It’s im-
portant to see former tech insiders add-
ing their stories to this tectonic shift.
We need more of them.”

ater that day, McNamee was sched-

“What are you doing for Thanksgiving?”
L uled to give a lunchtime presenta-
tion at the Four Seasons in Toronto’s
Yorkville district. For ninety-five dol-
lars each, four hundred attendees re-
ceived a copy of McNamee’s book and
a salmon lunch served by white-gloved
waiters. I struck up a conversation with
a banking C.E.O. who had recently de-
leted Facebook for ethical reasons, and
because she recognized her addiction.
“I didn’t like the fact that I was look-
ing at it every day,” she explained.
McNamee peppered his speech with
his usual jokes; a riff on “Google Glass-
holes” that I’d heard before got a big
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laugh. A few minutes into his presen-

tation, he turned to Sidewalk Labs. His
opposition to the smart city, he told the
audience, was based on “a very, very, very,
very strong belief ” about the risks of
Alphabet’s venture.
“They want to be a government, but
without any of the responsibilities of
government,” he said. McNamee ex-
plained that the ultimate goal of sur-
veillance capitalists is to eliminate un-
certainty in decision-making: “That has
a superficial appeal, until you realize that
agency and identity depend on uncer-
tainty, because it is the choices we make
in uncertainty that define who we are.”
There were a few murmurs of approval.
During the question-and-answer pe-
riod, a silver-haired woman approached
the microphone to say that McNamee’s
worries sounded like science fiction.
She admitted that she didn’t own a cell
phone, then said, “I saw the privacy
issue, but I wasn’t smart enough to in-
vest and make a profit from it.” The
room filled with nervous laughter. Mc-
Namee smiled. A middle-aged woman
who identified herself “as someone who
runs an accelerator” wondered how she
could instill in young entrepreneurs a
sense of “balanced capitalism.” McNa-
mee nodded eagerly while she spoke.
“We used to let gas stations pour oil
down the sewer, and we let mines leave
tailings on the side of the hill,” he said.
“Then we realized, Wait a minute, the
externalities have a very high cost, and
the people who create them need to
bear it.” The same crisis had been al-
lowed to take hold in Silicon Valley.
Don’t fall for the allure of smart this
and smart that, McNamee said. He re-
peated one of his common refrains:
Where curious
“The fix for this is going to be a busi-
ness opportunity way bigger than what minds meet
we have now. The difference is that if
we do this right it’s spread over thou- The TLS is a weekly magazine that
sands and thousands of companies in brings together the world’s most
hundreds of cities.” interesting thinkers and stylish writers.
McNamee paused and glanced around We believe in the importance of books
with a beatific expression. “That’s why
and ideas, and the transformative
this whole road show is so much fun for
me,” he said. Above all, he told the room, power of art. Join us as we decipher,
he wanted to find “people who can be discuss and delve into the world
part of the solution.” He was in his el- around us.
ement; the crowd waited for him to con- Get 12 editions for $12
tinue. When the speech was over, Mc- at the-tls.co.uk/subscribe
Namee stepped back from the podium,
already moving on to the next show. 
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ECSTASY AND RUIN
hen Beck was a child, his
W mother would take him and
his brother to the Los An-
geles County Museum of Art and ask
them to choose a favorite and a least
favorite piece. “I remember thinking,
That’s a lot of pressure,” he said last
month, in the atrium of the museum’s
Ahmanson Building, a few weeks be-
fore the release of his new album, “Hy-
perspace.” He often picked Millard
Sheets’s “Angel’s Flight,” an American
oil painting from 1931, as his favorite.
It shows two dark-haired women on
a small balcony overlooking Bunker
Hill, in downtown L.A. “Bunker Hill
is the neighborhood in all the old noir
films,” Beck said. “It was very pictur-
esque, kind of seedy, post-Victorian.
Then the nineteen-sixties came, and
the city dynamited it—they just blew
the whole hill up.”
Much of the museum’s campus—a
cluster of buildings interspersed with
open-air courtyards—will be demol-
ished early next year, to make way for
a contiguous structure. Beck, who is
forty-nine, was feeling vaguely nostal-
gic about the place. He wanted to take
a few photographs of the interior (the
mid-century brass clock by the eleva-
tors, the pebbled concrete floors) be-
fore it disappeared. He paused before
a stretch of worn oak panelling. “Lately,
I’ve been taking a lot of photos of
things like this,” he said. “Saying good-
bye to stuff from the past. Making way
for the new.”
He pulled out his phone and showed
me a black-and-white photo, taken in
one of the museum’s courtyards, of his
brother, Channing, at the age of five
or six, grinning beatifically at the cam-
era, his head slightly cocked. “Look at
that little pose he’s doing!” Beck said.
He swiped to a photo of himself, at
age seven or eight, wearing a home-
made Superman cape, with a plastic
six-shooter slung low around his waist.
34 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2, 2019
PROFILES
Beck’s aesthetic of abundance.
BY AMANDA PETRUSICH
He held an Oscar the Grouch pup-
pet. “This pretty much sums it up,” he
said, laughing. “Superman sheriff with
a Muppet.”
Since 1993, when he released his
first album, “Golden Feelings,” on cas-
sette, Beck’s music has varied so deeply
in style and tone that it is difficult to
tether him to anything other than Los
Angeles, where he has lived for nearly
all of his life. He has made fourteen
albums and won seven Grammys, in-
cluding one for Album of the Year, in
2014, for “Morning Phase,” a collec-
tion of elegant, down-tempo folk songs.
It is tempting to divide his music into
a handful of categories—mournful folk,
bedraggled hip-hop, postmodern sound
collage, sexy electro-pop—but the ma-
jority of his records fall somewhere
in between: Superman sheriff with a
Muppet. He can narrate a seduction
at a J. C. Penney in a slinking, Prince-
like falsetto, as on “Debra,” from 1999’s
“Midnite Vultures” (“I pick you up late
at night after work / I said, lady, step
inside my Hyundai / I’m gonna take
you up to Glendale / Gonna take you
for a real good meal”), or sing a raw
and quietly devastating chorus, as on
“Guess I’m Doing Fine,” from 2002’s
“Sea Change” (“It’s only lies that I’m
living / It’s only tears that I’m cry-
ing/It’s only you that I’m losing/Guess
I’m doing fine”). Neither mode feels
more authentic, though his work does
sometimes require listeners to inter-
rogate their own ideas about what they
believe to be more profound: ecstasy
or ruin.
At LACMA, we visited “Sound Sto-
ries,” an exhibition by the artist and
composer Christian Marclay, who used
the millions of videos publicly shared
on Snapchat to build a series of au-
diovisual installations. Beck was fa-
miliar with Marclay’s work. “He’s in-
credible,” he said. “I remember seeing
him on TV. He had done this thing
where he had chopped up vinyl rec-
ords and glued them all together.” Both
Beck and Marclay have relied heavily
on the recontextualization of samples,
and tend to question received norms
about how music should be made and
distributed. In 1985, Marclay released
“Record Without a Cover,” a single-
track experimental album that was sold
without packaging—any scratches or
dents that the record accumulated
became part of its sound. The piece
suggested that the way most of us had
come to consume music, by listening
to a fixed recording, was unnecessarily
limiting. In 2012, Beck released “Song
Reader,” a boxed set that included
twenty pieces of sheet music and more
than forty illustrations. “Song Reader”
uncoupled the idea of music from the
idea of recordings—songs could be
social, they could be pliable, they could
be temporary.
“The Organ,” one of Marclay’s in-
stallations, featured a small, spotlit syn-
thesizer in a dark room. Each key cued
a different sound and projected a se-
ries of vertical images on a screen. Beck
patiently tried to teach me how to play
Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” so that we
might duet. “You’re getting it,” he said,
though I was certainly not getting it.
We moved on to “Talk to Me/Sing to
Me,” a room with forty-two iPhones
suspended from the ceiling. Each phone
invited visitors to talk or sing and, in
response, receive a blast of video, culled
from Snapchat, that in some way mir-
rored the sound and pose they’d just
made. Beck launched into a low, echo-
ing version of Johnny Cash’s “Ring of
Fire.” “I just got a guy with his shirt
off, talking in Portuguese,” he said.
It is easy to become cynical about
the cacophony of modern living, par-
ticularly when you are being bathed
in human skronk—all the showboat-
ing and gasbaggery of social media.
Yet Marclay’s work is charming in its
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Although critics favor Beck’s darker work, he finds joyful songs harder to write: “How do you make something levitate?”
PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVID BENJAMIN SHERRY THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2, 2019 35
 UPLOADED BY "What's News" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws
playfulness and humor. Beck’s music
operates in a similar way. It forces a
person to consider that, sometimes,
two things are true at the same time.
The world is grim and hilarious; the
future is bright and unthinkable; you
are sad, but you are dancing; you are
home, but it is not the same.
Critics tend to take Beck’s darker,
singer-songwriter records more seri-
ously, but he has found that capturing
true joy is often more difficult. “Wow,”
a song from his thirteenth album, “Col-
ors,” is built around a howling synthe-
sizer melody that recalls the Italian
composer Ennio Morricone. “Wow!”
Beck sings, dragging out the word. “It’s,
like, right now.” The production is op-
ulent; the sentiment is dopey. During
the first chorus, Beck utters the phrase
“Oh, wow!” He sounds so genuinely
dazzled that I regularly find myself
thinking of this when I need to be re-
minded of pleasure. “It’s like how peo-
ple talk about comedy being harder to
pull off than drama,” he told me. “How
do you make something levitate?”
eck has spent twenty-six years
B making music that is complex in
form but scrappy in spirit. His work
is as likely to be featured in the cred-
its of “The Lego Movie 2” (“Super
Cool,” a collaboration with the pop
star Robyn and the comedy trio the
Lonely Island) as it is to appear on an
album of songs inspired by the Al-
fonso Cuarón film “Roma” (“Taran-
tula,” an echoing and apprehensive
electro-dirge). Though his earliest al-
bums are often described as dilapi-
dated assemblages, he has precise ideas
about craft and structure. At times, he
has leaned more deeply into funk and
R. & B., refining his falsetto and doing
the splits onstage. “I want to defy /The
logic of all sex laws,” he sang on the
single “Sexx Laws.” (The line was in-
spired by a verse in “Don’t U Know,”
an Ol’ Dirty Bastard song.) Like the
R. & B. singer Ginuwine, Beck has
an uncanny knack for writing lyrics
that totter between farcical and titil-
lating. “I’ll feed you fruit that don’t
exist,” he sang on “Nicotine & Gravy.”
There were hints of Beck’s scope
and ambition on “Mellow Gold,” his
first album for a major label, released
in 1994. The single “Loser,” which
36 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2, 2019
reached No. 10 on the Billboard charts,
sounded like a refracted, postmodern
version of Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean
Homesick Blues.” Beck had the same
scavenging instinct as Dylan, but he
was mining from several more de-
cades; besides blues, country, gospel,
and folk, he incorporated elements of
hip-hop, disco, punk, and electronic
music. It’s odd to think that Beck’s
first few albums preceded the rise of
file sharing, because they so adroitly
reflect the thrill and terror of having
everything all at once. He is still the
musical figure who best anticipated
and reflects the reigning aesthetic of
our time: abundance.
Beck is five feet eight, slender, and
handsome, with delicate features. His
eyes are a soft turquoise, and have a
deep, searching quality. In conversa-
tion, he is funny, kind, and curious. He
was born on July 8, 1970, as Bek David
Campbell. He and his brother later
took their mother’s maiden name, Han-
sen, and Beck added the “c” to his first
name, with the hope that it might help
people pronounce it properly. “I still
got Brock, Breck, Beak,” he said. “I re-
member leaving a meeting with some
record executives, and one said, ‘Very
nice to meet you, Bic.’”
His father, David Campbell, is a
Los Angeles-based arranger and com-
poser, who started his career playing
viola on Carole King’s “Tapestry” and
has since worked for the Rolling Stones,
Garth Brooks, Metallica, and Adele.
He has also arranged the orchestral
parts on most of Beck’s records. As a
kid, Beck wasn’t entirely aware of what
his father did. “He never talked about
it,” he said. “Ten or fifteen years ago, I
bought a CD of ‘Tapestry,’ and I was
reading the credits and saw that my
dad was on there. So I was, like, ‘ “Tap-
estry,” huh?’ It was just another session
to him.” Campbell was born in To-
ronto but moved to L.A. in the early
seventies, shortly after joining the
Church of Scientology.
In February, Beck filed for divorce
from the actress Marissa Ribisi, whom
he married in 2004. They have two
children. He described the experience
as heartbreaking. Ribisi’s family is also
active in the Church of Scientology,
and the question of Beck’s religious
affiliation has preoccupied the music
press for years; it is cited in nearly every
article written about him. “I’ve so de-
voted myself to music that it’s kind of
my main thing, and religion hasn’t been
a central part of my life,” he told me.
“There’s a misconception that I’m a
Scientologist. There was a period of
time, maybe in the early two-thousands,
where my family recommended I get
some counselling. But, beyond that, it
hasn’t been something I’ve actively
pursued.”
Though Beck and Ribisi’s marriage
is ending, “Hyperspace” doesn’t resem-
ble “Sea Change,” which he wrote in
the wake of another arduous breakup.
Some of its best songs are buoyant, al-
most ecstatic. “It’s not really a work of
it,” he said of the record’s relationship
to his personal life. In general, he is less
likely these days to pull material from
his own experience. “When I try to
shoehorn my life into a song, it gets re-
ally ham-fisted,” he said.
Beck’s mother, Bibbe Hansen, is a
performance artist and an actress. Her
father, Al Hansen, was a prominent
member of Fluxus, a community of in-
terdisciplinary artists interested in the
sublimity of the creative process. In 1945,
Hansen joined the military as a para-
trooper; the next year, while stationed
in Germany, he pushed a piano off the
roof of a building. The piano drop is
sometimes referred to as one of the first
“happenings”—fleeting, multimedia art
performances enacted outside of any
institutional context.
“My grandpa was a third-genera-
tion New Yorker, and tough as shit,”
Beck said. “Once, when I was rough-
housing with my best friend, we
knocked into one of his really big, im-
portant collages. It was a kite-shaped
piece, done on wood, and the bottom
broke off on my friend’s toe.” His
grandfather might have enjoyed that,
I told him. “He probably would have,”
Beck said. “He was a barroom brawler.
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He was like nineteen-seventies Jack are actual pictures of her eating a ham- when they were young. “Kids were kind
Nicholson, with a little Bukowski, and burger next to Warhol.” He laughed. of invisible when we were growing up,”
some Lou Reed from that interview “You can see how hungry she is. She’s Beck said. “I pretty much had free rein
in ’74 where he has the blond hair.” just, like, ‘I haven’t eaten in three days.’ to do whatever I wanted from a really
Al Hansen often made collages from If I had seen this when I was a teen- young age.” Bibbe and David divorced
found detritus, including cigarette butts, ager, I probably would have died.” when Beck was in his early teens.
centerfolds, and candy wrappers. (His Mostly, he lived with his mother and
papers contain a letter from Philip ne evening, Beck took me for a brother in rooming houses or studio
Morris, in which the company agrees
to “put 3000 Marlboro Cigarettes at
O drive around central Los Ange-
les, where he was born and raised. “It’s
apartments. “We had nontraditional
parents,” Channing Hansen, who is
your disposal to support your artistic not a definitive neighborhood, like now a visual artist in L.A., told me.
work.”) In 1998, the Santa Monica Mu- Hollywood or Silver Lake or Santa “We didn’t have parents with nine-to-
seum of Art hosted an exhibition ti- Monica. It’s sort of an in-between, for- five jobs, or a white picket fence.”
tled “Beck and Al Hansen: Playing gotten area,” he explained, steering a Westlake’s streets used to be lined
with Matches.” The show’s curators silver Mercedes through traffic. “Some with stately Victorian houses, but
found an easy line from Al Hansen’s people call it Pico-Union, other peo- eventually, as Robert Jones wrote in
aesthetic—the juxtaposition of odd- ple call it Westlake. I grew up with ev- the L.A. Times, in 1997, “the white
ball bits, resulting in a provocative and eryone going, ‘Ugh, L.A.—so cheesy.’ gentry fled to Encino and Westwood,
unexpected whole—to Beck’s music. My reality of L.A. was quite different leaving their ghost buildings behind
Beck, the keyboardist Roger Manning, from ‘Baywatch,’” he said. “‘There’s a them.” Beginning in the late nineteen-
and the bassist Justin Meldal-Johnsen beach? What is this beach that they seventies, there was an influx of drug
performed at the exhibit’s opening, speak of ?’ ” He has recently taken to dealers and gang members, including
débuting a one-off piece called “New listening to KROQ-HD2—which some fleeing the civil war in El Sal-
Age Evisceration, (Part 1).” Beck in- plays mostly New Wave and punk from vador. Beck was nine years old when
troduced it to the crowd by saying, the eighties—while cruising around the L.A.P.D. began its Community
“This will be the longest twenty min- town. “It’s sort of a time portal,” he Resources Against Street Hoodlums
utes of your life.” Toward the end of said. “It’s like opening a secret door. program, a notoriously savage unit
the performance, he attempted to cut They even have the original d.j.s from that was shut down in 2000, after
his synthesizer in half with a chainsaw. when I was a kid.” officers were alleged to have been in-
It was, by any measure, a “happening.” His parents got engaged at a diner volved in gang activity, murders, rob-
Hansen married the poet Audrey downtown that is now a MetroPCS beries, evidence planting, and brutal-
Ostlin, and in 1952 they had Bibbe. store. They had Beck and Channing ity. Cops would occasionally burst into
Ostlin died suddenly, in Greenwich
Village, in 1968. When Bibbe was a
teen-ager, Al introduced her to Andy
Warhol. She appeared in several of
Warhol’s films and two of his “Screen
Tests”—the black-and-white portraits
that Warhol made in the mid-sixties,
in which his subjects sat still in front
of a camera for a few minutes. “When
I was about fourteen, I discovered the
Velvet Underground,” Beck said. “I re-
member her making a comment like
‘You like that? I used to know those
people.’ She started telling this story
about how her friend was Warhol’s as-
sistant. He was the guy who used to
crack the bullwhip onstage with the
band, and she was one of the dancers.”
On his phone, Beck showed me a
few photographs of his mother and the
model Edie Sedgwick, one of Warhol’s
muses. He kept scrolling, stopping on
a picture of Bibbe cramming a ham-
burger into her mouth while Warhol,
wearing a dark blazer and sunglasses,
coolly flips through a book. Beck be-
held it with genuine disbelief: “There
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the buildings where Beck was living.
Surely, I said, all of this had to have
been frightening for him. He shrugged.
“It was just the world I knew,” he said.
Beck recalled a time, as a teen-ager,
when he attempted to cut through
MacArthur Park. He was accosted on
all sides by what he thought were zom-
bies. “It was ‘Night of the Living Crack-
head,’ ” he said. Things were no less
treacherous elsewhere in the area. “The
one store that was nearby was the
7-Eleven, but you didn’t go down there,
because there would be fourteen-year-
olds with steel pipes.”
He is not precious about the old
places, but each time we turned the
corner on some new, gentrified pocket
he appeared briefly befuddled. At the
corner of Sixth Street and South La
Brea Avenue, we came upon one of
those expansive new microbreweries
that suffocate some part of the soul.
His eyes grew wide. “What the hell is
that?” he said. “Look at that thing! That
does not belong here.”
We pulled up outside the home
where his family lived when he was
born: a pinkish, two-story rooming
house with a pair of rickety-looking
front porches and an iron fence looped
shut by several feet of thick chain. “We
lived right there in the front room.
There were probably ten other people
living here,” he said. We drove a few
more blocks. “I’m taking you to an area
that’s ungentrifiable,” he said. When
Beck was older, his mother qualified
for Section 8 public housing. Most of
the homes on his old block had either
been torn down or were boarded up
and awaiting demolition. Then we
found it: a squat, yellowing bungalow
with a broken vacuum cleaner out front.
Some roof tiles were missing. “Wow,”
he said, shifting the car into park. “It’s
the last one standing.” We watched a
man come out and walk down the side-
walk. “I guarantee you, in another year
and a half, this will be gone.”
The area is one of the most densely
populated parts of Los Angeles, and
its sheer saturation is evident in Beck’s
early lyrics. He tried to learn Spanish
when he was younger, but he was
clowned on so relentlessly in school
that he stopped. “They’d just be cry-
ing, in hysterics,” he said. “‘Oh, my God,
who is this güero?’ So I just shut up.”
38 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2, 2019
TO BURN THROUGH WHERE YOU ARE NOT YET
Those who take on risk are not those
Who bear it. The sign said to profit
As they do, trade around the one
Particular. Let them credit what you hunt,
Let future perform. Results are for your
Children anyway; returns can be long
To notice, and when wrong, will right
Unless the drawdown is steep, or of your own
Doing. If only to have known then the now:
The thesis did not revert, never worked;
You did not move
Except to the already—
And as the prodigy breaks from the pack,
Disrupts into the new for just one more
In 2005, he titled an album “Guero”— and the school where I was probably
Chicano slang for a fair-skinned or had amazing teachers.” By then, Beck’s
light-haired person—and on “Qué family was living in a three-hundred-
Onda Guero” (or, roughly, “What’s up, and-fifty-square-foot, two-room apart-
white boy?”) he evoked his old neigh- ment. “I slept under the dining-room
borhood over a loping beat co-pro- table,” he said. “My brother slept on
duced by the Dust Brothers: “Sleeping the couch.”
on the sidewalk with a Burger King He started taking the bus down-
crown / Never wake them up, más cer- town each day, to the Central Library.
veza /Till the rooster crows, vatos ver- There was an entire room of musical
gallos,” he sings. The image is neither scores, so he taught himself how to read
nonsense nor metaphor. “In the morn- music, sometimes practicing on a piano
ing, I would be stepping over eight guys in the foyer of his apartment building.
who were sleeping on the sidewalk,” he His tastes were shaped by the city: the
recalled. “And some of them would ranchera music of his neighborhood,
have on Burger King crowns.” the punk and New Wave he heard on
There are still vestiges of the old the radio, the hip-hop he encountered
streets: barbershops, all-night diners, on the street. He recalled taking a city
botanicas. “All the shop signs were bus that went from South Central up
hand-painted,” he said. “It was almost Vermont Avenue toward Los Feliz. “I
like folk art. There would be a paint- would wait for the bus right here,” he
ing of a toilet-paper roll. And each store said, pointing toward the corner of
would be at least three things, like: used Eighth Street and Vermont. “I would
furniture, dry cleaning, and taxes.” get on, and it would be Grandmaster
Beck stopped attending school when Flash, or whatever the cool rap thing
it grew too dangerous. “I was a little bit of the moment was, playing on a boom
of a target,” he said. He became a fast box on the back of the bus.”
runner, and learned how to be invisi- He became interested in American
ble. “They opened this performing-arts vernacular music, particularly country
high school downtown, and I applied blues, the acoustic songs recorded by
to get in, and they didn’t accept me.” indigent Southern musicians, between
He paused. “I don’t want to glorify what about 1929 and 1935. “One Foot in the
I did. I think school is really important, Grave,” Beck’s fourth album, features
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landlord disappeared with his secu-

rity deposit. He stayed for a while in
a flophouse in Hell’s Kitchen. “It was
basically a room with a bare bulb and
Click above the dial, the deal a cot,” he said. “I remember the hall-
Downriver is how you will get paid, ways being flooded with water. That
was . . . not romantic.”
Later, further. Out beyond “I was a street person, basically,” he
Where you just see. Trust the flow added. We sat for a moment at a red
light. What was it was like, I asked, to
Is what he said, sort out the secular be able to offer his kids a very differ-
As each day reconciles you ent kind of childhood?
“I feel really proud that they’re able
Into a morning of leaving. Or at least going; to have this other life,” he said. “It is a
Coming back at dark to take off your shoes miracle to me.”

And ease into that chair. With that glass. Filled
Again. Not yet paid for. All resting
On an infinitesimal wire you have never seen.
Their wire. Their there. You here. Not there.
a cover of Skip James’s “Jesus Is a
Mighty Good Leader,” one of a hand-
ful of songs that James, the spookiest
of the Delta-blues legends, recorded
in 1931. Beck said, “A friend of one
of my mother’s friends was a guitar
player and a huge collector of 78-r.p.m.
records. I was just a kid, but he would
let me come over and bring a blank
cassette and record his 78s.” With the
man’s help, Beck began learning how
to play blues songs by Mississippi John
Hurt and Fred McDowell on guitar.
“It was pretty obvious that he had mu-
sical chops,” Channing said. “When
he was eleven or twelve, he was record-
ing professional-sounding music on a
four-track.”
In 1986, when Beck was fifteen, the
Central Library caught fire. “Probably
the saddest day of my childhood was
watching the downtown library burn
down,” he said. “That was the moment
I thought, I have to leave L.A.—I have
nothing here. It was the only place that
I could go. I didn’t even have money
to go to a coffee shop. I was supposed
to be in school.”
One afternoon, he was riding the
bus up Vermont Avenue when he passed
Los Angeles City College. “I didn’t even
know what a community college was,”
he said. But he saw people walking
—Sophie Cabot Black
around carrying books. “It looked cool.
It felt safe.” He sneaked into a few
classes and eventually befriended the
writer Austin Straus, who was teach-
ing a literature course, and his wife, the
poet Wanda Coleman. “I showed him
some of my writing. He let me come
to his classes,” Beck said. “The next
year, I got a fake I.D., because you had
to be eighteen to go there, and I was
maybe fifteen or sixteen. I enrolled, and
I was in heaven.”
Eventually, he again grew frustrated
by his prospects in Los Angeles. “I
felt I just sort of slipped through the
cracks of the system,” he said. When
he turned eighteen, he saw a Grey-
hound commercial advertising a cheap
fare to anywhere in the United States.
It took him three days to get to New
York by bus. He had a flat-top Gib-
son—“a Woody Guthrie kind of gui-
tar”—and about two hundred dollars.
He slept in dorm rooms and on friends’
couches. He took I.D. photos at a pho-
tomat and worked as an usher at a
theatre, and he started playing acous-
tic songs at clubs downtown. The city
was then nurturing a so-called anti-
folk scene, which sought to disman-
tle some of the piousness and sancti-
mony of the folk revival. He tried to
rent a small studio apartment, but the
n 1994, Thurston Moore, of Sonic
I Youth, hosted an episode of MTV’s
“120 Minutes,” with Beck as his guest.
The show, which aired on Mondays
between 1 and 3 A.M., generally fea-
tured videos too obscure or perverse to
be broadcast at any other time. The in-
terview is less than four minutes, not
counting commercial breaks, but it en-
capsulates the cynicism and theatrical
apathy of alternative culture in the nine-
teen-nineties. I love watching it. Nei-
ther man raises his voice—to express
agitation would have required admit-
ting to some level of engagement in
the conversation—yet a vague con-
tempt for the scenario they’ve found
themselves in is palpable.
Moore asks Beck, who was then
twenty-three, what it was like to have
“Loser” become a smash hit. “It’s like
surfing in some oil spillage,” Beck says.
“Yeah, it is like that,” Moore replies.
Beck pulls out a small device and starts
playing what sounds like a melted cas-
sette. “That’s it, man,” Moore says. After
returning from a break, Moore asks
Beck what his real name is. Beck re-
moves his shoe and chucks it at the
wall. “All right,” Moore says.
It was perhaps not wrong to be un-
serious about MTV. A year before he
was a guest on “120 Minutes,” Beck
recorded a throaty, jagged folk song ti-
tled “MTV Makes Me Want to Smoke
Crack.” “MTV makes me wanna smoke
crack / Fall out of a window and never
come back,” he sang. Nowadays, it is
expected that a celebrity will express
only boundless gratitude for his posi-
tion. But, for the middle-class subur-
ban teen-agers watching MTV in 1994,
not giving a shit about anything (or at
THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2, 2019 39
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least pretending not to give a shit about
anything) was cool. I’ll cop to some
nostalgia for the vibe.
For Beck, though, this was not so
much affect as reality. The chorus of
“Loser”—“I’m a loser, baby, so why don’t
you kill me?”—seemed slyly defeatist, a
rallying cry for the slacker Zeitgeist, and
it briefly turned Beck into a Gen X
pinup. But the characterization was fun-
damentally off. Beck had a different van-
tage—coming of age as a güero in a
largely Latino, low-income neighbor-
hood, in the recesses of a corrupt and
violent city—compared with that of
most of his peers. Even “Loser” begins
with disconnection: “In the time of
chimpanzees, I was a monkey,” he spits.
Beck’s early lyrics were seen as a ran-
dom, ironic reflection of the MTV aes-
thetic—the jump cuts, the onslaught of
arbitrary images. In truth, he fretted over
them, as a poet might fuss with a line.
“At the time, I thought that I just hadn’t
done it well enough,” he said. “That I
had failed. People used to call me this
pop-culture junk surfer. I liked vision-
ary language that had a lot of really con-
densed imagery, where words could spark
these almost gemlike refractions. I
“It’ll never be ready in time.”
thought most song lyrics were really
throwaway and generic. I wanted to try
and populate my lyrics with really alive,
original, surprising language. Journalists
would be, like, ‘Well, you know, your lyr-
ics don’t really mean anything. You’re
just playing with a bunch of random
words you’ve thrown together.’ And I’d
be, like, Ah, man. I used to torture my-
self over those words. You know, how
do I fit this image that I have in my
mind into one line? How do I evoke this
whole world in five words?”
ne afternoon, Beck invited me to
O the Capitol Records Building, in
Hollywood, a white, thirteen-story
circular tower designed to look like re-
cords piled on a turntable spindle. We
met in Studio B. “Most of the strings
for my records were done in here,” he
said, gesturing around the room. He
tends to edit the orchestral parts of his
songs spontaneously. “It’s a lot of sim-
plifying,” he said. “‘Oh, that chord’s too
thick. That melody sounds like a bad
soundtrack.’ ” He finds working with
his father to be simple and enjoyable.
“There’s no ceremony to it at all,” he said.
“It’s ‘Hey, can you do this?’ ‘Yeah, O.K.’”
One of Beck’s engineers, David
Greenbaum, had brought a heap of hard
drives. Greenbaum estimated that they
contained hundreds of hours of unre-
leased material. “It’s kind of endless,”
Beck said. He and Greenbaum cued up
some mixes: alternate tracks from “Hy-
perspace,” even more songs inspired by
“Roma,” old demos, a series of heavy, spi-
ralling, Kraftwerk-esque songs for an un-
finished record that he had thought of
titling “Rococo.”The breadth of the ma-
terial was dizzying. His vocal range alone
is difficult to pin down: a falsetto, a
clipped rap. One deep, clear, ringing note.
“There’s nobody like him,” Green-
baum told me later. “No one else goes
to the lengths that he does.” He de-
scribed Beck’s process in the studio as
exhaustive. “He’ll try a gazillion differ-
ent versions and approaches, just to see
if he can beat what he’s already got. I
find it admirable that, no matter how
far down the road he goes, if he’s not
making it better, he will happily return
to the original idea in its original state.”
Campbell, Beck’s father, said that
sometimes a piece will transform en-
tirely between the recording of the string
arrangements and the release of the
song. “The things I worked on will be
in there, but in a new way,” he said. “It’s
always, ‘Wow! This is a whole differ-
ent song.’ It’s so refreshing.”
As a teen-ager, Beck loved film, es-
pecially the humor and audacity of the
European auteurs: “Fellini, Godard,
Truffaut, Antonioni, Buñuel,” he said.
“ ‘Odelay’ is me trying to Fellini the
neighborhood where I grew up.” His
favorite directors incubate an almost
hallucinogenic feeling, twisting the mun-
dane parts of an ordinary day into what
Beck described as a series of “wild, vi-
sionary, poetic moments.”
“I didn’t understand those films at all,”
he said. “I’d be, like, ‘What is happening?’
But, at the same time, I knew something
really incredible was happening.”
Beck’s music is typically classified
as pop—in the past decade, especially,
he has drifted more toward the sorts
of hulking anthems that are discern-
ible over the din of the beer tent at
giant outdoor festivals—but it can just
as easily be slotted into the avant-garde
canon, alongside work by other artists
who stack distinct images in chimeri-
cal ways. When I texted him a short
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poem by John Ashbery, he replied with
a picture of a tall pile of Ashbery’s
books. The spines were cracked.
he softness of the synthesizers on
T “Hyperspace” gives many of the
songs a pleading and almost hymnlike
feel. “Over time, I became fascinated
by the beauty of a really simple line,”
he told me. “Something that, if you
were in a conversation, you wouldn’t
think about twice but, in the context
of a song, it becomes really powerful.”
Seven of the album’s eleven songs
were either co-written or co-produced
by Pharrell Williams, an architect of
monumental hits for Snoop Dogg
(“Drop It Like It’s Hot”), Gwen Ste-
fani (“Hollaback Girl”), and Daft Punk
(“Get Lucky”). Though Williams has
in many ways defined the sound of con-
temporary pop, his contributions to
“Hyperspace” don’t approximate any-
thing else on the radio. “Saw Light-
ning,” which Williams co-wrote, co-
produced, and performed on (his verse
is loose and breezy, like a garment that’s
had all its seams ripped out), is both
minimal and maximal, a precise, skit-
tering beat punctuated by slide guitar,
whoops, and a throbbing bass line.
“He’s a smart guy—he understands
the seasons, he understands the pub-
lic temperament, he knows exactly when
to show up,” Williams told me of Beck.
“And it always feels good, because he
delivers it his way. I’ve always loved
that about Beck. He’s out-careered all
of his contemporaries. He was never
really in the same lane as them. He was
always this guy walking in a green pas-
ture. They were on a highway in Los
Angeles or Seattle, and he was in a green
pasture in his mind.”
Williams found that their approaches
to the material were distinct but com-
plementary. “The intersection for us
was ‘What inherently feels good and
fresh?’” he said. “A rock is a rock, but
we use different kinds of chisels.”
If any narrative thread unites Beck’s
music, it is a gentle existential duress, a
sense that nothing is permanent. “No-
where child keep on running / In your
time you’ll find something,” he sings on
“Everlasting Nothing,” the final track on
“Hyperspace.” On “Chemical,” a woozy,
spectral meditation on the intoxication
of love, the chorus becomes an implora-
“I hate when he stays late on the throne just
to avoid the tension at home.”
• •
tion: “And love is a chemical / Start it,
start it again,” he sings, his voice dissi-
pating into mist. He often writes about
the extraordinary moment when two
people become awake to each other. Like
all of us, he is hungering for a brush with
the sublime, but he understands that life
is more likely to be banal. On “Unevent-
ful Days,” the first single from “Hyper-
space,” he arrives at an emotional détente
with a partner: “Nothing you could say
could make it come to life /I don’t have
a way to make you change your mind,”
he sings. His voice sounds tender and
exhausted. The song follows a bleary syn-
thesizer riff, and although it isn’t an es-
pecially glum melody, it communicates
a precise ennui. How long should a per-
son keep waiting for something to feel
good again? In an early verse, Beck sings
the word “alone,” and a vocal effect makes
it sound as if he is, quite literally, pow-
ering down. This sort of liminal state—
after the panic of heartbreak, but before
whatever happens next—is rarely com-
municated very effectively in song. Beck
seems to know its contours instinctively.
In some ways, he said, “Hyperspace”
is all about the idea of wanting. “That,
to me, is what underlies the digital mo-
ment—a longing for something,” he
said. “The cliché about technology
is that it replaces human interaction,
somehow. But I think it’s the opposite.
I think ultimately it makes you hun-
grier for the real connection.”
he Pacific Dining Car opened an
T outpost in Santa Monica in 1990,
though it feels as if it has been serving
shrimp cocktail since the dawn of time.
When Beck and I arrived, late on a Fri-
day evening, the dining room was library-
quiet. We crossed a stretch of elaborate
carpet to a green vinyl booth. A silver
vase held a single yellow rose. The waiters
were wearing bow ties. “It’s like an episode
of ‘Bonanza’ directed by David Lynch,”
Beck said. He ordered a rib-eye steak,
creamed spinach, and mashed potatoes.
After dinner, we drove to the ocean.
Beck likes to check in with the Pacific
once in a while. We got out of the car
and walked along the waterfront. The
moon was a tiny silver crescent. We spoke
about how to know if and when you’re
done making art. “There was a point
where I was, like, ‘Is this over?’” he said.
“But I wake up with songs going. Mel-
odies, harmonies, a bass line. It’s like
there’s a radio station playing in my head
all the time.” Maybe, I said, the only
point of art is to make the thing that you
most want to exist in the world. He
thought about it for a moment. “I don’t
know if I’ve done that yet,” he said. 
THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2, 2019 41
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THE INTERVIEW
A group of volunteers is helping incarcerated people negotiate a parole system that is all but broken.
arlier this year, the Parole Prepa-
E ration Project put out a call for
volunteers, and more than a hun-
dred people applied. Many were law
students and lawyers, but there was also
a Planet Fitness employee, a pediatric
I.C.U. nurse, a professor of philosophy,
a software engineer, a waiter, and a trans-
lator. Parole Prep invited them to an
orientation, and, one Wednesday eve-
ning last April, some eighty people as-
sembled in a lecture hall at New York
University School of Law. Most were
in their twenties or thirties. Three-quar-
ters were female. A few people carried
reusable water bottles; one older woman
walked in with a cane.
Michelle Lewin, who is thirty-two
years old and the executive director of
Parole Prep, stood at the front of the
room, wearing a loose-fitting brown dress
and worn work boots. She explained that
Parole Prep requires an eight-to-twelve-
month commitment. Each volunteer is
assigned to a team of two or three peo-
ple, then matched up with someone who
has been incarcerated for decades, whom
the team helps prepare for an upcoming
interview before the parole board. Lewin
talked about Parole Prep’s “values as a
project.” “Nobody should be judged by
the worst thing they’ve ever done,” she
said.Then she introduced two men, Kevin
Bartley and Anthony Dixon, whom she
called “my uncles and my dear friends.”
Bartley, a sixty-seven-year-old man
with a shaved head and a confident de-
meanor, spoke first. “I’m not a law stu-
dent, like some of y’all,” he said. “But I
am an expert on corrections. What makes
me an expert? I did thirty-seven years.
I came home nine months ago. I went in
at twenty-eight, came out at sixty-five. I
was denied parole twelve times.” He talked
about his experience with Parole Prep. “I
had two of the best volunteers. They were
extraordinary,” he said. “I think I would
still be inside if not for Parole Prep. This
would’ve been my thirty-eighth year.”
42 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2, 2019
ANNALS OF JUSTICE
BY JENNIFER GONNERMAN
The official mission of New York’s pa-
role board is to “ensure public safety by
granting parole when appropriate.” When
incarcerated people appear before the
board, its members evaluate “their ulti-
mate fitness to be paroled.”The incarcer-
ated people are expected to speak openly
about their crimes, take responsibility for
them, and express remorse. But some
people who are convicted of very serious
crimes minimize their actions when they
appear before the board, saying things
like “The gun went off ” or “I made a mis-
take.” “That’s a bad thing for anyone to
say,” Bartley told the would-be volun-
teers. Killing another man is not a “mis-
take.” “A mistake is you wake up in the
morning and put on a white sock and a
black sock,” he said. He added, “The hard-
est thing that you’re going to have to do
if you become a volunteer is you sit down
with the guys and you have to pull it out
of them. It’s like pulling teeth, especially
when someone carries a lot of guilt and
shame, like myself.”
Dixon, a soft-spoken fifty-eight-year-
old man with square-framed glasses,
spent thirty-two years in prison. Speak-
ing about the first time he went before
the parole board, he said, “I failed, and
I failed miserably. My particular prob-
lem was I knew what to say but I had
a hard time saying it myself.” In the
months before his third parole-board
hearing, a team of volunteers had come
to see him on weekdays, weekends, and
holidays. He said that they prepared
him well for the parole interview: “I felt
so much confidence.” He added, “I didn’t
want to let my volunteers down. I wanted
to give the best presentation that I could,
because I felt they had connected with
me so much that it would hurt them if
I was denied parole.” The board voted
to release him.
New York’s state prisons hold some
forty-six thousand people. Almost twenty
per cent are “lifers,” which means that
they are serving a prison sentence with
“life” on the back, like twenty years to
life. Parole Prep works only with lifers,
most of whom have been convicted of
murder or other acts of extreme violence.
Once they have completed their mini-
mum sentence, they are given a date to
appear before a panel of usually three
parole-board members. According to
the Vera Institute for Justice, the suc-
cess rate for lifers appearing before the
board in the past three years has been
thirty-six per cent. According to Lewin,
the rate for people going before the board
after assistance from a team of Parole
Prep volunteers is about sixty per cent.
In the past five years, Parole Prep
volunteers have helped a hundred and
forty-nine people get out of prison,
twelve of them women. Often, the re-
lationships between the men and women
in prison and their volunteers endure
after the prisoners are released. Tyler
Morse, who recently finished a master’s
degree in women’s and gender studies
at the CUNY Graduate Center, went to
a Super Bowl party hosted by a man
she helped get out of prison. Ben See-
gars, who was released from prison in
January, was a guest at the wedding of
one of his volunteers, Stacy Auer. When
Chloé Truong-Jones, a Ph.D. student
at N.Y.U., discovered that the seventy-
one-year-old man she had worked to
get freed was in a homeless shelter that
was unsafe, she arranged for him to stay
at her boyfriend’s apartment in Bush-
wick while he waited for a transfer.
Recently, Gina Lee recalled the first
Parole Prep meeting she attended, in the
fall of 2017. A friend had been a volun-
teer and told her about the project; Lee
was then twenty-five and working at a
nonprofit that helped teen-agers who
had been jailed on Rikers Island. She
filled out an application, went to an ori-
entation, and found herself on a team
with another friend, John White, a
twenty-five-year-old who worked for an
art-auction Web site, and Olivia Button,
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Richard Lloyd Dennis at Auburn Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison. He was convicted of murder in 1972.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY AL J. THOMPSON THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2, 2019 43
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a twenty-four-year-old manager at a soft-
ware company. Lewin assigned the group
to work with a sixty-six-year-old man
incarcerated at Auburn, a maximum-
security prison in Cayuga County, two
hundred and fifty miles from Brooklyn,
where they all lived.
His name was Richard Lloyd Den-
nis, and he had been in prison for for-
ty-six years. The volunteers knew little
more than that he had been convicted
in 1972 of killing a police officer in
Brownsville, Brooklyn. He was twenty
when he committed the crime. At the
time, anyone convicted of killing a po-
lice officer in New York State faced the
possibility of the death penalty, but he
was sentenced to twenty-five years to
life. The parole board had turned him
down eleven times.
Lee, White, and Button travelled to
Auburn for the first time in December
of 2017. Waiting in the prison visiting
room, they noticed a short, balding man
walking toward them. He looked, as Lee
put it, like somebody’s grandfather. It
“Well, then, maybe don’t name your Wi-Fi TheRealBigFoot.”
was Dennis. All the formerly incarcer-
ated men whom Lee had heard share
their stories at Parole Prep meetings had
been powerful public speakers. But Den-
nis rarely smiled, and he had a stutter.
When the volunteers tried to broach the
subject of his crime with him, he stopped
talking altogether. Two hours into their
interview, he said, “O.K., now you leave.”
On the ride back to New York City, the
volunteers were caught in a blizzard. The
nerve-racking weather matched the
mood in the car. Lee, in particular, was
worried about the task they had taken
on. “I just remember being, like, Oh, this
is going to be really hard,” she said.
oday, New York’s parole board re-
T ceives almost no scrutiny, but in
the early seventies its operations drew
enormous attention. In September, 1971,
men incarcerated at Attica seized con-
trol of parts of the prison, sparking a re-
bellion that lasted four days. By the end
of it, forty-three people were dead—
thirty-two incarcerated men and eleven
state workers. Afterward, an official state
investigation into the uprising revealed
that the way the parole board operated
had been “a primary source of tension
and bitterness” inside Attica. “The de-
cisions of the parole board are fraught
with the appearance of arbitrariness,”
the report stated. “Even when parole is
granted, inmates must often wait in prison
for months while searching for jobs and
places to live. This is done through the
mail, and they are given little assistance.”
Many of the incarcerated men also be-
lieved that the board was racially biased.
Most of its members were white men;
none was younger than fifty-nine.
After the rebellion, a disparate group
of prominent New Yorkers formed the
Citizens’ Inquiry on Parole and Criminal
Justice. Ramsey Clark, who had served
as Attorney General under President
Lyndon B. Johnson, chaired the inquiry;
the committee members included the
playwright Arthur Miller, the civil-rights
leader Bayard Rustin, the psychologist
and educator Kenneth B. Clark, and the
labor leader Moe Foner. In 1975, they
published a two-hundred-page report,
declaring that New York’s parole system
had “failed dramatically” and was “beyond
reform.” The board’s decision-making
process, which was “based on an assess-
ment of an inmate’s rehabilitation,” rested
on “faulty theory,” the report said. “Since
the theory of rehabilitation includes
vague and subjective notions of moral
character and future conduct, there is no
way that the parole board can measure
the degree of an inmate’s rehabilitation.”
As a result, the board’s decisions about
how long to keep someone in prison
were “irrational and cruel.” The group
shared a version of the report with pa-
role officials before publication, but they
received no response. David Rudenstine,
who directed the inquiry, wrote in the
final report, “It is regrettable that the
primary loyalty of public officials respon-
sible for an important social system such
as parole seems to be the maintenance
of things as they are.”
In the decades that followed, allega-
tions of racism in the parole system con-
tinued to circulate. In 2016, three report-
ers at the Times examined thousands of
decisions made by New York’s parole
board and found that black men were
“at a marked disadvantage.” Michelle
Lewin, in the years since she started
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working with incarcerated people seek-
ing parole, has come to many of the same
conclusions that the Citizens’ Inquiry
did, forty-four years ago. As she put it
in a 2017 law-review article that she co-
wrote, “The Board’s practices exemplify
nationwide criminal justice policies that
are rooted in retribution and racism and
result in extreme punishment.”
Lewin grew up in Atlanta. Her pa-
ternal grandparents were Holocaust sur-
vivors, and she attended a Jewish day
school. She told me that she did not
have any non-Jewish friends until she
was fifteen, after she started attending
a private, progressive high school. As a
sophomore at Sarah Lawrence College,
she enrolled in a class called The Penal
State, and the professor took a group of
students to Sing Sing. “I remember just
the towering cells, stacked on top of each
other, floor after floor after floor,” she
told me. “It was horrifying.” After col-
lege, she worked for a victims’-services
group; she had a desk at a police precinct
in Coney Island and accompanied offi-
cers when they visited domestic-violence
victims. She later worked as a court ad-
vocate at the Hall of Justice in the Bronx,
trying to persuade judges not to imprison
people accused of low-level felonies.
In the fall of 2013, she enrolled at
CUNY School of Law, and soon after-
ward she attended a meeting of the Na-
tional Lawyers Guild’s Mass Incarcer-
ation Committee, in Harlem. One of
the other attendees, Scott Paltrowitz, a
Harvard Law graduate who worked for
a prison-reform organization, had re-
cently visited Otisville Correctional Fa-
cility, in Orange County, New York,
where he had met members of its Lif-
ers & Long Termers Organization. Pal-
trowitz informed Lewin and the other
meeting attendees that there was a man
at Otisville named Roberto Pascal, who
had been in prison for thirty-three years
and needed help obtaining parole. Lewin
and Nora Carroll, a Legal Aid attorney,
said that they would try to assist him.
Inside Otisville, Pascal gave crochet-
ing classes to the other men, and, Lewin
learned, he liked to feed Snickers bars
to the groundhogs in the yard. Lewin
and Carroll started visiting him every
other month. They worked with him to
prepare for his next parole interview,
helping him draft a personal statement
and studying transcripts from his earlier
interviews to figure out what had gone
wrong. Pascal had a heavy accent, and,
in Lewin’s view, the parole board “just
didn’t give a shit about him.” He seemed
to appreciate the women’s efforts on his
behalf, and on one visit he left them a
gift of two crocheted string bikinis to
pick up on their way out. (The next time
Lewin sent him a letter, she told him,
“Socks would’ve been nicer,” but, she
says, “it was harmless.”) The parole board
turned Pascal down at his next hearing,
but the women continued to work with
him, and he was later released.
Otisville had a very active Lifers &
Long Termers Organization. While
Lewin and Carroll were working on
Pascal’s case, they began hearing from
the group’s leaders, who told them sto-
ries about men who had been repeat-
edly denied parole. When the women
called lawyers who worked on prison
issues to get advice about how to help
the men, they realized that the lawyers’
knowledge was, as Lewin put it, “really
minimal.” “They really didn’t have a
sense of how to actually prepare some-
one for the board,” she said. “Most of
their clients were not getting out.”
In the spring of 2014, the two women
decided to expand their efforts, recruit-
ing volunteers and calling themselves
the Parole Preparation Project. That
June, at their first training session, some
thirty people showed up, most of them
law students. “I don’t even think they
knew what parole was,” Lewin told me.
“I think they just wanted to connect
with people in prison.” A jailhouse law-
yer at Otisville had sent them a list of
men who needed help obtaining parole,
and they assigned volunteers to work
with several of them. Six months later,
after they announced their second vol-
unteer training, a hundred and thirty
people responded, including a bartender,
a retired biology teacher, and a woman
who described herself as a “queer mama
of twins in the pursuit of justice.”
Carroll recalled that, as word of the
project spread throughout the state’s pris-
ons, “letters just started coming.” Soon
they were overwhelmed with requests
from incarcerated men. In 2016, Lewin
graduated from law school and began
running Parole Prep full time, working
out of a café in Brooklyn.The organization
now has two desks at a shared workspace
in Manhattan’s Chinatown. The second
desk belongs to Anthony Dixon, who
left prison three years ago and some-
times wears a suit to work. Parole Prep
often collaborates with the RAPP Cam-
paign—short for Release Aging People
in Prison—which pushes for parole re-
form and has three desks nearby. A bul-
letin board above Lewin’s desk is cov-
ered with photographs of middle-aged
and elderly men (and one woman). She
explained that they were people with
whom she had worked in the past five
years and who had died either in prison
or shortly after they were released.
One afternoon this past spring, over
lunch at a soup-dumpling restaurant
near the office, Lewin reflected on Pa-
role Prep’s evolution. When the project
started, she said, she thought that the
work was going to be “very technical.”
The first training sessions focussed on
how to assemble a packet for the parole
board, containing an advocacy letter and
letters from relatives. “It was very legal-
istic,” Lewin said of the approach, “but
it was not related actually at all to the
work we were doing, somehow.” That
work was building relationships, trying
to befriend someone who had been im-
prisoned for decades, helping him to
speak honestly about his crime. Parole
Prep has attracted many volunteers with
degrees from colleges such as Brown and
Yale. “They come in with a lot of ideas
about their politics,” Lewin told me, “but
don’t necessarily have a lot of experience
connecting with people in prison.”
In the past few years, she, Carroll,
and another friend, with the help of sev-
eral men at Otisville, have written nu-
merous memos for volunteers on topics
such as what to bring on a prison visit
(singles and quarters for the vending
machine), how to act when they get a
collect call (don’t say anything critical of
prison staff, because all calls are recorded),
and how to relate to the incarcerated
people they are working with (“the best
advocate is someone who listens actively,
THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2, 2019 45
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Dennis with a family photo taken at Comstock prison in the nineteen-seventies.
hears the nuances in what the other per-
son is saying”). They teach the volun-
teers how to obtain court documents in
order to learn the official narrative of
the crime. There are monthly meetings,
too, for which Lewin brings in speak-
ers who have served decades in prison.
ee, White, and Button studied Pa-
L role Prep’s training materials and
took notes at its meetings. From their
first visit, they had only five months to
help Richard Lloyd Dennis—whom they
call Lloyd—prepare for his next parole
interview. Volunteers working with peo-
ple in prisons closer to New York City,
such as Sing Sing and Fishkill, were able
to visit often, but since Auburn was so
far away, they had to rely more on letters
and calls. In a letter to Dennis in March,
46 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2, 2019
2018, a few months after they first visited
him, they wrote, “With your next parole
hearing quickly approaching, there is
much work to do, and an important part
of this work is the process of writing and
reflecting.” Parole Prep had distributed a
memo with writing prompts, and the vol-
unteers began including a few of them
in each letter they sent. At first, the ques-
tions were innocuous: “How would you
describe yourself as a young man?” “How
do you think you’ve changed since being
in prison?” But soon they became more
challenging: “What happened that night?”
“What do you remember of the victim?”
In his letters, Dennis began to tackle their
questions. “Temper is an attitude, a dis-
position and over the years I have learned
to control it,” he wrote. “I felt real bad
about my situation . . . but you should
know that I felt real hurt inside also for
the officer and his family.”
Many people who have been in prison
for thirty or forty years lose contact with
their families, but, in an early letter, Den-
nis enclosed phone numbers for eight
relatives. One Saturday in February of
2018, the volunteers got together at a
coffee shop in Brooklyn to work on his
parole packet. Button called Dennis’s
sister, Velma, in Virginia. Velma, who
had been sending letters to the parole
board for years, asking for her brother
to be freed, was delighted to hear that
someone was trying to help him get out.
Dennis was the sixth of seven siblings
who had grown up in New Castle, Penn-
sylvania. After high school, he spent a
year in the Marine Corps, then moved
to New York City, where he got a job
as a cook at a nursing home in Queens.
Button asked Velma to write another
letter on his behalf, and she sent it the
following week. She wrote, “Richard has
been in prison almost forty-six years
now (he turned twenty-one in prison),
no previous criminal record, high school
graduate, employed prior to entering
the system, raised in a two parent home,
has four brothers and one sister (none
in the system), and all of us ready to
step in and help upon his release!”
By many standards, Dennis was a
strong candidate for parole. He’d had no
disciplinary infractions for several years;
he had a place to live, with Velma; and
he had lined up a job as a laborer with
a contracting company run by Velma’s
son-in-law. The volunteers made the
drive to Auburn in February and again
in April, 2018, when they conducted a
mock parole interview with Dennis in
the visiting room. They had studied the
transcripts of his last two interviews, and
had noticed that many of his answers
were very short. “Just saying yes or no
unfortunately paints a picture of some-
one who really doesn’t want to be there,”
White explained. They tried to teach
him a strategy that any good job inter-
viewee knows: the art of the pivot. White
told Dennis, “Even if they are asking yes-
or-no questions, take every opportunity
to be, like, ‘Yes, and . . .’ ” He recom-
mended that Dennis then mention some-
thing positive, like the fact that he had
many relatives willing to take him in.
In May, two weeks before the parole
interview, White mailed copies of Den-
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nis’s packet to a parole coördinator at the
prison. It was fifty-seven pages long and
included a well-written five-page letter
from the Parole Prep team advocating
for his release (“We write to voice our
enthusiastic support for Richard Lloyd
Dennis . . .”). The letter reminded the
board how young Dennis had been at
the time of the crime and cited a Justice
Department report showing that “young
people between ages 14 and 25 are still
developing their abilities to control im-
pulses, suppress aggression, consider the
impact of their behavior on others.” The
packet also included a copy of his high-
school diploma, from 1969; Velma’s let-
ter and three other letters from relatives;
and three “inmate progress reports” from
his boss, the prison’s librarian, who had
deemed him “excellent” in categories
such as “dependability” and “attitude to-
ward authority figures.”
nside Auburn prison, on the second
I floor of the Administration Building,
there is a small room that is empty most
of the time. With the exception of a
large screen with a camera mounted
above it, and an air-conditioner propped
in a window—one of the few A.C. units
in the entire institution—the room has
the feel of a forgotten place. There are
stains on its pea-green carpet, a curtain
missing from one of its windows, and,
when I visited not long ago, a broken
replica of the state seal, on the floor.
Every month, men in prison greens sit
on wooden benches in the corridor out-
side the room and wait, sometimes for
hours, for their names to be called. In
the past, parole interviews were con-
ducted in person, but a few years ago
the parole board stopped coming to Au-
burn. The interviews are now conducted
in this room via video hookup.
New York State currently has sixteen
parole-board members, who conduct some
twelve thousand parole interviews a year.
The governor appoints the board’s mem-
bers, and the State Senate confirms them.
The current chairwoman is a former pros-
ecutor, and past parole-board members
have often had backgrounds in law en-
forcement. The job, which has a six-year
term, carries a title (commissioner) and
pays a salary of a hundred and twenty
thousand dollars a year. The work can be
gruelling. Every Monday, parole-board
members drive to cities such as Syracuse,
Rochester, and Buffalo, where they stay
for two or three nights. Parole coördina-
tors deliver the paper files of the incar-
cerated people from the prisons where
they are held to the parole offices where
the commissioners conduct their inter-
views. Carol Shapiro, who joined the
board in 2017 and quit in 2019, said, “The
irony is we’re travelling around the state
for videoconferencing. It’s insane.”
Parole-board members conduct inter-
views on Tuesdays and Wednesdays and
sometimes on Thursdays. In 1994, the
State Legislature amended the law in
order to allow victims to give in-person
testimony to the parole board. On Fri-
days, the commissioners take turns re-
ceiving the family members of crime vic-
tims and listening to their stories. Many
families bring photos and tell personal
anecdotes about their loved ones. “They
are very difficult sessions,” Shapiro said.
“It definitely takes a toll on you—absorb-
ing this pain over and over.” The rela-
tives’ words are typed up into a “victim
impact statement,” which is placed in the
parole file of the imprisoned individual.
If a murder victim was a police officer,
members of the police union, the Police
Benevolent Association, often accom-
pany the family to show their support.
Parole-board hearings can run from
a few minutes to an hour or more. Sha-
piro told me that there was very little
time to read through each file. “Com-
missioners get the case the day they see
the person,” she said. On busy days, while
the lead commissioner asks the questions,
the other two commissioners might re-
view the file of the next interviewee or
write a decision for the preceding one.
Sometimes the multitasking can lead
to a commissioner asking a question
that another commissioner has asked a
few minutes earlier. “There is a numb-
ing repetition of the interview process,”
Shapiro told me. “There is a witching
hour. By six o’clock, you’ve kind of had
it. Your head hurts, your back hurts, and
you’ve heard a gazillion stories.”
In a three-person parole panel, two
votes are needed for an individual to be
released. Parole commissioners are sup-
posed to follow a series of statutes—to
take into account factors including an in-
dividual’s institutional record, his release
plans, and the seriousness of the offense.
But some board members have higher
release rates than others, and everyone
seems to have a different idea about how
much weight to give the various pieces
of information in each case. “For some,
the offense is it, no matter what,” Sha-
piro said. “For some, it’s the victim impact
[statement]. Everyone has their own val-
ues and draws different lines in the sand.”
Robert Dennison, who was appointed
to the parole board by Governor George
Pataki, in 2000, went on to serve as the
board’s chairman from 2004 to 2007.
“We’re supposed to measure remorse,
but it’s kind of hard to do that,” he told
me. “So you try to see if they’re really
sorry for what they did, or if they just
think they’re a victim being caught up
in the system, or they just want to tell
you what they think you want to hear.
It’s certainly not a science. It’s very sub-
jective, and sometimes we make mistakes.
But, from my experience, the longer the
person’s been in, the better the parole
risk they’re going to be when they get
out. If someone has been in for a long
period of time, usually they got a terri-
ble taste in their mouth of what prison
is like, and they don’t want to do any-
thing to put themselves back in prison.”
The people who have been impris-
oned the longest, however, tend to have
been convicted of the most heinous
crimes, and, for parole commissioners,
there is little downside to denying them
parole. Although the cost of imprison-
ment is higher in New York than in any
other state—seventy thousand dollars a
year per person, and often considerably
more if the individual is elderly or ill—
parole-board members are not required
to justify the financial impact of their
decisions. The board determines not
only who will be set free but what rules
they must follow on the outside. Every-
one who is released on parole has to re-
port regularly to a parole officer and obey
certain restrictions—such as meeting a
curfew and submitting to regular drug
tests—and those who do not follow the
rules risk being sent back to prison. (The
number of people incarcerated for such
“technical violations” of their parole is
higher in New York than in all other
states but one, and these individuals make
up nearly thirty per cent of all the peo-
ple sent to New York’s state prisons each
year. In 2018, the Justice Lab at Colum-
bia University released a report, titled
“Less Is More in New York,” which be-
came the blueprint for a bill that was
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introduced in the State Legislature ear-
lier this year; the bill proposes limiting
the kinds of parole violations that could
be punished with incarceration.)
One’s odds of being released are heav-
ily influenced by where one is impris-
oned. “State paroling systems vary so
much that it is almost impossible to com-
pare them,” Jorge Renaud, an analyst at
the Prison Policy Initiative, a think tank,
wrote in a report earlier this year. But
Renaud’s report tried to do just that,
giving each state a grade. Renaud gave
his highest grade, a B-minus, to Wyo-
ming, noting that, among other strengths,
the state holds “in-person, face-to-face
parole hearings,” “allows incarcerated
people access to the information the
Board will use to determine whether to
grant or deny parole, and allows incar-
cerated individuals to question the ac-
curacy of that information,” and “allows
staff from the prison—who have true
day-to-day perspective on an individu-
al’s character and growth—to provide
in-person testimony.” Thirty-six states
got an F or an F-minus. Some of them
do not allow incarcerated people to ap-
pear before a parole board at all; in oth-
ers, such as Georgia, some individuals
can be made to wait up to eight years
after being turned down by the board
before their cases are reviewed again.
New York received a D-minus.
A few years ago, advocates lobbied
Governor Andrew Cuomo to appoint
commissioners with different types of
backgrounds, which is how Shapiro,
who is trained as a social worker, won
a seat. She described the culture of the
parole board as “very risk-averse.” At
times, she recalled, she would advocate
for an individual to be released, and a
fellow board member would respond,
“He’s playing you, Carol. He’s got your
number.” Shapiro told me, “I felt like a
lot of my colleagues focussed way too
much on the severity of the crime. If
this is your fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth,
ninth parole-board hearing, we really
shouldn’t be focussing on the crime any-
more. We should really be focussing on
your plans to go home.” She went on,
“I think the purpose of parole right now
is very murky. If the goal is to deter-
mine if someone is ready to go home,
that’s very different than relying on: Did
they serve enough time? Did the pun-
ishment fit the crime?”
48 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2, 2019
The most closely watched parole
hearings are those in which the individ-
ual being interviewed has been convicted
of killing a police officer. “Generally, if
you’re a parole-board commissioner, it’s
very hard for you to let somebody out
who killed a police officer, because that’s
one of the things that governors do not
like,” Dennison said. “The chances of
that parole-board commissioner being
reappointed certainly went down several
notches.” In 2018, Shapiro was one of
two board members who voted to re-
lease Herman Bell, the former Black
Panther who had been convicted of kill-
ing two N.Y.P.D. officers in 1971. The
decision was criticized by the governor,
the police commissioner, the editorial
boards of the Daily News and the Post,
and Mayor Bill de Blasio, who urged the
parole board’s chairwoman to reconsider.
(“Murdering a police officer in cold blood
is a crime beyond the frontiers of re-
habilitation or redemption,” he wrote.)
Shapiro said that she received a death
threat on Facebook, and many angry let-
ters. A few months later, the State Sen-
ate held a hearing on parole policies.
James B. Ferguson, Jr., a former prose-
cutor who served on the parole board
from 2005 to 2018, testified. Speaking
about people imprisoned for very seri-
ous crimes, he said, “The inmate can be
the perfect inmate. They’ve done every-
thing they possibly can. They perhaps
even demonstrate a genuinely changed
person.” But sometimes “enough time
has not been done,” he said. “What is
the public going to say if you release
Charles Manson?”
met Dennis for the first time this past
I spring, in the visiting room at Auburn.
By then, he had served nearly forty-eight
years in prison—close to double his min-
imum sentence of twenty-five years. De-
spite his volunteers’ dogged efforts, the
board had turned him down after his pa-
role interview in May, 2018. Part of the
problem seemed to be the gruesome na-
ture of his crime. On July 24, 1971, at
around 2:15 a.m., he was standing outside
a bodega in Brownsville when a police
officer named Robert Denton went in-
side to buy cigarettes, and after Denton
walked out of the store Dennis cut him
in the neck with a knife. “Cop Slashed
to Death, Youth Seized,” the Daily
News headline read. Denton, who was
twenty-six, was the eighth city police
officer that year to be killed on the job.
At the time, Dennis had been stay-
ing with the family of his brother Mel-
vin’s girlfriend in Brownsville. He had
no criminal record, and reporters seemed
at a loss to explain why he might have
killed a police officer; the News referred
to the crime as “an apparently motive-
less stab-killing.” The court record sug-
gests that alcohol may have been a fac-
tor; Dennis had been drinking beer and
vodka in the hours preceding the as-
sault. His trial was held in the spring of
1972. Denton’s partner testified that Den-
nis had approached their patrol car
shortly before the incident and asked
how he could become a police officer—a
detail that Dennis’s lawyer disputed but
which the local press had seized upon
in its reporting. Trial testimony revealed
that, after Denton was stabbed, police
officers who had come to the scene had
beaten Dennis so badly that, at the pre-
cinct later, he had bruises on his face
and body and was bleeding from both
ears. He had been taken to the hospi-
tal—for a “possible skull fracture,” ac-
cording to law-enforcement notes—and
when Melvin arrived he found him in
a wheelchair in a hallway. “I didn’t rec-
ognize him at all,” Melvin testified. “His
nose was smashed and his face was about
three times the size.”
By May, 2018, Dennis had been im-
prisoned longer than all but nine other
men in New York State. If he had been
convicted of killing anyone but a police
officer, he likely would have been set free
long ago. The reason for this may have
to do, at least in part, with the power of
the Police Benevolent Association. One
of its mantras is “No parole for cop kill-
ers”; on the P.B.A.’s Web site, the union
keeps a list of people who are in prison
for the murder of a police officer, and
the site promises that, if someone clicks
on a victim’s name, a letter will be sent
to the parole board, urging it to deny pa-
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role. Dennis’s name was on the list. Last 20TH IS OUR LEVITTOWN MEMORIAL strolling by, but, when I visited, Dennis
March, the Daily News revealed that the HS REUNION. YOU WILL BE MISSED MY had no interest in peering out the win-
link on the union’s Web site had not BROTHER.”This year, Bellistri, now sev- dows. “It puts me in a bad mood,” he
worked for five years. In late April, Pat- enty-three years old, made flyers, which said. “It makes me feel alone.”
rick J. Lynch, the union’s president, held he distributed at the Seventy-third and One of his strategies for holding on
a press conference, in Albany, accompa- other precincts, urging people to go to to his sanity had been to make certain
nied by widows of N.Y.P.D. officers who the parole board’s Web site and send a that he always had a job. Over the years,
had been killed. The P.B.A. had brought letter opposing Dennis’s release at his he had stocked shelves in the commissary
three hundred and sixty cardboard boxes, next hearing. The top of the flyer read at Auburn; helped cook the food at Com-
which they claimed held some eight hun- “URGENT” and identified Dennis as “Bob stock; mowed the grass at Attica; worked
dred thousand letters to the parole board, Denton’s murderer.” Bellistri said about early mornings baking bread at Green
signed by supporters. “An attack on a po- Dennis, “He deserves to stay incarcer- Haven. From 2000 to 2008, he had toiled
lice officer is an attack on the laws we ated for the rest of his life for what he in the laundry at Elmira, helping clean
uphold and the public we have sworn to did to Bobby.” the uniforms of other incarcerated men.
protect,” Lynch said recently, in an e-mail. In the visiting room at Auburn, Den- (“Inmate Dennis is the laundry’s #1 ma-
“Every time a cop-killer is released, it nis told me that during his decades in chine operator, he is an excellent worker,”
sends criminals a signal that there are custody he had been confined in almost his boss wrote in 2006.) Besides his work
really no laws worth following, because every maximum-security prison in the ethic, Dennis was known for his intense
our justice system is unwilling to protect state; his current stay at Auburn, he said, exercise regimen: running endless laps
those who enforce them.” was his third there. Auburn Correctional barefoot around the prison yard, lifting
Robert Denton’s best friend was Ron- Facility, which opened in 1817, is one weights, doing hundreds of pullups and
ald Bellistri, who grew up with Denton, of the oldest operating prisons in the pushups. He also meditated and prac-
in Levittown, and joined the N.Y.P.D. United States. The city of Auburn grew ticed yoga in his cell. His volunteers had
with him, in 1969. Bellistri told me that up around the prison; today, there is a told me that he was so strong and fit
he and Denton had attended grammar Tex-Mex restaurant next door and a Hil- that he could do pushups on only his
school and high school together; that ton Garden Inn down the street. From thumbs. When I mentioned this during
Denton’s first car was a 1957 Oldsmo- the windows in the prison’s visiting room, our meeting, a guard who happened to
bile; that Denton was drafted into the incarcerated men can see townspeople be passing by asked if I wanted to see
Army after high school and ended up
at Fort Lee, in Virginia, for two years.
Bellistri had encouraged Denton to join
him in the Thirteenth Precinct, in Man-
hattan, but Denton wanted to stay at
the Seventy-third Precinct, in Browns-
ville. “He said, ‘I love the action,’ ” Bel-
listri recalled. Sometimes they would
run into each other when extra officers
were called in to work at Vietnam War
demonstrations. Bellistri said that Den-
ton had recently married “the love of his
life” and, two weeks before his death, he
had bought a used Corvette, which he
drove over to Bellistri’s house, beeping
the horn in the driveway to show it off.
Every year on July 24th, Bellistri sends
flowers to the Seventy-third Precinct,
and he stops in during roll call to speak
to the officers about his friend. “I don’t
want them to forget him,” he told me.
Over the years, Denton’s friends and for-
mer colleagues have contributed remem-
brances to the Web site NYPD Angels,
which honors members of the force who
were killed in the line of duty, going back
to the mid-eighteen-hundreds. Earlier
this year, Bellistri wrote on the site,
“BOBBY, NOT ONE DAY GOES BY THAT
I DO NOT THINK OF YOU.” Four months “Someday I’ll buy a little place in the country and
later, he wrote, “THIS JULY 18TH THRU take my finger off the Zeitgeist.”
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his pushups—“It’s incredible,” he said—
and Dennis seemed to appreciate a
chance to show off his strength. In front
of a vending machine in an adjoining
room, away from the other visitors, he
placed his thumbs on the linoleum floor,
stretched out his legs, did a few push­
ups, and swore he could do many more.
Back at our table, we settled once again
into plastic bucket chairs. His next in­
terview was set for August, 2019, and he
sounded pessimistic about his odds. “If
you killed a cop, you ain’t got no hope,”
he said. He was tired of the whole ritual:
“You go to the board, they sit up there
and smile at you. They crack jokes. You
go back to your cell, and they hit you for
two more years.” The last time, however,
they had hit him with only fifteen months.
“Everyone says it’s a good sign,” he said,
“but it’s not a good sign to me.”
Yet he seemed buoyed by the com­
mitment of his volunteers. In the eight
years prior to their first visit, he had had
only one other visit, from his brother
Melvin and his wife. The first time he
met the volunteers, he admitted, he had
been uncertain of their intent. They
looked “mad young,” he told me. “I said
to myself, ‘What is this? Is this going
to be a playground thing? Something
for them to bide their time until they
get something better?’ ” But they had
earned his trust, coming to see him three
times in four months, and, after the
board denied him parole in May of 2018,
they had agreed to continue working
with him to prepare for his next hear­
ing. He called them all regularly, catch­
ing one or the other on the phone every
few days. “What surprised me about
them was their sincerity,” he said. “I trust
very few people if I trust anyone at all.
They have a real naturalness.”
In the months since they had started
working with him, he had tried to con­
nect with each of them. He knew that
Olivia Button liked to box, so he gave
her advice on how to train and sent pages
with exercises to do. When he learned
that Gina Lee’s parents were from South
Korea, he wanted to hear more; he’d al­
ways been interested in Korea. He dis­
covered that John White liked yoga, too,
and talked to him about yoga techniques.
When the volunteers told him how they
got to Auburn—leaving New York City
at 4 a.m. in a rental car, driving ten or
twelve hours round trip—he assumed
50 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2, 2019
that they must be getting paid for their
work. They told him that they were vol­
unteers. But every few months he would
ask again, as if he could not quite be­
lieve that they were helping him with­
out pay. He had little to give them in
return, except for his advice on working
out and healthy eating. When Lee was
sick, he suggested that she try chewing
on garlic. When Button’s birthday came,
he mailed her two birthday cards. In his
letters to them, he had expressed his
gratitude. “Thanks again for all the help
you are giving a person such as me,” he
wrote, three months after they met. “I
have not been a happy or hopeful per­
son in a very long time.”
here is no official mechanism to
T require people confined in New
York’s prisons to confront their guilt, to
grapple with questions of remorse and
responsibility, to think about how they
might make amends to a victim’s fam­
ily. At times, the legal system even seems
to work against these goals; at trial, de­
fense attorneys typically downplay the
defendant’s culpability—or deny his
guilt altogether—in an effort to mini­
mize his punishment. Often, a defen­
dant, long after he is convicted, will cling
to the narrative of his crime that his
lawyer told in court. The imprisoned
individual may go years, even decades,
without ever speaking honestly about
his crime. The state prison system did
start an “apology letter bank,” so that
incarcerated people could write to their
victims, but most people in prison do
not know that it exists.
The most successful programs to help
people reckon with their crimes have
often been started by incarcerated or for­
merly incarcerated people. In the mid­
two­thousands, José Saldaña and two of
his peers at Shawangunk prison launched
A Challenge to Change, an eighteen­
week workshop, led by incarcerated men,
which was later expanded to other pris­
ons. “We wanted a program where a guy
would come in and confront what he
did,” Saldaña, who was released in 2018
and is now the director of the RAPP Cam­
paign, told me. “We wanted total hon­
esty.” Saldaña described the group ses­
sions as “more difficult than we imagined”
and “at times very, very emotional.”
Among the program’s objectives is to
counter the notion, common among
people in prison, that there is a hierar­
chy of crimes; individuals who commit­
ted sex offenses were considered to be
at the very bottom. “The murderer thinks
he’s better than the rapist,” Saldaña said.
“We dispelled all that stuff.”
Kathy Boudin, who was imprisoned
at Bedford Hills, a maximum­security
prison, for two decades, told me that
most of the women with whom she was
confined did not speak honestly and
openly about their crimes, “because there
is no safe place inside the prison system
where people have a chance to do this.”
In the visiting room, they often lied to
their children out of a sense of shame
about what they had done, but the truth
inevitably became harder to conceal.
“You’re in prison for eighteen years, and
you’re, like, ‘I didn’t do it. I didn’t do it,’
and your children read on the Internet
and they know you did it,” she said.
When Boudin was released, in 2003, she
had an idea to start a program that would
“help people examine their lives and
come to terms with what they did” and
to “deal deeply with the harm” they had
caused. She hoped that the program
would “allow them to be able to talk to
their children about it, to talk to their
families about it, to not feel like they’re
living in total shame all the time.”
The program that Boudin envisioned
became the Longtermers Responsibil­
ity Project, which, for the past decade,
has been run by the Osborne Associa­
tion—a nonprofit group that works with
incarcerated people and their families—
at Sing Sing and Fishkill. In the pro­
gram, twelve people convicted of murder­
related crimes meet with a facilitator
for weekly group sessions over four
months. Laura Roan, a program man­
ager at Osborne, facilitates some of the
sessions. “ ‘Oh, I never meant to hurt
anybody.’ That’s the story I hear over
and over,” Roan said. “Well, why did
you load the gun, then?” She continued,
“It’s very hard to live with that idea that
you are somebody who is really able to
take the life of somebody else.” Perhaps
this is why, as she found, many long­
termers do not seem to have a coher­
ent narrative of their own crimes. “You
tell everybody something different,” she
said. “You tell yourself one story, you tell
your prison peers a different story.” But,
Roan went on, “the parole board is ask­
ing them to tell a different story they’ve
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never told before. Your goal is to show

them you’re safe to release.”
The stories that imprisoned men and
women tell the board about their crimes
often diverge from the facts in their court
or parole files. Sometimes people are
minimizing their guilt. Sometimes they
are misremembering details of events
that occurred decades earlier. Sometimes
they are actually correct, and the details
in the official documents are wrong. And
sometimes they have no memory at all
of the crime they have committed and
have created a narrative about it that
makes sense to them. Like many of the
men with whom Dennis was impris-
oned, he had repeatedly filed appeals
in the courts in the first decade of his
incarceration. The lawyers who wrote
them argued that he had been wrongly
convicted—his defense attorney at trial
claimed that he was not guilty—and
after he lost his initial appeals and started
representing himself, writing his own
legal papers and filing them pro se, Den-
nis continued to make this claim. His
court battles continued for more than
ten years. But, once he was eligible for
parole, he took the advice of peers: “As
long as you deny the crime, they’re going
to keep hitting you.” He appeared be-
fore the parole board for the first time
in the summer of 1996, when he was
forty-five years old. In a room at Attica,
seated across from two male commis-
sioners, he admitted to having killed Pa-
trolman Denton, and recounted a story
about arguing with him, saying that “the
argument initiated into a fight, and one
thing led to another, and that’s when
the officer got hit in the neck.” The pa- Michelle Lewin and Anthony Dixon, of the Parole Preparation Project.
role board turned him down, writing in
its decision that Dennis was “still in de- board continued to turn him down. In On March 30th, Button and Lee drove
nial” and “does not voice any remorse.” the course of twelve parole appearances, together from Brooklyn, leaving as usual
During the next two decades, Den- he was interviewed by twenty-five board at 4 a.m. White, who had enrolled in a
nis appeared before the parole board members, some of them more than once. master’s program in art history at the
every other year. Transcripts from his In 2018, the parole board explained its University of Massachusetts, drove from
hearings show that he attempted to ex- decision with the same language it had Amherst. Earlier, they had studied the
press remorse. In 2002, he said, “I take used many times before: “Your release at transcript of Dennis’s last hearing, and
responsibility for everything I did. I’ve this time is incompatible with the wel- were pleased with his performance. He’d
hurt a lot of people through this.” In fare of society.” There was no indication been more talkative. “I thought it was
2010, he said, “I regret it. Wasn’t my in- of what he could do to increase his odds a three-thousand-per-cent improve-
tention to murder anybody or kill any- of obtaining parole the next time. ment,” Lee said.
body.” In 2011, the state parole board Four days later, I sat down with But-
began using a new “risk assessment” tool, hen I first met Dennis’s volun- ton and Lee, in a café in Manhattan, to
to measure the likelihood that an indi-
vidual would commit another crime once
W teers, last March, they were just
about to go back to Auburn for the first
hear about their visit. In the Auburn
visiting room, they said, they had tried
he was released. An assessment of Den- time in ten months, to start getting him to keep the conversation focussed on
nis found that he was a low risk, but the ready for his parole hearing in August. strategies for Dennis’s hearing, but, as
THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2, 2019 51
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invariably happened, Dennis had other
things he wanted to discuss. A friend had
mailed him a pair of new work boots, but
he wasn’t allowed to keep them, he said,
because they were light brown with a
black leather strip on top; prisoners weren’t
allowed to have shoes of more than one
color. Before the visit, Dennis had told
Button on the phone, “Don’t forget the
boots”—and Button had not forgotten
to pick them up at the front desk on her
way out of the prison. He had said that
she could wear them or give them away;
in the parking lot after leaving the prison,
she had tried them on and found that
they fit. But she decided, “I’m going to
hold them until he gets out.”
Lee usually took charge at their vis-
its, and this time she wanted to try a
new strategy. Instead of talking about
“if ” he got parole, she insisted that they
say “when.” Dennis was resistant. “The
guys in here say ‘when,’ ‘when,’ ‘when,’”
he said, “but I’m not going to do that,
because, you know, the parole board could
hit me however many times they want.
You just don’t know.” Lee recalled, “I
was, like, ‘Listen, Lloyd, I hear that. But
we have to say “when.” I’m going to say
“when,” and I need you to say “when,”
because if you don’t imagine it, it’s not
going to happen.’” Dennis played along.
When the volunteers asked him what
he wanted to do first after being released,
he answered, “I want to go fishing.”
There was not a Parole Prep hand-
out about the benefits of encouraging
an incarcerated person to visualize his
own freedom, but Lee thought that it
might help Dennis work harder to pre-
pare for the hearing. It would be easy
for them to update his parole packet,
but in the next five months, she said,
“he has a lot of mental and emotional
work to do.” They had assigned him the
task of writing an apology letter—“That’s
his homework,” Lee said—which they
planned to include in his packet.
That spring, Lee was accepted into
M.I.T.’s graduate program in urban plan-
ning. She quit her job in June and went
to stay with her parents, outside Phila-
delphia. There, she worked on Dennis’s
parole packet, reading and rereading his
attempts at an apology letter. To her, they
seemed slightly flat; she thought he still
sounded like too much of a passive par-
ticipant in his own crime. On July 8th,
she borrowed her mother’s car and drove
52 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2, 2019
to Auburn. She recalled that, as soon as
Dennis sat down in the visiting room,
she said, “We have a lot to do today. I
have to leave by one-thirty. So we have
two hours, and we’re going to talk about
the crime. It might be difficult, but that’s
just what we’re going to do.”
In the past, when the volunteers had
asked Dennis about his crime, he had
told them that Patrolman Denton had
approached him in a way that made him
feel threatened. Sometimes he charac-
terized his crime as an act of self-defense.
At times, Lee thought that maybe even
Dennis himself did not know why he
had done it. His court file had been de-
stroyed in a warehouse fire, and although
the volunteers had read one or two news
stories about the crime, they did not
have a full understanding of what had
occurred on July 24, 1971. If they had
read his court file, they would have
learned that witnesses had described a
spontaneous, unprovoked attack.
In the visiting room at Auburn, Lee
repeatedly grilled Dennis about that
night, and made it clear that some of
his answers were unsatisfactory. “You’re
describing this as something that hap-
pened to you, and it’s not,” she said. “It’s
something that you did.” She had heard
him talk critically about the rapists he
was imprisoned with, and she made it
clear that she didn’t buy into the idea
that someone who has committed rape
is somehow a worse person than some-
one who has committed murder. “To a
lot of people, what you have done is the
worst thing that anyone could possibly
do,” she said. Her words seemed to stun
him; he said nothing and looked away.
The way Lee saw it, she was doing
work that somebody else at the prison
should have done decades earlier. “He
should have been doing this work in
therapy for his whole life with a social
worker or psychologist or anyone, any
qualified professional, which I am not—
I’m definitely not,” she told me. “That
would have made so much of a differ-
ence, because now the story that he tells
himself has been cemented for all this
time. And, for me, trying to push back
on that now is really challenging.”
It seemed that the coping strategies
Dennis had adopted were working
against him. “The only way that he’s
survived for this long—completely alone,
completely isolated from his entire sup-
port network—is by totally closing off
emotionally and relying on only him-
self,” Lee said. “He’s never been asked
to do anything remotely emotional.”
But, she said of the parole board, “what
they’re asking for is something genuine
and emotional.”
That night, Dennis called Button
and told her about the visit. Button sent
a text to Lee: “He called me and sounded
really appreciative and said you helped
him think in a new way. He also said,
‘You didn’t tell me you were sending in
a pit bull.’”
y the late summer of 2019, Lee had
B moved to Cambridge to start classes
at M.I.T., and White was about to begin
his second year of graduate school in
Amherst. Dennis appeared before the
parole board for the thirteenth time on
August 27th. Two days later, Button and
her boyfriend rode their bikes to a restau-
rant in Crown Heights, and when they
were locking them up she heard her cell
phone vibrate inside her backpack. She
pulled it out and read a message from
Lee, who had just heard from Dennis:
“He was denied.”
Button described that evening’s din-
ner as a “solemn meal.” A few days later,
her boyfriend told her that she had been
acting mean; she had been criticizing
his every move, even his choice of light
bulbs. “What’s going on with you?” he
asked. “Nothing,” she said. “I just feel
weird.” Then she started sobbing. She
almost never cried, and she realized how
much Dennis’s parole rejection, his sec-
ond on the volunteers’ watch, had upset
her. “The double denial is very demor-
alizing,” she said.
In October, she read the transcript
of the parole interview. The lead com-
missioner was Marc Coppola, a former
state senator who had once worked as
a deputy sheriff in Buffalo. He’d started
the interview by reading aloud a de-
tailed description of the crime, and then
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asked Dennis, “Is there anything that

you want to tell us about the offense
and why you did this to the officer?”
Dennis said, “I was more or less out
of control then from my drinking. I
should have complied when the officers
there approached me.” He went on,
“When they started to ask me ques-
tions, I started to walk away from them,
and . . . I guess that’s when I made my
mistake. They put their hands on me
and it led to an altercation.”
This response did not go over well.
“The description in the record is very
different than the description that you
give, that they approached you,” Cop-
pola said. According to the record in
his parole file, Dennis had encountered
only one officer, not two. “The record
says there were other witnesses, that
you came out unprovoked and stabbed
him in the neck.” He continued, “Is it
possible that you were intoxicated
enough that you believe that’s how it
happened, but maybe that’s not really
how it happened?”
“Yes. I guess it’s possible, yes.”
Throughout the parole hearing, Cop-
pola dominated the conversation, ask-
ing long-winded questions and speak-
ing nearly three times as much as
Dennis. He grilled Dennis repeatedly “Looks like we have mice.”
about the details of the crime; there was
relatively little discussion about the forty-
eight years that had followed, and just
• •
two questions about the plans Dennis
had made for his release.The vote against to take on his case. They recently filed who had once worked as a prison guard.
his release was two to one. (Coppola an appeal, arguing that the board had On the day of the State Senate com-
declined to be interviewed.) relied solely on the nature of his crime mittee vote, Lewin and a few activists
Button said of Dennis, “He said noth- and not taken into account other fac- from RAPP camped out in the room and
ing new in that interview. Everything tors. But appealing the board’s decision held up signs reading “Vote No!” The
we practiced went out the window, be- is a slow process, and Dennis’s next pa- candidate was not confirmed.
cause he is defensive and can’t really role hearing, set for November of 2020, Lee, White, and Button promised
learn how to not be defensive, given his will likely take place before their efforts Dennis that they would continue to work
life story.” She continued, “I think peo- to appeal have concluded. with him. As fall approached, Button de-
ple who do well in these interviews are If that happens, Dennis will have to cided to take on another case with Pa-
guys who spend a lot of time in the law decide whether to take a chance with role Prep, too. She joined a team with
library in prison and have an inclina- the parole board for the fourteenth time two volunteers she did not know, and
tion for speaking like their own lawyer. or wait for a judge to order an addi- Lewin assigned them to work with a man
Some guys are good at being their own tional hearing. A judge does not have at Otisville who has been incarcerated
advocate and can tell when they need the authority to release him, so Den- for thirty-six years. Button still sends let-
to reroute the conversation. But that’s nis’s best hope would be to go before a ters to Dennis and speaks to him on the
a skill and not something everyone is board that was more likely to vote for phone every week. In September, when
good at. Definitely not Lloyd.” his release. This past summer, five new she moved from one apartment in Bed-
Michelle Lewin told me, “I was so commissioners—including a former Stuy to another, she brought his new
pissed. He had no way out with that Legal Aid attorney, a minister, and the work boots with her, and now they are
board.” She started making calls and former head of a prison watchdog inside a suitcase in her closet. “I don’t
firing off e-mails, and soon found two group—joined the parole board. The know what to do with them,” she said.
attorneys, Ron Kuby and Rhiya Trivedi, Governor put forward a sixth candidate, “We thought he was going to get out.” 
THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2, 2019 53
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FICTION

54 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2, 2019 ILLUSTRATION BY JON MCNAUGHT

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e was walking back up the
H street from the seafront when
he looked up and saw the
woman coming at him. He’d been
watching the leaves. Ex-Hurricane
Ophelia was heading toward Dublin
and the leaves were blowing the wrong
way. They were passing him, dashing
by him, rolling up the hill. The cur-
few would be starting in half an hour.
He’d been giving out about it earlier,
before his wife left for work. Do they
think there’s a civil war? It’s only a bit
of weather. But, actually, he liked the
drama of it. Even now, walking home—
striding, he was striding, a man on a
mission—he felt involved, ready, ahead
of the coming catastrophe. It was doing
him good. He was carrying drugs in
a paper bag, but he felt like a man who
didn’t need them. He’d already folded
the garden chairs and put them away,
he’d tucked the wheelie bins well in
under the hedge. He’d put candles
around the house, just in case. He’d
done other stuff, too. He was all set.
He liked the word—curfew. He liked
the daft importance of it. There’d be
Army tenders patrolling the streets,
amplified voices warning citizens to
stay in out of the rain. Get back inside—
you’ll catch your death! There’d be bursts
of gunfire; blood would flow in the gut-
ters, downhill, while the leaves skipped
and swirled up the hill.
He didn’t have to visit his mother.
He didn’t have to work.
He didn’t have to tell his wife about
himself and the widow’s block.
He’d be safe inside the curfew for a
while.
—Bring it on, he said, aloud. There
was no one else on the street. Blow,
winds, and crack your fuckin’ cheeks.
Then he looked up and saw the
woman. She was wearing one of those
baby slings, and the baby was facing
out, looking his way, right under its
mother’s chin. There were two faces
coming straight at him.
It wasn’t a baby.
• There was no pain. There had been
—What should I do? he’d asked.
—Nothing, the doctor had said.
—Nothing?
He’d had a health check a couple
of weeks before. A routine check,
offered by his health insurer—free.
Heart, prostate, eyes, ears. He couldn’t
remember what else, and all he could
really recall was the prostate test.
The doctor was a woman, and he
hadn’t cared. He’d lain on his side and
grabbed his knees as she’d told him
to, and he’d been fine with it, and
pleased, even when he saw her drop-
ping the latex gloves into a bin as she
told him he could sit up again. He’d
felt modern. It was something he’d
never tell his daughters about, but he
would still remember, as they lectured
him on gender identity or the glass
ceiling in Irish universities. I know
what you’re talking about, he’d be
tempted to say. A woman doctor had
her finger up my arse, and she was
thoroughly professional.
He loved his daughters’ lectures.
A week after the checkup, his phone
had vibrated in his pocket. He didn’t
know the number on the screen.
—Hello?
It was the doctor.
—How are you today? she asked.
—Grand, he said. Yourself ?
She told him he had coronary-artery
disease.
—Oh.
—You shouldn’t worry, she said.
—What does it involve? he asked.
Exactly.
She told him there were high lev-
els of cholesterol in his arteries. One
of them was seventy per cent blocked.
—Seventy per cent?
—Yes.
—That’s nearly three-quarters, he
said.
—We’ll need to do further tests, she
said. And, again, there’s no need to be
worrying yourself unduly. It’s called the
widow’s block, by the way.
She sounded cheerful. He liked that.
—The blocked arteries? he asked.
—Yes, she said. The condition. That’s
what they call it. The widow’s block.
He liked the sound of it. The fact
that he had a wife helped. It made sense,
somehow. It was almost noble. He was
taking the pain for her.
no pain. Not an ache, not a twinge. But
now he had a heart problem, a heart
condition, a fuckin’ disease.
—What should I do?
—Nothing.
—Nothing?
—For now, she said. You’re fine.
There’ll be further tests, and we’ll or-
ganize an angiogram. Stents might be
wise. But nothing for now. And don’t
Google.
—O.K.
—That way lies madness, she said.
—What’s an angiogram? he asked.
—You can Google that one, she said.
That’s just information.
He liked her. He couldn’t remem-
ber what she’d looked like.
—Can I Google “stents”?
—You can. But leave it at that.
He put his phone back in his pocket
and continued working.
He wrote “angiogram” on an enve-
lope. He wrote “stents.” He wrote “ar-
tery” and “coronary.” And “nothing.”
And “disease.”
•
It wasn’t a baby in the sling. It was a
Teddy bear. They—the woman and the
bear—had nearly reached him now.
He didn’t have to move, or shift—sway
to the left or right—as he often had
to when he encountered people com-
ing the opposite way. They were be-
tween trees, him and her, so there was
plenty of room on the path.
A Teddy bear—a biggish one; it
fit neatly into the sling. A baby-sized
bear—a big baby. It was wearing a
jumper, and it wasn’t new. It was older
than any baby who might have owned
it. He looked at the woman, although
he didn’t want to; he didn’t want to see
her looking back at him. He didn’t want
to be caught. She looked straight ahead.
He felt like a spectator watching her
through a window. He wasn’t there,
near her, right beside her.
She passed. He didn’t look back. He
kept going, up to the house. The cur-
few was coming, the ex-hurricane was
coming. He wanted to check the wheel-
ies again, he wanted to make sure all
the windows were fastened. He wanted
to get off the street.
She didn’t look like a mother.
He didn’t know what that meant,
really. He could hear himself telling
his wife this, and she’d ask him. She
was thin, he’d say. She didn’t look like
a woman who’d recently been preg-
nant. They’d had four kids of their own;
he’d lived in the world of babies and
pregnant women. He wasn’t a total
THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2, 2019 55
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eejit. She was skinny, he’d say. Very—
unusually—skinny. Her face was—the
word was there, waiting for him—
empty. Her face was empty, he’d say.
Vacant. Expressionless. She walked right
past me, he’d say, like I wasn’t there.
He got his keys out. He’d have the
right one ready when he got to the
front door.
He remembered the weight of his
youngest daughter, Cliona, in one of
those slings. They hadn’t had one—
they might not have been invented
yet—for the other kids, the boy and
the two older girls. They’d had a back-
pack thing, like a rucksack, for carry-
ing them.
He’d hated the backpack, six or seven
years of having the thing on his back,
not being able to see the baby as he
walked. He’d hated it until the child
was old enough to grab his hair or his
collar and he’d know it was fine back
there. There was a day in Kerry, on a
beach, years ago. The eldest, Ciara, was
the baby in the backpack. He’d been
up early that morning; it was his turn.
He’d put her in the backpack, kissed
her forehead, hoisted her onto his back,
and gone walking. He hadn’t even
checked the weather or looked out the
window. If you’re able to see Brandon
in the evening you’ll be grand, some-
one, some oul’ lad with a peaked cap,
had told him. And he’d seen the moun-
tain the night before—he was sure he
had. So he’d fed Ciara, shoved a slice
of bread into his mouth, and walked
out the back door of the house they
were renting for the week.
There was a dead whale on the
beach, they’d been told when they
were eating in the local pub—he
couldn’t remember the name of the
pub or the name of the beach. He’d
walked down a lane, crossed the main
road, and ten more minutes along a
narrow line of tarmac to the beach.
Ciara was eight months, and he hadn’t
started doing what he did later with
the others, talking to them over his
shoulder, talking to himself, asking
questions they wouldn’t be answering.
It was early—about seven, he thought;
he’d done that thing, taken his watch
off when the holidays started—but it
was already hot. He reached the sand.
The beach was empty, no one else on
it at all. The whale, he knew, was to
56 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2, 2019
SIXTY
We are from the border
like the sun that is born there
behind the eucalyptus
shines all day
above the river
and goes to sleep there
beyond the Rodrígueses’ house.
From the border like the moon
that makes the night nearly day
resting its moonlight
on the banks of the Cuareim.
Like the wind
that makes the flags dance
like the rain
carries away their shacks
together with ours.
All of us are from the border
like those birds
flying from there to here
singing in a language
everyone understands.
We came from the border
we go to the border
like our grandparents and our children
eating bread that the Devil kneaded
suffering in this end of the world.
We are the border
more than any river and more
way more
than any bridge.
—Fabián Severo
(Translated, from the Portuñol, by Laura Cesarco Eglin and Jesse Lee Kercheval.)
the left. About twenty minutes along he was smelling the whale. His desti-
the strand, they’d said. You won’t fuckin’ nation. He couldn’t remember the smell;
miss it, sure. He’d started walking along he couldn’t remember the words he’d
the hard sand at the edge of the sea, used to describe it when he got back
and somewhere, ten minutes in, he’d to the house. Atrocious, probably; fuckin’
decided that Ciara was dead. And he atrocious. Unbelievable—ah, Jesus. He
kept walking until he could see the didn’t know. He knew it had been ter-
whale, and smell it. He was afraid to rible enough to halt him. He could feel
stop, submit to the feeling, the cer- it on his skin, adding oil to his sweat.
tainty he knew was false. He was about fifty yards from the car-
He found it hard to identify that cass. He stopped looking at it; he wasn’t
man as himself now, the eejit stepping interested. It was different shades of
over the sand. The mad logic of par- gray; that was all he remembered. He
enthood. He’d stopped when he knew took off the backpack. He parked it on
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the sand. Ciara was fine. She was sleep-
ing. He’d remembered to put her sun
hat on before he left the house; her
neck was properly covered. He’d never
told anyone that he thought she was
dead, that he’d carried her, dead, for
twenty minutes. She was in Vancouver
now. She’d be Skyping him later. He
hadn’t thought of it in years, that day
on the beach. He’d never tell her—he
didn’t know why not.
He was at the front door. But he
stepped off the porch and walked back
across the small garden to the wheelie
bins—brown, green, and black—and
the hedge. He looked again, made sure
they were tucked in under the lip of
the hedge, that they wouldn’t be lifted
by the wind that was coming. He pushed
them in farther. He didn’t know what
else to do with them. He could bring
them into the house. But he wouldn’t.
He didn’t want his wife to find them
lined up in the hall. Maybe he’d look
out the bedroom window and see them
spinning up, like Dorothy’s house in
“The Wizard of Oz.” Something to tell
Ciara when they were talking. The brown
one landed on the old witch across the street.
He let himself in.
• He remembered Hurricane Char-
The house was still empty. The way
he’d left it. His wife would be home
soon. She’d have to be. She’d have to
get home before the curfew kicked in.
Or else she’d be trapped in a spotlight,
shot on the front step by some kid in
the Army.
He went down, through the house,
to the kitchen.
He took the tablets, the three slim
boxes, out of the chemist’s paper bag.
His new pills. His regimen. He put
them standing in a row. They looked
unfinished like that. He needed more
boxes. Stonehenge. He could make a
joke of it when he was telling her later.
He got his reading glasses from the
table. He’d left them on top of the book
he was reading; he always did that.
“The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Eu-
rope, America.” They could all fuck off
till he’d taken his pills, and found out
what it was that he was taking.
He’d loved carrying the youngest
girl, Cliona. Any excuse, almost liter-
ally any excuse, he’d slide her into the
sling, her face looking out at the world,
and go off—to the shops, town, the sea-
front, nowhere. He’d loved the weight
there against his chest and the fact that
he saw what she was seeing. He could
feel her excitement, her legs hopping,
the approaching faces breaking into
smiles—for her, then for him. She’s gor­
geous. She’s a dote. Proud of his daugh-
ter, proud of himself. Cliona in the sling,
Conor in the buggy, Ciara and Maeve
on either side holding the handles.
Down through town, through the
crowds, Henry Street, Grafton Street.
People made way, he never lost a child.
The doctor had sent him leaflets in
the post. “The Fats of Life—The Low-
down on High Cholesterol” was one.
He wasn’t fat. He hadn’t read it yet; he’d
glanced at it. There was an article about
some smiling actor from “Fair City”
who’d taken “control of his cholesterol”
and a page called “Recipe Corner.”There
was another leaflet. “Angioplasty & Cor-
onary Stenting.” There were no pictures
in that one. Definitions, questions an-
swered, a detachable consent form at
the back. He hadn’t read that one, either.
He took his glasses off the book and
went back to Stonehenge. He listened,
for whistling wind, falling branches,
roof slates decapitating pensioners.
ley—in 1986, he thought it was. He’d
sat on his bed all night and waited for
the windows to fly in on top of him,
shred the curtains, impale him against
the wall. He’d lived alone then. It was
the last time he’d felt physically fright-
ened; he thought that was true. That
was more than thirty years ago.
He looked at the three boxes.
—The maximum dose, she’d said,
the cardiologist, this morning when
he’d met her. To be on the safe side.
—O.K.
—One piece of advice.
—Yes?
—Don’t Google, she’d said.
—Your colleague said that as well.
—Good, she’d said. You know
enough for now. You’ll pick up more
as we go along.
She was looking at him over her
glasses, as if she’d stopped being just a
doctor and had become his new friend.
He wondered later, when he was look-
ing at the scrambled eggs he’d ordered
in the café across from the hospital,
and the little portion of silver-foiled
butter for the toast, if that was him,
seeing her like that, or if it was her, part
of her training or her personality. He’d
taken the advice; he hadn’t Googled
“coronary-artery disease.”
He looked at the boxes. He picked
up the biggest one. Rosuvastatin Teva
Pharma. It sounded like a star or a
planet. Forty milligrams. The maxi-
mum dose, the cardiologist had said.
That fact had impressed him.
—We need to get the cholesterol
right down to where it should be.
—O.K.
May cause dizziness, a label on the
box said. He picked up one of the other
boxes. The same thing—May cause diz­
ziness. If affected, do not drive or operate
machinery. Did that include his laptop?
Or the printer. He’d joke about that,
too, when he was telling his wife. I fell
off the laptop—within seconds of taking
the things.
There was a leaflet—another leaflet;
death by fuckin’ leaflet—inside the box.
He unfolded it. It looked a bit like the
instructions that came with a washing
machine or a blender: Read all of this
leaflet carefully before you start taking
this medicine because it contains impor­
tant information for you. He’d never read
a leaflet in his life. He thought that
was literally true.
—Decide on a time of day, the car-
diologist had told him. Morning, eve-
ning—whatever suits.
He didn’t want to become the man
who forgot his pills, or the man who
remembered his fuckin’ pills. He could
hear his father. Where are my pills, where
did I leave my pills? The refrain that
had made the grandkids—his kids—
laugh whenever they heard it. They
still said it, ten years after his father’s
funeral, when they were looking for
the salt on the table or a missing sock
under a bed—when they were home.
He had no grandkids to entertain
with his pills. He’d take them—the
THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2, 2019 57
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pills—in the morning, with the porridge.
He’d told the cardiologist that he ate
porridge every morning. Oh, that’s great,
that’s helpful. Three tablets—he’d call
them tablets; it was better, more adult,
than pills. Where are my tablets, where
did I leave my tablets? One of each, once
a day. Two statins, one aspirin. It wasn’t
complicated. He’d manage. He’d opened
the two other boxes. One of the pill
cards had the days of the week on ser­
rated squares—Mon., Tue., Wed. Did
that mean he’d have to wait till Mon­
day before he started? If he started
now, he’d be taking his Monday pill—
his Monday tablet—on a Wednesday.
He was fuckin’ wild. He stood and
got himself a glass of water. He had a
look out the kitchen window while he
was at it. The branches on the tree next
door were waving; they were bending.
He could hear a siren, off somewhere.
He could hear wires whistling—he
thought he could.
• It was half past two. He’d listened
—Where are my pills?
His mother came running. Running
in her slippers, in from the kitchen.
—Where are your pills?
—That’s what I’m bloody asking.
Where are they?
She was afraid her husband would
fall dead if they didn’t find the pills. He’d
nearly died; she’d witnessed what could
happen. He’d had a heart attack, and a
triple bypass. He was sitting opposite
her at the kitchen table, then his face
was in his soup and she could see the
sweat running off the top of his head.
Like a tap, it was. Like a waterfall. She’d
phoned him—her son—and told him
about the ambulance arriving, the men
with the stretcher coming into the house.
He’d gone over and driven her to Beau­
mont—the hospital. He’d looked at her
face, the side of her face—the fear, the
tension. She didn’t look like his mother.
—What was the soup? he’d asked her.
—Cream of vegetable, she’d said.
And she’d smiled.
—Terrible waste.
Finding the pills, knowing exactly
where they were—that was the impor­
tant thing. She’d spent years looking
for his pills, keeping his father alive.
Until the grandkids started to make a
joke of it, and the fuckin’ old tyrant de­
cided to join in.
58 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2, 2019
But he’d seen it before it became
part of the fun of every Sunday after­
noon. He’d seen his mother’s face and
his father’s, her terror and his glee, be­
fore the kids turned it into a weekly
bit of fun.
—Where are my pills?
He wouldn’t have pills; they’d be
tablets. He’d know exactly where they
were. He wouldn’t become his father.
He put them on top of the fridge.
He typed a note into his phone: tab-
lets = fridge.
• —Anything happening out there?
He sat on the bed. He could see the
trees on the street, and the leaves fall­
ing, the chestnut leaves—huge brown
hands—dropping, floating, caught by
the wind and rolling uphill. If he lifted
himself slightly, he’d see the wheelies
tucked under the hedge. A guy on a
bike went past. His hood was fat, full
of the hurricane. That was all the
drama—the guy on the bike.
to the lunchtime news. The west of the
country was being chewed by the
weather; there were power cuts, roads
made impassable, tin roofs pulled off
farm sheds. Outside—here, in Dub­
lin—it was a windy day. That was all.
He’d been sitting on the bed, waiting.
He wanted to see a car in the air, a hun­
dred­year­old oak toppling; he wanted
to witness something—anything.
And he didn’t.
The leaves were the story. The fact
that nothing was happening. The leaves
going the wrong way, and the woman
with the Teddy bear. They were his
stories.
He lay back on the bed. He turned,
into whiteness and nothing—no
thoughts or things. He slept.
• —I saw a thing, he said.
He woke with an ache in his right arm;
the ache—the pain—had woken him.
Was that a sign? Was it pain in the
right or the left arm that was a pre­
lude to a heart attack? Or was that the
shoulder? He didn’t know; he wouldn’t
look it up. His arm was numb—just
numb, the way he’d been lying on it.
His wife had told him he slept with
his arms folded, as if he’d been sitting
in a chair and had fallen off it, straight
onto the bed. He hadn’t believed her.
—Not every night, he’d protested.
—Yes—every night.
—How do you know?
—I see you.
—You’re awake?
—Sometimes.
—Why?
—Jesus, there’s a question.
She was there now. She was sitting
where he’d been sitting before he fell
asleep. He felt her weight on the mat­
tress first, and saw her back. She was
looking out the window. It was dark.
—Not really, she said. Ex­hurricanes
aren’t what they used to be.
—Like everything else.
He’d have to tell her. He had the
widow’s block, and she was going to
be the widow.
—You made it home before the cur­
few, he said.
—Just about, she said.
He hadn’t moved. He didn’t want
to sit up. He liked looking at her, from
where he was, where she was. He’d al­
ways liked looking at her.
—Have we food? she asked.
—Loads.
—Grand.
—I put candles all around the house.
Just in case.
—We can pretend it’s a spa.
She hadn’t moved. She hadn’t turned
to look at him. He leaned out a bit—
the numbness in his arm had gone—
and put his hand on her back. He felt
her move, and her hand touched his,
just brushed across it.
—Get up, she said. And we’ll watch
the news. All the action is over in the
west. In Galway and Kerry and the
other lovely places.
—The wild Atlantic way.
—There you go.
He sat up now.
He told her about the woman he’d
seen, the woman with the Teddy bear.
—That’s so sad, she said.
He heard her shoes fall onto the floor,
and now she was sitting beside him.
He’d tell her in a minute. He’d tell
her about his tablets and his heart.
—I miss the kids, he said.
He started to cry. 
THE WRITER’S VOICE PODCAST
Roddy Doyle reads “The Curfew.”
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THE CRITICS

BOOKS

CAN YOU FORGIVE HER?

How Margaret Thatcher ruled.

BY JAMES WOOD

always found it hard to judge Mrs.
I Thatcher dispassionately, because she
was so like my mother. They looked and
sounded similar—shortish urgent women
who moved with purpose. From large
hair, their faces narrowed downward;
they had receding chins that appeared
weak and strong at once. Force of will
made them courageously disagreeable.
They were born two years apart (Thatcher
in 1925, my mother in 1927), came from
modest, fiercely principled Nonconform-
ist religious backgrounds, and saw life
as a ladder that everyone must climb,
from evil to goodness, from error to cor-
rection, from the lower social classes to
the higher ones. Estranged from their
native accents, they spoke in their grander
borrowed ones a little carefully—as if,
having learned their elocution lessons,
they were now giving them. Both women
were complex feminists, of a kind, who
didn’t use the term, preferred men to
women, and coddled their sons over their
daughters. And both powerful women
married supportive men named Denis.
The degree of my hostility for Mrs.

Thatcher’s “force of personality,” one colleague said, was “almost too powerful for easy rational discussion.”
ILLUSTRATION BY BEN KIRCHNER THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2, 2019 59
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Thatcher—political, but also affective—
troubled me, because it cast a cold shadow
over my filial love. Yet I was hardly alone.
The entire country seemed to be pas-
sionately insane about Thatcher and
Thatcherism. I was thirteen when she
became Prime Minister, in 1979, so all
my adolescence was spent under her long
reign. She was still Britain’s leader when
I left university, in 1988. Where I grew
up, in the North of England, her name
was uttered bitterly. We were twenty miles
from Newcastle, stalked by once power-
ful industries—steel, shipbuilding, coal—
that Thatcherism eyed as chronically sick,
inimical to progress, and infested with
unionist leftism. During the bloody min-
ers’ strike of 1984-85, men and women
collected money every Saturday in the
market square of my home town with
signs that asked us to “Dig deep for the
miners.” In those days, there was no such
thing as political indifference—that would
be allowable only in the next decade, the
era after the fall of Communism, the era
of steady Third Way prosperity, when
history had been called off. Of course,
we couldn’t be dispassionate: Margaret
Thatcher breathed over the country like
a great parental god. She wanted her na-
tion to be as ambitious, successful, hard-
working, thrifty, and right-principled as
she was, and to those ends she hectored,
wounded, pushed, and inspired.
“Force of personality was the most
striking thing about her—almost too
powerful for easy rational discussion,” a
political colleague of hers said. It’s the
dominant theme in the more than two
thousand pages of Charles Moore’s au-
thorized biography, now completed by
its third volume, “Herself Alone” (Knopf),
which chronicles a political downfall
brought about by a force of personality
too large for rational discussion. As early
as 1981, one of Thatcher’s advisers com-
plained that she bullied her weaker col-
leagues: “You criticise colleagues in front
of each other and in front of their offi-
cials. . . . You give little praise or credit.”
“If this is the best you can do,” she told
Geoffrey Howe, a long-abused Cabinet
minister, “then I’d better send you to hos-
pital and deliver the statement myself.”
On one occasion, when she became par-
ticularly “strident,” the Canadian Prime
Minister Brian Mulroney had to remind
her, “I am not a member of your govern-
ment, I am the head of a sovereign na-
60 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2, 2019
tion!” But she could just as easily rebuke
entire nations, genders, or both at once.
“You men, you’re all so weak,” she spat
at some Dutch representatives after an
episode of failed European negotiation.
Robin Butler, her principal private sec-
retary, confessed that “dealing with her
face to face was like feeding a fierce an-
imal.” Moore, who has an excellent eye
for anecdotes and a Gibbonian way with
footnotes, buries one of the best of such
tales at the bottom of a page in his sec-
ond volume. Once, at a meeting, when
she compared something to “Waiting
for Godot,” and pronounced “Godot”
with a hard “t,” Lord Carrington, her
first Foreign Secretary, whispered to her,
“It’s pronounced ‘Godo,’ Prime Minis-
ter.” How is it spelled? she asked. Car-
rington spelled it out. “Then it’s ‘Godot,’”
she replied, enunciating the “t” with even
greater distinctness.
Some of the squeamishness she
prompted can be attributed to male
chauvinism and Tory patrician snob-
bery; Moore, a right-wing columnist
for the Daily Telegraph and a former ed-
itor of The Spectator, likes to use this de-
fense when Thatcher is at her most in-
defensible, soothingly reminding us of
her role as the great disrupter of the old
boys’ club and its afternoon fug. This is
undeniable, though snobbery seems gen-
erally to have topped misogyny among
her detractors. Carrington, a suave old
Etonian diplomat, once exclaimed, “If
I have any more trouble from this fuck-
ing stupid, petit-bourgeois woman, I’m
going to go.”Thatcher reminded Valéry
Giscard d’Estaing, the aquiline French
President, of a tiresome English nanny
his family had once employed.
Snobbery she could do nothing about.
But the Westminster club remained a
stiflingly male one in large part because
Thatcher, across eleven years and three
administrations, appointed just one
woman to her Cabinet, and to a politi-
cally irrelevant post at that. The women
she encountered, insofar as they appear
in Moore’s biography at all, seem likely
to have joined the men in their patterns
of fascination and recoil. We aren’t told
what her mother thought of her, but Mar-
garet’s emphatic sidelining of the mater-
nal influence—“I loved my mother dearly
but after I was fifteen we had nothing
more to say to each other”—shades in a
sad mutual attrition. Geoffrey Howe’s
wife, Elspeth, detested Thatcher, and
faulted her for having, especially around
women, “Queen Bee syndrome—I made
it. Others can jolly well do the same.”
Even Queen Elizabeth shared the general
squeamishness; seven years into Thatch-
er’s rule, she let it be known through her
press secretary that she considered the
Prime Minister to be “uncaring, confron-
tational and socially divisive.”
n the opening pages of “The Rain-
I bow,” D. H. Lawrence describes the
long rhythms of traditional agricultural
life in Nottinghamshire. The men, he
suggests, stay close to the ground in
wordless communion, and do not yearn
for a significant life beyond their ele-
mental work. The women are “differ-
ent.” They look out and up, at the hori-
zon, “to the spoken world beyond”—
to the village, with its church and hall
and school. For Lawrence, the woman
is the ever-restless agent of social change.
Margaret Thatcher, born ten years after
the publication of “The Rainbow,” in
the neighboring county of Lincolnshire,
into the same religious Nonconformism
that shaped Lawrence (and, before him,
George Eliot), belonged to that sorority.
With astonishing enterprise and intel-
ligence, she treated her lower-middle-
class background as a problem to be
solved. It isn’t surprising that her school-
mates thought her accent was “affected”
and that she had about her “a smug per-
fection”: she would not be held back;
she was not going to stay in the rural
town of Grantham.
She looked out and up; she instinc-
tively agreed with Mr. Vincy, in “Mid-
dlemarch,” who announces that “it’s a
good British feeling to try and raise
your family a little.” Thatcher’s father,
the deeply pious Alfred Roberts, was a
shopkeeper, and she was born into mod-
est circumstances above the corner store
in Grantham. The family house lacked
a yard, hot water, and an indoor lava-
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tory. But Roberts was also a lay preacher,
and later became an alderman and the
town’s mayor. Ascent, for Margaret,
wasn’t merely a matter of sorority, then;
she studied her father’s public speak-
ing. At Oxford, she was one of only five
women in her year studying chemistry.
Called to the bar in 1954, she was the
first woman in her mentor’s law cham-
bers. She chose tax law, because, as a
young mother, she needed a regular
schedule—a year earlier, she had given
birth to twins, Mark and Carol. She
evidently went into the law because it
was the familiar (male) path to a career
in politics.
Her deep understanding of middle-
and working-class social aspiration, rev-
olutionary in the placidly entitled world
of Conservative Party politics, is what
kept her in power for so long, and is also
her greatest legacy. She figured out that
the labor movement, conservatism’s tra-
ditional radical foe, had itself become
conservative: it wanted too many things
to stay the same. Arthur Scargill, the
militant leader of the National Union of
Mineworkers, said that his members’
strike was taken in defense of the right
of their sons and grandsons to go down
the mine. Almost two decades earlier,
Mrs. Thatcher, then a young M.P., had
said that if she were “given a choice” she
would not send her son down a pit. It
was perilous and unhealthy: in 1967, three
miners were killed a week. The impor-
tant word there is “choice,” something
exercised, in 1993, by the same Arthur
Scargill, when he tried to buy a London
council flat (the equivalent of public hous-
ing), under a right-to-buy policy that
Mrs. Thatcher pioneered in the early
nineteen-eighties.
There is an unavoidable sense of
strategic efficiency about her domestic
life. Margaret Roberts was twenty-three
when she met Denis Thatcher, and she
reported back to her sister thus: “Major
Thatcher, who has a flat in London (age
about 36, plenty of money) was also din-
ing and he drove me back to town at
midnight. As one would expect he is a
perfect gentleman. Not a very attractive
creature—very reserved but quite nice.”
With admirable evolutionary shrewd-
ness, the right mate was being selected:
Margaret’s husband, who had means
from the family paint-and-preservatives
business he managed, would prove to
“It’s good, but not forty-five-minute-wait good.”
• •
be impressively supportive, and canny
at backing out of the limelight. Friends
said that it was a solid marriage but no
great love affair. “She was pleased to
have twins, but more because it meant
that she need not get pregnant again
than because of a wild enthusiasm for
motherhood” is Moore’s dry comment.
Not that Denis compensated with any
wild enthusiasm for fatherhood. “I just
wished the little buggers had been
drowned at birth,” he said years later,
when asked about his children. He was
watching cricket at the Oval when they
were born. Mark and Carol were dis-
patched to boarding schools at the ages
of eight and nine, respectively, and Mar-
garet Thatcher entered Parliament, in
1959, as a Conservative M.P. for the
North London constituency of Finch-
ley. Her steady rise to power had begun.
Thatcher’s singular mission was po-
litical. Such single-mindedness, which
is hoarded eccentricity, is easy to dis-
like—it so isn’t like us. Yet one can only
marvel at the determination and the for-
titude needed to surmount the slights
and obstacles of that time. Nearly every
normal habit of life—engaged parent-
hood, sibling loyalty, marital intimacy,
deep friendship, ordinary social inter-
course—gave way to the achievement
of that one thing. Denis Healey, a bril-
liant Labour politician of Thatcher’s
generation, thought that politicians
needed to have a “hinterland”; he said
that he had always been as interested in
music, poetry, and painting as he was in
politics. The English idea of the non-
chalant gentleman-amateur—Harold
Macmillan calmly reading Jane Austen,
and so on—had always presupposed
such hinterlands. You had one foot in
Downing Street and the other in your
country-house library. It was a tradition
of male affluence, to be sure, and Thatcher
might well have felt that she couldn’t let
her guard down. Or perhaps she just had
no hinterland. And no innerland, either:
in all of Moore’s thousands of pages,
there is not the slightest stirring of in-
teriority. What Margaret Thatcher felt
privately about God, or death, or a beau-
tiful phrase of music, or love, or sex, or
a sad movie, or the great blessings of
having children, or the beauties of for-
eign cities, or the anguish of suffering,
is not recorded. Her soul was shuttered.
But how hard she worked at that one
thing, and with what steely ministration!
Moore provides an example from the
beginning of her career. Junior members
of Parliament are encouraged to propose
their own bills; the gesture announces
a freshman’s seriousness of intention.
The young Thatcher found a subject—
she devised a bill that would force La-
bour councils to open up their proceed-
ings to the public (including newspapers
involved in labor disputes). But she
THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2, 2019 61
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identified an impediment to its passage.
On Fridays, when such bills were de-
bated, M.P.s were often absent. Thatcher
wrote individually to two hundred and
fifty of her Conservative colleagues—“I
have always believed in the impact of a
personal, handwritten letter”—asking
them to stay in Westminster; her pri-
vate-member’s bill was carried by an
overwhelming margin. About a decade
later, in the early seventies, she joined
Prime Minister Edward Heath’s Cabinet
as Education Secretary. When Heath
lost the general election of 1974, she
made a bid for leader of the Conserva-
tive Party, and won, in February, 1975.
Just over four years after that, she became,
as Moore says, “the first elected woman
leader in the Western world.”
Colleagues were astounded at how
thoroughly she could master briefing
material. She needed little sleep, and
worked late into the night. In 1984, when
the I.R.A. bombed the Grand Hotel in
Brighton, where the Prime Minister was
staying for the annual Conservative Party
Conference, she was polishing her key-
note speech at the moment her suite’s
bathroom exploded, at 2:50 a.m. On a
twenty-four-hour flight from Hong
Kong to Washington, D.C., in a gov-
ernment jet equipped with a bed, she
told Robin Butler that, while he could
go to sleep, she was going to stay awake
for the entire journey while she studied
the intricacies of the Anti-Ballistic Mis-
sile Treaty. She intently marked up ev-
erything that came her way, blitzing her
colleagues’ internal memos and policy
proposals with double and triple under-
linings, groaning castigations, and flat
prohibitions: “No,” “Very disappoint-
ing & sketchy,” “This is awful.” Vaca-
tions provoked something like bewildered
impatience; in his long chronicle, Moore
eventually flourishes a droll shorthand
for these recurrent challenges: “For her
customary but always unwelcome sum-
mer holidays, Mrs. Thatcher . . .”
ndeed, what emerges from these im-
I peccably researched, coolly absorbing
volumes are two Margaret Thatchers,
whom we might call the scientist and
the atavist. For the scientist Thatcher,
the chemist who had studied with Dor-
othy Hodgkin at university, knowledge
existed to be mastered, made use of, lev-
eraged. This Thatcher had read Fried-
62 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2, 2019
rich von Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom”
at Oxford, and at opportune moments
would pull his “Constitution of Liberty”
out of her handbag. Christmas of 1975
found her doggedly continuing her anti-
communist “holiday reading”: “The Pos-
sessed” and “Darkness at Noon.” This
Thatcher was genuinely interested in
whether Mikhail Gorbachev could re-
form Soviet Communism; she coaxed
and encouraged him before any other
Western leader dared to, and engaged
him in passionate, freewheeling collo-
quies. (Their first lasted six hours.) She
convened what were essentially academic
seminars on the Soviet Union at Che-
quers, the Prime Minister’s country res-
idence (with guests such as the British
historians Robert Conquest and Hugh
Thomas and the Columbia University
scholar Seweryn Bialer).
The scientist surrounded herself with
intelligent men (Nigel Lawson, Geoffrey
Howe, Keith Joseph, Douglas Hurd),
and approached Britain’s manifold woes
at the start of the nineteen-eighties with
an unsentimental willingness to push ex-
periment to the edge of cruelty. Britain
was teetering: the figures still astonish.
Interest rates in 1979 reached seventeen
per cent and inflation a staggering eigh-
teen per cent. Nationalized industries
were sluggish and fabulously costly to
the taxpayer. British Leyland, the auto-
motive conglomerate that included Jag-
uar, Triumph, and Austin Rover, was pro-
ducing comically dreadful cars and had
consumed about two hundred million
pounds a year in government subsidies.
Many of these companies approached
customer satisfaction like the proprietor
in the Monty Python cheese-shop sketch:
“Normally, sir, yes, but today the van
broke down.” Moore, in one of his foot-
notes, remembers trying to get a phone
installed in 1981, and being told by Brit-
ish Telecom that it would take six months,
owing to a “shortage of numbers.” As
Howe, Thatcher’s first Chancellor of the
Exchequer, noted in his budget speech
of June, 1979, Britain’s share of world
trade in 1954 had been equal to that of
France and Germany combined. Now
the French and German share was three
times bigger than Britain’s.
Controlling expenditure and the
money supply was part hypothesis
(Thatcher’s fabled monetarism, which
she got from Milton Friedman) and part
common sense: uncontrolled inflation,
like religion, poisons everything. A sys-
tem that was increasing miners’ pay by
nearly ten per cent a year was clearly un-
sustainable. Since many of the major in-
dustries (including railways, coal, tele-
communications, and a good chunk of
automobile production) were national-
ized, the government was effectively act-
ing as a giant employer. But since many
weren’t profitable, it was also acting as a
giant bank. The country had apparently
wandered into the worst of two worlds:
nationalization of the means of produc-
tion (largely achieved by Clement Att-
lee’s postwar Labour government) could
offer no magical respite from the mar-
ket—which had decided, for instance,
that it didn’t want badly made British
cars—and so it simply insured that cap-
italism was being done poorly. As a rem-
edy, Thatcher and her ministers em-
barked on a campaign of privatization,
releasing British Gas, British Airways,
British Telecom, BP, and British Ley-
land from government control.
Government subvention had fended
off the ravages of capitalism in one im-
portant way: it had provided steady em-
ployment. Now the country’s unemploy-
ment rate rose; it hit a high of thirteen
per cent in 1984, and was still seven per
cent in 1990, the year of Thatcher’s
ouster. Thatcher’s calculation was that
widespread unemployment was an un-
avoidable fact of economic reform, that
certain jobs would have to be the mulch
that went into the revival of the gen-
eral economic habitat. Apart from the
profound human misery that resulted,
there was an enduring political cost—
much of Scotland, Wales, and the North
of England remains lost to Conserva-
tives. This was the Thatcher who main-
tained that there was “no such thing as
society,” only individuals, “and people
must look to themselves first,” a state-
ment that Moore attempts, with little
luck, to wrestle from its infamy. That
unequal society tended toward ugly ex-
tremes, with great new impoverishment
and great new enrichment. Still, the
new order created undeniable economic
expansion (an average G.D.P. growth
rate of 3.2 per cent in the nineteen-eight-
ies), and Thatcher was reëlected in 1983
and 1987, the first Prime Minister after
universal suffrage, Moore notes, to win
three elections.
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Alas, the atavist Thatcher was a differ-
ent creature, and the atavist gradually
consumed the scientist, because the sci-
entist drank her own potion, the one
marked “ideology.” The atavist had been
happy to be called a “reactionary,” before
she became Prime Minister. The atavist
complained publicly about Britain’s being
“swamped” by immigrants; never, as far
as we know, used the National Health
Service herself and wanted to convert it
to an American-style insurance-based
system; believed in capital punishment;
agreed with her husband that the BBC
was infested with left-wing “pinkos”;
supported legislation prohibiting local
government authorities from “promot-
ing” homosexuality; refused to counte-
nance any meaningful political progress
in Northern Ireland; vehemently opposed
German reunification; was virtually alone
among world leaders in opposing sanctions
on the South African apartheid regime;
and called the A.N.C. “a typical terrorist
organization.” The atavist stopped listen-
ing to her colleagues, and deeply distrusted
her civil servants (particularly at the For-
eign Office), whom she worked around
or behind whenever she could. The ata-
vist was the possessor of what one col-
league called “a very English English-
ness”: she didn’t sacrifice Scotland and
Wales as part of a Conservative strategy;
she hardly noticed they were there.
Europe was the great theatre of this
very English Englishness. Throughout
Mrs. Thatcher’s career, Moore observes,
“the story of 1940 was the myth which
most dominated her imagination.” It is
the Dunkirk story, and not wholly myth-
ical: Nazis rampant in Europe, Paris
vanquished, Britain alone as the last bul-
wark of Western civilization, while the
air flashed with Spitfires and Churchill
growled in the Commons. Margaret
Roberts was fifteen, and Britain would
never be as noble again—unless it was
in 1982, when she led the country to vic-
tory over Argentina during the Falk-
lands War, and quoted the Duke of Wel-
lington: “There is no such thing as a
little war for a great nation.” The refusal
to accept Britain’s diminishment, the
refusal merely to “manage the decline,”
was central to Thatcher’s pugilism, and
it is the reason for her Churchillian sta-
tus among contemporary Conservatives.
Yet the question that devoured her
career, and remains grievously unresolved
to this day, is whether Britain is a greater
nation inside or outside the European
Union. Remainers and assorted economic
pragmatists tend to argue that the right
question is whether Britain is a richer
nation inside Europe or out; greatness
will have to look after itself. Brexiteers
reply that greatness cannot look after it-
self when the nation’s sovereignty is cur-
tailed. Thatcher appears to have been
one of those economic pragmatists for a
brief period, when Great Britain voted
by referendum to stay in the European
Economic Community, in 1975, and she
saw the economic possibilities of a large
internal market. Soon she grew dismayed
by French and German plans for greater
integration, a European Central Bank
and single currency, and the borderless
utopia that sought to banish national-
ist rivalry and bloodshed. To her, it all
smacked of socialism. It deprived nations
of their ability to control their own cur-
rencies and interest rates; it favored bur-
geoning German and French power; it
operated by élite consensus and an irri-
tating sort of mild bureaucratic snuffling.
Some of these objections were rea-
sonable, but it’s hard to resist the idea
that the core of Thatcher’s hostility to
Europe was flamingly unreasonable, al-
most exceeding articulate discourse. It
is unreasonable to credit nuclear weap-
ons—but not the E.U.—for keeping the
peace in modern Europe, as Thatcher
did. Moore, a prominent Brexiteer, her-
niates himself in his effort to defend his
subject in this area, assuring us that
Thatcher “was not, in any general sense,
anti-European,” to which the reply might
be: no, only in many specific senses. The
first speech she gave as Party leader, in
1975, pushed against the notion that Brit-
ain had become “a poor nation whose
only greatness lies in the past.” Yet a fro-
zen allegiance to the myth of 1940 rather
guarantees a nostalgia for the greatness
of the past. The theme was struck re-
peatedly. “How dare they! We saved all
their necks in the war,” she exclaimed at
a European summit in 1984, apparently
annoyed by the spectacle of European
foreign ministers idly drinking coffee
and “swapping funny stories.”
Her deep suspicion of all things
German became more vociferous once
German reunification loomed. She saw
greater European unity, Moore says, “not
as a solution for German power, but as
a cloak for it.” She had a map of Eu-
rope in her handbag, marked up with a
black circle around Germany, and an-
other, even warier circle around the Ger-
man-speaking peoples of Europe. The
German Chancellor Helmut Kohl re-
portedly joked to her at a 1990 meeting
that, at the recent World Cup semifinal,
the Germans had apparently beaten En-
gland “at their national game,” only to
have Thatcher reply that “the English
had beaten the Germans at theirs twice
in the twentieth century.” But it was
Kohl who accurately diagnosed the
problem: “She thinks history is not just.
Germany is so rich and Great Britain
is struggling. They won a war but lost
an empire and their economy.”
Increasingly, her colleagues and civil
servants worked around her. Officials at
the Foreign Office privately noted her
“Germanophobia” and her “obsessions
about the European Community and
Germany.” One minister, Douglas Hurd,
complained that Cabinet meetings now
involved three orders of business: “par-
liamentary affairs; home affairs; and xe-
nophobia.” The greatest pressure was felt
by Geoffrey Howe, who became her For-
eign Secretary in 1983. A loyal colleague
from the earliest days of her leadership
and an architect of the first Thatcher
economic plan, he was perhaps the last
person you would have selected to spend
long hours by the Prime Minister’s side,
as she sliced her way through flabby world
gatherings. Thickly bespectacled, defer-
ential, gently overweight, and meek of
manner, he spoke in a civil murmur, a
kind of clerical stutter that unfailingly
cast a sleeping spell over the entire na-
tion. Denis Healey said that being at-
tacked by Howe was “like being savaged
by a dead sheep.” Howe was a lawyerly
civil servant who had been mysteriously
transferred to the front lines of partisan
politics. Where Thatcher craved deci-
sion, Howe preferred deferment; where
Thatcher disrupted, he convened. He
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favored consensus, formulas, protocols,
quietly stagnant back channels.
He was also decent, capable, and well
liked. Perhaps she needed him around,
in an odd-couple way, as her reliable
negative: find out what Geoffrey would
do, and then do the opposite. Moore
speculates that she despised his “unman-
liness,” a shrewd surmise given her Lady
Macbeth-like disdain for the slightest
“wobbliness” in masculinity. She regu-
larly rebuked him in front of his peers.
At one of the Chequers seminars on
the Soviet Union, she called out, “Don’t
worry, Geoffrey. We know exactly what
you’re going to say.” After a memorial
service for her old friend Ian Gow, at
which Howe had delivered the eulogy,
she upbraided him in front of Gow’s
grieving sons: “Why don’t you speak up,
Geoffrey? You mumble.” Howe had been
distressed by Thatcher’s opposition to
South African sanctions—he feared that
Britain would be seen as “the sole de-
fender of apartheid”—and now he grew
convinced that Thatcher was attempt-
ing to turn the Conservative Party into
an anti-European tank. On November 1,
1990, she again reprimanded him in front
of his colleagues; later that day, he re-
signed. He did not go quietly. The res-
ignation speech he delivered at the House
of Commons (declaring that Thatcher’s
“perceived attitude towards Europe is
running increasingly serious risks for the
future of our nation”) led Tories to move
against her leadership.
nce Mrs. Thatcher’s fall had begun,
O the toppling was fast. But perhaps
it had really started earlier—when, in
October of 1989, she fell out with Com-
monwealth leaders on the question of
South African sanctions, and said, “If it
is one against forty-eight, I am very sorry
for the forty-eight.” Or when her second
Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Law-
son, resigned a few days later, complain-
ing that she “just doesn’t listen any more.”
Or in March, 1990, when some of the
worst rioting in modern British history
swept through central London, as thou-
sands of citizens protested the new poll
tax. Or when inflation rates and unem-
ployment began to rise, in the same year.
And how curious that Thatcher, whose
oft-repeated mantra was “Time spent in
reconnaissance is never wasted,” could
not or would not see this. Everyone else,
64 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2, 2019
it seems, was aware of what Moore nicely
calls the “growing fin de régime feeling.”
Parties exist to win elections. Miracu-
lously, she had won three elections; now
she imperilled the fourth: Labour was
polling between sixteen and twenty-one
percentage points ahead of the Conser-
vatives. So she faced a leadership chal-
lenge and resigned, on November 28, 1990.
Two years later, under her successor, John
Major, the Conservatives won the elec-
tion that had looked so grim for them.
She was a violently political animal,
and when the hunt was taken from her
she dwindled away into a cruelly perma-
nent winter that finally erased her only
self. Her private secretary Charles Pow-
ell thought that she never had a happy
day once she left power. Friends and
admirers did their best, setting her up
with houses and assistants—one wealthy
donor sent her flowers once a week for
the rest of her life. She signed up with
a speakers’ bureau, formed the Marga-
ret Thatcher Foundation, and travelled
the world in the remunerative manner—
as a kind of auctioned icon—that is now
grimly customary among former world
leaders, but was then unusual. Her pol-
itics, simmering away untended, thick-
ened into solid reductions: she became
ever more fervently opposed to E.U.
membership. She defended the former
Chilean dictator General Augusto Pi-
nochet, an old ally, when, visiting Brit-
ain for medical treatment, he was placed
under house arrest in compliance with
a Spanish warrant. Once presciently in-
terested in climate change—the scientist
Thatcher had organized an early con-
ference, in 1989, devoted to “Saving the
Ozone Layer,” and a subsequent semi-
nar at which she sat with the environ-
mentalist James Lovelock—she appeared
to recant it all in the book “Statecraft”
(2002), a dull collection of right-wing
speeches and anecdotes. The atavist now
decried the issue as little more than an
excuse for the promotion of “worldwide,
supranational socialism.”
Colleagues noticed her declining ca-
pacities. Giving a speech in 2000, she
repeated the same joke three times. She
suffered a mini-stroke at the end of 2001,
and another early in 2002, temporarily
losing the power of speech. Denis
Thatcher, mysteriously kept alive by a
stern regimen of nightly gin-and-tonics
and two packs a day, died in 2003, at the
age of eighty-eight. His absence caused
further bewilderment: “I must go home
now and get his supper,” she sometimes
exclaimed. As her dementia deepened,
her temperament sweetened; I saw the
same change in my own mother, who
followed Mrs. Thatcher in this regard,
and who, born two years after her, died
a year after her, in 2014. Almost mute,
uncannily gentle, and patient as she had
rarely been in the fullness of her life,
Mrs. Thatcher would—it is one of the
most poignant details in Charles Moore’s
account—sit for hours in front of a cer-
tain painting at the Oxfordshire estate
of a wealthy friend. The painting was a
Victorian scene, titled “The Leaming-
ton Hunt—Mr Harry Bradley’s Hounds,”
by John Frederick Herring. She liked
counting the dogs.
Dementia’s whittling seems crueller
when the oak once stood as tall as
Thatcher did. Her fiercest opponents
could not be unmoved by Moore’s last
pages. But a cold eye is required for her
legacy, which has been calamitous. Brexit
is always at the center of it, and yet al-
most the least of it. She split her own
party, but she also split the Labour Party
(with plenty of assistance from that great
Thatcher admirer Tony Blair). After all,
her opposition to the European Union
wasn’t just about Europhobia; it had
to do with her visceral Americophilia.
When she flew to Washington, D.C.,
in 1981 to proclaim her ardor for the
newly inaugurated Ronald Reagan, she
was not only announcing an ideologi-
cal kinship but binding her country to
the larger power. “America’s successes
will be our successes,” she declaimed.
“Your problems will be our problems.”
That promise was tragically fulfilled
when Tony Blair decided to join George
Bush’s invasion of Iraq—a decision that
fatefully weakened Blair’s party.
Thatcher legitimated a new kind of
inequality; she protected and coddled
Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing press,
which returned the favor with blind sup-
port; she ignored and undermined her
civil service, especially at the Foreign
Office; she divided politics into a purity
war of loyalists and enemies; she stopped
being the leader of one nation; she “dis-
rupted.” Alas, these are now very familiar
woes, with their own familiar rhetoric.
As David Cameron put it when she died,
“She made our country great again.” 
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BOOKS
OUT IN THE BLUE
American womanhood in Joan Didion’s early novels.
BY HILTON ALS
s the lovely New York spring of 1977
A turned into the worst kind of New
York summer, I did two things over and
over again: I watched Robert Altman’s
mid-career masterpiece “3 Women,” at
a theatre in midtown, and I read Joan
Didion’s astounding third novel, “A Book
of Common Prayer.” Released within
weeks of each other that year, when I
was sixteen, these two revelatory pieces
of art shared a strong aesthetic atmo-
sphere, an incisive view of uneasy friend-
Didion in 1972. Her women have an image in mind of what life should look like.
66 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2, 2019
ships between women, a deadpan hor-
ror of consumerism, and an understand-
ing of how the uncanny can manifest in
the everyday. Reading and watching—
it wasn’t long before Altman’s and Did-
ion’s projects merged in my mind, where
they constituted a kind of mini-Zeitgeist,
one that troubled, undid, and then re-
made my ideas about how feminism
might inform popular art.
After falling under the sway of “A
Book of Common Prayer,” I turned to
Didion’s first two novels, “Run River”
(1963) and “Play It as It Lays” (1970). (All
three novels were reissued in November,
as part of a handsome volume from the
Library of America, “Joan Didion: The
1960s and 70s.”) “Run River,” published
when Didion was not yet thirty, was con-
ventional in a way that reflected not the
fascinating slant of her intractably practi-
cal mind but, rather, her formidable am-
bition: writers wrote novels, so she wrote
one. Still, the book, which is set in Did-
ion’s home town of Sacramento, is not
just a reflexive or academic exercise. Its
protagonist, Lily Knight McClellan, is
a kind of ruined Eve living in relative
wealth in an Eden that the next gen-
eration will want no part of. Lily cries,
drinks, cheats on her rancher husband,
Everett, and aborts a child, because she
cannot forgo the “comfortable loving
fictions”—the story of being a wife and
thus socially acceptable, according to the
rules of her tribe. What no Didion hero-
ine can entirely reconcile herself to is the
split between what she wants and what
a woman is supposed to do: marry, have
children, and keep her marriage together,
despite the inevitable philandering, de-
spite her other hopes and dreams. Did-
ion’s women have an image in mind of
what life should look like—they’ve seen
it in the fashion magazines—and they
expect reality to follow suit. But it almost
never does. In Didion’s fiction, the stan-
dard narratives of women’s lives are man-
gled, altered, and rewritten all the time.
“Play It as It Lays” also centers on a
woman failing to live up to social expec-
tations, and it comes as close as any book
has come to representing what repres-
sion does to the soul. In this slim novel,
where sometimes a few words constitute
a chapter, Didion gives shape to ghosts,
the ghastly, and the ephemeral. Maria
Wyeth, a sometime B actress, suffers a
number of misfortunes, including the
birth of a disabled child, but what makes
her still the best known of Didion’s early
heroines is how she queers the image of
American womanhood even as she pre-
sumably lives it, in her nice house in Los
Angeles, a city where “failure, illness,
fear . . . were seen as infectious, conta-
gious blights on glossy plants.” Maria
feels an existential gnawing in her bones,
a dread she can never quite shake, but
instead of clinging tighter to the rules
she has presumably been taught—pol-
PHOTOGRAPH BY JILL KREMENTZ
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ish the furniture, make an apple pie, pre­
pare her husband’s Martini as he rolls
up the driveway—she makes a list of the
things she will never do: “ball at a party,
do S­M unless she wanted to, . . . carry
a Yorkshire in Beverly Hills.”
“Play It as It Lays” was published not
long after the Stonewall riots, in New
York, at a time when there were few sto­
ries about gay male life out there, repre­
senting. The book, which features a
significant gay male character, could be
read both as a metaphor for queerness—
the girl who doesn’t fit in—and as an
early, un­camp depiction of the fag hag,
a woman who questions convention by
avoiding it and finds safety in the com­
pany of gay men. I admired “Play It as
It Lays”—there isn’t a closeted gay ad­
olescent on the planet who wouldn’t iden­
tify with its nihilism played out in the
glare of glamorous privilege—but it didn’t
thrill me like “A Book of Common
Prayer,” which has a full­bodied pathos
and yearning that Didion’s other early
fiction lacks or suppresses.
hen “A Book of Common Prayer”
W came out, the country was still
drunk on Bicentennial patriotism; 1976
had given us a big dose of pomp and
ceremony. Over the receding jingoistic
din, Didion’s voice told another story,
about women’s inner lives formed in a
nation that was, as Elizabeth Hardwick
put it, in a 1996 essay about Didion,
“blurred by a creeping inexactitude about
many things, among them bureaucratic
and official language, the jargon of the
press, the incoherence of politics, the di­
sastrous surprises in the mother, father,
child tableau.”The first three items listed
have to do with language generally and
rhetoric specifically—how we fashion
the truth, and why. In Didion’s novel—
and in most of her fiction, including her
1984 masterpiece, “Democracy”—believ­
ing that empirical truth exists is like be­
lieving that the water in a mirage will
satisfy your thirst. What interests her is
why people still want to drink it. Cer­
tainly Charlotte Douglas does. Char­
lotte is the person whom the book’s
narrator, Grace Strasser­Mendana, is re­
ferring to when she says, at the start of
the novel, “I will be her witness.” When
I first read those words, that long­ago
summer, I was struck, as I am now, by
the feminist ethos behind them: I will
remember her, and therefore I, too, will exist.
I had grown up with the art and pol­
itics of such early heroes as Toni Morri­
son, Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, and
Ntozake Shange, but Altman’s potent
film and “A Book of Common Prayer”
were the first works I encountered that
embodied the second­wave white femi­
nism that mattered to me as well. Not
that Didion—a graduate of Berkeley and
a staffer at Vogue during the age of Ei­
senhower, who was already writing pieces
steeped in originality—was part of the
feminist movement. In her 1972 essay
“The Women’s Movement,” she objected
to several of the movement’s tendencies,
including its “invention of women as a
‘class’” and its wish to replace the ambi­
guities of fiction with ideology. It was
clear from Didion’s writing that not only
was she allergic to ideology, which she
avoided like a virus in most of her work,
but her ways of thinking and of express­
ing herself were unlike anyone else’s. In
a 2005 essay in The New York Review of
Books, John Leonard recalled how star­
tled he was, in the sixties, by Didion’s syn­
tax and tone: “I’ve been trying for four
decades to figure out why her sentences
are better than mine or yours . . . some­
thing about cadence. They come at you,
if not from ambush, then in gnomic hai­
kus, icepick laser beams, or waves. Even
the space on the page around these sen­
tences is more interesting than could be
expected, as if to square a sandbox for the
Sphinx.” Still, in “A Book of Common
Prayer,” Didion tried to close the gap be­
tween herself and others, to write about
the responsibility inherent in connecting.
To me, “A Book of Common Prayer”
was feminist in the way that Toni Mor­
rison’s “Sula,” published four years ear­
lier, was feminist—without having to de­
clare itself as such. But, whereas the two
friends in “Sula” live inside their rela­
tionship, Didion wrote about a woman
trying to enter into a friendship and a
kind of love with another woman who
is ultimately unknowable. A sixty­year­
old American expatriate living in the fic­
tional Central American city of Boca
Grande, Grace inhabits an atmosphere
of “opaque equatorial light.” Boca Grande,
a sort of ersatz movie set, has no real his­
tory; its airport is a way station between
more desirable destinations. A stomp­
ing ground for arms dealers and rich
people with offshore accounts, Boca
Grande is as good a place as any for Grace,
who has cancer, to live and die. Not once
during the course of the novel does she
ask who will remember her when she’s
gone. Grace, who shares some of her cre­
ator’s moral rigidity—“In order to main­
tain a semblance of purposeful behavior
on this earth you have to believe that
things are right or wrong,” Didion told
an interviewer—is always looking out,
rarely looking in. In a way, by moving to
Boca Grande, Grace sought to escape
life, or, at least, the life she was supposed
to have as an American woman. And yet
it followed her across the sea, in the real
and ghostly presence of Charlotte, who
died before Grace began telling this story.
Born in Denver, Grace was orphaned
at a young age: “My mother died of in­
fluenza one morning when I was eight.
My father died of gunshot wounds, not
self­inflicted, one afternoon when I was
ten.” Until she was sixteen, she lived alone
in her parents’ former suite at the Brown
Palace Hotel. Then she made her way to
California, where she studied at Berke­
ley with the cultural anthropologist A. L.
Kroeber, before being tapped to work
with Claude Lévi­Strauss, in São Paulo.
But make no mistake: her pursuit of an­
thropology was not the result of an in­
tellectual passion, or any kind of passion.
“I did not know why I did or did not do
anything at all,” she says. After marrying
a tree planter in Boca Grande, Grace “re­
tired” (quotation marks hers) from an­
thropology. She gave birth to a son, and
was eventually widowed and left, she says,
with “putative control of fifty­nine­point­
eight percent of the arable land and about
the same percentage of the decision­mak­
ing process.” Grace’s inheritance makes
her the head of the household, but money
isn’t everything—it isn’t even a start, when
your real interest lies in something other
than profit and waste. The flesh and the
spirit are on Grace’s mind; her terminal
illness no doubt contributes to our sense
that, for her, the day is a long night filled
with questions about being, questions she
attaches to her memories of Charlotte.
Referred to by the locals as “la norte­
americana,” Charlotte, during the brief
time that Grace knows her, is a perfect
denizen of Boca Grande. Pretty, ginger­
haired, she seems to have no past, though
she has an intense interest in the past,
which spills over to the present and infects
the future. She believes in institutions
THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2, 2019 67
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and conventionality, but they don’t be­
lieve in her. She has a daughter, Marin—
modelled on Patricia Hearst—who has
disappeared after participating in a plane
hijacking. Charlotte fills that absence
with invention: she makes up a version
of Marin who is forever a child. Char­
lotte’s husband, Leonard, isn’t around
much, either. When asked about him at
one of many cocktail parties, Charlotte
says carelessly, “He runs guns. I wish
they had caviar.” That Charlotte is a
mystery to Grace is part of the story:
what sense can be made of a woman
who spends half her time at the airport,
watching planes take off for other places?
Grace tries to shape these fragments and
images of Charlotte into a coherent
whole because she loves her, though she
has no real language to express that love
and Charlotte isn’t around to receive it.
“A Book of Common Prayer” is an act
of journalistic reconstruction disguised
as fiction: a Graham Greene story within
a V. S. Naipaul novel, but told from a
woman’s perspective, or two women’s per­
spectives, if you believe Charlotte, which
you shouldn’t. In a review of “The Exe­
cutioner’s Song,” Norman Mailer’s 1979
book about the Utah murderer Gary
Gilmore, Didion writes, of life in the
West, “Men tend to shoot, get shot, push
off, move on. Women pass down stories.”
This is true of life in Boca Grande, too.
Grace wants to pass down what she knows
about Charlotte and, thereby, what she
might know about herself. And yet some
of the drama rests, of course, in what she
can’t know. After marrying, Grace says,
she pursued biochemistry on an amateur
level. The field appeals to her because
“It’s not nuts she stores up as much as resentment.”
“demonstrable answers are common­
place and ‘personality’ absent.” She adds:
I am interested for example in learning that
such a “personality” trait as fear of the dark ex-
ists irrelative to patterns of child-rearing in the
Mato Grosso or in Denver, Colorado. . . . Fear
of the dark is an arrangement of fifteen amino
acids. Fear of the dark is a protein. I once di-
agrammed this protein for Charlotte. “I don’t
quite see why calling it a protein makes it any
different,” Charlotte said, her eyes flickering co-
vertly back to a battered Neiman-Marcus Christ-
mas catalogue she had received in the mail that
morning in May. . . . “I mean I don’t quite see
your point.”
I explained my point.
“I’ve never been afraid of the dark,” Char-
lotte said after a while, and then, tearing out a
photograph of a small child in a crocheted dress:
“This would be pretty on Marin.”
Since Marin was the child Charlotte had lost
to history and was at the time of her disappear-
ance eighteen years old, I could only conclude
that Charlotte did not care to pursue my point.
Also, for the record, Charlotte was afraid
of the dark.
Facts don’t necessarily reveal who we
are, but our contradictions almost always
do: it’s the warring self—the self that’s
capable of both caring for others and in­
tense self­interest—that makes a story.
And if Grace is drawn to anything it’s a
story; narrative—investigating it, creat­
ing it—gives her something to live for.
Part of what so captivates me about “A
Book of Common Prayer” is that, on
some level, it’s a book about writing,
which captures Didion’s love of cerebral
thriller­romances, such as Joseph Con­
rad’s 1915 tale “Victory” or Carol Reed’s
1949 film version of Graham Greene’s
“The Third Man,” in which a man tries
to piece together the story of his friend’s
life. But the dominant ethos of the novel
is one that Didion discovered as a teen­
ager, while reading Ernest Hemingway.
Writing about Hemingway in this mag­
azine in 1998, Didion noted:
The very grammar of a Hemingway sen-
tence dictated, or was dictated by, a certain
way of looking at the world, a way of looking
but not joining, a way of moving through but
not attaching, a kind of romantic individual-
ism distinctly adapted to its time and source.
Charlotte’s failure is that she attaches.
She can’t move through in the way that
Grace can, or believes she can. Charlotte
has her own stories to tell, but how can
you give force or form to a piece of writ­
ing when you’re immune to veracity? You
can only write fantasy, tell the world not
who you are but who you want to be.
Charlotte’s fantasy includes the convic­
tion that her strange and troubling fam­
ily is a family. “In many ways writing is
the act of saying I, of imposing oneself
upon other people, of saying listen to me,
see it my way, change your mind,” Didion
noted in her wonderful 1976 essay “Why
I Write.” “There’s no getting around the
fact that setting words on paper is the
tactic of a secret bully, an invasion.” Char­
lotte composes several “Letters from Cen­
tral America,” with a view to having The
New Yorker publish her reportorially soft,
inaccurate work, but the editors decline.
Charlotte’s ineptitude doesn’t keep us
from rooting for her, though, because,
despite it all, she doesn’t complain and
never loses heart, and how many of us
could do the same, if, like Charlotte, we
loved a child who couldn’t love us, or
married a man who was indifferent to
our pain? Grace’s sometimes smug re­
sponses to Charlotte’s high­heeled strolls
into political and emotional quicksand
are more upsetting than Charlotte’s mis­
takes, because Grace believes she knows
better, when, in fact, no one does. What
Charlotte teaches Grace, directly and in­
directly, is that, no matter how much you
want to tell the truth—or, at least, your
truth—the world will twist and distort
your story. Didion closes her most love­
lorn and visceral novel with Grace say­
ing, with sad finality, “I have not been
the witness I wanted to be.”
don’t think it’s necessary to read
I chronologically through the Library
of America volume—which, in addi­
tion to the novels, includes Didion’s
seminal essay collections “Slouching
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Towards Bethlehem” (1968) and “The
White Album” (1979). Almost any
page of this invaluable book will take
you somewhere emotionally and offer
a paramount lesson in the power of
Didion’s voice. Some readers came to
Didion later in her career—through
her National Book Award-winning
memoir, “The Year of Magical Think-
ing” (2005), about the death of her
husband, the writer John Gregory
Dunne, for instance, or “Blue Nights”
(2011), about the death of her daugh-
ter—and it’s interesting to go back
and explore the origins of the impulse
that drives those memoirs. Indeed, in
“The Year of Magical Thinking,” Did-
ion confesses a Grace-like tendency
to try to distance herself from the un-
fathomable through writing and re-
search: writing, for her, can be a means
of controlling the uncontrollable, in-
cluding grief and loss.
A story that’s as interesting as the
ones Didion tells in important works
like “A Book of Common Prayer” is how
she found and developed that authori-
tative literary voice. In her review of
“The Executioner’s Song,” this daugh-
ter of California wrote:
The authentic Western voice . . . is one
heard often in life but only rarely in literature,
the reason being that to truly know the West
is to lack all will to write it down. The very
subject of “The Executioner’s Song” is that
vast emptiness at the center of the Western
experience, a nihilism antithetical not only to
literature but to most other forms of human
endeavor, a dread so close to zero that human
voices fadeout, trail off, like skywriting. Be-
neath what Mailer calls “The immense blue of
the strong sky of the American West” . . . not
too much makes a difference.
So what’s out there in the blue?
What words can we try to grab and
shape as they’re fading away? How can
we describe intimacy, or the failure of
intimacy, without getting too close to
it? Part of Didion’s genius was to make
language out of the landscape she
knew—the punishing terrain of Cali-
fornia’s Central Valley, with its glaring
hot summers and winter floods, its stark
flatness, its river snakes, taciturn ranch-
ers, and lurking danger. “Those ex-
tremes affect the way you deal with the
world,” she said in a 1977 interview. “It
so happens that if you’re a writer the
extremes show up. They don’t if you
sell insurance.” ♦
BRIEFLY NOTED
Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming, by László Krasznahorkai,
translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet (New Direc-
tions). With an immense cast and wide-ranging erudition,
this novel, the culmination of a Hungarian master’s career,
offers a sweeping view of a contemporary moment that seems
deprived of meaning. In eastern Hungary, a famous scien-
tist known as the Professor renounces his comfortable life
for a hut on the outskirts of town—only to be bothered by
the news media, his daughter, and a Fascist biker gang. Mean-
while, the town expectantly prepares for the return of a scion
of its long-absent aristocracy from Argentina, hoping that
he will bring prosperity with him. When his arrival proves
disappointing, inexplicable events begin to beset the town.
What Is Missing, by Michael Frank (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).
The odd triangle of attractions that underpins this novel
arises in Florence among vacationing Americans. A di-
vorced fertility doctor and his teen-age son are captivated
by Costanza, a recent widow nearing forty who yearns for
a child. She and the father embark on a romance and, in
New York, on taxing rounds of fertility treatment. As the
novel probes relationships laced with curiosity and resent-
ment, what stands out is Costanza’s restive questioning of
her impulses. The result is a penetrating examination of
how a life can be defined by contingency and surprise,
marked both by the absence of things long dreamed of and
by unexpected presences.
Maoism, by Julia Lovell (Knopf ). Examining revolutionary
movements across five continents, this history emphasizes
the global reach of Maoist ideology. Mao Zedong’s theo-
ries inspired many groups fighting for decolonization and
minorities’ rights, giving Beijing an opportunity to wield
international influence. In the nineteen-fifties and sixties,
China, though ravaged by turmoil and famine, spent bil-
lions of dollars on aid in Southeast Asia and Africa, and
hosted revolutionaries from as far afield as Latin America
for political and military training. Although China achieved
its current dominance by abandoning Maoism for market
reform, similar tactics now characterize Xi Jinping’s bid for
global clout.
A Month in Siena, by Hisham Matar (Random House). After
completing a Pulitzer-winning memoir about his father’s
disappearance in Qaddafi’s Libya, the author travelled to
Siena to see paintings that had fascinated him for most of
his life. In this account, he spends his days in front of mas-
terpieces from the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries,
becoming familiar and then invisible to the museum guards;
he walks around the walled city, pressing himself against its
edges and feeling the “sort of rare freedom that only comes
from limits.” Matar’s discussions of art encompass both the
paintings’ histories and his own, and his grief that he will
never know where or how his father died subtly colors his
powerful descriptions of architecture and space.
THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2, 2019 69
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happen: the death of W. B. Yeats, in

THE ART WORLD Auden’s case, and the causes, events,
and consequences of human suffering,

CASUALTIES
What can art tell us about war?
BY PETER SCHJELDAHL
have rarely looked forward with less
I appetite to any art show than I did
to “Theater of Operations: The Gulf
Wars, 1991-2011,” which fills the Mu-
seum of Modern Art’s PS1 annex, in
Long Island City, with more than three
hundred works by eighty-two contem-
porary artists, including thirty-six Iraqis
and Kuwaitis. Why revisit the concat-
enating disasters in Iraq for which my
nation bears responsibility: the blitz
that drove Saddam Hussein’s troops out
days of mutually entangled art and pol-
itics, of a show that centers on hard his-
torical fact rather than on curatorial
themes or theories. The idea promised
acid tests. Might art afford new things
to know and new ways to feel about
matters that are so dismaying and de-
pressing that they hobble the brain and
lock down the heart? And might it do
so without sacrificing the aesthetic and
spiritual cultivation that is art’s reason
for being?
in that of “Theater of Operations.” The
simpler the subject, as a rule, the more
amenable to creative recollection and
refinement. The PS1 show, curated with
abundant wall texts by Peter Eleey and
Ruba Katrib, sputters with attempts to
seize on tractable aspects of a daunt-
ing complexity. Most informative are
scrappy works by Iraqi artists whose
struggle to make art becomes a subject
in itself. A fledgling art world in Bagh-
dad in the nineteen-eighties, led by paint-
ers bent on adapting Western modern-
ism to native traditions, succumbed not
to violence but to deprivation under the
sanctions that were imposed on Iraq by
the United Nations in the period be-
tween the wars.
With access to the outside world
choked off and even rudimentary art
materials all but unobtainable, Iraqis,
including the superb painter Hanaa
Malallah, developed varieties of dafatir
(notebooks): ruggedly handmade books
that are like the dream diaries of con-
stricted personal lives and thwarted ar-
tistic aspirations. Malallah immigrated
to the U.K. in 2006. A new work by her,
“She/He Has No Picture” (2019), am-
plifies the dafatir aesthetic to generate
a wall-filling array of portraits, drawn
on scorched canvas, that are derived
from photographs of some of the more
than four hundred civilians who, in 1991,
were killed in an air-raid shelter by a
U.S. “bunker-buster” bomb—whether
on purpose or in error remains a mat-
ter for debate, while not mattering to
them. The raw authenticity of the da-
fatir clashes with the comfortable so-
phistication of works by European and
American artists who respond far more
to media reportage of the wars than
they do to the wars themselves. Excep-
tions include the veteran British graphic
COURTESY THE ARTIST AND GALERIE ST. ETIENNE

of Kuwait in 1991 (remember when he
seemed the worst person in the world,
several human beasts ago?), and the
full-on invasion of 2003, whose terrible
consequences have not ceased since
Barack Obama declared an end to Amer-
ican combat involvement in 2010? But
I boarded the No. 7 train with wary cu-
riosity, piqued by the novelty, in these
Sue Coe’s “Bomb Shelter,” from 1991, appears in PS1’s show about the Gulf wars.
70 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2, 2019
Not really, on all counts. There’s the
sour news, which is complicated by tan-
gential sensations of grotesquerie and
elegance, fury and poignance, and, per-
haps, of philosophical insight. “Poetry
makes nothing happen,” W. H. Auden
wrote. The same goes for visual and—
rife in the show—conceptual art. But,
of course, things make poetry and art
artist Sue Coe, who finds focus for her
classic Expressionism and her lifelong
sorrow and anger at human barbarities.
But, for the most part, a sort of clammy
vicariousness reigns.
What made the Gulf War and the
Iraq War different from others in the
immemorial annals of human atrocious-
ness? (At points in the show, I found
myself disgusted with our animal spe-
cies.) Super-duper technology, of course.
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Many—too many—of the artists seize
on easy ironies of mediated information
(televised spectacle as somehow malig­
nantly manipulative rather than banal),
tendentious incongruities (the artist
Martha Rosler’s well­known montages
of sinister soldiers in battle array and of
upper­class women vamping in deluxe
homes prove what, exactly?), and fixate
on remotely deployed weaponry (as if
this were any more reprehensible than
dealing death with clubs and knives).
When will we stop obsessing about our
gimmickry of communication and just
communicate as best we can? Inexpli­
cably, to me, the show’s catalogue fea­
tures a reprint of the French philoso­
pher Jean Baudrillard’s flashy, repellently
foolish essay of 1991, “The Gulf War
Did Not Take Place,” which sashays
past the actuality of blasted lives for
fancies of postmodernist exposition.
According to Baudrillard, “simulacra”
have come to displace realities in human
understanding. No, they haven’t. But
the callousness of his essay may symp­
tomize the condition, shared by all, of
feeling overwhelmed by today’s volume
and speed of information.
T wo works in the show, neither of
them notably original, do a lot to
both dramatize and counter art’s worldly
futility. “Touching Reality” (2012), by
the icily didactic Swiss installation art­
ist Thomas Hirschhorn, is carefully ob­
scene. In a nearly five­minute video
projection, a hand on an iPad flicks
through color photographs of human
bodies that have been blown open or
blown to pieces in unspecified military
or terrorist incidents. I girded myself to
watch but was defeated as the hand
paused now and then and, with a thumb
and a forefinger, enlarged horrific de­
tails. The deliberation made this a work
as much about the hand’s owner—a
possessor of steel nerves and forensic
curiosity—as about the destroyed bod­
ies. As art, it invites viewers to identify
as similarly tough or, failing that, to
sample the sort of trauma that harrows
and blights survivors of war. Is the effect
salutary, fuelling righteous rage at the
governments, movements, and random
insanities that entail murder as a mat­
ter of course? Or might long exposure
to such sights desensitize us? I wouldn’t
know. After about a minute, I fled.
“Untitled (Iraq Book Project)”(2008­10), Signed Estate Jewelry
(Platinum, 18 karat yellow gold
by the Australian Rachel Khedoori, who and diamond, c. 1980)
is of Iraqi­Jewish descent, fills a large
room with long tables that bear seventy
Pair
large books, each of about seven hun­ earrings
dred pages, which are jammed with by Cartier
$28,500
run­on text in a nine­point, typewrit­
er­like Courier font. I estimate the over­
all word count to be well north of a
hundred million. What’s printed is every
article Khedoori could find online, start­
ing in March of 2003, that contains the
word “Iraq,” “Iraqi,” or “Baghdad.” All
Necklace by
were written in—or have been trans­ Van Cleef and Arpels
lated into—English: globalization’s lin­ (abt. 40.00 cts.)
$185,000
gua franca. Dip in. Stools that can be
wheeled around, from table to table, are
provided, and you may turn pages. You
will encounter passages of perfectly fine
journalistic prose that is taut with the Ring by Bulgari
(2D = 2.59 cts.)
urgency of breaking news—some of $14,500
which, inevitably, you read once and,
after some hours of searching the chrono­
logical sequence, might read again. The SHOWN
ACTUAL SIZE
work made me feel, strongly, two things:
helpless and serene. With a disarming FIRESTONE AND PARSON
tranquillity, it materializes the madden­ 30 Newbury Street, Boston, MA 02116
(617) 266 -1858 • www.firestoneandparson.com
ing torrent of news and views that can’t
be adequately comprehended, any more
than a teacup can collect a waterfall.
The room is evenly lit and quiet. Noth­
ing glows or clicks or hums. So much Discover...
art in the show importunes. Khedoori’s
left me in peace, with the welcoming, Luxury Barge Cruises
chaste beauty of the open books in an
afternoon that felt spacious and unhur­
ried. I almost felt like setting up a cot
and moving in.
What do we talk about when we talk
about war? Anything except war, it can
seem, when visual art is the language. P.O. Box 2195, Duxbury, MA 02331
Asked for contrary examples, most of 800 -222 -1236 781-934 -2454
us would cite some pictures by Goya, www.fcwl.com
from two centuries ago, and jump to one
by Picasso, from 1937 (what is it about
Spain?), then fumble in memory for any­
thing else at once adequate to the sub­
ject and distinguished as art. Novels,
sure, and movies, which pick us up in
one time and set us down, satisfied, in
another. The relative failure of “Theater
of Operations” to encompass a violent
and, lest we forget, ongoing history un­
derscores the limitation of pictures and
objects, in that regard, but also their
compensatory power: to occupy, with us
and like us, only the present, in which
not to be troubled and confused is not
to be paying attention. 
THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2, 2019 71
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MUSICAL EVENTS
A BEAM OF MUSIC
The Danish String Quartet extends the ECM sound.
BY ALEX ROSS
he German record label Edition of
T Contemporary Music, or ECM,
which recently celebrated its fiftieth an-
niversary, first made its name with ele-
gant, atmospheric jazz albums that turned
away from the melee of the post-bop
avant-garde. Its most famous product,
from 1974, was Keith Jarrett’s “The Köln
Concert,” which, to its creator’s chagrin,
became a mellow soundtrack to innu-
merable make-out sessions and coffee-
house transactions. ECM also estab-
lished itself as a purveyor of classical
minimalism, with best-selling disks de-
voted to Steve Reich and Arvo Pärt. The
label’s austere design aesthetic—block
letters, black-and-white photography,
The Danes bring tonal heft and rhythmic vigor to late Beethoven.
72 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2, 2019
sparse notes—was consistent to the point
of self-parody. Circa 1999, no sophisti-
cated stereo stand was complete with-
out an ECM CD showing, say, a picture
of a collapsed stone wall.
Stock images aside, ECM is one of
the greatest labels in the history of re-
cording. Manfred Eicher, who founded
ECM and remains its sole proprietor,
has forged a syncretic vision in which
jazz and classical traditions intelligently
intermingle. ECM’s catalogue of some
sixteen hundred albums contains abra-
sive sounds as well as soothing ones,
clouds of dissonance alongside shimmer-
ing triads. All benefit from a crisply re-
verberant acoustic in which an instru-
ment’s timbre is nearly as important as
the music played on it. Simply put, Eich-
er’s releases tend to sound better than
other people’s. Some of ECM’s best disks
were made in league with the Norwe-
gian recording engineer Jan Erik Kong-
shaug, who died earlier this month.
Just as important is Eicher’s knack for
sustaining long-term relationships with
artists. In the jazz world, to record for
ECM was to enter a community of the
elect, bridging gaps between freewheel-
ing European sophisticates and veteran
American progressives. At the beginning
of November, Jazz at Lincoln Center
hosted a celebration of ECM, bringing
in a remarkable parade of notables. Jack
DeJohnette and Wadada Leo Smith,
elder statesmen from the Association for
the Advancement of Creative Musicians,
joined such eclectic younger stars as Vijay
Iyer, Ethan Iverson, and Craig Taborn.
Indeed, too much talent was crowded
into one evening. When the unclassifiable
Meredith Monk came onstage, to per-
form “Gotham Lullaby,” from her ep-
ochal 1981 record, “Dolmen Music,” I
wanted her to keep going indefinitely.
Eicher’s achievement in the classical
sphere has equal weight. When, in 1984,
he began championing the music of
Pärt, he also launched a multi-decade
partnership with the Latvian violinist
Gidon Kremer, who went on to explore
the haunted worlds of Mieczysław Wein-
berg, Sofia Gubaidulina, and Giya
Kancheli. In time, ECM’s house artists
set down landmarks not only in new
music but also in the core repertory. If I
were naming my favorite albums of Bach’s
solo-string music, I might begin with
Kremer’s 2005 account of the sonatas and
partitas. I then would have to choose be-
tween Thomas Demenga’s traversal of
the cello suites and Kim Kashkashian’s
rendition of them on viola. András Schiff
has recorded revelatory Schubert on the
fortepiano; Carolin Widmann and Dénes
Várjon made a ferociously potent disk of
the Schumann violin sonatas.
As the decades have gone by, the ques-
tion of an “ECM aesthetic” has receded.
What matters most is Eicher’s relent-
less commitment to fostering artists he
admires. His monumental documenta-
tion of Monk’s career may prove to be
his proudest legacy. Like the best book
editors, theatre directors, and gallery cu-
rators, he offers talented people both a
ILLUSTRATION BY DANIEL KRALL
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stable foundation and a space for inde-
pendent expression. In a recent inter-
view with Downbeat, Eicher reiterated
his simple, deep philosophy: “It is all
about curiosity. It began that way and I
am still pursuing that. I am always search-
ing for new sounds.”
t first glance, the four young
A Scandinavians who form the Dan-
ish String Quartet—Frederik Øland,
Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin, Rune Tonsgaard
Sørensen, and Asbjørn Nørgaard—seem
to be unlikely additions to ECM’s mo-
nastic lineup. They are an informal,
shaggy-haired lot, resembling an in-
die-rock band more than a chamber
group. During a recent West Coast tour,
they took time off to attend a football
game at the University of California,
Berkeley. In an introductory note for
their ECM project “Prism,” which is
centered on Beethoven’s late quartets,
they describe the works in question as
“mind-blowing.” They fall into fluent
ECM-speak, though, when they offer
the image of “a beam of music . . . split
through Beethoven’s prism.”
The Danes are, in fact, musicians of
impeccable refinement, and the first two
“Prism” releases suggest a major cycle in
the making. Each disk sets Beethoven
alongside a later composer: “Prism I”
pairs the Opus 127 Quartet with Shos-
takovich’s spectral Fifteenth Quartet;
“Prism II” places Opus 130 next to Al-
fred Schnittke’s fraught Third Quartet.
There is nothing novel in pointing out
the visionary quality of late Beethoven.
Yet the Danes complicate the narrative
by including, at the start of each install-
ment, an arrangement of a fugue by Bach,
thereby emphasizing not only Beetho-
ven’s premonitions of the future but also
his consciousness of the past. Prior ECM
releases might have inspired the format:
Demenga has linked Bach to contem-
porary composers, and Kashkashian has
blended Schumann with György Kurtág.
Not unexpectedly, the members of
the Danish Quartet bring tonal heft and
rhythmic vigor to the proceedings. Their
Beethoven is no cosmic enigma: you reg-
ister the physicality of his stomping os-
tinatos, the off-kilter drive of his dance
movements, the playful abruptness of his
stylistic transitions. Beethoven practiced
polystylism long before Schnittke em-
ployed that term: the late quartets jux-
tapose Bachian counterpoint with Ros-
sinian frivolity. Conventional wisdom
holds that players must have decades of
experience to do this music justice, but
younger ensembles often thrive on its
kaleidoscopic, dial-spinning nature.
At the same time, the Danes have no
trouble stepping outside worldly realms
and into zones of rapt contemplation.
The Adagio of Opus 127 is taken at a
riskily slow tempo, yet it unfolds in long-
breathed lyric arcs. The Cavatina of Opus
130 is steeped in unaffected Old World
style, with throaty portamento slides Handcrafted, timeless design.
from note to note. The wrenching sec-
tion marked “beklemmt”—oppressed, an-
guished—curls inward toward silence, Visit our Maine
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ments are tuned with extraordinary care,
delivering a chiaroscuro of resonance.
Earlier this month, the Danes pre- c h il to n s .co m 866-883-3366
sented a spellbinding live version of
“Prism II” at Cal Performances, in Ber-
keley. They began with Bach’s Fugue in
B Minor, from the first book of the
“Well-Tempered Clavier.” Beethoven may
well have had Bach’s fugue subject in
mind when he wrote the Grosse Fuge,
the original finale of Opus 130. Schnittke,
in turn, weaves that theme into his quar-
tet.The Danes, playing with nerve-fraying
intensity, created the impression of a su-
per-quartet spanning centuries. In Feb-
ruary, they will perform Beethoven’s en-
tire quartet cycle at the Chamber Music
Society of Lincoln Center. Those concerts
will be worth hearing, though the “Prism”
project would have been more welcome. AD VERT IS EMEN T
How long can ECM go on making
records of this calibre? Eicher is seventy-
six, and he is still involved in every as-
pect of his business. His imprimatur re-
tains its power: the only biographical text
on the home page of the Danish Quar-
tet’s Web site is “ECM Recording Art- WHAT’S THE
ists.” Although producers of Eicher’s dis-
cernment are rare, a successor might be BIG IDEA?
found. The bigger question is whether Small space has big rewards.
record companies remain viable economic
enterprises in the age of streaming, which
has reduced royalties to a pittance. Con-
sumers show more fealty to apps and
media conglomerates than to labels and
artists. I’d recommend one of the Dan- TO FIND OUT MORE, CONTACT
JILLIAN GENET | 305.520.5159
ish Quartet’s disks for holiday shopping, jgenet@zmedia-inc.com
but the days of giving music as a gift
seem to be drawing to a close. 
THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2, 2019 73
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THE THEATRE
FINDING FORSTER
“The Inheritance” transports “Howards End” to millennial New York.
BY ALEXANDRA SCHWARTZ
t’s rare for good fiction to come with
I a credo, rarer still for that credo to be
worth remembering, but “Only connect,”
the maxim at the heart of E. M. For-
ster’s masterpiece “Howards End,” lodged
long ago in the cultural mainstream. It
sounds like a political slogan, something
to print on a T-shirt; its true meaning,
though, is personal. The phrase occurs
to Margaret Schlegel, Forster’s icono-
clastic, oddball heroine, as she reflects
on Henry Wilcox, the widowed busi-
nessman she has decided to marry. Wil-
cox is orderly and good-humored, but
he has cultivated a worldly persona while
neglecting his soul. Like Freud, Marga-
ret can see that sex—or its repression—
is at the root of the problem: Wilcox
fears the dark, disruptive power that
74 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2, 2019
“bodily passion” might unleash. His self
is split; her goal is to help him unify it.
Forster, an orthodox Edwardian styl-
ist among the modernist Bloomsbury
wrecking crew, was a gay man who wrote
five of his six novels before he allowed
himself to pursue his own bodily pas-
sion, late in his thirties. One of those
books, “Maurice,” told the story of two
men in love, but Forster refused to let it
be published until after his death, in
1970. With that in mind, you could read
“Only connect” as the writer’s plaintive
command to himself, tragically unful-
filled. Or, with the winds of modern mo-
rality at your back, you could lambaste
Forster as a hypocrite and a coward who
charged his characters with doing what
he himself could not. That is what hap-
pens during a seething moment in “The
Inheritance,” Matthew Lopez’s auda-
cious and highly entertaining, if not en-
tirely successful, play in two parts (di-
rected by Stephen Daldry, at the Ethel
Barrymore), which is based on “How-
ards End.” The accuser is Toby Darling
(Andrew Burnap), a gay millennial
writer; Forster, here called Morgan (Paul
Hilton), the name used by his intimates,
is present as a kind of spiritual godfa-
ther made flesh. “Just imagine what
would have happened if you had pub-
lished a gay novel in your lifetime!”Toby
rages. “You might have toppled moun-
tains. You might even have saved lives.”
Morgan concedes the point but knows
that Toby still needs his blessing. “Tell
your story bravely,” he says, and is gone.
Lopez, who is forty-two, was smart
to see in Forster’s tale of two maverick
sisters living in London at the start of
the last century a template for the one
he wants to tell about gay men in New
York today. Though “Howards End” was
published in 1910, it feels bracingly con-
temporary, in part because it deals so
frankly with things that are still central
to our lives: money, class, desire, and, as
the ideal manifestation of all of the above,
real estate. As “The Inheritance” begins,
Toby is partying at a glamorous Hamp-
tons house owned by an older couple,
Henry Wilcox ( John Benjamin Hickey)
and Walter Poole (Hilton again, doing
double duty in a wide-legged brown
suit). Drunk on Martinis and on this
glimpse of the high life, Toby leaves a
series of ecstatic voice mails for his boy-
friend, Eric Glass (Kyle Soller).
Where Toby is impulsive and wild,
nursing wounds from a past that he
keeps secret, Eric is a stable, openhearted
homebody. Employed at a friend’s social-
justice-advocacy firm, he’s “terminally
middle class,” with impeccable creden-
tials—Westchester, Fieldston, Yale—and,
miraculously, a roomy, rent-stabilized
apartment on the Upper West Side, in-
herited from his beloved grandmother.
Eric sentimentalizes family, and badly
wants one of his own. During an ath-
letic bout of sex, ingeniously staged by
Daldry, using contact-improvisation-
style moves as physical metaphor, Eric
asks Toby to marry him. He has spent
seven years supporting Toby, who has
been writing an autobiographical novel,
“Loved Boy,” and who is now trying to
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adapt it for the stage. To Eric, marriage
seems a fait accompli, but when Toby
senses the cage of intimacy lowering
over him he bolts.
Readers of Forster’s novel will recog-
nize, in the magnetic, vain Toby, some
of the qualities of Helen, the reckless
younger Schlegel sister, and, in Eric, those
of the more grounded, cerebral Margaret.
But though Lopez has drawn on For-
ster’s characters and plot, he isn’t afraid
to break from his source—Leonard Bast,
Forster’s pathetic, impoverished clerk,
who gets enmeshed with the Schlegels,
for instance, has been turned into two
characters, a guileful actor and an abused
sex worker (Samuel H. Levine takes on
both roles)—and to have quippy, comic
fun with it.
Even Forster enjoys himself—at least,
Lopez’s Morgan does. He presides over
the first part of the play, guiding and en-
couraging the men onstage. His pres-
ence makes literal Lopez’s theme of cul-
tural transmission and community, which
is on display everywhere in the play, most
clearly in its staging. Though the set is
almost propless, the vast Barrymore stage
essentially transformed into a black box,
Daldry (with the help of Bob Crowley,
the play’s designer) makes the space feel
amply inhabited, grouping any off-duty
members of his exuberant, winning cast
of fourteen around the raised platform
where the action takes place. Sitting
cross-legged on cushions, they look like
they are out to dinner at a Japanese
restaurant, though they behave more like
ballroom scenesters, hooting and snap-
ping at what they see.
Sex, in Forster’s novel, is a twin force
of death and life, but metaphorically so.
There is nothing figurative about that
binary for Lopez’s men, who belong to
a generation that came after the one
decimated by aids. Still, with Truvada
and other antiretrovirals, most of them
take their health for granted; the past is,
if not buried, at least contained. For Eric,
however, it becomes increasingly real,
especially after he grows close to Wal-
ter, who has moved into an apartment
above his. Walter tells Eric that, in the
eighties, at the height of the plague, he
and Henry bought a house upstate where
they could live together in protected iso-
lation. Soon, though, Walter, repulsed
by his own weakness, began, against
Henry’s wishes, to invite sick friends to
the house and to care for them as they
died. Later, Eric visits the property (it MAKE CHANGE
FOR CHILDREN
is represented onstage by a doll’s house)
and is surprised to hear someone call his
name. What follows is a magical com-
munion of the living and the dead, one
of the most moving stage pictures I’ve
seen: a special effect that relies not on
technical wizardry but on the power of
bodies sharing the same space for a brief,
impossible moment in time.
ll told, “The Inheritance” is a seven-
A hour affair—nine, if you see it in
one day, with a break for dinner—and,
although I recommend the first half
without reservation, it may not be worth
your while, or your dollars, to return for
the second, in which Lopez lets his fleet,
funny sensibility settle into something
regrettably more teachy and preachy.
There’s a pandering, stagy political de-
bate and too many Big Messages wrapped
in tearful professions. The tone turns
saccharine and then, with a sex-work
subplot that could be ripped from a nine-
teenth-century penny dreadful, maud-
lin. “I wasted so much time,” one char-
acter says, and another tells him, “You
have so much left.” A monologue deliv-
ered by Margaret (Lois Smith), the for-
merly homophobic mother of one of
Walter’s hospice patients and the sole
woman to appear in the play, tugs so ge-
nerically at the heartstrings that it had
me rolling my eyes. Stripped of specific-
ity, the speech feels like moral coddling,
a self-congratulatory display of penance
for the like-minded audience to eat up.
Forster was concerned with moral Give children like Jasmine
harm, and with the difficult necessity of
trying to forgive it. For all his intelli-
a brighter future.
gence and sensitivity, Lopez dodges that
Tiny Jasmine from the Philippines was
particular challenge, letting the produc-
quiet and lethargic. A Save the Children
tive conflict between Eric’s idealism and health worker diagnosed her with
Henry’s grizzled, cynical pragmatism acute malnutrition. Today she’s a busy
dissipate, rather than resolve. To only ball of energy, and she loves to cook
connect with those who agree with you with her mom. Find out how one small
may be the motto we deserve these days, act from you can create a ripple
but it is not one that bodes well. Like of change that spreads to children,
Forster, who was determined to give the families and communities like Jasmine’s.
lovers in “Maurice” a happy ending, Lopez
doles out contentment and redemption.
How much more satisfying it would have
savethechildren.org/change
been if he had asked his audience to con- #changealife
sider what makes redemption matter:
not just coming to the “right” point of
CHANGING A LIFE LASTS A LIFETIME
view but having made the effort to look,
to think, to struggle, and then to change. 
THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2, 2019 75
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THE CURRENT CINEMA
MURDER MOST FUN
“Knives Out” and “Kind Hearts and Coronets.”
BY ANTHONY LANE
id you read the profile of Benoit
D Blanc, “The Last of the Gentle-
man Sleuths,” in this magazine? If so,
congratulations. It takes a reader of rare
perspicacity and breadth to enjoy an ar-
ticle that does not exist. Or, rather, it
does exist, but only in the imagination
of Rian Johnson, the writer and direc-
tor of “Knives Out.” In this, his latest
Daniel Craig stars as a gentleman sleuth in Rian Johnson’s film.
film, we actually see a copy of The New
Yorker, turned to the page on which the
profile begins. Whether fictional fact
checkers were required to assess the va-
lidity of facts that were, in fact, fiction,
you will never know.
Benoit Blanc looks real enough. He
wears a lot of tweed. He smokes cigars
as long as fountain pens. His accent
hails from the Deep South—so deep,
indeed, that he may well have donned
it for the occasion, like a velvet waist-
coat. And he is played by Daniel Craig,
who seems mightily relieved, as ever,
to be slipping through the bars of Bond.
Blanc is asked to investigate a death.
He is unsure who hired him, for he re-
ceived nothing but an envelope of cash.
The death itself, to all appearances, is
76 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2, 2019
unambiguous, although, as any fan of
murder mysteries will tell you, the pur-
pose of appearances is to confound. The
deceased is Harlan Thrombey (Christo-
pher Plummer), who, by a tasty irony,
happens to have written murder myster-
ies—eighty million copies of which have
sold, in thirty languages. On the morn-
ing after his eighty-fifth-birthday party,
he is found with his throat cut, a dagger
by his side: the very definition of red-
handed. Suicide, then. Is it possible, none-
theless, that foul play might have been
involved? Or just play? Typical of Har-
lan, to bequeath a beautiful riddle.
The party was attended by most,
though not all, of his loved ones, who
are about as lovable as the flu. Meet
Walt (Michael Shannon), Harlan’s son,
who runs the publishing empire that
has sprung from Harlan’s books. Or
Walt’s sister, Linda ( Jamie Lee Curtis),
who shares her father’s penchant for
puzzles but lacks his warmth; she sounds
snappy from first to last, although being
married to the bumptious Richard (Don
Johnson) would give anyone cause to
snap. Their son, Ransom (Chris Evans),
can’t make the birthday, or even the fu-
neral, but compensates by rolling up
later, in his classic BMW, to annoy the
hell out of everyone. And don’t forget
Joni (Toni Collette), the wife of Har-
lan’s late son, who runs a company that
“promotes a total life style” and has the
free-flowing dresses to prove it.
The youngest generation includes
Joni’s daughter, Meg (Katherine Lang-
ford), who, thanks to Harlan’s gener-
osity, is at Smith, and Walt’s teen-age
son, Jacob ( Jaeden Martell), who is de-
scribed by his father as “very political”;
Blanc, having made Jacob’s acquain-
tance, refers to him more accurately as
“the Nazi child masturbatin’ in the bath-
room.” Last, and very much least, in the
opinion of the surviving Thrombeys, is
Marta (Ana de Armas), Harlan’s nurse,
who is distraught at his passing—more
so than his relatives, whose grief is as-
suaged by the fortune that they hun-
ger to inherit. All of them, even Ran-
som, muster for the reading of the will.
The stage is set.
If you sat and suffered through Ken-
neth Branagh’s “Murder on the Orient
Express” (2017), allow me to put your
mind at rest. “Knives Out” is not based
on a book by Agatha Christie. Nor does
it properly smack of her, in spite of the
domestic setup and the sudden demise.
Much of Christie’s unwaning appeal
relies on incongruity—maleficence
emerging in the most genteel of con-
texts, like strychnine in the tea—
whereas the Thrombeys make no pre-
tense of decency. Even if they are not
to blame for the old man’s sanguinary
end, you feel confident that they’re
guilty of something.
Harlan’s residence, as somebody re-
marks, recalls a game of Clue. Dark-red
brick, tall turrets, and, in the opening
shot, two black dogs bounding in slow
motion through fallen leaves. And the
interior! Firelight flickers off carved
wood; a passageway, high up, is entered
through a trick window; and the room
where Blanc interviews the bereaved has
a bearskin on the floor, an antique can-
non, and a host of knives arranged in a
wheel, like the rays of a homicidal sun.
It is as if the production designers, dis-
patched on a décor-gathering mission,
could not contain themselves; the whole
place is deliberately stuffed to the seams,
like a gothic pastiche, just as the perfor-
ILLUSTRATION BY PATRICK LEGER
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mances are pulpy and close to overripe.
“The game’s afoot, eh, Watson?” Blanc
exclaims, and unblushingly whips out a
magnifying glass to inspect a rug. In
short, the film is all too much, as if the
director were half mocking the genre
that he reveres. While fulfilling the de-
mands of the mystery form—his plot
locks into position, with a fiendish and
gratifying click—he’s also using it to tell
a different sort of tale.
The tenor of that tale is political, and
it will be interesting to see how “Knives
Out,” sumptuous and diverting as it is,
plays in the heartland. Though Donald
Trump is not named, he is discussed, in
predictably raucous tones, and what
matters about Harlan is not merely how
he perished but how his kinfolk behave
once his influence—clever, mild, and
sportive, as you would expect with Plum-
mer in the part—is removed. The an-
swer is that they scrap like rats in a sack.
After one relative claims to have built
a business “from the ground up,” an-
other retorts that it began with a mil-
lion-dollar loan from Harlan. (Remind
you of anyone?) The Thrombeys don’t
even have the encrusted dignity of old
money; Blanc, told that he is now in
their “ancestral home,” laughs heartily
and points out that Harlan bought it
from a Pakistani businessman in 1988.
This sardonic approach is not with-
out risks, and the movie’s polished sur-
face, to my eye, bears a sheen of smug-
ness. Regardless of the whodunnit, we
are left in no doubt as to where true
villainy lies, and the title might as well
have been “Wealth Kills.” What res-
cues the film, rooting it in moral hon-
esty, is the presence of Marta. The
Thrombeys, needless to say, can’t be
bothered to learn her country of origin;
one says Uruguay, another Paraguay, and
so on. She’s foreign, and that’s enough.
What none of them are equipped to re-
alize is that she’s good, and that her good-
ness—which Blanc, being a detective,
suspects from the start—will help him
crack the case. Virtue is never easy to
depict, but Ana de Armas does a touch-
ing and plausible job, glancing nicely
off Craig, and I look forward to seeing
them both again soon for the next 007
adventure, in which de Armas takes a
major role. Will it allow her to mooch
around in sweaters, sneakers, and jeans,
as she does for most of “Knives Out”?
I fear not.
ith an election year looming, a
W dilemma has arisen. What shall
we do with the undeserving rich? Tax
’em to the hilt? Or give ’em a tax break,
to cushion the agony of affluence?
“Knives Out” leaves them bamboozled
and marooned, but, if that response
strikes you as insufficiently robust, I
recommend “Kind Hearts and Coro-
nets.” Robert Hamer’s merciless mas-
terpiece of 1949, set in Edwardian En-
gland, and screening in a new print at
Film Forum, is nothing if not prag-
matic. The cure for inequality, accord-
ing to this film, is serial assassination.
Dennis Price plays Louis Mazzini,
whose beloved mother, having married
beneath her, was cast aside by the noble
clan to which she had the honor to be-
long. After she dies, Louis decides to
hallow her memory by sidling back into
the family and becoming the Duke of
Chalfont: a simple task, slightly impeded
by those tiresome souls whose claim is
more immediate than his—or, as he calls
them, “monsters of arrogance and cru-
elty, whose only function in the world
was to deprive me of my birthright.”
Working through the list, and slaying
them one by one, will not be a problem.
Why should it be? What counts is the
manner of slaughter, and—this being
the most courteous of films—the vital
importance of never mislaying one’s cool.
Also, not a droplet of blood must be
shown. That would be intolerably vulgar.
The movie is famed for many rea-
sons, eight of them being the charac-
ters played by Alec Guinness. Think of
the Cheshire Cat leaving eight separate
smiles in the air. Given that Hamer was
gay and alcoholic—not the most com-
fortable of compounds, in postwar Brit-
ain—it is, perhaps, little surprise that
“Kind Hearts and Coronets” should have
endured as the locus classicus of sub-
terfuge, deceit, and the charm of the
unspoken. I regard it as the best Oscar
Wilde film ever made, despite its not
being adapted from Wilde. Drownings,
explosions, and poisonings, their ethi-
cal status barely mentioned, let alone
chastised, roll by like carriages in the
park. The comedy is as black as widow’s
weeds. Artfulness is all.
If you are unfamiliar with “Kind
Hearts and Coronets,” the question is
not whether making the trip to Film
Forum to see it is worth your while. The
question is how stiff a penalty should
be levied upon you by the City of New
York should you fail to do so. My per-
sonal view is that a brief prison sen-
tence would not be too harsh. There re-
ally is no excuse. 
NEWYORKER.COM
Richard Brody blogs about movies.

THE NEW YORKER IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF ADVANCE MAGAZINE PUBLISHERS INC. COPYRIGHT ©2019 CONDÉ NAST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

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THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 2, 2019 77

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CARTOON CAPTION CONTEST

Each week, we provide a cartoon in need of a caption. You, the reader, submit a caption, we choose
three finalists, and you vote for your favorite. Caption submissions for this week’s cartoon, by Carolita Johnson,
must be received by Sunday, December 1st. The finalists in the November 18th contest appear below. We will
announce the winner, and the finalists in this week’s contest, in the December 16th issue. Anyone age thirteen
or older can enter or vote. To do so, and to read the complete rules, visit contest.newyorker.com.

THIS WEEK’S CONTEST

“ ”
..........................................................................................................................

THE FINALISTS THE WINNING CAPTION

“He’s brooding again.”

Jay Wilimek, Bemidji, Minn.

“But will he lift a finger after it hatches?” “Publicly, we’re still saying there are no side effects.”
Ben Fishel, Washington, D.C. David A. Epstein, West Hartford, Conn.

“I don’t know how to tell him it’s not his.”

John Dymale, Fond du Lac, Wis.
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• • •