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 OCTOBER 7, 2019

4 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

13 THE TALK OF THE TOWN
Steve Coll on the road to impeachment;
Trump and Ukraine’s TV-star President;
plutocrat conferences; a taxonomy of hugs.
PERSONAL HISTORY
Haruki Murakami 18 Abandoning a Cat
What I didn’t know about my father.
SHOUTS & MURMURS
Hallie Cantor 25 Are You on the Apps?
ANNALS OF SHOW BUSINESS
Adam Green 26 Belief System
Modern mind reading with Derren Brown.
A REPORTER AT LARGE
Rachel Aviv 34 Show of Force
What if your abusive husband is a cop?
PROFILES
Dana Goodyear 46 The Ends of the Earth
Thomas Joshua Cooper’s far-flung photography.
FICTION
Rion Amilcar Scott 56 “Shape-Ups at Delilah’s”
THE CRITICS
THE CURRENT CINEMA
Anthony Lane 65 “Joker.”
BOOKS
67 Briefly Noted
Lauren Collins 68 Duelling best-sellers in Norway.
Dan Chiasson 72 Fanny Howe’s “Love and I.”
THE ART WORLD
Peter Schjeldahl 74 Richard Serra at Gagosian.
THE THEATRE
Alexandra Schwartz 76 Florian Zeller’s “The Height of the Storm.”
DANCING
Jennifer Homans 78 William Forsythe comes to the Shed.
POEMS
Ciaran Carson 40 “Angela Hackett, ‘Lemons on a Moorish
Plate,’ 2013”
Barbara Hamby 60 “Ode on Words for Parties (American
Edition)”
COVER
Barry Blitt “Whack Job”

DRAWINGS Drew Panckeri, Maggie Larson, Julia Suits, Carolita Johnson,

Roz Chast, Nick Downes, Benjamin Schwartz, Liana Finck,
TICKETS STARTING AT $35
Amy Hwang, Emily Flake, Paul Karasik, Pat Byrnes SPOTS R. O. Blechman
 CONTRIBUTORS
Rachel Aviv (“Show of Force,” p. 34) is Dana Goodyear (“The Ends of the Earth,”
a staff writer and was a 2019 national p. 46) is a staff writer who is based in
fellow at New America. California.

Adam Green (“Belief System,” p. 26), a Haruki Murakami (“Abandoning a Cat,”

contributing editor and theatre critic p. 18) published his fourteenth novel
at Vogue, has written for The New Yorker in English, “Killing Commendatore,”
Not all our since 1993. last year.

award-winning Barbara Hamby (Poem, p. 60) has pub- Emily Flake (Sketchpad, p. 17), a New
lished six books of poetry, including Yorker cartoonist, will publish “That
writing can “Bird Odyssey.” She is currently at work Was Awkward: The Art and Etiquette
on a novel, “Claire Salt.” of the Awkward Hug” this month.
be found
Rion Amilcar Scott (Fiction, p. 56) pub- Barry Blitt (Cover) is a cartoonist and
in these pages. lished the story collection “The World an illustrator. His latest book, “Blitt,”
Doesn’t Require You” in August. His is a collection of his illustrations for
first book, “Insurrections,” won the The New Yorker and other publications.
PEN/Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction
in 2017. Jennifer Homans (Dancing, p. 78) is a
contributing writer and dance critic
Lauren Collins (Books, p. 68) has been for the magazine. She directs the Cen-
a staff writer since 2008. She is the au- ter for Ballet and the Arts at N.Y.U.,
thor of “When in French.” and is the author of “Apollo’s Angels.”

Steve Coll (Comment, p. 13), a staff Ciaran Carson (Poem, p. 40) is the au-
writer, is the dean of Columbia’s Jour- thor of, most recently, “From There to
nalism School. His latest book is “Di- Here.” His new collection, “Still Life,”
rectorate S.” is forthcoming in October.

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is the best way to stay on top of
news and culture every day, as THIS WEEK ON NEWYORKER.COM
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2 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019
 THE MAIL
BEARING WITNESS EDUCATION FOR ALL

I read Zuzana Justman’s Personal His- Hua Hsu, in his review of Caitlin Zaloom’s
tory about her experience in the Terezín “Indebted: How Families Make College
concentration camp with interest and Work at Any Cost,” characterizes “the
gratitude (“My Terezín Diary,” Sep- idea of free college” as “once Bernie Sand-
tember 16th). I was one of those for- ers’s fringe dream” (Books, September
tunate German-Jewish children whose 9th). Sanders’s idea is not as experimen-
parents were able to arrange for emi- tal in the American context as it may
gration before the tragedies began. We seem. Until 1976, the public colleges of
moved first to France, a few months New York City were tuition-free to city
before Kristallnacht, and then to the residents. Moreover, at some of the coun-
United States, four months before the try’s land-grant colleges, which were
German occupation of France. Until founded in the eighteen-sixties and
recently, I did not consider myself to offered affordable education to state res-
be a Holocaust survivor. But as the idents, fees amounted to a few dozen
Holocaust recedes further into his- dollars per term through the nine-
tory—and as Holocaust deniers seek teen-fifties. When I was a student at U.C.
to rewrite that history, and white su- Berkeley, in the sixties, I paid no more
premacism once again rears its ugly than ninety dollars each semester. Sand-
head—we, the survivors, are still here ers’s “fringe dream” would thus represent
to bear witness and to make our voices a return to equitable educational princi-
heard. Your magazine’s role in giving ples and policies from our past.
those voices an opportunity to speak Gene H. Bell-Villada
is greatly appreciated. Williamstown, Mass.

1
Evelyn Spiegler
Forest Hills, N.Y. Hsu captures the anxiety of middle-class
families over the cost of education, but
ASSAD’S CHLORINE GAS barely touches on one of the factors mo-
tivating their financial sacrifices: the my-
Dexter Filkins echoes a common mis- thology of élite schools. Buying into the
understanding when he, in his review idea that getting into a particular school
of Samantha Power’s memoir, calls will make one better educated and more
Bashar al-Assad’s deployment of chlo- successful, many parents believe that any
rine gas in Syria “barbaric but not il- expense is worth entry into one school
legal” (“Damned if You Don’t,” Sep- over another. The myth has given young
tember 16th). Under the Chemical people the skewed perception that not
Weapons Convention, which Assad getting into a certain school is a lifetime
reluctantly joined in 2013, the use of mark of failure, and has trivialized the
any chemical as a chemical weapon is content of knowledge. Having studied
banned. Yet, because chlorine has wide- and taught at both élite and non-élite
spread nonmilitary applications, states American universities, I believe that
are allowed to possess it, even after giv- breaking down this mythology is the
ing up their other chemical weapons. greatest challenge we face in alleviating
As a result, Assad has continued to the cost of college education.
have access to chlorine, though its use Bernard Dov Cooperman
as a weapon remains just as illegal as College Park, Md.
that of any other chemical agent.
Philipp C. Bleek •
Associate Professor, Nonproliferation Letters should be sent with the writer’s name,
and Terrorism Studies address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to
Middlebury Institute of International [email protected]. Letters may be edited
for length and clarity, and may be published in
Studies at Monterey any medium. We regret that owing to the volume
Monterey, Calif. of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter.
 OCTOBER 2 – 8, 2019

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

The sci-fi fantasias of Japanese video games, the pulsing bodies of E.D.M. raves, the mystical spaces
of Nigerian shrines, and the bygone music chain Tower Records all figure into the wildly ingenious
new work of the young American artist Jacolby Satterwhite (pictured). On Oct. 4, Pioneer Works,
in Brooklyn, opens “You’re at Home,” an exhibition of digital projections, performances, sculp-
tures, and music by the artist, who recently directed an animated music video for the singer Solange.

PHOTOGRAPH BY ARIELLE BOBB-WILLIS

 1
THE THEATRE
runboyrun & In Old Age in a New York starter apartment, for a boozy
book­group session in Jack Thorne’s new play,
New York Theatre Workshop directed by Lee Sunday Evans. They sound like
“Runboyrun” and “In Old Age” are the third members of their generation, chatting about
Kingfishers Catch Fire and the eighth installments in the playwright Ta­Nehisi Coates and toxic masculinity. (The
Mfoniso Udofia’s “Ufot Cycle,” an ambitious book group itself began as a “post­ironic joke.”
Irish Repertory series of nine interlinked plays that build a fam­ Their selection: an Ann Tyler novel.) But, where
Inspired by historical events, Robin Glendin­ ily mythology. In “runboyrun,” an exquisite some glint of soul should go, Thorne has in­
ning’s two­hander pits the former S.S. offi­ work of theatre, Disciple Ufot (Chiké Johnson) serted ennui with an undercurrent of cruelty to
cer Herbert Kappler (Haskell King) against is haunted by memories of Nigeria’s civil war show his audience what’s wrong with kids these
the Irish clergyman Hugh O’Flaherty (Sean while his wife, Abasiama (Patrice Johnson Che­ days. Most of this group of five went to prep
Gormley). It’s 1948 and Kappler is serving a vannes), struggles to connect with him. Udofia’s school together; Marie (Sadie Scott), a lonely
life sentence in Rome, where he used to head script is effortlessly lyrical and rhythmic, but book lover, is the odd one out. Thorne, who has
the local Nazi police. But “pits” is perhaps too it’s Loretta Greco’s graceful direction and the said that he was inspired, in part, by last year’s
strong a word for the amiable, meandering superb performances (especially by Johnson and Aziz Ansari debacle, throws various au­courant
conversation in Kappler’s cell—it is rather Chevannes) that coalesce to form a heartrending noodles at the wall—an episode of unwanted
startling that an encounter between a godless story about individual and national trauma. “In kissing, bursts of interpretive dance—and relies
murderer and a priest, bitter foes during the Old Age” (directed by Awoye Timpo) also fea­ on narration to illuminate his characters from
war, could be so dramatically inert. The writing tures Abasiama, now older and haunted by the without rather than within. His hero is Marie’s
is at times distractingly modern (at one point, ghost of Disciple. Though capably performed, older downstairs neighbor (Maurice Jones), an
Kappler questions O’Flaherty’s “little trope”), this work doesn’t have the same spark or inde­ introvert looking to connect in all the wrong
and Glendinning’s play, directed by Kent Paul, pendent strength as the first; it’s fashioned like ways.—Alexandra Schwartz (Through Oct. 13.)
never sets up an interesting moral dialectic be­ an endpiece, chained to what has come before,
tween its two protagonists. In real life, Kappler and is more bold­faced but less effective in its
ended up converting to Catholicism; the show sentimentality.—Maya Phillips (Through Oct. 13.) Why?
does little to illuminate his reasons for doing
so, or whether he was even sincere.—Elisabeth Polonsky Shakespeare Center
Vincentelli (Through Oct. 20.) Sunday This production’s nominal draw is that it’s by
Peter Brook, who co­wrote and co­directed it
Atlantic Theatre Company with Marie­Hélène Estienne, but its stron­
Mothers There’s something uncanny­valleyish about the gest asset is the idiosyncratic actress Kathryn
cohort of early­twentysomethings who gather, Hunter. The diminutive performer immedi­
The Duke on 42nd Street
In some hyperbolic version of suburban Amer­
ica, three mothers (Maechi Aharanwa, Jasmine ON BROADWAY
Batchelor, and Satomi Blair) smilingly snipe at
each other while watching their children play
at a “mommy­baby meetup”; a foreign­born
nanny (Tina Chilip) and an out­of­place father
(Max Gordon Moore) look on from the side­
lines. Take this scenario, picture it devolving to
its most depraved extreme, and there’s a good
chance you’ll accurately imagine the end point
of this cynical satire. Directed by Robert Ross
Parker for Playwrights Realm, from a script by
Anna Moench, its shocks bring up intriguing
ideas related to motherhood, tribalism, class,
and the survival instinct, but they never rattle;
the play’s offhand absurdities feel indebted
to the work of Young Jean Lee but lack her
uncanny precision. Wilson Chin’s minimal
toy­blocks set works beautifully.—Rollo Romig
(Through Oct. 12.)

Our Dear Dead Drug Lord

McGinn /Cazale
Alexis Scheer’s new play, presented by the WP
Theatre and Second Stage, is very now: teen­age
girls dealing with messy emotions; fast­flowing,
smart­aleck dialogue; ritualized physicality ex­ David Byrne can be safely filed under “miscellaneous.” Since establishing
pressed in a dance scene. To the mix, Scheer adds his surreal deadpan as the front man for Talking Heads, he has chased a
a glib morbidity. Her quartet of Miami high
schoolers, united by their fascination with Pablo head-spinning array of enthusiasms, from avant-garde soundscapes to
Escobar (already fifteen years deceased when the bicycling advocacy. He wrote a disco opera about Imelda Marcos, followed
action is set, in 2008), graduate from an initial by a rock musical about Joan of Arc. In 2008, he turned a Beaux-Arts
act of senseless cruelty into full­blown mania.
Both Scheer and the director, Whitney White, building in lower Manhattan into a musical instrument, using an antique
ILLUSTRATION BY BARBARA OTT

are most at ease when the girls banter, in scenes organ hooked up to electrical conduits and water pipes. So what’s next?
the excellent cast handles with aplomb. But the “American Utopia” is a Broadway incarnation of his 2018 album of the
show stumbles when it turns to an exploration
of grief, remorse, and unmooring. The lurid, same name, which came out of a multimedia project titled “Reasons to
violent finale suggests the shamanistic fervor Be Cheerful,” conceived by Byrne as a “tonic for tumultuous times.” The
of a Dario Argento film touched with magical show (starting previews Oct. 4, at the Hudson) features choreography
surrealism, but the show can’t quite handle its
jump into a different tonal and aesthetic uni­ and musical staging by Annie-B Parson, a roving twelve-piece band
verse.—E.V. (Through Oct. 27.) in matching suits, and a model of a human brain.—Michael Schulman
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019 5
ately captures our attention with her low rasp now revered CTI Records, he’d still be recog- Robert Glasper
of a voice and her fluid, expressionist sense of nized as one of the most substantial bassists in
movement. She’s a perfect fit for a play about jazz history, having shared stages with a slew of Blue Note
theatre itself. The lively first part offers overly legendary figures (including Miles Davis) and Whether Robert Glasper has significantly al-
whimsical generalities about the art form— recorded with dozens more—but he didn’t. He tered the landscape of contemporary jazz is a
some quick scenes are akin to acting exercises. has since added thousands of recordings to his question that can be bandied about all month
The show then pivots to the tragic fate of the résumé and established a respected solo career. long thanks to this ambitious residency. In a
Russian director Vsevolod Meyerhold and his Week one of this monthlong stint features the series of shows throughout October, Glasper—a
wife, the actress Zinaida Raikh: he was arrested exemplary instrumentalist fronting his Great glittering keyboardist who welcomes hip-hop,
and executed during the Stalinist purges; she Big Band.—S.F. (Oct. 1-26.) R. & B., pop, and other disparate genres into
was brutally murdered. Theatre may be a game his musical open house—presents a collabora-
of make-believe, Brook and Estienne seem to tion with the rapper Yasiin Bey; pays tribute

1
say, but one with such power that it becomes a Ladytron to such icons as Stevie Wonder, the producer
matter of life and death.—E.V. (Through Oct. 6.) J Dilla, and the late trumpeter Roy Hargrove;
Brooklyn Steel and hosts his own plugged-in and acoustic en-
The electronic-pop quartet Ladytron took its sembles.—S.F. (Oct. 3-Nov. 3.)
name from a song by Roxy Music, and it shares
NIGHT LIFE with that band a constitutional alignment with
high fashion. In the two decades since its incep- Beach Fossils
Musicians and night-club proprietors lead tion, Ladytron has never lost its stylized chill
complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in or its air of lightly ironic glamour. Yet, on its Knockdown Center
advance to confirm engagements. recent self-titled album, the musicians—who The Brooklyn band Beach Fossils seemed to
jelled in Liverpool but are now scattered across expand and transcend the subgenre of surf
the globe—reflect our more sinister era. “We rock with its 2010 début: hypnotic reverb and
Barry Harris are sirens,” the singer Helen Marnie coldly drowsy, distant guitars fused into a sound that
declares at one point, “of the apocalypse.”—Jay made its memory-soaked songs feel as though
Village Vanguard Ruttenberg (Oct. 2.) they’d been recorded underwater. The group
There are only a few active jazz musicians left hasn’t abandoned its lo-fi tendencies, but its
who had the privilege of playing with Charlie recent album “Somersault,” from 2017, finds
Parker, and the pianist Barry Harris is one of Daniel Miller the musicians breaking new ground again with
them. The eighty-nine-year-old master has fuller arrangements and crystalline, psych-
fashioned a style that calls on the keyboard Bossa Nova Civic Club rock-inspired melodies.—Julyssa Lopez (Oct. 5.)
language of the bebop pioneer Bud Powell, Daniel Miller founded Mute Records, in
leavening its frenetic effect with his own easy 1978, to issue the New Wave synth landmark
approach. He’s joined here by two expert as- “T.V.O.D.” b/w “Warm Leatherette,” a sev- Ghostly 20
sociates: the drummer Leroy Williams and en-inch he’d recorded as the Normal. The
the bassist Ray Drummond.—Steve Futterman label became his life’s work: Miller’s signings Elsewhere
(Oct. 1-6.) include Depeche Mode, Nick Cave, Erasure, The Ann Arbor-born, Brooklyn-based record
and Wire, and, in the nineties, Mute distrib- label Ghostly International celebrates twenty
uted key Detroit-techno titles. On the decks, years with two events, held back to back, each
Ron Carter Miller is as liable to spin straightforward tech- with its own lineup. The early-evening bill
house as he is to dip into his label’s classics; is heavier on live sets, including that of the
Birdland this appearance, at the goth dance party Syn- headliner, Gold Panda, who writes dance tracks
If Ron Carter had retired in the mid-seventies, thicide, suggests the latter.—Michaelangelo suffused equally with glitch noises and melody.
after helping cement the sonic identity of the Matos (Oct. 3.) But the acts of the all-d.j. late-nighter are more
enticing—especially Galcher Lustwerk, whose
sardonic, semi-spoken lyrics over muffled beats
have earned him a cult following, and the To-
FUNKY R. & B. ronto d.j. Ciel, a sharp and unpredictable house
selector.—M.M. (Oct. 5.)
For kids in the early two-thousands, the
video game Guitar Hero granted an op- Immigrant Defense Project Benefit
portunity to become rock stars, trans-
forming its players into overnight masters
Baby’s All Right
Harsh policies targeting undocumented im-
of the strings—or at least of those five migrants have inspired myriad artistic acts
colorful buttons. One member of that of solidarity. In that spirit, a few D.I.Y. ex-
generation, Steve Lacy, first known for perimentalists are joining forces to continue
fighting injustice. This benefit concert for New
his work in the spacey R. & B. band the York’s Immigrant Defense Project includes
Internet, turned that fantasy into real- Active Bird Community, a local trio known for
ity. The twenty-one-year-old musician its stirring indie rock; Nick Hakim, a D.C.-bred
artist who makes otherworldly R. & B.; Sad13,
has popped up on records by Kali Uchis, the solo project of Speedy Ortiz’s Sadie Dupuis;
Kendrick Lamar, Solange, and Vam- and the wry and whip-smart singer-songwriter
pire Weekend, injecting them with ret- Sidney Gish, from Boston.—J.L. (Oct. 6.)
ILLUSTRATION BY ANNA RUPPRECHT

ro-tinged funk. On his own, he configures

his musical identity around warm, imag- Phil Collins
inative guitar and bass textures. “Apollo Madison Square Garden
XXI,” his hazy solo début, from May, Even in its eighties habitat, Phil Collins’s signature
reconstructs sexual anxiety and libera- style was rarely mistaken for hip, but his hits have
tion as groovy bedroom pop; fittingly, on definitely taken on a robust afterlife. Nowadays, if
a New York driver decides to test the boundaries
Oct. 5, he brings the album to Harlem’s of his car stereo, the odds that he chooses a Collins
storied Apollo Theatre.—Briana Younger song seem bizarrely high; onstage, the songs,

6 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019

 not the singer, are the main attraction. Is there
another Madison Square Garden headliner whose RECITALS
fans are likely to identify his drumming more
readily than they are his face?—J.R. (Oct. 6-7.)

Black Thought
National Sawdust
The rapper Black Thought has enjoyed an es-
teemed and sprawling career—he fronts the
decorated hip-hop group the Roots and has
lent his acerbic lyricism to a bevy of other art-
ists’ tracks. It took him the better part of three
decades to finally release his own solo records;
“Streams of Thought Vol. 1” and “Streams of
Thought Vol. 2,” both from 2018, showcase his
sharp wit and even sharper tongue. For this
three-day exhibition of collaborative multime-
dia performances, he traces his lineage and his

1
inspirations, from the late Amiri Baraka to KRS-
One and Rakim.—Briana Younger (Oct. 8-10.)

CLASSICAL MUSIC
Pop-up events in unconventional locations have become de rigueur in a world
Ensemble / Parallax seeking novelty. Still, the organizers of Ladies First—a performing-arts initia-
National Sawdust tive curated and presented by women, now in its seventh season—have good
Salvatore Sciarrino’s music can be unnervingly reason to embrace spontaneity and stealth in their newest offering. “Honey-
quiet—the violin bows scrape the strings, pro- Traps,” presented at the KGB Espionage Museum, on Oct. 3, is inspired by
ducing rasp as much as tone, and the percussion the lives and the exploits of historic women spies, including Josephine Baker,
thumps at uneven intervals like something out
of Edgar Allan Poe. Ensemble/Parallax and the Anna Chapman, Judith Coplan, and Mata Hari. The museum’s curator, Agne
mezzo-soprano Kathleen Roland present two of Urbaityte, serves as a guide through the forty-five-minute performance in-
his pieces: “Infinito Nero” (“Black Infinity”), stallation, leading audience members in close encounters with the musicians,
which draws on the medieval mysticism of the
sixteenth-century nun St. Maria Maddalena de’ dancers, and actors. The composers Milica Paranosic, Lynn Bechtold, Erin
Pazzi, and “Le Voci Sottovetro” (“The Voices Rogers, Anna Veismane, and Ann Warren provide the music.—Steve Smith
Under Glass”), a more melodic work that re-
imagines the fractured beauty of Gesualdo’s
madrigals. Patricia Alessandrini’s “Nacht-
gewâchse,” for chamber ensemble and live ing a huge ensemble of choristers and dancers at singular, striking beauty of their music. High-
electronics, rounds out the program, which also the center of the action. The massed voices of lights include the pianist Taka Kigawa playing
features video art by Wolfgang Lehmann and the sixty-person chorus—in leisure, in mourning, Ferneyhough’s “Lemma-Icon-Epigram” (Oct.
David Webber.—Oussama Zahr (Oct. 4 at 7:30.) or in prayer—are overwhelming, and Camille A. 5) and the guitarist Kobe Van Cauwenberghe
Brown’s choreography gives the show a jolt. The adapting “No Pussyfooting,” created by Eno
tenement buildings of Catfish Row, designed by with Robert Fripp (Oct. 11).—S.S. (Oct. 5 at 7
Rhys Chatham /Glenn Branca Michael Yeargan, are nothing more than wooden and 8:30 and Oct. 11 at 7, 8, and 9.)
frames; these neighbors are so tight-knit that
Various locations they may as well stare straight into one another’s
Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca were collabo- homes. In this setting, the principal singers step Jessica Pavone String Ensemble
rators early in their careers, discovering common forward from the crowd, providing little win-
ground in experimental-music and No Wave cir- dows into the big lives that make this commu- Roulette
cles as they explored the ecstatic possibilities of nity tick, including Ryan Speedo Green’s virile Jessica Pavone, an improvising composer whose
electric guitars in massed phalanxes. They later Jake, Latonia Moore’s heartfelt Serena, Denyce works often reflect her physical relationship with
parted ways, pursuing disparate sonic paths, but Graves’s saucy, matriarchal Maria, Angel Blue’s the viola, introduces her newest group: a quar-
serendipity brings their work into proximity this dusky and yearning Bess, and Eric Owens’s noble tet with a fellow-violist, Abby Swidler, and the
week. Chatham presents a substantial première, Porgy. The conductor David Robertson taps violinists Erica Dicker and Angela Morris. The
“The Sun Too Close to the Earth,” in two con- into the drama, but not the swing, of Gersh- ensemble presents rough-hewn meditations from
certs at Issue Project Room. Elsewhere, Branca, win’s score.—O.Z. (Oct. 5 at 1 and Oct. 10 at 7:30.) Pavone’s new album, “Brick and Mortar,” plus
who died last year, is remembered on what pieces featuring an additional complement of two
would have been his seventy-first birthday; his cellos and two double-basses.—S.S. (Oct. 7 at 8.)
ensemble, now directed by his wife, the guitarist “B&B Festival”
Reg Bloor, celebrates the posthumous release
of his final recording, “The Third Ascension,” Spectrum String Orchestra of Brooklyn
ILLUSTRATION BY LIAM HOPKINS

at the heavy-metal venue Saint Vitus.—Steve Brian Ferneyhough, the standard-bearer of the
Smith (Oct. 4-5 at 8; Oct. 6 at 7.) New Complexity movement, is known for craft- Green-Wood Cemetery
ing scores of almost insurmountable technical The classical-music series “Angel’s Share” only
difficulty. Brian Eno, after an initial splash in the runs from May to October because the cata-
“Porgy and Bess” art-rock band Roxy Music, has become indelibly combs that it calls home, below Green-Wood
associated with ambient music—subdued aural Cemetery, become too cold for performances
Metropolitan Opera House environments not expressly intended for live in late fall and winter. The String Orchestra of
In the Met’s new production of Gershwin’s performance. What these iconoclasts share, a Brooklyn closes out the series’ second season
“Porgy and Bess,” the director James Robinson brave Brooklyn festival proposes, is the fervent, with a program of pieces united by grief, in-
leans into the opera’s potential for spectacle, plac- resourceful advocacy they have inspired and the cluding Pergolesi’s aching “Stabat Mater,” with

THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019 7

 in the book—a charming symbol of death. Peter
KUCHIPUDI Salem plays his sportive score, featuring banjo
and harmonica, live.—Brian Seibert (Oct. 1-6.)

Fall for Dance Festival

City Center
The middle programs of this year’s festival, as
inexpensive and as varied as ever, offer the most
novelty. The companies Dyptik, from France,
Malevo, from Argentina, and Skånes Danste-
ater, from Sweden, are all making débuts,
though much of what they’re bringing looks
familiar. (Malevo appears to be a hair-metal
version of Che Malambo, a sensation of the
2015 festival.) Mariinsky Ballet and Washing-
ton Ballet advance newbie choreographers—
Alexander Sergeev and Dana Genshaft—and
English National Ballet shows a going-to-war
duet from “Dust,” by Akram Khan. Excerpts of
Mark Morris’s “Mozart Dances” and the Alvin
Ailey troupe’s performances of Rennie Harris’s
“Lazarus” bookend the programs as dependable
winners.—B.S. (Oct. 1-6. Through Oct. 13.)

Antonio Ramos
One heartening aspect of the Joyce’s current season, the first to be curated The Chocolate Factory
Born and raised in Puerto Rico, Antonio Ramos
by its new director of programming, Aaron Mattocks, is its focus on live has had a distinguished dance career in New
music. The thrill of Indian classical dance derives in no small part from York. His works tend to be flamboyant, in-
the brilliant interplay between the dancer at center stage and the bank of your-face, and clever, with lots of nudity. In “El
Pueblo de los Olvidados (Parte II),” performed
musicians to her side. Shantala Shivalingappa, who performs at the Joyce, by his company, Antonio Ramos and the Gang
Oct. 8-12, is a Kuchipudi dancer, trained in Chennai, India, but based in Bangers, he serves up a science-fiction allegory
Paris. Like all classical Indian dance, Kuchipudi is a deeply musical form, in about the colonization of his native land. An
alien species tries to exploit the island as a trop-
which rhythm, melody, storytelling, and poetic allusion play important roles. ical resort, but some transgender hybrids offer
With her lilting movements, Shivalingappa becomes both an instrument and hope of resistance.—B.S. (Oct. 2-5. Through
an illustration of the meanings buried in the music itself.—Marina Harss Oct. 12.)

Monica Bill Barnes & Company

the soloists Kate Maroney and Molly Netter, In the striking work, first performed here in
and Pärt’s mysterious “Fratres.” It’s a profound 1966 (eight years after its creation), the dancers Brookfield Place
thematic choice given the setting—one that may move through a field of colored spots while Barnes has long trafficked in the absurdity of
well restore the emotional impact of Barber’s wearing similarly dyed unitards. This ingenious the everyday, sometimes bringing tongue-in-
familiar “Adagio for Strings,” which wells with design scheme, conceived by Robert Rauschen- cheek and heart-on-sleeve dancing into unlikely
chest-bursting feeling.—O.Z. (Oct. 8-10 at 7.) berg, turns the dancers into something like a places, such as the Metropolitan Museum of
flock of butterflies moving in an infinite sea Art. Usually, her casts are small, but in her new
of color. The choreography—leaps and tilts work “Days Go By” a large ensemble of actors,
Large Furniture and rapid changes of direction—also suggests dancers, and others are seeded throughout the
animal movement; in a sense, “Summerspace” marbled Winter Garden in the Brookfield Place
Areté Venue and Gallery is as much a nature study as it is a dance. It mall. Audience members, wearing provided
The bassists Greg Chudzik, Tristan Kas- will be interesting to see how the City Ballet headphones, listen to semi-obscure pop tunes
ten-Krause, Evan Runyon, and Pat Swoboda dancers adjust to Cunningham’s spare, utterly as the performers (including Danny Pudi, from
have provided their low-end authority to such undecorative technique, as well as to the lack the TV series “Community”) dramatize city
vital New York institutions as Wet Ink, Ensem- of connection between the steps and the music, life and how a day can get away from you. The
ble Signal, Exceptet, and Bearthoven, among which is by Morton Feldman.—Marina Harss show is free.—B.S. (Oct. 3-6.)
others. For this event, they band together for a (Through Oct. 13.)
program of diverse contemporary compositions

1
by Julia Wolfe, Veronika Krausas, Robert Hon- Washington Ballet
stein, and Larry Polansky.—S.S. (Oct. 8 at 8.) BalletX Guggenheim Museum
Joyce Theatre At “Works & Process,” Julie Kent and an en-
This ambitious, often excellent Philadelphia semble of dancers from Washington Ballet
ILLUSTRATION BY LISA TEGTMEIER

DANCE company shoots for a hit with its full-length present the company’s newest commissions
ballet version of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s ahead of their unveiling, in Washington, D.C.,
beloved “The Little Prince,” now receiving later this month. The current crop of choreog-
New York City Ballet its New York début. Choreographed by An- raphers includes Jessica Lang and Annabelle
nabelle Lopez Ochoa, the dance is a bright Lopez Ochoa (two veterans of the ballet scene)
David H. Koch picaresque for the downed pilot and prince from as well as John Heginbotham, a former Mark
On the occasion of Merce Cunningham’s another planet, with colorful characters emerg- Morris dancer. Heginbotham is the wild card
centenary year—and the tenth anniversary of ing from a set of white boxes. Stanley Glover here—his works tend toward the eccentric and
his death—New York City Ballet revives his steals the show as a slinky, bowler-hatted, the surreal, with elements of dance-theatre
“Summerspace” (Oct. 5, Oct. 10, and Oct. 12). Fosse-like snake, assuming a larger role than thrown in.—M.H. (Oct. 6.)

8 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019

 1
ART
elements in these small compositions), but
the apparent disarray belies the precision of
Blue Light” both feature rippling grounds and
central symmetrical forms resembling ghosts,
Thayer’s allegories. The spectral work “Care- tents, or portals. Elsewhere, mysterious bio-
fully Into One’s Mind” captures states of ru- morphic peaks and blobs are foils to glyphlike
Raúl de Nieves mination with the image of a skull wearing an crescent moons. At times, the artist appears
Elizabethan collar; it’s elucidated by a diaristic to make unabashed allusions to children’s art:
Company text that reads, in part, “I looked like a ta- in “Sun + Flower,” a perfect rainbow above a
DOWNTOWN A figure at once human and an- blecloth of snowflakes as I moved across the rectangle of blue water bridges the gap between
imal—trimmed with shaggy white fur and mysterious heavens of my empty head.” The two green mountains, as a blazing orb in a
encrusted with glass beads and plastic pearls— paranoid inferno of “The Sun Can Read Your peach-colored sky sprouts spiky yellow petals.

1
greets visitors at the entrance of this shrinelike Mind,” featuring a dangling yellow marionette, Thanks to its confident, meticulous simplicity,
exhibition. Hybridity, opulence, and laborious comes with a warning: “this cosmic furnace the weird picture works.—J.F. (Through Nov. 9.)
process are all typical of the artist’s approach, has an interest in punishing you, so keep your
but the sculpture’s pale color is an exception mind still and empty.”—J.F. (Through Oct. 6.)
among the rainbow-hued works on view. De
Nieves, who was born in Mexico and lives in MOVIES
New York, merges drag couture and devotional Ping Zheng
aesthetics to sketch out mythic narratives.
Here, a phalanx of barnacled creatures (their Lorello Blood of the Beasts
titles include “Sanctuary,” “Growth,” and “Sex- DOWNTOWN These small, beguiling oil-stick At the Porte de Vanves, it’s horses; at the
uality”) are installed on mirrored plinths along drawings find an ideal context in Kristen Lo- Porte de Pantin, it’s cows; and at the La Vil-
the center of the gallery, suggesting affable but rello’s vest-pocket gallery. Zheng, who was lette market, it’s sheep, all killed for meat.
serious queer shape-shifters. A room-span- born in China and now lives in New York, is Georges Franju’s short 1949 documentary of
ning canopy of tape, paint, and colored acetate inspired by nature; the subjects of her exacting, the slaughterhouses of Paris summons these
achieves both a sublime stained-glass effect textured, and highly stylized compositions evocative names and picturesque neighbor-
and drop-ceiling intimacy.—Johanna Fateman include night skies, distant hills, and geometric hoods to connect the romance of labor with
(Through Oct. 20.) trees. “Fireflies in My Backyard” and “In the the horror of spurting blood, twitching limbs,

Amy Sherald AT THE GALLERIES

Hauser & Wirth
CHELSEA The subjects of the eight strong oil
portraits here impress with their looks, in both
senses: striking elegance, riveting gazes. In six
of the pictures, people stand singly against
bright monochrome grounds. (The other two
works are more complicated.) Sherald acti-
vates the double function of portraiture as the
recognition of a worldly identity and, in the
best instances, the surprise of an evident inner
life. All of her subjects are African-American.
Should this matter? It does in light of the
artist’s stated drive to seek “versions of myself
in art history and the world.” Race anchors
Sherald’s project in history. She represents it
strategically, rendering the skin of her subjects
grisaille, and thereby apostrophizing America’s
original sin and permanent crisis: the otheriz-
ing of the not white, regardless of gradations.
Three years ago, Sherald was plucked from
low-profile but substantial status as an artist
when Michelle Obama chose her to paint her
official portrait. On view at the Smithsonian
National Portrait Gallery, in Washington,
D.C., it is a tour de force. Even so, it didn’t
prepare me for the more intense eloquence of
the canvases here—I had a dizzy sensation at
Sherald’s show of ground shifting under my
feet.—Peter Schjeldahl (Through Oct. 26.)
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND GREENE NAFTALI, NEW YORK

Happiness (finally) returns in the work of Paul Chan, whose digital videos
Tom Thayer from the early two-thousands were riots of color but who is now known
Eller as a virtuoso of darkness—one acclaimed piece, from 2009, is a punish-
DOWNTOWN In the winningly titled exhibition ingly long projection about the Marquis de Sade, composed of flickering
“Make a Pinch Pot Out of Your Mouth,” this shadows. Chan’s inspired new show, “The Bather’s Dilemma” (at the
New Jersey-based master of the lo-fi profound,
also admired for his eccentric, heartfelt music Greene Naftali gallery, in Chelsea, through Oct. 19), riffs on a more joyful
and animations, exhibits a new series of paint- Frenchman: the painter Henri Matisse. Figures stitched by the artist from
ings—assemblages, really, made of oil, acrylic, bright nylon fabric move with choreographic precision, animated by electric
ink, graphite, thread, burlap, aluminum, wood,
string, and wire. They could easily double as fans—beautifully absurd hybrids of Matisse dancers and gas-station tube
puppet-show backdrops: three-dimensional men. Chan has used this low-tech tactic before, to conjure despondence,
figures hang on the walls and are affixed to the but pleasure rules here. (A related exhibition, on the Lower East Side,
canvases’ gummy surfaces. Slapdash produc-
tion values rule (roughly cut corrugated-card- surveys the polymorphic output of the now defunct Badlands Unlimited,
board shapes and scraps of canvas are go-to a publishing house founded by Chan, in 2010.)—Andrea K. Scott
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019 9
and desperate gazes. Beginning with children’s screen, could easily be mistaken for a par- (Meryl Streep), who is retired, bereaved, and
play and lovers’ trysts and ending with moody ody of Altman’s film.) We find ourselves in a having trouble with an insurance claim—and
urban vistas, he connects the city’s throbbing servant-infested country house, overseen by to a facilitator named Boncamper (Jeffrey
energy with the work of death. Introducing Lord Grantham (Hugh Bonneville) and his Wright), who is based on the Caribbean is-
the laborers by name, Franju presents the invincible mother (Maggie Smith). Much of land of Nevis. Atop the pile of swindlers are
tools and practices of their trade, from the the action unfolds downstairs, where the but- Ramón (Antonio Banderas) and Jürgen (Gary
knives and captive-bolt pistols to the flaying ler, Barrow (Robert James-Collier), presides Oldman), who talk us through the evasive
and gutting of the carcasses, with a hallucina- uneasily over the staff; must his predecessor, process, cheerfully revealing their financial
tory attention to detail. These knackers, with Carson (Jim Carter), return to steady the ship? sleights of hand like magicians explaining
their easy camaraderie and nonchalant vigor, The story turns on the visit of the King (Simon their tricks. The demonstration may be en-
are the living models of emblematic characters Jones), who brings with him a rival entourage, tertaining, but will the viewer’s grasp of shell
in novels and movies—one man even sings, and the cast of the movie, likewise, jostle for companies and their role in tax avoidance, for
in a suave baritone, Charles Trenet’s classic dramatic prominence. Contenders include instance, be any firmer after the film than it
“La Mer,” as another whistles along. Franju Elizabeth McGovern, Michelle Dockery, Jo- was before? So enamored is Soderbergh of
evokes the collective brutality from which the anne Froggatt, and Imelda Staunton.—Anthony his various villains that his satire soon loses
refinements of culture are made.—Richard Lane (Reviewed in our issue of 9/30/19.) (In its bite.—A.L. (9/30/19) (In limited release.)
Brody (Anthology Film Archives, Oct. 7, and wide release.)
streaming.)
Saturday Fiction
The Laundromat This frenetic and paranoid thriller, by the
Downton Abbey The new Steven Soderbergh film, short and Chinese director Lou Ye, is set in Japanese-oc-
The screenplay of Michael Engler’s film is sharp, is aimed at the worshippers of Mam- cupied Shanghai during the week of the Pearl
by Julian Fellowes, the creator of the TV se- mon: specifically, those wealthy souls whose Harbor attack. With bitter irony seething in
ries from which the movie springs. (He also urge to hide their money offshore was ex- his blend of kinetic camerawork and silky
wrote Robert Altman’s “Gosford Park” and posed in the 2016 Panama Papers leak. So- black-and-white tones, Lou borrows the form
won an Oscar for his efforts, in 2002; “Down- derbergh’s fictional adaptation of the true of historical drama to expose the corruption
ton Abbey,” whether on the big or the small story introduces us to a typical victim—Ellen and the terror of a modern surveillance state.
Gong Li plays Jean Yu, a famous actress who
returns to the city—where British and French
IN REVIVAL zones remain protected—to perform in a play.
But she has an ulterior motive, to inquire about
her ex-husband, a captive of Japanese forces;
she also meets a manipulative French diplo-
mat (Pascal Greggory) from her past and a
mysterious young fan (Huang Xiangli). The
high-stakes deceptions of espionage threaten
romantic and professional relationships alike.
Binoculars, two-way mirrors, hidden micro-
phones, and encrypted messages raise the ten-
sion of secret encounters; conflicting plots
of collaboration and resistance give rise to
public violence and turn the opening of a play
into a political act of international import. In
Mandarin, English, and Japanese.—R.B. (New
York Film Festival, Oct. 8-9.)

The Whistlers
The dirty-cop trope gets an imaginative new
workout in this sly and intricate crime drama
by the director Corneliu Porumboiu. Its prem-
ise creeps up stealthily: a middle-aged Ro-
manian man named Cristi (Vlad Ivanov) is
ferried to one of the Canary Islands, but not
for pleasure—gangsters are force-teaching him
a local language that uses whistling in place of
words, so that he and other whistling accom-
A dancer who launched her movie career by filming her colleagues, the plices can be replanted in Bucharest to help
director Shirley Clarke (pictured above), whose centenary is Oct. 2, made spring a drug lord from jail. With elaborate
flashbacks detailing Cristi’s work as a police
a series of artist-centered films, in the nineteen-sixties, that are among detective and his duplicitous dealings with
the most original and influential works of the modern American cinema. colleagues, underworld figures, and family
She’s the subject of two retrospectives—a theatrical one, at Film Forum, members, Porumboiu explores the intersec-
tions—and the political implications—of lin-
through Nov. 5, and a digital one, on the Criterion Channel—that reveal the guistics, memory, and espionage. The many
PHOTOGRAPH BY ELLIOTT ERWITT/MAGNUM

span and the depth of her achievements. Clarke, a white New Yorker who characters’ distinct perspectives on the action
focussed on African-American culture and life, fused documentary, fiction, are multiplied by chilling views from surveil-
lance cameras, prompting deceptive displays—
and metafiction in such features as “The Connection,” about jazz musicians including romantic ones—in which tipped-off
waiting in a loft for a drug dealer while being filmed by a documentarian, targets fool those who are watching. The tale
and “Portrait of Jason,” in which she interviews Jason Holliday, a gay black winks at echoes of classic movies, as evoked
in showdowns at a cinémathèque and an aban-

1
cabaret artist and self-described hustler, in her apartment in the Hotel doned studio. In Romanian, English, and Span-
Chelsea. Film Forum also includes her rarely screened drama “The Cool ish.—R.B. (New York Film Festival, Oct. 6-7.)
World,” from 1964, about a Harlem teen-ager in quest of a gun; Criterion
offers Noël Burch and André S. Labarthe’s documentary “Rome Is Burning” For more reviews, visit
(1970), in which Clarke expounds her artistic philosophy.—Richard Brody newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town

10 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019

 with fresh dill and boldly seasoned with shrimp casserole with tomatoes and kas-
a flavor that’s familiar but at first difficult seri cheese (made of sheep’s and goat’s
to place: cinnamon! This appears on the milk) is a rare miss, its scorching tem-
“small plates” (translation: meze) part of perature giving way to surprising bland-

1
the menu, which also includes leeks that ness. For dessert, return to vegetables:
have been confited in olive oil until they among the standard rice pudding and
fall apart into meltingly luscious sheets, baklava, a dish of barely sweetened baked
TABLES FOR TWO served cold; tender braised artichoke butternut squash, topped with whipped
hearts, topped with whole favas and more cream and chopped walnuts, stands out.
Lokanta dill; and fluffy squares of what’s described Lokanta is one of a small handful
3116 Broadway, Queens as a pancake but is more like a kugel of Turkish restaurants in Astoria—a
made with shredded zucchini and carrots. neighborhood that’s long been associ-
Hospitality takes many forms. At Lo- Yegen puts equal effort into meat, ated with Greek food but has, in fact,
kanta, a Turkish restaurant that opened particularly lamb. You might think that grown quite culinarily diverse—and
in April, it manifests, counterintuitively, one restaurant does not need seven lamb one of relatively few in the city. Its most
in the blustery bearing of the chef and entrées (of fifteen total), but Lokanta important distinction, however, may be
owner, Orhan Yegen. There are very few (which means “restaurant” in Turkish) the weekends-only breakfast menu. For
PHOTOGRAPH BY HARUKA SAKAGUCHI FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE

people who can make slightly grumpy, proves you wrong. Glossy shreds of years, I have searched in vain for a decent
brusque confidence come across as allur- roasted lamb are spectacular mixed with Turkish breakfast in New York, longing
ing and even charming. Yegen, a veteran warm rice, currants, caramelized onions, to re-create a dreamy morning I spent
restaurateur who also owns Sip Sak, in and allspice, then gently molded into a in Istanbul at an open-air café in view
Manhattan (the menus overlap signifi- dome; tender, saucy hunks of braised of the Bosporus, noshing on a simple
cantly), is one of them, with a reputation lamb crown a bowl of beguilingly creamy but seductive array of fresh bread, cheese
that precedes him; the thrill of hearing eggplant purée, which takes on an almost with honey and marmalade, hard-boiled
his dramatic proclamations is one of the stretchy texture thanks to the addition eggs, olives, cucumbers, and tomatoes.
draws of his establishments. “If I was a of dehydrated yogurt. As a special one Finally, here is a similar platter—plus
normal person, I wouldn’t have come to recent night, ground lamb was formed baked eggs, clotted cream, flaky gozleme
this country,” he declared one evening in into a log-shaped adana kebab, grilled (which the menu calls “Turkish quesa-
May, as he surfed around Lokanta’s dining until crispy and smoky, and served on an dillas”), and pastries, including braided
room. “I’m not normal—I’m an artist.” intoxicatingly oily slab of fried flatbread. sesame rings known as simit. There is no
The other draw here is the food, which There is beef, too, rolled into rustic glittering turquoise strait to gaze upon
is, if not art per se, certainly artful. The meatballs and served simply with po- at Lokanta, and the restaurant’s interior
voguish approach to vegetables these days tatoes, or sealed into dainty dumplings resembles nothing so much as a West Elm
often involves doing very little to them, so called manti, which are blanketed in a showroom, with tropical-leaf wallpaper
it’s refreshing to find that Yegen’s faithful thick, garlicky yogurt sauce and drizzled and generic-looking gold tchotchkes. One
adherence to the traditions of his native with chili oil. Seafood is less successful. A Saturday morning, I felt transported none-
country largely dictates the opposite. pescatarian could be happy with expertly theless—and grateful to Yegen for being
Cooked fava beans are mashed into a paste prepared if unexciting fillets of sea bass so sure of himself. (Entrées $19-$22.)
that is smooth but still chunky, sprinkled or salmon, but an intriguing-sounding —Hannah Goldfield
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019 11
 BROADWAY PREVIEWS BEGIN FEBRUARY 7

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 THE TALK OF THE TOWN
COMMENT phone conversation between Trump and came clear how damaging the record of
REASON TO IMPEACH Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s Presi- the call might be, Administration offi-
dent, and a whistle-blower’s complaint cials participated in a coverup, moving
any features of Trumpism—the about that call—fully justify House the memorandum of conversation—the
M cynical populism, the brazen read-
iness to profit from high office, the rac-
Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision, an-
nounced on Tuesday, to open an official
contemporaneous documentation of the
call—to a highly restricted computer
ist and nativist taunts—have antecedents impeachment inquiry. The documents system not intended for such materials.
in American politics. But Donald Trump’s describe a breach of Trump’s constitu- The whistle-blower’s complaint is
open willingness to ask foreign govern- tional duties that is exceptional even in one of the great artifacts to enter Wash-
ments to dig up dirt on political oppo- light of his record to date. During the ington’s sizable archive of political mal-
nents has been an idiosyncratic aspect of telephone call, made on July 25th, he feasance. In the second paragraph, its
his rise to power. At a press conference leveraged the vast disparity of wealth author distills Trump’s offense with brac-
in July, 2016, when he was the presump- and power in the alliance between the ing clarity: “I have received information
tive Republican nominee for President, United States and Ukraine to ask Zelen- from multiple U.S. Government officials
he invited Russia to get hold of Hillary sky to, in effect, aid his reëlection bid. that the President of the United States
Clinton’s e-mails and leak them to the The complaint, filed on August 12th, by is using the power of his office to solicit
press. This past June, George Stepha- a person whom the Times has described interference from a foreign country in
nopoulos asked him what he thought his as an intelligence officer, further recounts the 2020 U.S. election.” The author goes
campaign should do now “if foreigners, how U.S. national-security and for- on to provide a revelatory narrative about
if Russia, if China, if someone else,” eign-policy officials who worked on is- the underlying facts of the case, one that
offered information on his political op- sues concerning Ukraine became en- complements investigative reporting pre-
ponents—accept it or call the F.B.I.? tangled in Trump’s scheme, and how viously published by the Washington
Trump allowed that he might do both, this distorted and undermined their Post, the Times, the Wall Street Journal,
adding, “If somebody called from a coun- work on behalf of American interests. Bloomberg, and other outlets.
try—Norway—‘We have information According to the complaint, once it be- The complaint’s lucidity and detail
on your opponent.’ Oh, I think I’d want may help House investigators defend
to hear it.” (When the interview was re- the integrity of their inquiry against the
leased, Ellen L. Weintraub, the chair of torrent of spin and lies that will surely
the Federal Election Commission, felt continue to issue from Trump and his
obliged to point out that “it is illegal for allies. When Washington scandals in-
any person to solicit, accept, or receive volving foreign affairs become politi-
anything of value from a foreign national cally contested, a timeworn tactic by
in connection with a U.S. election.”) We those accused of wrongdoing is to be-
now know that, as Trump spoke to Steph- fuddle the public; the unfamiliar names,
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDA

anopoulos, he and Rudolph Giuliani, his tangled chronologies, and ambiguous

personal lawyer, were deep in a vigorous meetings offer a way to distract non-
effort to persuade the government of obsessives from the heart of the matter.
Ukraine to conduct investigations that Already, Trump and Giuliani, on Twit-
might rake up some muck about Joe ter and Fox News, have fogged the
Biden and the Democratic Party. record by repeating falsehoods and con-
Two bombshell documents made spiracy theories. The story we can dis-
public last week—a record of a tele- cern so far, however, retains a certain
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019 13
straightforwardness, thanks to Trump’s cause he wasn’t doing enough about information will be very, very helpful to
lack of subtlety. Ukrainian corruption. Vitaliy Kasko, a my client.” Soon after the story was pub-
Ukraine is enmeshed in a low-grade Ukrainian former prosecutor, recently lished, Giuliani cancelled his trip.
but persistent war with Russia, which told Bloomberg, “There was no pressure It was a few days later that the whis-
began in February, 2014, after a popu- from anyone from the U.S. to close cases tle-blower, according to the complaint,
lar revolution in Kiev that ousted Pres- against Zlochevsky.” He added that the “heard from multiple U.S. officials that
ident Viktor Yanukovych, a corrupt ally Burisma case “was shelved by Ukrainian they were deeply concerned” that Giu-
of Moscow. He fled to Russia, and Vlad- prosecutors in 2014 and through 2015.” liani was doing an end run around proper
imir Putin ordered Russian forces to in- national-security decision-making, and
vade Ukraine. They seized Crimea, s it turned out, the American poli- opening a back channel between Kiev
which Russia then annexed. Putin’s mo-
tive was the reassertion of Russian power;
A tician first affected by Ukraine’s em-
boldened investigators was Donald
and Trump. Ukraine’s leaders were also
apparently worried that Trump’s will-
the United States and Europe, stunned Trump. Yanukovych had been a client of ingness to meet or talk with Zelensky,
by his audacity, imposed sanctions and Paul Manafort, who became Trump’s whose government cannot afford to lose
tried to shore up the post-revolution- campaign chairman in May, 2016. That American backing, “would depend on
ary government in Kiev. In search of ac- August, a Ukrainian law-enforcement whether Zelensky showed willingness
countability, the new Ukrainian regime unit released records showing that to ‘play ball.’”
opened corruption investigations into Manafort had received $12.7 million in Around mid-July, according to the
the previous political order. payments from the Yanukovych regime, Washington Post, Trump ordered his
That April, Joe Biden’s son Hunter, and he resigned from the campaign. chief of staff to hold back four hundred
a lawyer, accepted a lucrative seat on the Trump apparently concluded that Ukraine million dollars in military aid for Ukraine
board of one of Ukraine’s largest pri- was conspiring with Hillary Clinton and that had been approved by Congress.
vate gas companies, Burisma Holdings, the Democrats to try to defeat him. For Then, on July 25th, Trump had the phone
which is controlled by a Ukrainian oli- reasons that are not easy to fathom, he call with Zelensky that all the world can
garch, Mykola Zlochevsky. Burisma be- also came to endorse a conspiracy the- now review. According to the memoran-
came a subject of Kiev’s investigations, ory holding that Ukraine harbors a com- dum of conversation released by the
although the extent, seriousness, and puter server used by the Democratic Na- White House (it is a cross between a
focus of the inquiry are unclear. Hunter tional Committee in 2016. “They’re transcript and a summary, and its com-
Biden’s decision to accept the board seat terrible people,” Trump said privately of pleteness is uncertain), Trump began by
when his father was the Vice-President the Ukrainians as recently as May, ac- mentioning how generous the U.S. is to
and Ukraine’s crises were of interna- cording to the Times. “They’re all cor- Ukraine. “We do a lot,” he said, and then
tional importance showed questionable rupt and they tried to take me down.” noted, twice, that “the United States has
judgment. Since 2014, the Kiev govern- This did not stop Trump and Giuliani been very, very good to Ukraine.” Finally,
ment has been a ward of America and from attempting to use the Ukrainians he got to the point. “I would like you to
Europe; the potential for real or per- against Joe Biden. At the start of this do us a favor though,” he said, and went
ceived conflicts of interest should have year, they got wind of provocative alle- on to ask Zelensky to speak with Giu-
been apparent to both Bidens. Still, ac- gations made by Ukraine’s then prose- liani and Barr about conducting inves-
cording to Ukrainian officials, no evi- cutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko. Ukraine tigations. “There’s a lot of talk about
dence of wrongdoing by either Hunter was in the midst of its own raucous Pres- Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the pros-
Biden or Zlochevsky has been found. idential election, and Lutsenko, in the ecution, and a lot of people want to find
In 2015, the United States and some course of attacking his opponents in out about that,” Trump said. After the
of its European allies sought to oust Ukrainian politics, alleged that Shokin call, Giuliani flew to Madrid and met
Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Viktor had, indeed, been fired in order to pro- an aide to Zelensky. As Giuliani later
Shokin, because they believed that he tect Burisma. (Later, Lutsenko told told the Post, he said to the aide, “Your
had gone soft on corruption. That Sep- Bloomberg that he had no evidence of country owes it to us and to your coun-
tember, the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, wrongdoing by the Bidens.) try to find out what really happened.”
Geoffrey Pyatt, denounced Shokin’s fail- In April, Trump told Fox News that
ure “to successfully fight internal cor- Lutsenko’s allegations were “big” and ast week, the President and his al-
ruption.” In December, Joe Biden went
to Kiev and told Ukraine’s leaders that
“incredible,” and that he thought At-
torney General William Barr would
L lies made much of the fact that,
during the call, Trump did not mention
the U.S. would withhold loan guaran- find them interesting. That same month, the suspended military aid or link its re-
tees if they didn’t get rid of Shokin; he Zelensky, a former television comic, won sumption to Zelensky’s participation in
was ousted the following March. One Ukraine’s election in a landslide. In May, the President’s incipient dirty-tricks op-
of Giuliani’s aims has been to encour- Giuliani announced that he would go eration. (The aid was released this month,
age Ukraine to examine whether Shokin to Kiev to urge the new government to after bipartisan pressure from Congress.)
was pushed out to protect Burisma— investigate, among other subjects, the Yet, according to the record of the call,
and, by extension, Hunter Biden—from Bidens and alleged links between Trump immediately followed a fulsome
a corruption probe. But the record in- Ukraine and the Democrats. He would account of America’s support for Ukraine
dicates that Shokin was removed be- do so, he told the Times, “because that with a request for investigations of Dem-
14 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019
ocrats. Adam Schiff, the Democratic the republic to wait for the next election. better to be on TV than by phone.” His
chairman of the House Intelligence William Davie, a delegate from North deadpan cool, with wry comebacks, stood
Committee, called Trump’s technique “a Carolina, raised an alarming scenario: if in contrast with Trump’s gloomy solip­
classic Mafia­like shakedown.” a rogue with no conscience gained the sistic bluster. Then, as Trump urged Ze­
Historically, impeachment processes Presidency, he might “spare no efforts or lensky to “get together” with Vladimir
have been treacherous, tumultuous, and means whatever to get himself reëlected.” Putin, the mood went sour, as Twitter
unpredictable; with Trump involved, In 1972, Richard Nixon proved his point. began to post screen grabs of Zelensky’s

1
this one can hardly be otherwise. Opin­ So, now, has Donald Trump. chagrined expression, suggesting that
ion polls suggest that, currently, Amer­ —Steve Coll the scene be scored to the “Curb Your
icans are about evenly divided on the Enthusiasm” theme.
question of impeachment, a complica­ COUNTERPARTS DEPT. The premise of “Servant of the Peo­
tion for Democrats. Even if the House SCREEN SAVIOR ple” is simple and funny: one day, Vasyl
does eventually impeach Trump, it will Petrovych Holoborodko, a high­school
require a two­thirds vote by the Repub­ history teacher, begins ranting about his
lican­controlled Senate to remove him country’s broken elections, in which cit­
from office, and the Grand Old Party izens must vote for “the lesser of two
continues to lash itself to the President. assholes.” A student records the tirade,
The unlikelihood of Trump’s removal the clip goes viral, and fans crowdfund
means that the impeachment inquiry n the first episode of “Servant of the his campaign. When he wins, he’s ut­
may become a part of the political ar­
guments during the primary and gen­
I People,” Ukraine’s smash­hit politi­
cal satire, a schoolteacher in Kiev rushes
terly unprepared, as are the local oli­
garchs, who try and fail to bribe him.
eral­election campaigns of 2020. The around his crowded, messy apartment, The Prime Minister oversees his make­
President may not welcome the pros­ desperate to make it to work on time, over, complete with a “Queer Eye”­ish
pect of being impeached, but he is al­ juggling irons and coffeepots. He’s still squad of beauty coaches.
ready using the battle to defame Joe on the toilet, pants down, when there’s In the third episode, the new Presi­
Biden, and to reprise his “witch hunt” a loud banging at the door. It’s the Prime dent freaks out when he realizes that the
mantra in rage­inflected ad­libs, while Minister, with a surprising greeting: inauguration speech prepared by his han­
his reëlection campaign is citing the in­ “Good morning, Mr. President.” Our
quiry in fund­raising solicitations. He hero looks stunned: it’s his chance to
and his allies are also testing their de­ try to fix his broken country.
fenses and counterattacks, among them “Servant of the People,” which
the contention that, if Trump is to be premièred in 2015, has run for three sea­
investigated over his conduct involving sons, plus a movie. At once daffy, scath­
Ukraine, Joe Biden should be, too. ing, and inspirational, the series is a smart
The Democrats swept the House in genre­bender, mixing Ryan Murphy
2018 in large part by running a disci­ wackiness with Sorkinian uplift (minus
plined campaign emphasizing health the hubris), and Norman Lear sitcom
care and the need to address economic beats with “Scandal”­esque twists. Its
insecurity among working and mid­ biggest impact, however, has been po­
dle­class households—and by avoiding litical: in a turn that, a few years back,
baiting the President. Pelosi’s launch of would have seemed inconceivable, the
a formal inquiry followed a surge in sup­ show’s star, Volodymyr Zelensky, leaped
port for impeachment among moderate from the fictional Presidency into the
Democrats, some of them military and real one. In 2018, employees of his pro­
intelligence veterans, who said that they duction company, Kvartal 95, formed a Volodymyr Zelensky and
were shocked by the Ukraine revelations. political party—also called Servant of Donald Trump
Their change of mind is notable for its the People. A year later, he was elected
lack of obvious political reward. President in a landslide, promising, in dlers rips off the Gettysburg Address—
During the summer of 1787, at the effect, to drain the Ukrainian swamp. something the Prime Minister insists is
Constitutional Convention in Philadel­ At that point, Zelensky received a fine, since Ukrainians won’t notice and
phia, delegates designed impeachment congratulatory phone call from the other Americans might be flattered. In a sur­
as a political process entrusted to Con­ TV star who had been elected President: real twist, the ghost of Abraham Lin­
gress. The record of their debate shows Donald Trump, formerly of “The Ap­ coln shows up. He urges Holoborodko
they hoped that Presidents who were prentice.” Their relationship has since to free Ukrainians from economic slav­
merely incompetent would be thrown become more complicated. At a joint ery and to “be yourself, Mr. President,”
out of office at election time, by the vot­ press conference last week, after Nancy so our hero—in a classic TV move—
ers. Yet they also assumed that, occasion­ Pelosi launched an impeachment inquiry tosses the speech, explaining to voters
ally, Presidents might be so corrupt and into Trump, Zelensky joked, about meet­ that he’ll follow a new model: “One
so ruthless that it would be damaging to ing Trump for the first time, that “it’s should act in a way that doesn’t evoke
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019 15
shame when looking into children’s eyes. borodko is a humble man who, right incided with some explosive illustrations
Or their parents’. Or yours.” away, admits to not understanding the of the limits, and abuses, of that power.
It’s an ethic that’s the exact inverse policies that he needs to enact. He’s wor- This past Tuesday, Britain’s Supreme
of Trump’s embrace of shamelessness. thy of praise precisely because he doesn’t Court issued a rebuke of Prime Minis-
But there are other eerie echoes of the think he’s all that—and when he tells ter Boris Johnson, for an “unlawful” sus-
moment, suggesting the fraught bridges the truth, as he explains to his students, pension of Parliament. Hours later, the
between the two countries. In the Sea- it’s because the truth is objective, avail- U.S. House of Representatives launched
son 1 finale (spoilers!), Holoborodko able to all. He’s bookish, too; he falls its impeachment inquiry into Donald
goes on a talk show with the Prime Min- asleep studying Plutarch’s “Lives” and Trump. “The other one is the Israeli elec-
ister, participating in a debate on how has restless dreams in which philoso- tion,” Aliko Dangote, Africa’s richest
to end corruption. Midway through, he phers bicker about socialism and autoc- man, pointed out, as he chewed a piece
reveals a black ledger listing participants racy. If he resembles anyone on the of salmon at a wobbly cocktail table.
in dirty Ukrainian deals—a ledger not American scene, it’s Elizabeth Warren, (There was no clear winner in Israel’s
unlike the one that landed Paul Manafort another former teacher running on a most recent vote.) Dangote, a sixty-two-
in prison. In a moment as theatrical as platform of fighting corruption, opposed year-old Nigerian industrialist, was at
any boardroom ceremony in “The Ap- by America’s version of oligarchs. the Plaza Hotel, in midtown, for the
prentice,” he has the studio turn off the Whether Zelensky is for real or not Bloomberg Global Business Forum, an
lights for the big reveal: in the darkness, isn’t something that can be determined alternative gathering that aspires to be a
the Prime Minister’s face and hands light by someone from outside the culture. refuge from the political hurricanes out-
up in bioluminescent green, stained from But the actor turned President clearly side. It’s a successor, of sorts, to the Clin-
where he touched the dirty money. intended, even before he ran, for his ton Global Initiative, which used to hold
After that season, the show evolved show to do more than entertain. In 2017, an annual meeting alongside the U.N.
into more of an ensemble workplace when the series was picked up by Netflix, General Assembly (known to wonks by
sitcom—“Parks and Recreation,” Kiev he told Cinema Escapist that it was one word: Unga). After the initiative shut
style, with a cabinet of outsiders find- meant to speak to a post-Soviet gener- down, in 2017, Michael Bloomberg started
ing clever ways to procure I.M.F. fund- ation, eager for “positive changes.” Those hosting a few hundred executives for a
ing while passing reforms, against the offended by political satire, he said, “must day. This year’s event was titled “Restor-
will of scheming oligarchs. Despite hav- have an Iron Curtain in their brains ing Global Stability.” Seated across the
ing emerged from a kleptocracy, the higher than the one in the Soviet Union!” table from Dangote was Henry Paulson,
show—which was originally conceived, (He added that every country has its the former Treasury Secretary, who
in the early two-thousands, as a reality own tradition of rude jokes: “For exam- reached for a small cookie from a silver
show, with ordinary people running for ple, in the U.S., Trump is President: how dessert tower. “They’re talking about
office—is a strikingly more idealistic, can you not talk about it?”) Notably, he ideas, not politics,” he said.
less nihilistic project than many Amer- kept a campaign promise that seems es- The select politicians in attendance
ican series of the same period, such as pecially relevant: two days before his knew the room. Prime Minister Naren-
“House of Cards” and “Veep.” Mean- press conference with Trump, Zelensky dra Modi, of India, said in his speech,
while, Zelensky himself has become signed a new law that, for the first time, “Today, there is a government in India
an icon, playing the kind of guy who created a way to impeach the Ukrainian that respects the business world and
won’t let even his own family get away President—himself included—for “high wealth creators.” Between talks, the ex-
with graft. In some ways, Zelensky and treason or other felonies.” Afterward, ecutives huddled in the Palm Court, the
Trump are similar. They’re both come- he posted a video on Instagram, in which Plaza’s restaurant, where concentric rings
dians, although Trump is more a sta- he urged citizens to pay their taxes and of security kept the world at bay. Even
dium insult comic, whereas Zelensky to “live in accordance with the law.” in the warm embrace of exclusivity, Paul-

1
has starred in rom-coms. Like Trump, There are all kinds of influencers. son and Dangote attracted a stream of
Zelensky has appointed members of —Emily Nussbaum visitors: Christine Lagarde, the incom-
his company to official roles, and, like ing president of the European Central
Trump, Zelensky has circumvented ONE WORLD DEPT. Bank; Stephen Schwarzman and Larry
the mainstream press, communicating OASIS Fink, the heads of Blackstone and Black-
through Instagram, via slick self-pro- Rock, respectively; and John Elkann, the
duced videos—in which he is, on oc- Italian scion of the Agnelli car dynasty.
casion, in costume as President Holo- Between handshakes, a billionaire in-
borodko or “interviewed” by the actor vestor said, “The world is becoming a
who played the Prime Minister. world of conferences. I go to about fifty
In another way, however, their brands each year, and I kind of wonder, How
are opposites. On “The Apprentice,” the rdinarily, “high-level week” at the many of these can we go to? You always
bankrupt Trump was portrayed as a savvy,
cynical super-boss, the object of wor-
O United Nations General Assembly,
when heads of state converge on Man-
see the same people, and you always say,
‘Let’s have lunch, let’s have dinner.’ And,
ship to contestants. The entire point of hattan’s East Side, is a pageant of polit- of course, you never have lunch, never
“Servant of the People” is that Holo- ical power. But this year’s gathering co- have dinner.”Today’s masters of the uni-
16 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019
verse jet around the globe on the con-
SKETCHPAD BY EMILY FLAKE
ference circuit, like Presidential can-
SOME HUGS
didates touching down at state fairs.
Functions like the Bloomberg forum
offer a break from burdens like public
scrutiny of their taxes and their defense
of alleged monopolies. “I think, through-
out the history of the world, there’s al-
ways a pressure, always people that don’t
like wealthy people,” the investor went
on. For one day, the Palm Court was an
oasis, where executives could imagine a
world without angry speeches denounc-
ing millionaires and billionaires.
A guest with a buzz cut approached
Paulson: “I heard you were an ex-wres-
tler in high school. That’s what Don
Rumsfeld tells me.”
“Those days are long gone,” Paulson
replied, politely, “though, when I’m mak-
ing a big speech or something, I still used to bang
shake my hands out.” in college
Paulson returned to his conversation My God, you still recognize you at first” hug
with Dangote and Justin Smith, the smell the same Time is a real bitch
C.E.O. of Bloomberg Media; they were
already planning the next conference, a
larger Bloomberg confab to be held in
Beijing, in November. Smith recalled
proposing the idea to Paulson in 2015: “I
came in the middle of the winter, to your
office in Chicago, and I said, ‘I think the
world really needs something like this.’” the father-
Paulson was dubious at first. “People get daughter hug
asked to go to conferences all the time,” Just give me
he told Smith. But he changed his mind, the car keys, Dad
because the proposal emphasized sub-
stance, because Chinese leaders were re-
ceptive, and because C.E.O.s were ready
to fly there. “If the Chinese believe all
we’re trying to do is contain them, there
is no incentive to find common ground,”
he said. “That’s why it’s so important to
be engaging them on some of today’s
most important economic issues.” The
event in Beijing, he said, is “not just a
conference where people get together
and spout, like they do at Davos and the mother-
other places.” son hug
The Beijing conference is called the Like “Psycho,”
New Economy Forum, a title choice that but make it fashion
generated anxiety at the World Economic
Forum. “W.E.F. is getting very, very wor-
ried about this sort of gathering,” Dan-
gote said. “They kept asking, ‘Are you
coming to Davos?’ ‘What are all these uptight waspy relations
things about?’—you know? I said, ‘Look, The least emotional physical contact
joining the New Economy Forum does between two people possible
not mean that I’m not going to Davos.’”
—Evan Osnos
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019 17
 by American planes—one of a few still
PERSONAL HISTORY visible scars of the war.
My father and I set off that summer

ABANDONING A CAT
afternoon to leave the cat by the shore.
He pedalled his bicycle, while I sat on
the back holding a box with the cat in-
Memories of my father. side. We rode along the Shukugawa
River, arrived at the beach at Koroen,
BY HARUKI MURAKAMI set the box down among some trees there,
and, without a backward glance, headed
home. The beach must have been about
two kilometres from our house.
At home, we got off the bike—dis-
cussing how we felt sorry for the cat,
but what could we do?—and when we
opened the front door the cat we’d just
abandoned was there, greeting us with
a friendly meow, its tail standing tall. It
had beaten us home. For the life of me,
I couldn’t figure out how it had done
that. We’d been on a bike, after all. My
father was stumped as well. The two of
us stood there for a while, at a total loss
for words. Slowly, my father’s look of
blank amazement changed to one of
admiration and, finally, to an expres-
sion of relief. And the cat went back to
being our pet.
We always had cats at home, and we
liked them. I didn’t have any brothers
or sisters, and cats and books were my
best friends when I was growing up. I
loved to sit on the veranda with a cat,
sunning myself. So why did we have to
take that cat to the beach and abandon
it? Why didn’t I protest? These ques-
tions—along with that of how the cat
beat us home—are still unanswered.

nother memory of my father is this:

O f course I have a lot of memories

of my father. It’s only natural, con-
older female cat. Why we needed to get
rid of it I can’t recall. The house we lived
A Every morning, before break-
fast, he would sit for a long time in front
sidering that we lived under the same in was a single-family home with a gar- of the butsudan shrine in our home, in-
roof of our not exactly spacious home den and plenty of room for a cat. Maybe tently reciting Buddhist sutras, with his
from the time I was born until I left it was a stray we’d taken in that was eyes closed. It wasn’t a regular Buddhist
home at eighteen. And, as is the case now pregnant, and my parents felt they shrine, exactly, but a small cylindrical
with most children and parents, I imag- couldn’t care for it anymore. My mem- glass case with a beautifully carved bodhi-
ine, some of my memories of my father ory isn’t clear on this point. Getting rid sattva statue inside. Why did my father
are happy, some not quite so much. But of cats back then was a common oc- recite sutras every morning in front of
the memories that remain most vividly currence, not something that anyone that glass case, instead of in front of a
in my mind now fall into neither cate- would criticize you for. The idea of neu- standard butsudan? That’s one more on
gory; they involve more ordinary events. tering cats never crossed anyone’s mind. my list of unanswered questions.
This one, for instance: I was in one of the lower grades in el- At any rate, this was obviously an
COURTESY THE AUTHOR

When we were living in Shukugawa ementary school at the time, I believe, important ritual for him, one that
(part of Nishinomiya City, in Hyogo so it was probably around 1955, or a lit- marked the start of each day. As far as
Prefecture), one day we went to the beach tle later. Near our home were the ruins I know, he never failed to perform what
to get rid of a cat. Not a kitten but an of a bank building that had been bombed he called his “duty,” and no one was al-
lowed to interfere with it. There was an
The author in his garden in Shukugawa, Nishinomiya, in September, 1957. intense focus about the whole act. Sim-
18 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019
ply labelling it “a daily habit” doesn’t do Kyoto, and my mother crying, clinging discuss the situation no one volunteered
it justice. to him, pleading, “Whatever you do, to take on the temple duties. Becom­
Once, when I was a child, I asked don’t agree to take over the temple.” I ing the head priest of a large temple
him whom he was praying for. And he was only nine at the time, but this image like that was no easy undertaking, and
replied that it was for those who had is etched in my brain, like a memora­ would be a major burden for anyone’s
died in the war. His fellow Japanese sol­ ble scene from a black­and­white movie. family. The brothers knew this all too
diers who’d died, as well as the Chinese My father was expressionless, silently well. And my grandmother, a widow
who’d been their enemy. He didn’t elab­ nodding. I think he’d already made up now, was a strict, no­nonsense type; any
orate, and I didn’t press him. I suspect his mind. I could sense it. wife would have found it difficult to
that if I had he would have opened up serve as the head priest’s spouse with
more. But I didn’t. There must have y father was born on Decem­ her still there. My mother was the el­
been something in me that prevented
me from pursuing the topic.
M ber 1, 1917, in Awata­guchi, Sa­
kyo­ku, in Kyoto. When he was a boy,
dest daughter of an established mer­
chant family in Senba, in Osaka. She
the peaceful Taisho democracy period was a fashionable woman, not at all the
should explain a little about my fa­ was drawing to a close, to be followed type to fit in as the head priest’s wife
I ther’s background. His father, Ben­
shiki Murakami, was born into a farm­
by the gloomy Great Depression, then
the swamp that was the Second Sino­
in Kyoto. So it was no wonder she clung
to my father, in tears, begging him not
ing family in Aichi Prefecture. As was Japanese War, and, finally, the tragedy to take over the temple.
common with younger sons, my grand­ of the Second World War. Then came At least from my perspective, as his
father was sent to a nearby temple to the confusion and poverty of the early son, my father seemed to be a straight­
train as a priest. He was a decent stu­ postwar period, when my father’s gen­ forward, responsible person. He hadn’t
dent, and after apprenticeships at var­ eration struggled to survive. As I men­ inherited his father’s openhearted dis­
ious temples he was appointed head tioned, my father was one of six broth­ position (he was more the nervous type),
priest of the Anyoji Temple, in Kyoto. ers. Three of them had been drafted but his good­natured manner and his
This temple has four or five hundred and fought in the Second Sino­Japa­ way of speaking put other people at ease.
families in its parish, so it was quite a nese War and, miraculously, survived He had a sincere faith as well. He prob­
promotion for him. with no serious injuries. Almost all of ably would have made a good priest,
I grew up in the Osaka­Kobe area, the six sons were more or less qualified and I think he knew that. My guess is
so I didn’t have many opportunities to to be priests. They had that kind of ed­ that if he’d been single he wouldn’t have
visit my grandfather’s home, this Kyoto ucation. My father, for instance, held a resisted the idea very much. But he had
temple, and I have few memories of junior rank as a priest, roughly equiva­ something he couldn’t compromise on—
him. What I understand, though, is that lent to that of a second lieutenant in the his own little family.
he was a free, uninhibited sort of per­ military. In the summer, during the busy In the end, my uncle Shimei left his
son, known for his love of drinking. As obon season—the yearly festival to honor job at the tax office and succeeded my
his name implies—the character ben in family ancestors—these six brothers grandfather as the head priest of An­
his first name means “eloquence”—he would assemble in Kyoto and divide up yoji Temple. And, later, he was succeeded
had a way with words; he was a capa­ the visits to the temple’s parishioners. by his son, my cousin Junichi. Accord­
ble priest, and was apparently popular. At night, they’d get together and drink. ing to Junichi, Shimei agreed to become
I do recall that he was charismatic, with After my grandfather died, there was the head priest out of a sense of obli­
a booming voice. the pressing question of who would take gation as the eldest son. I say he agreed,
My grandfather had six sons (not over the priestly duties at the temple. but it was more that he had no choice.
a single daughter) and was a healthy, Most of the sons were already married Back then, the parishioners were much
hearty man, but, sadly, when he was sev­ and had jobs. Truth be told, no one had more influential than they are now, and
enty, at eight­fifty on the morning of expected my grandfather to pass away they probably wouldn’t have let him off
August 25, 1958, he was struck by a train so early or so suddenly. the hook.
while crossing the tracks of the Keishin The eldest son—my uncle Shimei
Line, which connects Kyoto (Misasagi) Murakami—had wanted to become a hen my father was a boy, he
and Otsu, and killed. It was an unat­
tended railway crossing in Yamada­cho,
veterinarian, but after the war he took
a job at the tax office in Osaka and was
W was sent to be an apprentice at
a temple somewhere in Nara. The un­
Kitahanayama, Yamashina, in Higashi­ now a subsection chief, while my fa­ derstanding, presumably, was that he
yama­ku. A large typhoon hit the Kinki ther, the second son, taught Japanese would be adopted into the Nara priest’s
region on this particular day; it was rain­ at the combined Koyo Gakuin junior family. However, after his apprentice­
ing hard, my grandfather was carrying and senior high school in the Kansai ship he returned home to Kyoto. This
an umbrella, and he probably didn’t see area. The other brothers were either was ostensibly because the cold had
the train coming around a curve. He teachers, too, or studying in Buddhist­ adversely affected his health, but the
was a bit hard of hearing as well. affiliated colleges. Two of the brothers main reason seems to have been that he
The night our family learned that had been adopted by other families, a couldn’t adjust to the new environment.
my grandfather had died, I remember common practice, and had different last After returning home, he lived, as be­
my father quickly preparing to go to names. At any rate, when they met to fore, as his parents’ son. But I get the
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019 19
feeling that the experience remained vice, but he forgot to take care of some Fukuchiyama but was headquartered in
with him, as a deep emotional scar. I administrative paperwork, and in 1938, Fukakusa / Fushimi, in Kyoto City. So
can’t point to any particular evidence of when he was twenty, he was drafted. It why was I under the impression that my
this, but there was something about him was a procedural error, but once that father had belonged to the 20th Infan-
that made me feel that way. kind of mistake is made you can’t just try Regiment? I’ll discuss this point later.
I recall now the expression on my fa- apologize your way out of it. Bureau- The 20th Infantry Regiment was
ther’s face—surprised at first, then im- cracies and the military are like that. known for being one of the first to ar-
pressed, then relieved—when that cat we Protocol has to be followed. rive in Nanjing after the city fell. Mil-
had supposedly abandoned beat us home. itary units from Kyoto were generally
I’ve never experienced anything like y father belonged to the 20th In- seen as well bred and urbane, but this
that. I was brought up—fairly lovingly,
I’d say—as the only child in an ordi-
M fantry Regiment, which was part
of the 16th Division (Fushimi Division).
particular regiment’s actions gave it a
surprisingly bloody reputation. For a
nary family. So I can’t understand, on The nucleus of the 16th Division then long time, I was afraid that my father
a practical or an emotional level, what consisted of four infantry regiments: had participated in the attack on Nan-
kind of psychic scars may result when the 9th Infantry Regiment (Kyoto), the jing, and I was reluctant to investigate
a child is abandoned by his parents. I 20th Infantry Regiment (Fukuchiyama), the details. He died, in August, 2008, at
can only imagine it on a superficial level. the 33rd Infantry Regiment (Tsu City, the age of ninety, without my ever hav-
The French director François Truffaut in Mie Prefecture), and the 38th Infan- ing asked him about it, without his ever
talked about being forced to live apart try Regiment (Nara). It’s unclear why having talked about it.
from his parents when he was young. my father, who was from Kyoto City My father was drafted in August of
And for the rest of his life he pursued proper, was assigned not to the local 9th 1938. The 20th Infantry Regiment’s in-
this theme of abandonment in his films. Regiment but instead to the far-off famous march into Nanjing took place
Most people probably have some de- Fukuchiyama Regiment. the previous year, in December of 1937,
pressing experience they can’t quite put At least this was how I understood so my father had missed it by nearly a
into words but also can’t forget. it for the longest time, but when I looked year. When I learned this, it was a tre-
My father graduated from Higashi- more deeply into his background I found mendous relief, as if a great weight had
yama Junior High School (equivalent that I was wrong. In fact, my father be- been lifted.
to a high school today) in 1936 and en- longed not to the 20th Infantry Regi- As a private second class in the 16th
tered the School for Seizan Studies at ment but to the 16th Transport Regi- Transport Regiment, my father boarded
eighteen. Students generally received a ment, which was also part of the 16th a troop transport in Ujina Harbor on
four-year exemption from military ser- Division. And this regiment wasn’t in October 3, 1938, and arrived in Shang-
hai on October 6th. There his regiment
joined up with the 20th Infantry Reg-
iment. According to the Army’s war-
time directory, the 16th Transport Reg-
iment was primarily assigned to supply
and security duties. If you follow the
regiment’s movements, you see that it
covered incredible distances for the
time. For units that were barely motor-
ized, and lacked sufficient fuel—horses
were the main mode of transportation—
travelling so far must have been ex-
tremely arduous. The situation at the
front was dire: supplies couldn’t get
there; there was a chronic shortage of
rations and ammunition; the men’s uni-
forms were in tatters; and unsanitary
conditions led to outbreaks of cholera
and other infectious diseases. It was
impossible for Japan, with its limited
strength, to control a huge country like
China. Even though the Japanese Army
was able to gain military control of one
city after another, it was, practically
speaking, incapable of occupying en-
tire regions. The memoirs written by
soldiers in the 20th Infantry Regiment
“All right, back to answering e-mails and sighing.” give a clear picture of how pitiful the
situation was. Transport troops were
not usually directly involved in front-
line fighting, but that didn’t mean they
were safe. As they were only lightly
armed (usually with just bayonets), when
the enemy attacked from the rear they
suffered major casualties.

oon after starting at the Seizan

S school, my father had discovered the
pleasures of haiku and joined a haiku
circle. He was really into it, to use a mod-
ern idiom. Several of the haiku he wrote
while he was a soldier were published
in the school’s haiku journal; most likely
he mailed them to the school from the
front:
Birds migrating
Ah—where they are headed
must be my homeland “It’s not you, it’s the humidity.”
A soldier, yet a priest
clasping my hands in prayer • •
toward the moon

I’m no haiku expert, so it’s beyond lated memory, the context unclear. I was net, but I recall my father telling me
me to say how accomplished his were. still in the lower grades in elementary that for this particular execution a sword
Clearly, what holds these poems to- school. He related matter-of-factly how was used.
gether is not technique but the open, the execution had taken place. Though Needless to say, my father’s recount-
honest feelings that underscore them. the Chinese soldier knew that he was ing of this cold-blooded beheading
My father had been studying, no going to be killed, he didn’t struggle, of a man with a sword became deeply
doubt conscientiously, to become a priest. didn’t show any fear, but just sat there etched in my young mind. To put it an-
But a simple clerical error had turned quietly with his eyes closed. And he was other way, this heavy weight my father
him into a soldier. He went through bru- decapitated. The man’s attitude was ex- carried—a trauma, in today’s terminol-
tal basic training, was handed a Type 38 emplary, my father told me. He seemed ogy—was handed down, in part, to me,
rifle, placed on a troop-transport ship, to have deep feelings of respect for the his son. That’s how human connections
and sent off to the fearsome battles at Chinese soldier. I don’t know if he had work, how history works. It was an act
the front. His unit was constantly on to watch as other soldiers in his unit car- of transference and ritual. My father
the move, clashing with Chinese troops ried out the execution, or if he himself hardly said a word about his wartime
and guerrillas who put up a fierce re- was forced to play a direct role. There’s experiences. It’s unlikely that he wanted
sistance. In every way imaginable, this no way now to determine whether this to remember this execution or to talk
was the opposite of life in a peaceful is because my memory is hazy, or whether about it. Yet he must have felt a com-
temple in the Kyoto hills. He must have my father described the incident in in- pelling need to relate the story to his
suffered tremendous mental confusion tentionally vague terms. But one thing son, his own flesh and blood, even if
and spiritual turmoil. In the midst of is clear: the experience left feelings of this meant that it would remain an open
all that, writing haiku may have been anguish and torment that lingered for wound for both of us.
his sole consolation. Things he never a long time in the soul of this priest
could have written in his letters, or they turned soldier. he 20th Infantry Regiment, along
wouldn’t have made it past the censors,
he put into the form of haiku—express-
At the time, it wasn’t at all uncom-
mon to allow new soldiers and recruits
T with my father’s unit, returned to
Japan on August 20, 1939. After a year
ing himself in a symbolic code, as it to practice killing by executing captured as a soldier, my father resumed his stud-
were—where he was able to honestly Chinese soldiers. Killing unarmed pris- ies at the Seizan school. At the time, the
bare his true feelings. oners was, of course, a violation of in- draft meant two years of military ser-
ternational law, but the Japanese mili- vice, but for some reason my father served
y father talked to me about the tary in that period seemed to take the only one. Perhaps the military took into
M war only once, when he told me
a story about how his unit had executed
practice for granted. Military units likely
didn’t have the resources to take care of
account the fact that he had been en-
rolled as a student when he was drafted.
a captured Chinese soldier. I don’t know prisoners. Most of these executions were After his service, my father contin-
what prompted him to tell me this. It performed either by shooting the pris- ued to enthusiastically write haiku. This
happened so long ago that it’s an iso- oner or by stabbing him with a bayo- one, written in October of 1940, was
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019 21
 I’m sure compared me to himself at the
same age. You were born in this peace-
ful time, he must have thought. You can
study as much as you like, with noth-
ing to get in the way. So why can’t you
make more of an effort? I think he
wanted me to follow the path he hadn’t
been able to take because of the war.
But I couldn’t live up to my father’s
expectations. I never could will myself
to study the way he wanted me to. I
found most classes at school mind-numb-
ing, the school system overly uniform
and repressive. This led my father to
feel a chronic dismay, and me to feel a
chronic distress (and a certain amount
of unconscious anger). When I débuted
as a novelist, at thirty, my father was re-
ally pleased, but by that time our rela-
tionship had grown distant and cool.
Even now I carry around with me
the feeling—or perhaps the dregs of
the feeling—that I disappointed my
father, let him down. Back in my teens,
this made things uncomfortable at
home, with a constant undercurrent
“Goodnight Twitter. Goodnight Instagram. of guilt on my part. I still have night-
Goodnight Snapchat. Goodnight Reddit. Goodnight Tinder. mares in which I have to take a test at
Goodnight Pinterest. Goodnight Facebook . . .” school and can’t answer a single ques-
tion. Time ticks away as I do nothing,
though I’m well aware that failing the
• • test will have major consequences—
that sort of dream. I usually wake up
probably inspired by a good-will visit fluenced me in my teens, when I de- in a cold sweat.
by the Hitler Youth to Japan: veloped a passion for reading myself. But, back then, being glued to my
My father graduated with honors from desk, finishing homework, and getting
They call out, singing
to bring the deer closer,
the Seizan school, and, in March, 1941, better grades on tests held far less ap-
the Hitler Youth he entered the literature department at peal than reading books I enjoyed, lis-
Kyoto Imperial University. It can’t have tening to music I liked, playing sports
Personally, I really like this haiku, which been easy to pass the entrance exam for or mah-jongg with friends, and going
captures an obscure moment in history a top school like Kyoto Imperial Uni- on dates with girls.
in a subtle, unusual way. There’s a strik- versity after undergoing a Buddhist ed- All we can do is breathe the air of
ing contrast between the far-off bloody ucation to be a priest. My mother often the period we live in, carry with us the
conflict in Europe and the deer (proba- told me, “Your father’s very bright.” special burdens of the time, and grow
bly the famous deer in Nara). Those Hit- How bright he really was I have no up within those confines. That’s just
ler Youth, enjoying a short visit to Japan, idea. Frankly, it’s not a question that in- how things are.
may very well have gone on to perish in terests me much. For somebody in my
the bitter winters at the Eastern Front. line of work, intelligence is less impor- y father graduated from the
I’m drawn to this poem as well: tant than a sharp intuition. Be that as
it may, the fact remains that my father
M School for Seizan Studies in the
spring of 1941, and at the end of Sep-
Anniversary
of Issa’s death, I sit here
always had excellent grades in school. tember received a special draft notice.
with his sad poems Compared with him, I never had On October 3rd, he was back in uni-
much interest in studying; my grades form, first in the 20th Infantry Regiment
The world depicted is so calm and tran- were lacklustre from start to finish. I’m (Fukuchiyama), and then in the 53rd
quil, yet there’s a lingering sense of chaos. the type who eagerly pursues things I’m Transport Regiment, which was part of
My father always loved literature interested in but can’t be bothered with the 53rd Division.
and, after he became a teacher, spent anything else. That was true of me when In 1940, the 16th Division had been
much of his time reading. Our house I was a student, and it is still true now. permanently stationed in Manchuria,
was full of books. This may have in- This disappointed my father, who and while it was there the 53rd Division
22 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019
in Kyoto was organized to take its place. from service, the Second World War
Most likely, the confusion of this sud- broke out in the Pacific. In the course

Now is
den reorganization accounts for why my of the war, the 16th Division and the
father was initially placed in the Fukuchi- 53rd Division were essentially wiped out.
yama Regiment. (As I said, I was always If my father had not been released, if
mistakenly convinced that he’d been in
the Fukuchiyama Regiment from the
he’d been shipped off with one of his
former units, he would almost certainly the time
to start
first time he was drafted.) The 53rd Di- have died on the battlefield, and then,
vision was sent to Burma in 1944, was of course, I wouldn’t be alive now. You
in the Battle of Imphal, and, from De- could call it fortunate, but having his
cember to March, 1945, was nearly dec-
imated by the British in the Battle of
the Irrawaddy River.
own life saved while his former com-
rades lost theirs became a source of great
pain and anguish. I understand all the
listening.
But quite unexpectedly, on Novem- more now why he closed his eyes and
ber 30, 1941, my father was released from devoutly recited the sutras every morn-
military service and allowed to return ing of his life.
to civilian life. November 30th was eight On June 12, 1945, after he had en-
days before the attack on Pearl Harbor. tered Kyoto Imperial University, my
After that attack, I doubt that the mil- father received his third draft notice.
itary would have been generous enough This time he was assigned to the Chubu
to let him go. 143 Corps as a pfc. It’s unclear where
As my father told it, his life was saved the corps was stationed, but it stayed
by one officer. My father was a pfc. at within Japan. Two months later, on Au-
the time and was summoned by a se- gust 15th, the war ended, and on Octo-
nior officer, who told him, “You’re study- ber 28th my father was released from
ing at Kyoto Imperial University, and service and returned to the university.
would better serve the country by con- He was twenty-seven.
tinuing your studies than by being a sol- In September, 1947, my father passed
dier.” Did one officer have the author- the exams to receive his B.A. and went
ity to make this decision? I have no idea. on to the graduate program in litera-
It’s hard to conceive that a humanities ture at Kyoto Imperial University. I was
student such as my father could be seen born in January, 1949. Because of his
as somehow serving the country by re- age, and the fact that he was married
turning to college and his study of haiku. and had a child, my father had to give
There had to be other factors at work. up his studies before completing the Join the best writers
Either way, he was released from the program. In order to make a living, he in America as they make
Army and was a free man again. took a position as a Japanese teacher at
At least that was the story I heard, Koyo Gakuin, in Nishinomiya. I don’t sense of the world and
or have a memory of hearing, as a child. know the details of how my father and the people changing it.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t accord with the mother came to be married. Since they
facts. Kyoto Imperial University records lived far apart—one in Kyoto, the other Hosted by David Remnick.
indicate that my father enrolled in the in Osaka—most likely a mutual ac-
literature department in October, 1944. quaintance had introduced them. My
Perhaps my memory is cloudy. Or maybe mother had intended to marry another
it was my mother who told me this story, man, a music teacher, but he died in the
and her memory was faulty. And now war. And the store that her father had THE NEW YORKER
there’s no way to verify what’s true and
what isn’t.
owned, in Senba, Osaka, burned down
in a U.S. bombing raid. She always re- RADIO HOUR
According to the records, my father
entered the literature department of
membered Grumman carrier-based
fighters strafing the city, and fleeing for
PODCAST
Kyoto Imperial University in Octo- her life through the streets of Osaka. A co-production with
ber, 1944, and graduated in September, The war had a profound effect on my
1947. But I have no idea where he was, mother’s life as well.
or what he was doing, between the ages
of twenty-three and twenty-six, the three y mother, who is now ninety-six,
years after he was released from the mil-
itary and before he entered Kyoto Im-
M was also a Japanese teacher. After
graduating from the literature depart-
Subscribe free, from your
favorite podcast app.
perial University. ment of Shoin Women’s School, in
Right after my father was released Osaka, she worked as a teacher at her
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019 23
alma mater, but she left her job when a hospital in Nishijin, in Kyoto. He had got up, I couldn’t hear it crying anymore.
she got married. terrible diabetes, and cancer was ravag- I stood at the base of the tree and called
According to my mother, my father ing much of his body. Though he’d al- out the kitten’s name, but there was no
in his younger days lived a pretty wild ways been on the stout side, now he was reply. Just silence.
life. His wartime experiences were fresh gaunt. I barely recognized him. And Perhaps the cat had made it down
then, and his frustration at the fact that there, in the final days of his life—the sometime during the night and gone
his life hadn’t gone the way he’d wanted very final few days—my father and I off somewhere (but where?). Or maybe,
it to made things hard at times. He managed an awkward conversation and unable to climb down, it had clung to
drank a lot, and occasionally hit his stu- reached a sort of reconciliation. Despite the branches, exhausted, and grown
dents. But by the time I was growing our differences, looking at my emaci- weaker and weaker until it died. I sat
up he’d mellowed significantly. He’d get ated father I did feel a connection, a there on the porch, gazing up at the tree,
depressed and out of sorts sometimes, bond between us. with these scenarios running through
and drink too much (something my Even now, I can relive the shared my mind. Thinking of that little white
mother often complained about), but I puzzlement of that summer day when kitten clinging on for dear life with its
don’t recall any unpleasant experiences we rode together on his bike to the beach tiny claws, then shrivelled up and dead.
in our home. at Koroen to abandon a striped cat, a The experience taught me a vivid
Objectively speaking, I think my fa- cat that totally got the better of us. I can lesson: going down is much harder than
ther was an excellent teacher. When he recall the sound of the waves, the scent going up. To generalize from this, you
died, I was surprised at how many of of the wind whistling through the stand might say that results overwhelm causes
his former students came to pay their of pines. It’s the accumulation of in- and neutralize them. In some cases, a
respects. They seemed to have a great significant things like this that has made cat is killed in the process; in other cases,
deal of affection for him. Many of them me the person I am. a human being.
had become doctors, and they took very
good care of him as he battled cancer have one more memory from child- t any rate, there’s really only one
and diabetes.
My mother was apparently an out-
I hood that involves a cat. I included
this episode in one of my novels but
A thing that I wanted to get across
here. A single, obvious fact:
standing teacher in her own right, and would like to touch on it again here, as I am the ordinary son of an ordinary
even after she had me and became a something that actually happened. man. Which is pretty self-evident, I know.
full-time housewife many of her former We had a little white kitten. I don’t But, as I started to unearth that fact, it
pupils would stop by the house. For recall how we came to have it, because became clear to me that everything that
some reason, though, I never felt that I back then we always had cats coming had happened in my father’s life and in
was cut out to be a teacher. and going in our home. But I do recall my life was accidental. We live our lives
how pretty this kitten’s fur was, how this way: viewing things that came about
s I grew up and formed my own cute it was. through accident and happenstance as
A personality, the psychological dis-
cord between me and my father became
One evening, as I sat on the porch,
this cat suddenly raced straight up into
the sole possible reality.
To put it another way, imagine rain-
more obvious. Both of us were unbend- the tall, beautiful pine tree in our gar- drops falling on a broad stretch of land.
ing, and, when it came to not express- den. Almost as if it wanted to show off Each one of us is a nameless raindrop
ing our thoughts directly, we were two to me how brave and agile it was. I among countless drops. A discrete, in-
of a kind. For better or for worse. couldn’t believe how nimbly it scampered dividual drop, for sure, but one that’s
After I got married and started work- up the trunk and disappeared into the entirely replaceable. Still, that solitary
ing, my father and I grew even more upper branches. After a while, the kit- raindrop has its own emotions, its own
estranged. And when I became a full- ten started to meow pitifully, as though history, its own duty to carry on that
time writer our relationship got so con- it were begging for help. It had had no history. Even if it loses its individual
voluted that in the end we cut off nearly trouble climbing up so high, but it seemed integrity and is absorbed into a collec-
all contact. We didn’t see each other terrified of climbing back down. tive something. Or maybe precisely be-
for more than twenty years, and spoke I stood at the base of the tree look- cause it’s absorbed into a larger, collec-
only when it was absolutely necessary. ing up, but couldn’t see the cat. I could tive entity.
My father and I were born into differ- only hear its faint cry. I went to get my Occasionally, my mind takes me back
ent ages and environments, and our father and told him what had happened, to that looming pine tree in the garden
ways of thinking and viewing the world hoping that he could figure out a way of our house in Shukugawa. To thoughts
were miles apart. If at a certain point to rescue the kitten. But there was noth- of that little kitten, still clinging to a
I’d attempted to rebuild our relation- ing he could do; it was too high up for branch, its body turning to bleached
ship, things might have gone in another a ladder to be of any use. The kitten bones. And I think of death, and how
direction, but I was too focussed on kept meowing for help, as the sun began very difficult it is to climb straight down
what I wanted to do to make the effort. to set. Darkness finally enveloped the to the ground, so far below you that it
My father and I finally talked face pine tree. makes your head spin. ♦
to face shortly before he died. I was al- I don’t know what happened to that (Translated, from the Japanese,
most sixty, my father ninety. He was in little kitten. The next morning when I by Philip Gabriel.)

24 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019

 dating app? It’s, like, you earn a point
SHOUTS & MURMURS every time you match with a person,
and when you get enough points it re-
minds you when to water your plants.
But it lets you see new guys only on
days when you haven’t watered your
succulents, I think. I tried to get my
single friend Eileen to let me swipe as
her the other day, but I accidentally
turned her into a monstera plant. And
I’ll never remember to water her. I’d
forget my head if it weren’t for Seth.
Sorry, Eileen!
What’s the name of that other app—
the one where if someone doesn’t re-
spond to your message a freelance con-
tract killer goes to his house and kills
him for you? I forget the name, but,
like, thank you, gig economy, am I
right? LOL.
Really, don’t listen to me. I’m such
a boring old coupled-up person—
I don’t know anything. In my day, an
app meant a bloomin’ onion. Just kid-
ding. Actually, Domino’s does have that
pizza-delivery-slash-dating app now,
right? You swipe and then, if there’s
someone nearby who wants to date
you, the person shows up within thirty
minutes or your pizza is free.
It almost sounds kind of fun. Like
a game. If you wanted, I could swipe

ARE YOU ON THE APPS?

for you for a while, just for fun. I mean,
thank God I’m not on the apps, but it
would be fun for, like, a day.
BY HALLIE CANTOR Are you on that one where you put
your name, age, credit-card number,
o how’s dating going? Are you on convenient. But I wouldn’t know—I’ve whatever on your profile and it matches
S all the apps? There are so many
now. I know, it’s crazy!
been with Seth for seven years, and we
share a toothbrush!
you with other users who have bought
the same paper towels and other house-
Are you on the app where girls have I also heard that millennials aren’t hold goods? And then you get the paper
to send the initial message, and then having sex as much. Like, kids don’t towels, too. It’s sort of a dating app
guys are only allowed to choose from “hook up” anymore—now they just do meets, well, a Web site where you buy
twenty preapproved words for the first this thing where they lie down and paper towels. But you save money by
hour? That way they can’t say any- kind of mash their elbows and legs to- getting them every week. Oh, my gosh,
thing overtly sexual or offensive until gether in an intertwined position and do you belong to Costco? It’s made
after you’ve spent an hour talking to stay like that. Like eagle pose in yoga, our lives a million times easier. Some-
them. My friend Amanda met her but between two bodies? I think it times I look at Seth’s body in bed and
boyfriend on it. started with the Amish. I feel like it’s my body and I can’t tell
I get it—it’s tough out there. Dating It ’s so funny—yesterday, Seth the difference. Ha ha ha. I’m so glad
seems so different now from the way thought I said “Sex?” and he got all ex- I’m not single anymore! Last week, I
it was when I was doing it. I was just cited, but I was actually saying “Seth?” came home and heard him crying from
reading somewhere that young people because I was going to say, “Seth? Next the driveway, so I drove around the
don’t even go on real dates anymore. time you dock the robot vacuum, can block a few times so I could keep lis-
They just “slide” into one another’s you make sure it actually docks? Be- tening to my podcast instead of com-
LUCI GUTIÉRREZ

Blue Apron accounts, and if you “like” cause I went to use it and it hadn’t forting him! Fun.
the same recipes as someone else then been properly charged, so I couldn’t. But anyway. Who needs dating,
that person gets delivered to your house Thanks, sweetie.” you know? There’s so much good TV
with your next meal-prep box. It sounds Oh! Have you heard about the plant right now. 
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019 25
 ingly inconceivable set pieces, orga-
ANNALS OF SHOW BUSINESS nized around the theme of how sus-
ceptible we are to hidden influence. He

BELIEF SYSTEM
gave demonstrations of subliminal per-
suasion, lie detection, instant trance in-
duction, and mass hypnosis, as well as
How Derren Brown remade mind reading for a skeptical age. manipulation of his own mental state
to control his response to pain. To show
BY ADAM GREEN that participants were selected at ran-
dom, he hurled a stuffed monkey into
the auditorium, and whoever caught it
would come up onstage. (You can see
a later performance of the show on
YouTube.)
Early on, a woman in the audience
was entrusted with a locked briefcase.
For the finale, Brown held up a large
envelope, which he said contained “a
prediction of the future, about the de-
cisions that you’re going to make”;
clipped the envelope to a metal stand
at center stage, where it remained in
full view; and summoned the woman
back up. He then tossed that day’s edi-
tions of ten assorted newspapers into
the audience and asked her to pick
someone who’d caught one of them.
Next, he gave her and other audience
members a series of choices, through
which, eventually, page 14 of the Daily
Mail was torn into dozens of pieces,
and the woman selected a single word
on one of them: “influences.”
Pointing out the number of papers
he’d tossed out and the approximate
number of words in each one, Brown
said, “That’s 1.6 million different words
that you had to choose from in this
room, and you choose the word ‘in-
fluences.’ Is that fair?”
n 2005, when I was visiting London, ent Garden. A slim, pale, vulpine man “Yeah,” she said.
I a magician friend told me that I had
to see the English mentalist Derren
in his mid-thirties, with well-tended
light-brown hair and a goatee, came
“No!” Brown said in a stage whisper.
“No, it’s not. It is not fair. It is inevitable.”
Brown, who was appearing in the West onstage, dressed in a trim black suit He went over to the stand where
End, in his one-man show “Something and a black shirt. He looked more like he’d left the envelope, opened it, and,
Wicked This Way Comes.” Brown had the creative director of an advertising giving the woman one end to hold, un-
become famous for an astonishing abil- agency than like a mind reader, and furled a long roll of paper that read, in
ity to seemingly read the thoughts of seemed to take neither his spectators large letters, “Influences.” The audience
his fellow-humans and to control their nor himself too seriously: when some- gasped and started cheering.
actions. In a series of TV specials, he’d one’s cell phone went off, he gave a look Brown held up a hand for quiet, say-
reinvented a waning branch of magic— of mock alarm and said, “Don’t answer ing, “Hold on a second. You’re all in-
mentalism—for a new generation, fram- it. It’s very bad news.” Beneath his ge- telligent people. You’re going to be hav-
ing his feats as evidence not of psychic nially impudent manner lurked a sug- ing a drink afterwards, or driving home,
powers but of a cutting-edge knowledge gestion of preternatural self-assurance or up at four in the morning trying to
of the mind and how to manipulate it. and even menace. work out how that worked. And you’ll
A few days later, I was sitting in a Brown spent the next two and a half think, Maybe it didn’t make any differ-
capacity audience at a theatre in Cov- hours performing a series of increas- ence what she chose. Maybe all that
happened is magic boy here switches a
Brown maintains that he neither has nor believes in any kind of psychic power. bit of paper at the end, hopes she goes
26 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019 ILLUSTRATION BY PETRA ERIKSSON
for that word, or something. It’s a com­ ertoire and generates from it an esca­ he was just treating me to an extra layer
fortable thing to think. But here’s the lating series of climaxes that forces you of deception—what magicians call a
point: if that is what happened and it to rethink everything you’ve just seen. “convincer.” Fourteen years later, I’m
didn’t matter what paper you chose or Rather than diminish the mystery, still not sure.
what page, and all that was rubbish, Brown’s revelation of his ostensible meth­
then that word ‘influences’ wouldn’t re­ ods reasserts and deepens it. He has al­ met up with Brown again for break­
ally be on page 14 of today’s Daily Mail.
And it is.”
ways maintained that he neither has nor
believes in any kind of psychic power,
I fast one summer morning last year
in Southend­on­Sea, a down­at­the­
Brown unlocked the woman’s brief­ and his emphasis on manipulating peo­ heels resort town about forty miles east
case and removed an envelope contain­ ple with techniques from the outer fron­ of London. Southend’s points of inter­
ing page 14 of that day’s Mail, with the tiers of psychology gives an audience too est include the world’s longest pleasure
word “influences” circled in red. The sophisticated to believe in the paranor­ pier and the Cliffs Pavilion, a sixteen­
audience roared and leaped to its feet. mal something scientific­seeming to hundred­seat theatre where Brown was
“Thank you all for coming—good night!” hold on to. Often, the explanations end performing the final shows of a tour of
Brown said, taking a bow and starting up being even more perplexing than the the U.K. and Ireland. I was waiting for
to walk offstage. feat itself. Whether one believes that him to join me on the patio of his hotel,
But then he paused and again sig­ he’s actually doing what he claims or above an esplanade with a view of the
nalled for quiet. He explained that he that he’s simply cloaking sleight of hand Thames Estuary, which, at low tide,
had been exposing us to secret mes­ and the like in brilliant theatrics, he seems amounted to a vast expanse of muck
sages and that it thus made no differ­ to be drawing back the curtain and offer­ dotted with grounded boats. As I sipped
ence who got selected for the final ing a glimpse into some uncanny realm. a weak espresso, I noticed a lanky man
trick—anyone in the audience would As Brown once told me, “People feel with graying hair pass by, do a double
have picked that word on that page of that they understand something about take, and stop. “Adam?” he said, in a
that paper. “Let me tell you what I’ve what I’m up to but not everything, which mildly disreputable English accent. “I
been doing,” he said. “We’ve been film­ satisfies their rational side but leaves don’t believe this. Good God, what are
ing little bits from the wings, little clips room for something more playful and you doing here?”
of the show.” subterranean.” I had no idea who he was, and as my
There followed a montage of mo­ In the U.K., Brown has been a house­ mind frantically tried to place him I
ments from that night, in which Brown hold name for nearly two decades, stammered something about being there
gave verbal suggestions, sometimes via thanks to dozens of TV shows, several for work, adding hopefully, “And you?”
subtle mispronunciations or non se­ stage shows, two Olivier Awards, and “Well, I’m here for work, too, aren’t
quiturs, that we had apparently ab­ a number of best­selling books. Despite I?” he said, hovering over my table. “I’m
sorbed subconsciously. In one clip, various forays into the U.S., including sure you’ve heard that Trump is com­
Brown set up a stunt that involved ham­ an Off Broadway run and Netflix spe­ ing to Southend as part of his visit—
mering a nail into his nasal cavity, say­ cials, he remains relatively unknown he’s being made an earl, in recompense
ing, “Do you hammer daily a number here, but now he is making his Broad­ for all he’s done—and I’m here cover­
14 mail into your head?” way début, with the show “Secret.” One ing it for the New York Times.”
In another, he explained, “Because of the producers, Thomas Kail, who di­ I stood up to discourage him from
of the sorts of unconscious behaviors rected “Hamilton,” told me that he’d taking a seat, and he went on, “How
that we unconsciously choose daily”— been obsessed with Brown for years. did you make out with all those peo­
and here he turned to the camera and “He just kind of lifts you up and takes ple, after I left you that night in New
winked—“male subjects tend to be . . .” you away, showing you things that York? Did you go out for more drinks?”
And in another he said, “Pain is a should not be, and yet they are,” Kail Sensing my confusion, he gave me a
subjective thing, like when you’re young said. “He tells you that it’s not real, and wounded look and said, “Don’t tell me
and you tear around influences, and you then he does it.” you don’t remember me.”
cut yourself, and you don’t really know Kail’s words reminded me of some­ Just then, Brown emerged from the
that you’re cut till you look down and thing that had happened after the Lon­ hotel, waved, and walked over to the
see the blood.” don show I saw. I’d been invited to say table. This seemed to offend the man.
“This is what you’ve been hearing hello to Brown in his dressing room. “Excuse me,” he snapped. “We’re hav­
without realizing you’ve been hearing Though clearly exhausted, he was court­ ing a private conversation, and it’s ex­
it,” Brown announced triumphantly. ly and chatty, but, as we talked, he sat tremely rude of you to listen in.”
“That’s why it was the Daily Mail, that’s down and started picking tiny shards “No, no, it’s O.K.—he’s a friend,” I
why it was page 14, and that’s why it of glass out of the sole of his foot. Ear­ explained. “He’s supposed to meet me,
was the word ‘influences.’ Thank you lier, he’d done a routine that involved and—”
for your attention, thank you for com­ walking barefoot across a carpet of jag­ At this point, Brown and the man
ing out tonight, and thank you for play­ ged broken bottles without bleeding or looked at each other and started laugh­
ing. Good night!” feeling pain. As I stood in his dressing ing. Brown introduced me to Michael
This is what Brown does best: he room, I wondered whether these glass Vine, who has been his manager since
takes an effect from the mentalism rep­ splinters were really from earlier or if the start of his TV career. Vine left, and
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019 27
we sat down to order breakfast. I told and he speaks earnestly but with an un- ticularly if you’re a magician, because
Brown that I felt like one of the unwit- dercurrent of amusement—at himself you’re doing something fundamentally
ting participants in his TV specials, and others—that bubbles up to flavor dishonest.”
who are often put through bewilder- the sincerity. The theme of Brown’s show is that
ing, elaborately constructed scenarios— When our food arrived, Brown, al- the stories we tell ourselves about who
part social-science experiment, part con though he has eaten a light bulb on- we are and how the world works dis-
game—designed to make them do stage, found his poached egg and smoked tort our perception of reality. As a per-
things they ordinarily wouldn’t, whether haddock suspect. “This tastes very fishy,” son, Brown may lament that human
good (take a bullet for another person) he said. “I’m not good enough with tendency; as a performer, he relies on it.
or bad (push a man off a roof ). He fish to know, but it tastes—how to put To be distracted from what a magician
laughed and said, “It’s a classic hypnotic this?—very ‘of the sea.’ Is that a good is really up to, an audience has to be-
technique—you induce confusion. You thing?” For the next ten minutes or so, lieve the story that’s unfolding. Brown’s
were so baffled by Michael that you gift is for making that surface story be-
were just trying to make sense of it, try- lievable and compelling. Though he’s
ing to find something that you could not the first mentalist to hint at scien-
hang on to. And that makes you very tific explanations for his abilities, what
responsive and suggestible.” he has done better than anyone else in
When Brown puts audience mem- his profession is to turn the purported
bers into a trance, he often starts by in- method into an observable drama. “I re-
troducing himself and then withdraw- member that, whenever I saw mental-
ing his hand when they reach out to ism, it was always about ‘O.K., think of
shake it. “They’re coming up onstage a word and write it down.’ Now I write
and they’re already a little bit baffled, Brown alternated between forging ahead something down and turn it around.
looking for direction from me, and then with his breakfast—“It’s fine, it’s fine”— ‘This is the word you were thinking of.’
when you drop something that’s very and pausing, a look of skepticism on his Bam! End of the trick,” Brown said.
automatic, like a handshake, it throws face. “I could just ask them to take it “The entire focus was on the revelation,
them into disarray,” he explained. “When back, but that’s a real insult, isn’t it?” he and it always struck me as misplaced,
I interrupt the handshake, put my hand said. “This is a very English situation.” because that’s not the interesting part
on their foreheads, and say, ‘Look at In the opening monologue of Brown’s of the trick. The interesting part of the
me. Sleep. All the way down, all the New York show, he says, “My story was trick is, What are you doing to read that
way deep,’ they just go with it.” that I had a secret, a big, dark secret I person’s mind? So my contribution was
Brown is now forty-eight. Since the couldn’t possibly tell anyone. . . . I pre- to put more weight on the process, be-
first time I saw him, he has got rid of sumed that I was gay when I was fifteen, cause—dramatically and theatrically and
his goatee and, after years of progres- but I didn’t come out till I was thirty- intellectually and everything-ally—that’s
sively more indisputable hair loss, has one. Which is a very long time to be what’s interesting.”
shaved his head. “It’s such a relief not avoiding the subject of sex. No one must
having to labor over the intricacies and ever know. Which is silly, because when nlike most magicians, Brown wasn’t
subterfuges of styling thinning hair and
just say fuck it,” he told me. Brown’s
you do eventually come out you real-
ize no one gives a fuck. Truly, nobody
U obsessed with the craft and its nice-
ties as a child. His parents gave him a
winsome air and even keel can make cares. Which is a little disappointing, magic set one Christmas, but he can’t
him hard to read, though he has a something of an anticlimax. All the recall whether he ever performed any
distinctive tell—a kind of sudden myo- things about ourselves that we think tricks. Born in 1971, Brown grew up in
clonic twitch of his head that he refers are so terrible—to other people, it’s just Purley, a town in South London, which
to as “my nod.” It’s the last vestige of a a bit more information about us. We’d he describes as “the epitome of mid-
childhood plagued by involuntary tics, worry a lot less about what other peo- dle-class suburbia.” Brown’s mother, a
he told me, and indicates that he is feel- ple think of us if we realized how sel- former wedding-dress model, worked
ing self-conscious, stressed, or anxious. dom they do.” as a medical receptionist. She doted on
Off the clock, Brown neither reads Brown actually came out a bit later— her son. Brown had cooler relations with
anyone’s mind nor, despite being a at the age of thirty-five to his friends his father, who was a swimming and
world-class card magician, performs and family, and publicly a year after. water-polo coach at the local second-
tricks of any kind. He finds it embar- Since then, he has come to understand ary school. “He was sporty and manly
rassing. He seems milder than his suave the toll of having kept that particular and didn’t have a lot of education,”
and commanding stage self—charm- secret for so long. “Before coming out, Brown said. “While I was bright and
ing and scrupulously polite, with no you work—unconsciously, but you precocious and not sporty and liked to
aura of mystery or danger. Though work—to sort of divert attention from play dress-up with my nan’s scarves.”
watchful, he exudes no sense that he’s those parts of yourself that you don’t At school, Brown got high grades
scrutinizing your every unconscious ac- want to expose,” he told me. “And even without studying much, but he was ill
tion or trying to worm his way inside when all that’s sorted out it doesn’t take at ease among his peers and was some-
your head. He is articulate and erudite, much to bring it all rushing back, par- times picked on. He spent most of his
28 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019
time alone, obsessively drawing, devis- to reconcile himself to his sexuality, “I was shaking, absolutely petrified,”
ing Lego creations, or talking to an Brown gravitated toward a group called she said. “I kept thinking, Oh, no. What
imaginary friend, Hublar, for whom Living Waters, which espoused a kind if it doesn’t work? But he was able to
his mother would set a place at the of gay conversion therapy based on put people under in a split second, and
dinner table. “Derren was a compli- Scripture, prayer, and a belief that male everybody loved it. There was a woman
cated boy but just so lovely,” his mother same-sex attraction stemmed from who heckled him, but he handled it
told me. “We were worried about him, overcompensating for deficits in the fa- with aplomb.” Another show was dis-
because we thought he was quite lonely.” ther-son relationship. But, he said, “at rupted by a group of students from the
Though neither of Brown’s parents some point I sort of realized, Nobody’s university’s Christian Union. “They were
was religious, at the age of six he asked standing up there saying it’s worked for casting demons out, exorcising the
them if he could attend Bible classes. them—not really.” process that was happening onstage,”
Later, he started going to church on During his first year at university, Brown said. “And that began—or, at
his own, growing increasingly fervent. Brown saw a performance on campus least, fed into—a process of starting to
“I would be the insufferable one who by a hypnotist named Martin Taylor. question all of that, too.” After some
would sit you down and give you all In one routine, Taylor got a student to reading and thought, he found that his
the proof of why God exists—a neat forget the number seven; when the stu- faith “started to fall apart and seem a
system that all makes sense,” he said. dent counted his fingers, he couldn’t bit silly,” he said. “I became very athe-
“My relationship with my father wasn’t understand why he had eleven. “You’re ist, with all the fervor of the righteous.”
great, and there’s God as this sort of laughing out of amazement and disbe- If Brown had a new religion, it was
father figure and the whole lovely net- lief and kind of empathizing with the getting up in front of a crowd. “It would
work of certainties that comes with it. confusion,” Brown said. “Almost right make me look and feel impressive, which
And, of course, as I got older there was away I decided, I’m going to do that.” I adored, and give me a feeling of control,”
the sexuality thing that I was hiding He started amassing books on hyp- he said. Alongside his study of hypno-
and not facing and hoping might go notism and practicing on fellow-stu- tism, Brown began to teach himself
away. Having a big thing you can put dents. Soon he was performing on cam- sleight-of-hand tricks with cards, and
up in front of you and say ‘That’s me’ pus and at a nearby theatre. His mother soon he was earning extra money by
is a very handy tool.” recalled seeing one of those early shows. giving walk-around performances at
At school, Brown fell in with a group
of kids known variously as the Music-
School Gang and the Poof Gang. “You
were ostracized if you were part of that
nerdy group,” he said. By the end of
high school, other students had be-
come more accepting, and Brown in-
gratiated himself with witty banter and
by drawing caricatures of teachers. “It
was all a bit much, born out of a des-
perate urge to impress, but the relief
that I felt of not being trapped in that
little group was immense,” he said.
Brown scored among the highest grades
in the country on his English, Politics,
and German A-levels, despite not read-
ing any of the assigned books. “I just
got quite good at making it sound like
I knew what I was talking about in es-
© John Divola

says,” he said.
After a gap year in Germany, Brown
enrolled at the University of Bristol, to
study German and law, and he took up
John Divola, portfolio with five dye-transfer prints, 1983-86, printed 1987. Estimate $8,000 to $12,000.
ballroom dancing, which he had dis-
covered abroad. (“It was an oddly cool
thing in Bavaria.”) He competed on the Classic & Contemporary Photographs
collegiate Latin dance circuit, winning October 17
several trophies for cha-cha before re-
Daile Kaplan • [email protected]
tiring. “The sad thing is, it kills your
desire and ability to dance in any other Preview: October 12, 14, 15 & 16, 12-5; October 17, 10-12
situation,” he said. “I dread weddings.” 104 East 25th St, New York, NY 10010 • tel 212 254 4710 • SWANNGALLERIES.COM
Still attending church and struggling
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019 29
 Brown seemed completely uninterested,
but they persuaded him to come to
London for a meeting.

entalism differs from other magic

M in a significant way: no one be-
lieves that it’s truly possible to overcome
the laws of physics and, say, make a leop-
ard vanish from a cage, but lots of peo-
ple believe that it’s possible to divine
someone’s thoughts, to see the future,
or to communicate with the dead. Hun-
ger for proof of a world beyond our own
fuelled the rise of spiritualism in the
mid-nineteenth century, and then the
birth of mentalism as a form of popu-
lar entertainment. Early performers,
such as the Fox sisters and the Daven-
port brothers, sought to pass themselves
off as genuinely psychic, but, among the
famous stage mentalists of the twenti-
eth century, any claim to supernatural
“Go on without me—I’ll never make it.” powers was generally soft-pedalled.
Joseph Dunninger worked to debunk
• • fake mediums; Chan Canasta and David
Berglas were both coy about whether
their “experiments” were genuine or
local restaurants. As graduation ap- pearance hadn’t kept pace. He cut his mere trickery; the Amazing Kreskin
proached, he nervously told his par- hair, updated his wardrobe, and found calls himself simply “an entertainer.”
ents that, rather than become a law- that he was able to double his fees. He After Kreskin’s heyday, in the nine-
yer, as had been the plan, he wanted spent most of his twenties working teen-seventies, mentalism’s popularity
to be a magician. “We said, ‘Fine— the tables at a Turkish restaurant in went into decline, and by the mid-nine-
whatever makes you happy,’” Brown’s Bristol, creating a signature style that ties Vine thought that it was overdue
mother told me. “I think he was quite blended urbane cheekiness with seri- for a comeback. He and O’Connor had
surprised.” ous intention. Whether revealing that noted how the American illusionist
After graduating, Brown stayed in a man’s watch had vanished off his wrist David Blaine had made magic feel
Bristol. He went on housing assistance, and wound up in Brown’s sock, caus- more contemporary and cool. O’Con-
moved into a tiny apartment, and eked ing a woman’s wedding ring to float nor went to Channel 4’s head of en-
out a living performing at restaurants. above his outstretched hand, or mak- tertainment and asked, “If I could find
He claims never to have had any real ing a playing card dissolve into a shower you a mind -reading David Blaine,
ambition, but his mother remembers of rose petals, Brown created effects would you buy that?”
him telling her, “Mum, someday I’m that engaged his spectators emotion- Vine and O’Connor got the go-
going to be a millionaire.” His focus ally and put more emphasis on their ahead, but finding the right mind reader
and intensity bordered on the fanati- reactions than on his abilities. proved to be a challenge, and they spent
cal. Brown’s friend Peter Clifford, a Over time, Brown found himself two years auditioning candidates from
magician and an actor, remembers more and more drawn to mentalism all over the world. The only one who
spending nine hours with him work- and started developing his credo of let- felt right was Andy Nyman, an actor
ing on various methods for one card ting audiences see what the process of who supported himself between gigs
routine. “We’d work on something mind reading looked like in action. He by performing mentalism; he turned
until I thought we’d exhausted every got his break in 1999, when he received them down, because he wanted to focus
possibility,” Clifford told me. “And a call from Michael Vine—the man on his acting career, but he agreed to
Derren would then go off and refine who fooled me at the hotel in South- work on the show behind the scenes if
it even more.” end. A magician and juggler turned tal- it ever went into production. Vine and
Early on, Brown affected a showy ent manager, Vine had formed a TV O’Connor were about to give up when
persona: long hair, blousy white shirts production company with an actor and someone Vine managed suggested that
with billowing sleeves, leather vests, vel- comedian, Andrew O’Connor. The pair they consider his friend Derren Brown.
vet pants tucked into knee-high boots, told Brown that they were looking for When Brown came to London to
and Byronic capes. As his act grew in a mentalist to front a new show on meet Vine and O’Connor, they took
sophistication, he realized that his ap- Channel 4. O’Connor remembers that him to dinner, and, once the check had
30 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019
been paid, he said, “Would you like me the meeting and influence the people money. (He’s at pains to stress that he
to show you something?” After light- so that we can get the contract?’ ” buys only animals that died of natural
ing a cigarette, he spread out a deck of As his act has evolved, Brown has causes.) He used to be a regular pres-
cards and asked O’Connor to remem- gradually tempered his claims about psy- ence at auctions, becoming well known
ber one of them and to repeat it over chological manipulation. These days, he in taxidermy circles, though now he
and over in his head. First, Brown named says that he uses a combination of “magic, mostly fields e-mail inquiries from deal-
the card O’Connor was thinking of; suggestion, psychology, misdirection, ers. When I first walked in, a giraffe
next, he demonstrated that the card and showmanship,” not to mention “the (from the neck up), a swan, and the
O’Connor had chosen wasn’t in the power of the well-placed lie.” But he still mounted head of a unicorn seemed to
deck; finally, starting to cough, he re- regularly has to disabuse people of their give me the eye. A pair of stuffed dogs
vealed that the cigarette in his mouth belief in him. “There’s plenty of people and a dog bed off to one side struck me
had transformed into O’Connor’s card, that think that I’m genuinely psychic as a nice touch, but then two dogs who
rolled up and smoldering. “It was like and just won’t admit to it,” he told me. were very much alive—Doodle, a bea-
the ground opened up and swallowed He cited a moment after a show in which gle mix, and Humbug, a Tibetan ter-
me,” O’Connor recalled. he announced that there was no such rier—ran in. A parrot flew into the room,
“Mind Control,” the show that thing as spirit mediums and then went past a taxidermied piglet with wings
Nyman, O’Connor, and Brown de- on to tell people impossibly specific de- that was suspended from the ceiling,
vised—they have since collaborated on tails about their dead relatives, all the and alighted on Brown’s outstretched
nearly all of the stage shows—débuted while assuring them that the whole thing finger. This was evidently an everyday
at the end of 2000 and quickly gener- was bullshit. “I went out to sign auto- domestic scene, but the moment had a
ated buzz. Brown’s approach caught a graphs at the stage door, and a girl said, disorienting, shivery vibe that felt very
moment: neuroscience, “mind-hacking,” ‘My grandmother died recently. Can you Derren Brown. He told me, “I’ve al-
evolutionary psychology, and neurolin- put me in touch with her?’ And I said, ways been interested in creating things
guistic programming were in the air. ‘Well, you realize what I was doing wasn’t that look and feel kind of real, and I
His explanations for his feats allowed real. I wasn’t actually doing it.’ And she love the idea of people not being quite
him to slip under the radar of viewers’ said, ‘Oh, no, no, no, I know you’re not sure how real what they’re seeing is.”
skepticism, tapping into technocratic really doing it, but are you able to put At home, Brown likes to relax by
belief systems in order to produce a me in touch with her?’” painting (he’s had a number of gallery
deeper credulity. “Mind Control” and shows) and cooking elaborate meals. On
its sequels borrowed the fragmented rown lives in a four-story town house tour, he spends his days wandering with
structure of Blaine’s street-magic spe-
cials, following Brown around as he
B in London, with his boyfriend of
almost four years. He asked me not to
a Leica through whatever city he’s in,
shooting street scenes, or in cafés writ-
performed such feats as subliminally identify the exact neighborhood, or his ing. He published his first book for the
influencing a betting-window cashier boyfriend’s name and occupation, be- conjuring community in 2000, and a
at a dog track to pay out on a losing cause of stalkers. Early in Brown’s ca- second the next year. He has also pub-
ticket and convincing dancers in a night reer, a woman became convinced that lished three books for the general pub-
club that they’d been touched by invis- she was married to him and turned up lic: a look at the quirks of human cog-
ible hands. His breakthrough came with nition; a memoir built around the card
his 2003 special, “Russian Roulette,” routines he performed in his pre-fame
during which he performed the game days; and “Happy: Why More or Less
of chance on live TV, generating head- Everything Is Absolutely Fine,” a sur-
lines and controversy while earning a vey of Stoic philosophy and how it ap-
reputation as a kind of bad boy with plies to the way we live now. By Brown’s
extraordinary powers. reckoning, writing “Happy” helped him
O’Connor recalled, “Michael Vine move through his own life with more
would literally get calls from people equanimity, and many of the tenets of
going, ‘We are pitching to a govern- Stoicism—that we are disturbed not by
ment, we’re bidding for a billion-dol- one afternoon at his mother’s door to what happens to us but by how we react
lar contract, and if Derren will come to complain that he was an abusive hus- to what happens, that we should let go
the meeting and use his techniques, if band. Not long before, Brown had come of the things we can’t control—have
we’re successful, we’ll give him a mil- out to his mother. “It was a very con- found their way into his performances.
lion dollars.’” Vine would try to explain fusing day for my mum,” he told me. Brown is starting to plan a follow-up
that it didn’t really work like that, just His house is decorated with leather to “Happy,” which he thinks may focus
as a magician who puts a woman in a club chairs, paintings, photographs, mar- on the tension between our relation-
box stage left and has her walk out of ble busts, magic memorabilia, book- ships with other people and our need
a box stage right may not actually be shelves with secret doors built into them, for self-realization. Whether listening
able to render air travel obsolete. O’Con- and a large and lovingly curated collec- to a partner vent frustrations or per-
nor went on, “They’d go, ‘Oh, of course tion of taxidermy. Brown has been a forming mentalism for a theatre full of
that’s silly, but can he please come to collector since he first started making strangers, the secret, he believes, is to
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019 31
take the focus off ourselves and make plained. “And sometimes based on prob- On the recording of Brown’s session,
the moment about the other person or abilities, or sometimes just general Chrissy said that she wasn’t a fortune-
people. “Emerson made the comment statements that could apply to almost teller—“They don’t exist”—and ex-
‘My giant goes with me wherever I go,’” anybody.” The technique works because plained her method as being like a radio
Brown said. “I really love that image of of so-called confirmation bias, our ten- with bad reception: “I give you every-
this sort of big lumbering giant stand- dency to latch on to evidence that sup- thing that I get, but it’s like a puzzle
ing behind us. Not just because I have ports our beliefs while ignoring evi- that we both put together between us.”
one myself but because everyone has dence that contradicts them. Brown no After leading Brown through a guided
one. And it is the things that we feel longer does cold reading and, in his meditation, she began her reading,
separate us, our own insecurities, that shows, has ridiculed psychics and dis- which involved tarot cards, angel cards,
generally turn out to be the things that credited their techniques. Despite hav- chakra cards, and messages from the
connect us, because they’re the very ing studied these techniques extensively, spirit world. She told Brown that she
things that we share. Which is how a he mentioned to me that he had never saw two past lives, one in which he was
psychic can so easily sound like she gone to see a psychic himself. But when a warrior in ancient China and one,
knows about you, or an author can es- I told Brown, while we were in South- more recently, in which he was an art-
sentially be writing about himself, but end, about a few I’d consulted over the ist. “You might not have been fully
it feels as if he’s writing about you.” years, he became curious. We searched fulfilled as an artist,” she said. “But you
When I had dinner with Brown and online and settled on a clairvoyant was in France, and you was an amaz-
his boyfriend at an outdoor table at their named Chrissy Bee, who does readings ing artist. And what they showed me
local Italian restaurant on a warm sum- and Reiki healings out of her house. was you had one of those cravat things
mer night, the conversation turned again Chrissy had a kind, maternal face on. So I don’t know what year it was,
to relationships and the consolation of and a head of tight brown curls, which, but it was very artistic, very Noël Cow-
philosophy. Brown told me that when along with acid-washed mom jeans and ard-ish. Does that make sense?”
a former partner broke up with him in a floral-print short-sleeved shirt, gave “Yeah, absolutely.”
2014, after seven years together, he had her the appearance of a seaside pen- “So I don’t know what you do for a
been in the middle of writing “Happy” sioner, though her bare feet and a pair living, but are you working with that
and was steeped in the Stoic mind-set, of esoteric-looking amulets around her creative energy this lifetime? Are you
which seemed to cushion the blow. “The neck alluded to her profession. She expressing it?”
breakup was relatively amicable and smiled at Brown and said, “You must “Yeah, I am.”
light and easy,” Brown said. “And I re- be Darren.” “Right. So that’s where they want
member feeling quite proud that I’d “It’s Derren, actually,” Brown said. you to go. So that’s that.”
dealt with it all extremely well.” A few “With an ‘e.’” A little later, she said, “Someone’s
months later, though, when a guy he’d The name seemed to mean nothing just touched me on the head, and I’ve
met on Tinder broke things off, Brown, to Chrissy, who ushered us inside and got a gentleman here who’s trying to
as he put it, “totally went to pieces.” asked us to take off our shoes so as not connect with you. He’s put a cross up
For a long time, he remained puz- to track in any negative energy. After as well, in blue. Is there anyone in spirit
zled by his reaction. “I fell apart over introducing us to her dog and showing or on the earth plane, please, who is
the little breakup that followed the big currently in your life that’s either to do
breakup, totally out of proportion to with hospitals or doctors?”
what it was—a decidedly un-Stoic re- “Um, my father.”
sponse,” he said. “But I’ve thought about “Right, so this gentleman will be
it since, and it makes sense. It’s the bit connected with your father on the other
that takes you by surprise when you’ve side. Does your dad not always express
dealt with this thing over here and his feelings? Does he try and white-
put all your attention on that, and then wash over things?”
something else sneaks in from the out- “He’s not well at the moment.”
side.” A thought seemed to occur to “Stiff upper lip sometimes, but he
him, and he added, “Which is kind of us framed photos of its two predeces- doesn’t always open up?”
what I spend my life doing.” sors, which, she told us, “are in spirit “Yeah.”
now,” she led Brown upstairs for his “O.K., well, he needs to. Because he
arly in his career, Brown would as- reading. Earlier, Brown and I had de- needs a lot of healing at the moment.
E tonish members of his audience by
telling them things about themselves
cided that it would seem peculiar for
me to sit in on his reading, so I gave
Has there been any communication
breakdowns around the family? If not
that he couldn’t possibly have known. him a digital recorder and was left to with you lot, with him and his father?”
He did this with a technique called cold wait in the living room with piped-in “No, I think it’s more that he’s not
reading, much used by psychics and New Age music and the July issue of well, and he’s finding it depressing. It’s
mediums. “They throw out statements the magazine Fate & Fortune. Porcelain difficult. But he’s good at always put-
about you, sometimes guesses based on figurines, stuffed dolls, crystals, chalices, ting a happy face on.”
what they observe about you,” he ex- and talismans covered every surface. “Yes, that’s it.”
32 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019
 Exploring a different tack, Chrissy think, isn’t it? It allows me to be more
said, “Right, you like nice things. So myself, and that’s all I ever can be. I’m
this is, like, artistic and everything, in not really into telly.” She sighed. “To
your garden, so to speak. This could me, I’m in the world but not of the
also represent beautifying the home, world, if that makes sense. To me, it’s
like moving, decorating, renovating. Are all the mystical stuff that’s real.”
you doing anything like that? Are you “That there are things more impor-
thinking of doing anything like that? tant than us,” Brown said, speaking in
Or have you recently?” the soothing, measured tone he uses
“Thinking of moving, yes.” when putting someone into a hypnotic

Eat +
“Oh, right, so that’s there as well. trance. Chrissy stood up and grasped
And it’s beauty, it’s beautifying.” Brown’s hand, her eyes glistening. “It’s
After the session was over, we chat- the divine, isn’t it?” she said. “Every-
ted with Chrissy in her living room. thing comes from source, and every-

Drink
She seemed taken with Brown and asked thing goes back to source.”
about his work, which he described as As soon as we were outside, Brown
“sort of mind reading, but from a ma- started analyzing Chrissy’s reading. She

With the
gician’s perspective.” When she found hadn’t been specific enough to have em-
out that he was performing at the Cliffs ployed so-called hot reading (using in-

Best
Pavilion, she was thrilled, having last formation secretly obtained beforehand).
been there to see the late comedian Ken She certainly had been using cold read-
Dodd. “He’s in spirit now, isn’t he? An- ing, but he felt that she sincerely be-

NEW
other one that’s gone,” she said. “So lieved in her abilities. “She did refer to
you’re just doing your magic, then? And moving house and in the same breath
it’s like subliminal hypnosis?” ‘a lot of decoration, a lot of interior
“Yeah, it’s hypnosis and suggestion décor.’ So maybe she was picking up on
and mind reading and so on,” Brown a slightly gay vibe from me,” he said. Restaurants in
explained. “But it’s definitely rooted in “If I was not who I am and had not
stuff that I could stop the video and been a step back from it, I might have
AMERICA at The
point out, ‘See, I’m doing that, and I’m
doing that.’”
gone, ‘Fuck! Amazing!’”
He went on, “What role is she fill- Hot 10
PARTY
Chrissy’s face fell for a moment, but ing? On a basic level, we all like a bit
she pressed on, asking, “So, obviously, of guidance and a bit of advice. But I
you must be interested in the mystical think, more deeply, we all yearn for
side of things, mustn’t you?”
“I’m interested in how it sort of blurs
into other things and other people’s
something that will kind of magically
relieve our sense of isolation, and she’s
giving a lot of what we sort of want
10.19.19
take on it,” Brown said. “And some- from our loved one.” NEW YORK
times you end up at a similar point.” A few days later, he was still think-
“The mind’s an amazing thing, re- ing about Chrissy and her reading. “She Buy Tickets Now at
ally, isn’t it?” Chrissy said. “I personally had an aspiration for something be- BABestWeekendEver.com
believe that consciousness has got noth- yond herself, which is wonderful, isn’t
ing to do with the mind. I mean, I’ve it?” he said. “We all have it. I have it.
been out of my body three times. Un- And my rational, sort of cosmopolitan
fortunately, I haven’t got control over version may give me a snooty feeling
it—it happened involuntary with me. of superiority sometimes over some-
But, with what you do, do you feel that body’s more suburban version, which
the consciousness has nothing to do is just very unpleasant of me. It’s easy
with the mind?” to be amused by, or put in brackets,
“Oh, I think we get a little too caught somebody’s attempts at transcendence
up in the self being this,” Brown said, that are different from our own, but
indicating his body. “And I think actu- we’re all trying to find that thing that’s
ally the self is something that naturally bigger than ourselves. I really liked when
extends into our relationships with peo- she said, ‘I’m in this world but not of
ple and out into the physical world.” this world.’ It’s lovely. I felt really sort
Before we left, Chrissy asked Brown of warm toward her, and you could sort
to pose for a picture with her, and then of imagine people going back and hav-
she said, “I’m so sorry I didn’t know ing a chat. Though a little bit of ecto-
who you are. But that’s good, really, I plasm would have been appreciated.” 
Must be 21+ to attend.
 J essica Lester’s friends persuaded
her to date Matthew Boynton, a
boy in the eleventh grade, by say-
ing, “If you don’t like him, you can al-
ways break up.” He was the grandson of
the sheriff of Spalding County, where
they lived, an hour south of Atlanta, and
his friends were football players and
cheerleaders. Jessica thought that Mat-
thew, who was baby-faced but muscu-
lar, looked rich; he wore Ralph Lauren
boots and collared shirts from Hollister.
Jessica, who was in tenth grade, was less
popular. She wore hand-me-downs and
liked to take nature photographs. Her
parents had abandoned her when she
was three, along with her sister and
brother, and she grew up on a farm with
her mother’s adoptive parents. “I guess
she felt like ‘Matthew could have picked
anybody, and for some reason he picked
me,’” her sister, Dusty, said.
Jessica had pale-green eyes, a melodic A REPORTER AT LARGE
voice, and blond hair that hung down
her back like a slab of wood. In the spring
of 2013, when she was sixteen and had
dated Matthew for a year, she took her
SHOW OF FORCE
grandparents into the kitchen, closed A policeman claimed that his wife had attempted suicide.
the door, and told them, apologizing, When she survived, a troubling story emerged.
that she was pregnant. Jessica’s grand-
parents, who are Baptist, were willing to BY RACHEL AVIV
help her bring up the child, but Jessica
decided to settle down with Matthew,
her first boyfriend. Her aunt Kathy, who
lives on the farm, said, “With Jessica’s
family background, there was probably
just a feeling of ‘Oh, I’ve finally found
someone who loves me.’”
Jessica and Matthew moved into a
house across the street from the sheriff,
Wendell Beam, and his wife. Jessica was
the kind of intuitive mother who pre-
dicts a baby’s danger—a fall, a spilled
drink, a choking hazard—a few seconds
before it happens. But she felt isolated.
She finished her high-school coursework
online, and almost never saw her friends
or family. She said that Matthew told
her she wasn’t related to them by blood.
For their son’s first Christmas, Mat-
thew took Jessica to her grandparents’
house—the first time she’d seen them in
months—but before she opened her pres-
ents he told her that they had to leave.
When Jessica graduated from high school,
her grandparents held a party for her and
projected a movie on the side of their
barn. Shortly after the movie started,
Matthew said that it was time to go. “The Jessica Lester started dating Matthew Boynton when she was fifteen. After they were
34 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019
married, her grandmother said, “it was almost like her personality got squished out of her.”
PHOTOGRAPHS BY DANNA SINGER THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019 35
rest of us enjoyed her graduation party,” himself or asked Beam or his wife to starting the job, so on Thursday night
Martha, her grandmother, said. deliver the item. When Matthew drove she and Matthew drove to Walmart, to
Matthew’s childhood dream was to his patrol car, he would often take the buy formula. At the store, they got into
work in law enforcement—a career in- keys to his truck, a Chevrolet Avalanche, a fight, and when they left Jessica said
spired by his grandfather, who had helped so that Jessica couldn’t use it. she didn’t want to get into the car. Mat-
bring him up following his parents’ di- Denise was on a science-curriculum thew called a Griffin police lieutenant
vorce. After high school, he worked as a committee with Matthew’s stepmother, for advice. “She’s a grown lady,” the lieu-
jailer at the Pike County sheriff ’s office Amy, a teacher in the same district. A tenant told him. “You can’t force her into
before being hired as a patrol officer few months after the wedding, Denise the truck.” (Matthew refused to com-
in Griffin, the largest city in Spalding and Amy went out for lunch. Denise ment for this story.)
County. In his personnel file there, a su- said that Amy confided that Matthew From her porch, Jessica’s neighbor
pervisor described him as “fiercely loyal” had once hit her and that their relation- Megan Browning saw Jessica and Mat-
but “stiff and unwilling to bend.” Another thew return home. A half hour or so
officer described him as “the type who later, Browning was lying in bed when
wants to make ten arrests a day if he she heard a gunshot. Unnerved, she went
could.” A senior officer privately advised out to the porch, where she heard an-
Matthew, “Lighten up a little bit, man.” other. Not long afterward, she saw Mat-
That mentality spilled into his home thew walk briskly to his truck.
life. Twice, Matthew called the police He drove to a nearby Waffle House
on Jessica, for yelling or cursing or pok- to have a late dinner with a fellow Griffin
ing his chest. According to a police re- police officer. On his way, at 12:54 a.m.,
port, Jessica was “very reserved and ap- he said, he received a text from Jessica:
peared to be upset.” She said that the ship was strained. “She became dead se- “I can’t do this anymore. Take care of ”
officers recommended that she not yell rious—I’d never seen her so serious,” De- the children. “Please tell them I love
at Matthew. nise said. “She said we needed to know them everyday. I have been suffering for
In December, 2014, Jessica had a brief what kind of kid he was. She said, ‘Do a while now and no one has noticed.
affair and got pregnant again. Her fam- me a favor. I want you to make sure that Here lately I have not been able to rec-
ily wondered if this was her way of es- Jessica is going to be O.K., because he’s ognize the person I see in the mirror.
caping the relationship. But Matthew going to hurt her.’” This is not the first time I have had sui-
said that he’d raise the child as his own. cide thoughts. I love you and the boys.”
They decided to get married. Jessica could n the spring of 2016, less than six A minute later, Matthew responded
never quite explain why—there was no
proposal, just an understanding that there
I months after the wedding, Jessica dis-
covered that Matthew was having an
to a joke from Callaway. “Haha I’m sorry
I didn’t think about that lol,” he wrote.
was too much momentum to break up. affair with Courtney Callaway, a dis- Then he called E.M.S. “Can you please
Martha worried that Jessica had “lost patcher at the Spalding County sheriff ’s dispatch a unit out to my location?” he
her feistiness. It was almost like her per- office, a mile away from the Griffin Po- said calmly. “In reference to my wife.”
sonality got squished out of her.” lice Department. He explained that she was having sui-
Her aunt Denise, a public-school “If you don’t want to be with me any- cidal thoughts and “she told me to take
teacher, said that, at the wedding, “there more,” Jessica texted him, “I’m not going care of the boys. So I’m trying to hurry
was just this sadness in her eyes, like, to stay here and play house.” Matthew, up and get back home, just to make sure
‘I’m done.’” She had the demeanor of a who had begun spending his free days that nothing is going to happen to them.”
child who had promised herself not to with Callaway, told her, “It’s not gonna Six minutes later, Matthew reported
cause trouble or draw attention to her work for us. I already know it won’t.” on his police radio that he had heard two
own feelings. Jessica and Matthew left Jessica’s grandmother made an ap- gunshots as he was walking up the stairs
their wedding reception, which her fam- pointment with a lawyer who could help to his apartment. He had looked in the
ily hosted, after less than an hour. Mat- her file for divorce. In a composition master bedroom, and when he didn’t see
thew wore a titanium wedding ring with notebook, Jessica documented the times the baby, who typically slept there, he
a blue stripe, to signify that he was in she assumed Matthew had been with ran outside. “I didn’t know if it was an
law enforcement. his girlfriend, and she jotted down notes active scenario,” he later told investiga-
They rented an apartment in Griffin, for the lawyer. “Difference between tors. “I was scared to death, because I
in a complex of beige two-story build- non-contested & adultery divorce?” she couldn’t find him, that she would shoot
ings surrounding a swimming pool. But wrote. “Most important to me. Custody me, shoot him, and then kill herself.”
the sheriff still loomed large in their (full?).” She and the boys planned to Eleven Griffin police officers arrived
relationship. Matthew asked Beam to move into her sister Dusty’s house on at the apartment complex. With their
phone him in the morning to wake him Friday, April 15th, and the next week guns drawn, the officers checked every
up. Jessica didn’t have her own credit she would begin working at a chiroprac- room in the house. The older boy was
card or car, so if she needed something tor’s office. “She had both of the boys asleep in his bedroom, and the baby was
from the supermarket she texted Mat- packed and ready to go,” Dusty said. in his own room, crying in his crib. The
thew, who either took her to the store Jessica had to wean her baby before officers found Jessica in her bedroom
36 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019
closet, unconscious and lying on her side, ment complex and discovered that Megan not fit with that description”; neither of
her head on a bloody pillow. She was Browning and her fiancé and a couple her hands had “any evidence of any gun-
wearing fluffy slippers. On a shelf by her that lived next door to Jessica were the powder stippling.” And her wound was
head was the notebook documenting only neighbors who had heard gunshots. on the top of her skull, which suggested
Matthew’s infidelity. Matthew’s service Both couples said that the shots occurred that she would have had to hold the
gun was under her stomach. around 11 p.m.—not at 1 a.m., when gun above her head, pointing down-
Matthew had reported them. One of the ward—“a very unusual direction in which
essica’s grandparents live on two hun- neighbors said that, not long before he to point the gun at one’s self with the
J dred acres of farmland in Pike County,
a twenty-five-minute drive from her
heard the gunshots, he also heard “some
banging, like she was banging on the
intention of committing suicide,” Hen-
derson wrote. Indentations in the walls
apartment. A fence separates their house door or something.” of Jessica’s closet suggested that one bul-
from an open field, where nine cows and Browning, who sometimes socialized let had been shot at an upward angle—
two donkeys graze. Just before 2 a.m. on with Jessica and Matthew, cried through- it entered the wall near the top of the
April 15th, Wendell Beam asked the out her interview. “I hope he goes to jail closet—and another bullet hit the wall
sheriff of Pike County to send officers for this shit,” she said. She wanted to near the floor. Her neurosurgeon, Paul
to the house. Two deputies woke Jessi- elaborate on what she’d witnessed, but King, told me, “It seemed most likely
ca’s grandparents and told them that Jes- the agents left after eight minutes and that someone else shot her.”
sica had committed suicide, using Mat- never came back. Jessica had an intracranial-pressure
thew’s gun. “No, that doesn’t ring right,” monitor inserted into her brain, to mea-
Martha told them. Four of her grand- n a hospital-admission form, Jes- sure swelling, and she was put in a med-
children had taken target-shooting classes
together, but Jessica had refused to par-
O sica was described as a “19 year old
reported to have shot herself in the right
ically induced coma. Matthew’s father
and stepmother visited the next week.
ticipate. “Jessica would not touch a gun,” skull.” But Vernon Henderson, a trauma “Amy fell to pieces,” Denise said. “I
she said. “She did not want to have any- surgeon for more than two decades, who hugged her and said, ‘It’s going to be
thing to do with it.” treated Jessica, wrote that her injury “did O.K.’ And she said, ‘No,’ and looked at
Dusty and her husband drove to Jes-
sica’s apartment. The first officer she saw
in the parking lot was Beam. The sheriff ’s
department does not respond to inci-
dents inside the Griffin city limits, and
he was the only one from his office there.
Dusty asked him where Jessica was, and
he said that she had been taken by he-
licopter to Atlanta Medical Center. He
did not explain why he’d earlier sent word
that Jessica was dead. Dusty approached
a group of Griffin police officers and
asked whether Matthew had shot her
sister. “She loved those kids more than
anything, and she knows how it feels to
grow up without a mom,” she said. “She
wouldn’t have done that to them.” The
officers told Dusty she needed to either
calm down or leave the property.
The police asked for assistance from
the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
Early that morning, Matthew was in-
terviewed by Chris DeMarco, a G.B.I.
agent who lived near Spalding County
and had worked with Beam on several
cases over the years. DeMarco told Mat-
thew that his clothes might need to be
collected as evidence. “Absolutely,” Mat-
thew said. “I didn’t try to brush off any-
thing. I didn’t try to wash my hands—
nothing.” He sounded like an eager
student. “I didn’t think about getting
any other clothes.”
G.B.I. agents canvassed the apart-
 the conversation; he hadn’t charged his
audio recorder. King told me, “You’d think
it would have been simple enough to put
bags on her hands and test them for gun-
shot residue. I was wondering why, but
then it came to pass that her husband
was a police officer and his granddaddy
was the sheriff, so I understood.”

atthew and Callaway broke up a

M few weeks later. In an interview
with the police, she said that she found
him intimidating. “I know that he’s a
police officer, and I’m not really any-
body,” she said.
In early May, after three weeks in a
coma, Jessica began to regain conscious-
ness. She silently surveyed the walls,
where her family had taped pictures of
her sons. A few days later, Kathy noticed
Jessica crying. She was watching a car-
toon about a lion. “Something had hap-
pened to the mama lion’s cubs,” Kathy
said. “They were hurt.”
“Where’s my baby?” Jessica asked,
once her breathing tubes were removed.
A nurse told her she’d been in an acci-
dent. “Like a car accident?” she asked.
The nurse didn’t answer.
Jessica’s recovery was so swift that
people at the hospital called her the “mir-
acle child.” Although her skull had been
fractured, neither bullet had penetrated
it. Less than a week after Jessica emerged
from her coma, DeMarco and another
Matthew’s wedding ring had a blue stripe, to signify he was in law enforcement. G.B.I. agent, Jared Coleman, interviewed
her as she lay in her hospital bed. It was
her husband.” (Amy did not want to assured Matthew that his phone, which the first time anyone had spoken with
comment for this article, explaining in had been seized during the investiga- her at length about the night of her in-
an e-mail, “I have tried to remain neu- tion, would be returned. “That’s what I jury. “Cases like this—we don’t usually
tral in this very serious situation.”) told your—That’s what I told the sheriff have someone to talk to like you, because
Matthew and the boys temporarily today,” he said. you’re not here,” Coleman told her.
moved in with Courtney Callaway, the Shortly after Jessica was hospitalized, “Right,” she said, nearly whispering.
dispatcher he was dating. In Jessica’s first her aunt Kathy took a photograph of a Her voice was hoarse from the breath-
three weeks in the hospital, he visited C-shaped bruise on the back of Jessica’s ing tubes, and she seemed childlike and
her once, accompanied by Beam, who head, and she shared it with the G.B.I. dazed, as if her only goal was to accom-
wore his uniform and carried his gun. “I agents, asking them to investigate how modate the agents as quickly as she
made sure that I had another party with Jessica had been injured there. She sus- could. She said that all she could re-
me, to insure the accusations wouldn’t pected that there had been a physical al- member about that night was that she’d
be made,” Matthew said later. tercation leading up to the gunshots. Al- gone to Walmart.
After the visit, Matthew, who had though it’s possible that Jessica’s head hit The G.B.I. agents asked if she had
been placed on administrative leave, was the wall after she shot herself, there was ever handled Matthew’s gun.
interviewed again by DeMarco. “The no blood on the wall or on the clothes in “No, I can’t even get it out of the case,”
chief would eventually like to get his the closet. Only the pillow under her head she said. She wasn’t sure how to unlock
officer back, as well as his service weapon was bloody. A G.B.I. summary of an in- the safety lever on the holster. “He asked
back,” DeMarco told Matthew. “So we’re terview with King, the neurosurgeon, me to go get it out before, and I told
going to try to expedite this as fast as noted that he called the circumstances of him, ‘You’re going to have to.’”
possible, and, when I say expedite, I her injury “suspicious,” but the agent who “Have you ever had any thoughts
mean the next few weeks.” DeMarco conducted the interview failed to record about hurting yourself?” Coleman asked.
38 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019
 “No. Never,” she said. “Especially be- a new service gun and wore his uniform, said she or her children had been abused
cause of my children.” She started cry- and was accompanied by Beam. “We by her husband, even when evidence cor-
ing. “I’ve never, ever wanted to hurt my- have an individual that is a parent that roborated the claim. “There is an unwill-
self before.” attempted to take her own life,” his law- ingness to believe, as if it’s just prefera-
“Do you think Matthew was incapable yer, Lance Owen, told the judge. “Some- ble not to know this about our culture,”
of doing this?” body that shoots themself in the head Meier told me. She has found that courts
“Honestly, I don’t know,” she said. means business. And if she’s capable of are rarely willing to hear evidence about
“That’s something that y’all would have attempting to take her own life, there’s a form of abuse called “coercive con-
to figure out.” a chance that she might do something trol”—a crime in England—which de-
The G.B.I.’s theory of Jessica’s shoot- to these children.” scribes the process by which people are
ing depended on her being suicidal, but Matthew testified that Jessica’s grand- dominated, sometimes to the point that
she gave no indication of being depressed. parents were “not blood-related,” and they are no longer free agents and can-
Although the hospital had placed her could not be trusted with the children. not make decisions without a partner’s
under constant observation after she was “The fact that they don’t believe that she permission. “The idea that domestic vi-
admitted, the precautions were removed did this to herself—I think they’re not olence is bad for kids still has not sunk
after she regained consciousness. Had taking it seriously,” Owen said. in—it sometimes barely makes a dent in
she attempted suicide, it would have “Have you spoken to her doctors about a case,” she said. Few states mandate that
been standard for the hospital to pro- what they believe is the cause of her head custody evaluators have domestic-vio-
vide psychiatric care. But a psychiatrist injuries?” Jessica’s lawyer, Bree Lowry, lence training; judges often characterize
who assessed her for depression appar- asked. Henderson, the surgeon, had writ- the allegations as mudslinging and focus
ently saw no need to give her a diagno- ten Lowry a letter stating that “what- not on their veracity but on which party
sis or refer her for treatment. A second ever investigation there was done into appears to be the better parent. “The
psychiatrist thought she had “appropri- this event in no way reflected our obser- judges are very swayed by their own re-
ate mood and affect; appropriate judg- vations in the emergency room.” actions to each person,” Meier said. She
ment and insight.” Her surgeon, Hen- “I’m only concerned with the G.B.I. found that, when a mother accused a fa-
derson, wrote that she was “a very reports,” Matthew said. ther of domestic abuse or child abuse,
positive person who is embracing the Lowry wanted to put witnesses on she lost custody to the father in twenty-
opportunities that a new lease on life the stand who would testify that Mat- eight per cent of cases. When the roles
afforded her by her recent recovery.” He thew had been psychologically abusive. were reversed, fathers lost custody in only
went on, “She has a sense of humor and “We believe he is a danger to her,” twelve per cent of cases.
has a gentle and calm personality. She she told the judge, Tommy Hankin- Hankinson briefly paused during the
speaks lovingly of her children and the son. “One witness”—Jessica’s neighbor hearing to see if any statutes said that
need to and desire to see them.” Megan Browning—“would like to speak attempted suicide was a form of child
to you anonymously in chambers, be- endangerment. He didn’t find any, and
fter Jessica had been in the hospi- cause she is afraid.” dismissed the protective order. But he
A tal for a month, her doctors tried
to transfer her to a rehabilitation pro-
Judge Hankinson seemed to find the
idea so novel as to be humorous. “I don’t
granted full custody to Matthew. Jessica
could see her children for only four hours
gram, but she didn’t have insurance, so think I’ve ever had that one before,” he on Sunday afternoons. Owen proposed
she was discharged to the care of her said. “Is she gonna wear a mask or—” that Beam supervise the visits. “Sheriff
grandparents. She walked with a limp “I think we’ve got the right to con- Beam can carry a weapon,” he said. “I
and struggled with headaches, short- front and cross-examine anybody that’s don’t know what she is capable of, Judge.”
term memory lapses, ringing in her ears, gonna be offering testimony,” Owen said. Jessica’s family agreed to pay a hun-
and numbness on the left side of her “Good for you, Mr. Owen,” Hankin- dred dollars every Sunday so that her
body. Three days after she left the hos- son replied. “I’m glad to know there’s still visits could be observed by another
pital, a deputy from the Pike County advocacy in the practice in the courts of armed law-enforcement agent. At the
sheriff ’s office delivered a Family Vio- the Griffin Judicial Circuit.” No one judge’s recommendation, they also ar-
lence Protective Order. Jessica could not ended up testifying about Jessica and ranged for a psychological evaluation.
come within three hundred yards of Matthew’s marriage. Jessica’s only diagnosis was “acute stress
Matthew or her children. According to In the past thirty years, the crimi- disorder,” which, the evaluator wrote,
the order, which Matthew had peti- nal-justice system has become more re- occurs “when an individual is exposed
tioned the court to issue, “probable cause sponsive to domestic violence, but fam- to actual or threatened death.” The eval-
exists that Family Violence has occurred ily courts have been largely insulated uator added that her “symptoms are nor-
in the past and may occur in the future.” from this cultural change. In an analysis mal and to be expected through circum-
Jessica was ordered to have a psycho- of more than two thousand family-court stances such as hers.”
logical evaluation. opinions from the past decade, Joan S. Two months later, Jessica was hired
At a family-court hearing that June, Meier, a professor at George Washing- as an assistant teacher at a child-care
Matthew asked that the protective order ton University Law School, found that, center in Griffin. Ashley Dunn, the lead
be extended for a year. Matthew, who in sixty-four per cent of cases, courts did teacher in Jessica’s classroom, said, “We
had been restored to patrol duty, carried not accept the story of a mother who were all, like, ‘You can do an awesome
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019 39
 ANGELA HACKETT, “LEMONS ON A MOORISH PLATE,” 2013

We’d been talking about how back in the day we’d nothing much of anything,
Though what there was to wear—the uniform!—was too big. The sleeves
Drooped well below the fingertips. It gave you room to grow into. Years loomed.
Day after day, summer after summer, days were immeasurably longer then,
And the one tin bathful of hot water did the several children one after the other.
Then it seemed in no time at all you were into your teens. Because your birthday
Fell a week before Christmas—December the 18th—you’d have to make do
With the merest token of a family present. A set of bath salts, maybe, or a bar
Of lemon soap the simulacrum of a lemon, and we tried to remember
If such a thing came wrapped in tissue paper like the fruit itself, or was it
See-through cellophane? Then to summon up the names of yesteryear—
Yardley’s April Violets; Morny White Heather; Lenthéric Tweed! It’s the 1960s,
And I see myself wondering what would be appropriate to buy for my mother,
Dazzled by the cornucopian Christmas window display of the chemist’s shop.

All this, believe it or not, was apropos of Angela Hackett’s painting—

Because when looking at a thing we often drift into a memory of something else,
However tenuous the link. Five years and more—ever since I bought it
For your birthday—it’s been hanging on our bedroom wall, pleasing us
To look at it from time to time to see different things in it. Only now has it
Occurred to us to talk about or of it at this length, the lemons—three of them—
Proceeding in an anticlockwise swirl from pale lemon to a darker yellow
To an almost orange, tinged with green—degrees, we speculate, of ripeness
Or decay. You know how lemons, if left too long in the bowl, one or two from time

job working with ten two-year-olds but Griffin police officers, some of whom committing it are often the same person.”
you can’t see your own kids?’” On week- Matthew considered good friends; one At the Griffin Police Department,
ends, Dunn sometimes asked Jessica to informed the agents that Matthew “was concerns about domestic violence have
babysit for her own children. telling me how she kind of acts crazy apparently been so slight that in 2018 the
sometimes when she don’t get her way.” department hired an officer whose per-
n September, 2016, the G.B.I. closed The G.B.I. did not record any interviews sonnel record showed that he had re-
I its case, concluding that Jessica’s
wounds were self-inflicted. Her DNA
with Jessica’s family or friends.
Although police departments have be-
cently been accused by his child’s mother
of threatening her with a gun. In many
had been found on the gun, which was come more attentive to officers’ use of ex- other cities, domestic violence seems to
to be expected—she had been lying on cessive force against civilians, the same be treated as similarly insignificant. This
it. Neither Matthew nor Jessica had been scrutiny has not been applied to their po- year, an independent panel found that
given a gunpowder-residue test. The tential for violent behavior at home. In the typical penalty for New York City
agency deferred to its chief medical ex- the nineteen-nineties, researchers found police officers found guilty of domestic
aminer, who spent ninety minutes on that forty-one per cent of male officers violence—some had punched, kicked,
the case and never examined Jessica. He admitted that, in the previous year, they’d choked, or threatened their victims with
concluded that Jessica had shot herself been physically aggressive toward their guns—was thirty lost vacation days. In
in the head, though he indicated that spouses, and nearly ten per cent acknowl- nearly a third of cases, the officers already
his assessment would have been more edged choking, strangling, or using—or had a domestic-violence incident—and,
definitive had there been a photo of Jes- threatening to use—a knife or a gun. But in one case, eight—in their records. In
sica’s wound before she’d had surgery. there are almost no empirical studies ex- the Puerto Rico Police Department,
The G.B.I.’s report never mentioned the amining the prevalence of this sort of ninety-eight police officers were arrested
picture of Jessica’s bruise that Kathy had abuse today. Leigh Goodmark, the direc- for domestic violence between 2007 and
given the agents. tor of the Gender Violence Clinic, at the 2010; three of them had shot and killed
The agents who wrote the report University of Maryland’s Carey School their wives. Only eight were fired.
seemed indifferent to the dynamics of of Law, speculates that one reason for the Last summer, the sheriff of Los An-
Jessica and Matthew’s marriage, as if the dearth of research is a reluctance to fund geles County, Alex Villanueva, articu-
subject were a private matter that didn’t a study that will bring attention to an un- lated a common justification for not con-
merit discussion in an official investiga- comfortable dilemma: that, as Goodmark sidering domestic violence as a concern:
tion. They recorded interviews with eight says, “those policing the crime and those in defending his decision to employ a
40 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019
 To time will show a blush of green, a dimple or a bruise of bluish green
That overnight becomes a whitish bloom? So we think Angela Hackett’s lemons
Might be on the turn. Though it’s possible the green tinge might be an echo
Of the two limes I haven’t mentioned until now, nestled in against the lemons
On the indigo-and-white Moorish plate, all of which complicates the picture.

It gave us pause for thought. How long does it take, we wondered, for a lemon
To completely rot? We imagined a time-lapse film, weeks compressed
Into seconds, the lemon changing hue, developing that powdery bloom, then
Suddenly collapsing into itself to leave a shrunken, pea-size, desiccated husk—
The flesh evaporated, breathed into the atmosphere as it transpires.
And that is why on the 26th of March, 2019, we set up the lemon experiment.
On the avocado-and-aubergine-colored Moroccan saucer we bought in Paris
We set a fresh lemon and a banana, whose peel, we are led to believe, releases
Ethylene gas and hence ripens any other fruit with which it comes into contact.
We wanted to see with our own eyes the end of the life cycle of the lemon.
I write this on the 6th of April. The banana has gone black except at the tips.
The lemon looks as fresh as ever. We’ve just been for our daily walk around
The Waterworks. Ducks are kicking up a racket. A blackbird sings
From a blackthorn bush. And as we enter into Glandore from the Antrim Road
How clean and fresh and green are the newly sprung leaves of the chestnut tree!

—Ciaran Carson

deputy who had been accused of stalking finding: one in five officers arrested for Beam had worked in the sheriff ’s office
and physically abusing his ex-girlfriend, domestic violence nationwide had also for thirty-seven years. He had a repu-
he told a local reporter that it was “a been the subject of a federal lawsuit for tation for being kind and personable
private relationship between two con- violating people’s civil rights. but also passive, indecisive, and resis-
senting adults that went bad.” The vi- The Griffin Police Department had tant to change. When female officers
olence was seen as unrelated to job per- not received any complaints about Mat- told him that they were afraid of the
formance, an activity that could be thew’s use of force, but Darrell Dix, a patrol-division captain, David Gibson,
understood only within the context of former lieutenant, told me that he and whom Beam had promoted, he did noth-
a relationship. some of his colleagues worried that ing. Gibson routinely said to female col-
But the factors that lead to abuse at Matthew had a domineering and “one- leagues, “Shut your cock garage.” He
home—coercion, authoritarianism, a dimensional” approach to his work, told a secretary that she should wear a
sense of entitlement to violence—are which could provoke “fights and scuffles.” cowbell around her neck, so he’d always
also present in the work that police “He had not learned that there is a know where she was.
officers do on the streets. It should not human side of this, too,” Dix said. “It Gibson had worked in the sheriff ’s
be surprising that domestic abuse ap- was ‘I’m going to lock people up. I’m office for twenty-eight years, and he cul-
pears to predict excessive use of force—a going to do it my way.’” tivated an aura of invincibility. He claimed
link that scholars have suggested should to have personally insured Beam’s elec-
alter the way that departments respond
to both kinds of aggression. The Citi- J essica’s shooting was the subject of
hushed conversations among Wendell
tion. He spoke about how he gambled
with a mythical figure known in the
zens Police Data Project, in Chicago, Beam’s staff at the Spalding County sheriff ’s office as the Wood Chipper, be-
analyzed the records of Chicago cops sheriff ’s office. “In all my years in law en- cause, supposedly, he had used such a de-
between 2000 and 2016 and found that forcement, when someone shoots him- vice to kill a woman. A deputy named
officers accused of domestic abuse re- self in the head it’s one and done,” Jes- Misty Piper said that, after Gibson re-
ceived fifty per cent more complaints sica Whitehouse, a deputy there at the peatedly pressured her to have sex with
than their colleagues for using excessive time, told me. There’s no second shot. him, she acquiesced, because she felt that,
force. Philip Stinson, a professor of crim- “Everyone said, ‘Beam’s grandson will get if she defied Gibson, she would meet
inal justice at Bowling Green State Uni- off,’” she went on. “ ‘Nothing will hap- a similar fate. Twice, she later testified,
versity and one of the few scholars who pen to the kid.’” Gibson choked her. In 2012, Piper com-
has studied the issue, reached a similar Before being elected sheriff, in 2011, plained to Beam, and he said he’d look
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019 41
 going to retract her statement,” he said
later. (Beam refused to talk to me.)
After several months, a male officer
told a captain in Internal Affairs that
he didn’t understand why Whitehouse’s
complaint had been ignored. At the rec-
ommendation of the captain, and with
Beam’s approval, an outside agency in-
vestigated Gibson and concluded that
he was a “predator.” In the spring of
2015, Beam allowed Gibson to retire,
keeping his pension.The secretary whom
he’d slapped in the head was asked to
type his resignation letter. “It was like
he was spitting in my face,” she said.
(Through his lawyer, Gibson told me
that the headlock-and-Taser incident
was “all in good fun”; most of the other
allegations were “untrue and are other-
wise embellished.”)
After Gibson left, citizens came for-
ward to say that they, too, were terrified
of him. One woman said that he would
drive to her house and shine the lights
of his patrol car into her windows. Then
he would “handcuff me and put me on
the hood of his patrol car and have oral
sex with me,” she wrote in a statement.
“I was going to report this, but, like he
“Of course, it was through my efforts that we landed that account, said, who will they believe?” Another
but did I get any credit? Ha! Don’t make me laugh.” woman, who used methamphetamine,
said that sometimes Gibson followed
her as she drove. He would flash his
• • lights and pull her over, and force her
to have sex with him. She was sure that
into the accusations, if she put them in South, “there’s no in-between—you can’t if she didn’t comply he would arrest her.
writing. “And then I started thinking, just be a human in uniform.” They were As it became clear that Gibson’s ac-
Well, why did I even come to you?” she made to feel that their presence con- tivities could be criminal, the G.B.I.
said. “I’m not well connected with any- taminated the ethos of the department. looked into the allegations. In an au-
one.” She decided to resign instead. “If you perceive yourself as being coun- dio-recorded conversation, an agent ex-
The following year, Gibson put a fe- try and rough, then you’re a dyke,” she pressed disbelief that Beam had let Gib-
male colleague in a headlock and held a said. “If you do wear makeup and fix son’s behavior continue for so long. “Why
Taser against her temple. “Get off of me!” your hair, you’re a whore.” is he getting so much protection and
she screamed. A male sergeant saw the Beam asked Whitehouse to meet him coverage?” the agent said. “This blows
exchange and told Beam, who provided at a park on the outskirts of Griffin. my mind.”
Gibson with what he called “undocu- Whitehouse didn’t understand why she
mented counselling.” Two years later, was being directed to “basically a hid- n December, 2016, Jessica filed a re-
Gibson slapped a secretary on the back
of the head, telling a male officer, “I’m
ing spot.” She recorded the conversation
on her phone, so that investigators could
I port with the Griffin Police Depart-
ment, saying that Matthew hadn’t re-
gonna show you how we take care of look for clues if she disappeared. “He turned her belongings. After she came
these secretaries.” Although the secre- had control of Spalding County,” she out of her coma, Denise had had to buy
tary complained to Beam about Gibson’s said, referring to Gibson. “He was Spal- her new clothes. Jessica was still missing
behavior, Gibson was never disciplined. ding County. Anybody that went against her orthodontic retainer. Matthew signed
In late 2014, Whitehouse, one of the him would be eliminated.” Whitehouse a sworn statement promising that he no
youngest deputies in the sheriff ’s office, said that Beam seemed concerned, but longer had anything of Jessica’s.
scheduled a meeting with Beam to say he said that she’d have to write down Matthew was now dating Shelby Wil-
that Gibson’s treatment of female cops her complaint. Like Piper, Whitehouse ley, a young mother who had recently
was demeaning. She told me that, for was afraid to follow through. Beam separated from her husband. They moved
female officers in many parts of the dropped the matter. “I figured she was in together in January, 2017, and as they
42 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019
were packing Willey discovered that Mat- a local truck driver named Will San- ment?” a sergeant asked him. “You know
thew had a large gym bag full of wom- ders, who had a reputation as a freelance you can’t give a sworn statement and lie
en’s clothes, along with a retainer with investigator. Sanders was forty-three on it.” Crying, Matthew set his body
“Jessica” printed on its case. When Wil- years old and the son of a former Re- armor, badge, and police radio on the
ley asked Matthew about it, she said, he publican state representative; he con- table in front of him, and agreed to re-
told her he intended to burn the bag, sidered himself a happy beneficiary of sign from the department.
which Jessica had packed one night when the “good-old-boys system,” he told In July, he was charged with two fel-
she was planning to leave him. Willey me, and did not do his work in pursuit onies: making false statements and vio-
had seen a copy of Matthew’s sworn of political reform. “It’s just a hobby,” lating his oath of office. Philip Stinson,
statement in his car, and she was dis- he said. “It interests me on a psycho- the professor at Bowling Green, main-
turbed that he was “lying straight to ev- logical level.” He had conducted his tains a database of officers who have
erybody’s face,” she later told the police. own canvass of Jessica’s apartment com- been arrested around the country, and
(She and Callaway, Matthew’s ex-girl- plex; retraced Matthew’s journey to the he said that, in response to the Lauten-
friend, couldn’t be reached for this story.) Waffle House, timing the drive with a berg Amendment, a federal provision
In a private Facebook message, Wil- stopwatch; and got permission from that was passed in 1996 and prohibits
ley complained to a friend that Mat- the new tenants of Jessica and Mat- people convicted of domestic violence
thew’s demeanor was “emotionless but thew’s apartment to inspect the holes from owning firearms, cops accused of
very authoritative.” She had learned about in the closet. He had filed nearly a hun- domestic violence are often charged with
Jessica’s shooting after probing stories dred Open Records Act requests about lesser offenses, as a kind of “professional
were published by Sheila Mathews in Jessica’s shooting, and he shared what courtesy,” so they can continue working.
The Grip, a free newspaper in Spalding he learned with Jessica’s family, as well “That’s the game here,” he said. Jessica
County, and aired on the Atlanta tele- as with The Grip. Jessica’s grandmother, found it darkly funny that it was a miss-
vision station 11Alive, reported by Bren- Martha, said that initially she had ing retainer, and not her brain injury,
dan Keefe. When she asked Matthew trusted Wendell Beam, whom her hus- that ultimately led to Matthew’s arrest.
about the shooting, “nothing adds up,” band had known for years, and the Mike Yates, the chief of the Griffin
she wrote to another friend on Facebook. G.B.I.’s investigative process. “I’ve al- police, told me in an e-mail that Mat-
“It’s always different. It’s always more ways been such a firm believer in our thew’s case had nothing to do with do-
exaggerated every time.” She felt uncom- justice system,” she said. “I would fight mestic violence. “We will not be swayed
fortable that Matthew told Beam “every you tooth and nail defending it.” But, by hearsay, false rhetoric or sensation-
detail of his life,” but that the conversa- after receiving thousands of documents alism in a manner that would cause harm
tions “were all confidential.” from Sanders, Martha stopped driving to the innocent,” he wrote.
In May, 2017, they broke up. Willey through Griffin, because she was afraid. In April, 2018, nine months after Mat-
contacted Jessica on Facebook and warned Sanders said, “I think the city thought thew was charged, Jessica called the Spal-
her that Matthew was not taking good this would be business as usual, until a ding County district attorney’s office to
care of the children; they were subsist- local reporter and a loser truck driver ask why Matthew’s case hadn’t been pre-
ing, she said, on cheese puffs, Fudge got involved.” sented to a grand jury. She was told that,
Rounds, corn dogs, and Mountain Dew, Sanders offered Willey a hundred to prove that a crime had been commit-
and sleeping at odd hours. “It breaks my and twenty dollars to sneak into Mat- ted, the district attorney needed to es-
heart!” she wrote. “I’ll go ahead and tell tablish that the oath of office had been
you that the boys deserve more structure administered to Matthew. But a Griffin
and more care and love which I’m almost city official said that the document
positive YOU have.” By then, the boys couldn’t be found. Mathews, the pub-
were spending half their time with each lisher of The Grip and its only reporter,
parent, switching houses on Fridays. submitted an Open Records Act request
Willey wanted to help Jessica because to the magistrate’s court, where judges
she was scared of Matthew, too. “It felt swear in new officers. Within three hours,
like he was just a ticking time bomb,” she she received a copy of Matthew’s offi-
told the police. “He never let me go any- cial oath, which the D.A.’s office had
where without me sharing my location been trying to find for six months. The
with him.” She said that, when they talked thew’s utility closet and get Jessica’s bag. next day, Yates texted the D.A. to say
about what happened to Jessica, “he laughs She agreed, and in May, 2017, Sanders that he had the original document.
about it. He thinks it’s funny. And he dropped off the bag at the Griffin Po- Matthew’s case was presented to a
said, ‘It’s a damn shame she didn’t do it lice Department. grand jury in July, 2018. Under Georgia
right the first time.’ ” She added, “He law, police officers, unlike civilians, have
doesn’t refer to her as, like, human. Like, atthew was called in for ques- the right to make a prepared statement
he talks about her as if she’s nothing.”
As Willey was moving out of Mat-
M tioning. At first he lied, but within
fifteen minutes he acknowledged that
at the end of a grand-jury hearing. There
is no public record of the proceeding, but
thew’s house, she again came across the he’d known about Jessica’s bag all along. the grand jury chose not to indict Mat-
gym bag of Jessica’s clothes. She notified “Why did you write the damn state- thew either for making false statements
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019 43
or for violating his oath. Four months forcement—“and what we should have protected for so long. Although Gib-
later, he was hired as a reserve officer in done is pulled some strings,” she said. son had been indicted on fourteen
Braswell, Georgia, a community of four She felt she needed men in power on charges, he was allowed to plead guilty,
hundred people. her side if she were to challenge a cul- in June, 2017, to only two, for violating
ture in which men let other men get his oath of office, and he was granted
essica’s grandparents wrote letters to away with what they please. first-offender status. After he serves a
J the G.B.I., the governor, the city man-
ager, and the district attorney to request
Will Sanders, the truck driver, reached
a similar conclusion. In July, 2018, he
three-year sentence and finishes his pro-
bation, his record will be wiped clean.
that the investigation into Jessica’s shoot- criticized Yates on the department’s For a time, Sanders thought that the
ing be reopened. By then, Beam’s rep- Facebook page for denying Sheila source of Gibson’s power might be con-
utation had been muddied by the Gib- Mathews, The Grip’s publisher, access nected to the Dixie Mafia (a gang based
son investigation, and he had been voted to public information—behavior that, in the South), or a gambling ring, or
out of office. Jessica’s grandparents hoped Sanders said, was part of a pattern of some hidden knowledge that afforded
that this development would help their intimidating female reporters. Yates had him a lifetime of leverage over Beam.
case. The new sheriff, Darrell Dix, the lost his previous job, in 2014, as chief of But now he resorted to a more mun-
former lieutenant in the Griffin Police the police department in Jonesboro, Ar- dane theory about the culture of power.
Department, told me that when he un- kansas, after he called a local reporter “My mama told me stories about going
locked the doors to the sheriff ’s office “smelly” and said that dealing with her to lunch with my father and his friends
on his first day on the job, January 1, was “like trying to pick up a dog turd in the sixties,” he said to me. “The men
2017, he found nine industrial-sized trash by the ‘clean end.’” She resigned, citing would sit down, and the women would
bags full of shredded papers. Jail trust- the “level of stress and anxiety created stand behind their men. When the men
ies—model inmates who did menial by a public official who commands a wanted tea, they just shook their glasses.”
jobs at the sheriff ’s office—told him small army.” Even Gibson’s lawyer, Phil Friduss,
that they’d spent two weeks destroying Within two hours of Sanders’s Face- seemed at a loss to explain whether Gib-
paperwork, at the previous administra- book comment, Yates informed San- son had controlled the county, as so
tion’s instruction. “They had wiped stuff ders that his private Facebook messages many people believed. “I hope those sto-
off the computers,” Dix said. “They had would be made accessible to “any per- ries went too far,” he said, referring to
even taken notebooks off shelves and sons interested in the entire scope of the notorious Wood Chipper. The in-
shredded the documents.” your actions, activities, motives and his- ability to pinpoint the source of Gib-
Dix was one of the Griffin police tory.” He added, “This material will be son’s dominance—and of Beam’s capac-
officers present the night that Jessica was released in the interest of transparency ity to shield other men—seemed only
shot. “I don’t doubt the findings of the and context.” The department had ob- to feed the drama and paranoia. Elea-
G.B.I.,” he told me. But, he said, “there tained the messages a year earlier, as part nor Attwood, a lawyer representing six
are a lot of questions out there—both in of the investigation into Jessica’s gym women who filed civil suits against Gib-
favor of Jessica and in favor of Matthew— bag. (The purposes of such a sweeping son, warned me to do all my reporting
that could be answered, but I just don’t request were never clear. To obtain the when the sun was out.
think the G.B.I. is going to do it.” He search warrant, a lieutenant submitted Sanders said that he no longer goes
believes that “the only two people who anywhere unarmed. If he has to drive to
know the answers are Jessica and Mat- downtown Griffin, he cleans and vacu-
thew,” and Jessica will never be a reliable ums his car, so he can easily see if some-
source, given her traumatic brain injury, one plants drugs or contraband. For a
and Matthew’s account can’t be trusted. while, he put clear tape on the doors of
“I guarantee you he won’t a hundred per his house and car, so he would know if
cent say what happened,” he said. (Mat- anyone had sneaked inside. Jessica gave
thew’s lawyer said, in an e-mail, “The ul- him her old cell phone and notebook,
timate aim of both the GBI’s investiga- and he keeps them in a safe at a loca-
tion and the grand jury’s inquiry was to tion that he won’t disclose, along with a
find the truth. And in both instances, he a sworn statement explaining that there shrink-wrapped box containing all the
was cleared of wrongdoing.”) was probable cause that Sanders had documents he collected. “My dream is
That Matthew had found himself in been involved in two commercial bur- that, one day, the Feds show up and say,
a troubled relationship did not surprise glaries; later, the lieutenant said that this ‘We want the notebook,’” he said. But
Dix. “Bad decisions,” he said. “Hard- was the result of a cut-and-paste error.) otherwise, he said, “I’m done—I’m out.
headed. Wouldn’t listen to anybody.” Sanders deleted his Facebook ac- They have won. I hold up the white flag.”
No one responded to Martha’s let- count, his primary method of commu-
ters. She concluded that she’d chosen the
wrong tactic. “At the time, I was well
nicating with sources and reporting his
findings. He had once assumed that if J essica’s older son often cried and
clung to her when Matthew picked
known in my field by people who had he dug deeply enough he would under- him up on Fridays, and in the summer
some clout”—she worked in hospital risk stand not only Jessica’s shooting but the of 2018 he complained that his father
management and had friends in law en- reasons that David Gibson had been had hurt him. Jessica reported what he
44 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019
said to child-protective services, who
helped arrange for the boys to see a
child psychologist. The psychologist
wrote, of the older son, “I asked him if
he has been happy or sad. He said, ‘Sad.’
When asked, how come, he stated, ‘be-
cause daddy scares me.’” He went on
to say, “Daddy was up the hill and hurt
me in his house.”
The sheriff ’s department in Pike
County, where Matthew was living,
investigated whether there had been
abuse, but Matthew denied the alle-
gation and the department did not find
any concrete evidence. During the in-
vestigation, Jessica’s sons were permit-
ted to stay with her full time. In the
spring of 2019, child-protective ser-
vices closed the case and recommended,
based on reports submitted by the chil-
dren’s psychologist, who had seen the
boys for twenty-five sessions, that they
no longer spend time with Matthew. “Oh, O.K. I can sort of see it.”
“The boys expressed fear of having any
potential contact with their biological
father,” the psychologist wrote. Mat-
• •
thew is challenging the ruling in court.
Jessica told me, “I’d probably go to jail nearby, she said, mildly, that she had and Matthew must have fought in the
before I’d put the boys back in a situ- tried to reconnect with her several times closet, and she never made it outside.
ation where Matthew could even think over the years, but her mother didn’t In the police body-cam videos, the dog
about doing anything to them.” seem interested. “She’s just a piece of is still wearing his leash.
She now lives two hours north of shit,” Jacob clarified. Like many docile, self-effacing
Griffin, with her fiancé, Jacob Boyack, When I asked Jessica why she never women, Jessica has some hidden pock-
a high-school classmate, in a small left the house when she lived with Mat- ets of pride, and one of them is her
yellow house with black shutters and thew, she explained, “We lived in an skills as a writer. She’s offended by the
an American flag hanging from the apartment complex with a playground. idea that she would have composed
front porch. Jessica and Jacob have a So there was really no need for me to something as syntactically messy as
son together, and their living room and leave. There was a pool there, too.” the suicide text she is alleged to have
kitchen are arranged like a nursery “You find plenty of reasons to leave written. “There are too many useless
school, with a poster displaying the now—I know that,” Jacob teased her. words thrown in,” she said. “I would
ABCs, a whiteboard, and wooden coat Occasionally, Jessica still reflexively have written, ‘I can’t do this anymore
hangers shaped like trucks. Jessica is asked Jacob for permission to do things comma.’” She said she would have put
placid and effortlessly polite, warm like visit her grandparents or go to a period after the line about taking
without being intimate. When I vis- the store. “I’m, like, ‘You don’t have to care of the boys, rather than letting
ited them in August, Jacob mentioned ask me,’” he said. “ ‘You are your own one sentence run into the next. “I would
that one of the boys had recently done person. You do whatever you want to have written ‘suicidal thoughts,’ not
a spin in the living room and called it do.’” The lead teacher at the day care ‘suicide thoughts.’”
a “pirouette.” Jessica seemed more en- where Jessica worked had also found She told me that she couldn’t imag-
ergized by the comment than by any- her unnecessarily deferential. “It was ine using a cliché such as “I have not
thing else we discussed. like she needed permission for every- been able to recognize the person I see
Martha was initially skeptical when thing,” she said. in the mirror.”
Jessica got involved with another man Jessica still has occasional migraines, “I don’t generally even look in the
who assumed the role of protector. weakness in her left foot, and lingering mirror,” she said. “I mean, I walk past it.
Gradually, though, her concerns dissi- amnesia about the night of her shoot- But I never look in it.”
pated. Jacob is gentle and jovial, artic- ing. She could now recall that after she “I don’t think the text was quite that
ulating emotions that Jessica herself returned from Walmart she went to her literal,” Jacob said.
struggles to name. She has a tendency closet to put her shoes on, because she “I would have picked something
to brush over painful experiences. When needed to walk the dog. That is where different,” Jessica went on. “A different
I asked about her mother, who lived her memory ends. She believes that she metaphor.” 
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019 45
Cooper’s project “The Atlas of Emptiness and Extremity” documents a three-decade attempt to traverse the perimeter
 PROFILES

THE ENDS OF THE EARTH

Thomas Joshua Cooper risks his life to photograph the world’s remotest places.

BY DANA GOODYEAR

of the Atlantic basin—an exile’s long search for home. He says that the process creates a “peculiar kind of ecstatic joy.”
PHOTOGRAPHS BY THOMAS JOSHUA COOPER
 or thirty-two years,Thomas Joshua tures, I may unintentionally become the shows. “But I’m unstoppable,” he said.

F Cooper has been working on a

project that he calls “The Atlas
of Emptiness and Extremity,” a collec-
first person in the world to circumnav-
igate the boundless coastal perimeter of
land-surfaces harbouring the entire At-
“I can’t do anything but make things.”
In setting the parameters of his project,
Cooper made a series of vows: to work
tion of some seven hundred black-and- lantic Ocean,” he has written. He says exclusively outdoors, to make only a sin-
white photographs that he makes from that a senior cartographer of the “Times gle exposure in each place, and to pur-
remote, forbidding, largely unpeopled, Comprehensive Atlas of the World” once sue his vision at the expense of all else.
all-but-forgotten outcroppings, on five told him that he was the first to see many “It wasn’t melodramatic,” he told me. “It
continents and at both poles, along the of these places and, because of global allowed me to realize that, whatever it
perimeter of the Atlantic basin. He sets sea rise, would likely be the last. “In the cost me to get to a place, I was willing
his camera in places with names like life of your children, most of those edges to pay the price. If I said to myself, ‘I am
Cape Frigid on the Frozen Strait, the will be underwater,” he told me. already dead,’ then I had nothing to worry
Lighthouse at the End of the World, Seventy-three, tall and lumbering, with about. I’m free. I no longer have any
Finisterre—places infused with human fair hair turned white and a goaty scruff fears. Only the joy, the peculiar kind of
awe of the unknown and with the yearn- of beard, Cooper is a kisser of hands, who ecstatic joy of making things at the point
ing of explorers embarking on a journey calls both men and women “sir.” Like a where nothing else is left.”
from which they will likely not return. kindly adult out of Roald Dahl, he’s often
“I thought maybe I could learn some-
thing by standing on the continental
enthused to the point of inarticulacy. Peo-
ple he admires are “absolute gobsmack-
“ I trespass whenever possible,” Coo-
per told me, walking by a “No Tres-
edges of the source of Western civiliza- ers.” He expresses happiness with rapid passing” sign and approaching a rusty,
tion and trying to imagine, with my back claps; moved, he thumps his chest with broken-down barbed-wire fence. It was
to the land, what happened when the a closed fist; when truly overwhelmed, a sunny morning, on a palisade over-
carriers of the culture went over the edge he says, “Fu-u-u-u-uck.” From the out- looking the Pacific, part of a twenty-
of the map,” he told me. Another time, set, Cooper was unfit for the physically five-thousand-acre ranch at Point Con-
he said, “Emptiness and extremity are arduous task he assigned himself, which ception, in Santa Barbara County. As a
what I was searching for, with the firm requires that he spend months at sea in coda to the “Atlas,” Cooper had decided
belief that it’d kill me or transform me.” small craft, hurl himself from dinghies to make a series of photographs along
Part Cherokee and part Jewish, Coo- onto slick rock faces, inch along cliffs, the coast where he was born, on a three-
per was born in California and has lived dangle over abysses. He has fallen into week road trip between Oregon and
in Scotland since the nineteen-eighties. quicksand; tumbled from peaks; sailed Tijuana. (The Pacific pictures will be
In images that are romantic and psycho- into a cyclone; been shot at, searched, exhibited at Hauser & Wirth, in Los
logically severe—the angular grandeur and detained; had his dinghy swamped Angeles, in late October.)
of rock and the terror of the ocean, be- among hunting leopard seals. “I get sea- Cooper clutched his camera, wrapped
fuddled by clouds, fog, and breaking sick,” Cooper told me. “I’m frightened of in a dark cloth, as he stiffly traversed
waves—the “Atlas” documents an exile’s water—I can’t stand this shit. In fact, I the fence. His wife, Kate Mooney, who
search for home. He looks for what he don’t really know how to swim. I swim has practical gray hair and a deflation-
calls “indications”—rocks or wave pat- like a rock.” He is blind in his right eye, ary wit, choreographed. She researches
terns that form arrows, pointing him in and his glasses fog. In books, which he and helps plan Cooper’s voyages, and
the right direction—and avoids horizons, publishes upon completing segments of serves as a living compass for her direc-
preferring pictures from which there is tionally challenged mate. “Right foot,
no clear escape. “He is part of the con- right foot, left foot, over,” she said. “The
ceptual-art tradition of artists traversing next piece of barbed wire, and then over
space to create sculpture,” Michael Govan, again. Well done.” He walked down a
the director of the Los Angeles County path to the eroded edge of the cliff. The
Museum of Art and a champion of Coo- ocean below was marbled like a steak.
per’s since the early nineties, told me. “He A train whistled in the distance, and
is also one of our greatest formal pho- Cooper turned to wave. “Heart-beat,
tographers. He captures the motion of the heart-beat, heart-beat,” he said.
environment, which is near-impossible Cooper’s camera, a five-by-seven-
to do.” In late September, the “Atlas” had his itinerary, he thanks the chiropractors inch field camera, is a wooden box that
its début, at LACMA, in an exhibition who help patch him together at the jour- was built in 1898. He refers to it as his
called “The World’s Edge.” At Cooper’s ney’s end. He thought the “Atlas” would “baby” and says, “She and I are going to
request, the show opened on the five-hun- take seven years; it has taken more than go into the fire together.” In recent years,
dredth anniversary of Magellan’s depar- four times that long. the materials required for the “Atlas”
ture for his trip around the globe. Mentally, though, Cooper is unflinch- have become increasingly scarce. He has
In Cooper’s photographic epic about ing. “I’m an invisible person, never had bought the last of the film developer
exploration, colonization, migration, and an audience,” he told me. His work, when that he prefers, the last of the fixer, and
homecoming, he is both narrator and it has been seen at all, has mostly been the last of the paper. “Analog photogra-
protagonist. “In making the Atlas pic- displayed in small galleries and group phy’s disappearing,” the artist Richard
48 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019
Learoyd, who uses a homemade cam-
era obscura, told me. “You have to change
and adapt to that. He doesn’t adapt.”
Working with an old, unwieldy in-
strument slows Cooper down, which is
a primary intention of his process. Awk-
ward, fragile, heavy (the rig, including
tripod and film, weighs some sixty
pounds), the camera has been lugged to
the literal ends of the earth. “There are
areas in South America where they see
me with the camera and tripod and they
say, ‘Oh, you’re the Yank that does the
impossible shit,’” he told me. Made from
nineteenth-century wood, the camera
is particularly vulnerable to the influence
of salt water. More than once, protect-
ing it has threatened to kill him. I have
the distinct impression that this is how
he’d like to go. “Death or picture,” he
likes to say.
At Point Conception, Cooper estab-
lished the tripod where the dirt began
to fall away and disappeared under the
dark cloth to check the composition.
He frames his images from the outside
in. “My whole practice is edges,” he says.
“Edge of the world, edge of the picture, “So, what inspired you to study engineering, get married, find a job,
edge of land and sea.” I heard muffled move to the suburbs, have a couple of kids, and grow old?”
laughter: he liked what he saw. Emerg-
ing, he closed his eyes and began mut-
tering to himself. Later, he told me that
• •
he was asking for a blessing. “I refuse
to take anything from anyone or any- said. “Come look at what I’m looking the camera back to the car. “I’m Scottish-
thing, ever, so I ask permission,” he said. at. Come look—look, look, look, look. Give Chickasaw, believe it or not,” the guard
“Then I feel less like a thief.” (Repeat- me one minute. Have a look.” said. “I was born in Oklahoma.”
edly, he told me that he does not “take” The guard was steadfast, miffed. “It “I bow to you, sir,” Cooper said, bow-
or “shoot” pictures. He says, “You shoot doesn’t matter whether you’re photo- ing. “That’s where my grandparents are
something, it dies. You take something graphing for the Blue Room or the Lin- buried.”
and you’re usually taking it against the coln Bedroom at the White House,” he By the time we left, he and the guard
will of the thing that is being removed.”) said. “You need to respect private-prop- were singing “Swing Low, Sweet Char-
With his eyes still closed, he depressed erty rights. There’s rules.” Cooper didn’t iot,” which was written by a formerly
a plunger, initiating the exposure, a min- move. “You know, I’m about to lose it, enslaved member of the Choctaw Na-
ute and thirty seconds long. sir,” the guard said. “I’m going to call tion, and making plans to see each other
A man in olive-green work pants and the sheriffs and you’re going to get a in Los Angeles, at the opening of Coo-
a matching shirt approached with a clip- twelve-hundred-dollar fine.” per’s museum show.
board. “Ranch security,” he said briskly. Cooper waited a moment longer, as
“Sir, I need you to pack it up and leave the exposure finished, and then said, hen Cooper was six, his family
immediately.”
“Could I have one minute?”
“Thank you very much! Would you like
to look? It’s not much, but it might make
W moved for two years to the
Standing Rock Reservation, in South
“No, you need to leave now.” you smile.” The guard remained unsmil- Dakota, where his father, Duahne, or
“I’m really sorry. You couldn’t give ing. “I’m not trying to be silly,” Cooper D.W., was employed by the Bureau of
me a minute?” said. “We’re from Scotland.” Indian Affairs. His mother, Nancy Rose-
“You’re not supposed to be here,” the “You’re Scottish?” the guard said, al- man, was known on the reservation as
guard said. “It’s posted. You don’t even most under his breath. “So am I.” Coo- Fancy Nancy, because she ordered
have permission to be on the property per apologized again; the guard apolo- dresses from San Francisco. At Thom-
photographing.” gized for doing his job. Then he asked as’s bedtime she recited poems in Jap-
Cooper began to wheedle, stalling. about the camera. He, too, was an “ana- anese and Mandarin, languages she had
“I didn’t mean to bother anybody,” he log redneck,” he said. He offered to carry learned as a child, when her father, a
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019 49
Cooper refers to his camera, a wooden box made in 1898, as his “baby.” At times, protecting it has threatened to kill him.

naval officer, was stationed on the Yang- Sioux and given an Indian name, Te- of Tears. After making the tree, she says,
tze. She and D.W., who was one-six- cumseh. When I asked Thomas’s brother, “I thought it was such a load of rubbish
teenth Cherokee, met in Honolulu; he David, who is younger by twelve years that I made Thomas take a DNA test.”
was also an officer in the Navy, and they and works for the Forest Service in Chico, The results were surprising. “The Rose-
married under a sabre arch. Cooper says California, if he, too, had an Indian name, mans and the Coopers believed them-
that D.W. was at Pearl Harbor, served he laughed. “Thomas definitely likes to selves to be entirely different, one bet-
in numerous major naval battles in the romanticize, and that’s wonderful,” he ter than the other. It turns out that both
Pacific, and fought in Korea, but still, said. “I’ve got a lot of friends that are were part Cherokee, part Jewish.”
PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN FRANCIS PETERS FOR THE NEW YORKER

upon discharge, was not permitted to Indians, and I wouldn’t blend in.” Even now, the only places Cooper
use the rest room in many places in the Some years ago, Mooney made a will not trespass are lands belonging to
United States. Cooper family tree, starting with Reuben indigenous people. In making the “Atlas,”
Life at Standing Rock was a child’s Cooper, a Portuguese Jewish metal mer- he has retraced sections of the early ex-
fantasy. Weekly, the Lakota elders told chant who came to the United States in plorers’ journeys: enacting a twenty-four-
the children stories; at the end of the the seventeenth century. At some point, hour vigil that Magellan made before
sessions, one of them would talk about the Coopers married into a Cherokee leaving Portugal; standing in the spot of
vision, fiercely pronouncing upon the family in the Southeast. “The Coopers Columbus’s first landfall in the Baha-
difference between “the eye that sees and are so intermarried—that’s the polite mas. But embedded in the work is a cri-
the seeing eye.” Thomas was white-white, way of putting it—that they have their tique of what Cooper calls the “conniv-
a towhead with a patched eye. As the own genealogist in South Carolina and ing, disruptive, venal, and murderous”
lone cowboy, being chased by his Indian North Carolina to make sure they’re not impulses of colonization, the slaughter
friends, he learned stealth. On his right intermarrying again,” Mooney told me. that followed in the explorers’ wake, or
hand, he bears a scar, which he says he The Cherokee part of the family was that they themselves perpetrated. In a
got when he was inducted into the Oglala forced west, to Oklahoma, on the Trail moody, scumbled photograph called
50 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019
“ ‘Erasure’—The Beginning of Conquest my father. I could hit what I was aim- hiking eight miles to the canyon’s end,
and Destruction, Native America Loses ing at.” After he turned thirteen, he he still didn’t have a picture. Beginning
the European Cultural Battle,” Cooper shunned violence, refusing to hunt or to despair, he went over a little ridge,
shows the beach in Veracruz where Cor- target-shoot again. “It aggravated the looked back, and saw a fallen tree, silvery
tés commenced his Aztec campaign. hell out of my old man,” he says. “My white, on a stream bank, pointing toward
Obliterating sea foam bisects the image: mother wasn’t that happy about it, either.” an old farmhouse: an indication. Recall-
the time before and the time after. Eventually, the family settled into a ing the experience, he once said, “The
“These guys went into the unknown conventional middle-class existence, in predictive nature of the name of this
willingly, and they suffered for it,” Coo- a suburb of Arcata, in Humboldt County, place, See Canyon, taught me several im-
per says. “They have to be despised, but California; Cooper remembers that his portant artist’s lessons. The first was to
to insist that you can do something that mother baked a lot of pie. When he relax into trying to see a place, be at ease
nobody has detailed before you—Jesus was sixteen, she died of a heart attack, if possible in the place, but attend to it
Christ, that’s admirable. I’m amazed by brought on by a combination of alcohol well and very carefully. Secondly, be pre-
Magellan, because he was a superior and sleeping pills. He can barely talk pared to change your mind and to see
sailor. Agog at Drake, who was a seri- about it still. “Fuck, I’m a kid,” he said. what you do not expect to see or did not
ous S.O.B., because to have survived the “I tried to give her mouth-to-mouth.” want to see.” He made the first of his
Drake Passage is incomprehensible. Ul- Nancy was not yet forty, and rumors of vows about where he would work (out-
timately, though, it’s all bad. Drake cre- suicide dogged the family. side) and how he would work (with aus-
ates the opportunity for globalization After her death, Cooper left home, tere economy, one image per site).
and the homogenization of culture at scrapping together odd jobs in sawmills. As Cooper experimented, he wrote
the great expense of anything that is ex- He enrolled at Humboldt State Uni- a series of solicitous letters to Ansel Ad-
treme and unbending.” versity, where, he says, he befriended the ams, the preëminent landscape photog-
Among the very few pictures of the painter Morris Graves, helping him in rapher of the time, whose pictures of
United States in the LACMA show are the garden at the Lake, Graves’s home Yosemite and other Western sites so-
two relating to Cooper’s Cherokee fam- and studio deep in the redwoods. At lidified a conservation movement. Soon,
ily: a river they crossed in their journey that point, Cooper wanted to be a poet, he began to visit. “He tucked me under
west on the Trail of Tears—where Coo- and thought he’d make a living as a rural his wing,” Cooper says. “The deal was,
per fell into a sinkhole and lost his postman, writing in the afternoons. After if I arrived at five, it was drinks. If I ar-
boots—and the Oklahoma homestead taking a photography course, to fulfill a rived at seven, it was dinner. I had to
of his father’s tribal grandparents. Pat- graduation requirement, he asked Graves do the dishes after dinner, and I always
rick Lannan, the president of the Lan- if he knew any artists making photo- had to spend the next day helping him
nan Foundation, which has funded the graphs. “The art is in the thinking and in the darkroom. I was itinerant for a
majority of the “Atlas,” says, “There’s an the feeling and the seeing and the mak- while. Being fed was a good deal. Being
indigenous sensibility. His pictures evoke ing,” Cooper recalls Graves telling him. offered a drink was a better deal.” He
a memory of a world that hasn’t been “Not in the medium.” slept rough, in a sleeping bag outside
harvested yet. He admires the explor- Graves introduced Cooper to the Adams’s house.
ers, the risks they took and all of that, photographer Imogen Cunningham, Adams encouraged Cooper’s work,
but he also recognizes what they brought who hired him as a studio assistant. (She but thought that his camera, a 35-mm.,
with them. His feet are in both worlds.” made a portrait of him: a young man was limiting. A few years earlier, Coo-
with a pouf of cidery blond hair, intent per had bought his five-by-seven cam-
oving on from Standing Rock, but faraway.) Cooper says that when he era, in Arcata, from the elderly son of
M Cooper’s family made its way to
D.W.’s next job, tending an elk herd for
applied to graduate school for photog-
raphy, in New Mexico, Graves wrote a
its original owner; it had been sitting
on his mantel, a provocation. When he
the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on a recommendation, in the form of an acros- presented it for Adams’s approval, Coo-
preserve in Wyoming. Nancy and D.W. tic that spelled A-R-T-I-S-T. He was per recalls, “he said, ‘It’s perfect, it’s per-
lived in a one-room cabin, while Thomas admitted, in the fall of 1970, and promptly fect. This is the biggest camera that a
and his sister, Leslie, shared an Army- got suspended, for punching a teacher normal person that’s interested in the
issue pup tent. D.W., whom Cooper de- who made fun of him. rectangle can carry.’” In a letter to Adams
scribes as “more or less nonverbal,” hunted During this period, Cooper briefly from 1972, Cooper reminisces about
for the family’s food, bringing Thomas worked as a substitute teacher for eighth showing him pictures of “the natural
with him. “If it takes more than two bul- graders at a barrio school in San Luis world as I felt it.” Adams, he writes, told
lets, you’re a bad shot,” D.W. told his son. Obispo County. In his art work, he was him that he was “on his way.”
“If I miss, we don’t eat.” Cooper says, “He flummoxed, hating everything he made. Despite the mentorship, Adams, a
was really spare, and that sparseness had One day, a friend drove him past an populist who made beautiful pictures
an effect on me.” Cooper’s father trained old apple farm. A hand-painted sign to encourage tourism to the national
him on a .22 at six, a shotgun at eight, read, “See Canyon.” Cooper told me, “I parks, is not the father of Cooper’s
and a range rifle at twelve. “I was blind thought, I’ll make pictures here. If I can’t project. According to Richard Learoyd,
as a bat, but I always knew where the start in See Canyon, then I’m fucked.” “Adams was chasing his own version of
target was,” Cooper says. “It confounded He set out on April Fools’ Day. After the photographic picturesque. It was a
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019 51
language that was understood, and he
was using it. With Cooper, he’s not using
the language of the picturesque—he’s
using the language of discovery and ab-
straction.” Darius Himes, the interna-
tional head of photographs at Chris-
tie’s, says, “You look at most of Cooper’s
pictures and don’t know where you are,
and it’s definitely not a place you want
to go visit.”

“ saw the picture over Kate’s shoul-

I der,” Cooper said. “She probably saw
it right away.” We were at Rincon, a beach
south of Point Conception, where Coo-
per had spent the previous hour moving
pieces of whitening driftwood around
on the sand, like an elephant burying
bones. Mooney was sitting on a bench,
with her eyes closed, face tipped toward
a hazy sky. “Thank Christ—I was start-
ing to worry,” Cooper said, when the
image revealed itself. “It’s always there,
you just have to be patient.” He trudged
past the bench and into a copse of cy-
press trees, whose branches looked like
upswept umbrellas on a windy day. There
was a John Deere tractor, which he
avoided, and a downed tree trunk, which
attracted him. “My pictures are not about
the specifics of geography,” he says. “They
attempt to be about what it’s like to stand
in a very specific place.”
Cooper has lived in Scotland since
1982, when he was hired to establish the
photography department at the Glasgow
School of Art, where he is still on the
faculty. He met Mooney, a silversmith-
ing student seventeen years younger than
he, playing table tennis in the yard outside
the photography building. Mooney says,
“He invited me to see his collection of
daguerreotypes, and I moved in.” Coo-
per’s experience of the courtship was “My whole practice is edges,” Cooper says. “Edge of the world, edge of the picture, edge of
more tormented. “I was thunderstruck,”
he says. “She was young, sweet, and didn’t my dear sweetheart are entirely inter- “How can I dream except beyond this
want an old dog around.” He contem- twined,” he told me. life?/Can I outleap the sea—/The edge
plated leaving Scotland for good, return- Cooper and Mooney have two of all the land, the final sea?” In the early
ing to America. Hoping for clarity, he daughters, Laura Indigo, who is twenty- two-thousands, he began making excur-
took his camera to northwest Scotland four, and Sophie Alice, who is twenty- sions to what he calls, after Roethke, the
and stood in the sea. “I was in the water one. When Laura was two weeks old, Far Field: the extremities of continental
about an hour, and I thought, O.K., fuck Cooper left their home, in Glasgow, on Europe and Africa, looking west, toward
this, I can’t figure out what else to do. a long voyage, setting a pattern that the setting sun and the unknown. “The
Finally, I saw this picture looking to- would persist. “I missed the entirety of cardinal points are always, historically,
ward Scotland, and thought, I know my children growing up,” Cooper told metaphors,” Cooper says. “West is the
what to do now.”That sea picture, empty me. “I was in the field for eighteen years.” area of promise for Westerners—follow
of humans but charged with human As an undergraduate, Cooper had the sun. The allure of the north—it’s the
emotion, began the “Atlas” and his rela- come across Theodore Roethke’s poem gate to Heaven, as native people say. The
tionship with Kate. “So the ‘Atlas’ and “The Abyss,” and it stayed with him: fear of the south starts with Captain
52 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019
 Listening to Cooper’s plans, Roberts
often thought, “Dude, you don’t like sail-
ing boats, so why the fuck are we sailing
to Antarctica?” On one trip to the South
Pole, he and Cooper were caught for
three weeks in a blizzard on the conti-
nental ice shelf. According to Cooper, as
the snow persisted, the camp filled up
with scientists, sportsmen, and explorers,
and jokes started to fly about who would
get eaten first. “I’m the only fat person
in the God-damned crew,” Cooper told
me. “They’re all looking at me and smil-
ing slightly lasciviously.” The wind was
blowing sixty to eighty miles an hour, a
whiteout. Travelling to the mess tent and
the latrine required hooking in to ropes.
After thirteen days in the tent, Cooper,
feeling stir-crazy, decided to go out and
make a picture. “I figured it would take
six people,” he told me. “Two to hold me,
two to hold the camera, and one to hold
the dark cloth. I stood facing into the
wind and made a picture of whiteness—
it’s nothing but pure white.”
“You might say he’s a madman, but
you have to respect him for dedication,”
Roberts says. “I would have given up a
long time ago if I was that uncomfort-
able.” But, he allows, “when things go
bad, he can be a moody bugger.”
Several years ago, at the North Pole,
Cooper broke through the ice, with a
thirty-five-pound tripod on his back.
One edge of the rupture held, and he
heaved himself out of the water. After-
ward, he returned to the spot to make
his photograph: a white ice field, rid-
dled with melt holes, like a sweater rav-
aged by moths. He said, “I’m up to my
neck in the Arctic Ocean and I thought,
Well, fuck, if I go down, that’s the end,
no one will know. Bye-bye! I got out,
the land and sea.” In Brazil, a wave nearly swept him off a cliff as he pressed the shutter. and I made the picture, which is how I
solve all my dilemmas.”
Cook. The east is always behind you; you Roberts has guided or overseen numer- Not everyone, of course, believes that
know where you came from.” ous expeditions for Cooper, to the fro- a photograph is worth dying for. In 2008,
With the support of Harry Blain, a zen ocean of the North Pole—where Cooper undertook an arduous journey
London gallerist, Cooper engaged Jason storms press the pack into “screw ice” to a place whose name, he felt, was sum-
Roberts, a polar explorer, who has also and the wind forms sculpted ridges called moning him: Prime Head, at the tip of
produced expeditions for David Atten- sastrugi—and to the parallel universe at the Antarctic Peninsula, north of Exas-
borough, and headed to the northern- the extreme south. “I would always send peration Inlet, Cape Disappointment,
most point in Europe, the Svalbard ar- pictures to his girls, saying, ‘Your bon- and Cape Longing. He engaged a cap-
chipelago. Roberts told me, “I was, like, kers father, look at what he’s doing now. tain, Greg Landreth, and his wife, Keri
What the hell do they want to take some He’s at the North Pole, to take one photo. Pashuk, to take him on a fifty-four-foot
guy to this place for? Do they seriously Then he’ll go all the way to the South motorized sailboat called Northanger.
know how complicated and costly it is?” Pole to take one picture,’” Roberts told (He might have paid closer attention
(Cooper’s trips can cost upward of three me. “It’s really quite funny to take a lot to that name.) From the start, there were
hundred thousand dollars each.) By now, more photos than he ever takes.” tensions. Cooper recalls that Landreth
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019 53
 U.K.’s Hydrographic Office, in the hope
that they would be considered, as he
says, “new knowledge.”
At Catherine Island, Cooper con-
ceded that he had to abandon Prime
Head. “The wind is up and the fog is
up and I can’t see thirty feet,” he told
me. “I said, ‘This is as far as we can go.’
The captain said, ‘Thank Christ,’ and
we prepared to pack up the equipment
into the dinghy. Just then, it got calm
and the fog rose, and we could see Prime
Head Point half to three-quarters of a
mile away. It was calm as fuck, and we
said, ‘We have to try this,’ and we made
a dash for the headland.” Facing a two-
hundred-and-fifty-foot ice wall, Coo-
per saw bedrock, the thin black line that
means the great ice continent is melt-
ing, and felt his heart leap. He made his
picture—“Uncharted Dangers, Clear”—
at the end of a sea ledge, in a survival
“It’s a good deal. You’re getting twenty more teaspoons suit, chest-deep in the Antarctic water.
of sugar for a quarter.” He believes that he was the ninth per-
son to set foot on Prime Head, and that
Landreth was the tenth. More people
• • have stood on the surface of the moon.
Laura recalls that when she and So-
greeted him by saying, “Any mistake you final two weeks they spent in the twelve- phie were little they would paint their
make is likely to kill someone. You’re a foot-long dinghy, towing Northanger father’s toenails before a trip. He’d come
green, unproven man, and I can barely and depth-sounding as they went. home thirty pounds lighter, fish white,
stand to be in your company.” Conditions According to Cooper, Landreth re- with flakes of pink polish still at the
were dangerous, and Cooper had laid fused to proceed, causing Cooper to in- tips of his grown-out, crabbed nails.
out a daunting itinerary: seventy Ant- voke his rights as the charterer to com- He’d empty his pockets of shells and
arctic sites in seventy days, with Prime mandeer the boat. (Landreth strongly rocks and other things found at the edge
Head as his ultimate goal. Landreth says disputes Cooper’s account. “I’m the of the Atlantic—and, later, perfumes
that it was his responsibility to stay alert owner of the boat,” he told me. “I cer- from duty free—before disappearing
to all present and future conditions to tainly would’ve noticed.”) “He went co- into the darkroom.
keep them safe. Cooper, on the other lossally berserk, and he said, ‘I’m put- Until Cooper develops a negative, he
hand, he said, “would stay in his cabin, ting you off,’” Cooper told me. “I said, is not exactly sure what he will find.
sequestered, till it was time to go and ‘Great, where the fuck are you going to Once, he discovered that a whale had
take his photo. Then off we’d go and put me off ? We’re seventy-five miles breached during an exposure, while his
land on this horrific wave-swept plat- from the nearest research base. It’ll take eyes were closed. He excluded the pic-
form and he’d do his thing, and then us three weeks to get there, and by then ture from the “Atlas”; animals are be-
he’d disappear again and not want to be we could get to Prime Head and back.’” side the point. Another time, he real-
noticed or bothered.” Finally, Cooper says, Landreth relented. ized that he’d accidentally marred the
They sailed through the austral sum- They were in a freezing fog, but Coo- negative, resulting in a flamelike black
mer; autumn lasted a week, and winter per could see on the map that nearby presence at the edge of the image. That
hit. Supplies ran low. Prime Head is sur- was an uncharted island, and he wanted one was a happy accident, as the picture
rounded on three sides by what sailors it. Landreth allowed him to chart the was made at a place in Tierra del Fuego
call “uncharted dangers,” places in which, island, which he called Catherine Is- called Cabo del Espíritu Santo.
according to maritime custom, poten- land, in Kate’s honor. Catherine Island Printing requires total concentra-
tial rescuers are not expected to respond is one of three previously unidentified tion—fifteen hours a day, a week per
to a Mayday signal. For three weeks, Antarctic locations that Cooper mapped print. (Mooney packs him lunch.) From
they maneuvered slowly toward Prime on the journey to Prime Head; another contact sheets, Cooper makes eight-by-
Head up the Bransfield Strait, a water- is LISA Rock (an acronym of “Laura In- ten study prints, which help him to de-
way between the South Shetland Islands digo Sophie Alice”), a protrusion near cide which to enlarge. Working in dark-
and the Antarctic mainland, clogged Cape Herschel that is said to have sunk ness, he adds light by overexposing, and
with brash ice and calving icebergs. The five boats. He submitted both to the inhibits it chemically, an idiosyncratic
54 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019
variant of the rigidly scientific devel- his mouth—A-ha-ha-ha, wordless joy. is a weird thing to be doing, but I think
oping system codified by Ansel Adams. There was only one more stop on the I am going to do it,” he said. “See if I
(Govan, the director of LACMA, says day’s itinerary, at Point Dume, in Mal- get lucky.” He addressed the moon—
that comparing Adams’s printing pro- ibu, where Cooper and Mooney were “Oh, you’re a pretty one. Strange, soft
cess to Cooper’s is like comparing Bach having dinner with Michael Govan, who penumbra of your light”—then spoke
to Glenn Gould.) Then Cooper im- had arranged a place for them to stay the to himself. “Now we see the impossi-
merses each finished print in selenium- night. Govan, who helped conceive the ble!” he said. “Hooray! Oh, crazy old
and gold-based toners, layering reds and Capes of California trip, has been try- man. Crazy, crazy Stupid Bastard Syn-
blues. Even those who have watched ing to bring Cooper’s “Atlas” to comple- drome. Oh ho ho.” He said the expo-
the process up close find it baffling. Rich- tion and into the museum for many years. sure would probably take two and a half
ard Learoyd, who worked as his studio “There was a point fifteen years ago when hours. Mooney grunted (the dinner, her
assistant for a time, says, “It’s like hav- I thought, This artist will be known after flu). Oblivious, Cooper said, “We may
ing somebody with big fat fingers try- he’s gone,” he told me recently. Cooper, end up making it three.”
ing to make a watch. It’s like a walrus too, has been straining to finish the last He set up his tripod in the sand, flush
trying to post a letter in a letter box.” stretch of his Atlantic journey, as both with the concrete bumpers of the park-
Cooper throws out most of what he his health and the coastline have dete- ing lot. He took out a negative and blew
makes. Patrick Lannan told me that one riorated. For nearly a decade, he has been on it, to clean dust off and breathe life
six-week trip that the foundation funded, trying to get to Zenith Point, the north- in. He hit the plunger, and the waiting
at a quarter of a million dollars, yielded ernmost spot on the Canadian main- in the dark began.
eighteen images. One of the things Coo- land. In 2012, he was poisoned by his an- The parking lot was empty except for
per hates most about photographs is tinausea medication, which prevented one other car, at the far end. When I
that they can be infinitely reproduced. him from urinating for four days; near walked past it to use the bathroom, I
Cooper dedicates most of his books death, he was treated at a hospital on heard a man inside screaming, “Whore!
to the hearth-warming triad of wife and Saint-Pierre, a tiny French island in the Whore! ” I speed-walked back to the group,
daughters. But Laura says that she Gulf of St. Lawrence, and then med- and the car pulled around after me. The
knew intuitively, even as a girl, that the evacked home. In 2014, bad weather got windows were down and cacophonous
work had nothing to do with them. in the way. In 2015, bad luck. Cooper’s music blared. The driver, sweaty and
When she mentioned this to her mother, plan for the six-week excursion covers amped, got out. Seeing Mooney and me,
Mooney replied, matter-of-factly, “He’s nearly six thousand miles and involves a he yelled “Whores! Get off my beach.”
looking for his mom.” The book LACMA single-engine airplane with skis and tun- He approached Govan, and spat in his
produced for the exhibition contains a dra treads, man-pulled sleds, and guns face. “How motherfucking stupid to try
stoic epigraph by Mooney—“There is to fend off polar bears. At the moment, to shoot the fucking moon!” Cooper stood
no exploration without exile”—and a it seems, everyone has decided that it is facing the tripod, protecting his baby.
searing essay by Laura on the painful too expensive, that Cooper is too old, The man returned to the car, backed
condition of being left behind. I asked and that he cannot be allowed to die in up, then drove into Cooper’s legs. Coo-
Laura what she saw in her father’s work. the frozen north alone with his camera. per growled and held his place. The man
“I see someone that’s very lost,” she said. It’s not clear that he agrees. pulled backward a few feet and then hit
“The pictures are his loss for words.” At Point Dume, Govan’s wife, Kath- him again. I tried calling 911, but the call
erine Ross, had organized dinner and dropped, and then, because my hands
“ L et’s go forward,” Mooney said.
“Rincon, Mugu, Dume.” On the
were shaking, so did the phone. The
third time he approached, Cooper stood
seat beside her was the “California Atlas steadfast, body between the madman
and Gazetteer” and a blue binder she and his camera, eyes on the moon and
had prepared for the trip, labelled “Capes the sea. Death or picture. He bellowed,
of California.” We headed south along “No-o-o!” Finally, the man drove away.
the Pacific Coast Highway. “This looks When he was gone, Mooney pointed at
like the end of the earth,” Mooney said, the sky. “There’s no moon now,” she said
as we neared Point Mugu. “We must wryly. A dark cloud had blotted it out.
be going in the right direction.” When a sheriff ’s deputy showed up,
At Point Mugu, a conical hunk of was waiting at the house. First, though, twenty minutes later, he was incredu-
rock where car commercials are often Cooper wanted to see the point. By the lous. Why hadn’t Cooper moved out
filmed, Cooper set up on a crumbling time we arrived at the beach, the sky of the guy’s way? Cooper said, “He
asphalt promontory, with one toe of the was smudged, a seventies-eyeshadow was trying to knock the camera over,
tripod hovering midair. It was late in palette, bruised mauve to midnight blue and he had to kill me to do that.”
the day, and the surfaces were begin- to ochre. Feathery smoke-colored clouds Mooney said, “You have to wonder who
ning to glisten. Scallops of white surf drifted past a crescent moon. Mooney is more insane.” Cooper’s picture of
surged against the pocked foot of a rock coughed. It had been a very long day, Point Dume—“Unexpected Dangers,”
covered in seagulls. He scared the birds and she was nursing a flu. a variation on a theme—is black with
away, asked permission, and opened But Cooper could not resist. “This a harsh white flare. 
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019 55
 FICTION

TYPOGRAPHY BY TAMARA SHOPSIN

56 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019 PHOTOGRAPH BY NAKEYA BROWN

 he night after Jerome’s brother crumpled onto the couch. His face was door, she sat in the hallway sobbing

T turned up on a Southside side­

walk, bloodied and babbling in
and out of consciousness, Tiny took
so fallen she barely recognized him;
sadness so chiselled into his cheeks and
his brow that Tiny couldn’t imagine
into the night, until she felt as useless
as piles and piles and piles of dead hair.

Jerome’s hand, sat him on a stool, wiped anything softening the rock of his face, iny had started cutting hair almost
tears from his cheeks, draped a towel
over his shoulders, and whispered,
so she sat and said nothing. She thought
of how much she had loved Jerome’s
T on a whim. She had found her fa­
ther’s old clippers at the bottom of a dusty
Relax, baby, you can’t go to the hospi­ mother—but that wasn’t the truth, sim­ box beneath the sink in a seldom used
tal like that. Your brother’ll wake up ply one of those things people tell them­ bathroom in the basement. Her father
to that damn bird’s nest on your head selves when someone dies. The woman, used to zug crooked lines and potholes
and fall right back into another coma. Tiny realized, was just a proxy; it wasn’t into his three sons’ hair when they were
For the next two hours, Tiny sheared for Jerome’s mother that she had once young and not yet vain. Soon her older
away Jerome’s knotty beads until his held an unshakable love but for Jerome brothers no longer allowed the maiming,
head appeared smooth and black, with himself. She opened her arms wide so someone buried the clippers under
orderly hairs laid prone by her soft, again and pulled him tightly to her piles of stuff. When Tiny stumbled on
smoothing hand. Back when they met, body. His head nestled itself between the clippers, she realized she had grown
she’d told him she cut hair, said she her breasts. It felt wrong, terribly, ter­ tired of her perm. The time had come to
was damn good, too. Jerome had nod­ ribly wrong. Jerome trembled in her shave it all off and let her natural hair
ded, smiled a bit, as if to say, How cute, arms. He wept and sniffled. Tiny grow long. She’d shape it and twist it,
and changed the subject. But now, the brushed her lips against his cheeks, and braid it and maybe lock it, as her mother
way his eyes danced in the mirror, the then she stopped. had, but whenever her hair grew she felt
joy that broadened his face, it all said, I’m sorry, Jerome, she said. I want to the urge only to trim it into what every­
Where in the hell did a woman, a W-O- end all that pain you’re carrying, but I one called “boy styles”: a faded­in Mo­
M-A-N, learn to cut like that? She cir­ can’t do what you want me to do. hawk, or just a fade, or a Caesar, or a tem­
cled him as she did her work, looking Damn it, he said. My mother just ple taper. It changed every two weeks.
at every angle of his head. She lath­ died. Is it that hard for you to break Soon Tiny began to choose her lovers
ered up the front and went at it with out your clippers and make me look based partly on the shape of their heads,
a straight razor so that his hairline sat presentable? Is your heart that full of what styles she could carve on their domes.
as crisp and sharp as the bevelled edge ice for me? I got a funeral to attend. When their heads no longer intrigued
of the blade that cut it. Tiny imagined God damn it, my little brother was her, she would lose interest. These days,
slicing her finger while sliding it across doing better, now I can’t find him and her hair grew long enough to keep in a
the front of his head; her imagined self you not trying to help me. My brother simple ponytail, and that was how she
then smeared the blood all over Je­ is God knows where, doing God knows wore it. She no longer had any interest
rome’s face. After she finished and had what drugs, in God knows how much in her own hair, just other people’s.
swept the fine hairs from his shoulders pain, and you can’t offer me this sim­ Nearly a year to the day after Tiny
and back, Jerome and Tiny collapsed ple kindness? watched the folds at the back of Jerome’s
onto the floor, spent, as if they had just No, Tiny whispered. No. I can’t. freshly cut head bob out her door for the
made love for hours. On a bed of Je­ Still, she walked into her bathroom, last time, Tiny’s Hair Technology opened
rome’s shorn hair, they slept into the whispering, No, as she grabbed the up, on River Way. The Great Hair Cri­
early morning. clippers, the razor, the rubbing alco­ sis was raging on with no visible end.
hol, and a towel. She draped the towel Every single barbering Cross Riverian
year to the day after Jerome’s over his shoulders and, in silence, she man somehow losing his touch, the abil­
A brother got out of the hospital, Je­
rome showed up at the only place he’d
cut his uncombed locks. They both
whimpered and sniffled a bit, avoid­
ity to deliver even a decent shape­up.
Afros had abounded within the town’s
ever found comfort, on the doorstep of ing each other’s eyes. When the tears borders since that moment in ’05 when
the woman he no longer loved and who, blurred Tiny’s vision, she didn’t stop; all the clippers and cutting hands began
by agreement, no longer loved him. instead, she let the salty drops drip onto shaving ragged patches into heads. It had
When Tiny opened the door that night Jerome’s head as she cut from mem­ been ten years of this wilderness, this
she snorted and looked him up and ory, her smoothing hand rubbing the dystopia. Men with beautiful haircuts
down, this man she had been comfort­ tears into his scalp. became as mythical as the glowing
able not seeing or speaking to for the It took her double the time of her wolves—lit up like earthbound Canis
past several months. Before she could most careful cuts, four whole painful Majors—that are said to walk the Wild­
complete her condescension, Jerome hours. When she finished, Jerome lands. Sonny Beaumont, Jr., once Cross
spoke: My mother is dead. thanked her and left, wiping his cheeks. River’s greatest barber, now looked like
Tiny’s face grew tender with sad­ I’m crying, he said, ’cause of my mom, a haggard old troll; he was about forty­
ness and disbelief. She opened her arms but also ’cause this haircut is so god­ five years old, and resembled a wrinkled
and called for Jerome to rest his head dam beautiful. set of intertwined wires covered in the
on the soft roundness of her chest. But Tiny nodded, hoping that Jerome thinnest, baggiest brown flesh. There
he breezed by her, eyes on the floor, and would never return. After she shut the would never again be any good days for
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019 57
Sonny. Even decent haircuts stayed fro- removed it from a patron’s shoulders, to The jutting branches resembled skeletal
zen in his past, and all he was capable of the door—was pure, pure magic. fingers, so the building appeared always
now were messes—carefully, carefully Tiny no longer cut her lovers’ hair on the verge of being snatched into an
carved messes. His remaining custom- for free. They’d have to pay like anyone abyss. The Wack Spot was salted earth;
ers patronized him only out of loyalty— else. After Jerome, she’d loved Cameron, no successful business could sprout from
poisoned nostalgia for the perfect cuts and then Sherita passed through her the ruined soil. There was the roti shop
they’d once received—and false hope. life, and then Bo and Jo, and Katrina, that never seemed to have any roti. Then
All those Cross Riverian Afros left and De’Andre and Ron. They all fell there was Ice Screamers (later Sweet
one to ask, Who cursed Cross River? A out of love with her when they realized Screamers, and, as a last ditch, Sweet
shop opened up on the Northside—a she wouldn’t use her magic on them. Creamers), a soft-serve spot run by a
decent shop—only for the owner to die And that was fine with her; it was easy surly guy with an eyepatch. For the pre-
of a heart attack mid-cut. The two re- for Tiny to fall out of love with them, vious several months the Wack Spot had
maining barbers opened shops of their too. Jerome seemed so long ago. She housed an adult bookstore that, much to
own, and eventually murdered each other hadn’t even loved him best. the dismay of the surly ice-cream ped-
in a gunfight over customers and terri- dler, retained the final name of the soft-
tory. Kimothy Beam closed his business, n the scheme of things Tiny’s Hair serve spot. It was common knowledge
Mobile Cutting Unit, after his haircut
van flipped during a police chase. He
I Technology is just a footnote, but it
would be even less than that had the
that only a witch spouting the most for-
bidden of spells could make the Wack
served three months and hung up his shop not opened during such desperate Spot work, and Tiny figured she would
clippers for good when the authorities times. A shop of lady barbers? Who had be that witch, conjuring the pitchest black
turned him loose. There was a long scroll ever heard of such a thing? It was Tiny magic from the back of her spell book.
of such mishaps: haircutting men, al- and Claudine and Mariah at first; later, When Jerome walked into the shop,
ways men, driven from the business and, a whole cast of lady barbers passed shortly after it opened, he was still tall
in some cases, from this world, through through. No one expected anything but and fine, though scruffy—he appeared
some misfortune. That’s not going to be another business popping up and then to be trying to grow a beard, but had
me, Tiny thought. The simple science shuttering within a couple of months. managed only wild crabgrass patches
of haircutting gets down into one’s bones, There had been five in three years in that along his cheeks.
into the soul of a person. She watched location. Folks in the neighborhood had Woman, cut my hair, he said with a
the peace settle over her customers after taken to calling it the Wack Spot, a dingy smirk.
a good cut. They’d walk out into the cardboard box of a structure tucked away Tiny spun her chair and dashed her-
world, where the noise would start again, at the edge of an unimpressive side street. self onto it. She loved to hear the lumpy
but that moment at the end of a fresh Behind the building stood knotted trees springs whine beneath the heft of her
cut—from the crack of the cape, as she that stayed bare no matter the season. backside.
Hello, Jerome, she said. Can I help
you with something?
All this formality now?
She didn’t respond, tried to make her
eyes blank as if she’d never seen him be-
fore. She couldn’t hide everything, though;
as she glanced at him she flashed a twin-
kle he took for a bit of residual love.
This is boring me, he said. I just want
a cut. One of your perfect little tight cuts.
Well, I’m busy now. Jerome looked
about the empty shop. Mariah, Tiny
said, should be here in a few. Would you
like me to make an appoint—
I don’t want a cut from some-damn-
body named Mariah! I want you. No
one makes me look as good as you do.
Tiny turned her head, reached for a
magazine, and pawed through the pages
with the bored, languid movements of
a cat. How’s your brother? she said, finally.
Dude is doing great. Jerome smiled
a little. Just great. It took Mom to die,
but you should see him. Designer suit
every day. This fucking little Dick Tracy
“I told you to listen to the climate science.” hat. Looks fly on him. I’m proud of the
guy. He needs a haircut, though. If you scrambled for the seat. As they tussled, wherein thy great strength lieth, and
do it good to me—the haircut, I mean— a short dark-skinned man with salt- wherewith thou mightest be bound to
I’ll recommend you. and-pepper hair and the twisted but un- afflict thee. That’s from Judges 16:6. You
How’d you even hear I was over here? becoming grin of a mischievous child men here giving away your strength,
You think niggas not gon’ talk about strolled to the barber’s chair. A Ghana- and for what? A nice haircut? Wrong
a new shop full of lady barbers during ian guy they called Doc pointed and is wrong is wrong is wrong in the eyes
the Hair Crisis? Now, you gonna cut laughed. Don’t forget to get the booster of the Lord.
me, or what? seat for my man, he said. Get out of my damn shop, Tiny
I’m sorry, Jerome, but I have a few Quiet, you fool, the short man replied. called. Now! Get out!
things to do now— You folks rowdy, Tiny said with a Dale! the Bible man called to the cus-
I’m trying to give your failing busi- smile. Don’t make me have to call the tomer in Tiny’s chair. I’m surprised at
ness some work. you. Real surprised. Your wife know you
Like I said, Jerome, Mariah— in here giving away your power?
You’re just going to repeat your bull- Rev. Kimothy, Dale said. I . . . I . . .
shit over and over, huh? I already know I’m tired of coming into your church
how you do. Thought you would have looking like I just stumbled in off the
matured by now, Tiny. Wanna take the street.
little-girl route? Gotcha. It’s fine. Kimothy? Tiny asked. Kimothy Beam
Jerome jutted out his lips, did a quick who had the Mobile Cutting Unit?
head nod, and watched his ex-lover as if I found God in prison, and you must
silence could break her. Don’t worry, bitch, be Delilah—that’s who you are.
he continued, sweeping a stack of mag- police to keep things quiet in here. I’ll be that, Rev.
azines to the ground and walking out the How’d y’all even hear about my shop? Dale stood from the chair, half of his
door. You’ll get yours. See you real soon. The short man grinned and pointed head shaved close, the other wild and
to the tall Eritrean. unshorn. He held a fistful of twenties
fter weeks of barber-chair empti- I heard from Doc, the tall Eritrean in his outstretched hand. I’m sorry, Tiny,
A ness and a floor sadly clean of shorn
hair, Tiny arrived one morning to find
said.
That first guy you cut today, Doc
he said. Real sorry.
That’s right, Rev. Kimothy said. Sorry
a line of men—many sporting unkempt said. That loudmouth. I heard from him. as snake shit.
dandruff bushes—waiting outside. Hmm, Tiny grunted. He said some- Naw, Tiny said. You sit your mon-
I thought you opened at ten, called one I never even heard of told him. key ass down and keep your money. You
the first desperately uncombed man in All I know, the short man said, is ain’t telling no one Tiny did that to your
line to a chorus of grumbles. It’s nearly that the Great Hair Crisis is over! head. Sit and you can rest your eternal
noon! soul in Hell, Rev. Kimothy shouted.
You guys been here since ten? Tiny hat day, Tiny cut as if possessed, Dale stood paralyzed, looking back and
asked. As she unlocked the door, the men
dazed her with numbers. Six in the morn-
T head after head, each cut better
than the last. She ignored the non-stop
forth between his reverend and his bar-
ber, until some guys from the back of
ing, one said, his voice trembling with a talk, the chatter about sports and poli- the shop made Dale’s decision easier,
mixture of embarrassment and pride. tics and the proper way to beat young snatching Rev. Kimothy by his arms and
I been here since five-fifty-five, a man children. After hours of clutching the tossing him onto the sidewalk as he
whose hair was cut into an asymmetri- vibrating clippers, her hand trembled. struggled and screamed, Lady barbers!
cal field of black said. He held the hand Men kept coming, though. Man after Whoever heard of such a thing? The
of a boy who looked everything like a man. Each with a different story as to Devil, that’s who! You gon’ burn! You
little Jackson 5 Michael Jackson except how he’d learned of Tiny’s shop. Ma- gon’ burn! You gon’ burn!
for the gopher hole shaved into the cen- riah showed up midafternoon to pick Even as Dale sat back down in the
ter of his head. up the slack. The first man she cut ap- barber’s chair, three Afroed men slipped
But . . . but, it’s a school day, Tiny said. proached her chair hesitantly, but when quietly out the door.
And? the father replied. I take him she finished he looked in the mirror and Bunch of bitches, Mariah mumbled,
out of school when he got a doctor’s ap- turned his head this way and that. staring into the sharp lines she had
pointment, too. She better than Tiny! trimmed into her customer’s head.
When she finished with the first man, Watch it! Tiny called, not taking her Bunch of little pussy-ass bitches.
he strutted out to cries of admiration eyes off the head she was trimming. This has been some day, Tiny mut-
and even applause. His hair—once dan- As Mariah’s customer walked out, tered into Dale’s hair. Some day.
gerously overgrown—now glittered.Tiny a man with dark glasses and a shining
slapped the chair with the cape and silver mane stomped in. He clutched ate one night—say, nearly eleven—a
cried, Next up!
A tall Eritrean man with curly hair
a thick Bible so old it looked as if the
pages had begun to sprout hair. He
L man in a beautiful cream serge suit
and a white panama hat came in just
and a tall—shorter than the Eritrean, held his book aloft and cried, And De- as Tiny finished her last head, a woman
but still tall—man with an oblong head li-lah said to Samson, Tell me, I pray thee, whose husband had recommended
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019 59
the shop. Tiny’s feet ached from stand-
ing, and she could feel her eyelids hang-
ing heavy like curtains falling over her ODE ON WORDS FOR PARTIES (AMERICAN EDITION)
eyes. Ordinarily she would have turned
the cream-suited man away, but he had Why do we have so many words for parties, a slew
pushed through a line of protesters out of them once you start looking: shindig, bash,
front. Rev. Kimothy and his new le- meet-and-greets, raves, blowouts, barbecues,
gion of followers had grown relentless. and more tepid functions, receptions, luncheons, and do’s
Fighting through those fools just to of all kinds, though, let’s face it, most people have no clue
get a haircut, especially at this time of about how to throw a party, like the friend who was complaining
night, was a level of dedication that because her husband wanted to have lots of food at the brunch
deserved a reward, Tiny thought. She they were planning, but she knew people didn’t go
glanced at him, didn’t take him in much. to parties to eat, and Marsha and I had to break it to her
She yawned. that brunch was the combination of two meals,
Tiny’s life was now love and hatred so her guests were expecting to eat double, and you can’t believe
falling on her in equal measure. Acco- the shock on her face, but her husband put out a great spread
lades and applause, followed by bricks and everyone ate and talked, though we’ve all been to those parties
wrapped in Bible verses sailing through with the bowl of dead chips and the onion dip
her window at night. The woman stood that looks like cat vomit on the driveway, actually not that good,
and stared into a handheld mirror, ad- but my sister throws a fabulous party, because she’s a great cook
miring her new fade from all angles. This and has an army of wine bottles that never stops marching,
shit right here fine, she said. Sonny trash and her garden is verdant, and she has a pool,
now. From now on, you my barberess. which some people end up in at the end of the night. What
The Barberess. What a title. Tiny would be the word for that kind of party—Vinocoolpool
had thought about changing the shop’s Party? And the other one might be a Kittydip Party. And guests!
name. That old name had grown stale. They can ruin a party, too. Think of the Music Nazis
Barberesses, maybe. Maybe. It would who make their way through the world with their one-upmanship,
look beautiful out front in red and white, and your collection of Van Morrison and Jimi Hendrix
Tiny thought. is so uncool compared with the Mud Stumps and Echo Park,
Wow, you sure are deep in thought, but only before they caved and became famous
Tiny heard a voice say. She looked up and were no longer cool. Then there are the couples
and the woman and her fade had left. who are glued at the hip, twins conjoined
The man with the cream suit took her by church and state, or the bloviators, or the drunks who can turn
place in the chair. He held the panama a party into a Godzilla-stomps-Tokyo apocalypse,
hat in his lap. It took Tiny a half sec- like the time the guy with the Ponderosa belt buckle slid chest first
ond to recognize the face. It seemed to in a dance move and put a gouge three feet long
have aged since she’d last seen it. Je- in my hardwood floor, and I hadn’t even invited him; he was
rome’s patchy beard had turned into a my hairdresser’s friend. That party was over. I wanted
choppy bush, but it was definitely him, everyone out of my house. Or what about the people who live
and this realization made Tiny close her
eyes for what seemed to her like a long
minute or two. I’ve seen worse on you, Tiny said, plied. Like you the Devil come to burn
You thinking about what you gon’ combing out the coils. The prongs of me right here where I stand.
do with all this mess, huh? he said, the pick made a plink, plink, plink music. No, Jerome said. No. Of course not. I
pointing to the unkempt pikes of locks You better give me a big tip, making me haven’t gotten a proper haircut in I don’t
jutting from his scalp. I never, never, revisit your big head. know how long. And you did something
ever take off this hat for any reason When Tiny had finished, she took divine up there, Ms. Tiny. I just want to
nowadays, unless I’m home or some- a straight razor and cleaned up the sprigs know what you got that them fools lack.
thing. Got a new attitude, a new style, from Jerome’s cheeks and chin. She Tiny sighed. Look at my eyes, she
Tine. The hat allows me to conduct placed a warm, wet towel on his face. said. I’m tired. I’m half ’sleep. I don’t have
business without looking like a vagrant, When she removed the towel, she nearly the energy to talk to you anymore tonight.
but it’s havoc on me, I tell you. Havoc. jumped back in fright. With his beard I must be half ’sleep, too, ’cause even
This thing itches and flakes. My bush, and sideburns trimmed, the smile Je- when you was cutting me back in the
I mean. These amateurs around here rome flashed took on a sinister edge; day I thought it was a fluke. I thought
worse than they ever been. I’m ready he grinned as if he had already poisoned it was ’cause you loved me. You clearly
to give anything a try, even a woman her and was just waiting for her to die. don’t love me now. You hate me, as a
barber who ain’t you. Jerome chuckled. How you work this magic, huh, matter of fact, but you still the best cut
Mariah here? I’ll wait for Mariah if you babe? around. You cut other people’s hair per-
want me to. There’s that evil look again, Tiny re- fectly, too. You can’t be in love with all
60 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019
 She scrunched her face for a second
and then straightened her brow. Je-
rome, I knew you could be a goddam
bastard, but—
in the middle of nowhere, and you know Hold on, Ms. Tiny, Jerome replied.
that on the way home you’ll end up in Hades or a ditch, It’s not even like that. I was mad at you
if you’re lucky, what would you call those? when you turned me away, but I was still
Suburban-Hell Parties? Hansel-and-Gretel-Lost-Weekend Parties? proud, so I told every nigga I know about
I often try to talk my husband into pulling over this shop. Thought Rev. Kimothy would
so we don’t crash, but he reminds me that we’re just setting be interested, since he used to cut hair.
ourselves up for the serial killers who roam lonesome Figured he’d tell his congregation, and
highways looking for poets, and what would you call he did. It’s just that he told them to meet
that concatenation of events? Zodiac-After-Party-Stab-Fest? him out front to protest this new De­
Post-Bash-Head-Bash? You can see that when I’m not lilah. Got to admit, though, Rev. Kim-
going to parties I’m watching too many true-crime shows, othy’s dumb ass is good for business.
which make you mistrust your fellow human beings Is he, though? I had a full shop be-
in the most basic way, and yet we continue to throw parties, fore he started his nonsense. Now I got
which is an interesting choice of verbs, and English a hassle of men outside my door at all
is full of them—throw a party, pitch a fit, pitch a tent, pitch hours. Tiny sucked her teeth. She looked
a no-hitter, pitch in, pitch-black, and that’s what the road to the floor, shaking her head. Y’all men
is like now, and I’d give anything to be at that Kittydip Party something else, boy. Something else. I
two blocks from my house, with the Einstein Brains don’t respect Rev. Kimothy or any of
blaring on the sound system so I can’t hear the guy talking them stupid-ass niggas outside, but I
about how he prepares petri dishes for his research can’t be mad at you for their dumb shit.
or the woman who is describing an airline-ticket fiasco Yeah . . . He trailed off. But, look, you
that wouldn’t even be interesting if it had happened gotta tell me your secret.
to me, but I guess that’s life—a continuum between darkness Secret?
and mala folla, a Spanish phrase that describes an indifference Every lady barber in here know how
so profound it can’t be bothered with scorn, to do something extra special with her
but I remember one of the best parties ever was a wine tasting clippers.
put together by an Australian father and son You can’t be this much of an idiot,
and by the end everyone was dancing to “Tutti Frutti” Jerome. There is no secret. Secret is I
and screaming drunk and in love with the world and I danced get a good night’s rest before I cut. Now
with a roly-poly lawyer named Booter, whom I never saw I’m tired and don’t know if I can work
again, and the hangover the next day was a small price to pay magic tomorrow. That’s my secret. I got
for that crazy mix of Little Richard and Cabernet, another secret: I’m going home. I’ll come
and there was food, yeah, but who remembers what. early to clean up before the day get
started. I need my beauty rest.
—Barbara Hamby Let me walk you, Tine.
No thanks. I’m done with you again.
Gotta be careful, sis. All those fools
them people. How a woman cut hair couldn’t lose nobody else after you and out here—
like this, huh? then my mother. I buy a lot of fancy Tiny turned out the lights and
Men barbers got some kind of se- suits with his discount. So do he. Get- pushed open the door. With the black
cret? Tiny said. They grip the clippers ting high off your own supply is not a of the sky as a backdrop, and the bright
with they dicks or something? big deal when you selling suits, it turns bluish-white glow of the street light
I guess not. He chuckled again and out. But look, Tiny. My brother says I’m hovering above like a low-hanging
looked down, shifted in his seat. You know, a fool for coming here. moon, the faces of the men who rushed
I bought this fancy suit from my brother. Damn right. Tiny appeared to her as hovering, dis-
How he doing? You owe me, though. embodied fright masks. The shouting
He good, he good. He off that stuff. How you figure? sounded like sharp, high winds batter-
Not owing no thugs no money no more. You see that? Jerome pointed to the ing her eardrums. Tiny tensed and
He don’t be off disappearing no more. fools outside pacing with signs reading clutched her hands to her chest before
He good. I helped him apply to his new Delilah! Repent! and Bitches Ain’t Shit she stumbled and nearly fell backward.
job selling these things at the haber- (at Cutting Hair)! You don’t think that She caught a glimpse of one of the
dashery. Nigga had no experience sell- mess organized itself, do you? You think signs. It featured an obscene drawing
ing anything—anything legal, that is. Rev. Kimothy’s dumb ass put all this to- and read I Like My Hair Like I Like My
No experience being good at selling gether by himself? Junk, Raw and Uncut. The man who
anything. None. I helped him ’cause I You telling me you behind this mess? held the placard had a bush that sat
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019 61
 rome met her at the shop that night he
took a look at the sign and said, You’re
such a troublemaker. This was after
Claudine had left for good, unable to
handle the crowds, the hatred, the men
who shouted vile threats and called her
bitch, as if it were the name her mother
had given her. Tiny understood. She
welcomed a rotating cast of women,
each a better barber than the previous
one.The new woman would claim Clau-
dine’s chair and then disappear after a
week or so, afraid of the angry men
outside. And with “Delilah’s” on the
front of the window, no one called her
Tiny anymore. Tiny became D. As the
new name took hold, she smiled se-
cretly, especially when Mariah bought
her a black apron emblazoned with a
bright-red “D.”
“I’m concerned about his memory. He keeps asking, Each morning brought a new influx
‘Who’s a good boy? Who’s a good boy?’ ” of men. A madness of men. So many
men. Since there were more men than
seats, the men gladly stood. Men burst-
• • ing out of the little shop, sometimes
pouring onto the sidewalk. Everywhere
atop his head like a woollen black cube. crets, she told him. What if I give away Tiny turned she saw men. Men who had
His face looked grotesque and plastic. my secret and the result is you can’t get previously protested, once yelling, now
Jerome shoved the forehead of the no more good cuts, huh? quiet as sheep. Sheep-men walking up-
block-headed man and snatched at Ti- I’ll take the chance. right to be shorn. These men said things
ny’s arm. He pushed his way through There is no secret,’Rome—how’s that like Real men, Tiny, real men can admit
the protesters, who had suddenly qui- for a secret? She watched his eyes as they when they wrong. But, really, it was that
eted, offering no resistance, giving Tiny began dimming in sadness. I cut with they’d observed other men, their friends
and her guardian space to escape into love. That’s it. Tiny said this because she who were now shining, beautiful men
night’s darkness. assumed that was what Jerome wanted because of their perfectly cut heads. Tiny
When they got to her house, Tiny to hear. His eyes grew sadder still; they and Mariah and whoever took the third
looked up into her protector’s eyes and rimmed with an unbearable melancholy chair couldn’t cut fast enough to keep
examined his freshly shaved face. Stray that she had seen before. Tiny looked up with all those men.
hairs dotted his cheeks and his forehead down. She wanted it to stop. Tiny could scarcely understand the
like black snowflakes. She looked away. Lye, she said. It’s lye. Red Devil Lye. uptick, until one day Dale burst into the
That was quite impressive, she said. That’s the secret. Makes the hair man- shop, his eyes wild, pupils dilated, his
Well, he replied. I told you to let me ageable. Mix in some eggs and potatoes head covered in a cap of soft black silk.
walk you. You gon’ to let me walk you and you got good old-fashioned conk Them nig—uh, dudes up the hill
tomorrow? juice. That’s the shit I be spraying on done gone crazy!
Jerome’s face hovered over hers, a your head. Makes anyone with a little Say, bruh, a man from the back called.
different sort of fright mask, fearful in- skill cut with magic. Even a lady barber. I think you got on your wife’s bonnet.
stead of terrifying. This time she didn’t I knew I felt my head burn a little, Yeah, another voice called. This nigga
turn away. Maybe, she said. Jerome said. I knew it. I’ma keep this wearing hair underwear!
Look, Ms. Tiny, you owe me. secret close to my heart, Tine. Jerome You clowns laugh, Dale said. Did you
I hope this isn’t your corny way of blathered with joy as Tiny walked slowly know that the idiots up the hill started
trying to get a kiss or something, ’cause into her house. putting lye in people’s hair without any
we too old to be speaking in riddles. goddam warning? Pardon my language,
You can kiss me if you want, Jerome iny woke one morning with the but that shi—stuff burned so bad I ran
said. I’ll take that. But what I really want
is the secret. How y’all lady barbers cut
T urge, just a throbbing and unre-
lenting urge, to change the name of the
to the damn—pardon me—Cross River
and stuck my head right in!
like that, huh? barbershop to Delilah’s. She hired a Dale uncovered his head; the once
Tiny kissed his cheek. That’s not so woman to paint a new sign, and the coarse grains of his hair were now
wrong, is it? she asked herself. woman worked at it all day. Tiny hung straight and wavy. The nig—guy, the
A lady barber’s got to keep her se- it after the last customer left. When Je- darn barber, Sonny, said it makes the
62 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019
hair easier to cut. D, you ever hear any- even why they broke up. And why should about her name. When I was small, she
thing so stupid? it matter that she cut another man’s hair, said, I was tiny. She chuckled, as she
Mariah and Tiny exchanged glances huh? Why does a haircut become an in- always did. The youngest and the tini-
as Dale took a seat to wait. timacy simply because Tiny’s a woman? est one in the family. But that’s not why
Such absurdity. But then that whispered they call me Tiny. I been a big girl ever
erome arrived that night just as story. Surely that was an intimacy. Or since, like, fourteen, but it’s like no one
J the shop was closing. Unfallen tears
rested in the corners of his eyes. The
perhaps she spoke so freely, so easily,
because she knew she’d never see this
could see that. When someone felt dis-
respected, they’d say something like,
shop sat empty except for Tiny and Ma- man again. This man who smiled at her You must think you talking to Abigail or
riah. When he walked through the door, when she passed him at the bus stop. some shit? That’s me, Abigail. Abby.
Tiny turned and pretended to straighten She couldn’t bear his smile, because the Disrespecting me was nothing to them,
the hair products on the table behind animal atop his head made him look de- I guess. Like disrespecting a bug or
her chair. fective. Every man around her during something. Tiny. Inconsequential. Even-
Why is there no trust between us? the Great Hair Crisis had become a tually, I told folks to stop calling me
he said. After all I did for you? All our ruined sculpture. She felt like a lapsed Abigail, Abby, all that shit—
walks. superhero, all that power she shrank Before Tiny could finish, the man
Mariah swept, trying to look away from wielding, all that responsibility she looked up at her with glowing eyes and
from Jerome’s sad, dim eyes while sup- shirked day after blessed day. Let me cut finished for her: Told ’em to call me Tiny
pressing a smile. your hair, she said to the man, as an act and no one ever asked why. It’s a beautiful
Go somewhere, Tiny said. You fools of charity. Shortly after that, she cut an- story. You told me last time. He laughed
believe anything. other man. And another man. They grew as if he had carved out some sort of victory.
Yeah, Mariah said. Red Devil Lye? as indistinguishable as strands of hair in Last time? She looked at his head and
Everyone knows we lick our razors just her memory. One man told the next suddenly remembered. Uh-uh. I told you
before every cut. about Tiny. And she accepted them into my rule then, I told you when you came
Mariah! Tiny called. her house, warning them all that she’d in the door today. One-time-only deal.
Don’t mind me, Mariah said. I’m half cut them only once. One time and no Dry your head, and then you gotta go.
’sleep. more—that way, she could control the You can’t do that to me, Abigail. He
Look, Jerome, Tiny said. I don’t want flow of hair-blighted men and she could smiled wider. You can’t do that to Cross
you in my shop no more. At all. Go. tell herself that by seeing these men only River. Too many heads in crisis. Uh-uh,
You’re not different. You’re not welcome. once she wasn’t betraying Jerome. you gon’ cut this. He snatched at her
You can’t seem to grow up. You’re the She cut their hair and never saw them wrist. Come on, Abby. Just give me a
same goddam fool I didn’t want to be again, and usually during the shape-up little trim. He chuckled a mean, mean
with anymore. she’d whisper the source of her name little chuckle. Make magic.
But our walks— and they’d all miss the point and ask The small man let go of Tiny’s wrist
You can get a head start. Go on. the source of her power. and sat with his back to her. Just a Cae-
Jerome didn’t argue or fight; he sim- One man, though, managed to slip sar today, he said, so confident he was
ply backed out of the shop, slowly, with in a second time. He was a small man that Tiny would cut his hair with lit-
a strange feline walk. tle fuss. And he was right. It was easier
to start shearing his nappy kinks than
ate in the afternoon the next day, a to keep arguing. Her hand shook as she
L man with a tuft of spongy and un-
ruly hair sat in Mariah’s seat and called
trimmed, though. She rushed the tricky
parts she would usually have moved
for his hair to be cut into a high-top through with precision and care. The
fade. sooner she finished, the sooner she’d
You want it tall, right? Mariah asked. never have to see him again. Tiny cut
Yeah. But please don’t do nothing with disgust, watching the stubborn
weird. I almost had to knock Sonny out dirt and dandruff as if they had left in-
this morning. I caught the nigga lick- with a reddish Afro. He hunched as he delible splotches on her, forever stain-
ing his clippers like some kind of god- walked and scrunched himself into a ing her soul.
dam animal. ball as he sat. His voice sounded like a When the small man stood and
high-pitched strain, and both times his looked into the mirror, he said nothing
ack when they were together, Je- hair had grown wild and unkempt. Balls at first, and then he balled his fists.
B rome never found out how she’d
gained the name Tiny, but another man
of white lint coiled into his curls. Tiny
had to wash his hair to soften it in order
What is this trash? he screamed. You
did this on . . . You did this ’cause I
did, over a perfect haircut one afternoon to move the clippers through his knots. wouldn’t leave!
while Jerome was elsewhere looking the As he bent over the sink in the back No, I—
other way. The illicit haircut was some- of Tiny’s basement with the water and Of course you did. This is worse than
thing else Jerome never found out about, lather dripping through his naps, she one of Sonny’s cuts.
and so that particular betrayal was not told him, as she usually told the men, You want your money back? Tiny
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019 63
tried to joke, but that seemed to make out here looking like George Jefferson. guished that it sent sharp pains shoot-
the small man even more angry. It’s the I was the dude with the good haircuts! ing through her joints.
curse, Tiny said, still trembling in fear. Who the fuck am I now? It’s piss. She dashed these words off
The Hair Crisis, she said, it comes for He stomped out the door, hunched halfheartedly, surprising even herself
every barber in Cross River eventua— and scarred like the small man. Tiny with the sting of her sarcasm.
You think I’m a fool, bitch? The man watched his disappearing form with sad Piss? You mean you pee on your
snatched at Tiny’s shoulders. All I eyes, vowing to never cut another man’s clippers?
wanted was a good haircut for once. Is head. Tiny held firm to her promise no No, silly. That would be ridiculous. I
that too . . . Tell me your secret, Abby. matter how many men knocked and soak all my clippers, my combs, every-
How come the Crisis ain’t come for cried and pleaded. She remained firm thing I have . . . I leave them all to soak
you, huh? until that night Jerome returned to her overnight in jars of piss.
I don’t have a secret, she said, shov- doorstep several months later with tears Really? True this time?
ing the man. Please leave. in his eyes. Yep. That’s my secret.
The small man raised his right fist as After that, she vowed to never again Yes, Jerome said. That makes so much
if about to throw a punch.The gold brace- give up her power. To never again freely more sense than all that other stuff you
let on his wrist, the gold chain around give away something as precious as a told me.
his neck, they both jangled. Tiny raised haircut. Does it? Tiny said, and then she
her arms and flinched to curl away from sighed again. Of course it does.
the blow, but the small man lowered his iny swept the hair of her last cou- Tiny looked at Jerome with sad, tired
fist with a snort and a chuckle. He tossed
the towel that lay around his neck be-
T ple of customers into woolly piles
late one night. She rubbed her clippers,
eyes. She forced a smile onto her lips.
She wanted to say, No, fool, what do you
fore stomping up the stairs and out of razors, and combs with alcohol even as take me for? But to point out his gull-
Tiny’s house. she felt her eyelids forcing themselves ibility now would be a true act of cru-
The next day, when Jerome came for shut. She enjoyed the solitude, though elty. If only Jerome knew how to read
his weekly cut, Tiny’s hand trembled as she stumbled through the shop with the crooked tilt of her lips. Her face was
if still trimming the small man’s red her eyelids low, sleep trying to ambush a book he could never truly compre-
bush. She could feel the heaviness of her. The one thing she couldn’t allow hend. These men, she realized, would
his fingers at her shoulders and her wrist. herself was a seat. To sit down would believe anything. They preached logic
What in the fuck is this? Jerome said, be to fall asleep and make herself vul- and reason but followed only magic.
peering into the mirror. nerable to an opportunist, one of Rev. Things would always be like this. Al-
I don’t know what’s wrong, Tiny lied. Kimothy’s legion out there, always look- ways and forever. As long as she lived
It’s the curse. ing to catch her slipping so they could and cut hair. Tiny felt more exhausted
For the rest of the week, Jerome re- do her harm. Tiny grasped the broom than she had ever felt before, like weights
mained sullen, only frowning at Tiny again and went at some hair clumps had attached themselves to her eyelids,
or grumbling her way. She wanted to she’d missed, and as she swept she heard her limbs, her neck, everywhere. After
tell him what had happened, but that the flat slap of an open palm against Jerome left, she locked the door and
would be a long story, beginning with the window. Without looking up she walked through the protest and into
the first man she cut behind his back. waved the interloper away. The noise darkest night, never to be seen in Cross
Or perhaps it would begin with her persisted. She slowly turned to the en- River again.
name and how her family made it into tranceway. Jerome stood at the window It was better this way. Perhaps Tiny
a curse, how they made her into a small, waving. A sharp pang of irritation ran sensed the horrors that hovered on the
tiny thing. She imagined him laugh- through Tiny, but also relief. At least it horizon. Sonny sitting alone every day
ing at her, sneering and calling her wasn’t another head to cut. At least it in an empty shop surrounded by endless
Abigail the next time she accidentally wasn’t a protester. Any annoyance Je- jars of his own piss. Soon would come
cut jagged marks into his head. Two, rome was about to cause would not end the hair cults. The Cult of the Licked
three weeks of bad haircuts made Je- in her destruction. When she opened Razor. The Cult of Red Devil Lye. The
rome into a different man. If there was the door she noticed he wore that same Cult of Blood. The Cult of Piss.
a fight to be picked, he picked it like serge suit. The same panama hat. Dirt But then there were also the Chil-
some naps. stains now ringed the hat’s brim and dren of Delilah, the barbers, the barber-
One day after a particularly bad hair- the jacket’s wrists. esses, sprouting all over town like new
cut, Jerome fingered the slanted fron- D! he exclaimed, stretching his arms growth and shining like the brightest
tier that was now his hairline as they out as if preparing to strangle her. D! points of light, like the finest, most lux-
ate Chinese food. Tiny’s clippers had Why is there no trust between us? urious hair, smoothed with a slick sheen
pushed it back so much that Jerome’s Look at my eyes, Tiny said. I’m half of grease, growing faster than any havoc
forehead now looked like an eroding ’sleep. the Hair Crisis could cause, faster than
coastline. Tiny asked Jerome to pass her Please, please, please, please, D, please any curse could possibly curse. 
a packet of soy sauce. tell me your secret.
Get it your damn self, Jerome barked, Tiny sighed. She just wanted to sleep. THE WRITER’S VOICE PODCAST
standing sharply from his seat. Got me This man in front of her looked so an- Rion Amilcar Scott reads “Shape-ups at Delilah’s.”

64 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019

 THE CRITICS

THE CURRENT CINEMA

NO LAUGHING MATTER
“Joker.”

BY ANTHONY LANE

t the beginning of “Joker,” Arthur be welded together, until we can’t tell peace and the pastoral bliss. The year,
A Fleck ( Joaquin Phoenix), seated
in front of a mirror, hooks a finger into
the light from the dark.
Arthur is a clown, and a would-be
by my reckoning, is 1981, since “Blow
Out” and “Zorro: The Gay Blade” are
each corner of his mouth, and pulls. Up, comic, but he’s really not funny at all. advertised on cinema marquees. Other
then down: a grin, a grimace. We are So badly does he bomb at a comedy highlights include a garbage strike. Ar-
meant to think of the masks, comic and club that footage of his set is replayed thur works for a clown agency, and one
tragic, that were worn by the actors in on television. That’s the joke. He lives of his jobs is to stand on the street in a
ancient Greek drama. Over the next in Gotham City, which, as everybody red nose and a green wig, holding a pro-
couple of hours, those two moods will knows, equals New York City minus the motional sign for a local store. When

Following Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger, Joaquin Phoenix wears the supervillain’s greasepaint, in Todd Phillips’s film.
ILLUSTRATION BY ZOHAR LAZAR THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019 65
some kids grab the sign, he gives chase, “Joker” is not plotted so much as in-waiting, halfway to the grave? Fran-
his enormous shoes clomping on the crammed with mangy incidents. Like cis Bacon, I think, would have stared at
sidewalk. Another clown lends him a animals, they come in two by two. By Arthur with a hungry eye.
gun, for safety’s sake, but it drops out of a charming coincidence, for example, The trouble is that Phillips, too, is
Arthur’s costume, clattering to the floor, two major scenes take place in public in thrall to his hero, unable to avert his
while he’s entertaining children in a hos- toilets. There are also two extended sub- gaze, or his camera, from the lurid spec-
pital ward and singing “If You’re Happy way sequences: one in which Arthur tacle. The same was true, you could
and You Know It.” A tough gig for Ar- uses his gun for the first time, and an- argue, of earlier Jokers—Jack Nichol-
thur, who says, “I haven’t been happy other in which, pursued by police, he son, in “Batman” (1989), or Heath Led-
one minute of my entire fucking life.” ducks in and out of the carriages, as if ger, in “The Dark Knight” (2008), whose
And there you have it. “Joker” is a in homage to “The French Connection” features cracked in tandem with his
miserabilist manifesto. It’s directed by (1971). Most important of all, we get mind. But those were supporting roles,
Todd Phillips, who co-wrote it with two father figures. One is Murray Frank- whereas Arthur is the main attraction.
Scott Silver, and whose previous films, lin (Robert De Niro), the host of a TV No longer is he forced to be part of the
from “Road Trip” (2000) and “Old talk show, under whose wing Arthur scenery; he is the scenery, and such is
School” (2003) to the “Hangover” trip- dreams of finding shelter and approval. the strenuous effort of Phoenix’s per-
tych, have delighted in the imperish- The other is Thomas Wayne (Brett formance that it becomes exhausting
able idiocy of the American male, and Cullen), a wealthy brute who is run- to behold. Get a load of me, he seems
in his stubborn plans to dodge the draft ning for mayor of Gotham. (He has a to say, and the load is almost too much
of adulthood. Arthur Fleck, you might young son named Bruce. Get it?) Thirty to bear. Now and then, other actors, less
say, represents a nasty new twist on this years ago, Penny Fleck worked for him, worked up, pass across the stage: Bill
theme. He still shares an apartment and Arthur hopes to exploit that dis- Camp as a detective, for example, or
with his aging mother, Penny (Frances tant link, though Wayne has nothing Brian Tyree Henry as a hospital clerk,
Conroy); their relationship is close but but scorn for the Flecks of this frag- both wonderfully weary, like visitors
tense—he washes her hair while she mented world. “Those of us who have from Planet Normal. I must admit, they
takes a bath—and he must search for made something of our lives will always come as a relief.
confidants elsewhere. As well as be- look at those who haven’t,” he declares, Here’s the deal. “Joker” is not a great
friending, or imagining that he has be- “and see nothing but clowns.” leap forward, or a deep dive into our
friended, a single mother (Zazie Beetz) collective unconscious, let alone a work
who lives in his building, he meets with railing clouds of controversy, “Joker” of art. It’s a product. All the pre-launch
a social worker (Sharon Washington),
appointed by the city, who monitors his
T descends upon us. The online dis-
cussion has mounted from the rampant
rumblings, the rants and the raves, tes-
tify to a cunning provocation, and, if we
medication. We learn from her that Ar- to the manic, undeterred, or perhaps yield to it, we’re not joining a debate;
thur has been institutionalized in the exacerbated, by the fact that nobody, we’re offering our services, unpaid, to
past, and he carries a card that he shows apart from critics and festivalgoers, has the marketing department at Warner
to people when they flinch away from actually seen the movie. (Emotions run Bros. When Dalí and Buñuel made
him. It reads “Forgive my laughter: I high when people are low on facts.) In “L’Âge d’Or” (1930), they wanted to start
have a condition.” one corner are those who crave a mas- a riot, and they succeeded, but “Joker”
But what condition? Could it be terpiece: a film that will unearth a new yearns for little more than a hundred
pseudobulbar affect, which is neurolog- psychic intensity in the domain of the op-ed pieces and a firestorm of tweets.
ical in origin and gives rise to uncon- comic book, ideal for our distended With ticket sales, naturally, to match.
tained laughing and crying? Under times. In the opposite corner are those The evidence for this daring scheme
stress, Arthur certainly breaks into a who fear that Phillips and Phoenix may is everywhere you look, in Phillips’s
hyena’s cackle, which stops as abruptly give license to all the lonely people out film, and everywhere you listen. Nich-
as it starts; he also weeps, and, in closeup, there—in particular, to any messed-up olson’s Joker may have danced and
we follow the tracks of the tears on his white guys who feel wretchedly uncher- pranced to the sound of Prince’s “Par-
clown’s white-painted face. (I haven’t ished and would welcome a tutorial in tyman,” but Phoenix gyrates, on a steep
seen such artful drips since 1971, when the art of lashing out. flight of steps, to “Rock ’n’ Roll Part 2,”
Dirk Bogarde’s hair dye melted, along What is agreed upon, among those a 1972 hit by Gary Glitter. It used to be
with his soul, at the end of “Death in who have seen “Joker,” is the prowess popular with sports teams, rousing the
Venice.”) The film, however, takes no with which Phoenix holds it all together. crowds at N.F.L. and N.H.L. games,
serious interest in what might be wrong His face may get the greasepaint, but before Glitter was convicted, in 1999,
with Arthur. It merely invites us to watch it’s his whole body, coiled upon itself of possessing child pornography, and,
his wrongness grow out of control and like a spring of flesh, from which the seven years later, of sexually abusing
swell into violence, and proposes a vague movie’s energy is released. He’s so thin minors, in Vietnam. Since then, under-
connection between that private swell- that, when he strips to the waist and standably, the song has tumbled out
ing and a wider social malady. “Is it just bends, his spine and shoulder blades jut of favor. Do you believe that the deci-
me, or is it getting crazier out there?” out from the skin; is he a fallen angel, sion to revive it, for “Joker,” is anything
he asks. Guess what: it’s both! with his wings chopped off, or a skeleton- but a studied choice, nicely crafted to
66 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019
offend? Please. I happen to dislike the
film as heartily as anything I’ve seen in
the past decade, but I realize, equally, BRIEFLY NOTED
that to vent any inordinate wrath to-
ward it is to fall straight into its trap, The Dutch House, by Ann Patchett (Harper). This warm in-
for outrage merely proves that our at- tergenerational saga transplants fairy-tale tropes into a
tention has been snagged. Just ask the mid-century mid-Atlantic setting. The house of the title, in
President of the United States. the Philadelphia suburbs, is the childhood home of Maeve
“Joker” has its own political poise. Lest and Danny, who are banished from it by a spiteful step-
it be accused of right-wing inflamma- mother, after their mother leaves them and their father dies.
tion, allowance is made for issues more Former members of the house’s domestic staff watch over
congenial to the left. Cuts to welfare, we them like fairy godmothers, but the siblings must depend
are told, will soon block Arthur’s access on each other for support through angsty college years, the
to therapy and medication, and the mov- vicissitudes of adulthood, and the sudden reappearance of
ie’s plea for the downtrodden to be given their mother, after more than thirty years. Through it all, the
their rightful say harks back to Frank house exerts an almost magical pull, drawing the siblings
Capra and Chaplin. In one bizarre scene, back to contemplate its influence; it is, Danny says, “the hero
the nabobs of Gotham, in tuxedos and of every story, our lost and beloved country.”
gowns, are even treated to a special screen-
ing of “Modern Times.” Why should A Pure Heart, by Rajia Hassib (Viking). Set in the aftermath
Phillips nod to a film of 1936, if not to of Egypt’s Tahrir uprising, this novel follows two sisters as
stake his claim as a legatee? No less bra- they navigate complicated geopolitics and their own differ-
zen are the references to Scorsese, and ences. Fayrouz, nicknamed Rose, emigrated to the United
to his probing of urban paranoia—in States after marrying an American journalist, and is now a
“Taxi Driver” (1976) and again in “The Ph.D. student in Egyptology. By contrast, her younger sis-
King of Comedy” (1982), where De Niro ter, Gameela, is “the only covered woman in the entire fam-
played a reckless proto-Arthur, fixated ily, rebellious in her conservatism.” Rose cannot understand
on a talk-show host. Gameela’s devotion; Gameela cannot understand how Rose
“Joker” peaks in chaos and conflagra- could leave Egypt, and becomes ever more passionate about
tion, ignited by Arthur’s crimes. Earlier, helping her country as the revolution’s promise dwindles.
he slew three fellows in suits on the After Gameela dies, in a suicide bombing, Rose struggles to
grimy subway: a fell deed that was taken unearth the secrets of a sister she never truly knew, who
by the have-nots as a call to arms against emerges as a fascinating enigma, full of contradictions.
the haves. Now the city swarms with a
mob of the frustrated, all sporting Joker Year of the Monkey, by Patti Smith (Knopf ). In this lucid dream
masks and wreaking indiscriminate re- of a memoir, the punk icon and poet chronicles the span from
venge. Arthur smiles indulgently upon New Year’s Day, 2016, to early 2017. A friend dies; Trump’s In-
them, like a wolf surveying its pups, then auguration approaches on a cloud of dread; Smith’s birthday
climbs onto the hood of a smashed ve- arrives, and she wryly laments, “Seventy. Merely a number but
hicle and glories in the applause. (You one indicating the passing of a significant percentage of the
can sense the movie congratulating it- allotted sand in an egg timer, with oneself the darn egg.”
self.) We’re not far from the flaming cli- Dreaming and waking life converge, with whimsical and om-
max of “White Heat” (1949)—another inous results: thousands of empty candy-bar wrappers, “like
Warner Bros. shocker, with James Cag- feathers after a molt,” stoke speculation about cults and con-
ney as, yes, a mother-stricken murderer spiracies. Smith sees mystical connections everywhere—and,
named Arthur, beset by psychiatric prob- floating along on the drifts of her words, the reader does, too.
lems and laughing his way to perdition.
Back then, the Times was dismayed: Growth, by Vaclav Smil (M.I.T. Press). This monumental study
“Let us soberly warn that ‘White Heat’ explores how things grow not only in the world of biology
is also a cruelly vicious film and that its but also in human systems—economies, technologies, cities—
impact upon the emotions of the un- and posits a synergistic relationship between the two realms.
stable or impressionable is incalculable.” Smil questions whether our biosphere is capable of supporting
No such worries for Phillips’s movie; its even the growth that economists, data scientists, and techno-
impact is solemnly calculated to the final optimists regard as “sustainable,” and argues that such experts
inch. I was expecting something called fail to consider the “dynamic link” between nature and civili-
“Joker” to be fun. More fool me.  zation in their calculations. Smil is no catastrophist, but his
conclusions—that infinite growth on a finite planet is impos-
NEWYORKER.COM sible, and that much depends on curtailing or reversing cer-
Richard Brody blogs about movies. tain trends—are no less chilling for their sobriety.
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019 67
 up with the author in conspicuous ways,
BOOKS Hjorth has said that the novel is not au­
tobiographical. Still, she has become the

NOTES ON A SCANDAL
biggest Scandinavian literary story of
the past twenty years, except for maybe
Karl Ove Knausgaard, with whose work
A Norwegian novel divided a family and captivated a country. hers has been compared, sometimes su­
perficially. Like Knausgaard, Hjorth is
BY LAUREN COLLINS writing against repression, against the
taboo on telling things as they really are.
But he urges us to look at dead bodies;
she forces us to regard bleeding souls.
Bergljot’s trauma lives as a secret that
she keeps from herself. She grows up,
marries a “nice, decent man,” produces
three children, and plugs away at a dis­
sertation on modern German drama
while trying to write a one­act play. Even­
tually, she leaves her husband; her par­
ents aren’t thrilled, but they chip in to
keep her afloat. When Bergljot’s father
helps renovate her bathroom, she wor­
ries about him having a key to her new
house, but she doesn’t dare ask Dad—
that’s what she calls him—to give it back.
The reader isn’t sure what’s stopping her,
and Bergljot probably isn’t, either. She
exists in a vague state, batting away doubt
and fear like pop­up ads from her psy­
che. Then, one Sunday morning, her
pain hits its target. She can’t move, talk,
stand. She suffers several more attacks
before discovering their source: “I went
to the Mac and read my text, and there
it was, in between all the other words,
and I had a shock, I was floored, and at
one fell swoop I turned into someone
else, forever changed into another by
this moment of truth.” It isn’t until much
later in the book that Bergljot reveals
emember how divisive reality tele­ way in 2016, and has just been published what, exactly, those words are: “He
R vision was, before it became just
television? In Norway, an intense de­
in English, by Verso. Earlier this month,
the translation, by Charlotte Barslund,
touched me like a doctor, he touched
me like a father.” She has effectively writ­
bate is taking place about virkelighets­ was long­listed for the National Book ten a diary that she never meant to read.
litteratur, or “reality literature,” a pu­ Award for Translated Literature. The main action of “Will and Tes­
tatively fictional strain of writing that “Will and Testament” was a sensa­ tament” takes place decades after this
draws on identifiable characters and tion in Norway, a best­seller and the episode. Now a drama critic, Bergljot
events. Critics of reality television com­ winner of the Norwegian Critics Prize. has broken with her parents, who have
plained that it was overproduced; the Already one of Norway’s preëminent au­ “entered into a conspiracy to save their
argument against reality literature is that thors, Hjorth, who has written more than reputation,” and with her two younger
it is insufficiently artificial, exposing and twenty novels, became a media fixation, sisters, Astrid and Åsa, who believe that
misrepresenting people who never con­ having marshalled her prodigious gifts her memories of abuse have been cooked
sented to be a part of it. The country’s to suggest—or to lead people to believe up in psychoanalysis. Within the clan,
most flagrant transgressor of the code that she had suggested—that her father Bergljot has undergone a sort of down­
of plausible disclaimability is Vigdis had raped her when she was five years ward mobility, becoming “an outcast who
Hjorth, whose prickly, persuasive novel old. Hjorth’s narrator’s name is Bergl­ threatened the family honour.” An older
“Will and Testament” came out in Nor­ jot, not Vigdis, and although she matches brother, Bård, has also absented himself
from the scene, citing paternal neglect.
Vigdis Hjorth’s account of abuse ignited debate over the ethics of “reality literature.” The siblings bring to mind a broken
68 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019 ILLUSTRATION BY KRISTIAN HAMMERSTAD
chain of paper dolls, one pair displayed friends are studies in solidarity, too. They Hjorth is fearless on the complicated
on the refrigerator door and the other serve as a gallery of character witnesses, bonds between survivors and abusers,
stuffed in the back of a drawer. “If you attesting to her ability to maintain long- who hold power over them in the form
didn’t know your parents had two other term bonds of love. of answers. Bergljot says, astonishingly,
children, you’d think it was a normal She cleaves so quickly and so closely that as a young mother “I still had a
happy family,” Bergljot’s grown son re- to one equally troubled acquaintance, small amount of contact with my fam-
marks, after an evening at his grandpar- Klara, that the reader’s disastrous-friend ily for the sake of my children.” Years
ents’ house. (They are the kind of people antennae bristle in anticipation. Klara, later, it doesn’t seem to occur to her that
who throw birthday parties for adults.) seemingly a classic pot-stirrer, insists that she doesn’t have to go to her father’s fu-
Monstrous men don’t create art as often Bergljot stop seeing her family. Yet Klara neral. An abusive parent is the alpha,
as they do fractured families. turns out to be a canny, patient tactician the omega, and the person who teaches
The filial conflict flares up again when for her friend’s best interests. After Bergl- you the alphabet.
Bergljot’s father announces his inten- jot’s father’s death, she counsels, “Now When Bergljot reënters the fray, she
tion to split his estate equally among his it’s three against two and that’s new, they does so in a headlong way that hardly
four children, with the exception of two weren’t prepared for that but they’re still protects her vulnerabilities. At the out-
cherished vacation cabins, which will go the majority, and they have each other.” set of the inheritance dispute, she gets
to the favored sisters. Bård and Bergl- Whether Klara is in affirming mode or up the nerve to e-mail Astrid, an expert
jot raise hell—knowing they are being egging-on mode, her most important at- in human-rights law and thereby “a kind
bought off, they refuse to offer them- tribute is that she is steadfast in her al- of officially good person,” about the cab-
selves on the cheap. Then Dad dies, leav- legiance to Bergljot, adding one more ins. Astrid responds with a litany of dis-
ing no clear heir to the most valuable number to her side of the field. passionate facts. Bergljot says, “I felt that
asset of all: control of the family story. Bergljot is settling scores with her- I was threatening her with an axe, she
self as much as with anybody else. She reacted as though I was waving a plas-
or years, the family has functioned is striving, in the Kierkegaardian tradi- tic knife in the air.” Hjorth seems to be
F as a closed circuit. Bergljot would
fire off an accusation, and it would
tion, to create a majority of one. It’s a
solitary quest of detours and traps, in-
suggesting that rectitude can be the
enemy of justice, and that neutrality can
bounce from relative to relative, then cluding the fear that, as both narrator be a form of self-dealing. Proudly ob-
return to her in unchanged form. There and character, she has somehow got the jective parties can’t satisfyingly adjudi-
was nowhere for it to go, no way to story all wrong. An inveterate phone- cate the most violent disputes, because
alter its energy. The book’s claustro- talker, Bergljot tells her tale as one would they have a bias against the emotional
phobic atmosphere is exacerbated by in conversations with a friend, doubling effects of conflict.
the use of letters, e-mails, and text mes- back on earlier versions as though to The book’s turning point occurs
sages—sometimes directly quoted, some- retrieve some crucial detail that might when Bergljot, desperate to jolt her rel-
times paraphrased, occasionally medi- prove her claim once and for all, vac- atives out of their complacency, decides
ated beyond all sense. In sharing them, illating among indignation and dark to read aloud her accusations at a meet-
Bergljot is doing the same thing we’re humor and self-doubt. These stops and ing with the entire family, in the pres-
doing when we send a friend a screen- starts illustrate the painful circularity ence of their accountant. After so much
shot: trying to break open a drama by of Bergljot’s problem: people don’t be- mediated confrontation, she has to work
drawing a new person into it. “Will lieve her because she’s a basket case, but herself up to this act of exposure (“Just
and Testament” is a gut-wrenching she’s a basket case because people don’t see it through, because it’s absolutely
novel, but it is also a gossipy one, which believe her. crucial, this is about your life,” she tells
begs to be read in an old-fashioned, Bergljot’s story can get blurry. Some- herself ), but she barely makes it through
judgmental manner. Right and wrong, times it’s been twenty years since she a paragraph before the family revolts.
good and bad, are applicable modes of cut off contact with her family; other “Now is not the time or the place,” As-
assessment here. The reader, furnished times it’s fifteen, and she still interacts trid chides, deleting Bergljot’s speech
with primary documents, has the op- with them sporadically. She doesn’t try as though it were one of her late-night
portunity to take a side. In fact, to be to pave over the holes in her testimony, e-mails. Later, Bergljot launches into a
a moral person in the zero-sum world instead allowing them to exist as nat- self-examination:
of this novel, she must. ural features of a turbulent emotional
Throughout “Will and Testament,” landscape. Nor does she tamp down her After my bombshell twenty-three years ago,
the plot is interrupted by short, cerebral reactions. There is a certain audacity in I chose to withdraw, to heal myself, to seek
professional help. Should I have called Astrid
chapters in which Bergljot meditates on saying, “I heard the email notification with the physical details, pleaded my case with
life in the abstract, as opposed to real- from my iPhone on the seat next to me, a skeptical sister who loved her parents and
ity in its particulars. She quotes the phi- an act of war, was my guess,” and ask- had every reason to, who had a great relation-
losopher Arne Johan Vetlesen’s work on ing people to take you seriously. Many ship with her parents, who wanted a happy
truth-and-reconciliation processes and readers, repelled by Bergljot’s grandios- family, should I have called her and shared my
open wounds, exposed my nakedness, so pain-
ruminates on the Balkan crisis—cases ity, won’t. But, in my eyes, Bergljot saves ful, so shameful, so intimate, so difficult to talk
through which she is seeking truth, her herself from melodrama by being hon- about outside the psychoanalyst’s consulting
own alongside the universal. Bergljot’s est about her tendency toward it. room, tell her things I hadn’t told anyone other

THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019 69

than my psychoanalyst, not even my friends, she had written her own as a rebuttal. sentially stand up, then the novel must
my boyfriends or my children because it hurt If a family in denial is a closed circuit, offer freedoms other than fabulation.
too much and was too physically intrusive, be- this was the feedback loop reactivated. These could be as simple and necessary
cause I didn’t want my nearest and dearest to
have such images of me in their heads? Helga Hjorth claimed that her sister as the right of omission, or of not hav-
had invaded her parents’ and her privacy, ing to keep typing the names of the sib-
One senses that these are not rhetori- by reproducing verbatim intimate con- lings who make you sad.
cal questions. Bergljot is trying to cal- versations, letters, and e-mails. (Vigdis “Free Will” also became an immedi-
culate the acceptable ratio of disclosure has said that she got permission to use ate best-seller in Norway. (It has not
to damage. such documents.) A Norwegian news- been translated into English.) The phe-
paper, in gumshoe mode, ran an article nomenon of an author ultimately mak-
n 2017, Vigdis Hjorth’s younger sis- showing that a funeral program men- ing money from a sibling’s interroga-
I ter, Helga Hjorth, published her first
novel, “Free Will.” A lawyer in Oslo,
tioned in “Will and Testament” was
nearly identical to the one commemo-
tion of her possibly ill-gotten inheritance,
the ledger forever out of whack, is ab-
Helga is ostensibly the levende model— rating the Hjorth father, down to the surd in a way that one imagines Vigdis
“living model”—for Astrid, the mad- reproduction of a sentimental poem by Hjorth could appreciate. Still, she has
deningly evenhanded sibling in “Will his wife. The implication: we tell our- upheld her sister’s right to have written
and Testament.” In Helga’s novel, a fam- selves stories in order to live, we call the novel. The rules of reality literature
ily is torn apart when the narrator’s his- them novels in order to not get sued. seem akin to those of Twitter: if you’re
trionic writer sibling makes false alle- But the argument that the literary part going to @ somebody, don’t be surprised
gations of incest in one of her books. In of reality literature is a legal veneer doesn’t if she claps back.
the press, Helga explained that she felt fully square. If the parts of “Will and Reading “Will and Testament” in
badly used by her sister’s novel, and that Testament” that can be fact-checked es- Barslund’s excellent translation, with-
out access to Helga Hjorth’s story, is the
closest one can come to separating the
scandale from the succès. Bergljot is far
from a reckless narrator. In fact, she is
remarkably alive to the plight of her
family members, locating the loneliness
in them even as they have marooned
her with her unbearable past. In a way,
she respects her uncommunicative sis-
ter, Åsa, and her father’s discipline in
freezing her out of his life. Intransi-
gence is at least a form of acknowledg-
ment. “Dad’s crime was greater, but purer,
Dad’s self-inflicted punishment was
harsher, his reticence, his depression
more penitent than Mum’s fake blind-
ness,” Bergljot says.
Hjorth seems to have formulated
from her experiments with living mod-
els a model for living, in which expo-
sure—of the self and of others—serves
a larger purpose. In “A House in Nor-
way” (2014), her only other book to be
translated into English, the narrator, a
textile artist, strives to depict “those who
had the courage to speak against power
when they found it necessary, regard-
less of the cost, who protested though
they were regarded as mad, everyone
who didn’t just want a head start for
themselves but progress for the many.”
The narrator reserves her greatest ad-
miration for those who are willing to
be both the speaker and the subject, the
heroine and the wretch—“those who
“And then I’m, like, whoa, I have superpowers. Why am turned the scrutinizing spotlight on
I wasting my time at the gym?” themselves,” and let it burn. 
 PRESENTED BY

Three Days More Than Fifty Events October 11-13

Sarah Paulson Billy Porter Susan Orlean

Tickets On Sale Now!

The New Yorker Festival brings together

the biggest names in news, politics, books, art,
music, and culture for three days of events—
from panels and live performances to intimate
discussions and exclusive screenings.

Find the full program and event details at newyorker.com/festival.

@NewYorkerFest #NewYorkerFest

PHOTOGRAPH OF SARAH PAULSON BY DOUG INGLISH/TRUNK ARCHIVE; PHOTOGRAPH OF BILLY PORTER BY JOSEPH MARZULLO/WENN/ALAMY; PHOTOGRAPH OF SUSAN ORLEAN BY NOAH FECKS
 from Buffalo to a railroad flat near Har-
BOOKS vard Square, in Cambridge, Massa-
chusetts. They made regular Sunday

WALKS OF LIFE
visits to the baronial quarters of Fan-
ny’s grandfather Mark Antony DeWolfe
Howe, an arbiter of everything old Bos-
Beginnings and endings in the poetry of Fanny Howe. ton, who lived in the heart of primor-
dial, purple-paned Beacon Hill. There
BY DAN CHIASSON she was struck by “tables and chairs and
objects brought from China generations
before,” an ivory pagoda, crystal finger
bowls, and Victorian storybooks full of
illustrations of “curly-haired children in
pinafores, stone walls, golliwogs, leap-
ing figures with scissors following them
to cut off their thumbs, and gardens
containing pale but specific flowers.”
In another poet of Howe’s back-
ground—Robert Lowell comes to
mind—this aristocratic, late-Victorian
milieu might have provoked claustro-
phobia, yet an aura of wonder pervades
Howe’s writing. It is evident in that
description of her grandfather’s Victo-
rian children’s books, as well as in her
lovely evocation of his stutter, which
“riveted” her, because it sounded as
though “his voice wanted to turn into
a musical instrument.”
Since new in Howe’s work means
late, “Love and I” is, in a double sense,
Howe’s latest volume. It hurries to join
a long and illustrious career, which,
besides poetry, includes novels, stories,
memoir, and short films. Approach-
ing eighty, Howe, in “Love and I,”is
now revisiting the earliest formative
impressions of preconscious childhood,
when “everything seemed like some-
thing else.” The opening of “1941” is a
“ W herever I step I am stepping
into a place that was just
Howe’s poetry takes a line-by-line ap-
proach to managing existential fear.
snapshot of her birthplace:

finished at the moment I arrived,” the Her work calls to mind a child’s tac- On a cold day near Lake Erie
I was in a double bind.
American poet Fanny Howe wrote, a tics of self-soothing, like whistling in The snow was like a lamb
decade ago, in “The Winter Sun: Notes the dark. Shorn in the upper circle.
on a Vocation.” This temporal dilemma, Howe is an experimental writer nev-
which skews past and future, has pre- ertheless fascinated by her own belat- The scene is part memory, part dream,
occupied her sixty years of work: “If I edness. Her father worked for a time as assembled from the rudiments of iden-
freeze here, one foot poised to go for- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.,’s clerk. Her tity just this side of nonexistence. “Zero
ward, to land on the path, I will at least mother, an Irish actress and playwright, and One sat on either side of me,” she
be living in the present and the past performed under Yeats’s direction at the writes. Howe’s poems assert that there
will know it.” Writing poetry has been Abbey Theatre, in Dublin. (One of is no meaning to be tracked back to
her way of knowing, and of knowing Howe’s sisters is Susan Howe, another an original cause: “No big bang, no
MICHAEL AVEDON/AUGUST

that she knows. Her latest collection, profoundly original American poet; they beginning.” They knock “meaning”
“Love and I,” is further proof of this may be the most important sibling duo off its rational basis and into the realm
knowledge. Pragmatic but blessedly in American poetry.) Shortly after Howe of hunch and intuition. They must be
naïve—she calls herself “gullible”— was born, in 1940, her family moved read not “with a spyglass / But with a
wild guess / And only three words:
Howe’s poems suggest tidy trajectories, then swerve toward nonnarrative insight. ‘You never know.’ ”
72 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019
 Your Anniversary
Howe prefers the clarity of mis­ built / On phony loans,” filled with Immortalized
in Roman Numerals
understanding to the blur of certainty. “pharmaceuticals / And cheap hospi­
Like stained glass, her poems await tal / Industry styles and ghost estates.” 3-Day Rush Available!
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dwell in puzzles and games: “Zero the interior life that its opening seems,
and One” brings to mind computer in classic lyric fashion, to summon.
code, and also, via tennis, unlocks her When poets look out the window, they
title, “Love and I.” But, although she are supposed to see a projection of their
delights in creating puzzles, she seems mood; here, as Howe puts it, “every­
wary of solving them: “A central con­ where I look, my thoughts grow wild.”
tradiction, once discovered,/ Leads to The necessity of reimagining time
collapse or evolution.” Metaphor is even as time runs out gives this book
one method of resolving, even while its urgency. These poems are partly
exposing contradiction. Rhyme, which about facing old age without a part­
Howe scatters throughout the book, ner. The title “Love and I” suggests
provides another. But there’s nothing old companions who have grown ab­
here like that line in Frost about a stract, almost allegorical in their rela­
cellar hole “closing like a dent in tions to one another, like functions in Handcrafted, timeless design.
dough.” Metaphors sometimes clinch a math problem. “Time was vertical,”
thinking; Howe’s tend to scatter it. Howe writes. “Is, and past perfect.” In
“Destinations,” Howe conjures the Visit our Maine
ove and I” is a book about the image of a hotel or an apartment build­
“L frayed beginnings and endings ing where life takes place in many
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their tidy trajectories (from then to To the past.
now, here to there), only to swerve to­
ward nonnarrative insight along the In another arresting formulation,
way. Many of her latest poems are ti­
tled with dates—“1941,” “1995,” “2016”—
time is “a long and everlasting plain,/ You
can pass across it any which way you
Discover...
but poetry is hardly a source of linear turn. ” But elsewhere Howe is stranded
order. Entering a person’s life at fluky and lost on that temporal plain, look­ Luxury Barge Cruises
intervals, it is, she believes, a “preoc­ ing for her own search party:
cupation” with “no motive, cause, or Someone help me find an animal
final goal”—a “vocation that has no Who will rescue me from
name.” She writes poems “in the mid­ Being a solitary
dle of children, crowds at train sta­ And more like my friends the wrens
tions, airports, motels, bus depots, in In an evergreen shrub: to be clear
Would be wonderful.
offices and schoolyards.” P.O. Box 2195, Duxbury, MA 02331
It is marvellous to think of these She wants “a sigh without the ghost­ 800 -222 -1236 781-934 -2454
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works as having been made not in some ly gasps/That accompany passion.”The
bower but in the midst of life. The touching passage that follows is Howe
basis of Howe’s poetry is watchfulness, at her saddest and funniest. In her old
A DVERTISE MENT
as from a train window. This passive, age, she is an explorer holding out for
open state, a little like prayer (Howe the right savior—a dog with valor but
is Catholic, and has written movingly without drool:
about her faith), modulates surpris­
Find me instead WHAT’S THE
BIG IDEA?
ingly into politics. Here is the open­ More like the breathy Saint Bernard.
ing of “2011”: But a little dog.
A cask of brandy hanging at her neck. Small space has big rewards.
On the last bus from Dublin to Limerick
Raindrops pelted the landscape
And held little photos
The syntax forces us to consider “me”
Of aluminum crutches in each drop also as the direct object: the “little dog” TO FIND OUT MORE, CONTACT

feels like a self­portrait. Howe, in a JILLIAN GENET 305.520.5159

Rolling down the glass.
[email protected]
lifetime of being stranded, has always
The view changes to “buildings been her own rescue party. 
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019 73
 tons apiece. All the works were forged
THE ART WORLD in Germany and shipped to Newark,
and the two segments of the S shape

HEAVY
spent the trip on deck. This likely ex-
plains the blooming orange surfaces of
the plates on sides that were exposed
The sculpture of Richard Serra. to sun and the gloomy striations on
the other sides, as yet uncured. The
BY PETER SCHJELDAHL third show is of “drawings”—rather a
frail word for diptychs and triptychs
reat sculptors are rare and strange. unity coalesces at each step. You’re of large sheets of heavy paper bearing
G In Western art, whole eras have
gone by without one, and one at a time
knocked sideways out of comparisons
to other art in any medium or genre.
thick black shapes in paint stick, ink,
and silica. Hardly pictorial, they are
is how these artists come. I mean sculp- Four centuries of intervening history about as amiable as the front ends of
tors who epitomize their epochs in evaporate. Being present in the body oncoming trucks. Apropos the sub-
three dimensions that acquire the is crucial to beholding Bernini’s incar- lime, there’s possible unpleasantness
fourth, of time, in the course of our nations. Painting can’t compete with galore about Serra’s sculpture: gross
fascination. There’s always something this total engagement. It doesn’t need materiality, bombastic scale, and per-
disruptive—uncalled for—about them. to, because great sculpture is so diffi- haps the all-time aesthetic quintes-
Their effects partake in a variant of cult and, in each instance, so particu- sence of passive aggression. You can’t
the sublime that I experience as, rough- lar and even bizarre. not think of the artist’s willfulness. He
ly, beauty combined with something Richard Serra, with current shows at has seemed at times an Ayn Randian
unpleasant. I think of the marble carv- three branches of the Gagosian gallery, (though leftist) figure of the creator as
ings of Gian Lorenzo Bernini in Rome: is our great sculptor, like it or not. I say a law unto himself. I would dislike him
the Baroque done to everlasting death. relax and like it. His new work consists, if I could build a case from the visible
A feeling of excess in both form and at one gallery, of a nearly twenty-foot- evidence equal in strength to my itch
fantasy may be disagreeable—there’s high, nearly hundred-foot-long elon- to dislike him. But beauty kicks in.
so much going on as Daphne morphs gated S shape of two-inch-thick weath- Again, shift your viewpoint. There is
into a tree to escape Apollo, or a de- erproof steel (sealed by its patina of a Beethoven-like majesty to the way
lighted seraph stabs an ecstatic St. Te- softly textured rust) and, at another, of the forms track, bend, concentrate, and
resa in the heart with an arrow. But try standing steel cylinders that differ in release the space that they share with
to detect an extraneous curlicue or an proportion of height to breadth but you. Your movement in their vicinity
unpersuasive gesture. Everything works! share the condition—so we are told is a kind of dance that you can’t refuse
Move around. A newly magnificent and can only believe—of weighing fifty or repress. Clear your mind. Let your

© 2019 RICHARD SERRA/ARS, COURTESY GAGOSIAN; PHOTOGRAPH BY ROB MCKEEVER

Serra’s “Nine,” from 2019. The sculptor’s work raised the stakes of minimalist confrontation.
74 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019
body tell you what’s happening. Then of the first-generation minimalists by What is “public art”? It is a phrase
your mind may start up again, ponder- making things—ragged lengths of lead, composed of two nouns. Serra failed epi-
ing the work’s significance. How can pulled out into rooms—whose subject cally with regard to one of them in 1980,
anything so preposterous feel matter- was the making of them. Did the cool with “Tilted Arc,” a commission by the
of-fact? How can it stun while com- effects secrete hot rage? You could think U.S. General Services Administration
ing as no surprise? so, in ways encouraged by the disqui- for the plaza of the Javits Federal
Serra is the straight-line consum- eting presence of Serra’s “prop” sculp- Building, near the Brooklyn Bridge in
mator of Minimalism, the aesthetic tures, weighty metal elements that Manhattan. The hundred-and-twenty-
revolution that, in the nineteen-sixties, leaned together, mutually supported by foot-long, twelve-foot-high leaning
redefined what sculpture is and what only gravity: not actually precarious slab looked graceful when viewed from
it does. Rather than offer objects for but sure seeming so. Those were, and its ends but faced anyone emerging
contemplation—as Bernini or Rodin remain, terrific as more than represen- from the building with a grim wall,
or even expansive modernists such as tations of the real—they are realities, and, in effect, cancelled any other use
Giacometti and David Smith did— raising the stakes of minimalist con- for the plaza. Federal workers peti-
minimalist artists induce acute self- frontation. Almost by the by, they are tioned against it. The furious contro-
consciousness, making us aware of elegant, too. Serra’s follow-up was an versy, leading to the removal of the
where we are in a given space and how engagement with outdoor sites which sculpture, in 1989, helped scuttle a pe-
our sensations alter as we move. There’s established his greatness as much by riod of lavish funding for art by na-
no right vantage point. Minimalism what he refrained from doing as by tional and state agencies, which were
ratified in art a mid-century shift to what he did. being advised by art-world panels. The
the sprawling new world of superhigh- The minimalist intoxication with G.S.A.’s Art in Architecture program
ways, airports, corporate plazas, malls, existing space spurred other artists of survives, but not its former deference
and big-chambered contemporary mu- the late sixties and early seventies into to the avant-garde. The event now
seums. For the viewer, it is “theatrical” the wild: Michael Heizer, with “Dou- seems an early harbinger of today’s cat-
and “in his way,” as the formalist critic ble Negative” (1969), excavations of two astrophic ruptures in the national body
Michael Fried put it, in an amazing mesas in Nevada; Walter De Maria, politic. (For the record, I deemed the
essay from 1967, “Art and Objecthood,” with “Lightning Field” (1977), four hun- installation a mistake and, in print, sided
in which his bull’s-eye attacks on the dred stainless-steel poles evenly spaced with the unhappy workers.) But it also
movement constituted an unintended in New Mexico; and Robert Smithson, illustrates, by overbalancing, the dy-
appreciation. Boxes by Donald Judd, with “Spiral Jetty” (1970), the epony- namic of the sublime—the affront, the
tiled metal plates on the floor by Carl mous shape, in rocks and dirt, which seduction—that Serra usually keeps in
Andre, and fluorescent fixtures by Dan extends into the Great Salt Lake. Earth- splendid tension.
Flavin irradiate rather than occupy works, as they were termed, were an Serra says that his new cylindrical
space. Judging the work is complicated overshoot, functioning as art mainly works are about weight. Lightness he
by a nagging consciousness that, as in by way of documentation or dedicated leaves to other artists. What do we un-
a game of tag, the “it” is you. The inside- tourism. (In person, I found “Spiral derstand of weight? I mean, beyond
out aesthetic spread to many arts, no- Jetty” disappointing as sculpture—dis- heavy, very heavy (a convertible sofa
tably music and dance, and remains a tinctly not quite big enough for the with the steel bed inside it which I
tacit lingua franca of curated exhibi- scale of its setting—though glorious as once helped carry up several flights of
tions to this day. a subject for photographs that will grace stairs), incredibly heavy (more than
every art-history book forever.) the sofa), and incomprehensibly heavy
erra arrived smack in the dawn of Serra kept his evolution to gigan- (budgeable only by immense machin-
S the movement, graduating from
Yale’s School of Art and Architecture
tism primarily in town and in art parks,
where it could relate to existing struc-
ery, if at all). Where do you stop along
the increments of that scale? The fifty-
with an M.F.A. in 1964, and entering tures and tended landscapes. The works, ton criterion for Serra’s “Forged Rounds,”
New York’s seething downtown art rather than complementing their set- as the cylinders are titled, owes to a
world. He was born in San Francisco tings, oppose them, with right-angled weight limit for trucking across the
in 1938, to a Spanish-American father forms in nature and sinuous ones against George Washington Bridge, Serra has
and a mother who had Russian-Jew- angular architecture. Pieces by Serra said. Therefore: as heavy as possible.
ish immigrant parents. Serra’s experi- command public spaces in cities from There’s something profoundly satisfy-
ence of heavy industry at the city’s Berlin to Pittsburgh. Most involve ship- ing—gravity as gravitas—about keep-
docks, while his father worked there as size steel slabs, curved or torqued and ing company with the new Serras, as
a pipe fitter, affected him for life. With very long or tipped together and soar- of being entrusted with a home truth
the truculent personality of some phys- ing. Some form corridors and enclo- of your and, for that matter, anything’s
ically strong, emotionally hypersensi- sures that can feel mazelike, though earthly existence. The sensation might
tive people, he swaggered into action their footprints are rationally simple be a tuning fork to gauge the degree
by ladling molten lead into junctions enough. They poetically rhyme exqui- of fact in other aspects of a world awash
of gallery walls and floors. It was a way site engineering with brute materiality, in pixelated illusions. How real is real?
of moving beyond the finished objects élan with solemnity. They jolt you awake. How real are we? 
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019 75
 tion is set in a grand, slightly shabby
THE THEATRE home in a suburb of Paris; the house
lights are kept down, the audience mem-

MEMORY PLAY
bers stowed safely in their seats, asked
only to watch and listen. It is the play
itself that lurches and rocks us, addling
Florian Zeller’s latest look at the losses of dementia. our expectation of narrative coherence
in order to take us inside the sort of
BY ALEXANDRA SCHWARTZ experience that can’t be grasped with
the mind alone.
That experience belongs to André
( Jonathan Pryce), an elderly writer in
rapid mental decline. He stands in his
kitchen, where the walls are painted a
robin’s-egg blue, looking out at a bare
tree in his garden. His adult daughter
Anne (Amanda Drew) is speaking,
though he doesn’t seem to notice her.
There was a big storm in the night.
Did he hear it? It kept her awake, but
she’s been having trouble sleeping any-
way, because of “all this.” It seems that
Anne, pragmatic and weary, has come
to help her father organize his affairs.
There is interest in publishing his di-
aries, if he agrees. Then, there’s the
matter of the house, which may not
be “what the situation calls for.” Anne
has asked a real-estate agent to come
by and have a little chat about selling.
At this, André comes alive. He has an
unstoppable tremor in his right hand,
but when provoked he can still boom
with Old Testament fury. And yet he
seems to be in a state of confused de-
nial—about, we presume, the recent
death of his wife of some fifty years,
Madeleine, whom Anne speaks of in
the past tense.
Suddenly, here is the missing woman
he theatre is a paradoxical place to tational ending of Jackie Sibblies Dru- herself, briskly returning from a round
T go in search of empathy. While the
actors are up there, working to make us
ry’s recent “Fairview”—and also, with
pity, of the outraged theatregoer I saw
of grocery shopping with Anne’s flighty
sister, Élise (Lisa O’Hare). Have we
feel, through their acute particularity, complaining to an usher at Jeremy O. misunderstood? Madeleine (Eileen At-
what it is to be human, we are down Harris’s “Daddy,” after one of that pro- kins) doesn’t seem to be a ghost; her
here, elbow to elbow with fidgeting, duction’s numerous displays of simu- daughters speak to her as if nothing
gum-chewing, symphonically cough- lated swimming-pool coitus left her were out of the ordinary. At the sight
ing specimens of our own kind. The di- soaked.) Or they may simply let the of her, André comes alive again, if
vide can seem vast—one ringing phone story lead, and trust in the power of differently than before. He laughs and
can be enough to make you want to performance to guide us. preens; his eyes shine as he teases his
cancel everybody, everywhere—and the- Jonathan Kent’s restrained staging “little scorcher,” though Madeleine
atre-makers try to bridge it in all sorts of “The Height of the Storm,” by the swats away his flirtatious displays. She
of ways. They deconstruct the stage and French playwright Florian Zeller (a has lunch to prepare, and André seems
break the famous fourth wall, enlisting Manhattan Theatre Club production to be coming unstuck again. He can’t
audience members to participate in the that has arrived at the Samuel J. Fried- remember what day it is, and Anne’s
action, to varying degrees of success. man after a heralded run in London), gentle answer—“Today, Dad”—tells
(I’m thinking of the radically confron- is as traditional as they come. The ac- us how far gone he really is. Or does
it? As her mother chops onions, Anne
Atkins and Pryce form a portrait of codependency in “The Height of the Storm.” again discusses the matter of the diaries,
76 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019 ILLUSTRATION BY SERGIY MAIDUKOV
 PROMOTION

only now it is her father whom she dry, crisp, and remote—is more of a cy-
speaks of in the past tense, before burst- pher, the consummate great man’s wife.
ing into tears of grief. Is this an alter- (Kent has her mark her domestic au-
native scenario, in which André, not thority by speaking in the quiet, calm
Madeleine, is the dead parent? Or have voice of a person used to being heeded,
Anne and Madeleine adopted this cal- and you may find yourself craning for-
lous way of speaking about someone ward to hear her.) Together, the pair
who is present in body but absent in form a portrait of codependency in the
mind—as if he had vanished altogether? extreme; their daughters are hardly more
No clear answers are given during than disappointed, disappointing in-
this intermissionless, eighty-minute terlopers in this closed union. Time
piece. Like André, who is sure of him- and again, Madeleine points out that
self one moment, befuddled and piti- André could never survive without her
ful the next, we are plunged into a shad- to cook for him and run his life. More
owy, fearful place where reality, memory, painfully, André begs Madeleine to
and imagination mingle indiscrimi- promise that she won’t die before him,
nately. Motifs are repeated in ways that which raises the morbid question of
contradict rather than amplify; the whether, overburdened by her husband’s
pauses between acts don’t so much reset slippage, she decided to do just that—
the action as muddle it, and us, further. especially once a mysterious, vampish
(Hugh Vanstone’s subtle lighting de- younger woman (Lucy Cohu), who may
sign does provide some clues as to who or may not be a long-ago lover of An-
is flesh and who is figment.) The mo- dré’s, arrives on the scene.
ments of greatest lucidity, like a quiet, These people—the devoted, resigned
companionable conversation between wife, the sultry old flame—are types,
husband and wife at the kitchen table, which is not in itself a problem; types
may prove to be the most delusional, are what people often are. (The same
if they are, as increasingly seems to be is true of the children; ambitious Anne,
the case, wishful fantasies that André we learn, wanted to be a writer but, in-
uses to moor himself. But fantasy is not timidated by her father’s example, “did
a bad place to go when reality proves nothing.” You can’t blame her.) But so
unbearable. From the outside, dealing is the life style that they inhabit. From
with dementia is a heartbreaking, ex- the books that line the living-room
asperating task. I cringed, watching last walls, the hanging planter, and the out-
year’s production of Kenneth Loner- of-date stove in Anthony Ward’s sce-
gan’s “The Waverly Gallery,” to see the nic design, we know that the family is
middle-aged Ellen ( Joan Allen) blow bourgeois but not stuffy, well off but
her top when her mother, Gladys (the not extravagant, and, since nothing is
glorious Elaine May), asked, yet again, said about the nature of André’s work,
if the dog had been fed, but it was im- he could be any kind of writer—a
possible to feel superior in the face of French one, you must remind yourself.
her exhaustion and sorrow. From the (Christopher Hampton’s translation
inside, Zeller’s unstable, flickering is perfectly fluid, but it feels silly to
play suggests, losing your mind may make these two great veterans of the
not be the worst that you can suffer. English stage speak of “Saint-Pierre”
It’s the effort to hold on to it that will and a “Madame Armanet”—empha-
bleed you dry. sis on the first syllable, Brit style—
when the action could be transposed
his is familiar territory for Zeller, anywhere.) Universality and general-
T whose play “The Father,” mounted
on Broadway in 2016, featured Frank
ity are cousins, not twins. As wrench-
ing as “The Height of the Storm” fre-
Langella as André, an egotistical man quently is, Zeller has a tendency to
in the grips of dementia. (Like Loner- slide toward the latter, striking a note
gan, Zeller was inspired by his grand- of chic, existential despair. “They say
mother’s struggle with the disease.) As life is short, but it isn’t true. It’s terri-
this iteration of André, Pryce is mag- bly long,” Madeleine says. “But, when
nificent, funny, and ferocious in his it does end, it can only be a deliver-
flashes of sanity, devastating in his anger ance.” Maybe so, but Zeller is just forty.
and weakness. Atkins’s Madeleine— He has time to change his mind. ♦
 always refreshingly informal and col-
DANCING laborative, and his highly trained danc-
ers often had strange, quirky bodies.

INSIDE THE MACHINE

Forsythe is intellectually voracious—a
kind of theory scavenger, who, over the
years, has drawn from fields including
William Forsythe shows what ballet is made of. philosophy, physics, semiotics, and the
visual arts. In 1987, for the Paris Opera
BY JENNIFER HOMANS Ballet—the highest precinct of classi-
cism, where ballet took shape, in the
seventeenth century—he made “In the
Middle, Somewhat Elevated,” a relent-
less dance to a propulsive score by Wil-
lems, in which the young Sylvie Guil-
lem moved in shockingly new ways:
body pitched at swerving angles; arms,
legs, hips, head oriented through multiple
spatial planes; executing point work that
pushed her supple body ever farther in
the physical contradictions that she and
Forsythe had devised. If this was an at-
tack, it was coming from the inside.
In 1994, Tracy-Kai Maier, Forsythe’s
wife and one of his most versatile clas-
sical dancers, died, from cancer, at the
age of thirty-two. Partly in response to
this tremendous loss, Forsythe has said,
his work turned in new directions. His
dances reflected an even deeper dive
into theory, and an expansion of his in-
quiry into the language of movement.
Does it have first principles? What are
its grammar and its rules? In the years
that followed, he and his dancers opened
up the machine and took it apart: time,
space, text, voice, sound, music, costume,
light, and the proliferating possibilities
of movement through every limb were
examined and reimagined in an impres-
sive flow of new dances.
illiam Forsythe’s “A Quiet Eve- his dancers to physical extremes, and his “One Flat Thing, Reproduced” (2000)
W ning of Dance”—which I saw at
the Venice Biennale earlier this year, and
use of electronic sound scores by his long-
time collaborator Thom Willems—to
was a gripping piece for fourteen danc-
ers and twenty metal tables, set to music
which comes to New York’s Shed arts say nothing of his taste for German Tanz- by Willems—although, Forsythe once
center on October 11th for two weeks— theater and French post-structuralist showed me, since the dance has a struc-
concludes with a joyful balletic piece to thought—have led some critics, espe- ture independent of music, it also works
music by the eighteenth-century com- cially in this country, to dismiss his work to Beethoven. For “Decreation,” in 2003,
poser Jean-Philippe Rameau. It is the as a violent and pretentious attack on the he worked with Dana Caspersen, a mag-
kind of dance we rarely see anymore, one body and on balletic form. netic performer with a compact body and
that leaves audiences elevated, energized, As a Balanchine-schooled dancer in a spine misshapen by scoliosis, on what
overcome by the sheer pleasure of move- the eighties, when Forsythe was becom- she has called “a language of indirectness
ment and music. Who would have ex- ing established, I saw things differently. and fragmentation,” in which they sent
pected this from an American choreog- Forsythe, who knows ballet as well as the “eyes in one direction, jaw in the other,
rapher who has spent the past four decades anyone, was breaking its stultifying or- rib cage in one direction, hips in the other.”
in the trenches of the European avant- thodoxies without forgoing technique Some of his dances took on a dark po-
garde, deconstructing ballet’s fundamen- or full-bodied dancing. His companies, litical edge, as in “Three Atmospheric
tal premises? Forsythe’s tendency to push based in Frankfurt and Dresden, were Studies,” in 2005, with its allusions to the
Iraq War and to Lucas Cranach’s paint-
In “A Quiet Evening of Dance,” Forsythe discovers a new classicism. ing “Lamentation Beneath the Cross.”
78 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2019 ILLUSTRATION BY ANA GALVAÑ
What had begun with ballet was becom- it is composed largely of reconceived wide, open through the chest, with deep
ing a powerful theatre of the absurd. fragments from Forsythe’s past, as well épaulement, but they are also torqued
At times, Forsythe could be madden- as a new dance to music from 1951 by and knotted, the limbs working in rhyth-
ingly obtuse. He lost me with “Sider” the avant-garde composer Morton Feld- mic counterpoint. The dancers have
(2011), in which the dancers wore head- man. Forsythe is not just reconstructing what one of them described to me as
phones and listened to an audio track Baroque steps; he’s using them as mate- “swing,” an ease through the hips and
drawn from the rhythms of Elizabethan rial, pulling ballet’s original elements joints that makes it all look perfectly
tragedy while we were hearing a score through his own imagination. The sec- natural. We see them walk straight into
by Willems. But I never found him ni- ond act is the result. Playfully entitled complex sequences of movements as if
hilistic. At the end of one of his most “Seventeen/Twenty One”—a reference they were picking up a conversation on
disorienting pieces, “I don’t believe in not to the year 1721 but to the seven- the street, a point emphasized by the
outer space” (2008), which included a teenth and the twenty-first centuries— presence of Yasit, whose braided break-
virtuoso Ping-Pong match with no ball it constitutes a new kind of classicism, dance moves fit right in.
or table, Caspersen danced a duet that made from elements of the old. Everyone is dressed in bold solid col-
left her talking about what you lose when The first act takes us inside the ma- ors—T-shirts, casual pants, arm-length
you die. “No more of this,” she said, as chine. In a series of sketches, Forsythe gloves. On their feet are colored socks
she gestured to her partner’s elbow, knee, presents a range of ideas to be fully in- pulled over sneakers, an ingenious lay-
chest—a bow to the mortal body but vestigated. One is a whimsical duet of ering that gives the dancers a broad phys-
also to the elemental daily work that had arms; another lays out the mechanics of ical gamut, from ballet to street. The
occupied Forsythe and his dancers for hands moving to and from knees. (Ready, slippery sock gains traction from the
so long. It was a dance, Forsythe said, go: hands to knees, hands crossing knees, sneaker, and there’s enough support
about his own absence. He was turning knees turning in and out, this hand, that from the rubber to give the extra lift of
sixty. In 2015, he dissolved his company hand, both hands to hips; it goes on.) a toe shoe. It is footwear that folds tra-
to focus on his international career and Forsythe is interested in movement that ditional gender roles into a single, an-
moved his base to rural Vermont. comes from movement, not from music, drogynous style. Still, it is mostly the
so much of the act is performed in si- men who hold the stage, as they did in
ow Forsythe is turning seventy, and lence—or, less convincingly, to birdcalls. Rameau’s time. At first, I couldn’t figure
N he has recently made several dances
that draw directly from ballet. A return
The many iterations can be fascinating,
but they can also be boring, a bit like
out why the five men stood out when
the two women were so good, too, and
to classical certainties with the mellow- the long hours dancers spend in rehearsal then I realized that the men move the
ing of age? Perhaps. But “A Quiet Eve- and the tedium that can accompany in- way Forsythe moves. This mirroring
ning of Dance” was not made for a bal- vention. Do we really need all this? We comes from years of working together,
let company. Forsythe has worked with do. Forsythe is edging his way from ev- making the ballet a kind of self-portrait
almost all of the dancers in its small eryday gesture to a ballet vocabulary. in absentia.
cast—two women and five men—for Soon the feet turn out, the line takes By the end of the evening, when the
years, on some of his most experimen- shape, the familiar positions emerge. In dancers all rush forward in a line—last
tal pieces; one of the men is the hip- a clever reversal, we arrive at balletic beats, hint of a bow, pull back, curtain—
hop dancer Rauf (RubberLegz) Yasit, steps using Forsythe’s own methods: we have stopped thinking. We thank
also a past collaborator. classicism born of deconstruction. Forsythe and his dancers for showing
“Quiet Evening” is a show in two acts. But this is not ballet like you have us how they got there, but, in an irony
The first is a dance as close to theory as seen before. As the music begins, three that he surely intended, once they have
I have ever seen. It is a physical disqui- men fly onto a brightly lit stage in a arrived we don’t really care. We just want
sition on the origins of ballet, except that full-tilt dance. Their movements are more dancing. 

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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, October 6th. The finalists in the September 23rd contest appear below. We will
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THIS WEEK’S CONTEST

“ ”
..........................................................................................................................

THE FINALISTS THE WINNING CAPTION

“I’m trying to see it from your point of view.”

Ashley Lieberman, Lexington, Mass.

“If this shows up in National Geographic, “I don’t tell you how to gather.”
we’ll never hear the end of it.” Joel S. Saferstein, Washington, D.C.
Nathan Skillern, Lafayette, Colo.

“I always knew we’d wind up together.”

Adam Wagner, Santa Monica, Calif.