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AUG. 8 & 15, 2016

AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

4 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

19 THE TALK OF THE TOWN

Steve Coll on Russias election games;

Gloria Allred; Morgan Freeman; pub rock;
James Surowiecki on executive action.
ANNALS OF POLITICS

Jill Lepore

24

Ian Frazier

33

Sam Knight

34

Jon Lee Anderson

40

Lauren Collins

52

Barry Blitt

59

Tessa Hadley

62

The War and the Roses

The lessons of the party Conventions.
SHOUTS & MURMURS

Outdone

THE SPORTING SCENE

Prance Master
The star rider who is transforming dressage.
A REPORTER AT LARGE

The Distant Shore

What made an isolated Peruvian tribe kill?
PERSONAL HISTORY

Love in Translation
Marriage to a Frenchman.
SKETCHBOOK

Behind the Scenes at the D.N.C.

FICTION

Didos Lament
THE CRITICS
POP MUSIC

Kelefa Sanneh

68

Adelle Waldman
Dan Chiasson

72
75
77

Emily Nussbaum

78

Anthony Lane

80

Nicole Sealey
James Richardson

31
47

Gucci Manes Everybody Looking.

BOOKS

Jay McInerneys Bright, Precious Days.

Jana Prikryls The After Party.
Briefly Noted
ON TELEVISION

BoJack Horseman.
THE CURRENT CINEMA

Jason Bourne, Little Men.

POEMS

A Violence
How I Became a Saint
COVER

Mark Ulriksen

Something in the Air

Paul Noth, Edward Steed, Jason Adam Katzenstein, Avi Steinberg, Sam
Marlow, Roz Chast, Amy Hwang, Will McPhail, Darrin Bell, Liam Francis Walsh
SPOTS Ben Wiseman

DRAWINGS

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

CONTRIBUTORS
Jill Lepore (The War and the Roses,
p. 24), a professor of history at Harvard,
is writing a history of the United States.
Steve Coll (Comment, p. 19) is the dean

of the Graduate School of Journalism

at Columbia University, and a staff
writer. He has published seven books,
including Ghost Wars.

Sheelah Kolhatkar (The Talk of the Town,

p. 20) recently joined the magazine as
a staff writer.
Nicole Sealey (Poem, p. 31), the programs
director for the Cave Canem Foundation, is the author of The Animal After
Whom Other Animals Are Named,
her dbut poetry collection.
Sam Knight (Prance Master, p. 34) is a
journalist living in London.
Mark Ulriksen (Cover) has contributed

to The New Yorker since 1994. A retrospective exhibition of his work will be
on view at the Galerie Oblique, in Paris,
in September.

Jon Lee Anderson (The Distant Shore,

p. 40) is a staff writer who has reported

for the magazine from various parts of
the world, including Africa, the Middle East, and South America.

Ian Frazier (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 33),

a longtime contributor, recently published Hogs Wild: Selected Reporting
Pieces.
Lauren Collins (Love in Translation,
p. 52) is a staff writer living in Paris.
Her book, When in French: Love in
a Second Language, will be out in
September.
Tessa Hadley (Fiction, p. 62) has published six novels, including Clever Girl
and, most recently, The Past.
Adelle Waldman (Books, p. 72) is the au-

thor of The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., her first novel.

Emily Nussbaum (On Television, p. 78),

the magazines television critic, won

this years Pulitzer Prize for criticism.

PODCASTS
New fiction from the magazine.
This week, Tessa Hadley reads her
short story Didos Lament.

VIDEO
In the latest film in our Screening
Room series, Lucy meets an amorous
cosmonaut on Chatroulette.

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.)

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

RIGHT: DARREN JOE

NEWYORKER.COM
Everything in the magazine, and more.

THE MAIL
UNEARTHING THE TRUTH

Paige Williamss Profile of the controversial paleoanthropologist Lee

Ber ger reveals the discrepancies
between the claims that Berger
makes about his discoveries and his
actual accomplishments (Digging
for Glory, June 27th). Numerous
scientists have questioned Bergers
assertion that the fossils he found
in the Rising Star cave system, in
South Africa, displayed ritualized behaviors directed toward the
deada claim that, if true, would
mean Homo sapiens is not the only
species with funerary practices. Science is supposed to provide a measure of certainty, but, increasingly,
we are blurring the distinction between speculation, supported hypothesis, and well-proven theory. As
the standards of scientific certainty
decline, the public loses faith in scientific claims, and in scientists. As
a result, even established science,
such as climate change or Darwinian evolution, which we know to
be beyond debate, is now being
questioned, especially when there
are political, economic, or cultural
implications.
Michael Mallary
Sterling, Mass.
Williams sheds light on the significant challenges researchers face
when gathering hard-to-find data
and publishing those findings. She
also illustrates one of the main debates in the scientific community
today: how to discern the differences
between scientific theory and science fiction. This has always been a
challengeparticularly in anthropology and its subdisciplines, because the field is so broadbut has
only become more difficult as more
and more fossils are found. If paleoanthropology is to have any success explaining the stages of human
evolution, it must rely more heavily
on universally accepted methodologies. It is easy to see why some of

Bergers claims about his discoveries, though not impossible, might be

called premature.
Joseph A. Reveles
La Mirada, Calif.

1
ROBBING THE SYSTEM

Patrick Radden Keefes article on

bank secrecy at H.S.B.C. mentions
a controversial tax law that requires
overseas banks to give the I.R.S. the
names and account information of
American clients (The Bank Robber, May 30th). Keefe characterizes
the law, called the Foreign Account
Tax Compliance Act, as a long-overdue move against banking secrecy.
But, as a longtime American resident of the Geneva area, where so
much of the financial mischief took
place, I feel the laws other effects
should be noted. The act often requires Americans with overseas bank
accounts to fill out reams of paperwork, exacting stiff penalties for those
who fail to do so, even inadvertently.
Law-abiding citizens struggle to find
banks willing to shoulder the cost of
compliance, which pushes us toward
a few large banks. This reduces access to basic banking services for
the millions of Americans who live
abroad while exacerbating the too
big to fail phenomenon. Given the
costs, one would hope that the benefits of the law would be considerable, but it seems unlikely that the
act deters tax evasion. By some estimates, less than one-eighth of the
American citizens who live overseas
file the forms. The burden of the law
falls not on tax-dodging million aires but on ordinary Americans living abroad.
Andrus Hatem
Ferney-Voltaire, France

Letters should be sent with the writers 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, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

AUGUST 3 16, 2016

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

This summer, the U.S. will send a sixteen-year-old, Kanak Jha, to RioJha may be the youngest male to
qualify for table tennis in Olympic history, but the sport remains graciously ageless. At Riis Park Beach Bazaar,
in Queens, Jared Sochinsky has opened the Push, a pop-up for games, installing beachside tables that have
attracted ringers like the seven-year-old Cole Weiner, above. It will be open weekends through Labor Day,
along with Fletchers BBQ, Ample Hills Creamery, and a bar, which wont serve as indiscriminately.
PHOTOGRAPH BY THOMAS PRIOR

THE THEATRE
1
OPENINGS AND PREVIEWS
The Layover
Trip Cullman directs a drama by Leslye Headland
(Bachelorette), about two strangers who meet on
a plane when their flight is delayed. (Second Stage,
305 W. 43rd St. 212-246-4422. Previews begin Aug. 9.)
The New York International Fringe Festival
The wide-ranging festival returns for its twentieth year, offering experiments, oddities, and absurdities (sample title: The Secret Life of Your
Third Grade Teacher). For the complete list of
showssome two hundred in allvisit fringenyc.
org. (Various locations. Opens Aug. 12.)

1
NOW PLAYING
Butler
At the outset of the Civil War, a compulsively quarrelsome slave named Shepard Mallory (John G.
Williams) seeks asylum at a Union fort commanded by a newly installed and equally argumentative major general named Benjamin Franklin
Butler (Ames Adamson). This comedy, by Richard Strand, provides sly insight into the absurd
logic of slavery and a Wodehouse-like knack for
subverting the conventions of master-subordinate
relations, but the production cant seem to keep
pace with his impulsive creations. Joseph Dischers
direction feels insufficient in urgency and zaniness, like its being played a notch too slow, leaving the play merely amusing where it could have
been uproarious. The supporting characters seem
especially ill directed, almost never taking full
advantage of that most Wodehousian tool of all:
deadpan. (59E59, at 59 E. 59th St. 212-279-4200.)
Men on Boats
In the summer of 1869, ten cisgender white males
set off on the U.S. governments first sanctioned
expedition of the Green and Colorado Rivers. In
Jaclyn Backhauss stylized retelling, directed by
Will Davis, the intrepid explorers are racially diverse, gender-bending sendups of masculine bravado. I almost fell to my death on the mountain ridge, the crews one-armed captain boasts.
Very exciting stuff. The energetic hundred-minute performance, presented by Playwrights Horizons and Clubbed Thumb, features a gusty ode to
whiskey, cleverly choreographed near-drownings,
and a steady stream of droll one-liners delivered in
present-day vernacular (Party boat!). The best
lines, though, may be those penned by the real scientist-adventurer John Wesley Powell, on whose
journal entries the play is loosely based. What a
chamber for a resting place is this, Powell (the
pitch-perfect Kelly McAndrew) observes upon
reaching, finally, the Big Canyon. (Peter Jay Sharp,
416 W. 42nd St. 212-279-4200. Through Aug. 14.)
Oslo
J. T. Rogerss drama is a good, if overlong, piece of
journalism-theatre, but it has moments of strangeness which suggest what might have been had the
playwright and his director, Bartlett Sher, been
more interested in taking risks. Mona Juul and
Terje Rd-Larsen (played by Jennifer Ehle and
Jefferson Mays, both of whom are killer in their

roles) are fortysomething Norwegian professionals,

charming, erudite, full of talk. Mona is an official in
the Norwegian Foreign Ministry, and Terje is a social scientist. After a while, we learn that, through
some trick of faith and will, Terje and Mona were
largely responsible, behind the scenes, for the discussions that led to the 1993 Oslo Accord, between
the Israelis and the Palestine Liberation Organization. Although Rogers mixes fact and fiction, he
uses reality not to buoy his imagination but to shore
up a Family of Man-type plea to end war and
hate. (Reviewed in our issue of 8/1/16.) (Mitzi E.
Newhouse, 150 W. 65th St. 212-239-6200.)

Paradiso: Chapter 1
Created and directed by Michael Counts and performed inside an apartment in Koreatown, this production is a hybrid between an escape-room game,
in which audience members must work together to
solve a puzzle whose solution will allow them to exit
a locked set, and immersive theatre, in which actors
shepherd the audience through a highly participatory
on-site story. The plot involves a sinister behavioralresearch laboratory called the Virgil Corporation,
which has been . . . well, its never clear, because
every crumb of narrative is quickly abandoned. The
puzzles, too, feel desultory; once it becomes obvious how each one is meant to be solved, reaching the
solution is mostly tedious. The one level on which
the show works is as a haunted house: amid the assemblage of action-movie and mystery-novel clichs
are a handful of genuinely startling and amusingly
macabre moments. (Ticket buyers will be contacted
concerning the meeting location. paradisoescape.com.)
Quietly
The Irish Rep has imported a cracking production from Dublins Abbey Theatre. Jimmy (Patrick OKane) is the only customer in a Belfast bar,
where hes come to have a pint or two of Harp and
watch the soccer match between Northern Ireland
and Poland with the barman, Robert (Robert Zawadzki), a Polish immigrant. Their macho bantering might have been enough to carry the play,
but when Ian (Declan Conlon) enters the focus
shifts, abruptly and dangerously. He and Jimmy
have never met, but their lives were inextricably
and tragically fused when they were both sixteen,
in 1974, during the dark heart of the Troubles.
Owen McCaffertys tense, taut one-act play covers some predictable ground, but it explores unexpected emotional corners as well, and the director,
Jimmy Fay, guides the three superb actors through
an evening that is both harrowing and heartening. (Irish Repertory, 132 W. 22nd St. 212-727-2737.)
Shakespeare and the Alchemy of Gender
Lisa Wolpes solo show brings wry humor and
Shakespearean insight to a range of wrenchingly
difficult subject matters, including sexism, domestic abuse, suicide, and the Holocaust. Weaving
monologues from her favorite male Shakespeare
rolesLear, Hamlet, Shylockwith reflections
on her family history, Wolpe explores her fascination with upending gender conventions as a way
to reclaim power in the face of a traumatic past.
Many of her family members died in the Holocaust; her father, who confronted Nazis in battle, committed suicide when she was four. Several surviving relatives similarly self-destructed,
while, for Wolpe, founding the Los Angeles Wom-

ens Shakespeare Company became a form of salvation. The show (which Wolpe performs in repertory with a three-person Macbeth) has its trite
side, but its hard not to credit Wolpe for fearlessness, sincerity, and good humor. (HERE, 145 Sixth
Ave., near Spring St. 212-352-3101. Through Aug. 14.)

Small Mouth Sounds

Bess Wohls play, directed by Rachel Chavkin, is
about six characters who try to connect to themselves, their guru, and one another during a silent
retreat in upstate New York. Wohl uses the retreat
to reveal how social convention cracks when real
intimacy is required. The flighty Alicia (the phenomenal Zo Winters) eats potato chips noisily,
while Rodney (Babak Tafti, free and humorous),
the most self-consciously enlightened member of
the group, does yoga and burns incense. Naturally,
the two hook up, though Rodney is married and
Alicia is trying to get over an unrequited love. A
fiction about lies, the play feels like a shadow version of Annie Bakers magnificent 2009 work, Circle Mirror Transformation, which followed amateur performers in an acting class in Vermont. Stuff
happens in Small Mouth Sounds, but nothing and
no one is transformed. (8/1/16) (Pershing Square
Signature Center, 480 W. 42nd St. 212-279-4200.)

1
OUT OF TOWN
Barrington Stage Company
On the Boyd-Quinson Mainstage, Will Swenson is the star swashbuckler in John Randos production of Gilbert and Sullivans The Pirates of
Penzance (through Aug. 13). On the St. Germain Stage, Louisa Proske directs Peerless, Jiehae Parks dark comedy about two sisters trying
to get into their dream college (through Aug. 6);
and in Broadway Bounty Hunter, with music
and lyrics by Joe Iconis, Annie Golden plays an
actress who is hired to capture a South American
drug lord (Aug. 12-Sept. 4). (30 Union St., Pittsfield, Mass. 413-236-8888. barringtonstageco.org.)
Williamstown Theatre Festival
The summers final mainstage production is Wendy
Wassersteins 1997 play, An American Daughter,
directed by Evan Cabnet and featuring Diane
Davis as a doctor who is nominated to be Surgeon
General (Aug. 3-21). On the Nikos Stage, Stafford Arima directs Poster Boy, Craig Carnelia
and Joe Traczs musical inspired by the story of the
cyber-bullying victim Tyler Clementi (through
Aug. 7); and Tom Holloways drama And No
More Shall We Part, directed by Anne Kauffman,
stars Jane Kaczmarek and Alfred Molina as a couple grappling with terminal illness (Aug. 10-21).
(Williamstown, Mass. 413-597-3400. wtfestival.org.)

1
ALSO NOTABLE
An Act of God Booth. Cats Neil Simon. Cirque du
SoleilParamour Lyric. The Color Purple Jacobs. A
Day by the Sea Beckett. The Effect Barrow Street
Theatre. Engagements McGinn/Cazale. Fiddler
on the Roof Broadway Theatre. Fun Home Circle in
the Square. The Golden Bride Museum of Jewish
Heritage. Hamilton Richard Rodgers. Himself and
Nora Minetta Lane Theatre. Through Aug. 6. The
Humans Schoenfeld. Ice Factory 2016 New Ohio.
Through Aug. 13. Privacy Public. PTP/NYC Atlantic Stage 2. Through Aug. 7. School of Rock Winter
Garden. Sense & Sensibility Gym at Judson. Summer Shorts 2016 59E59. Troilus and Cressida Delacorte. Through Aug. 14. Waitress Brooks Atkinson.

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

1
MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES
Met Breuer
Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible
Most critical responses to this inaugural show at
the Metropolitan Museums annex for modern
and contemporary art (in the former home of the
Whitney) have quibbled with its theme, which
tracks changing notions of finished through
almost seven centuries of Western art, from
Jan van Eyck to Elizabeth Peyton. Its critics
find it a gauzy sort of curatorial idea, which it
is, but with one overriding, tremendous virtue:
it calls attention to visual facts. This is a great
show. Mining the Mets own matchless collection and applying its muscle to extract major
loans, the show convenes works of genius and
items of charm and surprise. Aside from pieces
obviously abandoned by artists while still in
progress, the exhibits pique interest with variant senses of what constitutes a stopping point.
But if you ignore the theme the show will still
be a non-stop sequence of arousals and exhilarations. (No need for examples. Almost everything on view is exemplary.) The blowsy mis-

cellany of the works in Unfinished is exactly

the right tenor for the Met Breuer. Let the big
house on Fifth Avenue mount, as it does with
wonderful consistency, rigorous historical and
monographic shows. This one fulfills a yen to
experience, one at a time, works whose cynosure is their uniqueness, with no big rationale
for hanging together beyond being individually
very, very good. Through Sept. 4.

Guggenheim Museum
Moholy-Nagy: Future Present
The high point of this powerful retrospective of
the Hungarian-born painter, sculptor, photographer, filmmaker, designer, writer, teacher, and
all-around modernizing visionary is a replica of
his Light Prop for an Electric Stage (1930).
Its a sleek, motorized medley of rods, screens,
perforated disks, and springs, set in a box with
a circular cut in one sidea sort of industrialized synthesis of Cubist and Constructivist
styles. Moholy-Nagy took the original with him
in 1934, when, after the Nazis ascent to power,
he moved from Berlin to the Netherlands, and
then to London, and, finally, in 1937, to Chicago,
where he directed the New Bauhaus school. Two

Whitney Museum
Stuart Davis: In Full Swing
Daviss ebullient paintings rank either at the
peak of American modern art or a bit to the side
of it, depending on how you construe American and modern. Davis, who died in 1964,
at the age of seventy-one, laid heavy stress on
both terms. In the exhibition catalogue, the
art historian Harry Cooper, the shows cocurator, quotes a list of self-exhortations that
the painter wrote in 1938. The first item: Be
liked by French artists. The second: Be distinctly American. Davis is best known, and
rightly esteemed, for his later work (begun in
the forties), tightly composed, hyperactive,
flag-bright pictures, with crisp planes and emphatic lines, loops, and curlicues, often featuring gnomic words (champion, pad, else)
and almost always incorporating his signature
as a dashing pictorial element. Their musical

Bruce Davidsons 1966 photograph of a campground at Yosemite National Park, on view in A Cool Breeze, at the Howard Greenberg gallery.
6

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

COURTESY BRUCE DAVIDSON/MAGNUM AND HOWARD GREENBERG GALLERY

ART

years later, he founded the School of Design, still

part of the Illinois Institute of Technology, which
the art historian Elizabeth Siegel writes in the
catalogue was his overarching work of art. It
was in America, after Moholy-Nagy was diagnosed with leukemia (he died in 1946, at the age
of fifty-one) that he began to abandon rigor in
favor of delight, exposing the heart that had always pulsed within the technocratic genius. To
be a student of his then must have been heaven.
Through Sept. 7.

ART

1
rhythms and buttery textures appeal at a glance.
If the works had a smell, it would be like that
of a factory-fresh car. But in this beautifully
paced show, hung by the Whitney curator Barbara Haskell, Daviss earlier phases prove most
absorbing. They detail stages of a personal ambition in step with large ideals. Through Sept. 25.

Morgan Library and Museum

Rembrandts First Masterpiece
Seeing an unfamiliar painting by Rembrandt
is a life event: fresh data on what its like to be
human. A remarkable case in point is Judas Returning the Thirty Pieces of Silver (1629), now
on rare loan to the museum from a private collection in England. The artist completed the
smallish picture when he was twenty-three, still
living in his native Leiden. Is it a masterpiece?
The overused honorific distracts. Never mind
congratulating the painting. Look at it. Rembrandt embarked not only on an art career but
on an extended plumbing of souls, including his
own. Has anyone in the annals of human experience been more alone than Judas at the pictured
moment? How did the young Rembrandt know
so much about existential extremes of emotion?
The answer is that he didnt. Rather, whenever
he put brush to canvas, pen to paper, or burin to
metal, he posed some puzzle to himself about
the meaning of a particular story, social order,
or person. As he worked, a solution would come
to him, but without finality. It pended completion in other eyes, minds, and hearts: our own,
now. Through Sept. 18.
New-York Historical Society
Photographs by Larry Silver, 1949-1955
New Yorks urban landscape was in transition
when Silver, who is now eighty-one, was prowl-

ing the citys streets taking these pictures. In

those years, the El still ran above Third Avenue,
Oscar Niemeyers U.N. building went up, and
Penn Station had not been torn down. But to Silver such sights were simply backdrops for people,
whether they were the children he found horsing around in the dappled light of Grand Central Terminal or the pair of dishevelled women
he caught quarreling with operatic fury. Silvers women may recall Lisette Model and his
children may call to mind Helen Levitt, but his
approach is more formal, with an eye to Bauhaus-style skewed perspectives and an appreciation for the way grand architecture frames the
passing throng. Through Dec. 4.

1
GALLERIESUPTOWN

GALLERIESCHELSEA
The Family Acid
In the nineteen-seventies, the versatile Roger
Steffensan actor, a writer, and a musicologist
took thousands of atmospheric photographs,
which his wife, son, and daughter later helped
organize (together, they make up the Family
Acid). The locales range from Big Sur to Marrakech to Jamaica; the mood is endless Summer
of Love. Sometimes that manifests as trippy double exposures, and the stoner aesthetic can get
a bit cloying. But, over all, the project is as seductive and happy-go-lucky as Steffenss image
of a yellow balloon floating in front of the sun
above San Franciscos Golden Gate Park. Through
Aug. 26. (Benrubi, 521 W. 26th St. 212-888-6007.)

1
Martin Creed
Hats off to the co-curators Tom Eccles and
Hans Ulrich Obrist: their large, painstaking
retrospective of the deadpan British artist and
musician is a demented joy. The Aestheticist interiors of the Armory are almost too perfect a
backdrop for Creeds brilliant one-liners. His
notorious, Turner Prize-netting Work No. 160:
The Lights Going On and Off is installed in a
parlor thats chock-full of outmoded portraits,
adding an element of surprise. The Board of
Officers Room is filled with white balloons,
and has become a hot spot for selfies. The cavernous drill hall is almost empty, save for a sequence of gross-out videos and the modest
and strangely movingopening and closing of
a loading-dock door, which transforms the sidewalk of Lexington Avenue into a readymade.
Through Aug. 7. (Park Avenue Armory, Park Ave.
at 66th St. 212-933-5812.)

DANCE

GALLERIESDOWNTOWN
William Helburn
Helburn, now eighty-two, was one of Madison
Avenues go-to photographers in the late fifties and the sixties, thanks to these slick, sexy
pictures, which could have come straight from
a Don Draper pitch. In a sublimely ridiculous
ad for Supima cotton, from 1957, a woman in
Gramercy Park throws her arms up in delight
as her chauffeur secures a huge red canoe to
the roof of her Rolls-Royce. To hawk salad
dressing, in 1964, Helburn posed the model
Jean Shrimpton with a round radish between
her lips, like a ball gag. Sex sells in this fantasy
worldsexism does, too, but Helburn offsets
it with a sly sense of humor that makes everyone, the models included, seem in on the joke.
Through Aug. 26. (Staley-Wise, 100 Crosby St.
212-966-6223.)
to Indian dance, on Aug. 15, co-sponsored by the
Erasing Borders Festival (see above). (Robert F.
Wagner, Jr., Park, 20 Battery Park Pl. 212-219-3910.
Aug. 14-20.)

1
Lincoln Center Out of Doors
Noche Flamenca, New Yorks most beloved flamenco troupe, returns to the free festival. The programfeaturing, as always, first-rate live music
includes a new commissioned piece, but the
highlight is bound to be the culminating Sole,
by the incomparable Soledad Barrio. (Lincoln Center, Broadway at 64th St. lcoutofdoors.org. Aug. 3.)
Sarasota Ballet
Who would have imagined that a Florida resort town on the Gulf of Mexico could become
the countrys main purveyor of ballets by the
British choreographer Frederick Ashton? Sarasota Ballets artistic director, the Yorkshire-born
Iain Webb, is an Ashton enthusiast, and he has
made it his lifes work to bring the choreographers back catalogueclever, stylish, and always musicalto the stage. At the Joyce, the
troupe will perform Faade, a jazzy frolic set
to period tunes by William Walton; Valses Nobles et Sentimentales, a dreamy ballroom ballet with music by Ravel; and a medley of short
works, including the sweet and funny Tweedledum and Tweedledee. (175 Eighth Ave., at 19th
St. 212-242-0800. Aug. 8-13.)
Erasing Borders Festival of Indian Dance
A highlight of the summer, this yearly event
offers an intriguing glimpse of Indias rich
8

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

dance scene. The first night, at Pace Universitys Schimmel Center (3 Spruce St., Aug. 13;
for tickets, call 866-811-4111), includes five soloists and one ensemble, performing kathak (from
the north), bharatanatyam (from the south),
and various contemporary twists on both. The
star of the evening is Rama Vaidyanathan, a
refined and intensely musical dancer who also
excels at abhinaya, or mime, an integral part of
Indian dance. The second night, at the Robert F. Wagner, Jr., Park (20 Battery Park Pl.,
Aug. 15), is open to the public and presented
in conjunction with the Battery Dance Festival (see below). The performers include Avijit Das, who performs kuchipudi, a light, quicksilver dance style, which originated in Andhra
Pradesh, and Carolina Prada, a specialist in Mayurbhanj Chhau, a dance that combines acrobatics and martial arts.

Battery Dance Festival

This free weeklong festival boasts the most gobsmacking backdrop in New York: the rippling
waves of New York Harbor. Participants include
the contemporary ballet choreographer Joshua
Beamish and his troupe, Move: The Company;
Lori Beliloves ensemble of Isadora Duncan-esque
dancers; and the hosts, the socially conscious
modern-dance practitioners Battery Dance Company. Not to be missed is the evening devoted

OUT OF TOWN
Jacobs Pillow Dance Festival
In What the Day Owes to the Night (at the Ted
Shawn, Aug. 3-7), the bare-chested men of Compagnie Herv Koubi, from Algeria and Burkina Faso,
skim the ground and revolve like tumbleweeds, spin
on their heads, launch one another into the air, and
run up backs to fall precipitously. The feats are daring but the tone is meditative; the dance is beautiful
but obscure. New York Theatre Ballet (at the Doris
Duke, Aug. 3-7), the polite and loveable chamber
troupe, brings two ensemble works, old and new:
Dark Elegies, Antony Tudors severe evocation of
grief, is a classic from 1937; Song Before Spring is
a bright romp, created earlier this year, by the company standout Steven Melendez (with Zhong-Jing
Fang). Dorrance Dance, the hottest troupe in tap,
returns (at the Ted Shawn, Aug. 10-14), with ETM:
Double Down, an innovative combination of virtuosic hoofing and electronics. The show, though a
bit scattershot, is excitingly fresh. In recent years,
Adam H. Weinert has dedicated himself to reconstructing the neglected choreography of the Pillows founder, Ted Shawn. The Monument program (at the Doris Duke, Aug. 10-14) juxtaposes
nineteen-thirties solos by Shawn and Doris Humphrey with a new group work that builds on the motifs and styles of the historical pieces. (Becket, Mass.
413-243-0745. Through Aug. 28.)

NIGHT LIFE
1
ROCK AND POP
Musicians and night-club proprietors lead
complicated lives; its advisable to check
in advance to confirm engagements.

Belly
A new parent in western Massachusetts couldnt ask
for a hipper postpartum doula than Tanya Donelly,
the enchanting front woman of this nineties rock
act. (Since her group disbanded, in 1996, shes settled in Arlington, where she works with young families.) Considering the soothing magical realism of
her solo output, having Donnelly around the house
would presumably have a calming effect. Recently,
she decided to re-form the band for a series of performances, the first in twenty years, and has plans
for a new album. (Bowery Ballroom, 6 Delancey St.
212-260-4700. Aug. 11.)
Boris
This adventurous Japanese avant-metal trio celebrates the tenth anniversary of its breakthrough
album, Pink, with a worldwide tour and an expansive reissue, which includes an extra albums
worth of previously unreleased material. The
group formed in Tokyo, in 1992, inspired by a
shared love of the Melvins and Motrhead, as
well as of experimental noise artists like Merzbow,
with whom Boris later collaborated. Pink was the
bands seventh album, and it remains remarkable
for both its array of diverse stylesshoegaze, Detroit proto-punk, sludgeand its powerful, overarching musical unity. Opening will be the dronemetal pioneers Earth, who share Boriss love of
down-tuned guitars and slow tempos. (Warsaw,
261 Driggs Ave., Brooklyn. 718-385-0505. Aug. 5.)

ILLUSTRATION BY CUN SHI

Bush
Gavin Rossdale, the ex-husband of Gwen Stefani and lead singer of this alt-rock powerhouse,

is a songwriter of considerable talent, although

his group tends to get shelved among derivative
post-Nirvana fare. In spite of the success of its
dbut album, Sixteen Stone, from 1994, Bush
was polarizing in its early days, denounced by
record-store litists even as it sold out arena tours
and topped charts worldwide. If youve got the
stomach for it (and can tolerate Rossdales vocal
style), the music is ripe for reappraisal. Anthems
like Comedown, Swallowed, and the brooding Glycerine sound even better today. (Webster
Hall, 125 E. 11th St. 212-353-1600. Aug. 6.)

Deftones
This Sacramento group has long been a critical
darling, though it is often lumped together (in
topic or on tour) with peers such as Korn and other
bands from the late-nineties Nu Metal onslaught.
But Deftones preceded this trend, and, in 1995, in
a concerted effort to separate itself from the pack,
the group signed to Madonnas Maverick imprint.
In recent years, the band has found a touring partner in the reunited Swedish outfit Refused, whose
incendiary 1998 album, The Shape of Punk to
Come, blended jazz, hardcore, and electronic
music, while boldly declaring, in the midst of an
economic boom that most people thought would
never end, Capitalism is in fact organized crime,
and we are all the victims. (The Amphitheatre at
Coney Island Boardwalk, 3052 W. 21st St., Brooklyn.
fordamphitheaterconeyisland.com. Aug. 5.)
DMX
The former office of Def Jam Records, at 160
Varick Street, once served as a creative clubhouse
(or madhouse) for generations of hip-hops biggest stars and their associates who were privileged
enough to tag along. The wistful stories that are
told on the rapper Nores new podcast, Drink
Champs, recount ego-fuelled parking-space conflicts and you-had-to-be-there chance meetings.
Nores clan of early-aughts peers describe the space

Naomi (Nai Palm) Saalfield and her Melbourne mates form Hiatus Kaiyote, a psychedelic-soul
four-piece.The band stops at Irving Plaza to perform astral funk numbers from its sophomore album.

as a frat house with a music-industry budget and a

liberal treasurer. Def Jam first struck gold blending
rap and rock with Run D.M.C., and then found an
outsized rock star in Earl Simmons, known to fans
as DMX, the snarling Yonkers hit-maker who, in
1998, released two No. 1 albumsthe first rapper
to ever accomplish this feat. For a night in Harlem, he revives these hedonistic days and the anthems that came with them, with fellow Def Jam
alumni Nore, Jim Jones, and Jadakiss. (Apollo Theatre, 253 W. 125th St. 800-745-3000. Aug. 5.)

Sam Gellaitry
It can be hard to keep your synths straight with so
many aspiring artists flooding servers with homemade music. But Gellaitrys gentle keyboard touch
and far-swung bass lines grip fans in a way that
music by few nineteen-year-olds can. He started
tinkering with beats at the age of twelve, and left
high school at sixteen to commit to music full time.
The Scottish producer, whose father made bagpipes in his spare time, encapsulates the blend of
lusty low-end R. & B. and jittery electronica that
has catapulted labels like Soulection to notoriety,
if not quite fame. A release with the taste-making
XL Recordings clinched Gellaitrys status as one
of dance musics safest new bets, and hes since
toured his riotous sound around the globe; catch
this pit stop in Brooklyn. (Music Hall of Williamsburg, 66 N. 6th St., Brooklyn. 718-486-5400. Aug. 6.)
PJ Harvey
The presciently titled Let England Shake, from
2011, earned Harvey her second Mercury Award, but
the album is proving to be a hard act to follow. The
iconoclastic English singer-songwriter has drawn
some criticism for her most recent effort, The Hope
Six Demolition Project. Residents of the Seventh
Ward, in Washington, D.C., scoffed at lyrics, like
Just drug town, just zombies, that Harvey wrote
after a brief trip to the neighborhood. Good intentions aside, weighing in on the politics of another
country is rarely done to great effect (especially in
song). Harveys live show, however, remains stellar, and she has announced only two Stateside dates
so far, one in New York and one in Los Angeles.
(Terminal 5, 610 W. 56th St. 212-582-6600. Aug. 16.)
Hiatus Kaiyote
This Melbourne cosmic-soul quartets reverence
for Stevie Wonder shines through its buoyant
chord changes. The lead singer, guitarist, and
flower-child-in-residence, Naomi (Nai Palm)
Saalfield, is confident and affecting on songs
like the Grammy-nominated Breathing Underwater. The lyrics can drift a bit far into space,
but Saalfield always lands her precise staccatos and vocal flourishes. Like many of the future-funk bands catching traction with plug-infatigued youths, Hiatus Kaiyote is an act to be
experienced live: the watertight rhythm section
of the drummer, Perrin Moss, and the bassist,
Paul Blender, keeps bodies moving, and Simon
Mavins keyboards help Saalfield expand minds.
(Irving Plaza, 17 Irving Pl. 212-777-6800. Aug. 4.)
Pitbull
In the nineties, Courtney Love dubbed herself Miss World. These days, she shares the
title with Pitbull, the rollicking, Miami-based
entertainer known as Mr. Worldwide, who
draws from Cuban rap, crunk, reggaeton, and
other sounds in his bouncy bilingual numbers.
Pitbulls stated mission is to bring positivity to
the global masseshis characteristic mid-song
catchphrase is the affirmative dale, meaning go
ahead. The son of first-generation Cuban im-

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

NIGHT LIFE
migrants who required him to memorize the poetry of Jos Mart, Pitbull once claimed that he
chose his moniker because pitbulls are too stupid to lose in dogfights. He has since evolved
into a debonair mogul, grinning through aspirational songs about meeting love interests in taxis
and lamenting those who mess around. (Prudential Center, 25 Lafayette St., Newark, N.J. 973-7576464. Aug. 13.)

CLASSICAL MUSIC

1
JAZZ AND STANDARDS
Tony Danza
Resistance is futile: this spark-plug performer
is out to sing, dance, and regale you with showbiz stories until you surrender to his outsized
charms. From Whos the Boss? and The Iceman Cometh to Broad City, Danza has been
there and back, and hes more than willing to
share the long, strange trip. (54 Below, 254 W. 54th
St. 646-476-3551. Aug. 9-10.)

Mulgrew Miller Tribute

With Mulgrew Millers untimely death, in 2013,
the world lost one of the most proficient and
adaptable jazz pianists. Miller may have been
even better known for his work with a wide swath
of other bandleaders than for the fine recordings under his own name. Four former associatesSteve Nelson, Peter Washington, Terell Stafford, and Lewis Nashcome together with the
pianist Danny Grissett to pay tribute to this once
ubiquitous figure. (Smoke, 2751 Broadway, between
105th and 106th Sts. 212-864-6662. Aug. 12-14.)
Tierney Sutton
Joni Mitchell loves jazz, and jazz musicians seem
to love Joni. Here, Sutton revisits After Blue,
her 2013 musical mash note to this modern-day
genius of popular song, transforming ballads like
Woodstock, Little Green, and the not-a-dryeye-in-the-house anthem Blue. (Jazz Standard,
116 E. 27th St. 212-576-2232. Aug. 4-7.)
Voxfest
You may not recognize all the singers in this intriguing festivalcurated by the gifted and nurturing singer and teacher Deborah Latzbut
each brings a compelling presence to the stage
while reminding us that New York remains a hothouse for jazz vocal talent. (Cornelia Street Caf,
29 Cornelia St. 212-989-9319. Aug. 2-4.)
John Zorn
Fifteen ensembles are on hand to present selections from the composer John Zorns bagatelles,
a series of three hundred compact pieces open to
adaptation by any instrumentation. Among the
swarm of musicians will be the guitarists Mary
Halvorson, Marc Ribot, and Julian Lage; the pianists Kris Davis, Uri Caine, and Craig Taborn; and
the drummers Dave King, Tyshawn Sorey, and Jim
Black. (Village Vanguard, 178 Seventh Ave. S., at
11th St. 212-255-4037. Aug. 9-14.)
10

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

Several hundred volunteer singers will celebrate five decades of Mostly Mozart.

All for One

David Langs The Public Domain

seeks common ground.
For classical composers, a consistent
style, along with the musicianship to support it, is the guarantor of a sustained career. But the mastery of David Lang,
whose style blends elements of postminimalism, modernism, and conceptualism,
is of an unusual sort. Making his music
from tenderly spun-out fragments of
scales, he sometimes invites inanity (as in
Simple Song #3, written for the Paolo
Sorrentino movie Youth). When the
conditions are right, however, the poverty
of his material can bloom into an austere
kind of sonic, and expressive, richness: he
has a genius for maximizing the potential
of negative space.
Two years ago, Lang wrote Crowd
Out, a composition for, as his Web site
states, 1000 people yelling. The raucous
piece, which was premired by Englands
Birmingham Contemporary Music
Group (with a little help from their
friends), had a trace of violence to it, partly
inspired by the scream-songs chanted at
English soccer games. Now comes The
Public Domain, a work for 1000 singers, commissioned for the fiftieth anni-

versary of Mostly Mozart, which will be

performed as a free event on Lincoln Centers Josie Robertson Plaza, on Aug. 13. A
collaboration with the choral conductor
Simon Halsey and the choreographer
Annie-B Parson, it is an optimistic piece
that summons the spirit which prevailed
in American arts at the time when Lincoln Center was built, in the sixties. Lang
recently said of the era, Leonard Bernstein was on TV all the time, telling all
America that democracy and culture went
together. I believed that! So I thought I
could make a more democratic piece . . .
that invited in amateurs and took as its
topic things we all might share. (Groups
of volunteer singers have been rehearsing
for several weeks.)
As with Crowd Out, Lang looked
to the Internet for his texts, selecting
phrases from search-engine auto-completions of the sentence One thing we
all have is . . . The results included
music, favorite sandwich, and time,
until it stops. Lang hopes that some future performance might involve hundreds of thousands of people. It is a
vision more Whitmanesque, more amateur, than the proudly cultivated Bernstein might ever have imagined.
Russell Platt

ILLUSTRATION BY CELYN BRAZIER

Herbie HancockRobert Glasper

Experiment
Hancock probably sees more than a little of his
omnivorous, adventurous younger self in the pianist Glasper, who joins the keyboard icon at this
outdoor event, part of BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn! Hancock will be unveiling a new ensemble,
which includes the guitarist Lionel Loueke, while
Glasper fronts his eclectic Experiment band.
(Prospect Park Bandshell, Prospect Park W. at 9th
St. bricartsmedia.org. Aug. 11.)

CLASSICAL MUSIC

1
CONCERTS IN TOWN
Mostly Mozart
Aug. 5 at 6:30: The festival shows off its cutting
edge by bringing back the pathbreaking International Contemporary Ensemble, which, in addition
to marquee events, is presenting a series of free,
alfresco micro-concerts during the festivals opening fortnight. The next performance will be one of
the most closely watched: a world premire (Shiver
Lung 2) by the fast-rising composer Ashley Fure,
whose work mixes elements of installation art and
Parisian high modernism. (Hearst Plaza, Lincoln
Center.) Aug. 5-6 at 7:30: Mozarts Clarinet Concerto, with its combination of intimate lyricism and
poignant melancholy, crystallizes an aspect of the
composers personality during the last months of
his life. The dynamic Swedish clarinettist Martin
Frst will be out front in the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestras upcoming concert; the conductor is
Paavo Jrvi, who also conducts music by Arvo Prt
(La Sindone) and Beethoven (the Fourth Symphony). (Note: After the Saturday-night concert,
Frst will retire to the Kaplan Penthouse to perform chamber works by Brahms, Bartk, and Falla,
with the pianist Roland Pntinen.) (David Geffen
Hall.) Aug. 9-10 at 7:30: Louis Langre returns
to the podium and to the festival orchestra, leading an all-Mozart program that offers the first and
final symphonies (in C Major, Jupiter) as well
as the Piano Concerto No. 12 in A Major; Richard
Goode is the distinguished soloist. (David Geffen
Hall.) Aug. 12-13 at 7:30: Jeffrey Kahanea superb pianist, a capable conductor, and an entertaining compreis classical musics triple threat. He
conducts the festival orchestra from the keyboard
in another all-Mozart evening: the Piano Concertos Nos. 21, 22, and 24 (in C Minor, K. 491). (David
Geffen Hall.) Aug. 13 at 10: Inon Barnatan brings
his powerful pianism to the Little Night Music
series, performing a slate of piquant brevities by
Handel, Bach, Couperin (LAtalante), Barber (the
fugue-finale from the Sonata for Piano), and Ligeti,
along with a New York premire by Thomas Ads
(Blanca Variations). (Kaplan Penthouse.) (For tickets
and a complete listing of concerts, visit mostlymozart.org.)
Mostly Mozart: Cos Fan Tutte
The festivals fiftieth-anniversary season would not
be complete without at least one of the three operatic
masterpieces that Mozart wrote with the librettist
Lorenzo Da Ponte. This concert employs the same
castLenneke Ruiten, Kate Lindsey, Sandrine
Piau, Joel Prieto, Nahuel di Pierro, and Rod Gilfryas the Aix-en-Provence Festivals production
from June and July, but without the racially charged
staging by the director Christophe Honor; Louis
Langre conducts the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra. (Alice Tully Hall. 212-721-6500. Aug. 15 at 7:30.)
Bang on a Can at the Noguchi Museum
B.O.A.C., the biggest brand on the downtown scene,
has for several years fostered a summer outlet at
the museum, itself an enduring emblem of artistic
innovation. The American Contemporary Music
Ensemble, which has a string quartet at its heart,
presents an afternoon program featuring quartets
by Philip Glass (No. 5, from 1991) and Meredith
Monk (Stringsongs) as well as a new work by
one of the groups members, Caleb Burhans. (9-01
33rd Rd., Long Island City, Queens. noguchi.org. Aug.
14 at 3. The concert is free with museum admission.)
Bargemusic
The heat is on, but so is the music at the air-conditioned floating chamber-music series. Among
the concerts on offer in mid-August are appear-

ances by the Brooklyn cult pianist Beth Levin

(performing Schuberts Sonata No. 20 in A Major,
Brahmss Handel Variations, and music by
David del Tredici) and the compelling husbandand-wife, cello-and-piano team of Edward Arron
and Jeewon Park (interpreting works by Bach,
Mendelssohn, Hindemith, and Dvok, in addition to Arvo Prts Fratres). (Fulton Ferry
Landing, Brooklyn. Aug. 7 at 4 and Aug. 12 at 8.
For tickets and full schedule, see bargemusic.org.)

1
OUT OF TOWN
Glimmerglass Festival
This season, the preminent summer opera festival
of the Northeast hews to a reliable formula in its
lineup, presenting one warhorse, one relative rarity, one musical, and one twentieth-century opera.
E. Loren Meeker directs a Belle poque-themed
production of Puccinis beloved La Bohme; Peter
Kazarass fairy-tale staging of Rossinis The Thieving Magpie (best known, in the modern era, for
its sparkling overture) features Rachele Gilmore
as Ninetta and Michele Angelini, a bel-canto specialist on the rise, as Giannetto; Christopher Alden
sets Stephen Sondheims devilish Sweeney Todd
in a village hall in postwar England, in performances conducted by John DeMain; and Francesca
Zambello, the companys director, places Robert
Wards The Crucible (inspired by Arthur Millers play, an allegory of McCarthyism) where it was
meant to be setseventeenth-century Salem, Massachusetts. (Cooperstown, N.Y. Aug. 4-16. For tickets and for a schedule of dates and times, visit glimmerglass.org. Through Aug. 27.)
Tanglewood
Bostons musical duchy is in full swing; here are
some mid-month highlights. Aug. 5 at 8: Yefim
Bronfman, the thinking mans powerhouse pianist, will keep some of his technical dazzle in reserve as he forays into Liszts meditative Piano
Concerto No. 2 in A Major. Giancarlo Guerrero
conducts the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which
also performs a miniature by Mahler (What the
Wild Flowers Tell Me) as well as serenades by
the comrades Dvok (for Winds, Op. 44) and
Brahms (No. 2 in A Major). Aug. 6 at 8: Guerrero returns (with the Russian phenom Daniil
Trifonov) for a concert with the B.S.O. that features a modern classic by John Adams (Harmonielehre) as well as chestnuts by Chopin (the
Piano Concerto No. 2 in F Minor) and Strauss
(Till Eulenspiegels Merry Pranks). Aug. 12
at 8: Two favorite veteran artists, the conductor
Charles Dutoit and the pianist Emanuel Ax, are
out front with the B.S.O. for a populist program
offering music by Mozart (the Piano Concerto
No. 22 in E-Flat Major), Debussy (La Mer)
and Ravel (Bolro). Aug. 14 at 2:30 and 8: Two
major concerts tempt audiences on Sunday. The
B.S.O. reigns in its customary afternoon glory at
the Shed, with David Afkham conducting music
by Beethoven (including the Piano Concerto No. 3
in C Minor, with the fascinating young soloist Igor
Levit) and Schumann (the Fourth Symphony).
At night, the action moves to Ozawa Hall, where
Barry Humphriesa.k.a. Dame Edna Everage
will appear as himself in an unprecedented Tanglewood collaboration with the Australian Chamber Orchestra (directed by Richard Tognetti) and
the cabaret artist Meow Meow: a musical journey through the Weimar Republic which features
degenerate works by Weill (Pirate Jenny and
other songs), Krenek, Schulhoff, and Toch; parental discretion is advised. (Lenox, Mass. bso.org.)

Caramoor
Two concerts stand out during the final week of
the gracious Westchester festival. At the Spanish Courtyard, on Friday night, Jonathan Biss,
this summers artist-in-residence, brings his keen
intellect and fine technique to four piano sonatas by Beethoven (including the Tempest and
Appassionata). On Sunday afternoon, the Orchestra of St. Lukes, under the sure command
of Pablo Heras-Casado, offers the grand finale,
a concert devoted to music by Brahms: the Violin Concerto (with Gil Shaham) and the Second
Symphony. (Katonah, N.Y. caramoor.org. Aug. 5 at
8 and Aug. 7 at 4:30.)
Marlboro Music
The legendary summer festival and school, where
the worlds leading musicians gather with their
promising protgs to make chamber music
on the loftiest level, wraps up its season of intensively prepared concerts; programs are announced a week in advance on the festivals Web
site. (Marlboro, Vt. marlboromusic.org. Aug. 5-6
and Aug. 12-13 at 8 and Aug. 7 and Aug. 14 at 2:30.)
Bard Music Festival:
Puccini and His World
Leon Botstein, the magus (musical and otherwise) of Bard College, turns his ship into the
heady winds of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Italian music, a turbulent mix of
modernism, Futurism, and late Romanticism. A
plethora of concerts (many featuring Botstein
conducting the American Symphony Orchestra) and symposia are offered across two threeday weekends. Among the highlights are performances of Puccinis one-act operas Il Tabarro
and Le Villi; a concert of arias by Leoncavallo, Cilea, and other little masters of the verismo school; a program exploring the influence
of Fascism; and, the grand finale, an afternoon
pairing Berios completion of Act III of Puccinis
Turandot with a complete performance of Busonis rarely heard opera of the same name. (Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. Aug. 5-7 and Aug. 12-14. For
tickets and full schedule, visit fishercenter.bard.edu.)
Philadelphia Orchestra at SPAC
For fifty summers, the Philadelphians have been
bringing their gorgeous sounds to the Saratoga
Performing Arts Center. Two programs, of many,
are of special note. A Friday-evening concert featuring dancers from New York City Ballet finds
Stphane Denve conducting popular works by
Tchaikovsky (excerpts from Swan Lake) and
Ravel, along with a world premire by a leading
American composer profoundly influenced by
both of them: Michael Torke (Unconquered).
The following weekend, Cristian Mcelaru conducts Stravinskys complete ballet score The
Firebird (among other works), with the fantastical accompaniment of puppets made and
directed by Janni Younge Productions (of War
Horse fame). (Saratoga, N.Y. spac.org. Aug. 5 at
8; Aug. 11 at 3 and Aug. 12 at 8.)
Maverick Concerts
Among the classical artists appearing mid-month
at the Mavericks idyllic music barn are the quietly persuasive pianist Simone Dinnerstein (performing works by Bach, Schubert, and Philip
Glass) and the brilliant and invigorating Trio
Solisti (a longtime favorite, playing piano trios
by Beethoven, Arensky, and Brahms). (Woodstock, N.Y. maverickconcerts.org. Aug. 6 at 6 and
Aug. 14 at 4.)

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

11

MOVIES

Dance Revolution

The politics of disco, caught on film.

The heyday of disco, in the nineteenseventies, was defined by conflicts that
have recently come to the fore again.
The cultural advances of black people,
homosexuals, women, and urban lites
which challenged the mainstream presumptions of middle-class white men
are the focus of some of the major
offerings in Metrographs series Dim
All the Lights: Disco and the Movies
(Aug. 5-11).
In The Last Days of Disco, from
1998, Whit Stillman unfolds discos
lines of power with a historians insight
and a novelists eye for satirical nuance.
Set in Manhattan in the early eighties,
the film stars Chlo Sevigny and Kate
Beckinsale as recent college graduates
and editorial assistants whose social life
is centered on a flashy and exclusive
club. Their circle of men includes an
environmental lawyer (Robert Sean
Leonard), an ad man (Mackenzie
Astin), a colleague (Matt Ross), a club
employee (Chris Eigeman), and the
12

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

groups unofficial philosopher, a fledgling prosecutor named Josh (Matt

Keeslar). Disco, he says, replaced the
formless rock scene with cocktails,
dancing, conversation, exchange of
ideas and points of view, and his apparent nave irony is utterly straightforward. In the disco, talking is a meeting of the minds, and dancing is a
meeting of the bodiessex without sex,
an egalitarian indicator of erotic compatibility. Stillman highlights the political stakes of personal pleasures with
archival clips showing the infamous
1979 Disco Demolition Night at Chicagos Comiskey Park, a record-burning
that devolved into a riot mainly by
white men.
Disco music fills the soundtrack of
Richard Brookss 1977 film Looking
for Mr. Goodbar, starring Diane Keaton. Like the novel by Judith Rossner
from which its adapted, the movie is
loosely based on the true story of a
teacher of hearing-impaired children
who is oppressed by her conservative
Catholic parents, moves to her own
apartment, frequents bars, and picks up

men, one of whom murders her in her

bed. The night spots that she frequents
throb with songs by Thelma Houston,
Donna Summer, and the Commodores,
and the drama links this new wave of
dance music to womens sexual freedom.
Despite the tragicand apparently
cautionaryending, Brooks films
womens fight for sexual freedom as a
brave defiance of traditional constraints
and hypocritical distortions.
The iconic movie of the era, Saturday Night Fever, from 1977, is a wondrous paradox. Its set in an Italian
neighborhood in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn,
and stars John Travolta as the nineteenyear-old Tony Manero, who works in a
hardware store by day and is the dancefloor king of a local disco by night. Tony
and his friends spatter the movie with
racist and sexist epithets and behavior,
but, as in Looking for Mr. Goodbar,
the plot involves the battle over abortion, and the arc of the story is the
breakdown of religious values and family authority; the discothque is the
chrysalis of a new modernity.
Richard Brody

EVERETT

Donna Pescow plays a young woman with a crush on the ambitious disco star (John Travolta) at the center of John Badhams Saturday Night Fever.

MOVIES

1
OPENING
Florence Foster Jenkins Meryl Streep stars in this

comic drama, based on the true story of an heiress

who insists on singing opera despite her terrible
voice. Directed by Stephen Frears; co-starring Rebecca Ferguson and Hugh Grant. Opening Aug. 12.
(In wide release.) Hell or High Water Chris Pine
and Ben Foster star in this drama, as brothers on
a crime spree in rural Texas. Directed by David
Mackenzie; co-starring Jeff Bridges. Opening Aug.
12. (In limited release.) Little Men Reviewed this
week in The Current Cinema. Opening Aug. 5. (In
limited release.) Petes Dragon David Lowery directed this remake of the 1977 fantasy, about a boy
(Oakes Fegley) who is befriended by a dragon.
Co-starring Bryce Dallas Howard and Robert
Redford. Opening Aug. 12. (In wide release.) Richard Linklater: Dream Is Destiny A documentary
about the filmmaker, directed by Louis Black
and Karen Bernstein. Sausage Party An animated comedy, about foodstuffs rebelling at the
prospect of being eaten. Directed by Greg Tiernan and Conrad Vernon; with the voices of Seth
Rogen, Kristen Wiig, Jonah Hill, Michael Cera,
Craig Robinson, and Paul Rudd. Opening Aug. 12.
(In wide release.) Suicide Squad An action fantasy,
about imprisoned evildoers who are recruited for
a crime-fighting supergroup. Directed by David
Ayer; starring Margot Robbie, Cara Delevingne,
Will Smith, and Jared Leto. Opening Aug. 5. (In
wide release.)

1
NOW PLAYING
Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie
Decades after Absolutely Fabulous began as
a sitcom on the BBC, it lands at last on the big
screen. The principal couple, though rusting at
the edges, remains in place: the hapless Eddy
(Jennifer Saunders), who works in P.R., and the
indestructible Patsy Stone (Joanna Lumley), who
is allegedly employed by a fashion magazine.
The movie, written by Saunders and directed
by Mandie Fletcher, finds the two women in decline, with dwindling reserves of cash and joie
de vivre; indeed, there are moments when the
comedy itself appears to be running dry, and the
terror of aging, never far away on the TV series,
is now on open display. The plot, such as it is,
betrays an ominous dependence on celebrities;
Eddy and Patsy, prime suspects in the disappearance of Kate Moss, flee London and make for the
South of France. Such idle expansiveness doesnt
suit the small, fractious, yet resilient world that
Saunders dreamed up, with its generational tiffs
and its flood of Bollinger champagne; for that,
you should still consult the original show. With
Julia Sawalha, as Eddys long-suffering daughter,
and Jane Horrocks, as Bubble, the assistant who
doesnt really help.Anthony Lane (Reviewed in
our issue of 7/25/16.) (In wide release.)
Antoine and Antoinette
The director Jacques Becker builds this snappy,
sentimental comic melodrama, from 1947, out
of streetwise details, from the stress and danger of factory work to the wiles of philandering
housewives. The protagonists are a young married couple, Antoine (Roger Pigaut), an earnest
technician, and Antoinette (Claire Maffi), a
spirited shopgirl, who live in a cramped walkup
in a rough-and-tumble Paris neighborhood. As
they struggle with daily needs and pleasures, they
face the pressure of businessmen and bossesincluding a Mephistophelian grocer (Nol Roque14

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

vert) who tries to buy Antoinettes affections

even as he extorts sexual favors from an employee (Paulette Jan). But Becker, whose camera ranges breezily from Mtro-station ticket
booths to romantic rooftops, is a sophisticate
with a populist lilt: the adultery of working people has a ruddy vigor absent from the merchants
cadaverous clutches. A clattery plot involving a
lost lottery ticket tells an ironic tale of impossible dreams, but Beckers ecstatic, overwhelmingly intimate closeups of the couple burn away
daily cares with the blinding heat of erotic passion. In French.Richard Brody (MOMA; Aug.
5 and Aug. 14.)

The BFG
Steven Spielberg lavishes extraordinary care
and skill on this live-action adaptation of a story
by Roald Dahl, about an orphan named Sophie
(Ruby Barnhill) who is plucked from a London
orphanage by a giant named Runt (Mark Rylance) and brought to his home in Giant Country,
somewhere to the north of north. There, Runt is
bullied by nine even bigger giants, child-eating
cannibals who mock him for being a vegetarian
and try to hunt Sophie, whom he valiantly defends. Meanwhile, Runt plies his gentle trade as
the worlds dream-catcher and dream-brewer.
The early scenes offer a sort of magic realism in
which Runt struggles with the practical details of
the modern city with a cleverly grounded whimsy
that the movies far more fanciful later conceits
cant match for simple astonishment. Rylance
brings an arch literary rusticity to Runts brilliantly bungled language, and the gifted Barnhill
isnt given much with the role of Sophie, whos
written to be spunky, endearing, and blank. The
films technical achievements may be complex,
but its emotions are facile. With Penelope Wilton as the Queen, who summons the British
Army and keeps the American President, Ronald Reagan, informed.R.B. (In wide release.)
Caf Society
The new Woody Allen film, set in the nineteen-thirties, tells the tale of Bobby Dorfman
(Jesse Eisenberg), from the Bronx. Bobby goes
to Los Angeles and hooks up with his Uncle Phil
(Steve Carell), an agent to the stars. Phil is always busy (nobody is better than Carell at that
kind of busyness), and so his assistant, Vonnie
(Kristen Stewart), gets to show the rube around
town. They duly fall in love, as they would in any
Hollywood romance of that period, except that
theres a hitch: Vonnie is already having an affair
with Phil. Allen is an old hand at teasing out such
tangles, and, just for fun, he even ties on other
strands of plotperhaps too many. Bobbys encounter with a prostitute, played by Anna Camp,
is even more awkward for the viewer than it is
for the protagonists, and the figure of his brother
(Corey Stoll), a gangster, is rarely more than a
sketch. The fine cast includes Parker Posey, Blake
Lively, and a rubicund Ken Stott as Bobbys father, but its Stewart who takes the honors, allowing Vonnies shyness to shade into mystery.
The cinematography, by Vittorio Storaro, is almost illicitly beautiful; who better to pay tribute to a gilded age?A.L. (7/11 & 18/16) (In
limited release.)
Central Intelligence
Twenty years out of high school, the formerly fat
and bullied Robby Wierdich (Dwayne Johnson),
now known as Bob Stone, is a body-sculpted martial artist and a C.I.A. agent, and Calvin Joyner
(Kevin Hart), the class president, voted most

likely to succeed, is miserable as a mid-level accountant. On the eve of the class reunion, Bob
recruits Calvin for a high-risk mission to recover stolen top-secret files. Meanwhile, Calvin is struggling to save his marriage to his highschool sweetheart, Maggie (Danielle Nicolet), a
successful lawyer, and Bob has to face up to the
enduring trauma of his adolescence. This action
comedy, directed by Rawson Marshall Thurber,
builds a sentimental strain into its violent stunts;
the window-smashing and car-crashing offer
some giddy surprises, but the ridiculous yet
bland gunplay is as generic as the setup. Nonetheless, Johnson commands the screen with his
odd hesitations and deadpan line readings, and
the script gives him some wildly eccentric situations in which to shine; against all odds, he
lends real emotion to the flimsy artifice. With
Amy Ryan, as another C.I.A. agent in grimly
antic pursuit.R.B. (In wide release.)

Dont Think Twice

The comedian Mike Birbiglia wrote, directed,
and co-stars in this amiable, lovingly detailed
comedy about comedyspecifically, about the
life and possible death of an admired but struggling New York improv troupe called the Commune. Birbiglia plays Miles, who founded the
troupe a decade ago but is struggling to find a
place in the business at large. He and the five
other members hold down day jobs (ones a waitress, another works in a store, and Miles teaches
improv) while awaiting their big break. When a
producer invites several of the members to audition for Weekend Live, the Saturday-night
broadcast that makes comedians instantly famous, the resulting turmoil of resentments and
frustrations turns the Commune into a buzzing hive of individualists and threatens to pull
it apart. Birbiglia films what he knows, offering
ample and intricate scenes of improvisations performed onstage, along with an insiders view of
the industry, and he pushes his colleagues to the
foreespecially Keegan-Michael Key, who has a
drolly ambiguous turn as a self-anointed star, and
Gillian Jacobs, playing a powerhouse performer
tormented by self-doubt, who is the films movingly dramatic center.R.B. (In limited release.)
Equity
This methodical but cleverly plotted drama, directed by Meera Menon, shows female executives
coping with bosses, clients, lovers, lawyers, and
each other in a big New York financial firm. It
stars Anna Gunn as Naomi Bishop, a high-level
investment banker whose hopes of running the
firm depend on her leading an I.P.O. for a major
tech startup. Naomis subordinate, Erin Manning (Sarah Megan Thomas), is denied a raise
and a promotion, and blames Naomi. Naomis
lover, Michael Connor (James Purefoy), a broker at the firm, wants insiders secrets about
Naomis deal, and a prosecutor named Samantha Ryan (Alysia Reiner) is sniffing around. The
clash of their ambitions and desires is a volatile
brew that eventually blows up. Menons direction is merely efficient, but the script, by Amy
Fox (who co-wrote the story with Thomas and
Reiner), gives the womens personal lives equal
weight, as they struggle to balance family and
work and face male clients whose interests arent
all business. The story fits together too neatly
and the characters remain ciphers, but scenes
of news reports of the high-profile dealsin
which the protagonists see themselvesevoke
an eerie air of plausibility and alienation.R.B.
(In limited release.)

MOVIES
Ghostbusters
Paul Feigs new movie revisits Ivan Reitmans
comedy, from 1984. The ghosts are souped-up
versions of the old frighteners, including the
Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, but the busters
are brand new. Three of themAbby (Melissa
McCarthy), Jillian (Kate McKinnon), and Erin
(Kristen Wiig)are scientists, and the fourth is
an M.T.A. worker named Patty (Leslie Jones).
Together, they take on a series of malign phantoms, which are being released into the community by a disaffected, if rather dreary, villain
(Neil Casey). The whole thing seems unable to
decide whether it should worship or refresh the
original, and the action concludes, as you would
expect, in a fusillade of special effects; a lineup
of nothing but women, fronting a blockbuster,
certainly counts as a progressive move, but they
are no more or less vulnerable than male actors
to the smothering demands of the form. McKinnon comes off best, happily lost in the workings
of her own wackiness. There is also amiable support from Chris Hemsworth, as the office hunk,
plus a cameo for Bill Murray, showing a touch
of the grumpy cool with which he adorned the
original film.A.L. (7/25/16) (In wide release.)
Hunt for the Wilderpeople
Gentle and appealing performances cant rescue this facile and cloying comedy, about a neglected New Zealand boy who flourishes in an
idiosyncratically rustic household. Julian Dennison plays Ricky Baker, a twelve-year-old foster child who has bounced from family to family,
leaving behind a trail of trouble. Hes adopted
by Bella (Rima Te Wiata), a cheerful and openhearted woman who lives with her gruff, taciturn husband, Hector (Sam Neill), a skilled outdoorsman. Bella, who kills wild boars with her
bare hands, shows Ricky the love he never had
(her improvised song for his thirteenth birthday is the movies high point). When she dies
suddenly, Hectora convict considered unfit to
adoptprepares to send Ricky back to the authorities and heads for the woods. Ricky follows
him there, and the unlikely pair try to stay a step
ahead of a punctilious child-services agent (Rachel House) and her police posse. Ricky and Hector lurch from adventure to adventure in a series
of mechanical plot twists with a calculated blend
of laughter and tears, and only a final showdown
with a streak of earnest danger grounds the plastic sentiment in strong emotion. Directed by
Taika Waititi.R.B. (In limited release.)
Indignation
The filming of late-period Philip Roth continues apace. In 2014 we had The Humbling, starring Al Pacino as an actor with failing powers,
and now we have James Schamuss adaptation of
Roths blistering short novel, first published in
2008. (When will somebody bring Nemesis,
his heartbreaking account of a wartime polio
epidemic, to the screen?) Logan Lerman plays a
bright Jewish boy named Marcus Messner, who
goes to college in Ohio, in 1951, thus avoiding
the draft; friends of his have already been killed
in Korea. He is a loner, toiling hard and making
few friends, and that air of isolation brings him
to the attention of the Dean (Tracy Letts), who
calls him in for a talk; their long conversation,
spiced with prejudice and resentment, becomes
the core of the tale. Marcus also has a brief encounter with a fellow-student, Olivia (Sarah
Gadon), a troubled soul, who bewitches and baffles him with her forwardness. There are times
when the movie, patient and decorous, all but

seizes up; and yet there are outbursts and declarations that, true to Roth, bring the period
and the heros predicamentto life. Most fearsome of these is the proud and possessive speech
delivered by Marcuss mother (Linda Emond),
as she fights to save her boy.A.L. (8/1/16) (In
limited release.)

and viewers, of American imperialist and racist

depredations of the era. Jane, no mere victim,
is an accomplished fighter, but Tarzan inescapably plays the great white savior, and his African
counterparts are depicted favorably but emptily.
Directed by David Yates.R.B. (In wide release.)

Life, Animated
This documentary follows the story of Owen
Suskind, who as a young child, in the early nineteen-nineties, was diagnosed with autism. Just as
his parents, Ron and Cornelia, were starting to
fear that their son was lost to them, an unlikely
connection was made. Owen frequently repeated
phrases that he knew from Disney cartoons, and
it became clear that Disney was his principal conduit to the world, helping him to make sense of
his experience. The film, directed by Roger Ross
Williams, introduces us to the adult Owen, who
is graduating from high school and setting up
home on his own: a near-miraculous achievement, even if many viewers will be left wanting to learn more about his case. (At one point,
Owen and his classmates are visited by two actors from Aladdin. Its hardly the typical school
activity, and one would like to know what the actors made of it.) Interspersed with all this is a
series of animated sequences, designed by the
French visual-effects company MacGuff, that
trace the progress of the growing boycharming enough, but no match for the clips from Disney movies, so beloved by Owen, which are also
scattered throughout.A.L. (7/11 & 18/16) (In
limited release.)
Lights Out
David F. Sandberg directed this trim, tightly
wound horror film, which is based on his 2013
short. This version, written by Eric Heisserer,
opens up the minimalist story to focus on a sleepless boy (Gabriel Bateman) who, along with his
disturbed mom (Maria Bello), is haunted by a
vicious, shadowy female figure that materializes
when the lights go out. Essentially, the movie
is one big Boo! reel, punctuated by bursts of
music that provide a helpful lift to the scares.
Sandbergs tense, inky camera style draws the
eye to the films dark corners. Although the movie
doesnt offer much in the way of characterization,
its cheap thrills are manufactured effectively, like
an amusement-park ride designed to rattle the
nerves. With Teresa Palmer, as the boys big sister,
and Alexander DiPersia, as her boyfriend.Bruce
Diones (In wide release.)
The Legend of Tarzan
The classic adventure tale has been admirably reconfigured to meet modern sensibilities, but the
resulting film is simplistic, condescending, and
inert. The action is set in the eighteen-eighties,
when Belgian colonists, led by Leon Rom (Christoph Waltz), sought to conquer the Congo and
enslave its inhabitants. Great Britains envoy,
John Clayton III, Lord Greystoke, formerly
known as Tarzan (Alexander Skarsgrd), is informed of the Belgian plot by an American diplomat, George Washington Williams (Samuel L.
Jackson), and they travel together to thwart it.
Johns wife, Jane (Margot Robbie), the daughter of an American teacher in the Congo, joins
them and is captured by Rom. Forced to fight
once more as Tarzan, the man raised by apes displays his deep roots in Congolese society as well
as his ability to talk to animals (who end up engaging in the movies most photogenic combat).
Meanwhile, the urbane George reminds John,

The Marrying Kind

Despite its buoyant tone and comic energy,
George Cukors drama of scenes from a marriage, as viewed in flashback by a couple in divorce court, is a scathing work of New York neorealism. Judy Hollidaytall, squawky, and full
of purposeand the muscular, raspy-voiced, impulsive Aldo Ray (in his first lead role) play Flo
and Chet, two hardworking city people who meet
cute in Central Park, marry amid a gaggle of relatives, move into a clean but soulless apartment
in Peter Cooper Village, and find that minor irritations quickly become open wounds. Money
worries are constant and get worse when children arrive; when family tragedy strikes, the
fragile couple breaks down. The screenwriters,
Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin, offer sharply
nuanced scenes of tight bonds at work and at
home, and Cukors agitated direction mixes emotions hard until they overheat. The courtroom
framework, which turns the pain of memory into
a therapeutic obligation, evokes a new era of cultural modernismof the private realm exposed
in glaring clinical light. Released in 1952.R.B.
(MOMA; Aug. 4.)
Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates
A fine cast goes to waste in this risk-free and
clich-riddled comedy. The brothers Stangle,
Mike (Adam DeVine) and Dave (Zac Efron),
twentysomething liquor salesmen and roommates, have messed up too many family gatherings with their antics, and when their younger
sister, Jeanie (Sugar Lyn Beard), plans a destination wedding in Hawaii, their parents demand
that the young men bring proper young women
to keep them on their best behavior. Mike and
Dave place an ad on Craigslist and get scammed
by the hard-partying Alice (Anna Kendrick) and
Tatiana (Aubrey Plaza), who present themselves
as sedate and then, in Hawaii, cut loose. Kendrick plays the slightly more sentimental Alice
with puckish intelligence, and Plaza, as the uninhibited Tatiana, lets fly with quietly blazing
profanities. Alice Wetterlund co-stars as the
brothers cousin Terry, a sharp and free-spirited lesbian, and Kumail Nanjiani plays a masseur with cool manners and hot methods, but the
frivolities are tame and stereotyped. The resulting chaos threatens to drive Jeanie and her fianc, Eric (Sam Richardson), apart, but theyre
so thinly characterized that theres no reason to
care. Directed, with scant comedic flair, by Jake
Szymanski.R.B. (In wide release.)
On the Silver Globe
Space travel and pagan rituals converge with the
ruins of modern warfare and the dawn of civilization in Andrzej Zulawskis ecstatic, image-drunk
science-fiction fantasy, which he filmed in the
mid-nineteen-seventies and completed in 1987.
Its among the most visually extravagant films
ever made. Based on a novel by his great-uncle,
Jerzy, the surrealistic and allusive story involves
two astronauts falling in love on a distant planet,
where they propitiate the natives with psychedelic drugs and get trapped in gory battles of
warring tribes, delivering incantatory dialogue
in prophetic howls. Zulawski films it all with
a wildly gyrating camera that scampers across

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

15

MOVIES

Phffft!
In this comedy of remarriage, from 1954, Judy
Holliday and Jack Lemmon star as a successful suburban couple who find that the magic
has gone out of their eight-year union. After
quickly divorcing, both try to savor the single
life in Manhattan but find themselves unable to
escape each others attentions. Holliday, famous
for portraying ditzes of accidental genius, here
plays someone like herselfa smart and worldly
woman whose professional life requires her to
dumb down. Portraying a soap-opera writer, she
shines in sharply satirical scenes of live radio
and TV drama. Lemmon, as a nerdy attorney attempting to swing, offers frenzy tinged with pathos, though the grisly humor written for Kim
Novak, as a desperate good-time girl, is entirely
superfluous. The director, Mark Robson, fumbles the scripts late-screwball complications (except for a gleefully pugnacious night-club dance
number) but makes much of the real-life milieu where they take place, a nouveau-bourgeois
postwar New York, in which the makeup and the
schmooze made for impenetrable masks and the
Martini was the solvent of preference.R.B.
(MOMA; Aug. 5.)
Pull My Daisy
This short film from 1959 is a neat Beat pickerupper set in the slaphappy bohemian pad of a
railroad conductor whose pals include Allen
Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, and Gregory Corso
all of whom carry on, naturally enough, like poets
in their youth. Jack Kerouac based the script
on the third act of his play The Beat Generation, which in turn was based on the real-life
visit of a progressive clergyman to his pal Neal
Cassadys house. But theres no story to speak
of, and, in fact, theres no dialogue: the hilarity emerges from the way Kerouacs non-stop
voice-over narration gives breezy comic ripples
to seemingly spontaneous shenanigans. Their
secret, naked doodlings do show secret, scatological thought, he says in a verbal deadpan.
Thats why everybody wants to see it. Under
the co-direction of Alfred Leslie and the photographer Robert Frankwho wields his camera with a tipsy intimacythe mostly amateur
cast conjures an infectious, arrested-adolescent
joie de vivre. The artist Larry Rivers plays the
conductor, and Delphine Seyrig is his long-suffering wife; the painter Alice Neel plays the
clergymans mother.Michael Sragow (BAM
Cinmatek; Aug. 4.)
Star Trek Beyond
Bad news for the Starship Enterprise. On the
far side of a distant nebula, an unprovoked assault leaves the vessel in shreds, and her crew
headed, as custom demands, by Kirk (Chris Pine)
and Spock (Zachary Quinto)beached on a
mountainous planet. Thank heavens the air is
breathable. The nimble screenplay, by Doug
Jung and Simon Pegg (who returns in the role
of Scotty), hops neatly between the varying for16

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

tunes of Bones (Karl Urban), Uhura (Zoe Saldana), Sulu (John Cho), and Chekov (the late
Anton Yelchin), as they come together to defeat the dastardly Krall (Idris Elba) and thereby
thwart his cosmic plans. The director is Justin
Lin, who knows a thing or two about warp speed
from his work on the Fast & Furious franchise,
and who seldom allows the pace of events, in
the interstellar void, to slacken or to dip into
sententiousnessno small feat, given that this
is the thirteenth film in the series. The happiest innovation is the presence of Jaylah (Sofia
Boutella), who tinkers with an old spacecraft as
if it were a bicycle, and whose black-and-white
makeup is a jagged work of art.A.L. (8/1/16)
(In wide release.)

1
REVIVALS AND FESTIVALS
Titles with a dagger are reviewed.
Anthology Film Archives Films by Sergei Ei-

senstein. Aug. 5 at 7: Ivan the Terrible, parts

1 and 2 (1942-46). Aug. 6 at 7:30: Strike
(1925). Aug. 7 at 4:30: October (1928). Aug.
7 at 7:30: Old and New (1929). BAM Cinmatek
The films of Robert Frank. Aug. 4 at 7: Short
films, including Pull My Daisy. F Aug. 4

at 8:45: Short films, including Conversations

in Vermont (1969). Aug. 11 at 7 and 9: Me
and My Brother (1968). Joe Dante at the
Movies. Aug. 5 at 2 and 7 and Aug. 8 at 4:30 and
9:30: Gremlins (1984). Aug. 5 at 4:15 and
9:45: Small Soldiers (1998). Aug. 7 at 2: The
Movie Orgy (1968). Film Forum In revival. Aug.
3-11 at 12:30, 2:20, 4:10, 6, 7:50, and 9:45: Elevator to the Gallows (1957, Louis Malle). Metrograph Dim All the Lights: Disco and the Movies. Aug. 6 at 1:30 and 9:30: Saturday Night
Fever (1977, John Badham). Aug. 6 at 3:15
and 7:15: Nighthawks (1978, Ron Peck). Aug.
8 at 2 and 6:15: Looking for Mr. Goodbar
(1977, Richard Brooks). Aug. 11 at 2:30 and
7: The Last Days of Disco (1998, Whit Stillman). Aug. 8 at 4:30 and 9: Maestro (2003,
Josell Ramos). Museum of Modern Art The films
of Judy Holliday. Aug. 3 at 1:30: It Should Happen to You (1954, George Cukor). Aug. 4 at
1:30: The Marrying Kind. F Aug. 5 at 1:30:
Phffft! F Films Produced by Gaumont.
Aug. 3 at 4: The Earrings of Madame de . . .
(1953, Max Ophls). Aug. 4 at 6: The Tender
Enemy (1936, Ophls). Aug. 5 at 6: The Lovers of Montparnasse (1958, Ophls and Jacques
Becker). Aug. 5 at 8:30 and Aug. 14 at 2: Antoine and Antoinette. F Aug. 7 at 2 and Aug. 9
at 7: The Mouth Agape (1974, Maurice Pialat).

ABOVE & BEYOND

Hong Kong Dragon Boat Festival

This decorated-boat race and cultural festival
returns to Flushing, for its twenty-sixth year.
The tradition is said to have been inspired by
the ancient poet Qu Yuan, who spent years in
exile and then jumped to his death, in the Ni
Lo River, after learning that his home state had
been invaded. (Fishermen sped onto the river
but could not save him.) Today, teams in more
than thirty dragon boats race along the Meadow
Lake to cap off days full of food, folk art, and
crafts as well as a performance by the Chinese
Music Ensemble of New York and a showcase
of fifty years of photography from the newspaper Sing Tao. (Flushing Meadows-Corona Park,
Grand Central Pkwy., Whitestone Exwy., between
111 St. and College Point Blvd., Queens. hkdbf-ny.
org. Aug. 6-7.)

1
READINGS AND TALKS
Brooklyn Historical Society
In Tales from the Vault: The Skeletons in Our
Closets, the B.H.S. reference librarian Joanna
Lamaida and the exhibition cordinator and
registrar, Anna Schwartz, exhibit a trove of
odd artifacts connected to the urban legends
that surround one of the citys most storied ar-

chival institutions. Between 1863 and 1985, the

B.H.S. was known as the Long Island Historical Society, and it has preserved years worth
of rare atlases, family histories, and maps, and
miles of newspaper microficheits no surprise
that some strange tales find shadowy support
in the buildings dustiest wings. Lamaida and
Schwartz will bust myths about meteors, amulets, and runaway librarians, and showcase at
least one skeleton. (128 Pierrepont St., Brooklyn.
718-222-4111. Aug. 3 at 6:30.)

PowerHouse Arena
Pseudocide has been an irresistible concept
and plot twist in Western culture for decades,
but in our increasingly networked environment everyone is present and accounted for
the premptive announcement of a celebrity
death, often fuelled by viral tweets, may have
usurped the intentional faked death. In Playing
Dead: A Journey Through Death Fraud, Elizabeth Greenwood investigates the feasibility,
and the financial considerations, of the modern faked deathwhether dodging six figures
of student debt is worth hiring a thirty-thousand-dollar pseudocide consultant remains to
be seen. Greenwood launches the book at this
Dumbo engagement. (37 Main St., Brooklyn.
718-666-3049. Aug. 9 at 7.)

ILLUSTRATION BY PABLO AMARGO

fields, vaults over hilltops, thrusts through phalanxes of warriors, and pivots to reveal soldiers
dancing on the beach in front of orange flames.
One astronaut leaves a video diary, and another,
finding it, is mistaken for the Messiah and crucified, but the extreme obscurity of the plot conceals the over-all pointthe quest for freedom
and the role of religion in that quest. Polish authorities stopped the shoot before it was done;
they must have got the message.R.B. (Film Society of Lincoln Center; Aug. 3-4.)

FD & DRINK

TABLES FOR TWO

The Pandering Pig

PHOTOGRAPH BY SAMANTHA CASOLARI FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE

209 Pinehurst Ave. (212-781-3124)

Until recently, There was no pork
on the menu of the Pandering Pig. Presumably, this is because said pig has been
too busy doling out gratification to even
consider being cut up, cooked, and served
alongside Nicole OBriens excellent,
simple fare, at this new restaurant in
Washington Heights. Or perhaps the pig
has been out-pandered by the considerate
and multifaceted waitstaff; the other day,
one of them, a tousle-haired young man
with a breezy affect, explained that he
occasionally cooks, makes pastries, and
even d.j.s at the restaurant. This is the
Donovan Sunshine Superman selection
on Spotify, he said. You cant go wrong
with that.
The Pig occupies a slender space in
whats known as Hudson Heights, a pretty
little enclave of shops, bars, and restaurants perched on the western shore of
Upper Manhattan. The other day, a local
resident described how the area had recently been threatened by plans to replace
a much loved local supermarket with a
WalgreensThat would have been the
Brexit of Hudson Heightsand how
community activism had prevented disaster at the last minute. The restaurant
mirrors the delicate ethos of the neighborhood. Cards, collected by OBriens
great-aunt, bearing images of silent-movie

actors line one wall, and fresh flowers in

tiny vases (orchids, calla lilies) adorn each
table.
There is the occasional misplaced
trotter in the Pigs progression through
an evening. One of these is a tian daubergine (like a deconstructed eggplant
parm in a ceramic pot), which is disappointingly soapy and best avoided. Perfectly roasted Brussels sprouts, however,
ooze with blue cheese and are quickly
devoured, while thyme renders a chicken
sipping broth sprightly. For best results,
pair these with one of the Pigs delicious
wines, a chilled Pouilly-Fum, say, or the
effervescing tingle of a Kelso Pilsner,
from the ample list of artisanal beers.
Specials keep the main courses at the
Pig lively: a recent rainbow trout lay shining and squamous in a silver pan, as crisp
as a river nymphs laugh. Among the
regular dishes, the lamb is particularly
good. Its braised and sloughs from the
bone. The boeuf bourguignon has requisite
heft but is suspiciously porcine. After all
those, there is really only one way to end
dinner, and thats with a nuage au chocolata chocolate cloudwhich comes
in a scalding pot, with fresh berries. Its
surprisingly light, so much so that, on a
summer evening, it risks being blown
away by the zephyrs that have risen from
the river, crested the Heights, and
swished in through the Pigs open front
window. (Dishes $13-$21.)
Nicolas Niarchos

1
BAR TAB

Cubbyhole
281 W. 12th St. (212-243-9041)
Sixteen years before Edie Windsor sued the U.S.
government, in 2010, to claim legal rights as the
spouse of her same-sex partner, this clamorous,
dime-size dive in the heart of Greenwich Village
opened, becoming not only a beloved lesbian
hangout but also, in the words of one longtime
patron, both temple and U.N. of the L.G.B.T.
community. What Cubbyhole lacks in size, it
makes up for in mirth and unapologetic spunk.
An unsuspecting newcomer looking for the bathroom might find herself staring, instead, at the
ceiling: a phantasmagoria of tchotchkes, from
piatas to Venetian masks and Chinese paper
lanterns, evoking an indiscriminate matrimony
of the worlds various festivals. Recently, the
only time the bar was close to quiet was the week
after the annual pride parade, which had evidently done a number on a good many would-be
Cubby faithfuls. How you feelin, hon? a blond
bartender with a Belfastian brogue inquired
sympathetically of a regular. A slow shake of the
head from the respondent: Still shattered. At
the other end of the bar, a woman waited for her
date and decided to ease her nerves by ordering
the Pink Lemonade, a saccharine vodka drink
with cherries which, at four dollars, did the job
splendidly. Next to her, an old-timer reminisced
about her most memorable moments at the parade over a Light & Stormy (tequila, ginger
beer). She had seen Edie at the bar only once
during the past year, but celebrities werent the
reason she came. I cant really say why, she said,
explaining that shed moved away from the Village six years ago. But I end up back here at
least once a week, like clockwork.Jiayang Fan

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

17

THE TALK OF THE TOWN

COMMENT
DEFYING CONVENTIONS

O slipped a document into an American diplomats empty

ILLUSTRATIONS BY TOM BACHTELL

n August 20, 1978, in East Jerusalem, a K.G.B. agent

parked car. The paper contained false claims about Zbigniew

Brzezinski, Jimmy Carters national-security adviser and an
irritant to the Soviet Union. Operation muren failed to discredit Brzezinski, yet the Soviets persisted with active measures to influence American politics until the Cold Wars
end, according to archives smuggled out by Vasili Mitrokhin,
a K.G.B. defector. During the nineteen-seventies, Soviet spies
dug for dirt on Senator Henry (Scoop) Jackson, a Democrat
who twice ran for President. (They didnt find anything.)
For a 1984 operation to thwart Ronald Reagans relection, the K.G.B. warned its residencies worldwide, Reagan
Means War!
Last week, according to the Times, U.S. intelligence agencies advised the White House that they had high confidence
that Russian intelligence services had hacked into the Democratic National Committees computers and stolen thousands of its e-mails, possibly to interfere in the Presidential
election. As the country has learned painfully, just because
spy agencies are sure of something doesnt mean its true. Yet
what is known beyond doubt about the episode is disturbing
enough. On the eve of last weeks
Democratic Convention, in Philadelphia, WikiLeaks published the
D.N.C. files. Julian Assange, the
groups founder, had previously allowed, in an interview with a British journalist, that the publication
would harm Hillary Clintons campaign. Donald Trump might be
completely unpredictable, Assange
explained, but Clinton was known
and objectionable, because, as Secretary of State, she had supported
U.S. military action in Libya and had
criticized WikiLeaks. Assange did
not say how the organization had
obtained the e-mails.
The scheme succeeded only mod-

estly. The D.N.C. chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, resigned,

but she was already in trouble: Bernie Sanders supporters believed that her bias toward Clinton had cost their candidate
the nomination, even though Clinton won nearly four million
more primary and caucus votes. In any event, Bernie-or-Bust
delegates streaming into Philadelphia did not require foreign
inspiration to agitate against Clinton. Sanders, for his part,
made clear that he was over the imbroglio and was committed to unity in order to defeat Trump. It is easy to boo, he
scolded a catcalling delegation from California on the second
day. It is harder to look your kids in the face who would be
living under a Donald Trump Presidency.
The next afternoon, Trump clarified further what a cataclysm such a Presidency would be. At a press conference
at his Doral golf resort, in Florida, he encouraged the Russian government to carry out a cyber crime against the
U.S., by illegally acquiring and publishing e-mails that Clinton wrote as Secretary of State and later deleted after her
lawyers concluded that they were personal in nature. Russia, if youre listening, I hope youre able to find the thirty
thousand e-mails that are missing, Trump said. I think
you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.
The comments illustrated an insidious challenge of Trumps rise. He
has made proposals that are plainly
unconstitutional, such as a ban on
Muslims. He has made proposals that
are plainly preposterous, such as building a wall on the Mexican border,
which Mexico would finance. The
media often contextualize Trumps
comments by merely pointing out
that they are unprecedented or that
they shock experts, but this practice, rooted in otherwise admirable
professional norms, so understates
matters that it misleads the public.
If Trump, in private, over vodka
and cigars, had said to a Russian intelligence officer what he declared at
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

19

his press conference, and the F.B.I. happened to record the

conversation, Trump might well be hauled before a grand jury
on conspiracy charges. His remarks were not only novel as
campaign speech; they invited a semi-hostile power to illegally obtain a former Cabinet members correspondence. According to Title 18, Section 2, of the U.S. criminal code, whoever aids, abets, counsels, commands, induces or procures
the commission of an offense against the United States is
punishable as a principal.
Russias summer plot, if thats what it was, turned out to
be ham-handed. By far the greater danger lies with us. The
American electorates record of judgment in electing a President is not unblemished. Trump continues to poll respectably. In Hillary Clinton, the Democrats have nominated an
unpopular candidate, and she must now drag along a recalcitrant Democratic Party faction still caught up in the vanities and the disillusionments of its political revolution. Michelle and Barack Obama, in their Philadelphia speeches,
spoke of hope and inclusion stirringly enough to counter the
dark infomercials about fear and nativism that the Republicans broadcast from Cleveland. Yet preventing Donald Trump
from taking power will likely require many additional infusions of Obama charisma, among other elixirs.
On the Conventions final night, Hillary Clinton accepted
PHILADELPHIA POSTCARD
THE CALIFORNIANS

G womens-rights lawyer, was racing

loria Allred, the crusading

through the Pennsylvania Convention

Center last week when someone
screamed, Gloria! Can we take a picture? It was another lawyer, Brenda
Bergis. You are my hero, Bergis said,
and described her work defending
victims of domestic violence. She said
that Allredwho typically represents
women, from exploited porn stars and
ex-girlfriends of N.F.L. players to sexually harassed workershad inspired
her. I want you to run for office! Allred
told her. Bergis held out her phone for
a selfie.
Allred was an elected delegate from
California, where shes been a Hillary
Clinton supporter since 2008. She was
looking forward to casting her vote while
staying on top of her various cases
she represents thirty-two of Bill Cosbys accusers, among other clients. She
had a long day ahead, scheduled to end
with a 2:30 a.m. appearance on CNN.

20

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

her partys historic nomination with a long, less than transporting speech that featured the sorts of checklists that campaign tacticians favor: a nod to Sanders, pandering to diverse
television viewers, and anodyne slogans (America is great
because America is good). She did emphasize, effectively,
that the election presents a moment of reckoning. She
added, Many people made the mistake of laughing off Donald Trumps comments. She herself had initially done so.
Yet, she said, Heres the sad truth: there is no other Donald
Trump. This is it.
American Presidential elections reduce the countrys complexity to a binary choice. This years is admittedly not the
happiest one. The revival, on the big screens at the Convention hall, of the Clinton familys political narrative was at
times exhausting, evocative of Argentina. Still, there can be
no doubt that Hillary Clinton is deeply qualified to serve as
President, whereas Donald Trump has proved himself a transparently serious threat to the Constitution. Attached to Clintons candidacy are the futures of Supreme Court jurisprudence, European and Asian security, the health of American
pluralism, and the rule of law. It truly is up to us, Clinton
observed. The worry is whether, in this hot summer of disequilibrium, her country is adequate to the task.
Steve Coll

As Allred made her way through

the lobby of the Marriott Hotel, she
gestured toward a young man in a
pointy green felt cap. You see those?
Theyre Robin Hood hats, she said.
They were being worn by Bernie Sanders followers. A group of men and
women wearing Sanders T-shirts
floated up the escalator. Allred gave
them a plastic smile. Theyre Bernie
supporters from our delegation, she
said, rolling her eyes. They comprised
two hundred and twenty-one out of
the states five hundred and fifty-one
delegates, and some had booed during
their delegation breakfast, the previous
morning, whenever a speaker mentioned Clinton. Allred tried to be empathetic. Eight years ago, I was a Hillary delegate, and we felt grief and
disappointment when she lost.
In line for a shuttle bus to the Wells
Fargo Center, a woman leaned over.
Miss Pelosi? she asked.
Im not Nancy Pelosi, but thank
you for the compliment, Allred said.
Im Gloria Allred.
The woman gasped. Now Im embarrassed! she said. Can I have a picture with you?
Even though Im not Nancy Pelosi? Allred said.
Its even better that youre Gloria

Allred, the woman said. She was Rita

Robinzine, a teacher from Atlanta and
former candidate for Georgias school
superintendent. She and Allred smiled
for the camera while a man with a
placard ranted about Jesus a few feet
away.
Allred took note of a button that
Robinzine was wearing. Youre a Bernie supporter? Allred asked.
Im waiting till Thursday. Then Ill
be with her, Robinzine said. Until
then, Im holding on to my Bernie.
On the bus, Allred talked about
Roger Ailes, the Fox News chairman
who was recently forced to resign after
he was charged with sexual harassment.

Gloria Allred

The story had all the signifiers of an

Allred case: gender warfare, sex, and
shock value. I did get a lot of calls
about it, Allred said. It never surprises
me when there are allegations of sexual harassment against a man whos in
power. She went on, Did they try to
settle it prior to filing a lawsuit? As a
lawyer, that would be a question I would
have. She added, I do so many casting couch cases.
Three hours later, Allred was on the
floor of the convention hall, shoulder
to shoulder in the California section
with Kamala Harris, the states attorney general; Governor Jerry Brown;
Representative Maxine Waters; and
Gray Davis, the former governor. It
was time for the roll-call vote. Just as
Representative John Lewis, the Georgia congressman and civil-rights hero,
appeared onstage to begin the process,
the real Nancy Pelosi, wearing a shiny
white suit, arrived to take her place for
the vote. A mob of security agents,
angry Sanders supporters (Count more
votes!), and other factions (Remove
all staff exposed on WikiLeaks)
watched along with Allred and her
doppelgnger as Brown announced that
three hundred and thirty delegate votes
for California were going to Clinton.
By 6:39 P.m., it was official: Hillary
Rodham Clinton was the first woman
to be nominated by one of the major
political parties for President of the
United States.
When it was over, Allred collapsed
into a chair, still holding her Rosie the
Riveter Elect Hillary Clinton sign.
To finally be able to cast a vote for her,
she said, choking up. This is history. I
wish Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth
Cady Stanton were here to see this.
Sheelah Kolhatkar

1
THE PICTURES
SWORDS, SANDALS

M that his dreadlocks kept hitorgan Freeman was surprised

ting him in the face. Freeman, whos

seventy-nine, has been acting since he
was in grade school, and in the course

of his long career has played everything from a chauffeur, a pimp, and
God (twice) to the voice of history,
narrating Hillary Clintons introduction film at the D.N.C. None of these
roles have involved more elaborate costumesor, at least, more elaborate
hairthan that of Ilderim, a rich Nubian, circa 30 A.D. Ilderims dreads
reach practically to his elbows. Freeman shook them to show how they
dance around in a breeze.
It was lunchtime, and Freeman was
sitting in his trailer at Cinecitt, the
storied studio on the edge of Rome,
taking a break from filming the latest
version of Ben-Hur, which opens
this month. The trailers TV was tuned
to RAI 1, Italys most popular station,
even though Freeman doesnt speak
Italian. Its all we can get, he said,
shrugging. In addition to the wig, he
was wearing a long flowing robe, a
wide leather belt, and felt shoes with
pointed toes. He had just taken off another, more ornate robe, covered in
embroidery, which was draped over a
hanger. Freeman said that part of the
appeal of playing Ilderim had been the
extravagant getups.
The period costumes, all of that
its sort of a come-on, he said.
The Ben-Hur franchise is, by now,
pushing a hundred and forty. It began
with a wildly successful book, Lew Wallaces Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ,
published in 1880. Next came a stage
adaptation, which ran on Broadway
and used real horses trotting on treadmills to stage the chariot scene. (When
Wallace saw the display, he is supposed
to have exclaimed, My God! Did I set
all of this in motion?)
The play was followed by two
silent-film Ben-Hurs, an animatedmovie Ben-Hur, a Ben-Hur TV miniseries, and, most famous of all, William Wylers three-hour-and-thirtyseven-minute wide-screen epicone
of the most over-the-top movies ever
produced. Wyler employed a hundred
costume-makers and some fif teen
thousand extras. The chariot scene
alone took three months to film, and
so gruelling was the shooting schedule that a doctor was hired to administer Vitamin B injections. (Some suspected that the syringes actually contained amphetamines.)

In Wylers Ben-Hur, Sheik Ilderim

was a secondary character, and an essentially comic one. He was played by
Hugh Griffith, a Welshman who became Middle Eastern under several
layers of burned cork. Sheik Ilderim
rolled his eyes, belched loudly, and joked
about his many wives. Charlton Heston, playing Judah Ben-Hur, towered
over his Arab sidekick. (For his cheerfully hammy performance, Griffith received an Academy Award.)
In the 2016 version, Ilderim has
been reconceived. Gone are the eructations and the casual racism. Ilderim
now seems to be the biggest figure
in the movieFreeman towers over
Jack Huston, the British actor playing
Ben-Hur.
Theres no humor in him at all,
Freeman said. This character has quite
a bit of power in the story. And I like
playing power. Its something about my
own personal ego.
Freeman added, I have my own
chariots and horses. I gamble on them
and I make a lot of money, because
the Romans are so idiotic. One line I
have, I say, Was there ever a kind
more obsessed with the obscene?
Nice line.
Since the beginning, Ben-Hur
has claimed to strive for a higher moral
purpose. President James Garfield,
after finishing the novel, wrote to
Wallace, With this beautiful and reverent book you have lightened the
burden of my daily life. (Shortly
thereafter, he appointed Wallace ambassador to the Ottoman Empire.)
But, of course, distracting spectacle
has always been crucial to the storys
appeal: in Ben-Hur, the chariot race
is more memorable than the Crucifixion. This time around, something like
a full-scale Roman circus was constructed for the race, ten miles south
of the ruins of the Circus Maximus.
Though the filming of the chariot
race hadnt yet begun, the lot at Cinecitt was filled with horses, which had
been trucked in from all over Europe.
Freeman had spent the morning with
one that had refused to play its part.
After lunch, the plan was to try again.
We will go back and go through the
entire scene, and hope that the horse
will coperate, he said. An assistant
stuck his head in the trailer to say that

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

21

it was time for another take. Someone

grabbed the heavy embroidered robe,
and Freeman made his way down the
steps, his dreadlocks bobbing.
Elizabeth Kolbert

1
SECOND ACTS DEPT.
HARDBOILED EGGS

A ties, strolling around Macdougal

couple of guys in their late six-

and Bleecker, pointing out old haunts:

its as familiar a part of a Village morning as the beer trucks delivering kegs of
Stella or the bleachy reek of industrial
floor cleanser. The pair poking around
one recent morning was the band Eggs
Over Easy, or two-thirds of itJack
OHara and Austin de Lone. That Chinese bakery on Sixth? It used to be a
coffee shop. They often unwound there
after performing at a nearby club (Caf
Feenjon, long gone), and, one night in
1969, after a glance at the menu, the third
member (Brien Hopkins, now deceased)
came up with the name for the band.
The choice was perhaps one of many
that doomed them to pop purgatory.
We could fill a notebook with missed
opportunities, OHara said.
OHara and de Lone had recently reunited. They had a career-encompassing

compilation coming out (Good n

Cheap: The Eggs Over Easy Story) and
a reunion gig (Rockwood Music Hall).
That afternoon, they had to move some
equipment by ferry to OHaras house,
on Staten Island, in order to rehearse.
At the southwest corner of Washington Square Park, de Lone, a native of
Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, who
for the past several decades has lived in
Mill Valley, California, said, The first
place I stayed in New York was . . . that
bench right there. OHara said he had
an unfinished song about Mill Valley.
He crooned, She died in a hot tub / No
time for a back rub / Three lines on a
polished stone / Black book and a telephone. Thats all Ive got.
OHara, who also grew up in Pennsylvania, first visited New York with his
mother in 1960, when he was twelve. He
wandered into the Caf Wha?. A guitar
player there (not Jimi Hendrix, though
OHara later played with him) taught
him a few tricks. As soon as he graduated from high school, he moved to the
Village and tried to make it as a musician. Richie Havens was like an uncle
to me, he said. In 1967, he headed to
the Bay Area, where he met de Lone,
who had dropped out of Harvard and
gone to California to be a songwriter. In
1969, they moved back to New York,
met Hopkins, formed the band, gave it
a goofy name, and then, in 1970, went
to London to record a dbut album,
since it was cheap to do so there.

For music-business-y reasons, that

album never got released. Broke and
antsy, they found a pub, called the Tally
Ho, in Kentish Town, that paid them a
few quid to perform on dead nights. By
the end of the year, we were playing there
four nights a week, OHara said. They
packed the place. Among their regulars
were the BBC d.j. John Peel and the
members of Brinsley Schwarz, Nick
Lowes band. We were also big with
the roadies, the guys on the crews for
Procol Harum and Ten Years After,
OHara said. Their stage manner was
laid-back, yet they played crisp three-minute songs that were an antidote to the
bombastic, aimless rock then in fashion.
Still, their mark was more socioeconomic than musical. The pubs werent
a real career opportunity before we were
there, de Lone said. Previously, the only
things you heard in pubs were jazz and
folk. No one played original music. Once
the Eggs had established the model, and
returned to the States, it became a
thingpub rock. So thats another
missed opportunity, OHara said. Because punk emerged out of the pub-rock
scene, Eggs Over Easy, despite sounding more like the Lovin Spoonful than,
say, the Clash, has somehow been depicted, in many histories, as punks unlikely patient zero.
Back in the States, they kept trying.
They released an album, opened for
other acts, and even played CBGB. It
wasnt yet a punk palace, de Lone said.
They moved to Marin County, recorded
another album, and, for a time, backed
Dan Hicks, as the Loose Shoes, named
after an infamous racist remark attributed to the Nixon official Earl Butz.
Eventually, OHara came back to New
York and found work as a sound engineer. And that was pretty much it for
Eggs Over Easy.
Twelve years ago, Matt Hanks, a music
publicist and record geek, who had heard
about the band from Nick Lowe, came
across a Japanese import of their first
album. He learned that OHara had a
regular solo gig at a club in New York.
Hanks and a friend went to see him play
and asked him to sign a record. Where
the fuck did you get this? OHara said.
This put in motion the effort to produce
a compilation album, and perhaps to take
a better-late-than-never bow.
Nick Paumgarten

THE FINANCIAL PAGE

THE PERILS OF EXECUTIVE ACTION

I before a Cabinet meeting, said something that has come to

CHRISTOPH NIEMANN

n January of 2014, Barack Obama, speaking to the press

define his Presidency: We are not just going to be waiting for

legislation. Ive got a pen and Ive got a phone, and I can use
that pen to sign executive orders and take executive actions
and administrative actions. In the thirty-one months since,
in the face of congressional intransigence, he has used executive power to commit the U.S. to the Paris Agreement on climate change, to institute the Clean Power Plan to reduce
emissions, to restrict new energy exploration in the Arctic
Ocean and new coal leases on government land, to cap many
student-loan payments, and to tighten rules on gun sales. In
just the past few months, the Administration has made it harder for corporations to use so-called inversions to lower
their taxes, required retirement-investment advisers to eliminate conflicts of
interest, and made more than four million workers eligible for overtime pay.
While Obama may be a lame-duck
President, hes acted like anything but.
Not surprisingly, conservatives have
decried Obamas despotic lawlessness, arguing that his use of executive
power is unprecedented. It would be
more accurate to see his Administration as the latest stage of a long-term
trendwhat political scientists call the
rise of the administrative presidency.
Historically, Presidents have had more
control over foreign and military policy than over domestic policy. But during the past eighty
years the executive branch has come to exert far more control than it once did over areas like working conditions, the
environment, and the financial sector, responsibility for which
Congress has largely delegated to agencies and departments
such as the E.P.A. and the Department of Labor.
A Presidents ability to make policies with the stroke of
a pen is a good thing if you support those policies. But it
means that a new President can change them overnight.
When Obama took office, he immediately restored funding
for overseas family-planning clinics that provided abortion
services. The funding had been taken away by George W.
Bush after it had been restored by Bill Clinton, who was
reversing a previous action by Ronald Reagan.
Donald Trump has made it clear that he sees Obama as
having led the way in using executive action aggressively
and that, if elected, he intends to do the same. Im going to
do a lot of right things, he has said, and hes pledged to reverse many of Obamas executive orders and memorandums
within two minutes of taking office. Most concretely, he

has promised to use his power to restrict entry to the U.S.

in order to curb immigration from any country compromised by terrorism. In Trumps view, that includes Germany
and France. Hes also likely to step up deportation of undocumented immigrants, resurrect the Keystone XL pipeline, declare China a currency manipulator, and reopen coal
leases on federal land.
Not everything Obama has done with his executive power
will be as easy for Trump to overturn. Regulations that have
gone through a formal rulemaking process, such as the Clean
Power Plan, typically cant just be discarded by a new incumbent. Thats why Obamas executive agencies, like those
of his predecessors, spent the final year of the Administration hurriedly initiating a host of regulatory proposalsso
that the proposals could make it through the rulemaking
process before Obama leaves office.
Still, were Trump to win, many of Obamas accomplishments would be under threat. Even rules that cant be rescinded can be left unenforced. Trump,
who says that global warming is bullshit, has vowed to cancel the Paris
Agreement. Technically, he cant, but the
deal has no enforcement mechanism, so
hed be free to just ignore the Paris goals
and do nothing about greenhouse-gas
emissions. And what Trump cant reverse with his pen he can mitigate with
executive-branch appointments, as Ronald Reagan did when he named the rabid
anti-environmentalist James Watt to
head the Department of the Interior.
This is the downside of executive action: policies implemented via executive
order are more vulnerable to reversal
than ones that Congress writes into law.
Some critics have argued that Obama
should therefore have worked with Congress more, instead of relying on the power of the pen. But
many such attempts failed. Given the obstructionism of congressional Republicans, and the inherent inertia of the legislative process, not using pen and phone would simply have
meant fewer achievements. The choice was not between
temporary actions and permanent ones but between potentially temporary actions and no action at all.
Executive power isnt unlimited: the courts can often stop
it (the Clean Power Plan has been suspended, pending judicial review), and in principle Congress can override most
Presidential decisions on domestic policy. But the old idea
that Presidents cant do much on their own is outdated: as
Obama has shown, they have plenty of unilateral control on
domestic issues. As a result, a radical, authoritarian President could do a great deal to remake economic and regulatory policy before ever running into legal opposition (to say
nothing of executive control of foreign policy). The power
of the President is greater than ever. The choice of a President matters more than ever, too.
James Surowiecki
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

23

ANNALS OF POLITICS

THE WAR AND THE ROSES

Fear and loving in the convention hall.
BY JILL LEPORE

Cleveland

T bodies long and lean, like eels, the

hey perched on bar stools, their

women in sleeveless dresses the color of

flowers or fruit (marigold, tangerine), the
men in fitted suits the color of embers
(charcoal, ash). Makeshift television studios lined the floor and the balcony of
the convention hall: CNN, Fox, CBS,
Univision, PBS. MSNBC built a pop-up
studio on East Fourth Street, a square
stage raised above the street, like an
outdoor boxing ring. Who won today?
Who will win tomorrow? the networks
asked. The guests slumped against the
ropes and sagged in their seats, or straightened their backs and slammed their
fists. The hosts narrowed their eyes, the

osprey to the fish: Is America over?

Americans had been assassinating one
another, in schools and in churches, in
cars and in garages, in bars, parks, and
streets, insane with hatehate whites,
hate blacks, hate Christians, hate Muslims, hate gays, hate police. A certain
number of Americans, bearing arms, had
lost their minds, their souls, the feel of
the earth beneath their feet. Dread fell,
and lingered, like mud after rain. At the
Republican National Convention, in
Cleveland, gas masks were banned, body
armor was allowed. Write any or all
emergency phone numbers somewhere
on your body using a pen, a security
memo urged reporters. Best to write
your name, too, came a whisper over a
stall in a womens room, a Sharpie skit-

tering along the tiled floor, as if it had

travelled all the way from 1862, when
twenty-one-year-old Oliver Wendell
Holmes, Jr., wounded at Antietam and
afraid he was about to die, scratched a
note and pinned it to his uniform, Union
blue: I am Capt. O. W. Holmes, hoping his body would find its way home.
Has America ever before been so divided? the television hosts asked their
guests on street-side sets, while the American people, walking by, stopped, watched,
and listened, a tilt of the head, a frown,
a selfie. Wash yourselves! Make yourselves clean! evangelicals advised, by
megaphone, placard, and pamphlet.
Judgment is coming! T-shirts stating
the significance of life came in black and
blue or pink (for fetuses). Past the chainlink gate at the entrance to the Quicken
Loans Arena, a line of delegates and reporters snaked across an empty parking
lot and into security tentsconveyor
belts, wands, please place your laptop in
the binas if we were about to board
an airplane, take off, and fly to another
country, a terrible country, a land of war.
There are a lot of people who think the
whole purpose of all this turmoil is to

A delegate stands during a D.N.C. address. Both Conventions were riven and ruled by invocations of the people.
24

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

PHOTOGRAPH BY PHILIP MONTGOMERY

create martial law, Hal Wick, a delegate

from South Dakota, told me, musing
darkly on the shootings. Wick doesnt
believe that the United States will last
much longer if Hillary Clinton is elected.
If you do the research and the reading,
he said, you find out that, if you get to
a point where more than half the people are on the dole, the country doesnt
exist. It descends into anarchy. It wont
take as long as four years. I give it two
or three, Wick said. Tops.
A parking garage attached to the arena
had been converted into a media production center, cubbies for radio and television and Snapchat and Twitter, like cabins on a ship, the floor a tangle of cables
like the ropes on deck. Don King stood
astride its bow, dressed like a Reagan-era
Bruce Springsteen (faded jean jacket;
swatches of red, white, and blue). Hed
wanted to speak at the Convention, but
hed been snubbed; this was his chance
to testify. An audience of reporters and
photographers flocked around him,
seagulls to a mast. He drew himself up.
He threw his head back. He roared, as if
he were introducing a matchup: Donald Trump is for the people!
Every tyrant from Mao to Pern rules
in the name of the people; his claim does
not lessen their suffering. Every leader
of every democracy rules in the name of
the people, too, but their suffering, if they
suffer, leads to his downfall, by way of
their votes (which used to be called their
voices). Still, the voice of the People
is a figure of speech. Government requires make-believe, the historian Edmund S. Morgan once gently explained.
Make believe that the king is divine,
make believe that he can do no wrong
or make believe that the voice of the people is the voice of God. Make believe
that the people have a voice or make believe that the representatives of the people are the people.
Cast back to a time long past. In the
thirteenth century, the King of England
summoned noblemen to court and demanded that they pledge to obey his laws
and pay his taxes, and this they did. But
then they, along with other men, sent by
counties and towns, began pretending
that they werent making these pledges
for themselves alone but that they represented the interests of other people, that
they parleyed, that they spoke for them;
in 1377, they elected their first Speaker.
26

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

In the sixteen-forties, many of those men,

a Parliament, wished to challenge the
King, who claimed that he was divine and
that his sovereignty came from God. No
one really believed that; they only pretended to believe it. To counter that claim,
men in Parliament began to argue that
they represented the People, that the People were sovereign, and that the People
had granted them authority to represent
them, in some time immemorial. Royalists pointed out that this was absurd. How
can the People rule when they which
are the people this minute, are not the
people the next minute? Who even are
they? Also, when, exactly, did they grant
Parliament their authority?
In 1647, the Levellers, hoping to remedy this small defect, drafted An Agreement of the People, with the idea that
every freeman would assent to it, granting to his representatives the power to
represent him. That never quite came to
pass, but when, between 1649 and 1660,
England had no king, and became a commonwealth, it got a little easier to pretend that there existed such a thing as
the People, and that they were the sovereign rulers of . . . themselves. This seed,
planted in American soil, under an American sun, sprouted and flourished, fields
of wheat, milled to grain, the daily bread.
(The fiction that replaced the divine
right of kings is our fiction, Morgan
wrote, and it accordingly seems less fictional to us.) When Parliament then
said, We, the People, have decided to
tax you, the colonists, meeting in their
own assemblies, answered, No, were the
People. By 1776, what began as makebelieve had become self-evident; by 1787,
it had become the American creed.
We the people are, apparently, grievously vexed. Around the corner from
Don King, NBC News was running a
promotional stunt called Election Confessions (Tell us what you really think),
asking passersby to write on colored
sticky notes and shove them in a ballot
box; the confessions were displayed,
anonymously, on a wall monitor. Blue:
I cant believe it got this far. Orange:
I get to vote for the first time, and now
I dont want to. Green: THESE ARE OUR
CHOICES? I wandered down an aisle
and sat next to Johnny Shull, a delegate
from North Carolina who used to teach
economics at the Charles Koch Institute and helps run a conservative talk-

radio hour, The Chad Adams Show.

Sitting beside him was Susan Phillips,
a warm and friendly woman who was
a guest that day on the show. I told Shull
what Wick had said, about the end of
America. Thats silly, he said. Shull
had originally supported Rand Paul and
was now a Trump delegate. He thinks
America is resilient and will bounce
back, no matter who wins. Phillips agrees
with Wick. She loves Trump because
he says all the things she wants to say
and cant; because he speaks her thoughts
about the half of America thats living
off the other half, and about the coming lawlessness. (Mitt Romneys fortyseven per cent, which is the same figure
that the Nixon campaign complained
about in 1972, has very lately risen, in
the populist imagination, to forty-nine
per cent.) I asked Phillips what happens if Trump loses. She said, Then
weve got to build our compounds, get
our guns ready, and prepare for the
worst. Half of the people believe that
they know how the other half lives, and
deem them enemies.
THE PEOPLE welcome you to
W ECleveland,
banners declared,

hanging from street lamps along the road

to the citys Public Square, a graniteand-steel plaza with fountains and
patches of grass, trough and pasture. Parts
of Ohio used to belong to Connecticut,
and the New Englanders who settled
Cleveland, in the eighteenth century, set
aside land for a commons, a place for
grazing sheep and cattle and for arguing about politics: the public square, the
peoples park.
God hates America! a wiry man was
shouting from the soundstage. America
is doomed! Most of the protesters came
in ones and twos. Oskar Mosco, who told
me that he was a pedicab driver from
California, carried a poster board on
which hed written, Why Vote? He said,
Democracy, lately, is just a fiction. Make
believe the people rule. I sat down on a step
next to Amy Thie, a twenty-two-yearold student at the University of Cincinnati. Shed made a T-shirt that read, I
know shirts. I make the best shirts. Mexico
will pay for them. Its terrific. Everyone
agrees I have baby hands, to which shed
affixed a pair of pink plastic doll hands,
one clutching a miniature American
flag. Some people really hate Trump,

she said. I dont hate him. I think hes

bringing to light aspects of our society
that need to come to light. Shes worried about the world, but shes not that
worried about Trump. People are too
reasonable for this movement to win.
Thies faith in the people is a faith in
the future. It dates to the era of Andrew
Jackson, when the idea of the people got
hitched to the idea of progress, especially
technological progressthe steam engine, the railroad, the telegraph. Ralph Waldo Emerson, awed by the force of
American ideas, American
people, and American machines, called the United
States the country of the future. If the people can be
trusted to be reasonable, all
things are possible, the historian George Bancroft argued, in an 1835 speech called The Office
of the People. Bancroft was writing at
a time when poor men were newly enfranchised, and a lot of his friends thought
that these men were too stupid to vote.
Bancroft offered reassurance. If you lock
a man in a dark dungeon for his whole
life and finally let him out, he may be
blinded by the light, but that doesnt
mean he lacks the faculty of sight; one
day, he will see. Let him add his voice:
Wherever you see men clustering together to
form a party, you may be sure that however much
error may be there truth is there also. Apply this
principle boldly, for it contains a lesson of candor and a voice of encouragement. There never
was a school of philosophy nor a clan in the realm
of opinion but carried along with it some important truth. And therefore every sect that has ever
flourished has benefited Humanity, for the errors
of a sect pass away and are forgotten; its truths
are received into the common inheritance.

The voice of the People became a roar

and a rumpus. Year after year, the People convened, to write and revise and ratify state constitutions, to vote on party
rules and platforms, to pick candidates.
The men who drafted the Constitution
had been terrified of an unchecked majority; events in France had hardly quieted their concerns. John Adams and
James Madison, old men, hobbled into
constitutional conventions in Massachusetts and Virginia, where they sat, stiffly,
and endured the declamations of
long-whiskered shavers and strivers, the
lovers of the People. Americans had grown
convention-mad. In 1831, they even began
28

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

nominating candidates for the Presidency

in convention halls. The People must
exist: they climbed the rafters.
By the time I got to my seat in the
Quicken Loans Arena, the chairman of
the Republican National Committee,
Reince Priebus, was ordering delegates
to file out, sending them off to this committee meeting or that: Rules, Platform,
Credentials. When he stepped down
from the podium, the jumbo teleprompter
that hed been reading from
flickered, went black, and then
turned back on. I stared, wideeyed. They put that up there
whenever the stage is empty,
a reporter from The Nation
told me, helpfully. Up there,
in L.E.D., was the Gettysburg Address. Four score and
seven years ago our fathers
brought forth on this continent,
a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are
created equal. Now we are engaged in a
great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.
Lincoln stopped in Cleveland in 1861,
on the way to his inauguration as the
first Republican President. Down on the
convention floor, George Engelbach, a
delegate from Missouri, was dressed as
Lincoln: top hat and suit, whiskers. I
asked him why he admired Lincoln. If
it were not for him, we would have a divided country, he said. Engelbach has
been a Trump supporter from the start,
because Trumps the only one who can
put it back together again. That night,
the speakers at the Convention talked
about dead bodies: the bodies of Americans killed by undocumented immigrants, of Americans killed by terrorists
in Benghazi, of Americans killed by men
who supported Black Lives Matter. A
grieving mother blamed Hillary Clinton for her sons death. Soldiers described
the corpses of their fallen comrades. I
pulled his body armor off and checked
for vitals, one said. There were no signs
of torture or mutilation, another said.
We have come to dedicate a portion of that
field, as a final resting place for those who
here gave their lives that that nation might
live. But this wasnt Gettysburg. This
battle isnt over. Our own city streets
have become the battleground, the
Homeland Security Committee chair,

Mike McCaul, said. The Milwaukee

County sheriff, David A. Clarke, Jr., said,
I call it anarchy.
The next day, in Public Square, Vets vs.
Hate took the stage. Please stop using
our veterans as props, Alexander McCoy,
an ex-marine, begged the Trump-Pence
campaign. I went to see a ten-foot-tall
American bald eagle, made entirely out
of red-white-and-blue Duck Brand duct
tape, on display in a parking lot. (Hope
is, always, the thing with feathers.) Then
I got a ride out to the Cleveland History Center, where Lauren R. Welch
gave me a tour of a collection of memorabilia from earlier G.O.P. Conventions,
the buttons and the bunting. Welch,
twenty-eight and African-American,
has lived in Cleveland nearly all her life.
Shes an activist, a supporter of Black
Lives Matter. I asked whether either of
the two major Presidential candidates
could bring about a better future. Even
Obama couldnt bring people together,
she said, searchingly. No, she said. Hope
comes from the people.
After the Civil War, the idea of the
People and the idea of progress got uncoupled, an engine careering away from
its train. This was the work of the
late-nineteenth-century Peoples Party,
a left-wing movement of farmers and
workers who found out the hard way
that progress sometimes mows men
down; they wanted to use democracy to
limit certain kinds of technological progress, for the sake of equality. Historians
have tended to consider Populism muddleheaded: America looked forward, Populists looked backward. The utopia of
the Populists was in the past, not the future, Richard Hofstadter wrote, disapprovingly. Many historians have said the
same thing about conservatism, especially the Trump variety, whose followers, like their leftier, Populist forebears,
have found out the hard way that progress mows some men down. I talked to
Jimmy Sengenberger, a young conservative who thinks a lot about this question.
Looking back at the founding principles of this country is the best way to
look forward, he told me. Sengenberger,
twenty-five, was an alternate delegate
from Colorado. Hes polite and ambitious, a Jimmy Olsen look-alike. He
works in a law office during the week
and hosts a talk-radio show on Saturday
nights. Progressivism is regressive, he

said. Conservatism is the only truly forward-looking political philosophy.

Newt Gingrich is a historian, so on
the third day of the Convention, before
he was due to speak, I figured Id ask him
whether he was worried that the right
had ceded all talk of progress to the left.
No. Listen to my speech, he told me.
Im going to talk about safety. When I
suggested that making America safe again
isnt exactly forward-looking, he assured
me that he was going to talk about the
future. Back inside the convention hall,
after yet another speech by yet another
made-for-television Trump child, Ted
Cruz was doing a mike check, not by
reading the Gettysburg Address from the
teleprompter, as others did, but by reciting Dr. Seuss: I do not like green eggs
and ham, I do not like them, Sam-I-am;
ode to an ornery man. That night, Cruz
was booed off the stage. Gingrich, who
followed him, did talk about the future:
he warned of a coming apocalypse.

O vention, I went back to Public

n the last day of the G.O.P. Con-

Square. They came and they came, the

protesters, one by one, and two by two.
A mother of nine named Samia Assed
wandered by. She owns two New Yorkstyle delis in Santa Fe. Her family is originally from Palestine. She had driven to
Cleveland in a caravan organized by the
Grassroots Global Justice Alliance. I
asked her if she thought that either
Trump or Clinton could bridge the divide. She looked at me as if I were
nuts. They are the divide, she said.
Erika Husby, another protester, had blond
hair piled in a messy bun and was wearing a poncho painted to look like a brick
wall. It read Wall Off Trump. Shes
twenty-four and from Chicago, where
she teaches English as a second language.
She liked Sanders but was willing to
vote for Clinton. Black Lives Matter is
changing the country for the better,
she said. Joshua Kaminski, twenty-eight,
originally from Michigan, was wearing a Captain America T-shirt and a
silver cross on a silver chain. He works
for Delta Airlines. He and Oskar Mosco
got to talking, each keen, each curious.
Ive seen conservatism and Christianity separate, Kaminski told Mosco. Im
not going to vote against my morals anymore. Hes pretty sure hell vote for
Johnson-Weld. Meanwhile, he was giving

out water bottles labelled Elect Jesus.

The rule inside the Convention was:
Incite fear and division in order to call
for safety and union. I decided that the
rule outside the Convention was: No kidding, its really awfully nice out here, in
a beautiful city park, on a sunny day in
July, where a bunch of people are arguing about politics and nothing could possibly be more interesting, and the Elect
Jesus people are giving out free water, icy
cold, and the police are playing PingPong with the protesters, and you can
take a nap in the grass if you want, and
you will dream that you are on a farm
because the grass smells kind of horsy,
and like manure, because of all the
mounted police from Texas, wearing those
strangely sexy cowboy hats; and, yes, there
are police from all over the country here,
and if you ask for directions one of them
will say to you, Girl, Im from Atlanta!
and you have to know that, if they werent
here, who knows what would happen;
there are horrible people shouting murderous things and tussling, thats what
they came here for, and anything can
blow up in an instant; and, yes, there are
civilians carrying military-style weapons,
but, weirdly, they are less scary here than
they are online; they look ridiculous, honestly, and this one lefty guy is a particular creep, dont get cornered; but, also,
theres a little black girl in the fountain
rolling around, getting soaked, next to
some white guy whos sitting there, just
sitting there, in the water, his legs kicked
out in front of him, holding a cardboard
sign that reads Tired of the Violence.
I climbed up the steps of the parks
Civil War Soldiers and Sailors Monument, not far from the spot where Lincolns casket was put on display, in 1865,
on his way home. It was as if he had
pinned a note to his suit: We here highly
resolve that these dead shall not have died
in vainthat this nation, under God, shall
have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the
people, shall not perish from the earth.
I trudged back to the arena for the
final nights speakers.
No one has more faith in the American people than my father, Ivanka
Trump said. She called him the
peoples champion. She was wearing a sleeveless dress the color of a
grapefruit, the pinkest of peonies.
Trump took the stage, in a suit as
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

29

black as cinder. The American people

will come first again, he thundered.
I am your voice, he said. His face
turned as red hot as the last glowing
ember of a fire, dying.
Philadelphia

W love, what care, what service, and

elcome to the city of love.What

what travail hath there been to bring

thee forth, William Penn said, in 1684,
praying for a tiny, frail settlement huddled along the banks of the Delaware
River. O that thou mayest be kept from
the evil that would overwhelm thee. In
the Wells Fargo Center, Love Trumps
Hate signs fluttered on the floor of the
convention hall like the pages of a manuscript scattered by a fierce wind. It was
a book of antonyms: the future, not the
past; love, not hate. We are the party
of tomorrow! John Lewis hollered
to the crowd. What the world needs
now is love, the Democrats sang, holding hands, leaning, listing. And still the
signs fluttered and scattered, the book
of antonyms ripped up by Sanders delegates, who tore at its pages and yanked
at its binding, its brittle glue. Anne Hamilton, a delegate from North Carolina,
got out a marker and doctored her Love
Trumps Hate sign to read Love Bernie or Trump Wins. She was determined. They said they were going to
replace me with an alternate, she told
me. And I just kept repeating, Freedom
of speech, freedom of speech! And a
future under Clinton or Trump? Its
like a windshield after a rock hits it, she
said. The glass looks like a spiders web,
and you can see through it, but not really, and then, all at once, in a flash, it
cracks, and it shatters, and theres nothing left. Slivers of glass and the rush of
an unshielded wind.
Philadelphia was to Cleveland the zig
to its zag, the other half of the zipper.
The Democrats recycle. They provide
compost bins. They speak Spanish in the
security lines. They serve kosher food.
They offer a Gluten-Free Section.They
have blue-curtained breast-feeding and
pumping areas. The Democrats run out
of coffee. They run out of seats. They
run out of food. They run out of water.
They talk for too long; they run out of
time. During breaks between speakers,
the Republicans played the Knacks My
30

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

Sharona (When you gonna give me

some time, Sharona / Ooh, you make
my motor run); the Democrats played
Princes Lets Go Crazy (Dearly beloved / We are gathered here today / To
get through this thing called life ). Try
to get through a night at a Democratic
Convention, early in the week, with nothing more than M&Ms and the voice of
the People to jolt you awake. Its like
being at a sleepover and trying to stay
up until midnight for the candlelit sance,
the conjuring of a spirit: Speak, speak!
Dearly beloved. There is tension and
dissension in the land, Cynthia Hale, of
the Ray of Hope Christian Church, in
Decatur, Georgia, said, leading the invocation on the Conventions first day. And
there was tension and dissension in the
hall. Its time that the people took the
power back, Rebecca Davies, a delegate
from Illinois, told me. I asked her if she
supported Clinton. God, no! she said,
mock-affronted. She was wearing a pointy
hat, made of green felt, with a red feather
tucked in its brim. Shed got the hat at a
gathering that morning, when Sanders
tried to persuade his followers to support
Clinton, and they balked. People all over
the arena were wearing Robin Hood hats,
as if it were 1937 and Warner Bros. was
holding auditions for an Errol Flynn film.
Davies was cheerful, but she was disappointed; the People, spurned.
The proceedings began. But when
Barney Frank got up to speak the crowd
booed him. Thank you, or not, as the
case may be, Frank said, grimly. Frank,
no fan of Bernie Sanders, co-chaired the
Rules Committee, whose decisions Sanders supporters had protesteda protest strengthened by the release, the day
before, of hacked Democratic National
Committee e-mails. (Hacked by Russia?
Hack more! Trump taunted.) The People had been betrayed by the Party, corrupted. The D.N.C. thinks its better
to keep people ignorant, Robyn Sumners told me, angry, astonished. She was
a precinct inspector in Californias District 29, where Sanders lost by a smidgen. She blames the press and the D.N.C.
They dont want people involved, she
said. They dont trust us. Theyre afraid
of Bernie because you know what Bernie does? He wakes people up. I learned
in this election: They dont want us to
vote. Some Sanders people covered their
mouths with blue tape, on which theyd

written SILENCED.The People, muffled,

stifled, muzzled, unloved.
Carl Davis, a delegate from Texas,
works in the mayors office in Houston.
Hes African-American and a long-standing Clinton supporter. He was a Clinton delegate in 2008, too. The Democratic Party brings hope to this nation,
he told me. We, we are the ones looking out for the people of this country.
Not Trump, not Trump, not Trump. My
name isnt Sucker Boone, Emily Boone,
a Kentucky delegate, snapped, when I
asked her what she thought of the Republican nominee. When Democrats on
the floor talked about Trump, wincing,
shuddering, they tended to talk about a
political apocalypse possibly even darker
than the one conjured by Trump supporters when they imagined a Clinton
Presidency: Fascism, the launch codes,
the end of days.
Donald Trump knows that the American people are angrya fact so obvious
he can see it from the top of Trump
Tower, Elizabeth Warren said from the
lectern, undertaking the sober, measured
work of arguing that Trump did not speak
for the American people, that he had
misjudged if he thought that he could
make the American people angry with
one another. Ive got news for Donald
Trump, Warren said. The American
people are not falling for it!
The People are easy to invoke but impossible to curb. A spirit cant be bottled.
If you look at our platform, all the way
through it talks about trying to lift people up, people who have been left behind, Chris McCurry told me. This was
McCurrys first Convention. He was a delegate from South Carolina, where he works
as an I.T. guy in the states Department
of Transportation. He was wearing a hat
decorated with red-white-and-blue tinsel
and a vest pinned with eleven Hillary buttons. Shes spent her whole life trying to
lift up women and children, and when
we do that we lift up the nation, when
you do that you get gay rights, you fight
racism, he said. You always progress.
The Democratic Partys argument is
that it is the only party that contains multitudes. What happens when the people
are sovereign? The dangerous term, as
it turned out, was not sovereignty, as the
historian Daniel T. Rogers once put it.
It was the People. When white men
said, We are the People and therefore

A VIOLENCE

You hear the high-pitched yowls of strays

fighting for scraps tossed from a kitchen window.
They sound like children you might have had.
Had you wanted children. Had you a maternal bone,
you would wrench it from your belly and fling it
from your fire escape. As if it were the stubborn
shard now lodged in your wrist. No, you would hide it.
Yes, you would hide it inside a barren nesting doll
youve had since you were a child. Its smile
reminds you of your father, who does not smile.
Nor does he believe you are his. You look just like
your mother, he says, who looks just like a fire
of suspicious origin. A body, Ive read, can sustain
its own sick burning, its own hell, for hours.
Its the mind. Its the mind that cannot.
Nicole Sealey
we rule, how were they to deny anyone
else the right to rule, except by denying
their very peoplehood? We, too, are people! shouted women, blacks, immigrants,
the poorest of the poor. And, lo, the People did say, No, you are not people!That
worked for only so long. And, when it
failed, the People passed new immigration and citizenship laws, and restricted
voting rights, and made corporations
honorary people, to give themselves more
power. And, lo, a lot of Americans got
to worrying about what viciousness, what
greed, and what recklessness the People
were capable of. These people called
themselves Progressives.
In the early decades of the twentieth
century, the left lost its faith in the People but kept its faith in progress. Progressives figured that experts, with the
light of their science, ought to guide the
government in developing the best solutions to political and economic problems. In the nineteen-forties, populism
began to move from the left to the right,
not sneakily or stealthily but in the shadows all the same, unnoticed, ignored, demeaned. In Christopher Laschs grumpiest book, The True and Only Heaven,
from 1991, he argued that a big problem
with postwar liberalism was liberals failure to really listen to the continuing populist criticism of the idea of progress.
Their confidence in being on the winning side of history made progressive
people unbearably smug and superior,

Lasch wrote, but they felt isolated and

beleaguered in their own country, since
it was so much less progressive than they
were. That went on for decades.
In 1992, the year Bill Clinton was
elected, a letter to the editor appeared in
a small newspaper in upstate New York.
The American Dream of the middle
class has all but disappeared, substituted
with people struggling just to buy next
weeks groceries, the letter writer argued.
What is it going to take to open up the
eyes of our elected officials? AMERICA IS
IN SERIOUS DECLINE. It was written by
a young Timothy McVeigh.
And still, after Oklahoma City, and
Waco, and the militia movement, all
through the nineteen-nineties, progressive politicians and intellectuals continued to ignore the right-wing narrative
of decline, even as it became the hallmark of conservative talk radio. And they
ignored Sanderss warnings about decline, too, when he talked about the growing economic divide, the widening gap
between the rich and the poor, and the
stranglehold of corporate interests over
politics. There is a war going on in this
country, Sanders said, in an eight-anda-half-hour speech from the floor of the
Senate, in 2010. I am talking about a
war being waged by some of the wealthiest and most powerful people against
working families, against the disappearing and shrinking middle class of our
country. He spoke alone. Progressives

and liberals talked about growth, prosperity, globalization, innovation.

Dearly beloved. Dont let anyone ever
tell you that this country isnt great, Michelle Obama said, in an uplifting speech
on the first night of the Democratic Convention. But then Sanders got up and
said it: This election is about ending
the forty-year decline of our middle class,
the reality that forty-seven million men,
women, and children live in poverty. A
sea of blue signs waved at him, as if in
rebuke: A future to believe in. Sanders,
and only Sanders, talked that way about
decline and suffering. Meanwhile, outside, a sudden summer storm battered
the city, the rain falling like dread.
is Bright was stamped in
F uture
white on hot-pink sunglasses that

Planned Parenthood gave out to volunteers. Cecile Richards, the head of the
Planned Parenthood Action Fund, sat
next to Bill Clinton the night Michelle
Obama addressed the Convention. Look,
it was amazing to be there, Richards
said, when I talked to her the next morning. The passing of the torch, from one
incredible woman to another incredible
woman. Richards thinks that the Republicans are fighting a kind of progress
they cant stop. If I were trying to lead
a party that believed in rolling back
L.G.B.T.Q. rights and womens rights,
and denying climate change, that would
be a very tough agenda to sell to young
people in this country, she said. Downtown, a dozen volunteers wearing pink
pinnies gathered in front of a Planned
Parenthood clinic on Locust Street to
help escort women into the clinic, intending to steer them clear of pro-life
protesters, who never turned up. The idea
that love conquers all entered American
political rhetoric by way of the gay-rights
and the same-sex-marriage movements,
in which activists, following the model
of the civil-rights and the reproductive-rights movements, largely bypassed
the People and took their case, instead,
to the Supreme Court. A few blocks
down Locust Street, hundreds of people
had gathered for the Great Wall of Love,
a rally for unity in front of the Mazzoni
Center, an L.G.B.T.Q. clinic. They sang
Seasons of Love, from Rent. They
waved white placards that read, in rainbow-colored letters, Love Wins.
That night, Sanders, seated with the

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

31

delegation from Vermont, called for

Clintons nomination by acclamation.
The People shouted, but not with one
voice. Hundreds of Sanders delegates
and supporters rose from their seats
and walked out. We will not yield,
Alyssa DeRonne, a delegate from Asheville, North Carolina, said. I want to
see my children philosophizing and inventing new things, not blowing up
another country. Anne Hamilton
walked out, too. So did Sanders delegates from Hawaii. Carolyn Golojuch,
a seventy-year-old Clinton delegate
from Honolulu, was disgusted by the
walkout. I have stood on the streets
by the state capitol for eighteen years,
working for same-sex-marriage rights,
for my son, for everyone, she told me.
I have lost jobs. I have fought and I
have fought. These Sanders people,
they havent learned how to compromise. And you know what? They dont
own the word progressive. Golojuchs
husband, Mike, was wearing a rainbow
All You Need Is Love button, but neither of them had any illusions that love
always wins.
What wins? I asked Elizabeth Warren. The last three or four years that
I have been in the Senate, its been like
climbing a sheer rock wall, she said.
And all I do is try to find a finger hole
or a toe hole, somewhere, somewhere.
People are right to be angry, she said.
They should be angry. Theyre not
wrong that the system is rigged. The
rich and the powerful have all kinds
of money and all kinds of weapons,
to make the country, and the government, just the way they want it, she
said. And the rest of us? All weve got
are our voices and our votes, and the
only way those have any strength is if
we use them together and aim them
perfectly.
Two protests were happening by LOVE
Park, across the street from City Hall, in
the shadow of a thirty-foot-tall sculpture called Government of the People:
naked bodies smushed into the shape of
a clenched fist. If you stood in the middle of the park, you could listen to both
protests at the same time:
We, the people, can solve our ills, if we
work together
patriarchy is woven into the fabric
Yesterday we took some action
That is fucked up!
32

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

At one end of the park, a very small

audience listened to the Revolution Club;
at the other end, by the main stage, hundreds of people, including a lot of Sanders delegates, had gathered for an Occupy D.N.C. rally. They were young, and
they were mad, and they were undaunted.
They wore Bernie masks and waved Bernie puppets. They chanted, Hell no,
D.N.C., we wont vote for Hillary.They
were waiting for the Green Partys Jill
Stein to come and speak. Jill not Hill,
they cried. A woman in a red-white-andblue cowboy hat raised a sign to the sky:
This Is Not a Riot. They wanted to
boycott the Democratic Party. They
wanted to ban the oligarchy. I need that
Power to the People right now! Bruce
Carter, of Black Men for Bernie, called
from the Occupy stage. We aint in no
dance mode, we in a fighting mode, he
said. I dont want to dance right now. I
want to be mad as hell. The music
started. Power to the people, power to the
people, power to the people. The people
began to sway.
Something was slipping away, leaching out, like rainwater. The People had
lost their footing, their common ground,
muddied. Maybe it was a problem that
the Levellers had never managed to
get everyone in seventeenth-century
England to sign on to that Agreement
of the People, because the people I
talked to in Cleveland and Philadelphia didnt quite seem to believe in representation anymore. Either they were
willing to have Trump speak in their
stead (I am your voice), the very definition of a dictator, or else they wanted
to speak for themselves, because the
system was rigged, because the establishment could not be trusted, or because no one, no one, could understand
them, their true, particular, Instagram
selves. They hated and were hated; they
wanted to love and be loved. They could
see, even through a broken windshield,
that the future wasnt all dark and it
wasnt all bright; it was as streaked as
a sky at twilight.
Let love rule, Lenny Kravitz sang,
a choir behind him, the night before
the Democratic Convention ended. We
are not a fragile people, President
Obama insisted, in a beautiful speech
as boundless in its optimism as Trumps
was in its pessimism. And, when he has
faltered, Obama said, something, some-

one, an idea, had always picked him up.

Its been you, he said. The American people.
The next morning, Trumps campaign
instructed his supporters not to watch
Clintons speech and, instead, to send
money, heaps of it, promising that Hillary would hear the amount by 8 p.m.,
so that before she steps on stage, shell
have stuck in the back of her mind exactly whats coming for her this November: THE AMERICAN PEOPLE!
That night, the Democrats told a love
story. We are reviving the heart of our
democracy, said the Reverend William
Barber II, a North Carolina minister,
while the people climbed to the rafters.
We must shock this nation with the
power of love.
Ivanka Trump had introduced her father; Chelsea Clinton introduced her
mother. Daughters are the new political
wives. Chelsea wore a red dress with a
heart-shaped neckline. She introduced
the Presidential nominee as a grandmother. I hope that my children will
some day be as proud of me as I am of
my mom, she said. Mother-love is the
corsage pinned to every dress, right or
left. Im a mom! said everyone who was
one, at both Conventions, from Laura Ingraham to Kirsten Gillibrand. We all
hope for a better tomorrow, Morgan
Freeman intoned, in his voice-over to a
Clinton-campaign film. Every parent
knows that your dream for the future
beats in the heart of your child. And here,
at last, was the resolution, shaky and cynical, of the argument between the people
and progress. People + progress = children. In an age of atrocity, the unruliness
of the people and a fear of the future have
combined with terror, naked terror, to
make the love of children an all-purpose
proxy for each fraying bond, each abandoned civic obligation, the last, lingering
devotion.
Hillary Clinton took the stage in a suit
of paper white. I am so proud to be your
mother, she said to her daughter, beginning her address to the American people
not as citizens but as objects of love. I
will carry all of your voices and stories
with me to the White House, she promised, the words like lace. We begin a new
chapter tonight. The balloons fell.
And the nation clenched its teeth,
the top and the bottom of a jaw, and
waited for November.

SHOUTS & MURMURS

OUTDONE
BY IAN FRAZIER

C to reason exactly as humans do,

but will they ever be as dumb? I had
always thought that was impossible.
Now, however, Im not so sure. The
other day, I was in Penn Station on my
way home from work. A team of scientists had set up a table with a laptop
running the latest pattern-recognition
software, and they were asking passersby to suggest questions for the computer. With twenty minutes on my
hands, I asked it to find the best place

novelty reindeer antlers on my car. This

time, the reply came instantly: a simple Yes. I looked at the screen, impressed. Then, knocking me even flatter, it followed up with And a bumper
sticker that says I ROLLER-SKATE
DEAL WITH IT! I dont roller-skate,
but I had to admit that I admired the
statements attitude. Again, the computer was eerily right.
The scientists, who were young guys
of the sort you would expect, talked
among themselves in low, smug voices.

for me to sit while waiting for my train.

The word processing blinked on the
screen for a minute or so. Then a photo
appeared, with an X and a flashing
arrow marking the spot. I looked more
closely. The place the computer had
indicated was nearby, on a busy stairway, directly beneath a sign that said
DO NOT SIT ON STAIRSthe very spot
I often choose myself !
A bit stunned, I went and rested
there, causing the usual bottleneck of
hurrying commuters, some of whom
tripped over me. A computer as witless as I amhow can we maintain our
irreducible humanity in the face of that?
Maybe it was just a fluke. Reassuring myself that the machine could never
duplicate such a lucky hit, I went back
and asked the computer, by way of the
scientists, if it thought I should put

I hung around, pretending to look at

my phone, and eavesdropped. Oh, how
pleased these guys were with the way
their new program had performed!
Already that evening, the computer
had forgotten to call home and tell its
wifeanother computer, apparentlythat it would be late, and then
had inadvertently sent her embarrassing flirtatious e-mails intended for
another computer at the office. Can
everything I do, everything I am, be
translated so easily into code? I felt
myself descending further into despair.
No, damn it! I am a human being!
Our species does poorly thought-out
things, and we must not take a back
seat to any machine on that. Remember when I saw Bev at the Shelbys New
Years Eve party and blurted out, in
front of everybody, Bev, how fabulous!

JAY DANIEL WRIGHT

omputers may one day be able

Youre pregnant!, when she had only

put on a lot of weight? I defy any mere
mass of circuitry to duplicate this deeply
human feat. As I recalled the horror
on Bevs face, and on everybody elses,
my entire body contorted in a wince
of shame andIll be honesta certain species-specific pride. Top that,
techno-wizards! Other un-smart stunts
came back to me: No computer will
ever amass enough mainframe cluelessness to cut a big patch from the
pair of bluejeans that it is mending
rather than from the old bluejeans that
it uses for patches. Nor will it ever finish
filling out its income-tax return and
then mail it, along with the check for
the I.R.S., to a distant relative it hasnt
seen in years. You need to be a living,
breathing, flesh-and-blood creature to
achieve such things.
I calmed myself down, proceeded
to the platform, got on the wrong train,
and did not notice my mistake until
Trenton. The train back to Penn Station would not leave for another hour
and a half. I never expect to be as smart
as a computer, but, by God, I can be
dumber. A hard rain began to fall, and
I left the station so I could practice
not knowing enough to come in out
of it.
Update: The consequences of the
events related above are so well known
as not to need a detailed repetition
here. Preliminary reconstruction of the
disaster has revealed the outline of
what occurred. Evidently, the computer that the subject confronted in
Penn Station tracked him, by G.P.S.
signal, to Trenton. When it received
an indication that he had foolishly exited into the rain, the computer, not
to be outdone (or, to use tech jargon,
outdumbed), distracted its scientist
handlers with complicated prompts
that caused them to carry it into the
storm, which had by then settled over
the entire East Coast. A sudden drowning in the downpour not only destroyed
the computer but somehow led to a
mass-suicide spasm among linked programs, with thousands of computers
and other devices ruining themselves
in coffee spills, dog-bowl plunges, hottub dunkings, and so on. In the wake
of these occurrences, all Artificial Stupidity (A.S.) research has been halted,
pending investigation.
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

33

THE SPORTING SCENE

PRANCE MASTER
How Charlotte Dujardin took over the most lite equestrian sport.
BY SAM KNIGHT

Dressage is the only Olympic event that can claim Xenophon as its first coach.

T manding and exquisite movement

he piaffe is probably the most de-

in the Olympic sport of dressage. A horse

in piaffe defies what horses otherwise
do. Instead of going anywhere, it jogs
on the spot, three-quarters of a ton of
moving muscle, feet rising and falling
in the same four hoofprints like an animation in a flip book. Next week, in
Rio de Janeiro, seven judges around an
arena, known as a mange, will evaluate
the piaffes of the four-day dressage com34

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

petition. In addition to making sure that

the horses dont go forward or backward,
or side to side, the judges will keep track
of the number of steps (twelve to fifteen),
their height (as high as the cannon bone
on the foreleg; as high as the fetlock on
the rear), and insure that they are not,
in the somewhat baroque language
of the sport, unlevel. Then they will
score each piaffe out of ten.
No one knows what piaffing is for.
The movements of dressage are said to

have their origins in the training of horses

for war, and one theory suggests that the
piaffe might have been useful for trampling enemies. But the piaffe became an
abstraction long ago, like the pike in diving, or the asymmetrical bars. By 1733,
when Franois Robichon de la Gurinire, the equerry to Louis XIV of France,
wrote a seminal guide to horsemanship,
the piaffe had already become a thing of
mere ornament. The correctly piaffing
horse, de la Gurinire wrote, stands in
awe of the riders hand and legs.
Charlotte Dujardin, a thirty-one-yearold British rider who is the European,
World, and Olympic dressage champion,
rode her first piaffe in the summer of
1999. She was in a sand arena at Wrotham
Park, a Palladian manor in the suburbs
of North London. Dujardin, who was
fourteen, was spending a week helping
out Debi Thomas, a friend of her mothers, who worked in the stables on the
property. Thomas had a twelve-year-old
dressage horse that was trained to Grand
Prix leveldressage has eight heights,
of which Grand Prix is the highestbut
it was struggling for rhythm in its piaffe.
She had been schooling the horse, a mare
named Truday, from the ground but
needed a rider on top.
Thomas has trained horses for forty
years, and she has never, before or since,
put a child on the back of one trained
to Grand Prix. Dressage horses are frequently compared to gymnasts. From
the age of four, they undergo five or six
years of strengthening and suppling exercises before theyre able to carry out
the advanced movements: the piaffe, the
passage (a slow, prancing trot, pronounced as in French), and the pirouette (a hand-brake turn, ideally executed
in six to eight strides). There are fewer
than a hundred Grand Prix horses in
Britain, and a good one costs several
hundred thousand dollars.
But Thomas had been watching Dujardin ride since she was a toddler. Dujardins mother, Jane, used to keep a pair
of jumping horses at home. At the age of
two, Dujardin would scramble onto their
backs and gee them round the stables,
clicking and hollering. When Dujardin
got on Truday, and followed Thomass instructionsshortening Trudays strides,
shifting its weight to the hindquarters
the horse began to jig. It was no big deal
to her, Thomas said. But Dujardin looked
PHOTOGRAPH BY TEREZA ERVEOV

down and caught the expression on the

trainers face. She was, like, mesmerized,
Dujardin recalled recently.
Within days, Thomas had Dujardin
performing flying changesin which the
horse skips from one foot to the other, in
mid-canterand the passage. She just
explained what I needed to do, and that
was it, Dujardin said. Her mother looked
on from the rail. Jane had grown up on a
farm in Hertfordshire. She had been an
ardent show jumper, but her parents never
came to watch. When Jane had children
of her owntwo daughters, EmmaJayne and Charlotte, and a younger son,
Charlesshe poured herself into the
world of show ponies and junior competitions. The girls began competing at the
age of three. They did want to do it, because it was my passion to make them
want to do it, Jane said. The family kept
only first- and second-place rosettes.
Literally all our money went on it,
Dujardins father, Ian, told me. All of it.
Ian ran a packaging company, and in
1992, when Dujardin was seven, he won
a large contract to wrap up mirrors. He
spent fifty thousand dollars on a show
pony for his daughters. But by the summer of 1999 another packaging deal had
gone badly wrong. It pulled everything
down, Jane said. Our house, our home,
our everything. The Dujardins had to
sell the show pony, and the horse box.
As Jane watched her daughter ride,
she felt both joy and dread. It was obvious that Dujardin should pursue dressage. There was just no way to afford it.
Even within the expensive world of equestrian sport, dressage stands apart for the
aristocracy of its ideals and the wealth of
its participants. Ann Romney sent a horse
to the 2012 Games. In 2008, Denmark
was represented by Princess Nathalie, of
Sayn-Wittgenstein-Berleburg. lite foals
cost as much as sixty thousand dollars;
medal-winning horses go for millions;
the expenses of taking part are fantastic;
and the prize money is pitiful. The careers of top riders can last decades, so
the best horses and the richest benefactors have a way of gravitating to them,
concentrating the glory of dressage like
the blood of the Hapsburgs. Its a vicious circle, Astrid Appels, the editor
of Eurodressage.com, one of the sports
leading Web sites, told me. The weak
in the wallet can often not afford competing at international level.

The Dujardins knew all this. It has

always been a pompous sport, a money
sport, Ian Dujardin told me. We were
just about paying the rent, Jane said.
How was I going to fulfill what I
thought she needed to do?

D sports that you catch yourself watchressage is one of those Olympic

ing when you walk back into the room

and realize that you left the TV on. Its
legacy stuff, like archery, or the hammer,
that sneaked into the Games at some
point and hasnt quite been thrown out
although dressage has come closer than
most. At the 1952 and 1956 Olympics,
blatant favoritism by judges to riders from
their own nations almost led to the sports
expulsion. (Prince Bernhard, of the Netherlands, intervened.) The solution, which
involved filming each ride and arguing
about it for half an hour, pretty much
killed dressage as a spectator sport. The
interest of the public died down alarmingly, Colonel Alois Podhajsky, the director of the Spanish Riding School, in
Vienna, wrote of a visit to the Rome
Olympics, in 1960.
The sport was rejuvenated in the nineties, when a new event, the freestyle, came
on the scene.The freestyle made its Olympic dbut in Atlanta, in 1996, and since
then has helped nudge the sport toward
the same emotional, aesthetic realm as
figure skating: no one knows what the
hell is going on, but at least it looks nice.
In the freestyle, riders devise their own
routines, which are set to musical medleys, usually with any words removed,
because they can distract the horses. The
event is the climax of the Olympic competition and decides the individual medals. During the previous three days,
horses and riders compete for team medals in the sports traditional teststhe
Grand Prix and the Grand Prix Specialwhich involve a strict series of
movements. Then everyone watches
novel combinations of piaffe, half-pass
(in which the horses go forward and
sideways at the same time), and extended
trot, while the theme from Pirates of
the Caribbean blasts across the mange.
The freestyle probably saved dressage,
but it masks the sports essential grandeur. No other event in Rio this summer
can claim Xenophon, the ancient Greek
general and student of Socrates, as its
first coach. Xenophons On Horseman-

ship, written in the fourth century B.C.,

contains training exercises that are still
used in dressage, as well as the sports
ethical rationale: Anything forced or
misunderstood can never be beautiful.
The treatise was rediscovered during the
Renaissance and helped inspire the golden
age of classical ridingdisplays for kings
and courtiers in the great houses of Europewhich more or less ended with
the French Revolution.
Within the sport, none of this feels
particularly distant. Everything is judged
according to sacred preceptsharmony,
impulsion, self-carriage, submission
that have come down intact from the ancien rgime. Dressage feels culturally other
because it is. No country outside Europe
has managed to win an individual Olympic dressage medal since the United States
did it, in 1932. The most plausible story
behind the twelve cryptic letters that line
the mange and indicate where movements stop and start is that they mark
where German princes liked their underlings to stand. V is for vassal.
Since she began competing internationally, five years ago, Dujardin has occasionally threatened the feudal niceties
of dressage. She wears a crash helmet
with her tailcoat and white gloves, rather
than the customary top hat, and enjoys
dominating a sport in which she frequently finds herself up against more
gilded competitors. When they get in
the arena, Dujardin told me, they have
got no nerve. And yet Dujardins riding, which is normally so subtle as to be
virtually unnoticeable, is helping to reform dressage and to bring it to a state
of near-perfection. In 2006, the Dutch
three-time Olympic champion Anky
van Grunsven became the first rider to
score more than eighty per cent in a
Grand Prix test. In five years, Dujardin
has surpassed that sixteen times, and
currently holds the world record in all
three forms of the sport.
In 2014, Dujardin scored 94.300 per
cent in the freestyle, raising, at least in
theory, the possibility of the immaculate
ride. It is a new world, you can say, Suzanne Baarup, a Danish dressage judge
who has marked several of Dujardins
performances, told me. Why can you
not achieve a hundred per cent? Dujardin has never really been able to explain
what she does. I want to create, she said.
It is probably like an artist. They see in
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

35

their head what they want to draw, and

they draw it. It is like I have a feeling inside me that I want to create on a horse,
and that is what I do.

A jardin began to study dressage from

fter her stint with Thomas, Du-

a DVD. The presenter was Carl Hester,

an Olympic rider and trainer who has
competed for Britain since 1990. Hester
is from the Channel Island of Sark, where
there are no cars. His first horse was a
donkey, and in the past twenty years he
has done more than anyone to popularize dressage in a country more traditionally oriented toward rougher forms of
horse riding: foxhunting, racing, and
three-day eventing.
In her bedroom, Dujardin watched
Hester teach his horses the elevated strides
of dressage. Then she went and practiced
on the familys remaining pony, an Irish
thoroughbred named Charlie McGee.
After she left school, at sixteen, Dujardin became a groom at a yard run by Judy
Harvey, a trainer, judge, and BBC dressage commentator. Harvey recognized
Dujardins talent. She just watched it,
looked at it, did it, she told me. Harvey
had a horse that she had been trying to
teach to piaffe for months; Dujardin
taught it in two days.
In 2002, Janes mother died, leaving
an inheritance that allowed the Dujardins to put a down payment on a house
and to buy Charlotte a dressage horse.
That summer, Jane and her daughters
went to an auction, where a slim threeyear-old gelding bolted around the arena,
ran toward the wall, and performed a
smart flying change. Thats one for Charlotte, Jane said, and bought the horse, a
chestnut Westphalian named Fernandez,
for eighteen thousand pounds.
Dujardin trained Fernandez for three
years, working in a pub to earn money.
When she was twenty-one, she went to
a talent-spotting day at Addington
Manor, in Buckinghamshire. A panel of
judges watched fifty-six young horses
and their riders, and chose a handful for
a national training program. Carl Hester was helping out as a test rider. When
the judges didnt select Dujardin and Fernandez, Hester questioned their decision.
I said, Let me sit on it, he told me.
Dujardin watched as Hester rode Fernandez around the mange.
Hester got his big break as a young
36

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

rider when he was hired by Wilfried

Bechtolsheimer, a German industrialist
and dressage enthusiast based in Gloucestershire. Bechtolsheimer had a stable of
Grand Prix horses, and it was only by
riding them every day that Hester absorbed the intricacies of the sport. On
Fernandez, he was struck by the fact that
Dujardin had been able to train the horse
so well without ever having ridden a top
horse herself. She had managed to teach
that without having felt it, he said. The

judges didnt change their minds that day,

but Hester agreed to give Dujardin lessons. Dujardin kissed her saddle, and
swore that she would never wash it.

T and not unrelated to love. Young

he mysteries of dressage are many

horses mature well or badly. Riders fall

and lose their nerve. There is always a
search for the feeling of connection,
and no guarantee that you will find it.
Horses impossible for one rider will
dance for somebody else. Mediocre riders flourish on horses given up for the
same reason. There are relationships
that make everybody better than they
ever were, and there are horses and riders that simply never meet.
During one of her first lessons with
Hester, Dujardin saw a four-year-old dark
bay horse cantering down the far side of
the mange. I was, like, Oh, my God,
she recalled. He was so powerful. In
dressage, a young horses walk and canter are considered largely unalterable
(a trot is differenta trot you can fix),
and this horses canter was enormous. On
Fernandez, Dujardins challenge had always been to enhance the horses gaits,
but with this horse, Valegro, she could see
that the task was the opposite: to somehow capture and control his energy. When
Hester took Dujardin on, a few months
later, as a pupilin return for lessons and
lodging for Fernandez, she would clean
stables and warm up his horsespart of
her job was to exercise Valegro. I just
wanted to figure him out, she said.

Since leaving Bechtolsheimer, Hester had competed without major financial backing. He taught, rented out stables, and sold horses that he bought
young and trained himself. In 2005, he
sold his twelve-year-old Olympic horse,
Escapado, to a rival and added Valegro
to his stable. Valegro, a Dutch warmblood gelding, cost only four thousand
pounds, but he wasnt developing as Hester had hoped. His movements were so
strong that they hurt Hesters back when
he rode, and his frame was on the small
side. I wanted something more elegant,
Hester said. More worrying, Valegro was
a head-shakera sign of nerves that can
ruin a dressage horses career. In 2006,
Hester tried to sell Valegro but was unable to find a buyer. When Dujardin arrived, desperate to ride everything in the
yard, he was relieved. I was, like, You
can have him, he said.
In the spring of 2007, Hester took
part in the Sunshine Tour, a dressage
competition that takes place in the south
of Spain. He was gone for a month. Dujardin mucked out stables in the mornings, and during the afternoons, in the
yards indoor school, which had mirrors
not unlike those in a dance studioshe
rode Valegro. I just wanted him to relax,
she said. Dujardin has worked on anxious horses since she was a little girl. Families would bring round naughty ponies
for her to school. Every horse I get on
I can adapt to, she told me. Its like a
jigsaw puzzle.
Valegro was hot. It was just, Go, go,
go, go, go! Dujardin said. I used my
reins and nothing happened. The horse,
whose nickname was Blueberry, tossed
his head and raised his front legs at the
same time. Eventually, Dujardin managed to calm him down. When Hester
got back, Dujardin showed him Valegros
progress. The canter was coming into
shape. We used to walk down the drive
and then back again. I said, Please dont
sell him. Please dont sell him. Just let me
have a chance to ride.
They agreed that Dujardin would
begin the slow process of bringing Valegro through his levelsyears of training
and minor competitionsand Hester
would take over as the horse neared Grand
Prix status. I was going to take him on
as an eight-year-old, Hester said. It was
a typical arrangement for a dressage stable. Grooms and under-riders work on

younger horses. Competition riders and

their sponsorspeople with money on
the linetake them through to international competition. That is life, that is
the way it works, Dujardin said.
She trained relentlessly, riding as many
as eleven horses a day. Unusually, in a
sport that still retains an amateur, cavalier spirit, Dujardin lived as an athlete.
Since she was a teen-ager, she has swum,
worked out, watched her diet. Dujardins
riding is quiet, in part because her body
is strong. She could sit there with no
reins. She would still be in the same
place, Hester told me. She is a very
modern-day rider.
Her fault was pushing too hard. The
horses dont take it, Hester said. When
she rode them, she liked to pretend they
were winning a gold medal every day.
Early on, Hester nicknamed Dujardin
Edwina, after Edward Scissorhands, because her hands could be harsh, but he
was also invigorated by the younger
rider. Since the 2004 Olympics, when
Hester finished thirteenth, his own riding had been in a rut. Now in his midforties, Hester found that he wanted to
compete again.
In 2010, a TV crew made a short
documentary series about life at the
yard. Onscreen, Dujardin and Hester
bicker like an odd couple. (Hester is
eighteen years older than Dujardin, and
gay. She calls him Grandad.) The show
includes the moment when Hester was
supposed to take back Valegro. That fall,
at the national championships, Dujardin rode the horse in the Prix St. George,
the level below Grand Prix. The camera catches Dujardin as she leaves the
mange, fuming at an error that Valegro has made. Hes too hot, hes too
hot, she says. Hester waves her away.
A few minutes later, when Dujardin
finds out that she has won, she is transformed. She larks about with photographers, jumps into a hot tub in her riding breeches, and sips champagne. The
series ends with Dujardin daring Hester to ride Valegro now. Since 2007, the
pair had won every class they entered.
The master had been outfoxed by his
groom. She was absolutely not going
to give me that horse back, Hester said.
In March, 2011, Dujardin and Valegro competed in their first dressage
Grand Prix, in the South of France.
They came in first, and won six hun-

dred and fifty eurosbarely enough to

cover the trip. Hester has never paid
Dujardin a salary, and she was struggling to get by. By now, Fernandez had
reached Grand Prix level as well, and
Dujardin decided to sell the horse to
finance her career. The money paid off
her parents mortgage and allowed her
to buy a house near Hesters yard.
A Norwegian rider named Cathrine
Rasmussen bought Fernandez. Rasmussen is based in Denmark, where she works
out of the yard of Hasse Hoffmann, a
well-known trainer. When we spoke,
Hoffmann recalled his clients delight at
buying a horse from Hesters stable which
had once scored seventy-four per cent at
Grand Prix. Hoffmann warned Rasmussen that she might not be able to get the
same results as an experienced rider like
Hester. But yeah, Hasse, she replied. It
is the groom that is riding it. Hoffmann
laughed as he told me the story. You
know who the groom was? The fucking
best rider in the world.

J Olympic-level judge, saw Dujardin

ean-Michel Roudier, a French

ride for the first time at her second Grand

Prix, in April, 2011, in Saumur. Dujardin
was on Valegro, while Hester rode Uthopia, a dark bay stallion from his stable.
They finished second and first, respectively. Roudier was judging at the letter
M, on the long side of the mange. Oh,
my goodness, he said to himself. There
is the future of dressage.
For years, the sport had been ruled
by highly drilled, fine-boned horses from
Germany and the Netherlands, where
advances in breeding were producing

animals with long legs, capable of exceptional movements. But at Saumur

Roudier was captivated by the strength
of Hesters new horses. They moved
more like athletes. It is a sport, Roudier said. It is not only dancing. That
summer, a British team of four riders,
led by Hester and with Dujardin as the
newcomer, won the European dressage
title for the first time.
Dujardin was still relatively unknown
when she rode Valegro at Hagen, in
Germany, in the first major competition of 2012. She was on edge. You always think, Bloody hell, I am in Germany, she told me. (Since the 1964
Olympics, Germany has won the team
dressage gold ten times.) It was hot in
Hagen, and there were lots of flies. Valegros head-shaking came back. Dujardin managed to win her first test, the
Grand Prix, but as she was warming up
for her secondthe Grand Prix SpecialValegro began tossing his head,
and Hester and Dujardin had an argument about the way she was riding her
flying changes. Carl was shouting at
me, she said. And Im, like . . . my God,
dont do this to me.
It was a relief to be in the ring. In the
Grand Prix Special, each rider performs
the same thirty-six movements in order.
Music plays in the background, and in
Hagen, in honor of the upcoming London Olympics, it was the theme from
The Great Escape, the British war
movie. The refrain eerily matched the
steps of Valegros passage. Christoph
Hess, who was in charge of dressage instruction for Germanys national riding
federation, realized that no one was

land feast, and Hester opened the annual

horse, dog, and pet show. But Dujardin
was an intermittent, fragile presence at
the festivities. Valegro was for sale.

T time. Hester had done the same with

he plan had been in place for some

Watch out for his being better at boxing than you.

talking. Dujardin and Valegro eased from

one movement to the next. He did piaffe
transitions, passage, flying changes, Hess
said. Everything like being in another
world. Dujardin and Valegro set a new
world record of 88.022 per cent. Isobel
Wessels, a British judge at C, did her
best to keep her scores under control, to
avoid accusations of nationalism. It was
like a moment, she said. Like you remember where you were when Princess
Diana died.
The ride in Hagen not only made
Dujardin a contender for gold in London but also announced herand Hesteras potential redeemers of dressage.
Since the eighteenth century, when
classical-riding displays became the basis
for the modern circus, the sport has been
tainted by the notion that it is somehow
deviant and even cruel, a display of human power rather than of equine skill.
During the nineteen-nineties and the
aughts, a training technique known as
rollkur, in which the necks of dressage
horses are held tight against their chests,
became widely publicized. Horse-welfare
groups filmed German and Dutch riders
forcing their horses heads down for
minutes at a time. Photographs circulated
of horses with bleeding mouths and
tongues blue from tension. In 2009, Isabell Werth, a German multigold medallist, was banned for doping her horse with
fluphenazine, a sedative used in the treatment of schizophrenia. It was just a real
38

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

egotistical nightmare, Paul Belasik, an

American classical-riding trainer, told me.
Valegro and Dujardin presented a
different image of the sport. Hester was
known as an easygoing, orthodox trainer.
His horses jumped and went out in the
fields. In London, cheered on by huge
crowds at Greenwich Park, on the banks
of the Thames, Hester, Dujardin, and
Laura Bechtolsheimerthe daughter of
Hesters old patronwon the team gold,
Britains first-ever dressage medal.
The freestyle was held two days later,
in bright sunshine. Dujardin, on Valegro,
rode last. The penultimate competitor
was Adelinde Cornelissen, a Dutch rider
on Parzival, a fifteen-year-old chestnut
gelding. Performing to selections from
The Nutcracker, Cornelissen appeared
to ride flawlessly. Valegro stumbled into
his final pirouette. When Dujardin came
out of the mange, Hester said the mistake had probably cost her the gold. An
official checked the horses bit. High
above, Dujardin saw a woman leaning
over the grandstand. Youve done it! the
woman shouted, half an instant before
the stadium erupted. Like the roof fell
down, Dujardin said. The Dutch were
furious, and complained. But the result
stood. The judges noticed that Parzivals
jaws had crossed during the test, a sign
of the horses discomfort.
After the Games, Hester took the British riders to Sark to celebrate. There was
a vin dhonneur, a traditional Channel Is-

his previous Olympic horse, Escapado,

which he had co-owned with a friend,
Roly Luard, who restores English country houses. In 2007, Luard had taken a
half-share in Valegro, and now the two of
them had the opportunity to finance Hesters yard, and Luards involvement in the
sport, for years. I cant keep shelving out,
Luard told me. I cant just add lots of
horses to my books. For Dujardin, however, the sale of Valegro was a devastating
prospect. On Sark, Richard Davison, who
had managed the British dressage team,
sought to comfort her, but he didnt know
what to say. If you dont have a worldclass horse, he told me, you can be a
world-class rider, but it is worthless.
While Valegro was being vetted for
the sale, Dujardins parents took her to
Portugal to distract her. We walked round
and round and round, Jane said. You
could see she was in this never-never
land. Dujardin understood Hesters
financial limits better than most. Carl
has also come from a family with no background, she told me. But it was so hard,
because I really didnt want the horse to
go. And it was, like, just the fact that it
was for money. That was all. It was just
all about money.
Hester felt uneasy, too. In the back of
everyones mind was Totilas, a tall black
stallion, whose career had come to symbolize the sports excesses. Totilas was the
first horse to break the ninety-per-cent
barrier in dressage, taking his Dutch rider,
Edward Gal, to a clean sweep of the three
tests in the sports World Cup, in 2010.
Totilas caused mayhem in dressage. No
one had ever seen the movements executed with such panache. But the horse
also divided the sport. Gal was accused
of using rollkur in his traininga charge
that he deniesand critics saw Totilas
as an artificial creation. Sometimes people thought it was a little bit too much
circus, Suzanne Baarup, the Danish
judge, told me. Then, weeks after his triumph at the World Cup, Totilas was sold
to a German yard, for a rumored fifteen
million euros. Eurodressage.com crashed
from the traffic. But Totilas never went

as well for his new rider. Injured before

the London Games, he retired from the
sport last year.
There were two potential buyers for
Valegro, both from overseas. Luard and
Hester negotiated for six months with
the second. Hester veered between his
misgivings and his plans to buy houses
and cars, and to pay off his debts. It was
very exciting, he said. I cant deny it.
But Dujardin suffered in the uncertainty.
She and Hester argued. Dujardin and
her partner, a South African longdistance runner named Dean Wyatt
Golding, briefly broke up. At the last moment, the bid to buy Valegro fell through.
They were all set, Luard told me. Then
the money never went in the bank.
Valegros future took eighteen months
to resolve. Hester finally stopped talking
to the buyers, and in early 2014 he and
Luard formed a syndicate, in which a
new investor, Anne Barrott, bought a
third of the horse. Valegro would stay at
the yard.
Later that year, Dujardin devised a
new freestyle for Valegro. She made the
floor plan as difficult as she could imagine, opening with a half-pass in trot that
moved into a half-pass in passage, followed by a combined piaffe and pirouette and straight into another phase of
passage. She rode an extended canter into
a double pirouette, and set the test to
music from How to Train Your Dragon.
Dujardin and Valegro performed the routine for the first time at the Olympia
horse show, in London, that December.
Together, they broke the last of Totilass
world records. I literally did the final bit
with tears rolling down my face, because
he is the sort of horse that gives you everything, Dujardin said. He gives you
everything, and I can feel the partnership
and the connection. He is, like, with me.

O travelled to Gloucestershire to watch

n a recent Tuesday morning, I

Hester and Dujardin train. Hesters yard

is on the edge of the Forest of Dean, on
the grounds of an old mill. Rio will be
Valegros final Olympicshe is fourteen,
and the plan is to retire him at the end
of the year. Hester and Dujardin have
been keeping the horse under wraps in
recent months, competing only once and
training at seven-thirty in the morning,
when they have the yard to themselves.
Dujardin is spending more of her time

developing new horses, and that morning she was working on Mount St. John
Freestyle, a seven-year-old mare that she
is training for the Tokyo Games, in 2020.
Freestyle belongs to Emma Blundell,
a supermarket heiress who runs a large
dressage stud farm in Yorkshire, and the
young horse has already shown an unusual aptitude for the sports advanced
movements. Youre such a clever person, Dujardin said, stroking her brown
back. Arent you? Two grooms tacked
up the horse, putting on white booties to
prevent her rear and front hooves from
clashing. Nearby shelves held tubs of gut
balancer, biotin hoof supplement, and
electrolyte-maintenance liquid. There
were two Valegro figurines in boxes. Dujardin often feels cold, and although the
day was warm, she wore a gray hoodie
with her Great Britain crash helmet.
At the far end of the mange, Hester
sat on one of two chairs, raised on a dais.
Six dogs tumbled around him. Geese
barked nearby. Dujardin entered the arena
and began to trot and then canter so close
to the edge that, each time she and Freestyle passed, the air stirred briefly. As she
practiced movements, Hester called out
in the dense patois of dressage. O.K.,
the last one is downhill. You need a little bit more canter, a little bit more arch,
he said, of a series of flying changes that
Dujardin was riding past a long mirror
set up at B.
Dujardin performed leg yields and
shoulder-ins, flexing exercises that date
back hundreds of years, and Hester
mused for a moment on their history.
Moving away from a sword, he said.
Moving in to hack someones head off,
or whatever. He kept a quiet score of
Dujardins movements: seven point five,
eight, the occasional nine. I asked
whether Dujardin was doing the same
in her head. She just says either its good
or its shit, Hester said. Dujardin barely
spoke during the session. Her eyes
seemed focussed in the middle distance.
The detail of dressage riding takes place
in the seatwhere one creatures balance informs the other. Dujardin cantered toward us in a zigzag, skipping the
horse onto a different leg at each turn.
There you go, Hester called. Dujardin
swept past. Bit twisted, she said.
A few days later, Dujardin and Valegro rode their final rehearsal before Rio
at a small dressage competition held at

Hartpury College, an agricultural school

a few miles from Hesters yard. For the
freestyle performance at the Games, Dujardin has decided to keep her recordbreaking floor plan, but she had asked
her composer, Tom Hunt, to arrange a
new Brazilian-themed score. Hunt
e-mailed the latest version of the music
that afternoon. Dujardin and Valegro
were on at ten-fifteen at night. They were
the final pair, and a crowd of six hundred
was there to watch.
Half an hour before they went on,
Dujardin and Valegro warmed up in a
floodlit barn on a hill above the colleges
indoor arena. Dujardin wore a red down
vest over her dark-blue tailcoat. In the
flesh, Valegro is like a small train. Puffing
among the two or three other horses
waiting to perform, he seemed possessed
of a different force. Up close, when he
shouldered past, the veins on his flanks
looked like the estuary of a river system.
Hester watched, speaking into a small
microphone that transmitted to an earpiece in Dujardins helmet. Work on
the lightness, he said, as she practiced
a pirouette at the far end of the barn. As
Valegro has aged and mellowed, Dujardins competitive energy has remained
undimmed, and one of Hesters challenges is to keep the two in synch.
Smooth, he said, as she rode a set of
perfect changes toward him. Good.
Gradually, other riders went out to
perform. Valegro and Dujardin had the
mange to themselves. She rode past a
mirror in passage. She was about to take
the horse down the hill. She was about
to take off her vest. She was about to
ride into the arena and raise her right
hand for the music to begin. She was
about to ride her impossible routine, to
follow an extended canter with a double pirouette. She was about to score
more than ninety per cent, enough for
gold in Rio. Her mother, watching from
a balcony above the arena, was about to
cry. And plenty of other people would
cry, too, because it moves us when we
see a person in true communion with a
horse. Dujardin was ready. Valegro crossed
the barn in half-pass. Hester made to
leave. Then Dujardin turned Valegro
back into the middle of the mange.
She wanted to ride the steps of one last
piaffe. The horses shoulders began to
rise. But Hester cut them off. Enough,
he said. Save it for the ring.

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

39

A REPORTER AT LARGE

THE DISTANT SHORE

In Peru, a killing brings an isolated tribe into contact with the outside world.

efore Nicols (Shaco) Flores

was killed, deep in the Peruvian
rain forest, he had spent decades
reaching out to the mysterious people
called the Mashco Piro. Flores lived in
the Madre de Dios regiona vast jungle surrounded by an even vaster wilderness, frequented mostly by illegal
loggers, miners, narco-traffickers, and a
few adventurers. For more than a hundred years, the Mashco had lived in almost complete isolation; there were rare
sightings, but they were often indistinguishable from backwoods folklore.
Flores, a farmer and a river guide,
was a self-appointed conduit between
the Mashco and the regions other indigenous people, who lived mostly in
riverside villages. He provided them
with food and machetes, and tried to
lure them out of the forest. But in 2011,
for unclear reasons, the relationship
broke down; one afternoon, when the
Mashco appeared on the riverbank and
beckoned to Shaco, he ignored them. A
week later, as he tended his vegetable
patch, a bamboo arrow flew out of the
forest, piercing his heart. In Perus urban
centers, the incident generated lurid
news stories about savage natives attacking peaceable settlers. After a few
days, though, the attention subsided,
and life in the Amazonian backwater
returned to its usual obscurity.

In the following years, small groups

of Mashco began to venture out of the
forest, making fleeting appearances to
travellers on the Madre de Dios River.
A video of one such encounter, which
circulated on the Internet, shows a naked
Mashco man brandishing a bow and
arrow at a boatload of tourists. In another, the same man carries a plastic bottle of soda that he has just been given.
Mostly, the Mashco approach outsiders with friendly, if skittish, curiosity,
but at times they have raided local settlements to steal food. A few times, they
have attacked.
The latest attack, last May, took the
life of a twenty-year-old indigenous
man, Leonardo Prez, and this time the
news did not subside. People from Prezs
community wanted revenge, and the
governor of Madre de Dios took the
opportunity to rail about federal neglect
of the area. The government needed to
be seen to do something.
A few weeks later, officials announced
that they were sending a team to engage with the Mashco, drawn from the
Department of Native Isolated People
and People in Initial Contact, a recently
created sub-office of Perus Ministry of
Culture. When I spoke to Lorena Prieto Coz, the head of the department,
she emphasized that the government
preferred not to interfere with isolated

On the shore of the Madre de Dios River, in Peru, a group of Mashco Piro
await observers sent by the Department of Native Isolated People.
40

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

MAP BY LUKE SHUMAN

BY JON LEE ANDERSON

PHOTOGRAPHS BY AARON VINCENT ELKAIM

indigenous people, but the threat of violence had left no choice. We didnt
initiate this contactthey did, she said.
But its our responsibility to take charge
of the situation. She told me that an
outpost had been set up near where the
Mashco appeared, and a team from the
department was going soon. She invited
me to accompany them.
Only about a hundred groups of isolated indigenous people are
believed to still exist, with
more than half of them living in the wilderness that
straddles Perus border with
Brazil. Fiona Watson, the
field director of the tribalpeoples-rights group Survival International, told me
that the situation was dire
for the regions aislados, as
isolated people are called in Spanish. In
a cramped London office, Watson laid
out satellite maps to show me their territory, small patches in a geography overtaken by commerce: arcs of slash-andburn farmland; huge expanses where
agribusinesses raise cattle and grow soy;
mining camps that send minerals to
China; migrant boomtowns. Some of
the indigenous groups were hemmed in
on all sides by mining and logging concessions, both legal and illegal. One
tribe in Brazil, the Akuntsu, had been
reduced to four members. Near them,
a man known to anthropologists only
as the Man of the Hole lives in a hollow dug in the forest floor, warding off
intruders by firing arrows. He is believed
to be the last of his tribe.
Unless the trends were halted, Watson said, the Mashco Piro and the other
remaining aislados were doomed to extinctiona disquieting echo of the situation of Native Americans in the nineteenth century, as white settlers forced
them to retreat or die. Theres so much
at stake here, Watson said. These people are as much a part of the rich tapestry of humanity as anyone else, but
its all going down the drain.

I made several trips into the Peruvian

n the late nineteen-seventies, I

Amazon, at a time when the jungle was

just beginning to open. The governments of Brazil and Peru had recently
agreed to build a trans-Amazonian highway, linking the Atlantic and the Pacific,
42

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

but, aside from some muddy unfinished

tracks, the Peruvians efforts had been
defeated by the green hell of the rain
forest. The backwoods remained inhabited only by animals and by native people, who in those days were still referred
to as wild Indians.
On one such trip, in 1977, I travelled
up the Ro Callera, near the unmarked
Brazilian border, with a local guide
who spoke a few indigenous
dialects. We rode in a long
wooden dugout canoe known
as a peke-peke, its name derived from the sputtering noise
of its motor, a Briggs & Stratton outboard. The motor had
a propeller that could be
raisedessential in shallow
waters. Even so, there were
stretches where we were forced
to get out and pull the canoe by hand.
One day, after hours on the river with
no sign of human habitation, we rounded
a bend and saw a dugout canoe, carrying a woman and a child, both with long
black hair and naked torsos. At the sight
of us, they began screaming and paddling frantically toward the riverbank,
where a row of crude shelters sat on a
bluff that was cleared of jungle. They
shouted a word over and over: pishtaco.
We came ashore cautiously, pulling
the boat. The camp had been hastily
deserted; I found a fish still roasting
on an open fire. The boatman nervously
said that we should not continue upriver, or the Indians might attack us.
When I asked him about the word the
woman and child had shouted, he said
that they believed I was a pishtaco, an
evil person who had come to steal the
oil from their bodies.
Months later, a Peruvian anthropologist explained to me the roots of their
fear. The term pishtaco, he speculated,
originated in the sixteenth century, when
Spanish conquistadors such as Lope de
Aguirre began exploring the Amazon.
These initial contacts had been so nightmarish as to inspire a cautionary tale
that still endured: some of the Spaniards, frustrated that their muskets and
cannons rusted so quickly in the jungle
humidity, were said to have killed Indians and boiled their bodies in iron pots,
then used their fat to grease the metal.
For the next three hundred years, the
European settlers and their descendants

made few inroads into the Amazon.

Then rubber was discovered, and, in the
eighteen-seventies, South American rubber barons began to brutalize the jungles of Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, and
Brazil. In 1910, the Anglo-Irish diplomat Roger Casement spent three months
among rubber traders and the indigenous people who were forced to work
for them, and wrote of the abuses he
had witnessed. These [people] are not
only murdered, flogged, chained up like
wild beasts, hunted far and wide and
their dwellings burnt, their wives raped,
their children dragged away to slavery
and outrage, but are shamelessly swindled into the bargain. These are strong
words, but not adequately strong. The
condition of things is the most disgraceful, the most lawless, the most inhuman,
I believe that exists in the world today.
The caucheros, as the rubber barons
were called, were daring, ruthless men
the equivalent, in a sense, of modern-day
narco-traffickers like El Chapo Guzmn. The most murderously flamboyant
of them was probably Carlos Fermn
Fitzcarrald. Immortalized in Werner
Herzogs 1982 film Fitzcarraldo, he was
a man of limitless ambition who bloodily installed himself as Perus Rey del
Cauchothe Rubber King.
Fitzcarrald was born in 1862, the eldest son of an Irish-American sailor
turned trader and his Peruvian wife. By
the age of thirty, he had become wealthy
enough to build a twenty-five-room riverside mansion, with grounds tended by
Chinese gardeners. Seeking to expand
his operations, he began looking for an
overland route that would connect the
Urubamba River with tributaries of the
Brazilian Amazon. Using thousands of
indigenous conscripts to hack through
the jungle, he found that the headwaters were just six miles apart, on either
side of a fifteen-hundred-foot peak, and
he conceived a railroad that would unite
the two river systems. The plan was to
sail an iron-plated steamboat, loaded
with railroad ties, to the Urubambas
headwaters. There, native porters would
lay a track over the mountain, disassemble the ship, lug its pieces across, and
put it back together.
In 1894, he launched an expedition
to secure the route, and before setting
out he addressed his followers from a
balcony of his great house. Like a good

and just father, I take you with me, he

said. I will reward you with the bounty
of the divine mountains that extend
from where the Sun rises, and where
abundant hunting awaits.
Their quarry ended up being mostly
the Mashco, who then dominated the
region. Euclides da Cunha, the Brazilian scientist and explorer, described Fitzcarralds meeting with the Mashcos
leader, in which he mustered his armed
men to intimidate the natives into
coperating. The sole response of the
Mashco was to inquire what arrows
Fitzcarrald carried, da Cunha wrote.
Smiling, the explorer passed him a bullet from his Winchester. The Mashco
leader examined it, amused, and then
took one of his arrows and jabbed it into
his own arm, looking on implacably as
blood ran out of the wound. He turned
his back on the surprised adventurer,
returning to his village with the illusion
of superiority, da Cunha continued.
Half an hour later roughly one hundred Mashcos, including their recalcitrant chief, lay murdered, stretched out
on the riverbank.
It was the beginning of a seemingly
endless cycle of destruction. Eight decades after Fitzcarralds rampage, I took
another trip, on the Madre de Dios,
where a gold boom had recently begun.
Along the river were small camps of
prospectors, who had set up diesel-powered pumps and wooden sluices and
were noisily gouging away the riverbanks. Their arrival had clearly unsettled the local Amarakaeri people. The
Amarakaeri had once been a sizable
warrior tribe, but, by the time I arrived,
perhaps five hundred remained, living
in rudimentary hamlets, where they survived by fishing with poison and by panning for gold. As for the Mashco, who
had lived upriver, there was no sign of
them whatsoever. It was as if they had
never existed.

T gathered a few months ago in

he Ministry of Cultures team

Cuzco, high in the Andes, where a van

was loaded with provisions. The leader
was an anthropologist named Luis Felipe Torres, a slim man in his early
thirties with an aquiline face and the
unassuming manner of a professional
observer. He was joined by Glenn Shepard, an American ethnobotanist. A

youthful-looking man of fifty, Shepard

had lived for a year in the nineteen-eighties among the Matsigenka people, who
shared territory with the Mashco; he
had learned their language and returned
many times since. Shepard worked at
the Emlio Goeldi Museum, an Amazonian-research center in Brazil, but he
travelled to Peru frequently as an informal adviser to Torress department.
Soon after we set out, the paved road
ended, and we began dropping down
the eastern escarpment of the Andes,
zigzagging through cloud forest and into
the humid lowland jungle. After seven
hours, we reached the end of the road,
at Atalaya, a huddle of rough wooden
houses and bodegas on the upper Madre
de Dios River. Atalaya was a destination
for adventure tourists; at the shoreline
was a jetty lined with brightly painted
river canoes. But the recent killing had
threatened business in the area. A sign,
depicting the silhouette of an aislado with
a bow and arrow, announced, Beware!
This is a zone of transit for Isolated Indigenous Peoples. Avoid conflicts: Dont
attempt to contact them. Dont give them
clothes, food, tools, or anything else.
Dont photograph them; they might interpret the camera as a weapon. In the
event of incidents, contact the Ministry
of Culture.
Torres had recently overseen a rendezvous with a group of Mashco Piro:
several families, possibly interrelated,
who were led by a young man called
Kamotolo. In photographs that Torres

showed me, Kamotolotall and beardless, with alert eyeswas clearly recognizable as the man who appeared in the
Internet video carrying a soda bottle.
Other pictures showed an older man,
with wild hair and a scruffy beard, who
was likely Kamotolos father. He was
rumored by locals to have killed Shaco
Flores; Kamotolo was thought to have
killed Leonardo Prez.
At the departments outpost, Torres
had left a small team of local Yine people, who spoke the same language as the
Mashco. Their goal was to discover why
they were coming out of the forest, and
to get them to stop their attacks. But the
Mashco didnt like answering questions
about themselves, so Torress crew knew
little about them. They estimated that
between five hundred and a thousand
Mashco lived in four groups in the jungle of Peru and Brazil, around an expanse of protected land called Man National Park. They were related to the
Yine, but separated by history: the Yine
were the descendants of Fitzcarralds
conscripts, and the Mashco were believed
to be the descendants of those who had
fled. Former farmers who had become
nomadic hunter-gatherers, they had forgotten how to plant food, and were the
only indigenous people in the region who
didnt know how to fish. But they hunted
efficiently, using unusually stout arrows,
whose heads were attached in a distinctive manner that allowed anthropologists who found discarded shafts to track
their movements. The community that

Torress team was trying to contact was

perhaps three dozen people. In their first
encounters, it had been unclear how much
they understood of the outside world.
The Department of Native Isolated
People was drastically underfunded and
understaffed, so Torres shuttled between
the Mashco outpost and other assignments in Madre de Dios. He had just
returned from an even more remote area,
where he had followed up on reports of
aislados whose territory was being threatened by loggers. He showed me photographs of the remains of a cookfire and
a campsite, evidence that the department
could use to begin the process of having
the land protected. But Torres spoke of
his work as almost futile. The departmenttasked with looking out for all
of Perus isolated indigenous people
was a tiny office with little political clout.
The Ministry of Energy and Mines, by
contrast, was a well-funded agency with
the power to open up the Amazon to
development that would bring wealth
and jobs. In the battle for the governments ear, Torres said dryly, you can
imagine who is more influential.

ural resources. Opening up the jungle

has made Peru one of the worlds largest exporters of gold (as well as the second-largest producer of cocaine), and
the Camisea natural-gas facility, north
of Man National Park, provides half
of the countrys energy. Politicians have
been hesitant to disrupt business. Alan
Garca, the President from 2006 to 2011,
insisted that the isolated tribes were a
fantasy devised by environmentalists to
stop development; an official in the state

between their huts, Meirelles said, They

are the last free people on this planet.
For Perus city dwellers, who had thought
little about the isolated people, the film
was a revelation. Soon afterward, the
country amended its laws to say that the
aislados should be left alone.
But, even as Peru embraced the nocontact policy, a new idea was emerging. Last June, the journal Science published a paper in which two prominent
anthropologists, Kim Hill and Robert

F Brazil defined the regions approach

or much of the twentieth century,

to the aislados: its National Indian Foundation sent scouts to contact them, with
the goal of assimilation. These efforts
were mostly calamitous for the contacted people, who tended to die out
from disease, or to wind up living in
frontier shantytowns, where the men
often succumbed to alcoholism and the
women to prostitution. In barely fifty
years, eighty-seven of Brazils two hundred and thirty known native groups
died off, and the ones that remained lost
as much as four-fifths of their population. In the nineteen-eighties, officials
at the National Indian Foundation, horrified by the decline, began to enforce
a no contact policy: when its agents
spotted aislados, they designated their
land Terras Indgenasareas forbidden
to outsiders.
Most of the neighboring countries
adopted Brazils no-contact policy, which
anthropologists now see as the best way
to insure the survival of the remaining
aislados. But, for Peru, land in the Amazon was too rich to give up. In the past
two decades, the country has experienced an economic boom, based on nat44

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

Luis Felipe Torres, an anthropologist with the states isolated-tribes team.

oil company compared them to the Loch
Ness monster. As loggers, miners, and
narco-traffickers moved in, aislados fled
across the border into Brazil, seeking
sanctuary.
In 2011, though, Garca was voted
out of office, and his successor overturned his policies. Around the same
time, a documentary about the aislados
ran on Peruvian TV. In it, a BBC film
crew flew with Jos Carlos dos Reis
Meirelles, a prominent agent from Brazils National Indian Foundation, over a
part of the Amazon where aislados land
was being invaded by illegal loggers. As
the aislados stared up from the red earth

Walker, argued that isolated indigenous

groups were not viable in the long term,
because their environments are too degraded or too vulnerable to incursions.
Instead, they advocated a new policy,
built around well-organized contacts.
The article sparked a furious controversy. Walker and Hill play straight into
the hands of those who want to open
Amazonia up for resource extraction and
investment, Stephen Corry, the director of Survival International, wrote. Let
there be no doubt: isolated tribes are
perfectly viable, as long as their lands
are protected. To think we have the right
to invade their territories and make

contact with them, whether they want

it or not, with all the likely consequences,
is pernicious and arrogant.
But protecting the tribes land might
be an unrealistic hope. The governor of
Madre de Dios, Luis Otsuka, is the former head of a statewide miners association, and he has not changed his loyalties. He has allowed gold miners to strip
large sections of jungle, and, a few months
before I arrived, he sent bulldozers to
begin pushing a road through the forest,
which would run along the Madre de
Dios River, connecting the gold-mining
areas to the regional capital, Puerto Maldonado. It would be, in a sense, the fulfillment of Fitzcarralds dream. It would
also be the destruction of the areas wilderness, and of the Mashco. Indigenousrights groups sued to stop construction,
but Torres had little doubt that the road
would eventually go through. When he
met with Otsuka, as construction was
starting, the governor said bluntly that
he thought the Mashco Piro should be
contacted, and by force.
Last year, Glenn Shepard was asked
to look into the situation, and he and
Torres spent ten days speaking to local
people. Shepard feels that the best thing
for the Mashco would be total isolation.
But, by the end of the trip, he agreed
that it had become impossible. The
Mashco Piro are already talking to us,
in a sense, but its just one way so far
theyre coming out and killing people,
he said. We need to make it a two-way
dialogue. There has to be a next step.
The only thing is right now we dont
know what that is.

T to discourage fighting between the

orress most pressing job was

Mashco and the other indigenous people in the area, so his first stop was Shipetiari, the village where Leonardo Prez
had been killed, which is almost exclusively inhabited by Matsigenka. Shipetiari, set back in the jungle, is composed
of family compoundslarge huts on
stiltsconnected by a labyrinth of footpaths. At the village meeting house, we
were greeted by three protection agents:
local men whom Torres had hired to
patrol the community and to report any
incidents. They had been given walkietalkies and khaki vests with the departments logo. Torres asked them to gather
residents to discuss the latest develop-

ments, and in the next half hour a couple of dozen men and women, some
with small children, wandered in and
took seats on the floor.
The villagers sat with stubborn expressions. Most of them wore cast-off
Western clothing, except for one woman,
who had on a traditional cotton robe
with a hand-rendered design of black
and white stripes. After stilted greetings, Shipetiaris schoolteacher stood to
say that the community was frustrated.
On an earlier visit by Torres, people had
aired their views, and there seemed to
have been no results. A brother was
killed here and nothing happens, the
teacher said. Thats why when foreigners and N.G.O.s come from outside we
dont tell them anything!
Torres listened diplomatically, and
then reminded the Matsigenka that his
department had hired the protection
agents, who were on constant patrol. He
was paying the village for the use of the
meeting house, and had promised to install toilets and a water filter. But this
roof leaks, he said, pointing to the palmleaf thatching overhead; perhaps, he
suggested, some of the villagers might
volunteer to collect palm fronds to patch
it. There was a long silence. Eventually,
a woman named Rufina Rivera said,
But what happens if we go into the
forest to get fronds and the Mashco
shoot arrows at us? Torres said calmly,
O.K., understood. Well bring the
fronds from somewhere else.
Torres was careful to refer to the
Mashco using a term that the department was trying to encourage: nomole,
which means brother in the Yine language. The crowd seemed to feel little
affinity. For them, the Mashco were outsiders. Although the Matsigenkas traditional home was a couple of hundred
miles to the north, they had long maintained a small outpost in Shipetiari, and
in the eighties a larger group had moved
in, eking out an existence by growing
yucca and bananas. According to Shepard, they also worked with timber buyers, who hired them illegally to log valuable hardwoods.
The presence of the Mashco, and of
the officials tracking them, made it difficult for the Matsigenka to live normal
lives, much less expand their logging
operations. And Prezs death threatened to bring about an open conflict.

Following the killing, a squad of Matsigenka men armed with guns had pursued the Mashco into the forest. After
hiking for eight hours, they found their
camp, but it was empty, so they destroyed
it and threw the Mashcos arrows in the
river. It was both a defensive act and a
punishment: the cane that the Mashco
use for arrows ripens only once a year,
and they would not be able to hunt until
they were replaced.
Torres pointed to the protection
agents, and said that he hoped to be
able to hire more, but until there was
more money in his budget he needed
two volunteers to help out. Rivera insisted that he hire more agents, and give
them walkie-talkies. The schoolteacher
said, The Mashco are going to come
back. For sure they will come back to
look for food here when the rains come.
Rivera yelled, The solution is to send
all the Mashco across the river! Everyone laughed. Torres said, Thats not possible. If they returned, he said, the community should not be aggressive: If you
lose some bananas, they can always be
replaced. If you kill one of them, youll
live in a state of war. Gesturing toward
the forest, he said, The Mashco are going
to continue to live here. So, if they come
again, the thing to do is to stay in your
houses and then let us know so we can
come, and well use the contact we are
having with them to let them know its
not good to attack people.
Rivera said, So you say if the Mashco
come we shouldnt do anything. But, if
they kill someone of mine, Ill kill
themof course I will! If they come
and kill my husband, I will kill them,
and if they ask me why I am in prison
I will say, For killing Mashco.
After the meeting, we walked with
the protection agents to the edge of the
village and stopped on a broad path
shaded by trees. One of the agents
walked into the bush and crouched
down. This is where the Mashco was
hiding, he said. Here he drew his bow
and fired the arrow that killed Leo.
Around us, the forest was silent, except
for the trilling of a few cicadas.

N called their outpost, was two hours

omole, as Torres and his crew

farther downriver: a longhouse, made of

crude planks painted green, propped up
on stilts on a bluff above the river. The

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

45

surrounding forest had been slashed and

burned, and the open land was still dotted with blackened stumps. Visitors
pitched tents outside the longhouse; in
the woods, at a discreet distance, a trench
latrine had been dug.
At the edge of the bluff, a wooden
bench offered a view of the rocky shoreline on the other side, where the Mashco
had most recently appeared. The river
was perhaps four hundred feet across,
and in the middle was a pair of low islets that were submerged when the
water was high. Heavy rains in the past
few days had turned the river into a
swirling gray-green torrent, erupting
into white water around rocks and
fallen trees.
There were five Yine agents at the
Nomole post, led by Romel Ponceano,
a husky man in his late thirties, who
was a chief in a community several days
journey away. His family had a long history in the region, working as guides for
the rubber barons and, more recently,
for oil explorers and mahogany loggers.
Like a poacher who had become a game
warden, Ponceano had begun working
for Torres, and had made himself indispensable. He was aided by Reynaldo
Laureano, a sturdy man in his fifties,
and Nelly Flores, a plump, reserved
woman in her thirties, both from the
nearby Yine settlement of Diamante.
When we arrived, Ponceano reported
that the Mashco had appeared a week
earlier, and said they would return in six
days, but they hadnt shown up. Ponceano speculated that the rain had flooded
the rivers that demarcated their territory,
and the Mashco, who didnt know how
to swim, had been unable to ford them.
As we waited, a pattern developed.
People took turns as sentinels on the
bluff, watching for the Mashco and listening for a loud hooting whistle, the
sound they made to announce their approach. The watchers kept their hopes
in check. In three decades of visiting the
area, Shepard had never seen the Mashco:
he had encountered them only once, as
warning whistles in the forest.
Each morning, we were awakened
in our tents by the chattering of tiny titi
monkeys and the plunking call of paucar birds. The days were long and hot,
punctuated by meals of river fish with
boiled yucca or rice, or spaghetti and
tuna that Torres had brought from
46

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

Cuzco. There was an occasional flurry

of excitement. One morning, a tapir appeared in the reeds of the nearest islet,
and Laureano scrambled after it with a
shotgun, returning empty-handed. Another day, a large, hairy tarantula was
killed inches from the door of the longhouse. For entertainment, people stared
at the river, or watched the endless succession of bright-colored macaws that
flew squawking overhead.
The team spent most of its time at a
table in the longhouse, poring over photographs of the Mashco, speculating
about their relationships with one another. By bringing them bananas, which
they loved but didnt know how to cultivate, and communicating in basic Yine,
the team had established a tentative rapport. In several short encounters, they
had identified about twenty Mashco by
name. For now, they were emerging from
the forest about once a week, but that
was all.
One morning, there was a sound of
distant whistling, and several of us ran
toward the riverbank. Flores, ahead of
the others, shook her head: the sound
had come from a panguana bird, whose
call resembled the Mashcos whistle.

E it was clear that they were nearby.

ven if we couldnt see the Mashco,

People in Diamante, an hour downriver,

had reported quiet raids, in which the
Mashco came looking for food and for
things to steal. Torres hoped that they
would desist now that his team was
feeding them, but if the rains kept them
from the meeting point there was a risk
that they would start again.
At a community meeting in Diamante, a woman named Nena, carrying
a baby on her back, stood nervously to
say that she had visited her vegetable
patcha small plot that Peruvians call
a chacraand found indications that
the Mashco had been there. It had happened a week ago, and she was still afraid
to return. Torres wanted to review the
evidence, so we crossed the river in our
peke-peke, with Nena pointing the way.
Onshore, we followed her through a
maize field to a spot where she stopped
and looked around fearfully. At the entrance to a barely discernible path into
the forest, she pointed at two twigs that
had been bent so that their tips crossed.
Ponceano inspected them closely, then

walked on, scrutinizing the path. There

were four more sets of bent twigs: a
warning left by the Mashco.
What does it mean? I asked.
It means you should not go any farther, Ponceano said. If you do, they
will shoot you with arrows.
Nena led us back to the riverbank,
sweating and breathing in nervous gasps.
Her husband worked in a sawmill, far
away, and came home only every few
months, so she tended the plot herself,
often bringing along the baby and her
three older children. I keep the baby
here, she said, touching the bundle on
her back. Then she gestured at a shaded
area under some trees. I usually leave
the others there, playing. Now I cant
do that anymore. With a distressed
look, she said that she didnt know how
she was going to feed her family now.

A back upriver, the boat crew began

s we approached Nomole, going

shouting and pointing to the far shore.

A group of people had assembled, their
reddish skin distinct against the scree
of white rock. The Mashco had returned.
Across the river, the Nomole team
was setting out from the shore: Flores
and Ponceano, as well as a doctor named
Fernando Mendieta, who sometimes
volunteered. To avoid disrupting their
work, Torres steered us toward a long
sandbar, a hundred feet from where the
Mashco had gathered. We crept toward
a large tree snagged there, which offered
us cover while we watched.
The Mashco on the shore had very
erect posture and moved economically,
seeming always to be in synch. Their
leader, Kamotolo, was tall and squarejawed, with cropped black hair, and was
completely naked; so was a younger man,
who looked to be a teen-ager. There were
two women, who had long, thick hair
and wore flaps of woven bark on strings
around their waists, which protected their
genitals but left their bottoms bare. Both
women were pregnant, and they tended
to five children, all of them naked.
The Mashco had a ritual greeting:
they hugged visitors, put their heads
on their shoulders, and then felt inside
their clothing, as if to ascertain their sex.
For perhaps forty minutes, the two
groups mingled: the Mashco touching
and probing, and the Nomole team
acquiescing, mostly in good humor. The

HOW I BECAME A SAINT

Some sloppy Googling at the Vatican,

and James Richardson the soccer commentator,
or the JR who builds boats, or some JR
the Internet has never heard of
lost out on an immortal gig:
St. Jim, Patron of Apology.
Sorry, guys: admittedly your Works
were nobler than mine, your Faith purer.
But as for the required Miracles!
The one with the radiant child, the one with starlings
sweeping away the skythere were millions
I happened to be present for.
The water a clear stone over stones; the stream
of her gray hair, up close, clear;
how every way you look the fog
is thicker than where you are.
James Richardson
Mashco women approached Flores and,
as she giggled, touched her breasts and
stomach. Kamotolo strode along the
shore, sat down in the Nomole pekepeke, and then returned to the group,
looking excited. The team had brought
two large hands of bananas and set them
down near a fallen log. Kamotolo periodically went over, sat on the log, and
ate bananas, one after the other.
There was little talk, and no sense of
urgency; it was as if the Nomole team
had crossed the river to play with a group
of largely mute children. A couple of
the younger Mashco swarmed Ponceano
and made him race with them, back and
forth from the tree line to the shore.
They seemed delighted by his chubbiness. One of the women approached
Mendieta, and tugged at his shirt, a purple polo. He gently resisted, but the
woman finally got the shirt from him
and pulled it on.
When the team climbed into the
peke-peke to leave, the Mashco lined
up to watch. As the boat pulled away,
Kamotolo began staring at us and
shouting. I had seen him questioning
Ponceano about us, pointing in our direction. Now, without the team there
to distract them, the Mashco began
throwing rocks, which splashed into
the river. We hastily followed the Nomole team back to the outpost.

On the riverbank, the team members were elated, swapping stories about
their interactions. When I asked Flores
about the women, she put a hand to her
mouth in embarrassment. They felt my
breasts and stomach and said to me,
Youre pregnant, arent you? When I
said, No, Im not, they said, Tell us the
truth! Dont you have milk? When I
said no, Knoygonro squirted her milk
in my face, to say, I do. Flores covered
her mouth again, giggling.
The team spent the rest of the day
making notes and going over photos,
identifying the Mashco who had appeared, while Ponceano translated their
names. Kamotolo meant honeybee.
The younger man was Tkotko (king
vulture), and the two women were Knoygonro (tortoise) and Chawo (hoatzin
bird). The children, too, were named for
animals, except for one toddler, Serologeri, whose name meant ripe banana.
The Mashco had carefully examined
the Nomole teams gear and clothing
looking, Ponceano believed, for weapons, or for anything else they might find
useful. They had removed the drawstring from Laureanos shorts and kept
it. Kamotolo had been interested in Ponceanos shorts, too, but then he noticed
a big hole in the crotch and told him
to keep them.
Ponceano had inquired about the

warning signs near Nenas farm, and Kamotolo had hinted that the Mashco had
been in the area, but offered no details.
Ponceano had let the matter drop; he
had learned in previous encounters that
when he asked too many questions Kamotolo rounded up the others and left.
I asked what the Mashco had said
when they saw us on the sandbar. Flores
told me, They said, Are they bad people? I said, No, they are our friends, but
theyre not coming over because they
have colds, and we dont want you to
catch them. (In fact, the whole team
was healthy; Flores was trying to keep the
encounter under control.) The Mashco,
seeming unconcerned, had said, Tell
them to come!
Before the Nomole team departed,
Kamotolo said that the Mashco would
return in three days. The visits were getting more frequent, but Torres seemed
as concerned as he was pleased. Right
now, its bananas they want, he said.
But what will they be asking us for
in a few years time? What will be the
turning point?

A ered generator was turned on for

t sundown, Nomoles gas-pow-

an hour to pump water into a plastic

tank that sat on stilts, so that people
could bathe under a rudimentary shower.
Afterward, we met around the table in
the longhouse, eating dinner and talking,
almost exclusively about the Mashco.
One of the team members, an anthropologist named Waldo Maldonado, was
a voluble presence in the conversation.
Maldonado, a short, bearded man with
a fondness for Indiana Jones-style leather
boots, was from Cuzco, and before joining the Department of Native Isolated
People he had worked as a guide for
ecotourists in Man National Park. He
was trying to lose weight, and so, while
the rest of us ate dinner, he would unfurl a piece of embroidered Andean cloth
and take out a bag of coca leaves. As the
evenings wore on, he would become more
animated, chewing coca and rolling cigarettesorganic tobacco, he assured me.
One evening, Maldonado said, These
people are all going to come out. Its inevitable. The question is how we manage it to make sure that their coming
out does not result in their extinction.
The anthropologists agonized over the
ethics of their work, with a concern that
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

47

seemed nearly parental. They wanted

to teach the Mashco to fish, for instance,
but worried that theyd choke on bones.
They were especially uncertain about
how to handle the raids on chacras. If
they planted farmland for the Mashco,
it would provide them with yucca and
bananas, giving them less reason to invade other peoples property. But they
would have to depend on the state to
teach them each step of the process.
The big question is, can the Mashco
remain hunter-gatherers for another
hundred years? Shepard said.
Maldonado described the Mashcos
condition as an update of the huntergatherer life style: they had figured out
where the villages were, and what they
could get from them, but they seemed
uninterested in settled life. His greater
concern was abject dependence. Will
they become beggars now? Are they
going to stay on the beach and call out
to the boats and say, I want this and I
want that? In my heart, I dont know
if Im doing the right thing.
The team members agreed that the
Mashco were not really uncontacted.
Shepard maintained that they had been
contacted a century ago, when Fitzcarrald invaded their territory, and that the
survivors had isolated themselves by
choice. Now they appeared to be seeking contact again, and perhaps it was
unfair to stop them. The anthropologists Hill and Walker argue that the impulse to engage seems universal. People want to trade, they wrote. And they
crave exposure to new ideas and new
opportunities. Humans are a gregarious
species. By seeking out bananas and
tools, though, Kamotolos group might
have begun a path toward inevitable assimilation. The Yine in Diamante still
speak their own language, but almost
all of them wear Western clothing, drink
beer, and send their children to schools
where they are taught in Spanish.
The Mashco and their Yine cousins have been increasingly aware of one
another. In the seventies, a Mashco
woman and her daughters, who became known as the Three Maras, wandered out of the woods and camped
near a park rangers station. After a few
years of dislocation and confusion, they
were taken to nearby villages, and the
daughters eventually married local men.
Nelly Flores herself was half-Mashco.
48

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

Her father was a Mashco who had been

captured as a small boy by Shaco Flores
and raised by his family, so that he could
serve as a translator in contacts. Nelly
referred to Shaco, who was Matsigenka,
as her grandfather. But she also thought
of the encounters with the Mashco as
a kind of reunion. When I go to see
them, I tell them Im a relative, she said,
and smiled.

T Mashco returned on schedule. A

he following Sunday, the

routine had set in, with the Nomole

team handing over bananas, running
races, and being embraced and searched.
From the sandbar, I watched as Kamotolo squatted by a fire set among the
rocks on the shore, tending to something as it cooked: a stingray that he
had spotted in shallow water and killed
with an arrow.
There were signs of a tentative opening. The Mashco had been fascinated
by Ponceanos camera, which they called
Big-Eye, and, after Ponceano allowed
one of them to hold it, he realized that
it was missing. The Mashco feigned ignorance, but finally a boy named Wasese
admitted that they had brought it to
the older ones, those who stay in the
forest, and asked if Ponceano wanted
to come and get it back. Ponceano asked,
Will they kill me? Wasese replied, I
dont know, maybe.
On the shore, I could see Maldonado making faces with the children.
Mendieta scribbled notes and took pictures; at one point, he tried to inspect
the teeth of several of the Mashco. The
young man named Tkotko pulled Flores
aside and spoke to her intently. She explained later that he had asked if she
wanted to lie down with him and be
his woman. She had dodged his invitation with a universal fib: she already had
a boyfriend.
As they talked, there was the sound
of a motor, and a boat appeared, heading downriver. In the prow, a bearded
white man wearing a kepi-like hat stood
with the rigid posture of a conquistador. Maldonado and the others were
startled: they stopped what they were
doing and began shouting and waving
at him not to interfere. The boat sped
past, but a moment later it swung back
around, pulling close to the shore, and
the man held out six machetes to the

Mashco. The children ran toward him,

their arms outstretched.
One of the boatmen with me recognized the man as Father Pedro Rey, a
priest from a Dominican mission upriver. He called out, Padre Burro! Padre
Mentiroso! Father Donkey! Father
Liar! As Maldonado ran toward the
shoreline, yelling irately, the priest
abruptly set down his gifts and headed
back down the river. Before long, he had
vanished into the jungle.

T at the intrusion. What right do

he Nomole team was outraged

priests have to go against state law?

Maldonado said indignantly. Rey, he explained, was a Spanish missionary who
had been in Madre de Dios for eighteen years, and had long promoted contact with the aislados.
Rey was scheduled to lead Mass that
evening in Boca de Man, a village
downriver, and I found him there having dinner in a saloon. He sat alone, a
wiry man with glasses and salt-andpepper stubble. At the next table, Matsigenka rivermen were drinking litre
bottles of Cuzquea beer, shouting ebulliently and swaying in their chairs. Rey
quietly ignored them. After he finished
his meal, I introduced myself, and he
invited me to his church, where he had
to prepare for the Mass.
The church, several hundred feet away
along a footpath, was a cinder-block
structure with a simple altar and a dozen
wooden pews. Sitting in a pew, Rey told
me that he was happy to see the Mashco
defended but skeptical of the governments motives. The state is protecting
its interests, not those of the indgenas,
he said. The Nomole team had discouraged the Mashco from dealing with anyone but them, missionaries included,
which Rey described as a moral affront:
Those people have rights, and the right
to communication, too, but they are being
impeded from exercising that right.
He went on, We in the Church
have a hundred years of experience
making contact. But, among government officials, there are people who
have never seen an Indian! Reys mission had been established in the days
of the caucheros, and in his telling it
had rescued many of their victims.
When we came here, the rivers were
clogged with bodies, he said, grimacing.

By other accounts, the effect of the

mission was disastrous. An Amarakaeri
leader in the region told me that Reys
contact with the Mashco was outrageous, given the Dominicans previous
results. Hes trying to do what they did
with us, in a forced contact, he said. We
were once fifteen thousand. Now were
less than two thousand. But there was
no question that the missionaries were
better established here than the state was,
and Rey described the conflict with Mal-

ation that Torres felt was awkward but

unavoidable.
lvarez lived in Diamante, and one
afternoon I found him there. He was
sawing wooden planks in the entry of
a half-constructed church, which he was
building atop a concrete slab the size of
a basketball court; a sign said Asamblea de Dios. lvarez, a muscular, goateed man of fifty-five with prominent
teeth, said that for years he had worked
as a logger in the jungle, but at the age

I wouldnt leave this jungle until I embraced them and was able to tell them
that they were not alone in this world.
His chance came in March, 2015,
when he heard that the Mashco were
going to emerge on the riverbank. I felt
a little scared, he recalled, smiling
broadly. There were three of them, men,
and I gave them my hand and I hugged
them, too, and at that moment I knew
this was Gods mission for me. The
Ministry of Culture had pressed lvarez to stop meeting the Mashco, but he
had persisted, bringing them bananas.
He also brought clothes, until he realized that they didnt wear them. It seems
that clothing disturbs them, he told
me. Theyll have to be taught how to
use clothes, I guess. Waving around at
the church, lvarez said, Every day, in
my services, we pray for them here. For
them, Satan and sin doesnt exist. They
dont know about all those things. But
God is merciful.
lvarez complained that the authorities had prohibited others from having
contact, but were conducting encounters themselves. It seems they have some
kind of concealed plan, he said confidingly. One day, it will come to light.
When I asked where the Mashco would
be in five years, he brightened and replied, They will be evangelizing on behalf of the Church, because the Lords
word is powerful.

T the Mashcos health. Controlled

he teams greatest concern was

Nena, a Yine woman whose land was invaded by the Mashco.

donado as an interruption in an otherwise cordial relationship. I always give
the Mashco machetes when I pass by,
he said. The guards at the outpost have
no problem with me. He was referring,
I realized, to the Yine agents at Nomole.
They say to me, Father, whatever you
want, but not when Waldo is here.
As it turned out, Flores was a follower of Mario lvarez, an evangelical
preacher who had been trying to convert the Mashco. When the government
began intervening in the area, the
preacher had been told to cease his contacts, but Flores, his acolyte, was still
able to meet with the Mashcoa situ-

of thirty he had found God and renounced his previous life. He told me,
My work now is evangelism, and God
has work to do here on earth.
A couple of years ago, a revelation
had led lvarez to Diamante. I had a
dreama man told me to come to the
mouth of the Man River, he explained.
So I gave a challenge to God. I said, I
will go if you provide me with transport. Two days later, a man knocked on
my door and offered me a canoe and a
sister as a guide. Around that time, the
Mashco had begun appearing. I heard
of these naked people, and saw pictures
of them, lvarez said. I decided that

contact is impossible without intense

medical supervision: the societal equivalent, perhaps, of an organ transplant.
In the first encounter, Mendieta had
found that everyone was basically
healthy. Now, though, Kamotolos
mother, Puthana, was coughing, and so
was Kwangonro; Wasese had inflamed
tonsils. The doctor worried that they
were developing full-blown flu.
Mendieta was thirty-eight and
single, the son of a public prosecutor
and a teacher who ran a home for orphans. Working for Perus Ministry
of Health, he ran a hospital near the
Dominican mission, and was also
charged with overseeing most of the
upper Madre de Dios region, a vast area
where indigenous groups lived in various
degrees of contact with civilization.
The Mashco were at the most primary
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

49

stage, and Mendieta had become fascinated by their situation. We realized

we had to do something, but there was
no budget, he told me. When the Ministry of Culture got involved, he began
visiting surrounding communities to
educate local people and to inoculate
them against communicable diseases.
Still, he was sure that eventually the
Mashco would be stricken with an epidemic, and their remoteness would
make it difficult to treat. He said that
isolated communities struck by viruses
were governed by a three-day rule:
children invariably began dying on the
third day. In Madre de Dios, he had
sometimes arrived too late.
For now, though, vaccinations were
out of the question; the Mashco were
still not entirely comfortable being examined. Even donated clothing carried
the risk of disease, and he fretted about
the polo shirt that he had lost to the
Mashco woman. He reassured himself
that the shirt had been freshly washed,
and that it probably wouldnt be worn
for long. Wasese had reported that when
they returned to camp the older ones
took the clothing away and burned it
perhaps to prevent illness or perhaps
merely to destroy a vestige of the outside world.
The Nomole team felt certain that
more Mashco would come out of the
forest. In five years, were probably going
to have forty or fifty people to deal with,

Mendieta said. As long as they need

things from us, theyre going to be there,
on the riverbanks, exposed to everything
that comes along. He paused. The bottom line is, we want their lives to be respected. The problem is that a lot of people in Peru dont care about them at all.

P mostly absent from Madre de Dios,

erus national government is

so the future of its wilderness, and of

the Mashco, depends on a few regional
politicians in Puerto Maldonado. The
capital is hundreds of miles from the
Mashcos territory, a daylong trip. I set
out by boat early one morning, and spent
hours floating past dozens of illegal logging camps. Finally, I saw a small tributary rushing into the Madre de Dios,
and realized that I was near the uninhabited stretch where I had made camp
decades ago. Where once there was a
deserted riverbank, now pickup trucks
roared up to discharge people into boats,
while gaudily painted buses waited for
them on the other side. I boarded a bus,
and followed a dirt road through a forest that was being burned by ranchers;
the blaze was so intense that smoke obscured the horizon. Eventually, a paved
road led to Puerto Maldonado, through
an area where hundreds of gold-mining camps have been carved out of the
junglehome to as many as fifty thousand miners. There were a few roadside
boomtowns, with bars, shops, and broth-

els, and as night fell adolescent girls

came out to stand on the verge, ready
for the evenings business.
Puerto Maldonado was founded by
Fitzcarrald, and a main avenue there
still bears his name; guides take tourists downriver to view the wreck of the
iron boat that is said to have carried him
to his death. I had not been to the city
in four decades, and in that time it had
grown from a wooden-shack backwater into a sprawling grid of a hundred
thousand people. A bridge now crossed
the Madre de Dios, and a road extended
all the way to the border with Brazil;
others led south to Bolivia and west to
Cuzco. The only gap in the expanding
road system was to the north, where
Governor Otsuka wanted to push the
road through the jungle alongside
Mashco territory.
Otsuka had rushed off to tend to an
emergency at a mining camp, where gas
cannisters had exploded, but his deputy
at the time, Eduardo Salhuana, was there
when I arrived. A longtime political
player in the region, as well as Perus
former minister of justice, Salhuana was
regarded as the real power broker in
Madre de Dios. He greeted me coldly
and led me into his office.
When I pointed out that the gold-mining areas seemed totally unregulated, with
miners brazenly using banned chemicals
and machines, Salhuana described it as
inevitable. Theres a lot of gold in Madre
de Dios, but only 6.7 per cent of the region is legally available for mining, he
complained. Madre de Dios had reserves
worth billions of dollars, he added, and
as prospectors poured in they had no
choice but to break the law. Salhuana acknowledged that corruption, prostitution,
and other crimes were rife, and that Puerto
Maldonado had become a major transit
point for cocaine. But, in his telling, all
the problems were the fault of the national government, which did nothing to
enforce its own laws in the region.
In any case, Salhuana said, the laws
were already too strict. Sixty-five per
cent of the territory of Madre de Dios
has been classified as protected area,
with fifteen per cent given to indigenous reserves, he said. (In fact, barely
half of the area is restricted, with about
ten per cent set aside for indigenous
people.) So much land is protected that
there is not much left for people to do

anything with. But they are asking us,

Where is there left for us to work?
When I asked about the road that
would open up the Mashco area, he replied, The road isnt defined as an official project yet. In any event, the people of the area are yearning to be better
connected with Puerto Maldonado. I
mentioned the sordid roadside settlements north of the city. Was that what
he wanted for the area around Nomole?
Any infrastructure project will obviously have an impact, Salhuana replied.
But theres also a lot of poverty in the
indigenous communities. The other option is to leave them as they are.

T tact the Mashco was inspired by

he nomole teams mission to con-

killings, and by the fear that there might

be more. In the end, though, the killers
motivations remained elusive. When I
asked Nelly why Shaco Flores had been
killed, she shrugged; despite her family
relationship with the Mashco, she seemed
to find their behavior impossible to predict. During encounters, she said, They
hold my hands, get into the boat, and
say, Take us to your house. But we cant.
They might shoot us with arrows.
Shepard thinks that Shaco was killed
because he stopped giving the Mashco
things. They became angry, he said.
It was unclear why Shaco had changed
his habits: perhaps indigenous-rights
groups had encouraged him to leave
the Mashco alone, or perhaps it had
become too expensive to continue the
handouts. Either way, the contact had
created a dependency that was painful
to break. He had got them basically
hooked on bananas and pots and pans,
Shepard said.
For the Nomole crew, it was a reminder that their work entailed real
dangers. One afternoon, keeping watch
on the bluff, Maldonado spoke about
the history of attacks in Brazil, where
more than sixty contact agents had
been killed by aislados in the past forty
years. Apparently, the greatest risk came
after a bond of familiarity had been established. According to one theory, the
aislados were provoked by fears that the
outsiders gentle approach masked a
plan to log their land, take their women,
and kill their men.
As we talked, we heard the whistling that announced the Mashco, and

I followed Maldonado to the edge of

the bluff. Through binoculars, we saw
three men emerge from the forest. None
of the women or children were with
them. Maldonado was nervous. Where
are the women? he asked. Whats
going on? He told the team, which
had started carrying bananas down to
the peke-peke, to stand by.
As Maldonado spoke, however, a line
of women and children began
appearing from the forest.
He whooped with relief and
ran down to join the pekepeke. On the opposite shore,
Tkotko roared like a jaguar
at him, then laughed uproariously, explaining in
pantomime that his eyes
looked as if they were going to pop out of his head.
There appeared to be growing trust
between the two groups. The Nomole
team had instructed Kamotolo to meet
only with them, and he seemed to have
complied, moving his family to a closer
camp, about three hours walk away.
Maldonado said that the relationship
was limited: Our conversations are
very basic. He asks things like Are you
married? Do you have kids? And he
had few illusions about the Mashcos
motives: He keeps coming because he
knows he can get things. But he had
become fond of Kamotolo, who was
the right age to be his son. Laughing,
he recalled the time that Kamotolo had
searched their peke-peke and found a
pair of panties left behind by a French
journalist as she changed into her swimsuit. He had put them on, backward.
The Mashco seemed to have a special bond with Ponceano, whom they
sometimes adorned with a crown of
leaves. He attributed his influence to
a vision that one of the Mashco women
had after taking a hallucinogen derived
from the Amazonian flower floripondio. When they met, he recalled, the
woman had asked him his name. When
he told her his Yine name, Yotlot, meaning river otter, she had exclaimed,
Oh, you are Yotlot! I knew you were
coming today.
After that, he said, the Mashco had
regarded him as their primary link to
the outside world. He told me about
standing with them on the riverbank
when a loggers boat appeared. Kamo-

tolo had asked, excitedly, Are they good

people? Shall we call them? Ponceano
had said no, and they had let the boat
pass. The Mashco had told the other
Yine agents to look after Ponceano and
make sure nothing happened to him.
Theyve invited me to join them, he
said, laughing. I just say, Another day.
As we readied our boats to cross back
to Nomole, Maldonado confessed that
he had chewed too much
coca the night before. Unable to sleep, he had lain
awake fretting about the
Mashco. All I could think
about was Are they all right?
Are they sick? But Mendieta found that Puthanas
cough had abated, and so
had Kwangonros. Waseses
sore throat appeared to have
gone away, too. For now, the Mashco
seemed safe.
A few days later, I flew out of Puerto
Maldonado, on the first leg of the trip
home. As the airplane banked over the
jungle, I could see the great river, looping like liquid silver below. Then, for
several long minutes, the jungle disappeared, replaced by an expanse of giant
craters. The scale of destruction was
breathtaking: it was reminiscent of aerial photographs of North Vietnam
after it was carpet-bombed by B-52s.
I realized that I was looking at the
goldfields of Madre de Dios.
In Lima, the uneven effects of Perus
new wealth were evident. Around the
city, beggars work the traffic intersections near gaudy casinos, and rivers brim
with trash. Crime is rampant, so most
homes are protected by iron bars on the
doors and windows and by walls topped
by razor wire; armed guards abound.
Before I left, I stopped by the Department of Native Isolated People, in a
massive concrete government building
overlooking a noisy highway. Torres was
there, with his boss, Patricia Balbuena
Palacios, the vice-minister of interculturality. I asked Balbuena whether the
Mashco would still exist in five years.
Hopefully theyll last a little longer
than that, she said. Maybe we wont be
able to stop the changes, but maybe we
can slow them down. The changes are
going to continue, though, and, in the
end, the ones who are going to survive
will be those best able to adapt.
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

51

PERSONAL HISTORY

LOVE IN TRANSLATION
Would I be a different person in French?
BY LAUREN COLLINS

moved to Geneva to be with my

husband, Olivier, who had moved
there because his job required him
to. My restaurant French was just passable. Drugstore French was a stretch.
IKEA French was pretty much out of
the question, meaning that, since Olivier,
a native speaker, worked twice as many
hours a week as Swiss stores were open,
we went for months without things
like lamps.
We had established our life together
in London, where we met on more or
less neutral ground: his continent, my
language. It worked. Olivier was my
guide to living outside the behemoth
of American culture; I was his guide to
living inside the behemoth of English.
He had learned the language over
the course of many years. When he
was in his teens, his parents sent him
to Saugerties, New York, for a homestay
with some acquaintances of an American they knew. Olivier landed at JFK,
where a taxi picked him up. This was
around the time of the Atlanta Olympic Games.
What is the English for female athlete? he asked, wanting to be prepared
to discuss current events.
Bitch, the driver said.
They drove on toward Ulster County,
Olivier straining for a glimpse of the
Manhattan skyline. The patriarch of the
host family was an arborist named Vern.
Olivier remembers driving around Saugerties with Charlene, Verns wife, and
a friend of hers, who begged him over
and over to say hamburger. He was
mystified by the fact that Charlene called
Vern the Incredible Hunk.
Five years later, Olivier found himself in England, a graduate student in
mathematics. Unfortunately, his scholastic EnglishKevin is a blue-eyed
boy had been billed as a canonical
phrasehad done little to prepare him
for the realities of the language on the
ground. Youve really improved, his
52

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

roommate told him, six weeks into the

term. When you got here, you couldnt
speak a word. At that point, Olivier
had been studying English for more
than a decade.
After England, he moved to California to pursue a Ph.D., still barely
able to cobble together a sentence. His
dbut as a teaching assistant for a freshman course in calculus was greeted by
a mass defection. On the plus side, one
day he looked out upon the residue
of the crowd and saw a female student
wearing a T-shirt that read Bonjour,
Paris!
By the time we met, Olivier had become not only a proficient speaker but
a sensitive, agile one. Upon moving to
London, in 2007, hed had to take an
English test in order to obtain his license as an amateur pilot. The examiner rated him Expert: Able to speak
at length with a natural, effortless flow.
Varies speech flow for stylistic effect,
e.g. to emphasize a point. Uses appropriate discourse markers and connectors spontaneously.
I knew Olivier only in his third languagehe also spoke Spanish, the native language of his maternal grandparents, who had fled over the Pyrenees
during the Spanish Civil Warbut his
powers of expression were one of the
things that made me fall in love with
him. For all his rationality, he had a romantic streak, an attunement to the
currents of feeling that run beneath the
surface of words. Once, he wrote me a
letteran inducement to what we might
someday have togetherin which every
sentence began with Maybe. Maybe
hed make me an omelette, he said, every
day of my life.
We moved in together quickly. One
night, we were watching a movie. I spilled
a glass of water and went to mop it up
with some paper towels.
They dont have very good capillarity, Olivier said.

Huh? I replied, continuing to dab

at the puddle.
Their capillarity isnt very good.
What are you talking about? Thats
not even a word.
Olivier said nothing. A few days later,
I noticed a piece of paper lying in the
printer tray. It was a page from the Merriam-Webster online dictionary:
Capillarity noun ka-p-ler--t, -la-r-.
1 : the property or state of being capillary
2 : the action by which the surface of a liquid where it is in contact with a solid (as in a
capillary tube) is elevated or depressed depending on the relative attraction of the molecules of the liquid for each other and for those
of the solid.

Ink to a nib, my heart surged.

S basic sense, a hard time understandtill, we often had, in some weirdly

ing each other. The critic George Steiner

defined intimacy as confident, quasiimmediate translation, a state of increasingly one-to-one correspondence
in which the external vulgate and the
private mass of language grow more and
more concordant. Translation, he explained, occurs both across and inside
languages. You are performing a feat of
interpretation anytime you attempt to
communicate with someone who is not
like you.
In addition to being French and
American, Olivier and I were translating, to varying degrees, across a host
of Steiners categories: scientist/artist,
atheist/believer, man/woman. It seemed
sometimes as if generation was one of
the few gaps across which we werent
attempting to stretch ourselves. I had
been conditioned to believe in the importance of directness and sincerity,
but Olivier valued a more disciplined
self-presentation. If, to me, the definition of intimacy was letting it all hang
out, to him that constituted a form of
thoughtlessness. In the same way that
Olivier liked it when I wore lipstick,

The moment for languid afternoons spent naming the knees and the eyelashes had passed. Our classroom was the kitchen.
ILLUSTRATION BY ELENI KALORKOTI

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

53

or perfumeAmerican men, in my experience, often claimed to prefer a more

natural lookhe trusted in a sort of
emotional maquillage, in which one
took a few minutes to compose ones
thoughts instead of walking around,
undone, in the affective equivalent of
pajamas. For him, the success of le couplea relationship, in French, was something you were, not something you were
independed on restraint rather than
on uninhibitedness. Where I saw artifice,
he saw artfulness.
Every couple struggles, to some extent, to communicate, but our differences, concealing one another like nesting dolls, inhibited our trust in each
other in ways that we scarcely understood. Olivier was careful of what he
said to the point of parsimony; I spent
my words like an oligarch with a terminal disease. My memory was all moods
and tones, while he had a transcriptionists recall for the details of our exchanges.
Our household spats degenerated into
linguistic warfare.
Ill clean the kitchen after I finish
my dinner, Id say. First, Im going to
read my book.
My dinner, hed reply, in a babyish
voice. My book.
To him, the tendency of English

speakers to use the possessive pronoun

where none was strictly necessary sounded
immaturestroppy, even. My dinner,
my book, my toy.
Whatever. Its my language, Id
reply.
And why, hed want to know, had I
said Id clean the kitchen when Id only
tidied it up? Id reply that no native
speakerby which I meant no normal
personwould ever make that distinction, feeling as though I were living
with Andy Kaufmans Foreign Man. His
literalism missed the point, in a way
that was as maddening as it was easily
mocked.
For better or worse, there was something off about us, in the way that we
homed in on each others sentences,
focussing too intently, as though we
were listening to the radio with the
volume a notch too low. You dont
seem like a married couple, someone
said, minutes after meeting us at a
party. We fascinated each other and
frustrated each other. We could go exhilaratingly fast or excruciatingly slow,
but we often seemed hard pressed to
find a reliable intermediate setting, a
conversational cruise control. We didnt
possess that easy shorthand, encoding
all manner of attitudes and assump-

tions, by which some people seem to

be able, nearly telepathically, to make
themselves mutually known.

I noon, surfing the Internet, when I

m sitting at my desk one after-

come across a YouTube clip of Bradley

Cooper giving an interview on TF1, the
French television channel. Hes trilling
his rs as if hes gargling air. He even
throws in a couple of heins.
The interviewer asks Cooper how
he learned French. He says that during
college he spent six months living with
a family in Aix-en-Provence. TF1 calls
him la coqueluche de Hollywood, using
a word that has the unique distinction
of being a homonym for heartthrob
and whooping cough.
Our viewers appreciate the fact that
you spoke to us in French tonight, the
interviewer says.
I click on another video, this one
from an American channel called
CelebTV.
Who knew Bradley had this secret
weapon for getting the ladies? Hes totally fluent in French!
Like the presenter, Im impressed.
An excellent command of French seems
like a superpower, the prerogative of socialites and statesmen. I didnt have a
passport until I was in college. The prerequisite for speaking French, I have always thought, is being the kind of person who speaks French.
I need French like a bike messenger
needs a bicycle. I consider myself a fish.
One day, I see a woman named Alessandra Sublet on television and pronounce
her name sublet, as in what you do to
an apartment, achieving a sort of reverse
Tar-zhay effect.
But theres Bradley Cooper, nailing
his uvular fricatives on the evening news.
I tell myself the same thing I do when
faced with such challenges as doing my
taxes: if that guy can hack it, I can, too.
Maybe you speak French not because
youre privileged; youre privileged because you speak French. The language
suddenly seems mine for the taking, a
practical skill. Herbert Hoover was fluent
in Mandarin.
On a blustery morning in mid-March,
I report for my first day of school. The
entryway is shaded by a metal canopy,
topped by a mint-green neon sign
(ECOLE-CLUB). Inside, a canteen offers

hot meals, eaten on damp trays. Sleepyeyed students take their coffee at tables
of teal linoleum. Smoking is no longer
allowed, but its accretions remain, adding to the sensation of having enrolled
in a laundromat in 1973.
I climb the stairs to Room 401. Were
a dozen or so, sitting at four tables
arranged in a rectangle. For the next
month, we will meet five hours a day.
The professor introduces herself. She is
Swiss, in her sixties, with leopard-print
bifocals and a banana clip.
I am Dominique. Just call me Dominique. Not MadameDominique. I
will tutoyer you. You can tutoyer me, too,
she says, indicating that were all to use
the informal form of address. Im from
Lausanne.
Lausanne, by train, is thirty-three
minutes from Geneva.
The genevois, she adds, consider
the lausannois very provincial.
The class is intensive French B1a
level into which Ive placed after taking
an online test. According to the diagnostic, I can get by in everyday situations, but I cant explain myself spontaneously and clearly on a great number
of subjects. This is true: like a soap-opera amnesiac, Im at a loss to articulate
things of which I do not have direct
experience. Still, Im pleased that after
eight months in Geneva my piecemeal
efforts at picking up the language, which
consist mostly of reading free newspapers, have promoted me from the basest ranks of ignorance. One day, when
the front-page headline reads Une task
force pour contrler les marrons chauds, I
grasp that Geneva is about to sic the
police on the venders of hot chestnuts.
Alors! Dominique says.
For our first classroom assignment,
were to conduct a conversation with the
person next to us, and then introduce him
or her to the group. We spend the next
ten minutes chatting haltinglyan
awkward silence passes over the crowd
roughly every twenty secondsbefore
Dominique calls the class to attention.
Lauren, you will be my first victim!
A Hacky Sack, confirming that I
have the floor, comes sailing across
the room.
Je vous prsente Lana, I begin.
Lana, a twenty-six-year-old Bosnian Serb, likes gymnastics. She comes
from Banja Luka, a town with a tem-

perate climate, several discothques,

and a thirteenth-century fort. Lana is
in Geneva with her husband, who works
at a bank. She doesnt mention a job,
but she looks like a salon model, with
crimson fingernails and thick brown
hair, plaited like that of a dressage contestant. She is the second of three sisters. She takes copious notes with a
mechanical pencil that she produces
from a plastic case. When she makes
a mistake, she scrubs at it with a gum
eraser, delicately blowing the leavings
from the page, as though she were wishing on a dandelion.
Its Lanas turn to introduce me. Je
vous prsente Lauren. Lana explains that
I come from a village in North Carolina. I like books and travelling. Lana
does an impeccable job, except that she
says magasin amricain instead of magazine amricain, so everyone thinks I
work in an American store instead of
for an American magazine.

S ter a foreign language is to fall in

upposedly, the best way to mas-

love with a native speaker. Language,

in delineating a boundary that can be
transgressed, is full of romantic potential. For the philosopher Emmanuel
Levinas, the erotic intention amounted
to a sublime hunger for the other, the
more foreign the more delectating. It
is no accident that the metonym for
language is a tongue, not an ear, an eye,
or a prehensile thumb. A willingness
to take one onto take one in, filling
ones mouth with anothers words
suggests pliancy, openness to enticement. It worked for Catherine of Valois
(Henry V, English) and for Jane Fonda
(Roger Vadim, French). One can only
hope that one day the hardworking farm
boy from Rosetta Stone dazzles the Italian supermodel with his command of
the congiuntivo trapassato.
Love is both the cause and the continuance of my commitment to learning French, its tinder and its fuelwood,
but, pedagogically, Im not having great
luck with the soul-mate method. Olivier does not materialize at the tinkle
of a handbell, as did Abdul Karim
a twenty-four-year-old table servant
who became Queen Victorias closest
confidant, teaching her Urduor
proofread my letters, blotting my mistakes with light pink paper. More pro-

saically, he is completely deaf in his

right ear (childhood meningitis). Hes
freakishly adept at keeping up with conversationeven in another language,
even at a fifty-per-cent disadvantage
but, in order to hear, he has to turn his
head so that hes looking almost directly
over his right shoulder, which forces
him to speak out of the far left corner
of his mouth, as though hes perpetually telling a dirty joke. Enunciation is
not his strong suit. His syntax can be
equally askance. He starts sentences and
lets them trail off, circling back after
hes put whatever he was going to say
through another lap of thought.
We dont speak French as regularly
as we should. We try, but its hard, with
English at our disposal, to summon the
will power to dial back to a frequency
devoid of complexity, color, and jokes.
Had my language skills developed in
tandem with our relationshipthe ability to say things mirroring my desire to
say themwe might have got into the
habit. But the moment for languid afternoons spent naming the knees and
the eyelashes has passed. Our classroom
is the kitchen after a long day, extractor
fan howling. Oliviers uptight (he cant
let a mistake go without correcting it).
Im impatient (the moment I make one,
I cave). We cant seem to lower our inhibitions and just let the conversation
flow, the way youre supposed to do to
enter another language. When I try out
a new word, I feel conspicuous, as though
Im test-driving a car I cant afford. Its
hard for me, as someone for whom English is a livelihood, to embrace my status as an amateur in French. Im the opposite of Eliza Doolittle: I dont want
to speak like a lady in a flower shop; I
want to speak grammar.

D ity, French can be maddening. Vert

espite its pretensions to clar-

(green), verre (glass), ver (worm), vers

(toward), and vair (squirrel fur) constitute a quintuple homophone, not even
counting verts, verres, and vers. (You
dont pronounce the final s in French.)
Folklorists have argued for decades over
whether Cinderellas pantoufles de verre
might have come about as a mishearing, on Charles Perraults part, of pantoufles de vair. The subjunctive is a wish.
Genders a bitch. Le pole: a stove. La
pole: a frying pan. A mans shirt, une

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

55

chemise, is feminine, but a womans shirt,

un chemisier, is masculine.
Linguists have attempted to make
an objective assessment of the relative
difficulty of languages by breaking them
down into parts. One factor is the level
of inflection, or the amount of information that a language carries on a single
word. The languages of large, literate
societies usually have larger vocabularies. You might think that their structures are also more elaborate, but the
opposite is generally true: the simpler
the society, the more baroque its morphology. In Archi, a language spoken in
the village of Archib, in southern Dagestan, a single verbtaking into account
prefixes and suffixes and other modificationscan occur in 1,502,839 different forms. This makes sense, if you think
about it. Because large societies have
frequent interaction with outsiders, their
languages undergo simplification. Members of relatively homogeneous groups,
on the other hand, share a base of common knowledge, enabling them to pile
on declensions without confusing one
another. Small languages stay spiky. But,
amid waves of contact, large languages
lose their sharp edges, becoming bevelled as pieces of glass.
Another way to try to rate the difficulty of a language is to consider its
unusual features: putting the verb before the subject in a sentence, for example, or not having a question particle (do). Researchers analyzed two
hundred and thirty-nine languages to
create the Language Weirdness Index, anointing Chalcatongo Mixteca verb-initial tonal language spoken by
six thousand people in Oaxacathe worlds oddest language. The most conventional was Hindi, with only
a single unusual feature, predicative possession. English
came in thirty-third, making
it a third as weird as German but seven
times weirder than Purpecha.
According to the Foreign Service Institute of the U.S. State Department,
French is among the easiest languages
for an English speaker to learn. It requires an estimated six hundred hours
of instruction, versus approximately
eleven hundred for Pashto or Xhosa and
twenty-two hundred for Arabic or Man56

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

darin. Thanks to the Normans, who invaded England in the eleventh century,
somewhere between a quarter and half
of the basic English vocabulary comes
from French. An English speaker who
has never set foot in a bistro already
knows an estimated fifteen thousand
words of French.
The challenge is figuring out which
ones. Is challenge, for example, something else entirely in French, or just a
matter of Coopering out a shallonge?
French is notably not a hospitable environment in which to try your hand.
The thing thats tough about French
is the thing thats exemplary about
French, which is that French speakers
across the board are language nuts.
Jean-Benot Nadeau and Julie Barlow
write in The Story of French, Debates about grammar rules and acceptable vocabulary are part of the intellectual landscape and a regular topic
of small talk among francophones of
all classes and originsa bit like movies in Anglo-American culture.
American politicians play golf or
sing in barbershop quartets; French
statesmen moonlight as men of letters.
Charles de Gaulle was famous for resurrecting obscure bits of vocabulary, such
as quarteron (a small band) and chienlit
(a chaotic carnival), which had last been
heard sometime around the sixteenth
century. It took Olivier three weeks and
a working group of twice as many relatives to settle on the French text of our
wedding invitation, which read, in its
entirety, Together with our
families, we request the pleasure of your company at a
wedding lunch. The ideas
of excellence and failure are
so intimately linked in French
that what passes for a compliment is to say that someone
has un franais chtia wellpunished French. Olivier has
fond memories of watching
the grammarian Bernard Pivot, a national celebrity, administer the Dicos
dOr, a live televised tournament in which
contestants vied to transcribe most accurately a dictated textthe Super Bowl
of orthography.
Pivots competition was inspired by
the dicte de Mrime. On a rainy day in
1857, at Fontainebleau, the royal country estate, Empress Eugnie asked the

author Prosper Mrime to concoct an

entertainment. Mrime gathered the
party. He handed out pens and paper,
instructing the guests to jot down the
composition he was about to read.
When he had finished reading, the
guests handed in their papers, and Mrime tallied the results: in the course
of a hundred and sixty-nine words, Napoleon III made seventy-five mistakes,
Eugnie sixty-two, and Alexandre Dumas
twenty-four.The winner was Prince Metternich, of Austria, with only three mistakes. Dumas, auto-chastising, turned
to him and said, When will you present yourself at the Academy, to teach
us how to spell?

M days, we have Luisa, a stout Ven-

ondays, Wednesdays, and Fri-

ezuelan Frenchwoman with cantilevered

gray curls. Luisa speaks quickly and correctly. She does not welcome questions.
Every morning, she greets usshes a
vous womanwith a scowl.
Class opens briskly. We turn to Chapter 2, Come to My House! The topic
of discussion is cohabitation.
Luisa zeros in on Satomi, a Japanese
academic.
Tell me about your living situation,
Satomi.
I live with my husband, Satomi
says quietly. Hes American.
Is he an ideal roommate? Luisa
asks.
Yes, but sometimes he uses my
toothbrush, Satomi says, daring to
elaborate.
Thats an intimate violation! Luisa
barks.
Satomi withdraws as quickly as a slap
bracelet.
Luisa turns to Scotty, who is from
Alaska, which, she says, is not really
part of the U.S.
Scotty, what are the qualities of the
ideal roommate?
They have to be nice, she replies.
And, for you, what is nice?
Friendly?
Friendly seems a little extreme,
Luisa says, her eyebrow jerking up.
Scotty thinks for a moment.
The ideal roommate shouldnt
smoke?
Most of the class nods in agreement.
But there is sniggering from the corner
where several Italians sit en bloc. Yeah,

maybe for you, one of them says. Youre

not our ideal roommate.
Carlos, a Spanish bellboy, chimes in:
Not someone bipolar.
No! comes a cry from the Italian
corner. Its a woman named Cristina.
Im an artist, she says. This concerns
me. One day Im happy, one day Im
not. I was living in Norway. I was a little depressed. I didnt want to talk to
my roommates, and they were the type
of person that if they asked How was
your day? you had to say, I took the
bus, I ate a sandwich. After a week,
we had to have a discussion about the
fact that I wasnt very communicative.
But their view of communication was
exaggerated.
Listen, its a matter of respect, Carlos replies, fingering a black cord that
he wears around his neck. If you have
a bad day, you dont have to put it on the
other person.
Carlos is right, but hes driving me
nuts with his inability to stop actually
answering the questions instead of
merely demonstrating his ability to do
so. You say tomato, Carlos says the problem these days is that when you ship
food it loses its vitamins.
Lana raises her hand.
My boyfriendmy exand I
bought an apartment in Bosnia, she
says. But the problem was that we never
fought. One day, a woman telephoned
me and she said that she was with him.
I told him about it, and he asked me
how did I know it was true. I said that
she had described our apartmentright
down to the sheets on the bed.
Luisa, stone-faced, waits a minute
before responding.
Cest la vie, non?

D sorb the language by osmosis. We

ominique says that we can ab-

should have the television or the radio

on whenever were home. Im militant
about following this piece of advice, as
in inverse relationship to my daily
needsI can read and write, and even
speak, in French much better than I can
comprehend it. But bit by bit the language is taking shape, definite articles
and nouns and indirect objects and verbs
and prepositional phrases hanging off
subjects and predicates and predicate
complements like a Calder mobile.
Conjugations are coming along. To my

delight, I know the difference between

un lphant (a male elephant), une
lphant (a female elephant), and un
lphanteau (a baby elephant of either
sex).
My vocabulary is beginning to improve. I treasure each acquisition, remembering the exact circumstances
time, place, companyunder which it
was made. English is a trust fund, an
unearned inheritance, but Ive worked
for every bit of French Ive banked. In
French, words have tastes and textures.
They come in colors and smells. Ruban
is scarlet and scratchy, the stuff we
bought before a costume party to tie a
letter A around my neck. Hirondelle
will always be an easy hike on a gray
day in May. Were ticking off the Stations of the Cross, which a Savoyard
devout has installed on the rocky slope
were scampering up, Olivier becoming
the first man to ascend a pre-Alp while
carrying a golf umbrella. Une hirondelle
ne fait pas le printemps (One swallow
doesnt make a spring), he says, citing
a typically gloomy French proverb. The
sky rips open as we reach Calvary.
But Frenchfor me, at leastis an
exceedingly tough language to crack by
ear. If English is difficult to pronounce,
French presents learners with the opposite problem: easy to say, hard to hear.
Every syllable is accented equally, making it difficult to figure out where one
word ends and the next begins. French

words are connected by the liaison system, in which a word ending in a consonant links to the next one if it begins
with a vowel. Theyre impressionable, a
little bit fickle, behaving differently depending on whom theyre with. A French
word, if all its friends did, would definitely jump off the Brooklyn Bridge.
As for Dominiques suggestion that
we could become fluent by watching
TV, I find sitcoms and reality shows
with their fast, slangy dialogue and serial plotsextremely hard to follow if
I dont already know whats happening.
I decide to start with the radio, which
in elocution makes up for what it lacks
in context clues. Every morning, while
Im getting ready, I turn on Radio France
Internationale. At first, I listen to the
previous days news in franais facile, following along with the transcript that
RFI posts on the Internet, for learners
around the world, every afternoon.
Franais facile is in fact quite difficult. In Eight Months on Ghazzah
Street, her novel about an Englishwoman who moves to Jeddah with her
husband, Hilary Mantelan Englishwoman who moved to Jeddah with her
husband, in 1983describes the protagonists efforts to learn Arabic. Andrew took her to the bookshop at the
Caravan Shopping Center, Mantel
writes. She bought a language tape,
and a book to go with it, and during
Jamadi al-awal she pored over this book,
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

57

and set the careful slow voice of the

language tutor echoing through [the
apartment]. Good morning. Good
morning, how are you? Well, praise be
to God. Welcome! Will you drink
coffee? How are your children? How
is your wife? Despite her intelligence
and industryshes a cartographer by
trade, with a surfeit of free timethe
woman is strangely impotent. Arabic
wont take.
Her frustration resonates with me.
My efforts at French leave me at once
inert and exhausted, as though Ive
been dog-paddling in a pool of standing water. But as the weeks go by the
liaisons begin to sound less murky. I
drop the script and start tuning in to
the correct mornings broadcast, le septneuf par Patrick Cohen.
Trying to understand Patrick Cohen
is an almost physical challengeI have
to concentrate my mental energy and
then push with all my might, straining
to make out the words the way one would
to lift a dumbbell. Listening to one of
Cohens guests speak about the need for
more women in positions of power at
companies, I think how universal that
conversation is. As Im nodding along,
the thought occurs that Ive missed a
feint or a negation that actually renders
the entire argument the opposite of what
Ive understood it to be. Maybe Ive got
the right topic but not the stance, and
the guest is actually anti-women executives. An unreliable auditor, I cant trust
what Im hearing.
A few weeks later, I stumble into
the bathroom, pulling the phone out
of the pocket of my robe in my usual
bleary routine. I put it on the counter,
swipe to the RFI app, and press Play.
First four words: nid doiseaux chanteurs. No preamble. Patrick Cohen, I
know immediately, is talking about a
nest of songbirds.
That night, Oliviers brother calls.
Usually, their conversations pass me by
Ive missed years of ambient commentary, overheard plansbut this time little fragments of dialogue sing out, as
though someone has fiddled with the
volume knob on the background music
to our life.
Elle nest pas trs mobile, quoi, I hear
Olivier say.
I dont know whom hes talking about,
or why shes incapacitated. He seems to
58

be saying quoi a lot. Even as it dawns

on me that I may have pledged lifelong
fealty to a man who ends every sentence
with the equivalent of dude, Im taken
by an eerie joy. Four years after having
met Olivier, Im hearing his voice for
the first time.

S would describe a plan hed hatched

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

CHNAPSIDEEthe

way a German

under the influence of alcohol. PilkunnussijaFinnish for comma fucker, a

grammar pedant. In Mundari, ribuytibuy refers to the sight, sound, and motion of a fat persons buttocks. Jayus, in
Indonesian, denotes a joke told so poorly
that people cant help but laugh. Knullrufs is Swedish for post-sex hair. Gm
servi means moonlight shining on the
water in Turkish. Culaccino is the Italian word for the mark left on a table by
a cold glass.
Words like these are marvellous. We
make lists of them, compile them into
treasuries, trade them over any dinner
table at which holders of various passports have convened. (The German, armed
with Kummerspeckgrief baconwill
always win the day.) Theyre fun to say.
Theyre funny to think about, in their
Seinfeldian particularity. They expand
and concentrate the world, making it
bigger-spirited while at the same time
more specific. In Russian, you cant call
the sky blue. The language obliges its
speakers to make a distinction between
siniy (dark blue) and goluboy (light blue),
so that what is in English one color becomes in Russian two.
We like to think that the lexicon of
a language reveals broad truths about
its speakers. The wine will flow, and the
Japanese guest will mention komorebi,
the sunlight filtering through the leaves
of trees, and the Frenchman will offer
lappel du vide, the urge to jump off a
cliff, and there will be collective acknowledgment of the aesthetic qualities of the
Japanese and the nihilistic ones of the
French. But the idea that untranslatable
words prove that speakers of different
languages experience the world in radically different ways is as dubious as it
is popular, originating from the great
Eskimo vocabulary hoaxthe notion
that Eskimo has fifty or eighty or a hundred words for snow.
Eskimo is not a language but a group
of them, comprising the Inuit and Yupik

families, spoken from Greenland to Siberia. Nor, as the linguist Geoffrey Pullum explains, are Eskimo languages
actually especially rich in snow terminology. What they are rich in is suffixes,
which allow their speakers to build endless variations upon a small base of root
words. (If youre tallying derivations,
Eskimo languages also have a multitude of words for sun.) Sticking strictly
to lexemes, or minimal meaningful units
of language, Anthony C. Woodbury has
catalogued about fifteen distinct snow
words in one Eskimo language, Central
Alaskan Yupikroughly the same number as there are in English. A cartoon,
mocking our credulity, features two Eskimo speakers. One asks the other, Did
you know that in Hampstead they have
fifty different names for bread?
Even if Eskimo speakers did possess
a voluminous vocabulary for snow, or
Hampsteaders for bread, it wouldnt
prove that they were subject to some
separate reality. Lepidopterists have
terms for the behavior that butterflies
exhibit at damp spots (puddling) and
for the opening of the silk gland found
on the caterpillars lower lip (spinneret).
Architects can distinguish between arrowslits, bartizans, and spandrels, while
pilots speak of upwash and adverse yaw.
New words are created every day by people who are able to comprehend their
meanings before they exist. Novel language can be a function of time as well
as of space. Czech speakers came up
with prozvonitthe act of calling a cell
phone and hanging up after one ring so
that the other person will call you back,
saving you moneybecause cell phones
were invented, not because they were
Czech. Even if some languages express
certain concepts more artfully, or more
succinctly, its precisely because we recognize the phenomena to which they
refer that were delighted by knullrufs
and Kummerspeck.
A language carries within it a culture, or cultures: ways of thinking and
being. I spoke American English with
the people to whom I was closest (with
the exception of Olivier), who spoke
American English back to me. For most
of my life, I had assumed that Americanness agreed with me, because I had
never questioned it. My alienations were
localized, smaller-bore. In North Carolinamy parents had migrated there

SKETCHBOOK BY BARRY BLITT

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

59

from Philadelphia and Long Island,

rendering us lifelong newcomersI
craved the immensity of New York. In
New York, I longed for the intimacy of
North Carolina. It wasnt that I didnt
like either culture. I loved them both.
Yet I felt that I could claim neither place
as fully my own. In North Carolina, I
was an arriviste; in New York, some part
of me would always be a bumpkin, marvelling at the existence of doorman
buildings and thinking the phrase plus
one a little mean. In some way, I felt
that I had already learned a new language, picked it up, like Zadie Smith,
in college, along with the unabridged
Clarissa and a taste for port.
Why do people want to adopt another culture? Alice Kaplan, the French
scholar, writes. Because theres something in their own they dont like, that
doesnt name them. For me, French
wasnt an uncomplicated refuge. I was
coming at the language, I think, from
the opposite direction: I had accidentally become the proprietor of a life
suffused by French, and, for all its charms,
there was something I didnt like in it.
In French, the grid was divided differently, between public and private, rather
than polite and rude. At first, I felt its
emphasis on discrimination, its relentless taxonomizing, as an almost ethical
defect. Frenchthe language and the culturewas so doctrinaire, so hung up on

questions of form. The necessity of classifying each person one came across as
vous or tu, outsider or insider, potential
foe or friend, seemed at best a pomposity
and at worst an act of paranoia. The easy
egalitarianism of English tingled like a
phantom limb. French could feel as old
and cold and settled in its ways a place
to live as Joni Mitchells Paris. One day, I
bought a package of twenty assiettes grillades and ached for America, where you
could use your large white paper plates
for whatever the hell you wanted.
Like Mark Twainwho translated
one of his stories from the French back
into English, to produce the thricebaked The Frog Jumping of the County
of CalaverasI at first found the language comically unwieldy. In its reluctance
to disobey itself, it often seemed effete.
One French newspaper had a column
that recapitulated the best tweets of
the week in more characters than they
took to write. The biggest ridiculousism
I ever came across was dinde gigogne
compose dune dinde partiellement dsosse,
farcie dun canard partiellement dsoss,
lui-mme farci dun poulet partiellement
dsoss that is to say, turducken.
Even if muruaneqa Yupik word for
soft, deep fallen snowwas basically
powder, the question tantalized me: Does
each language have its own world view?
Do people have different personalities
in different languages? Every exchange

student and maker of New Years resolutions hopes that the answer is yes.
More than any juice cleanse or lottery
win or career switch, a foreign language
adumbrates a vision of a parallel life.
The fantasy is that learning one activates a latent alter ego, righting a linguistic version of having been switched
at birth. Could I, would I, become someone else if I spoke French?

I to a Mauritanian folktale on tape.

ts a Friday class. Were listening

There is a wise old man. He notices that

his daughters have lately been wearing
more revealing clothes. He summons
them and seats them around him in a
circle, and then shows them his hands.
The right one is open. In it, he holds
an ounce of gold. The left one is closed.
Choose one, he tells his daughters.
Without knowing whats in it, they
all select the left fist.
But you see that in my right hand
theres an ounce of pure gold while you
dont know whats in the other one, the
man says.
The daughters still want whatever is
in the left hand.
Thus bidden, he opens it. Theres
nothing there but a lump of coal.
You see, my children, he declares,
man always prefers that which hides
itself from him.
Luisa presses Stop on the tape deck
and scans the classroom.
What do you think?she says.Lauren?
I think the Mauritanian folktale is
pretty sexist, I reply.
Is that so? But why? Theres a profound philosophical lesson herethat
people should have a hidden side.
Why doesnt he tell his sons that,then?
Its not sexist to say that a woman
should have more mystery.
I think thats sexist.
Its not sexist, Cristina, the artist,
says, cutting in. Its about tradition versus modernity.
Luisa, warming to this interpretation, turns to Cristina and asks her to
continue.
Too open is not interesting, she
says. Thats the moral of the story.
Carlos cant help himself.
Man and woman are not the same!
he cries. Thats reality.
Its a pile-on. I know I should probably fold. But now, like Carlos, I cant

help trying to articulate my feelings.

Reality can be sexist, I say, fixing
Carlos with a stare. What if this was
Saudi Arabia instead of Mauritania?
Carlos is, for a millisecond, speechless.
Ladies, he says, regaining his composure. He opens his chest to the room,
like a lawyer addressing a jury. Do you
prefer a man who shows it all or who
keeps a little hidden?
I think people should wear whatever they want, I say.
No, but what if a guy is walking
around in collants?
Merde, what are collants? I whip out
my little dictionary app like a gunslinger
in a saloon fight.
What do you think of a guy, Cristina is yelling, who wears tights to show
his intimate form?
My pistol requires a password. I cant
type fast enough.
Its not the same for a man or a woman,Lana says,raising a manicured hand.
Carlos replies, Thats why I asked
what you ladies think.
Women arent the same as men,
Lana continues. They care what we
wear. I care what he feels, what he
thinks.
After class, Cristina approaches me
in the canteen.
That was very American of you,
what you said.
Thanks, I say, sawing away at my
veal cutlet.
Repeating I think thats sexist
doesnt exactly qualify as rhetorical pyrotechnics. But Im pleased that Ive
managed to say something that sounds
reasonably like myself. Ive thought of
learning as something passive. Ive been
hoarding words as though they were
rare doubloons, tucking them away in
the velvet pouches of my cerebrum. But
theyre worthless, I realize, out of circulation. A language is the only subject
you cant learn by yourself.

T internalized the vocabulary you have

he crazy thing is that once youve

to figure out how it goes together. In a

language with sixty thousand words,
there are approximately a hundred billion trillion ten-word combinations that
make grammatical sense. Knowing which
permutations work is, to some extent,
intuitive. But fluency is also a function
of familiarity, as grammar offers few

clues as to the parts of speech that are

not so much idioms as loose affinities.
How is one to know that inclement almost always goes with weather; that aspersions are cast but insults hurled; that
observers are keen; that processions are
orderly; that drinks, as someone apparently decreed sometime in the early years
of this century, must be grabbed and
e-mails shot? In English, I strained to
avoid such formulations. But in French
conformity was my ambition. Speaking

offered a sense of community, the rare

chance to crowdsource my personal thesaurus. I was trying to join in, not to
distinguish myself. I wasnt a writer but
a speaker. I wasnt an observer but a participant. It was such a happy thing to
strive for a clich.
Bilinguals overwhelmingly report
that they feel like different people in
different languages. It is often assumed
that the mother tongue is the language
of the true self. In many ways, it remains
the primal vehicle. A person who has
spoken English most of her life is always going to speak English when she
stubs her toe (or, according to spycraft,
at the moment of orgasm). But, if first
languages are reservoirs of emotion, second languages can be rivers undammed,
freeing their speakers to ride different
currents. People are more likely to say
theyd push a man off a bridgein order
to save five other people about to be hit
by a trainwhen the dilemma is presented in their second language.
The linguist Dan Jurafsky writes of
a phenomenon called semantic bleaching, in which words, most often in the
affective realm, lose their power with
the passage of time, so that the awe
fades from awesome and horrible
becomes merely unpleasant. French,
for me, was semantic baking soda, reinvigorating my expressive palette. Fun
and excited were out, having no obvious equivalent. I realized how many
fun things I was excitedly calling the

best once it became clear that the formulation didnt really work in French,
because French speakers took it literally. Tell a francophone, This is the
best tarte au citron!, and it will come
across less as sincere praise than as an
asininity. Shell go silent as she tries to
figure out what youre comparing it
with, whether youve actually sampled
all the tartes au citron the world has to
offer. It was hard to accept that, in
French, a compliment resonates in inverse proportion to the force with which
it is offered. Much better to say the
tart is bonne than trs bonne. Discrimination was a higher virtue than
effusiveness.
In Giovannis Room, James Baldwin describes French as that curiously
measured and vehement language,
which sometimes reminds me of stiffening egg white and sometimes of stringed
instruments but always of the underside and aftermath of passion. I liked
how Baldwin captured the relationship
between the obliqueness of French
the under and the afterand its erotic
charge. Its formality, paradoxically,
heightened its potential for feeling.
Shedding superlatives, I felt as though
I were enacting a linguistic version of
Coco Chanels dictum that before leaving the house a woman should remove
one piece of jewelry. I wondered if perhaps the Mauritanian folktalewhat
is hidden is desired; to conceal certain
parts is to keep them sensitivehad
actually been about French.
French is said to be the language of
love, meaning seduction. I found in it
an etiquette for loving, what happens
next. My acquisition of the language
had been a sort of conversion, and, in
the same way that Catholics valued the
Latin Mass for its grandeur, French represented to me a sacred medium. Where
I had once interpreted Oliviers reticence as pessimism, I now saw the deep
romanticism, the hopefulness, of not
wanting to overstate or to overpromise.
Vous and tu concentrated intimacy by
dividing it into distinct shadesthe
emotional equivalent of Russians two
shades of blue. I understood, finally, why
it made Olivier happy when I wore
makeup; why he didnt call me his best
friend; why, in five years, I had never
heard him burp. Love was not fusion.
Je taime was enough.

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61

FICTION

62

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

ILLUSTRATION BY DAVID DORAN

ynette was on Oxford Street,

which was a stupid place to be
at any time, and especially at
five oclock on a winter afternoon. It
was her own fault. Shed gone into John
Lewis after work for a few things she
needed, and then shed tried on some
clothes, which she hadnt meant to,
and now she was stuck in a crowd of
other shoppers and workers, fuming
inwardly and shuffling in half steps,
funnelling into the entrance to the
Underground. Everybody was shapeless, muffled in down coats, hooded.
Sleet was blowing in their facesno
one looked up at the Christmas lights.
Lynette had heard someone say that
one of the shops was pumping artificial snow into the street, which made
the idea of even real snow somehow
disgusting. Lynette was tall, anxious,
original, in her late thirties, with coffeecolored freckled skin; her hair was
shaved above her ears, and the rest of
it, dyed bronze and pink, was piled up
in a striking birds-nest mess, into
which soft spatters of sleet blew and
melted. She was wearing a red tartan
scarf with a wool coat shed found in
a charity shopbright pink, with a
big shawl collarand believed that
she despised the kind of clothes you
could buy in department stores like
John Lewis. It humiliated her to be
caught out in this queue, branded with
her own plastic carrier, stupid like
everyone else.
A man came pushing through the
crowd from behind her, accidentally
striking her hard with his shoulder
as he passed, sending her staggering
on her high heels; Lynette stumbled
sideways, grabbing at a teen-age boy
hunched in a thin jacket, and then
tripped against the wheels of a pushchair, only just stopping herself from
falling on top of the child inside it.
She was shocked out of her self-possession, her ankle wrenched painfully,
the hem of her pink coat dragging
in the dirty slush. A small stir of
commiseration opened around her:
someone helped her to right herself,
and the childs mother reassured the
child, who began to cry. No, Im fine,
Im O.K., Lynette said. Sorry, thank
you, sorry.
The people behind them, meanwhile, were pressing inexorably for-

ward. And the culprit whod pushed

her was forging on through the crowd,
oblivious of any trouble hed left in his
wake. Hey, you! Lynette shouted at
his back, but he didnt hear her, or
turn around. As soon as she was steady
on her feet she went hurrying after
him, pushing furiously herself between
trudging individuals, consumed by her
rage at this retreating back in its midlength tobacco-brown coat, which was
swinging open in spite of the weather
the man had his hands carelessly in
his pockets. Out of sheer stubbornness, Lynette refused to limp on the
hurt ankle, wouldnt allow anyone to
see that she was wounded. The tearing hot pain, every time she put her
weight on it, seemed inseparable
from her injured amour propreshe
couldnt bear the picture of her own
foolishness, the idiotic ugliness of her
stumbling sideways, hanging on to
strangers. Suddenly she hated this
afternoon, this whole day, her whole
life. The idea of her own separateness
from others was essential to Lynettes
dignity; she held herself apart from
the mainstream. Ahead of her the tobacco coat dipped down the stairs into
the Underground and she followed
after it, wouldnt take her eyes off it,
couldnt forgive it. Something about
that turned back infuriated herits
broad unconscious strength, its serene
unawareness of her.
They were all funnelled in together
again, through the ticket barriers, and
she felt for her Oyster card in the side
pocket of her bag without looking, so
as not to lose sight of her manhe
was halfway down the escalator to the
northbound platforms before she got
on at the top. She wanted the Victoria line, and at the bottom he turned
right for the Bakerloo, but she wouldnt
let him go until shed said something
and had some acknowledgment from
him. So she followed him onto the
platform but couldnt see him at first.
Then there he was, back still presented to her, making his way along
the platform to the other end; she
pushed through the crowd behind
him until she was close enough to
touch the heavy weave of his coat,
could almost feel the heat he radiated, smell the sweet-sour wool. Lynette put out her hand to tug at his

arm and make him turn around, to

accuse him.
Excuse me! she began indignantly.

P touched him, before he turned

erhaps it was as soon as she

around, that she knew it was Toby. It

wasnt really so extraordinary that shed
followed him all that way without recognizing himshed seen only his back,
and the open, flapping coat had obscured his shape, a knitted hat had hidden his hair. Anyway, Toby had changed
a lotfilled out and become more definitely, heavily, his good-natured self
in the years, nine years, since shed last
seen him. She realized in that moment,
to her surprise, that hed been only a
boy when they separated and then were
divorced. They had seemed so ancient
to themselves in those awful days, so
darkened and wizened by experience
and bitterness. It hadnt quite occurred
to her, in the time since theyd parted
and the parting had been all her
doing, he had just suffered it intensely,
with a white, fixed, wronged stare
and outbreaks of baffled protestthat
he might have had all this growing left
to do.
Toby wasnt exactly better-looking
now. In fact, hed never really been her
type, which might have been part of
the problem. He still had that sandy
coloring, his nose raw and pink with
cold, something naked in his face,
knobbed cheekbones and cracked lips,
bony forehead; she guessed that his
reddish-fair hair had receded quite some
way, underneath the hat. But he had
more force now than he used to have,
as if his bones had thickened and hardened: something unfinished in his face
had been completed and closed. At the
sight of her, however, his expression
cracked open into such spontaneous,
friendly pleasure that it was like a flare
against the underground light.
Lynette! What are you doing here?
A train was arriving: as the crowd
surged forward, he grabbed her with
both hands, hanging on to her sleeves
so that he wouldnt lose her, smiling
into her face. They let the train go.
The same as you, stupid, she said,
returning his smile. Living here.
I thought youd gone abroad?
I did, but I came back.
Still holding on to her, Toby looked

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

63

around him as if hed been so preoccupied that hed hardly taken the trouble, until now, to notice where he was.
Listen, this is no good. Lets get out
of here to talk.
But its hell up there, too.
Then where are you going to get
off ? Where is it you live? Ill get off
with you and well find somewhere for
coffee. Or for a drink. Its really good
to see you.
The old Tobythe young one
had been very shy. Hed had the air of
a country boy, which, in a way, he was:
hed grown up in a dilapidated farmhouse, though his parents werent farmers but artists. But how worldly he appeared now! He seemed to know how
to take command of their time and
arrange for their pleasure. And if he
was inviting her out for a drink, Lynette thought, then he had surely forgiven her for the past. He had got
over her, just as shed promised him
he wouldthough she hadnt, actually, been quite sure. Shed been afraid
that he was one of those men who
were marked for life when they were
hurt. But that fear had been only her
vanity, after allnaturally, hed forgotten her. She knew that she wouldnt
ever tell him now about how hed sent
her flying and shed come vengefully
after him. Im meeting friends later
in Marylebone, she lied. Im sure we
can find somewhere there for a drink.
Im free till eight.
On the train there was no chance
of a seat. Standing, pressed tightly
against each other, among all the wet
coats, still smiling into each others
smiles, leaning in to confideLynette
was tall enough to speak into his ear,
even though Toby was six foot three
or fourand swaying together, hanging on to the bar overhead, they talked
with a warmth and ease they might
not have managed seated side by side.
If Lynette inclined against him, she
could take the weight off her ankle.
Anyway, she hardly noticed the pain.
She was too full of her own performance: confident, forceful, charming.
Youve changed! she said to Toby.
Ive just realized what it is. You look
prosperous!
Laughing, he blushed. So at least
he still blushed easily. I am prosperous, he said. Moderately prosperous.
64

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

Things have gone pretty well these past

few years. Do I sound smug? The studios are getting plenty of work. Weve
set up a new production company to
develop some more innovative projects. We can afford to take a few risks
now. And what about you? You look
the same as ever.
Not prosperous, you mean.
You know what I mean, he said,
flatteringly, but easilyas if her looks,
and his pleasure in her looks, didnt dismay him as they once had.
Well, she wasnt prosperous, she
said. She had a temp job in admin at
the BBC. It was hardly tempingshed
been there almost a year. It paid the
bills, although, of course, in London
it didnt really pay the bills. But she
didnt care about money, he knew that.
She had everything she wanted. She
was still singing. Her parents were fine,
both alive, both still working: her mother
was a nurse and her dad, whose own
father had come from Sierra Leone,
was driving for a private car-hire firm;
hed finished with the buses. And have
you married again, Toby? she asked
him.
She thought she felt the faintest
wincing in him then, thrumming
through his body like a dull bass note.
But she might have been imagining
it; in his face, she couldnt see anything
but bright openness. I thought youd
have heard about Jaz, he said. Weve

got two little girls. Were very happy.

I did hear something. Im so glad
youre happy.
What about you?
Oh, remember what I told you: Im
not really the marrying kind. Or the
mothering kind, either.
Never say never.
Ive got a nice boyfriend, she added,
which was another lie, or a half lie
particularly that word boyfriend, which
she would never normally have used
about the man she saw sometimes, a

musician who was thoroughly wrapped

up in his own work.
Toby was carefully tactful. I dont
blame you about the mothering. Its
good, but very messy. Not much sleep.
When the train jolted and he put
an arm round Lynettes shoulders to
steady her, she imagined that their bodies, separated by all the layers of their
winter clothes, were sniffing each other
out, old familiars, remembering each
others nakedness, and all the daily closeness and lust and shame that, in the
comedy played out by their conscious
selves, they must pretend not to remember. Ive got a suggestion, by the way,
he said. All the bars will be packed, its
a nightmare, pre-Christmas. We could
go back to my place in Queens Park
and have a drink there, instead. More
peaceful. Id like you to see it.
The last thing Lynette wanted was
to meet his wife. She could imagine
her already, without meeting her. She
knew what she looked like from Facebook: small and blond and sparky, flexible from her Pilates, hostile. Really?
Wouldnt I just be in the way? Isnt it
the childrens teatime and all that?
Oh, theyre off visiting Jazs sister.
Ive got the house to myself.
That was startling. How worldly
was he, coolly inviting her to trespass
on the grounds of his second marriage?
Lynette even wondered for a mad moment whether shed made Toby wicked
when she left him, whether hed learned
from her how to have his own secrets
and calculate for his own devious purposes. She studied his open, hopeful
expressioncautiously, as if she were
just musing over the timing of her
imaginary arrangements for later
but couldnt catch any flicker of suggestiveness or sin. Probably what shed
concluded all those years ago still
held: if she was too complicated, he
was too simple. Perhaps he believed
that they could have their innocence
back, as if thered never been anything
between them. All right, why not?
she said. Im curious to see where youve
ended up.

T really was prosperous!fronted

he housea whole house! he

right onto Queens Park, so that at both

ends of the long sitting room, on the
first floor, you looked out onto bare

winter trees, a tracery of wet branches

gleaming black in the reflected light
from the windows. Toby went around
switching on lamps but didnt draw the
curtains, and so the room was filled
with their awareness of the thin city
darkness outside, and the rushing sound
of the rain, which had begun to fall in
earnest. He knelt to put a match to the
kindling in the wood-burning stove.
Lynette was taking in the distinctive,
comfortable, expensive room, well
lived-in, and its idiosyncratic mixture
of old things and modern ones: a worn
leather sofa with scuffed cushions, smoldering-red rugs on the dark polished
boards, some kind of ancient silk appliqu on one wall, a painted rocking
horse, piles of childrens books, toys, an
elliptical smoked-glass coffee table, a
Bose hi-fi, shelves stacked with vinyl.
Oh, Id like to stay here, she thought
before she could stop herself. She was
dead tired; it had been a long day. Toby
shook out the match, and behind the
bleary stove window young white flames
sucked and stretched, as sinuously as
animals.
Youve trailed your coat in the mud,
he noticed, still kneeling, picking up
her hem and frowning at it. Lynette
saw with a pang the patch on his crown
where the hair was sparse. We ought
to put it to dry, he said. Then you
can brush it off before you go out
again.
Pretending to see the mud for the
first time, she told him not to fuss, it
didnt matter, but he insisted on carrying off the coat to hang it somewhere warm. There had always been
a mismatch between the rugged form
of himknotty biceps and big, coarse,
freckled handsand the delicate way
he touched things and fretted over
them. Lynette remembered that this
scrupulous solicitousness of his had
goaded her into bad behavior; it had
made her careless and wasteful, afraid
that his loving kindness might enclose
her too entirely, like a sheath. Left
alone in his sitting room, she stood
stubbornly without exploring, putting
her weight on her good foot, rubbing
her long tapering hands together, palms
yellow with cold, nails painted dark
maroon, in the heat that was only just
starting to come from the stove. She
heard a reassuring rush of life into the

The gentleman says, You tell me youve got a dastardly plan, then Ill
swear to defeat you, and then we can both expense this.

central-heating system, which Toby

must have turned on, radiators ticking as they began to warm up. When
he returned, hed taken off his coat
and was carrying two glasses of white
wine, the glass faintly green, stems
twisted like barley sugar. She tapped
one with her nail, making it ring. Is
white all right? he asked. You used
to like it.
In the old days, he was always
anxiously searching her face to see
whether she liked things or didnt like
them; his subordination to her will had
dragged at her, making her resentful. Now she couldnt see past some
new barrier in his eyes, as if behind
it he were placid and settled, hardened. I still do, she said. What a
lovely place.
He glanced around him proprietorially, pleased. Do you approve?
Youve got your mothers good
taste. I dont mean exactly the same
taste as hers, but the same confidence
and good instincts. I thought I was
going to discover things about Jaz
when I came in here, but I cant feel
her anywhere.
Jaz isnt interested in her surroundings, so long as everythings comfortable. She cant believe what a big deal
I make out of choosing stuff. Shes like

you: everythings in the inner life.

Displeased, Lynette tapped on her
glass again, drumming a rhythm, turning away from him to look at an old
clock with an enamelled face, painted
with dancing cupids, telling the wrong
time. This is a nice piece, she said
randomly, though she hated the simpering pink cupids. Why did men
always do that, run their women together into a continuum? Had Toby
forgotten Lyn ette so thoroughly, or
had he never known her? How could
he not see that she and Jaz were opposites, who would dislike each other
on sight? On Facebook, at least before the babiesLynette had stopped
looking afterwardJaz was usually
huddled with a crowd of similar-looking friends, fellow-schoolteachers, perhaps, their arms around one anothers
necks. They were all grinning, and one
of them might have her eyes crossed
or be sticking her tongue out; sometimes they were wearing funny hats,
or set against the backdrop of a foreign city. When she first saw the photos, Lynette understood that Toby had
opted for an easier, chummier life, turning his back on certain kinds of difficulty. And why not?
She sat down in one corner of the
leather sofa, with Toby at an angle
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65

to her, their knees almost touching,

in a low chair covered in striped velvet. He had been right to bring her
here. In the anonymity of a bar somewhere, theyd have fallen easily into
a surface flirtation under her control;
here, in his family home, everything
was transparent, and therefore went
deeper. How could they be strangers
now, when they were so intimate once?
They had belonged to each other in
their youth. Her eyes filled with tears
unexpectedly, at the idea of it. The
wine was very cold, delicious; her body
was relaxing in the thickening warmth
of the room, while the clarifying alcohol flashed through her blood like
ice. Reminiscing, avoiding treacheries, she and Toby seemed to be treading on safe stepping stones above
dark flowing water. He was sorry he
hadnt kept in touch with her brothers: such lovely guys, they used to
seem super cool to him. They were a
nightmare, Lynette said. Theyd been
in all sorts of trouble but were settled
now. One painting and decorating,
one in the policeyou know, poacher
turned gamekeeper, what a joke. And
how was his mother? Lynette knew
about the cancerwas it still in remission? Carol wasnt so well, Toby
said. She was having more chemo.
Lynette touched the back of his hand
kindly, lightly, with her long fingers.

Do you remember our car crash?

she said. On the way home from your
parents house? When that white juggernaut was almost on top of us on
the motorway because he didnt see us
in his blind spot?
Clipped our back end when you
tried to accelerate ahead of him.
I really thought we were going to
die. And all that timewhile we went
spinning across into three lanes of oncoming trafficall that time you were
just talking to me very quietly in your
normal voice, telling me everything
was going to be all right. It was very
calming. No, that isnt what you said
exactly. You were just saying, Nothing s
happened yet. It s all right so far. Nothings happened yet.
Nothing did happen, Toby said
stoutly.
But we could have died tragically
young, like lovers in a story.
He laughed. Im glad we didnt die.
Lynette was watching all the time
for any little clue that gave away what
was missing from his new life. And
she was changing her mind about his
looks. The raw sweetness Toby had
once had was solidified now into authority; he was substantial and massive, without self-doubt. In the firelight the wiry hair on his forearms and
the down on his ruddy cheekbones
had a russet glow: shed felt distaste

, Waukesha County.

in the past for that gingery coloring.

Now it seemed like a signal sent up
from Tobys passionate, secret life, from
which she was shut out. Checking his
watch, he worried about her friends
in Marylebone. Though I wish you
could stay longer.
Yes, I ought to go soon.
She was running her finger around
the rim of her glass, making it ring out.
Why couldnt he guess that those
friends didnt exist?
Tell me about your singing, Toby
said.
Then Lynette was flooded with all
the anguish that music entailed for her.
It made her sick that he knew about
certain things shed rather forget: how
ambitious shed been, and the grand
idea of her talent that shed once cherished and had since discarded. Her
voice hadnt been as good as shed hoped,
she had failed to make a career out of
italthough she did do some teaching, hourly paid, and also some examining for the Associated Board. Turning her face away, she presented him
with her haughtiest profile. Oh, that.
Im in a show at the moment. You know
Im superstitious. I dont want to talk
about it.
And you have felt free? You told
me that as long as we were together
you werent free to give yourself over
to your work completely.
Did I say that? How pretentious
of me!
She felt a spasm of exasperation
that Toby had stored up all the nonsense shed ever spoken and taken it
so seriously. In fact, she was guesting
in a student production of Dido and
Aeneas, in which Aeneas was got up
as the captain of an American football team and Dido as a cheerleader;
it worked surprisingly well. Toby didnt
know anything about music, anyway.
Lynette hummed to herself the opening lines of Didos lament, as she
looked around at the beautiful room.
How strange that Toby was so simple and yet his simplicity had had all
these solid, complicated effects in the
real world, these material accumulations and accretionsand children,
too, the branching out and infinite
complication of children. Whereas her
own complexity seemed to have had
no consequences. It was all wrapped

up inside hershe had nothing to

show for it. She didnt even own anything significant.

T the utility room. While he worked

oby hunted for a stiff brush in

with it over the sink, getting the mud

off her pink coat, Lynette idled in the
spacious kitchen, stroking the dark teak
surfaces, rattling the drawers open and
closing themso many gadgets!and
admiring the childrens photos and
drawings stuck to the fridge and on
the cupboard doors. What gorgeous
little girls! Finally, holding her coat up
to the light, he was satisfied. You cant
see any trace of it.
Heres my number, Lynette said,
scribbling it on a board that was already
chalked with pasta, Calpol, kitchen
towel, black olives. Text me, so I get
yours. Its been so nice catching up.
Id like to stay in touch.
Id like it, too.
You ought to meet Jaz sometime.
That would be nice.
It was still raining hard, but she
wouldnt take an umbrella. I dont mind
getting wet, she called back from the
steps outside his front door, laughing
up at him. Its lovely! I love the rain.
They were waving and smiling. Lynette turned to go. And just as Toby
closed the door behind her, abruptly
stopping up the flood of light from inside, she put her weight down clumsily on her sprained ankle, missing the
bottom step and slipping heavily on
the wet stone. She cried out and grabbed
at the railing that ran in front of the
basement area. Toby couldnt hear her
from inside the house. A man hurrying past with his collar pulled up against
the weather chose not to turn around.
The street lights seemed all but obliterated by the falling rain; tall trees in
the gated park reproached her with
their penitential stillness. Everything
was desolationit was too much. Hot
tears of pain and self-pity mixed with
the cold rain on Lynettes cheeks. But
she wouldnt, she couldnt, climb the
steps to that front door again, although
she longed for the warmth stoked up
inside, the flames licking in Tobys stove.
As if the pain had summoned it, she
remembered a scene quite unlike all
the steadying, consoling stories that
she and Toby had exchanged upstairs.

It was when everything was almost

over between them and she was putting her things into boxes. She hadnt
wanted to take much, only a few essential CDs and clothes. She had pretended to be busy with the boxes, but
her hands were shaking and she hardly
knew what she was packing, and Tobys ranting behind her was terrible because it was so uncharacteristic, as if
something in him that should never
have come to light had been broken
open and exposed. Take whatever you
like, hed said. Everything youve
touched is spoiled for me now.

T his back to the closed door, not

oby stood for a moment with

thinking or processing anything, then

returned to the kitchen. He had work
to do this evening; he ought to make
a sandwich or an omelette and get on
with it. He checked his phone and then
he noticed Lynettes number written
on the chalkboard. After a moments
hesitation, he erased the number with
a wet cloth, wiped the whole board
clean, then rewrote pasta, Calpol,
kitchen towel, black olives. He washed
out the cloth and ran tap water in the
sink, rinsing away the dried mud hed
brushed off her coat, sending it spinning down the plughole.
When he took his omelette upstairs
to eat it in front of the twenty-fourhour news, the first thing he saw was
her forgotten plastic carrier, tucked
underneath the sofa where shed been
sitting. He ate the omelette without
tasting anything, not taking his eyes
off the TV screen, and then when hed
finished eating he put down his plate
and picked up the carrier gingerly, without opening it or looking inside. Perplexed, he stood holding it stiffly away
from his body. Hed have liked to bury
it deep in a dustbin somewhere outside, perhaps on the next street, only
he couldnt do that, in case Lynette
came back to ask for it. And now that
hed erased her number he couldnt
even text her to ask for her address so
that he could post the thing, get rid of
it. The item incriminated him, whatever he did. Eventually, he hid it at the
back of one of the cabinets in his office
upstairs. Toby wasnt a natural deceiver,
and he hadnt done anything that wasnt
innocent. But it would be better if Jaz

didnt know that Lynette had been

here, in this house, printing her presence everywhere so that it haunted
him wherever he looked. If Jaz didnt
know, then he didnt have to think
about what it meant.
Jaz called, but he didnt pick up his
phone or ring her back. He wasnt ready
to talk to her, not yet. He was deliberately not thinking something. He
wasnt thinking that hed put everything togetherfamily and work and
homeall so that Lynette could visit
it someday and see that hed managed
to have a good life without her. He
knew that if he held off from thinking that for long enough then at some
point it could no longer possibly be
true, and hed forget that hed ever
thought it might be.

L chilly, empty pub around the corynette managed to limp to a

ner, where no one was watching the

football on gigantic screens. She
bought another glass of wine, which
wasnt a good idea, because it wasnt
anything like as nice as the wine shed
had at Tobys, and, anyway, two glasses
always gave her a headache. Halfway
through her drink, she remembered
the silky top shed bought because it
was reduced, and must have left behind in his house, with its price tag
still attached, in its plastic carrier. She
imagined Toby pulling out the slinky
leopard-skin print and examining it,
surprised by how cheap it was, sorry
that Lynette couldnt afford anything
better, wondering if she wasnt too
old to wear it. At least he was bound
to text her now, as soon as he discovered that shed forgotten it. She put
her phone on the tabletop in front of
her and waited. Would she tell him
that shed hurt herself, that she was
still close by? I m just around the corner, bit of a disaster, I ve done something silly to my ankle. She didnt know
yet. She waited to see what words
he chose to use. She might not tell
him anything, might not even get
back to him at all, in fact. She might
just take an Uber home. It really was
better to be free. Or, if it wasnt better, it was necessary.
NEWYORKER.COM

Tessa Hadley on fiction as anthropology.

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

67

THE CRITICS
POP MUSIC

OUT OF THE TRAP

Can Gucci Mane survive his legend?

E jail, he likes to go straight to the revery time Gucci Mane gets out of

cording studioa habit that is acknowledged among his fans as a testament to

both his work ethic and his turbulent life.
On May 26th, it was time for another reintroduction. Freed once more, after serving three years in federal prison for illegal possession of a firearm, Gucci Mane
went to the studio. Less than twentyfour hours later, he released a grim comeback track, 1st Day Out tha Feds, sounding defiant: I bend, dont break, I dont
ask, just take / Black gloves, black tape,
and I dont play nor pray.
He delivered these words in an unhurried slur: his warm Southern accent
and peculiar enunciation soften the percussive force of his syllables, as if he were
drumming with brushes. (A hard word
like straight might come out as something gentler: shkray.) In a genre that
celebrates resourcefulness, no one is
more resourceful than Gucci Mane, who
built his legacy not on mainstream hits
but on a series of modestly successful
major-label albums and a profusion of
the unofficial albums known as mixtapes.
New releases arrived every yearsometimes every monthand even though
the guy on the cover wasnt always available to promote them, listeners were
drawn in by an idiosyncratic style that
was as consistent as his life was not.
Gucci Mane is one of the most street
guys I ever met, Zaytoven, one of his
longtime producers, says. But when he
raps it sounds like nursery rhymes. Of
course, these rhymes tend not to be childfriendly, or friendly at all: Pissy yellow
jewelry, pussy, dont piss me off / Sever
a nigga head off, cut a nigga feet off.
This combination of menace and
68

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

whimsy turned Gucci Mane into something more than a fairly popular rapper:
he became a folk hero, the kind of performer who is almost as much fun to talk
about as to listen to. Some musicians have
a song or an album that they are known
for, but Gucci Mane has been known
primarily for being Gucci Mane, although
he sometimes calls himself Gucci Mane
LaFlare, or simply Guwop. (This last
nickname may come in handy if he ever
receives a threatening letter from the legal
department of an Italian fashion house.)
And in 2011 he acquired a new trademark, when he covered the right side of
his face with a tattoo of an ice-cream
cone, accented with red lightning bolts
and one of his favorite interjections: Brrr.
He later explained, as if it were obvious,
that the image was a celebration of his
status as the coldest in the game.
This summer, a new Gucci Mane has
appeared, one so clearly transformed that
some fans insist he has been replaced by
a clone. Formerly a self-described big
fat rich nigga, he emerged from prison
looking lean and happy, flashing a newly
white smile. On Snapchat, he posted a
video of himself eating a well-balanced
meal. Yeah, this is kale right here, he
said. He says that he is sober after years
of addiction to prescription cough syrup.
And, at the age of thirty-six, he seems
to be relishing his role as one of the most
widely admired rappers on the planet,
especially among his peers. Gucci Mane
showed a generation how to emphasize
intonation over enunciation, and how to
deploy slight rhythmic imprecision to
buck the stiff authority of the beat. His
new album, Everybody Looking, is the
product of a six-day recording session
and, you might say, a three-year writ-

ing session: as an inmate, he passed the

time by composing verses in pencil on
a legal pad. The albums only featured
rappers are Kanye West, Drake, and
Young Thug, all defining voices of the
current moment, and all fans.
To celebrate his return, and his rebirth, Gucci Mane booked a night at
Atlantas grandest venue, the Fox Theatre, a former movie palace with an ornate ceiling, decorated with trompe-loeil
stars, and nearly five thousand seats, all
of which sold soon after the concert was
announced. He took the stage at precisely nine oclock, shirtless beneath a
sparkling golden jacket that reflected the
lights above him and the flashing phones
below. Wsappenin, he said, grinning.
Its Gucci, bitch!The beat dropped, but
for a few minutes he barely rapped, patrolling the stage while the crowd shouted
his lyrics back at him. The concert was
billed as Gucci Mane & Friends, and
the surprise guests arrived roughly in
order of popularity, building from local
favorites like OJ da Juiceman to a couple of emissaries from pop musics A-list,
Future and Drake. One guest was a new
friend: Fetty Wap, the New Jersey warbler behind Trap Queen, which was
among last years most popular songs.
Fetty Wap calls Gucci Mane his favorite rapper, and he followed an exuberant
performance at the Fox by posting, the
next morning, an even more exuberant
Instagram video. Yo, yesterday I met
Gucci Mane, he said. I met motherfuckin Guwop!
The concert wasnt quite exhaustive
if it had been, it might still be going.
In this room of admiring faces, more
than one of which was decorated with
an ice-cream cone, every song was a

ABOVE: MIGUEL PORLAN

BY KELEFA SANNEH

Gucci Manes rhymes draw from his turbulent life. He jokes, My flow so schizophrenic that I think I need a straitjacket.
ILLUSTRATION BY R. KIKUO JOHNSON

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

69

fan favorite, and no one seemed to mind

that the guy rapping about being geekedup crazy had changed his ways. Gucci
Mane has disclosed, in interviews, that
he felt numb during the drug-addled
years when he was most prolific. So
when he declares, at one point, I done
shook off all my demonsnow Im back
to myself, fans might wonder who,
exactly, that is.

G pers Atlanta has ever produced, is

ucci Mane, one of the greatest rap-

himself a product of Birmingham, Alabama. His name is Radric Davis, and

when he was nine he moved with his
family to a rough apartment complex in
East Atlanta, where his accent marked
him as an interloper. (He once described
himself as a country boy and a city boy
all blended into one.) He was an interloper, too, in Atlantas booming hip-hop
scene: when a local group scored a hit
with a lighthearted song called White
Tee, he and some friends recorded a
fearsome remake, Black Tee, which was
a paean to robbery; in an accompanying
low-budget video, his face was masked
by a black handkerchief.
Gucci Manes musical career has been
inseparable from the criminal career
that has frequently interrupted it, burnishing his legend while sabotaging his
professional prospects. He says that he
started selling drugs at thirteen, and so
when, as a fledgling rapper, he declared
himself independent, the implication
was that he didnt need record-company
money because he had plenty of his
own. His first real success, a 2005 gemophiles anthem called Icy, almost
ended his career, and his life. It featured
another Atlanta rapper, Young Jeezy,
and after the two men argued over its
ownership a friend of Jeezys was found
shot to death. Gucci Mane was arrested
for the shooting, but he claimed that
he acted in self-defense, when the
man and some associates burst into an
apartment to assault him; the case was
dropped. In an interview afterward,
Gucci Mane insulted Young Jeezy in
characteristically vivid language. The
nigga shaky, like a earthquake, he said.
Like awhat they call it? Quicksand.
Stepping on quicksand.
The first big-budget Gucci Mane album, released in 2009, was The State vs.
Radric Davis. Despite the dour title, he
70

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

seemed to be in high spirits, especially

in a song called Lemonade, which described colorful jewelry with the bewildered enthusiasm of someone seeing
it for the first time. (Yellow diamond
pinkie ring, call that there the lemon
rock / Jewelry box a lemon bin, my earring size of apricot.) Gucci Mane has
never found a consistent home on the
radio, at least outside Atlanta, but his
music and mythos spread online, sometimes through viral images. (One showed
him in a majestic white fur coat, which
morphed into a waterfallthe rapper as
force of nature.) And, because mainstream success never seemed within reach,
he generally eschewed crossover attempts
in order to focus on his core fans, which
meant focussing on the trap, or dope
house: his discography includes the Trap
House series (five volumes), Trap God
(three volumes), Trap Back (two volumes), and Trapology.
Gucci Manes first conviction, in 2001,
was for cocaine possession, but what followed can make him seem less like a trap
god than like a lost soul. In 2005, the
month after the killing for which he
wasnt charged, he was arrested for beating a concert promoter with a pool cue;
he pleaded no contest. He was arrested
a number of times in the following years,
for increasingly erratic behavior, and in
2011 he pleaded guilty to pushing a
woman out of a moving vehicle. Two
years later, his mother filed an unsuccessful petition for guardianship, declaring that he had been given diagnoses of
schizophrenia and bipolar disorder; a
psychiatrist testified that she didnt know
whether his behavior was based more
on the primary psychiatric issue or on
the substance-abuse issue. This is a sad
and disturbing chronicle, but fans sometimes treated the arrests as welcome proof
that Gucci Manes life really was as outrageous as his rhymes.

I scientious era of Hamiltonand Kent seems hard to believe, in the con-

drick Lamar, that there was once a time

when rappers were scary, and their music
was condemned by observers from across
the political spectrum. In some ways,
Gucci Mane is a holdover from this
older, meaner era, which is one reason
that a younger, courtlier peer like Drake
is so eager to get his blessing. (The two
are reportedly planning a collaborative

mini-album.) His music has drawn its

unsettling power not just from ostensibly true crime stories but also from sidelong references to addiction and mental illness: he has bragged about eating
them Percocets like they was baked
beans, and joked, My flow so schizophrenic that I think I need a straitjacket.
At his glassy-eyed best, he evoked a
zombie kingpin, staggering through a
strange and half-dead world. I keep on
hearing voices, he once rapped. The
voices were telling him to buy more
watches, more diamonds, more cars.
The older, meaner hip-hop world elevated brilliant but scruffy neighborhood
guys like Gucci Mane, without asking
them to apologize or explain. But it also
fostered a kind of exoticism: it was tempting to think of Gucci Mane primarily as
an avatar of East Atlanta mayhem, rather
than as an entertainer and a craftsman.
Everybody Looking is certainly entertaining, like dozens of Gucci Mane releases before it, but it hints at a previously implausible (and, it must be said,
happy) possibility: that the craftsman
might outlive the avatar. He still sounds
like himselfthe album is carefully devoid of any corrupting outside influence
or, for that matter, any concessions to
non-initiates. (On one track, he declares,
My Glocks sing my hooks, and we call
it pop music.) But he is equally uncompromising on the subject of his newfound sobriety, outing himself as a recovering drug addict in the albums
first stanza. And, though there is still
plenty of mayhem, many of the wildest
claims are made in the past tense. I got
so drunk, I left Priv and I crashed a
Bentley, he raps, as if he still cant quite
believe it.
Priv is an Atlanta night club, which
was also the site of the Fox concerts official after-party. Gucci Mane showed up
there shortly after two, and he seemed to
be the only person in the room not drinking or smoking anything. He watched,
impassive, as the d.j. crowed, Gucci
homethe whole motherfuckin city
come out! Not long afterward, Drake
arrived, thumping his chest, bowing his
head, and pointing to him in a gesture
of respect. Gucci Mane did not rap, but
he did briefly accept the microphone in
order to make a request. I wanna hear
some Gucci, he said. And then he stood
and listened to the guy on the record.

BOOKS

STATUS UPDATE
Jay McInerneys trilogy about the perils of privilege.
BY ADELLE WALDMAN

of the nineteen-eighties and recklessly

attempted to buy the publishing company where he worked. The Good Life
picked up the Calloways story fourteen
years later, around the time of 9/11, when
Corrine became involved with a man she
met while volunteering at Ground Zero.
The new book, like its predecessors,
is set against a major historical event
in this case, the financial crisis of 2008.
The Calloways are still together. Russell
now heads a small, independent publishing house with a focus on literary fiction. He yearns to make the company
more profitable, but his big move in that
direction backfires, humiliatingly. In the
course of the novel, Russell, once brash
and exuberant, is brought so low that,
when Corrine spots him unexpectedly
one day, she is thrown by his slumped
comportment, his slack demeanor, even
by the gray in his hair. . . . He looked like
one of those exhausted souls she saw
every day on the subway, men she imagined stuck in jobs they hated, going home
to wives they didnt love.
The final touch in this portrait of
middle-aged malaise comes when Russell takes part in a ceremonial softball
game in the Hamptons. A natural athlete, he sees the media-saturated event
as a chance to redeem himself before
the glitterati, if only for the duration of
the game. But Russell plays badly, flubbing a key catch and allowing two decisive runs. When Corrine tries to cheer
him up, Russell tells her not to bother:

heres a moment in Jay McInerneys new novel, Bright, Precious

Days (Knopf ), when one of its principals, a book editor in his early fifties,
comes to feel that he is a failure: How
was it that after working so hard and by
many measures succeeding and even excelling in his chosen field, he couldnt
afford to save this house that meant so
much to his family? Their neighbors
seemed to manage, thousands of people
no smarter than he wasless so, most of
themexcept perhaps in their understanding of the mechanics of acquisition.

Bright, Precious Days forms a trilogy that began with Brightness Falls
(1992), McInerneys most accomplished
and ambitious novel, and continued with
The Good Life (2006).The three books
revolve around Russell and Corrine Calloway, an attractive couple whose lives
appear to be very nearly charmed. But
the Calloways are restless types who have
the misfortune of living on a certain
skinny island where affluent professionals like them feel comparatively poor.
In Brightness Falls, Russell became
caught up in the leveraged buyout frenzy

McInerney (photographed above in 1988) is an intently psychological novelist.

72

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

Nobody has a more exquisite appreciation than McInerney of the morbid,

hypervigilant sensitivity we tend to harbor about our place in the world, especially when were feeling down.
Russells crisis of confidence coincides
with Corrines renewed involvement with
her attentiveand richlove interest
from The Good Life. (Though Russell has been guilty in the earlier books
of his own indiscretions, he has grown
too tired, or dejected, to bother with infidelity.) The contrast between these two
story lines, and the picture that emerges
of a marriage that seems both more stable and lonelier than it has ever been, is
quietly affecting. The secret romantic

RICK McGINNIS

That was possibly the most mortifying moment of my adult life, he added.
Oh, come on, its just a game.
No, its not. Its never just a game.

longings and professional disappointments

of people like the Calloways, who spend
summers in the Hamptons and live in a
Tribeca loft (albeit a rent-stabilized one),
might seem too frivolous to be placed at
the foreground of a novel, let alone three.
But McInerney rejects satires self-protective distancing as surely as he resists
its flattening effect on characterization;
in tone, Bright, Precious Days is mellow, earnest, almost elegiac. It is intelligent, and knowing in its depiction of certain segments of New York (especially the
world of publishing), but, unlike his bestknown novels, its rarely dazzling.

T stylish evocation of drug-addled

hat an author famous for slick,

youth has evolved into a restrained, almost sombre chronicler of professionalclass ennui may seem surprising. Bright,
Precious Days is a far cry from Bright
Lights, Big City, the novel that made
McInerney an instant celebrity in 1984,
at the age of twenty-nine. But, underneath the glamour and flash of his subject matter, he has always been a more
committed psychological novelist than
his reputation suggests.
Even Bright Lights, that most giddily evocative of eighties novels, isnt really a period piece. Its a highly disciplined work of fiction that happens to
capture its period. Thats why it has aged
better than the Brat Pack titles its typically associated with. Unlike some of
those books, Bright Lights relies far
less on the timeliness of its material than
on the energy of its prose:
The night has already turned on that imperceptible pivot where two A.M. changes to
six A.M. . . . Somewhere back there you could have
cut your losses, but you rode past that moment on
a comet trail of white powder and now you are trying to hang on to the rush. Your brain at this moment is composed of brigades of tiny Bolivian soldiers. They are tired and muddy from their long
walk through the night. There are holes in their
boots and they are hungry. They need to be fed.

McInerney maintains this brisk, moody

comedy for the next hundred and eighty
pages, as his unnamed narrator unravels
in a bender.
The real drama of Bright Lights is
not sociological. The narrator, however
blitzed, thinks of himself as being, really,
the kind of guy who wakes up early on
Sunday morning and steps out to cop the
Times and croissants. Who might take a

cue from the Arts and Leisure section

and decide to check out an exhibition
costumes of the Hapsburg Court at the
Met, say, or Japanese lacquerware of the
Muromachi period at the Asia Society.
The disconnect between the narrators
life and his almost comically staid vision
of it is at the heart of the book. Why,
McInerney earnestly wants to know, has
this man lost his upper-middle-class bearingswhy is he at a trashy night club in
the middle of the night, chatting up a
woman whose voice is like the New Jersey State Anthem played through an electric shaver, instead of living wholesomely
and finding a nice girl (an editorial assistant, maybe, or a graduate student at an
Ivy League school) to take to those exhibitions he imagines himself attending?
If this buttoned-up vision of the good
life isnt entirely convincing, neither is
the answer McInerney offersthat the
narrator is reeling from a family tragedy he hasnt properly dealt with. The
oversimplicity of this diagnosis wasnt
lost on McInerney, who has spent most
of his career returning to the same questions, growing increasingly sophisticated
in his attempts to understand the allure
of self-destruction and the compromises
required to support a sustainable degree
of happiness for ambitious, intelligent
(and relatively affluent) people.
In the seven novels and forty-odd stories he has published since Bright Lights,
McInerney has experimented widely and
with varying levels of success, veering from
comedy to self-conscious seriousness, from
the small and local to the decade-spanning. He has tried writing from the perspective of women (in the charming Story
of My Life, from 1988) and sexually confused men (in The Last of the Savages,
from 1996). But his interest in psychology has remained in place. It found its
most thoughtful expression in Brightness Falls, which is broader in scope than
Bright Lights and its closest rival, among
McInerneys novels, in the virtuosity and
near-perfection of its execution.
The book seems at first very different
from its predecessor, almost self-consciously so. Brightness Falls, like a nineteenth-century novel, is told from the
perspective of an omniscient narrator;
its humor is understated, derived from
dry observation and clever dialogue.
When Russells assistantthe offices
token punk, who wears an Eat the Rich
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

73

button pinned to her shirttells him she

is going to lunch, Russell replies, Ill warn
Donald Trump. McInerneys focus has
largely shifted from the question of sobriety (or the lack of it) to matters of status (or the lack of it). Of a writer friend
of the Calloways, whose first book was
an unexpected success, he writes, Everyone listened to him just a little more intently these days, as he listened less attentively to everyone else. But, unlike a
social satirist such as Tom Wolfe, McInerney is equally deft at capturing personality traits. Russells charismatic friend
Washington, for example, has the ability
to convince, if only to the point that you
felt it would be very stuffy to believe completely in your own position, or for that
matter in anything. It would be so uncool.
Thematically, however, Brightness
Falls and Bright Lights overlap substantially, as their titles suggest. Russell
can be viewed as a cleaned-up version
of the earlier books feckless narrator. He
and Corrine live the kind of life that the
hero of Bright Lights yearned for, complete with those de-rigueur Sundayafternoon trips to museums. But they
still arent all that happy. In their early
thirties, they want to want what they
haveeach other, a committed relationshipbut they are no more able to will
away their nagging discontents than the
narrator of Bright Lights was to refrain
from snorting that final, inadvisable line.
Corrine feels neglected and unappreciated. She resents Russells insatiable need
to socialize, his desire to be among fashionable people, not just because it keeps
him from home but because his concern
with status strikes her as a little ridiculous: Proximity to the glamorous, she
thinks, confirmed in Russell some sense
of his own entitlement. Russell, for his
part, feels hemmed in by a wife whose
judgment he both respects and resents,
and annoyed by her need for continual reassurance. In the course of the novel, he
becomes increasingly vulnerable to temptation. One evening, he finds himself more
attracted to Corrine than hes been in ages,
but his passion is stoked more by egoism
than eros. A sexy French heiress has hit
on him, and the narrowness of his escape is exciting: the vision of himself as
an upright husband had increased his appreciation of the wife for whom he performed this heroic feat of abnegation.
If the novel falters slightly, it is in the
74

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

improbability of its central conceit

Russells outlandish attempt to buy his
company. It feels forced, a means of linking Russell and Corrines personal problems to the headlines of the era. McInerneys evocation of New York was so
powerful in Bright Lights because it
emerged naturally from the story he had
to tell. By the time he wrote Brightness Falls, McInerney had been labelled
a New York novelist, and, as if on cue,
he delivers long, cinematic set pieces depicting everything from parties of the
Upper East Sides rich and shallow to
police raids on homeless encampments
in the East Village. They are well done,
but feel performative, not quite organic.

T (or triple-) dipping, as McInerney

he danger, of course, of double-

has done in reviving the cast of Brightness Falls, is that the later books invite
comparison to the first. And Bright, Precious Days, like The Good Life before
it, lacks the originals texture and piquancy,
its panoramic vibrancy. McInerney does
a lot of plain telling, informing us with
voice-over directness that the Calloways,
Ivy League sweethearts, had followed
their best instincts and based their lives
on the premise that money couldnt buy
happiness, learning only gradually the
many varieties of unhappiness it might
have staved off. The sharpness of McInerneys portrayals of side characters made
for a big part of the pleasure of Brightness Falls; in the later books, he seems
to rest on those characterizations, without adding to his earlier insights, like a
man who built his home when he was
richer and now cant quite afford the upkeep. Theyve grown dusty, a little stale.
Although he has continued the tradition of draping the novels around
pivotal events in New Yorks recent history, McInerneys evocation of the aughts
feels halfhearted compared with the
scene setting of his eighties novels. He
leans heavily on proper nouns and
topical references, something he did
sparingly in both Bright Lights and
Brightness Falls. When he did use
onewhen he name-dropped Donald
Trump in Brightness Falls, for exampleit served a dramatic purpose. In
Bright, Precious Days, on the other
hand, McInerney seems to be merely
telegraphing the moment and milieu,
as when he tells us that Corrine took

her preteen daughter shopping at AllSaints, or that the girl and a friend went
to see Forgetting Sarah Marshall, or
that Russell tried making Mark Bittmans improbable, and not entirely successful, forty-five-minute turkey.
But if Bright, Precious Days doesnt
match Brightness Falls stylistically, it
does explore similar terrain. Once again,
McInerneys real subject is happiness, and
whether it can survive the batterings of
our restlessness and ambition. On this
subject, he is mature and humane, offering considered and convincing analysis
instead of familiar novelistic tropes. McInerney is sensitive to arcs, both in characters and in relationships. Russells crisis
of spirit, as it unfolds over the three books,
feels like a natural and uncontrived consequence of a lifetime characterized by
buoyant self-satisfaction. He has always
been appealing and mostly good-hearted
but a little callow, the kind of person who
is savvy enough to conceal, even to himself, the fact that he is all too mindful of
whose stock is rising and whose is falling. Corrine, who has long floundered
professionally, was always the more solid
of the two, the more philosophical and
self-sufficient, even if she is financially
dependent. In The Good Life, she met
a man who seemed capable of appreciating her in ways that Russell temperamentally could not. Bright, Precious
Days shows us how that once promising new relationship plays out and how
it compares to the older, imperfect but
still loving one; on this subject, McInerney is refreshingly clear-eyed.
Still, theres no dodging the paradox
at the heart of his career. Although his
best books have never been merely lightweight eighties period pieces, the books
set in that decade, and redolent of it,
remain his strongest. Something about
what he calls the era of big hair and big
shoulder pads seems to have galvanized
McInerney: the buzzing confusions of
youth asserting themselves, in narrative
vigor, over the wan compromises of age.
Perhaps that accounts for the nostalgic
mood that pervades Bright, Precious
Days. As Russells friend Washington
remarks wistfully, at a dinner party that
recalls a more boisterous one from
Brightness Falls, We didnt know it
was the eighties at the time. . . . No one
told us until about 1987, and by then it
was almost over.

BOOKS

CHILDHOODS END
A dbut about life, language, and what binds them.
BY DAN CHIASSON

In Jana Prikryls The After Party, metaphor often takes the place of reality.
ana Prikryls first book of poems,
J The
After Party (Tim Duggan

Books), brings to a close the long period of silent evaluation known as childhood. The after party is our memory
of the past, not so much recollected
in tranquillity as relived in the riotous
terms of style and form. But it is also
the afterlife: this is a book haunted by
generations of the dead, including
Prikryls brother, who died suddenly in
1995; the book is dedicated to him. In
this bonus interval of borrowed time,
the hour ticks by especially loudly; the
poems that measure it are also subject
to it. There is a contest here between
elegy and forgetting. In Timepiece,
the meter (iambic dimeter, a rare one,
and hard to pull off effectively) recalls
PHOTOGRAPH BY JODY ROGAC

not only that ticking of a clock but the

beating of a heart:
Do not lose hope.
We found new hope.
There is no hope.
You have to hope.
Its my last hope.
Theres always hope.
It grows on trees.

The poem veers from the pattern in

its last line, literally giving up hope;
but the underlying rhythm holds on for
one last instant. Hope vanishes the moment it becomes ubiquitous: It grows
on trees is what we say of something
so common as to be worthless. Timepiece is a poem about perseverance, although, as in much of Prikryls work,
theres a vicious undertow of despair.

Prikryl, who is a senior editor at The

New York Review of Books (to which I
contribute), was born in Czechoslovakia and immigrated with her family to
Ontario, Canada, when she was sixa
passage that seems to have created an
attitude of friendly scrutiny toward
tragic material. Many of these poems
filter her earliest memories through the
scrim of folklore, from which they borrow their swift, severe causality and, especially, their terror of abandonment.
Their aesthetic is bright, kaleidoscopic,
a childs vision of abundance frozen
and preserved; she borrowed it in part
from the genre of Czech movies called
pohdka, lavish costume versions of fairy
tales. Prikryl tends to favor paradox, as
in the riddles and tests of childhood
stories, and innuendo, which feels at
once erotic and political. She moves by
not moving, desiring little / more than
the // arrival of the little more / that arrives, finding everywhere misunderstandings that are not, / we both know,
misunderstandings.
Prikryl is a notably resourceful writer
of autobiography. When poets write
about their past, they sometimes exclude
their shaping hand from the picture.
There are countless poems that describe
grainy black-and-white photographs
in a tenderly impartial tone, as though
photographs and the poems that describe them werent acts of selection and
judgment. Prikryl not only acknowledges but plays up her role in curating
her origins: in A Package Tour, she
casts herself as a kind of intrepid Time
Lord, hoisting a furled umbrella as she
leads her unsuspecting European ancestors toward the poem written about
them. This kind of temporal loop-deloop is not merely postmodern mischief;
its autobiographical writing with the
act of writing left in. It foils the illusion
of linear chronology: the last is first, the
first is last. The poem is a making-of
documentary supplied with English subtitles, a work assembled after the fact to
lead triumphantly to the main event.
Prikryls memories of childhood are
intensely sensory: lacking a family narrative with a clear form, she presents,
instead, unusually vivid, one-off impressions and colorful hunches about what
they might have meant.Ontario Gothic,
the books opening poem, is a little twopart origin story. In the first part, Prikryl
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

75


lies on her back, summer-daydream style,
and looks up at the clouds and floating albino basketballs of hydrangea,
along with anything else passing over,
including / one has to assumesince
it cant be verified, except in the imaginationthe neutral look / on a passengers face glancing down from a window seat. Sentience in a poem can go
wherever it likes: here it gets divvied up
between the earthly kid and the heavenly traveller, the one looking up at the
other looking down. In the second part,
dream logic takes the wheel:
Halfway there he squeezed between the
shoulders of the seats
to join his wife and me in back. I need
hardly tell you
what a stretch it was, wedging my arm
between the drivers seat and door
to steer with the tips of my fingers,
sidewalks in those parts just wide enough
for a car.

The man is her father, or perhaps

her lover; the woman in the back seat,
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THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

his wife, is pointedly not referred to

as her mother. The speaker is a child
or a grownup acting like one, or being
treated like onewho nevertheless is
entrusted with this anti-familys survival. The child who grows up feeling
that her familys safety depends on her
own composure, no matter how crazy
the circumstances, steers herself again
and again into adult jams where her
mettle alone makes all the difference.
In Ontario Gothic, its a stretch
to become a back-seat driver. To a new
speaker of the language, English idioms retain a troubling trace of literalness long after they are understood. All
the more so if the novice speaker is
also a child: children write stories with
real-life couch potatoes, where cats and
dogs rain from the sky. Thanks to that
ones nerve, Prikryl writes in Siblings
and Half Siblings, the four of us
boarded an overnight // and this is English. Meaning that otherwise shed

be writing Czech. If a change of life is

a change of language, why rank the one
above the other? Realitys my kind
of metaphor, she writes; and, elsewhere, metaphors swarm the surfaces
of things. These lines from Unrequited nail it: His feeling is metaphor
so complete / its the hum alone on loan
from the hive.
Metaphor is a poets spell, her magic;
more than any other feature of poetry,
it transforms realityunless, as here,
its already a part of reality, swarming,
and thereby taking the place of, the
surfaces of things. Language in this
enchanted book sometimes seems to
have an independent intelligence. As
Prikryl writes, it houses a will as acquisitive / as ours, if not more so: it
compels its speakers to say whatever
it has in mind. In Ars Poetica, language has its own dreams, not of sex
but of description, unmitigated / description, dragging the fainthearted
poet into acts of seduction shed really
(swear to God, really and truly) rather
not attempt. Its a brilliant and funny
poem about the power of feigned powerlessness, a subject at least as old as
the shepherds and lasses of classical
pastoral. An imagined debate between
Prikryl and Benedict Cumberbatch
about whats driven poets to this
bluff / of severely impartial / impudence lands them in an AlphonseGaston routine at a partys end, before
Cumberbatch suggests, reasonably
enough, that we spare / each other the
embarrassment / of being the last / to
leave and leave in unison. Prikryls response: Goodness that shows / every
sign of being also / resourceful has always been so / difficult to refuse.
An after party keeps people from vanishing into the night, and yet it, too, has
an end. The fear that cherished people
will evaporate creates the fantasy of a
leave-taking that leaves nobody behind.
As with lost siblings in many fairy tales,
the loss feels remediable, as though the
right path through the forest or the right
sequence of words might somehow restore them. A book that tries so earnestly to dilate endings, or to divide them
infinitely into smaller and smaller units,
has to be concerned with its own manner of conclusion. The collections final
poem, which, in forty-two sections, takes
up almost half the book, is a remarkable

sequence: Thirty Thousand Islands,

named for the largest freshwater archipelago in the world, in Lake Huron. Its
hero is Mr. Dialect, a name that suggests his retention of Old World language and customs. (Prikryls brother
was seven years older than she was, and
so had more to lose when the family left
Czechoslovakia.) Mr. Dialect wears a
suit bespoke / and out of style, frozen,
as he is, at the moment of his death; his
bearing has about it the terrible luxury
of an open coffin. He excels at evasion.
He cannot be adequately described, partly
because his own command of style raises
such a high bar (His very mood / an
index / of gestures that the artist / oversteps), and his death seems almost an
aspect of his suaveness and civility. He
will riselike the sun, like Lazarus
with an air of dressing / to breakfast
beside / a caramel brunette. When he
speaks, he offers this dating advice
for the pickup bars of the afterlife:
When the voices start confiding their
Christian names
as Im rinsing plates on the Never
its time to haul anchor, wait
in a dive in Parry Sound,
and buy a round
for whoever wont be a stranger.
Should a drink materialize
you didnt order, make eyes
at the girl who didnt send it, as Id
have done.

The poems sections offer, like the

thirty thousand islands they describe,
the chance that Mr. Dialect might touch
down anywhere, at any moment. Hes
not dead; hes just living on one of the
other islands. His sisters book has become the place where he can tarry
awhile, maybe even settle down:
Should some international
undocumented
wish to pursue
a lifestyle entirely free
from applause,
he reflected, this
would be the place.
He glances round.

Mr. Dialect assumes his immortality as

the eerie beauty of the place, the cool
underpinning of its pines and shimmering waters, yields to the beauty of
the language that is used to conjure it.

BRIEFLY NOTED
New England Bound, by Wendy Warren (Liveright). Whereas
most studies of slavery in the United States concern the antebellum South, this one stakes out less visited territorythe
laws and decisions made by the colonists in New England
two centuries earlier. In 1638, eight years after John Winthrops famed City Upon a Hill sermon, the first documented
shipment of enslaved Africans arrived. That same year, the
colonist Samuel Maverick, desirous to have a breed of Negroes, attempted to create slaves through rape. African slaves
started working on West Indian plantations and at New England ports. Not all of this was legal, but, as Warren points
out, it was hardly at odds with Puritan piety. Many colonists
used Scripture to justify it.
Cursed Legacy, by Frederic Spotts (Yale). This biography of
Klaus Mann, a literary enfant terrible of the Weimar era, focusses on his relationship with his domineering father, Thomas
Mann; his struggle to live openly as a homosexual; his exile
after the rise of the Nazis; and his drug addiction and his
fixation with suicide. Deftly handling a story ripe with psychological and cultural meaning, Spotts paints Mann as a hero,
waging a war for truth, liberty, and self-determination. (At
nineteen, he wrote the first expressly gay novel in German literature.) Spottss book is surprisingly timely, particularly in its
portrayal of the generational divide between Klaus and his
conservative father, who, despite homosexual leanings of his
own, thought homosexuals should be closeted, and who was
horrified by his sons work.
The Extra, by A. B. Yehoshua (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). In
this thoughtful novel, a contentedly single Israeli harpist
living in the Netherlands returns home because of a bureaucratic issue to do with her mothers apartment in Jerusalem. She enjoys her forced sabbatical, wandering the city,
sparring with Orthodox neighbors, and freelancing as a
movie extra. The issue of childlessness burdens the second
half of the novel, as she finds herself in a series of arguments with her mother and with her ex-husband, neither
of whom accepts her decision not to have kids. Few minds
are changed, but Yehoshua seems to be hinting that, in a
country that never ceases to be a threat to itself, peaceful
deadlock is a small but genuine victory.
Look, by Solmaz Sharif (Picador). It matters what you call a
thing: so begins this remarkable dbut poetry collection, which
is a deliberation on the way we talk about war in both the public and the private spheres. Sharif recounts her Iranian immigrant familys experience living under surveillance and in
detention in the United States, and elegizes an uncle who was
killed fighting in the Iran-Iraq War. Throughout, she draws
on the Department of Defenses Dictionary of Military and
Associated Termsused by the American military to define
and code its objectives, policies, and actions. By turns fierce
and tender, the poems are a searing response to American interventionHands that promised they wouldnt, but did.
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

77

Instead, the show fanned open to

multiple perspectivesamong other
things, during its brilliant second season it made the marriage of Diane and
Mr. Peanutbutter feel as intimate as anything on The Americans. Meanwhile,
The melancholy pleasures of BoJack Horseman.
BoJack fell in love with an owl his own
age, a network executive who had just
BY EMILY NUSSBAUM
woken from a thirty-year coma. (When
she met him, she said, Who?) He got
hen BoJack Horseman d- star of a network sitcom called Horsin cast in his dream project, a Secretariat
buted, in 2014, it didnt look par- Around, a hacky Full House-like se- bio-pic. Eventually, in one of the series
ticularly original. It was the hundredth ries about a bachelor raising orphaned most lacerating episodes, he landed in
series about a middle-aged manwell, kids. Since then, hes become a famous bed with his oldest friends teen-age
a horse, but stillwho did bad things. It has-been, marinating in self-pity. This daughter. Yet, magically, even as he
was the latest scathing portrait of the particular form of show-biz pathology trashed each opportunity, the series didnt
downside of fame. It was the newest has been explored a few times before; bog down in bleakness: it was sympastreaming dramedy: yet another adult an- namely, in The Larry Sanders Show. In thetic to BoJacks depression and the
imated alt-comedy meta-sitcom.
sources of his pain, but it didnt
In an anti-antihero frame
glamorize his solipsism as a
of mind, I took much too long
special sensitivity.
to catch up on what turned out
Better yet, BoJack Horseto be one of the wisest, most
man never stacks the deck by
emotionally ambitious and
reducing more decent charthis is not a contradiction
acters to dummies or dupes.
spectacularly goofy series on
Unlike lesser sad-guy shows,
television. Created by Raphael
the series includes complex
Bob-Waksberg, illustrated by
types like Princess Carolyn,
the brilliant Lisa Hanawalt,
BoJacks agent and sometime
and airing on Netflix, BoJack
girlfriend, a fortyish workaHorseman is a world-creation
holic in a series of dead-end
show, merging bleakness and
relationships (with BoJack, a
joy. Like The Simpsons and
cheating jackrabbit, and, most
its best descendants, BoJack
hilariously, Vincent AdultHorseman uses animation to
man, three little boys standimagine a teeming, surreal aling on one anothers shoulternative universein this case,
ders under a trenchcoat).
a place called Hollywoo, in
Theres also Todd, his sadwhich animals and humans live
sack roommate; the indie-film
side by side. BoJack, a former
director Kelsey; BoJacks deer
sitcom star, is a horse in a Cosby
friend Charlotte, whose famsweater; Diane, his sardonic biily he took refuge with when
ographer, is a human. Dianes
Los Angeles overwhelmed
husband is a dog; BoJacks
him; and many morea true
agent is a cat; a bunch of whale
moral menagerie.
strippers give lap dances in the
In certain ways, the shows
blowhole room. Easily half the
most original character may
gags are silly animal puns, verbe not BoJack but his mirror
bal or visual, like Broadway
image, Mr. Peanutbutter
posters for Fun Ham, kan- BoJack is a horse. His agent is a cat. His biographer is human. (voiced by Paul F. Tompkins),
garoo bellhops, or a painting
a golden retriever whose own
of Manets Olympia as a shark. The another familiar TV trope, in the first sea- awful nineties sitcom, Mr. Peanutbutsheer density of these giggle-inducing, son BoJack fell into a love triangle, with ters House, was a ripoff of Horsin
collect-them-all punch lines gooses Diane and her husband, Mr. Peanutbut- Around. Unlike BoJackbut like many
the shows more harrowing themes, as ter. The season took some gorgeous ex- golden retrievershes preternaturally
if Nathanael West had written Miss istential leaps, particularly in the second enthusiastic, full of silly show-biz ideas
half, but had it stuck entirely to the P.O.V. but also happy just to sit at home watchLonelyhearts in puffy glitter ink.
The basic story is this: In the nineties, of BoJack, a dyspeptic, near-suicidal know- ing Bones, his tongue lolling. Mr. PeaBoJack (voiced by Will Arnett) was the it-all, it might have felt airless.
nutbutter becomes the host of a game
ON TELEVISION

NEIGH SAYER

78

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

ILLUSTRATION BY BENDIK KALTENBORN

show called J. D. Salinger Presents:

Hollywood Stars and Celebrities! What
Do They Know? Do They Know
Things? Lets Find Out! Hes been divorced twice, including from a horrible
Jessica Biel, who bravely plays herself.
Artistically, he has low standards. But
he has a legitimate inner life. His openness to intimacy makes his wife, the unhappy Diane, itch. It also provides a
goad to BoJack himself, suggesting that
even for the rich and famous there are
better ways to chase your tail.

T which recently appeared on Netflix,

he third season of the show,

isnt a masterpiece like the second: a few

plot gears grind. But it lands powerfully,
with an earned tragedy thats as potent
as anything on TV this year. Along the
way, BoJack lobbies for an Oscar nomination at film festivals and at a bat mitzvahfor an actual bat. There are some
classic installments, particularly an ingenious silent episode set at an underwater film festival, a riff on Lost in
Translation, with sardines that cram
into buses and a Chaplinesque subplot
about BoJack acting as a midwife to a
male seahorse. Theres a story in which
Diane gets an abortion while the popstar dolphin Sextina Aquafina, the sexy
fourteen-year-old dubstep wunderkind
for whom shes been hired to write
tweets, sings a hilariously rude prochoice anthem. Again and again, the
show takes sharp jabs at modern culture, including a delirious vision of a
post-apocalyptic L.A. Times, with nothing left but customer service.
The show has always had a built-in
risk: as effective as BoJack is as a character, he runs in circles. Thats what addiction is, after all. BoJacks life is a formula, one that he feels desperate to
correct: hes ashamed of who he is, attempts to become creative or feel love
and then inevitably binges, betrays a
loved one, and runs away, realizing that
its impossible to truly repair the damage. Then back to shame. Repetition is
the signature of sitcoms, too; its their
curse and their power. On BoJack
Horseman, again and again, someones
life crashes, and he ends up on the living-room sofa, high, bingeing on reruns
of Horsin Around.The cynical, knowing characters may mock that shows
cornball ways, but theyve memorized

every plot: its a shared set of memories

much simpler and more comforting than
the real ones.
On a junket, BoJack rages at journalists who call Horsin Around a bad
show: It lasted nine seasons! Its whole
purpose was for people to watch it so
the network could sell ad time so the
show could make more money than it
cost to produce. It did that well. It was
a good show. But BoJack knows that it
has more meaning than that. Its no coincidence that BoJack Horseman itself replicates the plots of sitcoms
Princess Carolyn goes on a series of
bad dates, BoJack crashes a wedding
to inject them with something rawer
and more unsettling. It does the same
thing with jokes, messing with ancient
comedy math so that the missing beat
becomes the joke. Im the only albinorhino gyno I know, one of Princess Carolyns dates says, just before ordering a
bottle of wine. Oh, great, youre also a
wine addict, she replies. Its a clever
joke for people who love dumb jokes.
In one episode, we discover that
Horsin Around wasnt BoJacks only
TV show. Back in 2007, he tried to make
a dark comedy called The BoJack
Horseman Show, with his writing partner, a Harvard-grad hamster named
Cuddlywhiskers. The two panicked
when executives liked their experimental script, so they added heroin benders
and anti-catchphrases, sabotaging their
own creation for the sake of edginess.
Then BoJack Horseman itself offers
up an episode, Thats Too Much, Man!,
that includes the very gimmicks that it
makes fun of in BoJacks failed show,
including a weeks-long drug bender,
with multiple blackouts. This may be
the nitrous and bath salts talking, BoJack says at one point, but I want to
do some more nitrous and bath salts.
Theres a causticand then poignant
parody of the pointlessness of making
amends; theres an A.A. meeting at
which a slugs rock bottom is literally
under a rock. Theres the worlds most
random joke, about the Oberlin acappella group the Obertones. The episode should seem self-indulgent, but,
miraculously, the risk pays off. It does
what BoJack Horseman does best, allowing the most heartbreaking parts of
life to leach into the genre thats meant
to soothe them.
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

79

THE CURRENT CINEMA

FIND YOURSELF
Jason Bourne and Little Men.
BY ANTHONY LANE

Matt Damon stars in Paul Greengrasss latest installment of the Bourne saga.

T you wish to forget your troubles and

he obvious thing to do, should

just get happy, is to bind your knuckles

and enjoy a bout of illegal fistfighting
on the Greek-Albanian border. That is
the chosen hobby of Jason Bourne (Matt
Damon), and, for someone of his interests, there is no better way to relax. The
fight lasts precisely one punch, and it
signals the start of the imaginatively titled Jason Bourne, which finds our
man trotting the globe in a bid to discover, once and for all, who he is and
what he was and which of his passports
to use. Will the poor guy never stop?
Frankly, since Jason is already on Greek
soil, it would be easier if he went looking for a golden fleece.
The Bournology, for moviegoers, runs
as follows. We have three major works
with Damon as the central figure: The
Bourne Identity (2002), The Bourne
Supremacy (2004), and The Bourne
Ultimatum (2007), known collectively
to scholars as the synoptic Bournes. Then
comes The Bourne Legacy (2012), starring Jeremy Renner as a Bourne-flavored
80

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

agent, which is widely viewed as noncanonical. So, what are we to make of

Jason Bourne, crammed as it is with
flashbacks to its predecessors? Is it the
fourth gospel, plumbing the mystery of
the Bournian logos, or should we discard it as apocrypha?
Either way, the new film racks up the
air miles. From the Balkans, we zip to
Iceland, where a former colleague of
Bournes, Nicky Parsons ( Julia Stiles),
hacks into a C.I.A. mainframe (Could
be worse than Snowden, someone says)
and downloads a list of illicit programs
onto a memory stick. The landscape of
Bourne has always been littered with
widgets, beginning with the tiny laser
device buried in Jasons hip, in the first
film, that bore the details of his Swiss
bank account. Then came the SIM-card
switcheroo, in The Bourne Supremacya fiddly business that lightened
the load of Bournes brutality. At fortyfive, Damon remains in frightening
fettle, but twinned with that hunkhood
is a touch as deft as a pickpockets. The
entire Bourne franchise, indeed, can be

seen as an instruction manual in the art

of throwaway cool. Swipe a phone from
a caf table, make a call, dump the phone,
and walk on: thats the kind of knack
we have learned from Bourne over the
years, and the new film supplies a few
low-tech addenda, such as a Molotov
cocktail snatched from the grasp of a rioter, then tossed for Bournes advantage.
He makes fire as he goes along.
The riot occurs in Athenss Syntagma
Square and the surrounding streets,
where a crowd is raging against the government. This fits the story, because the
wildness of the ruckus, after dark, acts
as cover both for Bourne, who is meeting Nicky, and for a trained assassin (Vincent Cassel), who has been ordered
by whom I will not sayto take them
out. But the melee also suits the director, Paul Greengrass, who specialized in
drama-documentaries, on such subjects
as the shooting of civilians in Northern
Ireland and a racially motivated stabbing in London, before turning to The
Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne
Ultimatum. You can feel him itching
to link the ordeals of his fictional hero
to the stresses and the fractures of political reality. Its almost as if he were
faintly ashamed at having to concoct
yet more unlikely shenanigansplots
within plots, at the C.I.A.at a time
when unfeigned drama is bursting out
of the headlines.
Certainly, though the scenes in Athens come early in the movie, they mark
its high point, bringing clarity to chaos
and permanent damage to my nerve
endings. Greengrass then proceeds to
another topical zone: Bourne is caught
up in the case of Aaron Kalloor (Riz
Ahmed), a Silicon Valley tycoon who
founded a Facebook-like corporation
called Deep Dream, and who is now
under pressure from the director of the
C.I.A., Robert Dewey (Tommy Lee
Jones), to assist with national security.
One could argue that Internet billionaires should be humanely culled, like
badgers, but Bournes duty, nonetheless,
is to keep Kalloor safe and the cause of
freedom alive.
The presence of Jones is always welcome, but notice how he slots into a
well-worn position, previously held by
Chris Cooper, Brian Cox, and Albert
Finney: the older gentleman spy, whose
machinations rouse the ireand the
ILLUSTRATION BY PAUL ROGERS

dormant idealismof Bourne. Much of

the latest film smacks of established routine. Any car chase in which drivers weave
through oncoming traffic is to be applauded, but the thought that Bourne
pulled that stunt in Moscow, in The
Bourne Supremacy, does take a slight
edge off its impact in Jason Bourne.
True, were now in Las Vegas, and his
nemesis is at the wheel of an armored
SWAT truck, but its still more of a key
change than a brand-new tune. As for
the doomy question that beats throughout the movieWho is Bourne, anyway?the issue was raised and settled
long ago. His true name is David Webb,
and he was recruited into black ops and
deprived of his memory, though not of
his talent for martial arts or for falling
down a stairwell and using someone else
as a cushion. All this we know from earlier films, and Jason Bourne merely fills
in the gaps. Greengrass is as dexterous
as ever, yet the result, though abounding in thrills, seems oddly stifled by selfconsciousness and, dare one say, superfluous. Come on, guys.There are so many
wrongs in the world. If Bourne could
tear himself away from the mirror for a
moment, could he not be persuaded to
go and right them?

L but if you want to turn your life on

ove and death are all very well,

its head nothing compares with moving

house in the tristate area. That was the
story of the gay couple in Ira Sachss
Love Is Strange (2014), whose income
fell after their marriage, and real-estate
trauma strikes again in Sachss new
movie, Little Men. Brian (Greg Kinnear) is an actor, and his wife, Kathy

( Jennifer Ehle), is a psychotherapist.

When Brians father dies, they inherit
his house, and that means relocating
from Manhattan to Brooklyn, with their
thirteen-year-old son, Jacob (Theo Taplitz). On the ground floor of the house
is a dress shop, run by a Chilean woman
named Leonor (Paulina Garca), who
was a good friend of the old mansso
good that he didnt raise her rent for
eight years. Shes still paying eleven hundred a month. Brian wants to triple it.
Let the battle commence.
To what extent audiences elsewhere
will be stirred by these agonies is hard
to say, but Sachs finds ways in which to
counter the charge of parochialism. For
one thing, we see Brian play Trigorin in
a stage production of The Seagull, the
implication being that, since Chekhov
drew our attention to the squabbles of
unregarded souls, nothing lies beyond
dramatic bounds. Then there is the sadeyed Garca, who earned international
acclaim in the title role of Gloria (2013),
and who, though meek of manner, has
a resilience that verges on the unnerving. We are so accustomed to cranky
characters undergoing a sentimental
sweetening that its a shock when Leonor does the opposite, as her initial
greeting slowly loses its warmth. There
are times when shes downright mean,
slipping a thin jibe into the conversation like a knife between the ribs. Talking
to Brian about his father, she says, I was
more his family, if you want to know,
than you were.
The title of the film, likewise, has a
whetted edge. Brian can be ineffectual,
and he knows it. So does his son. Hes
not that successful or anything, Jacob

says to Glorias son, Tony (Michael Barbieri), who is about the same age and
whose own father is absent and unmourned. (I realized that hes better
when hes not around, Tony says.) The
two boys join forces, growing closer as
their parents start to bicker and fall out.
Brian is one of the big kids, straining
after adult wisdom as if he were auditioning for a role, whereas the little men
seem better equipped to ride the bumps.
Hence the lovely travelling shots of the
boysJacob on roller blades, Tony with
a scooteras they whisk along sunlit
streets. You get a whiff of Truffaut, and
a strong sense that none of the grownups
can match that gliding ease.
The best reason to watch Little
Men is Michael Barbieri, who musters a blend of soulfulness and aggression that would be remarkable at any
age. The danger for any Sachs movie
is that its humane quietude could slide
into dullness. Not with this boy around.
Tony plans to become an actor, and
we observe him in drama class, roaring through repetition practice with
his teacherhurling back phrase after
phrase as if he were volleying at the
net. So compelling is Tony that he
starts to outgrow not only Jacob, who
seems wispy by comparison, but all
other aspects of the film. Presumably,
thats why Barbieri has been honored
with a role in the next Spider-Man
adventure. I was hoping that it might
take a little longer for a promising
young actor to fall into Marvels clutches.
No chance.
NEWYORKER.COM

Richard Brody blogs about movies.

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81

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 weeks cartoon, by Danny Shanahan, must be
received by Sunday, August 14th. The finalists in the July 25th contest appear below. We will announce the winner,
and the finalists in this weeks contest, in the August 29th issue. Anyone age thirteen or older can enter or vote.
To do so, and to read the complete rules, visit contest.newyorker.com.

THIS WEEKS CONTEST

..........................................................................................................................

THE FINALISTS

THE WINNING CAPTION

Your overhead is going to kill you.

Carolyn Beck, Toronto, Ont.
The queen has agreed to split everything fifty-fifty.
Donald Metzler, New Providence, Pa.
We could also go with a chandelier.
Ross Taylor, Chicago, Ill.

Welcome to orientation.
Joe Repine, Ann Arbor, Mich.