AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017

6 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN 19 THE TALK OF THE TOWN Jeffrey Toobin on the taunting of Jeff Sessions; Jeffrey Tambor; a basement museum; war tales; Sheelah Kolhatkar on cable companies’ monopoly. PERSONAL HISTORY Lauren Collins 24 Identity Crisis Naming a son. SHOUTS & MURMURS Blythe Roberson 29 Future Austen Adaptations THE POLITICAL SCENE Benjamin Wallace-Wells 30 The Dream Deferred Bernie Sanders plays the long game. A REPORTER AT LARGE Larissa MacFarquhar 36 The Separation A mother goes to family court. PROFILES Judith Thurman 48 World of Interiors Rachel Cusk’s fiction of the self. SKETCHBOOK Luci Gutiérrez 53 “Subway Substitutes” FICTION Don DeLillo 58 “The Itch” THE CRITICS THE CURRENT CINEMA Anthony Lane 66 “Detroit,” “Whose Streets?” A CRITIC AT LARGE Adam Gopnik 69 Should Buddhism be secular? BOOKS 72 Briefly Noted Laura Miller 75 Tom Perrotta’s “Mrs. Fletcher.” Dan Chiasson 77 Susan Howe’s patchwork poetry. POEMS Michael Hofmann 27 “In Western Mass” Anne Carson 54 “Clive Song” COVER Bob Staake “Hell Train”

DRAWINGS Joe Dator, Charlie Hankin, William Haefeli, Frank Cotham, Liana Finck, Christopher Weyant, Edward Steed, P. C. Vey, Kendra Allenby, Will McPhail, Roz Chast, Tom Chitty, Ellis Rosen, Maddie Dai, Barbara Smaller, George Booth, David Sipress SPOTS Nishant Choksi

CONTRIBUTORS

Larissa MacFarquhar (“The Separation,” Benjamin Wallace-Wells (“The Dream p. 36) is the author of “Strangers Drown- Deferred,” p. 30) has contributed to the ing,” which is now out in paperback. magazine since 2006, and became a staff writer in 2015. Don DeLillo (Fiction, p. 58) is the au- thor of the story collection “The Angel Lauren Collins (“Identity Crisis,” p. 24) Esmeralda,” among other works of fic- is the author of “When in French: Love tion. “Zero K” is his most recent novel. in a Second Language,” which came out in 2016. Judith Thurman (“World of Interiors,” p. 48) began writing for the magazine Adam Gopnik (A Critic at Large, p. 69), in 1987 and became a staff writer in a staff writer, has been contributing to 2000. She is the author of “Cleopatra’s The New Yorker since 1986. His most Nose: 39 Varieties of Desire,” a collec- recent book is “The Table Comes First.” tion of her New Yorker essays. Luci Gutiérrez (Sketchbook, p. 53), an Bob Staake (Cover) has created twenty- illustrator based in Barcelona, contrib- one covers for the magazine. His “Book utes regularly to the Wall Street Jour- of Gold” will be published next year. nal and Time magazine. She is cur- rently working on a new book. Laura Miller (Books, p. 75), the author of “The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Dan Chiasson (Books, p. 77), who teaches Adventures in Narnia,” is a books-and- at Wellesley College, has written re- culture columnist at Slate. views for the magazine since 2007. “Bi- centennial” is his latest book of poems. Michael Hofmann (Poem, p. 27) is a poet and translator. His latest collection, Blythe Roberson (Shouts & Murmurs, “One Lark, One Horse,” will be pub- p. 29) is a contributor to the Onion, lished in September, 2018. ClickHole, and newyorker.com.

NEWYORKER.COM Everything in the magazine, and more.

PHOTO BOOTH PODCAST Alexandra Schwartz on Meryl Meis- Ryan Lizza discusses Anthony ler’s photographs of Fire Island as a Scaramucci’s strange phone call to gay haven in the nineteen-seventies. him about White House leaks.

SUBSCRIBERS: Get access to our magazine app for tablets and smartphones at the

App Store, Amazon.com, or Google Play. (Access varies by location and device.) MEISLER MERYL LEFT:

4 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017 THE MAIL

FROM TRUMP’S COLORADO white swing voters. I would like to stop reading about this disaffected sliver of Peter Hessler’s recent article on how the electorate and instead read about Donald Trump is transforming rural attempts to mobilize progressives and America offers a picture of Colora- people of color around a platform that do’s Western Slope that is essentially might even resonate with W.W.C. vot- unchanged from the one he painted ers, wherever they live. in his preëlection report for new- John Taht yorker.com (“Follow the Leader,” 1Washington, D.C. July 24th). Both pieces, dominated by interviews with a handful of charac- INSIDE A BROKEN SYSTEM ters, show the people of a downtrod- den desert region following Trump on Danielle Allen’s heart-achingly beauti- a path to nowhere. Hessler captures a ful history of her cousin—who became quirkiness with which any Grand Junc- a convicted felon at the age of fifteen, tion resident will be familiar, but he was incarcerated for eleven years, and makes no mention of the tangible was killed soon after his release— transformations taking place in our searches for explanations (“American community, many of which have gath- Inferno,” July 24th). If we want to find ered steam since the election. These ways to save the lives of young black include thousands of citizens flooding men, we must scrutinize the failures of Main Street for our local Women’s our criminal-justice system, the lack of March, exciting and unconventional rehabilitation services during and after approaches to diversifying our econ- incarceration, and the role of systemic omy, nonpartisan efforts to increase racism. If the system was harsh and un- funding for public schools and for forgiving to Michael, it must have been suicide- prevention programs, and pas- unimaginably more so to Bree, the trans sionate advocacy to protect our stun- woman whom Michael fell in love with ning and diverse public lands. This in prison, and who ultimately killed increase in progressive energy and mo- him. Trans women face some of the mentum is the real change that is hap- highest risks of partner violence, of ho- pening in western Colorado. It’s un- micide, and of incarceration—and the fortunate that Hessler focussed instead risks for trans women of color, like Bree, on a tired caricature that clouds many are even greater. We don’t know what people’s perception of rural America. violence Bree may have endured in her Mykan White life and in her relationships, or what Grand Junction, Colo. she had to do in order to defend her- self. In a broken system that penalizes Reading Hessler’s impressionistic story and criminalizes our most vulnerable about Trump supporters in Grand Junc- citizens, it is always difficult to distin- tion gave me a sense of déjà vu. How guish between victimhood and self-de- many more paeans to the white working- termination, between forced choices class voter will we have to read before and bad choices. Michael deserves an the Democratic Party realizes that it examination of his complex life. We must change its strategy in order to re- owe the same to Bree. gain power? Although rural Colorado Ann Whidden and suburban Atlanta are worlds apart, Oakland, Calif. the recent special election in Georgia, between Jon Ossoff and Karen Han- • del, exemplifies the Democrats’ obses- Letters should be sent with the writer’s name, sion with the W.W.C. Ossoff was a address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to [email protected]. Letters may be edited weak, boring candidate who ran a safe, for length and clarity, and may be published in boring campaign, and he refused to talk any medium. We regret that owing to the volume about any issues that might alienate of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter.

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017 5 AUGUST 2 – 15, 2017 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

The double feature used to be a staple of New York repertory houses, and Film Forum is bringing it back. The “Summer Double Features” series, from Aug. 11 to Sept. 5, includes twenty-eight pairings, ranging from silents to independents, from European political fantasies to Hollywood extravaganzas. The Aug. 22 program offers two film-noir classics, both from 1949, about lovers on the run—Nicholas Ray’s first feature,

“They Live by Night,” and Joseph H. Lewis’s “Gun Crazy,” a key inspiration for “Bonnie and Clyde.” FILM FORUM/PHOTOFEST COURTESY

ILLUSTRATION BY MIKE MCQUADE keep it delicate and compact. The duo’s first album, “Light Upon the Lake,” was released last summer, by the Indiana label Secretly Canadian, home to soul NIGHT LIFE stirrers like Anohni and the War on Drugs. They are 1 joined this week at Celebrate Brooklyn! by Moses Sumney and Weyes Blood. (Prospect Park Bandshell, ROCK AND POP forms with a live band and occasionally logs Prospect Park W. at 9th St. bricartsmedia.org. Aug. 11.) time with Ringo Starr’s act. (Ford Amphitheatre 1 at Coney Island, 3052 W. 21st St., Brooklyn. Aug. 11.) Musicians and night-club proprietors lead JAZZ AND STANDARDS complicated lives; it’s advisable to check The Selecter in advance to confirm engagements. Jamaican ska music, the predecessor to reggae and Brooklyn Jazz Underground Festival an offshoot of American rhythm and blues, is about A borough may bring them together, but the various Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie having fun. But in the early days of Margaret Thatch- forward-thinking instrumentalists and bandleaders The members of Fleetwood Mac have endured er’s Britain, when class and racial tensions height- who make up this intrepid collective go their own many emotional chapters in their five decades to- ened and then escalated into riots, the U.K. revival way when it comes to shrewd aesthetic choices and gether: breaking up, making up, and everything in of the genre became an unlikely rallying point for proclivities. Among the skillful participants are the between. John and Christine McVie, Lindsey Buck- antiracist youth across the torn nation. The scene was saxophonist Adam Kolker, the vocalist Tammy Schef- ingham, Mick Fleetwood, and Stevie Nicks have anchored in Coventry, England, where Jerry Dam- fer, the drummer Owen Howard, and the trumpeter all gone on to solo careers dotted with occasional mers, of the Specials, founded 2 Tone Records. One David Smith. (Shapeshifter Lab, 18 Whitwell Pl., Brook- reunions. There have been odd one-off combina- of the label’s prime exports was the Selecter, a New lyn. Aug. 6. Smalls, 183 W. 10th St. 212-252-5091. Aug. 7.) tions as well: Buckingham and Nicks collaborated Wave-inflected ska septet known for peppy hits like on an album in 1973, and, just last month, Christine “Too Much Pressure” and “On My Radio.” Recent Tony Malaby Festival McVie and Buckingham released an LP of duets. legal disputes between the group’s members have Brawny-toned and tough-minded, yet reflective and “We’re, to some degree, celebrating life—the fact left it overshadowed by peers like the English Beat lyrical when the music calls for it, the saxophonist Mal- that we’re still alive,” McVie said in a recent inter- and the Specials, but the live show, led by the char- aby has been a significant presence on the jazz scene view about the record, which treads familiar ter- ismatic rude girl Pauline Black, still packs a punch for the past twenty-plus years. This trim gala finds him ritory with the gift of hindsight. (Beacon Theatre, after nearly forty years. (Knitting Factory, 361 Metro- collaborating with such noteworthy peers as the bass- Broadway at 74th St. 212-465-6500. Aug. 10.) politan Ave., Brooklyn. 347-529-6696. Aug. 9.) ist William Parker, the guitarist Ben Monder, and the drummer Tom Rainey in a variety of ensembles. (Cor- Chic Sister Nancy nelia Street Café, 29 Cornelia St. 212-989-9319. Aug. 3-5.) “Le Freak,” Chic’s effervescent clap-along from 1978, On “Bam Bam,” the 1982 single that made this Jamai- is one of the most memorable singles of the disco can dancehall singer recognizable to bashment reg- An Evening with Nellie McKay era. The guitarist Nile Rodgers and the bass player ulars worldwide, the analog and the digital meet in A compact listening room such as this West Vil- Bernard Edwards urged listeners to indulge in the perfect harmony: soft bursts of horn give way to Nan- lage offshoot of Smalls may be the ideal spot to timeless allure of cutting loose and getting a little cy’s childlike voice, drenched with reverb as if it were absorb the multilayered brilliance of this singer- weird: “Like the days of stomping at the Savoy / Now bouncing through dusk at an open-air festival. The songwriter-pianist, whose whimsy is laced with a we freak, oh what a joy / Just come on down, to 54 / song is a prophetic boast that became a summer sta- dollop of political venom. Her most recent album, Find a spot, out on the floor.” (Ironically, Rodgers ple, recently sampled by Kanye West for “Famous,” “My Weekly Reader,” concentrated on a clever pe- and Edwards wrote the anthem after they were de- then by Jay-Z for “Bam.” Nancy appears in the free rusal of pop and rock classics from the nineteen- nied admission to the storied Studio 54.) Rodgers Lincoln Center Out of Doors concert series, at Dam- sixties, but who knows what’s now on the mind leads Chic at this reunion concert, joined by the sur- rosch Park, alongside Timaya, who straddles dancehall of this delightfully subversive artist. (Mezz row, viving members of the fusion-funk institution Earth, and Afrobeat, and the London-based band the Com- 163 W. 10th St. mezzrow.com. Aug. 15.) Wind & Fire. (Madison Square Garden, Seventh Ave. at pozers. (Broadway at 64th St. 212-721-6500. Aug. 10.) 33rd St. 800-745-3000. Aug. 7.) Roberta Piket Total Freedom An exceptional modern-jazz pianist hovering just DâM-FunK When the unruly menswear label Hood by Air staged outside the radar, Piket looks beyond the tradition This Pasadena producer and vocalist, born Damon its 2014 fall runway show, it tapped this subversive d.j. while tipping her hat to its verities. She’s joined Garrett Riddick, has been active since the mid- to create the score. The resulting twenty-four-min- by two players who prize invention and subtlety nineties, the West Coast’s formative G-funk era. Al- ute composition, “10,000 Screaming Faggots,” wove as much as she does, the bassist Harvie S and her ready a trained drummer, he quickly jumped into an together soaring Beyoncé samples and poetry by Ju- husband, the crafty drummer Billy Mintz. (Mezzrow, apprenticeship with the legendary songwriter Leon liana Huxtable, all laid under silver- bullet drums 163 W. 10th St. mezzrow.com. Aug. 9.) Silvers III, and was soon collaborating with L.A. rap- and synths that clawed at warehouse walls. Ashland pers like Mack 10 and MC Eiht. His full-length re- Mines, who goes by the name Total Freedom, plays John Pizzarelli leases with the record label Stones Throw and his pro- club sets that are just as gripping. He once hosted a In early 1967, two musical geniuses met to collabo- duction work for Snoop Dogg, Ariel Pink, and others series of parties in Los Angeles where attendees were rate on an album; half a century later, “Francis Al- have established the enigmatic artist as a central figure strictly forbidden to dance—if anyone broke form, bert Sinatra & Antônio Carlos Jobim” has lost none in his city’s dense beat scene. Riddick recently began he’d stop playing until the entire room froze again. of its seductive sheen. The guitarist and singer Piz- hosting a monthly Web radio show, “Glydezone,” de- He takes the Warm Up stage after Cardi B, a scrappy zarelli reveres both the Chairman of the Board and scribed as “a mythical space for modern funk, boogie, young Dominican-Trini woman from the Bronx who the master bossa-nova composer. With his vocal- cosmic, soul, and beyond.” He’ll bring these dispa- became known as a social-media personality with ist wife, Jessica Molaskey, and Antônio’s grandson rate sounds to a live d.j. set, after tunes from Jacques sharp-tongued observations on gender, culture, and Daniel Jobim in tow, Pizzarelli presents an elegant Renault, Sophia Saze, and Kyle & Griff. (Good Room, fashion; she recently adopted music as her medium, and heartfelt tribute to the achievements of these 98 Meserole Ave., Brooklyn. goodroombk.com. Aug. 4.) to entrancing effect. (MOMA PS1, 22-25 Jackson Ave., international cultural heroes. (Birdland, 315 W. 44th Long Island City. moma.org/warmup. Aug. 12.) St. 212-581-3080. Aug. 8-12.) Todd Rundgren At sixty-nine, the classic rocker Rundgren is Whitney A Tribute to Geri Allen showing no signs of slowing down, or losing The guitarist Max Kakacek, formerly of the Smith The recent death of the extravagantly gifted pianist his relevance, as the music industry shifts to- Westerns, and Julien Ehrlich, the onetime drum- and composer Geri Allen at the age of sixty contin- ward more electronic sounds. He started his ca- mer for Unknown Mortal Orchestra, came together ues to hover over the jazz community like a dark reer in the baroque-pop realm, in the late sixties; to form this soft-psychedelic outfit. Honeyed tim- cloud. An attempt to honor this great musician and then his experimentation with various mind- bres support their back-road folk songs about heart- to dispel the gloom finds the bassistEsperanza Spal- altering substances contributed to the expan- ache and home towns. The group’s ambitious ar- ding and the drummer Terri Lyne Carrington wel- sion of his sonic palette into more psychedelic rangements include warm strings and horns, pastel coming distinguished guests throughout the week, territory, yielding a slew of early-seventies hits, bridges, and swelling, shout-along choruses. “Golden including Joe Lovano, Nicholas Payton, Cassandra including “I Saw the Light.” These days, Rund- Days,” an excellent calling-card single, crams in gui- Wilson, and Ravi Coltrane. (Village Vanguard, 178 gren is embracing dance music; he still per- tar and brass solos, but Ehrlich’s soft-whine vocals Seventh Ave. S., at 11th St. 212-255-4037. Aug. 8-13.)

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017 7 history and drove it farther inland than could otherwise have been the case. Through Sept. 4.

A RT MOMA PS1 1 “Ian Cheng: Emissaries” What if a work of art were so smart that it could Museum of Modern Art MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES free itself from the artist who made it? The digi- “Robert Rauschenberg: Among Friends” tal whiz Cheng takes on that question in a trio of While creating the universe, did God have in color projections, which he describes as “video Metropolitan Museum mind that, at a certain point, a stuffed goat with games that play themselves.” These simulations “Talking Pictures: Camera Phone a car tire around its middle would materialize are set millennia apart in the same landscape, Conversations Between Artists” to round out the scheme? It came to pass, in which evolves from volcano to lake to atoll. (Po- Late last year, the curator Mia Fineman in- New York, with Rauschenberg’s “Monogram” litically minded viewers might grok a caution- vited twelve artists to play a new form of (1955-59)—goat, tire, and also paint, paper, fab- ary climate-change tale.) The characters start out phone tag: each one traded a series of cell- ric, printed matter, metal, wood, shoe heel, and shamanic and end up sci-fi. They include, by time phone pictures with another artist of his or tennis ball—now on view in an immense ret- line, a prophetic owl and the plucky daughter of her choice. The results chart a broad range rospective of the protean artist, who died in a village elder (a prehistoric Arya Stark), a pack of possibilities for the nascent medium. Nina 2008, at the age of eighty-two. Rauschenberg’s of Shiba Inus and an undead celebrity (a skele- Katchadourian and Lenka Clayton matched work, in mediums that range from painting ton with sunglasses intact), and a meerkat- like wits in a game of free association: a pink and photography to a big vat of bubbling gray race of futurist ranchers. Activity unfolds in real eraser segues to a wad of gum and then to a mud (“Mud Muse,” 1968-71), is uneven, and it time according to rules programmed by Cheng closeup of a tongue. The exchange between lost point and drama in his later decades. For and his collaborators, but, as in life, rules do not the painter Nicole Eisenman and the photog- a great artist, he made remarkably little good control outcome. The compassion of Cheng’s rapher A. L. Steiner was political, with im- art. But the example of his nimble intelligence transhumanist vision aligns him with a cohort of ages ranging from General Michael Flynn’s and zestful audacity has affected the thoughts other young artists working in New York, stay- insidious recent tweet “Fear of Muslims is and motives, doubts and dreams of subsequent ing awake as they dream of the future. Through rational” to ACT UP’s famous 1987 poster, generations, to this day. The show’s lead cura- Sept. 25. which reads “Silence=Death.” Manjari tor, Leah Dickerman, has incorporated first- Sharma and Irina Rozovsky both happened rate works by other artists—collaboration was a Guggenheim Museum to be pregnant when the project started, and regular elixir for Rauschenberg. He was a per- “Visionaries: Creating a Modern Guggenheim” their hundred and twenty-two quiet color formance artist, first and last. You respond to This exhilarating tour of the six great collec- prints of their daily lives, in Brooklyn and his works not with an absorption in their qual- tions that became the Solomon R. Guggenheim Boston, respectively, culminate in a pair of ity but with a vicarious share in his brainstorm- Museum is so judiciously laid out that the com- selfies with minutes- old newborns. Through ing excitement while making them. For a time, plex germs of early abstraction, the dry but se- Dec. 17. momentously, what he did caught a wave of cretly seething state of late-nineteenth-century painting, and the canon-defining tastes and in- terests of the businessman Solomon, his niece Peggy, the artist Hilla Rebay (who acquired her own work for the collection and also introduced the elder Guggenheim to the nonobjective art of Kandinsky), and three other major collec- tors all become enticingly transparent. Jewels of J. K. Thannhauser’s collection—on display, fit- tingly enough, in one of the building’s Thann- hauser Galleries—include van Gogh’s magnifi- cently eccentric ink drawing “The Zouave” and Cézanne’s “Man with Crossed Arms.” A bravura sequence running up the museum’s central ramp, from Picasso’s 1911 “Accordionist” through pieces by Robert Delaunay, Fernand Léger, Marc Cha- gall, and Franz Marc, captures, in just a dozen canvases, the emergence of Cubism, its overlap with Expressionism, and its far-reaching echoes. Through Sept. 6.

Whitney Museum “Hélio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium” This retrospective of the sorely under-known Brazilian artist is a revelation. Oiticica died in 1980, of a stroke, at the age of forty-two, after early success in Rio de Janeiro, a brush with fame in London, obscurity during seven years in New York, and a return to Rio that, at one opening, occasioned a riot. Along the way, he turned from superb abstract painting to innovative work in sculpture, film, writing, political action, and par- ticipatory installation, much of which remains as fresh as this morning. The sand, huts, potted plants, caged parrots, and inscribed poetry of his sprawling “Tropicália” (1968) await your barefoot delectation, should you choose to park your shoes in the rack provided. So do the multifarious love nests (mattresses, straw, chopped-up foam rub- Photo-realist paintings are best known for their echt-American subjects—cars, diners, neon signs— ber, water) of a more austere faux beach, “Eden” and their deft use of reflection. Audrey Flack injected a note of vanitas into the genre with her 1977-78 (1969). Works that he made in New York (and, at still-life “Wheel of Fortune” (above). It’s on view in “From Lens to Hand to Eye: Photorealism, 1969 the time, showed only privately) exalt sex, drugs, to Today,” which opens on Aug. 6 at the Parrish Art Museum, in Water Mill, N.Y. and rock and roll—delirium aplenty, yet managed COURTESY THE ARTIST AND PARRISH ART MUSEUM ART AND PARRISH THE ARTIST COURTESY

8 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017 A RT with acute aesthetic intelligence. Oiticica was a comes through in her command of space and ab- the digital and the handmade with rare ebul- great one for planning. His buoyant writings in surdist theatricality. Through Feb. 18, 2018. lience. Lumpy stuffed sculptures—they resem- English, displayed in vitrines and seductively re- 1 ble both psychedelic sea creatures and unhinged cited through earphones, hatch intricate utopian quilting projects—hang from the walls, trail- schemes, often architectural in character. In 1971, GALLERIES—CHELSEA ing thread from their uneven seams. They’re he proposed one that involved labyrinthine spaces, in happy dialogue with “Ruby Rendering,” a for construction in Central Park, called “Subter- Nari Ward five-channel video from 2015, of undulating ranean Tropicália Projects.” Had he lived longer, In his new show, titled “Till, Lit,” the Jamaican- colorful patterns. LoVid also performs; at the we would likely be blessed with a number of land- born, Harlem-based artist presents formally strik- opening, Hinkis and Lapidus played synth music mark achievements in public art. Through Oct. 1. ing and politically charged sculptures made from in costume to launch their new online work, surprising materials. The “till” of the title evokes “Young Antiquities,” a collection of intricate Jewish Museum both field labor and the reserves of a cash register. immaterial sculptures, spinning in virtual space. “Florine Stettheimer: Painting Poetry” Compartments from the latter figure in a num- Through Aug. 6. (Von Nichtssagend, 54 Ludlow St. It’s a good time to take Stettheimer seriously. ber of works here, as do delicate paper rectangles 212-777-7756.) The occasion is a retrospective of the New York that are made from the excised edges of dollar artist, poet, designer, and Jazz Age saloniste. It’s bills. These shapes overlap in abstract composi- “Makers Catalogue” not that Stettheimer, who died in 1944, at the age tions, such as the austere “Royal Alpha” and the Art about art—also art about craft—is a labor of seventy- three, needs rediscovering. She is se- shimmering “Providence Spirits (Silver),” which of love in this wonderful three-person show. curely esteemed—or adored, more like it—for her also incorporates cowrie shells (once valued as The Oregon-based Ellen Lesperance’s intri- ebulliently faux-naïve paintings of party scenes money). The legacy of slavery and its barbaric cate, colorful gouache-on-paper grids were in- and of her famous friends and for her four satir- transactions suffuses the works on view. The pow- spired by the sweaters worn by the Welsh anti- ical allegories of Manhattan, which she called erful installation “Lit” uses buzzing floodlights nuclear protest group the Greenham Common “Cathedrals”: symbol-packed phantasmagorias of and a concrete-submerged ladder to conflate an- Women’s Peace Camp, in the nineteen-eighties. Fifth Avenue, Broadway, Wall Street, and Art, in tebellum slave patrolling with present-day police Dan Fischer makes exacting graphite drawings the collection of the Metropolitan Museum. She surveillance. The mixed-media work “Hanging of recent art history; his reproduction here of painted in blazing primary colors, plus white and Study” proposes a form of redress—it spells out one of Yves Klein’s “Anthropometries”—in which some accenting black, with the odd insinuating the word “reparations.” Through Aug. 25. (Lehmann the French artist used nude models as human purple. Even her blues smolder. Greens are less Maupin, 536 W. 22nd St. 212-255-2923.) paintbrushes—involves at least five shades of frequent; zealously urbane, Stettheimer wasn’t 1 black. Cynthia Daignault, who splits her time much for nature, except, surreally, for the glo- between New York and Baltimore, shows small ries of the outsized cut flowers that barge in on GALLERIES—DOWNTOWN paintings of the ephemera and printed matter her indoor scenes. She painted grass yellow. She lying around her studio—album covers, Post- seemed an eccentric outlier to American mod- LoVid its, books—a charming self-portrait in foot- ernism, and appreciations of her often run to the A long-standing collaboration between the art- notes. Through Aug. 11. (Eller, 300 Broome St. camp—it was likely in that spirit that Andy War- ists Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus, LoVid bridges 212-206-6411.) hol called her his favorite artist. But what happens if, clearing our minds and looking afresh, we re- cast the leading men she pictured, notably Mar- cel Duchamp, in supporting roles? What’s the drama when Stettheimer stars? Through Sept. 24.

New-York Historical Society “Eloise at the Museum” The actor, author, and Plaza resident Kay Thomp- son may have created New York’s most famous lit- tle lady of leisure. But it was Hilary Knight who brought her to life in his illustrations for Thomp- son’s book “Eloise,” from 1955, and its three se- quels. His drawings are the undisputed hit of this pink-and-black nostalgia trip. In one preliminary portrait, Knight’s line varies from vanishingly thin, in Eloise’s feathery hair, to thick and wa- vering, for her falling-down socks. In an unpub- lished watercolor of the Plaza’s lobby, our hero- ine appears slouched in the corner of a vibrant scene of palm fronds, orange marble columns, and grownup ladies in their fur coats. Through Oct. 9.

Queens Museum “Anna K.E.: Profound Approach and Easy Outcome” The highlight of this five-part installation by the cheeky Tbilisi-born, Queens-based artist, which sprawls across a hundred and forty-five feet in the museum’s atrium, is a pair of billboard-size pho- tographs, part of an ongoing series in which she photographs herself in front of famous figura- tive paintings (in this case, two works owned by the Met). Standing before Otto Dix’s 1922 por- trait “The Businessman Max Roesberg, Dresden,” she wears an anxious expression, as if oppressed by the original picture’s art-historical weight. An awkward pose with Balthus’s “Girl at a Window” underscores the inevitable self-consciousness of a young woman inserting herself into a history dominated by men. The artist studied dance be- fore shifting her focus to visual art, training that

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017 9 1 OPENING

Columbus Reviewed in Now Playing. Opening Aug. MOVIES 4. (In limited release.) • Detroit Reviewed this week in The Current Cinema. Opening Aug. 4. (In wide release.) • The Glass Castle An adaptation of the memoir by Jeannette Walls, directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, about children who are raised by unconventional parents. Starring Brie Larson, Woody Harrelson, Naomi Watts, and Sarah Snook. Opening Aug. 11. (In wide release.) • Good Time Rob- ert Pattinson stars in this drama, directed by Josh and Benny Safdie, about a young criminal who lures his developmentally disabled brother (Benny Saf- die) into a bank robbery. Opening Aug. 11. (In lim­ ited release.) • Ingrid Goes West Reviewed in Now Playing. Opening Aug. 11. (In limited release.) • Noc- turama Bertrand Bonello directed this political fan- tasy, about a revolutionary group that commits a terrorist attack in Paris. In French. Opening Aug. 11. (In limited release.) • Whose Streets? Reviewed this week in The Current Cinema. Opening Aug. 11.1 (In limited release.) Three shoplifters display their wiles and their loot in Jon Alpert’s film “One Year in a Life of Crime.” NOW PLAYING

Atomic Blonde Caught in the Act ward their partners—in particular, This standard-issue, spy-by-the-pound yarn—set Mike, who physically abuses his girl­ during the last days of the Berlin Wall—is both en- A documentary about young thieves livened and deadened by its unusually realistic and friend and boasts about it. (Alpert reveals their intimate offenses, too. numbingly plentiful violence. Charlize Theron stars questions Mike about his violence; as Lorraine Broughton, an M.I.6 agent sent to the Many of the great movie dramas are Rob, who’s far from tender with his still divided city to locate—with the help of a Brit- ish colleague (James McAvoy)—a wristwatch con- crime stories. A remarkable new one, own girlfriend, urges Mike to stop.) taining a list of Western spies, and to rescue a Stasi “Good Time,” by the brothers Josh and Fred, a heroin addict who shoots up turncoat (Eddie Marsan), who has the list mem- Benny Safdie (opening Aug. 11), is on camera, risks his marriage by lying orized. This action is seen in flashbacks, intercut with scenes of the bloodied, bruised, and embittered partly inspired by an equally excep­ about his drug use. Rob contrasts his Lorraine’s chilly debriefing by her handlers (Toby tional 1989 documentary, “One Year in own fast and easy money with his fa­ Jones and John Goodman). The deceptive twists a Life of Crime,” by Jon Alpert, playing ther’s low­wage job, and also discusses and cynical moods of espionage take place in nos- talgically bleak Cold War cityscapes, but the fine Aug. 7 at Metrograph, in a series pro­ his father’s alcohol­ fuelled abuse of points of spy craft are either reduced to mere winks grammed by the Safdie brothers. Al­ him when he was a child. or amplified to bone-thwacking and gore-spraying pert’s film, which was made for HBO, The closest thing to an onscreen martial artistry. Theron keeps her cool throughout the pummelling gyrations, but the film strains to is a close look at three young criminals, conscience is a local auto mechanic achieve a breathless panache and a lurid swagger for as well as a revelatory display of the named Sid, who exhorts Rob to which David Leitch’s direction is too heavy-footed allure of crime itself, both in life and straighten himself out and reminds and literal; a deft, metal-bashing automotive bal- let comes too late to help. With Sofia Boutella, as in movies. him that he was much happier when a French agent with an artistic streak.—Richard In “One Year in a Life of Crime,” he had a regular job. Rob agrees. Mike Brody (In wide release.) Alpert films three professional shop­ and Fred also freely express their own Columbus lifters, Rob, Fred, and Mike, young dissatisfaction with their lives, but, as The title of the visual artist and video-essayist men from Newark who have long Alpert shows, happiness is beside the Kogonada’s intellectually passionate first feature criminal records and persist in their point. What these men get from a life refers to the Indiana city that’s home to a surprising abundance of modern architectural masterworks. illicit activities. Alpert’s rapport with of crime, and what they put into this Those buildings fire the imagination of his protag- them is as frank and uninhibited as his film, is drama—albeit miserable onist, a twentyish woman named Casey (Haley Lu filming of them, both in public and in drama, of which they are the antihe­ Richardson), who’s stuck in place. Spurning college to care for her mother (Michelle Forbes), who’s a their homes. Alpert uses a hidden cam­ roes, even the villains—which lifts recovering drug addict, Casey works in the local li- era to show their brazen thefts, which them out of ordinariness only to brary. When Jin (John Cho), an architectural histo- they pull off with little more than plunge them into degradation. They’re rian’s son, comes to town, he abets her outpouring of pent-up ideas and enthusiasms about architec- shopping bags and suitcases and sly hated, feared, marked, pursued. They're ture and tries to help change her life. Richardson getaways on foot and by car. Alpert wanted men in another sense, too, as infuses her hyperalert performance with a rare dia- becomes a virtual member of the three the subjects of this movie—vampirical lectical ardor; her avid gaze at the city’s landmarks is matched by Kogonada’s own images, which cap- men’s households and captures their stars who suck the life out of the peo­ ture the virtual libido of aesthetic sensibility. Film- flashy exuberance as they flaunt their ple around them. “One Year in a Life ing Casey and Jin on location in the presence of outlaw audacity. (The movie is also a of Crime,” like most crime films, is also the buildings that inspire them, he revels in the power of contemplative companionship—of look- record of his relationship with them.) a horror story. ing, talking, thinking together—and unfolds the

He films them acting monstrously to­ —Richard Brody wonder of an artistic coming of age. With Rory THAKALI GAURAB BY ILLUSTRATION

10 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017 MOVIES

Culkin, as Casey’s ironic grad-student colleague, disaster and determined not to crash alone. Yet topher Fairbank, as the husband’s horrible father, and Parker Posey, as Jin’s longtime friend.—R.B. Spicer’s empathetic view of Ingrid’s tangle of mis- who deserves everything he gets.—A.L. (7/24/17) (In limited release.) ery is outweighed by his satirical critique of on- (In wide release.) line stardom, Hollywood hustling, and conspic- Dunkirk uous consumption; he presents Ingrid’s maladies The Man Who Loved Women The new Christopher Nolan movie is set in 1940, as the results of the social ills of the times. The ac- François Truffaut’s bittersweet 1977 comedy, about during the mass evacuation of British and French tion devolves into wan op-ed commentary. With the pleasure and the pathos of sexual pursuit, is also troops from northern France to the relative safety Billy Magnussen, as Taylor’s dissolute yet deeply an ode to the art of writing. The film’s title is that of of England. The saga, an essential chapter in the loyal brother, and Wyatt Russell, as her trophy a memoir written by the protagonist, Bertrand Mo- British wartime narrative, is not widely known boyfriend.—R.B. (In limited release.) rane (Charles Denner), an engineer in Montpellier elsewhere, and what Nolan delivers is neither a who spends his free time chasing women (sometimes history lesson nor even much of a war film. A Lady Macbeth literally), until, after an unexpected rejection, he de- good deal of it strikes the senses, not to mention A striking début feature from William Oldroyd, cides to type out his erotic reminiscences. Despite the nerves, as an exercise in high tension and near- based—with many alterations—on a novella by being played by fine actors (including Brigitte Fos- abstraction, as men (there are almost no women to Nikolai Leskov, which also spawned an opera by sey, Leslie Caron, and Nelly Borgeaud), the women be seen) are perilously poised between land and Shostakovich. The setting has moved from Russia Bertrand “loved” remain ciphers, collections of at- water, water and air, darkness and light. Mark Ry- to the North of England, in 1865, and to the un- tributes surrounding elusive personae and bodies— lance, dourly determined, plays the skipper of the lovely castlelike home of Alexander (Paul Hilton) seemingly by design. The egotist is writing about Moonstone, one of the innumerable “Little Ships” and his new wife, Katherine (Florence Pugh). He himself and relying on women to reveal different that went to the aid of those who were trapped on is a boor, often absent; she is weary and resent- facets of his own identity. Like Bertrand, Truffaut the beaches. Overhead, Tom Hardy is in typically ful, desperate to crack the tedium of her days and pays homage to old-school formalities, constraints, phlegmatic form as a Spitfire pilot who must pro- nights. Opportunity presents itself in the person and styles, both social and sartorial (the film dwells tect the naval vessels from German bombers. The of Sebastian (Cosmo Jarvis), a groom from the obsessively on elaborate lingerie, formal skirts and movie feels old-fashioned whenever it seeks to stir stables, who ends up sharing not merely her bed dresses, and the rustle of silk stockings). His reti- up British pride; as a fable of survival, though, but, to his great discomfort, her dinner table. The cence about sex mirrors Bertrand’s; both the direc- with its quicksilver editing and an anxious score wrongs of the situation—pitiless crimes as well tor and the character come off as rear-guard warriors by Hans Zimmer, it amazes and exhausts in equal as social outrages—acquire their own momen- against the sexual revolution—against the banaliza- measure. With Kenneth Branagh, Fionn White- tum, and, if our initial sympathies lie with the tion of their epicurean delights. In French.—R.B. head, and Harry Styles.—Anthony Lane (Reviewed oppressed heroine, we soon grow alarmed, and (Film Society of Lincoln Center, Aug. 9, and streaming.) in our issue of 7/31/17.) (In wide release.) then appalled, by the lengths to which she will go in her reckonings. Oldroyd’s film is constructed Person to Person Girls Trip and framed with unstinting care; sometimes, in- Dustin Guy Defa assembles a vigorous and whimsi- This warmhearted, occasionally uproarious com- deed, you want it to cut loose, although Pugh lends cal cast for the many comedic and dramatic strands of edy doesn’t quite sustain the heights of its per- a definite dash of madness to her impassioned role. this sweet-and-sour New York street poem, inspired formers’ inspirations. Ryan (Regina Hall), a With Naomi Ackie, as the lady’s maid, and Chris- by his 2014 short film of the same title. The new film, best-selling author, is chosen to deliver the key- note address at the Essence Festival, in New Orle- ans, and she invites her three longtime best friends to join her for a sentimental and hard-partying re- union. Sasha (Queen Latifah), a journalist who’s now on the celebrity beat, has money trouble; Lisa (Jada Pinkett Smith), a nurse and divorced mother of two young children, is lonely; and Dina (Tif- fany Haddish), an outrageously brazen pleasure- seeker, seems oblivious of the consequences of her actions. Meanwhile, Ryan learns that Stewart (Mike Colter), her husband and business partner, is having an affair with a younger woman (Deb- orah Ayorinde). These women’s problems have substance even though their characters are thinly written, and the film’s comedic flourishes offer a refreshing frankness about sex from women’s perspectives. The view of middle-class African- American women’s lives behind closed doors, de- spite its antic exaggeration, has a lived-in spec- ificity. Malcolm D. Lee’s direction doesn’t offer much style or vigor, but Haddish delivers a wild yet precise performance of verbal and gestural fury that puts her at the forefront of contempo- rary comedy.—R.B. (In wide release.)

Ingrid Goes West Aubrey Plaza’s fiercely committed performance nearly rescues this dubious contrivance from ab- surdity. The drama, directed by Matt Spicer, is the latest entry in the picturesque-mental-illness genre. Plaza plays the title character, a young woman whose violent outbursts lead to a spell in an institution. When Ingrid gets out, instead of receiving therapy and taking medication, she moves to Los Angeles in order to stalk an Insta- gram celebrity named Taylor (Elizabeth Olsen) and insinuate herself into Taylor’s private life and social-media feeds. Ingrid manipulates Dan (O’Shea Jackson, Jr.), her new neighbor and quasi- landlord, for help with her schemes; indifferent to the pain she causes, Ingrid is speeding toward

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017 11 MOVIES

like the short, begins with the adventures of a record sioned, as a guide recounts the 1945 firebombing; a dealer named Bene (Bene Coopersmith); he’s on the bookseller who discusses the horrific abuses of great trail of a rare Charlie Parker LP that comes with an music in Auschwitz; and Felix Mendelssohn (Dan- odd backstory. Ray (George Sample III) has caused iel Ligorio) discovering the “St. Matthew Passion” real trouble and knows it; he’s in hiding after posting on a piece of sheet music in which his butcher has nude photos of his ex-girlfriend online. A high-school wrapped meat. From puckish humor and borderline student (Tavi Gevinson) with more attitude than ex- kitsch, a great notion emerges: modern Europe was perience seeks adventure and romance; two reporters, built on the foundation of classical music, which, a veteran (Michael Cera) and a rookie (Abbi Jacob- as a result, endures tenaciously there. In Spanish son), forge a bond on a stakeout while investigating and German.—R.B. (Socrates Sculpture Park, Aug. 9.) a crime in which a clock-shop owner (Philip Baker Hall) is involved. The crisscrossing action looks lov- War for the Planet of the Apes ingly at the self-made dramas of city life, despite its If only Darwin were alive to see this film. Cae- intimate cruelty and looming violence, and the lyrical sar, incarnated by Andy Serkis, is living proof that riffs of dialogue come bubbling off the screen, but the the highest human virtues—valor, compassion, a drama feels frictionless—an ideal of urban grit that, keen intelligence, and a gift for leadership—are for all its geographical specificity, never touches the most credibly combined in a monkey. In this lat- ground. With Isiah Whitlock, Jr., Marvin Gurewitz, est chapter of the simian saga, Caesar plans to lead and Dakota O’Hara, with her signature behind-the- his freedom- loving comrades to a promised land; beat diction.—R.B. (In limited release.) first, however, there is a military lunatic (Woody Harrelson) to contend with, and murders to be The Silence Before Bach avenged. What follows is often cruel, and hard to The Spanish director Pere Portabella’s 2007 film classify as entertainment; we see a labor camp in full brings Bach’s music to life with a dazzling blend of spate, and—surely a cinematic first—some form of drama, documentary, and quasi-surrealist whimsy. ape crucifixion. Matt Reeves’s film takes itself ex- Beginning with a scene of a player piano rattling tremely seriously, and, without a glimmer of irony, off the Goldberg Variations while rolling through a adds a touch of religious allegory to both the dia- bright, bare loft, Portabella tickles the senses with logue and the highfalutin images with which the a series of skits: a truck driver who plays Bach on story concludes. Still, the technical achievement the harmonica; Bach himself (the harpsichordist/ marches on, and there appears to be no challenge organist Christian Brembeck) teaching one of his that cannot be met and overcome by the magi of sons music via the “Well-Tempered Clavier”; a Bach the digital craft. (Do orangutans really cry?) The impersonator hosting tourists in Leipzig; an orches- most affable character, new to the franchise, is a tra of cellists playing a suite while speeding along in chimp who, after a long spell in a zoo, speaks En- a sleek new subway car; a boat trip through Dres- glish—voiced by Steve Zahn—rather better than he den, where the Goldberg Variations were commis- gibbers or howls.—A.L. (7/24/17) (In wide release.)

1THE THEATRE OPENINGS AND PREVIEWS ner. (Samuel J. Friedman, 261 W. 47th St. 212-239- 6200. Previews begin Aug. 3.)

Corkscrew Theatre Festival Really Rosie While the New York International Fringe Festival Encores! Off-Center concludes its summer season takes a one-year hiatus to reassess its goals, this with a concert version of the Carole King and Mau- new showcase highlights emerging artists who are rice Sendak musical, directed by Leigh Silverman using innovative forms of collaboration. (Paradise and featuring Taylor Caldwell (“School of Rock”). Factory, 64 E. 4th St. 347-954-9125. Opens Aug. 7.) (City Center, 131 W. 55th St. 212-581-1212. Aug. 2-5.)

Curvy Widow The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of Martha Bobby Goldman and Drew Brody wrote this musi- Stewart cal comedy, about a fiftysomething woman (Nancy Ryan Raftery, who has played Anna Wintour and Opel) who jumps back into the dating scene. (West- Andy Cohen in previous parody musicals, com- side, 407 W. 43rd St. 212-239-6200. In previews. pletes his “Titans of Media” trilogy as the life-style Opens Aug. 3.) guru, entrepreneur, and ex-con. (Joe’s Pub, 425 La- fayette St. 212-967-7555. Opens Aug. 7.) A Parallelogram Michael Greif directs a dark comedy by Bruce The Terms of My Surrender Norris (“Clybourne Park”), about a woman (Celia Michael Moore makes his theatrical début in this Keenan-Bolger) who can use a remote control to one-man rebuke to the Trump Administration, di- travel to any moment in her life. (Second Stage, 305 rected by Michael Mayer. (Belasco, 111 W. 44th St. W. 43rd St. 212-246-4422. Opens Aug. 2.) 212-239-6200.1 In previews. Opens Aug. 10.) Prince of Broadway Manhattan Theatre Club stages a musical cele- NOW PLAYING bration of the Broadway director-producer Har- old Prince, whose six-decade career includes “Cab- Amerike—The Golden Land aret,” “Company,” “Evita,” and “The Phantom of Moishe Rosenfeld and Zalmen Mlotek’s revue the Opera.” Prince directs, with co-direction and “The Golden Land” has morphed slightly since its choreography by Susan Stroman; the cast features première, in 1984. The addition of “Amerike” to the Karen Ziemba, Chuck Cooper, and Emily Skin- title of the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene’s

12 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017 THE THEATRE

revival suggests that the show isn’t just about Jew- tures Winston. Icke and Macmillan intensify the ish immigrants and Yiddish music (though those horror by turning up the lights and amping up the are worthy subjects, of course)—it’s about the very sound on the teeth-grindingly effective music. Ul- making of the United States. Bryna Wasserman’s timately, the torture comes off as imagined and the- production moves at full speed, from eighteen- atricalized; it’s more about what Icke and Macmil- eighties Ellis Island to the end of the Second World lan want us to see than what Winston might feel. War in ninety minutes, as it ricochets through de- (Reviewed in our issue of 7/10 & 17/17.) (Hudson, cades of popular tunes. It’s delicious to (re)discover 139-141 W. 44th St. 855-801-5876.) titans of Yiddish theatre, such as the composer Jo- seph Rumshinsky and the songwriting team Ar- Pipeline nold Perlmutter and Herman Wohl, and the mix In Dominique Morisseau’s play, Nya (Karen Pitt- of humor and unabashed pathos is neatly encapsu- man) is a black teacher at an economically dis- lated in Daniel Kahn’s rousing rendition of “Rou- advantaged urban high school. Her son, Omari mania, Roumania.” (Museum of Jewish Heritage, 36 (Namir Smallwood), attends a boarding school up- Battery Pl. 866-811-4111.) state. But he may have blown his future, by shov- ing a white teacher who was condescending to him. The Government Inspector What must it be like to anticipate your child’s slow In this adaptation of Gogol’s 1836 play, set in a provin- annihilation, the construction of his tomb, brick by cial Russian town where the corruption runs as deep brick, even as he lives? As played by Pittman—an as the mud in the street, Jeffrey Hatcher retains the actress of real wit—Nya is a woman who feels while original framework but gives the jokes a zingy mod- trying not to feel. The director, Lileana Blain-Cruz, ern spin. Jesse Berger, who directs the raucous Red has Pittman behave as if the world were closing in Bull Theatre production, freely mixes in bits from the on her, because it is: she wants to throw herself into Marx Brothers, the Three Stooges, and Woody Allen. the grave that is being dug for her son. Blain-Cruz Leading a cast of characters in whom virtue is uni- can’t quite overcome the curse of a flawed script, versally absent, Michael Urie is charming as hell as by a talented writer who is too taken with the cli- the lucky and manipulative object of mistaken iden- ché of the black mother as a symbol of oppression tity (his drunk scene is a comic masterpiece), while and then redemption. (7/24/17) (Mitzi E. New- Arnie Burton does superlative double duty as a cyn- house, 150 W. 65th St. 212-239-6200.) ical servant and a postmaster who reads all the mail. 1 As the mayor, Michael McGrath bluffs and blusters to the hilt, and Mary Testa, as his wife, earns big laughs ALSO NOTABLE just by changing the pitch of her voice. (New World Stages, 340 W. 50th St. 212-239-6200.) Anastasia Broadhurst. • Arcadia / Pity in History Atlantic Stage 2. Through Aug. 6. • Bandstand 1984 Jacobs. • Come from Away Schoenfeld. • Dear In a number of ways, Robert Icke and Duncan Mac- Evan Hansen Music Box. • A Doll’s House, Part 2 millan, who adapted George Orwell’s 1949 novel Golden. • Ghost Light Claire Tow. Through Aug. (they also direct, and obviously have a passion for 6. • Groundhog Day August Wilson. • Hamlet Pub- the material), have made a successful film, which lic. • Hello, Dolly! Shubert. • In & of Itself Daryl indirectly emphasizes how constricting the stage Roth. • Indecent Cort. Through Aug. 6. • Marvin’s can be. Airstrip One, formerly known as Great Room American Airlines Theatre. • A Midsummer Britain, is ruled by the Inner Party, a political re- Night’s Dream Delacorte. Through Aug. 13. • Na­ gime in which having your own opinion is consid- poli, Brooklyn Laura Pels. • Natasha, Pierre & the ered a “thoughtcrime.” At the Ministry of Truth, Great Comet of 1812 Imperial. • The Play That Goes Winston (Tom Sturridge) works with Julia (Olivia Wrong Lyceum. • Sweeney Todd: The Demon Bar­ Wilde), as Inner Party members walk by, includ- ber of Fleet Street Barrow Street Theatre. • War ing O’Brien (Reed Birney). Later, during a series Paint Nederlander. • Woody Sez: The Life & Music of excruciating exchanges, O’Brien physically tor- of Woody Guthrie Irish Repertory.

Encores! Off-Center revives “Really Rosie,” Carole King and Maurice Sendak’s 1980 children’s

ILLUSTRATION BY LORIS LORA LORIS BY ILLUSTRATION musical, starring Taylor Caldwell and featuring songs like “Pierre” and “Chicken Soup with Rice.”

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017 13 1 CONCERTS IN TOWN

Mostly Mozart: “A Little Night Music” CLASSICAL MUSIC With its uncommon intimacy and frequently off- beat repertoire, this nightcap series in Lincoln Cen- ter’s Kaplan Penthouse has proved to be one of the festival’s more popular innovations. So Percus- sion starts the eight-concert run with an offering of music by Cage, Caroline Shaw, and Viet Cuong. A program featuring Joshua Bell, Steven Isserlis, and Ana-Maria Vera in Romantic piano trios pre- sumably will be a hard ticket to secure, but don’t overlook solo-piano recitals by Víkingur Ólafsson, a refined Icelandic artist making his festival début with music by Bach and Philip Glass, and by Kirill Gerstein, who concludes the series with an intense pairing of Brahms and Clara Schumann. Aug. 2, Aug. 5, Aug. 9-12, and Aug. 15-16 at 10. (Rose Bldg., Lin- coln Center. For complete listings, see mostlymozart.org.)

Adam Tendler Tendler, a proficient and thoughtful pianist with a penchant for the music of John Cage, investi- gates that composer’s turn toward Eastern phi- losophy and chance operations, juxtaposing two The tenor Ian Bostridge stars in an ambitious reconception of Schubert’s song cycle “Winterreise.” of his final works for prepared piano, from 1954, with an unreleased recording of Cage reciting his “45′ for a Speaker,” from the same year. Two later Deep Freeze Contemporary Ensemble offer a free piano works, from 1962 and 1987, provide contrast, “Schubertiade Remix” (Aug. 7), a tribute and a post-concert discussion with Cage experts Explorations of the richness, and the lends context. Aug. 4 at 7. (Rubin Museum of Art, to “one of history’s greatest composers relevance, of Schubert. 150 W. 17th St. rubinmuseum.org.) and partyers” that features “radical re- In the past several years, the music of sponses” to Schubert’s songs. Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra Louis Langrée, Mostly Mozart’s music director, Franz Schubert has captivated classical- Art songs—lieder—remain at the core leads the first of the orchestra’s programs of the music programmers in New York and of Schubert’s identity. Consider “Win- next two weeks, partnering with the pianist Be- elsewhere. His appeal to audiences has terreise” (“Winter Journey”), his second atrice Rana in an all-Beethoven evening that of- fers the “Egmont” Overture, the Piano Concerto never been in doubt, as his song cycles, cycle for voice and piano, which Mostly No. 1 in C Major, and the vibrant Seventh Sym- piano sonatas, and string quartets parade Mozart presents by way of a staged pro- phony. Then Andrew Manze, a renowned British across our stages at a constant clip. But he duction, “The Dark Mirror: Zender’s period-performance violinist who has also become a fine conductor, takes over. After an all-star col- seems to walk among us now, as Mozart Winterreise” (Aug. 12-13 at the Rose The- laboration with the violinist Joshua Bell and the did in the nineteen-eighties and early atre): Netia Jones’s staging puts the tenor cellist Stephen Isserlis featuring Brahms’s Dou- nineties, and as Shostakovich did for some Ian Bostridge in Weimar cabaret costume ble Concerto and Mendelssohn’s “Reformation” Symphony, he moves on to an even more populist years after that. Schubert’s unprecedented while the International Contemporary program, conducting Beethoven’s Violin Concerto lyrical sensitivity, his revelatory harmonic Ensemble performs Hans Zender’s grip- (with the distinguished soloist Thomas Zehetmair) wanderings, and even his insecure crafts- ping orchestral transformation of the and Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 in G Minor. Aug. 4-5, Aug. 8-9, and Aug. 11-12 at 7:30. (David Geffen manship seem especially apt for a moment work, in which Schubert’s sound world Hall. 212-721-6500.) in which classical music is becoming more collides with those of Mahler and Boulez. of an “indie” venture. (Bostridge’s powerful Decca recording of Bargemusic The barge’s programs range far and wide these This summer, specialized program- Schubert’s original version is as represen- days, but in early August the series gets down ming intensifies the Schubert trend. tative of our time as the renditions of to brass tacks, touring through the catalogues of “Schubert’s Summer Journey,” a miniseries Dietrich Fischer- Dieskau were of the major masters. Mark Peskanov, the series’ direc- tor, sets the tone, partnering with the noted pia- of six concerts curated by the eminent Cold War era. ) nist Jeffrey Swann in the third of several concerts pianist Emanuel Ax, is under way at Tan- This will be the third time in eight years that pair Handel’s sonatas for violin and keyboard glewood; upcoming events include two that Lincoln Center has offered a drama- with those of Beethoven. On the next day, Philip Edward Fisher continues his journey through the Thursday evenings (Aug. 3 and Aug. 17) tized version of Schubert’s cycle, but previ- piano sonatas of Beethoven (including No. 24 in in which Ax and Yo-Yo Ma are joined by ous efforts drew criticism as well as cheers. F-Sharp Major). Aug. 5 at 6 and 8 and Aug. 6 at 2 such artists as the violinist Colin Jacobsen Ultimately, this is Schubert’s story, and we and 4. (Fulton Ferry Landing, Brooklyn. For tickets and full schedule, see bargemusic.org.) and the mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton. cannot own it. As the composer David Lang, 1 Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart efforts who has thought deeply about Schubert, are more wide-ranging. Trio Solisti makes points out, the final number, “The Hurdy- OUT OF TOWN its festival début in a late-night concert Gurdy Man,” shows that the desperation Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival at the Kaplan Penthouse centered on the of the narrator arises not only from his Popularly known as “Banglewood,” this appeal- sublime Piano Trio No. 1 in B-Flat Major situation as spurned lover but also from ing institute meaningfully embraces its setting— the recently expanded Massachusetts Museum of (Aug. 15); at the David Rubenstein his profession—“he writes songs.” Contemporary Art—with music meant to reso-

Atrium, the cool kids of the International —Russell Platt nate with the visual art works all around. Among CHOI JEE-OOK BY ILLUSTRATION

14 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017 CLASSICAL MUSIC this year’s highlights are a program featuring two (No. 25) and Schumann’s Second Symphony. On Philip Glass works, his dramatic Symphony No. 3 the following Friday night, Giancarlo Guerrero and intensely concentrated “Music in Similar Mo- takes the podium to lead music by Dvořák, Brahms tion,” and a six-hour closing marathon including (the Double Concerto, with the violinist Gil Sha- works by, among others, Louis Andriessen (this ham and the cellist Alisa Weilerstein), and Stra- year’s resident guest), Steve Reich, and the Bang vinsky (“The Rite of Spring”). Aug. 5 and Aug. 11 on a Can founders Michael Gordon, David Lang, at 8 and Aug. 6 at 2:30. (Lenox, Mass. For a complete and Julia Wolfe. Aug. 2 at 4:30 and Aug. 5 at 4. (North schedule, visit bso.org.) Adams, Mass. massmoca.org.) Marlboro Music Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival Another summer of glorious music wraps up at the This longtime East End festival, directed by the legendary festival, where a conclave of the world’s flutist Marya Martin, has flourished by offering leading classical virtuosos (and their exceptionally concerts both effervescent and distinguished. The talented protégés) gather to intensely rehearse a first one of August is an al-fresco affair on the range of chamber-music masterpieces, and the oc- grounds of Bridgehampton Presbyterian Church, casional novelty. Brett Dean is this year’s composer- which is the home base for most of the series’ pro- in-residence, with the conductor Leon Fleisher as grams: it’s an evening of gems from Baroque-era guest artist. Programs are announced one week in Italy, featuring concertos and other works by Vi- advance on the festival’s Web site. Aug. 5 and Aug. valdi, Gallo, and Albinoni. Aug. 2 at 6:30. (For tick- 11-12 at 8 and Aug. 6 and Aug. 13 at 2:30. (Marlboro, ets and full schedule, visit bcmf.org.) Vt. marlboromusic.org.)

Glimmerglass Festival Maverick Concerts This season’s schedule mixes classic Americana and The next two Sundays at the Maverick’s serene stories that echo today’s headlines. Rodgers and woodland music chapel feature, first, the Dover Hammerstein’s “Oklahoma!,” a complex but idyllic Quartet, which commands the heights in stan- slice of frontier life, features the young opera sing- dard repertory: its concert offers quartets by ers Jarrett Ott and Vanessa Becerra as Curly and Schumann and Tchaikovsky (the radiant First, in Laurey in a staging by Molly Smith; James Lowe D Major) as well as the Quartet No. 3 (1945) by conducts. Aug. 3 and Aug. 11 at 7:30 and Aug. 5, Aug. Szymon Laks, a survivor of the Holocaust. Then 8, and Aug. 14 at 1:30. • With its muted colors and it’s the turn of the Harlem Quartet, renowned sympathetic narrative, Donizetti’s “The Siege of for its broad embrace of repertory from the Old Calais” dramatizes the struggle of the French port and New Worlds: its concert features Hispanic- city during the Hundred Years’ War, when it was oriented works by Turina, Gabriela Lena Frank, under sustained attack by Edward III. The spectre and Guido López Gavilán before wrapping up of the so-called Calais Jungle—the migrant camps with Borodin’s lyrical String Quartet No. 2 (with that were dismantled by the French government the “Nocturne”). Aug. 6 and Aug. 13 at 4. (Wood- in 2016—lingers over the production by Francesca stock, N.Y. maverickconcerts.org.) Zambello (the festival’s artistic and general direc- tor), the work’s American première. Joseph Co- Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music laneri conducts a cast that includes Aleks Romano, Entrusted in years past to the supervision of an Leah Crocetto, Adrian Timpau, and Chaz’men eminent composer, this annual showcase is helmed Williams-Ali. Aug. 4 and Aug. 10 at 7:30 and Aug. 12 this season by three noteworthy Tanglewood Music and Aug. 15 at 1:30. • This summer’s flagship work Center alumni: the cellist Kathryn Bates, the pia- is George Gershwin’s beloved “Porgy and Bess,” nist Jacob Greenberg, and the violist Nadia Sirota. a jazz-and-blues-inflected piece that depicts the Each of the strikingly varied chamber-music pro- lives of an African-American enclave bedevilled grams includes a commissioned world première by drugs and poverty, in Charleston. Zambello, (by Anthony Cheung, Kui Dong, and Nico Muhly, the director, and the conductor, John DeMain, respectively); in the final concert, Stefan Asbury have restored the work’s original recitatives and conducts the Tanglewood Music Center Orches- orchestrations; Musa Ngqungwana and Talise Tre- tra in a hearty program (also featuring the Lorelei vigne take the title roles. Aug. 5 at 8 and Aug. 7 and Ensemble, a marvellous women’s vocal group from Aug. 13 at 1:30. • John Holiday, an up-and-coming Boston) that includes works by Ligeti, Dutilleux, countertenor with an appealing, sopranolike tim- Dai Fujikura, Anna Thorvaldsdóttir, and Huang bre, sings the title role of Handel’s “Xerxes,” giv- Ruo. Aug. 10-14. (Lenox, Mass. For details, see bso.org.) ing audiences the chance to hear his rendition of one of the most exquisite arias the composer ever Bard Music Festival: “Chopin and His World” wrote, “Ombra mai fu.” Nicole Paiement conducts; For its twenty-eighth iteration, Leon Botstein Tazewell Thompson directs. Aug. 6 at 1:30 and Aug. gathers the musical and academic forces of Bard 12 at 8. (Cooperstown, N.Y. glimmerglass.org.) College to devote two weekends, bursting with concerts and talks, to the musical and cultural uni- Tanglewood: Boston Symphony Orchestra verse of a single major composer. Frédéric Cho- The magnificent ensemble that is Tanglewood’s rai- pin is the lodestar this summer, an artist whose in- son d’être holds concerts on Friday and Saturday fluence on keyboard music was beyond measure evenings and Sunday afternoons. One of the early- and whose career transcended not only national August highlights is a Saturday evening (with Hans boundaries—France and Poland—but the whole Graf conducting) devoted to two early-Romantic idea of musical nationalism. Botstein conducts the masterworks, Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in American Symphony Orchestra in a typical pro- F Minor (with Garrick Ohlsson) and Mendels- gram, which uses Chopin’s “Fantasy on Polish Airs” sohn’s magical incidental music to Shakespeare’s as a springboard into a selection of pieces for the “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” complete (featur- concert hall and the opera house by such import- ing the soprano Kiera Duffy, the mezzo-soprano ant contemporaries as Weber, Meyerbeer, Bellini Abigail Fischer, and a host of actors and choris- (the Oboe Concerto, with Alexandra Knoll), and ters); on Sunday afternoon, Yo-Yo Ma comes by to Rossini (Act III of “Otello,” featuring the soprano perform Schumann’s brooding Cello Concerto in Nicole Cabell, among other singers). Aug. 12 at 8. a concert (conducted by David Zinman) that also (Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. fishercenter.bard.edu. features Mozart’s “Little G Minor” Symphony Through Aug. 20.)

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017 15 1 OUT OF TOWN

Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival DANCE Doug Varone & Dancers commemorates its thirtieth anniversary (at the Ted Shawn, Aug. 2-6) with a look- how-far-we’ve-come pair of solos for the choreogra- Lincoln Center Out of Doors bean music: Afro-pop, funk, and dancehall. pher: one that he set to a Chopin nocturne in 1987 and The free festival offers a bit of everything. (Lincoln Center, Broadway at 64th St. 212-721- a première also set to Chopin. “ReComposed,” a 2015 On Aug. 3, at Damrosch Park Bandshell, there 6500. Aug. 3-10.) ensemble work that captures the swirl of Joan Mitch- will be a celebration of Bollywood, with a col- ell pastels, completes the program, along with “Boats lage of dance, music, and projections, evoking Battery Dance Festival Leaving,” an affecting evocation of refugee suffering. • the larger-than-life, loopy world of Hindi cin- Every August, this free festival, sponsored by Kyle Abraham’s latest work, “Dearest Home” (at the ema. (The performers, all local, underscore the Battery Dance Company, enlivens summer Doris Duke, Aug. 2-6), is a stripped-down look at the the vitality of the South Asian diaspora.) On evenings with a series of open-air performances pain of intimacy, too bare in its exposure, despite some Aug. 4 at Hearst Plaza, the tap duo Chloe & in Battery Park. One full program, on Aug. 15, wounded beauty. Music is optional (through head- Maud—YouTube sensations—offer an eve- is devoted to Indian classical dance, under the phones); the weeping of the dancers isn’t. • Camille A. ning of their witty and sexy covers of pop- auspices of the “Erasing Borders” festival. That Brown’s “Black Girl: Linguistic Play” (at the Ted ular tunes by Beyoncé and Rihanna, danced program is always a highlight; this year’s par- Shawn, Aug. 9-13) winningly draws upon playground by their New York-based troupe, Apartment ticipants include a young couple specializing games to express the rivalrous and supportive sides 33. On Aug. 6, various groups specializing in in bharata natyam; Dimple Saikia performing of female friendship; there’s humor, live music, and Eastern European and Central Asian dances, the less-known sattriya, a dance practiced in an abundance of springy rhythm. • Audio of Donald like the Cossack hopak—squat walks and split the monasteries of Assam; and the Bethesda- Rumsfeld describing his meeting with Elvis Presley jumps galore—and the khorumi and other based kuchipudi ensemble Kalanidhi Dance. in Las Vegas is the seed of Mark Dendy’s “Elvis Ev- traditional Georgian dances, will take over But the entire weeklong series, which includes erywhere,” performed by Dendy/Donovan Projects Hearst Plaza. You haven’t lived until you’ve performances by international companies like (at the Doris Duke, Aug. 9-13). The lively show mines seen a Georgian dancer spin like a top, propel Mophato Dance (from Botswana) and Compañía the metaphor of Elvis as America, with swivelling pel- himself into the air, and land on his knees. On Elías Aguirre (from Spain), is worth explor- vises and ideas touching on cultural appropriation, Aug. 10, at Damrosch Park Bandshell, the fes- ing. (Robert F. Wagner, Jr., Park, 20 Battery Park celebrity worship, and patriotism. (Becket, Mass. 413- tival holds a showcase of African and Carib- Pl. 212-219-3910. Aug. 13-15. Through Aug. 19.) 243-0745. Aug. 2-6 and Aug. 9-13. Through Aug. 27.)

ABOVE & BEYOND

Hong Kong Dragon Boat Festival India, which became the world’s largest producer of culture pillars trace back, in part, to the Cold This decorated-boat race and cultural festival re- movies. At this event, musicians play live as dancers War-era Red Scare, when a battle of ideolo- turns to Flushing, for its twenty-seventh year. perform choreography rooted in Hindi film scenes, gies left countless actors, writers, and direc- The tradition is said to commemorate the an- flanked by projections of black-and-white classics tors defending themselves against accusations cient poet Qu Yuan, who spent years in exile and and present-day box-office smashes, as well as orig- of Communism. At this lecture, the film histo- then jumped to his death, in the Miluo River, after inal animations. (Damrosch Park Bandshell, Lincoln rian Max Alvarez unearths the legacy of black- learning that his home state had been invaded. Center. lincolncenter.org. Aug. 3 at 7:30.) listing, presenting extensive research and rare (Fishermen sped onto the river but could not save 1 archival clips. (St. Agnes Library, 444 Amster- him.) Today, teams in more than thirty dragon dam Ave. 212-621-0619. Aug. 5 at 2.) boats race along Meadow Lake after two days of READINGS AND TALKS food, folk art, and crafts as well as performances Strand Bookstore from bands and troupes across cultures, includ- Albertine Last year, Jarett Kobek self-published “I Hate ing the Chinese Music Ensemble of New York, Those revelling in the current Emily Dickinson the Internet,” a dig at Silicon Valley culture, the CASYM Steel Orchestra, the Echo Music Jam revival, spiked by the biographical film “A Quiet the digital-clout economy, and the changes to Band, and the Ka fele Bandele Group. (Flushing Passion” and the unseasonable chill of our polit- society both forces have wrought. The book Meadows–Corona Park, 11101 Corona Ave., Queens. ical moment, will find much to mine in the work found a wide audience, including Bret Easton hkdbf-ny.org. Aug. 12-13.) of the essayist, poet, and scholar Susan Howe, Ellis and several Pitchfork columnists. Kobek a Dickinson devotee. “My Emily Dickinson” is has followed it up with “The Future Won’t Be “Bollywood Boulevard: A Journey Through her recent book of close readings and histori- Long,” a novel that throws its two protago- Hindi Cinema” cal asides surrounding the poet’s “My Life Had nists into the WiFi-less New York art world Lincoln Center Out of Doors presents an evening Stood―A Loaded Gun”; on the occasion of its of the nineteen-eighties, where their friend- devoted to the rich history of the Bollywood mu- publication in French, she discusses her work ship is tested by the ebb and flow of the city’s sical. In the nineteen-twenties, the A.T. & T. sub- with the translator Antoine Cazé and the pub- night-life scenes. If the Internet has eroded sidiary Western Electric set out to “soundify” silent lishers Barbara Epler and Isabella Checcaglini. our sense of closeness, the author seems to theatres across the globe, exporting American musi- (972 Fifth Ave. albertine.com. Aug. 2 at 7.) wonder, how close were we to begin with? He cals (and, by extension, the American way) to places appears in conversation with Ivy Pochoda, like Shanghai, Fiji, and India. But it wasn’t long be- New York Public Library a Brooklyn native and the author of “Visi- fore filmmakers in those locales began to make films The roots of American skepticism about Hol- tation Street.” (828 Broadway. 212-473-1452.

of their own—nowhere more conspicuously than in lywood films, coastal media, and other pop- Aug. 15 at 7.) AMARGO PABLO BY ILLUSTRATION

16 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017 F§D & DRINK

1 TABLES FOR TWO also aims to transport diners to a sim- BA R TA B Pho Real ulacrum of Vietnam. On a recent eve- ning, a waiter informed a couple that Madame Vo, 212 E. 10th St. (917-261- the establishment had run out of trout. 2115); Hanoi House, 119 St. Marks Pl. Luckily, they were about to be edified: (212-995-5010) “Seafood in Vietnam is traditionally The great wave of Vietnamese restau- served with scallion oil and peanuts,” a rants that washed across the East Vil- waiter explained, recommending, in- The Wooly Public lage late last year left casualties in its stead, a dish of clams and congee, which 9 Barclay St. (212-571-2930) wake. Witness, for example, the also came with the oil-and-peanut sea- Since 2009, soirées for the young and well-heeled high-water mark around the bleached soning, yet managed to taste sprightly have taken place in a hidden lounge known as the bones of Chao Chao—known briefly and oceanic. In fact, most of the food Wooly, situated at the base of Woolworth Building, for its slick cocktails and its live d.j.— here is light and carefully flavored. Take, now a hundred and four years old. Last winter, the proprietors, David Tobias and Eric Adolfsen, stranded on the shores of Avenue A, for example, a summer roll, in which opened a companion bar next door called the with a “For Rent” sign in the window. pieces of cucumber float on an impos- Wooly Public. A bar for the people was refreshing Thankfully, like seeds scattered by the sibly aerated slate of pork sausage. news in inequitable times, particularly after the upper half of the great building, a neo-Gothic storm, others have survived, thriving in Where Madame Vo is bright, Hanoi landmark built by the founder of the five-and-dime what Eater has called a “great new era House revels in shadows. With the chain, was recently turned into luxury condomini- for Vietnamese food.” right Insta-filter, you can just about ums. While the condo owners may be unlikely to mingle with the masses downstairs over burgers, Each of the new restaurants makes capture the Vietnam of Catherine De- ’nduja, and devilled eggs, perhaps—if, say, they’re an appeal to New York’s cravings for neuve in “Indochine,” the dark wood Russian oil tycoons keen to take secret meetings authenticity, offering variously “tradi- and slatted shutters calling to mind an with American kleptocrats—they’ll appreciate the establishment’s shadowy corners and deafening tional” or “quintessential” dishes, albeit opium den in the early twentieth cen- acoustics. The aesthetic is an epochal medley lack- in obligatorily hip settings. Madame tury, though with a strictly reggae ing harmony—purple neon, vintage radios, fake Vo, on East Tenth Street, is loud and soundtrack, and sans the colonial vio- flowers, a pay phone. Maybe the designers were nodding to the building’s variety-store history. searingly bright, and bristles with life. lence. At this restaurant, however, The craft cocktails, including “Old Souls” (classics The flavors are as brazen as the lighting, sixteen- hour-stewed pho is the drug with modern twists) and “New Editions,” are tasty and many dishes burn with chili—after of choice. The steaming, perfectly bal- and tiki-forward. One rainy Friday night, two friends tried drinks with embarrassing names: a while, you don’t know what to do with anced broth is remarkably light and Fountain of Youth, Gem Heist at the Plaza. A the piles of peppers garnishing the soft- simply trance-inducing. Follow the woman with a glittery backpack ordered a Wooly- shell crab. Not that this bothers the waiter’s advice, add a few slabs of oxtail nesia, tropical punch with gin, lime, chili, cinna- mon, and puréed stone fruits, served in a woolly- trendy couples crouching over marble on top, or a marrow bone, and feel mammoth-shaped mug. Paintings, prints, and tables laden with bowls of pho and gar- yourself dissolve into the evening. statuary of the extinct beast, a lugubrious mascot, lic noodles, recording every moment of (Entrées at Madame Vo, $14-$24; Hanoi lurk everywhere you look. The woman took a sip, smiled at her man-bunned companion, and said, their meal for their friends. House, $13-$28.) as far as an amateur lip-reader could tell, either “I

PHOTOGRAPH BY ZACHARY ZAVISLAK FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE JOOST BY ILLUSTRATION YORKER; THE NEW FOR ZAVISLAK ZACHARY BY PHOTOGRAPH A bit farther south, Hanoi House —Nicolas Niarchos love you” or “Elephant juice.”—Carolyn Kormann

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017 17

THE TALK OF THE TOWN

COMMENT of the President’s grievance is that the ment the policy goals on which he THIS TIME, IT’S PERSONAL Attorney General recused himself from campaigned, and no member of the the investigation into possible Russian Cabinet has worked more assiduously he Attorney General of the United attempts to interfere in the 2016 elec- to advance Trump’s agenda than Ses- TStates supervises all federal prose- tion, thereby setting in motion the pro- sions. He has reversed the Obama Ad- cutors, and one of the rituals of the job cess that led to the appointment of Rob- ministration’s commitment to voting involves visiting the U.S. Attorneys’ offices ert Mueller, the special counsel. Sessions rights, which had been reflected in Jus- across the nation. When Jeff Sessions, did the right thing; according to prose- tice Department lawsuits against voter- who is now (that is, at this precise mo- cutorial ethics, he cannot supervise a re- suppression laws in North Carolina ment) the Attorney General, stopped view of a campaign in which he played and Texas. He has changed an Obama- in at the Philadelphia office the other a prominent role. Trump’s willful mis- era directive to federal prosecutors to day, President Trump had already made understanding of the obligations of an seek reasonable, as opposed to maxi- the first of what would be several pub- Attorney General reflects a larger flaw mum, prison sentences for nonviolent lic critiques of the nation’s chief law- in his Presidency and in his character— drug offenders. Similarly, he has re- enforcement officer. On this occasion, his apparent belief that his appointees vived a discredited approach to civil Sessions did not respond directly, but owe their loyalty to him personally, rather forfeiture, which will subject innocent seemed to make an almost poignant at- than to the nation’s Constitution and its people to the loss of their property. tempt to reingratiate himself with his laws, and, more broadly, to the Ameri- He has also backed away from the boss. Departing from his prepared re- can people. effort, championed by his predeces- marks, he said, “I do my best every day Every President has wide latitude sors Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, to be faithful to the laws of the Consti- in directing his appointees to imple- to rein in and reform police depart- tution of this United States and to fulfill ments, like the one in Ferguson, Mis- the goals of the President that I share.” souri, that have discriminated against The President, apparently, was unap- African-Americans. peased, because during the next several Although candidate Trump prom- days he continued his stream of spoken ised to protect L.G.B.T. rights, Presi- and tweeted insults, calling Sessions “be- dent Trump last week vowed to remove leaguered” and “very weak,” and declar- transgender service members from the ing himself “very disappointed” with his armed forces, and Sessions’s Justice De- Attorney General. partment, along the same lines, took On one level, this exchange resem- the position in court that Title VII, the bled a reality-show version of a reality nation’s premier anti-discrimination show, in which Sessions, a long-in-the- law, does not protect gay people from tooth apprentice, sought to avoid hear- bias. Most of all, Sessions has embraced ing Trump tell him, “You’re fired.” But the issue that first brought him and this black comedy of manners obscured Trump together: the crackdown on im- a clearer tragedy of state. Trump wasn’t migration. Sessions’s subordinates have taunting Sessions because of any policy defended the President’s travel ban on differences between them but, rather, as refugees and people from six majority- usually seems to be the case with this Muslim countries, and Sessions has

ILLUSTRATIONS BY TOM BACHTELL TOM BY ILLUSTRATIONS President, for personal reasons. The core stepped up enforcement of the laws

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017 19 that prevent undocumented immigrants the public, not the political interests of Mueller’s investigation, which he could from settling in the United States. the President who appoints him. attempt to do by directing the head of All these initiatives are unwise, Trump’s fixation on the personal al- the Justice Department (whoever that unjust, and counterproductive, but legiance of members of his Adminis- winds up being) to fire him. This, of course, they nevertheless represent the kind of tration also led to his decision to fire would be reminiscent of President Nix- change that tends to occur when an James Comey as the F.B.I. director. As on’s determination, in October, 1973, to Administration of one political party Comey recounted in his testimony be- fire Archibald Cox, the Watergate spe- takes over from the other. Elections, it fore the Senate Intelligence Commit- cial prosecutor. But a dismissal of Muel- is often noted, have consequences. Pres- tee, Trump repeatedly pressed him for ler would be worse. Nixon clashed with ident Trump’s behavior, however, rep- his loyalty—demands that Comey tried Cox over what was at least an arguable resents a different kind of change— to finesse, until the President abruptly matter of principle—specifically, whether one that threatens the basic norms ended his tenure. Congress set the term the prosecutor had the right to subpoena underlying our system of government. of F.B.I. directors at ten years, in order the White House tapes. Trump wants No President in recent history has to establish a standard of political in- Mueller gone simply because he doesn’t treated his Attorney General solely as dependence for them; no President had want to be investigated. An order to fire a political, or even as a personal, func- heretofore violated that tradition out Mueller would be an abuse of power, but tionary. When Alberto Gonzales, who of personal or political pique. But, as one in keeping with the way that Trump served as the Attorney General under bad as the decision to fire Comey was, has conducted his Presidency. On the Sat- George W. Bush, fired U.S. Attorneys and as lamentable as Trump’s attempted urday night that Cox was fired, he said, for failing to do the bidding of the Re- defenestration of Sessions is, the Pres- “Whether ours shall continue to be a gov- publican Party, Gonzales, quite prop- ident may be heading toward even more ernment of laws and not of men is now erly, lost his job, too. He had violated dramatic departures from American for Congress and ultimately the Ameri- a principle that, until now, seemed in- norms in the near future. can people” to decide. So it remains today. violate: that the Attorney General serves Trump now seems set on terminating —Jeffrey Toobin

THE PICTURES guy walking around with his hands in J. M. Coetzee. In the basement, he hap- BARGAIN BASEMENT his pockets, whistling,” he said. pily observed that the ceiling was lower, While he waited for the elevator, a and the air-conditioning weaker. He customer—a middle-aged woman— opened “The Oxford Book of Aging,” asked if she could take a photo of the and “Mean Dads for a Better Amer- two of them. ica.” He asked an employee if the Strand “You’re very red,” Tambor said, in a still sold bound galleys; he used to love soft voice. She looked as if she’d been them, he said, for the glimpse they effrey Tambor, the actor, first moved out in the sun. offered behind the curtain of book Jto New York in 1979, when he was “I was in Times Square this morn- publishing. He was directed down a thirty-five. He lived on Dean Street, ing, watching people die,” she explained. corridor cul-de-sac, and, when he found in Brooklyn, and made television com- Earlier that day, a man had driven for the galleys, noted that they were disap- mercials, playing what he recently three and a half blocks along the side- pointingly glossy; he recalled drab, called “the young, balding-father type.” walk of Seventh Avenue. He’d injured At the end of most weeks, he’d stop twenty-two pedestrians, and killed one at a bookstore—often the Strand, on young woman. Broadway—to buy a paperback, “just “You were there?” Tambor asked. to mark the fact that I’d got through “How close were you?” the week.” “I saw him barrelling at me and I ran When Tambor returned to the as fast as I could.” Strand not long ago, on a hot after- “Oh, my.” noon, during a break between shoot- She smiled. “Seeing you is confirma- ing the third season of “Transparent” tion that I’m going to be O.K.” and the fifth season of “Arrested De- There was a pause. “Well, you’re the velopment,” he was for a moment puz- first person who ever said that,” Tambor zled: the ground floor was bright and said. orderly, and “Für Elise” was playing on He pointed out a stack of his new the sound system. “Didn’t it used to be memoir, “Are You Anybody?” Delighted, a bit seedy?” he asked. she asked him to sign a copy for her. As Tambor lives in Westchester County, he wrote, she said, “It was a red car. I saw but for a few years has co-owned a book- it coming really, really fast.” store in Los Feliz, Los Angeles, where Tambor wandered, slowly. He en- he has no managerial duties. “I’m the thused about Murakami, Vonnegut, and Jeffrey Tambor

20 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017 1 matte Soviet volumes. “We don’t get ISLANDERS he does come he will have to duck be- too many of those now,” the employee said. EXTRA CREDIT cause of the low ceiling,” she said. Tambor asked him how long he’d On one wall hangs a replica of the worked at the store. Buddha’s footprint, from a mountain “Well, in the basement, four or five temple in Sri Lanka. The footprint is years.” about eighteen inches long. “Yes, I won- “Have you been relegated to the dered about that, too,” Julia said. “Maybe basement?” he just had really big feet. I love to hike A few minutes later, Tambor was sit- ulia Wijesinghe has spent all eigh- in Sri Lanka, and I have been to that ting on a bench in Union Square Park. Jteen years of her life on two islands: beautiful temple at the time when the A man was selling bottled water, wear- Staten Island and Sri Lanka. Her par- humans go. There is another time when ing a homemade hat on which was writ- ents, both Sri Lanka-born, met on the the animals visit the temple, and it can ten a message about epilepsy awareness. Staten Island Ferry. They started a Sri be dangerous, with snakes and leop- “You did Jimmy Fallon the other Lankan restaurant called Lakruwana ards. Buddha was only peaceful and did night,” the man said to Tambor. (which is also her father’s first name), on not harm animals. I have never eaten “I did.” Forty-fourth Street, in Manhattan, and meat in my whole life. I do not even kill “My man.” moved it to Bay Street, on Staten Island, mosquitoes.” “How’s business?” Tambor asked. thirteen years ago. It seats forty, received Palm-leaf books are thin rectangu- “It’s going great,” the water-seller re- a good review in the Times, in 2013, and lar strips of palm leaves that are bound plied. “I wish you all the best. Hug.” They sometimes has a line waiting in front. at one end. Julia’s grandmother writes hugged. “Call me up if you need a stand- Julia, an only child, has helped in the stories on these strips; a single story can in—a black-belt epileptic.” restaurant since she was little. At fifteen, fill an entire wooden container resem- The man walked off, and Tambor re- she had an idea: start a Sri Lankan mu- bling a shoebox. On exhibit were a palm- marked on his apparent optimism. “He seum in the restaurant’s basement. Her leaf book the size of a sheaf of paint made it to the other side,” he said. “He parents said she could do that when she samples, a big ball of raw rubber from was sick, he was an epileptic, and now was eighteen, and, a few months ago, she a rubber tree (one of Sri Lanka’s re- he’s made it to the other side. This guy’s did. Hers, she claims, is the only Sri sources), boxes of Ceylon tea (“We have probably got more gratitude than any- Lankan museum in the world outside the best, best tea”), a large stone grinder body walking in the park.” When he Sri Lanka. for spices (“Sri Lankan women were passed again, Tambor asked him how he Not long ago, as she gave a tour of strong, back in the day”), her grand- kept in such good shape. the museum to a wanderer of Staten Is- mother’s sitar, a replica of a seated Bud- “I work out!” the man said. “I’ve got land, she wore her school uniform: light- dha considered to be the fifth-greatest to stay in shape. I’m black. I’ve got to brown shoes, blue pleated skirt, gray statue in the world, and a statue of the survive. I’ve got to run from the police, hoodie with “Notre Dame” on it, and a fasting Buddha (“For six years, he ate I’ve got to run from stickup kids. I’ve got black button-up sweater with “Wije- no food and never opened his eyes”) to run all my fucking life. I’ve got no singhe” in white script on the left pocket. that was made of welded iron. choice but to stay in shape.” “I was going to put my first name, but “My friends ask me, ‘You’re from “Stay well,” Tambor said. there are a lot of Julias in my school, so New York, why do you have so much He looked at the opposite bench, I used my last name instead,” she said. pride for your parents’ country?’ I have where there was an elderly man wear- During her four years at the Catholic one-hundred-per-cent New York pride, ing a melon-colored T-shirt, white all-girl school—she graduated in June— too. I got inspiration for my museum pants, and loafers with no socks. “Would she was the only Buddhist. from going to MoMA. I loved my you have said no socks on this guy?” Julia stays with her grandmother in school—the nuns asked me to tell about Tambor said. “And his top is absolutely Colombo, Sri Lanka, every summer. Over Buddhism in theology classes, I learned wrong. If a costumer gave you that several years, with her father’s help, she how to use the Bible. My mom doesn’t outfit and said, ‘Look, it’s an old man assembled the museum’s collection of want me to go far away for college, so sitting on the bench,’ you’d say, ‘What Buddha statues (replicas and originals), I will go to St. John’s or the College of are you talking about? No, go get an- ceremonial weapons, musical instruments, Staten Island. But I am fluent in Sin- other costume.’ ” cooking implements, temple objects, a halese, and the amazing, wonderful A man asked to take a photograph—a rubber-tree log, gemstones, and statues country of Sri Lanka is my home, too. portrait, not a selfie. “I used to be an ed- of Hindu deities like Krishna and Ga- Sometimes strangers say, ‘You must be itor at People,” he said. “But now I’m just nesha. Last August, she packed them in from India.’ I tell them I’m not, and a retired old guy with a big mustache.” a twenty-foot shipping container and then, over and over, I get the question Tambor asked his name. sent them on a voyage to America. The ‘What—where is Sri Lanka?’ With my “Ira Berger,” he said. “My wife’s going container arrived a month later; she museum, I want to change that.” to be very happy that I met you.” worked on the museum all winter, and She went on, “When my dad came, “Mrs. Berger?” it opened in March. Mayor De Blasio thirty-four years ago, there were almost “Yes, Mrs. Berger.” heard about it, and she hoped he might no other Sri Lankans in New York. My —Ian Parker visit, but he hasn’t yet. “He’s tall, so when mom was the first Sri Lankan woman

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017 21 he met here, and when they dated he never handled an AK before.” After a what they’re getting into.” He asked took her to Yankee games. For us, there month, he was sent to the front lines. Nathan, “Do you have any first aid?” is no question between Mets or Yankees. Soon, his unit advanced on Raqqa, “I took an expedition first-aid course,” We are a Yankees family all the way.” ISIS’s self-proclaimed capital; the Y.P.G. Nathan said. 1—Ian Frazier is one of the United States’ primary part- Chapman offered some packing tips: ners in the region. Chapman said that bring chest seals, needle-decompression FREELANCE DEPT. he and the Kurds fought alongside scruffy kits, and tourniquets. “You have to con- HIGH STAKES American soldiers—“SOCOM types,” he trol hemorrhages,” he said, sipping his said, referring to special-operations units. lemonade. Strong painkillers, like Ket- According to Chapman, coalition war- amine and Fentanyl, are difficult to find planes bombed ISIS positions nearby and in Syria, but, he said, “you can buy low- his group received military equipment level opiates like Oxycodone.” Nathan from the United States. jotted down notes while, behind him, pa- Chapman, who left Syria in March, trons lined up for smoothies. ast May, Lucas Chapman graduated was on Capitol Hill the other day, try- Chapman went on, “A friend of mine Lfrom college and got a job with Post- ing to persuade staffers in the office of in Syria said, ‘The people who come over mates; he’d applied to do volunteer work Representative Alcee Hastings, of Flor- here are one of three types: Marxists and abroad and was saving up for a plane ida, to back several pieces of pro-refu- idealists, former military guys who ticket. He delivered stuff around Wash- gee, anti-ISIS legislation. He wore a tie couldn’t get enough, and crazy people.’ ” ington, D.C., in his ’98 Mustang. “I and a silver hoop in one ear, and he car- Chapman acknowledged that he is a lit- couldn’t do Uber because my car was too ried a messenger bag. tle bit of each. Nathan put himself in the old,” he said. Finally, in September, he re- After his meetings, he dropped by a first category. “I’ve been pretty far left ceived the encrypted e-mail message he’d café on Pennsylvania Avenue to speak for a long time, and the more I learned been waiting for: a note from the Peo- with another aspiring Y.P.G. fighter. It about the political makeup of these Kurd- ple’s Protection Units, a Kurdish militia was beastly hot. Chapman ordered a ish groups in Syria”—the Y.P.G. aims to in northern Syria, inviting him to war. lemonade and took a seat at a commu- create a socialist, feminist society through- He flew to northern Iraq. From there, nal table. Papers spilled from his mes- out northern Syria—“the more I real- a handler for the Y.P.G. (in translation, senger bag. “Lobbying materials,” he ized that, though you could sign peti- an acronym for the People’s Protection said to his counterpart, who asked to tions and write articles, it means a whole Units) escorted him into Syria—at night, be called Nathan. They’d met ten days hell of a lot more to go over there and on foot. Chapman, who is twenty-one, earlier, while attending a pro-Kurdish help the guys who are fighting ISIS.” is fair-skinned and slight. He reported protest in front of the White House. Nathan said that he planned to leave to a Y.P.G. training camp, where he Nathan—who is also twenty-one, with “whenever I get the go-ahead.” He’d fired guns, learned Kurdish, and stud- a patchy beard—recognized Chapman stashed a rucksack in a closet at his par- ied the group’s revolutionary ideology. from news stories about American vol- ents’ home, with a first-aid kit, a sleep- “I’ve known how to shoot since I was unteers fighting in Syria and asked for ing bag, a helmet, and body armor. “My eight, and had my own weapon since advice. “I don’t want to be considered a folks keep asking me, ‘Why don’t you I was twelve,” Chapman, who grew up Y.P.G. recruiter,” Chapman said later. get a job?’ I can’t tell them, ‘Because I’m in small-town Georgia, said. “But I’d “But I want people to be prepared for waiting for an e-mail from the Y.P.G.’ ” Chapman tried to keep things prac- tical. He asked Nathan if he knew how to treat a collapsed lung. “I’ve lost eight friends over there,” he said. Three Amer- ican Y.P.G. volunteers were killed near Raqqa this month. Nathan had heard about these deaths, but, he said, “I can’t get too worried about it. I mean, this is a once-in-a-gene ration opportunity. Thirty or forty years down the line, when someone says, ‘What did you do?,’ maybe I could say, ‘Well, I went over and liberated a section of the Mid- dle East from ISIS, and then helped re- build their society in a more egalitarian way.’ ” He admitted that perhaps he had not yet fully processed the gravity of his undertaking. “It’s not a reality right now, and won’t be until I’m on the plane.” “You weren’t supposed to see this.” —Nicholas Schmidle THE FINANCIAL PAGE the country, so that in many places there Rather than fuel vigorous compe- BAD RATINGS is only one way to reliably stream tition and lower prices, the rise of these Netflix, send e-mail, or read the news. giant companies has meant that Amer- “Cable is essentially a monopoly now icans are paying inflated costs for poor in urban areas,” Susan Crawford, a service. In Lexington, a university city professor at Harvard Law School and with a burgeoning technology indus- ast spring, a resident of Lexington, a former policy adviser to President try, the mayor’s office started getting LKentucky, named Jessica Abney Obama on science, technology, and in- calls from constituents shocked by their logged on to her computer and noticed novation, told me. In other words, Craw- bills almost as soon as the Charter- something odd: her monthly cable bill, ford said, when it comes to the Inter- Time Warner merger was complete; which had for years been around ninety net, a service that is essential for almost one city employee now devotes much dollars, had suddenly risen to a hundred every aspect of modern life, “we’re of his time to fielding the complaints, and thirty-one dollars. Abney, who is privileging the interests of a couple of which are entered in a huge spread- seventy-three, is retired and living alone companies over three hundred million sheet. (“Man with a severe mental dis- on disability; she was treated for colon Americans.” Nowhere are the drawbacks ability was sold a Spectrum package,” cancer last fall and has regular blood in- of such an uncompetitive market more one reads. “His sister wants to know fusions to address two autoimmune dis- evident than in Lexington, which has how he was signed up for service since eases. Even a small rise in expenses cre- become an active center of resistance. he doesn’t know his Social Security ates stress on her budget. Abney said number or birth date.”) Spectrum said that, when she called her cable company, that the price changes simply reflect Spectrum, to complain, a customer- the fact that Time Warner’s promo- service representative told her the bill tional deals have expired. would go up again soon, by another fifty Last week, Democratic leaders issued dollars. “I thought I was going to have a new agenda that singled out the cable a heart attack right there, and I’ve had industry as an example of bad antitrust five heart surgeries,” Abney told me. “I law. “We are going to fight to allow reg- said, ‘This is just not going to stop here. ulators to break up big companies if I’m a survivor, and I will do whatever I they’re hurting consumers,” Chuck have to do to get answers.’ ” Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader, Cable providers are among the most promised. Such pledges won’t do much despised businesses in the country, reg- to help Lexington. The city scheduled ularly coming in below airlines, banks, and a town-hall meeting later this month to drug companies in public-opinion polls. air grievances against Spectrum, and A mini industry of intermediaries has eight hundred people are expected to sprung up to help consumers deal with attend (along with at least one brave the providers’ notoriously terrible cus- representative from the company), but tomer service, offering to negotiate bills there’s little the town can do. As a let- and publishing online scripts for getting Internet service was deregulated ter from Lexington’s chief administra- rates cut (“The fleecing of the U.S. con- during the George W. Bush Adminis- tive officer to the cable companies last tinues!” a representative comment reads). tration, with the theory that fewer rules month read, “The city is left wondering Companies that attract such fervent would foster greater competition. For a what abuse will be heaped upon it next.” consumer ire are often the product of time, as A.T. & T. and Verizon started Abney eventually reached a tempo- extensive market consolidation. Abney’s building fibre-optic networks to com- rary agreement with Spectrum for a local cable provider, Time Warner, had pete with cable Internet, there seemed more modest increase in her bill, to a recently merged with Charter Com- to be truth to the idea. Over the past few hundred and sixteen dollars a month, munications, and the new entity was years, however, the companies have largely which allows her to get her favorite chan- named Spectrum. (Charter also ac- abandoned those projects; according to nels—Fox News, Fox Business, the quired Bright House Networks, a cable Crawford, the capital investments re- Christian network TBN—and the local company formerly owned by Advance/ quired were too high. President Trump’s news. Still, she blames the government Newhouse, the owner of this maga- newly appointed F.C.C. chairman, a for- for the problems she’s having and told zine.) Telecommunications service in mer Verizon lawyer named Ajit Pai, has me that competition needs to be re- the U.S. is now dominated by five com- done little to suggest that the agency will stored somehow. “I’ve never gone panies: Spectrum and Comcast; the improve the situation—in fact, he has through anything like this,” she said. telephone-service providers Verizon introduced a plan allowing companies “People are furious. If you go anywhere and A.T. & T.; and CenturyLink, which to raise rates even further, and abandoned in this town and mention Spectrum, has a strong presence out West. These a program that would bring competition they go ballistic.” companies have effectively carved up into the market for cable set-top boxes. —Sheelah Kolhatkar GOLDEN COSMOS

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017 23 an acquaintance with the same mono- PERSONAL HISTORY gram deemed our choice “a bit risky,” and we decided that maybe we did. (It was during this period that the pil- IDENTITY CRISIS low was delivered.) We were begin- ning to resemble Mr. and Mrs. John- Notes from a names obsessive. son, the expecting couple in an old “Saturday Night Live” skit. They’re BY LAUREN COLLINS sitting on the couch, trying to come up with a baby name. The wife makes a series of benign suggestions. The husband, played by Nicolas Cage, shoots them down on increasingly far- fetched grounds. Wife: O.K., I’ll just keep trying. What about Fred? Husband (sighing): Please . . . Fred, Frank . . . please, the “F”s are no good. If he’s fat, it’s just a disaster. Wife: O.K., all right. Um, Sam? Husband: Great. Sam. “Uncle Sam.” “I want you . . . to be ostracized!” The doorbell rings. It’s a delivery- man, with a telegram for Asswipe and Emily Johnson. “That’s Oss-wee-pay,” Cage says. A name can rack a person from the hospital bracelet to the gravestone. Or it can boost his confidence, help him make a positive first impression, and, supposedly, give him better chances of everything from excelling in school and ascending the corporate ladder to not going to prison. (I checked, but neither author of a study claiming that professional baseball players whose names begin with “K” have a higher rate of strikeouts bears the initials “B.S.”) Carl Jung wrote of “the some- times quite grotesque coincidence be- ur son’s room is almost ready. most popular boys’ name in France, tween a man’s name and his peculiar- OFrom the previous tenant—his and the seventh most popular in Paris, ities.” Is it any wonder that States sister, who’s two years old—he has in- where we live, and, even in this age of Rights Gist, the son of a nullification- herited a changing pad, a pile of her- nominative nonconformity, we wor- ist South Carolina governor, attended niated books, and an armchair and ried that he might enter school and Harvard Law School but died at the ottoman, the color of whose uphol- find it crawling with more Louises Battle of Franklin, in 1864, leading his stery, now flecked with who knows than a chart of Bourbon monarchs. brigade in a charge against federal what, might politely be called gray He’d have to become the Stammerer, troops? In Austin, Texas, there is ac- heather. I wanted him to have some- or the Pious, or the Universal Spider tually a urologist, specializing in va- thing pristine, all his own, so I or- (that was Louis XI, 1423-83, who ap- sectomies, named Dr. Richard Chopp. dered a personalized baby pillow. With parently wove a lot of plots and con- “Nomen omen,” the Romans said: fifteen days to go until my due date, spiracies). Then we were going to call the name is a sign. You don’t have much it’s turning into the “DEWEY DEFEATS him Pierre again, until we realized that choice in last name—and, if it’s more TRUMAN” of soft furnishings. his initials would spell out a French- than twelve letters long, your kid, no We were going to call him Pierre. language homophobic slur. For a while, matter what his achievements in min- Then we were going to call him Louis, we didn’t care. (It was during this pe- eralogy or hydraulics, will never join but Louis turned out to be the tenth riod that I bought the pillow.) Then the ranks of famous scientists im- mortalized on the side of the Eiffel

There are clearer criteria for naming dogs than there are for naming people. Tower—but scrawling a first name (BABY) ROBERTS/CLASSICSTOCK/GETTY ARMSTRONG H. PHOTOGRAPH:

24 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017 ILLUSTRATION BY OLIVER MUNDAY upon a clean slate of a human being ents, dabbling in Eastern religion in do with keyboards than with child is a momentous responsibility. The the seventies, each independently de- protection. In California, amazingly, problem is, there’s no consensual se- cided that they wanted to name a fu- you can be Adolf Hitler Smith, but miotics. Naming a baby is like trying ture daughter Lila—pronounced “Lee- not José Smith, because of a ban on to buy a house with no asking price lah”—and who, when it came time to diacritics. and then trying to predict what that name her own children, got Philo from The exuberance of American names house will be like in thirty years, even the street her husband grew up on (it’s has been one of the country’s hallmarks if it moves to a different city or comes also the name of the inventor of tele- since its founding. In sixteenth- century out as a transgender woman. (In 2016, vision, the field in which they both England, the Puritans started using the four girls’ names whose popular- work) and Winslow from, of all things, their children’s birth certificates as min- ity dropped the most drastically were a birthing video (his namesake was a iature sermons. They produced some Caitlin, Caitlyn, Katelynn, and Kait- bow-tied septuagenarian obstetrician), doozies: Humiliation Hynde, Kill-sin lynn.) Recently, I was surprised to learn I come from a family that is not strong Pimple, Praise-God Barebone (whose that my surname, Collins, has become on compelling nomenclature. My par- son, If-Christ-had-not-died-for-thee- a more common first name for girls ents are John and Sue. My mother’s thou-hadst-been-damned Barebone, (No. 647) than Claudia, the name we eight siblings—Marianne, Wendy, eventually went by Nicholas Barbon). gave our daughter (No. 761). “Until re- Nancy, John, Philip, Betsy, Jane, and Charles II largely stamped out the cently, no ‘s’ surname had ever come Bob—sound like characters from a se- trend during the Reformation, but the close to the girls’ top 1000,” the Web ries for early readers. My husband’s Puritans continued the practice in the site Baby Name Wizard notes. “Col- French family had already laid claim New World. The Claps—a Roger and lins has changed that, leaping from to a problematic portion of the indig- Johanna who immigrated to Dorches- obscurity thanks to Collins Tuohy, the enous male names that did not sound ter in 1630—produced a virtue-themed adoptive sister of football player Mi- like medieval troubadours and worked progeny that included Experience, chael Oher, seen in the film ‘The Blind well in English. Did I mention that Waitstill, Preserved, Hopestill, Wait, Side.’ Tuohy was given a family sur- my brother and his wife were expect- Thanks, Desire, Unite, and Supply, name in classic Southern fashion, and ing a baby boy the same week? They making them perhaps the Kardashians parents who saw the movie liked the had dibs on Henry. The pillow sat of Colonial Massachusetts. style.” Luckily, my parents chose to there like an unread diary. Your name “These names excite the derision use my mother’s maiden name as my is what you are. Your child’s name is of the English; an American comic middle name, rather than calling me what you want to be. character, in an English play or novel, Zurn. always bears one of them,” H. L. In Switzerland, one baby-naming n the U.S., as the law professor Carl- Mencken wrote, in 1919, in “The Amer- consultancy promises to “create a new Iton F. W. Larson has written, the ican Language,” before remarking upon and independent name for your child,” selection of a child’s name falls within the habits, in this country, of using for around the cost of a car. Unfortu- “a legal universe that has scarcely been last names as first names, particularly nately, the company’s name is Erfolgs- mapped, full of strange lacunae, spotty “in families of any consideration”; “of welle. According to the Times, grand- statutory provisions, and patchy, in- making given names of any proper parents in the U.S. are increasingly consistent case law.” Generally, you nouns that happen to strike the fancy”; offering things like family businesses can’t use a pictograph, an ideogram, a and of coining new names by blend- and ten thousand dollars in exchange number, an obscenity, or a name that ing existing ones. Mencken ignores for the naming rights to their grand- is excessively long, but the regulations African-Americans, who under slav- children. However, anyone who has vary wildly from state to state and are ery were deprived of their identities followed the fate of a polar-research often the domain of randomly applied and the right to determine their chil- ship that the British government asked “desk-clerk law.” It’s unclear whether dren’s, except to claim that they, “like the public to name, via an Internet you can call your son Warren Edward the white immigrants, have a great poll, will be sensitive to the perils of Buffett, Jr., when you have not actu- liking for fancy given names.” (Inter- crowdsourcing. The public, by a mar- ally procreated with Warren Edward estingly, many of the names he cites— gin of three to one, chose R.R.S. Boaty Buffett. There are stricter and clearer Evelyn, Olivia, Isabelle, Violet—are McBoatface. The British government criteria for naming dogs and horses ones you might hear on the playground took one look and thought, He’s re- than there are for naming people. (The in any recently gentrified neighbor- ally more of an R.R.S. David Atten- American Kennel Club prohibits, hood today.) “I don’t feel like no JoAnne, borough. Unless you want to some- among other things, the words “champ,” or no Negro, or no amerikan,” the Black how reconcile the proclivities of every “champion,” “sieger,” “male,” “stud,” Liberation Army member Assata aunt who doesn’t like diminutives and “sire,” “bitch,” “dam,” and “female,” Shakur, born JoAnne Deborah Byron, every neighbor who knew a mean while the Jockey Club recently went wrote in her autobiography, of shed- James, you end up drafting in solitude, to court to block the registration of a ding her “slave name.” We are the land even secrecy, one of the most public- filly named Sally Hemings, which has of Cotton Mathers and Ima Hoggs, facing statements you’ll ever make. since been rebaptized Awaiting Jus- Newt Gingriches and D’Brickashaw Unlike a friend of mine, whose par- tice.) Some of the rules have more to Fergusons. More than six hundred

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017 25 Americans answer to Ikea. There are cided that any future daughter of his even bigotry that comes through in babies named Moo, Charger, Paizlee, must bear a certain name. Not a fan the fascination with “stripper names” Blip, and Cheese. of Abra? Swipe left. and urban legends about twins named The downside of our freedom is The advent of search engines has Oranjello and Lemonjello, after the that many of us are paralyzed by the made the process all the more fraught. hospital food. The Web site Name- tyranny of choice. In naming, as in Whereas a child might once have grown berry (“Baby names, only smarter”) other matters, anxiety runs particu- up never knowing that he shared a name provides a list of names inspired by the larly high among upper-middle-class with, say, a porn star, now he’s bound Rockefeller family. I have a friend from parents, who, likely overestimating to find out. Could you in good con- high school named Eric Harvard Chen. their own importance, seek to endow science name your child Thelma or Proving that even the most conscien- their children with supernames—the Martha after reading, on a blog, that tious parent can’t control for the vaga- social equivalent of the superfoods the once common “th” sound “is not ries of adolescent cruelty, someone that fill their lunchboxes—to power currently deemed stylish”? What do started calling him Erection. them through life. Naming is an “enor- you do with the knowledge that roughly I’ve been a names obsessive since mously outsized marker of ‘look how a third of American boys’ names end childhood, when I’d pass afternoons thoughtful we were,’ with a side of with “n,” or that newly invented names addressing letters to grand-sounding ‘we have been known to read books,’ ” like Brayden and Nevaeh tend to be personages of my own concoction. I Duana Taha, the author of “The Name big in red states, while blue states are comb obituaries and police blotters Therapist,” said recently. To some peo- bastions of traditional favorites such as and alumni magazines for treasures, ple, names are as important an indi- Joseph and Sophia? (The made-up finding as much delight in a Rupert cator of compatibility as taste in music names of yore include Jessica and Mi- Louis Ferdinand Frederick Constantine or opinions about politics. A friend randa, coined by Shakespeare, and Va- Lofredo Leopold Herbert Maximilian recently told me about a colleague, a nessa, from Jonathan Swift.) The ul- Hubert John Henry zu Löwenstein- screenwriter in his late twenties. Sin- timate in-group signifiers, names are Wertheim-Freudenberg, Count of gle and childless, he has already de- the sites of the sort of snobbery and Löwenstein-Scharffeneck (the Roll- ing Stones’ longtime manager), as in a Trudie Love Pickle Hathcock (a Mississippi resident with nine chil- dren: Vernie, Verla, Velma, Napolean, Alvis, Xenia, Eddie, Dorothy, and Ed- ison). Names are a window into human psychology. You wonder what made Mrs. Hathcock give her first three children “Ve-” names and then switch to Napolean, what she felt Edison brought to the table that Eddie didn’t. In my own family, I longed for stories of who named whom what and why, but when I asked my parents how they had settled on Lauren, they could never come up with much more than “We just kind of liked it.” In contrast to the nearly two thousand members of the Jim Smith Society, who gather every July to celebrate their common moniker (“Our only requirement is that your name be Jim Smith”), I’ve never been very fond of my name. It has always seemed too easily placed in the suburbs of the nineteen-eighties, a decade during which American parents were churning out almost fifteen thousand Laurens a year. The fact that I grew up in North Carolina, surrounded by Spruills, Garrisons, Faisons, Ramseys, and MacRaes— Mencken’s last-name-as-first-name trend endures in the South—exacer- bated my sense that my parents hadn’t she’d even been conceived, so I couldn’t believe that we were still stuck. “The IN WESTERN MASS Internet says he’s the size of a Swiss chard!” I warned. “I could go into labor What do I remember of those strange episodic parts of my life. any second.” I’d always looked down What they nowadays call outliers. Someone put them in brackets. on those parents who made a split- second decision in the delivery room (Who put them in brackets? I wanted them to go on.) or, worse, took several days trying names on their newborn, like outfits A dwindling Fall, pumpkins, marriage, winter. bought on approval. They’d had one The Pioneer Valley. The roaring American convection heating. job—for nine months!—and failed to complete it. It was bothering me, on The fluff off our flannel sheets getting everywhere. a spiritual level, that this clearly sen- You wrote something about the number of windows. tient little thing, kicking and undu- lating, remained anonymous. I started Was it a lot? You seemed to think it was a lot. to think of my growing stomach as the Womb of the Unknown Soldier. Once, an owl huddled there, pecked at by small birds. France has a more rigid naming cul- It was daytime and just beginning to snow. Such a picture of misery. ture than America. This, like many things, goes back to the French Rev- Me in my blue shirt, and James’s tie. A frog olution, when the National Conven- hopped over my boot. It seemed like luck. Then the threshold. tion, in an effort to upend the mores of the ancien régime, passed a law that I don’t remember kitchen, entertainment center, bathroom— made it easy for people both to give just those cream flannel sheets rubbed and blown to lint. their children whatever names they wanted and to change their own—giv- The hereditary medievalist downstairs proclaiming: I have seniority ing rise, for a brief period, to citizens in the car park. like Mort aux Aristocrates (Death to The clever, clueless voice in workshop, hazarding: is it the voice of coffee. Aristocrats) and Droit de l’Homme Tricolore (Tricolor Right of Man). In The black, tremulous Jules Feiffer chenille dress you married in. Ah, me. 1803, Napoleon revoked the law, de- creeing that French babies could only —Michael Hofmann be named after Catholic saints. Tweaked in 1813 to permit “names of persons from ancient history,” the law remained tried hard enough, that my name was joyed moving to France and being mis- in force until 1966, when a Breton man neither particularly distinguished nor taken, quite frequently, for a Monsieur who’d named six of his twelve kids— meaningful. People who would never Laurent Colline. Adraborann, Brann, Diwezha, Gwen- have been named Lauren, because dal, Maiwenn, and Sklerijenn—after they’re not thirty-seven, would prob- s part of a bicultural family, my Celtic heroes sued to have them rec- ably say that it’s a little basic. Ahusband, Olivier, and I had to ognized by the state. In its ruling, the The most famous Lauren Collins is consider every name from two often Ministry of Justice instructed regis- Lauren Collins the Canadian actress, irreconcilable angles. Was Louis too trars to accept an expanded range of whom I’ve gotten to know on Twitter, Sun King, or was it too Lou (DiMag- names, including those derived from simply because of the novelty of see- gio) Gallina, the guy who killed sev- mythological figures (Hercule, Diana), ing our shared name pop up on each eral people with a baseball bat in “The those popular in foreign languages other’s feed. “It’s not that I dislike our Sopranos”? While pondering that (“like Ivan, Manfred, or James”), and name,” she wrote to me in an e-mail. question, we hit upon Jean, which had certain abbreviations (Ginette for Gene- “I think it’s strong and goes well to- the appeal of being simple, classic but viève), while continuing to exclude gether, but it’s just . . . forgettable.” She not overused, and nicely resonant with names derived from “things, animals, continued, “I spent a large chunk of the names of both of our fathers, John or qualities” and “names referring to my formative years being referred to and Jacques. “I think we’ve finally got political events.” A Muslim living in by another name altogether, Paige Mi- it,” I texted Olivier. “Jean!” I wrote, France could, at last, name his child chalchuk, the character I played on TV. only to find that my English-language Mohamed, but the government urged Paige evokes a daringness that I never autocorrect had replaced the letters officials to “tactfully suggest” that he felt as Lauren. Paige Michalchuk is one with a tiny pair of denim pants. be given a second name that corre- of a kind. Lauren Collins blends into Jean, then, was out. We’d agreed on sponded to their definition of French. a crowd.” Such is the name shame of our daughter’s name, Claudia, over the It wasn’t until 1993, when a Minis- a Lauren Collins that I’ve almost en- course of a spaghetti dinner, before ter of Justice took up the cause of a

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017 27 woman who wanted to name her daugh- announcements in the window of the little to spackle the holes in my cul- ter Méloé, that French parents gained local stationery shop. Librairies became tural knowledge, listing as a celebrity a greater degree of autonomy. Today, a purveyors of names, not books. (The Achille “the clown Achille Zavatta.” registrar is required to accept any name, British Museum, a few years ago, tried Olivier, who tends to take a ratio- except one he deems not in a child’s best pitching itself as a name trove. “Get nal approach to problem-solving, came interest, in which case he will refer the your baby something special from the home that night with a spreadsheet. matter to a judge. In recent years, French British Museum. A Name,” one adver- He had input the top two hundred and courts have rejected such names as Nu- tisement read, boasting of a selection fifty Parisian boys’ names for 2016, the tella, Prince- William, and, for a pair of from Abydos to Zenobia.) number of births corresponding to each, twins, Joyeux (Happy) and Patriste (a Even when I liked a name, I could and his comments on the entries. Sacha: phonetic take on Not Sad). “The names never tell whether I was projecting “Too Russian?” Neil: “Ask Lauren.” of ‘Joyeux’ and ‘Patriste’ are of a nature, onto it the same associations that our Leonardo: “Too DiCaprio.” Ferdinand: because of their fanciful, even ridicu- son’s peers and neighbors were bound “1st World War.” Aurèle: “J’aime bien.” lous, character, to create difficulties and to. It wasn’t until a recent story in the Charlie: “Charlie Hebdo.” Sure enough, embarrassment for the child,” the opin- magazine Marianne—“BRIGITTE,” the next to Kevin he’d written, “Silly.” ion read. “It is therefore necessary to cover read, “the crazy history of a first We went through the list together, confirm the judgment taken with regard name that tells the story of France”— filling in the missing cells. to the suppression of these two names, that I had any clue that the French “Timothée,” I read out. which must be replaced by the first names public’s affection for Brigitte Macron “Timothée douche,” Olivier said. of ‘Roger’ and ‘Raymond.’ ” might have to do with her name, which “What’s Timothée douche?” We wanted something squarely is apparently both charming and a lit- “A bath gel.” French, but not, as John F. Kennedy tle cheesy, “evoking irresistibly a pros- No. 90 was Lenny, one of a num- once warned Jackie in advance of a state perous France, sure of herself, opti- ber of English names that have re- dinner, “too Frenchy.” Our main crite- mistic: les trentes Glorieuses, sexual cently gained traction with French rion, which was also our main prob- liberation included.” How was I to parents. lem, was that all our parents needed to know that Kevin—a perfectly respect- “You put ‘Why not?’ next to Lenny?” be able to pronounce it. This elimi- able name, as far as I was concerned— I said. “Have you ever heard of a book nated a frustratingly huge number of was a national punch line, until I read called ‘Of Mice and Men’?” options, including our coup de coeur, Val- a notice in Le Gorafi, the French ver- Something that our acquaintance entin, which my people were sure to sion of the Onion, announcing the with the difficult initials had said kept shorten to Val and associate with cheap death of “the first Kevin,” at thirty-two coming back to me as we went through chocolates. I loved the name—the way years of age? Jim, an American I know, the list. “I would say that it’s essen- it connoted heart and valor, even the abdicated naming privileges to his tially a matter of self-confidence,” he’d physical shape of it—but I wasn’t en- French wife, Elisabeth, on one condi- concluded, suggesting that any name tirely sure that I could pull off yelling tion: that, with the chosen name, their we chose could go in any direction, it down a city block. Explaining to son could play shortstop for the Bal- depending on how our son embodied Olivier why Camille wasn’t an ideal timore Orioles. Jim’s father, a lifelong it. He was right. We had no idea if the option for a Franco-American boy, I Orioles fan, was to arbitrate. particular individual we were bring- thought of a recent episode of “Black- “Jean-Baptiste?” Elisabeth suggested. ing into the world would be sensitive ish,” in which Dre, the main character, “Hairdresser,” Jim’s father replied. to sticks and stones or schoolyard explodes at Rainbow, his biracial wife, “Jean-Baptiste is a hairdresser.” taunts, if his name could ever hurt who doesn’t share his affection for the “Christian, then.” or help him. This was especially true name DeVante: “Rainbow is the name “You cannot call him Christian. He when he’d be part one thing and part that white people give cocker spaniels!” is Catholic. We are Catholic. People another, either half inoculated or dou- (Rainbow, incidentally, is the name that will think he is a Christian Scientist bly vulnerable. Your child’s name is Eric Chen’s parents gave his sister.) or a Fundamentalist. If you want to what you want to be, but what he is I knew the Hundred-Year Rule, go down that path, just call him Jesus.” is really up to him. which holds that it takes a century for The boy was eventually christened On the two-hundred-and-fifty-first a forgotten baby name to make a come- Theodore. His French passport has an day of my pregnancy, we decided on back, but I was struggling to grasp the acute accent, but his American one Louis. Lew-ie. Lou-wee. I never would hidden codes of a culture that was still doesn’t. have guessed that it would be my son’s new to me. Olivier, whose interests tend For us, the clock was ticking. We name, but suddenly I could see myself more toward aviation than amateur so- solicited another friend’s advice on cooing it into his neck, writing it in his ciology, hadn’t given much thought to Pierre, and the feedback was not good: clothes, declining it into a thousand en- whether Calixte sounded precious or “Better to avoid.” “WE HAVE TO PICK dearments. I put the pillow inside the Côme was too stuck-up. Out of my SOMETHING NOW,” I texted Olivier, ottoman, thinking that I might show it zone, I haunted francophone baby-name after another fruitless afternoon pe- to him one day. If he asked me how he boards; scoured Le Figaro’s social page, rusing “Un Bébé, un Prénom,” a book got his name, at least he’d have a story. Le Carnet du Jour; studied the birth we’d acquired out of desperation. It did “We just kind of liked it,” I’d say. 

28 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017 dated version, the Navy guys are al- SHOUTS & MURMURS ways talking about how sea levels have risen, like, five whole inches in the past year alone, which maybe doesn’t sound that bad, but it is. A Series of Plays, Movies, and Miniseries Starring Colin Firth’s Hologram Just because adaptations of Austen’s work can and will continue to be made for hundreds of years doesn’t mean that we need to keep experimenting with who should play Mr. Darcy. Mr. Darcy is a thirty-five-year-old Colin Firth in a wet white shirt. A Completed, Updated Version of “Sanditon” Austen’s final, unfinished novel, “San- diton,” begins with a carriage overturn- ing. This version, written in 2150, be- gins with a self-driving car overturning. Wow! Technology! Absolutely Nothing “Northanger Abbey”- FUTURE AUSTEN Related In 2158, the last remaining human who ADAPTATIONS has ever heard of “Northanger Abbey” will die. BY BLYTHE ROBERSON “Persuasion” (2167) A generally faithful adaptation set in uly 18th marked the two-hundredth neighbors, and even briefer interludes 2167, but now the planet is made of Janniversary of Jane Austen’s death. of flirting with Edward Ferrars, who magma. Since 1817, we have been treated to count- is fine but kind of a dullard. “Janes Austens” less adaptations of Austen’s work, which “Mansfield Planet” In an age when cloning technology has have given us dozens of versions of In Austen’s third novel, “Mansfield finally been perfected, this movie asks: Mr. Darcy to rank by hotness. Here are Park,” the young Fanny Price is sent What would happen if a bioengineer- some predictions for the adaptations that to live with her aunt and uncle in the ing company created a theme park filled the next two hundred years will bring. British countryside. This movie asks: with cloned Jane Austens? The answer What if she were sent to live with her is: the Austens pretty much just sit Lydia Bennet’s Snapchat Story aunt and uncle . . . in space? Everything around writing novels. This Snapchat story depicts the life else is the same as in the original. A Dating App with No Real Men but a Fake of a modern-day Lydia Bennet in A Harry Styles Album with Each Song In- Profile for Every Man Mentioned in an ten-second chunks. It starts out as a spired by a Different Austen Love Interest Austen Novel pretty standard third-tier-friend-of- The man is an artist. It’s a really fun interface, and, since Kylie Jenner Snapchat, featuring dog Venmo Presents: “Austen’s Juvenilia” there are fifty billion humans on the filters, inflatable pool swans, and Did you know that Austen wrote some planet, actual dating has been outlawed hunks. Nothing really changes when genuinely hilarious juvenilia? And did anyway. there’s drama with Wickham, except you know that, in the year 2085, Venmo “Fast & Fastibility” that Lydia begins overusing the is going to be a major studio that pro- In spite of what the title implies, this sad-pineapple emoji sticker. Long after duces on-phone-only narrative con- “Fast & Furious” movie (the seventy- there’s anything interesting going on tent? At first you’ll be, like, “I don’t second in the franchise) actually fol- between Lydia and Wickham, they care about Venmo shows,” but when lows the basic plot of “Emma.” try to stay relevant by getting really “Austen’s Juvenilia” comes out you’ll “Persuasion” (2217) into crystals. be hooked. (Not you you, of course. A This film, set after the explosion of Virtual Reality “Sense and Sensibility” general “you.” You you will be dead.) Earth, depicts the budding romance This V.R. experience allows the viewer “Persuasion” (2117) between several human consciousnesses to live out the most exciting year in Released in the year 2117, this rare film that have been uploaded to the Cloud. Elinor Dashwood’s life. The major- adaptation of “Persuasion” tells the story And, in keeping with liberalized ex- ity of the viewer’s time is spent in a of an extremely elderly (twenty- seven- pectations of women, the spinster char- sitting room doing needlepoint, with year-old) spinster who reconnects with acter is no longer twenty-seven. She’s

LUCI GUTIÉRREZ LUCI brief interludes of talking to random her naval-officer ex-love. In this up- thirty-one. 

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017 29 ders won last year, campaigning on a THE POLITICAL SCENE platform of economic populism— Medicare for all, tuition-free college, and a fifteen-dollar minimum wage. THE DREAM DEFERRED Sanders told me that Trump was smart enough to understand that the Dem- Bernie Sanders’s not-quite-finished campaign. ocratic Party had turned its back on millions of people: “He said, ‘Hey, I BY BENJAMIN WALLACE-WELLS hear you. I’m going to do something for you.’ And he lied.” Sanders, who is seventy-five, may be too old to run again in 2020, but his barnstorming has a purpose—to deepen the connection to progressive ideas in rural America, to develop an attachment that might outlast him. At recent events, one of his biggest applause lines was that the “Republicans did not win the election so much as Democrats lost it.” Pro- gressives do not have much of a foot- hold in this country. What they have is Bernie Sanders. Sanders, who has represented Ver- mont in the Senate for the past decade, and served in the House of Represen- tatives from 1991 to 2007, has always had a complicated relationship with the Democrats. He caucuses with them and ran for their Presidential nomina- tion, but he is an Independent. His in- sistence on separation from the Party may be partly temperamental—though born in Brooklyn, Sanders has the de- meanor of a prickly Yankee—but it also reflects his underlying commit- ments. The word “oligarchy” is impor- tant to Sanders, and it gives his state- ments a messianic tone. Sanders told me, “The message has got to be that we can’t move along towards an oligar- ernie Sanders’s Presidential race for Snapchat. The central illusion of a chy. We’ve got to revitalize American Bended a year ago, but his campaign Presidential campaign is that a candi- democracy.” never did. Since the election, he has date can, through constant motion and For decades, Sanders has argued for staged events in Michigan, Mississippi, boundless energy, meet countless peo- a single-payer health-care system, and Maine, West Virginia, Arizona, Ne- ple and, in the end, give voice to the he is getting ready to introduce a vada, Ohio, Kentucky, Wisconsin, Penn- experience of the country. After the “Medicare for All” bill in the Senate. sylvania, Montana, Florida, Iowa, election, Sanders seemed to adopt the This summer, however, he assigned Maryland, and Illinois. At every one, illusion as an ethos. himself the task of leading the cam- he speaks about the suffering of small- Hillary Clinton’s loss gave his efforts paign against efforts, by Republicans town Americans, and his belief that a new urgency. The electoral map, with in the House and the Senate, to re- the Democrats can help them. When its imposing swaths of red, pointed to peal the Affordable Care Act. On the I caught up with him recently, his shirt a crisis confronting American liberal- Sunday after the Fourth of July, as was a little untucked, his head hung ism. Donald Trump may have lost the Senate Republicans prepared to re- down, and he carried a printed copy of popular vote, but, as he likes to point lease their bill, Sanders took a char- his remarks. Sanders was catching a out, he won 2,626 counties to Clinton’s ter flight from Burlington to West late-night flight to Chicago, and was four hundred and eighty-seven. Many Virginia and Kentucky, for a pair taking a moment to record a message of these counties are in states that San- of hastily arranged rallies. He and his staff had chosen states whose Re- Sanders is not a natural storyteller; his great political gift is his relentlessness. publican senators were pivotal in the

30 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017 ILLUSTRATION BY BENDIK KALTENBORN health-care debate. Kentucky’s Mitch West Virginians would lose their Med- McConnell, the Majority Leader, was icaid coverage, insurance premiums shepherding the bill toward a vote with- would double, and seven thousand se- out any public hearings. Rand Paul, of nior citizens would be unable to pay Kentucky, and Shelley Moore Capito, for their care facilities. “How many se- of West Virginia, were indicating that niors now in nursing homes will get they might vote against it. thrown out on the street or be forced Sanders talked about the Senate to live in their children’s basement?” bill’s likely effects in McConnell’s home Sanders said. What would happen to state. “How do you throw two hundred the tens of thousands of West Virgin- and thirty thousand people off the ians who lost health insurance if they health care they have without hesita- were to get sick? “The horrible and un- tion?” he asked. “It happens because speakable answer is that, if this legis- the Democratic Party is incredibly weak lation were to pass, many thousands of in states like Kentucky. And so he our fellow-Americans will die.” doesn’t have to face the wrath of the voters.” But it wasn’t just the Demo- eath and despair have been San- crats who were absent in Kentucky, he Dders’s themes since he launched said; it was also a balanced press. “In his Presidential campaign. From West many of these conservative states, you Virginia, he headed to Covington, Ken- get a media that is all right wing.” One tucky, in an area where the opioid ep- purpose of his visit, he said, was to gen- idemic has been particularly devasta- erate local coverage, so that he could ting. What had gone so badly in peo- explain to ordinary people “what’s in ple’s lives that they were turning to the bloody legislation.” heroin and opioids? “There is some- Sanders’s first stop was in Morgan- thing going on in West Virginia and town, West Virginia; he had been in Kentucky which is unbelievable, which the state just two weeks earlier. He re- is what sociologists call the illnesses membered a tattoo artist who had spo- of despair,” Sanders told me. He had ken then, a man who’d had to fight for been to parts of West Virginia where emergency insurance after he devel- there were very few jobs, “fewer that oped testicular cancer, and had become pay a living wage,” and there was a an advocate for single-payer health care. steep psychic cost. “There is a lot of Now an aide asked Sanders backstage pain. And we’ve got to understand that if he wanted to speak with Reggie. reality. And then tell these people that “Rusty,” Sanders said, correcting the their problems are not caused by some aide. Rusty Williams approached, and Mexican making eight dollars an hour Sanders asked him how he was doing. picking strawberries.” Williams said that he was working less Three weeks earlier, a man named but that the cancer was in remission. James Hodgkinson, who had volun- Sanders put his hands on Williams’s teered on Sanders’s Presidential cam- shoulders and gave him a pep talk: “At paign in Iowa, had tried to assassinate least you are healthy. That’s something.” Republican members of Congress as Morgantown, the home of West they practiced for an annual baseball Virginia’s largest state university, is a game. Sanders, who was in his Senate progressive enclave. But classes were office that morning, rushed to the floor not in session, and the room where to condemn the shooting. He believed Sanders’s event was being held, at a that it had something to do with what Marriott, was small. Before he spoke, he had been seeing in his travels. “I Sanders kept asking aides for the crowd think there is an enormous amount of count, and how many people were anger out there,” he told me in Ken- watching the live stream. tucky. “I think there is an enormous Sanders is not a storyteller. His amount of despair. We have got to ad- speeches, blunt and workmanlike, de- dress that issue, and if we don’t I worry pend upon dramatizing social statis- about the future of this country.” tics. Before an audience of more than Since the election, the Democratic seven hundred people, Sanders said Party has tried to move closer to San- that, if the Republican bill passed, a ders’s views. Last week, in a small town hundred and twenty-two thousand in northern Virginia, Chuck Schumer,

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017 31 the Senate Minority Leader, an- who was President Obama’s Secretary point the finger at the ruling class of nounced the Party’s platform for 2018, of Labor, narrowly defeated Represen- this country.” Hayes asked Perez if he “A Better Deal,” which is aimed at tative Keith Ellison, of Minnesota, the shared that view, and Perez wearily is- winning back working-class voters. co-chair of the Progressive Caucus and sued a talking point: “When we put The platform includes a fifteen-dollar an ally of Sanders. The insurgents had hope on the ballot, we win.” Clinton, minimum wage and a trillion-dollar come up short again. Hayes pointed out, had put hope on investment in infrastructure, plans that Sanders asked Perez to join him for the ballot. She had not won. Whereas Sanders has long promoted, often with a series of rallies around the country Perez offers the liberal abstraction of little support. Many people in the Dem- in April. The events had been planned inequality, Sanders insists on naming ocratic Party believe that, when it comes as shows of support for Obamacare, an enemy, the billionaire class. to policy, Sanders has prevailed. San- but, after some conversations, they were ders does not see it that way. He told billed as a Unity Tour, to demonstrate anders’s great political gift is his me, “Do not underestimate the resis- that the Party had healed. But the Party Srelentlessness. In 1968, when San- tance of the Democratic establishment.” had not healed. In Maine, Sanders sup- ders was twenty-six, he moved from When the Democratic Party frac- porters booed Perez. Sanders contrib- New York City, where he had grown tured, in the primaries, it was like a uted to the discord. State parties wanted up, to an especially poor and conserva- bone cracking—the Clintonites on one access to his e-mail list, but his staff tive part of Vermont, called the North- side, the Sanders faction on the other, refused to share it, telling officials to east Kingdom. He spent a year in the with no obvious way to repair the break. collect contact information at events. town of Stannard, which even now has Sanders’s supporters deeply resented In Louisville, Perez and Sanders sat unpaved roads and a population of only the Party’s obvious preference for Clin- for a joint interview with MSNBC’s two hundred; Sanders recalled seeing ton; Clinton’s backers accused them of Chris Hayes, two bald, bespectacled the “rotting teeth” of the children. sexism. Last July, at the Democratic men, shoulder to shoulder, neither of As early as the nineteen-thirties, the National Convention, in Philadelphia, them smiling. On camera, Sanders com- historian Dona Brown writes in “Back the Sanders faithful shouted down po- menced a silent, exasperated gymnas- to the Land,” leaving the city for Ver- dium speakers, marched out of the hall tics involving his tongue and lower lip. mont was a political statement. Journal- and occupied a media tent, and cov- Hayes asked Sanders if he considered ists were building blacksmith forges and ered their mouths with tape, on which himself a Democrat. “No, I’m an In- reporting on their success; there were ex- some of them had written the word dependent,” Sanders said. Then he gave periments in making artisanal Cheddar “Silenced.” The two camps clashed a brief lecture about the Party’s liabil- cheese. The appeal of the place lay, to again this winter, in the contest for the ities. Democrats would continue to lose some extent, in its opposition to central- Democratic Party chair. Tom Perez, elections “unless we have the guts to ized power: Vermont rejected parts of the New Deal, and it is one of a hand- ful of states where local citizens conduct government business in town meetings. The wave of counterculture migration, of which Sanders was part, helped to secularize the state. Vermont has many churches, but not so much religion. In 1969, Sanders moved to Burling- ton, where he wrote freelance articles, installed flooring, and produced doc- umentary films. During the seventies, as a member of the antiwar Liberty Union Party, he ran for the U.S. Sen- ate once and for Vermont governor twice, never earning more than six per cent of the vote. Friends recall that he would arrive in their towns for cam- paign events and then crash on their couches. Sanders ran for mayor of Burling- ton as an Independent in 1981. Local Republicans were so comfortable with the Democratic incumbent that they didn’t bother to field their own candi- date. Sanders, who had spent years building connections among activist “Don’t stop. I don’t want to talk to you.” groups, won the election by ten votes. The Democrats, who controlled the more than sixty-five per cent of the vote. city council, refused to allocate money When he says that he understands how for Sanders to hire a secretary. Paul progressives can win in rural areas, he Heintz, the political editor of Seven is talking about his popularity among Days, a Vermont weekly, told me, “The conservatives in Vermont. John Mc- story of Bernie Sanders is a story of Claughry, a longtime Republican state exclusion.” senator, recalled that, about a decade In 1988, Sanders married Burl- ago, Sanders held a press conference ington’s youth-services director, Jane with members of a V.F.W. auxiliary, O’Meara Driscoll, a social worker who where he was “thundering on about how had grown up in Brooklyn. the veterans were being ne- They had met during San- glected in the hinterlands ders’s first mayoral campaign, without decent health care when she helped to organize and without sufficient pen- an event. He planned to talk sion benefits.” In Congress, about health insurance, and Sanders has championed vet- she, a single mother, had none. erans’ services and commu- The year they married, San- nity health centers. ders ran for an open seat in In the decades since San- the House of Representatives, ders was elected to Congress, and lost by nine thousand he has been hosting spaghetti votes. In 1990, he ran again dinners in small towns across and won, after the National Rifle Asso- the state. Sometimes he’ll have as many ciation declined to endorse the Repub- as four of these on a single Sunday. lican incumbent, who had co-sponsored Volunteers cook pasta, and Sanders an assault-rifle ban. Bill Lofy, a long- gives talks on the topics that have pre- time Democratic operative in Vermont, occupied him since he first took office: told me that Sanders’s base included the importance of health care and the the Burlington and Brattleboro hip- inequities of a capitalist economy. They pies, but also another, unexpected type: are something like sermons, and San- “working-class, fuck-all New England ders has always liked delivering them ornery, from the Northeast Kingdom,” in churches. “He wanted it to be a lit- who usually vote Republican. tle like going to church,” his longtime Sanders never joined the Demo- state director, Phil Fiermonte, told me. cratic Party. When allies and former staffers launched the Vermont Progres- f there is an essential image of San- sive Party, in 1999, he didn’t join them, Iders’s Presidential campaign, it is a either. In 2005, after Senator Jim Jeffords minute-long ad, released just before announced his retirement and San- the New Hampshire primary. As the ders decided to run for his seat, the Simon and Garfunkel song “America” Democrats needed Sanders more than plays, the ad offers a dreamy vision of he needed them. Chuck Schumer, who small-town life: a couple dances in the was at that time the chair of the Dem- grass, a farmer tosses a bale of hay, a ocratic Senatorial Campaign Commit- boy picks up a calf. The power of the tee, promised that they would not run ad comes from its portrayal of San- a candidate against him. ders, long identified as outside the po- Lofy oversaw the Democratic Par- litical mainstream, as a representative ty’s campaign for Sanders. In their first of the heartland. meeting, Sanders asked Lofy whether An early version included narration the Party would work to turn out his by Sanders, but, when Jane Sanders supporters in the Northeast Kingdom, saw it, she insisted on removing the who were likely to vote for him in the voice-over. She thought the politics in- Senate race but for Republicans in oth- terrupted the direct emotional connec- ers. Sanders started calling Lofy almost tion with voters. Jane has long been in- daily. “I’d be out on the road, and I’d volved in her husband’s campaign look down at my cell phone, and it’s commercials, and, when she met Paul Bernie fucking Sanders calling about Simon, she asked for his permission to the count again,” Lofy said. use the song. Sanders won the race easily, with I drove up to Burlington to meet

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017 33 Representative Tulsi Gabbard, a Ha- waii Democrat, who was an early sup- porter of Sanders’s Presidential bid. Jane told me that the institute was looking for thinkers who “understand that conventional wisdom is often, often, often wrong.” Shortly after I returned from Bur- lington, a controversy that had sur- rounded Jane Sanders in Vermont drew notice in the Washington press. From 2004 until 2011, she had been the pres- ident of Burlington College, a liberal- arts institution, which had about a hun- dred and forty students and held classes in what had once been a supermarket building. In 2010, she launched an am- bitious campaign to expand the col- lege and relocate it to a large property, owned by the Roman Catholic Church, on the waterfront of Lake Champlain. To help secure a $6.7-million bank loan to buy the property, Burlington Col- lege declared that it had $2.6 million in confirmed pledges. In 2011, Jane Sanders left the college. The bulk of the donations never materialized. In 2016, Burlington College closed. Early last year, just before the pri- maries began, a Republican lawyer in Vermont, Brady Toensing, filed a com- plaint with the U.S. Attorney’s office, “In case you haven’t heard, we live in caves now, and we wear clothes.” asking for an investigation into whether Jane Sanders had committed federal loan fraud. Sometimes pledges simply •• don’t come through, and so one essen- tial question is whether the college, and Jane Sanders in early July. She told me ity.” She told me, “I’m a secular person, Sanders, knowingly inflated the prom- that she was initially opposed to her but during the campaign every night ises. In July, the Washington Post re- husband’s Presidential run; she recalled I would pray—just ‘Thank you, thank ported that federal prosecutors had ob- his early Senate races, and the feeling you, thank you.’ ” tained some of Burlington College’s “in the pit of my stomach” when she The Sanderses believed they had records, and, citing a grand-jury inves- picked up the newspaper during those little support outside their own move- tigation, issued subpoenas. campaigns. Early in the primaries, be- ment. When I asked Sanders whether Toensing had also suggested that fore Sanders was given Secret Service his campaign had revealed gaps in the the Senator’s office had intervened to protection, he received multiple threats. progressive infrastructure, he was in- pressure the bank to issue the loan, but She grew fearful, and when she joined credulous. “Gaps?” he said. “Gaps would he has not offered compelling evidence her husband onstage she found herself be an understatement.” Last August, for the allegation. That overreach, to- scanning the crowd, concerned that Sanders and his allies founded a new gether with Toensing’s prominence in someone would jump up with a weapon. political organization, Our Revolution, Republican politics, suggested that the But, as the enthusiasm for Sanders’s to support progressive candidates controversy might never have become campaign grew, her perspective changed. around the country, in state legislative public had Sanders not run for Presi- He had been saying the same things and city-council races where a few dent. “I find it incredibly sexist that ba- for years, but now he was drawing tens thousand dollars might make a differ- sically he’s going after my husband by of thousands of people, all across the ence. This June, Jane Sanders set up destroying my reputation,” Jane San- country. During the primary campaign, the Sanders Institute, a small think ders told the Boston Globe. Toensing he received more than six million in- tank based in Burlington, whose first told me that the episode would have dividual donations. Sanders was being class of fellows includes Ben Jealous, been a scandal much earlier had San- treated, Jane noted, “as a moral author- the former N.A.A.C.P. president, and ders been from any state but Vermont.

34 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017 “For a progressive, Vermont is like the gives his movement its special inten- Galápagos,” Toensing said. “You get sity. Sanders’s optimism about politics to evolve without predators.” is not complicated by an optimism about much of anything else. n early June, Sanders flew to Brit- Iain, to promote his book about his or Sanders this year, there is always Presidential campaign, “Our Revolu- Fanother stop on the tour. The week tion.” The general election in the after he returned from West Virginia United Kingdom was less than a week and Kentucky, he spoke at the annual away, and the Labour Party, led by convention of Jesse Jackson’s Rain- Jeremy Corbyn—another cranky left- bow PUSH Coalition, in Chicago, and ist with a fringe of white hair, beloved addressed a group of progressive activ- by the grass roots and at war with his ists in Iowa. On July 13th, in Silver party—was unexpectedly surging. Spring, Maryland, he offered an en- Later, after Labour kept the Conser- dorsement of his close political ally vative Party from winning an outright Ben Jealous, the former N.A.A.C.P. majority, Sanders called Corbyn and president, who has announced his can- asked him where he had got the ideas didacy for the governorship of the state. for his campaign. In an interview, Cor- In Washington, Sanders has been byn recalled that he replied, “Well, trying to build support for his single- you, actually.” payer bill. His recent progress may be Staid venues now accommodate the clearest measure of his influence populists. At the Sheldonian Theatre, on the Democratic Party. In the House, a seventeenth-century hall at Oxford, a majority of Democrats now support beneath a fresco of blue sky and pink a version of Sanders’s bill, the Medi- cherubs, Sanders was introduced as “an care for All Act (which Representa- inspiration to us all.” Later that day, tive John Conyers, of Michigan, has he received a rare standing ovation proposed each year since 2003). Sev- from the members of the Oxford eral prominent senators have expressed Union. Sanders promised that most their support, including Kirsten Gilli- Americans do not share Donald brand, of New York, and Elizabeth Trump’s beliefs about climate change, Warren, of Massachusetts. Warren has or international isolation, or the rela- said she believes that “now is the time tive virtues of the rich and the poor. for the next step—and the next step is He questioned U.S. support for the single-payer.” hereditary monarchy of Saudi Arabia, Sanders, like Warren, has ideas about and insisted that many Americans were progress that are utterly at odds with alarmed by Trump’s attachment to those of the Republican-controlled Vladimir Putin. To his usual statistics Senate. At the end of July, the Repub- about wealth in the United States he licans made what appeared to be a final added a global figure: eight individu- effort to repeal parts of the Affordable als in the world were as wealthy as 3.6 Care Act. There had not been a sin- billion people, about half of human- gle hearing on the latest bill. Sanders ity. “They have the money, we have the appeared on CNN, said that “this whole people,” Sanders declared at the Shel- process has been totally bananas,” and donian. When his speech ended, the argued for a new bipartisan effort at crowd let out a happy roar. health-care reform. Finally, at around Sanders is an old man who often 1:30 A.M. on Friday, July 28th, Senator finds himself speaking to young audi- John McCain signalled, with a thumbs- ences. They are not necessarily look- down, that he would cast a decisive ing for encouragement. “My wife tells vote against the bill, joining two of his me my speeches are so bleak that they Republican colleagues, Susan Collins have to pass out tranquillizers at the and Lisa Murkowski, and all forty- door,” he said at an event that evening eight members of the Democratic cau- at Brixton Academy, a music venue in cus. In the convention halls of Mid- South London. Sanders does not ask dle America, Bernie Sanders is the his supporters to place their trust in leader of an improbable progressive meritocracy, or capitalism, or even their movement. On the Senate floor that own country, and this is part of what night, he was a Democrat. 

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017 35 A REPORTER AT LARGE THE SEPARATION

When should a child be removed from his home?

BY LARISSA MAC FARQUHAR

hat should you do if child- kids are in imminent danger, she may time-consuming and inflexibly sched- protective services comes take them. You may not be allowed to uled that you lose your job. The more W to your house? say goodbye. It is terrifying for them to obedient you are, the better things will You will hear a knock on the door, be taken from their home by a stranger, go for you. Even if you are innocent and often late at night. You don’t have to open but this experience has repercussions far can prove it, it could be more than a year it, but if you don’t the caseworker out- beyond the terror of that night. Your chil- before you get a hearing, and during side may come back with the police. The dren may hear accusations against you— those crucial months your compliance caseworker will tell you you’re being in- you’re using drugs, your apartment is and deference are the currency that buys vestigated for abusing or neglecting your filthy, you fail to get them to school, you you visits with your children. children. She will tell you to wake them hit them—and even if they don’t believe up and tell them to take clothes off so these things they will remember. And, hen should you take a child from she can check their bodies for bruises and after your children see that you are pow- Whis parents? marks. She will interview you and your erless to protect them, this will perma- You must start your investigation kids separately, so you can’t hear what nently change things between you. What- within twenty-four hours of the hotline she’s asking them or what they’re saying. ever happens later—whether the kids call. Go at night—people are more likely She opens your fridge and your cabinets, come back the next week, or in six months, to be home. As you look around, you checking to see if you have food, and or don’t come back at all—that moment have to be very, very careful, because if what kind of food. She looks around for can never be undone. you miss something it will be partly your unsafe conditions, for dirt, for mess, for The caseworker has sixty days to in- fault if a child ends up hurt, or dead. You bugs or rats. She takes notes. You must vestigate the charges against you. She may be shocked by the living conditions be as calm and deferential as possible. will want you to admit to your faults as you encounter, but you’re not allowed to However disrespectful and invasive she a parent, and you should, because this remove children solely because of pov- is, whatever awful things she accuses you tells her you have insight into your prob- erty—if, for instance, there’s no food in of, you must remember that child pro- lems and that you have a sincere desire the kitchen because the parent’s food tection has the power to remove your to accept her help and change your life. stamps have run out—only for “immi- kids at any time if it believes them to be But you should admit only so much, be- nent risk” due to abuse or neglect. But in danger. You can tell her the charges cause she is not just there to help you: it’s often difficult to draw a line between are not true, but she’s required to inves- she is also there to evaluate and report poverty and neglect. When a child has tigate them anyway. If you get angry, your on you, so anything you say may be used been left alone because his mother can’t anger may be taken as a sign of mental against you in court. The Administra- afford childcare and has to go to work, instability, especially if the caseworker tion for Children’s Services—A.C.S., as is that poverty or neglect? What if the herself feels threatened. She has to con- child-protective services is known in New child has been injured because there sider the possibility that you may be hurt- York City—has to prove its allegations wasn’t an adult there to prevent it? Un- ing your kids, that you may even kill one against you only by “preponderance of less you’ve become desensitized through of them. You may never find out who re- the evidence.” It can bring in virtually repetition, emergency removals are awful. ported you. If your child has been hurt, anything as evidence—an old drug habit, Parents may scream at you and call you his teacher or doctor may have called the even if you’ve been clean for years; a terrible names. Sometimes a parent will state child-abuse hotline, not wanting to D.U.I.; a diagnosis of depression. While get violent. When you suspect in advance assume, as she might in a richer neigh- the court case is proceeding, you may be that a situation is going to be dicey, you borhood, that it was an accident. But it asked to submit to drug testing or a can bring a colleague or a police officer, could also have been a neighbor who mental- health evaluation, to attend par- but sometimes things turn very fast and heard yelling, or an ex-boyfriend who enting classes or anger-management you’re on your own. If you remove the wants to get back at you, or someone who classes or domestic-violence classes and children that night, you will take them thinks you drink too much or simply some kind of therapy. These services are to a processing center to be assigned to doesn’t like you. People know that a call intended to help you, but, if you want to a temporary foster home. Once you get to the hotline is an easy way to blow up get your kids back, they are not really there, it could take a long time for a home your life. If the caseworker believes your voluntary, even though they may be so to be found—many hours. The children

Mercedes, a mother of four, has spent eight years trying to regain custody of three of her kids at the Bronx Family Court.

36 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017 ILLUSTRATION BY ANNA PARINI THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017 37 sit and wait, along with other children and take what she believes to be the safer and it had fallen on her legs and burned in the same situation. They may be cry- course of action. Many at A.C.S. believe them. She looked at the burns and they ing, but it’s unlikely you will be able to that taking kids from their parents is the weren’t blistering, so she figured they comfort them, because you may never cautious thing to do. Nobody wants to were O.K. have met them before, and you have just end up on the front page of the Daily The next day, at her cousin’s house, separated them from their parents. If the News. You are working to protect chil- she saw that the burns had blistered, and children ask you where they’re going dren, and you will remind yourself of announced that she was going to take next, or when they’ll go home, or if they’ll that when your job gets really difficult. Leslie to the E.R., but her aunt told her, stay together with their brothers and sis- Maybe once or twice a parent will thank Do not go to the E.R. If they see those ters, you can’t answer them, because you you, and tell you that the services you burns, child services will take your kids. don’t know. provided made a difference in her life, So she didn’t. The next day, she went to After that first visit, you have sixty and you will feel that those thanks make her mother’s house. She and her mother days to investigate the charges. You up for all the other parents who cursed started fighting, as they usually did, and should interview the child’s teacher, his at you and called you a baby snatcher. she left the apartment with Leslie and pediatrician, and anyone else you think But that’s unlikely. The turnover among sat with her outside. It was a warm night. relevant. You should seek out neighbors A.C.S. caseworkers is very high. She saw two women she didn’t know and relatives; they may be too wary to walk past her and into the building. Her talk to you, or else so eager to talk that his is how Mercedes describes what mother called her phone and told her to you suspect they’re trying to get the par- Thappened. She was running a bath come upstairs. The two women were in ent in trouble. You must also draw out for her children. It was 2009, so Leslie her mother’s apartment; they told her the parent herself; this is tricky, because was eleven months old and Camron was they were from A.C.S., and had come you must play two conflicting roles— two. (To protect her kids’ privacy, Mer- to see what happened to the baby. helper and investigator. Even if you feel cedes provided pseudonyms.) She plugged She answered a few questions, grow- for the parent and believe her kids should in her curling iron, because she was plan- ing increasingly outraged, and then, not be taken away, that is not the end ning to curl and wrap her hair while they guessing her mother had called A.C.S. of the story, because the final decision were in the tub. The kids were playing to get back at her, began cursing at her to ask in court for the removal of chil- with toys in the living room. She left the and screaming that she would never see dren is not yours to make; your super- curling iron on the side of the sink and her grandchildren again. She started put- visor, or your supervisor’s manager, will went to fetch towels. She heard crying ting on Leslie’s clothes to leave, but the make it. Even though this manager has and, running back to the bathroom, she A.C.S. women told her that first they likely never met the parent or her kids, saw that Leslie had pulled the hot curl- had to take photographs of Leslie’s burns. she may override your recommendation ing iron off the sink by its dangling cord, Mercedes said no, she was going, and one of the women said, Miss, you are making me real nervous right now. The women left, but a few minutes later they came back, accompanied by a couple of policemen. Mercedes sat on the floor crying, holding Camron and Leslie and begging the women, Don’t take my kids, please don’t take my kids. But her mother, believing it was best to comply, picked up Camron and then Leslie and gave them to the women, both kids wailing, and the women took them away. Mercedes grew up in Brooklyn. Her father was a drunk, who beat her and her mother. One time he nearly killed them, trying to run their car off the road as they fled from him on the Belt Park- way. When Mercedes was old enough to understand what was going on, she started calling the cops on him. When she was older still, she started running away, at which point her mother called the authorities on her. When she was a teen-ager, her mother sat the kids down and they voted on whether they should kick their father out of the house. Mer- “This time, I’ll ask them to write ‘Not a Piñata’ on it in bigger letters.” cedes’s younger brother, who was six, voted no, but Mercedes and her older on the ground that she had been found family on a priority list for proper hous- brother and her mother voted yes, so her to neglect Camron and Leslie, and ar- ing and she would get Camron back. father left. Mercedes got pregnant when gued that all three children should be Mercedes desperately needed housing, she was fourteen, but her boyfriend beat taken into foster care. It pointed out that and she didn’t have anywhere else for her up and she lost the baby. When she Mercedes’s home had been observed to Camron to go, so she said O.K. Because was eighteen she got pregnant again. Her be unsanitary on at least two occasions, she was still angry with her mother, she father turned up and beat her, but she that she had refused to participate in told the caseworker that Camron could didn’t miscarry, and in 2007 she had her drug treatment despite admitting that go with the friend. That turned out to first baby, Camron. she smoked marijuana “whenever I get be the wrong decision. Camron’s father had told her to get the urge,” and had missed two child- Leslie was released from the hos- an abortion, and was violent with her, safety conferences, and there- pital a few days later, and too, so her mother came and brought fore posed an imminent risk she was given to the friend, her home. “She told me, ‘I’m going to to Tiana’s life or health. But too. Mercedes kept calling help you with the baby, I got you,’ ” the children’s attorney argued A.C.S., asking when she was Mercedes says. But although Mercedes that Mercedes should be al- getting her kids back. Tiana and her mother were best friends when lowed to keep the baby, and was still in the hospital— they weren’t living together—they the judge agreed. were they waiting for her to talked every day on the phone, spent Six months later, A.C.S. be released? Why did she not every weekend together—when they filed another petition to re- have Leslie? When was she were in the same house they fought move the children: Leslie had going to get her housing? constantly, and when Camron was eight cellulitis and eczema, and What was going on? But now months old Mercedes’s mother threw Tiana was seriously underweight, and a caseworker was telling her that she her out, so Mercedes and the baby A.C.S. argued that the persistence of had given up all three children of her moved into a shelter. When she got these problems suggested that Mercedes own free will. pregnant again, with Leslie, the same was failing to care for them properly. The thing happened: she moved in with her judge pointed out that since Tiana had he judge on Mercedes’s case was mother and then ended up in a shel- not gained weight even during a two- TCarol Sherman, who had worked ter again six months later. It was in this week stay in the hospital, it was not clear in family court in various capacities for second shelter that the incident with that Mercedes had anything to do with nearly forty years. As a law student, she the curling iron occurred. it. (Years later, Tiana was given a diag- had studied reformatories in Massachu- At the Bronx Family Court, A.C.S. nosis of growth-hormone deficiency.) setts and was appalled by what she saw— argued that Mercedes had burned Les- Moreover, she said, there was a strong children being held in prisonlike condi- lie with the curling iron on purpose, but bond between mother and infant, the tions, with only the most rudimentary the judge was not persuaded. Rejecting disruption of which would only make attempts at education—so when she the charges of abuse, she issued a lesser things worse. Three months after that, graduated she looked for an organiza- finding of neglect, because Mercedes had A.C.S. tried to remove Tiana a third tion that defended children in court. She failed to supervise her children properly time, but again the judge said no. found only one, the Juvenile Rights Di- and had not taken Leslie to the hospi- Mercedes fought with her mother vision of the Legal Aid Society in New tal. The children were put into foster care and moved with the kids to a shelter York, and went to work there in the sum- with Mercedes’s cousin, and Mercedes again, but there were bedbugs, so she left. mer of 1971. The reason she could find set about doing what A.C.S. told her she The next day she took Leslie and Tiana only one such organization was that, until had to do to get them back—going to to the doctor, and he told her they were a few years before, juvenile defense had parenting class, submitting to inspec- so sick he wanted to admit them both not been thought necessary. The Pro- tions by a caseworker. By this time, she to the hospital. For a couple of nights gressive Era creators of family court had was pregnant again. “The first thing that she and Camron slept in the girls’ hos- imagined its judges as quasi-parents, caseworker said to me when she met me pital room, but the hospital kicked them helping rather than punishing, ruling be- was not ‘Hello’ but ‘Oh, you’re pregnant out. Then, soon afterward, Mercedes’s nevolently in a child’s best interest. But, again? They ain’t going to do nothing mother and a woman friend of hers from in 1967, the Supreme Court ruled that it but take that baby, too.’ That was the church turned up at the hospital, along was irrelevant whether a judge felt be- first thing that came out of her mouth.” with a caseworker from A.C.S. The case- nevolent or not: family court had the But the caseworker was wrong: shortly worker told Mercedes that since she didn’t power to deprive citizens of their liberty, before Mercedes gave birth to her third have anywhere for Camron to go she and that kind of state power had to be child, Tiana, the judge gave Camron and had to give him to either her mother or restrained by the law, so a juvenile de- Leslie back to Mercedes, on the condi- the friend, or else A.C.S. would take all linquent was entitled to an attorney. tion that she live with her mother. three kids. As Mercedes understood the The mission to protect children, com- A.C.S. was still uneasy about Mer- arrangement, the caseworker promised bined with the excitement of creating cedes, however. Right after Tiana was her that, if she gave up Camron tempo- a whole new field of law, made the born it requested that the court find “de- rarily, then when the girls were released Juvenile Rights Division in the early rivative neglect” of Tiana by Mercedes, from the hospital A.C.S. would get the seventies a thrilling place to be. Martin

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017 39 Guggenheim, now a professor of law at they had adequately reformed, and made that impact his ability to deal with his N.Y.U., arrived at the same time that it far more likely that they would never child? Young children can be really frus- Sherman did, and together they felt get their children back. trating—the constant crying, not doing themselves to be part of a righteous cru- Sherman knew that foster care could what you tell them to do.” Did the par- sade on behalf of their underage clients. be harmful, so she felt more comfortable ent have an unrealistic idea of how well “We defended murderers and muggers removing children if there was a relative a young kid could be expected to behave? with zeal,” he says. “And if our client was who could pass a background check and Or did he simply believe that hitting was found guilty and sent away, we’d say, That take them—she believed that children the right way to raise a child? It was diffi- fucking judge. We were warriors!” almost always did better with family. cult to draw a line between corporal pun- When Sherman and Guggenheim Sherman: Did the father sign the birth ishment and abuse, and judges drew that started out, their caseload was almost all certificate at the hospital? line in different places. delinquencies. But then growing aware- A.C.S.: I believe so. Sherman: The court does find that A.C.S. Sherman: Does the mother have contact ness of “battered-child syndrome”—an has met its burden. J. testified that his father with the child? awareness that the abuse of children at beat him, punched him, and stomped on him, A.C.S.: The mother attended the child safety that he had been beaten by his father since he home was not a rare pathology but a conference but she became upset and walked was two years old, and that he has seen his fa- frequent occurrence that demanded at- out and told the father it was his baby now. tention—led, in 1974, to the Child Abuse ther hit C. This court is aware of Mr. A’s issues with anger control. The court is also aware that Prevention and Treatment Act. The Ju- She worked tirelessly, aware that she Mr. A cares very much for both of his children. venile Rights Division saw more and now had more power than ever to affect more abuse and neglect cases, and as this children’s lives. She read every report in Some of the hardest cases were those happened a divide opened among the advance, she took detailed notes and re- in which a doctor did not believe a par- warriors. To Sherman, it seemed clear viewed them, she interrogated. ent’s explanation of how a child had been that these new cases were very differ- hurt. It could be incredibly difficult to Sherman: I’d like to see the police report, ent—that whereas in the delinquency this makes no sense. Where is the child? know what to do. “Often the injury can cases children accused of crimes had to A.C.S.: With the paternal grandmother. be horrific,” Sarah Cooper, another judge be protected from the state, in the ne- Sherman: And what are you asking for at the Bronx Family Court, says. “A skull glect and abuse cases the state itself was today? fracture, a broken femur, retinal hemor- protecting children, from their parents. A.C.S.: The removal of the child to A.C.S. rhaging, which is typical of a shaken Sherman: Based on the mother leaving the But to Guggenheim the child-welfare child alone on one occasion for thirty minutes? baby. When there are these horrific in- cases and the delinquency cases looked A.C.S.: This is a very young child, less than juries, everybody’s on edge. Who broke all too similar: in both, the state pos- seven months old, he cannot fend for himself. the baby? Somebody broke the baby. And sessed the fearsome power to remove Mother’s Lawyer: The very age of the often there are multiple caretakers— children from their homes, and so in child suggests that he should stay with the maybe two parents in a home, maybe a mother. She is breast-feeding, she has been his both that power had to be kept in check. mother since birth. grandmother, an aunt, a babysitter. You By the time Sherman became a judge, Sherman: How do you know the child was have four people in front of you who are in 2008, a great deal had changed in fam- left alone for thirty minutes? all held accountable, and the likelihood ily court. In the eighties and nineties, A.C.S.: The child was found alone by the is one, maybe, did something, and two putting children in foster care was very father’s brother. or three other people are just roped into Mother’s Lawyer: The child was left with common: in 1991, there were nearly fifty the uncle. it. But how do you say, O.K., take your thousand children in care in New York Sherman: Wait, the father’s brother was baby home with their unexplained skull City. But study after study had shown home with the child? fracture? Nine months down the road how harmful foster care could be, and A.C.S.: The brother stated that he came we’re looking at a trial—medical experts judges had become leery of it; by 2005, home and found the child. come in and start lecturing about the Sherman: But why do you believe the the number had dropped to eighteen brother over the mother? What do we know ribs, genetic metabolic anomalies, brittle- thousand. (It is now under nine thou- about him? bone disease, rickets—and that takes sand.) But this didn’t mean that all the years. For a baby, that’s a lifetime—it’s children who were no longer in foster When it came to abuse, she tried to all of the bonding, all of the early-life care had stayed with their parents: many parse the different sorts of violence. Was attachment. And ultimately perhaps we experts in the field had come to believe the parent whipping with a belt, which never know what happened.” that the solution to the problem of chil- was painful but not usually dangerous, But abuse, in fact, made up only a dren spending years in foster care was to or choking, which was? And why was small percentage of the cases that came speed up adoption. In 1997, Congress the parent doing these things in the first through Sherman’s courtroom. The vast passed the Adoption and Safe Families place? “Is there mental illness?” she asks. majority of child-protective cases in- Act, which required states to file for ter- “Is there so much anger that this person volved neglect, and these could be even mination of parental rights in most cases really can’t control it? It may be that this trickier. In a neglect case, it was a mat- when a child had been in foster care for parent has every reason in the world to ter less of stopping something obviously fifteen of the previous twenty-two be angry, not at the child but at a whole terrible from happening than of filling months. This gave parents far less time host of experiences he’s had in his life— in the deficits in a child’s life, and the to satisfy child-protection agencies that I’m not here to judge that. But how does question of what constituted a deficit big

40 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017 enough to count as neglect was difficult to settle. It was also hard to tell when neglect suggested that something more worrying was going on. “The question is, what else is this parent doing that their living conditions look like this?” Sherman would ask. “That they’re so filthy dirty, the children are filthy dirty, the food is rotting—what else is going on here? Is the parent depressed? Does the parent have developmental disabili- ties? Is there drug use? Or is it none of those things and we just have to teach her how to keep a clean home?” Figur- ing out what was really going on was hard, because she had no firsthand knowl- edge of the situation and was forced to rely on the testimony of caseworkers, whose skill and diligence varied consid- erably. She scolded them when their work was sloppy, but in the end she usually sided with A.C.S. Sherman became known in family court for examining the tiniest of de- tails. When inquiring how a child was doing, she wanted to know everything there was to know about him. “I want “I’m going to level with you, Tom. The rest of the marketing to see every report card, and if the child team wasn’t sent upstate to live on a farm.” isn’t doing well in school I order tutor- ing in the home,” she says. “I will order P.S.A.T. and S.A.T. review courses. In- •• formation about scholarships. My ex- perience is that unless I give a very de- erything that my child’s entitled to.” Mother’s Lawyer: My client did not ac- tailed order the things that need to be To her, this was a matter of social jus- cept the cleaning service because she’s about done won’t necessarily get done.” She tice: she believed that it was not right to be evicted so she didn’t see the point. was notorious among caseworkers for for poor children to be deprived of Sherman knew that services didn’t al- her obsession with summer camp: if a the after- school activities and therapy ways work, and that parents often re- child was not enrolled by the middle of and evaluations and tutoring and do- sented them, but her job was to protect spring, she would issue an order requir- mestic orderliness that middle-class children, so she did the best she could ing it. She found out that one boy children had, so when a child came with the tools she had. What else could loved science but had never been to the into her purview she did her utmost she do? “Mental-health services, drug natural-history museum, so she issued to insure that the child’s life and pros- treatment—sometimes they’re benefi- a court order requiring his foster mother pects were substantially improved be- cial, sometimes not,” she says. “There are to take him there. When he was adopted, fore she was done with him. The trou- old studies on batterers’ programs which she bought him a book about atoms ble was, what to her seemed like said they did not have much of an im- and tickets to the planetarium to cele- helpful services could feel to a parent pact. People are trying to figure out what brate. Although she issued dozens of like intrusion, and the high standards can we do—we have to change people’s orders in every case, she kept track of she set could become barriers to re- behavior. I think just being brought to all of them, and excoriated the case- unification. “It moved into social con- court and having a child removed has a workers when they weren’t carried out. trol very quickly, in her courtroom,” very sobering effect. But some parents Some judges seemed to be concerned Emma Ketteringham, the managing are willing to say, I’d like to learn a bet- chiefly that their cases proceeded ac- director of the Family Defense Prac- ter way to do it, and others are not.” cording to schedule; Sherman was not tice at the law firm the Bronx De- “Carol does not see intervention as a one of them. “Judge Sherman cares very fenders, says. “I will never forget one terrible cost,” Guggenheim says. “She deeply for children,” Mary Anne Men- case where a case planner had put in sees it as a price to pay to avoid what is denhall, Mercedes’s lawyer, says. “That her report that there was a lot of stuff for many in this field the thing to avoid is something you can never doubt.” in the crib. Judge Sherman issued an above all else: wrongfully failing to pro- Sherman would often say, “All the order that nothing be allowed in the tect a child. She really has a Progressive children before me are entitled to ev- crib except the baby.” mind-set, in that she sees herself as the

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017 41 instrument of power to improve chil- erything stops,” she says. “Your heart the foster mother not to disparage Mer- dren’s lives. But, on the privileged side of stops. Everything stops. Then you’re try- cedes in front of the children, but she town in all parts of America, children are ing to figure out what the hell to do next. continued to do it. (A.C.S., Judge Sher- raised by drunks, by drug addicts, by vi- What do I do? Once they take them, man, and the foster agency all have a pol- olent people. We don’t care how privi- you don’t have no reason to be here no icy of not discussing open cases.) leged children are raised, because we’ve more. Your kids give you purpose.” Before she took in Mercedes’s kids, arranged our world around the funda- She was permitted to see her children the foster mother had been earning a lit- mental principle that the state doesn’t in- each week in a room at the foster- care tle money cleaning houses and watch- trude on the family. Equality requires that agency, but she came to dread these vis- ing people’s children, but now she began we give the same freedom to underpriv- its, because they were so short and say- receiving foster-care benefits. Mercedes’s ileged children as we give to privileged ing goodbye was awful for everyone, and children were medically complicated, so children—to be raised by crappy parents.” because someone from the agency would the payments were higher than usual. watch them, taking notes on how she For “special children” in New York, fos- or a long time after she lost her chil- and the kids behaved together. But mostly ter parents are paid up to $1,289 a month; Fdren, Mercedes was homeless. She she dreaded them because the kids had for “exceptional children,” the payment couldn’t sleep at her mother’s anymore, started saying things about her. They said is $1,953; so to take care of all three of and she didn’t have close friends, so she that their foster mother had told them them the foster mother was likely being floated from place to place, staying in that Mercedes was bad, that she was a paid between forty-six and sixty-two each as long as her host would let her, drug addict, that she didn’t want them thousand dollars a year, plus up to sev- sometimes staying with someone she back. Mercedes started coming late to enteen hundred dollars a year in cloth- had met that day. She refused to go to a visits, and sometimes she wouldn’t show ing allowance. If she ended up adopting shelter for single women—she had heard up at all, and the kids would get very the children, she would receive benefits there were fights in those places, and upset. Sherman ruled that if Mercedes until each child turned twenty-one. people stole things. She was used to this. was late for a visit it would be cancelled, She wanted to adopt them. In the past, Her life had been this way since she was and Mercedes was late. She was late for foster parents often did not want to adopt, sixteen—staying with her mother, get- court dates, too. “Mercedes has no sense so if a parent’s rights were terminated ting thrown out, staying with a friend, of time,” her mother says. “I tell her, Don’t the children were forced to go to yet an- getting in an argument, moving on. Be- leave when you feel like it, stop getting other home. To overcome this problem, sides, she didn’t have her kids, so she up when you feel like it, you got to be in the foster agency that was supervising barely cared what happened to her. court at twelve, how dare you get there Mercedes’s children had a policy of en- “When they take your kids, it’s like ev- when it’s over?” The foster agency warned couraging foster parents to consider adop- tion. The trouble with this solution was that foster parents were prompted from the start to form attachments to the chil- dren, and their hopes were pitted against those of the biological parents. While the case dragged on and Mer- cedes drifted, the agency was helping the foster mother with housing. “They done moved this lady three times, and every time the apartment’s getting big- ger,” Mercedes said bitterly. “But you can’t help the biological mother who’s showing you that she wants her kids? If they would have done that for me in the first place, I wouldn’t be in the sit- uation that I’m in now, and I’d have my kids.” Between constantly moving from place to place and feeling that A.C.S. had it in for her, and wasn’t going to return her kids no matter how hard she tried or how many parenting classes she enrolled in, Mercedes had started to fray. “By this time, I’m tired. I love my kids, but I’m tired. My mind is tired. My body is tired. I keep getting—excuse my lan- guage—dicked around by A.C.S. They’re lying to me, they’re being disrespectful. So I start to disappear for a while.” Every time she came to court she felt line between neglect and poverty in the get a new number and forget to men- surrounded by people who were con- wrong place—that parents lived in un- tion it. Bronx Defenders who previously vinced that she was a bad mother and a safe apartments without enough food worked in criminal court are befuddled bad person, although they barely knew and left their children home alone be- by this: they usually knew where their her. “At one point, we had a court date cause they had no choice. What was re- clients were—in jail. when the lawyer for the foster-care agency quired much of the time, the defenders In criminal court, defense lawyers have first came on,” she says. “And when we believed, was not parenting classes but an established function that everyone met outside he kept saying, ‘Oh, you’re material assistance—housing, childcare, understands, but in family court a par- really clean.’ What the fuck does that medication, food. They also believed that ent’s attorney who puts up a real fight is mean? ‘I don’t see nothing wrong with family court was racist. Why, when the still a novelty. Ten years ago, most par- you, you look clean.’ Because I’m black Bronx was forty per cent white, were ents were represented by individual pub- I’m supposed to be dirty?” She would sit nearly a hundred per cent of their cli- lic defenders who were too harried to in the courtroom resentfully listening to ents black or Latino? Why was the per- get to know their clients and often de- the caseworker note when she’d been late centage of the population in foster care ferred to A.C.S. Even now, the old as- to a visit, or missed a therapy appoint- twice as high in the Bronx as it was on sumptions of benevolence persist. Al- ment, but not mention when the foster Staten Island? They believed that child though judges know in principle that mother was late, or when she missed the protection had become for black women hearings are adversarial, they may feel kids’ doctors’ appointments, or that she what the criminal-justice system was for that in practice they and the lawyers had been telling the kids terrible and un- black men. should be on the same team—after all, true things about their mother. The law- New lawyers at the Bronx Defenders everyone wants what’s best for the fam- yers only ever brought up the bad stuff are asked to stay for three years, and many ily. So they may feel affronted when a about her, she felt; never the good. One of them leave as soon as that time is up. lawyer clearly doesn’t feel that way, or time when she was at a conference at the A defender in family court will have be- even seems to believe that other actors foster-care agency, Leslie burst into the tween seventy-five and ninety clients at in the courtroom are taking their posi- room and said, “I have an announcement a time; each of these clients is in the tions because they don’t understand—or to make—I love my mommy”; and then middle of one of the most painful crises don’t sympathize with—what it’s like to next time they were in court there was of her life and is depending on her law- be poor. Judges and lawyers for A.C.S. Leslie’s attorney advocating against re- yer to get her out of it, and much of the and the foster-care agencies often com- uniting her with her mother, and there time the lawyer will fail. Almost all des- plain that the Bronx Defenders are too was no mention of what Leslie had said perately want their children back, but aggressive, apt to make the whole pro- until Mary Anne Mendenhall, repre- some can’t seem to do even the simpler cess so nasty. But they are not the only senting Mercedes, brought it up. things that A.C.S. requires of them, like aggressive ones. There’s a lot of yelling The judge kept saying she understood being on time for appointments. The de- in family court—judges telling lawyers Mercedes, because they had been encoun- fenders ask their clients to do these to shut up and sit down; judges scold- tering each other in court for years, but things—they explain that, even if they ing caseworkers for not doing their job; she knew only a few things about her life. may not have anything to do with being lawyers sniping at one another in barbed, “It always bothered Mercedes when Judge a good parent, they are what the system formal language; parents shouting that Sherman would look at her and say, ‘I demands and are the quickest way to get accusations are untrue, or about the un- know you very well,’ ” Mendenhall says. their kids back—but if their clients still fairness of the system. “Mercedes would walk out crying and don’t do them they have to accept it. Sometimes the Bronx Defenders say, ‘She doesn’t know me! She only knows “Many of these people have been super- worry that their aggression is bad for what they say about me! She’s never talked vised their whole lives, threatened their their clients. A contentious family court to me, she doesn’t know anything about whole lives,” Mendenhall says. “If you reinforces the belief that the interests of who I am.’ Just because of the number of don’t da-da-da, you’re going to get kicked children and their parents can be sepa- pages she’d read about Mercedes, to feel out of class. If you don’t da-da-da, I’m rated, and this belief usually works to entitled to look her in the eye and say, ‘I going to suspend you. And they don’t the detriment of the parents. The de- know you very well.’ I don’t think Judge care. So when I say, If you would just stop fenders feel that a large part of what the Sherman recognized what that meant to smoking marijuana we’d be done with court and A.C.S. require from parents Mercedes. And how wrong it was. And this, they’re probably thinking something is compliance and deference, so will it how many times she said it.” like, Do your job—you know I’m not harm their cases if their lawyers show hurting my kids.” There is a saying at neither? “There certainly are times when ary Anne Mendenhall worked at the Bronx Defenders: You can’t work judges complain to me, ‘Why can’t you Mthe Bronx Defenders, on East 161st harder than your client, and you can’t people get along with everybody? You’re Street, a few blocks from the courthouse. want it more. doing your clients a disservice by not She and her colleagues represented par- Some clients are constantly in touch, helping them to do what we’re asking,’ ” ents in family court, and so they often texting, calling, pleading for help. Oth- Emma Ketteringham says. “And I remind found themselves at odds with A.C.S. ers disappear and have to be tracked myself, We are not a nonprofit with a and the foster-care agencies. They be- down—they don’t have a fixed home, mission of reforming the system; our mis- lieved that A.C.S. frequently drew the their phones run out of minutes, they sion is to represent the parents. Now,

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017 43 that is always tricky, because we are by law, hearings and trials had to be was struggling with whether I was going members of this system which we all scheduled in short time slots—half an to make a finding of neglect,” Ronald strongly believe is racist and classist and hour, an hour—spread out over the Richter, who was a family-court judge doing harm to the families it claims to course of many months. In fact, most from 2009 to 2011, before serving as serve. But, when it’s an individual cli- of the half-hour slots were closer to the A.C.S. commissioner, says. “The ent, the conversation must always be: If twenty minutes, because nearly ten mother was smoking marijuana in the you invite that caseworker in who is so minutes was spent trying to agree on shelter bathroom while her baby was condescending and rude to you, doesn’t a slot to meet the next time, with the on the bed in the next-door room, and remember your children’s names and has judge and three or four lawyers and I just didn’t feel that the agency had everything wrong about you—if you in- caseworkers all consulting their sched- proved harm to the child. The record vite her in and serve her food rather than uling books and calling out when they was so spare. There was nothing to give her attitude, your children will come could and couldn’t make it. And all show that this mother—they wanted home more quickly. It’s unlawful for us those months spent piecing together me to make all these inferences! And to prioritize fighting the system over ad- the few hours required for a hearing I struggled and struggled and strug- vocating for our clients, because we have or trial were months that removed chil- gled. Then the mother didn’t show up a duty of loyalty.” On the other hand, dren spent in foster care. to court, and her lawyer had nothing Ketteringham believes that the small Then, there were the times when to say, so I was able to draw a negative fights they pick are, year by year, having family court was even more tense than inference and I made a finding and I a cumulative effect. “You will now hear usual: after a gruesome and highly pub- was so relieved that that settled it.” judges turn to A.C.S. and say, ‘A par- licized murder of a child, people in It had become rare for a child to be enting class? Really? Wait, domestic- child protection got very jittery and removed solely because the parent was violence therapy and regular therapy?’ very cautious. More calls came in to smoking marijuana, but if kids had al- That’s from us pushing. Ten years ago the hotline, A.C.S. filed for more re- ready been removed and the parent it was so much worse, in terms of the movals, and judges were more likely to tested positive it was often a reason not cookie-cutter services that everybody grant them. What in normal times to give them back. This seemed to Men- rolled their eyes about.” seemed like a small, ordinary mistake— denhall so grossly unreasonable that she So much about working in family forgetting to take a child to a doctor’s would sometimes lash out at the A.C.S. court was maddening, it was small won- appointment, bringing him to school lawyers in the hallway afterward. “Never der that people got on each other’s late, getting drunk in his presence— say ‘marijuana’ again in this courthouse nerves. It had always been that way, could, in the wake of a death, seem until you call the police on your friend and it seemed it always would be, since, like a portent of danger. And you never from college who dares to smoke it when each time a solution to a problem was saw headlines accusing caseworkers of he has children at home,” she fumes. found, that solution seemed to gener- removing children when they didn’t “One guy said to me, ‘My own friends’ ate new and worse problems of its own. have to. Last October, the month after and family’s marijuana use is neither A few years ago, everyone with a court six-year-old Zymere Perkins died, al- here nor there.’ And I said, ‘How can date was told to show up at legedly at the hands of his that be? How can it be? If you really be- 9 a.m. and wait. Since it was mother and her boyfriend, lieve in what you’re saying.’ ” It was this unpredictable how long the foster-care placements in- double standard that galled her the most. earlier cases would take, a creased by thirty per cent. Blaming parents for the side effects of person might wait all day Newspaper accounts of child poverty was bad enough, but to censure without seeing a judge and deaths often suggested that them for doing what middle-class peo- be told to come back the next A.C.S. workers had too ple did all the time without any fear of day, which might mean los- many cases to do their jobs prosecution was too much. There was ing his job; and, once started, properly, but caseloads had no leeway, no give, no mercy at all, if a hearing would continue been reduced over the years you were poor. “I’m not in favor of cor- until it was finished, even if to a reasonable number— poral punishment,” she says. “I don’t it took till eight or nine at usually between eight and plan to hit my children, if I ever have night. This was bad for the people who fifteen. It wasn’t that caseworkers them. I assume I will at some point, worked at the court, bad for the peo- had too many clients, but that what though, because that’s how I was raised. ple whose cases weren’t heard, and bad they were required to do—change I will be shocked at myself, and I will for the city’s budget, because it required human behavior, predict the future— have the comfort and the privilege within so much overtime. So the court insti- was very hard. my family of processing how I failed, tuted “time certains,” so you could be With so many serious and intrac- and saying to my child, ‘I lost it, I’m re- reasonably sure that your case was going table issues to deal with in family court, ally sorry.’ Our clients never have that to be heard at a particular time, and it the Bronx Defenders found it partic- privilege.” started shutting down promptly at four- ularly infuriating when A.C.S. would She knew that A.C.S. lawyers and thirty every day. But in order to keep argue for removal based on something caseworkers had jobs to do, and that to the time certains while moving each they felt was relatively trivial, like mar- those jobs were necessary to protect chil- case along on the schedule mandated ijuana. “I remember one case where I dren. But there was a certain personality

44 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017 type that inclined toward that kind of work. “One of the A.C.S. lawyers, a couple years ago I saw her on the train, and I had a dog at the time. My dog was sixteen and I kept her alive till she was seventeen—doing O.K. First thing that lawyer did was stick her finger in my dog’s collar and say, ‘It’s a little tight, Ms. Mendenhall.’ ”

ecause A.C.S. continued to com- Bplain in court about Mercedes’s mar- ijuana use, and because she hoped that a dramatic demonstration of compliance and sacrifice might convince them that she was determined to reform, in 2012 she enrolled in a yearlong in-patient drug- treatment program called La Ca- sita. At first, it was hard. “I didn’t have no phone,” she says. “You got to get rid of everything—no nails, no hair, no makeup, nothing, you’re in there Plain Jane. I didn’t really understand the logic of why you got to take my weave out, or “We don’t know what kind of meat it is. That’s why it’s on sale.” why I can’t wear earrings. I cried about my hair. They said, ‘To strip you down •• to nothing and build you back up.’ But you already feel like shit because your kids are in the system. Why would you to come for overnight visits, so La Ca- gloves on him and he went at it and had want me to feel like nothing? I already sita moved Mercedes to a bigger room, a ball. He was play-wrestling with my feel like nothing.” She couldn’t believe with enough beds for all the kids to sleep brother. Tiana, she was playing with toys she was there in the first place—she there. Tiana was being fed through a with my cousin. Leslie was eating, talk- looked around and saw dope fiends and tube into her stomach now, and Mer- ing to my mother, talking to my aunt.” crackheads, and all she’d done was smoke cedes studied up on it so she would know Then, two days later, the agency told some pot. how to take care of her. “I knew how to Mercedes that Camron had said that But then she grew close to a couple flush it, I knew how to mix it, I knew during the Thanksgiving dinner she of the counsellors; she felt they under- how to put the milk and cereal together had taken him into the bathroom and stood her and gave her good advice. They and put the tube in and everything,” she punched him in the stomach while her believed in her and thought she should says. Mendenhall argued that the only mother held his shirt up. More accusa- get her children back. Little by little, she remaining barrier to reuniting the fam- tions followed: Leslie said that she had started to unfurl. “Like most women that ily was housing, and Sherman charged been abused, sexually and otherwise, by enter treatment, she didn’t trust, she came the foster-care agency with arranging it. Mercedes and other people in her family. from a broken home, she was always fight- The agency resisted—it believed that the Later, Camron admitted to Mercedes and ing,” Yolanda Stevenson, one of the coun- children should be adopted by their fos- a caseworker at La Casita that the punch- sellors, says. “She was angry at herself, ter mother—but she ordered it to com- ing at Thanksgiving hadn’t happened, and at the system. I also think that she ply. Now it was only a matter of finding that his foster mother had told him to suffered from some form of depression, an apartment: after three and a half years, say that, and the caseworker recorded his which was taboo for her. For a lot of it would be just a few more months be- statement, but the foster-care agency said African- Americans, we feel it’s taboo— fore the family could be together. the statement sounded coerced. we’re not crazy, why should we have ther- That year—2013—Mercedes brought A.C.S. investigated each of these re- apy? But when you’re fighting with your her kids to Thanksgiving dinner at her ports but pursued none of them in court. mother like boxers, that’s a little off.” Mer- aunt’s house. “Thanksgiving was beau- But as soon as one was closed another cedes felt that, after months of shutting tiful,” she says. “My aunt and my grand- accusation would be made, and no re- down and running away from her life, father hadn’t seen Leslie, Camron, and union could take place before the new this was her last chance, and she seized it. Tiana since they were babies. We ate, we report was properly looked into. It seemed Judge Sherman saw how hard she was laughed, we talked. My aunt has one of that nobody really believed that Mer- trying, and how far she’d come, and said them big dummies with no arms that cedes had abused her children, because that the kids could visit her on week- they have in defense classes, and Cam- she was never arrested, and during this ends. She said that soon they’d be able ron was fighting that—they put boxing period she gave birth to a fourth child,

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017 45 Amaya, and Amaya was never taken the accusations against the foster most gave up. “They already made up away. But the reports continued. “I wish mother, because the foster agency didn’t in their mind that they’re not going to I could have helped Mercedes fight mention them in court, and they were give them back,” she says. “I feel as more, the way she was treated by the all ultimately deemed unfounded. though they want me to say, ‘Fuck it, foster-care agency and the foster When Sherman did hear, she berated let me just sign, take ’em.’ I get to that mother,” Yolanda Stevenson says. “I’ve the agency for not telling her sooner, point. I get there. That’s why I’ve been been in this field for twenty-three years, but she decided that since it still seemed late. I can be on time; but when I’m at and I get that her children were trau- likely that the children would be re- home getting ready, I don’t see an end matized. But I think her kids were united with their mother, they should to this tunnel, I don’t see a light, it’s coached by the foster mother to say not be moved to yet another home. just pitch black, this is a fricking rou- these things—‘Mommy beat me,’ or Even the agency was worried about tine that is never going to fucking end, whatever.” Leslie started saying she’d what was going on. The agency itself and I feel like I’m drowning all the been hit by any number of people in had called in one of the maltreatment time. Lord knows, I love my kids. But, addition to her mother—by children cases against the foster mother; it was at the end of the day, it’s only so much on the school bus, by a teacher, by a concerned about her habit of filming one person is willing to take.” She teaching assistant in a school bath- the children when they were having started crying. “I’ve dealt with every- room, by her foster parents. Sherman tantrums. It also felt that her husband thing. Everything they threw at me, I stopped the children’s unsupervised was not behaving enough like a father. dealt with. After I busted my ass to visits at La Casita, so Mercedes saw When the caseworker visited, he would make sure I got where I needed to be, them at the foster-care agency again. be in another room. She would tell him they just snatched it back like it was But the foster mother reported that he had to come out and engage with nothing.” Mercedes sexually abused the children the kids, especially since they wanted The children grew worse and worse. during those supervised visits. to adopt them, but he would say, “My Camron threatened to kill his foster Reports started coming in against wife does that.” The agency testified mother and her husband, and the the foster mother and her husband, in court that there were incidents where month after the Thanksgiving dinner, too. There were several calls to the the foster mother and her husband when he was six, he ended up in a psy- hotline from mandated reporters— were very harsh with the children. chiatric hospital. Later on, he started people, such as teachers and social Mercedes had started missing vis- threatening to kill himself, too, and he workers, who were obligated to report its again and turning up late, and after was hospitalized again and again. When suspected abuse—accusing her or her several warnings Judge Sherman be- Camron was nine and in a psychiatric husband of mistreating the children. came so concerned about the trauma- ward, his foster mother took the girls “There were allegations of her hitting tizing effect her behavior was having and went on a vacation that she had the son,” Stevenson says, “but they on the children that she cancelled vis- planned, so he was all alone. In previ- didn’t remove the kids, which blew my its altogether. Mercedes was so far gone ous years, Sherman had seemed to agree mind.” At first, Sherman didn’t hear of in despair by that point that she al- with the foster-care agency that Cam- ron’s frightening behavior might be due to anxiety surrounding the visits with his mother, but now he hadn’t seen his mother in more than a year and he was far sicker, and she was grow- ing skeptical that Mercedes could still be blamed for what was happening. Since she wasn’t allowed to visit Cam- ron in the hospital, Mercedes called him on the phone the first day he was there, and he asked her to call him every day. She called the next day, and the next, but then the foster-care agency told the hospital that she was not al- lowed to have contact and her calls were blocked. Camron reminded Mercedes of her- self—he was angry and difficult, and she knew he was going to have a rough adolescence, as she’d had. “What I kept telling their foster mother is ‘You for- get those are my kids,’ ” she says. “ ‘My “I guess we’ll know ol’ Mr. Willis is dead when blood is running through them. My the Amazon packages stop arriving.” attitude is running through them. I gave my mother hell. You ain’t never closer I can get to the organic stuff, I government—we do not set a standard been through no shit like that, so you try to. I’ve seen him in the hospital for perfection in policing or so many ain’t going to understand, you’re not after he’s woken up after they give him other areas—in this case we do set a going to get it. I will get it, because I the shot to calm him down, and I don’t standard of perfection.” He said, “Our been there. These are my kids.’ ” It like what I see. He’s not responsive job is to get there first and intervene seemed to Mercedes that the foster quick enough for me. He just sit there, and stop it.” mother didn’t really want Camron— his mouth open. He’s talking, but it’s In Dostoyevsky’s novel “The Broth- what kind of mother left a nine-year- like the lights is on but nobody’s home. ers Karamazov,” Ivan asks his brother old alone in a mental hospital and went And I’m, like, no. Unh-unh. No.” Alyosha to consider the murder of a on vacation? “I felt the foster mother For Mercedes, spring was the hard- child and what price he would pay to treated the daughters better than the est time of year, because of birthdays. avert it. son,” Stevenson says. “When the kids Camron’s was March 21st, Tiana’s would come to visit, you could tell he March 30th, Leslie’s May 5th. Each “Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men needed a haircut, his clothes were year, she braced herself for this dark happy in the end, giving them peace and rest shabby, he didn’t smell the cleanest, so period by going all out for Amaya’s at last, but that it was essential and inevitable nobody was teaching him hygiene, but birthday, in January. She would spend to torture to death only one tiny creature— the girls looked like fashion models.” her food stamps on a birthday cake and that baby beating its breast with its fist, for in- At one point, Mercedes wondered they would celebrate together. “Your stance—and to found that edifice on its un- avenged tears, would you consent to be the whether she could make a devil’s bar- birthday is special,” she would tell her. architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell gain with A.C.S. to give up Leslie and “That’s the day you changed me. That’s the truth.” Tiana if they’d give her Camron—she the day you made me feel like I need “No, I wouldn’t consent,” said Alyosha softly. thought that the foster mother seemed to be here. Because I didn’t feel like I genuinely attached to the girls—but needed to be here for a long time. They Children are killed all the time. But she just couldn’t do it. always made me feel like my kids never when confronted with one particular By the spring of 2017, Mercedes needed me, they didn’t want me, they dead child and asked if there is no limit hadn’t seen her children in nearly two was better off with this lady. I just lost to what we should do to prevent an- years. She was living with Amaya in a the will to live. It was like, whatever other from dying like that—if perfec- shelter in Manhattan, near the F.D.R. happened to me happened to me, I’m tion should be the goal of child- Drive. “So much time has gone past, I on the streets until whatever. But, when protective services, and if the state don’t even know what my kids look I saw Amaya, that was my purpose— should intervene before bad things like right now,” she said. “I look at them to make sure she didn’t go into care. I happen, just in case—it is very diffi- old pictures, I know Camron looks made sure that that baby stayed with cult to say no, even if the price is other older. He’s taller. I know Leslie looks me, and I’m going to continue to make children and parents suffering while older and she’s taller. I don’t know what sure that my baby stay with me. I re- alive. they look like.” The foster-care agency fuse to lose her. I fucking refuse to. Mercedes knows that, at this point, was advocating strenuously for adop- They will have to kill me.” she has very little chance of getting her tion. The point of no return was get- kids back. She knows that they will ting closer. “ he reckless destruction of Amer- probably grow up without her, and that The agency asked the court to place Tican families in pursuit of the she may not even be allowed to see Camron in a long-term residential goal of protecting children is as seri- them. The foster mother and Mer- treatment facility. Mercedes went there ous a problem as the failure to protect cedes’s mother aren’t friends anymore. and asked for a tour, and she emerged children,” Martin Guggenheim, Sher- The photographs she has will get more feeling it wasn’t as bad as she’d feared. man’s former colleague, says. “We need and more out of date, and Camron, When the foster agency gave her a to understand that destroying the Leslie, and Tiana will become people stack of medication- consent forms to parent-child relationship is among she doesn’t know. What she hopes for sign, she first Googled each of the drugs the highest forms of state violence. It now is that when they’re grown, when they wanted to give him. There were should be cabined and guarded like a they’re adults and can do as they like, four or five of them, and she looked nuclear weapon. You use it when you one day they will come and find her. up the side effects, the tics he might must.” He believes the tide is turning “I will always be looking for that phone develop if he missed a dose, the with- in his direction—nine thousand chil- call, for that hit up on Facebook: drawal symptoms he would go through dren in foster care in New York City ‘Mommy, what happened?’ ” she says. if he stopped taking them. Some of compared with fifty thousand, chang- It will be years till then, but it’s been the antipsychotics sounded scary to ing views on drugs—but each time a years already, and she’ll survive as long her, especially for a kid as young as child is murdered by a parent some as she has Amaya. “I’m waiting for it,” Camron. “They want to put him on gain is lost. After the death of Zymere she says. “I got time. Camron, that’s Risperdal—I won’t let them do that. Perkins, last year, Mayor de Blasio spoke eight more years till he’s eighteen. Les- That give boys breasts. Abilify? That’s on the radio about the case. “Our mis- lie is, what, nine more years. Tiana is fine, it calms you. They wanted to do sion is to save every child,” he said. six now. So I’m waiting for it. I’m wait- the Ritalin for the A.D.H.D. Fine. The “Unlike pretty much any other area in ing for it.” 

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017 47 PROFILES WORLD OF INTERIORS

Rachel Cusk gut-renovates the novel.

BY JUDITH THURMAN

n Rachel Cusk’s most recent novels, tion is family life. But her imaginary in twenty-four years, is by the distance “Outline” and “Transit,” a British oral histories are exquisitely attuned to between her early work and that of her I writer named Faye encounters a se- the ways in which humans victimize one maturity. Cusk made her début in 1993, ries of friends and strangers as she goes another. at the age of twenty-six, with “Saving about her daily life. She is recently di- Late in “Transit,” Faye listens to a pa- Agnes,” a down-from-Oxford bildungs- vorced, and while her new flat is being laver about clothes and sex by a friend roman about a grandiose, tormented girl renovated her two sons are living with named Amanda, who works in fashion finding her way in London, which won their father. There is something catlike and has “a youthful appearance on which the Whitbread First Novel Award. Her about Faye—an elusiveness that makes the patina of age was clumsily applied.” subsequent novels include “The Coun- people want to detain her, and a curios- “No one ever tells you the truth about try Life,” a parody of a gothic romance ity about their pungent secrets. They tell what you look like,” Amanda says of her between a bratty invalid and his au pair, her their histories, and she listens in- profession, to which Faye responds, “Per- written in the ornate syntax of a Victo- tently. As these soliloquies unspool, a haps none of us could ever know what rian moralizer; “In the Fold,” set in a bo- common thread emerges. The speakers was true and what wasn’t.” At the end of hemian manor house rife with sexual suffer from feeling unseen, and in the their conversation, which is mostly about and dynastic intrigue; and “Arlington absence of a reflection they are not real Amanda’s affair with her contractor, she Park,” interlocking stories of suburban to themselves. Faye shares their dilemma. stands up to leave the café, “darting fre- anomie. The chaste prose of her current “It was as if I had lost some special ca- quent glances at me,” Faye observes. “It trilogy seems almost like a reproach to pacity to filter my own perceptions,” she was as if she was trying to intercept my the self-conscious virtuosity that pre- says. But she lends herself as a filter to vision of her before I could read any- ceded it. Before she wrote “Outline,” her confidants, and from the murk of thing into what I saw.” Cusk was a wickedly clever stylist, who their griefs and sorrows, most of which When I met Cusk, last winter, at a fired off aphorisms like a French court have to do with love, she extracts some- hotel in New York, I imagined that she diarist and made up the sort of meta- thing clear—a sense of both her own might be similarly deflective, but she phors—“cauliflower-haired old ladies”; outline and theirs. wasn’t. “You’ve caught me in a pliant con- the “floury haze” of a dry summer—that Critics have hailed these books, which versational state,” she said, tucking her you flag in the margin. A woman’s gray are the first volumes of a trilogy, as a “re- long legs under her. Cusk is tall and el- teeth are “a bouquet of tombstones.” But invention” of the novel, and they are cer- egant, with the features of a ballerina: an Cusk sometimes bared her own teeth: tainly a point of departure for it, one at expressive mouth and eyes in a finely her power to dazzle and to condemn. which fiction merges with oral history. molded small face. Frankness on inti- Cusk judges several of her early books Each witness has suffered and survived mate subjects seems to be a credo of both harshly: they were, she said, “bedevilled a version of the same experience, but her life and her work. She had just by a lack of benevolence.” By the time uniquely, and the events that are retold finished a multicity book tour, and she she published “The Bradshaw Varia- don’t build toward a revelation. The struc- was flying home to London the next day, tions,” in her early forties, that devil was ture of the text, a mosaic of fragments, eager to see her two teen-age daughters, behind her. Like its predecessors, but mirrors the unstable nature of memory. Albertine and Jessye, and to resume work more humanely, the novel tells a con- It is worth noting that “Outline” was on “Kudos,” the last volume of her tril- ventional story of family rivalries and published in 2014, a year before Svetlana ogy. “I’ll celebrate my fiftieth birthday marital ennui (particularly wifely ennui). Alexievich won the Nobel Prize in Lit- in the air,” she noted. When I asked what In retrospect, however, it was the end of erature. (“Transit” was published two the milestone meant to her, she para- a line. The Bradshaws’ real malaise, which years later.) Alexievich interviews women phrased D. H. Lawrence: “Some people wasn’t clear to Cusk yet, is the tyranny and men who have lived through cata- have a lot farther to go from where they of conventional stories: the fates and the clysms—the Second World War, Cher- begin to get where they want to be—a characters that we inherit, and to which nobyl, the Soviet gulags—and she dis- long way up the mountain, and that is we surrender our desires, along with our tills their testimony into what the how it has been for me. I don’t feel I am lives in the moment. Cusk was about to Swedish Academy cited as a “history of getting older; I feel I am getting closer.” upend the plot of her own life—to break emotions.” Cusk has been chastised for One way to measure the gifts of up her family, then to lose her house and ignoring politics and social inequities, a writer, particularly a prolific one like her bearings. The ensuing turmoil would and the central catastrophe in her fic- Cusk, who has published twelve books force her to question an old core principle

48 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017 The dissolution of Cusk’s marriage, and the system it represented, impelled a new sort of writing from the author.

PHOTOGRAPH BY LAURA PANNACK THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017 49 of the writer’s vocation, to presume au- like a ghost—was a prominent civil-rights the parking lots. The hordes have come thority, and of woman’s vocation, to lawyer who quit his job when they left to see not the sublime early frescoes of sacrifice herself for others. London, in 1999, shortly after the birth Giotto but the dry bones of St. Francis, of their first daughter. He was a legal which reside in his basilica. “The mania s it happened, Cusk didn’t celebrate scholar at Oxford University for a while, for the tangible is the predictable con- Aher birthday on the plane. She and and took up photography. They agreed sequence of the intangibility of religious her third husband, Siemon Scamell-Katz, that he would assume the primary bur- belief,” she writes. who had travelled to America with her, den of childcare while she worked on her The most deeply felt passages in “The were grounded in the Ramada at the books. “My notion was that we would Last Supper” are reserved for the artists Newark airport. Cusk was “looking from live together as two hybrids, each of us of the Renaissance; the most unforgiv- the window at a Hopper-esque land- half male and half female,” she writes. ing, for any group, pastime, or individ- scape of freight trains and telegraph poles Many modern couples negotiate such an ual that Cusk perceives as philistine. As and feeling an entirely unfounded sense arrangement, but for Cusk it was more in the case of the poor pizza, a lack of of optimism!” she e-mailed me gaily. than a pragmatic bargain, or even a mat- depth, or of an appetite for the dark and Cusk has felt more stranded in less ter of justice—she staked her identity on the visceral, never fails to disappoint her. alien environments: Los Angeles, where it. “The child goes through the full-time But Cusk saves her fiercest scorn for the she spent the early part of a childhood mother like a dye through water,” she English middle class, and that animus she described as purgatorial; the “medi- writes. “To act as a mother, I had to sus- has caused trouble for her, not only with ocre” Catholic boarding school where pend my own character.” critics who consider her an unrecon- she was bullied and ostracized; provin- In the thirteen years that she lived structed élitist. One of the British expats cial society in Brighton and Bristol, where with Clarke, Cusk published seven books, whom she encounters in “The Last Sup- she lived with her second husband when including “The Last Supper,” a memoir per” disputed Cusk’s depiction of him, their daughters were young, struggling of the family’s three-month sojourn in and sued her when the memoir appeared. to reconcile the demands of motherhood Italy which deserves a place in the canon Her publisher settled the suit without with those of art and autonomy—the of irritably highbrow British travelogues. fighting it, then recalled and pulped the subject of her memoir “A Life’s Work”; “Consider the pizza,” she writes. “It is first edition. A revised text has been re- and that marriage itself, which ended in like a smiling face: it assuages the fear printed several times. a draught of bitterness that she purged of complexity by showing everything on Clarke figures as an obliging fellow- like a poison in her memoir “Aftermath.” its surface.” On an ill-timed visit to As- traveller in “The Last Supper.” His pres- Cusk’s former husband Adrian Clarke, sisi—it is an overcast Sunday, and the ence is subsumed in the marital “we.” So, who is nameless in “Aftermath” and vir- city is teeming with tourists—the fam- it would seem, was Cusk’s sense of tually dematerialized—he haunts the text ily has a long wait for a space in one of entitlement to a stand-alone “I.” “After- math” is evasive about the reasons that the marriage ended. This was partly for the children’s sake, Cusk told me. In the book, however, she alludes to an “im- portant vow of obedience” that was bro- ken, and to her resentment of the fact that “I did both things, was both man and woman, while my husband—mean- ing well—only did one.” Clarke, she writes, “believed that I had treated him monstrously,” perhaps because he dis- covered that he had surrendered his male prerogatives to a feminist ideal only for his wife to regard him as de- sexed. A passage in “Arlington Park” may shed some light on Cusk’s view of this transaction. A woman who has up- rooted her family from London and moved to the suburbs deeply regrets it. She and her husband are like depor- tees “with no access to the things that brought them together.” He, like Clarke, was a prominent lawyer, but he takes a job at a sleepy local firm, and only at “Change of plan, heads. I want you to welcome my her urging: “He wouldn’t have moved enemies so that we might engage in open discourse and an inch if she hadn’t borne him along perhaps learn from each other’s differences.” with her,” though she fears that in bearing him along she “had damaged him, so an element of indecency to it. Like first, was of electoral upsets on both that she could no longer love him.” D. H. Lawrence, whom she calls her sides of the Atlantic. Norfolk voted for Whatever blame Cusk assumed for mentor, she sides with instinct against Brexit, despite the fact that its farmers the debacle, she was outraged by Clarke’s propriety, despite the cost to herself and depend on immigrant labor. It wasn’t demand for “half of everything, includ- others. “I haven’t hidden anything,” she clear what the consensus of our group ing the children,” she writes in “After- told me, “not my aggression or my anger.” was, and Cusk tactfully turned the sub- math.” “They’re my children,” she tells Later, she added, “Wanting people to ject to children and roses. She calls her- him. “They belong to me.” “Call yourself like you corrupts your writing.” But her self “antisocial,” though the adjective a feminist,” he retorts. (Clarke declined streak of valor was largely lost on critics didn’t jibe with her warmth and anima- to comment on Cusk’s portrayal of their in Britain. The memoirs’ merits as liter- tion in that company. Having recently life, except to dispute any implication ature took a back seat, in re- quit smoking, she vaped that she had paid him alimony or sup- views, to personal attacks discreetly, drank with rel- ported the family single-handedly.) But on the author’s perceived ish, and joked about her perhaps he is right, she reflects later. Per- arrogance and narcissism, gardening skills. The only haps a feminist true to her convictions and on her ambivalence to- time that I saw a flash of wouldn’t be “loitering in the kitchen, in ward maternity, about which aloofness was when the sub- the maternity ward, at the school gate.” “A Life’s Work,” in partic- ject of nicknames arose. And the deluded creature who thinks ular, is radically honest, and (The fishmonger’s was that she can be both a person and a woman at times self-excoriating. Fishy.) It bothered her, she is like an alcoholic with the “fantasy of Book reviewing can be a admitted, when people modest social drinking.” blood sport in the U.K., and shortened “Albertine” to “Aftermath” is a mystifying book if there was until recently even something cuter, like Bean you read it as an elliptical, one-sided a prize, the Hatchet Job of the Year award, or Bibi. “It’s a noble name,” she said. account of a divorce. And even a reader for the most savage critique. Camilla “ ‘Noble’ is its literal meaning.” sympathetic to Cusk’s iconoclasm is Long, a columnist for the Sunday Times, Cusk and Scamell-Katz divide their perplexed by her illogic. She takes on won it for her vivisection of “Aftermath,” time between Norfolk and London, the role of a breadwinning husband, in which she described Cusk as “a brit- where she owns a flat and her daugh- but, when her spouse claims the rights tle little dominatrix.” (“Bizarre” and ters go to school. “We spend most of of a stay-at-home wife, she expects “whinnying” were some other epithets.) our life in the car,” she said, “though at him to revert to ancestral form—to Cusk was nearly annihilated by this re- least we get to talk all the way.” They cede the kids to her and go make some ception. It was “English cruelty and bul- have been a couple for four years, and money. (Clarke has since become a lying,” she said. “I was depleted to the married for three. Their romance began psychotherapist.) point of not being able to create any- one Christmas, when they were both Cusk’s drive for separation, however, thing.” A teaching job kept her afloat without their children, and Scamell-Katz is a struggle with the paradoxes of a pri- financially. When she returned to her took Cusk to a wild Scottish peninsula, mal attachment being played out in an vocation, in 2013, she was “another writer,” in the middle of a storm. I had the im- adult relationship. Marriage, in her work, and a consciously “obscured” one. “A jour- pression that their complicity still sur- is oppressive on two counts: as a patri- nalist recently told me that she had been prises them daily. archal institution and a maternal body. sent to find out who I was,” Cusk said. Sunday nights at the Red Lion are A child attacks a controlling mother with “There seems to be some problem about a ritual of the couple’s country life, the intent to “destroy” her, but also to my identity. But no one can find it, be- though they are otherwise homebodies. prove that she can’t—that the mother’s cause it’s not there—I have lost all in- “You lose your power by living the wrong love can survive the attack. If the mother terest in having a self. Being a person way,” Cusk said. She isolates herself to surrenders or retaliates, the child feels has always meant getting blamed for it.” write, then works “around the clock”; abandoned. She is separate, yes; she has Scamell-Katz, who is semiretired, pro- succeeded; but she is powerless to con- t seven o’clock on a Sunday eve- tects her from intrusion, reading her sole herself. After the breakup, Cusk Aning, ten weeks after Cusk’s birth- manuscripts and vetting her reviews. stops eating, “and soon my clothes are day, we listened to the French-election The actual composition of a book, as too big for me . . . just as my mother’s news at the Red Lion, a pub in the vil- opposed to the long period in which clothes were when long ago I opened lage of Stiffkey, on the Norfolk coast. Cusk thinks about it, makes notes, and her wardrobe and curiously tried them The weather was golden, and Cusk had works out the structure, is relatively brief. on.” Looking at her daughters, she re- gone for a long walk by herself on a path “I don’t want to live a writer’s life,” she calls that “once I was pregnant with them, that runs through the salt marshes. said, by which she meant one shackled and the memory is too strange to toler- When she arrived at the pub, wearing to a computer, “so I’m unemployed most ate for long. My body is . . . drifting and a pair of overalls, Scamell-Katz was wait- of the time. My process is very uncom- fading toward a blank vision of its own ing with a chilled bottle of Chablis. A fortable. The hardest stage is to over- autonomy.” few local friends—a fishmonger, a liv- come the fakery, and I can’t associate In “A Life’s Work” and “Aftermath,” ery driver, a landscaper, a set builder— with people while I’m doing that. But Cusk risked a form of exposure that has joined us with their pints. The talk, at the writing part is pure technique. It’s

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017 51 a performance, like getting on a stage, a false self—a stock character one has perhaps, Cusk said, their birth order and before I start I have to have re- been forced to play by parents who ex- caused them to favor her older sister. hearsed everything I want to say, and to tort compliance, or by a mate who im- Only once in her life did she believe that know what’s in my sentences.” In Cusk’s poses submission as the price for love. they loved her: in the period of anguish recent novels, it isn’t the drama of the By resigning oneself to those terms, Faye and self-starvation when her first mar- events but their specificity that keeps tells the kind man, one stops being alive; riage ended. (The Cusks were shocked you riveted. Many experimental writers living becomes “merely an act of read- by Rachel’s view of them, which they have rejected the mechanics of story- ing to find out what happens next.” consider distorted.) telling, but Cusk has found a way to do Cusk’s parents had also “divorced” her, so without sacrificing its tension. Where achel Cusk was born in Saskatche- as she put it, although, as in the narra- the action meanders, language takes up Rwan, on February 8, 1967, to a Brit- tive of her breakup with Clarke, there the slack. Her sentences hum with in- ish couple who had moved to Canada. are two sides to the story. She tells of a telligence, like a neural pathway. She was the second of their four chil- loveless and repressive childhood, in At the beginning of “Outline,” Faye dren, an older girl and two younger which her parents, she claimed, “blamed flies to Athens, where she teaches a sum- boys. Carolyn, her mother, came from me for everything,” and she often felt mer writing workshop. She accepts an a large Catholic family in Hertford- like an outcast. Her mother’s prudish- invitation from her seatmate on the shire. Peter, her father, a Protestant from ness and conformity were, by Cusk’s ac- plane, a Greek businessman, to go out Yorkshire, converted to Catholicism count, stifling not only to the young Ra- on his speedboat, where she gets a sun- before their marriage. chel. On the morning after she and burn and fends off his advances. Her The Cusks met at a tennis club, in Scamell-Katz were married—in “a fan- students are asked what they noticed the early nineteen-sixties. Peter had tastic party on the beach,” she said—“I on their way to class, and, later, assigned trained as an accountant, but “he was met my father in the kitchen. ‘I didn’t to write about an animal. Local friends driven and aggressive,” Cusk said, and realize there were men like that,’ he said entertain her, though mostly with their he hankered for adventure. In Canada, of Siemon and his friends, who had been travails, and, on the morning that she and later in Los Angeles, he moved up dancing wildly around a bonfire in knee- is to leave, Faye finds a playwright named the corporate ladder, and the perks of high boots. And he wished he could have Anne, her replacement at the school, success—“the Mercedes and so on”— been like them, boots and all. Because eating honey with a spoon in her living were, Cusk felt, of unseemly importance his own wildness had been domesticated room. Anne confides that, following a to him. Carolyn, she told me, was a “very by my mother.” mugging, she discovered that a word or pretty,” “extraordinarily vain,” and “prig- In “Coventry,” an essay in Granta, two—“jealousy,” for example—would gish” girl who “wasn’t educated, though Cusk describes how her parents would sum up the idea she had for a new piece she should have been.” She had a “pow- stop speaking to her completely, for long of work, and there would then be no erful personality,” but no channel or am- periods of time, to make her pay for reason to go on with it. This had even bition for it outside the family. (Carolyn “offenses actual or hypothetical.” “Being happened to her with people, and since Cusk said on the phone that she stud- sent to Coventry,” she explains, is an En- “Anne’s life” summed up her daily exis- ied at Central Saint Martins, one of En- glish expression that means, essentially, tence she could no longer see its point. gland’s premier art schools, and that at getting frozen out. “It is the attempt to In “Transit,” whose title refers to the one point she had a successful interior- recover power through withdrawal, rather predictions of an Internet astrologer design business.) as a powerless child indignantly imag- “too obviously based on a human type Cusk’s feelings about her parents are ines his own death as a punishment to to be, herself, human,” Faye buys the still raw, and she seems to harbor wrath others. . . . My mother and father seem top floor of a derelict house in a choice at past wrongs that no triumph of liter- to believe they are inflicting a terrible location and renovates it with the help ary sublimation has been able to propi- loss on me by disappearing from my of contractors from Poland and Alba- tiate. On certain birthdays, she told me, life.” Cusk often had no idea what her nia. Her downstairs neighbors, long- “I would get a call from my mom re- offenses had been, even as an adult, time residents of the gentrifying neigh- minding me of the torment she had gone though one has to wonder if some of borhood, hate her with a vengeance, and through on that date.” Cusk’s birth, in them weren’t related to the fact that a try to sabotage her. She visits a beauty an understaffed hospital during a bliz- woman like the mother whom Cusk salon, where she changes her hair color, zard, was long and difficult. Cusk sug- described to me—a perfect storm of and a boy in the next chair, furious at gested that her father blamed her for the narrow-mindedness, seething resent- being shorn, explodes into violence. Two trauma his wife had suffered, because he ments, and vituperative retaliation— best-selling male memoirists, with whom always seemed angry with her. When figures in several of her novels. she shares the stage at a rain-sodden she reached puberty, she began to feel The last of these Coventries began reading, dominate the event. A kind that her developing body was “disgust- on a winter Sunday in Norfolk, two man with bad teeth takes her out, and ing.” “I always felt repellent,” Cusk said. years ago, and Scamell-Katz thought tells her the story of his adoption. “That has come out in my work, unfor- that something he said had provoked Faye’s encounters are orchestrated tunately, as disgust for the repellent qual- it. “We heard they were having some like a fugue, with each voice taking up ities of other people.” Both Peter and troubles,” he explained, “so we asked the theme: the quest for freedom from Carolyn were first-born children and them up for the weekend and looked

52 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017 SKETCHBOOK BY LUCI GUTIÉRREZ SUBWAY SUBSTITUTES

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017 53 after them. Rachel’s father seemed grate- ful that she was on more solid ground with me” than she had been with Clarke. CLIVE SONG “But, at the end of the dinner, I put my arm around Rachel, and asked them why If I were an early person they thought she was so honest, and how I’d look for the limits of wisdom they thought they had influenced her by going to sacred oak trees work.” They seemed to stiffen a little, he or the local blind man with lips on fire. said. After they left, there was no call or But this is now. This is N.Y.C. thank-you note, and six months passed I go to Clive. without contact. Cusk eventually decided We meet in a diner that her life was better with her parents and queue for the breakfast special. out of it. Her daughters were free to see Clive’s British. their grandparents, she writes in the essay, He tries to make the large Hispanic short-order cook appreciate but “I myself don’t wish to re-enter that “underdone” arena. I don’t want to leave Coventry. I’ve French toast. “My wife told me decided to stay.” not to say soggy,” says Clive. Like Clarke, Peter and Carolyn had We pay. Currie shows up. some objections to Cusk’s account of We sit and talk their parting ways. Peter could not re- of Clive’s upcoming trip to Guantánamo, where, call any conversation about masculin- although he’s visited thirty-six times, they’re questioning ity in his daughter’s kitchen, or any men (this time) his signature. in knee-high boots. He did, however, He laughs. remember that at the dinner in Nor- His current client, a Moroccan man, folk he had made some disparaging re- has been cleared for release marks about “Wolf Hall,” a novel by and also informed Hilary Mantel, who had encouraged he will never leave. Cusk’s work, and that his daughter had Clive, a lawyer, questions lashed out at him. The words had stung, the logic of this. he said, so he had remembered them: He laughs again, then says, “I shouldn’t laugh,” ‘You know nothing, and no one cares then tells more stories. what you think anyway.’ ” “Evidence” at Guantánamo is often supplied by snitches. Recently the same snitch brought evidence hen Rachel was a baby, her father against three hundred different people. Waccepted a new job, in Los An- Clive wondered about his motives geles. Cusk imagined, she told an in- and did some research. It turns out terviewer, that, as “stuffily brought-up every time he snitched people,” they had wanted to “let their he was allowed to visit the “love shack” hair down,” but that the hedonism of where the Americans show porn. Southern California had been “fright- Clive plans to question ening” to them. (What was more fright- the number three hundred ening, according to the elder Cusks, was the fact that the Manson family’s mur- der of Sharon Tate took place three gaze, and thick, badly cut hair; she is my body powerfully was the key to it. hundred yards from their house.) They holding a cigarette in an elongated hand. Sex has always been incredibly interest- moved to rural Suffolk when Cusk was There is a lot of smoking in Cusk’s fic- ing to me, and it becomes more so. Which eight, and three years later, in 1978, she tion, and she started at a young age, de- is strange, because my self-consciousness followed her sister Sarah to a convent spite the fact that she suffered from se- is so extreme.” boarding school, St. Mary’s, in Cam- vere asthma—perhaps, she suggested, as Albertine was conceived when Cusk bridge. The heroine of “Saving Agnes” a result of her ordeal at birth. “Being in was thirty-one. Some women are never is an alumna of such an institution: a control of my own destruction,” she said happier than when they are pregnant. hotbed of “female cruelty.” wryly, “has always seemed like a solution For others, a swelling womb threatens Sarah went on to Cambridge, and for it.” their integrity—their literal self-pos- Rachel to Oxford, where for the first Cusk and Clarke met at Oxford, but session. And becoming a mother raises time, she said, “I had the experience of she had a very brief first marriage before the spectre of becoming your own people treating me kindly, and sharing they reconnected. If her parents had been mother. One of Cusk’s beefs with Car- my interests.” On a shelf in her office, afraid to let their hair down, she wasn’t. olyn is that “no one taught me how to there is a snapshot of her from that pe- “I equated sexuality with truth,” she said be a woman”—though, actually, she was riod. The girl in the picture has a dreamy of her libidinous twenties. “Inhabiting taught, and she rejected the lessons.

54 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017 cences of the skin.” Still, she notes, “in their anomic, tyrannical hearts they like on statistical grounds. to know who’s boss, for weakness drives Most people know only three hundred people them to enslave and dominate.” in the whole world, demographers say. At the outset of the memoir, Cusk If you think like a lawyer warns the reader that she is writing in you look for the limits of wisdom “the first heat” of the transformation in facts like that. from active subject to passive vessel. But His French toast arrives. as she gets used to the climate of ma- “Is it underdone?” I ask. He sighs ternity her own piercing wail abates. and tells more stories, There are no sudden paroxysms of be- of his son at home who’s obsessed with “The Goon Show.” atitude, just a subtle shift. She reads a I don’t think like a lawyer. poem by Coleridge, “Frost at Midnight,” I’m looking to see and notices, for the first time, that there how the sacred oaks come whispering through a man like Clive, is a baby in it. “It is a poem about sit- now striving for people on death row or places like Gitmo ting still,” she writes, “about the way for thirty-five years, children act as anchors on the body and but worried eventually the mind.” The love it ex- his son doesn’t see the proper merits of “Monty Python” presses “is a restitution.” Reality begins or grasp its direct descent from the Goons. when an infant gazing at her mother I imagine a laughing, squabbling family first intuits the existence of a self be- back home in Wexford. yond her own, but for a mother it can Clive looks at his watch. begin at the same moment. Cusk told I take his scraps of French toast to the trash. me that she would have been a differ- We’ll meet again. ent writer if she hadn’t had children: “I He likes the idea would have been a minor lyricist.” The (Currie’s idea) compromise of motherhood, she con- of travelling around Pakistan with a troupe of square dancers. tinued, is an essential aspect of female Because the square dance is a “greeting dance” reality, “and if you design an uncompro- and we need more greeting! Clive smiles mised life for yourself ” you sever a vital and goes up the street artery. “Something has to be sacrificed.” in his saggy-butt pants, looking not much like a high-powered lawyer, usk is Scamell-Katz’s fourth wife. and the limits of wisdom remain, C(He appended his first wife’s sur- well—as perhaps we, who tend to confuse the greetings of dogs name to his when they married.) His and gods, third wife, a yoga teacher with whom he prefer limits has a teen-age son, Foiy, lives near them to do—more in Norfolk, and their relations are ami- or less where they were. cable. After that divorce, he bought some land in Stiffkey, and he and Cusk have —Anne Carson been building a house there together. Their property is semi-secluded, off a winding lane, with a distant view of the “What do I understand by the term ‘fe- of Catholic Mary-worship (even though North Sea. Scamell-Katz, who has a male’?” she asks in “A Life’s Work”: “A she prays “superstitiously” to the Virgin background in design, acted as their ar- false thing; a repository of the cos- in a moment of “madness”). The mem- chitect, and, with his owlish glasses and metic . . . a world in which words such oir is heretically funny, though its humor dandified clothes, you might mistake as suffering, self-control and endurance is driven by dread. When Cusk has trou- him for one. In a neighborhood of manses occur, but usually in reference to weight ble nursing, she takes her newborn to a and cottages, the house makes, as its loss; a world steeped in its own mild, breast-feeding clinic, where the “babies owners do, a statement of nonconfor- voluntary oppression, a world at whose boil like a row of angry kettles.” Her mity. The façade is a patchwork of cor- fringes one may find intersections to daughter’s “pure and pearly being re- rugated metal and raw slate, and the in- the real: to particular kinds of unhap- quires considerable maintenance. At teriors are austerely modernist. Cusk piness, or discrimination, or fear.” In first my relation to it is that of a kidney.” found the industrial windows on eBay— getting pregnant, she writes, “I have the Albertine suffers colic, and Cusk reads they had been fabricated for a school sense of stepping off the proper path of Dr. Spock—a gift from Carolyn, of all that was never built—and she scoured my life.” people. “Spock’s babies,” she writes, “are the site for bargain fixtures and furnish- “A Life’s Work” is at once a cri de cheerful souls in spite of . . . their con- ings. “There is a certain type of vender coeur, a prison diary, and a repudiation stant gastro-enteritis and chronic excres- you can always trust,” she said. “She’s a

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017 55 materialist who buys too much, then feels he sold his company, eleven years ago, at Cusk to tears, and they’d had a “semi- guilty and gets rid of her mistakes at a the age of forty-one, Scamell-Katz made nal” conversation to hash things out. “All loss.” (An oversized sofa, which barely his living as a marketing guru. He wrote I want,” she told her husband, “is for fitted through the doorway, arrived while a book on the subject, “The Art of Shop- them to treat me as conventional peo- I was there.) ping,” and he still does some consulting. ple treat their mothers.” Scamell-Katz Family houses have a central place (His alimony, Cusk noted crisply, has pointed out that she hadn’t raised them in Cusk’s fiction, perhaps because she dented their income.) Marriage and fa- to be conventional people, she had raised has lived in, fled, fixed up, envied, hated, therhood are now his prime occupations, them to be free women, so she shouldn’t yearned for, abandoned, and been dis- along with painting: a long-deferred pas- complain when they brandished that possessed of an unusual number, along sion. His studio, however—a ramshackle freedom at her. with the promises of happiness that quonset hut—suggests a certain self- Later that week, I met Cusk and her they represented. “Freedom,” Faye says, abnegation, particularly compared with daughters in Highgate for a quiet early toward the end of “Transit,” “is a home the office that he built for Cusk, in an dinner in an empty trattoria. Cusk and you leave once and can never go back annex to the main house. Her two-room Jessye were there when I arrived, and Al- to.” In an essay for the New York Times study is panelled in blond wood and bertine came a little later—she was tak- Magazine on remodelling her flat, Cusk skirted by a private deck; light streams ing a walk to clear her head from the describes how she gutted the rooms through the windows, which look out stress of schoolwork. The girls are so and threw away “decades’ worth of clut- on the garden; there is a wall of book- close in age (eighteen and seventeen) ter,” but then missed the abandon sanc- shelves, mostly still bare, except for some and in appearance (small, sturdy, and tioned by shabbiness, in which no one essential volumes, and among them was beautiful, in a different register from their had to worry about defiling a pristine a novel I didn’t know, “In Love,” by the mother) that you might mistake them sofa or scratching the floor. Men she British screenwriter Alfred Hayes, which for fraternal twins. But when I asked knows are as obsessive about house- was published in the nineteen-fifties. It Jessye if she would miss Albertine, who keeping as women, but their décor speaks intimately to Cusk, and she wanted leaves for university in the fall, she said doesn’t define them in the same way. me to have it. Hayes, she said, “gives you an that she wouldn’t—she’d have more room On one hand, they don’t have the fem- amazingly precise representation of what in the flat—and Albertine burst into inist’s temptation to prove that she isn’t the world looks like if there’s no love in it.” tears. Cusk, who was tenser than I had trivial by not caring about appearances; seen her—alert to every nuance of her on the other, they “never seem quite so fter the weekend, I went back to daughters’ moods—delicately set about trammeled or devoured by domestic- ALondon. I was reading “In Love” repairing the damage. ity. . . . It may be the last laugh of pa- on the train, and from time to time I I saw Cusk once more, at home in triarchy that men are better at being looked up to see the green fields of Nor- Tufnell Park. After she met Scamell-Katz, women than women are.” folk receding in the window. Hayes’s he persuaded her to sell the fixer-upper Her own marriage may be a case in novel is set in postwar New York, and it that Faye buys in “Transit”—the one point. When Cusk and Scamell-Katz opens in a hotel bar. What follows is the with the vile neighbors. Her current flat told me about their trip to Scotland, story of a hardboiled writer who thinks is the upper duplex of a Victorian row she recalled the beauty of their conver- he has no illusions about love, and a pretty house on a pleasant street, with bedrooms sations, and he recalled having brought on the top floor, off a small terrace, and emergency provisions—a goose and an open living area beneath them. The wine—on the train with them. Where apartment makes up in flair what it lacks she is conscientious about domestic in scale, with interesting modern art, a chores, nurture seems to give him un- smart orange kitchen, and Ikea furni- guilty pleasure. He does much of the ture. It is homier and more bohemian cooking (he left the pub early to start than the house in Norfolk. dinner), and it’s easy to see how the ten- Cusk was still struggling with “Kudos.” derness of a virile man would appeal to (She finished the book last week.) “It a woman as conflicted as Cusk is about feels like I’m pregnant with a lawnmower, femininity. “I’m a bit in awe of Siemon’s girl who just wants to be happy. Their something large and sharp that I have to patience and self-control as a parent,” fatal error is to mistake each other for expel,” she said. Last year, she interrupted she said. their fictional avatars—the sexy artist her work to help Albertine with her uni- Scamell-Katz, like Faye’s date in and the appealing waif—and truth takes versity applications. “For the first time, “Transit,” was adopted as a baby by a its revenge. I found myself tinkering with a manu- modest family, and when he was still a During my visit, Cusk’s daughters had script. In some ways, that was interest- child his birth mother wrote to his par- been staying at their father’s house, in ing. There was a funny freedom to having ents asking for a photo. His father tore part so that their mother could work but less control. But the messing around also up her letter in a fit of rage, but then, also because Albertine had wanted to be annoyed me, and the work wasn’t as good.” feeling remorseful, he taped the pieces in London. During the Easter weekend, “Kudos” is the ancient Greek word back together, and handed them to there had been an argument over their for “honor” or “glory.” “Female honor Siemon on his eighteenth birthday. Until living arrangements, which had brought is the burnish of having survived your

56 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017 experiences without being destroyed by them, and female glory has to do with moral integrity,” Cusk said. She cited Medea as an example of both. Medea is an early antiheroine in literature, and the progenitor of all the alienées whose crimes are a reproach to the hypocri- sies that underpin civilization. (Camus’s Meursault is her direct descendant.) She is a princess with magical powers who betrays her homeland for an am- bitious Greek—Jason—in exchange for his promise to marry her. They escape to Corinth, where Medea bears Jason two sons, and they supposedly live hap- pily for a while, though one rather doubts it. Jason is a congenital oppor- tunist, and when he is given a chance to marry Glauce, the beautiful daugh- ter of his host in exile, he tells Medea that, unfortunately, he has to leave her— but it’s nothing personal. Medea sends her boys to Glauce with a wedding gift, a golden cloak steeped in poison. She dies horribly, along with her father, who tries to save her. You can’t really begrudge Medea these murders, but there is one last cord to cut, and she ag- •• onizes over it. In the end, she decides to break Jason’s heart, though it means public sphere), and men didn’t like the “Aftermath,” and, finally, to the last scene breaking her own, and she kills their fact that a barbarian sorceress who defies of “Transit.” Faye has been invited to a children. patriarchal authority escapes her come- dinner party by her cousin. He and his Two years ago, the Almeida Theatre, uppance in a winged chariot. Critics new wife own a fancy country place. The in London, commissioned Cusk to adapt of the Almeida production had a few other guests are traditionally married Euripedes’ “Medea” for the contemporary qualms, but not about what Susannah couples, and their squabbles are a throw- stage. She had thought deeply about Greek Clapp, in the Observer, called the “cor- back to Cusk’s earlier fiction. At first, tragedy, but other plays had meant more uscating” power of the writing. Clapp you wonder why she would resurrect this to her. If she’d had any notions about continued, “It is Cusk’s skill to show milieu; then you realize that she has to “Medea,” she wrote in an essay on the ad- both a compendium of grievances and revisit her revulsion for the doll’s house aptation, they were that “the play’s prem- a woman whose grief exceeds them— before leaving it forever. A fog closes in; ise—the murder of two children by their who cannot be reconciled. This makes the next morning, Faye feels a change mother—had attained a troubling sort of her play a true tragedy.” Cusk’s Medea stirring beneath her. Silently, she lets autonomy that exposed it to all sorts of doesn’t kill her children—in part, she herself out. cultural misuses,” misogynistic ones. explained, because in modern terms the Cusk’s phone beeped with a text, and “ ‘Medea’ seemed to operate as a byword act would make her a psychotic, and she excused herself for a minute. When for maternal ambivalence.” Cusk sees her as “an ultimate realist,” she returned, she looked upset—she had Cusk read it differently—as a play who is “determined to honour the logic forgotten an appointment, she would about a feral divorce, and about an “en- of her own conclusions.” have to rush off, and she apologized pro- tirely familiar” woman who “broadcasts “Medea,” Cusk’s first play, also gave fusely for ending our talk so abruptly. both her own pain and the larger in- her an opportunity to explore some of There was a last question I had hesitated justices” of which women were victims her own conclusions, especially about to ask: Why, given her history, did she twenty-five hundred years ago, and still feminism. You can trace their evolution risk remarriage? She thought for a min- are, in her view, despite the “lip service” in her writing, from “Saving Agnes,” ute as we gathered up our things. “I’m that society pays to equality. where she describes feminism as “a pla- very strong,” she said. “The strongest One thing that has changed is the cebo of self-acceptance,” and “A Life’s thing about me is my honesty. Not that audience for “Medea.” In 431 B.C., when Work,” which rejects the pieties that it has helped me to be better at living. I it made its début, at the festival of Di- make a woman’s biological “destiny” to have used my strength for the purposes onysus, the crowd was largely male bear children seem sacred, through the of destruction. But now I can use it to (Greek women were cloistered from the argument with herself about gender in build something that will last.” 

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017 57 FICTION

58 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017 ILLUSTRATION BY RICHARD MCGUIRE ut nobody showed up, so he the air in the room or on the street or his body to hers, arms, legs, else- sat awhile looking at the wall. in the atmosphere itself, a corruption where, the ointments and hypoaller- B It was one of those Saturdays of the planetary environment. genic creams, the super-high-potency that feel like Sunday. He didn’t know He thought of this but did not be- corticosteroids. how to explain this. It happened inter- lieve it. It was semi-science fiction. But They had dinner now and then, went mittently, more often in the warmer it was also a form of comfort during to a movie, implicitly working out a months, and it was probably normal, those long periods of unrest when he routine that did not bury them in total although he’d never discussed it with was stretched and then curled and then mutual anonymity. anyone. belly down in bed, a raw body in cot- Her name was Ana with a single “n,” • ton pajamas, awash in creams and lo- and this was a fragment of information After the divorce he felt an odd tions, trying not to scratch or rub. that interested him. The fact of the numbness, mental and physical. He • missing “n.” He liked to scribble the looked in the mirror, studying the face He told his friend Joel that Satur- name, pencil on notepad, large “A,” small that looked back. At night he kept to day sometimes felt like Sunday and he “n,” small “a.” In the office he entered his half of the bed with his back to the waited for a response. Joel had two kids the name on his desktop device in differ- other half. Over time a life slithered and a wife named Sandra. They were ent fonts, or all caps, or upside down, out. He talked to people, took long Sandra and Joel, never the reverse. or cursive, or boldface, or in the char- walks. He bought a pair of shoes but “Saturday, Sunday, so what. Wouldn’t acters of remote non- Roman alphabets. only after testing them rigorously, both it be more interesting if Tuesday felt At dinner she spoke about the shoes, not just one. He walked from like Wednesday? Even better, if Tues- movie they’d just watched. He’d nearly one end of the shoe store to the other, day of this week felt like Wednesday forgotten it, scene after scene of fore- four times at various speeds, then sat of next week.” boding menace. The near-empty the- and looked down at the shoes. He took Joel was a fellow-member of the atre was more interesting than the one shoe off and handled it, pressing office staff. He wrote poetry when he movie. He leaned across the dinner the instep, placing his hand inside the was able to find the time and he’d re- table, sort of half comically, and asked shoe, nodding at it, tapping with the cently stopped trying to get the work about her name. Adherence to a fam- fingers of his free hand on the rigid published. He said, “How’s the itch? I ily tradition? A name from a Euro- sole and heel. think of the itch in world history and pean novel? The salesman stood in the near dis- my mind goes blank.” No such tradition, she said. No for- tance, watching and waiting, whoever The friend, the former wife, the doc- eign influence. Just a name spelled a he was, whatever he said and did when tors and nurses’ aides in scrubs and certain way. he wasn’t there. sneakers. They knew. No one else. He nodded slowly, marooned in his • “An emperor, a member of the royal slanted body posture and surprised at In the office his desk was set along- family. You need a context that you can the disappointment he felt. Eventually side a window and he spent time look- work with. A famous statesman scratch- he sat back, still nodding, and found ing at a building across the street, where ing in secret. Something that you could himself imagining her body. Always nothing was visible inside the rows of research, find some satisfaction.” the body. This was not an erotic set of windows. There were times when he “You think so.” curves but something even more won- could not stop looking. “Or Biblical, absolutely. You might drous, the basic body, the primitive He looks and scratches, semi- find that you’re part of a great narra- physical structure. surreptitiously. Certain days it’s the left tive, thousands of years. The Holy Land. She said that her mother’s name was wrist. Upper arms at home in the eve- The Itch.” Florence. ning. Thighs and shins most likely at “One word. A single syllable.” But her body, here, in the chair across night. When he’s out walking, it hap- “Four letters. Do you read the Bible, the table, the human, the person, the pens now and then, mostly forearms. ever? A plague in Bible times. I’m serious.” mass of flesh and blood ascendant over He was forty-four years old, trapped “So am I.” hundreds of thousands of years or more, in his body. Arms, legs, torso. Face did “Do the research. I know I would. millions of years, a body no different, not itch. Scalp developed something I can imagine how awful. Middle of essentially, in its sheer bodiness, from that a doctor gave a name to, but it the night.” the humped and half-crawling forms itched only rarely, then not at all, so “Middle of the day.” that preceded it. the name didn’t matter. “Even worse,” his friend said. He told himself to stop. They talked His eyes swept the windows across • about the food and the restaurant. He the street horizontally, never verti- He was seeing a woman, superfi- asked her what her father’s name was. cally. He did not try to imagine the cially seeing her. They were two reti- • lives inside. cent individuals, and he hadn’t said a In the morning he walked along the • word about the itch. When and if in- hallway in the building where he He began to think of the itch as timacy occurred, he hoped it would not worked, careful not to look directly at sense data from the exterior, caused by be unanticipated. She might otherwise others heading toward their offices, some outlying substance, unanalyzable, feel traces of the lotions and ointments, four or five, suits and ties, blouses and

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017 59 to say next, hand still raised but motion- less now, a request for silence from the others, and he stared into time and space and finally said that all the letters in the name Ana were also in the name Sandra. Sandra said, “What do we do with this information?” Three or four commercials every two or three minutes. Commercials in clus- ters. He began to think that he was the only person, anywhere and everywhere, who was looking at the commercials. At this distance the words on the screen that accompanied the images were just barely readable. Ana said, “I’m looking at the food on my plate.” The others waited but this was all she had to say. He held his fork in a poised position. The first half ended, and after a long pause he was able to stop watching. • “I take off my shirt, the itching starts.” He was in the examining room de- scribing his situation to the dermatolo- gist as he lay flat on his back wearing a knee-length garment, open-fronted, over his boxer shorts. She was checking his ankles, shins, and thighs. She spoke ab- ¥¥ sently about the pathology of the skin. He liked this term. It suggested a kind skirts. He liked to imagine them going low the smile into her life, to join her of criminal intent or an evil that befalls nowhere, remaining in place with their spell of recollection, a minute or an a person, hurled down from above, and feet moving up and down and their hour, in flawless time. he recalled Joel’s remark about the curse- arms swinging slightly. • worthy nature of the itch, something • They were at Sunday brunch, two semi-Biblical. His former wife had a certain kind couples, and there was a football game He was nearing the end of his third of smile that he kept remembering. on the TV placed over the bar at the visit to this doctor and he wondered She isn’t looking at him; she is smil- other end of the room, the sound turned whether she would tell him to return ing into space. Those four years to- off. He could not stop looking at next week or in six months or totally gether, before the seething weeks of the screen. The brief action, the slow- never. She recited the names of soap conflict, how she blew kisses across the motion replays, three or four replays of and shampoo brands, described con- dinner table to wish away the itch, an ordinary run or pass or punt, differ- ditions that might arise from symp- those summer-evening jogs along the ent camera angles, and he joined the con- toms such as his, and he tried to mem- river. versation at the table and ate his pan- orize all this, which was difficult to The symmetry of the itch, both cakes and kept on watching. He watched manage in his state of partial undress. thighs, the crook of each elbow, left the commercials. She listed the hidden dangers of a ankle, then right. The crotch does not The term “Sunday brunch” suggested number of ingredients in certain ex- itch. The buttocks, yes, when he re- a world of well-being. ternal analgesic medications. moves his trousers before going to But Joel was talking about the current Do we need to be fully dressed, he bed, and then it stops. situation, non-stop global turmoil, nam- thought, for our memory to function He could not forget the smile. It ing countries and circumstances, putting properly? was a beautiful moment, borne in down his fork so he could raise his hand “I give some patients a pill, a patch, memory, her head turned away to the and gesture in a whirling motion, elbow an injection. But what I am seeing in transfiguring past, the grandmother pinned on the table. Then he stopped your case is that you need to think of with a gift for storytelling, something speaking and paused to think, finally your itch as a long-term commitment.” way back then, and he wanted to fol- seeming to remember what he wanted The doctor checked his face, putting

60 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017 her gloved fingers to his cheekbones, forehead, and sideburns. Her assistant, Hannah, had materialized in a corner of the room, and they looked at each other blankly, he and Hannah, and then she left. • Joel yielded to rapid-fire blinking when he had something personal to say. Here is what he said. There were times, standing over the toilet bowl at home, when he heard what sounded like words as his urine hit the water in the bowl. “This happens how often?” He said that it happened on average every two weeks or so. Words. He heard the semblance of a tiny voice saying a word and then maybe another word and he tried to describe the sound, his feet spread and his hands semi-cupped near his groin, in demonstration. “Tiny words.” “I’m not imagining this.” “Or a noise that is saying something.” “Only when the flow is light.” “Like something said. An utterance.” “Monosyllabic.” They were in the locker room of a local gym, in workout gear, getting ready for the squat jumps and the treadmill. “You’re a poet. Words everywhere.” “Zaum. Transrational poetry. A hun- dred years ago. Words that have shapes and sounds.” “The little blips in the water in the bowl.” “Zaum.” “Transrational.” “Words and letters are free, outside reason and tradition. When was it ever the case,” Joel said, “that language could truly describe reality?” • They look at each other. It happens sometimes. She always initiates the look, her face empty of affect, and he stops speaking or eating and tells him- self that it is time to settle into the look. He begins by closing his eyes and holding his breath for a long moment. He will allow himself to be her recruit in whatever it is they are doing. They never talk about the look. It happens and then it stops. When he opens his eyes and resumes breathing, there she is, Ana, eyes trained on his face, and she is intent on seeing into him or through him, dissolving the

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017 61 man in all his particulars in order to “Do you talk to Sandra?” They rarely spoke about the job they find something else. Never mind what. “Sometimes, yes. She has opinions were doing. They talked about things Her face is cool and studied. Is this about what I write.” that came and went, local news and meant to be some kind of mutual in- “Do you talk to Sandra about the weather, men firing guns nationwide. trospection? Is it a simple respite from itch?” Now and then Joel read an obitu- the skein of endless human exchange? “Of course not.” ary to the others in the room, six men He tries not to analyze the matter. A “Of course not. I know that. Thank and women confronting their screens. playful fragment of her childhood, a you,” he said. Some of the obits were improvised, memory of bittersweet longing. • pure fiction, and he got a few laughs Is each of them trying to imagine who He stood on the corner waiting for and sometimes a burst of applause. the other person is within the freeze- the light to change. Dogs on leashes • framed face and eyes? A wordless glimpse lunging at each other. The left hand The new doctor’s name, online, in of identity or just a vacant gaze? rubbing the right wrist, then the right tribute, was the Itch Meister. He was He tries to go blank, to drain his hand rubbing the left wrist. There was short and broad with the look of a eyes and mind of the spatial array of a pause in traffic and two people crossed man who lives with one central ob- sensation, the mental debris. the street, but he chose to stay where session. He studied the patient, who Maybe she simply wants to see and he was, knowing that the light would was standing in the examining room be seen. change in three, two, one second. He in his boxer shorts. Then the doctor • liked to watch the numbers drop. whirled his hand and the patient Then there is the crude feeling of The eczema cream with two- per- turned around. The doctor spoke au- some unmeant gratification, a crea- cent colloidal oatmeal. thoritatively about the patient’s his- turely need. The right hand on the left The multi-symptom psoriasis-relief tory, based on what he’d gleaned from forearm and at first he uses his finger- cream with three-per-cent salicylic acid. reports and from what he was seeing tips to ease the itch but in time the The emollient-rich formula that pro- on the body itself. hand is in motion and the fingernails vides twenty-four-hour moisturization. Now the patient lay face up on the are digging in like an earthmoving ma- • table. chine. He sits back, eyes closed, and His gangly frame and large front “I take off my shirt or my pants and feels a hovering sense of revenge. It teeth gave him a friendly look. People the itch begins. Or the itch is just there, doesn’t matter to him if this is idiotic. in the office entrusted him with the comes and goes, night and day.” “Revenge on your body,” Joel said. occasional squalid secret. He was not They talked about the clothing he “Maybe. I don’t know.” a threat to do anything or say anything, wore, the underclothes, about the pil- “I can’t help thinking of the itch as to take advantage in some way of their low and the bedsheets. The Itch Meis- a symbol. See what you can come up faith in his apparent blandness. ter instilled confidence with a few short with, personally, about yourself.” He and Joel were access specialists, sentences, although he didn’t seem to “Stick to your poetry.” facilitating the delivery of home-health- address the patient’s remarks directly “I’m trying to decide on a title for care services to disabled consumers of and unequivocally. the thing I just wrote.” illegal drugs. “From what I see, you are not suffer- ing from weeping lesions or atopic dermatitis.” He went on to name different creams for different kinds of itches. He warned against a steroid that thins the skin if used repeatedly. He wore a surgical gown so long that it concealed his footwear. “This one stray rash, here near the underarm. Do not touch. It is not scratch-worthy.” The medications he cited were en- cased in language of a certain kind, fogbound words and terms, sylla- ble-ridden and somehow, strangely, totalitarian. Doctor told the patient to turn face down. “The symmetry is astonishing. The left-and-rightness of it. Don’t you think? People who itch, worldwide. Forearm, forearm. Buttock, buttock. “I won’t lie to you. Chopin’s Funeral March is a bad sign.” The simultaneity.” Doctor spoke not to the body on “Seventeen, then twenty-seven.” the table but to the room, the walls, “You remember these numbers,” maybe to a recording device concealed she said. somewhere. It occurred to the patient “I remember them. I think about that this entire session was for the them.” benefit of the doctor’s associates in a He liked watching them smoke. research institute in some crime-free There was a casual grace in their ges- suburb. tures, the sort of autonomic movements When the visit was over, the Itch of hand gliding toward face, lips part- Meister did not simply leave the room. ing, the way the head slips back, barely He seemed to flee. noticeable, as the woman inhales, first • one and now the other, and then the In the early days when he was run- head rocking slightly when she blows ning along the river with his wife he the smoke out of her mouth, the deep felt that he was leaving the itch be- relief, eyes closing, one woman, briefly, hind. He was outrunning it. Sometimes then the other. he raised his arms as he ran, surren- He had to remind himself that he was dering to a benevolent life force. separating the act from its consequences. • “How long did you smoke?” the first Joel would not discuss the lines. They woman said. were just the lines. The spacing, also, “First time, maybe a week and a was simply what it was. The space breaks, half.” the word breaks, the dangling word. “Second time?” “I want to be a poet to the bone. “Second time, two weeks.” But there’s nothing in the work that I “And now you expect to live forever.” want to talk about.” “Not when I’m in the office.” “You want to talk about the itch.” “What do you expect then?” “Tell me again what the doctor said.” “I expect to jump out the window “Weeping lesions. I keep forgetting next to my desk.” to look it up.” The second woman said, “Take us “Whatever the science, the term it- with you.” self has terrific aesthetic appeal.” • “Atopic dermatitis.” At home he walked from one room “Inhuman. Forget it.” to the other and then forgot why he Joel kept repeating the phrase “weep- was there. His smartphone rang and ing lesions,” thinking into it, trying to he went back to the first room and say something funny. picked it up, half expecting to see a • message telling him why he’d gone When he took off his shorts, his to the other room. thighs began to itch. Ana was in bed, Two hours later he was back on watching and waiting. He kept his an exam table, seated at the edge, doc- hands steadfastly at his sides. The tor in her sixties studying his left fore- surroundings in her bedroom were arm, lifting and looking, peering into unfamiliar and he stood a moment, the scratch marks, into the pores, the smiling, acknowledging her sweet tissue itself. scrutiny. The itch went away but she “Do not let others scratch your was still there. What a deliverance it itch. It will not succeed,” she said. was for him, a release from day-to- “You yourself must scratch.” day, he and she, so simple, being happy The room was small and seemed for a time. semi-abandoned—stale air, rumpled • documents pinned to corkboards, They stood against the wall of the things scattered randomly. building, lunch break, two women, col- The doctor asked him questions leagues, smoking, and he positioned and then repeated whatever he said. himself near the curbstone, watching He tried to place her accent, Middle them. Europe maybe, and this gave him “I smoked twice in my life,” he said. confidence in her abilities. The first woman said, “How old “When itching stops now and then, were you?” five minutes, six minutes, you are a

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017 63 little bereft. What do you think?” then repeated the question in a voice was moving his lips. A man in a suit He looked for a smile but it wasn’t meant to resemble his. and tie and baseball cap squeezed past, there. “My only itch is what is around me,” taking two steps at a time. “You will spend less time in the she said in her own voice, “and why I He’d gone a floor and a half before shower.” am here.” he began to notice the shoes he was “I have been told this.” When the visit was ending, the wearing. He looked and counted, re- “You have been told this. But not patient put on his pants, shirt, and minding himself of the fact that he by me,” she said. shoes, and the doctor wrote a cou- didn’t like these shoes and trying to She was looking directly into his ple of prescriptions. understand why he’d bought them face now. She looked and talked. He “When you pick up the medications, anyway. was sure that she spoke four or five you will be reading the instructions He began to climb more slowly, languages. printed on the inserts but you will not seeing himself walk back and forth in “Other patients, they are worse.” follow them. They are stupid and mis- the shoe store trying to feel his way “I am also worse.” leading. Do not use the medications into the shoes. Not truly seeing him- “You are nowhere in the compe- two, three, four times a day. You are hear- self but experiencing a misty image tition.” ing me say this. Once a day.” somewhere in the air within arm’s “I fool myself. I try to talk myself He felt obliged to repeat this. reach. People kept passing him on the out of being worse.” “You will scratch and scratch. But you stairs and he kept looking down, “You are eating. You are sleeping.” will also remember what I am saying.” counting the steps, seeing the shoes. “I am eating. I have forgotten how “What are you saying?” He’d walked back and forth sev- to sleep.” “You are nobody without the itch.” eral times and then sat awhile, the “The older you will get, listen to He took the long walk along the only customer in the store, and exam- me, the less you will walk and talk hall and thought of the doctor alone ined one of the shoes, hand and eye, and the more you will itch.” in her castaway office. The elevator scrupulously. She kept on looking, staring him took forever to arrive. Was it too much trouble, too awk- into deep levels of retreat. • ward, to tell the salesman that he didn’t “Look at where we are, in the last When he and Ana went for a walk, want the shoes? Did he think that the room at the end of the long hall. I sometimes bumping hips along the salesman would be disappointed, his will walk four times a day from there way, talking about nothing much, all day ruined? to here and then from here to there they were doing, he thought, was being He didn’t know the answer but he and all over again. I try to tell myself themselves. There was an innocence was beginning to feel victimized, be- this is not a thirteenth-century hos- that placed them, for a time, beyond latedly, by the salesman, the shoe store, pice for the destitute and the dying. responsibility. and the shoes, and he stopped count- But it is not so easy for me to be But the affair gradually changed from ing the steps one flight before he convinced.” a liquid to a solid. reached his floor. He liked listening to her but she “If we fall in love, what does it mean?” In the office he sat at his desk, left was speaking into free space. she said. “I find it strange to feel so much wrist in the prime of its morning itch, “When I talk to non-itching peo- affection for a man I don’t really know.” and he looked out the window, his eyes ple about the itch, they start itching.” He walked with his head down, con- sweeping across the face of the build- “This is true?” centrating on what she was saying. ing in the semi-distance, revisiting the “This is true,” she said. “I spoke “I don’t really know you. This is not horizontal pattern of the windows. He to a group in Warsaw. They were just a detail,” she said, pretending to looked left to right, reading the win- professors and students. The longer laugh miserably. dows like a book, line by line. I spoke about itch-specific nerves, • • about sensory neurons in mice, the People in the lobby were arrayed Finally, not to tell her felt like more scratching I could see in the and waiting. One elevator was being cheating. audience.” repaired, the other was blinking down They had a corner table in a nearly “Did they ask questions about this?” at them from the fifth floor, delayed empty café. His plan was to avoid de- “No questions. I do not accept ques- in its descent. tails and simply say that the itch was tions in public forums.” He decided to climb the stairs to a livable condition but not likely to When she was finished poking at his office, eleventh floor, a few others be alleviated anytime soon. his extended arm, she did not return joining him, a sense of shared com- In the meantime they listened to it to his side but simply let go, drop- plaint. Halfway up the first flight he thunder bouncing around the sky and ping it abruptly, and then took the long began counting the steps and then she spoke of country thunder when way around the table and lifted the decided that he needed to go back to she was growing up, an approaching other arm. the bottom step and start over, prop- storm, her fearful wonder at the drum- He said, “Do you ever itch?” erly, from one. rolls and jagged flashes. She looked at him, finding new di- He did this, occasionally looking He watched her talk. mensions in this particular patient, and down as he counted, aware that he Her fairness, the face and hair and

64 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017

THE CRITICS

THE CURRENT CINEMA TIMES OF TROUBLE

“Detroit” and “Whose Streets?”

BY ANTHONY LANE

or a movie that tells a true story of of events. Shots were heard, reportedly The screenwriter is Mark Boal, who Fviolent death, Kathryn Bigelow’s coming from the motel, and police collaborated with Bigelow on “The Hurt “Detroit” begins in a very strange way. officers, fearing a sniper attack, moved Locker” (2008), for which they won Os- A series of crude animated images, like in, to be joined by state police and mem- cars, and on “Zero Dark Thirty” (2012). paper cutouts, fills the screen with a pot- bers of the National Guard. (No evi- The latter, like the new film, was a richly ted history of African-American mi- dence of a sniper was ever produced.) researched exercise in tension, gather- gration from South to North, and of Things escalated fast, and confusingly. ing to a head in the hours of darkness, the prejudice that has greeted and John Hersey, the author of “Hiroshi- and it was fortified, rather than hin- thwarted the black population. The en- ma,” wrote a book entitled “The Al- dered, by its equivocation in regard to suing unrest is illustrated by cartoon giers Motel Incident,” published only torture; as you followed Navy seals in flames. It’s hard to conceive of a more a year after the killings, but even his ac- their task—the elimination of Osama sombre theme, so why are we leafing count, both impassioned and scrupu- bin Laden—you felt a squirm of dis- through a children’s picture book? lous, is a fragmentary affair—“not so quiet about the tactics that had led to Soon enough, we see the light of real much written as listened to, in bits and this exhilarating quest. With “Detroit,” fires. This is Detroit, in late July, 1967, pieces,” he admits. With that caution the opposite is the case. Though the when riots spread across town. What in mind, “Detroit” is best viewed as a facts remain fuzzy, the moral aspect could ignited them, and what gets the movie plausible reconstruction. The motel be- hardly be more unambiguous. Racist going, is a police raid on an after-hours comes a stage, across which the princi- and undisciplined law enforcement led illegal drinking club, better known as pal characters pass. to the slaying of innocent persons, and a “blind pig.” The clientele, entirely There is a marine named Greene that is all; no other viewpoint is admis- African-American, is hauled outside (Anthony Mackie), recently returned sible. Poulter plays Krauss as a border- and arrested; a crowd materializes to from Vietnam, although, as he discov- line psychopath. There is a court case protest; a rock is used to smash open a ers, his service to the nation carries less involving the three cops, but Boal and store. For the next few days and nights, weight than the color of his skin. He is Bigelow deal with it in a perfunctory the ferment barely subsides. Just as we’re one of those unlucky souls—like Au- fashion, and the legal upshot comes as wondering to what extent Bigelow will burey Pollard (Nathan Davis, Jr.) and no surprise. In some ways, “Detroit” is honor the promise of her title—how do Fred Temple (Jacob Latimore), or a cou- Bigelow’s simplest work to date. you dramatize a whole city?—the movie ple of fun-hunting white women (Han- Not that its methods are anything narrows its gaze, and a large proportion nah Murray and Kaitlyn Dever)—who but agile and deft. You can’t always tell of the story unfolds not merely in a par- just happen to be at the motel, and who where archive footage of the urban tur- ticular neighborhood but in a single wind up in the hallway, standing and moil ends and the scripted semi-fictions doom-ridden hallway. To be in that hall, shaking as if before a firing squad. begin, so restive and so probing is the indeed, is to inhabit a kind of hell, for Ranged against them (for that’s how it camera. The victims’ names are real; the powerful and the powerless alike, feels) are the cops. In ascending order those of the three policemen are made and you get a sickening sense that “De- of malice, we have Demens ( Jack up. We get a clip of George Romney, troit” cannot tear itself away. Reynor), Flynn (Ben O’Toole), and the then the governor of Michigan, speak- The hall is in the Algiers Motel, in inexcusable Krauss (Will Poulter), who ing at a news conference and bearing a central Detroit. It is a matter of histor- will not leave the building until, by what- startling resemblance to his son Mitt. ical record that within those walls, on ever means necessary, he learns who Later, a street scene is interrupted by a the long hot night of July 25th, three fired the alleged shots. All three men, black-and-white photograph from the black men died from gunshot wounds. like the overwhelming majority of De- period, showing the same place—a

What is less clear is the exact sequence troit police at that time, are white. curious device, as though Bigelow, JOHN ST. TODD ABOVE:

66 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017 In “Detroit,” Kathryn Bigelow’s new movie, John Boyega is the watchful eye at the heart of a roiling tempest.

ILLUSTRATION BY KEITH NEGLEY THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017 67 concerned by any charge of fabrica- the watchful eye at the heart of a roil- death. What we hear is the old-style, tion, were nudging us and saying, “No, ing tempest. In truth, as Hersey sug- preacherly measure of Brooks’s speech look, it’s all true.” This habit has grown gests, Dismukes may have been less (“We are all, all, all, all precious in God’s chronic among filmmakers, the usual noble than he appears here; according sight”) and, in reply, no more than a trick being to wait till the end of the to a witness, he, too, alongside the po- tepid mutter. These folks are not his movie and then to wheel on the real: lice, delivered a beating at the Algiers. natural congregation; they need the vol- the genuine military hero of “Hack- Boal and Bigelow choose to ignore that, ume ramped up. On comes the rapper saw Ridge,” say, or the actual Indian yet Boyega’s expression reveals all. He Tef Poe. “The people who want to take mother and her long-lost son from gives us a good man, devoted to order the time to break down racism from a “Lion.” When was it decreed that mov- but trapped in a tragedy for which good- philosophical level, y’all did not show ies must, if possible, flash their creden- ness and diplomacy provide no relief. up,” he says, referring to the marches in tials of authenticity? America is split in half, right there in Ferguson. “This ain’t your daddy’s civ- The problem for “Detroit” is that, front of him, and the hallway is as wide il-rights movement,” he adds, and not when contrivance is required, it tends as a canyon. once, in the movie, do we see the inside to jut out. To show Fred Temple sing- of a church. One young woman fore- ing with an a-cappella group called the o go from “Detroit” to “Whose sees “a generation of activists,” and an- Dramatics, for example, is accurate; but TStreets?,” a documentary about the other, Brittany Ferrell, schools her six- to show them having to quit the stage disturbances that began in Ferguson, year-old daughter, Keena, in the basics of a local theatre, thanks to the rioting, Missouri, three years ago, is both un- of black self-determination. Near the as they are about to perform—poised canny and deeply depressing. Uncanny, end, at a rally, Keena takes the micro- on the verge of their big break—is a because the progress of events, in each phone and merrily informs the crowd, twist at which Busby Berkeley would city, is the same: a summertime prov- with a smile, that they have nothing to have blushed. Where the movie scores, ocation—the raid on the blind pig, in lose but their chains. Marx would have by contrast, is in those casual deeds that Detroit, and the police shooting of an been proud, but maybe a trifle bemused. reveal the shape into which lives have unarmed African-American, Michael Hersey, in “The Algiers Motel In- been bent. Consider Melvin Dismukes Brown, in Ferguson—triggers com- cident,” made plain his mournful belief ( John Boyega), who works as a security plaint, conflagration, looting, and a that justice for white citizens and jus- guard in a store not far from the Al- fearsome response from the authori- tice for African-Americans were two giers. Because he’s black and wears a ties. Depressing, because in almost half separate entities. Yet still he spoke to uniform, the words “Uncle Tom” are a century so little seems to have healed. Detroit policemen, and delved into the thrown at him, but his gift is for taking The grievances are like fresh wounds. backgrounds of the officers who were palliative action before trouble erupts; What has improved, in the interim, at the motel with the same care that he he saves a black kid from police harass- is technology. On one hand, the use of showed in tracing the black lives that ment by pretending to be a relative, and smartphones means that filmmakers were lost. In “Whose Streets?,” by con- brings coffee to a bunch of National can build much of their story from trast, no cop is granted an interview, Guardsmen, who, having been sum- other people’s visual scraps, and Sa- unless you count the sight of George moned to the fracas, believe that they baah Folayan and Damon Davis, the Stephanopoulos, on ABC, asking the are in enemy terrain. Even Dismukes, directors of “Whose Streets?,” require hapless Darren Wilson—the officer however, has his tranquillity tested when no voice-over narration to bind their who killed Brown and was never in- he finds himself in the hall of the motel. movie together; some of the work is dicted—why he had described his vic- Boyega is quite something. He is a done by tweets, starting with “I just tim as “a demon.” The movie’s most po- Londoner, aged twenty-five, and already saw someone die OMFG.” On the tent closeup is of a black policewoman, a figure of distinction. The point at which other hand, there is the rising mili- in a line confronting protesters; if you he removed his storm trooper’s helmet, tarization of police forces; equipment can film her, why not learn what she in “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” that they would claim as a legitimate has to say? Folayan and Davis, however, (2015), was a pivotal moment in recent tool of defense, in the dispersal of chaos, hold no brief for even-handedness, and, popular culture; not only because J. J. is often seen by civilians as an exacer- for those who dominate the screen, any Abrams, instantly outstripping George bating threat, and there are sequences sign of temperance, even in a President, Lucas, had placed a character of color here, with officers arrayed in gas masks is treated with contempt. When Barack at the heart of a huge franchise, where and guns mounted atop armored ve- Obama describes the deployment of millions of viewers would be gunning hicles, that would not look out of place the National Guard as a matter for state for him, but also because of Boyega’s in a war film. jurisdiction, a fellow named Tory, watch- commanding stillness, and his air of per- Other shifts are less concrete but no ing him on TV, asks, “Didn’t he teach plexity at what havoc the storm troop- less momentous. We see Cornell Wil- constitutional law in Harvard? Wasn’t ers were obliged to wreak. Until then, liam Brooks, then the president of the he a constitutional professor? Ain’t no they had been little more than anony- N.A.A.C.P., stand at a lectern, wearing Constitution in Ferguson.”  mous bullies clattering around in white a suit, and address a gathering in the plastic. “Detroit” is a far more solemn Chaifetz Arena, in St. Louis. It is Oc- NEWYORKER.COM enterprise, but, once again, Boyega is tober, 2014, two months after Brown’s Richard Brody blogs about movies.

68 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017 popular books about Buddhism are A CRITIC AT LARGE rich in poetic quotation and arresting aphorisms, those ironic koans that are part of the (Zen) Buddhist décor— AMERICAN NIRVANA tales of monks deciding that it isn’t the wind or the flag that’s waving Is there a science of Buddhism? in the breeze but only their minds. Wright’s book has no poetry or par- BY ADAM GOPNIK adox anywhere in it. Since the poetic- comic side of Buddhism is one of its most appealing features, this leaves the book a little short on charm. Yet, if you never feel that Wright is tell- ing you something profound or beau- tiful, you also never feel that he is tell- ing you something untrue. Direct and unambiguous, tracing his own history in meditation practice—which even- tually led him to a series of weeklong retreats and to the intense study of Buddhist doctrine—he makes Bud- dhist ideas and their history clear. Perhaps he makes the ideas too clear. Buddhist thinkers tend to bridge con- tradictions with a smile and a para- dox and a wave of the hand. “Things exist but they are not real” is a typical dictum from the guru Mu Soeng, in his book on the Heart Sutra. “You don’t have to believe it, but it’s true” is another famous guru’s smiling ad- vice about the reincarnation doctrine. This nimble-footed doubleness may indeed hold profound existential truths; it also provides an all-purpose evasion of analysis. Still, the Buddhist basics are all here. Sometime around 400 B.C.E.— the arguments over what’s historically Robert Wright argues for meditation as a fully secular form of psychotherapy. authentic and what isn’t make the cor- responding arguments in Jesus stud- n author owns a snappy title, and our habitual thoughts and cravings, ies look transparent—a wealthy In- Athen the snappy title owns the shows us how to fix them. Being Bud- dian princeling named Gotama (as author. Robert Wright, having titled dhist—that is, simply practicing Vipas- the Pali version of his name is ren- his new book “Why Buddhism Is sana, or “insight” meditation—will dered) came to realize, after a long True,” has to offer a throat-clearing make you feel better about being alive, and moving spiritual struggle, that preface and later an apologetic appen- he believes, and he shows how you can people suffer because the things we dix, in order to explain exactly what and why it does. cherish inevitably change and rot, and he means by “Buddhism” and exactly Wright’s is a Buddhism almost desires are inevitably disappointed. what he means by “true,” while the to- completely cleansed of supernatural- But he also realized that, simply by tality of his book is an investigation ism. His Buddha is conceived as a wise sitting and breathing, people can begin into why we think there are “whys” in man and self-help psychologist, not to disengage from the normal run of the world, and whether or not any- as a divine being—no miraculous birth, desires and disappointments, and come thing really “is.” Wright sets out to no thirty-two distinguishing marks of to grasp that the self whom the sitter provide an unabashedly American an- the godhead (one being a penis sheath), has been serving so frantically, and swer to all these questions. He thinks no reincarnation. This is a pragmatic who is suffering from all these needs, that Buddhism is true in the imme- Buddhism, and Wright’s pragmatism, is an illusion. Set free from the self ’s diate sense that it is helpful and ther- as in his previous books, can touch anxieties and appetites and constant, apeutic, and, by offering insights into the edge of philistinism. Nearly all petulant demands, the meditator can

ILLUSTRATION BY ANNE LAVAL THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017 69 ently an atypically severe sect within Buddhism, came to be the standard- bearer, so much so that “Zen” became an all-purpose modifier in American letters meaning “challengingly coun- terintuitive”—as in “Zen and the Art of Archery” or the masterly “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” where you learn how not to aim your arrow or how to find a spiritual prac- tice in a Harley. It was this second movement that blossomed into a seri- ous practice of sitting lessons and a set of institutions, the most prominent, perhaps, being the San Francisco Zen Center. Though separated by generations, the deeper grammar of the two Bud- dhist awakenings was essentially the same. Buddhism in America is si- multaneously exotic and familiar— it has lots of Eastern trappings and ceremonies that set it off from the materialism of American life, but it also speaks to an especially Ameri- can longing for a publicly productive “O.K., so we’ll have sex and if that works out we’ll spiritual practice. American Bud- go out for a nice dinner and maybe a movie.” dhism spins off museum collections and Noh-play translations and veg- etarian restaurants and philosophi- •• cal books and, in the hands of the occasional Buddhist Phil Jackson, the see and share the actualities of exis- vision of a self that could shift and con- triangle offense in basketball. tence with others. The sitter becomes tain multitudes, or Thoreau’s secular The Buddhist promise in the Amer- less selfish and more selfless. withdrawal from the race of life. (Jon ican mind is that you can escape and Kabat-Zinn’s hugely successful medi- engage. “Ten minutes a day toward En- uddhism has had a series of strong tation guide, “Wherever You Go, There lightenment” is the sort of slogan that Brecurrent presences in America, You Are,” is dotted with Thoreau epi- has inspired the current generation to and, though Wright doesn’t stop to graphs in place of Asian ones.) The unimaginably large numbers of part- trace them, they might illuminate some quietist impulse in New England spir- time meditators. (Among whom I num- continuities that show why his kind of ituality and the pantheistic impulse in ber myself, following guided medita- Buddhism got here, and got “true.” Its American poetry both seemed met, tions recorded by Joseph Goldstein, a first notable appearance was in late- and made picturesque, by the Buddhist seventysomething Vipassana teacher nineteenth-century New England, tradition. who has the calming, grumpy voice of where, as Van Wyck Brooks showed The second great explosion of an emeritus professor at City College, long ago, Henry Adams was “drawn American Buddhism occurred in the though my legs are much too stiff for especially to the lands of Buddha.” An- nineteen- fifties. Spurred, in large part, the lotus position and I have to fake it, other New England Buddhist of the by the writings of the émigré Japanese making mine in every sense a half- day was William Sturgis Bigelow, who scholar D. T. Suzuki, it was, in the assed practice.) “Don’t just sit there, do brought back to Boston some twenty first instance, aesthetic: Suzuki’s work, something” is the American entreaty. thousand works of Japanese art, and though rich in tea ceremonies and With Buddhism, you can just sit there who, when dying in Boston, called for a haiku, makes no mention of Zazen, and do something. Catholic priest and asked that he an- the hyper-disciplined, often painful, nihilate his soul. (He was disappointed meditation practice that is at the heart right, like his Bay Area and Bos- when the priest declined.) These Amer- of Zen practice. The Buddhist spirit, Wton predecessors, is delighted ican Buddhists, drawn East in part by or the easier American variant of it, to announce the ways in which Bud- a rejection of Gilded Age ostentation, blossomed in Beat literature, produc- dhism intersects with our own recent recognized a set of preoccupations like ing some fine coinages (Kerouac’s ideas. His new version of an American those they knew already—Whitman’s “Dharma Bums”). Zen, though appar- Buddhism is not only self- consciously

70 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017 secularized but aggressively “scientized.” as a small triumph of his emancipa- the trees are reaching insistently to- He believes that Buddhist doctrine tion: hearing a buzz saw whining in ward the sun that sustains them. These and practice anticipate and affirm the the background, what would usually are the songs of wanting, the sounds “modular” view of the mind favored have been a painful distraction became, of life.) by much contemporary cognitive sci- robbed by meditation of any positive or Wright has, for the purposes of his ence. Instead of there being a single, negative cues (this is a pleasant sound / book, tied himself to a mechanical view consistent Cartesian self that monitors this is an unpleasant one), somehow of the constraints that operate on the the world and makes decisions,we musical. Meditation shows us how any- human mind—the same one that he live in a kind of nineties- era Liberia thing can be emptied of the story we has posited in previous books, rooted of the mind, populated by warring tell about it: he tells us about an en- in the doctrines of evolutionary psy- independent armies implanted by evo- lightened man who tastes wine with- chology. This is the view—to which lution, representing themselves as a out the contextual tales about vintage, Wright is, as a Buddhist might say, unified nation but unable to recon- varietal, region. It tastes . . . less emo- overattached—that our deepest desires cile their differences, and, as one after tional. “All the states of equanimity are instincts implanted by natural se- another wins a brief battle for the cap- come through the realization that things lection in our primeval past. Whether ital, providing only the temporary il- aren’t what we thought they were,” or not evolutionary psychology is a real lusion of control and decision. By ac- Wright quotes a guru as saying. What or a pseudoscience—opinions vary— cepting that the fixed self is an illusion Wright calls “the perception of emp- one can believe that human beings are imprinted by experience and rein- tiness” dampens the affect, but it also afflicted with too much wanting with- forced by appetite, meditation para- settles the mind. If it isn’t there, you out thinking that we are that way be- chutes in a kind of peacekeeping mis- don’t overreact to it. cause once upon a time those cravings sion that, if it cannot demobilize Having gone the full Buddha route, helped us have more kids than our the armies, lets us see their nature and Wright gives us accounts of medita- neighbors. Even if our desires were im- temporarily disarms their still juvenile tion retreats, and interviews with en- planted by evolution rather than incul- soldiers. lightened meditators; he explores sutras cated by culture, they’re still always Buddhism, alone among spiritual and explains dharma. Given that he’s helplessly double: altruistic impulses practices, has always recognized this more product-oriented than process- encourage us to look after our tribe; post-hoc nature of our “reason,” ask- oriented, Wright tends to reflect on the genocidal ones encourage us to get rid ing us to realize its transience through advantages of meditation rather than of the neighboring tribe. Pair bonding meditation. (“Not much really there, reproduce their pleasures. Meditation, is adaptive, but so is adultery: fathers is there?” Joe Goldstein murmurs about even the half-assed kind, does remind want to care for their offspring and see thought in one of his guided medita- us of how little time we typically spend them thrive; they also want to have sex tions.) Meditation, in Wright’s view, in the moment. Simply to sit and with the woman in the next cave in is not a metaphysical route toward a breathe for twenty-five minutes, if only order to cover all genetic bets. Desires higher plane. It is a cognitive probe to hear cars and buses go by on a city may arise from natural selection or from for self-exploration that underlines avenue—listening to the world rather cultural tradition or from random walks what contemporary psychology al- than to the frantic non sequiturs of or from a combination of them all— ready knows to be true about the mind. but Buddhist doctrine would be un- “According to Buddhist philosophy, affected by any of these “whys.” If every both the problems we call therapeu- doctrine of evo-psych turns out to be tic and the problems we call spiritual false—if it’s somehow all culture and are a product of not seeing things inculcation—it wouldn’t affect the Bud- clearly,” he writes. “What’s more, in dhist view about our need to get out both cases this failure to see things of it. clearly is in part a product of being misled by feelings. And the first step ther recent books on contempo- toward seeing through these feelings Orary Buddhism share Wright’s is seeing them in the first place—be- one’s “monkey mind,” fragmented object of reconciling the old meta- coming aware of how pervasively and thoughts and querulous moods racing physics with contemporary cognitive subtly feelings influence our thought each other around—can intimate the science but have a less doctrinaire and behavior.” possibility of a quiet grace in the midst view of the mind that lies outside the Our feelings ceaselessly generate of noise. The gong with which Gold- illusions of self. Stephen Batchelor’s narratives, contes moraux, about the stein’s meditations begin on YouTube, “After Buddhism” (Yale), in many ways world, and we become their prisoners. though a bit of Orientalia, does settle the most intellectually stimulating We make things good and bad, desir- the mind and calm its restlessness. (Yet book on Buddhism of the past few able and not, meaningful and trivial. many sounds of seeming serenity— years, offers a philosophical take on (We put snappy titles on our tales and birds singing, leaves rustling—are ac- the question. “The self may not be then the titles own us.) Wright gives tually the sounds of ceaseless striving. an aloof independent ‘ruler’ of body the example of a “buzz-saw symphony” The birds are shrieking for mates; even and mind, but neither is it an illusory

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017 71 product of impersonal physical and BRIEFLY NOTED mental forces,” he writes. As for the mind’s modules, “Gotama is inter- ested in what people can do, not with Tell Me How It Ends, by Valeria Luiselli (Coffee House). Between what they are. The task he proposes April, 2014, and August, 2015, more than a hundred thousand entails distinguishing between what unaccompanied Latin-American children crossed the Mexico - is to be accepted as the natural con- U.S. border and faced expedited deportation, as a direct result dition of life itself (the unfolding of decades of U.S. chingaderas, or “nasty-shitty” policies. Lu- of experience) and what is to be let iselli, a Mexican writer who volunteered as an interpreter in go of (reactivity). We may have no New York’s immigration court, focusses on the forty questions control over the rush of fear prompted she had to ask children before their deportation hearings. They by finding a snake under our bed, told her about riding on the roof of La Bestia, a dangerous but we do have the ability to respond freight train that traverses Mexico, and inhumane treatment to the situation in a way that is not in U.S. immigration centers. As in her hallucinatory and in- determined by that fear.” Where ventive fiction, Luiselli proves her skill as a storyteller while Wright insists that the Buddhist grappling with her own questions of nationalism. doctrine of not-self precludes the possibility of freely chosen agency, Cannibalism, by Bill Schutt (Algonquin). In this deeply re- Batchelor insists of Buddhism that searched account, Schutt demonstrates that the motives for “as soon as we consider it a task- cannibalism among animals and humans have varied widely, based ethics . . . such objections van- from starvation to the desire to show respect. (In China, for ish. The only thing that matters is thousands of years, children cut off body parts and cooked whether or not you can perform a them in a soup for their parents, as expressions of filial piety.) task. When an inclination to say The book is full of wondrous details, such as banana slugs something cruel occurs, for exam- nourished by their lovers’ genitalia during coitus, but its most ple, can you resist acting on that im- valuable contribution is in challenging ingrained attitudes. In pulse? . . . Whether your decision to the West today, Schutt shows, certain forms of people-eating hold the barbed remark was the re- are embraced: served a dish of “placenta osso buco” by a mother sult of free will or not is beside the in Texas, he finds himself able to appreciate the veal-like tex- point.” He calls the obsession with ture and robust flavor. free will a “peculiarly Western con- cern.” Meditation works as much at The Storied City, by Charlie English (Riverhead). This spell- the level of conscious intention as binding record of Timbuktu’s intellectual heritage blends it does at the level of unreflective accounts of European explorers to the ancient city with con- instinct. temporary reportage. English describes how, in 2012, jihad- Batchelor wants to make Buddhism ists nearly destroyed manuscripts on astronomy, poetry, and pragmatic not just in the idiomatic medicine from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Amer- sense—practical for daily use—but in ican connections bring the city closer to home, from the the technical philosophical sense as explorer John Ledyard’s correspondence with Thomas well: he thinks that the original doc- Jefferson, in the seventeen-eighties, to Henry Louis Gates, trines of Buddhism were in accord Jr.,’s realization, in 1997, that “precisely when Europeans said with the ideas of truth put forward that black Africans lacked the intellectual ability to read or by neopragmatists like Richard Rorty, write . . . 25,000 students and scholars gathered from all over for whom there are no firm founda- black Africa and North Africa” at “the great center of learning.” tions for what we know, only tem- porary truces among willing commu- The Senecans, by Peter Stothard (Overlook). This unconven- nities which help us cope with the tional account of the Margaret Thatcher years by a former ed- world. Buddhism, in his view, was itor of the Times of London mixes reminiscence, gossip, and long ago betrayed into Brahmanism; classical philosophy. As a political journalist in the nine- the open-ended artisanal practice of teen-eighties, Stothard formed a wary friendship with four meditation became a caste-bound mid-level members of Thatcher’s “court,” whom he presents dogma with “truths” and ceremonies. as “mirrors, each reflecting different aspects of her character.” It is a process of fossilization hardly The group called itself the Senecans, inspired by the stoicism unknown to other spiritual move- of the Roman statesman and tutor to the Emperor Nero, thus ments—there was a time when Ha- equating Thatcher with that “most volatile of emperors.” The sidism was all about spontaneity and book displays a patrician self-absorption, but the author cre- enthusiasm, and a break from too ates suspense through its framing device: an interview with a much repetitive tradition—but in young researcher who has a connection to his past. Batchelor’s view it led to a needlessly

72 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017 ornate and authoritarian faith, while to make it more appealing, just as the and Buddhist practice flows from the his own brand of Buddhism has been Christian redefines Hell. In the end, nature of scientific storytelling. The restored to its origins. we resort to “We don’t believe that”: practice of telling stories—imagined we just accept it as an embedded met- tales of cause and effect that fixate atchelor also tackles the issue, aphor of the culture that made the on the past and the future while es- Bbasically shelved by Wright, of religion. caping the present, sending us back whether Buddhism without any su- Then there’s the shrug-and-grin and forth without being here now— pernatural scaffolding is still Bud- argument that everyone believes some- is something that both Wright and dhism. As a scholar, he doesn’t try to thing. Is it fair to object that most of Batchelor see as one of the worst de- deny that the supernaturalist doc- us take quantum physics on faith, too? lusions the mind imprints on the world. trines of karma and reincarnation are Well, we don’t take it on faith. We take And yet it is inseparable from the En- as old as the ethical and philosoph- it on trust, a very different thing. We lightenment science that makes psy- ical ones, and entangled with them. have confidence—amply evidenced by chology and biology possible. The His project is unashamedly to secu- the technological transformation of contemporary generation of Ameri- larize Buddhism. But, since it’s Bud- the world since the scientific revolu- can Buddhists draws again and again dhism that he wants to secularize, he tion, and by the cash value of validated on scientific evidence for the power has to be able to show that its tradi- predictions based on esoteric mathe- of meditation—EEGs and MRIs and tions are not hopelessly polluted with matical abstraction—that the world so on—without ever wondering why superstition. picture it conveys is true, or more nearly a scientific explanation of that kind Here Batchelor’s pragmatic turn, true than anything else on offer. Batch- has seldom arisen in Buddhist cul- made tightly on a sharply curving road, elor tap-dances perilously close to the tures. (Science has latterly been prac- begins to fishtail more than a little. often repeated absurdity that a highly ticed by Buddhists, of course.) He insists that reincarnation is just credulous belief about supernatural What Wright correctly sees as the an embedded doctrine in the ancient claims and an extremely skeptical be- heart of meditation practice—the Pali culture—a metaphor like all the lief about supernatural claims are re- draining away of the stories we tell others we live with, a cosmological ally the same because they are both compulsively about each moment in picture that works well, not unlike the beliefs. favor of simply having the moment— metaphors of evolutionary fitness and A deeper objection to the attempted is antithetical to the kind of eviden- cosmology that are embedded in our reconciliation of contemporary science tiary argument he admires. Science is own culture. The centrality of rein- carnation doctrines shouldn’t be held as a mark against Buddhist truth. Can we really tiptoe past the elab- orate supernaturalism of historical Bud- dhism? Secular Buddhists try to, just as people who are sympathetic to the ethical basis of Christianity try to tip- toe past the doctrines of Heaven and Hell, so that Hell becomes “the expe- rience of being unable to love,” or Heaven a state of “being one with God”—not actual places with brim- stone pits or massed harps. Batchelor, like every intelligent believer caught in an unsustainable belief, engages in a familiar set of moves. He attempts to italicize his way out of absurdity by, in effect, shifting the stresses in the sim- ple sentence “We don’t believe that.” First, there’s “We don’t believe that”: there may be other believers who ac- cept a simple reward-and-punishment system of karma passing from gener- ation to generation, but our group does not. Next comes “We don’t believe that”: since reincarnation means eternal re- birth and coming back as a monkey and the rest of it, the enlightened Bud- “Maureen Alsop is leaving her magnolia, and her delphinium, dhist tries to de-literalize the “that” and her cats with us this weekend.” competitive storytelling. If a Buddhist values seem implicit in the very proj- about a Buddhist secularism, it is that Newton had been sitting under that ect of secularizing a faith, with its as- the Buddhist believes in the annihi- tree, he would have seen the apple fall- sumption that the ethical and the su- lation of appetite, while the pure sec- ing and, reaching for Enlightenment, pernatural elements can be cleanly ular humanist believes in satisfying experienced each moment of its de- severed—an operation that would have our appetites until annihilation makes scent as a thing pure in itself. Only a seemed unintelligible to St. Paul, as to it impossible. Appetite, though, has a restless Western Newton would say, Gotama himself. The idea of doing way of renewing itself even after it’s “Now, what story can tell us best what without belief is perhaps a bigger idea been fed; no matter what we do, some connects those apple-moments from than any belief it negates. Secular Bud- new gnawing materializes. Dissatis- branch to ground? Sprites? Magnets? dhism ends up being . . . secularism. faction with our circumstances, the The mysterious force of the mass of Can any old faith point a new way frustration of our ambitions, some- the earth beneath it? What made the forward? No doctrine is refuted by the thing no bigger than a failure to lose damn thing fall?” That’s a story we tell, bad behavior of the people who be- enough weight or to have an extra not a moment we experience. The Bud- lieve in it—or else all doctrines would room to make a nursery out of: even dhist Newton might have been hap- stand refuted—but the stories of ac- amid luxury, the ache of the un- pier than ours—ours was plenty un- tual Buddhism in large-scale practice achieved seems intense enough. It is happy—but he would never have found in America do not encourage the hope these dissatisfactions that drive so the equation. Science is putting names that Buddhism will be any different many Americans—who cannot un- on things and telling stories about them, from all the other organized faith prac- derstand why lives filled with mate- the very habits that Buddhists urge us tices. One of the best books about Bud- rial pleasure still feel unfulfilled—to to transcend. The stories improve over dhism in contemporary America, Mi- their meditation mats. time in the light of evidence, or they chael Downing’s “Shoes Outside the Secularized or traditional, the cen- don’t. It’s just as possible to have Bud- Door” (2001), takes as its subject the tral Buddhist epiphany remains es- dhist science as to have Christian sci- San Francisco Zen Center and its at- sential: the fact of mortality makes ence or Taoist science. But the medi- tempted marriage of spiritual eleva- loss certain. For all the ways in which tator’s project of being here now will tion with wild entrepreneurial activity. science and its blessed godchild sci- never be the same as the scientist’s proj- Downing’s novelistic and nuanced ac- entific medicine have reduced the overt ect of connecting the past to the fu- count focusses on the charismatic, Bill suffering that a human life entails, the ture, of telling how and knowing why. Clintonish master of the Zen Center, vector to sadness remains in place, as Richard Baker, who got embroiled in much as it did in the Buddha’s time. oth Wright and Batchelor end a Bill Clintonish sex scandal. Ameri- Gotama’s death, from what one doc- Bwith a semi-evangelical call for a can Buddhism seems as susceptible to tor describes as mesenteric infarction, secularized, modernized Buddhism the triple demon of power, predation, seems needlessly painful and grue- that can supply all the shared serenity and prejudice as every other religious some by modern standards; this is the of the old dispensation and still adjust establishment. kind of suffering we can substantially to the modern world—Batchelor ac- A faith practice with an authori- alleviate. But the universal mortality tually ends his book with a sequence tarian structure sooner or later be- of all beings—the fact that, if we’re of fixed tenets for a secular Gotama comes a horror; a faith practice with- lucky, we will die after seventy years practice. But does their Buddhism have out an authoritarian structure sooner or so—is not reformable. The larger a unique content, or is it simply the or later becomes a hobby. The dwin- problem we face is not suffering but basics of secular liberalism with a bor- dling down of Buddhism into an- sadness, and the sadness is caused by rowed Eastern vocabulary? What is other life-style choice will doubtless the fact of loss. To love less in order the specifically Buddhist valence of irritate many, and Wright will likely to lose less seems like no solution at saying, as Batchelor does, that the prac- be sneered at for reducing Buddhism all, but to see loss squarely sounds like titioners of a secular Buddhism will to another bourgeois amenity, like yoga wisdom. We may or may not be able “seek to understand and diminish the or green juice. (Batchelor refers to this to Americanize our Buddhism, but structural violence of societies and in- as a “dumbing down of the dharma.”) we can certainly ecumenicize our an- stitutions as well as the roots of vio- Yet what Wright is doing seems an algesics. Lots of different stuff from lence that are present in themselves”? honorable, even a sublime, achieve- lots of different places which we drink Do we need a twenty-five-hundred- ment. Basically, he says that medita- and think and do can help us man- year-old faith from the East to do tion has made him somewhat less ir- age. Every faith practice has a differ- this—isn’t that what every liberal-arts ritable. Being somewhat less irritable ent form of comfort to offer in the college insists that its students do, any- is not the kind of achievement that face of loss, and each is useful. Some- way, with the help of only a cultural- people usually look to religion for, but times it helps to dwell on the immen- studies major? it may be as good an achievement as sity of the universe. Sometimes it helps All secularized faiths tend to con- we ought to expect. (If Donald Trump to feel the presence of ongoing fam- verge on a set of agreeable values: com- became somewhat less irritable, the ily and community. Sometimes it helps passion, empathy, the renunciation of world would be a less dangerous place.) to light a candle and say a prayer. mere material riches. But the shared If there is something distinctive Sometimes it helps to sit and breathe. 

74 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017 spouses cheat, their kids demand too BOOKS much from them. They thought that by now they’d have more money or more interesting jobs or better friends. A FAMILY AFFAIR Perrotta’s best-known novel, “The Leftovers,” which was made into a Tom Perrotta’s “Mrs. Fletcher.” series for HBO, is his least typical. Everyone in that book has been struck BY LAURA MILLER by a sensational, inexplicable catastro- phe—two per cent of the world’s pop- ulation has vanished—and they are traumatized, rather than itchily un- happy. But, like almost all of Perrot- ta’s characters, they live in the sub- urbs of the Northeast—and not the mid-century suburbs of John Updike, that locus of the American Dream, where the ordinary was made lustrous by a literary virtuoso. Perrotta’s twenty- first-century suburbs are dimmer; they have drifted to the periphery of our collective fantasy life. These towns aren’t where anybody is headed, only where they end up, by mistake or mis- fortune or simple passivity. Amanda, another character in “Mrs. Fletcher,” has returned to her home town, Had- dington, after grad school and a few years in Brooklyn. Now she’s living in her late mother’s house, where she can’t even bear to empty the closets. She thinks of herself as “part of a hip- ster reverse migration, legions of over- educated, underpaid twenty-some- things getting squeezed out of the city.” It’s not an ideal situation, but one can, at least, find a Bikram-yoga class in Haddington these days. Eve, the novel’s title character and Brendan’s mother, takes pride in her job as the executive director of the Haddington Senior Center, but that’s about the only part of her life she re- gards as a success. With Brendan out n his freshman year of college, Bren- others have committed more new- of the house, she faces long evenings Idan, one of a handful of characters fangled transgressions (“CULTURAL of watching “Friends” on Netflix and at the center of Tom Perrotta’s new APPROPRIATOR,” “GASLIGHTER”). compulsively checking Facebook. “Her novel, “Mrs. Fletcher,” finds out that Under the painted portrait of Bren- life had turned to this: this lifeless hush, his image has been incorporated into dan, however, appears a phrase that this faint but elusive whiff of decay,” another student’s art project. Titled he considers “a brief summary of my Perrotta writes. Punctilious to a fault, “My Call-Out Wall,” the work pro- entire life”: “HUGE DISAPPOINTMENT.” Eve works on a checklist, “Going vides the artist’s friends with the Disappointment plagues the char- Solo: Fifteen Fun Things to Do by chance to “call someone out for be- acters in Perrotta’s novels, from the Yourself . . . For Yourself!,” that an- havior that damages our community disaffected parents in “Little Chil- other divorcée posts online. and threatens our safety.” Some of the dren” to the divorced sex-education The comic premise of “Mrs. targets stand accused of classic sins instructor in “The Abstinence Teacher.” Fletcher” is that when Brendan goes (“LIES RIGHT TO YOUR FACE”), while Their marriages lack passion, their off to college he looks forward to syb- aritic parties and a dorm roommate Perrotta’s fiction relies on his deft rendering of the tensions between characters. with whom he can “procrastinate for

ILLUSTRATION BY EMILIANO PONZI THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017 75 hours, trash-talking and playing video favored by Eve’s elderly clients has the leaves her cold, but there’s so much games,” while Eve expects a wind- perfect name the Lamplighter Inn. of it, and in so much variety, that down into lonely tedium. Instead, And who can deny that there is “noth- she can always ferret out a clip in Brendan struggles in school and alien- ing quite like the suspense of waiting which “the couple on her screen would ates his classmates with his bro-ish for a flirty text—as if the whole world seem inspired, or even blessed—you manner. And his mother—thanks to was on pause, holding its breath until could see how alive and happy and a newfound, Internet-enabled enthu- the next little ding! started it up again”? unself-conscious they were—and siasm for amateur porn and a com- Eve, the recipient of such a text, pro- maybe you envied them a little, but you munity-college course titled Gender longs that pause because she is “ada- also wanted to thank them for shar- and Society—embarks on a series of mantly opposed to texting and driv- ing this moment with you.”As much previously unimaginable adventures. ing.” She forces herself to “wait until as she disapproves of milfateria.com, she’d pulled into her driveway.” A Eve returns to it again and again. She he tone and the setting of “Mrs. smile-inducing touch: the conscien- reaches the point where she can’t make TFletcher” are mundane, and the tious restraint is so very Eve. small talk with a bartender or get tipsy stakes aren’t exactly momentous, even Or is it? The text has been sent to at dinner with a female friend with- compared with the petit-bourgeois her by an eighteen-year-old boy, her out imagining how the encounter dramas of “Little Children” and “The most ardent suitor. For better or worse, would evolve if it were a porn scene, Abstinence Teacher.” No one’s mar- sex is the force that perpetually threat- taking place in “a world where every- riage or career hangs in the balance. ens the suburban order in Perrotta’s one secretly wanted the same thing, Perrotta’s fiction is not a showcase fiction. It shatters families, tramples and no one failed to get it.” for dazzling prose; although “Little taboos, and every now and then even Technology can just as easily be Children” opens with an epigraph soothes enmities. For Perrotta, it’s used to tame and confine sex. When- from “Madame Bovary,” its sentences adult men who most often act on these ever Amanda needs an ego boost, she don’t appear to have been painstak- wayward desires; his work is full of signs on to Tinder to set up a tryst ingly chiselled in the course of hours, children like Brendan, whose father with a grateful middle-aged man. This like Flaubert’s. Nor does Perrotta lav- ran off with a woman he met through she regards as a necessary vice, on a ish attention on the material fixings the Casual Encounters section of par with tequila, and one that exacts of his characters’ lives, the spacious Craigslist. a similar hangover. Genuine desire, houses and green yards that are the Brendan has inherited some of his the elusive marvel Eve seeks in her raison d’être of the suburbs. (So much father’s skeevy prerogatives—the novel nightly explorations of milfateria.com, of “Madame Bovary” is devoted to opens with a disgusted Eve overhear- barely enters into Amanda’s transac- descriptions of Emma’s stuff.) The ing her son talking dirty while receiv- tions, but they are so much easier to sinews of Perrotta’s fiction, rather, are ing a farewell blow job from the ex- secure than the real thing. The Inter- the tensions within and between char- girlfriend he’s treated shabbily all sum- net hasn’t actually transformed sex, acters, tensions that he steadily and mer. The boy has a kinder heart than but it has enlarged the number and artfully amplifies until the reader be- anyone, even his own mother, gives the kinds of people with access to the comes possessed by curiosity about him credit for, but he’s rudderless and whole spectrum of erotic experience. how they’ll be resolved. Will the a bit dim, taking his cues from his fel- For every lover whose horizons ex- prematurely retired cop with anger- low lacrosse players, however uneasy pand, there’s one who wants gratifi- management issues finally go too far? they sometimes make him. (No one cations as anodyne and tidily pack- Will the adulterous lovers smash up accounts for the inner lives of jocks aged as fast-food meals. their families? In “Mrs. Fletcher,” the more persuasively than Perrotta.) There An amiable, diverting novel, “Mrs. suspense is more farcical: What sur- was a time when, for such boys, the Fletcher” doesn’t wedge itself as firmly prise will Brendan find in his boy- world, or at least college, was their oys- into America’s fault lines as many of hood bedroom when he flees the mess ter, but Brendan —who develops a crush Perrotta’s other books do. It features he has made of his college life? But on a strapping activist and gamely joins no religious zealots or sexual preda- it’s suspense all the same. Though her in a protest over the shooting of tors or dementedly ambitious over- Perrotta’s novels are rarely beautiful, Michael Brown—can’t keep up with achievers, just a few souls blundering they are never dull, as beautifully writ- the changing rules. into a future whose contours they can ten novels can often be. If “Mrs. Fletcher” has a theme, it’s never quite make out, looking for love “Mrs. Fletcher” is lit up by flashes the reshaping of American erotic life and doing the best that they can.  of acute observation—the fastidious by technology. An anonymous text sets 1 way, for example, that a character who off Eve’s foray into the Internet’s department of diagnostics has just chowed down on hot wings pornutopia: “U r my MILF!” it reads. pulls a napkin from a dispenser and, “Send me a naked pic!!” This leads to From the Truth or Consequences (N.M.) Herald. instead of wiping his face, “unfolded some Googling and the discovery of Sierra Vista Hospital’s Physical Thera- pists/Physical Therapist Assistants are help- it very carefully and laid it over his milfateria.com, “World’s Biggest Buffet ing people recover from strokes, traumatic plate, like he was covering his bones of All-You-Can-Eat Amateur MILF brain injuries, spinal cord injuries, amputa- with a blanket.” The local restaurant Porn!” Most of what Eve finds there tions and other weekend activities.

76 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017 the writings of Cotton Mather and the BOOKS Puritan divines, the captivity stories of Mary Rowlandson and Hannah Dustin, old bird books, Thoreau’s journals, the PAPER TRAIL poetry of Longfellow, dusty municipal histories, and, most of all, the poetry of The material poetry of Susan Howe. Emily Dickinson. Howe’s “My Emily Dickinson”—a quasi-biography with the BY DAN CHIASSON imaginative latitude of a poem and the intellectual reach of the best literary crit- icism—established for our time the new terms of Dickinson’s reputation, even as it advanced Howe’s own “American aes- thetic of uncertainty,” which shuttles among forms, genres, and states of mat- ter. What connects it all are Howe’s pow- ers of insight, and the implied relations between her sparkling trouvailles. “Debths” (New Directions) is Howe’s latest volume. The title comes from Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake”: Howe has said that she keeps her mother’s copy near at hand. The pun suggests the “debts” Howe owes to her ancestors and their works, the “depths” of her engagement with mate- rial traces of ideas (which often strand her in the literal depths of libraries and archives), and the “deaths” of parents and loved ones that have shaped Howe’s ele- giac intensities. Also, it looks like a typo: here, as throughout her career, Howe is interested in the accidents, smudges, and tears that fasten works of literature to their material embodiments on the page. Correct that word in print, or read it aloud, and you lose not only its triplicate meanings but the implied relations among them. What channels connect debt, depth, and death? To entertain this kind of ques- tion is the first strong step toward appre- onathan Edwards, the eighteenth- preacher’s clothes. It was an entirely prac- ciating Howe’s modernist forensics. Jcentury fire-and-brimstone theolo- tical approach, but, like most adaptations “Debths” is, like most of Howe’s books, gian, often rode from parish to parish on to the work of intense thinking, it read a hybrid animal, a composite of autobi- horseback through the country around as eccentricity. ographical prose, minimalist verse, col- Northampton, Massachusetts, compos- I first encountered this story in the laged (and mainly illegible) clippings of ing sermons as he went. Sometimes he work of the experimental American poet old texts, and lots of white space. Its wan- wrote them down, but on long rides he Susan Howe. The image of Edwards derings in and out of forms signal its used a mnemonic device: to remember dotted with materialized ideas suggests wary approach to some important ob- each insight he had, he would pin a small the nature of her obsessions. At eighty, sessions—home and childhood, Boston piece of paper to an area of his clothing Howe is among the worthiest heirs to and the wilderness around it, accident that he associated with the thought. After the high-modernist line in American and insight. Howe’s heroes, in this vol- trips of several days, he returned covered poetry. And yet she is haunted by the ume, are installation artists: Isabella Stew- in paper. As Edwards journeyed through oddball past of New England, especially art Gardner, who planned, down to the the wilderness, his mind moved in its as it inheres in material traces: her spare, last inch, a museum to house her art col- own direction; the two trajectories, one astringent poetics derives much of its lection and arranged, in her will, for its physical, the other mental, were joined power from the archival sources it jux- dismantling if anyone altered its organi- in those little pinned scraps covering the taposes. Howe’s work treats as bricolage zation; and Paul Thek, whose posthu- mous retrospective at the Whitney, in Howe brings to avant-garde poetry the pressing emotional stakes of memoir. 2010, impressed Howe deeply. She was

PHOTOGRAPH BY NICK MEYER THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 2017 77 especially taken by Thek’s installation sions, they usually sound nothing alike. catching fire. When Howe was a child, “The Personal Effects of the Pied Piper,” In Howe’s work, words mingle with she would visit the house after church, which comprised small bronze sculp- the material environments that they de- when it was still half museum, half pri- tures of the piper’s treasures and posses- scribe. Walking in her old Cambridge vate residence. She recalls: sions (knives and forks, pipes of various neighborhood recently, I saw, through Henry Longfellow Dana was living in one sizes, a book ravaged by rodents), scat- her eyes, writing all around: carved above part of the house, with a lover, while Charles and tered across the museum floor: part hobo lintels, into cornerstones, and onto graves; Helen Hopkinson (also Longfellow descendants) camp, part archeological site. printed on banners; stamped onto street often occupied the other. A caretaker (the posi- signs. Everywhere, the mute landscape tion traditionally went to a poet or a Divinity School student) lived in the attic. . . . Later we owe is a poet of autobiography, if seemed captioned unawares. It struck might sit in the dining room of Longfellow House Hnot exactly one of personal candor. me as natural and true to Howe’s sense eating lunch on one side of a roped-off area while The details of her childhood are often of language that words should chart a the resident poet-caretaker guided sightseers deployed in works whose experimental- passage toward the printed page from single- file along the other side of the barrier ism, while bracing, nevertheless feels like their origins in ambient space. It is one pointing out ornaments, furnishings, portraits, structural details; as if we were ghosts. an aspect of the world in which she grew surprising feature of her regionalism, this up. Howe’s mother was the Irish actress emphasis on writing’s uncanny priority This is Brahmin material culture long and playwright Mary Manning, a fix- in the world. Howe’s reflections on the after it had become a curiosity, around ture in the Dublin theatre world who Cambridge and Boston of her childhood the time that the cultural prestige of old worked with Yeats at the Abbey as a girl, stand with Robert Lowell’s “91 Revere New England faded for good. And yet, and, later, collaborated with Samuel Street” and the first few chapters of “The for a poet profoundly interested in time, Beckett. Her father was Mark DeWolfe Education of Henry Adams” as essen- nostalgia often acts as a covert poetics. Howe, the Brahmin historian and Har- tial evocations of an aristocratic milieu Where is Susan Howe now, looking back vard Law School professor, who in his on life support. upon the scene? Which side of the youth clerked for Oliver Wendell Holmes. I ended up that day at the Longfel- “roped-off area” that divides observer Two bookshelves faced off in the fam- low House, the most glorious house in from observed does a writer, remember- ily study: Howe’s mother’s books, “al- Cambridge, which Howe describes in ing her past, occupy? She might be “sight- most all Irish,” filled one, and her father’s her collection “Frame Structures.”The seer,” a pure voyeur, or “ghost,” a felt but “histories and reference books” filled the building served as George Washington’s invisible presence. Or is she a transitional other. Howe’s younger sister, Fanny, be- headquarters during the siege of Boston figure, monitoring the boundary between came a poet of rival brilliance and dis- and, later, as the homestead of Henry private and public, past and present: a tinction; Fanny and Susan Howe are, for Wadsworth Longfellow. Today, it is “poet-caretaker”? These aren’t abstract what it’s worth, probably the most im- owned by the National Park Service; you questions. A writer has to grapple with portant sibling poets in American liter- can tour it and see the bed where Long- them every time she sits down to work, ature. It is a tribute to their instincts that, fellow’s wife, Frances Appleton, died after and a lesser one might seem to foist them despite their hoard of shared impres- suffering horrible burns from her dress upon us. With Howe, they emerge or- ganically from her material. It is normal for a writer like Howe to carry her past as a burden—the way Low- ell and Adams, connoisseurs of decline, usually did. But Howe seems somehow free of these anxieties, perhaps because she never set out to be a poet in the first place. Though she grew up immersed in the culture of libraries and books, she started out as a visual artist, graduating from the Boston Museum School in 1961. Several years later, a friend visited her studio and suggested that she transfer her art works into a book. The result, “Hinge Picture” (1974), translated to the page Howe’s visual installations, in which isolated phrases had been offset by the stark white of a gallery wall: the gutter, a unique feature of books, divided the visual “picture” into distinct zones. The friend had inadvertently launched one “Thus, the Yardbirds begat Cream, Spencer Davis Group of the great careers in recent American begat Traffic, Cream and Traffic begat Blind Faith, and Blind Faith poetry. All of Howe’s volumes since have begat Derek and the Dominos and Ginger Baker’s Air Force …” tested the limits of the printed page; in doing so, they reaffirm the page itself as the edge of a pine forest. I begged them to ran- nal: “for the lustres,” as Emerson, another a necessary check on—and an expres- som me. But no. Around 4 PM they left for Bos- of Howe’s heroes, put it. sive feature of—her imagination. ton, leaving me alone with my dread of being “Debths,” though, shows Howe’s lyric lost in the past; absent. gifts at their most compelling. In a se- ecause Howe often front-loads her Echoes, ransoms, “visiting days,” a quence called “Periscope,” weaving and Bbooks with personal reminiscence, lake whose far shore is imagined as a ref- writing, longtime associates, are brought we see her experimentalism as a version uge and then as a prison: these images into focus in an epigraph from “Moby- of instincts learned and perfected in her circulate throughout the book. Every Dick”: “God’s foot upon the treadle of childhood. This is the Howe difference: Howe volume makes a new compound the loom.” That’s what Pip, the black boy she brings to the austerities of avant- out of its sources, without stripping them enlisted as an oarsman on the boat, ap- garde poetics the pressing emotional of their individual polarities. The author parently witnesses after he jumps ship stakes of memoir. “Debths” opens with and the reader alike move among them, and nearly drowns. He is treated there- an epigraph from Bing Crosby and the looking for a path, while at the same after as mad, though his madness is tinged Music Maids’ 1939 version of “Little Sir time being led forward almost against with what Melville calls “heaven’s sense”: Echo,” which suggests this book’s deep their will. We’re simultaneously the Pied he has seen at first hand “the multitudi- structures of call and response. The song’s Piper and his doomed children. Or we’re nous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, lyrics—“Won’t you come over and play? Peter Rugg, the hero of a “tall tale” by that out of the firmament of waters (and play) / You’re a nice little fellow / I the nineteenth-century New England heaved the colossal orbs.” The short, frag- know by your voice / But you’re always writer William Austin: an “absent hus- mentary lyrics of this sequence are all so far away (away)”—bring to mind the band responsible for his own mysterious about the mechanics of verse as a tech- old genre of echo verse, in which rhymes ruin,” as Howe puts it, “condemned to nology for wonder. The poems are open- are formed by repetition of the trailing wander with his small daughter in a one- ended, aware of and commenting on word of the previous line. Frost has a horse chair perpetually searching for Bos- their own gestation. Here is one of the great poem about this effect, “The Most ton.” Inside everyone is the feeling of call lyrics in its entirety: of It,” whose protagonist laments “the and the illusion of response, the “myste- These tallied scraps float mocking echo” of his voice when he calls rious ruin” that sets life in motion and like glass skiffs quietly for out across a forested lake for “counter- the penumbral Boston, just beyond the love or pity and all that love, original response.” tree line, that offers the prospect of hope In “Debths,” Howe recalls her own and home. What an idea in such a time as ours Pip among the Pleiads echo crisis at her childhood summer “Debths” is through and through a camp. You can feel the book lifting off book of poetry, though not entirely a The “scraps” are Howe’s poems, trans- into its themes in the comments between book of verse. Howe’s method of sur- parent and silent so as to afford her read- concrete memories: rounding conventional lyric with exege- ers unmediated access to revelation. In sis (at one pole) and illegible verbal col- another poem from the sequence, we When I was eight my parents packed me off lage (at the other) puts an enormous again encounter Peter Rugg, the “miss- to Little Sir Echo Camp for Girls on Lake Arm- ington in the foothills of New Hampshire co- amount of pressure on the actual lines ing man” who wanders everywhere search- founded and owned by Mary Hoisington and of verse stranded between the extremes. ing for Boston, from whose “historical Margaret Conoboy ten years earlier. Apparently I have sometimes felt that there was sim- song he himself / cannot free himself.” the women chose the name because of an echo ply not enough poetry in Howe’s poetry, That’s Howe, and Pip, and Isabella Stew- that bounces off the surrounding White Moun- that in evading its dowdy conventions art Gardner, and all the other vivid char- tains. An actual child may or may not fit paren- tal fantasies. I hated the place. . . . On the one she throws the baby out with the bath- acters we meet in “Debths.” The lesson visiting day allowed per summer we rowed across water. I’ve read her work almost the way of these poems, equal parts consoling and the lake and picnicked on a secluded beach at I tend to read her sources in the origi- devastating, is simple: we’re history. 

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THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 7 & 14, 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 Carolita Johnson, must be received by Sunday, August 13th. The finalists in the July 24th contest appear below. We will announce the winner, and the finalists in this week’s contest, in the August 28th 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

“Should we try that new place in the corner?” Gary Borislow, Johns Creek, Ga.

“Sorry, my roommate’s working from home today.” “We sue at dawn.” John Elson, Austin, Texas Jeff Sawyer, Franconia, N.H.

“Let’s go now while there’s no line.” David Rottman, New York City