Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Ny 171016
Ny 171016
DRAWINGS Will McPhail, Robert Leighton, Trevor Spaulding, Benjamin Schwartz, Michael Crawford, David Sipress, Shannon
Wheeler, Liam Francis Walsh, Edward Koren, Edward Steed, David Borchart,William Haefeli, Jason Patterson, Jack Ziegler,
Emily Flake, Frank Cotham, Amy Hwang, Tom Toro, Paul Noth, Avi Steinberg, Charlie Hankin, Danny Shanahan, P. C. Vey
SPOTS Giacomo Bagnara
CONTRIBUTORS
Ryan Lizza (“Taming Trump,” p. 30), a Alexandra Schwartz (Books, p. 80) be-
Washington correspondent for The came a staff writer earlier this year.
New Yorker, is also a political commen-
tator for CNN. Cynan Jones (Fiction, p. 72) is the au-
thor of five novels, including “The Dig”
Dexter Filkins (“The Thirty-Year Coup,” and “Cove,” which will be published
p. 60) is a staff writer and the author in the U.K. this fall.
of “The Forever War,” which won a
National Book Critics Circle Award. Zoë Heller (Books, p. 90) contributes to
The New York Review of Books. She has
Sheila Marikar (The Talk of the Town, published three novels, including “Notes
p. 24) is a writer living in Los Ange- on a Scandal.”
les. She is currently working on a book
about modern-day communes. C. L. O’Dell (Poem, p. 97) is a poet and
the editor of The Paris-American.
Jack Handey (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 37)
has written several humor books, in- Leo Robson (Books, p. 94) is a freelance
cluding, most recently, “Squeaky Poems: writer based in London.
Rhymes About My Rat.”
Alex Ross (Musical Events, p. 104), the
Julie Phillips (“Out of Bounds,” p. 38) is magazine’s music critic since 1996, is
working on a book on writing and working on a book entitled “Wag-
mothering, and is researching a biog- nerism: Art in the Shadow of Music.”
raphy of Ursula K. Le Guin.
Anthony Lane (The Current Cinema,
R. Kikuo Johnson (Cover), an illustrator p. 108) is a staff writer and film critic
and cartoonist, teaches cartooning at for the magazine. “Nobody’s Perfect”
the Rhode Island School of Design. is a collection of his New Yorker pieces.
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2 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016
THE MAIL
A MUSEUM’S UNSUNG HERO ray Perahia, who had been scheduled to
both conduct and perform, had to drop
Vinson Cunningham’s piece on the out. The late Sir Neville Marriner con-
Smithsonian Institution’s new National ducted, and Wang, with just a few weeks’
Museum of African American History notice, took on the planned Mendels-
and Culture describes the museum’s long sohn and Mozart concertos. Her per-
period of gestation, the obstacles it faced, formance of Mozart’s C-Minor Con-
and its many champions, but neglects to certo was remarkable. As her teacher
mention one of its major contributors, Gary Graffman told Malcolm earlier this
the late African-American architect year, “Who can play Mozart the way she
J. Max Bond, Jr. (“Making a Home for did? It was so natural, in such good taste.”
Black History,” August 29th). The idea One of the orchestra musicians later told
of a national museum dedicated to the me that they had all been impressed—
African-American experience was first as strong a recommendation as any Mo-
discussed in 1915. In 1991, while working zartian could wish for. Later, I saw Wang
on the Birmingham Civil Rights Insti- chatting with friends backstage. She had
tute with the congressman John Lewis, already changed into jeans and flat shoes.
Bond joined the effort. In 2006, he and Whatever she chooses to wear, her excep-
another noted architect, Phil Freelon, re- tional musicianship is the genuine article.
ceived the commission to define the proj- David Beech
ect’s objectives and to choose its site on Monterey, Calif.
the Mall. The early work of Bond and 1
Freelon, who joined forces with the mu- CHOPPED
seum’s director, Lonnie Bunch, and the
Smithsonian, led to an open design com- I read Ian Parker’s piece on the Times
petition. A firm believer in the power of restaurant critic Pete Wells on Septem-
collaboration, Bond invited David Ad- ber 11th, ironic timing for a piece that
jaye to join him and Freelon, to form a refers to five-hundred-dollar dinners
partnership—FAB—which ultimately won (“Knives Out,” September 12th). I was
the commission. Bond, who died in 2009, left with real sympathy for both Wells
saw the design process as akin to a jazz and the chef-restaurateur David Chang,
ensemble, where individuals would in- whose restaurant was the subject of one
spire one another to create a structure of Wells’s critical reviews. Eating at a
that reflected the richness and diversity Manhattan destination restaurant is an
of African-American life. The museum increasingly vainglorious experience; no
is not the effort of a single architect, Ad- wonder the food often disappoints and
jaye, as Cunningham’s article suggests. the “fun” has become difficult to locate.
While Bond cannot be here to share in Wells tells the devastated Chang, “This
the triumph, the decade of effort by him is the life you chose,” and so did Wells,
and his team should be recognized. who has the power to make or destroy
Charlie Shorter careers. But it’s worth noting that they
Senior Adviser, Davis Brody Bond work in a rarefied arena, in which good
New York City food has become something more and
1 yet less than it is for most people, to whom
A STAR TURN it means sustenance and community.
Hank Benson
Yuja Wang’s emergence as a gifted New Haven, Conn.
Mozart interpreter is a less recent phe-
nomenon than Janet Malcolm claims •
in her Profile of the pianist (“Perfor- Letters should be sent with the writer’s name,
mance Artist,” September 5th). I saw address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to
Wang perform in 2008 with the Acad- themail@newyorker.com. Letters may be edited
for length and clarity, and may be published in
emy of St. Martin in the Fields, at the any medium. We regret that owing to the volume
age of twenty-one, when the pianist Mur- of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter.
Anna Deavere Smith has carved out a singular niche straddling performance art, academia, and public-
interest journalism. Her documentary solo works, in which she plays a panoply of interview subjects,
have covered topics from the Crown Heights riots to the frailties of the human body. In her latest, “Notes
from the Field,” beginning previews Oct. 15 at Second Stage, Smith (above, in costume) draws on more
than two hundred and fifty interviews to explore hot-button issues of education and inequality.
PHOTOGRAPH BY RYAN PFLUGER
flare, an aura, a dotted pattern of sun on the
wall. The emptiest of these images recall Uta
Oscar Murillo
At the age of thirty, the London-based artist has
been a market phenom for several years, but he
may feel that he still has something to prove.
In his second solo in New York, Murillo comes
on like a house afire with big, heavily stitched,
messy but strangely elegant paintings that fea-
ture fugitive antique images, including one of a
marching band; many handmade books of furi-
ously scribbled drawings and personal snapshots;
and an immense installation. The latter, entitled
COURTESY THE ARTIST AND TEAM GALLERY, NEW YORK
Stephen Shames
The New York photographer got his start in 1966,
documenting the founding and growth of the
Black Panther Party, in pictures that emphasized
substance while admiring style. Any show of that
Sam McKinniss’s painting “Swan II,” in “Egyptian Violet,” at the Team gallery, opening Oct. 13. series of Shames’s can’t avoid the trivializing tug
The exhibition title refers to the crepuscular pigment the young artist uses, to striking effect. of radical chic (Angela Davis, Huey Newton, and
formers is not only a face and a body that Central Europe, emigrated to England to the safety of the present, Traherne makes
distill emotions we may or may not have escape the Second World War; as Jews, a romance of the past, just as audiences
been aware of but also a person who reflects they were outsiders in a country where tend to make a romance of Weisz. Part of
something of the times. While we some- anti-Semitism was often the rule, not the her strength is her ability to resist such
times associate the lush, forty-six-year-old exception. Weisz’s difference made her easy classifications, and to show us various
British-born consummate actress Rachel watchful, interior, rebellious. At secondary unconscious states consciously, with a
Weisz’s romantic countenance and mind- school, she was fortunate to meet an in- conjurer’s truth.
fulness with epochs other than her own— structor who picked up on her talent for —Hilton Als
10 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016
THE THEATRE
1
OPENINGS AND PREVIEWS Sweat
Kate Whoriskey directs a new play by Lynn Not-
The Cherry Orchard tage, about a group of friends from an assembly
The Roundabout presents a new adaptation of line who find themselves at odds amid layoffs
the Chekhov play by Stephen Karam (“The Hu- and pickets. (Public, 425 Lafayette St. 212-967-
mans”), directed by Simon Godwin and starring 7555. Previews begin Oct. 18.)
Diane Lane, Tavi Gevinson, Joel Grey, Chuck
Cooper, and John Glover. (American Airlines 1
Theatre, 227 W. 42nd St. 212-719-1300. In previews. NOW PLAYING
Opens Oct. 16.)
Afterplay
Chris Gethard: Career Suicide The conceit of Brian Friel’s one-act play from
The comedian’s solo show, directed by Kimberly 2002, directed by Joe Dowling, is intriguing from
Senior, looks for humor in such weighty sub- an intellectual angle. Andrey (Dermot Crowley),
jects as mental illness, suicide, and alcoholism. the once promising academic from “Three Sis-
(Lynn Redgrave, 45 Bleecker St. 866-811-4111. In ters,” and Sonya (Dearbhla Molloy), Astrov’s
previews. Opens Oct. 13.) disappointed lover from “Uncle Vanya,” meet in
a somewhat seedy tearoom in nineteen-twenties
Coriolanus Moscow, many years after the action of their re-
Red Bull Theatre presents Shakespeare’s politi- spective plays. There, in thoroughly Irish con-
cally minded tragedy, directed by Michael Sex- versation, they get to know each other, sharing
ton and starring Dion Johnstone as the Roman confidences, deluding themselves and one an-
general. (Barrow Street Theatre, 27 Barrow St. 212- other along the way. For dedicated students of
868-4444. Previews begin Oct. 18.) Chekhov, this exercise may hold some interest,
but as a stand-alone piece of theatre there’s lit-
Heisenberg tle to draw the audience toward the two charac-
Mary-Louise Parker and Denis Arndt reprise ters. (Irish Repertory, 132 W. 22nd St. 212-727-2737.)
their roles in Simon Stephens’s drama, about two
strangers who cross paths at a London train sta- Holiday Inn
tion. Mark Brokaw directs the Manhattan The- In a season of American agita, the Roundabout
atre Club production. (Samuel J. Friedman, 261 serves a nice glass of warm milk: a musical ad-
W. 47th St. 212-239-6200. In previews. Opens Oct. 13.) aptation of the 1942 film, which gave us Bing
Crosby crooning “White Christmas.” Gordon
Les Liaisons Dangereuses Greenberg’s production pads out the story with
Janet McTeer, Liev Schreiber, and Birgitte Hjort other Irving Berlin standards, including “Blue
Sørensen star in Josie Rourke’s revival of the Skies” and “Cheek to Cheek,” sung and danced
Christopher Hampton drama, depicting the se- to by a game, bright-eyed cast. Corbin Bleu, fill-
ductive games of aristocrats in pre-Revolution- ing Fred Astaire’s tap shoes, plays Ted, a night-
ary France. (Booth, 222 W. 45th St. 212-239-6200. club entertainer who craves the spotlight. Bryce
In previews.) Pinkham is his partner, Jim, who just wants to
give it all up for a farm in Connecticut, where he
“Master Harold” . . . and the Boys meets a girl (Lora Lee Gayer) and puts on a show
Athol Fugard directs his 1982 drama, set in a to pay the bills. Don’t expect an iota of irony; like
tea shop in South Africa in 1950, where two Jim, the show longs for simpler pleasures, and
black men and a white boy face the cruelties of delivers them by way of well-polished choreog-
apartheid. (Pershing Square Signature Center, 480 raphy, familiar tunes, and two debonair leading
W. 42nd St. 212-244-7529. Previews begin Oct. 18.) men. (Studio 54, at 254 W. 54th St. 212-719-1300.)
Yvon loses his family while imprisoned; when he Jacob (Keith Poulson), a wounded Iraq War veteran
gets out, he acts on his blankly righteous rage. newly released from the hospital. Grievously burned,
Bresson captures the moral weight of tiny gestures Jacob lives as a recluse; his girlfriend, Tricia (Kristin
in brisk, precise images, and conveys the cosmic Slaysman), works hard to sustain their relationship.
evil of daily life through one of the all-time great Their mother, Joani (Ally Sheedy), who suffers from
soundtracks, full of the rustle of bills and the clink depression, and their father, Bill (Peter Hedges), a
of change, the click of a cash register and the snap failing actor, maintain a veneer of exuberance, which
of locks. These noises make the exchange of labor Colleen’s arrival quickly shatters. Despite the fami-
and goods for money play like original sin itself. ly’s troubles, the film is as joyful and energetic as it
Bresson builds a brilliant sequence from an oppres- is unsparing and compassionate. Infusions of goth
sive succession of doors—of a paddy wagon, a store, styles retrieved from the siblings’ adolescence and
and a subway car, ending with the hellish barriers their ecstatic reunion with old friends, vibrant un-
that separate a prisoner from his freedom. A spir- dercurrents of local weirdness and echoes of radi-
itual filmmaker, Bresson is fascinated by violence. cal activism shake the core of heartland stereotypes.
Here, he revisits a classic moment from “Psycho” in With its blend of terrifyingly intense family bonds
a terrifying wink and reveals the making—as well as and the howling furies of the world outside, this is a
the meaning—of a sacred monster. In French.—Rich- great American political film.—R.B. (Metrograph.)
ard Brody (Film Society of Lincoln Center; Oct. 12.)
The Magnificent Seven
Certain Women A well-meaning rehash of John Sturges’s 1960 West-
The three sections of Kelly Reichardt’s new film— ern, Antoine Fuqua’s movie takes place in 1879, in a
set in Montana and adapted from stories by Maile town that is blessed with a gold mine and cursed by
Meloy—are consistent in their restrained tone but the heavy hand of Bartholomew Bogue (Peter Sars-
divergent in their impact. The first two episodes gaard). Murdering, menacing, or buying off the cit-
offer little besides moderately engaging plots, but izens, he seems invincible, until one proud widow
the third packs an overwhelming power of mood, (Haley Bennett) brings in a gaggle of mixed mer-
observation, and longing. In the first, Laura Dern cenaries. They are played by Denzel Washington,
plays Laura, a lawyer whose affair with a married man Chris Pratt, Ethan Hawke, Byung-hun Lee, Ma-
named Ryan (James Le Gros) is ending just as a cli- nuel Garcia-Rulfo, Martin Sensmeier, and an ur-
ent (Jared Harris), a disabled construction worker, sine Vincent D’Onofrio: not a bad gang, and cer-
comes unhinged. In the second, Ryan and his wife, tainly diverse enough to meet our ethnic demands,
Gina (Michelle Williams), who is also his boss, visit yet it lacks the near-wordless cool that radiated
an elderly acquaintance, Albert (René Auberjonois), from some of Sturges’s team—Yul Brynner, James
to buy stone for their country house. The third story Coburn, Robert Vaughn, and Steve McQueen. The
features Lily Gladstone as Jamie, a young caretaker shootouts, too, fall short of the old dexterity; the
at a horse farm who drops in on an adult-education most interesting innovation, mid-finale, is the cruel
class and strikes up a tense and tenuous friendship arrival of a Gatling gun, which allows the unchiv-
with the teacher, a young lawyer named Beth (Kristen alrous shadow of the modern age to fall across the
Stewart). Here, Reichardt infuses slender details with West.—A.L. (10/3/16) (In wide release.)
breathtaking emotion. The fervent attention to light
and movement—as in a scene of a quietly frenzied Masterminds
nocturnal pursuit—seems to expand cinematic time Jared Hess’s wildly plotted comedy of clueless crim-
and fill it with inner life.—R.B. (In limited release.) inals, based on a true story, is intermittently funny
but consistently inspired. It’s about an armored-car
Deepwater Horizon driver named David Ghantt (Zach Galifianakis),
Peter Berg’s account of the explosion on an oil rig off who, in 1997, in rural North Carolina, is persuaded
the coast of Louisiana, in 2010, is so expertly done, by Kelly (Kristen Wiig), with whom he’s hopelessly
and so thrilling to behold, that you end up slightly in love, to steal millions in cash from his company’s
troubled by your own excitement. Should the story vault. She, in turn, is under the influence of a coolly
of a true catastrophe, which left eleven people dead devious friend (Owen Wilson), who ships David off
and wrought havoc on the environment, really be to Mexico and sends a hit man (Jason Sudeikis) to
this much fun? We get a small squad of characters keep him silent. The reversals of fortune, the nar-
to guide us through the tangle of the incident. Mark row escapes, the plans for revenge—and, for that
Wahlberg plays Mike Williams, the chief electron- matter, the ludicrous details of the robbery itself—
ics technician on the rig, with Kate Hudson as his are gleefully outlandish, and Hess infuses them
wife and an indestructible Kurt Russell as his boss, with his unique sugar-frosted style and religious
known to all as Mr. Jimmy. The villain of the piece, substance. The carefully coiffed, goofily tucked-in
a senior figure from BP, is—as you would hope— David seems to be answering, in his own blunder-
played by John Malkovich. (Though the bulk of the ing way, the call of a higher power; David’s jilted fi-
blame ultimately went to BP, fault was also found ancée, Jandice (Kate McKinnon), blends sacred love
with other companies; but the film has no room for with profane humor; and all of the amateur miscre-
such niceties.) The movie, credible and relaxed as ants have a wide-eyed naïveté that veers toward holy
it delves into the daylight habits of the crew, bursts innocence.—R.B. (In wide release.)
into pandemonium as the well blows, night falls, and
the flames assume command. If you don’t quite un- Sully
derstand what’s happening, you’re not alone; even Clint Eastwood transforms the events, in 2009, of
some of the old hands, struggling to contain the Flight 1549—which Captain Chesley Sullenberger
chaos, are at sea.—A.L. (10/10/16) (In wide release.) and First Officer Jeff Skiles safely landed in the Hud-
son River after losing both jets in a bird strike—into
Little Sister a fierce, stark, haunted drama of horror narrowly
The 2008 Presidential election and the intimate dev- avoided. Eastwood’s depiction of Sully (played, with
astation resulting from misguided politics are the fully terse gravity, by Tom Hanks) begins with a shock: the
integrated context of Zach Clark’s fierce, tender, and captain’s 9/11-esque vision of his plane crashing into
grandly visionary story of a broken family in broken New York buildings. The action of the film involves
times. Addison Timlin plays Colleen, a young novi- another shock: federal officials question Sully’s judg-
tiate in a New York convent who is summoned to her ment and subject him and Skiles (Aaron Eckhart) to
family’s home, in North Carolina, to visit her brother, an investigation that could cost him his job and even
his pension. Eastwood films the doomed flight with prisoners (Bill Clinton’s policies, many undertaken
a terrifyingly intimate sense of danger, focussing with the support of black politicians, were also to
on its existential center, the little red button under blame) as well as the widespread tolerance of police
the pilot’s thumb. The film movingly depicts Sully’s violence against black people, linking legal depravi-
modest insistence that he was just doing his job and ties to entrenched economic interests. The film re-
the collective courage of flight attendants, air-traffic veals crimes that have been fabricated in the service
controllers, police officers, and the passengers them- of oppression as well as another, real and ongoing
selves. But, throughout, Eastwood boldly thrusts at- crime—against humanity.—R.B. (In limited release.)
tention toward the aftermath of the flight: the nerve-
jangling media distortion of events and personalities, Tower
plus the investigators’ ultimate weapon, a computer This documentary, by Keith Maitland, reconstructs
simulation of the landing, a movie on which Sully’s with forensic precision and dramatic immediacy the
honor depends. The result is Eastwood’s dedicated 1966 sniper attack at the University of Texas at Aus-
vision of moviemaking itself.—R.B. (In wide release.) tin that left eighteen people dead, an event that’s
widely considered the first modern mass shooting.
13th Maitland blends archival footage, original inter-
Ava DuVernay’s brilliantly analytical and morally views with survivors and responders, and animated
passionate documentary traces the current-day mass images of several sorts—including, strikingly, ones
incarceration of black Americans to its historical or- that return the interviewees to their age at the time
igins in the Thirteenth Amendment, which banned of the attack. The animation, by Craig Staggs, has
slavery and involuntary servitude “except as pun- a notable imaginative specificity, and the meticu-
ishment for a crime.” That exception, as she demon- lously complex interweaving of styles turns the film
strates by way of a wide range of interview subjects into a horrifying true-crime thriller that’s enriched
(including Jelani Cobb, of The New Yorker) and archi- by a rare depth of inner experience. The effect is as
val material, quickly led to the systematic criminal- much intellectual as emotional, folding the movie
ization of black people. When Jim Crow laws yielded reflexively into its subject: the personal importance
to the civil-rights movement in the nineteen-sixties, of public discussion. The dearth of archival inter-
Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy” and “law and views regarding this event corresponds to the inter-
order” campaign—which endure to this day—aimed viewees’ retrospective view of the mid-sixties. Ex-
to keep black citizens subjugated and out of power. horted at the time to put the troubles behind them
DuVernay shows Ronald Reagan’s “war on drugs,” and discouraged from speaking about their expe-
his economic policies, and his efforts at voter sup- riences, many of the subjects approach Maitland’s
pression to be a part of the same strategy. Mean- interviews as long-overdue, albeit pain-filled, acts
while, DuVernay traces the rising number of black of personal liberation.—R.B. (In limited release.)
DANCE
New York City Ballet reographer’s previous multimedia works, but it’s
In the last week of the season, Jerome Robbins’s similarly intense. The piece, part of the Crossing
“Dances at a Gathering,” a favorite of audiences and the Line Festival, is two solos that overlap—at-
dancers alike, will be performed four times as part of tracting, repelling, and sometimes colliding with
a double bill, with George Balanchine’s “Firebird.” each other. Lora Juodkaite, who spun with relent-
“Dances at a Gathering,” from 1969, marked Robbins’s less virtuosity in Ouramdane’s “Ordinary Wit-
return to ballet after years of working on Broadway. nesses,” spins again here, while Annie Hanauer,
Made up of a series of solos, duets, trios, and ensem- who has one prosthetic arm, seems stripped of de-
bles set to Chopin piano works, it is linked by a thread fenses as she twitches. (Baryshnikov Arts Center,
of lyricism, humor, and delicate emotion. “Firebird,” 450 W. 37th St. 866-811-4111. Oct. 13-15.)
in contrast, is a Russian folk tale with all the trim-
mings: a magic bird, a sorcerer, a pure-hearted prince, Danish Dance Theatre
and a wondrous score by Stravinsky. • Oct. 11 and Denmark’s foremost contemporary dance ensemble
Oct. 13 at 7:30 and Oct. 14-15 at 8: “Dances at a Gath- appeared at the Joyce in 2013, as part of a Nordic
ering” and “Firebird.” • Oct. 12 at 7:30: “Serenade,” dance festival. Now it’s back, on its own, with a new
“American Rhapsody,” “Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux,” work (“Black Diamond”) by the company’s artis-
and “Western Symphony.” • Oct. 15 at 2: “For Clara,” tic director, Tim Rushton. With an abstract theme
“The Dreamers,” “ten in seven,” “Unframed,” and (“the inherent duality of everything”) and futur-
“Everywhere We Go.” • Oct. 16 at 3: “Glass Pieces,” istic unisex costumes, the piece is self-consciously
“Thou Swell,” and “Stars and Stripes.” (David H. contemporary. It begins with a flash: a landscape of
Koch, Lincoln Center. 212-496-0600.) exploding fragments. The movement, which ranges
from legato partnering to angular, robotic moves,
Company Wang Ramirez is set to a sound collage of Philip Glass, Alexander
Sébastien Ramirez is French, and of Spanish de- Balanescu, and electronic beats. (Joyce Theatre, 175
scent. Honji Wang is German-Korean. They are a Eighth Ave., at 19th St. 212-242-0800. Oct. 13-16.)
couple, onstage and off, and “Monchichi” is about
their merging. Cutesy skits riffing on intercultural Platform 2016: Lost and Found
challenges alternate with impressive but quick-fading Danspace Project, the site of many memorials
bursts of dancing in their common physical lan- for dancers who died of AIDS, looks back at
guage, an elastic extension of hip-hop. (BAM Fisher, the plague years and their impact on the pres-
321 Ashland Pl., Brooklyn. 718-636-4100. Oct. 12-15.) ent in a six-week series of performances, conver-
sations, and film screenings. Much of the em-
Rachid Ouramdane phasis is on the hidden influence of careers cut
A white set, two dancers: “Tordre (Wrought)” is short and people left out of standard histories,
much more spare than the French-Algerian cho- but the first week focusses on such prominent
diamonds. This week also marks the start of pendent women faced a choice: proceed with
an online auction of photographs (Oct. 18-27) working life in big cities or settle into the role
from the collection of Shalom Shpilman, the of wife and mother. In “The Courtship of Eva
founder of the Shpilman Institute for Photog- Eldridge,” Diane Simmons traces one woman’s
raphy, in Tel Aviv. The images in the sale—ev- story through hundreds of wartime letters and
erything from Surrealist collages by Edouard papers, ultimately uncovering postwar America’s
Léon Théodore Mesens to the conceptual art of rampant bigamy and the women who overcame
Sophie Calle—all relate to the human form. (20 it. She discusses the book with Rachel Hall, the
Rockefeller Plaza, at 49th St. 212-636-2000.) • A author of “Heirlooms.” (29 Cornelia St. 212-989-
sale of prints at Doyle (Oct. 18) includes pieces 9319. Oct. 18 at 6.)
PHOTOGRAPH BY AMY LOMBARD FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE
neighborhood not usually synonymous Greek), in which tequila and salted- War and later became a tobacconist, supervised
the finishing touches on his house, then just a few
with risk-taking. There’s something pistachio orgeat lap at a single rock of steps from the Hudson. He sold it in the eighteen-
magical about the surrealism of the cut ice. thirties, and since then the exquisite Federal-style
sculpted putti and painted pigs frolick- Most of the “main” dishes—delicate building has been home to a number of taverns of
varying legality. Ear Inn was born there in 1977,
ing on the walls and the chintzy floral pieces of fried red mullet, lamb cooked when the building was bought by its current own-
patterns that bloom across the ceilings. and served in a plastic bag next to a bit ers, Rip Hayman and Martin Sheridan. The duo
The over-all effect is as if David Lynch of roasted-pepper ketchup—feel about have covered the bar’s time-warped ceilings and
storied walls with curios from the ages: eighteenth-
and Marguerite Duras had opened a the same size as the small plates. The century wine jugs that were dug up in the cellar
Mediterranean saloon somewhere in exception, however, is the astako pasta, during excavations, porthole-framed paintings,
Mitteleuropa. in which an imperial lobster, resplendent numerous sculptures and drawings of ears. At a
table with a tasty cheeseburger ($12.50) and a
On the other hand, 1633 also manages in full garnet regalia, presides over a Moscow Mule ($11), a visiting Mancunian told of
to strike a classic Manhattan timbre. realm of soft fettuccine. For Liakopou- the Williamsburg Airbnb where he was staying,
Perhaps this is merely an effect of the los’s final chapter, entitled “sweet which was owned by a hunter and came with a
fridge full of complimentary bear and deer meat.
disco soundtrack—think Larry Levan (dreams),” the brightest star is baklava Airbnb users with tastes less carnivorous and more
at the Paradise Garage—but more likely swimming in a jar with ice cream and historical can find an apartment that Hayman calls
it arises from the melding of cultures spiced syrup. One feels that if only the “Ear Up” on the site. Sitting outside on a wooden
bench that hugs two trees, one can peek up at the
that results in excellent dishes like the Sibyl of Cumae, that other great resident ceiling of the living room. Reviewers of the rental
gyro pizza: steaming heaps of pork belly of a jar, had just had some baklava, she’d mention that, despite the vibrant scene downstairs,
and lamb shoulder, finely ground, over have been happy to live forever. (Entrées no noise is audible, but one voiced concern about
hearing ghosts bumping around. Perhaps the pol-
crispy pizza dough spread with tzatziki. $24-$69.) tergeists had a few too many pints before heading
The chef Dionisis Liakopoulos’s dishes —Nicolas Niarchos upstairs.—Colin Stokes
COMMENT
THREE’S A CROWD
ast Wednesday, Neil Cavuto, of Fox News, offered into the tragedy of that city and decided that it is kind of
L Gary Johnson, the former governor of New Mexico Clinton’s fault.)
and the Libertarian Presidential nominee, a scenario: Hil- Still, logic is a poor tool for analyzing political speech in
lary Clinton and Donald Trump are in a boat, and they this election. Johnson quickly told the Times that Weld had
both fall overboard. “Who are you going to save?” Cavuto merely suggested a division of labor, in which he, Johnson,
asked. Instead of considering the question, Johnson col- would focus on Hillary. Weld, in turn, said that he wasn’t
lapsed into giggles, as though the prospect of both candi- campaigning for anyone but himself and Johnson, and would
dates flailing in the water while he watched was the fun- continue to strive to break up what he called the “two-party
niest thing he’d heard in a while. “Well, America will be duopoly.” In an interview on Fox Business News, he said,
saved,” he said. “This is a year when voters looking at the two establish-
Johnson was on Fox, in part, to refute reports that ment parties are thinking, I’m watching a scary movie and
his running mate, William Weld, the former governor of I can’t change the channel. Well, you can change the chan-
Massachusetts, might be taking a more sober view. nel!”—as if, having tired of the finalists on “The Celebrity
The day before, Weld had told the Boston Globe that Apprentice,” one could simply switch to “Shark Tank” and
Trump now has his “full attention,” owing to the singular be done with it, tuning out the White House and the world.
awfulness of his foreign-policy positions. The Globe, Nor would Weld concentrate, as had also been sug-
buttressed by sources close to Weld, took this to mean that gested, on solidly red states, where he wouldn’t harm Clin-
he would focus exclusively on insuring that Trump would ton’s electoral-college chances: last Friday, he campaigned
not be President. Follow-up reports in other publications in Maine and New Hampshire, where the polls show only
worked on the assumption that Weld was, in effect, giv- a couple of points separating Trump and Clinton, and where
ing up on his own running mate and endorsing Clinton. more than ten per cent of likely voters favor the Libertar-
After all, the Johnson-Weld ticket ian ticket. There are, in fact, eleven
is polling at about seven per cent states where the difference between
nationally, and Weld has previously Trump and Clinton is less than the
said that he is “not sure anybody is sum of likely voters who say that
more qualified” than Clinton to be they support either Johnson-Weld
President. And, if Trump’s reckless or Jill Stein, the Green Party candi-
comments about America’s place in date, and her running mate, Ajamu
the world weren’t enough to per- Baraka, who are at about two and a
suade him, then surely those of his half per cent in the polls. ( Johnson
running mate were. Weld must have is on the ballot in all fifty states, Stein
ILLUSTRATIONS BY TOM BACHTELL
BRAVE NEW WORLD DEPT. Delhi. He arrived in the United States drives a gray Tesla with his new com-
TRADING VS. TRUMP in 1998, to pursue a Ph.D. in computer pany’s name on the license plate: Trim-
science, with “two suitcases and two ian, short for three simians, a nod to
hundred dollars—the canonical Indian the wise monkeys of Japanese legend.
story.” It builds networking apps for profes-
Kumar dropped out of his program sionals. Emoji monkeys covering their
when the first dot-com boom beck- eyes, ears, and mouth adorn the door
oned. He hopped between computer- of Trimian’s office, which is sandwiched
he Depression era had Eleanor networking startups before joining between two acupuncture studios in a
T Roosevelt, the MTV generation Yahoo as an engineer, in 2005. After Sunnyvale office complex. “If you’re
had Rock the Vote. Our current age three years, he left and, in 2009, looking for Google or Facebook, this
has apps. In August, Amit Kumar, an founded Lexity, which used a Web bot isn’t it,” Kumar said. He passed a pan-
entrepreneur in Menlo Park, Califor- named Sophie to help small businesses try stocked with kale chips and pro-
nia, distressed by the popularity of Don- market themselves. (“Sophie would tein bars, and a graphic designer bal-
ald Trump, released a mobile app called say, ‘I’ve done some analysis on your ancing on a concave boogie board while
#NeverTrump, which allows users— site. The best course of action is to ad- typing at a standing desk.
there are now more than a thousand vertise on Google and spend three He sat down by a whiteboard and
of them—to win points for prodding hundred dollars a month.’ ”) In 2013, opened the #NeverTrump app on his
friends in swing states to vote. The app he sold the thirty-person shop to iPhone. (He coded the beta version
matches a user’s contacts with publicly Yahoo for a reported thirty-five to over a weekend, and his employees,
available data, figures out whom the forty million dollars. Kumar calls it “a most of them immigrants, jumped in
user knows in battleground states, then life-changing event.” to fine-tune it.) A pixellated monkey
offers to send those people automated A few months after the sale, Kumar asked Kumar where he was registered
reminders to vote and, especially, to not and his wife, who works for Cisco Sys- and whom he plans to vote for. For ar-
vote for Trump. “On Facebook, a lot tems, became eligible for citizenship. gument’s sake, Kumar said he was in
of people post, ‘I want to do something, “Our accountant sat us down and said, Ohio and voting for Gary Johnson.
but I’m in California, I feel powerless,’ ” ‘Do you really want to do this? Because The friendly monkey disappeared, re-
Kumar said the other day, at an Asian- you’ll have a lot of negative conse- placed by an admonition: “You are vot-
fusion restaurant in Sunnyvale. “Now quences from a tax perspective,’ ” Kumar ing for Gary Johnson in a swing state,
you have something to do.” said. “We didn’t have to think twice.” which could deliver the White House
Kumar, a slim, genial man of thirty- They took the Oath of Allegiance at to Donald Trump.” The app explained
nine, ordered American chop suey, a a community hall in Cupertino. how Kumar could find a friend in a
favorite during his college days in New Kumar wears designer denim and non-battleground state and “trade” his
24 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016
vote—he votes for Clinton, the friend ness, decided to diversify, so he bought weight. Women at my end of the spec-
promises to cast a ballot for Johnson. a building in Brooklyn, moved in up- trum often blow up and then get into
Sixteen per cent of #NeverTrump users stairs with his wife and child, and turned money problems and all that—whether
are registered in swing states, and half the ground floor into a bar, with a stage it’s Judy Garland or Billie Holiday or
of them want to vote for a third-party crammed in one corner. Raitt was here any number of chanteuses who had no
candidate. Last weekend, #NeverTrump to hang out, not to perform. She favors money at the end of their careers. I
unveiled a feature that suggests five to bigger venues, and has been successful thought, You know, this is gonna get
ten users with whom these voters can and sensible enough in her affairs to have out of hand if I don’t do something. I
trade, so they can vote their conscience the luxury of forgoing diversification. was maybe going to work with Prince,
without inadvertently helping elect It was early evening, and there weren’t and I thought, Man, if we make a video
Trump. There’s also a chat room where many people around. She had on black together, this is gonna look rough.”
people post messages like “Hey, Rob- boots, black jeans, a faux-leather mesh She went on, “There’s always some-
ert, if you’ll vote Hillary in Co., I will shirt, and a necklace of brass skeleton one who can give you advice about stalk-
vote Stein in N.J.” keys. To go incognito, she’ll often not
“Let’s say there are millions of such wear eye makeup and truss up her red
people, and the margin of victory for hair under a hat, but on this night she
Trump is, like, a hundred thousand,” felt no need to hide. She looked like
Kumar said. “If we can shift just a Bonnie Raitt. She tasted her drink, a
few of them over to Hillary . . .” He nonalcoholic craft cocktail, and said, “I
paused. “This only matters on the might have to hit on myself later.”
boundary condition, when there’s a “It’s really nice to be here and watch
coulda, woulda, shoulda. It’s back to the daylight fade,” she said. On the road,
Bush versus Gore. ” she explained, she spends her late after-
A casual observer of politics—“I noons in windowless rooms and halls—
wouldn’t consider myself a Demo- sound check, dinner, prep, performance—
crat”—Kumar was pushed over the and doesn’t get outside again until after
edge by Trump’s rhetoric against im- midnight. “Small price to pay for the gig
migrants and Muslims. Outside, by the I have, but I really miss watching the day
Tesla, he brought up Martin Niemöller’s end and the night come on.”
poem “First They Came . . . .” “This When Raitt passes through New York,
poem about the Holocaust—who would she tries to build in extra time. She likes
have thought that, less than a hundred to bike the loop around Central Park.
years on, we would have to invoke that?” She has tenuous roots here. Her early Bonnie Raitt
he said. childhood was spent in Westchester
“America was supposed to be the County, while her father, John Raitt, held ers or investing your money or not sign-
last bastion of bring me your tired, hud- down the lead in “The Pajama Game” ing your publishing away. You know,
dled masses,” he went on. “It doesn’t on Broadway. “I knew all the alternate ‘I’m in love with someone who’s mar-
matter what they believe in, who they parts of the shows he was in,” she said. ried—what did you do?’ People help me,
believe in. This was their final place. If “ ‘Carousel.’ ‘Oklahoma!’ It was really cool then I turn around and help somebody
you’re persecuted, if you’re looking for to hang out backstage when I was a kid else. It sounds facile, but it’s what gets
opportunity, there’s one place you can and soak up all that warming up and all you through.”
go. Hence my Iranian swim instructor.” the half-naked people running around. A friend of Raitt’s walked up with an
—Sheila Marikar He did twenty-five years of summer stock. older guy, who had on worn dungarees
1 He toured into his early eighties.” and a black American-flag T-shirt and
THE INDUSTRY When she was seven, he moved the was carrying a guitar case.
SING IT STRONG family to Los Angeles. Summers, she at- “Know this cat?” the friend said. It
tended a Quaker camp upstate. “I raced was Danny Kalb, a bluesman from the
to get old enough to come to New York old Village days, who was there to play
in the sixties, but I was too late.” It was a tip-jar set.
in 1969, post-heyday, that she got her “Danny! Nice to see you.”
first real gig, at nineteen, at the Gaslight, “Bonnie Raitt! Are you going to hear
in the Village. In the seventies, she often me tonight?”
“I before,”
’ve never even been to Bed-Stuy
Bonnie Raitt said. She was
played the Schaefer Music Festival, at
Wollman Rink; early sets led to late nights
“I’m gonna hear a little bit. I have to
get up early tomorrow.”
at the deep end of Bar LunÀtico, which at J.P.’s, a notorious den on the Upper Kalb went to set up, and Raitt said,
is owned by her friend Richard Julian, a East Side. “I haven’t seen him since the sixties. I
singer and songwriter. A few years ago, Raitt got sober decades ago. “I only met him once.” She went on, “I feel
Julian, amid the ongoing struggle of try- needed to get healthy. Also, I was get- really lucky at sixty-six to still have a gig,
ing to make a living in the music busi- ting chunky, and I wanted to lose because there’s an awful lot of people
26 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016
who do this who aren’t suited for other Pitt. He then walked through Times dying, you know: ‘You’re going to be dead
kinds of work. What are they supposed Square, reflecting on his anxiety that, soon.’ ” Macdonald laughed. “So, any-
to do, re-create themselves at sixty?” having now read half of the first volume ways, the guy dies, and then Chekhov
Soon, Kalb began to play a low, mut- of “In Search of Lost Time,” he might continues the story. They put him in a
tering blues, accompanied by a younger have chosen the wrong translation. A kind of duffelbag, a sack, and throw him
man on standup bass. “Danny Kalb!” section of Forty-second Street was closed, overboard. He sinks in the ocean, his
Raitt half whispered. “He was already because of a bomb scare, and the atmo- dead body. And one fish grazes against
famous when I was starting out. He’s sphere in Champs Sports, at the edge of him, rips the sack, and his body tumbles
much older than me.” She laughed. (He’s the cordoned area, was not restful. Mac- out, and a bunch of minnows come and
seventy-four.) donald left without buying anything; eat little bits of him. And a big fish comes
“Sing it high, sing it strong,” he grum- he wondered if Champs was the small- and takes away his legs, and that’s the
bled into the mike. “Everything I’ve had est sports store in the world. end.” (Some of these details are not in
is now done and gone.” In the park, Macdonald considered the original.) “You sort of go, ‘What? It’s
Later, between numbers, he said, two plans: one was to rent an apartment still going on? The guy’s dead. He’s still
“Tragedy. It’s kind of built into it, isn’t in New York for a few months next spring; asked to endure these indignities!’ It’s a
it, Bon?” the other was to go to college. “I always really cruel ending, and I like that.”
She nodded. Outside you could hear wanted to be educated, and always en- Macdonald jerked his head to one
the rev of motorcycle engines. vied educated people,” he said. He pre- side. “That bird almost hit me in the
—Nick Paumgarten fers long-dead authors, but said that his face, like Fabio on the roller coaster,”
1 son, who is twenty-three, and who has he said.
INK published poetry and short stories, had Macdonald, who includes imaginary
TEMPS PERDU recently persuaded him to try Raymond fistfights in his memoir, and in his com-
Carver. “And Carver really reminded me edy, said that there was “a kind of joy” in
of Chekhov, whose work I love,” he said. the real thing. “If you punch a guy, and
Macdonald had tickets for a matinée pre- it doesn’t hurt your fist or anything, and
view of “The Cherry Orchard” that af- he just falls—I don’t know, but it’s fun,”
ternoon; this was only the third or fourth he said. “One time I was in a fight—I
time he’d been to the theatre. was nineteen or twenty—and the guy
orm Macdonald, the comedian The operator of the Bryant Park car- was short, but he was strong, and he kept
N and former “Saturday Night Live” rousel began to remove overnight cov- hitting me and hitting me. So I got in
cast member, who lives in Los Angeles, ers that protect the horses. Macdonald, closer and embraced him, and I pushed
recently visited New York. One morn- who is fifty-six, and whose performances down, and his head hit the cement. I
ing, he was drinking coffee at a table in have a sort of sunny nihilism, talked about picked him up, and then the head hit
Bryant Park, wearing a red polo shirt Chekhov’s stories. “I like the endings the cement again. And then the terrible
from the Shadow Creek golf course, in where nothing happens. And I like bleak- terrible part was: I picked him up again,
Las Vegas. He had just made an appear- ness, because I grew up in a bleak area,” and he was limp, and I hit him against
ance on “Fox & Friends,” where he talked he said. (In Quebec, then Ontario.) the cement. Which, at that point, I guess,
about his new and largely fictional mem- “There is one story about a guy who’s was . . . murder, attempted murder, or
oir, “Based on a True Story,” and about on a boat, who’s dying, on this long, long something. So I just went home, and I
the breakup of Angelina Jolie and Brad trip. And everyone’s taunting him, about was so scared. I was thinking, God, I
hope he didn’t die, I hope he’s O.K.”
Macdonald was laughing. “And he was
O.K. We were both having sex with a
girl who was married to another guy. So
we were both bad.”
He walked back to his hotel; in the
lobby, he read a text message on his
phone. “Fucking Louis C.K.,” he said,
half-seriously. “He always wants to meet
and then he’s, ‘Nope, can’t do it.’ ” C.K.,
a friend, was asking if they could change
a plan, and meet that afternoon, at a
time when Macdonald would be see-
ing “The Cherry Orchard.” “How do I
lie my way out of this?” Macdonald
asked, putting the phone back in his
pocket. A moment later: “The truth! I
never considered the truth.”
—Ian Parker
THE FINANCIAL PAGE taken on the status of a moral creed. In 2012, the Repub-
TRUMP’S OTHER TAX PLOY lican platform stated, “Taxes, by their very nature, reduce a
citizen’s freedom.” Trump’s tax plan signals to conservatives
that he is ultimately on their side.
There are political risks to Trump’s embrace of supply-
siderism. After all, more than sixty per cent of Ameri-
cans think that the wealthy should pay more in taxes.
he revelation that Donald Trump’s business losses And his plan will only reinforce the image of the Re-
T in the mid-nineties may have enabled him to avoid publican Party as the home of rich people, something
paying federal income tax for nearly two decades may be that has already started to worry a few Republicans,
the biggest “October surprise” of any recent Presidential known as reformocons. “There are a lot of voters who
campaign. But the substance of it was no surprise at all. look at Republican politicians and say that all they care
When, in the first debate, Hillary Clinton challenged him about is cutting taxes for rich people,” Michael Strain, a
about years in which he may not have paid federal taxes, fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Insti-
he boasted, “That makes me smart.” And his real-estate tute, told me. Strain and other reformocons think that
empire, such as it is, was built on exploiting just about every the Party could draw new supporters if it started think-
government tax abatement, credit, and subsidy available. ing creatively about using tax credits and subsidies to
Still, whatever tax savings Trump has finagled over the incentivize work, education, and long-term investment.
years are dwarfed by the huge tax break But, though Trump’s tax plan may
he plans to give wealthy Americans if not attract many independents, let
he wins. According to the Tax Founda- alone Democrats, it’s unlikely to bother
tion, Trump’s tax plan would boost the the white working-class voters who
after-tax income of the top one per cent are his most ardent fans. Few voters
by ten to sixteen per cent, while aver- pay attention to the small print of tax
age households would gain only between proposals, which makes it easier for
.08 and 1.9 per cent. He would lower tax-cut proponents to put their poli-
the estate tax, which only the rich pay. cies in the best possible light, as Trump
He would slash the corporate tax rate is doing by insisting that cutting taxes
by more than half, to fifteen per cent, for the rich is really all about boost-
and has said that any business would be ing employment. “The wealthy are
able to take advantage of that lower going to create tremendous jobs,” he
rate, even so-called pass-through cor- said in the first debate. More funda-
porations, whose profits are typically mentally, polls show that taxes just ar-
taxed via personal income taxes rather en’t an emotive issue for most voters.
than via corporate taxes. That would As long as Trump’s working-class sup-
mean a huge windfall for, among others, porters believe that he’s with them on
hedge-fund and private-equity managers. the issues they care about most—bring-
None of this is shocking, given Trump’s obvious affec- ing back jobs, keeping immigrants out—no tax policy will
tion for paying as little in taxes as possible. But it’s worth drive them away.
noting how oddly tax cuts for the wealthy fit with the rest Put simply, white working-class voters are willing to tol-
of his campaign. Trump has presented himself as an out- erate a handout to the rich in exchange for the rest of Trump’s
sider sticking up for the ordinary voter against fat cats and ideological agenda, while the Republican establishment is
special interests, and, as he says, “taking on big business and willing to elect an ethno-nationalist populist in exchange
big media and big donors.” He has burnished his populist for tax cuts. The fact that more than eighty per cent of reg-
credentials by challenging G.O.P. orthodoxy on issues like istered Republicans now say they’ll vote for Trump demon-
trade and immigration, while promising to protect Social strates that, as long as a candidate can be counted on to
Security and Medicare. Yet his tax plan follows conven- bring taxes down, traditional Republicans will overlook any
tional Republican supply-side economics: hefty tax cuts for number of heresies and offensive statements. Coming out
the wealthy and for corporations, and blind faith that cut- against free trade and open borders, defending entitlements,
ting marginal tax rates will drive growth. attacking veterans, cozying up to foreign autocrats, indulg-
This ploy—Palin in the streets, Reagan in the balance ing in openly racist and xenophobic rhetoric: none of these
sheets—is a crucial part of Trump’s strategy for winning in things have hurt Trump with the vast majority of Republi-
November. No matter how much his core supporters love can voters and politicians. If he had wavered on tax cuts, it
CHRISTOPH NIEMANN
him, he has no chance unless he can persuade traditional would have been a very different story. Trump may be the
Republicans, many of whom would have preferred a more most politically incorrect man in America, but even he knows
traditional candidate, to turn out. There’s little that this that there are some taboos you can’t violate.
base cares about more than cutting taxes, an issue that has —James Surowiecki
up, and they will get out of your way. old path just a few feet away. Fend off And that man was John Wilkes Booth.
Some of them will even hide. the monkeys of “good manners” and Keep pushing and scraping and
Some will try to discourage you. the sloths of “patience.” clawing and begging. Even in your
They’ll say that what you’re doing is We are born with the instinct not dreams, don’t give up. If you dream
“illegal,” or a “sin,” or a violation of the to give up. As babies, we cry and scream that you are wearing nothing but un-
health code. They may cling to your until we get what we want. But some- derpants, try to make them expensive,
legs, causing you to drag them along, where along the line we lose that abil- executive underpants.
or jump onto your back, pleading, “In ity. People talk us out of our crazy Eventually, all your determination
the name of God, please stop what ideas—people who live in the so-called will pay off. The same people who
you’re doing!” real world, where things “make sense.” mocked your ideas and tackled you will
Keep going. Rest assured, they’re They’ve never attempted the impossi- now claim to love your vision. “We
jealous. ble. But you have, many, many times. love it! We love it!” they’ll say. They’ll
“We’re not jealous, honestly,” they Keep pushing ahead—not in a way tell you that the governor is interested
may say. “Just please stop!” Maybe that seems pushy but in a way that says in your ideas and will bundle you off
you’ve struck a nerve. you won’t stop. Some people say you in a car to the governor’s mansion. But
“No, you haven’t struck a nerve,” shouldn’t bang your head against a wall. when you pass under the stone arch-
they’ll say. “What you’re doing is just Tell that to the woodpecker. way you’ll notice that it doesn’t say
ANDY REMENTER
awful, and we’d like you to stop!” Along the way, there will be com- “Governor’s Mansion” but “Insane Asy-
Let that be your inspiration. Shake promises—bribes and torture and lum.” Jump out of the car and run into
off the naysayers and trudge on, through “hunting accidents.” You may have to the woods. Keep running. Never give
the mud and the filth and the slime, engage in unnatural sex acts. But don’t up running.
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016 37
“A Meditation in the Desert,” she imag-
ONWARD AND UPWARD WITH THE ARTS ines a stone being “full / of slower, lon-
ger thoughts than mind can have.”
She has roots in eastern Oregon that
OUT OF BOUNDS go back to the early days of white set-
tlement. Not long ago, she told me ex-
The unruly imagination of Ursula K. Le Guin. citedly that she’d rediscovered records
in the attic of her grandmother’s child-
BY JULIE PHILLIPS hood: “My great-grandfather, with my
grandmother age eleven, moved from
California to Oregon in 1873. . . . They
drove three hundred and fifty head of
cattle up through Nevada and built a
stone house on the back side of Steens
Mountain. I don’t think he made a
claim; there was nowhere to make it.
He was one of the very first ranchers
in what is still very desolate country.”
The family stayed there for five years
before they moved on, in search of
new grass or less isolation—her grand-
mother didn’t say. The story gives hints
of what Le Guin already knew: that
the empty spaces of America have a
past, and that loneliness and loss are
mixed up with the glory.
The history of America is one of
conflicting fantasies: clashes over what
stories are told and who gets to tell
them. If the Bundy brothers were in
love with one side of the American
dream—stories of wars fought and won,
land taken and tamed—Le Guin has
spent a career exploring another, dis-
tinctly less triumphalist side. She sees
herself as a Western writer, though her
work has had a wide range of settings,
from the Oregon coast to an anarchist
utopia and a California that exists in
Le Guin says she is “not just trying to get into other minds but other beings.” the future but resembles the past. Keep-
ing an ambivalent distance from the
olitics has been obsessing a lot Twitter feed with the hashtag #Bundy- centers of literary power, she makes
P of people lately, and Ursula K. Le EroticFanFic. room in her work for other voices. She
Guin is far from immune to bouts of The high desert of eastern Oregon has always defended the fantastic, by
political anger. In an e-mail to me last is one of Le Guin’s places. She often which she means not formulaic fan-
winter, she wrote that she felt “eaten goes there in the summer with her hus- tasy or “McMagic” but the imagina-
up” with frustration at the ongoing oc- band, Charles, a professor emeritus of tion as a subversive force. “Imagina-
cupation of an eastern Oregon wild- history at Portland State University, tion, working at full strength, can
life refuge by an armed band of anti- to a ranch on the stony ridge of Steens shake us out of our fatal, adoring self-
government agitators led by the broth- Mountain, overlooking the refuge. She absorption,” she has written, “and make
ers Ammon and Ryan Bundy. She was has led writing workshops at the Mal- us look up and see—with terror or with
distressed by the damage they had done heur Field Station, a group of weather- relief—that the world does not in fact
to scientific programs and to histori- beaten buildings used mainly by biol- belong to us at all.”
cal artifacts belonging to the local Pai- ogists and birders, and published a book When I met Le Guin at her house
ute tribe, and critical of the F.B.I. for of poems and sketches of the area, with in Portland this summer, she was in a
being so slow to remove these “hairy photographs by Roger Dorband, called happier mood. Coming out onto the
gunslinging fake cowboys” from pub- “Out Here.” She likes the awareness back porch, where I was sitting with
lic property. She had been mildly the desert gives her of distance, empti- Charles in the late-afternoon sun, to
cheered up, she added, by following a ness, and geological time. In a poem, offer us a bourbon-and-ice, she was
38 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016 ILLUSTRATION BY ESSY MAY
positively cheerful, her deeply lined, tiny magnet behind your earlobe,” she be her way of taking the edge off the
expressive face bright under a cap of explains. “The trouble is that if you polemic, as well as an introvert’s chan-
short white hair, her low, warm wood- bend down near the stove, for instance, nel of communication. Behind even
wind voice rising into an easy laugh. all of a sudden your earrings go wham!— the lightest remarks, one is aware of a
The bourbon is part of the couple’s and hit the stove. It’s kind of exciting.” keen intelligence and a lifetime of
evening ritual: when they don’t have Europe ends and the West begins thought, held back for the purposes of
company, they have a drink before din- outside the windows, on the back porch, casual conversation.
ner and take turns reading to each other. with its view stretching over the Willa- She has never felt at home temper-
On the hillside below us, two scrub mette River, past the city, to three vol- amentally with establishments of any
jays traded remarks through the trees. canoes of the Cascade Range: the white kind. But now she finds the establish-
The cheerfulness was relative, she peak of Mt. Adams, distant Mt. Rainier, ment wanting to hear what she has to
told me: it was partly because a con- and the sullen ash heap of Mt. St. Hel- say. Her criticism of the economics of
ference call set for earlier that day, with ens. The span of it evokes the feeling of publishing—objections to Amazon, a
the fantasy writer Neil Gaiman and distance and isolation that runs through fight with Google over its digitization
some film people who had a project to her work, and the awareness, more often of copyrighted books—is widely re-
propose, had been postponed, leaving found in science than in fiction, that ported in the news. Earlier this year, a
her with enough energy for a conver- what we can comprehend is a small part Kickstarter campaign for a documen-
sation. Her back is bent now with age— of everything there is to know. Imagi- tary about Le Guin, by the filmmaker
she’ll be eighty-seven this month— native literature, she has written, asks us Arwen Curry, raised more than two
and she has to be careful with a resource “to allow that our perception of reality hundred thousand dollars, nearly three
she once had in abundance. “My stam- may be incomplete, our interpretation times the requested amount. In 2000,
ina gives out so damn fast these days,” of it arbitrary or mistaken.” Michael the Library of Congress declared her
she said. Chabon, a friend and admirer, sees her a “living legend,” a designation that has
The house where Le Guin has lived as “untiringly opening her work up to a made its way into many introductions
for more than fifty years has, in certain perspective, to a nature that feels some- to her readings. Last month, her “Or-
respects, come to resemble its owner. how beyond human, and yet fully human sinian Tales” and the novel “Malafrena”
Past the barriers at the entrance— and recognizable. She gives us a view appeared as a volume in the Library of
Charles’s menacingly thorny roses, the from the other side.” America. (She and Philip Roth are the
lion’s-head knocker that guards the To talk to Le Guin is to encounter only living novelists included in the se-
door—the dark-panelled Craftsman alternatives. At her house, the writer ries.) “I am getting really sick of being
living room, with its Victorian feel, is present, but so is Le Guin the mother referred to as ‘the legendary,’ ” she pro-
might stand for her books set in Eu- of three, the faculty wife: the woman tests, laughing. “I’m right here. I have
rope, or for the great nineteenth-century writing fantasy in tandem with her gravity. A body and all that.”
novels she has always loved, with their daily life. I asked her recently about a
warmth, humanity, and moral concern. particularly violent story that she wrote n the late nineteen-thirties, in a
The front hall is surveyed by a row of in her early thirties, in two days, while I tall house in Berkeley, California, a
British Museum reproductions of the organizing a fifth-birthday party for girl climbs out the attic window onto
Lewis chessmen, souvenirs of the Le her elder daughter. “It’s funny how you the roof in search of solitude. If she
Guins’ two sabbatical years in London, can live on several planes, isn’t it?” she scrambles far enough up the redwood
when their three children were small. said. She resists attempts to separate shingles, she can reach her own Mt.
Some of her awards are in the attic, her more mainstream work from her Olympus, the roof ’s peak. From here,
but she keeps several, notably her first science fiction. She is a genre author she can gaze out over the rough blue
Hugo, from 1970, discreetly displayed who is also a literary author, not one of the bay to the city of San Francisco,
in the hall on the way to the kitchen. or the other but indivisibly both. row upon row of white houses climb-
A place of honor at the right of the Le Guin can be polemical, prone to ing the hills above the water. The city
fireplace is given to a portrait of Vir- what one close friend calls “tirades” on is strange to her—she rarely ventures
ginia Woolf, a hand-colored print that questions she feels strongly about. I so far from home—but the view is hers,
is a treasured gift from a writer friend. once watched her participate in a panel and splendid. Beyond it she knows
Later, I went with her into the discussion on gender and literature at there are islands with a magical name:
kitchen, where it’s easy to end up in WisCon, an annual gathering of fem- the Farallons. She imagines them as
the Le Guin household. It’s a homey inist science-fiction writers, readers, “the loneliest place, the farthest west
room with white appliances, cream cab- and academics in Madison, Wiscon- you could go.”
inets, and no sign of steel or marble, sin. Scowling like a snapping turtle, she Meanwhile, inside the house, the
as indifferent to fashion as its owners. sat waiting for illogical remarks, which girl’s father is at work, thinking about
Le Guin dresses well, but casually, fa- she then gently but firmly tore to bits. myths, magic, songs, cultural patterns—
voring T-shirts, and wears little jew- Yet a conversation with Le Guin is the proper territory of a professor of an-
elry, though occasionally she puts on often full of comic asides, laughter, thropology. From him she will take a
earrings fastened with clips or mag- and—a particularly Le Guin trait— model for creative work in the midst of
nets. “You put the stone in front and a good-natured snorts. Humor seems to a rich family life, as well as the belief
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016 39
that the real room of one’s own is in other stories to tell and other judg- sang impur abreuve nos sillons!’ every
the writer’s mind. Years later, she tells ments that might be made. time I entertained a passing opinion.”
a friend that if she ended up writing Ursula’s mother was Theodora Kra- Le Guin’s work combines a Berke-
about wizards “perhaps it’s because I caw Kroeber, born in Denver in 1897 leyite’s love of alternative thought with
grew up with one.” and raised in the mining town of Tel- a strong scientific bent that she sees as
Ursula Kroeber was born in Berke- luride. A friend of Le Guin’s recalls an inheritance from her father. In her
ley, in 1929, into a family busy with the seeing her, at the house in Berkeley, fiction, she has tried to balance the an-
reading, recording, telling, and invent- “coming down the long staircase, a alytical and the intuitive. “Both direc-
ing of stories. She grew up listening to majestic-looking woman with a long tions strike me as becoming more and
her aunt Betsy’s memories of a pioneer gown and a great big Indian silver more sterile the farther you follow
childhood and to California Indian leg- and turquoise necklace. She was very them,” she says. “It’s when they can
ends retold by her father. One legend stately.” Theodora took to writing in combine that you get something fer-
of the Yurok people says that, far out her late fifties, and produced “Ishi in tile and living and leading forward.
in the Pacific Ocean but not farther Two Worlds,” a nonfiction account of Mysticism—which is a word my fa-
than a canoe can paddle, the rim of the the last survivor of the Yahi people. Le ther held in contempt, basically—and
sky makes waves by beating on the sur- Guin loved her mother and admired scientific factualism, need for evidence,
face of the water. On every twelfth up- her psychological gifts. But she says and so on . . . I do try to juggle them,
swing, the sky moves a little more slowly, that their relationship also contained quite consciously.”
so that a skilled navigator has enough “something darker and stranger” that If it was difficult to be the youngest
time to slip beneath its rim, reach the she has never quite understood. “We and most precocious of the Kroeber
outer ocean, and dance all night on the were very lucky, because we never had children, leaving the house to enter the
shore of another world. to act that out. But if I see daughters world made Ursula feel like “an exile
Ursula absorbed these stories, to- and mothers act it out toward each in a Siberia of adolescent social mores.”
gether with the books she read: chil- other it doesn’t shock me or surprise In the fall of 1944, at fourteen, small
dren’s classics, Norse myths, Irish folk- me. It’s there.” for her age, disguised in the sweater,
tales, the Iliad. In her father’s library, The Kroeber household was full of skirt, and loafers of a “bobby-soxer” (a
she discovered Romantic poetry and voices as well as stories. Alfred liked term that still makes her shudder), she
Eastern philosophy, especially the to pose philosophical questions or puz- began her first year at Berkeley High
Tao Te Ching. She and her brother zles over the dinner table and ask his School, a huge, impersonal institution
Karl supplemented these with science- four children about anything that in- where popularity mattered more than
fiction magazines. With Karl, the clos- terested them. The kids were encour- learning, and fitting in was the ideal.
est to her in age of her three broth- aged to take an active part in the con- When Le Guin speaks of her teen-age
ers, she played King Arthur’s knights, versation, but, as the little sister, Ursula years, she speaks of loneliness, confu-
in armor made of cardboard boxes. rarely got a word in: “There were too sion, and the pain of being among peo-
The two also made up tales of polit- many people, and I was outshouted by ple who have no use for one’s gifts.
ical intrigue and exploration set in a everybody else.” Learning how to be “You’re just dropped into this dreadful
stuffed-toy world called the Animal heard taught her persistence and gave place, and there are no explanations
Kingdom. This storytelling later gave why and no directions what to do.”
her a feeling of kinship with the She found a refuge in the public li-
Brontës, whose Gondal and Angria, brary, reading Austen and the Brontës,
she says, were “the ‘genius version’ of Turgenev and Shelley. In fiction, she
what Karl and I did.” could satisfy her deep romantic streak:
Her father was Alfred L. Kroeber, she fell in love with Prince Andrei in
one of the most influential cultural “War and Peace” and once, at thirteen,
anthropologists of the past century. A defaced a library book by cutting out
New Yorker from a prosperous Ger- a still of Laurence Olivier’s Mr. Darcy
man immigrant family, he went west and taking it home to look at in pri-
in 1900, when he was twenty-four, and her a tendency to appear fiercer than vate, guilty rapture. From Thomas
did field work among the Indians of she is. “People think I mean everything Hardy she learned to handle strong
Northern California. Throughout his I say and am full of conviction, often, feelings in fiction by pouring them into
career, he learned about cultures that when I’m actually just floating balloons landscapes, letting the settings carry
were rapidly being transformed or de- and ready for a discussion or argument part of the emotional charge. “There’s
stroyed from men and women who or further pursuit of the subject. It’s a patronizing word for that: the ‘pa-
were among the last survivors of their my fault—I speak so passionately. Prob- thetic fallacy,’ ” she says. “It’s not a fal-
people. At a time when the dominant ably because, as the youngest and shrill- lacy; it’s art.”
story of America was one of European est child of an extraordinarily articu- As a child, she was painfully shy, and
conquest, Ursula was aware, through late and passionate family, I could only she still alludes to anxieties that she
her father and his Indian friends who be heard by charging over the top, keeps hidden from the world. I caught
came to the house, that there were shouting, ‘Marchons, marchons! Qu’un a glimpse of that when she asked me,
40 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016
cautiously, “Wouldn’t you say that any- Younger Poets Prize in her senior year, Tales,” and the short stories of Sylvia
body who thought as much about bal- Le Guin, still unpublished, felt pangs Townsend Warner, with their playful
ance as I do in my work probably felt of envy. and revelatory shifts of perspective. She
some threat to their balance?” After a On top of that, Radcliffe women also became fascinated by the prema-
long pause, she added, “Of course all were given a double message, receiv- ture, failed revolutions of 1830 and the
adolescents are out of balance, and very ing an excellent education while know- passionate political documents of the
aware of it. To become adult can cer- ing, in Rich’s words, that “the real power Romantic period, such as “My Pris-
tainly feel like walking a high wire, can’t (and money) were invested in Har- ons,” by the Italian poet and patriot
it? If my foot slips, I’m gone. I’m dead.” vard’s institutions, from which we were Silvio Pellico. “Books like that were
excluded.” Though Radcliffe has long very exciting to me because I could
quilibrium is a central metaphor since become part of Harvard, Cam- handle them better than I could the
E in Le Guin’s great works about ad- bridge remains a place of mixed emo- contemporary works,” she says. They
olescence, the six-volume Earthsea se- tions for Le Guin. She has told me opened up “the distance that I needed,
ries, which began in 1968 with “A Wiz- both that her college years were won- and probably have always needed, be-
ard of Earthsea.” That book follows derful and that she has come to dis- tween me and the raw, implacable fact
Ged, a lonely teen-ager with a gift for like the institution; the two emotions that’s going on right now. I’ve never
magic, who at wizards’ school learns a shadow each other. Her senior year was really been able to handle that. If it’s
painful lesson in achieving balance marred by a handsome and arrogant right in my face, I can’t see it.”
rather than forcing change. There’s lit- Harvard student, an accidental preg- Some writers of her generation em-
tle resemblance between the school on nancy, a broken heart, and an illegal braced confessional literature and, later,
Roke Island, with its Taoist magic (a abortion. “I’m often startled at the depth memoir. Le Guin has always preferred
mage is taught to “do by not doing”), of my anger at Harvard,” she told me. self-concealment to self-exposure. In
and Harry Potter’s Hogwarts. There is “I know some of the reasons for it, but the introduction to the Library of
some resemblance between Ged, the it wouldn’t be so immediate and un- America volume, she writes, “I have no
provincial boy with a chip on his shoul- controllable if it were accessible to rea- interest in confession. My games are
der, and Ursula Kroeber, the Califor- son. I did get a splendid education transformation and invention.” In col-
nian in jeans arriving at Radcliffe Col- there—there was wonderful Widener, lege, she began setting her fiction in
lege in 1947, all books and opinions, the Fogg, the elmy campus, which I an imaginary Eastern European coun-
never before out of her home state, remember fondly. But the anger’s there try called Orsinia and found that it
eager to prove herself as a poet. Her like a mine, ready to go off at a quiver freed her up as a writer. Away from the
Radcliffe friend Jean Taylor Kroeber, of the ground.” “small and stony” ground of realism,
who became her sister-in-law, recalls Le Guin graduated from Radcliffe her imagination began to flourish. Or-
that, before she and Ursula bonded with a degree in French, in 1951. Over sinia also gave her the distance to com-
over Russian literature, jokes, and music, the decade that followed, she wrote ment, indirectly, on Communist repres-
she found her “a little frightening. It’s poems, short stories, and at least four sion, the persecutions of the McCarthy
not that she meant to be, but that’s the novels. She submitted them to pub- era, the unfreedom of the age, and her
way it came across . . . that there was lishers; they came back with encour- decision to follow her own path.
a good chance that she was ahead of aging rejections. She felt her way ten- During the fifties, she worked on
you, in wherever the conversation was tatively forward, unsure of her direction, “Malafrena,” a novel about a young no-
going. And one rather brief acute re- lacking models. American literature bleman who obeys his moral compass
mark could set you back on your heels.” was still under the spell of Heming- by fighting for freedom of speech and
Ursula had her first clash with the way, Faulkner, Richard Wright; real- thought. Freedom is “a human need,
literary establishment when she and a ism held sway, and there was little in- like bread, like water,” he insists. Pressed
friend signed up to read submissions terest in play or fantasy. “I was going to define it, he replies, “Freedom con-
for a new Radcliffe literary magazine, in another direction than the critically sists in doing what you can do best,
Signature. Rona Jaffe worked on the approved culture was,” Le Guin has your work, what you have to do.” For
magazine, and its undergraduate con- said. “I was never going to be Norman Le Guin freedom is a complex ideal
tributors included Edward Gorey, Har- Mailer or Saul Bellow. I didn’t know and a word “too big and too old” to be
old Brodkey, and Adrienne Rich, whose who my fellow-writers were. There devalued as a platitude or appropriated
poem “Storm Warnings” was published didn’t seem to be anybody doing what by hypocrites. “Of course it gets mis-
there. The magazine accepted nothing I wanted to do.” She was alarmed by used,” she says. “But I don’t think you
of Ursula’s, and she found those fellow- the literary rivalries of the period; she can really damage the word freedom
students “cliquish and unfriendly”: remembers thinking, “I’m not compet- or liberty.”
“Their comments on what we submit- ing with all these guys and their em-
ted ourselves, even the comments on pires and territories. I just want to write nother of Le Guin’s places is
our comments, were often remarkably my stories and dig my own garden.” A Cannon Beach, a summer town
savage and dismissive. We got out again Instead, she found “allies in foreign- on the Oregon coast where she and
and gratefully went back to our in- ers I never met,” reading Woolf ’s “Or- Charles have a small house on a street
visibility.” When Rich won the Yale lando,” Isak Dinesen’s “Seven Gothic leading to the ocean. Although she
42 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016
claims to share her father’s “incapacity
for reminiscence,” she and I went there
to talk about her past. The prospect
made her uncomfortable at first, and
when we entered the shut-up house
she threw nervous energy into clean-
ing, enlisting me to stand on a chair
and brush cobwebs off the ceiling. At
a little kitchen table, over tea served in
the indestructible handmade earthen-
ware mugs of the seventies, she com-
mented, somewhat defiantly, that she
had always taken pleasure in cooking
and keeping house. It sounded like crit-
icism of the heroic writer, alone in his
garret, but there’s more to it than that.
She feels that marriage and family have
given her a stability that supported her
writing—the freedom of solitude within
the solidity of household life. “An art- “With the money we’ll save by shutting down quality control,
ist can go off into the private world we can issue some truly spectacular apologies.”
they create, and maybe not be so good
at finding the way out again,” she told
me. “This could be one reason I’ve al-
• •
ways been grateful for having a family
and doing housework, and the stupid until, in 1959, Charles got the job at with it.” “They” were the editors, fans,
ordinary stuff that has to be done that Portland State. Ursula recalls flying up and fellow-authors who gave her an
you cannot let go.” from Berkeley with a child on her lap audience for her work. If science fic-
When Ursula graduated from Rad- and pregnant with her second. “The tion was down-market, it was at least
cliffe, her plan was to get her doctor- plane came in low up the Willamette a market. More than that, genre sup-
ate and become an academic, like her Valley and circled the city, and I was plied a ready-made set of tools, includ-
three older brothers. She got her mas- in tears, it was so beautiful. I thought, ing spaceships, planets, and aliens, plus
ter’s in Romance languages at Colum- My God, I’m going to live there.” a realm—the future—that set no lim-
bia University, then received a Fulbright Stubbornness and a self-confessed its on the imagination. She found that
fellowship to do research in France for arrogance about her work helped Le science fiction suited what she called,
her dissertation. On the boat going Guin through her unpublished years. in a letter to her mother, her “peculiar”
over, she met Charles LeGuin, a his- Then and now, she feels that she is the talent, and she felt a lightheartedness
torian with an attractive Georgia ac- best judge of her writing; she is un- in her writing that had to do with let-
cent who was writing his thesis on the moved by literary trends, and not eas- ting go of ambitions and constraints.
French Revolution. They shared a sense ily swayed by editorial suggestion. “Writ- In the fall of 1966, when she was thirty-
of humor; they liked the same books; ing was always my inmost way of being seven, Le Guin began “A Wizard of
in Paris, they went together to the opera in the world,” she says, but that made Earthsea.” In the next few years—which
and the Louvre. Within two weeks rejections increasingly painful: “I suffered also saw her march against the Viet-
they were engaged. When they applied a good deal from the contradiction be- nam War and dance in a conga line
for a marriage license, a “triumphant tween knowing writing was the job I with Allen Ginsberg, when he came
bureaucrat” told Charles his Breton was born for and finding nowhere to to Portland to read Vedas for peace—
name was “spelled wrong” without a have that knowledge confirmed.” Then, she produced her great early work, in-
space, so when they married they both in 1961 and 1962, two of Le Guin’s sto- cluding, in quick succession, “The Left
took the name Le Guin. ries were published. One, set in Orsinia, Hand of Darkness,” “The Lathe of
Ursula abandoned her Ph.D. thesis a meditation on the consolations of art, Heaven,” “The Farthest Shore,” and
on medieval French poetry, and while went to a small literary journal. The sec- “The Dispossessed,” her ambitious
Charles finished researching his own ond, about a junior professor liberated novel of anarchist utopia.
thesis she read, wrote, and talked with from academia by an act of magic, was Science fiction opened her up fur-
him about Europe and revolution. bought by the science-fiction magazine ther to writing from alien points of
Charles became the first reader for all Fantastic. view—composing the political mani-
her work, made sure she got time to “I just didn’t know what to do with festo of an ant, wondering what it would
write, and when they had children my stuff until I stumbled into science be like if humans had the seasonal sex-
shared in their care. They spent the fiction and fantasy,” Le Guin says. “And uality of birds, imagining love in a so-
next few years in Georgia and Idaho, then, of course, they knew what to do ciety in which a marriage involves four
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016 43
people. Le Guin says her ambition has His isolation and wariness are mir- Hugo and Nebula awards, the top hon-
always been “not just trying to get into rored in the landscape of Gethen, a ors in science fiction; her migration
other minds but other beings.” She place of perpetual winter. from the margins was well under way.
adds, “Somewhere in the nineteenth No one trusts Ai but Estraven, a Despite her growing success, she
century a line got drawn: you can’t do Gethenian who is in exile; these two suffered periods of depression in the
this for grownups. But fantasy and sci- characters take turns narrating the book, nineteen-sixties—“dark passages that
ence fiction just kind of walked around so that we see how strange they appear I had to work through” is how she de-
the line.” Another use of the fantastic to each other, and how they struggle scribed them to me, as if they were
for Le Guin was to bring her ethical to connect. Among the book’s central vexed sequences in a novel. She wrote
concerns into her fiction without be- themes are balance—light is the left them into her fiction, she added, in the
coming didactic. Take a metaphor far hand of darkness, the Gethenian say- Earthsea novel “The Farthest Shore,”
enough and it becomes a parable, as ing goes—and trust.These are set against exploring a metaphor she borrowed
with her widely anthologized story anxieties about otherness, about con- from Rilke’s “Duino Elegies”: depres-
“The Ones Who Walk Away from trol and the loss of it. Estraven hopes sion as a journey through the silent
Omelas.” Le Guin’s story begins with that Ai can prevent impending war be- land of the dead.
an ethical question posed by William tween two rival states, and asks him: Another difficult time for her came
James: If all could be made blissfully in the long period that began after
“Do you know, by your own experience,
happy by the fact that one person was what patriotism is?”
“The Dispossessed” was published, in
being kept in torment, would we ac- “No,” I said, shaken by the force of that in- 1974, when she was rethinking the sub-
cept that condition? She gives the prob- tense personality suddenly turning itself wholly jects of her work. She had been writ-
lem just enough reality for the reader upon me. “I don’t think I do. If by patriotism ing about imaginary revolutions, but
to picture the single abused child and you don’t mean the love of one’s homeland, by then an actual liberation movement,
for that I do know.”
feel the consequences of the bargain. “No, I don’t mean love, when I say patrio-
feminism, was gaining traction. In the
Her influential thought experiment tism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And light of “the personal is political,” her
“The Left Hand of Darkness” uses its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, “Left Hand of Darkness” seemed to
this strategy to explore gender and al- rivalry, aggression. It grows in us, that fear.” some readers too oblique and meta-
terity. Genly Ai, a man from a future phorical, her sense of play not illumi-
Earth, arrives on the planet Gethen, To fulfill this mission, Ai must see nating but evasive. Up until then, al-
which is inhabited by human beings beyond his own narrow perspective most all of Le Guin’s protagonists had
who are neither male nor female but, and learn to trust, even love, this per- been male, and she wasn’t sure how to
for a few days a month, in a sexual son whose nature calls his own into write from a woman’s perspective, es-
phase, can become either. Ai, as a per- question. pecially since she had long resisted
manent male, is to them a “pervert.” The novel earned Le Guin her first writing directly from personal experi-
ence. As a wife and mother who had
always had her husband’s support, she
was wary of the angry anti-family rhet-
oric of some mid-nineteen-seventies
feminists. She explained, “I had lost
confidence in the kind of writing I had
been doing because I was (mostly un-
consciously) struggling to learn how
to write as a woman, not as an ‘hon-
orary man’ as before, and with a free-
dom that scared me.”
She went on working steadily, writ-
ing short stories, essays, poetry, and
young-adult fiction. She revised and
published some of her older work: “Or-
sinian Tales” (which was a finalist for
a National Book Award) appeared in
1976; “Malafrena” in 1979. She did begin
writing from female points of view. But
her turn to “writing as a woman,” while
it won her new readers, alienated part
of her old audience. Some of her new
work was criticized as unsubtle or mor-
alistic. Her mother died in 1979, a pain-
ful loss. She came to think of this time
“Welcome to tonight’s panel on interfaith humor.” as “the dark hard place.”
Le Guin emerged from this period tional Book Awards ceremony. In a in her dislikes. (The enthusiasms in-
by stepping over the boundaries that new collection of nonfiction, “Words clude works by Saramago, Rushdie, and
separated science fiction and literature. Are My Matter,” she writes that draft- Atwood; the dislikes include present-
Starting in the nineteen-eighties, she ing her six-minute speech took her six tense narration, fiction about “dysfunc-
published some of her most accom- months. “I rethought and replanned it, tional American suburban families,”
plished work—fiction that was realist, anxiously, over and over. Even on a and mainstream writers who attempt
magic realist, postmodernist, and sui poem, I’ve never worked so long and science fiction without understanding
generis. She wrote the Borgesian fem- so obsessively, or with so little assur- its rules.) She is turning more now to
inist parable “She Unnames Them,” ance that what I was saying was right, poetry; her most recent collection, “Late
and in 1985 an experimental tour de was what I ought to say.” But, having in the Day,” was published last year.
force of a novel, “Always Coming clashed with corporate publishing in She told me she was writing some
Home.” She produced “Sur,” the epic the past, she felt an obligation to take poems exploring extreme old age, play-
tale of an all-female Antarctic explor- the industry to task. ing with the metaphor of an explorer’s
ing party that may be her greatest and Standing at the lectern, she gave an sea voyage to the West. “I think some
funniest feminist statement. Her short uncharacteristically apologetic smile. testimony from the late eighties could
stories began appearing in The New Then she scowled at her audience of be useful to people,” she said. Then she
Yorker, where her editor, Charles Mc- editors and publishers and unleashed added, laughing, “Other people in their
Grath, saw in her an ability to “trans- a tirade. “I see sales departments given late eighties might want to read it. I
form genre fiction into something control over editorial. I see my own don’t know about anybody in their
higher.” publishers, in a silly panic of ignorance late fifties: ‘Oh, God, I don’t want to
In fact, it was the mainstream that and greed, charging public libraries for go there.’ ”
ended up transformed. By breaking an e-book six or seven times more than At the house in Cannon Beach, she
down the walls of genre, Le Guin they charge customers. . . . And I see a showed me the family’s photo albums.
handed new tools to twenty-first-cen- lot of us, the producers, who write the Over the years, Le Guin’s author pho-
tury writers working in what Chabon books and make the books, accepting tos show a steady progression from a
calls the “borderlands,” the place where this—letting commodity profiteers sell wary young woman, ill at ease in front
the fantastic enters literature. A group us like deodorant and tell us what to of the camera, to someone more at
of writers as unlike as Chabon, Molly publish, and what to write.” Instead, home in a public role. But I had asked
Gloss, Kelly Link, Karen Joy Fowler, she admonished them, “We’ll need about the private photos, and here was
Junot Díaz, Jonathan Lethem, Victor writers who can remember freedom— Ursula, age six or seven, with short
LaValle, Zadie Smith, and David poets, visionaries—realists of a larger black hair, bare-legged on dusty Cal-
Mitchell began to explore what’s pos- reality.” At her conclusion, members of ifornia ground, playing with a toy car
sible when they combine elements of the audience hesitated, looked around, and staring into the distance at some-
realism and fantasy. The fantasy and and then slowly rose to their feet for thing unseen.
science-fiction scholar Brian Attebery an ovation. “I like that one,” she told me. “I look
has noted that “every writer I know feral. I guess I was rather feral.”
S Le Guin
who talks about Ursula talks about a tarting in the nineteen-nineties, Then there was Ursula at the Arc
sense of having been invited or em- returned in earnest to his- de Triomphe, a gamine holding an arm-
powered to do something.” Given that fiction, in “Lavinia,” and to sci-
torical ful of roses, and Charles, looking dash-
many of Le Guin’s protagonists have ence fiction and fantasy. Some of her ing in a new Parisian coat, climbing
dark skin, the science-fiction writer best late work in this mode appears Mont Sainte-Victoire. Infants enter
N. K. Jemisin speaks of the importance in “The Found and the Lost,” a new the pictures, then small children. In a
to her and others of encountering in eight-hundred-plus-page compen- photo of Ursula in her twenties, she
fantasy someone who looked like them. dium of her novellas. But a few years glances up from a typewriter with a
Karen Joy Fowler, a friend of Le Guin’s ago Le Guin stopped writing fiction, look I’d come to recognize: startled,
whose novel “We Are All Completely saying it took an energy she didn’t her eyes unfocussed, her thoughts in a
Beside Ourselves” questions the nature have—although she doesn’t rule out place the camera can’t follow.
of the human-animal bond, says that anything in the future. “Never” and The next morning, Le Guin stood
Le Guin offered her alternatives to re- “last,” she wrote in a recent blog post, in the front yard of her house at the
alism by bringing the fantastic out of “are closing words. Having spent a edge of the world, feeding a family
its “underdog position.” For writers, good deal of my life trying to open of crows. The sun was out, and a
she says, Le Guin “makes you think closed doors and windows, I have no block away the surf beat gently on the
many things are possible that you maybe intention of going around slamming broad beach, where the town meets the
didn’t think were possible.” them shut now.” waters of the North Pacific. Here the
Le Guin still has strong feelings She still gives readings, which at- land seemed undone by the unknown
about artistic liberty. In November, tract a notably youthful audience. And distances of the ocean, and Le Guin
2014, she travelled to New York with she writes nonfiction, including book seemed to be standing where the forces
her son, Theo, to accept the Distin- reviews for the Guardian, in which she met, gazing beyond her garden to some
guished Contribution medal at the Na- is glowing in her enthusiasms and fierce farther shore.
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016 45
PROFILES
hen Leonard Cohen was den. Mules humped water up the long and milk,” she recalled decades later,
t nine o’clock on the night A Colonel Uzan Şahin replied, “Tell lions and overseen a worldwide network
Not just surgeries. It’s mainly fter the bribery case collapsed,
ordinary seepage, the drip down tubes into arms, A Erdoğan pursued the Gülenists re-
drains in secret to abdomen lentlessly. Thousands of public employ-
and lung. Always sheets bearing up their cool finish ees who were suspected of having ties
as if nothing will happen, then caught in to Gülen were pushed out, and govern-
ment agents raided Gülenist businesses.
that lie. The life behind fabric—cotton, flax Senior leaders in the movement began
in the weave—is a seed broken, to flee the country.
getting ahead of itself by tiny increments On Christmas Day, 2015, Turkish
unwatchable because we intelligence breached an encrypted mes-
have no patience with the slower inscrutables. saging app called ByLock—an appar-
ently homemade network with two
A woman drives this morning, takes the linens out hundred thousand users. According to
one door, to the street, and into another. Turkish officials, it was set up not long
Huge plastic bags encloud her. Bedazzlement keeps after Erdoğan began purging suspected
staining, the dry brush-by of Gülenists from the government. When
so many wings. She has a hard time with balance. the network was discovered, the server,
in Lithuania, quickly closed down, and
Nothing to make of it, nothing but its users switched to Eagle, another en-
look again. The bloody linens, evidence. crypted messaging app. “They went un-
And the little truck they drive derground,” a Turkish government aide
not much more than told me.
a go-kart really, a runabout. The intelligence officials say that they
—Marianne Boruch were able to decrypt the exchanges, and
one told me, “Every conversation was
about the Gülen community.” By check-
also came under suspicion, after a attempt to topple Erdoğan’s govern- ing the ByLock users’ names against
wiretap captured what was alleged to ment—but that the evidence seemed government records, they found that at
be a conversation between him and credible. As the investigation gathered least forty thousand were civil employ-
his father. Erdoğan has insisted that force, four of Erdoğan’s ministers re- ees, mostly from the judiciary and the
the tape was doctored, but it circu- signed. One of them, Erdoğan Bayrak- police department. In May, two months
lated widely on social media, and Turks tar, called on Erdoğan to quit, saying, before the coup, the government began
claimed to recognize his voice. “The Prime Minister, too, has to resign.” suspending them.
Tayyip Erdoğan: Eighteen people’s homes Instead, Erdoğan struck back. He In July, the intelligence department
are being searched right now with this big cor- denounced the investigation as a “judi- notified the military that it had also
ruption operation. . . . So I’m saying, what- cial coup” and enacted a wholesale re- identified six hundred officers of the
ever you have at home, take it out. O.K.? organization of the country’s criminal- Turkish Army, many of them highly
Bilal: Dad, what could I even have at home? justice system, forcing out thousands of ranked, among the ByLock users. Mil-
There’s your money in the safe.
Tayyip: Yes, that’s what I’m saying. police, prosecutors, and judges linked itary officials began planning to expel
to the Zarrab case. Ardıç, the police them at a meeting of senior generals
A little while later, the two appar- chief who headed the investigation, was that was scheduled for early the next
ently spoke again. removed from the case and later im- month. “We think the coup happened
prisoned. Ultimately, the bribery charges in July because they needed to move be-
Tayyip: Did you get rid of all of it, or . . . ? were dropped. fore they were expelled,” Ibrahim Kalın,
Bilal: No, not all of it, Dad. So, there’s
something like thirty million euros left that
In speeches, Erdoğan began lash- the Erdoğan aide, told me.
we haven’t been able to liquidate. ing out at his former ally, speaking of The details of the failed coup are
a “parallel structure” that sought to rule murky and often contradictory, but it
Western officials told me that they Turkey. “O Great Teacher, if you haven’t seems clear that the attempt was orga-
regarded the investigation as a Gülenist done anything wrong, don’t stay in nized in haste. Several detained soldiers
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016 69
said that it was supposed to begin six one of the plotters called on a secure fession, he identified seventeen colleagues
hours later, at 3 A.M., then was rushed line to recruit him, he thought that as Gülenists, including Erdoğan’s per-
for reasons that are unclear. As the things in the country were bad enough sonal military aide, Colonel Ali Yazıcı.
officers scrambled to take control, no that he agreed to go along. (Aslandoğan disputes Türkkan’s testi-
leader came forward. In some cases, Some former American officials said mony, but says that he can’t speak to
troops who’d received orders from rebel it was likely that Gülenists played the specific claims.)
commanders apparently didn’t realize leading role. After the purges of the pre- In 2011, Türkkan was promoted and
that they were taking part in an opera- ceding decade, they argued, no other became an aide to General Necdet Özel,
tion to overthrow the government, and group in the Army was large enough or the chief of the Turkish Army. “I started
refused to go along when they did. cohesive enough. “The Gülenists are carrying out assignments given by the
Indeed, it seems that the plotters the only people who could have done sect,” he said. For four years, he planted
staked their operation on capturing or this,” Jeffrey said. One officer, identified a small “listening device” in Özel’s office
killing Erdoğan and persuading Gen- only as Lieutenant Colonel A.K., every day and removed it every night.
eral Akar to join them. “If those things testified that he was informed of a coup “The battery lasted one day,” he said. “I
had happened, the coup would have suc- plot a week before, by a man who he would take the full device to my ‘sect
ceeded,” Kalın said. But none of the most assumed was a Gülen leader. The man brother’ once a week and get an empty
senior generals of the Turkish armed spoke of the troubles that the move- one from him.”
forces could be persuaded to join, which ment had been facing, and said that The night before the coup, Türkkan
may have left the plotters without a mil- some three thousand officers were going said, a fellow-Gülenist, a colonel, asked
itary leader. By 4 A.M., the coup plotters to be purged during the meeting of se- him to step outside for a cigarette. Once
were running for their lives. nior generals in August. “Gülen didn’t they were alone, he described a plan:
“Has the operation been cancelled, want this meeting to happen,” the man “The President, the Prime Minister, the
Murat?” one officer asked, in a text said. “We can’t lose our last fort.” ministers, the chief of general staff, other
message. Erdoğan’s government has given the chiefs of staff and generals would be
“Yes, Commander,” Major Çelebioğlu U.S. tens of thousands of pages of doc- picked up one by one. Everything would
replied. When another officer asked uments, tracking the Gülenists’ history be done quietly.” Türkkan’s assignment
whether to mount an escape, the Major in Turkey. According to American offi- was to help find Akar and “pacify” him.
replied, “Stay alive, Commander. The cials, little or none of it is relevant to Disturbed, Türkkan went to see his
choice is yours.” the question of Gülen’s direct involve- “brother” in the Gülen movement, who
After the coup, several statements, ment in the coup. General Akar, the lived in a house behind a nearby gas sta-
purportedly from the plotters, were re- chief of the general staff, said in a state- tion. He wasn’t there, but several others
leased to the press. The statements were ment that while he was being held cap- were, and they confirmed the operation.
impossible to verify. None of the men tive, one of the senior plotters said, “If Türkkan has suffered since the coup.
who confessed have spoken publicly, and you wish, we can put you in touch with In a photograph released with his testi-
most of their statements appear to have our opinion leader, Fethullah Gülen.” mony, he is wrapped in a hospital gown,
been heavily expurgated. Photographs One of the Western diplomats, who has with his face visibly battered and his rib
have circulated of officers who confessed; followed Akar throughout his career, cage and hands swaddled in bandages.
in several cases, they have wounds on told me, “Akar has been, since he took In his confession, he expressed bitter re-
their faces, suggesting that the position, a guy defined morse. “When I learned from the TV
they were beaten. by integrity.” that the parliament was being bombed
Two Western diplomats The most compelling ac- and civilians were being killed, I started
who spoke on the condi- count came from Lieutenant regretting it,” he said. “What was being
tion of anonymity told Colonel Levent Türkkan, done was like a massacre. This was done
me that they found the one of the officers who took in the name of a movement that I thought
government’s accusations Akar captive. The son of worked for the will of God.”
against Gülen’s movement a poor farmer, Türkkan
compelling, if not entire- dreamed as a boy of join- hree weeks after the coup, Er-
ly convincing. One said, ing the Army. His family T doğan, addressing a group of local
“Un doubtedly, Gülenists couldn’t afford to send him officials in Ankara, apologized for hav-
played a credible role in it. But there to a test-preparation school, so he started ing once been Gülen’s ally. “We helped
were also anti-Erdoğan military oppor- studying in the homes of Gülenist this organization with good will,” Er-
tunists mixed in.” Many people in the “brothers.” On the eve of the exam to doğan said. He said that he had trusted
armed forces, and in Turkish civil so- get into an élite military school, the Gülen, because of his apparent rever-
ciety, were enraged by Erdoğan’s grow- brothers gave him the answers—taking ence for education and his organiza-
ing authoritarianism. Brigadier Gen- care to include a few wrong ones, to tion’s aid work. “I feel sad that I failed
eral Gökhan Sönmezateş, one of the avoid arousing suspicion. He has re- to reveal the true face of this traitorous
plotters who went to Marmaris to cap- mained a follower ever since. “I believed organization long before.”
ture Erdoğan, said in a confession, “I that Fethullah Gülen was a divine en- For Erdoğan, though, retribution has
am absolutely not a Gülenist.” But when tity,” he told his interrogators. In his con- always come more easily than apologies.
70 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016
The state of emergency that he declared
after the coup gave him dictatorial
powers, which he used to carry out a
far-reaching crackdown that began with
Gülenists but has grown to encompass
almost anyone who might pose a threat
to his expanded authority. The figures
are stupefying: forty thousand people
detained and huge numbers of others
forced from their jobs, including twenty-
one thousand police officers, three thou-
sand judges and prosecutors, twenty-
one thousand public-school workers,
fifteen hundred university deans, and
fifteen hundred employees of the Min-
istry of Finance. Six thousand soldiers
were detained. The government also
closed a thousand Gülen- affiliated
schools and suspended twenty-one thou-
sand teachers.
It’s difficult to know whether those
targeted were hard-core followers of
Gülen, or sympathizers, or not related
to the movement at all. Public criticism
of Erdoğan has been almost entirely
squelched, either by the outpouring of
national support that followed the coup “I need something sturdy enough to withstand
or by the fear of being imprisoned. Er- the scrutiny of other parents.”
doğan has closed more than a hundred
and thirty media outlets and detained
at least forty-three journalists, and the
• •
purge is still under way. “The Gülenist
cult is a criminal organization, and a big he has also put himself in the awkward mon recorded a few days later, he said,
one,” Kalın, the President’s aide, told position of denouncing a man who en- “Let a bunch of idiots think they have
me. “You know, over eleven thousand abled his rise. Talking about Gülen and succeeded, let them celebrate, let them
people participated in the coup, accord- his movement, he can seem almost to declare their ridiculous situation a cel-
ing to our current estimates. We’re going be in pain. “They came asking for sev- ebration, but the world is making fun
after anyone with any connection with enteen universities, and I approved all of this situation, and that is how it is
this Gülenist cult, here and there, in the of them,” he told a crowd in 2014. “He going to go down in the history books.
judiciary, the private sector, the news- asked for land for schools, we gave it to “Be patient,” he told his followers.
papers, and other places.” him,” he added. “We gave them all kinds “Victory will come.”
The irony of the attempted coup is of support.” Erdoğan rarely spoke Gülen’s Gülen is old and ailing; it seems un-
that Erdoğan has emerged stronger than name in these speeches, but this time likely that he will be able to keep up
ever. The popular uprising that stopped he addressed him and his followers di- the fight for much longer. Listening to
the plot was led in many cases by peo- rectly. “So this is treason?” he asked, his sermon, I thought back to my meet-
ple who disliked Erdoğan only margin- sounding dismayed. “What did you ask ing with him last year. Even then, his
ally less than they disliked the prospect for that you couldn’t get?” movement was being dismantled, his
of a military regime. But the result has followers on the run. I asked how he
been to set up Erdoğan and his party he day after the coup, Gülen thought he would be remembered, and
to rule, with nearly absolute authority, T emerged from seclusion, summon- he gave me an answer the like of which
for as long as he wants. “Even before ing reporters to his compound for a I’ve never heard from another leader
the coup attempt, we had concerns that press conference, at which he denied in politics or religion. “It may sound
the government and the President were any involvement. As he watched his fol- strange to you, but I wish to be forgot-
approaching politics and governance in lowers being arrested en masse—and as ten when I die,” he said. “I wish my
ways that were designed to lock in a he became a national pariah—an edge grave not to be known. I wish to die
competitive advantage—to insure you crept into his voice. He told his follow- in solitude, with nobody actually be-
would have perpetual one-party rule,” ers that Erdoğan had staged the coup, coming aware of my death and hence
the second Western diplomat said. and that no one outside Turkey believed nobody conducting my funeral prayer.
Erdoğan has solidified his power, but that Gülen was responsible. In a ser- I wish that nobody remember me.”
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016 71
FICTION
BOOKS
BY ALEXANDRA SCHWARTZ
ew places are less conducive to Columbia. She was raised by liberal almost exclusively from the Internet,
F erotic optimism than the packed boomer parents who came of age in which, Witt points out, constitutes “the
waiting room of a public health clinic the sixties. Influenced by that decade’s most comprehensive visual repository
in Brooklyn. Sitting on a hard plastic liberties, and chastened by its excesses, of sexual fantasy in human history.”
chair under a fluorescent buzz as an they encouraged her to think of youth- Never before has such a wide variety
employee lectures on proper condom ful sexual experimentation as a healthy of sexual preferences and behaviors en-
use—a catechism you know by heart prelude to a coupled life. In this, Witt joyed such social sanction, or been so
yet sometimes fail to heed—you may was hardly alone. For young, straight, easy to explore by typing a few words
conclude, as Emily Witt did, that the well-educated American women, sleep- into a search engine in the privacy and
time has come to change your life. It ing around for pleasure and experience the safety of one’s own home. Google
was March of 2012. Just before Valen- has become a social convention, the may be the great sexual equalizer. “The
tine’s Day, Witt had slept with a friend. way dancing the cotillion at a débu- answers its algorithms harvested as-
She was single; he was not. A few weeks tante ball once was. sured each person of the presence of
later, he called to report that he might Witt was ready to move on. Follow- the like-minded: no one need be alone
have chlamydia. He was overcome ing her visit to the clinic, she fanta- with her aberrant desires, and no de-
with guilt. His girlfriend was enraged. sized about giving herself over to “the sires were aberrant,” Witt writes. She
Witt didn’t feel too great, either. She project of wifeliness,” as she saw many began to see that she was living in a
was thirty, and depressed after a recent of her peers doing, indulging in the time of unprecedented erotic possibil-
breakup. Though she had spent the en- sort of triumphal social-media posts— ity, a sort of sexual future. Might she
suing months hooking up with vari- engagement photos, wedding photos, have a particular set of unrealized de-
ous acquaintances, her hopes were set baby photos—that advertise the twenty- sires, a sexual identity she hadn’t yet
on long-term monogamy. “I still envi- first-century life cycle of young cou- discovered?
sioned my sexual experience eventu- ples. Monogamy, she felt, would be all Witt decided to take action. She
ally reaching a terminus, like a mono- the more satisfying for being obviously bought a ticket to San Francisco in
rail gliding to a stop at Epcot Center,” traditional, a path she could see as a order to report on the sexual subcul-
Witt writes in “Future Sex” (Farrar, “destiny rather than a choice.” She was tures she had reason to believe she
Straus & Giroux), her gutsy first book. tired of choosing. Better, she thought, would find there. (Parts of “Future Sex”
Instead, she found herself enmeshed to fall in love with one person and have first appeared in n+1, to which Witt
in “sexual relationships that I could not sex with him for the foreseeable future. is a frequent contributor, as well as in
describe in language and that failed But love failed to arrive. Her mono- the London Review of Books and Mat-
my moral ideals.” She didn’t have chla- rail glided on, Epcot nowhere in sight. ter.) “They believed in intentional com-
mydia, it turned out. What she caught Without the pressure of emotional munities that could successfully dis-
was worse: a dismal self-accounting of commitment, Witt was free to do what rupt the monogamous heterosexual
her existential shortcomings. she liked sexually, but she had little use tradition,” she writes, with a touch of
Marriage, for many, signals the start for a freedom she had already decided the East Coaster’s skepticism toward
of a new life stage. As Witt’s image of to give up. the Bay Area’s positive-thinking citi-
the Epcot monorail suggests, she pre- Maybe the problem had to do with zens. “They gave their choices names
ABOVE: LUCI GUTIÉRREZ
ferred to see it as an endpoint, the mo- a failure of imagination. Sexual free- and they conceived of their actions as
ment that would bring the aimless li- dom can be put to more interesting social movements.” But she is honest
aisons of her single years to a full stop. uses than sleeping with your friends. about her true motivations: “I used
Witt grew up in Minneapolis, went to Those of us born in the nineteen- the West Coast and journalism as al-
college at Brown, and got a master’s eighties belong to the first generation ibis.” She was going to see how strang-
degree in investigative journalism at whose experience of pornography comes ers in California used the Internet to
80 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016
Witt’s sexual quest leads her to Burning Man’s “orgy dome,” a B.D.S.M. video shoot, an orgasmic-meditation workshop.
ILLUSTRATION BY OLIMPIA ZAGNOLI THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016 81
lives, akin to Marie Kondo’s teachings
on “decluttering.”
The cleanest, best-lighted place Witt
finds is OneTaste, a San Francisco com-
pany specializing in “orgasmic medi-
tation.” At an open house at the orga-
nization’s headquarters, a man and a
woman projecting “the human neutral-
ity of an Apple store or IKEA” lead a
group of visitors in the sort of ice-
breaker games that recall college ori-
entation, mildly spiked with eros. Going
around a circle, participants describe
their “red hot desire”; one after another,
they agree to sit in the “hot seat” and
answer questions posed to them by
their fellows, who are instructed to
limit all responses to “thank you.” Eye
contact is encouraged.
The orgasmic-meditation “prac-
tice”—a word, Witt notes, meant to
signal “an ongoing, daily ritual in which
one gained incremental expertise and
wisdom over time”—is so simple that
“Hey, we’d ight to the last Spartan if this rain would let up.” you might wonder why anyone would
pay the hundred and forty-nine dol-
lars it now costs to be certified to en-
• • gage in it, never mind the twelve thou-
sand that it costs to become a OneTaste
organize and make sense of their de- met a Brazilian who showed her his coach. With a partner, a woman sets
sires, but the life she intended to hack marijuana plants. Even when her dates up a “nest” of pillows and blankets on
was her own. exceeded what Witt calls, in self-dep- the floor, then lies on it, naked from
recating scare quotes, her “standards,” the waist down. Her clothed counter-
itt’s first stop was online attraction failed to materialize. “Until part sits on a cushion to her right, puts
W dating. She used OkCupid—Tin- the bodies were introduced, seduction on a pair of latex gloves, applies lube
der was months away from launching — was only provisional,” she writes. to a finger, and, after asking for per-
and discovered that, though its match- Witt found that she often couldn’t mission to touch her and “poetically”
making algorithm could be eerily accurate discuss sex with her OkCupid pros- describing her vulva, proceeds to stroke
about the sorts of people she would like, pects. It struck her as too direct. In her clitoris. An iPhone timer is set for
it couldn’t predict whether the sight of this, she was not alone. One way that fifteen minutes; when it goes off, the
those people in the flesh would flood her companies mitigate their female cus- stroking stops, the partner covers the
with desire or leave her cold. This is un- tomers’ sense of vulnerability, Witt woman with a towel, and the pair ver-
derstandable. Even if you’ve been happily learns, is through the notion of “the balize their reactions.
partnered for years, let me recommend clean, well-lighted place.” Women are At the certification Witt attends,
that you fill out an OkCupid profile to more likely to go for sex, entrepreneurs the stroking is performed by OneTaste’s
see what it’s like to squeeze your person- have found, if it’s not presented with founder, a woman who had been on
ality and desires through the sieve of ques- a louche, porny aesthetic. When Witt the verge of committing herself to cel-
tions posed by its jovial anthropomor- was using OkCupid, she felt that “the ibacy at the San Francisco Zen Cen-
phic algorithm. How much influence do right to avoid the subject of sex was ter before a Buddhist she met at a party
your parents have over your life? Do you structurally embedded” in the site. Fem- gave her the idea for orgasmic medi-
think you’re smarter than most people? inist sex-toy shops long ago discovered tation. After the demonstration, the
Which are worse, starving children or that women prefer to buy dildos and audience is separated by gender into
abused animals, and which answer would vibrators if they are displayed like Bran- two lines and shuffled along at inter-
you accept in a prospective match? Will cusi sculptures, the kind of objet d’art vals, speed-dating style, under instruc-
your sanity be intact at the end of this that you might find on a coffee table tions to describe the face of each new
interrogation? at West Elm rather than at an XXX person to appear opposite. “As a man
While still in New York, Witt went peepshow den in pre-Giuliani Times described to me the traces of my
out with a composer, a woodworker, Square. It’s a marketing tactic meant makeup, a blemish on my chin, and
and a hair stylist. In San Francisco, she to give women a sense of order in their other flaws in my appearance that I
82 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016
had convinced myself were too small directed by Princess Donna, who both to. Among other things, “Future Sex”
to be noticeable,” Witt writes, “I felt a riles them up, encouraging them to offers a superb account of the absur-
unique experience of horror.” slap or spit or jeer, and keeps them in dities of San Francisco in the first
Witt sees the appeal of orgasmic check, lest the abuse go too far. Their half of this decade, a bouncy castle of
meditation. The timed stroking was a presence gives the scene its veneer of a city where the private pleasures of
“sexual technique that allowed for an reality. “Our job was to play the role the conquering tech class are con-
intimate connection but preserved an of an unruly and voyeuristic crowd for strued (and marketed) as social benefits
emotional distance,” a way of estab- the real audience, the people who paid for all.
lishing a clear set of boundaries to allow to watch a series called Public Dis- But where is she in these exploits?
women to give themselves over to plea- grace on the Internet,” Witt writes, What progress has she been making
sure without the pressure to recipro- though she has the additional job of in her quest to discover and express
cate. Its terms, unlike those of casual jotting the whole thing down, coming new desires? “I, personally, was not hav-
sex, didn’t have to be negotiated every as close as anyone has to embodying ing sex while all this was going on,”
time. The woman didn’t have to won- Nora Ephron’s epithet for a journalist: she confesses, after the Public Disgrace
der about her partner’s character or in- the “wallflower at the orgy.” shoot:
tentions; she didn’t even have to be at- Witt’s account of the scene is ter- The Kink actors were more like athletes or
tracted to him. The artificiality of the rifically done, an oddly sweet exercise stuntmen and -women performing punishing
structure was its point. in descriptive economy and dry comic feats, and part of what I admired was the ease
The same is true, in a very different timing. Paying attention to the start- with which they went in and out of it, the com-
way, of the experience Witt recounts stop momentum intrinsic to any film fort with which they inhabited their bodies,
their total self-assurance and sense of unity
in her best chapter, “Internet Porn.” shoot, she captures the moments of against those who condemned their practice.
Kink.com is a B.D.S.M. (bondage, tenderness and restraint that have no I possessed none of those qualities. I was, at
domination, submission, and masoch- place in the final cut: Princess Donna that time, so miserable about being alone, and
ism) Web site based in a landmarked gently wiping Penny’s sweat during a half-convinced by the logic that I could some-
armory in San Francisco’s Mission Dis- break, giving her water and a kiss on how solve the problem of loneliness by avoid-
ing sex until I fell in love, that I was in the
trict. It was founded by a man, but the the cheek; Ramon, wearing only com- middle of a long and ultimately pointless stretch
person of particular interest to Witt is bat boots, pacing and shaking out his of celibacy.
a woman: Princess Donna Dolore, an arms “like a long-distance runner who
accomplished dominatrix who has pre- has just crossed the finish line,” ignored This is a surprising admission.
sided over the site’s Public Disgrace by the crowd as Princess Donna fulfills Witt’s adventure started because she
channel since she came up with the Penny’s special request to be anally decided that she had better get ahead
idea for it, in 2008. In Public Disgrace fisted. with the physical side of things in
videos, a woman (or a few) is stripped, Then, there’s the crowd—mostly case the love part didn’t happen for
bound, and subjected to a series of tor- men, though there are women, too, in her. It seems that she’s been holding
ments, such as getting zapped with pairs or with their boyfriends. One in out for love anyway. “I performed,
electrical current or flogged, while an- particular catches Witt’s eye, or, rather, and experienced, detachment,” she
other performer (or a few) prods and her ear. She calls him “the shouty man.” says, of her first attempt at orgasmic
penetrates her body to the cheers and He seesaws between raw id, when the meditation. Detachment, though a
enthusiastic insults of onlookers. Im- camera is rolling (he is “particularly useful quality for a reporter, is an
mediately afterward, the submissive enthusiastic about yelling ‘worthless affliction for a person in search of a
performer records a testimonial to as- cunt,’ ” Witt notes), and bashful super- sex life.
sure viewers that she thoroughly en- ego, when it’s not. “You are beautiful Witt does sometimes push herself
joyed herself. and I’d take you to meet my mother!” to participate. In a chapter on live
The shoot that Witt describes took he calls out during a break, as if to re- Webcams, she tries out Chaturbate, a
place at a bar in a seedy neighborhood assure himself that he’s still a nice guy. site that allows users to stream videos
south of the Tenderloin. The female Like the Public Disgrace scene itself, of themselves that others can watch
performer, a five-foot, twenty-three- the shouty man’s performance is a com- for free. Writing wistfully of the gay
year-old blonde who goes by the stage pound of fiction and reality, though he cruising scene of pre-AIDS New York,
name Penny Pax, has discussed ahead seems uncertain which part is which. she makes the case that a voyeuristic
of time with Princess Donna what she It all works in the regulated fantasy of platform like Chaturbate can let
will and will not do, and what kinds the dungeon, but you might want to women experience similar anonymous
of things she especially wants done to keep your distance from him at an ac- encounters without worrying about
her. Her partner for the evening is a tual bar. physical danger, though when she
Spaniard with the palindromic nom finally initiates a private video chat
de porn Ramon Nomar and a penis, itt is a sharp observer of the with a naked man she’s too embar-
in Witt’s memorable description, “like W behavior and the motivations rassed to take her clothes off. At Burn-
the trunk of a palm tree.” Members of of others, a wry, affectionate portrait- ing Man, the annual festival in the
the public are recruited to be specta- ist of idealistic people and the in- Nevada desert that’s awash in hallu-
tors in Public Disgrace videos and are creasingly surreal place they belong cinogens and tech money, she meets
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016 83
a guy she likes; they enter the “orgy married, in the late nineteen-fifties, erosion of the primacy of marriage.
dome,” where they have sex together essentially two sexualities were avail- Witt, in short, has made the search
as other couples and groups do their able to him: “normal” and “deviant.” A for identity her identity. In this light,
thing. In a novelistic chapter on a young couple of decades later, that picture her forays into the world of future sex
polyamorous couple she spent time had irrevocably changed. He had de- gain a certain retroactive moral glam-
with in the course of a few years, she cided on his sexual future during a our. “I had wanted to seek out a higher
writes, “I envied their community of time of relative scarcity. Now that there principle of life than the search for
friends, the openness with which they was a surplus to sample—massage par- mere contentment, to pursue emo-
shared their attractions.” But she’s not lors and swingers’ parties—he wanted tional experiences that could not be
so sure that she envies the nature of to feast. immediately transposed to a party of
the attractions themselves. Like Alice To Witt, who grew up in the era of young people in a cell phone ad, even
making her way through Wonderland, the sexual supermarket, the abundance if it meant delving into ugliness, con-
she is a visitor deciphering the codes of options was less an allure than a tracting an STD, or lifting my shirt
and customs of a world she’s bound challenge. Through Chaturbate, she to entice someone jerking off over the
to leave behind. meets Edith, a young woman who likes Internet. There was no industry of
In that chapter’s final scene, Witt to bare her body to strangers on her dresses and gift registries for the sex-
is at a sex party arranged by Elizabeth, Webcam but is not sexually active off- uality that interested me in these years,”
one of the polyamorous pair, inhaling line. Edith is “Internet-sexual,” she she writes. This pronouncement has
whip-its, nitrous oxide dispensed tells Witt. She has found her niche, a nicely engagé ring to it—it’s cer-
through the nozzle of a whipped- while Witt is still searching for hers. tainly not detached—but it doesn’t
cream can. The gas leaves her giddy As Witt realizes, the problem may lie entirely convince. For one thing, the
and relaxed. A man touches her. It with the very notion of choice—the sexualities that interested her have all
feels nice. They kiss, and smack each idea that there’s always something bet- been commercially co-opted in their
other playfully with a riding crop. ter to select, that one’s experience can own way. (B.D.S.M. has its own ap-
Around them, people cuddle and be optimized if only the right search parel industry, and its tropes grace
spank. A paragraph later, still warm terms are found. In the “red hot de- many an advertisement.) For another,
with the evening’s glow, Witt reveals sire” orgasmic-meditation exercise, the people whose commitment to un-
that she has a boyfriend back in New Witt tells her partner that her wish is conventional sexual principles Witt
York who didn’t want her to go to the “to surrender to another person with- admires most are motivated by their
party. A boyfriend! The time line is out having to explain what I wanted.” own search for contentment. They’re
hazy, but we seem to be a few years The expectation that a person learn to following their bliss, not choosing it
past Witt’s lonely celibate phase. She articulate his or her pleasure is crucial from a drop-down menu. After the
found what she had been looking for. to contemporary sexual mores, the Kink shoot, Witt skeptically asked
Now she may not want it after all. key to consent. It also means that you Penny Pax if she had experienced “mo-
She regrets her shyness at the party; have to know the right words for what ments of genuine pleasure.” Pax, she
she’s sorry that she kissed only one you want. If you don’t, the Google- reports, “looked at me like I was crazy.
person rather than join the group cud- era Internet, built to catalogue and ‘Yeah. Like the whole thing!’ ” What
dling on a satin-sheeted bed. “I was categorize and suggest based on pre- Witt considers extreme is heaven to
still thinking of myself as just a visi- viously expressed preferences, can’t be Pax. Everyone has her own garden to
tor, or rather neither here nor there,” of much help. cultivate.
she writes, “someone undertaking an Witt leaves her Wonderland with- Contentment doesn’t have to mean
abstract inquiry but not yet with true out being able to say exactly how it complacency. The best sex Witt de-
intention.” has affected her. “Five years passed, scribes in her book is with a man she
and my life saw few structural changes,” had encountered at a wedding and
itt has said that one model she reports. She now sees sexuality as agreed to meet up with at Burning
W for “Future Sex” was “ Thy being determined not by a set of ac- Man. He works in tech; the two of
Neighbor’s Wife” (1981), Gay Talese’s tions but by the way those actions are them have nothing in common aside
account of sex in the nineteen-seventies. framed. A husband who cheats on his from a thrilling mutual attraction. “I
The books are markedly different in wife and a polyamorist who sleeps want to have sex with this person for-
approach and style. While Witt is rel- with a person outside his primary cou- ever,” she thinks, after they hook up
atively narrow and idiosyncratic in her ple do much the same thing, but their in the R.V. they are sharing with half
selection of topics—Kink.com rep- behaviors have different meanings. a dozen other people. It’s a relief to
resents a sizable sexual subculture; Witt remains, as ever, unsure of where read this, and not because the idea of
OneTaste does not—Talese set out to she fits in. She likes the idea of pledg- having sex with someone forever sug-
write an encyclopedic account of the ing herself to “the principle of free gests that Witt has surrendered to
effects of the sexual revolution on love,” though she seems to mean this conventional monogamy. If you need
American life. A reluctance to join in as a statement of political solidarity, to label it, call it happiness. For the
was, notoriously, not his problem. a way of allying herself with a set of first time, she sounds like she’s enjoy-
Talese was born in 1932. When he values—feminism, gender equality, the ing herself exactly where she is.
84 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016
month then?” These were not the slow-
BOOKS cooked stories and intricately intertex-
tual fables of the modern art novel.
One thing Shakespeare certainly
BRUSH UP YOUR never did is what all the novelists
adapting him for Hogarth must have
SHAKESPEARE done, and that is worry at length about
whether or not it would be an inter-
When novelists rewrite the Bard. esting artistic challenge to adapt a
classic. Homer, Plutarch, Holinshed,
BY ADAM GOPNIK Menander—Shakespeare just did them
and dropped them. (Though, like the
novelists, he was surely glad to get paid
once he had got it done.) And then
the story content of a Shakespeare play
is the least content it has. Saluting
Shakespeare with new versions of his
stories is a bit like saluting Mozart by
commissioning Philip Glass to write
a new opera to the plot of “Così Fan
Tutte,” with its disguised Albanians
and absurd coincidences. Shakespeare’s
music counts for far more than his ma-
terial. Adaptations of Shakespeare,
from “West Side Story” to “The Boys
from Syracuse,” have flourished from
time to time, but it is notable that the
early, more strongly plotted plays are
remade most persuasively: the musi-
cal adaptation of “Othello” (which
starred, of all people, Jerry Lee Lewis)
remains a memorable oddity. “The
Tempest” has been retold many times,
from science fiction (“Forbidden
Planet”) to dense philosophical poetry
(Auden’s “The Sea and the Mirror”),
but the retellings all tend to force one
back to the original.
Most of the authors in the Ho-
garth series, to their credit, aren’t so
much “reimagining” the stories as re-
acting to the plays. They’ve taken on
not the tale itself but the twists in the
he revived Hogarth Press, in terprise at first, given that Shakespeare tale that produced the Shakespearean
T London, with ambition and au- grabbed his stories more or less at ran- themes we still debate: anti-Semitism
dacity and what must also be a very dom from Holinshed’s history of Brit- in “Merchant of Venice,” the subjuga-
large fund for advances, has commis- ain and Plutarch and old collections of tion of women in “The Taming of the
sioned a series of novels by famous Italian ribald tales. As the “ordinary Shrew,” art and isolation in “The Tem-
novelists that retell tales from Shake- poet” of a working company of play- pest.” Each of the novels gives us a re-
speare. The novelists include Howard ers, he sought plots under deadline visionist account of the central Shake-
Jacobson, who has done “The Mer- pressure rather than after some long, spearean subject, and asks us to think
chant of Venice” (as “Shylock Is My deliberate meditation on how to turn anew about that subject more than
Name”); Anne Tyler, who’s done “The fiction into drama. “What have you got about the story that superintends it.
Taming of the Shrew” (as “Vinegar for us this month, Will?” the players Howard Jacobson, who is famous as
Girl”); and now Margaret Atwood, asked him, and, thinking quickly, he’d a sort of English Philip Roth (though
doing “The Tempest” (as “Hag-Seed”). say, “I thought I’d do something with often making one more grateful than
Retelling Shakespeare’s stories, albeit the weird Italian story I mentioned, ever for the American one), was a nat-
in honor of the four-hundredth anni- the one with the Jew and the contest.” ural for Shylock. His version of “Mer-
versary of his death, seems an odd en- “Italy again? All right. End of the chant” has a plotline so complicated,
ILLUSTRATION BY BENDIK KALTENBORN THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016 85
so overpopulated with players and ideas at least that written by men. We even chalantly, Shakespeare aspirationally.
and unrelated riffs, that I will confess have, in Glen Duncan’s “Bloodlines” Though the apparatus of Jacobson’s
I had to go back and reread it before I trilogy, an irritable werewolf. novel can be exhausting, several lovely
could make sense of it. We meet both The best things in the book are often turns and switcheroos lead us to a gen-
a contemporary British Shylock, an art the most discursive, the philosophi- uinely touching scene in which the
collector named Simon Strulovitch, cal-historical exchanges between Stru- original Shylock returns to Venice and
and the original Shylock, teleported lovitch and Shylock. Shylock has a paraphrases Portia’s great speech on
forward to our time, into whose mono- wonderful riff, concerning Strulovitch’s mercy (rachmones, in Yiddish), reclaim-
logues we peer, and with whom Stru- art dealing, about why words are, for ing it as a Jewish invention:
lovitch has intense exchanges about Jews, always more fundamental than
No man can love as God loves, and it is
money-lending, circumcision, and Jew- images: “God had spoken the world profane of any man to try. But you can act in
ishness generally. The dramatis personae, into existence—Let it be—he had not the spirit of God’s love, show charity, give
augmented by these twin Shylocks, in- painted it. Had God been a painter though it is gall and wormwood to you to give,
clude an English professional footbal- the world would have been other than spare the undeserving, love those that do not
ler who has disgraced himself, as some it is. Better or worse? Well, less dispu- love you—for where is the virtue merely in re-
turning love?—give to those who would take
French footballers have done in life, by tatious and declamatory, which might from you and where they have taken do not
offering the “quenelle,” the ambigu- not have suited Shylock.” (A reader recompense them in kind, for the greater the
ously inverted Nazi salute. The central may have the satisfying suspicion that offence the greater the merit in refusing to be
action turns on the footballer’s proposal Jacobson, like a few other contempo- offended. Who shows rachmones does not di-
to Strulovitch’s daughter, and on Stru- rary novelists, would actually rather minish justice. Who shows rachmones acknowl-
edges the just but exacting law under which
lovitch’s insistence, as a conscious par- be a magazine writer, since the riffs we were created.
ody of the demand of Shakespeare’s are usually more compelling than the
Shylock for a pound of flesh from relationships.) Shakespeare’s anti-Semitism, Jacob-
Antonio, that the Gentile athlete be Much of “Shylock Is My Name” is, son insists, is simply a category error;
circumcised. There is a large cast of indeed, taken up with set-piece dis- the morality in his play derives from
secondary, mostly Jewish-British char- courses on the perils and pleasures of his villain’s religion. With mercy and
acters, including an irresistible Nigella being an English Jew; though the book charity claimed as Jewish specificities,
Lawson-like figure named, in a Joyc- takes us in the end to Venice, most of the sarcasms of the book at last rise
ean sideswipe, Anna Livia Plurabelle. it is set in Manchester. These things and resolve into something like poetry.
Jacobson has an unmatched repu- are ordered differently in England, one
tation in his homeland as a humorist, sees. American Jewish writers once nne Tyler’s take on “The Tam-
but not all of it translates for an Amer- faced the double comedy of being out- A ing of the Shrew” is, predictably,
ican reader, since the jokes seem to de- siders to Gentile culture writ large and winsome, straightforward, and smart.
pend more on extreme aggravation of outsiders to English literature specifi- Instead of making her Kate into, say,
tone than on close observation of life. cally, thus producing the kind of pa- a caricature feminist professor, as might
Everything in Jacobson sounds as if it thos that the critic Lionel Trilling felt have seemed tempting, Tyler seizes on
should be read out loud by Alan Rick- so keenly in his life, trying to be a gen- a less obvious but essential part of Kate’s
man, as when Strulovitch speaks to tleman devoted to Matthew Arnold as psychology—her social awkwardness
Shylock about his daughter’s suitor: and her complicated relationship with
Here I’ve been steeling myself against the
Bianca, here represented as a sexy
next over-principled, money-hating, ISIS-back- younger sister called Bunny. It is the
ing Judaeophobe with an MA in fine art she’s fate of Tyler’s Kate not to be tamed,
going to bring back from college and she hits certainly, but to be socialized—in this
on someone who’s probably never opened a case, by a still more socially awkward
book and certainly never heard of Noam
Chomsky—a hyper possessive uneducated
Russian-émigré biologist named Pyotr.
uber-goy from around the corner. I’ve no idea From Shakespeare’s fable, Tyler has
how or where she met him. At a wrestling gracefully distilled a congruent but very
match, is my guess, or at the dodgems. . . . If a moral tutor while living a mixed-up different one—not one in which Kate
I hadn’t frightened her off Jewish boys by tell- Jewish life on the Upper West Side. needs to be “tamed” by a masterful man
ing her she had to find one she might have met
a nice quiet embroiderer of skullcaps.
British Jews, one feels, reading Jacob- but one where she becomes more her-
son, have long been more at home with self by being made to engage with
At one point, Jacobson uses the word the language of Shakespeare and more someone as odd as she is.
“sarcastic” to describe a speaker’s tone, uneasy as patriots and citizens. A Brit- The tone is Austen-Trollope, light
and he is often sarcastic, instead of, in ish Jew couldn’t begin a book, Augie and stinging and socially secure. The
Roth’s American way, mordantly ironic; March style, with “I am an English- characters are assumed to be doing
his tone can become tetchy and irrita- man, Manchester born.” They seem to something important, even if they do
ble as a result. Irritability is an odd trait enter Shakespeare with ease but En- it comically: Kate’s father, Dr. Battista,
for literature, but it seems a dominant glish football with difficulty, where who urges Pyotr on her in order to
one in contemporary English fiction, American Jews enter the ballpark non- keep him in his lab, is a bit of a clown,
86 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016
but also an important immune biologist. the shaming of the true—our struggle
Searching for the equivalent of an ar- with the truth that only authentically
ranged marriage in our romantic day, facing another can enable any of us to
Tyler ingeniously has found the one be ourselves—continues.
situation in which arranged marriages In contrast to the elaborate po-mo
are acceptable in American life—in agonies of Jacobson and the neat un-
order to get a green card for a deserv- dermining charm of Tyler, Margaret
ing alien. Atwood’s “Hag-Seed” lays out a satiric
Tyler’s quiet and quirky comic gift account of contemporary plays and
is on display throughout the book. players. Setting her tempest within a
The scenes in the kindergarten where production of “The Tempest,” she
Kate works have a delightful, slightly brings us to what any Canadian reader
Salingeresque tang, and the wedding— will recognize as the Stratford Shake-
taking place shortly after experi- speare Festival, where an artistic direc-
mental mice in the laboratory Pyotr tor is elbowed aside by his aide—Strat-
shares with Dr. Battista have been kid- ford can be a bloody place—just as he
napped—is a lovely scene in a Laura is about to mount a full-court-press
Linney comedy: “modernized” production. (“His Ariel,
Pyotr was walking him towards the front he’d decided, would be played by a
of the chapel now, his hand still resting on Dr. transvestite on stilts who’d transform
Battista’s shoulder. “I wake up early,” he said. into a giant firefly at significant mo-
“I think I will go to lab early so I am in time ments.”) Sent into the cultural wilder-
for wedding. I get to door; is locked the same ness—a comfortable Canadian cul-
as always. I punch combination. I go inside. I
go to mouse room.” tural wilderness, to be sure—he returns,
They slowed to a stop a few feet from the twelve years later, with a revival of his
altar. Uncle Theron and Kate and Bunny stayed production staged within the walls of
where they were, watching. Then Pyotr turned a prison.
to look back at Kate. “Where are you?” he And let us add to the Hogarth se-
asked her.
“Me?” ries another hot British retelling, “Mac-
“Come on! We get married.” beth, Macbeth” (Bloomsbury), by the
“Oh, well,” Dr. Battista said, “I don’t know Shakespeareans Ewan Fernie and
if that’s really. . . . I think I’d just like to get Simon Palfrey. The point of the exer-
on down to the lab now, Pyoder, even if—” cise—immensely pleasing to the
But Kate said, “Wait til we say our vows,
Father. You can check the lab afterward.” neo-Marxist Slavoj Zizek, who calls it
“a miracle”—is that it opens up the
Just as Jacobson takes Portia’s fa- play’s “absences,” telling the human
mous mercy speech and paraphrases it tales of all the little people whose fate
for modernity, Tyler, as the arranged Shakespeare leaves out of his tragedy.
marriage becomes a love match, takes It is a solemn version of the joke that
Kate’s notoriously servile final speech James Thurber played so well, decades
on men (is there something in the Ho- ago, in “The Macbeth Murder Mys-
garth contract that says you have to re- tery,” in which a hidden pattern involv-
write the big speech?) and re-orchestrates ing obscure rustics is found within the
it to become at once a feminist state- play. Here the hidden pattern is that
ment, a love letter, and a musing on the of the cruelty, starvation, and pervasive
perils of modern masculinity: oppression of ordinary people, pushed
to the fringes by Shakespeare’s con-
It’s hard being a man. Have you ever thought
about that? Anything that’s bothering them, men centration on the élite.
think they have to hide it. . . . They’re a whole
lot less free than women are, when you think etter than any of these, though
about it. Women have been studying people’s
feelings since they were toddlers; they’ve been
B also outside the Hogarth estate, is
perfecting their radar—their intuition or their Ian McEwan’s “Nutshell” (Doubleday),
empathy or their interpersonal whatchamacallit. a short, modern-dress take on “Ham-
It’s like men and women are in two different let,” in which the tale is narrated by
countries! I’m not “backing down,” as you call it; the fetus of the Prince, observing life
I’m letting him into my country. I’m giving him
space in a place where we can both be ourselves. from the womb as his mother, Trudy,
and uncle, Claude, plot to poison his
For Tyler, the very idea of the taming father. (Their prize in this case is not the
of the shrew is obviously defunct. But Kingdom of Denmark but something
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016 87
far more valuable: a prime bit of Lon- eventually bursts at the seams a bit that are not so much illuminated as
don real estate.) Though the names with occasional essays and driveby belied by the inward-turning ironies of
and many of the details are taken from editorials, though for the most part the modern psychological novel.
the play, “Nutshell” would succeed as McEwan curbs the inevitable aging Shakespeare’s poetic imagination
a story even if the connection to Shake- novelist’s need to register opinions on runs on such bold lines that we as-
speare were made far more subter- contemporary absurdities, or what seem sume his moral imagination must, too.
raneanly. It’s essentially an extreme so. An exasperated digression into the But that is a modern assumption: if
closeup study of how mad, adulterous stupidity of safe spaces and trigger we had asked Shakespeare or any of
passion leads to murder, with the evil warnings resolves into a beautiful med his company what to think about Shy-
couple being caught at the end more itation on time and temperament, with lock, we would have been told that it’s
efficiently than they are in the play— Gertrude embodying the instantly a great part—giving full scope to
a tale on the whole closer in tone to achieved innocence of the postmod human behavior, a mirror held up to
James M. Cain than to Shakespeare. ern mind, against her consort’s darker nature—but not that he’s a sympa-
For a reader utterly innocent of its guilt: “Her grief, her tears, are proof thetic man. The empathy that Fernie
source, the book would still work, of probity. She’s beginning to convince and Palfrey ask us to feel for Macbeth’s
though many of the details are cun- herself with her story of depression victims is not part of Shakespeare’s
ningly punned: the unborn Hamlet and suicide,” imputed to the man vision. We feel sorry for poor old Po-
conspires to revenge his father’s mur- they’ve poisoned. “Claude, unlike lonius being killed by accident, but
der with a fiendish touch of his finger Trudy, owns his crime. This is a Re when Hamlet says he’ll lug the guts
nail, sending Gertrude into labor just naissance man, a Machiavel, an old out of the room after he’s killed him
as the couple are about to abscond, a school villain who believes he can get we are not meant to feel the chill sense
detail surely meant to invoke the foil away with murder. The world doesn’t that Hamlet is a psychopath (though
by which, in the play, the Prince also come to him through a haze of the by our standards he behaves like one,
brings justice to that pair. subjective; it comes refracted by stu offing Polonius, Rosencrantz, and Guil-
The device of the omniscient fetus pidity and greed, bent as through glass denstern without much more than a
is one that McEwan takes up with a or water, but etched on a screen be morbid pun or two). He’s still a hero.
comic flair more darkly mischievous fore the inner eye, a lie as sharp and Shakespeare’s heroes kill innocent
than McEwan fans, accustomed to bright as truth.” people.
his usually melancholicmeditative Shakespeare believed in fate, order,
tone, might expect. The conscious hat would Shakespeare make and forgiveness; we believe in history,
ness that McEwan provides for the W of all this revision? We are sup- justice, and compassion—three pair-
unborn babe is, once one accepts the posed to say that he would be pleased, ings so similar as to sometimes seem
premise, persuasive in that he knows but in truth he would be puzzled. A the same, though they are not. The
a lot but not too much—he is inno long stretch of literary invention lies novelistic, psychological work of ex-
cent of the difference between green between him and us, and it involves plaining why evil people are evil gets
and blue, but does know everything both the internalization of action into very little energy from him. His vil-
political passing in the world, evi- psychology—a thing he is taken to lains are the products not of trauma
dently from hearing the BBC all day have begun but not completed—and and history but of nature and destiny.
and night. Many beautiful notes reg- the overcomplication of narrative. The He amputated Iago’s motive for ma-
ister, as with the embryonic Hamlet’s low-key, chastened, anti-dramatic lignancy from the Italian story where
fine palate for the wines he consumes movement of Anne Tyler’s imagina- he found Othello’s tragedy, in order
through the plumbing of his guilt tion—no marvels or events, really, just to make the evil more absolute. Even
racked mother. (This, of course, is the inner action rebounding off half- to ask if Shylock’s graspingness is a
one sensual detail that a hyperliter spoken idea—would have baffled him. product of his people’s history of ex-
ate fetus would be expert in.) One This sells? He was used to getting clusion would not have seemed im-
also suspects that, in addition to the half of London on their asses for a portant to him. He wasn’t looking
ghosts of Shakespeare, the book is play, and he knew you needed bloody for causes. Though not satisfying to
haunted by John Updike’s earlier, sym scenes and children baked in pies to our modern sense of “psychology,”
pathetic take on the story of Gertrude do it. And then to the inner conscious- this is actually psychologically quite
and Claudius, in his 2000 novel of ness of the modern novel we add the satisfying. The malevolent people
that name. Certainly the marked tone extreme self-consciousness of the post- we encounter in life are mostly just
of serene sexual relish seems deliber- modern one, as in Jacobson, with the like that. They don’t have a particu-
ately Updikean, particularly in our insistent mashup of forms and genres lar trauma that, if addressed and cured,
womb’s-eye view of the lovers’ rut- and characters. Shylock in Manches- would stop them from being evil. They
tings. (There is also the telling little ter now? Oh, right, nice move. Shake- were creepy, malignant kids, too.
detail that the good father, a poet, is speare is a dramatic poet rather than And Shakespeare believed in order
identified by his psoriasis, the skin a psychological novelist or a self- as an absolute good. His most elo-
signature of the bard of Shillington.) conscious critic of texts, and his imag- quent speeches are given to singers
The book, despite its small size, ination runs in broader, potent strokes of well-ordered communities, as with
88 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016
Canterbury’s speech on the beehive in
“Henry V,” or, most memorably, Ul-
ysses in “Troilus and Cressida”: “Take
but degree away, untune that string /
And, hark, what discord follows! / Then
every thing includes itself in power, /
power into will, will into appetite /And
appetite, an universal wolf ” devours
all. Maybe he felt this way because the
circumstances of the religious wars
filled his youth, but even to put it like
this is to show our prejudice for anach
ronistic historical or biographical ex
planations. He liked order. Most peo
ple do. He was perfectly aware that the
social order he saw before him was ar
bitrary and unjust, but he was con
vinced that its absence would lead to
chaos and cruelty, not to liberation and
kindness. Although modern scholars
like to pretend that this is one point
of view among many on offer in the
plays, any sensitive reader recognizes
in the eloquence of the argument the “There are plenty of children out there who would love being a pirate.”
pressure of personal faith.
But Shakespeare also believed in
forgiveness in a way that we don’t.
• •
Really rotten people get forgiven, in
the comedies and romances, at least, shrewish when she is only shy; shown uals or kill himself first, and they vibrate.
in ways that still make us uneasy. In Gertrude and Claudius grappling with Speaking for humanity, Shakespeare
“The Tempest,” “As You Like It,” their erotic compulsion toward each spoke for the dehumanized. But it
“Twelfth Night,” bad actors get easy other in a manner essentially sympa- would take a tortured reading of the
outs. Even Shylock isn’t killed. Dr. thetic to their entrapment. We apply text to find within it a message of equal-
Johnson thought the moment when our dutifully expansive moral imagi- ity or of what we understand to be
Hamlet delays killing Claudius in order nation to the plays, and, while this human freedom. A permanent Shake-
to deprive him of any chance of for- makes them seem fuller to us, it brings spearean paradox remains: his people
giveness was “too horrible to be read us no closer to Shakespeare. Our effort, continue to haunt us after the social
or to be uttered.” We are much more in the end, is hardly different from the and ethical structures that held them
ostentatiously compassionate and much eighteenth century’s insistence on tack- up have disappeared. It turns out to be
more effectively vindictive. Small in- ing a happy ending on to “King Lear,” just as possible to find persuasive
cidents of plagiarism end careers—not wishful thinking in the guise of an human beings in a world governed by
a rule that Shakespeare himself would improvement. fate and order and forgiveness as in
have escaped—and sexual sins can place If Shakespeare is our contempo- one governed by trauma and justice
their perpetrators forever beyond the rary, it is not because he shares our and compassion. Shakespeare offers
bounds of redemption. In Shakespeare, attitudes but because he shares our not so much an argument for univer-
rotten people do rotten things, but agonies. A production of “The Mer- sality as evidence for it. The settings
if they stick around and say they’re chant of Venice” that treats Shylock change. The roles don’t, because the
sorry they are forgiven. By contrast, as anything other than the most in- players can’t.
we feel everyone’s pain, forgive no one’s teresting person in the play will al- 1
trespasses. ways fail. But one that makes him into Correction of the Week
Our novelists aim at modernizing its hero has to fight so hard against From the Times.
Shakespeare by adding history or a the text that it will fail, too. Kate is An article in some editions last Sunday
greater sense of justice or more com- persecuted and oppressed in horrible about bars where dogs are still welcome inside
passion to plays that seem to lack them. ways, but she lives as she is. Tell stu- in violation of New York City’s health code
We are asked to feel for Macbeth’s vic- dents that “Hamlet” is a study in the misidentiied the breed of a dog visiting a bar
tims’ plight; given a discursive expla- horizons of personal liberation, and in Park Slope, Brooklyn. He is a yellow Lab-
rador, not a golden retriever. The article also
nation of how Shylock came to behave they will fall away, puzzled. Tell them omitted part of the dog’s name. He is Captain
as he does; presented with an under- that it’s about a man who can’t decide William Trigger of Ludlow, not Captain Trig-
standing of why a woman might seem whether to obey his father’s revenge rit- ger of Ludlow.
mons and ghosts and other gothic par- a staple of eighth-grade reading lists, country-club people, who regarded their
aphernalia in your fiction. Describe and her novel “The Haunting of Hill high-strung child with some perplexity.
yourself publicly as “a practicing ama- House” (1959) is often mentioned as one Jackson identified herself early on as an
teur witch” and boast about the hexes of the best ghost stories of all time. But outsider and as a writer. “When i first
you have placed on prominent publish- most of her substantial body of work— used to write stories and hide them away
ers. Contribute comic essays to women’s including her masterpiece, the beauti- in my desk,” she later wrote in an unpub-
magazines about your hectic life as a fully weird novel “We Have Always lished essay, “i used to think that no one
housewife and mother. Lived in the Castle” (1962)—is not widely had ever been so lonely as i was and i used
Shirley Jackson did all of these things, read. In recent years, there have been to write about people all alone. . . . i
and, during her lifetime, was largely dis- signs of renewed interest in Jackson’s thought i was insane and i would write
missed as a talented purveyor of high- work. Various writers, including Neil about how the only sane people are the
toned horror stories—“Virginia Were- Gaiman, Jonathan Lethem, and A. M. ones who are condemned as mad and
woolf,” as one critic put it. For most of Homes, have praised her idiosyncratic how the whole world is cruel and foolish
the fifty-one years since her death, that talent, and new editions of her work and afraid of people who are different.”
reputation has stuck. Today, “The Lot- have appeared. But these attempts to re- The chief representative of the cruel
tery,” her story of ritual human sacrifice claim Jackson have had a mixed response. and foolish world during Jackson’s
90 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016 ILLUSTRATION BY CRISTIANA COUCEIRO
childhood was her mother, Geraldine, disrespectfully and shamed her for le- of literary criticism, and “The Tangled
an elegant, rather vapid woman, who gitimate and rational desires,” reluc- Bank” (1962), on the literary strategies
was disappointed by her daughter and tantly went along with his terms. of Marx, Freud, Darwin, and Sir James
who made it clear that she would have They married—in the face of deter- Frazer—were grand projects of intel-
preferred a prettier, more pliable one. mined opposition from both sets of par- lectual synthesis, and both had taken on
She told Jackson that she was the prod- ents—shortly after graduating, and moved a dusty, doomed, Casaubonish quality
uct of a failed abortion and harangued to New York. During the next couple of by the time he completed them. He
her constantly about her bad hair, her years, both of them began contributing took solace in characterizing Jackson to
weight, and her “willful” refusal to cul- to The New Yorker, she as a fiction writer their friends as a sort of gifted idiot,
tivate feminine charm. Long after Jack- and he as a contributor to The Talk of who composed her fiction in a trance
son had grown up and moved away, the Town and, later, as a staff writer. In state of automatic writing and had to
Geraldine continued to send letters crit- 1945, after their first child was born, they take it to him to have it explained. He
icizing her “helter skelter way of liv- settled in Vermont, where Hyman had also continued to be chronically, blithely
ing,” her “repetitious” fiction, and her been offered a post on the literature fac- unfaithful, mostly with former students.
appearance: “I have been so sad all ulty at Bennington College. Here, in a The motif of a lonely woman setting
morning about what you have allowed rambling, crooked house in North Ben- out to escape a miserable family or a
yourself to look like.” Quotations from nington, they raised four children and grimly claustrophobic community and
the correspondence of the awful Ger- became the center of a social set that in- ending up “lost” recurs throughout Jack-
aldine are a source of guilty entertain- cluded Howard Nemerov, Ralph Ellison, son’s stories. Sometimes a woman comes
ment throughout Franklin’s biography. Bernard Malamud, and Walter Bernstein. to a place of apparent refuge—a house
Jackson’s adult life was ostensibly a Their domestic life, as described in the that seems to offer security and love—
rebellion against her mother and her comic dispatches that Jackson wrote for only to discover, once she is there, creep-
mother’s values. She became a writer; she Good Housekeeping and Woman’s Home ing menace or hidden evil. Sometimes,
grew fat; she married a Jewish intellec- Companion, was raucous and warm. But as in several of the stories included in
tual, Stanley Edgar Hyman, and ran a bo- Jackson was miserable a good deal of Jackson’s first published collection, “The
hemian household in which she dyed the the time, as indicated by her increasing Lottery; or, The Adventures of James
mashed potatoes green when she felt like reliance on alcohol, tranquillizers, and Harris” (1949), a woman encounters a
it. But she never quite shook Geraldine’s amphetamines. She felt patronized in romantic, chimerical figure, a “daemon
tentacular grip, or ceased to be tormented her role as a faculty wife and frozen out lover,” who promises to rescue her and
by her disapproval. And in her marriage by the townspeople of North Benning- then vanishes, leaving her alone and on
to Hyman she found a person with whom ton. (She took her revenge by using the brink of madness, in a frightening,
to replicate the abusive relationship. them as the model for the barbaric vil- alien landscape. Always, the hope of an
Jackson and Hyman met at Syracuse lagers in “The Lottery.”) Most of all, alternative, happier life proves illusory.
University; he sought her out after read- she felt oppressed by her husband. If these stories allude to the disap-
ing her first published story, “Janice,” in Hyman’s lordly expectations of what pointment of Jackson’s marriage—the
a college magazine and deciding that he was due as the family patriarch were escape from her mother’s house which
she was the girl he was going to marry. retrograde, even by the standards of the proved to be no escape at all—they also
To Jackson, who had already begun time. Jackson did the cooking, the clean- suggest the nature of the anxieties that
to experience the anxiety, depression, ing, the grocery shopping, and the prevented her from ever leaving Hyman.
and “fears of people” that plagued her child-rearing; he sat at his desk, pon- She was full of rage toward him, and she
throughout her life, Hyman seemed a dering the state of American letters and expressed this not only in the portraits
savior: a brilliant man who didn’t think occasionally yelling at his wife to come of insufferably pompous men that she
she was ugly, who understood her and and refill the ink in his pen. (His brother smuggled into her fiction but also in
loved her, who believed in her promise Arthur once commented that Hyman’s strange revenge-fantasy cartoons that
as a writer. His main drawback was his views on the domestic division of labor showed her serving Hyman entrails for
principled insistence on sleeping with were the only aspects of his traditional dinner, or creeping up behind him with
other women. He also expected Jackson Jewish upbringing that he had retained.) a hatchet. She once wrote Hyman a six-
to listen good-naturedly to accounts of Long after Jackson became the chief page letter explaining why she would
his sexual adventures. On a few occa- breadwinner in the marriage, Hyman eventually divorce him: “I used to think . . .
sions during the early stages of their re- continued to control the family’s fi- with considerable bitter amusement
lationship, Hyman’s behavior drove Jack- nances, meting out portions of Jack- about the elaborate painstaking buildup
son into such paroxysms of anguish that son’s earnings to her as he saw fit. Al- you would have to endure before get-
he worried she might be mentally ill. though he always encouraged Jackson’s ting [one] of your new york dates into
But he refused to compromise his in- writing, in part because it was her writ- bed . . . they had been sought out, even
tegrity on the issue. “If it turns you queasy, ing that kept the family afloat, he came telephoned, spoken to and listened to,
you are a fool,” he told her. Jackson, whom to resent how completely her career treated as real people, and they had
Franklin describes as having been primed had eclipsed his. His major published the unutterable blessing of being able to
by her mother’s criticisms “to accept a works—“The Armed Vision” (1948), a go home afterward. . . . i would have
relationship with a man who treated her comparative study of modern methods changed place with any of them.” Yet
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016 91
fear always inhibited her ability to act ness. At Hill House, where the adult El- that they can never achieve. In “The
on her anger. However intense the mis- eanor has been invited to assist in an in- Haunting of Hill House,” one of Elea-
eries of life inside her house, they were, vestigation of psychic phenomena, she nor’s fellow-assistants is the self-assured,
in the end, less vivid to her than the imagines that she is being ganged up on ironic Theodora. In “Hangsaman” (1951),
imagined horrors lurking outside it. by the other people at the house and that Natalie, a lonely college freshman, has a
its spirits have singled her out as their daring imaginary friend named Tony. In
Fifties, where Dundy was staying. On had posed at their first meeting, was the Everyday” (Oxford), writes that
one occasion, he had been waiting able to answer yes. “the search for an identifiable or classi-
around so long that, by the time Dundy At the time, Green was in his late fiable Henry Green retreats into the
showed up, the tulips he was holding forties and the author of nine novels, shadowy distance as the layers accu-
had gone droopy. Dundy apologized: including “Living,” “Party Going,” and mulate.” But, as Shepley notes, and
as NYRB Classics’ new reissues of
Green’s peculiar style arose from a keen sense of human unknowability. Green’s novels illustrate, his fiction was
94 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016
autobiographical—at times consciously “The Dud Avocado”—which she chose Bright Young Things for a four-hour
parasitic. He claimed that he disliked to write in the first person, using “the period during which their trip to France
Oxford because “literature is not a sub- voice I’d been polishing up on Henry.” is delayed by fog. As his characters hang
ject to write essays about.” In reality, Until that point, Southern’s rela- around the train platforms and hotel
he had discovered that Oxford was tionship with Green resembled Green’s rooms of Victoria Station, Green, show-
not a subject to write novels about— definition of the ideal prose contract: ing a new appetite for the long sen-
at least, not his time there, which was “a long intimacy between strangers tence, assails the reader with hazy sym-
mostly spent watching movies, play- with no direct appeal to what both may bols and exotic metaphors. But his
ing billiards, poring over Proust with have known.” Southern had first en- characters, for all the resources of their
his Eton classmate Anthony Powell, countered Green not at a party but in creator’s language, remain fumblers and
and ignoring his tutor, C. S. Lewis. In the pages of Partisan Review. An essay muddleheads—strangers to one an-
a letter to his father, Green explained titled “The Novels of Henry Green,” other and to themselves.
his decision to abandon his degree in in the journal’s May, 1949, issue, might Much of “Party Going” is taken up
favor of a stint working on the floor have been designed to snare the young with the saturated love life of the wealthy
at the Pontifex iron foundry: “Of course rebel. It called Green “a terrorist of flibbertigibbet Max Adey, who, in going
I have another book in my mind’s language.” on a holiday that he has proposed, will
eye. . . . I want badly to write a novel be spending time with a girlfriend he’s
I also worried that the work’s repetitive screened grids and lines in inks that have to do anything.” (She added, “Do
formulas—grids and stripes, mostly gray uncannily mimic graphite, provide not think that that is sad. It is not sad.
or palely colored, often six feet square— rhythmic relief. The cumulative effect Even sadness is not sad.”) In recent years,
would add aesthetic fatigue to the mild is that of intellectual and emotional she had been hospitalized for spells of
toll of a hike up the ramp. But the show’s repletion, concerning a woman who psychosis, tending toward catatonia, and
challenges to contemplation and stamina synthesized the essences of two world- was plagued by doomy thoughts. (“I
turn out to intensify a deep, and deep- changing movements—Abstract Ex- have tried existing, and I do not like it,”
ening, sense of the artist’s singular pow- pressionism and minimalism—and who, she wrote.) Stardom in the art world
ers. The climb becomes a sort of secu- from a tortured life, beset by schizo- imposed pressures that she seemed to
106 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016
find intolerable. But her flight, even fabled address of budding artistic rev-
from her own creativity, remains a mys- olutionaries since the Bateau-Lavoir of
tery—comparable to Arthur Rimbaud’s Picasso, Juan Gris, and their associates.
abandonment of poetry for adventur- Her neighbors included Robert Raus-
ing in Africa. chenberg, Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly,
As detailed in a crisp and penetrat- and James Rosenquist—most of them
ing recent biography, “Agnes Martin: gay (she was a lesbian) and determined
Her Life and Art,” by Nancy Princen- to counter the histrionic paint-monger-
thal, the artist’s hard existence began, in ing that was then in vogue. Her works
1912, in a small town on the plains of from that seedbed period tell a gripping
Saskatchewan, as the third of four chil- tale of borrowed stylistic ideas—redo-
dren of Scottish Presbyterian parents. lent of Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko,
Her father, who farmed wheat, died two Barnett Newman, and other Abstract
years later. Her mother, Margaret, was, Expressionists, and of Johns and Kelly—
by Martin’s account, harsh and unlov- which she didn’t so much follow as test,
ing. (Martin seldom spoke of her past, one by one, and expunge. Amid the
and what she told wasn’t always to be time’s cross-firing models of aesthetic
trusted.) Margaret eventually moved and rhetorical innovation, she struggled
the family to Vancouver, where, in high less forward than inward. She wanted,
school, Martin excelled at swimming; passionately, to be alone.
she just missed qualifying for the Ca- Martin had, from the start, an ex-
nadian Olympic team, for the 1936 traordinary sensitivity to subtleties of
Games in Berlin. She reportedly at- light and touch. When she hit, at last,
tended the University of Southern Cal- on the format of the grid—a motif
ifornia on a swimming scholarship, but that was tacit in modern painting after
dropped out and taught in elementary Cubism but never before stripped, and
schools for a couple of years, before com- kept, so bare—she found ways to make
pleting a degree at the Teachers Col- those qualities the exclusive basis of
lege of Columbia University, in 1942. a wholly original, full-bodied art. She
Then, at the age of thirty, Martin insisted that the results did not ex-
found a vocation in painting. She made clude nature but analogized it. She
figurative work, while working odd jobs said, “It’s really about the feeling of
in New York, and went to study art at beauty and freedom that you experi-
the University of New Mexico, in 1946. ence in landscape.” (Apropos of the
Five years later, she returned to Colum- slightly varied forms in some series of
bia to earn a master’s degree in fine-arts her paintings, she recalled studying
education. During that time, she ab- clouds in the sky: “I paid close atten-
sorbed principles of Taoist and Zen tion for a month to see if they ever
philosophy that would thenceforth repeated. They don’t repeat.”) The
guide her thinking, or, more accurately, effect of Martin’s art is not an exercise
her refusals of thought, even as she de- in overarching style but a mode of
veloped sternly logical solutions to the moment-to-moment being.
problems of painting. (Never religious, The relation of Martin’s mental ill-
she was the most matter-of-fact of mys- ness to her art seems twofold, combin-
tics.) Exposed to the high noon of Ab- ing a need for concealment and for con-
stract Expressionism in the city, she de- trol—the grid as a screen and as a
stroyed most of her early works and shield—with an urge to distill positive
gravitated to abstraction. content from the oceanic states of mind
Martin was back in New Mexico that she couldn’t help experiencing. She
when, in 1957, the august New York knew herself profoundly, because she
dealer Betty Parsons saw her work— had to. In a marvellous 1973 essay, “On
which at that point ran to abstracted the Perfection Underlying Life,” she
landscapes incorporating jagged shapes coolly contemplates the “panic of com-
reminiscent of Clyfford Still—and plete helplessness,” which “drives us to
offered her a show, on the condition fantastic extremes.” But the problem
that she move back to the city. Martin produces its own answer. She concluded
took a loft, which had electricity but no that “helplessness when fear and dread
running water and little heat, down- have run their course, as all passions do,
town on Coenties Slip, the most justly is the most rewarding state of all.”
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016 107
arrived. Bennett is currently outgunning
THE CURRENT CINEMA most of the guys in “The Magnificent
Seven,” a flush of anger heightening the
hue of her cheeks; Ferguson was top ba-
SEEING THINGS nana in last year’s “Mission: Impossi-
ble—Rogue Nation,” leaving a baffled
“The Girl on the Train” and “Under the Shadow.” Tom Cruise to work out what sort of
banana he was meant to be; and Blunt
BY ANTHONY LANE is Blunt, a deserving object of worship
ever since, armed with a queenly dis-
ere is an introduction to “The Hawkins. Half the sentient beings on dain and the best eyelids in the busi-
H Girl on the Train.” Listen care- earth appear to have read the book, al- ness, she held her own against Meryl
fully, and answer the questions that fol- leging with near-unanimity that they Streep in “The Devil Wears Prada.” It
low. Rachel (Emily Blunt) used to be couldn’t put it down. I couldn’t pick it is with infinite regret, therefore, that I
married to Tom ( Justin Theroux), but up. I tried, frequently, but it always fell must report on the veil of dourness that
Tom had an affair with Anna (Rebecca from my grasp, tugged down by the settles over all three actresses in “The
Ferguson), who is now his wife. He and dead weight of the prose. Still, plenty Girl on the Train.” None of them are
Anna have a baby, whose nanny is of viscous books have been transfigured allowed a flurry of wit or a lighthearted
named Megan (Haley Bennett). Megan into sprightly films. Clint Eastwood shrug, and to switch from Grace Kelly,
looks a bit like Anna. She— in “Rear Window” —a movie
Megan, not Anna—lives that dared to suggest how
with Scott (Luke Evans), much fun might be had from
who is creepy and possessive, the wicked watching of other
although Tom also looks a lives and the amateur prob-
bit clenched. Not as clenched ing of crimes—to Taylor’s
as Kamal (Edgar Ramírez), heroines is to pass from lu-
however, who is Megan’s su- minescence to a zone of quer-
perhot shrink. Rachel will ulous gloom. The tale is set
later enroll as a patient of largely in a suburb on the
Kamal’s. Stay with me here. Hudson, and nothing is duller
It so happens that Rachel, or more stifling, as a rule, than
who is obsessed with her people who wish to make it
ex, takes a twice-daily train perfectly plain how stifled
ride that passes the house they feel by their dull subur-
where Tom and Anna live. ban existence.
One day, she—Rachel, not Does it matter that the
Anna—sees, or thinks she plot is so full of holes that
sees, a woman with blond you could use it to drain spa-
hair, who could be Megan, ghetti? (For a more water-
although she might be mis- tight version, consult Agatha
taken for Anna, kissing a Christie’s “4:50 from Pad
man with dark hair, who dington,” in which a passen
could be Scott, Tom, Kamal, ger—a chum of Miss Mar
or possibly the FedEx deliv- ple’s, thank heaven—sitting
ery guy, on a balcony. Faced in one train spots a stran
with this devastating evi- gling in another.) Newcom
dence, she, Rachel, becomes ers, innocent of Hawkins’s
a sleuth, teaming up, slightly novel, may not even care that
unwisely, with Scott, who Emily Blunt in Tate Taylor’s ilm of the best-selling novel. the final twist is visible from
believes, slightly wrongly, many leagues distant. What
that she is a friend of Megan’s. So made something watchable out of “The does rile, though, is the drink. Rachel
(1), who beds whom? (2) Who doesn’t? Bridges of Madison County,” a public is a lush, decanting vodka tonics into a
(3) Who gets whacked? (4) Why can’t feat that ranks with the raising of plastic beaker for boozing on the move,
Rachel mind her own business? (5) Frankly, Lazarus. Perhaps the same could be and Blunt presents a gaunt and sorry
who gives a damn? done with Hawkins’s narrators—three spectacle, with flaking lips, unfocussed
Such are the issues that spring from of them, no less, maundering on in the gaze, and rosy nose. Whereupon she
the film, which is directed by Tate Tay- first person, often in the present tense, attends a single A.A. meeting and—
lor, written by Erin Cressida Wilson, and each as annoying as the next. bingo!—the problem starts to clear.
and adapted from the novel by Paula Spirits rose when news of the cast We realize that alcoholism was never
108 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016 ILLUSTRATION BY ADRIAN TOMINE
a serious theme; it was merely an ex- and is lucky to get off with a repri- experience of growing up in Tehran,
cuse for false-memory syndrome, and mand. Her name is Shideh (Narges and grates the nerves of his characters
hence a lazy way to mess with the logic Rashidi), her child is Dorsa (Avin Man- against the abrasively real. The lights
of the story. Judging by the restive sighs shadi), and they have just fled from don’t go out for no reason, in a bid to
that crowned the screening I went to, their apartment. This is not because stoke the mood; they go out because
not everyone is fooled. Shideh’s husband, a laughably hand- of a power cut. And you don’t go un-
Last and least, there is the title. some doctor named Iraj (Bobby Na- derground to confront the bogeyman;
Whether there was an overt attempt, deri), has been drafted to serve near you go there to avoid being bombed.
first by Hawkins and then by the film- the front line, leaving his wife and Yet there is a bogeyman—a djinn,
makers, to cash in on “Gone Girl,” I daughter to fend for themselves, or beloved of Persian legend, cited by con-
cannot say, but in both cases an enfee- even because of the missile that landed, servative neighbors, borne on the wind,
bling example has been set. By any not long ago, on their building and and scoffed at by Shideh right up to the
measure, the principal figures in both failed to explode. (The nose cone pro- moment that she meets one. Is it a sym-
works are women, and to label them truded through the roof, and spidery bol of oppression, by gods and men (es-
as girls is to tint them with childish- cracks from the impact spread across pecially men); a symptom of contagious
ness, as if they were easily cowed by the ceiling of the apartment.) What anxiety, passed from child to parent; or
circumstance or stormy feelings, and propels Shideh into the night is the nothing but a noisome dream? All these
thus more liable to lash out, or to sink belief, shared with her daughter, that and more, the result being that, by my
into a sulk, rather than submit their their home is possessed by spirits. calculations, “Under the Shadow” is pre-
troubles to adult consideration. In 1942, “Under the Shadow” is being sold cisely thirty-six times more interesting
Katharine Hepburn starred in “Woman as a horror film, and understandably than “The Girl on the Train.” Where
of the Year” as a prize-winning polit- so; there are a few nasty surprises that the conceit of that movie feels timid,
ical columnist. Try zipping back in will bop you right on the nose cone. cooked up, and culturally thin, Anvari’s
time, telling Hepburn to rename the At what point, though, will the un- is nourished by a near-traumatic sense
movie “Girl of the Year,” and see how warned viewer become aware that this of history, and, in terms of feminist
far you get. is a horror film at all? Many scenes are pluck, Rashidi’s presence, in the lead-
chafed by vexations that could not be ing role, is both gutsier and more plau-
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“I think I will unfollow him.” “He’s not reinventing it—he’s making it great again.”
Andrew Ng, San Francisco, Calif. Tim Noble, Brooklyn, N.Y.