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MAY 1, 2017

4 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN 17 THE TALK OF THE TOWN David Remnick on the first hundred days of Donald Trump. LIFE AND LETTERS Ariel Levy 22 A Long Homecoming Elizabeth Strout’s small-town novels. SHOUTS & MURMURS Calvin Trillin 27 The Irish Constellation LETTER FROM COLOMBIA Jon Lee Anderson 28 Out of the Jungle Former guerrillas try adapting to . THE POLITICAL SCENE Connie Bruck 34 A Hollywood Story What, exactly, did do in the movie industry? PROFILES Joshua Rothman 46 The Seeker A Christian concedes the culture wars. SHOWCASE Pari Dukovic 52 Rei Kawakubo at the Costume Institute. FICTION David Means 56 “Two Ruminations on a Homeless Brother” THE CRITICS THE THEATRE 60 Bette Midler in “Hello, Dolly!” BOOKS Louis Menand 63 Rereading Norman Podhoretz’s “Making It.” 69 Briefly Noted A CRITIC AT LARGE Anthony Lane 70 The films of Jean-Pierre Melville. POP MUSIC Hua Hsu 74 ’s “DAMN.” ON TELEVISION 76 “American Crime.” MUSICAL EVENTS Alex Ross 78 Icelandic music in Los Angeles. POEMS Dan Chiasson 38 “From ‘The Names of 1,001 Strangers’ ” Anne Carson 50 “Saturday Night as an Adult” COVER Mark Ulriksen “Strike Zone”

DRAWINGS Danny Shanahan, Shannon Wheeler, John Klossner, Jason Adam Katzenstein, Drew Dernavich, Bruce Eric Kaplan, Trevor Spaulding, Will McPhail, William Haefeli, Roz Chast, Harry Bliss, David Sipress, Corey Pandolph, Amy Hwang SPOTS Miguel Porlan CONTRIBUTORS

Connie Bruck (“A Hollywood Story,” Jon Lee Anderson (“Out of the Jungle,” p. 34) has been a staff writer since 1989. p. 28), a staff writer, began contribut- She is the author of three books, among ing to The New Yorker in 1998. them “The Predators’ Ball.” Joshua Rothman (“The Seeker,” p. 46) Hilton Als (The Theatre, p. 60), The New has been the magazine’s archive edi- Yorker’s theatre critic, won the 2017 Pu- tor since 2012, and is a frequent con- litzer Prize for criticism. He is an asso- tributor to newyorker.com. ciate professor at . Ariel Levy (“A Long Homecoming,” Louis Menand (Books, p. 63) has been a p. 22), a staff writer, is the author of staff writer since 2001. Last year, he the memoir “The Rules Do Not Apply,” was awarded the National Humanities which was published in March and is Medal by President Obama. based on her New Yorker essay “Thanks- giving in Mongolia.” Anne Carson (Poem, p. 50) is the au- thor of several books of poetry, includ- David Means (Fiction, p. 56) has written ing “Float,” which was published last several books, including “The Spot,” a October. short-story collection, and the novel “Hystopia,” which came out last year. Mark Ulriksen (Cover), an artist and il- lustrator, has contributed fifty-five cov- Pari Dukovic (Showcase, p. 52) is the ers to the magazine since 1994. magazine’s staff photographer.

Hua Hsu (Pop Music, p. 74), a contrib- Anthony Lane (A Critic at Large, p. 70), uting writer for the magazine since a film critic for The New Yorker since 2015, is the author of “A Floating Chi- 1993, is the author of “Nobody’s Per- naman: Fantasy and Failure Across the fect,” a collection of his writings for Pacific.” the magazine.

NEWYORKER.COM Everything in the magazine, and more.

DAILY SHOUTS PODCAST In this comic by Gabrielle Bell, a Rebecca Solnit joins Dorothy woman faced with a very smart Wickenden in a discussion on the mouse calls 1-800-CATS. politics of sexual harassment.

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2 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 THE MAIL

RUNNING THE COURT liant political satire. Nussbaum critiques him for abandoning the kind of sharp Jeffrey Toobin does to expose the questioning that distinguished “The Col- enormous influence of Leonard Leo and bert Report,” and she cites as proof his the Federalist Society, a conservative or- softball interview with Susan Sarandon ganization that has infiltrated many lev- about politics. But Sarandon is an actor, els of the U.S. judicial system (“Full-Court and her political opinions don’t merit the Press,” April 17th). Toobin says that Leo, serious cross-examination that Nussbaum who has been the executive vice- president demands. At a time when buffoonery of the society for many years, in effect rules the White House, I find it a relief chose three of the nine current Supreme to watch Colbert turn the day’s disasters Court Justices. This is alarming, partic- into hilarious jabs, providing me with a ularly because Leo and the society are little joy before I go to bed. committed to an “originalist” interpreta- Jamie K. Sims tion of the Constitution, which is any- 1Richmond, Va. thing but what the Framers had in mind. ( Justice Antonin Scalia called himself an POPULAR WARMONGERING originalist, as does his admirer and re- placement, Neil Gorsuch.) As Toobin In Steve Coll’s piece on Trump’s choice explains it, originalists believe that the to send fifty-nine missiles into Syria, he government “can’t do anything unless it’s mentions the role that Trump’s “contin- specifically authorized in the Constitu- ual search for approval” plays in his un- tion.” If that’s so, the originalists of the predictable decision-making (Comment, Federalist Society are frauds. Where does April 17th). It seems highly plausible that the Constitution specifically authorize Trump launched the missiles because he the treatment of corporations (which the wanted to raise his low approval ratings, Framers distrusted) as people—or of and to assert that he is not in Putin’s money as speech? Where does it specifi- pocket. Shortly after the attack, his son cally authorize judicial review of execu- Eric, in an interview with the Telegraph, tive and legislative actions? Where does claimed that the action disproved the the Constitution give the President the “ridiculous” stories involving Russia and right to start wars? Where does the Fif- his father’s Administration. If Trump’s teenth Amendment, intended to protect real motivation had been a sense of com- the voting rights of African-Americans, passion for the Syrian people, as he has allow for racist voter suppression? The claimed, he would not have been op- originalists don’t really give a hoot about posed to Obama’s taking action after what the Framers wanted. Rather, they Assad used chemical weapons in 2013, are using the Framers as cover for their harming even more people. Trump’s ap- right-wing policies. It’s disappointing proval ratings did increase following the that this piece didn’t do more to expose attack, and, as Coll notes, he was ap- their hypocrisy. plauded by people and by governments Roger Carasso around the world. It remains to be seen 1Santa Fe, N.M. what lesson Trump takes from this, but his insatiable need for approval gives us CONDEMNING COLBERT reason to be concerned. Eugene Golden It would be just as preposterous for me Los Angeles, Calif. to chastise Emily Nussbaum for not writ- ing her columns in the style of Dr. Seuss • as it is for her to criticize Stephen Col- Letters should be sent with the writer’s name, bert for not being an investigative jour- address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to [email protected]. Letters may be edited nalist on “The Late Show” (On Televi- for length and clarity, and may be published in sion, April 17th). Colbert is an entertainer any medium. We regret that owing to the volume first and foremost—one who does bril- of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter.

THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 3 APRIL 26 – MAY 2, 2017 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

Sophie Calle wants you to carry your secrets to the grave—to the Green-Wood Cemetery, to be precise. For the next quarter century, the French artist and Creative Time invite you to jot down confessions, seal them in envelopes, and insert them into an obelisk (pictured) at a grave site in the landmark. (When the plot becomes full, Calle will cremate the remains and begin again.) On April 29 and 30, from noon to 5 p.m., the artist will transcribe select participants’ secrets, on a first-come, first-served basis.

PHOTOGRAPH BY PARI DUKOVIC Natalie Dessay The French soprano’s blazing theatrics and aston- ishing coloratura facility have made her one of the CLASSICAL MUSIC biggest names in opera during the past twenty 1 years, so it should come as little surprise that her Carnegie Hall recital strikes such an individual OPERA a work for violin, viola, and six voices that leaves profile. The program offers operatic arias by Mo- matters of content and narrative entirely to the per- zart and Gounod; songs by Schubert, Pfitzner, formers. The edgy and imaginative young director Chausson, and Debussy; and two Debussy pre- Metropolitan Opera R. B. Schlather mounts it at the stylish Williams- ludes performed by Dessay’s accompanist, With its surging orchestral colors and brief flights burg music space with an impressive group that Philippe Cassard. April 26 at 8. (212-247-7800.) of melody, Franco Alfano’s “Cyrano de Bergerac” includes the ensemble Choral Chameleon, the vi- is a fluent example of Italian opera after Puccini, olist William Frampton, and the Brooklyn Rider Miller Theatre “Composer Portrait”: but it really owes its twenty-first-century revival to violinist Johnny Gandelsman (who will also per- Klas Torstensson a few star tenors who have been unable to resist the form Glass’s Partita for Solo Violin). April 28-29 Miller’s distinguished series wraps up its season chance to play the immortal title character, with his at 7. (80 N. 6th St., Brooklyn. nationalsawdust.org.) with a concert devoted to this veteran Swedish silver tongue and unsightly nose. (The opera first composer, well-known on the European modernist- came to the Met, in 2005, as a vehicle for Plácido The English Concert: “Ariodante” festival circuit but relatively obscure over here. Domingo.) The French tenor Roberto Alagna head- With City Opera ceding its claim to Sweden’s Ensemble SON teams up with the fine lines the current revival, opposite Jennifer Rowley Handel’s operas and the Met maintaining a very New York players of Either/Or to perform the and Atalla Ayan; Marco Armiliato conducts. May 2 limited repertoire of just two of them, the En- U.S. premières of three works (including “Elliott at 7:30. • Also playing: It would be hard to top Simon glish Concert’s annual presentations at Carne- Loves Bebop,” from 2016). April 27 at 8. (Colum- Keenlyside’s blistering portrayal of Mozart’s lech- gie Hall have emerged as the most reliable way bia University, Broadway at 116th St. 212-854-7799.) erous aristocrat from the fall performances of “Don for New Yorkers to experience these works in all Giovanni,” but the Met has stacked the cast of the their Baroque majesty. Harry Bicket conducts a Leif Ove Andsnes and Marc-André Hamelin spring run with topnotch talent, including Mariusz strong cast that includes Joyce DiDonato, Chris- Two powerhouse pianists, each with an indelibly Kwiecien, Angela Meade, Isabel Leonard, Marina tiane Karg, Joélle Harvey, and Sonia Prina. April distinctive style, combine to offer a piano-duo Rebeka, Matthew Polenzani, and Erwin Schrott. 30 at 2. (212-247-7800.) recital at Carnegie Hall. The repertoire is gilt- Plácido Domingo, whose conducting repertory typ- 1 edged: works by Mozart, Debussy (“En Blanc et ically hews to Italian composers, leads his first Mo- Noir”), and Stravinsky (the sere and neoclassical zart opera for the company. April 26 at 7:30 and April ORCHESTRAS AND CHORUSES Concerto for Two Pianos and the savage “Rite of 29 at 8. • Michael Mayer’s flamboyant, Vegas-style Spring”). April 28 at 8. (212-247-7800.) staging of “Rigoletto” features Željko Lučić (in the New York Philharmonic title role) and Olga Peretyatko (as Gilda), returning Esa-Pekka Salonen may be the Philharmonic’s cur- “Wall to Wall Steve Reich” to reprise their fine portrayals, and the honey-toned rent composer-in-residence, but he also remains Celebrations of this crucial contemporary com- Joseph Calleja, who sang the role of the Duke in one of the orchestra’s most enterprising and wel- poser’s eightieth birthday have been a highlight the Met’s previous production; Pier Giorgio Mo- come guest conductors. His latest program includes throughout the season, but none has been more randi. (This is the final performance.) April 27 at two auspicious local premières: “Funeral Song,” elaborate or extensive than this latest entry in 7:30. • Robert Carsen’s unmissable new production composed in 1908 by a twenty-six-year-old Stra- Symphony Space’s long-standing free-marathon of “Der Rosenkavalier” brilliantly updates Strauss vinsky and long thought lost, and “Forest,” a new tradition. The opening sequence offers canonical and Hofmannsthal’s eighteenth-century setting to concerto for French-horn quartet by the resourceful works in novel arrangements: “Six Pianos,” re- the turbulent, militarized pre-First World War Vi- English composer Tansy Davies. (The soloists are vised for a single player; “Electric Counterpoint,” enna of Schnitzler, Klimt, and Musil, even if some current and former principals of the Philharmo- for guitar and tape, rendered by a live ensemble; of his gestures—such as setting Act III in a brothel— nia Orchestra, of which Salonen is principal con- and so on. In the second part of the show, Alarm go too far. (Touches of Marlene Dietrich and Billy ductor.) Strauss’s cosmic “Also Sprach Zarathus- Will Sound plays “City Life” and “Radio Re- Wilder also spike the mix.) Renée Fleming is a poi- tra” concludes what promises to be an ear-opening write.” The home stretch includes a conversation gnant Marschallin, Elīna Garanča a thrilling and evening. April 27 at 7:30 and April 29 at 8. (David with Reich and performances of two essential highly original Octavian, and Günther Groissböck Geffen Hall. 212-875-5656.) works: “Different Trains,” the watershed string a surprisingly dashing and youthful Ochs; Sebastian quartet, and “The Desert Music,” a still under- Weigle. April 28 and May 1 at 7. • During the James Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment valued piece for chorus and orchestra based on Levine years, the operas of Richard Wagner were a One of the most proficient and exciting ensembles poetry by William Carlos Williams. April 30 at 3, cornerstone of the company’s repertory. Now Yan- to emerge from the historically informed perfor- 5:30, and 8. (Broadway at 95th St. 212-864-5400.) nick Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s music-director desig- mance revolution, the O.A.E., directed by Mat- nate, continues that tradition, leading the passion- thew Truscott, accompanies the dynamic violinist “Music Before 1800” Series: Sequentia ate and stormy “Der Fliegende Holländer,” his first Isabelle Faust in Mozart’s Violin Concertos Nos. 1 The harper Benjamin Bagby’s enduring ensemble Wagner opera for the company. The cast includes and 5. The program also includes Haydn’s stormy returns to Corpus Christi Church to wrap up the Michael Volle, Amber Wagner, Dolora Zajick, AJ Symphony No. 49 in F Minor (“La Passione”) and series’ season. As usual, Bagby and his colleagues Glueckert, and Franz-Josef Selig. April 29 at 1. (Met- Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s blithely unpredict- (Hanna Marti, also on harp and vocals, and Nor- ropolitan Opera House. 212-362-6000.) able Symphony in G Major. April 26 at 7:30. (Alice bert Rodenkirchen, on bone and wooden flutes) Tully Hall. 212-721-6500.) take a deep dive into medieval lore, presenting School of Music Opera Theatre: 1 “songs of heroes, gods, and strong women” sung “Der Zigeunerbaron” by monks in the ninth through the twelfth cen- Johann Strauss II’s operettas don’t get much RECITALS turies; the very pagan subjects include Orpheus, play in the U.S. outside of compulsory outings Dido, and Cleopatra. April 30 at 4. (529 W. 121st of the eternally appealing “Die Fledermaus.” “Three Generations: Bryce Dessner and St. 212-666-9266.) But, with this production of “The Gypsy Nico Muhly” Baron,” M.S.M.’s artistic director of opera, In the final installment of Steve Reich’s mini- Lark Quartet: “Now & Then” Dona D. Vaughn, continues to lead the conser- festival celebrating the legacy of American min- The outstanding all-female quartet, which, with vatory’s students down less trodden paths of imalism, an impressive collective of musicians— personnel changes, has been a going concern for the operatic canon. Linda Brovsky directs, and including the violinist Pekka Kuusisto and the thirty years, takes a well-deserved victory lap at Kynan Johns conducts. April 27-29 at 7:30 and violist Nadia Sirota—gathers to perform work Carnegie’s Weill Recital Hall. The current play- April 30 at 2:30. (Neidorff-Karpati Hall, Broad- by two of the most prominent younger expo- ers team up with the four original members for a way at 122nd St. msmnyc.edu/tickets.) nents of the brand, in a program that includes concert that includes not only works by Debussy world premières from both composers. The and John Harbison (the New York première of the National Sawdust: “Madrigal Opera” event includes a discussion with Reich, Dess- String Quartet No. 6) but also octets by Mendels- Philip Glass’s little creation from 1980, commis- ner, and Muhly. April 26 at 7:30. (Zankel Hall. sohn and Andrew Waggoner (a world première). sioned by the Holland Festival, is a strange bird, 212-247-7800.) May 1 at 8. (212-247-7800.)

THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 5 sound intermittently fills the room; in an aus- terely handsome video, a plastic bag undergoes a mechanical stress test. A trampoline is installed A RT inside one of two immaculate green dumpsters, 1 as if to abet dumpster diving. The over-all effect is that of a charmingly hopeful retro-futurism. MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES bled together from found materials—cardboard, (Sasamoto performs on Thursdays and Satur- a candle, a spray can—are genuinely startling in days.) Through May 13. (The Kitchen, 512 W. 19th their balanced beauty. A series of confidently un- St. 212-255-5793.) MOMA PS1 derstated abstract drawings, made with cacao, de- 1 “Maureen Gallace: Clear Day” serves a show of its own. Through May 13. (Sikkema Sixty-eight calm, cool little oil paintings—of land- Jenkins, 530 W. 22nd St. 212-929-2262.) GALLERIES—DOWNTOWN scapes, seascapes, barns and cottages, and flow- ers—hang in big rooms on walls painted a warm Max Ernst Lisa Alvarado white. It’s heaven. For thirty years, Gallace has Ernst hit a late-life peak in sculpture, based on The Chicago-based artist-musician’s first solo wondered, with brush in hand, if semi-realism is the evidence here: an unfamiliar suite of three show in New York is an abundance of lovely hang- still viable in wised-up art. Each picture is a new big bronzes cast from stone, which he carved ing pieces from an ongoing series she calls “Tra- guess: maybe so, given the insistent appeal of a in 1967. (The German artist died in 1976.) Ti- ditional Objects.” The geometric compositions breaking wave, a humble house, or a shadow on tled “Big Brother: Teaching Staff for a School of recall Mexican textiles and float between catego- snow. Gallace doesn’t so much see as notice, sus- Murderers,” it consists of the eponymous sinis- ries —they are at once screens, paintings, and tap- pending observation in states of unending, mild ter watcher, wearing a flat cap over close-set holes estries. Alvarado began making the works in 2010, surprise. Like the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, her for eyes and a tapering face that is all knife-edged as portable sets for her band Natural Information work generates power from reticence. She serves nose, and two “neophytes,” long-headed crouching Society, an experimental ensemble of traditional us with practical, remedial beauty. Once seen, this figures with clownish caps and broad, stuck-out and electronic instruments. (The group provides show won’t be forgotten. Through Sept. 10. tongues. As often with Ernst, there’s a longueur the atmospheric recorded soundtrack that plays in 1 of the “primitive”—vaguely Mayan, in this case. the gallery.) She makes elegant use of the gallery But an unusual formal rigor (was Ernst aware of space, installing her vibrant, two-sided works to GALLERIES—CHELSEA Minimalism?) infuses the playful works with a create airy partitions, evoking both theatrical and menacing might. Through May 13. (Kasmin, 515 ceremonial uses. Visitors may feel as if a live hap- William Cordova W. 27th St. 212-563-4474.) pening is about to occur, and, indeed, musical per- The Peruvian-born American sculptor’s third solo formances are scheduled for 7:30 on May 8 (An- show at the gallery is so overstuffed it verges on Aki Sasamoto gelica Sanchez, Gerald Cleaver, Joshua Abrams) overbearing, but it is studded with lovely moments Sasamoto makes art that thinks out loud, con- and May 10 (Battle Trance). Through May 21. (Do- nonetheless. Wooden scaffolding fills most of the structing sculptures and environments that nahue, 99 Bowery. 646-896-1368.) main room, leading visitors through an interior double as evocative props and settings for per- spiral to a dead end (unless, that is, they choose formances, which are equal parts lecture, exper- Sara Cwynar to squeeze around it). This is intended to “disrupt iment, and standup routine. Her latest subject The cerebral young New York-based photogra- assumptions of linear history,” but feels needlessly is the “yield point,” the amount of stress under pher takes on consumerism, the epistemology of coercive. More appealing is a mixed-media col- which a given material will fall apart. Garbage color, and the ambiguities of female experience lage, nearly thirteen feet long, of neatly overlap- bags stick to the gallery walls thanks to the magic using irresistible imagery and sophisticated in- ping colored squares. Two small sculptures cob- of static electricity, lights pulse, and a rattling camera tricks. Several resonant works featuring the same model, seen lounging against brightly colored cloth backdrops, were made by overlay- ing Cwynar’s portraits of her with found photo- graphs, objects, and clippings from a dictionary, then rephotographing. The results suggest that, surface appearances to the contrary, a photograph is rarely as flat as it seems. In the show’s center- piece, a video titled “Rose Gold,” a male voice reads a meditation on the iPhone of that color, drawing on Wittgenstein, , and the Encyclopædia Britannica, among other sources. Also sampled are a few remarks of Cwynar’s own, including, “Several male artists I know have told me that I’m having a moment.” Through May 14. (Foxy Production, 2 E. Broadway. 212-239-2758.)

Tam Ochiai Remember ashtrays? Now banished from nearly all indoor spaces in the city, they’ve been rescued by the Japanese artist from sec- ondhand shops and incorporated into surpris- ingly graceful tabletop abstractions. In most of these quiet compositions, one or two sit on a painted base. “CD (Carrie Fisher, Debbie Reynolds)” features kindred squares of metal- trimmed marble—one big, one small—with matching cigarette rests, like modernist me- morials on an avocado-hued ground. The art- ist strikes a very different tone with a blue- plastic promotional giveaway from the New York State lottery: the lone ashtray sits in the corner of a wooden rectangle decorated with expres- sive squiggles. Those who haven’t yet given up the vice are invited to smoke in the gallery, and The American painter Jackie Saccoccio’s show “Sharp Objects & Apocalypse Confetti,” at the 11R the sight is practically shocking. Through April

gallery through April 30, includes the riotously beautiful “Portrait (Nabokov), 2017.” 29. (Team, 83 Grand St. 212-279-9219.) N.Y. 11R GALLERY, COURTESY

6 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017

1 OPENINGS AND PREVIEWS

Babes in Toyland THE THEATRE Kelli O’Hara, Bill Irwin, Lauren Worsham, and Christopher Fitzgerald appear with the Orches- tra of St. Luke’s in the 1903 musical, conducted by Ted Sperling. (Carnegie Hall, Seventh Ave. at 57th St. 212-247-7800. April 27.)

Bandstand Corey Cott and Laura Osnes play a war veteran and a widow who team up to compete in a radio contest in 1945, in this swing musical by Robert Taylor and Richard Oberacker, directed by Andy Blankenbuehler. (Jacobs, 242 W. 45th St. 212-239- 6200. Opens April 26.)

Derren Brown: Secret Brown, an Olivier-winning British performer known for his feats of mind-reading and audi- ence manipulation, presents an evening of “psy- chological illusion.” (Atlantic Theatre Company, 336 W. 20th St. 866-811-4111. In previews.)

A Doll’s House, Part 2 ’s play, starring , Chris Cooper, Jayne Houdyshell, and Condola Rashad, picks up years after Ibsen’s classic leaves off, with the return of its heroine, Nora. Sam Gold directs. “Seeing You,” starting May 2, transforms a former meat market into Hoboken in the nineteen-forties. (Golden, 252 W. 45th St. 212-239-6200. In previews. Opens April 27.) Happenings for choreographing Sia’s “Chandelier” Ernest Shackleton Loves Me video, in which a little girl in a geomet- In this new musical by Joe DiPietro, Brendan Randy Weiner stages immersive war Milburn, and Valerie Vigoda, a put-upon single ric wig dances spasmodically around a games under the High Line. mother (Vigoda) embarks on an Antarctic adven- dilapidated apartment, Heffington grew ture with the famous explorer. (Tony Kiser, 305 It’s not easy to describe what Randy up in California’s Central Valley, and W. 43rd St. 866-811-4111. In previews.) Weiner does for a living. Some people moved to Los Angeles in the early Happy Days call him an “impresario,” but he comes nineties to be a “video ho,” he said, Theatre for a New Audience stages James Bun- across more like a mild-mannered car- meaning a backup dancer. He got by dy’s Yale Rep production of the Beckett play, star- ring Dianne Wiest as a chatterbox half-buried in diologist than like P. T. Barnum. With on odd jobs—dancing for Julio Iglesias a mound of sand. (Polonsky Shakespeare Center, 262 his wife, the director Diane Paulus, he and in a hallucination sequence on Ashland Pl., Brooklyn. 866-811-4111. In previews.) created “The Donkey Show,” a disco “Roseanne”—while staging feisty hap- The Lucky One version of “A Midsummer Night’s penings at L.A. night clubs under the The Mint revives A. A. Milne’s 1922 play, directed Dream” that ran Off Broadway from title “Psycho Dance Sho.” “We’d come by Jesse Marchese, about two brothers whose en- 1999 to 2005. More recently, he founded on at midnight and, like, throw meat at mity erupts when one of them lands in legal trouble. (Beckett, 410 W. 42nd St. 212-239-6200. In previews.) the seedy-opulent Lower East Side bur- people,” he recalled. “We’d have Super lesque club the Box; helped to import Soakers.” Mourning Becomes Electra the immersive-theatre juggernaut “Sleep What do you get when you put these Target Margin stages Eugene O’Neill’s dramatic trilogy, which resets ’s “Oresteia” in New No More,” by the British group Punch- two together? “Seeing You,” an interac- England just after the Civil War. David Hersko- drunk; created the ballroom spectacle tive theatre “experience” beginning May 2, vits directs. (Abrons Arts Center, 466 Grand St. 212- “Queen of the Night”; and brought in a former meat market on Fourteenth 598-0400. In previews.) “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of Street, under the southern tip of the Pacific Overtures 1812” to a pop-up Russian supper club High Line. Speaking at the hollowed- John Doyle directs Stephen Sondheim and John in the meatpacking district. A former out venue not long ago, Weiner and Weidman’s musical from 1976, which recounts the opening of nineteenth-century Japan, star- science teacher (he studied biochemis- Heffington were tight-lipped about the ring George Takei as the Reciter. (Classic Stage try at Harvard), Weiner said recently, “If piece, which has something to do with Company, 136 E. 13th St. 866-811-4111. In previews.) we boil down theatre to its essence, what Hoboken in the nineteen-forties, the The Roundabout is it? It’s about a performer and an au- Pacific theatre of the Second World As part of the “Brits Off Broadway” festival, Hugh dience member having an interaction. War, and the ethics of collateral damage. Ross directs J. B. Priestley’s 1932 comedy, in which Well, the interaction doesn’t have to be But they did disclose that the show will a man juggles his business foibles, his mistress, a gambling butler, and his daughter’s newfound on a stage.” guide audiences through a maze of ever- Communism. (59E59, at 59 E. 59th St. 212-279- Weiner has now joined forces with shifting spaces. “We’re not trying to do 4200. In previews. Opens April 30.) another artist with a blurry job descrip- something commercial that all ties up Seven Spots on the Sun tion, the choreographer and “movement and makes sense,” Weiner promised. In Martín Zimmerman’s play, directed by Weyni

director” Ryan Heffington. Best known —Michael Schulman Mengesha, a reclusive doctor in a town ravaged FAZENDA JOÃO BY ILLUSTRATION

8 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 THE THEATRE by civil war and plague discovers that he has a mi- fuses the tale with clever theatrical flourishes, like if the play, directed by Charlotte Moore, will build raculous healing touch. (Rattlestick, 224 Waverly a vertical car chase. (August Wilson, 245 W. 52nd St. up to a fiery debate between two men fighting for Pl. 212-627-2556. In previews.) 877-250-2929.) control over their country. Instead, we end up stuck in a dull recounting of the life of the driven, tuber- Sojourners & Her Portmanteau Indecent culosis-afflicted Browne, with acting to match. Sa- Ed Sylvanus Iskandar directs two installments Paula Vogel’s revelatory play—her belated Broad- lient issues, like the connection between money and of Mfoniso Udofia’s nine-part saga, which charts way début—begins in Warsaw in 1906 and ends in health, are buried under a thick layer of theatrical the ups and downs of a Nigerian matriarch. (New Connecticut a half century later, but it’s as intimate dust. (Irish Repertory, 132 W. 22nd St. 212-727-2737.) York Theatre Workshop, 79 E. 4th St. 212-460-5475. and immediate as a whispered secret. It tells the In previews.) story of another play, Sholem Asch’s Yiddish drama Samara “God of Vengeance,” which toured the theatres of Richard Maxwell’s last play, “The Evening,” sig- 3/Fifths Europe before coming to Broadway, in 1923, and nalled a fascinating departure. This new piece, pro- James Scruggs conceived and wrote this inter- causing a scandal, in part because of a passionate duced by SoHo Rep, never gets going. It wanders. active piece, which transforms the theatre into lesbian kiss. The cast was tried for obscenity, and Then it idles. Then there’s a light show. Hazy and a dystopian theme park called SupremacyLand, Asch chose to distance himself from the work—all questing, it unfolds in a postapocalyptic frontier celebrating white privilege. (3LD Art & Technol- before Nazism overtook the play, its people, and built from repurposed milk crates. As Steve Earle ogy Center, 80 Greenwich St. 800-838-3006. Pre- the world it came from. Directed with poetry and reads stage directions, a murderous kid (Jasper views begin May 1.) polish by Rebecca Taichman, Vogel’s play thrums Newell) sets out in search of a few dollars more. with music, desire, and fear, and it’s shrewd about He comes to a bad end. So do some other people. Twelfth Night the ways in which America isn’t free, and about how Probably. SoHo Rep’s artistic director, Sarah Ben- The Public’s Mobile Unit performs the Shake- art does and doesn’t transcend the perilous winds son, crowds the audience together on more milk speare comedy for free at its home base, after tour- of history. (Cort, 138 W. 48th St. 212-239-6200.) crates, unyielding benches designed to withhold ing prisons, homeless shelters, and other local ven- comfort just as the script stints on character and ues. Saheem Ali directs. (Public, 425 Lafayette St. Oslo world. Yet a few pleasures remain, among them 212-967-7555. In previews. Opens April 27.) J. T. Rogers’s play, which has upgraded to the big the luminous face of the ninety-two-year-old actor stage at , introduces us to the Rosen- Vinie Burrows, Earle’s blissfully weirdo score for Venus crantz and Guildenstern of the Middle East peace Uilleann pipes and deconstructed piano, and Max- Suzan-Lori Parks’s play, directed by Lear deBes- process: a married Norwegian couple who orches- well’s unrelenting need to push through the arti- sonet, is inspired by the life of Saartjie Baartman, trated the secret talks between Israelis and Palestin- fice of playmaking toward something truer on the a South African woman who became a nineteenth- ians which led to the 1993 Oslo Accords. Played by other side. (A.R.T./New York Theatres, 502 W. 53rd century sideshow attraction because of her large the exceptional and Jefferson Mays, St. 212-352-3101.) posterior. (Pershing Square Signature Center, 480 Mona Juul and Terje Rød-Larsen are tight-lipped W. 42nd St. 212-244-7529. In previews.) diplomatic professionals, as cautiously neutral as Sweat 1 their all-gray wardrobes suggest. (Bartlett Sher’s Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, staging is Scandinavian in its clarity.) Plying their newly transferred to Broadway from the Public NOW PLAYING guests with herring and waffles, they oversee col- Theatre, opens at top intensity in a parole office orful characters from both sides, who bond ten- in Reading, Pennsylvania, in 2008, as two young Come from Away tatively and tell jokes while haggling over Gaza. men, one black, one white, attempt to confront the Canadian hospitality doesn’t seem like grist for At nearly three hours, the play provides a jour- mess they’ve made of their lives. But this is really drama, but this gem of a musical, by Irene San- nalistic service without having much to say, ulti- the story of their mothers (embodied with rich au- koff and David Hein, makes kindness sing and mately, about the conflict itself, aside from a “We thenticity by Michelle Wilson and Johanna Day), soar. On 9/11, thousands of airline passengers were Are the World” coda that shows how close we were, who have spent their adult lives working the assem- rerouted to the tiny Newfoundland town of Gan- once, to peace. (Vivian Beaumont, 150 W. 65th St. bly line of a steel-tubing factory, and whose friend- der, population nine thousand. The Ganderites 212-239-6200.) ship crumbles the day in 2000 when the plant locks opened their doors—and fetched sandwiches, un- the workers out. By the end, everything is fully ex- derwear, and kosher meals—while the “plane peo- Present Laughter plained—perhaps too fully explained, depending on ple,” trapped in a five-day limbo, reckoned with This harmless production of Noël Coward’s 1939 your taste. But Nottage isn’t interested in hinting a changed world. A splendid twelve-person cast comedy about theatre, pretense, and lies should at what went wrong; she wants to make it known. plays dozens of characters, but Sankoff and Hein verge on farce—and does, at times—but the di- It’s a play that listens deeply to the confounding deftly spotlight a few, including an American Air- rector, Moritz von Stuelpnagel, plays it safe when plight of blue-collar workers in the world’s richest lines pilot (Jenn Colella) trying to maintain con- he shouldn’t. Still, there are bright spots amid the country, and which, in a just world, would shake trol of her charges and an Egyptian chef (Caesar dullness, and Kevin Kline, Kristine Nielsen, and their bosses to the core. (Studio 54, at 254 W. 54th Samayoa) coping with the first glimmers of post- Kate Burton are performers you look forward to St. 212-239-6200.) 9/11 Islamophobia. Christopher Ashley’s produc- seeing again and again. Kline plays the actor and 1 tion doesn’t dwell on inspirational messaging, in- rogue Garry Essendine; he can’t remember who’s stead letting the story, along with some fine fiddle loved him, but that doesn’t matter, because he loves ALSO NOTABLE playing, put the wind in its sails. (Schoenfeld, 236 himself more. As his handy assistant, Monica Reed, W. 45th St. 212-239-6200.) Nielsen does what no one else does better: tries to Amélie Walter Kerr. • Anastasia Broad- make sense of another character’s madness. And as hurst. • The Antipodes Pershing Square Signa- Groundhog Day Garry’s wife, Liz, Burton is a model of good sense ture Center. • Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Harold Ramis’s 1993 film had it all: an inspired per- and strong character, poised and maternal. Each of Lunt-Fontanne. • Daniel’s Husband Cherry Lane. formance by Bill Murray, a sweet romance, and a these actors makes Coward’s language sound fresh Through April 28. • The Emperor Jones Irish Rep- premise that was both a vehicle for endless comedic and contemporary while understanding that the ertory. • Gently Down the Stream Public. • The variation and a spiritual brainteaser, akin to a Bud- play has nothing to do with naturalism. (St. James, Glass Menagerie Belasco. • Hello, Dolly! Shubert. dhist parable. After all, aren’t we all repeating the 246 W. 44th St. 212-239-6200.) (Reviewed in this issue.) • If I Forget Laura Pels. same day over and over again, trying to find mean- Through April 30. • In & of Itself Daryl Roth. • Joan ing in the banal? Credit this fine musical adaptation Rebel in the Soul of Arc: Into the Fire Public. Through April 30. • Latin for not simply inserting songs into a readymade In 1951, the Irish minister for health, Dr. Noël History for Morons Public. Through April 28. • The formula but teasing out new ideas. The Australian Browne (Patrick Fitzgerald), tried to persuade the Little Foxes Samuel J. Friedman. • Miss Saigon musical satirist Tim Minchin wrote the catchy and influential Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles . • The Play That Goes Wrong Ly- cerebral score, his follow-up to “Matilda,” with McQuaid (John Keating), to support new legis- ceum. • The Price American Airlines Theatre. • The Danny Rubin, the original screenwriter, updating lation designed to improve Ireland’s awful child- Profane Playwrights Horizons. • Six Degrees of the script. As Phil Connors, the weatherman stuck mortality rate. This arcane (to the non-Irish) en- Separation Ethel Barrymore. • Sunset Boulevard in a time loop on February 2nd, Andy Karl doesn’t counter has dramatic potential, confronting science Palace. • Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of re-create Murray’s misanthropic euphoria—who and religion, church and state. Larry Kirwan’s new Fleet Street Barrow Street Theatre. • Vanity Fair could?—but gives the character his own sardonic docudrama begins with Browne gearing up for his Pearl. • The View UpStairs Lynn Redgrave. • War stamp. And the director, Matthew Warchus, in- audience in McQuaid’s antechamber, and it looks as Paint Nederlander.

THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 9 tion; cracking crime at the wheel, you sense, is not a theme on which variations can be spun for- MOVIES ever. With , who doesn’t even get to 1 drive.—A.L. (4/24/17) (In wide release.) Free Fire OPENING feld, starts the account in the mid-fifties, when A smug knockoff of Quentin Tarantino’s brand of Coltrane first came to prominence, as the saxo- ironic violence, at several degenerations’ remove. phonist in the Miles Davis Quintet, from which In the vast confines of an abandoned factory, some- Buster’s Mal Heart A fantasy drama, about a sur- he was fired for his drug and alcohol habits. Quit- where in Massachusetts in the nineteen-seven- vivalist in the Montana mountains (Rami Malek) ting cold turkey, Coltrane found fresh inspiration ties—a time that’s marked, on the soundtrack, by who is obsessed with a recurring dream. Directed in the company of Davis and Thelonious Monk be- John Denver and Creedence Clearwater Reviv- by Sarah Adina Smith; co-starring Kate Lyn Sheil. fore forming his own band, reaching new heights al—a weapons deal is going down. The sellers are Opening April 28. (In limited release.) • Casting Jon- of popularity and then repudiating it in the inter- a mismatched pair made up of a white South Af- Benet Reviewed in Now Playing. Opening April 28. est of deeper and wilder musical ideas. The sketch rican man (Sharlto Copley) and a former Black (Metrograph and .) • The Circle A science-fic- of Coltrane’s early days emphasizes the influences Panther (Babou Ceesay), and the buyers are Irish tion drama, based on a novel by Dave Eggers, of his two grandfathers, who were ministers, and Republican Army agents (Michael Smiley and Cil- about a young woman whose job at a high-tech the film draws a through-line regarding his spiri- lian Murphy); both sides have crews of gunmen, startup turns into a living nightmare. Directed tual quest. It features many performances by Col- as do the shrewd and cool brokers (Brie Larson by James Ponsoldt; starring Emma Watson and trane (including some fine if familiar film clips) and Armie Hammer). When a fight breaks out Tom Hanks. Opening April 28. (In wide release.) but buries them under graphics and voice-overs; among two crude subordinates (Sam Riley and 1 the movie’s one enduring contribution is inter- Jack Reynor), a chaotic and apocalyptic shootout views with some of Coltrane’s musician friends, ensues—it lasts for more than an hour and cuts its NOW PLAYING including Jimmy Heath, Reggie Workman, Wayne suspense with sassy verbal humor and gags involv- Shorter, and Benny Golson, but these discussions ing ricochets and explosions, oddly trivial practi- Aftermath are edited to snippets. Meanwhile, the film of- calities and roughneck idiosyncrasies (including A grieving Arnold Schwarzenegger is something to fers almost no musical context; Scheinfeld seems a germaphobic killer). The director, Ben Wheat- behold. Heavy with despair but girding himself for more interested in Coltrane’s story arc than in his ley (who wrote the script with Amy Jump), rev- revenge, he lumbers through Elliott Lester’s film in art.—R.B. (In limited release.) els in the gory breakdown of bodies and the men- the role of Roman, a construction worker living in tal derangement that goes with it. The linchpin Columbus, Ohio, who loses his wife and his daugh- Colossal of the story is an off-screen act of violence against ter in a midair crash. It was caused by an air-traffic The director Nacho Vigalondo’s new movie is a woman, but Wheatley never lets social or inter- controller (Scoot McNairy), and he is the luckless partly a blandly schematic drama of self-discov- national politics impinge on his empty amuse- fellow who, despite changing his name and his city of ery and partly a thinly sketched sci-fi monster ments.—R.B. (In wide release.) residence, is tracked down by Roman—not with the thriller—yet his mashup of these genres is inge- remorseless tread of the Terminator but in a mood nious and, at times, deliciously realized. Anne Ghost in the Shell of sullen perplexity. The script is by Javier Gullón, Hathaway stars as Gloria, a hard-drinking and un- Rupert Sanders’s new film, the latest example of who also wrote Denis Villeneuve’s “Enemy” (2013), employed New York blogger whose boyfriend (Dan ’s adventures in science fiction, and the first third of the film is as spare and uncon- Stevens) throws her out of his apartment. She re- casts her—not without controversy and complaint, soled as anything in the Schwarzenegger canon; treats to her late parents’ empty house in her rustic in some quarters—as a hybrid law enforcer, in a often unnerved by comedy, he seems surprisingly at home town, bumps into a childhood friend (Jason nameless Asian city. She takes the role of Major, home with bleakness. (Arnie’s King Lear cannot be Sudeikis), gets a part-time job in the bar he owns, who consists of a human brain, purloined under far away.) Sadly, as the plot proceeds, it loses defi- and tries to take stock of her life. Then she and the mysterious circumstances and housed inside a nition, and the finale is an unconvincing rush. With world are gripped by the sudden appearance of a manufactured body. She can think for herself, but Maggie Grace and Hannah Ware.—Anthony Lane gigantic monster that wreaks havoc in Seoul for if an arm gets ripped off she can always have it re- (Reviewed in our issue of 4/17/17.) (In limited release.) a few minutes each day. The connection between placed: no pain, all gain. We meet her boss, played Gloria’s story and the monster’s is too good to by the imperturbable Takeshi (Beat) Kitano, her Casting JonBenet spoil; suffice it to say that its metaphorical power shock-haired sidekick (Pilou Asbæk), and the doc- This narrowly reflexive documentary reduces its brings a furiously clarifying and progressive in- tor who designed her (). All this participants to reality-TV entertainers. The film- sight to Gloria’s troubles and aptly portrays them is loyally adapted from Mamoru Oshii’s 1995 film maker, Kitty Green, goes to Boulder, Colorado, and as the quasi-universal woes of humanity at large. of the same name, which has long been heralded auditions, on camera, local residents for a dramati- The trope takes a lot of setting up, but it’s worth as a high point of anime; Sanders carefully frames zation of the unsolved killing of JonBenét Ramsey it—and Hathaway’s self-transformative, force- some of his shots in tribute to the original. There (which occurred there in 1996) and its aftermath. ful performance brings Vigalondo’s strong idea to are startling sights here (to have your mind hacked, She shows only brief performances from her script life.—R.B. (In limited release.) we learn, is to be plunged into a writhing pit), and by the aspiring actors, and instead interviews them Johansson marches through her scenes with pur- at length about the case and their interest in it, elic- The Fate of the Furious pose, yet as a whole the reboot is less haunting and iting speculations and reminiscences as well as deep The latest and loudest addition to the franchise that less ruminative than Oshii’s work, and lacks its and traumatic personal stories, which they divulge will not die. Most of the regulars return, including strange erotic liquefaction. Also, the plot has ac- in the hope of being cast. Meanwhile, Green stays Letty (Michelle Rodriguez), Roman (Tyrese Gib- quired an unwelcome strain of mush; who ordered above the fray and out of the question; her motives son), and Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson), who grapples that?—A.L. (4/10/17) (In wide release.) and interests, as well as her presence in the locale once more with the problem of finding a vehicle and her presentation of the project to its partici- large enough to fit him. He also has to lay aside Graduation pants, are rigorously kept out of the film. (Also, his enmity with Deckard (Jason Statham) for the Cristian Mungiu, the Romanian director who made she doesn’t speak with any nonwhite Boulder resi- sake of a higher purpose: the taking down of Dom “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” (2007) and “Be- dents.) Green’s editing squeezes the actors’ outpour- (Vin Diesel), who has turned against his erstwhile yond the Hills” (2012), files another withering re- ings into sound bites; meanwhile, the snippets of pals. Such is Diesel’s dramatic range that the dif- port from his homeland. Yet his manner remains as dramatizations that she films are insubstantial, un- ference between the good Dom and the bad Dom unblinkingly calm as ever; for all the intensity of developed, disengaged. Every aspect of the movie is almost too subtle to be seen by the naked eye. his accusations and his laments, there is no loss of is trivialized—the experiment in documentary Behind the chaos lurks the figure of Cipher (Char- formal control. Maria Dragus, whom fans of Mi- form, the participants’ experiences, and the case lize Theron), who combines the roles of hacker and chael Haneke will recall from “The White Rib- itself.—Richard Brody (Metrograph and Netflix.) seductress, and whose party trick—the hot spot bon,” plays Eliza, a hardworking high-school stu- of the story—involves taking command of multi- dent who requires top marks in her final exams if Chasing Trane: The John Coltrane ple vehicles, by remote control, in New York, and she is to take up the offer of a place at a British uni- Documentary making them race around the streets like packs versity. Her plans are derailed by a simple and up- A dully conventional film about a brilliantly un- of dogs. The rest of the film, directed by F. Gary setting turn of fate, and it is up to her father, the conventional musician. The director, John Schein- Gray, is threatened by both silliness and exhaus- laughably named Romeo (Adrian Titieni), to get

10 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 MOVIES them back on track. To do this, he must call in fa- is a political Zelig, a cipher who lives for his place The Saragossa Manuscript vors, bend the rules, and yield to the pressures of in photos with powerful people; it’s never quite This three-hour swirl of Polish phantasmagoria, everyday corruption, which thus far, as a doctor, he clear what he gets out of the high-stakes trans- from 1965, is an epic piece of japery; it celebrates has managed to withstand—though not, we soon actions, though he seems to crave respect. Cedar visions and magic by means of labyrinthine sto- realize, in other areas of his life. This portrait of plays Norman’s story for tragedy but never devel- rytelling. Flashbacks within flashbacks make up a busted system is all too cogent, and it’s no sur- ops his inner identity, his history, or his ideals; the the story, which is catalyzed when two soldiers on prise that Romeo and his wife, Magda (Lia Bug- protagonist and his drama remain anecdotal and opposite sides of an unexplained nineteenth-cen- nar), urge their daughter to get out while she can. superficial.—R.B. (In limited release.) tury war stumble upon a manuscript that trans- In Romanian.—A.L. (4/10/17) (In limited release.) fixes them with its potent, sexy language and im- A Quiet Passion agery. The book recounts the picaresque adventures Hospital Terence Davies, who has previously adapted the of Captain Alfonso van Worden, who travels be- Frederick Wiseman’s fourth feature, from 1970, dis- work of Edith Wharton, in “The House of Mirth,” tween Andalusia and La Mancha during the Span- plays the inner workings of New York’s Metropoli- and Terence Rattigan, in “The Deep Blue Sea,” ish Inquisition, encounters two gorgeous Muslim tan Hospital, a public facility in East Harlem, and now turns his attention to Emily Dickinson. The women in a boudoir at a deserted inn, and awak- reveals the decisive impact of the art and science of arc of the film is a long one, marked by regular ens beneath a gallows. The rest of his journey cir- medicine—and the ways of government—on the readings of her poems; we meet the author first cles back to these euphoric yet troubling experi- lives of ordinary people. Wiseman had extraordi- as a defiant schoolgirl, played by Emma Bell, and ences, as such characters as a possessed peasant, a nary access to the hospital (including its operating trace her through the years of her maturity, her hermit exorcist, a cabalist, and a gypsy chief regale rooms), but the film is centered on the relation- gradual seclusion in the Amherst family home, and him with stories involving stumbling suitors, busty ships between doctors and patients. The troubles the shuddering awfulness of her death, in 1886. beauties, ridiculous duels, and mystical symbols. that come to light—the persecution endured by a takes the role of the adult Dick- The director, Wojciech Has, sustains a sardonic, gay man, the despair of a single father who has no inson, and does so without ingratiation, willing slaphappy tone; the elegantly modulated black- one to care for his children while he’s at work, the to make her difficult or, when occasion demands, and-white cinematography, with tones ranging panic of a young man from Minnesota adrift in the unlikable; Dickinson’s manners, always forth- from bleached to silken, and the off-kilter compo- city—extend beyond immediate physical sufferings. right, grow more barbed as her ailments worsen. sitions suggest that the director himself is sport- Meanwhile, doctors are forced, in effect, to play There is strong support from Keith Carradine ing a death’s-head grin.—Michael Sragow (Museum lawyers as they argue at length, by phone, with bu- and Joanna Bacon, as her parents; Jodhi May, as of the Moving Image; April 30.) reaucrats applying rules that impede proper care. her sorrowful sister-in-law; and Catherine Bai- For all Wiseman’s powers of analysis, he’s a sensu- ley, as a flirtatious friend, although the social ba- Slack Bay ous humanist who tenderly gathers gestures and ex- dinage seems forced in comparison with the qui- This cops-and-cannibals, high-society-draw- pressions, tones of voice and turns of phrase, that eter scenes around the hearth. Most striking of ing-room, and rustic-outdoors comedy, set in a arise in the ultimate drama—the struggle against all is the presence of Jennifer Ehle, whose com- French seaside resort village in 1910, is the boldest death.—R.B. (Film Forum; April 26.) passionate calm, as the poet’s sister, does much to and freest of recent genre mashups. The ritzy Van lighten the movie’s dark distress.—A.L. (4/24/17) Peteghem clan vacations in their villa overlook- The Lost City of Z (In limited release.) ing the bay; the Brufort family of mussel-gather- The new James Gray film has a scope, both in time and in geographical reach, that he has never at- tempted before—an anxious wrestle with the epic form. The movie, based in part on the book of the same name by David Grann, of The New Yorker, stars Charlie Hunnam as Percy Fawcett, a British soldier who journeyed repeatedly up the Amazon in the first quarter of the twentieth century. His goal, which came to consume his life and to cut it short, was to locate the remains of a forgotten civ- ilization in the jungle. So implacable a quest could be taken as foolish or futile, but Gray prefers to frame it in terms of heroic striving. Whether Hun- nam is the right actor to assume such a burden is open to question, and the whole movie, though shot with Gray’s defining elegance and his taste for deep shadows, is often a dour affair. Still, there are welcome touches of levity and mystery, supplied by Sienna Miller, in the role of Fawcett’s long-suf- fering wife, and by Robert Pattinson, overgrown with facial hair, as his equally loyal sidekick. With Tom Holland, as the explorer’s eldest son, who van- ished in the company of his father.—A.L. (4/17/17) (In limited release.)

Norman Richard Gere channels the mannerisms of middle- period Woody Allen in the title role of this plod- ding New York-centered drama by the Israeli direc- tor Joseph Cedar. Norman Oppenheimer is a fixer who breaks more than he fixes. He elbows his way into acquaintance with Micha Eshel (Lior Ashke- nazi), a rising young Israeli politician who visits New York, and attempts, via urgent schmoozing, to nudge him into an alliance with a big-time fi- nancier. Three years go by; Eshel is now Israel’s Prime Minister, and Norman pushes and whee- dles, doing favors for him and cadging favors in re- turn, until a whiff of scandal arises from Norman’s dealings and Eshel is tainted. Cedar’s specialty is dialectical—he delights in Norman’s rhetori- cal maneuvers and elaborate deceptions. Norman

THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 11 MOVIES ers and ferrymen live on a ramshackle farm in the lowlands. Several tourists have disappeared, and two loopy police inspectors investigate in vain; what they don’t know is that the Bruforts have DANCE been eating them. Meanwhile, the aristocratic young Billie Van Peteghem (played by the actress Raph) and the taciturn young mussel-man Ma Ballet (Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, Loute Brufort (Brandon Lavieville) fall instantly The “Here/Now” festival begins with three Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. 845- in love, but their romance is roiled by Ma Loute’s programs of recent ballets, each devoted to a 758-7900. April 27-30.) suspicion that Billie is a boy in drag. The director, different choreographer with strong links to Bruno Dumont, mashes up his cast along with his the company: Christopher Wheeldon, Alexei Tamar Rogoff Performance Projects genres—the elder Van Peteghems are played by Ratmansky, and Justin Peck. The Wheeldon A sensitive and tactful director-choreographer, the cream of French cinema, including Juliette program includes one of his most abstract and Rogoff aims for an expansion of empa- Binoche and Fabrice Luchini, while the Bruforts elegant works—and one of his best—“Polypho- thy, often in domestic tales set in a de- are played by local nonactors whose gruff preci- nia,” from 2001, set to music by György Ligeti. ceptively innocent past. Her new work, sion matches the stars’ antic flamboyance beat Peck is represented by four pieces that show “Grand Rounds,” alludes to Cherry Ames, a for beat. With poised and luminous wide-screen off his quick-moving, sharp, inventive style, in- Nancy Drew-like nurse who was the heroine images that fuse the ethereal to the grotesque, cluding “The Dreamers,” a pas de deux from of mystery novels in the nineteen-forties and the ludicrous to the ecstatic, Dumont raises con- last year packed with complicated, scrolling fifties. Inspired by her, a curious ten-year-old flicts of class, character, and into off-kilter moves. But if you can see only one program, girl investigates family secrets, medicine, and legend.—R.B. (In limited release.) make it the Ratmansky double bill (“Russian death. (Ellen Stewart, 66 E. 4th St. 646-430- Seasons” and “Namouna, A Grand Divertisse- 5374. April 27-30. Through May 14.) Thirst Street ment”), which showcases his prodigious imag- Nathan Silver’s new feature, a drama of romantic ination, musicality, and wit. • April 25 at 7:30 James Sewell Ballet / “Titicut : The obsession set mainly in Paris, is a sort of experi- and April 28-29 at 8: “Mercurial Manoeuvres,” Ballet” mental film. Silver, whose spontaneous melodra- “Polyphonia,” “Liturgy,” and “American Rhap- The veteran documentarian Frederick Wise- mas tend to focus on the closed spaces of confin- sody.” • April 26 and May 2 at 7:30 and April man is no stranger to ballet; he has made a few ing institutions, here condenses an entire city 29 at 2: “Russian Seasons” and “Namouna, films on the subject, including “La Danse,” into the pathological bounds of a few tight ven- A Grand Divertissement.” • April 27 at 7:30 from 2009, a deep dive into the bowels of the ues—and woe unto his protagonist, Gina (Lindsay and April 30 at 3: “In Creases,” “The Dream- Paris Opéra Ballet. In this latest project, con- Burdge), when she ventures beyond them. Gina, a ers,” “New Blood,” and “Everywhere We Go.” ceived under the auspices of N.Y.U.’s Cen- lonely flight attendant on a layover in Paris, meets (David H. Koch, Lincoln Center. 212-496-0600. ter for Ballet and the Arts, Wiseman tries his Jérôme (Damien Bonnard), a slick bartender at a Through May 28.) hand at developing a ballet based on one of louche night club. For Jérôme, Gina is a one-night his films, in collaboration with the choreog- stand; for Gina, Jérôme is the love of her life, and Aspen Santa Fe Ballet rapher James Sewell. Their new work is based she moves to Paris to pursue him, secretly taking Founded in 1996, this small but ambitious on Wiseman’s harrowing documentary “Titicut an apartment across the street from his home in troupe, which divides its time between two Follies,” from 1967, about life inside a hospi- order to spy on him. Though there’s something cities, has shown an admirable devotion to tal for the criminally insane. Can you make a theoretical, almost mathematical, about Gina’s commissioning new choreography. It’s too bad convincing ballet out of forced feedings, strip passion (which seems borrowed from other mov- that its taste tilts toward a trendy European searches, and hospital talent shows? We’ll soon ies), it provokes free and energetic performances shallowness. This program features recent find out.(N.Y.U. Skirball Center, 566 LaGuar- from Bonnard and the rest of the supporting cast, work by two ubiquitous Spanish-born dance- dia Pl. 212-998-4941. April 28-30.) headed by such notables as Jacques Nolot, as the makers. Alejandro Cerrudo’s “Silent Ghost” club’s owner, and Françoise Lebrun, as Gina’s land- is muted and melancholy; Cayetano Soto’s New York Theatre Ballet lord. Burdge infuses her rigidly and scantly de- “Huma Rojo” is flamboyant and self-mocking. Though it’s best loved for revivals of rarely fined role with tremulous vulnerability, and Sil- “Eudaemonia,” by Cherice Barton, is a jazzy seen repertory, this modest chamber-ballet ver, aided by the splashy palette of Sean Price search for happiness. (Joyce Theatre, 175 Eighth troupe also has a good track record with orig- Williams’s cinematography, evokes derangement Ave., at 19th St. 212-242-0800. April 26-30.) inal works. Here, a première by the longtime with a sardonic wink.—R.B. (Tribeca Film Festi- American Ballet Theatre corps member Zhong- val; April 29.) “From the Horse’s Mouth” Jing Fang joins one by Martin Lawrence, an The long-standing series has a reliably charm- alum of the Richard Alston Dance Company. Win It All ing, easily adaptable recipe, blending film The program hedges the risk of the new with The ambient violence in Joe Swanberg’s previous footage, dance snippets, and anecdotes about three brilliant and bristling pieces by Pam Ta- feature, “Digging for Fire,” bursts into the fore- dance. This time, the subject is the history of nowitz, and for the Sunday matinée the com- ground in this casually swinging yet terrifyingly Indian dance in America, from the exotica of pany switches to Keith Michael’s clever chil- tense drama of a compulsive gambler on the edge. Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn through the dren’s ballet “Alice-in-Wonderland Follies.” Jake Johnson (who co-wrote the film with Swan- present. The large cast includes the always (Schimmel Center, Pace University, 3 Spruce St. berg) stars as Eddie Garrett, a part-time Wrig- stunning Surupa Sen and Bijayini Satpathy, 212-346-1715. April 28-30.) ley Field parking attendant and full-time poker of the Nrityagram Dance Ensemble. (The- player who’s constantly in debt. When a rough- atre at the 14th Street Y, 344 E. 14th St. 212-780- “Works & Process” / American Ballet hewn friend prepares for a term in prison, he gives 0800. April 27-30.) Theatre: “Whipped Cream” Eddie a duffel bag to hide. Eddie finds cash in In 1922, between the operas “Die Frau ohne it, and, despite the best efforts of his Gamblers “We’re Watching” Schatten” and “Intermezzo,” the German com- Anonymous sponsor (Keegan-Michael Key), yields The subject of this exhibition is surveillance: poser Richard Strauss made a little ballet, to temptation. Eddie turns to his easygoing but how technology affects privacy, security, and “Schlagobers,” about a boy who gobbles up tough-loving brother, Ron (Joe Lo Truglio), who citizenship. Among the twelve works—a mix too much whipped cream and then dreams of runs a landscaping business, for help; besides sav- of performance pieces and installations spread dancing cakes. (If it sounds like “The Nut- ing his own neck, Eddie also wants to save his new throughout the nooks and crannies of Bard cracker,” you’re not wrong.) The original bal- relationship with Eva (the charismatic Aislinn Der- College’s Frank Gehry-designed Fisher Cen- let was a flop, but now the Russian-American bez), a nurse whose intentions are serious. With ter—is “What Remains,” an immersive look at choreographer Alexei Ratmansky has given it a teeming cast of vibrantly unglamorous Chicago violence and truths that won’t stay hidden. It’s a new life, as “Whipped Cream,” for American characters who hold Eddie in a tight social web, a collaboration by the poet Claudia Rankine, Ballet Theatre. At this preview, he will discuss Swanberg—aided greatly by Johnson’s vigorous the choreographer Will Rawls, and the film- his vision for the work, which includes out- performance—makes the gambler’s panic-stricken maker John Lucas. Also noteworthy is “The landish designs by the Pop Surrealist Mark silence all the more agonizing, balancing the warm Rehearsal,” a dance in the form of a voyeuris- Ryden. Dancers from A.B.T. will perform ex- veneer of intimate normalcy with the inner chill tic social-science experiment, performed by cerpts. (Guggenheim Museum, Fifth Ave. at 89th of secrets and lies.—R.B. (Netflix.) the excitingly original Michelle Ellsworth. St. 212-423-3575. April 30-May 1.)

12 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 NIGHT LIFE 1 Pinegrove ROCK AND POP Bands like this Montclair, New Jersey, outfit are ves- sels for memories shared within small circles. Evan Musicians and night-club proprietors lead Stephens Hall and Zack Levine have been playing complicated lives; it’s advisable to check music together since high school, and committed to in advance to confirm engagements. Pinegrove after graduation, producing blooming col- lege rock that aspired to early Wilco and Built to Spill Laurie Anderson while maintaining an adolescent thumbprint. “You’ll As Manhattan music venues continue to go the way know it when you hear it / ’Cause you know the way of the ticket stub, it’s heartening to see a midsized my voice felt,” Hall sings on “Cadmium,” the bright- night spot celebrate its tenth anniversary. This est spot on the band’s breezy, melodic “Car- cavernous club, nestled beneath the High Line, in dinal,” from 2016. Stacked guitar swells break away Chelsea, is owned by Steven Bensusan, a business- at the song’s midpoint, low and rumbling, stepping man whose father, Danny, started the Blue Note just ahead of the beat; the effect is wistful and cen- jazz club, in 1981. The Highline opened in 2007, and tripetal, the sound of moving forward with friends Lou Reed held court during its inaugural night; this who know your past. (Bowery Ballroom, 6 Delancey week, ten years later, Reed’s widow, the avant-garde St. 212-260-4700. April 27; Music Hall of Williams- artist and composer Anderson, will perform, hon- burg, 66 N. 6th St., Brooklyn. 718-486-5400. April 30.) oring both her late husband and the venue. (High- line Ballroom, 431 W. 16th St. 212-414-5994. April 29.) The Revolution Prince is gone, but the Revolution lives on. In the Brooklyn Folk Festival mid-eighties, the Purple One’s astounding back- Held in the borough for nine years, this festival ing band earned credits on three records—“Pur- honors string-band music in a celebration of folk, ple Rain,” “Around the World in a Day,” and “Pa- blues, bluegrass, ska, and Irish musical traditions. rade”—before calling it quits, in 1986. Now, a year Thirty bands perform across three days; there will after the death of their spiritual leader, the classic also be vocal and instrumental workshops, square lineup has re-formed for a North American tour in dances and swing jams, and an infamous contest in his honor. Originally slated for a two-week run, the which participants compete to see who can toss a Revolution added two months of performances to banjo the farthest into the Gowanus Canal. Gloves appease grieving fans. But don’t expect the musi- and a rope are provided; tips on shot-put form cians to take on Prince’s role: the guitarist Wendy are not. This year’s highlights include a set from Melvoin recently told that “we only the Last Poets, the firebrand Harlem band whose perform songs that don’t distance us as the band. . . . recitations foreshadowed hip-hop by a decade. Wherever we go, there’s going to be an artist who (St. Ann’s Church, 157 Montague St., Brooklyn. 718- loved him deeply and they can come up and sing.” 875-6960. April 28-30.) That’s thinly coded language for special guests, so do what you can to snag a ticket to this historic NYC show. (B. B. King Blues Club & Grill, 237 W. 42nd Los Angeles, for all its shimmer, isn’t celebrated for St. 212-997-4144. April 28.) innovation. But this weekly party, founded in Lin- coln Heights, in 2006, by the producer and label Diana Ross head Daddy Kev, created a space for beat-obsessives At one of his final Presidential Medal of Freedom to pull their tracks out from under rappers’ voices; ceremonies, last November, Barack Obama of- composers like Nosaj Thing and cul- fered a characteristic quip about an artist he ad- tivated followings of their own through regular ap- mired. “As a child, Diana Ross loved singing and pearances, and fans learned to hear their instrumen- dancing for family friends—but not for free,” he tals not as potential canvases but as works in and of said, with a laugh that spread throughout the hall. themselves. A sound was soon incubated: rubbery “She was smart enough to pass the hat.” From her jazz riffs, prog-funk keyboard tones, and glitchy, cos- formative work with the Supremes, which shaped mic drums that gave East Coast hip-hop’s icy swing the Motown sound, to her decades touring as a solo a bit of sun. More than a decade after its inception, act, Ross, whose golden voice still quakes, has more Low End Theory arrives in New York City, with sets than earned the nation’s most distinguished civilian from Kev, the Gaslamp Killer, and more. (Paper Box, honor. She hosts a five-night engagement starting 17 Meadow St., Brooklyn. 718-388-3815. April 28.) this week, performing timeless numbers like “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” “I’m Coming Out,” Mitski and “Stop! In the Name of Love.” (City Center, 131 The most vexing, and entrancing, aspect of this low- W. 55th St. 212-581-1212. April 26-29.) slung New Yorker’s jaggedly confessional songwrit- ing is the sense that, despite all she leaks onto the Travis Scott page and into the microphone, she’s keeping her Whatever the popular murky blend of jackhammer darker wounds covered up. Her fourth record, “Pu- drums, haunting film-score chords, and half-human berty 2,” has furthered the power belter’s notori- Auto-Tune riffs comes to be called in the future, ety, led by the ripping single “Your Best American Scott will be known to have mastered the format, Girl,” on which she negotiates a fractured cultural delivering roller-coaster raps in clothes soaked with identity with a proto-bro who knows that he’s the logos. He’s lent his bottomless well of spastic energy center of the universe by birthright: “You’re the to more ubiquitous names like Kanye West, Drake, sun,” she sings in a plainspoken quiver. “But I’m and the Weeknd, managing to channel their greatest not the moon, I’m not even a star.” Mitski invites strengths and discernible traits into effective singles of the fellow bleeding heart Told Slant to support her his own; great pop moves with the time, and if you’ve latest home-town gig. (Brooklyn Steel, 319 Frost St., seen Scott onstage you know just how fast he can go. Brooklyn. April 29.) (, 610 W. 56th St. 212-582-6600. April 30.)

THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 13 NIGHT LIFE

White Lung In 2009, this Vancouver band popped up on a compi- lation record called “Emergency Room: Volume 1,” named for the downtown D.I.Y. music-and-arts venue ABOVE & BEYOND where they came of age, playing early demos and dodging flying limbs at rambunctious all-ages gigs. “Therapy” closed side A; on it, the lead vocalist, Mish Way, sings, “I know it won’t take too long before your genius rips open the world.” The line might’ve been self-fulfilling—in the decade since the band formed, White Lung has outgrown local haunts and labels and developed into a punk act beloved by fans and critics from Austin to Moscow. On the band’s fourth album, “Paradise,” Lars Stalfors, who has produced records for Chelsea Wolfe and Alice Glass, tries his hand at taming Way’s yowl, with clean results. (Webster Hall, 125 E. 11th St. 212-353-1600. April 29.) 1 Sakura Matsuri Cherry Blossom Festival clude a spare trompe-l’oeil depicting an ivory- Today, only those vulnerable to pollen’s sea- and-wood crucifix against a white wall, made JAZZ AND STANDARDS sonal assault dread the impending bloom of in Lille in the early nineteenth century. The New York’s cherry blossoms. But, as depicted afternoon session adds sculptures and stat- Alan Broadbent in the 1975 horror film “Under the Blossom- uary to the mix. A petite and very ancient He’s played the role of the best man for years now, ing Cherry Trees,” the flowers were feared marble female figure, made in Turkey during both as the pianist for Quartet West—the cele- by some in ancient Japan, who avoided pass- the Chalcolithic period (3000-2200 B.C.), brated ensemble led by the late, great bassist Char- ing beneath their petals as stories spread of leads “Exceptional,” a small sale of extraor- lie Haden—and as an A-list studio arranger and the trees driving travellers mad. The Brook- dinary furnishings and objects (April 28). conductor. But Broadbent also deserves consid- lyn Botanic Garden is home to more than two The ovoid head, slightly tipped back, as if to erable attention for his work as a probing stylist hundred cherry trees across at least twenty-six take in the night sky, has earned it the name who deftly balances the rhapsodic and the propul- species; this two-day festival, celebrating the “Stargazer”; an estimate can be had upon re- sive. He’s joined by the bassist Don Falzone and blossoms’ arrival, is packed with performances quest. (20 Rockefeller Plaza, at 49th St. 212- the open-eared drummer Billy Mintz. (Mezzrow, 163 reflecting both traditional and modern Japan, 636-2000.) • Jewels from the collection of the W. 10th St. mezzrow.com. April 28-29.) including taiko drumming, martial arts, and gossip columnist Aileen Mehle—a.k.a. Suzy— a cosplay fashion show. The biggest threat will be sold off atDoyle, on April 27. Like her “Celebrating Ella: The First Lady of Jazz” might be an ill-placed photobomb interrupt- prose, the jewelry, which includes an endless No jazz singer was ever adored with more passion ing your well-framed shot, flush with pink. array of chunky bracelets in the shapes of var- by both hardcore aficionados and the John Q. Pub- (990 Washington Ave., Brooklyn. bbg.org. April ious animals, is colorful and bold. (175 E. 87th lic listener than the incomparable Ella Fitzgerald. 29-30 at 10 A.M.) St. 212-427-2730.) Honoring this sorely missed genius of song on 1 her centennial will be the singers Roberta Gamba- Street Games rini and Kenny Washington, supported by the Jazz Since 2007, residents near Thomas Jefferson READINGS AND TALKS at Lincoln Center Orchestra. Expect gems to be Park have welcomed spring by introducing flung about the stage—only a chosen few (Sinatra, their youngest neighbors to a bygone form of Brooklyn Public Library Crosby) brought as much classic American Song- entertainment commonly referred to as “going Christia Mercer teaches in Columbia Univer- book fare into the mainstream as Fitzgerald. (Rose outside.” At this event, kids five and older can sity’s philosophy department, but her curricu- Theatre, Jazz at Lincoln Center, Broadway at 60th St. enjoy classic recreations from the nineteen-six- lum also extends beyond the classroom: in 2015, 212-721-6500. April 27-29.) ties and seventies, including pogo sticks, hula she taught a course on “Oresteia,” the two-mil- hoops, rumbling boxcar races down First Av- lennia-old story of a woman who murders her Jimmy Greene enue, and quick-skipped double Dutch, while husband and his mistress, in a New York City Greene lost his daughter, Ana, in the Sandy Hook spectators take in a yo-yo master at work or women’s correctional facility. This week, she tragedy, and channelled his loss into fervent music- a performance by the Dance Theatre of Har- excavates storied plays and writings for an ex- making, as heard on the two-volume “Beautiful Life” lem. Food and drinks will be sold on site; chil- amination of women’s roles in the very shap- album, dedicated to her memory. He splits this en- dren who complete five of the ten activities on ing of Western thought. She builds on ideas gagement equally, kicking off with a taut quartet and their personal Street Games Passport can claim put forth by medieval women who reckoned concluding with a sextet featuring the pianist Renee a prize. (112th St. at First Ave. nycgovparks.org. with newfound self-awareness and cognition, Rosnes and the guitarist Lage Lund. (Jazz Standard, April 29 at 11 A.M.) and measures their influence on early mod- 116 E. 27th St. 212-576-2232. April 28-30.) 1 ern philosophy. (10 Grand Army Plaza, Brook- lyn. 718-230-2100. April 27 at 7.) King Vulture AUCTIONS AND ANTIQUES The compositions of the pianist Russ Lossing remain Just a Show deliberately sketchy, which gives his associates in this For its sale of silver, ceramics, and furnishings Harris Mayersohn is a staff writer for “The exploratory quartet plenty of leg room to contrib- on April 26, Sotheby’s has taken a deluxe ap- Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” and also ute in equal kind. Tossing ideas about and reacting proach, arranging the items in the manner of hosts a regular comic variety show at a venue in telepathic communion with the leader and with Dutch still-lifes. The photos in the catalogue named after the Trailer Park Boys. On the one another are Adam Kolker, on saxophones; Matt are by Paulette Tavormina, a specialist in such last Sunday of each month, he gathers fellow Pavolka, on bass; and Dayeon Seok, on drums. (Cor- sumptuous arrangements. (Anything to stim- standup performers and yuckster writers, who nelia Street Café, 29 Cornelia St. 212-989-9319. April 30.) ulate the pulse of prospective buyers.) Prints, frequent the greenrooms of grimy clubs and including the Motherwell collage “The Red have credits across cable comedy, for an un- Jane Monheit and Black”—made out of bits of other prints— predictable night of antics and pranks. This On her recent album, “The Songbook Sessions: Ella go up the following day. (York Ave. at 72nd week’s edition brings Aparna Nancherla, of Fitzgerald,” Monheit pays homage to a major vocal St. 212-606-7000.) • After a sale of extrava- “Inside Amy Schumer” and “Late Night with influence while having her pick of choice material gant gems (April 26), Christie’s settles in for Seth Meyers”; Steven Markow, a contribu- from the likes of Rodgers and Hart, Arlen, and Por- a day of Old Masters (April 27). The morn- tor to this magazine’s Daily Shouts; and Joe ter—a win-win situation. While the album benefits ing includes works dating to the fourteenth Pera, whose unsettlingly wholesome strain of from the work of the guest trumpeter Nicholas Pay- century—a Florentine gothic triptych, cen- standup has become an improbable favorite ton, here this congenial stylist will share the spot- tered on a Madonna Enthroned—but most on the edgy late-night network Adult Swim. light only with the spirit of the great lady herself. of the pieces hail from the sixteenth, seven- (Sunnyvale, 1031 Grand St., Brooklyn. sunny-

(Birdland, 315 W. 44th St. 212-581-3080. April 25-29.) teenth, and eighteenth centuries. These in- valebk.com. April 30 at 6.) AMARGO PABLO BY ILLUSTRATION

14 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 F§D & DRINK

1 TABLES FOR TWO galleries dark, the food was the focus, and BA R TA B Flora Bar deservedly so. A seafood platter seemed the work more of a sushi chef than of a 945 Madison Ave. (646-558-5383) lobsterman, the snow-crab legs split care- For almost fifty years, as the home fully, the morsel-size blue shrimp sweet of the Whitney Museum, Marcel Breuer’s and crunchingly fresh. Eating a strac- inverted ziggurat on Madison Avenue was ciatella dish recalled spelunking, its glop- a place to take in the American avant- ping texture giving way to sharper, Diamond Reef garde—and the basement cafeteria a place brighter edges: cubes of fennel and 1057 Atlantic Ave., Brooklyn to fortify oneself with starchy staples. The Meyer-lemon rind. Some victories were With all the fuss over artisanal liquors and bespoke kitchen was run early on by Daka, a pur- simple, like a Caesar dressing that replaced ambience, drinking establishments in New York veyor of the cheese-and-fruit-platter vari- anchovy with fermented rye berry, whose can be inclined toward the overserious. Which is ety; the nineties brought Sarabeth’s and its clean acid left room for the romaine. Oth- why a new spot from the team behind the Lower East Side’s Attaboy has flouted many of the ele- Goldie Lox plate; and in 2011, at Untitled, ers were grand, like the seafood dump- ments that speakeasy lovers generally cherish— Danny Meyer introduced his banana- lings; involving a mixture of lobster, scal- elaborate recipes, elusive reservations, waistcoats. hazelnut French toast. Now that the Whit- lop, and crab, they somehow tasted of each “I just wanted to do something as opposite as possible for this bar,” the co-owner Dan Green- ney has moved to the meatpacking district one individually, but also of bitter sorrel, baum said. Instead of, say, obscure free jazz, there’s and the Met is staging contemporary ex- in a gentle yuzu broth. dance music in a space that is echoey enough to hibitions at the Breuer, the eatery has again Rich food, lightly rendered—this is give a person an excuse to lean in closer. The airy plant-filled bar, which is tucked along a strip of been recast, with a downtown gaze. Mattos’s art. Yet it could not quite stand auto-body shops, recalls California—or, at least, The chef is the Uruguayan-born Igna- up to the demands of the brunch hour. a New Yorker’s version of it. (No crystals; no one cio Mattos, who, four years ago, joined with The maître d’ had no space at one o’clock lurking around a corner, waiting to read your aura.) On a recent Sunday afternoon, locals in stripes the restaurateur Thomas Carter to open the other Sunday, but the online-reserva- and wide-brimmed hats conspired over highballs Estela, a Houston Street hideaway beloved tions system did. The service, which ranges while large men in resort-branded T-shirts ordered by the likes of Barack and Michelle Obama from forgetful to chilly and is always slow, Presidentes and mingled on the spacious patio. “Everything is fast, so you can get back to your for its imaginative Mediterranean small upset both art-viewing plans and basic friends,” Greenbaum said. But the speed of service plates. Last year, Mattos and Carter motor function: More coffee, pretty please? belies the quality of the drinks—the Booze + Juice débuted the nearby Café Altro Paradiso, a Even the chef seemed to have been caught (a whole Granny Smith apple blitzed to order and combined with your choice of liquor) is pleasantly petite-portioned take on the Italian bistro. flat-footed with his savory truffled tart, tart and tantalizingly green, and pairs well with In Flora Bar, the pair faces its steepest chal- which had lost, among other ingredients, mezcal, for a touch of smoke. Diamond Reef’s lenge yet: museum café by day, neighbor- its toothsome dinnertime topping—slen- signature cocktail harks back to a darling of New York mixology: the Penicillin (Scotch, lemon, hood restaurant by night, Mediterranean- der disks of rutabaga—and gained a slimy honey, ginger), invented by the co-owner Sam Pacific tapas menu at all times—think fried egg. Mr. Mattos, don’t forget your Ross when he worked at Sasha Petraske’s Milk & olives, yogurt, and jamón ibérico, plus dai- root vegetables, and send those surly serv- Honey, and now a classic worldwide. Diamond Reef’s frozen take (the Penichillin) employs an kon, yellowfin, and Szechuan peppercorns. ers back downtown. (Dishes $9-$120.) age-old principle: anything is more fun when

PHOTOGRAPH BY FRANCES F. DENNY FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE JOOST BY ILLUSTRATION YORKER; THE NEW DENNY FOR FRANCES F. BY PHOTOGRAPH On a recent Tuesday evening, with the —Daniel Wenger tossed into a slushy machine.—Wei Tchou

THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 15

THE TALK OF THE TOWN

COMMENT ONE HUNDRED DAYS

n April 29th, Donald Trump will pled, cocky, value-free con who will in- Tayyip Erdoğan for passing a referen- O have occupied the Oval Office for sult, stiff, or betray anyone to achieve his dum that bolsters autocratic rule in Tur- a hundred days. For most people, the gaudiest purposes. “I am what I am,” he key—or when a sullen and insulting luxury of living in a relatively stable de- has said. But what was once a parochial meeting with Angela Merkel is followed mocracy is the luxury of not following amusement is now a national and global by a swoon session with Abdel Fattah politics with a nerve-racked constancy. peril. Trump flouts truth and liberal val- El-Sisi, the military dictator of Egypt— Trump does not afford this. His Presi- ues so brazenly that he undermines the how are the supporters of liberal and dency has become the demoralizing daily country he has been elected to serve and democratic values throughout Europe obsession of anyone concerned with the stability he is pledged to insure. His meant to react to American leadership? global security, the vitality of the natu- bluster creates a generalized anxiety such Trump appears to strut through the ral world, the national health, constitu- that the President of the world forever studying his own image. tionalism, civil rights, criminal justice, a can appear to be scarcely more reliable He thinks out loud, and is incapable of free press, science, public education, and than any of the world’s autocrats. When reflection. He is unserious, unfocussed, the distinction between fact and its op- Kim In-ryong, a representative of North and, at times, it seems, unhinged. Jour- posite. The hundred-day marker is never Korea’s radical regime, warns that Trump nalists are invited to the Oval Office to an entirely reliable indicator of a four- and his tweets of provocation are creat- ask about infrastructure; he turns the year term, but it’s worth remembering ing “a dangerous situation in which a subject to how Bill O’Reilly, late of Fox that Franklin Roosevelt and Barack thermonuclear war may break out at any News, is a “good person,” blameless, like Obama were among those who came to moment,” does one man sound more im- him, in matters of sexual harassment. A office at a moment of national crisis and mediately rational than the other? When reporter asks about the missile attack on had the discipline, the preparation, and Trump rushes to congratulate Recep Syria; he feeds her a self-satisfied de- the rigor to set an entirely new course. scription of how he informed his Chi- Impulsive, egocentric, and mendacious, nese guests at Mar-a-Lago of the strike Trump has, in the same span, set fire to over “the most beautiful piece of choc- the integrity of his office. olate cake that you’ve ever seen.” Trump has never gone out of his way Little about this Presidency remains to conceal the essence of his relation- a secret for long. The reporters who cover ship to the truth and how he chooses to the White House say that, despite their navigate the world. In 1980, when he persistent concerns about Trump’s at- was about to announce plans to build tempts to marginalize the media, they Trump Tower, a fifty-eight-story edifice are flooded with information. Everyone on Fifth Avenue and Fifty-sixth Street, leaks on everyone else. Rather than de- he coached his architect before meeting mand discipline around him, Trump sits with a group of reporters. “Give them back and watches the results on cable the old Trump bullshit,” he said. “Tell news. His Administration is not so much them it’s going to be a million square a team of rivals as it is a new form of re- feet, sixty-eight stories.” ality entertainment: “The Circular Fir- This is the brand that Trump has cre- ing Squad.”

ILLUSTRATIONS BY TOM BACHTELL TOM BY ILLUSTRATIONS ated for himself––that of an unprinci- This Presidency is so dispiriting that,

THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 17 at the first glimmer of relative ordinari- advisers are stocked with multimillion- L.G.B.T. federal employees from dis- ness, Trump is graded on a curve. When aires and billionaires. His positions on crimination; his Vice-President voted he restrains himself from trolling Kim health care, tax reform, and financial reg- in a Senate tiebreaker to allow states Jong-un about the failure of a North ulation are of greatest appeal to the super- to defund Planned Parenthood clinics. Korean missile test, he is credited with wealthy. How he intends to improve the Trump, because of the lavish travel hab- the strategic self-possession of a Dean situation of the middle class remains ob- its of his family, is shaping up to be the Acheson. The urge to normalize Trump’s scure. A report in Politico described thirty most expensive executive in history to adolescent outbursts, his flagrant in- staffers holed up in a conference room guard. At the same time, his budget pro- competence and dishonesty––to wish in the Eisenhower Executive Office posals would, if passed in Congress, cut it all away, if only for a news cycle or Building, attempting a “rebranding” of the funding of after-school programs, two––is connected to the fear of what this first chapter of the Trump Admin- rental-assistance programs, the Com- fresh hell might come next. Every day istration. The aides furiously assembled munity Development Block Grant pro- brings another outrage or embarrass- “lists of early successes” on whiteboards. gram, legal assistance for the poor, the ment: the dressing down of the Aus- One success they can name is the National Endowment for the Arts, and tralian Prime Minister or a shoutout appointment of Neil Gorsuch to the the National Endowment for the Hu- for the “amazing job” that Frederick Supreme Court, although Democrats manities. Scorekeepers will credit these Douglass is doing. One day NATO is rightly judge that his seat was stolen as promises kept. Guardians of demo- “obsolete”; the next it is “no longer ob- from Obama’s nominee, Merrick Gar- cratic values and the environment, cham- solete.” The Chinese are “grand cham- land. The first hundred days are marked pions of economic opportunity and the pions” of currency manipulation; then most indelibly by Trump’s attempted national well-being will view them as they are not. When Julian Assange is ban of travellers from six Muslim coun- an ever- growing damage report. benefitting Trump’s campaign, it’s “I tries, which failed in the courts, and the love WikiLeaks!”; now, with the Pres- effort to “repeal and replace” the Afford- here’s a slight madness to think- idency won, the Justice Department is able Care Act, which imploded in the “T ing you should be the leader of preparing criminal charges against him. House of Representatives. The list of the free world,” Obama admitted be- News of Trump’s casual reversals of pol- domestic initiatives is largely confined fore he went ahead and ran for Presi- icy comes with such alarming regular- to reversals of achievements of the dent. But even after Richard Nixon’s ity that the impulse to locate a patch of Obama era. Trump has proposed an ex- anti-Semitic rants and Ronald Reagan’s firm ground is understandable. It’s sooth- pansion of the prison at Guantánamo astrology-influenced daily schedule, we ing. But it’s untenable. and ordered the easing of Dodd-Frank are at a new level of strangeness with There is frustration all around. During financial regulations. He has reversed Donald Trump––something that his bi- his first hundred days in office, Trump plans to save wetlands and protect wa- ography had always suggested. has not done away with populist rhet- terways from coal waste; he has reversed Trump emerged from neither a log oric, but he has acted almost entirely as executive orders that banned gun sales cabin nor the contemporary meritoc- a plutocrat. His Cabinet and his cast of to the mentally ill and that protected racy. He inherited his father’s outer- borough real-estate empire––a consid- erable enterprise distinguished by racist federal- housing violations—and brought it to Manhattan. He entered a world of contractors, casino operators, Roy Cohn, professional-wrestling stars, Rupert Murdoch, multiple bankruptcies, tab- loid divorces, Mar-a-Lago golf tourna- ments, and reality television. He had no real civic presence in New York. A wealthy man, he gave almost nothing to charity. He cultivated a kind of louche glamour. At Studio 54, he said, “I would watch supermodels getting screwed . . . on a bench in the middle of the room.” He had no close friends. Mainly, he pre- ferred to work, play golf, and spend long hours at home watching TV. His mi- sogyny and his low character were al- ways manifest. Displeased with a harm- less Palm Beach society journalist named Shannon Donnelly, he told her in a let- ter that if she adhered to his standards “Someone’s at the hole.” of discretion, “I will promise not to show you as the crude, fat and obnoxious slob Trump, who has the attention span of a iety, fear, and disdain that they had been which everyone knows you are.” Inso- hummingbird, would not read reports of during the campaign. As George W. far as he had political opinions, they any depth; he prefers one- or two-page Bush was leaving the grandstand, ac- were inconsistent and mainly another summaries, pictures, and graphics. Obama cording to New York, he was heard to say, form of performance art, part of his talk- met with Trump once and talked with “That was some weird shit.” show patter. His contributions to polit- him on the telephone roughly ten times. By all accounts, the West Wing has ical campaigns were unrelated to con- The discussions did little to change become a battlefield of opposing fac- viction; he gave solely to curry favor Obama’s mind that Trump was “uniquely tions. The most influential of them is with those who could do his business unqualified” to be President. His grasp also the only one with a guarantee of some good. He believed in nothing. of issues was rudimentary, at best. After permanence––the Family, particularly By the mid-nineties, Trump’s invest- listening to Obama describe the frame- Trump’s daughter Ivanka and his son- ment prospects had foundered. Banks work of the nuclear agreement with in-law, Jared Kushner. (His sons Eric cut him off. He turned to increasingly Iran––a deal that Trump had previously and Donald, Jr., have remained in New dubious sources of credit and branding York to run the family business. De- opportunities at home and abroad. A spite the responsibility to put country typical deal, involving a hotel in Baku, before personal profit, the President re- Azerbaijan (described at length in these fuses to divest from the business.) Kush- pages by Adam Davidson), included as ner has no relevant experience in for- partners an Azerbaijani family distin- eign or domestic policy, but he has been guished for its outsized corruption and tasked with forging a peace between for its connections to some Iranian broth- the Israelis and the Palestinians, steer- ers who worked as a profit front for the ing U.S. relations with China and Mex- Iranian Revolutionary Guard. There is ico, reorganizing the federal govern- little mystery as to why Trump has bro- ment, and helping to lead the fight ken with custom and refuses to release against the epidemic of opioid use. It is his tax returns. A record of his colossal hard to know if Kushner, as an execu- tax breaks, associations, deals, and net tive, is in charge of everything or of worth resides in those forms. It may turn nothing at all. But, as a counsellor, he out that deals like the one in Baku will clearly is powerful enough to whisper haunt his Presidency no less than his Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump in his father-in-law’s ear and diminish grotesque conflicts of interest or any of the prospects of rival counsellors, in- the possible connections to Russia now assessed as “terrible” and vowed to dis- cluding those of the Administration’s being investigated by the F.B.I. and con- mantle––he conceded that maybe it made most lurid white nationalist, Steve Ban- gressional committees will. sense after all. In one of the many books non. Ivanka Trump’s duties are gauzier As Trump struggled in business, he published under his name, “Trump: Think than her husband’s, but they seem to made a deal with NBC to star in “The Like a Billionaire,” he said, “The day I relate to getting her father to go easier Apprentice,” which, for fourteen seasons, realized it can be smart to be shallow on L.G.B.T. and women’s-rights issues featured him in a role of corporate dom- was, for me, a deep experience.” and calming his temper. inance. It was there that he honed his On Inauguration Day, at the Capitol, The way that Trump has established peculiar showmanship and connected to Trump no longer affected any awe of the his family members in positions of power a mass audience well beyond New York task before him or respect for his prede- and profit is redolent of tin-pot dicta- City, perfecting the persona that became cessors. He furiously rebuked the elected torships. He may waver on matters of the core of his Presidential campaign: officials seated behind him and the in- ideology, but his commitment to the the billionaire populist. That role is not ternational order that they served. Using family firm is unshakable and resists eth- unknown in American history: in the the language of populist demagogues, ical norms. The conflicts and the privi- eighteen-seventies, wealthy leaders of from Huey Long to George Wallace to leges are shameless, the potential reve- the Redeemer movement, a southern Silvio Berlusconi, the new President im- nues unthinkable. On the day that the faction of the Bourbon Democrats linked plied that he, the Leader, was in perfect Trump family hosted Xi Jinping in Palm to the Ku Klux Klan and other white communion with the People, and that Beach, the Chinese government extended paramilitary groups, set out to defund together they would repair the landscape trademarks to Ivanka’s businesses so that public schools, shrink government, lower of “American carnage” and return it to she could sell her shoes and handbags taxes for land owners, and undercut the its prelapsarian state of grace. In this to the vast market from Harbin to rise of a generation of black politicians. union, it seemed, there was no place for Guangzhou. And yet Trump has discovered that the majority of the electorate, which had Trump is wary of expertise. During it’s far more difficult to manage the re- voted for Hillary Clinton. African-Amer- the campaign, he expressed his distrust alities of national politics than the set of icans, Muslim Americans, Latinos, im- of scientists, military strategists, uni- “The Apprentice.” In the transitional pe- migrants––it was hard to tell if Trump versity professors, diplomats, and in- riod between Election Day and the In- counted them as the People, too. More telligence officers. He filled the execu- auguration, Obama’s aides were told that likely, they remained the objects of anx- tive branch accordingly, appointing a

THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 19 climate-change denier as the head of the tend to leave out that it did not work. which crushed a pro-democracy move- Environmental Protection Agency; a The war in Southeast Asia went on for ment on Tiananmen Square, in 1989, then Secretary of Education who, during her years after Nixon’s brinksmanship. set out to make the case that it could confirmation hearing, displayed stunning achieve enormous economic growth while ignorance of public education; an En- he Trump Presidency represents ignoring the demand for human rights ergy Secretary who previously called for T a rebellion against liberalism itself–– and political liberties. In Russia, Vladi- closing the Department of Energy; a an angry assault on the advances of groups mir Putin has suppressed political com- United Nations Ambassador whose in- of people who have experienced pro- petition, a nascent independent media, ternational experience is limited to trade found, if fitful, empowerment over the and any hope for an independent judi- missions for the state of South Carolina; past half century. There is nothing about ciary or legislature while managing to and a national-security adviser who Trump’s public pronouncements that in- convince millions of his countrymen that trafficked in Islamophobic conspiracy dicates that he has welcomed these moral the United States is hypocritical and im- theories until, three weeks into the job, advances; his language, his tone, his per- moral, no more democratic than any other he was forced to resign because he lied sonal behavior, and his policies all sug- country. In Turkey, Erdoğan has jailed to Vice-President Pence about his ties gest, and foster, a politics of resentment. tens of thousands of political opponents, to the Russian government. It is the Other––the ethnic minority, the muzzled the press, and narrowly won a Trump has left open hundreds of immigrant––who has closed your factory, referendum providing him with nearly important positions in government, taken your job, threatened your safety. dictatorial powers. Western Europe is largely because he sees no value in them. The Trumpian rebellion against lib- also in question. In France, Marine Le “A lot of those jobs, I don’t want to ap- eral democracy is not a local event; it is Pen, the leader of the National Front, is point, because they’re unnecessary to part of a disturbing global trend. When polling credibly in a Presidential cam- have,” he has said. “I say, ‘What do all the Wall fell, in 1989, and the So- paign guided by two of her longtime as- these people do?’ You don’t need all viet Union dissolved, two years later, the sociates and fascist sympathizers, Frédéric those jobs.” Among the many federal democratic movement grew and liber- Chatillon and Axel Loustau. bureaucracies that are now languish- alism advanced, and not only in Eastern The stakes of this anti-democratic ing with countless empty offices are and Central Europe. During the course wave cannot be overestimated. Nor can the Departments of State, Treasury, it be ignored to what degree authoritar- Commerce, Health and Human Ser- ian states have been able to point out the vices, Homeland Security, and Defense. failures of the West––including the wars A recent article in The Atlantic de- in Vietnam, Iraq, and Libya—and use scribed the State Department as “adrift them to diminish the moral prestige of and listless,” with officials unsure of democracy itself. As Edward Luce writes, their duties, hanging around the cafe- in “The Retreat of Western Liberalism,” teria gossiping, and leaving work early. “What we do not yet know is whether Trump seems to believe that foreign the world’s democratic recession will turn affairs require only modest depths of into a global depression.” thought. It’s the generals who are the If we were ever naïve enough to be- authoritative voices in his Administra- lieve that progress in political life is inev- tion. To a President whose idea of a stra- itable, we are experiencing the contra- tegic move is to “bomb the shit out of ” diction. Freedom House, a nongovern- ISIS, they are the ones who have to make mental organization that researches global the case for international law, the effi- trends in political liberty, has identified an cacy of NATO, the immorality of torture, eleven-year decline in democracies around and the inadvisability of using the rhet- the globe and now issues a list of “coun- oric of “radical Islamic terrorism.” At the Vladimir Putin and tries to watch.” These are nations that same time, the pace of bombing in Syria, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan “may be approaching important turning Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen appears points in their democratic trajectory.” The to have increased; tensions with Iran, of thirty years, the number of democra- ones that most concern Freedom House Russia, and North Korea have inten- cies in the world expanded from thirty include South Africa, Iraq, Kyrgyzstan, sified. Trump, an erratic and impulsive to roughly a hundred. But, since 2000, Ecuador, Zimbabwe, and, the largest of spokesman for his own policy, needs com- nation-states of major consequence–– them, the United States. The reason the petent civilian advisers, if only as a coun- Russia, Hungary, Thailand, and the Phil- group includes the U.S. is Trump’s “un- terweight to the military point of view ippines among them––have gone in the orthodox” Presidential campaign and his and his own self-admiring caprices. opposite, authoritarian direction. India, “approach to civil liberties and the role of When conservative columnists write Indonesia, and Great Britain have be- the United States in the world.” about Trump and fondly recall Richard come more nationalistic. The Arab Spring In 1814, John Adams evoked the Ar- Nixon’s “madman theory” of international failed nearly everywhere. The prestige istotelian notion that democracy will in- relations––a calculated unpredictability and the efficacy of democracy itself is in evitably lapse into anarchy. “Remember, directed at the North Vietnamese––they question. The Chinese Communist Party, democracy never lasts long,” he wrote to

20 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 John Taylor, a former U.S. senator from Virginia, in 1814. “It soon wastes, ex- hausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy that did not commit suicide.” As President, Donald Trump, with his nativist and purely transactional view of politics, threatens to be democ- racy’s most reckless caretaker, and a fulfill- ment of Adams’s dark prophecy. Pushing back against Trumpism will not be easy. Even if the President drops some of his most brutal promises, even if he throws his smartphone into the Po- tomac, and ceases to titillate his base with racist dog-whistling and to provoke his enemies with a rhetoric of heedless bra- vado, he still commands a Republican Congress, and he is still going to score some distressing political victories. He is certainly not finished with his efforts to repeal Obamacare in a way that would deprive millions of people of their health insurance; he is certainly not going to “Can you ask them to do a little dance?” relax his effort to enact hard-line immi- gration restrictions; he is certainly not through trying to dismantle legislative •• and international efforts to rescue an en- vironment that is already suffering the of the new right-wing populism––the race. One well-established figure, Sena- grievous effects of climate change. fears it plays on, the divisions it engen- tor Elizabeth Warren, of Massachusetts, Trump forces us to recognize the fra- ders––and to confront the consequences just published “This Fight Is Our Fight,” gility of precious things. Yet there are of globalism, technology, and cultural a book on the decline of middle-class signs that Adams and the doomsayers change. Politicians and citizens who in- prospects and conservative ideology since of democratic values will be proved tend to defeat the forces of reaction, of the Reagan era. It’s the sort of manifesto, wrong. Hope can be found in the ex- Trumpism, need to confront questions like “The Audacity of Hope,” that fre- traordinary crowds at the many wom- of jobs lost to automation and offshor- quently augurs higher political ambition. en’s marches across the country on the ing head on. Unemployment is at five Warren came by our offices last week for day after the Inauguration; in the recent per cent, but that does not provide an an hour-long interview, and, while she marches in support of science and a more accurate picture of an endangered mid- made the ritual demurrals about a run compassionate, reasonable immigration dle and working class. for the Presidency, she spoke with a com- policy; in the earnest work of the courts The political math is clarifying: four bative focus on precisely the issues that that have blocked the “Muslim ban” and hundred and eighty-nine of the wealth- Clinton ceded to Trump in the 2016 race. of various senators and House members iest counties in the country voted for Warren will be sixty-nine when it comes in both parties who, unlike Mitch Mc- Clinton; the remaining two thousand six time to make a decision, but it would be Connell and Paul Ryan, have refused to hundred and twenty-three counties, foolish to think that she is not among put cynicism and expedience before in- largely made up of small towns, suburbs, those who are testing the waters. tegrity; in the exemplary investigative and rural areas, voted for Trump. Slightly The clownish veneer of Trumpism journalism being done by traditional and fewer than fifty-five per cent of all voting- conceals its true danger. Trump’s way of new media outlets; in the performance age adults bestirred themselves to go to lying is not a joke; it is a strategy, a way of anti-Trump candidates in recent con- the polls. That statistic is at least as pain- of clouding our capacity to think, to live gressional races in Kansas and Georgia. ful to process as the Comey letter, the in a realm of truth. It is said that each The opposition to Trump also has to Russian hack of the D.N.C., the strate- epoch dreams the one to follow. The task give deeper thought to why a demagogue gic failures of the Clinton campaign, and now is not merely to recognize this Pres- with such modest and eccentric experi- the over-all darkness of the Trump cam- idency for the emergency it is, and to re- ence could speak with such immediacy paign. It’s a statistic about passivity, which sist its assault on the principles of real- to tens of millions of voters anxious about is just what a democracy in the era of ity and the values of liberal democracy, their lives and their prospects, while the Trump can no longer afford. but to devise a future, to debate, to hear Democratic nominee could not. The in- There is still time for younger politi- one another, to organize, to preserve and tellectual and political task ahead is at cians to gather themselves for the 2018 revive precious things. once to resist the ugliest manifestations midterms and the 2020 Presidential ––David Remnick

THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 21 were skeptical of pleasure,” Strout has LIFE AND LETTERS written. They didn’t drink or smoke or watch television; they didn’t get the news- paper. “By the time I went to college, I A LONG HOMECOMING had seen two movies: ‘One Hundred and One Dalmatians’ and ‘The Miracle The novelist Elizabeth Strout left Maine, but it didn’t leave her. Worker.’ ” Strout’s family still owns the house, and as she walked in the front BY ARIEL LEVY yard—which isn’t really a yard so much as a perch among the pine trees, on a rocky outcropping high above Casco Bay—she said, “It’s a long way from nowhere.” And so she left. After college, at Bates, she went to England and worked in a pub. She went to law school, in Syracuse, because she was afraid that otherwise she’d end up a “fifty-eight-year-old cock- tail waitress,” instead of a fiction writer. She met her first husband, Martin Fein- man, there, and moved with him to New York City, where she taught at a com- munity college and he worked as a pub- lic defender. They had a daughter, Za- rina. “I just was so happy that she had the world right around her,” Strout said, looking out at the gray sea. “That she didn’t have to live like this.” For Strout’s most vivid characters, leaving their small towns seems either unthinkable or inevitable. The protago- nist of “Olive Kitteridge,” which won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize, is the embodiment of the deep-rooted world where Strout grew up: Olive could no more abandon Maine than she could her own husband. (“Oh God, yes, she was glad she’d never left Henry,” Olive thinks, when she’s older, and her husband has been incapacitated by a stroke. “She’d never had a friend as loyal, as kind.” But she also remembers ust outside the town of Brunswick, my mother felt like the person was . . . a “a loneliness so deep that once, not so J Maine, the Harpswell Road runs along summer person.” many years ago, having a cavity filled, the a finger of land poking into the ocean. Strout longed to be one of them— dentist’s gentle turning of her chin with It passes clapboard houses and mobile these people who were free to experi- his soft fingers had felt to her like a ten- homes, stands of red-tipped sumac and ence the world beyond New England. der kindness of almost excruciating pine, a few farms, a white Congrega- “They’d come in with their tennis rac- depth.”) The narrator of “My Name Is tional church, and the Harpswell His- quets, and I would want so much to be Lucy Barton,” a writer, cannot remain in torical Society, which used to be Bailey’s friends with them,” she said. “I just don’t the remote community where she was country store, when the writer Elizabeth think I existed for them on any level.” raised: there is an engine in her that pro- Strout worked there as a teen-ager. “I re- In her mind, they came from places where pels her into the unknown. member sitting on the front porch eat- a person wouldn’t feel so stuck—as Strout Strout dislikes it when people refer to ing a lollipop,” Strout, who is sixty-one, did, in the house that her parents had her as a “Maine writer.” And yet, when said one damp day in March, as she drove built next to her grandmother’s cottage, asked, “What’s your relationship with past. “And this woman came by, and she down a dirt road from her two great- Maine?” she replies, “That’s like asking goes, ‘Oh, you’re so cute! Can I take a aunts. “My parents came from many gen- me what’s my relationship with my own picture?’ My mother was furious. I think erations of New Englanders, and they body. It’s just my DNA.” It took her de- cades to understand this. After law school, “I often felt that I had been born in the wrong place,” Strout says. Strout quickly decided that she didn’t

22 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 PHOTOGRAPH BY JOSS MCKINLEY want to be a lawyer after all, and that she noticed a lanky girl on the front steps. if they needed Strout as an interlocutor. didn’t care if she ended up an aging, un- “Ooh! Ooh! Ooh!” she shrieked with de- On the day that Olive Kitteridge’s published cocktail waitress: at least she light. “Little skinny girl sitting there with son, Christopher, is getting married, to a would have spent her time writing. (“I her big feet!” It could have been Strout, doctor from California named Suzanne, took myself—secretly, secretly—very se- half a century ago, except that the girl Olive hides in the couple’s bedroom, riously!” Lucy Barton says in Strout’s had a cell phone, and the store is now suffering: novel. “I knew I was a writer.”) Strout defunct. “All the sadder for her,” Strout Olive, on the edge of the bed, leans her face barely published before she turned forty, said, shaking her head. “Jesus. I want to into her hands. She can almost not remember the except for a few stories in “obscure liter- say, ‘Come on, kid—get in the car, and first decade of Christopher’s life, although some ary journals” and in magazines like Sev- we’ll give you a ride out.’ ” things she does remember and doesn’t want to. enteen and Redbook. “It was a long haul,” She tried teaching him to play the piano and he wouldn’t play the notes right. It was how scared she said. “I kept going, long past the point live Kitteridge” has sold more he was of her that made her go all wacky. But she where it made sense.” Zarina told me, “I “O than a million copies, and to many loved him! She would like to say this to Suzanne. remember being really small and regis- readers, particularly in Maine, the woman She would like to say, Listen, Dr. Sue, deep down tering that she was miserable about it, at its center—who explodes with rage there is a thing inside me, and sometimes it swells and I was, like, ‘Why don’t you just stop?’ but is often unable to access her other up like the head of a squid and shoots blackness through me. I haven’t wanted to be this way, but And, of course, she was, like, ‘Because emotions—feels like an intimate. “I can so help me, I have loved my son. I can’t.’ ” think of at least a half-dozen real-life Strout had an intuition that the prob- Olives in Maine who helped raise me,” Growing up, Strout told me, she had lem was, as Lucy Barton says of another one woman said when Strout gave a read- a sense of “just swimming in all this ri- writer, that “she was not telling exactly ing in Portland recently. Another said, diculous extra emotion.” She was a “chat- the truth, she was always staying away “I just love Olive, and I’m always won- terbox,” people said. “Liz has always been from something.” Strout remembers dering about her backstory. What formed a talker,” her brother, Jon, told me. “I’m thinking, “I’m not being honest. But what her? What made her Olive Kitteridge? much more reserved, much more of a am I not being honest about?” She had Do you have any insight on that?” Maine Yankee. My sister’s not much of always been interested in standup com- “I do,” Strout replied from the stage. a Yankee.” edy, and it occurred to her that what’s She was wearing black, as she tends to, Her passion and volubility were funny is true. “That’s why people respond, and her blond hair was up in a clip. frowned upon in the taciturn world she because the unspeakable is getting said,” “Oh, good,” the woman continued. inhabited. “I can remember my father Strout told me. “So I thought to myself, “Will you tell us?” saying to me at Thanksgiving, when my What would happen if I put myself in Strout smiled and said, “No.” The au- aunts would be around, ‘When I put my that kind of pressure cooker where I was dience laughed, but she wasn’t kidding. hand on my tie, it means you’re talking responsible immediately for having peo- “She does have a backstory. We all do. too much,’ ” Strout said. “I often felt that ple laugh?” She enrolled in a standup class And I would love to tell you.” Strout I had been born in the wrong place.” at , which required stu- sighed. “But I just don’t think I will.” dents to perform at the Comic Strip. She Withholding is important to Strout. leven generations ago, a six- was terrified before going onstage. “My She never speaks about books before E teen-year-old named John MacBean whole routine, I made so much fun of they’re finished, because, she said, “there’s came from Scotland to New England. myself for being an uptight white woman a pressure that has to build, and if I talk “He made leather shoes,” Strout’s mother, from New England,” Strout said. “And about it then I can’t write it. It’s like put- Beverly, said one morning. “And the funny the incredible part is it worked.” ting a pin in a balloon and just popping thing is that L. L. Bean—who is also de- A few years later, Strout published the air out.” Her characters are no less scended from that line—made leather her first novel, “Amy and Isabelle,” about circumspect: there are always things that shoes. He was cousin to my grandfather.” an uptight white woman who lives with they can’t remember or can’t discuss, pe- We were sitting in a diner at the Tops- her daughter in an old Maine mill town. riods of time that the reader can only ham Fair Mall, not far from where Jon It was a national best-seller. Maine— guess at. Critics frequently note the stark- used to have a dental practice. (He had Strout’s DNA, the isolation and emo- ness of Strout’s writing—what Claire stopped by the diner earlier for a blue- tional restraint she had abandoned for Messud, reviewing “Lucy Barton” in the berry muffin. His mother ordered one, bustling, gregarious New York City— Times, called her “vibrating silences.” This too, though she worried that it would be was the thing that she’d been staying encompassing quiet is always there, like too large.) Mrs. Strout, who will turn away from. the sea on the edge of the horizon. ninety in July, was carrying a bag of cloth Maine has served as the setting for Strout has an aesthetic as spare as the she’d bought next door, at Jo-Ann Fab- four of Strout’s books, and now she lives white Congregational church, where her rics, and was wearing a gray-blue wool there part-time, with her second hus- father’s funeral was held. The dramatic cloak that she’d made: she still sews all band, in the middle of Brunswick. It’s turns are understated—tone on tone— her own clothes, and used to make clothes just twenty minutes away from the house but the characters are nearly bursting for Elizabeth, whom she called Wizzle. where she grew up, at the other end of with feeling. One of the central agonies “Anyway,” she said. “That’s the Beans.” the Harpswell Road. As we drove back of their lives tends to be an inability to Her late husband, Dick—who was past what was once Bailey’s store, Strout communicate their internal state. It’s as “kindness itself,” she said—was from a

THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 23 similarly old New England family; one open spaces to farm and timber to log.) Bailey’s. “This woman came in—she of his forebears, a cousin of his great- The inhabitants are white, reserved, gen- seemed old to me, but she was probably great-grandfather’s, was appointed the erally decent, and suspicious of new ar- like fifty-five—and she started to talk to lighthouse keeper of the Portland Head rivals. “It’s a similar kind of person who me about how her husband had had a Light during the Ulysses S. Grant Ad- has gone from the East to the Midwest,” stroke, and it had left him depressed,” ministration. (The job stayed in the fam- Strout said. “They’re Congregational- she recalled. “And I remember so clearly ily for six decades.) Dick was a profes- ists”—like her family—“and they’re plain, almost feeling her molecules move into sor of parasitology at the University of plain, plain.” me—or my molecules move into her. I New Hampshire in Durham, and Bev- In the communities that Strout cre- understood there was some sort of merg- erly taught expository writing at the local ates, the mores are set by tradition, and ing.” This is also how Strout feels when high school, which her children attended; people aren’t confused about their roles. characters “show up, just like that.” They the family shuttled between Durham But this continuity provides no protec- seem like real visitors, bringing dispatches and Harpswell. tion. In “Olive Kitteridge,” a young man, from their lives. “I have a very specific In an interview on NPR, Strout told returning home to Maine to commit sui- memory. I was loading the dishwasher, the host, Terry Gross, “I understood that cide in the same place that his mother and Olive just arrived,” Strout told me. my father in many ways was the more did, worries about who will find his “She was standing by the picnic table at decent person, but my mother was much corpse: “Kevin could not abide the her son’s wedding, and I could peer into more interesting.” Her mother taught her thought of any child discovering what her head.” She heard Olive thinking, It’s to observe others, and to write what she he had discovered; that his mother’s need high time everyone went home. “So I saw in a notebook. “She kind of whetted to devour her life had been so huge and wrote that down immediately. And that my appetite for characters,” Strout told urgent as to spray remnants of corpore- was it—there was Olive.” me. “We would be sitting in a parking ality across the kitchen cupboards.” (As lot, waiting for my father to come out of he contemplates this, Olive barges in and nce, when Strout was young, a store, and she’d point to a woman and interrogates him. “‘Jesus,’ Kevin said qui- O she asked her father, “Are we poor?” say, ‘Well, she’s not looking forward to etly. ‘Does everybody know everything?’ because they lived so austerely. “He said, getting home.’ Or, ‘Second wife.’ ” It was ‘Oh, sure,’ she said comfortably. ‘What ‘Yes!’ ” Strout told me. “And he said it Strout’s first experience of contemplat- else is there to do?’ ”) Lucy Barton’s par- with great pride.” In her telling, this was ing the interlocking lives that make up a ents hit her “impulsively and vigorously” a Yankee fiction, an attempt to embody small town, the way their disappoint- throughout her childhood, and lock her the understated flintiness that they val- ments and small joys—“little bursts,” Olive in the cold cab of a truck as a punish- ued. (Jon remembers it differently. “We calls them—can merge into a single story. ment. Her father is tormented by his ex- were poor,” he told me. When I asked In the diner, a man wearing a maroon periences in the Second World War, and, in what sense, he said, “Financially.”) It work shirt approached the table. “Well, in an indelible embarrassment, is caught was almost incomprehensible to her fam- hello, it’s been a long time!” Mrs. Strout by a farmer “pulling on himself, behind ily when Strout married into a wealthy, said to him. the barns.” In “Anything Is Possible,” the demonstrative Jewish family and moved He explained their history: “I did a barns have burned down, and the farmer to New York. “My former husband and lot of work for these people—septic sys- has become a janitor, haunted by the “ter- his father would kiss when they met,” tem, road.” rible screaming sounds of the cows as Strout told me. “I just thought that was “I need some more septic system,” she they died.” The tone of Strout’s fiction so lovely.” Her mother-in-law liked to told him. “They broke through the pipe. is both cozy and eerie, as comforting and hear her pronounce Yiddish words in Are you doing it still?” unsettling as a fairy tale. her clipped New England accent. “I could “I might take a look at it, yah. Jon still Strout feels misunderstood when peo- never say anything right except oy vey,” gets me out of some jams with my teeth. ple ask her if characters are based on her Strout said. “I was made for oy vey.” He said you were going to be celebrat- mother, her father, herself. “It’s not even Strout and her family lived in a brown- ing a big birthday this summer. Mine’s remotely how it is,” she said. “Because stone in Park Slope, which, she said, “felt this Saturday. I’m going to be seventy.” these are all different people that have almost like a village,” except that it was “Well,” Mrs. Strout said. “I guess you’re visited me. I use myself—I’m the only full of people she didn’t know. She joined growing up.” thing I can use—but I’m not an autobi- a writing group, and took classes from The connections and constraints of ographical writer.” (When her first book the editor Gordon Lish. “She really found small-town life—and the almost erotic came out, Strout asked her editor if she what she was looking for in New York,” ache for something more—remain could do without an author photograph Zarina said. “I remember clearly stacks Strout’s primary subject. Her new col- on the jacket. He said no.) “Some peo- of manuscripts throughout my child- lection, “Anything Is Possible,” takes place ple have an idea,” she continued. “I just hood on the dining-room table. They mostly in Lucy Barton’s childhood home, see a person, and I start describing who weren’t sacred—we’d kind of eat on them a depressed farming town in Illinois that this person is.” and live around them.” is strikingly similar to the towns that Strout recalls having almost mystical Strout’s parents didn’t often visit. Strout has written about in Maine. (Many experiences of temporarily inhabiting “They were well educated, but in some Mainers who survived the Civil War other people. The first time it happened, ways very provincial,” Feinman said. “New moved to the Midwest, where there were she was twelve years old, working at York was alien—it was like Sodom and

24 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 Gomorrah to them.” (Olive Kitteridge laments having “a little relative” living in the “foreign land of New York City.” She tells a friend, “I guess it’s the way of the world. Hurts, though. Have that DNA flung all over like so much dandelion fuzz.”) Strout feels that her parents dis- approved of the way she raised her daugh- ter. “My generation was the one that turned around and became friends with our kids,” she said. “I think they thought that I paid her far too much attention. I mean, I don’t know that, but I think that.” After Zarina left for college, Strout, who was then working on her second novel, “Abide with Me,” moved out of the brownstone. Feinman told me, “I know that one piece was a desire to really just focus on her writing. A desire to not have to be responsible for any- body else.” It was almost a decade, though, ¥¥ before she and Feinman got divorced. “They like each other so much—that made it confusing,” Zarina, who is thirty- when in fact they’d gone to camp there in front of her apartment with Maine four, said. “My takeaway is that love it- one summer. She asked where he was plates; he left his business card on the self is not enough.” from. “He said, ‘Lisbon Falls,’ ” Strout windshield. “They share an intense rela- Unlike Strout’s other books, “My recalled. “I thought, Oh, my God, he tionship with Maine,” Zarina added. “It’s Name Is Lucy Barton” is in the first per- really is from Maine. I mean, everything’s a need and an adoration and a loathing.” son. It is about a writer who flees a place shut down, the paper factories are gone.” Since 2010, Strout and Tierney have where she feels stifled and ends up in Lisbon Falls is not a place where people split their time between Manhattan and New York, delighted by the buzzing hu- go on family vacations. Brunswick, where they live in an old manity around her. She dearly loves her When Strout signed books afterward, brick house that has been converted into mother, a tough woman who sews and the man was first in line, and he intro- apartments. Down the block, she rents who calls her Wizzle. She is a passion- duced himself as Jim Tierney. “We chat- a modest office, decorated with a vomit- ate mother herself, who leaves her first ted for a while, and then, when he left, I colored carpet and a floral thrift-store husband. remember turning and looking at him couch. “It’s just my weird little place!” Barton is told by a friend that to be a and thinking, That should have been my she said. On the wall is an old photo- writer she would have to be ruthless. De- life,” Strout said. “I had no idea that I graph of the Libbey Mill, in Lewiston, cades later, when she is successful enough would ever see him again.” But she real- where her grandfather worked, and a to sit with wealthy people “in the wait- ized later that he had slipped her his framed copy of the Times best-seller list ing room for the doctor who will make e-mail address. “We wrote back and forth with “Olive Kitteridge” at the top. them look not old or worried or like their a few times,” she said. “And then we met In “Anything Is Possible,” Lucy Bar- mother,” she reflects on her friend’s ad- twice. And then he moved in.” On their ton returns home after seventeen years; vice. “The ruthlessness, I think, comes in second date, Strout told him that she had she tells her sister, Vicky, that she’s been grabbing onto myself, in saying: This is been rejected from his alma mater. “He busy. “‘Busy? Who isn’t busy?’ Vicky me, and I will not go where I can’t bear thought about it for a second, and then pushed her glasses up her nose. In a mo- to go—to Amgash, Illinois—and I will he said, ‘I’ve never had dinner with some- ment she added, ‘Hey, Lucy, is that what’s not stay in a marriage when I don’t want one so stupid they couldn’t get into the called a truthful sentence? Didn’t I just to, and I will grab myself and hurl on- University of Maine law school before.’ see you on the computer giving a talk ward through life, blind as a bat, but on And I thought, Oh, my God—I love this about truthful sentences? “A writer should I go! This is the ruthlessness, I think.” man.” write only what is true.” . . . Well. I don’t Tierney, who became Strout’s second believe you. You didn’t come here be- ight years ago, Strout was on- husband, was Maine’s attorney general cause you didn’t want to.’ ” E stage at Symphony Space, in New for ten years, and, before that, a member It’s a recurring theme in Strout’s nov- York City, when a man in the audience of the legislature. “My mom married els, the angry, aching sense of abandon- stood to ask a question. “I’m from Maine, Maine incarnate,” Zarina said, “except ment small-town dwellers feel when their too,” he said. She was skeptical: she had that he talks even more than she does.” loved ones depart. Olive Kitteridge never become accustomed to people in Man- Once, when they were visiting her in quite recovers from the “ghastly blow” hattan telling her they were from Maine, Brooklyn, Tierney noticed a car parked of having her son “uprooted by his pushy

THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 25 new wife, after they had planned on him bitious, when she accomplishes some- afraid I was going to get arrested,” she living nearby and raising a family.” When thing she “can’t take it in fully,” she said. said. “Then, eventually, I went into their I asked Strout if people she grew up with It upsets her when friends call her mod- store—at that point they only had one, resented her for leaving, she said, “I don’t est, because it means that they don’t now they have like a million—and they know. I haven’t stayed in touch.” really know her. The truth, she insists, is had different things: sheets next to rice Tierney, however, seems to know one that her successes are “inaccessible” to next to nutmeg next to a broom.” out of every ten people in Maine, and her, which she attributes to her upbring- Eventually, Somalis began inviting he frequently stops to chat with them ing in the Congregational Church, where Strout into their homes. “It took a long for as long as they’ll listen. One after- her father was a deacon. “We were not time, but it was so interesting,” she whis- noon, the couple walked into Gulf of supposed to think about who we were pered. “The men all hang out on the Maine, a bookstore down the block from in the world,” she said. In a draft of sidewalk because they like to see the their house in Brunswick, to say hello to “Abide with Me,” Strout wrote of what sky, they miss the way the sky is in So- the proprietor Gary Lawless, a poet with it felt like for the protagonist—a Con- malia. And these beautiful teen-age girls a long white beard and hair, whose fa- gregational minister in Maine—when would flutter downstairs—these young, ther was once the police chief in a town parishioners praised his sermons: “Com- butterfly-type girls. And I really saw the up the coast. “I never get tongue-tied ex- pliments would come to him like a shaft difference between the young ones, who cept when you’re here,” Lawless told of light and then bounce off his shoul- had come out of the camps early, and Strout. “When Jim’s here, I get ear-tied.” der.” It is, Strout suggests, literally against these women who had obviously spent Tierney, who was wearing cordu- her religion to feel pride. years there, and had such difficult lives, roys, a navy sweater with holes in it, When Strout told me about meet- and their faces were just ravaged.” and his grandson’s red Spider-Man cap, ing Tierney, I asked her why her imme- Strout told me she thinks of herself teaches at Harvard Law School and diate reaction was regret rather than ex- as “somebody who perches—I don’t sink has been working with progressive citement—why she thought, That should in. So I feel like New York has been this groups mounting legal challenges to have been my life, instead of, It’s about marvellous telephone wire for me to the Trump Administration, but he to be. “I’m a Strout,” she said. “We never perch on, and I can come back here and spends as much time as possible with think we’re going to . . . whatever.” perch. But Maine people sink in. This Strout, accompanying her to readings is their home.” One of the costs of liv- and events; they cling to each other he day after the Trump Admin- ing in a place where everyone seems in- with the urgency of mates who’ve found T istration made its second attempt terconnected is that outsiders stand out. each other late in life. “When I read to ban travel from a half-dozen Muslim- These days, Maine isn’t a place that Liz’s work, I forget she wrote it,” Tier- majority countries, Strout went to visit many people move to, as Strout’s ances- ney declared. “The strength of the voice the Telling Room, a youth writing or- tors did. It is the whitest and among takes me away—I go right down the ganization in Portland, Maine, where the oldest states in America, and is in- tube with everybody else.” He contin- she met refugee and immigrant high- creasingly far from political power. ued, “She’s the hardest-working person school students, mostly from Africa and Maine, which once had eight congress- I know. I work hard, she works harder.” the Middle East. The students stood in men, now has two, and may lose an- “Whatever,” Strout said. a circle and told Strout what they were other one as its population stagnates. Looking at a stack of copies of “Olive working on. “My name is Abass, and Before Strout left the Telling Room, Kitteridge,” adorned with Pulitzer in- I’m trying to define what home is,” a her hosts introduced her to Amran, a signia, Strout recalled once visiting the teen-ager from Ethiopia said. Steff, from seventeen-year-old, wearing jeans and shop and seeing a woman—“short, blond, Burundi, told her, “I’m writing about a yellow head scarf, whose family emi- bustling, chubby”—inspect the display. how I find my voice in America.” An- grated to Maine from Kenya four years “She goes, ‘ “Olive Kitteridge”—well, I other boy said, “I’m writing about sec- ago. She had just won a competition for guess that wasn’t the best book I’ve ever ond chances.” poetry recitation, and, in the hallway, read!’ ” Strout said. “That really blew a Strout’s fourth novel, “The Burgess she gave an impromptu performance of few hours for me.” Boys,” which Robert Redford is adapt- W. E. B. Du Bois’s “The Song of the “Olive Kitteridge” is dedicated to ing for HBO, was based on an incident Smoke.” “I am swinging in the sky, / I Strout’s mother—“the best storyteller I she read about in the newspaper after am wringing worlds awry,” she said, with know.” When I met Beverly Strout, I her mother alerted her to the story: in vibrant feeling, nearly singing the words. asked what she thought when the book Lewiston, which has a large Somali com- “I am the thought of the throbbing was awarded a Pulitzer. “I thought that munity, a young white man threw a fro- mills, / I am the soul of the soul-toil was fine,” she replied. “At the university, zen pig’s head through the door of a kills.” Strout listened, so rapt she could there was a professor who won a prize— mosque during prayers. Strout spent have been exchanging molecules. it wasn’t a Pulitzer—and the truth was he months lingering in Somali neighbor- In the parking lot, Strout looked back won the prize because he had friends on hoods before she started writing. “I would in through the windows. “The people I the committee. And I don’t think that was drive by the school to watch—I wanted write about are almost disappearing,” fair. I knew it wasn’t true of Elizabeth, so to see, with the little kids, if they were she said. “And that’s fine. It’s time. It’s I was very proud of her not cheating.” playing with white kids, and so I would like, Please, hello—let’s have others in Though Strout has always been am- just watch and watch and watch. I was here now.” 

26 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 astronomers and said, “How come the SHOUTS & MURMURS Italians are the only ones with a con- stellation? Canes Venatici sounds like the newly elected mayor of Salerno.” THE IRISH CONSTELLATION At which point, the chairman starts handing out constellations to the BY CALVIN TRILLIN Greeks (Camelopardalis) and the Span- iards (Dorado) and, eventually, the Irish. But it’s difficult to picture astrono- mers as New York pols. And I don’t think an astronomer would quietly slip his girlfriend’s name onto a constella- tion—although I must say that the presence on the list of a constellation named Norma gives me pause. It also may have been that constel- lations are sometimes named for the astronomers who discovered them, the way a medical researcher’s name is sometimes attached to the disease he managed to isolate. There’s one name ow that everybody’s confess- bit to the left I think you can see Pe- on the list that supports this supposi- N ing everything, I’m ready to con- nelope’s Pants Suit.” tion. As I imagine it, the most distin- fess that, until about five years ago, I It was during one of those Penelo- guished astronomer at the meeting is was under the impression that the con- pe’s Pants Suit occasions that the mis- Professor Szczepański, of the Univer- stellation Orion was the constellation apprehension I’d been under was re- sity of Lodz. It’s agreed to name a con- O’Ryan. I thought of it as the Irish vealed to me. When asked if I could see stellation he discovered for him—al- constellation, sort of the way that ac- the belt, I said, after shaking my head, though, since there is some concern tors refer to “Macbeth” as “the Scottish “I always pictured an Irish guy wearing that his surname is too difficult to spell, play.” Had I never seen “Orion” in print? suspenders instead of a belt, anyway.” they use his first name. Thus, the con- I had, in fact, but I suppose I thought “What Irish guy are you talking stellation Leo. it was pronounced “oar-e-un.” I thought about?” my companion said. After Professor Szczepański’s grace- it was some other constellation that I’d rather not relate the rest of the ful acceptance speech, a vote is about had nothing to do with the constella- conversation. It still stings. to be taken on a list of eighty-seven tion people were referring to when they Before that revelation, how did I constellations. But a voice is heard from pointed to the sky and said what I heard imagine a constellation had come to the back of the room: “Sure, and there’s as “Do you see O’Ryan’s Belt?” This is be named O’Ryan? I hadn’t given it one more.” The speaker is a small man not so crazy. I know somebody who, much thought, but when I discovered with a striking resemblance to the Irish not having been read to much when he a list of the eighty-eight recognized character actor Barry Fitzgerald. (As was a child, grew up thinking that “Pat constellations that was compiled, in it happens, Fitzgerald was only half the Bunny” was a book about a bunny 1922, by the International Astronom- Irish and was born William Shields. named Pat. These things happen. ical Union, I came up with a couple of But if you need to imagine a stage Irish- My customary answer to the ques- ways it might have happened. It’s cer- man who starts sentences with “Sure, tion about whether I could see the belt, tainly within the realm of possibility and” or “Begorra,” he’s your guy.) The by the way, was “No.” I have been called that the people in charge of the meet- comment is met with skepticism, but a constellation denier. I don’t accept ing at which that list was adopted op- then the astronomers look up to where the term. Like many people who are erated the way they would have oper- the Barry Fitzgerald character is point- called climate-change deniers—say, ated as commissioners in New York’s ing. (The meetings, for obvious rea- the people in our government who City Hall. According to the New York sons, are always held outdoors, at night.) are now in charge of doing something way of keeping the peace, if you can- For a while, nobody can make it out. about climate change—I prefer to say cel alternate-side-of-the-street park- Then Leo Szczepański says, “I think that the jury is still out. There may ing regulations on Yom Kippur, because I can see someone pointing.” be definable clusters of stars up there Orthodox Jews are prohibited from “Begorra,” the Fitzgerald look-alike which can be seen from Earth as con- driving on that day, then, fair being fair, says. “It’s me uncle telling that gob- stellations, or there may not be. If there you also cancel the regulations on the shite Callahan to keep his sheep on his are, I can’t make them out. When some- Feast of the Assumption, and on Greek side of the feckin’ fence.” body asks me if I can see Orion’s Belt, Orthodox Holy Thursday, and, even- “And what is your uncle’s name?” I sometimes vary a simple “No” with tually, on Eid al-Adha. So someone Professor Szczepański asks.

TOMI UM TOMI something like “No, but if you look a could have stood up in the meeting of “Sure and begorra, it’s O’Ryan.” 

THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 27 ting in a thatched hut in Yarí, which has LETTER FROM COLOMBIA long been dominated by the FARC, sip- ping Old Parr Scotch. Communist guer- rillas are not known for their fashion OUT OF THE JUNGLE sense, but Lozada, a limber man with a shaved head and a small paunch, has a After half a century of civil war, former guerrillas seek a return to society. dandyish streak. In Havana, he wore loud tropical shirts and suède loafers. In Yarí, BY JON LEE ANDERSON he favored T-shirts in hot pink, canary yellow, sky blue. With such bourgeois tastes, Lozada is an unlikely seeming Marxist revolutionary. But, at fifty-six, he is the youngest member of the seven- man secretariat that governs the FARC. By the terms of the peace treaty, which he had helped negotiate, some seven thousand FARC fighters will submit to a process of transitional justice. In exchange for full confessions and reparations to victims, those who committed war crimes will receive “restorative sanctions,” which offer the possibility of community work rather than prison. The FARC will be- come a political party, and, before long, former guerrillas will be able to run for public office. Lozada, who has spent decades shut- tling between jungle outposts and Co- lombia’s urban power centers, is a cru- cial leader for the FARC as it tries to reëngage with the world. But his history also creates complications. The Colom- bian government has tried several times to assassinate him, most recently in 2014, when an air strike on his camp killed three of his comrades. The U.S. State Department has a $2.5-million price on his head, accusing him of trafficking hun- dreds of tons of cocaine to raise funds for the FARC, and of murdering hundreds of people in the process. When pressed for details of his guerrilla activities, ast September, Carlos Antonio tims of both sides. “It was non-stop,” Lozada, obeying a long-established in- L Lozada, a commander of Colom- Lozada told me. At last, though, on Au- stinct for self-preservation, likes to reply bia’s FARC guerrillas, returned home to gust 24th, the two sides reached an agree- with a revolutionary maxim: “You own a jungle encampment in the vast wet- ment. When Lozada’s plane touched your secrets, but your words enslave you.” land region called Yarí. He had spent down, los camaradas—his fifty-odd per- When I visited, Lozada had spent the the past two years in Havana, staying sonal bodyguards, young men and previous two weeks helicoptering around in a villa near Fidel Castro’s home, while women who had been with him since the country with a Colombian Army working with other guerrilla leaders and they were little more than children— general and a group of U.N. officials, in- Colombian diplomats on a peace agree- greeted him on the airstrip with a song specting spots where guerrillas can meet ment to end the FARC’s fifty-two-year that they had composed. “They made and surrender their weapons. Earlier that insurgency—the longest in the West- me cry,” he told me. “Toward the end day, he had spoken to a group of young ern Hemisphere. His time there had of my time in Havana, all I could think fighters, and told them to prepare for been gruelling: an endless succession of about was being back here. The FARC peace. Sounding delighted, and a bit in- arguments, proposals, and counterpro- is my family.” credulous, he kept repeating, “The war posals, with painful testimony from vic- As Lozada told me this, he was sit- is over.” Most of the combatants had been living as fugitives in their own country, Carlos Antonio Lozada’s young fighters now search for their families on Facebook. and were now contemplating a return to

28 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 PHOTOGRAPH BY NADÈGE MAZARS towns and families they had not seen in cattle, pigs, and chickens from us, as they quently. When I asked if it was awkward years. At a nearby farm, Lozada had set did with thousands of other compatri- bumping into friends from old neigh- up a satellite Internet connection, and he ots.” In the early sixties, the government, borhoods, Lozada said that no one ever marvelled at its effect on his young backed by the U.S., sent in thousands of seemed surprised. “It’s what people do in fighters. “That’s all they talk about: get- troops to attack the area, where the res- cities,” he said. “They move all the time.” ting on Facebook to find their parents, idents were guarded by some forty armed The life he described sounded claus- and making WhatsApp calls,” he said. men. Marulanda and his followers fled, trophobically circumscribed, but Lozada That afternoon, the mother of one girl and, in hiding, they founded the Fuer- told me that his main regret was not who had run away to join the FARC ten zas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colom- finishing school. At one point, he took years earlier arrived at Yarí unannounced. bia—the FARC—to carry out a war against exams and obtained a high-school di- When she found her daughter, she broke the state. ploma, but because of what he called the down. “For ten minutes, no words came,” By then, Lozada’s parents had escaped “dynamic” of his guerrilla duties he was Lozada said. “She just sobbed.” to Bogotá, where his father worked as a never able to attend university. In his free But, after half a century of vicious pushcart peddler and his mother sold time, he listened to boleros and salsa and conflict, family reunions do not neces- arepas. Lozada was born there in 1961, read, returning often to Mario Vargas sarily portend an easy political reconcil- one of six children; his given name was Llosa’s “The War of the End of the iation. Lozada looked out from the hut Julián Gallo. His father was a member World,” a fictionalized account of a rural where we were sitting. Past a detachment of the Communist Party, and family con- revolt in Brazil, led by a charismatic figure of bodyguards, in the open kitchen of versations revolved around Marxist the- called the Counsellor. On days when he an adjacent farmhouse, guerrilla cooks ory, Cuba, and the Soviet Union. He wasn’t working, he liked to cook for a stoked a fire to prepare the evening meal. joined the Party’s youth wing when he small circle of friends. He brags about A dark-green expanse of jungle stretched was fifteen. Soon afterward, he attended his asado, Argentine-style barbecue, to the horizon. The scene was decep- an antigovernment demonstration, and which he learned from a “ladrón inter- tively peaceful. Concealed behind the was beaten by the police and jailed for a nacional”—an international thief—who tree line, the guerrillas had war-ready month. Like many of his peers, he be- helped his cell run a check-kiting scheme camps, with trenches to foil a ground in- came radicalized. “Armed struggle was that secured them millions of pesos. vasion and bunkers to protect against air the order of the day,” he said. His par- Lozada is vague about the specifics of raids. Los camaradas were readying them- ents warned him against joining the FARC: his work for the FARC, but he said that selves for peace, but they could also re- his mother objected on religious grounds, his primary responsibilities were “finan- turn to war if they had to, for it was war, and his father told him that a city boy cial and military.” Guerrilla armies have after all, that they knew best. wasn’t suited to guerrilla life. Against few viable sources of funding, unless they their wishes, Lozada dropped out of are supported by foreign governments, efore Lozada was born, his par- school and headed for the countryside and, he said, “We were always looking for B ents lived as farmers in an area of to join the guerrillas. He can still remem- ways to make money.” The FARC sustained central Colombia called Marquetalia—a ber the date: October 20, 1978. itself by taxing merchants and ranchers mountainous, inhospitable frontier that Lozada went for training to a FARC in areas of the countryside that it con- for the Lozada family was a haven. Like stronghold in a mountainous area of the trolled. More controversially, it took hos- other settlers, they had come in search Valle del Cauca, and was quickly sent tages and kidnapped people for ransom. of land and a respite from the country’s into combat. The first seven or eight In the late eighties, Lozada went to conflicts. For more than a decade, Co- months—hiking through the mountains, Ecuador with a group of guerrillas to lombia’s two major political parties, the sleeping on the ground, and eating what- kidnap a wealthy narco-trafficker linked Liberals and the Conservatives, had ever could be scrounged—were excruci- to the Cali cocaine cartel. At the narco’s fought a brutal civil war, which killed at ating. He suffered bouts of malaria and mansion, Lozada stood guard while the least two hundred thousand people and considered quitting, but he eventually ac- others broke in, grabbed the man, and became known simply as La Violencia. climatized. After three years, the FARC dragged him into a waiting car. As they In the late fifties, the two parties put an sent him back to Bogotá and put him in sped away, the narco’s bodyguards began end to the conflict by agreeing to alter- charge of the organization’s urban net- shooting; Lozada shot back, and then nate terms in power, in a coalition called works, which infiltrated universities and followed his comrades on a motorbike. the National Front. All those outside the unions to recruit new members, gathered The getaway car didn’t get far down the Front—especially those on the left— intelligence, raised funds, and, occasion- road before the driver lost control and were effectively shut out. ally, launched attacks. Lozada remained crashed into a passenger bus. As Lozada In Marquetalia, a charismatic peas- in the urban underground for nineteen raced toward the crash, he saw the narco ant named Manuel Marulanda organized years, calling himself Arnulfo, or Omar, emerge from the car and disappear into a group of Marxist-Leninist partisans, or Alberto, and telling people he met that the forest. Inside the car, he found the dedicated to fighting the Front. As fears he was a taxi-driver, a shopkeeper, or a driver dying of his injuries, and two com- of a Cuban-style revolution grew in the peddler. To avoid scrutiny, he found, it rades in the back seat bloodied and in capital, the government struck back, was best to live in apartment buildings, shock. Lozada tried to help them escape shooting and bombing. Marulanda re- where neighbors ignored one another. on foot, but they were surrounded by called, “The state expropriated farms, Even so, he changed apartments fre- uniformed men; behind the bus they had

THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 29 crashed into was another bus, full of came to believe that Delgado had been began landing decisive blows. During Ecuadoran soldiers. co-opted by Colombian military intelli- an Army attack in 2007, Lozada was In custody, Lozada protested that he gence, as part of a larger operation to shot in the back. Unable to walk, he had simply been a bystander. But when cause internal strife. When I asked Lozada crawled through the jungle as soldiers the police found his Colombian identity what had happened to Delgado, he said, combed the area for survivors. In agony, card, they grew suspicious. He found “He died in jail,” adding, “He was stran- he contemplated ending his life, until himself seated in an interrogation room, gled with a guitar string.” he was rescued by a guerrilla named hands cuffed behind his back, facing two As the conflict dragged on, successive Isabela. In Yarí, he lifted his T-shirt to men wearing black hoods over their faces. Colombian governments held peace talks, show me the ugly scar on his back. One of them produced two wooden bats. but the state did not always operate in In 2010, Juan Manuel Santos, Uribe’s “There was a big one and a small one,” good faith. In the mid-eighties, the FARC defense minister, became President and Lozada recalled. “The guy with the bats agreed to call a truce and to recast itself continued the crackdown. But Santos, said, ‘O.K., so which one do you want as a political party—only to see thousands unlike Uribe, hoped to be seen as a peace- me to use to get the truth out of you?’ I of its loyalists murdered by government maker. The following year, he sent offi- said, ‘Neither?’ The man said, ‘O.K.,’ death squads and paramilitary vigilantes. cials to meet with the FARC and offer to and left the room. He returned with a But the FARC did little to maintain moral negotiate. The guerrillas, losing influence really huge bat, and showed it to me. It superiority; at one point, it was kidnap- and membership, agreed. Around the had ‘Neither’ written on it.” ping as many as three people a day, in- same time, the Army located the FARC’s I asked Lozada what happened next. cluding landowners, military officers, tour- new leader, Alfonso Cano, a former an- “He started to beat me,” he said bluntly. ists, congressmen, even a Presidential thropology student who had taken charge Finally, Lozada acknowledged that he candidate. Some were held for years, in after the elderly Marulanda died. As San- was a guerrilla but claimed that he was appalling conditions. Eventually, the FARC tos told me in an interview, one of his from a different Colombian rebel group— moved into Colombia’s booming drug generals called and said, “Mr. President, one that had already entered into peace business, levying taxes on coca growers we have Alfonso Cano surrounded. negotiations with the government. With and cocaine traffickers. After a new round Should we proceed?” Santos, who is said the help of a canny lawyer, he served just of peace negotiations failed in 2002, the to be an astute and ruthless poker player, two years in an Ecuadoran prison, and fighting became more vicious; Lozada said that he had to make a quick deci- then returned to work in Bogotá, though moved from Bogotá to the jungle, and sion: “We had begun our talks with the with a major difference: his first child, a began leading combat operations. FARC, and I didn’t want to ruin them.” son, had been born while he was in prison. That year, a new President was elected, But, he reasoned, if the FARC command- on a promise to crush the FARC: Álvaro ers were talking it must be because they he Colombian attorney general has Uribe, the scion of a wealthy ranching were weakened by the strikes. Cano’s death T accused Lozada of terrorism. The family in Medellín. Uribe’s father had wouldn’t change that; it could even help. military claims that he is responsible for died in a botched kidnapping attempt, “I thought about it for a minute and a bike bomb in a police station; a car which he attributed to the FARC; in re- then told the general to proceed,” he said bomb in a military school; an explosion sponse, after he entered politics, he helped with a jaunty smile. “And it worked out.” in the Hotel Tequendama, in Bogotá; organize a series of armed self- defense and attacks against politicians. The Co- groups. Many grew into right-wing para- wind whipped across the Yarí lombian media have linked him to an militaries, allied with drug cartels and A plains, and the sky darkened. In the attack on the Presidential palace of Na- landowners. The paracos, as they were distance, lightning flashed. Lozada told riño, in which a rocket went astray and called, operated across the country, mas- me that the weather reminded him of the killed at least ten homeless people. sacring civilians suspected of guerrilla borrascas, tropical storms that terrorized (Lozada denies all the charges.) The ties, sometimes in close coördination guerrillas in the forest. “You look up and FARC, justifying its past use of violence, with the Army: one favored method of watch the trees swaying, falling, and won- has sometimes referred to a Communist instilling terror was to chainsaw people der which way you’re going to run,” he principle that calls for “a combination of to death in public. said. “You look for the biggest trees to get all forms of struggle.” In Colombia, the As President, Uribe negotiated with behind. Comrades have died in some rhetoric on both sides has often served the paracos, even as he escalated the war storms, and also from lightning strikes.” as cover for unrestrained brutality. against the FARC. One of his schemes, The guerrillas I spoke to didn’t seem In the mid-eighties, a FARC commander which offered rewards to soldiers who to question their way of life. Many were named Javier Delgado and another officer killed guerrillas, led to the murder of the children of peasants and had never formed a splinter faction and began ac- more than two thousand civilians—a been to a town; all they knew was the cusing their fellow- guerrillas of being campaign that became notorious as jungle, the Yarí plains, and the occasional spies. In one horrific episode, they chained False Positives. With the aid of a multi- farm hamlet. Lozada, gesturing toward a hundred and sixty-four fighters—in- billion-dollar U.S. program called Plan his security detail, said, “Many of these cluding close friends of Lozada’s—and Colombia—which included financial young fighters joined the FARC because methodically beat them to death. “They and intelligence assistance, a fleet of the paracos killed their parents.” even filmed some of it,” Lozada said with Blackhawk helicopters, and a contin- During my visit, Lozada was often disgust. Eventually, FARC commanders gent of American advisers—Uribe accompanied by a friend named Chepe,

30 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 a husky man in his early thirties, who mirrored Lozada’s style choices: shaved head, T-shirt, fatigue trousers, rubber boots. Chepe explained that he was the son of the FARC’s former military com- mander Jorge Briceño, a swashbuckling character known as Mono Jojoy. After Chepe was born, in a guerrilla camp, Jojoy sent him away for his safety, and he had been raised by surrogate parents in Bo- gotá. When he was ten, they swore him to secrecy and revealed his true parent- age, then took him to briefly meet Jojoy. Later, during one of the intermittent pe- riods of peace talks, they took him again, and this time Chepe, who was then six- teen, wanted to join Jojoy in the forest. His surrogate parents, weeping, begged him to return with them, but Chepe in- sisted. Adapting to guerrilla life wasn’t easy; he was a city kid, educated at an “It’s mostly mouse weight.” élite Catholic school. But, like Lozada, Chepe eventually settled in. He and his father acquired the habit of going to sleep •• very early and getting up at 2 A.M. to read the news and study together. In a camp near Yarí, young guerrillas, and in the evening danced to cumbia When Santos became President, he waiting to be reintegrated into Colom- bands. In a culminating moment of designated Jojoy as a primary target of bian society, lived in a way that their peers “FARCstock,” as reporters dubbed the his campaign against the FARC. He knew in Bogotá would have found unimag- conference, a chorus of white-clad guer- that Jojoy, a diabetic, suffered from swol- inable. They woke up at four-thirty every rillas gathered onstage to sing the “Ode len feet, and when intelligence services morning to muster and perform calis- to Joy” before a jubilant crowd. At the learned that a pair of custom boots was thenics, chanting FARC slogans, and fin- end of the week, the guerrillas voted being made for him they arranged through ishing with the Colombian national an- to ratify the accord. a double agent to have a U.S.-supplied them. Then they did chores: cooking, The deal, though, had to be approved microchip inserted into the . The boots bringing in supplies, chopping kindling by national vote—effectively, a referen- were delivered to Jojoy, who began wear- for the cook fire, or lugging sacks of dum on whether the FARC fighters ing them with evident relief. Soon after- sand to spread on pathways to dry out should be readmitted to Colombian so- ward, at two o’clock in the morning, a the jungle mud. Every morning, a mar- ciety. Álvaro Uribe, the former Presi- military plane bombed Jojoy’s compound, ried couple from Bogotá delivered polit- dent, who is now a congressman, led a obliterating him instantly but sparing ical lessons: Lenin and Che and highly campaign against the deal, describing Chepe, who had slept through their cus- ideological explanations of the World it as a “surrender” that would reward tomary meeting. Lozada, who was a few Trade Organization. In the afternoon, the guerrillas for their violence. In an hundred yards away during the bombing, the fighters played volleyball, and in the op-ed, he warned that if they were al- became a kind of father figure to him. evening they watched movies in an un- lowed to participate in politics “FARC Lozada had a second child, a daugh- derground earthen bunker. When I asked kingpins who ordered massacres, kid- ter, in Bogotá, but neither child showed what they wanted to do with their lives nappings, child-soldier recruitment and any interest in following him into the when peace came, the answer was, in- extortions will now run for mayors and FARC. He couldn’t fault them—they variably, “Whatever the Party asks of me.” governors of the regions they victim- were urban kids, raised by their moth- ized.” Although the FARC and the gov- ers. Still, their lives hadn’t been free of n September 26th, President San- ernment agreed that both sides had com- risk. Both had, at one time, been evac- O tos and the farc’s leader, who goes mitted war crimes, Uribe demanded uated from Colombia for their safety, by Timochenko, signed the peace treaty that former guerrillas be tried under after the intelligence services began in a ceremony in Cartagena, as thou- different conditions from government trailing them. In Havana, Lozada saw sands of Colombians looked on and soldiers. (Uribe might also have feared his children for the first time in twelve cheered. In Yarí, Lozada had organized being brought to justice himself, because years. He told me proudly that his a conference for guerrillas to vet the of his long-standing association with daughter would soon graduate from treaty—the FARC’s final summit as an paramilitary groups.) high school, and that his son had at- armed organization. For a week, hun- The country was tired of war, and tended medical school in Cuba. dreds of delegates discussed the terms, polling suggested that the proposition

THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 31 would pass easily. Instead, on Octo- helicopter to join the rest of the FARC’s decades of fighting for Marxist ideas, he ber 2nd, the Colombian public rejected secretariat, in a walled Catholic center is now trying to devise “economic proj- it, by a sliver-thin margin—fifty-three at the foot of the mountains that abut ects that, in coöperative form, can help thousand votes, out of thirteen million— eastern Bogotá. The guerrillas were sup- sustain the group.” Along with ecotour- in what became known as el Brexit posed to remain sequestered, but Lozada ism, he has been considering bus and colombiano. But Santos was encouraged ventured out to an upscale shopping mall trucking services, agriculture, ranching, by the approval of the international com- in the city, where he stopped by a cloth- and the arts. But many Colombians de- munity. On October 7th, the Nobel com- ing shop called Arturo Calle, the local spise the FARC, and it will be difficult to mittee announced that it would award equivalent of Brooks Brothers. Shad- persuade employers to hire ex-guerrillas— him the Peace Prize for his “resolute owed by bodyguards from the Interior especially when jobs are already scarce. efforts” to end the civil war. A couple of Ministry’s Special Protection Unit, he In other Latin American countries, sim- weeks later, Queen Elizabeth held a re- wandered among mannequins and racks ilar reconciliation programs have largely ception in his honor at Buckingham Pal- of clothes, picking out a gray blazer, a failed; ex-combatants who couldn’t find ace. At a subsequent gathering, attended mauve shirt, and a tie. On November 24th, regular employment returned to militias. by Beefeaters and liveried trumpeters, I when Santos and the secretariat signed For some of Colombia’s former guerril- asked Santos if he would be able to ne- the new peace accord, Lozada wore his las, drug trafficking might provide the gotiate a new deal before the Nobel cer- new jacket and tie. only available work. “It’s a problem,” emony, the following month. “It’s going Lozada said. “Unless they have a very to happen,” he said, and winked. n a Yarí camp, a senior FARC com- strong ideological understanding, some On November 12th, Santos and the I mander named Mauricio talked to will be vulnerable to the appeal of the FARC announced a “new final deal”— me enthusiastically about his fighters’ narco world.” Most people I talked with which Santos, who controlled a ma- career options. They could be park rang- anticipate that, based on previous demo- jority in Parliament, was able to push ers, he said, or guides for ecotourists: bilizations, about ten per cent of the through without a referendum. They “We know the jungle better than any- former rebels will resort to crime. offered a few concessions, including one.” For years, Mauricio’s fighters have In Colombia, though, a government tightened language for the sentencing operated in the vast national park of technical institute, with branches around of guerrilla leaders, but ignored demands Chiribiquete, an area that has been in- the country, has agreed to train former that the FARC be banned from political accessible to most Colombians because guerrillas as plumbers, electricians, or participation. As Timochenko said, “The of the war. On his laptop, he showed carpenters; in the demobilization camps, reason we agreed to lay down our arms me photos of guerrillas posed against they will learn animal husbandry and was on the basis that we could enter dazzling backdrops: rivers, jungle peaks, farming. The peace accord calls for a politics.” For its part, the FARC acknowl- ancient cave paintings. With the enthu- sweeping program that will set aside edged, after years of denials, that it pos- siasm of a boxing fan, he showed me a millions of acres of land for peasants, sessed a deep reservoir of funds—pre- video of a captured ocelot sparring with and provide assistance for agricultural sumably acquired through kidnapping, an anaconda. projects. extortion, and drug trafficking—and At the U.N. building in Bogotá, Most of the fighters have no formal promised to turn over the money to Lozada told me that the FARC secretar- education, other than the political train- compensate war victims. iat had appointed him to lead the for- ing provided by the FARC. Still, Lozada That week, Lozada flew by military mer militia’s new “productive sector.” After hopes that some of them can go on to white-collar careers. One morning, he went with his bodyguards to visit the Universidad Distrital, a state college with a reputation for left-wing activism. Years before, he had infiltrated the college in order to recruit cadres. Now he was ask- ing whether the school would allow his former guerrillas to complete their edu- cation there; if time permitted, and the peace held, he was thinking about going back to school himself. Chepe, Lozada’s young friend, told me that his schooling had been inter- rupted when he left Bogotá as a teen- ager, and he was eager to finish it. The approach of peace had made him curi- ous about his former classmates, and he had used the recently acquired Internet access to look some of them up. One “We don’t sell anything. This is the corporate office.” friend, whom he found through LinkedIn, had told him that he worked in foren- ing, had announced that it would re- Duzán, the host, wondered how sic medicine, and asked what Chepe did. main in the jungle, rather than join the the guerrillas imagined their new lives. Chepe replied that it was a long story. peace process. More pressing, as the Timochenko mused that it would be “What was I supposed to say?” he asked. FARC withdrew from territory, the para- nice to be in an apartment building in- “Guerrillero of the FARC?” Lozada said military narco-gangs were moving in, habited entirely by former guerrillas, that a Colombian Army general involved killing as they came. A pamphlet had to keep the family together. The farc in the peace process had invited him to circulated in San Vicente del Caguán, and the government have established a join LinkedIn. He had tried, but had a town near FARC territory, bearing a deadline of May 31st for final disarma- been stymied by the online membership stencilled machine gun and the insig- ment, and, in recent months, FARC form. “It asks you for ‘curriculum, pro- nia of the fearsome paramilitary group fighters have been moving from their fessional contacts and qualifications, and Autodefensas Unidas de Co- forest hideouts to demobili- references,’ ” Lozada exclaimed, erupt- lombia. The text read, “We zation camps, in a motley pro- ing in a fit of laughter. “Job description— have arrived . . . and have cession of buses, jeeps, and commander for the FARC! References— come to stay,” adding that the motorized canoes. Female Timochenko!” He had tried to skip the group’s purpose was to purge guerrillas have come carrying questions, but he kept receiving the same the town of FARC supporters. babies, and families have message, in English: “Turn Back.” He Three local peasant leaders brought jungle pets: monkeys, and Chepe laughed hysterically, and had been shot, and left-wing pigs, river otters, and coatis. when they regained their composure, activists accused the mayor, a Lozada’s camp, shared with Chepe said, “I think we’re a ways off follower of Uribe, of order- a few hundred of his fighters, from using apps like LinkedIn.” ing the murders. (The mayor is three hours outside Bogotá, “We’re still not sure how we’ll main- denied involvement.) According to in an area that was friendly toward the tain this big family once the armed strug- human-rights observers, more than peace process. From there, he travels gle ends,” Chepe said. “All we really seventy such activists were killed last frequently to the capital for “political know, though, is that this is the mo- year, inspiring fears of an extermina- work.” In August, the FARC will an- ment for peace. War hasn’t achieved the tion campaign. “A culture of violence nounce the creation of its political changes in Colombia that we fought has been formed,” Timochenko said. party; in the meantime Lozada has for. We are totally against the economic The society itself needed to change. been invited to expound his views at model of the country the way it is. With Part of that change, of course, is reck- academic forums and at the Bogotá peace, we still hope to be able to change oning with the FARC’s own violent acts. Book Fair. Buoyed, he said, “In a few the state.” Lozada will eventually have to appear years we’ll be openly involved and ac- Lozada was more circumspect. “We before a tribunal and confess to any tive in the political life of the country.” have a Marxist way of interpreting so- crimes he committed. When I asked if When I asked Lozada if he still con- ciety, but that doesn’t mean it’s our only he felt sorry for anything he had done sidered himself a guerrilla, he nodded reference,” he said. “As to what our new in the war, he gave me a long look and and said, “We will carry on with the guer- model will be, that’s something we have said, “The exercise of violence always rilla way of life and way of interpreting yet to invent.” gives one pause.” Like his colleagues, he things. But one begins to be aware that had come to regret the FARC’s ties to the there is a new way of doing things.” He n a blustery night, after the peace narcotics trade. “We know that it helped explained, “I’ve begun to realize that I O agreement became final, Lozada delegitimatize us, and we have con- can now go and visit my family, for in- and Timochenko were driven in armored cluded that without a doubt it did us stance, without fearing that something S.U.V.s to a television station in down- great harm.” Despite this, he said, his might happen to me at the hands of the town Bogotá, to appear on a talk show revolutionary ideals allowed him “to live state—and this is creating a new expec- called “Semana en Vivo.” As their body- with peace of mind.” tation of how life can be.” guards fanned out, the station’s staff His greatest regret was for lost com- When the show ended, station em- waited excitedly to greet them. It was rades. In 2012, the Army bombed a camp ployees rushed to pose for selfies with an unprecedented event in Colombia: where Lozada was training officers, and the guerrillas. Then Lozada and Timo- two guerrilla leaders, who had been at thirty-nine of his students were killed. chenko left to celebrate with a few war with the state for decades, sitting “That day was one of my worst in the friends in a walled parking lot, encir- down to discuss their plans. As people whole war,” Lozada said, with tears in cled by their bodyguards. Timochenko tuned in, the host, María Jimena Duzán, his eyes. “To lose so many comrades all smoked a cigarette, and he and Lozada looked at on her phone and ex- at once like that, you never get over it.” sipped Scotch from plastic cups. Lozada claimed, “We’re trending!” Seeing her He lamented that it had often been im- introduced a young woman standing guests’ confusion, she chuckled and said, possible for the guerrillas to bury their nearby—Milena, his compañera—and “That’s a good thing.” dead with dignity, or even to mark their pointed to her bulging stomach. She On the show, Lozada and Timo- graves. The FARC and the government would soon be giving birth to their chenko spoke of the threat of renewed have agreed to build three monuments child. Lozada beamed proudly, and the violence. A few months earlier, one far- to the war, made from the melted-down guerrillas raised their cups in a toast. flung rebel unit, linked to drug traffick- weapons of the guerrillas. “Al futuro,” they said. “To the future.” 

THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 33 THE POLITICAL SCENE A HOLLYWOOD STORY

Did the movies really make Steve Bannon?

BY CONNIE BRUCK

tephen k. Bannon, who main- Tim Watkins, the president of a ing out: first to convert, then turning tains a precarious hold over the small advertising company in Mary- in to destroy. That was the nature of S nativist wing of the Trump White land, was one of those people. A con- the beast.” House, honed his skills in the art of servative and a devout Catholic, Wat- Julia Jones, who worked as Bannon’s conservative persuasion in the most kins had an idea for a film, based on screenwriting partner for a decade, liberal precinct of the American imag- the book “Reagan’s War: The Epic Story helped write the script, but she told ination, Hollywood. He became him- of His Forty-Year Struggle and Final me that she was not involved in the self in the byways of the movie busi- Triumph Over Communism,” by the coda. She described how Bannon ad- ness. These days, Bannon is a dishevelled political consultant Peter Schweizer. mired the documentary films made by presence in the Oval Office, but he cut As Watkins began looking for some- the Nazi propagandist Leni Riefen- a different figure in Beverly Hills, where one to help make the movie, he was stahl, such as “Triumph of the Will”: he looked the part of a Hollywood ex- introduced to Bannon. He was im- “Her playbook was key for him. I think ecutive—fast-talking, smartly dressed, pressed by Bannon’s enthusiasm about he used her technique of fear, which aggressively fit, carrying himself with Ronald Reagan, and by his Holly- you can see in that movie.” what one former colleague described wood connections. Watkins showed Ultimately, Bannon was able to as an “alpha swagger.” He worked out him a trailer he had made, and Ban- secure only about a third of the film’s of an impressive office on Canon Drive. non “jumped in full-bore,” Watkins financing, and Watkins covered the He was passionate and knowledgeable told me. He understood that Bannon rest. He told me he would never use about film, and boasted about his con- would raise the money to produce it his own money again: “Because Steve nections, his production credits, and and would also distribute it. To Wat- was a Hollywood guy, I hoped there his background in mergers and acqui- kins, he seemed an ideal partner. “Steve was going to be a great distribution sitions at Goldman Sachs. He was a was very good at whipping people up program behind it, and there really Republican, but not dogmatic, and he into a passion,” he said. wasn’t.” tried not to let his political beliefs get Before 9/11, Watkins had planned The first major profile of Steve Ban- in the way of his work. to make a traditional documentary, but non appeared in Bloomberg Business- Bannon moved from New York to by the time he started working with week, in October, 2015, after he had Los Angeles in 1987, to help Goldman Bannon, he said, “something ticked in become the chairman of the conser- expand its presence in the entertain- us—that life is about good versus evil, vative Web site and ment business. Two years later, Bannon and history repeats itself.” The film, moved to Washington. He was work- and a senior colleague struck out on called “In the Face of Evil: Reagan’s ing out of a Capitol Hill town house, their own, opening a small investment War in Word and Deed,” opens with which he called the Breitbart Em- company in Beverly Hills. According archival footage from early-twenti- bassy, and the image he had cultivated to Bannon, the firm’s clients over the eth-century cataclysms—the First and years earlier in Hollywood was gone. next half-dozen or so years included Second World Wars, the Soviet labor In a photograph for the story, he sits Crédit Lyonnais, M-G-M, and Poly- camps and famine—and proceeds to slumped on a couch in the house. Gram. In 1998, the company was ac- Hollywood, where Reagan rose to Wearing an open-necked striped shirt quired by an offshoot of the French prominence. Throughout the film, a that bulges around his ample mid- bank Société Générale, and he remained female narrator invokes “the Beast,” an dle, and cargo shorts that ride up his there for a couple of years. He had brief authoritarian force that threatens “any- thighs, he looks at the camera with a stints at Jefferies, an investment bank, thing that elevated or empowered the baleful gaze. and at a talent-management company, individual.” The article, by Joshua Green, was the Firm, as a strategic adviser. By the The triumphal final scene shows the titled “This Man Is the Most Dan- early aughts, the former Hollywood col- destruction of the Berlin Wall, in 1989, gerous Political Operative in Amer- league recalled, “he was sitting on Canon but it is followed by an ominous coda ica,” and it set the tone for subsequent Drive, in his fabulous office, his book- that warns of the dangers of Islamic coverage. In it, Bannon said of Breit- shelves lined with military and history radicalism, with militants hoisting rifles, bart, which was publishing a slew of books, and he would take meetings all and people falling to their deaths from attacks on the mainstream media and day with people, some of whom came the Twin Towers. “War had not been on establishment politicians, “We’re to him for money for their movies.” wished away,” the narrator says. “Reach- linking to everybody else’s stuff, we’re

34 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 People were bewildered by Bannon’s account of his early career. “I never heard of him, prior to Trumpism,” Barry Diller said.

ILLUSTRATION BY BARRY BLITT THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 35 aggregating, we’ll pull stuff from the the Iranian hostage crisis. He became Talbott that he had some local small- Left. It’s a rolling phenomenon. Huge a Reagan Republican. company clients, and Talbott asked traffic. Everybody’s invested.” Green While Bannon was at the Penta- Bannon to join him. That year, Talbott described Bannon’s two decades in gon, he attended Georgetown Univer- Bannon & Co. launched, and opened California as “a succession of Gatsby- sity at night, and received a master’s an office in Beverly Hills. But the deal ish reinventions that made him rich,” degree in government. By then, the with the Japanese conglomerate came including a period of “Hollywood mo- Wall Street boom was under way, and undone, and within a year Talbott left. guldom.” When Donald Trump hired Bannon wanted to be part of it. He At Talbott’s request, Bannon removed Bannon to be the C.E.O. of his cam- entered Harvard Business School in Talbott’s name from the firm. paign, in August, 2016, it seemed a 1983. He was twenty-nine, older than fulfillment of Bannon’s many of his classmates, and unning Bannon & Co. was Ban- challenge to the liberal without the family and R non’s full-time job, but he was in- élite, in the movie business professional connections creasingly engaged by moviemaking. and in Washington. that some of them enjoyed. He became a voluble, intimidating People in Hollywood Bannon told Bloomberg presence at Thom Mount’s Burbank were bewildered by Ban- Businessweek that he at- office. One former colleague saw him non’s story of himself as a tended a Goldman Sachs yelling at Mount about some finan- major dealmaker. “I never recruiting event, where he cial matter, as though Mount were his heard of him, prior to stood on the edge of the subordinate. Sometimes he assumed Trumpism,” the media mogul Barry crowd and struck up a conversation the affect of a drill sergeant, barking Diller told me. “And no one I know about baseball. He later found out that orders at employees. He was passion- knew him in his so-called Hollywood he had been talking to John Weinberg, ate about military history. “He’d go period.” Another longtime entertain- Jr., whose father ran Goldman Sachs, into long diatribes about the Visigoth ment executive said, “The barriers in and he was offered a summer job. invasion and the Peloponnesian Wars,” Hollywood are simple. First, you have Bannon became an associate at another colleague said. “He talked in to have talent. And, second, you have Goldman in 1985, and two years later military terms all the time: ‘We’ll set to know how to get along with people. the firm sent him to the Los Angeles up a Trojan horse!’ ” It’s a small club.” office. Japanese companies were be- Others found Bannon entertaining Many who did have dealings with coming increasingly interested in Hol- and compelling. Someone who worked Bannon were unwilling to be inter- lywood, and Bannon focussed his efforts with him pointed out that he had loyal viewed. Others would not speak for on Japan. Thom Mount, a movie colleagues who tended to follow him attribution, saying that they feared executive who had a long career at from one endeavor to the next. Mindy what he might do with the instru- Universal Pictures, had just started a Affrime, who was the head of develop- ments of government—one spoke of production company. Bannon and an ment for Mount, recalled how her friend- a possible I.R.S. audit. He worked hard associate offered to raise financing for ship with Bannon started. They were at to join the Hollywood establishment, him, and during the next six months a meeting with other people when he and several people who knew him said they made at least a dozen trips to said something insulting to her, and she that they were startled by his conver- Tokyo, meeting with executives at insulted him back. That seemed to take sion to what one called “conservative NHK, Japan’s most powerful media him by surprise, and he laughed. Affrime political jihad.” Another said, “All the company. After Bannon helped raise told me that they remained friendly years I knew him, he just wanted to the money for Mount’s production of for many years, mostly because they make a buck.” “The Indian Runner,” written and di- shared a commitment to moviemaking. rected by Sean Penn, he demanded a “The art of it was what interested him,” annon was reared in an Irish producer credit. When some of the Affrime said. “He really wanted to learn B Catholic family in Richmond, Vir- NHK financing did not materialize, how to make movies.” ginia. Bannon’s father, Martin, spent Bannon offered to raise funds from Another colleague recalled that his career at A.T. & T., and his mother, other sources, in return for a small stake Bannon seemed out of place in Hol- Doris, was a homemaker. After attend- in the Mount Company. He negoti- lywood: “The business runs on talent ing Benedictine College Preparatory, a ated a deal for millions of dollars of relationships. He had this real will-to- private military high school, he went risk equity, spread over several pictures, power vibe that was so off-putting. He to Virginia Tech, graduating in 1976, from the Japanese conglomerate Nis- came on so strong, and in a way that and spent seven years in the Navy— sho Iwai, but that, too, fell apart. I couldn’t imagine he would be suc- four at sea and three as a low-level offi- In 1990, a senior Goldman colleague, cessful with creative people.” cial at the Pentagon, dealing with bud- John Talbott, made a deal with a Jap- Bannon left Mount in 1991, but still get and planning. He has told reporters anese conglomerate to create a private- wanted to make movies. He had long that his parents were Kennedy Demo- equity fund, with two hundred and fifty been drawn to Shakespeare’s play “Titus crats, and that he wasn’t political until million dollars in capital. Talbott de- Andronicus,” in which Titus, a Roman he entered the Navy, and witnessed cided to leave Goldman and set up general, sacrifices the eldest son of President Jimmy Carter’s handling of his own firm. Bannon had convinced Tamora, the Queen of the Goths, and

36 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 her younger sons rape and cut off the house executives told him, “If this is dication. After Turner Broadcasting hands and tongue of Titus’ daughter. such a great deal, why don’t you defer merged with Time Warner, in late 1995, In 1991, Bannon hired Jones as a screen- some of your cash fee and keep an Turner’s Castle Rock came under the writing partner, and their first project ownership stake” in that package? He Warner Bros. umbrella. Warner Bros. was an adaptation of “Titus,” which agreed. One of the shows was “Sein- started sending out all “Seinfeld” profit- featured galactic travel and an episode feld.” “We calculated what it would participation statements, including of “ectoplasmic sex” between a “lower get us if it made it to syndication,” Westinghouse’s, which goes to CBS. human” (a Moor in the original play) Bannon said. “We were wrong by a The Castle Rock and the Westing- and a space queen. Bannon could not factor of five.” Bloomberg Businessweek house records from the early months sell it. But in 1994 he reportedly op- said that Bannon continues to benefit of syndication are not readily available. tioned Julie Taymor’s Off Broadway from “a stream of ‘Seinfeld’ royalties.” It is possible that Bannon’s deal was adaptation of “Titus.” (Taymor denies Some of those who were responsi- capped and paid out at that time. But, this account.) Three years later, Tay- ble for “Seinfeld” became agitated by since then, neither CBS nor Castle mor, who by then had directed Dis- Bannon’s story. , the show’s Rock nor Warner Bros. has records of ney’s “The Lion King” on Broadway, head writer and executive producer, payments to Bannon, if those records wrote and directed the “Titus” film, told me, “I don’t think I ever heard of are as they were described to me. and Bannon was an executive producer. him until he surfaced with the Trump Bannon hoped to have an active campaign and I had no idea that he n early 1993, Bannon was hired by role in the creative process. A former was profiting from the work of indus- I Ed Bass, an heir to one of the big- colleague who knew Taymor said, trious Jews!” Rob Reiner, one of the gest oil fortunes in Texas. While Bass’s “Steve tried to be involved—I think founders of Castle Rock, has said of older brother managed the family’s he really cared about it. But Julie Bannon’s profits from the show, “It wealth, Ed moved to Santa Fe, where wouldn’t let him near it.” Taymor says makes me sick.” he spent time at Synergia Ranch, an that she did not even know he had any There were several companies in- intentional community devoted to eco- connection to the film until she saw volved in the deal: Turner Broadcast- logical sustainability. his name on the poster. The film, which ing Systems; Castle Rock; Sony, which One of Synergia’s founders was John came out in 1999, did poorly at the owned a stake of about forty-four per Allen, an ecologist and playwright. box office. Bannon told Jones that if cent in Castle Rock; and Westing- Allen and Bass became friends, and Taymor had used his ideas it would house, with a fifteen-per-cent stake. Bass eventually became the chief finan- have succeeded. In the end, Westinghouse received its cial backer of Biosphere 2, a closed cash compensation, plus a small per- ecological system that Allen planned ast November, when Bannon was centage of the TV package, and Ban- to build outside Oracle, Arizona, about L named Donald Trump’s chief non & Co. got a smaller one. In 1995, thirty miles north of Tucson. Bass com- White House strategist, many articles Westinghouse acquired CBS, and CBS mitted to spending a hundred and fifty highlighted an extraordinary fact about became the surviving company. million dollars to create the three- his Hollywood career: that he had ne- That fall, “Seinfeld” went into syn- acre compound, which included a rain gotiated a profit participation in “Sein- feld” in 1993, two years before the show went into syndication. Forbes reported that, if Bannon had a one-per-cent share in the profits, “he would have made about $32.6 million since 1998,” and went on to say that “Bannon’s steady ‘Seinfeld’ income” was supporting his career as a conservative propagandist. The “Seinfeld” story first became widely known after the Bloomberg Busi- nessweek profile. Bannon said that, in 1992, Westinghouse Electric hired Bannon & Co. to sell its small stake in Castle Rock Entertainment, a TV production company. It soon emerged that Ted Turner was interested in buy- ing all of Castle Rock, including its minority shareholders. Bannon advised Westinghouse to accept Turner’s offer, which included an interest in a pack- age of several Castle Rock shows. Bannon claimed that the Westing- “I’m sixty-six—I don’t want to see puppets in anything.” forest, a desert, an ocean, and a farm, with thousands of species of plants, insects, and animals. It also included FROM “THE NAMES OF 1,001 STRANGERS” people: a team of eight “biospherians” was sealed inside for two years, from 1 1991 to 1993, and a second team began a shorter stay the following March. Tom the stutterer’s brother By 1993, Bass had spent an addi- had the backhand: tional fifty million dollars on the proj- we were doubles partners ect, and he wanted to get its finances deep inside the quarry. under control. He assigned that task to Bannon, and to Bass’s Texas banker, Camel’s Hump was frozen Martin Bowen. Bannon went to New on the horizon or York investment banks, looking for snapped mid-undulation. venture capital. When he couldn’t raise Everyone died climbing it. the money, he came up with a market- ing plan, to sell biospheres to govern- La Tulip: the feared, the hated, ments around the world, and to build later embezzler of electricity: Biosphere 3, a Las Vegas casino and he smashed a fucking asteroid resort, but those efforts, too, were un- past my racquet to Quebec. successful. Meanwhile, Bannon said that Biosphere 2’s managers were re- Mike’s Civic bazooka’d Ratt sisting financial discipline. “The peo- to cross-bias La TulipÑ ple at the biosphere just treated huge party sled, hedonistic pod, our papers amounts of money like it was petty in the glove box, glow-lit, post-match … cash,” Rebecca Reider quotes Bannon as saying in her 2009 book, “Dream- and so we drift, apparently all the way, ing the Biosphere.” Ultimately, Bass to a background of bug zappers, agreed, and he and Bannon concluded thunder, and GNR. The Strezzles cough haze that the only solution was to seize Bio- and wheezed in the back. sphere 2 from Allen’s management, and to install Bannon as the acting C.E.O. Soon the way became time, Bannon planned the takeover as and we were still drifting, meticulously as a paramilitary opera- fresh from the worst slaughter, tion. On April 1, 1994, he and Bowen drifting west and west and west rode toward Biosphere 2, accompa- nied by armed U.S. marshals and a phalanx of support people. The mar- returned as soon as they learned of But the new Biosphere management shals went first, followed by invest- the seizure. Alling, known as Gaie, contacted the county attorney and de- ment bankers, accountants, public- was thirty-four, with a master’s degree manded felony prosecution, saying that relations people, and secretaries. Ban- in ecology from Yale, and one of the Alling and Van Thillo had done tens non had placed his younger brother Biosphere’s most passionate defend- of thousands of dollars’ worth of dam- Chris, a former Navy pilot, at the head ers. Van Thillo, thirty-three, was a age by breaking the safety valves. Alling of the first team. Chris Bannon told Belgian-born engineer. It was night and Van Thillo were charged with three Reider, “We had to secure the gate out when they arrived at the compound, felonies, including criminal property front, get out with the federal mar- and Alling instructed Van Thillo to damage. A grand-jury hearing was set shals, serve the security person at the break the system’s safety valves and for April 21st. gate, secure the gate, and then move open the doors. In a melodramatic Bannon tried to assert control over into the other critical areas that had flourish, Alling, in the local press, com- Biosphere 2, but some of the staff re- already been defined in order to in- pared the situation to that of the Chal- mained loyal to John Allen and the sure the safety and security of the Bio- lenger, which exploded in 1986, kill- original mission, and were deeply sus- sphere and its systems.” Several weeks ing seven astronauts. picious of their new boss. On April 17th, earlier, the second team of biospheri- On April 6th, police officers ar- four days before Bannon was to tes- ans had entered the sealed area. rested Alling and Van Thillo at a Tuc- tify before the grand jury, William As the Bannon brothers knew, John son hotel. The detective who was as- Dempster, Biosphere’s director of en- Allen and several other members of signed to investigate the break-in had gineering, went to talk to Bannon with the Biosphere 2 management were decided that if any charges were a tape recorder hidden in his under- travelling in Japan, but two of them, brought they would be misdemeanors, wear. Bannon, speaking to Dempster Abigail Alling and Mark Van Thillo, and the deputy county attorney agreed. about Allen, said, “Johnny thought

38 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 thousand dollars in damages; S.B.V. appealed, and the parties settled. to a party in a cattle pasture, William Walker, Alling and Van the cattle vaguely suspect. Thillo’s trial lawyer, told me that he Mike’s father, as you know, dealt spoke with the jury foreperson after in prize semen. All of this the verdict. Walker said, “What sunk Bannon was, he lied. I was able to in- turned out to be made of paper. troduce that he had said those things Imagine that: paper and notes to self, about Abigail, and then he denied it.” emotionless, like origami. The criminal case was dropped. (Ban- Even the backhand, even the match. non declined to comment.) Alling is the founder and now the president of 2 the Biosphere Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to stewardship of the earth’s Who changed change, die, eight ball, tarot, oracle? resources. Who put the flux in flux? It was my go-to Bannon’s team helped maintain Bio- when the slipstream slowed to a trickle, my hangover cure, sphere 2 as a center for scientific re- the reason reason gave the river wonder left behind. search. In November, 1995, Columbia University agreed to manage Biosphere 2, One day I’m looking around in my underwear for which the school thought could be a Maria Porizkova, the next I’m the leech-gatherer. site for ambitious climate-change ex- One day I’m carded trying to buy Coppertone, periments. Bannon, who remained the suddenly I’m mistaken for my own pallbearer. acting C.E.O. for a little more than two years, said, in an interview with God, who made change, made change change, C-SPAN, in January, 1995, that Bio- he made reason reason, bother bother, dust dust: sphere 2, which produced high levels then, lo, the mother bleeper goes and vanishes of carbon dioxide, was an ideal place before he makes decrease decrease, limit limit. to study the effects of greenhouse gases. Speaking about scientists who study Maria Porizkova and I are having a party. climate change, Bannon added, “Many Bill Bixby is tangoing with Jo Anne Worley. of them feel that the earth’s atmo- We’re all very small, and very hungry, and lonely, sphere in a hundred years is what Bio- since our friends are dead: we’re aphids, alone on a dianthus. sphere 2’s atmosphere is today.” Ban- non went on to run Breitbart, which ÑDan Chiasson routinely describes climate science as fraudulent; his brother Chris remains on the staff of Biosphere 2. they got a rough lesson on April 1st, ple at this place for running some- and they did. And you tell Johnny who thing.” He also said, “But she’s going hile Bannon was embroiled in delivered that lesson—I delivered it, to pay. She’s going to pay. When this W the Biosphere 2 litigation, a O.K.?” Referring to Alling, and to his is over, she’s finished.” complaint was filed against him by the upcoming testimony, he said, “On fuck- Later, at a pretrial interview, Ban- Santa Monica district attorney’s office. ing April 1st, I kicked his ass, and I’m non said he understood that he was Bannon, who had a daughter with his going to kick her ass on Thursday.” to conduct himself as if he were first wife, began seeing another woman Bannon was preoccupied by Alling’s under oath. He was asked if he had in 1989. According to police records remark about the Challenger, and her made some of those remarks. Bannon, and her divorce filing, they had vio- general intransigence, saying over and unaware that he had been recorded, lent fights during their early time to- over, “I am going to ram it down her claimed that he had not. “I’ve never gether and went to counselling. Five fucking throat.” He went on, “She referred to Ms. Alling as a bimbo,” years later, the woman, then forty-one, thinks she is a goddess, she thinks she he said. became pregnant with twins. Bannon is above us all. She thinks she has trans- As the criminal case proceeded, said that he would marry her, but only formed to something that we are not Alling and Van Thillo filed a civil suit if the fetuses were healthy. After an worthy of. Well, you know what? against Space Biospheres Ventures, Ed amniocentesis confirmed that they I don’t buy that. I think she is a self- Bass’s company, for breach of contract, were, he sent the woman a prenuptial centered, deluded young woman, and and S.B.V. countersued. The civil law- agreement, which they negotiated for she is about to get a reality check, and suits were consolidated, and went to three and a half months. They were I am going to deliver it to her.” He trial in May, 1996. The jury ruled married in April, 1995, three days be- added, “I am not about to have a twenty- mainly in Alling and Van Thillo’s favor, fore she gave birth to two girls. nine-year-old bimbo criticize the peo- awarding them more than six hundred On the morning of January 1, 1996,

THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 39 a Santa Monica police officer arrived [her] into the car, over the door. [She] arranged for his wife and their daugh- at the couple’s home, after being alerted said Mr. Bannon grabbed at her neck, ters to leave town, she said. (Bannon’s to a 911 call. The caller had hung up, also pulling her into the car. She said lawyer denies intimidating Bannon’s and when the operator called back the that she started to fight back, striking wife or arranging for her to leave town, phone was off the hook. In the officer’s at his face so he would let go of her. and Bannon declined to comment.) On crime report, he wrote that a woman After a short period of time, she was August 12th, the judge in the case, answered the door. She appeared to able to get away from him.” ruling that the “victim/witness” was “un- be very upset, and began to cry. It was She ran into the house, followed by able to be located,” ordered the case dis- several minutes before she was calm Bannon, telling him that she was call- missed. In January, 1997, Bannon’s wife enough to tell him what had happened. ing 911. “Mr. Bannon jumped over her filed for divorce. According to the officer’s report, and the twins to grab the phone from The divorce file covers more than the woman said that Bannon had slept her,” the report went on, and he threw a dozen years. During that time, the on the living-room couch the preced- the phone across the room. The woman two fought over Bannon’s repeated ing night. She got up early in the morn- later said, in a sworn divorce filing, failures to make court-ordered sup- ing to feed the twins, and Bannon was that he screamed, “Crazy fucking cunt!” port payments, and other issues in- upset because she was making too She complained to the officer about volving the twins. In April, 1997, he much noise. Later, as he got ready to her sore neck, and he wrote, “I saw red submitted an “income and expense leave, she asked him for the Ameri- marks on her left wrist and the right declaration,” indicating that his an- can Express card so she could go gro- side of her neck.” nual salary was roughly five hundred cery shopping. He told her to write a Bannon was charged with spousal thousand dollars, and that his total as- check. She followed Bannon as he went abuse, simple battery, and dissuading sets were around $1.1 million. Any to his car. The police report said, “She a witness, because he had made it im- profit participations from “Seinfeld” asked him why he was playing these possible for his wife to talk to the po- should have shown up at that time. games with the money, and he said it lice. The case was called for trial on Au- Either they were not substantial or was his money.” gust 12, 1996. Bannon’s wife later said Bannon failed to disclose them in a After she threatened to divorce him, that his lawyer told her that, if Bannon sworn statement. “[she] said he laughed at her, and said went to jail, “I would have no money Bannon rarely saw the twins, but, he would never move out. [She] said and no way to support the children.” according to the marital-settlement she spit at him, and [he] reached up Bannon, she said, told her that, if she agreement, he was responsible for their to her, from the driver’s seat of his car, went to court, “he and his attorney would private-school tuition—as long as he and grabbed her left wrist. He pulled make sure that I would be the one who approved of the school. When the girls her down, as if he was trying to pull was guilty.” Bannon and his attorney were ready to start kindergarten, Ban- non and his ex-wife visited a number of schools. During an interview at one of them, she wrote in a court filing, Bannon “asked the director why there were so many Chanukah books in the library.” After visiting another, “he asked me if it bothered me that the school used to be in a Temple.” Then, she went on, he “began a campaign of threatening every school to which I applied. He claimed that he would sue the school if they accepted our chil- dren. Needless to say, this had a dev- astating effect on the girls’ ability to get into a school.” The court file con- tains letters from administrators at two schools, who wrote that Bannon threatened them. At Odyssey, in Mal- ibu, Dr. Steven Mecham wrote that Bannon, after he visited, said there would be “no tuition from him. He further said that if we did enroll his children, he would sue me personally and the school.” The girls went to pub- lic elementary school. For middle school and high school, “Because when it actually works they just call it medicine.” the girls wanted to attend the Archer School, a girls’ school in Brentwood. Their mother, without informing Ban- non, had them apply, and they were ad- mitted for the sixth grade, in the fall of 2007. She then told Bannon that the girls had been admitted and urged him to visit the school. As they argued about Archer, Bannon’s ex-wife wrote, he told her that “the biggest problem he had with Archer is the number of Jews that attend. He said he doesn’t like Jews and that he doesn’t like the way they raise their kids to be whiney brats.” This account of Bannon’s comments about Jews and Archer has been widely reported, and Bannon’s supporters have dismissed them as the fabrications of an angry ex-wife. But the divorce file, which includes e-mails between Ban- non and his ex-wife, contains further evidence that he did complain about “Can I get a coffee and a relatable protagonist?” the number of Jewish students. On March 19, 2007, she told him that Ar- had accepted the girls. Twelve •• days later, she wrote to Bannon, “As for the % of Jewish girls at Archer I Bannon agreed that the girls could the board of Philips and was involved have no idea what it is nor do I un- go to Archer, and that he would pay in the transaction, told me that he derstand why that is such a concern their tuition. doesn’t remember Prince Alwaleed or for you. I certainly have not been rais- Bannon playing any part in the sale. ing the girls to be prejudice[d] against ast month, Kuhn did say that, a year or two ear- Jews or anyone else for that matter.” L reported that, during the nineties lier, Bannon & Co. had helped Poly- A spokesperson for Bannon said in Hollywood, Bannon became “very Gram when it was considering buy- that he is not an anti-Semite, and wealthy” from various deals and from ing M-G-M, but that acquisition never pointed out that the girls went to Ar- the sale of Bannon & Co. The Post happened. “So I don’t know where all cher, and Bannon paid their tuition. said that the sale of PolyGram by its this comes from,” he concluded. But that was only after his ex-wife parent company, Royal Philips Elec- Several months after the PolyGram went to the Los Angeles County Su- tronics, in 1998, was “one of Bannon’s deal, in September, 1998, SG Cowen, perior Court, later that year, laid out biggest deals.” Bannon told the Post the Société Générale subsidiary, ac- Bannon’s history of having sabotaged that he brought in Prince Alwaleed quired Bannon & Co. According to her efforts to find a school, and said bin Talal, of Saudi Arabia, as a possi- an official at SG Cowen, no meaning- that she hadn’t notified him about the ble bidder for PolyGram, and that al- ful consideration was exchanged for girls’ applications to Archer because though Seagram ultimately bought the Bannon & Co., but Bannon and his she feared that he would do so again. company, the prospect of another bid- partner, Scot Vorse, were given em- In Bannon’s court filing, he said that der drove up the price by twenty per ployment contracts. he did not want his children “attend- cent. Bannon said that he received “a Kim Fennebresque, the head of in- ing a secular school,” and that, “based big fee,” presumably from PolyGram. vestment banking at SG Cowen, who on my income, the expense of the pro- (The Prince declined to comment.) became the C.E.O. a year after the ac- posed school is excessive.” But a senior PolyGram executive quisition, recalled about Bannon, “What On the income statement that Ban- at the time said that Prince Alwaleed I saw was a smart guy, who was funny non submitted to the court, he wrote was not a bidder, and that he had never and likable and enjoyable, who had a that his employer was Bannon Stra- met Bannon. When I asked Michael quick laugh, who was ineffectual.” Fen- tegic Advisors, a consulting firm that Kuhn, who was the president of Poly- nebresque described the years that Ban- he set up in 2005. He left blank the Gram’s filmed-entertainment division, non and Vorse worked for SG Cowen, space for his salary, and reported whether PolyGram could have paid from 1998 to 2000, as “a high-octane $967,465 in stocks, bonds, and other Bannon a “big fee,” he said, “There’s time,” adding, “Anybody could make assets, and $41,401,067 in other prop- no way. We were just being sold, by chicken salad out of chicken shit in erty. The figure is inexplicable, and in- Philips—logically, we wouldn’t have that period.” Bannon “was one of those consistent with his other publicly avail- paid. We were the target.” guys who always had big stuff about to able filings. In late August of 2007, Pehr Gyllenhammar, who was on happen,” he said. “But, after a quarter

THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 41 or two or seven, you become highly critics were mostly dismissive. Lou Lu- olic filmmaker, conservative-film finan- skeptical. Ultimately, we parted ways.” menick, of the New York Post, noted cier, Washington networker and Hol- Bannon kept searching for a break- that it was “very much like Soviet pro- lywood deal-chaser,” who was “emble - through deal that would elevate him paganda.” But a small, fervent group of matic of a new wave in Hollywood, a into the Hollywood establishment. In conservatives in Hollywood embraced group that intends to clean those media the spring of 2002, he joined the Firm, it. That December, it was shown at pipes with pictures that promote god- a new talent-management company the Liberty Film Festival, a new con- liness, Pax Americana, and its own view headed by Jeff Kwatinetz. A Harvard servative event. At the festival, Bannon of family values.” Law School graduate, Kwatinetz had met Andrew Breitbart, at that time a The two men had a number of con- some success in the music thirty-five-year-old blogger versations in the spring of 2005, Ulmer business, and sometimes for the Drudge Report, who said, and Bannon told him several times said that he wanted to make was planning to start his that he hoped to destroy the Holly- the Firm the next AOL own Web site. wood establishment. In the Times Time Warner. At another screening, article, Ulmer said that Bannon had When Bannon arrived, Bannon met , told him, “We’re the peasants with the Kwatinetz was negotiating a longtime opponent of Bill pitchforks storming the lord’s manor.” to acquire Artists Manage- and Hillary Clinton. Bossie Ulmer recalled, “He was always mak- ment Group, the talent com- had first become known to ing these grand, hyperbolic analogies pany created by Michael the public as a Whitewater between good and evil, the culture of Ovitz. In the eighties and investigator for the House life versus the scourge of death that, early nineties, Ovitz was often de- Committee on Government Reform; in his view, Hollywood had become. scribed as the most powerful man in he resigned from his position after he Hollywood was the great Satan.” Hollywood, but A.M.G. had been produced misleading evidence about Ulmer met with Bannon at his Santa weakened by enormous overhead, and the Clintons’ real-estate investments Monica office, where Bannon had writ- a run of bad publicity was causing cli- in Arkansas. By 2004, Bossie was the ten the names of some recent movie ents to leave. president and chairman of Citizens releases on a whiteboard. Ulmer re- “They had essentially negotiated United, a conservative nonprofit. After ported that Bannon had said, “On Ash the number,” a Firm executive famil- seeing Michael Moore’s film “Fahren- Wednesday, ‘The Passion of the Christ’ iar with the A.M.G. acquisition told heit 9/11,” which came out during the is released theatrically, and on Sunday, me. “One day, Bannon goes to see Mi- Presidential campaign and fuelled at- ‘Lord of the Rings’—a great Christian chael, cuts the number dramatically, tacks on George W. Bush, Bossie de- allegory—wins 11 Academy Awards. and says, ‘This is it.’ ” In the end, this cided to get into filmmaking himself. So here you have Sodom and Gomor- executive continued, the deal got done Citizens United quickly produced the rah bowing to the great Christian God.” for a number closer to the original one. documentary “Celsius 41.11,” which Ulmer recalled, “I was watching him In late 2003, Bannon left the Firm. mounted a right-wing defense of the draw all these configurations and con- President and was released just weeks necting lines about the Beast and Satan, round this time, Bannon was before the election. and half of my brain was saying, ‘This A working on the Reagan documen- When Bossie and Bannon met, guy’s a comic stitch,’ and the other, tary. One of the more curious sequences Bossie was working with Kevin Knob- ‘He’s really off the deep end.’ ” in “In the Face of Evil” may shed some lock, the director of “Celsius 41.11,” on Bannon seemed to have absorbed light on Bannon’s transformation from “Border War,” a documentary about Bossie’s anger toward the Clintons. a Hollywood operative to a conserva- the perceived threat of illegal immigra- Ulmer was taken aback, he said, when tive activist. tion, and Bannon signed on as a dis- Bannon began talking about Hillary The film’s narrator praises the early tributor. Bannon and Bossie also started Clinton’s likely campaign for the Pres- studio bosses, “Jewish entrepreneurs,” planning a series of movies that Ban- idency in the next election. According who “differed in taste and style, yet non would work on for Citizens United. to Ulmer’s memory of the conversa- shared two common elements: ruth- Julia Jones, the screenwriter, sug- tion, Bannon told him, in graphic lessness and uncompromising patrio- gested to a friend, James Ulmer, an en- terms, that he and others were prepar- tism.” These men were not particularly tertainment journalist, that he do a story ing to destroy Hillary in 2008. (A kind to Reagan: “In the unforgiving about the new cadre. “I’d never heard source close to Bannon says that this calculus of the studio system, he was of Steve Bannon, and when I called my conversation never took place, and that weighed, measured, and found want- friends in L.A. none of them knew who Bannon never met Ulmer in person.) ing.” But a middling film career led to he was,” Ulmer told me recently. But something greater. Reagan became the Bannon cultivated Ulmer, who was annon tried to keep his per- most powerful figure in the world by struck by his persistence. “If anyone B sonal politics separate from his exploiting what he had learned from knows how to grab an opportunity, it’s efforts to make money. By 2004, he working in the movies. Bannon,” he said. Ulmer published an was the chairman of a film distribu- When “In the Face of Evil” was re- article in the Times, in June, 2005, that tor, American Vantage Media. He used leased, in October, 2004, mainstream described Bannon as a “Roman Cath- American Vantage to acquire another

42 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 distributor, Wellspring Media, which validation for Bannon, who regularly of Bannon’s Reagan movie, but they was well respected and reliably liberal, courted Goldman and boasted about were unapologetically crude and, in and became its chairman. According having worked there. But, according the case of “Hype,” arguably racist. to Ulmer’s recollection, Bannon told to Wired, I.G.E.’s profits started to “Hype” opened with footage of Obama him that his Wellspring colleagues decline in 2006, and the next year the dancing to Beyoncé on “The Ellen were his friends, even though they company sold some of its operation DeGeneres Show,” and showed him thought he was a reactionary and he at a deep discount. eating waffles. It twice mentioned thought they were “communists.” Obama’s relationship with the Rev- At Wellspring, former employees avid Bossie produced two doc- erend Jeremiah Wright, suggesting said that Bannon was an erratic man- D umentaries for the 2008 cam- not only that he agreed with Wright’s ager. He was overbearing in his de- paign season: “Hillary: The Movie” inflammatory remarks but also that mands, and then would disappear for and “Hype: The Obama Effect.” The he wasn’t really a Christian. weeks at a time. But they also found most damning review of the Hillary Bannon went back to James Ulmer, that he tended to judge people on tal- film came from the Federal Election telling him that he should write a ent, without regard to politics. He was Commission, which concluded that profile of Bossie. “David is very con- supportive of the films they wanted it was a piece of political propaganda, troversial and proud of it,” Bannon to work on, including “Going Upriver: and that Citizens United’s marketing wrote in an e-mail to Ulmer in Sep- The Long War of John Kerry,” a doc- efforts should be subject to campaign- tember, 2008. “He has established a umentary about Kerry’s journey from finance regulations. Citizens United conservative film making studio at his Vietnam soldier to peace activist, filed suit against the F.E.C., and the headquarters in dc and is preparing which countered conservative attacks Supreme Court ultimately heard the to roll out an entire slate starting with on his military record. case. In January, 2010, the Court is- the obama film.” A week later, he wrote The following year, Bannon orches- sued its landmark ruling against the again: “Do you think there is going trated a deal that had considerable F.E.C.: nonprofits could spend as they to be any interest in the story as other promise. Trevor Drinkwater, who was saw fit on campaigns, with no gov- people are starting to chase him but the C.E.O. of a film-distribution com- ernment restrictions. he obviously wants to see if you have pany, Genius Products, recalled that The Clinton and Obama docu- an interest.” And the following week, he and Bannon decided to merge Ge- mentaries had none of the bombast after Ulmer said that he had proposed nius and American Vantage; Bannon became chairman of Genius Products. Harvey and Bob Weinstein were start- ing their new production company. “Goldman Sachs was raising the money for the Weinstein Company, and Steve called one of his buddies at Goldman,” Drinkwater said. Bannon and Drink- water offered the Weinsteins a low- priced distribution deal. Drinkwater said that he and Bannon hoped that Genius might eventually be folded into the Weinstein Company. It did not work out that way. Genius lost money year after year, and was forced into bankruptcy in 2011. The bank- ruptcy trustee later sued T.W.C., which countersued; the two companies are still involved in litigation. Bannon’s other large deal in 2005 involved a company called Internet Gaming Entertainment, founded by the former child actor Brock Pierce, which sold virtual currency to players of the video game World of Warcraft. Pierce and Bannon pitched the com- pany to Goldman Sachs, and in Feb- ruary, 2006, Goldman, along with a consortium of private funds, report- edly agreed to invest about sixty “Dad, when someone your age grows a beard million dollars in I.G.E. It was a it’s cultural appropriation.” he could be in a sports bar in West Virginia, and he would be accepted.” The friend continued, “He never fit in in the world of investment bank- ing—he was this gauche Irish kid. Never fit in in the Hollywood world— his politics were much too conserva- tive. Never fit in in the mainstream Republican world—he wasn’t uptight like them. But then he got embraced by the Tea Party world. He really started playing that role, and he came into his own. He loved being on TV.”

n 2011, Bannon released a docu- I mentary about , “The Undefeated.” Although Obama had beaten John McCain and Palin in 2008, Bannon saw her as an avatar of populist conservatism. Friends fought with him about Palin. One recalled, “His excitement about her was com- pletely cynical. He thought she was a lightweight, but he was convinced she was going to be a star.” Bannon hoped that “The Unde- ¥¥ feated” could be a mainstream success, and kick off a Palin campaign for the the story to editors at the Times, Ban- by the Washington Post, Citizens 2012 Republican Presidential nomina- non wrote, “Dude . . . any progress United spent $1.9 million on film pro- tion. Palin, however, does not appear to on the article????” When Ulmer fi- duction that year; Citizens United have been involved in its production. nally said that the editors weren’t in- Productions spent $1.7 million on pro- Bannon purchased the audiobook rights terested, Bannon replied, at 3 A.M., duction and distribution. to her memoir, “Going Rogue,” and “Come on baby . . . this is a big story.” Bannon became a fixture at Tea used it as voice-over, but the documen- Party rallies and conventions across tary does not feature an interview with annon sensed that the political the country, where he gave rousing its subject. Bannon managed to track B mood of the country was chang- speeches. At a Tax Day Tea Party in down the Palin family’s lawyer, in Alaska, ing. As the financial crisis deepened, April, 2010, held on the streets of but apparently did not speak to any Obama made his insurgent run for midtown Manhattan, Bannon told a members of Palin’s staff or her family. President. Once he took office, the raucous crowd that America is “ad- The real star of the movie was An- Tea Party flourished in opposition to dicted to a drug,” debt, that is “pro- drew Breitbart, whose Web site had him and to the bank bailouts, and, in vided by the pushers on Wall Street just helped to discredit and destroy 2010, it helped Republicans recapture and the mules on Capitol Hill. Amer- the liberal activist network ACORN. the House. The Tea Party’s success ica needs an intervention, and the Tea Breit bart appeared throughout “The also sparked Bannon’s productivity. Party is going to give it to them.” Undefeated,” pale, heavyset, curly- That year, he released three docu- Bannon also started appearing reg- haired, speaking angrily about the mentaries: “Generation Zero,” which ularly on , where Sean Han- character of the Republican establish- laid the blame for the financial crisis nity produced a special about “Gener- ment. Over footage of a young man on the profligacy of liberal baby boom- ation Zero.” During this time, Bannon wearing a fitted suit in a corporate ers; “Fire from the Heartland,” which went through “a visible transforma- office, Breit bart says, “When you go showcased the women of the Tea Party, tion,” a friend said. “In his days in busi- to Washington, D.C., and you meet above all ; and ness, he dressed like an investment with the conservative movement, it’s “Battle for America,” which rallied banker from Connecticut—shirt and as if they’ve read the exact right books, conservative voters. Citizens United jacket, tie or not, boring men’s shoes, taken the right tests, met the right Productions, a company created by a short, conventional men’s haircut. But people, are wearing the right outfits, Citizens United, produced all three he couldn’t show up at the Tea Party wearing the right tie—and you almost Bannon documentaries in 2010, along dressed like that. He started dressing feel like an outsider, even though you’re with four by Kevin Knoblock. Ac- more casually. There was this other in the actual conservative movement.” cording to financial filings obtained side of him—he was from the South, Breitbart denounced mainstream

44 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 Republicans’ dismissive treatment of drew Breitbart, it came far sooner Bossie’s Citizens United, and in 2013, Palin. “She’s also an existential threat than he had expected. By March, 2011, as Jane Mayer has reported in these to these eunuchs who have run as men, Breitbart had been speaking at Tea pages, they became the principal in- but aren’t men,” he said. “They look Party events for more than a year and vestors in Cambridge Analytica, a at Sarah Palin and they say, ‘You know he was out promoting a memoir. At data-analytics firm, for which Ban- what? We’re going to destroy her.’ these events, he had perfected a funny, non served as vice-president and sec- That’s how I feel when I go into Wash- occasionally vulgar way of speaking retary of the board. That year, Ban- ington: I see eunuchs.” to conservative crowds, describing non reported receiving a seven- When Bannon was focussed on himself as a Los Angeles rollerblader hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar Hollywood, he had emphasized his who was out to take back the culture salary from Breitbart News, and a Goldman Sachs connection. Now he from liberals. At a conservative do- hundred-thousand-dollar salary from stressed his upbringing, which he de- nors’ conference in Palm Beach, Flor- the Government Accountability In- scribed as blue-collar. In October, 2010, ida, Robert Mercer, the hedge-fund stitute, according to records reviewed he appeared on “Political Vindication,” billionaire, and his daughter Rebekah by the Washington Post. a right-wing radio show in Los An- saw Breitbart speak. Charmed by his The Mercers helped place Ban- geles. One of the hosts said that Ban- speech, they started talking to him non at the center of a conservative non had been “evil” while he worked about the future of Breit bart News. network that intended to overthrow at Goldman Sachs. He replied equa- Soon, Breitbart introduced the Mer- the political establishment. He con- bly, saying, “It was a private partner- cers to Bannon. tinued making documentaries—in- ship then, and a firm of the highest Bannon had long encouraged cluding “Occupy Unmasked,” which ethical standards,” but it had changed Breitbart to expand his Web site, described the Occupy movement when it went public. He did not men- which at the time was largely aggre- as the product of a broad liberal tion that since it went public, in 1999, gating news from the wire services. conspiracy—and used Breitbart to he had made every effort to do busi- That spring, Bannon drafted a busi- promote them. At the Government ness with Goldman. Now, he said, “I’m ness plan that called for the Mercers Accountability Institute, Schwei zer fifty-six years old, and I’m a filmmaker to invest ten million dollars in Breit- wrote “Clinton Cash: The Untold full time.” He described David Bossie bart News. In return, they would re- Story of How and Why Foreign as his partner. “What I’ve tried to do ceive a large stake in the company. Governments and Businesses Helped is weaponize film. I want these films Bannon joined its board. Make Bill and Hillary Rich.” The to be incredibly provocative. I want to In March, 2012, Breitbart, then book, which was published by Harper- present our point of view. I’m not in- forty-three, suffered a fatal heart at- Collins in May, 2015, played a role terested in saying ‘on the one hand tack. A former employee told me in raising doubts about the Clinton and the other.’ I’m conservative. I be- about the aftermath at Breitbart News. Foundation. Bannon made an hour- lieve in the . I Larry Solov, Breitbart’s co-founder, long “Clinton Cash” documentary, believe in the populist rebellion.” had helped start the company “not which was produced by Glittering He added, “I make films of the high- because Larry is politically Steel, a film-production est artistic quality.” driven,” the former employee company that he founded Bannon’s warnings about Islam said, but because Solov and with the Mercers. had become even more dire since the Breitbart “were best friends After decades of pursu- making of “In the Face of Evil.” On since they were kids.” He ing opportunities that dis- the radio show, he said, “The left is went on, “Andrew was the appointed, Bannon’s appro- starting to drumbeat an idea that we alpha, Larry was the beta. priation of Breitbart News, should have the rapprochement with So, when Andrew died, and his securing the Mer- radical Islam. Well, that’s unaccept- Larry didn’t know what to cers as patrons, changed able. Sharia law and the freedoms of do. Bannon came in and everything. When Trump the U.S. are mutually exclusive terms.” said, ‘I’ll save the day!’ ” Solov announced his candidacy, Americans were “in a hundred-year agreed to name Bannon the chair- at Trump Tower, in 2015, Bannon war,” he said repeatedly. As the in- man of Breitbart News. saw something that others missed. terview ended, Bannon told his hosts, Meanwhile, the Mercers funded Perhaps it was their temperamen- “You guys are the backbone of this a slate of conservative projects that tal similarities, and their faith in their revolution. So please don’t give up paid Bannon as a consultant. In 2012, own business instincts despite re- the fight!” Bannon and Peter Schweizer, the peated failure. Trump, too, was a brash author of the Reagan biography, huckster who despised the élites that annon was confident that the set up the Government Account- had always spurned him. Bannon B populist revolution would even- ability Institute, a conservative non- sensed that he had finally found the tually vanquish the Republican estab- profit, to which the Mercers donated figure who could express that anger, lishment, “school district by school two million dollars during the next leading the populist rebellion of mil- district, city council by city council,” two years. In the same period, they lions of Americans who felt they had but, with an assist from his friend An- gave more than $3.5 million to David been left behind. 

THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 45 PROFILES THE SEEKER

Rod Dreher thinks we’ve lost our religion. Do we want it back?

BY JOSHUA ROTHMAN

od Dreher was forty-four when their approval with painful intensity. Elegy,” was largely responsible for bring- his little sister died. At the time, On Mardi Gras, 2010, Ruthie was ing the book to the attention of both R he was living in Philadelphia diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer. She liberal and conservative readers. He gets with his wife and children. His sister, was forty years old and had three daugh- around a million page views a month. Ruthie, lived in their Louisiana home ters. Dreher began visiting St. Fran- A bad Dreher post can be mean- town, outside St. Francisville (pop. 1,712). cisville as often as he could, and dis- spirited and overwrought, but when he’s Dreher’s family had been there for gen- covered that she was a pillar of the at his best his posts are unique: deeply erations, but he had never fit in. As a community that he had left behind. confessional, achingly sincere, intellec- teen-ager, when his father and sister She gave Christmas gifts to the poor- tually searching. The day after Ruthie went hunting he stayed in his room and est neighbors and mentored the most died, in September, 2011, Dreher wrote listened to the Talking Heads; he read difficult kids in school; she was a joy- a twenty-seven-hundred-word entry “A Moveable Feast” and dreamed of ful presence at bonfires, creek parties, describing her funeral. He recalled how, Paris. He left as soon as he could, be- and crawfish boils. Though exhausted the night before the service, half of coming a television critic for the Wash- by chemotherapy, she drew up a list of St. Francisville had waited in the rain to ington Times and then a film critic for friends in need and prayed for them pay their respects. Her friends sprinkled the New York Post. He was living every night. She made a new rule for creek sand over her body, pulled up beach in Cobble Hill on 9/11, and watched her family: “We will not be angry at chairs, and sang to her. The next morn- the South Tower fall. He walked with God.” When friends threw her a benefit ing, because Ruthie often went barefoot, his wife in Central Park. He wrote a concert, a thousand people came. To her daughters stood barefoot in their book, “Crunchy Cons,” about how con- Dreher, a devout Christian, she seemed pew. When the funeral party arrived at servatives like him—“Birkenstocked beatific in her suffering. He wondered, the cemetery, Dreher saw that the pall- Burkeans” and “hip homeschooling Why does she like everybody but me? bearers, too, had removed their shoes. mamas”—might change America. All through Ruthie’s illness, Dreher The six burly men “carried Ruthie to Ruthie never left. She was a middle- wrote about her and the rest of his fam- her grave across the damp cemetery school teacher, and her husband was a ily on his blog, which is hosted on the grounds in their bare feet,” Dreher wrote. firefighter. She could give a damn about Web site of The American Conservative, The love he had seen was “of such in- Edmund Burke and the New York Post. where he is a senior editor. For a decade, tense beauty that it was hard to look She was not a crunchy con, and she daily and at length, Dreher has written upon it and hold yourself together.” found her brother annoying. about his obsessions—orthodox Chris- Ruthie’s funeral made him wonder In truth, annoying wasn’t the half tianity, religious freedom, the “L.G.B.T. about his own life, in Philadelphia. He of it—there was a rift between Dreher agenda,” the hypocrisy of privileged lib- and his wife, Julie, had friends there, and and his family. His father, a health in- erals, the nihilism of secular capitalism, a rich cultural life, but it was impossi- spector, had never forgiven him for the appeal of monasticism, the spiritual ble to replicate the deep roots his fam- moving away; his nieces found his ur- impoverishment of modernity, brisket— ily had in St. Francisville, which seemed banity condescending. During one New while sharing candid, emotional stories an illuminated place. The people there Year’s visit, Dreher made bouillabaisse about his life. Dreher writes with grapho- had an expansive, natural, spontaneous for his parents and his sister; they maniacal fervor and ardent changeabil- relationship to God that made his own watched him cook the stew and let him ity. He is as likely to admire Ta-Nehisi faith feel intellectual and disembodied serve it, then declined to eat any: they Coates’s dispatches from Paris as to in- by comparison. This, he thought, was a preferred meals made by a “country veigh against “safe spaces” on college function of how they lived: to really know cook.” Later, Dreher learned that Ruthie campuses, and he delights in skewering God, one had to feel as much love as and her husband were struggling finan- the left and the right simultaneously—a possible, and to really feel love one had cially and resented the fact that he made recent post was called “How Are Pope to live among loved ones. The follow- twice their combined salaries for re- Francis & Donald Trump Alike?” Be- ing month, Dreher moved with his wife viewing movies. His father considered cause Dreher is at once spiritually and and kids to St. Francisville. His plan was him a “user”—someone who succeeded intellectually restless, his blog has be- to fall back in love with his family and by flouting the rules. Dreher loved come a destination for the ideologically with God at the same time. his father and sister for their rooted- bi-curious. Last year, his interview with From the porch of a rented house, ness and their vibrancy. He longed for J. D. Vance, the author of “Hillbilly he began to codify his intuitions. He

46 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 In “The Benedict Option,” Dreher says that Christians have lost the culture wars, and calls for a “strategic retreat.”

PHOTOGRAPH BY MAUDE SCHUYLER CLAY THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 47 had long been fascinated by Benedict of and crab cakes—I learned what hap- her’s father and sister left. He remained Nursia, the sixth-century monk who, pened when he moved back to St. Fran- on the bed, mystified by what had hap- convinced that it was impossible to live cisville. “The thing that I dreamed of pened. He sometimes wonders if his sis- virtuously in a fallen Roman Empire, and hoped for didn’t work out,” he said. ter’s later wariness toward him flowed founded a monastery where the flame “They just wouldn’t accept me—not my not from a divergence of values but from of Christianity might be tended during sister’s kids, and not my dad and mom. some long-forgotten habit of childhood the Dark Ages. This March, Dreher They just could not accept that I was so cruelty for which he was never punished. published “The Benedict Option: A different from them. I worshipped my When Dreher was fourteen, he went Strategy for Christians in a Post-Chris- dad—he was the strongest and wisest hunting with Ray and Ruthie, and, with tian Nation,” which David Brooks, in man I knew—but he was a country man, a shotgun, he killed two baby squirrels. the Times, has called “the most discussed a Southern country man, and I just wasn’t. Filled with remorse, he sat on the ground and most important religious book of All that mattered was that I wasn’t like and cried. “You sissy,” his father growled. the decade.” It asks why there aren’t more them. It just broke me.” He fell into a Year by year, the distance between fa- places like St. Francisville—places where depression and was diagnosed with ther and son grew. In college, at L.S.U., faith, family, and community form an chronic mono, then went into therapy Dreher was a leftist who invited Abbie integrated whole. and read Dante. When Dreher speaks, Hoffman to campus; he tried to debate Dreher’s answer is that nearly every- his emotions flow across his face with politics with his father, who once re- thing about the modern world conspires complete transparency, changing phrase sponded, in genuine bewilderment, “Why to eliminate them. He cites the Marx- by phrase. (His glasses, I realized, pro- would I lie to you?” It was as though his ist sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, who vide him with some emotional privacy.) dad couldn’t comprehend the concept coined the term “liquid modernity” to As he told his story, he looked freshly of difference. Dreher describes his fa- describe a way of life in which “change wounded, as if it had all happened that ther and his sister as “Bayou Confu- is so rapid that no social institutions morning. cians.” He explains, “They had this idea have time to solidify.” The most suc- Dreher had planned to travel the next that, if you did what you were supposed cessful people nowadays are flexible and day to Washington, D.C., where he was to do, you would succeed. I didn’t do rootless; they can live anywhere and be- scheduled to give a talk at the National those things, but I didn’t fail, and that lieve anything. Dreher thinks that liq- Press Club, but a blizzard struck the East drove them crazy.” (Dreher moved right uid modernity is a more or less unstop- Coast. Because trains were cancelled, his after college—he has worked as a blog- pable force—in part because capitalism publisher hired a driver to take him there ger for National Review but now says and technology are unstoppable. He that evening, after dinner, through the that he is more “traditionalist” than con- urges Christians, therefore, to remove storm. Dreher sat in the back seat, his servative: “I think there’s an individual- themselves from the currents of moder- hands folded in his lap, regarding with ism at the center of both parties—the nity. They should turn inward, toward a serenity the spun-out cars along the high- economic individualism of the Repub- kind of modern monasticism. way. “I’ve been thinking a lot lately about licans and the secular, social individual- my own longing for order,” he said. “I ism of the Democrats—that I find re- s a longtime reader of Dreher’s think it has to do with my dad. He was ally incongruous with what I believe to A blog—an experience alternately en- such a force. You thought the sun was be true because of my religion.”) thralling and exasperating—I’d always in the sky in the morning because Daddy In South Louisiana, religion was ev- wondered what he’d be like in person. I had hung it there, while he was making erywhere, but, as a kid, Dreher was in- imagined him as argumentative and in- our honey buns and getting us ready for different to it. Then, when he was sev- tense: a twenty-first-century version of the school-bus ride.” enteen, his mother, Dorothy, won a trip a nineteenth-century preacher. In most Ray O. Dreher grew up so poor that to Europe in a raffle and sent Rod in of the photographs I could find online, his family hunted squirrels for food. He her place. He visited Chartres and felt he wears thick, round glasses; as a result, liked to build, repair, hunt, and fish, and judged by the beauty of the cathedral. I nearly didn’t recognize him when we his forearms were freckled from the sun. He began to take religion seriously. met, earlier this spring, at a Manhattan He raised Rod and Ruthie with a firm When he was eighteen, he went to see steak house. Without them, Dreher, now sense of right and wrong. When he saw Pope John Paul II at the Superdome, in fifty, has an open, vulnerable, and strik- or read about an alcoholic, a philanderer, New Orleans. The Pope appeared, and ingly handsome face. His graying beard a shoplifter, he said, as if stating a fact, a thought flashed in Dreher’s mind: “I and fashionably upswept haircut sug- “That’s not how we do things.” wish he were my dad.” In his twenties, gest a Confederate soldier in a histori- Once, when Dreher was seven, he Dreher wanted nothing more than to cal drama. He wore black Chelsea boots did something mean to his sister—he fall in love—he had a poster for the and an oversized black leather jacket, doesn’t remember what—and his father French film “Betty Blue” on his bed- and, around his left wrist, a knotted told him it was time for a spanking. Dre- room wall—but his romances felt in- prayer rope. “Nice to meet you, brother,” her lay face down on the bed while his creasingly shallow, even sad, compared he said. He speaks slowly and quietly, dad removed his belt. Then Ruthie, who with what he’d seen in France. At twenty- with a soft Louisiana drawl. was five, ran into the room and threw six, he converted to Catholicism. Fed up Over dinner—Dreher, who was ob- herself over him; she cried, “Whip me! with what he perceived as his own cad- serving Lent, confined himself to oysters Daddy, whip me!” After a moment, Dre- dishness—he had dated one girlfriend

48 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 longer than he should have—he decided to embrace chastity until marriage. Three years later, he proposed to Julie in a church, kneeling before an icon. Dreher left Catholicism in 2006; after covering the Catholic sex-abuse scandal for the Post and The American Conser- vative, he found it impossible to go to church without feeling angry. He and his wife converted to Eastern Ortho- doxy, and, with a few other families, opened their own Orthodox mission church, near St. Francisville, sending away for a priest. It was Dreher’s Ortho- dox priest, Father Matthew, who laid down the law. “He said, ‘You have no choice as a Christian: you’ve got to love your dad even if he doesn’t love you back in the way that you want him to,’ ” Dre- her recalled. “ ‘You cannot stand on jus- tice: love matters more than justice, be- cause the higher justice is love.’ ” When Dreher struggled to master his feelings, Father Matthew told him to perform a demanding Orthodox ritual called the Optina Rule. He recited the Jesus Prayer—“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner”—hundreds of times a day. “No, the other kitten.” Two life-changing events occurred after Dreher began the regimen of prayer. •• He was alone at home one evening, lying in bed, when he sensed a presence in the room. “I felt a hand reach inside my heart her and his family moved to Baton Rouge. inalists. They doubt that entities like God, and put a stone there,” he said. “And I Looking back on his time in St. Fran- beauty, and evil are real in the same sense could see, in some interior way, that the cisville, Dreher thinks that, if he hadn’t that the physical world is real. Even if stone said, ‘God loves me.’ I’d doubted moved there and then forced himself to they believe in God, they imagine a bound- all my life that God really loved me.” A follow the rules—prayer, proximity, ary between the transcendent plane, few months later, Dreher stopped by his love—he would have stayed an angry where God lives, and our material one. dad’s house to organize his medications. child forever. This boundary makes God abstract—a Ray was sitting on the porch, reading designer, a describer, a storyteller—rather the newspaper and drinking coffee. When he Benedict Option” traces the than a concrete presence in our every- Dreher leaned down to kiss him on “T decline of faith in the West all the day life. By contrast, the early Christians the cheek, his father grabbed him by way back to a fourteenth-century de- were realists. They lived “sacramentally,” the arm. Tears were in his eyes. “He was bate about the nature of God. God tells as though the world itself were charged stammering,” Dreher recalled. “He said, us how to be good—but are the things with God’s presence. Last year, in a blog ‘I—I—I spent a long time talking to the he deems good actually good in them- post called “Re-Sacramentalizing My Lord last night about you, and the trans- selves, or good just because God says Life,” Dreher wrote, “We won’t start to gressions I did against you. And I told they are? According to one group, the recover spiritually and morally until we him I was sorry. And I think he heard “realists,” God is constrained by reality: begin to recover this ancient Christian me.’ ” Recounting the story in the back the goodness toward which he points vision to some significant degree— seat of the car en route to D.C., Dreher really exists in the world. According to though how we Christians in postmo- still seemed astonished that this had the second group, the “nominalists,” God dernity do so out of our own traditions happened. “I kissed him, and said, ‘I is totally free: simply by saying that some- is a very difficult question.” love you.’ ” thing is good, he makes it so. “I liken liquid modernity to the Great Dreher’s father died in 2015. The next The nominalists thought they were Flood of the Bible,” Dreher said, at the summer, the mission lost its priest and doing God a favor, by recognizing his National Press Club, speaking to a stand- one of the founding families moved away. power. In fact, Dreher writes, they under- ing-room-only crowd of priests and jour- To be near an Orthodox church, Dre- mined him. Today, most people are nom- nalists. The election of Donald Trump,

THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 49 he said, proved that the country was in the midst of a profound moral and spir- itual crisis; the fact that so many Chris- SATURDAY NIGHT AS AN ADULT tians voted for him suggested a weak- ness in their faith. American Christianity We really want them to like us. We want it to go well. We overdress. had been replaced with “a malleable, feel- They are narrow people, art people, offhand, linens. It is early good, Jesus-lite philosophy perfectly summer, first hot weekend. We meet on the street, jumble about with suited to a consumerist, individualistic, kisses and are we late? They had been late, we’d half-decided to leave, post-Christian society that worships the now oh well. That place across the street, ever tried it? Think we went self,” he said. “The flood cannot be turned there once, looks closed, says open, well. People coming out. O.K. In- back. The best we can do is construct side is dark, cool, oaken. Turns out they know the owner. He beams, arks within which we can ride it out, ushers, we sit. And realize at once two things, first, the noise is un- and by God’s grace make it across the bearable, two, neither of us knows the other well enough to say bag dark sea of time to a future when we it. Our hearts crumble. We order food by pointing and break into do find dry land again, and can start the two yell factions, one each side of the table. He and she both look rebuilding, reseeding, and renewal of exhausted, from (I suppose) doing art all day and then the new baby. the earth.” We eat intently, as if eating were conversation. We keep passing the Christians have always lived together bread. My fish comes unboned, I weep pretending allergies. Finally in intentional communities. The Book of someone pays the bill and we escape to the street. For some reason I Acts describes how the early Christians, was expecting snow outside. There is none. We decide not to go for having sold their possessions, held “every- ice cream and part, a little more broken. Saturday night as an adult, thing in common.” In the nineteen- so this is it. We thought we’d be Nick and Nora, not their blurred sixties, a wave of Christian communes friends in greatcoats. We cover our ears inside our souls. But you can’t sprang up, some inspired by the coun- stop it that way. terculture, others reacting against it. In —Anne Carson the main, however, Christians have sought to make America itself one big Christian community. Dreher thinks ally a good idea for Christians to live Two Dominican friars were next. One that this effort, most recently associated more cloistered lives?—Dreher made his of them introduced himself as Brother with the religious right, has been a di- way to a table, where he sat down to sign Henry. “If you’d write something about sastrous mistake—it has led Christians copies of “The Benedict Option.” A line the Dominican Option, I don’t have to worship the idol of politics instead of stretched down the hall and around the money to pay you, but I’d be tickled strengthening their own faith. “I believe corner. Many of those in it were long- pink,” he said. He joked that he had that politics in the Benedict Option time readers of his blog, and he seemed been personally offended by the nega- should be localist,” he said. The idea was relieved to be offstage and among his tive use of the word “cloistered” during not to enter a monastery, exactly. But people. (A friend of Dreher’s told me the Q. & A.: “Hey, I actually live in a Christians should consider living in tight- that, if Dreher had stayed in Brooklyn, cloister!” Dreher looked a little awed as knit, faith-centered communities, in the he would have found exactly the kind of he signed Brother Henry’s book. manner of Modern Orthodox Jews. They thick community he longed for: “He left should follow rules and take vows. They too soon.”) reher takes the phrase “the Ben- should admit that the culture wars had “I can’t do what I normally do when D edict Option” from “After Virtue,” been lost—same-sex marriage was the I’m waiting in line, which is read a new a 1981 work by the Scottish philosopher law of the land—and focus on their own blog post from you,” one man said. Alasdair MacIntyre. MacIntyre argued spiritual lives. They should strive to make Dreher chuckled. “That’s me! Rod that Western civilization had lost its Christian life meaningfully different Dreher: no unblogged thoughts!” He ability to think coherently about moral from life under high-tech, secular capi- wrestles with his addiction to blogging life. The problem was the Enlighten- talism; they should take inspiration from and to Twitter, and has covered the Apple ment, which put individuals in charge Catholic dissidents under Communism, logo on his laptop, which he calls “my of deciding for themselves what was such as the Czech activist Václav Benda, precious,” with a sticker of the Benedic- right and wrong. This, MacIntyre thought, who advocated the creation of a “paral- tine emblem. rendered moral language meaningless. lel polis”—a society within a society. A well-dressed, middle-aged couple Try to say that something is “good,” and They should pray more often. Start their ambled up. “If I take the Benedict Option, you end up saying only that it’s “good own schools. Move near their church. I may have to give up reading you,” the (to me)”—whatever that means. It be- St. Benedict, Dreher said, didn’t try to man said. Laughing, his wife said that comes impossible to settle moral ques- “make Rome great again.” He tended reading Dreher’s blog was the first thing tions or to enforce moral rules; the best his own garden, finding a way to live that her husband did each morning. we can do is agree to disagree. Such a that served as “a sign of contradiction” “Give it up!” Dreher told him, world falls into the hands of manag- to the declining world around him. pleased but embarrassed. “At least for ers and technocrats, who excel at the After a Q. & A. session—Was it re- Lent. It’ll increase your holiness.” perfection of means but lack the tools

50 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 with which to think deeply about ends. effect goodness in the world through of it, but it’s also how to eat together. I Surviving this new age of darkness might your actions in the café? I want to be like how St. Benedict says, in his Rule, call for the construction of local forms Catholic in every part of my world. That’s ‘Treat your utensils like they were tools of community, where a realist approach what I’m trying to do here, through for the altar.’ In other words, he’s say- to morality lives on. Today, MacIntyre coffee.” ing, treat everything as sacred, as a gift. wrote, “we are waiting not for a Godot “It’s all very intersectional,” Currie If you do that, even the ordinary things but for another—doubtless very differ- observed. you do can be done for Christ and for ent—St. Benedict.” Although Dreher is voluble in one- your neighbors.” Dreher’s book describes a number of on-one conversations, he is quieter in “I think that’s right,” Roberts said. intentional “Benedict Option commu- groups. He looked on in eager curiosity, “You can sanctify the simple things.” nities” that serve, in his view, as arks in resembling, in his thick glasses, long “I mean, there are downsides,” Cur- a liquidly modern sea. (Dreher hopes leather jacket, and black boots, a monk rie said. “The other day—it was seven- that many different kinds of communi- from some arctic monastery. thirty in the morning—I was in the bath- ties—even, in theory, Muslim and Jew- Currie led us outside, where we room, and somebody knocked on the ish ones—will adopt the “Benedict Op- climbed a steep hill toward the school, door. It was one of my Catholic neigh- tion” label.) One is in Hyattsville, an imposing brick pile. Inside, in the bors. He didn’t apologize for it or any- Maryland, a small suburb of Washing- hallway, we passed a diverse group of thing. He was on his morning run, and ton, D.C. The community has no name— students in Catholic-school uniforms. he thought, ‘Oh, I’d like to talk to Chris residents just call it Hyattsville—but, In the principal’s office—a dingy, insti- about this.’ ” judging from the size of its two gendered tutional room with seafoam-colored “If you want to be a little more pri- Listservs (“Barn Raisers,” for men, and walls—Currie introduced us to Michelle vate, or isolated, then this might be kind “Hyattsville Catholic Women”), around Trudeau, the vice-principal, and Mer- of a difficult place to live,” Roberts said. two hundred Catholic families live there, rill Roberts, a science teacher. Both had “But that’s the point of intentional com- in modest brick homes with front porches. children at St. Jerome’s. Trudeau, who munity. I tell myself, I chose to be part They send their kids to St. Jerome Acad- had an air of ironic mischief, had come of this. I want my neighbors to talk to emy, a local Catholic school that they to Hyattsville after dropping out of an me about their lives. This conversation have more or less taken over. anthropology Ph.D. program at Co- is a higher good.” The Hyattsville community got its lumbia; Roberts was about to finish his “People today, they want close com- start after Chris Currie, a public-rela- doctorate in solar physics at Catholic munity without sacrifice,” Dreher said. tions consultant with a philosophy de- University, which is nearby. “They want the good things, and they gree from Georgetown, moved there They described some typical com- want to edit out the bad things. But you with his family in 1997. He persuaded munal events. “Sunday-evening prayer cannot have that closeness without being his friends to join him, and one thing is one of the largest community draws,” up in each other’s business. The benefits led to another. (He’s now the director Roberts said. “People get together at come at a price.” of institutional advancement at St. Je- somebody’s house and pray the office Afterward, in the car, Dreher seemed rome’s.) Although Dreher had corre- and have a big potluck dinner.” unusually quiet. We talked for a while sponded with Currie, he had never been “I trained in anthropology, and I was about what distinguished a religious there, and it took several minutes of pre- really interested in culture and theology, community like Hyattsville from a sec- dawn driving to find Vigilante Coffee, and this community has a lot of rich- ular commune of progressives. (Dreher where we had agreed to meet. Hyatts- ness in those areas,” Trudeau said. “I’ve thinks that faith is the only rudder deep ville’s relative affordability is especially belonged to a bunch of enough to change the appealing to large Catholic families, and book clubs in my life. They course of life for an entire the café was in an industrial space that were always, ‘Did you community and its chil- might once have belonged to a body like the book?’ ‘Yeah . . .’ dren: “Religion isn’t a shop. Inside, indie rock jangled on the Then it was celebrity sight- statement of how we feel sound system. One wall was decorated ings and what restaurant about things but a stan- with colorfully painted skateboards. have you been to recently.” dard to which we have Currie turned out to be a tall man in In Hyattsville, she said, to conform.”) We dis- a dark suit, with an emphatic, energetic book-club conversations cussed the extroversion manner. He was discussing Vigilante’s included philosophy and theology, and and effervescence of the Hyattsville unofficial Catholic mission with Diane continued afterward, on the Listserv. Catholics (“That’s the difference be- Contreras, the coffee shop’s thirty-year- “Well, on the men’s Listserv we talk tween a monastery and a community”). old manager, who had moved to Hyatts- about trading tools,” Roberts said, to Our visit had been short, but he ville a few years ago, from Los Angeles, general laughter. seemed wistful, even a little sad, to be where she’d been a teacher at a charter In a teacherly way, Dreher broke in. leaving a place where he might have school. “There’s something very Benedictine belonged. In a 2013 post, Dreher medi- “The baristas here, some are Catho- about the simple things, like exchang- tates on his perennial outsiderness. He lic, some aren’t,” Contreras said. “But ing tools,” he said. “That’s how Bene- says he likes visiting places where he we’re always talking about: How do you dictine life is—contemplation is a part could live but doesn’t—places where he

THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 51 SHOWCASE BY PARI DUKOVIC

A Rei Kawakubo design from an exhibition of her work opening on May 4th at the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute. is “a stranger, but not strange”—more who lives in New York told me that she being a realist about the wrong set of than he enjoys fitting in at home. “I didn’t share Dreher’s sense of outsider- rules. Toward the end of our time to- don’t want to feel this way, but I do,” ness. “I grew up on the Upper West Side,” gether, I told Dreher that his life story he writes. He wonders if he is “an out- she said. “This is my St. Francisville.” At seemed very similar to those of many sider by nature,” chasing a “sense of the same time, she said, “when I was gay men I knew. He had grown up in fitting-in, of Home, that . . . I am inca- growing up, there were these moments the South, with a hypermasculine fa- pable of experiencing.” in the fall when you’d be walking in ther who found his sensitivity and One of Dreher’s favorite writers is Central Park, and you’d see that pink, difference alienating; he had gone away Walker Percy, whose novel “The Mov- 7-p.m.-in-September sunlight on the to find himself, and, since then, has iegoer” is set in a fictionalized version of buildings, and it seemed like there was struggled for a place in the world he West Feliciana parish, where St. Francis- another place the city was pointing to.” left behind. Surely, I said, he must have ville is situated. (Every year, Dreher hosts In an existential sense, she said, Chris- sympathy for gay Christians. And yet a Walker Percy Weekend, combining lec- tianity figured human beings as “resident Dreher is certain that gay marriage is tures from literary scholars with crawfish, aliens” in the world; the Benedict Op- wrong. bourbon, and beer.) Binx Bolling, the tion gave a name to the deliberate main- Like many orthodox Christian in- book’s protagonist, is a young stockbro- tenance of that difference. Several years tellectuals, Dreher holds labyrinthine ker who finds himself on “the search”— ago, with some friends who were also views on homosexuality. He is op- the search being “what anyone would un- readers of Dreher’s, she had tried to start posed to same-sex marriage but in dertake if he were not sunk in the every - a theologically conservative church. She favor of civil unions. In principle, he dayness of his own life.” Binx explains, saw the church that she currently at- is against gay adoption, but in prac- “To become aware of the possibility of tended, in Manhattan, as a “deliberate tice, he told me, “there are so many the search is to be onto something. Not community.” “A couple from my church gay couples who are wonderful par- to be onto something is to be in despair.” lives in my house,” she said. ents that I find it hard to maintain The Catholics in Hyattsville seemed “What the Ben Op means to me is any ardor for stopping it.” Early in happy and at home. Later, in New York, this,” Leah told me. “You’re married, our correspondence, he referred me I met some young Benedict Option right? Imagine a world where people to an essay called “The Civic Project Christians who seemed, like Dreher, to didn’t agree that marriage was a con- of American Christianity,” by Michael be on the search. Over artisanal mac- cept—where there was no social un- Hanby, a Catholic philosopher. The and-cheese, Leah and Alexi Sargeant derstanding of marriage. And imagine essay represents same-sex marriage told me about their own “Ben Op” ini- that your marriage was really impor- not as a rights issue but as part of an tiatives. She was twenty-seven, worked tant to you, and that, when you inter- ongoing, technology-driven revolu- for an altruistic for-profit, and wore a acted with other people, no one men- tion in our view of personhood. Hanby T-shirt advertising the “Metaphysical tioned your marriage; there was no re- argues that, where we used to see Transit Authority”; he was twenty-four, spect for it and no acknowledgment of human beings as possessing intrinsic sported a bow tie, and worked as an ed- its existence. You would do a lot to claw properties—masculinity, femininity, itorial assistant for the religious maga- out some space to manifest that your the ability to glorify God through zine First Things. They had organized marriage was important. And that’s how procreation—we now take a nomi- Benedict Option-themed poetry recita- it is with the Benedict Option. We have nalist view of ourselves, seeing our tions and had begun hosting dinner par- a relationship with Christ. Really, it bodies as subservient to our minds. ties for their Christian friends. An en- should be our most important relation- We use technology, such as the birth- tire gathering had been devoted to ship. But my relationship with Alexi is control pill, to subvert the natural way debating the Benedict Option. treated as more real and important and of things. Gay marriage, in this ac- “We did an evening of job applica- relevant. If I say, ‘Oh, I can’t make it, count, is a stepping-stone to a pro- tions and prayer, because job applica- Alexi and I have a thing,’ that’s normal. foundly technologized society in which tions suck,” Leah said. “Applying for But if I say, ‘Sorry, I have to go to church,’ “the rejection of nature” is complete. jobs is profoundly depressing. When that’s weird.” Today, it’s sex-reassignment surgery you don’t hear back, the message is: They weren’t sure if they would stay and surrogacy; tomorrow, we’ll be ge- ‘You’re worthless.’ And that feeling of in New York or move somewhere else. netically engineering our way into a worthlessness isn’t only unpleasant. It’s They loved the city, but its values—com- post-human future. untrue, from the point of view of being petition, individualism, transience, cap- The point of the essay is that there’s a Christian.” For the Lenten season, italism—seemed in tension with their an irreducible conflict between ortho- Alexi had adopted a new habit: pray- faith. They were still making up their dox Christianity and political liberal- ing morning office—a liturgical ritual minds about how they wanted to live. ism. On his blog, Dreher acknowledges that varies according to the calendar— that “gays, understandably, find their with the help of a smartphone app, as he upside of being a realist—of personal dignity insulted by people he walked to work. T believing that the rules are as real, who believe that their sexuality is in any “It’s more techy than Rod would like, in their way, as the sky and the earth— way deficient.” He writes that gay cou- but it’s still great,” he said. is that you live in a morally sanctified ples can “genuinely, deeply, and sacrifi- Another young Ben Op Christian world. The downside is that you risk cially love each other.” Still, he maintains,

THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 53 “our bodies have intrinsic moral mean- he might have said in their various on- “You’ve got to love your dad even if he ing. Christian orthodoxy is not nominal- line arguments. Sullivan has a long-stand- doesn’t love you back in the way that ist.” He regularly defends religious peo- ing disagreement with Dreher over same- you want him to.” ple who act illiberally “for conscience sex marriage, but he believes that the reasons”—Orthodox Jews, traditional- religiously devout should be permitted wo days after his visit to Hyatts- ist Muslims, the florist Baronelle Stutz- their dissent. “There is simply no way T ville, Dreher returned to Manhat- man, who was sued when she refused to for an orthodox Catholic to embrace tan to talk about the Benedict Option provide flowers for a gay wedding. same-sex marriage,” he said. “The at- at the Union League Club, in midtown. Dreher’s many critics sound a few tempt to conflate that with homopho- Various Christians came out to see him. common notes. They argue, first, that bia is a sign of the unthinking nature of A flock of young men in gingham hailed he is an alarmist about the decline of some liberal responses to religion. I re- from The American Conservative; hip- Christianity, and that he exaggerates ally don’t think that florists who don’t looking Manhattanites slouched in their the legal threats to its orthodox expres- want to contaminate themselves with a seats; Orthodox priests, wearing dark sion. They say that he has a blind spot gay wedding should in any way be com- robes and heavy crosses, waggled their about race and class, and note that many pelled to do so. I think any gay person beards in groups. In sober suits and head Christians seem just fine with the way that wants them to do that is being an scarves, men and women from the Bru- society is changing. (“Ten years from asshole, to be honest—an intolerant derhof, a vowed community in upstate now, ‘The Benedict Option’ will be an asshole. Rod forces you to understand New York, stood on the fringes of the interesting artifact showing just how what real pluralism is: actually accept- crowd, behind tables stacked with cop- anxious white conservative Christians ing people with completely different ies of their magazine, Plough. There are were about their changing place in so- world views than your own.” a number of Bruderhof communities ciety,” Robert P. Jones, who runs the In “The Benedict Option,” Dreher around the world—the first was founded Public Religion Research Institute, told writes that “the angry vehemence with in Germany, in 1920—and those who me.) A deeper criticism is that Dreher’s which many gay activists condemn take the membership vows agree to give anti-pluralism is too pessimistic—a re- Christianity” is the understandable re- up private property and embrace non- jection of the American project. Dre- sult of a history of “rejection and hatred violence. Their presence seemed to have her writes that, on gay marriage, there by the church.” Orthodox Christians the effect of supporting and challeng- can be “no tenable compromise” be- need to acknowledge this history, he ing Dreher simultaneously. tween orthodox Christians and pro- continues, and “repent of it.” He has as- After Dreher spoke, there were a few gressives; many Christians would pre- sured his children that, if they are gay, respondents. Ross Douthat, the conser- fer a softer approach. They agree with he will still love them; he is almost— vative Times columnist, suggested that Patrick Gilger, a Jesuit priest who, in but not quite—apologetic about his even a watered-down version of the Ben- a review of “The Benedict Option,” views, which he presents as a theologi- edict Option was useful: all religious peo- complained that Dreher’s “reading of cal obligation. He sees orthodox Chris- ple could stand to be a little more de- pluralism as a problem prevents him tians as powerless against the forces of vout. Jacqueline Rivers, who directs the from seeing it as a gift.” Earlier this liquidly modern progressivism; on his Seymour Institute for Black Church and year, Christianity Today put Dreher and blog, he argues that “the question is not Policy Studies, said that the Benedict “The Benedict Option” on its cover, and really ‘What are you conservative Chris- Option was unlikely to help Christians asked four experts to weigh in. John tians prepared to tolerate?’ but actually address social injustices like segregation Inazu, a law professor at Washington ‘What are LGBTs and progressive al- and inequality; in fact, it might perpet- University in St. Louis who focusses lies prepared to tolerate?’ ” He wants uate them. (Dreher’s theory is that in- on religion and free speech, argued them to be magnanimous in victory; to tentional communities, by “living in that Christians should avoid Dreher’s refrain from pressing their advantage. truth,” can inspire the rest of us to change defensiveness and embrace “confident Essentially, he says to progressives: You’ve in more worldly ways.) pluralism”: “Our confidence in the gos- won. You wouldn’t sue Orthodox Jews The most striking comments came pel lets us find common ground with or observant Muslims. Please don’t sue from Randall Gauger, a bishop at the others even when we can’t agree on a us, either. Bruderhof, who, with his wife, had lived common good.” When it comes to “What I really love about Rod is for many years in a Bruderhof commu- same-sex marriage, in other words, even that, even as he’s insisting upon certain nity in Australia. (They now live in a orthodox Christians tend to be nomi- truths, he’s obviously completely con- Pennsylvania Bruderhof community.) A nalist. They’d prefer to say, “Gay mar- flicted,” Sullivan said. “And he’s a mess! bald man in his sixties wearing a tan riage is wrong (to me).” I don’t think he’d disagree with that. sports coat, a black shirt, and a tan tie, The writer Andrew Sullivan, who is But he’s a mess in the best possible way, Gauger described what he and his wife gay and Catholic, is one of Dreher’s good because he hasn’t anesthetized himself. had done after “withdrawing.” They hung friends. Their friendship began in ear- He’s honest about a lot of the ques- out with their neighbors at barbecues; nest in 2010, when Ruthie got sick and tions that many liberal and conserva- they babysat and visited elderly shut-ins. Dreher, moved by a spirit of general- tive Christians aren’t really addressing.” Gauger became a police chaplain. Other ized repentance, e-mailed Sullivan to Talking to Sullivan about Dreher, I was Bruderhof members became firefighters or apologize for anything “hard-hearted” reminded of Father Matthew’s law: E.M.T.s. They collaborated with farmers

54 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 on sustainable agriculture, partnered with charities, volunteered in “crisis situations,” and hosted thousands of guests, includ- ing politicians and Aboriginal leaders. “Would we have done as much as a sol- itary nuclear family?” Gauger asked. “I doubt it.” He pointed out that capital- ist society caters to people with “extraor- dinary talents”: “Only in a communal church can the old and the very young, hurting military veterans, the disabled, the mentally ill, ex-addicts, ex-felons, or simply annoying people, like myself, find a place where they can be healed and accepted and, what’s more, contribute to life.” His criticism of “The Benedict Option” was that it did not go far enough. “Why stop at Benedict when we can go back to the original source of Christian- ity? Christians living in full community is how the church began . . . and the early church was far more radical than any- thing Rod has so far proposed.” Dreher, sitting next to him onstage, listened, en- raptured, with his head on his hand. Afterward, Dreher and the other panelists retreated to the club’s library. “Major shakeup of the senior staff.” Bartenders served the Benedict Option (“another—doubtless very different— cocktail,” made with whiskey, amaro, •• St-Germain, lemon juice, and simple syrup). Dreher, aglow, worked the room. told me they were uncomfortable with a now regretted the occasionally “shrill” “Everybody’s feeling a bit of a spiri- journalist tagging along, so after his visit tone of his book: “I’m truly trying to tual earthquake,” Jonathan Coppage, a Dreher called to tell me what it had been shake people out of their complacency onetime colleague of Dreher’s at The like. He had sung with them in church about church, but to visit the Bruderhof American Conservative, said. “He’s a and eaten with them in their communal is to go to a place of quiet and contem- seeker. He’s a rolling stone.” dining hall. (Their brewmaster, unfortu- plation and kindness. I wish I’d been able Mattia Ferraresi, the New York cor- nately, was out of beer.) He had stayed to capture more of that.” He urged me respondent for Il Foglio, mused on Dre- with a family who lived without televi- to go to the Bruderhof Web site, where her’s Americanness. “The idea of a ‘com- sion or the Internet, and he read stories I could read the community’s rule of life. munity’ that’s somehow separated, I think to their little boy. He’d visited the pri- “There seemed to be such order there,” it’s foreign to Italians,” he said. “For us, mary school; in a classroom, he noticed Dreher said. “Not a forced, grim, tense it’s about blending and layering in a small a teacher holding a child in her arms. order—just life. Life wasn’t directed by the space—the Romans, the Church . . . ” “Oh, he’s asleep,” Dreher observed. television or the computer. It was ordered “Part of the problem with religion “No, he has cerebral palsy,” his guide by the sacred. They’ve sacrificed their lib- is that it can just be an aestheticiza- said. erty and their comfort in ways I would tion of life,” a young Orthodox priest “It was like a Pietà, that woman with probably find impossible. The gentleness from Yonkers said. “It’s still late-modern that boy in her arms,” Dreher told me. of the people, how serene they seemed, and capitalism working its insidious tenta- “If that child were out in the world, who not in any weird or ethereal way—it re- cles. We need a vocabulary to get out- knows how expensive his treatment minded me of the old country people I side of that.” would be. It would be thoroughly med- grew up with around South Louisiana. A group of fresh-faced young peo- icalized and impersonal. Later, I saw him They were just more at home in the world ple from the Bruderhof hung together being brought into the luncheon assem- than I am. At the Bruderhof, they seem in a book nook. They were not drink- bly with his dad and his mom.” The very so . . . normal. It makes me think, Who are ing Benedict Options. old, too, are fully integrated into Bru- the abnormal ones here? These people, who Dreher had long been fascinated by derhof life, Dreher said. A man he met live in such close rhythm with their own the Bruderhof, and the next morning he had told him, “One of the measures of lives and the life of the church, or people travelled upstate to learn more about the our community is how much dignity we like me, who live like I do?” He paused. “It community. Members of the Bruderhof give to our elderly.” Dreher said that he was a sign to me of what could be.” 

THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 55 FICTION

56 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 PHOTOGRAPH BY ADAM KREMER SVIATOSLAV RICHTER an old sea captain, say, or of a farmhand shuffling through a limited space, say, of some type, which leads some to spec- always keeping close to the safety of here’s this old man who walks ulate that he was once one of those ship shelter if there is shelter, or to the house along the fence next to the hos- workers, river pilots who at times come of older parents who, bewildered by the T pital, or, say, down near town, in to land at the dock on the river to state of your life, will take you in and wobbling in his loose, flapping shoes, catch a cab down to the Bronx, expound- give you a bed and care for you as best digging around in the garbage can on ing stories of bridge heights and the as they can, telling you to stay in when the corner, smoking a cigarette, clutch- way the tides have to be calculated be- it’s cold, building a fire, listening and ing it between his battered fingers, or fore you take a ship upriver, attesting to waiting for you to speak with coher- simply walking with his shoulders the way it all works—one man captain- ence, to give a sign that somehow you braced as if he knew he was some kind ing the boat from the harbor to the river are going to pull out of this and get of fodder for speculation, because it mouth, another bringing it upriver. your life back together, say, or that you seems to be so consistent, his homeless Weather- beaten, some think while pass- are just gathering your equilibrium and rooting, keeping to a pattern, moving ing him on a windy day, watching the finding a foothold in reality, or at least south on Midland Avenue for a half way he lists with his arms out at his in common sense, having known you— mile to Franklin Place and then left on sides, winglike, the tail of his shirt flut- your parents—when you were a full- Franklin and down Franklin to River tering behind him as he walks. blown functioning adult in the world, Road, along River Road to Front Street, The way he roots through the gar- making deals, establishing relationships left on Front and up Front back to bage cans in the winter snow and in the with others, cleaning your body and Midland, and then, presumably, around summer heat with an admirable per- dressing in accordance with the climatic again. By virtue of his consistency, he sistence serves as a touchstone, fuelled conditions, enjoying good days and bad has edged his way into the conscious- by the concept of mental illness afloat days, lingering over the beauty of the ness of just about everybody who has over the land, even, say, for the less ed- world, over, say, an amazingly graceful driven more than once down Midland ucated observers who just see him and football play in which the receiver hooks Avenue, or Front Street, or, to a lesser think, Fucking crazy old homeless bas- his arm up without looking to clutch degree, Franklin Place. tard hanging in there, still going, still the ball in a way that seems to defy not Rain or shine, for about a year and doing his thing. The phrase “mental ill- only the nature of physics itself but a half, give or take, he has slogged with ness” shrouds his body as he walks, and something more, the potential in the the same gimp, the same loping swing orients him, slips him like a peg into act itself, or, better yet, over, say, the way of arms, the same cigarette burning be- whatever dreamy ideas of madness fill a kid, like your own son or daughter, if tween his fingers, and he’s rooted in the the minds of those passing and pushes you have one, looks up at you, beam- same trash cans—the one on the cor- away the thought that he is, in a way, ing after accomplishing some new task, ner of Midland and Franklin, or the one say, a reflection of some part of them- such as putting a round peg into a round on the corner of River and Front. Lean- selves that might, someday, under the hole instead of a square one, or, even ing down with his underwear showing right circumstances—a financial loss better, over, say, the way the pianist Svia- in winter, pale yellow, say, or his pants leading to ruin, say, or some neurolog- toslav Richter occasionally held back hiked up too far over his shirt in sum- ical disorder, an improper linking of from playing while the audience waited mer, he goes against the elemental facts nerves, or a shady haze of undetected and grew impatient, first making noise, in a disconcerting way that makes those tumor, or some sharp trauma abrupt mumbling and talking, anxious and ex- passing him shrug and wonder briefly enough to throw off their general bal- pectant, while he sat on the bench and what his story might be before going ance—irrevocably force them into the held his fingers poised to play, letting back to their lives, half caring and half same circumstances, wandering day after the sound of the Moscow hall rever- not caring, subsumed in the responsi- day, sticking to the same general pat- berate with all the coughing and tense bilities at hand, so to speak, or caring tern, stopping to dig in the public trash laughter, the whispering, and then deeply with a flash of intense sadness can for discarded bottles or scraps of waited and waited until a deep quiet and wonder, resolving to sign up to work food or newspapers to read. fell, a silence that anticipated the first at the shelter in town, the Soup Haven, Those who pass have had a sense notes and then grew even deeper, it was or whatever it’s called, or not caring one that perhaps, at least in theory, at least said, until there was nothing but the iota and getting riled up thinking about as some kind of innate potential, they creak of the seats and the soft, muted the ease with which a man can pass his may—unlikely, hugely unlikely—some- thump of shoe soles against wooden life in what must be a pleasurable vor- day find themselves in the same cir- floorboards, and then an even deeper, tex of non-time that comes from fol- cumstances, although with variations, astonished silence that seemed, in all lowing a set path day after day, say, in- of course, find themselves feeling some- its starkness, accusatory and frank, judg- sane or on the edge of insanity, as a way thing that isn’t simply shame but some- ing the ineptitude of those who would, of escaping responsibilities, dodging thing deeper in the self, an oblivious- in a few minutes—or by that point them for the poetic stance of being the ness that allows for wandering in perhaps never—listen to the beautiful odd homeless gent, strangely formal in ice-cold air with your shirt wide open, music that his fingers would produce the way he daintily roots, poking at the a deprivation of life force, or of gump- if they received the proper instruction trash with a stick, his face like that of tion, or of will that could leave you from the brain of the virtuoso, who was

THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 57 temperamental and elegant and oddly in what might be the terminal treat- able to do so at that moment—a kind dumb at the same time, a man holding ment for his condition. of purity of resolve (in the car) that sat his fingers clawed over the keys and It’s not just that the third time you behind your eyelids when you shut your casting back upon the world an innate visited him you sat in the car and re- eyes and let the sunlight purge through sense of that which lies between the hashed the way it would happen, at in a blood burst of warm red. It’s not flesh and the soul, forcing it on the au- least until you got in and sat with him just the clean, hard facts that you under- dience with his unusual—albeit par for face to face, listening to whatever he stood, in the car, and that were so thread- the course when it comes to creative was going to say, sharing the food, lean- bare and old hat that almost anyone could geniuses—behavior. ing back, taking in the room—the lit- have recited them, beginning with the tle kids visiting fathers, the older folks use of chemicals that sparked dopamine OH, ROCKLAND! visiting young patients, the celebratory production and lodged themselves in or- hilarity of the homecomings lifting the ganic compounds called receptors, and t’s not just that you went to visit air with a sweet vibration—sat in the then from there took over what was orig- I him when he was in Rockland, now car and rehashed the way you’d go in, inally a unique story—the Hudson River called Blaisdell Addiction Treatment face the mute receptionist, go through house, the art work, his stone-carved Center, stopping on the way to pick up the air-lock device, and then sit through faces in the front yard, the view of the some hard candies and a bagel and a the talk on FREEDOM again, after check- river from his back patio, his name, Frank, large coffee, as he had requested, and ing your food bag with the orderly. It’s the minutiae of his story—and trans- that you went in and checked in with not just that the third time you went muted it into a clichéd tale that changed the receptionist and signed the register to visit, on an autumnal day with the only in the terms that were used to de- and ignored (as best you could) her leaves brilliant in the sharp morning scribe it, so that those who were once blunt, bored stare from the other side sunlight, you’d go through the routine known as mad, Skid Row bums, stum- of the window—the grille of the voice- and then sense again, while you were blebums and drunkards and junkies were hole mute and silent—and then went talking, trying to coax him into a pos- now seen as diseased victims who might through what seemed like a set of air- itive vision of what he might become, be treated. lock doors to the elevator, standing the cycle of the entire story up to that It’s not just the fact that in the car, or alongside one or two other visitors who point, rolling in hoops, swinging around a few minutes later, riding up in the el- also held bags of food, and then went both of you, and you’d shrug it off and evator with an older couple who told up to attend the obligatory class, hear- watch while your brother removed the you they were from the Bronx, both work- ing the same nurse give the same speech lid of his cup, blew across the surface, ing people, you were aware that part of about FREEDOM (Focus on thought, Re- and took a sip and then another sip the tragedy of the situation was the loss member where it leads, Eliminate the and then leaned his head back and of story inherent in the hospital walls, error, Explore other options, Don’t react, swallowed, flexing his throat and the the sealed doors, the sign-in sheet, and respond, Organize thoughts, Motivate sinewy muscles of his neck, exposing the folding chairs that were standard to do better), her face slack and sweet his gaunt breastbone, which looked issue for this sort of place, along with but also bored, everyone uncomfortable covered in tissue paper, and then, when the social worker who had a heavy Hai- on the hard steel chairs, with the sense his head came back down, met your tian accent and told you, when you were that through the door the patients were gaze with deep brown eyes while be- done with , that he’d watch out gathering, waiting. tween you, in the quiet, unspoken si- for your brother in particular, respond- It’s not just that you drove over there lence that suddenly opened, there would ing to your politeness (you were extra and parked and felt the sorrow of the be such a thick exchange of informa- polite), his face wide, moonlike, and his locked ward from the outside—the tion that you’d both tear up and clear eyes watery, at his place behind the nurse’s building relatively new on the old hos- your throats and you’d push the bag desk outside the meeting room. It’s not pital grounds, the other buildings, some forward and say, I brought you a bagel, just the way he told you that your brother barracks- like, others elegant and Gothic, like you asked, and some hard candies, stood out as a lively patient, that he was their windows boarded up with blank and he’d give you a look that was so getting his act together, and that he sheets of plywood, mildewed gray, gap- thankful, so absurdly out of proportion would, quote, soon find his path, he likes ing—knowing that you’d enter his build- to your act of kindness that you would to draw and everyone knows he’s an art- ing and go through the above-mentioned know right there—amid the din of love ist, unquote. routine, also aware as you sat in the car talk between visitors and patients— It’s not just that you went home and for a minute that the same hospital had that the tenor of his thank-you would read Thomas Merton and reread a line a mention in the Ginsberg poem, again come back to haunt you later, no mat- you’d underlined in his book “Seeds of and again (“I’m with you in Rockland!”), ter what happened. Contemplation,” which stated in no un- which made you feel part of literary It’s not just that in the car before going certain terms that humility was the only history somehow, and also made you up on the third visit you’d granted your- antidote to despair—that you read it a wonder if perhaps you could use this self a bitter kind of solace, because you few times and then went into a deep in a story, take advantage of the fact were not locked up there and he was, contemplation out on your back deck, that you were in a real situation with and you were able to find words to sit- smoking a cigar, wondering if there was your real brother, who was back again uate yourself in life, and he didn’t seem a way to become humble before the

58 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 preordained humiliation of a chemical in the revisiting of the situation from ganic compounds, landlocked by their addiction, wondering if the narrative that particular point of time in relation restricting bonds, all those fuzzy quan- thrown around your brother would look to what happened later, and that would, tum orbitals, tend toward formations just as absurd when folks in the future in hindsight, seem marked, somehow, that are elegantly circular. It’s not just found out that it had nothing at all to in relation to the way the hospital ward that he took his boots off and leaped do with the way the compounds locked stood, even as you signed in, as a mo- from the palisade and lifted his hands into receptors but originated with some- mentary, fleeting refuge from the wild and flew out over the river and then thing else that was, at that time, out on torments of the outside world, the in- back and that he felt himself relin- the deck, out in the world, as mysteri- delible real places—the old house on quished of his condition and totally ous to you as it was to everyone else. the river that had been empty since your free for a few seconds, with the water It’s not just that he went from a brother’s divorce, and the old below him. It’s not just that halfway house called Open Arms, a art studio in the rehabilitated you imagined this as you neat and tidy little house in the town mill building where he had sat in the car in the parking of Haverstraw, tucked up amid the worked on his paintings, and lot, after the third, maybe river-town streets, with a view of the the river itself, the shoreline the fourth, visit, with the river—a glint of blue through the trees down near the state park smell of damp paper bag and in the summer, more stark and open where he’d hiked with his steaming coffee and—be- in the winter—to the hospital cleanup son—that would when he tween those smells—the ward, and then up to Rockland for the thought back on them spark bready bagel smell. It’s not first time, and then back to Open Arms in him a need, a desire, to re- just that you only imagined again for a second stay, and then back hash his relationship with the boots and then felt to the emergency-room cleanup ward, the chemicals that eased the pain they strange about the image, and remem- and then up to Rockland (as you’d think produced. It’s not just that you’re con- bered hiking back down the trail and of it some of the time), and then out stantly embarrassed by or ashamed of along the railroad tracks to the road, of Blaze (as you began to call it later) the circularity of the story when you stopping to stare at his house, now under into Open Arms again, and then to think of it. It’s not just that no matter new ownership, situated a quarter mile Blaze for a third, final time, which how hard you try to see his story in up the road from the stone quarry, the seemed to matter so much the third simple tragic terms, as an Aristotelian one you used in one of your stories, time you went to visit him, sitting in process, you also feel yourself spinning years back, when you were first begin- the car, watching the rain come down, back into the cycle that might eventu- ning to locate the sober source of your the smell of the bagel and the coffee ally devour him, losing touch with what- own vision. in the air, ruminating over the way the ever cathartic elements might lie hid- names of the institutions seemed to den within the structure of his story as o, it’s the fact that he never had map out with neat concision, to make it relates to your own, partly because N a chance to fly and that you never orderly what wasn’t orderly, as if lan- you are still part of the story and it has really found those boots and that each guage itself were straining to show in yet to reach its terminus and therefore time you visited him he seemed to be clear terms the structure of the story the overarching arc hasn’t been reached only slightly better. It’s the fact that that was forming around him, just as yet—at least, so it seems. when you left him behind, speeding his wife’s name had matched the name It’s not just that you went to the down the road past the old Rockland of his first roommate in the halfway state park to walk one afternoon and buildings, boarded up and unused now house, and he had felt the mockery of found his boots near the edge of the that most of the mad and crazy are fate itself, had said to you, Jesus, what palisade, the sheer drop-off to the shore outpatients, medicated, wandering the are the chances that I’d have a room- of the river. It’s not just that no mat- streets and the homeless shelters, you mate with a slightly feminine name ter how often you sort and pick through felt a keen elation. It’s the fact that and a wife with a slightly masculine the story, alongside your parents and once again you were joyfully facing the name, and that somehow I’d be put in your sister and everyone else, you can’t harsh limitations of reality, admitting with this guy who is half my age and help but find yourself, against your bet- that it all had to be taken and turned just going through this for the first ter nature, feeling the big sway and into a story of some kind. Otherwise, time, with his life spread out before spin of the cosmos—the dark eternal it would just be one more expression him, for God’s sake, while I’m here matter of the stars, which, however of precise discontent. And expressions with my life not spreading at all, be- isotropic or evenly balanced, seem, of discontent—you think in the car, cause even if I stay clean I’ve only got, when you think of him, to be moving sitting in front of your own house what, a dozen years left? in a circular pattern that reminds you now—no matter how beautiful, never It’s not just that it seemed, on the that the nurse explained, each time, solve the riddle of the world, or bring third visit, as you signed the clipboard, during each pre-visit orientation, that the banality of sequential reality to a that you were a signatory to some in- part of the healing process was to step location of deeper grace.  soluble time-sense, and that the dura- off the merry-go-round and never step tion of your visit would be a stasis of back on. NEWYORKER.COM time that would forever play itself out It’s not just that so many of the or- David Means on his short story.

THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 59 THE CRITICS

THE THEATRE THE STAR

Bette Midler brings the best of herself to “Hello, Dolly!”

BY HILTON ALS

ette Midler is such an incredi- creation the Divine Miss M—she’s looser Sue Mengers, or Dolly Levi, her quick, B ble self-creation—an artist like no and more cynical than Dolly Parton— exaggeratedly showgirlish walk is a walk other—that finding roles that can har- she sometimes lets the island girl come away from the audience. She needs our ness her enormous energy while al- out, and her ukulele playing while she love, but she wants to be out of its reach, lowing room for her wit and her ex- sings a Hawaiian song is soft, slow, and too: if she isn’t at our mercy, she can traordinary skill as a balladeer must tender. Midler arrived in New York in survive without us, trouper that she is. have long been a nightmare for her 1965. (She earned her fare by being a sea- But how can we survive our love agents. Early in her now more than sick extra in the epic, and epically bor- for her? I felt that love, in a rush, when fifty-year career, Midler did happen ing, 1966 movie “Hawaii.”) Given that Midler made her entrance in Zaks’s upon a part that tapped into her many she didn’t grow up as a member of any- fairly standard production of “Hello, talents. In 1979, she starred in “The thing even approaching a majority, it Dolly!” The musical, which was first Rose,” a fictional film portrait of a Janis makes sense that she discovered her most produced on Broadway in 1964, is based Joplin-like singer, which moved a lot adoring company among other outsid- on Thornton Wilder’s 1955 comedy, of people, not least because the script ers, in the pre-Stonewall gay commu- “The Matchmaker.” Although Wilder reflected aspects of Midler’s own life: nity. In that milieu, Midler found her worked on “The Matchmaker” for her camaraderie with her gay fans and voice and honed it. She could speak— years, it’s not one of his more interest- the distance she may have felt from loudly—not just for herself but for all ing pieces; it contains all the whimsy her parents. (Her father wasn’t sup- those men who weren’t allowed to be as and strained humor that he disciplined portive of her aspirations and saw her out there in the world as she was. himself against in more substantial perform only once.) Although “The Part of Midler’s genius has always plays, such as “Our Town” (1938) and Rose” was a milestone in Midler’s been her ability to translate an un- the overlong but fascinating “The Skin wildly diverse career—in addition to derground sensibility for a general of Our Teeth” (1942). Nevertheless, acting onstage and onscreen, she makes audience without losing either. It’s mediocre comedies can make good records, performs solo shows, and runs a fascinating process, one that Ellen musicals—a great score can bolster a a charity that helps transform vacant Willis described in a 1973 piece in weak story—and “Hello, Dolly!” ’s com- lots into gardens and public spaces— this magazine about one of Midler’s poser and lyricist, Jerry Herman, and it was just one of many. As recently as performances: Michael Stewart, who wrote the book, 2013, she was a hit on Broadway in As an ambitious artist in every sense, she pretty much stuck to the scenario that “I’ll Eat You Last,” in which she played was facing familiar contradictions: how to re- Wilder laid out. Horace Vandergelder the late mega-agent Sue Mengers to main “the last of the tacky women” and pre- (David Hyde Pierce) is a sour, money- superb effect. Now she is back on serve her special relationship with her “real” grubbing merchant from Yonkers. He Broadway, in “Hello, Dolly!” (directed fans while playing the Palace at fifteen dollars looks after his niece, Ermengarde (Mel- top; how to make the mass audience love her by Jerry Zaks, at the Schubert). while resisting subtle and not so subtle pres- anie Moore), a crybaby who’s in love Midler was born in Honolulu in 1945, sures to pander. with an artist named Ambrose Kem- a few months after the end of the Sec- per (Will Burton), whom Vandergelder ond World War. (She has a special fond- Willis goes on to criticize Midler for does not like. Still, the young couple ness for the Andrews Sisters and other how she handled that dilemma onstage, are determined to marry, with the help wartime vocalists.) The Midlers were but I think that much of her best work of the matchmaker Dolly Levi. In the not only one of the few white families has been inspired by the tension be- meantime, Vandergelder’s two young in their area; they were also Jewish. Al- tween being accepted and being out- assistants, Cornelius Hackl (Gavin though Midler became known for the raged by the very idea of acceptance. Creel) and Barnaby Tucker (Taylor

swift, self-mocking stage patter of her Whether Midler is playing the Rose, Trensch), head into New York City, BRIAN REA ABOVE:

60 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 The role of Dolly isn’t tailor-made for Midler, but she has remade the character in her own image—as a scrappy trickster.

ILLUSTRATION BY BEN KIRCHNER THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 61 where they fall for two women: Irene has remade the character in her own Molloy (Kate Baldwin), a hatmaker image: as a scrappy trickster with needs on whom Vandergelder has set his and vulnerabilities. No matter how sights, and her assistant, Minnie Fay much Dolly tries to engineer things in (Beanie Feldstein). her favor, she’s forever an outsider—a It’s not my favorite musical—Van- widow suffering from, though not de- dergelder is a one-note creation, a long bilitated by, loneliness—and the only misanthropic whine, and Herman is person who would understand how she not the subtlest lyricist in the world— feels is her dead husband, Ephraim. and until I saw Midler in the role I was Toward the end of the first act, Dolly partial to the 1969 Barbra Streisand asks Ephraim to send her a sign so that film version, directed by Gene Kelly. she’ll know it’s O.K. to move on and The movie is, more or less, a reprise of love again. It was very sweet to watch “Funny Girl,” down to its overhead Midler walk to the center of the stage, shots of Streisand travelling on or near turn her face up to the pin spot, and water, as she did when she sang “Don’t start addressing a lost love: the mo- Rain on My Parade,” in her Oscar-win- ment was filled with memories of Mid- ning performance as Fanny Brice. Some ler, Bette in a thousand and one pre- critics thought Streisand was too young vious incarnations, including herself. to play the middle-aged Dolly, but I It didn’t feel like nostalgia; it was more didn’t mind: she looked sort of dewy, like anticipation, the excitement of perfectly turned out, and the period looking forward to a wonderful eve- costumes and the locales were richly ning with an old friend—who has such detailed. Santo Loquasto’s costumes an interesting way of pronouncing and sets for the current production are things when she speaks and sings, those a little chintzy, not in comparison but round “o”s and drawn-out “love”s and in fact, though I liked the music-hall “you know”s. feel of the piece. But a different kind of reality soon As in Wilder’s original story, the intruded. Just before Midler launched characters address the audience from into “Before the Parade Passes By,” that time to time, which gives Midler paean to keeping going, to moving for- a chance to connect with us by draw- ward, she started to cough and couldn’t ing on who she really is, as well as stop. You could feel the audience hold- whom she wants to portray. (Midler’s ing its breath. As she tried to catch own instincts about what works on- hers, Creel ran onstage with a glass of stage and why are always her best di- water and knelt before the star, whose rector.) The night I saw the show, she mortality we could suddenly sense and entered with a good Yonkers accent see: Bette wouldn’t be Bette forever, and a lot of bounce. She was, after all, and the idea was intolerable. After in an American musical, and an iconic drinking the water, Midler lay down one to boot; in addition to Streisand, on the stage in a caricature of weari- stars ranging from Carol Channing ness, as the audience stood up to meet to Pearl Bailey have tackled the role, her energy, which, though flagging, was and that’s because it plays to a diva’s still greater than anyone else’s. Then strengths. The plot turns on Dolly, and she rose and walked over to the orches- the show offers ample opportunity for tra pit and asked the conductor to start whoever plays the part to showcase again. “I can’t hear you, honey,” she said. her ability to convey pathos and defi- Turning back to the audience as the ance, grief and comedy. And who bet- music began, Midler said, “Ugh—live ter than Midler to give us all that? theatre,” and rolled her eyes. When she (Pierce’s acting style—distant, ironi- started to sing, the number became un- cal, and quizzical—complements Mid- like any version I’d heard before—plain- ler’s perfectly. Of the supporting play- tive, sweet, a folk song about love and ers, Creel is the most charming and desire. That Zaks’s staging soon turned the least stressed.) it into show business, with dancers and The role of Dolly isn’t necessarily so on, wasn’t annoying: he was only tailor-made for Midler—she’s infinitely doing his job, just as Midler, breaking more complicated and funny and there our hearts with both her character and isn’t a corny bone in her body—but she her real self, was doing hers. ♦

62 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 can Jewish Committee, with a circula- BOOKS tion of around forty thousand. But Podhoretz assumed—as, in our own cases, we all tend to assume—that since OP DE STEZ his accomplishments were supremely gratifying to him, they must rank high Norman Podhoretz’s classic success story. in the world’s estimation as well. He suspected—he was certain—that oth- BY LOUIS MENAND ers were envious of his precocity and success, and he was writing the book to explain why he had no reason to pre- tend humility. When he finished, he showed the manuscript to mentors, colleagues, and friends. Almost all of them advised him not to publish it. Lionel Trilling told him that it would take ten years for his reputation to recover. Diana Trilling told him that the book was “crudely boastful” and humorless. Daniel Bell told him that it lacked “irony and self- distancing” (cardinal virtues in New York intellectual life back then), and recommended adding three or four pages at the end in which he took it back. His close friend Jason Epstein, an editor at Random House, begged him to throw it out. “If I were God,” Epstein is supposed to have said, “I’d drown it in the river.” Those who read the manuscript felt little compunction about sharing their reactions with others, and the word of mouth quickly became toxic. Friends of Podhoretz’s started wondering if he had lost his mind. Nearly a year before the book came out, Edmund Wilson noted in his diary that it was one of “the prin- In “Making It,” Podhoretz outraged friends by writing candidly about ambition. cipal subjects of conversation” in New York. “Everyone I saw who had read it e should have known the book Podhoretz was a young man, but he thought that it was awful,” he wrote. H was loaded. Norman Podhoretz had been in the business for a while. Podhoretz’s publisher, Roger Straus, started writing “Making It” in 1964. He had published his first piece in Com- of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, refused to He was thirty-four years old and the mentary when he was twenty-three, his promote the book. Podhoretz’s agent, editor of Commentary. His idea was to first piece in Partisan Review when he Lynn Nesbit, said she would no lon- write a book about how people in his was twenty-four, and his first piece in The ger represent it. Podhoretz withdrew world, literary intellectuals, were se- New Yorker when he was twenty-six. He the book from FSG (handing back cretly motivated by a desire for suc- had even published a piece in Scrutiny, the advance) and retained a new agent, cess—money, power, and fame—and the British quarterly edited by F. R. Candida Donadio, who managed to were also secretly ashamed of it. He Leavis, a critical Gorgon few could hope sell it to Random House. (Epstein was offered himself as Exhibit A. By con- to please, when he was just twenty-one. not involved in the acquisition; it was fessing to his own ambition, he would He had been named editor of Commen- enthusiastically approved by the head make it safe for others to confess to tary at twenty-nine. He was invited to of the company, Bennett Cerf, no stranger theirs, and thereby enjoy without guilt cocktail parties with all the smart peo- to chutzpah.) “Making It” came out at the worldly goods their strivings had ple. He hung around with Norman the very end of 1967; a reprint has just brought them. As he put it, he would Mailer. Jackie Kennedy was a friend. been issued by New York Review Books. do for ambition what D. H. Lawrence Those pieces were all book reviews, Trilling was wrong about one thing: had done for sex. He would make the actually, and Commentary was a non- ten years was not enough. case for Mammon. profit monthly, owned by the Ameri- With a couple of exceptions, it wasn’t

ILLUSTRATION BY YANN KEBBI THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 63 the reviews that hurt the most. The one hattan. In Podhoretz’s case, the prom­ also won a Pulitzer scholarship, which in the Times was quite positive; the re­ ised land was a big apartment on West was awarded to graduates of New York viewer, Frederic Raphael, called the End Avenue. He called crossing the public schools and covered the costs of book “frank and honest . . . a warning East River “one of the longest journeys attending Columbia. He entered the and a model.” What hurt the most was in the world,” and he believed, correctly, college at the age of sixteen (commut­ the parties. “Parties,” Podhoretz had ex­ that his story was also, more or less, ing from Brooklyn) and took the re­ plained in the book, “always served as the story of many of the people he quired great­books course, Literature a barometer of the progress of my ca­ hoped would admire the book—peo­ Humanities. “Possessed,” as he explains, reer.” Friends took note, and the invi­ ple like Bell, the Trillings, and the writ­ “by something like total recall and a tations stopped coming. Podhoretz un­ ers and editors at places like Dissent, great gift for intellectual mimicry,” he derwent what amounted to The New Leader, Partisan Re- quickly became a star student in Co­ a ritual shunning. He might view, and The New York Re- lumbia’s famous English Department. as well have worn a scarlet view of Books. What he did There he attached himself to Tril­ “A,” for “ambition.” not imagine was that his ver­ ling, whose major book, “The Liberal The experience was crush­ sion might not be one they Imagination,” came out in 1950, the ing, and he never got over it. wished to be identified with. year Podhoretz graduated. He took “When I talked to Norman, As Thomas Jeffers tells us away from his Columbia education the it was almost as if the whole in a scholarly and sympathetic belief that being a serious literary critic thing had happened yester­ biography, “Norman Podho­ meant holding in contempt the things day afternoon,” a reporter for retz,” published in 2010, Pod­ that belong to Caesar. “It was at Co­ the Times wrote, four years horetz grew up in Browns­ lumbia,” he writes, “that I was intro­ after the book’s publication. “None of ville, a neighborhood of Brooklyn that duced to the ethos—destined to grow the sores had scabbed over.” Four years was then equal parts Italians, Jews, and more and more powerful in the ensu­ after that, Podhoretz still sounded African­Americans recently arrived from ing years—in which success was re­ dazed. “I was raised intellectually to the South. Podhoretz’s parents were im­ placing sex as the major ‘dirty little se­ believe there was something admira­ migrants from Galicia; his father, Ju­ cret’ of the age.” ble in taking risks . . . but the people lius, spoke Yiddish and drove a horse­ Podhoretz was awarded a Kellett, a who raised me, in effect, punished drawn milk truck. Podhoretz went to postgraduate fellowship that, at Co­ me whenever I did what I was raised P.S. 28, where, one day, a teacher asked lumbia, is almost as prestigious as the to do,” he complained to another in­ him what he was doing. “I goink op de Rhodes. John Hollander, who gradu­ terviewer. “I’ve never quite under­ stez,” he explained, and was immedi­ ated from Columbia in the same year, stood why.” ately placed in a remedial­speech class. later said that Podhoretz had had his In 1979, he published a second mem­ His assimilation had begun. eye on the Kellett even as a freshman. oir, “Breaking Ranks,” and devoted sev­ Little Norman was a natural stu­ Podhoretz was amazed by his class­ eral pages to the reception of “Making dent—“everyone knew I was the smart­ mates’ reaction. “It was the first time I It.” In 1999, now retired as the editor est kid in the class,” he says in “Mak­ had ever experienced the poisoning of of Commentary, he published a third ing It”—but he also had an active street success by envy,” he says in “Making It.” memoir, called “Ex­Friends,” and de­ life as a member of a “social athletic He went to Cambridge. He loved it, voted many more pages to the subject. club” (i.e., gang) called the Cherokees, especially the perks that students there “Making It” was the pivotal episode in whose red satin jacket he wore every­ then enjoyed. “There are few things in Podhoretz’s career. where. (In the book, he is boyishly proud the world easier to get used to than hav­ It also appeared at a pivotal moment of this part of his past.) At Brooklyn’s ing lots of space to live in and being in American intellectual life. Intended, Boys High School, where Mailer had called ‘Sir,’ ” he writes. It was at Cam­ naïvely or not, as a celebration of a little­ also been a student, he was plucked out bridge that he sought out Leavis. “Soon magazine world created largely by the by a teacher he calls, in “Making It,” he was inviting me . . . to the indoctri­ children of immigrants, some of whom Mrs. K. Her real name was Mrs. Haft, nation sessions, thinly disguised as tea had, by 1967, risen triumphantly to a and she took on Norman as a Pygma­ parties, which he and his wife Queenie, place at the national table—“Jews were lion project. Her goal was to gentrify a famous critic in her own right, would culturally all the rage in America,” as him sufficiently to win him a scholar­ hold on the lawn of their home every Podhoretz put it in the book—“Mak­ ship to Harvard. One of the best bits Saturday afternoon,” and it was not long ing It” marked a fissure that would never in “Making It” is Podhoretz’s descrip­ before he scored his big Scrutiny assign­ be healed. It was the end of more than tion of Mrs. K’s disastrous attempt to ment. It was to review “The Liberal Podhoretz’s social life. introduce her teen­age protégé to gen­ Imagination.” In his piece, Podhoretz teel manners by taking him to lunch called Trilling “the most significant Amer­ odhoretz told his story as a com­ in a (non­kosher) restaurant in Man­ ican critic now writing.” The “Ameri­ P bination of Exodus and “Saturday hattan, where he is confronted with can” was a judicious sop to Leavis. Night Fever”: gifted youth escapes an some sort of dish involving duck. Podhoretz did some travelling while ethnic cul­de­sac in the outer boroughs Podhoretz did get into Harvard (as he was on the fellowship, and, after a and makes it to cosmopolitan Man­ did Mailer, who went there), but he visit to Israel, he wrote to Trilling to

64 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 report his impressions. “They are, de- of military life and culture in “Making zine writing works—his account in spite their really extraordinary accom- It.”) When he was discharged, in De- “Making It” of what it is like to write plishments, a very unattractive people, cember, 1955, he started working as an a magazine piece, and not only for mag- the Israelis,” he confided. “They’re gra- editor at Commentary. azines like Commentary, is the best that tuitously surly and boorish. . . . They Elliot Cohen was hospitalized with I have ever read—and he was a talented are too arrogant and too anxious to be- severe depression, and the magazine editor. He turned down the seminal come a real honest-to-goodness New was being run by two men referred to document of the New Left, the Port York of the East.” Trilling typed these in “Making It” only as The Boss. In Huron Statement, but he serialized words out and sent them to the editor real life, they were the art critic Clem- Paul Goodman’s “Growing Up Absurd,” of Commentary, Elliot Cohen. Cohen ent Greenberg and his brother Mar- which is now almost unreadable but had another editor, Irving Kristol, con- tin. The Greenbergs belittled and which at the time was received as an tact Podhoretz about writing a piece, abused Podhoretz. He had a hard time important diagnosis of contemporary and the connection was made. managing his resentment, and, by 1958, life. Podhoretz’s own politics were lib- This might not seem the obvious he was out. He got involved in a cou- eral. He loved Kennedy; he opposed the way to recommend a new writer to a ple of short-lived publishing ventures war in Vietnam. He was in synch with magazine published by an organiza- with Epstein that didn’t pay off. The the highbrow readership of the day. tion dedicated to the welfare of Jews, New Yorker had dropped him, without He was invited to be co-editor, with and, in “Making It,” Podhoretz leaves explanation, but he had become known Jason Epstein’s wife, Barbara, of The out the part about his letter to Tril- as a fearless young critic—“I came to New York Review of Books when it was ling. He possibly felt that it suggested be held by some in almost priestly re- launched, in 1963, but he told them the a calculation a shade too subtle. For gard” is his description—and he was salary was too low. (“Thank God,” Bar- in fact, as Benjamin Balint explains able to survive as a freelancer. Then, in bara later said.) He continued to write, in his history of the magazine, “Run- 1959, Cohen committed suicide, and and he was disappointed when critical ning Commentary” (2010), the peo- the A.J.C. offered Podhoretz the job. praise for a collection of his pieces, “Do- ple around Commentary and the A.J.C. ings and Undoings,” published in 1964, in those days were cool to Zionism. riends advised him not to accept, was not unmitigated. “I had been dream- (By the time “Making It” came out, F some of them making disparaging ing that the appearance of the book of course, this had changed.) It is easy remarks about the magazine which he would become the occasion for a gen- to believe that Podhoretz would not unwisely printed, with attribution, in eral proclamation of my appointment have characterized Israeli Jews in quite “Making It.” But Podhoretz had few to the office of ‘leading young critic in those terms if he had not guessed that doubts; this was what he had been America,’ ” he admits in “Making It”; his observations would meet Trilling’s waiting for. “I’m . . . exhilarated by the “instead it became the occasion for sev- preconceptions, and if he had not also possibilities that may now open up for eral people to present me with the first guessed that a bright young diaspora me, and by the power (which is some- installments of the bill for all those glo- Jew comfortable in America and skep- thing you can understand as my high- rious years when everyone had been on tical of Zionism might be just the kind minded friends can’t), and by the money my side.” But the nineteen-sixties was of writer Commentary was looking for. (my income will be more than dou- a boom time for magazines, and Com- If so, he guessed right. His first piece bled),” he wrote to the English novelist mentary thrived. By 1968, its circulation was a review of Bernard C. P. Snow, Balint reports. was up to sixty-four thousand. That Malamud’s novel “The Podhoretz had spent a was the year the bomb went off. Natural.” decade observing the little- Podhoretz had thoughts magazine business; he knew here are two ways to understand about continuing at Cam- what worked and what T the reaction to “Making It.” One bridge for a Ph.D., and even didn’t; and he transformed has to do with the politics (small “p”), went back, but an article Commentary. He fired most and the other has to do with the mer- he submitted to Leavis on of the staff, expanded the its. Politically, Podhoretz did an un- Benjamin Disraeli was re- letters section (which, for fathomably stupid thing. The reason turned with a classic rejec- readers of intellectual jour- that people like Jason Epstein and tion (mentioned, though not nalism, can be as addictive Lionel Trilling argued so strenuously quoted, in “Making It”). “We couldn’t as crossword puzzles or cartoons), against publishing the book—Diana print anything that did so little more stopped publishing poetry, and got rid Trilling reported taking Podhoretz and than a hundred or two readers of Scru- of the remnants of Yiddishkeit. As one his wife out to dinner on a trip to Ber- tiny could do impromptu,” Leavis told contributor put it, he removed the me- lin in 1967 to make one final plea— him. Podhoretz read this, not inaccu- zuzahs from all the doors. He made was not, or not only, that they were rately, as “You don’t belong,” and he re- Commentary what Cohen and the concerned for the reputation of their turned to the United States, where he Greenbergs had tried but failed to make friend and protégé. It was that their was duly drafted. He served two years. it: a magazine for every educated reader, own names appear all through it. (Interestingly, in the light of his later run by Jews. It seems not to have dawned on Pod- views, he is completely contemptuous Podhoretz understood how maga- horetz that he was not only writing

66 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 about himself; he was telling stories about people he worked and socialized with. People do not like to read about themselves in someone else’s book, and this goes double for writers. Writers are control freaks engaged in what is, among other things, a business of self-presentation. If they are in a story, they want to be the ones to tell that story. No one would have understood this better than Podhoretz, but some- how it failed to register when he was showing his book around. Even worse, at the same time that he was confessing to his own ambition, he was implicitly accusing his friends and colleagues of hiding theirs. In the brief acknowledgments section, Pod- horetz thanks Lionel Trilling, who, he says, “has taught me more than he or I ever realized—though not, I fear, pre- cisely what he would have wanted me “Welcome to Mar-a-Lago. Would you like to hear to learn.” This reads pretty clearly as a some classified intel before I take your order?” suggestion that Trilling, too, was a suck-up who wrote literary criticism in the hope of getting invited to a party •• with Jackie Kennedy. You can see why Trilling was not eager for Podhoretz’s cians—there is an implicitly observed the problem of race in the United States, memoir to see the light of day. and tacitly enforced distinction between it is ridiculous. For Podhoretz, though, And not only Trilling. “Making It” what counts as success and what counts as he confesses in “Making It,” the real is a book about what Podhoretz, bor- as selling out. (In no profession does significance of the essay was that, by rowing the term from Murray Kemp- owning an apartment on West End Av- publishing it, he was putting the rep- ton, calls the Family—the writers and enue constitute selling out.) There is a utation he had struggled to achieve on editors, mostly but not exclusively Jew- sociology of intellectual life. Podhoretz’s the line—and his reputation only got ish, who dominated the New York in- mistake was to overgeneralize from his better! (Goodman, however, did tell tellectual scene in the decades after the own experience. him he needed to see a therapist.) He war. It is as their proud product that This is often the flaw in his writ- called the essay “certainly the best piece Podhoretz presents himself, and he ob- ing. His most talked-about early piece, of writing I had ever done.” Something viously hoped to retain the approval of “My Negro Problem––and Ours,” pub- like this was his hope for “Making It”: these people, as he had done so often lished in 1963, an essay about coming that it would be received as “my am- in the past, by daring to write some- to terms with “the hatred I still feel for bition problem—and ours.” thing they were afraid to write. He be- Negroes,” is based entirely on obser- The reaction to the book changed lieved that they would admire his cour- vations of the young African-American Podhoretz’s life. He started looking for age, recognize the justice of his account, men he encountered as a teen-ager on academic positions, and he began drink- forgive any indiscretions he may have the streets of Brooklyn or, later, on the ing when he was at home alone, almost committed, and, freed at last from a sidewalks of the Upper West Side. From a fifth of Jack Daniel’s a day, his step- stifling hypocrisy, embrace him and the these experiences, he is able to con- daughter later told Jeffers. He had a book. Many writers have tried this kind clude that African-Americans are char- contract to write a book on the nine- of thing. It never works. acterized by “superior physical grace teen-sixties—he had hated the Beats, On the merits, the idea that English and beauty . . . They are on the kind and he regarded the counterculture as professors, magazine writers, and intel- of terms with their own bodies that I the legacy of the Beats—and he went lectuals generally are consciously com- should like to be on with mine.” As to Yaddo, the writers’ colony in Sara- peting for various types of worldly rec- usual, the root of the problem is envy. toga Springs, where he had written ognition, and that success in those lines The solution? Intermarriage: “I believe much of “Making It,” to work on it. of work requires some awareness of the that the wholesale merging of the two Writers’ colonies are not where you ide- contours of the playing field, is non- races is the most desirable alternative ally want to be if you have a drinking controversial today. As with members for everyone concerned.” problem. One day, a fellow-colonist, of any profession—rock stars, concert As a personal reflection, “My Negro the critic Kenneth Burke, told Podho- pianists, Olympic athletes, even politi- Problem” is compelling. As a take on retz that he needed to straighten out. So

THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 67 Podhoretz got in his car and drove, a He voted for Jimmy Carter four years sand were more interested in what peo- little under the influence, to a farm- later, but called it “the worst political ple at a magazine with a circulation of house he had bought in Delaware mistake of my life.” Ronald Reagan was twenty thousand were saying about County, and it was there, in the early his political messiah, and he believed Communism than they were in what spring of 1970, that he had a vision. that Commentary had something to do the President of the United States was with his election. “People like us made saying about it. Life with the Family s he told the story to Jeffers, he Reagan’s victory,” he proclaimed in 1983. was like a Thanksgiving dinner from A had finished his writing for the day. By 1990, subscriptions were down to hell. This is why little magazines are He was walking outside, carrying a Mar- twenty-nine thousand, and the maga- little. tini and feeling content, when it hap- zine was obliged to raise money in order In this tiny cosmos, Podhoretz was pened. “I saw physically, in the sky, to keep going. It was legally separated therefore in the awkward position of though it was obviously in my head, a from the A.J.C. in 2007. being reviewed by people he knew in kind of diagram that resembled a fam- Podhoretz developed his own inter- magazines run by people he knew. ily tree. And it was instantly clear to me pretation of the reaction to “Making Two reviews of “Making It” were es- that this diagram contained the secret It”: he decided that he was praising the pecially galling. One was in The New of life and existence and knowledge: pleasures of success in America, and York Review of Books. The reviewer that you start with this, and you follow that his critics were America haters. was Edgar Z. Friedenberg, a sociolo- to that. It all had a logic of intercon- This doesn’t correspond to what most gist, whose piece was not exactly a nectedness.” Not quite Allen Ginsberg’s of the reviewers actually said, but the strike at the jugular; it was mainly fo- “Sunflower Sutra,” but strangely close. book did appear at a politically frac- cussed on sounding dismissive. Pod- The vision lasted thirty seconds, and tious moment, during the height of ag- horetz was annoyed by it because he when it was over Podhoretz realized itation against the war in Vietnam. Al- had reason to believe that he had “dis- what the diagram was telling him: “Ju- though Podhoretz had been an early covered” Friedenberg for Commentary, daism was true.” He did not mean the opponent of the war, he feared and de- and now his own writer was conde- ethical teachings of Judaism; he meant spised the main active ingredient in scending to him in someone else’s Judaic law. He vowed to change his life. the antiwar movement, the New Left. pages. To all appearances, he did. He stopped The New Left was a problem for Podhoretz assumed that Jason Ep- drinking, he began interrogating friends the Family. The Family was Old Left stein was behind that review, and he about their spiritual condition, and he turned liberal anti-Communist. The made sure that Epstein’s (rather good) transformed Commentary again, this New Left was cavalier about Commu- book on the trial of the Chicago Seven, time into the scourge of left-wing per- nism, it was hostile to liberalism, and “The Great Conspiracy Trial,” pub- missivism and progressivism. The mag- it was hugely disrespectful of the en- lished in 1970, was solemnly lacerated azine attacked feminism; it attacked gine of social mobility that had car- in Commentary by a professor at Yale homosexuality; it attacked affirmative ried so many members of the Family Law School. The New York Review be- action. In 1972, Podhoretz wrote a col- out of Egypt, the university. And the came a regular punching bag at Com- umn that effectively announced the identity-based movements that emerged mentary, and Podhoretz and Epstein new editorial policy. Its title was “Is It after 1965—the women’s movement began a feud that was soon made the Good for the Jews?” He did not mean and black separatist movements like subject of a long article in the Times it ironically. It was exactly the mental- the Panthers—seemed to threaten a Magazine and that is not over yet. (Both ity that Cohen and his successors, in- crucial value for diaspora Jews, cosmo- men are still with us. It’s amusing that cluding Podhoretz I, had been trying politanism. After 1965, if you were a the reprint of “Making It” is from the to get away from. white, male, anti-Communist, and in- publishing arm of the Review.) Old friends stopped speaking to tegrationist liberal, Jew or Gentile, Podhoretz had better reason to Podhoretz and old contributors dropped whose side were you on? The question resent the piece that ran in Partisan away. They were replaced by a new split what used to be called the liberal Review. Mailer was the critic. He had stable of hawks and neoconservatives: left, and that political-intellectual co- read some of the manuscript and had Joseph Epstein, Edward Luttwak, alition has never been put back to- told Podhoretz how much he admired Michael Ledeen, William Bennett, El- gether. The fact that the Podhoretzes it, but the piece in Partisan Review was liott Abrams (who married one of stopped being invited to Manhattan a put-down. Most of the reviews had Podhoretz’s stepdaughters). Podhoretz cocktail parties was not the cause of already come out, and Mailer did his adopted a new test of his own impor- the split. But it was a symptom. readers a favor by quoting several of tance: the celebrity of the people he the nastiest. (The New Leader had called was no longer speaking to. “It’s im- he New York intellectual com- the book “a career expressed as a match- portant to have enemies,” he once told T munity Podhoretz grew up in was less 360-page ejaculation,” a phrase Cynthia Ozick, “because everything compulsively internecine. Its members Mailer liked so much he quoted it depends on the kind of enemies you were like cats in a bag. They thrived twice.) He summed the book up as “a have.” (Ozick was a little taken aback.) on—they got off on—the narcissism blunder of self-assertion, self-exposure, In 1972, Podhoretz voted for Rich- of small differences. People at a mag- and self-denigration.” It failed, Mailer ard Nixon in the Presidential election. azine with a circulation of ten thou- said, because it didn’t go far enough.

68 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 Podhoretz had pulled his punches. He should have called out the Family as a BRIEFLY NOTED bunch of second-raters who were ter- rified of being exposed. But he was nice to everyone. How Emotions Are Made, by Lisa Feldman Barrett (Hough- Podhoretz was right to rank this as ton Mifflin Harcourt). Drawing on neuroscience and exper- a betrayal. He had known Mailer since imental psychology to overturn the assumption that emo- 1957, when they met at a party at Lil- tions are innate and universal, this book describes them as lian Hellman’s, and they had been close “goal-based concepts” designed to help us categorize expe- friends. He had stood by Mailer through rience. Emotions, Barrett writes, are learned and shaped by many difficult times. In 1960, after Mailer culture, so “variation is the norm”: “Russian has two distinct stabbed and nearly killed his wife during concepts for what Americans call ‘Anger.’ German has three a party in their apartment, Podhoretz distinct ‘Angers’ and Mandarin has five.” Upbringing has the was one of the first people he sought biggest influence, but we can all reshape our mental makeup out, and he accompanied Mailer to the and learn new concepts. The latter part of the book consid- police station for booking. ers how doing so can affect our health, the law, and our re- Podhoretz had even paid homage to lationship to the natural world. As Barrett frequently repeats, Mailer in the final pages of “Making “You are an architect of your experience.” It.” Mailer had already written a book like “Making It,” Podhoretz admitted; City of Light, City of Poison, by Holly Tucker (Norton). In 1667, this was “Advertisements for Myself.” Louis XIV, hoping to reduce crime in Paris, created a law-en- That book had come out in 1959, when forcement position—the lieutenant general of police—with Mailer was at a low point; it attacked, sweeping powers of surveillance and detention. Tucker’s his- by name and with Mailer’s special gift tory focusses on the first incumbent, Nicolas de la Reynie, for invective, several prominent book who built up a network of informants and discovered more publishers and many of Mailer’s con- than he’d bargained for: an underground world of poisoners, temporaries; and it relaunched Mail- witches, and chiromancers who were linked to a rash of deaths er’s career. Podhoretz called it “one of at Versailles and were plotting against the King. Working the great works of confessional auto- from la Reynie’s extensive notes and reports, Tucker blends biography in American literature,” and an artful reconstruction of seventeenth-century Paris with concluded his book by saying he hoped riveting storytelling, presenting a contest between terror and that “Making It” would be appreciated surveillance that has strong contemporary resonances. as a similarly bold literary act. By 1968, when Mailer wrote his re- The Shadow Land, by Elizabeth Kostova (Ballantine). When view of “Making It,” his career was at Alexandra, a young American writer living in Sofia, happens its peak. He had just finished “The upon an urn of cremated remains, her search to learn about Armies of the Night,” which was pub- the deceased and to find his family engenders an exploration lished in May and which won him his of Bulgaria’s fraught history from the Second World War to first Pulitzer Prize. That book, a nonfic- the present. The novel is both a coming-of-age story and a tion account of Mailer’s participation thriller—Alexandra and a taxi-driving, poetry-writing ex- in an antiwar march in Washington, detective soon find themselves in danger—and the attempt was serialized in two magazines. The to unite various plot and stylistic strands leaves the protag- first half was published in Harper’s, onist’s character amorphous. The book is strongest when the where Mailer’s editor was Midge story of the dead man, a violinist who was a tragic victim of Decter, who happens to be Mrs. Nor- the communist era, takes over. man Podhoretz. The second half was published in Commentary. The Woman on the Stairs, by Bernhard Schlink, translated from Many years later, Mailer was asked the German by Joyce Hackett and Bradley Schmidt (Pantheon). why he had turned on his friend. He At the heart of this terse novel is a love rectangle, decades in said that he thought that the rest of the the past: a businessman commissioned a portrait of his wife, book didn’t live up to the promise of Irene; she left him for the artist; the narrator, a lawyer called the pages he had read in manuscript. in to settle a dispute over the painting, fell for Irene, too; then Then why hadn’t he recused himself? both she and the painting disappeared. Forty years later, a The reason, Mailer said, was that he chance glimpse of the picture in a gallery on the other side was angry at Podhoretz for not invit- of the world leads to a series of reunions and examinations ing him to a party that Jackie Kennedy of male possessiveness. Tellingly, it is Irene’s story that saves was expected to attend. Not the class- things from lapsing into aimless retrospect. Rejecting the iest excuse, but at least the punishment roles of trophy, muse, and damsel in distress, she refuses to fit the crime.  accept that a woman “belongs in the hands of some man.”

THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 69 On the other hand, he compensated A CRITIC AT LARGE for the modest tally of his films by in- suring that pretty much every one is a gem. String them together, and you KEEPING COOL end up with a necklace to die for—a necklace, let us say, like the one in “Bob Jean-Pierre Melville’s cinema of resistance. le Flambeur” (1955) that a croupier named Jean (Claude Cerval)lays proudly BY ANTHONY LANE on the pillow of his wife, whom he is striving to please. She immediately asks where he got the money to buy it. We don’t see the conversation that ensues, but we don’t need to, because we know what will happen. In Melville country, all slopes are slippery, some of them fatally so. The safe at the Deauville casino, where Jean plies his trade, is rumored to contain eight hundred million francs, and a heist is in the offing. He is the inside man, who is paid in advance for his troubles, only to blow his money on the trinket. A classic error, this: the minor gesture, often well meant, that gives the game away. Thus, in “Army of Shad- ows” (1969), set during the wartime struggles of the French Resistance, the heroine is serenely efficient, fearless, and discreet, save for one tiny weakness. In her handbag, against the advice of a comrade, she carries a picture of her daughter. When the Gestapo arrest her, they find it and use it, promising to send the daughter to a brothel on the East- ern Front unless her mother complies with their demands. Such is the price of love. One thing to know about Melville is that he was not Melville. He was some- body else. No wonder camouflage came his is how you should attend the tennial jamboree starts on April 28th so naturally. He was born Jean-Pierre T forthcoming retrospective of Jean- and ends on May 11th, followed by a Grumbach, in Paris, to a Jewish family Pierre Melville movies at Film Forum: weeklong run of “Léon Morin, Priest” from Alsace. Early on, he adopted his Tell nobody what you are doing. Even (1961), starring Jean-Paul Belmondo in nom de plume, or what became his nom your loved ones—especially your loved the title role. (Thanks to Godard’s de caméra, because of what he called ones—must be kept in the dark. If it “Breathless,” released the year before, “pure admiration and a desire to iden- comes to a choice between smoking and Belmondo was at the time the coolest tify myself with an author, an artist, who talking, smoke. Dress well but without Frenchman alive, so what did Melville meant more to me than any other.” That ostentation. Wear a raincoat, buttoned do? Put him in a dog collar and a black would be the creator of “Moby-Dick,” and belted, regardless of whether there soutane.) In all, the festival, which after although it was another Melville novel is rain. Any revolver should be kept, New York will travel to other cities, com- that triggered the awe of his French until you need it, in the pocket of the prises twelve features and one short. namesake, who described “Pierre: or coat. Finally, before you leave home, put Only a single work is missing, a rarity The Ambiguities,” published in 1852, as your hat on. If you don’t have a hat, you entitled “Magnet of Doom” (1963). “a book which left its mark on me for can’t go. Melville was far from prolific, and ever.” The peculiar title, you feel, could Melville was born almost a hundred his death, from a heart attack, in 1973, have been dreamed up by either man. years ago, on October 20, 1917. The cen- came too soon; he was only fifty-five. Melville was given his first movie camera, a simple hand-cranked machine, In Melville films starring Alain Delon, cops and robbers feel interchangeable. at the age of six or seven, although the

70 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 ILLUSTRATION BY MALIKA FAVRE obsession that colonized his childhood of cinema, and with good cause, Mel- was not making films but watching ville is the laureate of mistrust: them. They crowded his nights no less than his days; he remembered—or Why do you think I have chosen solitude? Commerce with men is a dangerous business. chose to remember—going to the cin- The only way I have found to avoid being be- ema at nine in the morning and not trayed is to live alone. emerging until 3 A.M. As a teen-ager, he ran with a loutish He said that in an interview in 1971. It gang, before military service intervened. was as though the war had never ended. He was conscripted into the Army in In the same vein, he added, “What is October, 1937, and was still there at the friendship? It’s telephoning a friend at start of the war. In 1940, he was evacu- night to say, ‘Be a pal, get your gun, and ated to England from Dunkirk; return- come on over quickly.’ ” It is? ing to France, he joined the Resistance Melville’s singular habits extended in the South. Details remain hazy, but to his professional career—not easy, we know that he served with the Free when the profession in question calls French forces, first in North Africa and for a cast, a crew, and the difficult rais- later in the campaigns to liberate Italy ing of funds. After being demobilized, and France. Now and then, in inter- in October, 1945, he founded his own views, bright recollections suddenly production company the following break through the haze: month, in part because the technicians’ union, which was overwhelmingly Com- On 11 March 1944, at five o’clock in the morning to be precise, I crossed the Garigli- munist, would not give him a union ano below Cassino. With the first wave. At card. Hence, in “Le Silence de la Mer,” San Apollinare we were filmed by a camera- the grandeur of the opening logo: “mel- man from the U.S. Cinematograph Service. I ville Productions.” Two years later, he even remember acting up when I realized we had his own studios built, on a dour were being filmed. There were still Germans at one end of the village, and Naples radio was Paris street, with two sound stages, two playing Harry James’s “Trumpet Rhapsody.” editing rooms, a wardrobe room, and a screening room. He gradually became, There speaks a man who is deter- to use his own term, “opocentric,” con- mined, and even destined, to make mov- vinced that everything should revolve ies. The scene feels at once authentic— around his work, and that “undue dis- we have little reason to doubt the order in one’s daily life excludes all pos- accuracy of his report—and somehow sibility of creativity.” He lived above the staged. It even gets its own soundtrack. studios, with a woman named Florence Melville later described his experiences Welsh, whom he married in 1952 and of the Second World War as awful, stayed with until his death. They had horrible, and marvellous, and discov- no children and three cats. ered a surprising nostalgia for the pe- The first thing we see in “Le Silence riod, as if its intensity were a legacy on de la Mer” is a man walking along a which he could continue to draw. A sunny street. He carries a suitcase, which movie director, he said, should be “con- he puts down beside another man, be- stantly open, constantly traumatizable,” fore moving on. No word is exchanged. and he made three films on the trauma Could these be smugglers, or spies? The of Occupied France: “Le Silence de la second man opens the case, at the bot- Mer” (1949), “Léon Morin, Priest,” and tom of which, under a layer of clothing, “Army of Shadows.” Yet that is not the he finds a book, “Le Silence de la Mer,” end of the affair. Although most of his by Vercors—the contraband wartime works are tales of private crime, inter- novel that Melville has adapted for the necine rather than international, and screen. We are watching the opening set in postwar France, there is almost credits. How stylish can you get? Such no corner of them that is not illumi- is the start of Melville’s first feature film, nated by what he saw and heard when and already his touch is sure. his country was ruled by oppression, Most of the movie takes place in the and when ordinary people were forced home of an elderly man and his niece, to decide what, or whom, they would in rural France. A German officer is bil- obey—and, in some instances, to keep leted with them. He turns out to be a cul- their decision a secret. In the roll call tivated fellow and an ardent Francophile;

THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 71 resent a crisis (as Samuel Beckett, who also dwelled in Occupied France, knew well), where does that leave the moral virtue of patience, or the dramatic virtue of suspense? No director, save Hitch- cock, delved further than Melville into these anxieties; moreover, unlike Hitch- cock, he had witnessed their effects on the world around him, in an era of pro- found risk, and that is why his best films are timed with a precision that verges on the excruciating. He is not playing games with us. He is putting us through the mill. Anybody with a heart murmur should probably consult a cardiologist before heading to Film Forum. Melville re- quires nerve. The tick of the grand- father clock in the peaceful parlor of “Le Silence de la Mer” is echoed, twenty years later, in “Army of Shadows,” when Gerbier—a leading light in the shad- ows of the Resistance, played by the matchless Lino Ventura—is taken to “Our boycotts are saving us a ton of money.” Gestapo headquarters, in what used to be a luxury hotel. He and another suspect sit in an antechamber, off a •• hallway, with a German guard standing nearby. We hear the clock. We know every evening, he stands and talks to the widow and the combative priest that this is Gerbier’s last chance; the mo- them, as they sit in front of the fire, (Belmondo), which feels as fraught as ment must be seized, but not quite yet. about his interests, his past, and his hopes any gun-toting standoff in one of the Wait and see. The ticking grows louder. for civilization. The old man smokes his director’s later thrillers. Even if you know Gerbier gets to his feet, politely requests pipe, the young woman sews, and they and love this masterly movie—the first a cigarette, pulls a knife from the guard’s say nothing—not until the final min- and last occasion, for Melville, in which belt, stabs him in the throat, lowers him utes, when, in a seraphic closeup, she a female character takes center stage— to the floor, and runs through the doors utters one word of farewell. Ingmar seek it out afresh at Film Forum, where and away. The camera, hitherto so calm, Bergman constructs a similar plight in eleven minutes of additional footage picks up speed, travelling beside him “Persona” (1966), where a nurse chatters have been restored, most of it overtly down the avenue, under falling snow. helplessly, as if filling a void, to her pa- concerned with the ethical agonies of The movie was not popular in some tient, who stays mute, but for Bergman occupation. Should Barny tip off a friend quarters of France. There were accusa- the clash—the waves of speech beating who has been targeted for summary jus- tions that it was a Gaullist work of art, against a rock—is psychological, whereas tice by the Resistance? Or risk her neck leaning rightward—hardly a badge of the old man and his niece, like their by going to collect ration cards for a honor in the late nineteen-sixties. It’s homeland, are under siege. Silence is family on the run? “I never answer when true that General de Gaulle, or an actor their resistance. the doorbell rings. It could be the Ge- resembling him, appears briefly during Things are noisier and busier in stapo,” she tells Morin. He answers, “It a strange interlude, mid-film, when Ger- “Léon Morin, Priest,” which twitches could also be someone who needs you.” bier goes to London, but then de Gaulle with the feuds and the frictions, great What has to be borne in mind, under was the leader of what he considered to and small, that beset a French provin- such conditions, is that the plainest ac- be the legitimate French government cial town during the war. At one point, tion, or a preference for inaction, can in exile. In the course of Gerbier’s trip, the graceful heroine, Barny (Emmanu- brim with political intent. Those French he watches “Gone with the Wind”—as elle Riva), slaps an office colleague who who neither struck back at the invad- did Melville, when he was in London is said to be consorting with the enemy. ing Germans nor entered into official on leave, in 1943. In fact, he saw twenty- Barny has a young daughter; the father, collaboration with them were said to seven films in one week. In a shirtmak- now deceased, was Jewish, so a baptism be practicing attentisme—a policy of er’s shop, a few days after gazing at Rhett must be hastily arranged, if the child is wait and see, exemplified by Marshal and Scarlett, he encountered Clark to stay safe. From here, we enter into Pétain in the early stages of the Vichy Gable in person, “whom I recognized an extraordinary spiritual joust between government. If mere waiting can rep- by the sound of his voice before I saw

72 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 him and he flashed his teeth at me in a “This Gun for Hire,”or Humphrey Bo- up the odds or joining in. Open a closet smile.” Melville was not a Gaullist, or a gart in “Casablanca,” both from 1942, door in his apartment and you find a Communist, or a believer in God. He did or Robert Mitchum in “Out of the slot machine, for his personal use. Like own up to being an “anarcho-feudalist,” Past” (1947). A cynic would say that the Dracula, he sleeps by day and comes whatever that may be. But he was a Frenchman is no more than a faded alive at night, craving the blood of a bet. cinéaste. That was faith enough. simulacrum of his English-speaking That is why the movie begins in the forebears, and that would be true if the ravishing sorrow of dawn, in Montmar- ne way to take stock of Melville only evidence were a sheaf of stills. Fol- tre and Pigalle, with the street lamps O is to watch him act. Spooky and low Jef on the move, however, as he going off; the cinematography, gray on unhurried, with dark sleepless rings crisscrosses Paris on the Métro, with the gray, was by Henri Decae, who, in ad- around his low-lidded eyes, he could be law on his tail, and you soon understand dition to his films for Melville, also shot the chubby offspring of Buster Keaton. how far he has strayed from the land of Louis Malle’s “Lift to the Scaffold” He appeared a few times onscreen, and the free. Neither the snarl of Bogart’s (1958) and François Truffaut’s “The 400 you catch a glimpse of him in the din- disappointed romantic nor Mitchum’s Blows” (1959), a crest of the French Nou- ing car of a train, in his second film, amused languor leave any trace on the velle Vague. Melville is sometimes ac- “Les Enfants Terribles” (1950), with Jean boulevards or in the subway cars. The claimed as a godfather of that move- Cocteau, whose novel, about the near- recent history of France had taught Mel- ment, but he came to spurn the honor, incestuous rapport of a brother and sis- ville a lesson—that existence is treach- and you can see why. Despite all the ter, was the superheated source of the erous—and not for a moment will he mirrors, his movies lack the self-reflect- movie. Nine years later, Melville as- allow his hero to forget it. ing air and the glancing wit of the New signed himself a far weightier role, as a In the opening shot, Jef is laid out Wave, and they move with a classical journalist, in “Two Men in Manhattan,” on a bed, at one side of the frame, like intent, wary of anything but the most his billet-doux to New York, complete the dreaming St. Ursula in Carpaccio’s mournful jest. Melville had to be his with a suitably blowsy score. The film famous painting from 1495. The only own man. Nevertheless, we should trea- made explicit a debt to America—or, at difference is that the blessed saint is sure his cameo in “Breathless,” as an au- least, to a vision of America that had not enjoying a slow Gitane. Eventu- thor named Parvulesco, who meets the possessed Melville since his childhood ally, Jef rises from his restful pose to press in dark glasses. When asked, “What’s days of moviegoing, in Paris. He liked don his coat and gray hat, standing be- your greatest ambition in life?,” he takes barge-size American automobiles, and fore the mirror and running his fingers off his shades and responds, “To become regularly wore a Stetson. around the front of the brim to insure immortal, and then die.” Such habits were not to be construed that he looks sharp. This is not vanity; So far, the plan is going pretty well. as affectation. Melville was immune to the sharpness is like a blade—a guar- Melville’s stoical films, from first to last, the idle whim. He was convinced that antee that his presence, and his skills, look like his and nobody else’s; he re- you had to be madly in love with mov- will slice into his environment at the mains, in his own phrase, “the same man ies, and cheerfully burdened by “a huge most acute and most profitable angle. with the same colors on his palette.” To cinematic baggage,” in order to make Jef is an assassin for hire, and he has a that extent, he fulfills one criterion of movies of your own. Thus, he could brag man to waste today. what it means, by New Wave standards, that the cop’s office, where the long in- Most of Melville’s leading men, and to be an auteur. Not that his style is in- terrogation scene in “Le Doulos” (1961) not just the murderers, take time out imitable. On the contrary, he has fervid unfolds, is “an exact copy of the office to check themselves in a mirror. The fans and emulators, as Quentin Taran- Rouben Mamoulian had built for ‘City hoodlum at the heart of “Le Doulos” tino’s “Reservoir Dogs” can attest. But Streets’ and which he copied from the does so just before he dies, confront- Melville’s style is at one with his sub- New York police headquarters.” In other ing his image one last time and cor- stance—hard, cold, illusionless, yet pre- words, a real room became a room in one recting the tilt of his hat, which slips sented with such panache that, against movie, made in 1931, which became an off and rolls away as he subsides to the all expectation, it breeds joy. The pros- identical room in another movie, thirty floor. Most dapper of all is the won- pect of a retrospective would doubtless years later. Why not just build a room? derful Bob Montagné (Roger Du- gratify him, although the skeptic in him If you insist on getting your dose of chesne), the older but spry-hearted gent would be astounded: life filtered through cinema screens, or who strolls through “Bob le Flambeur.” I don’t know what will be left of me fifty strained through the pages of books, how He, too, pauses at the looking glass, to years from now. I suspect that all films will much life are you actually consuming? gauge the immaculate sweep of his sil- have aged terribly and that the cinema prob- Take the case of Alain Delon, sa- ver hair. He opens a drawer and hesi- ably won’t even exist any more. I estimate the tanically handsome, who stars in “Le tates, reluctant to choose between a final disappearance of cinemas as taking place around the year 2020, so in fifty years’ time Samouraï” (1967), “Le Cercle Rouge” crisply laundered white handkerchief, there will be nothing but television. (1970), and “Un Flic” (1972), a trio of for his breast pocket, and a revolver—a late Melville dramas in which cops and handy tool, since Bob is off to a rob- You have been warned. The enemy robbers feel almost interchangeable. bery. He takes the handkerchief. is closing in. Resisters, rise up! To Film In the first film, he plays Jef Costello, A flambeur is a gambler, and Bob Forum, on West Houston Street! Be a dressed and armed like Alan Ladd in cannot pass by a game without sizing pal, get your gun, and go. 

THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 73 the same year Eazy-E released “Boyz- POP MUSIC n-the-Hood,” which, for many people, came to define the city. While in high school, he began recording mixtapes, LEGACY MEDIA which caught the attention of a local manager named Anthony (Top Dawg) Kendrick Lamar’s sense of debt to those who came before. Tiffith. In 2012, Lamar put out his major-label début, “good kid, m.A.A.d. BY HUA HSU city.” It was loosely structured around a seemingly average day from his teens: seeing about a girl, testing his parents’ patience, hanging out with friends and imagining that they are inside the reck- less lyrics of a Young Jeezy song. What made the album powerful was its ac- knowledgment of life’s precariousness, an awareness that arrives in the course of the day, as someone close to him is shot and Lamar begins rethinking his faith. (He is a devout Christian.) The success of “good kid” helped in- spire “To Pimp a Butterfly,” released three years later. The songs on that album com- municated Lamar’s ambivalence about his sudden fame, particularly at a mo- ment when the nascent Black Lives Mat- ter movement was casting light on all the young people, growing up just as he had, who would never see their twenties. He wanted to stay grounded, and not to sell out, and he explored this desire by making dark, adventurous music steeped in seventies funk and spaced-out jazz. It’s not that he spurned the mainstream. His have sold well, and he’s con- tributed verses to hit songs by Taylor Swift and Maroon 5. But these simple, tidy guest appearances underscore how much attention he pours into the care- fully rendered characters, symbols, and t some point during 2015, Ken- Los Angeles and the Bay Area, aston- places that populate his own albums. A drick Lamar came to seem like much ishing all who see him, until a cop brings On April 14th, Lamar released more than a rapper. One of his best songs, him down. At the BET Awards, he per- “DAMN.” It’s filled with contradictions, “Alright,” was adopted by the Black Lives formed the song on the roof of a van- seesawing between supreme needs and Matter movement as an informal an- dalized police car. At the 2016 Gram- animal wants, heroism and self-loathing, them; sing-alongs erupted at rallies and mys, he began his performance as part loose thrills and the possibility of eter- protests across the country. “Alright” of a chain gang. His verses felt like pro- nal damnation. The songs are at odds somehow manages to sound carefree yet nouncements, the words rushing out as with one another: “LOVE.” is an ode to urgent, like a radio jingle perforated by though he had been tasked with convey- trust and commitment, backed by ma- drum fills. “We been hurt, been down ing an entire community’s joys and sor- jestic, gliding synths; “LUST.” is rash and before,” Lamar raps, preaching about the rows. It has become commonplace for hellish, as Lamar, over a drum loop played glory inherent in struggle. “We gon’ be hip-hop’s biggest artists to see them- backward, raps about seeking the quick alright.” He sounded like a prophet, ca- selves as globalist curators, absorbing and affirmation that comes from being de- pable of articulating what people in the spreading new sounds. But Lamar’s cir- sired. “ELEMENT.” is Lamar at his most streets desired but couldn’t put into words. cle seems only to grow smaller, his music effortless and cocky, peering down from Lamar appeared to embrace the role. indebted to those who came before. on high; it’s followed by “FEEL.,” which In the video for “Alright,” he soars over Lamar was born in Compton in 1987, finds him nursing a chip on his shoul- der, mind racing toward the conclusion On “DAMN.,” he’s drawn to the idea of being judged by what we leave behind. that his insecurities may never fade. He

74 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 ILLUSTRATION BY KRISTIAN HAMMERSTAD begins recognizing his own sense of meg- these lyrics, hoping I can make amend,” alomaniacal paranoia: “I feel like this he raps, over Steve Lacy’s slowed-down, gotta be the feelin’ what Pac was / The jingle-jangle guitar, on “PRIDE.” feelin’ of an apocalypse happenin’.” “DAMN.” ends with “DUCKWORTH.,” a The phrase “What happens on Earth song about faith and the possibility of stays on Earth” is repeated on a few karma, a reminder that every decision songs—a reminder of something greater, matters. It recounts the story of Anthony, beyond this existence. Throughout a gangster from Nickerson Gardens, a “DAMN.,” Lamar wonders if it is nature public-housing complex in Watts. Over or nurture that determines who he is. “I a loping beat by 9th Wonder, Lamar de- got power, poison, pain, and joy inside scribes Anthony as a good-natured kid my DNA,” he raps. The question be- who grew up too fast, whose family his- comes whether that means his fate is tory of “pimpin’ and bangin’ ” instilled in preordained by virtue of his blood, his him a very narrow vision of the good life. faith, or his skin color. His crossroads seems minor: he is think- The considerable pressure put on ing about whether to rob the local KFC, Lamar has been unfair, and “DAMN.” re- when a worker there named Ducky starts jects the notion that he has all the an- sliding him extra chicken and biscuits, swers. Still, within hours of its release, hoping to get on his good side. there were theories, which proved to be Anthony is Top Dawg Tiffith, La- untrue, that on the first track Lamar rep- mar’s manager. Ducky is Kenny Duck- resents his death, and that a follow-up worth, Lamar’s father. As the story comes album, in which he is resurrected, would into focus, in the final seconds of “DAMN.,” come out on Easter Sunday. It feels like so much of what has preceded this chance a relief when the renowned New York encounter begins to take on a new signifi- d.j. Kid Capri, a voice from a different cance. Suddenly, the references through- era, pops up between tracks to play the out the album to an entire people being role of the hype man, as though to re- “cursed,” trapped in situations beyond mind you that what you are listening to their grasp, gain in resonance. “I’ll prolly is still hip-hop, not holy scripture. die anonymous / I’ll prolly die with prom- ises,” he had rapped on “FEAR.” eligion is often invoked in hip- “DUCKWORTH.” is the sound of turn- R hop in a metaphorical way, a method ing back these fates. Anthony takes of dramatizing one’s struggles against Ducky’s kindness to heart and decides temptation or judgment. Two of last year’s to spare him. “That one decision changed most acclaimed releases, Kanye West’s both of they lives / One curse at a time,” “The Life of Pablo” and Chance the Rap- Lamar raps, some twenty years later, of per’s “Coloring Book,” turned spiritual- Anthony and Ducky’s reunion in the re- ity into a kind of gilt-edged aesthetic. cording studio. Their anonymous lives Those artists’ songs were radiant and eu- have been made monumental. Their ev- phoric; you wanted to see the light that eryday choices led to magnificent con- they saw. sequences: “Because if Anthony killed Until “GOD.,” the album’s penultimate Ducky / Top Dawg could be servin’ track, Lamar’s version of faith feels heavy- life / While I grew up without a father handed and wearying: far from the mega- and die in a gunfight.” church’s spotlit pulpit, he’s more like a The track ends with a gunshot and street-corner preacher whom people go then the sound of a record getting spun out of their way to avoid. God is invoked back, as if Lamar were speaking in not merely to lend texture to his tri- tongues. Or maybe it’s a moment of pro- umphs. Lamar’s faith reminds him of found, almost divine hope that he can the possibility of judgment, of an turn back time. The record rewinds all old-fashioned belief in the discrete cat- the way to “BLOOD.,” the first song, pick- egories of good and bad. Where others ing up just after the opening words, which might simply bow to self-contradiction begin to resound with possibility: “Is it as inevitable, Lamar remains drawn to wickedness? Is it weakness? / You de- the idea that we will be judged by the cide / Are we gonna live or die?” There path we walk, and by the work we leave are the choices we inherit, which may behind. “I don’t love people enough to not be choices at all, and there is the path put my faith in men / I put my faith in that we make by walking. 

THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 75 an injustice this is but how ordinary, how ON TELEVISION useless it is to even resist. “It’s all set up so that the people at the top don’t get dirty,” he adds, shrugging. FIELD NOTES The theme is human trafficking, but that term is insufficient; as the show repeat- The disciplined power of “American Crime.” edly demonstrates, this is modern slav- ery, camouflaged as labor and protected BY EMILY NUSSBAUM by the illusion of democracy, its repercus- sions disguised even to those who enforce it. “I know, this can be depressing,” a so- cial worker named Kimara (Regina King) says, as she solicits a donation from Clair (a layered Lili Taylor). They’re at a fancy benefit for an anti- human-trafficking organization, bonding on a beautiful night. Kimara is black, unhappily single, a debt-ridden do-gooder who longs for a child; Clair is white, miserably mar- ried, a late-in-life mom who opted out. The women have plenty in common, too, including infertility—although only one of them can afford I.V.F. But, even as Clair writes a generous check, she’s in denial about her exploitation of her own nanny, an immigrant whose passport is locked up in Clair’s safe. Along with Kimara and Clair, the characters include Shae (Ana Mulvoy- Ten), a pregnant teen prostitute; Coy (Connor Jessup), a white junkie enlisted to work on the largely Latino farm; Luis (Benito Martinez), a Mexican father searching for his lost son; Jeanette, a newly radicalized wealthy woman (Felicity Huffman, exceptional in every season of the show), who is the wife of one of the farm owners and the sister of a recover- ing addict; and the remarkable Mick- aëlle X. Bizet, as the French-speaking an a humorless show be great? cast members in fresh roles. Season 3 is Haitian nanny, Gabrielle, who enters C My bias has long been that truly set in North Carolina, in our era of stag- halfway through the season, then steals ambitious dramas are also funny, how- nant wages and opiate addiction, starved every episode she’s in. ever submerged or black their jokes. social services and skewed law enforce- At base, the show is about exposing And yet John Ridley’s “American Crime,” ment. It begins on a sprawling tomato systems of false choices: Shae shuttles on ABC, which is currently ending its farm, staffed by migrant workers who from an abusive family to a pimp, then third season (and likely its last, given sleep in firetraps, neglected by the fam- to a state-imposed Christian shelter and the ratings), breaks that rule and is still ily that owns the business. But the show to Webcam porn, but each option is a a keeper. An astringent outlier in a dizzy keeps stepping off into grim motel rooms, trap. On the farm, getting a promotion age, it has none of the ironic pop songs drug-testing offices, an abortion clinic, a means tricking recruits into debt, then and retro homages that dominate so many dorm-like house filled with runaway teens, beating them into productivity. But what modern cable dramas. It’s serious in an and these isolated locations slowly form really makes “American Crime” pay off old-fashioned sense: sincere, thoughtful, a constellation. “People die all the time is its own stark system: even as we get and heartbreaking. on that farm. Nobody cares,” one minor helplessly attached to certain characters, Like several other recent series, “Amer- character explains, exasperated, during a their stories end, often violently, and the ican Crime” uses an anthology structure: police interrogation. “Women get raped, show coolly moves on. The series never each season tells a separate story, with the regular.” His aim isn’t to point out what buys into the comforting fantasy that ex- ceptional people can escape bad odds For all its wrenching subject matter, the show doesn’t feel like homework. through decency or grit just because we’re

76 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 ILLUSTRATION BY CHRIS GASH watching. Instead, it tucks their unhappy It’s fascinating, relevant material, framed endings in where they belong, at the mid- with urbane glamour. But, unlike “Amer- dle of another story, as part of a bigger ican Crime,” “Guerrilla” too often feels picture. as if it were cornering us at a party, mut- Along the way, the show makes un- tering about hegemony. Despite a strong expected leaps of sympathy: the rich wives, cast, which includes Freida Pinto and who could be cartoons, turn out to have Idris Elba, its rebels are mostly ciphers. made bad economic gambles of their own. There’s a great deal to admire here, in Even Clair’s bitter husband (Timothy theory. Certainly, the show doesn’t do Hutton) gets to state his case, as he bonds much spoon-feeding—it delves deeply with another business owner over their into the characters’ alliances with Ger- resentment at being breadwinners. “We man Marxists and Québécois separat- don’t get a hashtag,” he gripes. But it’s the ists; it shows police torture, graphically. more marginalized, inarticulate charac- But it verges on being unwatchably glum. ters—whose lives rarely take center stage The same editing decisions that enliven on TV—that linger, their struggles com- “American Crime”—the mini flashback, posed of ugly anecdotes that might fuel the rigorous use of silence—become tics an exposé in Mother Jones. (At times, the in “Guerrilla.” Why does one show suc- journalistic hyperlinks feel deliberate: a ceed and the other fail? It’s hard to say, line about the “green motel” of sexual but this may be a case in which an art- abuse in the fields prompted me to Goo- ist, sublimating his vision to a network, gle the topic.) The show’s style isn’t re- produced something less pure but finally alism; in daily life, social workers tell mor- more effective than his passion project. bid jokes. But, for all its theatricality, the And, for all its wrenching subject mat- series isn’t agitprop, either. It’s full of un- ter, “American Crime” doesn’t feel like expected angles, more like gazing into a homework. (It’s glum, too, but watchably prism than like reading a manifesto. so.) At its best, it’s a stark fairy tale about Some of this is due to the strong en- how power can disguise itself. Gabrielle’s semble, but it’s also the result of a set of story, in particular, is a smartly told fable distinctive, stylized directorial choices. about the false intimacy of domestic labor. There’s almost no music. Many scenes When Gabrielle meets Clair, at the air- are shot from a distance. In one, Coy gets port, her new position seems like a dream beaten up in the deep background, but job. She’s shown a lovely bedroom and the camera blurs the violence, focussing one small child, to whom she will speak instead on two unmoving observers who only French. But what she can’t know is stand in the foreground. Then another that Clair’s marriage is on the rocks— character—a man we know to be brave and that, as the marriage worsens, finan- and heroic—walks into the frame, sees cially and emotionally, the rules will what’s happening, and, ignoring the crime, tighten. Soon, Gabrielle needs permis- turns toward us and walks past the cam- sion to eat in the kitchen. Her things are era, back into his own story. There are moved into a closet, so that Clair can have other gambits of this type, bold but un- an office. Yet Clair keeps telling Gabri- flashy trademarks: monologues that flicker elle that she’s family, urging her to share with small cuts, like quick blackouts, or her traumatic past. By the time that Ga- a mini flashback. This chronological brielle spins out, and tries to break into shuffling is gently disorienting, forcing the safe, we know she’s doomed: there’s the viewer into a small seizure of empa- already an archetypal story, about an un- thy, a taste of lost control. stable immigrant worker, that she has un- knowingly stepped into. “Mon passeport here’s a risk to this sort of solem- est dans la maison,” she tries to explain, in T nity—and Ridley’s other new show, the back of a police car. “You would never “Guerrilla,” on Showtime, demonstrates know she was hiding all these dark things,” it. A six-episode miniseries about the Clair says in wonder. And when the cops British Black Power movement in the leave, Clair’s husband snarls at her, “You nineteen-seventies, the series is centered brought that into this house . . . that crazy on an internal debate among radicals woman.” It’s Gabrielle’s tragedy, but Clair about how best to fight a hideously rac- and her husband see themselves as the ist, anti-immigrant government. (Fight victims. Their sense of innocence is the violence with violence? If so, what kind?) world’s default setting. 

THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 77 prizes culture instead of punishing it. At MUSICAL EVENTS a pre-concert talk, the musicologist Árni Heimir Ingólfsson said, “Iceland won its independence from Denmark only in NORDIC FIRE 1944, and, like so many young countries, it has legitimized itself through culture.” The Los Angeles Philharmonic celebrates the music of Iceland. Because so many Icelanders have stud- ied singing or learned to play an instru- BY ALEX ROSS ment, classical music has a less isolated position in their society. It was no stretch for the L.A. Phil to reach out to Björk and members of the bands Sigur Rós and Múm, who already knew most of the principals on the classical side. Sigur Rós performed in three programs, with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the L.A. Phil providing accompaniment. Before the band took the stage, the orchestra played on its own. No pop idol will ever rock as granit- ically hard as Jón Leifs, with whom the modern history of Icelandic music be- gins. On the final night of the orchestral series, the convulsive dissonances of Leifs’s Organ Concerto, completed in 1930, star- tled a hall full of Sigur Rós fans. Leifs was a visionary musical thinker who tried to capture volcanoes, geysers, and Norse gods in sound, and largely succeeded. He was also an irascible curmudgeon who entertained theories of Aryan suprem- acy. He lived in Germany for most of the Nazi period, his career hampered by his brazen modernist tendencies and by his marriage to Annie Riethof, a German Jewish pianist. A performance of the Organ Concerto in 1941, in Berlin, led to mass walkouts and denunciations in the press. Somehow, he and Riethof sur- on for son, dóttir for dóttir, Iceland of a hovering mass of multicolored hair vived, escaping to Sweden in 1944. S may be the most musical nation on extensions, occupied one of Disney’s lobby The concerto not only unleashes earth. It has a population of three hun- spaces, setting a characteristic Icelandic spectacular sounds—screaming organ- dred and thirty-two thousand—about tone of epic whimsy. And the country’s and-brass chords at the outset; ritual the same as that of Corpus Christi, preëminent musical figure had not yet hammer blows on the timpani, bass Texas—and an international musical pres- arrived: in a postlude to the festival, Björk drum, and tam-tam—but also possesses ence that is out of all proportion to its will perform at Disney at the end of May. an intricate structure, in the form of size. In April, the Los Angeles Philhar- The explanation for the Icelandic thirty variations on a passacaglia theme monic hosted the Reykjavík Festival, music surge is difficult to pin down, but of dour folkish character. There are prob- which sprawled across eight days of pro- it may have to do with the persistence lems of balance: at the L.A. Phil, one gramming. There were around fifty mu- of a communal, close-knit culture, which saw the strings more than one heard sical compositions, six nonclassical groups, resists reducing music to a faceless dig- them. The finale is protracted to the and nearly a hundred and fifty Icelandic ital utility. The country has some two point of exhaustion, as the music hits a participants. The corridors of Disney Hall hundred choirs, nearly a hundred music climactic wall and then runs into it again were blonder than usual. Local hotel re- schools, a world-class orchestra (the Ice- and again. Yet Leifs’s maniacal over- ceptionists contended with names con- land Symphony), and an unknown num- emphasis is integral to his work’s aes- taining þ and ð. A huge installation by ber of bands. Much of this activity is thetic, which might be described as one the Icelandic artist Shoplifter, consisting supported by the government, which of sublime derangement. The English organist James McVinnie conquered Icelandic composers are united by a feeling for landscape. the daredevil solo part, and the ever

78 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 ILLUSTRATION BY RUI TENREIRO more masterly Salonen—who, earlier old composer and conductor Daníel of a-cappella pieces, including Leifs’s in the month, led the L.A. Phil in what Bjarnason, who also served as the festi- Requiem, which is as spare and sad as seemed to me a definitive rendition of val’s co-curator, contributed a majesti- the Organ Concerto is savage. The group Sibelius’s elusive Sixth Symphony— cally brooding symphonic triptych titled cast an even deeper spell in a free con- gave shape to the chaos. “Emergence.” (This and other recent Ice- cert at the First Congregational Church, Contemporary Icelandic composers landic works can be heard on a new Sono a handsome Gothic Revival pile near tend not to imitate Leifs, which is just Luminus album entitled “Recurrence,” MacArthur Park: the program featured as well, given his habit of running ideas with Bjarnason leading the Iceland Sym- “Hvíld,” an ethereally dissonant work by into the ground. They do, however, echo phony.) The fifty-seven-year-old Haukur Hörður Áskelsson, the chorus’s director. his feeling for landscape, exchanging Tómasson employed a brighter palette Just as restorative was a series of early- blood-and-soil philosophy for cosmo- in his Second Piano Concerto, with much evening appearances by Nordic Affect, politan environmentalism. At the festi- of the solo part—virtuosically executed a Reykjavík early-music quartet that has val, scores alluded variously to earth- in L.A. by Víkingur Ólafsson—given compensated for the lack of an Icelan- quakes, glaciers, long nights, weather over to crystalline scampering in the tre- dic Baroque by commissioning scores phenomena, and—inevitably—a volca- ble clef. Even here, though, abyssal tuba for period instruments. Here, too, Anna nic eruption. (The last was heard in a notes exposed a sonic substratum. Thorvaldsdottir stood out. Her “Shades delightful children’s program called Max- The Sigur Rós element of the equa- of Silence” begins with droning strings imus Musicus, telling of mice that go on tion felt more strained. The band first and with barely audible sounds produced tourist expeditions in an orchestra’s bag- gained fame in the late nineties with airy, by plucking, brushing, and rubbing the gage.) Other pieces dwelled more gen- falsetto-driven soundscapes; its recent strings of a harpsichord. Eventually, chim- erally on elemental textures, such as fixed work is heavy with guitars and drums, ing figures emerge from the cloud of harmonies, drones, and shimmering pat- verging on black metal. A starry array of timbre. You seem to be present at the terns. Players were often asked to aban- composers supplied arrangements of their birth of music itself. don the standard twelve pitches: glissan- songs—Bjarnason, David Lang, Missy The festival had many other high- dos, microtones, whistling harmonics, Mazzoli, and Nico Muhly, among oth- lights: Þurídur Jónsdóttir’s “Cylinder 49,” and other breathy noises proliferated. ers—but much of their effort disap- in which Schola Cantorum sang an old The effect was usually more evocative peared beneath the band’s bass-heavy Icelandic song into ceramic teacups, rep- than assaultive. A few too many com- roar. (Owen Pallett fared best with licating the distortions of an Edison- posers favored moods over ideas, antic- an impish wind-and-brass scoring of cylinder recording; Úlfur Hansson’s “Þýð,” ipation over event; this may be the down- “Starálfur.”) Disney’s hypersensitive in which the audience was asked to hum side of inhabiting a bohemian-friendly acoustics have never responded well to drones in support of Nordic Affect’s play- culture in which artists seldom assume amplified music, and to my ears the sound ing. As with past festivals, the L.A. Phil antagonistic roles. became oppressive, although the gentle- has masterminded an experience too ab- Anna Thorvaldsdottir, a thirty-nine- man who did a paganistic touchdown sorbingly complex to be summarized in year-old composer who divides her time dance in the aisle next to me obviously brief. In the coming months, this most between Iceland and England, is a par- disagreed. I wish that I had found the imaginative of orchestras faces a crucial ticularly artful purveyor of Icelandic at- courage to do the same during the Leifs. decision about its future: Deborah Borda, mospherics. Her short tone poem “Aer- who has served brilliantly as its presi- ality” leans on sustained notes, yet its he L.A. Phil balanced all that Nor- dent and C.E.O. since 2000, is moving sonorities are so alive with ever-chang- T dic thunder with events of more on to the New York Philharmonic, and ing instrumental filigree that it simulta- intimate potency. The superb chorus the organization is seeking a new leader. neously achieves a state of stasis and of Schola Cantorum Reykjavík prefaced The internal memo should be brief: transformation. The thirty-eight-year- the orchestral concerts with a selection “Change nothing.” 

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THE NEW YORKER, MAY 1, 2017 79 CARTOON CAPTION CONTEST

Each week, we provide a cartoon in need of a caption. You, the reader, submit a caption, we choose three finalists, and you vote for your favorite. Caption submissions for this week’s cartoon, by Jeremy Nguyen, must be received by Sunday, April 30th. The finalists in the April 17th contest appear below. We will announce the winner, and the finalists in this week’s contest, in the May 15th 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

“Your insurance company got back to us.” Laurie Blayney, Louisville, Ky.

“Have you tried exorcising?” “Honey, is the Tesla recharged yet?” Sam Seckel, Austin, Texas John Woodbridge, Larkspur, Calif.

“Good news. We found a match.” Dean Massey, Sequim, Wash.