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Great Wall of China
The New Yorker
Crossword Puzzle
FEBRUARY 1
1, 201
9

6 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

1
5 THE TALK OF THE TOWN
Margaret Talbot on the shutdown’s takeaways;
consensual night life; satirizing Phoenicia;
actors and astronauts; leave-no-trace dining.
ANNALS OF ENTERTAINMENT
Carrie Battan 20 Raw Material
Pamela Adlon makes TV from life.
SHOUTS & MURMURS
Colin Stokes 27 Signs That Something Might Be Going
Around the Office
PERSONAL HISTORY
Oliver Sacks 28 The Machine Stops
Growing old in a changing world.
PROFILES
Ian Parker 30 Unreliable Narrator
A mystery novelist’s deceptions.
ONWARD AND UPWARD WITH THE ARTS
Burkhard Bilger 44 Extreme Range
Singers redefining the beauty of the voice.
FICTION
T.Coraghessan Boyle 54 “Asleep at the Wheel”
THE CRITICS
BOOKS
1 . Stack for a publisher’s David Denby 62 Ben Hecht’s screenwriting genius.
assistant. 67 Briefly Noted
2 . Dulce et Dan Chiasson 68 Shane McCrae addresses America.
(Horatian maxim). ON TELEVISION
Emily Nussbaum 70 “The Masked Singer,” “The Other Two.”
3 . Flavoring used in
biscotti. THE CURRENT CINEMA
Anthony Lane 72 “Never Look Away.”
4 . Landmark 1 9 7 3 court
case, familiarly. POEMS
Richard Blanco 51 “My Father in English”
Rachel Eliza Griffiths 58 “Heart of Darkness”
COVER
Do the rest of the puzzle,
Pascal Campion “Love Interest”
and find a new one every week,
at newyorker.com/crossword

DRAWINGS Sam Gross, Harry Bliss, Maddie Dai, David Sipress,

Roz Chast, Ellie Black, Frank Cotham, Seth Fleishman, Joe Dator, Lars Kenseth,
P.C.Vey, Carolita Johnson, Jon Adams, Tom Cheney, Jason Adam Katzenstein,
Paul Noth, Benjamin Schwartz, Sara Lautman SPOTS R.O.Blechman
 PROMOTION

WIRED.
NOW ON
YOUR
SMART TV.
WIRED’s Video App Now Available
on Your Smart TV

Available on
 Thank you CONTRIBUTORS
for being
Oliver Sacks (“The Machine Stops,” Carrie Battan (“Raw Material,” p. 20)
a reader and p. 28), who died in 2015, was the au- began contributing to The New Yorker
thor of many books, including “Musi- in 2015. She became a staff writer
supporting cophilia,” “Gratitude,” and “The River
of Consciousness.” A final collection
last year.

independent of his essays,“Everything in Its Place,”

will be published in April.
Burkhard Bilger (“Extreme Range,”
p. 44) has been a staff writer since 2001.

journalism. Ian Parker (“Unreliable Narrator,” p. 30) Emily Nussbaum (On Television, p. 70)
began contributing to the magazine is the magazine’s television critic and
in 1994 and became a staff writer the recipient of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize
in 2000. for criticism.

Rachel Eliza Griffiths (Poem, p. 58) is T. Coraghessan Boyle (Fiction, p. 54)

the author of, most recently, the poetry has published sixteen novels and eleven
collection “Lighting the Shadow.” short-story collections.His new novel,
“Outside Looking In,” will be released
Elias Muhanna (The Talk of the Town, in the spring.
p. 17), a professor of comparative liter-
ature at Brown University, has contrib- Emily Witt (The Talk of the Town,
uted to The New Yorker since 2014. p. 16), a staff writer, is the author of
“Future Sex” and “Nollywood: The
Pascal Campion (Cover), an illustrator, Making of a Film Empire.”
is an art director for animation studios
in Southern California. Richard Blanco (Poem, p. 51) served as
President Obama’s inaugural poet in
Han Zhang (The Talk of the Town, 2013.His latest poetry collection,“How
p. 19) is a member of the magazine’s to Love a Country,” will be published
editorial staff. in March.

THIS WEEK ON NEWYORKER.COM

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In California, architects and Rivka Galchen on a little-known
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designs to protect homes from fires. the author of “The Princess Bride.”

Download the New Yorker Today app for the latest news, commentary, criticism,
and humor, plus this week’s magazine and all issues back to 2008.
4 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 1
1, 201
9

THE MAI
L return each year
ONE WORD: PLASTICS
Carolyn Kormann mentions a number
of efforts to reduce plastic pollution in
her article on the Great Pacific Garbage
Patch: the nationwide ban on micro-
beads, California’s restrictions on plas-
tic straws, and Lego’s introduction of a
“new plant-based form of plastic” (“The
Widening Gyre,” February 4th).It’s true
that Lego now uses a plant-based poly-
ethylene plastic for a small percentage
of its pieces,but it’s misleading for Kor-
mann to compare this to banning micro-
beads and straws. “Plant-based” does
not mean “biodegradable.” In this case,
it means that the ethanol used in pro-
duction comes from sugarcane rather
than from petroleum.Lego’s new plas-
tic is otherwise similar to that used in
traditional polyethylene products, and
will break down into the same kind of
microplastic as that currently swirling
in the world’s oceans.
Don Rogerson
St. Louis, Mo.
1 vestigative projects, at Newsday, where
DIVINE INTERPRETATION
There is something old-fashioned, even
pious, about the opening admonition in
Adam Gopnik’s recent piece on con-
temporary readings of sacred texts (A
Critic at Large, January 28th). Gopnik
writes, “When reading other people’s
sacred texts,we too easily glide past diffi-
culties, or propose aesthetic interpreta-
tions,in ways that lead us away from the
obvious intentions.” What he says is not
false, but it radiates the stern righteous-
ness of a largely bygone era of Biblical
studies when ahistorical religious or de-
votional criticism was embattled against
secular historical criticism. Contempo-
rary literary criticism, aware of both his-
tory and religion but not disarmed by
either, can quite respectfully accommo-
date the difference he notes.
Jack Miles
Santa Ana, Calif.
Gopnik writes that people reading scrip-
tures for pleasure are at risk of over-aes-
theticizing them:“When God’s the au-
Our members
thor, being pretty’s not the purpose.” But,
as faithfully as
as an ordained pastor since 1984, and as the tides.
someone who reads the Bible daily for
personal enjoyment as well as for spiri-
tual edification, I believe that Gopnik’s
assertion misses the mark. For me, one
of the main attractions of the Bible is its
beauty.In the Song of Songs, the Bible’s
erotic love poem, mentioned in Gopnik’s
essay, ancient Israel is portrayed as a bride
to be wooed and seduced by God.When
I read the Bible, my soul is, indeed, wooed
and seduced by the beauty of God, as
though by a lover.Perhaps “being pretty”
isn’t the main purpose, but the Bible is
the most widely read book in human
history, and I can’t help but think that
this is, in part, because of its beauty.
David Robinson
Cannon Beach, Ore.
1
ROBERT CARO’S LEGACY
Robert Caro, in his reflections on re-
searching the biography of Lyndon B.
Johnson, describes one of his earliest in-
he uncovered evidence of wealthy exec-
utives trying to keep Mitchel Field—a
massive open space on Long Island— Situated on 2,500 acres of unspoiled
all for themselves, rather than allow the paradise, Ocean Reef provides a long list
space to be used for public purposes of unsurpassed amenities to its
(“Turn Every Page,” January 28th). As Members including a 175-slip marina, two
it turns out, I am a beneficiary of Caro’s 18-hole golf courses, tennis facilities,
investigative work. After Newsday’s state-of-the-art medical center,
muckraking reporting, Mitchel Field K-8 school, private airport and more.
was turned into a campus for Nassau
Community College, where I was hired There are only two ways to experience
as a sociology instructor in 1965.I worked Ocean Reef Club’s Unique Way of Life –
on the Mitchel Field campus for fifty as a guest of a member or through
years, watching the student population the pages of Living magazine.
grow to thirty thousand. It is now one Visit OceanReefClubMagazine.com
of the largest colleges in the state. It’s or call 305.367.5921 to request your
amazing to think that this campus al- complimentary copy.
most never existed.
William Feigelman
Queens, N.Y.
•
Letters should be sent with the writer’s name,
address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to
themail@newyorker.com. Letters may be edited
for length and clarity, and may be published in
any medium. We regret that owing to the volume
of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter.
PRIVATE • AUTHENTIC • UNIQUE
 FEBRUARY 6 – 1
2, 201
9

GOI
NGS ON ABOUT TOWN

The Mexican painter Frida Kahlo is too often reduced to a pop-culture cliché—her likeness appears on
products from tote bags to cake toppers.Starting Feb.8, the Brooklyn Museum reaffirms her complexity,
in the exhibition “Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving.” Her indelible self-portraits on canvas
are joined—for the first time in the U.S.—by a selection of the Tehuana garments and jewelry with which
the artist cannily constructed her public persona—a reminder that, in Kahlo’s case, style was substance.
 1
NIGHT LIFE
Musicians and night-club proprietors lead
complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in
advance to confirm engagements.
Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah
Blue Note
The trumpeter Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah
was born in 1983, a fact worth noting when it
comes to appreciating why the sonic permuta-
tions of hip-hop—the genre he grew up with—are
second nature to him. His most recent album,
“The Emancipation Procrastination,” from 2017,
suggests that, for this open-eared jazz figure,
groove and texture are on equal footing with ani-
mated improvisation.—Steve Futterman (Feb. 5-8.)
Estelle
Baby’s All Right
Lovers rock, an amorous subgenre of reggae
that originated in London, was the inspiration
for and namesake of Estelle’s latest album. “It’s
the truest, Britishest version of me you’re prob-
ably going to get,” the singer told NPR of the
music, which sets romance (her parents’ love
story, in particular) against the blissful riddims
of reggae and dancehall as well as Afrobeat.
With a symphony of steel drums, synths, and
guitar lines propelling it forward, Estelle’s
“Lovers Rock” feels like a tropical excursion
into your own heart.—Briana Younger (Feb. 6.)
of sweat and possibly even tears left on the
bandstand. Kenny Washington and Joe Farns-
worth, the two combatants at this now annual
event, have the hard-bop ethos of competitive
respect deep in their bones. The esteemed pi-
anist Harold Mabern, a veteran player who has
presumably experienced similar gladiatorial
matches in his time, is in the accompanying
ensemble.—S.F. (Feb. 8-9.)
Sharon Van Etten
Beacon Theatre
Following the release of Sharon Van Etten’s
album “Are We There,” in 2014, the singer-
songwriter decided to step away from her
music and into her life: she enrolled in grad
school, forayed into acting, and had a baby.
The search for fresh sounds for a film she
was scoring drove her to experiment with
new instruments and tones, a process that
ultimately became the foundation for her
record “Remind Me Tomorrow,” released last
month. Where her older music steadied itself
on swelling guitars, her new songs are built
around mystic synths and galvanic drums.
Thematically, a peaceful sense of light under-
ELECTRONIC DANCE MUSIC
scores the album—the result of her artistic
and personal evolution—as Van Etten offers
proof that pressing Pause is often the best
groundwork for rebirth.—B.Y. (Feb. 9.)
Indo-Pak Coalition
Miller Theatre
Rudresh Mahanthappa’s Indian heritage is
never far from mind in the virtuosic sax-
ophonist’s new-jazz explorations, but his
Indo-Pak Coalition makes any idiomatic
influences explicit. The trio includes the
percussionist Dan Weiss and the guitarist
Rez Abbasi, both of whom are as committed
to organic pan-musical fusion as their adven-
turous leader.—S.F. (Feb. 9.)
Noncompliant
Nowadays
Formerly billed as DJ Shiva (an alias going back
to the Midwestern rave scene of the nineties),
the Indianapolis d.j. Lisa Smith has moved
into the techno spotlight with only minor al-
terations to her playing style. Like many of her

Tibet House Benefit

Carnegie Hall
Come February, the road to enlightenment
winds through Carnegie Hall. Now in its
thirty-second year, the Tibet House Benefit
has long been a fixture of New York’s concert
almanac, with a handful of moments—especially
those involving Iggy Pop—enshrined in lore.
Per usual, this year’s lineup features legend-
ary punks (Debbie Harry, Laurie Anderson),
creative arrivistes (the literate Southern song-
writer Jason Isbell), erudite boldfaced names
(Stephen Colbert), and the event’s artistic di-
rector, Philip Glass.—Jay Ruttenberg (Feb. 7.)

Olive T
Bossa Nova Civic Club
MURAY PHOTO ARCHIVES; RIGHT: ILLUSTRATION BY QIEER WANG
OPPOSITE: “FRIDA KAHLO, 1939,” NICKOLAS MURAY, © NICKOLAS

Several recent sets by the Brooklyn d.j. Olive T—

who’s become an increasingly visible draw at local
dance spots over the past year—show a command
of house and techno of all eras that is so fluent
it can seem offhanded, and she weaves in plenty
else, besides. Take her mix for the Ransom Note
blog: it ambles, with purpose, from early Sugar-
hill Records rap to a frosty tech-house nightcap by
Nicolas Jaar’s Against All Logic alias. Here, she
appears as part of this Bushwick hangout’s inau-
gural “Dweller” festival, featuring underground
black artists.—Michaelangelo Matos (Feb. 8.)
The New Drum Battle
Smoke
Drum battles aren’t occasions for making nice;
little blood is shed, but there’s always plenty
Two well-regarded European dance-event promoters, Italy’s Life and
Death and Spain’s Sónar, are behind this showcase, which features eight
d.j.s, five live performances, and all sorts of decorative extras—a fine
snapshot of the current dance-music underground.On the live side, the
standout act is Nosaj Thing, whose stoned-soul hip-hop beats have grown
more assured with each of his four albums.(He also produced Chance
the Rapper’s “Paranoia,” from the 2013 record “Acid Rap.”) Noteworthy
d.j.s include the L.A.-based Londoner DJ Harvey, with his trademark
mix of historical depth and party-hearty irreverence;Robag Wruhme,
from Germany, who, both solo and with his old duo, the Wighnomy
Brothers, crafts minimal techno that shimmers from within;and Call
Super, the British techno producer who spun one of last year’s friskiest
editions of BBC Radio 1’s “Essential Mix.” They take to the decks on
Feb.8, at Avant Gardner.—Michaelangelo Matos

THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 1

1, 201
9 7
regional peers, she approaches the decks with
a playfully brusque relentlessness, a manner
that’s grown in popularity globally. Her tastes
aren’t limited to techno’s hard side, though;
see her psychedelic-electro set for the booking
agency Oramics’s podcast.—M.M. (Feb. 9.)
YNW Melly
S.O.B.’S
In live settings, the rapper YNW Melly has
a contagious, childlike energy that makes it
seem like he’s genuinely just happy to be there.
Raised in a small city in Florida where, as he
told the Fader, no one ever makes it out, he
probably really is. His music reflects the feel-
ing accordingly, as he bends his stark realities
into exuberant melodies; his most popular
song, the ominous ballad “Murder on My
Mind,” wherein he croons about the homi-
cidal thoughts that plague him, was conceived
during a yearlong stint in jail. But for someone
with a life as troubled as his lyrics suggest, in
sound and performance Melly rarely lets his
pain show.—B.Y. (Feb. 11.)
1 Why is Admetos (Bonaros) cuddling a stuffed
THE THEATRE
God Said This
Cherry Lane
Leah Nanako Winkler’s new play stands on its
own, but it also brings back the nuclear family
from her breakout show, “Kentucky,” who this
time come together, or try to, as the mother,
Masako (played by the radiant actress Ako),
is dying from carcinosarcoma. But it shouldn’t
be dismissed as yet another cancer play—it’s
droll and foulmouthed, and when it gets seri-
ous it’s a lot more interested in anger than in
sadness or uplift. Directed by Morgan Gould,
OFF BROADWAY
The transgender performer Becca Black-
well (who uses the pronoun “they”) has
the charisma of a winking cowboy from
an old Western—you just want to ride
alongside them into some dirty sunset.
Whether performing wordless in the
nude, as in Young Jean Lee’s “Untitled
Feminist Show,” or in their own ribald and
disturbing standup show,“They,Themself
and Schmerm,” Blackwell delivers oodles
of warmth and personality.Fittingly, their
newest role is one of Greek mythology’s
great bons vivants.In Madeleine George’s
“Hurricane Diane” (beginning previews
on Feb.6,at New York Theatre Workshop,
directed by Leigh Silverman), Blackwell
plays a butch gardener who is secretly the
god Dionysus—back to return humanity
to its unspoiled natural origins, starting
with a quartet of New Jersey housewives.
Resist at your peril.—Michael Schulman
8 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 1
1, 201
9
this Primary Stages production inhabits its
Kentucky setting and inspects its mixed-race
family without cliché. Hiro (Satomi Blair) and
Sophie (Emma Kikue) feel remarkably like real
sisters. Tom Coiner is especially funny as an old
classmate of Hiro’s who veers from easygoing
to apoplectic. And it’s a pleasure to listen to
the magnificent baritone of Jay Patterson, as
James, the inept husband and father.—Rollo
Romig (Through Feb. 15.)
Hercules:In Search of a Hero
Abrons Arts Center
A program note by Ioanna Katsarou, the direc-
tor of this production from the Eclipses Group
(which specializes in Greek culture), notes that
ninety-five per cent of this play’s dialogue de-
rives from the Euripides plays “Alcestis” and
“Hercules” (in a new, colloquial translation by
Demetri Bonaros), and promises that it will
challenge “the conventional, masculine notion
of heroism.” Sounds good—but too many pe-
ripheral questions overwhelm this wacky yet
often wooden and self-serious show. Why is
Alcestis (Luisa Alarcón) wearing a trenchcoat?
puppy? Why is Hercules (Luke Couzens)
portrayed like a sort of Hellenic Ted Nugent,
complete with air guitar and camouflage-print
cargo pants? Why is Hades depicted as a wet
bar (maybe in Las Vegas)? When will the strobe
lights stop?—R.R. (Through Feb. 10.)
Joan
HERE
In many ways, Joan has led a normal existence:
daughter and mother, lover and wife, sister and
friend, artist and teacher. She has had affairs and
heartaches, hopes and frustrations. What’s less
ordinary is how the playwright Stephen Belber
tells her story: in nonchronological vignettes
that jump around various points in her life.
Johanna Day (“Sweat”) does not inflect her
portrayal as her character’s age shifts, suggesting
that Joan has always been the same throughout
the decades. It’s a daring choice that may turn
off some audience members, but it gives Joan
a sense of unshakable—bordering on self-cen-
tered—integrity. Adam Harrington and Mar-
jan Neshat are marvellous as Joan’s family and
friends, and Adrienne Campbell-Holt directs
with her usual sensitive touch for the Colt Coeur
company. Even when it’s overwritten (which is
often), “Joan” is a fractured portrait that holds
together.—Elisabeth Vincentelli (Through Feb. 16.)
True West
American Airlines Theatre
In a new revival of Sam Shepard’s acclaimed
1980 play, directed by James Macdonald for
Roundabout Theatre Company, Austin (Paul
Dano), a screenwriter, is house-sitting for his
mother, in suburban Southern California, when
his brother, Lee (Ethan Hawke), shows up after
three months in the desert, drinking beer in
a scuzzy trenchcoat and looking to provoke.
Hawke wears the role of Lee like a second
skin, and Dano beautifully evinces a charac-
ter navigating a loved one’s difficult behavior,
trying to retain power over his pitch meeting,
and his car keys, without causing offense. The
ensuing merging and transfiguring of identi-
ties—and blotto writer’s-block rage—culmi-
nates in shock, but to a contemporary audience
the lead-up can feel like squalor for squalor’s
sake. Shepard’s writing and his vision are as
powerful as ever, but American masculinity
has evolved since he wrote “True West”; what’s
true for one generation may not be true for the
next. (Reviewed in our issue of 2/4/19.)—Sarah
Larson (Through March 17.)
Whirlwind
Wild Project
Don’t judge a play by its ending: Jordan Jaffe’s
“Whirlwind” features a slightly preachy coda
that feels tacked on, especially after the de-
lightful eighty minutes that precede it. Jaffe
has come up with that rare theatrical beast—the
unabashed romantic comedy. The bro-ish boss
(Johnny Wu) of an alternative-energy company
dispatches Bethany (Annapurna Sriram), a
canny junior employee, to deal with Michael
(Christian Conn), an ornithologist who’s dis-
covered that some of the firm’s wind turbines
slaughter birds. Bethany wants to climb the
corporate ranks, whereas Michael is not averse
to sleeping in his van, yet they lose no time en-
gaging in the kind of banter that tends to lead
to dinner and bird-watching at night. Sriram’s
quick-witted performance powers Dan Am-
boyer’s production, which noticeably slackens
when she’s offstage. Fortunately, that does not
happen much.—E.V. (Through Feb. 10.)
ILLUSTRATION BY MARTA SEVILLA
1
CLASSICAL MUSIC
Yuja Wang
Carnegie Hall
The pianist Yuja Wang, she of the sequinned
minidresses and ferocious technical prowess,
 is well acquainted with the spotlight; perhaps
that is why she has decided to share every con- MUSIC FOR CHANGE
cert in her “Perspectives” series at Carnegie
Hall with other artists. She invites the sensi-
tive violinist Leonidas Kavakos to join her for
one of her adventurous programs, which leaps
from Brahms’s graceful Violin Sonata No. 2 to
Prokofiev’s eerily mesmerizing Violin Sonata
No. 1. Five nights later, the classical-music
tricksters Igudesman & Joo—whose mashup of
“I Will Survive” with Tchaikovsky and Chopin
has more than eight million views on You-
Tube—show up to make some mischief with
Wang in Zankel Hall. Also playing: Daniil
Trifonov—last season’s “Perspectives” artist
and another dazzler at the keyboard—performs
pieces by Beethoven, Schumann, and Prokofiev
(Feb. 9 at 8).—Oussama Zahr (Feb. 6 at 8 and
Feb. 11 at 7:30.)

“Radamisto”
Kaye Playhouse
The musical archeologists at Opera Lafayette
typically devote their energy to uncover-
ing artifacts from the French Baroque era,
but now they’re turning their attention,
for the first time, to Handel and one of his
best-known works, “Radamisto.” A spirit of
restoration suffuses the production, which
uses period instruments and reinstates the
opera’s often cut ballets. Seán Curran di-
rects and choreographs, and Ryan Brown
conducts.—O.Z. (Feb. 7 at 7:30.)
New York Philharmonic
David Geffen Hall
Like many of its choral coevals, Brahms’s “A
German Requiem”—a vernacular behemoth,
written in the eighteen-sixties and focussed
on the spiritual over the dogmatic—has its
ponderous moments, but the composer’s me-
lodic gifts and strategic restraint (the work is
only an hour long) save it from sentimentality.
The Philharmonic, the Concert Chorale of
New York, and two soloists (Ying Fang, a so-
prano, and the baritone Matthias Goerne) join
forces for this expression of hope in the face
of grief; Jaap van Zweden conducts. Earlier
in the week, on Feb. 6, Kahchun Wong leads
a special Lunar New Year program that in-
cludes Li Huanzhi’s dramatic “Spring Festival
Overture,” Stravinsky’s “Firebird” Suite, and
the U.S. première of Tan Dun’s new violin
concerto “Fire Ritual.”—Fergus McIntosh (Feb.
7 at 7:30, Feb. 8 at 2, and Feb. 9 at 8.)
“Improvement”
The Kitchen
It might be a misnomer to call the late Robert
Ashley’s “Improvement (Don Leaves Linda)”
(1985) an opera: there is no staging, no live
orchestra, and no vocal melodies. Six sing-
ILLUSTRATION BY MIKYUNG LEE
After President Donald J.Trump signed an executive order in January,
2017, preventing foreign nationals from seven predominantly Muslim
countries from entering the United States, numerous musicians, ensem-
bles, and organizations responded by showcasing art from precisely those
places. Kronos Quartet, an esteemed Bay Area new-music group with a
long history of social activism and unconstrained crossover, was among the
more prominent entities to challenge the wisdom of this policy.“Music for
Change:The Banned Countries,” the program that Kronos brings to Zankel
Hall on Feb.8, offers a substantial and savory cross-section of classical and
traditional idioms, including newly composed pieces, songs featuring the
Persian vocalist Mahsa Vahdat, and Middle Eastern pop tunes in crafty ar-
rangements.All told, it amounts to a rich and distinctive mixtape, amplifying
themes of dignity, resistance, and harmonious coexistence.—Steve Smith
ganize Linda’s world as she pushes back against eras about possession. In the first, a controlling
them.—O.Z. (Feb. 7-9 and Feb. 13-16 at 8.) king hides his blind daughter (poignantly sung
by Sonya Yoncheva) in a forest cottage. In the
second, Judith (the fearless Angela Denoke)
Argento New Music Project pushes the titular duke (the riveting Gerald
Finley) to reveal his feelings and his past to
Roulette her, only to inch closer to a dangerous truth
It seems practically unthinkable that this Ar- that will consume her. The conductor, Henrik
gento New Music Project event is billed as Nánási, reinforces the staging: Tchaikovsky’s
the vocalist and composer Erin Gee’s first- lush garden of a score sounds beautiful yet
ever portrait concert, given that the dispa- cheerless, and Bartók’s brass writing, glossy and
rate works that she calls “Mouthpieces” are so intense, gives the light of truth a forbidding
potent, influential, and genuinely appealing. glare. Also playing: The Met embraces the
She initiated the series, in 2000, with a mod- classical-crossover stylings of Andrea Bocelli
est two-minute earworm that showcased her in two concerts (Feb. 10 and Feb. 17 at 5).—O.Z.
own idiosyncratic vocal techniques; she has (Feb. 9 at 12:30 and Feb. 14 at 7:30.)
now completed thirty such pieces, for singers,
instrumentalists, or both at once. Here, Gee
performs some of her distinctive compositions, “Total Mozart”
including two New York premières, alongside
Alice Tully Hall

ers, seated at a table, declaim blocks of text
in a form of pitched speech, while a sound
designer creates a live mix of woozy, sustained
tones and keyboard effects. Ashley’s minimalist
means, however, achieve expansive ends. The
main character, Linda, is an allegorical repre-
sentation of the Jewish people, appearing in
episodes from 1492 to the nineteen-forties. As
the voices layer on top of one another, echoing
faintly, they reveal the social structures that or-
Argento’s dependably skillful players.—Steve
Smith (Feb. 8 at 8.)
“Iolanta” / “Bluebeard’s Castle”
Metropolitan Opera House
In this enthralling double bill, the director
Mariusz Treliński presents Tchaikovsky’s “Io-
lanta” and Bartók’s “Bluebeard’s Castle” as op-
The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Cen-
ter devotes a Sunday evening to small-scale
works by Mozart, a man who enjoyed life’s
little things as much as its grand affairs. The
delightful program includes a string quartet,
a miniaturized piano concerto, and a selection
of the composer’s groundbreaking horn duos,
which he claimed to have completed “while
playing ninepins.”—F.M. (Feb. 10 at 5.)

THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 1

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 its United States début at Peak Performances, in
CONTEMPORARY DANCE Montclair, New Jersey, people are puppets, hang-
ing inside overcoats within a machine-like set of
ominously mobile industrial lighting, watched
over by some kind of eye. Light is a form of
control and a source of hope. Escape may be
possible, via acrobatics and the will of the human
spirit.—Brian Seibert (Feb. 9-10 and Feb. 14-17.)

1
ART

“Anna Atkins”
New York Public Library
In our era of Instagram fame and botany chic
(“#plants” captions twenty-two million posts),
it may be hard to believe that the woman re-
sponsible for the world’s first photography book,
published in 1843—and illustrated with exquisite
velvet-blue cyanotypes of British algae—signed
it with her initials, A.A., instead of her name.
Not long after Atkins died, in 1871, an enthu-
siast attributed her book to an “Anonymous
Amateur,” but the British Museum quickly set
the record straight. The respected Victorian
Camille A. Brown’s “Ink,” receiving its New York première at the Joyce The- botanist, though humble, didn’t work in obscu-
atre,Feb.5-10,was preceded by “Mr.TOL E.RAncE” (2013) and “BLACK rity during her lifetime—she just languished
GIRL:Linguistic Play” (2015).The fact that those three works are all in it for much of the twentieth century, denied
credit as a maverick of the new medium. Her
broadly concerned with African-American identity doesn’t really make work was rediscovered, in the nineteen-eighties,
them a trilogy, as advertised, but the gradually simplified titles do reflect a by the art historian Larry J. Schaaf, an expert
progression:as Brown’s choreographic confidence has grown, her didacti- on Atkins’s friend William Fox Talbot, who
invented the negative-positive process. Atkins’s
cism has receded.In “Ink,” she largely lets the gestural language of the Afri- delicate collisions of science and art are the heart
can diaspora and her talent as a theatre artist (she choreographed the recent of this transporting exhibition, which includes a
Broadway revival of “Once on This Island”) speak for themselves,to illumi- fascinating trove of related material.—Andrea K.
Scott (Through Feb. 17.)
nate ideas of self-empowerment, brotherhood, and resilience.The percus-
sion-rich live music is expertly directed by Allison Miller.—Brian Seibert
“Lucio Fontana”
Met Breuer
Vicky Chow inaccurately labelled “Classic NYCB” (Feb. 6) The Italian artist is famous for the monochrome
contains only one classic, “Duo Concertant,” canvases, neatly slashed with knives, that he
The Stone at the New School as well as a Balanchine rarity, “Variations pour made—or executed—between 1958 and his
As the keyboardist for the Bang on a Can All- une Porte et un Soupir,” a surrealist experiment death, ten years later, at the age of sixty-nine.
Stars, Vicky Chow is routinely tasked with set to a score, by Pierre Henry, that sounds like This elegant retrospective, curated by Iria
negotiating a bewildering range of styles with the squeaking of hinges, the slamming of doors, Candela, has a melancholy aspect: it is among
ease and flair. As a soloist, she embraces that and matches being scraped against sandpaper. the last of the Met’s shows in Marcel Breuer’s
calling just as enthusiastically. Her Stone resi- A Jerome Robbins evening (Feb. 7 and Feb. granite alcazar on Madison Avenue, which it has
dency begins with an evening of pieces written 9) offers two of Robbins’s portraits of nine- occupied since the Whitney moved downtown,
between 2012 and 2019 and concludes with a teen-fifties-era American youth, “Interplay” in 2015. Conveniently, the chaste brutalism of
program of substantial works by Ann Southam, and “N.Y. Export: Opus Jazz.”—Marina Harss the Breuer building—finished in 1966, the year
Nik Bärtsch, and Toshi Ichiyanagi. In between, (Through March 3.) that Fontana won the Grand Prize for an Italian
Chow mingles with the steel-pan player Andy painter at the Venice Biennale—feels perfect for
Akiho and the percussionist Ian Rosenbaum, it, housing a period style in period style. Despite
and devotes two evenings to Philip Glass’s Vicky Shick and Dancers pleasant surprises—notably involving the artist’s
complete Études.—S.S. (Feb. 12-16 at 8:30.) lesser-known ceramic sculptures, which veer be-
Danspace Project tween figuration and abstraction and can suggest
1 Shick, a former member of the Trisha Brown the euphoric neo-Baroque of a drunk Bernini—
Company, makes dances that are like poems. the show has a droopy feel of avant-gardism left
DANCE Their meanings—intimate and fleeting—are out in the rain of subsequent history. So does a
not always legible, but, like delicate origami, lot of once radical twentieth-century art these
they are crafted with intention and precision. days, as myths of progress in culture complete
New York City Ballet The sense that the dancers’ movements contain their long collapse and mystiques of innovation
ILLUSTRATION BY BARBARA OTT

David H.Koch
Of the four mixed programs this week, the
most interesting is “New Combinations” (Feb.
9 matinée and Feb. 10), which includes Kyle
Abraham’s “The Runaway,” from last year, a
work that builds from the quiet introspection of
Nico Muhly to the fierce and stylish hip-hop of
Kanye West and Jay-Z. (Ballet and hip-hop are
more compatible than you might think.) The
buried stories gives Shick’s work, such as “Next
to the Sink,” performed here, a raw but remote
kind of power.—M.H. (Feb. 7-9.)
Raphaëlle Boitel
Alexander Kasser Theatre
“When Angels Fall” is dystopian nouveau cirque.
In this chiaroscuro vision from France, making
gravitate from individual genius to corporate
branding.—Peter Schjeldahl (Through April 14.)
Sanford Darling
Shrine
DOWNTOWN The curiously flat landscapes and
single still-life—a gummily rendered, off-kil-
ter bowl of fruit—on view in this show, titled

1
0 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 1
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 “House of a Thousand Paintings,” are the dis-
placed fragments of an obsessive undertaking
that consumed the final decade of the American
artist’s life. In 1963, the retired General Pe-
troleum engineer, after travelling extensively
through Europe, Asia, and Polynesia, began to
cover every surface of his Santa Barbara home
with unpeopled scenes. Using enamel sign
paint and a wide brush, Darling recalled his
adventures in roughly rendered, black ocean ex-
panses dotted with volcanic islands and strange
shorelines punctuated by wildly out-of-scale
palm trees. One small work, notable for its cool
palette and un-tropical clime, shows a striped
lighthouse emitting beams of light like flutter-
ing yellow wings against a drab blue sky. Amid
such examples of his strange, dogged output, one
imagines Darling’s legendary painted home to
be equal parts fearsome and fantastic.—Johanna
Fateman (Through Feb. 10.)
and poignancy to the role of a literary free spirit
in not so quiet desperation. She stars as Lee
Israel, a fiftyish biographer and journalist living
on the Upper West Side, who, in 1991, loses
her sources of income and—discovering the
value of a celebrity letter in her possession—also
finds that she’s good at fabricating letters in the
name (and voice) of famous writers. The frus-
trations of the brilliant, bitter woman—whose
lacerating wit creates a barrier of privacy and
solitude—offer peeks into an underground of
genteel artistic poverty that has little place in
the newly upscale city. The director, Marielle
Heller, anchors the action in New York’s gay
and lesbian community as the AIDS epidemic
raged, and evokes a powerful sense of mourning
and gratitude. Richard E. Grant co-stars, as
Jack Hock, Lee’s shambolic friend in need and
partner in crime. Written by Nicole Holofcener
and Jeff Whitty.—Richard Brody (In wide release.)
The Gospel of Eureka
The complex cultural mix and troubled history
of the small town of Eureka Springs, Arkansas,
are foregrounded in this sharply dramatic, in-
tricately interwoven documentary by Michael
Palmieri and Donal Mosher. The town’s main
attraction is its half-century-old Passion Play,
which was founded by the anti-Semitic and
racist preacher Gerald L. K. Smith; the town is
also home to a vibrant L.G.B.T.Q . community
with its own theatrical tradition, a drag show
with lip-synching performers. The filmmakers
talk with gay residents and Christian visitors
alike, and find surprising overlaps; they visit
a local church based on tolerance and also talk
with bigoted opponents of an antidiscrimina-
tion law. Two men, Lee and Walter, a longtime
couple, are prominently featured throughout,
and they’re divided on matters of faith—Lee

Ella Kruglyanskaya AT GRACIE MANSION

Brown
UPTOWN The crackerjack Latvian painter, now
based in L.A., favors bawdy figuration, and she
has some trompe-l’oeil tricks up her sleeve, as
when sheets of paper seem to peel off the bright
surfaces of her pictures. Folkloric wooden dolls
are painted with an eye on realism, while more
ostensibly lifelike figures—aggressively vo-
luptuous women—are speedily sketched with
expressive lines. At times, Kruglyanskaya
combines both approaches with startling re-
sults: “Ghost Rider” shows a loosely rendered
equestrienne, ponytail flying, extending an
arm off the flaming red rectangle that contains
her horse—a carved toy. Elsewhere, Krug-
lyanskaya makes winking reference to both
the male-dominated history of painting and
the undeniably sensual properties of paint. In
“Painter, Discontented,” as an artist strikes an
exaggerated pinup pose, the spattered mess
of her clingy slip echoes the gestural canvas
behind her.—J.F. (Through Feb. 24.)

Hannah Starkey
Bonakdar
CHELSEA The Irish photographer has, for two
“ART IS. . . (TROUPE FRONT),” (1983/2009), COURTESY ALEXANDER GRAY ASSOCIATES,

decades, staged deceptively naturalistic tab-

leaux—domestic interiors, offices, cafés, busy Last month, a record-breaking hundred and twenty-seven congresswomen
NEW YORK; © LORRAINE O’GRADY/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK

streets—populated almost entirely with women.
Starkey has a knack for coaxing her cast into
faraway moods, an effect she accomplishes even
when her subject’s face is concealed. In the grip-
ping, backlit image “Geraldine and the Stag,
Paris,” an older woman is seen in silhouette,
confronting an antlered statuette in a vitrine.
Elsewhere, a serious young woman’s expres-
sion floats, reflected, in a commercial display
of makeup mirrors. In a series documenting the
2017 Women’s March in London, the artist finds
counterparts to her alone-in-a-crowd heroines in
their protest signs; “Inspire Sisterhood,” reads
one colorful slogan—a motto for Starkey’s whole
show.—J.F. (Through Feb. 9.)
1 Simone Leigh).The most moving inclusions reacquaint us with the long
MOVIES
Can You Ever Forgive Me?
In this drama, based on a memoir by its real-life
protagonist, Melissa McCarthy brings passion
were sworn in on the floor of the House of Representatives.Now forty-four
women take over the walls of “the people’s house”—Gracie Mansion—in
“She Persists: A Century of Women Artists in New York,” an ambitious
exhibition inventively curated by the young art historian Jessica Bell
Brown, at the invitation of Chirlane McCray, the city’s First Lady.Sixty
paintings, sculptures, videos, prints, textiles, drawings, and photographs
enhance the formally appointed rooms of the Federal-style house.The
results are harmonious and unexpected;in the ballroom, a display devoted
to the incomparable Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman in Congress,
meets a poster by the art-activist Guerrilla Girls.There are museum staples
(the abstract painter Helen Frankenthaler, the performance artist Ana
Mendieta) and rising stars (the realist painter Jordan Casteel, the sculptor
overlooked, like Augusta Savage, a Harlem Renaissance artist seen in an
unattributed black-and-white photo in the process of sculpting a mag-
nificent stylized choir commissioned for the 1939 World’s Fair, which
was destroyed when the fair ended.(Public tours of “She Persists” are held
on Mondays from Feb.4 through the end of the year.)—Andrea K. Scott
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 1
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1
remains a devoted Christian while Walter,
painfully evoking the anti-gay dogma of his
upbringing, repudiates the church. The movie’s
vision of varieties of religious experience and
celebrations of identity is matched by its fer-
vent embrace of community in the shift from
hatred to acceptance.—R.B. (In limited release.)
High Flying Bird
Steven Soderbergh’s exhilarating new drama,
written by Tarell Alvin McCraney, renders the
behind-the-scenes wranglings of the N.B.A.
intensely physical. The premise is a lockout;
André Holland stars as Ray, an agent whose cli-
ent, Eric (Melvin Gregg), the No. 1 draft pick,
can’t get paid until an agreement is reached.
Ray launches a bold and risky scheme to break
the deadlock; in the process, he gives the ath-
letes a heady taste of power. The forceful set
of characters includes Ray’s ambitious assis-
tant (Zazie Beetz), a glad-handing team owner
(Kyle McLachlan), the head of the Players’
Association (Sonja Sohn), the mother and
manager (Jeryl Prescott) of Eric’s main rival
(Justin Hurtt-Dunkley), and the director of a
South Bronx basketball program (Bill Duke)
who’s the living conscience of the game—and
of the history of black players in it. Using his
IN REVIVAL
iPhone to create urgent, luminous images of
power-brokering amid gleaming glass-and-steel
buildings, Soderbergh gives the intricate, pug-
nacious drama a mighty sense of swing.—R.B.
(Film Society of Lincoln Center, Feb. 7, in limited
release, and on Netflix.)
Piercing
This closed-room horror thriller, written and
directed by Nicolas Pesce, is set vaguely in
the pre-cell-phone nineteen-seventies, and
its ideas are as vague as its context. Christo-
pher Abbott plays Reed, a young husband and
father who details his obsession with commit-
ting an icepick murder in his little red book of
handwritten scenarios. With the encourage-
ment of his wife, Mona (Laia Costa), he puts
one of them into action. He travels to a distant
city, checks into a hotel, and hires a prostitute
named Jackie (Mia Wasikowska), whom he
intends to kill; but realizing the plan proves
to be more complicated than he imagined. An
extended sequence of Reed’s rehearsals of the
crime—in which he elaborately pantomimes
the gestures of murder—offers theatrical as-
tonishment, which Pesce unfortunately spoils
with overemphatic effects. For every clever
twist, there’s a dead giveaway; the movie’s
high-style décor is more alluring than the
drama.—R.B. (In limited release and streaming.)
Querelle
The director Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s last,
posthumously released feature, from 1982—
an adaptation of a novel by Jean Genet—is
a work of bold artistic self-renewal. It stars
Brad Davis in the title role, as a sailor whose
ship pulls into the port of Brest. He plunges
into the town’s seamy underworld, centered
on a bar run by the singer Lysiane (Jeanne
Moreau) and a brothel run by her husband,
Nono (Günther Kaufmann). In his nocturnal
knockabouts, Q uerelle kills a man, and sub-
mits to Nono’s desires as if to punishment.
Fassbinder films the ensuing spiral in stylized
wide-screen images on blatantly artificial sets
with garish colors and ornate décor; the actors’
frozen declamation is matched by the severely
choreographed action. The teeming cast of
characters fight for power and pleasure while
decked out in whimsical costumes; the film’s
literary roots show in florid voice-overs and
intertitles. Fassbinder’s heightened manner
points to influential paths that he didn’t live
to take.—R.B. (Metrograph, Feb. 6.)
Serenity
On a tropical island lives a man with a tan,
named Baker Dill (Matthew McConaughey).
He has a fishing boat, a sorry past, a drinking
problem, a part-time lover (Diane Lane), a tuna
that he can never quite catch, and a penchant
for cliff-jumping in the nude. Could he be any
more fascinating? A former but still flickering
flame, Karen (Anne Hathaway), shows up, ex-
plaining that she has a horrible husband (Jason
Clarke), of whom she wishes to be rid; could
Baker please dispose of him, for a fee of ten mil-
lion dollars? Steven Knight’s peculiar thriller
is, for the most part, an ambling retread of old
noirish plots, such as “Body Heat” (1991). The
final third of the film, however, lurches into
very different territory—a welcome change,
even if the climax, suddenly rich in special ef-
fects, makes no sense whatsoever. With Djimon
Hounsou.—Anthony Lane (Reviewed in our issue
of 2/4/19.) (In wide release.)

The Wild Pear Tree

Few filmmakers are less hasty than Nuri Bilge
Ceylan, and his latest film, running more than
three hours, both tests and rewards the view-
er’s patience. Dogu Demirkol plays Sinan, a
grumpy graduate who returns to his home, in
COURTESY SIGNIFYIN’ WORKS AND FRAMELINE DISTRIBUTION

western Turkey, with an unpublished book and

As a student at Harvard, in the nineteen-seventies, Marlon Riggs became no job. He plans to become a primary-school
interested in exploring on film the racism and homophobia he experi- teacher, but that was the path taken by his fa-
enced, and he developed his own style extraordinarily quickly.Though ther, Idris (Murat Cemcir), who is hardly an
inspiring role model, having fallen into leth-
a documentarian in approach, Riggs made films, including, arguably, his argy and debt. The movie consists largely of
strongest, “Tongues Untied” (which will be screened as part of a retro- conversations, ranging from the querulous to
spective of his films at BAM, Feb.6-14), that are essays in the truest sense the resigned. As always, Ceylan’s focus is not
only on what the talkers say but also on how
of the word—attempts at describing the world both metaphorically and gracefully they are framed in the landscape;
actually.The universe that interested him—black masculinity—was a look at Sinan’s encounter with Hatice (Hazar
marginalized subject in 1989, when the movie came out;that it remains Ergüçlü), a friend now sliding toward marriage.
As they stand beneath a tree, some of her words
so probably wouldn’t have surprised Riggs, who succumbed to AIDS, in are almost lost in the wind. In Turkish.—A.L.
1994.As with many we lost to that hideous disease during that hideous (2/4/19) (In limited release.)
time, it’s bracing to consider what he could have done with a script like 1
“Moonlight,” say, and whether he’d even be given a chance to speak from For more reviews, visit
the inside to the culture at large.Imagine.—Hilton Als newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town

1
2 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 1
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 cows are not only grass-fed (which is said
to result in leaner, more flavorful, and
more nutritious meat) but also “grass-
finished,” which means that they’re not,
as is the practice at many farms, fattened
up with corn and soy just before slaugh-
1 ter. With Dinette, Hudson & Charles
TABLES FOR TWO also joins a handful of specialty shops,
like Russ & Daughters and Murray’s
Hudson & Charles Dinette Cheese, that have thought to advertise
522 Hudson St. their wares—and take advantage of li-
quor margins—by opening restaurants.
According to conventional wisdom, a Raising and eating meat like this is,
great butcher is one who will not only of course, as old as it is new, and Dinette,
sell you meat but also tell you how to as its name suggests, trades, to some de-
cook it. Might it stand to reason, then, gree, in nostalgia.The vibe of the small,
that the very best butcher is one who will spare dining room is vaguely diner-like.
go so far as to actually cook it for you? The narrow window looking into the
At Hudson & Charles Dinette, a new kitchen is lined with voluminous pies—
PHOTOGRAPH BY ERIC HELGAS FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE
sauce that came slathered on the patties
she’d just polished off:it was Catalina,
a nineteen-sixties-era ketchup-based
concoction that falls somewhere between
French and Russian dressing.“If I were
going to have another child,” she said,
“I’d name it Catalina.”
I was disappointed, though, by what
the kitchen chose to do with Hudson &
Charles’s steaks and chops, and by how
few of them are on offer.One night, the
single steak of the day—an unmarbled
and unmemorable “bachelor” cut (also
known as a “clod”) from the shoulder,
seared simply—was overpowered by
its side of oily roasted beets and wilted
greens.A pork chop met a similar fate at
the hands of too-sweet Brussels sprouts
and butternut-squash purée, and was

restaurant in the West Village, you can
test this supposition:it’s an extension of
Hudson & Charles Meats, next door,
which opened in 2013 and expanded to
the Upper West Side in 2016.
In an age in which stand-alone
butchers are starting to feel like relics,
and the ethics of meat-eating have never
been under sharper scrutiny, Hudson &
Charles is part of a small group (see
also:Fleishers, Dickson’s Farmstand,
the Meat Hook, Marlow & Daughters)
that has managed to find an edge by
offering meat that is,at least,as conscien-
tiously raised as meat can be.Everything
at Hudson & Charles is a hundred per
cent local and sustainable, sourced from
small farms in the Finger Lakes, the
Hudson Valley, and the Poconos, where
all animals are “pastured,” and where
chocolate peppermint, recently, and
lemon-thyme meringue. There is beef
Stroganoff with mushroom-cream sauce
on the menu, as well as burgers of the
straightforward American drive-through
variety, made with fairly thin but impres-
sively juicy, bright-tasting patties, grid-
dled until their exteriors are crispy and
sandwiched in squishy potato buns with
an optimal ratio of shredded iceberg let-
tuce, onion, pickles, and American cheese.
The burgers are soundly satisfying,
especially accompanied by a pile of
thick, perfectly golden-brown French
fries, cooked in beef tallow—just like
McDonald’s used to make theirs—and
a cold Mexican Coke in a glass bot-
tle, or a craft lager on tap. On a recent
evening, I overheard a diner asking her
server to remind her of the name of the
cooked more conservatively—which is
to say, well done—than I’d expect from
champions of meat.
Skip these in favor of another
butcherly art:the sausage.The snappy
“borscht” links are a phenomenal mar-
riage of brilliant-magenta beet purée,
caraway, and fatty ground pork, served
on a bed of finely diced braised cabbage
and carrots, with a generous dollop of
crème fraîche. I thrilled to a spin on
chicken parm:a whole peppery ground-
chicken coil that was breaded, deep-
fried, topped with chunky tomatoes
and a drippy slab of burrata, and ringed
with garlicky sautéed broccolini. And,
if you want to see how the sausage is
made, you have only to go next door.
(Entrées $14-$34.)
—Hannah Goldfield
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 1
1, 201
9 1
3
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 THE TALK OF THE TOWN
COMMENT
NOT WORKING
f, like Donald Trump, you divide the
I world into winners and losers, into
deal-closing masters of the universe and
their patsies,then,after the events of re-
cent days,you would surely place Trump
himself in the category he reviles. Last
week, he was publicly sparring with his
own intelligence chiefs and getting an
official rebuke from Senate Republicans
for the nature of his decision to with-
draw U.S. troops from Syria and Af-
ghanistan.None of that is likely to have
improved his mood as he prepared for
the State of the Union address,on Tues-
day, after it had been postponed by a
week.That delay was due to the fact that
Nancy Pelosi had triumphed in her first
confrontation with the President since
resuming her role as the Speaker of
the House.She had done so maybe not
by “dog walking” Trump, as the rapper
Cardi B might put it, but by managing
to end a deeply unpopular government
shutdown, without giving him his wall,
compelling him to put off his speech till
the government reopened, and creating
an opportunity for negotiations that
could lead to compromise legislation on
border security.
Trump’s handling of the longest-ever
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDA
government shutdown, which left eight
hundred thousand federal employees
without pay for thirty-five days,certainly
showcases the crudeness of his govern-
ing style, as does his repeated threat to
declare a national emergency if he doesn’t
get a wall.The standoff may also dam-
age his reëlection prospects, especially if
no border agreement is reached and the
government shuts down again, as it is
scheduled to do in that case, on Febru-
ary 15th.(Last Thursday,Trump told the
Times that he thought further talks were
“a waste of time,” and hinted that he
would just act on his own after the dead-
line.) Nobody comes out of this entirely
clean, but polls show that more Amer-
icans blame the President than blame
the congressional Democrats, and it’s
easy to imagine Democratic 2020 cam-
paign ads looping the sound bite of
Trump telling Pelosi and Senator Chuck
Schumer that he was “proud” to close
the government.
Perhaps the most consequential as-
pect of these events is what they have
revealed about the Administration’s
cluelessness when it comes to the every-
day lives of Americans.No one expects
Trump to show, say, racial sensitivity or
a plausible interest in gender politics.
Expectations concerning his general pro-
bity, his commitment to paying his fair
share of taxes, and his ability to distance
himself from meddling Russians and
dictators who flatter him are similarly
low.What the self-described billionaire
President and his Administration are
still supposed to have,though,is an affin-
ity for working-class Americans.
Yet last week, on CNBC, there was
Wilbur Ross, the Commerce Secretary,
saying, when asked about furloughed
workers who were resorting to food
banks, “I know they are, and I don’t re-
ally quite understand why.” Ross, who
became extremely rich in the business
of restructuring failing companies, ex-
plained that “there’s no real reason” that
people who weren’t getting paid couldn’t
just go out and get a loan. He didn’t
seem familiar—nor did Trump, in his
mentions of the shut-out workers—with
the concept of living paycheck to pay-
check, or with the statistic, released last
year by the Federal Reserve Board, that
forty per cent of Americans would have
trouble covering an emergency expense
of just four hundred dollars.Then there
was Kevin Hassett, the chairman of the
White House Council of Economic Ad-
visers, telling “PBS NewsHour” that
workers furloughed during the shutdown
were “better off,” since they could go on
vacation without having to use their va-
cation days.
Trump also had nothing much to say
about the plight of the hundreds of thou-
sands of government contractors—many
of them low-wage earners, such as jani-
tors,cafeteria workers,and security guards
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 1
1, 201
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in government buildings—who are not
guaranteed the back pay that career em-
ployees of the federal government will
get. Héctor Figueroa, the president of
a union that represents some of those
workers, told the Washington Post that
they “have been living on the edge of di-
saster for five weeks,” adding that many
“are facing eviction,power shut-offs,hun-
ger and even going without lifesaving
medications.”
At the same time, Trump’s larger vi-
sion for rebuilding blue-collar jobs took
a couple of blows.A report that the U.S.
Energy Information Administration re-
leased last month showed that coal pro-
duction had fallen in 2018, largely owing
to competition from cheap natural gas.
That was despite Trump’s attempts to
shore up an industry he has consistently
championed, by, among other things,
scrapping the Clean Power Plan and ap-
pointing as the head of the Environmen-
tal Protection Agency first the regula-
tion-crushing Oklahoman Scott Pruitt
and then, when he left, amid scandals,
the former coal-company lobbyist An-
drew Wheeler.
Meanwhile, Foxconn, the Taiwanese
electronics giant, waffled on its promise
to build a factory in Wisconsin that
would create thousands of manufactur-
ing jobs. First, the company suggested
that it wouldn’t build the factory, after
all,and then,on Friday,following a phone
call from Trump, it said that it would,
but left the number of blue-collar jobs
that it would provide unclear.At a White
House event announcing the deal, in
2017,Trump had bragged of his friendly
relationship with Terry Gou, the head
of Foxconn, but changes in what the
company called the “global market en-
vironment” were making that bonhomie
hard to count on.
All these misfires create opportuni-
ties for the Democrats to show that they
are committed to generating jobs and to
protecting people from the harshest forces
of the global market.They can start by
trying to pass legislation to guarantee
back pay for contract workers who were
cut off by the shutdown; a handful of
Democratic senators have already intro-
duced a bill, the Fair Compensation for
Low-Wage Contractor Employees Act,
to rectify the situation. In the coming
weeks, they can also work to fill in what
a Green New Deal jobs program might
look like.They can support infrastruc-
ture spending, introduce legislation to
raise the minimum wage, and focus, in
the House investigations of Trump, on
some issues of basic fairness for ordinary
Americans, such as the Administration’s
weakening of the Affordable Care Act.
They can show themselves to be the real
party of the American working class—
and find a Presidential candidate,among
the growing Democratic field, who can
bring that point home.
—Margaret Talbot

HELL, YES fishnets, lace. One man, dressed in a senticorns as they arrived, handing out
THE RULES button-down shirt,had missed the memo. horns from a shopping bag. The first
“I’m on the guest list,” he protested. shift starts an hour into the party, and
“I can lend you some bondage tape!” comes with free admission, a plus one,
someone offered. Problem solved. and a drink; the second, known as the
Rule No.3:Mandatory consent.“You “hero shift,” starts at 1:30 a.m.and goes
are not going to touch anyone,in any way, until the bar closes, at 4.
without getting express, verbal consent,” When House of Yes opened at its
n a freezing Friday night, a group the consenticorn, who wished to remain current location, a few years ago, Kay-
O of partygoers in winter coats hud- anonymous, said. “This is true for all
dled under a heat lamp at the entryway gender variations,” she continued.“Any-
win thought that she would become a
regular.Instead,every time she went she
of House of Yes, the night club, event thing that is not a ‘Yes’ or a ‘Hell, yes’ is got groped. After she posted about an
space, and self-described “temple of ex- a ‘Hell, no.’ ” And should anyone, at any incident on social media, Jacqui Rab-
pression” in Bushwick. The evening’s point, feel unsafe, she went on,“look for kin, the club’s marketing director, hired
event was House of Love, a monthly one of us with a horn.We’re the consen- her as a consultant. Along with the
party for the sexually adventurous.Cos- ticorns, and we’re here to help you.” House’s founders, Kae Burke and Anya
tumes were mandatory, but most pa- The consent program at House of Sapozhnikova, the women began pros-
trons had just come to dance with their Yes is three years old.It consists of waiv- elytizing the ideal of a better party en-
friends.(“This party is Rated R ...not ers, signage (“If you feel something, say vironment.The goal is not to police but
X.If you know what we mean,” the in- something”), staff trainings, and a pol- to educate.
vitation read.) Tickets had sold out, as icy posted on all event pages.At House “It’s really about people looking out
they usually do, but first one had to get of Love, where partyers are invited to for each other and not feeling like there’s
past the consenticorn. “embrace the full spectrum of gender this nanny-state babysitter of a night
The consenticorn, a kind of dance- and sexual possibilities,” vigilance is club,” Burke explained on another night
floor monitor, wore a long fur coat and heightened. at the club.She and Sapozhnikova had
a light-up unicorn horn, and stood be- Most of the consenticorns have been just hosted an erotic revue called “Dirty
fore a table bearing free New York City trained by Emma Kaywin, a sexual- Circus.” Burke was dressed as a French
Department of Health-brand condoms, health educator for hospitals and civic maid.Sapozhnikova, who was wearing
ready to deliver a short lecture on the groups, who now co-directs House of a red lace bodysuit, agreed: “We don’t
rules. Rule No. 1: No photos or video. Yes’s consent program. Shortly before want to just dismiss everyone that doesn’t
Rule No.2:Costumes.“Is everyone wear- 11 p.m., Kaywin stood in the lobby off know any better because they didn’t
ing a costume?” she asked.The partygo- the dance floor, wearing a corset with grow up in a family that had a positive
ers opened their coats to reveal corsets, a long gauze skirt.She greeted the con- masculine presence.”
1
6 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 1
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 Eighty people have been trained in
de-escalation strategies, including how
to talk about micro-aggressions, con-
sent violations, “over-inebriation,” and
violence. Other party organizers have
begun to hire the consenticorns for free-
lance gigs; the waiting list for training
is now seventy people long. It’s part of
a larger trend. Rafael Espinal, the city
councilman who represents sections of
Bushwick, and is running for public ad-
vocate,recently introduced a bill to make
signage and training about consent man-
datory for night-life venues. At Bossa
Nova Civic Club, a message is painted
on the wall: “If you touch a woman
against her will in this establishment “I’ve invented the wheel but I don’t want
we will literally ruin your life.” anybody to know about it yet.”
Back at House of Love, it was early,
and the crowd was still well-behaved.A
dominatrix dripped candle wax on a cou-
• •
ple who had been tied together back to
back.“Consenticorns have authority to back to its ex, and we are jealous.Latin Phoenician artifacts.On Twitter,he often
kick people out, but first they’re taught America is looking sexy again. What’s pokes fun at the habit some Middle
to acculturate,” Kaywin said.The lesson wrong with our oil? What’s so great Easterners have of claiming long-lost
can take many forms—if it’s a male con- about their oil, anyway?” civilizations like the Phoenicians and
senticorn dealing with another male,she Sharro, who is Lebanese-Iraqi, lives the Assyrians as their cultural ancestors.
said, “bro-speak can be incredible.” in London, where, officially, he is an ar- “They don’t want to identify as Arabs,
Kaywin handed a unicorn horn to chitect at a commercial firm called PLP. so they pretend to be the direct descen-
Emily Barrett,a veterinary cardiac tech- Unofficially, he is Karl reMarks, a Twit- dants of these ancient empires, which is
nician and part-time consenticorn.“First ter comedian with a large following and just silly,” he said.An Assyrian-ancestry
I walk through the room taking a look an acid take on Middle Eastern politics. group has been heckling him on Twit-
at their faces, making sure nobody’s dis- He was in town recently to promote his ter, which he finds funny.“I mean, they
tressed,” she said. In a cage suspended first book of humor, “And Then God have a fucking flag.” He asked a mu-
above the stage, a man whose body ap- Created the Middle East and Said ‘Let seum guard for directions to the Phoe-
peared to be bound with leather straps There Be Breaking News,’ ” a collection nician collection.“I’m not even sure what
lifted his legs into a full split. Barrettof tweets, drawings, and comic strips, you’re talking about,” she said.“I’m sorry.”
navigated the crowd, looking for people and he wanted to stop by the Metropol- Sharro,a Syriac Orthodox Christian,
in need of a rescue.“I’m everyone’s best itan Museum. Museums are a frequent grew up in Lebanon during the nine-
girlfriend on the dance floor,” she said. target of Sharro’s on Twitter. (“People teen-seventies, regularly visiting family
—Emily Witt often ask me,‘Where is the Middle East?’ members who lived in Syria and Iraq.
1 It’s the area between Egypt,Iran,Yemen, He looked forward to these trips, which
PUNCH LINE DEPT. Turkey, and the British Museum.”) So broke the tedium of life in Zahle,a town
NEAR PAST is religion. (“We’re actually very proud in the Beqaa Valley. “Just on a whim,
of God in the Middle East. He’s the you’d get in a car, you’d drive,” he said.
local guy who went on to acquire inter- “Twelve hours later, you’re in Baghdad.
national fame.”) And Western media. It was like a utopia.”
(“The main worry I have about driver- In college, Sharro discovered Woody
less cars is how Western journalists would Allen when a friend gave him a copy of
get their stories in the Arab world, with “Without Feathers.” “It resonated with
e complain about America, but no taxi-drivers to talk to.”) me, I think, because the Syriac minority
“W Middle Easterners are secretly Sharro arrived at the Met at 10 A.m., is completely misunderstood in Leba-
flattered that America devotes so much wearing jeans, a blue oxford shirt, and a non, and I felt like an outsider,” he said.
attention to regime change in our re- woollen blazer.His comic strips feature “Plus, when I was a teen-ager I used to
gion,” Karl Sharro said the other day, a pair of imaginary Phoenicians, Ab- have these very thick glasses,and I wasn’t
testing out new material. “It’s like a deshmun and Hanno—members of an very athletic.So you can see where this
crush.Now that Trump is taking troops ancient civilization that originated in is going.” He began tweeting and blog-
out of Syria and threatening to invade modern-day Lebanon—and Sharro ging ten years ago, during coffee breaks
Venezuela, it feels like America is going hoped to see the Met’s collection of at his architecture job. But things took
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 1
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off in 2011,when the Arab Spring began. of Strindberg’s “Miss Julie,” reset in an erything.She would lie on her back for
“Satire allowed me to critique all of theinvestment bank and staged in their for- hours,staring at the ceiling and “dream-
narratives without being politically com-mer apartment, in downtown Brooklyn. ing of the day when I can roll over and
mitted to one side or another,” he said. Last winter, they premièred a one- lie on my side,” she recalled.It dawned
Lately, Sharro has been dabbling in woman sci-fi odyssey called “Space- on the couple that having two broken
standup, performing at the Edinburgh man.” Stevens (a pen name for Steven arms was not unlike being an astronaut.
Fringe Festival and at universities. He Gridley, who wanted his early family “The same thing that they do in space,
reads tweets out loud, a process that he dramas to be un-Googleable by his fam- where they have to redefine how they’re
finds exhausting. “It’s six years’ worth ily) had become interested in space travel going to accomplish small, easy tasks,
of work in forty-five minutes,” he said. after reading an article in The Space Re- we were sort of doing on a smaller scale,”
He wandered a hall of Greek sculp- view which argued that NASA could re- Stevens said.Treadway added,“It’s also
tures, searching for the Ancient Near vive public enthusiasm by planning a the fact that you’re stuck. If anything
Eastern Art gallery. It was on another one-way expedition to Mars.“It likened goes wrong, you just have to keep your
floor.“Maybe I should use my architec- it to the sense of adventure that the early wits about you and solve the problem.”
tural skills to find the stairs,” he said.
European explorers had, in that they The couple were speaking in their
A few minutes later, he stood in a would just go sailing without knowing current apartment, a converted gallery
gallery lined with Assyrian reliefs from what was out there,” Stevens said re- big enough to house a small black-box
an ancient palace. “I used to have one cently. Not long afterward, the couple theatre off the kitchen.It now contained
of those,” he said, pointing to a huge saw a production of Beckett’s “Happy the ten-by-twelve set, which would
carving of a muscle-bound,bearded As- Days,” in which a woman flits away the soon be transported to the Wild Proj-
syrian king.“I drew it on the wall of thehours while stuck in sand.It reminded ect, where “Spaceman” will open again
first studio apartment I shared with my Stevens of space travel—“The isolation, this month. Although Treadway origi-
wife.I drew it full-sized.She got really and how you fill the time.” nally researched her role by watching
freaked out,because every time she woke On February 22nd of last year,“Space- NASA videos on YouTube, this time she
up there was this scary Assyrian guy man” made its début at the Wild Proj- took a more Method-acting approach.
with a lion.” ect, an eighty-nine-seat theatre in the In scenes during which her character
Around the corner was a small gal- East Village. The set was a room-size gets “very frustrated with the lack of
lery of Phoenician objects. Sharro ex- contraption made of welded steel and communication when she’s talking back
amined the cases of gold jewelry and Plexiglas, fitted with buzzers and key- to Houston,” she said, she thinks about
ivory carvings.He seemed to soften on boards and a chair that spins on a truss. herself lying immobile in bed:“You can’t
the appeal of a Phoenician legacy.“We The production simulated zero gravity get away with a temper tantrum.”
know very little about them,” he said. using low-light effects and a puppeteer. Collaborators drifted in for a 2 p.m.
“There’s that argument,‘Oh, they never After the show, Treadway, feeling good rehearsal. Treadway put on her puffy
called themselves Phoenicians.’ O.K., about the performance, came out for a white spacesuit and climbed into the
even if they didn’t, they still existed bow in her spacesuit. As she walked off chair.“Let’s do the meteoroid,” she said.
around that time, right?” He spotted a the stage, she tripped over a speaker.She They ran through a scene in which the
map of the ancient Near East. “Aha,” broke her fall with her arms,then popped astronaut furiously presses on beeping
he said, peering at it with ironic satis-back up and made a “clumsy old me” face. doodads after a sudden impact.(“Did it
faction.“They do call it Phoenicia here.” “Then I walked backstage and was, breach the hull? Jesus.”) “The movement
—Elias Muhanna like, whoa,” she recalled. “I realized I
1 couldn’t even take my costume off.” Ste-
TAKE TWO vens helped her change clothes, and
GRAVITY they took an Uber to a clinic in Red
Hook.The doctor informed Treadway
that she had broken both elbows and
her left wrist. (“The woman at physi-
cal therapy said it’s an injury that a lot
of break dancers have,” she said.) She
would need hard casts for a week, and
eegrid Stevens and Erin Treadway then splints.They would have to can-
L are a husband-and-wife team who cel the entire three-week run. Stevens
make theatre together,he as a playwright recalled,“The next morning, I’m draft-
and she as an actor. Both Texas natives, ing an e-mail to everybody telling them
they met in the costume shop at South- the news, and I’m looking through all
ern Methodist University, and started a these e-mails from people saying,‘Break
company called Loading Dock Theatre. a leg!’ ” He laughed ruefully. “I never
Past productions include “The Dudleys,” want to hear that phrase again.”
a family drama told in the style of an Those first two weeks after the ac-
eight-bit video game, and an adaptation cident, Treadway needed help with ev- Erin Treadway
1
8 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 1
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quality is great,” Jacob Titus,the director, Tickets—ninety dollars, or a hun-
told her.At one point, to affect weight- dred and fifty dollars with natural wine
lessness, Treadway balanced her back pairings—sold out quickly. Attendees
against the chair, dangled her legs for- included luminaries of New York’s sus-
ward, and grabbed a beam above her tainable-food scene: Adam Kaye, the
head,as Stevens (standing in for the pup- co-founder of the Spare Food Co.;Ben
peteer) held her aloft. After a few runs, Flanner, of the rooftop farm Brooklyn
the couple said that they wanted to try Grange; Tristram Stuart, whose com-
something new the next day:what if she pany, Toast Ale, makes beer from day-
let her hands go free? Titus agreed to old bread. Joost Bakker, an Australia-
give it a shot,but added,under his breath, based artist, whom McMaster called
“We want to keep you for the run.” “the zero-waste prophet,” had done the
—Michael Schulman flowers. Singer pointed up to the ceil-
1 ing to reveal his handiwork: four hun-
TRIMMINGS DEPT. dred yellow tulips, dangling by a length
NOTHING WASTED of wire, with the bulbs still attached.
“He found the wire on the street,” she
said.The tulips would be replanted later.
“So it’s not like any flower has to die
for this.” Bakker appeared, wearing a Lauren Singer
T-shirt with a picture of a crossed-out and Douglas McMaster
trash can.He said that he’d sourced the
he other day, in the kitchen of an tulips from a farm in New Jersey:“They They talked about grocery stores.
T event space called Fitzcarraldo, in behave beautifully when you suspend
Brooklyn, a visiting chef named Doug- them, because all the energy from the
“Oh, my God,” Echavarri said. “It fills
me with anxiety. It’s, like, mounds and
las McMaster was putting the final bulb keeps going down to the flower.” mounds of plastic.”
touches on a meal of what he called At 5:30 p.m., McMaster clinked a Kardon nodded. “Supermarkets are
“supernatural peasant food.” McMas- knife against a wineglass, and previewed filled with trash.”
ter is a zero-waste chef, meaning that the meal for the staff.It was vegetarian, Kunasagaran had remained quiet.
his meals produce no trash.At his res- but hearty:the carrots had been confited, “I’ve never been especially kind to the
taurant, Silo, in Brighton, England, he smoked, and grilled, to bring out their environment,” she said sheepishly, and
buys ingredients directly from farmers, “meatiness”;the celeriac had been treated pledged to take baby steps. “It’ll help
to avoid grocery-store packaging, and “like a leg of lamb.” “The beetroot is me sleep at night.”
returns peels and trimmings in the very much a beetroot,” he said. “And It was time to eat. Singer made a
form of compost, creating what he calls beetroot molasses—does anyone want speech, and reminded diners that they
a “closed loop.” His recipes strive to to try some?” He passed out pea-size would not be getting extra cutlery.“You
incorporate the whole vegetable. “So, drops.“Oopa!” Singer exclaimed. will see you have a fork and a knife in
like, these carrot tops, for instance,” he In the dining room, guests chatted front of you—guard that with your life.”
said, pointing to a plate of charred car- over cocktails (sea-bean Daiquiris, A woman quietly retrieved her knife
rot disks.“Ten per cent went into that Douglas-fir Old-Fashioneds). Mike from the communal butter plate.
oil, ninety per cent went into the trea- Sheffer said that his date, Isabel Kar- Talk turned to the trash in the ocean,
cle”—a dark sauce made from vegeta- don,a server at the farm-to-table restau- and the masses of plastic and rubber
ble scraps.“We maximize our resources rant Blue Hill, had converted him to flip-flops that routinely wash up on
to minimize waste.” the zero-waste life style.“Just be trash- Kenya’s beaches.“Why are they talking
The dinner was organized by Lau- free,” he said.“If you replace your one- about caravans of migrants?” said Mi-
ren Singer, the twenty-seven-year-old time-use items with reusable versions, chael Leva, who co-founded Sea Star
founder of Package Free Shop, in Wil- you can save a lot.” Beachwear,which makes espadrilles that
liamsburg.(She’s best known for fitting Kardon opened her tote bag to show stay on your feet.“They should be talking
six years’ worth of trash into a single off the utensils she carries around. “It about caravans of trash.”
Mason jar.) At Fitzcarraldo, she said might be a little gross, but at this point After dinner, McMaster gathered
that she’d been “obsessed” with Mc- I just never wash them,” she said. “Is his crew for a wrap meeting. He
Master since discovering his work on that too much?” squinted into the compost bin, which
Instagram.“I’d always thought that res- Juj Echavarri, an anesthesiologist, contained a mixture of vegetables,
taurants are inherently unsustainable, had brought her friend Geetha Kuna- eggshells, and slices of bread. “Tris-
but Doug kind of shifted my whole sagaran,a technologist at Bank of Amer- tram makes Toast Ale out of bread,
conception,” she said. She’d organized ica. “I’m not gonna get into my situa- so these bits of bread shouldn’t be in
the event, she added, to “spark conver- tion, but when I run the dishwasher I here,” he said. “Next time, these ones
sation and community around zero waste put them in there,” Echavarri said.“So we keep, O.K.?”
and restaurants.” at least they get washed.” —Han Zhang
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 1
1, 201
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ANNALS OF ENTERTAINMENT
RAW MATERIAL
Pamela Adlon mines decades of experience on the fringes of Hollywood.
BY CARRIE BATTAN
“A million horrible things happened,” Adlon said, of making “Better Things.”
ach day, on the set of her show
E “Better Things,” the director and
actor Pamela Adlon retreats to a small
room while the cast and crew eat lunch.
She turns off the lights, shuts down her
phone, removes her pants and her bra,
and lies face down on a couch. Often,
she falls asleep.Adlon is a single mother
of three daughters, as well as one of the
few showrunners who direct, produce,
write, and star in their own series.This
makeshift sensory-deprivation room is
often the only opportunity she has to
generate new ideas.
One afternoon in September,during
the filming of the show’s third season,
Adlon was directing a scene in which
her character’s increasingly absent-
minded mother, Phyllis, who lives next
20 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 1
1, 201
9 PHOTOGRAPH BY AMANDA DEMME
door (as Adlon’s mother does in real
life), barges into her kitchen. Adlon’s
character, Sam Fox, is hanging out with
her brother and a couple of friends,
cooking a meal. After a take, Adlon,
who likes to describe her show as
“handmade,” darted behind the direc-
tor’s monitor to review the footage.
The cast broke for lunch, and she re-
treated to her chamber of solitude.
Adlon, who is five feet one inch,
hunches constantly. She loves to call
people “bro” and has the energy of a
hyperactive teen-ager, but she also has
a tendency to lumber about, brows fur-
rowed.She looks prepubescent one mo-
ment and geriatric the next, and that
makes it difficult to guess her age,which
is fifty-two. She likes to come up be-
hind her cast and crew, reach up, grab
them by the shoulders,and march them
over to whatever she wishes to show
them.She emerged from her break and
took Celia Imrie, who plays Phyllis,
aside.She had decided that she wanted
Phyllis, whose cognitive abilities have
gradually flagged over the course of
the series, not to recognize one of the
friends,Rich,played by Diedrich Bader.
Instead, she would think he was “a
handsome,sexy man” to flirt with,Adlon
said.“Even though he’s gay.”
After the next take, Bader left the
set, appearing stricken.In 2017, his fa-
ther died, after struggling with Alz-
heimer’s disease.“Alzheimer’s patients
are trying to prove, like drunks, that
they’re fine,” Bader said.“Before, it was
a light, frothy scene about the mom
not liking the risotto. And then she
sprang this on me and didn’t tell me
she was going to change the way she
did it.This show, it’s a fluid thing.”
Adlon, however, felt that she had
crossed a tonal boundary that didn’t
suit the show.“It was very intense,” she
told me the next day.“Now we’re get-
ting tragic. And I always have to re-
member that my show is a comedy.”
“Better Things,” which airs on FX,
is concerned above all with realism.
“Smaller is better,” Adlon said. The
show is loosely the story of a middle-
aged single mother of three daughters
who is also a working actor. Like
Adlon, Sam is not starved for roles,
but casting directors are not chasing
after her, either. Sam is lewd and in-
delicate, but the show has a gentle way
of exploring how a single mother in
the entertainment industry must jug-
gle her friends, her aging mother, her
work, her shoddy romantic prospects,
and the needs of her precocious, head-
strong children. It is a sitcom in the
lineage of shows such as “Girls” and
“Insecure”—and “Louie,” which Adlon
co-wrote and guest-starred on. It ex-
presses a character-driven point of
view rather than following a narrative
arc. Many such shows land on unset-
tling or unresolved notes to affirm
their commitment to truth. Adlon,
though, is not afraid to make feel-
good television. “It always feels like
these are real choices being made, and
it is, at the end of the day, a very life-
affirming, heartwarming show,” Dan
Cohen, one of the executive producers
of the Netflix series “Stranger Things,”
told me.“The show isn’t made with a
grudge.”
“She did something that every writer
is supposed to do, but they never ac-
tually do, which is write the show that
only she could write,” Tom Kapinos,
the creator of “Californication,” said.
In 2007, he cast Adlon in the pilot
of that show as Marcy, a foulmouthed
aesthetician.Kapinos had no long-term
plans for the role of Marcy, but he ad-
mired Adlon’s unflinching capacity for
raunch and kept her on as a perma-
nent cast member. (He said she be-
came his “gutter muse.”)
Even in the age of autofiction and
the television auteur, “Better Things”
is particularly autobiographical.Adlon
initially considered tweaking the cen-
tral character to distinguish between
Sam’s life and her own—“to make her
a manicurist, or have a gay brother
living in the back yard, or something,”
she said—but eventually she decided
that the details of her own life felt
the most resonant. Sam lives in a
shabby-chic home in the Valley, or-
namented with an eclectic collection
of trinkets and art made by friends.
(Adlon picked out the art that crowds
the walls of the house built to stage
the show.) One of the few points of
deviation between Adlon and Sam is
that the fictional character is more
vocal about her feelings. It’s satisfy-
ing to watch Sam snap at her chil-
dren,her mother,colleagues,or strang-
ers, as if Adlon is reacting onscreen
in ways that she is unable to in real
life.In an episode of the third season,
which will begin airing on Febru-
ary 28th, Sam takes her daughters to
drive go-karts. Just before they strap
in, Sam’s daughter Frankie asks, “Do
you want to ride the go-karts, or not?”
Sam turns to her and says, “No, I re-
ally don’t. But I’m trying to give you
guys a fun childhood, and, at the same
time, to not die or get paralyzed.”
(Adlon once took her children go-kart-
ing, and got whiplash.) Later, when
the girls are arguing over who will
ride home in the front seat, Sam tries
to solve the problem the way Adlon’s
mother once had: she instructs them
to spew the meanest, foulest possible
remarks to one another for exactly
one minute. “It was a great defuser,”
Adlon told me.
One of the revelations of “Better
Things” is that children are the peo-
ple least sensitive to the plight of their
parents. Sam’s daughters are blithely
indifferent to her struggles. Adlon is
not afraid to convey that most of the
emotion generated in the act of par-
enting is not love.“I can’t remember a
time when I’ve seen my mom stay at
home and relax,” Gideon, her oldest
daughter, told me. “I can remember
when she’s had a breakdown because
it’s been too much.All of us have been
really difficult.” Gideon, who is twenty-
one, has moved out of her mother’s
house twice—once for a brief stint at
college and once to her own apartment
in Hollywood—before promptly re-
turning home. Gideon’s best friend,
who works as a member of the art de-
partment on “Better Things,” also lived
at Adlon’s house for a while.“My mom
is a charity,” Gideon said.
When television audiences hear the
word “showrunner,” they often assume
that that person is responsible for the
majority of the creative decisions on a
show. But there is a carrousel of pro-
fessionals involved in any production—
there are the writers, the directors, the
executive producer,and the stars.Adlon
spins all these plates at once. She has
evangelized to other showrunners the
importance of directing. Issa Rae, the
creator and star of “Insecure,” wrote
me in an e-mail,“She’s always exhausted
and claims it’s worth it, but I don’t want
that life. She’s great at it and loves to
challenge herself more and more every
season.” Rae added, “No thanks.”
Felicia Fasano, the show’s casting
director, has known Adlon for almost
fourteen years, but after reading the
script of the “Better Things” pilot she
called Adlon to apologize:“I’m so sorry
for all those times I’ve made you have
dinner with me! Oh, my God, I forget
how busy you are.”
“ B etter Things” is Adlon’s first time
directing a TV show, but she has
been acting since she was twelve years
old, mostly in parts that she calls “kick-
around side characters ...the little rac-
coons,the guest stars.” Her IMDb page
lists a hundred and ninety acting cred-
its, with roles ranging from the younger
sister of a Pink Lady, in “Grease 2,” to
an alien in an episode of “Star Trek:
The Next Generation” to Jenny Shein-
feld, the daughter of a doctor in “E/R,”
a short-lived CBS parody of “ER.”
Four decades of scrapping for parts
has given her a deep well of bad Holly-
wood experiences to be addressed on-
screen, and “Better Things” doubles as
a critique of an entertainment indus-
try that glorifies a small minority of
stars while largely demoralizing an
army of supporting actors and crew
members. In the nineteen-nineties,
Adlon worked on a monster film called
“The Gate 2: Trespassers.” One scene
required her to wear a harness and get
pulled through a ceiling, a maneuver
that had not initially been classified as
a stunt. Adlon’s head broke through
the ceiling, leaving her unconscious.
“When I came to, my arms were com-
pletely torn up,” she told me. After
protesting, she was given an eight-
hundred-dollar stunt fee.
Adlon showed me a scene from a
new “Better Things” episode that re-
calls this incident. While shooting a
blockbuster film in the desert heat,Sam
is strapped into a fast car. Everyone is
uncomfortable—two of her co-stars
vomit—but not quite uncomfortable
enough to protest.
Sam, however, cannot hold back
from talking about it. She stands be-
fore a few crew members, perspiring
heavily.“Was that legal, what just hap-
pened?” she asks,the director in earshot.
As consolation, he offers her access to
his private toilet.
“This was, like, my MeToo re-
sponse,” Adlon told me, but it was one
framed more broadly around abuses of
power on set.“Which I think is more
rampant than the other stuff, and no-
body talks about it.” The mistreatment
of non-famous actors and crew mem-
bers looms large in Adlon’s experience
of Hollywood.“It’s producers, it’s stu-
dios, it’s directors,” she said. “Every-
body’s afraid to say something.People
are afraid for their jobs.”
Yet directing a meta scene like this
forces Adlon to assume the duties of
the people she is critiquing. She’s now
the person with the power to abuse or
to behave responsibly. The scene was
shot in the Inland Empire of California,
in hundred-degree heat. “It was the
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 1
1, 201
9 21
 m.c. the party, using another micro-
phone.“People love hearing her talk,”
Willis said. Adlon’s husky, androgy-
nous voice—a surfer-bro affect with a
faint New York accent—is her defining
characteristic and her meal ticket.She
told me that her voice-over jobs, which
she began doing at age nine, are her
most lucrative. (She said, of her pay-
checks from voicing Bobby Hill on
“King of the Hill,” “That’s the money
my ex-husband is interested in.”) The
high-pitched rasp of her voice sounds
like that of a child chain-smoker, and
magnifies the comic effect of her pro-
fane way of speaking. According to
Gideon, Adlon was given the nick-
name F-mom by her daughter’s prin-
cipal, for cursing at a school event.That
isn’t to say that Adlon is aggressive or
domineering; on the many occasions
I heard her ask someone for some-
thing—a waiter for extra sauce, an ed-
itor to rewind the tape on a scene—
she followed up with a thundering “I
love you!” If anything sticks with au-
diences, it is Adlon’s voice, a version of
which has been passed down to all
three of her daughters. (Gideon has
“He won’t bite, but he carries with him a large repository of judgments.” just begun doing voice work, as well
as acting in feature films.) “But, even
• • now, at the most recent party I had, I
would still say that most of the people
at the party, although in show busi-
second week of shooting—I have all a teen-ager, Adlon was friendly with ness, did not really know who she was,”
these people to take care of,” Adlon said. Katey Sagal, who played Peggy Bundy Willis said.
Adlon’s father, Don Segall, was a in “Married with Children” and who “Nobody gets my name right, ever,
screenwriter and producer who took starred in the FX series “Sons of An- or my show right, or me,” Adlon said,
her to sound stages when she was a archy.”Through Sagal,Adlon met Allee sounding proud and amused. Just a
girl, but it was her mother, Marina, Willis, an eccentric artist and song- few weeks before, she had flown to
who created the blueprint for her ca- writer two decades her senior—she co- New York to participate in Glamour’s
reer. Segall was intermittently unem- wrote the “Friends” theme song, plus Women of the Year Summit. “And
ployed, and so Marina Segall, who is hits for Earth, Wind & Fire.This past my makeup woman, who I love, puts
British, worked as a travel agent and a Christmas Eve,Willis and Adlon,along me on Instagram: ‘Oh, my God, the
reporter, among other jobs, as the fam- with Marina, Gideon, and Frank Zap- best boss in the world! I love her so
ily bounced between Los Angeles and pa’s daughter Diva Zappa, went to To- much. You have to watch her show,
New York City. Adlon and her older luca Lake, California—about seven “Better Days.” ’ ”
brother, Gregory Segall, were exposed miles from Adlon’s home in the San In Adlon’s post-production editing
to the fringes of Hollywood—minor Fernando Valley—and followed a dec- office, a mock promotional poster for
screenwriters, classmates whose par- orated bus full of carollers which was the show hangs by the door.Instead of
ents worked in the business.“As a child, blasting music to crowds of revellers. “Better Things,” the poster reads “Bet-
she was meant for this world,” Marina At Willis’s parties, which are at- ter Days,” and, instead of Adlon, it pic-
told me. One of Adlon’s close friends tended by industry people ranging from tures the actress Constance Zimmer—
is the actress and talk-show host Ricki “A-list all the way at the top to D-list the two look quite similar, and Zimmer
Lake, whom she met while attending all the way at the bottom,” Willis said, appeared in the “Better Things” pilot
Manhattan’s Professional Children’s she wears a microphone, so that all the as another actress auditioning for the
School.She befriended Lenny Kravitz guests can hear her conversations, even same role as Sam. Under Zimmer’s
in high school; he was a guest star in if they don’t get the opportunity to image is the name “Pan Aldon.” Fake
the first season of “Better Things.” As speak to her. Occasionally, Adlon will reviews of the show feature several of
22 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 1
1, 201
9
Adlon’s least favorite words: “A brave, gives a fuck about everything, but she part of my life,” Adlon told me.“I say
empowering, badass feminist,” and “So doesn’t give a fuck about anything.” this line in my show this season: ‘I’ve
brave. Real thighs.” Adlon married the movie producer aged out of men like kids age out of
Felix Adlon (the son of the German the foster-care system.’”
dlon got her first video camera in director Percy Adlon),in 1997.They had
A 1986, when she was twenty. Ma- three daughters—Gideon,Odessa,who
donna’s “True Blue” album had just is now eighteen, and Rocky, fifteen—
n 2006,Phil Rosenthal recommended
I
Adlon to the producers of “Lucky
come out, and the singer held a con- before divorcing, in 2009. Felix Adlon Louie,” a short-lived HBO show writ-
test for young filmmakers to create a then moved to Europe. In “Better ten and directed by Louis C.K. The
video for the title track. Adlon and Things,” Sam’s ex-husband gets the vil- show was, in many ways, a dry run for
two friends made one that was cho- lain treatment—he comes to Los An- FX’s “Louie.” “Lucky Louie” had a more
sen as a finalist, an achievement that geles for the summer only to warn her conventional format than its succes-
she describes as “the most exciting that he won’t have much time to spend sor—it was a multi-camera sitcom
thing in my life.” Around the same with their kids. Marina Segall, who is filmed before a live studio audience—
time, she helped direct a documen- as cheeky and chatty as Celia Imrie por- but it hinted at the ways in which tele-
tary called “Street Sweep.” Adlon and trays her to be on “Better Things,” told vision creators could deploy their biog-
her friends would head to downtown me, “She was always the person who raphies and points of view to deconstruct
Los Angeles to befriend and film peo- earns the money.The fact that she’s had a tired genre.C.K.played a broke, sex-
ple who had become homeless as a to pay her ex-husband a great deal of ually frustrated mechanic married to a
result of President Reagan’s federal money when he basically, as far as I nurse. At the audition, “I was brought
housing-budget cuts. “There were so know, never earned a dime ...I don’t in up against all these blondes and cute
many documentaries narrated by Mar- think that’s easy for her, but she never women,” Adlon told me.“And he says
tin Sheen, or whatever,” Adlon said. talks about it.” he wanted to cast me because I was a
“This was for people to be able to speak For both Adlon and Sam, dating in mother of three, and that was interest-
for themselves.” middle age is a nuisance that must be ing, and he knew I would have stories
The documentary made it into the extinguished quickly each time it pops to tell.” In the first episode of the se-
Cleveland International Film Festival, up. “I don’t think dating is gonna be ries, C.K.’s character masturbates in a
but Adlon was rejected from New York
University’s Tisch Film & Television
program. She spent a single semester
at Sarah Lawrence.“I was really more
interested in working,” she told me.
She’d already scored a number of roles
that fans and colleagues still associate
with her, appearing in “The Facts of
Life” and “Say Anything.”
In the early nineties, Adlon was cast
in “Down the Shore,” a pre-“Friends”
sitcom about the foibles of a group of
twenty-somethings at the Jersey Shore.
“Right away, I fell in love with her, be-
cause she was the funniest one,” Phil
Rosenthal, one of the show’s writers
and the creator of “Everybody Loves
Raymond,” told me.But Adlon’s char-
acter was eventually cut from the show,
because, according to Rosenthal, she
wasn’t attractive enough. “I was furi-
ous about it,” he said.“I thought, This
is everything that’s wrong with TV.
Nobody watches a sitcom because of
Fan Ho,Cleaning,unique silver print,1950. Estimate $10,000 to $15,000.
pretty people!” At the time, Adlon was
living in Laurel Canyon with her co- Photographs: Art & Visual Culture
star, Anna Gunn, who cried when she February 21
learned that her roommate had been
Daile Kaplan • dkaplan@swanngalleries.com
let go.Adlon’s reaction was more jaded:
“I was, like, I’ve been down this road Preview: February 14,15,16,19 & 20,12-5; February 21,10-12
before, bro!” Her daughter Gideon 104 East 25th St,New York,NY 10010 • tel 212 254 4710 • SWANNGALLERIES.COM
summed up this quality, saying, “She
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 1
1, 201
9 23
closet while his wife, Kim, played by
Adlon, gives their daughter a bath.
“Lucky Louie” was cancelled before
its second season ran, but Adlon and
C.K.had become close.Together, they
wrote a pilot that was rejected by CBS
and Fox. But FX picked up another
show, “Louie,” with Adlon as a writer,
and it began airing in 2010.The series
was her first exposure to a new way of
making television—one in which a sin-
gle person could exhibit complete cre-
ative control over a project.But,as much
as the show represents C.K.’s vision, it
is indebted to the sensibility of Adlon,
who helped serve as a proxy for the fe-
male characters who enter Louie’s orbit.
When C.K.was writing an episode in
which his character goes out on a date
with an overweight woman, he called
Adlon and asked her for dialogue for
the woman. “I said, ‘Tell her to say, “I
got my period when I was nine,” ’ ”
Adlon told me.When the episode aired,
in 2014, the Washington Post described
the woman’s monologue as an “epic,
mesmerizing speech.”
Adlon guest-starred on the show as
one of Louie’s dear friends, with whom
he is also in love.They have a cat-and-
mouse relationship. She repeatedly re-
sists his overtures. One night she is
babysitting his daughters and, when he
returns home, he tries to force himself
on her.“This would be rape if you weren’t
so stupid,” she tells him,more exhausted
than afraid.“You can’t even rape well.”
“Have you given any thought to my suggestion about a sculpture
that’s just a chubby kid constantly peeing?”
“Louie” won two Emmys for its writ-
ing.“There was an immediate sophis-
tication and coolness to it. She just
hooked up with the right person,” Allee
Willis said of Adlon’s relationship to
C.K. “Because she was involved in so
much of his work, I think that trans-
lated over when she finally got a chance
to do her own thing.”
Like many networks, FX wanted
more of the kind of deconstructed,per-
sonality-driven shows that C.K. had
pioneered, but ones that featured the
perspectives of people of color and
women.The network tried to buy Aziz
Ansari’s “Master of None,” but lost a
bidding war to Netflix. At the time,
Adlon was acting in a major-network
television show—“a big-budget show
for NBC or ABC, one of those,” she
told me. (She has had so many parts
in the past four decades that they blur
together.) “I was doing an arc and a
Friday turned into a Saturday, and I
was, like, ‘What the fuck? Don’t they
have kids? Don’t they want to go home?’
I remember being on set that day and
thinking, I’m ready. I think I know
how to run a show.” C.K.pitched Adlon
as a showrunner, and the first season
of “Better Things”—with C.K.as Ad-
lon’s co-writer and executive pro-
ducer—began shooting in the spring
of 2016.
“This is what I would call, in busi-
ness terms, arbitrage,” John Landgraf,
the C.E.O.of FX, told me.“It’s about
finding a masterpiece hidden in plain
sight that might have been overlooked
because of biases we have carried for-
ward in our industry and our society.”
dlon likes to say that the chal-
A lenges of single parenting equipped
her with the skills necessary for run-
ning her own show, and she exudes a
maternal energy on her set.When some-
one is sick, she is sure to suggest a rem-
edy, which is typically homeopathic.“I
want to hear your sinus-infection story!”
she shouted across the set at a crew
member one day.When I had arrived,
I had been presented with a reusable
water bottle by an FX representative,
who explained that single-use plastic
bottles were not permitted. Between
takes, Adlon took colloidal silver for
her own sinus infection. She is fixated
on food, and on making sure that
her cast and crew are fed properly.On
set, there is kombucha on tap, and,
the day I visited, a food truck arrived
midafternoon to serve bowls of cucum-
ber and mango with chili salt to the
cast and crew.“Food truck! Food truck!
Food truck!” Adlon yelled,like a middle-
school softball coach.
Despite the familial environment
that Adlon has tried to cultivate on
set, “Better Things” has experienced
major setbacks. “A million horrible
things happened, and then other fuck-
ing earth-shattering, terrible things
happened,” Adlon told me.For the first
season, FX hired Nisha Ganatra, who
has worked on Lena Dunham’s “Girls”
and Jill Soloway’s “Transparent,” to di-
rect seven episodes. It eventually be-
came clear that Adlon should be di-
recting the show, but the shift to install
her was turbulent; in Adlon’s words, it
was “a fucking shit show.” (According
to Ganatra, there was always an un-
derstanding that Adlon would take
over directing duties.) The Directors
Guild of America has rigid rules in
place to prevent executive producers
or other employees of a show from re-
placing directors, and a grievance was
filed. “That got really bumpy,” Gana-
tra said. FX hired Lance Bangs to
“smooth the transition,” Adlon said.
(“They had to hire some guy, and that
was a little disappointing,” Ganatra
told me.)
After the first season, Adlon was
nominated for an Emmy for acting,
and she received a Peabody Award for
the show, as well as the go-ahead to
direct the second season. As a direc-
tor, Adlon prefers warm, natural light.
She has instructed her camera crew to
watch John Cassavetes movies and
take notes; she has a fixation on Cas-
savetes’s ability to make “conversa-
tional, documentary-style films,” she
told me. “Like a fable, based on real-
ity.” She shoots the minimum num-
ber of takes possible to nail a scene;
this is partly so that she and her em-
ployees can get home to their fami-
lies. She likes to let her shots linger
even when the dialogue is over, allow-
ing the scene to wallow in its own
awkwardness or tension.

or a decade, it seemed as though

F Adlon and C.K. were a well-
matched pair—two disillusioned en-
tertainers and parents in middle age
with equal proclivities for the scato-
logical and the profound. Then, in
November, 2017, just before the finale
of Season 2 aired, the Times published
a report detailing a pattern of sexual
misconduct by C.K. Several women
said that he had exposed himself and
masturbated in front of them. These
reports had been circulating for years,
albeit on blogs, like Gawker, making
them easy enough to dismiss as gos-
sip, for those who wished to.(If there
is any theme in C.K.’s work, it is the
plight of the chronic masturbator,
something he explores at great length
in most of his television and standup
work.) A few days before the news
broke, C.K.phoned Adlon and warned
her that “people were calling people
he knew” about reports of sexual mis-
conduct.Although Adlon was his clos-
est collaborator, she says that she was
not contacted by any reporters. FX
cancelled its extensive deal with C.K.
and his production company.“What’s
happening? What’s happening?” Adlon
remembered thinking.
In one of the many phone calls be-
tween Adlon and C.K. “to process,”
Adlon told him that she, too, would
need to sever ties.She gave him a pre-
view of the statement she would re-
lease: “My family and I are devastated
by and in shock after the admission of
abhorrent behavior by my friend and
“ You’re the one who wanted to go someplace off the beaten
track—you ask him what’s gluten-free.”
• •
partner, Louis C.K.” She soon also
fired Dave Becky, who managed her
and C.K., and who was accused of
making threatening comments to some
of C.K.’s accusers.
Adlon describes the period after the
news broke in the same extreme terms
as she does the time of her divorce.
(“These men,” she said, her voice drip-
ping with disgust.) “I’ve had a few 9/11s
in my life, including the real 9/11,” she
told me one evening, driving her Audi
Q5 S.U.V. from her post-production
studio to dinner at a hip Thai restau-
rant on Sunset Boulevard.“It felt like
the world was ending,” she said.“I was
his champion and he was my cham-
pion for ten years.” She paused. “And
then you’ve got these women, who’ve
all been through these things. And
you’re,like,what does that mean? What
did you do?”
Her concern was not only for C.K.’s
acknowledged victims. “I felt like I
was going to get arrested,” she said.
“I just felt, like, paranoid.That there
were people around every corner.” I
asked her if it was because she felt
implicated in some way, for being so
close to C.K.“No,” she said.“It’s not
a logical feeling. I just didn’t want to
go outside.”
She continued, “I felt enormous
empathy for him.And for any woman
whose reality is that somebody fucked
her up. Because I’ve been there.” I
asked her if she meant with C.K.
specifically.
“Oh, no. You mean, did he do this
to me?” Adlon said, and shook her head.
I pointed out that she had appeared in
multiple shows with C.K.that explore
unwanted sexual approaches and com-
pulsive masturbation.“Ewww!” Adlon
shrieked.“Don’t say ‘masturbation.’ Oh,
my God!” C.K. seems to be the one
subject that draws squeamishness out
of Adlon.
“If I name-checked any people, of
which there are, who did fucked-up
things to me,” Adlon said, trailing off.
“You sit there, and you go,‘I don’t want
my name to be linked with their names
for the rest of my life. I don’t want to
go after somebody’s family.’ ” She re-
considered for a moment. “Are they a
predator? Can this happen to some-
body else? Then you certainly have to
speak up and say something.”
Adlon felt that the furor about C.K.
had become unproductive. “I wanted
the world to calm down. I wanted a
conversation to happen,” she said. “I
don’t think there’s anything that can
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 1
1, 201
9 25
compare with a massive public sham-
ing like that.” Mostly, she has been
frustrated with what she describes as
the “flying shrapnel” of the news. “It
was another example of extremism hap-
pening in my lifetime,” she said.
In C.K.’s silence—he also declined
to comment for this piece—the people,
particularly the women, being forced
to answer for him are his colleagues.
Adlon said,“Anybody who has any as-
sociation with him is peppered” with
questions.“Sarah Silverman is his fuck-
ing spokesperson.” At the Toronto In-
ternational Film Festival, Chloë Grace
Moretz, who was in the film “I Love
You, Daddy” with C.K.,“got murdered
with Louis questions,” Adlon said.
“She was trying to promote her movie.”
Even Gideon Adlon was asked about
C.K., during the run-up to her début
feature film, “Blockers.” At the Emmy
Awards last September, where Adlon
was one of the nominees for Best Ac-
tress, she avoided red-carpet interviews
in order to dodge questions about C.K.
Now every time his name pops up in
the news—which is increasingly often,
since he has made a foray back into
standup comedy—she asks the people
around her to refrain from talking about
him. “I just need to focus,” she told
me. “I don’t want to have to weigh in
on his sets.”
Adlon, who had never written for
television without C.K., didn’t know
if she wanted to make “Better Things”
on her own. She told me John Land-
graf had said that, because of her as-
sociation with C.K., her show wasn’t
being considered for various awards.
“It was, like, I don’t know if I can do
this,” she said. “My heart’s not in it.”
Nevertheless, FX executives encour-
aged her to continue. Twice-weekly
therapy sessions helped, and Rosen-
thal coached her on how to continue
making the show, including hiring
four writers to replace C.K.“I told my
daughters that I should make T-shirts
that say ‘Bad for my life, good for my
show,’” Adlon said.
This season, Adlon made her ed-
iting room all female (“our little es-
trogen chamber,” she called it), and
she often points out that most of the
show’s major decision-makers are
women. During the Supreme Court
confirmation hearings for Brett Ka-
26 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 1
1, 201
9
vanaugh, the cast and crew staged a heart!” she said, overjoyed. “I give ev-
mini walkout. Yet these gestures to erybody a hard time,” she said. The
womb-ify the show can feel like at- waiter returned to the table with a plas-
tempts to buffer the unsettling new tic container, which was unsatisfactory.
reality of the series, which is that it “Fuck, what do I do?” Adlon asked
was shaped and championed by some- out loud.“I’ll take one of these and I’ll
one with a grotesque track record of reuse it.” Of all the ills in the world,
behavior toward women. the one Adlon is the most preoccu-
At dinner, Adlon begged me to pied with is climate change. She is a
change the subject. I told her that I crusader for the battle against the use
had interviewed some of the new writ- of plastic straws. “We’re fucked,” she
ers for her show, and had asked if they said.“And it’s not just the straws that’s
felt that C.K.’s shadow loomed over fucking us up, it’s everything.” Adlon
the process. All of them said no; C.K. was recently recruited to direct a Yo-
was generally off limits as a topic of plait commercial, an opportunity she
discussion. (Many people who are as- turned down because of her environ-
sociated with Adlon refer to C.K.sim- mental convictions. “I said, ‘I need
ply as “her former writing partner.”) money badly!’ ” she told me. “‘But I
One writer, Joe Hortua, confessed to can’t do this unless you tell me you
feeling a sense of anxiety, knowing that have some kind of sustainable pack-
he and his colleagues were replacing aging going on.’”
someone with such a celebrated—and The Yoplait commercial is one of
now marred—legacy.I mentioned this many unexpected opportunities pre-
to Adlon, and she seemed taken aback. sented to Adlon in the wake of “Bet-
“Of course,” she said.“That’s so inter- ter Things,” some of which are more
esting. Of course. I didn’t even think interesting to her than others. She
about it.” would like to direct a film, but only
Recently,I asked Adlon if she’d been one that pays well.“What I don’t need
aware of the Gawker reports. She to do is go work in a ditch and make
paused, sighed heavily, and said that an independent movie for thirty days
she had.“I was aware,” she said.“There’s that doesn’t pay me any money, because
certain things— Do I lay everything that’s what I do in every episode of my
bare? I don’t know how to respond.All show,” she told me.
you can do is, when you know some- When Adlon’s father turned fifty,
body you confront them.” I asked if he began to experience a form of dis-
she is still in contact with C.K. “No, crimination typically imagined to be
I’m not,” she said. “But I hate saying reserved for those in front of the cam-
that. If I said, ‘Oh, yeah, I talk to him era. Networks and studios started fa-
every day,’ or ‘No, I’m not,’ both are voring younger writers.Adlon remem-
awful. But I haven’t spoken to him in bers her father and one of his writer
quite a long time.” friends sending the friend’s son to pitch
an idea for a show;the show was picked
ne afternoon, I met Adlon for up. Adlon has experienced the oppo-
O lunch at a quiet dim-sum restau- site phenomenon. “A new life begin-
rant, where she did what she always ning at fifty,” she told me, in awe. “I
does when being served food or drink should be in the dustbin at the Jew-
(even at the Emmy Awards, last year): ish Council Thrift, down the street.”
she negotiated with the waitstaff Adlon is deeply superstitious. She
about their use of plastic straws and is constantly knocking on wood, and
containers. she and her daughters have a tradition
“Do you want something to go?” of making a spitting sound—“toi toi
she asked me as the plates were being toi”—at their fingers to ward off some-
cleared. I said yes, and she turned to thing sinister. Adlon is certainly the
the waiter. “What are the containers type to open a fortune cookie, which
made of ? Are they paper?” she did at the end of our meal. “You
“It’s Styrofoam.You don’t like those?” will soon be the center of attention,”
the waiter asked. the tiny slip of paper read.Adlon cack-
“You have another kind?” she asked led.“I don’t know if that’s a good or a
him. He nodded. “Thank you, sweet- bad thing anymore,” she said. 
 Your company has sent an e-mail tell-
SHOUTS & MURMURS ing everyone that, although the office
is not officially closed, employees
should make their way into work with
caution.

As a team-building activity, some

of the interns have banded together
to construct a blockade in the room
with all the printers.They’ve also col-
laborated on a sign warning people
not to enter if they’ve “caught the
sickness.”

When you walk past your friend’s

desk, you wonder if he’s always had
most of the skin on his face being
eaten by worms or if he’s going for a
new look.

It’s far too hot to get any work done,

because your desk is now next to a
large bonfire of contaminated office
supplies.There really must be a more
environmentally friendly way of get-
ting rid of those.

When you call the building manager

to complain about the bonfire (and its
negative impact on our planet), all you
hear on the phone line is an awful
groaning sound.

If you try to shake anyone’s hand, it

SI
GNS THAT SOMETHING falls off.

MIGHT BE GOING AROUND When you go out to lunch to decom-

press, you notice that your favorite
THE OFFICE sandwich place has been reduced to a
pile of ash.
BY COLIN STOKES
Then you find that your favorite falafel
here’s constant, loud sniffling that machines.Instead, they’re stockpiling shop has been replaced by a large pit
T is no longer confined to a single
cubicle.
water and food under their desks and
defending their stores with surpris-
in the ground so deep that you can’t
see the bottom.
ing force.
Everyone is carrying around a paper Co-workers keep saying obnoxious
towel for touching door handles, and Someone who says he’s from what stuff, like “I need to get out of the city
a few employees have started wearing sounds like the “Center for Febreze and go to Long Island to survive,” or
surgical masks. Control” has left a lot of strange, gar- “Things are just so much better up-
bled voice mails. state,” or “The only way to save my
Instead of saying “Bless you” when family from this plague is to leave New
someone sneezes, people flee the room. There’s an unpleasant odor in the office York today.”
that’s only a few notches down from
Attendance at meetings has dropped the stench of death. You get a seat on the subway going to
LUCI GUTIÉRREZ

to just you. and coming back from work.

When you look out the window, you
Your co-workers are avoiding the see a lot of people doing excellent You’ve been feeling a bit sick and might
drinking fountain and the vending “Walking Dead” cosplay. ask to work from home tomorrow. 
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 1
1, 201
9 27
 aunt did to some aspects of the new—
PERSONAL HISTORY perhaps because the rate of social change
associated with technological advances
has been so rapid and so profound. I
THE MACHI
NE STOPS cannot get used to seeing myriads
of people in the street peering into lit-
The neurologist on steam engines, smartphones, and fearing the future. tle boxes or holding them in front of
their faces, walking blithely in the path
BY OLIVER SACKS of moving traffic, totally out of touch
with their surroundings. I am most
alarmed by such distraction and inat-
tention when I see young parents star-
ing at their cell phones and ignoring
their own babies as they walk or wheel
them along. Such children, unable to
attract their parents’ attention, must feel
neglected, and they will surely show the
effects of this in the years to come.
In his novel “Exit Ghost,” from 2007,
Philip Roth speaks of how radically
changed New York City appears to a
reclusive writer who has been away from
it for a decade.He is forced to overhear
cell-phone conversations all around him,
and he wonders, “What had happened
in these ten years for there suddenly to
be so much to say—so much so press-
ing that it couldn’t wait to be said? . . .
I did not see how anyone could believe
he was continuing to live a human ex-
istence by walking about talking into a
phone for half his waking life.”
These gadgets, already ominous in
2007, have now immersed us in a vir-
tual reality far denser, more absorbing,
and even more dehumanizing. I am
confronted every day with the com-
plete disappearance of the old civili-
ties. Social life, street life, and atten-
tion to people and things around one
have largely disappeared, at least in big
cities, where a majority of the popula-
tion is now glued almost without pause
to phones or other devices—jabbering,
texting, playing games, turning more
y favorite aunt, Auntie Len, when Liz down Mill Lane, a road near the and more to virtual reality of every sort.
M she was in her eighties, told me house in London where I grew up. I Everything is public now, poten-
that she had not had too much diffi- stopped at a railway bridge where I had tially:one’s thoughts, one’s photos, one’s
culty adjusting to all the things that loved leaning over the railings as a child. movements, one’s purchases. There is
were new in her lifetime—jet planes, I watched various electric and diesel no privacy and apparently little desire
space travel, plastics, and so on—but trains go by, and after a few minutes for it in a world devoted to non-stop
that she could not accustom herself to Liz, growing impatient, asked, “What use of social media.Every minute, every
the disappearance of the old. “Where are you waiting for?” I said that I was second, has to be spent with one’s
have all the horses gone?” she would waiting for a steam train. Liz looked device clutched in one’s hand. Those
sometimes say. Born in 1892, she had at me as if I were crazy. trapped in this virtual world are never
grown up in a London full of carriages “Uncle Oliver,” she said. “There alone, never able to concentrate and
and horses. haven’t been steam trains for more than appreciate in their own way, silently.
I have similar feelings myself.A few forty years.” They have given up, to a great extent,
years ago, I was walking with my niece I have not adjusted as well as my the amenities and achievements of
28 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 1
1, 201
9 ILLUSTRATION BY SEB AGRESTI
civilization: solitude and leisure, the
sanction to be oneself, truly absorbed,
whether in contemplating a work of
art, a scientific theory, a sunset, or the
face of one’s beloved.
A few years ago, I was invited to join
a panel discussion about information
and communication in the twenty-first
century.One of the panelists, an Inter-
net pioneer, said proudly that his young
daughter surfed the Web twelve hours
a day and had access to a breadth and
range of information that no one from
a previous generation could have imag-
ined.I asked whether she had read any
of Jane Austen’s novels, or any classic
novel.When he said that she hadn’t, I
wondered aloud whether she would
then have a solid understanding of
human nature or of society, and sug-
gested that while she might be stocked
with wide-ranging information, that
was different from knowledge.Half the
audience cheered;the other half booed.
Much of this, remarkably, was en-
visaged by E. M. Forster in his 1909
story “The Machine Stops,” in which
he imagined a future where people live
underground in isolated cells, never
seeing one another and communicat-
ing only by audio and visual devices.
In this world, original thought and di-
rect observation are discouraged—“Be-
ware of first-hand ideas!” people are
told.Humanity has been overtaken by
“the Machine,” which provides all com-
forts and meets all needs—except the
need for human contact. One young
man, Kuno, pleads with his mother via
a Skype-like technology,“I want to see
you not through the Machine. . . . I
want to speak to you not through the
wearisome Machine.”
He says to his mother, who is ab-
sorbed in her hectic, meaningless life,
“We have lost the sense of space....We
have lost a part of ourselves.... Can-
not you see . . . that it is we that are
dying,and that down here the only thing
that really lives is the Machine?”
This is how I feel increasingly often
about our bewitched, besotted soci-
ety, too.
s one’s death draws near, one
A may take comfort in the feeling
that life will go on—if not for oneself
then for one’s children, or for what one
has created.Here, at least, one can in-
vest hope, though there may be no
hope for oneself physically and (for
those of us who are not believers) no
sense of any “spiritual” survival after
bodily death.
But it may not be enough to create,
to contribute, to have influenced oth-
ers if one feels, as I do now, that the
very culture in which one was nour-
ished, and to which one has given one’s
best in return, is itself threatened.
Though I am supported and stimu-
lated by my friends, by readers around
the world, by memories of my life, and
by the joy that writing gives me, I have,
as many of us must have, deep fears
about the well-being and even survival
of our world.
Such fears have been expressed at
the highest intellectual and moral lev-
els.Martin Rees,the Astronomer Royal
and a former president of the Royal
Society, is not a man given to apoca-
lyptic thinking, but in 2003 he pub-
lished a book called “Our Final Hour,”
subtitled “A Scientist’s Warning:How
Terror, Error, and Environmental Di-
saster Threaten Humankind’s Future
in This Century—on Earth and Be-
yond.” More recently, Pope Francis
published his remarkable encyclical
“Laudato Si’,” a deep consideration
not only of human-induced climate
change and widespread ecological di-
saster but of the desperate state of the
poor and the growing threats of con-
sumerism and misuse of technology.
Traditional wars have now been joined
by extremism, terrorism, genocide, and,
in some cases, the deliberate destruc-
tion of our human heritage, of history
and culture itself.
These threats, of course, concern
me, but at a distance—I worry more
about the subtle, pervasive draining
out of meaning, of intimate contact,
from our society and our culture.When
I was eighteen, I read Hume for the
first time, and I was horrified by the
vision he expressed in his eighteenth-
century work “A Treatise of Human
Nature,” in which he wrote that man-
kind is “nothing but a bundle or col-
lection of different perceptions, which
succeed each other with an inconceiv-
able rapidity, and are in a perpetual
flux and movement.” As a neurologist,
I have seen many patients rendered
amnesic by destruction of the mem-
ory systems in their brains, and I can-
not help feeling that these people, hav-
ing lost any sense of a past or a future
and being caught in a flutter of ephem-
eral, ever-changing sensations, have
in some way been reduced from human
beings to Humean ones.
I have only to venture into the streets
of my own neighborhood, the West
Village, to see such Humean casual-
ties by the thousand: younger people,
for the most part, who have grown up
in our social-media era, have no per-
sonal memory of how things were be-
fore,and no immunity to the seductions
of digital life. What we are seeing—
and bringing on ourselves—resembles
a neurological catastrophe on a gigan-
tic scale.
Nonetheless, I dare to hope that,
despite everything, human life and its
richness of cultures will survive, even
on a ravaged earth.While some see art
as a bulwark of our collective memory,
I see science, with its depth of thought,
its palpable achievements and poten-
tials, as equally important;and science,
good science, is flourishing as never
before, though it moves cautiously and
slowly, its insights checked by contin-
ual self-testing and experimentation.I
revere good writing and art and music,
but it seems to me that only science,
aided by human decency, common
sense, farsightedness, and concern for
the unfortunate and the poor, offers
the world any hope in its present mo-
rass.This idea is explicit in Pope Fran-
cis’s encyclical and may be practiced
not only with vast, centralized tech-
nologies but by workers, artisans, and
farmers in the villages of the world.
Between us, we can surely pull the
world through its present crises and
lead the way to a happier time ahead.
As I face my own impending depar-
ture from the world, I have to believe
in this—that mankind and our planet
will survive, that life will continue, and
that this will not be our final hour. 
1
Constabulary Notes from All Over
From the (Coupeville, Wash.) Whidbey Examiner.
Marshal responds to
animal concerns
8:54 a.m., a caller on South Main Street re-
ported the neighbor opened his door and yelled
for his cat. He did this as well the day before.
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 1
1, 201
9 29

UNRELIABLE NARRATOR
The mysteries surrounding the author of the best-selling thriller “The Woman in the Window.”
D
an Mallory,a book editor turned
novelist, is tall, good-looking,
and clever. His novel, “The
Woman in the Window,” which was
published under a lightly worn pseu-
donym,A.J.Finn,was the hit psycholog-
ical thriller of the past year.Like “Gone
Girl,” by Gillian Flynn (2012), and “The
Girl on the Train,” by Paula Hawkins
(2015), each of which has sold millions
of copies, Mallory’s novel, published in
January, 2018, features an unreliable
first-person female narrator,an apparent
murder, and a possible psychopath.
Mallory sold the novel in a two-book,
two-million-dollar deal.He dedicated it
to a man he has described as an ex-boy-
friend,and secured a blurb from Stephen
King: “One of those rare books that re-
ally is unputdownable.” Mallory was
profiled in the Times, and the novel was
reviewed in this magazine.A Washing-
ton Post critic contended that Mallory’s
prose “caresses us.” The novel entered
the Times best-seller list at No. 1—the
first time in twelve years that a début
novel had done so. A film adaptation,
starring Amy Adams and Gary Oldman,
was shot in New York last year.Mallory
has said that his second novel is likely
to appear in early 2020—coinciding, he
hopes,with the Oscar ceremony at which
the film of “The Woman in the Win-
dow” will be honored.Translation rights
have been acquired in more than forty
foreign markets.
Mallory can be delightful company.
Jonathan Karp, the publisher of Si-
mon & Schuster, recently recalled that
Mallory, as a junior colleague in the
New York book world,had been “charm-
ing, brilliant,” and a “terrific writer of
e-mail.”Tess Gerritsen,the crime writer,
met Mallory more than a decade ago,
when he was an editorial assistant; she
remembers him as “a charming young
man” who wrote deft jacket copy.Craig
Raine, the British poet and academic,
told me that Mallory had been a “charm-
30 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 1
1, 201
9
PROFILES
BY IAN PARKER
ing and talented” graduate student at
Oxford;there,Mallory had focussed his
studies on Patricia Highsmith’s Tom
Ripley novels,which are about a charm-
ing, brilliant impostor.
Now thirty-nine,Mallory lives in New
York, in Chelsea.He spent much of the
past year travelling—Spain,Bulgaria,Es-
tonia—for interviews and panel discus-
sions. He repeated entertaining, upbeat
remarks about his love of Alfred Hitch-
cock and French bulldogs. When he
made an unscheduled appearance at a
gathering of bloggers in São Paulo, he
was greeted with pop-star screams.
One evening in September,in Christ-
church,New Zealand,Mallory sat down
in the bar of the hotel where he and
other guests of a literary festival were
staying.Tom Scott,an editorial cartoonist
and a screenwriter, was struck by Mal-
lory’s self-assurance, which reminded
him of Sam Shepard’s representation of
Chuck Yeager, the test pilot, in the film
“The Right Stuff.” “He came in wear-
ing the same kind of bomber jacket,”
Scott said recently, in a fondly teasing
tone.“An incredibly good-looking guy.
He sat down and plonked one leg over
the arm of his chair, and swung that leg
casually, and within two minutes he’d
mentioned that he had the best-selling
novel in the world this year.” Mallory
also noted that he’d been paid a million
dollars for the movie rights to “The
Woman in the Window.” Scott said,
“He was enjoying his success so much.
It was almost like an outsider looking
in on his own success.”
Mallory and Scott later appeared at
a festival event that took the form of a
lighthearted debate between two teams.
The audience was rowdy;Scott recalled
that,when it was Mallory’s turn to speak,
he flipped the room’s mood. He an-
nounced that he was going “off script”
to share something personal—for what
Scott understood to be the first time.
Mallory said that once, in order to al-
leviate depression, he had undergone
electroconvulsive therapy, three times a
week, for one or two months. It had
“worked,” Mallory noted, adding, “I’m
very grateful.” He said that he still had
ECT treatments once a year.“You knew
he was telling us something that was
really true,” Scott recalled.In the room,
there was “a huge surge of sympathy.”
Mallory had frequently referred to
electroconvulsive therapy before.But, in
those instances, he had included it in a
list of therapies that he had considered
unsatisfactory in the years between 2001,
when he graduated from Duke Univer-
sity, and 2015, when he was given a di-
agnosis of bipolar II disorder, and found
relief through medication.In a talk that
Mallory gave at a library in Centennial,
Colorado, soon after his book’s publica-
tion, he said, “I resorted to hypnother-
apy, to electroconvulsive therapy, to ket-
amine therapy, to retail therapy.”
In that talk, as in dozens of appear-
ances, Mallory adopted a tone of witty
self-deprecation. (An audience mem-
ber asked him if he’d considered a ca-
reer in standup comedy.) But Mallo-
ry’s central theme was that, although
depression may have caused him to
think poorly of himself, he was in fact
a tremendous success.“I’ve thrived on
both sides of the Atlantic,” he said.“I’m
like Adele!” He’d reached a mass read-
ership with a first novel that, he said,
had honored E. M. Forster’s exhorta-
tion in “Howards End”: “Only con-
nect.” Mallory described himself as a
man “of discipline and compassion.”
Mallory also explained that he had
come to accept that he was attractive—
or “semi-fit to be viewed by the semi-
naked eye.” On a trip to China, he had
been told so by his “host family.” At a
talk two weeks later, he repeated the
anecdote but identified the host fam-
ily as Japanese.
Such storytelling is hardly scandal-
ous.Mallory was taking his first steps as
At Oxford, Dan Mallory studied Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley novels, which are about a charming, brilliant impostor.
ILLUSTRATION BY KRISTIAN HAMMERSTAD THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 1
1, 201
9 31

• •
a public figure.Most people have jazzed
up an anecdote, and it is a novelist’s job
to manipulate an audience.
But in Colorado Mallory went fur-
ther. He said that, while he was work-
ing at an imprint of the publisher Lit-
tle, Brown, in London, between 2009
and 2012, “The Cuckoo’s Calling,” a
thriller submitted pseudonymously by
J.K.Rowling,had been published on his
recommendation. He said that he had
taught at Oxford University, where he
had received a doctorate.“You got a prob-
lem with that?” he added, to laughter.
Mallory doesn’t have a doctorate from
Oxford. Although he may have read
Rowling’s manuscript, it was not pub-
lished on his recommendation. (And
he never “worked with” Tina Fey at
Little, Brown, as an official biography
of Mallory claimed;a representative for
Fey recently said that “he was not an
editor in any capacity on Tina’s book.”)
Moreover, according to many peo-
ple who know him, Mallory has a his-
tory of imposture, and of duping peo-
ple with false stories about disease and
death. Long before he wrote fiction
professionally,Mallory was experiment-
32 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 1
1, 201
9
ing with gothic personal fictions, ap-
parently designed to get attention,bring
him advancement, or to explain away
failings. “Money and power were im-
portant to him,” a former publishing
colleague told me.“But so was drama,
and securing people’s sympathies.”
In 2001, Jeffrey Archer, the British
novelist, began a two-year prison sen-
tence for perjury and perverting the
course of justice. Nobody has accused
Dan Mallory of breaking the law, or of
lying under oath, but his behavior has
struck many as calculated and extreme.
The former colleague said that Mal-
lory was “clever and careful” in his “ruth-
less” deceptions: “If there was some-
thing that he wanted and there was a
way he could position himself to get it,
he would. If there was a story to tell
that would help him, he would tell it.”
This doesn’t look like poetic license, or-
dinary cockiness,or Nabokovian game-
playing; nor is it behavior associated
with bipolar II disorder.
In 2016, midway through the auc-
tion for “The Woman in the Window,”
the author’s real name was revealed to
bidders.At that point, most publishing
houses dropped out.This move reflected
an industry-wide unease with Mallory
that never became public, and that did
not stand in the way of his enrichment:
William Morrow, Mallory’s employer
at the time, kept bidding, and bought
his book.
Mallory had by then spent a decade
in publishing,in London and New York,
and many people in the profession had
heard rumors about him, including the
suggestion that he had left jobs under
peculiar circumstances. Several former
colleagues of Mallory’s who were inter-
viewed for this article recalled feeling
deeply unnerved by him.One, in Lon-
don, said, “He exploited people who
were sweet-natured.” A colleague at
William Morrow told friends, “There’s
this guy in my office who’s got a ‘Tal-
ented Mr. Ripley’ thing going on.” In
2013,Sophie Hannah,the esteemed Brit-
ish crime-fiction writer, whose work in-
cludes the sanctioned continuation of
Agatha Christie’s series of detective nov-
els, was one of Mallory’s authors; she
came to distrust accounts that he had
given about being gravely ill.
I recently called a senior editor at a
New York publishing company to dis-
cuss the experience of working with
Mallory.“My God,” the editor said,with
a laugh.“I knew I’d get this call.I didn’t
know if it would be you or the F.B.I.”
raig Raine taught English litera-
C ture at New College, Oxford, for
twenty years, until his retirement, in
2010.Every spring, he read applications
from students who, having been ac-
cepted by Oxford to pursue a doctorate
in English,hoped to be attached to New
College during their studies. A decade
or so ago, Raine read an application
from Dan Mallory, which described a
proposed thesis on homoeroticism in
Patricia Highsmith’s fiction.Unusually,
the application included an extended
personal statement.
Raine, telling me about the essay
during a phone conversation a few
months ago, called it an astonishing
piece of writing that described almost
unbearable family suffering.The essay
sought to explain why Mallory’s per-
formance as a master’s student at Ox-
ford, a few years earlier, had been good
but not brilliant. Mallory said that his
studies had been disrupted by visits to
America, to nurse his mother, who had
breast cancer. Raine recalled, “He had
a brother, who was mentally disadvan-
taged, and also had cystic fibrosis.The
brother died while being nursed by him.
And Dan was supporting the family as
well. And the mother gradually died.”
According to Raine, Mallory had de-
scribed how his mother rejected the idea
of suffering without complaint.Mallory
often read aloud to her the passage in
“Little Women” in which Beth dies,with
meek, tidy stoicism, so that his mother
“could sneer at it, basically.”
Raine went on,“At some point,when
Dan was nursing her,he got a brain tumor,
which he didn’t tell her about, because
he thought it would be upsetting to her.
And, evidently, that sort of cleared up.
And then she died.The brother had al-
ready died.”
Raine admired the essay because it
“knew it was moving but didn’t exag-
gerate—it was written calmly.” Raine
is the longtime editor of Areté, a liter-
ary magazine, and he not only helped
Mallory secure a place at New College;
he invited him to expand the essay for
publication.“He worked at it for a cou-
ple of months,” Raine said. “Then he
said that, after all, he didn’t think he
could do it.” Mallory explained that his
mother, a private person, might have
preferred that he not publish. Instead,
he reviewed a collection of essays by
the poet Geoffrey Hill.
Pamela Mallory, Dan’s mother, does
seem to be a private person: her Insta-
gram account is locked.When I briefly
met her, some weeks after I’d spoken
to Raine,she declined to be interviewed.
She lives for at least part of the year in
a large house in Amagansett, near the
Devon Yacht Club, where a celebratory
lunch was held for Mallory last year.
(On Instagram, he once posted a video
clip of the club’s exterior, captioned,
“The first rule of yacht club is: you do
not talk about yacht club.”) In 2013, at
a country club in Charlotte,North Car-
olina, Pamela Mallory attended the
wedding reception of her younger son,
John, who goes by Jake, and who was
then working at Wells Fargo. At the
wedding, she and Dan danced. This
year, Pamela and other family mem-
bers were photographed at a talk that
Dan gave at Queens University of Char-
lotte.Dan has described travelling with
his mother on a publicity trip to New
Zealand.“Only one of us will make it
back alive,” he joked to a reporter.“She’s
quite spirited.”
I told Raine that Mallory’s mother
was not dead. There was a pause, and
then he said,“If she’s alive,he lied.” Raine
underscored that he had taken Mallo-
ry’s essay to be factual.He asked me,“Is
the father alive? In the account I read,
I’m almost a hundred per cent certain
that the father is dead.” The senior John
Mallory, once an executive at the Bank
of America in Charlotte, also attended
the event at Queens University.He and
Pamela have been married for more than
forty years.
an Mallory, who turned down re-
D quests to be interviewed for this
article, was born in 1979, into a family
that he has called “very, very Waspy,”
even though his parents both had a
Catholic education and he has described
himself as having been a “precocious
Catholic” in childhood. His maternal
grandfather, John Barton Poor, was the
chairman and chief executive of R.K.O.
General, which owned TV and radio
stations.Mallory was perhaps referring
to Poor when, as an undergraduate at
Duke, he wrote in a student paper that,
at the age of nine, he had “slammed the
keyboard cover of my grandfather’s
Steinway onto my exposed penis.” The
article continued, “As I beheld the
flushed member pinned against the ivo-
ries like the snakeling in Rikki-Tikki-
Tavi, I immediately feared my urinat-
ing days were over.”
Dan and Jake Mallory have two sis-
ters, Hope and Elizabeth.When Dan
was nine or so, the family moved from
Garden City, on Long Island, to Vir-
ginia, and then to Charlotte, where he
attended Charlotte Latin, a private
school. The family spent summers in
Amagansett. In interviews, Mallory
has sometimes joked that he was un-
popular as a teen-ager, but Matt Cloud,
a Charlotte Latin classmate, recently
told me,by e-mail,that “Dan’s the best,”
and was “a stellar performer” in a school
production of “Arsenic and Old Lace.”
In 1999,at the end of Mallory’s soph-
omore year in college, he published an
article in the Duke Chronicle which pur-
ported to describe events that had oc-
curred a few years earlier, when he was
seventeen; he wrote that he was then
living in a single-parent household.The
piece, titled “Take Full Advantage of
Suffering,” began:
From a dim corner of her hospital room I
surveyed the patient, who appeared, tucked primly
under the crisp sheets, not so much recouping
from surgery as steeped in a late-evening rev-
erie. Her blank face registered none of the pris-
tine grimness which so often pervades medical
environs; hopeful hints of rose could be discerned
in her pale skin; and with each gentle inhalation,
her chest lifted slowly but reassuringly heaven-
ward. Mine, by contrast, palpitated so furiously
that I braced myself for cardiac arrest.
I do not know whether she spied me as I
gazed downward, contemplating the unjustly col-
loquial sound of “lumpectomy,” or if some pri-
mally maternal instinct alerted her to my pres-
ence, but in a coarse, ragged voice, she breathed
my name: “Dan.”
His mother, he wrote, urged him “to
write to your colleges and tell them your
mother has cancer.” Mallory said that
he complied, adding, “I hardly feel I
capitalized on tragedy—rather,I merely
squeezed lemonade from the proverbial
lemons.” In college applications, he
noted, “I lamented, in the sweeping,
tragic prose of a Brontë sister, the un-
settling darkness of the master bedroom,
where my mother, reeling from bom-
bardments of chemotherapy,lay for days
huddled in a fetal position.”
This strategy apparently failed with
Princeton. In the article, Mallory re-
called writing to Fred Hargadon, then
Princeton’s dean of admissions. “You
heartless bastard,” the letter supposedly
began.“What kind of latter-day Stalin
refuses admission to someone in my
plight? Not that I ever seriously con-
sidered gracing your godforsaken insti-
tution with my presence—you should
be so lucky—but I’m nonetheless re-
lieved to know that I won’t be attend-
ing a university whose administrators
opt to ignore oncological afflictions;
perhaps if I’d followed the example of
your prized student Lyle Menendez and
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 1
1, 201
9 33
killed my mother, things would have
turned out differently.”
Mallory ended his article with an
exhortation to his readers:“Make suffer-
ing worth it.When the silver lining proves
elusive, when the situation cannot be
helped, nothing empowers so much as
working for one’s own advantage.”
At some point in Mallory’s teen years,
I learned, his mother did have cancer.
But the essay feels like a blueprint for
the manipulations later exerted on Craig
Raine and others: inspiring pity and
furthering ambition while holding a
pose of insouciance.
In the summer of 1999, Mallory in-
terned at New Line Cinema, in New
York. He later claimed, in the Duke
Chronicle, that he “whiled away” the sum-
mer “polishing” the horror film “Final
Destination,” directed by James Wong.
“We need a young person like you to sex
it up,” Mallory recalled being told.Wong
told me that Mallory did not work on
the script.
Mallory spent his junior year abroad,
at Oxford, and the experience “changed
my attitude toward life,” he told Duke
Today in 2001. “I discovered British
youth culture, went out clubbing. . . . I
learned it was O.K.to have fun.” While
there, he published a dispatch, in the
Duke student publication TowerView,
describing an encounter with a would-be
mugger, who asked him, “Want me to
shoot your motherfucking mouth off ?”
Mallory responded with witty aplomb,
and the mugger, cowed, scuttled “down
some anonymous alley to reflect on why
it is Bad To Threaten Other People, es-
pecially pushy Americans who doubt
he has a gun.”
Before Oxford, Mallory had been
self-contained—Jeffery West, who taught
Mallory in a Duke acting class, and cast
him in a production of Tom Stoppard’s
“Arcadia,” said that he was then a “gawky,
lanky kind of boy, an Other.” After Ox-
ford, Mallory was bolder.Mary Carmi-
chael, a Duke classmate and his editor
at TowerView, told me that Mallory was
now likely to sweep into a room.An ar-
ticle in the Chronicle proposed that “being
center stage is a joy for Mallory.” He di-
rected plays, which were well received,
and he became a film critic for the Chron-
icle. He ruled that Matt Damon had
been “miserably graceless” as the star of
“The Talented Mr. Ripley.”
34 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 1
1, 201
9
In 2001, Mallory was the student Dolan asked, “You had the disci-
speaker at Duke’s commencement. As pline to, say, not kick the door down?”
in his cancer article, he made a debat- Mallory, committed to twenty-two
er’s case for temerity, in part by deploy- hours and ten minutes, said that he
ing temerity.He called himself a “nov- had torn a brass towel ring off the wall,
elist,” and said that he had missed out straightened it into a pipe, “and sort of
on a Rhodes Scholarship only because hacked away at the area right above the
he’d been too cutely candid in an inter- doorknob.” He continued, “I did even-
view:when asked what made him laugh, tually bore my way through it, but by
he’d said, “My dog,” rather than some- that point my fingers were bloody, I
thing rarefied.He described talking his was screaming obscenities.This is the
way into the thesis program of Duke’s point—of course—at which the father
English Department, despite not hav- of the house walked in!” After Dolan
ing done the qualifying work.He com- asked him if he’d resorted to eating
pared his stubborn “attitude” on this toothpaste, Mallory steered the conver-
matter to struggles over civil rights. In sation to Hitchcock.
college, he said, “I had honed my per- In subsequent interviews, Mallory
sonality to a fine lance, and could de- does not seem to have brought up this
ploy my character as I did my intellect.” bathroom again.But the exchange gives
a glimpse of the temptations and risks
“ T he Woman in the Window” is
narrated by Anna Fox, an agora-
of hyperbole: how, under even slight
pressure, an exaggeration can become
phobic middle-aged woman, living alone further exaggerated.For a speaker more
in a Harlem brownstone, who believes invested in advantage than in accuracy,
that she has witnessed a violent act oc- such fabulation could be exhilarating—
curring in a neighbor’s living room.Early and might even lead to the dispatch, by
in 2018, when Mallory began promot- disease, of a family member. I was re-
ing the novel, he sometimes said that cently told about two former publish-
he, too, had “suffered from” agorapho- ing colleagues of Mallory’s who called
bia.He later said that he had never had him after he didn’t show up for a meet-
the condition. ing. Mallory said that he was at home,
In an interview last January, on “Thrill taking care of someone’s dog.The meet-
Seekers,” an online radio show, the writer ing continued, as a conference call.Mal-
Alex Dolan asked Mallory about the lory now and then shouted, “No! Get
novel’s Harlem setting.Mallory said that, down!” After hanging up, the two col-
when describing Anna’s house, he had leagues looked at each other. “There’s
kept in mind the uptown home of a fam- no dog, right?” “No.”
ily friend, with whom he had stayed when
he interned in New York. After a rare etween 2002 and 2004, Mallory
hesitation, Mallory shared an anecdote: B studied for a master’s degree at
he said that he’d once accidentally locked Oxford.He took courses on twentieth-
century literature and wrote a thesis
on detective fiction. Professor John
Kelly, a Yeats scholar who taught him,
told me, “He wrote very challenging
and creative essays.I said to him once,
‘It can be a little florid.’ I always think
that’s a wonderful fault, if it is a fault—
constantly looking for not just the mot
juste, as it were, but to give a spin on
the mot juste. And his e-mails to me
himself in the house’s ground-floor bath- were like that, too; they were always
room.When he was eventually rescued, very amusing.” Chris Parris-Lamb,
by his host, he had been trapped “for a New York literary agent, similarly
twenty-two hours and ten minutes.” impressed by Mallory’s e-mails, once
“Wow!” Dolan said. suggested that he write a collection
Mallory said, “So perhaps that of humorous essays, in the mode of
contributed to my fascination with David Sedaris.
agoraphobia.” As Kelly recalled, by the end of the
two-year course Mallory was making
frequent trips to America, apparently
to address serious medical issues.Kelly
didn’t know the details of Mallory’s ill-
ness.“We talked in general terms,” Kelly
said.“I didn’t ever press him.” Kelly also
understood that Mallory’s mother had
a life-threatening illness.“Alas, she did
die,” Kelly told me, adding that he re-
spected Mallory’s “forbearance.”
Mallory received his master’s in 2004
and moved to New York. He applied
to be an assistant to Linda Marrow,
the editorial director of Ballantine, an
imprint of Random House known for
commercial fiction. At his interview,
he said that he had a love of popular
women’s fiction, which derived from
his having read it with his mother when
she was gravely ill with cancer.He later
said that he had once had brain can-
cer himself.
Mallory was given the job. He im-
pressed Tess Gerritsen and others with
his writing; he contributed a smart af-
terword to a reprint of “From Doon
with Death,” Ruth Rendell’s first novel.
Adam Korn, then a Random House
assistant, who saw a lot of Mallory so-
cially, told me that Mallory was “a good
guy, lovely to talk to, very informed,”
and already “serious about being a writer.”
Another colleague recalled that Mal-
lory immediately “gave off a vibe of
‘I’m too good for this.’ ” Ballantine’s
books were too down-market; Mallo-
ry’s role was too administrative.
As if impatient for advancement,
Mallory often used his boss’s office late
at night, and worked on her computer.
On a few occasions in 2007, after Mal-
lory had announced that he would soon
be leaving the company to take up doc-
toral studies at Oxford, people found
plastic cups, filled with urine, in and
near Linda Marrow’s office. These
registered as messages of disdain, or
as territorial marking. Mallory was
suspected of responsibility but was not
challenged. No similar cups were
found after he quit.(Mallory, through
a spokesperson, said,“I was not respon-
sible for this.”)
A few months later, after Mallory
had moved to Oxford, his former em-
ployers noticed unexplained spending,
at Amazon.co.uk,on a corporate Amer-
ican Express card. When confronted,
Mallory acknowledged that he had used
• •
the card, but insisted that it was in
error.He added that he was experienc-
ing a recurrence of cancer.
n an interview with the Duke alumni
I magazine last spring, Mallory said
that, as someone who was “very rules-
conscious,” he found Patricia Highsmith’s
representation of Tom Ripley,across five
novels, to be “thrilling and disturbing
in equal measure.” He went on,“When
you read a Sherlock Holmes story, you
know that,by the end,the innocent will
be redeemed or rewarded,the guilty will
be punished, and justice will be upheld
or restored.Highsmith subverts all that.
Through some alchemy, she persuades
us to root for sociopaths.”
When, in a scene partway through
“The Woman in the Window,” Anna
Fox thinks about another character,
“He could kiss me. He could kill me,”
Mallory is alluding to a pivotal mo-
ment in “The Talented Mr.Ripley.” On
the Italian Riviera, Ripley and Dickie
Greenleaf, a dazzling friend who is tir-
ing of Ripley’s company, hire a motor-
boat and head out to sea. In the boat,
Ripley considers that he “could have
hit Dickie, sprung on him, or kissed
him, or thrown him overboard, and no-
body could have seen him.” He then
beats him to death with an oar.
Back at Oxford, Mallory has said,
he “anointed” Highsmith as the pri-
mary subject of his dissertation.But he
doesn’t seem to have published any
scholarly articles on Highsmith, and
it’s not clear how much of a thesis he
wrote. An Oxford arts doctorate gen-
erally takes at least three or four years;
in 2009, midway through his second
year, Mallory was signing e-mails, un-
truthfully, “Dr. Daniel Mallory.” Ox-
ford recently confirmed to me that Mal-
lory never completed the degree.
At Oxford, Mallory became a stu-
dent-welfare officer.In a guide for New
College students, he introduced himself
with brio, and invited students to ap-
proach him with any issues, “even if it’s
on Eurovision night.” According to Tess
Gerritsen,who had drinks with him and
others in Oxford one night, Mallory
mentioned that he was “working on a
mystery novel,” which “might have been
set in Oxford, the world of the dons.”
Mallory sometimes saw John Kelly,
his former professor, for drinks or din-
ner.“They were very, very merry occa-
sions,” Kelly told me. He recalled that
Mallory once declined an invitation to
a party, saying that he would be tied
up in London, supporting a cancer-
related organization. Kelly was struck
by Mallory’s public-spiritedness, and
by his modesty. “I would have never
found out about it, except he wrote to
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 1
1, 201
9 35
 signing with Little, Brown, Penny excit-
edly described Mallory as a former “Ox-
ford professor of literature.” Referring to
the bond between author and editor, she
added, “It is such an intimate relation-
ship, there needs to be trust.”
Others found his behavior off-put-
ting;it seemed unsuited to building long-
term professional relationships.The Lon-
don colleague said, “He was so full-on.
I thought, My God, what’s going on? It
was performative and calculating.” A Lit-
tle, Brown colleague, who was initially
impressed by Mallory, said,“He was not
modest, ever.” The colleague noted that
many editors got into trouble by disre-
garding sales and focussing only on books
that they loved, adding, “That certainly
never happened with him.” Little,Brown
authors were often “seduced by Dan” at
first but then “became disenchanted”
when he was “late with his edits or got
someone else to do them.”
“I’m feeling a little guilty for having introduced them to each other.” Mallory, who had just turned thirty,
told colleagues that he was impatient
to rise. He found friends in the com-
• • pany’s higher ranks.Having acquired a
princeling status,he used it to denigrate
me to say, ‘I’d love to be there, but it’s done enough” to earn such a position. colleagues.The London colleague said
going to be a long day in London.’ ” One of Mallory’s London colleagues that Mallory would tell his superiors,
(When Kelly learned that I had some to whom I spoke at length described “This is a bunch of dullards working
doubts about Mallory’s accounts of can- publishing as “a soft industry—and for you.” Another colleague said of Mal-
cer, he said that he was “astonished.”) much more so in London than in New lory, “When he likes you, it’s like the
At one point,Kelly noticed that Mal- York.” Hiring standards in London have sun shining on you.” But Mallory’s con-
lory no longer responded to notes sent improved in the past decade, this col- tempt for perceived enemies was dis-
to him through Oxford’s internal mail league said, but at the time of Mallo- concertingly sharp.“You don’t want to
system:he had left the university.Rob- ry’s hiring “it was much more a case of get on the wrong side of that,” the col-
ert Douglas-Fairhurst, his doctoral su- ‘I like the cut of your jib, you can have league recalled thinking.
pervisor, recently said of Mallory, “I’m a job,’ rather than ‘Have you actually Mallory moved into an apartment
very sorry that illness interrupted his got a Ph.D.from Oxford, and were you in Shoreditch, in East London. He
studies.” Mallory had begun looking an editor at Ballantine?’” wasn’t seen at publishing parties, and
for work in London publishing, de- Mallory was amusing, well read, and one colleague wondered if his extrover-
scribing himself as a former editor ebullient, and could make a memorable sion at lunch meetings served “to dis-
at Ballantine, not as an assistant. He first impression, over lunch, on literary guise crippling shyness” and habits of
claimed that he had two Ph.D.s: his agents and authors.He tended to speak solitude.On his book tour, Mallory has
Highsmith-related dissertation, from almost without pause. He’d begin with said that depression “blighted, blotted,
Oxford, and one from the psychology rapturous flattery—he told Louise Penny, and blackened” his adult life.A former
department of an American university, the Canadian mystery writer, that he’d colleague of his told me that Mallory
for research into Munchausen syn- read her manuscript three times, once seemed to be driven by fears of no lon-
drome.There’s no evidence that Mal- “just for fun”—and then shift to self- ger being seen as a “golden boy.”
lory ever undertook such research. A regard. He wittily skewered acquain- In the summer of 2010, Mallory told
former colleague recalls Mallory refer- tances and seemed always conscious of Little, Brown about a job offer from a
ring to himself as a “double-doctor.” his physical allure. He’d say, in passing, London competitor.He was promised
Toward the end of 2009,he was hired that he’d modelled for Guess jeans—“run- a raise and a promotion. A press re-
as a mid-level editor at Sphere, a com- way only”—or that he’d appeared on the lease announcing Mallory’s elevation
mercial imprint of Little, Brown. In cover of Russian Vogue. He mentioned described him as “entrepreneurial and
New York, news of this event caused a friendship with Ricky Martin. a true team player.”
puzzlement: an editor then at Ballan- This display was at times profession- By then,Mallory had made it widely
tine recalled feeling that Mallory “hadn’t ally effective.In a blog post written after known to co-workers that he had an
36 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 1
1, 201
9
inoperable brain tumor. He’d survived
earlier bouts with cancer,but now a doc-
tor had told him that a tumor would
kill him by the age of forty.He seemed
to be saying that cancer—already iden-
tified and unequivocally fatal—would
allow him to live for almost another de-
cade.The claim sounds more like a gob-
lin’s curse than like a prognosis,but Mal-
lory was persuasive; the colleague who
was initially supportive of him recently
said, with a shake of the head, “Yes, I
believed that.”
Some co-workers wept after hearing
the news. Mallory told people that he
was seeking experimental treatments.
He took time off. In Little, Brown’s
open-plan office, helium-filled “Get
Well” balloons swayed over Mallory’s
desk. For a while, he wore a baseball
cap, even indoors, which was thought
to hide hair loss from chemotherapy.
He explained that he hadn’t yet told his
parents about his diagnosis,as they were
aloof and unaffectionate. Before the
office closed for Christmas in 2011,Mal-
lory said that, as his parents had no in-
terest in seeing him, he would instead
make an exploratory visit to the facili-
ties of Dignitas,the assisted-death non-
profit based in Switzerland. A Digni-
tas death occurs in a small house next
to a machine-parts factory; there’s no
tradition of showing this space to pos-
sible future patients. Mallory said that
he had found his visit peaceful.
Sources told me that, a few months
later, Ursula Mackenzie, then Little,
Brown’s C.E.O.,attended a dinner where
she sat next to the C.E.O. of the pub-
lishing house whose job offer had led to
Mallory’s promotion.The rival C.E.O.
told Mackenzie that there had been no
such offer.(Mackenzie declined to com-
ment.The rival C.E.O.did not reply to
requests for comment.) When challenged
at Little, Brown, Mallory claimed that
the rival C.E.O.was lying,in reprisal for
Mallory’s having once rejected a sexual
proposition.
In August, 2012, Mallory left Little,
Brown. The terms of his departure are
covered by a nondisclosure agreement.
But it’s clear that Little, Brown did not
find Mallory’s response about the job
offer convincing.“And,once that fell away,
then you obviously think, Is he really ill?”
the once supportive colleague said. Ev-
erything now looked doubtful, “even
to the extent of ‘Does his family exist?’
and ‘Is he even called Dan Mallory?’ ”
Mallory was not fired.This fact points
to the strength of employee protections
in the U.K.—it’s hard to prove the ab-
sence of a job offer—but also, perhaps,
to a sense of embarrassment and dread.
The prospect of Mallory’s public antag-
onism was evidently alarming: Little,
Brown was conscious of the risks of “a
fantasist walking around telling lies,” an
employee at the company told me. An-
other source made a joking reference to
“The Talented Mr. Ripley”: “He could
come at me with an axe. Or an oar.”
In protecting his career,Mallory held
the advantage of his own failings: Little,
Brown’s reputation would have been
harmed by the knowledge that it had
hired,and then promoted,a habitual liar.
When Mallory left, many of his col-
leagues were unaware of any unpleasant-
ness.There was even a small, awkward
dinner in his honor.
wo weeks before Mallory left Lit-
T tle, Brown, it was announced that
he had accepted a job in New York, as
an executive editor at William Morrow,
an imprint of HarperCollins. Publish-
ing professionals estimate that his start-
ing salary was at least two hundred thou-
sand dollars a year.That fall, he moved
into an apartment in a sixty-floor tower,
with a pool, in midtown, and into an
office at Morrow, on Fifty-third Street.
He had been hired by Liate Stehlik,
Morrow’s widely admired publisher.It’s
not clear if Stehlik heard rumors about
Mallory’s unreliability—or, to use the
words of a former Morrow colleague,
the fact that “London had ended in
some sort of ball of flame.” Stehlik did
not reply to requests for comment for
this article.
Whereas in London Mallory had
sometimes seemed like a British satire of
American bluster, in New York he came
off as British.He spoke with an English
accent and said “brilliant,” “bloody,” and
“Where’s the loo?”—as one colleague put
it, he was “a grown man walking around
with a fake accent that everyone knows
is fake.” The habit lasted for years, and
one can find a postman, not a mailman,
in “The Woman in the Window.”
Some book editors immerse them-
selves in text; others focus on making
deals. Mallory was firmly of the latter
type, and specialized in acquiring estab-
lished authors who had an international
reach. Before the end of 2012, he had
signed Wilbur Smith—once a giant in
popular historical fiction (and now, as
Mallory put it in an e-mail to friends,
“approximately four centuries old”).
At some point that winter, Mallory
stopped coming into the office. This
mystified colleagues,who were given no
explanation.
On February 12, 2013, some people in
London who knew Mallory profession-
ally received a group e-mail from Jake
Mallory, Dan’s brother, whom they’d
never met. Writing from a Gmail ad-
dress,Jake said that Dan would be going
to the hospital the next day, for the re-
moval of a tumor.He’d be having “com-
plicated surgery with several high risk
factors, including the possibility of pa-
ralysis and/or the loss of function below
the waist.” But, Jake went on, “Dan has
been through worse and has pointed out
that if he could make it through Love
Actually alive, this surgery holds no ter-
rors.” Dan would eat “an early dinner of
sashimi and will then read a book about
dogs until bedtime,” Jake wrote, add-
ing, “Dan was treated terribly by people
throughout his childhood and teenage
years and into his twenties, which left
him a very deeply lonely person, so he
does not like/trust many people. Please
keep him in your thoughts.”
That e-mail appears to have been
addressed exclusively to contacts in the
U.K.The next day, Jake sent an e-mail
to acquaintances of Dan’s in the New
York publishing world. It noted that
Dan would soon be undergoing surgery
to address “a tumor in his spine,” add-
ing,“This isn’t the first (or even second)
time that Dan has had to undergo this
sort of treatment, so he knows the drill,
although it’s still an unpleasant and
frightening proposition. He says that
he is looking forward to being fitted
with a spinal-fluid drain and that this
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 1
1, 201
9 37
will render him half-man,half-machine.” The ventriloquism is halfhearted.Dan’s This would daunt a mere mortal but not
Recipients wrote back in distress.Anown voice keeps intruding, and the hur- my brother.”
editor at a rival publishing house told ried sequence of events suggests anxiety At the end of March, late at night,
about getting the patient home, and re-
me, “I totally fell for it. After all, who “Jake” wrote again to London contacts.
turning him to a sparer, mythic narrative
would fabricate such a story? I sent books Dan was “in decent physical shape,”
and sympathies.” In time,Jake’s exchangesof endurance and wit. While in a New but was upset about the “painful up-
with this editor became “quippy and up- York hospital,Dan was a dot on the map, heaval” of the previous year—and about
beat.” Another correspondent told Jake exposed to visitors.Reports from the ward an e-mail, written by an unnamed Lit-
that his writing was as droll as Dan’s. would require the clutter of realist fic- tle, Brown executive, that seemed to
tion:medical devices,doctors with names.
Jake’s styling of “e.mail” was unusual. “poke fun at him.” Dan felt “utterly let
The next week, Dan wrote to Chris “Jake” continued,“He has been fitted down” and was “withdrawing into him-
Parris-Lamb, the agent. He began, with a ‘lumbar drain’ in his back to drain self like a turtle.”
“Wanted to thank you for your very lovelyhis spinal fluid.The pain is apparently “Jake” noted that Dan had been
e.mail to my brother.” quite severe, but he is on medicine.” (A “working with abused children and in-
Given the idiosyncrasy of “e.mail”— Britishism.) “He is not in great shape fants at the hospital where he was
and given Dan’s taste for crafted zing- but did manage to ask if he could keep treated.” The previous week, “Jake” had
ers, and his history of fabrication—it’s the tumor as a pet. He will most likely seen Dan “talking to a little girl whose
now easy to suppose,as one recipient put be going home today.” arm had been broken for her,” he wrote,
it, that “something crazy was going on,” On February 15th, “Jake” wrote an adding, “My brother’s arm was broken
and that “Jake” was Dan.Like Tom Rip- e-mail to Parris-Lamb:“We’re anticipat- for him when he was a baby.” This phras-
ing a week or so of concentrated rest, the
ley writing letters that were taken as the ing seems to stop just short of alleging
work of the murdered Dickie Greenleaf, only trick will be finding enough read- parental abuse.(The theme of childhood
Dan was apparently communicating with ing material to keep his brain occupied.” victimization, sometimes an element of
friends in a fictional voice. (Online im-A week later, Dan Mallory, writing from “Jake” e-mails sent to London associ-
personations also figure in the plot of his own e-mail address,sent Parris-Lamb ates, did not appear in the New York
“The Woman in the Window.”) the note thanking him for the “very lovely e-mails.) “Jake” went on, “He wrote the
Jake Mallory is thirty-five.He’s a lit-
e.mail”—which, he said, had “warmed little girl a story about a hedgehog in
tle shorter than Dan, and doesn’t have my black heart.” Mallory went on,“Today his nicest handwriting to show her how
the same lacrosse-player combination of I start weaning myself—I’ll just let that she could rebound from a bad experi-
strong chin and floppy hair.The week of clause stand on its own for a minute; are ence.I want for him to do the same, al-
Dan’s alleged surgery,while Jake was sup-you gagging yet?—off my sweet sweet though I understand that he is tired of
posedly by his side in New York, Jake’s Vicodin, so am at last fit to correspond. having to rebound from things.”
fiancée posted on Facebook a professionalFeeling quite spry; the wound is healing The same night the “Jake” e-mail was
“pre-wedding” photograph of the couple. nicely, and I’m no longer wobbly on my sent, an ex-colleague of Mallory’s at Lit-
In it, she and Jake, who got married thatfeet. Not when sober, at any rate.” tle,Brown received an anonymous e-mail
summer, look happy and hopeful. Jake Mallory suggested meeting the agent calling her one of the “nastiest c*nts in
Mallory did not respond to requests for for drinks, or dinner, a week or two later. publishing.” Mallory was asked about the
comment. Dan Mallory, through the Writing to another contact,he described e-mail, and was told that Little, Brown
spokesperson, said that he was “not the an impending trip to London, for which would contact law enforcement if any-
author of the e-mails” sent by “Jake.” he was packing little more than “a moth- thing similar happened again. It didn’t.
eaten jumper.” On February 26th,twelve (Through the spokesperson,Mallory said
n February 14, 2013, a “Jake” mes- days after seven-hour spinal surgery,Mal- that he did not write the message and
O sage to New York contacts de- lory wrote to Parris-Lamb to say that he
scribed overnight surgery—uncommon was in Nashville, for work.
“does not recall being warned” about it.)
In “The Woman in the Window,” Anna
timing for a scheduled procedure—in Three days later,“Jake” wrote another Fox seeks advice about a threatening
an unspecified hospital.“My brother’s group e-mail, saying that “an allergic re- anonymous e-mail,and is told that “there’s
7-hour surgery ended early this morn- action to a new pain killer” had caused no way to trace a Gmail account.”
ing,” the e-mail began.“He experienced Dan “to go into shock and cardiac ar-
significant blood loss—more so than rest.” He went on, “He was taken to the week later, in an apparent attempt
is common during spinal surgeries, so hospital on time and treated immedi-
it required two transfusions.However, ately and is out of intensive care (still on
A at a reset, Dan Mallory wrote a
breezy group e-mail under his own name.
the tumor appears to have been com- a respirator and under sedation).While The cancer surgery, he said, had been “a
pletely removed. His very first words this setback is not welcome it is not per- total success.” A metal contraption was
upon waking up were ‘I need vodka.’ ” manent either, and at least Dan can now attached to his spine, so he was now
I was told that a recipient sent vodka say he has had two lucky escapes in the “half-man,half-machine.” He noted that
to Dan’s apartment, and was thanked space of two months.” “Jake” went on, he’d just seen “Matilda” with his parents.
by “Jake,” who reported that his brother “The worst is past and we are hoping he When Mallory returned to work that
roused himself just long enough to say can go back to his apartment this week- spring, after several weeks, nothing was
that the sender was a goddess. end and then pick up where he left off. said. A former co-worker at Morrow,
38 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 1
1, 201
9
who admires him and still has only the ment made him really quite extraordinary.” discussed Hannah’s non-Christie fiction,
vaguest sense of a health issue, told me The editor at a rival publishing house which later also came to Morrow.Han-
that Mallory “seemed the same as be- who’d had “quippy” exchanges with the nah, who lives in Cambridge, recently
fore.” He hadn’t lost any weight or hair. Jake persona said of the episode, “Even said by phone that they quickly became
After his return, Mallory came to work now it seems a bizarre, eccentric game, friends. Mallory “renewed my creative
on a highly irregular schedule. Unlike but not threatening.” “Jake” hadn’t asked energy,” she said. He had a knack for
other editors, he rarely attended Wed- for cash, so it wasn’t an “injurious scam.” “giving feedback in the form of praise
nesday-afternoon editorial meetings.At The editor said, “This seemed almost for exactly the things I’m proud of.”
one point, another co-worker began performance art.” Chris Parris-Lamb, Hannah seems to have found, in Mal-
keeping a log of Mallory’s absences. however, was affronted, in part because lory, a remarkable source of material.In
Mallory bought a one-bedroom apart- someone close to him had recently died 2015, she completed her second Her-
ment in Chelsea, for six hundred and from cancer. cule Poirot novel, “Closed Casket.”
twenty-five thousand dollars. He deco- The acquaintance who described an Poirot is a guest at an Irish country
rated it with images and models of dogs, industry “based on hope” didn’t see Mal- house, and meets Joseph Scotcher, a
a framed sign reading “Amagansett,” and lory for a few years, then made plans character whose role can’t be described
a reproduction of a seventeenth-century to meet him for a work-related drink, without spoilers. Scotcher is a charm-
engraving of New College, Oxford. in Manhattan.Mallory said that he was ing young flatterer who has told every-
Morrow executives either believed now well, except for an eye problem. one that he is terminally ill, with kid-
that Mallory’s cancer story was real or His eye began to twitch.Mallory’s com- ney disease. During Poirot’s visit,
decided to live with the fact that it was panion asked after Jake.“Oh, he’s dead,” Scotcher is murdered, and an autopsy
not.Explaining Morrow’s accommoda- Mallory said. “Yes, he committed sui- reveals that his kidneys were healthy.
tion of its employee, a former colleague cide.” The acquaintance recalled to me After the murder, Randall Kimpton,
said that Mallory’s focus on international that, at that moment, “I just knew I was an American doctor who is also staying
deals protected him, adding, “Nothing’s never going to correspond or deal with in the house, tells Poirot that he’d be-
more important than global authors.” him again.” come friendly with Scotcher years ear-
The co-worker went on, “There’s a hor- lier, at Oxford; he had begun to doubt
ror movie where all the teachers in a n 2013, Sophie Hannah met Mallory Scotcher’s dire prognosis, while thinking
school have been infected by an alien
parasite.The kids realize it, and of course
I for the first time, over lunch in New
York.They discussed plans, already set
that “surely no one would tell a lie of such
enormity.” Kimpton tells Poirot that he
nobody believes them.That’s what it felt in motion in London, for Hannah to was once approached by someone claim-
like.” The co-worker described Mallo- write the first official Agatha Christie ing to be Scotcher’s brother.This brother,
ry’s “gaslighting, lying, and manipula- continuation novel. William Morrow who looked identical to Scotcher except
tion” in the workplace as cruel, but noted, would publish it in the U.S. They also for darker skin and a wild beard, had
“People don’t care, if it’s not sexual ha-
rassment.” A Morrow spokesperson re-
leased a statement:“We don’t comment
on the personal lives of our employees
or authors. Professionally, Dan was a
highly valued editor, and the publication
of ‘The Woman in the Window’—a #1
New York Times bestseller out of the
gate, and the bestselling debut novel of
2018—speaks for itself.”
An acquaintance of Mallory’s recently
said that “there’s not a lot of confronta-
tion” in publishing.“It’s a business based
on hope. You never know what’s going
to work.” In the industry, rumors about
the “Jake” e-mails were contained—per-
haps by discretion or out of people’s em-
barrassment about having been taken in.
I recently spoke with Victoria San-
ders, an agent who represents Karin
Slaughter, the thriller writer. In 2015,
Slaughter signed a three-book deal, for
more than ten million dollars, involving
Mallory and a British counterpart.San-
ders viewed Mallory as Slaughter’s “quar-
terback,” adding, “His level of engage-
confirmed the kidney disease,and Kimp-
ton had decided “no man of honor would
agree to tell a stranger that his brother
was dying if it were not so.” But the sup-
posed brother had then accidentally re-
vealed himself to be Scotcher, wearing a
beard glued to his face.
A seductive man lies about a fatal dis-
ease, then defends the lie by pretending
to be his brother.The brother’s name is
Blake.When I asked Hannah if the plot
was inspired by real events, she was eva-
sive, and more than once she said, “I re-
ally like Dan, and he’s only ever been
good to me.” She also noted that, before
starting to write “Closed Casket,” she
described its plot to Mallory: “He said,
‘Yes, that sounds amazing!’ ” Hannah,
then, can’t be accused of discourtesy.
But she acknowledged that there were
“obvious parallels” between “Closed Cas-
ket” and “rumors that circulated” about
Mallory.She also admitted that the char-
acter of Kimpton, the American doctor,
owes something to her former editor. I
had noticed that Kimpton speaks with
an affected English accent and—in what
works as a fine portrait of Mallory, mid-
flow—has eyes that “seemed to flare and
subside as his lips moved.” The passage
continues,“These wide-eyed flares were
only seconds apart,and appeared to want
to convey enthusiastic emphasis. One
“I want to keep it, but my wife hates the way it scratches her face.”
was left with the impression that every
third or fourth word he uttered was a
source of delight to him.” (Chris Parris-
Lamb, shown these sentences, said,“My
God! That’s so good.”) While Hannah
was writing “Closed Casket,” her private
working title for the novel was “You’re
So Vain, You Probably Think This
Poirot’s About You.”
A publishing employee in New York
told me that, in 2013, Hannah had be-
come suspicious that Mallory wasn’t tell-
ing the truth when he spoke of making
a trip to the U.K. for cancer treatment,
and had hired a detective to investigate.
This suggestion seemed to be supported
by an account, on Hannah’s blog, of hir-
ing a private detective that summer.Han-
nah wrote that she had called him to de-
scribe a “weird conundrum.” Later,during
a vacation with her husband in Agatha
Christie’s country house, in Devon, she
called to check on the detective’s prog-
ress;he told her that “there was a rumor
going round that X is the case.”
“You’re supposed to be finding out if
X is true,” Hannah told the detective.
“I’m not sure how we could really do
that,” he replied. “Not without hacking
e-mail accounts and things like that—
and that’s illegal.”
Asked about the blog post, Hannah
told me that she had thought of hiring
a detective to check on Mallory, and had
discussed the idea with friends,but hadn’t
followed through. She had, however,
hired a detective to investigate a graffiti
problem in Cambridge.I said that I found
this hard to believe. She went on to say
that she had forgotten the detective’s
name,she had deleted all her old e-mails,
and she didn’t want to bother her hus-
band and ask him to confirm the graffiti
story. All this encouraged the thought
that the novelist now writing as Agatha
Christie had hired a detective to inves-
tigate her editor, whom she suspected of
lying about a fatal disease.
Hannah—who, according to several
people who know her, has a great appe-
tite for discussing Mallory at parties—
also seems to have made fictional use
of him in her non-Poirot writing.“The
Warning,” a short story about psycho-
pathic manipulations, includes an ex-
traordinarily charming man, Tom Rig-
bey, who loves bull terriers.Hannah re-
cently co-wrote a musical mystery,“The
Generalist”; its plot features a success-
ful romance novelist who feels that her
publisher has become neglectful, after
writing a best-seller of his own.
n American woman in mid-career,
A a psychologist with a Ph.D. and
professional experience of psychopathy,
is trapped in her large home by agora-
phobia.She has been there for about a
year, after a personal trauma.If she tries
to go outside,the world spins.She drinks
too much, and recklessly combines al-
cohol and anti-anxiety medication.Po-
lice officers distrust her judgment.On-
line, she plays chess and contributes to
a forum for stress-sufferers,a place where
danger lies.
This is the setup for “Copycat,” a spir-
ited 1995 thriller, set in San Francisco,
starring Sigourney Weaver and Holly
Hunter. It also describes “The Woman
in the Window.” In “Copycat,” the psy-
chologist’s forum log-in is She Doc. In
“Window,” it’s thedoctorisin.
“The Woman in the Window” ac-
knowledges a debt to the film “Rear Win-
dow,” by making Anna Fox a fan of noir
movies and Hitchcock.And Mallory has
publicly referred a few times to “The
Girl on the Train,” a well-told story about
a boozily unreliable witness, a woman
much like Mallory’s boozily unreliable
witness. But he hasn’t acknowledged
“Copycat”—unless one decides that
when, in “The Woman in the Window,”
a photograph with a time stamp in its
corner downloads from the Internet at
a suspenseful, dial-up speed, it is an hom-
age to the same scene in “Copycat,” rather
than an indictment of Internet service
providers in Manhattan.
When I e-mailed Jon Amiel, the di-
rector of “Copycat,” about parallels be-
tween the two narratives, he replied,
“Wow.” Later, on the phone, he proposed
that the debt was probably “not action-
able, but certainly worth noting, and one
would have hoped that the author might
have noted it himself.”
The official origin myth of “The
Woman in the Window” feels under-
written. In the summer of 2015, Mal-
lory has said, he was at home for some
weeks, adjusting to a new medication.
He rewatched “Rear Window,” and no-
ticed a neighbor in the apartment across
the street.“How funny,” he said to him-
self.“Voyeurism dies hard!” A story sug-
gested itself. Mallory is more cogent
when reflecting on his shrewdness re-
garding the marketplace—when he talks
about his novel in the voice of a startup
C.E.O. pitching for funds. “I bring to
‘The Woman in the Window’ more than
thirty years of experience in the genre,”
he told a crime-fiction blogger last win-
ter.He explained to a podcast host that,
before “Gone Girl,” there had been “no
branding” for psychological suspense;
afterward, there was vast commercial
opportunity. Mallory has said that he
favored the pseudonym A. J. Finn in
part for its legibility on a small screen,
“at reduced pixelation.” He came up
with the name Anna Fox after looking
for something that was easy to pro-
nounce in many languages.
Mallory has described writing a sev-
enty-five-hundred-word outline and
showing it to Jennifer Joel, a literary
agent at I.C.M., who is a friend of his;
she encouraged him to continue. He
has said that he then worked for a year,
sustained by Adderall, Coca-Cola, and
electronic music.Mallory told the Times
that he wrote at night and on the week-
ends.Former colleagues who had taken
note of his office absences were skepti-
cal of this claim.
Paula Hawkins’s “The Girl on the
Train” was published in January, 2015.
By the summer of 2016, it had sold 4.25
million copies in the U.S. Early that Anna, the narrator, feels subordinate to
September, just before the release of the Mallory’s struttingly insistent voice.It’s
film adaptation, it was No.1 on the Times much more a Tom Ripley novel than a
paperback best-seller list.On Septem- Patricia Highsmith novel. Instead of
ber 22nd and 23rd, a PDF of “The Highsmith’s disorienting, erotic discov-
Woman in the Window,” by A.J.Finn, ery of character, “Window” is an enact-
was e-mailed to editors in New York ment of Ripleyan manipulation. It’s a
and London. Mallory has said that thriller excited about getting away with
he adopted a pseudonym because he writing a thriller. In a recent e-mail,
wanted publishers to assess the manu- Joan Schenkar, the author of “The Tal-
ented Miss Highsmith,” an acclaimed
biography, described “Window” as a
“novel of strategies, not psychologies.”
It was, she said, “the most self-conscious
thriller I’ve ever opened.”
he selling of “The Woman in the
T Window” was a perfectly calibrated
maneuver, and caused the kind of hoopla
that happens only once or twice a year
script without “taking into account my in American publishing. One publisher
standing in the industry.”This isn’t true, offered hundreds of thousands of dol-
as Mallory has himself acknowledged lars in an effort to preëmpt an auction.
in some interviews: Jennifer Joel told This was rejected, and at least eight pub-
editors that the author worked at a se- lishing imprints, including Morrow,
nior level in publishing. began to bid for the North American
The editors started reading: “Her rights. Meanwhile, offers were being
husband’s almost home.He’ll catch her made for European editions, and Fox
this time.There isn’t a scrap of curtain, 2000 bought the film rights.
not a blade of blind, in number 212— When the bidding reached seven hun-
the rust-red townhome that once housed dred and fifty thousand dollars, Mallory
the newlywed Motts, until recently, until revealed his name. A former Morrow
they un-wed.” employee recalled, “I’d wondered why
The story feels transposed to New this person in publishing wants to be
York from a more tranquil place, like anonymous.Then:Oh, that’s why!” Mal-
North Oxford.The nights are dark; the lory has said that “nobody dropped out”
sound of a cello, or a scream, carries.At at that point; but many, including Lit-
the center of the plot are two neighbor- tle, Brown, did.When it was announced
ing houses, on the same side of a street, that Mallory’s employer had won the
with side windows that face each other auction, one joke in New York was “The
across a garden.This arrangement is easy call was coming from inside the house!”
to find in most parts of the world that Morrow sent out a press release say-
aren’t Manhattan. ing that Mallory had been “profiled in
Mallory cannily set himself the task USA Today”—he hadn’t—and quoting
of popularizing the already wildly pop- Jennifer Brehl, the Morrow editor who
ular plot of “The Girl on the Train.” had won the auction.“A. J. Finn’s voice
His book consists of a hundred very and story were like nothing I’d ever heard
short chapters, and reads like a film before,” she said.“So creepy, sad, twisty-
script that has been novelized, on a dead- turny, and cunning.” She said that she
line, under severe vocabulary restric- had not recognized this voice as Mallo-
tions:sunshine “bolts in” through a door; ry’s, and added, “He’s already known as
eyebrows “bolt into each other”; eyes an esteemed editor; I predict a long ca-
“bolt open”; one character is “bolted to reer as a brilliant novelist, too.” Liate
the sofa”;another has “strong teeth bolt- Stehlik, the Morrow publisher, later wrote
ing from strong gums.” He then gilded to booksellers, “I love it, and the only
his text with references to Tennyson, thing I thought when I was reading it
Nabokov, and the Pitt Rivers Museum, was that Morrow must publish this book.”
in Oxford.The over-all effect is a little Mallory stayed on as an editor at
like reading the e-mails sent by “Jake”: Morrow for another year. He set up a
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 1
1, 201
9 41
corporation, A. J. Finn, Inc., using an
Amagansett P.O.box.A photograph of
him smiling and unshaven,taken by Hope
Brooks,the older of his sisters,began ap-
pearing in stories about his success.
he Mallory house in Amagansett
T is set back from a quiet road; trees
line the driveway, joining overhead to
form a tunnel.On an overcast morning
just before Thanksgiving, I walked up
to the house,and reached a garage whose
doors were open.An S.U.V.was parked
in front;two dogs leaped, barking, from
its back seat.(I recalled that, according
to Dan Mallory,his mother had,on sep-
arate occasions,killed two dogs by back-
ing up over them.)
John Mallory, Dan’s father, came out
of the garage, wearing a denim shirt.
He is in his mid-sixties,and has a hand-
some, squarish face.He apologized for
the pandemonium, and joked,“I’m just
the lawn guy.”
I explained why I was there. “Dan
does not want me commenting,” he said.
“He’s my son, so I have to respect his
privacy.” But his manner was friendly,
and the dogs calmed down,and we stood
talking for a few minutes.“He’s a won-
derful young man, he truly is,” John said.
I said that I’d become interested in
Dan’s accounts of cancer—the claim that
he’d had a malignant tumor, and that his
mother had died of cancer.
“No, no,” he said. He didn’t sound
surprised or annoyed—rather, he was
obliged to correct a misapprehension.
When Dan was a teen-ager, he said,“his
mother did have cancer.Stage V, so she
was next to death. But, no, Dan didn’t
have it.He’s just been an absolutely per-
fect son.He has his faults, like we all do,
he’s just a tremendous young man.”
Did Dan have cancer later? “No, no,”
John said,adding that Dan had told him
that “he’d been misquoted several times,
and it really bothers him when things
come out that are negative about him.”
I began to describe the “Jake” e-mails.
“Dan and his brother,Jake,are very close,”
John said,adding that “Jake would never,
ever say” Dan had fallen ill with cancer,
because it wasn’t true.I wondered if John
had been told that such e-mails existed,
and could be explained as the work of
a scurrilous third party. They can’t—
Dan saw replies written to the “Jake”
e-mail address, and responded to them.
42 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 1
1, 201
9
When Dan wrote about living in a earnestness: he’s prone to tears, and
single-parent family when he was sev- teaches swimming to developmentally
enteen, was that true? disabled children.
“No,” John said. “Well, in a way I Then Ethan murders his mother,
guess it was,because my wife and I were and—in the novel’s climax—appears one
separated.”They were apart for two and night in Anna’s bedroom, with a letter
a half years,he said.“She made me come opener as a weapon, and a crazed look,
back,” he went on, laughing. “We had
our differences. We didn’t file for di-
saying, “Older women interest me.” In
passages that seem more fluent than
vorce or anything like that.” He added, those which have come before, Ethan
“Pam was saying, ‘I think you made a acknowledges the matricide, and de-
mistake.But it’s up to you.’ And then I scribes it as “exhilarating.” Sitting on An-
realized I’m being an idiot.” na’s bed, playing with the letter opener,
I asked if the separation was difficult he acknowledges other transgressions.
for Dan.“Very difficult,” he said.“The By impersonating a friendly grandmother
family’s very closely knit and to see the on Anna’s agoraphobia forum, he has
dad not there on Thanksgiving or tricked her into giving up her passwords.
Christmas—Ian, it’s my fault.I hate to He has copied her house key, allowing
this day to think they had a Thanksgiv- him to go in and out of her house. “I
ing dinner without me.” come here almost every night,” he says.
He continued,“Dan went through a He forces her to agree that she is “very
tough time, in his teen-age years, but fucking stupid.” He mocks her—a child
he’s really pulled together.” In the past, psychologist—for not recognizing him
“a lot of times, he hid from us.” Now for what he is.
“every morning I get a FaceTime from “I know what I am,” Ethan tells her.
Dan.He just bought a little French bull- “Does that help?”
dog.Oh, my God, Ian—he bought one Anna says to herself, “Psychopath.
three weeks ago, the dog has, like, four The superficial charm,the labile person-
thousand toys, a little blanket.He’s just ality, the flat affect.” She then tells him,
an avid dog-lover, as we all are—as you “You enjoy manipulating others.”
see.He doesn’t have a mean bone in his He replies, “It’s fun.And easy.You’re
body.” He said that, as far as he knew, really easy.” He strokes the blade against
Dan had finished his Ph.D. his thigh. “I didn’t want you to think I
The dogs started barking again. A was a threat.That’s why I said I missed
car came up the driveway.“Here comes my friends.And I pretended I might be
his mother,” John said.“Oh, Lord.” gay.And I cried all those fucking times.”
Pamela Mallory got out of an S.U.V. Both Ethan’s depression and his ac-
with a shopping bag. I introduced my- count of a vicious father were part of a
performance—one effective enough to
dupe a psychologist and draw the eye
away from personality pathology.
n a Morrow sales brochure, Mallory
Isaid that he’d “struggled for more than
fifteen years with severe depression,” and
that, in 2015, he had finally been given a
diagnosis of bipolar II disorder.This an-
nouncement surprised the acquaintances
self. “We’re not doing that,” she said, of Mallory’s who spoke to me.Over the
walking toward the house.“Thank you.” years, he had been willing to talk of can-
cer, near-death, and a brother’s suicide,
n “The Woman in the Window,” much but he hadn’t mentioned mental illness
I of whose plot this article is about to so severe that he’d sought relief in elec-
give away, Anna Fox watches a family tric shocks and ketamine.
move in next door. Ethan, the family’s Speaking in Colorado last January,
sorrowful and lonely only child, aged Mallory quoted a passage from Kay
about fifteen, visits Anna. She is filled Redfield Jamison’s memoir,“An Unquiet
with pity when he describes a controlling, Mind,” in which she describes repeat-
violent father, and she is struck by his edly confronting the social wreckage
caused by her bipolar episodes—know-
ing that she had “apologies to make.”
Nobody I spoke to remembered a Mal-
lory reckoning or an apology. In more
recent public appearances, Mallory seems
to have dropped this reference to wreck-
age. Instead, he has accepted credit for
his courage in bringing up his mental
suffering, and he has foregrounded his
virtues.Asked, on an Australian podcast,
to define himself in three adjectives, Mal-
lory said, “Inquisitive.Kind—I do think
I’m a kind person.” He clicked his tongue.
“And I love French bulldogs.I don’t know
if there’s an adjective that sums that up.”
Mallory clearly has experienced men-
tal distress. At Mallory’s request, his
psychiatrist confirmed to me that Mal-
lory was given a diagnosis of bipolar II.
The psychiatrist said that Mallory, be-
cause of his mother’s illness, sometimes
had “somatic complaints, fears, and pre-
occupations,” including about cancer.
But a bipolar II diagnosis does not eas- • •
ily explain organized untruths, main-
tained over time. Nigel Blackwood, a
forensic psychiatrist at King’s College firm working on Mallory’s behalf pro- I was utterly terrified of what people
London, told me that patients with the vided The New Yorker with a statement would think of me if they knew—that
condition may experience “periods of from him:“For the past two years, I’ve they’d conclude I was defective in a way
inflated self-esteem,” but he empha- spoken publicly about mental illness: that I should be able to correct, or, worse
sized that hypomanic episodes “cannot the defining experience of my life— still, that they wouldn’t believe me.Dis-
account for sustained arrogant and de- particularly during the brutal years sembling seemed the easier path.”
ceptive interpersonal behaviors.” bookending my late twenties and mid- He continued, “With the benefit of
Chris Parris-Lamb, the agent, who thirties—and the central theme of my hindsight, I’m sorry to have taken, or
has a very close family member who is novel. Throughout those dark times, be seen to have taken, advantage of
bipolar, said, “I’ve seen the ravages, the and like many afflicted with severe bi- anyone else’s goodwill, however des-
suffering that the disease can cause.” He polar II disorder, I experienced crush- perate the circumstances;that was never
went on, “If Mallory’s deceit is the prod- ing depressions, delusional thoughts, the goal.”
uct of bipolar episodes, then they have morbid obsessions, and memory prob-
been singularly advantageous to his ca- lems. It’s been horrific, not least be- paperback edition of “The Woman
reer, and that is unlike any bipolar per-
son I’ve ever encountered. And if he is
cause, in my distress, I did or said or
believed things I would never ordinarily
A in the Window” was published in
the U.K. in December, and the novel
one of the lucky ones who has managed say, or do, or believe—things of which, immediately returned to the best-seller
to get his disease under control and pro- in many instances, I have absolutely no list;the U.S.paperback will appear next
duce a best-selling novel—if he is sta- recollection.” month, with a first print run of three
ble and lucid enough to do that—then He went on, “It is the case that on hundred and fifty-five thousand cop-
he is stable and lucid enough to apolo- numerous occasions in the past, I have ies. The movie adaptation, written by
gize to the people he lied to and the stated, implied, or allowed others to be- the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright
people he hurt.” lieve that I was afflicted with a physi- Tracy Letts, is scheduled to be released
Carrie Bearden, a professor of psy- cal malady instead of a psychological on October 4th.
chiatry at U.C.L.A., who has not met one:cancer, specifically.My mother bat- Mallory has said that his second
Mallory, said that a patient with bipolar tled aggressive breast cancer starting novel will be set in San Francisco. It
II disorder cannot attribute to that di- when I was a teenager; it was the for- will have the flavor of an Agatha Chris-
agnosis delusions, amnesia, or “chronic mative experience of my adolescent life, tie story, and will be partly set in a Vic-
lying for secondary gain, or to get atten- synonymous with pain and panic.I felt torian mansion. It’s a story of revenge,
tion.”To do so is “very irresponsible,” she intensely ashamed of my psychological he has said, involving a female thriller
said, and could add to the “already huge struggles—they were my scariest, most writer and an interviewer who learns
stigma associated with these disorders.” sensitive secret. And for fifteen years, of a dark past.He hopes to turn it into
On January 30th, a public-relations even as I worked with psychotherapists, a television series. 
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 1
1, 201
9 43
 ONWARD AND UPWARD WITH THE ARTS
EXTREME RANGE
The vocal experiments of Roomful of Teeth.
I
n a throat, a note is forming.A puff
of air, a pulse of the lungs, rushes
up the windpipe and through the
vocal cords, parting them like a pair
of lips. As the cords begin to vibrate,
they’re stretched taut by muscles to ei-
ther side, raising the pitch. The dia-
phragm pumps more air, rocketing the
note up the vocal tract, making its walls
hum like the barrel of a woodwind.The
sound ricochets back and forth as it
rises, gaining resonance with each re-
bound, till it bursts into the hollow
chamber of the mouth, the ringing cav-
ities of the sinuses, and careens off the
palate into the open air.
The human voice is the world’s most
astonishing instrument, it’s often said.
It’s capable of everything from a trill
to a bark to an ear-splitting scream,
from growling harmonics to liquid ac-
robatics, lofted on the breath like a
lark on an updraft. Instrument is the
wrong word, really.The voice is more
like a chamber ensemble: winds and
strings and blaring horns, strung to-
gether end to end. It’s a pump organ,
a viola, an oboe, and the bell of a trum-
pet, each instrument passing the sound
along to the next, adding volume and
overtones at every step.Throw in the
percussion of the lips and tongue, and
the echoing amphitheatre of the skull,
and you have a full orchestra playing
inside you.
When I joined a chamber choir a
few years ago, my first thought was just
how much could go wrong. The peo-
ple weren’t the problem.Most were ex-
perienced singers, and there were nice
voices all around. It was more the na-
ture of the endeavor. A single voice is
complicated enough, but adding oth-
ers—we were about fifteen singers—
multiplies the complexities.Who missed
that cutoff ? Why do we keep going
flat? Even if the notes are right, the
rhythms can go slack, the chords refuse
to ring. Hitting pitches only gets you
44 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 1
1, 201
9
BY BURKHARD BILGER
so far.The singers have to keep the beat, “Can someone describe what you
modulate volume, match vowels, and just sang?” the conductor asks.
articulate consonants in perfect synch “They’re all just major triads. The
or sequence.Is that an ah or an ae, a ch A pattern is G, F, A-flat—all major
or a k? And even then their unison can chords. Then the B pattern is G, F,
be soured by a single tenor. A-flat, G-flat. It’s always alternating.”
Choral harmony is a kind of mira- “And do we know the voicing?”
cle when it works.It’s not just that every “I remember I was on the third.”
voice is different—that pitch and blend “Yeah,and the bass was on the tonic.”
can vary disastrously, that memory is “That’s what my body was telling
fitful and sight-reading uncertain, that me, but it was also telling me that I’m
there are too many sopranos and not on the ninth.”
enough basses—but that we hear things “And what were you telling your
differently.The sound that travels from body?”
your mouth to my ear passes through It’s early June, and the rehearsal
yet another set of sonic permutations. room, in a rustic lodge on the shores
It enters the auricle—the crumpled of Lake Dunmore, in central Vermont,
cone of the ear—and echoes through has been left unheated, somewhat op-
the auditory canal, strikes the eardrum, timistically.The indoor temperature is
chimes the bones of the middle ear, in the high fifties, and the singers are
and goes spinning down the sousa- bundled up as if for a hike. The con-
phone of the cochlea, tripping nerves ductor, Brad Wells, has on a worn base-
inside like keys on a piano.The sound ball cap and a sweatshirt,and the singers
we hear is one set of instruments trans- are wearing hoodies,woollens,and puffy
lated by another, like a game of tele- vests, some with scarves and beanies.
phone at the U.N.By the time the brain They have the ragamuffin look of
has decoded and combined it all— Christmas carollers,despite their fierce-
Happy Birthday!—it’s a wonder we sounding name: Roomful of Teeth.
even recognize the tune. They’ve been invited to the lake for a
weeklong residency at the New Music
n a room, a chord is forming. Two on the Point festival.(When the adults
I voices, faint but pure, are joined by leave, their cabins will be taken over by
a third, softly keening. They rise and hordes of summer campers.) Mostly,
swell, twist into dissonance and fade. though, they’re here to blow the other
Deeper voices awaken with a groan, singers’ minds.
then settle into a slow, thrumming Roomful of Teeth is a kind of lab
chant. Others join in, then peel away experiment for the human voice. Its
like rain from a spinning tire. They eight singers cover a five-octave range,
shout and wail, gather into pulsating from grunting lows to dog-whistle
chords and resolve, at last, into words: highs. Three have perfect pitch, all
“There will be always something you have classical training, and Wells has
can lean your weight into. There will brought in a succession of experts to
be always something you can rely on.” teach them a bewildering range of other
The singers,four men and four women, techniques:alpine yodelling, Bulgarian
are seated in a half circle around a con- belting, Persian Tahrir, and Inuit and
ductor. As the final chord crests and Tuvan throat singing, among others.
ebbs, they dart their eyes at one an- Because the group writes or commis-
other and grin, the sound still surpris- sions almost all of its pieces, it can cre-
ing after so many repetitions. ate vocal effects that most singers would
The singers in Roomful of Teeth produce music that’s both primal and sophisticated, ancient and startlingly modern.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY CECILIA POUPON THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 1
1, 201
9 45
 ancient and startlingly modern.“There
were these hard lines that had been
drawn around classical voice pedagogy,”
Wells says.“The mentality was: every-
thing else is an inferior use of the voice.
But if people have been using these
techniques in different parts of the world
for so long, how could they be wrong?
I love a throaty or a belchy voice.I love
voices when they crack. I love hearing
grit in the voice.It’s really just pushing
the bounds of what’s beautiful.”

horal directors make unlikely rev-

C olutionaries. Their repertoire is
rooted in church music, in which every
interval can have meaning and har-
mony was once a matter for papal in-
tervention. Christian monks sang in
unison for nearly a thousand years be-
fore they allowed themselves a second
vocal line, and then only in lockstep
with the melody.Three-part harmony
• • had to wait another three centuries,
when English and French clergymen
never attempt.Roomful of Teeth’s first the dawn chorus starts with the insects, added a third or a sixth to the chord.
record won the Grammy Award for then the birds, and then the next more- And what we think of as classical har-
Best Chamber Music/Small Ensem- evolved species.” It would be terrific, mony, with major and minor keys and
ble Performance in 2013. That same he seems to be saying, if this piece could chords that follow the bass line, didn’t
year, one of the group’s two mezzo- convey the same sense of dawning con- emerge until the Renaissance. As late
sopranos, Caroline Shaw, won the Pu- sciousness, of buzzing chaos resolving as the seventeen-hundreds, the tri-
litzer Prize for music for her piece “Par- into order. tone—a dissonant interval of two notes,
tita for 8 Voices.” She was, at thirty, the The singers ponder this for a moment. three whole steps apart—was reviled
youngest person ever to win the award. “If I wake up at noon, does that mean as diabolus in musica: the devil in music.
The piece they’re rehearsing this I’m the most evolved?” Wells, in his way, is like a Protes-
morning was written for them by Mer- “I was up at six-thirty this morning, tant Reformer, nailing his radical the-
rill Garbus, who performs with the so I have webbed toes.” ses to the conservatory door. He be-
bassist Nate Brenner under the name Darwin believed that music and longed to the church before he rebelled
Tune-Yards.The chants and howls and speech developed in part out of people against it. Growing up in Northern
panting rhythms alternate with mo- mimicking natural sounds.Roomful of California in the nineteen-seventies—
ments of sudden beauty—luminous Teeth, you might say, is another step in he is fifty-seven—Wells played violin,
plains swept by shimmering chords— that evolution.The group’s exotic tech- trumpet, and jazz guitar, and sang ev-
but it’s not always clear if that’s what niques not only use different parts of erything from barbershop to the Beach
Garbus intended.She taught the piece the vocal anatomy; they’re sound prints Boys. But his most formative musical
to the singers a few years ago, mostly of the landscapes where they were de- experiences were in his family’s Chris-
by ear, and never gave them a score. veloped. In Sardinia, in a tradition tian Science church.Mary Baker Eddy,
“It’s always a bit of an adventure re- known as cantu a tenòre, four men stand the founder of Christian Science, took
constructing it from collective mem- in a tight square and sing harmonies a dim view of choirs—“just more fod-
ory,” Wells says.Although Wells is the pitched to the sounds of their livestock: der for people to play their power
group’s founder and artistic director as the lowest voice is a cow, the middle games,” Wells says.She liked her con-
well as its conductor, his role in rehears- voices are a sheep and the sound of the gregations to do the singing, not as a
als tends to be more watchful than con- wind, and the soloist on top is like a performance but as an expression of
trolling.He sits facing the singers, hands shepherd singing to his flock. divine harmony. But the services did
in his lap, eyes following the score on By combining such sounds with the allow for occasional solos.By the time
an iPad, only occasionally offering a echoing cliffs of a Swiss yodel, or the Wells was in high school, he was work-
cue or an interpretive note.“I want this lashing rain of Korean P’ansori, and re- ing as a paid cantor at churches through-
to be true, but I don’t know if it is,” he fracting them through the mind of a out the area, practicing or going to re-
tells them at one point.“I’ve heard that composer, the group produces music hearsals four hours a day and thinking
when the sun rises in the rain forest, that’s both primal and sophisticated, of a career as a singer.
46 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 1
1, 201
9
 “I didn’t miss a day,” he told me one
afternoon. “I thought, Let’s see what
this instrument is capable of.” We were
sitting in a windowless studio in the
library at Williams College, in Wil-
liamstown,Massachusetts,where Wells
directs the vocal program and is an art-
ist-in-residence.Tall and spare, with a
shaved head and a trim beard, he still
has something of the seminarian about
him—a studious self-containment, a
cerebral serenity. He loved the disci-
pline of Christian Science, he told me.
“It’s a kind of full-contact sport for re-
ligion. If you’re in it, you’re in it every
day, studying, praying, talking—it sat-
urates your life.” But his faith eventu-
ally foundered on some of its core te-
nets. At the Christian Science school
where he studied voice—Principia Col-
lege, in Elsah, Illinois—one of his clos-
est friends was gay and tormented by
the Church’s sexual intolerance. And
Wells had known a number of Church
members who died after refusing med-
ical treatment. (Mary Baker Eddy in-
sisted on faith healing, though she took
morphine for her own illnesses.) “I just
thought, If there is some universal in-
telligence manifested on this plane,why
isn’t medicine an expression of that?”
Wells told me.“And if we’re all ascend-
ing toward a form of love, why isn’t
sexuality part of that?”
Wells has a deep, oaky baritone that
roughens to a grumble in its lower reg-
ister. He tried speaking at a higher
pitch a few years ago, when a voice
therapist told him that his tone was
causing vocal fatigue.“But it just didn’t
feel like me,” he said.As he talked, his
hands moved over a laptop keyboard,
splicing and shuffling a stack of vocal
tracks on a pair of computer screens.
He was piecing together some record-
ings he’d made of one of the oldest
known Shaker hymns, called “Solemn
Song No. 1.” Four of the tracks were
solo voices—Roomful of Teeth’s Car-
oline Shaw and the folk singers Rhi-
annon Giddens, Sam Amidon, and
Eamon O’Leary.The other tracks were
an amateur choir that his wife, Betsy
Burris, had put together with singers
from her Congregational church in
Williamstown. The piece was part of
an installation that Wells was creating
for a restored Shaker village in Han-
cock,Massachusetts.When the record-
ing was done, it would play on an end-
less loop inside an old silo.
The Shakers, like the Christian Sci-
entists, were believers too ardent for
ordinary churches. Dissident Quakers
impatient with their faith’s passivity,
they shipped to New York from En-
gland in 1774 and sailed up the Hud-
son, reaching Hancock nine years later.
Celibate by principle—they peopled
their ranks with orphans and adop-
tees—they channelled their passions
into religion, handicrafts, and music.
“They’d sing as they brought the cows
in from the field, sing at daily worship,
sing while peeling onions,” Jennifer
Trainer Thompson,the director of Han-
cock Shaker Village, told me. They
went on to compose more than ten
thousand songs, and invented a new
kind of pen nib to aid in their tran-
scription.The later hymns, often based
on Appalachian folk tunes, are fairly
conventional. But the early Shakers
mistrusted fancy lyrics and fussy com-
positions,preferring wordless tunes like
this one, full of the shuddering ecsta-
sies that gave them their name.Those
were the songs that Wells loved best.
After graduating from Principia,
Wells earned a master’s degree in music
from the University of Texas at Austin
and a doctorate from Yale. But along
the way he switched from singing to
conducting and composing.His voice,
rich as it was, couldn’t go low or high
enough for operatic roles, and opera
was one of the few profitable careers
“ You’d be amazed how much I save bringing my foie gras from home.”
he could imagine as a trained singer.“I
like opera,but it’s far from where I want
to live all the time,” Wells told me.“And
the question came up even then: Why
aren’t there other places for a classically
trained singer to make a living?”
t’s an old singer’s complaint:orches-
I tras get paid but choruses don’t.Vi-
olinists can find full-time work in a
string section; trombonists can earn
their keep with the brass. But aside
from a few prominent church choirs
and opera choruses, and a handful of
small ensembles like Chanticleer or the
King’s Singers, choral singing is vol-
unteer work. Even when an orchestra
and a chorus perform together, in a
piece like Beethoven’s Ninth, the in-
strumentalists are often the only ones
on the clock.
Opera and solo work are the big ex-
ceptions. Their underlying technique,
known as bel canto, is extraordinarily
hard to master. To produce the right
sound, countless muscles have to be
coördinated, reflexes marshalled, and
unseen body parts relaxed, until a col-
umn of air flows smoothly and evenly
as the singer moves through her entire
range.It’s a mixture of zen and jujitsu.
First developed in the seventeenth cen-
tury by the Italians—their clear, open
vowels suited it perfectly—bel canto
does a number of felicitous things at
once.It balances the body’s resonances,
fosters a natural vibrato, warms the
voice with overtones, and colors it with
 choir.“I mean, holy shit!” he says.“The
oranges and reds and pinks! At first I
was thinking, No, no, no.We’re always
trying to remove those colors from the
mix—to get this beautiful, uniform
blend from top to bottom.But the end
result is that the range of colors and
timbres gets more and more narrow.”
The great project of twentieth-cen-
tury music was to liberate instruments
from their prescribed sounds, Wells
says, citing the Dutch composer Louis
Andriessen. “Now it’s time to liberate
the voice.”

hen Wells founded Roomful of

W Teeth, in 2008, he began with a
set of strict conditions, like a biologist
designing a study. The group would
sing neither the standard choral reper-
toire nor songs from other vocal tradi-
tions.“I thought, We’re trying to build
a new kind of instrument,” Wells told
me. “So let’s force ourselves to come
up with clothes cut for our particular
physique.” His model was the avant-
garde restaurant Alinea, in Chicago.
He remembers reading a review of it
in Gourmet that fall. “It talked about
the hushed perfection of the place, and
the silence as the diners were presented
these inventive plates,” he said.After a
while, the reviewer couldn’t help but
start giggling, he was so surprised and
delighted.“I thought, That’s the effect
Brad Wells, top right, and his group are pushing the limits of choral singing. I want my group to have.”
Wells began by commissioning
emotion.(One researcher at Ohio State that the music they can sing is mostly pieces from two composers: Judd
argued that vibrato might trigger emo- written for amateurs. Choral singing Greenstein and Rinde Eckert.He per-
tions in listeners because it simulates tends to mean one thing:a clear,straight suaded MASS MoCA, a contemporary-
the sound of a voice trembling with tone designed to blend seamlessly with art museum housed in an old mill com-
fear.) Above all, bel canto is loud. It others. It can be an exacting skill, ca- plex five miles from Williams, to host
carries long distances.It’s why the Rus- pable of great beauty and refinement. a three-week residency, capped by a
sian soprano Anna Netrebko can fill a But it’s only a fraction of what the voice concert.Then he arranged for experts
concert hall with her voice, why she can do.It’s like a ballet choreographed in yodelling, belting, and Tuvan throat
can be heard above a thundering or- only for the upper body, a painting with singing to come teach their techniques.
chestra and a wailing chorus.It’s a great nothing but greens and blues. All he needed now was some singers.
feat of human athleticism, beyond the Wells remembers the first time he “It felt like a very one-time thing,”
capacity of most bodies.An opera star, heard a record by a Bulgarian women’s Caroline Shaw recalled, when I asked
no less than a sumo wrestler or an choir,in the late nineteen-eighties.Here about her audition for the group.“And
N.B.A. center, is a physical freak—a was music that broke all the rules of kind of a bad idea, actually. Are we
human bell, ringing in every hollow Western choral singing. The women going to learn to throat-sing that
and bone. You’re either born that way were technically belting, like Broadway quickly? Will the music be written in
or you’re not. singers—pushing their chest voices up time? Will it make any sense? I thought,
Wells was not.And the result strikes into the range of their head voices— Yeah, sure, I like those Bulgarian sing-
him as both a practical and an aesthetic but they took it much further. The ers. I like to yodel. But, looking back,
problem. It means that most classical sound was nasal, emphatic, transfix- I just didn’t know very much. I knew
singers can’t sing some of the finest ing—closer to Arab ululation than to a lot about Beethoven string quartets.”
and most lucrative vocal repertoire, and the smooth sonority of an American For the auditions,Wells set up in an
48 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 1
1, 201
9
apartment on the Upper West Side, on
102nd Street just off Broadway. Each
singer had to perform a classical piece
and a nonclassical piece. Shaw sang a
medieval plainchant, “Salve Regina,”
and Otis Redding’s “I’ve Been Loving
You Too Long.” The mezzo-soprano
Virginia Warnken Kelsey sang Bach
and “Mary Jane” by Alanis Morissette.
The baritone Avery Griffin sang Schu-
mann and “Fire in the Hole” by Steely
Dan.“So that was fun,” Griffin told me.
“And then he had us do sight-reading
exercises, and that was horrifying.”
Griffin, who hails from Weehawken,
New Jersey (“The smallest of the
Hawkens”), has foxlike features and a
skeptical turn of mind. Like Shaw, he
was convinced that the group was a bad
idea.“But it was kind of a dead month
for gigs, and I needed the money,” he
said. Wells first had him sing through
some standard choral pieces.Then he
tossed him a curveball: a violin part
from Bartók’s String Quartet No.1.Be-
cause it was written for a stringed in-
strument, the part was torture to fol-
low.It was like translating Russian into
English while singing a tune for the
first time.“I cried,” Griffin said.“I left
saying my life is a hollow lie.”
Singers tend to be either the worst
musicians in the room or the best.Some
are content to sing the same five or six
operas over and over, never bothering
to learn another. But those who spe-
cialize in new music,or in thorny twen-
tieth-century pieces,have to be as adept
as they are adventurous.Voices have no
frets or keys to place the pitches; no
brass or wood—impervious to running
noses—to make the sound. Wells in-
vited pop and musical-theatre perform-
ers to audition, as well as classically
trained singers, but only the latter had
the right technical chops.“He needed
people who could just look at a score
and know it, who could get it together
in one day,” Kelsey told me.“They had
to be able to name tone rows, or pick
out a single note from a tone cluster.
It was like an advanced-musicianship
test from grad school.”
The eight singers who made the cut
were all in their twenties. Four were
trained instrumentalists: Shaw was a
violinist, the soprano Martha Cluver
was a violist, the bass Cameron Beau-
champ played trombone, and the tenor
Eric Dudley studied piano.Among the
others, Kelsey, the soprano Estelí
Gomez, and the bass-baritone Dashon
Burton all studied voice, but with an
eye toward contemporary music.As for
Griffin, he had trained as both a singer
and a composer, but he thinks it was
something else that got him in. Even
in the Bartók, he says, when the inter-
vals and rhythms nearly brought him
to tears,he kept plowing ahead:“I think
that’s what Brad really wanted to see:
could you keep on going.Because that
openness and bravery may be the pri-
mary thing about this group.”
ne afternoon this past August, in
O a loft on the second floor of one
of the mills at MASS MoCA, a young
composer named Harry Stafylakis was
having the group sing death metal.Tall
and piratical, with a man bun and a
pointy beard, Stafylakis studied piano
as a boy in Montreal then dumped it
for heavy-metal guitar.“I was obsessed
with Beethoven,” he said. “That was
my gateway to metal.” Having circled
back to classical music in college, he
still favored doomsday chords and jack-
hammer rhythms.He was planning to
compose a piece for Roomful of Teeth
based on a Web site called the Dictio-
nary of Obscure Sorrows.
Stafylakis was one of eight com-
posers who’d been invited to MASS
MoCA for that summer’s residency.
Some—like Eve Beglarian and Julia
Wolfe—were accomplished profes-
sionals. Others were promising new-
comers, plucked from more than four
hundred applications to the American
Composers Forum. Wells had spent
the previous day introducing them to
the vocal techniques that his group
had learned in its decade together.
Death-metal singing, or supraglottal
laryngeal constriction, was the latest
addition to the list.The previous sum-
mer, a singer named Androo O’Hearn,
from the band Shaolin Death Squad,
had taught the group’s members to
tighten their throats so that their ary-
epiglottic folds—triangular membranes
that encircle the larynx and protect it
when swallowing—began to vibrate
furiously. Death-metal singers sound
as if they’re broiling their vocal cords
with a blowtorch, but the technique
causes no harm when done right.
Composing for Roomful of Teeth,
Wells says, is like writing for a pipe
organ with multiple stops: an instru-
ment that approximates the sound of
many others. It’s an imperfect simile,
he admits: “Mimicry is just a parlor
trick.It’s the liquid between these styles
that I want them to explore.” He’s often
asked if learning a technique like Per-
sian Tahrir—a kind of hiccupping
wail—is a form of cultural appropria-
tion.“Yes, these techniques have stylis-
tic fingerprints that are specific to cer-
tain musical languages,” Wells says.“But
they’re also just ways that the vocal folds
vibrate. How constricted is the larynx,
and how does air pass through it? Which
frequencies are amplified or attenuated?
All those things are just basic physiol-
ogy,and they manifest in different ways
around the world.” Flipping back and
forth between your chest and head
voice—what we call yodelling—comes
so naturally, for instance, that countless
cultures do it.There are Swiss yodellers,
cowboy yodellers, and polyphonic
Pygmy yodellers in the forests of the
Congo. “No one culture can say, ‘We
are the yodelling culture,’ ” he says.
To some composers, this is won-
derfully liberating. “I want to write
something for them tomorrow,” Julia
Wolfe told me during a break.“I mean,
I can’t wait.” Wolfe, who is sixty, has a
head of brilliant red hair and features
lit and charged by a constant current
of ideas. She won the Pulitzer Prize
in 2015 for “Anthracite Fields,” an or-
atorio about coal miners in Pennsyl-
vania. On the drive to MASS MoCA
from New York, she’d been listening
to Aretha Franklin, who’d died a few
days earlier.“You can hear her coming
out of all the cars as they drive by,” she
said. “I’ve been thinking, That blues
shout she does—I don’t think I’ve heard
that in a choral piece before.” She
laughed. “It’s sort of a composer’s
dream.I think of all the parts that I’ve
had to take out of pieces over the years,
thinking, Oh, they won’t be able to do
that. Well, these guys can do it.”
To other composers, it’s a little over-
whelming.Wells not only wants them
to incorporate novel techniques; he
wants them to tailor their pieces to the
group’s voices. Later that week, Staf-
ylakis and the others would sit down
with the singers one by one and take
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 1
1, 201
9 49
notes on their individual ranges, skills,
and timbres. Most choirs ignore such
differences or try to smooth them over—
to sound like a single voice.But Room-
ful of Teeth is defined by its idiosyn-
crasies, its flux of timbres and textures:
the deep drone of Beauchamp’s bass
with Cluver’s pristine soprano floating
above it; Kelsey’s gutsy belting against
Dudley’s fluid tenor;Burton’s huge bari-
tone,ember warm,beneath Shaw’s flick-
ering lines; and Gomez above them
all, surfing the riff like Robert Plant on
“Immigrant Song.” They’re less of a
choir than a rock band.
“Could you elaborate on the death
metal a little bit?” one of the compos-
ers asked.“Could we hear an eight-part
death-metal piece?” Wells frowned.
They didn’t have one yet, he said. Just
a few scattered passages. “Can you do
a death-metal chord?” Wells turned to
the singers, who obliged with a subter-
ranean growl, like a family of monsters
snoring in a cave.
“Can you tune the chord and hold it?”
“None of this is pitched,” Beau-
champ said.
“Is it possible to pitch it?”
“I don’t think so.Not yet.” But they
gave it a try anyway, now sounding like
a swarm of prehistoric hornets.
“That’s just bad Kargyraa,” Dudley
said. Kargyraa is the most famous of
the throat-singing techniques from
Tuva, in southern Siberia. Like death
metal, it involves activating parts of
the larynx that usually lie quiet—
in this case, the ventricular folds that
flank the vocal cords.By tightening the
throat and pushing air through it, Kar-
gyraa forces these folds to vibrate at
half the speed of the vocal cords, pro-
ducing two notes at once: the funda-
mental pitch and a groaning sub-har-
monic below it. (The Tuvans, like the
Sardinians, like to imitate their live-
stock;Wells once saw a film of a camel
herder comforting a rejected calf with
Kargyraa.) After a quick demonstra-
tion, Wells had the group try combin-
ing death metal with another Tuvan
technique, known as Khöömei. The
singers cupped their tongues, circled
their lips, and narrowed their throats,
creating high, whistling overtones. It
was mesmerizing, but they could only
sustain it for a few moments.
“What’s the problem?”
50 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 1
1, 201
9
“A lot of these techniques create lots The balance between innovation and
of phlegm,” Kelsey said. “We have to polish, individuality and blend, can be
have time to swallow that down.” She hard to find.Learning new techniques
shrugged. “The amount of time that is unnerving for professional singers.
singers talk about their phlegm is very “All of a sudden, you’re in kindergarten
normalized.” For a technique to sur- again, and your muscles aren’t strong
vive, it has to be safe—it’s an almost enough to do things,” Martha Cluver
Darwinian rule. But there are excep- says.And Roomful of Teeth sometimes
tions.Students of Korean P’ansori tra- feels like one too many sharp musical
ditionally shout themselves hoarse minds in the same room. “We’re this
under waterfalls, till their vocal cords nine-headed amoeba,” Wells says.“We
bleed and are covered in nodules and can conference about every fucking
calluses. The more ravaged the voice, thing.” Some of the singers wouldn’t
the more beautiful it is said to sound. mind a little more traditional,top-down
Roomful of Teeth won’t go that far. direction.Others would like even tighter
Its version of P’ansori is like a band collaboration. “I’m used to being in
saw with a blade guard: a rasping yowl chamber groups where everyone is in-
without the guttural breakup.But every vested in everyone else’s playing,” Shaw
style, no matter how harmless, uses says.“But some people found that offen-
different muscle groups and breathing sive.It got to the point where they were
techniques, different tongue, throat, saying, Caroline, maybe you should just
and mouth positions. Switching be- take a break and check your phone
tween them can be exhausting, and sometimes.”
even dangerous if the singer lapses into This fall,I met up with Shaw at Juil-
poor technique.“When we studied Kar- liard, on Sixty-fifth Street and Broad-
gyraa, I was just growling over and over way. The school had just hired her to
to try and access those muscles, but I coach students and present composi-
couldn’t find them,” Kelsey said. “I tions.Thin-boned and petite,with sharp
would thrash myself every time.” Dud- eyes behind oversized glasses, she had
ley nodded: “Over the arc of a Room- the high-strung yet unruffled quality
ful tour, there is a little bit of fear.”of a bird on a wire.More than any other
composer, Shaw has cracked the code
he question of limits—of how of Roomful of Teeth’s maximalist style—
T much a singer can take—hovers the world-spanning technique that tries
over all the group’s rehearsals.In 2014, to consume every other, like the uni-
during a residency at Williams Col- verse in Krishna’s mouth.Yet she feels
lege, the composer William Brittelle like a bit of an interloper at Juilliard,
the land of bel canto.Although she has
a bachelor’s and master’s in music from
Rice and Yale, and has written pieces
for Renée Fleming and Dawn Upshaw,
her degrees are in violin, not voice or
composition.“I woke up that first morn-
ing last week and thought, Do I have
to wear makeup and jewelry?” she said.
“The opera people in college always
had makeup on.”
began working on a piece called “Psy- Shaw grew up in Greenville, North
chedelics.” The early versions were like Carolina, both at the outskirts of the
a vocal triathlon, alternating between classical music and at the heart of it.
belting, throat singing, and yodelling— Her mother was a trained singer and
impressive to hear but a nightmare to Suzuki-violin instructor.(Shaw started
sing.Brittelle needed sixty-four drafts playing at age two, on a Fruit Roll-
to get it right. In the end, the group’s Ups box with a paint stick for a neck.)
best moments are often the quiet ones, Her church-choir conductor later be-
when the vocal gymnastics settle down came the director of the organ depart-
and the singers fall back into unison, ment at Indiana University. When
their tuning so perfect that it glimmers Shaw first moved to New York, in 2008,
with overtones. after graduating from Yale, she went
 spin weightlessly around one another.
“The detail of the pattern is move-
MY FATHER IN ENGLISH ment,” a voice says, and the music lands
back on its feet.
First half of his life lived in Spanish: the long syntax Roomful of Teeth concerts some-
of las montañas that lined his village, the rhyme times sound like musical playdates—
of sol with his soul—a Cuban alma—that swayed a bunch of composers tossing their
with las palmas, the sharp rhythm of his machete new sonic toys around a sandbox.But
cutting through caña, the syllables of his canarios Shaw’s pieces never feel arbitrary.“Par-
that sung into la brisa of the island home he left tita for 8 Voices” is a pattern book of
to spell out the second half of his life in English— vocal styles: its movements are stitched
the vernacular of New York City sleet, neon, glass— together from plainchant, percussive
and the brick factory where he learned to polish breathing, Early American hymnody,
steel twelve hours a day. Enough to save enough and half a dozen other techniques.Yet
to buy a used Spanish-English dictionary he kept the piece is so carefully constructed,
bedside like a bible—studied fifteen new words like the quilts that Shaw grew up with
after his prayers each night, then practiced them in North Carolina, that even its show-
on us the next day: Buenos días, indeed, my family. iest bits fit together.
Indeed más coffee. Have a good day today, indeed— To Wells, the piece is both a work
and again in the evening: Gracias to my bella wife, of art and a capsule history.“The move-
indeed, for dinner. Hicistes tu homework, indeed? ments are like geological strata,” he told
La vida is indeed difícil. Indeed did indeed become me. “In ‘Passacaglia,’ which was writ-
his favorite word, which, like the rest of his new life, ten first, the way the voices stretch past
he never quite grasped: overused and misused often bel canto to belting sounds and the
to my embarrassment. Yet the word I most learned yodel break—those two techniques
to love and know him through: indeed, the exile who were the ground floor. Then it’s an-
tried to master the language he chose to master him, other year and we’re learning P’ansori,
indeed, the husband who refused to say I love you and that’s ‘Sarabande.’” It’s as if Shaw,
in English to my mother, the man who died without like Wells, is rebuilding choral singing
true translation. Indeed, meaning: in fact/en efecto, one layer at a time.
meaning: in reality/de hecho, meaning to say now
what I always meant to tell him in both languages: ow will the singers of the future
thank you/gracias for surrendering the past tense
of your life so that I might conjugate myself here
H sound? Will they be specialists
or generalists, sprinters or decathletes?
in the present of this country, in truth/así es, indeed. Wells is hardly alone in rebelling
against bel canto.At MASS MoCA, one
—Richard Blanco composer all but declared a ban on vi-
brato, and the rest seemed to share her
skepticism.“Part of my argument with
from dance company to dance com- just a bonus.While the group focussed bel canto is that it runs roughshod over
pany, offering to play for their rehears- on new techniques and commissioned intelligibility,” the composer Eve Beg-
als.Pianists were the standard accom- pieces, Shaw hung back and absorbed larian told me. Beglarian is compos-
panists, but Shaw dismissed them as the new sounds, until they felt organic ing a piece for Roomful of Teeth and
parvenus.The first formal ballet classes, to her music.“We had no idea she was the Dessoff Choirs set to text from
she said, were taught by a dance mas- creating this spectacular thing,” Clu- Walt Whitman’s “A Song of the Roll-
ter under Louis XIV, playing a tiny ver told me. ing Earth.” Ordinary speech has a fre-
pochette violin tuned up a fourth.Both “Partita for 8 Voices” was written quency range of between a hundred
N.Y.U.and the Broadway Dance Cen- one movement at a time in the course and three hundred hertz, she said.
ter hired her.“I would just make stuff of three residencies at MASS MoCA. Above a thousand hertz, the brain has
up,” she said. “I knew I needed har- The movements are named for Baroque a hard time distinguishing vowels.Yet
mony, a bass line, and something me- musical forms—“Allemande,” “Sara- bel canto focusses the voice at a fre-
lodically interesting. It was just puz- bande,” “Courante,” and “Passacaglia”— quency more than three times that
zle solving.Puzzle solving in real time.” and the piece begins with spoken in- high—between three and four thou-
When Wells chose Shaw for Room- structions, as if Shaw were back in the sand hertz—so that it can vault over
ful of Teeth, ten years ago, he knew dance studio: “To the side, to the side, the sound of the orchestra to the au-
that she didn’t have the strongest voice to the side and around . . . two-three- dience.“It’s a rare breed of singer who’s
or the best technique. But her pure four.” When the voices suddenly break able, through feats of diction, to make
tone and uncanny musicality more than into high, belting harmonies, it’s as if English intelligible in opera,” Beglar-
made up for it. The composing was the dancers are swept into the air, to ian said. “But if you’re going to set a
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 1
1, 201
9 51
text, presumably you care about the
fucking text!”
Bel canto is an anachronism, some
say—a throwback to an unamplified
age.Why sing so loudly when you can
use a microphone? Like Broadway
shows and pop concerts, Roomful of
Teeth performances are amplified. It’s
the only way for styles like death metal
and Khöömei to be heard from the
stage, and it dramatically expands the
group’s expressive range.“You can just
do more with a microphone,” Kelsey
told me. “We can juxtapose very loud
belting with delicate breath sounds and
then equalize them with the sound-
board.Sopranos, when they were belt-
ing, used to top out at a C above mid-
dle C.Now they can go up to F-sharps
and G’s with the microphone, and
sometimes even higher.”
Yet for most trained singers, bel canto
is still a singular focus.“Vocally, it’s the
Olympics,” a young mezzo-soprano
named Ariana Stultz told me at the
New Music on the Point festival. “If
you’re sick or take a vacation, or time
away to explore other music, instead of
keeping in constant, super-operatic
vocal condition, the falloff is so quick.”
As Jascha Heifetz famously said of the
violin, “If I don’t practice one day, I
“Someone in the building recently password-protected
their Wi-Fi and I’m wondering if it was you.”
know it; two days, the critics know it;
three days, the public knows it.” Car-
oline Shaw, for her part, has no inter-
est in forcing her Juilliard students to
give up bel canto—to turn their great
brass instruments into woodwinds. “I
want a horn to sound like a horn,” she
told me.“I can push it to be breathy or
push it to a squawk. But it took a few
hundred years to get that instrument
to that point, and at some point I want
that horn to do what it can do. And
the same for the voice.”
After Shaw’s Pulitzer in 2013, and
Roomful of Teeth’s Grammy that same
year, the group’s obscure experimenta-
tion phase abruptly ended.Concerts at
Lincoln Center and Disney Hall fol-
lowed for the group, and, for Shaw, col-
laborations with Kanye West and the
National as well as appearances on
“Saturday Night Live” and “Mozart in
the Jungle.” “Is Caroline Shaw Really
the Future of Music?” a profile in the
Guardian wondered.Yet Shaw still lives
in a three-hundred-and-twenty-five-
square-foot one-bedroom, and Room-
ful of Teeth relies on grants and dona-
tions to break even.Wells has managed
to make good on one of his goals: to
pay his singers a living wage.Not every
member of the group can sing at every
concert—Wells has a pool of regular
substitutes. But the core members av-
erage about sixty thousand dollars a
year, for roughly a hundred days of re-
hearsing and performing. Still, that’s
only a fraction of what any successful
pop or country singer would get. And
the audience for opera still dwarfs the
one for contemporary choral music.
There will always be bel-canto spe-
cialists, just as there will be jazz and
gospel singers. But in the Juilliards of
the future, Wells hopes, most singers
will learn a variety of styles. “If you’re
going to work with composers, who are
constantly exploring different colors,
you should be comfortable yodelling
and belting and some sort of throat
singing,” he told me. “After that, the
options become sort of infinite.” Lately,
instead of learning new techniques,
Wells has been going in the opposite
direction.He’s been trying to strip the
voice back to the pitches and textures
of ordinary speech—to tap the hidden
music of everyday life, as the Shakers
once did.
Two years ago, he was listening to
NPR one morning when a story by the
reporter Jasmine Garsd came on.It was
about a heroin addict in North Caro-
lina named Bone who’d overdosed nu-
merous times and was once brought
back to life after his heart stopped.Lis-
tening to Bone, Wells realized that his
story was etched into the very sound
of his voice: a slow, dehydrated drawl,
thick with Southern heat and vocal fry,
the indolence of small towns and the
drag-footed pace of a heart slowed by
heroin.“I thought, This is it.That’s the
whole insanity of the opioid crisis right
there, in one voice.”
Wells has since gone to North Car-
olina with Garsd and interviewed a
number of addicts, dealers, and social
workers for a piece he’s composing
called “Visible Speech.” It’s a series of
portraits pieced together from tapes of
the conversations, interwoven with vocal
lines sung by Roomful of Teeth.Wells
hopes to have the singers capture some
of Bone’s drawling, descending pitches.
“We don’t think of French and English
as languages where pitch has meaning,”
he told me. “But it’s there.” He knew
an Irish composer who lived in Paris
and who noticed a pattern at his local
boulangerie.Customers who said “Bon-
jour!” in an ascending line, with two
notes a sixth apart, got served first.En-
glish has similar patterns, studies have
found.We use minor thirds when tell-
ing sad stories and major thirds when
telling happy ones. We match pitches
with those we admire and expect the
same of those who admire us.We har-
monize when we agree—starting our
sentences a perfect fifth or an octave
from where the last sentence left off—
and grow dissonant when we disagree.
Our arguments are full of tritones.
Whether we know it or not, Wells
said, we’re always singing.

n my drive back to New York in

O August, after my last day at MASS
MoCA, I stopped at Hancock Shaker
Village to see the silo installation.The
exhibit had opened in early June and
seemed to be a hit with visitors. But
there’d been a few complaints from the
farmers and grounds crew, Wells told
me when we met at the village. The
sound of the Shaker hymn looping end-
lessly was driving them all a little crazy.
The silo was about eight feet across
and thirty feet high, with boards of
unvarnished yellow pine as tightly fitted
as cooperage. Built in the late eigh-
teen-hundreds, the building was nearly
blown over by a storm in the winter
of 2017. When repairs were estimated
at a hundred thousand dollars, the vil-
lage had a choice: knock it down or
make it worth the price. Wells was
contacted soon after that.Twelve small
speakers were now mounted at cardi-
nal points around the wall—four at
ear level, another four halfway up, and
a third set close to the ceiling—along
with two speakers in the grain chute.
As we listened, Sam Amidon’s reedy
tenor began to hum, and then another
voice joined him, and another.
I asked Wells if he’d ever found a
religion to replace the Christian Sci-
ence of his youth, and he said no.He’d
tried attending his wife’s church, as
well as others over the years, but the
services seemed half-hearted compared
with the full-body worship he’d known.
“I love our young pastor, but I just can’t
stomach the Jesus brand,” he said.
When he was sick as a boy, he said,
his mother used to sing healing songs
instead of giving him medicine. The
one he remembered best was about not
“So, basically, this is all about what you want?”
• •
really having a body—just pure spirit.
“It was a warm, embracing hymn,” he
said, but it has a complicated effect on
him now. “When I was feeling nau-
seous, she would sing this hymn to me.
So now when I hear it I feel a sort of
malaise.”
Musical legacies are hard to predict.
Will choirs still be singing Roomful
of Teeth arrangements in fifty years?
Or will the group’s focus on individual
voices make the pieces sui generis—
doomed to have no interpreters? Wells
tries not to think about it.He needs to
find new music to perform now, he
says. The better it sounds, the more
likely it is to survive.Art and the human
voice can assume almost any shape, if
we want it badly enough. When Mo-
zart composed “The Magic Flute,” he
wrote the Queen of the Night aria for
his sister-in-law Josepha Hofer, who
had a prodigiously high and mobile so-
prano. Now lots of coloraturas do it.
Benjamin Britten wrote a number of
cabaret songs for his friend Hedli An-
derson, whose voice could go both very
low and very high. Now other sopra-
nos sing those songs, too.“What Room-
ful is trying to do is expand the idea of
the complete singer in the twenty-first
century,” Eve Beglarian told me. “If
there is rep that people want to do, they
will find a way to do the rep.”
The voices were growing louder,
circling the silo one by one with the
choir close behind. Wells lifted his
head to the cloud of voices rising and
swirling toward the ceiling, then
stretched out his arms as they joined
in a great, ragged chord. When they
fell silent, I could hear the tapping of
rain on the roof outside. Then a last
voice sang out—Shaw’s quiet mezzo,
wafting up like a fleck of ash above a
flame.Wells smiled and shook his head.
“It’s more like church than I expected,”
he said. 
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 1
1, 201
9 53
 FICTION

TYPOGRAPHY BY NICO SCHWEIZER

54 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 1

1, 201
9 PHOTOGRAPH BY DREW BROWN
THE PURSE
T
he car says this to her: “Cindy,
listen, I know you’ve got to get
over to 1133 Hollister Avenue
by 2 P.M. for your meeting with Rose
Taylor, of Taylor, Levine & Rodriguez,
L.L.P., but did you hear that Les
Bourses is having a thirty-per-cent-off
sale? And, remember, they carry the
complete Picard line you like—in par-
ticular,that cute cross-body bag in fuch-
sia you had your eye on last week.They
have two left in stock.”
They’re moving along at just over
the speed limit,which is what she’s pro-
grammed the car to do,trying to squeeze
every minute out of the day but at the
same time wary of breaking the law.
She glances at her phone. It’s a quar-
ter past one and she really wasn’t plan-
ning on making any other stops, aside
from maybe picking up a sandwich to
eat in the car,but as soon as Carly (that’s
what she calls her operating system)
mentions the sale, she’s envisioning the
transaction—in and out, that’s all it’ll
take, because she looked at the purse
last week before ultimately deciding
they wanted too much for it. In and
out, that’s all. And Carly will wait for
her at the curb.
“I see you’re looking at your phone.”
“I’m just wondering if we’ll have
enough time ...”
“As long as you don’t dawdle—you
know what you want, don’t you? It’s not
as if you haven’t already picked it out.
You told me so yourself.” (And here
Carly loops in a recording of their con-
versation from the previous week, and
Cindy listens to her own voice saying,
“I love it, just love it—and it’d match
my new heels perfectly.”)
“O.K.,” she says,thinking she’ll forgo
the sandwich.“But we have to make it
quick.”
“I’m showing no traffic and no ob-
structions of any kind.”
“Good,” she says, “good,” and leans
back in the seat and closes her eyes.
HITCHHIKE
he fleet is available to everybody,
T all the time, and you don’t even
have to have an account for Ridz.The
thing is, Ridz isn’t going to take you
directly to Warren’s house or to the
skate park or whatever destination you
tell it, because it’s programmed to take
you first to the Apple Store or GameStop
or wherever you might have spent
money in the past.So it isn’t really free,
and you have to plan for the extra time
to listen to the spiel and say no about
sixty times, but then, eventually, you get
where you want to go.Some kids—and
his mother would kill him if she knew
he was one of them—just step out in
front of any empty fleet car that hap-
pens to be going by and commandeer
it.You can’t get inside if you don’t have
the trip code, of course, but you can
climb up on the roof and cling to the
Lidar till you get to the next stop or
the one after that.
That is what Jackie happens to be
doing at half past one on this particu-
lar school day, clinging to the roof of
one of Ridz’s S.D.C.Volvos and catch-
ing bugs in his teeth, when his moth-
er’s car suddenly appears in the other
lane and he freezes. His first instinct
is to jump down on the curb side, but
they’ve got to be going forty miles an
hour—which feels like a hundred with
the way the wind is tearing at him—
so he flattens himself even more, as if
that could make him invisible.His plan
was to go over to Warren’s and hang
out, nothing beyond that, though he
could see a forty-ouncer in his future
and maybe another hitch over to the
beach with Warren and Warren’s girl-
friend, Cyrilla, but now, with his moth-
er’s car inching up on him, all that’s
about to go south in a hurry. She’ll
ground him for sure, cut his allowance,
probably report him to his father (who
won’t do much more than snarl over
the phone from Oregon, where he’s
living with Jennifer and never coming
back), and then go through the whole
charade of taking away his phone and
his games for a week, or however long
she thinks is going to impress on him
just how dangerous that kind of be-
havior is.
All bad.But then, when the car pulls
even with him, he sees that his mother,
far from looking out the window and
catching him in the act,isn’t even awake.
She’s got her head thrown back and
her eyes closed and Carly’s doing the
driving without her. He doesn’t think
in terms of lucky breaks or anything
like that—he just accepts it for what it
is.And,at the next light,he slides down
off the car and takes to his feet, his back
turned to the street, to the cars, to her.
KNIGHTSCOPE
he reason for the meeting with
T Rose Taylor is to arrange legal rep-
resentation for a homeless man named
Keystone Bacharach, who spends his
days on the steps of the public library
with a coterie of other free spirits and
unfortunates, and at night sleeps under
a bush in front of the S.P.C.A.facility,
where he can have a little privacy.What
most people don’t realize—and Cindy,
as an advocate for the homeless, does—
is how psychologically harrowing it is
to live on the streets, where through all
the daylight hours you’re under public
scrutiny. Your every gesture, whether
intimate or not, is on display for peo-
ple to interpret or dismiss or condemn,
and your only solace is the cover of
darkness, when everything’s hidden.
And this is the problem: the S.P.C.A.,
in a misguided response to a rash of
break-ins, graffiti tagging, and dump-
ster diving for syringes and animal tran-
quillizers, had deployed one of Knight-
scope’s Autonomous Data Machines
to patrol the area, which meant that
Mr. Bacharach was awakened every
thirty minutes, all night long, by this
five-foot-tall, four-hundred-pound
robot shining a light on him and giv-
ing off its eerie high-pitched whine be-
fore asking,in the most equable of tones,
“What is the situation here?” (To which
Mr. Bacharach, irritated, would reply,
“It’s called sleep.”)
A week ago, she went down there
after hours to see for herself, though
her sister had called her crazy (“You’re
just asking to get raped—or worse”)
and even Carly, on dropping her off,
had asked,“Are you sure this is the cor-
rect destination?” But they didn’t know
Keystone the way she did.He was just
hurt inside, that was all, trying to heal
from what he’d seen during his tour of
duty in Afghanistan, and if he couldn’t
make a go of it in an increasingly dig-
itized society, that was the fault of the
society. He had an engaging personal-
ity, he was a first-rate conversationalist
comfortable with a whole range of sub-
jects, from animal rights to winemak-
ing to the history of warfare (light years
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 1
1, 201
9 55
ahead of Adam,her ex,who toward the
end of their marriage had communi-
cated through gestures and grunts only),
and he was as well read as anybody she
knew. Plus,he was her age,exactly.
He was waiting for her in front of
the S.P.C.A., dressed, as always, in
shorts,flip-flops,T-shirt,and denim
jacket,his hair—he wore it long—pulled
back tightly in a ponytail.“Thanks for
coming,” he said,taking the gift bag
she handed him (trail mix,
dried apricots, a pair of
socks,a tube of toothpaste)
without comment. “This
is really going to open your
eyes, because, no matter
how you cut it,this is ha-
rassment,pure and simple.
Of citizens. In a public
place.And it’s not just me.”
She saw now that there
were half a dozen other figures there,
sprawled on the pavement or leaning
against the wall,with their shopping
carts and belongings arrayed around
them.It was almost dark,but she could
see that at least one of them was famil-
iar—Lula,a woman everyone called
Knitsy,because her hands were in con-
stant motion,as if trying vainly to stitch
the air.The street was quiet at this hour,
which only seemed to magnify the gar-
ble of whining,yipping,and sudden
startled shrieks coming from the
S.P.C.A.facility behind them,and if it
felt ominous it had nothing to do with
these people gathered here but with the
forces arrayed against them. She said,
“Is it due to come by soon?”
He nodded in the direction of the
parking lot at the far end of the facil-
ity. “It went down there,like,fifteen,
twenty minutes ago,so it should be
along any minute now.” He gave her
an angry look. “Like clockwork,” he
said,then called out,“Right,Knitsy?,”
and Knitsy,whether she knew what she
was agreeing to or not,said,“Yeah.”
The night grew a shade darker.Then
one of the dogs let out a howl from the
depths of the building,and here it came,
the Knightscope K5+ unit,turning the
corner and heading for them on its base
of tightly revolving wheels. She’d seen
these units before—at the bank,in the
lot behind the pizza place,rolling along
in formation in last year’s Fourth of
July parade—but they’d seemed unre-
56 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 1
1, 201
9
markable to her,no more threatening
or intrusive than any other labor-sav-
ing device,except that they were big-
ger,much bigger.She’d only seen them
in daylight,but now it was night,and
this one had its lights activated—two
eerie blue slits at the top and what would
be its midriff,if it had a midriff,in ad-
dition to the seven illuminated sensors
that were arrayed across its chest,if it
had a chest.Its shape was that of a huge
hard-boiled egg,which in
daylight made it seem or-
dinary,ridiculous even,but
the lights changed all that.
“So what now? It’s not
going to confront us,is it?”
“You watch,” Keystone
said.
The K5+,as she knew
from the literature, fea-
tured the same Light De-
tection and Ranging device that Carly
had,which used a continuously sweep-
ing laser to measure objects and map
the surrounding area,as well as thermal-
imaging sensors,an ambient-noise mi-
crophone,and a three-hundred-and-
sixty-degree high-definition video cap-
ture.It moved at a walking pace,three
miles an hour,and its function was sur-
veillance,not enforcement. She knew
that,but still,at this hour in this place,
she felt caught out, as if she’d been
doing something illicit—which,she
supposed,was the purpose of the thing
in the first place.
But now it was stopping,pivoting,
focussed on Knitsy,whose hands flut-
tered like pale streamers in the ray of
light it emitted,which had suddenly be-
come more intense,like a flashlight beam.
“What is the situation here?” it asked.
Knitsy said,“Go away. Leave me
alone.”
The K5+ didn’t move. It had been
specifically programmed not to engage
in conversation the way Carly did,be-
cause its designers wanted to avoid con-
frontations—it was there to deter crim-
inal activity by its very presence and to
summon the police if the need should
arise. Now it said,“Move on.”
“Hey,” Keystone called out,waving
his hands.“Over here,Tinhead.”
She watched the thing swivel and
redirect itself,starting down the side-
walk toward them. When it came up
even with her and Keystone,it stopped
and focussed its light on them.“What
is the situation here?” it asked her,em-
ploying the voice of one of NPR’s most
genial hosts,a voice designed to put
people at ease. But she didn’t feel at
ease—just the opposite—and that was
a real eye-opener.
What happened next was sudden
and violent. Keystone just seemed to
snap—and maybe he was showing off
for her,thinking,in some confused way,
that he was protecting her—but in that
moment he tucked his shoulder like a
linebacker and slammed into the thing,
once,twice,three times,until he finally
managed to knock it over with a screech
of metal and shattering glass. Which
was bad enough—vandalism,that was
what she was thinking,and her face was
on that video feed,too—but then he
really seemed to take his frustration out
on the thing,seizing a brick he’d stashed
under one of the bushes and hammer-
ing at the metal frame until the unit set
off a klaxon so loud and piercing she
thought her heart would stop.
Just then,just as she was thinking
they were both going to get arrested,
Carly pulled up at the curb.The door
swung open.“Get in,” Carly said.
REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE
t was a meme,really,that got them
I into it,a clip of the scene in the old
movie where two guys were playing
chicken and the greaser who wasn’t James
Dean got the strap of his leather jacket
caught on the door,which repeated over
and over till it was just hilarious. After
that,curious about the movie itself,they
dug deeper and it was a revelation—
teen-agers stole cars and raced them on
the street and there was nobody there
to say different. Even better,because
this was back in the day,the cars just
did what you wanted—all you had to
do was put the key in the ignition (or
hot-wire the car,if you wanted to steal
it),hit the gas,and peel out. He must
have seen the movie (or parts of it) at
least twenty times with Warren and Cy-
rilla,and,if Warren was James Dean
and Cyrilla Natalie Wood,he guessed
he’d have to be Sal Mineo,though that
wasn’t really who he wanted to be.
“Better than the dude that goes over
the cliff,though,right?” Warren says
now,waving his forty-ouncer at the
screen, and Cyrilla lets out a laugh that’s
more of a screech, actually, one of her
annoying habits, but that’s all right—
he doesn’t mind playing a supporting
role.Warren’s almost a year older than
he is, and he doesn’t have a girlfriend
himself, so to be near Cyrilla, to hang
out with her, see what she’s like—what
girls are like, up close—is something
he really appreciates on every level.
They’re coming up on the part where
Natalie Wood, her eyes burning with
excitement, waves her arms and every-
body stands back and the two cars hur-
tle off into the night, when Warren,
who has his arm around Cyrilla on the
couch and one hand casually cupping
her left breast, says, “I have this idea?”
Warren’s grinning, so Jackie starts
grinning, too.“What?” he says.
“Let’s us play chicken. Reënact the
scene, I mean. For real.”
He just laughs. Because it’s a joke.
Real cars, cars that do what you want,
cars you can race, are pretty much ex-
tinct at this point, except for on race-
tracks and plots of private land in the
desert, where holdovers and old peo-
ple can pay to have their manual cars
stored and go out and race around in
them on weekends, though he’s never
seen any of that, except online, and it
might just be a fantasy, for all he knows.
“What are you talking about?” he says.
“You going to steal a fleet car?”
“No,” Warren says, levelling a look
at him.“I’m going to steal two.”
RISK ASSESSMENT
he’s in the car on her way to the li-
S brary to pick up Keystone and bring
him to Rose Taylor’s office so they can
begin the process of filing a public-nui-
sance lawsuit against the S.P.C.A., when
Carly says, “I don’t mean to worry you,
but the house sensors indicate that
Jackie hasn’t come home from school
yet—and the calendar shows no extra-
curricular activities for today, so I’m just
wondering ...?”
Cindy’s feeling distracted, her mind
on Keystone and the way he stood up
for her that night on the street, or at
least thought he was standing up for
her, which amounts to the same thing.
“I wouldn’t worry. He’s a big boy. He
can take care of himself.”
“Granted, yes, but I can’t help think-
ing of last week, when he didn’t get in
till after dark and had no explanation
except”—and here she loops in Jack-
ie’s voice from the house monitor—“ ‘I
was at Warren’s, O.K., and his mom
made dinner, O.K., so I’m not hungry,
so don’t even go there.’”
“Listen, Carly, I’m just not up to this
right now, O.K.? I’m trying to focus on
getting Keystone over to Rose Taylor’s
and then I’ve got to get back to the
office for that five-o’clock meeting, as
I’m sure you’re aware, and then there’s
the fund-raiser after that ...”
“Sorry, I just thought you’d want to
know.”
She’s staring out the side window
watching the street lights clip by, pic-
turing Keystone pushing himself up off
the concrete steps of the library and
crossing the sidewalk with that smile
of his lit up just for her. She’s curious
to see what he’ll be wearing—“I clean
up pretty good,” he told her, promising
to dress up for the meeting—not that
it matters, really, just that she’s never
seen him in anything other than what
he calls his “street commando” outfit.
The street lights are evenly spaced, like
counters, and after a moment it occurs
to her that the intervals between them
are getting shorter and shorter, so she
turns, focusses on the street ahead, and
says, “Aren’t you going too fast, Carly?”
Immediately the car slows. “Forty-
four in a thirty-five zone, but there’s no
“How do you know it’s my leaves clogging the shower drain?”
indication of speed traps or police units,
and since we are running six minutes
and sixteen seconds late, I thought I
would expedite matters.”
She’s feeling angry, suddenly—and
it’s not Carly’s fault, she knows that, but
the comment about Jackie just rubbed
her the wrong way. “I didn’t give you
permission for that,” she snaps. “You
ought to know better.I mean, what good
is your program if you can’t follow it?”
“I’m sorry, Cindy, I just thought—”
“Don’t think—just drive.”
Of course, Carly was right, and if
they wind up being ten minutes late to
pick up Keystone that’s nobody’s fault
but her own. “All right, Carly, I’m
sorry—good job, really,” she says, only
vaguely aware of how ridiculous it is to
try to mollify a computer or worry about
hurting its feelings.
“Since we’re at the library,” Carly
says, “will you be acquiring books? Be-
cause they have three copies of the lat-
est installment of the Carson Umquist
series you like—and they’re all in the
special ‘Hot Reads’ rack when you first
walk in. I mean, they’re right there—
you don’t have to go twenty feet.If that’s
what you’re looking for. I’m not pre-
suming, am I?”
“Pull up here,” she says, and that’s
when she sees Keystone, in a pair of tan
Dockers and an emerald long-sleeved
shirt with a pair of red fire-breathing
dragons embroidered on the front.He
looks ...different—and if she’s surprised
by the dragons, which really aren’t the
sort of thing she imagines Rose Taylor
appreciating, she tries to hide it. She’s
smiling as he comes up to the car, and
he’s smiling, too, and now he’s reach-
ing for the door handle ...but the door
seems to be locked, and she’s fumbling
for the release. “Carly,” she says, turn-
ing away from the sight of his face
caught there in the window as if Carly
were an actual person sitting in the driv-
er’s seat, when, of course, there’s no one
there.“Carly, is the child lock on?”
“I’m sorry,” Carly says, “but this in-
dividual is untrustworthy.Don’t you re-
call what happened last Tuesday eve-
ning at 9:19 P.M.in front of the S.P.C.A.
facility at 83622 Haverford Drive?”
“Carly,” she says, “open the door.”
“I don’t think that’s wise.”
“You know what? I don’t give a God
damn what you think.Do you hear me?
Do you?”
HER FATHER’S LAST DRIVE
e was in his mid-seventies back
H then and he’d never really been
what anybody would call a good driver—
too rigid, too slow to react, baffled by
the rules and norms of the road and try-
ing to get by on herd mentality alone.
To complicate matters,he suffered from
arthritis and wound up developing a de-
pendency on the painkillers the doctor
prescribed,which,to say the least,didn’t
do much for his reflexes or his atten-
tion span.He was a disaster waiting to
happen, and Cindy and her sister, Jan,
kept nagging him to give up driving,
but he was stubborn. “I’ve seen ‘King
Lear,’ ” he said.“Nobody’s going to take
my independence away from me.”
Then one morning, when her car
was in the shop (this was before S.D.C.s
took over, when most people, including
her, still got around the retro way), she
asked him for a ride to work and not
only was he half an hour late but when
they finally did get on the freeway he
drove his paint-blistered pickup as if
the wheels had turned to cement blocks,
weaving and drifting out of his lane and
going at such a maddeningly slow pace
she was sure they were going to get rear-
ended.She was a wreck by the time she
got to the office and so keyed up she
didn’t dare even take a sip of her morn-
58 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 1
1, 201
9
HEART OF DARKNESS
Years ago I went to Noho Star
with some poets & Cecil Taylor.
Noho Star is closed now
& Cecil died yesterday. I walked
to Union Square & watched black
men playing chess. Rubbing their jaws
while the afternoon light poured
down the gentle rooks of their fingers
hanging above a queen or pawn.
Cecil Taylor sat across the table
from me. Wearing leather gym
shorts, rainbow-striped kneesocks,
a fringe vest, & a face so musical
I could hear the notes blunting
& banging as he low-laughed & looked
like a lion who had bitten off
the ancient secret of a soft roar. I
liked him right away. Said yes when
he asked me if I would share
a dessert with him. I in an ivory
dress that was vintage, the kind
my mother would have worn,
with chiffon sleeves—the shining
ing grande,let alone drink it.She Ubered “How’s he going to get around? I’m
home that night, though, as a recent di- not driving him, I’ll tell you that.”
vorcée and the mother of a two-year- “The bus.The senior van.Whatever.
old, she was trying to cut her expenses, Other people do it. But what about
so that was no fun. As soon as she got Luke—what if Luke asks him? He’d
in the door, she called Jan. never refuse Luke.”
“We’ve got to do something,” she Luke was Jan’s seventeen-year-old
said.“He’s going to get killed—or kill son, and as soon as Jan pronounced his
somebody in the process. It’s a night- name Cindy realized they were going
mare, believe me! Have you been in a to take the easy way out—or, no, the
car with him lately? It’s beyond belief.” coward’s way.
Jan was silent a moment, thinking, The next Saturday morning, Jan
then she said,“What about that refrig- dropped her son off at their father’s
erator you’ve got to move?” apartment so that he could borrow the
“What refrigerator? What are you truck to move the imaginary refrigerator,
talking about?” and the moment the keys changed hands
Her sister didn’t say anything, just their father’s time behind the wheel of
waited for her to catch on. a motorized vehicle, which stretched
“Can we do that to him? He’ll never all the way back to when he was two
talk to either one of us again, you real- years younger than Luke was then,came
ize that, right?” She was trying to pic- to an abrupt end.
ture the aftermath, the resentment, the
sense of betrayal, the way he used his THE HACK SUPREME
sarcasm like an icepick, chipping away
at you flake by flake, and how he’d par- nother day, another slow, agoniz-
celled out his affection all his life and
what that was going to mean for the
A ing procession of classes that are
like doors clanging shut in a prison one
future. “It’s not going to be me,” she after the other,and then they’re at War-
said.“I’m not going to be the one.” ren’s and Warren’s parents are at work,
“We’ll both do it.” so they have the place to themselves to
 because we’re both James Dean,and I’m
not even going to try to make it close.
I’m going to jump out way before and
if that’s chicken,O.K.,sue me,right?”
air made the loose dress Once they’re there, the real work
cling to me.The way a special starts.Warren—and this other kid,Jeffrey
music clung to Cecil Taylor, Zuniga,who’s a genius and destined to
followed the radical swing & be class valedictorian—start disabling
swag of his voice. Do you want the cars’ systems as much as possible,so
to have the Heart of Darkness they’ll go flat out,because what kind of
together, he said. That looks a race would it be if these two drone cars
sweet enough. I remembered just creep along toward the cliff ? All
later when we stood on the sidewalk, right.Fine.And here comes the movie.
sugar & poetry in us. Heat He and Warren,drawn up even,both
coming off the summer night in the city of them drunk on the punch and laugh-
always made me feel I could ing like madmen,revving the engines
never leave New York. He kissed on command (it’s as simple as saying
my cheeks. Said he had been fooled. “Redline” to the computer),and Cyrilla
I didn’t think they made women there waving somebody’s white jacket
like you anymore. Tipped his cowboy hat like a flag.It’s fully dark now,kids’ eyes
& took off his sunglasses. My god, in the headlights like the eyes of un-
in the dark his eyes burned so clear tamed beasts,lions and hyenas and what,
& wild I thought the sun was out,roaring jackals,and then they’re off and all he’s
through our hearts like a song, thinking is,If Warren thinks I’m going
daring its hunter to aim. to bail first,he’s crazy ...

—Rachel Eliza Griffiths THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE

t isn’t a date,not exactly,and if Jan

make preparations. The first thing is network on his laptop,and now he’s I ever finds out about it she’ll never
the punch,which means pouring grape accessing the individual codes for these hear the end of it,but she takes Keystone
juice, 7 UP, and about three fingers two cars while all the other cars are out to the local McDonald’s for a Big
of every kind of liquor in the cabinet going around them and they have to Mac and fries. It’s not as if she hasn’t
into a five-gallon bucket purchased at hope no surveillance vehicles come by taken other housing-challenged peo-
Walmart for just this purpose. Then or they’re dead in the water. ple out for fast food,men and women
snacks,but that’s easy,just bags of chips, That doesn’t happen. The doors both,so they can sit in a booth with
pretzels,Doritos,and whatever.Cyrilla swing open for them and they get in some kind of dignity and use the rest
rolls a couple of numbers,and he and and tell the cars to take them out to room to their heart’s content,without
Warren pull out their phones and give Mar Vista,where Cyrilla and some of the manager badgering them every step
everybody a heads-up: nine o’clock at the others are already gathered around of the way. But this is different. It’s a
the end of Mar Vista,where it dead- the punch and the chips,waiting for kind of celebration,actually,because
ends at that weed lot and the cliffs down them to get the party started.It’s beau- Rose Taylor filed the suit and,within
to the ocean. tiful. It’s perfect. He can’t remember hours,she had a call from the head of
He’s not a bad hacker himself—since ever seeing a prettier sunset,all orange the S.P.C.A.wondering if they couldn’t
as far back as he can remember,he’s and purple and black,as if the whole work something out,like using the K5+
hacked into Web sites just for the thrill world were a V.R.simulation,and if his primarily in the parking area and lim-
of messing with people a little—but heart goes into high gear when a cop iting its access to the public sidewalk.
Warren’s in another league.If anybody car comes up behind him and swings Keystone is back to his usual garb,
can steal a fleet car—two fleet cars— out to pass,that’s all part of the game with the addition of a military-looking
it’s him.So,after dinner (he texted his and he’s O.K.with it.O.K.with every- camouflage cap he’s picked up some-
mother to tell her he’d be eating at War- thing.He’s going to be a hero at school, where and an orange string bracelet
ren’s and then sleeping over,too),they an instant legend,because nobody’s tried Knitsy wove for him.He’s in good form,
go out on Cabrillo,where there’s a ton this before,nobody’s even thought of high on the moment and her company
of cars going back and forth between it. And,yes,it’s dangerous and illegal (and the dark rum he surreptitiously
pickups and drop-offs,and just step out and his mother would kill him and all tips into their Diet Cokes when no
in front of two empty ones,which slam that,and he did say to Warren,trying one’s looking),and she’s feeling no pain
on their brakes and idle there,waiting to be cool and hide his nerves,“So who’s herself. There’s something about him
for them to move.But they don’t move. the greaser that goes over the cliff,you that makes her just want to let go—in
Warren has already hacked into the or me?,” and Warren said,“Forget it, a good way,a very good way. And the
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 1
1, 201
9 59
rum—she hasn’t had anything stron-
ger than white wine in years—goes
right to her head.
“You know that this place—the
S.P.C.A.,I mean—has a furnace out
back,right?” he says,leaning into the
table so she’s conscious of how close
he is to her,right there,no more than
two feet away.“And maybe your attor-
ney friend can eventually get them to
stop harassing us people,but what about
the animals? You know what it smells
like when they fire that thing up? I
mean, can you even imagine?” He
pauses,bites into his Big Mac,chews.
“You’re in a house,right?”
“Uh-huh,yeah.With a yard.And I
know I should really adopt one of those
dogs,I really should,but I can never
seem to get around to it—”
“That’s not what I’m saying—I’m
not trying to lay any guilt trip on you.
The people that should feel guilty are
all these clueless shitwads that see a
puppy in a store window and six weeks
later dump it on the street....No,what
I’m talking about is the smell,which
you don’t get out in the suburbs,with
the windows rolled up and the air-con-
ditioning going full blast.Am I right?”
He is right. But whether he’s right
or wrong or whether he’s accusing her
or not doesn’t really matter.What mat-
ters is the intensity of his voice,the
gravel in it,and the way his eyes look
“We’re doing everything we can, which is just hair
and nails, unfortunately.”
right into her as if there were nothing
separating them but the illusion of a
Formica tabletop and the recirculating
air,with its heavy freight of warmed-
over meat and hunger.
In the car,she takes the leap and
asks him if he wants to come home
with her. “There’s a shower,” she says.
“And clean towels—I can offer you
clean towels,right? Isn’t that the least
I can do? As your advocate,I mean?”
It’s dark now,but for the yellowish
sheen of the McDonald’s arches and the
fiery glow of the tail-lights of the cars
at the drive-through window.He doesn’t
say anything and she keeps waiting for
Carly to butt in,though she gave her
strict instructions to keep quiet,no mat-
ter what.Finally,he sighs and says,“It’s
an attractive offer,and I thank you for
it,but I don’t want to be anybody’s pet.”
She doesn’t know whether she should
laugh or not. Really,is he joking?
“But why don’t we do this?” he says.
“You drive me back to my place and
we’ll sit on the wall there,finish the
rum, and see what happens. O.K.?
Sound like a plan?”
All the way there,Carly’s silent,ex-
cept to comment on the traffic condi-
tions—“There’s a lane closure on Mis-
sion because of roadwork,so I’m going
to take Live Oak to Harrison,which is
only a two-minute-thirty-five-second
delay”—and she finds she doesn’t have
much to say herself,anticipating what’s
to come and thinking about the last
time she had sex outdoors,which had
to have been twenty years ago. With
Adam. On a camping trip.
When they step out of the car,the
night comes to life around her,rich with
its crepitating noises and a strong sweet
wafting scent of jasmine,which is all
she can seem to smell—not the reek of
the dogs or the crematorium or the
hopelessness of Knitsy and the rest of
them,but jasmine blooming in some
secret corner.She likes the way the full
moon comes sliding in over the tree-
tops.The rum massages her.Then Key-
stone takes her hand and he’s leading
her to the wall and everything’s falling
into place ...until one of the dogs lets
out a howl and they both look up to
see the K5+ unit wheeling toward them,
its lights on full display.“Aw,shit!” Key-
stone spits,and before she can stop him,
before the machine can wheel up to
them and inquire what the situation is,
he’s halfway up the block,confronting
it. He seems to have something in his
hand now,a pale plastic bag he’s pulled
out of the bushes,and in the next mo-
ment he’s jerking it down like a hood
over the thing’s Lidar,rendering it blind.
It stops,emits its inquisitive whine for
a count of eight,nine,ten seconds,and
then triggers its alarm.
So much for romance.So much for
Rose Taylor and human rights. The
noise is excruciating. Every dog in the
S.P.C.A. starts howling as if it were
being skinned alive,and you can be sure
the cops are on their way,no doubt
about that.But here’s Keystone and he’s
grinning,actually grinning,as if all this
were funny. “You know,” he says,rais-
ing his voice to be heard over the din,
“maybe I am ready to be a pet.You want
a pet? For tonight,anyway?”
He doesn’t wait for an answer,just
puts his arm around her and guides her
to the car. But Carly’s having none of
it.Carly’s got her own agenda.The locks
click shut.
“Open up,” Cindy demands.
The car ignores her.
“Open up.Carly,I’m warning you—”
One long pulse-pounding moment
drifts by.The car is a dark conglomer-
ate of metal,glass,and plastic,as inan-
imate and insensible as a stone. She’s
angry—and frustrated, too, because
she’d been ready to let go, really let go,
for the first time in as long as she can
remember.The dogs howl.The klaxon
screams. And Keystone is right there,
smelling of the Mrs.Meyer’s hand soap
somebody must have given him a gal-
lon of, his arm around her shoulder, one
hip pressed to hers.She wants to apol-
ogize—For what, for a car?—but that
doesn’t make any sense.“I don’t know,”
she says, frantic now, and are those si-
rens she’s hearing in the distance?
“Oh, fuck it,” he says finally, throw-
ing a glance over his shoulder. “Let’s
just walk. We can still walk, can’t we?”

CHICKEN

e isn’t wearing a leather jacket.He

H doesn’t even own a leather jacket.
He’s just a kid in a simulation, the fleet
car jerking along over the bumps in the
field, and the night waiting for him out
there like an open set of jaws.He keeps
glancing over at Warren and Warren
keeps glancing over at him as if this re-
ally were chicken—and he’s not going “I’ve got to go—there’s been a sexy crime.”
to be the one to cave first, is he? But
that’s not the issue, not any longer, be-
cause what he is just now discovering
• •
is that the door is not going to swing
open no matter how many times he or- “just take them off. Go barefoot. It’s heels.The simplest thing: grass. In that
ders it to, and the brakes—the auton- good for you.” instant, she’s taken all the way back to
omous brakes, the brakes with a mind “Easy for you to say.” her girlhood, before Adam, before Jackie,
and a purpose of their own—don’t seem “Hell, I’ll go barefoot, too, no prob- before her infinitely patient dark-haired
to be working at all. lem—in fact, I like it better this way,” father taught her to balance clutch and
he says, and in the next moment he’s accelerator and work her way through
NIGHT MOVES got his flip-flops in one hand and her the gears in a smooth, mechanical suc-
shoes in the other and they’re heading cession that opened up a whole new world
n this, of all nights, she has to be up the sidewalk under the faint yellow- to her.“This is nice,” she murmurs, and
O wearing heels, but then she’s wear- ish glow of the street lights in a neigh- Keystone, a hazy presence beside her,
ing heels to impress Keystone, whether borhood that may or may not feature agrees that, yes, it is nice, though she’s
she wants to admit it or not.Men find broken glass strewn across the pavement. not sure he knows what he’s agreeing to.
heels sexy.He finds them sexy—and he It’s better than three miles to her There are no cars on the street.Her
told her as much when they were stand- house, and she’s so used to relying on house looms over them, two stories of
ing at the counter in McDonald’s, plac- Carly she manages to lose her way, until furniture-filled rooms humming with
ing their order. Now, though, she has finally she has to pull out her phone and the neural network of all the intercon-
her regrets—they haven’t gone five blocks follow the G.P.S., which is embarrass- nected devices it contains, the refriger-
and she’s already developing a blister on ing, but not nearly as embarrassing as ator clicking on, the air-conditioner, ap-
her left heel and her toes feel as if some- seeing Carly sitting there in front of the pliance lights pulsing everywhere. In a
one were taking a pair of hot pliers to house, running lights on, waiting for moment, she’ll lead Keystone up the
them.“What’s the matter?” he asks, his them.“You!” she calls out as they cross steps, through the living room, and into
voice coming at her out of the dark. the lawn.“You’re going to hear from me the back bedroom, but not yet, not yet.
“You’re not giving out already, are you?” tomorrow—and that’s a promise.” Everything is still.The moon is over-
“It’s my feet,” she says, stopping and But then something happens, some- head. And the grass—the grass is just
shifting her weight into him to take thing magical, and all the tension goes like she remembered it. 
some of the pressure off. out of her.It has to do with the grass, its
“It’s not your feet—it’s your shoes. dampness, its coolness, the way it con- NEWYORKER.COM
Here”—he braces her with one arm— forms to her toes, her arches, her aching T. Coraghessan Boyle on man and machines.
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 1
1, 201
9 61

NOTHI
NG SACRED
Ben Hecht was celebrated as Hollywood’s best screenwriter, but he wasn’t happy about it.
en Hecht, the greatest of Ameri-
B can screenwriters, produced, near
the end of his career, a garrulous auto-
biography, “A Child of the Century,” in
which he tells us the following:In 1910,
at the age of sixteen, he left the Univer-
sity of Wisconsin after attending for
three days and took a train to Chicago.
He had fifty dollars in his pocket.Hav-
ing slept on a bench in the Chicago rail-
road station, he tried to go see a show
at the Majestic Vaudeville Theatre,
only to be accosted by a distant relative,
Manny Moyses,a liquor salesman “with
a large red nose.” Moyses pried him
loose from the ticket line and brought
him to meet a client who also had a red
nose,the publisher of the Chicago Daily
Journal,one John C.Eastman.The pub-
lisher was throwing a party that night
and needed something he could show
off.He told the young man that he would
hire him if he wrote a profane poem—a
poem about a bull that swallows a bum-
blebee. (Don’t ask.) Hecht wrote the
poem while Eastman was out to lunch,
and got the job. For some months, he
wrote nothing for the Journal,but made
himself useful by invading the homes
of people suffering one tragedy or an-
other and stealing a picture of the vic-
tim,usually a woman,which would then
appear in the paper. At the age of sev-
enteen, he became a full-time reporter,
and attained what he called a “bug-in-
a-rug citizenship” of Chicago. In his
book, Hecht recalls the local-journal-
ism obsessions in the nineteen-tens and
twenties—spectacular crimes and mu-
nicipal frauds, a general atmosphere of
license, exploitation, and swindle.“The
Stockyards’ owners imported Billy Sun-
62 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 1
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9
THE CRI
TICS
BOOKS
BY DAVID DENBY
day to divert their underpaid hunkies
from going on strike by shouting them
dizzy with God,” he tells us.
How many of these details are true?
It’s impossible to say, but truth, in this
case, may not be the point.As Norman
Mailer noted in 1973, Hecht was “never
a writer to tell the truth when a con-
coction could put life in his prose.”
Hecht’s gift for confabulated anecdote
suggests one reason that he became so
successful as a Hollywood entertainer.
What Hecht got out of his ruffian jour-
nalistic years shaped his temperament,
and that temperament in turn shaped
American movies in the thirties. The
raffishness, the abruptness, the fusillade
of insults and wisecracks; the fascina-
tion with violence and the illicit;the di-
vision of the world into the knowing
(typically urban and male) and the saps
(often rural)—such qualities made the
comedies and the melodramas of the
Depression a hardheaded new Ameri-
can art, an art that moved faster and
ran shallower than life.
Hecht’s film résumé is difficult to
sort out,in part because he was indiffer-
ent to getting screen credit, though not
to getting paid.He worked on “Under-
world,” “The Front Page” (which yielded
the sensationally effective remake “His
Girl Friday”), “Scarface,” “Twentieth
Century,” “Design for Living,” “Nothing
Sacred,” “Wuthering Heights,” “Gunga
Din,” “Notorious,” various minor but
potent noir movies, and many other
things. Some of these were original
screenplays, some were adaptations,
some were collaborations (with his pals
Charles MacArthur or Charles Lederer);
a few times he simply provided an in-
delible story and moved on.Hecht also
pulled together and revivified a stalled
“Gone with the Wind” and worked as
a last-minute fixer on “Stagecoach,” “The
Shop Around the Corner,” “Foreign
Correspondent,” and “Gilda.” An enor-
mously talented man—“He invented
eighty per cent of what is used in Holly-
wood movies today,” Jean-Luc Godard
said in 1968—he was also frivolous, or-
nery,and contradictory.The best screen-
writer in Hollywood was contemptuous
of movies as an art form (“an outhouse
on the Parnassus,” Hecht declared), and
had little trust in the wisdom of studio
bosses and producers (“nitwits on a par
with the lower run of politicians I had
known”). Always a writer, he was un-
certain of his identity in other ways.He
said that he never thought of himself as
a Jew until the late nineteen-thirties,
but, in the following years, he struggled
to rouse concern in Hollywood and New
York about the ongoing massacres in
Nazi-occupied Europe.
Adina Hoffman’s superb “Ben Hecht:
Fighting Words, Moving Pictures”
(in the Yale Jewish Lives series) loads
Hecht’s staggering contradictions into a
compact but abounding two hundred
and twenty pages.Hoffman,born in Mis-
sissippi, has lived in Israel and has de-
voted books to the city of Jerusalem and
to the Palestinian poet Taha Muham-
mad Ali, in addition to serving time as
a movie critic (for the Jerusalem Post and
The American Prospect).In her biography
of Hecht, she expertly links Hollywood
and New York,American Jewish conun-
drums and the intricacies of Zionist pol-
itics.Immersing herself in Hecht’s nov-
els and tracts (no easy task), she writes
COURTESY LUSHA NELSON; OPPOSITE: BRIAN REA

Hecht (pictured with Charles MacArthur, left, in 1935) helped create both the gangster film and the screwball comedy.
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 1
1, 201
9 63
 point. We were not inside the routines of human
greed or social pretenses. We were without po-
liteness. . . . We who knew nothing spoke out
of a knowledge so overwhelming that I, for
one, never recovered from it. Politicians were
crooks. The leaders of causes were scoundrels.
Morality was a farce full of murder, rapes, and
love nests. Swindlers ran the world and the
Devil sang everywhere. These discoveries filled
me with a great joy.

Hecht himself became a famous re-

porter in town.After transferring to the
Chicago Daily News, he wrote an in-
novative daily column called “1,001 Af-
ternoons in Chicago.” He would wan-
der about the city and spend time with
“ordinary” people—an anticipation of
the warm-spirited columns that Jimmy
Breslin and Pete Hamill wrote years
later about working-class New Yorkers.
Barely in his twenties, he hung out in
Chicago’s literary bohemia, drinking
and exchanging ideas and manuscripts
with Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood An-
derson, Sandburg, and many other
“ Your workaholism is hurting this family.” members of what became known as the
Chicago Literary Renaissance.He wrote
satirical stories for H. L. Mencken’s
• • Smart Set and Margaret Anderson’s bril-
liant journal of new writing, The Little
with enormous flair about a marginal his uneducated parents is that they pur- Review, and, in 1921, published an am-
figure in literature but a major influence chased, as a bar-mitzvah present, four bitious novel, “Erik Dorn.” The book
on twentieth-century popular culture. crates packed with the works of Shake- has some effective passages, in which a
speare,Dickens,and Twain—the home- solitary man wanders through the flux
echt was born in 1893 (or there- library sets that were once so popular in of a great modern city, but the good
H abouts) on the Lower East Side of America.They asked little of him after moments get lost in endless political
Manhattan, a child of immigrant Jews that:“The fact that I was going to school and erotic musing.As Adina Hoffman
from Belarus and Ukraine.He spent the and that I stayed awake half the night says, the style is all over the place—
first few years of his life in the crowded reading books of every sort set me apart veering from modernist free association
ghetto, amid colorful aunts and uncles from them.” He always read voraciously to pulpy bodice-ripping. Hecht pub-
and with exciting visits from luminaries but, as he admits, with little memory of lished other experiments, including an
of the Yiddish theatre. When he was what he read and less taste. Words en- obscene novel that appears to have been
nine or ten, the family moved to Racine, tered and left his mind in a ceaseless flow. an attempt to get himself thrown in jail
Wisconsin, on the shore of Lake Mich- The Chicago press, in the nineteen- as a martyr to free speech. He lacked
igan, where Hecht, by his own account, tens, included journalists doing serious the patience and discipline for litera-
had a thrilling all-American boyhood of work as muckrakers or as war reporters, ture—though he might have become,
adventure,reading,and sex.He also played but Hecht was fascinated by the male if he had stuck to journalism, a second
the violin well and performed,for a sum- subculture of crime and politics report- Mencken, dispensing pungently funny
mer, as an apprentice trapeze artist with ing, with its cigars and spittoons, its sa- observations of everyone and every-
a local circus. “I yearned, swelled, wept, loons and brothels, and its sour views thing. The best evidence of the road
ravished,splashed through mud and rolled about women. From his unsavory but not taken can be found in “A Child of
in flowers,” he tells us, “and was never enjoyable sojourns among these book- the Century.”
injured, and hurt no one.” This boastful ish lowlifes—they all quoted litera-
catalogue attempts to echo Whitman. ture—Hecht extracted something mem- n his early twenties, Hecht married
Carl Sandburg, who met Hecht later, in orable, the myth of the newspaperman. I a fellow-reporter, Marie Armstrong,
Chicago,called him “a Jewish Huck Finn.” In “A Child of the Century,” he recalled but within a few years took up with the
Either way, he was a fearless boy leaping the type: writer and actress Rose Caylor, moving
from the nineteenth century into the There was, I am sure, neither worldliness back and forth between the two women,
maelstrom of the twentieth. nor cunning enough among the lot of us to run which led each to write a book denounc-
What Hecht remembers best about a successful candy store. But we had a vantage ing the other.Barrel-chested,fumy from
64 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 1
1, 201
9
cigars, a non-stop talker, Hecht was sters—one thuggish, one swank—and Tennessee Williams, Kenneth Tynan,
nevertheless some sort of prize.By the a flapper attracted to both,and von Stern- and Tom Stoppard all viewed it as a mile-
age of thirty, he had exhausted Chicago berg turned the story into a darkly brood- stone—is set in a courthouse pressroom,
journalism.In 1924,he and Caylor,soon ing composition of shadows and fleeting where a heartless group of reporters sit
to be married, moved to New York, figures.Hecht, whose grasp of the visual around waiting for an anarchist schnook
where they lived happily, if well beyond nature of movies was never strong, dis- to be hanged.The men are like tangled
their means. Hecht set up a playwrit- missed von Sternberg’s distinctive direc- electric wires, sparking one another into
ing partnership with Charles MacAr- torial touches as “sentimental.” To his insult, retort, slander; they talk over and
thur, another escapee from Chicago’s astonishment,the story of “Underworld” through one another, shouting at city-
newspapers, and, for a while, joined the brought him an Academy Award. He desk anchorites on the other end of the
journalistic and theatrical wits of the initially refused the statue, and then phone line.(“Listen, Duffy—I want you
Algonquin Round Table, some of them promised to use it as a doorstop. to tear out the whole front page. . . .To
contributors to the fledgling New Yorker. Howard Hawks’s “Scarface” (1932) hell with the Chinese earthquake!”) The
He parted with them, he says, as an act has a different kind of poetry—the pell- plot is a tempestuous male love story:
of self-preservation. He was a writer mell fury of ceaseless gang war, with the star reporter, a fellow named Hildy
still in search of a medium. square-backed cars racing down dark, Johnson, wants to decamp for marriage
In late 1926, broke and lying in bed shiny streets, tommy guns blazing out and respectability, and his unscrupulous
reading “The Decline and Fall of the of their open windows. Hecht knew editor,Walter Burns, does everything he
Roman Empire,” he received what from his reporting days that audiences can to keep him on the paper.The ma-
Hoffman describes as “the most legend- loved flamboyant people who broke all terial works best in the hetero movie ver-
ary telegram in American movie his- the rules and then paid dearly for it, so sion that Hawks directed in 1940, “His
tory.” The message was from his friend he created, for Hawks, a story about Girl Friday,” in which Cary Grant plays
Herman Mankiewicz, the future writer the rise and fall of an unlettered thug, Walter Burns as a brilliant heel, while
of “Citizen Kane” and another member, Tony Camonte (Paul Muni),who whis- Rosalind Russell,in a striped suit,is Hildy,
briefly,of the Algonquin group,who had tles a tune from Donizetti’s “Lucia di Walter’s ex-wife and the best reporter in
moved to Hollywood earlier that year Lammermoor” when killing his ene- town. Much of the Hecht-MacArthur
and was lonely for New York company: mies. Tony commits violence so sud- language remains intact—we hear the
WILL YOU ACCEPT THREE HUNDRED PER denly that he takes your breath away; relentless rhythm that Neil Simon picked
WEEK TO WORK FOR PARAMOUNT PICTURES. he dies under an electric billboard that up for “The Odd Couple” and many
ALL EXPENSES PAID. THE THREE HUNDRED IS says “THE WORLD IS YOURS.” other comedies,all much softer than this
PEANUTS. MILLIONS ARE TO BE GRABBED OUT The brutal and sardonic “Scarface” one,along with the wised-up and dressed-
HERE AND YOUR ONLY COMPETITION IS IDI- has served as the inspiration for many down style of verbal combat that Aaron
OTS. DON’T LET THIS GET AROUND.
gangster movies, including, of course, Sorkin came to specialize in.
When Hecht arrived in Hollywood, Brian De Palma’s scabrous remake,from What Hecht and MacArthur cre-
Mankiewicz laid down some rules of 1983, in which the same mocking epi- ated became one of the prime arche-
composition: “The hero, as well as the taph shows up in lights borne aloft by types in the movies of the thirties and
heroine, has to be a virgin.The villain a blimp. The pace of De Palma’s ver- after—the newspaperman as hero, a
can lay anybody he wants,have as much sion, which stars Al Pacino as a Cuban- man without illusions, contemptuous
fun as he wants cheating and stealing, born drug dealer, is slow, of society and authority.
getting rich and whipping the servants. the atmosphere either lan- Clark Gable played the
But you have to shoot him in the end.” guorous or chainsaw-red role to the hilt in “It Hap-
Not all of this was true.No one would violent. Hawks moved pened One Night”;Spen-
have mistaken the silent-film vamp swiftly, and with malicious cer Tracy, James Stewart,
Theda Bara for a virgin; tough, sexu- wit; so did Martin Scor- Fredric March, and many
ally aggressive women flourished in the sese, in another celebrated other actors also played
talkies until the Production Code took descendant, “Goodfellas” cocky reporters, while
hold, in 1934. But Hecht’s response is (1990), a gangster movie Jean Arthur and Katha-
significant.He decided to “skip the he- in the mode of vicious rine Hepburn, as well as
roes and heroines,to write a movie con- comedy,featuring the same Rosalind Russell, did the
taining only villains and bawds,” as he kind of abrupt savagery as the Hawks intrepid female versions.By the forties,
recalls in his memoir.“I would not have film. In “The Departed,” from 2006, violence and sexuality had been added
to tell any lies then.” Scorsese saluted the old movie yet again, to the plot, producing a new figure, the
His first script was for Josef von Stern- putting the same passage from “Lucia” private eye, lonely but potent, intimate
berg’s silent gangster movie “Underworld” on the soundtrack. with criminal ways. Humphrey Bog-
(1927),which Hecht claimed to have based “Scarface” came out a year after the art’s Marlowe is an insolent free man.
on tales he was told by a Chicago stoolie first movie adaptation of “The Front Hecht sensed that the growing urban
he met by chance in the lobby of the Bev- Page,” a satirical Broadway farce that audience of the Depression wanted the
erly Wilshire Hotel. He worked on the Hecht and MacArthur had concocted fast life; it wanted high-octane banter
scenario for a week, creating two gang- in 1928. This hard-charging comedy— and sex as warfare.In another Hawks-
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 1
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9 65
Hecht collaboration, “Twentieth Cen-
tury” (1934), the warfare passed into
sophisticated slapstick:John Barrymore’s
egotistical theatre producer roars at Car-
ole Lombard’s actress, and she fights
back with insults and ridicule. “Twen-
tieth Century” was one of the movies
that set the template for a new genre,
the screwball romantic comedy, with its
sparring lovers issuing taunts and epi-
grams—verbal mayhem that brushed
aside the sentimental tone of conven-
tional entertainment.The picture makes
fun of religious fanatics; “Nothing Sa-
cred,” the hit comedy that Hecht wrote
for the director William Wellman in
1937, spoofs the monosyllabic folk in a
small Vermont town, and then turns on
the verbose,self-admiring swells in New
York.Again, a newspaper setting:a star
reporter,Wally Cook,and an editor,Ol-
iver Stone, both hungry for sensational
copy, convince themselves that a beau-
tiful young woman is dying of radium
poisoning; they foist this swindle onto
their tearful and fascinated readers.
When the truth comes out (the girl is
perfectly healthy), the editor wails and
the reporter rails:
OLIVER: It’ll be worse than the French
Revolution!
WALLY: I hope I’m here when it breaks. I’m
gonna make one speech to our dear readers be-
fore they carry our heads off on a pike. I want
to tell them that we’ve been their benefactors.
We gave ’em a chance to pretend that their
phony hearts were dripping with the milk of
human kindness.
The satire is all-encompassing:journal-
ists and their readers get scuffed, and
so do hostile little children and high-
principled women who refuse to admit
that they’ve been taken in. “Nothing
Sacred” is Hecht’s Sinclair Lewis novel
on film.
hat was his problem with Holly-
W wood,anyway? Hoffman puzzles
over it at length.Inventing genres, char-
acter types, and moods, Hecht was a
major creative figure. For years, he was
the best-paid writer in town, a celebrity
in his own right. He even enjoyed, at
least a little, the atmosphere of studio
collaboration—“You wrote with the
phone ringing like a firehouse bell, with
the boss charging in and out of the ate-
lier, with the director grimacing and
grunting in an adjoining armchair”—
66 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 1
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9
which sounds a bit like the newsrooms
that he relished, and hardly like forced
labor with a pickaxe.In any case,he never
stayed very long. He made more than
twenty trips to the West Coast (taking
servants, oil paintings, and records with
him), enjoying abundant food and drink
when he wasn’t working, and then has-
tening back to Nyack, a town on the
Hudson twenty-five miles north of New
York, where he and Rose lived near
MacArthur and his wife, the actress
Helen Hayes.
Many good and great writers,includ-
ing Nathanael West, Dorothy Parker,
Lillian Hellman, F. Scott Fitzgerald,
and William Faulkner, were lured to
Hollywood in the thirties and forties
by easy money and by the chance to do
something exciting in a still young art
form, only to come away frustrated,
even disgusted. But Hecht had few il-
lusions to lose. As a screenwriter, he
stuck to the newspaperman’s ethos of
working fast and not caring much (or
seeming not to care much) about the
results. By exercising his right of con-
tempt, he succeeded, at least in his own
mind,in not becoming a victim,though
he may have become something else—
a cynic who undervalued the art that
he helped produce.
Or was he just pretending? No one
who was completely jaundiced could
have worked on so many good pictures.
Nor would he have attempted to direct
movies himself—seven in all, some of
them made with MacArthur in the As-
toria studio, in Queens, and a couple
made in Hollywood—including “An-
gels Over Broadway,” with Rita Hay-
worth and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.None
of them, alas, is very good.His direction
lacks rhythm and pace,and,as Hoffman
says, the dialogue in his own movies
grew florid.The truth is that he needed
the demands of popular storytelling,and
even the meddling of vulgarian produc-
ers, to do his best work.Irony is central
to Hecht’s temper, but his life was en-
folded in an irony that he couldn’t admit:
what he respected (literature) he couldn’t
pull off, and what he scorned (writing
movies) he excelled at. He’s a little like
Sir Arthur Sullivan, who wanted to be
the British Mendelssohn and produced
dull symphonic pieces and choral music,
only to attain immortality with the scin-
tillating comic operettas that he wrote
with W. S. Gilbert. This kind of split
between talent and aspiration can be sad
or comical, depending on how much
the artist suffers. The writer who de-
scribed himself as “an errand boy with
an oil magnate’s salary” did not suffer,
but, in Hollywood, he was never whole,
never satisfied, never quite a man he
could admire.
echt was not religious in any way,
H and ignored Jewish organizations
and political causes in general. But in
1937 and 1938, as the threat to European
Jews grew, he wrote a collection of tales
on Jewish themes, called “A Book of
Miracles.” In one of the fables, Ameri-
cans opened their newspapers and dis-
covered that “five hundred thousand
Jews had been murdered in Germany,
Italy, Rumania, and Poland. Another
million or so had been driven from their
homes and hunted into forests, deserts,
and mountains.” Hecht anticipated the
Holocaust, as it was eventually called,
and he was enraged a few years later
when it was actually happening and few
Americans wanted to hear about it. In
November, 1942, the State Department
confirmed reports that two million Jews
had been murdered,with no end in sight;
the Washington Post put the news on
page 6,the Times on page 10.The Times
continued to downplay the Jewish ca-
tastrophe throughout the war.(In 2001,
Max Frankel, a former executive editor
of the paper, called the negligent cov-
erage “the century’s bitterest journalis-
tic failure.”)
As a teen-age picture thief, Hecht
had made use of other people’s identi-
ties. In the war years, he became ob-
sessed with preserving and asserting an
identity of his own. Memories of the
big families and bustling social life of
his childhood came flooding back, and,
sick of Jewish victimhood,he issued blis-
tering articles and sarcastic newspaper
ads about the slaughter, intended to
awaken American Jews from compla-
cency.He also created a memorial pag-
eant for the dead, staged in Madison
Square Garden, and a play devoted to
the Zionist cause, both with music by
Kurt Weill, and both widely seen; he
propagandized for the Irgun, a Jewish
paramilitary group in Palestine which
was committed to violence against the
British, who controlled the territory.
Hecht became so pugnacious in his at-
tacks that his films were later boycotted
in the United Kingdom.In America,es-
tablished Jewish groups and even friends
turned against him. If the Lower East
Side had spoken, it would have called
him a kochleffel,meaning,literally,a cook-
ing spoon—a man who stirs the pot.
His new fervor also produced a great
screenplay. In Hitchcock’s “Notorious”
(1946), a seemingly worthless party girl
(Ingrid Bergman) goes to work after the
war for an American intelligence agent
(Cary Grant) and penetrates a danger-
ous Nazi circle in Brazil. Hecht refined
and subtilized the banter of the old screw-
ball comedies into ironic japery, and
Hitchcock directed with an unparalleled
mastery of sexual tension.The party girl
finds a useful life, even redemption, and
Hecht, with this anti-Nazi movie, may
have wanted to do the same for himself.
After the war, ensconced in Nyack,
he wrote plays,more fiction,angry reflec-
tions on Jewish identity and the new
state of Israel (a country he perversely
never visited). And, in 1954, he pub-
lished “A Child of the Century,” that
vast compendium of period evocation,
juiced anecdotes, and dubious philoso-
phy.Hecht’s fiction can’t be revived, but
“Child,” a book both candid about ap-
petite and generous in portraiture and
appreciation, could be strategically ed-
ited into an American classic, a step-
child of Mark Twain’s autobiography.
Meanwhile, until he died of a heart
attack, in 1964, Hecht continued to
work on film scripts. But the British
boycott had crippled his commercial
reputation; his price had fallen, and he
often labored under pseudonyms, like
a blacklisted screenwriter. And Holly-
wood changed:the studio bosses Hecht
had ridiculed were dead or gone; cen-
sorship had partially faded; the old
genres had become heavily psycholog-
ical, while the new crop of sex come-
dies were often obvious and gross.Al-
though the movies were made with
slightly more freedom, Hecht’s talent
for cynical satire no longer fit,and,apart
from a few noirs for Otto Preminger,
he produced little of value.He was both
the crown prince and the natural-born
jester of the old system. The court
changed beyond recognition, but his
laughter still rings out loudly enough
for anyone to hear. 
BRIEFLY NOTED
Almost Nothing, by Eric Karpeles (NYRB).This absorbing bi-
ography aims to rekindle interest in the Polish painter and
writer Józef Czapski (1896-1993), whose career was for de-
cades stymied by history’s tumult. As a Soviet prisoner of
war, he gave lectures on Proust and wrote a history of French
painting, and, in 1940, was one of only a few hundred survi-
vors of the Katyn massacre, in which some twenty-two thou-
sand Polish officers were killed.After the war, exiled in Paris,
he advocated for a free Poland and wrote two searing mem-
oirs, but only in old age was he able to devote himself to his
paintings, which Karpeles analyzes with acuity and grace.
Czapski called painting both “prayer” and “defeat,” after a
lifelong “apprenticeship of looking.”
Making Music American, by E. Douglas Bomberger (Oxford).
America’s entry into the First World War, in April, 1917,
marked a turning point in the nation’s musical life, as this
month-by-month account of the year chronicles. Germanic
performers who had dominated classical music for genera-
tions were ostracized, while jazz—“a frantic musical meta-
phor of the unsettled times”—gained a new and sudden
popularity. Following a diva, two conductors, two virtuoso
soloists, and three bandleaders into, variously, military de-
ployment, forced retirement, and the bottom of a bottle,
Bomberger interrogates the national character of American
art and artists.Walter Damrosch, the flamboyant conductor
of the New York Symphony, told an interviewer that he was
more American than she was—“because I am one by choice.”
Come with Me, by Helen Schulman (Harper).Set in Palo Alto,
in the course of three non-consecutive days, this novel is the
story of Amy and Dan, their three sons, and the countless
alternative lives they could have led. Amy works for a tech
prodigy who has invented an algorithm that allows people
to see their “multiverses”—how their lives might have played
out if they had made different choices.When Dan follows a
woman he’s smitten with to the site of a nuclear accident in
Japan and other crises arise at home, Amy struggles to cope;
the lines of reality are blurred, and she begins to ponder mul-
tiverses of her own.Though occasionally overwrought, the
novel plays creatively with the universal question “What if?”
The Children of Jocasta, by Natalie Haynes (Europa).This cu-
rious novel reinterprets two of Sophocles’ Theban plays, Oe-
dipus Tyrannus and Antigone.Two narratives alternate: the
third-person tale of Jocasta, who marries Oedipus and comes
to fear that he is her long-lost son;and the narrower, first-per-
son testimony of Ismene, the youngest child of these “cursed
parents,” and Antigone’s sister.Haynes’s dialogue can be overly
expository, and the liberties she takes with the original myths
are to mixed effect: an entirely new character, a kindly physi-
cian named Sophon, must be invented to serve as the story’s
lone sympathetic male presence.But the alternating structure
proves powerful, gaining momentum through what Haynes,
in an afterword, calls “the sheer weight of inevitable plot.”
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 1
1, 201
9 67
 J.D. at Harvard Law School. He now
BOOKS teaches at Columbia and, remarkably,
has published half a dozen books since
2010. In his new volume, “The Gilded
SONG OF MY SELVES Auction Block,” he extends the style he
developed in “Mule” (2010) and “Blood”
Shane McCrae’s poems to America. (2013), and which he perfected in “In
the Language of My Captor”(2017), to
BY DAN CHIASSON measure the imagination of race in the
era of Donald Trump. Many of these
new poems address that great muzzled
interlocutor “America,” echoing Allen
Ginsberg’s famous apostrophe.In “The
President Visits the Storm,” snippets
from Trump’s remarks after Hurricane
Harvey interrupt McCrae:
America you’re what a turnout great
Crowd a great crowd big smiles America
The hurricane is everywhere but here an
Important man is talking here Ameri-
ca the important president is talking

The first two lines so nail Trump’s rally

patter that you can almost hear, as punc-
tuation, the crowd’s roars. But they also
fall into elegant near-pentameter: the
rhythm forces you to suture together
phrases ordinarily heard in sound bites,
over cheers. New clusters of meaning,
pressurized by the line breaks,undermine
Trump’s familiar rhetoric. You can read
the opening line as a deadpan assessment
of the Trump era. “Turnout” can mean
crowd size, but it also means outcome.
Trump’s turnouts have been robust.
America’s turnout has been catastrophic.
McCrae’s poems often read like tran-
scripts, their style a flustered but nec-
essary shorthand.He almost never uses
conventional punctuation;instead, over
the years, he has honed a signature rep-
f, as John Ruskin wrote, “to compose McCrae’s compositions so ingenious ertoire of devices.Sometimes he pitches
I is to arrange unequal things,” the poet are their marvels of prosody and form, language headlong over his line breaks,
Shane McCrae is a shrewd composer of learned from the English Renaissance only to halt it, in the next line, by oddly
American stories.His poems often piece poems that he read in libraries when he scattered caesuras and slashes.Because
together, for striking effect, swatches of was just starting out.The result is beau- his style is so distinctive, he’s a pres-
material from divergent sources: word tifully up-to-date, old-fashioned work, ence even when he’s not the principal
salad from one of President Trump’s where the dignity of English meters subject: the voices in his poems are
speeches, a letter from an ex-slave, lines meets,as in a mosh pit,the vitality—and hammered into his style.In “After Car-
of poetry from Sylvia Plath and T.S. often the brutality—of American speech. rie Kinsey’s Letter to Theodore Roo-
Eliot, and echoes from McCrae’s tor- McCrae treats his own American story sevelt,” McCrae transforms into verse
mented childhood. He is a prospector as only one among many.He earned his an important archival document—a
for speech rhythms, collecting his ma- G.E.D. at eighteen after dropping out letter to the President from an African-
terial wherever he can.But American at- of high school, enrolled in community American woman whose brother had
tics are full of old boxes of diaries and college in Oregon, transferred twice be- been taken into slavery by “a white man
letters;and testimony,no matter how ar- fore graduating, and eventually got an named MacRee” around 1903:
resting, is not itself poetry.What makes M.F.A.at the University of Iowa and a he has
No mother and no father Mr. President
“The Gilded Auction Block” evokes the vitality and brutality of American speech. they are

68 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 1

1, 201
9 PHOTOGRAPH BY IKE EDEANI
 both dead / I am his only friend he’ll want it back almost immediately.
My brother have not done Borrowed whiteness works in the same
Nothing for them to have him in way. “America I am becoming white,”
Chains and I saw no money
McCrae writes balefully.“Still for every
The letter is available online, a solid inch my afro grows / I wait a minute
block of mostly unpunctuated prose. longer at the Wal- / mart deli.” Instead
McCrae’s lines add back the rhythmic of a placid “inner life,” speckled with Happy Valentine’s
Order by 2/12!
variety of speech, its erratic pauses and wonders like a coral reef, McCrae, both
Your Anniversary
sudden accelerations. In those lurches pursuer and pursued, a black man raised Immortalized
you find the undeniable tang of Kinsey’s to fear himself and people like him, has in Roman Numerals

personhood: McCrae’s intervention is no escape: “Even in my dreams,” he Crafted from Gold and Platinum
JOHN-CHRISTIAN.COM
a moral act, relying on an aesthetic tech- writes, “I’m in your dreams.” The title OR CALL 888 .646.6466
nique.Carrie Kinsey’s is now one voice of another poem puts the problem suc-
from the past that will not be forgot- cinctly: “The Monster Made of Amer-
ten.McCrae has done this kind of thing ica Dreams of America.”
for scores of real people from forgot- This is partly a book about current
ten history; part of the urgency we pick events, with poems about Jeff Sessions’s
up from his poems seems to stem from confirmation hearings and a bill that
his realization of how many unheard attempted, and failed, to undo Obama-
voices are still left. care.But its heroic dimensions emerge
You can’t help but notice that the sur- from deeper in the subconscious.The
name of the brother’s captor resembles book’s longest poem, part Dante, part
McCrae’s. The detail suggests the ex- B-movie Bosch, is “The Hell Poem.” WINTER SALE
tent to which McCrae, the child of a It begins with an “Intake Interview” at FEBRUARY 1 ST - 24TH
black father and a white mother, has the gates of the underworld. A mys- Find great values,
been singed by both sides of the legacy tical guide in the form of a barking including our
Mysa
of American racism.He has written else- bird—a vulgar version of a Disney side- Sleigh Bed
where about the trauma of being taken kick—taunts McCrae: designed
and Made
at a young age to live with his maternal in Maine.
It said
grandparents. Cut off from his father, barking it said Hey fuck you
he was brought up as a white suprema- asshole you fucking asshole fuck
cist by his grandmother, who insisted You follow me and coughed this little chiltons.com 866-883-3366
that he wasn’t black.It is a story of ter- skeleton hand up
rible cruelty, more troubling because it middle finger up
Then it took off
was disguised as love.Yet McCrae often barking
treats his autobiography like just another
transcript, with a judicial coolness that The authority in these lines arises,
makes the details all the more devastat- as with everything in McCrae’s work,
ing.In a pair of poems, he tries to work from speech heard so clearly you want
New Yorker
through the arguments for forgiving his to punch that punk bird. Later in the
grandmother, who has been, at differ- poem, McCrae is told of an allegorical
Cartoon Prints
ent times in his life, a source of both vis- satanic figure called the boss, who ped-
ceral comfort and profound pain. But dles a grim, anti-creation story:
his torture, in the end, defies the logic
At the beginning of
of argument.Instead, McCrae often lets
the evidence simply speak for itself. The world you want to know
Denied the safe house of interiority what
so lavishly furnished for even the dim- God said what words God spoke to
mest white person, he can seek refuge Call humans into being
The boss says God said Snails
only in testimony. “I’m sub- / merged
every day in the ocean of the inner/Lives
of white people,” McCrae writes: Make shells humans make
hells
Michael Maslin, July 1 1 , 1 9 9 4
And winked and there you were
To make my way through you I have to
borrow The glib, nightmarish motto offers a
An inner life the way a scuba diver
form of clandestine comfort.How will
Order online at
Whose tank was empty might borrow a newyorkerstore.com
mask you know a fellow-human when you
encounter him in this world? Look and
If you borrow a mask from a scuba diver, see if he’s in Hell. 
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 1
1, 201
9 69
 and who is almost certainly the former
ON TELEVISION talk-show host Ricki Lake, or perhaps
Sherri Shepherd. There’s a genuinely
impressive Bee; based on the clues, she
STAR 69 seems to be Gladys Knight,an icon who
probably didn’t expect to be competing
The pursuit of fame on “The Masked Singer” and “The Other Two.” with the Pineapple, who, it turns out, is
the stoner comic Tommy Chong.
BY EMILY NUSSBAUM The episodes feature elaborately cho-
reographed singing competitions, al-
though nobody is especially interested
in whether the contestants sing well,and
that’s good, because only a few do. In-
stead, the forum is framed—mock sin-
cerely—as a kind of liberation for celeb-
rities suffering from too much exposure.
“With this mask on,the tables are turned!
I see you, but you can’t see me,” squeaks
the Alien,who,in her introductory video,
wears a sweatshirt reading “Don’t Talk
to Me!” and an insect mask with ma-
genta eyes. She explains to the packed
stadium, “In my family, anonymity is a
completely alien concept”—a clue that
she’s a Kardashian, or maybe a Hilton.
Under the sweatshirt, there’s an apple-
shiny red catsuit.“I betcha she’s a model,”
Jenny McCarthy, one of the judges, says.
Is it Bella Hadid? The vengeful ghost of
a Dionne quintuplet? Every masked per-
formance is followed by a heated brain-
storm to guess the star’s real name, like
Influencer Rumpelstiltskin.
The wildest routines—such as a
straitjacketed Rabbit twitching to “Livin’
la Vida Loca” as flames shoot up, or
some Fosse-esque gyrations by one-eyed
monsters—do have a giddy,“Laugh-In”
camp appeal. If you, like me, enjoy ka-
raoke, think you like songs just because
“ E nter the Pineapple!” Nick Can-
non,Mariah Carey’s ex-husband,
mean it’s not fun. Based on the South
Korean series “King of Mask Singer,”
you recognize them,and appreciate fash-
ion that combines neon, puppetry, and
shouts.As Salt-N-Pepa’s “Whatta Man” “The Masked Singer” is a reality show capes, you’ll find something to enjoy.
thumps over the loudspeakers,the mys- in which contestants disguise themselves (The costumes alone make the show
tery contestant struts onto the stage, in Comic Con-style costumes,then com- watchable.) Still, the outrageousness is
his head concealed by a bulbous pine- pete for—well, mostly, to be recognized somewhat dampened by the number of
apple mask. His Hawaiian shirt hangs as worthy of their fame.The competi- times that the judges, whose fame is
open, revealing fake abs.A plastic par- tors are all C-level celebrities (or A- or about the same level as that of the con-
rot bobs on his shoulder. Two mock B-level ones—it’s impossible to say, al- testants (they include Nicole Scher-
bodyguards strut behind him. A chy- though I doubt that Beyoncé is lurking zinger, from the Pussycat Dolls, and
ron pops up,reading “Pineapple.Weak- inside the Alien). It’s a bit like “What’s Ken Jeong), stiltedly announce, “This
ness: Ripens Quickly.” My Line?” merged with Pokémon Go. show is crazy!” The banter is resolutely
Ripening quickly also happens to be Each participant gets a moniker— cheesy. (“It’s like buttah,” Scherzinger
the weakness of a lot of reality compe- the Monster, the Lion, the Poodle— says.) If you’re relaxed or,ideally,stoned,
titions, particularly those based on gim- and a voice-distortion algorithm.There’s the dad jokes can be comforting, with
micks as extreme as that of “The Masked the Unicorn,who speaks in a tinny voice, a TV blandness that spans decades of
Singer,” a Gaga-glittery pageant on Fox like a broken Siri. There’s the Raven, bad taste, in the honorable tradition of
that has become a surprise hit. But just with a glorious span of slick black wings, “Donny & Marie.”
because something is dumb fun doesn’t whose “strength” is being “empathetic,” In Vulture,the reality-TV critic Andy
70 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 1
1, 201
9 ILLUSTRATION BY NICK LITTLE
Dehnart offered an aficionado’s brisk, toward their first movie première, ready
convincing diagnosis of the show’s main to charge their drinks to Billy Eichner’s
flaw: unlike the Korean version,it drags. tab, “we must live every day like it’s the
It should be a two-night event, not last day that Chase is famous!”
something that goes on for weeks; “The Other Two,” which was created
the unmaskings should come faster; and by two “Saturday Night Live” writers, is
we should get a reasonably revelatory full of giggle-inducing satires of Holly-
interview once the mask comes off. wood, from Chase’s fake celebrity dates
The judges should also, he suggests, to the red-carpet questions he cheerfully
know what they’re talking about— evades.“Israel or Palestine?” one reporter
right now, they swing between off-base asks. “I think they’re both dope and
guesses (a celebrity chef ?) and joke should just keep being true to them-
guesses (Ruth Bader Ginsburg!). My selves!” Chase replies.A sweet,well-man-
less informed complaint is that, if I’m nered blank, he gets re-branded by the
going to watch a Broadway/Vegas trivia day, from “cute” to “woke” to “bad boy,”
game, it shouldn’t feature so many—or, as his hashtags are monitored like vol-
really, any—athletes. They can’t sing, atile stocks. There are great set pieces
and I don’t know, or care, who any of involving Justin Theroux’s glam-mini-
them are, and you can’t make me. malist apartment, which contains both
Because, really, that’s the problem: a church and a motorcycle toilet.Wanda
you do need to care who the star is when Sykes is funny as a music publicist; Ken
it’s revealed.Instead,that moment bursts Marino, as Chase’s suspiciously boy-
the fantasy bubble—all along,we’ve been focussed manager, does his creepy-
watching a variety show featuring Terry pathos thing. But, rather than simply
Bradshaw singing Imagine Dragons. caricaturing Hollywood’s bottom-feed-
One of reality TV’s most impressive, ers—a specialty of harsher satires such
and underpraised, achievements has as “Difficult People,” “Unbreakable
been its ability to find ultra-talented no- Kimmy Schmidt,” and “BoJack Horse-
bodies, like Kelly Clarkson, and reveal man”—“The Other Two” has a surpris-
that they’re secretly stars.“The Masked ing tender streak.In certain ways, it re-
Singer” is a pleasantly goofy,undemand- sembles the Canadian sitcom “Schitt’s
ing diversion, but too often it does the Creek,” another charming fish-out-of-
opposite: it makes you miss the mask. water family story, and another show
with a layered queer male hero.
n “The Other Two,” a smart new sit- Although every character, including
I com on Comedy Central, a thirteen- Chase’s mom,who is pursuing her “Year
year-old Justin Bieber-like YouTube star, of Yes,” gets shading as the season goes
Chase Dreams (Case Walker), moves on, the strongest story traces Cary’s You deserve
from Ohio to New York with his wid- dawning recognition of just how warped
owed stage mom (Molly Shannon,wear- he’s been by years of playing it straight.
ing a magnificent moussed mullet), to When Chase releases a tween anthem
a good laugh.
grab the golden ring of tween celebrity. called “My Brother’s Gay,” Cary is em-
But, as the title indicates, the series isn’t barrassed.But it liberates him, too, and Get cartoons
so much about Chase’s rise as about the he quickly begins to embrace his new and more funny stuff in
breakdown it triggers in the lesser brand—only to find that that choice
Dreams standing next to him: his sis- has its underside as well.Soon, he’s ag- your in-box with the
ter, Brooke (Heléne Yorke), a dancer gressively pursuing “likes” with a group Daily Humor newsletter.
turned homeless party girl, and his of outrageous “Instagays.” (“I used to
brother, Cary (Drew Tarver), a gay be fat,” one hunk explains solemnly, de-
waiter/actor who struggles to get cast scribing his brand.“But now I have two
in a cat-food ad as “man at party who nieces.”) He finds himself nervously
smells fart.” Chase’s siblings aren’t mean serving mojitos to Andy Cohen.He has
about his fame—in fact, they’re often potential,but it’s as ephemeral as a Snap-
the only protective people around, ob- chat post. “Do you know how many
jecting when his manager wants, say, to views your video has?” an awful new
dye Chase’s tongue. But his rising sta- agent asks him. “Fifteen million.” She Sign up at
tus does trigger a desperation not to adds, “And that means I can make you newyorker.com/humoremail
throw away their own shot. “Cary,” the most famous person in the world—
Brooke says,as the two drift,overdressed, for the next fourteen hours.” 
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 1
1, 201
9 71

THE CURRENT CINEMA
EYES WIDE OPEN
“Never Look Away.”
BY ANTHONY LANE
he hero of “Never Look Away” is
T called Kurt Barnert,and,for the bulk
of the narrative, which covers his early
adult years and the start of his career as
an artist, he is played by Tom Schilling.
But the movie begins when Kurt is a boy
of six, and the actor who takes the role,
Cai Cohrs, exerts, I would say, a more
powerful pull on your attention.You can’t
Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s film pits art against German history.
take your eyes off his eyes—blue and un-
blinking, as he confronts the world like
a camera with the shutter left open, per-
mitting the images to burn into his brain.
The opening scene is set in Dresden, in
1937, and one thing Kurt stares at with
particular care is a Kandinsky from 1921.
It’s a small abstract painting, one of a
cluster of works that have been gathered,
under Nazi auspices, to be jeered at for
their decadence and their moral defor-
mity. Kurt is viewing the collection in
the company of his beloved aunt, Elisa-
beth (Saskia Rosendahl), and she quietly
says to him,as they stand before the Kan-
dinsky, “Don’t tell anybody, but I like it.”
To all appearances, Elisabeth is a
model citizen, tall and fair. When Hit-
ler visits the city, she has the honor of
72 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 1
1, 201
9 ILLUSTRATION BY PETRA ERIKSSON
obstetrician and a member of the S.S.—a
combination so extreme that it belongs,
perhaps, in a schlockier film altogether.
Dresden is levelled in one infernal night,
and, as the war crawls to a close, See-
band is captured by the Russians.After
saving his skin, if not his soul, by assist-
ing in the birth of a Russian child, he
slots into the Communist regime of
East Germany with the disciplined ease
handing him a bouquet of flowers as his that made him so capable a Nazi.
car goes by. But what propels the film,
in the course of more than three hours,
“Never Look Away” is written and
directed by Florian Henckel von Don-
is a growing awareness that appearances nersmarck, who won an Oscar for “The
are not merely deceptive but doomed to Lives of Others” (2006).That movie, a
be incomplete; they dare us to pierce saga of surveillance and baffled yearning,
them, as best we can, and to puzzle over measured the grip of the Stasi on daily
the truths that they encrypt. Elisabeth, existence and the effects of what you
for instance, is profoundly troubled in might call intrusive-compulsive disorder.
What the new film suggests, over and
over, is that, for a person held in that
grip—or, indeed, for the Seebands who
do the gripping—the political shape of
the state is immaterial.Distinctions be-
tween left and right mean nothing to
the crushed.What Kurt observed about
art as a child,for example,is what he dis-
covers afresh when,in the East Germany
of the nineteen-fifties, he enrolls in art
school and is corralled, like his confrères,
into Socialist Realism.The wider cause
is paramount, and to serve one’s private
needs, in paint, is to yield to the bour-
geois blandishments of the self.“Me,me,
me!” his teacher exclaims, decrying the
modernist mysteries of the West.
Kurt falls in love with a fashion stu-
dent named Ellie (Paula Beer),who sews
him a suit.There’s a strange nocturnal
sequence, which begins as the two of
mind, and, back at home, Kurt finds her them, lying in bed, hear her parents re-
sitting at the piano in the nude.She standsturning unexpectedly. Kurt, minus his
up, hits herself on the head, drawing clothes,leaps out of the window and into
blood, and says, “I’m playing a concert a fir tree—a dark, primitive, and very
Germanic gag.He climbs down, a bare,
for the Führer.” Still the little boy looks.
As she is taken away in an ambulance, forked animal, and comes face to face
he briefly puts his hand in front of his with Ellie’s mother,Martha (Ina Weisse).
face, to occlude his final sight of her, Without raising the alarm, she lets him
much as Tom Hanks gazes up from Earth, scamper off. Meanwhile, Ellie’s father,
in “Apollo 13” (1995), and uses his thumb who saw nothing,goes upstairs and shuts
to blot out the moon he will never reach. his daughter’s window.As he leans over
Elisabeth is treated by Carl Seeband to blow out her candle, we see him for
(Sebastian Koch), although the treat- the first time. It’s the Professor.
ment, in grim violation of the Hippo-
cratic oath, consists of sterilization and, f you are as slow on the uptake as I
later, euthanasia.The insanity lies not I am, you’ll need a few seconds to
in the patient but in the society that piece together the evidence. It’s like
wolfs her down. Seeband, who insists this:Kurt adores, and will soon marry,
on being addressed as “Professor,” is an the child of the man who sent Aunt
Elisabeth to her death. And neither
he nor Seeband has made the connec-
tion.In fact, it is only Kurt’s work that
will—years later, once he, Ellie, and
her parents have fled to West Ger-
many, and after much trial and error
in his creative approach—start to probe
the wounds of the past.Even then, we
don’t get the sense that he’s wreaking
a conscious revenge; rather, his paint-
ings are in themselves acts of investi-
gation.Neither purgative, like therapy,
nor sententious, like propaganda, they
simply sit on the white walls or the
cold floor of Kurt’s studio and bear
witness with a frightening honesty, so
much so that, when Seeband first sees
them, you hold your breath. Will he
heed what they have to say?
This is Sebastian Koch’s moment.
He is a handsome presence onscreen,
with a formality that grows more in-
teresting as it is compromised.In “The
Lives of Others,” he was a successful
playwright in East Berlin, striving
equally to obey and to buck the sys-
tem. Here, as the Professor, with his
sombre suits and his clinician’s coats,
his stiffness remains intact until he is
accosted by the paintings, whereupon
he shies away, folding into himself, and
crumples like a man made of paper.
The whole scene is beautifully gauged,
and the problem is that Koch—like
Weisse, as Seeband’s anxiously watch-
ful wife, and like Rosendahl, as Elisa-
beth—overshadows Tom Schilling,
who is suave but anodyne in the lead-
ing role. He is a flimsy successor to
the late Ulrich Mühe,who brought such
mesmerizing calm and concentration to
“The Lives of Others,” as the operative
who bugged and recorded his fellow-
citizens.To be fair,you don’t envy Schil-
ling in his task. Compared with spy-
ing, the ordeal of artistry is notoriously
hard to feign, and only the wisest ac-
tors have flourished in the attempt.
Think of the great Michel Piccoli, for
whom Emmanuelle Béart so patiently
posed, hour upon hour, in Jacques
Rivette’s “La Belle Noiseuse” (1991),
and whose intensity, like Mühe’s, never
flagged.
Donnersmarck, in the end credits,
offers thanks to the German painter
Gerhard Richter, who is still alive,
and the extent to which “Never Look
Away” does or does not mirror his bi-
ography is already a matter of debate.
(It was recently explored in these pages
by Dana Goodyear.) The paintings on
show in the film are a spirited exer-
cise in the Richteresque, and it’s no
surprise to learn that they were done
by Andreas Schön, a former assistant
of Richter’s. Should you seek the real
thing, however, I would steer you
toward “Gerhard Richter Painting”
(2011), a fine documentary by Corinna
Belz, which reveals the artist to be far
more gnomic than Kurt Barnert, and
more puckishly amused.Talking of his
pictures, he remarks, “They do what
they want,” and “I don’t like the ones
I understand.”
It may be that the ideal viewer of
“Never Look Away” will be one who
has never heard of Richter, and who
is at liberty to greet the movie on its
own ground.Less compact than “The
Lives of Others,” it ranges much more
widely, in both tone and time, and la-
bors under a musical score so tena-
cious that you feel half bullied into the
right emotional response. (The com-
poser is Max Richter, and you won-
der: Is Donnersmarck racking up the
Richters? If so, why not have Bach
played by Sviatoslav, or conducted by
Karl?) Also, the spaciousness of the
plot allows for the gravest errors of
judgment.A sequence in which women
suffering from mental afflictions are
led naked into a gas chamber ought
not to have made the final cut; many
people will ask why it should have been
filmed in the first place.
Then, there are the contrivances on
which the movie turns.I was especially
taken with the lad who just happens
to enter a restaurant where Seeband
and Kurt are dining, long after the war,
and hawks a newspaper, crying out that
a prominent Nazi doctor, the Profes-
sor’s former boss, is under arrest. For
chronic storytellers, though, coinci-
dence is a natural ingredient of fate,
and Donnersmarck is something of a
rigorous romantic—a rare breed, un-
embarrassed by the urge for melodrama,
and by tales that are lavishly uphol-
stered and plainly told.The most com-
mon complaint is that he’s old-fash-
ioned, but that is no crime, and a more
antic or more aggressive style would
hardly have improved “The Lives of
Others.” The latest film, stately rather
than stealthy, is no match for it, but
you are borne along, nonetheless, by
the clash of characters, and by the iro-
nies of historical momentum.Only by
glancing backward into the shadows,
we realize, can Kurt, like his homeland,
hope to progress.One brush with des-
tiny, and the painter comes alive. 
NEWYORKER.COM
Richard Brody blogs about movies.

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 CARTOON CAPTION CONTEST

Each week, we provide a cartoon in need of a caption. You, the reader, submit a caption, we choose three
finalists, and you vote for your favorite. Caption submissions for this week’s cartoon, by Sofia Warren,
must be received by Sunday, February 10th. The finalists in the January 28th contest appear below. We will
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THIS WEEK’S CONTEST

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THE FINALISTS THE WINNING CAPTION

“It all started when we adopted a highway.”

Asma Latif, East Greenwich, R.I.

“So how did you and Thomas meet?” “I choose to remember Aspen as it was.”
Mike Lachant, Greenwich, Conn. John Duffy, Philadelphia, Pa.

“It doesn’t even stop here.”

Benjamin Branfman, New York City