The new yorker 8 august 2016

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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 Russia’s 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

“Dido’s 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 Mane’s “Everybody Looking.”

BOOKS

Jay McInerney’s “Bright, Precious Days.”

Jana Prikryl’s “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

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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 début 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 magazine’s television critic, won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for criticism.

PODCASTS New fiction from the magazine.

This week, Tessa Hadley reads her short story “Dido’s 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.)

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THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

RIGHT: DARREN JOE

NEWYORKER.COM Everything in the magazine, and more.

THE MAIL UNEARTHING THE TRUTH

Paige Williams’s 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 Berger’s assertion that the fossils he found in the Rising Star cave system, in South Africa, displayed “ritualized behaviors directed toward the dead”—a 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 challenge—particularly in anthropology and its subdisciplines, because the field is so broad—but 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

Berger’s claims about his discoveries, though not impossible, might be called premature.

Joseph A. Reveles La Mirada, Calif.

1 ROBBING THE SYSTEM

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

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

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AUGUST 3 – 16, 2016

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

This summer, the U.S. will send a sixteen-year-old, Kanak Jha, to Rio—Jha 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 Fletcher’s BBQ, Ample Hills Creamery, and a bar, which won’t 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 shows—some two hundred in all—visit 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 can’t seem to keep pace with his impulsive creations. Joseph Discher’s direction feels insufficient in urgency and zaniness, like it’s 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. government’s first sanctioned expedition of the Green and Colorado Rivers. In Jaclyn Backhaus’s 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 crew’s 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. Rogers’s 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 Rød-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, it’s 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 clichés 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 Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. Jimmy (Patrick O’Kane) is the only customer in a Belfast bar, where he’s 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 McCafferty’s 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 Wolpe’s 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 roles—Lear, Hamlet, Shylock—with 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-

en’s Shakespeare Company became a form of salvation. The show (which Wolpe performs in repertory with a three-person “Macbeth”) has its trite side, but it’s 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 Wohl’s 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 Zoë 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 Baker’s 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 Rando’s production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Pirates of Penzance” (through Aug. 13). On the St. Germain Stage, Louisa Proske directs “Peerless,” Jiehae Park’s 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 summer’s final mainstage production is Wendy Wasserstein’s 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 Tracz’s musical inspired by the story of the cyber-bullying victim Tyler Clementi (through Aug. 7); and Tom Holloway’s 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 Soleil—Paramour 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

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1 MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES Met Breuer “Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible” Most critical responses to this inaugural show at the Metropolitan Museum’s 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 Met’s 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).

It’s a sleek, motorized medley of rods, screens, perforated disks, and springs, set in a box with a circular cut in one side—a 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” Davis’s 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 show’s 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 Davidson’s 1966 photograph of a campground at Yosemite National Park, on view in “A Cool Breeze,” at the Howard Greenberg gallery.

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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, Davis’s earlier phases prove most absorbing. They detail stages of a personal ambition in step with large ideals. Through Sept. 25.

Morgan Library and Museum “Rembrandt’s First Masterpiece” Seeing an unfamiliar painting by Rembrandt is a life event: fresh data on what it’s 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 didn’t. 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 York’s urban landscape was in transition when Silver, who is now eighty-one, was prowl-

ing the city’s streets taking these pictures. In those years, the El still ran above Third Avenue, Oscar Niemeyer’s 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. Silver’s 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 GALLERIES—UPTOWN

GALLERIES—CHELSEA The Family Acid In the nineteen-seventies, the versatile Roger Steffens—an 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 Steffens’s image of a yellow balloon floating in front of the sun above San Francisco’s 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 Creed’s brilliant one-liners. His notorious, Turner Prize-netting “Work No. 160: The Lights Going On and Off” is installed in a parlor that’s chock-full of outmoded portraits, adding an element of surprise. The Board of Officer’s 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 moving—opening 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

GALLERIES—DOWNTOWN William Helburn Helburn, now eighty-two, was one of Madison Avenue’s 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 world—sexism 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 York’s most beloved flamenco troupe, returns to the free festival. The program—featuring, as always, first-rate live music— includes a new commissioned piece, but the highlight is bound to be the culminating “Soleá,” 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 country’s main purveyor of ballets by the British choreographer Frederick Ashton? Sarasota Ballet’s artistic director, the Yorkshire-born Iain Webb, is an Ashton enthusiast, and he has made it his life’s work to bring the choreographer’s back catalogue—clever, stylish, and always musical—to the stage. At the Joyce, the troupe will perform “Façade,” 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 India’s rich 8

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

dance scene. The first night, at Pace University’s 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 Belilove’s 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 Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival In “What the Day Owes to the Night” (at the Ted Shawn, Aug. 3-7), the bare-chested men of Compagnie Hervé 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 Tudor’s 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 Pillow’s 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; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements.

Belly A new parent in western Massachusetts couldn’t ask for a hipper postpartum doula than Tanya Donelly, the enchanting front woman of this nineties rock act. (Since her group disbanded, in 1996, she’s 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 album’s worth of previously unreleased material. The group formed in Tokyo, in 1992, inspired by a shared love of the Melvins and Motörhead, as well as of experimental noise artists like Merzbow, with whom Boris later collaborated. “Pink” was the band’s seventh album, and it remains remarkable for both its array of diverse styles—shoegaze, Detroit proto-punk, sludge—and its powerful, overarching musical unity. Opening will be the dronemetal pioneers Earth, who share Boris’s 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 début album, “Sixteen Stone,” from 1994, Bush was polarizing in its early days, denounced by record-store élitists even as it sold out arena tours and topped charts worldwide. If you’ve got the stomach for it (and can tolerate Rossdale’s 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 Madonna’s 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-hop’s biggest stars and their associates who were privileged enough to tag along. The wistful stories that are told on the rapper Nore’s new podcast, “Drink Champs,” recount ego-fuelled parking-space conflicts and you-had-to-be-there chance meetings.

Nore’s 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 albums—the 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 Gellaitry’s 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 Gellaitry’s status as one of dance music’s safest new bets, and he’s 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). Harvey’s 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 quartet’s 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 Mavin’s 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.

Pitbull’s stated mission is to bring positivity to the global masses—his characteristic mid-song catchphrase is the affirmative dale, meaning “go ahead.” The son of first-generation Cuban im-

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NIGHT LIFE migrants who required him to memorize the poetry of José Martí, 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 “Who’s the Boss?” and “The Iceman Cometh” to “Broad City,” Danza has been there and back, and he’s 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 Miller’s 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 associates—Steve Nelson, Peter Washington, Terell Stafford, and Lewis Nash—come 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 festival—curated by the gifted and nurturing singer and teacher Deborah Latz—but each brings a compelling presence to the stage while reminding us that New York remains a hothouse for jazz vocal talent. (Cornelia Street Café, 29 Cornelia St. 212-989-9319. Aug. 2-4.)

John Zorn Fifteen ensembles are on hand to present selections from the composer John Zorn’s 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.)

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

All for One

David Lang’s “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 premièred by England’s 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 Center’s 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 Hancock–Robert 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 festival’s opening fortnight. The next performance will be one of the most closely watched: a world première (“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: Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto, with its combination of intimate lyricism and poignant melancholy, crystallizes an aspect of the composer’s personality during the last months of his life. The dynamic Swedish clarinettist Martin Fröst will be out front in the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra’s upcoming concert; the conductor is Paavo Järvi, who also conducts music by Arvo Pärt (“La Sindone”) and Beethoven (the Fourth Symphony). (Note: After the Saturday-night concert, Fröst will retire to the Kaplan Penthouse to perform chamber works by Brahms, Bartók, and Falla, with the pianist Roland Pöntinen.) (David Geffen Hall.) • Aug. 9-10 at 7:30: Louis Langrée 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 Kahane—a superb pianist, a capable conductor, and an entertaining compère—is classical music’s 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 (“L’Atalante”), Barber (the fugue-finale from the Sonata for Piano), and Ligeti, along with a New York première by Thomas Adès (“Blanca Variations”). (Kaplan Penthouse.) (For tickets and a complete listing of concerts, visit mostlymozart.org.)

Mostly Mozart: “Così Fan Tutte” The festival’s 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 cast—Lenneke Ruiten, Kate Lindsey, Sandrine Piau, Joel Prieto, Nahuel di Pierro, and Rod Gilfry—as the Aix-en-Provence Festival’s production from June and July, but without the racially charged staging by the director Christophe Honoré; Louis Langrée 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 group’s 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 Schubert’s Sonata No. 20 in A Major, Brahms’s “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 Dvořák, in addition to Arvo Pärt’s “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 preëminent 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 Époque-themed production of Puccini’s beloved “La Bohème”; Peter Kazaras’s fairy-tale staging of Rossini’s “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 Sondheim’s devilish “Sweeney Todd” in a village hall in postwar England, in performances conducted by John DeMain; and Francesca Zambello, the company’s director, places Robert Ward’s “The Crucible” (inspired by Arthur Miller’s play, an allegory of McCarthyism) where it was meant to be set—seventeenth-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 Boston’s musical duchy is in full swing; here are some mid-month highlights. Aug. 5 at 8: Yefim Bronfman, the thinking man’s powerhouse pianist, will keep some of his technical dazzle in reserve as he forays into Liszt’s 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 Dvořák (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 Eulenspiegel’s 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 (“Boléro”). • 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 Humphries—a.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 summer’s 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. Luke’s, 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 world’s leading musicians gather with their promising protégés 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 festival’s 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 Puccini’s 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 Berio’s completion of Act III of Puccini’s “Turandot” with a complete performance of Busoni’s 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 Stéphane Denève conducting popular works by Tchaikovsky (excerpts from “Swan Lake”) and Ravel, along with a world première by a leading American composer profoundly influenced by both of them: Michael Torke (“Unconquered”).

The following weekend, Cristian Măcelaru conducts Stravinsky’s 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 Maverick’s 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.)

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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 élites which challenged the mainstream presumptions of middle-class white men are the focus of some of the major offerings in Metrograph’s series “Dim All the Lights: Disco and the Movies” (Aug. 5-11).

In “The Last Days of Disco,” from 1998, Whit Stillman unfolds disco’s lines of power with a historian’s insight and a novelist’s eye for satirical nuance.

Set in Manhattan in the early eighties, the film stars Chloë 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

group’s 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 naïve irony is utterly straightforward. In the disco, talking is a meeting of the minds, and dancing is a meeting of the bodies—sex 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 Chicago’s Comiskey Park, a record-burning that devolved into a riot mainly by white men.

Disco music fills the soundtrack of Richard Brooks’s 1977 film “Looking for Mr. Goodbar,” starring Diane Keaton. Like the novel by Judith Rossner from which it’s 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 women’s sexual freedom.

Despite the tragic—and apparently cautionary—ending, Brooks films women’s 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. It’s 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 discothèque 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 Badham’s “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.) • Pete’s 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 doesn’t 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 Eddy’s long-suffering daughter, and Jane Horrocks, as Bubble, the assistant who doesn’t 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 Mafféi), 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 bosses—including a Mephistophelian grocer (Noël Roque14

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

vert) who tries to buy Antoinette’s affections even as he extorts sexual favors from an employee (Paulette Jan). But Becker, whose camera ranges breezily from Métro-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 merchant’s cadaverous clutches. A clattery plot involving a lost lottery ticket tells an ironic tale of impossible dreams, but Becker’s 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 world’s 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 movie’s far more fanciful later conceits can’t match for simple astonishment. Rylance brings an arch literary rusticity to Runt’s brilliantly bungled language, and the gifted Barnhill isn’t given much with the role of Sophie, who’s written to be spunky, endearing, and blank. The film’s 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.)

Café 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 there’s 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 plot—perhaps too many. Bobby’s 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 Bobby’s father, but it’s Stewart who takes the honors, allowing Vonnie’s 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.)

Don’t Think Twice The comedian Mike Birbiglia wrote, directed, and co-stars in this amiable, lovingly detailed comedy about comedy—specifically, 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 (one’s 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 insider’s view of the industry, and he pushes his colleagues to the fore—especially 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 film’s 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. Naomi’s subordinate, Erin Manning (Sarah Megan Thomas), is denied a raise and a promotion, and blames Naomi. Naomi’s lover, Michael Connor (James Purefoy), a broker at the firm, wants insider’s secrets about Naomi’s 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. Menon’s direction is merely efficient, but the script, by Amy Fox (who co-wrote the story with Thomas and Reiner), gives the women’s personal lives equal weight, as they struggle to balance family and work and face male clients whose interests aren’t all business. The story fits together too neatly and the characters remain ciphers, but scenes of news reports of the high-profile deals—in which the protagonists see themselves—evoke an eerie air of plausibility and alienation.—R.B. (In limited release.)

MOVIES Ghostbusters Paul Feig’s new movie revisits Ivan Reitman’s 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 them—Abby (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 can’t 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. He’s 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 movie’s high point). When she dies suddenly, Hector—a convict considered unfit to adopt—prepares 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 Schamus’s adaptation of Roth’s 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 hero’s predicament—to life. Most fearsome of these is the proud and possessive speech delivered by Marcus’s 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.” It’s 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 boy—charming 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.

Sandberg’s tense, inky camera style draws the eye to the film’s dark corners. Although the movie doesn’t 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 boy’s 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 Britain’s envoy, John Clayton III, Lord Greystoke, formerly known as Tarzan (Alexander Skarsgård), is informed of the Belgian plot by an American diplomat, George Washington Williams (Samuel L. Jackson), and they travel together to thwart it.

John’s 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 movie’s most photogenic combat).

Meanwhile, the urbane George reminds John,

The Marrying Kind Despite its buoyant tone and comic energy, George Cukor’s 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 Holliday—tall, squawky, and full of purpose—and 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 Cukor’s 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 modernism—of 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 cliché-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 fiancé, Eric (Sam Richardson), apart, but they’re so thinly characterized that there’s 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 Zulawski’s ecstatic, image-drunk science-fiction fantasy, which he filmed in the mid-nineteen-seventies and completed in 1987.

It’s 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

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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 other’s attentions. Holliday, famous for portraying ditzes of accidental genius, here plays someone like herself—a 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 script’s 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 Cassady’s house. But there’s no story to speak of, and, in fact, there’s no dialogue: the hilarity emerges from the way Kerouac’s 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.

“That’s why everybody wants to see it.” Under the co-direction of Alfred Leslie and the photographer Robert Frank—who wields his camera with a tipsy intimacy—the 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 clergyman’s mother.—Michael Sragow (BAM Cinématek; 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 sententiousness—no 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 Cinématek 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 Ophüls). • Aug. 4 at 6: “The Tender Enemy” (1936, Ophüls). • Aug. 5 at 6: “The Lovers of Montparnasse” (1958, Ophüls 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 coördinator and registrar, Anna Schwartz, exhibit a trove of odd artifacts connected to the urban legends that surround one of the city’s 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 microfiche—it’s no surprise that some strange tales find shadowy support in the building’s 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 preëmptive 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 death—whether 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 point—the 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.)

FßD & 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 O’Brien’s 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 can’t go wrong with that.”

The Pig occupies a slender space in what’s 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 Walgreens—“That would have been the Brexit of Hudson Heights”—and how community activism had prevented disaster at the last minute. The restaurant mirrors the delicate ethos of the neighborhood. Cards, collected by O’Brien’s 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 Pig’s progression through an evening. One of these is a tian d’aubergine (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 Pig’s delicious wines, a chilled Pouilly-Fumé, 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 nymph’s laugh. Among the regular dishes, the lamb is particularly good. It’s 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 that’s with a nuage au chocolat—a chocolate cloud—which comes in a scalding pot, with fresh berries. It’s 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 Pig’s 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 piñatas to Venetian masks and Chinese paper lanterns, evoking an indiscriminate matrimony of the world’s 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 weren’t the reason she came. “I can’t really say why,” she said, explaining that she’d moved away from the Village six years ago. “But I end up back here at least once a week, like clockwork.”—Jiayang Fan

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THE TALK OF THE TOWN COMMENT DEFYING CONVENTIONS

O slipped a document into an American diplomat’s 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 Carter’s 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 War’s 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 didn’t find anything.)

For a 1984 operation to thwart Ronald Reagan’s reëlection, 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 Committee’s 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 doesn’t mean it’s true. Yet what is known beyond doubt about the episode is disturbing enough. On the eve of last week’s Democratic Convention, in Philadelphia, WikiLeaks published the D.N.C. files. Julian Assange, the group’s founder, had previously allowed, in an interview with a British journalist, that the publication would harm Hillary Clinton’s 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 you’re listening, I hope you’re 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 Trump’s 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 Trump’s 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 member’s 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.”

Russia’s summer plot, if that’s what it was, turned out to be ham-handed. By far the greater danger lies with us. The American electorate’s 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 Convention’s final night, Hillary Clinton accepted PHILADELPHIA POSTCARD THE CALIFORNIANS

G women’s-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 Allred—who typically represents women, from exploited porn stars and ex-girlfriends of N.F.L. players to sexually harassed workers—had 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 she’s 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 Cosby’s accusers, among other clients. She had a long day ahead, scheduled to end with a 2:30 a.m. appearance on CNN.

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her party’s 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 Trump’s comments.” She herself had initially done so.

Yet, she said, “Here’s the sad truth: there is no other Donald Trump. This is it.”

American Presidential elections reduce the country’s complexity to a binary choice. This year’s is admittedly not the happiest one. The revival, on the big screens at the Convention hall, of the Clinton family’s 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 Clinton’s 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?

They’re 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. “They’re Bernie supporters from our delegation,” she said, rolling her eyes. They comprised two hundred and twenty-one out of the state’s 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.

“I’m not Nancy Pelosi, but thank you for the compliment,” Allred said.

“I’m Gloria Allred.”

The woman gasped. “Now I’m embarrassed!” she said. “Can I have a picture with you?”

“Even though I’m not Nancy Pelosi?” Allred said.

“It’s even better that you’re Gloria

Allred,” the woman said. She was Rita Robinzine, a teacher from Atlanta and former candidate for Georgia’s 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. “You’re a Bernie supporter?” Allred asked.

“I’m waiting till Thursday. Then I’ll be with her,” Robinzine said. “Until then, I’m 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 who’s 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 state’s 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 doppelgänger 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, who’s 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 Clinton’s introduction film at the D.N.C. None of these roles have involved more elaborate costumes—or, at least, more elaborate hair—than that of Ilderim, a rich Nubian, circa 30 A.D. Ilderim’s 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 Cinecittà, the storied studio on the edge of Rome, taking a break from filming the latest version of “Ben-Hur,” which opens this month. The trailer’s TV was tuned to RAI 1, Italy’s most popular station, even though Freeman doesn’t speak Italian. “It’s 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— it’s 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 Wallace’s “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-Hur”s, an animatedmovie “Ben-Hur,” a Ben-Hur TV miniseries, and, most famous of all, William Wyler’s three-hour-and-thirtyseven-minute wide-screen epic—one 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 Wyler’s “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 movie—Freeman towers over Jack Huston, the British actor playing Ben-Hur. “There’s no humor in him at all,” Freeman said. “This character has quite a bit of power in the story. And I like playing power. It’s 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 story’s 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 hadn’t yet begun, the lot at Cinecittà 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 coöperate,” 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: it’s 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 it—Jack O’Hara 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 (Café 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,” O’Hara said.

O’Hara 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 O’Hara’s 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.” O’Hara 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.’ That’s all I’ve got.”

O’Hara, who also grew up in Pennsylvania, first visited New York with his mother in 1960, when he was twelve. He wandered into the Café Wha?. A guitar player there (not Jimi Hendrix, though O’Hara 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 début 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,” O’Hara said. They packed the place. Among their regulars were the BBC d.j. John Peel and the members of Brinsley Schwarz, Nick Lowe’s band. “We were also big with the roadies, the guys on the crews for Procol Harum and Ten Years After,” O’Hara 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 weren’t 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 thing—“pub rock.” “So that’s another missed opportunity,” O’Hara 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 punk’s unlikely patient zero.

Back in the States, they kept trying.

They released an album, opened for other acts, and even played CBGB. “It wasn’t 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, O’Hara 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 O’Hara 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?” O’Hara 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. I’ve got a pen and I’ve 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, he’s acted like anything but.

Not surprisingly, conservatives have decried Obama’s “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 trend—what 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 President’s 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. “I’m going to do a lot of right things,” he has said, and he’s pledged to reverse many of Obama’s 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 Trump’s view, that includes Germany and France. He’s 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 can’t just be discarded by a new incumbent. That’s why Obama’s executive agencies, like those of his predecessors, spent the final year of the Administration hurriedly initiating a host of regulatory proposals—so that the proposals could make it through the rulemaking process before Obama leaves office.

Still, were Trump to win, many of Obama’s accomplishments would be under threat. Even rules that can’t be rescinded can be left unenforced. Trump, who says that global warming is “bullshit,” has vowed to cancel the Paris Agreement. Technically, he can’t, but the deal has no enforcement mechanism, so he’d be free to just ignore the Paris goals and do nothing about greenhouse-gas emissions. And what Trump can’t 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 isn’t 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 can’t 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 hate—hate 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 women’s 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 tents—conveyor belts, wands, please place your laptop in the bin—as 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.”

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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 doesn’t 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 doesn’t exist. It descends into anarchy.” It won’t 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). He’d wanted to speak at the Convention, but he’d 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 Perón 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 weren’t 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.”

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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, we’re 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 can’t believe it got this far.” Orange: “I get to vote for the first time, and now I don’t 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. “That’s 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 can’t; because he speaks her thoughts about the half of America that’s living off the other half, and about the coming lawlessness. (Mitt Romney’s “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 we’ve 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 city’s 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 people’s 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 he’d 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. She’d made a T-shirt that read, “I know shirts. I make the best shirts. Mexico will pay for them. It’s terrific. Everyone agrees I have baby hands,” to which she’d affixed a pair of pink plastic doll hands, one clutching a miniature American flag. “Some people really hate Trump,”

she said. “I don’t hate him. I think he’s bringing to light aspects of our society that need to come to light.” She’s worried about the world, but she’s not that worried about Trump. “People are too reasonable for this movement to win.”

Thie’s 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 progress—the 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 doesn’t 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 he’d 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 “Trump’s 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 son’s 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 wasn’t Gettysburg. This battle isn’t 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.

She’s 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 couldn’t 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 People’s 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. He’s 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 I’d 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.

“I’m going to talk about safety.” When I suggested that making America safe again isn’t 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.” She’s 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.

“I’ve seen conservatism and Christianity separate,” Kaminski told Mosco. “I’m not going to vote against my morals anymore.” He’s pretty sure he’ll 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, it’s 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, I’m from Atlanta!” and you have to know that, if they weren’t here, who knows what would happen; there are horrible people shouting murderous things and tussling, that’s 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, don’t get cornered; but, also, there’s a little black girl in the fountain rolling around, getting soaked, next to some white guy who’s 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 park’s Civil War Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument, not far from the spot where Lincoln’s 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 vain—that 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 night’s speakers.

“No one has more faith in the American people than my father,” Ivanka Trump said. She called him “the people’s 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

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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? “It’s like a windshield after a rock hits it,” she said. “The glass looks like a spider’s web, and you can see through it, but not really, and then, all at once, in a flash, it cracks, and it shatters, and there’s 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 Knack’s “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 Prince’s “Let’s 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&M’s and the voice of the People to jolt you awake. It’s like being at a sleepover and trying to stay up until midnight for the candlelit séance, 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 Convention’s first day. And there was tension and dissension in the hall. “It’s 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. She’d 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 protested—a 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 it’s better to keep people ignorant,” Robyn Sumners told me, angry, astonished. She was a precinct inspector in California’s District 29, where Sanders lost by a smidgen. She blames the press and the D.N.C. “They don’t want people involved,” she said. “They don’t trust us. They’re afraid of Bernie because you know what Bernie does? He wakes people up. I learned in this election: They don’t want us to vote.” Some Sanders people covered their mouths with blue tape, on which they’d

written “SILENCED.”The People, muffled, stifled, muzzled, unloved.

Carl Davis, a delegate from Texas, works in the mayor’s office in Houston.

He’s 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 isn’t 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 angry—a 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. “I’ve 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 can’t 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 McCurry’s first Convention. He was a delegate from South Carolina, where he works as an I.T. guy in the state’s Department of Transportation. He was wearing a hat decorated with red-white-and-blue tinsel and a vest pinned with eleven Hillary buttons. “She’s 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 Party’s 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 you’ve 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, I’ve read, can sustain its own sick burning, its own hell, for hours.

It’s the mind. It’s 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 Lasch’s 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 week’s 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 Sanders’s 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. “Don’t let anyone ever tell you that this country isn’t 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 can’t stop. “If I were trying to lead a party that believed in rolling back L.G.B.T.Q. rights and women’s 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

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delegation from Vermont, called for Clinton’s 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 haven’t learned how to compromise. And you know what? They don’t own the word ‘progressive.’ ” Golojuch’s 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, it’s 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. They’re 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 we’ve 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!”

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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 won’t vote for Hillary.”They were waiting for the Green Party’s 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 ain’t in no dance mode, we in a fighting mode,” he said. “I don’t 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 didn’t 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 wasn’t all dark and it wasn’t 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 Trump’s was in its pessimism. And, when he has faltered, Obama said, something, some-

one, an idea, had always picked him up.

“It’s been you,” he said. “The American people.”

The next morning, Trump’s campaign instructed his supporters not to watch Clinton’s 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, she’ll have stuck in the back of her mind exactly what’s 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. “I’m 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, I’m 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 don’t roller-skate, but I had to admit that I admired the statement’s 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 STAIRS”—the 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 am—how 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 “wife”—another computer, apparently—that 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 Year’s Eve party and blurted out, in front of everybody, “Bev, how fabulous!

JAY DANIEL WRIGHT

omputers may one day be able

You’re 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 Bev’s face, and on everybody else’s, my entire body contorted in a wince of shame and—I’ll be honest—a 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 hasn’t 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

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THE SPORTING SCENE

PRANCE MASTER How Charlotte Dujardin took over the most élite 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 manège, 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 don’t 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 François Robichon de la Guérinière, 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 Guérinière wrote, “stands in awe of the rider’s 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 mother’s, who worked in the stables on the property. Thomas had a twelve-year-old dressage horse that was trained to Grand Prix level—dressage has eight “heights,” of which Grand Prix is the highest—but 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 they’re 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. Dujardin’s 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 Thomas’s instructions—shortening Truday’s 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 ČERVEŇOVÁ

down and caught the expression on the trainer’s face. “She was, like, mesmerized,” Dujardin recalled recently.

Within days, Thomas had Dujardin performing flying changes—in which the horse skips from one foot to the other, in mid-canter—and 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 own—two daughters, EmmaJayne and Charlotte, and a younger son, Charles—she 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,” Dujardin’s 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. Élite 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. “It’s a vicious circle,” Astrid Appels, the editor of Eurodressage.com, one of the sport’s 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. It’s legacy stuff, like archery, or the hammer, that sneaked into the Games at some point and hasn’t 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 sport’s 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 début 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 sport’s traditional tests—the Grand Prix and the Grand Prix Special—which 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 manège.

The freestyle probably saved dressage, but it masks the sport’s essential grandeur. No other event in Rio this summer can claim Xenophon, the ancient Greek general and student of Socrates, as its first coach. Xenophon’s “On Horseman-

ship,” written in the fourth century B.C., contains training exercises that are still used in dressage, as well as the sport’s 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 riding—displays for kings and courtiers in the great houses of Europe—which more or less ended with the French Revolution.

Within the sport, none of this feels particularly distant. Everything is judged according to sacred precepts—“harmony,” “impulsion,” “self-carriage,” “submission”— that have come down intact from the ancien régime. 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 manège 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 Dujardin’s 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 Dujardin’s 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 family’s 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 Dujardin’s 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, Jane’s 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. “That’s 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 didn’t 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 manège.

Hester got his big break as a young 36

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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 didn’t 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 manège. “I was, like, ‘Oh, my God,’ ” she recalled. “He was so powerful.” In dressage, a young horse’s walk and canter are considered largely unalterable (a trot is different—a trot you can fix), and this horse’s canter was enormous. On Fernandez, Dujardin’s challenge had always been to enhance the horse’s 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 pupil—in return for lessons and lodging for Fernandez, she would clean stables and warm up his horses—part 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 wasn’t developing as Hester had hoped. His movements were so strong that they hurt Hester’s 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-shaker—a sign of nerves that can ruin a dressage horse’s 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 yard’s indoor school, which had mirrors— not unlike those in a dance studio—she 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. “It’s 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 Valegro’s progress. The canter was coming into shape. “We used to walk down the drive and then back again. I said, ‘Please don’t sell him. Please don’t sell him. Just let me have a chance to ride.’ ” They agreed that Dujardin would begin the slow process of bringing Valegro through his levels—years of training and minor competitions—and 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 sponsors—people with money on the line—take 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. Dujardin’s 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 don’t 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 manège, fuming at an error that Valegro has made. “He’s too hot, he’s 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 euros—barely 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 Hester’s 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 client’s delight at buying a horse from Hester’s 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 manège. “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 Hester’s 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. Valegro’s head-shaking came back. Dujardin managed to win her first test, the Grand Prix, but as she was warming up for her second—the Grand Prix Special—Valegro 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 I’m, like . . . my God, don’t 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 Valegro’s passage. Christoph Hess, who was in charge of dressage instruction for Germany’s 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 her—and Hester—as 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 Bechtolsheimer—the daughter of Hester’s old patron—won the team gold, Britain’s 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 manège, Hester said the mistake had probably cost her the gold. An official checked the horse’s bit. High above, Dujardin saw a woman leaning over the grandstand. “You’ve 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 Parzival’s jaws had crossed during the test, a sign of the horse’s discomfort.

After the Games, Hester took the British riders to Sark to celebrate. There was a vin d’honneur, 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 Hester’s yard, and Luard’s involvement in the sport, for years. “I can’t keep shelving out,” Luard told me. “I can’t 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 didn’t know what to say. “If you don’t 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, Dujardin’s 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 Hester’s 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 didn’t 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 everyone’s mind was Totilas, a tall black stallion, whose career had come to symbolize the sport’s 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 sport’s 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 training—a charge that he denies—and 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 can’t 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.”

Valegro’s 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 Totilas’s 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. Hester’s yard is on the edge of the Forest of Dean, on the grounds of an old mill. Rio will be Valegro’s final Olympics—he 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 sport’s advanced movements. “You’re such a clever person,” Dujardin said, stroking her brown back. “Aren’t 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 manège, 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 someone’s head off, or whatever.” He kept a quiet score of Dujardin’s movements: seven point five, eight, the occasional nine. I asked whether Dujardin was doing the same in her head. “She just says either it’s good or it’s 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 seat—where one creature’s 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 Hester’s 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 college’s 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 Dujardin’s 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, Dujardin’s competitive energy has remained undimmed, and one of Hester’s 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 manège 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 manège.

She wanted to ride the steps of one last piaffe. The horse’s shoulders began to rise. But Hester cut them off. “Enough,” he said. “Save it for the ring.” 

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A REPORTER AT LARGE

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

B

efore Nicolás (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 region—a 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 region’s 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 Peru’s 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 Pérez, and this time the news did not subside. People from Pérez’s 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 Peru’s 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

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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 didn’t initiate this contact—they did,” she said.

“But it’s 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 Peru’s border with Brazil. Fiona Watson, the field director of the tribalpeople’s-rights group Survival International, told me that the situation was dire for the region’s 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 extinction—a disquieting echo of the situation of Native Americans in the nineteenth century, as white settlers forced them to retreat or die. “There’s so much at stake here,” Watson said. “These people are as much a part of the rich tapestry of humanity as anyone else, but it’s 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

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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 Río Callería, 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 raised—essential 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 Guzmán. The most murderously flamboyant of them was probably Carlos Fermín Fitzcarrald. Immortalized in Werner Herzog’s 1982 film “Fitzcarraldo,” he was a man of limitless ambition who bloodily installed himself as Peru’s Rey del Caucho—the 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 Urubamba’s 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 Fitzcarrald’s meeting with the Mashco’s leader, in which he mustered his armed men to intimidate the natives into coöperating. “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 Fitzcarrald’s 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 Culture’s 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 Emílio Goeldi Museum, an Amazonian-research center in Brazil, but he travelled to Peru frequently as an informal adviser to Torres’s 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: Don’t attempt to contact them. Don’t give them clothes, food, tools, or anything else.

Don’t 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, Kamotolo—tall and beardless, with alert eyes—was 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 Kamotolo’s father. He was rumored by locals to have killed Shaco Flores; Kamotolo was thought to have killed Leonardo Pérez.

At the department’s 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 didn’t like answering questions about themselves, so Torres’s 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 Manú National Park. They were related to the Yine, but separated by history: the Yine were the descendants of Fitzcarrald’s 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 didn’t 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

Torres’s 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 department—tasked with looking out for all of Peru’s 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 government’s ear,” Torres said dryly, “you can imagine who is more influential.”

ural resources. Opening up the jungle has made Peru one of the world’s largest exporters of gold (as well as the second-largest producer of cocaine), and the Camisea natural-gas facility, north of Manú National Park, provides half of the country’s energy. Politicians have been hesitant to disrupt business. Alan García, 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 Peru’s 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 region’s 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 Brazil’s 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 Indígenas—areas forbidden to outsiders.

Most of the neighboring countries adopted Brazil’s 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

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Luis Felipe Torres, an anthropologist with the state’s 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, García 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 José Carlos dos Reis Meirelles, a prominent agent from Brazil’s 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 Fitzcarrald’s dream. It would also be the destruction of the area’s 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 it’s just one way so far— they’re 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 don’t know what that is.”

T to discourage fighting between the

orres’s most pressing job was

Mashco and the other indigenous people in the area, so his first stop was Shipetiari, the village where Leonardo Pérez had been killed, which is almost exclusively inhabited by Matsigenka. Shipetiari, set back in the jungle, is composed of family compounds—large huts on stilts—connected 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 department’s 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, Shipetiari’s 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. “That’s why when foreigners and N.G.O.s come from outside we don’t 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. We’ll 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 Matsigenka’s 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 Pérez’s 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 Mashco’s 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, “That’s 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, you’ll 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 we’ll use the contact we are having with them to let them know it’s not good to attack people.”

Rivera said, “So you say if the Mashco come we shouldn’t do anything. But, if they kill someone of mine, I’ll kill them—of 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

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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 hadn’t shown up. Ponceano speculated that the rain had flooded the rivers that demarcated their territory, and the Mashco, who didn’t 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

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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 didn’t 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 Mashco’s whistle.

E it was clear that they were nearby. ven if we couldn’t 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 patch—a small plot that Peruvians call a chacra—and 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 can’t do that anymore.” With a distressed look, she said that she didn’t 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 sky—there 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, ‘You’re pregnant, aren’t you?’ When I said, ‘No, I’m not,’ they said, ‘Tell us the truth! Don’t 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 team’s gear and clothing— looking, Ponceano believed, for weapons, or for anything else they might find useful. They had removed the drawstring from Laureano’s shorts and kept it. Kamotolo had been interested in Ponceano’s 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 Nena’s 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 they’re not coming over because they have colds, and we don’t 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, it’s 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, Nomole’s 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 Manú 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 cigarettes—organic tobacco, he assured me.

One evening, Maldonado said, “These people are all going to come out. It’s 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 they’d 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 people’s 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 Mashco’s 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 don’t know if I’m 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, Kamotolo’s 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 Marías, wandered out of the woods and camped near a park ranger’s 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.

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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 I’m 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 Ponceano’s 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 don’t 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 Manú, 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 Cuzqueña 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 government’s motives. “The state is protecting its interests, not those of the indígenas,” 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!” Rey’s 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 Rey’s contact with the Mashco was “outrageous,” given the Dominicans’ previous results. “He’s trying to do what they did with us, in a forced contact,” he said. “We were once fifteen thousand. Now we’re 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. Álvarez 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.” Álvarez, 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 wouldn’t 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 God’s mission for me.” The Ministry of Culture had pressed Álvarez to stop meeting the Mashco, but he had persisted, bringing them bananas.

He also brought clothes, until he realized that they didn’t wear them. “It seems that clothing disturbs them,” he told me. “They’ll have to be taught how to use clothes, I guess.” Waving around at the church, Álvarez said, “Every day, in my services, we pray for them here. For them, Satan and sin doesn’t exist. They don’t know about all those things. But God is merciful.” Álvarez 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 Lord’s word is powerful.”

T the Mashco’s health. Controlled he team’s 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 Álvarez, 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 Mashco—a 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 Álvarez to Diamante. “I had a dream—a man told me to come to the mouth of the Manú 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,” Álvarez 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, Kamotolo’s 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 Peru’s 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

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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 wouldn’t 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, we’re probably going to have forty or fifty people to deal with,”

Mendieta said. “As long as they need things from us, they’re 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 don’t care about them at all.”

P mostly absent from Madre de Dios, eru’s 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 Mashco’s 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 jungle—home 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 evening’s 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 Peru’s 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. “There’s 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 isn’t 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 there’s 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 team’s 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 can’t.

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. “What’s 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 Mashco’s 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 logger’s 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.

“They’ve 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 Puthana’s cough had abated, and so had Kwangonro’s. Wasese’s 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 Peru’s 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 they’ll last a little longer than that,” she said. “Maybe we won’t 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

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PERSONAL HISTORY

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

BY LAUREN COLLINS

I

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, Vern’s 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 English—“Kevin is a blue-eyed boy” had been billed as a canonical phrase—had done little to prepare him for the realities of the language on the ground. “You’ve really improved,” his 52

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

roommate told him, six weeks into the term. “When you got here, you couldn’t 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 début 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, he’d 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 language—he also spoke Spanish, the native language of his maternal grandparents, who had fled over the Pyrenees during the Spanish Civil War—but 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 letter—an inducement to what we might someday have together—in which every sentence began with “Maybe.” Maybe he’d 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 don’t have very good capillarity,” Olivier said.

“Huh?” I replied, continuing to dab at the puddle.

“Their capillarity isn’t very good.”

“What are you talking about? That’s 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-pə-’ler-ə-tē, -’la-rə-.

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 Steiner’s categories: scientist/artist, atheist/believer, man/woman. It seemed sometimes as if generation was one of the few gaps across which we weren’t 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

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or perfume—American men, in my experience, often claimed to prefer a more “natural” look—he trusted in a sort of emotional maquillage, in which one took a few minutes to compose one’s thoughts instead of walking around, undone, in the affective equivalent of pajamas. For him, the success of le couple—a relationship, in French, was something you were, not something you were in—depended 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 transcriptionist’s recall for the details of our exchanges.

Our household spats degenerated into linguistic warfare.

“I’ll clean the kitchen after I finish my dinner,” I’d say. “First, I’m going to read my book.”

“My dinner,” he’d 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 immature—stroppy, even. My dinner, my book, my toy.

“Whatever. It’s my language,” I’d reply.

And why, he’d want to know, had I said I’d clean the kitchen when I’d only tidied it up? I’d reply that no native speaker—by which I meant no normal person—would ever make that distinction, feeling as though I were living with Andy Kaufman’s 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 other’s sentences, focussing too intently, as though we were listening to the radio with the volume a notch too low. “You don’t 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 didn’t 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. He’s trilling his “r”s as if he’s 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? He’s totally fluent in French!”

Like the presenter, I’m impressed.

An excellent command of French seems like a superpower, the prerogative of socialites and statesmen. I didn’t 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 there’s 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 you’re privileged; you’re 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. We’re 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 Madame—Dominique. I will tutoyer you. You can tutoyer me, too,” she says, indicating that we’re all to use the informal form of address. “I’m 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 B1—a level into which I’ve placed after taking an online test. According to the diagnostic, I can get by in everyday situations, but I can’t explain myself spontaneously and clearly on a great number of subjects. This is true: like a soap-opera amnesiac, I’m at a loss to articulate things of which I do not have direct experience. Still, I’m 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 contrôler 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, we’re 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 haltingly—an awkward silence passes over the crowd roughly every twenty seconds—before 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 présente 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 discothèques, and a thirteenth-century fort. Lana is in Geneva with her husband, who works at a bank. She doesn’t 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.

It’s Lana’s turn to introduce me. “Je vous présente 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 américain instead of magazine américain, 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 on—to take one in, filling one’s mouth with another’s 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, I’m 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 Victoria’s closest confidant, teaching her Urdu—or proofread my letters, blotting my mistakes with light pink paper. More pro-

saically, he is completely deaf in his right ear (childhood meningitis). He’s freakishly adept at keeping up with conversation—even in another language, even at a fifty-per-cent disadvantage— but, in order to hear, he has to turn his head so that he’s looking almost directly over his right shoulder, which forces him to speak out of the far left corner of his mouth, as though he’s 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 he’s put whatever he was going to say through another lap of thought.

We don’t speak French as regularly as we should. We try, but it’s 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 relationship—the ability to say things mirroring my desire to say them—we 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. Olivier’s uptight (he can’t let a mistake go without correcting it).

I’m impatient (the moment I make one, I cave). We can’t seem to lower our inhibitions and just let the conversation flow, the way you’re supposed to do to enter another language. When I try out a new word, I feel conspicuous, as though I’m test-driving a car I can’t afford. It’s hard for me, as someone for whom English is a livelihood, to embrace my status as an amateur in French. I’m the opposite of Eliza Doolittle: I don’t 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 don’t pronounce the final “s” in French.)

Folklorists have argued for decades over whether Cinderella’s pantoufles de verre might have come about as a mishearing, on Charles Perrault’s part, of pantoufles de vair. The subjunctive is a wish.

Gender’s a bitch. Le poêle: a stove. La poêle: a frying pan. A man’s shirt, une

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chemise, is feminine, but a woman’s 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 verb—taking into account prefixes and suffixes and other modifications—can 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 Mixtec—a verb-initial tonal language spoken by six thousand people in Oaxaca—the world’s 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 Purépecha.

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

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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 that’s tough about French is the thing that’s exemplary about French, which is that French speakers across the board are language nuts.

Jean-Benoît 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 origins—a 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 français châtié—a wellpunished French. Olivier has fond memories of watching the grammarian Bernard Pivot, a national celebrity, administer the Dicos d’Or, a live televised tournament in which contestants vied to transcribe most accurately a dictated text—the Super Bowl of orthography.

Pivot’s competition was inspired by the dictée de Mérimée. On a rainy day in 1857, at Fontainebleau, the royal country estate, Empress Eugénie asked the

author Prosper Mérimée to concoct an entertainment. Mérimée 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 Mérimée tallied the results: in the course of a hundred and sixty-nine words, Napoleon III made seventy-five mistakes, Eugénie 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 us—she’s a vous woman—with 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. “He’s American.”

“Is he an ideal roommate?” Luisa asks.

“Yes, but sometimes he uses my toothbrush,” Satomi says, daring to elaborate.

“That’s 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 shouldn’t 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. “You’re not our ideal roommate.”

Carlos, a Spanish bellboy, chimes in: “Not someone bipolar.”

“No!” comes a cry from the Italian corner. It’s a woman named Cristina.

“I’m an artist,” she says. “This concerns me. One day I’m happy, one day I’m not. I was living in Norway. I was a little depressed. I didn’t 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 wasn’t very communicative.

But their view of communication was exaggerated.”

“Listen, it’s a matter of respect,” Carlos replies, fingering a black cord that he wears around his neck. “If you have a bad day, you don’t have to put it on the other person.”

Carlos is right, but he’s 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 boyfriend—my ex—and 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 apartment—right down to the sheets on the bed.”

Luisa, stone-faced, waits a minute before responding.

“C’est 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 we’re home. I’m militant about following this piece of advice, as— in inverse relationship to my daily needs—I 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 éléphant (a male elephant), une éléphant (a female elephant), and un éléphanteau (a baby elephant of either sex).

My vocabulary is beginning to improve. I treasure each acquisition, remembering the exact circumstances— time, place, company—under which it was made. English is a trust fund, an unearned inheritance, but I’ve worked for every bit of French I’ve 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. We’re ticking off the Stations of the Cross, which a Savoyard devout has installed on the rocky slope we’re 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 doesn’t make a spring”), he says, citing a typically gloomy French proverb. The sky rips open as we reach Calvary.

But French—for me, at least—is 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. They’re impressionable, a little bit fickle, behaving differently depending on whom they’re with. A French word, if all its friends did, would definitely jump off the Brooklyn Bridge.

As for Dominique’s suggestion that we could become fluent by watching TV, I find sitcoms and reality shows— with their fast, slangy dialogue and serial plots—extremely hard to follow if I don’t already know what’s happening.

I decide to start with the radio, which in elocution makes up for what it lacks in context clues. Every morning, while I’m getting ready, I turn on Radio France Internationale. At first, I listen to the previous day’s news in français facile, following along with the transcript that RFI posts on the Internet, for learners around the world, every afternoon.

Français 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 Mantel—an Englishwoman who moved to Jeddah with her husband, in 1983—describes the protagonist’s 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

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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 industry—she’s a cartographer by trade, with a surfeit of free time—the woman is strangely impotent. Arabic won’t take.

Her frustration resonates with me.

My efforts at French leave me at once inert and exhausted, as though I’ve 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 morning’s broadcast, le septneuf par Patrick Cohen.

Trying to understand Patrick Cohen is an almost physical challenge—I 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 Cohen’s guests speak about the need for more women in positions of power at companies, I think how universal that conversation is. As I’m nodding along, the thought occurs that I’ve missed a feint or a negation that actually renders the entire argument the opposite of what I’ve understood it to be. Maybe I’ve got the right topic but not the stance, and the guest is actually anti-women executives. An unreliable auditor, I can’t trust what I’m 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 d’oiseaux chanteurs. No preamble. Patrick Cohen, I know immediately, is talking about a nest of songbirds.

That night, Olivier’s brother calls.

Usually, their conversations pass me by— I’ve missed years of ambient commentary, overheard plans—but 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 n’est pas très mobile, quoi,” I hear Olivier say.

I don’t know whom he’s talking about, or why she’s 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,” I’m taken by an eerie joy. Four years after having met Olivier, I’m hearing his voice for the first time.

S would describe a plan he’d hatched

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CHNAPSIDEE—the

way a German

under the influence of alcohol. Pilkunnussija—Finnish for “comma fucker,” a grammar pedant. In Mundari, ribuytibuy refers to the sight, sound, and motion of a fat person’s buttocks. Jayus, in Indonesian, denotes a joke told so poorly that people can’t help but laugh. Knullrufs is Swedish for “post-sex hair.” Gümüş 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 Kummerspeck—“grief bacon”—will always win the day.) They’re fun to say.

They’re 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 can’t 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 l’appel 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 hoax”—the 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 you’re 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 Yupik—roughly 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 wouldn’t 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 caterpillar’s 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 prozvonit—the act of calling a cell phone and hanging up after one ring so that the other person will call you back, saving you money—because cell phones were invented, not because they were Czech. Even if some languages express certain concepts more artfully, or more succinctly, it’s precisely because we recognize the phenomena to which they refer that we’re 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 Carolina—my parents had migrated there

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from Philadelphia and Long Island, rendering us lifelong newcomers—I craved the immensity of New York. In New York, I longed for the intimacy of North Carolina. It wasn’t that I didn’t 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 there’s something in their own they don’t like, that doesn’t name them.” For me, French wasn’t 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 didn’t 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. French—the language and the culture—was 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 Mitchell’s Paris. One day, I bought a package of twenty assiettes à grillades and ached for America, where you could use your large white paper plates for whatever the hell you wanted.

Like Mark Twain—who translated one of his stories from the French back into English, to produce the thricebaked “The Frog Jumping of the County of Calaveras”—I 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 composée d’une dinde partiellement désossée, farcie d’un canard partiellement désossé, lui-même farci d’un poulet partiellement désossé ”—that is to say, turducken.

Even if muruaneq—a Yupik word for soft, deep fallen snow—was 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 Year’s 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. t’s a Friday class. We’re 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 what’s in it, they all select the left fist.

“But you see that in my right hand there’s an ounce of pure gold while you don’t know what’s in the other one,” the man says.

The daughters still want whatever is in the left hand.

Thus bidden, he opens it. There’s 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? There’s a profound philosophical lesson here—that people should have a hidden side.”

“Why doesn’t he tell his sons that,then?”

“It’s not sexist to say that a woman should have more mystery.”

“I think that’s sexist.”

“It’s not sexist,” Cristina, the artist, says, cutting in. “It’s about tradition versus modernity.”

Luisa, warming to this interpretation, turns to Cristina and asks her to continue.

“Too open is not interesting,” she says. “That’s the moral of the story.”

Carlos can’t help himself.

“Man and woman are not the same!” he cries. “That’s reality.”

It’s a pile-on. I know I should probably fold. But now, like Carlos, I can’t

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 can’t type fast enough.

“It’s not the same for a man or a woman,”Lana says,raising a manicured hand.

Carlos replies, “That’s why I asked what you ladies think.”

“Women aren’t 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 that’s sexist” doesn’t exactly qualify as rhetorical pyrotechnics. But I’m pleased that I’ve managed to say something that sounds reasonably like myself. I’ve thought of learning as something passive. I’ve been hoarding words as though they were rare doubloons, tucking them away in the velvet pouches of my cerebrum. But they’re worthless, I realize, out of circulation. A language is the only subject you can’t learn by yourself.

T internalized the vocabulary you have he crazy thing is that once you’ve

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 wasn’t a writer but a speaker. I wasn’t an observer but a participant. It was such a happy thing to strive for a cliché.

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 they’d push a man off a bridge—in order to save five other people about to be hit by a train—when 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 didn’t 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. She’ll go silent as she tries to figure out what you’re comparing it with, whether you’ve 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 “très bonne.” Discrimination was a higher virtue than effusiveness.

In “Giovanni’s 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 after—and 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 Chanel’s dictum that before leaving the house a woman should remove one piece of jewelry. I wondered if perhaps the Mauritanian folktale—what is hidden is desired; to conceal certain parts is to keep them sensitive—had 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 Olivier’s 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 shades—the emotional equivalent of Russian’s two shades of blue. I understood, finally, why it made Olivier happy when I wore makeup; why he didn’t call me his best friend; why, in five years, I had never heard him burp. Love was not fusion.

“Je t’aime” was enough. 

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FICTION

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THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

ILLUSTRATION BY DAVID DORAN

L

ynette was on Oxford Street, which was a stupid place to be at any time, and especially at five o’clock on a winter afternoon. It was her own fault. She’d gone into John Lewis after work for a few things she needed, and then she’d tried on some clothes, which she hadn’t 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 faces—no 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 bird’s-nest mess, into which soft spatters of sleet blew and melted. She was wearing a red tartan scarf with a wool coat she’d found in a charity shop—bright pink, with a big shawl collar—and 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 child’s mother reassured the child, who began to cry. “No, I’m fine, I’m O.K.,” Lynette said. “Sorry, thank you, sorry.”

The people behind them, meanwhile, were pressing inexorably for-

ward. And the culprit who’d pushed her was forging on through the crowd, oblivious of any trouble he’d left in his wake. “Hey, you!” Lynette shouted at his back, but he didn’t 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, wouldn’t 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 propre—she couldn’t 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 Lynette’s 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, wouldn’t take her eyes off it, couldn’t forgive it. Something about that turned back infuriated her—its 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 man—he 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 wouldn’t let him go until she’d said something and had some acknowledgment from him. So she followed him onto the platform but couldn’t 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 wasn’t really so extraordinary that she’d followed him all that way without recognizing him—she’d 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 lot—filled out and become more definitely, heavily, his good-natured self— in the years, nine years, since she’d last seen him. She realized in that moment, to her surprise, that he’d 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 hadn’t quite occurred to her, in the time since they’d 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 protest—that he might have had all this growing left to do.

Toby wasn’t exactly better-looking now. In fact, he’d 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 wouldn’t 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 you’d gone abroad?”

“I did, but I came back.”

Still holding on to her, Toby looked

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around him as if he’d been so preoccupied that he’d hardly taken the trouble, until now, to notice where he was.

“Listen, this is no good. Let’s get out of here to talk.”

“But it’s hell up there, too.”

“Then where are you going to get off ? Where is it you live? I’ll get off with you and we’ll find somewhere for coffee. Or for a drink. It’s really good to see you.”

The old Toby—the young one— had been very shy. He’d had the air of a country boy, which, in a way, he was: he’d grown up in a dilapidated farmhouse, though his parents weren’t 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 she’d promised him he would—though she hadn’t, actually, been quite sure. She’d 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 all—naturally, he’d forgotten her. She knew that she wouldn’t ever tell him now about how he’d sent her flying and she’d come vengefully after him. “I’m meeting friends later in Marylebone,” she lied. “I’m sure we can find somewhere there for a drink.

I’m 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 other’s smiles, leaning in to confide—Lynette was tall enough to speak into his ear, even though Toby was six foot three or four—and 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.

“You’ve changed!” she said to Toby.

“I’ve 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.

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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. We’ve 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 easily—as if her looks, and his pleasure in her looks, didn’t dismay him as they once had.

Well, she wasn’t prosperous, she said. She had a temp job in admin at the BBC. It was hardly temping—she’d been there almost a year. It paid the bills, although, of course, in London it didn’t really pay the bills. But she didn’t 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; he’d 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 couldn’t see anything but bright openness. “I thought you’d have heard about Jaz,” he said. “We’ve

got two little girls. We’re very happy.”

“I did hear something. I’m so glad you’re happy.”

“What about you?”

“Oh, remember what I told you: I’m not really the marrying kind. Or the mothering kind, either.”

“Never say never.”

“I’ve 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 don’t blame you about the mothering. It’s good, but very messy. Not much sleep.”

When the train jolted and he put an arm round Lynette’s 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 other’s 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. “I’ve got a suggestion, by the way,” he said. “All the bars will be packed, it’s a nightmare, pre-Christmas. We could go back to my place in Queens Park and have a drink there, instead. More peaceful. I’d 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?

Wouldn’t I just be in the way? Isn’t it the children’s teatime and all that?”

“Oh, they’re off visiting Jaz’s sister.

I’ve 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 she’d made Toby wicked when she left him, whether he’d learned from her how to have his own secrets and calculate for his own devious purposes. She studied his open, hopeful expression—cautiously, as if she were just musing over the timing of her imaginary arrangements for later— but couldn’t catch any flicker of suggestiveness or sin. Probably what she’d 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 there’d never been anything between them. “All right, why not?” she said. “I’m curious to see where you’ve ended up.”

T really was prosperous!—fronted he house—a 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 didn’t 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 appliqué on one wall, a painted rocking horse, piles of children’s books, toys, an elliptical smoked-glass coffee table, a Bose hi-fi, shelves stacked with vinyl.

Oh, I’d 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.

“You’ve 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 didn’t 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 him—knotty biceps and big, coarse, freckled hands—and 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 you’ve got a dastardly plan, then I’ll 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, he’d 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 didn’t like them; his subordination to her will had dragged at her, making her resentful. Now she couldn’t 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?”

“You’ve got your mother’s good taste. I don’t 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 can’t feel her anywhere.”

“Jaz isn’t interested in her surroundings, so long as everything’s comfortable. She can’t believe what a big deal I make out of choosing stuff. She’s like

• you: everything’s 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 babies—Lynette had stopped looking afterward—Jaz was usually huddled with a crowd of similar-looking friends, fellow-schoolteachers, perhaps, their arms around one another’s 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?

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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, they’d 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 hadn’t kept in touch with her brothers: such lovely guys, they used to seem super cool to him. They were a nightmare, Lynette said. They’d been in all sorts of trouble but were settled now. One painting and decorating, one in the police—you know, poacher turned gamekeeper, what a joke. And how was his mother? Lynette knew about the cancer—was it still in remission? Carol wasn’t 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 didn’t 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 time—while we went spinning across into three lanes of oncoming traffic—all 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 isn’t what you said exactly. You were just saying, Nothing ’s happened yet. It ’s all right so far. Nothing’s happened yet.”

“Nothing did happen,” Toby said stoutly.

“But we could have died tragically young, like lovers in a story.”

He laughed. “I’m glad we didn’t 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: she’d felt distaste

“ В конечном итоге, все сводится к Waukesha County.”

in the past for that gingery coloring.

Now it seemed like a signal sent up from Toby’s 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 couldn’t he guess that those friends didn’t 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 she’d rather forget: how ambitious she’d been, and the grand idea of her talent that she’d once cherished and had since discarded. Her voice hadn’t been as good as she’d hoped, she had failed to make a career out of it—although 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.

I’m in a show at the moment. You know I’m superstitious. I don’t want to talk about it.”

“And you have felt free? You told me that as long as we were together you weren’t 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 she’d 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 didn’t know anything about music, anyway.

Lynette hummed to herself the opening lines of Dido’s 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 accretions—and 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 her—she had nothing to show for it. She didn’t 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 them—so many gadgets!—and admiring the children’s 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 can’t see any trace of it.”

“Here’s 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. It’s been so nice catching up.”

“I’d like to stay in touch.”

“I’d like it, too.”

“You ought to meet Jaz sometime.”

“That would be nice.”

It was still raining hard, but she wouldn’t take an umbrella. “I don’t mind getting wet,” she called back from the steps outside his front door, laughing up at him. “It’s 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 couldn’t 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 desolation—it was too much. Hot tears of pain and self-pity mixed with the cold rain on Lynette’s cheeks. But she wouldn’t, she couldn’t, climb the steps to that front door again, although she longed for the warmth stoked up inside, the flames licking in Toby’s 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 hadn’t 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 Toby’s 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,” he’d said. “Everything you’ve 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 Lynette’s number written on the chalkboard. After a moment’s 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 he’d 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 she’d been sitting. He ate the omelette without tasting anything, not taking his eyes off the TV screen, and then when he’d 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. He’d have liked to bury it deep in a dustbin somewhere outside, perhaps on the next street, only he couldn’t do that, in case Lynette came back to ask for it. And now that he’d erased her number he couldn’t 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 wasn’t a natural deceiver, and he hadn’t done anything that wasn’t innocent. But it would be better if Jaz

didn’t know that Lynette had been here, in this house, printing her presence everywhere so that it haunted him wherever he looked. If Jaz didn’t know, then he didn’t have to think about what it meant.

Jaz called, but he didn’t pick up his phone or ring her back. He wasn’t ready to talk to her, not yet. He was deliberately not thinking something. He wasn’t thinking that he’d put everything together—family and work and home—all so that Lynette could visit it someday and see that he’d 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 he’d forget that he’d 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 wasn’t a good idea, because it wasn’t anything like as nice as the wine she’d had at Toby’s, and, anyway, two glasses always gave her a headache. Halfway through her drink, she remembered the silky top she’d 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 couldn’t afford anything better, wondering if she wasn’t too old to wear it. At least he was bound to text her now, as soon as he discovered that she’d forgotten it. She put her phone on the tabletop in front of her and waited. Would she tell him that she’d 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 didn’t 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 wasn’t better, it was necessary. ♦ NEWYORKER.COM

Tessa Hadley on fiction as anthropology.

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

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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 studio—a 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, don’t break, I don’t ask, just take / Black gloves, black tape, and I don’t 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 year—sometimes every month—and even though the guy on the cover wasn’t 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, don’t piss me off / Sever a nigga head off, cut a nigga feet off.”

This combination of menace and 68

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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 album’s 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 Atlanta’s grandest venue, the Fox Theatre, a former movie palace with an ornate ceiling, decorated with trompe-l’oeil stars, and nearly five thousand seats, all of which sold soon after the concert was announced. He took the stage at precisely nine o’clock, shirtless beneath a sparkling golden jacket that reflected the lights above him and the flashing phones below. “Wsappenin’,” he said, grinning.

“It’s 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 music’s A-list, Future and Drake. One guest was a new friend: Fetty Wap, the New Jersey warbler behind “Trap Queen,” which was among last year’s 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 wasn’t 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 Mane’s 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

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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 demons—now I’m 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 Atlanta’s 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 Mane’s 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 didn’t need record-company money because he had plenty of his own. His first real success, a 2005 gemophile’s 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 Jeezy’s 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 a—what 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

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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 waterfall—the 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 Mane’s 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 wasn’t 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 didn’t 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 Mane’s life really was as outrageous as his rhymes.

I scientious era of “Hamilton”and 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 himself—the 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 album’s 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 Privé and I crashed a Bentley,” he raps, as if he still can’t quite believe it.

Privé is an Atlanta night club, which was also the site of the Fox concert’s 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 home—the 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 McInerney’s 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 didn’t 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:

T

here’s a moment in Jay McInerney’s 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 couldn’t afford to save this house that meant so much to his family? Their neighbors seemed to manage, thousands of people no smarter than he was—less so, most of them—except perhaps in their understanding of the mechanics of acquisition.”

“Bright, Precious Days” forms a trilogy that began with “Brightness Falls” (1992), McInerney’s 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.

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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 we’re feeling down.

Russell’s crisis of confidence coincides with Corrine’s renewed involvement with her attentive—and rich—love 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, it’s just a game.”

“No, it’s not. It’s 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 satire’s 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, it’s 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, isn’t really a period piece. It’s a highly disciplined work of fiction that happens to capture its period. That’s why it has aged better than the Brat Pack titles it’s 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 narrator’s 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 bearings—why 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 isn’t entirely convincing, neither is the answer McInerney offers—that the narrator is reeling from a family tragedy he hasn’t properly dealt with. The oversimplicity of this diagnosis wasn’t 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 McInerney’s 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 Russell’s assistant—the office’s “token punk,” who wears an “Eat the Rich” THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

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button pinned to her shirt—tells him she is going to lunch, Russell replies, “I’ll warn Donald Trump.” McInerney’s 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. Russell’s 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 book’s 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 aren’t all that happy. In their early thirties, they want to want what they have—each other, a committed relationship—but 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 Russell’s 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 he’s 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.”

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improbability of its central conceit— Russell’s outlandish attempt to buy his company. It feels forced, a means of linking Russell and Corrine’s personal problems to the headlines of the era. McInerney’s 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 Side’s 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 original’s 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 couldn’t buy happiness, learning only gradually the many varieties of unhappiness it might have staved off.” The sharpness of McInerney’s 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 can’t quite afford the upkeep. They’ve grown dusty, a little stale.

Although he has continued the tradition of draping the novels around pivotal events in New York’s recent history, McInerney’s 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 one—when he name-dropped Donald Trump in “Brightness Falls,” for example—it 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 Bittman’s improbable, and not entirely successful, forty-five-minute turkey.”

But if “Bright, Precious Days” doesn’t match “Brightness Falls” stylistically, it does explore similar terrain. Once again, McInerney’s 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. Russell’s 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, there’s 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 Russell’s friend Washington remarks wistfully, at a dinner party that recalls a more boisterous one from “Brightness Falls,” “We didn’t know it was the eighties at the time. . . . No one told us until about 1987, and by then it was almost over.” 

BOOKS

CHILDHOOD’S END A début about life, language, and what binds them.

BY DAN CHIASSON

In Jana Prikryl’s “The After Party,” metaphor often takes the place of reality. ana Prikryl’s 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 Prikryl’s 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.

It’s my last hope.

There’s 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 Prikryl’s work, there’s 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 six—a 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 child’s vision of abundance frozen and preserved; she borrowed it in part from the genre of Czech movies called pohádka, 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 weren’t 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; it’s 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.

Prikryl’s 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 book’s opening poem, is a little twopart origin story. In the first part, Prikryl THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

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• 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 assume”—since it can’t be verified, except in the imagination—“the neutral look / on a passenger’s 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 driver’s 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, 76

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• 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 one—who nevertheless is entrusted with this anti-family’s survival. The child who grows up feeling that her family’s 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,” it’s 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 one’s nerve,” Prikryl writes in “Siblings and Half Siblings,” “the four of us boarded an overnight // and this is English.” Meaning that otherwise she’d

be writing Czech. If a change of life is a change of language, why rank the one above the other? “Reality’s 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 / it’s the hum alone on loan from the hive.”

Metaphor is a poet’s spell, her magic; more than any other feature of poetry, it transforms reality—unless, as here, it’s 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 she’d really (swear to God, really and truly) rather not attempt. It’s 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 “what’s driven poets to this bluff / of severely impartial / impudence” lands them in an AlphonseGaston routine at a party’s end, before Cumberbatch suggests, reasonably enough, that “we spare / each other the embarrassment / of being the last / to leave and leave in unison.” Prikryl’s 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 collection’s 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. (Prikryl’s 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 “rise”—like 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 I’m rinsing plates on the Never it’s time to haul anchor, wait in a dive in Parry Sound, and buy a round for whoever won’t be a stranger.

Should a drink materialize you didn’t order, make eyes at the girl who didn’t send it, as I’d have done.

The poem’s sections offer, like the thirty thousand islands they describe, the chance that Mr. Dialect might touch down anywhere, at any moment. He’s not dead; he’s just living on one of the other islands. His sister’s 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 territory—the laws and decisions made by the colonists in New England two centuries earlier. In 1638, eight years after John Winthrop’s 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.) Spotts’s 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 son’s 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 mother’s 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 début 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 family’s 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 Defense’s Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms—used 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 intervention—“Hands that promised they wouldn’t, but did.”

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Instead, the show fanned open to multiple perspectives—among 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” dé- star of a network sitcom called “Horsin’ cast in his dream project, a Secretariat buted, in 2014, it didn’t 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 man—well, kids. Since then, he’s become a famous bed with his oldest friend’s teen-age a horse, but still—who 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 didn’t 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 BoJack’s depression and the imated alt-comedy meta-sitcom. sources of his pain, but it didn’t 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, BoJack’s 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 another’s shoulternative universe—in this case, ders under a trenchcoat). a place called “Hollywoo,” in There’s also Todd, his sadwhich animals and humans live sack roommate; the indie-film side by side. BoJack, a former director Kelsey; BoJack’s 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. Diane’s Los Angeles overwhelmed husband is a dog; BoJack’s him; and many more—a true agent is a cat; a bunch of whale moral menagerie. strippers give lap dances in “the In certain ways, the show’s 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 Manet’s 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 ter’s House,” was a ripoff of “Horsin’ collect-them-all punch lines gooses Diane and her husband, Mr. Peanutbut- Around.” Unlike BoJack—but like many the show’s more harrowing themes, as ter. The season took some gorgeous ex- golden retrievers—he’s 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

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ILLUSTRATION BY BENDIK KALTENBORN

show called “J. D. Salinger Presents: Hollywood Stars and Celebrities! What Do They Know? Do They Know Things? Let’s Find Out!” He’s 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,

isn’t a masterpiece like the second: a few plot gears grind. But it lands powerfully, with an earned tragedy that’s as potent as anything on TV this year. Along the way, BoJack lobbies for an Oscar nomination at film festivals and at a bat mitzvah—for 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. There’s a story in which Diane gets an abortion while the popstar dolphin Sextina Aquafina, the “sexy fourteen-year-old dubstep wunderkind” for whom she’s 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. That’s what addiction is, after all. BoJack’s life is a formula, one that he feels desperate to correct: he’s 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 it’s impossible to truly repair the damage. Then back to shame. Repetition is the signature of sitcoms, too; it’s their curse and their power. On “BoJack Horseman,” again and again, someone’s 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 show’s cornball ways, but they’ve memorized

every plot: it’s 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. It’s 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. “I’m the only albinorhino gyno I know,” one of Princess Carolyn’s dates says, just before ordering a bottle of wine. “Oh, great, you’re also a wine addict,” she replies. It’s a clever joke for people who love dumb jokes.

In one episode, we discover that “Horsin’ Around” wasn’t BoJack’s 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, “That’s Too Much, Man!,” that includes the very gimmicks that it makes fun of in BoJack’s 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.”

There’s a caustic—and then poignant— parody of the pointlessness of making amends; there’s an A.A. meeting at which a slug’s rock bottom is literally under a rock. There’s the world’s 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 that’s meant to soothe them.  THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

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THE CURRENT CINEMA

FIND YOURSELF “Jason Bourne” and “Little Men.”

BY ANTHONY LANE

Matt Damon stars in Paul Greengrass’s 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

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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 Bourne’s, 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 Jason’s hip, in the first film, that bore the details of his Swiss bank account. Then came the SIM-card switcheroo, in “The Bourne Supremacy”—a fiddly business that lightened the load of Bourne’s brutality. At fortyfive, Damon remains in frightening fettle, but twinned with that hunkhood is a touch as deft as a pickpocket’s. The entire Bourne franchise, indeed, can be

seen as an instruction manual in the art of throwaway cool. Swipe a phone from a café table, make a call, dump the phone, and walk on: that’s 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 Bourne’s advantage.

He makes fire as he goes along.

The riot occurs in Athens’s 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 say—to 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. It’s almost as if he were faintly ashamed at having to concoct yet more unlikely shenanigans—plots 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 Bourne’s 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 ire—and the ILLUSTRATION BY PAUL ROGERS

dormant idealism—of 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, we’re now in Las Vegas, and his nemesis is at the wheel of an armored SWAT truck, but it’s still more of a key change than a brand-new tune. As for the doomy question that beats throughout the movie—Who 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 Sachs’s “Love Is Strange” (2014), whose income fell after their marriage, and real-estate trauma strikes again in Sachs’s new movie, “Little Men.” Brian (Greg Kinnear) is an actor, and his wife, Kathy

( Jennifer Ehle), is a psychotherapist.

When Brian’s 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 García), who was a good friend of the old man’s—so good that he didn’t raise her rent for eight years. She’s 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 García, 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 it’s a shock when Leonor does the opposite, as her initial greeting slowly loses its warmth. There are times when she’s 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. “He’s not that successful or anything,” Jacob

says to Gloria’s son, Tony (Michael Barbieri), who is about the same age and whose own father is absent and unmourned. (“I realized that he’s better when he’s 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 boys—Jacob on roller blades, Tony with a scooter—as 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 teacher—hurling 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, that’s 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 Marvel’s clutches.

No chance.  NEWYORKER.COM

Richard Brody blogs about movies.

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THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8 & 15, 2016

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CARTOON CAPTION CONTEST

Each week, we provide a cartoon in need of a caption. You, the reader, submit a caption, we choose three finalists, and you vote for your favorite. Caption submissions for this week’s cartoon, by 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 week’s 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 WEEK’S CONTEST

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THE FINALISTS

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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.