PRICE $8.99 MAY 8, 2017
MAY 8, 2017
GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
THE TALK OF THE TOWN Jelani Cobb on the death penalty in Arkansas; the Big Book in L.A.; after the Oregon stando ; a bio-pic about Emily Dickinson; Jimmy Webb.
LETTER FROM FRANCE Lauren Collins Can the Center Hold? Notes from a free-for-all election.
SHOUTS & MURMURS Ann Beattie Flood Airlines
ONWARD AND UPWARD WITH THE ARTS Andrew Marantz The Best Medicine Kumail Nanjiani turns pain into comedy.
THE POLITICAL SCENE Evan Osnos Endgames How could Trump be removed from o ce?
A R E P O RT E R AT L A RG E Michael Grabell Cut to the Bone Using immigration law to exploit workers.
FICTION Yiyun Li “A Small Flame”
THE CRITICS BOOKS Garth Greenwell Édouard Louis’s “The End of Eddy.” Alexandra Schwartz The fiction of Grace Paley. Briefly Noted
THE ART WORLD Peter Schjeldahl A Louise Lawler retrospective.
THE THEATRE Hilton Als A sequel to “A Doll’s House.”
POEMS Ryan Fox “And Both Hands Wash the Face” Sophie Cabot Black “Chorus and Anti-chorus”
COVER Bruce Eric Kaplan “Man’s Best Friend”
DRAWINGS Amy Hwang, Sam Marlow, Drew Dernavich, Mike Twohy, Will McPhail, Liana Finck, David Sipress, Harry Bliss, Jason Adam Katzenstein, Roz Chast, William Haefeli, Barbara Smaller, Seth Fleishman, Paul Noth, Trevor Spaulding SPOTS Pablo Amargo CONTRIBUTORS
Lauren Collins (“Can the Center Hold?,” Evan Osnos (“Endgames,” p. 34) writes p. 20) is the author of “When in French: about politics and foreign afairs for Love in a Second Language,” which the magazine. His book, “Age of Am- was published in September. bition,” won the 2014 National Book Award for nonfiction. Andrew Marantz (“The Best Medicine,” p. 28) has been contributing to the mag- Alexandra Schwartz (Books, p. 66) is a azine since 2011. staf writer.
Peter Schjeldahl (The Art World, p. 72), Michael Grabell (“Cut to the Bone,” p. 46) the magazine’s art critic, is the author writes about immigration and labor is- of “Let’s See: Writings on Art from sues for ProPublica. His piece is a col- The New Yorker.” laboration between The New Yorker and ProPublica. Yiyun Li (Fiction, p. 54) has written sev- eral books, including the novel “Kinder Sophie Cabot Black (Poem, p. 50) has Than Solitude.” Her memoir, “Dear published three books of poetry, in- Friend, from My Life I Write to You in cluding, most recently, “The Exchange.” Your Life,” came out this year. She lives in New England.
Garth Greenwell (Books, p. 62) is the Bruce Eric Kaplan (Cover) has contrib- author of the novel “What Belongs to uted more than eight hundred and fifty You,” which was published last year. cartoons and nine covers to the maga- zine since 1991. His most recent book Jelani Cobb (Comment, p. 15), a staf is “I Was a Child,” a memoir. writer, is a professor of journalism at Columbia University. His most recent Sarah Larson (The Talk of the Town, book is “The Substance of Hope: Barack p. 19) writes about pop culture for Obama and the Paradox of Progress.” newyorker.com.
NEWYORKER.COM Everything in the magazine, and more.
DAILY SHOUTS PHOTO BOOTH Using the classic form of the political Andrea K. Scott writes about cartoon, Edward Steed deftly explains Sara Cwynar’s portraits and the the current moment. meaning of rose gold.
SUBSCRIBERS: Get access to our magazine app for tablets and smartphones at the
App Store, Amazon.com, or Google Play. (Access varies by location and device.) COURTESYSARA PRODUCTIONCWYNAR/FOXYSTEED; RIGHT: EDWARD LEFT:
2 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 THE MAIL
RACISM AND BARBECUE sine,” April 24th). Once, after eating an edible and getting really high, I tried a I read with interest Lauren Collins’s ar- seafood soup at a Thai restaurant in my ticle about the racist barbecue baron Mau- neighborhood. I had never tasted any- rice Bessinger, and his family’s handling thing so delicious, and I moaned with of his legacy (“Secrets in the Sauce,” April pleasure with each spoonful. The next 24th). Collins writes that “barbecue might week, I returned to the restaurant, eager be America’s most political food,” citing to try the soup again. This time, I was the social and civic role of barbecue feasts sober. The soup was . . . O.K. Nothing in American history. Barbecue has also special. I have replicated this dining ex- been used as a metaphor for the lynch- periment many times, always with the ing of black bodies, and was a social and same outcome. Which of these experi- civic ritual of white supremacy. In 1916, ences was “real”? Could it be that the the black teen-ager Jesse Washington marvellous flavors I experience when I was lynched in Waco, Texas. Afterward, am high are made possible because the his body was mutilated and burned. The part of my brain that limits taste sensa- murder was a public spectacle—a party, tions is turned of ? And, if that’s the case, even, with white women and children in why wouldn’t one wish to be transported attendance—and professional photogra- to gustatory heaven as often as possible? phers took pictures, which they sold as Simone LaDrumma souvenir postcards. One of these post- 1Seattle, Wash. cards, which survives, has a handwritten inscription: “This is the barbecue we had THE INSTAGRAM LIFE last night. . . . Your son, Joe.” Julia Lee Rachel Monroe’s depiction of Emily King Los Angeles, Calif. and Corey Smith—who live out of their van and use corporate sponsors to sup- Maurice Bessinger’s son Lloyd claims port their surfing, biking, and yoga—re- that he doesn’t know how he can make veals the degree to which we have lost amends for his father’s racism. “I’m not ourselves in social media (“#Vanlife,” April objecting to doing that,” he told Collins. 24th). The excitement that I felt reading “I just need to know what that is.” If you the article’s opening paragraphs, which claim to have good intentions, then do describe young people finding meaning something good. How hard is that? Con- in the natural world, quickly turned to tribute to a scholarship fund. Canvass for disgust over the insidious means through a voter-registration drive in an African- which corporate sponsorships are driv- American neighborhood. Give money ing consumerism. Do King and Smith to the N.A.A.C.P. Donate resources to really believe that they are still free spir- help restore black churches that have its, despite constantly worrying about been attacked. Join the action to remove product placement and their Instagram the last Confederate flags. There’s a very following? Regardless of their initial in- long list of things that Bessinger could tent, they have become de-facto agents do. It doesn’t take much imagination to of the marketing behemoth whose phi- make amends, but it does take genuine losophy runs exactly counter to the hip- good will. pie ideal that they espouse. Ann Terry Arup De 1Bellerose, N.Y. Delmar, N.Y. TA S T E B U DS • Letters should be sent with the writer’s name, Lizzie Widdicombe’s article on Laurie address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to [email protected]. Letters may be edited Wolf and edible marijuana got me think- for length and clarity, and may be published in ing about the diference between what any medium. We regret that owing to the volume is “real” and what is “unreal” (“High Cui- of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter.
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 3 MAY 3 – 9, 2017 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
The spindly compositions that Valerie Teicher records as Te i S h i are fierce in their modesty, making spare use of whispered high notes and loud screams for a well-studied blend of Janet and Gwen. On May - , the Buenos Aires native performs her début record, “Crawl Space,” at Rough Trade; the record’s nimble R. & B. is broken up deftly by home recordings she has saved since childhood. “I’m a bad singer, I confess it,” a young Teicher warns through cassette hiss. At twenty-six, she’s grown into her voice, and her tone is just as brave.
PHOTO-ILLUSTRATION BY CARMEN DANESHMANDI song contest in 1945, whose members all served in or were widowed by the Second World War— is that the actors play their own instruments. THE THEATRE There’s little else to recommend it: Andy Blan- 1 kenbuehler’s direction and choreography are often sti and cluttered, Richard Oberacker and Rob- OPENINGS AND PREVIEWS celebrating white privilege. (3LD Art & Technol- ert Taylor’s songs are forgettable, and Corey Cott ogy Center, 80 Greenwich St. 800-838-3006. In pre- makes an unsympathetic leading man. It’s brazen views. Opens May 9.) the way it scolds showbiz for exploiting veterans Arlington while indulging in similar shtick. And it’s risible The Irish playwright Enda Walsh wrote and di- Venus the way it excludes nonwhite Americans from its rects this Orwellian tale o a man monitoring a Suzan-Lori Parks’s play, directed by Lear deBes- versions both o the war and o jazz music: aside young woman in the waiting room o a tower. sonet, is inspired by the life o Saartjie Baartman, from a single, strictly peripheral black actor in a (St. Ann’s Warehouse, 45 Water St., Brooklyn. 718- a South African woman who became a nineteenth- cast o twenty-one and the most eeting o ref- 254-8779. In previews.) century sideshow attraction because o her large erences to Fats Waller and Duke Ellington, it’s posterior. (Pershing Square Signature Center, 480 all as white as a snowstorm. (Jacobs, 242 W. 45th Can You Forgive Her? W. 42nd St. 212-244-7529. In previews.) St. 212-239-6200.) In Gina Gionfriddo’s play, directed by Peter Du- Bois, Amber Tamblyn plays a woman aicted by The Whirligig Charlie and the Chocolate Factory nancial and romantic problems who nds refuge The New Group presents Hamish Linklater’s There’s pure imagination, and then there’s over- with an engaged couple on Halloween. (Vineyard, play, directed by Scott Elliott and featuring Zosia thinking it. That’s what seems to have happened 108 E. 15th St. 212-353-0303. Previews begin May 4.) Mamet, Dolly Wells, and Norbert Leo Butz, in with this musical adaptation o the Roald Dahl which divorced parents care for their ailing adult classic, heavily retooled after a glitzy West End Derren Brown: Secret daughter as gures from her past reëmerge. (Per- outing. In Jack O’Brien’s production, Willy Wonka Brown, an Olivier-winning British performer shing Square Signature Center, 480 W. 42nd St. 212- (an uncertain Christian Borle) disguises himsel known for his feats o mind-reading and audience 279-4200. Previews begin May 4.) as a candy-shop proprietor, only to reëmerge in manipulation, presents an evening o “psychologi- 1 purple regalia at the end o Act I. After intermis- cal illusion.” (Atlantic Theatre Company, 336 W. 20th sion, we enter the factory, which is less a cabinet o St. 866-811-4111. In previews.) NOW PLAYING wonders than a featureless box onto which we’re supposed to project our wildest dreams. Still, the Ernest Shackleton Loves Me Anastasia show is not without its tasty pleasures, among In this new musical by Joe DiPietro, Brendan Mil- The Romanov Grand Duchess, who at seventeen them the Oompa Loompas, designed by the pup- burn, and Valerie Vigoda, a put-upon single mother was brutally slaughtered by the Bolshevik secret peteer Basil Twist (who should have been given (Vigoda) embarks on an Antarctic adventure with police, doesn’t seem like the ideal candidate for the the run o the whole thing), and the scene-stealer the famous explorer. (Tony Kiser, 305 W. 43rd St. Disney-princess treatment, but that was the idea Jackie Homan, as a boozy Mrs. Teavee. Marc 866-811-4111. In previews. Opens May 7.) behind the 1997 Twentieth Century Fox animated Shaiman and Scott Wittman wrote the mostly movie. This new musical, which also draws (to a catchy score, interspersed with beloved songs Happy Days much lesser extent) from the 1956 Ingrid Berg- from the 1971 lm. (Lunt-Fontanne, 205 W. 46th Theatre for a New Audience stages James Bun- man lm, picks up on the legend that Anastasia St. 877-250-2929.) dy’s Yale Rep production o the Beckett play, star- (the clear-voiced Christy Altomare) survived the ring Dianne Wiest as a chatterbox half-buried in revolution. With the help o a con-artist duo (John Hello, Dolly! a mound o sand. (Polonsky Shakespeare Center, 262 Bolton and Derek Klena), she travels to Paris to In Jerry Zaks’s fairly standard production o the Ashland Pl., Brooklyn. 866-811-4111. In previews. reveal hersel to her grandmother, the exiled Dow- 1964 musical, by Jerry Herman and Michael Stew- Opens May 4.) ager Empress (Mary Beth Peil). In Darko Tres- art, Horace Vandergelder (David Hyde Pierce) is njak’s production, it’s all incredibly overblown, a sour, money-grubbing merchant from Yonkers. Mourning Becomes Electra from the screen-saver-like cityscape projections His two young assistants, Cornelius Hackl (Gavin Target Margin mounts Eugene O’Neill’s dramatic to the earwormy score, by Lynn Ahrens and Ste- Creel) and Barnaby Tucker (Taylor Trensch), trilogy, which resets Aeschylus’ “Oresteia” in New phen Flaherty (“Ragtime”), who never met a pop head into New York City, where they fall for two England just after the Civil War. David Hersko- ballad they couldn’t top o with a sweeping high women: Irene Molloy (Kate Baldwin), a hatmaker vits directs. (Abrons Arts Center, 466 Grand St. 212- note. (Broadhurst, 235 W. 44th St. 212-239-6200.) on whom Vandergelder has set his sights, and her 598-0400. Opens May 3.) assistant, Minnie Fay (Beanie Feldstein). But the The Antipodes plot turns on Dolly Levi, the matchmaker, and the Pacific Overtures Annie Baker is a writer o astonishing skill and show oers ample opportunity for whoever plays John Doyle directs Stephen Sondheim and John believability, but after forty minutes o her dra- the part to showcase her ability to convey pathos Weidman’s musical from 1976, which recounts the maturgically confused new play you’re at a loss to and deance, grie and comedy. And who better opening o nineteenth-century Japan, starring understand what any o it means, let alone why than Bette Midler to give us all that? The role isn’t George Takei as the Reciter. (Classic Stage Company, you should be interested. We’re in a writers’ room; necessarily tailor-made for her—she’s innitely 136 E. 13th St. 866-811-4111. In previews. Opens May 4.) the writers are (maybe) trying to come up with an more complicated and funny, and there isn’t a idea for a TV show. They’re all men, except Elea- corny bone in her body—but she has remade the Seven Spots on the Sun nor (Emily Cass McDonnell), who confesses that character in her own image: as a scrappy trick- In Martín Zimmerman’s play, directed by Weyni she, like all the women in her family, has some- ster with needs and vulnerabilities. (Reviewed Mengesha, a reclusive doctor in a town ravaged by thing medically wrong with her. Sandy (the great in our issue o 5/1/17.) (Shubert, 225 W. 44th St. civil war and plague discovers that he has a mirac- Will Patton) heads the proceedings, and, as they 212-239-6200.) ulous healing touch. (Rattlestick, 224 Waverly Pl. spitball ideas, aspects o their lives and dreams 212-627-2556. In previews.) mesh with the crushing banality o creating by Indecent committee. In part about the commodication Paula Vogel’s revelatory play—her belated Broad- Sojourners & Her Portmanteau o the imagination, the show is also a mournful way début—begins in Warsaw in 1906 and ends Ed Sylvanus Iskandar directs two installments paean to storytelling as a former Eden now lled in Connecticut a hal century later, but it’s as in- o Mfoniso Udoa’s nine-part saga, which charts with spoiled or jaded children, with elements o timate and immediate as a whispered secret. It the ups and downs o a Nigerian matriarch. (New Richard Maxwell’s stylish investigations into bro tells the story o another play, Sholem Asch’s Yid- York Theatre Workshop, 79 E. 4th St. 212-460-5475. alienation, competitiveness, and secret-sharing dish drama “God o Vengeance,” which toured the In previews.) added to the mix. (Pershing Square Signature Cen- theatres o Europe before coming to Broadway, in ter, 480 W. 42nd St. 212-244-7529.) 1923, and causing a scandal, in part because o a 3/Fifths passionate lesbian kiss. The cast was tried for ob- James Scruggs conceived and wrote this inter- Bandstand scenity, and Asch chose to distance himsel from active piece, which transforms the theatre into The best thing in this musical—about a Cleveland the work—all before Nazism overtook the play, a dystopian theme park called SupremacyLand, swing band, assembled to compete in a national its people, and the world it came from. Directed
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 5 THE THEATRE 1 ALSO NOTABLE with poetry and polish by Rebecca Taichman, Vo- its Miami-like setting invigorating it with a fresh gel’s play thrums with music, desire, and fear, and infusion o color and song. The party scenes, fuel- it’s shrewd about the ways in which America isn’t led by Donnetta Lavinia Grays’s vocals and Mi- Amélie Walter Kerr. • Come from Away Schoen- free, and about how art does and doesn’t transcend chael Thurber’s multi-instrumental beverage cart feld. • A Doll’s House, Part Golden. (Reviewed the perilous winds o history. (Cort, 138 W. 48th o wonders, are straight-up bangers. The wed- in this issue.) • The Emperor Jones Irish Reper- St. 212-239-6200.) ding nale earns its happy tears, its couples pal- tory. • Gently Down the Stream Public. • The Glass pably hungering for each other. The occasional Menagerie Belasco. • Groundhog Day August Wil- The Little Foxes passages in Spanish eloquently demonstrate how son. • How to Transcend a Happy Marriage Mitzi E. Long dismissed as ripe melodrama, Lillian Hell- every production o Shakespeare is a transla- Newhouse. Through May 7. • In & of Itself Daryl man’s 1939 play, about a Southern family rotten tion. It seems unfair to single out any actor from Roth. • The Lucky One Beckett. • Miss Saigon with greed and rancor, has a Greek tragedy’s im- such a lovable ensemble, but Christopher Ryan Broadway Theatre. • Oslo Vivian Beaumont. • Pres- placability and the taut plotting o lm noir. Dan- Grant’s headlong plunge into comic invention as ent Laughter St. James. • The Price American Air- iel Sullivan’s production, for Manhattan Theatre Sir Toby Belch deserves special commendation. lines Theatre. • The Profane Playwrights Horizons. Club, is traditional in every respect but one: Cyn- After touring New York City as part o the Pub- Through May 7. • The Roundabout 59E59. • Samara thia Nixon and Laura Linney take turns playing lic’s Mobile Unit, the show is now home at Astor A.R.T./New York Theatres. • Sunset Boulevard the imperious, steel-willed Regina Giddens—one Place for a three-week run. As Viola (a convinc- Palace. • Sweat Studio 54. • Sweeney Todd: The o modern theatre’s greatest creations—and the ingly desirable Danaya Esperanza) puts it, you Demon Barber of Fleet Street Barrow Street The- vulnerable, alcoholic Birdie Hubbard. While both can keep your purse: all seats are free. (Public, atre. • Vanity Fair Pearl. • The View UpStairs Lynn stars play Birdie along the same lines, each brings 425 Lafayette St. 212-967-7555.) Redgrave. • War Paint Nederlander. very dierent shadings to Regina. Linney portrays the villainy with gleeful relish, while Nixon makes us fully understand how Regina’s anger has been fuelled by decades o frustration. It’s worth see- ing the show twice i you can. Hellman’s incisive storytelling, her razor-etched insights into wom- en’s limited options in a patriarchal society, are ART largely good enough to withstand the scrutiny. 1 (Samuel J. Friedman, 261 W. 47th St. 212-239-6200.) MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES Otto Dix’s 1922 portrait “The Businessman The Play That Goes Wrong Max Roesberg, Dresden,” she wears an anxious Mischie Theatre’s combustible farce, originally expression, as i oppressed by the original pic- staged above a pub in North London, invites us Museum of Modern Art ture’s art-historical weight. An awkward pose to the opening night o “Murder at Haversham “Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar with Balthus’s “Girl at a Window” underscores Manor,” a hoary nineteen-twenties whodunnit Abstraction” the inevitable self-consciousness o a young staged by the ostentatiously inept Cornley Univer- It looks like a typical march-of-styles histor- woman inserting hersel into a history dom- sity Drama Society. “The Play That Goes Wrong” ical survey, tracking high points in the boom inated by men. The artist trained as a dancer is a bit hoary, too—an intricately planned asco decades o abstract art. There are ninety-four before shifting her focus to visual art, which in which doors slam, cues go haywire, the lead- works by fty-three international artists, all comes through in her command o space and ing lady gets knocked unconscious, and every inch but one o them drawn from the museum’s absurdist theatricality. Through Feb. 18, 2018. o the musty drawing-room set (by Nigel Hook) collection, dating from 1942 to 1969. They are 1 is destined to come crashing down. O course, it grouped in categories o gestural, geometric, takes incredible skill to pull o such bungling, and reductive, and “eccentric” abstraction, sup- GALLERIES—UPTOWN Mark Bell’s production nails every spit take and plemented with textiles, ceramics, and deco- sight gag. (This is one o those genres that Brits rative arts. The show’s curators, Starr Figura John Baldessari just do better—you need those plummy accents and Sarah Meister, with assistance from Hil- These works, from 1966 to 1968, mark a turning to paper over the mayhem.) The show never tells lary Reder, have exercised just one unusual point for the great L.A. Conceptualist, when he us anything about its characters, but it succeeds criterion: nothing by a man. This isn’t to say began using a photographic emulsion process as pure comedic eye candy. (Lyceum, 149 W. 45th that no male presence is felt. Rather, the con- to print images directly onto canvas and hired St. 212-239-6200.) trary: most o the works were achieved in an sign painters to execute his text-based works. art world—and a culture—that discounted the The most iconic o the latter category is “Pure Six Degrees of Separation feminine, presenting women less with glass Beauty,” a white square on which the sardonic The playwright John Guare has written at least ceilings than with absent oors. The level o title is rendered in capital letters; “Space Avail- three masterpieces, and this is one, a brilliant in- quality is high—transcendently so, in works able” explores the idea o a painting as place- vestigation into the lies we tell ourselves—and by Joan Mitchell and Agnes Martin—but the holder. It’s purposely generic and empty, but our children—without admitting how much we drama o the show is in the intermittent, soli- for the author’s rather prominent signature, need to believe them to get through. A wealthy tary struggles against steep odds. That changes written in pencil. Baldessari extended his chal- Manhattan couple, Ouisa (Allison Janney, tall and only toward the end, with the dawn o an era lenge to conventional authorship and aesthet- nimble) and Flan (John Benjamin Hickey), live to in which such newcomers as the postmini- ics in “paintings” based on grainy photographs, succeed while forgetting how to love. When Paul malist sculptors Eva Hesse and Lynda Beng- shot at random from the window o his Volks- (Corey Hawkins) enters their home, saying he’s lis could at once pioneer important develop- wagen bus, and in sassy art-world appropria- the son o Sidney Poitier, the couple begin to feel ments in art and invest them with peculiarly tions, such as “A 1968 Painting,” which features things they haven’t felt for years, like the excite- sensuous qualities that are not about what the a small, colorless reproduction o a big, blar- ment that comes with letting dierence into their female body is like—the fascination o male ing Frank Stella. The intimate presentation o lives. While the director, Trip Cullman, manages artists, for millennia—but about what it’s like this funny, consequential body o work is not the relatively large cast with clarity and power, to have one. Through Aug. 13. to be missed. Through May 20. (Starr, 5 E. 73rd nothing feels inspired except for Hawkins’s per- St. 212-570-1739.) formance and Peter Mark Kendall’s, as Rick, one Queens Museum o Paul’s lovers and victims. Both characters want “Anna K.E.: Profound Approach and Easy Cindy Sherman to believe in the power o love, but are undone, in Outcome” The title o this exhibition o three series o dierent ways, by romance: Rick’s with a man he The highlight o this ve-part installation by photographs, “Once Upon a Time, 1981-2011,” cannot know, and Paul’s with himself, the person the cheeky Tbilisi-born, Queens-based artist, aptly conjures a fairy tale: Sherman’s pictures he dreams o being but can never realize. (Ethel which sprawls across a hundred and forty-ve are rife with gendered archetypes, rich backsto- Barrymore, 243 W. 47th St. 212-239-6200.) feet in the museum’s atrium, is a pair o bill- ries, impending doom, and melancholic long- board-size photographs, part o an ongoing se- ing. The “Centerfolds,” from the nineteen- Twelf th Night ries in which she photographs hersel in front eighties, evoke damsels, i not exactly in dis- Saheem Ali’s production o Shakespeare’s gender- o famous gurative paintings (in this case, tress, then in vulnerable reverie. The “History bending comedy moves from delight to delight, two works owned by the Met). Standing before Portraits,” from the nineties, provocatively
6 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 ART
garble art-historical painting styles, depict- with encroaching darkness. A white curtain gurative pieces tend toward portentous opac- ing aristocratic and religious subjects to em- is emblazoned with words and phrases lifted ity; an exception is “Soiled,” a foam mattress phasize their grotesque qualities. In the largest from political news coverage, a tempest o lan- that rests on the gallery oor, sprouting grass— works here, the “Society Portraits,” from 2008, guage in the artist’s handwriting. In the scene- equal parts object and organism. Through May the shape-shifting artist assumes the eccentric stealing “H(e)art Island,” a misty gray en- 14. (Abreu, 88 Eldridge St. 212-995-1774.) glamour o women o a certain age. The severe, croaches on a maplike abstraction, embellished coied looks o Sherman’s characters in these with a hand-sewn heart shape. Named for Hart Lee Relvas later works are poignantly spot-on. They look Island, the historic New York location o a now I the show’s title, “Some Phrases,” conjures right at home on the Upper East Side, amid the defunct psychiatric hospital and a potter’s eld, musical notation, it’s apt: Relvas has re- ladies who lunch. Through June 10. (Mnuchin, it’s a melancholic tribute to the city’s forgot- leased six experimental pop albums, under 45 E. 78th St. 212-861-0020.) ten. Through May 14. (On Stellar Rays, 213 Bow- the names Rind and Dewayne Slightweight. ery, at Rivington St. 212-598-3012.) Each o the thirteen delicate wooden sculp- “The Woman Question” tures in her début at the gallery is based on a In 2015, Jane Kallir, who is the director o Ga- Rochelle Goldberg simple action (“Waiting,” “Feeling,” “Adorn- lerie St. Etienne, curated a show at the Bel- Glazed ceramic gures, clad in felted human ing”). To create the bentwood forms, Rel- vedere Museum, in Vienna, which appears in hair, hang in the gallery from steel armatures vas rst cuts slender elements out o ply- an abbreviated recap here. The broad-strokes in a show haunted by histories, both recent wood, then joins them with putty, and sands title—which borrows a mid-nineteenth- and Renaissance. Goldberg’s impressive sculp- them down to a satin-smooth nish. The re- century phrase most closely associated with tures are loosely modelled on Donatello’s gaunt sulting squiggles, lines, and loops suggest Victorian England—is little more than an ex- statue “Penitent Magdalene,” which similarly quickly sketched drawings o human charac- cuse to round up some sixty spectacular n- paired a feminine face with masculine shoul- ters. In the freestanding “Thinking,” an out- de-siècle Austrian works from private collec- ders and feet. Her works also convey some o line strides through a narrowing doorway; in tions, which you’re unlikely to see again soon. the anguish o the dismembered forms o the “Holding,” a legless torso that hangs on the Gustav Klimt’s drawings here are mostly those mid-twentieth-century Polish sculptor Alina wall extends a hand lined with loose change o a man who’d rather be painting, though the Szapocznikow. But what Goldberg achieves toward the viewer—whether it’s oering or contrast between the patterned coat and the most powerfully is the sense o bodies under- begging remains up in the air. Through May blank dress and face o Friederike Maria Beer, going both trauma and regeneration. Her non- 21. (Callicoon, 49 Delancey St. 212-219-0326.) in a 1916 sketch, is striking. But Egon Schiele’s insistent lines are at their best in pencil, par- ticularly in “Seated Couple (Schiele with His Wife),” which is so cutting that its materials might have been razor wire and sheer intel- ligence. Oskar Kokoschka’s 1921 watercolor “Girl on Red Sofa” has the charmingly forth- right innocence o a children’s-book illustra- tion. Through June 30. (Galerie St. Etienne, 24 W.1 57th St. 212-245-6734.) GALLERIES—CHELSEA
Leslie Hewitt In this concise exhibition, Hewitt puts the genre o still-life through conceptual paces, ex- ploiting its capacity for both withholding and divulging information. At rst glance, the pho- tographic series “Color Study” appears to be composed o variations o the same image—a trio o dahlias on a dark background—printed small and large, in black-and-white and in color. But look carefully and subtle shifts are revealed (note the leaves framing the owers, which are arranged dierently from image to image). For the series “Topographies,” items were photographed against wood surfaces and given classicatory titles. An embroidered handkerchie is identied as a “memory ob- ject”; a photograph o a well-worn copy o the post-colonialist philosopher Frantz Fanon’s book “The Wretched o the Earth” is noted as “mildly out o focus.” Throughout her ce- rebral project, Hewitt frustrates attempts to make simplistic sense o her aesthetic or po- litical choices. Through May 13. (Sikkema Jen- kins,1 530 W. 22nd St. 212-929-2262.) GALLERIES—DOWNTOWN
Rochelle Feinstein Painterly joie de vivre and political malaise face o in Feinstein’s new show, which is ti- tled “Who Cares.” Spoiler alert: apathy loses. “O Color,” a big square canvas featuring brightly colored trapezoids in pinwheel for- mation, greets visitors with a wow at the door. “Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Under-Song for a Cipher,” opening May 3 at the New
COURTESY THE ARTIST; CORVI-MORA, LONDON; JACK SHAINMAN GALLERY, NEW YORK NEW SHAINMAN GALLERY, JACK CORVI-MORA, LONDON; ARTIST; THE COURTESY In other works, Feinstein tempers ebullience Museum, includes the British painter’s 2017 canvas “Ever the Women Watchful.”
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 7 1 OPERA
Metropolitan Opera CLASSICAL MUSIC Opening night o the Met’s revival o Wagner’s “Der Fliegende Holländer” was the occasion for a well-deserved round o toasts. To the late Au- gust Everding, whose 1989 production has stood the test o time; to the veteran German baritone Michael Volle (in the title role), whose voice may have lost a bit o richness over the years, but not a bit o authority or style; to the American dra- matic soprano Amber Wagner, who oered a star- making performance (as Senta) that, with its dark intensity o coloring, could stand comparison to the best o Astrid Varnay; and to the conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the company’s music di- rector designate, whose solo curtain call brought forth a cascade o roses, thrown by a grateful or- chestra. May 4 at 8 and May 8 at 7:30. • Also play- ing: The Met has stacked the cast o the spring run o “Don Giovanni” with topnotch talent, including Mariusz Kwiecien, Angela Meade, Isabel Leonard, Marina Rebeka, Matthew Polenzani, and Erwin Schrott; Plácido Domingo conducts. May 3 at 7:30 and May 6 at 8. • Robert Carsen’s new production o “Der Rosenkavalier” brilliantly updates Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s eighteenth-century setting to the turbulent, militarized pre-First World War Vienna o Schnitzler, Klimt, and Musil. Renée Fleming is a City Opera presents “Los Elementos,” a charming Spanish Baroque opera by Antonio Literes. poignant Marschallin, Elīna Garanča a thrilling and highly original Octavian, and Günther Groissböck a surprisingly dashing and youthful Ochs; Sebas- For the People in a production by Nashville Opera. But tian Weigle. May 5 and May 9 at 7. • Franco Alfano’s “Los Elementos,” directed and choreo- “Cyrano de Bergerac” is a uent example o Italian New York City Opera makes its second opera after Puccini, but it really owes its contem- graphed by Richard Sta ord, is an en- foray into Spanish-language opera. porary revival to a few star tenors who have been tirely original e ort. And, with City unable to resist the chance to play the immortal the Paul Kellogg era of Opera currently floating on a wave of title character. Roberto Alagna headlines the cur- rent revival, opposite Jennifer Rowley and Atalla the nineties and the aughts that New York critical acclaim for its recent productions Ayan; Marco Armiliato. May 6 at 12:30. • The Met City Opera became a force for Baroque of Bernstein’s “Candide” and Respighi’s will probably never top the star-studded, eight- opera—specifically works by Handel, “La Campana Sommersa,” its timing hour concert with which it marked its centennial, in 1983, but its Fiftieth Anniversary Gala, commem- which, with their historical-mythical plots seems to be superb. orating the company’s move to Lincoln Center, in and arrays of pleasing arias, were emi- “Los Elementos” has none of the range 1966, packs its fair share o glamour, with Renée nently adaptable to a plethora of produc- or ambition of those twentieth-century Fleming, Anna Netrebko, Plácido Domingo, Juan Diego Flórez, and René Pape among the dozens o tion styles. The newly resurrected City works: it is an hour-long serenata written artists scheduled to perform. May 7 at 6. (Metropol- Opera, under the direction of Michael circa for the entertainment of mem- itan Opera House. 212-362-6000.) Capasso, has tacked away from Handel, bers of the Spanish royal court, who had Experiments in Opera: “Flash Operas” showcasing the company’s heritage as a brought Literes into their service in the Six composers have raided the ction anthology producer of verismo works and contem- sixteen-nineties. Literes, a prolific master “Flash Fiction Forward” for very short stories to porary pieces. But this week Baroque opera of vocal works both sacred and operatic, inspire their brie operas. The featured authors include Jack Handey (o “Saturday Night Live” makes an intriguing return with a piece by followed the fashions of the time by writ- fame), Peter Mehlman (“Seinfeld”), and Patricia a Spanish composer whom Handel could ing a work that combined Spanish tradi- Marx (a sta writer for this magazine), and each have claimed as a colleague: Antonio tions with the sonic and structural inno- fteen-minute piece is fully staged and accompa- nied by a ve-piece chamber ensemble. May 5 at Literes ( - ), whose “Los Elemen- vations of the Italian Baroque. With one 7:30 and May 6 at 2 and 7:30. (Symphony Space, 2537 tos” (“The Elements”) will be o ered at exception, the cast is entirely female, Broadway. 212-864-5400.) the Harlem Stage Gatehouse (May - ). following Spanish practice. The instru- 1 The production is part of a new ini- mental accompaniment calls not only for ORCHESTRAS AND CHORUSES tiative, “Ópera en Español,” led by Ca- Italian violins but also for the vigüela de passo, who is interpreting the company’s arco, a bowed instrument with a medieval New York Philharmonic Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is a big musical state- mandate as “the people’s opera” in a new Iberian lineage, while the opera’s fetching ment in every way, and the humanistic values it way, emphasizing outreach to the His- sequence of arias and choruses mixes promotes remain ever fragile in a fallen world. panic community while inviting connois- Italian da-capo arias with Spanish-style Alan Gilbert, entering his nal spring as the Phil- harmonic’s music director, conducts it this week; seurs to sample an out-of-the-way trea- songs that incorporate haunting minia- Schoenberg’s “A Survivor from Warsaw,” a shatter- sure. The program began with last season’s ture refrains. Written to amuse the Bour- ing seven-minute piece for narrator, orchestra, and presentation of Daniel Catán’s “Florencia bon aristocracy, “Los Elementos” is now male chorus that illustrates one man’s harrowing memory o the Holocaust, opens the program. The en el Amazonas,” a work squarely in the for everyone. vocal soloists in the Beethoven are Camilla Tilling, post-Puccini tradition, which was o ered —Russell Platt Daniela Mack, Joseph Kaiser, and Eric Owens; the GIZEM ILLUSTRATIONBY VURAL
8 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 CLASSICAL MUSIC
Tony Award-winning actor Gabriel Ebert narrates the Schoenberg text. With the Westminster Sym- phonic Choir. May 3-4 and May 9 at 7:30 and May NIGHT LIFE 5-6 at 8. (David Geen Hall. 212-875-5656.) 1 Cecilia Chorus of New York Brahms abstained from using the Latin liturgy in ROCK AND POP o diaphoretic night owls. (Saint Vitus, 1120 Man- his splendid “German Requiem,” employing instead hattan Ave., Brooklyn. saintvitusbar.com. May 5.) consolatory passages from the Luther Bible and the 1 Apocrypha. Here, Mark Shapiro conducts this reli- Musicians and night-club proprietors lead ably venturesome choral ensemble and an orches- complicated lives; it’s advisable to check JAZZ AND STANDARDS tra in the Brahms masterpiece and a thematically in advance to conrm engagements. allied première: “A Garden Among the Flames,” George Garzone by Zaid Jabri, a Kraków-based Syrian composer o Demdike Stare and Regis A virtuosic Boston saxophonist o renowned stat- complex yet urgently communicative works, who Navigating electronic dance music can be daunting, ure, Garzone is also one o the vaunted teachers o has set texts by the thirteenth-century Su spiri- especially for listeners whose lives may not sup- his instrument—in short, a local legend. He brings tual teacher Ibn Arabi and the contemporary South port late-night scouting trips and liver abuse. For a quartet o ne regional talent with him for this African-born poet Yvette Christiansë. May 6 at 8. those interested in the genre’s more urbane cabal, southerly visit, including the trumpeter Phil Gren- (Carnegie Hall. 212-247-7800.) however, the producer Regis and the duo Dem- adier and the bassist John Lockwood. (Cornelia dike Stare are among the most exciting artists in Street Café, 29 Cornelia St. 212-989-9319. May 5-6.) Philadelphia Orchestra the eld. While Regis skews techno and Demdike Even while conducting “The Flying Dutchman” at Stare leans toward avant-garde ambient, both are Highlights in Jazz: The Joe Bushkin the Met, Yannick Nézet-Séguin still makes time for inuenced by upbringings in industrial British Centennial his orchestra’s third and nal Carnegie Hall perfor- metropolises (Birmingham and Manchester, re- Joe Bushkin was a Zelig-like gure o classic jazz mance o the season. The program features works spectively), and share a fascination with goth at- and pop who itted amid the glimmer o such gi- that in their own way are as storm-tossed as Wag- mospherics, post-punk aesthetics, and the occult. ants as Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby, Benny ner’s opera: Bernstein’s Symphony No. 1 (“Jere- And in spite o (or in deance o) their record-nerd Goodman, and Frank Sinatra, contributing idi- miah”), featuring the radiant mezzo-soprano Sasha fans both have the ability to whip the oor into a omatic piano work and, to Sinatra’s delight, the Cooke; Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 24 in C Minor, dark dance party. (Good Room, 98 Meserole Ave., standard tune “Oh! Look at Me Now.” Bushkin with the rened soloist Radu Lupu; and Schumann’s Brooklyn. 718-349-2373. May 5.) died in 2004, but his centennial will be marked by Second Symphony. May 9 at 8. (212-247-7800.) such mainstream mavens as Eric Comstock, Wy- 1 NAO clie Gordon, Warren Vaché, Ted Rosenthal, and Neo Jessica Joshua, who performs as NAO, plays Nicki Parrott. (BMCC Tribeca Performing Arts Cen- RECITALS tunes that she describes as “wonky funk.” The ter, 199 Chambers St. 212-220-1460. May 4.) East London-bred musician—who, as a teen-ager, Yefim Bronfman studied piano and vocal jazz at London’s Guildhall Pat Martino This commanding pianist is often found investigat- School o Music & Drama, and then toured as a Through soul jazz, bebop, modal adventures, fu- ing some o the more interesting avenues o contem- backup vocalist for Jarvis Cocker and other lumi- sion, and beyond, Martino has taken his instru- porary music, but for Carnegie Hall’s annual Isaac naries—released her début full-length album, the ment on a roller coaster o stylistic twists and Stern Memorial Concert he’ll stick to the classics ebullient, electronic-inected R. & B. feat “For turns during his six-decade career, emerging as a in a program that mixes pieces both acidulous and All We Know,” last year. Her salt-of-the-earth ap- patriarch o jazz guitar. A serious health crisis and sweet: works by Bartók, Schumann (the “Humo- proach to songwriting on the likes o the groov- determined recovery in the early eighties, which reske”), Debussy, and Stravinsky (Three Move- ing “Good Girl” has won over fans, but she’s just as climaxed with him painstakingly relearning the ments from “Petrushka”). May 4 at 8. (212-247-7800.) fearlessly frank outside o her music. She’s joined guitar, may be a touchstone o his iconic legacy, by the electronic horn project Brasstracks. (Brook- but Martino doesn’t have to call on an inspira- Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center lyn Steel, 319 Frost St., Brooklyn. May 5.) tional backstory to dazzle. (Iridium, 1650 Broad- Two o the Society’s most distinguished string play- way, at 51st St. 212-582-2121. May 4-6.) ers, the violinist Ani Kavaan and the cellist Carter Slowdive Brey, join the insightful young pianist Orion Weiss Contrary to what its name suggests, this Reading Jim Rotondi in a program o canonical pieces: Mozart’s sprightly quintet rose quickly in the late-eighties British rock Rock and roll may never die; hard bop appears to Trio in C Major (K. 548), Dvořák’s uncharacteristi- scene. The group pioneered the thunderous, atmo- be striving for immortality as well. The rip-roaring cally intense Trio in F Minor, Op. 65, and Brahms’s spheric instrumentals and non-eusive vocals that trumpeter Jim Rotondi wasn’t around for the rst glorious Trio in B Major, Op. 8. May 5 at 7:30 and came to be known as shoegaze, because guitarists owering o the earthy style, but he’s thoroughly May 7 at 5. (Alice Tully Hall. 212-875-5788.) often looked down toward the complex pedal boards absorbed its playbook. A faithful member o the at their feet during shows. But Slowdive was also long-running neo-bop unit One for All, Rotondi Bang on a Can Marathon fast to fall: the music press gleefully panned the here leads a quintet with such reputable associates The postminimalist collective’s thirtieth-anniversary band’s full-length records in the early nineties, and as the pianist David Hazeltine and the vibraphon- concert, which is as progressive politically as it is the group broke up shortly after the release o its ist Joe Locke. (Smoke, 2751 Broadway, between 105th aesthetically, features not only an important work 1995 album, “Pygmalion.” In the twenty years since, and 106th Sts. 212-864-6662. May 5-7.) by one o its founders, Julia Wolfe (“Steel Ham- however, a slew o contemporary groups have name- mer”), but also contributions from such compos- checked Slowdive, with its progressive approach to John Scofield Retrospective: “Quiet and ers, performers, and ensembles as Women’s Raga layering guitars, as a critical inuence. At these re- Loud Jazz” Massive, Joan La Barbara, the Oberlin Contempo- union performances, Slowdive will stage cuts from He’s a modern-jazz avatar o the electric guitar, rary Music Ensemble, and the Brooklyn steel-pan its new self-titled album. The band is joined by the but one o John Scoeld’s masterworks is the 1996 band Pan in Motion. May 6, beginning at 2. (Brook- dreamy pop project Japanese Breakfast. (Brooklyn album “Quiet,” which found him concentrating on lyn Museum, 200 Eastern Pkwy. Attendance is free with Steel, 319 Frost St., Brooklyn. May 8-9.) an acoustic instrument. At this mini-retrospective, museum admission. bangonacan.org.) Scoeld will revisit that landmark recording, minus Hank Wood and the Hammerheads the saxophonist Wayne Shorter, one o its key con- Emerson String Quartet and Yefim Bronfman Emerging from the fertile punk scene incubated tributors (Joe Lovano, a worthy replacement, will America’s leading quartet, with an equally starry in Bushwick warehouse spaces, Hank Wood and stand in for him). Plugging in, Scoeld will also guest artist, oers a concert that touches on the the Hammerheads have become the best garage cast a fond look back on “Blue Matter,” a 1986 range o enthusiasms it has pursued across four de- act working in New York today. They play a high- album that made use o a groove-oriented rhythm cades: the program includes the Piano Quintet o octane strain o rock and roll that’s best described section, which included the bassist Gary Grainger Brahms, preceded by a gem from the French rep- as “ripping,” advancing a thread o brawny, pissed- and the drummer Dennis Chambers, both o whom ertory (Ravel’s sole quartet) and a modernist mas- o ght music hybridized by groups like Fear and will be on hand to reminisce. (Appel Room, Jazz at terwork (Berg’s Quartet, Op. 3). May 7 at 3. (Car- the Dwarves. The desired eect is most ideally Lincoln Center, Broadway at 60th St. 212-721-6500. negie Hall. 212-247-7800.) experienced while pogo-dancing around a room May 5-6.)
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 9 and leaves it undeveloped. Mary and Michael (Debra Winger and Tracy Letts) are long-mar- ried and long-frustrated suburban cubicle jock- MOVIES eys who are both having aairs. Mary is see- 1 ing Robert (Aidan Gillen), a writer; Michael is seeing Lucy (Melora Walters), a dancer; and OPENING from jail and seeks one last score to fund his get- each is waiting for the right moment to tell the away. The suave Paul Meurisse plays Gu’s admiring other that the marriage is over. But the impend- nemesis, a police inspector whose honor and profes- ing visit o their son, Joel (Tyler Ross), a col- Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. James Gunn directs the sional pride are matched by his deductive brilliance. lege student, puts a crimp in their plans; while sequel to the 2014 superhero comedy-adventure, star- From the abstract virtuosity o the opening jailbreak waiting to separate, Mary and Michael suddenly ring Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Vin Diesel, and Bradley to the silent salute o the nal heartbreak, Melville rekindle their relationship—in eect, cheating Cooper. Opening May 5. (In wide release.) • The Lovers distills emotions to rareed minimalist gestures— on their lovers with each other. Winger is com- Reviewed in Now Playing. Opening May 5. (In limited as in a New Year’s Eve scene with Gu, alone in his manding in action and repose, and Letts invests release.) • Risk A documentary about Julian Assange, hideout, stoically facing a blank future—and oers his role with gru energy, but they and the other directed by Laura Poitras. Opening May 5. (In limited a stringent morality o self-discipline, both his he- actors exert themselves in a void—none o the release.) • A Woman’s Life Reviewed in Now Playing. roes’ and his own. In an age o philosophical and characters have any substance beyond their func- Opening May 5. (In limited release.) aesthetic extremism, Melville captured the second tion in the story. The writer and director, Aza- 1 wind (or the last gasp) o a dignied formality and zel Jacobs, oers a few visual grace notes that restraint by way o a crook and a cop who coolly left resonate beyond the plotlines, but his script is NOW PLAYING their mark as auteurs o crime and punishment. In devoid o imagination. With Jessica Sula, as French.—R.B. (Film Forum; May 4-5 and May 9.) Joel’s girlfriend, Erin, whose quandaries go Bringing Up Baby utterly unaddressed.—R.B. (In limited release.) The enduring fascination o this 1938 screwball The Fate of the Furious comedy is due to much more than its uproarious The latest and loudest addition to the franchise that A Quiet Passion gags. Having already helped launch the genre, the will not die. Most o the regulars return, including Terence Davies, who has previously adapted the director Howard Hawks here reinvents his comic Letty (Michelle Rodriguez), Roman (Tyrese Gib- work o Edith Wharton, in “The House o Mirth,” voice, establishing archetypes o theme and perfor- son), and Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson), who grapples and Terence Rattigan, in “The Deep Blue Sea,” mance that still hold sway. He turned Cary Grant once more with the problem o nding a vehicle now turns his attention to Emily Dickinson. The into an extension o his own intellectual irony, an large enough to t him. He also has to lay aside his arc o the lm is a long one, marked by regular absent-minded professor who seems lost in thought enmity with Deckard (Jason Statham) for the sake readings o her poems; we meet the author rst but awaits the chance to unleash his inner leopard. o a higher purpose: the taking down o Dom (Vin as a deant schoolgirl, played by Emma Bell, and He refashioned Katharine Hepburn as a sexually Diesel), who has turned against his erstwhile pals. trace her through the years o her maturity, her determined woman who hides her aggression under Such is Diesel’s dramatic range that the dierence gradual seclusion in the Amherst family home, and intricate scatterbrained schemes that force the deep between the good Dom and the bad Dom is almost the shuddering awfulness o her death, in 1886. thinker to deploy his untapped humor and virility. too subtle to be seen by the naked eye. Behind the Cynthia Nixon takes the role o the adult Dick- And Hawks brought to fruition his own universe o chaos lurks the gure o Cipher (Charlize Theron), inson, and does so without ingratiation, willing to hints and symbols that conjure the force that rules who combines the roles o hacker and seductress, make her dicult or, when occasion demands, un- the world: she tears his coat, he tears her dress, she and whose party trick—the hot spot o the story— likable; Dickinson’s manners, always forthright, steals his clothes, she names him “Bone,” and the involves taking command o multiple vehicles, by grow more barbed as her ailments worsen. There mating cries o wild animals disturb the decorum remote control, in New York, and making them race is strong support from Keith Carradine and Joanna o the dinner table, even as a Freudian psychiatrist around the streets like packs o dogs. The rest o Bacon, as her parents; Jodhi May, as her sorrowful in a swanky bar gives viewers an answer key in ad- the lm, directed by F. Gary Gray, is threatened sister-in-law; and Catherine Bailey, as a irtatious vance.—Richard Brody (MOMA; May 4.) by both silliness and exhaustion; cracking crime friend, although the social badinage seems forced at the wheel, you sense, is not a theme on which in comparison with the quieter scenes around the Colossal variations can be spun forever. With Helen Mir- hearth. Most striking o all is the presence o Jen- The director Nacho Vigalondo’s new movie is partly ren, who doesn’t even get to drive.—Anthony Lane nifer Ehle, whose compassionate calm, as the po- a blandly schematic drama o self-discovery and (Reviewed in our issue of 4/24/17.) (In wide release.) et’s sister, does much to lighten the movie’s dark partly a thinly sketched sci- monster thriller— distress.—A.L. (4/24/17) (In limited release.) yet his mashup o these genres is ingenious and, at The Lost City of Z times, deliciously realized. Anne Hathaway stars as The new James Gray lm has a scope, both in time A Woman’s Life Gloria, a hard-drinking and unemployed New York and in geographical reach, that he has never at- This adaptation o Maupassant’s 1883 novel about blogger whose boyfriend (Dan Stevens) throws her tempted before—an anxious wrestle with the epic a woman’s fall from aristocratic ease to careworn out o his apartment. She retreats to her late par- form. The movie, based in part on the book o the dependency starts deceptively well. Jeanne le Per- ents’ empty house in her rustic home town, bumps same name by David Grann, o The New Yorker, stars thuis des Vauds (Judith Chemla) returns from con- into a childhood friend (Jason Sudeikis), gets a part- Charlie Hunnam as Percy Fawcett, a British sol- vent school to her family’s estate and enjoys do- time job in the bar he owns, and tries to take stock dier who journeyed repeatedly up the Amazon in mestic amusements and the splendors o nature. o her life. Then she and the world are gripped by the rst quarter o the twentieth century. His goal, She revels in the warm wisdom o her parents, even the sudden appearance o a gigantic monster that which came to consume his life and to cut it short, as the director, Stéphane Brizé, seems to revel in wreaks havoc in Seoul for a few minutes each day. was to locate the remains o a forgotten civilization the delicate diction o the actors who play them The connection between Gloria’s story and the in the jungle. So implacable a quest could be taken (Yolande Moreau and Jean-Pierre Darroussin). monster’s is too good to spoil; suce it to say that as foolish or futile, but Gray prefers to frame it in Then the drama kicks in, and the movie goes o its metaphorical power brings a furiously clarify- terms o heroic striving. Whether Hunnam is the the rails. Jeanne marries a local man named Ju- ing and progressive insight to Gloria’s troubles and right actor to assume such a burden is open to ques- lien (Swann Arlaud); he promptly impregnates aptly portrays them as the quasi-universal woes tion, and the whole movie, though shot with Gray’s her servant (Nina Meurisse) and has an aair o humanity at large. The trope takes a lot o set- dening elegance and his taste for deep shadows, is with a neighbor (Clotilde Hesme), whose hus- ting up, but it’s worth it—and Hathaway’s self- often a dour aair. Still, there are welcome touches band (Alain Beigel) kills him. Jeanne and Julien’s transformative, forceful performance brings Viga- o levity and mystery, supplied by Sienna Miller, son, Paul, grows into a ne’er-do-well whose debts londo’s strong idea to life.—R.B. (In wide release.) in the role o Fawcett’s long-suering wife, and by reduce Jeanne to destitution. The tale o worldly Robert Pattinson, overgrown with facial hair, as aiction and spiritual redemption is, unfortu- Le Deuxième Souffle his equally loyal sidekick. With Tom Holland, as nately, merely illustrated; Brizé pays more at- The director Jean-Pierre Melville’s chilled under- the explorer’s eldest son, who vanished in the com- tention to the tasteful costumes and the alluring world romanticism, one o the most inuential pany o his father.—A.L. (4/17/17) (In wide release.) settings than to the drama or the images. The per- styles in the modern cinema, reached a height o formances are muted as well, as i to link formal- personal expression in this crime drama, from 1966. The Lovers ity and misery, but his view o the milieu’s hypoc- It stars the gru, granitic Lino Ventura, as Gustave This bittersweet romance thrusts its fertile and risy and constraint is bland and passionless. In (Gu) Minda, a principled gangster who escapes clever dramatic framework into the foreground French.—R.B. (In limited release.)
10 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 DANCE
women’s technical ranks at N.Y.C.B. for the past decade or so has been Tiler Peck (no relation to Justin), who can command just about everything— speed, clarity, timing—and deploy it all without making a fuss. At times, her modesty is actually a problem. She makes perfection look normal. But in the running duet that she danced with Amar Ramasar in “The Times” some of her bobby pins seemed to come loose. Beneath her little black shorts, her legs started to look not just beautiful and capable but like flesh. She even had a few butt-out moments. I’m almost em- barrassed to say that Tiler Peck looked sexy, but there it is. The ballet’s lead male, Robert Fair- child (Tiler Peck’s husband), underwent a similarly poignant disassembly. Fair- child is one of the most purely classical dancers I have ever seen. From step to step, he shows us every central principle of ballet: the rounded shapes, the long line, the solid center. As a result, the experience of seeing him get shaken from that equipoise temporarily, as he is in this jazz-baby ballet, and then return—and all of this very unself- consciously, like a bird sticking its wing out and then folding it back in—almost makes you cry. And to watch him do this alongside a man performing the same steps but in a di erent way—less like something from ancient Greece, In “The Times Are Racing,” the dancers wear sneakers, and the ballet is set to rock music. more like something from a Knicks game—redoubles the sweetness. The Bobby Pins Come Loose ing,” which seemed to be the most man dancing next to him, as it hap- popular new piece of City Ballet’s past pened, was Justin Peck, who still per- Justin Peck softens up in a new piece for season—it will be repeated this season forms with the company but seldom in New York City Ballet. on May and May —did show signs his own ballets. He may have given of ballet today is of trying to portray a youth group. The himself this role just to act as Fairchild’s whether Justin Peck, the resident cho- dancers wore sneakers instead of ballet foil. Possibly, for a choreographer who reographer of New York City Ballet, shoes, and sported T-shirts imprinted is wary of sentimentality or who, let’s has a beating heart in his chest or else with words like “Defy,” “Shout,” and face it, may not know what he wants to a little piece of stone. Peck’s ballets are “Change.” The score was the last four say, a way to make meaning in ballet is superbly constructed and, in the hands tracks of Dan Deacon’s thudding rock just to push the dancers into becoming of City Ballet’s excellent late-twenties album “America.” fully human—tender, surprising, even cadre (that’s his age, too), superbly But to me what was impressive awkward—at the same time that they danced, but much of the time you can’t about “The Times Are Racing” was not are trying to be perfect. That is, Peck tell what they’re about. I’ve been told the cool-cat factor. It was the opposite. may be creating ballets about people that his subject is the “spirit of his gen- The ballet seemed to show a softness trying to do ballet.
ILLUSTRATION BY CYNTHIA ILLUSTRATIONBY KITTLER eration,” and his “The Times Are Rac- that was new to Peck. At the top of the —Joan Acocella
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 11 DANCE
New York City Ballet In week two o the “Here/Now” festival, the com- pany unveils its newest creation by Alexei Ratman- sky, a ballet entitled “Odessa” and set to music by ABOVE & BEYOND the Russian contemporary composer Leonid Des- yatnikov. The score—a driving tapestry o tangos and folk music—was originally written for a lm by Alexander Zeldovich based on Isaac Babel’s “Odessa Tales,” set in an Odessa ghetto. (Desyatnikov is also the composer o the music for Ratmansky’s “Rus- sian Seasons,” which is being revived this season.) • May 3 at 7:30: “In Creases,” “The Dreamers,” “New Blood,” and “Everywhere We Go.” • May 4 at 7: “Jeu de Cartes,” “After the Rain” pas de deux, “Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux,” and “Odessa.” • May 5 at 8 and May 9 at 7:30: “Neverwhere,” “Mother- 1 ship,” “Spectral Evidence,” and “The Times Are • Bryant Park Fencing Class Racing.” May 6 at 2 and 8 and May 7 at 3: “Jeu de READINGS AND TALKS Cartes,” “After the Rain” pas de deux, “For Clara,” In 2016, Daryl Homer became the rst Amer- “Ten in Seven,” and “Odessa.” (David H. Koch, Lin- ican to win an Olympic silver medal for men’s coln Center. 212-496-0600. Through May 28.) sabre in more than a century—and certainly Strand Bookstore the rst from Hudson Heights. He was one Christopher Kelley, a professor at the New Limón Dance Company o three New York City medallists who School, argues that i the human condition Last July, forty-four years after the death o José trained at the Manhattan Fencing Center, damns us to disaection and angst, then our Limón, its namesake founder, this venerable which was founded in 2007 by Yuri Gelman ability to laugh at such limitations is a uniquely troupe acquired its rst new artistic director in as an incubator for Olympic talent, and is ex- human privilege. He spent years studying Bud- nearly as long: the British-born choreographer panding the reach o the sport. The gym’s ex- dhism under Robert Thurman at Columbia, and former company member Colin Connor. His pert foilists host this free weekly class every and has nursed an interest in the works o such rst New York season at the helm includes his own Friday through the end o May, where ama- dark comedians as Louis C.K., Tig Notaro, and “Corvidae,” which alludes to birdlife while swirl- teurs can learn the basics o sword-handling Andy Kaufman, who have mined the desolate ing to part o Philip Glass’s overly familiar Vio- without any prior experience. “You put a corners o everyday reality for big laughs. At lin Concerto. As for the Limón repertory, there’s sword in any kid’s hand,” Homer observed this talk, Kelley screens segments from these “Concerto Grosso” (1945), a baroque cathedral o shortly after the Games, “they’re going to comedians’ most famous routines and aligns a dance, and “The Exiles” (1950), a vision o Adam like it.” Preregistration is required, and walk- them with Buddhist pillars to suggest a com- and Eve as refugees, which Connor presents in al- ins are admitted on a rst-come, rst-served mon approach to existential relief. (828 Broad- ternate versions: one with the original Schoenberg basis. (Bryant Park, Fifth Avenue Terrace, at way. 212-473-1452. May 5 at 7.) score, the other with new commissioned music 41st St. manhattanfencing.com. May 5 at 1:30.) by Aleksandra Vrebalov. (Joyce Theatre, 175 Eighth 1 Eyebeam Ave., at 19th St. 212-242-0800. May 2-7.) Futurists like Elon Musk already describe the AUCTIONS AND ANTIQUES mind in digital terms: at a recent address in Gibney Dance Company Dubai, Musk looked forward to “a closer merger As part o the Gibney Repertory Initiative for To- Before becoming an architect, in the years o biological intelligence and digital intelli- morrow, the company presents work in its home after the Second World War, the Venetian gence,” which would be “mostly about the band- space by two notable contemporary choreogra- artist Carlo Scarpa practiced a craft closely width, the speed o the connection between your phers. Joanna Kotze, the less established o the two, identied with the city o his birth: the de- brain and the digital version o yourself.” The oers “Already Ready,” a première that explores signing o glassware. Working for Venini, one boundaries are getting thinner: “MVR,” now in openness and spontaneity. Reggie Wilson mashes o the renowned glass factories on the island its second year, is a lecture series co-presented up three o his structurally and rhythmically invig- o Murano, Scarpa revived the sixteenth- by Pioneer Works, focussed on the increasing orating earlier works—“Pang,” “The Dew Wet,” century technique known as mezza ligrana, impact that digital practices have, and will have, and the especially terric “Big Brick—A Man’s in which layers o thin glass encase a slen- on the physical body, spanning such topics as Piece”—into a new one, “Cong Khoum-Baie.” der, spiralling thread, and brought back other virtual and augmented reality, robotics, gam- (Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center, novelties as well. Christie’s holds a sale de- ing, and machine learning. Presenters include 280 Broadway. 646-837-6809. May 4-6.) voted to these colorful, translucent objects the digital artists Ursula Endlicher and Brian on May 4. (20 Rockefeller Plaza, at 49th St. House, New York University’s Ella Klik and Christopher Williams 212-636-2000.) • An aectionate letter from Rodrigo Ferreira, and the video-game designer A connoisseur o the archaic and the arcane whose Ernest Hemingway to Marlene Dietrich— Nicholas Fortugno. (34 35th St., Brooklyn. pio- dances animate strange and fantastical elements the two carried a torch for each other for sev- neerworks.org. May 9 at 7.) o the past with rare persuasiveness and imagina- eral decades after they met during an ocean tion, Williams now turns to “Il Giardino d’Amore,” crossing in 1934—is one o the star lots at Powerhouse Arena a treatment o the myth o Venus and Adonis by Swann’s sale o manuscripts and autographs The Upright Citizens Brigade performer and the Baroque composer Alessandro Scarlatti. Aided (May 4). (104 E. 25th St. 212-254-4710.) • The occasional actor Doug Moe launches his rst by Andrew Jordan’s costumes, which augment as Maastricht-based art extravaganza known book, “Man vs. Child,” a tongue-in-cheek guide much as adorn the dancers’ bodies, Williams pre- as TEFAF (the European Fine Art Fair) re- for new fathers with awkward questions, includ- sents the lovers as creatures who precede—or sur- turns to the Park Avenue Armory (May 4-8), ing—but not limited to—“Is It Okay to Bring pass—conventional notions o gender. (Danspace featuring works from a selection o galler- My Baby to a Bar?” The short answer is no, but Project, St. Mark’s Church In-the-Bowery, Second Ave. ies specializing in modern and contempo- there are plenty o long answers as well: Moe at 10th St. 866-811-4111. May 4-6.) rary art as well as design objects, antiquities, writes from experience, and casts an empathetic and African and Oceanic art. (Park Ave. at eye on the shifting representations o modern “Places Please!” 67th St. 212-370-2501.) • Meanwhile, Frieze fatherhood. “Old Dads,” Moe claims, could Larry Keigwin—the founder o the modern-dance New York (May 5-7), a sprawling, carnival- father from a distance, while the “New Dads” ensemble Keigwin + Company—brings his jazzy, like showcase o contemporary and twentieth- o today are rightfully expected to share play- club-inected dancing to the intimate quarters o century art, sets up shop on Randall’s Island. time duties. He goes on to describe the awed Joe’s Pub. He’s teaming up with his longtime collabo- Beyond the art, the attractions include art aection new fathers may have for their chil- rator Nicole Wolcott (a powerhouse) to create a play- talks, food, the open-air setting, and a fun dren with relatable humor and genuine insight, ful portrait o their friendship and the creative jockey- ferry ride across the East River. (Randall’s Is- oering a promising resource for the curious ing that has sustained them since their rst duet, way land Park, East River at Harlem River. frieze- and the clueless. (28 Adams St., Brooklyn. pow-
back in 2002. (425 Lafayette St. 212-967-7555. May 4-6.) newyork.com.) erhousearena.com. May 9 at 7.) AMARGO PABLO ILLUSTRATIONBY
12 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 FßD & DRINK
1 TABLES FOR TWO By Chloe’s upper echelons are having BAR TAB By Chloe family issues of their own. Chloe Cosca- relli, the restaurant’s namesake and the Bleecker St. ( - - ) originator of many of the recipes, was re- to know about By cently forced out of the business she Chloe is that the chipotle aioli and the founded three years ago, after the company beet ketchup are very good, and very free. she had partnered with alleged that she Joe Gould would be delighted, but there had become negligent. Cue a guerrilla war Snacky are very few Gould-like characters left in fought on the blogosphere and in New 187 Grand St., Brooklyn (718-486-4848) the West Village, where this vegan fast- York tabloids. Cue, too, a vicious rumor This little bar, tucked away on one o Williams- food chain’s original branch is located, and that the split happened because the partner burg’s busiest thoroughfares since 2003, is easy to even fewer near some of the other loca- company wanted to serve animal products. miss. Inside, it recalls the bedroom o a teen-ager tions, in SoHo, Williamsburg, and the Despite Coscarelli’s departure, By with a penchant for collectibles: Japanese action gures (Godzillas, Totoro, Mazinger Z), Chinese Flatiron district. Think of By Chloe as Chloe will keep its name. And, while this luck charms (laughing Buddhas, golden peanuts, Shake Shack without the meat. Bid adieu calls to mind the deletion of Trotsky from children holding sh), original paintings and to the days when vegans were dour granola photographs during Stalin’s reign, the sculptures by local artists, skateboard decks, a gigantic lion head. On a recent Thursday night, eaters swathed in carob-stained hemp o cial word is that the restaurant will stay moody shoegaze played while Bruce Lee’s 1978 shirts, and say hello to a new, well-heeled plant-based, and won’t change the food, masterpiece “Game o Death” screened on a small subset of SoulCycling, health-obsessing which is undeniably delicious. The burgers television. A young woman’s Coconutzu Freeze (sake, crema de coco, pineapple juice) arrived in foodies. Call them bubblegum vegans. are springy (the classic involves lentils, the giant stomach o a ceramic Buddha: “I always Whole families of them descend on tempeh, and chia), the basil pesto is zesty, rub the belly for good luck,” she said. The loyal By Chloe. Witness, in the SoHo branch, and the faux mac and cheese, with a clientele consists mainly o rst-wave gentriers: the artists and musicians who have been drinking a teen-age girl, bespandexed, glued to a sweet-potato-cashew-cheese sauce and there since it opened, many o whom have been Y.A. soap on her phone, and chewing a shiitake bacon, is better than the real thing. priced out o what is now one o the most expensive tartly satisfying guacamole burger, the At the SoHo branch the other day, over areas in the city. There’s a playful menu o unpre- tentious pan-Asian small plates, like a Szechuan patty a mix of black beans, quinoa, and coconut waters in the shell, one bearded chili dog, and cocktails named after Wong Kar-wai sweet potatoes. Her father sports a jew- man said to another, “You’re only a runner movies: In the Mood for Love (sake, ginger, cran- elled watch and stares at his phone while once you run the New York Marathon. berry juice), Chungking Express (soju, Calpico, nigori). The owner, Sandy Pei, who was born in munching on a steaming pile of dairy-free Last year, after the race, we were picked Seoul to Chinese parents, grew up in the Midwest ginger-spice pancakes. Opposite sits her up by a Gulf stream so we could go to and moved to the city in 1998. “I came to New York mother, photographing a quinoa taco French Laundry”—Thomas Keller’s Cal- to be a painter,” she said. “But I’m from a restau- rant family. It’s in my blood.” Pei has been adding salad with her Vuitton-cased phone. Only ifornia restaurant. Around them, a horde trinkets she unearthed in Chinatown shops to the the girl’s sister, dipping a sweet-potato fry of bubblegum vegans continued stu ng bar’s collection all along. She glanced at a statue into that lusciously beety ketchup, at- their faces, too content to bother with such o the general turned deity Guan Gong, standing behind the bar, weapon in hand, and said, “I’m not tempts to make eye contact with her fam- a public boast. (Entrées $ . -$ . .) that religious, but I decided that I needed him to
PHOTOGRAPH BY SIMONEPHOTOGRAPH BY JOOSTTHEYORKER; LUECKILLUSTRATIONBY SWARTE NEW FOR ily. None of them look up. —Nicolas Niarchos protect me.”—E. P. Licursi
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 13
THE TALK OF THE TOWN
COMMENT OUT OF TIME
reasoning of capital punishment, the expiration date, calculated how many people might be killed B state of Arkansas grew some unknowable fraction safer before it passed, and generated the warrants that Asa last Monday evening, when Jack Jones, a fifty-two-year- Hutchinson, the state’s Republican governor, signed. old, overweight, hypertensive, diabetic amputee, was strapped McKesson Medical-Surgical, Inc., which distributes vecu- to a gurney in the Cummins Unit prison and administered ronium bromide—a drug that is commonly used during sur- drugs to successively sedate him, impair his breathing, stop gery but that can also be used to stop a person’s breathing— his heart, and kill him. According to the state’s timeline, filed suit against Arkansas, claiming that it had been duped the process was a model of e ciency, taking only fourteen into providing an ingredient of the cocktail. Four of the exe- minutes to complete—less time than one might spend reg- cutions were blocked by court order. The Eighth Amendment istering a vehicle at the Little Rock D.M.V. This was signifi- prohibition against “cruel and unusual” punishment served as cant, as the night’s work was just getting started. Arkan- a measure of the elastic morality that facilitates the death pen- sas was staging the first double execution in the United alty: does it constitute cruelty to infuse the condemned with States since . Three hours later, Marcel Williams, a a sedative, rather than a stronger anesthetic, particularly if, as forty-six-year-old man who also su ered from diabetes, attorneys for Jones and Williams argued, the circulatory con- obesity, and hypertension, was strapped to the same gur- ditions of the men might impair its e ectiveness? ney, injected with the same cocktail of drugs, and declared The rush of executions is notable not only for its barba- dead within seventeen minutes. rism but also for its contrast to prevailing thinking about cap- Jones’s and Williams’s executions were the second and ital punishment. Support for the death penalty peaked in , third in a four-day period; at the same facility, on the pre- with eighty per cent of Americans in favor. Last year, a Pew ceding Thursday, Ledell Lee, aged fifty-one, became the study found that the number had fallen to forty-nine per first prisoner to be put to death in Ar- cent—the first time since that less kansas since . A fourth man, Ken- than half of the public supported it. The neth Williams, aged thirty-eight, who declining crime rate accounts for part of had been on death row since , was the drop: in the mid-nineties, murders executed at Cummins on Thursday, were twice as common as they are now. shortly before midnight, when his war- At the same time, the idea that death rant was set to run out. These four serves as a deterrent to other criminals were among eight men whom Arkan- has been consistently unsupported by ev- sas sought to execute in eleven days. idence. Data from the Death Penalty In- With the state’s supply of the sedative formation Center show that, in the past midazolam due to expire at the end of forty years, there have been eleven hun- the month, the proposed schedule came dred and eighty-four executions in the to resemble a lethal clearance sale. To South, compared with four in the North- socioeconomics and race—the known east, yet homicide figures in were and inescapably arbitrary factors in the nearly seventy per cent higher in South- application of the death penalty—we ern states than in Northeastern ones. The may now add a novel dynamic: the death penalty is about retribution for past shelf life of benzodiazepine compounds. o enses, not prevention of future ones. There is a banal horror in the bureau- There is also a growing awareness
ILLUSTRATIONS BY TOM BACHTELL TOM ILLUSTRATIONS BY cratic diligence that noted the drug’s that it is perhaps impossible to create a
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 15 justice system that both executes criminals and avoids kill- that the expense of death-penalty appeals drains resources ing innocents. The sclerotic appeals process insures that from other prosecutions. In response, Governor Rick Scott years, if not decades, will pass before the condemned meet removed the Loyd case, along with twenty-two others, from their state-authored fate. But streamlining the process only Ayala’s jurisdiction—an action she is challenging in court. increases the likelihood that innocent people will die. Since Last year, the Presidential election was won by a man who , a hundred and fifty-eight inmates on death row have had demanded the death penalty for five young black and been exonerated of the crimes for which they were sent Latino men who were convicted of a brutal rape in Central there. A prisoner in Ohio named Ricky Jackson spent thirty- Park that they did not commit. He appointed an Attorney nine years on death row before a key witness admitted to General who had successfully fought to vitiate federal prohi- lying in the testimony that led to his conviction. Jackson is bitions on the execution of the mentally ill. He chose a Su- alive solely because of the ine ciency of the system that preme Court Justice who, in his first major vote on the Court, sought to kill him. cast the decisive one, in a – decision, to allow an execution That complexity has been reflected in the politics of to proceed—that of Ledell Lee, who died minutes later. death-penalty prosecutions. In January, Bob Ferguson, the These are the actions of powerful men in service of out- Washington State attorney general, proposed a bill that moded ideas. We in this country are unaccustomed to mass would eliminate the death penalty in his state. The same executions carried out under government auspices. We month, Beth McCann, the Denver district attorney, an- would prefer to believe that such things happen in less nounced that her city was done with it. In March, Aramis evolved locales. Yet that is precisely what the state of Ar- Ayala, the state attorney for the Ninth Circuit, in Florida, kansas set out to achieve. The condemned men perpetrated announced that her o ce would not pursue capital punish- a litany of horrors, but the rationales for putting them to ment in any cases. Her o ce was in the midst of prosecut- death—a decades-delayed catharsis for the victims’ fami- ing Markeith Loyd, who is accused of murdering his preg- lies, a lottery-slim chance that some future violence will nant girlfriend and a policewoman. Ayala said, “I’ve been be deterred—are as close to their expiration as Arkansas’s unable to find any credible evidence that the death penalty supply of midazolam. increases safety for law-enforcement o cers.” She added —Jelani Cobb
DEPT. OF SELF-HELP pages, marked up with edits and cor- Manifesto”? The Book of Mormon? BIGGER rections, that were sent to the printer Mao’s Little Red Book? “The Autobi- in April, . Its driver and escort was ography of Malcolm X”? “The Joy of Zach P., an employee at Profiles in His- Sex”? The Big Book represents the or- tory, an auction house, which had it on igin of the self-help movement; try to consignment. (As the courier, Zach P. imagine a publishing industry without was not authorized by Profiles in His- it, or without the word “anonymous.” tory to speak on its behalf.) The house “I’ve seen people who behold it as Big Book forty-five is o ering the book at auction in June, though it’s a religious relic,” Zach P. I minutes to make it down to Holly- and estimates that it will fetch as much said, as he removed the manuscript wood from Calabasas, riding shotgun as three million dollars. To promote from its sixteen-by-twenty-inch ar- in a Honda Accord. By : . ., it the sale, Profiles in History is exhibit- chive box and its swaddling of bubble was reclining poolside at the Holly- ing the manuscript in New York later wrap. He laid it, with some ceremony, wood Roosevelt Hotel amid the mem- this month, at the Questroyal Fine Art on a table stained with water rings and ory of guests and carousers like Hem- gallery, and was floating a claim from cigarette burns. ingway, Fitzgerald, Montgomery Clift, an A.A. historian, Dr. Ernest Kurtz: Its current owner, a longtime Profiles and Errol Flynn, who, legend has it, “Not only is this manuscript the most in History client and a recovering al- made bathtub gin in the hotel’s bar- important nonfiction manuscript in all coholic, who’d bought it in , for bershop. Such ghosts, and the squig- history—I consider it right up there just under a million dollars, had had it gly David Hockney mural at the bot- with the Magna Carta, because of the bound in burgundy board. Each page tom of the pool, and the ashy traces, personal freedom it has provided so was encased in a clear plastic sleeve, to among the palms, of a party the night many millions of alcoholics.” prevent oxidation and decay. On the before, seemed to call for a round of This seemed like bar talk, until one title page, someone had marked to de- Bloody Marys. But not today, pal. thought it through a bit. The Big Book lete the misbegotten apostrophe in “Al- The Big Book is the founding tes- has sold tens of millions of copies, in coholic’s Anonymous.” The previous tament and manifesto of Alcoholics dozens of languages, and has altered an page had a handwritten inscription Anonymous, written for the most part untold number of lives, mostly, one as- from Lois Wilson, Bill W.’s widow, be- (anonymously) by the organization’s sumes, for the better. (Aldous Huxley queathing the volume to her friend co-founder Bill Wilson, a.k.a. Bill W., called Bill Wilson the twentieth cen- Barry Leach, on New Year’s Day, . and this version, by the pool the other tury’s “greatest social architect.”) What, When Bill W. wrote the book, he’d day, was the original working manu- from the past century or two, at least, been sober for fewer than four years, script, the some hundred and fifty typed might compare? “The Communist and there were only two A.A. groups:
16 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 one meeting on Tuesdays, in Brook- occasionally recognized on the street, boy hat and boots and spurs, and the lyn, the other on Wednesdays, in Akron, and she gives talks all the time. What wild cowboy starts knocking people’s Ohio. The book was an attempt to made this one di erent was that Burns hats o and spilling people’s drinks and spread the word. (Bill W. also had in is the county seat of Harney County, kicking their chairs out from under mind a for-profit drunk-tank business, home of the Malheur National Wild- them. The cowboy is raising all this but he couldn’t get the financing.) life Refuge, the site, last year, of a six- havoc, and the people in the saloon are The manuscript featured the colla- week takeover by armed protesters, who stunned, and suddenly the quiet stranger tion and distillation of comments from demanded that the federal government stands up and goes over to the cowboy about four hundred readers: A.A. mem- return the land—though to whom was and says, ‘Mister, I’m giving you five bers, doctors, and ministers, plus, in not exactly clear. One of the occupiers minutes to pack up and get out of town.’ Bill W.’s words, “policemen, fishwives, was killed in the stando . Limerick And the cowboy looks at him and gets housewives, drunks, everybody.” You knew that her audience, about seventy- his gear and packs it on his horse and could see, flipping through it, what five county residents, included both they’d been going for, on this final supporters and opponents of the pro- round: to make it more palatable to a test. The mood in the room seemed broad audience. The changes sought congenial, not tense, but she couldn’t to make the text descriptive, rather than be sure. A local man had told her about prescriptive. “You should do” became a past confrontation between the two “we have done.” When Bill W. writes, sides in which many had likely carried “It works—it really does. Try it,” the firearms. He said he thought that if “Try it” is excised. There was also an someone had dropped a book people e ort to tamp down the Christianity. might have started shooting. “It’s amazing how they made it Limerick wore a black Western- more secular,” Joe Maddalena, the tailored shirt embroidered with tur- owner of Profiles in History, said over quoise and purple flowers, and a black the phone. “Still, this is a sacred text. skirt. Her hair is straight, parted on It’s not like it’s some ‘Chicken Soup the left, and two feet long. When she for the Soul.’ ” He has sold Marilyn was twenty, she happened to appear Monroe’s subway-grate-scene white on a CBS news special having to do dress, the car from “Chitty Chitty Bang with a history project she put together Patricia Limerick Bang,” and a manuscript of Einstein’s in college, at the University of Cali- theory of relativity. “But the Big Book fornia Santa Cruz, that attempted to rides out of town! So the townsfolk is so much bigger than all of us.” build bridges between students and come over to the stranger and they After about an hour by the pool, the senior citizens. When the interviewer thank him, and they say, ‘Stranger, if Big Book got back in the Accord and asked about her ambition in life, she you don’t mind, we do have one ques- returned to Calabasas. It’s planning to said, “To save the world.” She was a tion. What would you have done if the come to New York via Brink’s. Not for hippie then, and is not much less of cowboy hadn’t left town in five min- nothing, but the Magna Carta, when one now, forty-plus years later. The utes?’ The stranger thinks and then it flew over from Oxford, seven years University of Colorado’s Center of the he says, ‘Well, I believe I would have ago, for a visit to the Waldorf-Astoria, American West, of which Limerick is extended the time.’ ” had its own seat in business class, and the faculty director, has an o cial The audience members, who had a bodyguard named Rocco. motto: “Turning hindsight into fore- wondered where she was going with 1—Nick Paumgarten sight.” She believes that history, skill- this—they knew about strangers, like fully applied and deeply understood, the Feds who were in Burns during the LETTER FROM OREGON can save the world. occupation—laughed at the punch line. HINDSIGHT “So I started out my talk with a Both sides joined in. “I was so delighted story,” Limerick told an amateur his- and relieved at that laugh,” Limerick torian who had breakfast with her a said. “I talk to people I disagree with few days after she returned to Boul- politically more often than anybody I der, where she lives. “I had a reason for know, and I’ve discovered that some- choosing this story, but as I went along times we find the same things funny. I couldn’t imagine what I had been So then I told the folks in Burns that, , well-known his- thinking. The story is this: In a small whatever side they were on, the conflict P torian of the American West, gave Western town one afternoon, the local between local wisdom and outsider ex- a talk at the community center in the folks are sitting in the saloon when pertise has been going on over land use town of Burns, Oregon, one evening they notice a stranger who comes in throughout human history, and they’re not long ago with her heart slightly in and sits in a corner. The stranger doesn’t at the absolute center of something her throat. Limerick belongs to the say anything. Suddenly, into the saloon very important for the country and the small category of historians who are comes a wild cowboy with a big cow- world. I think they were glad to hear
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 17 that. And, as for getting along with one cobbler. The restaurant has not been “I am an observer. You can see things another, I put in a big plug for hypoc- o ering a menu inspired by another sometimes with greater clarity than risy. We don’t have to be honest with of its exhibits, “I’m Nobody! Who people who are not, but it can be lonely.” each other all the time.” Are You?,” about the life and work of Davies grew up in a working-class fam- During her stay, she said, she also Emily Dickinson. Visiting the other ily, in Liverpool, the youngest of ten, visited the wildlife refuge, which has day, Terence Davies, the British film- and was brought up as a devout Cath- been returned to federal control, and maker, agreed that this was just as olic. “Then I realized it’s a lie—men she stood at the foot of the bird- well. “It would be very sparse,” he said. in frocks, nothing else,” he said. He watching tower and thought how nice “None of this ‘knitted by nuns in left school at sixteen, to become a clerk it was that it didn’t have snipers in it Nepal’ business.” in an accountant’s o ce, before escap- anymore. “I know federal sta people, Davies directed “A Quiet Passion,” ing to drama school in his twenties. naturalists and so on, who are some- the new film about Dickinson, for which He might have made a good actor— times afraid they’ll get shot just for he also wrote the screenplay. Starring his voice is particularly low and sono- doing their job,” she said. “When the Cynthia Nixon, the movie starts out rous. “From a very early age, I sounded park rangers and other employees of looking like a conventional bio-pic be- like the Queen Mother, after she died,” the refuge came back to work, some of fore turning into a devastating depic- he said. the citizens of Burns had a potluck tion of crushing social mores, and of A few years ago, Davies took to supper to welcome them. Somehow, the anguish of constrained creativity. writing poetry himself, though he when I think of that it makes me cry.” Davies was turned on to Dickinson’s has never published any of it. “I don’t 1—Ian Frazier poetry a dozen years ago. In an intro- know if they are any good, but it gives duction to an anthology, he read that me a great deal of pleasure,” he said. THE CREATIVE LIFE she “withdrew from life” beginning in “Sometimes when you are feeling low, UNDER A BUSHEL her twenties. “I thought, There must be and rather lonely, it does give some more to it than that,” he said. “She loved solace.” He wrote one poem after being to go out, she loved to bake, she impro- stranded in New York by Hurricane vised on the piano, she loved the com- Sandy. “We were doing a casting, sit- mencement balls, she liked to dance.” ting in this very grand hotel, with an Davies, who is seventy-one, has interior courtyard, and suddenly it su ered his own creative constraints: started to snow,” he said. “I just kept , room at the it took six years to raise the money to looking at the snow, and a poem did L Morgan Library & Museum has make “A Quiet Passion,” and other come out of it: Why can’t I stay in the been o ering a lunch menu inspired projects have been similarly hard to moment? Why am I outside, looking by one of its exhibits, of treasures from get o the ground. He recognized in at the snow? And why should snow the National Museum of Sweden: Dickinson a kindred spirit. “She was fall? It seems so sad. And there was a cucumber-elderflower aquavit sparkler, a watcher, and I am not a participant,” young lad sitting at a computer, and brown-butter cod cake, lingonberry he said, over a bowl of black-bean soup. he looked like August Strindberg, and I thought, Why does he look like August Strindberg? And how can anyone be that young? And snow fall- ing all over the Eastern Seaboard.” Davies looked melancholy. “I’m very good at misery and death,” he said. “A bit short on the old joie de vivre, but I’m working on it.” After lunch: a tour of the exhibit, with Carolyn Vega, one of the curators. Davies studied a map of Dickinson’s Amherst, which he visited for research, though the movie was shot mostly in Belgium, for economy’s sake. “For the exterior scenes, basically we built the portico of her house, then put the rest in digitally,” he explained. He lingered over Dickinson’s schoolbooks, and the register of students from Mount Hol- yoke, where she studied for a year. “Is this Miss Lyon?” he asked, pointing to a portrait of the school’s founder. “I’m “When will someone teach us how to share?” afraid I made her rather severe.” (In the movie, Dickinson defies the principal the first time I came here was with for piano and orchestra. I hope I get it on religious grounds, and flees home.) Artie Garfunkel. We had a chamber played here sometime.” There were pages of Dickinson’s man- group, and I’d done all the arrange- He talked about songwriting. He uscript poems, written in pencil—“How ments.” Later, in , Webb played begins with chords; motifs will pop have they survived? How have they sur- “MacArthur Park” at Sting’s Rainfor- out; he begins to structure. Melody is vived?” Davies asked—and even a lock est Foundation Fund concert there. important. So is originality. “I can’t have of her vivid auburn hair. “Oh, I do hope “Will Ferrell was climbing around in anybody in the room with me when I she knows we’re still interested,” he said. the cheap seats in a red leotard,” Webb do it,” he said. When the song is As Davies left the exhibit, he was recalled. “So it was all a big sendup. finished, he plays it for people. “I’m still mulling Dickinson’s lack of recog- But the orchestra was magnificent watching them intently,” he said. “I nition in her lifetime. “I just think, Oh, that night.” want their anti-gravity to kick in. You why couldn’t she have got one success?” “MacArthur Park,” made famous by can generally tell when that happens.” he said. “Or, at least, won first prize for Richard Harris, the regal British actor her bread! Why couldn’t she have been who went on to play Dumbledore, was at the head of the class, for once?” The later recorded by everyone from Frank Morgan’s interior courtyard was bathed Sinatra to Waylon Jennings (several in sunlight: no snow now, only the un- times) and Donna Summer. Its ba- certain promise of spring. roque, nearly psychedelic lyrics, in 1—Rebecca Mead which a cake left in the rain stands in for the end of a love a air—its sweet EARWORM DEPT. green icing flowing down—have THE ELEMENTS haunted and provoked listeners for decades; their reactions have, in turn, haunted and provoked Webb. He con- siders the lyrics to be “a list of things that sort of happened—partly cloaked, not diabolically so.” He said, “I was sur- prised when people ran up against this drizzly Wednesday wall of incomprehensibility.” O afternoon, Jimmy Webb, the sev- Last month, Webb published a enty-year-old Grammy-winning song- memoir titled “The Cake and the Rain.” writer of “Up, Up and Away,” “Mac- It details his rise from Oklahoma Jimmy Webb Arthur Park,” “Wichita Lineman,” and preacher’s son to young L.A. hitmaker many other wistful hits of the AM-FM for Glen Campbell and others to He looked philosophical. “It’s always era, visited Carnegie Hall with his wife, high-flying countercultural hedonist. nice when people burst into tears and Laura Savini. Webb wore a spi y gray It features Sinatra, Elvis, and, memo- collapse in a pile on the rug.” suit and a paisley tie; his short gray hair rably, Harry Nilsson, who lures Webb He began playing “MacArthur Park,” was softly unruly. He and Savini left into the nadir of John Lennon’s Lost which he wrote about his first love, their umbrellas in the Maestro Suite Weekend, as well as helicopters, hot- Susan Horton, now Susan Ronstadt, (Steinway upright piano; portraits of air balloons, cocaine, a cli side baby- who worked at an Aetna o ce in Los Bernstein and Toscanini) and headed goat rescue, Jimi, Janis, and a nude Angeles, near MacArthur Park, where to the main stage, Stern Auditorium. chamber-music concert hosted by Webb she and Webb often met for lunch. There, this week, artists including Judy and attended by Joni Mitchell and Once, it rained on them. (Two pas- Collins, Art Garfunkel, Toby Keith, members of the Los Angeles Philhar- sages in “The Cake and the Rain” elu- and Hanson (yes, that Hanson), will monic. It ends in . cidate further.) “The melody started perform Webb’s songs, in a fund-raiser At center stage was a Steinway con- like—” He played minor chords. “So for Alzheimer’s research, presented by cert grand. Webb sat on the bench and there’s a little verse, and there’s the cho- City Winery. Michael Douglas, Webb’s began to play a rolling, majestic tune, rus—‘MacArthur Park is melting in former roommate, will host. In the sev- evocative of his hits but unplaceable in the dark,’ ” he sang. “This little motif enties, Webb explained, “Mikey and the canon. He played for a minute and now goes into majors.” He played, Jann Wenner and myself were like the a half, music filling the hall as two main- wordlessly, the “someone left the cake Three Musketeers.” tenance workers mopped the aisles. He out in the rain” part, through to “I don’t As Webb approached the stage, he ended with a flourish. “Nothin’ wrong think that I can take it / ’cause it took stopped what he was doing—remi- with that!” he said. It wasn’t a song: he so long to bake it.” He went on, “Then niscing about being in the studio with had just made it up. “Usually, what I it goes into another key; then the mel- the Beatles when they recorded do when I’m writing a song is I sit ody more or less turns upside down. “Honey Pie”—and paused to take it down and I start playing,” he said. “And Those are what Leonard Bernstein all in. “It’s always awe-inspiring to then something will surface. I just wrote called ‘transformational elements.’ ” walk onto this stage,” he said. “I think my first real classical piece, a nocturne —Sarah Larson
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 19 er of the centrist movement En Marche!) LETTER FROM FRANCE came out, he said he’d picked his child- hood grammar book but had left it in the greenroom, given the gravity of the CAN THE CENTER HOLD? moment. “The first duty of the President is to protect,” he asserted. Later, François Notes from a free-for-all election. Fillon (the candidate of the center-right Les Républicains), declaring that he BY LAUREN COLLINS wasn’t “a fetishist,” dodged the whole exercise, and, not to be outdone by Ma- cron, announced that he was cancelling the next day’s campaign events. By late April, French Presidential cam- paigns have usually settled into a simple duel between the two main parties, the Socialists and the Republicans, but this race was a free-for-all. According to polls, four candidates—Mélenchon, Macron, Fillon, and Le Pen—all had a viable shot at progressing to the two-person run- o , to be held on May th. Mélenchon wanted a nationalist economy but a glo- balist identity, Macron wanted a global- ist economy and a globalist identity, Fil- lon wanted a globalist economy but a nationalist identity, and Le Pen wanted a nationalist economy and a nationalist identity. The world was looking to the French election as either a ratification or For many French voters, the Presidential race has o ered no good choices. a rejection of the populist surge that had led to Brexit and Trump. The balance of of April th, nearly a handicapped child had given him, and power among America, Europe, and Rus- O a quarter of France’s television- then whipped out his cell phone and sia was also at stake. With four candi- watching public was tuned in to a spe- began reading a series of text messages dates hovering somewhere in the vicin- cial called “ Minutes pour Convain- from a “big media boss” who, he said, ity of twenty per cent, the permutations cre.” Its format was simple: each of had tried to bully him into dropping of possible matchups and outcomes were eleven Presidential candidates would out of the race. almost too complicated to contemplate. appear and speak for fifteen minutes, It was around this time that viewers, This was clearly a “change election”— making a final pitch to the electorate—a fiddling with their own devices, began to or, to hear it from French voters, a race full third of whom, according to ana- receive notifications about some sort of in which they’d been presented with a lysts, remained undecided, just days be- shooting on the Champs-Élysées. One dog’s dinner of choices, leaving them fore the first of two rounds of voting. of the hosts interrupted the broadcast to so enraged that they could hardly see The hosts asked each candidate to pre- announce that a possible terrorist attack straight, much less render their vote a sent an object that, if elected, he’d keep had taken place. Then he introduced coherent expression of their fears and in his o ce at the Élysée. Jean-Luc Philippe Poutou (Nouveau Parti Anti- aspirations. No matter how they leaned, Mélenchon (who had created his own capitaliste), a trade unionist who’d made their first words, when asked to com- far-left movement, La France In- an impression at the previous debate by ment on la présidentielle, were more often soumise) chose an alarm clock, “to tell showing up in a long-sleeved T-shirt and than not “J’en ai marre,” or “I’m fed up.” me that it’s time to redistribute the mercilessly dinging his better-known op- The political analyst Brice Teinturier be- wealth.” Nathalie Arthaud (Lutte Ou- ponents. Without saying a word about lieved that the disappointing adminis- vrière) brandished a photograph of the attack, Poutou launched into his show- trations of the two previous Presidents Tommie Smith and John Carlos rais- and-tell session. “This is green for the had led to the rise of a powerful group ing gloved fists at the Olym- richness of the soil of the Amazon for- of voters, whom he christened the pics. Marine Le Pen (representing the est,” he said, unfurling a miniature flag— Party. The acronym stood for “plus rien extreme-right Front National) came an homage, he said, to French Guiana, à faire, plus rien à foutre”—nothing more with a key, saying that she wanted to where crowds had been in the streets for to do, nothing more to give a damn about. give French people their house back. weeks protesting mistreatment by the One day, I got to talking with the pro- Nicolas Dupont-Aignan (Debout la mainland government. prietor of an antique shop, who said, “You France) brought a wire sculpture that When Emmanuel Macron (the found- want to start another French Revolution
20 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 PHOTOGRAPH BY OSCAR B. CASTILLO of and cut o all their heads.” pletely unheard of), into even greater family’s Paris apartment was bombed, in In January, a story in Le Monde had chaos. Three days later, Macron and Le —Marine woke up to a blown-away likened the contest to something out of Pen progressed to the second round, gar- bedroom wall—they moved to a Second a Quentin Tarantino film, “one of those nering . and . per cent, respec- Empire mansion in the Paris suburb of B-movie pastiches where each character tively, of the vote. Saint-Cloud, which an elderly industri- who seems designated to be the hero finds alist had bequeathed to Jean-Marie. (The himself ‘smoked’ by a Magnum to the a French Presiden- estate “smells of death,” one of her sisters head.” At that point, Fillon (a former T tial election was anywhere near this told a journalist, but Marine continued to Prime Minister) had vanquished Nicolas wild was in . Jacques Chirac, the live there until .) According to Ma- Sarkozy (a former President), winning center-right President, was supposed to rine’s autobiography, both of her parents the Républicains’ primary in a surprise face Lionel Jospin, the center-left Prime were spectacularly inattentive. When Ma- landslide. Macron had committed a “pat- Minister. (The two men had been shar- rine was sixteen, her mother, Pierrette, left ricide” of his former mentor, the sitting ing power in a “cohabitation” govern- Jean-Marie for his biographer. Jean- President François Hollande, by quitting ment.) The extreme-right candidate, Marie banished her from the family, say- as Minister of the Economy and setting Jean-Marie Le Pen—Marine’s father, ing, “If you want money, go clean houses.” up En Marche!, at the age of thirty-eight. an eyepatch-wearing former paratrooper She posed for Playboy scrubbing the floor. Hollande, with an approval rating of four and gleeful racist, who famously called Without any particular encourage- per cent and an unemployment rate of the Holocaust a “detail” of history—had ment, except the feeling that she’d been ten, had declined to seek reëlection, an been polling a weak fourth. But in the blocked from society on account of her unprecedented surrender. His Prime Min- first round of voting, he came in second, name, Marine gravitated toward her fa- ister, Manuel Valls, sought the Socialist propelling him to a runo against Chi- ther’s milieu. By , she was coming nomination, but was unexpectedly rac, who was embroiled in a corruption into her own in the F.N. A criminal law- trounced in the primary by Beno t Hamon, scandal. “Le choc Le Pen” galvanized both yer, she’d joined the Party’s executive com- a former Minister of Education, whose the political establishment and the pub- mittee. After a string of defeats—run- platform included a universal basic in- lic. An array of parties that had previ- ning for the national legislature, she come and a tax on robots. This was all ously had no common interest banded blamed the Socialist Party for five hun- before prosecutors put Fillon under for- together to repel Le Pen. More than a dred thousand infections—she’d mal investigation for misuse of public million citizens took to the streets, some finally won a seat on a regional council. funds (according to allegations, he paid bearing signs that read, “Vote for the She’d recently divorced her husband, an his wife and children parliamentary sal- Crook, Not the Fascist.” Ultimately, Chi- F.N. operative and the father of her three aries for work they never did) and arrested rac received more than eighty-two per children. Soon, she married another Party several close associates of Le Pen (who cent of the vote, the most decisive vic- activist, and again divorced. (Her current ignored a summons to testify about a tory in French history. companion, Louis Aliot, is the F.N.’s fake-jobs scandal of her own). Then The election was inédit because vice-president.) Defending her father on Mélenchon, an ex-Trotskyist who wanted Jean-Marie Le Pen, considered so un- television, she launched her reputation as to tax earnings of more than four hun- thinkable that the French national soc- a rivetingly aggressive interlocutor, bang- dred thousand euros at a hundred per cer team issued a statement condemn- ing the table and taking her arguments, cent, began soaring in the polls. ing his racism, made it to the second delivered in a commanding smoker’s voice, “ Minutes pour Convaincre” didn’t round of voting. This year’s election is past their logical ends. “She had an as- end until nearly eleven o’clock. In the fol- inédit not only because Marine Le Pen, sertiveness, a glibness, and a prodigious lowing hours, the specifics of the attack considered so thinkable that both Bri- bad faith that promised a fine career in emerged. Karim Cheurfi, a French citi- gitte Bardot and the President of the the media,” a journalist later said. zen and ex-convict, had opened fire on a United States have praised her, is within Meanwhile, Macron was training at parked police cruiser, killing Xavier reach of the Presidency but also because the École Nationale d’Administration, Jugelé—a proudly gay policeman who Macron, who has never held elected France’s élite civil-service school. The was a first responder at the Bataclan mas- o ce, has become the front-runner a son of doctors from Amiens, he’d ar- sacre—and injuring three others. Police year after putting together a party from rived in Paris in . He’d been sent shot Cheurfi as he tried to escape on foot. scratch. As soon as the results of the there, alone, to finish high school after According to prosecutors, a note praising first round were announced, a parade falling in love with Brigitte Trogneux, a was found near his body. Jugelé was of establishment figures declared their member of a prominent family of local the two hundred and thirty-ninth person support for Macron, in an attempt to chocolatiers. She was married, the mother since the beginning of to lose his form a “barricade” like the one that had of three children, and his drama teacher. life in a terrorist attack on French soil. thwarted Jean-Marie Le Pen. The Prime (Macron and Trogneux wed in , French people kept their composure; they Minister addressed the nation on live when he was twenty-nine and she was didn’t need a tweet from Donald Trump television, urging citizens “to fight the fifty-four.) As an undergraduate, Ma- (“Will have a big e ect on presidential Front National and doom its cata- cron studied philosophy. Then, at Sci- election!”) to tell them that the news had strophic projects.” ences Po, he earned a master’s in public thrown the race, which commentators Marine, the youngest of three Le Pen a airs. He was a prodigy, serving as an kept describing as “totalement inédit” (com- daughters, was born in . After the assistant to the phenomenologist Paul
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 21 ceived me at the town hall. He is Le Luc’s third F.N. mayor since , the first having resigned for health reasons, and the second having resigned also sup- posedly for health reasons (but not be- fore sending a letter to the local paper saying that she was quitting because her team reproached her for “not being F.N. enough”). Apparently, there had been some drama over a European Union flag that hung outside the town hall. When Verrelle took over, it came down. Ver- relle led me up to his o ce. A former prison o cial with a buzzcut, he was wearing a khaki jacket and a lavender shirt, accessorized with wire-rimmed glasses and a gold watch. I wanted to know why, in Verrelle’s opinion, the people of the town had put the F.N. in power. He said that their vote had not necessarily been for the most •• attractive party but for the one with which they were least acquainted. “Little by lit- Ricœur, and an enigma, taking the train in schools, and exiting the European tle, they told themselves, ‘We have to try to Amiens every Friday to see Trogneux. Union. (Many observers fear that her something else,’ ” Verrelle said. He con- Aurélien Lechevallier, a friend and ad- election would mean the end of the tinued, “There were people who thought viser, remembers him dressing in “an E.U.) Just before the first round of that we were going to construct watch- East Coast Ivy League jacket” when his voting, she announced a plan to imple- towers, that we were going to put up peers were wearing T-shirts. Lecheval- ment a moratorium on legal immigra- walls to separate the neighborhoods, that lier told me, “I think when we met he tion, “to stop this delirium.” So far, the we were going to walk around with po- had no real experience of living lightly F.N. has been unable to win more than lice dogs, that we were going to kick the with friends—just making jokes, having a handful of seats in France’s legisla- foreigners out. Then they realized that a couple of beers at the bar.” ture. But, in the municipal elec- we’re no more racist than anyone else, Macron went back to Amiens to an- tions, the Party clinched eleven mayor- just a little more nationalist.” nounce the launch of En Marche! in alties, seven of them in . An op- Verrelle’s budget was small and his April, . “This isn’t a movement to position party for almost half a century, agenda modest: he spoke of having de- have an umpteenth candidate in the Pres- the F.N. is trying to prove that it can creased the town’s debt (he’d served a idential election,” he said. Very few peo- govern in places like Le Luc en Provence rosé sangria rather than champagne at ple thought he’d succeed. “I would be (pop. , ). the annual New Year’s reception), solved sorry if Emmanuel Macron wanted to es- In February, when I visited Le Luc, its trash problem (he was now leading cape, to undertake some sort of personal the mimosa trees were exploding with a campaign against dog poop), and hired adventure,” François Hollande confided blooms. To a foreign eye, Le Luc looked four new police o cers (“including two to a journalist. “Not because it would be like a picturesque village out of a maghrébins”—North Africans—“who a betrayal but because it would be hope- Provençal fantasy, all golden light and are excellent”). But despite his claim of less. It would be a waste.” He added, “The chalky pastel façades. A tourist might representing some harmless arithmetic system is voracious, it would crush him.” have happily assumed that the prepon- mean of racism, he touched on many of derance of shuttered storefronts indi- the F.N.’s identitarian themes. “I have - - ’ cated the persistence of some charming nothing against immigrants, the real P ( ), a region that occupies the southern siesta tradition, but, in fact, they immigrants,” he said. But today, he told eastern half of France’s Mediterranean had long been vacant. The unemploy- me, they were all “young men, between coastline, has one of the highest rates ment rate in Le Luc is twenty per cent, twenty-five and thirty, in perfect health, of immigration in the country. It is a double the national average; fifty-six per well dressed, with the latest phones. I Front National stronghold: twenty-eight cent of its citizens don’t earn enough don’t understand what they’re doing chez per cent of its residents—the second- money to pay income taxes. I couldn’t moi. And I’m afraid that they’re com- highest rate in France—voted for Ma- find a boulangerie, the classic French ba- ing to prepare something.” rine Le Pen in the first round. Le Pen’s rometer of a town’s healthy environment. We left the town hall and, after a platform calls for, among other things, A vandal had taken a hammer to one of stop at the stamp museum, dropped by outlawing dual citizenship with most the windows at the Café de la Mairie. a clothing boutique run by a woman countries, banning foreign languages Pascal Verrelle, Le Luc’s mayor, re- named Fanny, who was from Benin.
22 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 “She’s the prettiest woman in Le need to acknowledge our past,” Houm- as she canvassed the city’s Saturday Luc, after my wife,” Verrelle said. ria Berrada, the thirty-three-year-old market. “The Mayor’s looking for a new French-born daughter of Algerian Bertrand represents a new and potent place for me,” Fanny said, explaining butchers, told me. A partner in a con- type of figure in the Party, the arch- that her current location didn’t draw sulting business and a Macron sup- articulate young woman who pits wom- much foot trafc. She admitted that porter, she praised “his desire to change en’s rights against Muslim immigration. she had been afraid of the F.N., but the software of our society, to bring it The exemplar of this trend is Marion said that Verrelle was “super.” into the twenty-first century, and to tap Maréchal Le Pen, Marine’s twenty-seven- I asked if her admiration for him into the energy of the working-class year-old niece and a member of Parlia- would translate into a vote for Le Pen. neighborhoods.” ment from the neighboring Vaucluse, “Frankly, no. She kind of freaks me Toulon, like many southern cities, who has warned that the coastal cities of out,” she said. “But I never would have has a large population of pieds noirs, PACA are turning into “favelas.” Maréchal imagined that a Front National mayor Europeans who lived in Algeria during espouses an ultra-hard-line social con- would come into my shop.” French rule, many of whom returned servatism, opposing abortion (she claims Verrelle seemed to be practicing a to France after the country gained in- that this is a feminist position) and same- hyper-local version of dédiabolisation, dependence, in 1962. They have tradi- sex marriage, issues on which her aunt the strategy of “de-demonization” that tionally formed one of the bases of has been ambivalent. According to Ber- Le Pen has pursued over the past few support for the F.N., much of whose trand, Toulon’s Muslim immigrants have years in the hope of making the F.N. early leadership came out of military driven secular, native-born women out seem respectable. The Party has ex- circles. (Jean-Marie Le Pen has long of the center of the city. “Here you’ll have communicated a few of the most been dogged by allegations that he a problem if you leave a bar at midnight flagrantly intolerant members of its es- committed torture during the Alge- in shorts and a T-shirt,” she said. tablishment, including, in 2014, Jean- rian War.) F.N. Party activists were de- Bertrand was handing out leaflets that Marie Le Pen. It has courted groups termined not to let Macron’s appear- featured a head shot of Marine Le Pen, that it has traditionally alienated, such ance in the area pass without protest. wearing a jacket—in bleu marine, her as women, senior citizens, Jews, prac- The morning of the rally, I joined Aline signature color—with a beaded collar. ticing Catholics, and gay people. Yet, Bertrand, an F.N. regional councillor, A late-middle-aged man and woman every once in a while, Marine Le Pen lets a shocking comment fly. She in- sisted recently that France bore no blame for the 1942 Vel d’Hiv roundup, in which French police arrested nearly thirteen thousand Jews and sent them to concentration camps. The efect, if not de-demonizing, is destabilizing. Unsure what to make of the latest it- eration of the F.N., or simply disillu- sioned with its competitors, some peo- ple figure, Why not put it to the test?
he day after my visit to Le Luc, T Macron was hosting a rally in Tou- lon, a sunbaked port city less than an hour away. It was a dicey moment for his campaign. Earlier in the week, during a TV interview in Algeria, he had de- clared that colonialism was “a crime against humanity.” French people across the political spectrum had reacted to the remark with a level of ofense that surprised me. Opinions tended to vary by age and race, the most indignant skewing whiter and older. The few dis- senters I encountered said that they ap- preciated Macron’s willingness to take on a taboo subject. “France has never come to terms with its colonial history, and I share his sentiment that to move on and close this painful chapter we
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 23 approached. They were worried about Jewish influence was at work, making refugee policy, saying that it “saved the their pensions. it all the more irresistible for the Front dignity of Europe.” Proud to be a fluent “Go on the O.F.I.I. site,” Bertrand National. Macron also spent four years English speaker, he has even appealed said, referring to the government depart- as an inspector of finance—a high- to the technocratic, cosmopolitan sec- ment that deals with immigration. powered position in the French civil tor of the American population that “Someone who’s never paid into social service—but nobody was stuck on that. has despaired since Trump’s election. To security in France can get retirement.” American scientists, he has promised, “People think Marine Le Pen is scheduled for three “From now on, from next May, you will against immigrants,” the woman, warm- T o’clock at the Toulon Zénith, a con- have a new homeland—France!” ing to the theme, said. “She’s not. It’s jus- cert hall. When I got there, around two- There was popcorn for sale. Laurence tice that we want.” thirty, the front gates were locked and Haim, a celebrated French reporter who “It’s like when the refrigerator is full the police weren’t letting anyone in. A quit journalism to join Macron’s cam- we give to our neighbors, but when the couple of hundred protesters had sur- paign, told me that “change” and “hope” refrigerator is empty we give to our chil- rounded the entrance, creating what are En Marche!’s keywords. In its dis- dren. The refrigerator of France is they called a “hedge of horror” that any- ciplined idealism, Macron’s campaign empty,” Bertrand said, and the couple one who wished to attend would have is self-consciously modelled on Obama’s trudged o , carrying bags filled with to traverse. They were chanting, “Ma- operation, right down to the cauliflower and lettuce. cron, treason!” When a scu e broke out, armies of fresh-faced volunteers in I wandered away and started talking the police fired tear gas. Two protesters cool-looking T-shirts. (They have even to a woman wearing a quilted leather were arrested, a policeman was injured, been going door-to-door, a new tactic jacket and lots of mascara. “I adore and a journalist went to the hospital. in France.) When I visited Macron’s Marine!” she said, identifying herself Inside, a Macron spokesman told me, headquarters, in Paris, I found a sign as Michèle. She was a French teacher “We strongly believe that some people taped to the restroom wall that read, and a pied noir. She had high hopes saw the mess, were hassled, and turned “According to a very serious study, we for the election, particularly after what around.” The auditorium was conspic- spend between forty and fifty-five sec- had happened in America. “Bravo, bravo uously not full. Still, the atmosphere was onds in the bathroom. One like takes for Trump!” she said. She was unim- upbeat, in keeping with Macron’s asser- you half a second. Ready for likes?!” pressed by Macron, whom she called tion that his campaign is the only “pro- A Socialist member of Parliament “a little opportunistic asshole.” She jet positif ”—the sole “for,” rather than who’d defected to En Marche! warmed asked if I knew that he was “a Roth- “against,” on o er. Macron claims to be up the crowd with a pilou pilou, a local s child banker” (Macron worked for the leading a “transpartisan” movement that rugby chant. Then the lights went down firm from to , earning around is “neither of the left nor of the right.” and a video, a sort of “We Didn’t Start a million dollars a year), invoking a He shares many of the traditional con- the Fire” in visual form, began playing slur—I heard it repeated over and over, cerns of the left, but often prefers to on a big screen: contraceptive pill; Sim- and not just by F.N. supporters—that meet them with capitalist solutions. one Weil; Berlin Wall; gay brides; Vic- seemed laser-targeted toward some He wants to cut corporate taxes, sim- tor Hugo; Gandhi; Je suis Charlie; liberté, primal place in the French imagina- plify labor laws, consolidate the retire- égalité, fraternité. Macron walked in to tion, where a fondness for conspiracy ment system, invest in education and “Closer,” by the Norwegian electronic- theory intersected with a suspicion of vocational training, and reinvigorate music duo Lemaitre, and took the stage. high finance. “Rothschild banker” sug- France’s relationship with Europe. He “You are brave because you’re here,” gested, without having to say it, that has praised Angela Merkel’s generous he said. “While, at the entrance to this arena, there were those who didn’t want to let you in.” The Front National wanted “to confine France to its fears,” he said, nonetheless admonishing the crowd not to boo the opposition. He said that he wouldn’t apologize for the crime- against- humanity comment, but implored those whom he had o ended to “forgive me for having hurt you.” Macron has conjured an extreme cen- ter that didn’t exist before he identified it. He has a talent for balancing oppos- ing ideals, sometimes to the extent of ap- pearing disingenuous or oxymoronic. His economic program gives companies more leeway in firing workers, but it o ers unemployed workers higher benefits. “I love spring days when we get to work outdoors.” Meme-makers delight in his habit of saying “at the same time,” which, in Tou- visited the ArcelorMittal steelworks, lon, he repeated twenty-two times in ninety which towers over the town, and prom- minutes. Occasionally, his syntheses pre- ised to keep it open. Twenty-nine per sent new and even revelatory ways of see- cent of the town’s residents voted for ing things. “Europe is also the place of him in the first round (their second our sovereignty,” he told the crowd in a choice, at twenty-seven per cent, was confident voice, managing, for a moment, Marine Le Pen). Later that year, Arce- to unite two concepts—globalization and lorMittal closed two blast furnaces, elim- nationalism—that had roiled politics inating more than six hundred jobs. In worldwide for the better part of a year. 2014, Hayange elected Fabien Engel- As Minister of the Economy, Ma- mann as mayor. Engelmann, a thirty- cron sponsored an explosively unpopu- seven-year-old vegetarian, started his lar labor reform, which the Hollande career as a far-left activist but switched government had to push through using to the Front National in 2010, to pro- a technical maneuver. Marc Ferracci, a test the candidacy, for regional ofce, friend and adviser of Macron’s, told me of a woman who publicly wore a hijab. that Macron took it as a personal fail- Hayange, for the moment, still has a ure—his biggest—that he wasn’t able middle class. The marriage banns, posted to corral the votes needed to pass the on a bulletin board in the town hall, in- bill, and that his disillusionment at the cluded those for an auto-body painter gridlock “was the main reason he de- and a cashier, a zinc roofer and his stay- cided to launch his movement.” Ma- at-home fiancée, and an optician and a cron has been accused of arrogance. He midwife. In a shoe store, two saleswomen relishes confronting his detractors, once told me that they remained undecided, telling a man who criticized his expen- but were leaning toward Le Pen. “I think sive suit, “The best way to get a suit is everyone wants her to win, but they don’t to work.” He gets flak for having come want to vote for her,” one woman said, out of nowhere, for being “a hologram” depicting a Le Pen victory as a sort of or “a marketing concept,” but his youth forbidden fantasy of the collective un- can be an asset, particularly when cou- conscious. (In the first round, thirty-three pled with one of his strongest argu- per cent of hayangeois ended up voting ments—that the world is undergoing for Le Pen, with Macron drawing only an epochal, accelerated transformation. nineteen per cent.) A florist who was This theory neutralizes charges of over- preparing a spray of lilies for a funeral ambition while positioning him as a told me that his parents were Italian im- man of his moment. It also justifies En migrants and had been stalwarts of the Marche! as part of a social evolution left, but that he was considering voting rather than a vanity project. “The world for Le Pen. He dismissed Macron as “a changes,” Macron told the crowd, an- smooth talker who proposes nothing.” nouncing the end of the old order, in His family, like many in Hayange, had which “one must be right or left—in a jumped across the political spectrum in finished taxonomy, as if political life the space of a generation, skipping over were a frozen species, butterflies that the center entirely. had to be pinned to a wall.” That evening, I travelled to Monswiller, a tiny village near the German border rench voters say that economic where Le Pen was speaking. Several dozen F issues (employment, buying power, protesters were staked out across the street and retirement) rank just above immi- from the auditorium, whose windows gration as their most pressing concerns. were plastered with posters for accordion At the beginning of April, I went to bands. “No, France Doesn’t Want to Take Hayange, a town in the Grand Est re- in Any More Racists,” one of their post- gion, which has been known for iron ers read. They banged on pots and pans. manufacturing since the de Wendel The hall was packed. Near where I family established a foundry there, in was standing, a woman in Capri pants 1704. Hayange, where unemployment and a young man with a scorpion tattoo is seventeen per cent, used to be a bas- that went from his ankle to his knee were tion of the left, but its political land- hanging on to a rail, hoping to get a scape is in flux. During the Presiden- better look. “Marine! Marine!” the crowd tial election of 2012, François Hollande yelled as Le Pen came on. She said, “My
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 25 dear friends, I can’t disguise my immense date, received twenty per cent of the above the knee, because, according to pleasure at being here, in this dear land vote in the first round; his supporters, advisers, “women’s freedom is under at- of Alsace!” From there, she launched into combined with Le Pen’s, constitute a tack by Islamist radicals.”) The interval an unremittingly dark oration, delineat- forty-per-cent share of the electorate. between the two rounds of voting al- ing the betrayals of the political classes Both reject Macron’s business-friendly lows passions to cool. The system dis- (“Don’t forget that François Fillon was economics and his a nity for Europe. courages extremism, but this means that the first Prime Minister of the Fifth Re- In , Mélenchon, then a Socialist a large portion of the French electorate public to celebrate the opening of a minister, condemned Jean-Marie Le Pen, may feel pushed into an unsatisfactory mosque with a little girl of only six years saying, “You must not hesitate. Put on forced choice. “Ni patrie ni patron, ni Le old, veiled, by his side!”), the culture of gloves if you want, or hold your nose, or Pen ni Macron” (“Neither motherland permissiveness, the unfair tax system, the whatever you want, but vote. Put Le Pen nor bossman, neither Le Pen nor Ma- dearth of public services, the abandon- down as far as possible!” This time, he cron”) someone spray-painted, the day ment of single mothers. Her gru , sar- was coyer, declining to denounce Le Pen after the first round, at the foot of the castic delivery held the audience spell- immediately, and leaving it to an online bronze statue of Marianne that soars bound. She had clearly studied the poll to determine whether his followers above the Place de la République. smallest particulars of their predicament. supported voting Macron, voting blanc On the eleventh day before the “Look at these large, merged regions,” (submitting a blank ballot), or abstain- French people had to make their final she said, veering into a denunciation of ing. Fillon, the center-right candidate, choice, Macron was in his home town a plan by which the French government, threw his support behind Macron, but of Amiens, meeting at the chamber of in , had consolidated the country’s more than half of his voters are saying commerce with union members from a administrative regions. “I was a victim in that they won’t follow his advice. Whirlpool plant that has been threat- the North,” she said of the area she rep- Still, the math heavily favors Ma- ened with closure. Its owners had de- resents. “You, too, here, with the mas- cron, whom polls, which were accurate clined to authorize Macron to visit, but todon ‘Grand Est’ imposed on you. Which in the first round, have put ahead by Le Pen, sensing a publicity opportunity, does not represent anything, which has twenty points. By Nate Silver’s esti- showed up, unannounced, in the facto- no history, no soul, no meaning, no co- mate, Le Pen “could beat her polls by ry’s parking lot. “When I learned that herence.” Her voice booming, she built as much as Trump and Brexit com- Emmanuel Macron was coming here up to the line that would command the bined, and still lose to Macron.” Even and that he didn’t intend to meet the biggest applause of the evening: “I am if Macron wins, he will face another workers, that he didn’t intend to come leading the revolution of proximity. . . . I challenge almost immediately: the June to the picket line, but that he was going will give you back Alsace!” parliamentary elections. France’s sys- to take shelter in I-don’t-know-what “On est chez nous!” the crowd chanted. tem is set up so that the Prime Minis- meeting room of the chamber of com- “It’s our house!” ter, who is chosen from whichever party merce to meet two or three handpicked Not only was Le Pen talking about controls a majority in Parliament, holds people, I considered it such a sign of the “forgotten people of France,” as she numerous executive powers. When the contempt for the Whirlpool workers calls them; she was meeting them on President and the Prime Minister come that I decided to leave a committee meet- their turf. Her rejection of globalism from di erent parties—this has hap- ing and come see you,” she said, as F.N. went smaller than nationalism. She was pened only three times since —the activists handed out croissants. The fac- subdividing the country into its narrow- President is essentially paralyzed. It is tory would not be shut down, she prom- est possible parts and trying to conquer far from certain that a fledgling group ised, if she is elected President. them one by one. In the event that Ma- such as En Marche! can win the two Macron scrambled over to the site. cron’s vision of France stretched to the hundred and eighty-nine seats needed Even though he received a rough re- outer ring of one of those diagrams of for a majority, particularly with a slate ception—“You don’t know Amiens!” concentric circles that kids draw to rep- of inexperienced candidates composed, someone shouted, as smoke from burn- resent their position in the universe, Le in part, of members of civil society, ing tires filled the air—he stayed and Pen’s was confined to its tight nucleus. whom Macron has encouraged to apply talked with a group of workers for Her inspiration is to link the economic for candidacy online. forty-five minutes, broadcasting the un- su ering of France with its social ills. If Macron secures the Presidency and scripted encounter on Facebook Live. “We are the owners of our country,” she a parliamentary majority, his tenure will Enduring insults and interruptions from said in Monswiller. “We must have the constitute the first and the most impor- the scrum, he persisted in trying to ex- keys to open the house of France, to tant fortification of the next barricade plain his perspective. He said that, as open it halfway, to close the door.” against the Front National. But, as the President, he would try hard to find a journalist Anne Sinclair told me, “If this buyer for the factory, and, if he failed, , a Le Pen ascen- next mandate is a failure, you can be sure he would work to insure the best pos- T sion comes not as a shock but as a Marine Le Pen will win next time. And sible deal for laid-o workers. “I’m not troubling inevitability. Political leaders Marion Maréchal Le Pen has forty years here to o er false promises,” he said at are not unanimous in the belief that, in ahead of her to become President.” (The one point. “When Marine Le Pen comes the name of solidarity, they must endorse F.N.’s o cial poster for the second round here and tells you we’ve got to reject Macron. Mélenchon, the far-left candi- depicts Marine wearing a skirt that falls globalism, she’s lying to you!”
26 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 lopes. Members of the military trav- SHOUTS & MURMURS elling with ocelots may board with Group . Shepherds, cowboys, and veterinar- FLOOD AIRLINES ians may also board with Group . We ask that you not place leashes, har- BY ANN BEATTIE nesses, or pet toys in the overhead bins, as they may shift during flight and upset the animals on board. We , and gentlemen basically a red color—and parents trav- ask that no umbrellas, raincoats, rain A in the boarding area: Flight , elling with small children who have ponchos, or other rain-repellent gar- with service to New Canaan, will begin not been abandoned at another gate ments, such as wader boots, or any kind boarding in twenty, that is two-oh, min- during a psychotic break. Anyone need- of hat or earmu (this includes noise- utes. So we ask that you check with an ing extra time to board may also board cancelling headphones) be placed in attendant at the departure gate if you with Group , such as passengers who the overhead bins, and that bags con- must leave the area because of prostate have already been bitten by an animal. taining cement blocks weighing more problems, to conclude a drug deal, to We ask that all remaining skunks than two hundred pounds be put under abandon your child at another gate, to board with Group . If you do not have your seat or checked at the gate. refill your water bottle from the Free a group number on your boarding card, Boarding will now begin with Group .
on Mondays water fountain outside please line up with the Fat Chance We ask that your animals remain the restrooms (for a fountain charge of group after boarding is completed for leashed or in pet carriers, and that birds $ . ), or to place a phone call to end ocelots, skunks, members of the mili- be con fined to cages and do not pre- your marriage. tary who keep our homeland safe, those cede you onto the plane, which is cur- Those customers travelling with people travelling with members of the rently being serviced by End of Days ocelots will be boarding first, with pri- military, and those with our élite No- personnel, whose safety and security is ority given to Mars Attacks members, ah’s Ark status. If you are not already of paramount concern—paramount Solid Black customers, Gray custom- a Noah’s Ark member, forms may be means “more important than anything ers, and customers with a white stripe picked up at Gate E or in flight for else”—to Flood Airlines. We are a hu- on their black boarding card, regard- a small fee, discounted for seniors, the manitarian airline, and we do not dis- less of whether they are skunk or military, and ocelots who have not yet criminate against customers on the human. Flood Airlines is an equal- joined a frequent-flier program. We basis of age, gender, religion, agnosti- opportunity, gender-friendly, species- realize that ocelots and others have a cism, atheism, weight, or the function- friendly employer. choice of airline, and we appreciate ality of one’s prostate; we also welcome In Group , we welcome any relatives your choosing Flood. Fresh fish will passengers currently experiencing uri- of the airline’s owner, regardless of be provided on board, and, for an ad- nary-tract infections or inflammations, gender or species, and anyone whose ditional charge of ninety-nine cents, or other bodily disruptions caused by nausea has already subsided. Welcome grooming combs with your choice of bacteria, carcinogens, or microbes not aboard to Last Legs members, Alizarin decal initials and animal-face emojis previously mentioned.
NISHANTCHOKSI Crimson members—alizarin crimson is will be provided in recyclable enve- Welcome aboard!
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 27 in the middle of Iowa. “I thought, from ONWARD AND UPWARD WITH THE ARTS watching TV and stu , that America was one place,” he told me. “They only show you L.A. and New York. They don’t THE BEST MEDICINE warn you about Iowa.” When he got to college, he says, “I was super shy, but I Onstage and onscreen, Kumail Nanjiani turns his pain into comedy. learned that my friends thought I was funny.” His senior year, there was an open BY ANDREW MARANTZ mike on campus, and his friends urged him to try standup. He performed for thirty-five minutes. “I don’t think I’ve ever done better than that crowd, reac- tion-wise,” he said. “Of course, it was full of people who knew me. But it gave me an irrational amount of confidence.”After school, he moved to Chicago and started performing. Michael Showalter, a come- dian and director who has admired Nan- jiani from the beginning, told me, “Any- one who saw him saw how smart and fresh his voice was. The question wasn’t whether he’d be successful, only which direction he’d choose to go in.” The year of the Letterman set, Nan- jiani landed a recurring role on “The Colbert Report,” as a Guantánamo de- tainee who lives under Stephen Colbert’s desk. Many of Nanjiani’s earliest film and TV credits were, he says, “more or less what you’d expect”: “Delivery Guy,” “Cable Guy,” “Pakistani Chef.” But he quickly started getting more substantial roles, and in the past few years he has appeared on almost every show beloved by comedy snobs, including “Portlandia,” “Broad City,” “Community,” “Key & Peele,” and “Inside Amy Schumer.” He now has a lead part on “Silicon Valley,” , the “Late Show with David hands. His next bit was about the Cy- an ensemble comedy on HBO, playing I Letterman,” the comedian Kumail clone, the rickety roller coaster on Coney a coder who, despite his good looks, re- Nanjiani walked onstage, wearing a boxy Island. “The Cyclone was made in the mains hopelessly unlucky with women. black suit and a cordless mike, to do a year ! Let that sink in. They should “It’s a version of me in high school, when standup set. The band played a few bars change the name of that ride to , I was at my least confident,” he said. of “Born in the U.S.A.,” an allusion, pre- ’cause that fact is way scarier than any As a child, Nanjiani spoke Urdu at sumably, to the fact that he wasn’t. The cyclone,” he said. “And the whole thing home; he learned English at school, and first anecdote of Nanjiani’s set fell flat. is made of wood . . . you know, that in- picked up colloquialisms from TV. “I He stood sti y, swallowing hard, his destructible substance that uses for grew up watching ‘Ghostbusters’ and hands clasped tightly in front of his chest. its space shuttles.” The bit could have ‘Knight Rider’ and Hot Wheels com- Then he told a joke about theme-park been delivered in the nineteen-sixties, by mercials,” he said. “When I got to col- attractions with excessively convoluted Woody Allen or Mort Sahl, with one lege, having never set foot in America, backstories. “It’s like a story line to a porn exception: Nanjiani said the ride was I knew more American pop-culture movie,” he said. “I really don’t care what “the scariest experience of my life—and references than my friends did.” As a all your professions are. I’m just here for I grew up in Pakistan.” standup, he said, “I was so eager to avoid the ride.” It wasn’t the cleverest punch Nanjiani spent his childhood in Ka- being known as an immigrant comedian, line in Nanjiani’s act, but it received a rachi, Pakistan’s biggest city. In , when or as a Muslim comedian, that I would big laugh and a ten-second applause he was nineteen, he left to attend Grin- just come out wearing a T-shirt and start break. He exhaled audibly, relaxing his nell College, a small liberal-arts school talking about video games. I wasn’t judg- mental about other comedians using their Judd Apatow heard about Nanjiani’s life and said, “That should be a movie.” backgrounds to their advantage—joining
28 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 PHOTOGRAPH BY NATHANAEL TURNER the Spicy Masala Comedy Tour, or what- doesn’t stray too far from a dramatically and he incorporated his fear into a pen- ever—but I could never bring myself rich series of events that befell Gordon sive onstage persona. “He would wear to do it, even though I could have used and Nanjiani a decade ago, shortly be- loose hoodies, and he was sort of a mum- the work.” fore they turned thirty. bler,” Pete Holmes, a comedian who Then came / . “Suddenly, Islam was Nanjiani didn’t conceive of the film started at the same time as Nanjiani the elephant in the room,” he continued. as at all political. “It was just supposed and became one of his closest friends, “I just thought, O.K., I’m brown, I speak to be a heartwarming little movie that, told me. “He was really good, but wordy, with an accent—I have to at least bring if we did it right, would be funny and subtle—you had to pay attention.” it up.” He began opening his sets by say- maybe a bit poignant,” he said. But it was What Nanjiani avoided mentioning ing, “Don’t worry, I’m one of the good filmed last summer, when much of the onstage was that he was brought up a ones,” which put some audiences at ease. conversation between takes was, inevita- strict Shiite Muslim. He was taught that Other times, he was interrupted by some- bly, about the Presidential campaign; the a lustful glance or a sip of wine would one shouting “Go home!” or “Go back Sundance première was on January th, result in perpetual torment, and that the to the Taliban!” Recalling one heckler, at the day Donald Trump was sworn in. Quran was the literal and inerrant word a club in Milwaukee, Nanjiani said, “The “That coincidence is so weird and terri- of God; because the Quran didn’t men- room got so quiet and awkward. I fum- ble that I don’t even know what to make tion dinosaurs, dinosaurs had never ex- bled around with words and tried to ig- of it,” Nanjiani told me. (On Twitter, isted. When Nanjiani was eight, his nore it. It made the audience pity me, where he has more than a million fol- mother set aside a cache of jewelry that which is not a good look for comedy. lowers, he makes no secret of his politi- she planned to give his future wife on After that, I came up with something to cal opinions: “I’m thankful our new Pres- their wedding day. It went without say- say—I realized it doesn’t have to be a ident-elect is anti-Muslim so now my ing that Nanjiani’s parents would select perfect line, just something to show the parents & I agree on politics”; “Silver lin- this future wife, and that she would be audience that you’re still in control.” The ing: one day the ocean will take us.”) a Pakistani Shiite, possibly a family friend next time he was heckled, he responded, Apatow said, “We never talked about or a cousin. When Nanjiani left for col- “That guy’s right. I am a terrorist. I just it in terms of ‘What does it mean to rep- lege, his mother made him promise that do standup comedy on the side, to keep resent a secular Muslim onscreen?’ We he would never succumb to Western sec- a low profile.” talked about telling Kumail’s story, and ularism. A few days later, during Grin- A similar exchange, with “Taliban” that led us, naturally, to questions about nell’s freshman-orientation week, he updated to “ ,” appears in Nanjiani’s family and culture and religion.” The shook a woman’s hand for the first time. movie “The Big Sick.” It premièred ear- movie, which will be released in June, How could he make this upbringing lier this year, at the Sundance Film Fes- appears at a time when an individual ac- funny to the tipsy patrons of Joe’s Bar tival, where it was a favorite among both tion can seem unusually freighted with on Weed Street? There would be too audiences and critics. The movie was political meaning—when a football player many terms to define, too much cultural directed by Showalter, whose film ca- taking a knee during the national an- context to establish in a ten-minute set. reer has included slapstick cult classics them or a passenger being dragged from Besides, a successful joke requires a clear (“Wet Hot American Summer”) as well a plane can be transformed, by TV pun- point of view, and his views were am- as o beat romantic comedies (“Hello, dits and tweeting politicians, into a na- bivalent and constantly shifting. He as- My Name Is Doris”), and produced by tional Rorschach test. “I still don’t look sociated Karachi with poetry and archi- Judd Apatow, who has specialized, re- at it as a political movie, but I guess now tecture, violence and misogyny, delicious cently, in helping almost famous come- everything is political, whether we like food, unnerving squalor, and every rel- dians adapt their formative experiences it or not,” Nanjiani told me. “Like that ative he’d ever loved. Part of him as- into memoiristic meta-comedies. Ap- heckling scene, for instance. When we sumed that he would soon move back atow’s producing partner, Barry Men- wrote it, the clear assumption was: That to Pakistan, and part of him knew that del, described “The Big Sick” to me as guy in the crowd is an asshole, an out- he never would. He couldn’t fully artic- “part comedy about comedy, part drama lier, and the viewer of the movie is au- ulate these thoughts to himself, much about families, part medical mystery, tomatically on my side. Now that ass- less to strangers. and also, incidentally, a Muslim Amer- holes like that guy have taken over the By , Nanjiani had been doing ican rom-com.” country, I’m not sure how funny it plays.” standup for five years. He lived with a Nanjiani co-wrote the screenplay friend on the North Side of Chicago with his wife, Emily V. Gordon, and he career, Nanjiani built and worked a day job as an I.T. special- plays its protagonist, a standup comic E his act around subjects he thought ist. “A really cliché job for a South Asian named Kumail. It’s the first feature ei- his American audiences would find re- guy to have, I realize,” he said. “On the ther of them has written, and it’s Nan- latable. While Louis C.K. and other co- other hand, I take some pride in how jiani’s first starring role. The fictional medians had success with an expansive, bad I was at it.” He performed three or Kumail works as an Uber driver, a day confessional style, he stuck to terse ob- four nights a week, around town and job that didn’t exist when the real Ku- servational jokes about vintage horror on the road. Many comedians, at this mail still had day jobs. Aside from that, movies, the nature of memory, and the point, might have moved to New York and a few other departures to help a pluralization of the word “octopus.”An or Los Angeles, where they could au- joke land or a plot line cohere, the movie introvert, he was scared of performing, dition for TV jobs and get noticed by
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 29 agents. Nanjiani, out of comfort and in- that he dreaded flouting his family’s ex- days,” she told me. “But no more I.C.U.s, ertia, stayed in Chicago. pectations. “I couldn’t imagine a universe which is pretty fucking sweet. Now I only With time, he grew more assured on- where I ended up accepting an arranged have to go to the hospital when we’re stage. He trained himself to take the mi- marriage, but I also couldn’t imagine filming a movie in one.” crophone out of the stand and move telling my parents that,” he said. “So I As a co-writer of “The Big Sick,” Gor- around—“It sounds like a tiny thing, but just deflected and delayed.” don was on set every day of the shoot, it was transformative,” he said—and he One day, after Nanjiani and Gordon which took place in New York, last spring. changed his hair style from a floppy mid- had been dating for a few months, she She and Nanjiani now own a house in dle part, à la nineteen-nineties Hugh texted him to say that she was going to Los Angeles, but during the shoot they Grant, to an Elvis pompadour. “He the doctor. Nanjiani didn’t hear from her rented an Airbnb in Williamsburg, Brook- started getting muscly and wearing tight for several hours. Around midnight, he lyn. The first time I met Gordon, she was T-shirts,” Holmes said. “He plucked his got a call: Gordon was in the emergency sitting in a canvas director’s chair in front unibrow. He started getting loud, con- room, and she was having trouble breath- of a video monitor, a pair of headphones trolling the room, high energy. It was ing. He rushed to the hospital and spent slung around her neck. Next to her were like watching a car suddenly shift into a the night. By the next morning, Gordon Mendel, the producer, and Showalter, the higher gear. Instead of calling him Ku- was heavily sedated and was drifting in director. We were in an art space in Wil- mail, I started calling him Newmail.” and out of wakefulness. Her lung was liamsburg that had been decorated to At one show, in a bar on the North infected, and the infection was spread- look like the fictional Kumail’s bachelor Side, Nanjiani asked, facetiously, “Is Ka- ing fast. In order to treat it, the doctors apartment in Chicago: an Xbox, an in- rachi in the house?” Someone in the au- told Nanjiani, they needed to put her flatable mattress, a family- sized box of dience, also facetiously, let out a “Whoo!” into a medically induced coma. They Cheerios. Between shots, Zoe Kazan, Nanjiani could see that she was a white asked if he was her husband. He said who played the fictional Emily, sat next woman, a pretty brunette with a streak no—he wasn’t even sure that he was her to the real Emily, and they chatted about of purple in her hair. “I don’t think so,” boyfriend. They asked again, pressing which books they were reading. At one he said. “I would have noticed you.” Two him to sign a release form. Finally, at the point, Kazan turned to me and said, “You nights later, they ran into each other doctors’ insistence, he signed it. The know the first grader who has this cool again, and she introduced herself as Emily doctors tied Gordon down and injected third-grade cousin, and she just thinks Gordon. She was from North Carolina, her with an anesthetic. She thrashed her big cousin hung the moon? That’s and although she was a couples and fam- against the restraints, then fell into a coma. how I feel about her, essentially.” ily therapist, she knew as much about Nanjiani was supposed to go on the Kazan swung her feet in the air and comedy—and video games, and comic road to open for Zach Galifianakis, but squinted at shoes the costume designer books, and horror movies—as he did. he stayed in Chicago and visited Gor- had selected, a pair of gray ballet flats. Soon they were texting almost every don in the I.C.U. every day. She remained “Are these shoes you would actually wear?” day. There was an obvious mutual attrac- in the coma for more than a week while she asked Gordon. tion, but neither was interested in a re- the doctors ruled out several possibili- Without speaking, Gordon gestured lationship: Gordon, who was twenty- ties, including H.I.V. and leukemia. Even toward her own feet: gray ballet flats. seven, had already been married and a decade later, after having recounted the “Fair enough,” Kazan said. divorced; Nanjiani, then twenty-eight, experience dozens of times, Nanjiani still When the crew was ready, Showalter wasn’t supposed to be dating anyone, chokes up whenever he talks about it. “I called for quiet, and those of us sitting in much less a non-Muslim. “We’d hang was sitting by her bed,” he said. “She was front of the monitors put on headphones. out, hook up, and then be, like, ‘We can’t unconscious, and she was hooked up to Kazan went into an adjacent room, and do this anymore. But let’s hang out again,’ ” all these beeping machines, and I very she and Nanjiani started filming the next Nanjiani said. “Once, before she came clearly remember thinking, If she makes scene: the couple’s first fight. At this over to watch a movie, I threw a bunch it out of this, I’m gonna marry her.” His point in the movie, their relationship of dirty laundry on my bed, to insure that voice caught. “I know that sounds cli- seems promising, but Kumail has been nothing would happen. It didn’t work.” ché, and it’s actually kind of creepy and avoiding some traditional landmarks of Meanwhile, Nanjiani’s parents, who nonconsensual if you think about it too commitment, such as introducing Emily had moved from Karachi to New Jersey, hard. But that was the thought I had.” to his parents. In the scene, Emily, rum- were sending him information about maging in Kumail’s bedroom, finds a eligible Shiite bachelorettes in the Chi- —I made it,” Gordon cigar box full of photos—the Pakistani cago area. He avoided meeting the “S said, last May, flashing me a thumbs- bachelorettes his mother has been at- women. “My American friends would up and a goofy smile. On the eighth day tempting to set him up with. Emily starts be, like, ‘Dude, just tell your parents of her coma, she received a diagnosis of to ask questions, including, “Can you you’re not interested,’ ” he said. “But adult-onset Still’s disease, a rare inflam- imagine a world in which we end up to- that’s a misunderstanding of the cul- matory syndrome that is manageable once gether?” The emotional climax of the ture. Arranged marriage is marriage. it’s identified and treated. “I have to sleep scene is Kumail’s inadequate response. Anything else is unthinkable.” He felt the right amount and exercise the right “Finding a literal box of photos— American enough to want to choose his amount, and I still occasionally get flare- that’s cinematic license,” Gordon told me. romantic partners, but Pakistani enough ups and have to stay in bed for a few “That said, the themes are obviously
30 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 drawn from reality. And it’s extremely accurate to our actual conflict styles, to the point where it’s almost eerie to watch. His body responds to conflict by basi- cally shutting down and going to sleep. Which, of course, makes me fly into a fucking rage.” When I took o my head- phones, Kazan’s voice pierced through the walls, whereas Nanjiani’s was, for much of the scene, an inaudible murmur; in the video monitor, Kazan paced and gesticulated while Nanjiani leaned wea- rily against a doorpost, his eyes Stygian pools. In Nanjiani’s comic performances, on “Silicon Valley” and elsewhere, he has demonstrated onscreen magnetism and authenticity. Here, he showed that he could anchor a tense scene, full of long “Do you allow progressive substitutions?” pauses and light on comic relief. They filmed the argument several more times, improvising variations on •• the written dialogue. (Kazan: “Are you judging ‘Pakistan’s Next Top Model’ Nanjiani nodded. “On other stu sumed that his mother would be furi- or something?” Nanjiani: “You know I’ve done, there were always monkeys ous, “but she kept it together. Every day, that’s not an actual franchise.”) Before and elephants and Buddhas and Arabic she’d go, ‘Is Emily O.K.?’ Then, one each take, Showalter urged Nanjiani script—just every possible brown- person day, the answer was yes, and she im- to speak more directly, sounding out thing.” mediately switched to ‘How could you the line between candor and cruelty. The next scene on the shooting sched- do this to us?’ ” At the end of one take, Nanjiani said, ule was one that took place earlier in the Gordon left the hospital in May of in a near- whisper, “We’ve only been movie—a makeout scene. After lunch, . She and Nanjiani were married dating for five months, Emily. I think Kazan and Nanjiani, preparing to simu- that July, at Chicago’s City Hall, with six you’re overreacting.” late a Chicago winter, put on bulky sweat- friends as witnesses. Two weeks later, “Harsh,” Mendel, at the video mon- ers, which would come o in the course his parents hosted a Muslim wedding itors, said. of the action. “I think your stubble looks in New Jersey. The cleric, in a reverse- “Fuck you, Kumail,” Gordon said. awesome, but you are going to scratch xenophobic gesture, refused to perform “Character Kumail, I mean.” the shit out of my face,” Kazan said. the ceremony for anyone with a non-Mus- Because shooting had begun in the In a discussion the previous night, lim name, so Gordon went by Iman for late morning and would end around mid- Kumail and the two Emilys had decided the day. “I think that the ceremony was night, they broke for “lunch” at . . that, during the filming of this scene, my mom’s way of saying to Emily, Even Nanjiani, Gordon, and Kazan decided Gordon would leave the set. “Zoe doesn’t though you’re not the bride I imagined, to walk to a vegan Asian-fusion restau- think it’s weird if I’m here, and I don’t I’m trying my best to include you in the rant nearby. On the way, they passed a think it’s weird if I’m here, but Kumail family,” Nanjiani said. Shabana, Nanji- trailer where the props department was does,” Gordon said. ani’s mother, told me that when she first preparing for an upcoming dinner scene; “I’m sorry,” Nanjiani said. learned about Emily, “I was a bit disap- they had ordered from a Pakistani kebab “Dude, whatever makes it easier for pointed, I admit. But later I came to love house in Queens, and were deciding you is fine with me,” Gordon said, gath- her like a daughter.” On the day of the which foods would look best on cam- ering her things. “Now I get to go home, Muslim wedding, Shabana gave Gordon era. Kumail tasted the biryani and the nap, maybe play some video games. I the cache of jewelry she had been sav- haleem, a thick wheat stew. “This is the wish my husband would make out with ing for the occasion. real deal,” he said. “You guys might also other women every day!” Nanjiani, having crossed one bound- want to get some barfi. It’s a milk-and- ary by marrying Gordon, started to cross sugar thing, a dessert.” in the coma in others. In the spring and summer of , “Barfi?” a production designer asked, W Chicago, Nanjiani spent the first he wrote a ninety-minute one-man show writing down the word. few days evading his parents’ calls. One about his personal relationship to Islam. “ ‘Barf,’ with an ‘i,’ ” Nanjiani said. night, he picked up the phone and ad- He performed it at the Lakeshore The- They continued walking to the restau- mitted that he had a girlfriend, that she atre, an august venue in Chicago that rant. “The prop guys have been great on was an American and a non-Muslim, has since closed. In the only extant re- this,” Kazan said. “Even the books in my and that she was very ill. “I was too ex- cording of the show, a low-resolution apartment are on point.” hausted to keep lying,” he said. He as- video of the opening-night performance,
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 31 the theatre’s artistic director introduces ing therapy, and she and Nanjiani moved creep. The act is inflected with anecdotes Nanjiani by saying, “We’ve had a lot of to Los Angeles and started to collabo- about his upbringing. Once, when he was great shows over the past few months, rate. They co-hosted “The Indoor Kids,” twelve, he was watching a forbidden vid- since we set out to become a Mecca of a podcast about video games, and, with eotape, and, during one of his neighbor- comedy as art—we’ve had Patton Os- the comedian Jonah Ray, founded a hood’s frequent power outages, it got walt, Janeane Garofalo, Maria Bamford, weekly standup showcase called “The stuck in the VCR. He imagines running Louis C.K. None of them have been as Meltdown with Jonah and Kumail,” which away in shame and having to fend for exciting to me as what you’re about to featured a rotating stable of performers himself: “Any work needs doing? I can see tonight.” The Mecca pun seemed to curated by Gordon. From to , beat Mario and draw a Ninja Turtle.” be unintentional. the show took place every Wednesday, At one point during the performance, The show was called “Unpronounce- in a small black-box theatre in the back it became clear that a woman in the au- able,” after Nanjiani’s first conversation of a comic-book store on Sunset Boule- dience was from Karachi. on American soil, with the customs agent vard—the heart of the heart of cool-nerd “How’s Karachi doing?” Nanjiani who took his passport. (“He said, ‘Wel- culture. During a trip to L.A. last year, I asked her, from the stage. (He has not come to America, Mr. . . . this is unpro- happened to catch the last-ever night of been back to Pakistan since college.) nounceable.’ Not ‘I can’t pronounce that’ “The Meltdown,” which featured standup “Same as ever,” she said. or ‘How do you pronounce that?’ Un- by Apatow and a performance by a sa- “Mostly on fire?” he asked, not with- pronounceable.”) These days, Nanjiani tirical pro-Trump reggae band. After the out a ection. describes the show in self-deprecating show, Nanjiani and Gordon stayed for terms, and “The Big Sick” includes a nearly an hour, greeting and hugging sev- , performed at South cringe-inducing sendup of a cheesy one- eral members of the audience. I by Southwest, where he met Apatow. man show. If a few moments in “Unpro- Gordon has written personal essays, “He started telling me about that time nounceable” smacked of juvenilia—an advice columns, and a cheeky self-help in his life, in Chicago,” Apatow said. “I overwrought description of a falling book, “Super You: Release Your Inner went, ‘That should be a movie.’ ” This snowflake, for example—the writing, on Superhero.” She also spends much of her led to a series of meetings, which led to the whole, was heartfelt and trenchant, free time dispensing advice. Most of her a series of e-mails, which led to drafts of even when tackling such di cult topics friends in L.A. are comedians, and co- a screenplay, which, four years later, be- as crises of faith and the tradition of pub- medians tend to be, as she puts it, “won- came “The Big Sick.” lic self-flagellation. The show was a hit, derful, kindhearted individuals who The scenes in Kumail’s parents’ house and it allowed Nanjiani to sign with a sometimes have no fucking clue how to were shot in Douglaston, Long Island. prominent agent and quit his I.T. job. live like grownups.” A few of her friends One day last summer, as the crew dusted That October, five months after Gordon have compared her to Wendy among the the front lawn with fake snow, Nanjiani, left the hospital, she and Nanjiani moved Lost Boys. Gordon, and Showalter sat in the living to New York. “It’s not like we ever turned In , Nanjiani filmed an hour-long room, alternating between nimble ban- to each other and said, ‘Life is fleeting, standup special in Austin, Texas. This ter and earnest discussions of gun-con- let’s take our shot,’ ” Nanjiani said. “But, time, he chose his own walk-on music: trol policy. Mendel, the producer, sat in in hindsight, Emily getting sick was a rap song built around a Bollywood sam- front of a video monitor in the back yard; clearly a big event that spurred us to ex- ple. In the special, “Beta Male,” he strides the house’s owners had cats, and Men- amine our priorities.” across the stage, projecting swagger even del was severely allergic. Gordon eventually stopped practic- as he jokes about being a coward or a “For Emily’s parents, we went through a normal casting process,” Nanjiani said. The roles went to Holly Hunter and Ray Romano. “When we were going to cast my parents, I called my dad and asked, ‘Who should play you?’ and he answered right away: Anupam Kher.” Kher has been a Bollywood star for de- cades; “The Big Sick” was, by his count, his five-hundredth film. While Kher was filming in Douglaston, Nanjiani’s par- ents insisted on visiting the set, a pros- pect that made Nanjiani palpably ner- vous. “The real world and the world of the movie are not supposed to be this close together,” he said, stepping outside and pacing around the back yard. “There are things that come up in the script that my parents and I haven’t talked about yet.” Earlier that day, they’d filmed a scene in which Kumail’s mother asks on the snowy main drag of Park City, joke about it. In Nanjiani’s standup him to go into another room and pray Utah, I asked her to describe a couple special, he said, “I want to be so famous before lunch. Kumail unfurls a prayer of them. “Euphoric?” she said. “Shell- that I’m the pop-culture reference that rug and sets a timer on his phone; five shocked? Is nausea an emotion? When people would make to try and be racist minutes later, after watching a video and the end credits rolled and people started to me. So I’d be walking down the street playing with a cricket bat, he rolls up clapping, I had tears in my eyes, and I and someone would be, like, ‘Hey, look the rug and leaves the room. literally reached down as if to unbuckle at this Kumail Nanjiani. Oh, fuck, that Nanjiani’s parents arrived on set and my seat belt. Like, my brain was taking is Kumail Nanjiani!’ ” made small talk with Kher. “Doesn’t he the roller-coaster metaphor too liter- Cho actually did appear in “Harold look like my separated-at-birth twin ally.” She elbowed Nanjiani. “He was and Kumar”—he played Harold. The brother?” Nanjiani’s father, Aijaz, joked. stoic, as usual.” audience laughed, and then Nanjiani They posed for photos, and Nanjiani’s “I was overwhelmed!” he said. “That’s addressed the question sincerely. “I don’t parents left after about ten minutes. “That how I process emotions.” go, ‘It is now time to change Ameri- wasn’t so bad, was it?” a crew member Within a day, Amazon had bought cans’ perception of Muslims. It’s going asked Nanjiani. the movie for twelve million dollars, one to be a long day,’ ” he said. “I think you Later, I asked him how his relation- of the most lucrative deals in Sundance just try to be unique and try to be your- ship with his parents had progressed in history. (At the previous year’s festival, self, and if something good comes of the years since the wedding. “It’s a pro- Amazon spent ten million dollars on that then great.” On “Silicon Valley,” cess,” he said. “I think it’s good. They “Manchester by the Sea.” ) From then for example, Nanjiani’s character fulfills love Emily. We see them a lot. It’s com- on, walking around Park City with Nan- some stereotypes and subverts others. plicated.” He gathered his thoughts. “In jiani was like trailing a groom at his He is unfashionable but insists on wear- the movie, the Kumail character and his wedding reception. Heads turned when ing a gold chain, for which he is roundly parents are on step one of figuring all he entered a room; people he’d never mocked; he’s a naturalized American that stu out. In real life, we’re on step met greeted him with handshakes and citizen whose nemesis, a white coder four or five. I don’t know how many steps hugs. His parents had been texting him, from Canada, is an undocumented im- there are.” thrilled by his success. “They haven’t migrant. “That chain idea came directly seen the movie yet,” he said, tentatively. from Kumail’s life,” Alec Berg, a co- Emily falls “They’re gonna like it, though. I think showrunner of “Silicon Valley,” told W into a coma, the fictional Kumail they’re gonna like it.” When I spoke me. “So did the details of what it’s like doesn’t know how to contact her par- with his parents, in April, they still hadn’t to apply for an American visa. It’s such ents. To find their phone number, he seen it. “But we have kept up with the a luxury, when you’re trying to write a has to gain access to Emily’s iPhone. reviews and everything,” Nanjiani’s fa- character that feels grounded in real- He sits next to her hospital bed and ther said. “Rotten Tomatoes, IMDb, ity, to be able to avoid drawing on ste- whispers, “Sorry”; then he places her Variety, the Hollywood Reporter—I have reotypes and instead just take Kumail inert thumb on the phone’s touch pad, not seen a single negative review!” out to lunch and say, ‘Tell me about unlocking the screen. Reading that mo- At Sundance, Nanjiani arrived at your life.’ ” ment in the screenplay, I worried that the Filmmaker Lodge, a venue with After the panel, in the greenroom, it might seem inauthentic, like some- rustic wood panelling and moose heads Nanjiani expanded on his thoughts thing that would happen in a movie but mounted on the walls, to speak on a about representation. “People use these not in real life. When I saw it at Sun- two-person panel with the actor John words so much that they can start to dance, sitting among eleven hundred Cho. The interviewer noted that both sound meaningless,” he said. “But I be- people in a sold-out auditorium, the men were born abroad (Cho is from lieve it matters. The stories you see as moment landed. From the opening cred- South Korea), and asked whether they’d a kid show you what’s possible. I mean, its onward, the audience was in the film’s felt the burden of “being the represen- I’m almost forty, and when I saw a thrall. After Kumail is interrupted by tative of an entire group of people.” brown guy kicking ass in the new ‘Star the racist heckler, Emily’s mother shuts “First, I wanna say that when I started Wars’ movie I started crying in the the heckler down; her monologue re- doing standup comedy people were rac- movie theatre.” ceived a spontaneous mid-scene round ist to me, and they would call me Kumar, He went on, “Everyone knows what of applause. Emily’s father, eating lunch so I’m sure this is very confusing,” Nan- a secular Jew looks like. Everyone knows with Kumail for the first time, leads jiani said. He was referring to the what a lapsed Catholic looks like. That’s with an o ensive icebreaker: “ / . . . comedy “Harold and Kumar Go to all over pop culture. But there are very What’s your stance?” Kumail’s acerbic White Castle,” about an Indian-Amer- few Muslim characters who aren’t ter- response—“It was a tragedy. I mean, ican and a Korean-American embark- rorists, who aren’t even going to a mosque, we lost nineteen of our best guys”— ing on a series of stoned adventures, who are just people with complicated resulted in waves of cathartic laughter. which was one of the highest-grossing backstories who do normal things. Ob- After the Sundance première, Gor- Hollywood movies without a white actor viously, terrorism is an important sub- don posted on Instagram, “We just in a lead role. Although Nanjiani didn’t ject to tackle. But we also need Muslim showed our movie for the first time. appear in the movie, strangers called characters who, like, go to Six Flags and emotions.” The next day, standing him “Kumar” so often that he wrote a eat ice cream.”
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 33 THE POLITICAL SCENE ENDGAMES
What would it take to cut short Trump’s Presidency?
BY EVAN OSNOS
Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago, he measures his fortunes he said. It was a treasured campaign line, Inauguration, a post appeared through reports from friends, sta , and to which he now added a vow of immi- H on the o cial White House a feast of television coverage of himself. nent progress: “You’re gonna have one petitions page, demanding that he re- Media is Trump’s “drug of choice,” Sam very soon.” After Republicans abandoned lease his tax returns. In only a few days, Nunberg, an adviser on his campaign, their first e ort to enact health-care re- it gathered more signatures than any told me recently. “He doesn’t drink. He form, and courts blocked two executive previous White House petition. The doesn’t do drugs. His drug is himself.” orders designed to curb immigration success of the Women’s March had Trump’s Tax Day itinerary enabled from predominantly Muslim countries, shown that themed protests could both him to avoid the exposure of a motor- he was determined to dispel any sense mobilize huge numbers of people and cade; instead, he flew on Marine One di- that his Administration had been weak- hit a nerve with the President. On Eas- rectly to Snap-on’s headquarters. Several ened. “Our tax reform and tax plan is ter weekend, roughly a hundred and hundred protesters were outside chant- coming along very well,” he assured the twenty thousand people protested in ing and holding signs. But the event’s crowd. “It’s going to be out very soon. two hundred cities, calling for him to organizers had created a wall of tractor- We’re working on health care and we’re release his tax returns and sell his busi- trailers around the spot where Trump going to get that done, too.” nesses. On Capitol Hill, protesters would land, blocking protesters from see- Trump’s approval rating is forty per chanted “Impeach Forty-five!” In West ing Trump and him from seeing them. cent—the lowest of any newly elected Palm Beach, a motorcade ferrying him Snap-on’s headquarters, a gleaming President since Gallup started measur- from the Trump International Golf expanse of stainless steel, chrome, and ing it. Even before Trump entered the Club to Mar-a-Lago had to take a cir- enamel, provided a fine backdrop for White House, the F.B.I. and four con- cuitous route to avoid demonstrators. muscular American manufacturing, gressional committees were investigat- The White House does all it can to though in fact the firm closed its Keno- ing potential collusion between his as- keep the President away from protests, sha factory more than a decade ago. sociates and the Russian government. but the next day Trump tweeted, Nick Pinchuk, the C.E.O., led Trump Since then, Trump’s daughter Ivanka “Someone should look into who paid past displays of Snap-on products, and her husband, Jared Kushner, have for the small organized rallies yester- showing him a car hooked up to state- become senior White House o cials, day. The election is over!” of-the-art diagnostic equipment (“It’s prompting intense criticism over po- On Tax Day itself, Trump travelled a di erent world!” Trump mused), and tential conflicts of interest involving to Kenosha, Wisconsin, where he would a table of Snap-on souvenirs, includ- their private businesses. Between Oc- be among his supporters again, giving ing small, colorful metal boxes that tober and March, the U.S. O ce of a speech at Snap-on, a manufacturer of Pinchuk said some customers buy to Government Ethics received more than high-end power tools and other gear. hold ashes after a cremation. “That’s thirty-nine thousand public inquiries Wisconsin has emerged as one of kind of depressing,” Trump said. and complaints, an increase of five thou- Trump’s favorite states. He is the first An auditorium was packed with sand per cent over the same period at Republican Presidential candidate to local dignitaries and Snap-on employ- the start of the Obama Administra- win there since . He included the ees. As “Hail to the Chief ” played on tion. Nobody occupies the White state in a post-election “thank-you tour.” the sound system, Trump stepped onto House without criticism, but Trump Another visit was planned for shortly the stage. He stood in front of a sculp- is besieged by doubts of a di erent after the Inauguration, but it was can- ture of an American flag rippling in order, centering on the overt, specific, celled once it became clear that it would the wind, made from hundreds of and, at times, bipartisan discussion of attract protests. Snap- on wrenches. Behind him was a whether he will be engulfed by any one By this point in George W. Bush’s banner: “ — - of myriad problems before he has com- term, Bush had travelled to twenty-three .” For a moment, the President, pleted even one term in o ce—and, states and a foreign country. Trump has wearing a red tie, leaning on the lec- if he is, how he might be removed. visited just nine states and has never tern, looked as if he were back on the When members of Congress re- stayed the night. He inhabits a closed campaign trail. “These are great, great turned to their home districts in March, world that one adviser recently described people,” he began. “And these are real outrage erupted at town-hall meetings, to me as “Fortress Trump.” Rarely ven- workers. I love the workers.” where constituents jeered Republican turing beyond the White House and “We don’t have a level playing field,” o cials, chanting “Do your job!” and
34 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 PHOTOGRAPH: MARK WILSON/GETTY MARK PHOTOGRAPH: The history of besieged Presidencies is, in the end, the history of hubris, of blindness to one’s faults, of deafness to warnings.
ILLUSTRATION BY BEN WISEMAN THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 35 “Push back!” The former South Caro- Trump if over half the country doesn’t The Administration’s defiance of lina governor Mark Sanford, who is now approve of him. That, to me, should be conventional standards of probity makes a Republican congressman, told me that a big warning sign.” it acutely vulnerable to ethical scandal. he’d held eight town halls in his district. Trump has embraced strategies that The White House recently stopped re- Trump won South Carolina by nearly normally boost popularity, such as mil- leasing visitors’ logs, limiting the pub- fifteen points, so Sanford was surprised itary action. In April, some pundits lic’s ability to know who is meeting to hear people calling for him to be im- were quick to applaud him for launch- with the President and his sta . Trump peached. “I’d never heard that before in ing a cruise-missile attack on a Syrian has also issued secret waivers to ethics di erent public interactions with people airbase, and for threatening to attack rules, so that political appointees can in the wake of a new President being North Korea. In interviews, Trump alter regulations that they previously elected,” he told me. “Even when you marvelled at the forces at his disposal, lobbied to dismantle. heard it with the Tea Party crowd, with like a man wandering into undiscov- On the day that Trump spoke in Obama, it was later in the game. It didn’t Wisconsin, the Citizens for Responsi- start out right away.” bility and Ethics in Washington ( ), Trump’s critics are actively explor- a prominent legal watchdog group, ex- ing the path to impeachment or the in- panded a federal lawsuit that accuses vocation of the Twenty-fifth Amend- Trump of violating the emoluments ment, which allows for the replacement clause of the Constitution, a provision of a President who is judged to be men- that restricts o ceholders from receiv- tally unfit. During the past few months, ing gifts and favors from foreign in- I interviewed several dozen people about terests. The lawsuit cites the Trump the prospects of cutting short Trump’s International Hotel, half a mile from Presidency. I spoke to his friends and ered rooms of his house. (“It’s so in- the White House, which foreign dig- advisers; to lawmakers and attorneys credible. It’s brilliant.”) But the Syria nitaries have admitted frequenting as who have conducted impeachments; to attack only briefly reversed the slide in a way to curry favor with the President. physicians and historians; and to cur- Trump’s popularity; it remained at his- (“Isn’t it rude to come to his city and rent members of the Senate, the House, toric lows. say, ‘I am staying at your competitor’?” and the intelligence services. By any It is not a good sign for a belea- an Asian diplomat told the Washing- normal accounting, the chance of a guered President when his party gets ton Post in November.) The suit, first Presidency ending ahead of schedule is dragged down, too. From January to filed in January, in the Southern Dis- remote. In two hundred and twenty- April, the number of Americans who trict of New York, is partly an e ort to eight years, only one President has had a favorable view of the Republican pry open the President’s business rec- resigned; two have been impeached, Party dropped seven points, to forty per ords. Two plainti s involved in the though neither was ultimately removed cent, according to the Pew Research hotel- and-restaurant industry joined from o ce; eight have died. But noth- Center. I asked Jerry Taylor, the presi- the current case, arguing that Trump’s ing about Trump is normal. Although dent of the Niskanen Center, a liber- businesses enjoy unfair advantages. some of my sources maintained that tarian think tank, if he had ever seen “This isn’t about politics; I’m a regis- laws and politics protect the President so much skepticism so early in a Pres- tered Republican,” Jill Phaneuf, a plain- to a degree that his critics underesti- idency. “No, nobody has,” he said. “But ti who books receptions and events mate, others argued that he has already we’ve never lived in a Third World ba- for hotels, has said. “I joined this law- set in motion a process of his undoing. nana republic. I don’t mean that gratu- suit because the President is taking All agree that Trump is unlike his pre- itously. I mean the reality is he is gov- business away from me.” decessors in ways that intensify his po- erning as if he is the President of a is best known for its role in litical, legal, and personal risks. He is Third World country: power is held by exposing the ethics violations of Tom the first President with no prior expe- family and incompetent loyalists whose DeLay, the former House Majority rience in government or the military, main calling card is the fact that Don- Leader, who, in , resigned under the first to retain ownership of a busi- ald Trump can trust them, not whether indictment; and of Jack Abramo , a ness empire, and the oldest person ever they have any expertise.” Very few Re- lobbyist who went to prison for corrup- to assume the Presidency. publicans in Congress have openly chal- tion the same year. Richard Painter, the lenged Trump, but Taylor cautioned vice-chair of ’s board, was formerly ’ , the depth of his against interpreting that as committed the chief ethics lawyer in George W. F unpopularity is an urgent cause for support. “My guess is that there’s only Bush’s White House. He said that the alarm. “You can’t govern this country between fifty and a hundred Republi- Bush Administration maintained a with a forty-per-cent approval rate. You can members of the House that are policy of forbidding senior o cials just can’t,” Stephen Moore, a senior truly enthusiastic about Donald Trump from retaining business interests that economist at the Heritage Foundation, as President,” he said. “The balance sees conflicted with their responsibilities, who advised Trump during the cam- him as somewhere between a deep and as some in Trump’s White House have paign, told me. “Nobody in either party dangerous embarrassment and a threat done. “We never had controversies over is going to bend over backwards for to the Constitution.” divestment,” Painter told me. “They’d
36 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 ask, ‘What is Hank Paulson’ ”—who the F.B.I. is in immediate danger of per- guy and he’s so powerful,” Ruddy went became Treasury Secretary in — jury in the most innocent way, and I on. “I already sense that a lot of people “ ‘going to do?’ ‘He’s going to sell his think that’s really dangerous,” Gingrich don’t want to give him bad news about Goldman Sachs stu .’ It was pretty told me. “None of these guys under- things. I’ve already been approached by cut and dried.” stand that this is a war, and, if the left several people that’ll say, ‘He’s got to Meanwhile, nine months after the can put them in jail, they’re going to hear this. Could you tell him?’” F.B.I. started investigating Russian in- put them in jail.” terference in the campaign, it contin- It’s not clear how fully Trump ap- considerable spec- ues to examine potential links between prehends the threats to his Presidency. T ulation about Trump’s physical and Trump’s associates and the Kremlin. Mi- Unlike previous Republican Adminis- mental health, in part because few facts chael Flynn, who resigned as Trump’s trations, Fortress Trump contains no are known. During the campaign, his national-security adviser after acknowl- party elder with the stature to check the sta reported that he was six feet three edging that he lied about his contact President’s decisions. “There is no one inches tall and weighed two hundred with Russia’s Ambassador, is seeking im- around him who has the ability to re- and thirty-six pounds, which is consid- munity in exchange for speaking with strain any of his impulses, on any issue ered overweight but not obese. His per- federal investigators, raising the pros- ever, for any reason,” Steve Schmidt, a sonal physician, Harold N. Bornstein, pect that he could reveal other undis- veteran Republican consultant, said, issued brief, celebratory statements— closed contacts, or a broader conspiracy. adding, “Where is the ‘What the fuck’ Trump’s lab-test results were “astonish- Robert Kelner, Flynn’s lawyer, wrote in chorus?” ingly excellent”—mentioning little more a statement, “General Flynn certainly Trump’s insulation from unwelcome than a daily dose of aspirin and a statin. has a story to tell, and he very much information appears to be growing as Trump himself says that he is “not a big wants to tell it, should the circumstances his challenges mount. His longtime sleeper” (“I like three hours, four hours”) permit.” The F.B.I. is also investigating friend Christopher Ruddy, the C.E.O. and professes a fondness for steak and Paul Manafort, Trump’s former cam- of Newsmax Media, talked with him McDonald’s. Other than golf, he con- paign chairman, after it was reported recently at Mar-a-Lago and at the White siders exercise misguided, arguing that that Manafort received millions of dol- House. “He tends to not like a lot of a person, like a battery, is born with a lars in cash payments from pro-Kremlin negative feedback,” Ruddy told me. finite amount of energy. groups in Ukraine; and Carter Page, a Ruddy has noticed that some of Trump’s Secrecy about a President’s health foreign-policy adviser to the Trump cam- associates are unwilling to give him news has a rich history. “No one in the White paign until last September. The F.B.I. that will upset him. “I don’t think he re- House wants to emphasize the fact that has described Page, in court filings, as alizes how fully intimidating he is to the President might be too ill to carry out having connections to Russian agents. many people, because he’s such a large his responsibilities,” Robert E. Gilbert, a The White House maintains that it was unaware of any links to the Krem- lin, and the details of the investigations are classified. But select members of Congress who oversee the intelligence agencies have access to the findings. Re- cently, one of them, Senator Mark War- ner, of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, pri- vately told friends that he puts the odds at two to one against Trump complet- ing a full term. (Warner’s spokesperson said that the Senator was “not referring specifically to the Russia investigation, but rather the totality of challenges the President is currently facing.”) In a gesture intended to convey trans- parency, Jared Kushner and Trump’s outside adviser Roger Stone have o ered to speak to the Senate Intelligence Com- mittee, but Newt Gingrich, a Trump campaign adviser who, when he was Speaker of the House, led the push for Bill Clinton’s impeachment, believes it is a risky maneuver. “Anybody who goes in front of a congressional hearing for something that is being investigated by political scientist at Northeastern Uni- versity who studies Presidential health, told me. “They want everyone to think AND BOTH HANDS WASH THE FACE that the President is able to surmount any problem, no matter how serious, be- You were all over everything. cause they are thinking of reëlection, and I just wanted to read the “Four Quartets.” they are thinking of the judgment of his- But there was your handwriting, tory.” Although John F. Kennedy’s tan All over everything. was often described as a sign of vigor, it was caused by Addison’s disease, an en- Talking about Coleridge, docrine disorder, which Kennedy and his Talking about sage Herakleitos. aides hid for decades, and which left him You even spelled it like that, dependent on multiple medications. With a “k.” He looked at a river once, Yet it is impossible to conceal the sheer physical strain of the Presidency. Famously. And in it he saw our a iction: Studying the medical records of Pres- Nothing but time. idents since Theodore Roosevelt, Mi- Because one hand washes the other, chael Roizen, the chairman of the I take down the book Cleveland Clinic’s Wellness Institute, has concluded that “unrequited stress”— And there is your hand the absence of peers and friends—takes And here is your body the greatest toll. Kennedy, who liked Draped over mine to compare his critics to hecklers at a In the mirror of a Carbondale motel room bullfight, quoted a poem by the mat- ador Domingo Ortega: “Only one is In nineteen ninety-nine. there who knows / And he’s the man —Ryan Fox who fights the bull.” A study, led by Anupam Jena, of Harvard Medical School, analyzed the life expectancy of However, the definition of what would probably impaired job performance.” five hundred and forty politicians in constitute an inability to discharge the Some of these illnesses had far-reach- seventeen countries. Jena found that duties of o ce was left deliberately vague. ing historical consequences. Just before the lives of elected leaders are, on av- Senator Birch Bayh, of Indiana, and oth- Franklin Pierce took o ce, in , his erage, . years shorter than those of ers who drafted the clause wanted to in- son died in a train accident, and Pierce’s the runners-up. sure that the final decision was not left Presidency was marked by the “dead The Framers of the Constitution to doctors. The fate of a President, Bayh weight of hopeless sorrow,” according to planned ahead for the death of Presi- wrote later, is “really a political ques- his biographer Roy Franklin Nichols. dents—hence, Vice-Presidents—but they tion” that should rest on the “profes- Morose and often drunk, Pierce proved failed to address an unnerving prospect: sional judgment of the political cir- unable to defuse the tensions that pre- a President who is alive and very sick. cumstances existing at the time.” The cipitated the Civil War. Had Kennedy survived being shot, and Twenty-fifth Amendment could there- Years after the death of Lyndon B. been left comatose, there would have fore be employed in the case of a Pres- Johnson, it emerged that, as the war in been no legal way to allow others to as- ident who is not incapacitated but is Vietnam intensified, he exhibited symp- sume his powers. To fend o that pos- considered mentally impaired. toms of profound paranoia, leading two sibility, the Twenty-fifth Amendment A study by psychiatrists at Duke of his assistants to secretly seek the ad- was added to the Constitution in Feb- University, published in the Journal of vice of psychiatrists. Johnson imagined ruary, . Under Section , a President Nervous and Mental Disease, in , conspiracies involving the Times or the can be removed if he is judged to be “un- made a striking assertion: about half United Nations or élites whom he called able to discharge the powers and duties the Presidents they studied had su ered “those Harvards.” He took to carrying, of his o ce.” The assessment can be a mental illness at one time or another. in his jacket pocket, faulty statistics made either by the Vice-President and The researchers examined biographies that he recited about “victory” and troop a majority of the Cabinet secretaries or and medical histories of thirty-seven commitments in Vietnam. “For a long by a congressionally appointed body, such Presidents, from Washington to Nixon, time, Johnson succeeded,” one of the as a panel of medical experts. If the Pres- and found that forty-nine per cent met assistants wrote, “not in changing re- ident objects—a theoretical crisis that the criteria for a psychiatric disorder— ality, but in deceiving much of the coun- scholars call “contested removal”—Con- mostly depression, anxiety, and sub- try and, perhaps, himself.” gress has three weeks to debate and de- stance abuse—at some point in their Only one Administration is known cide the issue. A two-thirds majority in lives. Ten Presidents, or about one in to have considered using the Twenty-fifth each chamber is required to remove the four, had symptoms “evident during Amendment to remove a President. In President. There is no appeal. presidential o ce, which in most cases , at the age of seventy-six, Ronald
38 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 Reagan was showing the strain of the he wasn’t, calling him “warped,” “impul- Frances wrote, “He may be a world- Iran-Contra scandal. Aides observed sive,” and a “paranoid schizophrenic.” class narcissist, but this doesn’t make that he was increasingly inattentive and Goldwater sued for libel, successfully, him mentally ill, because he does not inept. Howard H. Baker, Jr., a former and, in , the American Psychiatric su er from the distress and impairment senator who became Reagan’s chief of Association added to its code of ethics required to diagnose mental disorder. . . . sta in February, , found the White the so-called “Goldwater rule,” which The antidote to a dystopic Trumpean House in disarray. “He seemed to be forbade making a diagnosis without an dark age is political, not psychological.” despondent but not depressed,” Baker in-person examination and without re- To some mental-health profession- said later, of the President. ceiving permission to discuss the find- als, the debate over diagnoses and the Baker assigned an aide named Jim ings publicly. Professional associations Goldwater rule distracts from a larger Cannon to interview White House o - for psychologists, social workers, and oth- point. “This issue is not whether Don- cials about the Administration’s dysfunc- ers followed suit. With regard to Trump, ald Trump is mentally ill but whether tion, and Cannon learned that Reagan however, the rule has been broken re- he’s dangerous,” James Gilligan, a pro- was not reading even short documents. peatedly. More than fifty thousand fessor of psychiatry at New York Uni- “They said he wouldn’t come over to mental- health professionals have signed versity, told attendees at a recent public work—all he wanted to do was watch a petition stating that Trump is “too se- meeting at Yale School of Medicine on movies and television at the residence,” riously mentally ill to perform the du- the topic of Trump’s mental health. “He Cannon recalled, in “Landslide,” a ties of president and should be removed” publicly boasts of violence and has threat- account of Reagan’s second term, by Jane under the Twenty-fifth Amendment. ened violence. He has urged followers Mayer and Doyle McManus. One night, Lance Dodes, a retired assistant clin- to beat up protesters. He approves of tor- Baker summoned a small group of aides ical professor of psychiatry at Harvard ture. He has boasted of his ability to to his home. One of them, Thomas Medical School, believes that, in this in- commit and get away with sexual as- Griscom, told me recently that Cannon, stance, the Goldwater rule is outweighed sault,” Gilligan said. who died in , “floats this idea that by another ethical commitment: a “duty Bruce Blair, a research scholar at maybe we’d invoke the Constitution.” to warn” others when he assesses that a the Program on Science and Global Baker was skeptical, but, the next day, he person might harm them. Dodes told Security, at Princeton, told me that if proposed a diagnostic process of sorts: me, “Trump is going to face challenges Trump were an o cer in the Air Force, they would observe the President’s be- from people who are not going to bend with any connection to nuclear weap- havior at lunch. to his will. If you have a President who ons, he would need to pass the Person- In the event, Reagan was funny and takes it as a personal attack on him, which nel Reliability Program, which includes alert, and Baker considered the debate he does, and flies into a paranoid rage, thirty-seven questions about financial closed. “We finish the lunch and Sena- that’s how you start a war.” history, emotional volatility, and phys- tor Baker says, ‘You know, boys, I think Like many of his colleagues, Dodes ical health. (Question No. : Do you we’ve all seen this President is fully ca- speculates that Trump fits the descrip- often lose your temper?) “There’s no pable of doing the job,’ ” Griscom said. tion of someone with malignant nar- doubt in my mind that Trump would They never raised the issue again. In cissism, which is characterized by gran- never pass muster,” Blair, who was a , four years after leaving o ce, Rea- diosity, a need for admiration, sadism, ballistic-missile launch-control o cer gan received a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s. in the Army, told me. “Any of us that His White House physicians said that had our hands anywhere near nuclear they saw no symptoms during his Pres- weapons had to pass the system. If you idency. In , researchers at Arizona were having any arguments, or were in State University published a study in the financial trouble, that was a problem. Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, in which For all we know, Trump is on the brink they examined transcripts of news con- of that, but the President is exempt ferences in the course of Reagan’s Pres- from everything.” idency and discovered changes in his In the months since Trump took o ce, speech that are linked to the onset of de- several members of Congress have cited mentia. Reagan had taken to repeating and a tendency toward unrealistic fan- concern about his mental health as a rea- words and using “thing” in the place of tasies. On February th, in a letter to son to change the law. In early April, specific nouns, but they could not prove the Times, Dodes and thirty-four other Representative Jamie Raskin, a Mary- that, while he was in o ce, his judgment mental-health professionals wrote, “We land Democrat and a professor of con- and decision-making were a ected. fear that too much is at stake to be si- stitutional law at American University, lent any longer.” In response, Allen Fran- and twenty co-sponsors introduced a - professionals ces, a professor emeritus at Duke Uni- bill that would expand the authority of M have largely kept out of politics versity Medical College, who wrote the medical personnel and former senior since , when the magazine Fact asked section on narcissistic personality dis- o cials to assess the mental fitness of psychiatrists if they thought Barry Gold- order in the Diagnostic and Statistical a President. The bill has no chance of water was psychologically fit to be Pres- Manual of Mental Disorders—IV, sought coming up for a vote anytime soon, ident. More than a thousand said that to discourage the public diagnoses. but its sponsors believe that they have a
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 39 constitutional duty to convene a body believe that Presidential disability must Misdemeanors” by a simple majority to assess Trump’s health. Representa- be understood to encompass “very sub- vote, and they gave the Senate the power tive Earl Blumenauer, of Oregon, in- tle manifestations” that might impair the to convict or dismiss the charges, set- troduced a similar bill, which would President’s capacity to do the job. A Pres- ting a high bar for conviction, with a also give former Presidents and Vice- ident should be evaluated for “alertness, two-thirds majority. Presidents a voice in evaluating a Pres- cognitive function, judgment, appropri- But what would “high Crimes and ident’s mental stability. Of Trump, he ate behavior, the ability to choose among Misdemeanors” mean in practice? In said, “The serial repetition of proven options and the ability to communicate , during an unsuccessful e ort to falsehoods—Is this an act? Is this a clearly,” Mohr told a researcher in . impeach the Supreme Court Justice Wil- tactic? Is he just wired weird? It raises “If any of these are impaired, it is my liam O. Douglas, Representative Gerald the question in my mind about the opinion that the powers of the President Ford argued that an impeachable o ense nature of Presidential disability.” should be transferred to the Vice-Pres- was “whatever a majority of the House Over the years, the use, or misuse, of ident until the impairment resolves.” of Representatives considers it to be at the Twenty-fifth Amendment has been In practice, however, unless the Pres- a given moment in history.” That was an irresistible to novelists and screenwrit- ident were unconscious, the public could overstatement—the President was never ers, but political observers dismiss the see the use of the amendment as a con- intended to serve at the pleasure of Con- idea. Je Greenfield, of CNN, has de- stitutional coup. Measuring deteriora- gress—but it contained an essential truth: scribed the notion that Trump could be tion over time would be di cult in impeachment is possible even without a ousted on the basis of mental health as Trump’s case, given that his “judgment” specific violation of the U.S. Criminal a “liberal fantasy.” Not everyone agrees. and “ability to communicate clearly” Code. When Alexander Hamilton wrote Laurence Tribe, a professor of consti- were, in the view of many Americans, of “high Crimes,” he was referring to the tutional law at Harvard, told me, “I be- impaired before he took o ce. For violation of “public trust,” by abusing lieve that invoking Section of the those reasons, Robert Gilbert, the power, breaching ethics, or undermining Twenty- fifth Amendment is no fantasy Presidential-health specialist, told me, the Constitution. but an entirely plausible tool—not im- “If the statements get too strange, then The first test came with the impeach- mediately, but well before .” In the Vice-President might be able to do ment of Andrew Johnson, in . John- Tribe’s interpretation, the standard of something. But if the President is just son, who became President after Lin- the amendment is not “a medical or oth- being himself—talking in the same way coln’s assassination, was a combative erwise technical one but is one resting that he talked during the campaign— Tennessean, sympathetic to the South- on a commonsense understanding of then the Vice- President and the Cab- ern states, and was uncomfortable in what it means for a President to be ‘un- inet would find it very di cult.” Washington, which he disparaged as able to discharge the powers and duties “twelve square miles bordered by real- of his o ce’—an inability that can ob- impeachment is a ity.” He mocked the legislative branch viously be manifested by gross and T more promising tool for curtailing as “a body called, or which assumes to pathological inattention or indi erence a defective Presidency. The Framers con- be, the Congress,” and vetoed the Civil to, or failure to understand, the limits sidered the ability to eject an executive Rights Bill of , which was intended of those powers or the mandatory na- so critical that they enshrined it in the to confer citizenship on freed slaves. Con- ture of those duties.” gress was incensed; Senator Carl Schurz, As an example of “pathological in- of Missouri, compared Johnson to “a attention,” Tribe noted that, on April wounded and anger-crazed boar.” Even- th, days after North Korea launched tually, the President engineered a show- a missile, Trump described an aircraft down with Congress, by deliberately carrier, the U.S.S. Carl Vinson, as part breaking a law against firing a Cabinet of an “armada” advancing on North secretary without Senate consent. As a Korea, even though the ship was sail- result, the House moved to impeach him, ing away from North Korea at the time. accusing him of “denying” the work of Moreover, Tribe said, Trump’s language another branch of government and “pre- borders on incapacity. Asked recently Constitution even before they had agreed venting the execution” of laws passed by why he reversed a pledge to brand China on the details of the o ce itself. On Congress. Johnson was acquitted in the a currency manipulator, Trump said, of June , , while the delegates to the Senate by one vote. President Xi Jinping, “No. , he’s not, Constitutional Convention, in Phila- David O. Stewart, the author of “Im- since my time. You know, very specific delphia, were still arguing whether the peached,” a history of the case, told me formula. You would think it’s like gen- Presidency should consist of a commit- that it established a crucial point: im- eralities, it’s not. They have—they’ve tee or a single person, they adopted, peachment is not a judicial proceeding actually—their currency’s gone up. So without debate, the right to impeach but a tool of political accountability. it’s a very, very specific formula.” for “malpractice or neglect of duty.” They “Because of the unique powers of the Lawrence C. Mohr, who became a gave the House of Representatives the executive, we are depending on a sin- White House physician in and re- power to impeach a President for “trea- gle person to be wise and sane,” Stew- mained in the job until , came to son, bribery or other high Crimes and art said. “If, in fact, there are enough
40 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 people who no longer think those are both true, impeachment is designed to deal with that.” For this reason, actual evidence of misconduct may not be the most important criterion in determin- ing which Presidents get impeached. “The most important thing is politi- cal popularity,” Michael J. Gerhardt, a professor of constitutional law at the University of North Carolina, told me. “A popular President is unlikely to be threatened with impeachment. Second is your relationship with your party— how strongly are they connected to you? Third is your relationship with Congress, and fourth is the nature of whatever the misconduct may be.” By far the most valuable lessons about impeachment come from Richard Nixon. In , Nixon resigned shortly before he could be impeached, but his misjudg- ments—political, psychological, and legal—have illuminated the risks to Presidents ever since. In , Nixon’s White House oversaw the bugging of “I can’t remember—do I work at home or do I live at work?” the Democratic National Committee o ces at the Watergate complex and the •• ensuing coverup. That was illegal and unethical, but it did not guarantee Nix- on’s downfall, which came about because House Judiciary Committee launched sent a letter to Secretary of State Henry of two critical mistakes. impeachment hearings. By thwarting Kissinger: “Dear Mr. Secretary, I hereby First, when the scandal emerged, the other branches, Nixon weakened his sup- resign the O ce of President of the President underestimated the threat. port in Congress and convinced the coun- United States. Sincerely, Richard Nixon.” “There were any number of steps that try that he had something to hide. Until A quarter century later, the Bill Clin- could have made it go away,” Evan that point, much of the public had not ton impeachment yielded two related Thomas, the author of “Being Nixon,” focussed on the slow, complex investi- lessons—one about the path into crisis, told me. “They could have cleaned house gation, but interviews at the time show and one about the path out of it. The and fired people.” But Nixon assumed that Nixon’s stonewalling made people first lesson was that investigations beget that his supporters would never believe pay attention, and he never recovered. investigations. In January, , when a the accusations. “He was ahead by thirty- “Well, everything has added up to his special prosecutor started looking into four points in the polls in August, ,” incompetence over the last few months, Bill and Hillary Clinton’s investments Thomas went on. “He could have taken and I don’t think the American people in Whitewater, a failed Arkansas real- his clothes o and run around the White should stand for it any longer,” a woman estate deal, there was no way to antici- House front yard and he was going to interviewed in New York by the Asso- pate that it would conclude, nearly five win reëlection.” ciated Press said. “In fact, I just signed years later, with Clinton’s impeachment As the scandal ground on, Nixon made an impeach petition.” for trying to cover up an a air with his second mistake: he flouted the au- By August, many of his top aides had Monica Lewinsky, a twenty-two-year- thority of a coequal branch of govern- been indicted, and polls showed that old White House intern. Many raged ment. In October, , Nixon refused fifty-seven per cent of the public be- against the conduct of that inquiry, ac- to obey a federal appellate-court ruling lieved that Nixon should be removed cusing Kenneth Starr, the independent that ordered him to turn over tapes of from o ce. On August th, after a tape counsel, of abusing his powers, but the conversations in the Oval O ce, and he recording surfaced which captured him outcome demonstrated that a White forced out the investigation’s special pros- orchestrating the coverup, he was aban- House under investigation is in danger ecutor, Archibald Cox. For nine months, doned by Republicans who had previ- of spiralling into crisis. Nixon continued to resist—in e ect ously derided the Watergate scandal as The second lesson of the Clinton im- threatening the basic constitutional sys- a witch hunt. Senator Barry Goldwater, peachment comes from the strategy tem—until, in July, , the Supreme of Arizona, told colleagues, “Nixon adopted by his legal team. Learning Court ruled that he had to comply. By should get his ass out of the White from Nixon’s fate, the lawyers realized then, the damage was done, and the House—today!” On August th, Nixon that congressional Democrats would
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 41 abandon Clinton if they concluded that cent—his highest level ever. “It’s a vin- tactical—it’s good for the country, be- he had lost the trust of the public. Greg- dictive party that just went out to get cause you should only pursue impeach- ory Craig, one of the lawyers who di- him,” a man at an American Legion ment if you really have to.” rected Clinton’s defense, told me recently, post in San Diego told a reporter, in “The fundamental point is that it’s a po- December, just before the House voted , the topic of im- litical process.” He and his team spent to impeach. When the case reached the N peaching Trump occupied a spot less energy on disputing the details of Senate, Clinton’s lawyers capitalized on on the fringe of Democratic priorities evidence than on maintaining support his popularity and presented his mis- somewhere around the California se- from fellow-Democrats and from the deeds in the broader context of his Pres- cessionist movement. “If you’d have public. They painted Clinton as the vic- idency. In closing arguments, Charles asked me around Election Day, I would tim of a partisan quest to exploit an Ru , the White House counsel, asked, have said it’s not realistic,” Robert B. o ense—covering up an a air—that “Would it put at risk the liberties of Reich, Clinton’s Secretary of Labor, was not on the scale of abuse that the the people to retain the President in told me in April. “But I’m frankly Framers had in mind. “To be honest, we o ce?” The Senate acquitted Clinton amazed at the degree of activism among pursued a strategy that embraced polar- on all charges. Democrats and the degree of resolu- ization,” Craig recalled. “I gave a state- Were Trump to face impeachment, tion. I’ve not seen anything like this ment to the press that said this is the his lawyers would likely try to present since the anti-Vietnam movement. ” In most unfair process since the Inquisi- him as a victim of a partisan feud, but April, Reich, who is now a professor tion in Spain. Some arcane historical his unpopularity would be a liability; of public policy at the University of reference came out of my mouth. I said, Republicans in Congress would have California, Berkeley, released an ani- ‘It’s like they’ve tied up President Clin- little reason to defend him. Nonethe- mated short, mapping out the path to ton, put him in a closet in the middle less, the Clinton impeachment may con- impeachment, and it became an un- of the night and turned o the lights, tain an even larger warning for Dem- likely viral hit, attracting . million and they’re whipping him.’ ” ocrats in pursuit of Trump. “It’s pretty views on YouTube in the first twenty- The strategy succeeded. By the time important to be seen in sorrow rather four hours. the House impeached Clinton, on De- than anger,” Stewart, the historian of Because the Republican leadership in cember , , his approval rating impeachment, said. “Don’t emerge red the House of Representatives will almost had risen to more than seventy per in tooth and claw. That’s not merely certainly not initiate the ouster of a Re- publican President, the first step in any realistic path to impeachment is for Dem- ocrats to gain control of the House. The next opportunity is the midterm elections. Republicans have been rela- tively confident, in part because their re- districting in tilted the congressio- nal map in their favor. But Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a Republican economist and the president of the right-leaning American Action Forum, believes that the chances of control shifting to the Democrats is greater than many people in either party realize. “After a party takes the House, the Senate, and the White House, they typically lose thirty-five seats in the House in the next midterm,” he told me. “Republicans now hold the House by twenty-three seats, so, as a going proposition, they’re in trouble. They need to do really, really well.” Unfortunately for the congressional G.O.P., unpopular Presidents sow mid- term fiascos. Since , whenever a Pres- ident has had an approval rating above fifty per cent, his party has lost an aver- age of fourteen seats in the midterms, according to Gallup; whenever the rat- ing has been below fifty per cent, the av- erage loss soars to thirty-six seats. Steve “Twenty bucks says he pulls out a Moleskine.” Schmidt, the Republican consultant, is concerned that, in , the Party faces who alleges that he sexually assaulted necticut Democrat who is on the Ju- a convergence of vulnerabilities akin to her in . The constitutional question diciary Committee, believes that the those which pertained during the of whether a President could be im- Administration’s actions denigrating midterms, whose outcome George W. peached for o enses committed before or denying the power of equal branches Bush characterized as “a thumping.” he took o ce is unsettled, but, as Clin- of government portend a “constitu- Schmidt told me, “The last time Repub- ton’s case showed, civil proceedings con- tional crisis” akin to Nixon’s refusal to licans lost control of the House of Rep- tain risks whenever a President testifies accept the appellate-court judgment resentatives, it was on a mix of compe- under oath. regarding the White House tapes. Last tency—Iraq and Katrina—and corruption Many scholars believe that the most week, lawmakers from both parties an- in government, with the Tom DeLay plausible bases for a Trump impeach- nounced that White House o cials Congress.” The Trump Administration ment are corruption and abuse of power. had refused a request from an over- has a comparable “basic competency Noah Feldman, a Harvard Law School sight committee to turn over internal issue,” he said. “The constant lying, the professor who specializes in constitu- documents related to the hiring and lack of credible statements from the tional studies, argues that, even without resignation of Michael Flynn. In a let- White House, from the President on evidence of an indictable crime, the Ad- ter to the House oversight committee, down to the spokesperson, the amateur- ministration’s pattern of seemingly triv- Marc T. Short, the White House di- ishness of the threats to the members of ial uses of public o ce for private gain rector of legislative a airs, said that the Congress, the ultimatums, the talk of “can add up to an impeachable o ense.” Administration is withholding docu- ‘enemy lists’ and retribution.” Last week, after the State Department ments because they “are likely to con- Tom Davis, who twice led Republi- took down an o cial Web page that tain classified, sensitive and/or confiden- can congressional-election e orts during showcased Trump’s private, for-profit tial information.” Blumenthal told me, fourteen years as a representative from club, Mar-a-Lago, Feldman told me, “A “I foresee a point that there will be sub- Virginia, believes that his former col- systematic pattern shown through data poenas or some kind of compulsory leagues are overly complacent. “These points would count as grounds for im- disclosure issued against the President guys need a wake-up call. They’re just peachment.” He said that economic anal- or the Administration by one of the living in la-la land,” he said. He pointed ysis of the former Italian Prime Minis- investigative bodies—the F.B.I. or the out that regardless of the final outcome ter Silvio Berlusconi’s self-enrichment Intelligence Committee or an inde- of an attempt to impeach—the two- proves the concept. “Berlusconi is said pendent commission, if there is one— thirds majority in the Senate remains a to have gained at most one per cent per and, at that point, there may be the high bar to clear—Democratic control business transaction from his Presidency, sort of confrontation that we haven’t of the House would immediately make but that added up to more than a bil- really seen in the same way since United Trump more vulnerable to investigations. lion euros,” Feldman said. States versus Nixon.” “If the gavels change hands, it’s a di er- Allan J. Lichtman is an American ent world. No. , all of his public records, University historian who has correctly as a dealmaker they will go through those with a fine- forecast every Presidential election since T who could woo disparate Repub- tooth comb—income taxes, business deal- (including Trump’s victory). In licans. Though there was no natural ings. At that point, it’s not just talk— April, he published “The Case for Im- Trumpist wing of the Party, he was ex- they subpoena it. It gets ugly real fast. peachment,” in which he predicted that pected to ally with the three dozen He has so far had a pass on all this busi- Trump will not serve a full term, because conservative members of the Freedom ness stu , and I don’t know what’s there, of a “Nixonian” pattern of trespassing Caucus, who tended to admire his anti- but I’ve got to imagine that it’s not pretty beyond constitutional boundaries. He establishment populism. But the rela- in this environment.” cited an incident in late January, during tionship descended into acrimony al- If Democrats retake the House, the the legal battle over Trump’s first exec- most immediately. After the caucus Judiciary Committee could establish a utive order on immigration. James L. objected to part of Trump’s e ort to subcommittee to investigate potential Robart, the U.S. district judge who repeal and replace Obamacare, leading abuses and identify specific grounds for blocked the order, rejected the White to the collapse of the bill, Trump pub- impeachment. The various investigations House’s claim that the court could not licly threatened to target its members of Trump already in process will come review the President’s decision, ruling in next year’s elections. “The Freedom into play. In addition to allegations of that the executive must “comport with Caucus will hurt the entire Republi- business conflicts and potential Russian our country’s laws, and more impor- can agenda if they don’t get on the collusion, Trump is facing dozens of civil tantly, our Constitution.” Trump’s re- team, & fast,” he tweeted. “We must proceedings. In a case in federal court, sponse was a further violation of dem- fight them, & Dems, in !” he is accused of urging violence at a cam- ocratic norms: he disparaged Robart as He went after individual members as paign rally in Louisville, Kentucky, in a “so-called judge” and said that he should well. At one point, he threatened to sup- March, , where he yelled, referring be held responsible for future terrorist port a primary challenger against Mark to a protester, “Get ’em out of here.” In acts on Americans. “If something hap- Sanford, the South Carolina congress- a New York state court, he is facing pens blame him and court system. Peo- man. I asked Sanford if he regarded the a suit brought by Summer Zervos, a ple pouring in. Bad!” Trump tweeted. threat as a bargaining tactic. “I think it former contestant on “The Apprentice,” Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Con- was genuine,” he said. “It certainly wasn’t
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 43 said in a way that suggested a blu and By and large, they have found him more anything wrong.” Nixon convinced then a wink and a nod.” Sanford said, approachable than they expected, but himself that his enemies were doing of the level of support for Trump among much less informed. “Several have been the same things he was; Reagan dis- Republicans in Congress, “In general, a little bit amazed by the lack of policy missed the trading of arms for hos- the mood of the conference is that we’re knowledge,” Kristol said. “God knows tages as the cost of establishing rela- in the same boat together.” But he added Presidents don’t need to know the details tions with Iran; Clinton insisted that a caveat: “This has to fundamentally be of health-care bills and tax bills, and I he was technically telling the truth. In a game of addition, not just subtraction. certainly don’t, either—that’s what you Pfi ner’s view, “Each of these sets of I’m not sure the Administration has have aides for. But not even having a basic rationalizations allowed the Presidents fully grasped that concept yet. You’re level of understanding? I think that has to choose the path that would end up probably not adding to the list of per- rattled people a little bit.” He added, “Rea- damaging them more than an initial manent allies and friends.” He went on, gan may not have had a subtle grasp of admission would have.” “I think that there’s a degree of immu- everything, but he read the briefing books Law and history make clear that nity that has come with the way that he and he knew the arguments, basically. Trump’s most urgent risk is not get- has broken all of the past molds. But I And Trump is not even at that level.” ting ousted; it is getting hobbled by would also argue that there’s a half-life When I asked Kristol about the unpopularity and distrust. He is only to that.” chances of impeachment, he paused to the fifth U.S. President who failed to Trump is not faring much better with consider the odds. Then he said, “It’s win the popular vote. Except George W. moderate Republicans. At a meeting in somewhere in the big middle ground be- Bush, none of the others managed to March, Charlie Dent, a seven-term cen- tween a one-per-cent chance and fifty. win a second term. Less dramatic than trist congressman from Pennsylvania, ex- It’s some per cent. It’s not nothing.” the possibility of impeachment or re- pressed misgivings about the health-care moval via the Twenty-fifth Amend- plan, and Trump lashed out. “He said besieged Presiden- ment is the distinct possibility that something to the e ect that I was de- Tcies is, in the end, a history of hu- Trump will simply limp through a sin- stroying the Republican Party,” Dent told bris—of blindness to one’s faults, of gle term, incapacitated by opposition. me. “And that the tax reform is going to deafness to the warnings, of seclusion William Antholis, a political scien- fail because of me, and I’d be blamed for from uncomfortable realities. The se- tist who directs the Miller Center, at it.” In targeting Dent, Trump found an cret of power is not that it corrupts; the University of Virginia, told me that, unlikely antagonist. Dent co-chairs an that is well known. “What is never thus far, the President that Trump most alliance of fifty-four moderate Republi- said,” Robert Caro writes, in “Master reminds him of is not Nixon or Clin- cans so resolutely undogmatic that they of the Senate,” about Lyndon Johnson, ton but Jimmy Carter, another outsider call themselves simply “the Tuesday “is that power reveals.” Trump, after a who vowed to remake Washington. Group.” Dent said that he remains ready lifetime in a family business, with no Carter is Trump’s moral and stylistic to back Trump “when the President is public obligations and no board of di- opposite, but, Antholis said, “he couldn’t on the right track,” but he left no doubt rectors to please, has found himself find a way to work with his own party, that he would break when his conscience abruptly exposed to evaluation, and his and Trump’s whole message was pug- requires it. “We have to serve as a check. reactions have been volcanic. Setting nacious. It was ‘I alone can fix this.’ ” I mean, that’s kind of our one power. We Like Trump, Carter had majorities in should accept that.” both chambers, but he alienated Con- William Kristol, the editor-at-large gress, and, after four years, he left the of The Weekly Standard, one of the most White House without achieving his prominent conservative critics of Trump, ambitions on welfare, tax reform, and told me that the Administration’s fail- energy independence. ure to get any bills passed was stirring Oscillating between the America of frustration. “Most Republicans, I would Kenosha and the America of Mar-a- say, wanted him to succeed and were Lago, Trump is neither fully a revolu- bending over backwards to give him a tionary nor an establishmentarian. He chance,” Kristol said. “I think there was a more successful course for the Pres- is ideologically indebted to both Pat- pretty widespread disappointment. You idency will depend, in part, on whether rick Buchanan and Goldman Sachs. He kind of knew what you were getting in he fully accepts that critics who iden- is what the political scientist Stephen terms of some of the wackiness and also tify his shortcomings are capable of Skowronek calls a “disjunctive” Presi- some of the actual issues that people curtailing his power. When James P. dent, one “who reigns over the end of might not agree with him on—trade, Pfi ner, a political scientist at George his party’s own orthodoxy.” Trump immigration—but I think that just the Mason University, compared the White knows that Reaganite ideology is no level of chaos, the lack of discipline, was House crises that confronted Nixon, longer politically viable, but he has yet beginning to freak members of Congress Reagan, and Clinton, he identified a to create a new conservatism beyond out a little bit.” perilous strain of confidence. In each white- nationalist nostalgia. For the mo- Trump has been meeting with con- case, Pfi ner found, the President could ment, all he can think to do is rekindle gressional Republicans in small groups. not “admit to himself that he had done the embers of the campaign, to bathe,
44 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 once more, in the stage light. It lifts him up. But what of the public? Does he understand that all citizens will have a hand in his fate?
’ in Keno- W sha was over, he walked across the stage to sign an executive order. “Get ready, everybody,” he said. “This is a big one.” Since taking o ce, he had issued twenty-four executive or- ders, and the signings had become a favorite way of displaying his power. The scope of this order was modest— it merely established studies of visas and imports—but he described it as “historic.” He uncapped a pen and, just before he signed the order, he said, “Who should I give the pen to? The big ques- tion, right?” There was nervous laugh- ter, and he called some local and vis- “Shall I compare thee to my ex?” iting politicians up to the stage to stand beside him while he signed. Then he said, “This is a tremendous honor for •• me,” and tried his joke again: “The only question is, who gets the pen?” He held production moved o shore, she found sided with Trump, by just two hun- up the signed order to the cameras, as a job at the Chicago Lock factory (“Five dred and fifty-five votes out of more always, pivoting left, then right, and years later, they closed”) and then one than seventy-one thousand cast. grinned broadly. at Air Flow Technology, making indus- That is a fragile bu er. In late April, He stepped down from the stage trial filters. After fourteen years there, Trump promoted the results of a Wash- and walked along the front row of the she was earning almost seventeen dol- ington Post/ABC News poll showing audience, shaking hands, before his Se- lars an hour, but in she was laid that only two per cent of those who cret Service detail escorted him toward o . “I lost my job there because they voted for him regretted doing so. When Marine One. He was going straight hired somebody that they could pay I asked Wollmuth if she had any re- back to Washington. The audience, seven dollars less. It was a lot of immi- grets, she made it clear that it was the kept in place until he was safely extri- grants there. Let’s put it that way. I’m wrong question. “I don’t want to be cated, milled about awkwardly. The sure you know what I mean.” She didn’t disappointed, and I hope he’s really theatrical atmosphere dissipated, leav- like the way it sounded, but she wanted trying,” she said. “I’d like to believe ing behind the remainder of an ordi- me to understand. “I’m just so stuck on that. I’d like to see it happen. I’ve got nary Tuesday at work. this immigration thing. I really am, be- mixed emotions with him so far.” I approached a woman who intro- cause I’ve lived through it, giving bene- Walking out of Snap-on’s headquar- duced herself as Donna Wollmuth. fits and everything to people that aren’t ters, through the chanting crowd, I She was sixty-eight years old, and she here legally.” wondered whether Trump could see worked in Snap-on’s warehouse, pack- Wollmuth had almost always voted the protesters from his chopper. He ing boxes for shipment. I asked her for Democrats, but she had come knows the unpredictable potential of what she thought of Trump’s com- to believe that her family—she has a crowd. I remembered something that ments. “I believe in it,” she said. “And seven grandchildren and stepgrand- Sam Nunberg, the Trump campaign I believe in America. I want the jobs children—faced a dark future. When adviser, had told me about Trump’s fix- back here.” Trump entered the race, Wollmuth ation on crowds. “I said to him once, At first, I wondered if she was merely was turned o by his antics. “He’s ‘I understand it’s the biggest. Who repeating Trump’s slogans, but it be- gotta learn to keep his mouth shut,” gives a shit? Who cares at this point? came clear that she had thought hard she said, but his pledge to reënergize What we care about is votes,’ ” Nun- about his message. Her story was of the American manufacturing was too berg said. “And he says, ‘No. It’s got to kind that has become a stock explana- specific and attractive to ignore. She be.’ Some of it was he was seriously tion for Trump’s rise. For twenty-three took a chance on Trump, as did many concerned about the country. He also years, she operated a sewing machine, of her neighbors. After going for wanted to see where this went and what making briefs and sportswear at Jockey. Obama by large margins in the pre- it was. The crowds and energy showed When the plant closed, in , and vious two elections, Kenosha County him it was a movement.”
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 45 A REPORTER AT LARGE CUT TO THE BONE
How a poultry company exploits immigration laws.
BY MICHAEL GRABELL
, the smell ical Center, where surgeons amputated Case Farms has built its business by from the Case Farms chicken his lower leg. recruiting some of the world’s most vul- B plant in Canton, Ohio, is like a Back at the plant, Osiel’s supervisors nerable immigrants, who endure harsh pungent fog, drifting over a highway hurriedly demanded workers’ identifica- and at times illegal conditions that few lined with dollar stores and auto-parts tion papers. Technically, Osiel worked Americans would put up with. When shops. When the stink is at its ripest, it for Case Farms’ closely a liated sanita- these workers have fought for higher means that the day’s hundred and eighty tion contractor, and suddenly the bosses pay and better conditions, the company thousand chickens have been slaugh- seemed to care about immigration sta- has used their immigration status to get tered, drained of blood, stripped of feath- tus. Within days, Osiel and several oth- rid of vocal workers, avoid paying for ers, and carved into pieces—and it’s time ers—all underage and undocumented— injuries, and quash dissent. Thirty years for workers like Osiel López Pérez to were fired. ago, Congress passed an immigration clean up. On April , , Osiel put on Though Case Farms isn’t a house- law mandating fines and even jail time bulky rubber boots and a white hard hat, hold name, you’ve probably eaten its for employers who hire unauthorized and trained a pressurized hose on the chicken. Each year, it produces nearly workers, but trivial penalties and weak plant’s stainless-steel machines, blasting a billion pounds for customers such as enforcement have allowed employers to o the leftover grease, meat, and blood. Kentucky Fried Chicken, Popeyes, and evade responsibility. Under President A Guatemalan immigrant, Osiel was Taco Bell. Boar’s Head sells its chicken Obama, Immigration and Customs En- just weeks past his seventeenth birthday, as deli meat in supermarkets. Since , forcement agreed not to investigate too young by law to work in a factory. A the U.S. government has purchased workers during labor disputes. Advo- year earlier, after gang members shot his nearly seventeen million dollars’ worth cates worry that President Trump, whose mother and tried to kidnap his sisters, he of Case Farms chicken, mostly for the Administration has targeted unautho- left his home, in the mountainous village federal school-lunch program. rized immigrants, will scrap those agree- of Tectitán, and sought asylum in the Case Farms plants are among the ments, emboldening employers to sim- United States. He got the job at Case most dangerous workplaces in America. ply call anytime workers complain. Farms with a driver’s license that said his In alone, federal workplace-safety While the President stirs up fears name was Francisco Sepulveda, age twenty- inspectors fined the company nearly two about Latino immigrants and refugees, eight. The photograph on the I.D. was million dollars, and in the past seven he ignores the role that companies, par- of his older brother, who looked nothing years it has been cited for two hundred ticularly in the poultry and meatpack- like him, but nobody asked any questions. and forty violations. That’s more than ing industry, have played in bringing Osiel sanitized the liver-giblet chiller, any other company in the poultry in- those immigrants to the Midwest and a tublike contraption that cools chicken dustry except Tyson Foods, which has the Southeast. The newcomers’ arrival innards by cycling them through a more than thirty times as many employ- in small, mostly white cities experienc- near-freezing bath, then looked for a lad- ees. David Michaels, the former head ing industrial decline in turn helped fo- der, so that he could turn o the water of the Occupational Safety and Health ment the economic and ethnic anxieties valve above the machine. As usual, he Administration ( ), called Case that brought Trump to o ce. Osiel ended said, there weren’t enough ladders to go Farms “an outrageously dangerous place up in Ohio by following a generation of around, so he did as a supervisor had to work.” Four years before Osiel lost indigenous Guatemalans, who have been shown him: he climbed up the machine, his leg, Michaels’s inspectors had seen the backbone of Case Farms’ workforce onto the edge of the tank, and reached Case Farms employees standing on top since , when a manager drove a van for the valve. His foot slipped; the ma- of machines to sanitize them and warned down to the orange groves and tomato chine automatically kicked on. Its pad- the company that someone would get fields around Indiantown, Florida, and dles grabbed his left leg, pulling and hurt. Just a week before Osiel’s accident, came back with the company’s first load twisting until it snapped at the knee and an inspector noted in a report that Case of Mayan refugees. rotating it a hundred and eighty degrees, Farms had repeatedly taken advantage so that his toes rested on his pelvis. The of loopholes in the law and given the Presidential elec- machine “literally ripped o his left leg,” agency false information. “The company Jtion in November, I toured Case medical reports said, leaving it hanging has a twenty-five-year track record of Farms’ chicken plant in Canton with by a frayed ligament and a five-inch flap failing to comply with federal work- several managers. After putting on hair- of skin. Osiel was rushed to Mercy Med- place-safety standards,” Michaels said. nets and butcher coats, we walked into
46 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 The law makes it hard to penalize employers, and easy for employers to retaliate against workers.
ILLUSTRATION BY CLEON PETERSON THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 47 a vast, refrigerated factory that is kept birds were scalded alive or frozen to wear diapers. One woman told me that at forty-five degrees in order to pre- their cages. the company disciplined her for leav- vent bacterial growth. The sound of Next, the chickens enter the “eviscer- ing the line to use the bathroom, even machines drowned out everything ex- ation department,” where they begin to though she was seven months pregnant. cept shouting. Thousands of raw chick- look less like animals and more like ens whizzed by on overhead shackles, meat. One overhead line has nothing but founded in , slid into chutes, and were mechanically chicken feet. The floors are slick with C when Tom Shelton, a longtime poul- sawed into thighs and drumsticks. A water and blood, and a fast-moving waste- try executive, bought a family-owned bird, I learned, could go from clucking water canal, which workers call “the river,” operation called Case Egg & Poultry, to nuggets in less than three hours, and runs through the plant. Mechanical claws whose plant was in Winesburg, Ohio. In be in your bucket or burrito by lunch- extract the birds’ insides, and a line of the world of larger-than-life chicken ty- time the next day. hooks carry away the “gut pack”—the coons, like Bo Pilgrim—who built a gran- Poultry processing begins in the diose mansion in rural Texas nicknamed chicken houses of contracted farmers. Cluckingham Palace—Shelton, with a At night, when the chickens are sleep- neat mustache, a corporate hair style, and ing, crews of chicken catchers round a mild manner, stood out. The son of a them up, grabbing four in each hand farmer, Shelton majored in poultry tech- and caging them as the birds peck and nology at North Carolina State, where scratch and defecate. Workers told me he was the president of the poultry club that they are paid around $ . for every and participated in national competi- thousand chickens. Two crews of nine tions in which teams of aspiring poul- catchers can bring in about seventy-five trymen graded chicken carcasses for qual- thousand chickens a night. livers, gizzards, and hearts, with the in- ity and defects. Perdue Farms hired him At the plant, the birds are dumped testines dangling like limp spaghetti. right out of college, and he quickly rose into a chute that leads to the “live hang” On the refrigerated side of the plant, through the ranks, attending Harvard area, a room bathed in black light, there’s a long table called the “debon- Business School’s Advanced Manage- which keeps the birds calm. Every two ing line.” After being chilled, then sawed ment Program before becoming Perdue’s seconds, employees grab a chicken and in half by a mechanical blade, the chick- president, at the age of forty-three. hang it upside down by its feet. “This ens, minus legs and thighs, end up here. In , the year that Shelton resigned piece here is called a breast rub,” At this point, the workers take over. Two from Perdue and started Case Farms, he Chester Hawk, the plant’s burly main- workers grab the chickens and place gave a keynote address at the Interna- tenance manager, told me, pointing to them on steel cones, as if they were win- tional Poultry Trade Show. It was a time a plastic pad. “It’s rubbing their breast, ter hats with earflaps. The chickens then of change: new mass-market products and it’s giving them a calming sensa- move to stations where dozens of cut- such as nuggets, fingers, and bu alo tion. You can see the bird coming to- ters, wearing aprons and hairnets and wings—along with health concerns over ward the stunner. He’s very calm.” The armed with knives, stand shoulder to red meat—had made chicken a staple birds are stunned by an electric pulse shoulder, each performing a rapid se- of American diets. With more women before entering the “kill room,” where ries of cuts—slicing wings, removing working, families no longer had time to a razor slits their throats as they pass. breasts, and pulling out the pink meat cut up whole chickens. To meet the grow- The room looks like the set of a hor- for chicken tenders. ing demand, Shelton told the audience, ror movie: blood splatters everywhere Case Farms managers said that the poultry plants would have to become and pools on the floor. One worker, lines in Canton run about thirty-five more automated, and they would also known as the “backup killer,” stands in birds a minute, but workers at other need lots of labor. the middle, poking chickens with his Case Farms plants told me that their Shelton was the kind of manager who knife and slicing their necks if they’re lines run as fast as forty-five birds a could recite the details involved in every still alive. minute. In , meat, poultry, and fish step of production, from the density of The headless chickens are sent to cutters, repeating similar motions more breeding cages to the number of birds the “defeathering room,” a sweltering than fifteen thousand times a day, ex- processed per man-hour. He set about space with a barnlike smell. Here the perienced carpal-tunnel syndrome at maximizing line speeds at Case Farms, dead birds are scalded with hot water nearly twenty times the rate of work- buying additional family-owned opera- before mechanical fingers pluck their ers in other industries. The combina- tions and implementing modern factory feathers. In , an animal-welfare tion of speed, sharp blades, and close practices. Today, the company’s four group said that Case Farms had the quarters is dangerous: since , more plants—Morganton and Dudley, in “worst chicken plants for animal cru- than seven hundred and fifty process- North Carolina, and Canton and Wines- elty” after it found that two of the com- ing workers have su ered amputations. burg, in Ohio—employ more than three pany’s plants had more federal hu- Case Farms says it allows bathroom thousand people. mane-handling violations than any breaks at reasonable intervals, but work- Winesburg, the home of Shelton’s other chicken plant in the country. ers in North Carolina told me that they first plant, is a small community in the Inspectors reported that dozens of must wait so long that some of them middle of Amish country. Even today,
48 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 it’s not uncommon for drivers to yield Catholic church in Florida that was help- made it to Florida had limited options. for horse-drawn buggies or to see women ing refugees from the Guatemalan civil Beecher arrived at the church in time in long dresses and bonnets carrying war. Thousands of Mayans had been liv- for Sunday Mass, and set himself up in goods home from Whitmer’s General ing in Indiantown after fleeing a cam- its o ce. He had no trouble recruiting Store. Before Shelton bought the plant, paign of violence carried out by the Gua- parishioners to return with him to the it had employed mostly young Amish temalan military. More than two hundred Case Farms plant in Morganton, in the women and Mennonites. But, as the thousand people, most of them Mayan, foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. company expanded, it stopped recogniz- were killed or forcibly disappeared in Those first Guatemalans worked so hard, ing Amish holidays and began hiring the conflict. A report commissioned by Beecher told the labor historian Leon outside the insular community. “The the United Nations described instances Fink in his book, “The Maya of Morgan- Amish fathers found the urban newcom- of soldiers beating children “against walls ton,” that supervisors kept asking for more, ers objectionable because of such things or throwing them alive into pits,” and prompting a return trip. Soon vans were as coarse slogans on T-shirts, vulgarity covering people “in petrol and burning running regularly between Indiantown in conversations, and ‘necking’ in the them alive.” In , in a village of Agua- and Morganton, bringing in new recruits. parking lot,” the company said later, in catán, where many Case Farms workers “I didn’t want [Mexicans],” Beecher, who federal-court filings. The Amish work- come from, soldiers rounded up and shot died in , told Fink. “Mexicans will ers left Case Farms, and, almost imme- twenty-two men. They then split their go back home at Christmastime. You’re diately, the company had trouble find- skulls and ate their brains, dumping the going to lose them for six weeks. And in ing people who were willing to work bodies into a ravine. the poultry business you can’t a ord that. under its poor conditions for little more Through the years, the United States You just can’t do it. But Guatemalans can’t than minimum wage. It turned first to had supported Guatemala’s dictators go back home. They’re here as political the residents of nearby Rust Belt cities, with money, weapons, intelligence, and refugees. If they go back home, they get which had fallen on hard times follow- training. Amid the worst of the vio- shot.” Shelton approved hiring the im- ing the collapse of the steel and rubber lence, President Reagan, after meeting migrants, Beecher said, and when the industries. Turnover was high. About with General Efraín Ríos Montt, told plant was fully sta ed and production had twenty-five to thirty of its five hundred the press that he believed the regime doubled “he was tickled to death.” employees left every week. had “been getting a bum rap.” The Ad- Scrambling to find workers in the late ministration viewed the Guatemalan could feel nineteen-eighties and early nineties, Case refugees as economic migrants and E the pain in her left arm getting worse. Farms sent recruiters across the country Communist sympathizers—threats For eight hours a day, she stood at a cut- to hire Latino workers. Many of the new to national security. Only a handful ting table at the Case Farms Morgan- arrivals found the conditions intolerable. received asylum. The Mayans who ton plant, using a knife or scissors to In one instance, the recruiters hired doz- ens of migrant farmworkers from border towns in Texas, o ering them bus tick- ets to Ohio and housing once there. When workers arrived, they encountered a sit- uation that a federal judge later called “wretched and loathsome.” They were packed in small houses with about twenty other people. Although it was the mid- dle of winter, the houses had no heat, fur- niture, or blankets. One worker said that his house had no water, so he flushed the toilet with melted snow. They slept on the floor, where cockroaches crawled over them. At dawn, they rode to the plant in a dilapidated van whose seating consisted of wooden planks resting on cinder blocks. Exhaust fumes seeped in through holes in the floor. The Texas farmworkers quit, but by then Case Farms had found a new solution to its labor problems.
in , a Case O Farms human-resources manager named Norman Beecher got behind the wheel of a large passenger van and headed south. He had got a tip about a remove fat and bones from chicken legs every two to three seconds. She wore a chain-mail glove on her non-cutting CHORUS AND ANTI-CHORUS hand to protect it from accidental stabs by her knife or by the blades of her (January , , Washington D.C.) co-workers. The glove weighed about as much as a softball, but grew heavier All tragedies contain us as grease and fat caught in the steel mesh. With no beginning By , the pain and swelling were To speak of; each time we talk routinely driving González to the plant’s first-aid station. A nursing assistant Ourselves back into gathering would give her pain relievers and send Another step toward her back to the line. She could no lon- The nally said ger lift a gallon of milk, and had trou- ble making a fist. At night, after putting Which does not work for all. her children to bed, she’d rub soothing To say to each other lotion on her swollen wrist and forearm. What we believe One Friday, in September, , González was called to Case Farms’ Becomes the action, to explain human- resources o ce. The director told The story while also being her that the company had received a let- The story. We are enough ter from the Social Security Adminis- tration informing it that the Social Se- Not as one but as one of many. curity number she had provided wasn’t We have imagined the places valid. González, one of the few Mexi- We will not be moved; cans at the plant, told me that the direc- tor sold her a new permanent-resident card, with the name Claudia Zamora, workers left the plant, gathering at a “Claudia, you’re a probationary em- for five hundred dollars, and helped her Catholic church nearby. González and ployee,” the director replied. “I don’t have fill out a new application. (The human- another woman agreed to speak to a local a job for you.” resources director denied selling her the newspaper reporter. Quoted as Claudia González challenged her firing before I.D.) She was assigned to the same job, Zamora, González said, “Workers at Case the National Labor Relations Board, a with the same supervisor. And Case Farms are routinely told to ignore notes federal body created to protect workers’ Farms paid her more than it did new from doctors about work restrictions when rights to organize. The N.L.R.B. judge hires, noting in her file that she “had pre- they’ve been injured on the job.” wrote, “In my opinion, [Case Farms] vious poultry experience.” later found that Case Farms often made knew exactly what was going on with re- Around that time, Case Farms work- workers wait months to see a doctor, spect to her employment status.” The ers began complaining that their yellow flouted restrictions, and fired injured company, he said, “took advantage of the latex gloves ripped easily, soaking their workers who couldn’t do their job. situation.” The board eventually ruled hands with cold chicken juice. Only after Returning to the factory on the Mon- that González had been illegally fired for pieces of rubber began appearing in pack- day after the walkout, González brought protesting working conditions. But the ages of chicken did Case Farms buy a note from the local medical clinic pre- victory was largely symbolic. In , the more expensive, better-quality gloves. It scribing “light work or no work” for a Supreme Court had ruled, in a – de- passed the extra expense along to its em- week. She gave it to the safety manager, cision, that undocumented workers had ployees, charging workers, who were who asked her to fill out a report stat- the right to complain about labor viola- making between seven and eight dollars ing when the pain began. When she tions, but that companies had no obliga- an hour, fifty cents a pair if they used wrote “ ,” he was ba ed. Accord- tion to rehire them or to pay back wages. more than three pairs during a shift. ing to personnel records, “Zamora” had In the dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer The morning the policy took e ect, worked there for only a month. The predicted that the Court’s decision would in October, , there were grumbles human- resources director who had hired incentivize employers to hire undocu- throughout the plant’s locker rooms. As González as Zamora summoned her to mented workers “with a wink and a nod,” workers began cutting chickens, the line the o ce; she had been sent a copy of knowing that “they can violate the labor abruptly stopped. One woman yelled the newspaper article quoting González. laws at least once with impunity.” that if they stuck together they could The pain couldn’t be related to work at Case Farms had broken the law, but force the company to change the policy. Case Farms, the director told González. there was nothing González could do When they refused to go back to work, After all, she was a new employee. about it. The doctor told her that she managers called the police, and o cers González didn’t understand. “I’m not needed surgery for carpal-tunnel syn- escorted workers o the premises. new,” she said, her voice rising. “You know drome, but she never got it. A decade More than two hundred and fifty how many years I’ve been working here.” later, her hand is limp, and her anger
50 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 bales of hay. According to the N.L.R.B., when the workers walked out again, in , a manager told an employee that he would take out the strike leaders “one Have given many names at a time.” A short time later, Ixcoy was To what we can make— fired for insubordination after an argu- And the river sings as it ows ment with a manager on the plant floor prompted some workers to bang their Past both sides of the city knives and yell “Strike!” A judge with the As it splits the one N.L.R.B. found that Ixcoy had been un- Into two. And he who was to be the hero lawfully fired for his union activity and ordered that he be reinstated. After Ixcoy Is not the hero returned to work, however, the union re- And we who are given so much ceived a letter saying that it had come to To sing must move as if this is not the company’s attention that nine of its employees might not be legally autho- Interlude or merely disruption rized to work in the United States. Seven As we sing by the engine were on the union organizing commit- That will not cease, and the bird above the siren tee, including Ixcoy. All were fired. The company’s sudden discovery that In its unexamined freedom the union organizers were undocumented Lifts even higher was hard to credit. Ixcoy had first been As there is no place left to land. hired in , as Elmer Noel Rosado. After a few years, a Case Farms man- —Sophie Cabot Black ager told him that the company had re- ceived notice that there was another per- son, in California, working under the still fresh. “This hand,” she told me, sit- had expired or were about to expire. Case same I.D. “The manager, he told me if ting in her living room. “I try not to use Farms refused to negotiate with the union you can buy another paper you’re wel- it at all.” for three years, appealing the election re- come to come back,” Ixcoy said. So he sults all the way to the Supreme Court. bought another I.D. for a thousand dol- González was After the company lost the case, it re- lars and returned to Case Farms under W part of Case Farms’ decades-long duced the workweek to four days in an the name Omar Carrion Rivera. Cur- strategy to beat back worker unrest with e ort to put pressure on the employees. rent and former workers at Case Farms’ creative uses of immigration law. The Eventually, the union pulled out. four plants said that the company had year that Case Farms was founded, Con- Case Farms followed the same play- an unspoken policy of allowing them to gress passed the Immigration Reform book in , when workers at the come back with a new I.D. An employee and Control Act, which made it illegal Winesburg plant complained about faster in Dudley told me that he had worked to “knowingly” hire undocumented im- line speeds and a procedure that required at the plant under four di erent names. migrants. But employers aren’t required them to cut three wings at a time by Case Farms executives had to have to be document experts, which makes it stacking the wings and running them known that many of their employees hard to penalize them. The requirement through a spinning saw. Occasionally, were unauthorized. On at least three oc- that workers fill out an I- form, how- the wings broke, and bones got caught casions, scores of workers fled their plants, ever, declaring under penalty of perjury in workers’ gloves, dragging their fingers fearing immigration raids. that they’re authorized to work, makes through the saw. One day, a Guatema- Ixcoy eventually received a special visa it easy for employers to retaliate against lan immigrant named Juan Ixcoy refused for crime victims because of the work- workers. to cut the wings that way. As word spread place abuses he had su ered. “Ixcoy lived In , around a hundred Case Farms through the plant, workers stopped the in an atmosphere of fear created by su- employees refused to work in protest lines and gathered in the cafeteria. Ixcoy, pervisors at Case Farms,” the Labor De- against low pay, lack of bathroom breaks, who is now forty-two, became a leader partment wrote in his visa application. and payroll deductions for aprons and in a new fight to unionize. “They saw “He feared for his own safety, that if he gloves. In response, Case Farms had fifty- that I didn’t have fear,” he told me. complained or cooperated with author- two of them arrested for trespassing. In In July, , more than a hundred ities, he would be arrested or deported.” , more than two hundred workers and fifty workers went on strike. For nine walked out of the plant and, after strik- months, through the depths of the reces- few years, Tom Shelton ing for four days, voted to unionize. Three sion, they picketed in a cornfield across I has cast himself as the genial propri- weeks after the protest, Case Farms re- the street from the plant. In the winter, etor of a winery that he runs on his quested documents from more than a they bundled up in snowsuits and pro- forty-acre estate on Maryland’s Eastern hundred employees whose work permits tested from a shed made of plywood and Shore. Its name, Bordeleau, means “the
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 51 water’s edge,” and it’s one of the few win- the industry’s trade group, the National ness as if it’s their own,” Popowycz said. eries in the United States that you can Chicken Council, said that Case Farms I found it hard to believe that Shel- visit by boat. Shelton exercises the same had made some safety mistakes but was ton, who is known to ask questions about attention to detail at the winery that he working hard to correct them. He de- a ten-thousand-dollar equipment ex- does at Case Farms. According to Bor- fended the company on every question pense, wouldn’t be aware of workplace deleau’s Web site, he is “particular about I had. Case Farms, he said, treated its disputes costing tens of thousands of everything, from pruning vines to the workers well and never refused to let dollars in legal fees. I contacted sixty operation of the bottling line to the fresh- them use the bathroom. Fees for re- former Case Farms managers, supervi- ness of the wines being served in the placement equipment discouraged work- sors, and human-resources representa- tasting room.” The label features Shel- ers from throwing things away. As for tives. Most declined to comment or ton’s elegant Georgian-style château. unions, the company didn’t need some- didn’t return my calls, but I spoke to Shelton never responded to my calls one to stand between it and its employ- eight of them. Many agreed that Shel- or letters. A Case Farms P.R. person said ees. “Our goal is to prove that we’re not ton gave them a good deal of auton- he declined to be interviewed and, in- the company that has basically omy, and denied that there was pres- stead, arranged for me to meet with the said we are,” he told me. sure to produce chickens faster and company’s vice-chairman, Mike Po- Popowycz seemed unaware of many more cheaply. “When I was there, any powycz, and other managers in a con- of the specific incidents I cited. He problems that we saw, we took care of ference room in Winesburg. Popowycz was almost like a parent hearing of it,” Andy Cilona, a human- resources di- is the son of Ukrainian immigrants, his teen-ager’s delinquency: he hoped rector in Winesburg in the nineties, told who came to America after the Second supervisors didn’t do that, but, if they me. But two said that promotions went World War. His father was a steelworker, did, it was wrong. Case Farms oper- to those who pushed employees hard- and his mother worked nights in a ates under a decentralized manage- est, which led some supervisors to treat thread mill. “I know what these people ment system, which Shelton instituted workers harshly. go through every day,” he said. “I can see early on. Every Monday at . ., Shel- Popowycz acknowledged that some the struggles that they go through be- ton hosts a conference call from Mary- human-resources supervisors had sold cause those are the struggles my parents land, but many decisions are left to fake I.D.s; when the company found out, went through.” local managers. “We want the people it fired them. He insisted that Case Farms Popowycz, who is the chairman of at the locations to manage their busi- complied with immigration laws. It was one of the first companies in Ohio to re- port Social Security numbers to immi- gration in the nineties. Case Farms also periodically audits its personnel records, and when it receives letters from the au- thorities about discrepancies in workers’ I.D.s it investigates. But the company has never used immigration status to re- taliate against injured or vocal workers, Popowycz said; any firings that occurred after protests were coincidental. “At the end of the day, we need labor in our plants; we’re not looking to get rid of these folks,” Popowycz said. “Do we do everything right? We hope we do.”
, travelled to several vil- L lages in the Guatemalan state of Huehuetenango in the hope of finding former Case Farms workers. After pass- ing through the market town of Agua- catán, where women in white-and-red huipiles sell everything from garlic to geese, I headed forty-five minutes up a mountain to the village of Chex, where I found a cargo truck that had careened over the side of a road. Dozens of men came from the nearby fields and helped brace the truck with branches and ropes. I asked the men if any of them had “Today, I’ll be cherry-picking from Deuteronomy.” worked for Case Farms. “I worked there for a year, around to ,” one man said. “ ,” another added. “Six months. It’s killer work.” “Eleven years,” said another. Two said that they had been among the first Guatemalans to work in Winesburg. Former Case Farms workers turned up everywhere—the hotel clerk in Aguacatán, members of the local church, a hitchhiker I picked up on the way to another village. One man in Chex had been a chicken catcher in Winesburg, but years of overuse had left his elbow swollen and in chronic pain. Unaware that Case Farms is supposed to pay for workplace injuries, he told me that he had returned to Guatemala to heal and had spent thousands of dollars see- ing doctors. Now his arm lay frozen at his side. The village where Osiel grew up, Tec- titán, is at the top of another mountain five hours west, reachable by a winding red-dirt road. It’s so isolated that it has its own language, Tektiteko. Like Chex, Tectitán has a long history of sending “I said it was a new idea—I never said it was a great idea.” residents north to work at Case Farms. By the time Osiel was a teen-ager, a man watching a soccer match could make •• fun of the Guatemalan team’s goalie on Facebook by saying that he “couldn’t to touch it. I didn’t have anything there. to ethnic Nepalis expelled from Bhutan, even grab the chickens at Case Farms.” I started crying.” Today, he lives with who today make up nearly thirty-five I met Osiel at Centro San Jose, a two of his brothers in a weathered gable- per cent of the company’s employees in social-welfare agency and legal clinic front house next to a vacant lot. He is Ohio. “It’s an industry that targets the operated from an old redbrick Lutheran still getting used to the prosthesis, and most vulnerable group of workers and church on the edge of downtown Can- hobbles when he walks. “I never thought brings them in,” Debbie Berkowitz, ton. For the past few years, Centro San that something like this could happen ’s former senior policy adviser, told Jose has been swamped by hundreds of to me,” he said. “They told me that they me. “And when one group gets too pow- unaccompanied minors fleeing gang vi- couldn’t do anything for my leg to get erful and stands up for their rights they olence in Guatemala. Osiel was wear- better. They told me that everything was figure out who’s even more vulnerable ing a blue knit hat with a pompom, a going to be O.K.” and move them in.” white compression shirt, sweatpants with The Labor Department, in addition Recently, Case Farms has found a more patches, and blue sneakers. He told me to finding numerous safety violations, captive workforce. One blazing morning that he left Guatemala on his sixteenth fined Cal-Clean, Case Farms’ sanitation last summer in Morganton, an old yel- birthday, after his mother’s murder, and, contractor, sixty-three thousand dollars low school bus arrived at Case Farms two weeks later, was in the custody of for employing four child laborers, in- and passed through the plant’s gates, pull- border-patrol agents in Arizona. He cluding Osiel. The fines and the cita- ing up to the employee entrance. Doz- moved in with an uncle in Canton and tions against Case Farms have contin- ens of inmates from the local prison befriended some other teen-agers from ued to accumulate. Last September, filed o , ready to work at the plant. Even Tectitán who were working nights at determined that the company’s line their days may be numbered, however. Case Farms. He worked at the plant for speeds and work flow were so hazard- During the tour in Canton, Popowycz eight months, earning nine dollars an ous to workers’ hands and arms that it and other Case Farms managers showed hour, before the accident. should “investigate and change imme- me something they were excited about, Osiel said that, on the night of the diately” nearly all the positions on the something that would help solve their accident, after passing out in the ma- line. As the company fights the fines, it labor problems and also reduce injuries: chine, he awoke in the hospital. “The finds new ways to keep labor costs down. in a corner of the plant was a shiny new nurses told me that I lost my leg,” he re- For a time, after the Guatemalan work- machine called an “automatic deboner.” called. “I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t feel ers began to organize, Case Farms re- It would soon replace seventy per cent any pain. And then, hours later, I tried cruited Burmese refugees. Then it turned of the workers on the line.
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 53 FICTION
54 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 ILLUSTRATION BY BIANCA BAGNARELLI , than ten, ac- her second divorce and was taking it sected them with vehemence, as if out costed Bella and Peter as they out on them, and they had to put up of hatred. A left the restaurant famous for with her for only one more hour. In the cab back to the hotel, no one its Peking duck. Adrian, Peter’s boy- spoke. Peter and Adrian said goodbye friend, was lagging behind, practicing Peter for twenty- to Bella in the hallway. They were to his Mandarin one last time before the B five years. They had shared a place take an early flight the next morning. end of their trip. with two other housemates in Boston “So long, farewell,” she replied in a “Buy a rose,” the girl said to Peter when they were in law school, and singsong voice. “Adieu, adieu, to you in English. “For your girlfriend.” for as long as they had been friends and you—” “Thank you, my dear,” Peter said, they had been talking about visiting “And you,” Peter said. “Come home “but she’s not my girlfriend.” China together. It was one of those soon.” The girl did not understand En- promises made for not keeping, simi- Bella had arranged to spend a few glish. She prompted him again with lar to the solo trip to Antarctica that extra days in Beijing before flying back the memorized line. Bella had sometimes imagined when to New York, thinking that she would “Quiet,” Bella said in Mandarin. things were going wrong in her mar- need a break after playing tour guide. “He’s not my boyfriend.” riages. But China, not as far-fetched Now she deplored their imminent de- “How can it be, sister? He’s hand- as Antarctica, had become much closer parture. Loneliness, people might call some. And you’re pretty.” when Peter started dating Adrian, a it, yet it was not loneliness that made “Sister? I’m old enough to be your French-Canadian whose great-grand- her feel betrayed. Peter had been an aunt.” father had been among the Chinese early friend in America, made out of “Then tell my uncle to buy a rose laborers who collected bodies and dug convenience when Bella first arrived, for you,” the girl said, gesturing toward graves on the Western Front in . but he’d turned out to be a rarity, with the cardboard sign she wore like a bib. Adrian was a writer, and he was work- a seemingly boundless memory. He “ RMB,” it said, with crudely drawn ing on “a multigenerational and inter- could recall with precision any episode flowers surrounding the price. Peter continental epic” based on his family from a friend’s life—and he had many shook his head and stuck both hands history, and during the past two weeks friends. If Bella had to write an auto- determinedly into his jacket pockets. the three of them had toured a num- biography—what a thin, dull volume “Listen, I’ll give you the money for ber of towns on the East China Sea, that would be—he would be her ghost- a rose, and you leave us alone,” Bella sifting through local archives, tracing writer. If she were to put her life on- said. the untraceable. We know his surname stage, he would be her prompter. But “No,” the girl said. “You have to buy was Li, Adrian had said of his great- the ease of having her life stored in an- one. I can’t go home until I sell them grandfather, and that his family mi- other person’s memory had done little all.” grated from Jiangsu to Shandong some- to help Bella on this trip. Peter had be- Bella counted out three hundred time during the Qing dynasty. Do you come the wrong accompaniment for RMB. “Enough?” she asked. The girl know how many people bearing that Bella’s solo. Perhaps he and Adrian felt surrendered the entire bouquet, and surname live in China? Bella had said. the same way about her. Bella tossed it into the cypress shrubs by Ninety million. “What’s wrong with China?” Bella the restaurant’s entrance, well groomed It was irksome to Bella that Adrian said now. “This is still my home coun- and fenced in. “Now,” she said, “home had created romances for his charac- try.” you go.” ters and himself in the places he had “You may not be an easygoing The girl put the money away care- the remotest reason to claim—Jiang- person,” Peter said, “but you’ve always fully, and then, standing on tiptoe, yin, Wulian, Marseille, Ypres, Beau- been fun. Here in China? It’s like you’re tried to reach the flowers. Adrian, who lencourt, Montreal, New York. With a stoned the wrong way.” had just come out of the restaurant, novelistic certainty, this blue-eyed, “So I’m a bore.” jumped over the fence and retrieved pale-skinned man and his Chinese “A contentious bore!” the bouquet for the girl. She vanished great-grandfather would be sentimen- It had been a mistake to combine into the darkness, a swift and pur- tally reunited. People without geneal- Adrian’s research with her recovery hol- poseful minnow. ogies, Bella thought, were like weeds, iday. Memory lane was barely wide The April night was cool but not their existence of consequence to no enough for one traveller. clear, the smog bringing tears to Bel- one but weed killers. Perhaps that was In the bathtub, Bella hummed to la’s eyes. “What’s wrong?” Adrian asked. why any reasonable person would try herself: “I’m glad to go, I cannot tell a “You owe me three hundred yuan,” to locate a family root or two. From lie. I flit, I float, I fleetly flee, I fly.” To Bella said. the roots to the flowers and the fruits: this day, she could sing from beginning Adrian exchanged a look with Peter, the penchant for cultivating—a gar- to end every song from “The Sound of and Bella knew they were speaking to den, a love a air, a family, a friend- Music,” which she had had to watch each other in that language which lov- ship, a made-up epic—seemed to be a every Saturday afternoon for a year ers stupidly think of as their own. She healthy, constructive habit. But Bella as a requirement for her high-school was in a horrendous mood, they were was no horticulturist. At work, she read English class. It had so sickened her telling each other; she was angry over legal documents and contracts and dis- that when the English club discussed
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 55 putting on a stage production she English better than anyone—she had Bella had been treated well by teachers threatened to quit—it was either Maria studied with a tutor since she was seven, and students alike. Once, a delegation von Trapp or Bella, and her classmates something unheard of among her of American politicians had toured the had chosen her. schoolmates in Beijing in . campus, and Bella, assigned to accom- O English club, the epitome of Bel- What Bella had wanted to play, pany them with the headmistress, had la’s youth! instead of Red Riding Hood or Cin- worn her favorite dress, its lavender color Of course, she had had a di erent derella, was the Little Match Girl. matching the wisteria hanging over the name then, but she had been Bella for “Matches, matches, please buy some pathway between the science building the past twenty-five years, legalized in matches, sir? Please buy some matches, and the art building. The delegation did America, the name used for her pass- madam?” their share of praising, and the head- port, for her marriage licenses, and then Buy a rose; buy a rose for your girl- mistress reciprocated with her share of for the divorce papers. Not, though, friend. appreciation. Bella, interpreting for the carved on her parents’ gravestones: both But there had never been such a pro- visitors, believed for a brief moment stones bore her Chinese name, that of duction. The story did not have many that she could have anything—all she their only child. Bella had not included roles or many lines, even for the Little needed was to want—but that blissful her first husband’s name on her moth- Match Girl. It was silly to perform fairy feeling was cut short by Miss Chu, who er’s gravestone—her mother had given tales when the students were already in was walking across the lawn without only lukewarm approval to the mar- high school, but most of her classmates casting even the most perfunctory glance riage. When Bella’s father died, she was did not speak enough English for more at the visitors or at Bella. in her second marriage, already seeing sophisticated work. Once, they had ven- What Bella had wanted was to be cracks, which she could have made an tured into “The Necklace,” by Maupas- the Little Match Girl: hungry, cold, for- e ort to mend had she cared a little sant, and at a rehearsal Bella had watched ever begging, and forever dying. What more. She had been wise not to include with abhorrence the boy who was play- she was was the opposite. She had been a husband’s name on either gravestone. ing her insignificant husband kick raised in a family of stature. Her father Her parents could have been stuck for open an imaginary door. “Mathilde,” he was a diplomat, her mother an opera eternity with the consecutive ex-sons- said, his voice reminding Bella of an singer; her maternal grandfather had in-law, though that possibility, a dis- inner tube hung at a bicycle repairman’s been among the group of revolution- cordant note that their marriage, known stand—rubbery, greasy, intestine-like. aries who established the Chinese So- for its harmony, would have had to en- “Mathilde, my dear. Look what I have viet Republic, in the nineteen-thirties. dure posthumously, entertained Bella. got you.” She had to open the card he The only imperfection—in others’ eyes handed her, part of the play. But, instead more than in the family’s—was that Bella had of an invitation to the party at the Min- Bella was not connected to these peo- I read in college, English clubs hosted istry of Education, it held a love poem ple by blood. Her mother, whose beauty feasts and boasted of social status, from the boy to Bella. and career were not to be destroyed by whereas the English club at her high Contaminated, she remembered the childbearing, had adopted a pretty baby school had merely collected a medley episode afterward: the basement room girl from her home province. At two, of students with various motivations with its buzzing fluorescent tubes, a few the girl had been diagnosed, in the par- and needs: some wanted to have access lance of the day, as deaf-mute and had to the only typewriters in the school been sent away. Not to her birth par- (and, quite possibly, in their lives), or to ents, Bella had learned, but with her the works of Charles Dickens, Jane Aus- nanny, who had received a handsome ten, Jack London, and Ernest Heming- sum of money for them to settle com- way, among other writers, which were fortably in the countryside. Bella had available in the English club’s library; come later, another baby girl whose others required extra tutoring from their beauty was prominent, and this truth, teacher, Miss Chu; and others chose it like the story of the deaf-mute, had because, unlike the science club or the never been kept a secret from her. mathematics club, it was undemanding, chairs and curtains forming a makeshift A more sentimental heart would have a place to escape the heavy load of stage, and the boy’s hands clasping experienced curiosity or sympathy for schoolwork for a few hours. Bella wanted hers—part of the play, too. Contami- the girl whom she had replaced; a more to be near Miss Chu—there was no nated also were Bella’s memories of high inventive mind would have seen herself other reason for Bella to be in the club, school: the place, the people, the end- as that deaf-mute, growing up in silence. which was beneath her in many ways less years. But she was unfair. Her alma One time, a distant cousin of Bella’s and for which she had to tolerate the mater had received support from grandfather had come to visit, bringing English plays they staged. She was al- and had served as a model school for with him his granddaughter, who was ways given the leading role. No one foreign visitors, its cluster of marble- Bella’s age. Poor relatives, Bella, ten years questioned this. She was voted “the white buildings poised like an aristo- old then, instantly recognized. A gentler school flower” by the boys, an honor cratic swan among gray alleyways and soul would have formed a kind of kin- given to the prettiest girl. She spoke sprawling, run-down quadrangles. And ship with the girl, who was wearing a
56 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 gray, passed-down blouse, but Bella Chu would be close to sixty now, old solution but a consummation of her bossed the girl around, showing o her enough to be a mother-in-law. The love, her grandfather had to summon Swiss chocolates and her Japanese sta- mathematics was disorienting. Bella Mr. Wu through a secretary. Soon after tionery and her dresses made of silk and did not feel a moment of wistfulness that, Peipei dropped out of school, and ta eta and velvet, allowing the girl to about her own aging. She was the same Mr. Wu stopped teaching. A Cinder- touch the fabric with only one finger. person she had been at six or sixteen, ella, Bella’s mother commented, and Bella would have tortured the deaf-mute unchanged and unchangeable. But other Bella wondered if an unwilling Cin- girl similarly, except that the deaf-mute, people—would they stay loyal to what derella would make a wretched end- even if she had been permitted a visit, her memory dictated they should be? ing to a fairy tale. would not have understood anything There had to be ways to find out, Bella had always disdained Peipei a Bella said to her. Perhaps Bella could from her school friends or perhaps by little, as she knew others might disdain have locked her in a closet. Would she calling her high school. But Bella hated her. But between Peipei and herself there have banged on the door in panic, or to put herself in such a position. When- was a fundamental di erence. Peipei would she, not knowing how to make a ever she travelled back to China, she had not left China. It had been unnec- sound, have waited quietly until her needed only to announce her visit, and essary. She and her husband had their death? there would be plenty of friends and own fast-food and hotel chains, having Once, at a rooftop party in Key West, acquaintances ready to welcome her made good use of their assets: his hand- an old man had reminisced about an with a banquet or a tête-à-tête. This someness and his ability to discern and encounter years before with a boy who was the first time she had not let the accept what could not be changed; her had been adopted to be the heir of a news out: she didn’t want to see peo- pedigree. Bella, despite the fact that her scion: “At the dinner, he came in to ple exchanging knowing looks about road had been paved more smoothly greet everyone. Barely three years old. her divorce. She counted the days she than most people’s, was on her own. She In a white tuxedo. I swear, no boy could had left, a void she’d have to fill by her- had studied hard and aced college and have been more perfect than him, but self. Perhaps she should change her re- law school; she had overcome many the next year he was gone. The rea- turn flight. hurdles to establish herself—who in son? The mother decided he wouldn’t Of course, it wasn’t entirely true that America would care that her grandfa- do. I’ve never forgotten him. Imagine! Bella could always play the homecom- ther was one of the founders of the Chi- For a year he was destined to be one ing queen. There were people whom, nese Soviet Republic? of the richest people in the country.” if she wanted to see them, she would Bella’s parents would have preferred “He didn’t know,” Bella said. have to seek out. For instance, Peipei. that she stay in China; they would have “True,” the man said. “Still, what a They had been boarders for three years used their connections wisely on her strange fate.” at Sunflower Childcare before going behalf. For that reason, Bella had de- O changelings of the world: we go to elementary school. Their beds placed cided to emigrate. What a waste, her up and down the ladder in this circus side by side and in opposite direc- mother said. A waste of what? Bella called life, and we are more entertain- tions, they had often, when the teach- asked. Your good looks, her mother said, ing than clowns, more grotesque than ers were not looking, sneaked their and, of course, your good fortune. Bel- freaks. How dare Peter call her a bore? hands through the rails and held each la’s good looks had been given to her Bella dried herself and put on a silk by the people who had conceived her; robe. She uncorked a bottle of wine and she knew nothing of them but that they thought of inviting Peter and Adrian had had enough charity to not lower over for a drink, but they would decline, her into a tub of water like an unwanted saying they had to get up early for their kitten. Her good fortune had been given flight; they might not even pick up the to her by her parents; to throw it away phone. was a gesture of ingratitude. By the second glass, Bella did not But, by all means, it’s your life, her have any di culty seeing herself as the mother said. We aren’t parents who Little Match Girl, forever begging, for- would interfere. ever dying, yet Miss Chu would not other’s feet when they could not sleep. Bella had not been particularly close notice the tiny bursting flame when They had been classmates until the to her mother, but by middle school Bella struck a match for her; she would first year of high school, when Peipei she had acquired enough sophistica- remain blind to the streak of light when discovered the man of her dreams, tion to please her, and they got along Bella turned into a falling star. their geography teacher, Mr. Wu. For nicely as two women who respected someone from a lesser background, it each other’s beauty and brains. Bella’s had Miss Chu would have been called a schoolgirl father, indulging her in an absent- W become—a wife? A mother? crush, but the power of Peipei’s pas- minded manner, did not have any real Bella, sitting alone at breakfast the next sion matched that of her family: Bel- interest in her—this Bella had under- day, wondered. Miss Chu had been la’s grandfather had political prestige, stood and accepted when she was young, twenty-seven when she was the adviser but Peipei’s had political influence. as she had the story of the deaf-mute. of the English club, Bella sixteen. Miss When Peipei refused to accept any Her father was the kind of melancholy
58 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 man who would always be born into the wrong family, married to the wrong wife, settled in the wrong profession, and destined to die alone. Only after his death—Bella’s mother had been dead for four years by then—had Bella wondered about her parents’ relation- ship. The best marriage, they had once explained to Bella, is one in which hus- band and wife treat each other as hon- ored guests. It was possible that there had been little, or even no, love be- tween them. They were two guests who had lived in their shared courteousness for so long that they had mistaken it for a ection or warmth. But even two guests living together for fifty years would have some secrets between them. Perhaps Bella could have understood them intuitively had she been their blood child. In her own marriages—the first had lasted twelve years, the second five— Bella had fared poorly as host to her husband-guests. Your problem, Peter had said after the second divorce, is that you don’t take yourself seriously. I saw your eyes when you were walking •• down the aisle. They snickered even though you kept your face straight. With Paul? Bella asked. Both times, like Mr. Wu, had to give up something her experience with the students her Peter said. What do women do when essential in order to advance in the mother had taken on as she grew older, they can’t take themselves seriously? world, because a person of good luck knew that Miss Chu’s voice, had it Bella asked. That’s not a question I can could become a person of bad luck been remedied with training, would answer, Peter said. She wished he hadn’t overnight. The luckless, like Bella or have become unique, extraordinary, taken the liberty of giving her a diag- the deaf-mute, had no choice but to even. But nobody seemed to have put nosis without o ering a cure. follow the path assigned to them. That any work or imagination into it, so it Both her ex-husbands had called their lives had turned out di erently had an unpleasant quality, like a piece her toxic. She had to respect them for was a mere accident. of half-used sandpaper, its coarseness that and for not wanting to stay on and uneven. be poisoned. She would have respected teachers at Bel- Miss Chu made little e ort to hide Peipei, too, if she had outgrown her U la’s high school, who had held per- her irritation when her students func- obsession with Mr. Wu. Over the years, manent positions, Miss Chu had been tioned at any level below her expecta- Bella had successfully maintained the hired on a contract that could be ter- tion, yet who, other than Bella, could right distance between Mr. Wu and minated at any time. The credential have met her demands? It was in the herself: too close, and Peipei would that had made Miss Chu attractive to English club that Bella had first encoun- have felt jealous; too removed, Peipei the school was that she had spent a tered Don McLean and D. H. Lawrence. would have felt slighted on behalf of year in Australia. What connection had The music of the former was the her husband. If only Peipei could have taken her there was not known to any soundtrack of Miss Chu’s mood when an a air. Or, better, divorce her hus- student; she had taught at Bella’s school she sat in a trance—even the chattiest band, and send him tumbling back to for only two years, and after she quit girl or the neediest boy knew to leave the pool of commoners. But she held there were rumors that she had re- her alone then. The work of the latter on to the marriage with a kind of fairy- turned to Australia. Miss Chu read aloud to them, “The tale loyalty. What would Mr. Wu think Miss Chu was not pretty. Her Rocking-Horse Winner” and then “The of this passion which refused to die? cheeks, too chiselled, had an unhealthy Princess” and finally “The Fox,” which Obsession that has outlived youth must pallor. Her eyebrows were constantly she read several times, no doubt her be poison, too. knitted, and her eyes had a distracted favorite. Perhaps that’s what separates a lucky and sullen look. If anything made her Sometimes, when Miss Chu went person from a luckless one. The lucky, stand out, it was her voice. Bella, from on reading for too long, Bella’s club
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 59 mates brought out work sheets in math taunt Peipei, who had been married to said you were my Auntie Su and I was or physics or chemistry. A lyrist play- the same man for too long. your Auntie Lan.” ing to a herd of cows masticating their Even the most superficial tie could Bella knew of the existence of own ignorance, Bella often thought. take permanent hold if it lasted for Auntie Lan only from a few childhood Soulless they were, soullessly they forty years. Do you realize that only pictures. She had stopped working for treated Miss Chu. Bella wanted Miss for you would I rearrange my business the family when Bella began boarding Chu to know that she understood the meetings at such short notice? Peipei at Sunflower. Had she ever missed the indi erence they both had to endure; had said the moment she walked into woman, who would have become the she wanted Miss Chu to su er less the restaurant. Do you realize no one only mother known to her had Bella because she was su ering with her. Yet else would count your toes hundreds been deemed flawed, as the deaf-mute Miss Chu treated Bella with more sar- of times, as I did? Bella had replied. was before her? Bella was surprised casm than she treated the other stu- “What about this teacher?” Peipei that Peipei, like Peter, remembered dents. Do not act like a drunken mouse, asked now. “Why are you looking for more about her life than she herself she admonished Bella when, at a re- her?” did. Friends like them gave her per- hearsal, she tottered on in a pair of “I’m not. Just curious what has be- mission to forget, but they also sum- heels, unfit slippers for an unenthusi- come of her.” moned memories at unpredictable or astic Cinderella. But at this moment “You always fuss over this or that inconvenient moments. Cinderella is overwhelmed by happi- random person. When are you going Peipei said she would ask around ness, Bella argued. Then she’s an im- to outgrow this childishness?” about Miss Chu. Bella was certain that becile to feel that way, Miss Chu said. Bella said she had no idea what Pei- Peipei would help her. They were each And please stop widening your eyes pei was talking about. other’s hostage, and no ransom could like a three-year-old. “All the time,” Peipei said. “Remem- rescue them from their shared past but ber when we used to take turns acting mutual loyalty. Who else would re- English teacher deaf and mute? Until the teachers member Peipei’s despair at fifteen when “W by that name?” Peipei said. “I banned that game?” she held a finger to a lit match until have no recollection.” “At Sunflower?” Bella asked. She did the flame scorched her? Who else would “Your eyes could see only one teacher not remember the game. It appalled recall the deaf-mute, a reminder that back then,” Bella said. her that she had left such a sentimen- Bella had been a replacement for an “And your precious eyes can’t put up tal episode in Peipei’s memory. “When imperfect product? with a grain of dust,” Peipei answered. did you learn about the girl?” “Which is why I can’t keep a hus- “I don’t think it was ever a secret,” , Peipei texted Bella band,” Bella said. Her divorce, rather Peipei said. “And after that game we T the new name that Miss Chu was than being bad news, could be used to pretended to be each other’s nanny. You going by and the organization that she worked for. “Once a teacher, now a preacher” was Peipei’s accompanying message. Bella, who had chosen her English name the moment she landed in Amer- ica, found it ridiculous that Miss Chu needed a new Chinese name. Who did she think she was, a celebrity? Bella tapped the link for the organization, a nonprofit advocating for L.G.B.T. rights. The Web site listed Miss Chu as the organization’s co-founder. There was an audio clip of an interview she had given to a media company; a list of her public appearances; and blog posts signed by her, the most recent focussed on a new law against domes- tic violence, the first of its kind in China, which excluded protection for victims in same-sex relationships. There was no picture of Miss Chu on the Web site, nor did a search of her new name yield an image elsewhere. Bella wanted to see Miss Chu’s face. She wanted it to remain the same as she re- “We want one that’s genetically gifted but not genetically spoiled.” membered, but seeing it altered by time would bring some vindictive pleasure, stranger, talking about her activism and hands of the Little Match Girl. Make- too. Faceless, Miss Chu had denied Bella revealing her personal life, was a sham, believe was her genealogy. access. She considered texting Peipei, “I looking for purpose and solace in the The high school had an observatory thought your omnipotence would have wrong place. Mistakenly, she thought that was open, a few times a year, to stu- arranged a dinner meeting for me by she had found them in a just cause. dents outside the science club, and once now”—but what was the point of at- That basement room: Bella wished Bella had gone there with some friends. tacking Peipei? she could be there now, to study Miss She did not recall which stars or plan- Bella played the audio clip. Miss Chu and herself again. Had Miss Chu, ets they were supposed to see that night, Chu’s voice had not changed much, watching the falling dusk through the but, after the teacher had left, a boy from though there was something di erent: narrow window near the ceiling, been the science club, in order to impress a fervor that had not been there be- reliving the sordid pain another person Bella, had turned the telescope toward fore, or perhaps it was simply liveli- had inflicted on her body? Had she been one of the first high-rises in the city and ness. Miss Chu discussed the grass- searching for meaning in her su ering found an uncurtained window. A man roots e ort led by her organization and when she listened to Don McLean? and a woman, their backs to the win- some polls and interviews conducted When she watched Bella’s rehearsals dow, were watching a soap opera, the within the L.G.B.T. community in re- with derision, or when she dismissed actress crying unabashedly. The room, sponse to the government’s claim that Bella’s attentiveness with unseeing eyes, with the marriage in it, with the drama there was no evidence of domestic vi- was she refraining from doing harm, or onscreen, was pulled so close to Bella’s olence in homosexual relationships. was she, familiar with conquest and sur- eyes that for a moment, when the boy “Why is it important to you that render, relishing her power? Those who touched her elbow timorously, she did the law recognize domestic violence in allow themselves to be hurt in the name not bother to shake him o . She could same-sex relationships?” the reporter, of love must understand better than still see the space between the man and a woman softening her tone into dis- anyone the desire to hurt. the woman: they were sitting at oppo- ingenuous understanding, asked. The hunter of the fox, hunted by the site ends of the sofa, leaning on the arm- “When members of a heterosexual fox: Bella remembered falling under rests. She could even see the piece of relationship outside of marriage—the D. H. Lawrence’s spell while listening crochet placed on top of the television, so-called cohabiting relationship—are to Miss Chu, her voice almost beauti- blue and white—thirty years ago, a tele- protected by the law while those in a ful when she herself fell under that same vision set had been a luxury that a woman same-sex relationship are not, the ex- spell. The story should be made into a dedicated to housekeeping would have clusion raises questions about the legal stage play—why had that never occurred decorated with fine needlework. rights we have as a community.” to Bella? No doubt Miss Chu would Bella wished that the telescope had “But why is it important to you per- have sco ed at her request, but Bella, brought into her sight that night Miss sonally? Have you experienced domes- who lived with a will to overwrite other Chu and her lover, instead of the in- tic violence?” people’s wills, would not have needed sipid couple. A ection and aggression, “Yes.” her grandfather to summon Miss Chu passion and pain—Bella wished she “Can you tell our audience more through a secretary. She would have in- had seen it all between the two women. about that?” sisted to Miss Chu that they play the But she had been too young when she Bella found the reporter’s questions two women in the story. Bella would be met Miss Chu, and she had arrived too inane and Miss Chu’s willingness to the unattractive and neurotic Banford— late to know the deaf-mute. Timing coöperate distasteful. “It was thirty years she wouldn’t mind playing an unappeal- had made them the unattainable in her ago. I was young, and I was ashamed ing role—and Miss Chu would play the life, and the unattainable, which she of my relationship with another woman. other woman, March, endowed, for the could neither damage nor destroy, lived In our time it was called a mental ill- duration of the performance, with a on as wounds. Even now, if she called ness, defined as such in medical text- beauty that she had not been born with. the organization and demanded to books. I did not know anything about Bella would be killed by the end—some- speak to Miss Chu, what could she say? domestic violence, either.” one always has to be in a Lawrence story. Faceless to Miss Chu, Bella would only The interview went on, giving a few She wouldn’t mind that, either, because be a voice on the line that could be cut more details of an inexperienced woman her death would leave Miss Chu in a o at any moment. She would be the confusing control with love, compli- permanent trance. Why not, if Peipei girl on the street corner, forever strik- ance with devotion. Same old story, was right that everything was a game ing matches, forever reaching for a Bella thought, and when the conver- of pretend for Bella? She could be the di erent world in the small flame. sation turned to statistics and case stud- deaf-mute; she could be the fox be- When she turned into a falling star, ies she stopped listening. Whoever the witching Miss Chu; she could make up Miss Chu, herself another girl strik- person being interviewed was, she was epic tales, as Adrian did in imagining ing matches on another street corner, not Miss Chu of the English club. The his ancestors. Adrian was still confined would not even sense the vacancy left latter had had a heart made of polished by geography and family. Bella had no by Bella’s absence. ice, which, inviolable and immovable, such limits. Everything could be hers: had long ago absorbed what warmth men and women, days and nights, the NEWYORKER.COM could be found in Bella’s blood. This stars in the sky, the eternal flame in the Yiyun Li on fairy tales.
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 61 THE CRITICS
BOOKS GET OUT OF TOWN
“The End of Eddy,” a novel of class and violence in the provinces.
BY GARTH GREENWELL
published in France, nities of poverty, “you end up repro- Paris and at the École Normale, I would hear S in , “The End of Eddy,” ducing it against others, in other situ- my classmates ask me But why didn’t your par- Édouard Louis’s slim début novel, has ations, by other means.” ents send you to an orthodontist. I would lie. sold more than three hundred thou- “The End of Eddy” (Farrar, Straus & The assault, it soon becomes clear, sand copies. Much of the extraordi- Giroux; translated, from the French, is not a single event, but a composite, nary interest in the book has centered by Michael Lucey) covers five or six a kind of ritual repeated over two years. on its depiction of Hallencourt, a vil- years in the life of Eddy Bellegueule, It happens in a regular spot, a secluded lage of about fourteen hundred peo- a child growing up poor and gay in corridor outside the school library, ple in Picardy, in the north of France, Hallencourt—in the novel, Louis re- where Eddy appears daily. He submits not far from the sea. Hallencourt’s oc- fers to it only as “the village”—where to the beatings out of fear, and out of casional beauty—fruit trees in gar- he’s viciously mocked for his e emi- a desire to su er in privacy; he won- dens, explosions of color in the au- nate manners, what his family calls his ders if his actions constitute complic- tumn woods—does little, in Louis’s “fancy ways.” In the book’s opening ity. A weird intimacy develops between telling, to alleviate the human su er- pages, Eddy is ten, and two boys, some- him and the two boys. When one of ing that takes place there. A post- what older, are assaulting him in a them seems sad, Eddy worries about industrial decline has shuttered most middle-school hallway. They call him him. Later, attempting to have sex with of the region’s factories, and jobs are “faggot” before spitting in his face; a woman, he will think about the boys scarce and hard. Children in the vil- soon they’re shoving him; finally, as and their violence in a failed e ort to lage leave school early; women have his head slams against the wall, they arouse himself. children young; one in five adults kick him, laughing. The passage is bru- In interviews, Louis has said that ev- has di culty reading and writing. Al- tal and vivid, but it lacks the usual erything he recounts in the novel is true. coholism is rampant and violence markers of tension or urgency: the nar- (Members of his family, as well as other casual. ration wavers unsteadily between past inhabitants of Hallencourt, have dis- The village overwhelmingly votes and present tense, and there’s a lyrical puted elements of his account.) Édouard for Marine Le Pen’s far-right National slowing of time, an almost luxurious Louis was born in , in Hallencourt, Front, and, as France has braced itself lingering on sensation as the boys’ sa- as Eddy Bellegueule—his father, a fan for the possibility of a Le Pen Presi- liva slides down Eddy’s face. Louis of American television, thought that dency, Louis’s book has become the pauses the drama for digressions on Eddy was “a tough guy’s name.” After subject of political discussion in a way violence in the village, on how the joining a drama club at his middle that novels rarely do. (In the first round structures of domination in the play- school, Louis was accepted into a resi- of the current Presidential election, ground mirror those in the world at dential theatre program at a high school Le Pen received nearly twice as many large, even on dental care: in a nearby city, Amiens, which pro- votes in Hallencourt as any other can- I could smell their breath as they got closer, vided his escape from the world of his didate.) For Louis, the tide of popu- an odor o sour milk, dead animals. Like me, childhood. From there, he went on to lism sweeping Europe and the United they probably never brushed their teeth. Moth- the University of Picardy Jules Verne, States is a consequence of what he, ers in the village weren’t too concerned about to study history, and to the prestigious citing the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, their children’s dental hygiene. Dentists were École Normale Supérieur, in Paris, for calls “the principle of the conservation expensive and as usual a lack o money came graduate work. Shortly before his novel to seem like a matter o choice. Mothers would of violence.” “When you’re subjected say There’s way more important things in life. was published, he legally changed his to endless violence, in every situation, That family negligence, class-based negligence, name to Édouard Louis. every moment of your life,” Louis told means that I still su er from acute pain, sleep- “The End of Eddy” is an instance of an interviewer, referring to the indig- less nights, and years later, when I arrived in what is sometimes called autofiction, REA BRIAN ABOVE:
62 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 In interviews, Édouard Louis, who is now twenty-four, has said that everything he recounts in the novel is true.
PHOTOGRAPH BY RYAN PFLUGER THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 63 which has been the source of some of nounced, much too pronounced, way Louis, who has edited a collection the most interesting English-language my hips swayed from side to side, or of essays on Bourdieu, uses such theory- fiction of the past decade. There is a the shrill cries that escaped my body— inflected language throughout the long tradition of such writing, espe- not cries that I uttered but ones that novel. As analysis, his comments don’t cially in French, and queer writers are literally escaped through my throat take us very far: he doesn’t dissect which central to it: behind all such novels lies whenever I was surprised, delighted, “modes of discourse intersected” in his the example of Proust; the works of or frightened.” mother, or how or why they “existed the French novelist Hervé Guibert and The sense that his sexual identity only in relation to each other.” Passages the American Edmund White are more is hardwired and essential is shared by like this often do little more than align recent precursors of Louis’s book. The his tormentors. After he’s discovered his observations with common refer- novel is dedicated to the sociologist having sex with some friends, Eddy ence points in French social theory, es- Didier Eribon, whom Louis met as a wonders why they escape the bully- pecially Bourdieu and Foucault. Some university student. Eribon’s memoir, ing directed at him. The adult Louis, of them echo more academically rig- “Returning to Reims,” also recounts a echoing the philosopher Michel Fou- orous passages in “Returning to Reims,” gay man’s trajectory from provincial cault, realizes that “the crime was not which also attempts to explain the shift poverty to academic prestige. having done something, it was being of the working classes in France from “The End of Eddy” largely dis- something.” leftist political parties to the National penses with the conventions of the re- Front. alist novel. The book is organized top- , Louis For the novelist, there’s a danger ically, in short chapters, several with T catalogues the ba ing contradic- in this kind of language. Structures the feel of essays, bearing titles like tions of the world of his childhood: become visible through abstraction at “My Parents’ Bedroom” and “A Man’s brutal racism next to friendliness to- the cost of suppressing local variation Role.” While the novel is full of inci- ward the village’s single person of color; and noise, the apparently aberrant, dent and anecdote, scenes are inter- his father’s scorn for the bourgeoisie the individual. It’s out of such noise rupted by commentary so often that and his hope that Eddy will join their that novels are made. French critics there is almost no sense of a forward- ranks; the villagers’ hatred of govern- have compared Louis with Zola, who moving plot. The most common nar- ment, which they insist must take ac- also wrote about the French working rative mode is the generalized past. tion against immigrants and sexual mi- classes in novels informed by socio- What distinguishes “The End of Eddy” norities. Describing his mother’s in - logical theories. But Zola, in a novel from its autofictional antecedents is coherent politics, Louis cites Stefan like “L’Assommoir,” sticks close to in- the urgency with which Louis seeks Zweig’s account of peasant women who dividual lives and experiences, with- to separate himself from his previous protested at Versailles and then shouted out importing the language of spe- self, a desire so intense that the novel “Long live the King!” at the sight of cialists. The abstractions that Louis can be seen as a kind of wake. The Louis XVI: “their bodies—which had deploys can flatten out novelistic tex- French title, “En Finir Avec Eddy spoken for them—torn between abso- ture, rendering invisible any details Belle gueule,” might have been more lute submission to power and an en- that they can’t accommodate. This literally translated “Finishing O Eddy during sense of revolt.” problem is suggested in passages where Bellegueule.” Above all, Louis is perplexed by the Louis speaks of “the simplicity of those Queerness is the key that springs simultaneous pride and humiliation who possess little,” or of a specific in- Eddy from the various cycles—of pov- that his parents and their neighbors cident as “the first in an endless se- erty, of alcoholism, of violence—that feel for their particular way of life. But ries, each time the same—down to he sees as determining life in the vil- he comes to believe that these seem- the tiniest details.” lage. “Being attracted to boys trans- ing contradictions appear paradoxical Louis is a canny writer, however, formed my whole relationship to the only because of his own manner of and he signals his awareness of this world,” he writes, “encouraging me to looking at things. Of his mother, he danger in the novel’s first lines. “From identify with values that were di er- writes, “It was I myself, arrogant class my childhood I have no happy mem- ent from my family’s.” This doesn’t renegade that I was, who tried to force ories. I don’t mean to say that I never, mean that queerness represents free- her discourse into a foreign kind of co- in all of those years, felt any happiness dom; it’s an “unknown force that got herence, one more compatible with my or joy. But su ering is all-consuming: hold of me at birth and that impris- values—values I’d adopted precisely in it somehow gets rid of anything that oned me in my own body.” While his order to construct a self in opposition doesn’t fit into its system.” The word parents regard his mannerisms as a to my parents”: that Lucey renders as “all-consuming” choice, “some personal aesthetic proj- I came to understand that many di erent is more discomfiting in the French ect that I was pursuing to annoy them,” modes o discourse intersected in my mother original: “La sou rance est totalitaire.” Louis considers not only his desires and spoke through her, that she was constantly “The End of Eddy” is a dark book, but but also elements of cultural style often torn between her shame at not having nished it isn’t an entirely joyless one; nor is it school and her pride that even so, as she would coded as queer to be corporeal, deter- say, she’d made it through and had a bunch of “totalitarian.” If the narrator occasion- mined in and by the body: “I had not beautiful kids, and that these two modes o dis- ally o ers a reductive view of his world, chosen my way of walking, the pro- course existed only in relation to each other. the novel itself doesn’t exclude what
64 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 falls outside his system. Its characters When a prosecutor ofers him a chance act in ways that ofer the novelistic to provide extenuating circumstances pleasure of surprise. for his crimes—“Can you afrm that This is especially true of Eddy’s fa- your acts are imputable to external in- ther, who is introduced in the novel’s fluences of some kind ”—Sylvain is un- first pages as an almost gothic figure, able to follow the question: taking startling delight in the every- He wasn’t embarrassed, he didn’t feel the day violence of rural places. He kills a violence the prosecutor was exercising, the litter of kittens by placing them in a class violence that had excluded him from the plastic shopping bag and slamming it world of education, the violence that had, in the end, led him to the courtroom where he against concrete; he drinks the warm now stood. In fact he must have thought that blood of pigs he has slaughtered. He the prosecutor was ridiculous. That he spoke joins eagerly in the brawls that are part like a faggot. of the rituals of manhood and falls vic- tim to the alcoholism that is the plague The passage is brilliant in its man- of the village. And yet, despite having agement of sympathy. The final clipped been brutalized by his own father, he sentence reminds us that Sylvain, here never hits his wife or his children, a victim, is also an agent of the vio- breaking a cycle that Louis elsewhere lence that Eddy sufers again and again suggests is invincible. In one agoniz- in the novel. Louis knows that the lan- ing scene, the father allows himself to guage of social theory, which requires be beaten, refusing to strike back as he the kind of education the poor are de- shields Eddy from his older brother’s nied, is complicit in the system that it drunken rage. For all the shame he feels seeks to make visible. His use of that at Eddy’s efeminacy, he repeatedly as- language in “The End of Eddy” is sures him of his love. When Eddy’s freighted with an ambivalence that an- mother tells him stories of his father imates the book and gives it a devas- as a young man, when he struck out tating emotional force. To write the for a new life, travelling to Toulon and novel is at once an act of solidarity and becoming best friends with an Arab an act of vengeance. man, she expresses bewilderment: “It “For us, a book was a kind of as- don’t make sense, when he says we should sault,” Louis wrote of his family re- kill all the ragheads but then when he cently in the Guardian. Some of the lived in the Midi his best mate was a rag- residents of Hallencourt have received head.” That attempt to change his life “The End of Eddy” as just that. “It’s failed, and it may be irrelevant to struc- not right, what he’s done,” Louis’s tural analysis; Louis doesn’t try to ex- mother told a reporter. “He presents plain it. But it is not irrelevant to the us like backward hicks.” Louis’s second human interest, which is to say the novel, “Histoire de la Violence,” has novelistic richness, of character. also provoked controversy. It recounts Even Louis’s use of academic lan- a terrifying altercation between Louis guage ultimately comes to feel less an- and a man he picks up on the street on alytical than aesthetic and dramatic. Christmas night in 2012. Their sexual For the young Eddy, refined language encounter begins tenderly; then, after is a weapon, a way to turn the stigma Louis catches the man attempting to of diference into the prestige of dis- rob him, the man rapes and beats him. tinction. When Eddy uses the formal We learn the details of the encoun- verb dîner at home instead of the fa- ter in large part in the voice of Louis’s miliar boufer (“to chow down”), his sister: he is back in Hallencourt, in her family takes umbrage. They accuse him home, listening as she relates for her of putting on airs, of “philosophizing” husband the story he has told her ear- (“to philosophize meant talking like lier. The book doesn’t ofer any resolu- the class enemy, the haves, the rich folk”). tion to the conflicts of “The End of The full implications of this come clear Eddy,” but it does imply that Louis in the book’s most sustained narrative, hasn’t turned his back on Eddy’s past a story Louis tells late in the novel as finally as his first novel suggests. In- about Eddy’s cousin Sylvain, whose jured and frightened, he wants a kind short, harsh life of petty crime arouses of solace that his friends in Paris can’t both dismay and pride in his family. ofer him. He wants to go home.
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 65 the disappeared, got arrested at a sit-in BOOKS at a New Hampshire nuclear power plant, and co-founded the Jewish Women’s Committee to End the Oc- BELIEVE YOU ME cupation of the West Bank and Gaza. And that’s not the half of it. She called Grace Paley’s neighborhood. herself a “somewhat combative pacifist and cooperative anarchist.” The F.B.I. BY ALEXANDRA SCHWARTZ declared her a Communist, dangerous and emotionally unstable. Her file was kept open for thirty years. Paley was an archetypal Village figure, the five-foot-tall lady with the wild white hair, cracking gum like a teen-ager while handing out leaflets against apartheid from her perch on lower Sixth Avenue. She also lived in Vermont, where her second husband, Bob Nichols, had a farmhouse. In May, , they drove to Burlington to pro- test their congressman’s support for the Iraq surge. Paley was eighty-four, undergoing chemo for breast cancer. Three months later, she was dead. “My dissent is cheer / a thankless disposi- tion,” she wrote in her poetry collec- tion “Fidelity,” published the follow- ing year. That incorrigible cheerfulness carried her to the very end. No one was more grimly adamant that the world was in mortal peril, or had more fun trying to save it from itself. Through it all, Paley wrote, or didn’t. She published only three slim collec- tions of her wry, chatty, alarmingly wise short stories: “The Little Disturbances of Man” ( ), “Enormous Changes at the Last Minute” ( ), and “Later the Same Day” ( ). Her “Collected Stories” appeared in , as if to ’ to be made that ship. : Jailed for civil disobedience confirm that the well had run dry. (“Just T Grace Paley was first and fore- on Armed Forces Day, starts teaching As I Thought,” a collection of mem- most an antinuclear, antiwar, antirac- at Sarah Lawrence. : Travels to oir, speeches, and reportage, from which ist feminist activist who managed, in North Vietnam to bring home U.S. the essays in the “Reader” are culled, her spare time, to become one of the prisoners of war, wins an O. Henry followed in .) This is a great shame, truly original voices of American fic- Award. if not so surprising. Activism, like al- tion in the later twentieth century. Just Such political passion may seem in coholism, can distract a writer from glance at the “chronology” section of “A keeping with those times, but Paley the demands of her desk. Actually, Paley Grace Paley Reader” (Farrar, Straus & didn’t slow down once the flush of the didn’t even have one. She liked to type Giroux), a welcome new collection of sixties faded. In the mid-seventies, she at the kitchen table, right in the messy her short stories, nonfiction, and poems, attended the World Peace Congress heart of family life, rather than clois- edited by Kevin Bowen and Paley’s in Moscow, where she infuriated So- ter herself in a Woolfian room of her daughter, Nora. : Leads her Green- viet dissidents by demanding that they own, though her characters often long wich Village PTA in protests against stand up for the Asian and Latin- for the luxury of a closed door. In her atomic testing, founds the Women American oppressed, too. In the eight- early stories, they are immigrants’ chil- Strike for Peace, pickets the draft ies, she travelled to El Salvador and dren, Jews mixing with the slightly board, receives a Guggenheim Fellow- Nicaragua to meet with mothers of more established Irish, Poles, and Ital- ians in the tenements and row houses
Paley’s ction is peopled with the politically minded but it never preaches. of Coney Island or the Bronx, where PALEY NORA PALEY/COURTESY JESS
66 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 “every window is a mother’s mouth single bubbling rush. Everything is In a “Fresh Air” interview, she told bidding the street shut up, go skate comic, down to the undignified string Terry Gross, “When you write, you il- somewhere else, come home.” Privacy of Livid’s pajama pants and the verb luminate what’s hidden, and that’s a is out of the question. Brothers, sis- “harassed,” with its tart note of house- political act.” ters, cousins, neighbors crowd around; hold martyrdom and manipulation. The remarkable fact is that her fic- lurking everywhere are adult “spies,” Notice how Faith claims the sort of tion, peopled by the politically minded, like Mrs. Goredinsky, with flesh “the objective authority you’d expect to find doesn’t do the things that politically consistency of fresh putty,” who sta- in third-person narration. She doesn’t infused writing typically does. It doesn’t tions herself in front of her building say that Livid might have been dream- preach; it doesn’t demonize or lionize; on an orange crate, or the palsy- handed ing of Eton; she says that he was. This it doesn’t nobly set out to illustrate a “Mrs. Green, Republican poll watcher is the omniscience not only of a writer set of beliefs or ideals. Indeed, it often in November,” who spends the rest of but of a wife. It’s the least she can do undercuts them with sly self-aware- the year scanning the street for kid to have a laugh at his expense, though ness. “We hoped we were not about to trouble. later, in a moment of rare solitude, her su er socialist injustice, because we Then the kids grow up and find mood turns melancholy. “I organized loved socialism,” one of Paley’s narra- that they are under siege from their comfort in the armchair, poured the tors says, on a trip to China. Paley’s un- own children and from the childish co ee black into a white mug that said wavering trust in the power of the col- men who inconsistently love them. , tapped cigarette ash into a ce- lective was essential for her activism, In “The Little Disturbances of Man,” ramic hand-hollowed by Richard. I as her clear-eyed a ection for the foi- Paley introduced Faith Darwin, an looked into the square bright window bles and fallibility of the individual was alter ego who returns, like a friend, in of daylight to ask myself the sapping essential for her art, and it is a delight each subsequent collection. When we question: What is man that woman to encounter both Paleys in a single meet Faith, she is in her cramped apart- lies down to adore him?” volume, where they can usefully con- ment, dealing with not one husband Into the dough of domestic life Paley verse with each other across genres. but two: her ex, the father of her two folds the Bible (like Cain, Tonto “raised Bowen, in his foreword to “A Grace young sons, a boastful charmer who up his big mouth against his brother,” Paley Reader,” says that he and Nora has dropped by for a brief visit before in Paley’s wonderful mixed metaphor), Paley wanted to put together a book vanishing again on one of his vague politics (there is a brief discourse on “that would be a good companion.” adventures, and her limp, dreamy cur- the benefits of the Diaspora over Zi- They could not have known when they rent mate. (She nicknames them Livid onism), philosophy (what is man that began their work, in early , just and Pallid, a small act of fond revenge.) woman lies down to adore him?), and how valuable its companionship would The men are men. They drink the Eros (and yet she does). The story’s prove to be. You can take the “Reader” co ee Faith has brewed, complain title, “Two Short Sad Stories from a to a rally and feel galvanized by Paley’s about the eggs she’s cooked, rootle Long and Happy Life,” assures us that conviction, or you can take it to bed around in her cupboards for booze, all will end well—if Faith can hang on late at night and find pleasure and com- grandly discuss lust, women, and Faith until then. Paley leaves her at the win- fort in her humane prose. herself. She keeps mostly quiet, while dow, Tonto snuggled in her lap, nour- Paley was a natural storyteller, and mentally whittling them down to size. ished and imprisoned by the bonds of short stories were her natural form. In Here is Livid, greeting his sons, Rich- maternal love: “Then through the short “A Conversation with My Father,” from ard and Anthony, called Tonto: fat fingers of my son, interred forever, “Enormous Changes at the Last Min- Well, well, he cautioned. How are you boys, like a black-and-white-barred king in ute,” she shows us why. The narrator’s have you been well? You look ne. Sturdy. How Alcatraz, my heart lit up in stripes.” father, eighty-six years old and sick in are your grades? he inquired. He dreamed that bed, asks her to entertain him with a they were just up from Eton for the holidays. asked about the “simple story . . . just recognizable peo- I don’t go to school, said Tonto. I go to the connection between her politics ple and then write down what hap- park. P I’d like to hear the child read, said Livid. and her fiction. Sometimes she said pened to them next.” She reluctantly Me. I can read, Daddy, said Richard. I have that her subject matter turned out to produces the following: a book with a hundred pages. be inherently political. People like Once in my time there was a woman and she Well, well, said Livid. Get it. Henry Miller and Saul Bellow were had a son. They lived nicely, in a small apart- I kindled a fresh pot o co ee. I scrubbed not writing about the lives of people ment in Manhattan. This boy at about fteen cups and harassed Pallid into opening a sticky like Faith Darwin. Paley initially sus- became a junkie, which is not unusual in our jar o damson-plum jam. Very shortly, what neighborhood. In order to maintain her close could be read had been, and Livid, knotting pected that her work would be consid- friendship with him, she became a junkie too. the tie strings o his pants vigorously, ap- ered “trivial, stupid, boring, domestic, She said it was part o the youth culture, with proached me at the stove. Faith, he admon- and not interesting,” but she couldn’t which she felt very much at home. After a while, ished, that boy can’t read a tinker’s damn. Seven help it: “Everyday life, kitchen life, chil- for a number o reasons, the boy gave it all up years old. and left the city and his mother in disgust. Hope- Eight years old, I said. dren life had been handed to me.”An- other answer had to do with justice, less and alone, she grieved. We all visit her. The scene pours forth with spar- the quality that Paley saw at the root Her father complains that she’s left kling immediacy, as if transcribed in a of her literary and political endeavors. everything out. For instance: How did
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 67 called Babushka, and his younger sis- ter, Mira. Isaac became a doctor; he learned English by reading Dickens. He and Manya had a son and a daugh- ter right away. After a fourteen-year gap, Grace, their third child, was born in , the happy accident of her par- ents’ middle age. Politics ran in Paley’s blood. Her childhood was “rather typical Jewish socialist” in that she believed Judaism and socialism to be one and the same. Isaac wouldn’t go near a synagogue, so Paley accompanied Babushka to shul on the holidays. Babushka, for her part, entertained Paley by recounting the heated arguments that had taken place around her table in the old country among her four children: Isaac the So- cialist, Grisha the Anarchist, Luba the Zionist, and Mira the Communist. A fifth, Rusya, had been killed at a pro- test as he brandished the red banner of the working class. In the way that other “It’s not the captivity—I’m just not sure if I’m ready to have kids.” children are warned not to play with matches, Mira repeatedly instructed young Grace never to be the one to •• carry the flag at a demonstration. At nine, Paley joined the Falcons, a the woman look? Who were her par- erature. Her father isn’t convinced. He Socialist youth group, where she wore ents that she should end up like this? pities the woman’s sad end. But it’s not a red kerchief and belted out the “In- The narrator tries again: the end, the narrator says. In fact, the ternationale”—“with the Socialist end- narrator decides on the spot to make ing, not the Communist one.” (So much Once, across the street from us, there was her the receptionist at an East Village for the F.B.I.’s suspicions.) To her de- a ne handsome woman, our neighbor. She had a son whom she loved because she’d known clinic, beloved by the community, and light, she was given a small part in the him since birth (in helpless chubby infancy, prized by the head doctor for her expe- group’s play, “a kind of agitprop” mu- and in the wrestling, hugging ages, seven to rience as a former addict. Her father sical about a shopkeeper’s eviction. As ten, as well as earlier and later). This boy, when finds this absurd. The woman will back- soon as Manya heard that her daugh- he fell into the st o adolescence, became a slide: that’s reality. His daughter, he says, ter would be singing onstage, she pulled junkie. He was not a hopeless one. He was in fact hopeful, an ideologue and successful con- doesn’t understand how to craft a proper her from the show. Grace was tone verter. With his busy brilliance, he wrote per- plot. He’s right. She despises plot, that deaf, she insisted, and would make a suasive articles for his high-school newspaper. “absolute line” drawn between a begin- fool of herself: “Guiltless but full of Seeking a wider audience, using important con- ning and an end: “Not for literary rea- shame, I never returned to the Falcons. nections, he drummed into Lower Manhattan sons, but because it takes all hope away. In fact, in sheer spite I gave up my newsstand distribution a periodical called Oh! Golden Horse! Everyone, real or invented, deserves the work for Socialism for at least three In order to keep him from feeling guilty open destiny of life.” years.” (because guilt is the stony heart o nine-tenths Writing down this memory sixty-five o all clinically diagnosed cancers in America ’ parents that years later, Paley finds in it a deeper today, she said), and because she had always she should have ended up like meaning. To grow up the American believed in giving bad habits a home where W one could keep an eye on them, she too be- this? In , Tsar Nicholas II of Rus- child of Russian Jewish immigrants in came a junkie. . . . sia had a son. To celebrate, he freed po- the twenties and thirties was to live in litical prisoners under the age of twenty- a world of constant noise pierced by On the branches of the bare first one, among them Isaac Gutzeit, a bewildering silences. Politics were de- draft, life begins to bud. Before, the socialist who had been sent to Siberia, bated with neighbors and friends, yet woman seemed delusional, pathetic. and his wife, Manya Ridnyik, exiled to the private history of su ering went Now we see her goodness, her confused Germany. Two years later, they immi- largely unspoken. Paley understood that optimism, her protective love for her grated to the United States, where they her family had known hatred and vio- son. The narrator’s tone turns rueful, changed their name to Goodside and lence in Europe, “that godforsaken tender; a piece of gossip has become lit- settled in the Bronx with Isaac’s mother, place,” which she connected to the
68 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 American racism she was learning about struggling with the transition to civil- clucks and sings. Like many a Paley cre- in the Falcons. Yet “despite its adher- ian life. (They separated in , but ation, Rose is a ribald genius of home- ence to capitalism, prejudice, and lynch- stayed friends.) There was very little brewed figurative language. “I could no ing, my father said we were lucky to be money. Paley had dreamed of having longer keep my tact in my mouth,” she here in this America.” five or six kids, but when she learned says. The source of the story’s title is re- As a child, Paley found such con- that she was pregnant for a third time vealed in Rose’s summation of her moth- tradictions perplexing. The same par- she went to West End Avenue for an er’s marriage to her father: ents who had endured exile for their abortion. Soon she was pregnant again, beliefs reacted with fury when she was with a child that she wanted and Jess She married who she didn’t like, a sick man, his spirit already swallowed up by God. He suspended from school for signing an didn’t. She was agonizing over what to never washed. He had an unhappy smell. His anti war pledge. Socialism in America do when she su ered a miscarriage. teeth fell out, his hair disappeared, he got could wait, they felt; their daughter’s By the mid-nineteen-fifties, the ac- smaller, shriveled up little by little, till good- education could not. As an adult, Paley cumulation of these experiences was bye and good luck he was gone and only came saw that heroic Isaac and Manya were “creating a real physical pressure” in Pa- to Mama’s mind when she went to the mail- box under the stairs to get the electric bill. In also “a couple of ghetto Jews struggling ley’s chest. “I was beginning to su er memory o him and out o respect for man- with hard work and intensive educa- the storyteller’s pain: Listen! I have to kind, I decided to live for love. tion up the famous American ladder” tell you something!” Her chance was a until they reached the middle class. “At bout of sickness serious enough to keep And so she does. Rose’s tale opens that comfortable rung (probably up- Nora and Danny at an after-school pro- with her youthful days working as a holstered), embarrassed panic would gram until dinnertime for several weeks. ticket seller at the Russian Art Theatre, be the response to possible exposure.” Freed from interruption, Paley wrote on Second Avenue. There she is courted Hence Manya’s refusal to allow her to until she had her first story. over seltzer by Volodya Vlashkin, an sing—or so Paley, at seventy-two, tells older, married man and a charismatic her eighty-six-year-old sister, who re- ’ “Goodbye and Good king of the Yiddish stage. Rose even- jects her theory. Forget all the class I Luck,” and it’s a triumph. Here’s how tually ends the a air, but she never mar- analysis, her sister says. Manya had per- it begins: “I was popular in certain cir- ries; Vlashkin’s picture stays on her wall. fect pitch; it was torture for her to hear cles, says Aunt Rose. I wasn’t no thin- Rose is pragmatic, vital, without self- a wrong note. And so Paley’s account ner then, only more stationary in the pity. Still, we suspect that she is a sad of her earliest years ends with two old flesh. In time to come, Lillie, don’t be case, a solitary old maid gabbing to her ladies trying to make out the blur of surprised—change is a fact of God. From niece about happier times. The joke is their young mother, as powerfully enig- this no one is excused. Only a person on us. Vlashkin has finally retired, she matic as ever. like your mama stands on one foot, she tells Lillie. Mrs. Vlashkin couldn’t stand Paley dropped out of high school at don’t notice how big her behind is get- having him around all day and has di- sixteen. She took classes at Hunter and ting and sings in the canary’s ear for vorced him. The lovers are back together, at City College but never got a degree. thirty years.” No throat-clearing pre- this time for good: “After all I’ll have a (She also studied poetry at the New amble, no careful, self-conscious fram- husband, which, as everybody knows, a School with W. H. Auden, who did her ing of the kind that so often accompa- woman should have at least one before the great service of encouraging her to the end of the story.” write in her own voice.) At nineteen, Paley counted the publication of “The she married Jess Paley, a soldier, and Little Disturbances of Man” as a stroke went to live with him at Army bases in of luck. She had been rejected by more the South and the Midwest before mov- than a dozen journals before an editor ing to a basement apartment on West at Doubleday whose kids were friends Eleventh Street to wait out the war, with hers asked to see what she was supporting herself with a string of sec- working on. The book made her repu- retarial jobs. tation; she began placing stories in The Mainly, though, she worked as a Atlantic, Esquire, and—that small pond housewife. “That is the poorest paying nies early work. Just a voice on the page, of big fish—New American Review. Still, job a woman can hold,” Paley wrote speaking high and proud, certain of fifteen years passed before “Enormous later. “But most women feel gypped by being heard. Changes at the Last Minute” came out, life if they don’t get a chance at it.” Nora Paley grew up in three languages: and it might well have been more, had was born in , followed, two years Russian at home, Yiddish in the street, Donald Barthelme, Paley’s neighbor and later, by a son, Danny. Motherhood and English everywhere else, a blend friend, not badgered her into putting elated and sustained Paley; as she got that marks all her work. In this first together the second collection. older, she spoke of children with an al- story, you hear notes of Isaac Bashevis In that time, the sixties came and went, most mystical appreciation. (“The child, Singer; you hear Babel, a little Che- and the women’s movement arrived. you know, is the reason for life” is a typ- khov, some Joyce, all active influences, “The buoyancy, the noise, the saltiness” ical Paleyism.) She was also overbur- but above all you hear Paley inventing of second-wave feminism gave Paley a dened, exhausted, and lonely. Jess was her own American English, one that definitive framework for analyzing the
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 69 world, and a community to survive it tiny of life, a lesson Paley didn’t forget. erwise see? Faith has gone looking for with. As she put it, she “required three When she was tasked with drafting the the past. What she has found is the fu- or four best women friends” to whom unity statement for the Women’s ture—the lives that came after she grew she could “tell every personal fact and Pentagon Action, an antiwar feminist up and took hers elsewhere. then discuss on the widest, deepest, and sit-in, she spoke of women, particularly The best way to read Paley’s fiction most hopeless level the economy, the incarcerated ones, who “were born at is still by way of the “Collected Stories,” constant, unbeatable, cruel war econ- the intersection of oppressions,” a phrase where they echo and amplify and some- omy, the slavery of the American worker that hadn’t yet gone mainstream. As for times undercut one another, growing, to the idea of that economy, the com- prisons, she thought they should all be like life, more complex and jagged with plicity of male people in the whole struc- in residential neighborhoods: easy to time. Di erent voices, black and Latino, ture, the dumbness of men (including visit, hard to hide. appear, to testify to di erent experiences. her preferred man) on this subject.” Close friendships between women Some critics have found this side of feminist writer from deepen or become strained with age. Paley cloyingly righteous. It’s true that P the start, but in her first book women Some adored children, raised by parents in her political writing she could slip are preoccupied by their dealings with committed to giving them a better into the kind of Earth Mother holi- men. In the second, they suddenly have world, are lost to drugs, or jail, or even ness that she loved to ironize in her fic- friends, too, other women to sit around to Weather Underground-type politi- tion. Some of the pieces in the “Reader” the playground and discuss life with. cal extremism; others thrive. Adults are were written as speeches for meetings Gone are Faith’s days of listening to her exasperated by their aging parents even or protests, and their rhetoric matches husbands natter on as she rolls her eyes as they fear for what will happen when the occasion. Wars are “violent games” toward the ceiling. She is hungry to they’re gone. Men and women keep played by men; women, on the other talk, and so is Paley, whose language, driving each other crazy in bed and in hand, “know there is a healthy, sensi- already so fleet and free, now really be- the head, but with more mutual sym- ble, loving way to live.” In an article for gins to fly. In the story “Faith in a Tree,” pathy and gentleness. Political urgency Ms., Paley argued that the American one of Paley’s best, Faith perches like a rattles the soul. And then, like life, it all adoption of maimed Vietnamese or- Sibyl on the branch of a sycamore over- abruptly ends. phans amounted to war profiteering. looking the playground and delivers a Why did Paley stop writing short (To her credit, when she republished manic monologue on all the great Paley stories? Signs of renunciation are ev- the piece, in “Just As I Thought,” she concerns—war, socialism, capitalism, erywhere in “Later the Same Day,” her included an exchange of letters with a class, parents, children, sex, love—while last book of fiction. “I am trying to curb furious reader, and a postscript recon- pausing to flirt with men, chat with my cultivated individualism, which sidering her position.) women, argue with Richard and Tonto, seemed for years so sweet,” she writes But Paley’s sense of sisterhood was and gossip about everyone she sees. “I at the start of one story. “It was my never complacent. Early on, she per- digressed and was free,” Faith says, o er- own song in my own world and, of ceived the challenges posed by divisions ing the perfect motto for her breath- course, it may not be useful in the hard of race, class, and sexuality to feminist less, bravura performance. It’s as if she time to come.” These do not sound at solidarity, and to the broader American were trying to put the whole of her all like the words of someone who still left. One highlight of the “Reader” is world into words before she, or it, van- has another thirty years of joyful liv- Paley’s essay about the six days in ished for good. ing left. They sound like an ascetic’s that she spent in the Women’s House The disappearing world is Paley’s vow to renounce the self ’s happiness of Detention, the old Greenwich Vil- great topic, and not only when it comes for a higher cause. The end of the book lage prison, for trying to block a mili- to the threat of nuclear war. In “The is even more severe. Faith is driving a tary parade. Paley is one of the few white Long Distance Runner,” Faith goes for friend, Cassie, home from a meeting. women there, and the only inmate not a jog in Brighton Beach, where she grew As they stop at a red light, Faith turns booked for prostitution or drugs. She up. Her block, once Jewish, is now black; to admire, at lustful length, a sexy man gets to know Rita and Evelyn, the tough she is an interloper, this out-of-breath crossing the street. She thinks, “with tenants of a neighboring cell, and Helen, middle-aged white woman in shorts, a mild homesickness,” of the “every- a Jew from Brighton Beach who used viewed with a mixture of curiosity and day life” he is leading; hers has been to hook with them. “Then one day along hostility. A Girl Scout shows her around subsumed by her political work. Cas- come Malcolm X and they don’t know her old apartment building, then be- sie is scornful. The man, she says, is me no more, they ain’t talking to me,” comes frightened of the “honky lady” “just a bourgeois.” And what is Faith’s Helen tells her. “You too white. I ain’t and calls for help. Faith, “frightened by everyday life, anyway? “It’s been women all that white.” One woman has a child her fear of me,” pounds on the door of and men, women and men, fucking, at Hunter High School; when she gets her old apartment until she’s let in. Here fucking. Goddamnit, where the hell is out, she’s going to clean up her act. Paley the story becomes surpassingly strange. my woman and woman, woman- loving is deeply moved. Rita and Evelyn laugh Faith stays with the current tenant, Mrs. life in all this?” Faith is shocked. She at her naïveté. “Change her ways? That Luddy, a recluse, for three weeks. Is she asks Cassie’s forgiveness. “I do not for- dumb bitch. Ha!!” Not everyone has there as a voyeur, peering, like Paley in give you,” Cassie says. That frighten- equal reason to believe in the open des- prison, into a life that she’d never oth- ing, damning pronouncement is the
70 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 last line of fiction Paley published. It is as if she had taken a knife and slashed BRIEFLY NOTED through everything that had come be- fore this unsparing final judgment. This isn’t to say that Paley curbed Shattered, by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes (Crown). This her “cultivated individualism.” In the withering account of Hillary Clinton’s Presidential campaign nineties, she turned again to poems, her draws on interviews conducted with sta ers as the race un- first literary love. They are more plain- folded. Robby Mook, who ran the operation, is portrayed as spoken, politically and personally, than being obsessed with analytics and demographics, to the exclu- her stories, though often full of the same sion of the traditional politics of persuasion. Regional direc- surprising humor and wit. Yet one won- tors, begging for resources, are told that their states won’t mat- ders how Paley came to decide that the ter, and everyone waits for the next headline about e-mails. fictional imagination, which loves di- The candidate herself, largely out of view, emerges mostly to gression, inconsistency, and the beauty spread blame: “In her view, it was up to the people she paid of the trivial, could no longer help her to find the right message for her.” The book’s perspective yields say what she wanted to about the world. a great deal of backroom color, but its insights are limited, Recently, I’ve been thinking of one which is partly the point: the Clinton campaign never had a story in particular, “Anxiety,” also from clear picture of its own candidate or of what was coming. “Later the Same Day,” which, though only about three pages long, isn’t in- The Great Cat and Dog Massacre, by Hilda Kean (Chicago). cluded in the “Reader.” It is April, “the Over four days in September, , pet owners in London, an- season of first looking out the window.” ticipating an aerial bombing campaign by the Germans, eu- The narrator, an older woman, is gaz- thanized some four hundred thousand cats and dogs. Kean’s ing past her box of marigolds at a young goal, in this multifaceted history, is to get at the many reasons attractive father who has picked up his for the unprecedented event, which was voluntary, advised little girl from the school across the against by major governmental bodies, and premature: the first street and set her on his shoulders. But bombs didn’t fall until seven months later. Pursuing questions the girl is wiggling too much, saying as varied as a pet’s value in the years leading up to the war, “oink.” Her father puts her down harshly, how the idea of war-preparedness (or “doing things”) goaded yelling at her. The woman leans out her people into acting drastically (and often pointlessly), and how window and calls after him: the event shaped thinking on animal rights, Kean achieves an unusual psychological portrait of a society in wartime. Young man, I am an older person who feels free because o that to ask questions and give advice. . . . Son, I must tell you that madmen Number , by Jonathan Coe (Knopf). To succeed, satire needs intend to destroy this beautifully made planet. to be self-aware, so it is a good sign when a character in this That the murder o our children by these men mordant novel of British politics says that “every kind of pub- has got to become a terror and a sorrow to you, lic discussion has to have a veneer of comedy. Politics espe- and starting now, it had better interfere with any daily pleasure. cially.” The book (a sequel of sorts to Coe’s “The Winshaw Legacy”) addresses the corrosive power of both austerity and The father is embarrassed, a bit surly, wealth, and the burden of choice versus coddling paternalism. but he listens to what the woman has These weighty topics are leavened by a mischievous narrative to say. She wants to know what could and a gothic humor: an academic is literally crushed by his have happened to justify his anger at his obsession; in an exclusive area of London, “closed-circuit cam- child. He thinks. The problem was the eras sprout among the ivy and the sycamore trees.” Yet the word “oink”—he once said it to the cops, dominant note is one of horror at the changeless injustice of and he doesn’t want it said to him, as if the modern social compact, and the violence it entails. he were some sinister authority figure. Very good, the woman says, why doesn’t A Little More Human, by Fiona Maazel (Graywolf Press). This he try again? He lifts his daughter up, idiosyncratic thriller, set in Staten Island, is layered with se- and o they gallop like horse and rider. crets: the antihero, Phil, has the power to read minds; his “I lean way out to cry once more, Be mother may have committed suicide; his neuroscientist father careful! Stop!” She is thinking of the has incipient dementia; and his wife used a sperm donor to busy intersection they are about to reach, conceive. When Phil receives incriminating photographs of of all the danger that she sees ahead. himself from a night he cannot remember, he’s drawn into a They are too far o to hear her warn- dark conspiracy about a radically innovative medical center, ing. So she settles back down to imag- founded by his parents. The novel’s paranormal elements (a ine where they will go out to play on diabolical villain’s glass eye has superhuman powers) do not this gorgeous day while she sits alone fully counteract the ubiquity of the genre’s tropes, like meet- with her precious, bitter knowledge. ings conducted in remote lighthouses.
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 71 are beguiled by the bench, wowed by THE ART WORLD the tureen, amused by the bedspread, and piqued by the wall label. She knows what we want. Marcel Duchamp called LOOKING AND SEEING art “a habit-forming drug.” Lawler deals us poisoned fixes. The image of A Louise Lawler retrospective. the Warhol appears twice in the show, under two titles: “Does Andy Warhol BY PETER SCHJELDAHL Make You Cry?” and “Does Marilyn Monroe Make You Cry?” Your emo- tional responses to the painting are thus anticipated and cauterized. The e ect is rather sadistic, but also per- haps masochistic. Lawler couldn’t mock aesthetic sensitivity if she didn’t share it. Her work suggests an antic self-awareness typical of standup com- ics. It feels authentic, at any rate. Lawler was born in in Bronx- ville, New York. Having graduated with a bachelor-of-fine-arts degree from Cornell University, in , she moved to New York City, and got a job at the Leo Castelli Gallery. That’s about the extent of the biographical information she has made available. She shuns interviews, and whenever she is asked for a photograph of her- self she provides a picture of a parrot seen from behind while turning its head to look back at you, Betty Gra- Lawler’s “Untitled - ” ( ): a Miró and its re ection. ble style. Lawler varied that tactic in , when the magazine Artscribe re- photographs by educated cohort—which included Bar- quested a likeness for a cover: she sub- I Louise Lawler, currently the sub- bara Kruger, who produced mordant mitted a photograph of Meryl Streep ject of a retrospective at the Museum feminist agitprop, and Sherrie Levine, (with the actress’s permission), cap- of Modern Art, first hurt my feelings, who took deadpan photographs of tioned “Recognition Maybe, May Not some thirty years ago. They pictured classic modern photographs—beamed Be Useful.” Lawler’s stand against ce- paintings by Miró, Pollock, Johns, and contempt at established myths, modes, lebrity deserves respect, despite the Warhol as they appeared in museums, and motives of prestige in art. As a fact that it comes from an artist whose galleries, auction houses, storage spaces, sort of mandarin parallel to punk, work advertises her entrée to the inner and collectors’ homes. A Miró co-starred the movement disdained the ideal- sanctums of museums and private col- with its own reflection in the glossy ism of previous avant-gardes. I found lections—her derisive treatment of surface of a museum bench. The floral most of its ploys lamely obvious: bul- them notwithstanding—and her abil- pattern on a Limoges soup tureen vied lets whizzing past my head. But Law- ity to have Meryl Streep return her with a Pollock drip painting on a wall ler got me square in the heart. calls. The road to becoming famous above it. Johns’s “White Flag” harmo- There is a recurrent moment, for while remaining unknown does not nized with a monogrammed bedspread. lovers of art, when we shift from look- run smooth. An auction label next to a round gold ing at a work to actively seeing it. It’s Yet although Lawler has resisted Warhol “Marilyn” estimated the work’s like entering a waking dream, as if we public exposure, she has been colle- value at between three hundred thou- were children cued by “Once upon a gial with her peers. Among the early sand and four hundred thousand dol- time.” We don’t reflect on the worldly pieces in the show are two lars. (That was in . Today, you arrangements—the interests of wealth photographs, from , of works by might not be permitted a bid south of and power—that enable our adven- fellow-artists, including Sherrie eight figures.) tures. Why should we? But, if that Le vine, Roy Lichtenstein, and Jenny I knew what Lawler’s game was: consciousness is forced on us, we may Holzer, which Lawler had arranged in “institutional critique,” a strategy de- be frozen mid-toggle between look- two di erent groups, on black back- ployed by members and associates of ing and seeing. Lawler’s strategy is se- drop paper, in one case, and tulip-red
the Pictures Generation. That theory- duction: her photographs delight. We paper, in the other. Dominating each METROANDPICTURES ARTIST THE COURTESY
72 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 arrangement is a “Cow” poster, by War- for the show, in moma’s garden, she hol, which he sent to Lawler in 1977, recorded herself chirping the names in return for the favor of giving him of twenty-eight celebrated male con- a roll of film at a party when he had temporary artists, who are listed al- run out. She has photographed more phabetically, on a glass wall, from Vito works by Warhol than by any other Acconci to Lawrence Weiner. artist, and with what seems an un- Her recent work lampoons the pres- usual afection; her own art wouldn’t sure on artists to produce big-scale be conceivable without his trailblaz- works to satisfy a trend, in galleries and ing conflations of culture high, low, museums, toward ever pompously and sideways. But Warhol’s happy com- larger exhibition spaces. It consists modifying of art couldn’t sit well with of photographs, or tracings of them, her, given the ideological slants that that she has made of art works in- she shares with others in her social stalled in museums: sculptures by Jef and artistic milieu. Koons and Donald Judd; paintings by From 1981 to 1995, Lawler was mar- Lucio Fontana and Frank Stella. The ried to Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, the pictures are enlarged and distorted, formidably erudite German-American scrunched or elongated, to fit the di- art historian and apostle of Frankfurt mensions of vast walls. (In one of them, School critical philosophy, who can shot from floor level in a room dis- winkle out malignancies of the hope- playing minimalist works by Judd, fully termed “late capitalism” in just Stella, and Sol LeWitt, the blur of about anything. Certainly, her work someone’s striding leg intrudes evi- has invited that sort of analysis, which dence of real time on putatively time- some of the eight essays in the show’s less art.) The efect of the mural-mak- catalogue doggedly apply. But one ing distortions is spectacularly clumsy, essay pleasantly surprises. In it, the cranking up a pitch of arbitrariness to British art historian Julian Stallabrass something like a shriek. wonders how it is “that Lawler’s art, Lawler’s work is periodically topi- which is sly, slight and light, quick, cal, as with her occasional, somewhat jokey, agile, epigrammatic, and per- frail gestures of antiwar sentiment. haps subversive, has elicited a litera- (Shelves of glass tumblers engraved ture that is slow, ponderous, grinding, with the words “No Drones,” from and heavy.” Lawler’s tendentious crit- 2013, don’t exactly menace the Penta- ics lumber past the sense of a personal gon.) But, even if she didn’t intend the drama—ethics at odds with aesthet- significance that I take away from the ics, and rigor with yearning—that show—an antagonism to art’s organs makes her by far the most arresting of commerce and authority in grid- artist of her kind. She transcends the lock with a profound dependence on dreary impression, endemic to most them—her career has a timely politi- institutional critique, of preaching to cal importance. The retrospective comes a choir. at a moment when an onslaught of il- Humor helps. Having landed her- liberal forces in the big world dwarfs self in a war zone between creating intellectual wrangles in the little one art and objectifying it, and between of art. Who, these days, can aford the belonging to the art world and resent- patience for mixed feelings about the ing it, Lawler capers in the crossfire. protocols of cultural institutions? Art- She charms with such ephemera as ists can. Some artists must. Art often paperweights, matchbooks, napkins, serves us by exposing conflicts among and invitations—one announces a per- our values, not to propose solutions formance by New York City Ballet, but to tap energies of truth, however tickets to be purchased at the box partial, and beauty, however fugitive; ofce—that reproduce her photographs and the service is greatest when our or are imprinted with bits of teasing worlds feel most in crisis. Charles text. (The moma show takes its title Baudelaire, the Moses of modernity, from a sort of Zen koan that Lawler wrote, “I have cultivated my hysteria rendered on a matchbook, in 1981: with terror and delight.” Lawler does “Why Pictures Now.”) For “Birdcalls” that, too, with disciplined wit and (1972/1981), a sound piece broadcast, hopeless integrity.
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 73 constitutes an individual achievement in THE THEATRE this age of the simulacrum, when every- thing owes something to something else? Ibsen was born about a hundred and REWIND fifty years before Hnath, in Skien, Nor- way, into a family of merchants. His par- Lucas Hnath’s sequel to “A Doll’s House.” ents were unusually close, and he was both fascinated and horrified by their re- BY HILTON ALS lationship. The question of intimacy— and its connections to money, Christian morality, and gender roles, or, more specifically, how a woman should be- have—excited his dramatic imagination and also made him a critic of the mores he grew up with. Widely considered the father of modern realism, Ibsen wrote “A Doll’s House” in , and it changed ev- erything. Before that, he’d produced a number of scripts in verse, but poetry had sort of prettified his characters, and the restrictions of the form prevented them from getting to the heart, or the marrow, of their stories. Ibsen switched to prose for its more immediate e ects—and as a way of shocking audiences out of their complacency. “A Doll’s House” did just that. In Ibsen’s day, people went to the the- atre to see their values upheld, not at- tacked. When Nora Helmer, the play’s protagonist, shut the door on her hus- band, her children, and her bourgeois life, and went out into the world with no connections to her past and none to advance her future, it was left to the au- dience to wonder what would become of her. To go from dreaming about Nora’s life to writing it required a leap of faith— hard story to tell.” So writes In many ways, the work of the thirty- an author’s faith in his own imagina- “T Joan Didion near the start of her seven-year-old playwright Lucas Hnath tion—and that’s the kind of energy that novel, “Democracy,” a book that’s grows out of the authorial complexities jumps out at you from Hnath’s play, his narrated by a character named Joan Di- of that older generation of writers. (He strongest yet. It’s a treat to watch his dion, who describes the di culty of de- owes something to Tom Stoppard, too.) Nora come to life without sacrificing the vising a whole fiction in the fragmented But instead of writing directly about the emotional and political architecture that modern world. Like a number of her experience of writing or not writing, in- Ibsen built into and around her. contemporaries or near-contemporar- venting or not inventing, Hnath has now The characters in the piece are the ies—Julian Barnes and Renata Adler found himself by parsing and filling in same as in Ibsen’s, until they become among them—Didion is ultimately chal- a story he didn’t write, Henrik Ibsen’s “A something else—Hnath’s. The setting: a lenging the writer’s empirical “I,” a sub- Doll’s House.” high-ceilinged sitting room in a nine- ject that Susan Sontag tackled in an essay “A Doll’s House, Part ” (directed by teenth-century middle-class home. It’s published in this magazine, in : Sam Gold, at the John Golden), Hnath’s sparsely furnished and bright. What you Inevitably, disestablishing the “author” brings invigorating ninety-minute, intermis- notice first is the door, dark and tall. about a rede nition o “writing.” . . . All pre-mod- sionless work, is an irresponsible act—a Someone is knocking and a maid, Anne ern literature evolves from the classical concep- kind of naughty imposition on a classic, Marie (Jayne Houdyshell), enters, hu ng tion o writing as an impersonal, self-su cient, which, in addition to investing Ibsen’s and pu ng. “Hold on, I’m coming,” she freestanding achievement. Modern literature projects a quite di erent idea: the romantic con- signature play with the humor that the says. Opening the door, Anne Marie ception o writing as a medium in which a sin- nineteenth-century artist lacked, raises discovers Nora (Laurie Metcalf). In her gular personality heroically exposes itself. a number of questions, such as What stylish hat, fitted jacket, and long skirt, she looks prosperous as she walks pur- In “A Doll’s House, Part ,” Nora (Laurie Metcalf ) has written her own story. posefully toward—what?
74 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 ILLUSTRATION BY CLAIRE MERCHLINSKY Well, well. Here she is again, after so “A Doll’s House, Part ” is a play about much with Chris Cooper. But that may many years—fifteen, to be exact. Since a play, and about men looking at women— not be Gold’s fault: Cooper’s passive- leaving her husband, Torvald (Chris Coo- though not condescendingly, or with any- aggressive energy, sublime on film, gets per), Nora has discovered her own voice thing approaching lust and, thus, the idea swallowed up by the powerful actresses and become—drumroll, please—a writer. of possession. Although Hnath’s Nora around him. (He’s the only man in the A popular feminist writer who writes is free, she, like most of us, is still bound piece.) Metcalf does her best to draw him under a pseudonym. Her first book was to the thing that we can leave behind out, to help him dramatize his interiority, about a woman who was in a seemingly but never fully divest ourselves of: family. but all he really conveys is a kind of soft- good marriage, with children and so on, I’ve seen all Hnath’s plays that were edged confusion; you can’t see or feel Tor- and who left it all, just like that. Having produced downtown. This is his first vald’s anger when he discovers Nora in basically written her own story, Nora dis- Broadway venture and the first of his his home. Conversely, Condola Rashad, covered that many other women had ex- works that has moved me in a complete as Emmy, the daughter Nora left behind, perienced similar predicaments. Now she’s way. There were moments in his is perfect in every way. Now a grown in town very briefly, with a task to accom- piece, “The Christians,” that rocked me, woman, Emmy meets her mother with plish. It turns out that she’s not divorced but “Red Speedo” ( ) left me cold. It her back sti with propriety and her self from Torvald. She needs him to sign a felt trumped up, hanging on a sliver of an firmly in place. She will not follow Nora’s document saying that he is divorcing her: idea, and an old idea at that: male com- path, but has forged her own—in the by law, no woman can divorce her hus- petition, inside and outside the locker more comforting country of convention. band without proof of mistreatment. room. “A Doll’s House, Part ” is less im- In Emmy’s scene with Nora, recrimina- While Houdyshell and Metcalf go plicitly macho than Hnath’s previous tions float just above the strained pleas- about their work—each gives her role the works, perhaps in part because it has a antries between mother and child. There’s ideal pacing, balancing humor and resent- gay influence: David Adjmi’s “Marie An- something profound, too, in the words ment with business that is unexpected and toinette” ( ). Like that work, Hnath’s that Emmy won’t speak, or even let her- true, such as Nora’s habit of taking swigs is divided into scenes marked by titles self think: How could you have left us for of water from a bottle she keeps in her and uses language that stresses the collo- anything, let alone for self-love? She stares bag, like a jogger cooling down after a long quial in a period setting. (It has become out into the theatre. If she looked at Nora run—the ideas keep coming, fast and de- a trend in downtown theatre to take a directly, would she die of love? Or rage? licious. Nora has written a book about her work set in another era and infuse it with I have seen Rashad in a variety of roles life? How could she do that when Ibsen in- talk from this one. Presumably, the inten- on Broadway, and in each one she has vented her and Hnath is reinventing her? tion is to create a slightly “o ” or disjunc- lacked either a great script or a great di- How real is she? Because we know her tive atmosphere, but I suspect that the rector—the shows just never came to- sto ry, she’s real to us, maybe even more device will soon start to feel tired.) And gether for her. This one does. And it takes real than what’s happening outside the Sam Gold’s direction, very cast-supportive, a moment for us to recall that in Ibsen’s theatre. The thoughts go on: We’re watch- reminded me of Rebecca Taichman’s vi- play Emmy has only a walk-on part; she ing a play written, in a sense, by two male sion for the Adjmi play, down to the swift- isn’t heard from. This means that she is playwrights. Wouldn’t it be “truer” if a wom- ness with which the lines were spoken Hnath’s most fully invented character in an wrote the story? Or is Nora, as played and the way scenes sometimes began with this spectacle about family, law, and a by the fierce Metcalf, writing her story little preamble. It was thrilling to feel that woman’s right to choose—at a price. For now, by making Hnath’s text her own? the writer and the director weren’t con- Emmy, Hnath didn’t need to push Ibsen Like so many of Stoppard’s works in descending to us and assumed we’d keep aside to find his way; he simply, and not which historical figures come up against up. We do, because Nora matters to us so simply, trusted his own imagination to the playwright’s irrepressible love of ideas, and will always matter to us. carry the joy and the weight of telling a Hnath’s script is a kind of metafiction. It doesn’t feel as if Gold has really done story, of making things up. ©
THE NEW YORKER IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF ADVANCE MAGAZINE PUBLISHERS INC. COPYRIGHT ©2017 CONDÉ NAST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
VOLUME XCIII, NO. 12, May 8, 2017. THE NEW YORKER (ISSN 0028 792X) is published weekly (except for ive combined issues: February 13 & 20, June 5 & 12, July 10 & 17, August 7 & 14, and December 18 & 25) by Condé Nast, which is a division o Advance Magazine Publishers Inc. PRINCIPAL OFFICE: Condé Nast, 1 World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. Elizabeth Hughes, chie business oicer; Risa Aronson, vice-president, revenue; James Guilfoyle, executive director o inance and business operations; Fabio Bertoni, general counsel. Condé Nast: S. I. Newhouse, Jr., chairman emeritus; Robert A. Sauerberg, Jr., president & chie executive oicer; David E. Geithner, chie inancial oicer; James M. Norton, chie business oicer, president o revenue. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and at additional mailing oices. Canadian Goods and Services Tax Registration No. 123242885-RT0001.
POSTMASTER: SEND ADDRESS CHANGES TO THE NEW YORKER, P.O. Box 37684, Boone, IA 50037 0684. FOR SUBSCRIPTIONS, ADDRESS CHANGES, ADJUSTMENTS, OR BACK ISSUE INQUIRIES: Please write to The New Yorker, P.O. Box 37684, Boone, IA 50037 0684, call (800) 825- 2510, or e-mail [email protected]. Please give both new and old addresses as printed on most recent label. Subscribers: I the Post Oice alerts us that your magazine is undeliverable, we have no further obligation unless we receive a corrected address within one year. I during your subscription term or up to one year after the magazine becomes undeliverable, you are ever dissatisied with your subscription, let us know. You will receive a full refund on all unmailed issues. First copy o new subscription will be mailed within four weeks after receipt o order. For advertising inquiries, please call Risa Aronson at (212) 286-4068. For submission guidelines, please refer to our Web site, www.newyorker.com. Address all editorial, business, and production correspondence to The New Yorker, 1 World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. For cover reprints, please call (800) 897-8666, or e-mail [email protected]. For permissions and reprint requests, please call (212) 630-5656 or fax requests to (212) 630-5883. No part o this periodical may be reproduced without the consent o The New Yorker. The New Yorker’s name and logo, and the various titles and headings herein, are trademarks o Advance Magazine Publishers Inc. Visit us online at www.newyorker.com. To sub- scribe to other Condé Nast magazines, visit www.condenast.com. Occasionally, we make our subscriber list available to carefully screened companies that oer products and services that we believe would interest our readers. I you do not want to receive these oers and/or information, please advise us at P.O. Box 37684, Boone, IA 50037 0684 or call (800) 825-2510.
THE NEW YORKER IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THE RETURN OR LOSS OF, OR FOR DAMAGE OR ANY OTHER INJURY TO, UNSOLICITED MANUSCRIPTS, UNSOLICITED ART WORK (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, DRAWINGS, PHOTOGRAPHS, AND TRANSPARENCIES), OR ANY OTHER UNSOLICITED MATERIALS. THOSE SUBMITTING MANUSCRIPTS, PHOTOGRAPHS, ART WORK, OR OTHER MATERIALS FOR CONSIDERATION SHOULD NOT SEND ORIGINALS, UNLESS SPECIFICALLY REQUESTED TO DO SO BY THE NEW YORKER IN WRITING.
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 8, 2017 75 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 Peter Kuper, must be received by Sunday, May th. The nalists in the April th contest appear below. We will announce the winner, and the nalists in this week’s contest, in the May nd issue. Anyone age thirteen or older can enter or vote. To do so, and to read the complete rules, visit contest.newyorker.com.
THIS WEEK’S CONTEST
“ ” ......
THE FINALISTS THE WINNING CAPTION
“There goes my novel.” William Postle, Anaheim, Calif.
“We’ll see how a ectionate he is when he “Hire the one that said, ‘Whom.’ ” finds out who ate his parrot.” Jason Berger, San Diego, Calif. Adam Wagner, Santa Monica, Calif.
“He calls it Ishmeow.” Ronnie Raviv, Chicago, Ill.