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OCT. 16, 2017

FALL BOOKS OCTOBER 16, 2017

5 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN 21 THE TALK OF THE TOWN

Amy Davidson Sorkin on Trump and tragedy; the Gallic view; still singing his part; remembering S. I. Newhouse, Jr. ANNALS OF MEDIA

Andrew Marantz

26

Will Stephen

33

Joshua Yaffa

34

Dexter Filkins

42

Alexandra Schwartz

56

Tessa Hadley

66

Birth of a Supremacist How a leftist became a white nationalist.

SHOUTS & MURMURS

Haikus by Don, Jr. LETTER FROM MOSCOW

House of Shadows An apartment building is a portal to the past.

A REPORTER AT LARGE

The Breaking Point Rex Tillerson’s uncertain tenure at State.

PROFILES

Watch Closely The novelist Jennifer Egan travels in time.

FICTION

“Funny Little Snake” THE CRITICS A CRITIC AT LARGE

Kathryn Schulz

76

Jill Lepore Claudia Roth Pierpont

80 83 87

Alex Ross

94

Anthony Lane

96

Amit Majmudar Ellen Bass

53 60

Reading the Very Short Introduction series.

BOOKS

Briefly Noted What should we do with the dead?

A new biography of Leonardo da Vinci.

MUSICAL EVENTS

Bellini’s “Norma,” Mahler’s Fifth Symphony.

THE CURRENT CINEMA

“Blade Runner 2049.”

POEMS

“Of Age” “Indigo” COVER

David Plunkert

“October 1, 2017: One Day in a Nation of Guns”

DRAWINGS Bruce Eric Kaplan, Mick Stevens, Sara Lautman, Danny Shanahan, P. C. Vey, Liana Finck, Maddie Dai, Kate Curtis, Will McPhail, Zachary Kanin, Trevor Spaulding, Roz Chast, Tom Toro, Emily Flake and Rob Kutner, Frank Cotham, Joseph Dottino, John O’Brien, Jason Adam Katzenstein, Sophia Wiedeman, Robert Leighton, William Haefeli, Teresa Burns Parkhurst, Harry Bliss SPOTS Alexandra Pichard

THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 16, 2017

1

CONTRIBUTORS Alexandra Schwartz (“Watch Closely,”

p. 56), a staff writer, received the Na­ tional Book Critics Circle’s Nona Ba­ lakian Citation for Excellence in Re­ viewing for 2014.

Dexter Filkins (“The Breaking Point,” p. 42) is the author of “The Forever War,” which won a National Book Crit­ ics Circle Award.

Jill Lepore (Books, p. 83) is a professor

David Plunkert (Cover) is an illustrator

and a graphic designer.

Tessa Hadley (Fiction, p. 66) has been publishing short stories in the maga­ zine since 2002. Her latest book is “Bad Dreams and Other Stories.”

Amy Davidson Sorkin (Comment, p. 21),

a staff writer, is a regular contributor to Comment. She also has a column on newyorker.com.

Will Stephen (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 33),

a writer for “Saturday Night Live,” re­ cently appeared in the film “The In­ credible Jessica James.”

Claudia Roth Pierpont (Books, p. 87) is

a longtime staff writer and the author of “American Rhapsody: Writers, Mu­ sicians, Movie Stars, and One Great Building,” which came out last year.

of history at Harvard. Her new book, “These Truths: A History of the United States,” comes out next fall.

Joshua Yaffa (“House of Shadows,” p. 34)

is a New Yorker contributor based in Moscow and a fellow at New America.

Kathryn Schulz (A Critic at Large, p. 76), a staff writer, won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing.

Andrew Marantz (“Birth of a Supremacist,” p. 26) has been writing for the magazine since 2011. He is at work on a book about politics and new media.

Ellen Bass (Poem, p. 60), a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, teaches in the M.F.A. program at Pacific University. Her most recent book is “Like a Beggar.”

NEWYORKER.COM Everything in the magazine, and more.

PODCAST Jeffrey Toobin talks with Dorothy Wickenden about what the Supreme Court thinks of extreme gerrymandering.

DAILY SHOUTS

Lars Kenseth illustrates lesser­known Roomba error codes.

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.)

2

THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 16, 2017

THE MAIL TRUMP VS. KIM JONG UN

I directed the Iraq Survey Group, which detailed the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and, more important, the internal dynamics of Saddam Hussein’s regime (“On the Brink,” September 18th). Reading Evan Osnos’s report about Kim Jong Un and North Korea, I noticed some striking parallels. Saddam made assumptions about President Bush and Washington that were wildly off the mark; he did not know what motivated Washington, and Washington did not know what motivated him. So it is now with Kim and Donald Trump.

Osnos notes that there is no U.S. Embassy in Pyongyang. Similarly, the U.S. closed its Embassy in Iraq in 1990 and reopened it only after the invasion of 2003. This dramatically limited the number of Americans who had any contact with Iraqis inside Iraq. The quality of U.S. decisions—and the understanding of the public—suffered from that. The same will be true of North Korea.

Charles Duelfer Fairfax, Va. Growing up in Mao’s China during the Cold War, I heard my share of antiAmerican propaganda delivered by loudspeaker. So it’s not hard for me to understand the North Korean national ethos expressed in the old saying “Nuh jukgo, nah jukja!” (“You die, I die!”) But I was surprised that Osnos didn’t fully explain China’s role in North Korea’s relationship with the United States.

China is desperate to denuclearize North Korea, and it’s trying to do it through America. North Korea, on the other hand, feels great angst about China. The Kim dynasty has considered China a traitor since it established a diplomatic relationship with South Korea, twenty-five years ago. A recent editorial in a North Korean state newspaper ridiculed China as a frog that forgets that it used to be a tadpole—a reference to when China nearly went broke in an effort to develop its own

nuclear weapons, in the sixties. North Koreans threw all their moral support behind China throughout its metamorphosis from tadpole to frog. Now, however, a nuclear North Korea is as much a threat to China as to the U.S. and its Asian allies, if not more.

M. Eigh Falls Church, Va. In 1996, I was a consul at the U.S. Consulate General in Vladivostok, Russia, an ideal place to observe the interactions between South and North Korea. That year, my South Korean counterpart was assassinated by a North Korean hit squad for his role in facilitating the escape of North Korean defectors through the Russian Far East. In those days, Pyongyang tried to boost its economy by ferrying counterfeit U.S. dollars through Russian banks and markets. There was little interaction between North and South Korea until the Asian financial crisis hit, in late 1997, after which channels of communication began to open up between them.

Around that time, North Korea teamed up with Russia and China to develop the Tumen River where the borders of the three countries converge. Despite undergoing famine and cholera epidemics, North Korea surpassed its partners in making the enterprise attractive to foreign investors.

Pyongyang’s role ended, however, a few years after the U.N. imposed sanctions in response to its nascent nuclear program. Since then, dealing with Pyongyang has become only more difficult. Still, there are openings to be had, and, as Osnos makes clear, the situation calls more for sustained diplomacy than anything else.

Chris Davis Falls Church, Va.

• Letters should be sent with the writer’s name, address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to themail@newyorker.com. Letters may be edited for length and clarity, and may be published in any medium. We regret that owing to the volume of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter.

THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 16, 2017

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OCTOBER 11 Ð 17, 2017

COURTESY SUCCESSION RAGHUBIR SINGH

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

One of the great gifts the Met Breuer has given New York has been spotlighting modernists beyond art history’s Eurocentric canon. The latest is Raghubir Singh, the Indian photographer—and color pioneer—who died in 1999, at the age of fifty-six. Born in Jaipur, he lived in Hong Kong, Paris, and London, but India remained his inexhaustible muse. On Oct. 11, the museum opens the three-decade survey “Modernism on the Ganges: Raghubir Singh Photographs,” which includes “Monsoon Rains, Monghyr, Bihar, 1967,” above.

CLASSICAL MUSIC

1 OPERA

Metropolitan Opera Bartlett Sher’s production of Offenbach’s “Les Contes d’Hoffmann” often feels disjointed in performance. But in the current revival it coalesces around Vittorio Grigolo’s thrilling performance in the title role, with each act emerging as a fever dream of frustrated longing. The bass Laurent Naouri is a wonderfully arch antagonist as the Four Villains; other standouts include Anita Hartig’s sensitively sung Antonia and Erin Morley’s dazzling Olympia. Offenbach was primarily a composer of operettas, and Johannes Debus, appropriately, conducts with rhythms that dance and melodies that gently waft into the air. Oct. 13 at 8. • If Sondra Radvanovsky comes to be remembered as one of the great interpreters of Bellini’s “Norma,” it will be as much for her talents as a colleague as for her accomplishments as a soprano soloist; when she is in the company of either Joseph Calleja (a sensitive Pollione) or Joyce DiDonato (a shining, steadfast Adalgisa), her fibrous voice is especially incandescent in its impact. David McVicar’s new production is cautious and dark, but supportive of the drama; Carlo Rizzi keeps the orchestral forces well in hand. (Marina Rebeka replaces Radvanovsky in the second performance.) Oct. 11 and Oct. 16 at 7:30. • Franco Zeffirelli’s over-the-top style defined the Met in the eighties and nineties, but now the famed Italian director has only one other production (besides “La Bohème”) left in the company’s repertory, a traditionalist pageant of glittering chinoiserie that he devised for Puccini’s “Turandot” thirty years ago. Oksana Dyka, Aleksandrs Antonenko, and Maria Agresta star in the revival; Rizzi. Oct. 12 at 8 and Oct. 17 at 7:30. • James Levine, an inspired and expert interpreter of the music of Mozart, is conducting “Die Zauberflöte,” presented in Julie Taymor’s fairy-tale staging. The ensemble cast includes Charles Castronovo, Markus Werba, Kathryn Lewek, Golda Schultz, and, for this final performance, a special guest Sarastro, René Pape.

Oct. 14 at 1. • This year’s revival of Franco Zeffirelli’s crowd-pleasing production of “La Bohème” offers the house début of the soprano Angel Blue, a former Miss Hollywood and an Operalia finalist who has worked as a presenter for the BBC Proms.

Her castmates include Brigitta Kele, Jean-François Borras, and Lucas Meachem; Alexander Soddy. Oct. 14 at 8. (Metropolitan Opera House. 212-362-6000.)

1 ORCHESTRAS AND CHORUSES

New York Philharmonic The superlative pianist Leif Ove Andsnes begins his season-long engagement as the Philharmonic’s artist-in-residence with Rachmaninoff’s taut, incisive Fourth Piano Concerto, a work Andsnes rendered powerfully on disk only a few years ago.

The pianist’s newest recording focusses on Sibelius; here, fittingly, Paavo Järvi conducts that composer’s majestic Fifth Symphony and Esa-Pekka Salonen’s “Gambit,” the latter in its New York première. (The Saturday-matinée concert features the Sibelius symphony and performances of piano trios by Grieg and Shostakovich.) Oct. 12 and 17 at 7:30, Oct. 13 at 11 A.M., Oct. 14 at 2, and Oct. 14 at 8.

(David Geffen Hall. 212-875-5656.)

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THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 16, 2017

American Symphony Orchestra: “The Sounds of Democracy” Leon Botstein, always intellectually as well as musically adventurous, leads his orchestra (and the Bard Festival Chorale) in an exploration of three works about patriotism, religion, and endurance from the middle decades of the American Century: Copland’s “Canticle of Freedom,” written during the McCarthy era; Sessions’s Symphony No. 2, a tribute to Franklin Roosevelt; and Bernstein’s Symphony No. 3, “Kaddish,” an intensely personal work dedicated to the memory of John F. Kennedy. Oct. 11 at 8. (Carnegie Hall. 212-247-7800.)

Orchestra of St. Luke’s Beethoven’s Symphony No. 1 in C Major is a feisty early-career work; Mozart’s Mass in C Minor (the “Great”) is a late, unfinished masterpiece. Intensely ambitious compositions, they are joined on Pablo Heras-Casado’s upcoming concert with the outstanding orchestra (and the Westminster Symphonic Choir), at Carnegie Hall. The vocal soloists include the sopranos Camilla Tilling and Susanna Phillips. Oct. 12 at 8. (212-247-7800.)

Juilliard415: “Reformation 500” Masaaki Suzuki, the eminent Japanese authority on the music of Bach, returns to lead Juilliard’s fine period-performance group in another collaborative concert with the singers of the Yale Schola Cantorum. This one is all-Bach, offering two cantatas (including “Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott”) and the little-known Mass in G Major, BWV 236.

Oct. 14 at 7. (St. Michael’s Church, Amsterdam Ave. at 99th St. No tickets required.)

1 RECITALS

Takács Quartet The renowned group, an American ensemble whose roots reach back to Central Europe, comes to Zankel Hall for a two-concert residency, joined by friends.

Its first concert offers string quartets by Haydn (in D Minor, “Fifths”) and Carl Vine (a U.S. première) as well as Mendelssohn’s Quintet No. 2 in B-Flat Major; the second includes more Haydn, Shostakovich’s enigmatic Quartet No. 11 in F Minor, and Brahms’s bighearted Sextet in G Major, Op. 36. Oct. 12 and Oct. 14 at 7:30. (212-247-7800.)

Founders: “Sacred Space” The dynamic songwriting and performing collective, which embraces classical, pop, and folk influences, is currently in love with Edgar Allan Poe. Its members have written a collaborative song cycle based on texts about life and the afterlife by the moody, ecstatic poet, which they’ll pair with a radiant and weighty work on similar themes, Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time,” in a concert at National Sawdust. Oct. 12 at 10. (80 N. 6th St., Brooklyn. nationalsawdust.org.)

Ruby Hughes and Julius Drake The British soprano offers a concert at Carnegie’s Weill Recital Hall, joined by one of classical music’s best collaborative pianists. The program has an old-school format, unfolding in roughly chronological order. It starts with Baroque selections and a German song cycle (Schumann’s Liederkreis, Op. 39), moves on to brief, evocative collections

from Debussy and Ravel, and concludes with the world première of Huw Watkins’s “Echo” and the soothing songs of Britten’s “Charm of Lullabies.”

Oct. 13 at 7:30. (212-247-7800.)

“Thomas Adès and Friends” Adès, the brilliantly talented composer-conductorpianist, is in town for the Met première of his opera “The Exterminating Angel.” Accordingly, he makes a stop at Zankel Hall, where he joins the standout singers Sally Matthews, Alice Coote, Iestyn Davies, and Joseph Kaiser in an afternoon of songs by Purcell, Schubert, Stravinsky (“The Owl and the Pussycat”), Britten, John Woolrich, and himself (“The Lover in Winter”). Oct. 15 at 3. (212-247-7800.)

Hypercube: “Brain-on-Fire” If a composer writes a memorable piece with unorthodox instrumentation, the grouping might well accrue a repertoire, as now-canonic works by Schoenberg, Bartók, and Messiaen have demonstrated. The quartet Hypercube adheres to the needs of Louis Andriessen’s “Hout”—saxophone, guitar, piano, and percussion—and performs it here alongside pieces by Philippe Hurel, Christopher Cerrone, Mikel Kuehn, and Philip Schuessler. Oct. 15 at 5. (Le Poisson Rouge, 158 Bleecker St. lpr.com.)

“Bill Murray, Jan Vogler & Friends: New Worlds” A collaboration hatched not long after the celebrated actor and the admired cellist found themselves seated on opposite sides of an airplane aisle reaches the hallowed stage of Isaac Stern Auditorium. “New Worlds,” a new album that this odd couple made with the violinist Mira Wang (Vogler’s wife) and the pianist Vanessa Perez, is amiable, quirky, and frequently droll, featuring songs by Foster, Gershwin, Mancini, Bernstein, and Van Morrison, pieces by Bach and Schubert, texts by Walt Whitman and Mark Twain, and more. Oct. 16 at 8.

(Carnegie Hall. 212-247-7800.)

Kelly Moran: “Hallucinations” Moran, a composer and pianist, employs stylistic devices borrowed from Satie, Cowell, and Cage with the hands-on assurance of a classically trained performer; after growing up infatuated with electric jazz, minimalism, and metal, she cut her teeth in art-rock bands. “Bloodroot,” the album she released in March on the Brooklyn label Telegraph Harp, features appealing works for prepared piano and synthesizer; here, she concentrates on the former, introducing gently narcotic reveries accompanied by video projections of her own design. Oct. 16 at 8. (Roulette, 509 Atlantic Ave., Brooklyn. roulette.org.)

Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center: “Mozart in 1787” Opening the Society’s new season, the pianists Alessio Bax and Lucille Chung perform alongside five refined string players in a program that brings together three spirited products of the composer’s thirty-first year: the Sonata in C Major (K. 521) for Piano Four-Hands, the Sonata in A Major (K. 526) for Violin and Piano, and the String Quintet in C Major (K. 515). Oct. 17 at 7:30. (Alice Tully Hall. 212-875-5788.)

Alisa Weilerstein and Inon Barnatan The cellist and the pianist, two highly distinctive artists of the younger generation, collaborate as equals in their upcoming concert, an evening of works by Mendelssohn and Steven Mackey (the world première of “Through Your Fingers”) and the magisterial sonatas for cello and piano by Britten and Rachmaninoff. Oct. 17 at 7:30. (Zankel Hall.

212-247-7800.)

1 OPENINGS AND PREVIEWS

THE THEATRE

After the Blast Zoe Kazan’s play, featuring Cristin Milioti, follows a couple living underground in a postapocalyptic world where fertility is regulated. Lila Neugebauer directs, at LCT3. (Claire Tow, 150 W. 65th St. 212-239-6200. In previews.)

Animal Wisdom In her new music-theatre piece, which draws from blues, folk, and nineteenth-century Methodist hymns, the composer and performer Heather Christian plays a woman who talks to the dead.

(The Bushwick Starr, 207 Starr St., Brooklyn. 866811-4111. In previews. Opens Oct. 14.)

The Band’s Visit David Yazbek and Itamar Moses’s musical, about an Egyptian police orchestra stranded in the Israeli desert, moves to Broadway; Katrina Lenk and Tony Shalhoub reprise their roles in David Cromer’s production. (Ethel Barrymore, 243 W. 47th St. 212-239-6200. In previews.)

Odd Man In Edgar Oliver’s eccentric solo act.

For many years, Edgar Oliver lived in a house on East Tenth Street in the East Village that was an S.R.O. Eventually, the other tenants moved out, and the now sixty-year-old Oliver, who looks and sounds like no other performer on earth, lived there with his sister, Helen. Somehow, love entered the gothic establishment from time to time, and when Oliver wrote about it in his brilliant 2009 piece, “East 10th Street: Self Portrait with Empty House,” it was with all the ardor and verve of a romantic who knows he’s an outsider by birth and inclination but who still hopes to find—to believe— those persons who won’t hurt his heart because of it. That’s just one of Oliver’s charms. And weirdnesses. Because who likes to admit, let alone makes a performance out of, yearning in general and yearning for a world that ultimately can’t accept you in particular? Oliver is so brave that it cracks your self-protective reserve—and makes you ashamed, too, for all the conventional behavior and thought you hold on to, just because you think it will shield you, mostly from your own fears about your own difference.

Oliver grew up in a gothic atmosphere, ruled, or should one say shaped, by a very strong and possessive mother who could not see her children as being separate from herself. She raised her son and daughter in Georgia, with its history of slavery and 8

THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 16, 2017

strangeness; Helen was an artist as well, and she would go on to paint the sets for his early theatre pieces. Eventually, the siblings fled Georgia for Paris, city of dreams, before taking up occupancy in that building on East Tenth Street, where the travellers had other dreams. (Helen was chased out of Paris by the rats, Oliver said.) In New York, Oliver wrote a number of outstanding works for the stage, including “The Seven Year Vacation” and the gorgeously titled “Mosquito Succulence.” An early home for his work was Ellen Stewart’s La Mama. Of course, the late Stewart, a champion of genius and the dispossessed, took to the artist with the Halloween-goblin voice: Oliver’s a genius, and dispossessed. He’s the James McCourt of the American stage, a gay man not inebriated by but still prone to dreaming about Poe. The Axis Theatre is presenting his “New York Trilogy” (Oct. 12-Nov. 18), which comprises “East Tenth Street” and two other pieces—“In the Park,” from 2014, and “Attorney Street,” from last year—all directed by Randy Sharp and starring Oliver himself. He’s a frightening performer, so utterly himself that you can’t compare him to anyone out there, nor can you compare his work to the synthetic or stupidly crafty stuff that passes as theatre nowadays. Oliver, by example, reminds you that theatre first began as a way of making poems live, and gives voice to stories that couldn’t be told any other way.

—Hilton Als

Burning Doors The dissident troupe Belarus Free Theatre performs a new piece at La Mama about art and persecution, featuring Maria Alyokhina, of Pussy Riot. (Ellen Stewart, 66 E. 4th St. 646-430-5374.

Opens Oct. 12.)

Jesus Hopped the “A” Train In Stephen Adly Guirgis’s dark comedy from 2000, directed by Mark Brokaw, a former bike messenger imprisoned at Rikers Island meets a born-again serial killer. (Pershing Square Signature Center, 480 W. 42nd St. 212-244-7529. In previews.)

Junk Doug Hughes directs a new play by Ayad Akhtar (“Disgraced”), about a nineteen-eighties investment banker (Steven Pasquale) attempting a takeover of a manufacturing company. (Vivian Beaumont, 150 W. 65th St. 212-239-6200. In previews.)

The Last Match Anna Ziegler’s play, directed by Gaye Taylor Upchurch for the Roundabout, centers on two tennis champions preparing to face off in a high-stakes match. (Laura Pels, 111 W. 46th St. 212-719-1300.

In previews.)

Lonely Planet Keen Company revives Steven Dietz’s 1994 play, featuring Arnie Burton and Matt McGrath as gay men who meet at a map store during the height of the AIDS epidemic. (Clurman, 410 W. 42nd St. 212-239-6200. In previews.)

M. Butterfly Clive Owen and Jin Ha star in Julie Taymor’s revival of David Henry Hwang’s Tony Awardwinning drama, about the romance between a married French diplomat and a Chinese opera singer.

(Cort, 138 W. 48th St. 212-239-6200. In previews.)

Oedipus el Rey Luis Alfaro wrote this adaptation of the Sophocles tragedy, reset in a South Central L.A. penitentiary. Directed by Chay Yew, in collaboration with the Sol Project. (Public, 425 Lafayette St. 212967-7555. In previews.)

Office Hour Julia Cho’s play, directed by Neel Keller, is about a college professor facing an ethical crisis when

ILLUSTRATION BY PIETER VAN EENOGE

In “New York Trilogy,” at the Axis Theatre, Oliver recounts delectably odd tales taken from his life.

THE THEATRE one of her students writes obscene work in class.

(Public, 425 Lafayette St. 212-967-7555. Previews begin Oct. 17.)

The Portuguese Kid John Patrick Shanley wrote and directs this comedy, at Manhattan Theatre Club, about a lawyer (Jason Alexander) juggling his personal travails with those of a widow settling her husband’s affairs. With Sherie Rene Scott and Mary Testa.

(City Center Stage I, at 131 W. 55th St. 212-5811212. In previews.)

Richard III At the Next Wave Festival, the director Thomas Ostermeier, of Berlin’s Schaubühne, stages Marius von Mayenburg’s German-language adaptation of the Shakespeare history play, reset in a mud-spattered arena. With English supertitles.

(BAM Harvey Theatre, 651 Fulton St., Brooklyn.

718-636-4100. Oct. 11-14.)

Shadowlands Fellowship for Performing Arts revives William Nicholson’s 1990 play, about C. S. Lewis’s relationship with a young American writer who developed terminal cancer. (Acorn, 410 W. 42nd St. 212-239-6200. Previews begin Oct. 17.)

The Siege The Freedom Theatre, based in a Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank, presents this interview-based retelling of the 2002 seige of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. (N.Y.U. Skirball, 566 LaGuardia Pl. 212-998-4941. Opens Oct. 12.)

Springsteen on Broadway The Boss performs solo with guitar and piano, tracing his life through songs and storytelling.

(Walter Kerr, 219 W. 48th St. 212-239-6200. In previews. Opens Oct. 12.)

Strange Interlude Transport Group presents this reimagined version of Eugene O’Neill’s nine-act drama, in which David Greenspan performs all the characters himself. (Irondale Center, 85 S. Oxford St., Brooklyn.

866-811-4111. In previews.)

Torch Song Michael Urie and Mercedes Ruehl star in a new version of Harvey Fierstein’s “Torch Song Trilogy,” directed by Moisés Kaufman and set in the New York gay scene of the seventies and early eighties. (Second Stage, 305 W. 43rd St. 212-2464422. In previews.)

1 NOW PLAYING

The Gospel According to Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens and Count Leo Tolstoy: Discord Jefferson, Dickens, and Tolstoy walk into a room; ninety minutes later, there is still no punch line.

Not that Scott Carter’s play, while not entirely devoid of levity, is meant as a joke. As it turns out, these three historical figures each wrote his own version of the Bible, a fact that Carter, a longtime writer and producer for Bill Maher’s shows, uses as a starting point for his meeting of the minds in Limbo. It is certainly not love at first sight: “You are all tongue and no brain,” Jefferson (Michael Laurence) tells Dickens (Duane Boutté), while Tolstoy (Thom Sesma) broods on the side. Alas, the line also applies to this listless show at Pri

mary Stages, which could use extra helpings of wit, intellectual insight, and dramatic momentum. After much theological banter, the conversation takes a personal turn, and we learn that these great men have feet of clay. What a revelation. (Cherry Lane, 38 Commerce St. 866-811-4111.)

KPOP At once skeptical and exuberant, this immersive show from Ars Nova (in collaboration with the Woodshed Collective and Ma-Yi Theatre Company) transforms the multi-floor space into a candy-colored K-pop factory, equal parts Willy Wonka and “Blade Runner.” The audience, we’re told, is the focus group for JTM Entertainment, a Korean label trying to cross over to America; spectators are split up and introduced to its star acts.

There’s the girl group Special K, whose teen-age members undergo a rinse cycle of voice lessons, media training, and plastic surgery; a boy band, F8, squabbling over whether to Westernize their sound; and the pop diva MwE (Ashley Park), fighting off an Eve Harrington-esque rival. Cleverly, the show blasts away its own cynicism with a sonic boom, in a ravelike finale that displays how, for K-pop’s ever-expanding global audience, the product easily out-glimmers the means of production. (A.R.T./ New York Theatres, 502 W. 53rd St. 866-811-4111.)

Mary Jane Amy Herzog’s beautiful new play, directed by Anne Kauffman, is about family and illness, and how the difficulties inherent in caring for the infirm can strengthen familial bonds—or erode them. Mary Jane (Carrie Coon) is a single mother; her young boy has cerebral palsy. We never meet him, but from time to time we glimpse the dark wallpaper and toys in his room. While the majority of the play unfolds in Mary Jane’s apartment, the audience really lives within the parameters of her maternal concern—and sometimes panic—as it beats against the walls of her heart. (The cast also includes, in multiple roles, the fantastic Liza ColónZayas and the brilliant Brenda Wehle.) Herzog, in her most satisfying work to date, has made theatre that shines from her characters’ inner lives first.

And, for a hundred intermissionless minutes, they become our imperfect family, too. (New York Theatre Workshop, 79 E. 4th St. 212-460-5475.)

The Show-Off You cannot trust the pompously self-important Aubrey Piper. His hair is fake, and his name is likely to be as well; he lies about his job, his income, and his achievements. George Kelly’s 1924 comedy could have been titled “The Dolt,” “The Braggart,” or even “The Sociopath.” Earning the attention of a young woman named Amy (Emma Orelove), Aubrey (Ian Gould) has wormed his way into the Fisher family. Only the no-nonsense matriarch (a wonderfully grumpy Annette O’Toole, on a hot streak after “Southern Comfort” and “Man from Nebraska”) is immune, allergic even, to his gab.

Dan Wackerman’s production, for the Peccadillo Theatre Company, is not as sharp as it could be, but it leaves the ending satisfyingly ambiguous.

Has Aubrey undergone redemption or pulled off another trick? No matter. Like Mrs. Fisher, you will want to throttle him either way. (Theatre at St. Clement’s, 423 W. 46th St. 866-811-4111.)

Tiny Beautiful Things An epistolary play is tough to pull off: how do you stage the recitation of texts that offer one actor the highly untheatrical activity of writing, while the others have nothing to do at all? In this adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s collection of “Dear Sugar”

advice columns, which is back for an encore run, the show’s co-conceivers—Marshall Heyman, Nia Vardalos (who plays Strayed), and Thomas Kail (who directs)—find about as good a solution as possible, situating the action in Strayed’s home (beautifully cluttered by the set designer Rachel Hauck), as if to suggest that the advice seekers have taken up residence in her domestic routine.

Of the three actors who embody those seekers, Hubert Point-Du Jour does the best job of selling this occasionally awkward conceit with an intense and flexible performance. But it’s unclear what advantage even a clever staging provides over the experience of reading the book. (Public, 425 Lafayette St. 212-967-7555.)

Too Heavy for Your Pocket Bowzie Brandon (Brandon Gill), a young AfricanAmerican man in Nashville in the sixties, has a scholarship to Fisk University. But he has decided to leave the classroom and step onto a Freedom Riders bus. As he tells his friend Sally-Mae (Nneka Okafor), “I got a chance to help grab us some true justice. More than just a tiny piece of the dream. I don’t care if they call me an agitator. I don’t care if they kill me. I don’t.” In Jiréh Breon Holder’s lyrical drama, directed by Margot Bordelon for Roundabout Underground, Bowzie and his wife, Evelyn (Eboni Flowers), and SallyMae and her husband, Tony (Hampton Fluker), reckon with their varying appetites for freedom and responsibility. If the structure wobbles and the metaphors are overstressed, Holder has created a quartet of fully realized, deeply felt characters, all in search of what Bowzie calls “basic human dignity.” (Black Box, Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre, 111 W. 46th St. 212-719-1300.)

The Treasurer There’s a lot of potential in Max Posner’s alternately brilliant and dull play about family guilt and hate, most of which the director, David Cromer, brings out in his excellent staging. But this story of a son (the outstanding Peter Friedman) dealing with a failing mother doesn’t get nasty enough to explode various taboos, such as what elder care means, let alone mother love. Ida Armstrong (the fantastic Deanna Dunagan) is no sweet old lady: she’s a woman with a past, who years before left her children for a lover. Her son has never gotten past that hurt, and he means to make her pay, right down to cutting off her credit cards; if he allowed for tenderness, he would have to forgive his mother, but he wouldn’t know himself without remorse and recrimination. Posner is a fine young playwright on the threshold of writing a great stage work, but in the meantime he has given a company of terrific actors plenty to sink their teeth into. (Playwrights Horizons, 416 W. 42nd St. 212-279-4200.)

1 ALSO NOTABLE

As You Like It Classic Stage Company. • Charm Lucille Lortel. Through Oct. 15. • A Clockwork Orange New World Stages. • Come from Away Schoenfeld. • Hello, Dolly! Shubert. • The Home Place Irish Repertory. • Inanimate Flea. Through Oct. 16. • Measure for Measure Public. • The Play That Goes Wrong Lyceum. • Prince of Broadway Samuel J. Friedman. • The Red Letter Plays: In the Blood Pershing Square Signature Center.

Through Oct. 15. • Stuffed Westside. • The Terms of My Surrender Belasco. • Time and the Conways American Airlines Theatre. • The Violin 59E59. Through Oct. 14. • War Paint Nederlander.

THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 16, 2017

9

1 ROCK AND POP

NIGHT LIFE

Musicians and night-club proprietors lead complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements.

The Courtneys The next time you overhear someone lamenting the death of guitar-based music in the face of E.D.M., tell the perpetrator he isn’t looking hard enough. The Courtneys, an all-woman trio from Vancouver, write bittersweet alt-rock earworms in the tumble-down style popularized in the nineteen-eighties by the antipodean legacy label Flying Nun Records. The lone Courtney in the group is the lead singer, Courtney Garvin, who belts out ambivalent pleas to a slew of mega-crushes while working double duty as the band’s drummer. Every track on their 2017 release, “The Courtneys II,” would fit perfectly onto a fantasy teen-age mixtape, perfect for long drives through suburban locales. (Park Church Co-op, 129 Russell St., Brooklyn. 718-389-0854. Oct. 15.)

After Live Modest Mouse warmly evokes a moment of pop-savvy indie rock.

MTV’s revival of “TRL,” its daily musicvideo countdown, premièred on Oct. 2, and the initial slate of guests—including DJ Khaled, Ed Sheeran, and Migos— reflected the prismatic tastes of the young adults the network covets. But so far the new “TRL” hasn’t made much space for rock, despite the fact that bands like Blink 182 and Panic! at the Disco were originally as central to its brand as Britney Spears and Rihanna. Through the early aughts, MTV helped punk and indie stretch far beyond their niche audiences, pointedly slotting bands next to rappers and pop stars. By 2005, seven years into the series’ initial run, the effects were noticeable: Spin reported on a newfound inclusivity, exemplified by the “former indie-rock heroes Modest Mouse,” who suddenly “were platinum MTV mainstays.”

Of course, the bands first had to make great songs. Modest Mouse formed in 1992, growing out of the Northwest’s storied alt-rock boom, which peaked with Nirvana and had waned by the time Modest Mouse’s front man, Isaac Brock, signed the band to Epic Records, in the late nineties. Its major-label début, “The Moon & Antarctica,” arrived in 2000, and reached the “Sunday Night Football” crowd via ad placements: in 2003, the dreamy single “Gravity Rides Every10

THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 16, 2017

thing” was plugged into minivan and beer commercials. The band’s follow-up album, “Good News for People Who Love Bad News,” came a year later, and its amorphous art-rock sound, boasting shades of the Talking Heads and the Pixies, made full contact with the mainstream. The Grammy-nominated single “Float On” topped the Alternative Songs chart and stormed music television, while “Ocean Breathes Salty” was Modest Mouse at its catchiest, with willowy guitars and a hard-swung breakdown full of new-millennium moroseness: “For your sake I hope Heaven and Hell are really there, but I wouldn’t hold my breath,” Brock riffs. “You wasted life, why wouldn’t you waste the afterlife?”

Modest Mouse, which plays at the Capitol Theatre on Oct. 13-14, remains a testament to the peculiar influence MTV wielded not so long ago—the network might reclaim such authority by embracing indie’s current outsized characters, like Father John Misty or St. Vincent (or, at least, by occasionally airing their music videos). Still, Modest Mouse retains its stature not just for reaching a summit but for staying within earshot of its base. The band released “Strangers to Ourselves” in 2015, after an eight-year sabbatical; despite all the time off, the record clanked and stomped as well as anything they’d done prior. If nothing else, it showed how fun resurrections can be.

—Matthew Trammell

King Missile From 1993 until the early aughts, rock-radio listeners could catch a meandering ballad about the morning-after search for a member gone rogue. King Missile’s “Detachable Penis,” written by the West Village poet and lead singer John S. Hall, featured predominantly on K-Rock’s daily playlists for its irreverent tone and Rotten Apple sensibility. (He ultimately finds it on St. Marks, “next to a broken toaster oven. Some guy was selling it.”) But there was more to the band than shock-jock ammo: “It was a nice little New York underground art-poetry-scene thing that somehow burbled up into your MTV/Spin world,” the guitarist Dave Rick said in 2003. Deeper King Missile cuts like “Cheesecake Truck” and “Jesus Was Way Cool” highlight Hall’s sardonic, beatnik lilt—soon after “Detachable” took off, the writer lived up to his deadpan pose and left band life behind for a law career. Missile will probably play its signature number third or fourth in this Park Slope gig, so one-hit fans can cut out early. (Union Hall, 702 Union St., Brooklyn. unionhallny.com. Oct. 13.)

Ministry / Death Grips Well before Nine Inch Nails pivoted industrial music toward the limelight, the Chicago band Ministry sculpted the genre into a comically aggressive hybrid of clenched-fist metal and avant-garde electronics engineered to burst eardrums and repel parents. The group, led by the dreadlocked and face-tatted Al Jourgensen, recently announced a co-headlining tour with Death Grips, an equally confrontational experimental rap outfit famous for surviving spectacular acts of career suicide, like dropping out of major tours or leaking albums in advance of their release dates. Either in spite of—or because of—this commitment to antagonism, both groups are quite successful, warranting a pit stop at Brooklyn Steel, a modish recently opened space in a former steel factory in East Williamsburg. (319 Frost St., Brooklyn. 888-9297849. Oct. 16.)

Chelsea Wolfe Last month, amid wildfires and hurricanes and earthquakes, the science-fiction writer John Scalzi sized up the situation and tweeted, “These aren’t the End Times, but it sure as

ILLUSTRATION BY NIV BAVARSKY

Modest Mouse wraps up an extensive fall tour with two nights at the Capitol Theatre.

NIGHT LIFE hell feels like the End Times are getting in a few dress rehearsals right about now.” All the more reason to gird yourself in obsidian tones and skulk up to this terrific double bill featuring two of the most prominent women on the darker fringes of rock. Chelsea Wolfe may have had a bit of foresight in 2011, when she named her breakout album “Apocalypsis.” Since then, she’s developed a sizable following with songs a bit too folkie for the headbangers and a bit too crushing for the average Wiccan. She’s joined

by Youth Code, a showstopping electronic duo from Los Angeles. The group’s ace in the hole is its vocalist, Sara Taylor, who sports a throatshredding rasp that could break glass and insures that, if we are living in the end times, we’re going out with a bang. (Irving Plaza, 17 Irving Pl. 212-777-6800. Oct. 17.)

1 JAZZ AND STANDARDS Carl Allen “My ultimate goal is to get to a level like Art Blakey, Art Taylor, Elvin Jones, and Billy Higgins,” Carl Allen has stated, “who every time they sit down behind a set of drums it’s swinging.” Olympian as his vision may be, Allen, undaunted, has built a long and sturdy career providing uplifting rhythm for any number of illustrious jazz artists. Leading his own quintet, Allen pays tribute to two of his guiding lights: Blakey and Jones. (Smoke, 2751 Broadway, between 105th and 106th Sts. 212-864-6662.

Oct. 13-15.)

Kenny Barron Few musicians can creatively reimagine the legacy of Thelonious Monk’s idiosyncratic genius as well as Barron, the unquestioned dean of mainstream pianists. He will explore the skewed lyricism of the enigmatic visionary on the occasion of Monk’s centenary, but promises to bring even more to the table. Trust him to buff the results to perfection. (Jazz Standard, 116 E. 27th St. 212-576-2232. Oct. 11.)

John Beasley’s Monk’estra The large-scale Monk’estra may be inspired by the beauty and mystery of Thelonious Monk’s compositions, but it’s hardly beholden to their original forms. Beasley, a pianist and arranger, molds Monk to his own needs, supported by an ensemble spilling over with worthy players, including the trumpeter Brian Lynch, the saxophonists Vincent Herring and Adam Kolker, and the drummer Kendrick Scott. (Jazz Standard, 116 E. 27th St. 212-576-2232. Oct. 12-14.)

Ron Carter Quartet Having recently turned eighty, this master bassist is officially a jazz patriarch, though his nimble fingers and agile responsiveness regularly make light of the calendar. Carter propels a fleet quartet featuring the saxophonist Jimmy Greene and the pianist Renee Rosnes. (Birdland, 315 W. 44th St. 212-581-3080. Oct. 10-14.)

Joey DeFrancesco The enduring and rigorously individualistic music of Thelonious Monk can be adapted by any instrumentalist valiant enough to face its challenges. Here, DeFrancesco, a sparkplug of a keyboardist, brings his electric organ to the ever-challenging repertoire. (Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, Broadway at 60th St. 212-258-9595.

Oct. 12-15.)

THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 16, 2017

11

MOVIES

1 OPENING

Human Flow Ai Weiwei directed this documentary,

about the rapid pace of migration in recent years.

Opening Oct. 13. (In limited release.) • Marshall Reviewed in Now Playing. Opening Oct. 13. (In wide release.) • The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) Noah Baumbach wrote and directed this drama, about conflicts among the children (Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller, and Elizabeth Marvel) of an elderly and frustrated artist (Dustin Hoffman).

Co-starring Emma Thompson, Grace Van Patten, and Adam Driver. Opening Oct. 13. (In limited re­ lease.) • Professor Marston and the Wonder Women Reviewed in Now Playing. Opening Oct. 13. (In wide release.) • Sylvio Reviewed in Now Playing. Open­ ing Oct. 13. (Nitehawk Cinema.)

1 NOW PLAYING

Battle of the Sexes Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton, who made “Little Miss Sunshine,” turn to the tennis court for this drama, set in the early nineteen-seventies. Emma Stone stars as Billie Jean King, a champion in her late twenties who has multiple barriers to contend with. First, there’s unequal pay. The gods of tennis, headed by Jack Kramer (Bill Pullman), still decree that women players are less of a draw—which, as King points out, is untrue—and therefore deserve lesser prizes. Then, there’s her husband, Larry (Austin Stowell), who could surely make a fortune advertising slacks; she loves him, but her heart belongs to her hairdresser, Marilyn (Andrea Riseborough).

Last, there’s Bobby Riggs (Steve Carell), a fiftysomething former champion and full-time chauvinist, who, having beaten King’s rival Margaret Court (Jessica McNamee), looks forward to trouncing King herself. Some hope. Carell convinces you that Riggs was more of a sad sack than a showman; Stone, trailing clouds of wistfulness from “La La Land,” may seem ill-suited to so combative a role, but, once the match starts, at the Houston Astrodome, she comes into her own, shuts off her smile, and leaves her opponent gasping like a fish. With Sarah Silverman, Elisabeth Shue, and Alan Cumming, as the doyen of tennis fashion.—Anthony Lane (Reviewed in our issue of 9/25/17.) (In wide release.)

The Florida Project Sean Baker’s new film, his first feature since “Tangerine” (2015), is set in Orlando, where a confident six-year-old named Moonee (Brooklynn Prince) lives with her mother, Halley (Bria Vinaite), at the Magic Castle Motel. Moonee’s friends—occasional partners in crime, and fellow hunters of ice cream— include Jancey (Valeria Cotto) and Scooty (Christopher Rivera), though she is also on excellent terms with Bobby (Willem Dafoe), the manager of the motel. (It’s rare, and touching, to see the gentler side of Dafoe.) The first half of the movie is almost plotless, and pleasingly dotted with escapades and scrapes; far from looking down on these kids, let alone askance at them, Baker invites us to look with them, granting us privileged access to their hopeful view of the world. It seems both natural and sad that, as the plot quickens, and as Halley gets herself into trouble for the sake of her daughter, that view should grow darker and more confused. The result 12

THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 16, 2017

earns a place among the memorable chronicles of childhood, all the more so because of its punches of bright color, and the heart-seizing image with which it ends.—A.L. (10/9/16) (In limited release.)

Hallelujah the Hills In this antic, freewheeling comedy, from 1962, the director Adolfas Mekas tells a story of love, loss, and lunacy as filtered through movie madness—his characters’ and his own. After two losers, Jack (Peter Beard) and Leo (Martin Greenbaum), spend seven years courting the same woman, Vera (each has his own version of her, played by different actresses), she runs off with a third man, and her jilted suitors head for the wilderness in raucous despair to live out a survivalist fantasy that joins Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway to Charlie Chaplin, W. C. Fields, and D. W. Griffith. Jack and Leo see their romantic disasters (shown in flashbacks) as Hollywood melodramas, their rustic gunplay as war movies, their erotic dreams as musical numbers.

Beard and Greenbaum are the world’s loudest silent comics—Beard, a sort of East Village Buster Keaton, does dangerous stunts with a self-mocking hullabaloo—and Mekas puts them through shambling but surprisingly snap-timed routines that teem with cartoonish, bittersweet whimsy. These cinematic idiots savants come off as the self-aware worshippers of clichés that everyone else in their eccentric orbit lives out blindly.—Richard Brody (New York Film Festival, Oct. 12.)

I No Longer Hear the Guitar This quiet, stark love story, from 1991, is Philippe Garrel’s most radical attempt at confessional melodrama. The long-range tale starts with a simple setup—two bohemian couples in a beach house, talking about love—and quickly crystallizes around one pair, the romantic dialectician Gérard (Benoît Régent) and a troubled woman, Marianne (Johanna ter Steege), and their bitter breakup. When they get back together, it’s a match made with heroin and other artificial pleasures. After their inevitable degradation, Gérard manages to remake his life, into which Marianne once again intrudes. Holding tight to his characters with long takes and closeups, capturing them only at the breaking points in their lives, Garrel balances a hypnotic romanticism with the frightening lurch of unsteady emotions. Leaping effortlessly, audaciously ahead in time, the fractured form embodies Garrel’s themes: the speed of life passing, the inescapable burden of memory. He dedicates the film to the singer Nico, with whom he lived in the seventies, and who died in 1988. In French.—R.B. (Metrograph, Oct. 13 and Oct. 24.)

Marshall Reginald Hudlin directs this historical drama, set in 1941, with an apt blend of vigor and empathy.

It stars Chadwick Boseman as Thurgood Marshall, a thirty-three-year-old N.A.A.C.P. attorney who is dispatched to Bridgeport, Connecticut, to represent a black man, Joseph Spell (Sterling K. Brown), who is accused of the rape and attempted murder of a wealthy white woman (Kate Hudson) for whom he worked as a chauffeur. As an out-ofstate attorney, Marshall has to be paired with a local lawyer; his reluctant partner, Sam Friedman (Josh Gad), is an insurance specialist with no defense experience. Meanwhile, the judge hearing the case high-handedly bars Marshall from speaking in

court, reducing him to Friedman’s silent counsel.

Much of the action is set in the courtroom, where Hudlin (working with a script by the Bridgeport attorney Michael Koskoff and his son, the screenwriter Jacob Koskoff) lends physical energy to the language of ideas. He ties the dialectical action to Marshall’s energetic and plainspoken brilliance— and to the behind-the-scenes insights of Marshall’s wife, Buster (Keesha Sharp), and a random woman he meets in a bar. Meanwhile, the movie urgently dramatizes the threat of racist violence that poisons personal relationships and judicial proceedings alike.—R.B. (In wide release.)

Night Catches Us Tanya Hamilton’s complex treatment of the Black Panther legacy, from 2010 (and set in 1976), is an emotion-charged memory play with a prickly social conscience. It contains one human time bomb—a trigger-happy street kid (Amari Cheatom) with delusions of political glory—and several characters carrying scars from a fatal police-Panther showdown. Kerry Washington plays it cool and smart as a Philadelphia civil-rights attorney with a radical past, a single mother whose precocious daughter (Jamara Griffin) has never learned exactly why cops killed her father. Anthony Mackie plays her former Panther comrade, who rekindles their romantic feelings when he returns to their Germantown neighborhood for his father’s funeral. His presence renews accusations that he betrayed the movement as a snitch. More than the night, it’s the past that catches them. The result is a personal work of art rather than a docudrama, and it was a stirring début for Hamilton, as a keen, intuitive writerdirector (she has done most of her work since then in episodic television).—Michael Sragow (MOMA, Oct. 12, and streaming.)

Our Souls at Night An unhurried coda to the partnership of Robert Redford and Jane Fonda, which began with “The Chase,” in 1966. Here, they play a couple of widowed neighbors, Louis Waters and Addie Moore, in a small Colorado town. Both are lonely, though only Addie has the nerve to confront the problem; she comes around one evening and asks Louis to sleep with her—or, at any rate, to go to sleep beside her. The directness of the question gets the story going with a jolt, of the kind in which Fonda has specialized, and it’s a shame, some viewers will feel, that the rest of the film, directed by Ritesh Batra, is dedicated to softening the blow. The unorthodox behavior of these senior citizens is at first condemned, then mocked, and finally accepted by their peers, and it even assists the younger generation— Addie’s unhappy son (Matthias Schoenaerts) and his no less dispirited child (Iain Armitage), who, with Louis’s encouragement, even learns how to cast aside his phone. Much of this is too hokey by half, yet the two leading actors, their skills unfaded, command your attention to the end. With Bruce Dern at his grouchiest.—A.L. (10/9/17) (In limited release and on Netflix.)

Professor Marston and the Wonder Women The writer and director Angela Robinson illuminates an extraordinary corner of pop-culture history with a bland and textureless drama. It’s based on the true story of a married couple—William Moulton Marston (Luke Evans), a Harvard professor in the psychology department, and Elizabeth Marston (Rebecca Hall), a newly minted Ph.D. in the field and a law-school graduate—who become jointly enamored of their new research assistant, Olive Byrne (Bella Heathcote), and set up a ménage à trois. Booted from the university, they

MOVIES struggle to make a living for their growing family (William fathers children with both women). But their visit to a Greenwich Village S. & M. parlor inspires William’s vision of a new kind of superhero, and he decides to write a comic book embodying both his sexual fantasies and what he calls his feminist ideals; it becomes the Wonder Woman series. The drama is shown in flashbacks from a hostile interrogation of William by a representative of a conservative religious group; the movie is sympathetic but simplistic, depicting an exceptional story with little energy or sense of physical presence. (Hall’s high-relief line readings, though, are memorable.)—R.B. (In wide release.)

Sylvio In this exquisite yet uproarious fantasy, Sylvio (Sylvio Bernardi) is a frustrated cubicle jockey at a debt-collection agency. Sylvio happens to be a gorilla; he can’t speak, but he does everything else that humans do, strolling and driving through his home town of Baltimore in his trademark red sunglasses and red parka. (Bernardi wears a gorilla costume throughout the film.) The drama involves the conflict of artistic dreams and commercial realities. Sylvio is an aspiring puppeteer who, in his spare time, makes a sweetly melancholy Web series showing a balding and stiff-armed Every-white-man doll on miniature sets. But when Sylvio goes to a local TV studio to collect a debt he accidentally ends up on the air; though he’s an artist of refined sensibility, he becomes famous for going wild, and a crisis of conscience results. The directors, Kentucker Audley (who co-stars as a talk-show host) and Albert

Birney, embrace both sides of Sylvio’s temperament, realizing his frenzied outbursts (including a vehicular-chase scene) as imaginatively and as delicately as his self-doubt. Bernardi is an actor of genius; his Janus-faced pantomime, as Sylvio struggles voicelessly for a place among human chatterboxes, channels the infinite grace of the great silent-film comedians.—R.B. (Nitehawk Cinema.)

Victoria and Abdul In 1887, a young Indian clerk named Abdul Karim (Ali Fazal) is summoned to England to perform a ceremonial duty. He makes the mistake of looking at Queen Victoria (Judi Dench), rather than averting his eyes, and she returns the look with interest.

Soon he finds himself hired as her personal footman, and then as her munshi, or teacher; his duties range from teaching her Urdu to dancing with her, on a warm Florentine night, and serving her tea on a windblown Scottish hillside. Such intimacy is an outrage, in the view of the royal household, and determined efforts are made to halt the unlikely romance. Stephen Frears’s new venture into period drama, stiff with formal costumes and lightly trimmed in anecdotal charm, feels impossibly distant from the mischief that he once made, and the emotional devastation that he charted, in “Dangerous Liaisons” (1998). Dench, as expected, commands the scene with monarchical ease, but, despite the barbs in Lee Hall’s screenplay, the fusty colonial attitudes of the period emerge unscathed.

With Michael Gambon, as the Prime Minister, and Eddie Izzard, as the Prince of Wales.—A.L. (10/2/17) (In wide release.)

ART

1 MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES New Museum “Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon” The four nouns in the title of this large group show go off like improvised explosive devices, boding civil strife. Not to worry. The works, by forty-two mostly L.G.B.T.Q.-identified artists, who range in age from twenty-seven to sixtyseven, artist teams, and collectives tend to be elegant and ingratiating, temperate, or even a little boring—though not unpleasantly so.

(A little boredom may come as welcome relief to our lately adrenaline-overdosed body politic.) One rare example of an aggressive affront is a series of fantastically nasty small works by the reliably dazzling Los Angeles-born, Berlin-based, biracial, transgender artist and performer Vaginal Davis: abstract reliefs that suggest mangled faces, viscera, and genitalia, painted in a blood-red mixture of substances, including nail polish. (Black artists account for most of the works in the show that pack punches.) The happiest surprise is a trend in painting that takes inspiration from ideas of indeterminate sexuality for revived formal invention. Two painters who stand out are Tschabalala Self and Christina Quarles. Each rhymes ambiguous imagery of gyrating bodies with dynamics of disparate pictorial techniques. Each artist may call to mind early-nineteen-forties Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning, who fractured Picassoesque figuration on the way 14

THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 16, 2017

to physically engaging abstraction. Self and Quarles play that process in reverse, adapting abstract aesthetics to carnal representation.

Whether intentionally or not, they effectively return to an old well that suddenly yields fresh water. Through Jan. 21.

Studio Museum in Harlem “Fictions” This lively exhibition, the museum’s fifth in a series of surveys of new tendencies in art, presents nineteen emerging artists of African descent. As the title suggests, many works imagine fantastic or speculative worlds. The painter Christina Quarles depicts a surreal scene in which slumbering figures occupy parallel planes of existence, delineated by contrasting patterns.

Michael Demps’s nearby sculpture—a tilted obelisk supported by scaffolding—is inspired by medieval alchemy; its rough, gray surface of candle wax and electromagnetic crystals will morph in response to sound waves and humidity during the show. A few installation works stand out as anchors, including Allison Janae Hamilton’s immersive “Foresta,” which conjures a mythical wood with birch logs, horsehair, and a video of raindrops projected onto a wall of tambourines. In Paul Stephen Benjamin’s “God Bless America,” dozens of stacked monitors flash, playing video clips including Aretha Franklin singing at Jimmy Carter’s Inauguration and Lil Wayne’s “God Bless Amerika” video, from 2015, a desolate riff on the original song. Benjamin’s layered meditation

ART on the African-American experience implies that the “fiction” may be that of social progress. Through Jan. 7.

1 GALLERIES—CHELSEA

Chris Ofili Black-and-white canvases hang on a chain-link enclosure inside the gallery, facing inward—they’re not easy to see. With this installation, titled “Paradise Lost,” the Turner Prize-winning British artist, who lives and works in Trinidad, explores confinement, freedom, and beauty, in homage to Maya Angelou. (Earlier this year, he unveiled a new tapestry, “The Caged Bird’s Song,” at London’s National Gallery.) Angelou is not the only writer alluded to here: in a striking abstraction composed of tiny triangles, tall letters at each side spell “Emheyo Bahabba,” the name of an influential Trinidadian poet, musician, and artist—a close friend of Ofili’s—who died in 2015. Beyond the enclosure, the gallery’s walls are filled with scenes of tropical deities, overlaid with a chain-link pattern—an effect that suggests that the viewers are imprisoned, too. Through Oct. 21. (Zwirner, 525 W. 19th St. 212-727-2070.)

1 GALLERIES—DOWNTOWN

© EMMET AND EDITH GOWIN/COURTESY PACE/MACGILL GALLERY

Eillie Ga In 2015, the peripatetic video artist, who recently relocated from Brooklyn to Stockholm, was in the Greek islands to research messages in bottles. (The first one was probably launched by Aristotle’s student Theophrastus, around 310 B.C.) When Ga began volunteering with Syrian refugees arriving on boats, she kept her camera running. The resulting half-hour-long video includes voice-over interviews with a Dutch beachcomber and an English collector of driftwood, and juxtaposes lingering shots of peacefully lapping Aegean tides with desperate shouts of “Ya, Allah!” and piles of abandoned orange life jackets. It’s a loosely gathered bundle of meditations on distance, dislocation, and identity, as thoughtprovoking as it is discomfiting. Through Oct. 22.

(Bureau, 178 Norfolk St. 212-227-2783.)

Claes Oldenburg, among many others—is the subject of this impeccable show, organized by his biographer, Judith Stein, with works by more than forty artists. Most are from the nineteensixties, including an early Dan Flavin fluorescent sculpture, a long golden canvas speckled with turquoise spots by Larry Poons, and a large oil painting by Alfred Leslie, an impastoed marvel in pink, white, and yellow squares. Best of all are the portraits. A pencil sketch of Bellamy by the art critic Sidney Tillim catches him from behind, with a phone to his ear; two clay statues

by Daisy Youngblood incorporate the art dealer’s hair; and in a red-and-green pastel by the sculptor George Segal, Bellamy is creeping off the edge of the page. Bellamy, best known as the founder of the avant-gardist Green gallery, on Fifty-seventh Street, was a behind-the-scenes type; in a picture by Alex Katz, from 1960 (on loan from the Whitney), he looks as if he wanted to recede into the warm gray background. Art history has other ideas. Through Oct. 28. (Freeman, 140 Grand St. 212-966-5154.)

1 GALLERIES—QUEENS

Genesis Belanger You might describe this Brooklyn sculptor’s solo début as funny-pages Surrealism, as her unglazed but richly pigmented ceramics play games with everyday objects. A four-foot stick of gum

leans against a wall in “Big Yummy”; in “Dog in Heels,” an extra-long frankfurter nestles into a wedge-heeled woman’s shoe. Crumpled cigarettes, slumping drinking straws, misplaced body parts, and a series of oversized stoneware matches (titled “Burn-Out”) allude to addiction, unexpressed anguish, and sexual dysfunction. The contrast between the works’ sharp lines and their matte surfaces is half icon and half emoji. The standout is a stomach-shaped vase, titled “Pieta,” sprouting two sets of fingertips—the better to hold a bunch of porcelain bananas. Through Nov. 9. (Mrs. Gallery, 60-40 56th Dr. 347-841-6149.)

Eva O’Leary The photographs by this recent Yale M.F.A. graduate (who recently contributed to this magazine) have an ambiguous aura of menace. Shirtless young men pumping their fists in a crowd, in “Monument Climb,” are students at Penn State, not alt-right hooligans, but the resemblance is striking. In “Blonde,” a young woman gazes offscreen, as if at some approaching calamity. The strongest images are also the strangest, such as “#powerofmakeup,” in which a woman’s face is split in two by different shades of foundation. It suggests the “uncanny valley” effect—the discomfort evoked by robots and dolls that look almost, but not quite, human. Through Oct. 30. (Meyohas, 43-01 21st St. meyohas.com.)

Sojourner Truth Parsons If they were smaller, these seductive canvases might be mistaken for grade-school art projects, with their messily collaged, brightly painted canvas leaves, petals, and butterflies. But the young Canadian artist, who is now based in L.A., makes works that are ambitiously large; at this scale, her compositions have an assertive, brooding sophistication. A slapdash sunflower blares from the black square of “Everybody Anyone,” its round center cluttered with glued-on bugs. In “View from Diane II,” the long stems of a pair of Pepto-Bismol-colored roses cross on a skyblue background. Horizontal bands of black canvas traverse the painting like warped venetian blinds—or perhaps the bars of a cell. The theme of incarceration recurs in “For Every Black Woman in Prison,” a storm of angular, cutout butterflies and spiny flowers. Throughout, Parsons’s playful approach is balanced by a refreshingly obdurate edge. Through Oct. 22. (Downs & Ross, 96 Bowery. 646-741-9138.)

“Deadeye Dick: Richard Bellamy and His Circle” The storied gallerist Richard Bellamy—who died in 1998 and was the first to show Dan Flavin and

Emmet Gowin spent nearly two decades photographing live moths in Central and South America. The exquisite results (including “Index 8. February 2007, Integral Forest Otonga, El Reventador, and Otongachi Reserve, Ecuador”) are on view in his show “Here on Earth—Notes from the Field,” at the Pace/MacGill gallery.

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DANCE New York City Ballet Of the four programs in the last week of the fall season, you can’t go wrong with the allBalanchine bill, which includes the luminous “Square Dance,” a work that exemplifies the Balanchinean virtues of balance, manners, and musicality. Also on the program: “La Valse,” a stylish ballroom ballet, and the seldom seen “Cortège Hongrois,” a suite in which classical-ballet numbers alternate with bootsand-ribbons dances in the Hungarian style.

There is also a mixed bill (Oct. 13-14) of new works by young choreographers (among them Troy Schumacher and Lauren Lovette), as well as one (Oct. 12) of works by three of the leading lights on the scene: Christopher Wheeldon, Justin Peck, and Alexei Ratmansky. • Oct. 10-11 at 7:30: “The Red Violin,” “In Memory of . . .,” and “Stravinsky Violin Concerto.” • Oct. 12 at 7:30: “Liturgy,” “Polyphonia,” “Odessa,” and “The Times Are Racing.” • Oct. 13-14 at 8: “The Chairman Dances,” “The Wind Still Brings,” “Composer’s Holiday,” “Not Our Fate,” and “Pulcinella Variations.” • Oct. 14 at 2 and Oct. 15 at 3: “Square Dance,” “Duo Concertant,” “La Valse,” and “Cortège Hongrois.”

(David H. Koch, Lincoln Center. 212-721-6500.)

Ballet West The last time the Salt Lake City-based company appeared in New York, it was still basking in the afterglow of starring in a reality TV show, “Breaking Pointe.” Now that the hoopla has passed, Ballet West can be seen on its own terms. At the Joyce, the troupe dips its foot into the Balanchine rep with “Chaconne,” a lyrical ballet set to music from Gluck’s opera “Orfeo ed Euridice.” It also presents a late work by Gerald Arpino, co-founder of the Joffrey Ballet; his “Ruth, Ricordi per Due” is a sorrowful elegy set to Albinoni’s famous adagio (prominently featured in “Manchester by the Sea”).

These oldies are counterbalanced by recent ballets by Nicolo Fonte, Val Caniparoli, and Africa Guzman. (175 Eighth Ave., at 19th St. 212242-0800. Oct. 11-14.)

Fall for Dance Kyle Abraham, a purveyor of thoughtful, poetic meditations on American culture, has created one of several new works premièring at the festival. His “Drive” is included in the fourth program (Oct. 11-12), along with a collaboration between Sara Mearns—a principal at New York City Ballet—and the German-born hip-hop choreographer Honji Wang. Another première, Mark Morris’s new solo suite for American Ballet Theatre’s Apollonian star David Hallberg, anchors the final bill (Oct. 13-14), which also includes a rare appearance by the Danza Contemporánea de Cuba, a modern–dance troupe based in Havana. (City Center, 131 W. 55th St. 212-581-1212. Oct. 11-14.)

Joshua Beamish / MOVETHECOMPANY Long based in Vancouver and New York, Beamish is best known in New York for his contribution to Wendy Whelan’s “Restless Creature.”

For his company’s BAM début, he brings “Saudade.” Using for its title a hard-to-translate Portuguese word (“a longing for things that 16

THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 16, 2017

may or may not exist” gets close), the work takes a wistful look at modern relationships.

Set to a cello score by Hildur Gudnadóttir that’s at once gloomy and propulsive, the piece features six strong men, often outstretched and sometimes shirtless, who touch one another in a looping series of encounters that are equally intense and evanescent. (BAM Fisher, 321 Ashland Pl., Brooklyn. 718-636-4100. Oct. 11-15.)

Rebecca Davis “The Final Hands Count Beginning Sounds,” the title of Davis’s new work, might be a fragment of a Zen koan or a line in a haiku—appropriate associations considering the enigmatic spareness of such recent Davis pieces as “Bloowst Windku.” Here, four women sit, kneel, stand, and spread their bodies along the floor, slowly and methodically shifting among positions that are occasionally strange. (The Chocolate Factory, 5-49 49th Ave., Long Island City. 866-811-4111. Oct. 11-14. Through Oct. 21.)

Roy Assaf Dance More than a decade ago, Assaf made a strong impression in New York as a dancer, moving in unison with the Israeli choreographer Emanuel Gat. Since then, Assaf, who is also Israeli, has emerged as a noted choreographer, but only now is his company making its New York début, bringing two short works that have become his calling cards. “Six Years Later” (2011) is a duet of gruff intimacy for Assaf and Madison Hoke. “The Hill” (2012) is a rough-andtumble trio for three men who might be Israeli soldiers; they goof around, tussle with one another, and end up isolated as the Bee Gees’ “I Started a Joke” plays. (Baryshnikov Arts Center, 450 W. 37th St. 866-811-4111. Oct. 12-13.)

James Thierrée / “La Grenouille Avait Raison (The Toad Knew)” Thierrée is a physical-theatre artist and an acrobat both by blood—he is the grandson of Charlie Chaplin, and grew up in a circus— and by temperament; he moves with a silken, silvery ease, defying the laws of gravity. He is also a wizard of stage design. “La Grenouille” is set in a dreamlike maze of scientific instruments, interlocking passageways, and flying objects. Narrative, however, is not his forte.

The fragments of story revolve around a pair of siblings trapped in a magical world, but the show is best enjoyed as a series of beautiful, surreal set pieces. (BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, 30 Lafayette Ave., Brooklyn. 718636-4100. Oct. 12-14.)

Yossi Berg and Oded Graf “Come Jump with Me” is a manic satire of life in Israel, or life in a state of perpetual crisis. Presented by the American Dance Festival at New York Live Arts, it is a duet choreographed by Berg and Graf, performed by Berg and the charismatic dancer Olivia Court Mesa amid many props: jump ropes, lollipops, tape.

The tone of both recited text and absurd action is playful, almost cartoonish, but there is a strong undercurrent of desperation as the piece pokes at taboos. (219 W. 19th St. 212-9240077. Oct. 13-14.)

DANCE Kazu Kumagai The improvisations of this Japanese-born tap dancer tend to fall into the same shape, building into volcanic eruptions, subsiding, and building again. When he’s inspired, it’s thrilling; when he isn’t, it’s still impressive. For the program “Hear/Here,” he’s joined by live musicians, including the soulful singer Sabrina Clery, and by the young and ebullient hoofer Gabe Winns.

Each night also features a different tap legend: the old-school entertainer Ted Levy on Friday, the jazz-tap matriarch Brenda Bufalino on Saturday. (92nd Street Y, Lexington Ave. at 92nd St. 212-415-5500. Oct. 13-14.)

Luca Veggetti The Italian choreographer draws upon a longstanding interest in Noh drama for “Left-RightLeft,” a modern ritual of transformation with time-honored ingredients. A child actor recites from the classic Noh plays “Okina” and “Hagoromo” (translated into English by Donald Keene), and the live music is by the Noh masters Genjiro Okura and Rokurobyoe Fujita. But each of the three sections features a different dancer: the Butoh veteran Akira Kasai, the younger Butoh-trained iconoclast Yukio Suzuki, and the elegant, elongated contemporary dancer Megumi Nakamura. (Japan Society, 333 E. 47th St. 212-715-1258. Oct. 13-14.)

ABOVE & BEYOND

Open House New York Historic residential and commercial buildings will be opened to the public during this annual series of architecture tours and talks.

Attendees will enjoy access to more than two hundred and seventy-five sites across the city, along with lectures from designers and developers. Highlights include the African Burial Ground National Monument, in Tribeca; the restored Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House, in the financial district; the rooftop farms of Brooklyn Grange; a trip to the top of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine; the Edgar Allan Poe Cottage, in the Bronx; the Met Breuer, on the Upper East Side; and the Kings County Distillery, the city’s oldest operating whiskey distiller. (Various locations. ohny. org. Oct. 14-15.)

less dissident with a pragmatic tone, convinced that informed citizens must become “historians of the future,” shaping the course of events before they occur, as described in his 1982 book, “The Fate of the Earth,” a rallying cry for total nuclear disarmament. After his death, in 2014, the Nation Institute began the Jonathan Schell Memorial Lecture on the Fate of the Earth, an annual environmental talk now in its second year. For this installment, Elizabeth Kolbert, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Sixth Extinction” and a staff writer for this magazine, discusses a selfless incentive for resisting climate change and nuclear war, arguing that damage to the atmosphere threatens entire species of plants and animals—many of which have existed on the earth millions of years longer than humans. (Alvin Johnson/J.M. Kaplan Hall, 66 W. 12th St. fateoftheearth.org. Oct. 11 at 7.)

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ILLUSTRATION BY PABLO AMARGO

READINGS AND TALKS Brooklyn Brainery This crowd-sourced classroom offers talks and affordable courses on a myriad of topics. This week, the film producer turned tech-project manager Eve MacKnight maps the arc of media transformation since the turn of the millennium. Zeroing in on the fields of music, publishing, and cinema, which have all shifted radically, she outlines the chronological progression of content creation and consumption, starting with Napster’s file-sharing fever dream and running all the way to the YouTube stars and subscription-based streaming services of today.

(190 Underhill Ave., Brooklyn. brooklynbrainery. com. Oct. 11 at 6:30.)

The New School As a budding author in his mid-twenties during the nineteen-sixties, Jonathan Schell reported on a world trembling with war and the possibility of nuclear holocaust. He grew into a fear

Rizzoli Bookstore We may tend to consider real-estate development in the context of shimmering modern cities with skylines dotted by cranes. But the balance of political, economic, intellectual, and social factors that cause (and counter) the impulse to build has been present in major societies throughout history, from Alexander the Great’s Macedonia to the Second French Empire. The authors Herb Auerbach and Ira Nadel dig up the legacy of broken ground and raised monuments in “Placemakers: Emperors, Kings, Entrepreneurs—A Brief History of Real Estate Development,” with a close eye on the motives that drove pivotal decisions about land and population. From the world’s first lighthouse to the condos and plazas of today, our infrastructures tell stories as insightful as our ledgers and records, the authors suggest; they launch their hardcover with this reading, moderated by Frances Halsband, the architect and former dean of architecture at Pratt. (1133 Broadway. 212-7592424. Oct. 13 at 6.)

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F§D & DRINK

Sen Sakana 28 W. 44th St. (212-221-9560) The history of cuisine is the history of immigration. In one chapter from the early twentieth century, thousands of rural Japanese laborers crossed the Pacific Ocean and settled on the Peruvian coast, to work its expansive sugar and cotton plantations. The diaspora of Japanese emigrants, known as Nikkei, today makes up less than one per cent of Peru’s population, but its cuisine has become an international star. In 2013, the Spanish chef Ferran Adrià opened a Nikkei restaurant in Barcelona, and earlier this year Maido, a Nikkei restaurant in Lima, was named eighth on the World’s Best Restaurants list. Sen Sakana, a cavernous new restaurant in midtown, which opened in July, is one of the first, and best, examples of Nikkei food in New York. The vastness of the space, with an incredible hundred and ninety seats filling its four block-spanning dining rooms (estimated to have cost the owner Allan Wartski seven million dollars, partly due to long delays in acquiring the necessary building permits), precludes the need for another one anytime soon.

The chefs Mina Newman, who is of Peruvian descent, and Taku Nagai, who is from Osaka, Japan, have created a delicious and straightforward, if unsurprising, introduction to the pleasures of Nikkei. Aji amarillo, the tangy Peruvian 18

THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 16, 2017

pepper with subtle flavor-packed heat, brightens many small, typically Japanese dishes, such as the yogurty, house-crafted tofu, the “addictive” cucumber salad, and the unforgettable black-feather chicken wings. Quinoa, native to the Andes Mountains, also makes some toothsome appearances: crisped and offered as a two-dollar addition to the sushi offerings, or deep-fried with black vinegar to encrust the juicy chicken nanban.

Fresh fish, raw or citrus-marinated, is the heart of Nikkei cuisine, and it’s offered here in many variations beautiful to both the eye and the taste buds. Classic nigiri is so fresh and delicate that soy sauce shouldn’t be used; Nikkei nigiri adds Peruvian flavors—like pisco (fiery Peruvian brandy) or papa morada (purplepotato purée)—to the fish. The best news of one recent evening’s meal was that a good ceviche can now be found in midtown. Tender corvina was served in a bowl of perfectly balanced leche de tigre, the citrusy and spicy broth that’s standard in most Peruvian ceviches, and made here with yuzu, Japan’s superpower version of a lemon. Salt-bomb corn kernels from two Andean varieties—big, soft, white choclo and small, crunchy, yellow cancha— brilliantly cut the acidity. A waiter arrived with a pisco sour and a shot of shochu, and two diners clinked glasses to Pacific crossings. (Dishes, $25-$40; tasting menu, $125; gratuity included.)

—Carolyn Kormann

1 BAR TAB

Honey’s 93 Scott Ave., Brooklyn (401-481-9205) The mead served at this thoughtful Bushwick cocktail bar is dry and floral, more like natural wine than the cloyingly sweet stuff one imagines swilling in a land of dungeons and dragons. This is not to say that you’ll want for magic. The co-owners Raphael Lyon and Arley Marks are devoted herbalists who pick many of their mead ingredients upstate, and there’s something indelibly witchy about drinking rounds of Floralia (made with juniper, lavender, and marjoram) from delicate Nick and Nora glasses at a bar festooned with the spoils of their frequent foraging trips, such as a branch of downy pink sumac berries. A window behind the bar looks onto the facility where Lyon and Marks produce and age their wines, in racks of ponderous barrels. On a recent Friday evening, there were only a few bottles left of the pleasantly grassy Memento Mori, for which a hundred and fifty pounds of wild dandelion flowers were collected. There are also imaginative cocktails like the Ocean Martini, which combines Material vodka with house-cured autumn olives and seawater hauled in from Montauk. “We’ve gone through about thirty gallons since we opened,” Marks, who previously devised cocktails at Mission Chinese Food and Dimes, tabulated, noting that the “seawater is very complex,” containing notes of umami and sweetness. Kvass, a nonalcoholic tonic fermented from rye, is tart and intriguing. (Think kombucha, but sexier.) The elegant industrial setting is low-key, inclusive of patrons both offbeat (one woman wore twinkling fairy lights in her hair) and not (men in khaki shorts and pastel polos). “In our fantasy of the world,” Lyon said, “having fun while drinking our mead is simply a normal thing to do.”—Wei Tchou

PHOTOGRAPH BY CHRISTAAN FELBER FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE

TABLES FOR TWO

THE TALK OF THE TOWN COMMENT DISASTERS WILL HAPPEN

extended to Florida and Texas after Hurricanes Harvey and Irma. Days after Trump’s visit, nearly half the populaonald Trump is a man given to tion was still without clean water, some superlatives, and last week, in ninety per cent had no electricity, and Puerto Rico, where he had flown for sewage pooled in the streets.

The island had voices that could the first of two trips to survey scenes of disaster—the aftermath of Hurri- plead, but not enough that could decane Maria there, and a mass shooting mand by, say, threatening to withhold in Las Vegas—he offered one up. At a a key vote in Congress if action wasn’t briefing in an airport hangar, Trump taken. (Tellingly, politicians in New introduced Representative Jenniffer York and Florida, where the Puerto González Colón by saying that she “ac- Rican diaspora’s vote counts, were among tually represents the largest number of the quickest to respond to the crisis.) people of any congressperson in the The President has made it clear that United States. I know that. It’s 3.5 mil- what he expects as a price for his attenlion people.” Observers might have been tion is an absence of criticism. In Puerto forgiven for thinking he didn’t know Rico, he said that the “nice” people there that: in the two weeks since Maria had had given him and his team “the highhit, Trump had repeatedly avoided ac- est grades” and didn’t “play politics.” knowledging that Puerto Ricans are Earlier, he had dismissed those who did otherwise as “ingrates.” citizens of the United States.

If Puerto Rico is a story about the Nevertheless, González Colón, Puerto Rico’s sole representative, is not a full member of Congress—technically, she is a resident commissioner—and she cannot vote on passing legislation. And although Puerto Ricans can vote in Presidential elections if they move to one of the states, they cannot do so on the island, which has no Electoral College votes. Indeed, the crisis in Puerto Rico is a case study of what happens when people with little political capital need the help of their government. (The U.S. Virgin Islands, which were also struck

by Hurricane Maria, are in a similarly dire situation.) Aid, in the form of both logistical equipment and waivers on programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, was slow in arriving, compared with the help

cost of the lack of political representation, Las Vegas is about the consequences of a lack of political courage.

In that city, Stephen Paddock, a single gunman in a thirty-second-floor hotel room, killed fifty-eight people, attending an outdoor concert hundreds of yards away, within the space of ten minutes. Trump argued that the catastrophe had nothing to do with anything except Paddock’s “evil,” and the Republican Party was right alongside him. Repeating what has become a standard G.O.P. line, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said that it was “particularly inappropriate” to talk about gun-safety measures after a mass shooting. But Paddock was able to kill so many people—leaving nearly five hundred more injured—because of a distinctly American political pathology: a resistance to laws regulating the ownership of guns, including assault weapons. Paddock had twenty-three guns in his hotel room; he owned more than forty, thirty-three of which he had bought legally in the past year, in a buying spree that had triggered no alerts.

Too many politicians treat the gun lobby and other donors as their true constituents, even though polls show that a majority of Americans would support common-sense gun legislation. After the shooting at Sandy Hook, whose victims included all the children in a firstgrade class except a girl who had played dead, legislation was introduced calling for a universal background check that would have closed the so-called gunshow loophole. Seventy-four per cent of the National Rifle Association’s members supported such a measure, but the

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ILLUSTRATIONS BY TOM BACHTELL

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N.R.A. itself lobbied against it, and it was defeated in the Senate.

The Nevada shooting revealed that the gun laws are more lax than most people knew. Nearly everyone supports the existing prohibition on the sale of almost all fully automatic weapons—that is, machine guns. A dozen of the guns in Paddock’s hotel room were semi-automatic AR-15-style assault rifles, but he had at least one “bump stock,” an accessory that allowed the rifles to fire as if they were automatic. Bump stocks can be purchased legally; until last week, Walmart sold them on its Web site. This means that there isn’t really a ban on the sale of machine guns, just a rule that requires dealers to sell them in two parts.

Last Thursday, the N.R.A. said that it was open to discussing some regulations, though not a ban, on bump stocks.

Passing any regulation would be a victory, but this would be a small, sad one, leaving unmodified semi-automatic

rifles—the kind of gun used at Sandy Hook and in many other mass shootings—readily available. Meanwhile, a vote on a bill to deregulate silencers, absurdly packaged in the House as the Hearing Protection Act, was delayed after the Las Vegas shooting, in part because it raised questions about what might have happened if Paddock had had one.

(The Senate version is the Silencers Help Us Save Hearing, or shush, Act.) But the bill is still in play, as is one that would allow more people to carry concealed weapons across state lines.

When one pretends that politics have no role, problems can be viewed as mere quirks of chance and of character. In this light, Hurricane Maria was a natural disaster that had nothing to do with climate change, and Puerto Ricans just needed to stop behaving as if, in Trump’s words, everything should be “done for them.” (His idea of doing things for them involved tossing out rolls of paper tow-

els, as if they were hats at one of his rallies.) Similarly, Stephen Paddock was an aberration—“The wires are screwed up,” Trump noted—and Las Vegas was “a miracle,” because, thanks to the quick actions of first responders, the death toll wasn’t higher. According to the Gun Violence Archive, there have been nearly three hundred mass shootings this year. The wonder will be if there isn’t another one before all the Las Vegas victims are out of the hospital, just as it can be no surprise that, while Trump was in Nevada, another storm, Nate, was gathering over the warming waters of the Caribbean.

The atmosphere is packed with carbon dioxide, and American homes are filled with high-powered guns. Both situations demand a political response, not as a partisan exercise but as a common calling. We live in a republic of lowered expectations, but we can insist on more, from our President and from ourselves.

—Amy Davidson Sorkin

PARIS POSTCARD IN SEARCH OF AMERICA

publicans of the Rust Belt or the bears of Yellowstone Park (“Mon point de départ est Denver, dans le Colorado”).

“We’re trying to say to French readers that America is a more complex country than we thought,” François Busnel, the editor-in-chief, said the other day.

“There are fantastic parts, there are nightmares, but let’s try to understand.”

The magazine is a side project for Busnel, who is well known in France

as the host of “La Grande Librairie,” a prime-time television program devoted to the celebration of literature.

(Americans might need a special periodical to get their heads around that.)

When Trump was elected, Busnel realized that many of the American writers of his acquaintance had foreseen what the political experts had missed.

“Everybody was saying, ‘Hillary’s going to win,’ but when I read John Irving,

n a recent Monday night in the O First Arrondissement of Paris, a crowd of cowboys, Native Americans, Uncle Sams, and federal agents packed the terrace of a restaurant. They drank Bloody Marys and draft beers. They ate popcorn and wore buckskin vests— this was a faintly ironic theme party, thrown by the editors of America, a new magazine that, since launching in the spring, has sold nearly a hundred thousand copies in France.

The magazine’s tagline is “America like you’ve never read it.” A trimonthly that will be published until the fall of 2020, America was conceived to help French readers make sense of its namesake in the age of Trump. The editorial mix comprises long interviews with American novelists (Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, James Ellroy); essays and excerpts in translation (Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “My President Was Black”); and original reported pieces by famous French writers set loose among the Re22

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“Can the chef prepare it in some way no one has ever prepared anything before?”

Donald Ray Pollock, Russell Banks, Jim Harrison, they told me the opposite: of an America that’s a little disenchanted, a little forsaken; that, since September 11th, doesn’t know anymore where it lives.” The weirder and faker the news got, the more American literature seemed the most credible vector of truth. “We’re living in a profoundly novelistic era,” Busnel said.

“America’s a country that was capable of electing George W. Bush two times in a row, and then electing two times in a row his exact opposite, Barack Obama. How can you explain that?”

The magazine’s view of America is both slightly anachronistic (lots of hoboes and road trips) and exceptionally well informed. The first issue offered a sort of CliffsNotes on books that the editors deemed prescient: Sinclair Lewis’s “It Can’t Happen Here,” Bret Easton Ellis’s “American Psycho,” and “The Plot Against America,” by Philip Roth.

“And if the world’s experts had taken the time to read the great American novels instead of their polls?” the headline read. “They would have discovered a country haunted by a tendency toward authoritarianism, the spectre of Fascism, the growing shadow of a blond-maned billionaire.” The second issue included a great article by the French novelist Laurent Gaudé on the inventor of barbed wire. The third issue, whose publication the party marked, was dedicated to the F.B.I., “the ruthless mirror of America’s demons.” It featured an infographic on America’s police forces. “There exist more than 18,000 police bodies in the United States, structured according to a complicated administrative architecture,” the chart read, noting that county officers were the ones in “Miami Vice” and “Longmire,” while city police could be found in “Serpico” and “The Wire.”

At the restaurant, an American took the opportunity to drink her first decent Margarita in several years. When she asked a guest wearing a sheriff ’s badge what his favorite book about America was, he answered, “Rien,” but a survey of several other partygoers yielded thought-provoking results: “Anything by Kurt Vonnegut. ‘Timequake,’ probably.” “ ‘L’Attrape-Coeurs.’ ” (That turned out to be “The Catcher in the Rye.”)

“There was one about the suffering of the American people. It came out in July last year,” one man said, opening his Amazon app to search, unsuccessfully, for the title. “ ‘No Country for Old Men,’ for the beauty of the landscape.” “ ‘Tropic of Cancer,’ by Henry Miller.”

Busnel’s favorite book about America is “Travels with Charley,” by John Steinbeck. He was hoping that America, taken in its entirety, would assist not only today’s French people but also future generations in making sense of a tumultuous moment. “I’m interested in how novelists can tell history again,” he said. “If you want to understand France during the last war, I would suggest to read André Malraux or Camus. That’s what we would like to do. The sixteen issues are going to be a map of America, but also a memoir of its time.” The fourth issue comes out in January. The theme remains undecided.

—Lauren Collins

1 GIGGING DEPT. LATE BLOOMER

hen Ben Schatz was in his first W year at Harvard Law School, in the mid-eighties, he conducted an experiment. He sent his résumé, seeking a summer job, to hundreds of law firms.

On half of the résumés, Schatz listed his credentials as a leader in the gayrights movement at Harvard College, and on the other half he omitted his associations with gay causes. He received responses to seventeen per cent of the non-gay-affiliated résumés, and to just three per cent of the ones that had made it clear that he was gay. “That was the kind of thing that I went to law school to do,” Schatz said the other day. “I wanted to be Martin Luther Queen.”

After law school, Schatz moved to San Francisco to do legal work in the city’s nascent gay-rights movement, but he quickly became disenchanted.

“I was never a lawyer’s lawyer,” he said.

Ben Schatz “Law is fundamentally about coloring between the lines, and I was more of an activist with a law degree.” He was mostly doing work related to the AIDS crisis, and the toll was daunting. “I was doing ten press interviews a day, and most of my clients were dying.”

At the end of 1993, Schatz and a group of friends decided to go to a Bette Midler concert in drag. A promoter noticed the men and told them that she was organizing a tribute to the Andrews Sisters. Did they want to perform? “We’d never thought about it before,” Schatz recalled. “But—surprise, surprise—some of us had musicaltheatre experience in college. We spent the rest of the night singing in my apartment.” A first outing on a street corner netted thirty-seven dollars. “We were thrilled,” he said.

A couple of years later, Schatz decided to make what he calls dragapella his career. He and his colleagues dubbed themselves the Kinsey Sicks—a pun on the sex researcher’s famous metric for same-sex attraction (six being the most gay). During the next two decades, the group performed all over the world, made CDs, and provided Schatz (who now lives in Puerto Vallarta, in Mexico) with a modest living. “I always say that I’m in the bottom one per cent of my law-school class in income but in the top five per cent in job satisfaction,” he said.

Life on the road isn’t easy, and last fall, as Schatz was closing in on sixty, he considered hanging up his boa for good. “On Election Night, I was flying THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 16, 2017

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to a gig in Boise, Idaho, and I decided to splurge five bucks for Wi-Fi in the plane so I could see the first woman be elected President,” he recalled. Donald Trump’s victory upended Schatz’s retirement plans. “At first, all I wanted to do was cry, but then I started having flashbacks to when I started, when everyone was dying around me.” (Two of the group’s original five members died in the AIDS era. Another became a rabbi.)

The Kinsey Sicks have always had a political dimension. “People show up and they think they’re getting someone doing Liza or Cher, but we’re a very different act,” he said. Schatz, who has biceps like a linebacker’s, usually inhabits the persona of “Rachel” onstage, but he drops character for a monologue that he added to the newest version of the show, which the group performed last month at the SoHo Playhouse, in Manhattan. He pulls up a chair, smooths his dress, and tells a story. “I got my very first death threat right before I graduated from college,” he said, describing a newspaper article about a gay-rights demonstration that he was planning. “Well, Harvard was so concerned that they graciously offered to fly me home. I just as graciously declined, pulled off my protest—thank you very much—and graduated on June 4, 1981.The very next day, the first scientific article appeared about a mysterious illness among homosexual men.

“We are living in a historical event, and we have the responsibility to try to shape that event and not just watch it happen,” Schatz went on, mentioning the files full of clippings about landmark lawsuits which he has at home. “I remember the weight of all the people I couldn’t help, of all the calls I couldn’t even answer from people who were fighting to stay alive when they were being kicked out of their homes or their jobs or off their insurance plans.” He continued, “We carry so many dead on our backs that it’s a wonder we can walk at all.” He concluded, “Don’t let the world make this our shameful secret. We are not the ones who should be ashamed.”

Then, as Rachel, he introduced the next song.

—Jeffrey Toobin 24

THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 16, 2017

POSTSCRIPT S. I. NEWHOUSE, JR.

orty-eight years ago, Gardner BotsF ford, a longtime editor at the magazine, wrote an obituary and appreciation in these pages of his stepfather, Raoul Fleischmann, a wealthy yeast tycoon, who had underwritten an itinerant newspaperman named Harold Ross to begin a weekly magazine in Jazz Age Manhattan. Together, in February, 1925, they published the first issue of The New Yorker. Botsford drew an extended, witty contrast between the posh publisher (“he never drove anywhere; he motored”) and the gap-toothed editor, who played poker with his cronies till all hours and looked as if he cut his upstanding hair with a pair of hedge shears.

But this was the crucial passage: Publishing is, or should be, a quiet operation, and it was Fleischmann’s talent to make it almost inaudible. From the first, he was convinced that the separation of the editorial and the business sides of the magazine had to be complete: no disingenuous management requests for editorial mention of an important advertiser’s product, no publisher’s protests against an article that might offend a prominent client—no pressures, overt or hidden. In fact, by his own wish, he never saw the editorial content of any issue until it had been printed and bound—a demonstration of phenomenal self-restraint—and he never commented to his editors on what they had turned out.

Samuel I. Newhouse, Jr., who has died at the age of eighty-nine, bought The New Yorker from the Fleischmann family thirty-two years ago in the name of Advance Publications, his family’s media company. He differed from the Fleischmanns in many respects—for one thing, the Newhouse holdings extend far beyond yeast—but he shared their approach to The New Yorker. Si Newhouse almost never came around our offices—not the old ones in mid-

town, on Bryant Park and in Times Square, and not the new offices, at One World Trade Center. He stuck to his own uncluttered lair, where he ran the business of Condé Nast with a sense of passion, creativity, mystery, and daring for almost forty years. Si Newhouse kept in close touch, of course, with the magazine’s editor and the publisher, but his formal distance was not a function of his reticent personality. It was, as it had been with Raoul Fleischmann, a kind of ideology. The New Yorker was to be in the hands of its editors, writers, and artists. He owned the operation, paying the salaries and the rent, but he did not touch the magazine’s pages; he never suggested a story, he never revealed his political inclinations, he never gave advance instructions or retrospective criticism of an issue. When he mentioned that he had liked something in The New Yorker, he did so shyly, reluctantly, as if he were overstepping.

As the magazine’s owner, Si reserved the right to hire and fire the editor, but the distance he otherwise kept was a rarity in modern American journalism, just as Fleischmann’s had been. Si’s way of communicating even something as essential as his desire to preserve the magazine’s editorial independence was often oblique. When I succeeded Tina Brown as the editor, in July, 1998, my only experience in editing a publication was a stint at my high-school newspaper. Some months later, when faced with an investigative article that made many bold assertions based on deep and prolonged reporting, I wondered if I should give Si a full rundown of the piece and its preparation. I recalled, from my years as a reporter at the Washington Post, that Ben Bradlee,

the editor, had an arrangement with the paper’s owner, Katharine Graham, called the “no-surprises rule.” That is, if he was planning to publish something of unusual investigative moment or daring, he alerted Graham, because she, after all, would be paying the legal bills. If I was going to burn down the house, it seemed fair to call the one who held the deed. So I called Si. It is fair to say that Si Newhouse was not a big talker on any occasion, but here he was especially reserved. I responded by rattling on about the strength of the piece, the efforts exerted by the writer and the fact checkers, the care lavished on the text by the editors and our lawyer. Finally, I concluded this bumbling soliloquy with “And so I think we should be O.K.” A prolonged silence ensued at the end of the line. At last Si said, “That sounds very interesting. I look forward to reading it.” The message seemed clear: it’s for you to decide. Although there were many reasons one might have called him in the years ahead—investigative pieces, political opinion pieces, sure-to-be controversial covers, and, yes, mistakes— there would be no more calls. The print magazine closes Friday evenings, and sometimes we would send proofs of a few articles to Si late Friday, when they’d already gone to the printer. But nearly always he read the contents of The New Yorker when the readers of The New Yorker did. In a world of meddlesome owners, worrywart owners, mercenary owners, owners who use their publications as instruments of political influence or social positioning, he bought The New Yorker because he enjoyed what it had been and he wanted it to go on being true to itself, even as it modernized and reached readers in new ways.

Si Newhouse, who began work at Condé Nast in 1961 and became its chairman in 1975, had two particularly important mentors. The first was his father, who so loved the world of newspapers that, in 1939, he turned down a chance to buy the New York Yankees and set out to buy newspapers in Syracuse instead. The second was Alexander Liberman, a courtly émigré from Russia by way of Paris, who was both an accomplished artist and a creator of magazines, first as the art director of Vogue and then as the editorial direc

tor of Condé Nast. Si took his direction in business from his up-beforedawn, detail-driven father and learned the art of magazine-making from Liberman. He was not averse to risk; he kept a constant eye out for new projects and acquisitions. They tended to pay off. As the head of Condé Nast and, from 1980 to 1998, of the Random House group, he wielded tremendous influence in the media world. As a book publisher, he did not hesitate to suggest a big-ticket author or a subject that captured his interest, like the Rockefellers. Yet he hardly followed the pattern of the self-promoting modern tycoon, and seldom gave interviews to the press.

The initial crisis he faced as the owner of The New Yorker was a succession drama.

William Shawn, a man as reserved, in his way, as Si Newhouse, had been its editor since 1952, and had long since gained a reputation for editorial brilliance and uncommon sympathy with his writers and artists, but he was nearing the end of his eighth decade, and there was no plan for the magazine’s editorial future. Shawn thought that it was his prerogative to choose a successor, or, indeed, not to; Si thought otherwise and, in 1987, replaced him with Robert Gottlieb, who had won a sterling reputation as the head of two publishing houses, Simon & Schuster and then Alfred A. Knopf. The move unnerved and angered many staff members, both because of their deep loyalty to Shawn and because they worried that The New Yorker would stray from the course set by Ross and Shawn. But Si did not acquire the magazine to turn it into another one; his abiding concern was maintaining its health and sense of mission.

Like their father before them, Si and his brother Donald, who is still active in the family’s media business, were at their desks sometime around 5 a.m. At Condé Nast, Si took advantage of the longer horizons of a private company to make editorial investments that would prove themselves over the years, not quarter to quarter. But the ledger sheet was not his favorite reading material. Si and his devoted wife, Victoria, an architectural historian, loved books; they were avid art collectors, travellers, and theatre- and operagoers. Si was especially steeped in the movies, high and low. He loved gangster pictures, romantic comedies, film

noir, silent comedies, the avant-garde.

Every November, he celebrated his birthday with a screening for his family and friends: “Gold Diggers of 1933,” “Gun Crazy,” “The Earrings of Madame de . . .” His reticence disappeared in the dark. In movie theatres, he laughed, and sometimes cried, without restraint.

Si was a shrewd businessman who cared deeply about what his businesses were ushering into the world. Each title at Condé Nast meant something to him, excited some passion of his, some aspect of his personality: architecture, literature, food, fashion, art, Hollywood.

When he got to start a new title, he was thrilled, and when circumstances dictated that a magazine’s time had reached an end, or when a launch turned out to be a misfire, he suffered. The New Yorker was different from the other magazines he had husbanded—it had, and still has, its own set of standards, methods, and even eccentricities—and he would have had it no other way. When the magazine lost money for a while, he was patient; when it built upon its strengths, he was pleased. He was not unduly preoccupied with short-term setbacks and gains. (Raoul Fleischmann did not quite have this gift for equanimity.) The quiet sustenance he provided was unwavering, and just one of the many sources of support he provided to the people who worked here.

A. J. Liebling, who was the press critic for this publication in the nineteen-forties and fifties, wrote that the pattern of a reporter’s life “is like the plot of ‘Black Beauty.’ Sometimes he finds a kind master who gives him a dry stall and an occasional bran mash in the form of a Christmas bonus, sometimes he falls into the hands of a mean owner who drives him in spite of spavins and expects him to live on potato peelings.”

Where The New Yorker was concerned, Si Newhouse was generous in more than material ways. His forbearances were as thoughtful as his actions, and he justly took pride in what had often seemed a long-odds scenario: a comic weekly from the Jazz Age, which has evolved and deepened in many ways, is now braving its tenth decade.

We honor the kindness, the vision, and the memory of a man who did so much to help make that possible.

—David Remnick THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 16, 2017

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ANNALS OF MEDIA

BIRTH OF A SUPREMACIST How a leftist contrarian became a white-nationalist shock jock.

BY ANDREW MARANTZ

his summer, after a loose coalition T of white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and Confederate apologists announced that they would hold a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, promotional flyers began to circulate on the Internet. The flyers included a list of names: the self-proclaimed thought leaders who planned to speak at the rally, arranged, Coachella-like, in order of prominence.

At the top of the list was Richard Spencer, who coined the term “alt-right” almost a decade ago, and who has been so successful at making himself the poster boy of the movement that he was once sucker punched while standing on a sidewalk in Washington, D.C.

Farther down the list were Jason Kessler, the Charlottesville resident who organized the rally; Matthew Heimbach, who has been called “the affable, youthful face of hate in America”; and Christopher Cantwell, who would later star in a Vice documentary about Charlottesville, unpacking a small arsenal of guns and saying, among other things, “We’re not nonviolent—we’ll fucking kill these people if we have to.”

The second person listed on the flyers, immediately below Spencer, was a white-nationalist shock jock named Mike Enoch. The name might have been unfamiliar to most Americans, but, to an inner cadre of Web-fluent

Mike Enoch’s political conversion was both quotidian and unsettling.

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THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 16, 2017

neo-fascists, Enoch is an influential and divisive figure. In May, David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, tweeted, “Hate him or love him— Mike Enoch is someone to pay close attention to.” Just three years ago, Enoch could be heard mocking Spencer (“talks like a fag”) and Cantwell (“a dickhead turtle”), criticizing their ideologies as too extreme. But that was before his radicalization was complete. These days, Enoch routinely refers to AfricanAmericans as “animals” and “savages,” and expresses “skepticism” about how many Jews died in the Holocaust. Apart from interviews with Spencer and Cantwell, who are now his close friends and ideological allies, he largely eschews attention from the media. He prefers to speak—voluminously, articulately, and with an uncanny lack of emotion—on his own podcast, “The Daily Shoah.” (The title, a pun about the Holocaust by way of Comedy Central, reflects the overall tone of the show.) “The Daily Shoah” is the most popular of more than two dozen podcasts on the Right Stuff, a Web site that Enoch founded in 2012. Once an obscure blog about “post-libertarian” politics, the site is now a breeding ground for some of the most florid racism on the Internet. One of its pages is set up to accept donations, in dollars or bitcoins; another is devoted to “fashy memes,” songs and images that extol fascism in an antic, jokingbut-not-joking tone. The podcasts— meandering, amateurish talk shows hosted by bilious young men who make Rush Limbaugh sound like Mr. Rogers—are not available on iTunes, Spotify, or any other major platform, and yet collectively they draw tens of thousands of listeners a week.

The Charlottesville rally, on August 12th, immediately erupted in violence, and the police shut it down before any of the speakers could take the stage. A few of them reconvened in a park two miles away. Enoch, surrounded by small concentric circles of reporters, protesters, and counterprotesters, stood on a wooden riser in the shade of a dogwood tree. A tall, stout man with a husky voice and a grim, downturned mouth, he wore aviator sunglasses, a slight beard, and the unofficial uniform of the day: khakis and ILLUSTRATION BY BRIAN STAUFFER

a white polo shirt. “We’re here to talk about white genocide, the deliberate and intentional displacement of the white race,” he said. “Have we heard this conspiracy theory of white privilege? This is a concept that was brought to us by Jewish intellectuals, to undermine our confidence in ourselves.” He finished his remarks and introduced the next speaker, David Duke. An hour later, James Alex Fields, Jr., wearing khakis and a white polo, drove a car into a crowd of people, killing Heather Heyer, a local counterprotester.

Enoch’s father, who is also named Mike, spent that Saturday at home.

He lives in an upper-middle-class New Jersey suburb that is often listed among the most progressive towns in the country. “I made breakfast, and at some point I mowed the lawn,” he said recently. “Then, as I do every day, I sat down to read the New York Times.”

He saw a photograph of a torch-wielding mob taken in Charlottesville the previous night. “I looked at the picture for a while, and I couldn’t find Mike anywhere,” he said. He scrutinized other photos online, and still didn’t see his son. “I said, ‘Thank God,’ and I went about my day.”

On Sunday, after he got home from church, he saw that a relative had e-mailed him a YouTube link. He clicked on it: his son and David Duke, standing shoulder to shoulder. “It turned my stomach,” he said. “Until that moment, I had imagined that, whatever had caused him to go down this path, it could somehow be reversed, and he could come home again.” ost of the bloggers and comM menters on the Right Stuff use pseudonyms—Sneering Imperialist, Toilet Law, Ebolamericana, Death.

“Mike Enoch” is a pseudonym, too.

Over the years, on “The Daily Shoah,” he occasionally dropped hints about his identity, though he was careful not to reveal too much. He said that he lived with his wife in New York City— “which narrows it down to me and eight million other people”—and that he worked at a “normie” day job, which he would surely lose if his employers ever learned about his alter ego. As a child, he had attended church camps and public schools, where he’d been

“programmed” to believe in universalism and equality. Most members of his immediate family were still “shitlibs”— committed liberals who had not yet seen the error of their ways.

In January, a group of anti-fascist activists dug up his personal information and released it against his will— an Internet-specific form of retribution known as doxing. Mike Enoch was actually Michael Enoch Isaac Peinovich, a thirty-nine-year-old computer programmer who worked at an e-publishing company and lived on the Upper East Side. As predicted, he lost his job. Someone printed out color photographs of his face and pasted them to telephone poles on the corner of Eighty-second Street and York Avenue: “Say Hi to Your Neo-Nazi Neighbor, Mike Peinovich!” The dox revealed that he had an older sister, a social worker who treated traumatized children, and an adopted younger brother, who was biracial and cognitively impaired. Perhaps most baffling of all, Mike’s wife, who was also identified in the dox, turned out to be Jewish.

At first, Enoch tried to insist that he wasn’t Peinovich, but he soon put up a post on the Right Stuff confirming his identity: “I won’t even bother denying it.” On white-nationalist message boards, including the Right Stuff itself, a few commenters accused Enoch of being “controlled opposition,” or demanded that he divorce his wife. (“I can’t believe all you fags still support this Jew fucker!”)

Some held out for more information (“How Jewish? Because if 1/4 or less, I don’t give a shit”); others changed the subject (“I’m more disappointed by how fat he is than anything”).

A few days later, on “The Daily Shoah,” Enoch and his co-hosts read dozens of notes from listeners who were remaining loyal to the podcast, some of whom had donated money to Enoch in his time of need. “My heart goes out to his wife,” one fan, a long-distance trucker, wrote. “If she is married to Mike, she must be a good individual.”

“That is a really nice thing to say,” Enoch said. “I’m sure she’ll appreciate that.” He didn’t mention that his wife had gone to stay with her mother in the Midwest.

Also included in the dox were two e-mail addresses, both purportedly

belonging to Enoch. In general, I am opposed to doxing—I worry about vigilante mobs, false positives, slippery slopes—but not opposed enough, apparently, to overcome my curiosity.

I e-mailed both addresses.

Enoch responded right away. He said that he didn’t want to talk—“I have a platform to tell my story that is bigger than yours”—and yet, every time I sent another e-mail, he sent one back.

I made no secret of the fact that I found his views repugnant, but I added, truthfully, that I wanted to know how he’d ended up in this predicament and what he planned to do next. At one point, I wrote him a long note trying to persuade him to talk to me. His entire response was “You seem kinda mad.” We went back and forth for a while, but I had no real success in drawing him out, and eventually we both lost interest.

He later read our full exchange on “The Daily Shoah.” To his credit, he didn’t edit his responses to make them sound smarter, but he didn’t have to.

According to the rules of online debate in the Right Stuff ’s “Essential T.R.S. Troll Guide,” which I hadn’t read at the time, Enoch had won our exchange by default, because he had written fewer words and maintained his ironic detachment, whereas I had committed the greatest possible faux pas: letting myself be “triggered” into displaying emotion. After the podcast aired, a few of Enoch’s fans sent me nasty messages on Twitter. I figured that was the end of it.

Then I heard back from the other e-mail address. “I am not the Mike Peinovich to whom you addressed this email, but I am his father,” it read. “Until two days ago, I was totally unaware of his ‘alt-right’ activities. . . . I am struggling to understand how Mike E. (which is what we call him to distinguish him from me and my father who was also Mike Peinovich) could have said, posted or tweeted the things that are attributed to him.”

I called Mike, Sr., and we talked for a long time. It was the week of Donald Trump’s Inauguration, and he spoke in the tone that a lot of liberals were using then—weary and a bit dazed, as if struggling to shake a bad dream.

“We tried to give our kids good values,” he said. “Mike E. went to good THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 16, 2017

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schools, and he loved being part of his church youth group. We knew that he was an outspoken Trump supporter, and he was very much the only one in the family, so we agreed, at a certain point, not to talk about politics.” He had listened to the podcast for long enough to recognize his son’s voice and profane sense of humor, but lasted only a few minutes before turning it off.

Four days after the rally in Charlottesville, I went to meet Mike, Sr., and his wife, Billie, in New Jersey.

They live in an Arts and Crafts house on a treelined block near the center of town. Mike, Sr., answered the door. He was taller and thinner than his son, with silver hair and rimless glasses, but I saw the resemblance right away: the square jaw, the downturned mouth.

Billie and Mike are retired, and they spend several months a year travelling.

They gave me a tour of the house, pointing out items they’d collected: Persian rugs, Mexican pottery, a floor-mounted globe. Mike was once a professor of Old English at the University of Pennsylvania, and his study contains several dictionaries and translations of “Beowulf,” along with contemporary books such as Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me.” We sat in armchairs in the living room, and he talked at length about his ancestors. “My grandfather helped drive the K.K.K. out of North Dakota,” he said. “My other grandfather came from Yugoslavia, fleeing religious persecution.”

Billie, who was a psychiatric social worker for many years, spoke in the language of therapy. Mike E.’s parents broke up when he was three, and Billie married into the family a few years later; as far as she was concerned, she was as much Mike E.’s parent as anyone. “I feel shock and anger,” she said.

“I also feel shame, which is irrational, because I don’t think I’ve done anything wrong. I think he brought this on himself because he wants to distance himself from us, from everyone, as a form of self-protection.” Then, more quietly, she said, “He must be so lonely.”

Billie wondered aloud how to tell their friends and family about Mike E. 28

THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 16, 2017

“What do you do?” she said. “Send a letter to your cousins—‘Haven’t spoken to you in twenty years, hope you’re doing well, and, oh, P.S., our son’s a Nazi now’?” She worried that people would wonder what she and Mike, Sr., had done wrong as parents. “Everyone wants it to be simple, to know who to blame,” one of Mike E.’s relatives told me later. “But lots of kids have parents who get divorced when they’re young.

Lots of white kids have difficult personalities. They don’t all become Nazis.”

A few people around town had already heard the news, mostly through Facebook, and some of them were talking about Mike E. as if he had been abducted by a cult, or tied down and injected with a serum of pure hatred. Other people assumed that there must be some key biographical fact—a chemical imbalance, a history of abuse—that would neatly unlock the mystery. But Mike E.’s conversion was more quotidian than that, and therefore more unsettling; somehow, over time, he had fallen into a particularly dark rabbit hole, where some of the most disturbing and discredited ideas in modern history were repackaged as the solution to twenty-first-century malaise. s a child, Mike E. suffered from A severe asthma and eczema. In most old photographs, his face is red and swollen and his shoulders are hunched, a sign that he is straining to catch his breath. The Peinoviches spent one summer at a lake house in Ohio, where the air was fresh and Mike E. found it easier to breathe; still, he went swimming with his shirt on, because his skin was covered with scratches and open sores.

“When we walked through an airport or a mall with our younger son, we would get stopped and told what a beautiful child we had,” Billie said. “Not with Mike E.” He was so allergic to so many things—dust, pollen, nuts, wheat, shellfish—that he carried an EpiPen almost everywhere he went. At birthday parties, while the other children ate ice cream and cake, he ate saltines. “A few months ago, for some reason, it became

a joke on the alt-right to talk about drinking milk,” someone who knew Mike E. as a child told me. On Twitter, “his bio said, ‘Lactose tolerant’—as code for, you know, white power. But the funny thing was, anyone who knew him knew that any exposure to dairy would make him sick.”

In 1980, Mike E.’s mother left Mike, Sr., and she later moved out of the state.

The divorce was ugly, and for many years she rarely saw the children. Mike E. was sent to a series of therapists, who mentioned potential disorders, but nothing definitive. One therapist, instead of giving a diagnosis, said that Mike E. was “as vulnerable as a peeled grape.”

Gradually, he learned to insulate himself with jokes and insults. He was clever, and found strength in contrarianism.

His ideology shifted over time, but his approach was always the same: exposing and attacking the flaws in commonplace arguments, often without any sense of proportion. Even when he agreed with someone’s opinion, he still loved to engage in rhetorical battle—not to advance any particular agenda, one of his relatives told me, but “to stir up resentment. He strikes me as someone without a core, who only knows how to oppose and who chooses his positions based on what will be most upsetting to people around him.”

He grew up listening to the Jerky Boys, virtuosos of the scatological prank call, and to Opie and Anthony, a pair of afternoon-radio comedians who always seemed to be daring their station managers to fire them. Opie and Anthony, in particular, revelled in boundary-pushing for its own sake.

For several years, they held a “Most Offensive Song Contest.” Crowd favorites included “Baby Raper” and “Stuck in an Oven with Jews.” Such songs were not actually calling for genocide, of course. The point was to flout as many taboos as possible. Anyone who didn’t find it funny was urged to grow a thicker skin.

This aesthetic now thrives on forums like 4chan and the Right Stuff, where the dominant modes of self-expression are trolling and “shitposting”—transcribing the motley contents of one’s id, the more bizarre or abhorrent the better. But, compared with terrestrial radio or network TV, the Internet offers

fewer direct boundaries to push against; there are no station managers to thumb your nose at. If “Stuck in an Oven with Jews” was shocking before social media, the race to the bottom has since accelerated into free fall. ike E.’s high school was diverse M and academically rigorous. (His sister’s classmates included Zach Braff and Lauryn Hill.) He had the sort of grades that are common among smart but disobedient kids: A’s in classes that interested him, D’s and F’s when he was bored or felt that the teacher didn’t deserve his respect. He went to Ohio University to study graphic design, but dropped out after the first quarter. He studied at two Rutgers campuses, then took computer-programming classes at Pace University, but left without a degree. “Mike E. took his fourth run at college and finally faced the fact that he is not suited to academic life,” the family’s 2006 Christmas letter read. He moved to Bushwick, in Brooklyn, taught himself how to code, and eventually got a lucrative job as a back-end programmer at AOL. His supervisor there was a blond woman from the Midwest, a musician and photographer who shared many of his interests—sci-fi movies, medieval history, recondite Internet humor. They started dating. Her father was born Jewish and her mother had converted to Judaism, but Mike E. hardly found this remarkable; half the people he grew up with were Jewish, including his high-school girlfriend. The Christmas letter continued, “Though he commutes into Manhattan to a corporate job, he’s still the non-conformist that he always was.”

He and the supervisor got married and moved to a one-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side. (Their wedding ceremony was mostly secular, but they recited a prayer and stomped on a glass.) She maintained a blog, reviewing local rock concerts and dragqueen shows, and she often talked about a fantasy novel she hoped to write. To get his eczema under control, Mike E. ordered large doses of prednisone, a prescription steroid, from an Indian Web site, and took it without medical supervision. Prednisone’s side effects include depression, agitation, weight gain, and vision problems. He gained

so much weight that he was almost unrecognizable, and he went temporarily blind in one eye, necessitating emergency cataract surgery.

Gradually, he and his wife stopped going out with their friends from Bushwick, then stopped going out much at all. Instead they stayed home, playing video games or reading on their laptops. Mike E. spent hours in politicaldebate forums on Facebook and Reddit, where he let his contrarian side run wild. Online, no one was keeping track of his opinions. No one even knew his name, or what he looked like. It felt like another video game. Sometimes he would stake out a seemingly indefensible position, then see if he could invent an argument to back it up.

It was obvious to him that the country was profoundly off track, and that both major political parties were morally and intellectually bankrupt. The only question was which utopian system should replace the current one. He read books by Noam Chomsky and articles on antiwar.com, which published critiques of American foreign policy from the far left and the far right. He dabbled in leftist anarchism, but discovered glaring flaws in the ideology; after that, he became a Trotskyist. One Saturday, he later wrote, he found himself at a meeting “in a run down YMCA in Brooklyn with a group of middle-aged Jewish public school teachers.” They were discussing what stance to take on Islamic terrorism. “An overwhelming sense of loathing washed over me like an awesome wave,” he wrote. “The people I was around suddenly seemed twisted and horrible. A revelatory religious experience is the closest thing I can compare this experience to.”

He began reading books by Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, and Ludwig von Mises, the grandfather of libertarianism. For a few years, he was an enthusiastic and doctrinaire libertarian. He started a blog called the Emptiness, where he wrote posts such as “Socialism Is Selfish” and “Taxation Is Theft.” Through online debate forums, he met a few likeminded friends—a painting contractor from upstate New York, an E.M.T. from Virginia, a devout Christian from Tennessee. They called themselves “post-libertarians,” though they weren’t THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 16, 2017

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sure what would come next. In a private Facebook group, they debated the merits of various micro-ideologies—paleoconservatism, neo-reaction, radical traditionalism—and made jokes that were too self-referential or too offensive to share with the wider public. Each time Mike E. adopted a new world view, he was able to convince himself that his conversion was rational, even inevitable.

Within a few years, he started to wonder whether libertarianism was too tepid. After all, its premises pointed toward a starker conclusion: if the state was nothing but a hindrance to freedom, why not abolish the state altogether, leaving only the unfettered market? From there, he went even further. What if you couldn’t account for people’s behavior without considering their cultural background, and even their genetic makeup? “Slapped in the face by the reality of human biodiversity,” he later wrote, “I had to come to grips with the fact that libertarianism isn’t going to work for everyone, and the people that it isn’t going to work for are going to ruin it for everyone else.” Human biodiversity: the idea that people are different, that they differ in predictable ways, and that some people—not just individuals but groups of people—might be inherently superior to others.

He thought he had carefully examined each of his beliefs, reducing them to their most fundamental axioms. But here was an axiom so fundamental that he hadn’t even articulated it to himself, much less subjected it to logical scrutiny. Now that he thought about it, he wasn’t sure why he should assume that all people were equal. Maybe they weren’t. If this was a textbook definition of racism, then so be it—maybe racism was true.

“They’re fucking religious fanatics,” he said later, of liberals like his former self. “They believe in the equality of human beings like a Muslim believes that he has to pray five times facing Mecca, or like a Southern Baptist hates the devil. . . . If you’re a liberal, you’ve never thought twice, you’ve never reconsidered, you’ve absorbed what you were taught in the government schools and by the TV.” The idea of racial hierarchy seemed 30

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to hold enormous explanatory power.

As a liberal, he had dealt with troubling facts—the achievement gap between black students and white students, say— by invoking the history of racial oppression, or by explaining why the data didn’t show what they appeared to show. As a Marxist, he had attributed unpleasant facts to capitalist exploitation; as a libertarian, he had blamed the state. But all those explanations were abstract at best, muddled at worst, and they required levels of context that were impossible to convey in a Facebook post. Now he was free to revert to a far simpler explanation: maybe white people had more wealth and power because white people were superior. After arguing himself out of every previous position, he had finally found the perfect ideology for an inveterate contrarian—one that presented such a basic affront to the underlying tenets of modern democracy that he would never run out of enemies.

He felt the urge to explain what he was learning to his co-workers, his parents, and his sister, but he knew that they wouldn’t understand. He stopped haranguing his family about tax policy and the Federal Reserve.

They assumed that he had lost interest in politics, and he didn’t bother to correct them.

In December, 2012, with friends from his post-libertarian Facebook group, he started the Right Stuff.

“We’re right wingers,” the About Us page read, “but we welcome comments from intelligent and civil people across the political spectrum.” A few months later, the About Us page was edited: “While unabashedly authoritarian, fash-ist, and theocratic, we welcome comments from intelligent and civil people across the political spectrum.”

In 2016, the page was amended yet again: “Even though you are wrong, we are open to outside opinions. . . .

Also we’re white and we’re not sorry.”

he Right Stuff ’s podcasts are laden T with acronyms, abbreviations, and inside jokes. (At one point, the site published a “T.R.S. Lexicon,” a glossary for newcomers.) Some of the neologisms are unique to T.R.S.; others would be familiar to anyone who spends a lot of time in certain parts of the Internet. A person who takes on an overly

theatrical identity, for example, is “larping”—live-action role-playing. A “red pill” is a transformative bit of knowledge that is supposed to subvert leftwing brainwashing. (“Red-pill me on that, goy,” one “Daily Shoah” co-host might say to another, asking to be brought up to speed on the latest white-nationalist thinking.) The tone of a discussion can swing, sometimes within a single sentence, from sincerity to sarcasm to reverse sarcasm. These distinctions are so subtle and ever-shifting that the co-hosts sometimes have to tell one another, on air, “I actually meant that,” or “I was just doing a bit.”

Bigots these days often claim that the bigoted things they say are ironic, or quasi ironic. Part of what makes this feint so disorienting is that it is sometimes true. When “The Daily Shoah” started, in 2014, its title was not, or not primarily, meant to be earnestly anti-Semitic. “At first, it was a joke,” Enoch explained on Chris Cantwell’s podcast, in May. “It was just a funny pun. But we kinda put ourselves in a box.” The Right Stuff launched other podcasts, each with its own parody logo: “Fash the Nation,” “Nationalist Public Radio,” “Good Morning White America.”

In the early days, “The Daily Shoah” reserved most of its firepower for its neighbors on the political spectrum, mocking those on the alt-right who reduced all geopolitical issues to a simple Zionist conspiracy. With each episode, though, the co-hosts’ anti-Semitism sounded more sincere. Allusions to gas chambers and ovens became almost a verbal tic. Whenever the co-hosts mentioned a Jewish journalist or politician, they would emphasize the name, pronouncing it in a nasal accent and using a reverb effect. This invention—the Echo, they called it—became one of their signature memes. They approximated it in writing, in the blog and on Twitter, surrounding Jewish names with triple parentheses.

Then, in January, 2015, Enoch read “The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements,” by Kevin MacDonald, a former psychology professor at California State University, Long Beach. The book—published in 1998,

heavily footnoted, and roundly debunked by mainstream social scientists—is a touchstone of contemporary intellectualized anti-Semitism.

On “The Daily Shoah,” Enoch called it “important and devastating, something I urge everybody to read,” and then offered even higher praise: “It triggered me so hard.” From then on, he began to express his anti-Semitism more frankly. He sometimes spun his Northeastern upbringing as an advantage: having grown up around Jews, he understood the enemy. “You’ll talk to white Americans today, and they don’t actually know if someone’s Jewish or not,” he said. “I have very honed Jewdar. I can tell.”

Enoch still lived with his wife, in the one-bedroom apartment where he recorded “The Daily Shoah.” His wife—they separated in January and are in the process of divorcing—declined to be interviewed for this piece, and no one I talked to, including people who were in a position to know, could fully explain how a Jew and a professional anti-Semite stayed together for so long. “They always talked about everything,” one person told me.

“She was his best audience. It’s possible that they never talked about this, but it’s hard to imagine.”

After the dox, Mike E.’s parents spoke to his wife, and she told them that, although she was aware that their son hosted a podcast, she didn’t know anything about its contents. This was false.

On December 22, 2015, she appeared on “The Daily Shoah” ’s annual Christmas episode to recite a poem, a parody of “A Visit from St. Nicholas.” “She wrote this,” Enoch said, by way of introduction, “and she’s really proud of it.” The poem betrayed a deep familiarity with the show’s tone, and with several of its inside jokes: ’Twas a T.R.S. Christmas, and all through the house, Not a creature was stirring, not even my spouse The cucks were all prepped for the ovens with care, Just waiting for morning to pop ’em in there. . . .

Out Communists, out Socialists, out leftlibertarians!

Out betas, out allies, S.J.W. contrarians Out beaners and dindus and Muslim jihadists Spare us your Syrian-refugee problems Just fash away, fash away, fash away all!

Somehow, Enoch’s wife must have convinced herself that the words she was repeating were empty signifiers. She was an aspiring writer, and she presumably wanted to demonstrate to her husband and his friends that she, too, could excel at their game. In the poem, she referred to herself as a troll. Maybe she imagined that she was indulging in a bit of victimless, anonymous humor, another edgy joke that went too far.

uring one of my visits to Mike, D Sr., and Billie’s house in New Jersey, I met their adopted son, who asked

to go by his middle name, Joshua. Before the dox, he and Mike E. had had a good relationship. Every once in a while, Joshua would take a train to New York, they would see a superhero movie together, and Joshua would sleep over.

After Mike E. was doxed, Joshua said, “I was a big target.” Some of Enoch’s followers, apparently upset that he had a nonwhite family member, found Joshua’s Facebook page and sent him threats and obscene images. “I just deleted them, just blocked the people,” Joshua said. “I didn’t even want to acknowledge it.” Joshua has a brain injury, and he tends to express his thoughts simply and flatly; still, it was clear that this had been a harrowing experience.

The two brothers haven’t spoken since.

Mike, Sr., told me that after he found out about his son’s online persona, in January, he’d seen him only once, in Manhattan, where they met to put a modest inheritance from Mike E.’s grandmother in a trust fund. As they waited in the lobby of a bank, they made awkward small talk. “He told me he’d been going to the gym and not eating carbs,” Mike, Sr., said. “He didn’t say where he was living, or what he was doing with his days, or how he was feeling. It felt like talking to someone I hardly knew.” Before he left, Mike, Sr., made one request: that Mike E. legally change his last name to Enoch, or Paine, or anything, really, other than Peinovich.

Mike E. agreed.

The day after Charlottesville, Mike, Sr., texted him, reminding him of his promise. “Whatever,” Mike E. wrote.

He had changed his mind. “This is my final decision. Perhaps if you had shown more sympathy and interest in fairness, my decision would be different.” ne Friday afternoon in September, O Mike Enoch called my cell phone.

“I hear you’ve been talking to my family,” he said. I told him that I’d been hoping to speak to him, but that it would have to wait; I was in the middle of lunch. “What are you having?” he asked.

I didn’t want to tell him the real answer—a bagel and lox—so I lied and

“I thought getting bigger rocks would make us happier, but I guess I was wrong.”

said I was eating a salad. As if we were on his podcast, he went on a comedic riff about a takeout chain called Just Salad: “I’ve always thought that that was a nice little double entendre, to appeal to social-justice-minded white people.”

He was about to board a train to Washington, D.C., so we agreed that he’d call again that night. I assumed that he would record the call, troll me for a few minutes, and then play the audio on his show, as he’d done with other reporters.

In the end, we spoke for more than two hours. He was surprisingly forthcoming. “My family always larped as Wasps, even though we’re not AngloSaxon,” he said. “My dad wore tweed jackets, that whole thing.” His biological mother, he said later, “was always a bit of a race realist on this point. She’s completely Norwegian, while my dad is half Norwegian and half Serbian.” He added, “My mother always said, ‘Your temper comes from your Serbian side.’

I’m quite sure she meant that in a racial sense. And I think there’s something to that.” (His mother, a retired college president in New York, clarified that she meant this “in a cultural sense” and that she is not fully Norwegian.)

I asked him whether he regretted the violence in Charlottesville. “You’ll have to ask Antifa,” he said. “The violence wasn’t initiated by our side.” He described his current ideological position as “white nationalism, or the altright, or whatever you wanna call it.”

In hindsight, he now says, he was always more wary of African-Americans and Jews than he let on. “I noticed these differences, even when I didn’t necessarily put emphasis on them or think that they were socially deterministic,” he said. He spoke freely about his “intense, personal antipathy for Jews,” but insisted that he did not hate black people: “I just feel sorry for them and see them as a social problem.” I asked how to square this with the fact that he had a black brother. “He’s only a quarter black,” he responded.

A few times, I tried to ask another obvious question: If you never liked Jews, why did you marry one? The first time, he sighed and then said, “I don’t really know.” The next time it came up, he said, “Jews have certain physical features that I don’t think are particularly attractive. She didn’t have 32

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those. I thought she was very pretty.”

Nor did she exhibit what he considered typical Jewish traits: “The pushiness, this absolute inability to empathize with others, an exploitative personality. She didn’t have any of that.”

Why did he work so hard, for so many years, to keep his normal life separate from his online alt-right persona?

“My wife,” he said without hesitation.

“For a long time, I wanted to have it both ways, by just being anonymous on the Internet. But then we got popular.”

In 2015, he attended a conference hosted

by Richard Spencer’s think tank, the National Policy Institute. Enoch’s identity was still secret, and audience members were asked not to take his photo; still, everyone he talked to recognized his voice, and several people told him that they had bought a ticket because they were hoping to meet him. “At that point, it was, like, O.K., this is getting out of control,” he told me. “I kept saying, ‘It’ll be fine, it’ll be fine.’ But I knew that I was just delaying the inevitable.”

We talked about “The Culture of Critique,” the anti-Semitic text that he’d found so formative, and I mentioned that I’d just ordered a copy. “Well, don’t red-pill yourself too hard,” he said.

Then, after a pause: “You’re not Jewish, are you?”

I am. I don’t put triple parentheses around my name on Twitter, as some Jews do, in defiance of T.R.S.’s Echo.

But I have never made a secret of my identity. I have written for Jewish magazines. My face looks Jewish. My name sounds Jewish.

“Yep,” I said.

“Interesting,” he said, sounding a bit flustered. “Fully Jewish, or half Jewish?”

“Fully,” I said. “Your Jewdar must be broken.”

“Yeah, well, you’ve got red hair,” he said. “That threw me.” He encouraged me to read MacDonald’s book nonetheless. “I would hope that you would be able to look past any dissonance and at least examine the argument,” he said.

“Maybe do some internal—not that I expect you to hate yourself . . .” He trailed off.

At one point, without prompting, he said, “You wanna know the first thing my dad asked me after Charlottesville?

He didn’t say, ‘Are you O.K.?’ or ‘How are you?’ He said, ‘Change your name.’ ”

His birth mother had asked about his safety—“Mothers are mothers,” he explained—but not his father. “He didn’t care about that,” he said. “All he cared about was his good name.” I couldn’t be sure, over the phone, but it sounded as if he was holding back tears.

n my last visit to the Peinoviches’ O house, Mike, Sr., flipped through a photo album that Billie had brought up from the basement. One photo sparked a pleasant memory: a twentyfifth-anniversary trip to Hawaii, in 2008, with the three children. “We were all in good spirits that week, even Mike E.,” he said. “We went out to these long dinners and ordered a bunch of cocktails, which probably helped.

Mike E. had brought along this computer program he’d made—” “The Bergman Plot Generator,” Billie said.

“He somehow figured out how to randomly generate plots of Ingmar Bergman films—” “ ‘A dark knight encounters death on a lonely road,’ that kind of thing—” “And he left it running, in the condo we were renting, and all day it would be spitting out plots,” Mike, Sr., said, chuckling. “We’d come back inside and read them out to one another, and we’d fall down laughing.”

Mike, Sr.,’s smile faded. “I still love him, in spite of everything,” he said, his voice catching. The sun started to set, casting shadows across the living room, and Mike went into the kitchen to open a bottle of wine. Billie said, “All I keep thinking is that, if we were Jewish, we’d be sitting shiva right now.”

At one point in our conversation, I brought up the Parable of the Prodigal Son, but Mike, Sr., rejected the comparison. A few days later, in an e-mail, he elaborated: “The prodigal son eventually realizes that he would be better off returning to his father as a hired hand than starving as an outcast in a foreign land. His return is an act of self-preservation rather than of repentance. Mike seems to be thriving in his new environment and it’s unlikely he would return to us to save himself.” The parable is a story of unconditional forgiveness, Mike, Sr., wrote. “It’s a very difficult example to live up to.” 

SHOUTS & MURMURS

HAIKUS BY DON, JR.

LUCI GUTIÉRREZ

BY WILL STEPHEN

Slick wood and slick hair.

Striped suits, chairs, Fiji bottles.

I love cool meetings.

America First.

Hell, yes. Badass. So baller.

I have five children.

My name is Donald Trump, Jr., the son of President Trump. K, bitch?

“Kim Jong Un’s a bitch.”

I tell Dad that, and he nods.

“Yep.” No eye contact.

A President’s boy.

Maybe one day, President?

No. I’m apprentice.

Aboard Air Force One, We are kings. On my iPad, I watch “Neighbors 2.”

“You’re fired,” I told them.

They left. My Secret Service.

In peace, I collude.

Eric is my friend, Ivanka and Jared, too.

My dad is, too—cool.

Buildings are the best, With elevators, and glass.

So cool. So cool. Chyeah.

So I testified.

Who cares. My fingers were crossed The whole time, biatch.

On Election Night, Dad hugged Jared. I was pissed.

No hug since ’02.

Seth Rogen trolled me On Twitter. I’m . . . confused. Sad. I love him so much.

The White House. It’s real.

I thought it exploded in “Independence Day.”

God, I miss college.

Beer bongs. Beer pong. Every night, I would piss my slacks.

A crowd cheers for Dad. My eyes close. I pretend it’s For my cute hairdo.

Sometimes I miss them, My Secret Service. Cold. Still, At least they were there.

My dad is so smart.

“Rocket Man.” “Little Marco.”

I’m just “Don.” That’s fine.

That little boy who Mowed the White House lawn for Dad— What makes him so great? 

THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 16, 2017

33

HOUSE OF SHADOWS Living with the ghosts of history.

BY JOSHUA YAFFA

The House on the Embankment embodies Soviet-era privilege—and horror. few years ago, after looking at half A a dozen apartments all over Moscow, I visited a rental in a vast building across the river from the Kremlin, known as the House on the Embankment. In 1931, when tenants began to move in, it was the largest residential complex in Europe, a self-contained world the size of several city blocks. The House of Government, as it was initially called, was a mishmash of the blocky geometry of Constructivism and the soaring pomposity of neoclassicism, and had five hundred and five apartments that housed the Soviet Union’s governing élite—commissars and Red Army generals and vaunted Marxist scholars.

On the day that I visited, the apartment’s owner, Marina, a cheerful woman 34

THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 16, 2017

in her forties who works for a multinational oil-and-gas company, met me in a courtyard. She took me up to the apartment, which had been in her family for four generations. It was a two-bedroom with a small balcony. Successive renovations had left the place without much of the original architectural detail, but as a result it was airy and open: less apparatchik, more IKEA. Tall windows in the living room looked out over the imperious spires of the Kremlin. I decided to move in.

By that time, the House on the Embankment was popular with expats, and was known for its proximity to a stretch of bars and night clubs in a renovated industrial space that once belonged to the Red October candy factory. A design-

and-architecture institute had just opened down the road; I often took my laptop and worked in its café, which was decorated with vintage furniture. I quickly made friends in the building: there was Olaf, a Dutch journalist, and his wife, Anya, who worked at the design school; and Dasha, the owner of a popular pétanque café in Gorky Park. With time, I also became close to Anatoly Golubovsky, a historian and documentary filmmaker who goes by Tolya. He is sixty years old, with a gray beard and wavy hair, and is one of the most reliably fascinating storytellers I know. He and his wife live in an apartment not far from mine that was originally occupied by his grandfather, who was the Soviet Union’s chief literary censor under Stalin.

The most striking thing about the building was, and is, its history. In the nineteen-thirties, during Stalin’s purges, the House of Government earned the ghoulish reputation of having the highest per-capita number of arrests and executions of any apartment building in Moscow. No other address in the city offers such a compelling portal into the world of Soviet-era bureaucratic privilege, and the horror and murder to which this privilege often led. The popular mania about the building today holds it to be a kind of phantasmagoric, haunted museum of Russia’s past century. I asked Tolya what he made of our building’s notoriety. “Why does this house have such a heavy, difficult aura?” he said. “This is why: on the one hand, its residents lived like a new class of nobility, and on the other they knew that at any second they could get their guts ripped out.”

hundred years ago, in the turbuA lent autumn of 1917, the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, took advantage of a moment of political chaos in Russia. The empire had grown weak and feckless, and, the previous February, Tsar Nicholas II had left his throne, bringing to a close the era of the Romanovs, a royal dynasty of more than three hundred years. That October, Lenin and the Bolsheviks overturned the interim government, seizing power and setting in motion the dictatorship of the proletariat. At the time, the Bolsheviks were not the country’s largest or most popular socialist party, but they were the most fervently certain of their ILLUSTRATION BY CRISTIANA COUCEIRO

PHOTOGRAPH: COURTESY NIKOLAY SEMENOV (BUILDING)

LETTER FROM MOSCOW

own prophecies. They were, in essence, the first faith-based apocalyptic sect to take charge of a country.

This is the opening argument of a magisterial new book by Yuri Slezkine, a Soviet-born historian who immigrated to the United States in 1983, and has been a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, for many years. His book, “The House of Government,” is a twelve-hundred-page epic that recounts the multigenerational story of the famed building and its inhabitants— and, at least as interesting, the rise and fall of Bolshevist faith. In Slezkine’s telling, the Bolsheviks were essentially a millenarian cult, a small tribe radically opposed to a corrupt world. With Lenin’s urging, they sought to bring about the promised revolution, or revelation, which would give rise to a more noble and just era. Of course, that didn’t happen. Slezkine’s book is a tale of “failed prophecy,” and the building itself—my home for the past several years—is “a place where revolutionaries came home and the revolution went to die.”

In the years following the Great October Socialist Revolution, as it would be called in Soviet literature, Bolshevik leaders found themselves refashioned as Communist Party officials.

They faced the conundrum of how to turn their sect into a church—that is, how to transcend the end-of-days rhetoric and create a stable system of governance. Lenin died in 1924, and Stalin, after maneuvering into power, proclaimed that global revolution was not necessary, and that the socialist utopia could be established in one country, the U.S.S.R. The “building” of socialism was the operative metaphor for what became known as the Stalin Revolution, which was defined by rapid urbanization and industrialization. The fury of construction was meant as a kind of creation myth: on the first day, the Communist Party built the Magnitogorsk steel mill; on the second, the Kharkiv tractor factory. In Moscow, citizens were amazed by the metro, which began operation in the midthirties; its cavernous stations, with their chandeliers and marble, felt like palaces for the new Communist era.

Inevitably, the builders of this new state needed a home of their own. After the revolution, top Party officials had

taken rooms in the city’s most storied addresses, occupying the Kremlin, the National and Metropol Hotels, and a prominent Orthodox seminary. Such housing was thought to be a temporary necessity that would quickly give way to collective living arrangements.

The early post-revolutionary years were a time of utopian experimentation, in architecture as well as in social engineering; the Constructivist Konstantin Melnikov drew up blueprints for giant “sleep laboratories,” in which hundreds of workers could simultaneously drift off to mechanically produced scents and calming sounds. By the late twenties, however, Stalin had dampened the freewheeling spirit in the arts, and, anyway, top Party officials had grown used to the comforts of their hotel suites and noble mansions. Construction on the House of Government began in 1928, with a design, by Boris Iofan, of the “transitional type”—that is, a building with communal services but which, for the moment, allowed residents to live in traditional family apartments. When it opened, in the spring of 1931, Slezkine writes, it boasted a cafeteria capable of serving all House residents, a theater for 1300 spectators, a library, several dozen rooms for various activities (from pool-playing to symphony orchestra rehearsals), and above the theater, both tennis and basketball courts, two gyms, and several shower rooms. There was also a bank, laundry, telegraph, post office, daycare center, walk-in clinic, hairdresser’s salon, grocery store, department store, and movie theater for 1500 spectators . . . with cafe, reading room, and band stage.

Apartments were distributed among those in charge of the nascent Communist project. Nikolai Podvoisky, a former seminarian who led the storming of the Tsar’s Winter Palace, in 1917, moved into Apartment 280. Boris Zbarsky, a chemist who presided over the embalming and maintenance of Lenin’s body inside its mausoleum, on Red Square, was given Apartment 28. Nikita Khrushchev, then the forty-year-old head of the Moscow Party Committee, moved into No. 206.

Iofan himself took a penthouse.

My apartment, in a less desirable wing of the building, was occupied by the family of Mikhail Sergushev, who was born to a peasant family in 1886 and became interested in socialist politics while working in a porcelain fac-

tory in Riga. My landlady, Marina, Sergushev’s great-granddaughter, told me that, in the years following the revolution, Sergushev travelled around half a dozen regions, helping to establish Communism across the Soviet domain. His word alone could decide the fate of local officials, even of entire villages and farming coöperatives. At first, Sergushev moved into a seven-room apartment in a mansion that once belonged to a count, where his son would ride a bike from room to room. Yet Sergushev’s health was poor, and in 1930 he died of tuberculosis. The next year, his wife and son moved into the House of Government.

The “transition” that the building was meant to bring about never came to pass. Instead, its residents moved further from collectivist ideals, and adopted life styles that looked suspiciously bourgeois. Residents had their laundry pressed and their meals prepared for them, so that they could spend all day and much of the night at work and their children could busy themselves reading Shakespeare and Goethe. There was a large staff, with one employee for every four residents. Slezkine compares the House of Government to the Dakota, in New York City—a palace of capitalism along Central Park, where residents could eat at an on-site restaurant and play tennis and croquet on private courts.

A report prepared for the Soviet Union’s Central Committee in 1935 showed that the cost of running the House of Government exceeded the Moscow norm by six hundred and seventy per cent. To the extent that the House of Government facilitated a transition, it was the metamorphosis of a sect of ascetics into a priesthood of pampered élites.

Just as the building fell short of its promise, so, too, did the early Soviet Union fail to deliver on its prophecies of a just, classless society. Food shortages, cramped housing, and life’s many other indignities continued. All millenarian movements face this moment sooner or later: this is the “Great Disappointment,” a term Slezkine borrows from the story of William Miller, a farmer in Massachusetts who prophesied that the apocalypse would occur in 1843, and, when it didn’t, shifted the date to October 22, 1844.

The Soviet Union had experienced two revolutions, Lenin’s and Stalin’s, THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 16, 2017

35

“Oh, good! This says the artist is poor.”

• and yet, in the lofty imagery of Slezkine, the “world does not end, the blue bird does not return, love does not reveal itself in all of its profound tenderness and charity, and death and mourning and crying and pain do not disappear.” What to do then?

The answer was human sacrifice, “one of history’s oldest locomotives,” Slezkine writes. The “more intense the expectation, the more implacable the enemies; the more implacable the enemies, the greater the need for internal cohesion; the greater the need for internal cohesion, the more urgent the search for scapegoats.” Soon, in Stalin’s Soviet Union, the purges began.

There would be no such thing as an accident or an error—any deviation from virtue and promised achievements was the result of deliberate sabotage.

This is the logic of black magic, of spirits and witches, and of the witch hunt. It was only natural that the hunt’s victims be found among those who set the original prophecy in motion. is hard to imagine now, with a chilplayground in one of its courtIyardstdren’s and a pan-Asian noodle bar on the ground floor, but throughout 1937 and 1938 the House of Government was 36

THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 16, 2017

• a vortex of disappearances, arrests, and deaths. Arrest lists were prepared by the N.K.V.D., the Soviet secret police, which later became the K.G.B., and were approved by Stalin and his close associates. Arrests occurred in the middle of the night. A group of N.K.V.D. officers would pull up to the building in a Black Raven, the standard-issue secret-police automobile, which had the silhouette of a bird of prey. A story I have heard many times, but which seems apocryphal, is that N.K.V.D. agents would sometimes use the garbage chutes that ran like large tubes through many apartments, popping out inside a suspect’s home without having to knock on the door. After a perfunctory trial, which could last all of three to five minutes, prisoners were taken to the left or to the right: imprisonment or execution. “Most House of Government leaseholders were taken to the right,” Slezkine writes.

No one publicly mentioned the accused or spoke of their plight to surviving family members. On the whole, Slezkine writes, those who lived in the House of Government “believed that enemies were in fact everywhere,” and that any innocent victims were isolated mistakes in an otherwise virtuous blood-

letting. He quotes a diary entry of Yulia Piatnitskaya, whose husband, a Comintern official, was arrested, along with their seventeen-year-old son, at the House of Government in 1937. Piatnitskaya is in anguish over her son, and torn between two opposing images of her husband: an honest revolutionary and a purported enemy of the people.

When she thinks of the first, she writes, “I feel so sorry for him and want to die or fight for him.” But when she ponders the second: “I feel tainted and disgusted, and I want to live in order to see them all caught and have no pity for them.” In total, according to Slezkine, eight hundred residents of the House of Government were arrested or evicted during the purges, thirty per cent of the building’s population. Three hundred and forty-four were shot.

Before long, the arrests spread from the tenants to their nannies, guards, laundresses, and stairwell cleaners. The commandant of the house was arrested as an enemy of the people, and so was the head of the Communist Party’s housekeeping department. So many enemies of the people were being uncovered that individual apartments were turning over with darkly absurd speed.

In April, 1938, the director of the Kuznetsk steel plant, Konstantin Butenko, moved into Apartment 141, which had become vacant after the arrest of its previous tenant, a deputy commissar from the Health Ministry. Butenko occupied the four rooms for six weeks before he himself was arrested, and his family evicted. Matvei Berman, one of the founders of the Gulag, took over the space. Berman was arrested six months later, and shot the next year.

One afternoon not long ago, I visited a woman named Anna Borisova, whose apartment is across a courtyard from mine. Borisova is an amateur artist and poet, and her photographs cover the walls of her living room, alongside faded family portraits. The space has the feel of an airy salon. Borisova put out a pot of tea, and slices of salty cheese and cake. She told me about her grandfather Sergey Malyshev, who was a Soviet official in charge of food markets and trade. Borisova explained that he spent 1937 in a fit of anxiety. “He felt a premonition,” she said. “He was always

waiting, never sleeping at night.” One evening, Malyshev heard footsteps coming up the corridor—and dropped dead of a heart attack. In a way, his death saved the family: there was no arrest, and thus no reason to kick his relatives out of the apartment. “Since he died his own death, it all stayed with our family—the apartment, everything,” Borisova said. “And after that no one ever touched us.”

My friend Tolya, the documentary filmmaker, told me how his grandfather, born Iosif Fradkin, survived those years. Before the revolution, he gave himself the nom de guerre of Boris Volin, a play on the Russian word volya, which connotes both will power and freedom. (Renaming was a popular Bolshevist fashion. Vladimir Ulyanov called himself Vladimir Lenin; Iosif Dzhugashvili took the name Joseph Stalin.) Volin could be a harsh, combative man. He took a post at Glavlit, the Soviet Union’s censorship organization, and announced a “decisive turn toward extreme class vigilance.” By the mid-thirties, Volin was a deputy head at the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment, an early Soviet propaganda and education body. One day in the fall of 1937, after fighting with his boss, a mean-spirited man named Andrei Bubnov, Volin had a heart attack.

He spent the next several months in and out of state hospitals and rest homes. After his recovery, he found that Bubnov, along with all but one other deputy from the ministry, had been arrested and shot.

I remarked to Tolya that it must have been terrifying to learn that many of your colleagues and friends had been liquidated in your absence. We were sitting in his apartment, surrounded by stacks of antique books and family artifacts. The center of the apartment is his grandfather’s old study, a stately room with a heavy desk and a dramatic wall of floor-to-ceiling wood-and-glass shelves. “The thing is,” Tolya said, “before this awful discovery were many others.” One of Volin’s brothers was a Soviet intelligence officer who worked in the United States under the cover of a military attaché. He was called back, arrested, and shot. One of Volin’s sisters was married to an N.K.V.D. officer, and they lived in the House of Government,

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in a nearby apartment. When the husband’s colleagues came to arrest him, he jumped out of the apartment window to his death.

Volin, I learned, kept a suitcase packed with warm clothes behind the couch, ready in case of arrest and sentence to the Gulag. His wife burned an archive of papers dating from his time as a Bolshevik emissary in Paris, fearing that the work would brand him a foreign spy. They gave their daughter, Tolya’s mother, a peculiar set of instructions. Every day after school, she was to take the elevator to the ninth floor—not the eighth, where the family lived—and look down the stairwell.

If she saw an N.K.V.D. agent outside the apartment, she was supposed to get back on the elevator, go downstairs, and run to a friend’s house.

We spoke about the atmosphere in the building back then, what Tolya’s grandparents must have been thinking as the bright and just world they thought they had built began to cannibalize itself. “They could only think about one thing: how to survive. I am profoundly certain of that,” he said.

“They weren’t able to intervene, to control things in the slightest. The forces they were up against were Biblical, like fighting nature itself.”

ike the passing of a black and fuL rious storm, the arrests ended. The last people killed were officers in the N.K.V.D. “Having waked up after the orgy, Stalin and the surviving members of the inner circle needed to get rid of those who had administered it,” Slezkine writes. It was not long before a new tragedy befell the residents of the building, and the country: the invasion by Nazi Germany, in June, 1941.

The House of Government was evacuated, its residents scattered to towns across the Soviet Union. Slezkine reports that around five hundred people from the building went off to the war; a hundred and thirteen of them were killed. In the Soviet consciousness, the war was an event as powerful as the revolution. The conflict, Slezkine writes, “justified all the previous sacrifices, both voluntary and involuntary, and offered the children of the original revolutionaries the opportunity to prove, through one more sacrifice, that their childhood 38

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had been happy, that their fathers had been pure, that their country was their family, and that their life was indeed beautiful even in death.”

After the war, residents of the House of Government trickled back, but the early spirit of the building was gone.

During the forties, as new residents mingled with the old, and furniture moved in and out, the place was, according to Slezkine, “busier, noisier, messier, less exclusive.” New élite apartment blocks went up around town, including the Stalin-era “wedding cake” skyscrapers, and the House of Government ceased to be Moscow’s only prestigious address.

The cult of Stalin and, by extension, the myth of Soviet virtue and exceptionalism—the “bond that had held the scattered survivors of the House of Government together,” Slezkine writes—began to be dismantled in 1956, when Khrushchev, once a resident of the building, now the Soviet First Secretary, delivered a secret speech on Stalin’s crimes to the twentieth Party Congress. This puncturing of the U.S.S.R.’s infallibility was heartbreaking to the generation of original Bolshevik revolutionaries. Tolya’s grandfather, by then a lecturer at the Marxism-Leninism Institute, was devastated by the speech.

His wife had died not long before, and Tolya told me that those two events “sent him to the grave.” He died within

the year, at the age of seventy-one.

Tolya’s parents were typical members of the next generation of Soviet intelligentsia: successful and outwardly unquestioning of the Communist system, but privately harboring doubts and frustrations. Tolya, like many of his friends, grew up in the protective shadow of the Soviet Union’s postwar might and good cheer. One of his earliest memories is of Yuri Gagarin’s first spaceflight, in 1961, which his family watched on a television—a de-

vice in extraordinarily short supply in Moscow in those days. “Gagarin made his flight, and now we, the U.S.S.R., were on top of the world,” Tolya said, describing the mood at the time. “I felt at the very center of the universe.”

In those years, the House of Government residents were still de-facto members of the Soviet élite, even if they were no longer all high-ranking bureaucrats. A “special dispensary” was tucked into one of the courtyards, a quasi-secret food shop and cafeteria that offered otherwise impossible-tofind groceries and various delicacies at subsidized prices. Tolya said that, as a matter of principle, no one in his family took advantage of the shop, but that on several occasions a group of young people would throw an impromptu party, send one of his friends into the shop, and, suddenly, the “table would be set for twenty people.”

In the apartment I now rent, Sergushev’s son, Vladimir, lived with his mother and his wife, Nonna, a glamorous beauty. She had a tense relationship with her mother-in-law, who found the younger woman’s interest in lipstick and lace gloves and nights at the theatre to be gauchely bourgeois. The Sergushev name helped Vladimir get a job at the K.G.B. He was an intelligent and thoughtful man, but with weak nerves.

In the fifties, he lost an attaché case filled with top-secret documents while on assignment in Germany, and was quietly removed from the secret services. He got a job as a professor and economist, with access to treats like sturgeon and bananas. He had a son, who, in 1975, had a daughter—my landlady, Marina. She told me that, when she was a child, the building’s history was largely forgotten or purposefully ignored. Growing up, she knew that her great-grandfather had his own entry in the Soviet encyclopedia, but she didn’t think of him as someone who had helped shape history.

Perhaps the defining event in the building’s postwar life came in 1976, when Yuri Trifonov, a former resident, published his novella “The House on the Embankment,” a loosely fictionalized account of his boyhood there. Trifonov, who was six years old when his family moved in, describes the building as a “huge grey block with its thousand windows giving it a look of a whole

town.” His father had a high-ranking job at the Council of People’s Commissars; his mother was an economist at the Commissariat of Agriculture.

Trifonov’s father was arrested as an enemy of the people in June, 1937, when Trifonov was eleven. The next April, N.K.V.D. agents came for his mother.

They took her out wearing thin canvas sneakers and a gray jacket—clothes she would wear all through the first winter at a Gulag camp in the frozen steppes of Kazakhstan. She paused for a moment on the landing, her arms held behind her, and looked up toward her children. She did not offer the usual words of comfort about her innocence or her imminent return, but instead a piece of advice, which Trifonov remembered for the rest of his life: “Children, no matter what happens, don’t ever lose your sense of humor.” What Trifonov did not know then was that his father was already dead, and he would not see his mother until eight years later, when she returned, weakened and sick, from the camps. Trifonov wrote “The House on the Embankment” when he was fifty-one years old, and the book’s characters are children of his generation, but he alludes to the trauma of the purges only through supporting characters who suddenly vanish, and the narrator’s passing remark that “people who leave the house cease to exist.”

The book was an immediate sensation among Soviet readers, and it gave the building a new life: from then on, it was known as the House on the Embankment. Trifonov died in 1981, but his widow, Olga, who is seventy-eight, is a proud chronicler of her husband’s life and work. We spoke this summer at the small museum dedicated to the House on the Embankment, where Olga is the director. The museum, an apartment on a courtyard of the building, is full of original artifacts, like the custom wooden furniture that Iofan, the building’s architect, designed for tenants. A stuffed penguin sits near the entrance; it was brought back, alive, from the North Pole by Ilya Mazuruk, a famed polar explorer, who lived in the building in the thirties and forties and, legend has it, took the penguin for evening walks along the embankment. Trifonov and his siblings were evicted from the building after his

mother’s arrest, and he never returned.

As Olga told me, he rarely spoke of his years there. “He was not a man who loved to talk about the past,” she said.

“He saved that for his literature.”

In the early eighties, Olga said, the couple lived in a run-down apartment above a food store. Trifonov’s popularity was immense. His name had been floated for a Nobel Prize nomination.

One day, a high-ranking Soviet official approached Olga and proposed that the couple move to a four-bedroom apartment in the House on the Embankment. It seemed a fantastic stroke of good fortune. “I came back upstairs with this silly smile, and right in the hallway I told him, ‘We are being offered to move into the House on the Embankment!’ ” Trifonov recoiled: “Do you really think that I want to move back there?” Needless to say, they declined the offer. “For him,” Olga said, “this building contained his most cheerful memories from childhood, the bitterest, and the most tragic, all of that mixed up together.” olya told me that as he grew older T he became curious not just about the story of his grandfather, whose medals and Orders of Lenin were displayed in the family bookcase, but also about the many periods of Soviet history that were never discussed. When he was around ten, he read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” a tale of existence in Stalin’s camps. Later, he made his way through Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago,” a three-volume opus that appeared only in samizdat. By his university years, he, like many of his peers, was an antiSovietchik—not fully a dissident, but thoroughly disillusioned with official ideology. He developed a split consciousness toward the house. “Of course, on a rational level, I know this building’s history, who lived here, and all about the repressions,” he said. “But there is also a more personal experience: I was born here, grew up here, and have spent a large part of my conscious life here.”

In 1991, the fall of the Soviet Union was treated with excitement and relief by many of those who lived in the House on the Embankment. Its residents were no longer true believers in Communism; by then, it seemed that there was hardly THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 16, 2017

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¥ a true believer left in the empire. The nineties in the building, as in Russia as a whole, were a time of anarchic opportunity, exhilarating and terrifying in equal measure. Pensioners moved out, their apartments snapped up by Russia’s nouveau riche. Gangsters from across the former Soviet expanse bought apartments at the city’s most central address, which, for many, still carried a whiff of privilege and power. Underground casinos popped up in some apartments; others were turned into cramped hostels for migrant workers. My apartment was rented to an American oilman, then to an investment banker, after which came a professor from France, and finally, before me, a young socialite who threw raucous parties that upset the neighbors.

The most visible symbol of the era was a Mercedes logo mounted on the roof, an advertisement several stories tall that towered over the building.

The logo had been placed there in a murky deal that wasn’t discussed with, let alone approved by, the building’s residents. A rental fee of a million rubles a month was paid to the cityowned company in charge of maintaining the building. When the sign finally came down, after ten years, the company suddenly threatened bankruptcy and said that the cash was gone.

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¥ If the nineties were defined by untrammelled commerce and the collapse of authority, then the early Putin years, beginning with Putin’s ascension to the Presidency, in 2000, were a time of increasingly centralized state power. The Kremlin subsumed other centers of authority, including the Orthodox Church, under its control. In 2012, these forces came together with symbolic absurdity in a nasty and protracted lawsuit between neighbors in the House on the Embankment. A woman living in an apartment that belonged to Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Orthodox Church, sued her neighbor, a high-profile surgeon named Yuri Shevchenko, for six million dollars, to cover damage, she said, that was caused by construction dust emanating from Shevchenko’s apartment, which was being renovated.

For his part, Kirill—who at the time was facing corruption allegations tied to a luxury Breguet watch—said that the apartment was a gift from Moscow’s former mayor, and that he used it only to store his extensive collection of antique books. A Moscow court ruled against Shevchenko, who, in order to come up with the money, sold the apartment and left the building. In a final twist, the Patriarch’s apartment looks out onto the Church of Christ

the Savior, the city’s main Orthodox cathedral, which, that same year, became the site of Pussy Riot’s punk-art protest—a performance meant to satirize the Church’s intimacy with politics under Kirill.

When I called Shevchenko, he didn’t want to talk about the details of the case, but did offer thoughts on his former home. “The building was dreamed up as a little piece of heaven for the chosen,” he told me. “But this house stands on mournful ground, and its residents are doomed to carry a very difficult sorrow.” Without a doubt, he added, the building is “cursed.”

I, like many of my acquaintances in the building, don’t necessarily feel the burden of such heavy symbolism.

A friend of mine, Nina Zavrieva, a consultant and tech entrepreneur, grew up in an apartment that first belonged to her grandfather, a lawyer who worked in the Politburo secretariat.

Nina, who is thirty, told me that from a young age she was familiar with the building’s rich history. “I knew all this in theory, but I never really felt it,” she said. “I never internalized it.” I asked her if anything about the building felt different after all these years. She said that she wasn’t sure, then remembered something: the color of the façade had changed. “At some point, it was pink, then it became bright gray, but really I don’t think I notice anymore.”

Another friend, Shakri Amirkhanova, a thirty-eight-year-old magazine publisher, had a similar view of the building. Her grandfather was a revered Soviet-era poet who secured an apartment in the House on the Embankment for Shakri’s parents. Now Shakri lives there with her boyfriend and fiveyear-old daughter. She told me that she was wary of the scale and intensity of the building’s history crowding out her own experience. “It’s my space, with my childhood memories—playing cards with my sister at night, listening to Beatles tapes, taking piano lessons in the living room,” she said. “And now it will be home to my daughter’s memories.”

Tolya told me that he was not a “mystic” about the House on the Embankment. Yet he saw a satisfying parallel in the fact that the square across the road had become the central location for a series of large-scale

anti-Kremlin demonstrations in 2011 and 2012. Protesters were angry about election fraud—observers had documented ballot stuffing and other irregularities during the country’s recent elections—but also about the cynicism and corruption that had come to define the Putin state. Tolya and his wife participated in the marches and protests. He said that, in a way, this political consciousness might be the truest inheritance from his grandfather, even though his grandfather’s prescription for change was wildly different from his own. “It seems to me that this yearning, this energy, which ultimately threw itself into revolution, is definitely passed along,” he said. “It’s a natural process. The revolutionary furor softens and adapts, becomes bourgeois, part of the system— and appears again in new forms.” ver the years, Putin has had a diffiO cult time articulating a coherent position on the events of 1917, and on the revolutionaries who eventually occupied the House on the Embankment. His logic, however contradictory, seems to be that fomenting revolution is bad, but being a superpower is good. He sees the Bolshevik revolutionaries as forerunners to those who might challenge his power today. “Someone decided to shake Russia from inside, and rocked things so much that the Russian state crumbled,” he told a gathering of students and young teachers. “A complete betrayal of national interests! We have such people today as well.” Earlier this year, in a rare comment on the revolution’s upcoming hundredyear anniversary, he said that Russians must study their history to “fully understand and give purpose to the lessons of the past,” but he didn’t say what those lessons might be.

Not long ago, I spoke to Gleb Pavlovsky, a member of underground literary circles in the nineteen-eighties, who, in the two-thousands, became one of the chief architects of Putin’s political messaging—the dark art of packaging and spin known in Russia as “political technology.” What attracted him to Putin, he told me, was that he represented neither “revolution nor counterrevolution—all of that was left in the past.” Instead, with Pavlovsky’s guidance, Putin cultivated the image

of a nonideological father figure, stern and decisive, but pragmatic and without sweeping philosophical passions.

In 2004, Pavlovsky returned to Moscow from Kiev, where he had overseen an unsuccessful Kremlin effort to install a Russia-friendly candidate as President. He decided to buy an apartment in the House on the Embankment. It was a large, sunny place on the ninth floor, with a wall of windows and an expansive balcony, where he would often sit in an armchair and work. Pavlovsky’s colleagues laughed at his choice of address: by then, fashionable Kremlin apparatchiks lived in walled-off mansions outside town. But Pavlovsky enjoyed the gravitas of his new home. “I felt like a participant in history, and I must say I liked it.” The apartment was home to the “years of my most fierce Putinism,” he said.

Eventually, Pavlovsky soured on the political machine he had helped construct. In 2011, when Putin decided to return to the Presidency for a third term, Pavlovsky disagreed with the decision. He left the Kremlin, and became an outspoken critic of the Putin government. Like Tolya, he attended the protests across the street. At a certain point, he decided that he no longer liked living in the House on the Embankment and the connotations that came with it. For a decade, he had been part of the country’s political establishment, and, as he put it, lived in a building that served as an “external confirmation” of that status. But he began to think of that as something “unpleasant, even embarrassing—that I was connected to the part of the establishment in that building who were guilty, the ones who had allowed, or at least not prevented, the evil of the past.”

As Pavlovsky told me, the Bolshevik revolutionaries who first inhabited the House on the Embankment “thought that they were smarter, that they could outwit the system they created. But they lost control, became marionettes of something much bigger and more powerful than any individual, and, by the time that system had started to devour people, it was too late.” He sold his apartment in 2015, and now rents a place in a different part of town. On the whole, he said, he’s relieved to be gone. “But I do miss the views.”  THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 16, 2017

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A REPORTER AT LARGE

THE BREAKING POINT Will Donald Trump let Rex Tillerson do his job?

BY DEXTER FILKINS

ne afternoon in late September, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called a meeting of the six countries that came together in 2015 to limit Iran’s nuclear-weapons program.

They gathered on the main floor of the United Nations headquarters, in Manhattan, in the “consultations room,” a private chamber where diplomats can speak confidentially before stepping onto the floor of the Security Council. Tillerson, who was the head of ExxonMobil before becoming President Trump’s top diplomat, had not previously met Iran’s foreign minister, Javad Zarif, who negotiated the agreement with the Obama Administration. Tillerson’s career had been spent making deals for oil, and his views on such topics as Iran’s nuclear weapons were little known. Even more obscure were his skills as a diplomat.

Sitting at a U-shaped table, Tillerson let the other diplomats—representatives of Germany, France, Russia, China, the United Kingdom, the European Union, and Iran—speak first. When Zarif ’s turn came, he read a list of complaints about the Trump Administration and its European partners. The nuclear deal had called for the removal of economic sanctions against Iranian banks, but, he said, the United States had not yet lifted them.

“We still cannot open a bank account in the U.K.,” he said.

Gatherings of diplomats are usually dull affairs, with the participants restricting themselves to bromides in order to avoid open disagreements. Tillerson, peering down over his reading glasses, spoke in a deep Texas drawl that evoked a frontier sheriff about to lose his patience. “No one can credibly claim that Iran has positively contributed to regional peace and security,” he said.

Tillerson is an imposing man; he is stocky, and has a head of swept-back gray hair and a wide mouth that often droops in a scowl. Turning to Zarif, he went on to say that Iran had funded groups like

O

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Hezbollah, the Lebanese Islamist militia; it had backed Bashar al-Assad, the murderous Syrian dictator; and it had sent its Navy into the Persian Gulf to harass American ships. The fault for all this, Tillerson said, lay in the nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which curtailed Iran’s nuclear-weapons program but not its aggressive actions in the region. For Tillerson, it was an emblem of the previous Administration’s overly lenient foreign policy, which sought to promote America’s priorities through consensus, rather than through the frank display of power.

“Lifting the sanctions as required under the terms of the J.C.P.O.A. has enabled Iran’s unacceptable behavior,” he said.

The room went silent, until Zarif took the microphone. In the West, Zarif is an enigma; he was educated in the United States and speaks nearly perfect English, but he remains loyal to the revolutionary regime in Iran. In the course of the negotiations over the J.C.P.O.A., the Obama Administration came to regard Zarif as a moderate among hard-liners, trying to make a deal to avert a war.

Zarif began by telling Tillerson that, in reaching the nuclear deal, Iran and the U.S. had agreed to set aside other points of contention. In a professorial tone, he noted that for Iranians this meant relinquishing a long list of historical grievances. “The U.S.A. is used to punishing Iran, and Iran is used to resisting,” Zarif said. He accused the Trump Administration of violating the terms of the nuclear deal, by, among other things, holding up export licenses that Boeing and Airbus required in order to do business in Iran. “We’re not going to argue over this,” he snapped. “Had I wanted to look for excuses to violate this agreement, we would have had plenty.”

Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, objected. “This is not a negotiation,” he said. Tillerson took the microphone and began again, his voice un-

wavering. The real problem, he said, was that Iran had been attacking Americans since 1979, when Iranian students seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and held fifty-two diplomats for more than a year.

“The modern-day U.S.-Iran relationship is now almost forty years old,” he went on, still looking at Zarif. “It was born out of a revolution, with our Embassy under siege—and we were very badly treated.” He enumerated Iraniansponsored attacks in Lebanon in the nineteen-eighties and in Iraq more recently, which together killed hundreds of American citizens. “The relationship has been defined by violence—against us,” he said.

Tillerson wondered aloud whether the entire effort to improve relations with Iran wasn’t doomed by history. “We have more pounds, and our hair is gray,” he said. “Maybe we don’t have it in our capacity to change the nature of this relationship, because we are bound by it— maybe we leave it to the next generation to try.” He thought for a moment. “I don’t know. I’m not a diplomat.”

As Lavrov, muttering loudly in Russian, stood and led his assistants out of the room, the meeting broke up, with the officials talking in hushed tones about what had happened. For proponents of the nuclear deal, it was an unacceptably risky bit of brinkmanship.

For the Trump Administration, it was an ideal expression of a bellicose new foreign policy, based on the campaign promise of America First. An aide to Tillerson later told me, “It was one of the finest moments in American diplomacy in the last fifty years.”

hen I met Tillerson recently, in W his seventh-floor office at the State Department, he was wearing a dark-blue suit and a bright-red tie, but he carried himself like a hard-charging Texas oilman. Tillerson, who is sixty-five, was born in Wichita Falls, Texas, near

As the C.E.O. of Exxon, Tillerson had unquestioned control. At the State Department, he has struggled to impose his will.

ILLUSTRATION

BY MICHAEL CHO

THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 16, 2017

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the Oklahoma border, and grew up in a lower-middle-class family that roamed across the two states. He was named for two Hollywood actors famous for playing cowboys: Rex Allen and John Wayne (his middle name is Wayne). “I grew up pretty modest,” he told me. “My dad came back from World War Two and drove a truck selling bread at grocery stores. My mom had three kids—you know, the nineteen-fifties.”

His formative experience was in the Boy Scouts.

When he was young, his father took a job helping to set up local chapters, and Tillerson eventually became an Eagle Scout, one of an élite class of “servantleaders” distinguished by obsessive, nerdish attainment.

When he was fourteen, and living with his family in Stillwater, Oklahoma, he got a job washing dishes in the kitchen of the student union at Oklahoma State University, for seventy-five cents an hour.

On weekends, he picked cotton: “You just show up Saturday morning at 6 a.m., climb into the back of a panel truck with a bunch of other guys, and you drive out to one of the farms and drag a big cotton sack behind you, picking cotton all day long, for a dollar an hour.”

When Tillerson was sixteen, he started sweeping floors at the university’s engineering school, and began thinking about engineering as a career. He got there by an unusual route. Tillerson, who had played drums in his high-school marching band, won a band scholarship to the University of Texas, where he studied civil engineering. Upon graduation, in 1975, he got a job at Exxon as a production engineer.

Exxon has historically been dominated by engineers, who pride themselves on their precise, quantifiable judgments. “Rex is what you would expect to get when you cross a Boy Scout with an engineer—straight and meticulous,” Alex Cranberg, an oil executive who went to college with Tillerson, said. Others described a more pragmatic sensibility, noting that Tillerson’s favorite book is “Atlas Shrugged,” the Ayn Rand novel extolling the virtues of capitalism and individualism. “The thing about Rex is, he’s got this big Texas aw-shucks thing going on,” a Russia expert who 44

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knows Tillerson told me. “You think he’s not the smartest guy in the room.

He’s not the dominant male. But, after a while, he owns all your assets.”

It was through a Boy Scouts connection that he was chosen to be Secretary of State. From 2010 to 2012, Tillerson was the national president of the Boy Scouts of America, where he sat on the board with Robert M. Gates, the former Defense Secretary for George W. Bush and for Barack Obama.

After quarterly meetings, Gates told me, he and Tillerson got together. “We would share a whiskey and talk about the world,” he said. (Exxon also engaged a consulting firm owned by Gates and another prominent Republican, Condoleezza Rice.)

After the election, Michael Flynn, a Trump adviser, asked Gates to meet the President-elect in New York. The introduction was tense—Gates had written that Trump was unfit to be President—but Trump grew comfortable enough to ask Gates to suggest a nominee for Secretary of State. “I wanted to recommend someone who would be good—and who Trump would accept,” Gates told me. At the time, the leading contenders were John Bolton, a neoconservative ideologue and a former Ambassador to the U.N., and Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House. Gates suggested Tillerson, and not long afterward Condoleezza Rice spoke with Vice-President-elect Mike Pence to add her support for Tillerson. “This President doesn’t trust the foreign-policy establishment,” Rice told me. “A businessman who has made big oil deals—we thought that would be something that Trump would be comfortable with.”

When Tillerson got a call from Pence, asking him to come to New York, he told friends that the President-elect likely wanted advice about foreign affairs. But Steve Bannon, Trump’s former adviser, told me, “They got along right away.

Trump offered him the job on the spot.”

It was not immediately clear that Tillerson wanted it. At the time, he was four months from retiring, set to receive a retirement package worth about a hundred and eighty million dollars, which

would augment a personal fortune of at least three hundred million. He owned two horse and cattle ranches in Texas, where he liked to hunt and ride. (His wife, Renda Tillerson, raises cutting horses, bred to push through herds of cattle.) “He had a great life ahead, right?

Ranch. Tons of money. Relax. Laurels to rest on,” a former government official told me. “And all of a sudden this happens. He couldn’t really say no.” In an interview with a conservative Web site, Tillerson alluded to his ambivalence. “I didn’t want this job,” he said. “My wife told me I’m supposed to do this.”

Tillerson’s reservations turned out to be well founded. His tenure, like that of other members of Trump’s Cabinet, has been marked by strife and confusion. As Tillerson has struggled with diplomatic crises in North Korea, Iran, Qatar, and elsewhere, Trump has contradicted and even embarrassed him, usually by emphasizing America’s willingness to use force instead of diplomacy. In a further slight, he has given Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, a broad portfolio of international responsibilities typically reserved for the Secretary of State. Tillerson, for his part, shows little evidence of holding his Commander-in-Chief in high regard.

Last July, following Trump’s strangely political and inappropriate speech at the annual Boy Scout Jamboree, Tillerson, according to NBC, was so offended that he was going to resign, until VicePresident Pence, Defense Secretary James Mattis, and the incoming chief of staff, John Kelly, persuaded him to stay. That same month, Mattis reportedly attended a meeting of nationalsecurity officials at which Tillerson referred to Trump as a “fucking moron.”

Those reports have renewed rumors in Washington that Tillerson will soon resign or be fired. Both sides quickly responded with ritual assurances of fealty.

Yet few believe that the relationship between Trump and Tillerson is warm or coöperative, or that it will last long.

Before taking office, Tillerson ran a corporation whose reach and success have few rivals in American history. In government, he has been uncomfortably subordinate to an unpredictable man he does not seem to respect. “I think running a Fortune 500 company is a whole lot easier than working as a

Cabinet official, running foreign policy for the United State government,” a senior Trump Administration official told me. “It’s two different worlds. You cannot be God. The big, dirty secret about Washington is that no one has a lot of power in this town, O.K.? Even the wannabe Machiavellis don’t do well in this town.” n February, a few weeks after Tillerson was confirmed by the Senate, he Ivisited the Oval Office to introduce the President to a potential deputy, but Trump had something else on his mind.

He began fulminating about federal laws that prohibit American businesses from bribing officials overseas; the businesses, he said, were being unfairly penalized.

Tillerson disagreed. When he was an executive with Exxon, he told Trump, he once met with senior officials in Yemen to discuss a deal. At the meeting, Yemen’s oil minister handed him his business card. On the back was written an account number at a Swiss bank. “Five million dollars,” the minister told him.

“I don’t do that,” Tillerson said.

“Exxon doesn’t do that.” If the Yemenis wanted Exxon on the deal, he said, they’d have to play straight. A month later, the Yemenis assented. “Tillerson told Trump that America didn’t need to pay bribes— that we could bring the world up to our own standards,” a source with knowledge of the exchange told me.

At Exxon, Tillerson often dealt with foreign governments, but ethics were typically not the primary concern. When he was named C.E.O., in 2006, the company had eighty thousand employees doing business in almost two hundred countries, and annual revenues that approached four hundred billion dollars, making it richer than many nations. Its political power is similarly far-reaching; heads of state often defer to Exxon in order to secure its coöperation. In the U.S., it spends millions each year on lobbying Congress and the White House, and, through a political-action committee, contributes heavily to candidates, the overwhelming majority of them Republicans.

Tillerson’s predecessor at Exxon was Lee Raymond, who ran the company for thirteen years. Raymond was larger than life: brilliant, relentless, and un-

sparing toward those he regarded as unworthy. In a business in which it is not uncommon to spend a billion dollars exploring an oil field, only to find that it is not worth the effort, Exxon produced consistent profits. In 1998, Raymond led a merger with Mobil, at that time the largest in history. The company developed a unique culture: spread across the globe, but insular and often resistant to outsiders. “A lot of Exxon’s people come from Texas,” a former employee told me. “And, frankly, they’d be happy to stay in Texas their whole lives.”

Exxon maintained exacting standards for its employees, who tended to be highly paid and highly loyal. “Tillerson was a typical Exxon baby—worked there his whole life,” the former employee told me. “The first rule at Exxon is, your reputation and your company’s reputation— they are one.” During Tillerson’s early career, that reputation was mixed. Raymond publicly derided scientists who posited a link between fossil fuels and climate change, and he spent millions of dollars attempting to discredit them.

Exxon was also one of the last major U.S. corporations to ban discrimination against gay and lesbian employees.

When Tillerson took over as C.E.O., he was charged with maintaining Exxon’s profits while improving its public image. To change a company the size

of Exxon is no easy task, and Tillerson lacked his predecessor’s charisma. “Raymond was the kind of guy who would visit an oil field and remember the name of a rig worker he’d met there twenty years before,” the former Exxon employee told me. “Tillerson is made of different material. He’s much less folksy.”

An Exxon employee told me, “When he first became C.E.O., people could still stop by his office—‘Hey, Rex, what about this?’ ” Over time, Tillerson grew increasingly isolated, retreating to a cloistered area that employees called the “God pod,” eating lunch in a private dining room, and relying on a few handpicked executives. The employee described Tillerson’s domineering style in briefings: “The management committee would be the handful of guys who run the company with him. But not one of them ever said a word or asked a question. Only Tillerson. The implication was ‘This is my show.’ ” In the oil business, the greatest imperative is discovering new reserves; any company that can’t meet demand risks terminal decline. In search of a competitive advantage, Exxon has established oil platforms in the Arctic Ocean, natural-gas fields in the jungles of Indonesia, and drilling platforms in Iraq’s Euphrates Valley. For a decade before Tillerson assumed the top job, he was

“It’s the super—he says a lot of short American fiction has been clogging the pipes in the basement.”

¥ in charge of overseas operations, securing new reserves to replace those refined and sold. When he was C.E.O., Exxon’s prospects for large oil discoveries increasingly migrated overseas, often to difficult places. That required negotiating multibillion-dollar deals with sometimes erratic and brutal foreign leaders.

“You can’t navigate this world by being some Stetson-wearing simpleton,” the former Exxon employee, who worked in Russia, told me. Tillerson sometimes played the naïve provincial for effect, but he and his company were ruthlessly focussed on achieving their aims.

Last year, before being named Secretary of State, Tillerson made an appearance at the University of Texas, where he was asked about the interplay of Exxon’s global influence and American foreign policy. He suggested that business and politics existed in separate realms.

“I’m not here to represent the United States government’s interest,” he told the audience. “I’m not here to defend it, nor am I here to criticize it. That’s not what I do. I’m a businessman.” n 2002, a year after Congress passed Ivestigators the Patriot Act, a group of Senate inwanted to determine whether American banks were complying with the law’s restrictions against money laun46

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¥ dering. One of them was Riggs Bank, in Washington, D.C. When the investigators began looking into Riggs’s books, they discovered several accounts, containing hundreds of millions of dollars, linked to Teodoro Obiang Nguema, the dictator of Equatorial Guinea, a tiny African nation with enormous gas and oil reserves. Some of the accounts were receiving deposits from ExxonMobil, which maintained large operations in the country. At the time, Tillerson was Exxon’s senior vice-president.

Since the nineteen-nineties, when oil and gas were discovered in Equatorial Guinea, it has been one of the world’s most corrupt and undemocratic nations, where dissidents are routinely jailed and tortured. Obiang, who came to power in 1979, oversaw the awarding of all the country’s oil contracts. He is estimated to have a fortune of at least six hundred million dollars, while most of his citizens live on less than two dollars a day.

His son is notorious for flagrant displays of wealth; he owned a thirty-million-dollar mansion in Malibu (later confiscated by American officials) and more than a million dollars’ worth of Michael Jackson memorabilia.

In some cases, the Senate investigators found, Exxon wired money directly to offshore bank accounts that Obiang

controlled. In others, money was carried to the bank in suitcases containing millions of dollars in shrink-wrapped bundles. Exxon also contributed to a fund, controlled by Obiang, to send the children of high-ranking government officials to study in the United States.

Exxon officials told the investigators that the payments were made not to acquire oil concessions but to pay for a variety of services, such as security and catering, that Exxon needed in order to operate in Equatorial Guinea.

The company had no choice, they said, since Obiang’s family had monopolies on these services. Elise Bean, a former Senate investigator who worked on the case, told me, “It was a wonderful example of paying someone off without paying them off.”

The discoveries helped prompt senators to draw up legislation requiring American resource companies to disclose any payments to foreign governments. According to the bill’s sponsors, the United States had an interest in promoting good governance abroad. “Corruption is a real problem for American foreign policy,” a former Senate aide who drafted the bill told me. Under the legislation, companies would also be required to disclose domestic payments, including taxes paid to the U.S. government, something Exxon has never done.

For years, as Exxon and others in the industry conducted a concerted lobbying effort against the legislation, Congress delayed acting on it. Then, in 2010, following the financial crisis, language calling for a new disclosure regulation, Rule 1504, was included in the DoddFrank legislation, which imposed reforms on banks and other financial institutions. Tillerson, as the C.E.O. of Exxon, went to Capitol Hill to argue against the rule, and met with one of the senators who supported it. According to a source with knowledge of the meeting, Tillerson said that if Exxon had to disclose payments to foreign governments it would make many of those governments unhappy—especially that of Russia, where Exxon was involved in multibillion-dollar projects.

The senator refused to drop the rule, and Tillerson became visibly agitated.

(Tillerson denies this.) “He got redfaced angry,” the source recalled. “He lifted out of his chair in anger. My

impression was that he was not used to people with different views.”

After years of wrangling, Rule 1504 was approved, and scheduled to go into effect on January 1, 2017. Following Trump’s election, however, the Republican-controlled Congress singled out a number of regulations for repeal, Rule 1504 among them. But Congress waited until after Tillerson’s confirmation hearing to include the rule in repeal legislation; Tillerson was not asked about it at the hearing. On February 1st, with Exxon lobbyists on the Hill to push Congress, the House voted to rescind Rule 1504, and the Senate quickly did the same. Almost exactly an hour later, Tillerson was confirmed as Secretary of State.

2013, Tillerson travelled INurintoNovember, Washington, D.C., to meet with al-Maliki, the Prime Minister of Iraq. Maliki was hoping to persuade Tillerson to change his mind about a sensitive political matter. Exxon was then negotiating a multibillion-dollar deal with the government of Iraqi Kurdistan, a semi-autonomous region in the northern part of the country, which has long sought independence. Under the deal, Exxon would explore for oil in some eight hundred and forty thousand acres, potentially providing the Kurds with a steady stream of revenue that was independent of the government in Baghdad. In Maliki’s view, giving the Kurds their own revenue would hasten a breakup of the country.

Maliki was not alone in objecting; President Obama opposed the deal, and his aides had prevailed upon Exxon executives to drop the Kurdish project.

“We were concerned that this would further embolden the Kurds to strike out on their own,” Tony Blinken, Obama’s deputy national-security adviser at the time, told me.

The meeting, held at the Willard Hotel, ended in acrimony. Exxon had previously made an agreement with Maliki to undertake two drilling projects in southern Iraq, and Maliki, a former dissident and guerrilla fighter, threatened to cancel them if Exxon pursued the Kurdish deal. Tillerson refused. Maliki argued bluntly, “You’re dividing the country. You’re undermining our constitution!” But Tillerson held firm. “It was

one of the worst meetings of my career,” a senior Iraqi official who was in attendance said. In the end, Exxon made the Kurdish deal.

Determined to find new reserves, Tillerson demonstrated on several occasions that he was willing to engage in deals that were contrary to the foreign policy of the United States. The most intense conflicts arose when Exxon tried to do business in countries where the U.S. had imposed economic sanctions.

According to senators and aides, and to documents filed with Congress, Exxon lobbied the U.S. government extensively to relax sanctions on Iran, which were designed to curtail its nuclear-weapons program. Exxon was also a member of USA Engage, a group that lobbied against the sanctions.

Asked about the sanctions at his confirmation hearing, Tillerson said that he did not “personally” lobby against the legislation, and, “to my knowledge,” neither did Exxon. The senators—Democrats and even some Republicans—were incredulous. “I have four different lobbying reports totalling millions of dollars, as required by the Lobbying Disclosure Act, that list ExxonMobil’s lobbying activities on four specific pieces of legislation authorizing sanctions,” Robert Menendez, a Democrat from New Jersey, said. “Now, I know you’re new to this, but it’s pretty clear.”

The senators also inquired about a

company called Infineum, a European subsidiary of Exxon operated jointly with Royal Dutch Shell, which, from 2003 to 2005, sold fifty-five million dollars’ worth of oil additives to Iran, Syria, and Sudan, all of which were under American sanctions. (At the time, sales by foreign subsidiaries were permitted.) Although Tillerson was then in charge of Exxon’s overseas operations, he told the senators, “I don’t recall that incident.”

Chris Murphy, a Democrat from

Connecticut, asked Tillerson, “Was there any country in the world whose record of civil rights was so horrible, or whose conduct so directly threatened global security or U.S. national-security interests, that Exxon wouldn’t do business with it?”

Tillerson’s answer seemed unconcerned with ethics. “The standard that is applied is, first, Is it legal?” he said.

“Does it violate any of the laws of the United States to conduct business in a particular country? Then, beyond that, it goes to the question of the country itself. Do they honor contract sanctity?”

The Senate voted to confirm Tillerson, but with forty-three votes against— more opposition than any other Secretary of State had faced in fifty years.

2013, at a ceremony in Moscow, PresIbluenident Vladimir Putin affixed a small pin to Tillerson’s lapel, signifying his membership in Russia’s Order of Friendship. For Tillerson, it was evidence of a connection that he had spent nearly two decades establishing. In Tillerson’s talk at the University of Texas, he noted that he had a “very close” relationship with Putin. “I don’t agree with everything he’s doing,” he said. “But he understands that I’m a businessman.”

Tillerson’s work in Russia began in the early nineties, when Exxon, in partnership with Rosneft, a state-owned oil firm, won a multibillion-dollar contract to develop a natural-gas field off Sakhalin Island, in the country’s remote eastern territory. At the time, Tillerson was in charge of Exxon’s operations in Russia and in the Caspian Sea. Exxon was one of several Western oil companies trying to exploit Russia’s vast oil and gas reserves. As Putin saw it, Exxon offered unparalleled expertise in tapping deposits in hard-to-reach places. Equally important to the Russians, it offered access to the highest echelons of American power. “They think the C.E.O. of Exxon can control anything,” a former senior American diplomat who worked in Russia told me.

In 2006, though, the price of oil was rising dramatically, and Russian officials wanted a greater share of profits.

Putin’s government and its allies began to make trouble for foreign oil companies. In another large project off Sakhalin Island, a joint venture of Royal THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 16, 2017

47

Dutch Shell and the state-owned company Gazprom, Shell was forced to sell half of its share, at a loss of billions of dollars.

Not long afterward, Gazprom demanded that Exxon abandon plans to export natural gas from the Sakhalin field to China. Exxon executives feared that the demand was a prelude to another takeover, but they refused to be intimidated. They publicly warned the Russian government against violating their contract. “Exxon, because they’re so big, they have this swagger,” a second former senior American diplomat who worked in Russia recalled. “They told the Russians, Fuck you. And the Russians backed off.”

According to several people with knowledge of the Russian oil industry, the tug-of-war over Sakhalin marked the start of the relationship between Tillerson and Igor Sechin, the president of Rosneft; Exxon’s representative in Russia owned a weekend house outside Moscow that was next door to Sechin’s, and Tillerson liked to visit when he was in town. Sechin, a close associate of Putin, was a former translator for the Soviet military in Angola, but he found that he had chemistry with the Boy Scout from Texas. “Sechin wants to be the next Rex Tillerson, the head of the world’s biggest oil company,” Konstantin von Eggert, an executive for Exxon in Russia, told me. “Tillerson is very confident. He’s very tough. The Russians respected that.” At one point, Tillerson took Sechin on a tour of New York, including a stop for caviar, with Putin, at the upscale restaurant Per Se. (When Sechin was later barred from travelling to the U.S., he joked that he regretted missing the opportunity “to ride around the United States on a motorcycle with Rex Tillerson.”)

Still, both Americans and Russians told me that Tillerson’s relationships with Sechin and Putin were purely transactional. “Tillerson courted Sechin,” a former American diplomat with deep experience in Russia told me. “He only got in to see Putin when Sechin needed him to—as a way of fluffing Tillerson.”

In 2011, Exxon signed a deal to explore for oil in the Kara Sea, a forbidding Arctic region that may contain hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of oil.

The agreement also allowed Rosneft to 48

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carry out joint projects with Exxon in the United States—an unusual opportunity for a relatively unsophisticated company. At a ceremony in Russia, Putin and Tillerson toasted the signing of the deal. “I wish you great success,” Putin said, as Tillerson smiled and raised his champagne flute. As Tillerson’s relationship with Putin developed, American diplomats hoped that he would share his impressions of the powerful Russians he encountered. Tillerson did not.

“I don’t think he thought it was important to see us,” a former senior American official who worked in Russia told me.

In early 2014, Russian troops invaded the Crimean Peninsula, in Ukraine, claiming that it was historically Russian territory. The move was denounced worldwide, and the Obama Administration moved to impose economic penalties on Putin’s government.

Among these was a ban on oil exploration, which meant that Exxon had to shut down its operations in the Kara Sea. Exxon lobbied against the sanctions; public records show that Tillerson visited the White House five times in 2013 and 2014, twice to see Obama.

“Of all the companies we dealt with, Exxon was by far the most resistant to sanctions,” a former American official who worked on the issue said. “They were used to people caving in, used to bigfooting people.”

In the end, Obama imposed the sanctions. “The Kremlin was very much surprised,” von Eggert told me. “The idea that the American government could kick Exxon around was very novel to them.” Exxon asked for an extension, to wind down its exploration in the Kara Sea; its executives told the White House that, without more time, the remnants of their operation could damage the environment or be seized by the Russian state. Despite objections from State Department officials, the Treasury Department granted the reprieve. On the final day of work, Exxon announced that it had discovered oil. “We were pretty pissed off,” a former Obama Administration official told me. “They were obviously trying to roll us, to get more time.”

In addition to imposing sanctions on the Russian government, the U.S. targeted Sechin and other senior officials close to Putin. Yet the relationship

with Exxon continued. Company officials made a number of oil deals with Sechin, and, after Tillerson’s confirmation, applied for a waiver to the sanctions that prevented work in the Kara Sea. The Treasury Department subsequently fined Exxon two million dollars for the deals it made with Sechin, and denied its request for a waiver. “I was very pleased about that,” a former U.S. official who worked on Russia sanctions told me. “The integrity of the people at Treasury held up.

It didn’t matter that Tillerson was Secretary of State.” ver since the nineteen-seventies, E when scientists began asserting that the burning of fossil fuels was causing the planet to warm, Exxon has been in the vanguard of American corporations attempting to undermine their conclusions. According to public records, Exxon gave tens of millions of dollars to organizations, like the Competitive Enterprise Institute, that challenged the science. Records show that, even while Exxon was publicly denying that the climate was changing, its own scientists had concluded that it was. Naomi Oreskes, a professor of the history of science at Harvard, examined nineteen papers and reports on climate change produced by Exxon scientists between 1999 and 2004, and compared them with a series of essays from Exxon that were periodically published as advertisements in the Times. “Exxon’s scientists were very good,” Oreskes told me. “At the same time that they were telling their bosses that the climate was warming, Exxon was taking ads out in the Times saying that the science was wrong.”

Exxon has recently come under scrutiny for claims it made to its shareholders about how it was responding to climate change. In 2014, the company published a report saying that it had begun to add a “proxy cost” to all of its activities—a notional tax, in anticipation of increased environmental regulations, which sometimes amounted to as much as eighty dollars per ton of carbon emissions. Such an added cost could affect crucial decisions about whether projects were profitable. At a conference with shareholders two years later, Tillerson said, “We impose that cost in all of our investment decisions, our

operating decisions, our business plans.”

In 2015, Eric Schneiderman, New York’s attorney general, began an investigation into whether Exxon’s accounting related to climate change was fraudulent. The gist of the argument is that Tillerson’s assurances to shareholders were fictitious, or at least greatly exaggerated. The actual additional cost that Exxon was figuring into its business decisions was much lower, Schneiderman claimed. “Exxon’s proxy-cost riskmanagement process may be a sham,” John Oleske, an attorney in Schneiderman’s office, wrote in one court filing.

A consultant who has worked with Exxon for many years told me that Tillerson and the company’s senior executives viewed the investigation as a baseless intrusion into their business. “The law Schneiderman is investigating Exxon under seems to have been created so attorneys general of New York could run for governor,” the consultant told me.

“I can’t tell you how angry they are.”

Exxon has fought the investigation relentlessly, taking the unusual step of suing Schneiderman in federal court, on the ground that his suit violated the First Amendment. “The coercive machinery of law enforcement should not be used to limit debate on public policy,” lawyers for Exxon said.

In the thousands of documents that Exxon has turned over, two things stand out. The first is that Tillerson, when he was C.E.O., maintained an Exxon e-mail account under an alias, Wayne Tracker. Schneiderman’s lawyers found dozens of e-mails from the account, which, they say, Tillerson used to send messages about the risks posed by climate change. In court filings, Exxon lawyers said that the Wayne Tracker account was set up because Tillerson’s original account was flooded with e-mails sent by “activists.” When investigators asked Exxon to turn over other e-mails from the account, employees claimed that they had been inadvertently destroyed.

The second discovery was a document that Schneiderman’s lawyers believe helps prove their claims about Exxon’s accounting. According to court filings, Jason Iwanika, a supervisor for Imperial Oil, an Exxon subsidiary in Canada, asked his superiors in the United States whether he

should apply Exxon’s proxy cost to a project. “What is the guidance?” he wrote. According to Schneiderman, Iwanika’s Exxon supervisors told him to use a smaller tax, suggested by the Canadian government.

The suit will likely take years to resolve, but it will undoubtedly form part of the calculations about Tillerson’s legacy at Exxon. At this point, his legacy seems mixed. Exxon is one of the largest and most consistently profitable corporations in the world, and will continue to be as long as fossil fuels are a dominant source of energy. But, since 2010, its stock price has mostly been below that of Chevron, which would have seemed unimaginable in Lee Raymond’s time. Tillerson charted Exxon’s future based on the idea that, as developing economies matured, the demand for fossil fuels would continue grow-

ing for decades. But, as the threat of climate change increases and the prices of alternative energy decline, Exxon has been slow to respond. In 2009, Tillerson led an investment in oil shale, purchasing a company called XTO, in a deal valued at thirty-six billion dollars. The effort is widely seen as ill-considered and belated. “Exxon is going to be paying for that for a long time,” a former Exxon executive told me.

During Tillerson’s time as C.E.O., Exxon stopped funding some of the most aggressive anti-climate-change groups. At his confirmation hearing, he said that he “came to the conclusion a few years ago that the risk of climate change does exist, and that the consequences of it could be serious enough that action should be taken.” Tillerson added that he thought our ability to measure the effect of fossil fuels on the

“Can I tempt Madam with a piece of gum?”

• climate is “very limited.” But, when asked if he supported the Paris climate accords, he praised them. “I think we’re better served by being at that table than leaving that table,” he said.

On the issue of climate change, at least, Tillerson had managed to improve his company’s public image. But, as Secretary of State, that stance has done him little good. In June, Trump backed out of the Paris accords, despite Tillerson’s support for them. “We don’t want other leaders and other countries laughing at us anymore,” Trump said. “And they won’t be.” hen the United States emerged W from the ruins of the Second World War as the world’s richest and most powerful country, its diplomats were determined to avoid another global catastrophe. Dean Acheson, the Secretary of State under President Truman and one of the principal architects of the postwar international order, wrote later, “The enormity of the task . . . was to create a world out of chaos.” Their idea was to devise political and economic arrangements that would bind the world together through free trade and 50

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• encourage the spread of Western-style liberal democracy.

In the past seven decades, this system has grown into a web of relationships, treaties, and institutions that span the globe and touch every aspect of daily life, from the protection of human rights to the conduct of global trade. Such mundane but essential concerns as the flight paths of airliners, the transfer of patents, and the dumping of waste in oceans—even the number of bluefin tuna that can be taken from the sea—are governed by international agreements.

The system came to have many crucial components—NATO, the European Union, the United Nations—but its indispensable member was the United States. The U.S. has given billions of dollars to help expand trade, fight disease, and foster the growth of democracy. It was largely through American leadership that the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo ended, that Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait was reversed, that the wars between Israel and Egypt and between Israel and Jordan were brought to a close. (The American wars in Vietnam and Iraq were notable because they

were carried out to a great extent in defiance of allies and international organizations.) The postwar system, for all its injustices and hypocrisies, has achieved the principal purpose that Acheson and others set out for it: the world has not fallen into a third enveloping war.

Daniel Kurtzer, a former U.S. Ambassador to Israel and to Egypt, told me that in his time abroad the idea of American global leadership was so pervasive that he never saw it seriously challenged. “Whenever I would walk into a room filled with other ambassadors, everyone would sit down and wait for me to speak,” Kurtzer told me.

“They didn’t always agree, but they wanted to know what the United States was going to do.”

During the 2016 campaign, Trump struck a fervently nationalistic tone. For years, he said, the United States has protected ungrateful allies who were freeloading on America’s labors. He questioned the value of NATO, suggested that the U.S. might abandon such allies as Japan and South Korea, and promised to negate some of the country’s longest-standing trade agreements.

Trump presented a world view in which the interests of the United States were much more narrowly defined; in which only enemies that attack us directly, such as ISIS, merited a military response; and in which international agreements had to show more tangible benefits if the U.S. was to remain a party to them.

Trump was describing not just an abdication of global leadership but an America more concerned with asserting its prerogatives than with maintaining long-term friendships.

Tillerson’s own vision—apart from a commitment to efficiency—is less clear. Unlike his predecessors, he has not given a major foreign-policy address in which he has outlined a world view.

The few statements that he has made sound remarkably like those of Secretaries past: he has reaffirmed America’s historical commitments, whether to NATO or the U.N. or Japan. “America has been indispensable in providing the stability to prevent another world war, increase global prosperity, and encourage the expansion of liberty,” he said at his confirmation hearing.

Since then, he has given a handful

of television interviews, but, aside from a few brief conversations with journalists, he has not spoken to a reporter for a newspaper or a magazine. Early in his term, he moved to reduce the number of journalists accompanying him on trips, at one point requesting a plane too small to accommodate reporters. In May, after Trump’s summit in Saudi Arabia, Tillerson called a press conference for the foreign press, but excluded American journalists.

Even in his public role, Tillerson has conducted himself more like a businessman making deals. “If you’re a senior executive at Exxon, any day you wake up and you’re not in the newspapers, that’s a good day,” a former senior American official who knows Tillerson told me. “I don’t think he’s used to operating in the public glare.” He has effectively abandoned an essential part of the top diplomat’s role: that of explaining his actions, and the world, to the American public. n Tillerson’s first day as Secretary O of State, he appeared in the lobby auditorium of the nondescript building, on C Street, in Washington, that houses the State Department, and spoke to a crowd of employees. He started with a joke: “We apologize for being late. It seemed that at this year’s prayer breakfast people felt the need to pray a little longer.” The line elicited a rush of laughter, and Tillerson got applause as he went on.

Much of the enthusiasm fell away in a matter of days, when Tillerson told staff members that he intended to cut State’s budget by nearly a third, possibly eliminating two thousand diplomatic jobs and billions of dollars in foreign aid. When the White House announced a ban on travellers from seven Muslim-majority countries, nine hundred State Department employees signed a petition protesting it. “I think it gave him the impression that he was heading into enemy territory,” a retired senior diplomat told me. Tillerson responded with a series of moves that, to many veteran diplomats, suggested a disdain for the profession itself. Indeed, as time went on, Tillerson appeared to be one of several Trump Cabinet secretaries, like Scott Pruitt, at the Environmental Protection Agency, who were

essentially hostile to the departments that they were heading.

Tom Countryman, like many senior officials I spoke to, was demoralized by Trump’s election, but he decided to carry on until his replacement was named.

Countryman entered the Foreign Service in 1982, and served in Egypt, Tunisia, Italy, Yugoslavia, Greece, and the Pentagon. Under President Obama, he was the Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Nonproliferation. In the crazy-quilt makeup of the modern State Department, Countryman was one of twenty-three Assistant Secretaries, each appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate. Some Assistant Secretaries are political appointees, but most, like Countryman, are career diplomats.

In late January, he boarded a plane to attend two conferences overseas. At the first, in Jordan, he would speak with representatives of Russia, Great Britain, and the Arab League about the creation of a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East. When it was over, he would fly to Rome, to discuss nuclearnonproliferation efforts at a conference of the G-7 countries, a group that includes most of the world’s largest economies.

As he was getting ready to leave Jordan, he got an e-mail from Arnie Chacón, the director general of the Foreign Service, asking him to call.

Countryman, as is customary for Assistant Secretaries, had submitted a letter of resignation, which the White House could act on at will. Chacón told him that the White House had accepted his resignation, along with those of four other Assistant Secretaries and an Under-Secretary of State.

Countryman asked who his replacement was; he was told there was none.

“We agreed that it would be better if I just came home,” Countryman told me. So he flew back, and a staff member of the U.S. Embassy in Rome attended the conference in his place. With no new post on offer, Countryman decided to retire. Chacón was dismissed not long afterward.

At the start of every Presidency, most senior officials at the State Department, and most ambassadors in the highest-profile postings, resign, meaning that every new Secretary of State

has to fill a large number of vacancies.

But the number during this transition has been unusually high; according to several former State Department officials, at least three hundred career diplomats have departed, including most of the upper tier. In the months after Tillerson took over, scores of senior diplomats retired, quit, or requested sabbaticals. Few were fired outright; as civil servants, they retained substantial protections against being terminated.

Some left after being told that their jobs were to be eliminated and others after they were removed from their posts without being reassigned. Some were unwilling to serve in a Trump Administration. Others concluded that neither Tillerson nor Trump understood the role of diplomacy in American foreign policy.

Typical of those who have left is Victoria Nuland, a thirty-two-year veteran who spent her formative years in Moscow during the collapse of the Soviet Union. Nuland speaks Russian and French; she served in VicePresident Dick Cheney’s office and worked for Secretary of State James Baker under George H. W. Bush; her last job was as Obama’s Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs. Nuland told me that she decided to leave because she could not accommodate herself to the President’s views on Russia. “Trump is a hundred and eighty degrees off what I believe,” Nuland said. “What am I going to do, turn on a dime?”

It appears that many of the departed employees will not be replaced. At the moment, forty-eight ambassadorships are vacant. Twenty-one of the twentythree Assistant Secretary positions, the most senior stations in diplomatic service, are either vacant or occupied by provisional employees, because Congress has not confirmed appointees to fill them. In August, Tom Malinowski, an Assistant Secretary of State in the Obama Administration, described to me a visit to State’s headquarters, in Foggy Bottom: “There’s furniture stacked up in the hallways, a lot of empty offices. The place empties out at 4 P.M. The morale is completely broken.”

As at Exxon,Tillerson has surrounded himself with a small group of trusted employees: a handful of experienced THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 16, 2017

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foreign-policy professionals and a chief of staff, Margaret Peterlin, who is said to wield extraordinary influence. But he has had a difficult time finding anyone else to join him. Much of the Republican foreign-policy establishment opposed Trump’s candidacy; dozens of former officials who served in senior positions in previous Administrations spoke against Trump or signed public proclamations declaring him unfit for office. According to Trump officials, those candidates have been blackballed.

Even when Tillerson finds suitable candidates, he has struggled to get them approved by the White House. One official said that as many as a dozen people in the White House have veto power. Steve Bannon told me that he had personally scuttled Tillerson’s choice of Susan Thornton to be Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. Thornton is a career diplomat, and a fluent speaker of Chinese and Russian, but in Bannon’s view she had not been tough enough on China’s trade policies. “She’s not hawkish enough toward China,” he told me. “I had to throw myself in front of her.”

Just before the Inauguration, Tillerson chose Elliott Abrams to be his Deputy Secretary of State. Abrams, a veteran of the Reagan and George W. Bush Administrations, had publicly criticized Trump, but had not signed any of the Republican proclamations against him.

When Tillerson brought Abrams to the Oval Office to meet Trump, the encounter went smoothly. “I thought everything was set,” Abrams told me. The next day, Tillerson called to tell Abrams that his nomination had been dropped. “Trump had seen Rand Paul denounce me on Fox News,” Abrams said. “That was it.”

Tillerson’s proposed budget cuts would considerably reduce the number of American diplomats working abroad, possibly by thousands. In addition, Tillerson suspended the hiring of new Foreign Service officers, including many who had accepted fellowships in the expectation of a job. (He has since allowed two Foreign Service 52

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classes to move forward.) “These cuts will decimate the Foreign Service,” Nick Burns, a former Under-Secretary of State, told me. “The Foreign Service is a jewel of the United States. There is no other institution in our government with such deep knowledge of the history, culture, language, and politics of the rest of the world.”

Tillerson’s aides insist that Mick Mulvaney, the President’s budget director, initially asked for still deeper cuts, and that Tillerson fought to limit them. “I thought we were going to end up being the Black Knight in ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail’—no arms and no legs, a stump in the middle of the road yelling at people,” one aide told me. “But the Secretary was able to scratch back some of that money.” When I asked Tillerson about the cuts, he maintained that they could be made without harming America’s diplomatic efforts or its standing in the world. He said that the work of some State Department programs was duplicated by the Pentagon and by other federal agencies. And he suggested that State had been so lavishly funded for so many years that its employees had lost the ability to make difficult choices. “We’ll do the most we can do with the money that’s appropriated to us,” he said. “I want to spend it wisely.”

Some of Tillerson’s supporters in the department argue that claims of wrecking the diplomatic corps have been exaggerated. Kurt Volker, the special representative for Ukraine negotiations, told me that he was summarily dismissed from a senior job by the Obama Administration in 2008, much as the political appointees are being dismissed now. “No one will tell you this, but there’s a lot of dead wood around here,” he said. Others suggested that Tillerson was bound to run into opposition, because the majority of diplomats were politically liberal. “I think a lot of the people had it out for him from Day One,” a longtime diplomat in Asia told me.

A number of veteran diplomats conceded that there were areas at State that were unnecessary. The best example, they said, was the sixty-six special

envoys and representatives, created at various times by Congress and the White House—essentially, senior diplomats given ambassadorial rank. There are special envoys who cover North Korea, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo, but their jobs overlap substantially with those of ambassadors and Assistant Secretaries. “No one, starting over, would design something like this,” Bill Burns, a former Deputy Secretary of State, said.

But what Tillerson has proposed is far more ambitious than eliminating a few dozen jobs. He has suggested deep cuts for humanitarian aid and economic development—the whole range of initiatives designed to alleviate suffering and to advance America’s interests. His budget called for drastically reducing or completely dissolving programs to help refugees, deliver aid to countries hit by disaster, support fledgling democratic movements, protect women’s groups, and fight the spread of H.I.V. and AIDS. The proposed cuts to such foreign-aid programs total some $6.6 billion.

Foreign-policy experts, including many Republican senators, rejected Tillerson’s proposal as impractical. “It was a total waste of time to go through the line items and even discuss them, because it’s not what is going to occur,” Bob Corker, a Republican and the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told Tillerson at a hearing. Several current and former diplomats told me that what was happening at the State Department—the unfilled ambassadorships, the conferences not attended, the foreign aid not given—amounted to a slow degradation of America’s global leadership.

“My fundamental concern is that he is so decimating the senior levels of the Foreign Service that there’s no one to show up at meetings where the U.S. needs to be represented,” a retired diplomat told me. “Whether it’s the oceans, the environment, science, human rights, broadband assignments, drugs and thugs, civil aviation—it’s a huge range of issues on which there are countless treaties and agreements that all require management. And, if we are not there, things will start to fall apart.”

In small ways, the breakdown is already showing. The Secretary of State’s

Administration told me. “When all of your tools are military, those are the tools you reach for.”

OF AGE

You’ve come of age in the age of migrations.

The board tilts, and the bodies roll west.

Fanaticism’s come back into fashion, come back with a vengeance.

In this new country, there’s no gravitas, no grace. The ancient Chevys migrate west and plunge like maddened buffalo into a canyon. Where the oil-slick geese go, no one knows—maybe the Holland Tunnel because they take it for the monstrous turbine promised them in prophecy. I brought you to this world, and I do not regret it.

The sky’s still blue, for now. I want to show you an island where the trees are older than redwoods ever since Prospero turned them into books. You’ll meet him when you’re ready.

For now, though, study this list of endangered species: it’s incomplete, of course, since all species are in some danger nowadays.

This is the country I bequeath to you, the country I bequeath you to. You’ve come of age, and you’re inheriting the whole house, busted pipes and splintered deck and all.

This is your people, this, the mythic West your grandparents wished to reach, and reached.

The oceans surge, but the boat is up on blocks.

There’s no America to sail to anymore.

—Amit Majmudar office has typically sent guidance to diplomats on how to speak publicly about important decisions. According to the longtime diplomat in Asia, after the withdrawal from the Paris accords the State Department sent paraphrases of Trump’s speech denouncing the accords. “The guidance we got was juvenile,” the diplomat said. (A more thorough memo came twenty-four hours later.)

The larger effects may become apparent in a moment of crisis, or they may develop only in the long term.

“You look out over the next ten, twenty, maybe thirty years, and the United States is still going to be the preëminent power in the world,” Bill Burns told me. “We can shape things, or wait to get shaped by China and everybody else. What worries me about the Trump people is that they’re going to miss the moment. There are sins of commission and sins of omission. And

sins of omission—not taking advantage of the moment—cost you over time.” A number of diplomats pointed to the example of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a twelve-nation trade deal that Obama officials negotiated in order to develop a regional counterweight to Chinese influence. Trump withdrew from the T.P.P. soon after taking office, saying that he had done a “great thing for the American worker.”

As the Trump Administration pushed for cuts in diplomacy, it was proposing to increase defense spending by fifty-four billion dollars—roughly equal to the entire budget of the State Department. The choice seems to reflect a sense that force is more valuable than diplomacy in international affairs, and that other countries, even allies, respond better to threats than to persuasion. “All of our tools right now are military,” a former senior official in the Obama

bama regards the deal to constrain O Iran’s nuclear program as one of the capstones of his Presidency—and his aides believe that the agreement in all likelihood prevented a war. During the campaign, Trump criticized the agreement as “the dumbest deal” in history, and his Administration has raised the possibility of backing out of it altogether. At a meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency, held this summer in Vienna, Tillerson’s aides aggressively questioned the Iranians about cheating on the deal. “We took the I.A.E.A. to places it had never been before,’’ a senior aide to Tillerson said.

In my talk with Tillerson, he suggested that the agreement represented only a small part of the relationship with Iran, but was worth retaining. “I think it has usefulness in terms of holding Iran to the limitations—as long as we have very strong enforcement,’’ he said. Trump apparently disagrees.

In early October, it was reported that the Administration will refuse to certify Iran’s compliance with the agreement. Such a move would not automatically kill the deal; instead, it would leave it to Congress to decide whether to reimpose sanctions on Iran that were lifted as part of the agreement.

Some former officials from the Obama Administration predict that, even if Congress decides against doing so, European countries will be alarmed by the possibility of new sanctions, and begin to cancel investments in Iran. “Death by a thousand cuts,” one official told me. “I’ve always thought that is the most likely way they kill the nuclear deal.”

Trump’s apparent refusal to reaffirm the agreement is part of a more aggressive strategy to confront Iran. Officials in his Administration believe that Obama’s desperation to strike a deal emboldened Iran, which embarked on a campaign of hostile actions across the region, extending its influence to Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. “We inherited an Iran that is feeling as hegemonic as it has felt in a very long time,” the Tillerson aide told me. “We intend to roll back those gains.” The THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 16, 2017

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Administration also hopes to stop Iran from developing ballistic missiles, which would be capable of hitting targets across the region, from Riyadh to Tel Aviv.

But how? At the moment, there appears to be little appetite in either Congress or among our allies in Europe to levy new sanctions on Iran—which, after all, appears to be adhering to the deal. Trump officials were reluctant to describe the new strategy, but some suggested that an expanded program of covert action may be in the works.

“It’s classified,” the Tillerson aide said.

“I can only tell you that we’re taking a dramatically different approach to Iran.” he other challenge is North Korea.

T On its face, the confrontation seems like a prelude to war: North Korea’s leaders have vowed to develop a nuclear missile capable of hitting the United States, and Trump has vowed to stop them, by force if necessary.

Tillerson faces this crisis with a diminished diplomatic corps. Nine months into Trump’s term, he still has not named an Assistant Secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, and no Ambassador to South Korea has been confirmed. Susan Thornton, despite being rejected by the White House, has stayed on as the acting Assistant Secretary. An American official who visited northern Asia told me that some of the officials in the region who were most concerned with the crisis had largely stopped dealing with the U.S. Embassy, saying that it no longer seemed relevant. One Asian official said, “Why call the Embassy when the only thing that matters is what the President tweets?”

According to the senior Administration official, Nikki Haley, the U.N. Ambassador, is seen as the most effective diplomat in the crisis; twice she has rallied unanimous support for tighter sanctions at the U.N. Security Council, despite the members’ reluctance to discomfit China. “Nikki’s getting it done,” the official told me. “She’s bringing home the bacon.” This has apparently fed an enmity between Tillerson and Haley. “Rex hates her,” the official said. “He fucking hates her.”

In March, Tillerson made his first visit as Secretary of State to Beijing, 54

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where he tried to persuade the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, to force North Korea to acquiesce by squeezing its economy. According to an official who was briefed on the meeting, the encounter was uneventful, until the end, when Tillerson made a striking diplomatic slip: he told the Chinese that he was hoping for a relationship with “no conflict, no confrontation, mutual respect, and win-win coöperation.”

Chinese officials saw it as a recognition of their country’s equal status in the Pacific—or, more cynically, as an admission that the U.S. would not resist its aggressive moves in the region.

“Tillerson’s words came as a surprise, to the delight of many in Beijing but to the dismay of some in Washington,” China Daily, a Communist Party newspaper, reported. The slip did not go unnoticed among American observers. “He had not adequately consulted the experts when he went into those talks,” the senior Administration official told me.

Since then, though, Tillerson and others in the Administration have maintained pressure on the Chinese.

A South Korean official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, praised the approach. “No previous Administration has been willing to put the relationship with China at risk. Trump has. We think that’s good.” A former senior official in the Obama Administration also endorsed the idea of focussing on China. “Our policy failed,” he said. “My impression is that Tillerson is getting North Korea policy about right.”

And yet, as Tillerson has tried to persuade America’s allies in Asia to help resolve the crisis peacefully, he has been repeatedly undercut by his boss. Trump has threatened to “totally destroy” the North Korean regime and even to penalize South Korea—a crucial ally in resolving the crisis—for its trade practices. In late September, as Tillerson returned from a trip to China, he disclosed that he was in direct communication with the government of Kim Jong Un. The next day, Trump tweeted, “I told Rex Tillerson, our wonderful Secretary of State, that he is wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man.” He added, “Save your energy Rex, we’ll

do what has to be done!” When I asked Tillerson about Trump’s warlike comments, he demurred. “The President may say something that I didn’t expect him to say,” he told me. “If the policy is not robust enough to handle that, then we probably had a fragile policy to begin with.”

The Administration believes that the prospect of a nuclear-armed North Korea is worse than the prospect of war. The North Koreans, similarly, have suggested that they prefer war to giving up their nukes. If Tillerson and his fellow-diplomats want to avert a conflict, they must forge a compromise between Trump and Kim Jong Un— who have seemed, at least in their public rhetoric, disinclined to compromise.

Tillerson told me that he hoped a diplomatic solution could be found. But he added, “In the United States, diplomacy has always been backed up by a very strong military posture. As I said to the state councillor of China, ‘If you and I don’t solve this, these two guys get to fight. And we will fight.’ ” n early October, a few hours after Iconsidered NBC reported that Tillerson had resigning, he appeared in a State Department briefing room to lavish praise on his boss. “President Trump’s foreign-policy goals break the mold of what people traditionally think is achievable on behalf of our country,” he said. “We’re finding new ways to govern that deliver new victories.”

Members of the Administration took pains to emphasize the good relations between Tillerson and Trump. A senior official at the State Department told me that they talk several times a week, often several times a day—“All the time.”

But the most significant achievement of Trump’s foreign policy—the tightening of economic sanctions against North Korea—was accomplished largely by Haley. The other major foreign-policy actions—renewing the commitment in Afghanistan, degrading ISIS—have been almost entirely military. For Tillerson, there seems to be a mismatch of means and ends; he has spoken as though the U.S. will remain as engaged in the world as it has been under previous Administrations, while proposing

budget cuts that would make it very difficult to do so.

A senior European diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told me that the overwhelming perception of American foreign policy among European governments was chaos—that there was no way to know what the Trump Administration wanted to do, whether it was withdrawing from the global scene or just acting unilaterally. The uncertainty was compounded by the fact that there were few people in the White House or the State Department whom they could talk to. “Obama, Kerry—we talked all the time,” the diplomat said.

“Tillerson has never taken the initiative to call.”

With hundreds of vacancies at State, the diplomat said, there is no “working level” to sort out problems. The diplomat recalled that some colleagues recently asked Tillerson for help with a national-security issue involving North Africa. Tillerson merely repeated Trump’s language of not getting involved, and so the diplomats went to Haley instead. “Something like that, North Africa—in this kind of Administration, there is not enough political interest,” the diplomat said.

Some observers believe that Tillerson is overwhelmed by the volume of decisions that he and his team have to make. According to current and former diplomats, Tillerson has centralized decision-making so aggressively that he is unable to keep up. A senior Trump Administration official told me, “Where things fall in the cracks is in the area of management and leadership of the organization, and in leveraging the immense amount of expertise in that building.” Why isn’t Tillerson making better use of his people? “I can’t explain it,” the official told me. “I cannot frickin’ explain it.”

Part of the problem is that Tillerson has not entirely given up the perspective of an imperial C.E.O. He rarely meets with legislators, and has sometimes been high-handed with fellow Cabinet members. “It is a fundamentally counterproductive form of hubris,” the official told me. “People who should be easy allies for him, he’s kneecapping them.”

His most crucial relationship, with

“Ooh! Artisanal!”

• the President, may be broken beyond repair. In recent weeks, the Washington chatter has intensified about how long Tillerson will remain in the job.

Rumors have surfaced about possible replacements, including Mike Pompeo, the C.I.A. director. “Think about it,” one of the aides I spoke to told me.

“Tillerson was contemplating his retirement from Exxon, after which he could do whatever he wanted—travel the world, sit on corporate boards. Now he’s got to feel like he’s covered in shit.

I can’t imagine this is what he expected.”

Another official told me that Tillerson’s sole reason for staying was loyalty to his country: “The only people left around the President are generals and Boy Scouts. They’re doing it out of a sense of duty.”

The essential task of diplomacy remains the same today as it was in Dean Acheson’s time: to make a world out of chaos. The difference, for Tillerson, is that the chaos comes not just from abroad but also from inside the White House. In the popular mythology, the generals and the Eagle Scouts—Tillerson, Mattis, Kelly, and H. R. McMaster, the national-security adviser—can protect the country from Trump’s most impulsive behaviors. But the opposite has proved true: Trump has forced them all to adopt positions that seem at odds with their principles and intentions.

• Tillerson confronts an unstable world and an unstable President, who undermines his best efforts to solve problems with diplomacy. Still, he carries on, conceding by his persistence that the best course is to accommodate Trump’s policies while apologizing for his most embarrassing outbursts. At Exxon, Tillerson was less a visionary than a manager of an institution built long before he took over. With Trump, he appears content to manage the decline of the State Department and of America’s influence abroad, in the hope of keeping his boss’s tendency toward entropy and conflict from producing catastrophic results.

In June, shortly after the Administration announced that it was pulling out of the Paris accords, David Rank, the Deputy Ambassador to China, decided to resign, rather than deliver the official notice of withdrawal to the Chinese government. Rank told me that his greatest fear is that the damage done to the State Department, and to the American-led international order, will be too extensive to repair. Reflecting on his three decades as a diplomat, Rank said, “Maintaining our network for foreign relations is hard. It requires constant attention, a lot of people, a lot of work.

Sometimes it’s beyond us. But rebuilding it? Not a chance.”  THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 16, 2017

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PROFILES

WATCH CLOSELY How the novelist Jennifer Egan travels through time.

BY ALEXANDRA SCHWARTZ

riting four novels is no guarantee that you’ll complete a fifth. Readers may love you; critics may praise you; you might win a big prize. None of it helps when you find yourself back at the beginning, confronted with your own unredeemable prose, convinced, as Jennifer Egan was not so long ago, that you’ll never produce a decent chapter again.

“The book was bad,” she told me recently. “I did one draft that was absolutely unspeakable. But that’s normal.”

Then she wrote a second draft, and despaired. “I thought very, very seriously about abandoning it, because I just thought, Hell—the distance between this and something anybody is ever going to want to read is too great for me to span.”

The book was “Manhattan Beach,” Egan’s latest novel—her fifth, if you’re going by its October publication date, though it has been in progress for close to fifteen years. In that time, Egan has published two other books, “The Keep” and “A Visit from the Goon Squad,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, in 2011. Her sons, Manu and Raoul, have grown from toddlers to teen-agers. “They were so young when ‘Goon Squad’ came out that I think they somewhat regarded me as a failure,” she said. “From their point of view, I’m essentially a stayat-home mom.”

Egan, at fifty-five, is about as famous as a contemporary American literary novelist can expect to be, but it can be hard to say what kind of novelist she is. She is a realist with a speculative bent of mind, a writer of postmodern inclinations with the instincts of an old-fashioned entertainer. She’s known for her roving, unpredictable imagination, and for the dazzling ingenuity of her narrative conceits. “Goon Squad,” a Proustian meditation on rock music and lost time, hopscotched

W

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through the past, the present, and the future, switching protagonists and voices with each chapter. “The Keep” (2006), a neo-gothic fable of technology and paranoia set in an Eastern European castle, is also the story of a romance between a murderer and the instructor of his prison creative-writing class. In 2012, Egan wrote a short story, “Black Box,” a tightly controlled spy thriller, as a series of tweets. She had little knowledge of the medium, and composed each tweet by hand in a notebook.

Because she is interested in technology, American society, and the passage of time, Egan can sometimes seem capable of predicting the future. In the last chapter of “Goon Squad,” which was published in the age of the iPhone but mainly written before it came on the market, she introduced the Starfish, a touch-screen handset for children.

(Two parents argue over when to allow their daughter to use one, maybe the first depiction in literature of that losing battle.) For her second novel, “Look at Me” (2001), she invented a protosocial-media platform, Ordinary People, whose members compress their personalities into carefully crafted profiles and submit to perpetual Webcam surveillance. Fans tune in; advertisers glom on. When Egan went on “Charlie Rose” to promote the book, Rose questioned her about the rise of “reality-based entertainment”—“Survivor” had come out the previous year— as if she might be partly responsible.

One of the main characters in “Look at Me” is Z., a Lebanese terrorist who teaches high-school math in the Midwest as he plots a strike on the United States. Egan worked on the book for six years; it was a week away from publication when the World Trade Center towers were hit. The F.B.I. agents whom Egan consulted had told her that the average terrorist was likely to

be young, callow, fairly inept. But Egan made Z. a well-educated, sophisticated polyglot, integrated into the culture that he dreams of destroying—much as, it turned out, the main 9/11 hijackers had been.

Egan told me that her invented technologies were “easy predictions.”

Z.’s terrorism plot was of another order, but, still, “everyone knew that there were people around who wanted to do this stuff.” She credits any powers of foresight she might possess to “the energy of logic,” a phrase she got from the novelist Jane Smiley. The vector of the present points the way to a number of possible futures. Interpret the signals with care, and reality may well end up mimicking your own projections. ith “Manhattan Beach,” Egan W took the energy of logic in the opposite direction. The novel is a conventionally structured work of historical fiction set in Brooklyn during the nineteen-thirties and forties, a period that she became curious about in the wake of 9/11. The attacks felt like the end of something—the United States’ sense of itself as king of the world, snug in its supremacy.

“And that led me to think, Well, what was the beginning of that something?” she said. “Somehow it felt like it was World War Two, this violent conflict in which we played a critical but relatively small part in such a way that it left us quite unscathed and tremendously dominant.”

Egan was sitting in her office, a cozy, cluttered room with buttermilk-yellow walls on the third floor of the Fort Greene brownstone where she lives with her husband, David Herskovits, a theatre director. The windows looked out on a lush back yard. Egan, an avid gardener, had just given me a tour of her three compost bins, plunging her

Imagination propels Egan’s forays into the future, but for years she struggled to turn historical fact into living fiction.

PHOTOGRAPH

BY ERIK MADIGAN HECK

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“You just march right back in there and keep marching around and around until he sees you’re good enough to put back in the marching band.”

• fingers into the pungent soil to hold up fat worms with a fisherman’s pride for a good catch.

The Marie Kondo gospel of minimalism has not made a convert of Egan. She loves to be surrounded by stuff. While plucking a family photograph from the mantel of her dining-room fireplace, she set off an avalanche of picture frames, kids’ drawings, candlesticks, Christmas ornaments, an Irish American Writers & Artists crystal award plaque, and a mysterious plastic soda bottle containing a slip of blue paper. “That’s a conceptual art piece Manu made,” Egan explained. She collects interesting baseballs, the hollow seedpods dropped

by California scrub oaks, cheesy porcelain figurines. The house décor reflects Egan and Herskovits’s playful love of kitsch. Upon crossing the threshold, visitors are greeted by a chandelier that resembles Chiquita Banana’s headpiece.

In Egan’s office, a large, L-shaped desk takes up a wall. Cuddles, a snowshoe Siamese with a myopic stare, stretched out on top of it, covering a pile of papers. “Cuddsie!” Egan cooed.

“She’s my sub-intelligent daughter.

She’s very pretty, but she’s very dumb.”

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• Regarding her indulgently, she told Cuddles, “You have your own survival mode, which is beauty!”

Across the room, a mahogany bookcase was packed with volumes that Egan had used to research “Manhattan Beach.”

At first, she had imagined that the novel would span the second half of the century, ending with the World Trade Center attacks. But, as she poked around in the forties, she got interested, then absorbed, then obsessed with the period. To fix the cadences of the time in her ear, she watched noir movies and read Damon Runyon, Raymond Chandler, and Harold Q. Masur. Contentedly messy in daily life, she is rigorously organized in her work. On her iPad, she kept an ever-expanding encyclopedia of notes, alphabetized by subject: Advertising. Bars. Books. Businesses. On her iPhone, she kept lists of questions: Where did the urban poor bury their dead? Were ballgames played on Sunday? Did rubber bands exist?

Egan writes her fiction longhand, at a clip of five or six pages a day, sitting in an overstuffed IKEA armchair that lives in her office, or, when the weather is good, in a Zero Gravity recliner that she sets up under the magnolia tree in her back yard. The pro-

cess quiets her critical brain; she can let herself riff. After a year and a half, she typed up the nearly fourteen hundred handwritten pages she had produced and read them cold.

“You know, caricaturish people, horrible dialogue, stupid and obvious moves, blundering historical context,” Egan said, when I asked her what about her manuscript had so revolted her. Her voice grew hard with disgust as she catalogued her failures. “And so, when you put all that together, you end up with something that’s truly nauseating. And I kind of mean that literally. I felt physical illness reading my own work.” Making fiction about the forties was like trying to speak a foreign language by consulting a grammar book. She was awash in facts, but facts only describe the past; they don’t give it new life. “It just felt like this fetid, uncomfortable, miserable landscape that I couldn’t leave, and I also couldn’t navigate,” she said.

“It was a nightmare.”

Much of “Manhattan Beach” takes place at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where Anna Kerrigan, the novel’s nineteenyear-old protagonist, goes to work during the war, first in a factory and then as a diver, walking on the bottom of the East River to repair the underbellies of aircraft carriers and battleships. Before Anna can dive, she has to pass a test.

Suited up, with her hands squeezed into three-fingered gloves, she is given a knotted rope to untie. “There was an area in every knot that would yield when you pushed on it hard and long enough,” Egan writes. “It was like pushing through a wall to find a hidden chamber just beyond it.” When the knot comes undone and Anna is released from her suit, she feels “as if she were floating, even flying.”

That’s how Egan says she felt when she had her breakthrough on the novel. She often dreams about finding a door that leads to an unknown room, like the one that Anna senses in metaphor. Sometimes the door leads to a garden. They are wonderful dreams. They are dreams about writing. can be tempting for even the most Iturestrational among us to attribute feaof our personalities to the stars.

“You’re a Virgo! I could have guessed that,” Egan told me, when she learned that my birthday, like hers, falls in early

September. She is reliable, efficient, focussed: Virgo qualities. So is the perfectionism that almost crushed her as she worked on “Manhattan Beach.”

She once wept over a typo in one of her short stories published in The New Yorker, and, when the Times Magazine had to run a correction on an article she’d written, she said, “I was gaga with misery.” Other symptoms are more benign. One day, when Egan made us ham and turkey sandwiches for lunch, she neatly squeezed each slice of meat between paper towels to insure that all were equally dry.

Or maybe geography is responsible for her temperament. Egan grew up in San Francisco, and her claims of New York-style neurosis are balanced by a sunny California attitude—many things are “excellent” and “cool”—as well as by a can-do pragmatism that might be traced to Chicago, where she was born, in 1962. She has Midwestern roots on both sides. Egan’s paternal grandfather was a prominent Chicago police commander; in her office is a picture of him grinning next to Harry Truman.

Her maternal grandfather was an orthopedic surgeon in Rockford, Illinois.

Egan spent a lot of time there as a child, examining her grandfather’s medical specimens and making cookies with her grandmother, using walnuts from their own trees. The house was filled with funky murals painted by Egan’s great-grandfather, who had once been an acrobat with a travelling circus.

“Rockford for me has that mythical quality that childhood landscapes have in memory,” she said. After her grandmother died, in the early nineties, Egan found herself drawn back there. She stayed in motels, scoping out the scene.

Rockford ended up serving as a key setting in “Look at Me,” a place that represents all that is repressive about small-town American life, and all that might be redemptive about it, too.

The Rockford house was a rare point of childhood stability. Egan’s parents divorced when she was two. She grew up mainly with her mother, Kay, an art dealer, and her stepfather Bill Kimpton; their son, Graham, was born when Egan was six and a half. She spent Sundays with her father, Donald, a corporate lawyer, going to church and then out for burgers. Egan loved her dad,

but she could see that he was troubled.

He was a devout Catholic, and had initially refused to grant Kay a divorce; the marriage was ultimately annulled.

He also had a serious alcohol problem.

“I think he was very much of the school where you win the woman, and then she starts cooking your dinner and you go out drinking with your friends again,” Egan said. “And my mother would be the first to say that she was a rather pampered, beautiful, catered-to creature. And she was not going to put up with that.”

When Egan was seven, Kimpton, who worked at the time as an investment banker, moved the family to San Francisco. Egan went to a private girls’ school and then to a big public high school. The adjustment was difficult. She was indifferent to her classwork, and wasn’t sure she wanted to go to college.

To come of age in San Francisco in the seventies was to regret not having come of age in San Francisco in the sixties. “I felt like I was born too late,” Egan said. “Not even way too late. A little too late.” San Francisco felt like a place that had already peaked with the hippies and the Summer of Love.

Phoebe, the protagonist of Egan’s début

novel, “The Invisible Circus” (1994), feels the same way. “The sixties had been named and written about,” she thinks as she pores over old magazines at the library, trying to get a glimpse of what the era might have felt like before it was sealed in history.

Egan adopted a different approach.

“I drank a ton as a teen-ager,” she said, “and I took a lot of drugs”—pot, cocaine, hallucinogens. She and her friends hung out on the beach, went to keggers, and danced at gay clubs, where the vibe was good and no one hit on them. When punk arrived, a repudiation of the peace-and-love sixties, she adored the music—“so raw and angry and energetic.” But she felt mostly like an observer of the scene. In ninth grade, Egan had a friend who was drawn to its darker side. “There was a lot of heroin around, and I was actually in the presence of people sharing needles. I watched her share a needle with all of them. She didn’t get AIDS, which is a miracle.”

Egan was nervous about her sons’ discovering some of the less virtuous aspects of her past. “They like to hold me up as a kind of paragon,” she said, rolling her eyes. “You kind of want your

“Remember all those 401(k) contributions we matched? Well, now we need a favor.”

parents to be parents. Those are the signals I get.” Egan has worked hard to give her sons a stable, happy childhood.

She and Herskovits bought the Fort Greene house in 2000, and the boys’ presence is felt everywhere in it, from the sports trophies lining the livingroom shelves to the drawings tacked up by the kitchen. Egan drives all over the country to see minor-league baseball games with Manu, who has a business collecting and selling autographed baseball cards online. With Raoul, she goes to Renaissance fairs and live-actionrole-playing retreats. “I would want to do it even if they weren’t my kids,” she said. “I mean, I just feel like I’m being given a chance to learn about another world and another way of thinking.

There’s no way I’m turning that down.”

Alongside her fiction, Egan has for years written journalism for the Times Magazine, often about painful subjects: self-mutilation, closeted marines, bipolar children. When we met, she was reporting a story about mothers who suffer from opioid addiction. Egan felt a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God identification with them, grateful that she hadn’t inherited her father’s harddrinking gene. She told me that he had a few years of sobriety, after a family intervention when he was in his early fifties; several years later, he was hit by a car on a biking trip and killed. Egan attended his funeral and her mother’s third wedding in the same week. Her novels often feature dead or distant fathers; the emotional core of “Manhattan Beach” is Anna’s enduring childhood love for hers.

“I guess when I felt I was doing anything to excess, my urge was always to move away from it,” Egan said.

“I often felt like that Mr. Magoo figure in the cartoon, who just wanders through traffic and somehow it never hits him. I kind of feel that way about my whole childhood: Why do I have a normal life?”

erskovits is converting a garage H in Sunset Park into a permanent space for his company, Target Mar-

gin Theatre, and one recent midweek afternoon Egan went to help out.

When she arrived, sunshine was pouring through the open door and Motown was playing on the sound sys60

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INDIGO

As I’m walking on West Cliff Drive, a man runs toward me pushing one of those jogging strollers with shock absorbers so the baby can keep sleeping, which this baby is. I can just get a glimpse of its almost translucent eyelids. The father is young, a jungle of indigo and carnelian tattooed from knuckle to jaw, leafy vines and blossoms, saints and symbols. Thick wooden plugs pierce his lobes and his sunglasses testify to the radiance haloed around him. I’m so jealous.

As I often am. It’s a kind of obsession.

I want him to have been my child’s father.

I want to have married a man who wanted to be in a body, who wanted to live in it so much that he marked it up like a book, underlining, highlighting, writing in the margins, I was here.

Not like my dead ex-husband, who was always fighting against the flesh, who sat for hours on his zafu chanting om and then went out and broke his hand punching the car.

I imagine when this galloping man gets home he’s going to want to have sex with his wife, who slept in late, and then he’ll eat barbecued ribs and let the baby teethe on a bone while he drinks a cold dark beer. I can’t stop wishing my daughter had had a father like that.

I can’t stop wishing I’d had that life. Oh, I know it’s a miracle to have a life. Any life at all.

It took eight years for my parents to conceive me.

First there was the war and then just waiting. tem. Theatre people and friends were sawing boards and sweeping the floor in preparation for painting it black.

Herskovits, who has the diction of someone who knows how to make his voice carry, was wearing khaki cargo pants and a Red Sox T-shirt. He greeted Egan with a kiss.

Egan eyed the dusty floor. “You aren’t going to paint this today?” she asked.

“I beg your pardon?” Herskovits said.

“We certainly are.”

“Honey, I think we at least have to mop first,” Egan said. “Right? Otherwise, the dirt will just get stuck. I don’t think this is a very good idea.”

A few minutes later, Herskovits reappeared, brandishing a yellow cleaning bucket. “Now we mop!” he announced.

“Oh, good,” Egan said, relieved. She carefully filled a bucket with water and wheeled it onto the floor to get to work, like one of the company.

Egan didn’t always want to be a writer. In adolescence, she decided on archeology. But a stint squatting in the sun hunting for artifacts in Kampsville, Illinois, cured her of that ambition. Egan was eighteen, on a gap year before starting at the University of Pennsylvania.

Her mother’s marriage to Kimpton was foundering, and she was eager to escape the tumult at home. After the disappointing dig, she decided to spend the spring before school in Europe, where she had never been. She was working at a Haight Street coffee shop run by leather boys; when it became clear that espresso money wouldn’t get her across the Atlantic, she started modelling, doing catalogue work in San Francisco and then in Tokyo.

Egan’s brush with the fashion world embarrasses her. “If you’re five-nine and halfway decent, someone’s going to approach you, in our culture,” she told

And my mother’s bones so narrow, she had to be slit and I airlifted. That anyone is born, each precarious success from sperm and egg to zygote, embryo, infant, is a wonder.

And here I am, alive.

Almost seventy years and nothing has killed me.

Not the car I totalled running a stop sign or the spirochete that screwed into my blood.

Not the tree that fell in the forest exactly where I was standing—my best friend shoving me backward so I fell on my ass as it crashed.

I’m alive.

And I gave birth to a child.

So she didn’t get a father who’d sling her onto his shoulder. And so much else she didn’t get.

I’ve cried most of my life over that.

And now there’s everything that we can’t talk about.

We love—but cannot take too much of each other.

Yet she is the one who, when I asked her to kill me if I no longer had my mind— we were on our way into Ross, shopping for dresses. That’s something she likes and they all look adorable on her— she’s the only one who didn’t hesitate or refuse or waver or flinch.

As we strode across the parking lot she said, O.K., but when’s the cutoff ?

That’s what I need to know.

—Ellen Bass me, when I asked how she got discovered. In truth, Egan is not halfway decent; she is blessed with high, appleround cheeks, a slanting jawline, and intelligent eyes. Her early author photos make her look like a classic Hollywood starlet, feline and sharp.

Writing is an invisible profession. Alexander Pope, stunted and hunched, made verse of sublime symmetry; George Eliot did not stop writing novels on account of her nose. All that matters, in theory, is what is on the page. But it is not uncommon in the literary world for unkind comments to be made about a female author with a striking jacket photo, as if it might be proof of an unserious mind. “I think playing the glamour card is a disastrous error as a literary writer,” Egan said. Still, her experience as a model marked her more deeply than she likes to admit. Throughout her career, in both fiction and reportage, she has returned

to the transient glories promised by the fashion industry, and to the damage that it visits both on the people who transmit its messages and on the ones who consume them—which is to say, just about everybody.

“I knew what it was like to stand in front of a camera, and I knew what it was like to be commodified,” Egan said.

“It has this very strange mix of feeling utterly denigrated and yet raised aloft in this rather exalted way.” She added, “If I had been really successful, I can’t promise you I would’ve given it up. I might have ended up like Charlotte”— the protagonist of “Look at Me,” a washed-up, world-weary model who is sent into an existential tailspin when reconstructive surgery following a car accident renders her unrecognizable.

When Egan finally made it to Europe, she had a breakdown of her own.

In a barren hostel room in Reims, she

had the first of what she now identifies as panic attacks, but which at the time she believed were LSD flashbacks. She called them The Terror, and thought she was going crazy. Egan kept a diary of her trip, in which she documented her misery—“in all its florid detail,” she said. “I decided then that I would be a writer. It became very clear.”

After that experience, college felt like a cloistered heaven. Egan studied literature, which at the time meant theory: too many books about books. Still, she got her first taste of experimental narrative from reading William Faulkner, Ken Kesey, and John Fowles, and learned how society might be dissected with stylistic grace from Edith Wharton, whose New York novels remain a touchstone. (Charlotte, with her inability to leave behind a world that trades mercilessly in beauty, is a latterday daughter of Lily Bart, in “The House of Mirth.”) Egan took a graduate fiction-writing workshop and submitted a portfolio of short stories as an honors thesis, one of which later appeared, in revised form, in her story collection, “Emerald City” (1996).

“Some of it was absolutely terrible,” she told me of her early writing, still shamed by a simile in which she had likened the sky to the underside of a duck. “I wasn’t quite in touch with the music of the language,” she said. “But I could sometimes write things that had a bit of a pulse.” t a dinner party in San Francisco A the summer after her sophomore year, Egan got into a conversation with a man who told her that he worked at Apple computers. “I kept saying, ‘What, exactly, do you do?’ And he would only mention specific tasks,” Egan said. “Because he looked so young, I thought he was trying to hide the fact that he had a very lowly job.”

It was Steve Jobs. He was twentyeight, and already famous. “I think Steve at that point was so fawned over, and was basically kind of a shy person who was constantly the center of attention, that on some level he liked that I didn’t know who he was,” Egan said.

Egan and Jobs dated for a year. The relationship was joyful, romantic, intense. He wined and dined her in high style in New York and Palo Alto, and THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 16, 2017

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came to Penn for visits. “There was a way in which it felt like we were able to exit from our own contexts,” Egan said. “I was in that state where I was deep into philosophy and semiotics and the meaning of life. I mean, it was college! And he would go there. He was someone who was very impatient with details but very excited by big questions. And he definitely liked to be challenged.” Egan pressed Jobs on the contradiction between his devotion to Buddhist philosophy and his vocation, getting people to buy computers. “Whether in the end he did us harm or good is an open question, from my point of view,” she told me. When they met, he was inventing the Mac; he delivered one to her mother’s apartment, which Egan took East to write her papers on.

“It was very fun to have him be so in love with me, honestly,” she said. “I would call him at his office from the pay phones at the Penn library, and, no matter what he was doing, he would always come to the phone. We would have these long conversations, and then he’d say, ‘Well, I can see some reporters waiting for me outside my office so I probably should go.’ ” She giggled. “I found it hilarious that he had this gigantic company attached to him. It seemed stupefyingly overwhelming, but also funny.” When he told her that he was worth hundreds of millions of dollars, she burst out laughing. “I was in hysterics! I think he liked that reaction. I just thought it was absurd!”

The relationship ended when Jobs proposed marriage—a formality, in a way, since he knew she would decline.

“I grew up saying, ‘I’m not going to be the wife,’ and there were moments when I felt overshadowed by him,” Egan said. “Not by the fact that he was a kind of star, if you will. But more when he would talk about going to the White House and being friendly with people in the Reagan Administration, and having conversations about power and diplomacy. I felt really dwarfed by that. Like, I felt, Oh, my God, I’m nothing. Nothing I do matters. That was a lot to have in my head as a college student.”

When Egan learned that Jobs had pancreatic cancer, she wrote to him and 62

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they got back in touch. He came to a “Goon Squad” reading she did in Palo Alto, the year before he died. Afterward, they sat outside and talked. “He said to me, ‘You know, it’s really incredible. All those things that you wanted to do back when we were together, you did them.’ And I said, ‘You know, it’s true. And so did you.’ ” fter college, Egan went to Cambridge on a graduate fellowship in A English. A friend from high school had warned her to avoid an awful ex-boyfriend of hers, David Herskovits, who was studying classics there. But something in the friend’s description piqued her curiosity. “I thought, I’m interested in you, Mr. Awful,” Egan told me. She showed up at Herskovits’s room for their first meeting. “It was noon, and he was shaving, and there were the remnants of a dinner party still out,” she recalled. “Knowing everything you need to know about someone in the first fifteen minutes, that was David. He loves to sleep late, he loves to entertain, he’s an amazing cook. He’s such a joyful, celebratory, sybaritic person.”

At Cambridge, Egan read the classics—Greek tragedy, Shakespeare, the nineteenth-century novel—and started writing “The Invisible Circus.” She was confident and prolific. “I just kind of spewed out a few pages every morning and hoped it was genius,” she said.

When she moved to New York, in the fall of 1987, she discovered that it was not. Egan now produces as many as fifty drafts of each chapter she writes, but she sent her five-hundred-oddpage manuscript to agents and publishers without revising it and hoped for the best. “It would come back instantly,” she recalled. Set in the late seventies, “The Invisible Circus” follows Phoebe, a sensitive, slightly lost eighteen-year-old who embarks on a trip to Europe to discover why her older sister committed suicide there a decade before. In its finished form, the novel is affecting and polished, full of insight into the outsized historical shadow cast by the sixties and the unsolvable riddle of family. But the early draft was inert, without a strong voice.

Egan started out living on the Upper West Side, in a dingy room with a foam couch for a bed and a view of an air-

shaft, before upgrading to a walkup on East Twenty-seventh Street. To support herself, she took a job in the typing pool of a law firm, tinkering with her fiction when work was slow. A family friend who knew George Plimpton got her a job reading slush at the Paris Review; at one of the magazine’s parties, she met someone who put her in touch with Aline, Countess of Romanones, a sixty-five-year-old former model from Rockland County who had gone to Europe as a spy during the Second World War, married a Spanish count, and was looking for someone to ghostwrite her second memoir. The job was trying—the countess, as countesses do, failed to distinguish between “employee” and “servant,” and was given to shouting—but fruitful for Egan’s craft.

“We would discuss it as if it were a work of fiction: ‘What should happen?’ ” Egan said. “Or her editor would say, ‘Can you give us some sense of your inner life at this moment?’ And she would hand it to me and say, ‘Jenny! You do that!’ ” Around the same time, Egan began getting calls from her brother, Graham, then in college, that reminded her of things she had read about in her abnormal-psych class. He had always been a golden boy, athletic, funny, and magnetic; even though he was younger, Egan had felt upstaged by him growing up. In high school, he had begun to struggle academically. Now he told her that he had special powers, and could read people’s minds. “Even knowing all that, it still was inconceivable to me that Graham could be a mentally ill person destined to live his life that way,” she said.

A few years later, Graham had a psychotic break and was hospitalized.

He was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and, after some struggles, at last agreed to be treated. He spent years in and out of McLean, the psychiatric hospital outside Boston. (His father, who had gone on to make a fortune in the boutique-hotel industry, paid for his care.) Eventually, he moved to Northern California, to be near his mother and his half sisters. When he was well enough, he made art, and kept a small studio near his home.

Egan, meanwhile, finally sold a much revised version of “The Invisible Circus,” to Nan A. Talese, at Doubleday,

when she was thirty. The sale was modest—“appropriate to the work itself,” Egan said. Still, some of her peers were starting to see big success.

As long as literary fame eluded her, Egan told me, she had wished for it.

“Of course one craves that desperately— you’re in America,” she said. “I felt that I clearly wasn’t worthy of that, and that’s why I had not been pegged for it. But I now feel that I dodged the biggest bullet in the world. I just think that, for my particular personality, feeling slightly invisible is always a help.”

That sense grew harder to maintain when “Look at Me”—a novel she wrote to explore, as she put it, how “mass media and image culture had qualitatively changed the experience of being human”—was published. It was widely reviewed, and nominated for a National Book Award. Egan had earned the coveted status of a writer to watch.

ew Yorkers tend to forget that N their city is built around an island, and Egan had never paid much attention to the waterfront until she began to research “Manhattan Beach.” She became a maritime nerd, consulting radio operators, vice-admirals, sergeant majors, tugboat-company proprietors, deck officers, Army divers, and naval librarians. She read the 1942 American Merchant Seaman’s Manual cover to cover—“I was lapping this up like it was a chocolate sundae!”—and pored over copies of The Shipworker, the Navy Yard’s newspaper. She attended a reunion of the United States Army Diver’s Association, where she tried on a Mark V diving suit to learn what it felt like to be encased in two hundred pounds of canvas and vulcanized rubber, with a copper helmet weighing down her head.

The more Egan researched her book, the more she put off writing it by doing more research. “Goon Squad” began as a diversion; one day, she saw a wallet peeking out of a handbag in a hotel bathroom, practically begging to be stolen, and wondered what it would be like to try on the perspective of a thief.

She wrote a story about Sasha, a kleptomaniac whose habit costs her a job in the music business, and got to thinking about Sasha’s old boss, a record executive named Bennie Salazar, so she wrote a story about him, too. A third

¥ story followed, and a fourth. The writing felt unfettered and blissful, but when the novel was published, in June of 2010, few people bought it. Things picked up when it started appearing on the year’s best-of lists; it won a National Book Critics Circle Award, and then came the surprise of the Pulitzer.

Egan ended up travelling with “Goon Squad” on book tour for nearly two years. She didn’t sit down to start “Manhattan Beach” until 2012; it was nerveracking to contemplate following the biggest success of her career.

On a Friday morning in August, I met Egan at the DeKalb Avenue subway station. We took the Q train to the elevated Brighton Beach stop, where she came to the assistance of a babushka struggling to get her shopping cart down the stairs to the street. The woman followed as Egan descended, explaining about a knee replacement in a strong

¥ Russian accent. “This is what I just adore about New York,” Egan said, after the babushka limped off. “There are subcultures everywhere.”

A time and a place are typically the first things to come to Egan when she is writing a book. Character, theme, structure, plot: all emerge from an early sense of atmosphere. Egan had an intimation that her novel should open at a luxurious, secluded house on the water, imposing yet private, situated in the city but aloof from it, too. By the time she began to write, she knew who lived there: Dexter Styles, a debonair gangster who runs night clubs for the Italian Mob, and whose fate intertwines with Anna Kerrigan’s. She just didn’t know where the house was. Egan belongs to a small writing group, with which she shares her work in progress. When she read the group her first pages, a member had a suggestion: Manhattan Beach, a THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 16, 2017

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neighborhood to the east of Coney Island, developed in the late eighteenhundreds as an upscale resort of beachfront hotels and handsome homes. (The developer, the robber baron Austin Corbin, served as the secretary of the American Society for the Suppression of Jews; that the neighborhood is now largely Jewish is a nice piece of New York retribution.) Egan went to scout it in early 2013. Hurricane Sandy had done its damage; the beachfront was covered in rubble, trees and lawns had died from saltwater exposure, and many homes were being repaired or torn down. But at the end of Beaumont Street she found a stately red brick house with a green tile roof and a deck facing the open water like a prow.

“Invention and memory are so close together in the place they occupy in my brain,” Egan said, as we walked down Brighton Beach Avenue. Her hair was pulled through a broadbrimmed straw visor in a loose topknot. Two summers before, she explained, she had driven Manu to Wisconsin to watch the Beloit Snappers play and decided to pass through Rockford, to see her grandparents’ house. The acrobat’s murals were still intact. Yet Egan had felt that she was as likely to run into the Rockford

characters from “Look at Me” as she was to see anyone in her own family.

Now fact and fiction were blending again. We turned onto Oriental Boulevard, named for the long-demolished Oriental Hotel—“where Dexter’s father worked,” Egan said, as if she had known rather than invented him—and found Beaumont Street, a short block of modest mid-century split-levels and hulking new bunkers of concrete and aluminum. Trees rustled in the breeze coming off the Atlantic. “WARNING: ATTACK DOG ON PREMISES” signs hung from fences. No one was around.

Behind us, a van drove halfway down the street, made a U-turn, and stopped without turning the corner.

“I love that Mobby flavor,” Egan whispered.

Dexter’s house was ringed by a green construction fence, though no work seemed to be in progress. The porch sagged, and ivy had begun creeping over windows. “You leave something by the sea without repainting for a few years, and it starts to look bad,” Egan said, gazing up. Yet even in its decrepitude the house had an elegance and grandeur far beyond anything else on the block.

In Egan’s novel, Dexter Styles is working-class Italian and Polish by

“It’s alive! It’s nearly impossible to tell the difference, but it’s alive!”

background. Growing up, he was barred from the Oriental Hotel’s exclusive beach, and he sees his home as proof of his triumph, a symbol, like his Anglicized name, of the life he has made for himself. “What he was trying so hard to do, he’d already done!” Egan writes. “He was American!”

As we turned back, the idling van drove away—“probably having utterly photographed us,” Egan said. She pulled up a series of old maps she had stored on her phone that detailed how the neighborhood had been altered by landfills in the early twentieth century.

Her research obsession was showing.

We walked farther down Oriental Boulevard, Egan pointing out the sights— “St. Maggie’s. This is Dexter’s church”— like a tour guide of the hybrid world that she had made in her own mind. e had lunch—chicken Kiev and an oddly beetless borscht—on W the terrace of Tatiana, a Russian restau-

rant on the Brighton Beach boardwalk, facing the sea. Suddenly, our conversation was interrupted by furious shouting. A woman down the boardwalk was gesticulating wildly. “Is she crazy?” Egan said. “Oh, no, she’s FaceTiming. Maybe. I mean, there’s very little difference. The only difference is whether there’s an actual person on the other end.” Egan is preoccupied by the mentally ill people she sees around New York, but because of her experience with Graham she knows better than to approach them, lest she confirm their paranoid sense that they are being watched.

The woman walked by, holding a baby, talking angrily into her phone.

Soon she was back, dragging a little boy by the elbow. Tears ran down his face as he screamed. “Oh, God. I hate to see that,” Egan said. “I’m always thinking, What is that boy’s future going to be like?”

I asked Egan, on another occasion, whether her family was ever hurt by what she wrote. “No, because I don’t write about people I know,” she said.

She is adamant that she keeps her fictional universe totally separate from the one she lives in. Yet her life does leak into her books. At lunch, she told me that her favorite character is Moose, from “Look at Me,” a beloved high-school

football king who has a breakdown in his early twenties, and, to his sister’s distress, lives in a perilous state of mental health. There is a harrowing moment in the novel when Moose contemplates suicide but is pulled back by his wife. “It was so fun to give him a good life,” Egan said. “Like, he has this wonderful wife. And I really hoped that that would happen to Graham.”

In the summer of 2016, Graham killed himself in his studio. He was forty-seven. Egan’s mother had called the police when she couldn’t reach him; with her husband, Sandy Walker, she was outside his studio, on the phone with Egan, when his body was found.

Egan speaks about her brother with tenderness and pride. She showed me the program from his memorial service, with a picture of a young Graham on the cover: a handsome, grinning man with wavy brown hair and eyes full of light. Works of his are displayed throughout Egan’s house. Her favorite is in the living room: a large image of a yellow vase with a bouquet of tulips held in a larger transparent vase, placed in the center of a matrix-like room.

“It’s all very symbolic of his illness, but he won’t tell me what it means,” she said, slipping into the present tense.

“My brother was hilarious,” Egan said, at Tatiana. “He and I would always say that we were going to write a screenplay about someone like him.

And it was going to be a comedy!” She told me a story involving a missing suitcase packed with medication and a feckless concierge at Club Med. “He was so good at making things funny, and we would roar over his hallucinations. We would say, ‘That’s another one for the screenplay.’ ” With Graham, Egan often had the uncanny feeling “that you can’t use language to reach a common understanding. What they say sounds crazy, and what you say sounds suspicious and wrong. I sometimes feel like I’m very willing to let go of my version of reality. And so, back when he really was untreated, I would feel duplicitous, that all the things he suspected me of might be true. I would even, at moments, suspect that he must somehow be right.”

She described writing fiction as something like this: shedding her own perspective entirely to adopt someone else’s.

“He loved to talk about writing with me. And I loved to talk to him about his voices,” she said. “Once, I was talking about ‘The Keep,’ and how I’d had so much trouble at the beginning of that book because I couldn’t find the right voice for it. There was this moment where I wrote, ‘I’m trying to write a book.’ It was as if I heard someone say it, and realized that my narrator was actually a first-person narrator sort of masquerading as a third-person narrator. Once I knew that, I got it. And Graham said, ‘I can’t believe this.

You’re hearing voices and you’re making a living from it. And I’m hearing voices and I’m spending a fortune trying to get rid of them.’ ” “I feel as if our lives could have been exchanged,” she went on. “It almost feels like luck, that I’m the one who came back from Europe and ended up living a normal life, and he didn’t.” She corrected herself: “It is luck. To be mentally ill is bad luck, and to not be mentally ill is good luck. And in bad moments, I feel so”—she paused, and sighed. “I’m trying to find the right metaphor. So engulfed by the violence of his bad luck that I almost feel like I can’t function.

There are days like that. It feels unendurable to have to witness such pain and suffering, so undeserved. And no real reward for his years of hard work.

It’s so cruel. So there are times when I feel crushed by it. And then, on better days, I think, I know what he would say. Which is ‘Live for both of us.’ ” hen Graham died, Egan was W working on the final draft of “Manhattan Beach.” She told me that it was a solace to be able to disappear into her fictional world and momentarily distance herself from actual life.

In the difficult period of writing the novel, Egan had comforted herself with the thought that her success or failure made no difference in the larger scheme of things. “I have a plan for what I’ll do if I’m not writing fiction anymore, which is that I would try to devote myself more to journalism, and just try to find ways to be helpful in the world,” she said. “As long as I realized that it didn’t matter, that on some level it

was actually irrelevant, it was a help.”

If that willed self-deprecation helps her to write, it also lingers long after her work is done. She is convinced that “Goon Squad” was “overvalued.” In a karmic sense, she feels that she has got more than her due—“that I’ve taken something that actually should have gone to other people”—and is going to be punished for it. Two weeks before publication, “Manhattan Beach” made the long list for the National Book Awards.

When I e-mailed Egan to congratulate her, she responded with thanks, and told me that she thought it was “a little crazy” that she was on the list and not, say, George Saunders.

“Twenty years ago, I was thirty-five, and that’s not even young!” she said as she boarded the subway in Sunset Park, after visiting Herskovits’s theatre. She began rattling off her dead. “My father died at sixty.

Bill”—Graham’s father—“died at sixtyfive. Steve died at fifty-six. Graham died at forty-seven.” She figures that she has twenty good writing years left, give or take, and she has a plan to write seven books in that time, so that she never has a fallow period again.

She already knows what they will be; she keeps notes on each of them.

She’s begun her next book, which “uses the same structural ideas as ‘Goon Squad,’ and some of the same characters, but has nothing in common with it.” She wants to write a novel stemming from “Manhattan Beach,” following Anna Kerrigan’s son in the sixties—“the sort of sixties novel no one wrote, the one I wish I could have read, that captures what it was like to live then.” She doesn’t like to reveal details about the others, for fear of jinxing their progress. But she knows that the last will be a memoir. “It’s a duty,” she said. “If you can write, you’ve got to tell your story, I really believe that.”

The idea of a memoir surprised me. Egan spoke often about her hatred for writing about herself. I asked her why she dislikes it. “So boring!” she said. “It’s really like having a dream in which everything is the same as your real life.” Then she got off the train, to resume hers.  THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 16, 2017

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FICTION

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THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 16, 2017

ILLUSTRATION BY BILL BRAGG

he child was nine years old and couldn’t fasten her own buttons. Valerie knelt in front of her on the carpet in the spare room as Robyn held out first one cuff and then the other without a word, then turned around to present the back of her dress, where a long row of spherical chocolatebrown buttons was unfastened over a grubby white petticoat edged with lace.

Her tiny, bony shoulder blades flickered with repressed movement. And although every night since Robyn had arrived, a week ago, Valerie had encouraged her into a bath foamed up with bubbles, she still smelled of something furtive—musty spice from the back of a cupboard. The smell had to be in her dress, which Valerie didn’t dare wash because it looked as though it had to be dry-cleaned, or in her lank, licoricecolored hair, which was pulled back from her forehead under an even grubbier stretch Alice band. Trust Robyn’s mother to have a child who couldn’t do up buttons, and then put her in a fancy plaid dress with hundreds of them, and frogging and leg-of-mutton sleeves, like a Victorian orphan, instead of ordinary slacks and a T-shirt so that she could play. The mother went around, apparently, in long dresses and bare feet, and had her picture painted by artists. Robyn at least had tights and plimsolls with elastic tops—though her green coat was too thin for the winter weather.

Valerie had tried to talk to her stepdaughter. It was the first time they’d met, and she’d braced herself for resentment, the child’s mind poisoned against her.

Robyn was miniature, a doll—with a plain, pale, wide face, her temples bluenaked where her hair was strained back, her wide-open gray eyes affronted and evasive and set too far apart. She wasn’t naughty, and she wasn’t actually silent— that would have been a form of stubbornness to combat, to coax and maneuver around. She was a nullity, an absence, answering yes and no obediently if she was questioned, in that languid drawl that always caught Valerie on the raw— though she knew the accent wasn’t the child’s fault, only what she’d learned.

Robyn even said please and thank you, and she told Valerie the name of her teacher, but when Valerie asked whether she liked the teacher her eyes slipped uneasily away from her stepmother’s and

T

she shrugged, as if such an idea as liking or not liking hadn’t occurred to her.

The only dislikes she was definite about had to do with eating. When Valerie put fish pie on Robyn’s plate the first night, she shot her a direct look of such piercing desperation that Valerie, who was a good, wholesome cook and had been going to insist, asked her kindly what she ate at home. Eggs? Cottage pie?

Baked beans?

Honestly, the girl hardly seemed to know the names of things. Toast was all she could think of. Definitely not eggs: a vehement head shake. Toast, and— after long consideration, then murmuring hesitantly, tonelessly—tomato soup, cornflakes, butterscotch Instant Whip.

It was lucky that Gil wasn’t witness to all this compromise, because he would have thought Valerie was spoiling his daughter. He and Valerie ate together later, after Robyn was in bed. Gil might have been a left-winger in his politics, but he was old-fashioned in his values at home. He despised, for instance, the little box of a house the university had given them, and wanted to move into one of the rambling old mansions on the road behind his office. He thought they had more style, with their peeling paint and big gardens overgrown with trees.

Valerie didn’t tell him how much she enjoyed all the conveniences of their modern home—the clean, light rooms, the central heating, the electric tin opener fitted onto the kitchen wall. And she was intrigued, because Gil was old-fashioned, by his having chosen for his first wife a woman who went barefoot and lived like a hippie in her big Chelsea flat. Perhaps Marise had been so beautiful once that Gil couldn’t resist her. Valerie was twenty-four; she didn’t think Marise could still be beautiful at forty. Now, anyway, he referred to her as the Rattrap, and the Beak, and the Bitch from Hell, and said that she would fuck anyone. When Valerie first married him, she hadn’t believed that a professor could know such words. She’d known them herself, of course, but that was different—she wasn’t educated.

n the phone with his ex-wife, Gil O had made a lot of fuss about having his daughter to visit, as a stubborn point of pride, and then had driven all the way down to London to fetch her.

But, since getting back, he’d spent every day at his office at the university, even though it wasn’t term time, saying that he needed absolute concentration to work on the book he was writing. Robyn didn’t seem to miss him. She looked bemused when Valerie called him her daddy, as if she hardly recognized him by that name; she’d been only three or four when he’d moved out. Valerie didn’t ask Gil what he’d talked about with his daughter on the long car journey: perhaps they’d driven the whole way in silence. Or perhaps he’d questioned Robyn about her mother, or ranted on about her, or talked about his work.

Sometimes in the evenings he talked to Valerie for hours about university politics or other historians he envied or resented—or even about the Civil War or the Long Parliament or the idea of the state—without noticing that she wasn’t listening, that she was thinking about new curtains or counting the stitches in her knitting. He might have found fatherhood easier, Valerie thought, if his daughter had been pretty.

Moodily, after Robyn had gone to bed, Gil wondered aloud whether she was even his. “Who knows, with the Great Whore of Marylebone putting it about like there’s no tomorrow?

The child’s half feral. She doesn’t look anything like me. Is she normal? Do they even send her to school? I think she’s backward. A little bit simple, stunted. No surprise, growing up in that sink of iniquity. God only knows what she’s seen.”

Valerie was getting to know how he used exaggerated expressions like “sink of iniquity,” whose sense she didn’t know but could guess at, as if he were partly making fun of his own disapproval, while at the same time he furiously meant it. He stayed one step ahead of any fixed position, so that no one could catch him out in it. But Robyn looked more like him than he realized, although she was smooth and bland with childhood and he was hoary and sagging from fifty years’ experience. He had the same pale skin, and the same startled hare’s eyes swimming in and out of focus behind his big black-framed glasses. Sometimes, when Gil laughed, you could see how he might have been a different man if he hadn’t chosen to be this professor with THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 16, 2017

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his stooping bulk and crumpled, shapeless suits, his braying, brilliant talk.

Without glasses, his face was naked and keen and boyish, with a boy’s shame, as if the nakedness must be smothered like a secret.

Gil’s widowed mother had owned a small newsagent’s. He’d got himself to university and then onward into success and even fame—he’d been on television often—through his own sheer cleverness and effort. Not that he tried to hide his class origins: on the contrary, he’d honed them into a weapon to use against his colleagues and friends. But he always repeated the same few anecdotes from his childhood, well rounded and glossy from use: the brew-house in the back yard, where the women gossiped and did their washing; the bread-and-drippings suppers; a neighbor cutting his throat in the shared toilet; his mother polishing the front step with Cardinal Red. He didn’t talk about his mother in private, and when Valerie once asked him how she’d died he wouldn’t tell her anything except—gruffly barking it, to frighten her off and mock her fear at the same time—that it was cancer. She guessed that he’d probably been close to his mother, and then grown up to be embarrassed by her, and hated himself for neglecting her,

but couldn’t admit to any of this because he was always announcing publicly how much he loathed sentimentality and guilt. Valerie had been attracted to him in the first place because he made fun of everything; nothing was sacred.

She didn’t really want the child around. But Robyn was part of the price she paid for having been singled out by the professor among the girls in the faculty office at King’s College London, having married him and moved with him to begin a new life in the North. There had been some quarrel or other with King’s; he had enemies there.

As the week wore on, she grew sick of the sound of her own voice jollying Robyn along. The girl hadn’t even brought any toys with her, to occupy her time. After a while, Valerie noticed that, when no one was looking, she played with two weird little figures, scraps of cloth tied into shapes with wool, one in each hand, doing the voices almost inaudibly. One voice was coaxing and hopeful, the other one reluctant. “Put on your special gloves,” one of them said. “But I don’t like the blue color,” said the other.

“These ones have special powers,” the first voice persisted. “Try them out.”

Valerie asked Robyn if these were

“If you don’t get on that plane … there’s also the 5:43, then the 9:27, but that’s got a layover in Atlanta, then …”

her dollies. Shocked out of her fantasy, she hid the scraps behind her back.

“Not really,” she said.

“What are their names?”

“They don’t have names.”

“We could get out my sewing machine and make clothes for them.”

Robyn shook her head, alarmed.

“They don’t need clothes.”

Selena had made them for her, she told Valerie, who worked out that Selena must have been their cleaner. “She doesn’t come anymore,” Robyn added, though not as if she minded particularly. “We sacked her. She stole things.”

When Valerie tied her into an apron and stood her on a chair to make scones, Robyn’s fingers went burrowing into the flour as if they were independent of her, mashing the butter into lumps in her hot palms. “Like this,” Valerie said, showing her how to lift the flour as she rubbed, for lightness. Playfully, she grabbed at Robyn’s fingers under the surface of the flour, but Robyn snatched them back, dismayed, and wouldn’t try the scones when they were baked. Valerie ended up eating them, although she was trying to watch her weight, sticking to Ryvita and cottage cheese for lunch.

She didn’t want to run to fat, like her mother. She thought Gil refused to visit her mother partly because he worried about how Valerie might look one day, when she wasn’t soft and fresh and blond anymore.

Robyn had hardly brought enough clothes to last the week—besides the dress with the buttons, there was only a gray skirt that looked like a school uniform, a ribbed nylon jumper, one spare pair of knickers, odd socks, and a full-length nightdress made of red wool flannel, like something out of a storybook. The nightdress smelled of wee and Valerie thought it must be itchy; she took Robyn shopping for sensible pajamas and then they had tea at the cafeteria in British Home Stores, which had been Valerie’s treat when she was Robyn’s age. Robyn didn’t want a meringue but asked if she was allowed to hold her new pajamas, then sat with the cellophane package in her lap and an expression of conscious importance. The pajamas were white, decorated with yellow-and-blue yachts and anchors. “Can I keep them?” she asked

tentatively, after a long, dull silence.

Valerie had grown tired of chatting away inanely to no one.

She had been going to suggest that Robyn leave the pajamas behind, for the next time she visited, but she didn’t really care. Every child ought to want something; it was only healthy. And, packed into Robyn’s suitcase along with the rest of her clothes—all freshly washed, apart from the dress, and pressed, even the socks, with Valerie’s steam iron—the pajamas would be like a message, a coded reproach, for that mother in Chelsea. She imagined Marise unpacking them in some room of flowery frivolity she couldn’t clearly visualize and feeling a pang for the insufficiency of her own maternal care.

Valerie knew, though, that her parade of competence and righteous indignation was a lie, really. Because the truth was that she couldn’t wait for Robyn to go home. She longed to be free of that dogged, unresponsive little figure following her everywhere around the house. il was supposed to be driving G Robyn back down to London on Wednesday. On Tuesday evening, when he came home early, Valerie knew right away that something was up. He stood behind her while she was preparing meat loaf at the kitchen counter, nuzzling under her ear and stroking her breast with one hand, determinedly jiggling the ice cubes in his Scotch with the other. He always poured himself a generous Scotch as soon as he came in: she’d learned not to comment.

“You’re so good to me,” he said pleadingly, his voice muffled in her neck. “I don’t deserve it.”

“Oh dear, what’s Mr. Naughty’s little game now?” Valerie was long-suffering, faintly amused, swiping onions from her chopping board into a bowl with the side of her knife. “What’s he sniffing after? He wants something.”

“He knows he’s so selfish. Causes her no end of trouble.”

These were two of the roles they acted out sometimes: Valerie brusquely competent and in charge, Gil wheedling and needy. There was a truth behind their performances, as well as pretense. Gil groaned apologetically. A problem had come up at work tomor

row, a special guest coming to dinner at High Table, someone he needed to meet because he had influence and the whole game was a bloody conspiracy.

He’d never be able to get back from London in time. And Thursday was no good, either—faculty meeting; Friday he was giving a talk in Manchester. They could keep Robyn until Saturday, but the She-Bitch would never let him hear the end of it. He wanted Valerie to take her home tomorrow on the train. Valerie could stay over with her mother in Acton, couldn’t she?

Come back the following day?

Valerie had counted on being free in the morning, getting the house back to normal, having her thoughts to herself again, catching a bus into town perhaps, shopping. She was gasping for her solitude like a lungful of clean air.

Biting her lower lip to keep herself from blurting out a protest, she kneaded onions into the minced meat; the recipe came from a magazine—it was seasoned with allspice and tomato ketchup.

Certainly she didn’t fancy three extra days with the kid moping around. She thought, with a flush of outrage, that Gil was truly selfish, never taking her needs into consideration. On the other hand, important men had to be selfish in order to get ahead. She understood that—she wouldn’t have wanted a softer man who wasn’t respected. She could squeeze concessions out of him anyway, in return for this favor. Perhaps she’d ring up one of her old girlfriends, meet for coffee in Oxford Street, or even for a gin in a pub, for old times’ sake. She could buy herself something new to wear; she had saved up some money that Gil didn’t know about, out of the housekeeping.

Theatrically, she sighed. “It’s very inconvenient. I was going to go into Jones’s, to make inquiries about these curtains for the sitting room.”

He didn’t even correct her and tell her to call it the drawing room.

“He’s sorry, he’s really sorry. It isn’t fair, he knows it. But it could be a little holiday for you. You could just put Robyn into a cab at the station, give the driver the address, let her mother pay. Why shouldn’t she? She’s got money.”

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“He gets a little bolder every time we pass by.”

• could hardly get herself dressed in the mornings; she certainly wasn’t fit to be knocking halfway around London by herself, quarrelling with cabdrivers.

And, anyway, if Valerie really was going all the way to London, she might as well have a glimpse of where her stepdaughter lived. She was afraid of Marise, but curious about her, too. utside the front door in Chelsea, O Valerie stood holding Robyn’s suitcase in one leather-gloved hand and her own overnight bag in the other.

The house was grand and dilapidated, set back from the street in an overgrown garden, with a flight of stone steps rising to a scruffy pillared portico, a broad door painted black. Names in faded, rain-stained ink were drawingpinned beside a row of bells; they’d already rung twice, and Valerie’s feet were like ice. The afternoon light was thickening gloomily under the evergreens. Robyn stood uncomplaining in her thin coat, although from time to time on their journey Valerie had seen her quake with the cold as if it had probed her, bypassing her conscious mind, like a jolt of electricity.

The heating had been faulty on the train. While Valerie read her magazines and Robyn worked dutifully through one page after another in her coloring book, the washed-out, numb winter 70

THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 16, 2017

• landscape had borne cruelly in on them from beyond the train window: miles of bleached, tufted dun grasses, purpleblack tangled labyrinths of bramble, clumps of dark reeds frozen in a ditch.

Valerie had been relieved when they got into the dirty old city at last. She hadn’t taken to the North, though she was trying.

Staring up at the front door, Robyn had her usual stolidly neutral look, buffered against expectation; she hardly seemed excited by the prospect of seeing her mother again. And, when the door eventually swung open, a young man about Valerie’s age—with long fair hair and a flaunting angel face, dark-stubbled jaw, dead cigarette stuck to the wet of his sagging lip—looked out at them without any recognition.

“Oh, hullo?” he said.

With his peering, dozy eyes, he seemed to have only just got out of bed, or to be about to slop back into it. He was bursting out of his tight clothes: a shrunken T-shirt exposed a long hollow of skinny brown belly and a slick line of dark hairs, leading down inside pink satin hipster trousers. His feet were bare and sprouted with more hair, and he smelled like a zoo animal, of something sour and choking. Realization dawned when he noticed Robyn.

“Hullo!” he said, as if it were funny.

“You’re the little girl.”

“Is Mrs. Hope at home?” Valerie asked stiffly.

He scratched his chest under the T-shirt and his smile slid back to dwell on her, making her conscious of her breasts, although he only quickly flicked his glance across them. “Yeah, somewhere.”

A woman came clattering downstairs behind him and loomed across his shoulder; she was taller than he was, statuesque, her glittering eyes black with makeup, and diamonds glinting in the piled-up mass of her dark hair, in the middle of the afternoon. Though, of course, the diamonds were paste—it was all a joke, a pantomime sendup. Valerie wasn’t such a fool, she got hold of that. Still, Marise was spectacular in a long, low-cut white dress and white patent-leather boots: she had an exaggerated, coarse beauty, like a film star blurred from being too much seen.

“Oh, Christ, is it today? Shit! Is that the kid?” Marise wailed, pushing past the young man, her devouring eyes snatching off an impression of Valerie in one scouring instant and dismissing it. “I forgot all about it. It can’t be Wednesday already! Welcome home, honeypot. Give Mummy a million, million kisses. Give Jamie kisses. This is Jamie. Say hello. Isn’t he sweet? Don’t you remember him? He’s in a band.”

Robyn said hello, gazing at Jamie without much interest and not moving to kiss anyone. Her mother pounced in a cloud of perfume and carried her inside, calling back over her shoulder to Valerie in her husky voice, mistaking her for some kind of paid nanny, or pretending to. “Awfully kind of you.

Are those her things? Do you want to drop her bags here in the hall? James can carry them up later. Do you have a cab? Or he can get you one. Oof, what a big, heavy girl you’re getting to be, Robby-bobby. Can you climb up on your own?”

The hall was dim and high, lit by a feeble unshaded bulb; when determinedly Valerie followed after them, her heels echoed on black and white marble tiles. “Hello, Mrs. H.,” she sang out in her brightest telephone voice. “I’m the new Mrs. H. How nice to meet you.”

Marise looked down at her from the

curve of the staircase, where she was stooping over Robyn, setting her down.

“Oh, I thought you might be. I thought he might have chosen someone like you.”

“I’m hoping you’re going to offer us a cup of tea,” Valerie went on cheerfully. Of course Marise had known that she was bringing Robyn—Gil had telephoned last night to tell her.

“Only we’re frozen stiff, the pair of us! The heating on the train wasn’t working.”

“Do you take milk?” Marise wondered. “Because I don’t know if we have any milk.”

“So long as it’s hot!”

She submitted graciously when Jamie offered to take both bags, then was aware of his following her up the stairs, appraising her from behind, and thought that Marise was aware of it, too. A door on the first floor, with a pillared surround and a pediment, stood open. You could see how it had once opened onto the best rooms at the heart of the house: now it had its own Yale lock and was painted purple and orange. The lower panels were dented and splintered as if someone had tried to kick through them. In the enormous room beyond, there was a marble fireplace and a candelabra and floor-length windows hung with tattered yellow brocade drapes; the glass in a vast gilt mirror was so foxed that it didn’t double the perspective but closed it in, like a black fog. Valerie understood that, like the diamonds in Marise’s hair, this wasn’t really decaying aristocratic grandeur but an arty imitation of it. Marise led the way past a glass dome as tall as a man, filled with stuffed, faded hummingbirds and a staring, dappled fairground horse, its flaring nostrils painted crimson; Robyn flinched from the horse as if from an old enemy.

In the next room, which was smaller, a log fire burned in a blackened grate beside a leather sofa, its cushions cracked and pale with wear. Jamie dropped the bags against a wall. Robyn and Valerie, shivering in their coats, hung over the white ash in the grate as if it might be lifesaving, while Marise hunted for milk in what must have been the kitchen next door, though it sounded cavernous. Jamie crouched to put on more logs, reaching his face toward the flame to reignite his rollie.

The milk was off, Marise announced.

There was a tin of tomato juice; wouldn’t everyone prefer Bloody Marys? Valerie said that might be just the thing, but knew she must pace herself and not let the drink put her at any disadvantage.

The Bloody Marys when they came were strong, made with lots of Tabasco and ice and lemon and a stuffed olive on a stick: Marise said they were wonderfully nourishing, she lived on them.

She even brought one—made without vodka, or only the tiniest teaspoonful—for Robyn, along with a packet of salted crisps, and she kissed her, pretending to gobble her up. Robyn submitted to the assault. “You’re lucky, I saved those for you specially. I know that little girls are hungry bears. Because Jamie’s a hungry bear, too—he eats everything. I’ll have to hide the food away, won’t I, if we want to keep any of it for you? Are you still my hungry bear, Bobbin?”

Robyn went unexpectedly then into a bear performance, hunching her shoulders, crossing her eyes, snuffling and panting, scrabbling in the air with her hands curled up like paws, her face a blunt little snout, showing pointed teeth. They must have played this game before; Marise watched her daughter with distaste and pity, austerely handsome as a carved ship’s figurehead. For a moment, Robyn really was a scruffy, dull-furred, small brown bear, dancing joylessly to order. Valerie wouldn’t have guessed that the child had it in her, to enter so completely into a life other than her own. “Nice old bear,” she said encouragingly.

“That’s quite enough of that, Bobby,” Marise said. “Most unsettling. Now, why don’t you go and play, darling?

Take your crisps away before the Jamiebear gets them.”

Robyn returned into her ordinary self, faintly pink in the face. “Shall I show Auntie Valerie my bedroom?”

Marise’s expression ripened scandalously. She stared wide-eyed between Robyn and Valerie. “ ‘Auntie Valerie’! What’s this? Valerie isn’t your real auntie, you know. Didn’t anyone explain to you?”

“We thought it was the best thing for her to call me, considering,” Valerie said.

“Well, I’m relieved you didn’t go in THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 16, 2017

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for ‘Mummy.’ Or ‘Dearest Mamma,’ or ‘Mom.’ ” Flustered, Robyn shot a guilty look at Valerie. “I do know she’s my stepmother, really.”

“That’s better. Your wicked stepmother, don’t forget.” Marise winked broadly at Valerie. “Now, off you go.

She doesn’t want to see your bedroom.”

They heard her trail through the kitchen, open another door on the far side, close it again behind her. The fire blazed up. Jamie began picking out something on his guitar, while Marise rescued his rollie from the ashtray and fell with it onto the opposite end of the sofa. Valerie guessed that they were smoking pot—that was what the zoo smell was. And she thought that she ought to leave. There was nothing for her here—she had made her point by coming inside. “So, Valerie,” Marise said musingly. “How did you get on with my dear daughter? Funny little snake, isn’t she? I hope Gilbert enjoyed spending every moment with her, after all those protestations of how he’s such a devoted father. Was she a good girl?”

“Awfully good. We didn’t have a squeak of trouble.”

“I mean, isn’t she just a piece of Gilbert? Except not clever, of course. Poor little mite, with his looks and my brains.”

Outside, the last of the afternoon light was being blotted out, and although wind buffeted the loose old windowpanes, no one stirred to draw the curtains or switch on the lamps.

Valerie wanted to go, but the drink was stronger than she was used to, and the heat from the fire seemed to press her down in the sofa. Also, she feared returning through the next room, past the stuffed birds and that horse. She was imagining how her husband might have been impressed and excited once by this careless, shameless, disordered household. If you owned so much, you could afford to trample it underfoot in a grand gesture, turning everything into a game.

“I do adore clever men,” Marise went on. “I was so in love with Gilbert’s intelligence, absolutely crazy about him at first. I could sit listening to him for hours on end, telling me all about history and ideas and art. Because, you know, I’m just an absolute idiot. I was kicked out of school when I was fourteen—the nuns hated me. Valerie, truly, I can hardly read and write. Whereas I expect you can do typing and shorthand, you clever girl. So I’d just kneel there at Gilbert’s feet, gazing up at him while he talked. You know, just talking, talking, droning on and on. So pleased with himself. Don’t men just love that?”

“Do they? I wouldn’t know.”

“But they do, they love it when we’re kneeling at their feet. Jamie thinks that’s hilarious, don’t you, Jamie? Because now I’m worshipping him instead, he thinks. Worshipping his guitar.”

“My talent,” Jamie chastely suggested. Marise shuffled down in the

“Things are going fine, so I may as well ask: How about those Mets?

Ha ha, just kidding. The tail. Please fix this tail thing.”

sofa to poke her white boot at him, prodding at his hands and blocking the strings so that he couldn’t play until he ducked the neck of his guitar out of her way. His exasperated look slid past her teasing and onto Valerie, where it rested. Marise subsided with a sigh.

“So Gilbert’s sitting there steering along in the little cockpit of his own cleverness, believing himself so shining, such a wonder! And then suddenly one day I couldn’t stand it! I thought, But the whole world, the whole of real life, is spread out underneath him. And he’s up there all alone in his own clever head. Don’t you know what I mean?”

“I’ve never taken much interest in Gil’s work,” Valerie said primly. “Though I’m aware how highly it’s regarded. I’ve got my own interests.”

“Oh, have you? Good for you! Because I’ve never really had any interests to speak of. I’ve counted on the men in my life to supply those. Gilbert was certainly interesting. Did you know that he beat me? Yes, really. To a pulp, my dear.”

What melodrama! Valerie laughed out loud. She didn’t believe it. Or perhaps she did. When Marise, mocking, blew out a veil of smoke, she had a glimpse for a moment of Gil’s malevolent Bitch from Hell, the strongjawed dark sorceress who might incite a man to violence. Poor Gilbert.

And it was true that his rages had been a revelation when they were first married. In the university office, all the women had petted him and were in awe of his mystique: he had seemed thoughtful, forgetful, bumbling, dryly humorous, and high-minded. She stood up, trying to shake off the influence of the Bloody Mary. Her mother would be expecting her, she said. “And I don’t know what your plans are for Robyn’s tea. But I made us cheese sandwiches for the train, so she’s had a decent lunch, at least, and an apple and a Mars bar.”

Marise was amused. “I don’t have any plans for Robyn’s tea. I’ve never really made those kinds of plans.”

She stretched out, luxuriating into the extra space on the sofa, putting her boots up. Valerie meant to go looking for Robyn then, to say goodbye, but the sight of chaos in the kitchen

brought her up short: dishes piled in an old sink, gas cooker filthy with grease, torn slices of bread and stained tea towels and orange peels lying on the linoleum floor where they’d been dropped. The table was still laid with plates on which some dark meat stew or sauce was congealing. She went to pick up her bag instead. “Give her my love,” she said.

No one offered to show Valerie out.

Heroically, like a girl in a film, she made her way alone through the next-door room, where the pale horse gleamed sinisterly; she jumped when something moved, thinking it was a flutter of stuffed birds, but it was only her own reflection in the foxed mirror. On the stairs, she remembered that she shouldn’t have called it “tea.” Gil was always reminding her to say “dinner” or “supper.” And once she was outside, on the path in the wind, Valerie looked back, searching along the first-floor windows of the house for any sign of the child looking out. But it was impossible to see—the glass was reflecting a last smoldering streak of sunset, dark as a livid coal smashed open. hat night it snowed. Valerie woke T up in the morning in her old bedroom at her mother’s and knew it before she even looked outside: a purer, weightless light bloomed on the wallpaper, and the crowded muddle of gloomy furniture inherited from her grandmother seemed washed clean and self-explanatory. She opened the curtains and lay looking out at the snow falling, exhilarated as if she were back in her childhood. Her mother had the wireless on downstairs.

“Trains aren’t running,” she said gloatingly when Valerie came down.

She was sitting smoking at the table in her housecoat, in the heat of the gas fire. “So I suppose you’ll have to stay over another night.”

“Oh, I don’t know, Mum. I’ve got things to do at home.”

The snow made her restless; she didn’t want to be shut up with her mother all day with nothing to talk about. She found a pair of zip-up sheepskin boots at the back of a cupboard and ventured out to the phone box. Snow was blowing across the narrow street in wafting veils, and the quiet was like

¥ a sudden deafness; breaking into the crusted surface, her boots creaked. No one had come out to shovel yet, so nothing was spoiled. Every horizontal ledge and edge and rim was delicately capped; the phone box was smothered in snow, the light blue-gray inside it. She called Gil and pushed her money in, told him she was going to go to the station, find out what was happening. He said that there was snow in the North, too. He wouldn’t go to the faculty meeting today; he’d work on his book at home.

“Please try to get here any way you can,” he said in a low, urgent voice. “He misses you.”

“I have to go,” she said. “There’s quite a queue outside.”

But there wasn’t; there was only silence and the shifting vacancy. The footprints she’d made on her way there were filling up already.

“I don’t know why you’re so eager to get back to him,” her mother grumbled. But Valerie wasn’t really thinking about Gil: it was the strangeness of the snow she liked, and the disruption it caused. It took her almost an hour and

¥ a half to get to King’s Cross—the Underground was working, but it was slow.

When she surfaced, it had stopped snowing, at least for the moment, but there still weren’t any trains. A porter said she should try again later that afternoon; it was his guess that if the weather held they might be able to reopen some of the major routes. Valerie didn’t want to linger in King’s Cross.

She put her bag in left luggage, then thought of going shopping—they’d surely have cleared Oxford Street. But she took the Piccadilly line instead, as far as South Ken. By the time she arrived at the Chelsea house, it was gone two o’clock.

The house was almost unrecognizable at first, transformed in the snow.

It seemed exposed and taller and more formidable, more mysteriously separated from its neighbors, standing apart in dense shrubbery, which was half obliterated under its burden of white. Valerie didn’t even know why she’d come back. Perhaps she’d had some idea that if she saw Marise today she’d be able to behave with more THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 16, 2017

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“I’m going to e-mail you this op-ed about how your generation is ruining everything.”

• sophistication, say what she really thought. As she arrived at the corner, she glanced up at the side windows on the first floor. And there was Robyn looking out—in the wrong direction at first, so that she didn’t see Valerie.

She seemed to be crouched on the windowsill, slumped against the glass.

It was unmistakably her, because although it was past lunchtime she was still dressed in the new white pajamas.

Valerie stopped short in her tramping. Her boots were wet through.

Had she seriously entertained the idea of ringing the doorbell and being invited inside again, without any reasonable pretext, into that place where she most definitely wasn’t wanted?

The next moment it was too late: Robyn had seen her. The child’s whole body responded in a violent spasm of astonishment, almost as if she’d been looking out for Valerie, yet not actually expecting her to appear. In the whole week of her visit, she hadn’t reacted so forcefully to anything. She leaped up on the windowsill, waving frantically, so that she was pressed full length against the glass. Remembering how those windows had rattled the night before, Valerie signalled to her to get down, motioning with her gloved hand and mouthing. Robyn 74

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• couldn’t hear her but gazed in an intensity of effort at comprehension.

Valerie signalled again: Get down, be careful. Robyn shrugged, then gestured eagerly down to the front door, miming opening something. Valerie saw that she didn’t have a choice.

Nodding and pointing, she agreed that she was on her way around to the front. No one had trodden yet in the snow along the path, but she was lucky, the front entrance had been left open—deliberately, perhaps, because, as she stepped into the hall, a man called down, low-voiced and urgent, from the top landing, “John, is that you?”

Apologizing into the dimness for not being John, Valerie hurried upstairs to where Robyn was fumbling with the latches on the other side of the purple-and-orange door. Then she heard Jamie. “Hullo! Now what are you up to? Is someone out there?”

When the door swung back, Valerie saw that—alarmingly—Jamie was in his underpants. He was bemused rather than hostile. “What are you doing here?”

She invented hastily, hot-faced, avoiding looking at his near-nakedness.

“Robyn forgot something. I came to give it to her.”

“I want to show her my toys,” Robyn said.

He hesitated. “Her mother’s lying down—she’s got a headache. But you might as well come in. There’s no one else for her to play with.”

Robyn pulled Valerie by the hand through a door that led straight into the kitchen; someone had cleared up the plates of stew, but without scraping them—they were stacked beside the sink. The only sign of breakfast was an open packet of cornflakes on the table, and a bowl and spoon. In Robyn’s bedroom, across a short passageway, there really were nice toys, better than anything Valerie had ever possessed: a doll’s house, a doll’s cradle with white muslin drapes, a wooden Noah’s Ark whose roof lifted off. The room was cold and cheerless, though, and there were no sheets on the bare mattress, only a dirty yellow nylon sleeping bag.

No one had unpacked Robyn’s suitcase—everything was still folded inside; she must have opened it herself to get out her pajamas. There was a chest with its drawers hanging open, and most of Robyn’s clothes seemed to be overflowing from supermarket carrier bags piled against the walls.

“I knew you’d come back,” Robyn said earnestly, not letting go of Valerie’s hand.

Valerie opened her mouth to explain that it was only because she’d missed her train in all this weather, then she changed her mind. “We weren’t expecting snow, were we?” she said brightly.

“Have you come to get me? Are you taking me to your house again?”

She explained that she’d only come to say goodbye.

“No, please don’t say goodbye!

Auntie Valerie, don’t go.”

“I’m sure you’ll be coming to stay with us again soon.”

The child flung herself convulsively at Valerie, punishing her passionately, butting with her head. “Not soon! Now! I want to come now!”

Valerie liked Robyn better with her face screwed into an ugly fury, kicking out with her feet, the placid brushstrokes of her brows distorted to exclamation marks. Holding her off by her shoulders, she felt the aftertremor of the child’s violence.

“Do you really want to come home with me?”

“Really, really,” Robyn pleaded.

“But what about your mummy?”

“She won’t mind! We can get out without her noticing.”

“Oh, I think we’ll need to talk to her.

But let’s pack first. And you have to get dressed—if you’re really sure, that is.

We need to go back to the station to see if the trains are running.” Valerie looked around with a new purposefulness, assessing quickly. “Where’s your coat? Do you need the bathroom?”

Robyn sat abruptly on the floor to take off her pajamas, and Valerie tipped out the contents of the suitcase, began repacking it with a few things that looked useful—underwear and wool jumpers and shoes. The toothbrush was still in its sponge bag. Then they heard voices, and a chair knocked over in the kitchen, and, before Valerie could prepare what she ought to say, Marise came stalking into the bedroom, with Jamie behind her. At least he’d put on trousers. “How remarkable!” Marise exclaimed. “What do you think you’re doing, Valerie? Are you kidnapping my child?” Wrapped in a gold silk kimono embroidered with dragons, the sooty remnants of yesterday’s makeup under her eyes, she looked as formidable as a tragic character in a play.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Valerie coolly said. “I’m not kidnapping her. I was about to come and find you, to ask whether she could come back with us for another week or so. And I’ve got a perfect right, anyway. She says that she’d prefer to be at her father’s.”

“I’m calling the police.”

“I wouldn’t if I were you. You haven’t got a leg to stand on. It’s criminal neglect. Look at this room! There aren’t even sheets on her bed.”

“She prefers a sleeping bag. Ask her!”

Frozen in the act of undressing, Robyn turned her face, blank with dismay, back and forth between the two women.

“And I’d like to know what she’s eaten since she came home. There isn’t any milk in the house, is there? It’s two-thirty in the afternoon and all the child has had since lunchtime yesterday is dry cornflakes.”

“You know nothing about motherhood, nothing!” Marise shrieked.

“Robyn won’t touch milk—she hates

it. She’s been fussy from the day she was born. And she’s a spy, she’s a little spy! Telling tales about me. How dare she? She’s a vicious, ungrateful little snake and you’ve encouraged her in it.

I knew this would happen. I should never have let Gilbert take her in the first place. I knew he’d only be stirring her up against me. Where’s he been all these years, with his so-called feelings for his daughter, I’d like to know? Jamie, get this cheap kidnapping whore out of here, won’t you? No, I like whores.

She’s much worse, she’s a typist.” alerie said that she didn’t need Jamie V to take her anywhere, and that, if they were slinging names about, she knew what Marise was. Minutes later, she was standing outside in the garden, stopping to catch her breath beside the gate, where the dustbins were set back from the path behind a screen of pines.

She was smitten with the cold and trembling, penitent and ashamed. She shouldn’t have interfered; she was out of her depth. It was true that she didn’t know anything about motherhood.

Hadn’t she encouraged Robyn, just as Marise said, trying to make the child like her? And without genuinely liking in return. Now she had abandoned her to her mother’s revenge, which might be awful. Then the front door opened and Jamie was coming down the path, with a curious gloating look on his face: under his arms, against his bare chest, he was carrying the dirty yellow sleeping bag that had been on Robyn’s bed.

Hustling Valerie back among the pines, out of sight of the windows, he dumped the bag at her feet. “Off you go,” he said significantly, as if he and Valerie were caught up in some game together. “Her mother’s lying down again. Take it and get out of here.”

It took her a moment or two to understand. In the meantime, he’d returned inside the house and closed the door.

There was a mewing from the bag, she fumbled to unroll it, and Robyn struggled out from inside and wrapped her arms, with a fierce sigh of submission, around Valerie’s knees. But she was in her white pajamas, barefoot, in the snow!

How could they make their way through the streets with Robyn dressed like that?

A window opened above them and Jamie lobbed out something, which landed

with a soft thud on the path: one of the carrier bags from Robyn’s room, packed with a miscellany of clothes—and he’d thought to add the pair of plimsolls.

Then he closed the window and disappeared. There was no coat in the bag, but never mind. In panicking haste, Valerie helped Robyn put on layers of clothes over her pajamas: socks, cord trousers, plimsolls, jumper.

“I thought he was going to eat me,” Robyn said.

“Don’t be silly,” Valerie said firmly.

She kicked the sleeping bag away out of sight, among the hedge roots.

“Are we escaping?”

“We’re having an adventure.”

And they set out, ducking into the street, hurrying along beside the hedge.

By a lucky chance, as soon as they got to the main road there was a taxi nosing through the slush. “How much to King’s Cross?” Valerie asked. She had all the money she’d been saving up to spend on a new dress. She’d have to buy Robyn a train ticket, too. Then she asked the taxi to stop at a post office, where she went inside to send a telegram. She couldn’t telephone Gil; she knew he’d forbid her to bring the child back again. But she couldn’t arrive with Robyn without warning him. “Returning with daughter,” she wrote out on the form. “No fit home for her.” She counted out the shillings from her purse.

Back in the taxi, making conversation, she asked Robyn where her dollies were. Robyn was stricken— she’d left them behind, under her pillow. It was dusk in the streets already: as they drove on, the colored lights from the shops wheeled slowly across their faces, revealing them as strangers to each other. Valerie was thinking that she might need to summon all this effort of ingenuity one day for some escape of her own, dimly imagined, and that taking on the child made her less free. Robyn sat forward on the seat, tensed with her loss. Awkwardly, Valerie put an arm around her, to reassure her. She said not to worry, they would make new dolls, and better ones. Just for the moment, though, the child was inconsolable. ♦ NEWYORKER.COM

Listen to Tessa Hadley read her story on the “Writer’s Voice” podcast.

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THE CRITICS

A CRITIC AT LARGE

KNOW IT ALL What you learn from the Very Short Introduction series.

n addition to all of your other identities—urban, rural, Christian, atheist, IAfrican-American, first-generation, introverted, immunocompromised, cyclist, gun owner, gardener, middle child, whatever panoply of nouns and adjectives and allegiances describes you—you are also this: a gnathostome. A gnathostome is a creature with a jaw, a characteristic you share with all other human beings, plus macaques, zebras, great white sharks, minks, skinks, boa constrictors, and some sixty thousand other species.

I learned this fact about myself (and you) from one of the more unlikely books I lately committed to reading: “Teeth: A Very Short Introduction,” by Peter S. Ungar, a professor of anthropology at the University of Arkansas. Like its subject, “Teeth” is both a freestanding entity and part of a larger body: the Very Short Introduction series, a project of Oxford University Press. At present, that series consists of five hundred and twentysix books; “Teeth” clocks in at No. 384.

If you are so inclined, you can also read a Very Short Introduction to, among a great many other things, Rivers, Mountains, Metaphysics, the Mongols, Chaos, Cryptography, Forensic Psychology, Hinduism, Autism, Puritanism, Fascism, Free Will, Drugs, Nutrition, Crime Fiction, Madness, Malthus, Medical Ethics, Hieroglyphics, the Russian Revolution, the Reagan Revolution, Dinosaurs, Druids, Plague, Populism, and the Devil.

Some of these books are concise introductions to topics you might later wish to pursue in greater depth: Modern India, say, or Shakespeare’s Tragedies. Others, like “Teeth,” contain pretty much everything the average layperson would ever 76

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want or need to know. All of them, however, take their Very Short commitment seriously. The length of each book is fixed at thirty-five thousand words, or roughly a hundred and twenty pages. (See Very Short Introduction No. 500, “Measurement.”) Never mind that the Roman Empire got some four thousand pages from Edward Gibbon, and that was just to chronicle its demise; here it gets the same space as Circadian Rhythms, Folk Music, and Fungi.

In a clever marketing move, the Very Short Introductions advertise their brevity visually. They are small and trim, as if Steve Jobs had designed them, with covers that feature five hundred and twenty-six variations on the theme of horizontal swaths of color, like knockoff Rothkos or the wrappers on high-end chocolate bars. In common with the latter, they make for an appealing purchase, impulse or otherwise. Looking at them, it strikes you that, if you had to hop a flight from D.C. to Cleveland, you could be well on your way to mastering the basics of Microeconomics or Medieval Britain by the time you arrived.

That feeling, or something like it— the yearning for mastery, or, more cynically, the yearning for the illusion of mastery—has helped make a basically nerdy series from a basically nerdy publishing house impressively popular. Since the Very Short Introductions were launched, in 1995, they have collectively sold eight million copies and been translated into forty-nine languages. Somewhat surprisingly, the books that sell best are those which tackle the most demanding topics: the U.S. Supreme Court outperforms Hollywood, and Aristotle outperforms

Dinosaurs. True to that logic, for some years in a row the best-selling book in the series has been “Globalization.” The No. 2 spot currently belongs to “Literary Theory,” a title that I would have guessed languished near the bottom, somewhere in the vicinity of, say, “Environmental Economics” and “Engels.”

As the Oxford project has grown in popularity, it has also increased considerably in size. There is no Very Short Introduction to the Universe—although you can read about Earth, Planets, Stars, Galaxies, and Infinity—but there will almost certainly be one eventually, because, like the universe itself, the series is still expanding. Roughly fifty new titles are published every year; all told, the inhouse list of topics to be covered currently runs to one thousand two hundred and fifteen. Nor will matters end there. In fact, matters will not end anywhere. According to Nancy Toff, the American editor of the series, its intended scope is basically limitless.

In that sense, the Very Short Introductions have a very long history. Ever since people began writing things down, we have intermittently attempted to write everything down: the nature of the earth and the cosmos, all of prehistory and recorded time, and the political arrangements, cultural productions, and collective wisdom of humankind. For at least the past few centuries, pundits have routinely popped up to lament the ostensible death of that dream, invariably at the hands of increased specialization and an explosion in the available information.

That lament was always absurd, not because the dream didn’t die but because it never lived. There has never been a

ABOVE: TODD ST. JOHN

BY KATHRYN SCHULZ

A yearning for mastery, or the illusion of it, has helped make a nerdy series from a nerdy publishing house impressively popular.

ILLUSTRATION

BY TAMARA SHOPSIN AND JASON FULFORD

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golden era in which our collective knowledge was so modest that it could be compiled in one place—and, if such an era had existed, one wonders exactly how golden it would have been.

In our own time, though, a curious thing has happened. Thanks to technological advances, our ability to store information has just about caught up to our ability to produce it, putting the dream of an omnibus compilation of knowledge in reach for the first time in history. Arguably, Wikipedia is such a compilation; arguably, so is the Internet itself. At all events, the world’s knowledge is better documented and more accessible today than it has ever been; you probably carry it with you in your pocket everywhere you go. In that context, the Very Short Introduction series is something like a top-of-the-line Canon camera: it’s wonderful, but most people will still just use their phone.

That makes the popularity of this series all the more remarkable, especially right now, when truth is hotly contested and expertise is anathema. Yet, in a way, this popularity makes perfect sense. Although no one would describe “Isotopes: A Very Short Introduction” as pleasure reading, it’s a profound relief, these days, to press our collective feverish forehead against the cold steel of actual information. What better time than one in which nothing makes any sense to revive the ancient dream of knowing everything?

t could reasonably be said of Pliny the Icuriosity.

Elder that he was killed, like a cat, by In August of 79 A.D., while commanding a fleet in the Bay of Naples, the Roman statesman and author witnessed a volcano erupting nearby and went ashore to get a closer look. Bad move: he landed barely two miles from Pompeii, the eruption was that of Vesuvius, and within forty-eight hours the poisonous gases it spewed into the atmosphere had killed him.

Pliny knew quite a lot about volcanoes—according to him, the ashes from Mt. Etna fell on towns as far as thirty-five miles away, while the hottest lava in the world flowed from a summit in Ethiopia—because he knew quite a lot about everything. At the time of his death, he had been completing the final revisions on his ten-volume “Natural History,” whose subject he defined as, in a word, 78

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“life.” To that immodest objective, he added an equally immodest claim. “There is not one person to be found among us who has made the same venture,” he wrote in his preface, “nor yet one among the Greeks who has tackled single-handed all departments of the subject.”

About that much, at least, Pliny was probably right: “Natural History” is one of the earliest-known efforts to record all available human knowledge in a single work. It begins with the appropriately expansive question of whether the universe is finite or infinite, then goes on to address, among other subjects, planets, eclipses, elements, the distance between stars, the antipodes (“Do they exist?”), geography, botany, agriculture, horticulture, mineralogy, mining, medicine, the uses of papyrus, counterfeit coins, the character of various Roman eminences, and famed artists and writers past as well as contemporaneous. (See also Very Short Introduction No. 1, “Classics.”)

The resulting work is endlessly fascinating and extremely fun to read, but its merits come skidding to a stop at the question of accuracy: by any standards, not just modern ones, vast swaths of “Natural History” are utter bunk. Peter Ungar would be dismayed by Pliny’s “investigation as to teeth,” which includes the assertions—odd in part because they are so easily disproved—that men have more teeth than women, and that “human teeth contain a kind of poison, for they dim the brightness of a mirror when bared in front of it and also kill the fledglings of pigeons.” Yet those and countless other blatant falsehoods did nothing to undermine the book’s popularity; if the best-seller list weren’t such a recent phenomenon (see Very Short Introduction No. 170, “Bestsellers”), “Natural History” would have dominated it for some sixteen centuries. As late as 1646, the British philosopher Sir Thomas Browne could still complain, “There is scarce a popular error passant in our days, which is not either directly expressed or deductively contained in this work; which, being in the hands of most men, hath proved a powerful occasion of their propagation.”

Browne wrote those words in his own omnibus project, “Enquiries Into Very Many Received Tenets, and Commonly Presumed Truths,” generally known as “Vulgar Errors”—a kind of inverted en-

cyclopedia, which sought to establish the world’s truths by chronicling its falsehoods. What Browne failed to mention was that he was insulting his intellectual progenitor; with “Natural History,” Pliny had essentially invented the genre of the encyclopedia. (Pliny did not use the term, but Browne did. It comes from a misreading of the Greek phrase enkyklios paideia—literally, “circular education.”

The circle in question is not that of circular reasoning but, rather, the kind we have in mind when we talk about a “wellrounded education.”) For the next thousand years, nearly every attempt at an encyclopedic work, at least in the Western world, was written by someone who had read Pliny and found him to be either inspiring or wanting. ut more potent forces motivated B these subsequent authors as well.

Across cultures and eras, the two greatest powers behind the production and dissemination of knowledge—which is to say, its control—have been religious authorities and the state, and one or the other typically provided both the financial means and the ideological ends for compendium projects. Thus, scholars working under the auspices of Islam produced encyclopedias (of medicine, of science, of everything) as early as the eighth century, while in China the Song dynasty oversaw the creation of “The Four Great Books of Song,” an omnibus work a hundred years in the making, and the Ming dynasty produced the eleven thousand and ninety-five volumes of the Yongle Encyclopedia—until the digital age, the largest encyclopedia in the world.

In the premodern West, where civil authorities showed little interest in—and sometimes considerable antagonism toward—the broad dissemination of knowledge, most encyclopedists were monastic Christians. Unlike Pliny, who wrote for the benefit of his own reputation, plus possibly some praise from the emperor, these later authors bent to their impossible task with the aim of glorifying God. For them, the natural world was a divine gift, analogous to the Bible; they studied creation in order to draw closer to the Creator. The most influential of these devout compilers include the seventh-century scholar Isidore of Seville, whose “Etymologies” was the principal textbook of the early Middle

Ages (the title is misleading; of its twenty volumes, just one is dedicated to the origins of words), and Vincent of Beauvais, a thirteenth-century Dominican friar responsible for “The Great Mirror,” an eighty-book compilation that attempted to summarize all practical and scholarly knowledge accrued up to that time, along with all history, beginning, like Genesis, with God and the creation of the world.

These works had something in common with narrower compendia produced under religious auspices, from medieval bestiaries to lives of the saints to Christian systematics themselves—attempts to organize all the themes, topics, and texts of Christianity into a single coherent work. But they also had something in common with a far older idea, dating back at least to Plato: the great chain of being, a grand interconnected hierarchy within which every part of the natural world has its allotted position. As interpreted by early monastics, the great chain of being began with God, below which came angels and other creatures of the spirit, followed by humans, followed by other animals, plants, and, at the base, rocks and minerals. Centuries of Christian scholars tinkered with this basic structure—adding royalty below God and above the rest of us, for instance, or subdividing angels so that seraphim trumped cherubim—until every imaginable entity had a place of its own.

It was this hierarchy—so central to Western cosmology for so long that, even today, a ten-year-old could intuitively get much of it right—that was challenged by the most famous compendium of all: Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert’s eighteen-thousand-page Encyclopédie. Published between 1751 and 1772, the Encyclopédie was sponsored by neither the Catholic Church nor the French monarchy and was covertly hostile to both. It was intended to secularize as well as to popularize knowledge, and it demonstrated those Enlightenment commitments most radically through its organizational scheme. Rather than being structured, as it were, Goddown, with the whole world flowing forth from a divine creator, it was structured human-out, with the world divided according to the different ways in which the mind engages with it: “memory,”“reason,” and “imagination,” or what we might

today call history, science and philosophy, and the arts. Like alphabetical order, which effectively democratizes topics by abolishing distinctions based on power and precedent in favor of subjecting them all to the same rule, this new structure had the effect of humbling even the most exalted subjects. In producing the Encyclopédie, Diderot did not look up to the heavens but out toward the future; his goal, he wrote, was “that our descendants, by becoming more learned, may become more virtuous and happier.”

It is to Diderot’s Encyclopédie that we owe every modern one, from the Britannica and the World Book to Encarta and Wikipedia. But we also owe to it many other kinds of projects designed to, in his words, “assemble all the knowledge scattered on the surface of the earth.”

It introduced not only new ways to do so but new reasons—chief among them, the diffusion of information prized by an élite class into the culture at large.

The Encyclopédie was both the cause and the effect of a profoundly Enlightenment conviction: that, for books about everything, the best possible audience was the Everyman. t is not entirely clear where you would Iif you situate the Very Short Introductions were designing a great chain of reading. They are something like textbooks—in that they provide a basic education on a single subject, are popular

among and useful to students, and are largely written by professors—but also something like conventional nonfiction, in that they are meant to be read on their own, without lectures or problem sets.

They are also something like the entries in an encyclopedia, since what they promise, above all else, is brevity and edification; for the same reason, they are something like CliffsNotes, which likewise offer a shortcut to knowledge. Finally, they are something like the For Dummies series, with the chief difference between the two being a caricature of the difference between Oxford and Indianapolis, where the Dummies guides are published: the British books tackle abstract subjects in cerebral tones, while the American books focus on pragmatic topics (“Knitting for Dummies,” “HTML for Dummies,”“Diabetes for Dummies”) through lists, illustrations, and simple prose. Still, the two series share one basic and hopeful vision of humanity: that what someone can teach, anyone can learn.

That is, of course, the dream of Diderot, filtered down across eras and borders. In twentieth-century France, it took the shape of the Que Sais-Je? series, a near-exact analogue to the Very Short Introductions (the phrase, which means “What do I know?,” is what Montaigne had engraved on his personal seal), while in Germany it helped forge a similar project called, simply, Wissen: “Knowledge.” In England, the idea of a series of

BRIEFLY NOTED Goodbye, Vitamin, by Rachel Khong (Henry Holt). “More

and more, I get this feeling I don’t know a thing,” says the narrator of this novel, who, after a terrible breakup, moves in with her parents to help care for her Alzheimer’s-stricken father. Despite the sad premise, the novel unfolds in quirky, diary-like bursts. Khong, a food writer and editor, dots the narrative with beautiful quotidian details, often gustatory: jellyfish lovingly prepared to stave off dementia, secrets told over a shared pomegranate. The novel’s opening sentence—“Tonight a man found Dad’s pants in a tree lit with Christmas lights”—encapsulates much of its magical, visual approach, which is micro in detail but universal in scope.

Out in the Open, by Jesús Carrasco, translated from the Span-

ish by Margaret Jull Costa (Riverhead). Set at an unspecified point in time and place, this novel follows a young runaway, identified only as “the boy,” who has fled from an impoverished village to the drought-ravaged plain that surrounds it. Unequipped to deal with the dangers he faces—scorching sun, dehydration, and “the bailiff,” an elegantly sadistic official from the village who’s bent on tracking him down— the boy is taken under the wing of an old goatherd. Although they travel together in near-total silence, the goatherd teaches the boy the skills he needs to survive, and offers tenderness. The tale ends abruptly, on a bleak note, but a rainstorm delivers a glimmer of hope.

Murder in Matera, by Helene Stapinski (Dey St.). In this lively family history and travelogue, Stapinski follows the trail of her great-great-grandmother Vita Gallitelli, who came to America from southern Italy in 1892, evidently after having killed someone. Stapinski’s investigation involves interviewing the present-day inhabitants of Vita’s village and combing through local archives. Vita remains elusive, but Stapinski weaves together an engrossing set of possibilities.

Was Vita, a farmhand’s wife, a victim of prima notte, a grim tradition in which a landowner slept with a worker’s bride on the couple’s wedding night? Did she bear more children than the two whom she brought to America? In addition to solving the murder, Stapinski produces a vivid picture of the region’s hardships, past and present.

Insomniac City, by Bill Hayes (Bloomsbury). This touching memoir of the late neurologist Oliver Sacks, by a photographer and writer with whom he fell in love near the end of his life, turns a story of death into a celebration. It chronicles Hayes’s move to New York after a previous partner dies, and his romance with Sacks. Haiku-like journal entries capture Sacks, who was celibate for most of his life, caught off guard by love and turning his clinician’s eye on his own feelings. “I just want to enjoy your nextness and nearness,” Sacks says, his head resting on Hayes’s chest to count his heartbeats. Sacks approaches his end with wonder and courage: “I don’t so much fear death as I do wasting life.”

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books designed to educate the public at large about the world at large was first taken up by Allen Lane. Lane was the founder and editor-in-chief of Penguin Books, a British publishing house that originally specialized in fiction, and its later imprint, Pelican, which published nonfiction that was borderline academic but aimed at a general audience: “Common Wildflowers,” “Practical Economics,” “Glass Through the Ages,” “Electronic Computers.” Many of these were written by literary eminences, including the very first book that Pelican published, “The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism,” by George Bernard Shaw. By the time the imprint was discontinued, in 1984, it had published thousands of books that had collectively served as, in the company’s words, “an informal university for generations of Britons.” (The Pelican imprint was revived in 2014, with a modest catalogue of five books.)

By demonstrating that scholarly nonfiction could turn a profit, Pelican Books exerted an outsized influence on the publishing industry. Among its many direct and indirect descendants was Oxford University Press’s Past Masters series, which launched in 1980 and served up concise biographies of historical figures, from Bentham and Carlisle to Spinoza and Tolstoy. In 1995, that series ceased publication, and its extant titles were folded into a new O.U.P. project: the Very Short Introductions.

It’s impossible to generalize about the resulting books, partly because they are written by five-hundred-odd different authors and partly because not even the series editor has read all of them. (They aren’t that short.) I read a dozen or so cover to cover and started, skimmed, or skipped around in two dozen more—a practice that, in this case, feels less like reading on the cheap and more like browsing in a bookstore or shopping classes at the beginning of a college term.

A few of the introductions I sampled were disappointing. “Mountains” reads in places like a United Nations report, while “Home” succumbs to didacticism, an easy pitfall for this kind of book, and “Archeology,” in its effort to avoid stuffiness, veers too far in the direction of bad jokes and bad taste.

But those are exceptions. For the most part, the Very Short Introductions range

from worth reading to wonderfully appealing. It helps that some volumes are the product of exceptional writers and thinkers; it’s a pleasure to read Hermione Lee on “Biography” (if not quite as pleasurable as reading her biography of Virginia Woolf ), or Terry Eagleton on “The Meaning of Life,” one of the grander titles in the collection, here rendered wry.

Plenty of less familiar names make welcome contributions, too. Darren Oldridge is excellent on the Devil (whether he serves God’s will or defies it, for instance, and how he has migrated inward in modern times, leaving off torturing the body in favor of distorting the mind); and Paul Strohm is astute on the equally enticing subject of “Conscience” (how inconvenient it is, how unevenly distributed, how strangely yet strategically it is located, simultaneously in the deepest reaches of the self and on the boundary we share with the world).

The most impressive introductions, though, are the ones that shine despite their lacklustre subjects. Teeth, for example, is a topic I don’t care about at all, beyond no root canals, please, yet the book is among the best introductions I read. Ungar is epigrammatic (“The goal is to break without being broken”), understatedly funny (“Getting food from the biosphere into the mouth can be a challenge”), and succinct about why such an unprepossessing topic should command our attention. “Teeth matter because they are right in the middle of it,” he writes, “mediating between eater and eaten.” He proves it, too; in reading “Teeth,” you learn a considerable amount about evolution, biodiversity, biology, ecology, paleontology, and even physics.

Similarly, Nick Middleton’s introduction to “Deserts”—a definitionally dry subject—is fantastically interesting. It covers everything from the historical importance of desert cities (Baghdad, Cairo) to the adaptive weirdness of desert creatures (camels, locusts) and the highly variable composition of deserts themselves, which, as we learn, take up twenty-five per cent of the earth’s surface—if not more, since, as Middleton points out, natural features do not have hard-and-fast boundaries. In fact, like many subjects in the series, his turns out to be surprisingly difficult to define. Mere lack of rainfall does not a desert make, since the real issue is not so much the

absolute quantity of precipitation in an area (in the form of rain, fog, snow, or dew) as the ratio of that precipitation to the rate of evaporation. In south-central Egypt, for example, the annual rainfall averages between zero and five millimetres, but the annual evaporation rate can be as high as five metres. Middleton’s colloquial definition sums it up: “If you leave a bucket on the ground and it never fills up, you are in a desert.” Sometimes, however, there is no ground to leave a bucket on. As Middleton explains, there are deserts in the middle of the ocean: marine regions that have an arid climate because so little freshwater falls into them. Desert islands, it turns out, are surrounded by desert oceans.

As that suggests, much of the pleasure to be found in the Very Short Introductions is the bedrock one of good nonfiction: facts. It is fascinating to learn, from “Robotics,” that rats use more of their cerebral cortex to process input from their whiskers than from their eyes. Or, from “Bestsellers,” that the first novel to be optioned for the movies was Thomas Dixon’s “The Clansman,” which became D. W. Griffith’s 1915 film, “The Birth of a Nation.” Or, from “Galaxies,” that if we lived nearer to the center of the Milky Way, in a region called Sagittarius A* (the asterisk is part of its name, like the dollar sign in Ke$ha), we would see, packed into the same distance that stretches out empty between us and Alpha Centauri, more than twenty million stars.

you read enough of the Very Short Ifacts,fIntroductions in a row, some of these gleaned from different books, collide with one another and do interesting things—coalesce, contradict, form big, thudding major chords or eerie minor ones. But these encounters happen only in your mind; the series is not designed to put its subjects into any particular relationship. On the contrary: unlike Pliny and the Christian encyclopedists and, in his way, Diderot, the Very Short Introductions abandon taxonomy entirely.

There is no hierarchy in them, no genealogy or chronology or organizing principle of any other kind. Instead, as with many modern omnibus projects, the books’ essential structure is that of the inventory, and their essential grammar that of conjunction: not this above that or this below that or this because of that

but this and that and that and that. (This is one reason, apart from the fun of it, that there are so many lists in this piece.)

Initially, what dazzles about the Very Short Introductions collection is its apparent diversity—World Music! The Tudors! Animal Rights!—but an inventory of its inventory reveals a lot of gaps. Some of these are likely to be remedied by the arrival of future volumes, since they are merely the consequence of carving up the world wherever the knife happens to fall. At present, you can read about Mountains and Deserts but not about Ecology, about the American West but not the American South, about Shakespeare’s Comedies and Shakespeare’s Tragedies and Shakespeare’s Sonnets but not about Shakespeare’s Histories.

Other omissions, however, appear to be deliberate—for example, the somewhat comic failure of the series to cover athletics. There’s a Very Short Introduction to Sport, much as there’s a Very Short Introduction to Philosophy, but while you can also read books in the series on Epicureanism, Existentialism, Metaphysics, and Hermeneutics, to say nothing of some sixty other philosophical topics, you cannot, at present, read one on soccer or skiing or cricket or golf or any other organized sport. Your odds of ever reading one on football or basketball or Nascar are not good, since only about twenty-five per cent of the introductions are commissioned in the United States, and a certain British bias persists in the choice of subjects. When I spoke with the series editor, Nancy Toff, she had just completed an assignment—given to her by her U.K. colleagues but reminiscent of grade school—to “write one paragraph about why baseball is important.”

With luck, then, a Very Short Introduction to America’s national pastime might be in the offing. But other gaps in the series are more entrenched, and more insidious. You can read about Alexander the Great but not about Catherine the Great, Kafka but not Virginia Woolf, Clausewitz but not Sojourner Truth, Schopenhauer but not Simone de Beauvoir, Michael Faraday but not Marie Curie. In fact, of the fifty-four individuals featured in the series all but a handful are white and none are women. The editors say that this is because the biographical introductions were grandfathered in THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 16, 2017

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from the Past Masters series, and that they rarely commission books on individual people anymore. But that is a choice, not a law, and, whatever the logic behind it, it leads the series to implicitly endorse the same position as millennia worth of other omnibus projects: that the experiences and the contributions of women and people of color barely belong even in the vast inventory of everything worth knowing. hy is baseball important? For that W matter, why is Russian Literature important? Why is the Silk Road important? Why—intellectually speaking, not as a practical matter—are Teeth important? Put differently, what do we gain or hope to gain by reading books about all this stuff?

The larger any compilation of knowledge gets, the more it forces us to confront the question of what, exactly, so much knowledge is for. Is it meant to glorify God? Perhaps, yet it creeps equally close to blasphemy; omniscience, after all, is the purview of the divine. Is it to impress an emperor, or a boss, or a date?

Maybe, but there’s a fine line between being full of information and being full of oneself. Does it make us happy and virtuous, as Diderot hoped? Not on the evidence of Diderot himself, who suffered poverty and a prison sentence, was deserted by countless friends, and cheated rampantly on his wife. Does it make us wise? Not always. You can know everything there is to know about volcanoes and still die in one.

The classic defense of knowledge, as a hundred thousand inspirational posters will tell you, is that it is power. But, as a hundred thousand cultural theorists will counter, the relationship between those two terms is complicated: power is, among other things, the power to determine what counts as knowledge. Since roughly the middle of the last century, that kind of clout, which used to rest with the church and the state, has devolved to a considerable degree onto the academy. Accordingly, modern omnibus projects tend to reflect the ideas and ideals of the university (and often, as with the Very Short Introductions, to be a direct product of them).

Those ideals are not just the oftrepeated one of learning for learning’s sake. “A society whose members lack a 82

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body of common experience and common knowledge is a society without a fundamental culture,” warned a 1946 report by President Truman’s Commission on Higher Education for American Democracy, an entity whose name said it all. The point of collecting, organizing, and disseminating a shared body of information—what E. D. Hirsh so controversially termed “cultural literacy” decades later—was to protect a certain vision of American society: at the time, from Communism, but, more broadly, from all alien cultures and antagonistic ideas. Mere protection often turned into active promotion, in the form of various initiatives intended to spread Western values. From that perspective, projects like the Very Short Introductions seem like a kind of epistemological imperialism: an effort to dictate to the entire world what among its wild array of contents is worthy of our study.

That criticism, while merited, has its limits. The academy is not like the Catholic Church or an autocratic state, which has precious little room for contested ideas. It is, instead, a relatively open and cosmopolitan intellectual arena, one far more likely to help us understand and embrace new ideas than to obliterate them.

What’s more interesting, though, is that this criticism of omnibus projects shares with the projects themselves a fundamentally optimistic vision of knowledge: that it can bind people together, affect their behavior, and alter their world view.

This is an ancient notion. Ever since Aristotle, people have argued over whether accurate information produces appropriate action—that is, whether knowing the right thing reliably makes us do the right thing. It’s profoundly tempting to believe that it does, but, if you attend to the actual workings of the world, it’s also profoundly difficult. Indeed, we live in an era of abundant evidence to the contrary. An Islamophobe won’t necessarily change his mind after reading a very short introduction to Islam, or, for that matter, a very long one; nor will an introduction to Global Warming necessarily reform a climatechange denier. Indeed, study after study shows that encountering information that contradicts people’s preëxisting beliefs often just makes them double down.

In our own fact-indifferent moment, it can often seem that knowledge, like po-

etry per Auden, makes nothing happen.

Yet it’s impossible to shake the notion that knowledge is extraordinarily important—impossible, and terribly unwise. “To describe an attitude as knowledge is to rank it above many other attitudes,” Jennifer Nagel writes in “Knowledge,” the most meta title of all the Very Short Introductions. Implicitly, we all understand that knowledge is sturdier, more important, and more virtuous than beliefs or opinions or suspicions. Whatever else knowledge may be—and, as Nagel is at pains to point out, it is fiendishly difficult to define—it is not subservient or convenient; it has a goodfaith relationship to reality. There’s a reason repressive regimes are notorious for spreading false information. What we think we know can change how we behave—not quickly, not consistently, but often enough to matter.

Knowledge is, in that sense, unknowable; it’s impossible to predict what it will or won’t do once released into the world. That’s reason enough to side with it: for the possibility, however slim, that it will work. But even a fact that fails to affect anything or anyone is no less factual, no less interesting, no less important. “It does not have to look good or sound good or even do good,” Tom Stoppard wrote, in “The Invention of Love.”

“It is good just by being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge is that it is true. You can’t have too much of it and there is no little too little to be worth having.”

That sentiment could be the motto of the Very Short Introductions. They appeal to us because the world is vast and strange, because everywhere we look, from the firefly flashing in the darkness to Auden’s elegy for Yeats, there is something to provoke our curiosity, some sliver of existence that we want to understand.

Not everyone longs to be a polymath, but everyone who does is a philomath— someone who loves knowledge qua knowledge, who finds it moving, joyful, comforting, fun, startling, awe-inspiring.

Whatever else might motivate a project like the Oxford University Press series, that kind of pleasure is an essential part of it; at their best, omnibus works flow forth from an omnibus love of life. In the end, all we get of that is a very short introduction, too. Why not spend it learning everything we can? 

Our mortuary conventions speak to the grip that the dead have on the living.

Vernon to a tomb beneath the U.S. Capitol, arguing that his “sacred remains” were a “treasure beyond all price” that belonged not to the South but to the nation. That hadn’t worked out; Washington’s bones stayed put. But, spying an opportunity, Joice Heth’s owner, a man from Kentucky, had taken her on the road, along with a stack of documents to prove her age, including an ancient bill of sale, treasure beyond price, all of which he sold, in June, 1835, for a thousand dollars, to P. T. Barnum, who, when he met Heth, was twentyfive, running a grocery store in Manhattan, and bored.

Barnum later claimed—and still later denied—that he starved Heth and pulled out all her teeth to make her look older. He billed her as “The Greatest Natural and National Curiosity in the World.” She was the sensation of the age—an age obsessed with fakery, ancestry, monuments, and the walking dead. In February, 1836, having been exhibited for nine months, six days a week, she died. Her corpse was carried by a horse-drawn sleigh to Barnum’s boarding house. He stowed her in a small, cold room and began selling tickets to her autopsy, although, after the surgeon declared that she could not possibly be a day older than eighty, Barnum said that her death was a hoax and that he’d given the surgeon a different dead body; Heth was alive and well and living in Connecticut, on her way to becoming a hundred and sixty-two.

There are only so many ways to deal with the dead: remember or forget, put up statues or pull them down, bury or burn. Heth is an edge case, like a head on a pike, or a mass grave, or a man hanging from a gallows, a display of decay, a spectacular atrocity. But the edge is not so far from the viscera. Frederick Douglass called slavery a tomb.

The way Americans still bury their dead is a consequence of the war that was fought to end it.

“We cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow, this ground,” Lincoln said at Gettysburg. But bodies could be embalmed and brought home, to be seen, one last time, beloved and mourned. A business grew. Before the war, families washed and shrouded and carried their own dead, burying them in boxes built of softwoods like pine and cedar. During

ILLUSTRATION BY TAMARA SHOPSIN

THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 16, 2017

BOOKS

DEAD WEIGHT The burden of the corpse.

BY JILL LEPORE

. arnum’s first exhibit was a P . blind, crooked, and shrivelled old woman, a hundred and sixty-one years T B

old, and his second was her dissection, conducted in an amphitheatre on Broadway in front of more than a thousand New Yorkers, who paid fifty cents each to see her get cut up. Her name was Joice Heth, and the story she’d told, long before she met Barnum, was that she was born in Madagascar in 1674, kidnapped into slavery in 1689, and transported to Virginia, where she became the property of George Washington’s father. She said she’d been in the room when George Washington was born—“little Georgy,” she called him—and that she’d been

the first to swaddle him. “In fact,” she said, “I raised him.”

Was she alive or was she dead? She looked like a mummy. “She is a mere skeleton covered with skin,” one observer remarked. She weighed forty-six pounds. She was paralyzed; she had no teeth; her eyes had sunk into her skull; her skin was like India rubber. She was a relic of the United States’ most famous relic, as unloved as he was loved.

Sometimes she said she’d fed George Washington at her breast, though she would have been fifty-eight when he was born, in 1732. In honor of the hundredth anniversary of that event, in 1832, Northerners had tried to get Washington’s bones moved from Mount

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the war, families hired undertakers to preserve their sons long enough to bring them home from distant battlefields on railway cars. “Night and day journeys a coffin,” Walt Whitman wrote.

Gravestones filled the fields like poppies. There were fields of black and fields of white. In 1868, when the radical Republican Thaddeus Stevens was on his deathbed, weeks after the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, which he’d drafted, he insisted on being buried in an integrated cemetery. He wrote his own epitaph: I repose in this quiet and secluded spot, Not from any natural preference for solitude But, finding other Cemeteries limited as to Race,

by Charter Rules, I have chosen this that I might illustrate in my death, The principles which I advocated through a long life: EQUALITY OF MAN BEFORE HIS CREATOR.

Cemeteries remained segregated for another century.

After the war, coffins and cemeteries got fancier and embalming more elaborate. There is no need to preserve a body that has no distance to travel before burial, but preparing the dead by pickling them and sealing them in boxes made of hardwoods and un-

breachable metals turned out to be a good business: the denial of decay. The price of dying rose. It used to be that you pretty much had to be famous to get your name on your grave; after the Civil War, nearly everyone did, except the poorest of the poor, interred in potter’s fields. Then, too, remains were dug up, and moved: it became fashionable to relocate the eminent dead to better quarters, to elevate them above the more ordinary departed. Very often, monuments were built in places that lacked the bodies, creating more permanent markers.

In 1836, the year Joice Heth died, George Washington memorialists, unable to get the President’s bones moved from Mount Vernon, announced a competition to design the Washington Monument. In the age of Jim Crow, the Confederacy followed a similar practice. The corpse of Jefferson Davis, buried in New Orleans at his death, in 1889, was removed from his vault four years later and carried, by windowed railroad car, to Richmond, a former capital of the Confederacy. New Orleans, bereft of the corpse, built a monument to Davis.

At its dedication, white schoolchildren dressed in red, white, and blue stood in the formation of a Confederate flag.

“All of Earth’s problems seem so small up here, compared with the whistling sound Rodriguez makes in his sleep.”

All these burials and reburials were a danger to public health, according to advocates of cremation, who argued that burning the dead would put a stop to the dreadful practice of “horrid exhumations and mangling of remains.”

A sudden American vogue for cremation took place in 1874, the year the New York Cremation Society was formed. (The Times published one article about cremation in 1873, and seventeen in 1874.) To counter the objection that cremation would interfere with resurrection, the Reverend O. B. Frothingham assured Americans that “to recover a shape from a heap of ashes can be no more difficult than to recover it from a mound of dust.” Cremationists, spurning the open pyre of the ancients, built an industrial-age cremation furnace, which was used for the first time in 1876. As the religious historian Stephen Prothero has argued, Gilded Age advocates for cremation hoped to purify the remains of the wealthy, by fire, and keep them separate from the rotting, polluted remains of the buried masses.

The Gilded Age cremation movement failed, largely because of the extraordinary power of the growing burial business. “There is nothing too good for the dead,” the author of “The Modern Funeral” wrote, in 1900. And yet the dead were very often left behind, especially those descended from the enslaved. During the Great Migration, millions of African-Americans departed their homes in the South, abandoning the remains of their ancestors in search of a future for their children.

In 1945, Zora Neale Hurston asked W. E. B. Du Bois, “Why do you not propose a cemetery for the illustrious Negro dead?” Hurston wanted to move the remains of Nat Turner and Frederick Douglass to a site in Florida, and to add black leaders as they fell, creating a place of pilgrimage for a scattered people. “Let no Negro celebrities, no matter what financial condition they might be in at death, lie in inconspicuous forgetfulness,” she wrote Du Bois. “You must see what a rallying spot that would be for all that we want to accomplish and do.” Hurston’s plan was never realized. But the dead did play a rallying role in the civil-rights movement: black deaths mattered. After

fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was tortured, shot, and thrown into a river in Mississippi, his mother had his body shipped to Chicago, where she had his disfigured and decayed remains displayed in an open casket, seen by tens of thousands of mourners.

Throughout the nineteen-forties, most American cemeteries were subject to the same racially restrictive covenants as housing, and were just as resistant to integration, even after courts deemed this practice a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Black graves were more likely to be unmarked, their occupants buried in the old ways, a traditional “homegoing.” In the fifties, consumer conformity drove the conventions of burial; the rising cost of dying outpaced the rising cost of living. Black funeral directors sold the same wares. “Negro undertakers gross more than $120 million for 150,000 funerals each year,” Ebony reported in 1953, in an article titled “Death Is Big Business.” “If a person drives a Cadillac, why should he have a Pontiac funeral?” one funeral director asked Jessica Mitford, as she reported in “The American Way of Death,” in 1963. What sounded like a hoax worthy of Barnum had become by then the way a great many Americans buried their dead—on satin sheets in stainless-steel caskets, with hymns piped in their crypts through high-fidelity stereo, beneath vast, manicured lawns. “The desirable crypts are now in the new air-conditioned section,” another funeral director told Mitford when she updated the book.

There were, nevertheless, dissenters, a cadaver counterculture. In 1971, the “Last Whole Earth Catalog” offered instructions for a “Do-It-Yourself Burial” that you could arrange for fifty dollars. Cremation is generally cheaper than burial, and it makes a certain sense if you have no intention of maintaining the geraniums on the family plot. Long forbidden in the Jewish and Muslim faiths, and disparaged by Christians, it slowly became more acceptable. By 1980, the cremation rate in the United States, which had been virtually zero, had risen to nearly ten per cent. For people with no religious faith, cremation proved particularly appealing. (That number is growing, fast: one in three younger millennials has either never or rarely

attended a religious service.) In the Gilded Age, the rich were the ones who wanted to be cremated; in the Second Gilded Age, cremation is the only kind of end the poor can afford. Stagnant wages and the financial crisis of 2008 appear to have accelerated the flames: people who’d lost their homes could hardly afford mahogany coffins. In 2013, Time declared cremation “the new American way of death.”

Ashes scatter. In 2016, for the first time, more than half the American dead were cremated, marking a change to the landscape of every city and town—tombstones uncarved, graveyards abandoned—and a weakening of the ties that bind the living to the dead. The dead are a people and the past is a place that half of Americans no longer visit, except to topple stones. aitlin Doughty founded the Order C of the Good Death, a “death acceptance collective,” in 2011, not long after she finished mortuary school. The death-acceptance movement is sometimes called the “death positive” movement, and it’s something like the “fat positive” and “sex positive” movements, except that it has ancient roots, since the search for a good death is older than the oldest bones. Members of the Order of the Good Death include death professionals with titles like “street anatomist,” “eco-death revolutionary,” and “death midwife.” They believe, according to the collective’s Web site, that “there is a revolution afoot in the way our society handles death” which has to do with rootlessness, secularism, and globalism, developments that unhitch children from their parents, believers from their faiths, and people from their homes. All these things might easily be considered devastating, but members of the Order of the Good Death consider them emancipating: “All of a sudden, we are able to choose the rituals we perform with our dead and how we dispose of dead bodies.”

“From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death” (Norton) is Doughty’s tour of the death ways of other peoples, from Bolivia to

Barcelona. Doughty, who styles herself after Morticia Addams, is a sort of cheerful and companionable Grim Reaper. In Crestone, Colorado, population a hundred and fifty, she visits the only sanctioned open-air pyre in the United States (she calls the town “a morbid Mayberry”). She describes a structure of piñon and spruce, sitting in a field of black-eyed Susans, that costs five hundred dollars (technically a donation “to cover wood, fire department presence, stretcher, and land use”). The average burial, by contrast, costs between eight and ten thousand dollars.

The pyre sounds beautiful, especially when compared with industrial crematoriums—big, ugly buildings often found next to scrap heaps and junk yards, off limits to mourners, and with “cremation tribute centers,” which charge upward of five thousand dollars for a more sanitized experience of the burning of the dead.

At Doughty’s own funeral home, in Los Angeles, she, like other American funeral directors, is required by law to pulverize the fragments of bone that come out of the cremation machine with the ashes. In Japan, where the cremation rate is 99.9 per cent, Doughty reports on a ceremony known as kotsuage, in which the mourners, each with a pair of chopsticks, pick up the bone fragments, starting with the feet and moving to the skull, and place them in an urn. In the southern part of the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, Doughty visits families who live with their mummified dead for months or even years, dressing and feeding them, until the dead are ready to go into their graves. In North Carolina, at the Urban Death Project, she helps compost a corpse, an environmentally sustainable process known as “recomposition.” Instead of ashes in urns, mourners end up with bags of rich, dark soil to add to their own gardens, so that, for instance, “a mother who loved to garden can, herself, give rise to new life.”

A bad version of this book would read like “Ripley’s Believe It or Not!” But Doughty chronicles each of these practices with tenderheartedness, a THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 16, 2017

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technician’s fascination, and an unsentimental respect for grief. One premise of her work is that dead bodies shouldn’t be carried off and hidden from families, pumped up with fluids and slathered with makeup: mourners should be allowed to see and touch the dead and to prepare the body. Many grieving people will agree. I held my father’s hand as he died, the two of us, alone. I stroked his fingers, before, and after. I didn’t see my mother’s dead body until I saw her in her coffin, waxen and unrecognizable, smiling a half smile she had never smiled before. I know that he is dead. I have never quite accepted that she is.

The year before Thomas Mira y Lopez’s father, Rafael, got sick, he planted a buckeye seed on his farm in Pennsylvania. A buckeye tree can grow to forty-five feet and live for eighty years.

After Rafael died, Thomas’s mother took him to visit the tree every year.

“Come see Dad’s tree,” she’d say. She had come to think of the buckeye as him. “The hands that scooped out the pocket of earth and laid the seed to rest are now the buckeye’s leaves, his limbs the branches, the mind that decided to plant the tree exactly there are its roots,” Mira y Lopez writes, in “The Book of Resting Places: A Personal History of Where We Lay the Dead” (Counterpoint). Mira y Lopez hated the annual pilgrimage to the buckeye.

He was only twenty when his father died, still in the throes of post-adolescent rebellion, and every way his mother saw that death was a way that he did not. “I cannot see the buckeye the way my mother sees it,” he writes. “My father does not stand tall within it, this ugly thing choking the water and stealing sunlight away from the evergreen.”

He also didn’t like it when, two years after his father died, his mother bought a memorial tree in Central Park, a horse chestnut. He decided to go in search of better ways to remember the dead.

“The Book of Resting Places” is Mira y Lopez’s account of his travels, from a cemetery to a crematorium to a cryonics company. Like Doughty, he’s looking for the good death, somewhere, anywhere. “I even have a mummy out back,” the proprietor of a rock shop on the side of a two-lane highway in Arizona tells him. “You wanna see?”

Doughty is a death professional. There’s 86

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something warmer about Mira y Lopez’s writing, as a chronicle of his own mourning, and there’s also something colder, for the same reason. On visiting his father in an I.C.U., after he’d had brain surgery, he writes, “There wasn’t much to do: hold my father’s hand, read Graham Greene, watch soccer or CNN, masturbate in the shower, nap, wipe the sweat from my father’s forehead, play solitaire on my iPod.” He was there when his father died. He pried open his father’s hand, pressed a penny into his palm, and closed it. “He might need this,” he told his mother. He does not know why he did this. “I was not being me, but watching myself be me,” he writes, and he’s still watching. The night before his father died, he had looked back at him before leaving the room and closing the door: “I saw his body propped up on the bed, his shrunken torso and caved-in head, and I realized he would have to go through the night alone.”

The trouble is, we all go through that night alone.

The idea that the disposition of the dead, loved or unloved, is a matter of personal choice, absent the commitment of belief and the burden of history, is an illusion of a cockeyed and shortsighted present. “The dead like to stay close to the living,” the literary scholar Robert Pogue Harrison once argued, in “The Dominion of the Dead,” an account of the importance of burial and of burying places in human history. To be buried is to hope for resurrection, but to bury the dead is to build a future on top of the past.

A grave is a monument. So is a tree.

There are other ways to dispose of the dead, worse ways and better ways, but there’s no escaping the reach of the dead that haven’t found peace. he dead cannot vote, but they are T very often recruited to political causes, armies of the night. The latest conflicts, between people who march in the streets carrying photographs of black men shot by the police and people who circle monuments draped in Confederate flags, are in some ways battles between the newly dead and the long-ago dead, between the present and the past. It remains to be seen whether the struggle over the dead will

grow fiercer, and wilder, the past made into a mummy, carted and carried, displayed and dissected.

Earlier this year, New Orleans’s Jefferson Davis monument was taken down, on the orders of the city, after a series of protests. Its current location is a well-kept secret. Three years ago, archeologists at Mount Vernon began excavating a slave cemetery on a hill south of George Washington’s tomb.

“Forgotten No Longer” is the name they’ve given to the project. They suspect that there are about a hundred bodies buried there; they’ve located forty-six, among them the graves of sixteen children. No graves have been opened, no remains disturbed. The dead cannot be desegregated. But history has got to be, or else Americans will keep on clobbering one another with the bones of their ancestors.

Joice Heth is not buried at Mount Vernon. The best archival evidence— painstakingly compiled by the historian Benjamin Reiss—suggests that Heth was born about 1755 and that by the seventeen-nineties she was the property of a Revolutionary War veteran named William Heth, a petty civil servant from Richmond who barely knew George Washington but who regularly dined out on lavishly embroidered stories about his visits to Mount Vernon. Joice Heth’s own tall tales, Reiss thinks, began as mockery of her puffed-up and ridiculous owner, a theory that may or may not be true but that is far less painful to think about than the ways she was used and abused by Barnum, who, in abolitionist towns, claimed that he was using the money he made by exhibiting her to buy her great-greatgrandchildren out of slavery.

P. T. Barnum died in his bed in Bridgeport, Connecticut, on April 7, 1891. “The scene at the deathbed was deeply pathetic,” the Times reported.

His rise, the obituary reported, had begun with “a remarkable negro woman.” He’d made his own funeral arrangements: “In accordance with the expressed wish of the deceased he will be buried in Mountain Grove Cemetery, where he recently had erected a massive granite monument.”

Barnum once said he’d arranged for Joice Heth to be buried in his family plot. He was lying. 

A new biography celebrates the great artist’s more scientific innovations.

few years, of two fantastical inventions: a machine that he explained was meant “to open a prison from the inside,” and another for tearing bars off windows.

These drawings are part of a vast treasury of texts and images, amounting to more than seven thousand surviving pages, now dispersed across several countries and known collectively as “Leonardo’s notebooks”—which is precisely what they were. Private notebooks of all sizes, some carried about for quick sketches and on-the-spot observations, others used for long-term, exacting studies in geology, botany, and human anatomy, to specify just a few of the areas in which he posed fundamental questions, and reached answers that were often hundreds of years ahead of his time. Why is the sky blue? How does the heart function? What are the differences in air pressure above and beneath a bird’s wing, and how might this knowledge enable man to make a flying machine? Music, military engineering, astronomy. Fossils and the doubt they cast on the Biblical story of creation. “Describe,” he instructs himself, “what sneezing is, what yawning is, the falling sickness, spasm, paralysis, shivering with cold, sweating, fatigue, hunger, sleep, thirst, lust.” He intended publication, but never got around to it; there was always something more to learn. In the following centuries, at least half the pages were lost. What survives is an unparalleled record of a human mind at work, as fearless and dogged as it was brilliant. And yet, despite occasional jottings—a grocery list, a book to be borrowed—these notebooks were in no way a diary or a personal journal; they contain none of the self-exploration of Augustine or Thoreau. Consumed with the desire for knowledge, Leonardo told us more about the world than seems possible, and next to nothing about himself.

His biographers have a hard time, at once starved and overwhelmed, tasked with constructing a man around the spectacular evidence of this disembodied mind. The paintings offer little more in the way of knowledge.

Arguments persist even about the identity of the woman known as Mona Lisa, or why Leonardo never delivered the portrait to the husband who commissioned it, if indeed it was her

ILLUSTRATION

BY TAMARA SHOPSIN

THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 16, 2017

BOOKS

ANGELS AND MEN The world according to Leonardo da Vinci.

BY CLAUDIA ROTH PIERPONT

ENGRAVING: HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY

Florence, a number IoutnoftheRenaissance designated boxes placed throughcity allowed citizens to make

anonymous denunciations of various moral crimes—in 1461, for example, the artist-monk Filippo Lippi was accused of fathering a child with a nun.

But the crime that the government was really trying to control was sodomy, so notoriously prevalent that contemporary German slang for a homosexual was Florenzer. The common nature of the offense did not erase the threat of serious consequences. In 1476, Leonardo da Vinci, on the verge of his twenty-fourth birthday, was named as one of four men who had practiced

“such wickedness” with the seventeenyear-old apprentice of a local goldsmith. There is little doubt that Leonardo was arrested. Although any time he may have spent in jail was brief, and the case was dismissed, two months later, for lack of corroborating witnesses, he had plenty of time to ponder the possible legal punishments: a large fine, public humiliation, exile, burning at the stake. It is impossible to know if this experience affected the artist’s habit, later cited as a mark of his character, of buying caged birds from the market just to set them free.

But it does seem connected with the drawings he made, during the next

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“I’d hate to think there’s a national discussion I’m not part of.”

• husband who commissioned it. Our deepest sense of this most famous artist remains subject to change. The systematic publication of the notebooks, beginning in the late nineteenth century, tipped our understanding of his goals from art toward science, and opened questions about how to square the legendary peacefulness of his nature with his designs for ingeniously murderous war machines. More recently, the sensationalizing notion at the center of Dan Brown’s mega-selling book “The Da Vinci Code”—that one of the apostles depicted in Leonardo’s “The Last Supper” is actually, and visibly, a woman—connects him with our current preoccupation with gender fluidity. And this sense of connection isn’t entirely imposed. Leonardo’s works do show a striking fixation on androgyny, a term often used about his figures—a fixation that became unignorable with the rediscovery, in the nineteen-nineties, of a long-lost pornographic drawing. Is there noth88

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• ing in Leonardo that can’t be found once we start looking? Who will he be for us today? alter Isaacson, at the start of his W new biography, “Leonardo da Vinci” (Simon & Schuster), describes his subject as “history’s consummate innovator,” which makes perfect sense, since Isaacson seems to have got the idea for writing his book from Steve Jobs, the subject of his previous biography. Leonardo, we learn, was Jobs’s hero. Isaacson sees a particular kinship between the men because both worked at the crossroads of “arts and sciences, humanities and technology”—as did Isaacson’s earlier subjects, Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein. For all the unfamiliar challenges this book presents, in terms of history and culture, Isaacson is working a familiar theme. As always, he writes with a strongly synthesizing intelligence across a tremendous range; the result is a valuable introduction to a complex subject.

He states right off that he takes the note-

books, rather than the paintings, as his starting point, and it isn’t surprising that he has the most to say when he slows his pace and settles into a (still brief ) discussion of optics, say, or the aortic valve.

The most sustained and engrossing chapter is largely devoted to Leonardo’s water studies—vortices, floods, cloud formation—and depends on one of the remaining complete notebooks, the Codex Leicester. The codex is currently owned

by Bill Gates, who (as Isaacson does not point out) had some of its digitized pages used for a screen saver on the Microsoft operating system.

Isaacson’s Leonardo is a comparably modern figure, not merely “human,” as the author likes to point out, but a blithe societal misfit: “illegitimate, gay, vegetarian, left-handed, easily distracted, and at times heretical.” True enough, although Isaacson sometimes strains the relatability. His Leonardo is lucky to have been born illegitimate—because he was not expected to follow his father into the notary business—and lucky, too, to have been only minimally educated, in math and writing, rather than schooled in the Latin authors reserved for youths of higher rank. Untrammelled by authority, he was free to think creatively. As for being easily distracted, Isaacson warns that a young Leonardo today might well be medicated out of his creative urges. Beneath its diligent research, the book is a study in creativity: how to define it, how to achieve it. Isaacson’s answer, repeated like a mantra, lies precisely in the Leonardesque (or Jobsian) refusal to distinguish art from science, observation from imagination, and to attain a “combinatory creativity.”

And this goal isn’t just the prerogative of genius; we can all approach it.

The most up-to-date if occasionally dismaying aspect of the book is its framing as a self-help guide, along the lines of “How Leonardo Can Change Your Life.” Isaacson explains that, while working on the book, he taught himself to be more observant, and it isn’t hard to respect his good intentions—he mentions sunlight, eddying water—until he writes, “When I saw the hint of a smile come across someone’s lips, I tried to fathom her inner mysteries.” One hopes that she shook him out of it. Fortunately, the book contains several clear and absorbing pages about the “Mona Lisa” ’s famously mysterious smile, particularly in relation to

Leonardo’s studies of lip muscles, which he dissected, and drew, alternately, with skin on and skin off. Most important, Isaacson tells a powerful story of an exhilarating mind and life, which is rewarding even if it doesn’t set you on the path to enlightenment.

hat’s more, he brings news. Five W hundred and sixty-five years after Leonardo’s birth, in 1452, we at last know who his mother was. Her first name, Caterina, was previously all we had, although it had been assumed that she was of lower station than Leonardo’s father, Piero, who left the tiny Tuscan town of Vinci for bustling Florence around the time his son was born, and married a highly respectable woman within a year.

Speculation about Caterina has been rampant. Mark Lankford’s “Becoming Leonardo” (Melville House) builds on theories that she was a slave, possibly of North African origin, thus adding “mixed race” and “cross-cultural” to the artist’s twenty-first-century credentials. Isaacson, though, relays the findings of a new work of documentary scholarship, Martin Kemp and Giuseppe Pallanti’s “Mona Lisa: The People and the Painting” (Oxford), which establishes Caterina as a sixteen-year-old orphan from a neighboring hamlet, quickly married off to a local farmer to avoid awkward situations.

But many questions remain. Did the boy ever live with his mother? Whom did he love, and who loved him? Being illegitimate was not a disgrace; although the status carried legal limitations, Leonardo’s baptism was a well-attended event, and he seems to have grown up mostly with his father’s family, while Caterina (who soon had other children) lived a short distance away. Still, he was a country boy of few prospects. Left-handed, he had trouble writing except in reverse, from right to left, each letter backward on the page—perhaps a trick he’d taught himself to keep from smearing his ink, or for keeping secrets, but a habit that no one seems to have bothered correcting. All he could certainly do was draw.

He moved to Florence to live with his father at about the age of twelve, shortly after Piero’s wife and their only child died. The exact year is uncertain, as is the year, not long after, when he became an apprentice in the workshop of Verrocchio, a leading artist and his father’s

client. The city must have been a revelation to Leonardo: enormously wealthy, with numerous palazzi built by the newly dominant business class, room after room to be filled with art. There were more wood-carvers in town than butchers, and the streets were a living gallery of works

by Donatello, Ghiberti, and Brunelleschi—the revolutionary generation that had just passed. Verrocchio provided a practical education, not only in painting and sculpture but also in metalwork and engineering. And Leonardo, even in his teens, made a strong impression. He was reportedly a boy (and later a man) of exceptional good looks and grace, and art historians have conjectured that he might have posed for Verrocchio’s delicate, curlyhaired bronze David, described by Isaacson as “a slightly effeminate and strikingly pretty boy of about fourteen,” whose face bears the hint of a smile. The identification is appealing (if not the established fact that Isaacson ultimately suggests). Most fascinating, however, is the way that Leonardo transformed this lightly boyish charm into a radiantly pure yet sensual ideal of male beauty.

He had an affinity for angels. In Verrocchio’s painting “The Baptism of Christ,” the Master’s hardy, pug-nosed angel seems to stare in wonder at the rapt creature beside him, one of the earliest works of Leonardo, its noble profile trailing a cascade of golden curls. The divide between the two is technical as well as imaginative: Leonardo used oil paint, not old-fashioned egg-based tempera, and applied it in multiple thin layers, each a luminescent veil, so that his angel appears to be modelled in light. Giorgio Vasari, who wrote the first authoritative biographies of Renaissance artists, in 1550, claimed that Verrocchio gave up painting when he saw what his pupil had done, an exaggeration meant to stress the unprecedented nature of Leonardo’s genius, and of the generation he introduced.

Yet Leonardo’s reputation, unlike Michelangelo’s and Raphael’s after him, was slow to rise. He does not seem to have been conventionally ambitious: he stayed with Verrocchio for roughly a decade, far longer than the usual term, both working and living with the Master. Another angel he painted in this period, part of an “Annunciation” now in the Uffizi, was distinguished by scrupulously naturalistic bird wings. Although they were crudely

overpainted sometime later, one can make them out, short and strong: real wings to give fantasy flight. Clearly, Leonardo’s mind was already roaming beyond the studio.

He was still living with Verrocchio when he was charged with sodomy in 1476. As soon as he was cleared, he left town for a year, to work on a project in Pistoia. Some have speculated that the charges caused a break with his father— who, by now remarried, went on to have several legitimate sons. Others have wondered if the accusations (there was a second one, soon after the first) contributed to the evident disfavor of Florence’s most important patron, Lorenzo de’ Medici.

Although Leonardo had already produced his first indisputable masterpiece—a poetic portrait of a local banker’s daughter, Ginevra de’ Benci, which is now a treasure of the National Gallery in Washington—and had established his own studio on returning to Florence, his name was notably absent from a list of the best painters in the city that Lorenzo provided to the Pope, in 1481. (Botticelli, Perugino, and Ghirlandaio were among those who made the cut and were hired to paint the walls of the newly built Sistine Chapel.) But there were other possible reasons for the omission. Leonardo had never painted in fresco, the durable technique favored for wall paintings. And he was already known for leaving things unfinished. Indeed, by 1483, he had abandoned two important commissions and departed for Milan. He was thirty years old, and had accomplished little. In a long and detailed letter that reads like a job application, he offered his services to the local ruler, Ludovico Sforza, as a military engineer. As a seeming afterthought, he mentioned that he could also paint.

chariot fitted with enormous whirlA ing blades, slicing men in half or cutting off their legs, leaving pieces scattered; guns with multiple barrels arranged like organ pipes to increase the speed and intensity of firing; a colossal missile-launching crossbow.

Leonardo made many such frightening drawings while in the employ of Ludovico, who gained the title of Duke of Milan only after poisoning his nephew, some years later, but who effectively served in that role throughout the seventeen years that Leonardo spent in the city. Partly because Ludovico’s THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 16, 2017

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claim was shaky, Milan was under frequent siege by rival powers, and Leonardo offered him skills—“I have methods for destroying any fortress or redoubt, even if it is founded on solid rock”—that seem both opportunistically savvy and fantastical, rather like the drawings. He had never demonstrated any military skills before, and his intention in these drawings remains a matter of dispute. Was he an unworldly visionary or a conscienceless inventor? Isaacson wants it both ways: “I believe his proposal was serious,” he writes of the fearsome crossbow, pointing to some thirty preparatory drawings, yet he believes that the design was nevertheless “a work of imagination rather than invention,” for the plain reason that it wouldn’t have worked— and didn’t work, even when constructed by modern engineers, for television, in 2002. This argument blurs the question of intent, but suggests the complexities involved in making any moral judgments about the man.

It was a new life in Milan, which is perhaps just what Leonardo wanted. He was not put to work on military matters, or indeed on any major project, for years—his first job was to fix a plumbing problem—but he proved his worth by designing the elaborate pageants that were a hallmark of Ludovico’s regime, a theatrical form of family propaganda.

This sort of work, however, was ephemeral, and has left almost nothing behind, to the immense regret of art historians, who have often fretted that he was wasting his time. Yet Leonardo appears to have been content. The hedonistic court life suited him: he became something of a dandy, dressing in pinks and purples, satins and velvets, his hands scented with lavender. He completed portraits, much admired, of Ludovico’s mistresses, and set up a workshop that turned out devotional pictures for a wealthy clientele. He enjoyed the company of colleagues in widespread disciplines, from architecture to mathematics. Even the damp Lombard weather seems to have suited him; its blue-gray mists, so different from Tuscan sunlight, become the weather of his paintings. And it was in Milan that he began to keep notebooks.

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range of his activities led him to write down his ideas, in his strange right-toleft script, and to annotate his drawings, beginning with simple pieces of machinery and ending with the world.

“Thief liar obstinate greedy”: with these four exasperated words, written in 1491, after a decade in Milan, Leonardo described the figure with whom he had the most enduring relationship of his life. Gian Giacomo Caprotti was ten years old when he entered the workshop,

the previous year. A poor boy of extraordinary beauty, he was brought in as a servant, probably also as a model, and to be trained as a painter—he later had a modest career—and stayed for twentyeight years. He seems to have resembled one of Leonardo’s angels. Vasari wrote about his beauty and particularly about his “lovely curling hair which Leonardo adored.” Since, however, he was in the habit, early on, of stealing purses, silverpoint pens, and anything else he could get his hands on, Leonardo gave him the nickname Salaì—Little Devil, more or less—and that is how he has been known to history.

It seems fair to assume that they became lovers when Salaì was in his teens.

Another of Leonardo’s early biographers, Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, writing in about 1560, invented a dialogue between Leonardo and the Greek sculptor Phidias, in which Leonardo replies to the question of whether he and Salaì ever played “that ‘backside game’ which Florentines love so much” with a boisterous affirmative: “Many times!” By way of explanation, he recalls Salaì’s beauty, “especially at about fifteen.” Modern scholars have identified a number of drawings presumably of Salaì, mostly at a later age, when the hair is still curly but the chin is weak and the flesh already somewhat slack. If he does not entirely impress us, though, he continued to impress Leonardo, whose most touching portrait shows the maturing

man sketched lightly, almost absentmindedly, around a drawing of the human heart.

It was while he was making notes on the flight patterns of birds, and particularly the fork-tailed red kite, that he was reminded of an early experience, and wrote the only passage about his childhood in the notebooks. Disregarded until Freud wrote a small book about it, in 1910, the passage still commands attention. In this memory—or, as Freud suggested, this fantasy—a kite flew down on the artist in the cradle, “and opened my mouth with its tail, and struck me several times with its tail inside my lips.” Freud was apologetic about pointing out that the fantasy “corresponds to the idea of an act of fellatio,” which readers might well consider a grave insult to the artist, although “tradition does in fact represent Leonardo as a man with homosexual feelings.” Feelings that, Freud believed, did not have a sexual outlet: the very existence of the notebooks, in his view, was evidence of the redirection of Leonardo’s sexual energies into his obsessional researches. Leonardo himself was not a stranger to such thoughts, writing, in one of the notebooks, “Intellectual passion drives out sensuality.” It is impossible to know if he was alluding to the experience of an afternoon or of a lifetime, but it isn’t hard to imagine what he would have made of Freud’s assertion that he had never known sexual passion.

Freud’s study has been discredited on many counts, the most profound being his theory that the “psychical genesis of homosexuality” lies in a boy’s erotic attachment to a too-loving mother. Working backward from this theory, he concluded that “poor, forsaken” Caterina must have lived alone with her son for at least the first three years of his life. Surprisingly, the most admirable of Leonardo’s modern biographers—Serge Bramly, writing in 1988, and the richly nuanced Charles Nicholl, writing in 2004—while hardly uncritical of Freud’s analysis, consider his thoughts about the artist’s relationship with his mother to be of enduring value.

Isaacson is almost refreshing in his sweeping rejection not only of Freud but of any attempt to psychoanalyze a man who lived five hundred years ago

(although he occasionally bends his own rule). As he sees it, the bird, tail and all, reflects nothing more than Leonardo’s interest in flight. Whether or not this is true—who can say?—it is good to have a major biography that (at last) presumes no need to put forth a reason for the artist’s sexuality.

Long before Freud, critics noted that Leonardo painted figures that displayed what Freud called the “blissful union of the male and female natures.” The ravishing angel in each of the two versions of “The Virgin of the Rocks,” commissioned in Milan, is a clear descendant of the early Florentine angels, and confounds any attempt to assign the figure a pronoun—perhaps conveying a theological ideal as well as a personal one. In fact, the preparatory drawing, used for both figures, is of a woman. (Michelangelo elided gender in a comparably obsessive way: his heavily muscled female figures—the Libyan Sibyl on the Sistine Ceiling, Night in the Medici Chapel—were clearly modelled on men, as the drawings attest.) In more openly erotic territory, Leonardo’s late painting of St. John the Baptist is notoriously epicene (Isaacson writes of its “come-hither naughtiness”) and some have seen it as an idealized Salaì. Stranger still, there is a resemblance between this St. John and the woman in the painting often called the “Nude Mona Lisa,” who sits with breasts exposed, against a misty landscape, turning to look the viewer in the eye. At least eight copies of this softly smiling, seminude portrait exist, in emphatically Leonardesque style, and a finished drawing may show the Master’s own corrections. Evidently, his studio fed an appetite for more than Madonnas.

But no one was prepared for the emergence, in 1991, in New York, of a drawing of a hollow-eyed, wingless angel, a sure but dissipated cousin to these other figures, sporting both the suggestion of a woman’s breasts and a huge erection, just slightly blurred where attempts to erase it had failed. Playful caricature?

Hermaphroditic pornography? Isaacson suggests both, but even a thick volume devoted to the drawing, edited by a leading Leonardo expert, Carlo Pedretti, fails to provide any answers. One story has it that the drawing was part of a secret cache of obscene Leonardo material held in the Royal Collection at Windsor

Castle. The works were allegedly stolen, in the nineteenth century, prompting not legal prosecution but relief.

often Leonardo’s ambition that Ithattkeptwasruined him from completing things, or the things he completed. A bronze horse that he designed for Ludovico was so enormous that it proved impossible to cast; Ludovico finally dispatched the raw bronze to a neighboring state to be turned into cannons, in preparation for a threatened attack by the French. It may have been Ludovico’s fear that the French would make off with “The Last Supper” that caused Leonardo to execute the painting directly on the wall of the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie, the church that Ludovico had chosen for his tomb.

Again, the scale was enormous—twentynine feet wide, fifteen feet tall—and Leonardo was in a predicament about technique. He liked to work slowly, to rethink, to add layer upon layer, none

of which was possible with fresco, which dried quickly and bonded to the wall.

Yet he wasn’t sure how to make his preferred medium—oil paint—bond successfully. Experimenting, he concocted a mixture of oil and tempera, and, sometime around 1495, he went to work. Using everything he had learned, in years of study, about anatomy, perspective, light, color, and the physical manifestations of human emotion, he painted one of the world’s most celebrated masterpieces, completed by early 1498, and flaking off the wall by 1517. Leonardo was alive then, and would have known.

The French were unable to pry the painting from the wall, it’s true, although they gave it serious thought almost as soon as they stormed the city, in 1499, driving Ludovico out. They were more successful, however, with the painter. Leonardo was soon on cozy terms with Louis XII’s occupying force, earning unspecified “obligations to His Majesty the King of France.” It was

“Which is the best variety for sitting around and eventually rotting because you don’t even like apples, you just wanted to do something ‘fallish’?”

¥ only the threat of Ludovico’s return that made him leave the city and go back to Florence, where he made the acquaintance of an even greater master of Realpolitik, Niccolò Machiavelli.

At the time, Machiavelli was an envoy for the Florentine Republic, negotiating to keep the infamous warlord Cesare Borgia from attacking the city. It seems to have been under Machiavelli’s auspices that, in 1502, Leonardo became Borgia’s military engineer. He inspected fortresses, made maps, and designed weapons—he may also have acted as a spy for Florence—as Borgia conquered towns through central Italy in a trail of slaughter that rattled even Machiavelli. Leonardo lasted eight months in the job.

Back in Florence, where the fame of “The Last Supper” had spread, he was greeted as a great master come home. Crowds flocked to see a new work on display; he turned aside commissions from the titled and the rich.

But he accepted the commission for a patriotic battle scene on a wall of the city’s Great Council Hall and completed a preparatory cartoon that was 92

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¥ among the most powerful works he ever made. “The Battle of Anghiari” has been viewed as both a monument to the passions of war and a passionate antiwar statement: men’s faces savagely twisted, horses tearing at one another’s flesh, one horse screaming in pain, like something out of a Renaissance “Guernica.” Just as he was readying himself to work on the painting itself, though, the city government commissioned Michelangelo to paint another wall in the same room, deliberately spurring a competition between Florence’s two greatest artists.

Michelangelo loathed Leonardo. It’s clear from their work why they might not have got along. Michelangelo’s hardedged line, even in painting, was sculptural, and deliberately antithetical to the softened atmospherics that Leonardo pursued. But the animus was also personal. Michelangelo, then in his midtwenties, was gruff, hardworking, illkempt, and, by his own account, celibate, because of what appears to have been his severely repressed and spiritualized homosexuality. At one point, he insulted Leonardo on the street, with a taunt

about the bronze horse that had been left unfinished, reportedly leaving Leonardo standing red-faced. The witness to this incident found it worth noting that Leonardo, ever beautiful in his person, went around Florence in a rose-pink tunic, and it is irresistible to infer how irritating Michelangelo must have found the older artist, with his peacock clothes and his perfumed air, and with what now amounted to an entourage of swankily dressed assistants.

Leonardo seemed to delight in adding fuel to the fire. Some months before Michelangelo was commissioned to paint alongside Leonardo, in early 1504, there was a meeting to view his nearly completed statue of David and to decide where in the city it would stand. All the important artists in town were present—Botticelli, Perugino, Filippino Lippi (child of the artistmonk and the nun)—but Leonardo alone objected to the figure’s exposed nudity, and pronounced the need for “decent ornament.” A tiny sketch he made on the spot shows the statue with its offending member neatly hidden by what Isaacson describes as “a bronze leaf.” It’s hard to believe that the man whose notebooks contain a section, “On the Penis,” in which he argues against “covering and concealing something that deserves to be adorned and displayed with ceremony ” was truly offended by what he saw. Yet his objections prevailed. The genitals of the marble colossus were covered, and stayed that way for some forty years.

It isn’t hard to imagine the defiant mood in which Michelangelo set about producing his rival cartoon for the Council Hall. Instead of a battle scene, he depicted a whole troop of naked, twisting, posing, and extremely well-muscled men, who are caught bathing in a river just as the battle alarm sounds. (As Jonathan Jones notes, in “The Lost Battles,” this work, like Leonardo’s, quickly became a school for younger artists.) But, before Michelangelo could begin to paint, the Pope summoned him to Rome for another commission. Leonardo had seen enough to comment on certain artists who made figures so conspicuously muscled that they resembled “a sack of walnuts.” Still, he was nonplussed by the aggressive younger artist, and was temperamentally ill-suited to this sort

of head-on competition. Worse, he had continued to experiment with materials, and as he worked he discovered that, yet again, the paint was not adhering to the wall. When Michelangelo suddenly returned, in 1506, Leonardo abandoned the project and fled back to Milan. As it happened, Michelangelo, consumed by other tasks, never even began his painting. All that remains of either work are a few sublime preparatory drawings—the monumental cartoons are both lost—and later copies.

Among the paintings that Leonardo took away with him was the portrait later known as the “Mona Lisa,” begun around 1503 and soon admired for its astonishing naturalism. Although most scholars agree that it represents Lisa del Giocondo, the wife of a local silk merchant, there is no consensus on why the artist chose such a comparatively lowly subject when he was evading requests from the Marchioness of Mantua. As for the “Mona Lisa” ’s haunting smile— “Mona,” a contraction of “Madonna,” is a title akin to Lady or Madam—it, too, remains a mystery. Was Leonardo recalling his mother’s smile? Or Salaì’s?

Both theories have been proposed. Or was the smile just a clever allusion to the fact that the lady’s last name, Giocondo, means “cheerful”? (In France, the portrait has always been known as “La Joconde.”) Whatever this portrait meant to Leonardo—the biggest mystery of all—he chose never to relinquish it, but went on, year after year, adding small perfecting strokes and glazes. Nonetheless, he increasingly turned away from painting, anxious to complete his studies and to order the contents of his notebooks. He was in his fifties and feared that he was running out of time.

In Milan, he acquired the services of another beautiful boy who became central to his life. Francesco Melzi, however, was in every other way Salaì’s opposite: aristocratic, educated, serious, a devoted amanuensis, and ultimately something of a son. When political changes forced Leonardo to leave Milan in 1512, he (and Salaì) stayed with the Melzi family outside the city, before moving on to pass three mostly miserable years in Rome. His reputation for not finishing things meant that he no longer received big commissions, a situation that he generally felt as a relief,

except when confronted with the galling achievements of Michelangelo and Raphael, in their positions as favorites of the Pope. (It was one thing to be free from unwanted work, another to be ignored.) Although he was universally revered, Leonardo still needed money, and so required a patron with more patience than this class of person usually displayed. Fortunately, Francis I, the new King of France, just twentyone years old, was eager to import Italian art, and very much in the market for a grand old man of the Renaissance.

All that Leonardo needed to supply, in exchange for a stipend and a small château, was his wisdom. e get a last glimpse of him in 1517, well ensconced in France but W frail, when the secretary for the Cardinal of Aragon recorded a visit. Leonardo is still in possession of a portrait of “a certain Florentine lady,” and two other paintings that appear equally impressive. He shows off his notebooks, calling them “an infinity of volumes,” and the account continues, “If these were to be brought to light they would be both useful and delightful.” None of the notebooks had been brought to light by the time Leonardo died, in May, 1519, at the age of sixty-seven. Instead, the task fell to Melzi, who inherited most of Leonardo’s estate, the notebooks included.

He managed to organize the notes on painting, and did his careful best—the selling of pages did not begin until after his death—but was finally overwhelmed.

A single lifetime was not enough.

Melzi was with Leonardo at the end, but Salaì was living in Milan. He had left the entourage on its way to France, and, despite reported visits to Leonardo, it has been easy to assume a serious break.

Leonardo, in his will, left Salaì only half of a property he owned near Milan, leaving the other half to a favorite new servant. Many biographers, including Isaacson, assume that Salaì was essentially cut off. The will, moreover, makes no mention of the paintings, an omission that has been the source of much scholarly agitation. A document detailing Salaì’s effects, made out after his death, only five years later, lists a number of paintings identified by Leonardesque titles (“La Ioconda”), but leaves it unclear whether these were originals or

copies. Isaacson concludes, somewhat rashly, that Salaì (in his late thirties) “lived up to his reputation as a stickyfingered little devil, one who was somehow able to get his hands on things.”

But another document, not discussed

by Isaacson, suggests a happier possibility. Brought to light in 1999 by the scholar Bertrand Jestaz, it shows that, in 1518, while Leonardo was still alive, Francis I’s treasurer in Milan issued a small fortune to Salaì in exchange for a group of paintings. According to Jestaz, the sum involved was so large that they can only have been Leonardo’s originals; several of his paintings did indeed enter the King’s collection and are now in the Louvre. (The ones still in Salaì’s possession at his death fell steeply in value soon after and were surely copies.) The art historian Laure Fagnart plausibly concludes that Leonardo left so little to Salaì in his will because he’d already provided for him very well.

Salaì’s reputation has never been the best, and Isaacson’s suggestion hardly does further damage. But the two interpretations say very different things about Leonardo. No one believes anymore that a great artist must be a saint, and there are many things we will never understand about the man. The way that he treated the grownup child who had been the love of his life, as that life was coming to an end, may not be on the same moral plane as the issues raised by his machines of war, but it offers at least one answer to the question of who Leonardo really was.

Leonardo seems to have found peace in his final years, closely attended by the young King—who lived in a château just a few hundred yards away—organizing court celebrations and pondering geometric puzzles to his heart’s content. His last certain work was not a painting, or even a drawing, but a party he put on in his gardens, in honor of the King, in the summer of 1518. There was an enormous canopy of sky-blue cloth decorated with gold stars, supported on columns covered with ivy. There was music. A spectacle titled “Paradiso” was performed, with players costumed as the planets, surrounded by the sun, the moon, and the twelve celestial signs. Four hundred torches were set burning, so that, as a letter-writer of the time recalled, “the night was chased away.” And in the morning all of it was gone.  THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 16, 2017

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Christopher Alden recently transferred the action to an Amish-style community.

David McVicar, who directed the new Met staging, stuck with Romans and Druids. This is McVicar’s seventh production for the house since 2009, and another, “Tosca,” is due on New Year’s “Norma” at the Met, and Mahler at the Philharmonic.

Eve. His approach has grown increasingly formulaic, amounting to mildly

BY ALEX ROSS sexed-up traditionalism. In “Norma,” we he Metropolitan Opera opened the less operas that end with ritual female are given a gnarled old tree, a thatched season with its hundred-and-fifty- death, it is something other than a mon- hut resembling a yurt, a megalith, and seventh performance of Bellini’s “Norma.” ument to patriarchy. Norma, the Druid choral scenes augmented by gym-toned The New York Philharmonic began with priestess of a Gallic tribe under Roman extras. Bellini’s majestic creation comes its hundred-and-nineteenth rendition of rule, is caught in a classic operatic di- off as bel-canto “Game of Thrones.”

What vitality there is comes from the Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. This is the lemma: she has secretly borne children safe course that many performing-arts with a Roman, Pollione, who has in turn two female leads. Sondra Radvanovsky groups are choosing in precarious times: fallen in love with Adalgisa, a temple is now the Met’s reigning bel-canto the eternal return to the world that was. virgin. Norma flies into an obligatory diva, having completed the Beverly Sills trifecta of Donizetti’s queens Both works are masterpieces (“Anna Bolena,” “Maria Stuthat deserve to be heard rearda,”and “Roberto Devereux”). peatedly. Yet the implicit mesLike most Normas of recent sage is reactionary. As the nadecades, Radvanovsky falls tion contends with its racist short of perfection, if perfecand misogynist demons, New tion is possible. On opening York’s leading musical institunight, she had shaky moments tions give us canonical pieces in “Casta diva,” perhaps the by white males, conducted by mightiest aria in the repertory. white males, directed by white Her tone lacked steady warmth; males. The Met’s productions rapid runs were smudged here this season feature no female and there; one or two high composers, no female conducnotes were on the verge of tors, and no women directing cracking. McVicar did Radvanew stagings.The Philharmonnovsky no favors by placing her ic’s main schedule, at David on an elevated platform in a Geffen Hall, has one female wide-open forest space. More conductor and one female comintimate surroundings would poser. The fact that Deborah have left her less acoustically Borda has taken over as the orexposed. Angela Meade, who chestra’s president and C.E.O. triumphed in “Norma” at the means that change is immiMet in 2013 and will take over nent: Borda did much to the part in December, displays modernize the Los Angeles a more serene, long-breathed Philharmonic, which she led authority with this music. for seventeen years. (On OcOnce “Casta diva” was out tober 3rd, Borda indicated a reof the way, Radvanovsky came ordering of priorities by announcing, with Lincoln Center, Sondra Radvanovsky and Joyce DiDonato in “Norma.” into her own. The more dramatic aspects of the role— the abandonment of a five-hundred-million-dollar rebuilding scheme rage when she learns of the betrayal, yet those fuelled by sorrow, rage, and righfor Geffen Hall.) Still, the path of prog- she has a bond with Adalgisa that is only teousness—bring out her strengths. Her ress is dauntingly steep. It is no wonder strengthened as a result. The all-encom- dark, mezzo-ish timbre conveys a sense that younger generations stay away from passing grandeur of Norma’s music, which that Norma is drawing energy from the institutions whose programming makes ranges from the bel-canto radiance of earth beneath her feet. Radvanovsky is Donald Trump’s Cabinet look vibrantly “Casta diva” to steely, Isolde-like blasts, an involving actress, signalling emotion evokes a matriarchal age. The scenario with her entire body and not just with diverse in comparison.

Little effort would have been required lends itself to directorial transformation. her arms. What she has, above all, is drato make “Norma” pertinent to the issues A 2013 production starring Cecilia Bar- matic momentum: she only gained power of the day. Although it is one of count- toli was set in Nazi-occupied France, and and depth as the evening went on. In MUSICAL EVENTS

SHOWS OF FORCE

T

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ILLUSTRATION BY PETRA ERIKSSON

the climactic duet “Qual cor tradisti” (“The heart you betrayed”), she deliberately landed a little late and low on the final notes of her phrases, tugging the gently buoyant major-key accompaniment toward the shadows. Carlo Rizzi, the conductor, followed her alertly, eliciting plush, pliant playing from the orchestra.

Joyce DiDonato, who sang Adalgisa, has the kind of voice of which bel-canto composers dreamed. Her technique is immaculate, and she has the preternatural ability to invest turns, runs, and trills with psychological significance, so that it seems entirely in character for a Druid to sing in rapid-fire Italian. When she snatches a breath between long phrases, she makes it a convulsion of the heart.

Although her upper register sounded taxed on opening night, the struggle melded with the character’s anguish.

Unfortunately, McVicar kept inserting DiDonato into scenes where she didn’t belong: she effectively photo-bombed Radvanovsky’s “Casta diva.” Joseph Calleja was a pinched but stylish Pollione, giving the role an arrogant, brutish edge; his advances toward Adalgisa bordered on violence. This hinted at a modern-minded reading of the opera, but the action kept fading into a mist of Gothic-Romantic cliché. he Dutch conductor Jaap van ZweT den, the Philharmonic’s incoming music director, won’t officially assume his duties until next fall. Still, his appearances this season should give a sense of where the orchestra will go after the imaginative, questing regime of Alan Gilbert. Van Zweden’s first full program paired the Mahler Fifth with a recent piece by Philip Glass, the Double Piano Concerto. (I saw the Saturday-night concert.) Although van Zweden has made his name as an assertive interpreter of the standard repertory, he has presented a fair amount of contemporary music in his previous posts, at the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic, the Hong Kong Philharmonic, and the Dallas Symphony.

He was the first international conductor to take notice of John Luther Adams, years before Adams won a Pulitzer Prize for “Become Ocean.” That said, the Double Piano Concerto, a quirky, pensive product from the Glass workshop, made an indifferent impression. Katia and

Marielle Labèque crisply dispatched the piano parts, but the orchestra provided tentative accompaniment.

In the Mahler, the orchestra delivered a potent, revved-up sound. The opening was titanic: Chris Martin’s trumpet solo had a darkly triumphant ring, and the first full orchestral chord shook the room.

Yet all this intensity created a structural problem. Mahler marks the first tutti chord “ff ”; more than two hundred bars later, however, he ratchets the dynamics up to “fff,” as the orchestra picks up speed and then goes over a psychic cliff. By amping up to the proverbial eleven at the start, van Zweden left no room to build.

Canny symphonic plotting was one of Gilbert’s virtues; this Fifth was more about instant gratification.

The ferocious second movement— “With utmost vehemence,” Mahler’s score says—brought forth some of the most electrifying playing that I’ve lately heard from the Philharmonic: jagged gestures in the strings, snarling splendor from the brass. After that, the performance meandered. The third movement, the Scherzo, needs a conductor at ease with Mahler’s pastoral longueurs, his folkish enthusiasms, his flirtations with kitsch. (Over the years, I’ve heard the Philharmonic play the Fifth under five conductors, and the only one who captured the rustic side of Mahler’s personality was Michael Tilson Thomas, in 1996.) The Adagietto showed off burnished strings, but it skimped on lyrical heartbreak. Vehemence returned in the finale, a show of muscular force.

Then again, are shows of force really what we want in concert halls? Macho shock and awe can easily be found elsewhere in the culture: too many orchestras these days bludgeon the ears with an approximation of Dolby cineplex sound. It would be good to hear more expressiveness, more vulnerability, from the perpetually hard-driving Philharmonic.

Happily, van Zweden’s recordings suggest that he can cultivate such tenderness. Witness his account, on Naxos, of Wagner’s “Die Walküre,” with the Hong Kong Philharmonic. The “Ride of the Valkyries” is almost dancelike; Wotan’s Farewell, with Matthias Goerne singing opposite Petra Lang, is rich in hushed emotion. “Be guided now by your own light thoughts,” Wotan says. The ideal orchestra would be led in the same spirit.  THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 16, 2017

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THE CURRENT CINEMA

REPLICANT REDUX “Blade Runner 2049.”

BY ANTHONY LANE

he good news about life on Earth, T thirty-two years from now, is that people still listen to Frank Sinatra. In “Blade Runner 2049,” the land is the color of a corpse, and the skies are no better. The only tree is sapless and dead, and the only farmer is harvesting weevils for protein. The Voice, however, is unimpaired. True, Sinatra is no more

to “retire” (a ghoulish euphemism) any early-model replicants who are still out there. They have “open-ended lifespans,” and immortality, as ever, is not to be trusted. Such is the premise of Denis Villeneuve’s ambitious sequel to Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner,” which came out in 1982 and was set, with startling powers of premonition, in 2019.

Denis Villeneuve’s sequel to Ridley Scott’s 1982 film compounds its mystery. than a hologram, crooning to a couple of folks in the shell of a Las Vegas hot spot, and yet, when he sings the words “Set ’em up, Joe,” you soften and melt as if it were 1954 and he were singing them to Doris Day, hushing a crowded room, in “Young at Heart.”

By a nice twist, there is a Joe around.

He’s with the L.A.P.D., and he’s officially called KD6.3-7 (Ryan Gosling), or K, for short, but somebody suggests Joe, and it lends him a little flavor. He needs a real name, not least because it makes him sound like a real person— shades of Pinocchio, who longed to be a real boy. In fact, K is a Blade Runner: a synthetic human known as a replicant, physically redoubtable and emotionally dry, whose job is to find and 96

THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 16, 2017

It starred Harrison Ford as Deckard, a cop who hunted down rogue replicants across Los Angeles—a joyless Babel, blitzed by neon glare and lashed by the whip of dirty rain. That was the future back then. How’s it looking now?

Well, the rain hasn’t stopped. Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink; most of it is contaminated, and when K takes a shower it’s over in a two-second blast. The director of photography, Roger Deakins, delights in drowning our senses: enemies clash by night in a frothing torrent, at the foot of a dam, and, in one telling image, K’s boss, Lieutenant Joshi (Robin Wright), is barely visible through a window, such is the deluge streaming across the panes.

“It is my job to keep order,” she says,

and that order is coming adrift. K has been sent out of town to confront a hulking replicant named Sapper Morton. (He is played by Dave Bautista, who gets better and more solid, if that is possible, with every film.) What K discovers, buried on Morton’s property, is a box of bones, and what the bones reveal is unthinkable: a secret that could undermine the near-fascistic system, upheld by Joshi, whereby replicants do the bidding of humanity. If replicants were to rise up or—perish the thought— to reproduce, there might be no way to contain them.

Not that the film is a hymn to revolution. It runs for nearly three hours, and it looms as large as an epic, with a score, by Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch, that feels at times like an onslaught of monumental thuds. Yet the bastions of power—the corporate ziggurats of L.A., cliff-high and elephant gray, which viewers of the first film will recall with awe—remain in place, unbreached, and the hordes at ground level seethe not with a lust for liberation but with a busy trade in high-tech assistance and lowly sexual favors. Moreover, the plot is a small and coiled affair, involving a missing child, and the mood is as inward as anything in the annals of Philip Marlowe, with a dose of Marlowe’s glum self-bullying, as K investigates not only historical crimes but his own potential presence in the labyrinth of the past. The movie doesn’t seem slow, but its clues are minuscule—a single piano key depressed beside its neighbors, a serial number visible only under a microscope—and the action sequences flare up against a backdrop of inaction and an existential dread of getting stuck.

The result is at once consuming and confounding, a private puzzle cached inside a blockbuster.

One coup, for Villeneuve, is the return of Harrison Ford, as Deckard. The surprise was sprung in a trailer, months ago, raising expectations that the new movie might clear up the conundrum that has plagued the brains of “Blade Runner” fans since 1982: Is Deckard himself a replicant? I am pleased to report that I still can’t decide. Undying he may or may not be, but he is certainly aging, with a halting gait and a bottle of Johnnie Walker close at hand.

He lives alone with—guess what—a ILLUSTRATION BY STEPHANIE SCHOLZ

shaggy dog, pouring whiskey onto the floor for the mutt to lap at. Ford is splendidly grizzled and gruff, giving the film a necessary rasp, and he even shakes up Ryan Gosling. I happen to like Gosling in hangdog mode, when he yields to the pressure of sentiment, as in “Blue Valentine” (2010), but many of his worshippers prefer the cool constraint that he showed in “Drive” (2011), and that is mostly what we get here. K is an android, after all, who can walk away from a bloody fight without a squeak of complaint, and one purpose of the film is to probe that calm façade.

Hence the two scenes in which, after a mission, he is interrogated not by a superior but by a computer that stares at him, with an unblinking lens, and performs a “Post-Trauma Baseline Test.”

K must respond to certain words and phrases: “Cells,” “Interlinked,” “A Tall White Fountain Played.” The first time he takes the test, he passes. Later in the film, he fails. hat the hell is going on here, W and what does it tell us about the relation of “Blade Runner 2049” to the original? Decode the test, and you realize that the computer is quoting verse: Cells interlinked within cells interlinked Within one stem. And dreadfully distinct Against the dark, a tall white fountain played.

The lines come from Nabokov’s “Pale Fire,” a novel that wraps a poem inside a commentary. The mixture is rich in murder and madness, and you can go crazy, too, piecing together the components of the book; what matters is that each gorges on the other, and so

it is with the two parts of “Blade Runner.” The second film doesn’t explicate the first so much as compound its mystery, and, in some respects, I envy those who don’t have to wrestle with the comparison. Younger viewers who’ve never seen Scott’s movie will be granted a delicious jolt as the fully formed dystopia rises out of nowhere to greet their virginal gaze. They can relish the spectacle of K’s police car in flight, while we veterans get a kick out of the newfangled drone that detaches from its roof and, at K’s casual command, goes sniffing around like a gundog. And, if the newbies thrill to Sylvia Hoeks as a Terminator-style replicant, assigned to track the hero in his quest, try not to ruin their fun by mentioning Rutger Hauer, who, shouldering a similar role in 1982, brought us the poetry of implacability. The new film’s idea of an arch-villain is Jared Leto, who has milky orbs for eyes, and who gives the impression, as in last year’s “Suicide Squad,” of an actor straining a little too hard, with dialogue to match: “You do not know what pain is. You will learn.”

Despite all the overlaps, this is not a simulacrum of a Ridley Scott film. It is unmistakably a Denis Villeneuve film, inviting us to tumble, tense with anticipation, into his doomy clutches.

“Prisoners” (2013) was as welcoming as a dungeon, and, in “Blade Runner 2049,” the light is no longer, as Nabokov had it, “dreadfully distinct / Against the dark,” for the darkness has overcome it. San Diego is a waste dump, and Las Vegas lurks in a tangerine dream of radioactive smog. And yet, within the gloom, what miracles unfold. Brace yourself for the delivery of a new rep-

licant, not born as a baby but slithering out from a plastic sheath as an instant adult, slimy with fabricated vernix and quaking at the shock of being a live. Suddenly, the lofty questions that swarm around artificial intelligence— Could the feelings familiar to mankind abound within the man-made? Could an operating system grow a soul?— reach a breathtaking consummation, and become flesh.

More wondrous still is Ana de Armas, who plays Joi, a digital program that in turn plays K’s live-in girlfriend.

It is no coincidence that Villeneuve’s best films, “Sicario” (2015) and “Arrival” (2016), feature a woman at their center, and, whenever Joi appears, the movie’s imaginative heart begins to race. Upon request, she manifests herself in K’s apartment, switching outfits in a shimmer—a vision that smacks of servility, except that it’s he who seems beholden to her. Gosling looks happiest in these scenes, perhaps because happiness, albeit of the simulated sort, hovers within K’s grasp. And what a simulation: at one point, Joi uses an Emanator, which allows her to escape her virtual self and to experience mortal sensations—the prick of rain on her skin, naturally, and a tangible embrace. Has science fiction, you want to ask, ever conjured a moment quite as romantic as this?

And how can it possibly last? It can’t; K gets a voice mail that overrides Joi and freezes her, inches short of a kiss.

Love is deleted, and the Blade Runner gets back to work. The future, unlike Heaven, can’t wait.  NEWYORKER.COM

Richard Brody blogs about movies.

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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 David Borchart, must be received by Sunday, October 15th. The finalists in the October 2nd contest appear below. We will announce the winner, and the finalists in this week’s contest, in the October 30th 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

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THE FINALISTS

THE WINNING CAPTION

“I have a feeling they are going to treat us like dirt.”

Cary Silverstein, Scottsdale, Ariz.

“Finally, an identifiable flying object.”

Howard Braye, Green’s Harbour, Newfoundland “And they say life can’t exist in a vacuum.”

Larry Looney, Austin, Texas

“Hold on, the Senate Committee on Women’s Health is getting out.”

Chris Janssen, San Jose, Calif.