PRICE $6.99 JUNE 30, 2014

JUNE 30, 2014

7 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

19 THE TALK OF THE TOWN Dexter Filkins on Obama and Iraq; diving at the World Cup; Jane Gardam; cockroach genome; urban planning: the musical.

john cOlapinto 24 SHY AND MIGHTY What’s next for the xx?

david sedaris 30 STEPPING OUT Living the Fitbit life.

jeffrey toobin 34 THE ABSOLUTIST Don’t underestimate Ted Cruz.

nathan heller 46 MOMENT TO MOMENT Time and Richard Linklater. FICTION rebecca Curtis 56 “THE PINK HOUSE”

THE CRITICS THE THEATRE Hilton Als 66 “When We Were Young and Unafraid,” “Much Ado About Nothing.”

BOOKS Caleb Crain 70 A new biography of Stephen Crane. 75 Briefly Noted

THE CURRENT CINEMA Anthony lane 76 “Jersey Boys,” “Venus in Fur.”

POEMS timothy donnelly 38 “Malamute” jean gallagher 60 “To Noah, from Wife”

bruce M cCall COVER “Cap’n Ahab’s”

DRAWINGS Zachary Kanin, Edward Steed, Farley Katz, Joe Dator, William Haefeli, Tom Cheney, Ken Krimstein, Danny Shanahan, Christopher Weyant, Frank Cotham, Paul Noth, Robert Mankoff, Drew Dernavich, P. C. Vey SPOTS Tibor Kárpáti

2 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 30, 2014 CONTRIBUTORS

dexter FIlkins (comment, p. 19) , the author of “The Forever War,” has reported from Iraq since 2003. He joined the magazine as a sta' writer in 2011.

ELIzabeth kolbert (the talk of the town, p. 22) is the author of, most re- cently, “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History.”

john colapinto (“shy and mighty,” p. 24) , a sta' writer, will publish “An Up- right Man,” his second novel, early next year.

david sedaris (“stepping out,” p. 30) has been contributing to the magazine since 1995. His book “Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls” is just out in paperback.

jeFFrey toobin (“The absolutist,” p. 34) is a sta' writer and the author of six books, including “The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court” and “The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson.”

Timothy Donnelly (poem, p. 38) , a recent Guggenheim Fellow, won the 2012 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for “The Cloud Corporation.”

charles barsotti (Drawings, pp. 40-41) , who died on June 16th, contributed more than thirteen hundred cartoons to the magazine beginning in 1962.

nathan heller (“moment to moment,” p. 46) , a sta' writer, is also a film and television critic for Vogue . rebecca curtis (fiction, p. 56) is the author of the story collection “Twenty Grand and Other Tales of Love and Money.”

caleb crain (books, p. 70) published his first novel, “Necessary Errors,” last year.

bruce m ccall (cover) , a longtime New Yorker contributor, is working on a book about creativity, which is due out next year.

THE"NEW"YORKER"DIGITAL

WWW!NEWYORKER!COM DIGITAL"EDITION

NEWS"DESK COMMENT FICTION MUSIC Commentary Daily news Rebecca Curtis A performance by on events in analysis from reads her new the indie rock band Washington and George Packer and story. the xx. abroad. others.

PAGE#TURNER PODCASTS POETRY On books and Nathan Heller and Richard Brody talk Readings by the writing life. with Sasha Weiss about Richard Timothy Donnelly Linklater’s career in movies, and about and Jean Gallagher . his new film. Plus, the Political Scene.

ARCHIVE HUMOR FILM HUMOR Our complete A Daily Cartoon Richard Brody on his A gallery of bonus collection of issues, drawn by Movie of the Week cartoons from the back to 1925. Farley Katz , and pick, “Faust,” archive. Shouts & Murmurs. from 1926.

Access our digital edition for tablets and phones at the App Store, Amazon.com, Google Play, or Next Issue Media.

4 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 30, 2014 THE MAIL

LITERARY WARNINGS often subtle, and are easily explained away as “sleeping wrong” and waking Rebecca Mead, in her piece on trig- up with a sore neck, straining the voice ger warnings, the shootings at the from speaking too much, or eye aller - University of California, Santa Bar- gies. Individuals with dystonia may bara, and the #YesAllWomen cam- go years without a proper diagnosis, paign, o&ers a thoughtful and histori- but prompt diagnosis is critical, be - cally informed approach (Comment, cause research suggests that treatment June 9th & 16th). The purpose of trig- outcomes may improve with early ger warnings is not, as some have ar- intervention. gued, to make participants in a class Art Kessler discussion feel that they’re in a “safe President, Dystonia Medical Research space.” Trigger warnings serve to pre - Foundation vent panic attacks or flashbacks that Chicago, Ill. impede one’s ability to engage in dis- cussion. (I speak as a college professor When I read Owen’s article concern- with P.T.S.D.) They are intended to ing neuromuscular hand spasms that enable everyone to remain present occur in golfers, musicians, and others, and alert enough to be challenged and I was reminded of how ahead of its discomfited. time the Alexander Technique was Margaret Price and still is, more than a hundred years Atlanta, Ga. since Frederick Matthias Alexander made his discoveries. I am a pianist I studied in the great-books program and a singer as well as a teacher of the at St. John’s College, in Santa Fe, New technique, which helps people move Mexico. I cannot imagine what might more freely and relieves muscle ten - happen to the excellent curriculum sion by developing the mind-body there if trigger warnings were to be in - connection. Alexander’s book “The troduced. To concern ourselves with Use of the Self ” has a chapter called who might be o&ended could endan- “The Golfer Who Cannot Keep His ger the program and rob participants Eyes on the Ball.” If George Bernard of a singular experience. No work of Shaw and Aldous Huxley (both stu - philosophy, literature, art, mathematics, dents of Alexander) had read Owen’s or science is meant to target one group article, they might have suggested that of people—anything that has perse - the golfers mentioned would do them- vered in the Western canon is for all of selves a lot of good by taking some Al - us. To attempt to temper all that might exander lessons. be deemed threatening or insensitive is William Barto Jones to demean us. New York City Meri Hamilton Palm City, Fla. EDITORS ’ N OTE : HSBC is the sole ad- vertiser in this week’s issue. As with EYES ON THE BALL any advertiser, it has had no advance knowledge of or control over the issue’s David Owen’s article on a condition contents. that a2icts golfers deftly brought to • light emerging research on dystonia, Letters should be sent with the writer’s name, a little-known neurological disorder address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to [email protected]. Letters that manifests in surprisingly diverse and Web comments may be edited for length ways and in people of all ages and and clarity, and may be published in any medium. We regret that owing to the volume backgrounds (“The Yips,” May 26th). of correspondence we cannot reply to every The early symptoms of dystonia are letter or return letters.

THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 30, 2014 5

GOI G" O ABOUT T$W

JUNE/JULY WEDNESDAY • THURSDAY • FRIDAY • SATURDAY • SUNDAY • MONDAY • TUESDAY 2 0 1 4 2 5 T H 26TH 27TH 28TH 29TH 30TH 1ST

When Boston Ballet arrives at Lincoln Center this week, it brings “The Afternoon of a Faun,” movies | DANCE created by the fabled Ballets Russes star Vaslav Nijinsky in 1912. The piece shows a little faun on a THE THEATRE summer afternoon, encountering a pack of nymphs and trying to detain one. When she flees, he takes FOOD & DRINK her scarf, faute de mieux, to his bed. More than a hundred years old, this dance is still astonishing, with classical music its sweet, milky haze set against its slicing steps, its demure classicism against its blunt sexuality. After “Faun,” Nijinsky choreographed three more pieces, but meanwhile he was going insane. In 1919, he was ABOVE & BEYOND hospitalized, and he never worked again. Of his ballets, only “Faun” survives. art | NIGHT LIFE

photograph by Ryan Pfluger financing—$1.4 million—he had only sixteen shooting days in which !"VIES to make the movie; now that it’s completed, Lee has to shop it around for distribution. Lee is a very busy filmmaker these days, directing TV specials featuring Pharrell Williams and Jerrod Carmichael, a music video for Eminem (it currently has more than twenty-one million views on YouTube), a short tribute to the World Cup (sponsored by Pepsi), and a documentary about the history of Brazil in anticipation of the 2016 Olympics; he’s also preparing to adapt “She’s Gotta Have It” as a series for Showtime. But none of these works seems likely to add to the legacy of his grand-scale, big-screen dramatic frescoes—the films that are being celebrated in the BAM retrospective. I asked him whether he missed making movies with the range of his 1992 film, “Malcolm X.” “Yeah, but it takes epic money to do an epic,” he said. However, these days, as Lee acknowledged, studios tend not to produce director-driven movies, leaving even filmmakers with Hollywood track records, such as Martin Scorsese, Terrence Malick, and Wes Anderson, to seek financing from independent producers. I asked Lee why he thought that the o5-Hollywood moguls—the Megan Ellisons and the Bill Pohlads— aren’t investing in his productions. “Here’s the thing,” he said. “Perception is a lot. So if I’m perceived as the angry black man who’s, quote unquote, a racist, that’s going to color their whole thing: ‘He’s unapproachable, he’s not

“Da Sweet Blood of Jesus,” Spike Lee’s most recent feature film, was financed through Kickstarter. a collaborator.’ ” Lee also cited the importance of stars in getting auteur- spike lee comes home based projects made. Scorsese’s recent productions, he said, have been boosted The Brooklyn-based director seeks the means of production. by the participation of Leonardo " $%&%'() % * + ,*, %%- . )--*/%(+)(0, BAM Cinématek will reprise, from June DiCaprio, and he praised Brad Pitt 29 to July 10, the program with which it was launched: a retrospective of the films of Brooklyn’s for his involvement with “12 Years a own Spike Lee. The timing is apt, because Lee has, in a way, come full circle, too. He began his Slave.” “So, depending on the subject career as an independent filmmaker, and he recently said, “I’m still an independent filmmaker.” matter,” he said, “if you don’t have a He was referring to the fact that he financed his new feature, “Da Sweet Blood of Jesus,” via patron—because that’s what Brad Pitt Kickstarter—a process that he likened to the fund-raising he did “with pen and paper” for his was—it’s just not getting done on the first dramatic feature, “She’s Gotta Have It,” which he shot in twelve days in the summer of scale that you might want, that you 1985. “We were doing Kickstarter before there was Kickstarter,” he said. might need to tell the story.” After a But, according to Lee, independence entails both freedom and constraint. He said that moment of silence, he added, “I know if “Da Sweet Blood of Jesus,” a thriller set in Brooklyn and on Martha’s Vineyard, had what you’re thinking: Where’s my been a studio production, he “would have gotten some crazy notes”—comments from patron?” executives about what they’d want him to change. On the other hand, because of the modest —Richard Brody

8 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 30, 2014 ILLUSTRATION BY STANLEY CHOW Now Playing The Fall of the Roman Empire a war story between good dragons A Coffee in Berlin Physically, it’s a milestone: no and bad ones) features intense #ly- Opening This downbeat, romantic, black- producer in the decades since has ing sequences that seem inspired by Begin Again and-white vision o" slacker-centric assembled as vast an ocean o" extras Second World War dog#ights. The John Carney directed this comedy, about two young Berlin stars Tom Schilling as Niko or as stunning an acreage o" plaster 3-D cinematography is grandly musicians (Adam Levine Fischer, a law-school dropout in as Samuel Bronston did in his vivid and sometimes astonishing. and Keira Knightley) whose his mid-twenties who doesn’t work, Spanish studio, and no director in The voice work, by Gerard Butler, relationship is threatened by doesn’t make art, doesn’t do much o" Bronston’s stable could make better Craig Ferguson, and America Fer- the lure of success. Co-starring anything, and does it with parental use o" it all than Anthony Mann. In rera, among others, is lively and fun. Mark Ruffalo, Hailee Steinfeld, funding. The writer and director, the culturally aspiring movie world This sequel also adds a major new CeeLo Green, and Catherine Jan Ole Gerster, weaves Niko’s o" 1964, it was possible to #ilm the character, Valka (voiced exquisitely Keener. Opening June 27. (In incremental drama from slender same basic story as “Gladiator” and by Cate Blanchett), a protective den limited release.) threads o" coincidence, including actually have the dying Emperor mother who runs a dragon sanctu- The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron a problem with his bank card and Marcus Aurelius use a phrase like ary. She gives the #ilm a surprising Swartz an encounter with a high-school “Pax Romana.” Alec Guinness plays emotional resonance.— B.D. (In A documentary about the acquaintance (Friederike Kempter) Aurelius as a weary—dare we say wide release.) software creator and political who holds a long-standing grudge. Stoic?—intellectual who wants a activist, who committed The unde#ined, irresponsible idler Roman peace that all foreigners Maleficent suicide in 2013 while facing with no evil intentions—indeed, hardly can join, not as slaves or as clients From Disney, the studio that brought prosecution for publishing any intentions at all—moves through but as citizens. Unfortunately for you “Sleeping Beauty,” in 1959, comes copyrighted documents the gleamingly photographed city like Aurelius, but perhaps fortunately a new take on the same tale. The online. Directed by Brian Knappenberger. Opening a human litmus test, revealing sadness, for audiences, Aurelius’ successor, prickable heroine is still in evidence, June 27. (In limited release.) narrow-mindedness, frustration, and Commodus, played here by the played by a beaming Elle Fanning, Snowpiercer petty cruelty at every turn. Niko’s #lamboyant Christopher Plummer, but hers is now a supporting role. Bong Joon-ho directed this own curdled past also comes to the forsakes the Pax Romana and turns (As for the prince who is meant to thriller, about the survivors fore alongside German history; he Rome into an empire o" camp. Sophia save her, armed with a loaded kiss, of a failed climate-control #inds himsel" on the set o" a gro- Loren ups the entertainment level his impact on the movie barely experiment who live aboard tesquely sentimental and morally as Aurelius’ daughter, especially counts as a gentle peck.) Resplen- a giant train. Starring Chris dubious Second World War movie, when the dashing, heroic Stephen dent on center stage, and requiring Evans, Jamie Bell, Alison Pill, and later connects with a bitter Boyd makes her feel like a vestal no support whatsoever, is Angelina John Hurt, Octavia Spencer, elderly man who recalls the horri#ic virgin again.— Michael Sragow (Film Jolie, as Male#icent—the evil fairy and Tilda Swinton. Opening crimes o" that era. In Gerster’s view, Forum; July 1.) who crashes the christening gig and June 27. (In limited release.) Berlin’s unresolved past taints its leaves a curse as a gift. Not that They Came Together bustling charm and glossy serenity, The Fault in Our Stars Jolie owes much to the wisps and Reviewed in Now Playing. as well as every familiar course o" A faithful adaptation o" the deservedly whimsies o$ fairyland; she wears a Opening June 27. (In limited release.) practical action—yet his movie veers popular young-adult novel by John lot o% black, a lot o% lipstick, a pair Transformers: Age of toward the historical kitsch that he Green. Shailene Woodley delivers a o" curvy horns, and wings that would Extinction satirizes. In German.— Richard Brody complex and beautiful performance send Batman back to his belfry with The fourth installment (In limited release.) as Hazel, a sharp-witted sixteen-year- one #lap. She and her makeup artist, of the franchise, set in old #ighting thyroid cancer. At the the great Rick Baker, seem tuned into postapocalyptic Chicago. Edge of Tomorrow urging o% her parents (the excellent the grimness—and the Grimmness—o" Directed by Michael Bay; Tom Cruise’s slick persona is inte- Laura Dern and Sam Trammell), the legend with more acuity, and with starring Mark Wahlberg, gral to the drama o$ Doug Liman’s Hazel joins a cancer support group. a darker wit, than anything that the Sophia Myles, Nicola Peltz, and science-#iction thriller, based on There, in the company o$ Isaac other actors, the set designers, or Stanley Tucci. Opening a novel by Hiroshi Sakurazaka. (the scene-stealing Nat Wol"%), her the director, Robert Stromberg, are June 27. (In wide release.) Cruise stars as Major William Cage, wisecracking friend who is losing prepared to muster. As for the screen- Whitey: United States of America v. James J. Bulger a P.R. o"#icer in an international his sight, she meets Augustus (Ansel play, by Linda Woolverton, it treads A documentary, directed by army that has formed to combat Elgort), a sweet, gooey hunk who carefully, and all too kindly, in the Joe Berlinger, about the trial an invasion o" thrashing, lurching, has lost a leg to bone cancer, and footsteps o" “Wicked,” assigning a of the long-pursued gangster. spiderlike creatures that have laid a romance—fuelled by their shared tender heart to what we have hitherto Opening June 27. (In limited waste to Europe. When Cage, a love o% books—begins. It’s not your viewed, and relied upon, as bad. Can release.) former advertising executive and everyday meet-cute scenario, and our imaginations really not take the Yves Saint Laurent determined noncombatant, refuses the writers, Mi chael H. Weber strain?— Anthony Lane (Reviewed in Jalil Lespert directed this to be embedded with the troops and Scott Neustadter, do careful, our issue o" 6/9 & 16/14.) (In wide bio-pic, starring Pierre for a D Day-like attack on occupied constructive work to keep Green’s release.) Niney; co-starring Guillaume France, he’s arrested, demoted, and characters both vibrant and literate. Gallienne. In French. Opening forced onto the front lines. Killed The #ilm dodges most o" the pitfalls A Million Ways to Die in the June 25. (In limited release.) in action by a creature from space, o" clichéd cancer dramas with humor West Cage is somehow endowed with the and natural warmth. Directed, quietly, Seth MacFarlane directs and stars power and the curse to relive, over by Josh Boone.— Bruce Diones (In in this new comedy, set in 1882. and over, the day o% his death—thus wide release.) He plays an Arizona sheep farmer allowing him to use each recurrence who #inds himsel" jilted by his belle as a training day, until, with the help How to Train Your Dragon 2 (Amanda Seyfried), befriended by a o% his martial mentor, played by The writer and director Dean De- more resourceful woman (Charlize Emily Blunt, he becomes human- Blois takes the comedy to a deeper, Theron), and, in consequence, pursued ity’s potential savior. Cage’s many more satisfying place than he did by her blackguard o" a husband (Liam throwbacks to the start o% his #inal in the original franchise-launching Neeson). The plot, however, is not day are realized with a jolting wit that animated #ilm. Hiccup (voiced by Jay the point; MacFarlane has chosen eludes the action itself; the incisive Baruchel), the earlier #ilm’s Viking the Western solely for the pleasure editing and the metaphorical replay boy, is now a teen-ager, and he has o" stripping it bare and removing o" the Second World War are the been busily mapping the world in any vestige o" mystique. The gags, Movie OF THE WEEK best things that the movie has to o""er. the company o% his #lying dragon, even when deadpan, are a kind o" A video discussion of In Liman’s overly literal view, Cage discovering new lands, meeting cumulative sneer, lampooning the F. W. Murnau’s “Faust,” from comes o"" as blandly una""ected new people, and encountering new foul conditions under which pioneers 1926, in our digital edition. by his miraculous experience; the dragons. The #ilm smartly plays to a and settlers existed—scarcely an marvel o" multiple lives is reduced slightly older audience than the #irst original complaint, as any Western to a variety o% basic training.— R.B. one did; the adventures are darker, fan will testify. What remains is

EVERETT (In wide release.) and the action (which is essentially a gross-out so unremitting that it

THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 30, 2014 9 Revivals and Festivals verges on desperation; i" a joke ticisms and ponderous aphorisms and the emotions push out to the Titles in bold are reviewed . isn’t aimed below the midri"", both conceal and de#lect passion. extremes. The ardent sincerity o" Anthology Film Archives MacFarlane seems unbothered, and Gaspard’s providential con#idence in this emotionally exhausting movie “The Italian Connection.” his strong cast, which includes Neil his artistic dreams also harks back remains in memory long after June 5 at 7: “The Violent Four,” Patrick Harris, Giovanni Ribisi, and, to Rohmer’s own inchoate days, as smoother, more conventional works a.k.a. “Bandits in Milan” (1968, as a cheerful hooker, Sarah Silver- i" the director had been waiting hal" have passed into oblivion.— David Carlo Lizzani). • June 26 at 7 man, is left scrabbling for scraps o" a century for the artistry with which Denby (6/23/14) (In limited release.) and June 29 at 9: “Caliber 9” (1972, Fernando Di Leo). • dignity. The one person who gets he could exorcise his memories o" June 27 at 7: “Grand Slam” (1967, the balance right, weighing parody embarrassment, pain, and sexual 22 Jump Street Giuliano Montaldo). • June 28 at and homage, is the composer, Joel frustration. In French.— R.B. (In The “21 Jump Street” boys are back, 9: “Blood in the Streets” (1973, McNeely, whose opening theme stirs limited release.) mucking around in college this time, Sergio Sollima). • June 29 at hopes and memories that the movie as they search for a dangerous new 6:45: “Born Winner” (1976, Aldo cannot match.— A.L. (6/9 & 16/14) They Came Together synthetic drug called WHYPHY. As Lado). (In wide release.) The leering title is the wittiest thing Jenko, the lunkhead cop, Channing BAM Cinématek in this amiable comic mis#ire. Paul Tatum has developed his own comic BAMcinemaFest. June 27 at 8: Policeman Rudd and Amy Poehler star as Joel style. Shy, a little tentative, his Jenko “Stations of the Elevated” (1981, The Israeli director Nadav Lapid’s and Molly, a comfortable New York is an amiable dope who confuses Manfred Kirchheimer). • perspective-shifting thriller is only couple at dinner with two good friends “Cate Blanchett” with “carte blanche”; June 25 at 9:30: “L for Leisure” (2014, Lev Kalman intermittently suspenseful, but it’s (Bill Hader and Ellie Kemper), who he’s so friendly that he makes stu- and Whitney Horn). • June 26 consistently bombastic. The main ask how they met. The rest o" the pidity almost attractive. Jonah Hill, at 7: “Something, Anything” story involves Yaron (Yiftach Klein), #ilm, more or less, consists o$ #lash- with his narrow-set eyes and small, (2014, Paul Harrill). • June 26 a young Tel Aviv-based o"#icer in backs that provide the answer; the suspicious mouth, plays Jenko’s at 9:30: “Other Months” (2014, an antiterrorist unit that is facing gimmick is that every step o" their partner, Schmidt, a self-conscious Nick Singer). • June 27 at 7: charges for excessive force. As Yaron courtship, from the meet-cute and and easily embarrassed man who “Happy Christmas” (2014, Joe and his partners conspire to shift the meet-the-families to the tests has to take back hal" o" what he Swanberg). • June 27 at 9:30: blame, they focus on one colleague o" devotion and the troubles along says. Hill’s gift is for mi""ed feelings “The Foxy Merkins” (2013, Madeleine Olnek). • June 28 (Gal Hoyberger), who is su""ering the way, is rendered as a parody and hu""y outrage, but he uses his at 6:30: “Low Down” (2014, from a brain tumor and is immune o" romantic-comedy clichés. The short, rubbery body with greater Jeff Preiss). • June 28 at 9:30: from prosecution. The action moves opposites-attract setup presents abandon than he has in the past. “10.000KM” (2013, Carlos to another conspiracy, in which four Molly as the owner o" a small Manhat- The odd-couple formula—beauty Marques-Marcet). • The films young Jewish leftists—led by the cold tan candy shop and Joel as a manager and brains, each man desperately of Spike Lee. June 29 at 5: “Do and charismatic Nathanael (Michael in a large candy conglomerate that needing the other—works as well the Right Thing” (1989). • Aloni) and the wealthy Shira (Yaara plans to drive her out o+ business. as it does because Tatum and Hill June 30 at 7 and 9:30: “School Pelzig), who loves him—plan an armed No trope o" the genre is safe from aren’t forced to do everything in Daze” (1988). • July 1 at 4:30 and 9: “Mo’ Better Blues” attack. The o"#icers’ macho chatter sendup by the #ilmmakers (David tandem. The directors, Phil Lord (1990). • July 1 at 7:30: “Joe’s and exuberant wrestling parallel the Wain, who directed, and Michael and Christopher Miller, create the Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut radicals’ chewy manifesto and reckless Showalter, who co-wrote the script usual college satire and #ill up the Heads” (1983). gunplay. Despite the movie’s ostensibly with him), but their satirical sense holes in the plot with knockabout Film Forum diagnostic cross-section o$ Israeli is neither tender nor savage; it’s physical comedy, some o" which The films of Alec Guinness. society, none o" its elements seem to as clichéd as the conventions they is funny (Tatum gracefully climbs June 26 at 12:40, 2:50, 5:10, exist on their own; all o" them stand mock, and the chirpy overwriting and vaults; Hill barrels and falls). 7:30, and 9:45: “Our Man in for something, from Yaron’s swagger- and one-note direction constrain the With the sulfurous Ice Cube, as Havana” (1959, Carol Reed). • ing dances and uxorious devotions lively cast.— R.B. (In limited release.) the boys’ boss, and Jillian Bell, as June 27-28 at 1, 3, 5:10, 7:20, and to Shira’s #lirtations with an insipid a basilisk-eyed student who spots 9:30 and July 1 at 4:40: “The underground rock scene. Lapid’s Third Person Schmidt as a ringer.— D.D. (6/23/14) Ladykillers” (1955, Alexander Mackendrick). • June 29 at 3:30 workmanlike direction illustrates The writer and director Paul Haggis (In wide release.) and 7:45 and June 30 at 2:30 his lockstep script e"#iciently, and tells three powerful stories, set in and 7:15: “Lawrence of Arabia” sometimes engagingly, but unimag- Paris, Rome, and New York, about We Are the Best! (1962, David Lean). • July 1 at inatively. He has something to say; the varieties o+ love, and his unifying There just aren’t enough #ilms about 7:15: “The Fall of the Roman he shows very little. In Hebrew.— R.B. theme is that a “third person”—a teen-age girl punk bands made by Empire.” • July 1 at 2:30: “Kind (In limited release.) child, an old lover—lingers in the left-wing feminist Swedish Christian Hearts and Coronets” (1949, background o" every serious rela- males. All the more reason, therefore, Robert Hamer). A Summer’s Tale tionship. As he did in “Crash,” he to welcome this new contribution from Film Society of Lincoln This strangely rigid comedy by intercuts the stories, but this time Lukas Moodysson. Adapted from Center Eric Rohmer, from 1996, starts the characters don’t impinge on one the graphic novel by his wife, Coco New York Asian Film Festival. June 27 at 5: “Overheard 3” with a tensely lyrical sequence in another—at least not until the end, Moodysson, and set in Stockholm in (2014, Alan Mak and Felix which Gaspard (Melvil Poupaud), a when Haggis leaps into meta#iction 1982, the #ilm tells the tale o$ Bobo Cheong). • June 30 at 8:45: young mathematician and aspiring and changes our relation to every- (Mira Barkhammar) and her friend “Blind Massage” (2014, musician, spends too much time thing we’ve seen. Liam Neeson, as Klara (Mira Grosin), who feel cut Lou Ye). • June 30 at 6: alone while awaiting his girlfriend a famous but struggling American adrift from their contemporaries “Han Gong-ju” (2014, Lee in a crowded Brittany resort town. novelist, and the dazzling Olivia and their elders alike. With nothing Su-jin). • July 1 at 9:15: “No Gaspard befriends Margot (Amanda Wilde, as a go-getting New York better to do, they start a two-woman Man’s Land” (2009, Ning Hao). Langlet), a graduate student with journalist, play perverse erotic band, which soon swells to three Museum of Modern Art whom he shares much, but not games in Paris. In Rome, Adrien with the arrival o$ Hedvig (Liv “An Auteurist History of Film.” desire. For that, there’s her friend Brody, as a self-loathing American LeMoyne)—devout and square, but June 25-27 at 1:30: “Aguirre, the Solène (Gwenaëlle Simon), an businessman, falls in love with a the only one o" them who can actu- Wrath of God” (1972, Werner Herzog). impulsive bank clerk, whose hold tempestuous and funny Romanian ally play an instrument. Moodysson on him is challenged by the arrival immigrant (the Israeli actress Moran returns to the zone that he plotted so Museum of the Moving Image o+ his girlfriend, Léna (Aurelia Atias, who seems to have stepped acutely in “Show Me Love” (1998) “See It Big! Science Fiction.” Nolin), an imperious bourgeoise with out o" a Rome Opera production o" and “Together” (2000); this movie June 27 at 7: “Robocop” (1987, breezy manners that veil a tough, “Carmen”). The dolorous New York is more raucous, but his ability to Paul Verhoeven). • June 28 at glossy sense o" power. Despite the story is devoted to a disorganized chart the pressures and pleasures 4:30: “Mars Attacks!” (1996, bright summer sun and the inviting and desperate young woman (Mila o" young lives as they approach the Tim Burton). • June 28 at expanses, Rohmer’s #ilm is tight and Kunis, in a tearful, bottom-dog limits o" childhood is as fresh as ever. 7: “Silent Running” (1972, airless; though it’s set in the present performance) who has lost custody His rebels may not have much o" Douglas Trumbull). day, the febrile formalities evoke a o+ her little boy to her nasty artist a cause, let alone talent, but their vanished age—that o" the director’s ex-husband (James Franco). Much o" haircuts speak louder than words. In own youth—in which worldly wit- the dialogue is prickly and intimate, Swedish.— A.L. (In limited release.)

10 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 30, 2014 American Ballet Theatre This week, the company presents eight performances o" “Swan Lake,” with seven ballerinas in the role o" Odette/ Odile. Polina Semionova (the evening D!"CE o" June 25 and the June 28 matinée) and the re$ined David Hallberg make a dashing pair. But you can’t go wrong with Alina Cojocaru and Herman Cornejo, on June 27: she’s expressive and touching; he’s warm, and $lies across the stage with panache. Gillian Murphy’s swan is stylish and $ierce; she appears alongside Marcelo Gomes on June 23. Hee Seo, a young dancer with beautiful lines who exudes vulnerability and lyricism, is well partnered by Roberto Bolle on the evening o" June 28. • June 23-24 and June 26-27 at 7:30, June 25 at 2 and 7:30, and June 28 at 2 and 8: “Swan Lake.” • June 30-July 1: “The Dream” and “The Tempest.” (Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center. 212-362-6000. Through July 5.)

Savion Glover For this virtuoso, tap is like religion, and his concerts are ceremonies o" communion with deceased masters o" the form. This inward focus draws some people in and leaves others cold. The title o" Glover’s latest show, “Om,” seems to promise explicit spirituality, which could exacerbate the divide between the entranced and the bored. (Joyce Theatre, 175 Eighth Ave., at 19th St. 212-242-0800. June 24-25 The Trey McIntyre Project performs “Vinegar Works: Four Dances of Moral Instruction,” at Jacob’s Pillow. and July 1 at 7:30, June 26-27 at 8, June 28 at 2 and 8, and June 29 at 2 Music for Peacocks and 7:30. Through July 12.) A chamber-ballet company says farewell. Out of Town Jacob’s Pillow "# %#& '()* &%# +%,-#( , which will appear at Jacob’s Pillow this week, is a chamber- Without the street-dance original ballet company, which means, more or less, that you get the ballet steps without the panoply: the Storyboard P, who had a scheduling con$lict, “Unreal Hip-Hop,” a showcase serried ranks, the tutus, the love-struck swans. Strange to say, classical ballet sometimes seems clearer, organized by Pillow’s director, Ella more like itself and like nothing else, when it’s performed in this way. I once went to see T.M.P. Ba"", tilts to the dista"". The Wonder- perform a piece set to songs—including “Pu$, the Magic Dragon”—by Peter, Paul and Mary. Gird twins, slick brothers from Boston who specialize in old-school popping and your loins! I said to myself. This is going to be a sentimental business. It wasn’t. I can still see the Pu$ locking, are surrounded by women: dancer, performing pas de chat across the stage—this huge guy, in shorts, doing these dainty little the skilled and spunky B-girl Ephrat hops. It was all there: the thrill of love, the coming sorrow. Asherie and the all-female Brooklyn crew Decadancetheatre, who o""er a ri"" McIntyre has been making dances for twenty-five years. In 2005, he assembled a permanent on Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons.” (Becket, troupe, and, a few years later, he moved it to Boise, Idaho. To him, this was not an exotic locale (he’s Mass. 413-243-0745. June 25-29.) from Wichita), but some people wondered whether Boiseans would welcome a ballet company, and Trisha Brown Dance Company one, furthermore, whose executive director, John Michael Schert (he also dances—he did those pas With Brown retired and her company de chat for Pu$), was the artistic director’s partner. But the company “outreached” like mad, putting halfway through a farewell tour, on free performances at local hospitals and Roller Derbies. In turn, the city’s merchants o$ered the each performance has a get-it-while- you-can appeal. This program for dancers discounts on everything from MRIs to cookies. Soon the mayor named T.M.P. Cultural Bard SummerScape is particularly Ambassadors of Boise. tempting. In “I’m Going to Toss My Now this story is coming to a “Pu$”-like end. McIntyre has always been interested in film and Arms,” one o% Brown’s $inal works, from 2011, the dancers are blown photography, and he wants to give more time to them—which means that, though he will go on doing about by industrial fans. In “I& You freelance choreography, his company will close its headquarters at the end of the summer and cease to Couldn’t See Me,” a soloist moves be a full-time operation. The Jacob’s Pillow season is thus a farewell. It includes the comically creepy expressively without once turning to face the audience. And “Set and “Vinegar Works: Four Dances of Moral Instruction,” based on books by Edward Gorey. This piece Reset,” from 1983, is a masterpiece o" involves a baby-stealing bird with a ten-foot wingspan. (It requires three puppeteers.) Also on the free-$lowing invention that extends program is a suite of dances set to songs by Queen. “It’s music for peacocks,” McIntyre told the Chicago into the wings. (Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, Bard Tribune , “expansive and joyful and melodic”—good music to go out on. College, Annandale-on-Hudson, —Joan Acocella N.Y. 845-758-7900. June 27-28.)

ILLUSTRATION BY DADU SHIN THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 30, 2014 11 Signature Center, 480 W. 42nd St. Hot Season 212-279-4200.) Strange Sun Theatre presents a play by Evan Mueller, in which a group Tick, Tick . . . Boom! o% friends attempt to escape a TH#ATRE “Encores! O!!-Center” returns for a life-threatening epidemic by taking second season, with this musical by shelter at a cabin in the woods. Kevin Jonathan Larson, starring Lin-Manuel J. Kittle directs. (Black Box, 18 Bleecker also notable Openings and Previews Miranda, Leslie Odom, Jr., and Karen St. 866-811-4111. Through June 28.) Aladdin Atomic Olivo, about an aspiring composer New Amsterdam A new musical about the Manhattan who is turning thirty. Oliver Butler The Old Woman All the Way Project and the creation o! the atomic directs. June 25-28. (City Center, 131 Robert Wilson directs this absurdist Neil Simon. Through June 29. bomb has a book and lyrics by Danny W. 55th St. 212-581-1212.) play, adapted by Darryl Pinckney Beautiful—The Carole Ginges and Gregory Bonsignore and from the writings o! the Russian King Musical music and lyrics by Philip Foxman. author Daniil Kharms, about two Stephen Sondheim Damien Gray directs. Previews begin Now Playing dapper men who must dispose o! The Book of Mormon June 26. (Acorn, 410 W. 42nd St. 212- Carnival Kids a corpse. Mikhail Baryshnikov and Eugene O’Neill 239-6200.) With no money in the bank and Willem Dafoe star. (BAM’s Howard Bullets Over Broadway nowhere else to go, Dale (Randall Gilman Opera House, 30 Lafayette St. James Faust: The Concert Newsome), a middle-aged ex-rocker Ave., Brooklyn. 718-636-4100. Through Cabaret “Encores! O!!-Center” presents a from Texas, crashes at his adopted June 29.) Studio 54 one-night-only concert, starring son’s New York City apartment, even Casa Valentina Randy Newman as the Devil, Tony though his son—a buttoned-down Time of My Life Samuel J. Friedman. Vincent as Faust, and Isaiah Johnson overachiever named Mark (Jake The proli$ic British playwright Alan Through June 29. as the Lord, in a musical written by Choi)—wants nothing to do with Ayckbourn has a merry heart, fed The City of Conversation Newman. July 1. (City Center, 131 him. Mark’s roommate, however, a with an aorta o! despair. He sets his Mitzi E. Newhouse W. 55th St. 212-581-1212.) $lamboyant shut-in named Eckland melancholy comedy from 1992, now The Cripple of Inishmaan (Max Jenkins), appreciates Dale’s making its U.S. première as part o! Cort The Gyre predicament and, on the sly, arranges “Brits O!% Broadway,” in perhaps the Fly by Night: A New The Amoralists present two plays for him to get a quick ten grand by world’s only Esperanto restaurant, a Musical in repertory: “The Quali$ication marrying a young Syrian woman in perplexing bistro serving delicacies Playwrights Horizons. o% Douglas Evans,” about alcohol need o! a green card (Danelle Eliav). such as trickletasse, vissviss, and Through June 29. addiction, by Derek Ahonen (begins Lucas Kavner’s hilarious play is a love crimpledoos. The play begins at a A Gentleman’s Guide to previews June 26), and “Enter at song to slightly immoral and totally birthday dinner for a woman named Love and Murder Forest Lawn,” by Mark Roberts, irresponsible losers, and it works. Laura Stratton, then spins o!! into Walter Kerr which goes behind the scenes o! The successful, long-su!!ering son meals that her eldest son and his wife Hedwig and the Angry network television (begins previews should, by all rights, be the hero o! will enjoy in the future and others Inch June 27). (Walkerspace, 46 Walker St. this production by Lesser America, that her younger son and his $iancée Belasco www.theamoralists.com.) but he’s not: the mis$its are way too ate in the past. Despite some wildly Just Jim Dale much fun, and, ultimately, they’re funny scenes, the three time lines Laura Pels Ice Factory Festival deeper, kinder, and wiser people. coalesce into a bleak tale o/ how we The Killer The annual festival includes six new Under the direction o! Stephen disappoint ourselves and each other. Polonsky Shakespeare Center. works; it kicks o!! with “The Upper Brackett, the acting—especially that o! Ayckbourn is typically an able direc- Through June 29. Room” (June 25-28), presented by the wonderfully hammy Jenkins—is tor o/ his work, but here the pacing Lady Day at Emerson’s Rady&Bloom, about the realities superb. (TBG, 312 W. 36th St. 212- drags, and the gags o! the waiters Bar & Grill o! global warming. Jeremy Bloom 868-4444. Through June 28.) (all played by Ben Porter) are as Circle in the Square and Brian Rady wrote and direct. leaden as the smooliboos. (59E59, at The Lion Opens June 25. (New Ohio Theatre, Gertrude Stein Saints! 59 E. 59th St. 212-279-4200. Through City Center Stage II 154 Christopher St. 888-596-1027.) Theatre Plastique sets works by June 29.) Matilda the Musical Gertrude Stein, including “Four Shubert The Muscles in Our Toes Saints in Three Acts,” to music from The Who & the What Les Misérables Labyrinth Theatre Company presents various genres, including rock, rap, Ayad Akhtar, who won a Pulitzer Imperial a dark comedy by Stephen Belber, country, and bluegrass. (Abrons Arts Prize for “Disgraced,” likes to take Much Ado About Nothing in which four friends convene at Center, 466 Grand St. 212-352-3101. familiar scenarios (a fraught marriage, Delacorte. (Reviewed in their high-school reunion and hatch Through June 28.) a contentious family) and interweave this issue.) a plan to rescue a classmate who was them with philosophical questions. Of Mice and Men kidnapped by a radical political group. Holler If Ya Hear Me His latest play at LCT3, also directed Longacre Anne Kau!!man directs. In previews. Instead o! synopsizing the rapper by Kimberly Senior, is both a love Our New Girl Opens June 26. (Bank Street Theatre, Tupac Shakur’s life and death—he story and—inspired by Jacques Atlantic Stage 2. Through 155 Bank St. 212-513-1080.) was killed in a drive-by shooting, in Derrida, from whom he borrows the June 29. 1996—this new musical uses his songs title—an inquiry into ideas o/ love. The Realistic Joneses The Other Mozart to tell a $ictional but familiar story o! Zarina (Nadine Malou/) and Mah - Lyceum Sylvia Milo wrote and stars in this life in a gang-addled neighborhood. wish (Tala Ashe) are the daughters The Village Bike solo show, about Nannerl Mozart, the Saul Williams (a poet as well as an o! Afzal (Bernard White, superb). Lucille Lortel undersung sister o! Amadeus, who was assured actor) plays John, just out Mahwish and Afzal contrive to set Violet also a prodigy. Opens June 25. (HERE, o! prison and determined to re-start Zarina up with Eli (Greg Keller), American Airlines Theatre 145 Sixth Ave., near Spring St. 212- his life, even as violence tears at the a white convert to Islam. But when 352-3101.) streets. Hip-hop has been slow to a smitten Zarina recommences work When We Were Young and Unafraid in$iltrate Broadway, but Kenny Leon’s on a controversial book about wo- City Center Stage I. Piece of My Heart staging shows how naturally theatri- men and Islam, competing loyalties (Reviewed in this issue.) A new musical, with a book by cal it can be; “Thugz Mansion,” sung fray relationships. Akhtar has a Wicked Daniel Goldfarb, based on the life by Williams, Christopher Jackson, splendid command o! structure, Gershwin and songs o% Bert Berns, who wrote and Ben Thompson, makes a $ine a $ine ear for dialogue, and some the title song, as well as “Twist and eleven o’clock number. The show’s personal experience with provoca- Shout,” “I Want Candy,” “Hang on problems are similar to those o! most tive novels (“American Dervish”). Sloopy,” and many more. The cast jukebox musicals: songs shoehorned But, while the play is continually includes Zak Resnick, Leslie Kritzer, into the plot, and a book (by Todd absorbing, it too often smooths over and De’Adre Aziza. Denis Jones di- Kreidler) that leans on cliché. (Palace, tangled arguments. (Claire Tow, 150 rects. In previews. (Pershing Square Broadway at 47th St. 877-250-2929.) W. 65th St. 212-239-6200.)

12 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 30, 2014 F D & DRI#K

BAR TAB Met Roof Garden Café and Martini Bar 1000 Fifth Ave. (212-535-7710) In addition to its Stradivarius collection, Tables for Two its Caravaggios, and the Sphinx of SCHMEAR CAMPAIGN Hatshepsut, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has the best sky in town. Its Russ & Daughters Café, 127 Orchard St. (212-475-4881); Black Seed Bagels, rooftop café, which becomes the 170 Elizabeth St. (212-730-1950) Martini Bar on Friday and Saturday evenings, overlooks Central Park; the view is of leafy treetops, a mostly " $ %&'&"( )*"+$, $-(&%" ", two men sat back to back at Russ & Daughters prewar skyline, and an unobstructed Café. One, in his eighties, reclined in a wheelchair, wearing a nylon tracksuit; the other, in celestial display worthy of Bierstadt. his thirties, sported chambray and skinny jeans, cu#ed to expose bare ankles. The Lower “Giant cumulonimbus clouds,” a East Side has changed tremendously in the hundred years since Joel Russ opened a tiny woman drinking a dirty Martini said on shop to supply a mostly Jewish neighborhood with “appetizing,” defined by his great- a recent evening, gazing up at what grandchildren and successors as “the foods one eats with bagels.” But, inflation aside (at looked like a benevolent H-bomb. The $1,895, five hundred grams of Osetra Gueldenstaedtii caviar costs about as much as a sky, between rainstorms, was a dusky gray, its clouds backlit by sun. A merry, month’s rent for a studio apartment on East Houston Street), Russ & Daughters has international group—a young boy and remained almost exactly the same, and has sold enough smoked fish and cream cheese to his dad, both with blond dreadlocks open a full-service restaurant a few blocks away. and crisp white shirts; Italian-speaking The Café is a master class in how to court both the old and the new, imbued with a women in scarves; a tiny French hard-earned air of authority and gorgeously designed to pay detailed homage to Russ & bulldog in a service vest—hung out on Daughters’ history and to the mid-century soda fountain. Wallpaper makes art out of sesame the man-made lawn that’s part of this seeds and Take-A-Number tickets. Servers, wearing white lab coats and ties, deliver frothy summer’s installation, by Dan Graham and Günther Vogt. The piece, which egg creams and platters of sable and Gaspé Nova, glistening like candy, to marble tables in also features ivy and curved two-way sun-washed slate-green booths. Diners kvell over salty-sweet chopped liver, dressed with mirrored glass walls, reflects hedges pickled onions and schmeared on matzo toasted golden brown; cool, silky borscht topped and skyscrapers while evoking suburbs with dill and sour cream; and scrambled eggs folded around delicate slivers of sturgeon. and the countryside. People drank For food to eat with bagels, nobody beats Russ & Daughters. When it comes to Martinis or a chlorophyll-colored, basil- bagels themselves, the playing field has been levelled, thanks to a renaissance led, for the infused gin specialty called the Greens. moment, by a nearby bakery called Black Seed. Purists will protest, for Black Seed’s bagel After a while, the sky darkened. A rumble of thunder, a satisfying blast of is modelled, in part, after Montreal’s, which is skinnier and more oblong, boiled in honey lightning. “Whoo!” everyone yelled. “It’s water, and baked in a wood-burning oven. (Black Seed is co-owned by the Montrealer like ‘Ghostbusters,’ ” the woman said, Noah Bernamo#, of Mile End.) But it smacks of New York, too, with its assertive saltiness, approvingly. Then it was back into the satisfying density, and smaller hole—all the better for sandwiches, which the shop does museum, a tipsy spin through Arms extremely well, pairing bubblegum-pink tobiko spread with smoked salmon and butter and Armor, and out into the warm and lettuce, and whitefish salad with cream cheese and sweet marinated cucumbers. stormy night. —Sarah Larson At Black Seed, it takes twenty minutes to get a sandwich that any veteran bagel counter would have ready in five, keeping tattooed young locals jostling impatiently for iced co#ee and tapping their feet to Nirvana and TLC. But its very existence acknowledges what came before it—and what better to snack on than a Black Seed sandwich while waiting for a table at Russ & Daughters Café? —Hannah Goldfield

Russ & Daughters Café open Wednesdays through Mondays from 10 A.M. to 10 P.M. ; smoked-fish platters

ILLUSTRATION%BY%MORGAN%ELLIOTT $70-$90. Black Seed Bagels open daily from 7 A.M. to 4 P.M. ; bagel sandwiches $5-$15.

PHOTOGRAPH BY JAMES POMERANTZ THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 30, 2014 13 ebrating one o" the era’s foundational in A Major), and Taneyev (the tow - genres—the concerto grosso, heard ering Piano Quintet). • June 29 at in examples by Telemann, Vivaldi, 4:30: The storied Juilliard String classical Locatelli, and Corelli (in D Major, Quartet appears at the Venetian Op. 6, No. 1). (West End Ave. at Theatre, o""ering arrangements o" 87th St. nybaroque.org. June 28 at 7.) Bach (from “The Art o% Fugue”) "#SIC as well as Berg’s “Lyric Suite” and Either/Or Festival of Beethoven’s “Razumovsky” Quartet Contemporary Music No. 3 in C Major. (Katonah, N.Y. Concerts in Town Thomas; Dan Saunders accompanies The ninth annual festival organized 914-232-1252.) “The Beethoven them. (Pier 1, Brooklyn. June 25 at by Richard Carrick, a cheerful em- Piano Concertos: 7. No tickets required.) inence o" modernism, begins with Hudson Valley Chamber A Philharmonic Festival” two concerts (featuring music by Music Circle The New York Philharmonic’s Michael Hersch’s “On the Druckman, Stockhausen, and Alvin This exclusive little series #ills the long farewell to Glenn Dicterow, Threshold of Winter” Lucier) at the Whitebox Art Center; it gap between the regular and summer its longest-serving concertmaster, Hersch, now in his second decade as concludes at Brooklyn’s Issue Project seasons with concerts by illustrious culminates in this season-ending one o" the most prominent composers Room, with the ensemble focussing performers. It concludes with an program, conducted by Alan Gilbert, in the country, writes masterly mod- its energies on a single work, “For evening devoted entirely to the which also marks the conclusion o" ernist music o" implacable seriousness. Philip Guston,” a four-and-a-half- three sonatas for violin and piano by Ye#im Bronfman’s series o" concerts After personal tragedy—he not only hour Abstract Expressionist epic by Brahms, performed by two sterling exploring the Beethoven Piano Con- battled cancer but watched a close Morton Feldman. (22 Boerum Pl. younger artists, the violinist Jennifer certos. Bronfman’s grand style and friend die o" the disease—he came to issueprojectroom.org. June 29 at 3.) Koh and her husband, the pianist sensitive touch should be ideal for the write his #irst opera, a monodrama Benjamin Hochman. (Olin Hall, Concerto No. 5, “Emperor”; before for soprano employing texts from Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, intermission, he joins Dicterow and the #inal collection o" the Romanian Out of Town N.Y. 845-339-7907. June 28 at 7.) the Philharmonic’s principal cellist, poet Marin Sorescu. Ah Young Caramoor Carter Brey, in Beethoven’s great Hong, accompanied by the Nunc June 26 at 6 and June 27 at 8: The Maverick Concerts pièce d’occasion, the Triple Concerto. ensemble, sings the world première cellist Edward Arron, a thoughtful Woodstock is not just about rock (Avery Fisher Hall. 212-875-5656. o" the piece, in a production directed young virtuoso, is the driving force music: this distinguished but laid- June 24-26 at 7:30 and June 27-28 by Roger Brunyate and conducted behind two o" the festival’s upcoming back series, the oldest summer at 8.) by Tito Muñoz. (BAM Fisher, 321 chamber concerts in the evocative chamber-music festival in the U.S., Ashland Pl., Brooklyn. bam.org. Spanish Courtyard. The #irst #inds takes place at the Maverick Hall, Metropolitan Opera Summer June 25 at 7:30.) him and members o" the Caramoor a serene music chapel in the forest Recital Series Virtuosi joining several o" the Bel that’s an ideal space for string quar- The popular series continues at New York Baroque Canto Young Artists in an abundance tets. This year’s schedule commences Brooklyn Bridge Park, with several Incorporated: “Il Grosso o" music, vocal and otherwise, by with a longtime favorite, the Shang- o" the company’s brightest young Primo” Donizetti; in the second, he teams hai Quartet, performing music by talents singing arias and ensembles St. Ignatius o" Antioch Episcopal up with such young guns o" Gotham Haydn, Bright Sheng, and Dvořák from favorite repertory works. This Church is the new home for this as the pianist Gilles Vonsattel and (the Piano Quintet, with Benjamin year’s crew includes the soprano enterprising young band o% Baroque the violist Max Mandel to play Hochman, who also o""ers Janáček’s Amber Wagner, the mezzo-soprano instrumentalists, which inaugurates music by Turina, Mendelssohn “In the Mists”). (Woodstock, N.Y. Jamie Barton, and the tenor Russell its residency by o""ering a concert cel- (the ebullient String Quintet No. 1 maverickconcerts.org. June 29 at 4.)

On June 28, members of the Orchestra of St. Luke’s will join a hundred and fifty young musicians in a concert at the United Palace Theatre, in Washington Heights, which benefits “El Sistema”-style youth-music programs in New York, New Jersey, and New Orleans. unitedpalace.org.

14 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 30, 2014 ILLUSTRATION BY LUCI GUTIERREZ above beyo!d

Dave Chappelle “It’s about more than just making money,” the comedian said in “Dave Chappelle’s Block Party,” the documentary "ilm, directed by Michel Gondry, that chronicled his free hip-hop concert in Brooklyn in September, 2004. A year later, the Yellow Springs, Ohio, resident lived up to his word with startling audacity, quitting the hit sketch-comedy series he co-created with Neal Brennan, “Chappelle’s Show,” and throwing away a contract reportedly worth more than "ifty million dollars. After a decade, the mercurial satirist is performing in New York again, with a run o# solo shows that started last week. Now he’s joined by Nas (June 23), the Roots (June 24), Busta Rhymes, DJ Premier, and Janelle Monáe (June 25), and Erykah Badu (June 26). (Radio City Music Hall, Sixth Ave. at 50th St. 866-858-0007.)

“Rockaway!” Klaus Biesenbach, the director o% MOMA PS1, is putting Rockaway Beach on the cultural map. After Hurricane Sandy, the silver-haired German bused in Madonna and Michael Stipe to pick up trash in the beach community, where he owns a small house. Last year, he spearheaded the construction o# a geodesic dome for displaying art on the beach. Now he’s helped to organize a free arts festival, featuring installations by Patti Smith, Adrián Villar Rojas, and Janet Cardi##, in celebration o# the reopening o# the beach at Fort Tilden, a former site o# surface-to-air Nike missiles, during the Cold War, and a current favorite o& hipsters and nudists. Opening day, June 29, includes food trucks, historical tours o% Fort Tilden, a baseball clinic, art activities for children, performances by the Rockaway Theatre Company, and a poetry reading by Smith. More events are planned for the summer, and the exhibitions continue through Sept. 1. (momaps1.org/rockaway1.)

Readings and Talks BookCourt Thomas Beller discusses his new book, “J.D. Salinger: The Escape Artist,” with Jonathan Ames and Phillip Lopate. (163 Court St. 718-875-3677. June 23 at 7.)

“American Catch” Paul Greenberg marks the publication o& his new book, “American Catch: The Fight for Our Local Seafood,” with a talk on June 26 at 7, at the New Amsterdam Market, which is situated on the site o# the old Fulton Fish Market and which will be open for a special fund-raising night market, featuring treats from April Bloom"ield, Back Forty, Esca, and other restaurants and purveyors. (South St. between Beekman and Fulton Sts. newam- sterdammarket.org.)

Wordtheatre The Los Angeles-based nonpro"it returns with the actors Dana Delany and Jason Butler Harner reading stories by Andre Dubus III and Elizabeth Strout, both o# whom will be on hand to discuss their work. (NeueHouse, 110 E. 25th St. For tickets and more information, call 323-822-0823, or visit wordtheatre.com. June 30 at 6.)

THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 30, 2014 15 staged, but the moments o" anxiety, discomfort, and pleasure they convey never feel performative. Like Nan Goldin, Davis knows how to both confront and seduce the camera, and her strong persona is inspiring. !RT Through July 3. (ClampArt, 531 W. 25th St. 646-230-0020.)

Nancy Grossman Museums Short List Museums and Libraries Viewers may be more familiar with Metropolitan Museum ward compensating for the hazy SculptureCenter Grossman’s sculptures o" androgy - “Garry Winogrand.” Opens premise: something about erasure nous heads wrapped in leather June 27. “Katrín Sigurdardóttir” and uncertainty. A baleful tone At last year’s Venice Biennale, the masks, but in the early and mid- Museum of Modern Art predominates, notably in a bronze artist disrupted the Icelandic pavilion nineteen-sixties she created poised “Alibis: Sigmar Polke, sculpture by Huma Bhabha o" two assemblages out o% fabric scraps, 1963-2010.” Through Aug. 3. with a raised platform, covered with charred, disembodied feet; silvery, thousands o$ handmade tiles laid wood fragments, and the occasional MOMA PS1 partially e""aced photo-paintings out in ornamental patterns (loosely car part. Gloriously #ierce, these “James Lee Byars: 1/2 an by John Beech; and photogravures based on baroque architecture) that objects chime with other art o" the Autobiography.” Through by Tacita Dean from her “Russian era: Lee Bontecou’s wall reliefs, Sept. 7. extended beyond the building’s Ending” series, which is predicated walls and into the surrounding Jean Tinguely’s contraptions, and Guggenheim Museum upon an old European #ilmmaking the sculptures o% David Smith, to “Under the Same Sun: Art grounds. Imported to Queens and conceit in which two endings were installed inside a cavernous gallery, whom Grossman dedicated a piece from Latin America Today.” shot, an upbeat one for Americans memorializing his death in a car Through Oct. 1. the piece lacks its original force and a downer for the Soviets. What and feels more like a freestanding crash. All made before she turned Whitney Museum of Nam June Paik’s 1971 television cabinet thirty, these works mark a stellar start American Art sculpture than an intervention. Yet #itted with ukiyo-e samurai prints is “Jeff Koons: A Retrospective.” Sigurdardóttir’s intricate #loor—which to the career o" an underappreciated doing here is anyone’s guess, but, American artist. Through July 3. Opens June 27. dovetails formal elegance and con- as outliers go, you could do worse. Brooklyn Museum ceptual rigor—retains a surprising (Rosenfeld, 100 Eleventh Ave., at Through Aug. 1. (Blum, 20 W. 57th 19th St. 212-247-0082.) “Witness: Art and Civil Rights force when you climb the steps and St. 212-244-6055.) in the Sixties.” Through July 6. wander the surface, already scu""ed American Museum of and worn by hundreds o" thousands Elaine Stocki The Canadian photographer makes Natural History o% footsteps. The experience becomes Galleries—Chelsea “Pterosaurs: Flight in the Age a meditation on memory and lost her New York solo début with big, of Dinosaurs.” Through Jan. 4. Jen Davis unframed black-and-white pictures, time. Through July 28. Davis makes her substantial body— Museum of the City of crudely hand-tinted and curling o"" New York pale, pillowy, and often seen naked— the wall, that look like period artifacts. the center o" attention here, lighting “In a World of Their Own: Galleries—Uptown Portraits o" men carousing or posing Coney Island Photographs by it lovingly in patches o$ buttery sun “Traces” awkwardly might have come from Aaron Rose.” Through Aug. 3. and sometimes picturing hersel" with an old boxing gym or a theatrical The powerful works in this eight- a lover. Made over the past eleven artist exhibition go a long way to- agent’s o"#ice. Other images—o" a years, the self-portraits are carefully leering geezer framed by palm trees, three female nudes struggling with a large painting, hands exchanging a slice o$ bologna over a collage o" lunch meat—are comically hallucina- tory. Through June 28. (Erben, 526 3W. 26th St. 212-645-8701.) Galleries—Downtown Hervé Guibert The French writer and photographer became the public face o" AIDS in France before he died, in 1991, at the age o" thirty-six. The pictures here, in classic black-and-white, have the casual intimacy o" diary entries, recording friends and lovers (including Michel Foucault, in a bathrobe), elderly relatives, and Gui- bert’s comfortably chic surroundings (including an elegant writing desk). A self-portrait o" the artist in repose opens this #ine show, and all the work feels personal, even when it is more restrained than revealing, as we witness Guibert re#lecting on (i" not consciously memorializing) his life. Through June 29. (Callicoon, 49 Delancey St. 212-219-0326.)

Walter Robinson Though he’s better known as a shrewd art critic and editor, Robinson has been making skillful #igurative paintings From 1961 to 1963, the photographer Aaron Rose roamed the beach and the boardwalk at Coney Island. Seventy since the eighties, and these new pictures, including this untitled image, are on view for the first time, at the Museum of the City of New York. works are especially #ine. They’re

16 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 30, 2014 drawn from banal images found in Olympia. Through July 17. (Lynch Derrida and Mao. Pierre Buraglio’s clothing catalogues, sometimes just o" Tham, 175 Rivington St. 212-387-8190.) small mixed-media compositions and apparel on a plain background—three Claude Viallat’s hanging dyed ropes folded Lands’ End #lannel shirts are “Supports/Surfaces” are the standouts, but all eleven o" GOINGS ON, ONLINE depicted with forensic detachment— French postwar painting is like Amer- the artists whose work is on view See our Web site for more night- and sometimes o" improbably gleeful ican soccer: it may not be world-class, took big formal risks; there’s hardly life events, including the American models frolicking in casual separates. but it deserves more respect than it a stretched canvas in sight. With so première of a forgotten Cole In one knockout painting, done with gets. This show is dedicated to the many galleries in the grip o" what’s Porter score. Additional dance wide and bold strokes, Robinson Supports/Surfaces movement, which been called “zombie formalism,” performances this week include isolates a reclining woman smiling began in the South o$ France in the young painters should pay attention. Reggie Wilson’s “Moses(es),” in the widely in a giant hat and a bathing seventies; its artists favored unstruc- Through July 20. (Canada, 333 Broome River to River Festival. suit—a mass-market update o$ Manet’s tured abstractions and had a taste for St. 212-925-4631.)

band, an Afrocentric jazz unit that Coleman Hawkins to the free-jazz includes the saxophonist Pee Wee pioneer Cecil Taylor. The drummer Ellis, who put in noted time with will give the run cohesion, making IGHT #FE James Brown and Van Morrison, and room for the special guests on various the Ghanaian percussionist Abass nights. They include the guitarist Dodoo. Now seventy-four years old, Ben Monder, the pianists Orrin Baker may no longer summon up the Evans and David Bryant, and three Rock and Pop White Lung incredible power and velocity that bassists, Reid Anderson (o" the Bad Musicians and night-club proprietors This potent, neurotic punk trio is led made him a legend in the late-sixties Plus) among them. Thursday night lead complicated lives; it’s advisable by the Canadian vocalist and writer Cream era, but his wholly individual is the exception: it features duets to check in advance to con"rm Mish Way, a consummate alum o" approach and unique sound remain between McHenry and Cyrille. engagements the Courtney Love School o" Stage instantly recognizable. (B. B. King (Village Vanguard, 178 Seventh Presence. Generally clad in black Blues Club & Grill, 237 W. 42nd St. Ave. S., at 11th St. 212-255-4037. Beck leather, her blond hair shrouding 212-997-4144. June 25-26.) June 24-29.) How many Becks are there? By his- her face, Way yelps and wails like a torical count, there are at least four. banshee, often crumpling into a ball Kris Davis Midsummer Night Swing There’s the slacker genius, who burst o" emotion on the #loor. She recently A new-jazz pianist and composer The singer Cécile McLorin Salvant, out with “Loser” in the mid-nineties. relocated to Los Angeles, and much unafraid o" sensuous lyricism or backed by Vince Giordano and the There’s the postmodern soul idol, o" the group’s recent album, “Deep serious keyboard explorations, Davis Nighthawks, opens the season o" al- who released “Midnite Vultures” in Fantasy,” was completed while the rest is a part o" many avant-leaning en- fresco dancing on June 24. Ricardo 1999. There’s the aging indie-minded o" the players remained at home in sembles. For her six-day residency Lemvo , who was born in the Congo rocker, who has remained on the Vancouver. But the distance hasn’t di- at the Stone, she calls up a few o" and whose roots stretch back to An- scene with albums such as “Guero” minished their intensity, and they are these crafty bands, some led by others gola, combines the music and styles and “The Information.” And there’s a #inely honed bludgeoning machine. (Ingrid Laubrock’s Anti-House, the o* his birthplace and his ancestry the heartfelt, Nick Drake-style (June 25, at Saint Vitus, 1120 Man- Kermit Driscoll trio, Tom Rainey’s with those o" Cuba and beyond. On troubadour, who recorded mournful hattan Ave., Brooklyn, saintvitusbar. Obbligato ) and some o" which are June 25, he and his band, Makina ballads on albums such as “Sea com; June 26, at the Mercury Lounge, coöperative units ( Infrasound, Par- Loca , lead a night o" soukous, semba, Change” and his latest, “Morning 217 E. Houston St. 212-260-4700.) adoxical Frog, Lark, Death Rattle ). kizomba, and Cuban son , assisted Phase.” All four Becks should be Davis gives hersel" the spotlight, by the salsa legend Jimmy Bosch . present this week, when he’s at the Wreckless Eric too—the run includes a solo set and June 26: The Loser’s Lounge pays Hammerstein Ballroom, on June 30 In 1977, the same year the Sex a turn with her Capricorn Climber tribute to ABBA. June 27: The hot (Manhattan Center, 311 W. 34th St. Pistols released “Never Mind the band. (Ave. C at 2nd St. thestonenyc. jazz o" the Hot Sardines. June 28: 800-745-3000), and at Central Park Bol locks . . .,” the English label Sti"" com. June 24-29.) the Band Courtbouillon, featuring Summerstage, on July 1 (Rumsey Records, whose roster sported Ian the accordionist and singer Wayne Play#ield, Central Park, mid-Park Dury, Elvis Costello, and Nick Lowe, Azar Lawrence Toups, Steve Riley (o" the Mamou at 69th St. 800-745-3000). released a sampler that included Time hasn’t quite stood still for the Playboys), and Wilson Savoy (from Wreckless Eric’s “(I’d Go the) Whole saxophonist, but the extended, fer- the Pine Lea$ Boys), makes its New Jello Biafra and the Wide World.” The song became a cult vently voiced John Coltrane-infused York City début. July 1: A night Guantanamo School of favorite, and he recorded regularly solos that garnered Lawrence attention o" merengue with Milly Quezada. Medicine but stayed mostly under the radar, back in the seventies are echoed on (Damrosch Park, Lincoln Center. Six years ago, Biafra, the ex-Dead with the exception o" a brie" spike in “The Seeker,” a newly released album midsummernightswing.org. Through Kennedys front man, record-label attention in 2006, when Will Ferrell that captures particularly impassioned July 12.) owner, Tipper Gore antagonist, did a lovely, heartbreaking version o" live performances from three years spoken-word artist, Green Party that début tune in the #ilm “Stranger ago. Though any number o" contem- “Shades of Jazz: Keith activist, and onetime San Francisco Than Fiction.” This show is part o" a porary saxophone stylists tra"#ic in Jarrett’s Music” mayoral candidate, started this group. sixtieth-birthday tour for the lovably the Coltrane idiom, he is closer to For the better part o* his career, Last year, the band released its crusty old punk. He’ll be appearing the source than most, having honed Jarrett has focussed on interpreting second full-length album, “White solo, employing some low-grade loops his prodigious chops in the bands standards with his trio and spinning People and the Damage Done,” an and electronics, and highlighting o" the key Trane associates McCoy spontaneous improvisations in his exhilarating return to the musical songs from his albums “Le Beat Tyner and Elvin Jones. (Dizzy’s Club solo recitals, and the quality o* his concision and high energy o" punk’s Group Electrique” and “The Donovan Coca-Cola, Broadway at 60th St., earlier compositions has often been heyday. While the new material lacks o* Trash.” (Mercury Lounge, 217 212-258-9595. June 26-29.) overlooked. Championing Jarrett as the sardonic bite that marked such E. Houston St. 212-260-4700. June 25.) a tunesmith, this intriguing project Dead Kennedys songs as “Holiday Bill McHenry brings together the saxophonist Greg in Cambodia” and “California Über The vigorous, forward-thinking tenor Osby, the bassist Ben Allison, and Alles,” Biafra’s latest band compel- Jazz and Standards saxophonist takes top billing, but the drummer Matt Wilson, as well lingly matches the singer’s caustic Ginger Baker he’s joined by a frequent partner, as two keyboardists: Dan Tepfer, insights and spastic, vibrato-laden Every crevice in Baker’s battered face the acclaimed poly-stylistic drummer on the acoustic piano, and James delivery with taut, punchy ri""s. could probably tell ten thousand not Andrew Cyrille, throughout this week- Weidman, on the electric piano, an With the Detroit hardcore pioneers very pretty stories, but somehow the long run featuring shifting ensembles. instrument that Jarrett—an outspoken Negative Approach opening. brilliant drummer is still with us. Over the course o" a six-decade career, jazz Luddite—hasn’t laid a #inger on in (Highline Ballroom, 431 W. 16th His #irst album in sixteen years, the Cyrille has collaborated with giants forty years. (Iridium, 1650 Broadway, St. 212-414-5994. June 27.) bracing “Why?,” features his current ranging from the mainstream titan at 51st St. 212-582-2121. June 29.)

THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 30, 2014 17

THE TALK OF THE TOWN

COMMENT CHOICES AT THE TOP

resident Obama won the White House in part by prom- As dramatic as the insurgents’ approach has been, it is not Pising to end the war in Iraq, and since then he placed his terribly surprising. They have fed on the deep discontent that faith in Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to help him do so. It prevails across the Sunni heartland, provoked and sustained was Maliki who would hold together the state that the by Maliki. Since the last American forces departed, he has Americans had helped build. Obama had correctly judged embarked on a stridently sectarian project aimed at margin - the war in Iraq to be a catastrophe, but placing his confidence alizing the Sunni minority. He has presided over the arrest in Maliki required no small exertion of faith. Maliki’s past, of his Sunni political opponents, jailed thousands of Sunni and his present, often raised doubts about his inclination to men, and excluded the Sunni population from any meaning- reach beyond his own community, the Shiites—the country’s ful role in government. The Sunni Finance Minister, Rafe long-suppressed majority—and mend relations with the al-Essawi, fled the capital; the Sunni Vice-President, Tariq country’s other main groups, the Sunnis and the Kurds. In al-Hashemi, fled the country and faces a death sentence if early 2009, a group of American diplomats in Iraq warned he returns. When the Sunnis rose up in anger, as they did in the White House that it ran the risk of creating a dicta- Falluja and elsewhere, Maliki ordered the Army to shell ci - tor. They were largely ignored, and when Maliki won reëlec- vilian areas and detain more Sunni men. Ever since the fall tion a year later Obama gave him his full support. In 2011, of Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s Sunnis have been faced with the after the collapse of halfhearted discussions about keeping choice of pledging their allegiance to the Shiite-led govern- some U.S. forces in Iraq, the last American soldiers left the ment in Baghdad or to the armed groups within their own country. Just a few months ago, Maliki community. Ordinary Sunnis may was feeling so proudly independent find the insurgents’ methods bar- that he wrote in an e-mail, “I am the baric—during the occupation, Sunni owner of the idea of withdrawing the leaders helped the Americans crush U.S. troops.” Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia—but the Then, in recent days, Sunni mili- relentless sectarianism of the govern- tants took over Mosul, Iraq’s sec- ment in Baghdad has confirmed for ond-largest city, and a string of towns many of them that they have no place along the Tigris River. The Iraqi Army, in Maliki’s Iraq. The Kurds in the trained and equipped at enormous north of Iraq have pulled away from American expense, melted before the the rest of the country; as the conflict rebel advance; the Sunni insurgents, between Sunnis and Shiites becomes led by a vanguard called the Islamic an explicit land war, Iraq threatens to State in Iraq and al-Sham ( ISIS ), have break apart. moved to within forty miles of the cap- Last week, responding to pleas ital, threatening to reignite the sectar- from Maliki’s government, President ian war that inflamed the country Obama announced that he would during the American occupation. In a deploy as many as three hundred mil - strange and unpredictable way, the cri- itary advisers to Iraq, step up intel- sis has brought President Obama and ligence gathering, and, if he deems

ILLUSTRATIONS!BY!TOM!BACHTELL Maliki together again. it necessary, carry out air strikes on

THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 30, 2014 19 insurgents in both Iraq and Syria. The President intended the country back together. The President didn’t say it, but he to boost the Iraqi Army’s morale and, more broadly, to de- almost certainly wants Maliki to step down, and American grade the terrorist threat that is growing in the vast un- diplomats in Baghdad appear to have begun signalling such governed area along the border between Syria and Iraq. a desire to other Iraqi leaders. This will be no easy thing. Some of the measures announced last week were similar, Maliki, whose self-regard has ballooned during his eight if scaled back, versions of those discussed by Obama and years in o'ce, will very likely try to prevent his Shiite com - Maliki in 2011; this time, the objections on both sides petitors from marshalling the support they need to unseat fell away. him. (As long as they can’t, he will remain in the job.) And Some leaders in both countries have said that the pres- he has very likely appealed to his backers in Iran, who have ence of even a small number of American troops, acting assisted him in his sectarian project. Removing Maliki in non-combat roles, would help stabilize not just the mil- would deal the Iranians a blow as well. itary but Iraq as a whole, in part by helping to blunt the In 2003, when American troops first rolled into Bagh- country’s sectarian dynamics. Whether or not this proves dad, they destroyed the Iraqi state and its institutions; for true, the actions that the President ordered will probably the next eight and a half years they tried to build something not prove decisive. Administration o'cials said that they to replace it. The truth is that the political system imposed were shocked not by the strength of ISIS , a group they have on the Iraqis has never worked very well without substan- been tracking, but by the woeful performance of the Iraqi tial U.S. involvement; since the Americans left, it hasn’t security forces. For the foreseeable future, the Iraqi Army is worked at all. American diplomats and military advisers unlikely to be capable of retaking many of the areas lost to can’t save Iraq and they can’t govern it, but the decision by the militants. President Obama to return to Iraq amounts to a recognition In any case, the real questions are political, and they cen - that there was work left unfinished. It’s likely to be a long ter on Maliki. Obama suggested that his o4er of help would and di'cult job. be determined by the progress the Iraqis make in knitting —Dexter Filkins

THE BEAUTIFUL GAME “Bogus article,” the novelist and act as though you are in pain when POOR, POOR PITIFUL YOU football fan Teju Cole tweeted. “Same you are not. Maybe there are places tedious shit every World Cup. . . . Amer- where toughness is not a virtue and icans are more honest than greasy for- lying is not a vice, but, wherever you eigners.” Sam Borden, the reporter are, being a wuss is being a wuss. In an who’d written the story, asked Cole for early match between Germany and some clarification, and Cole responded, Portugal, the hand of Pepe, a Portu- “Like the politician who says his only guese defender, brushed the face of an or many Americans, the World weakness is that he’s a workaholic, the opponent, Thomas Müller, and Müller FCup is a little like a family Thanks- piece was disingenuously braggy about went down as though he had been giving: a feast of reënacted arguments the USA.” stabbed in the jaw. Pepe, himself an in- that lie dormant the rest of the year. When you love something, you famous flopper, ran back to Müller and Nothing seems to annoy interna- make allowances. Many hockey fans, began to scold him. Müller, perceiving tional fans of the futebol more than enthralled by toughness (hockey players a head butt, sprang to his feet, miracu- Americans’ objections to the players’ don’t even acknowledge real injuries, lously healed. Pepe, who had done little widespread practice of diving, flop- much less dramatize fake ones), con- more than call out a crybaby, got a red ping, and/or rolling around on the grass tort themselves to justify bare-knuckled card (meaning he was ejected from that in feigned agony, as though sledge- fistfights. Baseball fans, sensitive about game and the next), and the commen- hammered in the shin rather than the glacial pace of their game, wax on tators deplored his loss of composure. hardly nicked. When you call attention about the majesty of a sport without a Müller, meanwhile, got no foul and to the phenomenon—what FIFA , the clock. And so, when the subject of div- ended the game with three goals: a sport’s governing body, euphemisti- ing comes up, many soccer fans ratio- hero. Ugh. cally calls “simulation”—you may be nalize it. They cite the universality of A few years ago, Daryl Rosenbaum, accused of tra'cking in American ex- gamesmanship and the prevalence of a doctor and an associate professor of ceptionalism or an outdated idea of floppers in other sports (Exhibit A: medicine at Wake Forest, and a soccer masculinity. Early in the World Cup, Dwyane Wade, in the N.B.A. finals, enthusiast taken aback by the preva- which runs for the next three weeks, earlier this month), or else they find a lence of embellishment, conducted a the Times had a page-one story about way to enjoy the fakery (zesty subplots!) study of injury simulation in men’s in- how the United States players and and see it as necessary (the refs would ternational soccer. He examined the coaches were concerned that they not see the fouls if the players didn’t women’s game the following year and weren’t adept or eager enough at faking oversell them). found that there were twice as many ap- injury to get a square deal from the ref- Still, it can be galling to watch grown parent injuries among the men and that erees. Americans, the piece said, are men pretend to be hurt. It’s one thing twice as many of the women’s injuries raised to play fair. to embellish a penalty, and another to seemed to be real. Maybe this means

20 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 30, 2014 that men are four times more likely to Her home, Haven House, was once a pil - review to T. S. Eliot, she insisted on deliv - fake being hurt. grims’ hostel. “I saw it in Country Life ,” ering the volume to him herself. “Awful Are men wimps? “There’s more she recalled. “When we arrived, we were cheek!” she recalled. “Of course, all I saw money in men’s soccer, and it’s been greeted by a manservant in a white jacket, were his cats.” around a lot longer,” Rosenbaum said who led us to a strange old lady sitting in Gardam gave up work to raise three last week. “Multiply more money by a chair in front of a fire.” A character in children—Tim, Kitty, and Tom—in what more time, and you get more cynical one of Gardam’s short stories thinks that she has called a “monster of a beat-up behavior. You have a set of incentives “English country life is more like Che- house” in the London suburb of Wimble - specific to the demonstration of an in- khov than ‘The Archers’ or Thomas don. She channelled her creativity into jury: the red card and the yellow card, Hardy or even the Updike ethic with becoming the ideal mother. “I gave my- which are more ‘valuable’ than most which it is sometimes compared.” In her self to my children,” she said, pouring penalties in other sports.” Players now England, manners mask seismic desires. white wine. “It happens to some women.” capitalize on those incentives—in this She invited the neighborhood busybod- case, by pretending to be hurt. ies to tea. She fed the hordes. “I did all the There’s a word for faking it in pur- right things, because I wanted my chil- suit of what doctors call “secondary dren to have friends,” she said. The day gain”: malingering. Though its lineage that Tom went to school, she marched is not entirely ignoble (notable malin- upstairs, sat down at her desk, and began gerers include King David, Odysseus, to write. “I ought to tell you at the begin- and Yossarian), malingering can sub- ning,” the opening line of her first novel ject one, in the military, to a court-mar- reads, “that I am not quite normal.” tial and, in civilian life, to shame among David brought “Filth”—an acronym one’s peers. Connivance puts it a step for “Failed in London Try Hong Kong,” beyond hypochondria. Good sense dis- and the nickname of Sir Edward Feath - tinguishes it from Munchausen syn- ers, the book’s main character—to Jane drome. Still, the world is inconsistent after hearing it at lunch in the Inner Tem- in its indulgence of self-pity. French ple. She remains interested in the profes- rail workers, acclaimed Norwegian sions. She is intrigued by “coelacanths”— novelists, American whiplash su'erers: throwbacks, anachronisms, fish out of the calls often go their way when they time. Her attitude is less reactionary than roll around on the grass. There’s some Jane Gardam coolly amused. In “Lunch with Ruth irony in the fact that the United States, Sykes,” the narrator’s daughter—“fast car, nation of litigants and spoiled chil - There is longing in the umbrella stand doctor’s bag slung in the back, stetho - dren, is the country with the soccer and violence in the string of pearls. In ad - scope, white coat. So quick on the tele- players who supposedly flop the least. dition to having published twelve novels phone”—could chip a nail on herself. Maybe it’s all a matter of misaligned and eight books of short stories—Europa “My daughter used to say, ‘You don’t re- incentives. As Rosenbaum said, “It’s Editions just released “The Stories,” a ally like young women, do you?,’ and I was not often that I’ve had to fill out a dis - new collection—Gardam is the author of very surprised,” Gardam recalled. “But, I ability claim for someone who loves what must be contemporary literature’s suppose—frightening daughters.” (Gar- their job.” most devastating dedication. “Old Filth,” dam’s daughter, Catharine Nicholson, an —Nick Paumgarten her 2004 novel about the catastrophic accomplished botanical artist, died of childhood and fraught dotage of a grand breast cancer in 2011.) THE LITERARY LIFE old expatriate judge, begins, “To Raj Or - “Come on, let’s have lunch.” Gardam, RETROSPECTIVE phans and their parents.” Before the first who was wearing blue button earrings page, a reader might be in tears. and a print dress, led the way inside. Her Gardam’s late husband, David, was a house, like her fiction, is a repository of distinguished barrister. The couple met in fine, unfashionable things. Asparagus London, just after the war. Jane had won waited on an electric warmer, accompa - a scholarship to the University of London nied by a tureen of hollandaise. There was to study literature; David had recently brown bread and poached shrimp. Gar- garden in Kent—willows, bu' joined the bar. “There was no coal in En - dam spoke about L. A. G. Strong, a for- A roses, bumblebees on a salted wind. gland, and there was very little food, but gotten critic and early mentor, who ad- Next door, a pair of builders stood on a it was extraordinary,” she said. “I couldn’t monished students, as she recalls in the sca'old, hammers prattling. “Sandwich is get over the fact that we’d won, I was so introduction to “The Stories,” to “write getting rather smart,” the writer Jane sure we’d be overrun by Germans, that it about everything—even linoleum.” She Gardam said, setting a ramekin of potato seemed to me romantically wonderful said, “If I’ve got one thing that I really be- chips on an iron table. “It’s disappointing.” that we were alive.” For a while, Jane lieve about fiction and life, it’s that there Gardam, who was born in Yorkshire in worked as an editor at a magazine called are no minor characters.” 1928, has lived in Sandwich since 1987. Time & Tide . When it assigned a book As a nomenclator, Gardam’s only

THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 30, 2014 21 rivals are Dickens and Amis. (One of her Natural History, sees roaches di'erently. a plastic cockroach, which, though obvi- most memorable characters is named “There’s this notion that a lot of peo- ously fake, still struck a visitor as repulsive. Terry Veneering.) In “The Tribute,” a ple have that there are good living things Someone else had brought along two woman phones an old friend to tell her and bad living things,” he said. “But they vials of ground-up leeches. that “poor darling Denchie,” a nanny all just evolved on this planet, like every- “Cockroaches are cool,” Mark Siddall, who’d worked for both of their families, thing else.” Well, not exactly like every- a principal investigator at the institute, has died. thing else. “If you cut cockroaches’ heads said. “They’re one of the very first exam - “She was wonderful in the War,” one o', they still walk around for a long time, ples of powered flight.” of the women says. functioning O.K., except that they don’t Amato explained that the goal of the “Wonderful means old,” the other have any way to eat,” Amato observed. living-fossil project is to press back as replies. Cockroaches are survivors. They, or far as possible into evolutionary history. Marvellous, then. After cheese and their roachlike ancestors, have been “It really is like looking backward in a strawberry tart—“It’s only Marks & around since the Carboniferous period, time,” he said. Spencer”—Gardam called a taxi service which means that they’ve crawled Of course, just because cockroaches that she often uses to take her visitor to through not just one or two but three (or bedbugs) appear unchanged doesn’t the station. The driver arrived too soon. major mass extinctions. For the past two mean that they are. “They’ve looked His name was Mr. Bootie. hundred million years, the cockroach the same and have been successful, —Lauren Collins body plan has remained essentially un - but we know they’ve been evolving,” changed. This means that the roaches Amato said. ICK DEPT. that scurried under the dinosaurs of The Sackler Institute is situated in OLD BUGS Mongolia looked pretty much the same the museum’s Starr Building, which oc- as the ones now scurrying under the cupies an internal courtyard and is in- dumpsters of Manhattan. visible from the street. Sequencing the A couple of years ago, Amato and his cockroach genome is one of the more colleagues at the Sackler Institute set out labor-intensive tasks that the museum’s to sequence the genome of the American geneticists have taken on—the genome cockroach, Periplaneta americana . The has turned out to be nearly twice as long lot of people are grossed out by work is part of a larger project to explore as researchers had expected—but it is by A cockroaches. They think they’re the genetics of long-lived lineages, or so- no means the weirdest. Once, the author dirty and disgusting, and if they see one called “living fossils.” (Other living fossils Peter Matthiessen, who died this past scuttling across the floor they reach for whose genomes the team is working on April, sent Amato some odd-looking a can of Raid, or maybe they roll up a are the bedbug, Cimex lectularius , and the hairs from Nepal. magazine and whack it, so that its in- European leech, Hirudo medicinalis .) The “He was entirely certain that they were nards spill out through its abdomen. first of these genomes is about to be pub - yeti samples,” Amato recalled. “I actually George Amato, the director of the lished, and so the other day Amato and a had to sign this letter of agreement with Sackler Institute for Comparative Ge- few of his colleagues gathered to chat the government of Nepal saying that we nomics, at the American Museum of about the project. Someone had brought wouldn’t announce what we found.” Genetic analysis showed that the yeti hairs had, disappointingly, belonged to a horse. Another time, the U.S. government sent him some black-market pills ru - mored to be made from human fetuses. Instead of fetuses, they contained tissue from a species of rare Mongolian gazelle. “If Jesus were alive today, we could tell you who his father was,” Siddall said. “Oh, jeez, Mark,” Amato said. Amato and Siddall o'ered to show a visitor some of the institute’s roaches. There were several tanks’ worth, sitting in a hallway. One tank was occupied by Madagascar hissing cockroaches, which are even larger than American cock - roaches and, as their name suggests, pro- duce a curious hissing sound. The Mad- agascar cockroaches seemed right at home on the Upper West Side. “It’s hard to draw a simple scientific “Yes, Peters, it is just legalese. It’s all just legalese. We’re a law firm.” term around this attribute, but cock- roaches are ubiquitous,” Amato said. her hands folded on her knees. Menzel, in hire you today.’ ” The friend introduced “They can live in all sorts of di0erent a loose-fitting blouse, sat on the rug, bare- her to the urbanist William H. Whyte, temperatures, di0erent environments.” foot. “I’m a floor person,” she said. who became her mentor. In the eighties, Siddall noted that the roaches New In an early draft, Yorkey said, Eliz- she oversaw the design of Battery Park Yorkers encounter are often German abeth was a microeconomist, but he City. As planning czar, she rezoned forty cockroaches— Blattella germanica — changed course after coming across an ar- per cent of the city’s neighborhoods. rather than American ones. The German ticle about Burden. For research, he read It had been a big week in urban- cockroach is thought to have originated Jane Jacobs and studied the Atlantic planning news: Mayor de Blasio had in Southeast Asia. In Germany, it is Yards, one of the high-end urban-renewal just announced an $8.2-billion a0ord- known as the Russian cockroach. The projects that defined the Bloom berg era. able-housing program, and a controver- American cockroach, meanwhile, is na - Yorkey also met with Burden’s former tive to Africa, and is sometimes referred D.C. counterpart, Harriet Tregoning. But to as the Bombay canary. This cosmopol- calls to 22 Reade Street went unanswered. itanism is presumably one reason that the “My secretary at one point said, ‘Some - cockroach lineage has endured, and that body wants to write a musical about city it is likely to keep on doing so long after planning,’ ” Burden recalled. “I said, ‘That the museum, New York, and all its has to be a prank call.’ ” Raid-toting inhabitants are gone. Nevertheless, Burden was thrilled at —Elizabeth Kolbert seeing her job onstage. “They got every - thing right,” she said. “Not only how this CHARACTER STUDY city planner—Idina’s character—shaped BUILDING BLOCKS these very large plans for very large devel- opments but the process of deciding what goes there. Does it have a0ordable hous- ing? How do you treat developers? The politics of it: who you alienate and who you have to win over.” Her favorite line from the show: “City planners don’t have ne night this spring, Amanda Bur- fans.” “Developers hate me,” she said. Idina Menzel and Amanda Burden O den went to see the new Broadway “They think I’m a witch.” musical “If/Then.” She had recently re- Like Elizabeth, Burden might have sial plan to revamp the New York Pub- turned from a “psychic healing” retreat in easily taken a di0erent path. Her father lic Library’s central building had been Arizona, having spent twelve years as was the Standard Oil heir Stanley G. scrapped. Burden dismissed the idea that Mayor Bloomberg’s director of city plan- Mortimer, Jr., and her mother was the these developments signalled a Bloom - ning. One of Bloomberg’s aides had rec- socialite Babe Paley, one of Truman berg backlash. “It’s a continuum, if you ommended “If/Then,” which stars Idina Capote’s “swans”; her stepfather was Wil - look carefully,” she said, adding, of de Bla - Menzel (you have heard her sing “Let It liam S. Paley, the founder of CBS. In her sio, “He’s much more pro-development Go”) as an urban planner named Eliza- youth, Burden was a celebrated débu- than I am. He wants more big towers.” beth. After a chance moment in a park, tante, whom Halston once called “the These days, she is working with an ini- her life takes two divergent paths: In one, most beautiful girl going.” “You can look tiative to spread the Bloomberg ethos, she calls herself Liz, marries an Army re- at my past life and think I was destined to which she describes as “making urban life servist, and has two kids. In the other, go shopping,” Burden said. Her if/then better,” to cities around the world. (Mex- she’s Beth, a career woman who becomes moment came in 1976, after earning a ico City is on the list.) New York City’s chief planner. Burden degree in environmental science and ani - She says she sees her imprint every- trembled in her seat. “Oh, my God,” she mal behavior at Sarah Lawrence. “I had where in New York: “I’m very emotional recalled thinking. “I think that’s me!” two young kids, I was divorced”—from about every block.” She added, “A lot of As it turns out, it was. “We wanted a Carter Burden, a descendant of Cornelius planners don’t get out in the neighbor- profession that a dynamic, intelligent, Vanderbilt—“and I was thinking, Great, hoods. They do their plans, put them on glamorous, but also very detail-oriented I can study with Jane Goodall in Africa. a shelf.” and somewhat wonky woman would Well, of course, my former husband said, “It really is about the head and the have,” Brian Yorkey, who wrote the book ‘You’re not going to Africa. You’re not heart,” Yorkey said. “It’s about the aes- and the lyrics, said the other day. Burden going anywhere.’ ” The day she graduated, thetics and also about the function of it. was back at the theatre visiting Menzel she ran into a high-school acquaintance Most of us are good at one thing and not and Yorkey, whom she had met after see - in Grand Army Plaza. “I said, ‘I don’t the other.” ing the show. (“It was like Madonna know what I’m doing.’ And he said, “And the fear of change,” Burden coming,” Menzel, who was nominated ‘What can you do?’ And I said, a little bit added. “It’s always, like: No, no, no, no, for a Tony for her role, said.) Burden sat joking, ‘Well, I can take quantitative anal - no, no, maybe. Maybe, maybe, maybe, on a sofa in Menzel’s dressing room, yses of behavior,’ thinking he’d say, ‘Oh, maybe, maybe, if.” wearing an all-black ensemble and heels, great.’ But he said, ‘Come with me. We’ll —Michael Schulman

THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 30, 2014 23 were as intimate as pillow talk—mur- ANNALS OF MUSIC muring and sighing against an almost silent background—but the two singers stood separated by the d.j. booth, un til SHY AND MIGHTY Smith’s beats launched them into a dance routine as sharply etched as a tango. Col- A band of introverted Brits finds unlikely fame. ored lights pulsed against the walls and the low ceiling as Madley Croft, in a BY JOHN COLAPINTO black blazer, leggings, and boots, strode across the stage. Sim, swaying his bass in n late March, the xx, a band that ordi- geometric cut that fell over one eye; the the air, faced o& with her, in a panto- I narily appears at ten-thousand-seat bassist and singer Oliver Sim, a tall man mime of confrontation and retreat that arenas, played a ten-night “residency” at with a blond Tintin forelock; and the could have been a lovers’ quarrel or a the Park Avenue Armory, performing for boyish-looking d.j./drummer Jamie xx taunting seduction. just a few dozen people at a time. Open (né Smith), who stood behind a phalanx The mood of almost uncomfortable to the public for fifty-five dollars a ticket, of samplers, keyboards, and percussion intimacy seemed to prevent performers the shows also drew the musicians Be- instruments. and audience from acknowledging one yoncé, Jay Z, and Madonna, as well as the For fifty minutes, the xx played a re- another; the band didn’t speak a word filmmakers Wes Anderson and Noah strained, audaciously spare version of between songs, and the spectators didn’t

Jamie xx, Romy Madley Croft, and Oliver Sim. Madley Croft and Sim started their group, the xx, as high-school friends.

Baumbach. After assembling in a win- indie rock with a pronounced dance-mu- applaud. The mood persisted even when, dowless storage area deep within the Ar- sic edge. Picking out single-note ri&s halfway through the show, Madley mory, a former military headquarters on on a chiming Les Paul, Madley Croft Croft sang, “Can I make it better / with the Upper East Side, ticket-holders were sang yearning lyrics in a breathy whisper the lights turned on?,” and the fabric led through tunnels to a small, square (“You don’t move slow / taking steps walls dropped away, revealing the Ar- room, built around a shallow pit where in my direction”) while Sim, plucking mory’s vast drill hall, an acre of stone and three unsmiling figures stood in near widely spaced bass notes, answered in arching steel struts. Finally, in the last darkness: the guitarist and singer Romy a velvety baritone (“You say I’m fool- song, she crooned, “Did I hold you too Madley Croft, with dyed black hair in a ish / for pushing this aside”). The songs tight? / Did I not let enough light in?”

24 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 30, 2014 PHOTOGRAPH BY PARI DUKOVIC The room went completely dark, and ing they had to hold onto those limita- tablature o+ the Internet. Inspired by the when the lights came up, the audience, tions. The third is about cracking them punkish band the Distillers, she played as if startled out of a daze, broke into open. Making them do things they fear.” power chords with heavy distortion and loud applause. After one performance, sang like Brody Dalle, the raspy-voiced Kanye West told the band that it had re- hree days after the last Armory per- front woman. “I did it for about a day,” she minded him of Steve Jobs, who “took Tformance, the xx were in Athens, says, “and then realized I can’t sing like something as big as the computer and Georgia, to play at a thousand-seat the- this. I’m not Kurt Cobain.” Instead, she put it in a cell phone.” atre. I met with Madley Croft a few developed her soft contralto, and began The members of the xx were barely out hours before the show. A strikingly pale plucking single notes to double the mel - of their teens when, in 2009, they released woman of twenty-four with a quiet, ody of her singing—the roots of the un- their first album, “xx,” a collection of slightly lisping voice, she was dressed all embellished guitar patterns that are an xx muted love laments written mostly in in black: T-shirt, tight jeans, and round- signature. She recorded rudimentary their childhood bedrooms. For a genera - toed boots. She looked su0ciently alien cover songs on her computer. “I would tion reared on the calculated bombast of under the bright Southern sun that she send them to a couple of friends, but very Lady Gaga and Katy Perry, the album was stopped by a young man who wanted much over e-mail, and not in person, and seemed like a refreshingly honest account to photograph her. She blushed and I was very private about it,” she says. of first love, and the band itself, appeal- stammered, “Uh, oh—um, O.K.,” then Among those she confided in was Sim, ingly shy Britons, like a relief from exhibi- stood sti1y as he took two shots. her closest friend since nursery school. tionism and boastfulness. The album, re- The band’s members, all similarly di0- “Our parents were friends and kind of leased by a small label called Young Turks, dent, resist defining themselves as rock pushed us together,” Madley Croft says. sold more than a million copies and won stars—or defining themselves at all. Mad- “There’s a lot of funny photos of us. We the Mercury Prize, the most prestigious ley Croft grew up in the London suburb of look like twins.” (The two retain a frater - award in the U.K.’s pop-music industry. Putney, the only child of an art-teacher nal relationship. Before a recent show in For their second album, “Coexist,” mother and a father who worked in a li- Memphis, Madley Croft scolded him for the band members—after two years of brary. “I was a very shy kid and really into eating fried alligator, which had made non-stop touring—sequestered them- art,” she says. When she was eleven, her him sick on an earlier swing through the selves for six months in a makeshift re- mother died, of a brain hemorrhage, and South.) Despite their closeness, neither cording studio in a candlelit London she was sent to live with her aunt and uncle had known, at fourteen, that the other was attic draped with black velvet. The new and their daughter. “My life changed—just secretly playing music. “It was this really album was another collection of plain- click —overnight,” she says. “I grew up a funny moment,” Madley Croft told me. “I tive ballads, but the band, praised for its huge amount in, like, thirty seconds.” She said, ‘You sing.’ He said, ‘No, you sing.’ And spare style, reduced its arrangements al- and her cousin, Lotte Je+s, became close, so we sang together.” most to nothing; some verses were just a but they rarely spoke of her mother’s death. Sim, a rawboned twenty-five-year-old, single voice over the distant whistle of “She dealt with it in the way that she seems is the most extroverted member of the one of Smith’s samplers. Released in to deal with everything, which is very band. (During a post-show tour of a September, 2012, the album débuted at inter nally and very quietly,” Je+s, now an historic mansion in Marfa, Texas, he No. 1 on the U.K. charts, but failed to editor at the Evening Standard Magazine , bounded o+, margarita in hand, to sneak generate the criti cal acclaim of the first says. “She was just very worried about how into closed-o+ rooms, and emerged from album. Some complained that it showed everybody else was doing. I never saw her one joking about interrupting a pair of little musical advance over “xx” and cry. Not once.” lovers.) Yet he is also the most guarded su+ered from an airless mood and fussy Madley Croft’s father died, apparently about his early life, which was scarred by production—flaws that the band reluc - of complications from alcoholism, soon family dysfunction that he declines to dis - tantly acknowledges. after the release of “xx.” Another cousin, cuss. In an interview to promote the sec- Hence the decision, this spring, to cre- to whom she was also close, died of a ond album, he said, “If you took anyone ate their third album on the road. After brain tumor. But Madley Croft rejects o+ the street and asked them to share as the residency at the Armory, the band set the idea that these hardships help explain much as we get asked to share, they’d say out to play a string of small venues in the band’s moody aesthetic. “I’m happy— no. I don’t think that’s abnormal.” the Southern United States, writing and despite things that might have happened He grew up in a council flat in South performing new songs almost nightly. in my life,” she says. “The melancholy in London, with his mother, a social worker, The idea originated with Caius Pawson, our music has never been related to any and his father, who worked for a hep- a twenty-eight-year-old Londoner who of the deaths. If anything, it’s just that I atitis C charity. He listened to his par- manages the band, owns its record label, quite like sad songs.” ents’ music (Talking Heads, the White and acts as a kind of creative facilitator. When her father had played records of Stripes) and to his older sister’s commer- “The sound, the songs, everything, ex- sixties-era bands, she preferred the gloom cial R. & B. (Aaliyah, En Vogue, Ginu- isted before me,” Pawson told me. “My of the Velvet Underground to the Beatles, wine). Like Madley Croft, he resists input is in the process. How do they get whom she has never felt inclined to listen speculating on the origins of the melan- to writing that song?” He explained, “The to closely. (“I feel like it’s not O.K. to say choly in the xx’s songs. “I suppose I’ve first album came out of their limitations. that,” she told me, laughing.) At fourteen, never really tried to analyze it too much,” Their second LP was about them think- she took up guitar, teaching herself with he says. “But I do remember sharing

THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 30, 2014 25 music with my mom the first time and it?” Another defining aspect of the xx’s I’d be up front, miming to Romy, ‘Sing her asking if I was all right.” He laughed. music—the tamped-down eroticism of louder,’ or ‘Enunciate more.’ ” Sim told “I said, ‘I’m O.K.—don’t worry.’ ” the singers’ entwined voices—was also un - me that being onstage was unpleasant. Their earliest collaborations were intended, since both are gay. “It sounds like “Really painful,” he said. “All the other studiedly jokey cover tunes. “God forbid we’re addressing each other, but we’re not,” bands would say, ‘Uh, you’re all right. we would seem like we were taking our- Madley Croft says. “We’re really singing Might be a good idea if you got a drum- selves very seriously,” he says. Wham’s past each other.” The romantic yearning, mer .’ ” Neither Sim nor Madley Croft can “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” was however, was real enough—even if the explain what made them endure the ter- an early staple. (“We took it to a weird scenarios in their songs were, at least on rors of performing. “I guess, deep down, place,” Madley Croft says. “I’ll give us the first album, mostly imagined. One somewhere, hidden underneath all of our that.”) They soon began writing songs, early song, “Crystalised,” was built from a nerves, there was a desire to be onstage,” but, too shy to work in the same room, passage that Sim wrote as he fantasized Madley Croft says. “But it’s quite odd. they sketched ideas separately and shared about what an a+air might be like. “I We definitely didn’t look like we wanted them on iChat, assembling songs like hadn’t really had any relationships to be to be doing it.” collages. They refrained from asking working o+,” he told me. “But I had a huge Bands were starting to find popular- about the meaning of lyrics. “I wouldn’t interest in life, and looking at other peo - ity on the Internet—the British singer be sending him an e-mail back asking, ple’s relationships around me.” He sent a Lily Allen had built a large following ‘What exactly is that about?’ ” Madley snippet—“You applied the pressure / to through her MySpace page—and so the Croft told me. “It’s unsaid, which is quite keep me crystalised”—to Madley Croft, members of the xx posted their songs on- nice.” They worked in their bedrooms who wrote an answering verse, which be- line. “There was no interest in us,” Sim late at night, keeping their voices down gins, “I’ll forgive and forget / Before I’m says. “None at all. We weren’t being writ- so as not to wake their families—a source, paralyzed.” The finished lyrics, some of ten about on any of the blogs. We weren’t both say, of the xx’s muted aesthetic. their best, suggest a twisted love a+air, but ever in NME ”—the New Musical Ex- When they were fifteen, they finished also hint at drugs and ecological disaster. press , an influential rock weekly. “We their first song, the unreleased “Blood Their high school, the Elliott School, didn’t have any fans.” Red Moon.” Recorded on Madley Croft’s was seen as a center for pop music—hav- One day in Wandsworth, near their digital eight-track to the accompaniment ing produced several notable acts, includ- neighborhood, they noticed the head- of a rinky-dink drum pad, it already sug - ing Hot Chip, Burial, and Four Tet—but quarters of the independent record label gested the xx’s later style: a sultry melody Madley Croft and Sim kept their musi- Beggars Banquet. “We saw a White with an uncluttered backdrop, and enig- cal aspirations private. Nicola Pocock, a Stripes poster and asked if we could hand matic but suggestive lyrics. As a bass music teacher at the school, told the in a demo,” Sim told me. “But we never throbbed under a two-note guitar hook, Guardian , in 2010, “I don’t remember did, because we were too afraid.” Madley Croft and Sim murmured, “Pic- Oliver and Romy singing at all. They just ture me under b lood red moon / I’ll make didn’t do it.” But in their junior year they aius Pawson is a loquacious young your eyes turn yellow / Make your skin decided to attempt a live gig. They re- C man with slicked-back blond hair turn blue / I know that it’s hard to see.” The cruited a classmate, Baria Qureshi, and a square, leonine face. Having strug- band felt that it had discovered something to play second guitar and a two-octave gled with learning disorders since child- almost by accident: a stripped-down, at - child’s keyboard that Madley Croft hood, he dropped out of college after one mospheric sound reminis- bought, for ten pounds, on semester and became a devotee of Lon- cent of New Order, the Cure, eBay. They named them- don’s underground rave scene, supplying and Mazzy Star, but with a selves the xx—they liked d.j.s and sound equipment for a series of propulsive dance beat. “We the graphic possibilities of all-night dance parties he called Young were, like, ‘Ahh—we like the paired crosses, as well as Turks. He enjoyed growing celebrity, until this!’ ” Madley Croft says. In the associations with kisses the police raided one of his parties and the next year, they wrote a and chromosomes—and seized his gear. Pawson, then nineteen, handful of songs—includ - started playing at far-flung took a job in A. & R. at XL Recordings, ing “VCR,” “Night Time,” pubs and clubs. “In our the London-based independent label and “Stars”—that ended school, there were lots of known for signing Adele, and quickly es - up on their début album. bands putting up posters tablished his own small label within the The spareness of their music was partly saying ‘Come to our gigs,’ ” Sim says. “We company, also called Young Turks. imposed by their lack of virtuosity. “We didn’t want people to know.” In his first three years, Pawson signed couldn’t have done more complicated Standing like suspects in a police several groups, without much success. One parts, even if we wanted to,” Sim says, “be - lineup, avoiding eye contact with the au- day in the fall of 2007, his assistant, Katie cause we didn’t actually have the playing dience, they eked out their set to tinny O’Neill, told him about the xx, which she’d skills. We didn’t have very loud voices so drum patterns pre-recorded on a CD. found trawling MySpace—“just clicking we couldn’t make a very big sound. When Lotte Je+s loyally attended every gig. “I on di+erent artists’ ‘Top 4’ or ‘Top 8’ friends the first album came out and people would would be one of three people in the to find something interesting,” she says. ask us, ‘Where did this minimalist thing room,” she recalls. “They’d be playing a Together, they attended the xx’s next gig, come from?,’ we thought, It’s minimal , is pub in Shoreditch, in East London, and at Shunt, a large, dark club with ivied walls

26 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 30, 2014 situated beneath the massive arches of the London Bridge railway station. There, Pawson was confronted with the un- prepossessing sight of three eighteen-year- olds—Madley Croft, Sim, and Qureshi— standing motionless, eyes on the ground, inching their way through a moody set. “For some reason, the guy behind the bar wouldn’t turn o$ the bar stereo,” Pawson told me. “And they were playing o$ a beat on a CD player. It was very funny. If you’d reviewed the show, you wouldn’t necessar - ily have reviewed it very positively, but there was, like, endless scope for . . . other possibilities .” Pawson had been raised to appreciate • • the possibilities of stylish minimalism. His father is the architect John Pawson, “make them collapse.” Instead, he prom- all these other sounds he could make.” who created the spare glass-and-stone ised to secure them a rehearsal space and Smith’s drum patterns and ethereal synths Calvin Klein store on Madison Avenue, find them gigs. Still high-school students gave the xx a distinctive quality: a hybrid and the Sackler Crossing, an unadorned without heavy financial obligations, they of singer-songwriter balladry and in - sine wave of black granite that crosses a agreed, and began to gather at the re- fluences from hip-hop and underground lake in Kew Gardens. Before a retrospec - hearsal room—a disused garage at the re- London dance music. tive of his work at the Design Museum in cord company’s headquarters, in the same For eighteen months, they rehearsed London, a Telegraph article noted that his Wandsworth building where they had in the garage, testing new songs at tiny home was so bare of ornament that, when once been too afraid to drop o$ a demo. venues. In that time, all of them gradu- he showed it to some Cistercian monks “I don’t know what I thought we were ated from high school. Madley Croft was whose monastery he was about to design, doing—with what purpose,” Madley accepted in a pre-undergraduate course they “worried his style might be too aus - Croft says. “It wasn’t for an album. I was at London’s Central Saint Martins arts tere for them.” Caius’s mother, Hester van just happy playing music.” Sim was gal- college, where the musicians M.I.A., Jar- Royen, is an art dealer who was one of vanized by Pawson’s enthusiasm. “He was vis Cocker, and PJ Harvey had studied; John Pawson’s earliest patrons, and had taking us seriously. It’s a real driver, when Sim got a job as a waiter; Smith worked worked with the artists Donald Judd and no one else is particularly excited.” on his d.j. beats; and the band continued John Chamberlain. She took a lively in - The xx soon recruited Jamie Smith, a to rehearse and play gigs. “It was all very terest in her son’s work at Young Turks. longtime friend from the Elliott School. A casual,” Madley Croft says. “And then “She would come down to shows and highly self-contained young man, Smith one day the people at Young Turks were, give me a visual-arts reference,” Pawson has dark, puppyish eyes and a bashful like, ‘Do you want to make an album?’ ” told me. “I had a band called Holy Fuck— smile. (“I once went shopping and raving By then, she had plans to attend college. an instrumental Krautrock band. She with Jamie in Holland,” Pawson told me. “Caius was, like, ‘You kind of need to loved them. She was, like, ‘This is the “A day and a night of partying. Don’t think make a decision—do you want to go to gangster Rothko of sound!’ ” he said a word—but he had an awesome university, or do you want to focus on the He brought her to an early xx show at time!”) He grew up listening to his parents’ band?’ I chose the band.” the AB Club, in Brussels. “She grabbed Stax soul and funk, and then to electronic me,” he says, “and she was, like, ‘This is dance music, built around drum sounds or the xx’s stripped-down tour of the the first extreme talent you have.’ She sampled from those classic recordings by FSouth—including shows in Atlanta, looked me in the eyes and was, like, ‘Cre- musicians like DJ Shadow and RJD2. He Raleigh, Memphis, and Marfa—Pawson ativity is not a tap! Do not fuck this up!’ had turned down an earlier o$er to drum encouraged the band not to fall into the What she meant was, just because you for the band. “I didn’t think I was good usual rut: performing, crashing, rising late, have something exciting, you can’t just enough,” he says, “and I didn’t want to be eating, performing again. The idea was to put them on the promo bandwagon.” onstage.” But for his eighteenth birthday absorb the color and culture of the South, Pawson recognized that the xx were es- he was given his first MPC—a combined in the hope that the new surroundings pecially vulnerable to the pressures of re- recorder, sampler, and drum machine— would break them out of their routine. cording, touring, and press interviews. and brought it to the xx rehearsal room. Before sound check in Oxford, Missis - “They were very frail and shy kids,” he When Madley Croft and Sim heard how sippi, Pawson corralled Madley Croft and says. “Some people are born a bit more the band sounded with Smith providing Smith on a trip to a record store, the End ready. This band wasn’t born ready.” live beats, tapping pads with his fingers to of All Music, outside of town. While Pawson refrained from asking them simulate a drum set, they urged him to Pawson energetically pitched the owner to sign a deal, convinced that handing join. “It had a live element,” Madley Croft on hosting a solo show with Smith for them money to record an album would says, “and it added so much texture, with broadcast online (Smith has developed a

THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 30, 2014 27 successful solo career as a d.j., and worked had to be possible to play live, without But the album sold slowly at first, as a producer for Drake and Alicia Keys), extra instruments,” Madley Croft says. and the band’s a0ect on stage remained Madley Croft quietly scanned the albums Instead of using the studio’s synthesizers, recessive. That fall, when they played on the walls. Smith camped out in a they insisted on the child’s keyboard at the CMJ Music Festival in New back room filled with obscure gospel and bought on eBay. “I can’t believe how naïve York, Pitchfork praised their music but country recordings, where he listened we were,” Smith says. “I’m glad, because said that “their live presence is not exactly through headphones to record after that’s why it sounded like it did. None of dynamic.” And there were problems record, bobbing his head, looking for us even had the idea in our head that it o0stage. The pressures of touring had in - sounds to sample for the xx’s new songs. was going to be released.” Indeed, Young creased long-standing tensions between When Smith produced the band’s Turks did not sign them to a record deal Qureshi and the rest of the band, and first album, he was only nineteen. Paw- until after the album was released. she subsequently left, signing an agree- son had brought in experienced hitmak- When “xx” went on sale, the follow- ment that o1cially ended her relation- ers, including Diplo, an L.A.-based pro- ing August, NME hailed it as “one of ship with the band. She does not speak ducer who has worked with Beyoncé, No 2009’s most unique debuts.” The critic to the press, but in a recent tweet she Doubt, Justin Bieber, and Usher; and the Robert Christgau wrote, “It’s hard to complained that she didn’t get enough London-based Kwes, who has collabo- imagine their music getting much bet- credit for her contribution to the band’s rated with Damon Albarn and Bobby ter,” and Slant made comparisons to music. (Pawson disputes this.) Womack. The xx were initially excited to Belle and Sebastian, Joy Division, In- If the band’s critics called the music work with established names, but soon terpol, and Regina Spektor. Katie Stel- anodyne, its blank-slate quality o0ered balked. Where the band had left spaces manis, of the Toronto-based band Aus- wide commercial opportunities. The in the songs, producers wanted to insert tra, which later opened shows for the xx, BBC picked up the spooky instrumen- sounds and beats. “They wanted to put said that the album signalled a chang- tal “Intro” for its coverage of the general their own little stamp on it,” Smith says. ing fashion. “Their entire aesthetic re- election, and Rihanna sampled it for her “If you have a band with a sound, and you ally didn’t exist in any kind of main- dance tune “Drunk on Love.” Soon, the can hear it, you should do something that stream way before,” Stelmanis told me. xx’s music was being used in car com- sounds like them.” He lobbied his band- “I remember the first time listening mercials, movies, and television shows mates and the label to let him produce to them and thinking, How can they (“Cold Case,” “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Gos- the record, and they agreed. get away with this? It’s so simple. That sip Girl”). Karl Lagerfeld chose it for a The album, recorded in December, minimalism has definitely swept over Chanel fashion show. In April, 2010, the 2008, in the converted garage, retained the world—even to the point where band was invited to play at the Coa- the unvarnished production of the band’s Beyoncé’s new record sounds like it chella Music Festival, in California. The demos. “We had a rule that everything could be produced by Jamie xx.” members came onstage at four in the af - ternoon to discover that thirty thousand people had gathered to see them. Jay Z and Beyoncé were in the pit in front of the stage. Madley Croft says, “That was the moment when I was, like, Oh, my God, I think people might be into this.” Touring relentlessly over the next two years, the band grew more at home onstage. “Over time, Oliver started to move a bit,” Madley Croft says. “I didn’t know, because I spent the whole time looking either down or forward. I thought, I’ve got to step it up. I started to move, and now we’ve kind of devel - oped this whole swaying thing that we do. I sort of follow his lead.” (Before the Armory shows, they worked out each night’s moves on paper.) Madley Croft lost weight, and traded her baggy black T-shirts for slim blazers, leggings, and high-heeled boots. She started dating Hannah Marshall, a London fashion designer, who creates stage outfits for all the xx members: narrow black clothes with slits at the elbows. Inevitably, crit - ics and fans talked about the sexiness of “Whoa, check it out—Bill Murray just crashed our cartoon!” the music. “A lot of people would come up to us after the shows and want to tell ment, where you’re at right now. There any, to include under his singing. Each us that it was a sexy sound. You kind of will be other albums—this is it.’ ” night, they played a di)erent version, don’t know what to say!” Madley Croft The resulting album, “Coexist,” sometimes with Madley Croft doubling told me, laughing. “What I like about it sounded in many ways like “xx,” but even Sim’s voice on guitar, sometimes with is that there was absolutely no intention more starkly minimal—an e)ect that nothing but a booming bass-drum sample to make it sound like that.” Some of seemed less a confident artistic choice under his voice. After each show, the band their early fans, who loved their awk - than a band’s straining to recapture what discussed which version had got the best wardness, feel that they’ve sold out. But critics had defined as its signature sound. reaction from the audience, and made at the Armory the transformative power “With the first album, we never talked mental notes for when they reached Marfa, of stardom made their stony expressions about it” being minimal, Smith says. in West Texas, where they were scheduled look less like stage fright than like dead- to start recording the new album. Madley pan cool—the sang-froid of rock stars Croft said that it was frightening to play an content to make you come to them. unfinished song live—at sound check in Athens, she had to stop midway through few weeks ago, I visited Final Cut “Hiding Place,” because she couldn’t re - A studios in New York, where the member the melody of her verse—but, she photographer Jamie-James Medina was added, that was the point of the exercise: editing a documentary about the band. “I’m trying to go along the lines of, If it Medina has been shooting for four “Making the second album, we may have makes me nervous, then do it.” years, amassing a hundred and twenty talked about it too much.” On the Southern tour, the xx played hours of footage, which he was trying to “It’s a great record that we all love and mostly in college towns, for audiences of assemble into a ninety-minute rough are extremely proud of,” Pawson told me, undergraduates in preppy T-shirts and cut. In an editing suite dominated by a “and there’s no other record that could be shorts: boys and girls on dates, swaying large TV screen, he spoke wistfully of made. But the process was exhausting with their arms around each other’s waists; D. A. Pennebaker’s “Don’t Look Back,” and very painful.” groups of sorority sisters and frat brothers. with its unguarded scenes of a young Diehard fans reverently sang along to “An - Bob Dylan gleefully bullying a Time uring sound check at the Georgia gels,” as it slowed nearly to a halt with the magazine reporter. With the xx, he said, D Theatre, in Athens, the xx played a repeated, whispered phrase “They would “it took me two months before I even song written only days earlier, in New be as in love with you as I am.” While the asked if I could shoot backstage.” York. It began with washes of organ from band played its hits, the feeling in the But Medina did capture moments of Smith’s keyboard, and a plangent lyric room was less like a rock concert than like drama, however subterranean. He showed sung by Madley Croft: “I used to es- an encounter-group session, with both the me footage from the velvet-lined attic cape / into my hiding place. Now we’re audience and the band members reliving studio where the band members, in- face to face / and I don’t feel so afraid.” the private moments of their first loves. tensely nervous about following up on Pawson, standing close to the stage, The new songs, however, were often their début, were making the second re- said, “First time I’ve heard this. First time less well received. On the tour, Madley cording. Sim says, “Our first album we anyone’s heard it.” The song was more Croft débuted “Performance.” Sung solo thought no one would even hear. Now we thickly orchestrated than usual—tolling to strummed guitar chords—a departure were creating knowing there was an audi- drumbeats, swirling organ sections, ring- from her usual single notes—the song is ence. It was bizarre.” Madley Croft adds, ing chords. When it ended, Pawson elab- an achingly tender confessional about “We thought, We just need to hide away, orated on forcing the band to write and private pain and the necessity of putting and we kind of shut all the doors.” Smith, arrange new songs on tour. “Instead of on a brave face onstage. At the Armory, who was producing again, at first loved having two months to dwell on how the the audience had leaned in close to catch the isolation. Now, he says, “I realize a lot drums should sound,” he says, “they have every nuance. But in Oxford, at a small, of it was quite miserable. I spent too half an hour before the show to get it dark venue called the Lyric, the standing- much time making sure every sound was right. It’s trial and error—live.” The need room-only crowd of college students perfect.” In Medina’s footage, the band to resolve artistic di)erences on the spot talked and laughed as Madley Croft members hardly speak to one another, left no time for entrenched disagree- bared her soul; some checked messages and when they do a tone of tetchy irrita - ments, an approach that Madley Croft on their phones. After the show, Pawson, tion is audible. They finally stopped com- said was closer to how they made the first outraged, herded the band into the tour municating directly, settling creative dis- album. “We’d played all those songs live bus, past a line of autograph-seekers. putes by speaking through Pawson. Their loads of times before we recorded them, Over dinner the next day, in Memphis, label asked repeatedly to hear the new re- and they morphed and were influenced Madley Croft acknowledged that it was cording. “We’d be, like, ‘O.K., we’ll play it by the reaction they got from the crowd.” di+cult when audiences were indi)erent, to you this week,’ ” Sim says. “Then we’d In the next few days, they rehearsed but she said that even this could be an in- realize we wanted to change part of it.” “Hiding Place” at sound checks, and often spiration. “That feeling of hoping for the Finally, Pawson demanded to hear the struggled with a section late in the song best—and then people just talking right album. “Caius came,” Sim says, “and was, where Sim takes a verse. The band was try- through,” she said, and laughed. “It really ‘O.K., this is great. You captured a mo - ing to figure out what instrumentation, if reminded me of when we started out.” 

THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 30, 2014 29 feet five inches. It sounds like a lot, but PERSONAL HISTORY you can cover that distance in the course of an average day without even trying, especially if you have stairs in your STEPPING OUT house, and a steady flow of people who regularly knock, wanting you to accept Living the Fitbit life. a package or give them directions or just listen patiently as they talk about birds, BY DAVID SEDARIS which happens from time to time when I’m home, in West Sussex, the area of England that Hugh and I live in. One April afternoon, the person at my door hoped to sell me a wooden bench. It was bought, he said, for a client whose garden he was designing. “Last week she loved it, but now she’s decided to go with something else.” In the bright sun- light, the fellow’s hair was as orange as a Popsicle. “The company I ordered it from has a no-return policy, so I’m won- dering if maybe you ’d like to buy it.” He gestured toward an unmarked van idling in front of the house, and seemed angry when I told him that I wasn’t in- terested.“You could at least take a look before making up your mind,” he said. I closed the door a couple of inches. “That’s O.K.” Then, because it’s an ex- cuse that works for just about every- thing, I added, “I’m American.” “Meaning?” he said. “We . . . stand up a lot,” I told him. “Oldest trick in the book,” my neighbor Thelma said when I told her what had happened. “That bench was stolen from someone’s garden, I guar - was at an Italian restaurant in Mel- Lesley pushed back her shirtsleeve, antee it.” I bourne, listening as a woman named and as she reached for an olive I no - This was seconded by the fellow Lesley talked about her housekeeper, ticed a rubber bracelet on her left wrist. who came to empty our septic tank. an immigrant to Australia who earlier “Is that a watch?” I asked. “Pikeys,” he said. that day had cleaned the bathroom “No,” she told me. “It’s a Fitbit. You “Come again?” countertops with a bottle of very ex - synch it with your computer, and it “Tinkers,” he said. “Pikeys.” pensive acne medication: “She’s afraid tracks your physical activity.” “That means Gypsies,” Thelma ex - of the vacuum cleaner and can’t read or I leaned closer, and as she tapped plained, adding that the politically cor- write a word of English, but other than the thickest part of it a number of rect word is “travellers.” that she’s marvellous.” glowing dots rose to the surface and Lesley works for a company that danced back and forth. “It’s like a pe - was travelling myself when I got my goes into developing countries and dometer,” she continued. “But updated, I Fitbit, and because the tingle feels trains doctors to remove cataracts. “It’s and better. The goal is to take ten thou- so good, not just as a sensation but also incredibly rewarding,” she said as our sand steps per day, and, once you do, it as a mark of accomplishment, I began antipasto plate arrived. “These are peo - vibrates.” pacing the airport rather than doing ple who’ve been blind for years, and I forked some salami into my mouth. what I normally do, which is sit in the suddenly, miraculously, they can see “Hard?” waiting area, wondering which of the again.” She brought up a man who’d “No,” she said. “It’s just a tingle.” many people around me will die first, been operated on in a remote area of A few weeks later, I bought a Fitbit and of what. I also started taking the China. “They took o% the bandages, of my own, and discovered what she stairs instead of the escalator, and and for the first time in two decades he was talking about. Ten thousand steps, avoiding the moving sidewalk. saw his wife. Then he opened his I learned, amounts to a little more than “Every little bit helps,” my old friend mouth and said, ‘You’re so . . . old.’ ” four miles for someone my size—five Dawn, who frequently eats lunch while

30 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 30, 2014 ILLUSTRATION BY NISHANT CHOKSI hula-hooping and has been known to thing that could be used to grab one I thought of the first time I had a visit her local Y three times a day, said. by the neck and fling it into the path kidney stone. That was in New York, in She had a Fitbit as well, and swore by of an oncoming car. It’s a hand-size 1991, back when I had no money or it. Others I met weren’t quite so taken. claw on a pole, and was originally de - health insurance. All I knew was that I These were people who had worn one signed for picking up litter. With it I was hurting, and couldn’t a(ord to do until the battery died. Then, rather can walk, fear snakes a little less, and anything about it. The night was spent than recharging it, which couldn’t be satisfy my insane need for order all at moaning. Then I peed blood, followed simpler, they’d stuck it in a drawer, the same time. I’ve been cleaning the by what looked like a piece of gravel most likely with all the other devices roads in my area of Sussex for three from an aquarium. That’s when I put it they’d lost interest in over the years. To years now, but before the Fitbit I did all together. people like Dawn and me, it primarily on my bike, What might I have thought if, after people who are obsessive and with my bare hands. seven hours of unrelenting agony, a to begin with, the Fitbit is That was fairly e(ective, creature the size of a full-grown cougar a digital trainer, perpetu - but I wound up missing emerged, inch by inch, from the hole at ally egging us on. Dur- a lot. On foot, nothing the end of my penis and started has - ing the first few weeks escapes my attention: a sling me for food? Was that what the that I had it, I’d return to potato-chip bag stu(ed cow was going through? Did she think my hotel at the end of the into the hollow of a tree, she was dying, or had instinct some- day, and when I discovered an elderly mitten caught how prepared her for this? that I’d taken a total of, in the embrace of a black - Maja and I watched for an hour. say, twelve thousand steps, berry bush, a mud-coated Then the sun started to set, and we I’d go out for another three thousand. matchbook at the bottom of a ditch. trekked on, disappointed. I left for “But why?” Hugh asked when I told Then, there’s all the obvious stu(: the London the next day, and when I re - him about it. “Why isn’t twelve thou - cans and bottles and great greasy turned several weeks later, and hiked sand enough?” sheets of paper that fish-and-chips back to the field, I saw mother and “Because,” I told him, “my Fitbit comes wrapped in. You can tell where child standing side by side, not in the thinks I can do better.” my territory ends and the rest of En - loving way that I had imagined but I look back at that time and laugh— gland begins. It’s like going from the more like strangers waiting for the post fifteen thousand steps—Ha! That’s rose arbor in Sissinghurst to Fukushima o+ce to open. Other animals I’ve seen only about seven miles! Not bad if after the tsunami. The di(erence is on my walks are foxes and rabbits. I’ve you’re on a business trip or you’re just staggering. stumbled upon deer, stoats, a hedge - getting used to a new prosthetic leg. hog, and more pheasants than I could In Sussex, though, it’s nothing. Our ince getting my Fitbit, I’ve seen all possibly count. All the badgers I find house is situated on the edge of a roll - S kinds of things I wouldn’t nor- are dead, run over by cars and eventu- ing downland, a perfect position if you mally have come across. Once, it was a ally feasted upon by carrion-eating like what the English call “rambling.” to(ee-colored cow with two feet stick- slugs, which are themselves eventually I’ll follow a trail every now and then, ing out of her. I was rambling that af- flattened, and feasted upon by other but as a rule I prefer roads, partly be- ternoon, with my friend Maja, and as slugs. cause it’s harder to get lost on a road, she ran to inform the farmer I marched but mainly because I’m afraid of snakes. in place, envious of the extra steps ack when Maja and I saw the cow, The only venomous ones in England she was getting in. Given all the time B I was averaging twenty-five thou- are adders, and even though they’re I’ve spent in the country, you’d think I sand steps, or around ten and a half hardly ubiquitous, I’ve seen three that might have seen a calf being born, but miles per day. Trousers that had grown had been run over by cars. Then I met this was a first for me. The biggest sur - too snug were suddenly loose again, a woman named Janine who was bit - prise was how unfazed the expec tant and I noticed that my face was look- ten and had to spend a week in the mother was. For a while, she lay flat ing a lot thinner. Then I upped it to hospital. “It was completely my own on the grass, panting. Then she got up thirty thousand steps, and started mov- fault,” she said. “I shouldn’t have been and began grazing, still with those feet ing farther afield. “We saw David in wearing sandals.” sticking out. Arundel picking up a dead squirrel “It didn’t have to strike you,” I re - “Really?” I said to her. “You can’t go with his grabbers,” the neighbors told minded her. “It could have just slid five minutes without eating?” Hugh. “We saw him outside Steyn - away.” Around her were other cows, all of ing rolling a tire down the side of the Janine was the type who’d likely whom seemed blind to her condition. road”; “ . . . in Pulborough dislodging a blame herself for getting mugged. “It’s “Do you think she knows there’s a pair of Y-fronts from a tree branch.” what I get for having anything worth baby at the end of this?” I asked Maja Before the Fitbit, once we’d eaten din - taking!” she’d probably say. At first, I after she’d returned. “A woman is told ner I was in for the evening. Now, found her attitude fascinating. Then I what’s going to happen in the delivery though, as soon as I’m finished with got vindictive on her behalf, and started room, but how does an animal inter - the dishes I walk to the pub and back, carrying a snake killer, or, at least, some - pret this pain?” a distance of 3,895 steps. There are no

32 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 30, 2014 street lights where we live, and the a hamster on a wheel from the mo- houses I pass at 11 P.M. are either dark ment she got up until she went to bed. or very dimly lit. I often hear owls, and Her family would eat dinner, and she’d the flapping of woodcocks disturbed observe them from her vantage point by the beam of my flashlight. One beside the table, panting as she asked night, I heard a creaking sound, and her children about their day. I knew noticed that the minivan parked a that I was supposed to sco% at this dozen or so steps ahead of me was woman, to be, at the very least, enter - rocking back and forth. A lot of people tainingly disgusted, the way I am with where we live seem to have sex in their the people on “Hoarders,” but instead cars. I know this because I find their I saw something of myself in her. Of used condoms, sometimes on the road course, she did her walking on a tread- but more often just o% it, in little pull- mill, where it served no greater pur- over areas. In addition to spent con - pose. So it’s not like we’re really that doms, in one of the spots that I patrol much alike. Is it? I regularly pick up empty KFC con- In recognition of all the rubbish tainers and a great number of soiled I’ve collected since getting my Fitbit, Handi Wipes. Do they eat fried my local council is naming a garbage chicken and then have sex, or is it the truck after me. The fellow in charge other way round? I wonder. e-mailed to ask which font I would like my name written in, and I answered look back on the days I averaged Roman. I only thirty thousand steps, and “Get it?” I said to Hugh. “ Roamin’ .” think, Honestly, how lazy can you He lost patience with me some - get? When I hit thirty-five thousand where around the thirty-five-thousand steps a day, Fitbit sent me an e-badge, mark, and responded with a heavy sigh. and then one for forty thousand, and Shortly after I decided on a type- forty-five thousand. Now I’m up to face, for reasons I cannot determine sixty thousand, which is twenty-five my Fitbit died. I was devastated when and a half miles. Walking that dis - I tapped the broadest part of it and the tance at the age of fifty-seven, with little dots failed to appear. Then I felt a completely flat feet while lugging a great sense of freedom. It seemed that heavy bag of garbage, takes close to my life was now my own again. But nine hours—a big block of time, but was it? Walking twenty-five miles, or hardly wasted. I listen to audiobooks, even running up the stairs and back, and podcasts. I talk to people. I learn suddenly seemed pointless, since, with - things: the fact, for example, that, in out the steps being counted and regis- the days of yore, peppercorns were sold tered, what use were they? I lasted five individually and, because they were so hours before I ordered a replacement, valuable, to guard against theft the express delivery. It arrived the follow- people who packed them had to have ing afternoon, and my hands shook their pockets sewed shut. as I tore open the box. Ten minutes At the end of my first sixty-thou - later, my new master strapped securely sand-step day, I staggered home with around my left wrist, I was out the my flashlight knowing that I’d ad- door, racing, practically running, to vance to sixty-five thousand, and that make up for lost time.  there will be no end to it until my feet snap o% at the ankles. Then it’ll just )*+’/ 0120 232456 7892;0<850 be my jagged bones stabbing into the From the Times. soft ground. Why is it some people can manage a thing like a Fitbit, while California has banned high-capacity others go o% the rails and allow it magazines, but Mr. Rodger had at least 41 low-capacity magazines, with more than to rule, and perhaps even ruin, their enough ammunition to unleash a deadly at- lives? While marching along the road- tack, said Adam Winkler, a law professor at side, I often think of a TV show that University of California, Los Angeles, who is I watched a few years back—“Ob - an expert in gun laws. “The lesson here is that there is not neces- sessed,” it was called. One of the epi- sarily some magic bullet that is going to stop sodes was devoted to a woman who these mass shootings, though I wish there owned two treadmills, and walked like were,” Mr. Winkler said.

THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 30, 2014 33

Ted Cruz says, “In both law and politics, I think the essential battle is the meta-battle of framing the narrative.” From his reading of Sun

PHOTOGRAPH BY PARI DUKOVIC ed Cruz, the Republican junior Tsenator from Texas, has heard the line about how the Party needs to be- come more moderate to win Presiden- tial elections. “It is amazing that the wisdom of the chattering class to the Republicans is always, always, always ‘Surrender your principles and agree with the Democrats,’ ” he told me. “That’s been true for my entire lifetime. The chattering classes have consistently said, ‘You crazy Republicans have to give up on what you believe and become more like Democrats.’ And, I would note, every time Republicans do that we lose.” Cruz then o&ered a short history of recent Presidential politics. Richard Nixon ran as a conservative, twice a winner; Gerald Ford, moderate, loser; Ronald Reagan, also twice a winner. “President George Herbert Walker Bush ran as a strong conservative, ran to continue the third term of Ronald Reagan, continue the Ronald Reagan revolution,” Cruz went on. “Then he raised taxes and in ’92 ran as an estab- lishment moderate—same candidate, two very di&erent campaigns. First one won, second one lost. In 1996, you got Bob Dole; 2000 and 2004, you have George W. Bush; 2008, John McCain; 2012, Mitt Romney. And what does the entire D.C. Republican consulting class say? ‘In 2016, we need another estab- lishment moderate!’ Hasn’t worked in four decades. ‘But next time will be the time!’ ” As the midterm elections grow closer, with the Presidential race to follow, the Republican Party is still split roughly along the historical lines that Cruz described. On the issues, the di&er- THE POLITICAL SCENE ences between the two wings appear modest, but the temperamental, even geographic, distinctions are profound. THE ABSOLUTIST Establishment Republicans, based in Washington, remain at some level com- mitted to uphold rudimentary opera- Ted Cruz is an unyielding debater—and the far tions of government and at least talk right’s most formidable advocate. about broadening the Party’s appeal. BY JEFFREY TOOBIN Ardent conservatives, including those in the Tea Party movement, regard the Capitol as a cesspool of corruption, and they see compromise as betrayal. The outcome of this struggle is uncertain, as illustrated by the varying political for- tunes of two leading establishment figures. Mitch McConnell, the Repub- Tzu he has learned that a battle is won by “choosing the terrain on which it will be fought.” lican leader in the Senate, easily survived

THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 30, 2014 35 a primary challenge in Kentucky, but word ‘Washington.’ ” (Cruz’s go-to just long enough to be slicked back. When Eric Cantor, the Party’s leader in the hashtag is #makedc listen.) Cruz’s con- he speaks to an audience, he usually o0ers House, went down to a humiliating de- vention booth, designed to resemble a a half smile that suggests an unspoken feat in his primary in Virginia. rustic Texas cabin, with a saddle out bond with his listeners. He paces the Cruz’s ascendancy reflects the di- front, was the most popular in the hall. stage, like a motivational speaker, and he lemma of the modern Republican Party, Hundreds of people stood in line for extemporizes but doesn’t ramble. It’s easy because his popularity within the Party hours to have their photograph taken to follow his speeches, because he sticks to is based largely on an act that was re- with him. an outline, in keeping with his training as viled in the broader national commu- Still, Cruz’s historical narrative of a college debater. nity. Last fall, Cruz’s strident opposition Presidential politics is both self-serving “Marriage is under assault,” Cruz to Obamacare led in a significant way told the crowd. “It is under assault in a to the shutdown of the federal gov- way that is pervasive. We’re seeing mar- ernment. “It was not a productive en- riage under assault in the courts, includ- terprise,” John McCain told me. “We ing, sadly, the Supreme Court of the needed sixty-seven votes in the Senate United States. It struck down the Cali- to stop Obamacare, and we didn’t have fornia marriage laws. California had a it. It was a fool’s errand, and it hurt the referendum. They asked the voters of Republican Party and it hurt my state. I California, ‘Do you want marriage to think Ted has learned his lesson.” But and questionable on its own terms. be a traditional marriage between one Cruz has learned no such lesson. As he Conveniently, he begins his story after man and one woman?’ And the voters travels the country, he has hardened his the debacle of Barry Goldwater, a con- of California—those crazy right-wing positions, delighting the base of his servative purist whom Cruz somewhat kooks—said, ‘Yes, now that you men- party but moving farther from the po- resembles. Nixon ran as a healer and tion it, we like marriage to be between sitions of most Americans on most governed, by contemporary standards, one man and one woman!’ Went to the issues. He denies the existence of man- as a moderate, opening up relations with U.S. Supreme Court, and the U.S. Su- made climate change, opposes compre- China, signing into law measures ban- preme Court said, ‘You can’t say that,’ hensive immigration reform, rejects ning sex discrimination, expanding the and struck it down. You want to know marriage equality, and, of course, de- use of a3rmative action, establishing what judicial activism is? Judicial activ- mands the repeal of “every blessed word the Environmental Protection Agency, ism is judges imposing their policy pref- of Obamacare.” (Cruz gets his own and signing the Clean Air Act. Rea- erences on the words of the Constitu- health-care coverage from Goldman gan’s record as governor of California tion.” (Cruz’s views on marriage equality Sachs, where his wife is a vice-presi- included support for tax increases, gun are widely shared within the Texas Re- dent.) Cruz has not formally entered control, and abortion rights, so he publican Party. The John Birch Society the 2016 Presidential race, but he is tak- sometimes appeared less conservative was allowed to have a booth at the con- ing all the customary steps for a pro- than his modern reputation suggests. vention, but Log Cabin Republicans, a spective candidacy. He has set up polit- George W. Bush won (if he won) as a gay-rights group, wasn’t.) ical-action committees to raise money, self-advertised “compassionate conser- As Cruz built to his peroration, he travelled to early primary states, like vative.” So, at this point, Cruz’s con- said, “I’m going to encourage three very Iowa and New Hampshire, and cam- certed attempt to establish himself as simple things. No. 1, I’m going to en- paigned for Republican candidates all the most extreme conservative in the courage each and every man and woman over the country. His message, in sub- race for the Republican nomination has here to pray. If ever there was an issue on stance, is that on the issues a Cruz Pres- not evoked much fear in Democrats. which we should come to our knees to idency would be roughly identical to a “We all hope he runs,” one Democratic God about, it is preserving marriage of Sarah Palin Presidency. senator told me. “He’s their Mondale.” one man and one woman. And this is an Cruz and I were talking in a back (Running against Reagan as an unal- issue on which we need as many praying room at the Fort Worth Convention loyed liberal in 1984, Walter Mondale warriors as possible to turn back the tide. Center earlier this month, during the lost every state but his native Minne- “A second thing I’ll tell you: when Texas Republican Convention. A crowd sota.) Such skepticism was nowhere in the President tried to impose federal law of more than seven thousand greeted evidence at the convention in Fort in Utah, I introduced federal legislation, Cruz’s speech there rapturously. They Worth, and at the series of talks Cruz along with Senator Mike Lee, to pre- cheered his anti-Washington gibes. “I gave he was invariably introduced as he vent the federal government from set- spent all week in Washington, D.C., and was at the Defense of Texas Marriage ting aside the marriage laws of the states it’s great to be back in America,” he Amendment rally: “Ladies and gentle- across this country. We need to stand told the delegates. On another occa- men, I give you the next President of the and defend marriage, and we need to sion at the convention, Cruz noted that United States!” defend the prerogative of the citizens of some people think the name of the Cruz is conservative in appearance as Texas to determine what marriage means Washington Redskins football team is well as ideology. He dresses like an I.B.M. in the state of Texas. o0ensive. “There’s an easy way to fix salesman circa 1975, in boxy blue suits, “And the third thing we need to do is that,” he said. “You can just drop the white shirts, and red ties. His black hair is we need to rise up and we need to turn

36 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 30, 2014 this country around,” Cruz said, to a grow- Rubio, Chris Christie, and others. Last venues around the state. “They created ing rumble of cheers. “We’ve got an elec- year, he won the Values Voter Summit’s a spino2 group called the Constitu- tion coming up in 2014, and, let me tell Presidential straw poll. Last month, he tional Corroborators,” Cruz told me. you, it’s going to be phenomenal. We’re won the straw poll at the Republican “And they took five of the students, all going to retake the U.S. Senate! And I’ll Leadership Conference and, not sur- of whom had been involved on the tell you this: as good as 2014’s going to be, prisingly, the straw poll at the Texas free-market side, and we focussed on 2016’s going to be even better!” G.O.P. convention. The speed of Cruz’s studying the Constitution. So we’d meet rise makes Barack Obama’s ascent seem on Tuesdays and Thursdays, for a cou- ruz came to the Senate, in 2012, almost stately. ple of hours each night, and study the C and then to national prominence, Cruz’s inner o+ce is dominated by a Constitution, read the Federalist Papers, through an unusual route. Like many pol- three-panel painting of Ronald Reagan read the Anti-Federalist Papers, read the iticians, he is a lawyer, but his legal exper- in Berlin, before the Brandenburg Gate. debates on ratification. And we memo- tise is of a special kind, which helps ex- Reagan is Cruz’s hero, though Cruz, at rized a shortened mnemonic version of plain both his fame and his notoriety. forty-three, is too young ever to have the Constitution.” Before he ran for the Senate, Cruz was on voted for him. Like Reagan, Cruz be- I asked for an example. his way to becoming one of the most no- lieves in limited government, but his “TCCNCCPCC PAWN MOMMA table appellate advocates in the country. basis for that belief di2ers in a signifi- RUN ,” Cruz said. “Taxes, credit, com- “He was and is the best appellate litigator cant way from Reagan’s. Reagan thought merce, naturalization, coinage, counter- in the state of Texas,” James Ho, who suc- limited government was a matter of po- feiting, post o+ce, copyright, courts, pi- ceeded Cruz as solicitor general of the litical choice; Cruz believes it is a con- racy, Army, war, Navy, militia, money state, told me. Trial lawyers, civil or crimi- stitutional mandate. Cruz comes to that for militia, Washington, D.C., rules, and nal, are often brought into cases when belief from a position of unusual inti- necessary and proper.” there are compromises to be made; much macy with the constitutional text. This was more than a parlor trick. of their work winds up involving settle- When Cruz was in his early teens, in During the past several decades, the ments or plea bargains. But appellate liti- Houston, his parents enrolled him in ideological battles over the Constitution gators, like Cruz, generally appear after an after-school program run by Rolland have often come down to the original- the time for truce has passed. Their job is Storey, a retired energy executive who ists, closely aligned with the textualists, to make their best case and let the chips wanted to instill the values of the free against those who believe that the Con- fall where they may. That is the kind of market in young people. At the Free stitution also protects some nontextual, politician Cruz has become—one who Enterprise Institute, Storey had his or unenumerated, rights. The right to came to Washington not to make a deal young charges read Milton Friedman, privacy is the paradigmatic unenumer- but to make a point. Citing Margaret Friedrich Hayek, and other authors re- ated right, one that is not mentioned Thatcher, Cruz often puts his approach vered by conservatives, and then give in the text of the Constitution but has this way: “First you win the argument, speeches at Rotary Clubs and similar been recognized by judges to include, then you win the vote.” Many senators turn the foyers of their Washington o+ces into shrines to their states. Al Franken, for instance, covers the walls with pennants from every college in Minnesota. But in Cruz’s foyer, in the Dirksen Building, there are only a couple of framed por- traits (of Texans who have served in the Senate) and a Dr Pepper-branded re- frigerator. (Dr Pepper is headquartered in Plano.) The room looks as if Cruz had just moved in. Three years ago, he was an obscure long shot making his first run for public o+ce. As he fre- quently puts it, “I was at two per cent in the polls, and the margin of error was three per cent.” Cruz ranks ninety- fourth in seniority in the Senate. Last fall, though, he nearly single-handedly precipitated the shutdown of the federal government. Today, polls show Cruz in the thick of the crowded race for the 2016 Republican Presidential nomi- “He was sent here from the future to terminate me, nation, along with Rand Paul, Marco but then he really got into grilling.” for example, a woman’s right to abor- tion. Cruz’s memorization trick was an early stage in a textualist’s education. To MALAMUTE textualists, the meaning of the Consti- tution is limited to the precise terms of When I was a dog I pulled the sled with the other dogs the document, and nothing more. and to the crest of my ability, for never was I a snob about it “Ted was just an amazing speaker at moreover never lazy, day into night through the cold fourteen, by far the most impressive stu- pine forest we were bred to and for which I came to feel dent we ever had,” Winston Elliott III, love as fast as others as a blur that slowed around us who became a#liated with Storey’s or- at our suppers, then watched us twitch in our heavy sleep. ganization when Cruz was a student and now serves as its president, told me. When I was a dog I pulled the sled with the other dogs “Our program is very much committed mile on mile convincingly, my tongue construed the forest to private property, free markets, and no condition not to drape in, identical its pinkness constitutionally limited government. from my open mouth as theirs, the nylon tapes between us When it came to the Constitution, Rol- reinforcing sentiment, a kind relief through constant land was a great believer in original in- focus but from what I failed to grasp, as did our language. tent, and so the focus was very much on what the Constitution says. We brought When I was a dog I pulled the sled with the other dogs in a memorization expert. We wanted who didn’t know I didn’t know, but that was what we were them to focus on the words. Ted was just meant to be there for to begin with, yet I could follow an ideal student, because he just ab- them who followed anyone behind us through the forest sorbed everything, and he came from a where what seemed to know but was a shape without conservative family in the first place.” su#cient contour hovered, and it proved some trouble to me. Cruz first achieved national notice last September, when he staged a twen- When I was a dog I pulled the sled with the other dogs ty-one-hour talking marathon on the concealing my disquiet like a shoulder bone the forebears Senate floor against Obamacare, as said to hurry up now bury, but everywhere the dirt part of the political o(ensive that led to rebuffed my larger purpose, a fortitude from all the earth the government shutdown. In the best- had frozen up against me, the paws of whom had brought me known part of the speech, he read Dr. nowhere but to shame to let it drop for another mouth. Seuss’s “Green Eggs and Ham” as a bed- time story to his two young daughters When I was a dog I pulled the sled with the other dogs watching in Houston, who were sup- the way a roof collapses, inevitably, and even as the wind posedly tuned in to C)SPAN . (Later, he must always push or it isn’t wind, it’s air, and I was air also read long excerpts from the novels that had come to think of it, in some trouble to me the others of Ayn Rand, one of his literary heroes.) felt no twitch of, or if they did, our language failed what Several times, he drew an analogy be- must have been its purpose, or I won’t soon be a dog again. tween the “oppression” of Obamacare and the oppression that his father, Ra- —Timothy Donnelly fael, faced as a young man in Cuba. “I view that from a very personal per- spective, because fifty-five years ago, Let me make you dependent on the gov- Texas in 1957 after aligning himself with when my father came from Cuba, he ernment. Don’t bother washing dishes. the anti-Batista movement. He returned was eighteen, he was penniless, and he Don’t bother working.’ ” to Cuba for just a month, in 1959, and couldn’t speak English,” Cruz said on became convinced that Fidel Castro was the Senate floor. “But he was lucky to be t the Texas Republican Convention, even worse than his predecessor, so he able to apply for a student visa, to get to A the line for photographs with Ted settled in the United States for good. He America. He was lucky to be accepted Cruz snaked through the exhibition majored in mathematics at the Univer - to the University of Texas, to flee the hall. To keep those waiting from getting sity of Texas at Austin, and met and mar- Batista regime, where he had been im- restless, Rafael Cruz worked the line, ried Eleanor Darragh, who was born and prisoned and tortured as a kid.” Later, shaking hands and posing for photo- raised in Delaware. (Rafael had two Cruz said, “Thank the good Lord that graphs. White-haired, vigorous, and daughters from a previous marriage.) when my dad was a teen-age immigrant charismatic at seventy-five, Rafael is a Rafael and Eleanor started an oil-ser- in Texas fifty-five years ago, how grate- familiar figure to those who have fol- vices company after moving to Calgary, ful I am that some well-meaning liberal lowed his son’s career. He introduces in Alberta, Canada, where Rafael Ed- did not come and put his arm around Ted’s stump speech with the boast “He ward Cruz was born, in 1970. (Ted’s him and say, ‘Let me take care of you. will not compromise!” birth in Canada, with dual American and Let me give you a government check. Rafael Cruz fled Batista’s Cuba for Canadian citizenship, has raised the

38 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 30, 2014 question of whether he is a “native born” debating programs. One focusses on a sin- to right-leaning students on campus. “It’s citizen and thus eligible, under the Con- gle topic every year, and the other, Cruz an occupational hazard for academics like stitution, to be President. The answer is and Panton’s specialty, is known as parlia- me to assume that our best students are not completely clear, but it seems likely mentary debate. “In parliamentary debate, going to become academics themselves. that the Constitution does not bar a Cruz they don’t give you the subjects in advance. And so I was sure that Ted was going to Presidency. Recently, Ted Cruz formally You just have to be fast on your feet and become a professor.” But Cruz was already gave up his Canadian citizenship.) know a lot about a lot of di0erent sub- on his way to Harvard Law School. Rafael and Eleanor split up a few years jects,” Panton said. “Ted was the best de- “He came to class with his right hand after Ted was born, and Rafael moved to bater in the country, hands down. He was in the air and he kept it in the air for the Houston. Six months later, Eleanor and the No. 1 debater our senior year.” whole semester,” Alan Dershowitz, who young Ted also went to Houston. The At Princeton, Cruz wrote a senior the- taught Cruz’s criminal-law class, told me. couple reconciled (though they eventually sis about a topic that was obscure at the Cruz and Panton sat next to each other, divorced), and Rafael experienced a reli - time but later became of wide interest in and both disagreed with most of what gious awakening. He left the oil business the conservative legal movement: the Dershowitz said throughout the semester. and became a charismatic minister. Pastor Ninth and Tenth Amendments. The “They were pro death penalty, they ques - Cruz, as he is often called, is not currently Ninth states, “The enumeration in the tioned the exclusionary rule, and they a$liated with any church or denomina- Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be were both completely brilliant.” (Panton tion, but he is a sought-after surrogate for construed to deny or disparage others re - became the second black president of the his son on the campaign trail. In his tained by the people”; and the Tenth reads, Harvard Law Review , after Barack speeches and talks, he operates as a kind “The powers not delegated to the United Obama. He now works in private equity, of political id for Ted, much as Ted oper- States by the Constitution, nor prohibited in Atlanta.) At Harvard, Cruz’s ambitions ates as the id of the Republican Party. Ra- by it to the states, are reserved to the states came into focus. “He was going to clerk fael attacks Obama and the Democrats respectively, or to the people.” Ever since for Michael Luttig, on the Fourth Circuit, with a religious intensity. In many of these the Bill of Rights was ratified, near the who was the big feeder for the conserva - talks, Rafael draws explicit parallels be- end of the eighteenth century, the mean - tive Justices on the Supreme Court, and tween Fidel Castro and Barack Obama as ing of these provisions has proved elusive then clerk on the Court,” Dershowitz said. twin betrayers of the concepts of “hope to scholars and judges. Robert Bork com- “And of course that’s exactly what he did.” and change.” pared the Ninth to an inkblot. Liberal From 1996 to 1997, Cruz clerked for “It all started for us in 1980, when Ted scholars have generally viewed the Ninth Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, was nine years old,” Rafael Cruz told me. Amendment, in particular, as a guarantee and again he impressed both ideological “I was involved with a group called the that the Constitution represents a floor allies and adversaries with his intelli- Religious Roundtable, which was work- for, not a ceiling on, the rights of individ - gence and persuasiveness. “We became ing with the Moral Majority to help mo- uals. In his thesis, Cruz wrote that he in- friends on the first day of our clerkships,” bilize Christians to elect Ronald Reagan. tended to “elaborate upon a conception of Neal Katyal, who clerked for Stephen All during that year, we talked every night the Ninth and Tenth Amendments which Breyer and went on to become Act- about how important it was to get rid of revitalizes the Founders’ commitment to ing Solicitor General in the Obama Ad- this socialist-leftist President Carter and limiting government, to re- ministration, said. “We spent replace him with a constitutional conser - straining the reach of our the next year arguing about vative, Ronald Reagan. I must have told none-too-angelic leaders.” just about everything, espe- Ted a dozen times, ‘When I was in Cuba The conclusion is debatable, cially the death penalty, and they took away our freedoms, I had a but the level of erudition in which Ted definitely sup- place to go. If we lose our freedoms here, the thesis is extraordinary, es - ported. He was conservative, where are we going to go?’ ” pecially for a twenty-one- of course, but he was not an year-old who had not yet ideologue. He knew how to ed Cruz arrived at Princeton in the gone to law school. make arguments based on Tfall of 1988, after graduating from The thesis was so good the law. He was obviously Houston’s Second Baptist High School. that the professor who super - already a very good lawyer.” He quickly became friends with David vised Cruz’s work, Robert George, de- After his clerkships, Cruz faced the Panton, a sixteen-year-old freshman cided to play a joke on him. “When I was first genuine crossroads of his career. from Jamaica. They became debating grading it, I dog-eared the first page and Until then, he had followed an élite path partners and roommates for the rest of wrote ‘C-plus’ on it, so it was the first from the Ivy League to coveted clerk- their college years and at Harvard Law. thing he’d see,” George told me. “Then in- ships. Now he had to decide what kind “Ted’s views today politically are al- side I wrote, ‘Just kidding—A.’ I thought of lawyer he was going to be. Cruz most identical to when I met him,” Pan- it might do Ted some good to wonder for turned down an o0er from a big firm ton told me. “There’s nothing he says a second whether he really was the smart- (with a big signing bonus) and joined a today that I didn’t hear in college. It all est guy in the room.” A widely respected boutique firm then known as Cooper & came from his father and from the Con- conservative legal philosopher, known for Carvin, in Washington. stitutional Corroborators.” his opposition to same-sex marriage and “When I was clerking for the Chief, There are two main kinds of college abortion rights, George played godfather Chuck Cooper and Mike Carvin came

THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 30, 2014 39 POSTSCRIPT CHARLES BARSOTTI

harles Barsotti, who died last week at the age of Whitney Darrow, Jr. He grew up in a world where C eighty, started publishing cartoons in The New cartoons were everywhere, and in the sixties he was the Yorker at the height of the war in Vietnam. He was such cartoon editor at the Saturday Evening Post . That an ardent opponent of that war that he ran for changed. After the Post folded, in 1969—a few years Congress in Kansas on the issue. And while he lost that before cartoon-rich Look died, too––Barsotti joined the race, he spent a lifetime obsessed with the theme of sta2 of The New Yorker . And, for the next forty-five years, power. He didn’t think of himself as Important or, God every week he sent a batch of around a dozen “roughs” to forbid, Serious. Drawing with a simple, shapely line, New York from his home and drawing board in Kansas Barsotti employed a set of recurring characters that City. He used a Rapidograph pen, no halftones, and seemed ino2ensive, apolitical, even sweet—adorable conventional two-dimensional perspective. He did not hounds, therapized kings. Somehow, though, his humor have the high-art ambition of a Saul Steinberg or a approached essential things: the tyranny of autocrats, William Steig, but there was a distinct streak of wildness the injustice of corrupt judges, the complacency of the in him. In his peculiarly enchanted kingdom any being or wealthy and the corrupt. In other drawings, of course, object was capable of speech and wit: there were talking he took a zero-gravity approach, with a hedgehog noodles, boxes, fruit, squirrels, hammers, and bowling sidling up to the bar o2ering to tell everyone the one pins. He was astonishingly productive. At the end, there thing he knows. were many dozens of drawings available to us, and while Barsotti was born and raised in south Texas; his we will miss him, we will be publishing Charley Barsotti liter ary influences included “Blondie,” “Li’l Abner,” “Jiggs for a long time to come. and Maggie,” Charles Addams, George Price, and —David Remnick

and recruited me,” Cruz told me. Coo- mott, a Democrat, for illegally leaking Proposition 8, which banned same-sex per was a former Rehnquist clerk. At the recording of a phone call involving marriage, before the law was ultimately the time, the firm was nine months Newt Gingrich. (Boehner won the case, overturned.) old and had only six lawyers. Cruz was and McDermott was forced to pay And so, in 1999, Cruz went to work the first new associate the partners re- damages, including more than a million as a domestic-policy adviser on the cruited. Cooper and Carvin had served dollars of Boehner’s legal fees.) Carvin, George W. Bush Presidential campaign. in senior roles in the Reagan Justice De- who has since moved on to another “I essentially had responsibility for all partment, and they created a firm that firm, said, “Ted was the best law partner the policy that touched on law,” Cruz combined their passion for high-level I ever had, but he was a junior associate.” told me. “So we all divided up the issues, litigation with conservative politics. Soon enough, though, it became clear but anything law-related fell under my Cooper has long been the outside coun- that Cruz’s ambitions extended beyond bailiwick. The campaign was a year and sel to the National Rifle Association, success as a private lawyer. “Ted had this a half of incredibly intense eighteen-to- and, he recalled, “Ted was basically my obvious burning interest in matters of twenty-hour days. The best part of the lieutenant on all N.R.A. matters.” He important public policy,” Cooper re- campaign was I met my wife. We were helped Cooper prepare his testimony called. “He had the obvious tools to suc- one of eight marriages that came out of before the House Judiciary Committee ceed at the highest levels of politics. It the campaign, so I tell young people, in favor of the impeachment of Bill was clear to me that it was at least in the ‘If you want to meet your spouse, go Clinton. Cruz also worked on Repre- back of his mind, and I encouraged it.” join a political campaign.’ ” (Heidi Cruz sentative John Boehner’s civil lawsuit (Cooper later became best known for lives in Houston with their daughters.) against Representative Jim McDer- leading the legal defense of California’s When the result of the 2000 campaign

40 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 30, 2014 “Middle class—we thought we should keep one.”

“Oh, yeah, I forgot about the law of the “I’ve never understood—what is the difference jungle—not guilty.” between morals and ethics?”

devolved into a legal struggle over the vote national counsel to the Bush campaign, clerk—I’ve known John a long time,” in Florida, Cruz was well situated to play and his associates set up seven teams of Cruz said. “Everyone we called, without an important role. By the Thursday after lawyers to address the sprawling contro - exception, dropped everything and came Election Day, he was in Tallahassee. versies generated by the recount, and Cruz down. And for a young lawyer, I mean, it “Through an odd bit of serendipity, it hap - was the only lawyer who served on all was a breathtaking and humbling experi - pened that I was the only practicing law- seven. His job was to encourage commu- ence to get the chance to carry the bag and yer, and, in particular, constitutional lit - nication and assure consistent positions. work alongside some of the most talented igator, who had been on the full-time “I’ve been amused at some of the lawyers in the country.” campaign team,” Cruz told me. “One of subsequent descriptions of Bush versus the realities of the recount and life is that Gore, because they sort of described us onservatives have long denounced lawyers and political folks don’t really as this fine-oiled machine with a careful C liberal judges and lawyers for judi- speak the same language. By the accident strategy,” Cruz said. “It was one tiny cial activism—that is, for using the courts of being in that place I found myself, there notch slightly below utter chaos.” to overrule the work of the democrati- was sort of a small leadership team that Cruz’s initial assignment was to as- cally elected branches of government. consisted of Jim Baker and Josh Bolten semble a legal team. His first call was to Roe v. Wade, which invalidated state laws and Ted Olson and George Terwilliger his former mentor Carvin, who wound up banning abortion around the country, is and Ben Ginsberg and me. And I’m representing Bush before the Florida Su- the consummate act of liberal judicial ac- twenty-nine years old, this kid, and all of preme Court. Cruz’s second call was to a tivism. In the eighties and nineties, how- these other folks are Cabinet members Washington lawyer named John Roberts. ever, as Reagan nominees began to dom- and masters of the universe.” Ginsberg, the “John had been a friend and a Rehnquist inate the federal judiciary, conservatives

THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 30, 2014 41 began to use the courts for their own po- bott had served on the Texas Supreme states’ rights, and the right to religious litical ends as well. Conservatives like Court and developed strongly conserva- expression in public places. In one high- Cruz never stopped denouncing liberals tive views on legal issues. “I wanted profile case, Cruz wrote the brief that for their e"orts to use the courts to pro- someone who had the capability to han- persuaded the court to approve a monu - mote their ideological agenda, even as dle appellate arguments in court, but I ment of the Ten Commandments out- they began to do much the same thing wanted to do so much more,” Abbott side the state capitol, in Austin. (Abbott themselves. The heart of Cruz’s legal ca- told me. “I wanted Texas to be a national argued that case.) reer was a sustained and often successful leader on the profound legal issues of In just over six years, Cruz argued undertaking to use the courts for conser- the day. I wanted us to be able to have a nine cases before the U.S. Supreme vative ends, like promoting the death larger footprint, a larger impact.” Court, more than any other Texas law- penalty, lowering the barriers between Though Cruz was only thirty-two, he yer during this period and more than all church and state, and undermining inter- persuaded Abbott that he was up to the but a few lawyers in the country. In ad- national institutions and agreements. job. In 2003, he moved to Austin. “We dition, he filed dozens of briefs in fed- In the nineteen-nineties, several wanted Ted to take a leadership role in eral and state appeals courts. In his ar- states created the position of solicitor the United States in articulating a vision guments before the high court, Cruz general, a chief appellate advocate, mod- of strict construction. I look for employ - won five cases and lost four, but that un- elled on the one in the United States ees with batteries included,” Abbott said. derstates the magnitude of his success. Department of Justice, which represents “Ted was supercharged and ready to go.” The cases he lost were rather minor; in the federal government before the Su- In e"ect, he asked Cruz to roam the one of them he appeared as a friend preme Court. The Texas job was started country in search of cases that might ad- of the court. The cases he won had in 1999, when John Cornyn was the vance the Constitutional agenda that more drama and importance. The most state attorney general. (Cornyn is now Cruz had first embraced as a teen-ager. notable, from 2008, began, as Cruz re- Cruz’s senior colleague in the Senate.) Sometimes Texas was an actual party to counted to me, when “two teen-age girls But when Greg Abbott became attor- the cases Cruz argued, and sometimes who were walking home one night ney general of Texas, in 2002, he decided he simply volunteered to write friend- stumbled into a gang initiation and were to expand the responsibilities of the so- of-the-court briefs for causes that he and horribly gang-raped and murdered. One licitor general beyond simply handling Abbott supported. They intervened in of the most brutal crimes that shocked appeals in cases involving the state. Ab- cases supporting gun-owners’ rights, the conscience of the city of Houston. Ernesto Medellín was one of the lead- ers of the gang, and he was apprehended several days later, and he confessed to it right away. His confession was one of the most chilling documents I’ve ever read, handwritten, where he describes bragging about raping these little girls. He describes showing o" his blood- stained clothes. He describes keeping, as a trophy of the night, one of the little girls’ Mickey Mouse watches. This was an unrepentant murderer. He was con- victed, he was sentenced to death, and then the case took a strange turn.” The World Court, which is the judi- cial arm of the United Nations, issued a directive to the United States to reopen the cases of Medellín, who was Mexi- can, and fifty other Mexican nationals who were on death row. After their ar- rests, none of the defendants had been o"ered the consular services of the Mexican government, a right that the United States was treaty-bound to honor. In a crucial twist, the Adminis- tration of George W. Bush agreed with the World Court judgment. The Justice Department asserted that the cases, in- cluding Medellín’s, should be reopened, “You’ll have to forgive Roland. He still uses ‘stomach’ because the defendants had not been and ‘abdominals’ interchangeably.” granted their rights under the treaty. As both a legal and a political matter, Tex- preme law of the land, and the judges in his boss. But Perry decided to run for as’s position looked weak. How could every state—I guess it means including reëlection and, as a result, so did Abbott. Abbott (and Cruz) take on a President Texas”—the audience laughed—“shall Cruz stepped down as solicitor general of the United States who also happened be bound thereby.” and joined a law firm in Houston. In short to be a fellow-Republican and fellow- “Certainly, Justice Breyer,” Cruz an- order, another opportunity presented itself: Texan? And how, in any event, could the swered. “Texas, of course, does not dis- Kay Bailey Hutchison was retiring from state of Texas overrule a judgment of pute that the Constitution, laws, and the U.S. Senate, opening up a seat in the both the United States government and treaties are the supreme law of the land.” 2012 election. the World Court? But, he went on, the President’s order, in Cruz flew to Washington for a con- “In both law and politics, I think the this case, was none of these. The ques- ference of the Federalist Society for Law essential battle is the meta-battle of tioning of Cruz became so raucous that, and Public Policy Studies. There he ar- framing the narrative,” Cruz told me. “As at one point, Justice John Paul Stevens ranged to meet with Mike Lee, a newly Sun Tzu said, Every battle is won before felt compelled to interject, “You said elected senator from Utah. The two had it’s fought. It’s won by choosing the ter - there are six reasons. . . . I really would much in common. Both were former rain on which it will be fought. So in lit- like to hear what those reasons are with - Supreme Court clerks and both had an igation I tried to ask, What’s this case out interruption from all of my col- intense interest in constitutional law. about? When the judge goes home and leagues.” Cruz won the case, six-to-three, (The son of Rex Lee, who was Solicitor speaks to his or her grandchild, who’s in with Stevens joining the Court’s conser- General in the Reagan Administration, kindergarten, and the child says, ‘Paw- vatives. In another case, a major chal- Mike Lee clerked for Samuel Alito Paw, what did you do today?’ And if you lenge to Texas’s 2003 electoral redistrict- during his first year on the Court.) “At own those two sentences that come out ing on the ground that it discriminated that point, I felt like I had already known of the judge’s mouth, you win the case. against minorities, the number of plain- Ted, because three of my co-clerks were “So let’s take Medellín as an example ti+s before the Court was so large that Princeton undergrads, and he was a of that,” Cruz went on. “The other side’s Cruz was allowed to file a hundred-and- legendary debater,” Lee recalled. Cruz narrative in Medellín was very simple twenty-three-page brief in response, well and Lee hit it o+. “He and I see a lot of and easy to understand. ‘Can the state of above the usual page limit. He won that things the same way, through a similar Texas flout U.S. treaty obligations, inter- case as well. lens. As someone who has studied the national law, the President of the United Cruz became so comfortable before Constitution throughout his entire life, States, and the world? And, by the way, the Justices that he even employed a he understands the importance of fed- you know how those Texans are about touch of humor, which is always risky at eralism and separation of powers. As a the death penalty anyway!’ That’s their the Supreme Court. In 2008, the Jus- former Supreme Court clerk and appel- narrative. That’s what the case is about. tices invited Cruz to argue in support of late litigator, he is very aware of how the When Justice Kennedy comes home Louisiana’s position that the Constitu- courts look at things. But he also knows and he tells his grandson, ‘This case is tion permitted the execution of an indi- that we can’t leave every constitutional about whether a state can ignore U.S. vidual who raped a child. (To be asked question to the courts. The legislative treaty obligations,’ we lose. to argue a case as a friend of the court is branch has to follow the Constitution, “So I spent a lot of time thinking itself a significant honor for a lawyer.) too.” The two men took a long walk about, What’s a di+erent narrative to At one point, Justice Stevens asked around the Capitol grounds. By the end, explain this case? Because, as you know, whether any country had ever made Lee had agreed to endorse Cruz for the just about every observer in the media punishments for rape more draconian. Senate. and in the academy thought we didn’t “It’s interesting if you look at the his- David Dewhurst, the lieutenant have a prayer. This is a hopeless case.” tory in England,” Cruz said. “Blackstone governor of Texas (an especially power- Cruz decided to change the narrative actually talks about how rape under ful position there), was far and away into one about the separation of powers. Saxon law was punishable by death, and the best-known and best-financed He refashioned the case from a fight be- then there was a period—1285—where candidate for the Senate seat in 2012. tween Texas and the United States to the punishment was ‘relaxed’ to loss of But Cruz, calling himself a “constitu- one between the executive branch and the eyes and testicles. That was William tional conservative,” rallied the Tea the legislative branch of the federal the Conqueror’s kinder, gentler version.” Party movement to his side and bat- government, with Texas advocating for Laughter followed. Still, the court ruled tered Dewhurst as a conciliator and a Congress. He argued that the President that Louisiana could not execute the defender of the status quo. Tea Party fa- could not order Texas to reopen the defendant. vorites like Sarah Palin, Rick Santorum, cases without the specific authorization Rand Paul, and Jim DeMint swarmed of Congress. Cruz duelled with Stephen n 2010, Greg Abbott was planning on the state for Cruz, and conservative Breyer and other skeptical Justices for I running to succeed Rick Perry as gov- political-action committees like the well over the allotted thirty minutes. ernor, and Cruz decided to step out on his Club for Growth bought millions of Breyer ribbed Cruz: “As I read the Con- own and run for attorney general. By this dollars’ worth of advertisements on his stitution, it says all treaties made, or point, Cruz had reached such a level of behalf. Dewhurst finished ahead of Cruz which shall be made, under the author- prominence as solicitor general that he had in the first round of voting—forty-five ity of the United States shall be the su- basically cleared the field to take over for per cent to thirty-four per cent—but

THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 30, 2014 43 then Cruz won the runo!, with fifty- topic, but it has long operated as the net- which aims to defeat incumbent Re- seven per cent of the vote. The general work for potential Republican judicial publican senators whom it deems un- election was a formality against Texas’s nominees and executive-branch o&cials. duly moderate. Challenged by his moribund Democratic Party. In practice, the Federalist approach has colleagues in the Republican caucus, meant an “originalist” view of the Con- Cruz vowed to refrain from targeting ruz made his influence felt in the stitution, which, in turn, reflects the incumbents. But then it happened C Senate even before he took o&ce. priorities of the modern Republican again, with the Madison Project, He was invited to join the weekly lunch of Party—including an expansive view of which also supports candidates who the Senate Republican caucus on Decem- an individual’s right to bear arms under challenge Republican incumbents. ber 4, 2012, which happened to be the day the Second Amendment, a rejection of “It’s time to elect some conservatives the full Senate was debating the United constitutional protections for a woman’s who won’t run from a fight!” Cruz Nations treaty on the Rights of Persons right to choose to have an abortion, a po - wrote, according to Politico. (Cruz says with Disabilities. The treaty seemed fairly rous barrier between church and state, the letter went out without his permis - uncontroversial, but Cruz, as the tribune and a narrow conception of the power of sion.) Just a few months after Cruz of the Tea Party movement, was opposed. the federal government to intervene in had taken o&ce, McCain was refer- “I was a newly elected senator who hadn’t the economy. Dozens of judges have ring to him, in public, as a “wacko even been sworn in yet, but I did just pass brought a Federalist orientation to the bird.” (The insult still stings. Introduc- on, having just come from the campaign bench in recent years; Cruz is the first ing her husband to the delegates at the trail, that issues of U.S. sovereignty reso - politician, and the first prospective Pres - Republican convention in Fort Worth, nate powerfully with the American peo- ident, to put their ideas at the center of Heidi Cruz denied that he was a ple,” Cruz told me. The issues in the treaty national debate. “Like many people in wacko bird.) were broadly similar to those in the Me- this room, I’ve grown up with the Fed- By one reckoning, the twenty-one- dellín case, in that they involved the inter- eralist Society,” he said soon after he ar- hour speech Cruz mounted against play between American law and interna- rived in Washington. “This has been my Obamacare last September was his tional institutions. home for my entire adult life, my entire consummate wacko-bird moment. At Dick Durbin, the Illinois Democrat professional life.” It was at a later Feder- that time, the House and the Senate who is the assistant majority leader, re- alist Society dinner that Cruz was in- were weighing a continuing resolution, called Cruz’s influence on Republicans spired to write a series of reports on what which would keep the federal govern - at that lunch. “These people walked out he found to be abuses of power by the ment funded and open. The Republi- scared as hell,” he said. “And I thought, Obama Administration. The idea came can House, with Cruz’s encourage- This guy is wasting no time to flex his from another prominent conservative ment, had passed a budget that denied muscles over there.” lawyer, Justice Samuel Alito, who was all funds for the A!ordable Care Act. As part of the e!ort to pass the treaty, the speaker that evening. It was clear that this budget would supporters brought Bob Dole, the Cruz’s facility with constitutional never pass the Democrat-controlled widely respected former Republican argument draws admiration even from Senate and certainly never be signed majority leader, to the Senate floor, in a those who do not share his views. “Ted by the President. So Cruz’s speech wheelchair, to lobby for passage. But is able to use erudite constitutional merely delayed the inevitable—the pas - Dole, and the treaty, failed. John Mc- analysis with politically appealing slo - sage of a budget that included money Cain told me, “It was the most embar- gans—that’s a rare talent,” Walter Del- for the bill. rassing day in my time in the Senate, to linger, the former acting Solicitor Gen- There are generally two kinds of force Bob Dole to watch that.” eral in the Clinton Administration, senators: those who legislate and those Cruz explained, “I personally have who has debated Cruz, told me. “The who run for President. Cruz’s speech, been passionate for a long, long time only problem is that Ted’s view of the and its aftermath, locked down his sta- about protecting U.S. sovereignty, that Constitution—based on states’ rights tus in the second category. John Cornyn, our laws should reflect American val- and a narrow scope of federal power— his Texas colleague, opposed Cruz’s ues, American mores, and not be gov- was re jected at the Constitutional e!orts on the shutdown. “Ted is very erned by the laws or tribunals of foreign Convention in Philadelphia, and then smart and very articulate and he has a nations or foreign institutions. I urged was resurrected by John C. Calhoun, huge following, but the question is my soon-to-be colleagues to protect and the Confederates during the Civil whether what he’s doing is going to U.S. sovereignty, and ultimately they War, when it failed again. It’s still help us be a majority party,” Cornyn did so.” around now. I think it’s wrong, but Ted told me. “The great thing about the On another early trip as a senator- does a very sophisticated version of Senate is that you are a free agent; you elect, Cruz made a speech to the Feder- that view.” can follow your conscience. But if you alist Society, to which he has since re- want to be e!ective you can’t get your turned several times. Founded in 1982, ince taking o&ce, Cruz has had lit- way a hundred per cent of the time. We the society is a forum for discussion of S tle use for the traditional political need to think about the eighty-twenty conservative legal ideas. It takes no for- norms of the Capitol, as he showed rule. We need to get back to the idea mal positions on issues, and members when he signed a fund-raising letter that it doesn’t always have to be a hun- don’t agree with each other on every for the Senate Conservatives Fund, dred per cent our way.”

44 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 30, 2014 Cruz takes a di"erent view of his role in the shutdown. While the gov- ernment was closed, the Obamacare Web site, healthcare.gov, made its di- sastrous début, and the polls turned against the Democrats. Cruz felt that his political argument, not the failure of the Web site, produced the political turnaround. “Many voices in Washing - ton say the fight that we had last fall was not successful,” Cruz told me. “Like any good litigator, at times you think of a battle as a long-term battle. You don’t always accomplish every - thing in the first skirmish. As a conse- quence of millions of people last sum- mer and fall getting engaged in that battle, I believe we dramatically ele- vated the national debate over the harms of Obamacare. And today Dem- ocrats are running scared, and the pre- vailing wisdom is Republicans are quite likely to win control of the Senate be- “O.K., Mr. Slow and Steady—let’s see you stick this one.” cause of Obamacare.” In any event, Cruz still glories in • • flouting the conventions of senatorial, even Republican Party, courtesy. Earlier this year, Mitch McConnell, the Repub- and making it easier for Harry Reid to corrupt bipartisan cabal in Washing- lican leader in the Senate, made a pro- add trillions of debt to our nation.” To ton,” but what he’s really proposing is a cedural deal with the Democrats so that Cruz, McConnell’s procedural legerde- purification ritual, the fulfillment of a fifty votes, not sixty, would be needed to main defined what was wrong with conservative agenda that has moved raise the debt ceiling. The lower thresh- Washington. “It’s part of the reason why well to the right of that of his hero Ron- old would allow senators like McCon- I’ve said many times that I think the ald Reagan. The only Republicans he nell, as well as John Cornyn, to vote biggest divide we’ve got in this country wants to challenge are those who want against raising the debt ceiling, which is not between Republicans and Dem- to coöperate or compromise with Dem- would help them in their primaries ocrats,” he said. “It’s between entrenched ocrats. As he told the delegates in Fort against Tea Party challengers. By object- politicians in Washington in both par- Worth, Cruz wants to “abolish” the In- ing, Cruz forced some of his Republican ties and the American people.” ternal Revenue Service, “audit” the Fed- colleagues to make a tough, politically eral Reserve (though it’s not clear what risky vote. he way Cruz characterizes the di- that means), and, of course, repeal the “I have to tell you that there’s noth- Tvide in American politics—Wash- A"ordable Care Act. ing that I’ve done in my year and a half ington vs. the people—is demonstrably Cruz’s sincerity in these goals is be- that enraged my colleagues more,” Cruz incorrect. Far more significant than the yond question. When he was solicitor said of his debt-ceiling maneuver. “The conflict between the capital and the general of Texas, he had a piece of advice Republican leadership asked every Re- people is the ideological clash between for the lawyers on his sta". “I tried to publican senator to a)rmatively con- left and right. Cruz’s rhetoric is mostly stress to every lawyer in the o)ce that if sent to lowering the threshold to taking an exercise, in the manner of Sun Tzu, any lawyer from the S.G.’s o)ce stands up the debt ceiling from sixty votes to of framing the narrative in the most ad- in front of the judge and says, ‘The law is fifty votes. And the argument was two- vantageous way. “Anti-Washington” X and the facts are Y,’ then that judge fold: No. 1, if we do so, it will pass, and is better positioning than “doctrinaire,” would always, always trust that we are we want it to pass. That is the outcome but that is what Cruz is, even compared levelling with them and telling the we want. And, No. 2, if we don’t, the with his likely rivals for the Republi- truth.” He’s approached politics the same Democrats can pass it on their own. can Presidential nomination. Unlike way. “Since I became a senator, a year and Every one of us can vote no. We can go Marco Rubio, Cruz opposes compre- a half ago, I’ve kept two promises to the and tell our constituents we opposed the hensive immigration reform; unlike people of Texas,” he said. “I have endeav - thing—we just consented to allow it to Rand Paul, Cruz embraces the con- ored to do what I said I was going to do happen. And my response was simply to frontational foreign policy associated and I have always told the truth. It says say that there is no universe in which I with the George W. Bush Administra- something about Washington that those can consent to lowering the threshold tion. Cruz speaks of challenging “the are perceived as radical acts.” 

THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 30, 2014 45 PROFILES MOMENT TO MOMENT

Why Richard Linklater makes movies.

BY NATHAN HELLER

o get to the place where Richard is often thought to be the Hollywood are we doing, an ad?’ We’re playing TLinklater was shooting his new farm leagues, Linklater has claimed it as human beings here.” film, you had to travel a short distance a bright alternative to studio produc- This brand of naturalism brings its that seemed far: past the Barton Creek tion. Working with a team of actors, a own imperatives. As Linklater entered Greenbelt, a preserve on the edge of few funders, and his own production his forties, he kept returning to the idea downtown Austin; past an R.V. park and lot, he operates more like the leader of of making a movie about growing up. But a country club; past the turno# to the a repertory theatre than like an indus- he couldn’t see how it could work. “If you Salt Lick Bar-B-Que, one of the last try director, turning out films that find make a film about childhood, you’ve got open-pit joints in Texas. You’re in Oak broad national audiences across a vast to pick a moment—you know, ‘The 400 Hill now, where the Hill Country starts. stylistic range. Linklater has been ac- Blows,’ ” he says. Most childhoods aren’t The trees crop up more densely on the claimed for “Slacker,” his anti-narrative like Tru#aut’s, though. They have no sin- sides of Route 290. In the spring, along début, and for “Dazed and Confused,” gle, representative dramatic stretch. They the highway, there are wildflowers, but in his high-school comedy. He is beloved gain meaning across years and disparate August the grass bakes and leaves droop for movies like “Before Sunrise” (ro- moments. The problem nagged at him drowsily from the surrounding branches. mantic, hyper-verbal, European) and until it didn’t. “I sat down at my com- At the Texaco, you’d turn, and down “Bernie” (gothic, hyper-Texan, strange). puter, and I had a flash of that feeling: Mowinkle Drive you’d spy a group of He adapted “Fast Food Nation” for why couldn’t you do that?” trailers near a small house. These marked the screen; he dreamed up the semi- Linklater started filming “Boyhood” the final preparations for “Boyhood,” a animated dream-within-a-dream “Wak- in 2002, shooting a few days every movie that Linklater had been shooting ing Life.” Then he made “School of year; the finished product will arrive in in Texas over the past twelve years. Rock.” theatres next month. As news of the “I always say I’ll never make a film in “With his first four or five films, you project emerged, it was often compared Austin in summer, but I always end up may have thought you had Rick pegged, to Michael Apted’s “Up” series. But Ap- here,” Linklater said before the day began. and you would have been wrong,” Quen- ted’s project is a sequence of documenta - It was a hundred degrees, dry. He had ar- tin Tarantino, who calls “Dazed and ries; Linklater’s is a single feature-length rived in a dirt-brown Toyota Tundra Confused” his favorite film of the nine- work of fiction covering crucial points pickup, dressed like a PTA dad on a fish- teen-nineties, says. “He’s done it very qui- from the age of seven to eighteen in the ing trip: red short-sleeve shirt, New Bal- etly, one step at a time.” Although few of life of its protagonist, Mason (Ellar Col- ance sneakers, big shorts, white athletic Linklater’s films have much plot in the trane), and his family: a sister (Lorelei socks pulled up as far as they would go. traditional sense, they lack the dead Linklater, the director’s now twenty- (His partner, Tina Harrison, has been points and the aimlessness that many one-year-old daughter) and separated at him to purchase some more charis- plotless movies have: they’re funny and parents (Patricia Arquette and Ethan matic socks, but so far the idea hasn’t buoyant, bouncing forward with an un- Hawke). Viewers watch Mason find his taken hold.) At fifty-three, Linklater self-conscious, joshing wit. Going against way through childhood and head to col - looks much as he did when he made his the fashions of contemporary film- lege. By the time the film is over, they’ve first films. He is squarely built, with making, Linklater’s notion of cinematic not only witnessed his growth but shared sandy-brown hair cropped into a grown- refinement has less to do with virtuosic it—the evolution of a personality, the man version of a bowl cut. He wears a camerawork than with creating a mo- changing soundtrack of those years. As a brush of five-o’clock shadow and, usually, ment that’s worth capturing. teen-ager, Linklater was the guy with the a look of heavy-lidded, glazed repose that “Almost every other director I’ve eight-hundred-dollar stereo and a junker gives no indication how quickly he worked with hides behind the monitor— for a car. But he considered himself too moves: one second he’ll be next to you, they love to huddle up with the director out-of-touch to pick music for “Boy - gazing o#; the next he’ll be gone, light- of photography and talk about ‘the light’ hood,” so he got kids about Mason’s age footed, flitting through a distant door- or ‘the frame,’ ” Ethan Hawke, who has to nominate the music they most re- way. He went to college on a baseball appeared in eight of Linklater’s films, membered from each period and write scholarship, and, even now, he has the as- says. “Directors are interested in ‘If you little essays on their associations: this pect of a man continually on the verge of turn a little to the left, your nose catches song recalled the long, hot summer of stealing third. a light in a great way.’ Rick would puke if 2009; that one was bound up with the At a time when independent cinema anybody said that on his set. Like, ‘What memory of getting dumped. The result,

46 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 30, 2014

“Boyhood” was filmed over twelve years; in the course of the nearly three-hour feature, the actors age along with their characters.

PHOTOGRAPH BY DAN WINTERS THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 30, 2014 47 which extends from Coldplay to Family phones. During a take, his body tenses, was not evident. Some directors are ty- of the Year, is a tribute to the fading mo- and he sometimes gently sways as if in rants, driving their actors with lengthy, ments of the now. sympathetic motion with the actors. If chaotic shifts; abusing their crews; and he likes what he sees, a smile flickers running through assistants like silk “ K., here we go—lock it up!” Vince at the left corner of his mouth; if stockings in a berry patch. This isn’t O. Palmo, Linklater’s assistant direc- he doesn’t, he might put a fingertip Link later’s style. His shoots rarely run tor, called in the Mowinkle Drive house. against his lips. Otherwise, he is impas - very late or involve a crazy range of takes. It was midmorning. Earlier that day, with sive. After the scene had finished, he When he’s annoyed, it’s mostly visible in a single camera and a small crew, Linkla- called out some correctives. Everybody a slight tightness at his jaw. Perhaps as a ter had shot five takes of a finger opening needed to make more noise. “You’re result, his collaborators often stay with a beer can—a closeup insert for a larger messing around, you’re drinking . . .” him. Sandra Adair, one of the producers sequence. As a young director, he would “Oh, that was my fault,” Hawke said. on “Boyhood,” has edited all his films stay up the night before filming a scene, He was costumed in a suit and standing since “Dazed and Confused,” in 1993. planning out shots, but now he mostly at the back of the room, near Linklater’s His assistant and o0ce manager Kirsten operates by instinct, and his allotments of two younger daughters, the nine-year- McMurray answered an ad for part-time attention, which favor rehearsal, tend to old twins Alina and Charlotte, playing work as a college student, ten years ago, run against the norms of his craft. “The Mason’s cousins. Following a second and never left. Vince Palmo has been the problem with a lot of directors is that take, Linklater darted over to Arquette. assistant director on almost all his fea - they don’t know how to rehearse, and “So, Patricia, you’d be running in tures over the past decade. they’re a little bit afraid of the actors,” pretty quickly,” he said. He turned to the In the case of “Boyhood,” actors Tarantino says. “He does real rehearsal.” crowd. “And it should be ‘He’s here.’ You stuck around, too. “Even as I was getting This morning, Linklater was filming don’t really know the other guy.” Hawke parts as an ingénue, I decided that’s a re- a party after Mason’s high-school grad- had found a prop guitar and was walking ally short-shelf-life career,” Arquette uation. Mason and his best friend, through the house playing it. said after her morning’s work was done. played by Sam Dillon, walk in the door Progress was quick at first, but techni- She was thirty-four when the project in their graduation gowns, and the cal delays accumulated through the day. started, and says that the idea of aging family members milling around cheer Linklater was shooting “Boyhood” on openly onscreen was invigorating. “You and take pictures with their smart - film, rather than with digital cameras, for can’t hold onto your youthful beauty,” phones. “All right!” Linklater said. It’s visual continuity: digital technology she said. “I’ll get responses from fans his way of registering attention, and he would advance over twelve years, he’d sometimes, like ‘You’re not hot any- pronounces it with cheery surprise, like reasoned, but celluloid would not. Unfor - more!’ It makes me laugh. Like, Am I a guy who’s just won a toaster at a tunately, neither had the cameras, which supposed to be? Was that ever an agree- school-benefit ra'e. “And—action!” required constant reloading and fre- ment we had?” He stood behind a small monitor wear - quently jammed. Linklater was frustrated “A lot of my life I think about as a ing a pair of cheap wire-frame head- with the morning’s progress, though it movie,” Coltrane said during lunch. “I think about interactions I’m going to have in the future and script them out.” He was tapped by a talent scout when he was a chubby-cheeked five-year-old, and Linklater had put him through about ten callbacks. (“He just seemed like a cool kid,” Linklater says. “He had some charisma to him. Other kids kind of wanted to be his friend, I could tell.”) Now he is tall and lean, with a gauged ear, and Hawke tells him he’s been lucky—he’s experienced all the good parts of being a young star and none of the junk.

awke’s big scene came the next day, H at Antone’s, a beer-scented Austin blues club where he and Coltrane shot a father-son tête-à-tête. The blocking called for them to start at one end of an empty balcony. They would talk as they moved along, and come to rest against the rail - ing, watching a warmup by the guitarist Charlie Sexton, who plays a version of himself. Linklater was filming much of lot about how our relationships to our fa- images.” He was still writing short stories, the scene as a long Steadicam two shot, thers changed as we aged,” Hawke later and, as an exercise, tried adapting one the technique for which he’s known. Ac- explained, of writing the scene. “The idea into a screenplay. “I could see the whole tors walk together, talking, and the cam- of an empty club: what if we could feel movie in my head—all the shots and an- era, attached to its operator by a suspen- what the father had given up?” gles. I thought, Oh, I’ve got this visual sion harness, moves ahead. He regards this Linklater’s own childhood, as he re- thing.” as a technical necessity when dealing with calls it, grew from a split conception of As the second semester of his sopho- dense, naturalistic dialogue: it’s fussy and adult life. His parents, Chuck and Diane, more year began, he was the team’s start- distracting to keep cutting between an- separated when he was in the first grade. ing left fielder, batting third in the pre- gles, and physically complicated to use Chuck, an insurance underwriter, stayed season lineup. Yet he wasn’t entirely camera track or dollies over long, un- in Houston. Diane got a home in Hunts- satisfied. “I remember daydreaming out even routes. ville, seventy miles north, which contains in the outfield: I wish I had more time,” As the crew dressed the set, and he says. “I want to read ‘The Brothers Hawke, who had found both another Karamazov.’ ” His wish came true, in guitar and a stage, launched into “Ooh perverse fashion. He contracted an in - La La” (“I wish that I knew what I know fection of the heart tissue, which caused now,” he sang, “when I was younger”), an arrhythmia. Suddenly, he couldn’t Cathleen Sutherland, the film’s produc- play, doctor’s orders. tion manager, looked around wistfully. “I “It was like fate had gone, O.K., guess used to go to summer camp—same girls both Sam Houston State University and what?” he says. “My whole second half of for years,” she said. “This is a little like the state execution chamber. She had my sophomore year, during baseball sea- that. And, you know, when camp ends, taken a graduate degree in speech pathol- son, I closed down the library every night. you feel a little sad.” ogy while Linklater and his two older sis- I’d be up there writing.” He kept a pho- They rehearsed the scene, which ters were in school. In “Boyhood,” Ma- tograph of Edward Albee with him like spanned a dense five pages in the screen- son’s mom does much the same, and a talisman. play. Hawke likes to joke that he films Linklater has found himself defending If he wasn’t playing, he’d have to make more dialogue before lunch on a Linkla- the character to those who say she’s a dis- up the time in work-study employment, ter set than in most entire movies. The tracted parent. He procrastinated for and he didn’t want to do that. A friend actors were going a shade too quickly, months about showing “Boyhood” to his helped him get a summer job working on Linklater said. He talked to Coltrane mother. an oil rig. It paid well, and gave him many about his mood: the character didn’t un- The young Linklater’s interests were free hours to read and write, so Linklater derstand why he’d been dumped. “I didn’t divided between books and sports. Be- asked if he could stay on that fall. He do anything wrong, I didn’t do anything ginning in middle school, he’d send sto- never returned to school. Instead, for the wrong—remember that,” Linklater told ries and essays to magazines, hoping for next two and half years, whenever he Coltrane. “All right! And—action!” publication. A play he’d written—a com- came back to the mainland, in Houston, Five takes later, they moved on. In the edy about a family on a camping trip— he would watch movies: first two a day, scene, Mason confesses girl trouble, and had impressed his teachers enough that then three, then four. By his early twen- his father o'ers the compromised reas- they organized a performance, and a ties, he was seeing six hundred films a surances of a guy calloused by years of short story that he composed in high year. “I just felt I’d discovered something, screwups and broken promises. Linklater, school won an interscholastic award. “I like this whole world had opened up,” he Coltrane, and Hawke had started spit- noticed all the winners went to, like, In- says. “I was greedy for it.” balling dialogue a year earlier, though terlochen and all these arts academies I In 1983, he quit his oil job, took eigh- they’d begun anticipating the scene years had never heard of,” he says, “and then teen thousand dollars that he’d saved, before that. there’s me, from Huntsville”—the only bought some film equipment, and moved When the first take of the next shot Texan on the list. to Austin. Often, he would write, shoot, ended, Hawke looked fretful. “O.K., that To most of his peers, he was an ath- edit, and watch film eighteen hours a day, was a warmup,” he said. “I fucked up a lete. Linklater had an all-American high- to the exclusion of most other things. “I million things.” Linklater nodded pa- school experience—football, baseball, would tell girlfriends, ‘Hey, I’m already tiently; it was Hawke’s last scene after cars, girls, jobs, a certain ambivalence married—to this.’ Kind of smart-assy, but twelve years of shooting, and he wanted about schoolwork. When Sam Houston kind of true,” he says. “A real job? A house? to nail it. The second take ran well, but State o'ered him a baseball scholarship, A mortgage? Kids? It was like, Ugh, gosh, Linklater was unhappy with the way he took it, and majored in English. By his what’s the point? I just wanted to live in Coltrane sat in the visual frame. Hawke sophomore year, he was thinking about some cinematic parallel universe.” called “Cut” in the middle of the third. “I writing plays. “I was dating girls who He had noticed that most good di- got screwed up,” he said, shaking his were actresses, and that was fun, so I took rectors made their first feature around head. On the fourth, Linklater began to a playwriting class,” he recalls. “But that the age of thirty, so that became his sway with excitement. He ran five more, was short-lived. That was one year. goal. He was obsessed with Tolstoy, and, with each one, the script seemed to Around that time, I was seeing movies and read extensively in his diaries. inch further toward reality. “We talked a that were making me think in terms of He dreamed of making an enormous

THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 30, 2014 49 biographical film that addressed the late-eighties Austin, and “the obsessiveness he recalls. “At the end of the night, we’d crucial moments of Tolstoy’s life. In the of that age, and the thinking at that time. I driven a hundred and thirty-eight miles, meantime, he made shorts, each con- thought it would be kind of funny, too,” and we hadn’t left the area.” This high- ceived as a technical study: this one was Linklater says. He filmed “Slacker” through intensity aimlessness pointed toward the about lighting; that one, camerawork. It the summer of 1989, for twenty-three desperate, di0use energy at the edge of was like training for the big season. He thousand dollars. “I thought we’d show it adulthood. He imagined a movie that filed his best ideas away. He sat on at a few film festivals and sell some videos.” fixed the camera on a single space, like a many of them for years. Instead, the movie got picked up for car, with a single eight-track tape playing In his mid-twenties, Linklater took a national distribution. As it went into (ZZ Top’s “Fandango!,” obviously), and Super 8 camera and three thousand dol- general release, in 1991, American pop let the world enter and exit on its own. lars and made “It’s Impossible to Learn culture was in the process of reimagining That framework fell away after he started to Plow by Reading Books” (1988), an itself. Douglas Coupland had just pub- writing, though. He wanted to shift eighty-six-minute film about alienated lished a novel, “Generation X,” announc- points of view in order to get as much of characters who wander around town and ing a new, institutionally aloof demo- high school—the campus hallway, the farther afield, playing pinball, reading graphic. Nirvana released “Nevermind.” sports culture, the parties—as possible. about Kafka, shopping. Link later ran the “Slacker” was thought to be the cinematic He also decided to set the film in the camera himself and edited at a pub - distillation of this ethos, and the film seventies, some fifteen years earlier. In that lic-access TV station. He did most of the made back more than fifty times its tiny respect, the movie marked a narrative acting, too. The result was poised, but budget. Linklater was hailed as the voice angle that Linklater has repeatedly re- it wasn’t a mature work. The feature has of a generation, though the generation turned to: the personal historical present, a little dialogue; the camera rarely moves. wasn’t his: he was by then in his thirties. kind of Polaroid of the moment developed Every shot is strikingly composed, but One of the film’s admirers was Tina by a man farther along in time. We’re self-consciously so. It seems the work of a Harrison. She had grown up in the Bay meant to be fully immersed in the world it director hung up on the filmic qualities of Area and moved to Austin for graduate portrays, but that world always exists rela - film. By the time Linklater finished it, he school in art history, but “found Austin tive to an o0screen future; we know where had moved on. His next film, he knew al - rather dreary after San Francisco and it leads, although the characters do not. “I ready, would be all about the human voice. Berkeley.” The precise nature of this was trying to make a pretty anti-nostalgic dreariness had been ine0able to her until piece,” he says. “The view of that movie is ne day a few months ago, Linklater, she saw “Slacker,” which seemed to cap- that the times they’re living in suck.” O who hasn’t eaten meat since his ture it: the movie, she recalls, conveyed Linklater sought out young actors early twenties, got lunch at Mr. Natural, the “romance of the utter boringness of who, in many cases, weren’t career actors. a vegetarian Mexican cafeteria that he Austin.” She passed the young director at “I like the street artists,” Linklater says. much enjoys. Linklater is especially en- an event one evening, but thought noth- “This is almost a Warholian notion, but amored of Mr. Natural on Tuesdays, be- ing of it; soon after, though, their social there’s an interesting kind of performer in cause Tuesday is potato-flautas day. That circles collided, because one of Linklater’s the world who doesn’t have the qualities afternoon, he got three potato flautas, big buddies had a crush on her roommate. to want to pursue that as a profession, you scoops of carrot slaw and rice with vege- He found a way to meet up with the ob- know? To want to be a professional actor tables, and an ice-filled glass of bright- ject of his a0ection at a music show one is like wanting to be a professional athlete. green spinach-pineapple agua fresca. He night, and Linklater came along as his You’ve got to want that so bad. And a lot wandered onto the side porch, out of wingman. Harrison had gone as her of the people I wanted weren’t like that.” range of a mariachi band. roommate’s wingwoman, and they got Alumni of Linklater’s early movies have When Linklater first moved to Aus- to talking, and eventually she decided variously ended up as acting hobbyists tin, in the eighties, it had a reputation for that he was kind of cute, in spite of his and as stars. Wiley Wiggins, who was cast attracting Texas’s liberal eccentrics and weird hair. The nascent romance was not after picking up a flyer on Guadalupe gadabouts. All sorts of “interior ideas” all-consuming. “Rick works,” Harrison Street, in Austin, still does the occasional poured forth from passersby. For a while, says. “He just works. Nothing changes film (including “Waking Life”), but he he lived with roommates in a house that that.” Often, he’d meet her late, a small mostly works, happily, as a Web and vid - had once been home to Janis Joplin; the stack of fresh script pages face down on eogame designer. Other “interesting” kids doors had no locks, and people from the his desk when she arrived. The only time Linklater plucked out for “Dazed and street would wander in and out. she tried to read one, he leaped over and Confused” include Ben A2eck, Adam The city seemed like a perfect setting swatted the page back into place. Goldberg, and Parker Posey. for an idea he’d had—a movie that, in place The screenplay that Linklater was In a bar one night, Don Phillips, who of a traditional plot, used pedestrian tra/c writing was “Dazed and Confused.” In led casting for the film, met a promis- as a narrative engine. Imagine: you’d be fol- high school, he and a couple of friends ing-seeming U.T. student, Matthew lowing one character, who’d bump into a once spent a night driving around in a McConaughey, who had previously been friend in the street, and talk awhile, and hopped-up Le Mans, looking for some- in a beer commercial. The day of his cos- then the camera would follow her, leav- thing to do. “A couple of races, a couple tume fitting, Linklater invited him to ing him behind, and on and on, like the of almost-fights, a couple of flirtations, a sit behind the wheel of a prop car and links of a chain. It could be a film about lot of beer consumed, a couple of joints,” film his first scene. McConaughey was

50 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 30, 2014 nervous. This was bad, because his char- acter, David Wooderson, a smooth- talking deadbeat in his early twenties who hangs out with the high-school crowd, would never be nervous. McConaughey ran over his discussions with Linklater, trying to figure out what Wooderson would be. The character loved this car; he loved the pot he was smoking; he loved the rock music he was hearing. (Linklater had made a custom playlist for each char- acter, conveying his or her inner life.) Mc- Conaughey tried to will himself into the role by giving those three things a verbal thumbs-up when Linklater called action. “All right, all right, all right!” he said. It became part of his character’s dialogue. On the first day of rehearsals, Linkla- ter had assembled the actors and bran- dished his screenplay. “I told the cast, ‘If we do this word for word, we’re fucked,’ ” he recalls. This is the approach he’s used in almost all his movies, even those he • • didn’t write, and it’s sometimes described, incorrectly, as improvisatory. Actually, future I start thinking of these as the best verbatim rehearsal, and he’s suspicious Linklater avoids surprises on the set. He years of my life, remind me to kill myself. of other writers who demand that kind DON : I just want to be able to look back schedules a lot of rehearsal time—two and say I did the best I could while I was of deference. As a result, his work in solid weeks or so before production stuck here. Played as good as I could, had the progress is extremely hard to track. starts—and goes through each scene in most fun I could, and (grabs Shavonne) Sometimes executives will express en - dogged as many ladies as I could. an open-ended way, talking about char- thusiasm about producing a Linklater acter motivations and getting actors to By the shoot, the actors had memo- project, so he will send in a screenplay ri*. Most of the rehearsal time is spent rized a more surprising and emotionally he plans to film. The response is pre- rewriting the screenplay, line by line, intricate scene: dictable. “They’re, like, ‘We love your drawing out and molding his work other films, but this isn’t for us,’ ” Link- WOODERSON : You gotta do what Randall saw against performers’ strengths and styles. “Pink” Floyd wants to do, man. And let me later says. “I’m, like, ‘Well, if you my “Often what I write is incredibly tell you this: the older you do get, the more other scripts . . . ’ ” ‘written,’ pretentious, whatever,” he says. rules they’re gonna try to get you to follow. After the box-o+ce flop of his sec- You just gotta keep livin’, man. L-I-V-I-N. “Then it’s, like, How do we undercut SLATER : Man, if you’re gonna sign that ond studio movie, “The Newton Boys” this?” The original ideas work their way paper, man, you should throw a little grass (1998), based on a true story about into the scene, but the language changes. right in the middle, man. Roll it up. Sign the mostly nonviolent bank robbers, Link- joint, man. That’s gonna tell ’em something. By the time the cameras start rolling, the PINK : That’s what I’ll do. Assholes. later started to see himself as a dropout of screenplay is halfway between the voice DON : Yeah, so what? They’re all a bunch of the Hollywood finishing school. He of the writer-director and the voices of assholes. But you gotta think about it. We’ve didn’t do another studio-financed film had a lot of really good times right here, Pink. his actors. Here’s the big introspective SIMONE : Yeah, I mean, come on, Pink. I until the producer Scott Rudin started scene of “Dazed and Confused,” as the can’t believe this. You act like you’re so op- courting him for a comedy about a failed cast first received it: pressed. Man, you guys are kings of the musician who teaches kids to rock. Rudin school. You get away with whatever you want. What are you bitchin’ about? said he saw something Linklaterian in PINK : And it’s always these same fools that PINK : Well, look, I mean, all I’m saying is, the project, and eventually Linklater did, are always saying . . . (imitative voice) People, if I ever start referring to these as the best too. The wrong way to make “School of these are the best years of your life. They told years of my life, remind me to kill myself. me that when I was your age and I didn’t believe DON : Well, all I’m saying is, I just want to Rock,” he realized, would be to hire a it then, but now I see they were telling the truth. be able to look back and say that I did it the bunch of child actors and have them If I only knew then what I know now . . . (nor - best I could while I was stuck in this place. dorkily pretend to play musical instru- mal) I just want to go, yeah, if you’re a dumb- Had as much fun as I could when I was stuck fuck, it just might be the best years of your life. in this place. Played as hard as I could when I ments. But what if you assembled a group PICKFORD : Really. was stuck in this place. Dogged as many chicks of actual musicians—interesting kids— DON : Yeah, the coaches are dumb-fucks, as I could when I was stuck in this place! and worked up moments with them? “It but if you think about it, we actually have SHAVONNE : Yeah, right, Mister Premature had some great times, right here. Ejaculation. felt like we were rehearsing for a play SIMONE (to Pink): Yeah, you act like more than making a movie,” Jack Black, you’re the oppressed. You guys are the kings of the school. Linklater doesn’t trust the precision who starred in it, says. “When we filmed, PINK : I’m just saying, if any point in the of his writing enough to insist on its that was like opening night.” The film,

THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 30, 2014 51 which was released in 2003, grossed more film industry? He got a long-term lease. wasn’t just looking for two actors, in a than a hundred and thirty million dollars Austin Studios now serves as a kind of way—he was looking for two partners.” worldwide, and Linklater, who had expe- community garden for filmmakers. In Delpy: “It was very, very di/erent in rienced the full pleasures of institutional one building, Jason Reitman was running tone—we went down a much more ro- support, realized how easy it would be to auditions for his new project. Yonder is mantic road when we started working to- adapt his creative ambitions to the stu- the patch where Terrence Malick parks gether.” Linklater says that the movie has dio’s needs. The seductiveness of the ex- his trailers. Most of Linklater’s work exactly the tone that he set out to create. change made him wary. takes place in Bungalow D, a lime-green None of them are wrong. “Before Sun- Today, Linklater visits Los Angeles triple-wide trailer where his o4ce—a rise” is drawn, very loosely, from a night the way one might visit a low-grade ra- small room with cluttered bookshelves, that Linklater had in Philadelphia soon diation site. When he has business and a black Remington Noiseless Junior after filming “Slacker.” In the first draft of there, he takes the early flight into typewriter—is decorated with posters for the screenplay, which he wrote with the LAX, runs to morning, lunch, and af- actress and writer Kim Krizan, Jesse is ternoon meetings, then catches the late named Terry and Celine is Kris. They get flight home to Austin. When he is o/ in San Antonio, instead of Vienna. ready to make a movie, he finds pro- Their talk is not the stu/ of polka dots ducers who trust him with a long leash. and moonbeams: (In the case of “Boyhood,” this was Jonathan Sehring, at I.F.C., who gave “La Maman et la Putain” and “Week- KRIS : I understand that we’re animals, but my god, we have the capacity to transcend the project a small but stable stipend end.” Last year, the Austin Film Society the physical instinct and have a much richer every year.) He tops o/ the co/ers with worked out an arrangement with the experience. You can satisfy your desires and his own money, and makes the movies Marchesa, a theatre on the edge of town, have that be the end of that, but wouldn’t you prefer to really share an experience with as cheaply as possible. Since the nine - to serve as a repertory house. Linklater whomever you’re with and know that you’ve ties, Linklater has o/ered his stars recently organized a Wednesday-night made them happy and ful"lled some of their percentage points instead of Holly- series from the nineteen-eighties—films desires, too? wood fees. He calls this “betting on like Jonathan Demme’s “Melvin and (Terry looks right at her and smiles.) TERRY: Sure, when do we start? I’m just myself,” and if the bet is good, which it Howard” and Louis Malle’s “Atlantic talking about a mind-set I had a few years almost always is, it makes the director City.” He planned to do the whole de- ago that I haven’t fully shaken. I would’ve as free and self-sovereign as a painter or cade, but made it to 1983 before running dismissed those desires you talk about satis- fying as meaningless—they’re only momen- a novelist. out of Wednesdays. tarily satis"ed and are a never-ending cycle When he had cleaned his plate at that controls our life. Mr. Natural, Linklater got in his truck inklater still conceives of himself as a and drove to Austin Studios, where his L Texas filmmaker, but his work and Young love. Even the finished “Before production company, Detour, is based. interests often carry him afield. He is Sunrise” occasionally has an eighth- Austin Studios is run by the Austin Film known among colleagues for a steel-trap grade-slow-dance sti/ness to it, yet there Society, which Linklater founded, in memory for scenes, dialogue, and faces— are stunning moments. The movie’s 1985, with a few friends. He conceived of he once recognized a stunt man’s friend strongest scene—Celine and Jesse in a it as a club for local enthusiasts to watch visiting the set of “Bad News Bears” record-shop booth, listening to Kath film classics and sub-classics on a big (2005) from an episode of “The Dating Bloom’s acoustic ballad “Come Here,” screen. In the mid-nineties, after his ca - Game” he’d seen in the nineteen-seven- trying to be cool and polite, secretly puz- reer took o/, Linklater hired a develop- ties—and projects such as “Before Sun- zled by the record, and falling in love— ment sta/ and started a grant program rise” (1995) arose from his reimmersion layers emotion in a way that became for young filmmakers who live in Texas; in the moments of his past. The film’s Linklater’s signature. there’s also a travel-grant program to help conceit is simple: Jesse (Ethan Hawke), These delicate weaves, tailored to them get to festivals like Sundance. Partly a twenty-something American bum- the performers, tighten through the as a result, Austin has become a capital ming around on a Eurail pass, sees a film’s sequels, “Before Sunset” and for independent cinema. “It used to be pretty Frenchwoman, Celine ( Julie “Before Midnight.” Creative natural- just Linklater, Malick, and Rodriguez,” Delpy), on a train from Budapest to Paris, ism is the beautiful revenge of people Rebecca Campbell, the film society’s where she’s a student. He’s getting o/ in who feel they’re being outrun by time executive director, says. Now the field is Vienna, to catch a flight home, and per- and human opportunity: the real thing crowded. suades her to join him: take a chance, he speeds past you, impervious, so you In 1999, Linklater approached the says, or you’ll spend the rest of your life reconjure it on the screen, where you city with a proposition. Austin had just wondering what might have happened. and everybody else can live in it forever. got a new airport, east of town. The old They wander around, chatting about “I always had that personality—I think one, Mueller Municipal Airport, was love and philosophy and God. Then they it’s a writer’s sensibility—where you’re lying dormant. What if the film society part, with promises we do not think there but not there,” Linklater says. “I took over a swath of it, turned the old they’ll keep. had to make a peace with myself. It’s hangars into soundstages, and created a Everyone involved is pleased to take like, well, you’re not in the moment. production lot for the city’s growing creative credit for this film. Hawke: “He But just by contemplating it, by search -

52 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 30, 2014 ing for the depth of the moment, that adults and by children Lorelei’s age— torched the Bastrop woods. It levelled is itself an experience.” hence “School of Rock” and “Bad News seventeen hundred homes, including During a break in the writing of Bears,” a remake of Michael Ritchie’s the Linklaters’. The shady woodlands “Before Sunset,” Delpy put on Nina 1976 youth-baseball comedy. Linklater grew back as a more typically cen- Simone, and started dancing. Linkla- used his obsession with growth across tral-Texas landscape: grassy, undulating, ter realized that he’d witnessed the time to layer stages of life in one narra- and scattered with trees. On Linklater’s film’s ending. In the finished movie, tive. “Boyhood” is, in some ways, a dis- property, there were now open spaces. Jesse is married, with a child; having tilled version of the “Before” series, pay- He had designed a bunkhouse by the published a novel based on that Vi- ing tribute to the passage of real time creek, making the bunks double-wide enna night, he gives a reading in Paris as frankly as it can at cinematic length. and mounting them on wheels so they that Celine attends, and something is He also started putting his kids on- could be dragged onto the porch on rekindled. Celine shows Jesse her apart- screen. Lorelei, who studies painting at warm nights, and for a couple of years ment and puts on Simone’s “Just in the California College of the Arts, in the family slept there when they were in Time.” She begins dancing, and says, in Oakland, first appeared in “Waking Bastrop. the singer’s voice, “Baby, you are gonna Life,” but “Boyhood” involved a greater Because he’d done so much of the miss that plane,” and he says, “I know,” commitment. When she was a very cool original construction himself or inex- and fingers his wedding ring. twelve-year-old, she recalls having to pensively, he made out well on the insur- The ending isn’t merely trite, because, dress up in a Harry Potter costume for ance. “Everything here, all these acres?” like much of Linklater’s work, it has a a scene. “Can my character die ?” she he said recently. “The cost of a nonde- sharp, against-the-system edge. Aren’t pleaded. The years passed, and Lorelei script Tribeca apartment.” Since finish- those heightened moments, the perfect grew ambivalent about the whole en- ing “Boyhood,” he has been rebuilding. instants with Nina Simone playing, the deavor. “I’m kind of a fantasy nerd—sci- “The whole place, to me, is like an indie points toward which all life strains? Is it ence-fiction-fantasy stu&,” she says. “I’m film,” he said. He started designing little actually so crazy to set our compass by not always so interested in things that try “guesthouses” across the property, each them? In the end, the “Before” series em- to capture reality.” with a di&erent eco theme. One will be braces what we’d rather forget: every true made out of old glass bottles, with a love story is a story of bad timing. ver Labor Day weekend in 2011, semicircular façade to trace the path of O after one of the hottest and driest the sun for a stained-glass e&ect inside. hile Linklater was working on summers on record, a fire, fanned by the Another will be made out of cob, and W “Dazed and Confused,” Harri- winds of an approaching Gulf Coast a third faced with old license plates. son got pregnant. This caught him o& storm, tore across the countryside and Link later’s friends are constantly trying guard. “One of those go-with-the-flow things,” he says. He and Harrison were not married, and still are not; Link- later has never really understood the point. (“Why let two of the most insti - tutional things, the government and the Church, into your life?”) Impend- ing fatherhood seemed right, by his mid-thirties, but it brought the fear of lost momentum. That’s not what happened. Instead, he turned his attention away from the life of an underground artist and toward build- ing a quirky kind of homestead. Not long after Lorelei was born, Linklater bought a thirty-eight-acre parcel of land near Bastrop, half an hour southeast of Austin. The terrain was thick with pine trees, which reminded him of East Texas, where he grew up. He started building on it, doing much of the construction him- self. The state didn’t require permits then, and many of the structures—a simple cabin among the trees, tennis courts— had a nonce air. The transition to family man also broadened Linklater’s work. He started making films that could be seen both by “I miss the old cubicles.” preservation of his work space was striking to him. By 2011, he had reached a phase of comfortable accomplish - ment, both in his construction at Bas- trop and in his creative life more gener- ally. He was ready to enjoy it. “The irony is that I felt done ,” he said, as a soft breeze fluttered the remaining leaves outside. The blaze, in some peculiar way, remotivated him. “The fire came, and it was like, Oh, O.K. You don’t want me to be done.”

n January, Linklater, Lorelei, Coltrane, I and a few of the “Boyhood” producers went to Park City, Utah, for the Sun- dance Film Festival, and Arquette and Hawke met them there. A friend who had rented a house near the town’s main drag didn’t need it, so Linklater’s group moved in. After a day of relative repose, Linklater donned a nice gray cowboy shirt and sat on a high stool at the kitchen counter. Coltrane came down, and started making a cup of tea. “I’m glad you’re here, man,” Linklater said. “It’s like those big things, it must be like—not that I’m married, but, you know—getting married. Like, ‘I knew “I’ve been dumping bodies here for years, and it this day would come.’ Like your kid seems to me that the sea level is rising.” going o1 to college. It’s going to happen, or whatever, but—” • • Lorelei bounced down the stairs in a velvet cocktail dress. “This is one option,” she said. to finish screenplays, books, or other her multimillion-dollar fortune for gifts Linklater furrowed his brow. “It’s—” projects, and he envisages the guest- and charity. After Tiede won early re- “What?” houses as artist-colony-like spaces lease, this May—evidence was intro- “I don’t know. I might not be the right among the rhythms of his small work- duced that he had been sexually abused judge.” ing farm, complete with vegetable beds, throughout his adolescence, which “I have a dress with sleeves,” Lorelei poultry, and miniature donkeys. A cou- might have caused a “dissociative epi- said. ple of years ago, Linklater got a pig, also sode”—Linklater invited him to live in “Yeah, you might want sleeves,” Link- miniature—in “Boyhood,” Mason’s girl- an apartment above the garage at his later said, trying to sound casual. He friend shows him a picture of it on her family’s Austin home. At present, he’s looked to Cathleen Sutherland, the pro- phone—and at Bastrop it has the run of there, trying to remake his life, as Link- duction manager, and to Sandra Adair, the place, sleeping on a pillow bed out- later, working in Bastrop, reimagines his longtime editor. “What do the ladies side the master bedroom and the home his own. think? Thumbs up or down?” theatre that adjoins it. Before the fire, Linklater stored ev- “The dress is pretty, but she might get It is not uncommon for Linklater erything at Bastrop: drafts of his early cold,” Sutherland said. to bring his work and the lives it con- screenplays, correspondence, produc- “It’s adorable, though!” Adair added. cerns home. In 2011, he came out with tion paperwork, props, and Super 8 Lorelei clambered back upstairs. “Bernie,” based on the true story of films from his early years. He lost it all. Linklater looked after her, and then at Bernie Tiede, a beloved funeral-home “You get philosophical really quickly,” the producers with paternal fretfulness. employee in Carthage, Texas (played he said, tramping through the low “That seems a little skimpy ,” he whis- by Jack Black), who became the dot- brush. pered. “Will someone tell her?” ing ward of an emotionally abusive One of the few structures untouched By the time they arrived at the the- older woman (Shirley MacLaine); shot by the fire was the library, a small two- atre, a group of photographers and in- her with a .22 rifle; hid the body in a story building clad with multicolored dustry reporters waited, like kennelled freezer; and went about his life, using tile, where Linklater likes to write. The puppies, behind a rail. Linklater and

54 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 30, 2014 the actors travelled along the line, smil- the cars. Lorelei edged in and put an that—and then just to see him wander, ing and answering a couple of ques- arm around him. They drew close. “Are after the scene, over to the craft-service tions for each outlet. It was the first you O.K.?” she said. table and strike up a conversation,” he time that Coltrane—a movie star for says. “Life is just around these heightened more than a decade, yet never a public inklater is going into production on a moments. You captured something figure—had done a press gantlet, and L film this autumn, but he’s not yet within the world, that is a record, that ex- he started edging away from the micro - sure what it will be. There are two op- ists—and you just move on. Like, ‘O.K., phones. Sutherland guided him back tions. One is “Larry’s Kidney,” which he we got that. What’s the next shot? Oh, into position. adapted from the eccentric memoir by the sun’s going down.’ ” “Twelve years a slave,” Linklater mur- Daniel Asa Rose. Will Ferrell and Zach The afternoon after the Antone’s mured as the cast trooped backstage Galifianakis have agreed to be in it. His shoot, Linklater filmed the last “Boyhood” along with the producers. “That’s how I other production -ready screenplay is sequence in Austin. It had carried over feel.” The theatre’s twelve hundred and what he calls his “college comedy,” set on from the previous day, when, after the seventy seats were filled. John Cooper, campus, during his own college years. technical delays, they had lost the outdoor the festival director, introduced the The floor of the passenger side of his car light on Mowinkle Drive. It was a simple movie. He brought out Linklater, Ar- is littered with homemade CDs of music scene: a shot-reverse-shot conversation quette, and Hawke. Linklater said, “It of the late seventies and early eighties. He between Mason and his friend, parked was a big leap of faith and a big commit- envisions his college comedy as the spir - outside the graduation party, bracing ment for so many people.” Then he took itual sequel to “Dazed and Confused” and themselves for the family throng within. his seat, in the sixth row. “Boyhood”; it’s the one stage of youth he The backdrop had to match the Mowin - In the editing room over the past few hasn’t yet dealt with onscreen. He is also kle house only vaguely, because it was be- weeks, Linklater and his team had trying to write a space -race movie about yond the focus zone, but the late -after- thought about titling the movie “Always what it was like to grow up in Houston noon light had to align exactly with the Now.” Part of the film’s pathos comes in the age of Mission Control. footage the day before. Linklater and from the realization that, although the Since 1999, he’s been working on a Palmo had settled on the perfect spot, by a actors are acting, the passage of their movie about the American Transcenden- tree in front of somebody’s lawn. A crew lives is real and irretrievable. There is no talists: Emerson, Thoreau, the whole member had been holding the position Young Mason actor who can be trotted group. As a child, Linklater attended with his silver Camry. Now, when he got out for interviews. But then it struck Unitarian services with his father, and he in to move it, the car wouldn’t start. Linklater that many Richard Linklater thinks it’s strange that there’s never been Somebody got a cable, and they tried movies could be called “Always Now.” a truly great cinematic history of a move- to jump the battery. No luck. By the time They stuck with “Boyhood.” ment so foundational to modern Amer- a tow truck could arrive, the light would When the closing credits came up, ican identity. He has a fantasy of bring- be gone. Linklater had grown quiet. the crowd began to cheer, and Linkla- ing academics and actors together around They’d have to get the car out of the ter and his actors were called onstage a table, reworking the script, line by line. parking spot themselves, he said. The for a Q. & A. The first question was Yet, despite fifteen years of research, he owner of the Camry took the wheel and not a question. “I’m nineteen years old,” hasn’t found a way to make something put the car in neutral. Linklater and a few a kid in the fourth row said. “You’ve that isn’t a “bonnet movie” period piece— crew members got behind and pressed just captured my life.” Soon Linklater high collars, grave dinner parties, mid- their palms against the back. and the actors were whisked o'stage. Atlantic dialogue. “My two historical They strained. Slowly, the car inched Sutherland threw her arms around films, ‘Me and Orson Welles’ and ‘The forward; the driver pulled a sharp left, Coltrane. With the lights o' him, he Newton Boys,’ I think they both have and it swivelled from the parking space. seemed less stolid. It was 1 A.M. They this in-the-moment feel that kind of They kept pushing, and it glided out far- headed out the back doors of the the- throws you,” he says. “That’s kind of ther down the center of the road. It atre, into a parking lot where S.U.V.s Tolstoy’s view of history. Lincoln went gained speed. The sun was going down; waited. from the Gettysburg Address, probably the street was bathed in rose-colored It was cold out, and clear, and the had to go eat dinner, and then some re- central-Texas light. Soon Linklater was slopes rising behind Park City sparkled ally practical concerns with his family: no longer applying force. He took grow- with the night lights of the lifts. A po- shit.” His fascination with the glints of ing strides in his New Balance shoes. He lice barrier had been set up along the lot, magic in this endless rough—the way released his hands from the back. The and behind it a small gaggle of photog- that the world and the people in it peri- Camry was moving under its weight raphers were beckoning. “Richard!” they odically exceed themselves, creating a few now, and Linklater was simply jogging shouted. “Mr. Linklater!” Near the front seconds of ecstatic here-ness and then behind, grinning ecstatically, trying to of the group, in the line of the camera fading back into banality—is also his keep up, as the car kept rolling forward, lenses, Linklater, Hawke, and Suther- deepest pleasure in the long process of toward the main road.  land tried to figure out where people moviemaking. were getting dropped o'. Behind them, “One of my favorite moments is when Coltrane took small steps. He was qui- an actor does something incredible that newyorker.com/go/outloud etly sobbing. He inched blindly toward you film—you know you’ve achieved A conversation with Nathan Heller.

THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 30, 2014 55 FICTION

56 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 30, 2014 ILLUSTRATION BY JON GRAY/GRAY"#$ “ ut it’s tawdry,” the woman said. fort, and the Northern California gold- four hundred and thirty-five dollars a B “Petty. I still can’t figure out what rush-era hotel where female guests woke month; how could I go wrong? happened. . . .” with hand-shaped bruises around their “Here comes the tawdry part of the She was tall, pale, and had dark hair necks. A ghost story about a man’s life story. I couldn’t a(ord a U-Haul. I didn’t and a heart-shaped face. She looked to be getting ruined seemed better. They leaned know how I’d manage the move—but at in her early thirties. “I made a series of forward. the last minute my father called me. He’d mistakes,” she said, “due to being hasty, or The novelist opened a bottle of wine recently bought a trailer. He o(ered to influenced by who knows? And each led and poured it into glasses. “Tawdry,” he drive with my mother from Maine, where to the next, and they seem to have ruined said. “I like it.” they lived, to Manhattan with the trailer this man’s life—my ex-boyfriend’s—or The woman spread her hands. “The hitched to their station wagon, and pick else changed it completely. And the initial mistakes were trivial.” me up on a Friday morning in August; if mistake was that, when I moved from “It’s always like that,” a painter said. we left early, he said, we’d beat weekend Manhattan to a bleak town upstate, I took He smiled. “Everything on earth is trivial. tra)c. They’d have me in Syracuse by a house sight unseen.” Also tawdry.” 2 P.M., and they could drive the eight “That doesn’t sound so bad,” someone “You think you ruined a man’s life,” the hours from Syracuse back to Maine that said. novelist said. “But all women think that.” same day. My father guessed, he said “Yes,” a man, a novelist, said, and nod - A few people laughed. gru+y, that I was broke. He was embar- ded. “If you didn’t like it when you got “Maybe I didn’t,” the woman said. rassed to o(er this help; he guessed that, there, you could have just switched “That would make me happy.” since I had some pride, I’d refuse. houses.” “Tell us and we’ll judge.” “My parents and I were not close. “But I didn’t,” the woman said. “I didn’t She sipped her wine. They were typical New England par- realize the truth about the house until too ents; they showed my sister and me lit- late, and then I stayed. I was too lazy to “ he year I met this man, I was twen- tle a(ection, and we showed them little move, or else sick in the head.” Tty-five and lived in New York City, back. My father always told me that if I The woman sat down at the table. It where I’d moved to become a writer. But accepted any assistance from him after was the first time she had that evening. no journal responded to the stories I he’d paid for college I’d be a loser. My Rain smashed sideways against the bun - mailed them—I knew myself they were mother was a housewife who believed galow’s steel siding. The rain had begun no good—and I spent all my time tutor - that all non-Catholics and women who halfway through dinner. Then thin straws ing and proctoring exams for a test-prep had premarital sex would burn in ago - of lightning appeared beyond the dark company. Most days, I taught at the test- nizing flames forever after death. As a windows, and hail fell on the tin roof. The prep center; others I travelled to Riverdale kid, I wished I felt a sense of kinship woman had served jumbo shrimp sautéed or White Plains to sit in grand dining with my parents, but I never did. Like in garlic butter; chicken quesadillas with rooms with people my own age and show many people, I suppose, I fantasized that goat Cheddar cheese; refried black beans, them how to combine tricky if-then I’d discover I was adopted, and had ‘real’ sautéed onions and peppers; a pear-and- statements so as to improve their scores parents somewhere far away who were bitter-greens salad; and flourless choco - on the law- and business-school entrance intelligent, well-read, sophisticated, and late cake with raspberry-vodka sauce. Ev- exams. The students’ parents paid the cared about improving the world. But eryone had drunk Lone Star beer. Her company exorbitant sums, but my checks because I resembled my parents physi - guests were a Korean-American crime- were so small I barely made rent. I had cally—my father’s eyebrows, my moth- noir novelist, a Lebanese fantasy writer, a three dollars a day for food; every day I er’s round face, their pink skin—I knew Thai journalist, and three Brazilian paint- bought a bagel and a small carton of milk I was not adopted. ers. None of the seven people around the to go in my oatmeal. When I was ac - “I’m an ingrate, I know, but my parents’ table knew one another well; they’d all cepted to a Master of Fine Arts program control of my sister’s and my bodies and been flown to this mountain town on the in Syracuse, I was thrilled, even though I movements, when we were kids—over Mexican border by a foundation that was was rejected from the fiction track and ac- the organization of the clothes in our putting them up and paying them to cepted only for poetry, and even though closets; the minute of our return, should practice their respective arts for six weeks. the city was a frigid, depressed backwater, we go out to see a movie—was so total They were all unsuccessful, middle-aged, because the program o(ered me a fellow- that after I left home the idea of their en - and hard up for cash. None of them knew ship with a stipend. tering any space of mine was repulsive. who’d selected them for the residency, or “When time came to secure housing, They left a scent behind them. Maybe all why. The woman had agreed to host a I was too broke to make the trip to Syra- parents do. It didn’t help that my mother dinner, because her bungalow was the cuse, so I called the program secretary and had a habit of ‘fixing’ whatever room she largest. Three of the group were divorced; asked if she knew of any apartments. She entered—rearranging pillows on beds, four never married. Over dinner, they’d demurred, but called back the next day: a dusting windowsills, and finding hidden discussed politics and failed relationships, student was vacating an apartment. Sev- spots of mold—and my father of ‘check - then moved on to ghost stories. The eral others had lived there before him, and ing’: he opened cupboards and desk guests were full, tipsy, and reluctant to go had also broken the lease; she didn’t know drawers when he thought no one was out into the rain. They’d heard about the why. It was cheap, and close to campus. looking, and he always peeked under boot steps on the stairs of the old Virginia The apartment was a two-bedroom for loose couch cushions for lost change. So

THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 30, 2014 57 I didn’t want to accept my parents’ help. “In retrospect,” the woman said, “I torian with a second-level porch that But my father had said that they’d drop should have said something sensitive, like, tilted downward as if it might fall o#; the me o# in Syracuse and leave immediately, ‘I like your black cock,’ or ‘I like you ,’ but I house was deep, Pepto-Bismol pink. and so I slyly felt that I’d get something just nodded. He said, ‘Say it,’ and so I said, “The front door was locked. But I for nothing. ‘I like black cock,’ and he proceeded to spied a rickety wooden staircase in back, “My father warned me that I must love me so vehemently that afterward I so I walked up the driveway and climbed have my boxes on the sidewalk in front of fell asleep without setting my alarm or it; the second-story back door opened to my apartment by 9 A.M. that Friday. He peeing, as all women must after sex. a dusty kitchen. Dirty mops and old didn’t want to spend money on a hotel, or “When I woke, it was nine and my buckets littered the floor. In the bath - stay overnight in Syracuse. Of course, I parents were waiting; my father was irate. room, nails and asbestos poked through swore I’d be ready at nine. But I managed He asked why I wasn’t ready, and I told the exposed attic roof beams. A claw- to fuck things up. I’d been dating a hand - him I’d overslept; he swore and hit the footed tub stood mid-room; its bottom some black banker-by-day who did trailer. My mother made him sit in the car was stained a radiant orange-green. The standup at night—one of several hand- with her while my pale, skinny sister toilet sat below a rusty old-fashioned some black men I’d dated that summer— helped me pack and carry boxes down the standing tank that almost reached the and when he suggested we have dinner stairs. On the road, my father sped. The ceiling. on the eve of my departure I agreed, be- day was sunny, and, once we were out of “On my return to the car, I passed two cause I suspected romantic pickings the city, hay fields stretched beyond the black boys tossing a football in my neigh- would be slim in Syracuse; besides, I en- highway. It looked as if we might still beat bor’s driveway and, seated in a lawn chair joyed his company. After dinner, we went the weekend tra0c. My father even nearby, a middle-aged man with an un- to a bar with an outdoor patio and had turned on his radio station that played the usual look. He had a normal, if markedly drinks; the time when I should have gone Beach Boys, and hummed. My mother masculine, body: dark chest hair burst home to pack came and went. I thought, watched pine trees pass by, read her study- out of the top of his blue-checkered Ah, how important is packing? I can stu# group Bible, and chewed chocolate button-down shirt. What was unusual things in boxes between 1 and 3 A.M.! We tru1es; my sister read a fantasy novel. was his large egg-shaped head and a had such fun that the banker suggested “Eventually, my mother touched my forehead that encompassed nearly half we continue to date once I was in Syra- father’s thigh. She murmured, ‘We’ll get his oddly appealing face. He had al- cuse; he could drive up, he said, and I home tonight, don’t worry.’ mond-shaped brown eyes, olive skin, could bus down to see him. But I was in- “Just then, I felt a horrible pain in my wide cheeks, and fierce eyebrows. He toxicated, also caddish, and replied, crotch. Or, more precisely, in my urinary frowned slightly as he wrote in the ‘That’s silly—it’s too far to drive.’ tract. I knew why I had it. I also knew that book—a thick manuscript—in his lap. “His face flushed. He had full cheeks; my parents would know, and how angry As I passed him, he looked up. His hand he looked down at his tie; I guessed I’d they’d be. As subtly as possible, I stu#ed raised in a small wave. I said hello, with- o#ended him. To apologize, I added, my fist in my crotch. I held my book in out intending to chat, but once I’d spo- ‘You’ll have girlfriends here, and I’ll be my lap. But the pain got worse. After an ken the man greeted me and said, ‘So busy with coursework and people I meet hour, I tapped my mother’s shoulder, and you’re the new girl.’ in Syracuse.’ He flushed deeper. A drink whispered that I needed a clinic. I begged “I nodded. later, I asked if he’d come up to my place; her not to say why. “His long legs stretched in front of the I loved his humor, and thought it would “She stared at me; her eyes narrowed. old chair. His khaki pants were wrinkled, be nice to have one last roll with him. It’d “My father asked what was wrong; my his leather shoes scu#ed. He gestured be quick, I figured, and I could pack once mother announced that I had a U.T.I. My toward the car. he’d left. When we reached my tiny father cursed and said we couldn’t stop, or “ ‘Them, too?’ fourth-floor studio and started making we’d never make Syracuse in time. My “I explained that my family was help - out on my moldy old futon, he asked, out sister, who was thirteen, asked what a ing me move, and leaving that night. of nowhere, if I’d ever slept with other U.T.I. was. “ ‘So it’s just you,’ he said. ‘Good.’ black men; I said I had; we were already “My mother, her lips curled in disgust, “When I asked him whether he lived undressed; he said, half comic, half angry, informed her that a U.T.I. was a disease in the adjacent house, he shrugged and ‘You like black cock?’ I hesitated. To me, that married women got; my sister re - gestured toward the kids. the question seemed odd, since it was ev - marked that I wasn’t married; no one “ ‘Tom takes people in,’ he said. ident that I did. Who, I wondered, replied. “I decided that meant he was homeless. wouldn’t like such a good thing?” “In the next town we found a clinic, “I’d just said, ‘Nice to meet you,’ and The woman looked around the table. but there was a line; getting medicine started moving toward my parents’ wagon The rain was still beating against the took three hours. When I returned to the when he pointed at my house and said, tin roof. A painter got up and poured car, no one spoke. We pulled onto the lightly, ‘You know, that house is haunted.’ wine. The journalist took a bite of choco - highway, and hit tra0c. It was dusk when “Once he said it, it made sense—I’m late cake. He said, “This relates to the the hills of Syracuse came into view. not one to believe in ghosts, and, as far as ghost story?” “On the street that was to be mine, I knew, I had never seen one; but the She nodded. “Yes.” rusted filing cabinets sat in overgrown apartment felt stu#y. If it was haunted, He waved his arm. “Then go on.” yards. My address was a tall, narrow Vic - though, I didn’t care. What unsettled me

58 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 30, 2014 was the man’s intimate demeanor and They’d done me a favor. Of course they Yankee skinflint who could go from jovial o#erings about the house I hadn’t inhab- could have my bed, I said. to enraged in a second. He liked to joke. ited yet. “We drove to get takeout Chinese, “I felt nervous and repeated the man’s “ ‘Oh, really?’ I said. then brought it back and ate it straight superstition—the ghost couldn’t a#ect us “ ‘Don’t worry.’ His hand moved across from the cartons, in silence, while sitting unless we invited it to appear. the manuscript. ‘He can’t do anything to on the living-room floor. “My father held out both hands palms you unless you give him permission.’ “Eventually, I spoke. Perhaps I couldn’t up. ‘In that case,’ he yelled, ‘I invite the “ ‘What do you mean, “give him per - take the silence. ghost to have his way with whoever he mission”?’ I asked. “I said casually, ‘The house has a ghost.’ finds in the house!’ He lowered his voice. “The man shrugged. The evening “My sister pushed a carton of greasy ‘I can speak generously because I’m pretty breeze blew his curly dark hair. My father noodles toward the center of the room. sure the ghost will choose one of my honked the car horn. “My father put a piece of broccoli in young attractive daughters.’ “The man looked down at his papers his mouth, then a piece of long red beef, “My mother wailed my father’s name. with embarrassment. ‘Oh, you know,’ he and chewed. He stared at me. My sister looked at the floor. said. ‘Summon him with a Ouija board, “My mother gazed at the windowsills. “ ‘Or my attractive wife,’ he added. ask him to tell you secrets, take his stu#. On one were three dead flies. “ ‘There’s no “He hummed ‘Runaround Sue.’ That’s true with any ghost. They can such thing as ghosts,’ she said. ‘Except for “I arranged the futon for my parents, never a#ect you unless you address them the Holy Ghost, who lives with God and made a blanket-bed on the dining-room and invite them to appear.’ He smiled is part of him. Once we die on earth, we’re floor for my sister, and slept on the floor disarmingly. done here. After people die, they go to myself, using a sweatshirt as a pillow. I “I thanked him for the advice. He re - Heaven to be with God. Unless they go felt bad that my sister had come on this mained there, reading his manuscript, to’—she looked at me—‘Hell.’ journey and learned what a U.T.I. was. while my family and I carried boxes into “My father pulled my sister’s lo mein Through the night, a breeze moved the the house. My parents seemed not to see toward him, stabbed a chicken gristle-blob bedroom door, which my parents had left him. At one point, a middle-aged black with his fork, and ate it. ajar, back and forth, and the creaking man opened the back door of the neigh - “ ‘This Chinese food is delicious!’ he woke me; several times I dreamed that a boring house, peered across the driveway, yelled. ‘I bet the ghost would like some! man, my father, left the bedroom and ignored the man, and told the kids to Rachel, what do you think?’ stood, half menacingly, half perplexedly, come inside. Only my little sister noticed “My sister stared at him. Our father over my sister’s form. I thought, Please the man. She looked at him once, jerked was a duplicitous, lascivious, agnostic don’t let it take her; if it has to take her head down—she had a tic—and asked who he was; I told her that he was a vagrant. “My sister said, ‘Weird neighborhood.’ “My father reassembled my futon while my sister and I carried in boxes, and I was feeling pleased that my parents were helping me move in but curious why they weren’t hurrying home, when my father announced that we should get food. My mother said they weren’t staying: the apartment was disgusting, and I had only one bed; she wanted a hotel. My father replied, No way in hell was he spending money when he’d driven nine hundred miles to save me money; they could use my bed. “I knew they could a#ord a hotel, be - cause my mother collected designer clothes and bought herself ruby and em- erald bracelets on a regular basis. I felt hu- miliated that I had the U.T.I.; I wanted to be alone. Mostly, I did not want them to sleep in my house—for their presence in it to infect my new life in Syracuse, how- ever absurd that sounds. I wanted them to leave. I almost o#ered to pay for a hotel. But I knew how ungrateful my feelings were—undaughterly and unnatural. “Sorry, but I’m cheating on my diet and I don’t like loose ends.” anyone, let it take me. She hasn’t done anything; let it leave her alone. It seemed as if I’d just thought this when I woke. TO NOAH, FROM WIFE Everyone else was up. “While I slept, my mother had Of course I was the one who drowned the old scrubbed and mopped the entire flat. It world. I’d wanted it emptied-slash- was ‘filthy,’ she said, ‘disgusting.’ Before filled by an element essential to life but, whoa, they left, my father handed me two quar - fatal in large quantity. I’d wanted less, ters, which he’d discovered in a bedroom concentrated. But here was the math of it: 2 + closet, and a man’s ring, which he hap- idea = the 10K things. Hence pened to find atop the old toilet tank. the box built to float over what ‘Pretty grody up there,’ he said. I’d killed, and everyone got in. If “The ring was large and had a blue- “everyone” = a representative sample of green stone shaped like an elephant, out- the total zoo, which rides with us now lined in silver. Trunk and tail were tucked; full time. Nights, the animals sleep and we the torso was an octagon. My mother said can grab a drink up on deck under the stone was a Paraiba tourmaline, nice the tarp. It’ll rain awhile yet. but occluded. A shame, she said; it The 2’s turn in their beds and the black bird weighed at least thirty carats. She showed and the white wait for their chance to bring a little me a dark blot in the elephant’s torso and branched something —evidence of else — said, ‘Flawed.’ I dropped the ring onto the back before never anymore coming home. necklace I always wore, a simple chain with some charms—a rose quartz, a silver —Jean Gallagher goat head—and forgot about it.

“ settled into Syracuse. Because of pre- liked it, and graduate students went there and he’d never judge me for anything. I cipitation from the Great Lakes, to shoot pool and discuss literature. The He’d boxed in college, but was so gentle, snow arrived in September and stayed man—I’ll call him Paul—was a year I’d later learn, that when he found a spi - through May. I learned that its popula- ahead of me, the program’s best writer. der in a house he carried it outside. His tion declined in the seventies and eight- He already had a literary agent; his pro - mother had multiple sclerosis and was in ies, when General Electric moved west, fessors predicted that he’d be famous. love with him. She tied pink ribbons and that, owing to industrial contamina- “I heard this before we met, from around her slender waist whenever he vis- tion, its lake, Onondaga, was among the other students; also that he was engaged. ited, and repeatedly told him that he was most polluted in the world. Personally, I “I introduced myself to Paul. When he the kind of boy she wished she’d met at thrived: I started classes, ran in the local asked where I’d moved from, I said Man - his age. He wrote by hand, in cursive sen- park, and read copious books, especially hattan. He appraised my outfit and said tences that wound on for pages, ri's that the absurd dead Russian writers. that I wouldn’t like Syracuse. When I ‘rolled like music,’ our teachers said, and “One night, soon after moving into asked why, he said I was a ‘sophisticated loved gerunds. His fiancée had lupus and the house, I put on tight pants, a top that city type.’ lived in Virginia, where he was from, be- showed my midri', and a thin leather “I told him I’d grown up in Maine, cause of her job. jacket, and went to the neighborhood bar, bought the jacket at an outlet. “That night, we played pool. After- Taps. Once there, I did something un - “ ‘But you wear jewels,’ he said, and ward, I invited him to my flat to play characteristic: I picked out a man I nor- pointed to the ring on the chain around chess.” mally wouldn’t have chosen.” my neck. The woman paused. The woman rose and put plates in the “I laughed and said it was flawed. “I have morals. But they’re my own. If sink. “For some reason,” she said, “I’m not “He plucked it from my shirt and I make a promise, I keep it. If someone attracted to men who are Christian or mock-examined it; said he didn’t see any else breaks promises, that’s their business. ‘white.’ Perhaps it’s self-loathing.” flaws. “What I regret is that I spent six years The rain poured down. “When I looked at him, I was re - with a man I wasn’t physically attracted to. The fantasy writer sipped his wine. pulsed. I feel like a traitor, even now, say- I’m not sure why, or why”—the woman “I’ll take a piece of chocolate torte,” he ing this. Others found him handsome, shrugged—“he liked me. It was cold in said. “But one without raspberries.” but I was repulsed. He had silky blond Syracuse. The program was small. He was She flicked the raspberries o' a slice hair, green eyes, a cherubic face, and rosy smart and kind. Even after smoking and served it to him. skin. Usually, I don’t feel comfortable twelve joints, he told charming anecdotes. “The bar was a former funeral parlor, around pink-skinned Christian men; After we’d dated awhile, he called o' his long and dark, with no windows. But it they seem porcine, stupid, and swollen. I engagement. had pool tables, cheap drinks, and free like tall, dark, big men; Paul was five feet “I went to lengths to please him. He popcorn. It was owned by a Greek family eight and skinny. Yet I was drawn to him. liked my apartment, but said my living who had lived in town a long time. Locals He made me feel as if we shared a secret room needed a couch; I got a tutoring

60 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 30, 2014 job and bought a couch. He said my liv- live in a haunted apartment. But it was mall. The park nearby had a lot of rapes in ing room needed a TV; I bought a big and cheap, and I’d had a good time it, but only at night. It was pretty, and had twenty-five-inch tube with a built-in there so far. a rose garden. VHS player. At yard sales, I scored “I sometimes saw the homeless guy, co#ee tables and lamps. Soon Paul was “ ne odd thing happened my second who I assumed lived with my neigh- spending most of his time at my apart- O year in the program. I was at Taps, bor—he was always wearing the same ment. I’d always preferred solitude, but chatting with the owner’s son, the bar- khaki pants and blue checkered shirt, sit- his presence made me happy. And he tender—a Greek tough, mid-thirties, ting in the lawn chair reading papers or taught me how to write. In our first year gold chains, hairy chest—when he tomes—but he spoke to me only once together, he produced stories our teach- pointed to the ring on my necklace and after the day I moved in. He’d been ers called masterpieces, and under his asked where I’d got it. sweeping the neighbor’s driveway. I tutelage my writing improved so much “When I explained, the bartender might have been staring at him, because that I was allowed to switch to the fic- asked where I lived. Then he asked to see the hair on his big head was so wild and tion track. We discussed our writing and the ring, and examined it. A guy had died curly, and he looked funny pushing a our childhoods, dreams, and plans. I felt in my apartment, he said. The ring was his. broom in khakis. Possibly I was lonely. that I could be myself around him. He “The bartender had been a kid when When he saw me watching him, he loved my cooking—he didn’t know that the guy died, he said. He, the bartender, smiled and said, ‘How’s the writing?’ I had bought a tin of MSG at Price had hung out at the bar a lot, done his “I said, ‘Fine.’ Chopper, and stirred tablespoons into homework there, helped his dad, and he’d “He said, ‘Good.’ my curries before I served them. liked the ring because it was an elephant, “He indicated the broom: ‘Doing a lit - “One night toward the end of my first and the guy, a regular, had let him play tle yard work. Tom expects everyone who year at Syracuse, Paul stayed home to with it. The guy was no one special, the hangs around to pitch in.’ work, and I wrote until late. I felt so con- bartender said. He’d come from the Mid- “I didn’t think sweeping a blacktop tent—in my work and life—that I slept west to help with construction at the was work, but I nodded. with the lights o#. power plant. The guy was a self-taught “The guy pushed the broom brusquely. “Usually, I leave the lights on when I type: he welded, built furniture, made the Dust flew into the air. Then he walked sleep. It’s ridiculous, but I’m afraid of the ring himself. Sat at the bar every night, over, asked where I was from, where I dark, if I’m alone. drinking seltzer and reading physics text- went jogging, what books I liked. Even - “That night, I turned them o#. I fell books. The guy died, the bartender said, tually, he o#ered, ‘I’ve been working on asleep with the bedroom door ajar. At because there was an accident at the my manuscript.’ 3 A.M. , I woke. The room was dark. But I plant. Some workers were exposed to too “ ‘That’s good,’ I mumbled. could see the outline of my bureau, and, much radiation. One thing that made the “ ‘It’s about my life,’ he said. in the light from the window, the outline guy weird, the bartender said: he’d re- “I said I bet it was interesting. I of the bedroom door. Then the doorknob fused treatment. The ‘treatment’ was a guessed it was about hopping trains, car - moved. crock—the guys who accepted it all died rying food sacks on sticks, whatever “Nothing moved outside the door. But anyway, but in the hospital. This guy died hobo stu# hobos did. its knob turned back and forth. I could see in his apartment, while taking a bath. “ ‘Well, I don’t know about that ,’ the knob turning. It jerked all the way left, “The bartender gave me the ring back, he said. ‘But I’ve had interesting jobs.’ clicked, then turned right. wrung out his rag, and said I “I nodded, asked where he “I was terrified. I lay rigid, watching shouldn’t wear it. was from. the knob turn for several minutes, until it “When I asked why not, he “ ‘Nebraska,’ he said. stopped. Then I flicked the lights on and blushed. He said that it was “I had little interest in the called Paul. Almost every night after that, probably just superstition, but Midwest, which I thought of he stayed at my house. When he didn’t, I in Greek culture they believed as a wasteland of flat-faced, left the lights on. the dead were attached to ob - goiter-ridden white people. “Weeks later, a student who’d lived in jects they’d interacted with, and He didn’t look like a Mid - the apartment before me told Paul why that when you wore their westerner, not with his olive he’d left. He’d been lying in bed late at things you attracted their spirit. skin and nearly black hair. night, in the room now my bedroom, “He walked to the end of He’d folded his muscular and the knob of the door—which he’d the bar. Added, ‘Plus, you look stupid arms across his chest, and was peering in- closed fully—had turned suddenly, and wearing a man’s ring.’ scrutably at my apartment’s porch. He continued to twist. The student, a “So I stuck the ring in a drawer and was standing quite close to me, I realized. self-proclaimed goatfucker from Ne - forgot about it. “He said, ‘You ever been?’ vada, leaped out of bed, took his nun- “I shook my head. chakus out of his underwear drawer, “ didn’t think about Syracuse much. I “ ‘It’s beautiful ,’ he said. Then he brandished it, and yelled, ‘Whaddya I was busy taking classes, reading books. added that his fiancée, the best girl in the want, Motherfucker?’ The economy was depressed—in the world, was there, and that he was return - “O.K., I thought. A ghost who turns square, boutiques stood empty. But people ing soon. doorknobs. So what? I wasn’t thrilled to still came down from Canada to go to the “I felt irrationally peeved and blurted

THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 30, 2014 61 out, ‘If you really like her, why are you here “I knew I was selfish to want him to ing with me depressed him; or that de- and she’s there?’ stay, just to help me with my work. But pression was the inevitable result of living “He looked down at his scu%ed shoes, whenever I wrote a story he knew in Syracuse. and his cheeks reddened. He explained whether it was good or bad, and, when it “He claimed he was ‘fine’; but some- that there were things he ‘had to do’ in was bad, he told me exactly how to fix it. times he said his head hurt, and that Syracuse, but that he was going back once Also, I’d never had the kind of friendship he couldn’t concentrate; however, this he finished his work. He hoped she’d wait and support I got from him. seemed natural for a writer. We seldom for him. He smiled at me and said, ‘Do “We stood in my dining room. He had sex; but that was natural, I guessed, you think time and space matter?’ asked me, point blank, if I wanted to be for a couple who’d moved in together. “I wasn’t sure what to say, it seemed with him long-term. I knew that if I said “I’d thought Paul and I were similar— such a stupid question. ‘No,’ or ‘Not sure,’ he’d leave. agnostic, liberal. But one afternoon, a few “ ‘Yes,’ I said. “I hesitated. months after moving in, he asked how “He smiled. ‘Then maybe they do,’ he many men I’d slept with in my life. I said gently. ‘For you.’ trusted him, so I gave an honest answer. “He pulled a photograph from his That is, an honest estimate. He’d never pocket. It was color, but so faded that I said he thought having sex was immoral, couldn’t see an image—just a form. so I was shocked by his response: he “I said she was pretty. wiped his brow and said, ‘Really?’ Then “For lack of better topics, and because his eyes glistened. I was concerned. It was I’m interested in these things—how peo- his birthday, and we’d invited friends over ple develop emotions and make the ab- “He turned away. for the evening. I’d baked a cake, and surd decision to spend their whole life “I panicked. guests were about to arrive. with one probably actually disgusting and “ ‘Wait,’ I said. “I asked what was wrong. ‘Are you not very intelligent person—I asked how “My mother was cold, but whenever O.K.?’ I said, and tried to hug him. they’d met, and he told me that she was a she wanted someone to do something for “Abruptly, he said he had to go buy freshman in high school when he was a her she gave gifts. beer for our guests. I said I’d bought beer; senior, and that she’d been dating his “Paul waited. he answered that I hadn’t bought enough. younger brother. His eyebrows lifted. ‘You “I went into my bedroom and grabbed When our guests arrived, Paul hadn’t re - can’t tell by looking at me,’ he said. ‘But my the tourmaline. The stone sparkled. I had turned. Eventually, someone reported brother has blond hair and blue eyes. I’m some jewellers’ boxes, and I slipped the that he was at the bar, on a bender. the dark one in my family.’ He frowned. ring in one. I brought the box to Paul and “I forgave him for that night, or he He’d had to do a lot of work to get his held it out. me—but I felt betrayed. I’d seldom expe- fiancée away from his brother, he said, be - “I said that I’d been meaning to give it rienced such revulsion directed my way, cause she’d found his brother incredibly to him, as a symbol of my fondness for and I felt vulnerable, as I had when I was handsome. When I asked what he’d done, him, and that I hoped he’d stay. a child. I saw him now as I had initially— he said, ‘Oh, just the usual: took her out a “He seemed impressed. He put it on. his face and body so viscerally pink, like lot, invented surprise -adventure treats, He said he’d stay. underdone pork loin. and told her a lot of bad jokes. Persistence.’ “I suggested we get a nicer apartment. “When I stopped sleeping with him, “He peered o% into the woods behind But Paul decided that he liked my flat. So he didn’t seem to care. I thought he’d my house. he moved into the pink house. cheat on me, but he left the house now “That was the last time I saw him. only to work at the factory. “ aul quit smoking weed. He swore o% “I thought he’d leave. But he didn’t. I’d “ hen Paul graduated from the PTaps and spent days in the second published some stories in national maga - Wprogram, he said he might move bedroom—now his o)ce—but his novel zines—almost entirely because of his en- to D.C. and work as a reporter. I was dev- never progressed. He had taken a posi- couragement, plot ideas, edits, and, often, astated, because I’d imagined he would tion working in the warehouse at the insertions of missing paragraphs—and stay in Syracuse. When I suggested it, he air-conditioner factory in town, and he Paul soon informed me excitedly that I looked away. He said since I didn’t plan to complained that it took all his energy. But was now eligible to apply for tenure-track be with him long-term there was no rea- he also stayed up every night until 4 A.M . teaching jobs. I must apply, he said. If he son for him to stay. watching movies, and each morning could, he would. It was an honor, the “I’d told him frankly, when it came up, when I opened the freezer I found that a chance of a lifetime. that I had no interest in marrying him. I large carton of Breyer’s ice cream that had “All year, Paul had worked and paid had no interest in marriage at all. I sup- been full the night before was now half our rent. Because of this, he said, he’d pose that, like many people, I lacked a empty. We went on walks together during been unable to write. If I got a ten - good model. Marriage seemed a bad which he didn’t speak, or else ranted ure-track job, I thought, I could support deal: the man cheated, and the woman about the crooked Republican govern - us, and Paul could finish his novel. So I got fat. Also, I’d never met anyone I liked ment. When his mother called, he didn’t applied for jobs. Paul organized the whole enough to want to marry; also, I wasn’t pick up. I guessed that his pot-smoking thing, printing out the list from the attracted to Paul. habit had masked depression; or that liv- M.L.A. Web site, highlighting ads I qual -

62 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 30, 2014 ified for, and circling the best positions. “Only once did he seem his former cause it sticks in my memory and is po- “To please him, I applied to schools in self—he read a book and talked to me tentially relevant to the story, I have to say. Ohio, Utah, Iowa, and even Minnesota. about it. It was a true-crime novel. He A minute later, I was pushed onto my But not Nebraska—I wouldn’t go there, bought—but failed to read—biographies, back and held down; I told him to cut it I said. histories, pop science. His head hurt too out, and he ignored me; he was slender, “ ‘But it’s the best job,’ he said. The much, he admitted, to read. but a boxer, and much stronger than me. teaching load was low, the salary high. So “I almost never went into his o(ce, It’s going to sound like a terrible romance I applied. because I respected his privacy. But one novel, but he forced me, held me down, “Ultimately, I got several o&ers, but the time I did, and I saw a piece of paper looked right at me the whole time, and job in Nebraska was the best. that said ‘ KILL YOURSELF ’ in black let- basically made me want things I didn’t “When the time to move came, we ters, taped to the wall above his desk. even know I wanted. It was a di&erent hadn’t slept together in a year. I told Paul When I told him I’d seen the sign and style, I guess you could say. Anyway, I was we should break up. To my surprise, he was concerned, he laughed and said it was half-horrified and half-exalted afterward, asked me to give him another chance. a joke. ‘Don’t go in my o(ce,’ he said. thinking that my whole life had changed, He’d change in Nebraska, he said. “He still stayed up watching movies thinking, Maybe this could work, our lives “In the end, I acceded, because I was most nights. Once, he told me that he’d could change, we could be happy, I’ve afraid to move to Nebraska by myself. written a novel but it was worthless, and been such a fool this whole time. I was Even if he’d become unfamiliar—morose, he’d thrown it out. I know now that vari- thinking these things when he said casu - silent, unable to read—he was familiar— ous things cause depression. But, at the ally, lying apart from me now, ‘That was his scent, body, posture, gestures, voice. time, I was ba)ed; he seemed so di&erent. for him, by the way.’ He was my friend. “We lived in Nebraska for two years. “I was still catatonic, and unsure what “But in Nebraska we grew further Once, we had it out. ‘I see the way you he meant, when he added, ‘Because he apart. Paul loved the friendliness of the look at me,’ he said. He wasn’t stupid. He still likes you, even though you’re being people and the fields and trees. I hated the knew I’d ‘settled.’ Did I ever think maybe such a cunt.’ flatness of the Nebraskans’ faces and of he’d settled for me ? I was critical, self-righ - “I lay there for a minute. the terrain. He’d studied the town’s layout teous, and a jerk. I was no beauty. There “I said, ‘It’s not O.K. to call me a cunt.’ before we moved, scoured rental ads, and hadn’t been many options in Syracuse for “He settled onto his side and looked chosen a stone ‘worker’s house’ for us that him, either, he said. at me calmly, fully naked, completely I found ugly and he adored. The univer - “ ‘You were engaged ,’ I said. unembarrassed. ‘You’re right,’ he said. sity gave him classes to teach, and he “He blinked. Flicked his ear as if He added reasonably, ‘It’s also not O.K. loved doing it; I saw teaching as a job. brushing o& a fly. ‘True,’ he said. to be a cunt.’ Evenings, we walked along the low, slug- gish river that cut through town. The “ still recall the last time we had sex, “ hen I said we should separate, river was brown and smelled of industrial I because it occurred in an odd way. He W his first words were ‘I want the runo& and dead fish. Mosquitoes swarmed touched my shoulder in the night, and, as house.’ along the levee, and as we walked we usual, I rolled away; I don’t want to dis- “He also said, when I asked, that I dripped sweat. Sand islands in the river gust you with sordid information, but, be- couldn’t have the ring back. It was tacky had signs with skulls on them that read, ‘Toxic, No Fishing,’ and on larger ones old men sat in lawn chairs, rods in the water. I found this tragic. Paul said mildly, ‘People need to eat.’ “He taught his classes, I mine. He worked in his home o(ce, I in mine. We slept in the same bed like brother and sis - ter. Sometimes he o&ered me a back rub or touched my shoulder in the night, and I rejected him. I’m ashamed now. “He stacked neighbors’ wood for fun, swept their driveways. There was one old woman down the block whose lawn he mowed for free, and whose weeds he trimmed. Only now can I see how terri - ble my attitude was, but I told him that he didn’t need to play grandson to every prairie hag. He reprimanded me calmly, saying he did it because he liked doing it, and wanted to. She wasn’t old, he said; she wasn’t even sixty. said his father knew him well; I asked the owner to tell me about him. “He told me what I already knew: that he’d been a regular. That he’d come to town to work at the FitzPatrick plant, but once he saved enough money he was going back to where he was from. The owner paused. ‘Midwest somewhere. Oklahoma, Wyoming . . .’ “I said, ‘Nebraska?’ “That was it, he said. ‘The guy had a cute fiancée. Showed everybody her pic - ture. Came here to make quick dough, go home, and buy her a house.’ But there was an accident; the man’s crew was exposed to dangerous levels of radioactive chemi- “Anyone who isn’t speci$cally named in the will cals. The victims were o)ered treatment, still receives one of these valuable gift bags.” but the guy declined. ‘Maybe he was smart,’ the owner said. ‘The other guys • • still died.’ He’d heard from locals who’d visited them in the hospital—the skin slid o) their faces like putty. of me to ask. He gently pointed that hair. In the picture next to her, Paul’s “I asked the owner what the guy was out. face looked larger. He was thirty-five; like before he died, and the owner said “I left Nebraska; he stayed. his arms gripped the woman tightly. that he only came in a couple of times “I moved to Brooklyn. I heard She was probably sixty. I recognized after the accident, but that he said some - through acquaintances that he contin - her: it was the woman who’d lived down thing about finding a way out. He’d seen ued to teach, and also got a job at a the block from us in Nebraska, whose medical doctors, naturopathic doctors, foundry. For years I thought of him as a lawn he’d mowed. That surprised me. homeopathic ones, and finally a Santería. failure. A debacle. I don’t know why I But they looked happy. So I thought, Said he paid her up the wazoo, and that judge people this way. He didn’t publish. Well, they get along. The profile—it they’d worked out a special deal with the I saw pictures of him on Facebook with was his profile photo—said ‘Married, to universe. He said he’d gotten permission various younger women, possibly stu - Erendita Dantine.’ ” to do something extraordinary. dents. I was glad he was dating. The woman got up and cleared some “I asked what the thing was; he shook “After I moved to Brooklyn, I started plates, then sat down. his head. substitute teaching at private high “I make too much out of nothing, “The owner’s son walked outside to schools. One needed a gym teacher, and maybe. But here’s the end: though I’d smoke. so I became one.” She shrugged. “I real- published nothing in years, I was in- “The owner polished the counter, be- ized I liked being a gym teacher. I wasn’t vited to Syracuse to give a reading. The came expressive. He said that the guy, writing. The truth is, without Paul’s morning after, I walked to my old Otensky, didn’t drink. He just ordered help I can’t finish a story. I dated now neighborhood and knocked on the tonics with Rosie’s and read books about and then, men I liked well enough, no door of my former apartment. When a quantum mechanics. He bragged that burning love. It’s only recently—” the young woman answered, I said I’d lived he was smarter than most men, though woman looked up and brushed her hair there once, described the doorknob’s he’d never been to college. He was a rab- behind her ear; her skin was plump, but turning in the night, and asked if any - bi’s son. The bar owner told me that when she smiled tiny lines appeared thing similar had happened to her. after the accident, before the radiation under her eyes—“that I fell in love and She didn’t know what I was talking a)ected him, he said, ‘I can do what understood what people mean when about. God tells us we can’t. Do you know they talk about wanting to be with “I had time before my flight, so I why?’ When the owner asked why, he someone forever.” went to Taps. The owner’s son was still said, ‘Because there is no God. There’s “What happened?” The fantasy writer bartending, though his face was beefy only matter, energy, subatomic particles, asked. now, and he had a paunch; his old dad and vectors.’ He told the owner that She shrugged. “I don’t know if he was with him. I ordered a vodka-soda man could do almost anything he wanted loves me.” and chatted. Neither of them remem- through physics, and that thought and The guests fidgeted. bered me. Eventually, I said I used to matter were intertwined. He said that a “Last fall,” she continued, “I went to live nearby, in the pink house, where a person’s whole spirit could be contained Paul’s Facebook page and saw a picture man had died. within one bit of flesh from the inside of of him with a woman: she had a wrin- “ ‘Otensky,’ the owner said. his cheek. kled face, watery blue eyes, and gray “I remembered that the bartender had “The owner leaned forward. ‘He

64 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 30, 2014 got crazy,’ he said. He shrugged. ‘He The woman didn’t know. After she claimed that through a combination gave it to Paul, she said, he always wore it. of ’—he paused—‘quantum entangle- “Interesting,” the crime-noir novelist ment, infrared energy, crystals, and said. “I guess.” welding tools, he’d welded a piece of “There’s one more thing,” the woman himself into the stone in his ring, and said. “He published a novel this summer. that he was going to mail the ring to his That’s why I can’t tell you his real name. fiancée. He told me that he was going It’s been on the best-seller list for fifteen to write to her, “I’m going to try to come weeks.” back to you,” and tell her to take the “Guy’s a writer,” the crime-noir novel - ring and find a man she liked, and tell ist said. him to put it on.’ “It’s good,” the woman said. “I’m “I said that was crazy, which it was. happy for him. But the prose is odd. It’s “The owner smiled. ‘Guy had a big like the writing of someone who didn’t go head,’ he said. ‘Brilliant man, kinda crazy, beyond eighth grade. Short, simple sen - big head.’ tences. Very declarative.” “I was at the door when the owner The crime-noir novelist raised his said, ‘The wife had a weird name. Emer - eyebrows. alda. Topaz, something like that.’ ” “But every hundred pages or so—” she The people at the dinner table stared looked up forlornly—“there’s one sen - blankly at one another. tence that goes on for three pages, full of The crime-noir novelist said, “Was the modifying clauses and gerunds.” name Erendita?” The fantasy writer laughed. “Now The woman nodded. you’re saying—what? Two authors, one The novelist pushed his dessert body?” plate away. “So, the fiancée had the She shrugged. “I don’t know. Say it’s same name as the woman your ex-boy - possible. The original owner. And a friend married,” he said. “But that’s just guest.” coincidence.” The journalist smiled. “So, if there was The people at the table yawned. They a ghost, the ghost didn’t choose you.” felt that the story was overlong, and The fantasy writer spread his hands. unsatisfying. “Trivial crap,” he said. “It’s pointless to “I don’t understand,” a painter said. unpack these things. Every man makes “Let’s see if I got this,” the fantasy his own path. This guy, Paul, fucked up by writer said. “You and your boyfriend sleeping with you. Excuse my honesty. liked each other at first. After living Sure, he got depressed. No man really together, you got sick of each other wants to find out his girlfriend’s a ho-bag. and treated each other like shit. Then But what’s to worry about? He wrote a you broke up. That’s all relationships. best-selling novel. So what if he had to Isn’t it?” pump old pussy to do it? Even if a man “What are you saying?” the crime-noir gets half of what he was meant to get, and novelist asked. “Are you saying this guy becomes half of what he was meant to be, melted, hung around as a ghost in a lawn that’s good. Who cares how it happens? I chair in Syracuse for thirty years , somehow hope some dead fuck helps me get where took possession of your boyfriend, and I’m going, too.” persuaded you to be his paying escort The people at the table sighed and back to Nebraska? So he could get with shifted in their seats. The night outside his old lady?” was still—the rain had stopped—but in The woman shrugged. the nearby trailer park a mutt howled. In “Hmm,” the crime-noir novelist said. the yard, the dark stubby shapes of three “It’s kind of a stretch.” javelinas trotted through a stand of Two painters chatted rapidly in Portu - prickly-pear cactuses. One grunted guese. They laughed. One turned to the softly and kicked an empty can, and in woman and smiled. She said, apologeti- the lights of the bungalow’s porch it cally, “Stupid story.” flashed like a star.  The woman nodded. “And the ring?” the crime-noir novel- ist said. “The stupid elephant ring? What nyr.kr/thisweekinfiction was the deal with that?” Rebecca Curtis on “Pink House.”

THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 30, 2014 65 drogynous performer, and her Agnes is both maternal and paternal, sense and THE CRITICS sensibility, femme and butch. It’s that quality in Agnes—the Platonic ideal of two halves becoming one—that Hannah (the exciting Cherise Boothe), a black lesbian separatist who turns up at the B. and B., finds so attractive. Hannah, a drifter who works her way into Agnes’s home by fixing a sign here, a cabinet door there, is very much a woman of her time; THE THEATRE a reader of feminist writers like Ti-Grace Atkinson, she wants to live in a female- centered world. Hannah’s rootlessness JUST US isn’t troubling, because she has a home in her body, in her self. (At first, you Surviving the bad guys. groan over her clichéd backstory and MacKinnon’s direction of it, but then BY HILTON ALS Boothe takes o), finding the humanity in the part.) don’t know which casting directors cade or so, Jones, now fifty-seven, has Unlike Hannah, Mary Anne (Zoe I first took notice of the great Ameri- played a number of mothers poised on a Kazan), an abused woman whom Agnes can actress Cherry Jones, but they must precipice, who keep themselves from fall- takes in, refuses ambiguity: she believes have had an interest in what I call spiri- ing by being indefatigable, if not inde- in absolutes, such as the strength and ir- tual casting. More often than not, casting structible. Now, in Sarah Treem’s weighty, refutability of men, and the weakness and directors work from the outside in: tak- flawed, and politically astute play “When uselessness of women. Mary Anne has ing their cue from a director’s previous We Were Young and Unafraid” (a Man- lived only for men, so when she meets projects, they call on actors who, first, hattan Theatre Club production at City Paul (Patch Darragh), a guitar player who conform to that director’s established vi- Center’s Stage I, directed by Pam Mac - has holed up at the B. and B., she can’t sion and, second, may add a little some- Kinnon), she portrays a single parent help wanting him to want her, despite the thing to it. Spiritual casting involves named Agnes, who owns a bed-and- bruises on her face. looking beyond an actor’s superficial suit- breakfast on an island o) the coast of ability for a role and recognizing, with a Washington State. It’s 1972, and the ac - “ hen We Were Young and Un- kind of critical love, the artists, like Jones, tion is set in Agnes’s kitchen and dining Wafraid” is, in some ways, a con- whose interiority not only transcends the room, where the emotional climate is ventional, naturalistic piece, but it is limitations of their physical features but often as thick as the weather outside. You also a memory play that brings to mind transfixes us until we believe in the very see, Agnes, a former nurse from Tennes- those wonderful Bette Davis “problem” real unreality of the stage. see, isn’t running an ordinary B. and B.; it’s pictures—“The Great Lie” or “Old Ac- Ever since she played the emotionally also a shelter for abused women. Agnes quaintance” or “The Old Maid”—in doomed Catherine Sloper, in the 1995 re- and her beloved friend Danielle came to which the ennobled sacrifice themselves vival of Ruth and Augustus Goetz’s “The this isolated place after Danielle got preg- for the selfish. Eventually, as Treem’s Heiress”—she won a Tony for her por- nant and had to flee their home town. characters shed their types and evolve trayal—Jones has made her characters’ Agnes believed that she and Danielle into more fully realized people, their incorporeal beings, their spiritual selves, would rear the child together and “be- world grows darker. The danger that we visible to her audiences. The e)ect can come a kind of family.” But, after giving sense lurking outside the doors and hov- sometimes feel supernatural, and yet birth, Danielle ran o) and was later killed. ering beyond the windows feels very real, Jones is always grounded. Her Mrs. War - Agnes tries to save Danielle again and even though what we fear is a phantom ren, in the 2010 staging of George Ber- again, starting with her now teen-age figure, a bogeyman we never meet: Mary nard Shaw’s “Mrs. Warren’s Profession,” daughter, Penny (Morgan Saylor), whom Anne’s abusive husband, John. Mary was mercenary and tough, but also full of Agnes adopted. But Penny doesn’t like Anne can’t resist her urge to call him, hope, which kept her pure. In last season’s living in this “weird” house and she which is how he finds out where she is. revival of Tennessee Williams’s “The doesn’t like Agnes, whose care and When Agnes catches her at this, we can Glass Menagerie,” Jones, who is South - watchfulness she finds stifling. As Saylor see her resolve sti)en, but it’s not enough ern-born, found a match in the willful shrieks, rather than speaks, her lines, to keep the sad emotional sludge that and sometimes brutally realistic single Jones’s Agnes studies her from across the she’s always trying to contain from ooz- mother, Amanda Wingfield, a survivor gulf that separates children and adults. ing out into her neat house, blackening

who wishes on the moon. In the past de- Jones has always been an emotionally an- her floors and her fortitude. Repeatedly, ABOVE!"VASCO"MOURÃO

The abused: Cherry Jones, Morgan Saylor, Zoe Kazan, and Cherise Boothe in Sarah Treem’s “When We Were Young and Unafraid.”

66 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 30, 2014

ILLUSTRATION BY HOPE GANGLOFF THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 30, 2014 67 Mary Anne withholds the truth of who idea of being appreciated for something excluded him from its rites and passages. she is from Agnes, just as John likely other than her devotion to Danielle and On the way home from the battlefield, withheld much from her. And although Penny horrifies her: she knows that, for a the brothers and their fellow-soldiers Agnes has probably seen Mary Anne’s woman, to be emotionally exposed is to Claudio (Jack Cutmore-Scott) and Ben- particular pathology before—perhaps risk being violated. edick (Hamish Linklater) stop o% in even in Danielle—she keeps after her, Treem’s interest in the psychology of Messina, where Don Pedro’s friend trying to break through to her as a intimacy and domestic violence is deep Leonato (John Glover) is the governor. woman, when, in fact, Mary Anne has and moral; in this discordant drama, she In Leonato’s house, they find a number of no interest in female sympathy. To let hits many notes that vibrate the nerves. lovely young women, including Leonato’s herself be befriended by a woman, she’d Her story is about the body, and not just niece Beatrice (Lily Rabe) and his daugh - have to have a modicum of self-respect, the female body but the fundamental ter, Hero (Ismenia Mendes), who hopes and what is that? weirdness of all humans—bipedal, think- to marry Claudio, the love of her life. Be- But Mary Anne is not a classic case atrice, it turns out, had a prior involvement study of the abuse victim: there’s some- with the sometimes slaphappy, sometimes thing rotten in her character as well. She romantic, always talkative Benedick, but encourages Penny to pursue the object of things didn’t really work out, probably be- her crush—Tommy, the captain of the cause neither character is a stranger to high-school football team—and tells her strong opinions. (In 1972, Sam Water- that hiding her feelings will be the best ston and Kathleen Widdoes matched wits aphrodisiac. We watch, perturbed, as Mary and hearts in Joseph Papp’s fantastic stag- Anne’s cynicism sets the innocent Penny ing of the show, which also originated at on an all too familiar course—playing ing creatures, who, seemingly, never pass the Delacorte. Fortunately, it has been games to win a prize that’s not worth hav - up an opportunity to test the limits of preserved on tape by the Broadway The- ing. After Penny is intimate with Tommy, their strength by trying to make others atre Archive.) Beatrice overhears two of she tells Mary Anne that he pinned her feel weak. As you absorb the play’s colors her women friends gossiping about Ben- arm behind her back so that she couldn’t and shading, you may ask yourself ques- edick’s love for her, which would define his move. Isn’t that funny? Mary Anne, finally tions such as these: When did violence soul if only he could find the words, in the seeing that her own story is about to repeat become a problem that we don’t really midst of all his talk, to express it. But, un- itself, objects, but by then we don’t buy her want to solve? Why do fury and the need like Kate, in “The Taming of the Shrew,” concern; she’s too egocentric in all the for control dictate so much social and po- she doesn’t bend to male will; when she’s wrong ways for us to trust her. litical action in the world? And why is it softened, it’s out of loyalty to her beloved Treem’s script is filled with under- that our imaginations thrill to stories of cousin Hero. Don John’s nefarious plot- stated Ibsen-like touches; the Norwegian debasement and physical threat? I think ting convinces Claudio that Hero has be- master’s influence flitters along the edges it’s less that we are wired to respond to trayed him, and the distressed Beatrice of the dialogue and the action and then violence than that we are riveted by exis- enlists Benedick in the e%ort to clear He- disappears, but not for good. It works on tential questions, among them: What ro’s name (while she pretends to be dead). you residually—it may take a few days for would happen to “me,” if my body were In the end, of course, virtue triumphs. you to grasp why you felt so uneasy snu%ed out? Don John’s villainy is revealed, and Hero during certain scenes, and your unease Shakespeare’s villains often pose these and Claudio are reunited. may have something to do with your kinds of questions. His evildoers are As with many of Shakespeare’s works memory of the moments in your own life smart enough to know that maleficence that are built around a specific theme— when you felt your humanity trivialized is everywhere—even in his e%ervescent marriage, betrayal, aging—it would be by violence, or the threat of violence, and comedies. In fact, it’s Parolles, the villain silly to argue that the plot should be plau- you quickly tried to tuck those feelings in “All’s Well That Ends Well,” Angelo, sible. It’s the language you come to hear, away, like something ugly and shaming, in “Measure for Measure,” and Don behind all the whimsy, with its masks, locked in a dresser or shoved to a corner John, in “Much Ado About Nothing,” manipulations, and mistaken identities. of the attic. Treem’s play opens that who give psychological weight to the po- Every minute of “Much Ado” is filled dresser drawer and empties it onstage. et’s ruminations on the drama of cou- with verbal action, which the actors in Even the stalwart Agnes can’t handle the pling. In “Much Ado” (at the Delacorte, this production fully inhabit: it’s opera stench that rises from her pain once she directed by Jack O’Brien), Don John bu%a without the singing. And yet what reveals herself to Hannah just a bit. Ro- (wonderfully played by Pedro Pascal) is would our pleasure mean without Don mantic love—the love she felt for Dan- the bastard brother of Don Pedro (the al- John’s forlorn, lonely presence, his emo- ielle and perhaps no one else—is what ways hearty Brian Stokes Mitchell), the tional violence toward his own soul? Pas- sets her o%: Hannah wants to give Agnes Prince of Aragon. Although the brothers cal gives the most honest and authentic the gift of her body and thereby put her have fought in the same war, they are not performance in the play, because it’s fu- closer in touch with herself. But Agnes the same. Don John is an outsider whose elled by Shakespeare’s understanding can’t accept it. First, she’s not a lesbian— social illegitimacy is inseparable from that, as much as we may be momentarily though her resistance is only partly due the brilliance of his observations; he drawn to the light, it’s the spirits in the to labels, which scare and anger her. The can see the world clearly because it has dark that get us every time. ♦

68 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 30, 2014

Existential compromises fascinated BOOKS Crane. Does an alcoholic choose to drink? Is a soldier blameworthy if he flees an attack that scatters half his reg- THE RED AND THE SCARLET iment? In the eighteen-nineties, during a brief and fiery literary career—he died The hectic career of Stephen Crane. before he was thirty—Crane explored these questions with vividly imagined BY CALEB CRAIN detail and little moralizing. In narra - tives of the hopeless and the near-hope- less, of human beings experiencing powerlessness and self-delusion, he managed to record a new kind of con- sciousness, giving the reader glimpses of the self as an opaque and somewhat mechanistic thing. In “The Red Badge of Courage,” the novel that made Crane famous, at the age of twenty-three, the nonhero Henry Fleming desperately wants to be perceived as brave, even though he de- serts in a moment of cowardice, and doesn’t really seem to believe in bravery except as a perception. When, after his flight from the front lines, he manages to return to his regiment unexposed, he adopts a virile attitude: “He had per - formed his mistakes in the dark, so he was still a man.” And that’s only the outermost shell of his hypocrisy. A friend has entrusted Fleming with let- ters to his family, to be delivered in case of the man’s death. Fleming, desperate to keep his lapse secret, sees that these personal letters make the man vulner- able. He decides to taunt his friend about them if he gets too curious about Fleming’s absence. As it happens, the friend doesn’t get curious. When he asks for the letters back, Fleming tries n Stephen Crane’s novel “Maggie” end is determined from the beginning, to come up with a cutting remark but I (1893), it’s impossible to pinpoint the when the girl has the misfortune to be can’t, and hands them over without moment when the title character is first born into poverty with attractive looks comment. “And for this he took unto set on the path to prostitution. Maybe it and an alcoholic parent. himself considerable credit,” Crane happens when her brother’s friend Pete Crane tells Maggie’s story in a way writes, as Fleming’s self-serving con - tells her that her figure is “outa sight.” that resists a simple answer. If he had cast sciousness turns a final pirouette. “It Maybe it happens a little later, when her her as a traditional heroine, he could have was a generous thing.” job making shirt collars on an assembly praised her resourcefulness or faulted her Even when performing a small act of line begins to seem dreary. Is it a mistake vice. Instead, his novel acknowledges the self-restraint, Fleming is, to the narra- when she lets Pete take her to a music contingent world she lives in, where her tor’s eye, a cad. Crane writes of Fleming hall? What about when she lets him intentions may not be as powerful as the at one point that “his capacity for self- spirit her away from her rage-filled labor market, her instinct for survival, or hate was multiplied,” and one senses mother, who has collapsed on the the influence of family and friends, and that he saw himself in the character, and kitchen floor after a bender? Women in her own understanding of her intentions was correspondingly hard on him. the neighborhood gossip, and a prac- is at times partial. “She did not feel like Crane’s great literary innovation here is ticed flirt steals Pete away—perhaps a bad woman” is as close as she, or the to combine intimacy of observation they are instrumental. Or maybe the reader, gets to insight. with antagonism—a play of antipathy rather than of sympathy. Mental calcu-

Early readers of “The Red Badge of Courage” assumed that its author was a war veteran. lations so unflattering and so familiar BETTMANN/CORBIS

70 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 30, 2014 had rarely been made so visible in fiction sonal self, and as recklessly disinclined to seems to have been joining the Delta before, except, from time to time, in vil- take conventional sexual morals seri- Upsilon fraternity, and, after a desperate lains. When, in a later short story, Crane ously, as Oscar Wilde. transfer to Syracuse, a semester later, he says of one of his characters, a loner and arrived at the frat house on the new a spy, that his “irony was directed first at rane was born in Newark in 1871, campus, as a friend recalled, “in a cab and himself; then at you; then at the nation C into religion and conflict. His a cloud of tobacco smoke.” By then, the and the flag; then at God,” he is describ- mother came from a family of Method- only thing he took seriously was baseball. ing his own sensibility. ist ministers. He joked that they were “Mr. Crane, what are you in this univer - Fittingly, it has been hard for biogra- “the old ambling-nag, saddle-bag, ex- sity for?” one of his professors asked. He phers to figure out who this chronicler horting kind,” but in fact a great-uncle admitted to an interest in journalism. of the undermined self really was. “I was a bishop. His mother gave temper- He began to write for a college paper, cannot help vanishing and disappearing ance lectures: after cracking the white and an old friend of the family hired him and dissolving,” Crane once told an ed- of an egg into a glass, she showed the as the Syracuse correspondent for the Tri- itor. “It is my foremost trait.” He left no audience how a squirt of alcohol curdled bune . Sorrentino believes that Crane diary, and few of his surviving letters re- it. Crane’s father, too, was a minister, as began to explore Syracuse’s slums, police veal much. In 1923, a biography by the well as the presiding elder of Newark’s courts, and bordellos as a reporter, and novelist Thomas Beer claimed, among Methodist churches, and he wrote trea- that it was during his one semester at Syr- other things, that Crane as an infant tises denouncing intoxication, theatre, acuse that he shaped this material into a cried for a favorite red handkerchief, and frivolous novels, and dance. first draft of “Maggie.” The novel as pub- that as a young man he loaned money to The youngest of fourteen siblings, only lished, however, is set in New York. Crane a woman who threw a knife at him; lin- nine of whom survived infancy, Crane did might have gleaned some of his urban de- gered outside an opera singer’s window not have an easy childhood. The family tails from literature—New Yorkers had until the police chased him away; and moved often, and his father died, of what been writing about waifs and prostitutes quipped that Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” seems to have been a heart attack, in 1880. for half a century—but he no doubt came “goes on and on, like Texas.” Critics be- In 1886, the local paper reported that his by many of them firsthand. He explored lieved Beer’s anecdotes until 1990, when mother was “su/ering from a temporary New York in forays during the next two the scholars Stanley Wertheim and Paul aberration of the mind.” Sorrentino sus - years, while living with his brothers up - Sorrentino reported that Beer’s archive pects that Crane contracted tuberculosis state. In October, 1892, he moved to the contained rough drafts of letters osten- quite young. But he was precocious in his city, renting a room in a boarding house sibly written by Crane that di/ered pursuit of pleasure. By the time he was on Avenue A with a fraternity brother, sharply from versions he eventually four, he was already reading novels. When and revised the manuscript extensively. published. They concluded that scores he was six, a friend watched in admiration To signal that the characters in “Mag- of the letters were “concocted.” Scholars as he smoked a cigarette on the way to a gie” were not necessarily in charge of now think that more than half a dozen temperance lecture and drank a beer at a their life stories, Crane deployed an people in Beer’s biography were con- fair the next day. irony that verged on scorn. When Mag- cocted, too—including many whom He was sent to a Methodist boarding gie is impressed by a bartender’s boast of Beer had credited as sources. school, but he dreamed of a career in the having “plunked” a “blokie” who chal- In the decades since, Wertheim and military, and when, in a dispute over a lenged him, Crane writes that she “per- Sorrentino have labored to sift the truth hazing incident, a teacher called him a ceived that here was the beau ideal of a about Crane’s life from the myth, edit- liar, he dropped out. His mother agreed man.” The contrast between the charac- ing his correspondence and a log of bi- to send him to a semi-military academy ters’ dialect and the narrator’s formal dic- ographical documents. Now Sorrentino instead. He loved it. He memorized Ten - tion can become heavy-handed, but has written a biography, “Stephen Crane: nyson, taught younger boys about poker Crane relished linguistic texture, allow- A Life of Fire” (Harvard), that summa- and romance, played baseball, and rose to ing it to take the foreground in a way rizes the research. Years of debunking the rank of captain in the school’s mili- that his contemporaries William Dean seem to have left him reluctant to paint tary corps. In the summers, he worked Howells and Henry James almost never in bold strokes, however, and his book is for an older brother, a bandanna-wearing did. Maggie’s mother takes a drink a collection of facts rather than an inter- eccentric who ran a news bureau in As- from what Crane calls “a squdgy bot - pretation. He also fills gaps in the record bury Park, which supplied the New York tle,” and she dismisses her daughter’s fall with reminiscences pulled from news- Tribune with reports of socialites’ visits to from grace with the squawky line “She papers, books, and archives that in some the town, then a fashionable resort. goes teh deh bad, like a duck teh water.” cases seem no more trustworthy than In 1890, another brother persuaded Crane worried over every sentence, ac- Beer’s. Still, his book o/ers the most Stephen to give up on the military, argu- cording to friends. “Not until it had been comprehensive picture to date, and it ing that there wasn’t likely to be a war in completely formulated would he put pen enables us to piece together a new Ste- his lifetime. He enrolled at Lafayette to paper,” his first New York roommate phen Crane: a figure as driven to prove College, in order to study mining engi- recalled. Sometimes he wrote just a pol- his manhood as Jack London; as plain- neering. It was a practical idea, but he ished phrase on a scrap of paper, only af- tive about his broken faith as Herman failed five of his seven classes. In writing, terward figuring out where to lodge it. Melville; and as ironic about his per- he got a zero. His only achievement Unable to find a publisher, Crane

THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 30, 2014 71 scraped together the money for “Maggie” eros went largely unpoliced. One night, oughly that he fooled some reviewers. “The to be printed. He chose yellow covers and when leaving a late poker game, a friend extremely vivid touches of detail convince the pseudonym Johnston Smith, and his noticed a girl in Crane’s bed and, referring us that he has had personal experience of friends threw him a raucous party. The to his novel, asked, “Is it Maggie?” “Some the scenes he depicts,” a critic wrote in the novelist Hamlin Garland was enthusias - of her,” Crane said. A photograph from the Saturday Review . When Crane’s narrator tic about “Maggie,” and Howells, though period shows Crane and another man nes - explains that the men in Fleming’s regi - apprehensive about the profanity in the tled together asleep, a pile of shoes on the ment don’t yet look battle-hardened, be- dialogue, invited Crane to tea. He had to floor beside them. (But a rumor that cause, despite several long marches, “there borrow a pair of pants from a friend in Crane tried to write a novel about a male was too great a similarity in the hats,” it order to look presentable. prostitute seems to derive from one of sounds like an observation that only some- To advertise the book, Crane hired Beer’s fabrications.) “We just about lived one on the spot could have made. When four men to read it as conspicuously as on potato salad for days at a time,” Linson Fleming, hiking back toward the front, gets possible on the elevated train, which, un- recalled, but sometimes they went out to a caught in some brambles, the sense that fortunately, had little e$ect on sales. “It Sixth Avenue restaurant called Boeuf-à- they are holding him back makes him think fell flat,” he later admitted. But praise la-Mode (nickname: Bu$alo Mud), where that “Nature could not be quite ready to kill from a writer of Howells’s prominence the food was cheap, the napkins soiled, and him.” The thought is so peculiar and so gave Crane the feeling of having been the Spanish waltzes loud. In one building striking that it seems reasonable to con - launched. “Well, at least, I’ve done some - where Crane rented a room, a quote from clude that Crane himself must once have thing,” he wrote to a married woman he Emerson was chalked onto a ceiling beam: been in similar circumstances. was flirting with. He was fighting, he told “Congratulate yourself if you have done Crane told a journalist, “I believe that I her, in a “beautiful war,” and he was on the something strange and extravagant and got my sense of the rage of conflict on the side of the realists—those who believe broken the monotony of a decorous age.” football field,” which may have been a that “we are the most successful in art joke. His explanation to Willa Cather was when we approach the nearest to nature inson kept a shelf of back issues of that “he had been unconsciously working and truth.” The woman stopped writing L the magazine The Century , to which the details of the story out through most back, but Crane’s spirits remained high. he contributed illustrations, and Crane be- of his boyhood,” in fantasies about men on He fell in with a bohemian circle of art- came fascinated by a series of Civil War his father’s side of the family who had ists, writers, and medical students, and an memoirs that it published. But he felt that been soldiers: an ancestral Stephen Crane illustrator named Corwin K. Linson in- the recollections lacked immediacy: “I had served in the Continental Congress, vited him to bunk in his studio. “The joint wonder that some of these fellows don’t tell and he and his sons had fought in the is open house,” Linson said. At night on how they felt in those scraps!” Between the Revolutionary War. Photography might Linson’s roof, they listened to echoes of summer of 1893 and the spring of 1894, as have been another source. Because expo - Shakespeare being performed in a theatre he wrote “The Red Badge of Courage,” sure times in the eighteen-sixties were too around the corner. It was a milieu in which Crane imagined these feelings so thor - long to capture soldiers in combat, the iconic images of the Civil War are of corpses after battle. When Crane writes, of the torn sole of a soldier’s shoe, that death “exposed to his enemies that pov - erty which in life he had perhaps con- cealed from his friends,” or when he writes that on the face of another dead soldier “there was an astonished and sorrowful look, as if he thought some friend had done him an ill turn,” it is easy to imagine him studying the images of Timothy O’Sullivan and Alexander Gardner. The heart of his realism, however, is psychological rather than photographic. As a contemporary critic put it, “He stages the drama of war, so to speak, within the mind of one man, and then admits you as to a theatre.” Before Fleming’s courage is tested, his mind is a porridge of sopho - moric generalizations (“Greeklike strug- gles would be no more”) and schoolboy- ish anxiety about his potential for valor (“He tried to mathematically prove to “Here’s where all the worries of the world have himself that he would not run”). In the been seeping into your home.” moment of running away, he doesn’t think much at all, forming only a single mental impression: a lieutenant who waves a sword in an attempt to stop him must be “a peculiar creature to feel interested in such matters upon this occasion.” Alien - ation sets in only after Fleming’s flight. “He could never be like them,” Crane writes of Fleming’s state of mind when he sees a column of undisgraced soldiers. “He could have wept in his longings.” Crane may have been drawing on the mind-set of the sinner as expounded to him during his Methodist childhood: a sin harms the sinner by making him believe that he’s no longer worthy of God’s grace or of Chris - tian fellowship. War, the novel suggests, is “an im- mense and terrible machine.” It relies on a soldier’s wish to belong and to be well thought of, in imitation of a sinner’s rec- onciliation to the church, but, unlike the Christian God, it doesn’t care about any individual soul. It can function perfectly even if no soldier has one. In a world with such a machine, and without any over- arching theological significance, the no- blest remaining use for the human virtue of courage is the pursuit of experience where it is most intense. Fleming feels drawn to re- turn to the front; Crane writes, “He must go close and see it produce corpses.”

“ he Red Badge of Courage” first ap- Tpeared at the end of 1894, in an abridged form that was syndicated to newspapers across the country. A full- length book version appeared the next year, as did a volume of Crane’s poems, and the syndication company sent him to report from the West and Mexico. During this first flush of success, Crane wrote his most enjoyable and least char - acteristic novel, “The Third Violet.” It’s a literary meringue. An earnest young artist falls for a pretty socialite, while his best friend, a once serious writer who has become “a trained bear of the maga - zines,” supplies badinage. For pages and pages, there is almost nothing but dia- logue. The best scenes feature a group of bohemian friends in New York, who stare, for example, at two eggs and half a loaf in their larder, in the hope that a miracle will multiply them into dinner. “The Monthly Amazement may pay me to-morrow,” a freelance artist in the group says. “They ought to. I’ve waited over three months now.” In real life, Crane lamented that “of all human lots

THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 30, 2014 73 for a person of sensibility, that of an ob- case, you are pretty sure to come out with with an easy conscience, or on account of scure freelance in literature or journalism mud all over you.” Crane, however, a pregnancy that didn’t come to term, or is, I think, the most discouraging,” but in thought it unfair to punish even a pros- whether, as she later claimed, the money “The Third Violet” the struggle has a titute for a crime that she hadn’t com- was hers to begin with.) happy-go-lucky charm. The hero is torn mitted, and, after he testified on her be- On reaching Jacksonville, he checked between the heiress and a model who half the next morning, she was set free. into a hotel under an assumed name, poses for the artists and whom they have He justified himself in a newspaper arti- sent one of his brothers an informal will nicknamed Splutter. Crane is unexpect - cle. “Do citizens have no duties?” he asked, and testament, and wrote to Leslie that edly tender in his treatment of Splutter. omitting both the hashish and his previ- “I want you to be always sure that I love She pretends not to have a romantic in- ous knowledge of Clark’s profession. you.” But a few days later he was making terest in the hero; she comes over to cook Newspapers across the country cov- overtures to Cora Taylor, the madam of his friends spaghetti. She isn’t exactly in ered the scandal. “Stephen Crane is re- the Hotel de Dream, the city’s toniest control of her destiny, but neither is she spectfully informed that association brothel. On the flyleaf of a book he gave anybody’s victim. Somehow, Crane’s with women in scarlet is not necessarily her, he wrote, “Brevity is an element that narrator has let go of his need to demon - a ‘Red Badge of Courage,’ ” the Chicago enters importantly into all pleasures of strate his superiority to his characters. Dispatch said. Teddy Roosevelt, who was life.” She became his common-law wife Crane tried to continue the tone that New York’s police commissioner at the for the years remaining to him. winter, in love letters to a real-life social- time, had been an admirer of Crane’s He embarked for Cuba on a steamer ite, Nellie Crouse. “I never encourage writing, but their friendship ended. A carrying arms smugglers, but the ship friends to read my work—they some- couple of weeks later, Dora Clark sued sank, and, for thirty hours, he and three times advise one,” he quipped. But when the police o+cer for wrongful arrest and other men took turns rowing a dinghy he wrote, not quite seriously, that he was named Crane as a witness. The police back to land, in danger of capsizing “an intensely practical and experienced searched his apartment and found a set whenever they swapped places. In “The person,” she thanked him for the warn- of opium-smoking paraphernalia. He Open Boat,” Crane’s short story based on ing and, not long afterward, let him kept it on a plaque on the wall, or so he the experience, the hero glimpses in na - know that she preferred society men to told an interviewer from his own paper, ture the cosmic indi2erence that Henry high-minded ones. implying that it was a souvenir. Under Fleming had seen in war. To describe his Perhaps it dawned on Crane that he cross-examination during the court case, hero’s confusion and anger, Crane came was addressing the wrong character— however, his story became more ambig- up with a self-destructing metaphor: “He that he would have a better time talk- uous, to judge by a newspaper report: at first wishes to throw bricks at the tem - ing to an artist’s model—because he be- ple, and he hates deeply the fact that “Did you ever smoke opium with this came bolder about crossing the line that Sadie or Amy in a house at 121 West Twenty - there are no bricks and no temples.” separated respectable people from the seventh Street?” asked Lawyer Grant. After the brush with death, Crane demimonde. Before long, though, he “I deny that,” said Mr. Crane. pursued experience even more avidly: “On the ground that it would tend to discovered that if you go too far across degrade or incriminate you?” the final three years of his life were an you may not be able to come back. “Well—yes,” hesitatingly. exhausting round of travel and work. He William Randolph Hearst’s New asked Hearst to appoint him and Cora York Journal hired him to write about Amy Leslie and Sadie Traphagen war correspondents, and, in the spring of the Tenderloin, a New York neighbor- were sisters who went by a variety of last 1897, he at last witnessed combat, re- hood, between Madison Square and names and lived on a block known for porting on the Greco-Turkish War. A Times Square, famous for night life, its brothels and opium dens. After a jan- roll of musketry struck him as sublime. drugs, sex trade, and police corruption. itor in their building testified that Crane “The crash of it was ideal,” he wrote, One night in September, 1896, he met had shared Amy Leslie’s apartment for though he acknowledged that the sol- two chorus girls at a hashish parlor, and, six weeks during the summer, the po- diers it killed might have had a di2erent as he was leaving, a woman who called liceman was acquitted. As Sorrentino opinion. He and Cora moved to En- herself Dora Clark joined his group. writes, “Crane’s career as an investigative gland and, that fall, when they were liv- She was a prostitute—according to Sor - reporter had been ruined.” ing in a damp, pretentious house, in Sur- rentino, Crane knew this—and while rey, he told Joseph Conrad that he now Crane was helping one chorus girl onto rane fled. There was an uprising in knew that the battle scenes in “The Red a cable car a policeman tried to arrest C Cuba, and he went to Florida to Badge of Courage” were “all right.” Clark and the other chorus girl for solic- write about people who were smuggling In England, spending more than he iting. To save the chorus girl, Crane arms to the rebels. Amy Leslie rode the could a2ord, and writing newspaper flu2 claimed to be her husband. Saving Dora train with him as far as Washington. He about society life to pay for it, he still Clark was more of a challenge. “She entrusted five hundred dollars to a friend, managed to create some memorable fic- hasn’t done anything wrong since she asking him to help Leslie through what tion. He drew on his childhood for “The has been in our company,” Crane in - he called “a great trouble,” and in the next Monster,” about a black man stigmatized sisted, but the policeman took her to the four months she received more than three by a small town after his face is maimed station house anyway. A desk sergeant hundred dollars. (It’s unclear if he gave her in an act of heroism; he drew on his visit warned Crane, “If you monkey with this the money so that he could abandon her to Greece for “Death and the Child,”

74 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 30, 2014 about a journalist who romanticizes war but then loses his nerve; and he drew on his time in the West for “The Blue BRIEFLY NOTED Hotel,” about a traveller intent on pro- voking his own murder. During the CAPITAL , by Rana Dasgupta (Penguin Press) . In the interviews Spanish-American War, he travelled to with rich young Indians that make up much of this unspar- Cuba and witnessed combat again, devel- ing portrait of moneyed Delhi, no telling detail seems to es- oping a bare, rhythmic style to describe it. cape Dasgupta’s notice. His novelistic talents are matched by “I heard somebody dying near me,” he his skill at eliciting astonishing candor from his subjects. The wrote of a marine landing at Guantánamo best passages are incisive summaries of the human and envi- Bay. “He was dying hard. Hard. It took ronmental costs of the élite’s wealth and privilege and his per- him a long time to die.” During the as - suasive predictions of crises yet to come. Dasgupta constantly signment, Crane became dangerously ill. seeks to upend conventional wisdom about Delhi, the murky The first diagnosis was yellow fever; the circulation of its money, and the roots of its periodic outbursts second, malaria. But Crane must have of violence, making this one of the most worthwhile in a suspected a third possibility, because he strong field of recent books about India’s free-market revolu- made a long detour to the Adirondacks, tion and its unintended consequences. where he consulted a tuberculosis special - ist. “He looked like a frayed white rib- WHISTLER , by Daniel E. Sutherland (Yale) . In the eighteen- bon,” a journalist who observed him after seventies, James Abbott McNeill Whistler began signing his he returned to the Caribbean wrote. He paintings with a butterfly, a perfect symbol for his views on holed up for three months in Havana, art—that it should contain no moral or story, but should in- and Cora wrote panicked letters in search stead strive to be pleasing in form and color. In this engaging of him to one of his brothers (who biography, Sutherland interprets the butterfly as a stance of seems not to have known of her existence rebellion for an artist whose gentle palette belied fierce mod- until then), to his literary agent, and to ernist intentions. Born in Massachusetts in 1834, Whistler the American secretary of war. lived most of his life in Europe, gaining fame for his pioneer- When at last he returned to England, ing colorist techniques. Flamboyant and smug, he was per- he moved with Cora to an even grander petually at odds with critics. Sutherland, drawing on a wealth house, which lacked plumbing, gas, and of previously unpublished correspondence, captures the con- electricity and was said to be haunted by a tradictions of an artist whose life and work delighted and Tudor-era ghost. The household now in - confounded his contemporaries in equal measure. cluded half a dozen servants and a late friend’s two illegitimate children. Most of LOVERS!AT!THE!CHAMELEON!CLUB"!PARIS!#$%& , by Francine Prose what Crane wrote to provide for them, as (Harper) . This novel of Paris before and during the Second he died of tuberculosis, was hackwork. World War imagines the circumstances surrounding Brassaï’s Two exceptions were “War Memories,” an 1932 photograph of a lesbian couple at a Paris night club. essay whose loose, bittersweet style antic - Prose spins a tale of love, cross-dressing, betrayal, fast cars, and ipates Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up,” and espionage through a team of grandiloquent narrators, includ - “Manacled,” a short story about an actor ing a Hungarian photographer, an American novelist remi- trapped in handcu1s and leg irons as a niscent of Henry Miller, an artsy baroness, and a biographer theatre burns down. The idea for “Mana- writing abut one Lou Villars—an athlete, cabaret performer, cled” came to Crane in a dream, according racecar driver, and Nazi collaborator. Prose’s braided narrative to a young woman then staying with the is engrossing at first, but as the historical frame becomes more family, and he asked Cora and her to bind crowded the various voices lose distinction and depth. his wrists and ankles so that he could know what it felt like. “I don’t know THE!DIVORCE!PAPERS , by Susan Rieger (Crown) . In this com- whether he published the story,” the edy of manners, Sophie Diehl, a criminal-law associate, is woman recalled, “but he lived it.” pressured to take on a divorce case after she unwittingly im- In May, 1900, friends paid for Crane presses the wealthy and influential Maria Durkheim, whose to go to a sanatorium in Germany, but it sixteen-year marriage is ending. Diehl not only learns to nav- was too late. As his mind wandered on igate the ecosystem of a high-society divorce but also reas- his deathbed, scraps of his fiction sur- sesses her own divorced parents and her ideas about love and faced. “It is too awful to hear him try to loyalty. The novel unfolds through e-mails, legal briefs, hand- change places in the ‘ open boat ,’ ” Cora written notes, and intero0ce memos, along with a child-eval- wrote in a letter to a friend. He was uation form and custody recommendations submitted by a twenty-eight. A few years after burying therapist. Though all the correspondents are on the articu- him, Cora returned to Jacksonville and late side, the texts o1er a provocative glimpse of how inti- opened a new brothel.  mately our documents reveal us.

THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 30, 2014 75 Nick Massi (Michael Lomenda), and THE CURRENT CINEMA Bob Gaudio (Erich Bergen) to create the Four Seasons; they will rise and con- quer; and yet, all the while, we will be re- STAGE TO SCREEN minded just how quickly life can slide o3 key. “Jersey Boys” and “Venus in Fur.” The movie is based on the stage mu- sical, which was shiny and crisp, and so BY ANTHONY LANE streamlined that you walked out at the end with the tunes ringing in your head and every scrap of plot, let alone of emo- tional setback, left under your seat like a candy wrapper. As with all jukebox the- atre, it asked us to believe that creativity is no sweat; that, once inspiration de- scends, you strap on your ready-tuned guitar, step up to the mike, and unleash. Some of this pleasant nonsense remains in Eastwood’s film. We get the guys clustered around a phone, pouring the start of “Sherry” into the ear of Bob Crewe (Mike Doyle), their producer, who informs them that, by chance, he has tapes set up to record; and we get the eureka look that dawns on Gaudio’s face, as Crewe, watching “Ace in the Hole,” on TV, explains the allure of the hero - ine—“big girls don’t cry.” That’s the new Valli guys: Erich Bergen, Michael Lomenda, Vincent Piazza, and John Lloyd Young. single taken care of, right there. Some tales are even tall and true; apparently, here was a moment in Martin tion outside the gates. His breeziness the band, having hopped from one name TScorsese’s “Goodfellas” (1990) is catchy, and you can sense the movie to another, really did emerge from a when Karen (Lorraine Bracco) went to tuning up to make sweet music. But bowling alley called the Four Seasons find Henry (Ray Liotta) after he stood Eastwood, the maker of “Mystic River” and make the change. In the movie, it her up for dinner. She confronted him, (2003) and a Charlie Parker biopic, becomes a sight gag: a repairman fixes and asked, “Who the hell do you think “Bird” (1988), is not someone to let dark - the sign outside, the name flashes up, you are, Frankie Valli or some kind ness slip away. Many of the early scenes and Nick exclaims, “It’s a sign!” of big shot?” I remember thinking what are staged for shudders and thrills, with Sparks like that are scattered through, an unlikely name it was for Karen to a cursing match that ends in a gunshot, and yet the sad fact is that “Jersey Boys” pluck from the air. What was it, exactly, and a safe being manhandled into the is a mess. Parts of it feel half-finished. that gave a guy the right to disrespect a trunk of a car, as Tommy and his con - The screenplay is by Marshall Brickman girl—was it the fame, or the falsetto? frères oil themselves into a life of crime. and Rick Elice, and there are shades of Now we have “Jersey Boys,” directed by You ask yourself, What kind of movie “Annie Hall,” which Brickman wrote Clint Eastwood, which gives us a fresh does “Jersey Boys” want to be? with Woody Allen, in the constant chance to measure just how big a shot A clue comes one night as Tommy shu5e of styles. Look at Nick, turning little Frankie was. and a friend get up to mischief, leaving aside to the camera, as the Four Seasons For the first third of the movie, it is Frankie Castelluccio (John Lloyd Young) play live on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” Scorsese territory that Eastwood muscles as their lookout man on the sidewalk. A and talking to us about the band’s prob - in on. We are in New Jersey, in the nine- cop approaches, on his beat, and Frankie lems. We get yanked two years into the teen-fifties, and young Tommy DeVito gives the alarm, not with a yell or a whis- past, for a lengthy flashback about the (Vincent Piazza), cockiness made flesh, tle but with a song—his high, e3ortless boys getting arrested over a hotel bill and addresses us head on: “You want to hear tone ringing o3 the walls of the deserted Tommy’s obligations to a loan shark. the real story?” The model here is Liotta, street. If nightingales listened to Sinatra, Contractual wrangles ensnare the rest of in “Goodfellas,” whose voice-over buoyed they would sound like that, and the se- the movie, interspersed with odd revisits us through the storms of the action. He quence allows Eastwood to put the to Frankie’s home life. Renée Marino, never talked to the camera, however, overwhelming question: How do you making her big-screen début as his wife, whereas Tommy can stroll out of prison, make trouble and music at the same Mary, has one terrific scene, when they after an easy six months for theft and time? Castelluccio will change his name first meet and she tells him to pick Valli other lapses, and engage us in conversa - to Valli; he will team up with DeVito, over Vally (“ ’cause ‘Y’ ’s a bullshit letter”),

76 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 30, 2014 ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN JAY CABUAY but then she fades from view. Suddenly, mold-breaker, written by Crewe and one sense, it’s a perfect fit: she is named the marriage is in ruins, and Frankie is Gaudio, which premièred at the Roost- Vanda (Emmanuelle Seigner), and so is comforting his daughter Francine ertail club, in Detroit, with diners sitting her character—a decorous vamp, en - (Elizabeth Hunter), of whose existence at tables, not knowing what’s coming. countered at a country inn, in 1870. we are hardly aware; as the parents split, Eastwood gets to flourish his dramatic Thomas has forged the play from a no- a couple of other daughters appear from command and his love of the music at torious novel by Leopold von Sacher- nowhere. Francine gets a subplot to her - the same time: waiting for the buildup Masoch, and the clue is in that name. self, and a fine song, “My Eyes Adored after the verse, he pulls back a curtain Welcome to the zone of dog collars, You,” is the result, but by now the film is behind the band to reveal a shining whips, and the scu+ed paraphernalia of taking random directions as if wonder- brass section and its full-throated blare, submission and control. Vanda will do ing where they will lead. before Frankie surges back in with the more than read for the role. She will All this seems precisely unsuited to chorus—“I love you, baby.” The crowd become it. the talents of Clint Eastwood. He is a stands to applaud. It’s a clear echo of In truth, the heart deflates at this, for master of the clean, classical narrative, a lovely scene in “The Glenn Miller the trappings of such naughtiness creak not of lurching moods and similar folde - Story,” in which everything locked into like old leather. Furthermore, the film rol. In “Bird,” he and his star, Forest place at a performance of “Moonlight itself is adapted from a play by David Whitaker, kept the focus squarely on Serenade.” That film was directed by Ives, and Polanski’s other borrowings the person of Parker, and took care Anthony Mann—a forerunner of East- from the theatre, like “Death and the not to stray too far from the music. So wood, both men making mighty contri- Maiden” and “Carnage,” have felt more how come, in “Jersey Boys,” we get the butions to the Western and venturing like exercises than like immersions. Now, instrumental introduction to “Decem - further afield. But Mann held his nerve though, miraculously, he brightens the ber, 1963” at the start, but no straight and told the Miller story as calmly as it faded material, and conjures his most rendition of it, with the explosive vocal deserved, letting the music take care of graceful work in years, guiding his cam - line (“Oh, what a night”), until the end the excitement. Eastwood, with the era in a dance around the confined arena credits, when Eastwood decides to turn weight of the stage production on his and permitting his actors—just the two his film into “West Side Story” and have back, is unable to relax. “Jersey Boys” has of them—to duck so freely in and out of the whole cast—including characters its highs, but too often you can take character that the wall between the real who have died—show up and dance in your eyes o+ it. Whenever possible, trust and the imagined feels no thicker than the street? As a sendo+, it’s fun, not your ears. stretched silk. Even the shortage of least because Christopher Walken, who props is more of a help than a handicap: has popped up here and there as a mafi- he new Roman Polanski film, when Thomas taps a co+ee cup with an oso figure named Gyp DeCarlo, gets to T“Venus in Fur,” is set entirely, or al- unseen spoon, or Vanda cracks an invis - show us his ageless moves, but it feels too most entirely, in a theatre. Outside, ible whip, we hear the tinkle and the late and not a little desperate. Still more thunder groans on a rainy Paris boule- lash. As the film tightens, the playwright remiss is Frankie’s final tribute to the vard; inside, alone, is Thomas (Mathieu is not merely upstaged but engulfed by time—the best ever, he says—when it Amalric), who has written a play, “Venus his fictional creation. What painful joy it was “just four guys under a street light.” in Fur,” and is directing it himself. Today, is, Polanski suggests, to be a slave to the Oops, we never actually saw that time, so audition day, has been frustrating, but, rhythm of art.  it has to be quickly drummed up for our just as he is packing up to go, a latecomer delight as the film stumbles to a close. arrives. She is soaked to the skin, with a Against that, I’m glad to say, we get lot of skin to soak, removing her raincoat newyorker.com/go/frontrow “Can’t Take My Eyes O+ You”—a to reveal no more than underwear. In Richard Brody blogs about movies.

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THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 30, 2014 77 CARTOON CAPTION CONTEST

Each week, we provide a cartoon in need of a caption. You, the reader, submit a caption, we choose three "nalists, and you vote for your favorite. Caption submissions for this week’s cartoon, by Tom Cheney, must be received by Sunday, June 29th. &e "nalists in the June 9th & 16th contest appear below. We will announce the winner, and the "nalists in this week’s contest, in the July 21st issue. &e winner receives a signed print of the cartoon. Any resident of the United States, Canada (except Quebec), Australia, the United Kingdom, or the Republic of Ireland age eighteen or over can enter or vote. To do so, and to read the complete rules, visit newyorker.com/captioncontest.

THE WINNING CAPTION

THE FINALISTS “I’ll see you later.” Matthew Starobin, Bronxville, N.Y.

“He only plays when I’m on hold.” “My eyes are down here.” Ken Ho$man, Los Gatos, Calif. Raja Shah, San Francisco, Calif.

“Say something viral.” Robert Bray, Philadelphia, Pa.

THIS WEEK’S CONTEST

“ ”