Contents July 20, 2023

ONE NATION
6 ...................................... Adam Thirlwell The Trouble with Truth
Yoga by Emmanuel Carrère, translated from the French by John Lambert INDIVISIBLE
10 .......................... Carolina A. Miranda ‘Places That Weren’t Supposed to Be Places’
no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane
Maria an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City
Catalog of the exhibition edited by Marcela Guerrero
Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s–Today
an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
Catalog of the exhibition edited by Carla Acevedo-Yates
Tropical Is Political: Caribbean Art Under the Visitor Economy Regime
an exhibition at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, San Juan
Catalog of the exhibition edited by Aimé Iglesias Lukin and Karen Marta
14 ................................... Terrance Hayes Poem
15 .................................. Darryl Pinckney Black Talk on the Move
Lover Man by Alston Anderson, with an afterword by Kinohi Nishikawa
18 ..................................... Fintan O’Toole Unrepentant Pence
20 ........................... Daniel Mendelsohn Robert Gottlieb (1931–2023)
21 ............................ Anahid Nersessian The Republic of Translation
Historiae by Antonella Anedda, translated from the Italian and the Sardinian E L I Z A BE T H C UR R ID-H A L K E T T
by Patrizio Ceccagnoli and Susan Stewart
Common Life by Stéphane Bouquet, translated from the French
by Lindsay Turner THE OVERLOOKED
23 ........................................ Laura Marsh The Pregnancy Plot
Reproduction by Louisa Hall
AMERICANS
27 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jeffrey Toobin Keeping Speech Robust and Free The Resilience of Our Rural Towns
Actual Malice: Civil Rights and Freedom of the Press in ‘New York Times and What It Means for Our Country
v. Sullivan’ by Samantha Barbas
30 ...................................... James Walton The Hemon Variations
The World and All That It Holds by Aleksandar Hemon
“This timely book belies the
32 ...................... Ruth Bernard Yeazell Life Made Light
Vermeer an exhibition at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
narrative of a nation sharply
Catalog of the exhibition edited by Pieter Roelofs and Gregor J. M. Weber polarized across an urban-rural
Johannes Vermeer: Faith, Light and Reflection by Gregor J. M. Weber divide. Instead, Elizabeth Currid-
Vermeer and the Art of Love by Aneta Georgievska-Shine
Halkett shows that Americans
35 .................................. Kerri Arsenault Vacationland
Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty aren’t nearly as divided by
36 ...................................... Cynthia Zarin Poem geography as the punditry and
41 ............................... Joyce Carol Oates None-Too-Gay Divorcées media would have us believe.
Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott, with a foreword by Alissa Bennett and Essential reading for all who care
an afterword by Marc Parrott
Becoming the Ex-Wife: The Unconventional Life and Forgotten Writings about the future of our country.”
of Ursula Parrott by Marsha Gordon —RICHARD FLORIDA,
44 ...................... Gabriel Winslow-Yost ‘This Is Not Your Grave’ author of The New Urban Crisis
Acting Class by Nick Drnaso
Men I Trust by Tommi Parrish
“The Overlooked Americans
tears down entrenched definitions
and stereotypes and builds a
new image of rural America that
is not hopelessly divided
from urban America. Nuanced,
cogent, and empathetic.”
—J A N E H A R M A N , USC presidential
scholar, former member of Congress (CA, 36)

“Through data and heartfelt stories,

Currid-Halkett reveals the grit
and resilience of rural Americans.”
nybooks.com Robin D. G. Kelley: The War on Black Studies
Nawal Arjini: Berenice Abbott’s New York of the Future —T Y L E R C O W E N ,
Frederic Wehrey: A Forgotten Fascist Massacre in Ethiopia
Liza Batkin: ‘Prima Facie’ Litigates the Sexual Assault Trial George Mason University
Aida Alami: Spain’s Exploited Migrant Workers
Jessica Riskin: Does ChatGPT Pass the Turing Test? basicbooks.com
Lucy Jakub: Hayao Miyazaki’s Parables of Work

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3

The Backstreets
A Novel from Xinjiang
PERHAT TURSUN
Translated by Darren Byler
and Anonymous
Named a Best Book of 2022
by The New Yorker
“A startling literary document of
urban alienation.”
—The New Yorker
“The Backstreets is undoubtedly
an important political document,
but it is, most of all, a significant
addition to the canon
of outsider literature.”
—Wall Street Journal
The Narrow Cage The Kokinshū
and Other Modern Selected Poems
Fairy Tales Translated and introduced by Migrant Aesthetics
VASILY EROSHENKO TORQUIL DUTHIE Contemporary Fiction, Global
Translated by Adam Kuplowsky. “From the cries of the warbler Migration, and the Limits of Empathy
Foreword by Jack Zipes. in spring to the lonely nights of
GLENDA R. CARPIO
longing for a lover, Duthie
“A treasure trove of inventive and
offers fresh translations from “[Carpio’s] superb book reframes
sometimes subversive fables that
each book of the Kokinshū.” our understanding of migration by
transcend borders.”
highlighting the aesthetic strategies
—Christina Laffin, author of
—Tokyo Weekender that authors like Julia Otsuka, Teju
Rewriting Medieval
Cole, and Valeria Luiselli use to push
Japanese Women
readers away from empathy and
toward understanding.”
—Paula M. L. Moya, author of
The Social Imperative
COLUMBIA
UNIVERSITY
PRESS
CUP.COLUMBIA.EDU

Carnival of Animals On Making Fiction

Xi Xi’s Animal Poems
XI XI
Edited by Fuk-yan Ho.
Translated by Jennifer Feeley.
Most of Xi Xi’s animal poems
featured here are new works
written during the past few
years. Full of whimsical ideas,
they embody the notion of “all
humans are siblings, and all things
are companions,” brimming with
warmth and compassion.
This book is suitable for young
readers, as well as adults who
“Heart wrenching ... A true gem.”
appreciate literature and art.
—Nemir Matos Cintrón, poet, writer
Frankenstein and the Life of Stories
FRIEDERIKE DANEBROCK
Iconic texts such as Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein and its numerous
adaptations stubbornly resist
our attempts to classify them as
mere representations of reality.
Friederike Danebrock shows how
Negras Book of Water
these texts insist that we take
YOLANDA ARROYO ANDREAS them seriously as agents and
PIZARRO PHILIPPOPOULOS- interlocutors in our world—and
Translated by MIHALOPOULOS culture-making activities. Drawing
Alejandro Álvarez Nieves Translated by Sakis Kyratzis on this analysis, she develops
a theory of narrative fiction
“The wonder of water is alive in
as a generative practice.
these pages.”
—Astrida Neimanis, author of
Bodies of Water

ERIS PRESS

4 The New York Review

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July 20, 2023 5

 The Trouble with Truth
Yoga
by Emmanuel Carrère,
translated from the French
by John Lambert.
Picador/Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
335 pp., $28.00; $20.00 (paper)
For a long time, as I was reading Em-
manuel Carrère’s Yoga, I found myself
not getting something. This was be-
cause I was distracted by the issue of
truth, which is another way of saying
that I was distracted by gossip. The
book tells the story of Carrère’s de-
scent into a breakdown and his gradual
recovery. But the publication of Yoga in
France in 2020 had been accompanied
by a flurry of argument between Car-
rère and his ex-wife, Hélène Devynck.
While he was writing Yoga the couple
had separated, and Devynck had sub-
sequently made him sign a contract
promising never to mention her in any
of his texts without her explicit per-
mission. Devynck outlined this deal in
a French Vanity Fair article in which
she defended the excisions she had
demanded in Yoga, adding her obser-
vation that much of what remained in
the book and that Carrère presented
in it as fact was actually made up.
It was a highly bourgeois, literary
version of breakup trash talk, but it
also made it impossible to ignore a re-
lated network of arguments and prop-
ositions in Carrère’s writing, a way he
has liked to talk about literature ever
since his book The Adversary was pub-
lished in the early 2000s: as a repudi-
ation of fiction, a polemically selfless
and absolute fidelity to truth. In Yoga
he once again repeated this mantra:
Regarding literature, or at least
the sort of literature I practice, I
have one conviction: it is the place
where you don’t lie. . . . What I write
may be narcissistic and vain, but
I’m not lying. I can quietly affirm,
and will be able to quietly affirm on
Judgment Day, that I write what
crosses my mind, what I think,
what I am.
Yoga, therefore, turned out to be a book
that had a hole in it. This narrative
that seemed to tell the story of his
breakdown was missing a giant ele-
ment of that story. And at the same
time none of this gossip and recrim-
ination was really any help in under-
standing what Yoga was trying to do.
But then, the question of Yoga’s true
subject is difficult, just as any book’s
subject may be at first obscure. After
all, it can take a reader many reread-
ings to be sure of a book’s possible
meanings, just as its writer may have
also gone through a similar process
of revision and rethinking. Mostly, of
course, writers tend to conceal this
confusion in the apparently finished
work. But Yoga opens with a seduc-
tively open expression of composi-
tional anxiety:
Seeing as I have to start some-
where in relating the story of
these four years—during which
I tried to write an upbeat, subtle
little book on yoga, was confronted
with things as downbeat and un-
6 The New York Review
Adam Thirlwell
Emmanuel Carrère; illustration by Harriet Lee-Merrion
subtle as jihadist terrorism and
the refugee crisis, was plunged
so deep in melancholic depres-
sion that I was committed to the
Sainte-Anne Psychiatric Hospi-
tal for four months, and, finally,
during which I bade farewell to my
editor of thirty-five years, who for
the first time wouldn’t be there to
read my next book—I choose to
start with this morning in Janu-
ary 2015, when, as I finished pack-
ing, I wondered whether I should
take my phone, which in any event
I wouldn’t be able to keep with me
where I was going, or leave it at
home.
Yoga presents itself as a mess and
never deviates from this image. Car-
rère offers up his book as a suite of
apparently unrelated and unprocessed
incidents. Any interpretation or even
understanding, therefore, has to begin
with an outline of the basic material.
E verything begins with Carrère in
January 2015 setting off on a yoga
retreat, where he is planning on writ-
ing his “upbeat, subtle little book on
yoga.” He is vaguely happy and calm,
personally and professionally. At last,
he thinks, he is in a stable state. And
for about a hundred pages this is
roughly the book that you read—filled
with meditations on meditation, mar-
tial arts, the practice of attention. But
then this book is interrupted because
Carrère is interrupted, brutally, on his
retreat: a friend is killed in the Charlie
Hebdo terrorist murders in Paris, and
he is asked to speak at the funeral.
Nevertheless, he still manages to write
a draft of this yoga book, roughly rep-
resented by Yoga’s early pages, even
if he finds that between the yogi on
their zafus and
Bernard’s brains on the linoleum
floors of Charlie Hebdo’s dingy
newsroom . . . one experience is
simply truer than the other. Ev-
erything that is real is true, by
definition, nevertheless some per-
ceptions of the real have a greater
truth content than others, and
they’re not necessarily the most
optimistic.
Then, however, the descent begins.
He has been having an affair with
another woman, an affair that he be-
lieves he is conducting with immacu-
late propriety and emotional precision
but that in fact precipitates a major
crisis: a terrible depression, followed
by an eventual diagnosis of bipolar
disorder and, in particular, tachypsy-
chia. “Tachypsychia is like tachycardia,
only for mental activity. Your thoughts
are erratic, disconnected, unrelenting.
They’re all over the place. They swirl
and scathe.” Finally Carrère is interned
at the Sainte-Anne Psychiatric Hos-
pital for four months.
This mental breakdown is the sub-
ject of the book’s third part. Following
his release, he goes to stay in the Greek
islands, at first on vacation, until he
becomes involved in working with
refugees caught in transit. (It is this
fourth part that Devynck emphasized
when accusing Carrère of fictional em-
bellishment.) And then a final trauma
occurs when his publisher and editor,
Paul Otchakovsky-Laurens, who has
published everything he ever wrote,
dies suddenly. Yet at the end Car-
rère, pulverized but still alive, seems
to reach a moment of peacefulness.
What links a yoga retreat, a friend’s
murder, a breakdown, a refugee center,
and a publisher’s death? And why is the
issue of truth or fiction so important?
How to judge such a book? Perhaps by
first returning to the moment when
Carrère changed his perspective in the
late 1990s and abandoned fiction. Or by
going back even further, to see what
he was doing when he still trusted in
one version of the novel.
C arrère began his writing career
in the 1980s. His most celebrated
book from that era is The Mustache, a
hallucinogenic novel about a man who
shaves off his mustache, but no one no-
tices. Everything in this book is a kind
of nihilistic fantasy, in which the pro-
tagonist gradually experiences a sui-
cidal loss of reality. The mustache, or
lack of mustache, becomes a cipher for
a general impossibility of knowing the
world: a sign of philosophical terror.
For about a decade fantasy and sci-fi
were Carrère’s favored modes. As well
as his fictions he also published two
works of criticism, one of them an
essay on uchronie, or speculative fic-
tion, the other a biography of Philip K.
Dick. They can be read in many ways as
companions to each other, since they
both depend on the axiom that the
real is malleable:
At every instant millions of events
happen or don’t happen; at every
instant variables transform into
givens, the virtual becomes actual,
and it is in this way that at every
instant the world presents a dif-
ferent state. Whatever he writes,
at his small scale, a writer does in
effect this kind of work: everything
could happen, it’s down to him to
decide whether something hap-
pens or not.
This is the principle behind the al-
ternative histories in some of Dick’s
novels, but it also leads to a darker
intuition: that the real is just a screen,
concealing a more arcane system vis-
ible only to the paranoid imagination.
According to this intuition, people
don’t exist. Everyone may be dead.
Or as Carrère writes of Dick:
People had perfectly imitated the
real so as not to frighten him, but
he lived among the dead. One day,
he thought, he would have to write
a book about that: how someone
discovers that in fact we are all
dead.
The central task of literature, accord-
ing to this thinking, is to pose the basic
question of philosophical paranoia, the
one sketched by Descartes in his ter-
ror that the external world is all an
illusion projected by a super-powerful,
malign demon.
At the same time, it was as if some-
thing was blocked or repetitive in Car-
rère’s writing. The release was a book
that wasn’t a fiction about paranoia
but reportage about a real-life loss of
reality: an investigation into the case
of the fantasist and murderer Jean-
Claude Romand. Romand became no-
torious for the murder of his family in
1993, which led to the discovery that
everything this bourgeois man had
maintained about his life—for eigh-
teen years he claimed to his family
and friends that he was a doctor who
 CHRISTOPHER WOOL CROSSTOWN TR AFFIC a public commission for Two Manhattan West, New York City

LUHRING AUGUSTINE luhringaugustine.com

July 20, 2023 7

worked at the World Health Orga-
nization—was in fact a lie. At first,
since Romand’s lawyers refused Car-
rère access to their client, he used the
material indirectly for a short novel,
La Classe de neige. But then, in 1996,
Romand made contact, and Carrère
began to follow his trial. The book he
finally wrote was not so much a simple
investigation into Romand as a record
of Carrère’s feelings about Romand’s
story, whose details began to obsess
him. In Romand he had found a kind
of mutant double—a man who was a
lurid exaggeration of an everyday bour-
geois anxiety of status and ambition
and disappointment, an anxiety that
had become a form of psychosis.
In this way The Adversary marked a
shift in Carrère’s writing. From then
on he abandoned fiction to explore a
new territory of nonfiction or auto-
fiction: an apparent universe of true
stories, but one where the subject was
still madness or suffering or mania.
His identity as a writer has become
the writer who gave up on fiction to
tell stories that are true. And truth,
according to Carrère, can only be found
in moments of horror: when the ap-
parently stable human world is altered
or broken or lost. We are always vul-
nerable to demons. Sometimes they
take the form of a person’s psychotic
fantasy. Sometimes they appear as
outside disasters, as he described
in Lives Other Than My Own (2012),
with its catastrophe stories of tsuna-
mis and terminal illness. And now, in
Yoga, the demons emerge from inside:
“that powerful, self-destructive streak
I had presumptuously believed I was
cured of, and that raged like never
before, driving me forever from my
enclosure.”
T he novelty of Yoga, therefore, is
that now the suffering has become
Carrère’s own. It’s true that he had al-
ways put himself inside the stories he
told, but there was a deliberate con-
trast between the bourgeois writer
and the extremes he was describing.
In Yoga this contrast has collapsed.
The most moving moments in Yoga
are those when Carrère describes the
depths of his depression during his
stay in the psychiatric hospital. The
depression leads only to hallucination
and death:
The doctors murmur softly to the
right of my bed, I don’t understand
what they’re saying but they must
be reciting verses from the Tibetan
Book of the Dead to accompany me
to the Bardo. There’s a light above
me. I have to go there. I have to
go there. I mustn’t miss the exit.
In the hospital there’s a Raoul Dufy
poster, one of his multicolored beach
scenes with women and children, and
this is what Carrère sees each time
he comes around from another brutal
session of electroconvulsive therapy:
It’s strange, I think as I write
this, that my stretcher was always
turned in such a way that when I
opened my eyes I always, always,
saw that beach and those women in
hoop dresses watching their chil-
dren in sailor suits. It’s strange,
but that’s how it is. I remember
each reawakening as a moment of
unbearable distress. What made it
8 The New York Review
unbearable was that it was impos-
sible to consider as a moment that
could be put into perspective and
would be followed by better mo-
ments. It wasn’t a moment: there
would be no more moments, there
had never been any.
It’s so irrevocable and absolute, this
statement of horror, just as there is
something equally precise and almost
seductive in his descriptions of the
social comedy in the ward:
My companions in the ward were
an elegant woman with stylish
hair who confessed with melan-
cholic pride that this was her sev-
enteenth long-term stay, and an
obese film critic whom I’d known
in a previous life, lost sight of for
thirty years and who was having
a good little depression—well, a
good big one: you don’t end up at
Sainte-Anne otherwise. He used
to write for a magazine that was
a direct rival to mine, and we had
a good time talking about the peo-
ple we knew and our past quarrels.
All Carrère’s writing reads as a se-
ries of excursions on a single axiom:
Humans live on an edge, a border be-
yond which life can be emptied of all
meaning. The only true stories are
those of devastating loss. And the
long chapter in which he describes
his own suffering, “The Story of My
Madness,” represents one of his most
poignant investigations into this ex-
perience of loss.
But his ongoing obsession with the
sensational and the lurid, with tales of
suffering and unreality, can also desta-
bilize the entire project, because the
account of his madness is enclosed
within that longer chain of stories: a
friend’s murder, a friend’s death, the
endurance of refugees as they wait
for their futures to be processed on a
Greek island. Each singular narrative
begins to dissolve into the others, all
told in Carrère’s fluently rueful and
complicit and never inelegant sen-
tences. The immediate justification
for these multiple stories is that he
happened on them in the course of
his breakdown. For after all, his ideal
literature is free-form and casual and
improvised: a refusal of editing. “The
writers who wrote what goes through
their heads are the ones I prefer. Mon-
taigne, our patron saint, does just
that,” he writes in Yoga. In Lives Other
Than My Own he described his “taste
for and even obsession with chronol-
ogy. Ellipsis does not agree with me.”
At a local level, this commitment
to linearity, to a bricolage using any
element he encounters, can provoke
moments of bored exasperation, like
these sentences about a restaurant he
goes to with his lover:
One night we were hungry, and the
receptionist told us about the only
place still open in the neighbour-
hood. It belonged to the Entrecôte
group of restaurants, which have
the merit of closing very late and
at which they only serve steaks
with fries and a sauce that’s the
house’s well-kept secret.
But there’s also a problem larger than a
simple dissipation of narrative energy.
I t’s as if Carrère in Yoga is trying
to argue for a total universality of
suffering, a mystical experience of hor-
ror. His empathy is garishly absolute:
“Tears stream down my cheeks, tears
that will never cease, tears that will
flow as long as human misery exists.”
This is why there are many other ver-
sions of suffering in Yoga. The prob-
lem is that these versions lose their
specificity; they are warped by their
proximity to Carrère’s true subject,
which is himself. The flow is really a
composition that vampirically sorts
wildly disparate accounts of terror and
harm into neat patterns and motifs:
everything becomes a flattened ele-
ment in his sequence of human mis-
ery. Like this short section, titled “I
continue not to die,” which suddenly
interrupts his time in the hospital:
My friend Ruth Zylberman sent
me these two short letters, from
an eight-year-old boy to his grand-
mother during the 1936 purges in
the Soviet Union. The first:
Dear Babushka, I’m not dead
yet. You’re the only one I have in
the world and I’m the only one
you have. If I don’t die, when I’m
grown up and you’re very, very old,
I’ll work and take care of you. Your
grandson, Gavrik.
And the second:
Dear Babushka, I didn’t die this
time either. It’s not the time I told
you about in my last letter. I con-
tinue not to die.
These letters are extraordinary;
they’re harrowing records of cata-
strophic harm, but as I read them I
was also perturbed not just by their
presence in the book but by that last
sentence, “I continue not to die.” It is
an echo of a passage in which Carrère
describes another period of depression
a decade earlier, when he also thought
of committing suicide. He went to see
an analyst, who said to him that yes,
sometimes suicide was indeed the
right solution for a person: “Then he
added, ‘Or you can live.’” The Russian
child’s “I continue not to die” is a neat
reversal of the analyst’s “Or you can
live.” Both sentences represent the
basic motor of Yoga, this manual for
survival. But the neatness of the echo
was, for me, a problem. This impro-
vised collage, it suddenly seemed, was
too often structured with the methods
of bad fiction.
Just after I read Yoga I was reading
a novel by another European writer
whose work I admire: Enrique Vila-
Matas’s Montevideo. Early in it there’s
a moment when Vila-Matas, or his
narrator, mentions his ongoing bore-
dom with the debates about autofic-
tion, about truth and lies. Autofiction
doesn’t exist, he argues, since every-
thing is autofiction, “even the Bible is
autofiction, since it begins with some-
one creating something,” just as non-
fiction doesn’t exist either, since “every
narrative version of a real history is
always a form of fiction.” The moment
the world is given an order by words, he
writes, that world’s nature is modified.
Vila-Matas is a great artist of the
self and the self’s nonexistence, and
perhaps what I mean is that I started
to miss some of that artfulness as I
was reading Yoga. Late in the book, in a
little chapter describing his love for his
publisher, Carrère explains how their
relationship began: “The first novel I
wrote I sent to him, and to him alone,
without knowing him, because P. O. L.
published Georges Perec.” I paused
here, because I found this admission
perplexing. For there is great suffering
in Perec’s work also, of course—the
suffering of bereavement, of loss, of
the Holocaust. But this suffering is
always percolated through a dense net-
work of form. It was Perec who wrote
the truly great book with a hole in it:
W, or The Memory of Childhood. W con-
tains two separate texts, which run in
alternating chapters: a fable about a
society dedicated to sport called W,
and an autobiography of Perec’s child-
hood. But the best summary of this
novel is the one Perec himself offered:
In this book there are two texts
which simply alternate; you might
almost believe they had nothing in
common, but they are in fact inex-
tricably bound up with each other,
as though neither could exist on
its own, as though it was only their
coming together, the distant light
they cast on each other, that could
make apparent what is never quite
said in one, never quite said in the
other, but said only in their fragile
overlapping.
It looks like there are two elements,
the story of W and the story of Perec’s
childhood, but these two in fact con-
ceal a third element, the unspeakable
losses of the Shoah, unrecoverable ex-
cept through the shimmer of the two
parts’ interaction.
Perec’s novel is a beautiful exam-
ple of the literary uses of montage
and the truth it produces—the way
apparently unrelated elements com-
bine to form a deeper meaning. This
was what I couldn’t help remembering
as I read Carrère describing a central
principle of Yoga:
It’s both a rule for me and one
of the most reliable teachings of
psychoanalysis that when you say
two things have nothing in com-
mon there are strong chances
that on the contrary they have ev-
erything in common.
I think Carrère wants Yoga to work
like this, to produce new meanings
and forms out of its collage of differ-
ent elements—to find a hidden unity
underneath the wildly various surface.
But maybe, in the end, it found that
.
unity so fluently that I was left with a
surprising desire. I didn’t want more
truth, whatever that might be. I wanted
more intricate arts of fiction.
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 ‘Places That Weren’t Supposed to Be Places’
no existe un mundo poshuracán:
Puerto Rican Art in the Wake
of Hurricane Maria
an exhibition at the Whitney Museum
of American Art, New York City,
November 23, 2022–April 23, 2023.
Catalog of the exhibition edited
by Marcela Guerrero.
Whitney Museum of American Art,
128 pp., $45.00
(distributed by Yale University Press)
Forecast Form:
Art in the Caribbean Diaspora,
1990s–Today
an exhibition at the Museum
of Contemporary Art Chicago,
November 19, 2022–April 23, 2023;
the Institute of Contemporary Art,
Boston, October 5, 2023–February
24, 2024; and the Museum of
Contemporary Art San Diego,
April 6–July 8, 2024.
Catalog of the exhibition
edited by Carla Acevedo-Yates.
Museum of Contemporary Art
Chicago/DelMonico/DAP ,
288 pp., $65.00
Tropical Is Political:
Caribbean Art Under
the Visitor Economy Regime
an exhibition at the Americas
Society, New York City, September 7–
December 17, 2022; and the Museo de
Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico,
San Juan, February 18–July 30, 2023.
Catalog of the exhibition
edited by Aimé Iglesias Lukin
and Karen Marta.
Americas Society, 103 pp., $5.00;
available for free at as-coa.org
There are ruptures so great that they
function as markers of time. “We
would say: ‘the year of the great earth-
quake,’ or: ‘the year of the hurricane
that flattened M. Celeste’s house,’ or:
‘the year of the fire on Main Street,’”
the Martinican poet and philosopher
Édouard Glissant once wrote of his-
tory’s junctures.
In Puerto Rico, Hurricane Maria
was one of those ruptures. This bibli-
cal storm, with its biblical name, made
landfall at Yabucoa, on the island’s
east coast, at dawn on September 20,
2017, then traveled northwest, bull-
dozing its way along the Cordillera
Central, the mountain range that
serves as Puerto Rico’s spine. Maria
was a Category 4 storm two miles per
hour short of being classified as Cat-
egory 5. Its force was such that riv-
ers spilled out of their beds, forests
were smashed into splinters, houses
were pulverized, and roofs were torn
from buildings. Aerial images taken
afterward revealed roads that look
as if they’d been carpet- bombed.
Death tolls fluctuated wildly, but an
estimate published by the Milken
Institute School of Public Health at
George Washington University con-
cluded that nearly three thousand
lives were lost during the storm and
in the six months that followed. As
the journalist and commentator Ed
Morales wrote in his astute Fantasy
Island: Colonialism, Exploitation, and
the Betrayal of Puerto Rico (2019), the
island after Maria “was not so much
10
Carolina A. Miranda
Teresita Fernández: Rising (Lynched Land) (detail), 2020
a disaster area as it was a disaster
nation.”
The damage wrought by the hurri-
cane, which the writer and geographer
Joshua Jelly-Schapiro chronicled in
these pages in 2017, wasn’t the only
disaster.* Puerto Rico had already had
its capacity for resilience stretched
by centuries of colonial rule—first by
Spain, then the United States, which,
since seizing control in 1898, has used
the territory as sugar plantation, mil-
itary base, medical lab, and tax haven
(often aided and abetted by the island’s
fair-skinned elite). When the hurri-
cane hit, Puerto Rico was mired in
a stew of toxic policies that, in the
words of Morales, had turned it into
“a hollowed-out shell of itself.” There
was high unemployment, increasing
emigration, a faltering economy, and
a government drowning in so much
debt (enthusiastically supplied by Wall
Street banks) that it was teetering on
the brink of default. What the hur-
ricane made evident was the level of
decay: the storm damaged 80 percent
of Puerto Rico’s already flickering elec-
trical grid. It also made evident the
responsibility the US bore for the rot.
It is Congress, after all, that has final
say over Puerto Rican policy, and an
unelected financial oversight board—
also based in the US—that adminis-
ters its economy.
*“A Perfect Storm,” The New York Review,
November 23, 2017.
M aria wasn’t one rupture, but many.
The storm simply gave the unrav-
eling a moniker and a marker in time.
As Astrid Cruz-Negrón, an organizer
based in Utuado, told the journalist
Alana Casanova-Burgess last year, “It
is as if Hurricane Maria never finished
leaving us.”
This rupture served as a starting
point for “no existe un mundo pos-
huracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake
of Hurricane Maria,” a group show at
the Whitney Museum of American Art
that concluded in April. The exhibition
was the first large survey of Puerto
Rican art at a major New York City
museum in half a century. (The New
York Times critic Holland Cotter es-
timated that the last such show was
“The Art Heritage of Puerto Rico: Pre-
Columbian to Present,” jointly orga-
nized by the Metropolitan Museum of
Art and the nascent Museo del Bar-
rio in 1973.) In the region to which
most Puerto Ricans in the US have
historically migrated, over a period
in which Puerto Ricans on the main-
land have come to outnumber those
on the island, art institutions in New
York (with the notable exception of
El Museo) have neglected the Puerto
Rican story.
But using Hurricane Maria as the
basis for the exhibition carries a risk,
since it means foregrounding ruin over
possibility. Indeed, some involved with
the show approach it with ambiva-
lence. “Many of my Puerto Rican art-
ist friends, in the archipelago and in
diaspora, worry over the way disaster
capitalism has conditioned our sud-
den visibility in cultural institutions,
including the Whitney,” writes the es-
sayist Carina del Valle Schorske in the
catalog. “How the disaster—whatever
it took from us—also made us a little
famous, spared us a little change.” The
show’s title appears to acknowledge
this unease. Drawn from a poem by
the Puerto Rican writer Raquel Salas
Rivera, “No existe un mundo pos-
huracán” could be translated as “A
post-hurricane world doesn’t exist”
or “There isn’t a world after the hurri-
cane.” Whether that was a rejection of
how Maria has come to define Puerto
Rico’s story or a suggestion of a world
unable to move beyond perpetual rup-
ture was left up to the viewer to decide.
Occupying an entire floor of the
Whitney, the exhibition—like Salas Ri-
vera’s poem—brought expressions of
grief, rage, and resistance to the very
island (Manhattan) where Puerto Ri-
co’s ruinous debt was created. Greeting
visitors was a broken wooden lamppost
harvested from the debris of Maria
by the artist Gabriella Torres-Ferrer.
The pole still bore a placard for one of
the semiregular referendums on the
island’s political status, theaters of
democracy that are in no way binding.
It read, “Valora tu Ciudadanía Amer-
icana” (Value Your US Citizenship),
making a case for US statehood over
independence or remaining a terri-
tory. The year of the hurricane, ironi-
cally, also marked the centenary of the
Jones–Shafroth Act, which granted US
citizenship to Puerto Ricans—though
TE RE S ITA FE RNÁNDE Z/ MUS EU M OF C ONTE M PORARY ART CHICAGO/ LEH MANN M AU PIN, N EW YORK , HONG KONG, S EOUL, AN D LON DON
not the right to vote in federal elec-
tions. In English, Torres-Ferrer’s piece
is subtitled “Value Your American Lie.”
The exhibition featured more than
fifty works by twenty artists from
the island and the diaspora, and was
loosely organized into the themes
of infrastructure, ecology, tourism,
mourning, and resistance. Though pre-
sented as a survey, it felt more like a
series of targeted responses to recent
events. Absent, for example, were the
dancer and choreographer nibia pas-
trana santiago, who has created poi-
gnant site-specific performances in
public places like swimming pools and
airport hangars, and the painter Juan
Sánchez, who for decades has explored
Puerto Rico’s colonial condition in can-
vases that evoke religious iconography.
The most conspicuous absence,
however, was that of the prominent
Puerto Rican assemblagist Daniel
Lind-Ramos—currently the subject
of a solo show at M oMA PS1 , on view
through September 4—whose to-
temic sculptures weave the detritus
of consumerism and ecological disaster
into powerful pieces that evoke Afro-
Boricua cultural traditions. (A whole
separate show could be mounted on
how the recent ruptures—to which you
can add the pandemic and the uprisings
that occurred around the world after
George Floyd’s murder in 2020—have
pulled at the threads that bind Puerto
Rico’s national identity, which has his-
torically marginalized Black people.)
There were, however, astonishingly
potent moments—especially in the
The New York Review
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July 20, 2023 11

section devoted to grief and mourn-
ing. A beautifully constructed instal-
lation by Gabriella N. Báez, Ojalá nos
encontremos en el mar (Hopefully, We’ll
Meet at Sea; 2018), paid tribute to the
artist’s father, who died by suicide
shortly after Maria’s first anniversary.
(Suicide rates rose precipitously after
the hurricane.) Báez’s installation fea-
tured framed photographs of father
and daughter on a broad plinth, along
with a handful of keepsakes. The pho-
tos were connected by dozens of ten-
drils of red thread that traveled from
one image to another. Like blood ties,
the threads articulated a vascular sys-
tem shared by two bodies, one that
was vulnerably, distressingly exposed.
Just beyond this display was Sofía
Gallisá Muriente’s absorbing 2020
video piece Celaje (Cloudscape). Prom-
inently projected onto a large screen,
the forty-minute video served as a
lament for her family (she lost both
her grandmother and her father before
completing the film) and also the en-
tire Puerto Rican colonial project. Ce-
laje intercut shots of the island—lush
foliage, decaying factories, neighbor-
hoods wracked by flood and exodus—
with footage of a more personal nature:
scenes with her grandmother, a family
funeral, snippets of old home movies.
Some of the film was damaged by the
hurricane, and she presented this too.
Bands of scratched and moldy celluloid
appeared like earthy abstractions on
the screen, the memories they once
contained erased by disaster. Serv-
ing as soundtrack were fragments of
found audio and a moody score by the
musician José Iván Lebrón Moreira.
At certain moments Gallisá Muri-
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ente’s voice surfaces above the din,
delivering brief, poetic observations.
“Aprendimos a leer los tiempos de la
naturaleza cuando se suspendió el ti-
empo humano,” she says. “We learned
how to read nature’s time when human
time was suspended”—the trauma of
history’s unofficial markers captured,
quite literally, on film.
T he show at the Whitney was one of
three exhibitions this spring that
explored Caribbean themes, highlight-
ing the precarious states induced by
colonialism and global warming, as well
as the vitality of a region shaped by
constant movement and exchange. In
San Juan, “Tropical Is Political: Carib-
bean Art Under the Visitor Economy
Regime” is on display at the Museo de
Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico
(MAC ) through July 30, featuring work
by nineteen Caribbean and diasporic
artists and collectives who question
the tourism industry’s marketing of
the region as one big postcard para-
dise. On the mainland, “Forecast Form:
Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s–
Today” recently concluded its run at
the Museum of Contemporary Art Chi-
cago (MCA ) and will open in October
at the Institute of Contemporary Art
in Boston. An ambitious show in scale
and content, it features work by thirty-
seven artists covering the Americas,
Europe, and Asia.
All three shows, in one way or an-
other, grapple with tourism’s visions of
swaying palm trees and empty beaches,
which imply land for the taking. At the
Whitney, the most effective piece in
this vein was La Concha (2022), a sculp-
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ture by the Puerto Rico–based art-
ist Yiyo Tirado Rivera that presented
San Juan’s famed La Concha hotel—a
1950s modernist structure with a flam-
boyant shell-shaped restaurant—as a
sandcastle. The sculpture slowly disin-
tegrated over the course of the show,
Dalton Gata: Cuidado con el chango, 2022
embodying both political and ecologi-
cal phenomena: the way valuable land
is turned over to foreign developers
(the beachfront hotel is owned by Mar-
riott) and the way rising seas threaten
lives and livelihoods, as well as corpo-
rate balance sheets. But the sculpture
also reflects a disillusionment with
modernism, which promised us prog-
ress but ultimately put a streamlined
façade on exploitation.
Work by Tirado—a neon wall sculp-
ture that turns the logo of the Caribe
Hilton (another of San Juan’s well-
known modernist structures) into the
phrase “Caribe Hostil” (Hostile Carib-
bean)—also appears in “Tropical Is
Political,” which, before landing at the
MAC , was presented at the Americas
Society in New York City. The show was
organized by the MAC curator Marina
Reyes Franco, who also contributed
an essay on the economy and tourism
in Puerto Rico to the Whitney’s cata-
log—the industry, as she notes, now
permeates the island, turning it into
a place that “serve[s] the experience
and gaze of the visitor.”
In “Tropical Is Political,” she ex-
plores this idea in depth across the Ca-
ribbean, examining the links between
the region’s old plantation economies
and the new ones based on tourism.
The similarities between them, she
writes in the MAC ’s exhibition catalog,
are extensive,
whether measured by the eco-
nomic impact of the industries;
the resignification of spaces from
one era to the next; the priority
that is given to certain histories,
sites, and architectural heritage;
or the importance each has played
in the creation of stereotypes for
the region.
A 2022 video by Gallisá Muriente ze-
roed in on these ideas. The Envoy
(Even If It’s Not More Than a Truce),
as it is titled in English, shows the
artist and her friends inhabiting the
country home that once belonged to
Rexford G. Tugwell, who in the 1940s
served as one of the last US-appointed
governors of Puerto Rico. They have
dinner and stage an informal reading
of Tugwell’s writings about imperial-
ism and colonization, as if to conjure
his spirit. Tucked into a scenic patch
of El Yunque rainforest, on the east
side of the island, Casa Tugwell was
designed by the German-born modern-
ist Henry Klumb. It is now available
as an idyllic vacation rental.
Many of the pieces in “Tropical Is
Political” address tourism in direct,
even didactic, ways. But there are rav-
ishing moments, too, including a num-
ber of talismanic works that attempt
to take Caribbean landscapes back
from tourism’s gaze. A trio of mono-
chromatic paintings rendered in red
ink by the Martinican artist Gwladys
Gambie feature the silhouette of a fan-
tastical flying bird-woman hovering
protectively over a palm tree–studded
landscape battered by storm.
Also enthralling is Las playas son
nuestras (The Beaches Are Ours; 1989),
a video by the Puerto Rican movement
artist Viveca Vázquez showing a group
of dancers who slip into the ocean and
join their bodies together to form a
large “warrior fish,” rhythmically slic-
ing the air with their hands as if to
warn off what is presumably a battle-
ship in the distance. The video docu-
ments a performance Vázquez staged
on the island of Vieques in 1989; at
the time the US Navy was still staging
exercises in the area, but one could
imagine a similar performance today
involving a cruise ship. It is a hypnotic
artwork: the dancers enter the water
as if summoned, come together, then
are broken apart by the tide, their bod-
ies swept back to shore—a cycle that
begins anew every four minutes, since
the video is played on a loop.
I n the MCA Chicago’s “Forecast
Form,” artists likewise took the cli-
chés of Caribbean tourism and tore
them apart. In an early gallery, an
assemblage by the Puerto Rico–born
conceptual artist Rafael Ferrer, Ciclón
en el Mar de la China (1977), featured
a twisted piece of wire penetrated by
pieces of paint-splattered palm tree,
one of tourism’s romantic symbols
trapped in globalization’s debris. In
another room, the Cuban American
artist Teresita Fernández presented a
wood and copper sculpture of a palm
suspended from the ceiling by a piece
of rope. Rising (Lynched Land), from
2020, speaks to the degradations of
tourism (see illustration on page 10).
But if you grew up in Florida or South-
ern California, a palm on a rope is a
familiar sight, since this is how adult
palms are planted alongside hotels,
fast-food drive-throughs, suburban
subdivisions, or anywhere a devel-
oper wants to channel a tropical vibe.
Palms, in fact, aren’t so much a symbol
of paradise as they are of migration
and colonization. The coconut palm—
that great marker of Caribbean para-
dise—is not endemic to the Americas.
“Forecast Form,” however, is less
about specific problems facing the
DALTON GATA/AGUSTI NA FE RRE YA, SAN JUAN
Caribbean than it is about states of
Caribbean-ness. Every exhibition
about the Caribbean must first grap-
ple with the region’s range of geog-
raphies, ecologies, colonial histories,
languages, migrations, and geopolitical
boundaries, all of which for hundreds
of years have been shaped by outsiders.
The Caribbean was the site of one of
the earliest independence struggles in
the Americas—the slave revolt that led
to Haiti’s independence in 1804—yet
many of its islands (including Puerto
Rico, Martinique, and the British
The New York Review
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Virgin Islands) remain colonial terri-
tories. (Is it any wonder that some of
the most notable postcolonial thinkers
of the twentieth century—Glissant,
Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire—emerged
from the Caribbean?)
The Trinidadian artist Christopher
Cozier described the region to me in
2018:
These are places that weren’t sup-
posed to be places. You have a lo-
cation where competing European
kingdoms created external labor
camps to enrich themselves. . . .
It was where transplanted units
of labor and raw materials came
together.
Among Cozier’s contributions to the
MCA ’s show was a biting video titled
Gas Men (2014) that showed two men
in business suits spinning gas pump
hoses as if they were lassos—the
mythical silhouette of the cowboy
transformed into a symbol of fossil
fuel extraction.
The Chicago show moved beyond re-
gional definitions of what is Caribbean
to include Caribbean diasporas around
the globe. The aim was to present the
region as “a capacious and mutable
space, a diaspora open to multiple ge-
ographies, temporalities, and histories
at once.” This vision included double
diaspora—for example, the indentured
Indian workers who labored on plan-
tations throughout the Caribbean for
several generations, then relocated to
the US and Europe in the twentieth
century. A sumptuous wall sculpture
by Suchitra Mattai, an artist born in
Guyana and now living in Colorado,
created a large, roiling seascape out of
strips of vintage saris and ghungroos,
the ankle bells worn in classical Indian
dance. Bands of braided cloth connect
one colorful abstracted mass with an-
other, suggesting the paths taken over
generations.
“F orecast Form”—whose weather-
inspired title implied constantly
shifting conditions—generally avoided
putting artists into categories of ge-
ography or identity, opting for a se-
ries of loose themes such as landscape,
exchange, and the traces left by peo-
ple in a state of perpetual movement.
Stringing the show together were a
number of images from Ana Mendie-
ta’s 1970s Silueta Series, photographic
records of performances in which the
artist carved the outline of her body
into the earth and filled the nega-
tive space with pigment or flowers.
These serve as spiritual antecedents
to the transitory states the show ex-
plores. Also connecting the dots is the
thoughtful catalog, which features an
instructive discussion between the
MCA curator Carla Acevedo-Yates and
several of the show’s artists, as well
as an essay by the Puerto Rican au-
thor Mayra Santos-Febres that delves
into Glissant’s ideas about rupture
and how history is wielded as a tool
of supremacy. “If there must be a his-
tory—the transcendental, the ratio-
nal,” she writes, “then there also must
be the dark, the barbaric, the natural,
the beastly, all things that cannot be
articulated from modernity’s organized,
structured discourse.”
The loose themes made for a show
that could veer from far-reaching to
unmoored, and felt at times like a trot
14
through the globalized art world. The only Chicago-based artist in the ex-
inclusion of work by Filipino and Bra- hibition, contributing a larger-than-
zilian artists seemed to point to shared life collage, showing bodies entangled
histories of colonialism but muddled in a lush garden, made out of wall-
the premise, and no reasons for their paper, Jacquard tapestries, and spar-
inclusion were given in the wall text or kling beads.
the catalog. Moreover, for a show that Yet within “Forecast Form” there
focused on diaspora, Chicago—home were many moments of great power
to important populations of Jamaicans and some crackling juxtapositions.
and Puerto Ricans—was overlooked. Particularly memorable was Kwa
(This is the city, after all, where the Bawon (2004), a multimedia sculpture
Young Lords, the militant Puerto by the Haitian artist Maksaens Denis
Rican activist group, first emerged that featured seven televisions con-
in the late 1960s.) The Jamaica-born figured into the shape of a cross on
Ebony G. Patterson, who also main- a stacked platform, an arrangement
tains a studio in Kingston, was the evoking a symbol for Baron Samedi,
How to Fold
Seated alone at the edge of the bed
grasp the finest fabric first,
the shrunken sock or silk softest to touch
among laundry high & hot enough
to wrestle your body in rags and towels
and undivided multicolor trappings.
When you find your phantom lover’s
item in the pile, you will have to decide
how to handle it. When it is an undergarment,
you may grasp the heat
which does not linger in silk or lace.
When it is a shirt or pair of jeans, position
the fabric on your skin in the absent
lover’s position. Most of your armor is cotton.
You may undress & lie with the item
against the most exposed part of your seams,
a root work of threads like veins.
The scent folded into the fabric may no longer be
detectable to the unknowing nose.
Folded on the bed alone, conjure the love
under some fabricated light streaming
into the room, a milk-blue ink
at some temperatures, a lucid plasma,
a pearl on the bud & palette in others.
Place your fingers as the fingers are placed.
The oblivious spirit folds out of its material.
Washed till worn, then worn despite tatters.
Fold the legs & arms
until the figure fits neat as a book
of matches in a drawer. The map inside & out
is a mix of missteps & crossroads
bordering cliffs & edges. You cannot live
without the heat & iron of love.
The scent folded into the material travels
as far as music. The scent is like lavender
if lavender were meat-salted & emitting
a heat that travels as far as music.
—Terrance Hayes
a Vodou spirit who serves as guardian
of cemeteries. The televisions flashed
images of landscapes, dancing women,
street protests, and satellite views of
Hurricane Jeanne, which battered
Haiti in 2004, alongside the names of
journalists and civil rights activists
killed during the final tumultuous re-
gime of Jean-Bertrand Aristide (2001–
2004). It was a mordant rumination on
a place contending with overlapping
ruptures, environmental and political.
Particularly absorbing was a gallery
devoted to landscape, which featured
Patterson’s wall-sized installation
and Mattai’s oceanic sari assem-
blage alongside one of Lind-Ramos’s
otherworldly totems, fabricated out
of fragments of palm, a drum, and a
coconut grater. Nearby hung Cursed
Grounds: Cursed Borders (2021), an
arresting canvas by the Haiti-born,
Philadelphia-based painter Didier
William. It showed a cross section of
a forest in which the trees sprouted
jumbles of human appendages in lieu
of roots. Covering the roiling mass of
arm and leg roots were hundreds of
tiny eyes—the gaze of the viewer re-
turned by the gaze of bodies embed-
ded in a land that is very much alive.
At the opposite end of the space was
a magnificent wall-sized installation
by Firelei Báez, who was born in the
Dominican Republic, that featured
eighty-one small paintings that used
reproductions of historic documents
as their canvases. Colonial maps, sci-
entific drawings, and insurance plans
were overpainted with delicate im-
ages of explosive flames, fantastical
flora, and playful interpretations of
the mythical ciguapa, a female figure
from Dominican folklore who, like a
siren, can lure and entrap. The ciguapa
can be a grotesque figure with blue
skin and feet pointing backward, or she
can embody female power. In Báez’s
hands she is the latter, materializing
on the canvas as a flamboyant sprite
who rejects the colonial mythologies
of the past.
The exhibitions in New York, San
Juan, and Chicago showed artists in-
tent on rewriting history—or, more
accurately, “nonhistory,” as Glissant
called the erasure of cultural memory
by slavery, colonialism, and now hur-
ricanes. In the catalog for “no existe
un mundo poshuracán,” the curator
Marcela Guerrero writes about how the
Puerto Rican artists in the show “leave
behind visual testimony of a nation
that has survived its disappearance.”
They do more than that.
Ruptures destroy, but they also
mark new beginnings (just as hurri-
canes carry to new places seeds that
take root and grow). In the Whitney’s
show, an installation by Miguel Lu-
ciano featured ten standing sculp-
tures made from fragments of an old
school bus. The piece was installed so
that as you approached it, the bright
yellow paint and the logo of the bus
company—“Transporte Escolares Pa-
checo”—came into view, an apt meta-
phor for Puerto Rico’s school system,
which is falling apart. If you circum-
navigated the piece, however, on the
rear of each fragment you encountered
a Puerto Rican flag in black and white,
a symbol of protest that emerged in
2016 in response to predatory US eco-
.
nomic policies. Luciano’s school bus
pieces aren’t simply scraps, they are
shields—objects of resistance in an
ongoing struggle.
The New York Review
 Black Talk on the Move
Lover Man
by Alston Anderson, with an
afterword by Kinohi Nishikawa.
McNally, 194 pp., $18.00 (paper)
James Weldon Johnson was critical of
dialect because it had only two stops:
pathos and humor. Mark Twain may
have listened to how the black people
around him spoke, and the case has
been made passionately that he gave
his black characters credit for thinking
at a time when dialect was used mostly
to confirm the inferiority of black peo-
ple, but even if not racist, dialect is
still racialized speech. It contains the
problem of having to overcome the as-
sumption that racial distinctions will
be demeaning for black people.
The only character who speaks in
dialect in Paul Laurence Dunbar’s
Civil War novel, The Fanatics (1901),
is the “negro” bell ringer in the Ohio
town that hates black people almost
as much as it does the rebels. Dunbar
could not drink away the self-doubt he
had because white critics preferred his
poems in dialect to those in what was
once called standard English. One lan-
guage for the master, another for the
slave, George Washington Cable said.
Charles Chesnutt tried in his work to
present a realistic picture of the South
at the turn of the twentieth century
and was exasperated by the huge mar-
ket for the literature of Uncle Remus–
style folksiness. Chesnutt argued that
there was no such thing as “Negro di-
alect”; it was just white writers trying
to come up with phonetic spellings of
what black talk sounded like to them.
In the folk realism of Porgy (1925)
by the white South Carolina writer
DuBose Heyward, black people do
all the talking, and in a dialect that
supposedly reflects that of the Gullah
people of the Carolina coastal region.
The dialect is not easy, and Heyward’s
intention may have been to make the
thoughts expressed poetic, because the
story itself is finally about something
that cannot be explained.
Julia Peterkin, Heyward’s contem-
porary, portrayed isolated Carolina
black communities in her fiction, as
if showing blacks in an autonomous
setting without the dangers of racial
politics would present them in their
best light. Peterkin is preoccupied
with the Gullah dialect and customs:
the birth suppers, the quilt-making
parties. However, though her black
characters have folk wisdom about
how to read a landscape and listen to
bird calls for signs, they have no con-
ventional sense of morality. Her char-
acters supplement Christianity with
Conjure, and a womanizing preacher in
Peterkin’s Black April (1927) is tricked
into marrying a girl he didn’t know
was his daughter. In Peterkin’s Pulit-
zer Prize–winning Scarlet Sister Mary
(1928), the black woman protagonist
has eleven children by seven differ-
ent men.
PRI VAT E COLLE CTION
Z ora Neale Hurston perhaps con-
ceived of her heroine in Their Eyes
Were Watching God (1937) in part as a
rebuke to Peterkin. Although Hurston
mentions, in a letter written in 1935,
July 20, 2023
Darryl Pinckney
Bill Traylor: Red House with Figures, 1939
that she had lunch with Peterkin and
got on well with her, she minded the
success that white writers had with
black folk material. The black novelist
George Wylie Henderson was seen as a
follower of Peterkin’s. He has plenty of
black folkways in his Ollie Miss (1935),
and at the same time he tries to pro-
tect his black woman protagonist from
stereotype by cordoning her off, not
letting her talk much, making her as
strong as a man in the field and gloom-
ily taciturn, unwilling to share with
others how sad her love is. But in Their
Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston of-
fers the story of an independent black
woman capable of romantic love and
of talking about it.
Hurston’s biographers tell us that
early on in her career she had difficulty
separating the folklore she collected
from the fiction she was writing. Hur-
ston wasn’t troubled by dialect. It was
not to her the most important thing
about the idiom of the Negro. She val-
ued the flowing, poetical style of blacks
and their cultural tendency to think
in images, as she called it. Moreover,
where portraits of black peasant life
in the South tended to focus on im-
pervious settings, on unchanged cul-
tures from which the shape of the past
could be inferred, Hurston enlarged
the scope of folklore. For her, folklore,
“the boiled-down juice of human liv-
ing,” was movable, renewable. Some
of her black critics complained that
her portraits of all-black communities
were a form of pastoral, but the out-
side world impinges on Hurston’s black
community in her first novel, Jonah’s
Gourd Vine (1934), when mass migra-
tion kills off the agricultural economy
and empties the black church. Every-
body has gone North.
What first distinguishes Richard
Wright’s work from Harlem Renais-
sance writing has to do with his atti-
tude toward urban living. Novels about
Harlem migration tend to emphasize
the sheer exuberance of being there.
The voice of the displaced black per-
son immediately after World War I
in Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem
(1928) is still countrified: “‘Doom, mah
granny,’ retorted Zeddy. ‘Ef that theah
black ole cow come fooling near me
tonight, I’ll show her who’s wearing
the pants.’” In Wright’s first novel,
Lawd Today!, begun in 1931 but un-
published in his lifetime, the talk of a
black urban culture that Wright cap-
tures is far from dialect. Black speech
is intimate, yet virile. Any hankerings
for the South are curtailed by memo-
ries of lynching. Wright’s casually bru-
tal Chicago migrants prefer films with
urban rather than rural stories. The
idiocy of rural life, Marx said.
Wright’s first published book, Uncle
Tom’s Children (1938), a collection of
stories set in the South, is full of white
violence and has no black ritual, no
black music. He was after a kind of
naturalistic detachment, not enter-
tainment. The paranoid black psycho-
logical interior would become Wright’s
domain. He needed speed in order to
convey the feeling of being always
hunted, of having to be always vigi-
lant. Wright’s dialogue in his south-
ern stories has no dialect punctuation
that might make words sound or look
quaint, no apostrophes to slow things
down.
Moreover, like Hurston, Wright ex-
panded his definition of folklore. It was
in everything, it was everywhere, down
to “the swapping of sex experiences
on street corners from boy to boy in
the deepest vernacular,” he notes in
his essay “Blueprint for Negro Writ-
ing” (1937). He identified folklore as
the “most indigenous and complete
expression” of black life. It gave black
communities the sense of a common
life. Wright recognized it as the cul-
ture from which he sprang—and the
terror from which he fled.
In Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man
(1952), a phantom black woman, a
voice from the slave past, tells the
narrator that freedom “ain’t nothing
but knowing how to say what I got up
in my head.” The sense of Harlem in
Ellison’s novel comes not from any
description of place. Instead, Ellison,
the antinaturalist, makes an allegory
of what had been previously shown
through the hard-won realism on which
the truth of what was then called the
black experience depended. Language
had been used to describe the reality
of black people, but Ellison concluded
that language itself was reality, urging
his novel to travel through a variety of
black idioms as it goes from the South
to the North.
B lack talk is again on the move in
Lover Man, a newly reissued col-
lection of melancholy stories by Alston
Anderson originally published in 1959.
Alston Anderson is one of those lost
names of twentieth-century African
American literature. In our present
cultural mood of generous reexamina-
tion, the hunt is on for the forgotten,
the overlooked, the could have been,
and there among them is Anderson.
Born in 1924 in the Panama Canal
Zone to Jamaican parents, he moved
to North Carolina when he was four-
teen. He served in the US Army and
after World War II enrolled in North
Carolina College, before making his
way to Columbia and then to the Sor-
bonne, a drifter of the GI Bill gener-
ation. It took Anderson a while to
get Lover Man together—a much-
praised literary takeoff. However,
15
his was the brief flight of a self-
destructive soul, and before long his
name had sunk in the darkness.
Because of the historical truth be-
hind the authority of the autobiograph-
ical voice in twentieth-century African
American literature, one critical bias
held that the black condition was an
unfair advantage as dramatic material.
Hidden resentment led to interpre-
tations of black fiction as more tran-
scription of experience than literary
invention, especially fiction written in
the first person. And it was all about
one thing, racial oppression. Ellison’s
intentions were complex, but one as-
pect of his achievement in Invisible
Man was the assertion of the first
person as an overt literary strategy
for the black writer. The first person
was other things besides testimony,
witness; it could be the instrument
of a trickster, the writer.
While Ellison’s presence is on every
page of Invisible Man, Anderson in
Lover Man heads in the other direc-
tion, as if already in pursuit of his own
disappearance. Each story is told in
the first person (except one that is all
dialogue). Aaron Jessup, whom we meet
as a boy in “The Checker Board” and at
different points in his growing up, is
not the narrator of every story. Two of
the collection’s narrators are women.
Yet the fifteen stories are linked by
family ties and community: someone
who is mentioned or a secondary char-
acter in one story may be the focus
of another. The stories are rendered
largely as dialogue, with minimal first-
person interiority. Sometimes a narra-
tor is addressing a particular person,
telling someone a lie, a tall tale. “I used
on Miss Florence Tactiful Approach
Number One For Ugly Women,” says
the narrator of “Signifying,” who may
be Aaron’s older brother, seen in previ-
ous stories dancing or building a shelf.
Anderson begins somewhere in the
Black Belt, in the 1930s of people hav-
ing to chop wood for the kitchen stove.
His style is straightforward, but the
simplicity is deceptive, the calm sur-
face at odds with the depths sending
up their clues. When the mother cries
out the father’s name in the morning
at the end of “The Checker Board,” the
question is whether Aaron’s father is
having sex with Aaron’s mother, or
is absent, or has been found dead of
natural causes, or was killed by Aar-
on’s brother, who has already left the
house. Tragedies are absorbed in a line,
as when Aaron ends “The Dozens” by
saying he has not played the Dozens—
an insult contest—since he helplessly
watched Mutton Head, his best friend,
drown in quicksand.
T he settings of the early stories are
usually “the town” or “my town,”
and it’s seldom specified where the bus
pulling in came from. In “A Sound of
Screaming,” one of the longer stories,
an older man takes a nineteen-year-old
girl from their unnamed hometown to
Kapalachee, Alabama, where he is pay-
ing for her backstreet abortion. Nei-
ther the woman abortionist nor her
house is as sinister as he thought they
would be. He leaves them, finds wine,
tries not to think of anything, but can’t
help picturing what is going on back at
that house. When they get on the bus
to return to their town, he knows that
“the girl,” “that girl,” can’t go home,
and he brings her to his place:
16
Her hair moving against the pillow
made a sound like a whist broom
when clothes are being brushed.
She was crying. I wished right then
that I could go through what she
was going through: that I could
do it for her then with her. But
I didn’t say it. A man can’t say a
thing like that to a woman and
sound like anything but a damn
fool, I thought.
As tender as his understanding is, he
wants her ordeal to be over, to get back
to their good times. “James, don’t. Oh,
James, darling.” He is Aaron’s father,
and the girl, Maybelle, is Aaron’s “play
mother” from an earlier story.
At one point, the girl asks him to
tell her something “funny.” He recites
a toast about a crapshooter, Sam the
Man. “He was a killer from way back./
He’d fall into town sharper’n a tack.” A
toast—poetry of a black subculture in
which the hustler is a hero. The stan-
zas in “A Sound of Screaming” are An-
derson’s, and in several stories, such
as the gripping “Big Boy,” about a
senseless, fatal razor fight between
strangers—“chewing gum and grin-
ning like a brass monkey”—Anderson
inserts examples or passages of folk-
lore as performance, barbershop en-
tertainment. Big Boy “even knowed”
and rattles off in his “high-pitched,
faggity voice” “The Signifying Mon-
key,” the urtext of trickster ballads in
black culture.
James Turner is the narrator of “Big
Boy,” and James Turner is the man the
woman in “Suzie Q.” is looking for.
“That woman won’t built, Daddy, she
was constructed.” The narrator doesn’t
know James Turner, but he ends up
wanting to find Turner himself in order
to give back the woman he lost his job
over. He took to shoplifting and got six
months on the rock piles. The short
piece, like others in the collection, has
the atmosphere of a riff, a tale:
I opened up with an uppercut and
missed. I followed up with a right
and a left and two fast rights and
when her defences was down I
feinted and jabbed, feinted and
jabbed, feinted and feinted and
feinted and jabbed until wow!
Anderson, Chester Himes, and other
black writers who had a disposition to
sexual satire because of the tradition
of male lies, were saying that primi-
tivism and the fear of being labeled
“primitive” were over. In another short
tale, “Think,” James Turner fails to get
a woman to play strip poker with him
and a friend. “I wouldn’t give a damn
ef you knowed him since Eartha Kitt
was poor,” she says.
“Schooldays in North Carolina,” the
longest story, has Aaron attending a
segregated boarding school in the late
1930s. Founded by a white abolition-
ist, the school is in the white section
of town, with a statue of a Confeder-
ate on a pedestal in the main square,
like the small Alabama town he comes
from, he says. For four years he and his
roommate play the radio, talk about
girls, and drink Pepsi Colas after
lights out. Or Aaron dreams of being
a bandleader at the Apollo or a chauf-
feur in Hollywood, where the movie
star he opens the door for would say,
“Oh Aaron, Aaron, Aaron my dearest
love.” Throughout his school career, he
has been courting the prettiest girl in
the dining room, “prettier than May-
belle.” But his coming-of-age story has
an unexpected anticlimax: upon grad-
uation Aaron can’t express his feelings
to his roommate about their friend-
ship, and when at last he is about to
be rewarded with his girlfriend’s body,
he chokes.
The stories move away from the
South, and in those set in an outside
world the connections of the narrators
to the Jessups are not stated. A man
calling himself Jones remembers the
“easy summer” of 1943 in “Blueplate
Special.” He was working at a restau-
rant in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, and
learning the patience needed to wait
on white people, to lay the food on
them real nice and keep things cozy:
“To hell with it, man, you dig? I went
up to Harlem and got high, and for the
rest of the summer laid up in bed and
played crazy. Then I got drafted.” In
“Comrade,” a war story set in Würz-
burg in the spring of 1945, Frank talks
about the poker games and the ten-
sions on the base because he befriends
a German family. When his new com-
rade calls to his wife, “Ich habe einen
Neger mit mir,” he explains that the
word so disliked by black Americans is
a mispronunciation of a German word
by English sailors in the seventeenth
century, adding that Frank must not
be offended. “‘I’ll think about it,’ I
said.”
A nderson’s frame is invisible. Time
passes in the way his characters
talk, in the music they listen to, from
victrola to jukebox, from Jimmie
Lunceford to Charlie Parker. Black
music is the chief repository of black
idiom, Ellison argued. Hipster slang
comes through town with the new
music. In “Dance of the Infidels,” the
bebop style of jazz lures Benevolence
Delany to New York’s Pennsylvania
Station after he meets Ronnie from
“The Apple” in his small town:
I still couldn’t figure him out. He
looked like he was in a world all
his own.
“You blow?” he said.
“Blow?”
“Yeah. You play anything?”
“No. No, I don’t play nothing.
You?”
“I blow box.”
“You blow what?”
“Piano.”
He sounded irritant because I
couldn’t understand everything
he said.
Ronnie introduces Benevolence to
marijuana, Minton’s Playhouse, the
Savoy Ballroom, and the poolroom
where he cops heroin. Benevolence
does not get high, but he observes in
detail the mechanics of shooting up:
The man held the flame to the
bottom of the spoon and moved
it around so that it heated even.
Then he threw the match away and
took a hypodermic needle out of his
jacket. He sucked all the melted liq-
uid up with the needle, then handed
it to Ronnie. Ronnie took it. You
could hear him breathing hard.
Benevolence remembers being told in
the army that one mustn’t let a man
on dope pass out. He gets Ronnie back
to his place, sitting with him until he
is sure he’s OK: “I’m awright, Sugar.”
They shake hands and Benevolence is
very satisfied with Harlem.
The absence of judgment in “Dance
of the Infidels” is striking. The nar-
rator of James Baldwin’s short story
“Sonny’s Blues,” first published in Par-
tisan Review in 1957, pretends to be an
algebra teacher while sounding like
a mournful essay by James Baldwin
on the ghetto conditions that produce
heroin addicts like his brother: “He
smelled funky.” He looks down on his
brother’s ambition to play jazz: “Now.
Who’s this Parker character?” Baldwin
has given his narrator his own mediat-
ing voice, one that reassures a square
audience, as if they’d read an exposé
on a problem.
Lover Man ends on stories set “back
home,” in a tobacco store, or listen-
ing to James Turner reminisce about
his reunion with Old Man Maypeck,
a character who recurs in several of
the stories and is “crazier than a bow-
legged coon,” with his memories of
“Old Master” and the “Big War,” and
his unchanging disapproval of Aaron’s
father for leaving his mother. In the
title story, James Turner and Old Man
Maypeck are on their way to church to
hear none other than James Jessup’s
farewell sermon as deacon, a penitent
lover who prays to look at “a chicken
as a chicken and not as Sunday’s din-
ner.” It is in the nature of a curtain
call for Anderson’s cast of characters,
the return to origins as denouement.
W riters are not dialectologists.
The sound of Anderson’s Deep
South is a work of the imagination.
He came from the Canal Zone to the
Upper South, not the Black Belt, but
his ear, like Hurston’s, can be fault-
less. An Anderson story can be in the
form of a lie, and then within that lie
he has a character tell a lie. Folklore
as language is a collective experience,
a symbol of identity, a dialect main-
tained by common experiences. Yet
although most of Anderson’s stories
are set in the South, Lover Man has
considerable interest as a portrait of
black postwar migration from the lusty,
incestuous-feeling, small-town South
to the war-changed streets of Harlem,
where there is bebop and heroin and a
boxer answering the door in his under-
wear who is maybe also rough trade.
The music of migration defined the
aesthetic of the black hipster of the
The New York Review
1940s and 1950s. The zoot-suited fig-
ures who show up at the end of In-
visible Man correspond to Anderson’s
coming of age. They are the hepcats
whom Claude Brown memorialized and
Malcolm X had been, not marginal, but
unabsorbed, nonconformist. It was an
attitude. Hipsterism was for some an
escape from the idea of a single au-
thentic blackness. Clarence Major, in
his Dictionary of Afro-American Slang
(1970), warned that as disarming as
black slang was, beneath the charm
of the mode of speech lay unhappi-
ness. People who use a code language
have need of secrecy. The first person
takes on the loneliness of the jazz solo.
In his sensitive afterword to Lover
Man, Kinohi Nishikawa tells us that
although Anderson was praised by
white critics for his “perfect ear,” his
“warm heart,” and the liveliness of his
characters, some black critics thought
his folk portraits retrograde, insuffi-
ciently political. Learning how to avoid
or to appease white people is shown
to be a part of a black youth’s edu-
cation in Anderson’s stories. In that,
they reconcile Wright’s and Hurston’s
supposedly low was at last recognized
as mainstream.
T he triumph of the vernacular took
a long time. After all, Negroes are
telling ghost stories in Washington
Irving’s Knickerbocker New York. Yet
even if Anderson’s treatment of his
folk material disappointed some, his
storytelling gifts were undeniable. The
critical success of Lover Man got him
included in anthologies such as L. M.
Schulman’s Come Out the Wilderness
(1965), one that puts him in the se-
lect company of Wright, Baldwin, Ann
Petry, Owen Dodson, and William Mel-
vin Kelley as representatives of famil-
iar and new voices in postwar black
ate ideas about the Civil War. Anderson
attempts to historicize black speech,
but his ear is gone. His first-person
narrator, October Pruitt, invokes
“negro voices” and the “niggersmell.”
Anderson’s picture of plantation life
does not even bother to be realistic.
The plot in turn seems improbable:
October’s passionate love affair with
the Old Master’s daughter, who is hap-
pily married off in the next chapter. In
the course of things, October escapes
North but returns South, is kidnapped,
sold downriver, escapes, fights for the
Union, is wounded, survives, forms an
alliance with the Old Master’s heir—
his childhood pal—after the war, and
they run things together, until Octo-
ber is lynched.
Anderson inserts comic tales and
folk voices, but his novel is not satire.
His intention was perhaps to say that
his hero was always a free man, the
maker of his own destiny, an epiphany
of Frederick Douglass’s: that even in
bondage he could never be a slave in
fact. In Anderson’s book the point is
somehow obscure, abstract. The mood
of the time was reflected more in Mar-
themselves matter by going against
the grain on black issues. But what
Anderson’s novel reveals in its dis-
organization is his inability to con-
centrate, to make one page connect
with another, he who once commanded
subtle code.
Nishikawa says that around the time
All God’s Children was published, An-
derson wrote to Graves about a sui-
cide attempt. A letter to The New York
Times in 1965 supporting William F.
Buckley Jr. against James Baldwin was
the last thing Anderson published. His
final letter to Graves was written in
1966, after which Nishikawa can find
no more documentation concerning
his life. He disappeared, his where-
abouts unknown before his death in
New York City in 2008.*
“Lover Man.” A song written in 1941
by Jimmy Davis, Roger Ramirez, and
James Sherman, famously associated
with Billie Holiday, who, when she re-
corded “Lover Man” in 1944, was al-
ready with the man who would get
her hooked on heroin. When Charlie
Parker recorded his version of the song
in 1946, he was so high his producer

ideas of the South as both threat and
home. After Brown v. Board of Educa-
tion, black youth were under increas-
ing attack. The folk feeling that some
white critics found reassuring was
being pushed aside by more aggressive
stances. It wasn’t urban impatience
rebuking southern black patience; the
divide was now generational more than
geographic. Henry Dumas, ten years
Anderson’s junior, killed by New York
City police in 1968, has in his eerie,
posthumously published stories, Ark
of Bones (1974), a much more retribu-
tive sense of folk culture.
Yet in the late 1950s folk wisdom was
still taken as an innocence; it was un-
dervalued in some quarters because it
was seen as peculiar to black American
culture, not necessarily a psychological
fit with the goals of social integration.
The black idiom was distant, if not hid-
den, from the larger society. Langston
Hughes regarded the beat of Negro
music and Negro speech as a private,
emotional shorthand that evolved
and changed in order to stay ahead of
mainstream usage, of white adoption.
A similar feeling runs through Amiri
Baraka’s (LeRoi Jones’s) Blues People:
Negro Music in White America (1963), in
which black culture is an avant-garde
consciously shielding itself from white
commercialization and contamination.
Elsewhere, wise darkies were viewed
as obsolete, relics of the dying order.
But they survived the militant moment
that had dismissed them.
It was the generation led by Toni
Morrison in the 1970s that made folk
culture central to the black literary
experience. A black oral tradition was
an alternative to the Western literary
tradition, and Morrison started off by
formulating a conception of the black
novel as an “aural” work. Folk culture
became vernacular culture; Negro di-
alect was elevated into Black English.
Henry Louis Gates Jr. is a scholar who
did not forget Anderson, citing in The
Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-
American Literary Criticism (1988) his
story “Signifying” as “a masterpiece of
the genre” and “one of the most deli-
cately wrought representations of Sig-
nifyin(g) as theme, as depicted oral
ritual, but also as structuring prin-
ciple.” Vernacular culture was no lon-
ger underground communication. The
American literature. What happened?
Nishikawa is puzzled. He finds clues
in Anderson’s disastrous temperament
and in his being angrily out of sync
with the civil rights era.
Nishikawa traces Anderson’s steps
as fully as he can. Though not a US cit-
izen, he enlisted in 1943 and was sent
to Germany and Iran, and was later in
Paris studying German metaphysics.
There he began to write and met Mor-
decai Richler, who may have pointed
him toward Majorca. The White God-
dess was the backpack book of its day,
and Anderson turned up there in the
early 1950s, perhaps in search of Rob-
ert Graves. “After the first shock of
novelty, the villagers’ reaction was
‘How lucky we are! A black man!’ In
Majorca negroes bring luck,” Graves
wrote of the tall, soft-spoken stranger
in the village.
Anderson traveled back and forth
between Majorca and New York in the
1950s. Together with Terry Southern,
he interviewed Nelson Algren for The
Paris Review in 1955. In 1949 Algren
had published The Man with the Golden
Arm, in part about morphine addiction,
which he explained in the interview
was almost an afterthought. Ander-
son was at Yaddo in 1955 at the same
time as Baldwin, but Nishikawa notes
that his behavior offended the direc-
tor, Elizabeth Ames. He refused to pay
his phone bill, informing Ames that he
couldn’t risk his writing life for the
sake of a job just to take care of bills.
When he asked for another fellowship,
she demurred.
In 1955 Anderson, whether bragging
or begging, wrote to Graves from New
York that he’d been hanging out with
juiceheads and hopheads on the wa-
terfront and had changed his address
six times. Graves came to the rescue,
or at least wrote the foreword to Lover
Man. What happened? The life of apri-
cots and yogurt was easier, and Ander-
son must have been back on Majorca
in 1962, because he and Graves had a
falling out then. Graves complained
of Anderson using sexually explicit
language with his wife, and also of
what he called Anderson’s “drinking
and doping.”
For another thing, Anderson’s first
novel happened. All God’s Children
(1965) is a mess, a notebook of incho-
.
garet Walker’s folk-filled but forward- had to hold him up while he played.
looking Civil War novel Jubilee (1966). Anderson published Lover Man in 1959,
She said in an essay that she felt she the year Billie Holiday died. Lover Man
began the novel when she heard her O where can you be?
grandmother’s stories as a little girl.
Nishikawa observes that a novel *Patrick Hill, “Robert Graves and the Mys-
about an enslaved man who escapes tery of Alston Anderson,” charlesmarlow
to freedom but chooses to return to .com, January 24, 2016; and Lawrence
bondage left people “scratching their Downes, “The Three Burials of Alston
heads.” Anderson’s bad luck is that Anderson,” The New York Times, June 12,
for a black writer, to be a contrarian 2011. See also Simon Gough, The White God-
is usually a shrewd career move or dess: An Encounter (Norwich: Galley Beg-
survival tactic: George Schuyler or gar, 2012); and Miranda Seymour, Robert
Zora Neale Hurston trying to make Graves: Life on the Edge (Henry Holt, 1995).
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July 20, 2023 17

 Unrepentant Pence
In a letter to The New York Times in
2005, Donald Trump wrote that “some
people cast shadows, and other people
choose to live in those shadows.” Mike
Pence went a little further and chose to
be Trump’s shadow. He has ended up
as a gray man of no substance, who has
to insist ever more emphatically on his
own godliness because he has no soul
left to sell. In the video with which, on
June 7, he launched his campaign for
the Republican presidential nomina-
tion, he managed not to say Trump’s
name—an attempt at conscious un-
coupling that convinced nobody.
When the indictment of his former
boss under the Espionage Act was un-
sealed on June 9, Pence pronounced
himself “deeply troubled,” but could
not bring himself to say what the trou-
ble was. His signature policy stance is
to claim that “Trump and others in this
race are retreating from the cause of
the unborn,” a claim that seems un-
likely to draw supporters from either
Trump or Ron DeSantis. That a can-
didate with Pence’s name recognition
is polling in the single digits, barely
ahead of the almost unknown Vivek
Ramaswamy, shows how, like so many
others who offer their necks to Trump’s
fangs, he has been sucked dry.
All that is left is a washed-out im-
itation of his former master’s show-
manship. Pence’s current pose is Uriah
Heep pretending to be Bill Sikes. As a
teaser for his big announcement, on
June 3 he rode into Des Moines, Iowa,
on a Harley Davidson, wearing blue
jeans, cowboy boots, a black shirt, and
a leather vest with patches that read
“Pence” and “Rolling Thunders.” The
most sycophantic figure in modern
American politics, Trump’s ever-so-
humble plus-one, was not just born
again but also—who knew?—born to
be wild.
Perhaps it was this deep need to ape
an alpha male that made Pence such
easy meat for Trump. Long before he
joined the Republican ticket in 2016,
Pence showed a taste for secondhand
macho. After Barack Obama was inau-
gurated as president in January 2009,
Pence riled up his fellow Republican
members of the House of Represen-
tatives by showing them the opening
scene of the 1970 movie Patton, in
which George C. Scott, looking weirdly
like Mussolini, addresses his men in
front of a giant Stars and Stripes:
We are advancing constantly and
we’re not interested in holding
onto anything—except the enemy.
We’re going to hold onto him by
the nose, and we’re gonna kick him
in the ass. We’re gonna kick the
hell out of him all the time, and
we’re gonna go through him like
crap through a goose!
This self-identification with poultry
excrement (albeit goose rather than
chicken) may not have been quite
what Pence intended, but in his case it
seems apt. On January 6, 2021, Trump
unleashed a mob that chanted “Hang
Mike Pence” and erected a gallows
outside the Capitol for that very pur-
pose. Pence was accompanied inside
the building by his wife, Karen, and his
18
Fintan O’Toole
Mike Pence at a ‘Roast and Ride’ fundraiser for a veterans’ assistance nonprofit attended
by eight Republican presidential candidates or soon-to-be candidates, Des Moines, Iowa,
June 3, 2023
daughter Charlotte. They had to flee
from his office to the basement. As
Pence recalled, “I could hear the falling
of footsteps and angry chanting.” Had
the mob caught up with them, it may
well have inflicted serious violence,
not just on Pence but on his wife and
daughter, too.
While they were hiding in the Cap-
itol garage, Trump—according to
witnesses, then in his residence at
the White House, watching the riot
on TV —posted a tweet that seemed
intended to inflame even further the
mob’s anger: “Mike Pence didn’t have
the courage to do what should have
been done to protect our Country and
our Constitution.”
Yet Pence just turned the other
cheek. On the morning after the Jan-
uary 6 insurrection, Nancy Pelosi and
Chuck Schumer jointly called Pence to
urge him to invoke the Twenty-fifth
Amendment to the Constitution, which
allows for “the Vice President and a
majority of . . . the principal officers of
the executive departments” to issue
a declaration to Congress that “the
President is unable to discharge the
powers and duties of his office.” Pence
refused to speak to them. The reason
is obvious: he had long understood that
the Republican Party’s base belongs to
Trump, and that he could not himself
become president if he alienated his
boss’s fans.
E ven after Trump’s indictments,
first on state and then on federal
criminal charges, this is still the pre-
dicament that Pence embodies, as it
were, on behalf of the entire Republi-
can Party. He is trying to triangulate
to a point somewhere between defer-
ence and defiance, to be at once supine
and superior, to look presidential while
pandering. The very narrow ground
on which Pence is standing is his re-
fusal on January 6, after four years of
slavish loyalty to Trump, to abort the
process of counting the votes cast in
the Electoral College and, in effect,
to overturn Joe Biden’s victory. The
password for members of the media
to gain access to the formal launch of
his presidential primary campaign on
June 7 was “KeptHisOath!” The man
they couldn’t hang is also the man they
couldn’t bully.
Things have come to a bad pass
when not quite overthrowing Ameri-
can democracy is the definition of re-
publican virtue. Even so, Pence’s claim
to be the hero who stood in the gap
of danger and held off the barbarian
hordes is laughable. In the aftermath
of the 2020 election he went along with
Trump’s attempted coup for as long as
he possibly could and demurred only
when the coup had already failed.
At 2:30 AM on the morning of No-
vember 4, 2020, Trump stood on a flag-
bedecked stage in the East Room of the
White House, declared that “frankly,
we did win this election,” and called
for the counting of votes to stop. This
was very obviously the scripted begin-
ning of a coup. And Pence was a full
participant. He stood behind Trump,
literally as well as figuratively. When
Trump finished speaking, he beckoned
his sideman forward for his short solo.
Pence summarizes his own speech in
his memoir, So Help Me God (2022):
I obliged, thanking the more than
60 million Americans who had al-
ready voted for us. I promised that
we would remain vigilant to pro-
tect the integrity of the vote and
said I believed with all my heart
that we were on the road to vic-
tory. And I did.
It’s worth noting that believing some-
thing “with all my heart” is, in Pence’s
overwhelming insistence on his evan-
gelical faith, tantamount to saying that
God has placed this belief there. The
convenience of this construction is
that it absolves Pence himself of any
responsibility for making a judgment
based on the available evidence.
Even if we accept that Pence be-
lieved on election night that he and
Trump had won, it’s clear from his
own account that he knew by at least
November 7 that this was not so. In
his memoir he quotes a conversation
with Jared Kushner on that day: “I
told him over the phone that ‘Dem-
ocrats cheat’ is virtually a proverb in
Indiana, and although I was sure that
some voter fraud had taken place, I
wasn’t convinced it had cost us the
election.” In other words, Pence now
accepted that Biden had won the elec-
tion legitimately and therefore must
be accepted as the incoming president.
Yet not only did Pence not say that
in public, he continued to feed the
Trump narrative of widespread fraud
and the expectations among the Re-
publican base that courts would over-
turn the result. On November 9, two
days after he told Kushner that alleged
cheating had probably not cost Trump
the election, Pence tweeted, “Told @VP
Team Today, ‘it ain’t over til it’s over . . .
and this AIN’T over!’” On January 4
Pence told a crowd in Milner, Georgia:
I know we all—we all got our
doubts about the last election. And
I want to assure you, I share the
concerns of millions of Americans
about voting irregularities. And I
promise you, come this Wednes-
day, we’ll have our day in Congress.
A gain, it matters that this promise
was embedded in an evocation of
religious righteousness. Pence’s own
account of the speech makes this very
point:
With the election controversy
hanging in the air, I spoke about
my faith. I told the audience
about . . . the night I had come to
Christ, reminding them, “Even
when it doesn’t seem like it, God
is always working.”
Pence was doing what he had always
done for Trump—providing a godly
cover for his boss’s depredations. For
an audience steeped in evangelical
preaching, the insistence that God is
working despite the evidence was a
clear signal that Biden’s victory would
be annulled by the divine will. Faith in
Jesus fused with faith in Trump, and
together they would prevail over the
mere facts of how Americans had voted.
Nor is it clear that Pence’s ultimate
refusal to stop the counting of the
Electoral College votes on January 6
was anywhere near as straightforward
as he now pretends. Pence insists that
he understood from December 5 that
“there was no ambiguity in the Consti-
tution or the law about the role of the
vice president, and I never believed that
the vice president’s role was anything
more than ceremonial.” But he seems
to have at the very least explored the
possibility that he might be able to sig-
nal, in that purely ceremonial act, his
belief that the results were tainted. He
knew that Trump’s fans would blame
him for doing his constitutional duty.
He hoped to deflect some of that anger
by indicating that he really was on
their side—even if this self-serving
message did immense harm to Amer-
ican democracy.
Thus, in late December 2020, Pence
DAVE KAU P/ RE UT ERS
called the other recent vice-president
from Indiana, Dan Quayle. A detailed
account of the conversation (which
presumably can only have come from
either Pence or Quayle) is given in
Bob Woodward and Robert Costa’s
The New York Review
Peril (2021). It has Quayle consistently
telling Pence that he has no wiggle
room, but Pence apparently probed
for just such space: “He wanted to
know, veep to veep, whether there
was even a glimmer of light, legally
and constitutionally, to perhaps put a
pause on the certification if there were
ongoing court cases and legal chal-
lenges.” Pence, in his memoir, denies
that this was the import of his ques-
tions, and Quayle subsequently told
The Washington Post that “I did not
notice any hesitation on his part. I in-
terpreted his questions as looking for
confirmation that what he was going
to do was right and that he had no
flexibility. That’s the way I read it.”
Yet there is also, in Peril, an account
of Pence’s subsequent meeting, on Jan-
uary 3, 2021, with the Senate parliamen-
tarian Elizabeth MacDonough: “‘Can I
perhaps express sympathy with some
of the complaints?’ Pence asked. Mac-
Donough was curt, professional. Stick
to the script, she advised. You are a
vote counter. Pence agreed.” Pence dis-
cusses this meeting in So Help Me God
but does not dispute Woodward and
Costa’s account. There’s no doubt that
Pence accepted there was nothing he
could do to stop Biden being confirmed
as president on January 6, but it seems
equally clear that he was hoping to find
some way to appear to be trying.
I n this concern with appearances,
Pence is at least consistent. Those
who mock him for the quirkier sides
of his religious persona—his refusal
to dine alone with any woman other
than his wife or to drink alcohol at
any event at which she is not pres-
ent—pay him a backhanded compli-
ment. They play into his self-projection
as a man of rigid principles, true to
himself even in ways that others re-
gard as weird. His sheer dullness, es-
pecially in his infinitely dreary public
speeches, reinforces this notion of sin-
cerity—nobody that boring can really
be thought of as performative. This is
to misunderstand, and in some ways to
underestimate, Pence. His religiosity
may be entirely sincere, but it is also
instrumental and highly politicized.
Pence is, in his own way, just as much
an actor as Trump is. He, too, is in
show business.
It’s worth going back to Patton,
which seems to be Pence’s favorite
movie. In So Help Me God, Pence is
reminded of it by his experience of
watching with admiration as Trump
expressed his enraged impatience in
meetings with minions. What Pence
loved was his own privileged access
to the knowingness of these perfor-
mances: “Once they were gone and only
the president and I remained, he would
often turn to me and ask, ‘How was
that?’” This, in turn, reminded Pence
of Scott as Patton bawling out his
subordinates:
His orders delivered, an aide-de-
camp tells Patton, “You know,
General, sometimes the men can’t
tell when you’re acting and when
you’re not.” With a wry smile, Pat-
ton replies, “It’s not important for
them to know. It’s only important
for me to know.”
Far from being repelled by the play-
acting, Pence was delighted by it—so
long as he was allowed in on the act.
July 20, 2023
His monotonous political persona
makes it easy to forget that Pence
spent five years as a radio talk show
host and TV presenter in Indiana after
his failed bids to win a House seat in
1988 and 1990. In his own mind, those
years in show business connected him
to Trump: “He had spent a decade on
television hosting a reality show; I had
spent years on radio and TV as well.
The audience sizes were, of course, just
a little different, but it was common
ground.” Trump used his TV character
as the medium through which to enter
politics. Pence, on a much smaller and
more local scale, used The Mike Pence
Show to resurrect his political career
after it had failed.
The political version of The Mike
Pence Show is the performance of
authenticity. His imaginary heart-
land has three provinces: small-town
America, Irish heritage, and the born-
again heart where Jesus has taken up
residence. Each of them demands a
suspension of disbelief. Pence’s origin
myth was recounted on Trump’s pres-
idential website while he was in office:
“Sitting at the feet of his mother and
his father, who started a successful
convenience store business in their
small Indiana town, he was raised to
believe in the importance of hard work,
faith, and family.” The suggestion of a
semirustic upbringing in a mom-and-
pop store is entirely phony. Pence was
not, as he also claims in his memoir,
a “small-town kid.”
He was born and raised in the small,
well-to-do city of Columbus, Indiana,
which was home to two Fortune 500
companies—Cummins, which manu-
factured high-tech engines, and Arvin
Industries, which made auto parts and
electrical appliances. It was also a
showcase for modern architecture. Its
main Christian church was designed
by Eero Saarinen, its public library
by I. M. Pei. Pence’s father was vice-
president, and later co-owner, of Kiel
Brothers Oil Company, which supplied
two hundred gas stations across Indi-
ana and Kentucky. When Kiel Broth-
ers, by then run by Pence’s brother
Greg, collapsed in 2004, it left the tax-
payers of Indiana (and to a lesser ex-
tent Kentucky and Illinois) on the hook
for over $20 million in cleanup costs
for eighty-five contaminated sites, in-
cluding, according to the investigative
reporter Brian Slodysko, “underground
tanks that leaked toxic chemicals into
soil, streams and wells.” So much for
bucolic, small-town America—and for
self-reliance and fiscal conservatism.
P ence’s Irishness, which he empha-
sized heavily in his announcement
speech, is in many respects remarkably
similar to that of the man he hopes to
defeat in 2024, Joe Biden. Both grew up
in devout Irish Catholic families. Both
trace their roots back to County Mayo.
Both were heavily influenced in their
youth by a maternal grandparent—in
Pence’s case Richard Michael Cawley,
who “often told me that of all the Pence
boys, I was the only true Irishman.” Both
grew up adoring the Kennedys, whose
rise to power sealed the acceptance of
Irish Catholic immigrants as true Amer-
icans. Pence writes of his “Irish gift of
the gab,” his “Irish stubbornness,” and
how “it takes a lot to get my Irish up.” All
of this is genuine enough: Pence spent
his first summer after college pulling
pints in Morrissey’s bar in Doonbeg,
County Clare, owned by some of his
distant Irish cousins.
But it’s also a way of presenting him-
self as an American success story. As
he told the Republican convention
when accepting his nomination as
Trump’s running mate in 2016, “I grew
up on the front row of the American
dream. My grandfather immigrated to
this country.” Which is all very well,
except that Pence served in one of the
most viciously anti-immigrant admin-
istrations in US history. In 2017, when
Sheryl Gay Stolberg wrote a long piece
for The New York Times about Pence’s
Irish roots, Pence’s spokesman denied
that there was a contradiction between
the vice-president’s valorization of his
grandfather’s ability to make a new
life in Chicago as a penniless immi-
grant and Trump’s demonization of
contemporary migrants. He insisted
that “President Trump’s efforts to re-
strict immigrant travel would not have
applied to Mr. Cawley because ‘Ireland
is not compromised by terrorism.’”
This, too, is a lie: Cawley, accord-
ing to Pence’s own memoir, “had left
Ireland to escape the civil war” that
was raging in 1923 and was charac-
terized by what would now be called
terrorist outrages. The policies that
Pence helped to implement—barring,
for example, refugees from civil war in
Syria—would certainly have blocked
their earlier Irish equivalents like his
grandfather, unless a specific excep-
tion were made for those who were
white and Christian.
Pence’s three-generational immi-
grant success story was made pos-
sible by the labor movement. As he
recalls of Cawley, “Grampa drove a
bus for the Chicago Transit Author-
ity for thirty years and was a proud
member of the transportation union.”
Yet as governor of Indiana, Pence was
proudly antiunion. In 2015 he ended a
system used since before World War II
to set a common wage for most pub-
licly funded construction projects—a
move opposed not only by the unions
but also by many Republicans.
T he third arena for Pence’s perfor-
mance is by far the most important
politically: his very particular brand
of religiosity. Its potency lies in the
way he embodies one of the critical
developments in the rise of the right,
the coming together of Catholic and
Protestant reactionaries through their
shared opposition to abortion. Pence
occupies a pivotal position in this rap-
prochement: he grew up Irish Catholic
but became an American evangelical.
This personal passage has important
historical resonances. Right-wing
Protestants (not least in Indiana, a
hotbed of the Ku Klux Klan) hated
Catholics almost as much as they
hated Jews and Blacks.
Pence’s brother Greg recalled that
the Protestant kids in Columbus would
sometimes throw rocks at him and his
brothers because of their religion.
Mike’s decision, in 1978, to be born again
and subsequently to leave the Catholic
Church and practice as an evangelical
Protestant was, in microcosm, the clos-
ing of a great divide. It was part of a
larger process in which total opposi-
tion to abortion from the moment of
conception, hitherto seen as a specif-
ically Catholic theological obsession,
became the energy powering the fusion
of white Christian conservatives into
a single political and electoral force.
Yet here, too, underneath Pence’s
self-projection, there is a contradic-
tion. Pence has long identified his op-
position to abortion from the moment
of conception as the great motive force
of his political career. “When Karen
and I reentered politics in the summer
of 1999,” he writes, “we explained our
decision to run for Congress to our
three small children by saying that it
was ‘for the babies.’” But his account of
how and when he came to believe this
is quite odd: “I became an advocate
for life five years after the Supreme
Court’s fateful 1973 decision in Roe v.
Wade, when I made a personal deci-
sion to put my faith in Jesus Christ.”
In other words, Pence claims that he
came to see abortion as the defining
issue of politics while he was moving
away from the Catholic Church—the
very body that had (to the general in-
difference, back then, of most evangel-
icals) tried to make it exactly that. This
does not quite add up. It seems rather
more likely that one of the main rea-
sons for Pence’s move away from the
Catholic Church, which bans divorce
and remarriage, was that Karen had
been married and divorced before she
met him. Pence airbrushes this signif-
icant detail from his memoir. The only
hint of it is that he refers to her, at the
time he first met her, as Karen Whita-
ker. Whitaker was her first husband’s
name. He does not mention that she
was born Karen Batten. The omission
allows Pence to skate over the tension
in his life between religious belonging
and the pursuit of love—a tension felt,
of course, by many LGBTQ+ Christians.
Pence’s constant projection of re-
ligious fervor also has the distinct
advantage of making it unnecessary
for him to accept accountability for
his own political choices. God has a
knack for being very easy on him. Be-
cause Pence was doing it “for the ba-
bies” and thus for their Creator, Jesus
saw no problem with his using $13,000
of his 1990 congressional campaign
funds to pay for personal expenses like
his mortgage and Karen’s car. Later
Pence excused his refusal to oppose
Trump’s most egregious behavior thus:
“Barring an issue of principle or mo-
rality, the vice president is there to
support the president, not to present
a divided front to the cabinet or Con-
gress.” Wasn’t it good of God to ensure
that no issue of principle or morality
(like separating little children from
their parents at the Mexican border)
arose over those four years that might
have forced Pence to oppose Trump?
The utility of prayer—which always
seems to produce the answers that
send Pence along the path of least
resistance—is nowhere clearer than
in the way he describes his decision
to stick with Trump in the immediate
aftermath of the release of the Access
Hollywood tape. “Rumors abounded,”
he writes,
that Karen was so upset that
she urged me to abandon the
19
 ticket. Nothing could be further
from the truth. We were both
offended by the tape, but it was
Karen who was the more forgiv-
ing and sympathetic. . . . It was
my wife’s deep faith and belief
Robert Gottlieb (1931–2023)
Robert Gottlieb, New York City, circa 1979; photograph by Nina Bourne
It is probably safe to say that until the
early evening of June 14, readers of se-
rious newspapers and intellectual jour-
nals such as this one were unlikely to
come across references to Vasily Gross-
man and 3D dog posters, George Bal-
anchine and plastic women’s handbags,
Yasujiro Ozu, macramé owls, Lauren
Bacall, and Miss Piggy’s Guide to Life in
a single article. But late that afternoon
the eminent Knopf and New Yorker ed-
itor Robert Gottlieb died, at the age of
ninety-two, and within an hour obitu-
aries and tributes began appearing on-
line—none of which, as far as I could
tell, was able to resist an at least en pas-
sant nod to the dizzying oscillation be-
tween high refinement and utter kitsch
that was the hallmark of his taste.
A source of constant amusement
(and, it must be said, a secret, ongoing
puzzlement) to many of us who knew
him, the vast and unpredictable range
of Bob’s enthusiasms was, nonetheless,
a boon to readers of The New York Re-
view and the handful of other publica-
tions for which he began writing in his
early seventies, after he had left The
New Yorker and embarked on an ener-
getic new life as a writer and critic. His
dozens of contributions to the Review
alone include essays on Bruno Bettel-
heim, Anna May Wong, and Ethel Wa-
ters; some evangelical proselytizing
for foreign writers past and present
20
in forgiveness that guided our
response.
Here, Pence is insulated from the
decision to continue as the politi-
cal partner of a self-declared serial
Daniel Mendelsohn
who he felt were insufficiently known
here (Ivo Andrić, Sebastian Barry); a
not insignificant number of pieces on
classical ballet (the greatest passion of
his life, after reading); and often gleeful
assessments of entire genres, such as
a two-part article about books on near-
death experiences, including one called
Cold Noses at the Pearly Gates: A Book
of Hope for Those Who Have Lost a Pet.
I happened to be staying with Bob
at his home in Miami Beach when he
was working on the near-death ex-
periences piece. This was in 2014; I’d
known him for twenty years by that
point. (We had met in November 1994,
when he was part of a group of people
who gathered at a pizza parlor before
seeing a preposterous sci-fi movie called
Stargate. When the movie was over, we
were shell-shocked, but Bob was elated.
“That was so fabulous!” he chortled, with
a gleam in his eye that, over the next
thirty years, I learned to recognize. “We
have to do this again next week!” That
was the beginning of the Schlock Movie
Club, which met pretty much every Sat-
urday or Sunday morning over the next
dozen years or so to see the worst movie
of the week.) As usual when preparing
a major piece for the Review, he was
lying stretched out on a faded blue
sofa in the “Florida Room”—it has
windows shaped like portholes and is
decorated with, among other things,
molester of women by a double layer
of protection: Karen tells him how
to respond, and God tells Karen.
It would be interesting to know
whether Jesus, in his conversations
with Pence, has ever suggested a
a lamp made out of a stuffed alliga-
tor—surrounded by piles of books he
had ordered, which teetered squishily
atop the sofa cushions. I was curled up
in a matching loveseat, catercorner to
Bob (he would wince when people said
or wrote “catty-corner”), poring over
a scholarly book about Sappho for a
piece I was working on. Suddenly he
turned to me. “Enough of Greek lyric!”
he cried. “This is really great!”—at
which point he began declaiming aloud,
beaming, from the opening pages of
Cold Noses at the Pearly Gates.
“G reat” was a word that was likely
to come up when you talked to
Bob, although it was hard to predict to
what text, object, or activity it might at-
tach. Dickens was the greatest novelist
in English, War and Peace the great-
est novel ever written, Shakespeare the
greatest writer, period, Balanchine the
greatest choreographer. Les Misérables
wasn’t the best nineteenth-century
French novel, but it was the greatest.
Then again, a brightly colored 1960s
rattan handbag shaped like a fish, or
a 1930s chrome-plated electric cof-
fee urn with orange Bakelite handles
(“Every room needs an orange ac-
cent”), or the way that Kerry Washing-
ton would declare “We’re done here!”
at the climax of a particularly heated
course of action that might harm his
.
quest for power. But, then, Jesus has
not had to do that because, in the
end, Donald Trump has done it for
him.
—June 21, 2023
exchange in Scandal—or, indeed, any
number of curiosities discovered while
flea-marketing, another long-standing
weekend-morning tradition—could
have what Bob liked to call “the element
of greatness.” The E of G, as the gaggle
of schlockers and flea-marketers who
gathered around him came to call it, was
the hard-to-define but impossible-to-
live-without quality that separated the
merely interesting or entertaining from
what was truly worthy of his (and there-
fore your) attention: the unexpectedly
delightful, the authentically expressive,
the productively provocative.
At least some of this, I can now see,
was Bob “modeling” for me (a term he
would have loathed) what he clearly
thought of as a proper education.
When I first knew him, he enjoyed
teasing me out of my hifalutin, grad-
school notions of where “greatness”
might lie, which turned out to be in TV
series such as Broadchurch or Borgen,
say, as well as in Antigone. Although
Bob had a first-class formal educa-
tion—Columbia under Lionel Tril-
ling, Cambridge—he was ultimately
self-taught in the way that many peo-
ple who are voracious and indiscrimi-
nate readers in their formative years
are self-taught: because he sampled
everything for himself firsthand, his
relationship to books and, later, to all
culture was wholly unfiltered by re-
ceived opinion or “theory” or schools
of thought. As a result, he was utterly
without intellectual or cultural preju-
dice—not at all a bad model for an as-
piring critic. He went on teaching that
lesson to the very end. Days before he
died, when he was terribly weakened
and confined to a hospital bed, he was
lecturing me and an understandably
wide-eyed nurse about the “right”
translation of The Brothers Karama-
zov (Constance Garnett) and the im-
portance of Ethel Merman’s career.
This is why so many of the obituaries
and tributes, when amusedly mention-
ing Bob’s wacky-seeming eclecticism,
were missing the point. The handbags
and Miss Piggy were never a form of
intellectual slumming, never a way of
trying to earn (let alone show off) a kind
of pop bona fides, never “ironic.” He
really did love that stuff—he really did
think it was great. What spoke to Bob,
what he believed in and trusted and
fostered in his own writers, was work
that had honest intentions and stylistic
conviction, qualities he found equally in
Balanchine’s Jewels and Extraordinary
Attorney Woo, a South Korean TV series
about an autistic young lawyer, which
he was trying furiously to persuade me
GOTT LI EB FAMI LY
to watch when he fell ill. Since he hated
.
sentimentality, I probably shouldn’t
say here that I’ve now started watch-
ing it and just wish I could call to tell
him he was right.
The New York Review
 The Republic of Translation
Historiae
by Antonella Anedda,
translated from the Italian
and the Sardinian by Patrizio
Ceccagnoli and Susan Stewart.
New York Review Books,
151 pp., $16.00 (paper)
Common Life
by Stéphane Bouquet, translated
from the French by Lindsay Turner.
Nightboat, 147 pp., $16.95 (paper)
“There is a big secret about sex,” wrote
Leo Bersani in 1987. “Most people don’t
like it.” The same might be said of
translation, which many readers se-
cretly consider a necessary evil. Even
the very best produces a lingering frus-
tration, an irritable awareness that we
didn’t get what we came for. If transla-
tion is like sex, it often leaves us with
a case of epididymal hypertension, or,
in the vernacular, blue balls.
One of the worst things about a bad
translation is that it’s unforgettable.
The Pre-Raphaelite artist, designer,
and utopian socialist William Morris
took a run at Homer in 1887 and hit
the wall hard. “Tell me, O Muse, of the
Shifty,” his translation of the Odyssey
begins, “the man who wandered afar,/
After the Holy Burg, Troy-town, he had
wasted with war.” When I e-mailed a
friend to ask if he had any bathetic
examples, he instantly replied with the
last stanza of J. B. Leishman’s transla-
tion of Rilke’s “Autumn Day”:
He’ll not build now, who has no
house awaiting.
Who’s now alone, for long will so
remain:
sit late, read, write long letters,
and again
return to restlessly perambulating
the avenues of parks when leaves
downrain.
The consequences of infelicity can be
serious, though not as serious as they
once were. In a brief against William
Tyndale, who published his translation
of the New Testament from Greek to
English in 1525, Thomas More com-
plained that Tyndale “hath mistrans-
lated three words of great weight,”
tweaking the language to serve his
own egalitarian ends: for presbyteros
he wrote “senior” (not “priest”), for ek-
klesia “congregation” (not “church”),
for agapē “love” (not “charity”). “Now
do these names in our English tongue
neither express the things that [Tyn-
dale] meant by them,” wrote More, “and
also there appeareth . . . that he had
a mischievous mind in the change.”
Tyndale was executed for heresy
in 1536.
A ntonella Anedda has referred to
Sardinian, the language she grew
up hearing and speaking, as a “pre-
scholastic language, thick with con-
sonants and shorn of adjectives.” In
a new translation of her book His-
toriae by Patrizio Ceccagnoli and
GR EG BU RAK
Susan Stewart, some of the original
texts appear only in Italian, some in
Italian and Sardinian, a linguistic
and tonal contrast that sounds the
July 20, 2023
Anahid Nersessian
Greg Burak: Landscape I, 2020
distance between island and main-
land, home and nation, domestic and
public life.
Anedda is especially attuned to how
dialect signifies expulsion as well as
attachment, and to how every trans-
lation is also an accident report, or
a record of casualties. The poems in
Historiae negotiate between two dif-
ferent forms of exile. The first is Aned-
da’s psychic dislocation following the
death of her mother; the second is the
refugee crisis in Europe. Without col-
lapsing the world-historical into the
intimate, Anedda offers an unsenti-
mental portrait of the sort of mind
that never forgets the one while think-
ing about the other. “At the radio,” she
writes, “hell buzzes.”
Historiae takes its title from Taci-
tus’s chronicle of the same name. Writ-
ten roughly between AD 100 and 110,
his Historiae was intended as an in-
quiry—the Greek word historía means
“research”—into the recent history of
the Roman Empire, from roughly AD
69 to 96. All that remains of the work,
however, stops at the beginning of the
reign of Vespasian, who is credited
with restoring stability to the empire
after a year of civil war. The epigraph
to Anedda’s poem “Exiles” comes from
Tacitus’s description of that turbulent
period: “plenum exiliis mare, infecti
caedibus scopuli,” or, in the English
that takes twice as many words, “the
sea swarmed with exiles and the sea
cliffs were stained with murder.”
That was then, and “today,” Anedda
reports,
I think of two, out of the
many who drowned
just a few meters from these
sunny coasts,
found under the hull, in a tight
embrace.
I wonder if coral will grow on their
bones
and what salt does to the blood.
Anedda’s Italian rhymes; mercifully
the translation does not. Still, Cec-
cagnoli and Stewart have preserved
the terseness of her idiom, which as-
pires, as she says in “Annales,” to the
austerity of Latin: “The naked facts,/
the near absence of adjectives,/the
gerund that avoids useless turns of
phrase.” Much of the prosodic force
of Anedda’s writing comes from the
tension that builds between her rhe-
torical economy and what she calls the
“dripping” of modern Italian, a word
that, in its benign sense, suggests the
viscous, hypersaturated sound of the
language and, more darkly, the water
and blood that hug its history and
coastline. “I search,” Anedda writes,
“in my father’s/old books of forensic
medicine” and learn
that the precise
term is livor mortis.
Blood gathers in the lower body
and coagulates
first red then livid finally turning
to dust
it might—yes—melt into the
brine.
A nedda was born in Rome in 1955
but her family’s roots were in Cor-
sica and Sardinia, and her poetry often
confronts the long history of Sardinia’s
subordination. Sardinia’s reputation
as a land of “bandits clad in sheep-
skins,” to quote Cicero, goes back to
the Roman Empire, as does its legacy
as a place of exile: in AD 19 the em-
peror Tiberius deported four thousand
Jews from Rome along with members
of an Egyptian Isis cult and sent them
to Sardinia, “to quell,” as Tacitus put it,
“the brigandage of the place.” As late
as 1921 D. H. Lawrence was locating
Sardinia “outside the circuit of civi-
lization,” a place that “has no history,
no date, no race, no offering.” “It lies
within the net of . . . European civili-
zation,” Lawrence writes, “but it isn’t
landed yet.”
In “Contra Scauro,” a short poem
in Sardinian, Anedda tells of an inci-
dent in which a man named Scaurus,
proconsul of Sardinia in 54 BC , was
accused of raping a local woman who
later died by suicide. Some Sards trav-
eled to Rome to testify against him,
and Anedda imagines them encounter-
ing the city as a “glut of beauty, taste
and linen tunics,” in Jamie McKen-
drick’s translation. Cicero was Scau-
rus’s lawyer, and he impugned the
Sards as “powerless in resources [and]
treacherous by descent,” not to men-
tion polluted by “an admixture of Afri-
can blood.” Anedda quotes Cicero—“A
truthless people . . . [a] land where even
the honey is gall”—and then dazzlingly
annuls him:
But his name, now,
tiny and rapid, flits among the
stones, and just as
then, witnesses die, the bee
labours on.
Honey endures—a tongue of salt,
arbutus, thistle.
The word for “tongue” here is limba,
and the first poem in Historiae is
called “Limbas,” or “Languages.” It
too is about the endurance of a cul-
ture inseparable from the past that
has forged or, to use Anedda’s more
rustic metaphor, kneaded it:
Once in a while I use a language
of mine
I invent it, kneading it with the
past
I don’t hand it over except in
translation.
Even to a nonnative speaker, the
acoustic differences between Sar-
dinian and Italian are striking: the
hard and heavy d of the former is
sounded as a neat and percussive t
in the latter (tandu/tanto, passado/
passato), and in the last line of the
poem the two languages pull almost
entirely away from each other only
to fall together fittingly on the final
words, “in traduzione,” which is the
same in both non-English texts. You
can see what Anedda means by call-
ing Sardinian profound, for each word
seems to beat against its sense, some-
thing like the voices “of the Germani”
that, in another poem, she describes
as “screen[ed] . . . with shields,” “dark-
ened” to intimidate “their enemies.”
T he keyword of Historiae is suf-
fering, or, as Anedda says, male,
dolore, pena. These words have dif-
ferent connotations, and Ceccagnoli
and Stewart are bold to translate them
all as “pain,” a choice that might have
flattened the book’s descriptive tex-
tures and thus its ethical complexity.
In this case the effect is productive,
highlighting the economy of Aned-
da’s language and making sure that
those who read only the English trans-
lations won’t neglect her preoccupa-
tions. More importantly, the reduction
of pain’s varieties to a monosyllable
captures its stupefying surplus, the
certainty that every day, like every
century, will only offer more of the
same. In “August 2017, Chronicles,” an
elderly couple rescued from a fire are
indistinguishable from the charred
bodies of Pompeii:
two just like them found at the
front door
saved but with their old skulls half
burned.
Too old to run away,
borne in arms toward healing,
21
 crying out incredulously when
they are touched.
“Saved,” the word that carries the most
crucial information, is tossed off the
cliff by an enjambment and buried by
the arresting image of “old skulls half
burned,” so that you might read this
poem several times before realizing
that the couple did not, in fact, die.
When it comes to describing her
mother’s old age, illness, and death,
she does not flinch. “She suddenly
vanished/into a television tunnel,”
she writes in “Stars,” and “beneath,
putrefaction began”:
When I opened the window she
complained,
the air wasn’t obliged to disperse
the pain
and the pain did not have to be
shared.
When I’d lie next to her to hold
her hand she’d sheer away.
Once she was dead—instructed by
a French funeral website—
I tidied her face
by inserting a wad of cotton in her
throat: it worked,
suddenly she was young again,
the mother that she would be.
Unlike the bodies under the sea, the
body of Anedda’s mother is seen up
close, available to the tenderness that
it nonetheless refuses; in another
poem that describes her mother uncon-
scious and sedated in a hospital bed,
“her breath digging into her lungs,”
Anedda is almost triumphant “to hold
that hand/that cannot” squeeze hers
back. Later, her mother is present only
as a “vapor,” a “nothingness” grasped
in vain: “‘She wasn’t there’—I said to
myself—‘it was a sickle of cloud/curv-
ing up the side of the moon.’”
Like cleaning out a dead person’s
closet, “uncertain about what to do-
nate, keep, toss,” or “clean[ing] fish
in the sink,” poetry turns out to be a
quotidian labor that is a way of “not
thinking about time, yet thinking
about it.” It’s also women’s work—re-
call Anedda’s description of translation
as “kneading.” The idea, admirably un-
derstated, is that domestic drudgery
is an alternative form of history, one
that tells the stories and marks the
graves of those who are mown over by
empire. It is not heroic, merely con-
sistent, and it lives in the languages
that are “mixed with thorns and bram-
bles,” spoken in remote or disregarded
places: in the home, by a deathbed, on
the road from one inhospitable place
to another, between a ruin and an un-
imaginable future.
C ommon Life, Lindsay Turner’s En-
glish rendition of Stéphane Bou-
quet’s La Vie commune (published in
France in 2016), achieves something
rare: an alignment between text and
translation so seamless it seems to
create a whole new object, neither orig-
inal nor variant but a lustrous synthe-
sis of sensibilities. To some extent, this
might be because Turner and Bouquet
are an unusually sympathetic match:
Bouquet, in addition to being a poet
and a choreographer, is also a screen-
writer, and Turner has a master’s de-
gree in cinema studies. But I suspect it
also has a lot to do with Bouquet’s in-
fluences, which are as much American
as European, perhaps even more so.
22
The most prominent of those influ-
ences are James Schuyler and Frank
O’Hara, whose urbane melancholy
and reflections on queer life are not
so much echoed as elongated by Bou-
quet’s poetic Polaroids of a twenty-
first-century vie bohème. For all its
contemporary references—climate
change, dating apps, wink emojis—
Common Life radiates the same intelli-
gent loneliness as The Crystal Lithium
or Lunch Poems, and gazes out upon
a shared landscape of sidewalks and
city parks, cramped but livable apart-
ments and empty coffee cups. The
third poem, “Elegy Again,” squarely
situates itself and by extension Bou-
quet in a gay literary and intellectual
tradition that has been disproportion-
ately defined by mourning on levels
both intimate and collective, while
also grounding that tradition in the
present tense of capitalism, with its
“agonies of brand-name kisses and
of/luxury caresses/and expensive
blowjobs” and spasmodic episodes
of resistance:
And now in
Brussels, Place de la Bourse,
gray at 9am
and on strike so there’s much less
traffic, someone
already boozy rooster red
apologizes, “Everybody has to eat,”
well, ok go ahead and
in the next streets
persist promises of utopian
socialism, promises I know
how to make last
on demand.
You don’t need to look at the French
to appreciate the thoughtfulness of
Turner’s translation, but consider
the way she has captured the acous-
tic farce of Bouquet’s “rouge de coq
alcool,” transposing its jaunty plosives
into the alliteration of “rooster red”
and retaining the dribbling vowels of
“rouge” and “alcool” in her “boozy”
and “rooster.” The shift is both shrewd
and unobtrusive, allowing the poem
to stay in Bouquet’s refined colloquial
register, which combines phrases like
“alors allez vas-y” (“well, ok go ahead”)
and “C’est le merveilleux/matin à
cause/de la vibrante épaisseur à nous
reconfiée de la lumière” (“It’s morn-
ing and it’s marvelous due to/the vi-
brant thickness once again entrusted
to us by the light”) modestly and
with ease.
T he largest part of Common Life is
a poetic drama called Monsters,
a “play for eleven actors or more, or
fewer.” Monsters is bookended by three
gorgeous lyric poems, which introduce
the volume, and three texts in prose,
which conclude it. The first of those
lyrics, “As an Excuse,” is painfully
romantic, and this sets the tone for
everything that follows. Even if Mon-
sters seems at times to channel a con-
tempt for the bourgeoisie worthy of
Godard (whose 1963 film Contempt is
mentioned by one of the characters),
its perspective remains essentially
compassionate:
I’m thinking of a little poem about
the one who wondered
what pills I was taking
at night. Pills against absence.
He’s sitting
so close oh I’d love
to write one more sadness on the
inaccessible shelter
of his shoulders.
Bouquet suggests that these lines
are “salvos/from the interior trou-
badours”; they’re also dragged for-
ward into a very modern world where
seagulls follow
the rivers from landfill to landfill,
because
they’re good examples
of adjectives: avid, famished,
starving, and the whole
linguistic list
that means simply, I miss you.
The poem ends with a grim image of
being “suffocated by polluted dust,” a
casualty of “a hostile environment” in
which the persistence of love does not
necessarily mean its survival or ours.
These themes are animated by the
interlocking plots of Monsters, at
whose center lies a commune with
eleven members, “a group of sweetly
elated young people [who] have taken
over a house and are planning a major
action,” even if they “don’t yet know
what.” Other events, set in office build-
ings, apartments, and unnamed va-
cation spots, take the place of this
deferred rebellion. A wealthy couple
disappears on holiday; two women de-
bate whether “the world can change”;
a sex worker gets paid just to sleep;
three people exchange messages on “a
sex site” (the more candid French is un
site du cul, which literally means “ass
site”); a housekeeper steals a wallet
left behind in a hotel room. Conver-
sations ricochet from the banal to the
revelatory, as between this “intellec-
tual couple, driving or pretending to
be driving”:
H E : We had kids because life
was so peaceful it was getting
dangerous.
SHE : You really remember that or
you’d like to remember that?
HE : You mean that, in fact, we were
afraid of failing the exams and we
didn’t know how to survive. Our
parents were bugging us. Mark was
an accident. Probably. But that’s
the only reason to get older. You
can drown everything in the luke-
warm water of memory.
SHE : Everything. Almost every-
thing, yes.
Later, the couple share a fantasy that
they are about to drown—“I’ve still
got a square of salted chocolate in my
left pants pocket. What irony!” cries
the man—and then “make love with
unusual ardor,” supercharged by the
thrill of rehearsing finitude in each
other’s arms.
One of the men from the site du cul
winds up in a jail cell, from which he
directs a confession offstage or, per-
haps, to the audience, a lyric apostro-
phe set in Bouquet’s dreamlike but
earthy theater. “Listen, I’m sorry,” he
begins, “I love you,” even if
I only saw you once. It’s a little
crazy. But I remember that we
stayed huddled together for seven
hours, like barnacles against their
rocks. Your back was full of light,
you would’ve thought there were
electric lightbulbs inside. You cov-
ered me methodically in your saliva,
like a snail. We listened to our re-
spective pulses beating at the ends
of our fingertips. I exploded with
happiness. I felt complete prox-
imity, for once nowhere else ex-
cept in proximity. . . . Please release
me back out of the world where it’s
possible to go everywhere.
This is about desire, yes, but it is also
a theory of la vie commune, of the no-
tion that we might live with other be-
ings “in proximity” without collapsing
into complete identification with them.
Monsters refers regularly to political
crises—to French fascist paranoia
about refugees, to the exorbitant cost
of living, to strikes, to the surveillance
state, to protests “against the waste
of perishable food”—and it is set in a
time when people go everywhere but
get nowhere, orbiting the world with
and like commodities, cut off from the
possibility of a truly social existence.
Perhaps, Bouquet suggests, if we called
that sort of existence “love,” we might
long for it as ardently and explicitly as
we long for the limited satisfactions
of conventional romance.
C ommon Life is threaded with lit-
erary references—to Wordsworth,
Seneca, Cicero, Inger Christensen,
Takuboku Ishikawa, and, in the first
lines of “As an Excuse,” Sappho’s Frag-
ment 31. In his Latin riff on that very
famous poem, which figures proximity
not as communal utopia but as pri-
vate torture, Catullus writes, “Ille mi
par esse deo videtur/. . . qui sedens
adversus identidem te/spectat et
audit,” or “He seems to me to be like
a god . . . he who sits opposite watch-
ing and hearing you again and again.”
Bouquet too longs for a lover who is
“sitting/so close,” perhaps to him or,
more excruciatingly, to another, and
he too describes that lover as someone
who “makes the world/vibrate faster,”
as Sappho’s did when longing made
her ears buzz and her limbs tremble.
It’s the sort of sensuous disturbance
Louis Zukofsky registers in his eccen-
tric rendition of Catullus’s lines, based
as much on the sound of the Latin as
on its content:
linked tongue set torpid, tenuous
support a-
flame a day mown down, sound
tone supped up in its
tinkling, in ears humming, twin
eyes tug under
luminous—a night.
Allusions are also translations, inso-
far as they export language from one
context to another in a way that invari-
ably alters the original meaning. And
like translation, they can suggest an
essentially lateral, even democratic, re-
lationship among literary texts, along
with the notion of a culture that is
communal. That, of course, is a highly
idealistic proposition: culture is not
held in common, and the world of lit-
erature is no more egalitarian than
the world of its readers. Still, a good
translation—which might be consci-
entious, playful, tentative, scholarly,
or any other number of things, in any
number of combinations—allows us
to access that ideal, to act as if poems
were vitally available resources for
.
thought instead of treasures behind
plate glass. It’s no accident that Bou-
quet’s band of subversives steals books
as well as electricity.
The New York Review
 The Pregnancy Plot
Reproduction
by Louisa Hall.
Ecco, 209 pp., $30.00
The first thing you’ll hear about preg-
nancy in the contemporary novel is:
there is nausea. Morning sickness
makes the world “tilt slightly,” the un-
named narrator in Louisa Hall’s Re-
production reports. It interferes with
thinking, writing, getting anything
done. Above all, it creates an obliga-
tion to make excuses and break off.
When the narrator misses meetings
in her first ten weeks, she makes sure
to pretend “it was just because I was
selfish and careless, and not because of
morning sickness.” Similarly, the (also
unnamed) narrator of Kate Zambre-
no’s Drifts (2020) never tells her stu-
dents why she rushes out of class to
vomit. (“They probably just think I’m
gross.”) Dorothy, an adjunct professor
in Christine Smallwood’s The Life of
the Mind (2021), puts on a brave face to
her friends.1 “No nausea,” she insists.
Nausea is the opposite of creativity;
nausea is incoherence, avoidance, delay.
It would be easy to mistake Repro-
duction for a study of this strangely
suspended state—for a book about
getting nothing done. The narrator
has set herself the task of writing “a
novel about Mary Shelley,” finding that
Shelley’s experiences of pregnancy and
miscarriage bear some resemblance to
her own. But the nausea makes writ-
ing too difficult, and instead we get
flickers of Shelley’s story: the grief
of losing her two-week-old daughter
(“Dream that my little baby came to
life again—that it had only been cold
and that we rubbed it by the fire and it
lived,” Shelley wrote in her journal); her
nickname for her tiny son, “Willmouse”;
the gloom of the summer of 1816, when
volcanic ash blotted out the sun and
she began to write Frankenstein.
The narrator’s own story is just as
loose and choppy. A writer and teacher
of creative writing, she is always start-
ing over, as she moves from Austin to
New York City to Bozeman to Iowa
City, from apartment to apartment,
college town to college town. She trav-
els to American wildernesses—Glacier
National Park, Las Vegas—for no real
reason, except to keep moving or to
experience dislocation in new settings.
In the spirit of much autofiction, her
attention seems to alight on every-
thing except the planned work. Details
of daily life intrude (her dog’s fear of
cardboard boxes, the abandonment
of her houseplants when she leaves
New York) and an avalanche of news
presses into the novel, which begins in
2018 and ends in 2021. Families sepa-
rated at the US–Mexico border, floods
and wildfires, abortion laws in Texas
and Alabama are simply noted as they
happen, forming not so much part of
the story as the disorienting backdrop
to a set of events that refuse to con-
nect. Among these are the pregnancies
themselves, which either stop abruptly
or proceed unpredictably. Disjoint-
edness is the only mode that makes
sense, that can reflect the highly po-
1
See Michael Gorra, “Promise Miscarried,”
The New York Review, May 27, 2021.
July 20, 2023
Laura Marsh
Illustration by Tatjana Prenzel
liticized, minimally supported expe-
rience of being pregnant in America.
But this is only half the story of
Reproduction, which also draws from
Shelley a sense of dark experiment.
Hall’s novel is really two separate but
related works: the novel about the nar-
rator who can’t write her book, and that
story’s weird outgrowth—a suspense-
driven novella about the narrator’s bi-
ologist friend, who takes science into
her own hands in a Frankenstein-tinged
effort to conceive. While the first story
relates the anxieties of childbearing
today with grinding realism, the sec-
ond tries to imagine a state that in-
creasingly seems to belong to science
fiction: reproductive freedom.
T here is a rare and jarring moment
of pregnant contentment near the
beginning of Reproduction. The nar-
rator, a writer in her mid-thirties,
has just arrived in Bozeman, with
her husband and dog in tow. In this
new place she conceives immediately.
At the clinic for her first ultrasound,
she sees all the “other young mothers
with various sizes of bellies” in the
waiting room and feels “immediately
welcomed” into this “world inhabited
solely by women.”
It’s the kind of nice thought that
cannot last; the rest of the novel is
more or less devoted to shattering the
notion of an easy pregnancy. Even be-
fore the narrator learns that anything
is wrong, she is filled with forebod-
ing. Her early weeks are steeped in
the secrecy of the first trimester. She
goes from class to class, carrying the
knowledge of “the baby growing from
the size of a poppyseed to a cherry”
and counting off the weeks before she
can tell anyone (“six and then eight
and then nine”) on her own, private
calendar. All while feeling so “seasick”
that she cannot put her thoughts in
writing.
When she miscarries, the silence
does not break; it deepens. There is the
devastating, wordless way she learns
that she is no longer pregnant: the so-
nogram technician is spreading lubri-
cant over her belly; they are chatting
and both looking up at the monitor;
then “suddenly the technician stopped
talking.” There is also the incommu-
nicable aftermath of her loss. Every-
one thinks they already understand
the situation. What more is there to
say? “Everyone . . . told me how common
it was. Miscarriage, they told me, is
another one of these things, like eat-
ing disorders and rape, that happen
to most women.” She is supposed to
find solace in “the commonness of fe-
male suffering” and move on.
Except, of course, suffering is in-
conveniently specific. In her case, the
miscarriage has both happened and
not happened. She learns that the
baby stopped developing and was
partially “reabsorbed” back into her
body, but her body has not stopped
being pregnant. The symptoms of
pregnancy continue without the pro-
cess itself: she still suffers the sick-
ness, the sore breasts, the vivid and
disturbing dreams. (“I’d had a baby as
small as a religious figurine. It was a
pale ivory deity the size of a cherry. It
had an elephant’s snout.” And later, “I
had been placed in a storage unit for
women who couldn’t get pregnant.”)
Her two subsequent pregnancies
are no smoother, no less surprising.
One of the remarkable qualities of Re-
production is its way of showing the
strangeness of medical procedures as
they actually happen. After that first
ultrasound, the nurse gives her a tis-
sue to wipe her tears, but she needs a
second tissue to clean off the K-Y jelly.
Later, giving birth to a daughter, she
undergoes excruciating pain because
she initially refuses an epidural. The
pain of childbirth, she had always be-
lieved, was natural, though she now
realizes that the antibiotics and Pito-
cin and doctors and hospitals are just
as artificial as anesthetic. The pain
makes her think for a moment that her
dog is more useful than her husband:
“The dog, who did not try to help, who
did not try to do anything to alleviate
my suffering, but only huddled there
with me, his whole body trembling.”
The anesthesiologist, when he finally
arrives, sings a “carefree little song”
as he administers the injection.
Her third pregnancy pulls her into
the bewildering world of rare medi-
cal conditions: terminology that she
cannot possibly understand without
looking it up online; online commu-
nities that function as “enormous,
throbbing sinkholes of grief.” All this
trying for a baby also comes with a lit-
eral price. Reproduction is a novel that
tells you about the medical bills that
arrive after a miscarriage. Eight thou-
sand dollars in Montana, because even
though the narrator has health insur-
ance, she has to meet the deductible,
which is eight thousand dollars. Ten
dollars in Iowa, because of “the return
of the copay once you’re no longer car-
rying a living baby,” she grimly notes.
The visceral and the political have
a tendency to combine in terrifying
new ways. Twice the narrator needs
a D&C —a dilation and curettage, or
surgical abortion to end the pregnancy
safely. Without the procedure, the body
may eventually discharge the remain-
ing fetal tissue on its own, but there’s
also a risk that it won’t and “the woman
is forced to carry her empty egg sac for
years.” The sac can harden over time
into a “stone baby,” causing “lifelong
infertility, or really, lifelong pregnancy.”
The precise years and locations of
her particular crises take on an absurd
significance. In 2018 in Montana and
2021 in Iowa, she gets the procedure.
But in Texas, where she lived just a
few years earlier, several women were
recently denied a D&C and are suing
the state for endangering their lives.
She is acutely aware of the knife-edge
quality of the changing law and the
changing Supreme Court that—just
months after the novel ends—will
overturn Roe: as she prepares for the
first procedure, she reads with weary
disgust a magazine article about Brett
Kavanaugh’s confirmation.
A s much as the catastrophes and
cruelty of 2018–2021 make each
pregnancy feel riskier, they present a
problem for the imagination. The nar-
rator spends the Trump years and the
pandemic immersed in the same news
most readers spent the same years
wading through. She is dimly aware
at all times of awful new developments,
but does not make much of them.
Each item of actual news that enters
the novel makes its atmosphere less,
rather than more, real. She reads an
article about ICE ’s family separation
policy; she sees “trucks with Trump
bumper stickers, Confederate flags,
white supremacist decals.” The tone is
23
 “UNAPOLOGETICALLY
SEXY AND
INFINITELY
THE AV CLUB
WISE”

“SEDUCTIVE...
A THREEWAY TANGLE
OF DESIRE AND
CONFUSION”
SCREEN INTERNATIONAL

FRANZ ROGOWSKI BEN WHISHAW

ONLY IN THEATERS GET TICKETS

AUGUST 4 mubi.com/passages

24 The New York Review

 AND ADÈLE EXARCHOPOULOS
WRITTEN BY
DIRECTED BY MAURICIO ZACHARIAS
IRA SACHS & IRA SACHS

July 20, 2023 25

frequently glib, a performance of aware-
ness rather than a fully formed thought
about the horrors listed. On her trip to
Vegas she suddenly remembers that her
hotel is “the hotel where the shooter
was staying who killed all those people
at the country music festival.” “Every
day, it seemed, there was a new mass
shooting,” she remarks from a comfort-
able distance. “Every month, a Muslim
ban was instated or overturned.”
Even the pervasive indications of
climate crisis feel choreographed to
show how firmly the narrator grasps
the issue. In New York City the fall
is so warm that the ginkgo leaves do
not change color. In Pennsylvania the
narrator sees a dead tree swarmed by
crows at a motel—where coinciden-
tally the TV is playing news about “the
rallies in Charlottesville that had hap-
pened exactly one year before.” When
she and her family enter Bozeman, the
road into town is lined with firetrucks.
The world is shifting beyond recogni-
tion, yet it can all be summed up in a
wearily familiar list of the “looming
threats of global warming, the murder-
ous gangs of police, the school shoot-
ings, the endless wars, the restrictions
on reproductive rights.” The subject
headings are so familiar that it would
take an extraordinary effort to render
them newly disturbing.
Reproduction is not that effort. Its
unnerving and haunting moments
come mostly from its relatively few,
scattered passages on the narrator’s
fixation with Mary Shelley. She finds
that parts of Shelley’s story “detached
themselves from the page and clung
to my life”—not just the loss of her
daughter in 1815 or the vulnerability
of Willmouse, who died at the age of
three in 1819, but also the apocalyp-
tic weather of the period, a parallel
with the climate shocks of the present.
The narrator’s interludes on Shelley
allow her to conjure the dark summer
of 1816, when Shelley, her husband
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Claire Clairmont,
and Lord Byron stayed indoors with
“candles lit, reading ghost stories and
morbid poems.” The years Hall covers,
“after the fall of the Napoleonic em-
pire,” had their own political upheav-
als and their own pandemic, cholera.
For the narrator, in the first part of
the novel, reading Shelley is an out-
let for otherwise inexpressible grief.
Shelley’s letters to Thomas Jefferson
Hogg after the death of her daughter
are strikingly spare. “My dearest Hogg
my baby is dead,” she writes.
Will you come see me as soon
as you can. I wish to see you—it
was perfectly well when I went to
bed—I awoke in the night to give
it suck it appeared to be sleeping
so quietly that I would not awake
it. It was dead then, but we did not
find that out till morning—from
its appearance it evidently died of
convulsions—Will you come—you
are so calm a creature & Shelley is
afraid of a fever from the milk—
for I am no longer a mother now.
Those last words later ring through
the narrator’s own realization that her
first pregnancy is over, and her sting-
ing self-reproach for being “foolish”
enough to identify with all those “other
young mothers with various sizes of
bellies” in the waiting room a moment
earlier, given “the fact that I was no
longer a mother.”
26
She begins to see Frankenstein as a
story about the wish to bring a missing
child back to life—as another version
of the dream Shelley described after
losing her daughter (“that we rubbed
it by the fire and it lived”). In her in-
troduction to Frankenstein, Shelley
recalls forming the idea of a student
who imparts the “slight spark of life”
to a creature of “imperfect anima-
tion.” Rereading this after her D&C ,
the narrator observes that she, like
Shelley and Victor Frankenstein, “had
also conceived a creature of imperfect
animation, a creature who . . . had sub-
sided again into dead matter.” She un-
derstands Frankenstein as something
like a newly bereaved mother who
goes to what he had once imagined
was the cradle of life, and finds,
instead, a transient existence: a
creature not dead and not fully
living . . . something one half step
away from really living, and yet
somehow all the more affecting.
In this reading, Frankenstein isn’t
about the hubris of tinkering with life
itself, but about the desperate longing
for a child.
Perhaps the most touching thing
about that reading is its willful selec-
tivity. It ignores another line in Shel-
ley’s introduction, where she writes
that the student “would hope that, left
to itself, the slight spark of life which
he had communicated would fade.” He
wants the living being he has created
to die—a feeling Hall’s narrator never
shares. In her grief, she ignores the
details that do not fit, though she also
never quite runs with her chosen the-
ory. “It was interesting. It was very in-
teresting,” she thinks. And it is: the
parts of Shelley’s biography that she
relays are interesting, the letters and
journal entries she quotes are eloquent
and painful, but they do not quite com-
bine with her own story or anything
else. She manages to complete a draft
of the “novel about Mary Shelley” but
concludes that it “wasn’t a very good
novel” and throws it away.
A s much as Reproduction is about
pregnancy, it’s also about the lim-
its of a certain genre of storytelling.
The first part progresses like a novel
by Zambreno or Sheila Heti. There
is a plot in the loose sense that the
narrator has an ultimate goal (in this
case, giving birth to a child), but Hall
has little use for suspense, direct dia-
logue, or any number of other devices
for building narrative tension. In a
style that mixes essayistic reflection
with journalistic observation, the nar-
rator often reports on books she has
recently read, the results of “research
rabbit holes” she has gone down, or
discussions about genre she has had
in class. A book like this stands or falls
on the narrator’s voice and the qual-
ity of her thoughts and judgments, a
performance that Heti and Zambreno
have an unusual ability to sustain;
Reproduction is a heavier book that
often aims for emotional force (“I am
no longer a mother now”) rather than
arresting ideas.
The first time Reproduction builds
momentum is in its novella-like final
section (titled “Science Fiction, 2021”),
which attempts a more conventional,
propulsive narrative. Anna, a friend
from the narrator’s past life in Aus-
tin (about which we know little except
that it was a long time ago and there
was an unhappy marriage), appears
in Iowa City, where the narrator now
lives. Anna is something of a mystery.
She and the narrator have spent sev-
eral wine-soaked confessional eve-
nings together without growing any
closer: “She seemed somewhat stoned,
and often she was, so you never felt as
though you really knew her.” Anna is
a scientist—a different species from
this writer who spends all day think-
ing about another writer.
The more immediate mystery is
why Anna wants to meet and why the
narrator has agreed to the meeting,
since she doesn’t really like Anna and
has lost the habit of socializing amid
her pregnancy attempts, her moves,
and pandemic isolation. (It’s also the
first time that her own actions are
mysterious to her and that her own
motivations—rather than her suffer-
ing—are examined.) These questions
are not especially original, but they
pull the narrator out of her looping,
introspective mode. The prospect of
seeing Anna again gets her to “brush
up old habits, to recall old ways of tell-
ing stories: the little plots, scenes, and
dialogue. The settings, the sprawling
casts of characters.” Before the two
women even meet, the narrator has
built up a fuller portrait of Anna than
of any other character in the novel—
including herself. Anna has a past—a
detailed and volatile romantic history;
a career linked to specific skills and
ambitions; episodes of caginess and
vulnerability—all of which the nar-
rator mulls over as she tries to imag-
ine this latest version of Anna and to
work out why she has appeared again.
Anna, it turns out, wants the same
thing as the narrator. She’s in her for-
ties, has no partner, has tried for a baby
unsuccessfully, and is determined at
last to make it happen. Her attempts
to conceive do not at first appear to be
out of the ordinary. She freezes em-
bryos. She picks out a sperm donor
and jokes with the narrator about the
quirks of the process: the agencies
don’t release photos of the donors as
adults, but they do release old photos
from their childhood, so the women
find themselves staring at “a serious-
looking boy” posed in front of the mar-
bled background of a school photo.
Despite this section’s title, only
slowly do we realize that Anna has actu-
ally entered the realm of science fiction.
Like Frankenstein, she has access to
her own lab. She is a leading researcher
in the field of gene editing. She begins
to proselytize about engineering em-
bryos to make them “invulnerable to
risk.” And though she is supposed to
be carrying out experiments on mice,
she has also been using the facilities
to store her own embryos, transport-
ing them via the “service they used to
transport frozen mouse embryos.” Doc-
tors had told her that her embryos were
not viable. But she proves them wrong.
A rogue pregnancy, however, has its
own challenges. Anna does not dare see
the doctor for a checkup; what if the
sonogram shows something has gone
horribly awry? She is terrified of being
discovered and sent to jail. The fate of
the Chinese scientist He Jiankui—who
genetically modified the embryos of
twin girls and was sentenced to three
years in prison—hangs over her. One
of the most gripping and most sci-fi
scenes in the novel results from this
dilemma, when the two women enter
Anna’s lab at night to perform a secret
ultrasound, repurposing a machine
usually used on animal research sub-
jects. The experiment is a personal
risk for Anna as well as an imagina-
tive risk for the novel, just stretching
the bounds of plausibility. It’s not so
much a vision of reproductive freedom
as of one woman’s bid for freedom and
the extreme, irreplicable measures it
would take.
T he strangeness of this novel, how-
ever, lies also in the narrative lim-
its it doesn’t address. Though its two
parts operate in different genres, they
share a focus: the narrator rarely takes
interest or sees value in anything be-
yond motherhood. It’s unexpectedly
deflating when she sees Anna for the
last time, near the end of the novel,
and neatly concludes that her suc-
cessful pregnancy has somehow can-
celed out all the difficulties of her life
up to this point: “Her pregnancy had
released her from all that. It had al-
lowed her to set sail, it would give her a
chance to start afresh on a new planet.”
Would it? And, after all she’s done to
get to this point, all her diligence and
lawbreaking, would a clean break from
the past even be desirable?
How much of this is the novelist’s
view versus the character’s? The nar-
rator’s experience has left her feeling
“empty” without a child. She repeat-
edly describes “a hollowness, an emp-
tiness, that I now carried within me:
one that, perhaps, could only be filled
by a creature.” But her experience soon
becomes a view of the world. She used
to take offense at the suggestion that
there was a link between women’s writ-
ing and pregnancy. “Must the experi-
ence of womanhood . . . entail carrying
a baby?” she remembers thinking after
one man’s rude comment. Yet later, “in
those weeks after my release from the
hospital, I began to feel that perhaps
he was correct.”
Her reading of Shelley certainly
follows from this view. Hall presents
Shelley as a figure of pity, not only
because she lost three children but
because her own mother, the feminist
philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, died
of sepsis eleven days after giving birth
to her. For Hall’s purposes Shelley is
“a motherless girl . . . disowned by her
father, when she gave birth for the first
time,” and a lonely waif “at seventeen,
giving birth to her first baby, later leav-
ing the continent with no one but a lit-
tle dog.” These passages struck me as
a bizarre miniaturization of one of the
great writers and mythmakers of her
age. Shelley was raised by her father,
the philosopher William Godwin, and
she identifies herself in the introduc-
tion to Frankenstein as “the daughter
of two persons of distinguished liter-
ary celebrity”—a writer of steely am-
bition, intent on matching her parents’
accomplishments.
To cast Shelley as a bereft teenager
is to set aside most of her writings, her
intellectual milieu, and much of the
significant writing about her. It was, in
fact, the feminist critic Ellen Moers who
five decades ago in these pages pro-
posed the link between Shelley’s preg-
nancies and the germ of Frankenstein.2
In Moers’s reading, Frankenstein’s
2
“Female Gothic: The Monster’s Mother,”
The New York Review, March 21, 1974.
The New York Review
 revulsion at his monster is a glimpse
of a mother’s postnatal revulsion to-
ward her newborn, which Shelley was
uniquely positioned to know, as one of
the vanishingly few writers of her time
who had borne children. Moers’s essay
doesn’t aim to reduce the novel to its
Keeping Speech Robust and Free
Actual Malice:
Civil Rights and Freedom of the
Press in New York Times v. Sullivan
by Samantha Barbas.
University of California Press,
282 pp., $29.95
The libel lawsuit filed in March 2021 by
Dominion Voting Systems against Fox
News, over the network’s coverage of
claims that the company had rigged the
2020 election, was settled this spring,
but the case may soon become an arti-
fact of a vanished era. In pretrial skir-
mishing, the two sides agreed on this
much: the law of libel is governed by
the Supreme Court’s 1964 decision in
New York Times v. Sullivan. In the last
legal arguments before the jury was to
be seated, Rodney A. Smolla, one of
the lawyers for Dominion, called Sul-
livan “the landmark decision that is
the genesis for all of our modern First
Amendment principles involving defa-
mation law.” Erin E. Murphy, a lawyer
for Fox, likewise said that the principle
governing the case “starts in Sullivan.”
But the emboldened conservative ma-
jority on the Supreme Court, having
dispatched Roe v. Wade to the dustbin
of overruled precedents, may now tar-
get Sullivan for the same treatment.
Such a change would have fundamen-
tal consequences for both those who
speak and those who are spoken about.
It’s a fitting time, then, to take a
fresh look at Sullivan—how it came
about and what it means today. In Ac-
tual Malice: Civil Rights and Freedom
of the Press in New York Times v. Sul-
livan, Samantha Barbas, a professor
at the University of Buffalo School of
Law, tells the improbable story of the
advertisement that gave rise to the
case and the decision that Justice Wil-
liam J. Brennan ultimately wrote. It’s
a tale that has been told before—no-
tably in books by Anthony Lewis and
Aimee Edmondson*—but Barbas has
a distinctive and relevant argument.
Like the earlier authors, Barbas
makes the reasonable claim that Sul-
livan represented a straightforward
battle between good and evil. It was, she
writes, “one of a string of libel lawsuits
brought by Southern segregationist
DIT H PRAN/ T HE N EW YORK T IME S / RE DU X
officials against Northern media out-
lets . . . to prevent them from reporting
on the civil rights movement.” By rul-
ing for the Times, the Supreme Court
“freed the press to cover the civil rights
movement” and, not incidentally, likely
*Anthony Lewis, Make No Law: The Sullivan
Case and the First Amendment (Random
House, 1991); Aimee Edmondson, In Sul-
livan’s Shadow: The Use and Abuse of Libel
Law During the Long Civil Rights Struggle
(University of Massachusetts Press, 2019).
July 20, 2023
echoes of motherhood, but to estab-
lish a tradition of writing by mothers
that had previously been overlooked;
it was an attempt to find in Shelley a
source of creative possibility.
Ellen Moers doesn’t appear in Re-
production (though the novel does cite
Jeffrey Toobin
M. Roland Nachman Jr. (left), who sued The New York Times for libel on behalf of L. B.
Sullivan, with William P. Rogers (center) and Herbert Wechsler, who defended the Times,
at an event commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision
in New York Times v. Sullivan, March 1984. They are gathered around a reproduction of
the advertisement that prompted the suit.
saved the newspaper from being bank-
rupted by the damages it would have
been ordered to pay in this and simi-
lar libel cases. But Barbas’s endorse-
ment of the Sullivan decision is more
nuanced than those of Lewis and Ed-
mondson, and more reflective of the
current moment. She appreciates the
need for libel lawsuits at a time when
“damaging falsehoods can spread on-
line with a click, and reputations [can
be] destroyed instantly.” But she rec-
ognizes that the protections of Sulli-
van are needed as much, or more, by
individuals as by media companies. The
story of Sullivan, and of the precedent’s
possible demise, reveals as much about
our own times as it does the 1960s.
I n 1960 the authorities in Mont-
gomery, Alabama, including L. B.
Sullivan, the commissioner of pub-
lic affairs, filed trumped-up charges
of tax fraud and perjury against Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr. Later that year
a group of King’s supporters met at
Harry Belafonte’s apartment in New
York to start a fundraising effort for
King’s defense. The civil rights leader
Bayard Rustin took charge of it and
decided to buy a full-page advertise-
ment in the Times to attract donors.
He gave some quick instructions to the
playwright John Murray, who over six
typewritten pages excoriated the Ala-
bama officials for hounding King and
abusing civil rights protesters.
other writers, such as Elaine Scarry, by
name). The narrator works through her
reading of Shelley alone, as if she were
the first to have seen the connection.
It’s a loop in her own thoughts rather
than a conversation among readers
across the decades. That absence may
Rustin listed several dozen endorsers
of the message, mostly civil rights sup-
porters from the North, but at the last
minute he decided to add the names of
twenty Black ministers from the South
as well, though he had not asked them
and they had no idea their names were
being used. With the headline “Heed
Their Rising Voices,” the ad ran on page
25 of the Times on March 29, 1960. It
cost $4,800 but generated enough con-
tributions for Rustin’s group to turn a
nice profit for King’s defense.
In that era, just 394 copies of the
Times circulated in Alabama, but the ad
drew the attention of local officials in
Montgomery. This is where the trouble
began. Barbas writes of the advertise-
ment, “In its overall gist, of course, the
statements were true. The Montgomery
officials had abetted and committed vio-
lence against the civil rights protesters.”
Unfortunately a few details in the ad’s
text were inaccurate. It described the
song that protesters had sung on the
state capitol steps as “My Country, ’Tis
of Thee,” when it was the national an-
them, and it said that King had been ar-
rested seven times, not four. In addition,
the ad incorrectly said that local law
enforcement officials “ringed” a local
college campus; the officers entered the
campus but did not surround it.
Alabama, like most states at the time,
recognized a doctrine of law known as
“libel per se,” under which, if the Times
was sued for libel, it was required to
prove that the words in the advertise-
be fitting for a novel that so effectively
conveys the isolation that can accom-
pany conception and pregnancy. But it
.
also left me with the impression that
mothers—and those who choose not
to become mothers—require a fuller
world than this.
ment were true “in all their particulars.”
So if the Times could not verify every
word, then the plaintiff could win unlim-
ited damages. (Then as now, newspapers
are legally responsible for everything
they publish, including advertisements.)
In short order, L. B. Sullivan, who
wasn’t mentioned by name in the ad,
filed suit against both the Times and
four Alabama ministers whose names
had been listed without their knowl-
edge: Ralph Abernathy, Joseph Lowery,
Solomon Seay, and Fred Shuttlesworth.
Sullivan’s lawyers added them because
if the case included local defendants,
the Times couldn’t legally move the
proceedings to federal court and be-
cause, of course, he wanted to ha-
rass his political adversaries. After a
brief trial, the jury awarded Sullivan
$500,000. The liability was “joint and
several,” which meant that he could
collect the entire award from the Times
or any of the four ministers.
Lewis’s book about Sullivan centers
on the plight of the Times, and Ed-
mondson’s ranges over a number of
related cases in the South, but Barbas
makes a signal contribution by focusing
on the harrowing story of what hap-
pened to the four ministers. The Times
posted a bond, enabling it to proceed
with an appeal, but the ministers had
no such resources, and Sullivan began
seizing their property. He took Aber-
nathy’s five-year-old Buick Century and
his one-twelfth share of a small piece
of land that his parents, who had been
sharecroppers, managed to buy in an-
other part of Alabama. Shuttlesworth
and Lowery lost their cars, too, and
Seay his land. Their bank accounts
were seized and their salaries gar-
nished. (Their congregants pitched in
to make sure they had cars to drive.) In
all, the Alabama authorities took about
$7,500 in property from the ministers.
The “segregationist ‘libel attack,’”
as Barbas calls it, continued after Sul-
livan’s victory at trial. Later in 1960,
in response to a Times article by the
reporter Harrison Salisbury, local of-
ficials in Birmingham filed four more
libel suits against the Times. A few
months after that the Times lost an-
other libel case in Alabama, this one
filed by the mayor of Montgomery and
based on the same advertisement as
the one in the Sullivan case, and it
faced another damage judgment of
$500,000. “By 1964,” Barbas writes,
“officials in three Southern states had
brought seventeen libel actions against
Northern media outlets, primarily over
civil rights coverage, seeking damages
of more than $288 million.” By suing
their critics, the plaintiffs were engag-
ing in the same kind of resistance that
they had mustered to fight the legal
27
demands to integrate their schools,
and for the same reason: the libel
cases were another way of defending
Jim Crow.
In September 1960, after the jury’s
verdict in the Sullivan case, a grand
jury in a town near Birmingham in-
dicted Salisbury on forty-two counts
of criminal libel, exposing him to a
possible sentence of twenty-one years
in prison. Because the Times was still
a fairly small Sulzberger-family busi-
ness during this period, the libel suits
threatened it with economic devasta-
tion. So the Times made a crushing
journalistic concession. In order to
avoid local process servers and thus
more lawsuits, as well as more arrests
of its reporters, it kept all of them out
of Alabama for the next two and a half
years. The paper thus had to rely on
wire services in one of the central lo-
cales of the biggest story in the United
States—the civil rights movement.
Marvin Frankel, a pair of Columbia
Law School professors. They came up
with a new approach.
The lawyers were, it turned out,
pushing on an open door, because
Chief Justice Earl Warren’s Supreme
Court was in the process of disman-
tling the legal superstructure of Jim
Crow. Justice Hugo Black, a noted First
Amendment absolutist, had recently
said that civil libel judgments were like
the ancient crime of “seditious libel,”
which governments had used to punish
critics. The Court had never explicitly
held that the crime of seditious libel
was unconstitutional, but Black had
suggested that it would, if given the
opportunity.
Picking up on that idea, when their
appeal made it to the Supreme Court
in 1964, the Times’s lawyers argued
that the civil libel judgment in the Sul-
livan case was tantamount to allow-
ing the state of Alabama to criminally
prosecute the Times for exercising
rights guaranteed by the First Amend-
be overturned, didn’t want to go that
far. As Warren often did, he turned to
his loyal deputy Brennan to come up
with an opinion that would satisfy all
nine justices: one that would preserve
the right of government officials to file
libel cases but make it more difficult
for them to prevail.
The advertisement in the Times con-
tained acknowledged errors, so one im-
portant question was whether the First
Amendment could protect statements
that included falsehoods. Brennan es-
tablished a rule that trivial errors like
the ones in the advertisement could
not be the basis for libel judgments.
“A rule compelling the critic of official
conduct to guarantee the truth of all
his factual assertions—and to do so on
pain of libel judgments virtually unlim-
ited in amount—leads to a comparable
‘self-censorship,’” he wrote. “Allowance
of the defense of truth, with the bur-
den of proving it on the defendant,
does not mean that only false speech
will be deterred.” In other words, he
The following day, the network started
trying to make amends.
Trump and some of his advisers
began to blame Dominion, whose
voting equipment had been used in
twenty-eight states, for engaging in
fraud that he said cost him the elec-
tion. Asked about Dominion’s software
in an interview with Maria Bartiromo
on Fox on November 8, Sidney Powell,
a Trump adviser and attorney, said,
“That is where the fraud took place. . . .
That’s when they had to stop the vote
count and go in and replace votes for
Biden and take away Trump votes.”
Over the next several weeks Powell and
other Trump allies, especially Rudolph
Giuliani, returned to Fox to make the
same claim. On November 19 Giuliani
said that Dominion’s machines were
programmed “to give somewhere be-
tween a 2 and 5 percent advantage”
to Biden.
As soon as these statements were
made, Dominion sent a series of pro-
test letters to Fox, asserting that none

W hat were the Times and the min-

isters to do? Before the 1960s,
the Supreme Court had frequently
held that libel was purely a matter of
state tort law, and the First Amend-
ment offered no protection for speech
found to be libelous. As the Court had
put it in a 1942 case, libel belonged to
a category of speech “the prevention
and punishment of which has never
been thought to raise any constitu-
tional problem.” And under Alabama
law, because the advertisement was
both implicitly critical of Sullivan and
incorrect in certain particulars, it was
libelous. Desperate for a solution, the
Times turned to Herbert Wechsler and
ment. The paper thereby shifted the
focus of the case from the right of in-
dividuals to protect their reputations
to the right of individuals to criticize
government.
Barbas makes good use of recently
released archives to tell the behind-
the-scenes story of how the Court de-
cided to rewrite the law of libel. In
the justices’ initial private confer-
ence after the argument, Black, Ar-
thur Goldberg, and William O. Douglas
pushed for a simple approach: rule
that the First Amendment prohib-
ited public officials from filing libel
suits. The six others, while agreeing
that the judgment for Sullivan should
said, it was both unreasonable and un-
constitutional to force newspapers to
check everything they published for
minor mistakes or face ruin.
Brennan went further, creating a
new burden of proof for public of-
ficials seeking libel awards. He em-
ployed a fairly obscure legal phrase,
ruling that public officials must show
that false statements about them were
made with “actual malice.” Over the
years, the use of the word “malice” has
caused some confusion. Brennan did
not mean malice in its conventional
sense of anger or preexisting animus.
Rather, he provided a different defini-
tion, writing that a public official can-
not win a libel case “unless he proves
that the statement was made . . . with
knowledge that it was false or with
reckless disregard of whether it was
false or not.”
of what the Trump surrogates said was
true. E-mails and texts that came out
later in the course of discovery showed
that many people inside Fox recog-
nized that the claims about Dominion
were false. In blunt, frequently scath-
ing terms, top Fox hosts and execu-
tives privately dismissed the claims of
the Trump allies. Tucker Carlson, for
example, texted Laura Ingraham on
November 18, “Sidney Powell is lying
by the way. I caught her. It’s insane.”
Ingraham responded, “Sidney is a com-
plete nut. No one will work with her.
Ditto with Rudy.” Rupert Murdoch, the
chairman of Fox, wrote in an e-mail,
“Watching Giuliani! Really crazy stuff.
And damaging.”
Still, Fox kept airing the claims
about Dominion for a very specific
reason. In the postelection period, it
was losing viewers to Newsmax and
OANN , a pair of smaller right-wing net-
works that were embracing Trump’s

F or decades, even as the Supreme

Court moved to the right, the Sul-
livan precedent lived a charmed life.
Chantal Montellier
In one important respect, the breadth
Translated from the French by Geoffrey Brock
of its protections was expanded. The
Paperback • $24.95
decision said only that “public offi-
On sale July 25th
cials”—that is, representatives of the
government—were required to show
Dark, smart, and indomitably cool, the 70s and 80s dystopian visions of Chantal actual malice in order to win libel
Montellier still unsettle. cases. Three years later, in a case in-
volving a libel claim by a college foot-
Visitors to an underground mall must recreate civilization after a nuclear strike may
ball coach, the Court said that “public
have wiped out the rest of humanity. Newlyweds find themselves implicated in a
figures”—that is, prominent people or
government eugenics program. A disembodied authority reprimands a man for step-
companies—would also have to meet
ping out of view of a security camera. the actual-malice standard. So over the
In this collection of three novellas—Wonder City, Shelter, and 1996—published next six decades, the question in every
together in English for the first time, Montellier’s blend of dark humor, gripping libel case involving public officials or
storytelling, and consistent focus on the perils of totalitarianism, shows her to be public figures has been whether the
a master of both comics and science fiction. contested statements were made with
either knowledge of falsity—that is,
Social Fiction includes a Q&A between Chantal Montellier and Geoffrey Brock.
lies—or reckless disregard of the
“For over four turbulent decades, Chantal Montellier has been on the truth. Barbas’s careful summary of
front lines of French comics.” —Paul Gravett the origin and meaning of Sullivan
provides a useful guide to whether
Dominion would have met Brennan’s
standard if its case against Fox had
gone to trial.
On the evening of Election Day, No-
vember 3, 2020, Fox News alienated
Donald Trump, as well as many of his
supporters, by projecting—correctly—
that Joe Biden would win Arizona.
Once all the state’s votes were counted,
that projection was vindicated, and
Fox as well as all the major networks
declared Biden the president-elect on
NEW YORK REVIEW COMICS Available from bookstores, comics stores, and www.nyrb.com November 7. Still, the Arizona call put
Fox on the defensive with its audience.
false claims about Dominion. Carlson
texted his producer, “Do the execu-
tives understand how much credibility
and trust we’ve lost with our audience?
We’re playing with fire, for real . . . an
alternative like newsmax could be dev-
astating to us.”
When Fox White House correspon-
dent Kristin Fisher fact-checked claims
by Powell and Giuliani, she was criti-
cized by her bosses. She later testified
in a deposition that her direct supe-
rior “emphasized that higher-ups at
Fox News were also unhappy with it,”
and she “needed to do a better job
of . . . —this is a quote—‘respecting our
audience.’” When a different reporter
fact-checked the Trump claims about
Dominion, Carlson texted Sean Han-
nity and Ingraham, “Please get her
fired. Seriously. . .What the fuck? I’m
actually shocked. It needs to stop im-
mediately, like tonight. It’s measurably
hurting the company. The stock price
is down. Not a joke.”
In his deposition, Bill Sammon, a
Washington-based Fox executive, put
it plainly: “It’s remarkable how weak
ratings make good journalists do bad
things.”
B ased on the false claims of fraud,
which were amplified across many
programs on Fox News and its sister
network Fox Business, Dominion sued
for libel, seeking $1.6 billion in dam-
ages. Fox also broadcast similar lies

28 The New York Review

about Smartmatic, another voting ma-
chine company, which has also filed
suit against the network, demanding
$2.7 billion in damages. That case is
pending, as are various other Domin-
ion and Smartmatic lawsuits against
Newsmax and OANN , as well as against
Powell and Giuliani as individuals.
Before settling with Dominion, Fox’s
lawyers offered a straightforward de-
fense: the network was just covering
the news. “There is no evidence that
anyone in Fox Corporation had a di-
rect role in creating or publishing
any of challenged statements in this
consolidated case,” the Fox lawyers
asserted. “To the contrary, Fox News
hosts testified repeatedly that they
covered the President’s allegations
about Dominion because they were the
most newsworthy story of the day.” As
Carlson put it in his deposition, “The
allegation that the presidential elec-
tion was rigged by a voting machine
company, true or not, is in itself one
of the biggest news stories of [our]
lifetimes.” And all major news outlets,
not just Fox, covered Trump’s allega-
tions. The problem with Fox’s argu-
ment is that it has long been true in
libel law that a publisher, in any me-
dium, is responsible for all the state-
ments it publishes, even if it is merely
quoting others. (This is why Sullivan
could sue the Times over the text of
an advertisement.)
In a broader sense, the Fox law-
yers claimed that a Dominion victory
would be “a profound threat to the
First Amendment.” But it was never
clear how that was so. Dominion’s libel
case was the rare one in which it ap-
peared likely that the plaintiffs could
satisfy both strands of the Sullivan
standard.
Most libel cases that go to trial are
fought over whether the publisher
displayed “reckless disregard” of the
truth. Here, Fox’s conduct was obvi-
ously reckless, not least because sev-
eral staff members used that very
word in off-air communications at the
time. On November 17 Carlson texted
Powell, “If you don’t have conclusive
evidence of fraud at that scale, it’s a
cruel and reckless thing to keep say-
ing.” Four days later he texted Jenna
Ellis, a Trump legal adviser, that the
accusations against Dominion were
“shockingly reckless.” A producer for
Jeanine Pirro, the Fox anchor who was
the most enthusiastic transmitter of
Powell’s lies, e-mailed a colleague that
Pirro was a “reckless maniac” on the
subject of Dominion.
But Dominion also had the rarer op-
portunity to satisfy the first strand:
“knowledge of falsity.” As the internal
texts and e-mails made clear, virtually
everyone at Fox knew that Trump’s
allies were peddling lies, yet the net-
work continued putting Powell and
Giuliani on the air.
If the tort of libel is going to exist
at all—if individuals and companies
are going to have any redress for false
statements that damage their reputa-
tions—Fox deserved to lose this case.
As Barbas aptly notes, in defending the
continued existence of libel claims by
public officials and figures, “Reputa-
tion remains an important personal
interest that is essential to dignity and
individual well-being. The protection
of reputation also has social value.”
Sullivan did not provide shelter for
Fox’s assault on Dominion’s reputa-
tion, nor should it have.
July 20, 2023
On April 18 the two sides settled,
with Fox agreeing to pay Dominion
$787.5 million. The vast sum brought
a measure of comfort to both compa-
nies; it compensated Dominion for the
reputational damage it suffered, and it
spared Fox the likely embarrassments
that a trial would have produced as
well as the risk of an even larger award
from a jury. But since the case never
reached any appeals court, much less
the Supreme Court, the legal issues
underlying the lawsuit were left un-
resolved. The most important of these
is the status of Sullivan itself.
B arbas concludes her book with a
thoughtful appreciation of the bal-
ance Brennan struck in Sullivan. He left
room for redress by plaintiffs in cases of
extraordinary journalistic malfeasance,
but the core of the decision affirmed a
broad conception of First Amendment
protections. She notes that the Supreme
Court has at least sixty times since 1964
quoted Brennan’s most famous passage:
there is “a profound national commit-
ment to the principle that debate on
public issues should be uninhibited, ro-
bust, and wide-open.” But that commit-
ment, at least as expressed in Sullivan,
is now under threat.
Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil
Gorsuch have placed Sullivan in their
sights. Both have long-standing griev-
ances against the press—Thomas
for the reporting on his confirmation
hearing, when he was accused of sexual
misconduct by Anita Hill, and Gorsuch
for how the press covered his mother
Anne Gorsuch’s tenure as head of the
Environmental Protection Agency
under President Reagan, when she
was cited for contempt of Congress.
The two justices also share a judicial
philosophy that could scarcely be more
different from Brennan’s. Dissenting
from the Court’s failure to grant certio-
rari in a 2021 case, Gorsuch wrote that
freedom of the press was not “a favor
to a particular industry.” He went on:
What started in 1964 with a de-
cision to tolerate the occasional
falsehood to ensure robust report-
ing by a comparative handful of
print and broadcast outlets has
evolved into an ironclad subsidy
for the publication of falsehoods
by means and on a scale previously
unimaginable.
Writing in agreement with Gorsuch
in the same case, Thomas explained,
“This Court’s pronouncement that the
First Amendment requires public fig-
ures to establish actual malice bears
‘no relation to the text, history, or
structure of the Constitution.’”
Thomas and Gorsuch offer an “orig-
inalist” and “textualist” argument
against Sullivan. To be sure, there is NOT SINCE DANTE AND MILTON
HAS EDEN BEEN SO DEEPLY EXCAVATED
a plausible case that the framers did From the invisible microbes that sustain us,
not specifically have the actual-malice to the fantastical creatures in Eden, to our
blindfolded image of how we were sexually
standard in mind. But the problem is created—a new-normal novel about living with
our species origins and Western origin story.
more with originalism and textualism
T H E E D E N R E V E L AT I O N edenrevelation.com
than with Sullivan. The genius of Bren- An Evolutionary Novel
David Rosenberg & Dr. Rhonda Rosenberg
nan’s solution was that he upheld the
value at the heart of the First Amend-
ment—the right to criticize the gov-
ernment—while also preserving the “A small gem from Bosco, this
tort of libel. The strength of Domin- book has been described as a French
ion’s case and Fox’s willingness to Huckleberry Finn even though a
settle for so much money refute the comparison with Thoreau’s Walden
justices’ contentions that the Sullivan might make more sense . . . . Bosco’s
decision effectively killed the ability of story carries readers into an innocent
anyone to sue for libel. And the con- childhood world as easily as the
tinued existence of a robust and free current carries the boys on their
adventures.” —Kirkus Reviews
press over the past six decades vindi-
cates the balance that Brennan struck.
But Sullivan’s long survival is no
guarantee that it will endure. The
three liberals—Sonia Sotomayor,
Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown
Jackson—will clearly support Sulli-
van should it get to the Court anytime
soon. Samuel Alito will probably join
Thomas and Gorsuch. Chief Justice
John Roberts has resisted overturn-
ing long-settled precedents, but Amy
Coney Barrett sidestepped the chance
to endorse Sullivan in her confirma-
tion hearing. That leaves Brett Kava-
naugh, who, as an appeals court judge,
gave Sullivan an enthusiastic embrace.
In an opinion citing Sullivan on the
D.C. Circuit, Kavanaugh said that
to preserve First Amendment
freedoms and give reporters, com-
mentators, bloggers, and Tweeters The Child and the River tells a simple
(among others) the breathing room but haunting tale.
they need to pursue the truth, the
Supreme Court has directed courts Young Pascalet is permitted by his par-
to expeditiously weed out unmer- ents to play wherever he likes—only never
itorious defamation suits. by the river. Unfortunately, Pascalet
dreams of nothing so much as heading
But in those days Kavanaugh was bound down to the river, and one day, with his
by Supreme Court precedents. Now he parents away, he does. Wandering along
can create them—or overrule them. the bank, he falls asleep in a rowboat
and wakes to find himself caught in rap-
If any of the other libel cases coming
ids and run aground on an island where
out of the 2020 election are not settled
a band of Gypsies has pitched camp.
before trial, they may well serve as test
cases for Sullivan. If the Court rejects Hiding in the underbrush, he observes
Sullivan, as it did Roe, that would lead that the group includes a boy his age,
to a similar result: returning the issue who, after receiving a whipping, has
to the states and allowing each one to been left tied to a post. As soon as night
design its own rules for libel cases. falls, Pascalet sets the boy, Gasco, loose.
In states dominated by Democrats, They escape in a boat and spend a
the courts or the legislature would week on the river. But the mysterious
probably restore the Sullivan status “puppeteer of souls” arrives, bringing
quo with alacrity. Barbas’s book gives their adventure to an end, and Pascalet
a pretty good idea of what would hap- returns home. Has he seen the last of
pen elsewhere. In red states today, the his new friend?
mainstream media may be even less
popular than it was in the 1960s, so it’s THE CHILD AND
hard to imagine that authorities there
will create any rules that provide rig-
THE RIVER
Henri Bosco
orous protections for journalists and
A new translation from the French
other speakers. Unlimited liability for
by Joyce Zonana
trivial errors could return.
And thanks to the Internet, the Paperback • $14.00
words of controversial speakers are The Child and the River is the
now disseminated nationwide. Ag- August selection of the NYRB Classics
grieved plaintiffs would thus look to Book Club. To order a membership, call
bring their cases in the states with 1-800-354-0050 or visit www.nyrb.com
laws that protect free speech the least.
Individuals who air unpopular views, Supported by Albertine Translation,
a program created by the Villa Albertine
either on small websites or on social and funded by the FACE Foundation
media, would be especially vulnera-
ble as the modern-day counterparts ALSO BY HENRI BOSCO
of the four ministers in Sullivan. And MALICROIX
just like the Times and the ministers,
these imperiled speakers would even-
tually look to the Supreme Court for
.
vindication of their First Amendment
rights, but they would likely find a very
Available from booksellers and www.nyrb.com
different reception than the Sullivan
defendants did in 1964.
29
 The Hemon Variations
The World and All That It Holds
by Aleksandar Hemon.
MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
336 pp., $28.00
As the title suggests—particularly
once you realize that its grandiosity
is unironic—The World and All That It
Holds is by some distance Aleksandar
Hemon’s most ambitious work, with
the main action spanning thirty-five
years, two disintegrating empires,
World Wars I and II, and the Russian
and Chinese Revolutions. The prob-
lem is that his transparent desire to
paint his masterpiece results too often
in a self-conscious striving for effect
and an unwavering commitment to so-
lemnity. Anybody who comes to the
book without having read his earlier
ones might be surprised to hear that
Hemon can be a playful, funny writer.
Here, such comedy as there is proves
largely inadvertent.
Granted, it’s not hard to see why
Hemon might have wanted to strike
out in a new direction. Since his first
short story collection, The Question
of Bruno (2000), his reputation has
steadily and justifiably grown, with
honors including a Guggenheim Fel-
lowship, a MacArthur “genius” grant,
and three titles shortlisted for a Na-
tional Book Critics Circle Award. At
the same time, the books themselves
have shown an increasing impatience
with their own subject matter, which
has generally been versions of Hemon’s
own admittedly extraordinary life and
his attempts to make sense of it.
Hemon grew up in Sarajevo, Bosnia,
when it was still part of Communist
Yugoslavia. In 1992, aged twenty-seven,
he was part of a journalistic exchange
to the United States that was supposed
to be temporary—but soon after he
arrived, the Bosnian War began and
his city was besieged by Serb forces
for what turned out to be four years.
Finding himself suddenly a refugee,
Hemon settled in Chicago, working as
a bike messenger, a sandwich maker,
a canvasser for Greenpeace, and a
seller of magazine subscriptions. He
also learned English, first well enough
to teach it as a second language, and
then, more unusually, to publish short
stories in The New Yorker that earned
him comparisons to Nabokov.
Not that Hemon appeared espe-
cially keen to ingratiate himself with
his new compatriots. The center-
piece of The Question of Bruno was
the eighty-page “Blind Jozef Pronek
and Dead Souls,” in which Pronek, a
character with a biography very like
his creator’s, is constantly struck by
the obesity of Americans, their igno-
rance of geography (“Bosnia . . .That’s
in Russia, right?”), and their unearned
conviction about living in “the great-
est country on earth.” Faced with all
this, he discovers how easy it is for a
refugee “to become someone else, a
complete stranger to oneself.”
The collection also drew on Hemon’s
life in Bosnia, where his great-
grandparents moved from Galicia (the
region that is now part of Ukraine)
as the Austro-Hungarian Empire fell
apart after World War I, bringing with
them the beekeeping that has buzzed
30
James Walton
Aleksandar Hemon; illustration by John Brooks
through all his work. Pronek then re-
turned in Nowhere Man (2002), an
overlapping group of stories in which
he was seen by a series of different
narrators at different stages of a life
that again closely resembled Hemon’s,
complete with Ukrainian ancestors,
an early career in Sarajevo as a jour-
nalist, and a 1992 exchange program
to the United States that leaves him
exiled in Chicago.
Hemon’s first novel, The Lazarus
Project (2008), looked initially like
something of a departure. It opens in
1908 with the true story of the Jewish
immigrant Lazarus Averbuch show-
ing up at the home of Chicago’s po-
lice chief, George Shippy, who without
much in the way of evidence decides
that Averbuch is a murderous anarchist
and shoots him dead. It is, however,
not long before we’re back in the world
of the Hemon alter ego. The aftermath
of the killing is interspersed with the
first-person narration of Vladimir Brik,
a Bosnian-born American writer in-
vestigating the Averbuch case for a
potential novel in which he’d draw on
his personal experience of immigrant
travails (“lousy jobs . . . the acquisition
of language, the logistics of survival”)
to animate the story. Brik also bags
a lucrative scholarship similar to the
“genius” grant Hemon received at
about the same time and uses it, as
Hemon did, to visit Eastern Europe
with a photographer friend. Their first
stop is Lviv, Ukraine, near the village
where Brik’s beekeeping grandfather
was born. Their last is Brik’s old home-
town of Sarajevo, where “it occurred
to me that . . . I would always be here,
where my heart was.”
S o what did Hemon do next? The
answer was stick to his guns. Love
and Obstacles (2009), which again took
the form of overlapping stories, fol-
lowed apparently the same unnamed
narrator from his childhood in Sara-
jevo to survival in Chicago during the
Bosnian War by such means as sell-
ing magazines door-to-door and on to
a successful career as a writer who’d
published a story called “Love and Ob-
stacles” in The New Yorker. Along the
way, we got a thirty-page tale about
his Ukrainian-descended family’s love
of beekeeping.
For my money, Love and Obstacles
was Hemon’s most accomplished work
up to that point: funny, rueful, and
angry—often all at the same time. Yet
despite the many pleasures it offered,
you couldn’t help noticing how much of
the material Hemon had covered be-
fore. And neither, it appears, could he.
In one passage, the narrator is some-
what dismayed when, on an American
book tour, he realizes “everyone was
content to think that I was in con-
stant, uninterrupted communication
with the tormented soul of my home-
land”; in another, he delivers to a fel-
low author his “usual, well-rehearsed
story of displacement and writing in
English”; in a third, he talks of “the
image of the noble, worldly misfit who
found his salvation in writing, the
image I had so carefully and publicly
established.”
When a filmmaker approaches the
narrator to contribute to a documen-
tary about “the Bosnian experience,”
he nudges her “toward a short film in
which I could play myself in various
situations from my life—one of those
brainy postmodern setups everybody
likes so well because it has something
to do with identity.” This mixture of
self-satire, self-fatigue, and maybe
even self-disgust is most starkly ex-
pressed when the narrator decides that
“my story is boring.” On the other hand,
he admits, “once you start inventing
and soliloquizing, it is terribly hard
to quit.” In short, Hemon seemed to
sense with a distinct pang that all
his books thus far could have had the
same title as the one that Averbuch’s
friend in The Lazarus Project dreamed
of writing: The Adventures of a Clever
Immigrant.
And, as we know from a recent in-
terview, it was in 2010, the year after
Love and Obstacles, that Hemon signed
the contract for The World and All
That It Holds. The immediate reason
for the long delay in the book’s ap-
pearance was the death from a rare
tumor of his one-year-old daughter,
about which he wrote piercingly in an
essay, “The Aquarium,” that appeared
in The Book of My Lives (2013), a loose
collection of autobiographical pieces
confirming how heavily (if sometimes
playfully) he had mined his life for his
fiction. Six years later, he confirmed
it all over again in My Parents: An
Introduction/This Does Not Belong to
You (2019), a pair of complementary
memoirs published in one volume,
which even its own jacket copy ac-
knowledges is “grounded in stories
lovingly polished by retelling.” Or, as
Hemon rather wearily put it in the sec-
ond memoir, “There are no more newly
discovered memories, the repertoire is
presently, eternally, woefully limited,
and I’m looping through it.”
The first sign of a break for free-
dom came between the two auto-
biographical collections. The 2015
novel The Making of Zombie Wars is
pretty much a flat-out comedy—if a
dark one—in which Joshua Levin, a
would-be screenwriter, isn’t a restless
Bosnian-born exile but a contentedly
American secular Jew. (Hemon him-
self is a gentile.) He does live in Chi-
cago and teach English as a second
language. And several of his pupils are
from Bosnia, including the beautiful
but married Ana, with whom he starts
an affair that ends in the same type of
cartoonish violence as does the Zombie
Wars script he’s working on. He is also
friends with a Bosnian named Bega,
whom he knows from his screenwrit-
ing workshop and who at times seems
like a send-up of the author. “Man is
from Sarajevo. He was happy there. He
was young. . . . War came. He is refugee
now,” goes one of Bega’s movie ideas.
“Yeah, yeah,” the workshop leader re-
plies. “We heard that the last time.
Got something beyond that?”
The New York Review
 A s the violence, jokes, and sex
pile up, the result is definitely
Hemon’s wildest book—and, I would
say, his most entertaining, with much
of the fun coming from the sense of a
writer letting himself off the leash and
relishing a newfound irresponsibility.
(This January in an interview with The
New York Times an apparently recov-
ered Hemon sternly denounced Philip
Roth, whose “steadfast commitment to
the many privileges of male whiteness
reliably repels me.” In The Making of
Zombie Wars, Joshua reads Portnoy’s
Complaint and, without any notice-
able authorial dissent, finds it “un-
sparingly honest.”) Nevertheless—or
maybe exactly for those reasons—you
can see why even admiring reviewers
called the novel a “surprising . . . ram-
bunctious farce” and compared it to a
“gross-out movie,” rather than greeting
it the way the author’s friend David
Mitchell has obligingly greeted The
World and All That It Holds—as “Alek-
sandar Hemon’s masterpiece.”
Which brings us back to Hemon’s
almost achingly responsible new book.
Rafael Pinto is Jewish, too, and when
the novel begins, in 1914, he is living
in Sarajevo, where he works in a
pharmacy inherited from his devout
father. He’s also, as we soon learn,
both gay and an opium addict, whose
own experiences of God come mainly
when he’s high on the shop’s lauda-
num—which by the second page he
is. His ruminations on “the radiance
of His majesty” are interrupted by
the entry of a handsome Austrian sol-
dier. Emboldened by the drugs, Pinto
kisses him and follows him out into
the street on what will turn out to be
the most significant day in Sarajevo’s
history.
The assassination of Archduke
Franz Ferdinand has come up before
in Hemon’s fiction. In “The Accor-
dion,” from The Question of Bruno, the
Hemon-like narrator (possibly Hemon)
claims that his great-grandfather,
“freshly arrived in Bosnia from
Ukraine,” was holding an accordion
with a missing key near the archduke
when he was killed. Now, as Pinto joins
the crowds in an attempt to find the
handsome officer, the man holding the
accordion with a missing key is back—
and this time influences history by ac-
cidentally bumping aside another guy
who was about to grab the assassin’s
gun. As a result, “the shots rang, louder
than a cannon salvo, and . . . the world
exploded . . . into the before and after.”
And with that, so does Pinto’s life,
as the book moves to Galicia in 1916,
where he’s serving in the Austro-
Hungarian army fighting the Rus-
sians—and already in love with Osman,
a Muslim fellow soldier and Saraje-
van, with whom he has joyous sex “in
a trench, in the woods, on a haystack,
in the barracks bathhouse.” Their love
deepens as they become prisoners of
war in Tashkent (in present-day Uz-
bekistan) until the Russian Revolution
reaches them, their captors run away,
and they escape into the city. Fortu-
nately, Isak, the widowed doctor who
takes them in, fully approves of their
relationship, having been denied his
own chance at gay happiness when the
love of his life was beaten to death in a
pogrom. “What is it that makes people
do things like that?” Pinto asks after
GR ANGE R
hearing the story, with the mixture of
portentousness and banality that will
characterize much of the book.
July 20, 2023
I n an interview earlier this year,
Hemon scrupulously acknowledged
his “stage fright” at the “cultural ap-
propriation” involved in imagining “a
consciousness from 1914 by a queer
man,” before he decided, “Fuck it. Let’s
do it.” The trouble is that the initial
nervousness doesn’t seem to have
quite gone away, and he never really
does fuck it, instead handling the re-
lationship with a level of anxious piety
that often curdles into sentimentality.
At one point we hear that “Osman was
already up and gone, leaving but an
indentation in the reed mat on which
they slept. Had he kissed him before
he left, or was it part of a dream?” At
another, “a pair of turtledoves in a tree
branch above watched them, cooing,
as in a poem.”
In the same interview, Hemon said,
“I strive for complexity,” on the in-
Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, lying
in state in the Hofburg after their assassination, Vienna, June 1914
disputable grounds that “everyone
is complicated.” But, again, this is
not a theory he wholeheartedly em-
braces in practice. Most obviously, it
doesn’t appear to apply to Osman, with
his “eyes . . . like mountain lakes on a
sunny day,” his brilliance as a story-
teller, and his all-around virtuousness
that borders on the saintly. (He is, after
all, “the kindest man in the world.”)
Or, in fact, a virtuousness that even-
tually crosses into the Christlike. For
reasons that perhaps suit the plot
more than the characterization, Osman
apparently embraces heterosexual-
ity long enough to impregnate Isak’s
daughter Klara. While she’s in labor,
the Bolsheviks are seen approaching
the safe house—and bee farm—where
Osman has taken her and where Pinto
is assisting with the baby’s delivery.
Osman volunteers to go back and in-
tercept the Bolshevik posse despite
Pinto’s fierce protests and (accurate)
fear that if he does, they’ll never see
each other again. So it is that Osman
lays down his life to save his friends—
but not before he has echoed Christ’s
promise to the disciples by assuring
Pinto, “I will always be with you.”
And like Christ, Osman is as good as
his word. After Klara dies in childbirth,
Pinto takes the baby, Rahela, with him
on a six-year journey across the Tak-
lamakan Desert toward China, during
which he continues to hear Osman’s
voice urging him on. Even in death,
Osman doesn’t abandon his fondness
for speaking in little nuggets of wis-
dom that bring to mind the character
in E. M. Forster who “always delivered
a platitude as if it was an epigram.”
Back in happier times, Osman would
make remarks to Pinto that a lesser
man might have found a bit preten-
tious (“You have a soul, that’s the
candle. The candle never burns itself
out”), and some that an even lesser
one might have considered worthy
of the rejoinder “No shit, Sherlock”
(“When death comes, that’s the end
of life”). Posthumously, he offers such
encouragement as “You’ll die when it’s
time and you’ll know it’s time when
it comes.”
Worse, this tendency infects the
rest of the narrative. Even at times
of genuine excitement, Hemon keeps
pausing the action for grand-sounding
pronouncements that don’t stand up
to scrutiny. When Pinto escapes from
the Tashkent prison, his tense journey
to freedom is interrupted within the
space of four sentences by both “Trou-
bles dim your eyes, but liberty blinds
you” and “The evil in this world is the
leftover from the worlds destroyed.”
(Would that first aphorism make any
more or less sense if it were reversed:
“Liberty dims your eyes, but troubles
blind you”?) At another characteris-
tic moment, Pinto and Rahela hide in
a cave from a desert sandstorm—al-
though it takes Hemon a while to tell
us how they’re doing:
He who is in the dark can see what
is in the light, whereas he who is
in the light cannot see what is in
the dark. Only the Holy One does
see what is in the dark, because
He sees everything, everywhere. . . .
And if He ever bothered to actually
look into this particular lightless
cave, He would see Pinto and Ra-
hela, now sleeping on his chest.
So they’re OK, then.
Indeed, that many of Hemon’s blasts
of windy rhetoric are religious in na-
ture makes for a handy comparison
with The Making of Zombie Wars and
offers further proof of his transition
from winning mischievousness to off-
putting solemnity. That novel had
plenty of religious aphorisms as well,
but they were invariably comic and ir-
reverent: “I will walk with the Lord in
the lands of living, and the rest of yous
can go fuck yourselves”; “The Lord re-
viewed the whole of what he had done
and, behold, he couldn’t remember a
fucking thing.” In The World and All
That It Holds, they’re not only deliv-
ered straight—if not always decipher-
ably—but also repeated several times.
We’re told on three separate occa-
sions, for example, that “For everything
God created, He created its counter-
part”; that “God has no needs and we
are the needy ones”; and, most mysti-
fying of all, that “Because you hear so
many voices, do not imagine that there
are many gods in heaven.” In The Book
of My Lives, Hemon gently mocked his
younger self for trying “to produce
some lofty-seeming thoughts, coming
up with hapless imitations instead.”
Now he can unblushingly write—again
three times in all, with one minor vari-
ation—“The worlds that preceded this
one and were destroyed were like the
sparks that scatter and die away when
the blacksmith strikes the iron.”
N obody who reads The World and
All That It Holds is likely to com-
plain about feeling shortchanged—
and not just because it bristles with
so many different languages.1 (This
does create the desired effect of a jum-
ble of nationalities, although the lack
of translations might prove tricky for
any readers a little rusty on, say, their
Ladino, a variation of Spanish spo-
ken by Sephardic Jews.) The novel is
often successful as an adventure yarn,
even if it would work better without
the constant editorializing. To be sure,
the geographical and historical set-
tings are unfailingly vivid, proving the
truth of the idea in one of Hemon’s
earliest stories that “the verisimilitude
of fiction is achieved by the exactness
of the detail.” His sympathy with peo-
ple caught up in history can be highly
affecting, and there’s no denying the
emotional punch of the book’s climax.
Adding to the narrative richness,
meanwhile, is a large supporting cast,
including a scene-stealing British
spy—complete with a “stiff upper lip,”
a “chin slightly upturned in perpet-
ual contempt,” and a firm belief that
Americans are “muttonheads”—who
acts as a recurring deus ex machina.2
Pinto and Rahela reach Shanghai just
in time for the Japanese invasion, and
a memorable new villain turns up in
the shape of a (muttonhead) Ameri-
can “committed to wishful thinking
and arrogance.”
For good measure, if less happily, the
book also provides the kind of coda
that Hemon has used regularly since
Nowhere Man, but that here smacks
of “one of those brainy postmodern
setups everybody likes so well.” The
final chapter features the apparent
self-portrait of a rookie Bosnian Amer-
ican writer at a 2001 literary festival
in Jerusalem. There, the writer meets
the now-elderly Rahela, who relates
to him the basic outlines of her story,
from which he’s seemingly created the
novel we’ve just read. This serves to ex-
plain the “I” narrator-researcher who
has shown up from time to time and
whose presence, according to Hemon,
is ethically necessary because in order
.
to “write about someone who is not
me . . . I have to acknowledge that I am
imagining it”—a fact that we might
have worked out for ourselves.
1
By Hemon’s own reckoning, there are five
in the first chapter alone, counting English.
2
In The Book of My Lives, Hemon says that
for years he reread John le Carré’s Smiley
novels every summer.
31

Vermeer
an exhibition at the
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam,
February 10–June 4, 2023.
Catalog of the exhibition edited
by Pieter Roelofs and Gregor
J. M. Weber.
Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum/
Veurne: Hannibal, 317 pp., $65.00
Johannes Vermeer:
Faith, Light and Reflection
by Gregor J. M. Weber.
Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum,
165 pp., $35.00 (paper)
Vermeer and the Art of Love
by Aneta Georgievska-Shine.
London: Lund Humphries,
160 pp., $59.99
In an uncanny anticipation of his sub-
sequent reception history, Johannes
Vermeer made one of his first ap-
pearances in the printed record in
the guise of a phoenix, the mythical
bird that regenerates itself from its
own ashes. The context was a poem by
the printer Arnold Bon, published in
1667 to commemorate the premature
death of the painter Carel Fabritius
in the explosion of Delft’s gunpowder
arsenal thirteen years earlier, and Bon
concluded his lament by reassuring his
fellow citizens that a worthy successor
had nonetheless miraculously emerged
to take Fabritius’s place. Despite this
evidence of the esteem in which Ver-
meer was held at the time, his name
largely vanished from accounts of
Dutch painting in the centuries that
followed, only to reappear—phoenix-
like—when the French journalist and
art critic Théophile Thoré devoted a
three-part article to this “unknown
of genius,” as he’d earlier dubbed
him, in the Gazette des beaux- arts
in 1866.
Vermeer’s virtual disappearance
from the record is usually explained
by the small size of his corpus—mod-
ern scholars estimate that the entire
oeuvre consisted of some forty-five
to fifty works, as compared to more
than 350 currently attributed to his
great compatriot Rembrandt—and
by the fact that a significant number
of his paintings were swallowed up
in a single private collection during
his lifetime. If the art historian Ben
Broos is right to speculate that the
influential chronicler of Dutch paint-
ing Arnold Houbraken managed to
skip the crucial lines about the newly
risen phoenix because they appear on
a separate page from the rest of the
poem, then an accident of printing may
also have helped consign the artist to
oblivion. (Houbraken’s The Great The-
ater of Dutch Painters first appeared
in 1718, and the commentators who
followed mostly took their cues from
him.)
The result was that when an occa-
sional Vermeer did circulate, it was
often attributed to someone else, and
even admirers of his paintings didn’t
know whose art had actually capti-
vated them. Girl Reading a Letter at
an Open Window (circa 1657–1658)—
recently restored by the Gemäldegal-
erie in Dresden and the centerpiece
32
Life Made Light
Ruth Bernard Yeazell
Johannes Vermeer: Woman with a Pearl Necklace, circa 1662–1664
of its Vermeer exhibition less than
two years ago—was purchased in
1742 for the elector of Saxony as a
Rembrandt; two decades later Lady
at the Virginals with a Gentleman,
better known as The Music Lesson
(circa 1662–1664), entered the Royal
Collection at Windsor as a Frans van
Mieris. When The Art of Painting (circa
1666–1668) changed hands at the be-
ginning of the nineteenth century, it
was attributed to Pieter de Hooch—
an error that persisted until Ver-
meer’s signature was deciphered and
De Hooch’s identified as a forgery in
the 1860s.
Thoré called his discovery “Van der
Meer de Delft” in order to distinguish
him from the bewildering array of
other Van der Meers and Vermeers who
wielded a brush in the seventeenth-
century Netherlands, but such dis-
criminations have long outlived their
usefulness, as the recent exhibition
at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam
clearly demonstrated. Titled simply
“Vermeer”—the “Johannes” that still
preceded it for the last monographic
exhibition of his work at the National
Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the
Mauritshuis in The Hague in 1995–
1996 apparently felt superfluous—the
Rijksmuseum show sold out its entire
run of tickets just days after it opened.
Though much still remains unknown
about the artist and the man alike,
there is no question about the spell
he continues to exert on his viewers.
One of the most intimate and quiet
of painters, and one who often chose
to work on an unusually small scale,
Vermeer has become, paradoxically,
a crowd-pleaser.
M anaging those crowds can’t have
been easy, especially since the
Rijksmuseum’s advance publicity made
much of the fact that the twenty-eight
paintings on display represented the
largest group of works by Vermeer
ever assembled—probably more, ac-
cording to the museum’s director,
Taco Dibbits, than the artist himself
could have seen at any one time. (The
previous record holder, the 1995–1996
exhibition in Washington, consisted
of twenty-one paintings and proved
so popular that people lined up in the
winter cold for as long as twelve hours
to view it.) Any museum that hopes to
stage a Vermeer exhibition also has
to contend with viewers’ tendency to
linger longer before his paintings than
they do before the work of his contem-
poraries—the sort of behavior cura-
tors ordinarily welcome but that must
make estimating the pace of admis-
sions particularly difficult.
Despite the challenges, however,
this latest version of blockbuster
Vermeer largely succeeded in recon-
ciling its contradictory imperatives.
Having begun by exercising some wise
restraint on ticket sales, the museum
followed up by hanging the paintings
in a sequence of spaciously arranged
rooms, each of which afforded view-
ers ample opportunity—physically,
at least—to fulfill the promise of the
show’s rubric: “Closer to Vermeer.”
If the art so magnificently displayed
can still elude our desire for other
kinds of closeness, that’s one of the
principal ways, after all, it keeps us
looking.
Of the thirty-seven paintings now
attributed to Vermeer, only four bear
complete dates,1 and the show mostly
subordinated the question of chronol-
ogy to other concerns, both formal
and thematic. Though it did devote
a single room to his early ambitions
as a history painter, the first thing
to catch the viewer’s eye was not one
of the canvases with which the artist
launched his career but the one that
helped to precipitate his modern re-
vival: View of Delft (circa 1660–1661).
Acquired by the Mauritshuis in 1822,
it was the first of Vermeer’s paintings
to enter a public museum under the
artist’s name and the first with which
Thoré, writing more than four decades
later, chose to introduce him to con-
temporary viewers. Allowing for the
change of venue, the opening line of
Thoré’s pioneering article—“In the
museum at The Hague a superb and
very singular landscape arrests all vis-
itors and vividly impresses artists and
connoisseurs”—might still serve to
gloss the experience of those lucky
enough to have acquired tickets to the
Rijksmuseum.
By calling View of Delft “very sin-
gular,” Thoré presumably meant to
distinguish it from other landscapes
with which he was familiar, but the
painting has proved virtually unique
in Vermeer’s corpus as well. Persuaded
that its creator must have specialized
in the genre—about a third of the
seventy-odd works Thoré tentatively
attributed to him were landscapes or
cityscapes—the artist’s nineteenth-
century champion ended up construct-
ing a Vermeer very different in this
respect from our own. Only the paint-
ing known as The Little Street (circa
1658–1659), which hung on a wall ad-
jacent to View of Delft at the Rijks-
museum, continues to represent this
version of the artist. (A third such
painting, known to modern scholars
from a seventeenth-century sales cat-
alog, has never been located.) Despite
the fact that Vermeer’s wife gave birth
to fifteen sons and daughters, eleven
of whom are known to have survived
his death, these cityscapes are also
his only pictures to feature children:
a tiny figure carried by a woman in
View of Delft and the two youngsters
playing in the foreground of The Lit-
tle Street. The modern Vermeer is pri-
marily an artist of the interior, and his
celebrated silence partly depends on
keeping those children, imaginatively
speaking, outside the walls.
I n one of his several contributions
to the catalog, Gregor J. M. Weber
GE MÄL DE GAL E RI E, STAATLICH E MUSE E N ZU BE RLI N
observes that the hint of clouded sky
and a red building just barely visi-
ble through the casement in Officer
and Laughing Girl (circa 1657–1658)
represents the single such outward
1
A catalog essay by Pieter Roelofs refers to
“five” dated paintings, but this includes the
recently discovered evidence of a Roman
numeral on The Art of Painting whose last
digits scholars have not been able to de-
cipher completely. The catalog elsewhere
dates the painting circa 1666–1668—a judg-
ment based, like all such approximations in
Vermeer’s case, on a loose consensus as to
the artist’s stylistic development.
The New York Review
 view in all the artist’s oeuvre. That
determination to close off his space
to everything but light is among the
characteristics that most distinguish
Vermeer from a contemporary like De
Hooch, with whom he otherwise shared
so many motifs. There are no figures
in the doorways of Vermeer’s interi-
ors or glimpses of a cheerful court-
yard, only an illuminated enclosure
that often seems to double as a met-
aphor for the inwardness of the soli-
tary woman—or occasional man—who
inhabits it.
Commentators on the paintings
frequently remark their tendency to
leave things out: not just the things
we cannot see through the window,
but the elements Vermeer originally
painted and then removed from the
picture and the narrative cues he de-
liberately suppressed, sometimes by
painting them over, too. (A man could
once be seen in the inner room of A
Maid Asleep (circa 1656–1657), for in-
stance.) Rather than emphasize such
absences, however, the contributors to
the catalog prefer to follow the lead
of the exhibition, arguing that more
of what lay beyond Vermeer’s windows
made it into his pictures than a casual
viewer might think.
Sometimes this takes the form of
calling attention to individual figures,
like the “fashionable intruders”—by
definition male—said to “bring the out-
side world into the intimate inner world
of the elegant young women” in three
early paintings of courting couples: The
Glass of Wine, Girl Interrupted at Her
Music, and Girl with a Wine Glass (all
circa 1659–1661). At other times we are
urged to notice particular objects that
serve as physical representations of the
wider world—the map and globe in The
Geographer (1669), for example—or the
pieces of paper that implicitly travel
back and forth between sender and re-
ceiver in the six paintings of women
reading or writing letters, “piercing the
confines of domesticity like so many
windows and doors,” in the apt phrase
of Marjorie E. Wieseman.
Less satisfying, I think, is a repeated
attempt to divide Vermeer’s figures be-
tween “introverts” and “extroverts,” as
if the border between inside and out
could be mapped directly onto their
psychology. At its most literal, the dis-
tinction is clear enough and loosely
corresponds to the well-known divide
between absorption and theatricality
first advanced by Michael Fried in re-
lation to eighteenth-century painting:
while many of Vermeer’s figures are ap-
parently absorbed by something within
the picture itself and take no notice
of our presence—think of Woman in
Blue Reading a Letter (circa 1662–1664),
for instance, or The Lacemaker (circa
1666–1668)—others face the viewer,
as if inviting us to meet their gaze.
Probably Vermeer’s most famous “ex-
trovert” in this sense is Girl with a
Pearl Earring (circa 1664–1667), but
the category includes his other small
head studies, or tronies, like Girl with
a Red Hat (also circa 1664–1667), as
well as individual figures in a range
FRICK COLLE CT ION, NE W YOR K
of works both early and late, from the
smiling young man to the left of The
Procuress (1656), who has sometimes
been identified as the artist himself,
to the two women at the virginals, one
seated and one standing, who look out
at us from a pair of late paintings that
usually hang in the National Gallery
in London.
July 20, 2023
Yet physical orientation is no guar-
antee of psychological effect, and with
a few arguable exceptions, like the
awkwardly laughing young woman in
Girl with a Wine Glass, “extrovert”
feels like the wrong term for Vermeer’s
figures, even when they literally turn
outward. Nor does the distinction re-
ally address the way they respond to
one another within the pictures. On
which side of the divide, for exam-
ple, should we place the young woman
of Officer and Laughing Girl, as she
turns her luminous face not toward
the painting’s beholder but toward her
enigmatic visitor? Like the gentleman
who attends to the woman’s perfor-
Johannes Vermeer: Officer and Laughing Girl, circa 1657–1658
mance in The Music Lesson—or, for
that matter, the artist who faces away
from us and looks toward his model in
The Art of Painting—she is as much
removed from the viewer by a state of
absorption as any of the single figures
engaged in their solitary tasks.2
Even when Vermeer’s figures do turn
our way, the fact that they typically
look at us over their shoulders rather
than confront us directly, as Lawrence
Gowing long ago noted, means that
there remains something oblique and
withheld in the very gesture with which
they meet our gaze. Perhaps because it
classed her among the extroverts, the
Rijksmuseum chose a reproduction of
Girl with the Red Hat to welcome vis-
itors, but that curiously androgynous
face still kept its secrets—and so too
did that of Girl with a Pearl Earring,
for all the radiance of her image. De-
spite their parted lips, it remains im-
possible to imagine what either young
woman is about to say.
“A t one for once with sunlight fall-
ing through/A leaded window”:
as this lovely phrase from Howard
Nemerov’s 1962 tribute to the art-
2
Neither of these great paintings, unfortu-
nately, made it to the Rijksmuseum.
ist implicitly affirms, what does re-
solve the dialectic between inner and
outer in Vermeer is light. Nemerov’s
resonant lines lack a subject, as if
the poet wished to leave ambiguous
whether that sense of oneness belongs
to the subject of the painting or its
beholder—who may, of course, also
be the painter himself. Elsewhere in
the poem, the speaker evokes “those
little rooms/Where the weight of life
has been lifted and made light”: a line
that manages elegantly to identify a
physical phenomenon with a state of
consciousness by playing on the dou-
ble meaning of its final phrase as il-
lumination and release from burden.
Both the physics of light and its psy-
chological resonance are also crucial to
Weber’s account of the artist. In one
of his contributions to the catalog, he
draws on a 1678 treatise by Vermeer’s
contemporary Samuel van Hoogstraten
in order to explain how we respond to
the lighting of a painted interior. Hav-
ing observed that the brightest surface
of any interior is always darker than
the shadows outside, Van Hoogstraten
advised his fellow artists to save their
most brilliant white for any glimpse of
sky or clouds they wished to include in
the picture. By choosing to foreclose
such possibilities, however, Vermeer
freed himself to use that white within
the room instead, typically employing
it, Weber notes, for a window jamb or
wall: a maneuver whose paradoxical re-
sult is to make viewers’ imagination of
what they cannot see shine still more
brilliantly than what they can. Though
we have no way of knowing if Vermeer
made such decisions consciously—
unlike Van Hoogstraten, he never at-
tempted to theorize his practice—the
paintings themselves provide abun-
dant testimony to their creator’s un-
derstanding of how vision operates.
Scholars have long speculated that
Vermeer must have had access to a
camera obscura, since certain features
of his work—especially the areas of
blurred focus and the dots of bright
paint he often scatters on the can-
vas—resemble the effects it gener-
ates. Consisting in its simplest form
of a pinhole in a wall through which
sunlight projects an image onto an op-
posing surface in a dark room (the lit-
eral meaning of “camera obscura”), the
device has been known since antiquity,
and versions of it can be readily doc-
umented from Vermeer’s time. Advo-
cates for its connection to his work like
to cite the eyewitness testimony of the
Dutch statesman and polymath Con-
stantijn Huygens, who acquired such
a camera in 1622 and wrote ecstati-
cally to his parents of its “admirable
effects”: “It is impossible to describe
for you the beauty of it in words: all
painting is dead in comparison.”
But while Huygens suspected that at
least one Dutch artist of his acquain-
tance had secretly employed the cam-
era for his illusionistic still lifes, and
Van Hoogstraaten would subsequently
refer to it in his treatise, no definitive
evidence has emerged to link Vermeer
to such an instrument. An inventory
of his possessions compiled after his
death lists other artist’s paraphernalia,
like easels and palettes, but says noth-
ing about a camera. Nor have attempts
to associate his apparent knowledge
of its effects with the optical experi-
ments of another Delft citizen, Antonie
van Leeuwenhoek, proved especially
fruitful, despite the tantalizing fact
that the microscopist later served as
executor of Vermeer’s estate.
Weber, however, has a different can-
didate, one literally closer to home: the
inhabitants of the Jesuit residence
just down the street from the house
where the adult artist lived with his
Catholic wife, Catharina Bolnes, and
mother-in-law in the neighborhood of
seventeenth-century Delft known as
the Papists’ Corner. Weber is the head
of Fine and Decorative Arts at the Ri-
jksmuseum, and in Johannes Vermeer:
Faith, Light and Reflection he elaborates
an argument he briefly advances in the
catalog—that the Jesuits were not only
neighbors of the Vermeer family but a
principal source of the painter’s optical
knowledge. Equally important, by this
account, they also provided the chief
inspiration for his treatment of light
as a spiritual phenomenon.
Weber is not the first to connect
Vermeer to the local Jesuits, who have
sometimes been identified as possi-
ble commissioners of the late paint-
ing known as Allegory of the Catholic
Faith (circa 1670–1674), a technically
sophisticated exercise in Baroque reli-
giosity that many of the artist’s mod-
ern admirers have nonetheless found
difficult to love. More recently, scholars
have speculated that the Jesuits next
door may also have commissioned the
early Saint Praxedis (1655), a copy ap-
parently signed by Vermeer after an
Italian original by Felice Ficherelli.
Not every authority has accepted the
attribution, but if the painting is in-
deed Vermeer’s, as Weber and his col-
leagues believe, its depiction of the
saint serenely wringing the blood of
martyrs from a sponge would repre-
sent perhaps his earliest attempt at an
image of female absorption—a maca-
bre forerunner of works like The Milk-
maid or Young Woman with a Water
Pitcher (both circa 1662–1664). Only
when his brush drew a fluid squiggle
of red paint beneath the dead snake in
Allegory of the Catholic Faith, however,
33

Firebird brings together
many of Zuzanna Ginczanka’s
uncollected poems and
presents On Centaurs, her sole
published book, in its entirety.
Zuzanna Ginczanka’s last poem,
“Non omnis moriar. . . ” (“Not all of
me shall die”), written shortly before
her execution by the Nazis in the last
months of World War II, is one of
the most famous and unsettling texts
in modern East European literature: a
fiercely ironic last will and testament
that names the person who betrayed
her to the occupying authorities as a
Jew, it exposes the hypocrisy at the
heart of Polish nationalist myths.
Ginczanka’s linguistic exuberance and
invention—reminiscent of Marina
Tsvetaeva, Marianne Moore and Mina
Loy—are as exhilarating as the passionate
fusion of the physical world and the
world of ideas she advocated in her work.
Zuzanna Ginczanka, 1938
Photograph: Museum of Literature/East News
“The brief, cataclysmic life of
Zuzanna Ginczanka would be
enough to draw English-language
readers to this compelling volume.
But Ginczanka’s poems speak for
themselves in Alissa Valles’s thrilling
translations. Should there have been
a longer life and more poems?
Of course. ‘I leave no heirs,’
Ginczanka writes. Not so. Her
‘magnificent estate’ returns to life
in Valles’s inspired versions.”
—Clare Cavanagh
FIREBIRD
Zuzanna Ginczanka
Translated from the Polish by
Alissa Valles
Paperback $14.95 • On sale July 25th
• Vermeer’s overtly religious paintings
2013 – 2023
Available from booksellers and www.nyrb.com
34
would he again mark a canvas with
the sign of blood.
Y et while many scholars have con-
sulted Jesuit sources for the ico-
nography of such images, they have not
typically mined those sources for the
kind of optical knowledge that Weber’s
new book uncovers or connected that
knowledge to Vermeer’s own experi-
ments with vision. Like other attempts
to fill the gaps in the record, Johannes
Vermeer: Faith, Light and Reflection
inevitably rests much of its case on
informed speculation, and claims as
to what the artist “must have” seen
or known appear repeatedly in its
pages. But by building on the work
of those who have gone before him,
Weber makes some significant new
discoveries whose cumulative impact
persuades this reader, at least, that
the local Jesuits probably did serve
as the conduit for Vermeer’s knowl-
edge of the camera obscura. Whether
we must therefore conclude that they
also shaped his view of the world is
another matter, however, especially
when we can begin to share in that
view by looking at all the paintings
they didn’t commission.
Central to Weber’s argument is a
Jesuit emblem book first identified
by the Dutch iconographer Eddy de
Jongh as a source for the mysteri-
ous reflecting globe that hangs from
the ceiling in Allegory of the Catholic
Faith. Published by Guilielmus Hesius
in 1636, the book shows a similar globe
whose capacity to reflect both a sun
and a cross serves as an emblem of
faith, its meaning glossed by the motto
Capit quod non capit (It grasps that
which it cannot grasp). Weber goes De
Jongh one better by locating a man-
uscript version of the book whose
emblem resembles the painting still
more closely, since its globe appears
indoors rather than outdoors and is
framed by a curtain drawn to the left,
just as it is in Vermeer’s picture. More
to the point, he also identifies another
emblem in the book that features a
camera obscura—there are two in the
manuscript—and traces the personal
connections by which knowledge of the
earlier document might have reached
the artist. Though he has to concede
there’s no hard evidence that the Delft
Jesuits actually owned such a camera,
Weber argues plausibly that a draw-
ing by one of their number was com-
posed with its aid and drives home the
argument by noting that the maker
of the drawing died in the spring of
1656—the very year, he contends, in
which the effects of the camera began
to appear in Vermeer’s paintings, as if
the device had somehow made its way
into the hands of the artist.
It’s a persuasive story, and so too is
Weber’s demonstration that the Jesuits
were fascinated by optical phenomena
because they associated the proper-
ties of light with those of the God they
worshiped. But the argument carries
with it a troubling corollary: that both
and his work as a whole are best un-
derstood as the product of his Catholi-
Summer Issue, August 17— on sale August 3
Fall Books Issue, September 21—on sale September 7
cism and that the visual pleasure of his
art should always be measured against
the didactic traditions he inherited.
Advanced most strenuously in We-
ber’s book, the argument also filtered
into the exhibition, where it came to
the fore in the moralizing comparison
that closed the show: two of Vermeer’s
most radiant images, Woman with a
Pearl Necklace (circa 1662–1664; see
illustration on page 32) and Woman
Holding a Balance (circa 1662–1664),
pointedly displayed alongside Allegory
of the Catholic Faith—despite the de-
cade separating them—and glossed
by the solemn rubric “Reflections on
Vanity and Faith.”
I n a lengthy contribution to the cat-
alog, Pieter Roelofs offers to bring
us “closer to Vermeer” by using the
posthumous inventory of his estate to
produce a meticulous reconstruction
of his living arrangements. Weber’s
book draws on the same document to
place him squarely within what it calls
“Vermeer’s Catholic household,” a move
that takes for granted not only the well-
established fact that the painter mar-
ried out of the Dutch Reformed Church
in which he was baptized but that his
probable conversion to his wife’s Ca-
tholicism—for which we lack any writ-
ten evidence—entailed considerably
more than a formal profession of faith.
Weber also presumes, oddly, that it
was Vermeer who “must have taken
the lead” in the hanging of the house-
hold pictures, despite the fact that
the house in question had belonged
to his Catholic mother-in-law before
the couple moved in and that she con-
tinued to share it with them for most
of the artist’s career. Because the no-
tary who compiled the inventory re-
corded a picture including “all kinds of
women’s things” right before “one of
Veronica” (either the saint or the mi-
raculously imprinted veil that serves
as her icon), we are meant to under-
stand that Vermeer would have invited
a similar comparison: hence the show’s
final juxtaposition of Woman with a
Pearl Necklace and Woman Holding a
Balance. While the first looks in the
mirror and admires one of those “wom-
en’s things” that Weber identifies with
female vanity, her faithful sister stands
before a painting of the Last Judg-
ment in the place ordinarily occupied
by Saint Michael and meditates on how
she too will finally be judged.
Shift the frame, however, and the
picture changes. Aneta Georgievska-
Shine’s Vermeer and the Art of Love
also draws on textual sources to illu-
minate Vermeer’s art, but the legacy
of Petrarch figures far more promi-
nently in her book than that of the
Jesuits, and the texts she cites most
frequently are the poems—not the ser-
mons—of John Donne.3 Though her
title might suggest that she focuses
3
Lest the Donne connection seem too far
afield, Georgievska-Shine informs us that
Constantijn Huygens was a great admirer
of the poems, nineteen of which he trans-
lated into Dutch and published in a col-
lection in 1658.
Summer Schedule
on Vermeer’s depiction of courtship,
she is more concerned with his amo-
rous relation to what he painted: “that
lover-like absorption with the object
of representation,” in her words, that
ends by making the beholder of the
painting fall in love, too.
This is not a biographical argument,
and Georgievska-Shine touches lightly
on the idea that we may be respond-
ing to visual evidence of Vermeer’s
feeling for his wife. (If he did convert
to Catholicism in order to marry her,
however, it’s at least an open ques-
tion whether the “personal religious
beliefs” Weber detects in the pictures
were their primary inspiration.) Nor
does Vermeer and the Art of Love merely
address the techniques by which the
male artist negotiates his relation to
beautiful women, though the book of-
fers a suggestive analogy between the
remoteness of Petrarch’s beloved Laura
and the various strategies Vermeer de-
vises for rendering his own objects of
desire at once alluring and unattain-
able, like the curtain that promises “ei-
ther to disclose the scene more fully. . .
or remove it forever” in Girl Reading a
Letter at an Open Window. By repeat-
edly pausing to note “the subtle ten-
sion” Vermeer maintains between the
descriptive character of his work and
its formal qualities, Georgievska-Shine
also seeks to account, however partially,
for our own lover-like absorption in the
paintings. What keeps us looking, she
implies, is what keeps us unsettled—
caught between our surrender to illu-
sion and our consciousness of the art
that makes that illusion possible.
I n 1922 the British poet, novelist, and
essayist E.V. Lucas paid tribute to
Woman with a Pearl Necklace by dwell-
ing not on the woman herself but on
the white wall behind her, “beautiful
beyond the power of words to express,”
while fantasizing about extracting
from the canvas what amounted to
an incipient piece of abstract art. “It
is so wonderful,” Lucas wrote, “that
if one were to cut out a few square
inches of this wall alone and frame
them one would have a joy for ever.”
That’s one way of looking at Vermeer,
closely akin to the modernist spirit in
which Lucas’s more famous contem-
porary Marcel Proust was arranging
that same year for his fictional nov-
elist Bergotte to spend his dying mo-
ments admiring the “little patch of
yellow wall” in View of Delft.
For Weber, who would presumably
regard such blithe neglect of iconog-
raphy as an anachronism, the lumi-
nous expanse behind the woman with
the pearl necklace signifies the God
on whom she has turned her back in
order to focus on her own image in
the mirror. But Vermeer’s light falls
on her, too, and to divorce that light
from his human subject is also to cut
up the picture—if only, like Lucas, by
an act of mental vandalism. Scholars
have responsibilities that poets are
.
free to ignore, but in this case Nem-
erov’s “At one for once with sunlight”
feels truer to Vermeer than the dic-
tates of the emblem books.
The New York Review

Night of the Living Rez
by Morgan Talty.
Tin House, 285 pp., $16.95 (paper)
A sign flanking the Maine Turnpike
near the New Hampshire border greets
drivers as they file in from points
south: “Maine. Welcome Home. The
Way Life Should Be.” This seductive
dictum, however, obscures less roman-
tic landscapes within the borders of
our state. Most of its residents live on
roads where the 15.6 million tourists
who visited in 2021 probably didn’t go:
in communities damaged by toxic pol-
lutants or opioids, bankrupted by gov-
ernment inaction, devoured by poverty,
haunted by our country’s colonial past.
Penobscot Nation—along with the rest
of Maine’s Native population—has suf-
fered all of the above.
In June 1972 a long ribbon of liti-
gation began to unspool that obliged
the Department of Justice to sue the
state of Maine on behalf of the Passa-
maquoddy Tribe. Two weeks later, it
filed suit on behalf of Penobscot Nation.
The claims centered on the applicabil-
ity of the Nonintercourse Act of 1790, a
federal statute prohibiting the sale or
confiscation of Native land without the
express approval of Congress. Penob-
scots claimed, rightly, that the transfer
of their land to Massachusetts (now
Maine) in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries had broken this
law, and they wanted their land back.
At issue was the ownership of nearly
two thirds of the entire state.1
In 1980 the lawsuit was settled, re-
sulting in the federal Maine Indian
Claims Settlement Act (MICSA ) and
its accompanying state legislation. In
return for their vacated land claims,
Penobscots were granted rights that
supported tribal self-determination
through self-governance, which, under
federal Indian policy, other tribes
across the country already enjoyed.
At the time, most MICSA stakeholders
considered this a victory for both the
tribe and the state.
However, MICSA includes provisions
that allow Maine to deem federal Indian
policies void if they interfere with the
application of Maine state law. As a re-
sult, Maine’s Wabanaki Nations—which
include the Penobscots—are uniquely
prevented from benefiting from these
federal Indian policies, including the
more than 150 laws passed since the
signing of MICSA . They have been de-
prived of opportunities to determine
how to regulate their own health care,
housing, disaster response, and en-
vironmental protections. This has
crushed their ability to prosper: while
the incomes of nearly all other tribes
under federal Indian policy have grown
an average of 61 percent since the
1980s, the Wabanaki’s has increased
a skimpy 9 percent. A recent report
from Harvard University confirms that
their “stark economic underperfor-
mance” is unique to Maine and rooted
in the “restrictive construct of MICSA .”2
1 but Governor Janet Mills has threatened to
See Paul Brodeur, “Restitution,” The New
Yorker, October 11, 1982.
2
Legislation to amend the act was passed
in the US House of Representatives last
July 20, 2023
Vacationland
Kerri Arsenault
Morgan Talty; illustration by Leanne Shapton
Moreover, the Penobscot River—a
sixty-mile stretch of which encom-
passes more than two hundred islands
that are part of Penobscot Nation, in-
cluding Indian Island, the tribe’s seat of
government and primary village—also
remains managed by the state. Even as
the water flows around and under their
reservation, Penobscots can’t regulate
it or the industrial toxics like dioxins
that have been discharged thirty-five
miles upstream by a paper mill for over
a century. The river’s fish are so con-
taminated that Maine’s Department of
Inland Fisheries and Wildlife recom-
mends people eat no more than one
or two per month. Anyone consuming
more could face reproductive problems;
a weakened immune system; increased
risk for kidney, testicular, or liver can-
cer; or a catalog of other bodily woes.
Sustenance fishing is not just impos-
sible—nobody can live off one or two
fish a month—but potentially deadly.
Industrial toxics can also harm indige-
nous wetland creatures like turtles and
beavers. “For traditional Penobscots,”
Darren J. Ranco, now the chair of Native
American Programs at the University
of Maine, wrote in 2000, “to harm these
animals is to harm tribal members.”
year, but it was opposed in the Senate by
Maine’s own Susan Collins and Angus King.
Maine’s House and Senate have more re-
cently agreed to support changes to MICSA
that would create a path to sovereignty,
veto them. Her office’s chief legal counsel
testified in March that MICSA adjustments
“would not solve any real world problem,
but would instead create new confusion.”
According to the Wabanaki Alliance,
which represents Maine’s tribes, there
are 2,398 enrolled Penobscot mem-
bers, with 417 living on Indian Island.
The entirety of Penobscot Nation con-
sists of about 4,900 acres of reser-
vation land, including the islands in
the river, as well as over 95,000 acres
of managed trust land in nine terri-
tories across Maine. While the tribe
is small, and perhaps to federal or
state government of little political
or fiscal concern, their predicament
illustrates global environmental is-
sues. So what does it mean to live in
a nation that’s in pieces and parts, or
under another government’s control—
where the boundaries are as murky
and hazardous as the pollution that
runs through it?
I n his essay “Landscape and Nar-
rative,” Barry Lopez suggests that
there are two landscapes with which
the storyteller contends—“one out-
side the self, the other within.” He
proposes that “the purpose of story-
telling is to achieve harmony between
the two landscapes . . . to reproduce the
harmony of the land in the individu-
al’s interior.” To violate this alignment,
Lopez argues, is to violate narrative
itself:
To make up something that is
not there, something which can
never be corroborated in the land,
to knowingly set forth a false re-
lationship, is to be lying. . . . For
a storyteller to insist on rela-
tionships that do not exist is
to lie. Lying is the opposite of
story.
Morgan Talty, in his debut collection
of short stories, Night of the Living
Rez, inscribes his characters’ inner
landscapes with the violence enacted
upon their exterior landscapes, show-
ing how difficult it is for them to flour-
ish in such an environment. In doing
so, he indicts the false rhetoric around
our home state and presents Maine
not as it should be, but as it is. This
is a Maine story long overdue and an
environmental story often left untold.
But it’s a quiet book in many ways.
Silences gather and losses accumu-
late, just as toxics accrue in a school
of Penobscot fish.
In the foreground, a family of Pe-
nobscots (of which Talty is one). In the
background, a fictionalized Penobscot
Indian Nation Reservation (much like
the one where Talty grew up), sepa-
rated by a bridge from lands off the
reservation. At the book’s heart is a boy
named David, who as an adult goes by
Dee, and who tries to be good despite
everything keeping him from doing
just that. David/Dee narrates these
two phases of his life, but not chrono-
logically and not at every age, so some
movements occur offstage, with family
and friends shuffling through scenes in
a turnstile of instability. There’s Da-
vid’s divorced mother, who calls him
gwus (the Penobscot word for “little
boy”) and whose presence is almost
as sporadic as that of his older sister,
Paige; his declining grandmother; his
pill-popping, hard-drinking childhood
friend, Fellis; and his lackluster step-
father, Frick, who claims he’s a medi-
cine man while chugging boxed wine
and clumsily performing his dubious
rituals.
Even when they are present, these
people are often as unsteady as the
crooked steps and crooked door of Da-
vid’s house. Early on, after David and
his mother relocate to the reservation
from somewhere in the south, Frick
moves in “just as fast as Mom had un-
packed.” In another story Dee visits his
mother in a crisis stabilization unit,
where she’s been prescribed Valium
and clonazepam—for what, we don’t
exactly know. There, she experiences
a seizure, which lasts about a minute.
“I’m holding on,” Dee says.
My mother is loosening, struggling
to sit up as if it were the first time
she ever rose, ever used her mus-
cles. I’m rubbing her back, and I’m
thinking about the cigarettes and
the voice mails. The voice mails
about the cigarettes she always
wants. Right then I tell myself I
will always bring her cigarettes.
Meanwhile, his sister is in rehab
somewhere else, and his grandmother
is sent to live at Woodlands, an elder-
care facility where there are no woods
but the dark forests of dementia. In
another story Fellis receives electro-
convulsive therapy treatments. “He
looked so beat up,” Dee thinks. “His
eyes were half shut, his expressions
plain and simply devoid of any life,
kind of like if you’d put two black dots
35
and a straight line on an orange and
called it a face.”
W e are left to puzzle out what’s
happened in the gaps. But Talty
leaves plenty of dots for us to connect.
David’s biological father lives down
south and lingers in the margins of
some of the stories, an absence as
palpable as the loss of the “red alien
guy,” a toy David accidentally drops
in a crack between the front door
and the stairs and imagines “getting
sucked deeper and deeper into that
thawing mud.” This constant motion
doesn’t necessarily propel the char-
acters forward. Like the plastic toy,
they get swallowed up or anesthetized
by circumstance, and evanesce in the
periphery.
There’s a restrained tenderness in
Talty’s writing, and in how his charac-
ters show compassion. After David gets
sick from being made to smoke four-
teen cigarettes by his grandmother,
who thinks she’s teaching him a lesson
about stealing blessing tobacco, Paige
rubs his scalp and serves him ginger
ale. It’s not just suffering Talty has
brought us here to see, but love de-
spite suffering, even if it’s a tiny ges-
ture of comfort. His characters aren’t
relics of the past, undead (per the title
of the book), or gesticulating from a
daguerreotype of Native life. They eat
“freezer-burned orange creamsicles”
and “bags full of double cheeseburgers”
from McDonald’s, shop at TJ Maxx,
play bingo, and gamble with dried spa-
ghetti instead of cash.
Talty emphasizes the quietness of
his characters’ lives, even if they’re
in turmoil or somehow stuck. “Fellis
and I were on the couch, watching re-
runs of The People’s Court and sipping
warm Arizona Iced Tea,” Dee narrates
after bringing Fellis home from his
ECT treatments.
Beth baked chicken and made a
green bean casserole. . . . As the
cases came and went—as Beth
walked back and forth from the
living room to the kitchen—Fel-
lis and I said, Fuck Judge Milian.
We’d deliver the verdicts.
The book’s opening story begins:
Winter, and I walked the sidewalk
at night along banks of hard snow.
I’d come from Rab’s apartment off
the reservation. Rab—this white
guy with a wide mouth and eyes
that closed up when he laughed—
sold pot.
In a few sentences, Talty maps this
world. Slippery, unshoveled sidewalks,
the frozen river, a blocked bridge are
all external barriers that reshape the
characters’ lives—their paths also lit-
tered with Ativan, Adderall, booze, and
cigarettes. Then Dee hears a strange
noise:
Moonlight through bare tree limbs
lit the swamp, and caught among
the tree stumps and solid snow
was a person sprawled out on the
ground. He was trying to sit up
but kept falling back, like he’d just
done one thousand crunches and
was too sore to do just one more.
It was Fellis. . . . He tried to sit
up, but something pulled him back
down. . . .
36
“My hair,” he said. humor.3 But isn’t this what all humor
I looked at it with the lighter’s tries to accomplish, not just Native
flame. “Holy,” I said, and I laughed. humor?
Instead of the tight braid that Talty is also teasing us, daring his
shined, Fellis’s hair had come un-
done, and it was frozen into the
snow.
readers to designate Night of the Liv-
ing Rez a collection “about” indigeneity
or to appoint him a spokesperson for
Native literature. With 574 federally rec-
Dee tries to pull Fellis’s hair out of the ognized tribes, no one writer or book can
snow but it won’t come loose, and Fellis represent them all. Talty’s stories con-
screams when he yanks at it: tain details specific to being Penobscot,
but this is only part of who his charac-
“Lift your head up,” I said. I opened ters are. Instead of relying on harmful
my pocketknife, and at the click of tropes, Talty restyles them again and
the blade Fellis spoke. again, holding cultural assumptions up
“Wait, wait,” he said. “Don’t cut to a light box, then turning out the light.4
it.”
“What do you want me to do?
Tell the ice to let it go?. . . I have
to cut it,” I said. “You ain’t getting
out if I don’t. . . . You want me to
I n a book where little is nailed down,
Fellis becomes trapped—by hair,
body, addiction, lifestyle, land. Dee
cut my braid too?” does too. At times it’s as if the land is
haunted and seeking revenge on those
“I never thought I’d scalp a fel- who inhabit it. This seems especially
low tribal member,” Dee says after true in a story called “In a Field of
cutting Fellis’s braid. His joke un- Stray Caterpillars.” Driving home from
derlines the brutal associations of the hospital in Fellis’s truck, Dee and
scalping mingled with empathy for Fellis approach the bridge that con-
his friend. In scenes like this, Talty
cloaks gloom with sarcasm and masks 3 and creeping up the grassy banks
Ian Frazier, “‘Part of Why We Survived,’”
intimacy with teasing. “Humans are
The New York Review, January 13, 2022.
resilient, and the risky exhilaration
4
of making one another laugh helps See also Morgan Talty, “I Regretted Not
them to be,” Ian Frazier wrote in Having a Long Braid When My Mother
these pages in an essay on Native Died,” The Guardian, August 23, 2022.
At Putney
Pink scud clouds over the bridges,
Vauxhall, Lambeth, Battersea,
spider-work. Black. The syllables
of water, black. Go. Stay. Met
in air, met in water, and I a child
of summer born far from here
on a Thursday. A Thursday, you say?
Far to go and full of woe.
And what year was it, the house
a page torn from the calendar,
a foolscap boat filled with paper
ballast, bisecting the waves
until they parted, impossible to let
a single page go, and the thud
when the tide hit the bank? A year
to remember. Give me your hand
across the water. Once I went down
when the tide was out and the stones
ashimmer, obsidian in the moonlight,
the ivy brackish and the toads
dry in their den. Come out
from the fountain, maenad
made of green stone, moss-flecked
bone and your teeth chattering.
—Cynthia Zarin
nects the town to the reservation and
see a yellow flashing sign that says
“Drive Slow, Use Caution.” The road
beyond is boiling with caterpillars:
Some were dead, run over by cars
and trucks—it sounded like pop-
corn popping when we drove over
them—and others were alive, crawl-
ing among the gooey dead in search
of trees with leaves that they hadn’t
already eaten, or of tree trunks
that the Department of Natural
Resources hadn’t wrapped in duct
tape and smeared with petroleum
jelly to save what leaves remained.
The smell “moved about the rez” and
makes the two friends vomit.
In another story, “Food for the Com-
mon Cold,” a snapping turtle dies and
rots under the house, and David thinks
(riding over that same bridge to the
island):
There was no escaping how those
problems shaped us all, no escaping
the end, like the way the ice melts
in the river each spring, overflowing
and over lawns, reaching farther and
farther toward the houses until fi-
nally the water touched stone, a gen-
tleness before the river converged
on the foundation, seeping inside
and flooding basements, insulation
swelling, drying only when the water
has receded. What remained was
a smell, a reminder that the water
had come and risen up and would
rise again, in time. I would never
forget that car ride or that night
at home: because we all found that
smell, literally, and it was not subtle.
Such conditions reveal the conundrum
of Penobscots living in Maine or any-
one living on land they don’t have the
agency to control.
Toward the end of the book, an at-
mosphere of zombification prevails.
Dee goes blind, Frick becomes a mon-
ster, and Paige loses her baby—who
“suffered terrible seizures from meth-
adone withdrawal”—becoming cata-
tonic in her grief. In the next-to-last
story, which bears the same title as the
book, there’s an acute menace afoot
in the house. As in George Romero’s
Night of the Living Dead, Paige and
David are attacked from all sides. We
root for them to flee—but for them to
do so would be a rejection of the place
in which they have the most right to
live. They are trapped.
There’s no medicine man or People’s
Court coming to save the day in Talty’s
fictional world. In an early story, after
Paige’s loss, the family buries the re-
mains on the riverbank at the north-
ernmost point of the island, using a
plastic tub that had held David’s toys.
He expresses his uncertainty about
being human in a land that often makes
it difficult to be one:
We were all on the ground and in
the cold sand, using our hands to
shovel the sand back into the hole
and over the tub . . . and I wondered
if the river would undo our work
when it rose up, ripping away the
sand and sucking out my tub, tak-
ing it away forever and ever, car-
.
rying it downriver before dumping
it out into the salty ocean.
The New York Review
 

 

 
 

  
 





  


 

 
 


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Society. —Publishers Weekly
The Problem with American
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Available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Xulon Press.


 
"


"

 
 


!!!"

38 The New York Review

  
 

((($  $&$!%!(* ($%
HIGHWAY 28 WEST
by Joe Taylor
“Imagine Cormac McCarthy living
in a trailer, eating bologna sand-
wiches and magic mushrooms while
writing Sunday church bulletins.
Close to the feeling of this strange
and astonishing book.” —Charles
McNair
978-1-952386-60-2 • Paper, $19.95
• 112 Pages • Contemporary
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Available on Amazon, Asterism
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THE CONSCIOUS
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An Aedgar Wisdom novel
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Aboriginal doctor Nerida hears
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Dr. Nerida cares for desert people.
She encounters the spirit Aedgar—
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978-1-922612-04-5 • Paper, $21.11
• 504 Pages • Magical Realism/
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SWEET BABY MINE
by Maria Daversa
Set in Paris, an American expat has
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cret.
979-8-9861669-1-9 • Paper, $12.98
• 300 Pages • Literary/Psychological
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Author’s website:
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July 20, 2023
  
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A LONELY
JOURNEY’S END
An Oceanic Park Mystery
by Geoff Cabin
Sun, sand, and surf meet intrigue
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series.
978-1-6698-6932-0 • Paper, $13.99
• 246 Pages • Mystery
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CHANCE OF A
LIFETIME
by Robert M. Tucker
A gold hunt taps into the heart of
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which reluctantly forsakes their
life in a mountain wilderness.
978-1-4257-2530-3 • Paper, $18.99
• 471 Pages • Fiction
Available on Amazon.
Author’s website:
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RAFAEL JEROME
by Tobias Maxwell
“The novel’s vital emotional core . . .
rouses in readers a desire to see jus-
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“Maxwell writes with crisp prose,
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9798887470078 • Paper, $18.95
• 275 Pages • Fiction/LGBTQ/
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O’BRIEN’S LAW
A Romantic Thriller
by John McNellis
A gripping yet humorous thriller
about lawyers, love, and honor
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Francisco’s glorious late seventies.
978-1736352519 • Paper, $12.36 •
306 Pages • Legal Thriller
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SHOGUN OF THE
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Book One: Fall Of Immortals
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Fall of Immortals is the first piece
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both new and familiar.
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436 Pages • Dark/Fantasy/Thriller
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The Confessions of a Soldier of
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“Latour’s prose takes on a delusional
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“. . . a curious, startling read . . .
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978-1-7365347-0-0 • Paper, $17.76; 978-1-7365447-1-7 • e-Book,
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AMONG THE OKAPI
by John S. Taylor
“Deep character development
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Past tragic events in the Congo
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• 234 Pages • Literary Fiction
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SONG FOR THE
WIDOWMAKER
by Gail S. Fraser
Immigration, prejudice, hardship,
tragedy, love. From Scottish jute fac-
tories to American gold mines, “fans
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978-1-03-913383-9 • Hardcover,
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JUDGE RANDALL AND
THE LECHMERE BUS
A Judge Randall Mystery
by Tony Rogers
Neither his years as a judge nor
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an amateur detective prepares Jim
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RETURN TO BERLIN
A Spy Story
by Noel Hynd
“A Compelling Spy Thriller of
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Amazon 4.4./5 stars
978-1704410968 • Paper, $19.29;
e-book, $4.89 • 351 Pages •
Espionage Fiction
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by Ed Davis
A hobo, a wanderer, a madman—
three characters hurtling toward
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their way of life, and their lives,
hang in the balance.
9781951122256 • Paper, $15.95 •
278 Pages • Literary Fiction
Available on Bookshop.org, Amazon,
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BLACKOUT TRAIL
A Post-Apocalyptic EMP Survival
Thriller
by Linda Naughton
When the power goes out forever, a
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ity in a world gone mad?
979-8-9868525-5-3 • e-Book,
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OFF TELEGRAPH
A Novel of Berkeley in the Sixties
by Joseph Rodricks
A tale of scientific fraud that twists
its way through the cultural and po-
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978146362951 • Paper, $14.49 •
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 -!)+"*!
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40
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THE WOMAN
IN GREEN
by Larry Lockridge
Final volume of The Enigma Quartet,
four standalone yet interrelated
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dystopian age with devastating
humor.” —Robert J. Mrazek
978-1-77180-616-9 • Hardcover,
$37.99; 978-1-77180-615-2 •
Paper, $20.99; 978-1-77180-614-5
• e-Book, $9.99 • 225 Pages •
Literary Fiction
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SEDUCED BY THE
LIGHT
The Mina Miller Edison Story
by Alexandra Rimer
The biography draws on unprece-
dented access to Edison family di-
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below the surface of the family
during the Gilded Age.
978-1-4930-6941-5 • Hardcover,
$29.95 • 368 Pages • Biography
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Author’s website:
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BREAKING NEWS OF
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by Igor Chirashnya
What would you do if you had the
chance to influence the world?
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979-8987982112 • Paper, $18.99 •
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A LESSON IN
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The ninth installment of the popu-
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David Unger, PhD. “An entertain-
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978-1-7323395-6-9 • Paper, $15.95
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PROTECTING
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Neutralize the Users, Abusers and
Manipulators Hidden Among Us
by Steven J. Wolhandler, JD,
MA, LPC
A new paradigm for protection from
toxic people epidemic in politics and
life. Comprehensive. Practical.
“A must read!” —George Simon,
author of In Sheep’s Clothing
978-0-692-16052-7 • Paper, $16.95
• 280 Pages • Nonfiction/Psychology
Available on Amazon, Audible, and Tattered Cover.
Author’s website: emotionalpredators.com
 
 
(((!#!!$!


 
FINDING HOME
(HUNGARY, 1945)
by Dean Cycon
Eighteen-year-old pianist Eva Fleiss
and five other surviving Jews of
Laszlo, Hungary, return from Aus-
chwitz—but the town that sent
them away is not ready to accept
their return.
9798888240755 • Hardcover, $21.95
• 378 Pages • Historical Fiction
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Author’s website:
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EXTREME VETTING
A Thriller
by Roxana Arama
An immigration lawyer fights to
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are coming here—for both of them.
978-1947845381 • Paper, $18.00 •
288 Pages • Legal Thriller
Available on Amazon, Bookshop.org,
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THE FOREVER YOUNG
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by Marcus Lessard
Tommy McConnell, inmate
#176543, sets out to investigate
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979-8-218-16845-2 • Paper, $15.99
• 350 Pages • Mystery
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The New York Review
 None-Too-Gay Divorcées
Ex-Wife
by Ursula Parrott,
with a foreword by Alissa Bennett
and an afterword by Marc Parrott.
McNally, 218 pp., $18.00 (paper)
Becoming the Ex-Wife:
The Unconventional Life and
Forgotten Writings of Ursula Parrott
by Marsha Gordon.
University of California Press,
300 pp., $29.95
Lord, I have been more chased
than chaste.
—Ursula Parrott, Ex-Wife
Seemingly out of nowhere, precociously
aphoristic and coolly unsentimental,
the debut novel Ex-Wife appeared in
1929 to much scandalized acclaim;
originally published anonymously, it
brought a life-altering celebrity to its
hitherto unknown author, Ursula Par-
rott, just thirty years old, who found
herself not only controversial and an
immediate best seller but, more ques-
tionably, something of a spokesperson
for the “new woman” of the era—a fe-
male counterpart to her almost exact
contemporaries Ernest Hemingway
and F. Scott Fitzgerald. In the trajec-
tory of her career as in its vicissitudes,
Parrott is more akin to Fitzgerald than
to Hemingway, whose expatriate char-
acters and stark themes of war, manly
valor, and the ubiquity of death-in-life
take him far from the domestic dramas
of romantic disillusion, marital strife,
and divorce that preoccupied Parrott
and Fitzgerald and made them, each
for a vertiginous while, rich.
Like Fitzgerald but from a wom-
an’s perspective, Parrott examined
the fraying social fabric in the after-
math of World War I, the final ves-
tiges of a Victorian era in which the
place of a woman was defined almost
exclusively in reference to men: fa-
thers, husbands, ex-husbands, lovers.
In the pre-war world to be a woman
was to inhabit a role; the essence of
the role was duty. But in the 1920s to
be a woman was to find oneself with
no specific role and to confront a rad-
ically altered landscape in which the
confining security of the past could
no longer be taken for granted. “An
ex-wife is a young woman for whom
the eternity promised in the marriage
ceremony is reduced to three years or
five or eight,” wrote Parrott in Ex-Wife.
This rueful-wise voice of Parrott’s
divorcées set the tone for much of her
writing from 1929 to 1947, when she
published approximately 130 works:
novels, stories, novelettes, and serials.
(Of these, only Ex-Wife is currently in
print, in a new edition.) In her prime
in the 1930s Parrott was earning the
equivalent of hundreds of thousands
of dollars a year; like Fitzgerald, she
found a financially bounteous market
in such magazines as The Saturday
Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, Redbook,
and Ladies’ Home Journal. Unfortu-
nately, like Fitzgerald, she managed
to outspend this extravagant income,
invariably finding herself in debt and
dependent on publishers’ advances and
the gradually waning support of edi-
tors and friends; her talent for prose
July 20, 2023
Joyce Carol Oates
Ursula Parrott; illustration by Seth
would come to seem, in the later years
of her productivity, fueled by despera-
tion. Holding an unsparing mirror up
to herself and others of her generation,
Parrott dramatized the oscillating for-
tunes of a fitful life that reads like the
script for a screwball comedy veering
into something like crude farce and
finally a sordid sort of tragedy.
Ex-Wife is a sharply observed, in-
timate account of a failed marriage,
several failed love affairs, an abor-
tion, numerous alcoholic interludes
and one-night stands, and an abrupt,
pseudohappy ending when the ex-wife
decides, for purely pragmatic reasons,
to marry a man she doesn’t love: “Yet
I shall hope, through all my youth,
through all my life, that in some far
city I shall find my love again.”
At its most entertaining Ex-Wife is
a Broadway play in novel form, with
briskly clever dialogue tending to-
ward the comic-aphoristic, as if Dor-
othy Parker, Noël Coward, and Oscar
Wilde had collaborated to examine the
war between the sexes in the post-
Victorian era. The setting is an up-
scale Manhattan world of high-priced
restaurants, hotels, and speakeasies
in which young divorcées find them-
selves popular yet exploited by men.
“They all want to sleep with us,” the
novel’s narrator, Patricia, complains
to her fellow ex-wife Lucia. “So soon
as they get here for dinner they begin
arranging to stay for breakfast.”
When the women are alone together
their rapid-fire one-liners spring from
the page: “An ex-wife is just a surplus
woman, like those the sociologists used
to worry about, during the war”; “Ex-
wives . . .young and handsome ex-wives
like us, illustrate how this freedom for
women turned out to be God’s greatest
gift to men.” Sagely Lucia points out
that not every woman who has been
divorced is an ex-wife—some have
moved on and managed to establish
new lives for themselves. But Patricia
is not one of these and, to the reader’s
exasperation, never grows beyond her
humiliating need for men to define
her: “You’re an ex-wife, Pat, because
it is the most important thing to know
about you . . . explains everything else,
that you once were married to a man
who left you.”
I n its more didactic mode, Ex-Wife
replicates the sort of articles pub-
lished in women’s magazines on the
subject of modern love and marriage
through the decades. Patricia is lec-
tured by the more experienced Lucia:
Fifty years ago, you wouldn’t have
been unfaithful to [her husband
Peter] once; because you wouldn’t
have twenty opportunities for in-
fidelity flung at you in a year; and,
if he were unfaithful to you, he’d
manage it discreetly, because he’d
be socially ostracized if he didn’t.
And he wouldn’t have told you to
go your way, blithely; because there
wouldn’t have been any way for you
to go. . . .
Women used to have status, a
relative security. Now they have
the status of any prostitute, suc-
cess while their looks hold out.
If the next generation of women
have any sense, they’ll dynamite
the statue of Susan B. Anthony,
and start a crusade for the revival
of chivalry. . . .
The choices for women used
to be: marriage, the convent, or
the street. They’re just the same
now. Marriage has the same name.
Or you can have a career, letting
it absorb all emotional energy
(just like the convent). Or you
can have an imitation masculine
attitude toward sex, and a suc-
cession of meaningless affairs,
promiscuity. . . .
But I think chastity, really, went
out when birth control came in. If
there is no “consequence”—it just
isn’t important.
Though it is tempting to see Par-
rott as a precursor of successful career
women and feminists of the second
half of the twentieth century, she has
nothing good to say about feminism as
a political movement and rarely passes
up the opportunity to sneer at noncon-
forming women: “The abnormal ones,
I suppose, had a rotten time of it, and
so they yelled and pushed and tipped
over the applecart for the rest of us
in the end.” In an interview when Ex-
Wife was published Parrott insisted,
“I am not a feminist. In fact, I resent
the feminists—they are the ones who
started all this. I wonder if they re-
alized what they were letting us all
in for.” This predilection for blaming
other women for the marital problems
exacerbated by her own alcohol-fueled
behavior suggests a curious sort of
logic that prevails through her career;
it was her conviction that the women
of her grandmother’s generation had
more “actual freedom” than those of
her own.
In flashback scenes in Ex-Wife Par-
rott glides lightly over Patricia’s mar-
riage to a young man named Peter,
with whom she’d fallen in love while
still in college: “We had loved each
other for three years, and hated each
other half the fourth.” Not much is
made of the newlyweds having a baby
who died, with no explanation, at the
age of three months; of this baby Peter
“did not talk . . . at all.” Yet naively Pa-
tricia imagines that having a second
child might be good for their marriage:
“I thought it might be rather nice . . . a
small son something like Pete.” His
brutal response to her announcement
of her pregnancy is a surprise to her
but not the reader:
Where in hell will we put it in a
livingroom-bedroom-and-bath? We’ll
never be alone again. It’ll take all
your time. They have to be washed
and rocked and fed incessantly. . . .
Oh, God, they cry all the time,
don’t they?
Yet more naively Patricia later con-
fesses to Peter that she has been un-
faithful to him with a mutual friend
when both were drunk; this confes-
sion, which will destroy their marriage
and set the course of her life onto its
downward spiral, she undertakes as
coyly as an ingenue in a romantic com-
edy: “Peter, I want to put on a wife-
confesses-all show.”
It had been Patricia’s understand-
ing, based on her husband’s admis-
sion that he’d been unfaithful to her
41
once or twice, that as a modern young
couple they were “very definitely com-
mitted to the honesty policy.” Analyz-
ing the situation in retrospect, she
acknowledges:
I know it all sounds absurd—as if
I thought then the thing [confess-
ing infidelity] should be played as a
farce. I did not. There was anguish
and regret and bewilderment. But
they have faded. I only remember
my surprise that all the theories
about the right to experiment and
the desirability of varied experi-
ence—theories that had seemed
so entirely adequate in discuss-
ing the sexual adventures of ac-
quaintances—were no help at all
when the decision concerned Peter
and me.
I nitially Patricia mistakes her hus-
band’s seeming placidity for ac-
ceptance of her infidelity and for
forgiveness, but he has not accepted
it, and he is not mature enough to for-
give her. Soon he demands a divorce,
for he has ceased loving her: “You look
like hell nowadays; you aren’t even
pretty any more.” In one of the most
disturbing scenes in a novel primar-
ily comprised of conversation, Peter
begins to strangle Patricia, who has
been taunting him: “He just picked
me up and threw me through the glass
door of the breakfast room. Then he
went out.” Bleeding profusely, she ban-
dages herself and makes her way to a
doctor; while she is being treated (he
discreetly makes no inquiries when
she tells him that her husband is re-
sponsible for her injuries) she asks him
to arrange for an abortion, which he
does, with the sort of dispatch that
suggests how common abortion was in
the 1920s, at least in reasonably well-
to-do circles in Manhattan.
Typically rueful, Patricia takes care
to dress stylishly for the abortion: “I
might be turning up a corpse before
sunset, and that did not matter very
much; but I would prefer to be a well-
groomed one.” Since she is a fashion-
conscious young woman with a modest
career in advertising copywriting, she
wears a “Jane Regny original” to the
abortionist’s office:
Soft grey tweeds, a grey wolf collar
and deep cuffs, a cream-coloured
blouse. Its scarlet piping matches
the close fitting hat, and the shin-
ing flat purse. Brilliant scarlet and
blue scarf, grey mocha gloves. . . .
A small, slim, scared, extremely
smart young figure. “I may not
be pure, but thank heaven I look
immaculate.”
Describing an appointment with an
abortionist in fashion terms is bril-
liantly ironic, but the scene passes too
swiftly and bloodlessly to register as
altogether convincing.
Despite these humiliations Patricia
resists giving Peter a divorce for as
long as she can. She fantasizes that
he will change his mind and return
to her, so she is always prepared:
“Clothes were real. I bought many
clothes so that, when Peter called up,
I could say ‘come over instantly’ and I
would be marvellously dressed.” When
Peter does call, however, it’s to discuss
their divorce. Patricia manages to se-
duce him, but their relations are not
42
altered: to Peter she is a “slut” who
“can’t help being what you are, I sup-
pose.” Every scene in Ex-Wife involving
the estranged husband ends with Pa-
tricia’s humiliation, both physical and
emotional, yet she continues to pine
for Peter, even after he has physically
abused her.
Following the divorce, as her creator
would do with the spoils of the success
of Ex-Wife, Patricia spends money ex-
travagantly as soon as she acquires it,
mostly on clothes: “While I was mar-
ried, I saved money and made plans
for the next fifty years. . . . Afterward,
I did not make plans for the month
after next. It seemed such a waste of
time.” The most lyrical chapter of Ex-
Wife pays homage to George Gersh-
win’s Rhapsody in Blue, much loved
by Patricia and Lucia as the musical
expression of romantic Manhattan:
“The tune matches New York,”
Lucia said. “The New York we
know. It has gaiety and colour
and irrelevancy and futility and
glamour as beautifully blended as
the ingredients in crêpes suzette.”
I said, “It makes me think of
skyscrapers and Harlem and lin-
ers sailing and newsboys calling
extras.”
“It makes me think I’m twenty
years old and on the way to own-
ing the city,” Lucia said. “Start it
over again, will you?”
As a divorcée, Patricia makes an
effort to be “harder, inside”: “To try
to take all this sort of thing as men
are supposed to take it, for the ad-
venture, for the moment’s gaiety . . .
against feeling so alone.” Her life soon
shifts out of her control, however: she
begins to drink heavily and becomes
involved with a succession of men,
most of whom are charming but in-
nocuous, though at least one, named
Stepan, is a brute who treats her more
cruelly than her husband did, and she
eventually comes to love another, Noel,
more than she’d loved Peter, but he
is married to a woman he will never
leave for her.
By the time Ex-Wife arrives at its
abrupt ending, with Noel lost to Patri-
cia and Patricia betrothed to another
man, a sensation of exhaustion has
set in for both her and the reader. The
novel’s final line trails off in an aura
of nostalgia: “New York lights blurred
behind us. . . . That was a shining city.”
M arsha Gordon’s Becoming the Ex-
Wife: The Unconventional Life and
Forgotten Writings of Ursula Parrott is
a thoroughly researched, sympathetic,
but not uncritical portrait of a woman
who achieved exceptional commercial
success as a writer and who was, for
a while, “the most famous divorcée in
the United States.” As an expert on
marital strife and its aftermath, Par-
rott was frequently interviewed in pop-
ular publications even as, in private,
she was often struggling with “des-
perate,” “hopeless,” “suicidal” moods
exacerbated by alcohol; and like many
female writers prominent in their time,
she was subsequently forgotten. (Nota-
bly, Parrott does not appear in Elaine
Showalter’s magisterial A Jury of Her
Peers: Celebrating American Women
Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie
Proulx, 2009.)
Biography is an art most powerful
when it is not a mere summary of a
life, however interesting it may have
been, but an illumination of a life (and
a career) that has been misunderstood,
perhaps even by the subject, and un-
dervalued. Gordon argues:
Like many of her female contem-
poraries, [Parrott] was categorized
as a woman who wrote trivial and
sentimental romances, although
her tales were about much more:
difficult divorces, phenomenally
successful women’s careers, and
single parenting; female piloting,
adventuring, and traveling; risk-
taking on the Underground Rail-
road, combat, and labor organizing;
World War II veterans returning
to civilian life and nefarious Nazi
plots.
Parrott’s turbulent life, Gordon con-
cedes, can hardly be told as an “in-
spirational feminist story”: she was a
“wildly successful woman” who would
have preferred to have had a conven-
tionally happy marriage; a “roman-
tic” who nonetheless burned through
a succession of lovers and married—
unwisely in each case—four men. In
her uninhibited letters to the Herald
Tribune reporter Hugh O’Connor, the
unfaithful, unreliable, married man
who seems to have been the love of her
life but whom she never succeeded in
marrying, Parrott confesses the most
pitiful weaknesses, declaring herself
a woman who merely appears mod-
ern, independent, and radical while
craving the stability of a long-lasting
relationship—marriage:
We hunt about among the wreck-
age of old codes for pieces to build
an adequate shelter to last our life-
time . . . and the building material’s
just not there. . . . Women like me,
here and now, feel one way, believe
another . . . and on neither side is
happiness to be reckoned . . .
The ironic intelligence suffused
through Ex-Wife does not seem to
have prevailed in her own life.
U rsula Parrott was born Katherine
Ursula Towle on March 26, 1899,
in Dorchester, Massachusetts; her fa-
ther was a family physician described
in the press of the day as “one of the
last of Dorchester’s old family doctors,”
though he also had, in his daughter’s
words, “a small very highhat practice
as a consultant and obstetrician.” As a
girl Parrott received an excellent edu-
cation at the prestigious Girls’ Latin
School in Boston, where her poten-
tial was recognized though her grades
and “work ethic” were not outstand-
ing. At Radcliffe she majored in En-
glish, involving herself in a number
of undergraduate activities (includ-
ing a short-lived membership in the
Suffrage and Socialist Club), and only
just managed to graduate in 1920 with
mediocre grades and a reputation for
purchasing “ghostwritten” papers for
her courses. Years later her son Marc
would speculate whether his moth-
er’s “showoff traits, some charming,
some very dangerous, derived from
the snubbing she took in Cambridge
as a pushy lace-curtain Irish girl from
Dorchester.”
After her graduation from Radcliffe,
her conservative Catholic father put
pressure on her to live at home and
teach English in a Catholic convent
school nearby. Instead of placating
him, Parrott acquired a job as a cub
reporter to please herself; instead of
pursuing a graduate degree in English,
in 1922 she married Lindesay Marc
Parrott, whom she’d met at a Prince-
ton prom and who was twenty-one to
her twenty-three. Soon Lindesay began
a career as a reporter at the Newark
Evening News and became a member
of a “booze-loving” brotherhood of
reporters who lived in New York City
and environs, “many of whom drifted
between papers and crossed paths be-
tween pressrooms, speakeasies, and
women”—the same romantically lively,
rowdy, hard-drinking, sexually promis-
cuous Manhattan netherworld evoked
in Ex-Wife.
As in Ex-Wife, Parrott’s young, im-
mature husband was strongly opposed
to having children, while she looked
forward to motherhood; very likely
their marriage was seriously compro-
mised when she kept her pregnancy
a secret until it was too late for him
to pressure her to have an abortion.
As in Ex-Wife, Lindesay could not for-
give Ursula’s being unfaithful to him
though he’d been unfaithful to her.
Naively assuming that she and her
husband were equals, she unwittingly
destroyed her marriage through her
honesty: Gordon reports that Linde-
say “deemed her one-night stand an
irreparable moral failing. The wounds
she inflicted, he told her, would ‘never
mend’; he could not trust her or, for
that matter, any other woman again.”
This single act of unfaithfulness, or
rather the impulse to confess it, cat-
apulted the vulnerable young woman
out of the security of marriage, mak-
ing her both a divorcée and a single
mother in an era in which to be ei-
ther was considered scandalous, if not
immoral.
Later she reflected wryly on the
“ethics” of the so-called new moral-
ity in which, as in the old morality,
women were held to a far more severe
standard than men, and she recalled
her reckless act of infidelity with a no-
torious heavy drinker and womanizer
who had meant little to her, as she’d
meant little to him, when she “needed
to think of something funny. It was so
funny in its devastating consequences.”
If it was funny, then only in retro-
spect. More immediately it was cat-
astrophic for the young wife, who
never fully recovered from the shock
of losing her husband and was long
haunted by
a memory. . . of [Lindesay] and me
standing in that funny livingroom
The New York Review
 of the last apartment we had—the
color of the walls, the way that the
sunlight had faded an oblong on
the green sofa, the pattern on the
rug, and he and I so very young and
bewildered, on the day he left. We
had a banjo clock that belonged to
his family. . . . It had an odd sort of
tick. I can remember the sound of
it. I’ll remember the sound of it
ticking when I’m seventy if I live
so long.
I n melodramatic fiction and films of
the era it was often a single reck-
less act (like a confession of unfaith-
fulness) that precipitated a sequence
of unanticipated consequences; un-
fortunately for her, Parrott’s life fol-
lowed this formula. Even before her
divorce was finalized in 1928, she had
begun an intense romantic relation-
ship with O’Connor, who would domi-
nate her emotional life for years, even
when she was married to other men;
not Lindesay, who in his fictional guise
as Peter casts such a shadow over Ex-
Wife, but O’Connor would emerge as
“the most wonderful and most awful
thing that ever happened to her.”
It was O’Connor who rescued Par-
rott from the emotional wreckage of
her divorce and strongly encouraged
her to write her first novel, in which he
is enshrined, nearly idolized, as Noel.
(“Noel, your hair is a colour destined to
shine in my soul.”) Like numerous men
in Parrott’s life, O’Connor was married
not happily but (as he led Parrott to
believe) permanently; in Ex-Wife, No-
el’s wife is described as “disfigured” as
a result of an automobile accident, and
Patricia helps to ensure that their mar-
riage prevails. In real life, the ex-wife
had no such agency over her married
lover. Though O’Connor seems to have
assured Parrott that she was “‘the one
woman’ whom he believed his ‘equal,’”
he could not be convinced to divorce
his wife and marry her, or even to be
faithful to her.
It is a measure, however, of Parrott’s
increasing desperation that she had
several abortions at O’Connor’s re-
quest, though she had badly wanted
to have a child with him; still more
desperately, after the failure of her
second marriage (to Charles Terry
Greenwood, a Manhattan banker for
whom she seemed to have felt little
emotion), she offered O’Connor $6,000,
the equivalent of his annual salary at
The New York Times, if he would agree
to be her husband for at least one year,
piteously begging, “‘If I happen to get
pregnant’ during this period, ‘let me
go through with it.’” Gordon interprets
this astonishing proposal as “proof
positive” that Parrott was “radically
rethinking male-female relationships
in ways that defied tradition beyond
recognition,” but the reader is likely
to wonder if it isn’t a painful sign of
her mental deterioration.
That O’Connor rejected the eccentric
offer is not surprising, nor is it surpris-
ing that Parrott continued to barrage
him with letters alternately cajoling
and accusing: “Such an old Victorian
plot this is, after all. . . . It makes me a
little sick to recognize it. The woman
‘gives her all’ to a man without mar-
riage, and he ‘spurns’ her, finally.” An-
other time Parrott suggests that she
and O’Connor have a baby together:
“If you would like to have a child . . . I
am entirely willing. I should be very
July 20, 2023
glad in fact, to have the child”—hast-
ily adding that, if O’Connor wanted
her to have an abortion, she would be
willing to have an abortion. All to no
avail: O’Connor did eventually divorce
his wife but married a much younger
woman in 1934.1
E x-Wife was a publishing sensa-
tion in 1929, receiving excellent
reviews and selling over 100,000 cop-
ies on its first print run; it was on the
best-seller lists with Hemingway’s A
Farewell to Arms and Remarque’s All
Quiet on the Western Front and adver-
tised alongside Faulkner’s The Sound
and the Fury. When the anonymous
author was outed in Walter Winchell’s
syndicated gossip column On Broad-
way it was assumed, by Winchell and
subsequently by others, that Parrott
had written an “autobiographical”
novel despite her protestations that
this was not the case, at least not en-
tirely—an identification that would
persist through her life.
Much of Ex-Wife’s success had to do
with its novelty as a racy sort of so-
ciological document in the guise of a
titillating tale of young divorcées be-
having badly in Manhattan; even as
divorce rates were rising alarmingly in
the 1920s, the very category ex-wives
scarcely existed. The first check Par-
rott received from her publisher, the
new transatlantic firm Jonathan Cape
& Harrison Smith, was for $16,000, the
approximate equivalent of a quarter-
million dollars in today’s currency.
Naturally, Hollywood was intrigued
by Parrott, optioning Ex-Wife for
$20,000 as a vehicle for Norma Shearer;
retitled The Divorcee, it was a success
at the box office even as the country
was plunging into the Great Depres-
sion. Other films adapted from subse-
quent work by Parrott had such titles
as Strangers May Kiss, There’s Always
Tomorrow, and Next Time We Love
(starring James Stewart and Margaret
Sullavan); in 1931 she published what
her biographer calls a “gangster novel,”
Gentlemen’s Fate, which was made into
a movie starring John Gilbert and was
criticized, perhaps not surprisingly, for
its lack of “vigorous credibility.”
A Hollywood “feeding frenzy” erupted
over the rights to Parrott’s The Tumult
and the Shouting. Even as she was
1
Ironically, Becoming the Ex-Wife could not
have been written without Gordon’s access
to Parrott’s letters to O’Connor, preserved
in his archive at the University of Oregon;
apparently he saved most of her letters,
which were immensely flattering to him.
involved in writing a screenplay for
Gloria Swanson based on her as-yet-
unpublished novel Love Goes Past, she
reported to friends that in this “gaudy
hell” she felt “like a dead woman, in a
sort of daze.” Tersely, without elaborat-
ing, Gordon notes that in Hollywood,
Parrott’s antisemitism “flared up in a
town and industry run by Jews.”
Disillusioned with Hollywood, chas-
tened by professional setbacks, Par-
rott fled back to the East Coast and to
a second misbegotten marriage that
ended in divorce within a year—a
“brief absurdity,” she called it—with
charges against the husband of “in-
tolerable cruelty, drinking, and abu-
sive language.” Two more husbands
followed, each apparently a brief ab-
surdity soon rectified by divorce, lu-
ridly heralded in tabloids and gossip
columns in which Ursula Parrott had
become a familiar, scandalous name.
By this time her frantic life was
coming undone as a consequence of
extravagant spending, heavy drink-
ing, and increasing failures to meet
publication deadlines. Her advances
for stories were sometimes as high
as $8,000; pressure was put on her to
return them if she failed to deliver
on time or editors rejected her work,
which was beginning to happen with
disconcerting frequency. Her son Marc
recalled Parrott working “like a galley
slave [with] . . . the chaos and tension
of making those eternal deadlines.”
Gordon remarks sympathetically,
“Mass-market fiction writers have
been defined by ‘speed, volume, and
predictability, none of which aids in
composing great literature.’” Amid a
life of turmoil complicated by need-
less spending, in 1940 Parrott took fly-
ing lessons with the notion of helping
“defend the United States during the
war,” her biographer tells us without
evident irony.
In the final phase of her career in
the 1940s, Parrott wrote fiction for
popular magazines about World War
II from the perspective of a generation
of women younger than she, whom she
could imagine as more optimistic and
less disillusioned than her own gener-
ation; her themes were marital strife,
reconcilations and divorces, women’s
careers curtailed or tempered by the
demands of men. By then her long-
time agent George Bye had cut ties
with her and she was “drowning in
debt”—in her biographer’s grim words,
“completely worn out.” It is nearly mi-
raculous that somehow she managed to
set aside enough money to send Marc
to Harvard: “Parrott took comfort in
few things, but she delighted in her
son’s academic achievement.”2
T here followed then a series of in-
creasingly unfunny episodes pre-
sumably linked to Parrott’s alcoholism.
The most scandalous involved Michael
Neely Bryan, a twenty-six-year-old
2
In a breezy afterword to a 1989 reprinting
of Ex-Wife, included in the McNally edi-
tion, Marc speaks of its succès de scandale,
which taught her that she could make a
good deal of money as “one of the chief
practitioners of what’s now a dead trade . . .
women’s magazine fiction, formula stuff.”
Scornfully he relegates her to a catalog of
“other brand names of this kind of writ-
ing, most of them as forgotten now as my
mother’s”—Faith Baldwin, Margaret Culkin
Banning, Kathleen Norris.
army private with a fondness for mari-
juana seventeen years Parrott’s junior,
whom she recklessly aided and abet-
ted in escaping from a Miami prison
stockade in December 1942; with Par-
rott at the wheel of a rental car, pur-
sued by law enforcement, the fugitive
lovers surrendered within twenty-four
hours. The sensational adventure was
recounted in tabloids and gossip col-
umns. The “four-times-married, thrice-
divorced author” Parrott and her
paramour were charged with federal
crimes; Bryan was sentenced to a year
in prison for breaking confinement,
while, to her great relief, Parrott was
found not guilty of “subversive activi-
ties in undermining loyalty, discipline
or morale of the armed forces.” But
the damage to what remained of her
reputation was irrevocable.
Parrott’s last novel, Even in a Hun-
dred Years—described by Gordon as an
“introspective tale about generations,
tradition, loss, and hope. . . . A far cry
from the hedonistic, destructive fre-
neticism of Ex-Wife”—was published
in 1944; her last story, ironically titled
“Let’s Just Marry,” appeared in 1947.
Seriously in debt in the years follow-
ing and hounded by the IRS for un-
paid taxes, Parrott tried to write her
way out of disaster as she had in the
past, but without success. She bor-
rowed money from her new agent that
she had no intention of repaying; she
wrote bad checks and “was the subject
of unwanted press for ‘smuggling her-
self out’” of hotels without paying her
bills; in a particularly embarrassing in-
cident she was arrested on a charge of
grand larceny for stealing silver items
from the home of wealthy friends. She
became destitute and homeless. A final
time she wrote to O’Connor saying she
was penniless and faint with hun-
ger and asking if he could send her
five dollars. (Gordon doesn’t confirm
whether O’Connor replied.) In Septem-
ber 1957 Parrott died in the charity
ward of a New York hospital. Not a
single obituary appeared.
This piling on of pratfalls and pa-
thos in the concluding chapters of Be-
coming the Ex-Wife fatally diminishes
its already minor, vulnerable subject.
The reader winces for Ursula Par-
rott, humiliated by pleading letters
to a man who seems to have exploited
her naive adoration of him, as well as
by the vicissitudes of a life ravaged by
alcoholism. Holding the biographer’s
magnifying glass up to an individual
so unstable and self-destructive under-
mines the claim for the subject’s sig-
nificance; it is difficult to believe that
a woman who so frequently behaved as
foolishly as Parrott could have possibly
written much of consequence after her
initial success with Ex-Wife.
It might be called the Brobdingnag-
ian effect: a predilection in even the
most sympathetic biographies (includ-
ing most recently Benjamin Moser’s
Sontag: Her Life and Work and Blake
Bailey’s Philip Roth: The Biography) to
dwell upon minutiae of the most petty
sort and by sheer corrosion wear away
the dignity of the subject, undermin-
ing what should be the fundamental
effort of the biographer—to enhance,
to illuminate. One thinks of Jonathan
Swift’s Gulliver in the land of the Brob-
dingnagians: forced to see too much, at
.
too-close quarters, appalled by the gro-
tesque physicality of his giant hosts,
suffused with disgust, and desperate to
escape.
43
 ‘This Is Not Your Grave’
A panel from Nick Drnaso’s Acting Class
Acting Class
by Nick Drnaso.
Drawn and Quarterly,
267 pp., $29.95
Men I Trust
by Tommi Parrish.
Fantagraphics, 206 pp., $34.99
Nick Drnaso draws comics with a mini-
malism just this side of crudeness. The
colors are flat, the lines uniform and
thin, the pages strict grids of small
panels. His characters are soft and
boxy and barely differentiated, like
cheap cars: their clothes are vague
masses of fabric, their hair sits in rigid
lumps above round, empty faces—in
his first two books, the collection of
linked stories Beverly (2016) and the
graphic novel Sabrina (2018), their eyes
are simply black dots. These faces are
at times capable of registering subtle
and powerful emotions—both books
focus on the aftermath of shocking,
violent events—but more often they
are almost blank, barely animate.
Drnaso’s people seem to be staring
out from somewhere deep within their
own amorphous bodies, imprisoned
and perplexed.*
In his new graphic novel, Acting
Class, this changes, just a bit. The lay-
outs are a little looser, there’s more
surface detail on hair and clothes,
more contour to people’s forms; their
eyes now have pupils and color. Acting
Class has a larger cast of characters
than his previous books, and Drnaso
has said that this required showing
“a wider variety of distinguishing de-
tails”—but the result goes far beyond
that purpose. It is startling how even
the most minute shift in drawing style
can affect the tone of a comic. The
whole book feels a few degrees warmer,
more humane, quieter, yet somehow
more uncanny. His people still look
a bit stunned by their own existence,
but one can imagine them thinking
and feeling, rather than just reacting
or failing to react.
In the book’s opening pages ten
people gather for a free acting class,
*For more on Drnaso’s previous work, see
my “Savage Torpor,” Harper’s, August 2018.
44
Gabriel Winslow-Yost
held at a community center once a
week after hours, attracted by a flyer
or word of mouth and, as the teacher
tells them, “because something is
wrong in your life.” They bristle at
this, and at his explanation that he
just means they are “restless search-
ers,” but he is, by and large, right: the
students include a bored married cou-
ple, a stressed-out single mother, an
unstable young woman and her protec-
tive grandmother, and an assortment
of awkward loners. And if one or two
don’t quite seem to fit his description,
he soon makes sure they do.
Iris Murdoch often spoke and wrote
about “the way in which people make
other people play the role for them of
gods and demons,” as she put it in an
interview in the late Sixties, and how
charismatic “enchanter” figures could
“come in and generate [such] situa-
tions,” since “there are always victims
ready to come forward.” In this sense,
Acting Class is a thoroughly Murdoch-
ian book. The enchanter at its cen-
ter tells his students he has been “a
teacher in one form or another for
over thirty-five years,” that his name
is John Smith—“a name that’s easy to
forget”—and very little else. He is an
easygoing, relentlessly positive man
in late middle age, nondescript apart
from his crooked teeth and unnerv-
ingly vibrant blue eyes. (One almost
suspects Drnaso started drawing irises
purely to include this detail.) Like his
name, his speech and manner are al-
most ostentatiously generic. The very
lack of distinguishing features seems
to pull people toward him.
H is class involves no lessons in
technique, no scripted perfor-
mance, little critique or feedback. In-
stead, he puts his students through a
series of improvised scenes, with the
most minimal of prompts: two of them
are to act as a boss and an employee,
say, and “the rest is up to both of you.”
It soon becomes clear that the goal
is not to improve anyone’s ability to
perform or mimic, but to cajole them
into entering an imagined world and
unmoor them from their current lives.
Drnaso renders these shared fan-
tasies with a matter-of-factness that
makes them strangely engrossing.
As the characters enter their fic-
tional personas, the backgrounds
shift with them—the blue and gray
of the community center basement
is replaced, a panel later, by the drab
browns of a manager’s office or a sub-
urban home; a metal folding chair be-
comes an imposing desk chair, and
then reverts as the improvisers lose
the thread. The ordinariness of the
transformation makes clear that the
spell John Smith is weaving owes less
to the content of these shared hallu-
cinations than to the simple fact that
they are not real life.
The core of the book consists of
several long sequences of this im-
provisation, often involving the en-
tire class, over the weeks that follow.
In the first, John tells them that they
are all at a party and gives them each
a line or two to guide their character.
Over fifteen densely packed pages, we
watch them make inane small talk, play
games, have revealing conversations,
move in and out of the party, in and
out of the fantasy.
John’s prompts often seem more like
psychological interventions than act-
ing guides. During the party scene, for
instance, he tells Dennis, a tedious,
clinging husband, that he’s imme-
diately enamored of his classmate
Angel—and tells Rosie, Dennis’s bored
wife, that she’s intensely attracted to
Rayanne, another classmate. To Angel,
a young woman whom we first meet
failing so thoroughly to read social
cues that she stays at a dinner party
until four in the morning, he says: “You
can’t be pinned down. You have an au-
thority problem. . . . You move freely
and often to avoid responsibility and
attachment.” In the book’s opening
pages, we saw Lou, a muscle-bound
loner, bringing a plate of cookies to
his coworkers. No one eats any—“I’m
not saying anything,” one coworker
remarks to another. “I just think you
should try one first.” Now John tells
Lou to be another character’s dog: “Is
it any different than playing a lawyer
or a security guard? . . . You’ll be great.”
Nothing particularly dramatic hap-
pens, but the scene is fascinating: an
ordinary, boring situation subtly but
thoroughly deranged. Every minor,
seemingly simple interaction needs
to be interpreted—Is this inten-
tional performance? Unintentional
revelation? A rejection of the situa-
tion or an embrace of it?—as a mun-
dane yet unreal world is molded and
negotiated, moment by moment, in
front of us.
As the classes proceed, these exer-
cises begin to have powerful effects on
many of the participants. Lou pursues
his canine character for the rest of the
book; we later get a brief glimpse of
him lying in bed, growling and barking
to himself. Angel is so consumed by her
“‘rebel without a cause’ persona” that
she enters a fugue state, in which the
character takes over the rest of her
life. Drnaso draws this altered reality
as a kind of hackneyed Pottersville, all
neon lights and new friends made in
bars, but it has very real consequences:
Angel abandons her job, her apartment,
and her cat and, in the moments when
her real personality reemerges, has no
memory of what she’s been doing or
even where she’s been.
Those are the most extreme cases,
but for all John’s students a psychic
porousness seems to develop. The
classes set something loose in them,
and it isn’t always clear how much of it
stems from John’s suggestions and how
much was already there beneath the
surface. Rosie and Rayanne’s mutual
attraction also continues for the rest
of the book; it makes plenty of sense
on its own—they both feel hemmed
in by their domestic lives, and their
rapport seems easy and genuine—but
would any of it have happened with-
out John’s prompt? Did he create their
feelings, or detect their beginnings
and help them emerge?
T homas is the most outwardly self-
confident of the students, a friendly
young man who works as a nude model
for drawing classes at a local commu-
nity college and wears his hair in a
ponytail—quite a flashy choice in
the thoroughly muted world Drnaso
has created. For the party scene, John
takes him aside and tells him, “You are
a liar and thief. . . . You have to act on
these impulses and not get caught.”
He is, in fact, caught—going through
the pockets of the very real coats be-
longing to his classmates. “It’s part
of the performance, I’m just acting,”
he explains. “I’m sorry.” “Why are you
apologizing,” his classmate asks, “if it’s
just a performance?”
In an interview with the comics
magazine Bubbles, Drnaso said that
this was John, “for his own reasons,”
manipulating and gaslighting Thomas,
NICK DRNASO/ DRAWN AND QUARTER LY
attempting to “break him down.” But
as Thomas’s self-confidence falters
over the course of the book, and his
acting exercises become filled with
fear and shame and nebulous violence,
it seems less simple than that. Was he
really so confident in the first place?
If so, why did it take such a tiny push
to make him fall?
In a later class—held in a house in
the woods a long drive out of town,
as if to test the students’ commit-
The New York Review
ment—John gives them an exercise
that abandons the concept of “perfor-
mance” entirely. “You’re all going on a
solo journey,” he announces, and asks
them to lie down. “Create a scene in
your mind as completely as possible.
Put yourself in the scenario, arrange
some elements, and see what happens.”
What follows is an extraordinary
succession of reveries, each a dense
layering of the students’ explicit and
implicit desires, their memories and
anxieties, along with the ongoing influ-
ence of John, clearly present yet hard
to pin down. Rayanne imagines her
three-year-old son as a hideous green
monster, relentlessly growing, already
too big to get through the door of his
room—and invites an imaginary Rosie
over to help. Rosie, meanwhile, imag-
ines her husband intruding uninvited
into her own exercise. When she tries
and fails to imagine herself leaving
the scene and going to Rayanne, he
tells her it’s because “your heart’s not
in this. . . . You have to listen to John.
You have to give yourself over to the
process.”
Lou imagines an idyllic life as some-
one’s pet, then that he is being led to
a slaughterhouse—still as a dog—
and made into food to be consumed
by his owner. Thomas imagines himself
trapped in a Kafkaesque interrogation,
accused of kidnapping a local disabled
man and of incriminating himself at
the acting class. “This isn’t acting,”
a policewoman chides him. “This is
real life.”
Drnaso carefully avoids all the flash-
ier possibilities of the comics form.
There are no elaborate panel arrange-
ments, no exaggerated physiogno-
mies or wild artistic flights. Even his
monsters are a little stiff and reces-
sive. But his pacing—panel to panel,
page to page—is subtle and power-
ful, precisely controlled; these scenes
feel endless, dreamlike, and yet go by
quite quickly. His tone is relentlessly
ambiguous: the book never tips over
into horror or satire, always remains
slippery, unsettled.
A ll of Drnaso’s books share a sense
that the world their characters are
living in is flimsy, inadequate—that
it could pop like a balloon at any mo-
ment and leave just a few sad scraps
behind. In his previous work, that rup-
ture came from without, in the form
of murders, fatal accidents, and vio-
lent intrusive thoughts; the world was
terrifyingly fragile. In Acting Class, by
contrast, violence and exploitation lurk
only at the far edges of the story. The
characters don’t fear the dissolution
of their world; they long for it. That is
what gives John his power: he knows
this before they do. “You would like to
see a new dimension,” he tells them all
early on, in his blandly seductive way,
and they do.
In the end, John does have a larger
purpose behind it all—as most read-
ers will have long suspected. “I’m just
a recruiter,” he declares at the end of
the class’s final and most elaborate
exercise. He invites his students into
vans, which will take them to the
“larger group . . . where the real work
The New York Review of Books (ISSN 0028-7504), published 20 times a year, monthly in January, July, August, and September; semi-monthly in February, March, April, May, June, October, November, and December. NYREV, Inc., 207 East 32nd
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July 20, 2023
happens.” The class is “no longer free,
but we’ll work something out.”
Many of them go, a few don’t, though
no one, it seems, escapes without con-
sequence. It is, on one level, an obvious
betrayal, in which the book is revealed
to be an examination of the psycho-
logical dynamics of cults—the long
process of breaking down and build-
ing up, exploration and manipulation,
recruitment and isolation.
But Drnaso does not let it sit so
easily. He gives no sense of what this
larger organization is, and does noth-
ing to make it feel malevolent or even
particularly real. It seems as much the
abstract idea of liberation as an actual
group, and those who choose it at the
end of the book seem bound as plausi-
bly for nirvana as for NXIVM . Drnaso’s
subject is not the “next phase of the
class” John offers but the deep, pow-
erful feeling that makes that offer so
tempting—the longing to change your
life, and what you can learn, and lose,
by pursuing it.
T ommi Parrish’s new graphic novel,
Men I Trust, takes that same long-
ing as a starting place. (I don’t think
it’s a coincidence that both Parrish and
Drnaso are in their early thirties, both
with a couple of other books behind
them—just the point when one might
begin to take stock, and to wonder.)
But where Drnaso lingers in the de-
sire for change, dissecting it, spinning
off complications and contradictions,
Parrish focuses on the hard work of
actually making change happen. It’s a
book about the reality of trying, day by
day, to be a better version of yourself.
Parrish’s characters often find them-
selves struggling to put their feelings
into words, but their bodies are always
wildly expressive. Parrish’s approach
to the human form—or “THIS CLUNKY
COSTUME OF FLESH AND NERVES ,” as
they put it in one short comic (Par-
rish uses they/them pronouns)—is
the most distinctive aspect of their
art. The characters’ faces are consis-
tently deemphasized, the heads dis-
proportionately small and the features
drawn with just a few quick lines or
even omitted entirely. The rest of the
body is outsized, bulbous, more than
a little elastic: jutting elbows, huge,
expressive hands, vast swaths of torso
and leg. Parrish’s bodies dominate the
room (and the page), and yet their
sheer expanse seems to accentuate
their vulnerability as much as their
power. They are inescapable, and in-
escapably exposed.
At the center of Men I Trust is a
brand new friendship, wobbly and frag-
ile and exciting, between two women
at different stages in the process of
changing their lives. Eliza is a thirty-
two-year-old single mother, a recover-
ing alcoholic, and, whenever she can
find the time and energy, a poet. Sasha
seems much younger but is twenty-
nine (“Wait . . . really?!” says Eliza); she
has just moved back in with her par-
ents after an unspecified crisis, and
does some sex work now and then.
They meet after one of Eliza’s read-
ings. The words she reads are a “thinly
veiled metaphor for depression,” as
Parrish’s narration puts it (and in re-
ality they’re drawn from a poem by
Anne Boyer, “What Resembles the
Grave But Isn’t”), yet Eliza delivers
them with an energy and physicality—
rendered in a page of fifteen vibrant,
densely packed panels as she emotes
and gesticulates, addressing the mic
from all sorts of angles—that make
them feel urgent and alive.
Sasha is immediately smitten. She
introduces herself, meets Eliza’s young
son, Justin, helps them schlep their
stuff home, lights a fire in a gutter to
amuse them, yells at a reckless motor-
ist on their behalf. The conversation
is halting, inarticulate. Sasha is volu-
ble and scattered. “Your writing’s just
so, like—” she declares, then resorts
to sticking out her tongue and slicing
an imaginary knife across her belly.
Eliza is clearly tired, and doesn’t quite
catch Sasha’s name at first, but seems
charmed by her enthusiasm.
After Justin is put to bed, they sit
together drinking tea. Eliza is, for
Sasha, an “inspiring” version of what
she could become—someone creative
and unconventional but capable of
maintaining an adult existence with
real responsibilities. “I just think it’s
really cool, you know,” she says, “what
you’ve built, the life you’ve built.” Eliza,
for her part, sees an earlier version of
herself in Sasha, someone still prone to
declaring that “most of my energy goes
into trying to not want to die!” Per-
haps, too, she sees a reminder not to
let her fatigue and determination turn
into callousness—Sasha represents a
self she does not want to leave com-
pletely behind. As the evening winds
down, Sasha goes in for a kiss but is
gently, awkwardly rebuffed.
This kind of spiraling, intimate, un-
resolved encounter between two peo-
ple has become Parrish’s signature
form. Most of their shorter works—
many of which were collected in Perfect
Hair (2016)—are similarly open-ended
duets: a sex worker and client pre-
tending to be in love (“Young Spirits
Scene”); friends trying to reconnect
(“Sufficient Lucidity”); a “Generic Love
Story” starring two naked, abstract
figures. Their first graphic novel, the
fantastic The Lie and How We Told It
(2018), takes place over a single long
evening as two former friends, Cleary
and Tim, run into each other in the
supermarket and then catch up over
drinks.
Tim almost immediately announces
that he’s become engaged to a woman
but, as he drinks more and more
heavily, keeps steering the conver-
sation back to his sexual encounters
with men. Cleary, who is queer, rem-
inisces about the closet (“It was all
such a fucking mess”) but struggles
to respond to Tim’s aggressive bon-
homie and obvious panic. The conver-
sation lurches and sputters, circling
around sexuality and denial, need and
delusion, the way a friendship can go
from being “my whole world,” as Cleary
puts it, to this strained dance between
near strangers. But they never quite
figure out how to talk to each other.
Tim weeps, briefly, in the men’s room.
Cleary explains what a “weird night”
it’s been to an attractive bartender.
In the end, they just go their sepa-
rate ways.
P arrish has said that they try to
avoid “unnecessarily gendering”
characters when drawing them. Ev-
eryone is “shaped like a person,” and
the rest is often left ambiguous until
signaled by a name, a pronoun, or a
choice of clothing. (When Sasha puts
on a skimpy outfit for a date with a
client, it is clearly a costume, or even
a uniform, with little relation to the
body within.) In description this might
sound a bit didactic, but in practice
it is so natural it is almost invisible;
only gradually does it dawn on you how
different these depictions are from
those in most other comics, with their
unmistakable, unchanging breasts and
lips and waists and biceps. Parrish’s
books simply take for granted that
gender is something the characters
perform—or don’t—from moment to
moment.
Their drawings also generally high-
light body language instead of the
subtleties of facial expression. In
the space of three panels, a character
might splay a hand out in greeting, dip
it down to emphasize embarrassment,
cock it on a hip to admire an outfit. The
page near the end of The Lie and How
We Told It in which Cleary and Tim
say good-bye to each other is a small
masterpiece of social choreography,
hilarious and devastating: one goes in
for a hug while the other reaches for
a handshake, they both tighten up in
chagrin, they try and fail again, this
time in reverse, then finally manage an
oddly tender left-handed clasp.
Conversation in Parrish’s work is
a ragged improvisation, both inad-
equate and highly significant. Their
comics are full of Uhs and Ohs and
Haha reallys, lulls and evasions and
false starts, the fleeting aggressions
and misunderstandings of people try-
ing to connect—and the joy and ter-
ror when something real does manage
to break through. Early on in Men I
Trust, Eliza, reaching for some way
to help Sasha, tells her to try “the
45
gratitude game”: “Basically you just
write down everything you’re grate-
ful for every night before you go to
bed. . . . It can help with breaking up
negative thinking.” Much later in the
book, when Eliza vents to Sasha about
her own life—“Being broke is almost
as exhausting as it is humiliating”—
Sasha responds, “Have you—I don’t
know. Have you tried counting the
things you’re grateful for?” It’s snide
and callous (and she immediately apol-
ogizes), but in between these scenes
we’ve seen that Sasha did, in fact, sin-
A panel from Tommi Parrish’s Men I Trust
cerely try to play the game, however
platitudinous it seemed. Can hostility
express gratitude? Are sympathy and
condescension sometimes the same
thing?
In many of Parrish’s earlier com-
ics, their interest in duets went along
with experiments in formal bifurca-
tion. They played with a disjunction
between image and narration, or a di-
vision into “before” and “after.” Tim
and Cleary’s encounter, for example,
is repeatedly interrupted by a story
within a story, a comic book called One
Step Inside Doesn’t Mean You Under-
stand that Cleary (in a conceit some-
where between clunky and charming)
finds in a bush. Parrish uses a min-
imalist, black-and-white style quite
different from the rest of the book,
with no speech balloons and just a sin-
gle large panel per spread—it’s even
printed on a different paper stock—
but it too is a pas de deux. Its icy nar-
ration describes a brief, unsatisfying
relationship between a stripper and a
wealthy older man. “He’s as colorless
as the sex,” she reflects as it ends. “My
46
disgust has passed through rage and
emerged as a militant indifference.”
M en I Trust replaces this kind of
formal gambit with greater nar-
rative complexity and an intense at-
tention to the texture of the images.
The relationship between Sasha and
Eliza unfolds in a series of encounters,
rising in intimacy and intensity before
suddenly falling apart. But the scenes
between them are broken up by other
pairings and occasional larger groups:
Eliza and her son, as she struggles not
to give in to her weariness and frus-
tration in front of him (or tearfully
apologizes after she does); Sasha and
her mother, who is reflexively critical,
often a bit drunk, but also genuinely
worried about her; Eliza and Justin’s
deadbeat dad (on the phone); Sasha
and one of her clients, an alcoholic TV
host (mainly via text message); Eliza
at her AA meeting.
The panels are unusually large,
crammed together with no gutter in
between—usually six per page, but
occasionally even fewer. The colors are
bright and hand-painted, sometimes
naturalistic but more often decidedly
not. Eliza’s skin is generally an orang-
ish red, Sasha’s a pale yellow, but the
exact hue varies from page to page
and panel to panel. In many places the
art is deliberately raw, with the brush-
strokes clearly visible and some areas
left unfinished—the face mostly filled
in but not the hair, say, or the clothes
but not the skin. Textiles and back-
grounds sometimes become almost
abstract, an opportunity to play with
pattern and shading rather than an
attempt to depict the world.
This makes what might otherwise
be simple scenes of two people talking
curiously energetic and unstable. Even
the quietest moments have a wildness
lurking within them, a sense of things
being on the verge of going to pieces or
bursting into life. In the book’s most
vivid sequence, Sasha and Eliza walk
to the subway together after another
of Eliza’s readings and have a long,
raw conversation as they wait for the
train. Sasha is enthusiastic, almost
cloyingly solicitous; Eliza lashes out
at her and then, for the first time
in the book, opens up. “I don’t like
myself very much these days,” she
says. “I don’t know when I became
this person—this person that’s so
angry.”
As they talk, the panels expand and
contract. Our viewpoint moves toward
the characters, away from them, cir-
cling around, reframing the space. The
red of the floor tiles, the yellow of the
warning strip in front of the subway
tracks, the green grid of Eliza’s hoodie
seem to take on a life of their own. The
atmosphere is restless, uncertain, a
little unsettling, vibrant with possi-
bility. At one point Eliza stands right
on the edge of the platform, looking
down at the tracks. She’s too close, and
a train is coming—Sasha calls for her
to step back but at first she doesn’t
respond. The last panel before Eliza
finally turns away is one of the rough-
est in the book: the brushwork is rag-
ged, and a large section of the image
is left uncolored, as if the book itself
were on the verge of calling it quits.
Like Acting Class, Men I Trust ends
with a form of betrayal. Sasha con-
vinces Eliza—who has done some sex
work in the past—to join her on a date
with Andrew, her TV -host client. “It
doesn’t have to be anything more than
dinner,” she promises, but it quickly
becomes clear that isn’t true. They go
up to his hotel room, where he’s al-
ready half-naked, drinking heavily, er-
ratic. Sasha has told him that she and
Eliza are a couple. “I guess I figured
it might get him to pay more,” she ex-
plains, unconvincingly. When Andrew
goes down to the lobby for more drinks,
Sasha invites Eliza onto the bed, then
kisses her. She claims she’s setting up
a performance for Andrew to walk in
on but tells Eliza that “there is some-
thing between us. Something special.”
After Andrew returns and immediately
disrobes, Eliza leaves.
She and Sasha have one last argu-
ment outside—harsh, emotional, final.
It’s not clear if this night was just Sa-
sha’s attempt to draw Eliza further
into her life and into a sexual relation-
ship, or an attempt to sabotage their
newfound intimacy or her own happi-
ness or even Eliza’s sobriety, or some
combination of it all. It’s not clear if ei-
ther of them knows. “I really hope you
work out how to be OK, Sasha,” Eliza
tells her. “It just can’t have anything to
do with me.” As usual, Parrish avoids
tidy resolution. We see brief scenes of
Eliza and Sasha, separately, meeting
other people. The last few panels of
the book are sketchy, and then sim-
ply blank. The words Eliza recited just
before they met—the words from the
poem that caused them to meet, that
.
drew them together—seem to echo
back: “Always falling into a hole. Then
saying ‘ok this is not your grave, get
out of this hole.’”
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