Professional Documents
Culture Documents
The New York Review of Books
The New York Review of Books
The New York Review of Books
ONE NATION
6 ...................................... Adam Thirlwell The Trouble with Truth
Yoga by Emmanuel Carrère, translated from the French by John Lambert INDIVISIBLE
10 .......................... Carolina A. Miranda ‘Places That Weren’t Supposed to Be Places’
no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane
Maria an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City
Catalog of the exhibition edited by Marcela Guerrero
Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s–Today
an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
Catalog of the exhibition edited by Carla Acevedo-Yates
Tropical Is Political: Caribbean Art Under the Visitor Economy Regime
an exhibition at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, San Juan
Catalog of the exhibition edited by Aimé Iglesias Lukin and Karen Marta
14 ................................... Terrance Hayes Poem
15 .................................. Darryl Pinckney Black Talk on the Move
Lover Man by Alston Anderson, with an afterword by Kinohi Nishikawa
18 ..................................... Fintan O’Toole Unrepentant Pence
20 ........................... Daniel Mendelsohn Robert Gottlieb (1931–2023)
21 ............................ Anahid Nersessian The Republic of Translation
Historiae by Antonella Anedda, translated from the Italian and the Sardinian E L I Z A BE T H C UR R ID-H A L K E T T
by Patrizio Ceccagnoli and Susan Stewart
Common Life by Stéphane Bouquet, translated from the French
by Lindsay Turner THE OVERLOOKED
23 ........................................ Laura Marsh The Pregnancy Plot
Reproduction by Louisa Hall
AMERICANS
27 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jeffrey Toobin Keeping Speech Robust and Free The Resilience of Our Rural Towns
Actual Malice: Civil Rights and Freedom of the Press in ‘New York Times and What It Means for Our Country
v. Sullivan’ by Samantha Barbas
30 ...................................... James Walton The Hemon Variations
The World and All That It Holds by Aleksandar Hemon
“This timely book belies the
32 ...................... Ruth Bernard Yeazell Life Made Light
Vermeer an exhibition at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
narrative of a nation sharply
Catalog of the exhibition edited by Pieter Roelofs and Gregor J. M. Weber polarized across an urban-rural
Johannes Vermeer: Faith, Light and Reflection by Gregor J. M. Weber divide. Instead, Elizabeth Currid-
Vermeer and the Art of Love by Aneta Georgievska-Shine
Halkett shows that Americans
35 .................................. Kerri Arsenault Vacationland
Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty aren’t nearly as divided by
36 ...................................... Cynthia Zarin Poem geography as the punditry and
41 ............................... Joyce Carol Oates None-Too-Gay Divorcées media would have us believe.
Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott, with a foreword by Alissa Bennett and Essential reading for all who care
an afterword by Marc Parrott
Becoming the Ex-Wife: The Unconventional Life and Forgotten Writings about the future of our country.”
of Ursula Parrott by Marsha Gordon —RICHARD FLORIDA,
44 ...................... Gabriel Winslow-Yost ‘This Is Not Your Grave’ author of The New Urban Crisis
Acting Class by Nick Drnaso
Men I Trust by Tommi Parrish
“The Overlooked Americans
tears down entrenched definitions
and stereotypes and builds a
new image of rural America that
is not hopelessly divided
from urban America. Nuanced,
cogent, and empathetic.”
—J A N E H A R M A N , USC presidential
scholar, former member of Congress (CA, 36)
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at nybooks.com/newsletters, and read every issue we’ve published since 1963 at
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3
The Narrow Cage The Kokinshū
and Other Modern Selected Poems
The Backstreets Fairy Tales Translated and introduced by Migrant Aesthetics
A Novel from Xinjiang VASILY EROSHENKO TORQUIL DUTHIE Contemporary Fiction, Global
PERHAT TURSUN Translated by Adam Kuplowsky. “From the cries of the warbler Migration, and the Limits of Empathy
Foreword by Jack Zipes. in spring to the lonely nights of
Translated by Darren Byler GLENDA R. CARPIO
longing for a lover, Duthie
and Anonymous “A treasure trove of inventive and
offers fresh translations from “[Carpio’s] superb book reframes
Named a Best Book of 2022 sometimes subversive fables that
each book of the Kokinshū.” our understanding of migration by
by The New Yorker transcend borders.”
highlighting the aesthetic strategies
—Christina Laffin, author of
“A startling literary document of —Tokyo Weekender that authors like Julia Otsuka, Teju
Rewriting Medieval
urban alienation.” Cole, and Valeria Luiselli use to push
Japanese Women
readers away from empathy and
—The New Yorker
toward understanding.”
“The Backstreets is undoubtedly
—Paula M. L. Moya, author of
an important political document,
The Social Imperative
but it is, most of all, a significant
addition to the canon
of outsider literature.”
COLUMBIA
—Wall Street Journal UNIVERSITY
PRESS
CUP.COLUMBIA.EDU
ERIS PRESS
Carolina A. Miranda is the art and design columnist at the Los Angeles
Lauren Kane
Online Editors
Times. She was a winner of the 2017 Rabkin Prize in Visual Arts Journalism. Lucy Jakub, Max Nelson
Anahid Nersessian is a Professor of English at the University of California
at Los Angeles. A new edition of her book Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse
Associate Editor
Daniel Drake
was published in November. Assistant Editors
Nawal Arjini, Willa Glickman
Joyce Carol Oates is Visiting Distinguished Professor in the School of Arts
Copyeditors
and Sciences at Rutgers–New Brunswick. She is the author, most recently, Sam Needleman, Will Palmer
of the novel Babysitter and the 2023 recipient of the Award for Literary
Editorial Interns
Excellence from Taobuk, the Taormina International Book Festival. Jordi Anaya, Yadira Gonzalez, Hannah Langer
Fintan O’Toole is the Advising Editor at The New York Review, a columnist Advising Editor
for The Irish Times, and the Leonard L. Milberg Professor of Irish Letters Fintan O’Toole
at Princeton. His most recent book, We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal
History of Modern Ireland, was published in the US last year.
Editor-at-Large
Daniel Mendelsohn
Darryl Pinckney’s memoir, Come Back in September, was published last year.
Adam Thirlwell’s new novel, The Future Future, will be published in October.
Publisher
Rea S. Hederman
Jeffrey Toobin’s most recent book, Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Associate Publisher, Business Operations
Rise of Right-Wing Extremism, was published in May. Michael King
Associate Publisher, Marketing and Planning
James Walton is a writer and broadcaster. He is the editor of The Faber Book Janice Fellegara
of Smoking and the author of the literary quiz books Who Killed Iago? and
Advertising Director
The Penguin Book Quiz: From “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” to “Ulysses.” He
is a cohost of The Booker Prize Podcast, which will begin in early July.
Lara Frohlich Andersen
Contracts Director
Gabriel Winslow-Yost is on the editorial staff of The New York Review. Jean Marie Pierson
.
dren in sailor suits. It’s strange, ogy. Ellipsis does not agree with me.” Just after I read Yoga I was reading unity so fluently that I was left with a
but that’s how it is. I remember At a local level, this commitment a novel by another European writer surprising desire. I didn’t want more
each reawakening as a moment of to linearity, to a bricolage using any whose work I admire: Enrique Vila- truth, whatever that might be. I wanted
unbearable distress. What made it element he encounters, can provoke Matas’s Montevideo. Early in it there’s more intricate arts of fiction.
TE RE S ITA FE RNÁNDE Z/ MUS EU M OF C ONTE M PORARY ART CHICAGO/ LEH MANN M AU PIN, N EW YORK , HONG KONG, S EOUL, AN D LON DON
Teresita Fernández: Rising (Lynched Land) (detail), 2020 not the right to vote in federal elec-
There are ruptures so great that they tions. In English, Torres-Ferrer’s piece
function as markers of time. “We
would say: ‘the year of the great earth-
quake,’ or: ‘the year of the hurricane
a disaster area as it was a disaster
nation.”
The damage wrought by the hurri-
M aria wasn’t one rupture, but many.
The storm simply gave the unrav-
eling a moniker and a marker in time.
is subtitled “Value Your American Lie.”
The exhibition featured more than
fifty works by twenty artists from
that flattened M. Celeste’s house,’ or: cane, which the writer and geographer As Astrid Cruz-Negrón, an organizer the island and the diaspora, and was
‘the year of the fire on Main Street,’” Joshua Jelly-Schapiro chronicled in based in Utuado, told the journalist loosely organized into the themes
the Martinican poet and philosopher these pages in 2017, wasn’t the only Alana Casanova-Burgess last year, “It of infrastructure, ecology, tourism,
Édouard Glissant once wrote of his- disaster.* Puerto Rico had already had is as if Hurricane Maria never finished mourning, and resistance. Though pre-
tory’s junctures. its capacity for resilience stretched leaving us.” sented as a survey, it felt more like a
In Puerto Rico, Hurricane Maria by centuries of colonial rule—first by This rupture served as a starting series of targeted responses to recent
was one of those ruptures. This bibli- Spain, then the United States, which, point for “no existe un mundo pos- events. Absent, for example, were the
cal storm, with its biblical name, made since seizing control in 1898, has used huracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake dancer and choreographer nibia pas-
landfall at Yabucoa, on the island’s the territory as sugar plantation, mil- of Hurricane Maria,” a group show at trana santiago, who has created poi-
east coast, at dawn on September 20, itary base, medical lab, and tax haven the Whitney Museum of American Art gnant site-specific performances in
2017, then traveled northwest, bull- (often aided and abetted by the island’s that concluded in April. The exhibition public places like swimming pools and
dozing its way along the Cordillera fair-skinned elite). When the hurri- was the first large survey of Puerto airport hangars, and the painter Juan
Central, the mountain range that cane hit, Puerto Rico was mired in Rican art at a major New York City Sánchez, who for decades has explored
serves as Puerto Rico’s spine. Maria a stew of toxic policies that, in the museum in half a century. (The New Puerto Rico’s colonial condition in can-
was a Category 4 storm two miles per words of Morales, had turned it into York Times critic Holland Cotter es- vases that evoke religious iconography.
hour short of being classified as Cat- “a hollowed-out shell of itself.” There timated that the last such show was The most conspicuous absence,
egory 5. Its force was such that riv- was high unemployment, increasing “The Art Heritage of Puerto Rico: Pre- however, was that of the prominent
ers spilled out of their beds, forests emigration, a faltering economy, and Columbian to Present,” jointly orga- Puerto Rican assemblagist Daniel
were smashed into splinters, houses a government drowning in so much nized by the Metropolitan Museum of Lind-Ramos—currently the subject
were pulverized, and roofs were torn debt (enthusiastically supplied by Wall Art and the nascent Museo del Bar- of a solo show at M oMA PS1 , on view
from buildings. Aerial images taken Street banks) that it was teetering on rio in 1973.) In the region to which through September 4—whose to-
afterward revealed roads that look the brink of default. What the hur- most Puerto Ricans in the US have temic sculptures weave the detritus
as if they’d been carpet- bombed. ricane made evident was the level of historically migrated, over a period of consumerism and ecological disaster
Death tolls fluctuated wildly, but an decay: the storm damaged 80 percent in which Puerto Ricans on the main- into powerful pieces that evoke Afro-
estimate published by the Milken of Puerto Rico’s already flickering elec- land have come to outnumber those Boricua cultural traditions. (A whole
Institute School of Public Health at trical grid. It also made evident the on the island, art institutions in New separate show could be mounted on
George Washington University con- responsibility the US bore for the rot. York (with the notable exception of how the recent ruptures—to which you
cluded that nearly three thousand It is Congress, after all, that has final El Museo) have neglected the Puerto can add the pandemic and the uprisings
lives were lost during the storm and say over Puerto Rican policy, and an Rican story. that occurred around the world after
in the six months that followed. As unelected financial oversight board— But using Hurricane Maria as the George Floyd’s murder in 2020—have
the journalist and commentator Ed also based in the US—that adminis- basis for the exhibition carries a risk, pulled at the threads that bind Puerto
Morales wrote in his astute Fantasy ters its economy. since it means foregrounding ruin over Rico’s national identity, which has his-
Island: Colonialism, Exploitation, and possibility. Indeed, some involved with torically marginalized Black people.)
the Betrayal of Puerto Rico (2019), the *“A Perfect Storm,” The New York Review, the show approach it with ambiva- There were, however, astonishingly
island after Maria “was not so much November 23, 2017. lence. “Many of my Puerto Rican art- potent moments—especially in the
apartment – right across the street moving it to a new home, or Caribbean than it is about states of
from Vitsœ’s New York shop – reconfiguring a decades-old system, A 2022 video by Gallisá Muriente ze- Caribbean-ness. Every exhibition
with his dog, Sullivan. our team offers expert help and advice, roed in on these ideas. The Envoy about the Caribbean must first grap-
free of charge. (Even If It’s Not More Than a Truce), ple with the region’s range of geog-
They’ve since switched home – and as it is titled in English, shows the raphies, ecologies, colonial histories,
DPBTUs – for a new life in Seattle, Founded 1959 artist and her friends inhabiting the languages, migrations, and geopolitical
Washington, together with their Design Dieter Rams country home that once belonged to boundaries, all of which for hundreds
treasured Vitsœ shelving system. Delivered worldwide
Rexford G. Tugwell, who in the 1940s of years have been shaped by outsiders.
Whether you’re just over the road, or New York served as one of the last US-appointed The Caribbean was the site of one of
on the other side of the globe, Vitsœ’s Los Angeles governors of Puerto Rico. They have the earliest independence struggles in
planners are on hand to take care of dinner and stage an informal reading the Americas—the slave revolt that led
you personally. vitsoe.com of Tugwell’s writings about imperial- to Haiti’s independence in 1804—yet
ism and colonization, as if to conjure many of its islands (including Puerto
his spirit. Tucked into a scenic patch Rico, Martinique, and the British
Virtual Festival Day Virtual Festival Day offers authors and readers from across the
globe and country the opportunity to celebrate books of all genres
Sunday, September 24 through spirited online discussions featuring emerging and
iconic authors. Tune into the Brooklyn Book Festival from
wherever you are — in Brooklyn or across the world.
.
structured discourse.” nomic policies. Luciano’s school bus
The loose themes made for a show pieces aren’t simply scraps, they are
that could veer from far-reaching to shields—objects of resistance in an
unmoored, and felt at times like a trot ongoing struggle.
not to her the most important thing in Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem after World War II enrolled in North
about the idiom of the Negro. She val- (1928) is still countrified: “‘Doom, mah Carolina College, before making his
.
ideas of the South as both threat and American literature. What happened? garet Walker’s folk-filled but forward- had to hold him up while he played.
home. After Brown v. Board of Educa- Nishikawa is puzzled. He finds clues looking Civil War novel Jubilee (1966). Anderson published Lover Man in 1959,
tion, black youth were under increas- in Anderson’s disastrous temperament She said in an essay that she felt she the year Billie Holiday died. Lover Man
ing attack. The folk feeling that some and in his being angrily out of sync began the novel when she heard her O where can you be?
white critics found reassuring was with the civil rights era. grandmother’s stories as a little girl.
being pushed aside by more aggressive Nishikawa traces Anderson’s steps Nishikawa observes that a novel *Patrick Hill, “Robert Graves and the Mys-
stances. It wasn’t urban impatience as fully as he can. Though not a US cit- about an enslaved man who escapes tery of Alston Anderson,” charlesmarlow
rebuking southern black patience; the izen, he enlisted in 1943 and was sent to freedom but chooses to return to .com, January 24, 2016; and Lawrence
divide was now generational more than to Germany and Iran, and was later in bondage left people “scratching their Downes, “The Three Burials of Alston
geographic. Henry Dumas, ten years Paris studying German metaphysics. heads.” Anderson’s bad luck is that Anderson,” The New York Times, June 12,
Anderson’s junior, killed by New York There he began to write and met Mor- for a black writer, to be a contrarian 2011. See also Simon Gough, The White God-
City police in 1968, has in his eerie, decai Richler, who may have pointed is usually a shrewd career move or dess: An Encounter (Norwich: Galley Beg-
posthumously published stories, Ark him toward Majorca. The White God- survival tactic: George Schuyler or gar, 2012); and Miranda Seymour, Robert
of Bones (1974), a much more retribu- dess was the backpack book of its day, Zora Neale Hurston trying to make Graves: Life on the Edge (Henry Holt, 1995).
tive sense of folk culture. and Anderson turned up there in the
Yet in the late 1950s folk wisdom was early 1950s, perhaps in search of Rob-
still taken as an innocence; it was un- ert Graves. “After the first shock of
dervalued in some quarters because it novelty, the villagers’ reaction was
was seen as peculiar to black American ‘How lucky we are! A black man!’ In # !$
culture, not necessarily a psychological Majorca negroes bring luck,” Graves
fit with the goals of social integration. wrote of the tall, soft-spoken stranger "
The black idiom was distant, if not hid- in the village.
den, from the larger society. Langston Anderson traveled back and forth
Hughes regarded the beat of Negro between Majorca and New York in the
music and Negro speech as a private, 1950s. Together with Terry Southern,
emotional shorthand that evolved he interviewed Nelson Algren for The
and changed in order to stay ahead of Paris Review in 1955. In 1949 Algren
mainstream usage, of white adoption. had published The Man with the Golden
A similar feeling runs through Amiri Arm, in part about morphine addiction,
Baraka’s (LeRoi Jones’s) Blues People: which he explained in the interview ϐ
Negro Music in White America (1963), in was almost an afterthought. Ander- " " & "
which black culture is an avant-garde son was at Yaddo in 1955 at the same " %
consciously shielding itself from white time as Baldwin, but Nishikawa notes #
ǡϐǤ ǡǡ
commercialization and contamination. that his behavior offended the direc-
ǡ
Elsewhere, wise darkies were viewed tor, Elizabeth Ames. He refused to pay ' " $(
as obsolete, relics of the dying order. his phone bill, informing Ames that he
But they survived the militant moment couldn’t risk his writing life for the Dzǡ
that had dismissed them. sake of a job just to take care of bills. Ǥ ǯ Ǥ ǯ
It was the generation led by Toni When he asked for another fellowship, ǡ ǤdzDz
ǡdz ǤDz ǣ Ǥ
Morrison in the 1970s that made folk she demurred.
ǫdzDz ǡ ǯǡǡ Ǥdz
culture central to the black literary In 1955 Anderson, whether bragging Dz Ǩdz ǡ Dz ǡ
experience. A black oral tradition was or begging, wrote to Graves from New "" #('
an alternative to the Western literary York that he’d been hanging out with ǡdzǡDz Ǣǫdz
tradition, and Morrison started off by juiceheads and hopheads on the wa- ǤDzǡǡǢ ǡ ǡ
formulating a conception of the black terfront and had changed his address ǡ ǡ ǡ "" "
novel as an “aural” work. Folk culture six times. Graves came to the rescue, #(
became vernacular culture; Negro di- or at least wrote the foreword to Lover ǯǤDz ǫ
alect was elevated into Black English. Man. What happened? The life of apri- ǡǢ
Henry Louis Gates Jr. is a scholar who cots and yogurt was easier, and Ander- # " %( '& "
did not forget Anderson, citing in The son must have been back on Majorca ǡ ǯ Ǣ ǡ ǯ Ȅ
Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro- in 1962, because he and Graves had a ǯǤdzDz ǡdzǢDz
American Literary Criticism (1988) his falling out then. Graves complained ǡǡǡ
ϐǤdzDzǨǯǨ
story “Signifying” as “a masterpiece of of Anderson using sexually explicit Ǩ ǨǦ ǨdzDz
the genre” and “one of the most deli- language with his wife, and also of ǫdz Dz ǡdz ǡ
cately wrought representations of Sig- what he called Anderson’s “drinking #'"( "' Ǣ
nifyin(g) as theme, as depicted oral and doping.” ! "
ritual, but also as structuring prin- For another thing, Anderson’s first #() *
ciple.” Vernacular culture was no lon- novel happened. All God’s Children
ger underground communication. The (1965) is a mess, a notebook of incho-
In a letter to The New York Times in some voter fraud had taken place, I
2005, Donald Trump wrote that “some wasn’t convinced it had cost us the
people cast shadows, and other people election.” In other words, Pence now
choose to live in those shadows.” Mike accepted that Biden had won the elec-
Pence went a little further and chose to tion legitimately and therefore must
be Trump’s shadow. He has ended up be accepted as the incoming president.
as a gray man of no substance, who has Yet not only did Pence not say that
to insist ever more emphatically on his in public, he continued to feed the
own godliness because he has no soul Trump narrative of widespread fraud
left to sell. In the video with which, on and the expectations among the Re-
June 7, he launched his campaign for publican base that courts would over-
the Republican presidential nomina- turn the result. On November 9, two
tion, he managed not to say Trump’s days after he told Kushner that alleged
name—an attempt at conscious un- cheating had probably not cost Trump
coupling that convinced nobody. the election, Pence tweeted, “Told @VP
When the indictment of his former Team Today, ‘it ain’t over til it’s over . . .
boss under the Espionage Act was un- and this AIN’T over!’” On January 4
sealed on June 9, Pence pronounced Pence told a crowd in Milner, Georgia:
himself “deeply troubled,” but could
not bring himself to say what the trou- I know we all—we all got our
ble was. His signature policy stance is doubts about the last election. And
to claim that “Trump and others in this Mike Pence at a ‘Roast and Ride’ fundraiser for a veterans’ assistance nonprofit attended I want to assure you, I share the
race are retreating from the cause of by eight Republican presidential candidates or soon-to-be candidates, Des Moines, Iowa, concerns of millions of Americans
the unborn,” a claim that seems un- June 3, 2023 about voting irregularities. And I
likely to draw supporters from either promise you, come this Wednes-
Trump or Ron DeSantis. That a can- daughter Charlotte. They had to flee June 7 was “KeptHisOath!” The man day, we’ll have our day in Congress.
didate with Pence’s name recognition from his office to the basement. As they couldn’t hang is also the man they
is polling in the single digits, barely Pence recalled, “I could hear the falling couldn’t bully.
ahead of the almost unknown Vivek
Ramaswamy, shows how, like so many
others who offer their necks to Trump’s
of footsteps and angry chanting.” Had
the mob caught up with them, it may
well have inflicted serious violence,
Things have come to a bad pass
when not quite overthrowing Ameri-
can democracy is the definition of re-
A gain, it matters that this promise
was embedded in an evocation of
religious righteousness. Pence’s own
fangs, he has been sucked dry. not just on Pence but on his wife and publican virtue. Even so, Pence’s claim account of the speech makes this very
All that is left is a washed-out im- daughter, too. to be the hero who stood in the gap point:
itation of his former master’s show- While they were hiding in the Cap- of danger and held off the barbarian
manship. Pence’s current pose is Uriah itol garage, Trump—according to hordes is laughable. In the aftermath With the election controversy
Heep pretending to be Bill Sikes. As a witnesses, then in his residence at of the 2020 election he went along with hanging in the air, I spoke about
teaser for his big announcement, on the White House, watching the riot Trump’s attempted coup for as long as my faith. I told the audience
June 3 he rode into Des Moines, Iowa, on TV —posted a tweet that seemed he possibly could and demurred only about . . . the night I had come to
on a Harley Davidson, wearing blue intended to inflame even further the when the coup had already failed. Christ, reminding them, “Even
jeans, cowboy boots, a black shirt, and mob’s anger: “Mike Pence didn’t have At 2:30 AM on the morning of No- when it doesn’t seem like it, God
a leather vest with patches that read the courage to do what should have vember 4, 2020, Trump stood on a flag- is always working.”
“Pence” and “Rolling Thunders.” The been done to protect our Country and bedecked stage in the East Room of the
most sycophantic figure in modern our Constitution.” White House, declared that “frankly, Pence was doing what he had always
American politics, Trump’s ever-so- Yet Pence just turned the other we did win this election,” and called done for Trump—providing a godly
humble plus-one, was not just born cheek. On the morning after the Jan- for the counting of votes to stop. This cover for his boss’s depredations. For
again but also—who knew?—born to uary 6 insurrection, Nancy Pelosi and was very obviously the scripted begin- an audience steeped in evangelical
be wild. Chuck Schumer jointly called Pence to ning of a coup. And Pence was a full preaching, the insistence that God is
Perhaps it was this deep need to ape urge him to invoke the Twenty-fifth participant. He stood behind Trump, working despite the evidence was a
an alpha male that made Pence such Amendment to the Constitution, which literally as well as figuratively. When clear signal that Biden’s victory would
easy meat for Trump. Long before he allows for “the Vice President and a Trump finished speaking, he beckoned be annulled by the divine will. Faith in
joined the Republican ticket in 2016, majority of . . . the principal officers of his sideman forward for his short solo. Jesus fused with faith in Trump, and
Pence showed a taste for secondhand the executive departments” to issue Pence summarizes his own speech in together they would prevail over the
macho. After Barack Obama was inau- a declaration to Congress that “the his memoir, So Help Me God (2022): mere facts of how Americans had voted.
gurated as president in January 2009, President is unable to discharge the Nor is it clear that Pence’s ultimate
Pence riled up his fellow Republican powers and duties of his office.” Pence I obliged, thanking the more than refusal to stop the counting of the
members of the House of Represen- refused to speak to them. The reason 60 million Americans who had al- Electoral College votes on January 6
tatives by showing them the opening is obvious: he had long understood that ready voted for us. I promised that was anywhere near as straightforward
scene of the 1970 movie Patton, in the Republican Party’s base belongs to we would remain vigilant to pro- as he now pretends. Pence insists that
which George C. Scott, looking weirdly Trump, and that he could not himself tect the integrity of the vote and he understood from December 5 that
like Mussolini, addresses his men in become president if he alienated his said I believed with all my heart “there was no ambiguity in the Consti-
front of a giant Stars and Stripes: boss’s fans. that we were on the road to vic- tution or the law about the role of the
tory. And I did. vice president, and I never believed that
We are advancing constantly and the vice president’s role was anything
we’re not interested in holding
onto anything—except the enemy.
We’re going to hold onto him by
E ven after Trump’s indictments,
first on state and then on federal
criminal charges, this is still the pre-
It’s worth noting that believing some-
thing “with all my heart” is, in Pence’s
overwhelming insistence on his evan-
more than ceremonial.” But he seems
to have at the very least explored the
possibility that he might be able to sig-
the nose, and we’re gonna kick him dicament that Pence embodies, as it gelical faith, tantamount to saying that nal, in that purely ceremonial act, his
in the ass. We’re gonna kick the were, on behalf of the entire Republi- God has placed this belief there. The belief that the results were tainted. He
hell out of him all the time, and can Party. He is trying to triangulate convenience of this construction is knew that Trump’s fans would blame
we’re gonna go through him like to a point somewhere between defer- that it absolves Pence himself of any him for doing his constitutional duty.
crap through a goose! ence and defiance, to be at once supine responsibility for making a judgment He hoped to deflect some of that anger
and superior, to look presidential while based on the available evidence. by indicating that he really was on
This self-identification with poultry pandering. The very narrow ground Even if we accept that Pence be- their side—even if this self-serving
excrement (albeit goose rather than on which Pence is standing is his re- lieved on election night that he and message did immense harm to Amer-
chicken) may not have been quite fusal on January 6, after four years of Trump had won, it’s clear from his ican democracy.
what Pence intended, but in his case it slavish loyalty to Trump, to abort the own account that he knew by at least Thus, in late December 2020, Pence
DAVE KAU P/ RE UT ERS
seems apt. On January 6, 2021, Trump process of counting the votes cast in November 7 that this was not so. In called the other recent vice-president
unleashed a mob that chanted “Hang the Electoral College and, in effect, his memoir he quotes a conversation from Indiana, Dan Quayle. A detailed
Mike Pence” and erected a gallows to overturn Joe Biden’s victory. The with Jared Kushner on that day: “I account of the conversation (which
outside the Capitol for that very pur- password for members of the media told him over the phone that ‘Dem- presumably can only have come from
pose. Pence was accompanied inside to gain access to the formal launch of ocrats cheat’ is virtually a proverb in either Pence or Quayle) is given in
the building by his wife, Karen, and his his presidential primary campaign on Indiana, and although I was sure that Bob Woodward and Robert Costa’s
.
from the truth. We were both response. of protection: Karen tells him how quest for power. But, then, Jesus has
offended by the tape, but it was to respond, and God tells Karen. not had to do that because, in the
Karen who was the more forgiv- Here, Pence is insulated from the It would be interesting to know end, Donald Trump has done it for
ing and sympathetic. . . . It was decision to continue as the politi- whether Jesus, in his conversations him.
my wife’s deep faith and belief cal partner of a self-declared serial with Pence, has ever suggested a —June 21, 2023
dozens of contributions to the Review a major piece for the Review, he was fee urn with orange Bakelite handles to watch when he fell ill. Since he hated
.
alone include essays on Bruno Bettel- lying stretched out on a faded blue (“Every room needs an orange ac- sentimentality, I probably shouldn’t
heim, Anna May Wong, and Ethel Wa- sofa in the “Florida Room”—it has cent”), or the way that Kerry Washing- say here that I’ve now started watch-
ters; some evangelical proselytizing windows shaped like portholes and is ton would declare “We’re done here!” ing it and just wish I could call to tell
for foreign writers past and present decorated with, among other things, at the climax of a particularly heated him he was right.
Susan Stewart, some of the original cagnoli and Stewart have preserved and Anedda imagines them encounter- saved but with their old skulls half
texts appear only in Italian, some in the terseness of her idiom, which as- ing the city as a “glut of beauty, taste burned.
Italian and Sardinian, a linguistic pires, as she says in “Annales,” to the and linen tunics,” in Jamie McKen- Too old to run away,
and tonal contrast that sounds the austerity of Latin: “The naked facts,/ drick’s translation. Cicero was Scau- borne in arms toward healing,
.
gree in cinema studies. But I suspect it what pills I was taking you would’ve thought there were thought instead of treasures behind
also has a lot to do with Bouquet’s in- at night. Pills against absence. electric lightbulbs inside. You cov- plate glass. It’s no accident that Bou-
fluences, which are as much American He’s sitting ered me methodically in your saliva, quet’s band of subversives steals books
as European, perhaps even more so. so close oh I’d love like a snail. We listened to our re- as well as electricity.
“SEDUCTIVE...
A THREEWAY TANGLE
OF DESIRE AND
CONFUSION”
SCREEN INTERNATIONAL
.
uniquely positioned to know, as one of it was an attempt to find in Shelley a the first to have seen the connection. also left me with the impression that
the vanishingly few writers of her time source of creative possibility. It’s a loop in her own thoughts rather mothers—and those who choose not
who had borne children. Moers’s essay Ellen Moers doesn’t appear in Re- than a conversation among readers to become mothers—require a fuller
doesn’t aim to reduce the novel to its production (though the novel does cite across the decades. That absence may world than this.
officials against Northern media out- Martin Luther King Jr. Later that year state capitol steps as “My Country, ’Tis filed by the mayor of Montgomery and
lets . . . to prevent them from reporting a group of King’s supporters met at of Thee,” when it was the national an- based on the same advertisement as
on the civil rights movement.” By rul- Harry Belafonte’s apartment in New them, and it said that King had been ar- the one in the Sullivan case, and it
ing for the Times, the Supreme Court York to start a fundraising effort for rested seven times, not four. In addition, faced another damage judgment of
“freed the press to cover the civil rights King’s defense. The civil rights leader the ad incorrectly said that local law $500,000. “By 1964,” Barbas writes,
movement” and, not incidentally, likely Bayard Rustin took charge of it and enforcement officials “ringed” a local “officials in three Southern states had
decided to buy a full-page advertise- college campus; the officers entered the brought seventeen libel actions against
*Anthony Lewis, Make No Law: The Sullivan ment in the Times to attract donors. campus but did not surround it. Northern media outlets, primarily over
Case and the First Amendment (Random He gave some quick instructions to the Alabama, like most states at the time, civil rights coverage, seeking damages
House, 1991); Aimee Edmondson, In Sul- playwright John Murray, who over six recognized a doctrine of law known as of more than $288 million.” By suing
livan’s Shadow: The Use and Abuse of Libel typewritten pages excoriated the Ala- “libel per se,” under which, if the Times their critics, the plaintiffs were engag-
Law During the Long Civil Rights Struggle bama officials for hounding King and was sued for libel, it was required to ing in the same kind of resistance that
(University of Massachusetts Press, 2019). abusing civil rights protesters. prove that the words in the advertise- they had mustered to fight the legal
.
of reputation also has social value.” ‘no relation to the text, history, or vindication of their First Amendment
Sullivan did not provide shelter for structure of the Constitution.’” rights, but they would likely find a very
Available from booksellers and www.nyrb.com
Fox’s assault on Dominion’s reputa- Thomas and Gorsuch offer an “orig- different reception than the Sullivan
tion, nor should it have. inalist” and “textualist” argument defendants did in 1964.
The World and All That It Holds story of displacement and writing in
by Aleksandar Hemon. English”; in a third, he talks of “the
MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, image of the noble, worldly misfit who
336 pp., $28.00 found his salvation in writing, the
image I had so carefully and publicly
As the title suggests—particularly established.”
once you realize that its grandiosity When a filmmaker approaches the
is unironic—The World and All That It narrator to contribute to a documen-
Holds is by some distance Aleksandar tary about “the Bosnian experience,”
Hemon’s most ambitious work, with he nudges her “toward a short film in
the main action spanning thirty-five which I could play myself in various
years, two disintegrating empires, situations from my life—one of those
World Wars I and II, and the Russian brainy postmodern setups everybody
and Chinese Revolutions. The prob- likes so well because it has something
lem is that his transparent desire to to do with identity.” This mixture of
paint his masterpiece results too often self-satire, self-fatigue, and maybe
in a self-conscious striving for effect even self-disgust is most starkly ex-
and an unwavering commitment to so- pressed when the narrator decides that
lemnity. Anybody who comes to the “my story is boring.” On the other hand,
book without having read his earlier he admits, “once you start inventing
ones might be surprised to hear that and soliloquizing, it is terribly hard
Hemon can be a playful, funny writer. to quit.” In short, Hemon seemed to
Here, such comedy as there is proves sense with a distinct pang that all
largely inadvertent. his books thus far could have had the
Granted, it’s not hard to see why same title as the one that Averbuch’s
Hemon might have wanted to strike friend in The Lazarus Project dreamed
out in a new direction. Since his first of writing: The Adventures of a Clever
short story collection, The Question Immigrant.
of Bruno (2000), his reputation has And, as we know from a recent in-
steadily and justifiably grown, with terview, it was in 2010, the year after
honors including a Guggenheim Fel- Love and Obstacles, that Hemon signed
lowship, a MacArthur “genius” grant, the contract for The World and All
and three titles shortlisted for a Na- That It Holds. The immediate reason
tional Book Critics Circle Award. At for the long delay in the book’s ap-
the same time, the books themselves pearance was the death from a rare
have shown an increasing impatience tumor of his one-year-old daughter,
with their own subject matter, which about which he wrote piercingly in an
has generally been versions of Hemon’s essay, “The Aquarium,” that appeared
own admittedly extraordinary life and in The Book of My Lives (2013), a loose
his attempts to make sense of it. collection of autobiographical pieces
Hemon grew up in Sarajevo, Bosnia, confirming how heavily (if sometimes
when it was still part of Communist playfully) he had mined his life for his
Yugoslavia. In 1992, aged twenty-seven, Aleksandar Hemon; illustration by John Brooks fiction. Six years later, he confirmed
he was part of a journalistic exchange it all over again in My Parents: An
to the United States that was supposed through all his work. Pronek then re- where Brik’s beekeeping grandfather Introduction/This Does Not Belong to
to be temporary—but soon after he turned in Nowhere Man (2002), an was born. Their last is Brik’s old home- You (2019), a pair of complementary
arrived, the Bosnian War began and overlapping group of stories in which town of Sarajevo, where “it occurred memoirs published in one volume,
his city was besieged by Serb forces he was seen by a series of different to me that . . . I would always be here, which even its own jacket copy ac-
for what turned out to be four years. narrators at different stages of a life where my heart was.” knowledges is “grounded in stories
Finding himself suddenly a refugee, that again closely resembled Hemon’s, lovingly polished by retelling.” Or, as
Hemon settled in Chicago, working as complete with Ukrainian ancestors, Hemon rather wearily put it in the sec-
a bike messenger, a sandwich maker,
a canvasser for Greenpeace, and a
seller of magazine subscriptions. He
an early career in Sarajevo as a jour-
nalist, and a 1992 exchange program
to the United States that leaves him
S o what did Hemon do next? The
answer was stick to his guns. Love
and Obstacles (2009), which again took
ond memoir, “There are no more newly
discovered memories, the repertoire is
presently, eternally, woefully limited,
also learned English, first well enough exiled in Chicago. the form of overlapping stories, fol- and I’m looping through it.”
to teach it as a second language, and Hemon’s first novel, The Lazarus lowed apparently the same unnamed The first sign of a break for free-
then, more unusually, to publish short Project (2008), looked initially like narrator from his childhood in Sara- dom came between the two auto-
stories in The New Yorker that earned something of a departure. It opens in jevo to survival in Chicago during the biographical collections. The 2015
him comparisons to Nabokov. 1908 with the true story of the Jewish Bosnian War by such means as sell- novel The Making of Zombie Wars is
Not that Hemon appeared espe- immigrant Lazarus Averbuch show- ing magazines door-to-door and on to pretty much a flat-out comedy—if a
cially keen to ingratiate himself with ing up at the home of Chicago’s po- a successful career as a writer who’d dark one—in which Joshua Levin, a
his new compatriots. The center- lice chief, George Shippy, who without published a story called “Love and Ob- would-be screenwriter, isn’t a restless
piece of The Question of Bruno was much in the way of evidence decides stacles” in The New Yorker. Along the Bosnian-born exile but a contentedly
the eighty-page “Blind Jozef Pronek that Averbuch is a murderous anarchist way, we got a thirty-page tale about American secular Jew. (Hemon him-
and Dead Souls,” in which Pronek, a and shoots him dead. It is, however, his Ukrainian-descended family’s love self is a gentile.) He does live in Chi-
character with a biography very like not long before we’re back in the world of beekeeping. cago and teach English as a second
his creator’s, is constantly struck by of the Hemon alter ego. The aftermath For my money, Love and Obstacles language. And several of his pupils are
the obesity of Americans, their igno- of the killing is interspersed with the was Hemon’s most accomplished work from Bosnia, including the beautiful
rance of geography (“Bosnia . . .That’s first-person narration of Vladimir Brik, up to that point: funny, rueful, and but married Ana, with whom he starts
in Russia, right?”), and their unearned a Bosnian-born American writer in- angry—often all at the same time. Yet an affair that ends in the same type of
conviction about living in “the great- vestigating the Averbuch case for a despite the many pleasures it offered, cartoonish violence as does the Zombie
est country on earth.” Faced with all potential novel in which he’d draw on you couldn’t help noticing how much of Wars script he’s working on. He is also
this, he discovers how easy it is for a his personal experience of immigrant the material Hemon had covered be- friends with a Bosnian named Bega,
refugee “to become someone else, a travails (“lousy jobs . . . the acquisition fore. And neither, it appears, could he. whom he knows from his screenwrit-
complete stranger to oneself.” of language, the logistics of survival”) In one passage, the narrator is some- ing workshop and who at times seems
The collection also drew on Hemon’s to animate the story. Brik also bags what dismayed when, on an American like a send-up of the author. “Man is
life in Bosnia, where his great- a lucrative scholarship similar to the book tour, he realizes “everyone was from Sarajevo. He was happy there. He
grandparents moved from Galicia (the “genius” grant Hemon received at content to think that I was in con- was young. . . . War came. He is refugee
region that is now part of Ukraine) about the same time and uses it, as stant, uninterrupted communication now,” goes one of Bega’s movie ideas.
as the Austro-Hungarian Empire fell Hemon did, to visit Eastern Europe with the tormented soul of my home- “Yeah, yeah,” the workshop leader re-
apart after World War I, bringing with with a photographer friend. Their first land”; in another, he delivers to a fel- plies. “We heard that the last time.
them the beekeeping that has buzzed stop is Lviv, Ukraine, near the village low author his “usual, well-rehearsed Got something beyond that?”
.
and they escape into the city. Fortu- And like Christ, Osman is as good as from winning mischievousness to off- to “write about someone who is not
nately, Isak, the widowed doctor who his word. After Klara dies in childbirth, putting solemnity. That novel had me . . . I have to acknowledge that I am
takes them in, fully approves of their Pinto takes the baby, Rahela, with him plenty of religious aphorisms as well, imagining it”—a fact that we might
relationship, having been denied his on a six-year journey across the Tak- but they were invariably comic and ir- have worked out for ourselves.
own chance at gay happiness when the lamakan Desert toward China, during reverent: “I will walk with the Lord in
love of his life was beaten to death in a which he continues to hear Osman’s the lands of living, and the rest of yous 1
By Hemon’s own reckoning, there are five
pogrom. “What is it that makes people voice urging him on. Even in death, can go fuck yourselves”; “The Lord re-
in the first chapter alone, counting English.
do things like that?” Pinto asks after Osman doesn’t abandon his fondness viewed the whole of what he had done
GR ANGE R
2
hearing the story, with the mixture of for speaking in little nuggets of wis- and, behold, he couldn’t remember a In The Book of My Lives, Hemon says that
portentousness and banality that will dom that bring to mind the character fucking thing.” In The World and All for years he reread John le Carré’s Smiley
characterize much of the book. in E. M. Forster who “always delivered That It Holds, they’re not only deliv- novels every summer.
poem, then an accident of printing may preceded it for the last monographic ciling its contradictory imperatives. observes that the hint of clouded sky
also have helped consign the artist to exhibition of his work at the National Having begun by exercising some wise and a red building just barely visi-
oblivion. (Houbraken’s The Great The- Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the restraint on ticket sales, the museum ble through the casement in Officer
ater of Dutch Painters first appeared Mauritshuis in The Hague in 1995– followed up by hanging the paintings and Laughing Girl (circa 1657–1658)
in 1718, and the commentators who 1996 apparently felt superfluous—the in a sequence of spaciously arranged represents the single such outward
followed mostly took their cues from Rijksmuseum show sold out its entire rooms, each of which afforded view-
1
him.) run of tickets just days after it opened. ers ample opportunity—physically, A catalog essay by Pieter Roelofs refers to
The result was that when an occa- Though much still remains unknown at least—to fulfill the promise of the “five” dated paintings, but this includes the
sional Vermeer did circulate, it was about the artist and the man alike, show’s rubric: “Closer to Vermeer.” recently discovered evidence of a Roman
often attributed to someone else, and there is no question about the spell If the art so magnificently displayed numeral on The Art of Painting whose last
even admirers of his paintings didn’t he continues to exert on his viewers. can still elude our desire for other digits scholars have not been able to de-
know whose art had actually capti- One of the most intimate and quiet kinds of closeness, that’s one of the cipher completely. The catalog elsewhere
vated them. Girl Reading a Letter at of painters, and one who often chose principal ways, after all, it keeps us dates the painting circa 1666–1668—a judg-
an Open Window (circa 1657–1658)— to work on an unusually small scale, looking. ment based, like all such approximations in
recently restored by the Gemäldegal- Vermeer has become, paradoxically, Of the thirty-seven paintings now Vermeer’s case, on a loose consensus as to
erie in Dresden and the centerpiece a crowd-pleaser. attributed to Vermeer, only four bear the artist’s stylistic development.
of works both early and late, from the unlike Van Hoogstraten, he never at- martyrs from a sponge would repre-
smiling young man to the left of The tempted to theorize his practice—the sent perhaps his earliest attempt at an
Procuress (1656), who has sometimes
been identified as the artist himself,
to the two women at the virginals, one
“A t one for once with sunlight fall-
ing through/A leaded window”:
as this lovely phrase from Howard
paintings themselves provide abun-
dant testimony to their creator’s un-
derstanding of how vision operates.
image of female absorption—a maca-
bre forerunner of works like The Milk-
maid or Young Woman with a Water
seated and one standing, who look out Nemerov’s 1962 tribute to the art- Scholars have long speculated that Pitcher (both circa 1662–1664). Only
at us from a pair of late paintings that Vermeer must have had access to a when his brush drew a fluid squiggle
2
usually hang in the National Gallery Neither of these great paintings, unfortu- camera obscura, since certain features of red paint beneath the dead snake in
in London. nately, made it to the Rijksmuseum. of his work—especially the areas of Allegory of the Catholic Faith, however,
.
Alissa Valles with it a troubling corollary: that both Constantijn Huygens was a great admirer free to ignore, but in this case Nem-
Paperback $14.95 • On sale July 25th
• Vermeer’s overtly religious paintings of the poems, nineteen of which he trans- erov’s “At one for once with sunlight”
and his work as a whole are best un- lated into Dutch and published in a col- feels truer to Vermeer than the dic-
derstood as the product of his Catholi- lection in 1658. tates of the emblem books.
2013 – 2023
Summer Schedule
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Available from booksellers and www.nyrb.com Fall Books Issue, September 21—on sale September 7
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was too sore to do just one more. rying it downriver before dumping
It was Fellis. . . . He tried to sit it out into the salty ocean.
up, but something pulled him back
down. . . .
--- %) #&&")&$
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other time Parrott suggests that she to Parrott’s letters to O’Connor, preserved “other brand names of this kind of writ- too-close quarters, appalled by the gro-
and O’Connor have a baby together: in his archive at the University of Oregon; ing, most of them as forgotten now as my tesque physicality of his giant hosts,
“If you would like to have a child . . . I apparently he saved most of her letters, mother’s”—Faith Baldwin, Margaret Culkin suffused with disgust, and desperate to
am entirely willing. I should be very which were immensely flattering to him. Banning, Kathleen Norris. escape.
whole book feels a few degrees warmer, mance, little critique or feedback. In- attachment.” In the book’s opening attempting to “break him down.” But
more humane, quieter, yet somehow stead, he puts his students through a pages, we saw Lou, a muscle-bound as Thomas’s self-confidence falters
more uncanny. His people still look series of improvised scenes, with the loner, bringing a plate of cookies to over the course of the book, and his
a bit stunned by their own existence, most minimal of prompts: two of them his coworkers. No one eats any—“I’m acting exercises become filled with
but one can imagine them thinking are to act as a boss and an employee, not saying anything,” one coworker fear and shame and nebulous violence,
and feeling, rather than just reacting say, and “the rest is up to both of you.” remarks to another. “I just think you it seems less simple than that. Was he
or failing to react. It soon becomes clear that the goal should try one first.” Now John tells really so confident in the first place?
In the book’s opening pages ten is not to improve anyone’s ability to Lou to be another character’s dog: “Is If so, why did it take such a tiny push
people gather for a free acting class, perform or mimic, but to cajole them it any different than playing a lawyer to make him fall?
into entering an imagined world and or a security guard? . . . You’ll be great.” In a later class—held in a house in
*For more on Drnaso’s previous work, see unmoor them from their current lives. Nothing particularly dramatic hap- the woods a long drive out of town,
my “Savage Torpor,” Harper’s, August 2018. Drnaso renders these shared fan- pens, but the scene is fascinating: an as if to test the students’ commit-
The New York Review of Books (ISSN 0028-7504), published 20 times a year, monthly in January, July, August, and September; semi-monthly in February, March, April, May, June, October, November, and December. NYREV, Inc., 207 East 32nd
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with a form of betrayal. Sasha con- WARM, STRIKING, SENSITIVE, independent woman
vinces Eliza—who has done some sex ORYHVDOORIWKHULFKHVOLIHKDVWRRIIHUVHHNVNLQGLQWHUHVW-
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work in the past—to join her on a date PRUHEasternbluebird9@gmail.com.
with Andrew, her TV -host client. “It
doesn’t have to be anything more than DATING FOR BOOK LOVERS. Find a date that loves
ERRNV-RLQIUHHwww.booklovers.dating.
dinner,” she promises, but it quickly
becomes clear that isn’t true. They go GAY F, 61,SURIHVVLRQDOÀWFXOWXUHGDQGJHQHUDOO\WRJHWK-
up to his hotel room, where he’s al- HUZRQGHULQJLIDVXUSULVLQJLQVSLUDWLRQ³URPDQWLFRURWKHU-
ZLVH³PLJKWDULVHLQ$FW,,,NYRBact3@gmail.com.
ready half-naked, drinking heavily, er-
ratic. Sasha has told him that she and O LONESOME ME. 6HHNLQJ FRPSDQ\ ORYH PXVHXPV QR
FRVWQRREOLJDWLRQ,·PPDOHZKLWH8:6NYR Box 68555.
Eliza are a couple. “I guess I figured
it might get him to pay more,” she ex- SINGLE MAN, 79, VHHNV D ZRPDQ ZKR OLNHV 'RR :RS
plains, unconvincingly. When Andrew PXVLF /HW·V UHPLQLVFH DQG FRQQHFW ,W·V 7ZLOLJKW 7LPH
mullisen@sbcglobal.net.
goes down to the lobby for more drinks,
Sasha invites Eliza onto the bed, then PRIVATE DATING CLUB VHHNV DWWUDFWLYH DFFRPSOLVKHG
A panel from Tommi Parrish’s Men I Trust kisses her. She claims she’s setting up JHQWOHPHQDJHGV²VWRPHHWDQGGDWHVWXQQLQJLQWHO-
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cerely try to play the game, however Eliza and her son, as she struggles not on but tells Eliza that “there is some- DOOPDMRUFLWLHV 868.&DQDGD(XURSH 5HSO\ZLWKELR
SKRWRLQFRQÀGHQFHphoebe@seiclub.com.
platitudinous it seemed. Can hostility to give in to her weariness and frus- thing between us. Something special.”
express gratitude? Are sympathy and tration in front of him (or tearfully After Andrew returns and immediately PERSONAL SERVICES
condescension sometimes the same apologizes after she does); Sasha and disrobes, Eliza leaves.
$1,(//(·6/,36(59,&(3KRQHFKDW$OOFUHGLWFDUGVDQG
thing? her mother, who is reflexively critical, She and Sasha have one last argu- GHELWFDUGVDFFHSWHG3HUVRQDODQGSULYDWHGLVFUHHWFRQYHU-
In many of Parrish’s earlier com- often a bit drunk, but also genuinely ment outside—harsh, emotional, final. VDWLRQV(773) 935-4995.
ics, their interest in duets went along worried about her; Eliza and Justin’s It’s not clear if this night was just Sa-
EXCELLENT MASSAGE BY EVA . . . 2XWFDOO RQO\
with experiments in formal bifurca- deadbeat dad (on the phone); Sasha sha’s attempt to draw Eliza further Lifeisapreciousgift@yahoo.com.
tion. They played with a disjunction and one of her clients, an alcoholic TV into her life and into a sexual relation-
between image and narration, or a di- host (mainly via text message); Eliza ship, or an attempt to sabotage their INTERNATIONAL RENTALS
vision into “before” and “after.” Tim at her AA meeting. newfound intimacy or her own happi-
and Cleary’s encounter, for example, The panels are unusually large, ness or even Eliza’s sobriety, or some
is repeatedly interrupted by a story crammed together with no gutter in combination of it all. It’s not clear if ei-
within a story, a comic book called One between—usually six per page, but ther of them knows. “I really hope you
Step Inside Doesn’t Mean You Under- occasionally even fewer. The colors are work out how to be OK, Sasha,” Eliza
stand that Cleary (in a conceit some- bright and hand-painted, sometimes tells her. “It just can’t have anything to
where between clunky and charming) naturalistic but more often decidedly do with me.” As usual, Parrish avoids
finds in a bush. Parrish uses a min- not. Eliza’s skin is generally an orang- tidy resolution. We see brief scenes of
TOMMI PARRI S H/ FANTAG RAPHIC S
imalist, black-and-white style quite ish red, Sasha’s a pale yellow, but the Eliza and Sasha, separately, meeting
different from the rest of the book, exact hue varies from page to page other people. The last few panels of
with no speech balloons and just a sin- and panel to panel. In many places the the book are sketchy, and then sim-
gle large panel per spread—it’s even art is deliberately raw, with the brush- ply blank. The words Eliza recited just
printed on a different paper stock— strokes clearly visible and some areas before they met—the words from the
FRENCH RIVIERA FOR RENT. 6WRQH KRXVH ZLWK VHD
but it too is a pas de deux. Its icy nar- left unfinished—the face mostly filled poem that caused them to meet, that YLHZV³%RUPHVOHV0LPRVDV PLOHV IURP 6W 7URSH]
.
ration describes a brief, unsatisfying in but not the hair, say, or the clothes drew them together—seem to echo EGUP EDWK 3RRO 3DUNLQJ )XOO\ HTXLSSHG NLWFKHQ
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relationship between a stripper and a but not the skin. Textiles and back- back: “Always falling into a hole. Then DQGVHFXULW\GHSRVLWSOXVUHQW&RQWDFWjrsuno@aol.com.
wealthy older man. “He’s as colorless grounds sometimes become almost saying ‘ok this is not your grave, get
as the sex,” she reflects as it ends. “My abstract, an opportunity to play with out of this hole.’”
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PUBLICATION Genius Without Genius Nakashima, Ponti, Noguchi.
autobiography of an American original: jazz musician Open Air Modern (718) 383-6465
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