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rather than literature.”
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© Brigitte Lacombe
MERYL
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FALL BOOKS
SEPTEMBER 18, 2023
4 GOINGS ON
9 THE TALK OF THE TOWN
Amy Davidson Sorkin on Biden’s challenges;
Steven Soderbergh’s sci-fi series; a wellness speakeasy;
Chess Records; the latest hard-seltzer offerings.
LIFE AND LETTERS
Casey Cep 14 Glow in the Dark
What Kate DiCamillo understands about children.
PROFILES
Isaac Chotiner 20 The Believer
Ross Douthat’s theories of persuasion.
SHOUTS & MURMURS
Ian Frazier 27 Old Men and Sea
A REPORTER AT LARGE
Jennifer Egan 28 Off the Street
A new supportive-housing facility opens in Brooklyn.
SKETCHBOOK
Roz Chast 39 “Art-Envy Dream”
ANNALS OF LITERATURE
Judith Thurman 46 Mother Tongue
Emily Wilson’s translations of Homer.
FICTION
Lore Segal 54 “On the Agenda”
THE CRITICS
BOOKS
Jill Lepore 58 “Elon Musk,” by Walter Isaacson.
Moira Donegan 63 Betty Friedan and the movement that outgrew her.
Julian Lucas 68 Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s prize-winning novel.
71 Briefly Noted
Parul Sehgal 72 James Ellroy takes on Marilyn Monroe.
Kamran Javadizadeh 75 The world-bridging poetry of Ben Lerner.
POP MUSIC
Carrie Battan 78 Romy’s solo début.
POEMS
John Lee Clark 35 “A Protactile Version of ‘Tintern Abbey’”
Tiana Clark 50 “Maybe in Another Life”
COVER
R. Kikuo Johnson “Bodega Cat”
DRAWINGS Evan Lian, Charlie Hankin, Liza Donnelly and Carl Kissin, Jared Nangle, Nick Downes,
P. C. Vey, Ngozi Ukazu, Ken Levine, Gingle Pingle, Paul Noth, Emily Bernstein, Ellis Rosen, Jason Adam Katzenstein
and Natalia Winkelman, Lila Ash, Will McPhail, David Ostow and Lindsay Arber SPOTS Jochen Gerner
CONTRIBUTORS
Jennifer Egan (“Off the Street,” p. 28), a Judith Thurman (“Mother Tongue,”
Pulitzer Prize winner, is the author of p. 46) began writing for the magazine
seven books of fiction, including, most in 1987 and became a staff writer in
recently, “The Candy House.” 2000. Her latest essay collection is “A
Left-Handed Woman.”
Isaac Chotiner (“The Believer,” p. 20), a
staff writer, is the principal contributor Casey Cep (“Glow in the Dark,” p. 14)
to Q. & A., a series on newyorker.com. is a staff writer and the author of “Fu-
rious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the
Jill Lepore (Books, p. 58) is a staff writer Last Trial of Harper Lee.”
and a professor of history and law at
Harvard. She is the host of the five- Kamran Javadizadeh (Books, p. 75), an
part podcast series “Elon Musk: The associate professor of English at Vil-
Evening Rocket,” on BBC Radio 4. lanova University, is at work on his first
book, “Institutionalized Lyric.”
Ian Frazier (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 27),
a staff writer, is the author of “Cranial Moira Donegan (Books, p. 63) is a col-
Fracking,” a collection of humor pieces. umnist at the Guardian and a writer-
in-residence at Stanford.
Roz Chast (Sketchbook, p. 39), a long-
time New Yorker cartoonist, will pub- John Lee Clark (Poem, p. 35) is a Deaf-
second act
lish her forthcoming book, “I Must Be Blind writer and a Protactile educator.
Dreaming,” in October. His latest book is “How to Commu-
nicate: Poems.”
R. Kikuo Johnson (Cover) is an artist
and the author of, most recently, “No Lore Segal (Fiction, p. 54), the author
One Else.” In March, he became the of “Half the Kingdom” and “Her First
a life story’s beginning
first graphic novelist to receive a Whit- American,” will publish “Ladies’ Lunch
can end all of a sudden, ing Award. and Other Stories” in the U.S. this fall.
after years of joy and struggle,
and its passing may seem sad.
but if we always
stayed the same, THIS WEEK ON NEWYORKER.COM
there’d be no beautiful
second act.
Download the New Yorker app for the latest news, commentary, criticism,
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THE MAIL
BRANCHING OFF retailers, highlights the extent of a shock
ing phenomenon (“There and Back
Kathryn Schulz, in her review of Gun Again,” August 21st). Retailers have seem
nar Broberg’s biography of Carl Lin ingly accepted the “free return” policy as
naeus, discusses the fact that biologists the norm. But the costs of added ship
have changed the classification of many ping and early disposal represent econo
species since Linnaeus’s time (Books, mic and environmental losses that should
August 21st). But the article omits the be addressed. There is a community seek
central paradigm shift: whereas Lin ing to change such practices, under the
naeus believed that groups simply re rubric “zero waste.” A zerowaste policy
flect similarity, biologists now see them would place the responsibility for a prod
as generally indicating species’ ancestral uct and its packaging’s eventual disposal
relationships. Thus, scientists no longer on the producer. There would be a focus
count Monera among the kingdoms, be on reuse, and on product designs that
cause we now recognize that its former are more durable, repairable, and recy
subgroups, Archaea and Bacteria—al clable. These measures would not pre
though both consist of singlecelled or vent returns, but they would make them
ganisms—are only very distantly related less desirable and less harmful.
to each other; the split between them Roger Diedrich
represents perhaps the deepest surviv Cypress, Texas
BE A
ing fork in the tree of life. 1
Daniel Weissman TRAGEDY ON MAUI
Associate Professor of Physics
Emory University
Atlanta, Ga.
Elizabeth Kolbert, in her Comment on
the Maui wildfires, mentions the intro FORCE
Schulz quotes Charles Darwin as say
ing that he looked “at the term ‘species’
duction of invasive grasses in recent de
cades as a contributing factor, and inter
views a fire ecologist who says that “noth
FOR GOOD
as one arbitrarily given, for the sake of ing’s been done since then” (August 28th).
convenience, to a set of individuals closely Indeed, there was ample warning for these Your name can live on
resembling each other.” In this passage fires. Between 1999 and 2019, twentysix
from “On the Origin of Species,” Dar wildfires occurred in West Maui. Hazard as a champion of the
win is asserting that a natural group’s mitigation plans noted the changing
taxonomic rank—its status as a species vegetation but ignored the ubiquity of
causes, communities,
rather than as a genus, class, or variety— flammable materials in Lahaina. The and places dear to
is arbitrary. He is not denying that a governments of Hawaii and Maui are a
species is a unique kind of creature, as morass of large committees and agen you...for generations
real as a chemical element. Indeed, only cies; some actions they could have taken,
natural selection could explain this “nat but didn’t, include burying electrical lines,
to come.
ural arrangement in group under group.” requiring more sprinklers, implementing
According to Darwin, the branches in evacuation plans, and maintaining reser
the tree of life are real, but a particular voir capacity. By blaming climate change
branch’s “rank” is not. as something inevitable and unstoppa
Marc Lange ble, governments avoid responsibility for
Theda Perdue Distinguished Professor preventable disasters.
of Philosophy Michael Lindenfeld
University of North Carolina La Jolla, Calif.
Chapel Hill, N.C.
1 • Kickstart your charitable legacy
WASTE NOT Letters should be sent with the writer’s name, with NYC’s community foundation.
address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to [email protected]
David Owen, in his article about the [email protected]. Letters may be edited
for length and clarity, and may be published in (212) 686-0010 x363
high percentage of products that are re any medium. We regret that owing to the volume
turned, especially those sold by online of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter.
giveto.nyc
of electronics, the gently throbbing bass, and
haunting, atmospheric vocals that dissolve
GOINGS ON like vapor—conjure an inescapable dream-
scape.—Sheldon Pearce (Town Hall; Sept. 14.)
SEPTEMBER 13 – 19, 2023
DANCE | The dance form known as stepping
developed in Black fraternities and sororities
in the early twentieth century, mainly as group
routines of stomping and clapping in intricate
rhythms and formations which grew out of Af-
rican American traditions of body percussion.
What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week. But it was only in 1994 that the first professional
company dedicated to the form, Step Afrika!,
débuted. From the start, the troupe proudly
The Perelman Performing Arts Center, a.k.a. PAC NYC, inaugurates its juxtaposed the American style with South Af-
new facility with a five-night concert series that assembles thirty-odd rican ones, and its latest program keeps that
conversation going, with samples of the gum-
distinguished artists from various musical disciplines. The opening show, boot dancing of South African miners and of
on Sept. 19, dubbed “NYC Tapestry: Home as Refuge,” celebrates New the Indlamu dance of the Zulu people.—Brian
York as a safe space and an incubator for music and culture from around Seibert (N.Y.U. Skirball Center; Sept. 16-17.)
the globe, featuring musicians who have made the city their creative home. CLASSICAL | When composers have milestone
Performances in the pay-what-you-wish series range from experimental anniversaries, a company might trot out the
music (Laurie Anderson) to erhu fiddle-playing (Wang Guowei), and influential pieces that made them memora-
ble in the first place, but the Brooklyn-based
include (pictured, left to right) the concert pianist Daniel Gortler, the soul new-music incubator National Sawdust honors
fusionist Martha Redbone, the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Raven the restless spirits of the boundary-breakers
Chacon (with a world-première commission), and Alberto Villalobos, John Zorn and György Ligeti with fresh mate-
rial. Two weeks after his seventieth birthday,
of the world-music violin trio the Villalobos Brothers.—Sheldon Pearce Zorn unveils “Love Songs,” the third in a set of
chameleonic, genre-spanning projects with the
lyricist Jesse Harris (Sept. 16-17). For Ligeti’s
centennial, the pianist Han Chen has commis-
sioned a companion piece for each of the com-
poser’s eighteen études, eruptive works thinly
disguised as keyboard exercises. Here, Chen
plays the new pieces, paired with the originals,
for the first time (Sept. 24).—Oussama Zahr
(National Sawdust.)
OFF OFF BROADWAY |“Don’t mind me as I let meat-flavored seltzer at your own risk.—Dan dramas. The Criterion Channel is offering a cor-
myself be seen on this stage, on my own Stahl (Kraine Theatre; Fridays and Saturdays.) nucopia of his work, including his satire “Henry
terms.” These words come from one of the Fool,” from 1997, in which his arch methods reach
thirty two-minute plays that, on a recent JAZZ | On the record “Love in Exile,” the vocal- a height of expressive power. Set in Queens, the
night, constituted “The Infinite Wrench.” That ist Arooj Aftab, the composer and pianist Vijay film is a cartoonish yet dour sendup of artistic
could be the motto of the whole show, whose Iyer, and the bassist Shahzad Ismaily tap into the ambition and celebrity, starring Thomas Jay
performers have an hour to sing, dance, and same frequency. The songs on the album, which Ryan in the title role of a literary outlaw—a sex
sock-puppet their way through as many of was released in March, move at a spellbindingly fiend with a superiority complex who’s working
the plays as possible, in a random order de- sedate pace, building gradually around Aftab’s on an unpublishable magnum opus—and James
termined by the audience. Note that they sinuous melodies, sung in Urdu. Many of the Urbaniak as Simon Grim, a sanitation worker
don’t act. “We are who we are,” an ensemble tracks stretch out as if trying to fill a void, with who, persuaded by Henry to write, becomes a
member of the New York Neo-Futurists, the most running around twelve minutes long. world-famous poet and a target of right-wing
troupe behind this production, announces The sounds are sustained and even echoing, politicians. Despite his wide-ranging mockery,
before the show. The company doesn’t hes- seemingly inexhaustible. The music’s ebbs and Hartley delivers a spiritual vision of redemptive
itate to test the audience’s limits; drink the flows—generated by the hiss, hum, and chime romance and creative devotion.—Richard Brody
a little bit ticky-tacky; its sophistication Loup, this is not a veiled insult: the fries
was a product of its clientele, not a mat- are slim, golden, and crisp, glimmering
ter of design. But Cecchi-Azzolina has with salt. An Italian-sausage variant on
transformed the space into a Hollywood pigs in a blanket belongs on a kids’ menu;
vision of an important literary hangout. apricot-glazed ribs are conceptually more
The old cane-backed Café Loup chairs aligned with an eighties issue of Parade
remain; the hulking vintage cash regis- than with the timeless glamour that Cec-
ter is still the centerpiece of the bar. But chi’s is trying to evoke. “Food or service?”
there’s now molten-honey lighting, sin- Cecchi-Azzolina muses in his memoir.
uous banquettes ideal for table-hopping, “The one thing that keeps customers
and whimsical murals of bons vivants in coming back over and over is the service.”
various states of lust and play. No one forgot to deliver my drinks the NEWYORKER.COM/GO
Stepping into the vestibule is like second time around. (Dishes $7-74.) Sign up to receive the Goings On newsletter,
being dropped into the middle of a party, —Helen Rosner curated by our writers and editors, in your in-box.
Presented by
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returns October 6th Misty Copeland Spike Lee
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DAVID BYRNE BY SHERVIN LAINEZ; ROZ CHAST BY BILL HAYES; MISTY COPELAND COURTESY MASTERCLASS; SPIKE LEE BY MISAN HARRIMAN; JULIA LOUIS-DREYFUS BY CHRISTOPHER ANDERSON;
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proves the doubters wrong. sixty per cent had doubts about whether
Perhaps so, but the midterms are be- Biden was “mentally up for” the job;
ginning to feel like a long time ago. Un- the number was forty-six per cent for
employment is low and inflation has Trump. Both men’s ages add two some-
eased, but it would be perilous to con- what paradoxical factors to the politi-
sider this a period of ascendance for cal equation: a sense that the country
Biden, or to be all that confident about is stuck in a loop (with the same char-
the 2024 election. Foer writes, by way of acters contending for the same offices)
THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 18, 2023 9
and that our institutions are unstable ral step forward.” Hunter Biden is not vestments, as they pay off, could give
(with the possibility that upheaval is the candidate, and his legal issues are still Biden more to run on. After all, he is
only one medical incident away). minuscule compared with Trump’s, but not lacking in ways to differentiate him-
There is also the matter of Hunter they don’t help. self from Trump. A key factor in the un-
Biden, the President’s son. Polls indicate Foer, in calling Biden the “last poli- expected outcome of the midterms was
that the G.O.P.’s focus on him is begin- tician,” relies on a narrow definition of the rage of women voters at the Supreme
ning to gain traction with some voters. politics which is distinctly Washingto- Court’s Dobbs decision, in June, 2022,
The problem is not imaginary: a special nian, involving mediation, tolerance, rules, which overturned Roe v. Wade. That
counsel, David Weiss, is assigned to the and acceptance of defeat. It is manifest anger remains.
case, and he has said in court filings that in backroom negotiations of the sort that Biden is not the last politician, though
he expects to bring at least one indict- ultimately yielded the Inflation Reduction he may be among the last of a certain
ment against Hunter Biden in the next Act. Politics, in this sense, is Commerce kind. Trump is a politician, too—with
few weeks, connected to the purchase of Secretary Gina Raimondo helping to his rallies and his appeals to crowds, the
a gun while he was addicted to crack co- bring Senator Joe Manchin back to the raw tools of the political trade—and a
caine, with more, on tax charges, likely negotiating table by serving him and very dangerous one. Politics can be both
to follow, and potentially more after that, Klain a dinner of eggplant parm, roast its most compelling and its ugliest when
perhaps related to foreign lobbying. A pork, and cannoli. (Manchin likes Ital- people feel that they are shut out. Ulti-
plea agreement fell apart after a judge ian food.) But that anecdote is also a re- mately, in the United States, politics is
found it questionable. Republicans have minder of what has changed since the about gaining power at the polls. Win-
alleged political interference on Hunter’s midterms: Manchin is now openly con- ning bureaucratic, legislative, or even legal
behalf, a claim that the Justice Department templating a third-party Presidential bid. battles is not the same as winning the
has publicly denied. Last month, Kevin Still, the Inflation Reduction Act in- country. And Biden has a real fight ahead
McCarthy, the Speaker of the House, cludes unprecedented support for green of him.
called an impeachment inquiry “a natu- energy and a climate transition. Such in- —Amy Davidson Sorkin
WORMHOLE DEPT. derbergh, whose œuvre has probed the and influencing ultra-powerful jerks to
DO-OVERS pleasures and the agonies of voyeurism make better decisions. Their method of
(“sex, lies, and videotape”), stripping time travel: entering a wormhole inside
(“Magic Mike”), and Liberace (“Behind a laundry dryer while listening to “Theme
the Candelabra”). In 2020—a dread- from Mahogany.”
filled year—he was reading the nonfic- The fictional billionaires include a
tion book “Evil Geniuses: The Unmak- fossil-fuel mogul and the founder of a
ing of America,” about the decades-long private-equity firm—the type of guys
t the Brandy Library, in Tribeca, a effort of plutocrats and right-wing in- who are “infatuated with their own
A man in suspenders led Steven So-
derbergh down a spiral staircase, into
tellectuals (the Koch brothers, Charles
Murray) to rig the economy. “Like ev-
brilliance and the affirmation of that
brilliance by having a quarter-trillion
an amber-lit V.I.P. lounge. Soderbergh, erybody, I was in a steady state of feel- dollars,” Andersen, who sat beside So-
who calls the bar his “satellite office” ing overwhelmed by everything,” So- derbergh with a glass of Merlot, said.
(his real office is down the street), or- derbergh, who wore a blazer and his
dered “the usual.” The usual was sin- signature black-rimmed glasses, recalled.
gani, a Bolivian spirit made with Mus- “It’s always been my theory that this can
cat of Alexandria grapes that are grown all turn into ‘Mad Max’ a lot faster than
in the Andes, at an altitude of six thou- people think.” Naturally, he contacted
sand feet. Soderbergh first tasted it in the book’s author, Kurt Andersen, and
2007, while directing “Che,” and learned they turned it into a comedy.
that it had never been exported from The result is “Command Z,” a sci-fi
Bolivia. In 2014, he founded his own series that Soderbergh self-funded and re-
brand, Singani 63, and spent eight years leased independently this summer, avail-
on a quest to bring it to market. The able on the Web site commandzseries.com,
spirit finally received U.S. government in eight bite-size episodes. Michael Cera
recognition this past winter. plays a billionaire who has blown him-
“Don’t go into the booze business,” self up on his way to Mars and appears
Soderbergh warned, as the server poured in the dystopian year 2053 as an A.I.
him a glass. “I wonder why I did. Part upload. (Shades of the would-be cage-
of it was to be able to get it, because oth- match combatants Mark Zuckerberg and
erwise you’d have to have people buy it Elon Musk.) His digital double sends
and send it to you.” a trio of employees on a mission to save
Dread seems to come easily to So- the world by travelling back to 2023 Michael Cera
10 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 18, 2023
Neither man has had close experience pening on that backbar was invisible to elahni’s proprietors, stood nearby with
with such people. Andersen knows me. And now it’s ruined.” a hand on an unmarked metal door.
Warren Buffett—they’re both from —Michael Schulman “Ready?,” he said, and slid it open.
Omaha—but views him as the rare be- 1 Inside, Rizk, who is thirty years old
nevolent billionaire. Soderbergh has MEMBERS ONLY DEPT. and wore a black long-sleeved T-shirt,
worked with an evil non-billionaire, SCHVITZ AND TONIC and his business partner, Keane Tan, a
Harvey Weinstein, and plenty of mega- baby-faced thirty-one-year-old Austra-
stars—“Clooney told this story about lian, guided guests around the window-
getting elbowed in the mouth in Rome less four-hundred-square-foot space.
by somebody trying to get to Brad”— They explained that visitors would make
but Hollywood fame “doesn’t typically their way through the yoga studio and
result in the Federalist Society,” he said. spend ten minutes in elahni’s hundred-
Still, the thought experiment was he concept of the speakeasy has had and-eighty-degree sauna, followed by
tempting. Given the opportunity to go
back in time, how would they influence
T considerable staying power, but why?
We live in times of abundant booze, in-
a minute or so in one of its two thirty-
nine-degree ice baths. They’d repeat the
our future billionaire overlords? Let’s creasingly legal drugs, and technological cycle three times. “It’s a forced medita-
say: Zuckerberg, 2004, Harvard Uni- surveillance. The semi-illicit-thrill indus- tion: your body doesn’t know where to
versity. “Get him laid more,” Andersen try could use an update. The other day, go, except to focus on itself,” Tan said,
spitballed. in the back of a second-floor yoga stu- as Middle Eastern house music pulsed
“It’s axiomatic,” Soderbergh said. “If dio in NoMad, a couple of entrepreneurs softly. Next, it would be off to the bar
he had the same approach to relationships were giving it a shot. They were throw- for the tonic shots, which are meant to
that I do, that business couldn’t have ing a party celebrating a new establish- support the body’s hormones. Elahni
scaled in the way it scaled. I would have ment called elahni, New York’s first “well- (which is “inhale” spelled backward) or-
probably smothered it as soon as I saw ness speakeasy,” which combines a spa ganizes its drinks by “desired end state”:
the implications of what it could do.” with a bar that serves nonalcoholic “adap- “energized,” “restful,” “grounded,” “ready
How about Musk, in his South Af- togenic tonics.” Unlike a traditional speak- to mingle.” Rizk, a tech entrepreneur
rican adolescence? Andersen proposed easy, the party wasn’t hush-hush. (Heather with a master’s in neuroscience, and Tan,
enrolling teen Elon in an institute to Graham was on the invite list.) But there a former matcha importer, curated the
teach him “that free speech is not just was a doorman, a guy in a peach-colored menu themselves. “We’ve been trying
being an asshole and a troll and saying suit with his arms crossed, who manned stuff out, saying, ‘How does it feel?’”Tan
whatever you want and, like, lolz.” The the elevator entryway. His task: insure said. “Neither of us has a background
Koch brothers? “Just kill them,” An- that all guests removed their shoes. “The in, like, tonics.”
dersen joked. Donald Trump? “His fa- wood is too gorgeous,” Rima Rabbath, The pair met five years ago, at a bou-
ther was a monster,” Andersen reasoned. the pixielike co-owner of SOUK, the yoga tique gym in SoHo. Last fall, they vis-
“He would be better today if I went studio, explained. Nick Rizk, one of ited SOUK for some yoga. “Nick sensed
back in time to 1946 and raised him as
my own.”
How would they use the time ma-
chine on themselves? Andersen said that
he would urge himself to visit his mother
in Omaha more often before she died:
“I don’t think it would have any bad un-
intended consequences—unless my plane
went down. That would be tragic.”
Soderbergh said that he’d pondered
the question on the walk to the bar. “It
wouldn’t work,” he said, clutching his
second glass of singani. “First of all, if
it was my voice, I wouldn’t trust it at all.
Secondly, I’ve gotten very good advice
from people whom I do trust that I have
completely ignored.” Would he advise
himself to stay out of the Bolivian-booze
trade? “No, and I think it comes back
to issues of intention, why you do things,”
he said. “But, boy, it’s extremely com-
petitive in ways that I didn’t understand,
as somebody who used to just walk into “In this corner, a man who describes everything as ‘Orwellian.’
a bar and order a drink. What was hap- And, in this corner, a guy who loves saying ‘Kafkaesque’!”
a Lebanese vibe,” Tan said. (Rizk’s mother fingers pulsed, capillaries dilated and mer Keith Leblanc, formerly the house
is from Lebanon.) Rabbath, the co-owner, danced. After the last plunge, Tan slipped session man for Sugar Hill Records.
confirmed that she’d been born in Leb- behind the bar to pour four shots of a Being a kid around 2120 South Mich-
anon, too. She told them about a spare plum-colored tonic. He warned that it igan Avenue, the label’s main office and
twenty-by-twenty space that she was contained traces of kratom, an herb with studio, “was like being raised in a car-
struggling to put to use. A partnership some opioid properties. “We call it ‘calm nival,” Marshall said. “There were all
was born. Rizk’s father, an architect, over- focus,’” Tan said. “The company calls it these characters. I used to drive Willie
saw the intensive four-month construc- a ‘heart opener.’”The shots were downed. Dixon to the bank to cash checks for
tion that followed. “I gained a son,” the A Dalí-style melting clock that hung sessions. Willie was so big, the car would
elder Rizk said, gesturing toward Tan. from a bookshelf read quarter to nine. rock to his side when he got in.” The
The Rizks’ corgi, Mishmush, panted at Carlos changed back into his work wear, Flamingos, a Chicago doo-wop group,
Tan’s side. “I gained a dog,” he said. wet hair neatly re-combed, and set off performed at Marshall’s bar mitzvah.
In the studio’s main space, fit, sleekly for the interview. He said he no longer Chuck Berry recorded “Maybellene” at
dressed partygoers sipped boxed water cared if he got the job. 2120. (Leonard had suggested that Berry
and rosé beneath a disco ball. A d.j., who’d —Dan Greene change the name from “Ida Mae,” after
been granted a footwear exemption (he 1 spotting a box of Maybelline-brand mas-
and his Brooks sneakers were confined THE FAMILY BUSINESS cara on a windowsill in the studio.) After
to a yoga mat), spun tunes. Guests’ back- FOOT STOMPING Marshall spoke at Berry’s funeral, in 2017,
less dresses revealed cupping bruises. a friend of Berry’s told him, “Mr. Chess,
Rizk’s mother, Amal—“the most incred- your daddy was the one who told Chuck
ible Lebanese chef in the universe,” Rab- to put the beat in there.”
bath announced—had prepared a lavish At twenty-one, Marshall quit college
dinner buffet. Two partygoers, Leah to work at Chess, as his father’s heir ap-
Kreitz and her husband, Gabe Quiroga, parent. After a month on the job, he
were curious about elahni’s price point.
(A session costs fifty-five dollars.) Had
they ever tried adaptogenic tonics? Kreitz
Sordsome people hear the birth of rock
and roll in the nasty backbeat on rec-
that Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon,
asked what he was supposed to be doing.
He said that his father replied, “You stu-
pid motherfucker, your job is watching
wasn’t sure. “We live in Brooklyn, so . . .” Junior Wells, and Little Walter, among me.” Marshall added, “My father was a
she said, and shrugged. others, made in Chicago for Chess Rec- rough character. He never played catch
A few days later, Rizk and Tan in- ords, the storied indie label, in the nine- with me. Instead, he taught me how to
vited a neophyte for an early-morning teen-fifties. Marshall Chess hears the shake hands.”
demo. Since opening, they had hosted foot of his father, Leonard. One day in the early sixties, after
bachelorette parties, birthday celebra- Born Lejzor Szmuel Czyz in what Muddy Waters performed at the New-
tions, and office team-building outings. is now Belarus, Leonard Chess and his port Jazz Festival, Marshall was called
“We’ve been having the real speakeasy brother Phil recorded some of the great- into his dad’s office. “We’re getting all
experience,” Tan said. “One girl tried to est Mississippi Delta musicians who these sales from white kids,” Leonard
come up in the service elevator.” Just rode the Illinois Central Railroad from said, perplexed. “What’s going on?”
then, a bespectacled sales rep named New Orleans to Chicago. The Chess Marshall, hip to the British Invasion,
Carlos Oliva arrived, in khaki jeans, to brothers marketed 78-r.p.m. singles of knew. In 1967, he started his own Chess
discuss samples of a negative-ion drink. hits like Muddy Waters’s “Hoochie
Rizk invited him to join the session. Coochie Man” to Black record buyers.
Oliva had no swim trunks (“We (These albums, originally known as “race
should sell some,” Tan said), and he said records,” were later billed as “R. & B.”)
he was on his way to a job interview, “My dad was called the Foot Stomper,”
but that he was game. He emerged from Marshall, who is eighty-one, said the
the locker room a few minutes later, in other day. “He wanted a big backbeat.”
black boxer briefs. Tan distributed paper To demonstrate the sound, Marshall
cups of electrolyte water and led the stomped on the floorboards of his of-
group to the sauna, for the first ten-min- fice, outside Phoenicia, in the Catskills,
ute stint. “We had a timer display, but which he calls the “family museum”: a
then we noticed everyone was just look- log-cabin-style building decorated with
ing at the clock,” he said. Next came the old black-and-white photos of Marshall
one-minute ice bath. “There’s a lot of with his dad and uncle.
bro culture around cold plunges,” Rizk Marshall’s latest project is “New
said. “We’re trying to make it more Moves,” an album of Chess Records clas-
mindful.” Oliva went wide-eyed and stiff sics reinterpreted by a supergroup that
upon entry. “You should have a camera, includes the Stones’ backing vocalist Ber-
like roller coasters,” he suggested. nard Fowler, the guitarist Skip (Little
The rounds carried on. Feet tingled, Axe) MacDonald, and the hip-hop drum- Marshall Chess
12 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 18, 2023
imprint, Cadet Concept, to create the SKETCHPAD BY HILARY FITZGERALD CAMPBELL
sound of Chess’s future: “psychedelic
blues.” The next year, Cadet released a
Muddy Waters album with wah-wah
and fuzz pedals. The old-school aficio-
nados—“blues Nazis,” Marshall calls
them—hated it. Howlin’ Wolf, another
era-defining Chess artist, called his own
psychedelic-blues album “dog shit.” But
a generation of hip-hop artists, includ-
ing Public Enemy’s Chuck D, were later
inspired by the new sound.
In 1969, Leonard called Marshall from
his Cadillac’s car phone to say that he’d
sold the record label. (He hung on to
the publishing copyrights.) His son was
devastated. “It’s like you’ve trained your
whole life to throw the javelin, and then
a month before the event the Olympics
are cancelled,” Marshall said. He later
spent eight years as president of Roll-
ing Stones Records, and wound up with
a heroin addiction. That led to his mov-
ing to the Catskills and embarking on
a psychedelics-and-cannabis-aided jour-
ney of self-discovery.
He tried primal-scream therapy with
the psychologist Arthur Janov, but got
nowhere. “They told me I was the most
defended person they had ever met,” he
said. “I couldn’t remember crying.” He
experimented with ayahuasca. He in-
stalled a sensory-deprivation tank in the
family museum’s bathroom. He attempted
to study with the Tibetan Buddhist mas-
ter Namkhai Norbu, whose practice in-
cludes sealing his disciples inside a cave.
It was unsuccessful. “He said I’d go in-
sane,” Marshall said. “He yelled at me.”
Finally, in the late seventies, Mar-
shall tried LSD therapy with an Aus-
trian psychiatrist. “That broke the dam,”
he said. “I cried like a baby.” He real-
ized the source of his torment: “It was
all that phone call,” he said.
The tracks on “New Moves” reflect
both the Chess legacy and Marshall’s
journey to make peace with it. The proj-
ect is co-produced with his son, Jamar,
who lives nearby. “I told him, ‘I’m try-
ing to treat you better than my dad
treated me,’” he said.
What would Leonard say about the
new record?
“He would say, ‘I hope you’re not
ahead of time with this, because it’s the
same as being behind time.’ Then he
would say, ‘Good luck, motherfucker.’”
—John Seabrook
THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 18, 2023 13
twice. Novels such as “Because of Winn-
Dixie,” “Flora & Ulysses,” “Raymie
Nightingale,” “The Beatryce Prophecy,”
and “The Tale of Despereaux” have en-
deared her to generations of children
who see themselves in her work—some-
times because her human characters are
shy or like to sing or have single parents
as they do, but more often because their
yearnings, loneliness, ambivalence, and
worries are so fully, albeit fantastically,
captured in the lives of her magical
menagerie: a chivalrous little mouse, a
poetry-writing squirrel, a “not-so-chicken
chicken,” and more than one rescue dog.
DiCamillo is startlingly versatile,
which may help explain why, although
she has now sold more than forty-four
million books, she is not more of a house-
hold name. Some of her stories read like
fables, stark and spare; others like the
memoirs of mid-century children; still
others like works of magical realism, or-
nate and strange. One of her picture
books, “La La La: A Story of Hope,”
which was illustrated by Jaime Kim, con-
sists of a single repeated word; some of
her seemingly simplest stories—an early-
H3B5KAW
men waking up very early, as usual. send messages cheering him on. He cal standards do you see in this story?
Santiago, in his shack by the harbor, tries to respond personally to as many Is it possible to transfer out of this
sees that he has a message from Edu- of these as he can. By now, he has been course so late in the term and still get
ardo, who is forwarding messages from fighting the fish for a long time. He credit for it? Discuss.
THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 18, 2023 27
A REPORTER AT LARGE
J
essica moved into 90 Sands Street, Medley and Jessica met in 2019, when
a vast new supportive-housing fa- Medley, who is now twenty-nine, moved
cility in Brooklyn, on February 15th: to New York with the goal of working
a bleak, cloudy morning. The move came in homeless outreach, an interest that
not a moment too soon; there had been was sparked by research on unhoused
much upheaval in her life in the previous mothers that she did as a student at Ohio
few weeks, including an assault by her State. She got a job with the nonprofit
ex-boyfriend and two of his friends that Breaking Ground, working on a team that
had left her with facial bruises, and an seeks out homeless people in and around
overdose caused by the presence of the Macy’s flagship Thirty-fourth Street store.
animal tranquillizer xylazine in her her- Breaking Ground’s goal is to coax these
oin—an honest error, it seemed, on the clients, as they are known, into transi-
part of her trusted dealer—for which the tional and ultimately permanent hous-
forty-two-year-old was rushed to Mount ing without requiring that they first ac-
Sinai from the transitional-housing fa- cept treatment for the drug, alcohol, and
cility where she’d been living for nine mental-health issues that are widespread
months. “I was dead,” she told me with among New Yorkers who live outdoors.
characteristic flair, in her strong South- This strategy, known as “housing first,”
ern accent. “When I left in the ambu- was pioneered in New York, in the early
lance, I was dead. They gave me CPR, nineteen-nineties, by Sam Tsemberis, a
they took me to the best hospital in Man- psychologist whose organization, Path-
hattan, and they shocked me in the hos- ways to Housing, began renting apart-
pital six times.” ments for homeless people with mental-
Her hospital discharge paper flapped health diagnoses and delivering medical
in the breeze on top of one of the many and psychiatric services to them at their
plastic tubs that Jessica, her friend Bill, new residences—debunking the prevail-
and her case manager, Carley Medley, ing belief that people could not remain
hauled from Jessica’s transitional-hous- stably housed without having first under-
ing room to the van that Medley was gone treatment. Study after study showed
driving. ( Jessica’s name and those of her Tsemberis’s approach to be far more suc-
friends and family have been changed.) cessful than requiring treatment in ad-
Given that Jessica had spent most of vance. Housing first became a federal pol-
the previous seven years living outdoors icy in the United States with passage of
(with two interludes in jail for probation the Hearth Act, in 2009, though advo-
violations on old drug-related charges), cates say that its implementation is spotty.
she had amassed a remarkable number Outreach of the kind that Medley was
of possessions: Barbies and LOL Sur- doing at Macy’s is the first step, but even
prise! Balls, craft kits, scented candles, identifying an unhoused person in a bus-
and an array of cosmetics. Jessica is savvy tling department store can be a challenge.
and resourceful, which is partly how she “Being in Macy’s is kind of like hiding
managed to survive, alone, on New York’s in plain sight,” Medley told me. “It’s like,
streets. In addition to panhandling, Oh, I think I’ve seen that woman sitting
which usually brought in a hundred dol- here every day this week, and she was
lars a day, she ran an online business here last week. Maybe we can go intro-
with a friend, selling merchandise they’d duce ourselves, let her know what we’re
bought at a discount from “boosters,” here for.” This stage of the process, which
who often had stolen it from large stores. is known as engagement, is uncertain and
Hence the random assortment of brand- often protracted; mistrust leaves many
new items in her bins. unhoused people reluctant to interact, Jessica tours her new apartment at 90 Sands,
28 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 18, 2023
February 15, 2023: “I slept on Thirty-fourth Street between Madison and Fifth for, like, a year and a half, the same spot,” she said.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOSÉ A. ALVARADO JR. THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 18, 2023 29
and, when you’ve managed to survive troubled history, which has included both subway traffic with suctioning silence.
outdoors in New York City, you might pregnancy (a daughter and a son, whom Like all the supportive-housing apart-
be excused for thinking that you don’t she ceded to their father when they were ments in the building, it was furnished
need anyone’s help. pre-teens, are now healthy young adults) with a full-sized bed, a small table, and
Jessica is slight, with rounded shoul- and abusive relationships (her last boy- two chairs. There were built-in shelves
ders, thanks perhaps to years of pushing friend, the one who assaulted her in Jan- and drawers in an enormous closet, and
the small shopping trolley she often has uary, also knocked out many of her teeth a “welcome box,” containing bedding,
with her. She’s white, with hazel eyes and slashed her with a knife, leaving a kitchen and cleaning supplies, and toi-
and thick dark hair that reaches to her broad scar). She says that she was intro- letries. The building has a gym, a com-
waist, although she keeps it tied back. duced to heroin in her mid-thirties by puter room, a laundry room, a bike room,
While living on the street, she used the her third husband, who relapsed shortly and an outdoor plaza, as well as a team
oversized sink in Macy’s wheelchair- after their wedding into an addiction of service providers that includes psy-
accessible restroom to clean herself. “I’d that Jessica had been unaware of. “He chiatrists, a doctor, a nurse practitioner,
strip down naked, sit in the sink, and held me down and shot me up,” she told and an employment specialist.
take a bath,” she told me. “Wash my hair me. “I had never used drugs in my life, “There are a hundred types of peo-
and everything. I would be in there for, not even smoked weed.” Her husband ple who are homeless, but there are ba-
like, three hours. . . . They knew it was then persuaded her to leave the South- sically two patterns: people who are
me in the bathroom, ’cause I would go, ern state where they were living and come homeless for short periods of time and
like, twice a week.” with him to New York. “I said, ‘You prom- people who are homeless for very long
Medley first encountered Jessica pan- ise you’re not going to leave me by my- periods of time,” I was told by Dennis
handling outside Macy’s with a sign that self ? ’ And he did.” Within a year, she Culhane, a social-science researcher at
identified her as pregnant and fleeing found herself alone in a new city, loosely the University of Pennsylvania, who has
an abusive marriage. Alarmed, Medley connected to a group of about fifty drug spent decades studying modern home-
alerted her fellow outreach workers. “And users, she said, all of them living on the lessness and has worked on the prob-
they were, like, ‘Carley, that’s so cute. It’s street in midtown Manhattan. lem under the Bush and Obama Ad-
your first day, you don’t know anything ministrations. Short-term homelessness
yet.’ Her belly looked so real. And they’re,
like, ‘Yeah, she’s been pregnant for like
a year. It’s a big baby.’”
Sriesituated in Dumbo, near the Brook-
lyn waterfront, 90 Sands is thirty sto-
high and has Richard Scarry-esque
is best addressed with what is known
as “rapid rehousing”: granting emer-
gency cash and rent money for up to
Jessica cheerfully acknowledges the views of New York Harbor. Jessica’s newly two years. Permanent supportive hous-
fabrication: “I wouldn’t make any money renovated studio apartment looked pris- ing like 90 Sands is the most effective
without that sign!” She is garrulous and tine, and its triple-paned windows re- solution for those in the chronically
unabashed about her drug use and her placed the din of the Manhattan Bridge homeless category: generally people
with disabilities—usually mental illness
or substance-use disorders, often both—
who need long-term rent subsidies and
support services to keep them stably
housed. A recent study showed that
about ninety per cent of homeless peo-
ple who enter supportive housing re-
main housed after two years.
Supportive housing has evolved since
it was introduced in New York, in the
early nineteen-eighties, and exists in var-
ious forms, from “scattered site” arrange-
ments, in which tenants occupy ordinary
apartments (singly or with a roommate),
to entire buildings like 90 Sands. What
the different arrangements have in com-
mon is that case management comes to
the tenants with the goal of helping them
remain housed. According to an estimate
provided by the Supportive Housing
Network of New York, there are now
thirty-seven thousand units of support-
ive housing in New York City, about
ninety per cent of which are for single
adults, and about thirty-eight hundred
“I just have to finish reading them first.” more are under construction. Still, the
quantity is woefully inadequate to the busloads of asylum seekers began fill- “I didn’t even know her,” Jessica said. She
current need. (A Department of Social ing the city’s shelters last fall; housing- remembers looking out the back window
Services spokesperson said that the city approved tenants were able to move of the car and screaming for her aunt and
is working to “aggressively expand” its out quickly to make room. her grandmother as she was driven away.
supportive-housing capacity.) Her mother had a new husband who
90 Sands was originally a residential o qualify for supportive housing at abused Jessica, and she left home at fif-
hotel for Jehovah’s Witnesses, and it has
some unusual features, including a pan-
T 90 Sands, a homeless person must
have received a diagnosis of either a
teen. She finished high school and a year
of community college while sharing a
oramic observation deck on the top floor substance-use disorder or a serious men- small, rented trailer with a female friend.
and a gargantuan underground kitchen tal illness, such as bipolar disorder or She had her children at nineteen and
that will be rented out to a commercial schizophrenia. Jessica’s her- twenty-two with her first
tenant. Snagging such valuable real estate oin addiction made her eli- husband and recounts hav-
for a supportive-housing development gible, but she insisted, in Jan- ing thrived professionally in
required some creative financing from uary, as I sat beside her on a young adulthood as a deli
Breaking Ground, which then brought freezing Upper West Side bakery manager for a super-
in the Center for Urban Community pavement outside Bed Bath market chain, with more
Services (CUCS) to provide on-site so- & Beyond while she pan- than a dozen bakeries under
cial services and medical care. The two handled, that she had no her supervision. “I had a new
organizations have been collaborating need for that kind of sup- car every other year, a house.
on such projects in New York since 1991. port. “I’ll stay for, like, a year, My kids were spoiled rotten.
By late spring, 90 Sands, which started and hopefully they can find We went on vacation twice
accepting residents in September of 2022, me an apartment without a year,” she told me. But a
had filled all of its three hundred and supportive housing. I don’t want to take violent rupture with her second husband
five supportive units, sixty per cent of something from somebody that really brought an end to this stability, and the
the building’s apartments. (The support- needs it,” she said. By the time she moved children went to live with their father.
ive residents’ rent is paid by New York in, a few weeks later, she had reduced her She spoke of wanting to go back to school
City’s Department of Housing Preser- daily heroin intake from two grams—or for culinary arts. “I can decorate wedding
vation and Development, in combina- twenty-plus bags (“My tolerance is out cakes, all kinds of cakes. I can do any-
tion with either a public-assistance hous- of this world”)—to a quarter of a gram, thing in a grocery store,” she said. She
ing allowance or a third of the resident’s which she divided into morning and eve- and her aunt remained in frequent con-
income or disability payments.) The re- ning injections. When Jessica was in jail tact and shared a passion for reading—
maining hundred and eighty-five apart- in 2018, she went on methadone, which thrillers especially. When I visited Jessica
ments are designated “affordable” units allowed her to stay heroin-free for sev- while she was panhandling on the Upper
to be rented by low- and middle-income eral months, but she now regarded meth- West Side, she’d come straight from the
New Yorkers through a separate bureau- adone as another form of addiction and public library and had in her trolley a
cracy that has proceeded more slowly (as believed that it was harder on her body backpack crammed with fiction by Mi-
of this writing, about forty-five per cent than heroin. Years of homelessness and chael Connelly, Nora Roberts, Nicholas
of the affordable units had been leased), drug use had taken their toll on her phys- Sparks, and others. While panhandling,
for sums ranging from $537 to $2,132. ically: she needed oral surgery to remove she usually reads a book a day.
Mixing supportive and affordable units all her teeth; the veins in her arms were After the lease signing, Jessica un-
is a standard industry practice, and the “shot,” meaning damaged from years of packed her library books and a few other
two types of tenants are co-mingled injecting; and, in January, a deep new items, including a tiny green cactus in a
throughout the building. Sixty-one thou- wound appeared where she had injected ceramic vase, which she placed on her
sand applicants entered the city’s lottery heroin into her calf—a by-product of that new windowsill. Medley handed over
for 90 Sands’s affordable units, a testa- animal tranquillizer that nearly killed her. Jessica’s birth certificate and New York
ment to New York’s ongoing crisis of “That is a lot of paper . . . my God,” State I.D.: two hard-won “vital docs,”
affordable housing. Jessica said at the start of her lease signing, whose retrieval had been essential to
Eligible individuals are usually re- which took place in 90 Sands’s brightly qualifying her for supportive housing.
ferred into specific units by New York lit conference room at a table decorated Jessica had lost virtually everything while
City’s Department of Social Services. with silk flowers. As her emergency con- living outside—most people do, which
However, 90 Sands served as a test case tact, Jessica listed Mary, her aunt, whom is why it’s nearly impossible to apply for
for direct referrals, in which Breaking she lived with as a young child in the housing while chronically homeless, and
Ground and CUCS, both major players Midwest and often referred to as her why street outreach and case manage-
in the city’s street-outreach work and mother. Her biological parents, whom ment are crucial to the process.
transitional-housing programs, were she called her sperm and egg donors, It was time for Medley to head back
able to refer qualified clients ( Jessica both had drug addictions and were ab- to Manhattan, and Jessica walked out to
being one) into two-thirds of 90 Sands’s sent from her early life. Her mother re- catch a ride with her. 90 Sands occupies
supportive units. This made for an ex- appeared when Jessica was six and drove a gap between the Manhattan Bridge,
pedited process that proved timely when her from her aunt’s home to the South. the Brooklyn Bridge, and the B.Q.E.; at
THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 18, 2023 31
plains the more overt presence of home-
lessness there.
The six per cent or so of New York-
ers who choose to remain outdoors de-
spite the city’s right to shelter are almost
all single adults who tend to be chron-
ically homeless and predominantly male.
Often, they sleep on the street because
they’re unwilling to enter the city’s huge,
centralized shelter system, which sepa-
rates men and women into large congre-
gate settings, sometimes dozens to a space.
(Family shelter is handled through a dif-
ferent centralized system.) Drugs and al-
cohol are forbidden in city shelters; there
are metal detectors and bag searches and
a ten-o’clock curfew if one is not to lose
one’s bed. Many shelters require that res-
idents vacate the dorms during the day.
Thousands of New Yorkers do suc-
cessfully avail themselves of the city’s
shelters. One example is Kenneth Ro-
berson, who moved into 90 Sands last
September and was a lively source of
knowledge and street smarts for me
throughout my research. Roberson, who
is sixty-four and Black, with bright-blue
eyes, is an avuncular presence; he often
covers his shaved head with a do-rag,
maintains a tightly manicured mustache
and goatee, and has a love of flashy sneak-
ers. As a youth living in the Bronx, he
ran with the Wild Cowboys, a notori-
U9M2CZ8
MOTHER TONGUE
Emily Wilson makes Homer modern.
BY JUDITH THURMAN
S
ome three millennia ago, a blind cultivated valleys and hillsides terraced speech with a mixture of dialects that
bard whose name in ancient Greek with vineyards and olive trees. But the they patched into their recitals. In clas-
means “hostage” is said to have landscape, like Homer’s prosody, is mostly sical Athens, the singers were known
composed two masterpieces of oral po- rugged and austere. (Ithaca is “only fit as rhapsodes, from the verb meaning “to
etry that still speak to us. The Iliad’s for goats,” the poet tells us.) It wasn’t sew songs together.” Their diction was
subject is death, and the Odyssey’s is hard for Wilson to imagine the tar-black- stately, but audiences of every class and
survival. Both plumb the male psyche ened ships that Odysseus’ father beached age listened raptly to Homer’s graphic
and women’s enthrallment to its bra- in its secluded coves, and the treasure he imagery and impassioned dialogue,
vado. “Tell the old story for our modern plundered stowed in its mountain grot- scored to a propulsive beat. Wilson’s
times,” Homer entreats his muse, in the toes. “Old Laertes was basically a pirate,” ambitious project of the past decade has
Odyssey’s first stanza. The translator she said fondly. been to re-democratize both the poetry
Emily Wilson took him at his word. Her One of the grottoes is known as Eu- and its audience. Her “folk poetics,” as
radically plainspoken Odyssey, the first maeus’ Cave, in honor of the faithful she calls them, are a reproach to prede-
in English by a woman, was published swineherd who tended Odysseus’ pigs cessors who have “turned a great poem
six years ago. Her Iliad will be published and is said (improbably, given the terrain) into a hard one,” or into a poem of their
in two weeks. to have fattened them on acorns there. own. She rejects historical reënactments
On a recent summer evening, Wil- Following Athena’s directions, we found that “archaicize” Homer’s diction—“he
son surveyed the view from a precipice it near the spring of Arethusa, whose didn’t sound archaic to the Greeks”—
above Polis Bay, in the quiet village of black waters are alleged to be a moth- and modern renovations that expand
Stavros, on the northwest coast of Ithaca. er’s tears for her dead son. his footage. The opening of Robert Fa-
A shrine in the town square shows the After a vertiginous climb through gles’s widely admired Odyssey, she points
floor plan of a ruin, not far away, that thorny underbrush, Wilson and I out, uses two English words for every
may be the palace of Odysseus. She reached a keyhole of rock in the cliff Greek one. Her own translation hews
pointed to a crescent beach five hundred and slid down the moss-slimed rocks strictly to the original line count, and
feet below, slung like a hammock be- at its entrance into a humid cavern that it retains the power of a storyteller’s
tween two mountains. The cave at its far looks like a rotunda some Titan sheared voice to fix itself in your memory. “I
end was a site of Mycenaean goddess in half. She had sprinted ahead of me, write for the body,” she told me.
worship, and relics recovered from it in- and when I caught up with her she was
clude a set of bronze tripods which fit sitting on a boulder, dwarfed by her sur- s a brotherhood of nomads, the
Homer’s description of gifts that Odys-
seus received from the Phaeacians. “We’ll
roundings. The air hummed with bird-
song, and with the bells of the moun-
A bards must have imbued their songs
with a yearning for nostos: the home-
swim there,” she said. tain goats that forage in the highlands. coming that crowns a hero’s journey.
Wilson is fifty-one, with expressive “That sound takes you straight back to Homer keeps us in suspense about Od-
features that radiate alertness, and a lithe, Homer,” she said. ysseus’ nostos. He left Ithaca unwillingly
sinewy physique—more Hermes than In bringing Homer back from an- to fight the Trojans and spent his youth
Hera. She set a brisk pace on our hike tiquity, Wilson also had to bridge the at war. His return is disrupted by mis-
down the mountain. As I watched from chasm of time that has elapsed in En- fortunes, but “dreadful, beautiful, divine”
the deserted beach, she plunged into the glish literature since the first full trans- Calypso rescues him from the sea. After
water and headed for the cave with rhyth- lation of the Odyssey: George Chap- seven years of captivity, her charms have
mic strokes. The bay was glassy until a man’s, in 1616. But, she cautioned, “you palled. When Zeus finally orders her to
breeze ruffled its surface with purple can’t and shouldn’t try to make all that set him free, she looks for him on her
shadows, suddenly making sense of Ho- history—layer upon layer—visible in island’s shore:
mer’s “wine-dark sea.” It was Wilson’s the text. My goal was to evoke an ex-
first visit to Ithaca. “I felt the presence perience like the original, using the lan- His eyes were always
tearful; he wept his sweet life away, in
in that sea of protective deities,” she told guage of the people who will read it.” longing
me later, though she hastened to add The epics were originally performed to go back home, since she no longer
that, elsewhere in Greece, unprotected by itinerant singers who roamed an- pleased him.
migrants were drowning in it. cient Greece, entertaining guests at so-
On our way to Stavros, we’d passed cial gatherings. Travel inflected their A jealous goddess is dangerous, as
46 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 18, 2023
“As a translator, I was determined to make the whole human experience of the poems accessible,” Wilson said.
PHOTOGRAPH BY HANNAH WHITAKER THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 18, 2023 47
anyone would know who had lan- haps even more than Odysseus, they’re worked on the Iliad. They inscribe her
guished for ten years at Troy: our familiars: beleaguered humans in closest relationships: with her children;
So Odysseus, with tact, tragically stressed relationships, at the Foreman; her late mother; her younger
said, “Do not be enraged at me, great mercy of fate. sister Bee Wilson, the noted British food
goddess. Apollo sparks the conflict that will writer; plus a pantheon of Greek deities
You are quite right. I know my modest wife engulf them. One of his priests is a Tro- and creatures sacred to them. The birds
Penelope could never match your beauty. . . . jan ally with a cherished daughter, “beau- and flowers are emblems of a tender heart,
But even so, I want to go back home.”
tiful Chryseis.” Achilles captures her in while the armory of spiky weapons—a
Odysseus knows how to massage an a raid, and Agamemnon, the Greek com- spear and a bow on her calves, the thun-
ego; that was his role in the fractious mander, claims her as his war trophy. derclouds of Zeus on her shoulder—are
Greek camp. He’s also the The priest offers to ransom badges of a fighting spirit.
con man who thinks up her with a priceless treasure, That afternoon, Wilson took me for
the Trojan horse. Homer which Agamemnon spurns a walk through a neighborhood of aban-
introduces him with the ad- rudely, and Apollo punishes doned factories, then along the banks
jective polytropos—literally, this sacrilege with a plague. of the Schuylkill River, crossing wild
“of many turns.” Previous Only after the Greek armies meadows to a glade, a route she’d cho-
translators have called him have been decimated does sen for its “Iliadic contrast of beauty
“shifty,” “cunning,” and a their general relent and and desolation.” Her Iliad won’t be the
hundred other things. After send Chryseis home. But first by a woman, but she considers “the
grappling with the alterna- then he consoles himself first-woman thing” a sexist distraction:
tives, Wilson chose “com- by mortally offending his “It slights the many brilliant female
plicated,” hoping also to greatest warrior: he confis- scholars who’ve worked on the poems.
convey the sense of “problematic.” Her cates Achilles’ trophy from an earlier And no one mentions the gender of the
first sentence—“Tell me about a com- looting spree, “fresh-faced Briseis.” And men.” What she didn’t say, though her
plicated man”—instantly makes him with that puerile quarrel between stub- followers do (the flaws and merits of
our familiar: that charismatic prince born warlords over the right to own and her Odyssey have been vehemently de-
who’s too impossible to live with and to rape a girl, Western literature begins. bated on social media), is that it slights
too desirable to live without. While Wilson was contemplating the her translations’ real singularity.
Part of Odysseus’ appeal, not least Greeks sickening in their camp, and the “The ancient Greeks teach one to be
to modern writers, is that he redefines Trojans caged behind their city walls, modern,” the poet and classicist A. E.
heroism as imagination. “You love fic- the plague of Covid forced her family Stallings observed to me. “They taught
tion,” Athena teases him. The decade of five into lockdown. She didn’t want that to me and to Emily. It was time to
of his odyssey passes like a dream, as to push the analogy (“I never thought, strip away all the mannered layers—the
episodes of hardship and violence al- ‘Oh, no—Achilles has to order online tarnish of centuries—and she does that.
ternate with voluptuous idylls. And the groceries’ ”), but she was conscious of Her translations have the freshness of
mind games he plays to outwit his cap- both how volatile confinement can be the sky after a storm. Their briskness and
tors—lusty nymphs, ravenous canni- and how primal the need for company simplicity are faithful to the oral tradi-
bals, vengeful gods—have, Wilson notes, becomes. “You can either rage at the peo- tion, and she brings the poems to a new
“a ‘meta’ element that’s about language ple you’re stuck with or grow more de- generation, which struggles to read harder
and storytelling.” voted,” she said. texts and wants clarity.” Wilson feels an
The Iliad feels suffocating by com- Wilson teaches classics and compar- acute, almost maternal sense of duty to
parison. Its central protagonist, the ative literature at the University of Penn- those lay readers: “They need to trust
demigod Achilles, is problematic with- sylvania and lives near the campus in a that I’m telling them the truth, both
out being complicated. His “cataclys- rambling old house that she shares with about the language and the psychology.
mic wrath” fuels a story that begins in her partner of nine years, David Fore- There are no lazy ways to do it.”
medias res—not with Paris’ abduction man, an administrator at Swarthmore, On rare occasions in her Iliad, a word
of Helen, or the massing of an invasion and her two school-age daughters, Psy- would jar me: “flirty,” “flabbergasted,”
force, but at the end of a nine-year stale- che and Freya. (Her eldest daughter, Imo- “inappropriate.” Or a slangy outburst
mate, with the demoralized Greeks gen, is now in college.) When we met made me laugh at a dramatic moment:
camped on the Trojan coast and the last May, she greeted me at her door in “Stop! You are acting crazy, Menelaus!”
Trojans trapped in their impregnable running clothes. I was surprised first by But that line is worth pausing to con-
city. The action is compressed into about her youthfulness, then by the luxuriance sider precisely because none of Wilson’s
six weeks, whose grinding carnage would of her tattoos. “I didn’t used to read as a predecessors would have written it.
numb your senses if Homer’s poetry tattoo person,” she told me, as we settled Among the notable translations of the
didn’t keep stirring them. Yet the Iliad’s on the deck outside her bedroom, which past century—by Fagles, Robert Fitz-
greatness is inseparable from its claus- is painted Aegean blue. “When you get gerald, Richmond Lattimore, Peter
trophobia. Against a background of tattooed in places that show, it changes Green, Caroline Alexander, Stanley
blight and bleakness, the characters daz- your identity.” Lombardo, Robert Graves (who pivots
zle us with their vivid idiosyncrasy. Per- Wilson’s tattoos became visible as she from prose to poetry to highlight dra-
48 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 18, 2023
matic moments; there’s a lot of man- weren’t listeners,” she said, “so it was hard priciously. “One day you were the scape-
splaining in Homerdom)—each has its for me to imagine that I could be heard.” goat, the next you were his chosen one,”
strengths. Their authors are united in Encouraged by her mother, she took ref- Bee told me, over lunch in Cambridge.
presuming that readers will be “im- uge in books, and excelled in school, “It was a toxic game which served to
proved,” as pious critics used to say, by though she refused to say a word in class. teach us that love is conditional.” It also
their encounter with Homer. But Wil- Her other sanctuary was a world of fan- served to cast them as foils. In Bee’s
son reminds us that a great storyteller tasy: “For a year or two, I pretended to telling, she was the “normal” one who
conceived the poems as entertainment. be a gorilla. I would thrust my lower jaw loved comics and television, didn’t cause
Her language is so vitally urgent that out, even though it was painful to walk much trouble, and cleared her plate.
even the Iliad’s endless battle scenes around that way.” Her other alter ego Emily was the brooding “genius.” At
feel, to use an un-Homeric simile, like was an orangutan, which referred to it- around fourteen, she stopped eating,
listening to the Super Bowl on car radio. self in the third person. “It felt liberat- then coming to the table altogether,
Stallings said, “Does Emily’s clarity be- ing to speak in another voice,” Wilson though neither parent commented on
tray that element of the epic register told me. “It drove my parents completely her blatant anorexia, even when she was
that Matthew Arnold calls ‘nobility’? crazy, which is also why I did it.” living on apples. “As E got smaller, I got
Some critics think a certain grandeur When Emily was eight, a perceptive larger,” Bee wrote in a poignant essay
is missing. But every translation is a teacher saw through her camouflage on sisters and their eating disorders.
compromise, even a great one.” and cast her as Athena in a school pro- Unhappy families tend to spin con-
duction of the Odyssey. (The headmas- flicting narratives, and there would prob-
ilson’s mother, Katherine Duncan- ter played the Cyclops, and the children ably be no literature without them. “I
W Jones, was an eminent scholar of
Elizabethan literature who died in Oc-
relished poking his eye out.) “It was a
turning point in my life,” Wilson writes
found this when I was working on my
memoir,” Andrew Wilson said. (His
tober of complications from Alzheimer’s. in the notes to her translation. The ex- daughters are mentioned in it only in
Her father is A. N. Wilson, the prolific perience kindled a love of theatre shared passing.) “It was my version of events,
English writer whose subjects as a bi- by her mother; it also, she suggests, gave not theirs, about which I won’t com-
ographer include Jesus, Darwin, Tolstoy, her a model of “human and nonhuman” ment, except to say that what they may
Milton, Hitler, and Queen Victoria. shape-shifting. “Translators have to be tell you about me is true, or partially, be-
When I spoke with him in June, at the chameleons,” she said, “leaping from a cause they felt it.” No one, however, took
British Library, he was researching a life green leaf to a brown one.” issue with Emily’s account of the bitter
of Goethe. His latest book, “Confes- Both sisters told me that they were, scene that took place on January 1, 1988,
sions: A Life of Failed Promises,” is the at times, hostages to their mother’s de- when she was sixteen. The Wilsons had
memoir of a writer’s triumphs and tra- pression, though they never doubted gathered for a New Year’s lunch, and
vails. Among the latter, his first mar- her devotion to them. Their father could they went around the table announcing
riage set the high-water mark. be charming, but he played favorites ca- their resolutions. “My resolution,” their
The Wilsons met at Oxford. Kath-
erine was a teaching fellow, and Andrew
was an undergraduate of twenty, a de-
cade her junior. They married hastily in
1971, when she got pregnant with Emily.
“Mom did all the housework and cook-
ing and was always apologetic about it,”
Wilson said. Andrew Wilson told me
that he found talking to his daughter
difficult: “Sometimes she was completely
mute, and sometimes she would burst
into tears.” Even as a little girl, Emily
was conscious of her father’s rage at his
vassalage to a family, for which she felt
he blamed her: “I was the one who had
ruined his young life by being born.” For
reasons that are a bit inscrutable under
the circumstances, the couple had Bee
when her sister was two.
The Wilsons lived in poisonous si-
lence, beneath a veneer of civility. (“We
had a fatal gift for politeness,” as An-
drew put it.) Emily often locked herself
in her room, from which she heard Bee
sobbing through the wall. “My parents “Well, these feelings are all perfectly normal.”
father told them, “is to get a divorce.”
Andrew Wilson decamped to London,
where he eventually remarried and had MAYBE IN ANOTHER LIFE
a third daughter. Duncan-Jones went on
to write “Ungentle Shakespeare,” a bi- I think of the kids I may or may not have. I think about
ography that reads the Bard’s work deeply their hair, the possible dark-brown curls. Baby fingers
but portrays the man as a cad. “Mom tapping on my face. I haven’t made up my mind yet,
knew that great literature is written by but my body is making decisions before I am ready
imperfect humans,” Wilson said. Her fa-
ther read “Ungentle Shakespeare” as a to make them. I can’t seem to say what it is I want
swipe at “Ungentle A.N.” out loud. I can almost see all my different lives, almost
When Bee went to boarding school, taste them, like trying to catch the tail end of a cinematic
then to Cambridge, Emily stayed in Ox- dream before it evaporates. I want to capture it, a glimpse,
ford to support their mother, “who was
devastated for a long time.” She read clas- sneak a peek at each distant future before the View-Master
sics at Balliol and earned a master’s in reel clicks. I want to follow the perfume of each life
English literature at Corpus Christi, but I could live and linger in it: the vanillas. Milk leaking
by then England “felt like the wrong place from my breasts. Cereal. The piquant odor of parenthood.
for my well-being.” In 1996, she took a
blind leap. Knowing nothing about Amer- The one where I am a mother negotiating happiness.
ica or about Yale—“I hoped it was by the The one where I am not a mother and still negotiating
sea”—she arrived in New Haven to pur- happiness, beauty, and rest. Almost 39, and I’ve never
sue a doctorate. Her marriage to a for- loved myself more, yet nostalgia wavers all around me
mer fellow graduate student ended shortly
after Imogen’s birth. A second union also like a montage of mirages muddling memories, complicating
foundered and was followed by the fa- hope, making me miss things I’ve already mourned.
miliar trials of single motherhood. The bargaining—ain’t it a bitch? The bargaining aspect
Wilson’s thesis became a book: of grief, to constantly release that which I’ve already
“Mocked with Death,” a treatise on the
tragedy of “overliving”—a penal sentence,
by age or loss, to the terminal privation
of whatever made a life worthwhile. Her
mother’s dementia hadn’t set in yet, but new country. Wilson became an Amer- I’d get stuck in traffic, she gave me strict
she was attracted to writers who have ican citizen last year, in order “to vote instructions to take the trolley. I shared
dramatized this “horror”: Sophocles, Eu- where I live,” and to engage with the po- a car with Swifties in lamé, graduates
ripides, Seneca, Shakespeare, and Mil- litical arguments raging around her. Had in mortarboards, and their elders of three
ton. “Most of us,” she wrote, “struggle in she not emigrated, she doubts that she generations. Wilson’s chair had been
vain to outlive our own past selves.”That would have seen the need for new Homer endowed by the College for Women
struggle may not be in vain, if the self translations. “Being from two worlds is class of 1963 (Penn became coed a de-
that survives it is the authentic one. But, part of the story,” she said. In that re- cade later), and the alumni who had
Wilson wondered to me, how do you spect, she’s also a dual national of two gathered for their sixty-year reunion
recognize her? “I’m not sure I have a sta- education systems. Her own élite school- would celebrate her at a banquet. Many
ble identity—or perhaps it only emerges ing had come to seem cloistered, shielded were the same age as her mother. “To-
through an engagement with language.” by “walls of class” that also insulate some day’s her birthday,” she said quietly. “She
At lunch, Bee had wanted to show of her students. The ones who went to would have been eighty-two.”
me what one of Emily’s past selves looked private schools “don’t doubt that they be- When I asked Wilson about the eve-
like, so she’d brought a family album. In long” in a classics program, even if “they ning’s dress code, she apologized for
a grainy photograph from the nine- have some unlearning to do,” she said. having “no idea.” But she typically wears
teen-seventies, the Wilsons pose in an The public-school kids “need more nur- something talismanic when she per-
English garden. The parents—a dapper turing to feel welcome. As a translator, forms. For her readings of the Odyssey,
young fogy with ramrod posture and a I was determined to make the whole it was often a sequinned owl T-shirt
soulful, slightly rumpled bluestocking— human experience of the poems acces- that channelled Athena. (Homer, she
stand behind two tidy little girls in match- sible to them.” notes, has an eye “for things that spar-
ing sailor suits. The taller one is refus- kle.”) Athena is a shape-shifting god-
ing to smile. “It’s funny, isn’t it?” Bee said. y first visits with Wilson took dess. She has the power to make her-
“Emily escaped to a world where peo-
ple were free to express anger.”
M place during graduation weekend
at Penn, which happened to coincide
self invisible, and at luminous moments
in Wilson’s translations, especially pri-
She was thinking of ancient Greece, with Taylor Swift concerts in Philadel- vate ones between foes or lovers, so does
but her sister also escaped to an angry phia, so the city was a zoo. Worried that Wilson. Those exchanges are often
50 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 18, 2023
have an edge of zaniness; she pulls
faces and changes character with comic
let go of, but how the water in my mind brings it all back props—a cardboard crown, cat ears, a di-
like the flood current each day, and each morning, in the ebb shevelled wig. But that night, dressed
I see the seafloor for what it is, another landscape of loss sombrely in black lace, she recited one of
and renewal, another augur deciphering the tea leaves the Iliad’s most heartrending passages.
The gods have been intriguing furiously.
in the tide pool revealing the children I might never name, Thetis begs Zeus to avenge her son’s
have, or hold. There is a finite number of eggs and books honor, although the plan he hatches will
inside me. I am trying to release them. I am trying to mourn also fulfill the prophecy that torments
the possible futures bursting before me in a fantastic finale her: Achilles can choose to either die young
as a hero or live to an obscure old age.
of fireworks, bursting in my mouth like red caviar as I try As the story unfolds, Agamemnon is
to find the right words to say goodbye to little faces I can tricked into thinking that he can win the
only imagine. I’m not sure what I want. Each decision seems war without his greatest fighter. The Tro-
to dissolve at the edge of the beach softened by the watercolor jans’ champion—Hector, King Priam’s
son—makes the most of this advantage,
cream of winter floating above the same shore where Eliot wrote without knowing it’s a ploy. But a wary
“The Waste Land” after a mental breakdown a hundred and one seer warns him to seek Athena’s favor,
years before me, writing “On Margate Sands. / I can connect / so he leaves the gory plain to organize
Nothing with nothing.” I keep looking at the gentle waves a sacrifice. Back in the city (briefly, he
hopes), he finds his wife, Andromache,
for answers without trying to make another metaphor. watching the war from the battlements
What if the image of what I’m feeling is too heavy to be with a nurse cradling their infant. In the
carried over into language? Maybe in another life you get passage that Wilson read, she grasps his
to live out all the lives you’ve imagined. Maybe in this life hand and implores him:
I become who I am by not knowing— What are you doing, Hector? You strange
man!
Your will to fight will kill you! Do you feel
—Tiana Clark no pity for your little baby son,
or my unhappiness, my life of loss?
monosyllabic and charged with unspo- litely. As a jazz group played oldies, her Achilles, she reminds him, raided
ken feeling. Her aim, she said, was “to co-speaker, Stuart Weitzman, checked her father’s kingdom, killing him and
give the characters breathing room for out her footwear. “I can see you’re a lady her seven brothers and enslaving their
their ambiguities.” who’s into comfort,” he said. Weitzman, mother. Hector is torn. If he stays be-
That evening, her sandals paid hom- a Penn megadonor, is a ’63 graduate of hind on the walls, he can defend the cit-
age to Achilles’ mother, “silver-footed Wharton who made a fortune in the adel. But the supreme imperative of the
Thetis”—a daughter of the sea god shoe business. “I should really have noble warriors on both sides—Achilles,
Nereus, who was forced to marry King planned a talk around various characters Odysseus, Ajax, Aeneas, Sarpedon, Pa-
Peleus of Phthia, after he had raped her tying on their sandals,” Wilson told me troclus, and even foppish Paris—is, as
with the gods’ connivance. Thetis is a tu- later. “They abound. But I wanted to Hector exhorts his fighters, to “be men.”
telary spirit for Wilson: “I’ve come to see read a violent slaughter passage.” A man is someone who courts death for
the Iliad as a poem about the pain of a Diffidence is Wilson’s default mode, glory, hoping that his deeds will be im-
goddess mother who adores her mortal the legacy of a childhood spent biting mortalized by a poet. (This worked out
child and can’t protect him. The theme her tongue, but her ferocity emerges for all of the above.)
of a mother’s tragic love structures the onstage. “I think there’s a tension,” she Hector tells Andromache, “No one
whole poem. But that anguish teaches told me, “or at least for many people a matters more to me than you.” Yet he
you a hard truth: you can’t prevent your surprise, in the gap between my mostly offers her no comfort:
children from ever being hurt.” shy persona and the intensity of emo- One day some bronze-armed Greek will
The banquet was held at the Penn li- tion I try to express in performance.” capture you,
brary, and we got there early, so that Wil- Her sonorous voice gives ancient Greek and you will weep, deprived of all your
son could review her notes in a quiet cor- the rumble of a cataract, though she freedom. . . .
ner. As the guests drifted in for cocktails, also brings an impious verve to passages But as for me, I hope I will be dead,
and lying underneath a pile of earth,
a few came over to introduce themselves. of dialogue. In a video I watched on- so that I do not have to hear your screams
One regretted that she’d never studied line, Penelope might have been Lady or watch when they are dragging you away.
Greek. Another suggested that the Iliad Chatterley and gruff Odysseus her sexy
was ripe material for “a rap musical like gamekeeper. Hector routs the besiegers and sets
‘Hamilton,’ ” and Wilson nodded po- Some of Wilson’s YouTube readings fire to their ships. The desperate Greeks
THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 18, 2023 51
ment akin to “what feels so satisfying in
translation. Working within strict con-
straints like syntax and meter is like dig-
ging out the gem from a donation bin.”
Wilson translated Homer into Shake-
speare’s meter—an iambic five-foot line,
natural to an Anglophone’s ear. She tuned
her text like an instrument by reciting
it aloud. But she avoided reading her
predecessors, who suffered, in her opin-
ion, from reading one another. None of
them, she said, felt “particularly sacred,
beyond Pope and Chapman, and that’s
because they are both in very different
ways great poets.” In writing for the
body, she searched not only for the most
visceral equivalent of every Greek word
but for the least slanted one. Toward
the end of the Odyssey, the hero’s son,
Telemachus, proves that he has become
a man by hanging twelve of his moth-
er’s serving women, who have slept with
the suitors besieging her. Most transla-
• • tors, Wilson writes, describe them as
“sluts” or “whores,” terms that don’t fig-
throw every man they have into the the Western canon have questioned a ure in the Greek. Instead, she calls them
field. While Achilles sulks in his tent, woman’s fitness to do Homer justice. what Homer does: “slaves,” or, in an echo
his beloved comrade, Patroclus, who “Any woman who has lived with male of plantation culture which felt apt to
shares his bed, bravely joins the battle rage at close range has a better chance her, “house girls.”
in Achilles’ armor. This imposture cows of understanding the vulnerability that Wilson’s translations are the first in
the enemy, but Hector slays Patroclus fuels it than your average bro. She learns English to jettison slurs or euphemisms
anyway, sealing everyone’s fate. Mad- firsthand how the ways in which men that mask the abjection of women in a
dened by grief and rage, “the best of all are damaged determine their need to society where a goal of war, according
the Greeks” butchers the Trojans and wreak damage on others.” to the Iliad, was to rob men of their
seizes twelve of their young boys to sac- This insight, and the lucidity Wil- women, and where female captives of
rifice on Patroclus’ funeral pyre. He son brings to it, may be the greatest rev- every rank were trafficked for sex and
spears Hector through his neck, then elation of her Iliad. The poem’s ma- domestic labor. (Boys were, too.) Yet she
drags the corpse around the city walls chismo has often bored or estranged isn’t aiming to generate outrage at the
until old King Priam abases himself to me, and, in more grandiloquent trans- sexual politics of a Bronze Age patriar-
beg for its return. The poem ends with lations, its heroes’ mindless bloodlust chy: “It’s too easy.” To the degree that
the laments of three royal women— obscured the pathos of boys and men she’s outraged, it’s by the sexual politics
Helen, Hecuba, and Andromache— who are shamed literally to death by of her vocation. “The ‘faithful’ transla-
whose losses, Wilson writes, “can never weaknesses that they’ve been bred to tion,” she writes, is a “gendered meta-
be recuperated,” except in the retelling. suppress. Her plainsong conveys the phor.” It presupposes a wife-like help-
Wilson has spent the past decade tragedy of their bravado, and, listening meet whose work is subordinate to that
contemplating her kinship with these to her voice, I felt it for the first time. of “a male-authored original.” To some
warriors. “My childhood self was an of her critics, especially the trolls on Twit-
Achilles,” she said, “holed up in protest,
then emerging later to reveal his power.
But I also had a dutiful Hector self,
Imoremet Wilson in Athens before we left
for Ithaca. The city, in late June, was
crowded than Philly had been, and
ter, Wilson’s “wokeness” perverts Ho-
mer’s world view. In her own view, the
biases of previous translators have dis-
doomed by compliance.” I told her that considerably hotter. One morning, we torted Homer’s “experiential truth.”
I thought Hector’s speech to Andro- hiked up to the Acropolis, but the wait Homer’s goddesses are thrilling mod-
mache, with its vision of her degrada- for tickets was two hours in the sun, so els of female power. Aphrodite takes her
tion, was tinged with sadism, but she we hiked back down. Over coffee in a pleasure where she finds it (everywhere).
disagreed: “Brusqueness is often a mark little square, I told her about a vintage Semi-divine Helen, Zeus’ daughter, has
of fear. You push people away when you shop near my hotel. She was delighted a witchy seventh sense, a ventriloquist’s
worry that you need them too much.” by the prospect of taking her girls there. voice, and a pharmacy of magic potions.
And it rankles her that men whom she Finding a treasure in a thrift store, she In Wilson’s view, “Nothing beats Hera,
considers self-appointed guardians of said, gives her a sense of accomplish- dressing up with super-chic earrings and
52 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 18, 2023
skin creams to mess with Zeus’ plans.” virility—that generate violence in the western Spain, and elsewhere on Ithaca,
(Her craftiness evokes a conjugal eye world are still the same. I will confess but the School of Homer is a contender.
roll: “She always thwarts whatever I de- that, in the next gallery, I tarried for lon- Its ruins were once a complex of build-
cree.”) But the poems’ mortal women ger than was strictly seemly at the statue ings pieced together from massive blocks
are subject to the dictates of their hus- of Paris—a monumental nude youth of limestone, and sited so that ships or
bands and fathers, and even, like Pe- with surely the most beautiful face ever strangers were visible as they approached.
nelope, of their barely postadolescent sculpted. Of course Helen eloped with Whoever lived here would have given
sons. None of them challenge that him. Abduction, my foot. those strangers a cordial welcome, ac-
convention, yet Wilson is alert to the cording to xenia—the sacred code of
ambivalence in their stoicism. Where hen Odysseus at last reaches Greek hospitality, whose breach by Paris
Andromache’s is explicit, Penelope’s is
opaque. (Her name means “veil over the
W Ithaca, he doesn’t recognize the
island. Athena has shrouded it in mist
(it was bad form to run off with your
hostess) led to the Trojan War.
face.”) “Is Penelope really glad to see her to buy him some time for plotting his If these are indeed the ruins of the
husband after twenty years?” Wilson revenge before he confronts the suitors. palace, they don’t fit the Odyssey’s de-
asked me. Yes, but her translation of their Once she unveils the landscape, Odys- scriptions of a royal seat with a vast ban-
reunion gives us a moment to wonder: seus, elated, knows just where he is: in quet hall, a storeroom secured by “daz-
a bay like Polis, shaded by a wooded zling double doors,” and an upper story
She crossed the threshold
and sat across from him beside the wall, mountain. A “cave sacred to nymphs” where Penelope worked at her loom and
in firelight. He sat beside the pillar, lies at one end of the beach, and that is hid herself from the rowdy suitors. A
and kept his eyes down, waiting to find out where they hide his treasure—the Phaea- mosaic floor in one of the roofless cham-
whether the woman who had once shared cians’ “heroic gifts of bronze.” bers looked Roman. (Rome occupied
his bed On Ithaca, Wilson and I often crossed Greece for hundreds of years.) In the
would speak to him. She sat in silence,
stunned. paths with mountain goats, whose bleat- seventeenth century, some of the stone
ing kids rooted at their udders, but we was used to erect a church, dedicated to
After coffee, I went prospecting for never met a goatherd. “They’re all off St. Athanasios. The School of Homer
gems at the National Archaeological composing poetry,” she said. We never got its name in English some two hun-
Museum. Its most famous artifact is a met a soul, in fact. It was as if the gods dred years ago, from a local priest who
funeral mask of hammered gold leaf that had decided to reward her with a pri- showed the site to a British classicist.
Heinrich Schliemann, the German ar- vate tour of their haunts. He saw shards of pottery, perhaps My-
cheologist, found in what he believed to To reach the palace of Odysseus, we cenaean, scattered in the rubble; Odys-
be Agamemnon’s tomb at Mycenae. The set out from Stavros a little before dusk, seus was unlikely to have been the first
mask, from the sixteenth century B.C.E., when the heat had abated. About a mile Achaean prince to live there.
predates the war, if there was one, by from the village, on a steep mountain The birds singing in this ruined choir
about three hundred years, but it’s the road, we found a sign that vaguely might have told us its history, but there
haunting likeness of an old king with pointed toward the “School of Homer.” was no one to interpret their song. Wil-
an archaic smile, and, whatever terrible Turning onto a rocky path, we climbed son wandered off alone and spent a while
crimes he succumbed to or committed, for another twenty minutes until an an- looking out to sea. Later, she told me
he seems to be at peace. that she’d been thinking about her
The ancient gold in the vitrines re- mother: “She was the home that I came
minded me of a passage from Wilson’s back to.”
introduction to the Odyssey. Helen and Nostos may also imply the yearning
her husband, Menelaus, she notes wryly, for a home that doesn’t exist, or no lon-
“seem to have suffered no obvious ill ef- ger, or only as an ideal: a place where
fects from her escapade—beyond the the people you love the most finally rec-
fact that so many people . . . died as a ognize and embrace you. “I often feel
result.” Their marriage, she concludes, like an Odysseus,” Wilson said. “He was
might have been cemented by a mutual always reinventing himself and, like a
appreciation for “wonderful consumer cient flight of steps delivered us to a pla- translator, pretending to be someone
goods.” They surely would have coveted teau that is one of the island’s strategic else and telling that character’s story.
the goods that were on display: exqui- high points. In the distance, we could But maybe a true self can emerge from
sitely wrought diadems, tripods, wine see Afáles Bay and, beyond it, the Io- the lies.”
cups, sword hilts, and jewelry, the likes nian Sea shimmering in a violet haze. When we got back to the road, a sud-
of which Homer inventories with the Schliemann poked around this acrop- den apparition arrested us. The setting
concupiscence of a Sotheby’s catalogue. olis in the mid-nineteenth century, and sun backlit a spider’s web. She hung like
If you learn one thing from the Iliad, many archeologists have followed him. a dense onyx bead precisely at our eye
it’s that the greed for stuff, the drive for The existence of the palace has been level between a gnarly olive tree and a
sex, the fear of death, the bonds of love, disputed for millennia, and alternative pine whose scent mingled in the warm
the pull of home, the glamour of fame, locations have been proposed in Ceph- air with jasmine and goat dung. Wilson
plus all the insecurities—especially about alonia, Paxos, Sicily, the Baltic, south- whispered, “Athena is with us.”
THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 18, 2023 53
FICTION
F
arah said, “Ladies’ Lunch at my Farah said, “I had to decently wait till cupboard for a bag and out fell an av-
place, my agenda: Forgetting as nine o’clock before calling, and I reached alanche of who knows how many years’
an Olympic sport. You know how him at the airport, already in line to board. worth of paper bags that I must have
TV uses competition to turn us on to It was a slow line. I said, ‘Ervin! It’s this kept, for whatever future use or need
baking, interior decorating, fashion, and sorry old head of mine. I forget things!’ I may have imagined, stuffed in any-
what all? I propose the Great Ladies’ He said what we all routinely say—he how just anywhere.’”
Forgetting Olympics.” says, ‘So do I. I forget things, too!,’ mean- The shifting and resettling on chairs
Bessie said, “You mean whoever for- ing, If I forget, forgetting is nothing to might have alerted Bridget that she
gets the most names gets the gold?” do with your embarrassing old age. ‘I for- was wearying her friends’ interest and
“Forgets more words, words, words,” get everything all the time!’ he says. If he attention. Not knowing where she was
said Bridget. thinks he’s going to out-forget me, he headed, she continued, “Why, when I
“And dates and appointments,” Farah has another think coming. I say, ‘I forget already had my coat on, did I start to
said. names, words, and dates, and yesterday I organize the large and the midsize into
Bessie said, “Addresses. I remember forgot that it was the fourth.’ So he says, separate piles, the small throwaways
Lotte calling me several times for the ad- ‘And I can’t remember the number of without handles on the left, and those
dress of the party that turned out to be—I Cousin Hami’s phone,’ and we’re off to handsomely engineered to be refolded
forget, what do we call a Jewish wake?— the races. I say, ‘I can’t remember my own on the right?”
for Sylvia’s deceased aunt. Poor Lotte phone number, and I forgot my keys in- Lucinella said, “There was a time
spent the evening trying to remember side my apartment and had to call the when I needed, when I had to have my
from where she knew Sylvia or if maybe locksmith.’ He says, ‘I left my bag in the pencils in a row, sharpened to perfect
she had never met her.” hotel room. They will have to send it on.’ points, all of one length, which, of
“Forgetting people,” Ilka said. “I had “And now he’s one up on me because course, they couldn’t remain unless I
KWSF an e-mail from a Samson who writes as I’m not going to tell him, I have forgot- kept getting rid of the wrong size.”
if I should know his brother, his mother? ten you and what you look like. If we “My friend Dario,” Ruth said, “used
The only Samsons I know are Kafka’s passed in the street I wouldn’t know you. to come in and sit and talk and fidget
bug and the one in the Bible.” “Ervin said, ‘The line is beginning and look uncomfortable until he sud-
“I picked up a story I published in to move. Goodbye, Aunt Farah.’ I said, denly got up and straightened the pic-
2007,” Bridget said. “It’s not that I don’t ‘Next time you’re in New York, you’ll ture on the opposite wall.”
recognize what I wrote, but I couldn’t come and have dinner at my place and Hope said, “The nice woman who
think how it ended.” I’ll take you up to our roof and show comes in once a week to clean doesn’t
“So anyway,” said Farah impatiently. you the Hudson River right underfoot.’ put things back where they belong.”
“This is this morning. I’m enjoying my ‘You showed me already,’ he said. ‘You’ve “Tell her you want the right things
coffee, going to turn on the news, and never been in my place,’ I said. ‘Sure I in the right place,” Bessie said.
I think, Wait a minute—today is the have,’ he said. ‘Last year, when I was in “Oh, I tell her. I tell her and tell her
fifth? Imagine yourself in an elevator in town, and after dinner we took drinks and tell her. I think she may really not
free fall, your stomach has been left be- up to your roof. Goodbye.’ remember where things are supposed
hind, or drops into your boots—or is it “ ‘Goodbye, Ervin,’ I said. I try and to go.”
your heart that drops into your pants—I try and fail to see Ervin sitting—on “Does it matter?” Ilka asked her.
forget the idiom, but wasn’t it on the which chair? Facing in which direction? “It so obviously doesn’t, so why is it
fourth I was having dinner with Ervin? Looking over the wall on the roof? A driving me insane?”
“Ervin’s folks are my mother’s dis- mean trick if the loss of vision has taken Bessie said, “My Eve and Jenny are
tant cousins who went to Canada. Ervin away my visual memory.” terminally untidy, which reminds me
is the in-between generation, younger Ruth said, “Like trying to force the of my mother standing in my door-
than my son but older than my grand- raggedy tail end of a dream to reconsti- way saying it looked as if a band of
son Hami, I think. Anyway. So. I tute the dream before we forget what it robbers had gone through the things
marched myself into my office, turned was about.” in my room.”
on the computer—I have this big desk- Farah said, “Before we forget what The group considered Bessie to be
top because of my bad eyes—got briefly there is to remember.” the arbiter of Ladies’ Lunch agendas.
hysterical when I couldn’t remember This week she had e-mailed them an
how to find the calendar, found it, and MARCH: NEXT TO GODLINESS idea suggested by a recent New York
it was! It was yesterday that Ervin was Times article that, she explained, “com-
in town. I see him sitting at a table wait- At Monday’s Ladies’ Lunch, Bridget pared our children’s relations with us
ing for me, except that I can’t remem- told her friends the bad thing she had with our attitudes toward the adults
ber where we were supposed to meet. . . .” done on her way over. “My neighbor of our day.”
“Wait!” Ilka said, “Wait, wait, wait! from 6-J got on the elevator and asked “And my suggestion,” put in Ruth,
Samson! Lotte’s son was Sam and his me how I was doing, and, instead of “was that we should think about what
THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 18, 2023 55
our lot understands by ‘wokeness.’ ” was remembering where Lotte used to sit, their way up. Hope might come a bit
Lucinella said, “I don’t know that I with her back to the window, and Farah later. What’s going on? Talk to us.”
know what exactly it is.” understood that she was seeing her friends They seated themselves around
“That’s what I want us to talk about.” across the table as if through a plastic baggie. Bridget’s table. She said, “It’s the stu-
“Yes,” Bridget said, “yes, but why Ruth picked up the Times and put pid nerves before giving a talk. I’m on
do Hope’s things need to be in the it down again: they were not going to this panel on Wednesday and I have
right place?” talk about wokeness. to give the opening statement. This is
“So she can find them?”suggested Farah. Hope said, “Isn’t ‘neatliness’ sup- stuff I do all the time.”
“I grant you that, O.K.,” Bridget said. posed to be next to ‘godliness’?” “But public speaking is famously
“But that is not why we arrange things Bessie said, “That order is better nerve-wracking,” said Ruth, the retired
in rows. Who benefits from my smooth- than disorder is self-explanatory. ” lawyer. “I used to worry weeks ahead,
ing the wrinkles of my bedcover? Why “Explain it,” said Bridget. and then only one week, and later one
do I correct what is off-center?” day, then just for the five minutes be-
“Because you want things to look JUNE: FUNK fore going on, until I learned to just
neat and tidy.” be nervous.”
“I do. I know I do. But why do I? “Woke up in some sort of state,” Brid- “And I’m frazzled by all the things
What’s it for? Why do we neaten na- get e-mailed Ruth on the day of La- I haven’t got done around the house,”
ture into gardens? What is the virtue of dies’ Lunch. “I don’t like to do this, but Bridget said.
a tidy grass border? And why did I take I’m not going to make it to your place.” “Like what, for instance?”
the trouble to hang the picture parallel “Do you want us to come to you?” “Like . . . I can’t remember—and I
to the floor in the first place?” Ruth e-mailed back. don’t know how to find—the name
“Well, jeez, you wouldn’t purposely “What I want is for this week to be of the guy who washes my windows,
hang it askew.” the week after next,” Bridget returned. so I can’t call to find out when he
“No. I certainly would not,” said Brid- “Farah and I are coming over,” Ruth is supposed to come. Hope, hello!”
get. “That’s what I mean. Why not?” wrote. she greeted the latecomer. “Sit down.
Bessie said, “Do you remember Lotte “I don’t think I have any food,” wrote Have sushi.”
saying that things not put properly Bridget. “Sorry I’m late,” Hope said. “What’s
away were like ‘visual noise’? Don’t we • happening?”
have a need—don’t we yearn for order?” “Bridget can’t remember the name of
There followed a moment in which “Hi! We’ve brought sushi,” Ruth said, her window washer,” reported Bessie.
Bridget did not say “Why do we?,” Bessie and Farah said, “Bessie and Ilka are on “Oh, wow!” commented Hope.
“Bridget is on a panel and has to
give a talk,” added Ruth.
“I know. I’m coming to hear you.
It’s this Wednesday, isn’t it? Not the
end of the world?” Hope finished on a
questioning note.
“You know that,” Bridget said. “And
I know that, but you tell me why my
blood pressure is way up, heart thump-
ing, my sleep lousy with nightmares.”
“That’s unlike you,” Farah said. “We
rely on you to make us see our discom-
forts, even our disasters, as interesting
experiences.”
“Well, there is nothing interesting,
I promise you, in not being at home
when the window washer comes to
wash your windows, or in being home
when he comes to wash the windows
and you haven’t cleared a lifetime col-
lection of colored glassware from the
windowsills.”
“Why not move everything and then
he can come when he comes?”
“And live, for who knows how long,
in a world with glass objects on every
surface?”
“The Bible I did for my publisher. ‘Murder in Heaven’ I did for me.” Ilka said, “I must have quoted to
you my old friend Carter, who num- “The Connecticut train out here other one of these longtime get-
bered the things that do not matter, wasn’t bad,” Ruth said, and Hope said, togethers—and at the last moment
which drove him to drink? ‘It do not “Oh, I like the train. I always feel that it seemed too complicated and I
matter’ became our watchword. It’s little thrill as soon as I sit in the taxi begged off.”
surprising how many things that ap- to the train or to a plane. It’s the anx- “And you regret not going?”
plies to.” iety of the days—of the week—before “Not the dinner, and not the not
Bridget said, “Anxiety is surprisingly a trip that’s hard to survive.” getting together so much as not hav-
uncomfortable. I remember and long “Oh, that. Yes,” they had all agreed, ing gone, which makes it easier to not
for my normal, well-enough-regulated and Farah said, “My balance is shot, go the next time.”
self. It’s like not being able to imagine and, with my eyes getting worse by Bessie said, “Colin can no longer do
summer afternoons when your coat without me, and it’s getting harder for
won’t zip on a windy street corner in me to take the train into the city. I’m
February.” going to let Eve have the Ninety-fourth
“Wait! Hang on,” Hope said. “Now Street pied-à-terre. The light is good
imagine Hell as an eternal February for her painting.”
on a windy corner with the zipper ir- “No more lunches at the Café
reparably broken.” Provence,” said Hope, who’d learned
“What sin is it punishment for?” that her old friend Jack had died. “That
Ruth asked. was in June,” she said. “Curious to have
“No sin. Pure punishment. The been living for months in a world with-
greatest imaginable discomfort with- the day, it’s the thought of the two out Jack living in it.”
out the possibility of change or end is blocks to Broadway that produces a “So can we batten on the love it is
my idea of Hell. What’s yours?” small agoraphobia.” better to have had and lost than never
“I’ve got a good one,” Farah said. Bridget said, “I feel—do we agree— to have had at all?” said Bridget.
“Being on a telephone hold that can- that we don’t need more adventures, “Yes,” Farah said. “Yes.” And her
not be disconnected and will never be don’t need new experiences? That we friends waited for the story. Farah said,
answered.” can batten on past travels?” “I’ve been toying with a notion that
They took turns imagining eterni- Bessie said, “The time Lotte and losing my sight is the punishment for
ties of what each thought unbearable I and our two guys lit out for Europe my great, grand forbidden affair.”
until Bessie said, “Watching my Colin after our final exams—the four of us “Oh, for goodness’ sake, no you
in pain.” lugging our bags, the only people out haven’t! You don’t really believe in pun-
Here’s where Hope opened the in the streets of midnight Venice.” ishment,” Ruth said.
bottle of wine she had brought, and “China,” Bridget said. “In the “I really don’t,” said Farah, “but pun-
Bridget said, “My anxiety is a mod- eighties. We noticed the designs on ishment feels like the right idea.”
erate Hell, like a low-grade, general- the houses along the Burma Road— “You mean that you wouldn’t do it
ized fear about personal stuff I don’t each village had its signature. A very if you had it to do again?”
know how to fix and the stuff in the old woman bent down to her grand- “Yes, I would!” said Farah.
news that nobody knows how to fix, child and pointed at me: ‘Look! An “Will you tell us the story?”
so I’m going to do what I know how American.’ ” “No,” Farah said. “Did I mention
to do, which is to write a story and Ilka said, “ When you’ve made that Medicare is sending me a walker?”
call it ‘Funk.’ ” it up the mountain, you get to look
over the top, and there is a new bit of •
NOVEMBER: NO MORE TRAINS the world that you could not have Then there was Covid and their chil-
supposed.” dren worried about them. Ruth un-
“But no more trips, no more trains,” They continued to meet for Ladies’ dertook to Zoom Ladies’ Lunch. They
Hope said. Lunch and continued to say “If some- became accustomed to watching them-
“Except to go and see Lotte at her one would drive us we could go to see selves talking to one another out of
‘facility,’” Ruth said. Lotte in Green What’s Its Name.” Lotte squares that showed their beds, their
It was early one September. The had begun to call them hallucinating bookshelves, the doors to their bath-
friends had taken the train to Old missing keys to a car that she seemed rooms. It turned out to be easier to
Rockingham to have Ladies’ Lunch at to believe she had bought to take her- stay at home—not to have to leave the
Bessie’s. Colin, who was having one of self home to her apartment. house. Then, one day, Ruth e-mailed
his bad days, had gone into his room. “We didn’t—we couldn’t go to see everybody to ask if anyone would mind
They lunched on the wooden deck her,” they said after Lotte died. This, if they took a hiatus. Nobody minded,
overlooking the curling blue bay with too, is now—how long ago? and it has become easier to not have
its traffic of pleasure boats. “Like so Ladies’ Lunch. For now?
many little white triangles. It’s lovely,” •
they said, and Hope added, “But no At lunch in November, Ruth said, “I NEWYORKER.COM
more trips.” accepted an invitation to dinner—an- Lore Segal on friendship, talking, and aging.
BOOKS
THE X-MAN
How Elon Musk became a superhero and then a supervillain.
BY JILL LEPORE
I
n 2021, Elon Musk became the world’s delivered safely a few weeks later. In you’re a billionaire,” Colbert interrupted.
richest man (no woman came close), mid-December, Grimes’s new baby came “Yeah,” Musk said, nodding. Colbert said,
and Time named him Person of the home and met her brother X. An hour “That seems a little like superhero or su-
Year: “This is the man who aspires to save later, Musk took X to New York and pervillain. You have to choose one.” Musk
our planet and get us a new one to inhabit: dandled him on his knee while being paused, his face blank. That was eight
clown, genius, edgelord, visionary, indus- photographed for Time. years, several companies, and as many
trialist, showman, cad; a madcap hybrid “He dreams of Mars as he bestrides children ago.Things have got a lot weirder
of Thomas Edison, P. T. Barnum, An- Earth, square-jawed and indomitable,” since. More Lex Luthor, less Tony Stark.
drew Carnegie and Watchmen’s Doctor the magazine’s Person of the Year an- Musk controls the very tiniest things,
Manhattan, the brooding, blue-skinned nouncement read. Musk and Grimes and the very biggest. He oversees com-
man-god who invents electric cars and called the baby, Musk’s tenth, Y, or some- panies, valued at more than a trillion dol-
moves to Mars.” Right about when Time times “Why?,” or just “?”—a reference lars, whose engineers have built or are
was preparing that giddy announcement, to Musk’s favorite book, Douglas Adams’s building, among other things, reusable
three women whose ovaries and uteruses “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” rocket ships, a humanoid robot, hyper-
were involved in passing down the mad- because, Grimes explained, it’s a book loops for rapid transit, and a man-ma-
cap man-god’s genes were in the mater- about how knowing the question is more chine interface to be implanted in human
nity ward of a hospital in Austin. Musk important than knowing the answer. brains. He is an entrepreneur, a media
believes a declining birth rate is a threat Elon Musk is currently at or near the mogul, a political provocateur, and, not
to civilization and, with his trademark helm of six companies: Tesla, SpaceX least, a defense contractor: SpaceX has
tirelessness, is doing his visionary edge- (which includes Starlink), the Boring received not only billions of dollars in
lord best to ward off that threat. Shivon Company, Neuralink, X (formerly known government contracts for space missions
Zilis, a thirty-five-year-old venture cap- as Twitter), and X.AI, an artificial-intel- but also more than a hundred million
italist and executive at Musk’s company ligence company that he founded, ear- dollars in military contracts for missile-
Neuralink, was pregnant with twins, con- lier this year, because he believes that tracking satellites, and Starlink’s network
ceived with Musk by in-vitro fertiliza- human intelligence isn’t reproducing fast of four thousand satellites—which
tion, and was experiencing complications. enough, while artificial intelligence is provides Pentagon-funded services to
“He really wants smart people to have getting more artificially intelligent ex- Ukraine—now offers a military service
kids, so he encouraged me to,” Zilis said. ponentially. Call it Musk’s Law: the called Starshield. Day by day, Musk’s
In a nearby room, a woman serving as a answer to killer robots is more Musk companies control more of the Internet,
surrogate for Musk and his thirty-three- babies. Plus, more Musk companies. “I the power grid, the transportation sys-
year-old ex-wife, Claire Boucher, a mu- can’t just sit around and do nothing,” tem, objects in orbit, the nation’s security
sician better known as Grimes, was suf- Musk says, fretting about A.I., in Wal- infrastructure, and its energy supply.
fering from pregnancy complications, too, ter Isaacson’s new biography, “Elon Musk” And yet. At a jury trial earlier this
and Grimes was staying with her. (Simon & Schuster), a book that can year, Musk’s lawyer repeatedly referred
“I really wanted him to have a daugh- scarcely contain its subject, in that it raises to his client, a middle-aged man, as a
ter so bad,” Grimes said. At the time, infinitely more questions than it answers. “kid.” The Wall Street Journal has de-
Musk had had seven sons, including, “Are you sincerely trying to save the scribed him as suffering from “tantrums.”
with Grimes, a child named X. Grimes world?” Stephen Colbert once asked Musk The Independent has alleged that selling
did not know that Zilis, a friend of hers, on “The Late Show.” “Well, I’m trying Twitter to Musk was “like handing a
was down the hall, or that Zilis was preg- to do good things, yeah, saving the world toddler a loaded gun.”
nant by Musk. Zilis’s twins were born is not, I mean . . . ,” Musk said, mumbling. “I’m not evil,” Musk said on “Satur-
seven weeks premature; the surrogate “But you’re trying to do good things, and day Night Live” a couple of years ago,
58 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 18, 2023
MARK MAHANEY; OPPOSITE: ANTONIO GIOVANNI PINNA
“Unless the woke-mind virus ... is stopped,” Musk told Isaacson, “civilization will never become multiplanetary.”
THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 18, 2023 59
playing the dastardly Nintendo villain lines of his life of Musk. “They can be ther, Errol Musk, an engineer and an
Wario, on trial for murdering Mario. “I’m reckless, cringeworthy, sometimes even aviator. In 2019, she published a memoir
just misunderstood.” How does a biog- toxic. They can also be crazy. Crazy titled “A Woman Makes a Plan: Advice
rapher begin to write about such a man? enough to think they can change the for a Lifetime of Adventure, Beauty, and
Some years back, after Isaacson had pub- world.” It’s a disconcerting thing to read Success.” For all that she writes about
lished a biography of Benjamin Frank- on page 615 of a biography of a fifty-two- growing up in South Africa in the nine-
lin and was known to be writing one of year-old man about whom a case could teen-fifties and sixties, she never once
Albert Einstein, the Apple co-founder be made that he wields more power than mentions apartheid.
Steve Jobs called him up and asked him any other person on the planet who isn’t Isaacson, in his account of Elon Musk’s
to write his biography; Isaacson says he in charge of a nuclear arsenal. Not potty- childhood, barely mentions apartheid
wondered, half jokingly, whether Jobs trained? Boys will be . . . toddlers? himself. He writes at length and with
“saw himself as the natural successor in compassion about the indignities heaped
that sequence.” I don’t think Musk sees lon Musk was born in Pretoria, South upon young Elon by schoolmates. Elon,
himself as a natural successor to anyone.
As I read it, Isaacson found much to like
E Africa, in 1971. His grandfather J. N.
Haldeman was a staunch anti-Communist
an awkward, lonely boy, was bored in
school and had a tendency to call other
and admire in Jobs but is decidedly un- from Canada who in the nineteen-thirties kids “stupid”; he was also very often
comfortable with Musk. (He calls him, and forties had been a leader of the anti- beaten up, and his father frequently be-
at one point, “an asshole.”) Still, Isaac- democratic and quasi-fascist Technoc- rated him, but when he was ten, a few
son’s descriptions of Jobs and Musk are racy movement. (Technocrats believed years after his parents divorced, he chose
often interchangeable. “His passions, per- that scientists and engineers should rule.) to live with him. (Musk is now estranged
fectionism, demons, desires, artistry, “In 1950, he decided to move to South from his father, a conspiracist who has
devilry, and obsession for control were Africa,” Isaacson writes, “which was still called Joe Biden a “pedophile President,”
integrally connected to his approach to ruled by a white apartheid regime.” In and who has two children by his own
business and the products that resulted.” fact, apartheid had been declared only stepdaughter; he has said that “the only
(That’s Jobs.) “It was in his nature to in 1948, and the regime was soon recruit- thing we are here for is to reproduce.”
want total control.” (Musk.) “He didn’t ing white settlers from North America, Recently, he warned Elon, in an e-mail,
have the emotional receptors that pro- promising restless men such as Haldeman that “with no Whites here, the Blacks
duce everyday kindness and warmth and that they could live like princes. Isaac- will go back to the trees.”)
a desire to be liked.” (Musk.) “He was son calls Haldeman’s politics “quirky.” In Musk’s childhood sounds bad, but
not a model boss or human being.” ( Jobs.) 1960, Haldeman self-published a tract, Isaacson’s telling leaves out rather a lot
“This is a book about the roller-coaster “The International Conspiracy to Es- about the world in which Musk grew
life and searingly intense personality of tablish a World Dictatorship & the Men- up. In the South Africa of “Elon Musk,”
a creative entrepreneur whose passion for ace to South Africa,” that blamed the there are Musks and Haldemans—Elon
perfection and ferocious drive revolution- two World Wars on the machinations and his younger brother and sister and
ized six industries.” I ask you: Which? of Jewish financiers. his many cousins—and there are ani-
“Sometimes great innovators are risk- Musk’s mother, Maye Haldeman, was mals, including the elephants and mon-
seeking man-children who resist potty a finalist for Miss South Africa during keys who prove to be a nuisance at a con-
training,” Isaacson concludes in the last her tumultuous courtship with his fa- struction project of Errol’s. There are no
other people, and there are certainly no
Black people, the nannies, cooks, gar-
deners, cleaners, and construction work-
ers who built, for white South Africans,
a fantasy world. And so, for instance, we
don’t learn that in 1976, when Elon was
four, some twenty thousand Black school-
children in Soweto staged a protest and
heavily armed police killed as many as
seven hundred. Instead, we’re told, “As a
kid growing up in South Africa, Elon
Musk knew pain and learned how to
survive it.”
Musk, the boy, loved video games and
computers and Dungeons & Dragons
and “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Gal-
axy,” and he still does. “I took from the
book that we need to extend the scope
of consciousness so that we are better
able to ask the questions about the an-
“I’m trying to get better at barking for what I want.” swer, which is the universe,” Musk tells
Isaacson. Isaacson doesn’t raise an eye- domitable. For the rest of us, Musk’s pet- file that advanced what was already a
brow, and you can wonder whether he tiness, arrogance, and swaggering vi- hackneyed set of journalistic conventions
has read “Hitchhiker’s Guide,” or lis- ciousness are harder to take, and their about the man-boy man-gods of North-
tened to the BBC 4 radio play on which necessity less clear. ern California: “The showiness, the chutz-
it is based, first broadcast in 1978. It sounds Isaacson is interested in how innova- pah, the streak of self-promotion and the
like this: tion happens. In addition to biographies urge to create a dramatic public persona
Far back in the mists of ancient time, in the
of Franklin, Einstein, Jobs, and Leonardo are major elements of what makes up the
great and glorious days of the former galactic da Vinci, he has also written about fig- Silicon Valley entrepreneur. . . . Musk’s
empire, life was wild, rich, and, on the whole, ures in the digital revolution and in gene ego has gotten him in trouble before, and
tax free. . . . Many men of course became ex- editing. Isaacson puts innovation first: it may get him in trouble again, yet it is
tremely rich, but this was perfectly natural be- This man might be a monster, but look at also part and parcel of what it means to
cause no one was really poor, at least, no one
worth speaking of.
what he built! Whereas Mary Shelley, for be a hotshot entrepreneur.” Five months
instance, put innovation second: The man later, Musk married his college girlfriend,
“The Hitchhiker’s Guide” is not a who built this is a monster! The political Justine Wilson. During their first dance
book about how “we need to extend the theorist Judith Shklar once wrote an at their wedding, he whispered in her ear,
scope of consciousness so that we are essay called “Putting Cruelty First.” Mon- “I am the alpha in this relationship.”
better able to ask the questions about taigne put cruelty first, identifying it as “Big Ego of Hotshot Entrepre-
the answer, which is the universe.” It is, the worst thing people do; Machiavelli neur Gets Him Into Trouble” is more
among other things, a razor-sharp sa- did not. As for “the usual excuse for our or less the running headline of Musk’s
tiric indictment of imperialism: most unspeakable public acts,” the ex- life. In 2000, Peter Thiel’s company Con-
cuse “that they are necessary,” Shklar finity merged with X.com, and Musk re-
And for these extremely rich merchants life
eventually became rather dull, and it seemed
knew this to be nonsense. “Much of what gretted that the new company was called
that none of the worlds they settled on was en- passed under these names was merely PayPal, instead of X. (He later bought
tirely satisfactory. Either the climate wasn’t quite princely wilfulness,” as Shklar put it. This the domain x.com, and for years he kept
right in the later part of the afternoon or the is always the problem with princes. it as a kind of shrine, a blank white page
day was half an hour too long or the sea was just with nothing but a tiny letter “x” on the
the wrong shade of pink. And thus were created
lon Musk started college at the Uni- screen.) In 2002, eBay paid $1.5 billion
the conditions for a staggering new form of in-
dustry: custom-made, luxury planet-building. E versity of Pretoria but left South Af-
rica in 1989, at seventeen. He went first
for the company, and Musk drew on his
share of the sale to start SpaceX. Two
Douglas Adams wrote “The Hitch- to Canada and, after two years at Queen’s years later, he invested around $6.5 mil-
hiker’s Guide” on a typewriter that University in Ontario, transferred to the lion in Tesla; he became both its largest
had on its side a sticker that read “End University of Pennsylvania, where he shareholder and its chairman. Around
Apartheid.” He wasn’t crafting an in- studied physics and economics, and wrote then, in his Marvel Iron Man phase, Musk
struction manual for mega-rich luxury a senior paper titled “The Importance of left Northern California for Los Ange-
planet builders. Being Solar.” He had done internships les, to swan with starlets. Courted by Ted
in Silicon Valley and, after graduating, Cruz during COVID, he moved to Texas,
iographers don’t generally have a enrolled in a Ph.D. program in materi- because he dislikes regulation, and be-
B will to power. Robert Caro is not
Robert Moses and would seem to have
als science at Stanford, but he deferred
admission and never went. It was 1995,
cause he objected to California’s lock-
downs and mask mandates.
very little in common with Lyndon the the year the Internet opened to commer- Musk’s accomplishments as the head
“B” is for “bastard” Johnson. Walter Isaac- cial traffic. All around him, frogs were of a series of pioneering engineering
son is a gracious, generous, public-spirited turning into princes. He wanted to start firms are unrivalled. Isaacson takes on
man and a principled biographer. This a startup. Musk and his brother Kimball, each of Musk’s ventures, venture by ven-
year, he was presented with the National with money from their parents, launched ture, chapter by chapter, emphasizing the
Humanities Medal. But, as a former ed- Zip2, an early online Yellow Pages that ferocity and the velocity and the effec-
itor of Time and a former C.E.O. of sold its services to newspaper publishers. tiveness of Musk’s management style—“A
CNN and of the Aspen Institute, Isaac- In 1999, during the dot-com boom, they maniacal sense of urgency is our oper-
son also has an executive’s affinity for sold it to Compaq for more than three ating principles” is a workplace rule. “How
the C-suite, which would seem to make hundred million dollars. Musk, with his the fuck can it take so long?” Musk asked
it a challenge to keep a certain distance share of the money, launched one of the an engineer working on SpaceX’s Mer-
from the world view of his subject. Isaac- earliest online banking companies. He lin engines. “This is stupid. Cut it in half.”
son shadowed Musk for two years and called it X.com. “I think X.com could He pushed SpaceX through years of fail-
interviewed dozens of people, but they absolutely be a multibillion-dollar bo- ures, crash after crash, with the confi-
tend to have titles like C.E.O., C.F.O., nanza,” he told CNN, but, meanwhile, dence that success would come. “Until
president, V.P., and founder. The book “I’d like to be on the cover of Rolling today, all electric cars sucked,” Musk said,
upholds a core conviction of many ex- Stone.” That would have to wait for a launching Tesla’s Roadster, leaving every
ecutives: sometimes to get shit done you few years, but in 1999 Salon announced, other electric car and most gas cars in
have to be a dick. He dreams of Mars as “Elon Musk Is Poised to Become Sili- the dust. No automotive company had
he bestrides Earth, square-jawed and in- con Valley’s Next Big Thing,” in a pro- broken into that industry in something
THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 18, 2023 61
like a century. Like SpaceX, Tesla went saying, ‘What the hell are you doing This is flimflam. Twitter never has and
through very hard times. Musk steered smoking weed?’” never will be a vehicle for democratic ex-
it to triumph, a miracle amid fossil fuel’s “Musk’s goofy mode is the flip side pression. It is a privately held corpora-
stranglehold. “Fuck oil,” he said. of his demon mode,” Isaacson writes. tion that monetizes human expression
“Comradery is dangerous” is another Musk likes this kind of cover. “I rein- and algorithmically maximizes its distri-
of Musk’s workplace maxims. He was vented electric cars, and I’m sending peo- bution for profit, and what turns out to
ousted as PayPal’s C.E.O. and ousted as ple to Mars in a rocket ship,” he said in be most profitable is sowing social, cul-
Tesla’s chairman. He’s opposed to unions, his “S.N.L.” monologue, in 2021. “Did tural, and political division. Its partici-
pushed workers back to the Tesla plants you think I was also going to be a chill, pants are a very tiny, skewed slice of hu-
at the height of the Covid pandemic— normal dude?” In that monologue, he manity that has American journalism in
some four hundred and fifty reportedly also said that he has Asperger’s. A writer a choke hold. Twitter does not operate
got infected—and has thwarted work- in Newsweek applauded this announce- on the principle of representation, which
ers’ rights at every turn. ment as a “milestone in the history of is the cornerstone of democratic gover-
Musk has run through companies and neurodiversity.” But, in Slate, Sara Lut- nance. It has no concept of the “civil” in
he has run through wives. In some fam- erman, who is autistic, was less impressed; “civil society.” Nor has Elon Musk, at any
ilies, domestic relations are just another she denounced Musk’s “coming out” as point in his career, displayed any com-
kind of labor relations. He pushed his “self-serving and hollow, a poor attempt mitment to either democratic governance
first wife, Justine, to dye her hair blonder. at laundering his image as a heartless or the freedom of expression.
After they lost their firstborn son, Ne- billionaire more concerned with crypto- Musk gave Isaacson a different ex-
vada, in infancy, Justine gave birth to currency and rocket ships than the lives planation for buying the company: “Un-
twins (one of whom they named Xavier, of others.” She put cruelty first. less the woke-mind virus, which is fun-
in part for Professor Xavier, from “X- damentally antiscience, antimerit, and
Men”) and then to triplets. When the usk’s interest in acquiring Twitter antihuman in general, is stopped, civili-
couple fought, he told her, “If you were
my employee, I would fire you.” He di-
M dates to 2022. That year, he and
Grimes had another child. His name is
zation will never become multiplane-
tary.” It’s as if Musk had come to believe
vorced her and soon proposed to Talu- Techno Mechanicus Musk, but his par- the sorts of mission statements that the
lah Riley, a twenty-two-year-old British ents call him Tau, for the irrational num- man-boy gods of Silicon Valley had long
actress who had only just moved out of ber. But Musk also lost a child. His twins been peddling. “At first, I thought it
her parents’ house. She said her job was with Justine turned eighteen in 2022 and didn’t fit into my primary large mis-
to stop Musk from going “king-crazy”: one of them, who had apparently be- sions,” he told Isaacson, about Twitter.
“People become king, and then they go come a Marxist, told Musk, “I hate you “But I’ve come to believe it can be part
crazy.” They married, divorced, married, and everything you stand for.” It was, to of the mission of preserving civilization,
and divorced. But “you’re my Mr. Roch- some degree, in an anguished attempt buying our society more time to become
ester,” she told him. “And if Thornfield to heal this developing rift that, in 2020, multiplanetary.”
Hall burns down and you are blind, I’ll Musk tweeted, “I am selling almost all Elon Musk plans to make the world
come and take care of you.” He dated physical possessions. Will own no house.” safe for democracy, save civilization from
Amber Heard, after her separation from That didn’t work. In 2022, his disaffected itself, and bring the light of human con-
Johnny Depp. Then he met Grimes. “I’m child petitioned a California court for a sciousness to the stars in a ship he will
just a fool for love,” Musk tells Isaacson. name change, to Vivian Jenna Wilson, call the Heart of Gold, for a spaceship
“I am often a fool, but especially for love.” citing, as the reason for the petition, fuelled by an Improbability Drive in “The
He is also a fool for Twitter. His Twit- “Gender Identity and the fact that I no Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” In
ter account first got him into real trou- longer live with or wish to be related to case you’ve never read it, what actually
ble in 2018, when he baselessly called a my biological father in any way, shape happens in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide”
British diver, who helped rescue Thai or form.” She refuses to see him. Musk is that the Heart of Gold is stolen by
children trapped in a f looded cave, a told Isaacson he puts some of the blame Zaphod Beeblebrox, who is the President
“pedo” and was sued for defamation. That for this on her progressive Los Angeles of the Galaxy, has two heads and three
same year, he tweeted, “Am considering high school. Lamenting the “woke-mind arms, is the inventor of the Pan Galac-
taking Tesla private at $420,” making a virus,” he decided to buy Twitter. I just tic Gargle Blaster, has been named, by
pot joke. “Funding secured.” (“I kill me,” can’t sit around and do nothing. “the triple-breasted whore of Eroticon 6,”
he says about his sense of humor.) The Musk’s estrangement from his daugh- the “Biggest Bang Since the Big One,”
S.E.C. charged him with fraud, and Tesla ter is sad, but of far greater consequence and, according to his private brain-care
stock fell more than thirteen per cent. is his seeming estrangement from hu- specialist, Gag Halfrunt, “has personality
Tesla shareholders sued him, alleging manity itself. When Musk decided to problems beyond the dreams of analysts.”
that his tweets had caused their stock to buy Twitter, he wrote a letter to its board. Person of the Year material, for sure. All
lose value. On Joe Rogan’s podcast, he “I believe free speech is a societal imper- the same, as a Vogon Fleet prepares to
went king-crazy, lighting up a joint. He ative for a functioning democracy,” he shoot down the Heart of Gold with Bee-
looked at his phone. “You getting text explained, but “I now realize the com- blebrox on board, Halfrunt muses that
messages from chicks?” Rogan asked. pany will neither thrive nor serve this “it will be a pity to lose him,” but, “well,
“I’m getting text messages from friends societal imperative in its current form.” Zaphod’s just this guy, you know?”
62 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 18, 2023
The woman who answered the door
looked Burnett up and down. She called
upstairs, “Betty, you won’t believe this.
Here’s this woman down here in a chin-
chilla hat and muff, who says she’s a life-
long Republican.” Hearing this, Friedan
ran down, and “yanked” Burnett inside.
Unbeknownst to Burnett, a lifelong
Republican in a chinchilla hat was ex-
actly the sort of NOW member that Frie-
dan was looking for. In Rachel Shteir’s
new biography, “Betty Friedan: Magnif-
icent Disrupter” (Yale), it becomes clear
why. Friedan’s vision was always to make
NOW, and feminism more broadly, as
nonthreatening as possible to the Amer-
ican mainstream. But the American
mainstream, in Friedan’s imagination,
was a very narrow, specific group. “Frie-
dan saw herself as the protector of the
marginalized,” Shteir writes, “by which
she meant mothers, wives, and Midwest-
erners.” By 1969, Friedan was already
afraid that this mass of women would
be turned off by feminism’s reputation
for bra-burning radicalism. “I kept mov-
ing to figure out new ways of bringing
back the women the others were alien-
ating,” she later recalled. Someone like
BOOKS Burnett could be her perfect poster child:
a demure, respectable, and extremely
feminine feminist.
THE CATALYST Burnett had arrived at an especially
convenient moment. Friedan’s apartment
Betty Friedan and the movement that outgrew her. was crowded with journalists, cameras,
and lights. Friedan was about to hold a
BY MOIRA DONEGAN TV news conference with other women
in the movement, including Beulah
Sanders, a Black leader of the National
trymen. (Among its targets seems to existence prior to civilization.” Many “The Most Secret Memory of Men”
have been Senegal’s poet-President, African writers accused him of cyni- is an aerobatic feat of narrative inven-
tion, whirling between noir, fairy tale,
Mohamed Mbougar Sarr fictionalizes literary history to escape its clutches. satire, and archival fiction in its self-re-
68 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 18, 2023
flexive meditation on the nature of the “slave hold” of self-exoticism), Af- capital of French West Africa, and
literary legend. Its Goncourt was seen rican readers (“avid to be represented graduated with so many honors that
as a coup in the world of French let- when they are in fact unrepresent- he was declared Senegal’s top student.
ters, which had never before conferred able”), white ones (who envision them He later enrolled at Paris’s École des
its highest recognition on a writer “weaving tales in the moonlight”), Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales,
from sub-Saharan Africa. (Sarr’s char- and, above all, the French literary es- where he began a dissertation on three
acters poke delicious fun at such du- tablishment, object of their public de- West African writers and their work
bious ethnogeographical distinctions.) rision and private dreams. in the late sixties: Ahmadou Kou-
This month, it’s finally becoming avail- The anxiety of influence is crush- rouma, Malick Fall, and Yambo Ouo-
able to Anglophone readers in Lara ing for Diégane, who grew up in a loguem. Ouologuem’s swift rise and
Vergnaud’s propulsive translation for country “still haunted by Senghor’s subsequent ostracism particularly
Other Press, which also plans to re- cumbrous ghost.” In one of the nov- fascinated him. “I always ask myself
release “Bound to Violence.” el’s funniest chapters, he almost par- whether he would have had the same
There’s an element of poetic jus- ticipates in a threesome with other fate if he hadn’t been Malian,” Sarr
tice in an homage to Ouologuem win- members of the group, but overthinks said recently, arguing that what really
ning such approbation from the very the situation’s literary resonances. bothered Western readers about Ouo-
establishment that discarded him. Sarr “First we surrendered to the galvanic loguem was that he “not only copied
witheringly scrutinizes the cultural tremors of the barely nubile night, but, more explosively, parodied texts
Françafrique—a word for France’s green as a young mango,” he recounts, from the colonial tradition.”
geopolitical influence over its former parodying the sensual imagery of Eventually, Sarr decided to stop
colonies—that relegates African fic- Négritude. Their hostess proposes studying fiction and start publishing
tion to the status of veiled memoir, moving to the bedroom, but Diégane, it, releasing his début novel with
ethnographic study, or folkloric en- too timid, ends up stewing on the the storied house Présence Africaine.
tertainment. Defying these catego- couch under a giant crucifix, trying to “Brotherhood” (2015) takes place in a
ries, he delivers a demiurgic story of ignore the cacophony of lovemaking fictional African city seized by an Is-
literary self-creation, transforming the as he hallucinates a conversation with lamist militia, whose residents estab-
sad fate of an author who stopped Jesus. Vergnaud’s fine ear gives vivid lish an underground journal to chron-
writing into a galvanizing tale about life to the Englished Diégane, whose icle the occupation. The book’s theme
all that remains to be written. extravagant sentences belie his literary- was topical—Mali, at the time, had
libidinal stagefright. become embroiled in an insurgency—
Iernnappeared
the spring of 1995, dozens of snakes
on the beaches of South
California. Panic. A Biblical curse,
of L.A. crime fiction, is back, with his
favorite snake, Fred Otash, in tow. The
real Otash, who died in 1992, was a dis
tences and percussive rhythms. Stories
are sheared down to barebones plot,
almost stage directions, almost, at times,
some held, to punish the wicked. “Cal graced former cop turned private eye demented squaredance calls: “Pete ro
ifornia has been given so many signs: and freelance menace who worked with tates. Wayne rotates. Pete moves state
floods, drought, fires, earthquakes lift the notorious Hollywood tabloid Con- side. Laurent’s there. Ditto Flash. They
ing mountains two feet high in North fidential; he claimed to have hotwired funnel stateside. Stanton stays incoun
ridge,” the California congresswoman every bathhouse in L.A., to have spied try. Ditto Mesplède. Tiger Kamp runs
Andrea Seastrand declared. “Yet people on Rock Hudson and Tab Hunter, and lowsupervised. The war escalates. More
turn from His ways.” The Los Angeles to have eavesdropped on Marilyn Mon troops pass through. The kadre hits
Times made soothing noises, counselling roe as she died. Ellroy knew the man a Saigon halfassed.” We expect redheads
against the curse theory. But the obvi little and loathed him a lot. “You don’t and racists, shock and schlock, pearl
ous person to consult would have been a go out and wreck lives en masse the way gray suits and straw fedoras, weak men
native son of Los Angeles who saw ge he did with Confidential and retain your and strong women—noir stock types,
ography as destiny, who specialized in humanity,” he once told an interviewer. surely, but not only.
snakes of all stripes, and whose charac But Freddy Otash had his uses—that The world of Dashiell Hammett and
ters find, in natural disasters, their only was the point of him—and he sure can Raymond Chandler, the pulps Ellroy
competitors in the making of mayhem. shoulder a novel. He has been a sturdy loved as a child, and his own private
James Ellroy, the neonoir eminence muse: reportedly the inspiration for Jake California are distilled into a gab, a gram
mar for brutality, shame, misogyny, and
In “The Enchanters,” the master of neo-noir crime fiction has met his match. unresolved mourning. Violence is taken
72 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 18, 2023 ILLUSTRATION BY EMILIANO PONZI
YOUR LEGACY
lightly, and desire with utmost serious- and rescued, only to be lost again. This BROUGHT TO LIFE
ness. Ellroy, like Patricia Highsmith, has repetitiveness, this obstinacy, is a distinc- FAMILY CREST RINGS
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Beyond the syntax, beyond the quick, mid-seventies, on a plane beyond the ex-
greasy fun, there’s a world view shaped igencies of either, enjoying a rare kind
by personal tragedy. When Ellroy was of freedom. What does he choose to do
ten, his mother was strangled to death; with it? And how will he—a writer, im-
her body was dumped, her killer never pelled by personal history, whose work
©2020 KENDAL
found. Receiving the news, he felt as if glows inwardly, with private signifiers— Never stop
a veil had been lifted. “I wanted to can- contend with postwar Hollywood’s learning.
onize the secret LA I first glimpsed the brightest neon sign?
day the redhead died,” he wrote in his Retirement living in proximity to
memoir, “My Dark Places,” from 1996. he is the bait girl nonpareil; no one Oberlin College, Conservatory of
His novels inspect that secret L.A.—
the hidden life of his mother, the un-
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DeLillo, otherwise an important influ- Norman Mailer didn’t hesitate to pub- Experience Pennswood!
ence. “America was never innocent,” Ell- lish a glossy art-book appreciation of the
roy tells us in “American Tabloid” (1995). actress. Why? Money, honey. “I’ve really
“We popped our cherry on the boat over gotten to the point where I’m like an old
and looked back with no regrets.” Ellroy prizefighter,” Mailer told Time during
once said that he wanted to destroy the the book’s launch, in 1973. “And if my
cheap empathy of the crime novel, and, manager comes up to me and says, ‘I’ve
later, that he wanted to move past the got you a tough fight with a good purse,’
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right-wing regimes. Men who are racists. blessing, perhaps. But she remains fly-
Men who are homophobes.These are my paper for all sorts of agendas and desires.
guys. These are the guys that I embrace.” Many years later, Gloria Steinem imag-
What does it mean to embrace such ined a feminist future that gave us Mar-
men? For Ellroy, this is literary vision— ilyn as a “student, lawyer, teacher, artist,
to see the world for what it is, to love it mother, grandmother, defender of ani-
as it is without flinching, and to see your-
self in the same way. In effect, it means
mals, rancher, homemaker, sportswoman,
rescuer of children.” Why shouldn’t James
WHAT’S THE
that he can never fully abandon his psy- Ellroy have a turn? BIG IDEA?
chosexual plots; they burn at the core of Yet it’s curious that he would choose Small space has big rewards.
everything he writes. You even find it in to. The sirens of the fifties (more than a
the section headings of “The Enchant- few of whom have walk-on roles in “The
ers”: “Sex Creep,” “Bait Girls,” “Wife Enchanters”) exert a powerful hold on
Swap.” Public history does not feel as al- his imagination—Rita Hayworth, in the
luring to him as furtive genealogies of luxuriance of her red hair, Kim Novak,
violence, dramatized in obstinate orphic in her close-fitting dove-gray suit in “Ver- TO FIND OUT MORE, CONTACT
JILLIAN GENET | 305.520.5159
repetition from one book to the next: a tigo.” Ellroy still sends flowers to Lois [email protected]
woman (a redhead, a divorcée, someone Nettleton’s grave, in the Bronx, and gives
love-hungry and secretive) is resurrected her choice roles in his novels. He has
THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 18, 2023 73
always seemed indifferent to Monroe, ers” is tragic, cowed, and inexplicably lyn, to coach her. I swear it’s all true!”
however, and evidently remains so. He more taciturn, even as he goes to work It’s perplexing to see Ellroy let his
speeds through her scenes. Even Freaky with brutal efficiency on some quarry story go so slack, to see the tension flat-
Freddy Otash, rifling through her be- of the hour. “The drop ran eighty feet,” lining, resistant even to the defibrilla-
longings, sniffs her sheets with only per- Freddy observes in the novel’s opening tions of jokey, jittery tabloid-speak.
functory enthusiasm. sequence. “I held his right arm. Max Monroe, who could have been the book’s
This is not necessarily a flaw; it’s rare Herman held his left arm. Red Strom- making, is instead its undoing—which
to encounter a portrayal of Monroe un- wall jammed his head down and force- is, consoling thought, an odd sort of
concerned with diagnosing, rescuing, or fed him the view.” The sequence is as triumph on her part. But, for all the
rehabilitating her. And there’s no question tight, mean, and poised as anything in novel’s exasperations, its author’s talent
that Monroe could have provided all the Ellroy. A flicker of hope: the novels of for mayhem still has its charms. Under
details and darkly funny lines needed to late have been uneven—perhaps this the L.A. heat dome, he sends snakes
carry an Ellroy novel. (Her regular makeup one has a chance? among the sunbathers and challenges
artist fixed her up after the autopsy; he It does not. “The Enchanters,” which us to tell them apart.
still had a money clip that she had given takes place during L.A.’s August heat,
him, inscribed “Whitey Dear: While I’m is at once panting and sluggish. Ellroy he last film that Ellroy saw before
still warm. Marilyn.”) But Ellroy seems
determined to curtail her presence. He
creates a world and refuses to enter it.
While the reader is keen for him to go
T his mother died was, in fact, “Ver-
tigo.” The movie is structured like a
can only write about her, it appears, be- in, he merely goes on (and on). He is spiral and populated with them—from
cause she is so often in disguise. What known for crafting detailed outlines that the opening sequence, designed by Saul
risk does she pose? stretch to hundreds of pages, and that Bass, with its animated spinning spi-
Ellroy and Monroe were born five is what it feels we are left with—the rals, to the spirals found in hair styles
miles apart, in Los Angeles; they both ribs and spine of a book, delivered with and in the structure of the famous stair-
took on names of their own devising. strange weariness despite the cheerful, case. The themes and shapes of the
They endured the early and decisive ab- enabling amorality of Freaky Freddy. story would become Ellroy’s—losing
sences of their mothers, and struggled It’s Freddy as Whistler’s Mother, per- a woman, remaking other women in
with addiction. They cultivated over-the- manently parked in a chair. He waits, her image, the lurching and discom-
top public personas that courted ridicule, watching a quarry’s home: “Spots popped fiting transposition of past and pres-
beneath which they remained, in many in front of my eyes. My arteries pinged. ent, obsession.
ways, canny operators. And they seemed My feet went numb. I lost weight as I There’s a shot Hitchcock popular-
to work the same neighborhood. “When tried to sit still.” “Snoresville,” he sums ized in “Vertigo” that involves the spiral:
you’re famous, you kind of run into human it up. It’s possible to compile a taxon- the dolly zoom, known as the “Vertigo”
nature in a raw kind of way,” Monroe omy of yawns in “The Enchanters”: effect. You’ll notice it when the private
once said. “You’re always running into stage yawns, stifled yawns, stifled stage investigator, played by James Stewart,
people’s unconscious.” No matter Ellroy’s yawns, yawns to stay awake, yawns to is climbing the spiral staircase, despite
grand claims of excavating American his- fall asleep, yawns of our own. his fear of heights, pursuing a woman
tory; he remains the trawler of the male Between the yawns, the naps, the he is trying to save. He looks down,
id, the uncontainable unconscious. waiting, we get disquisitions on how foolishly, and the floor seems to surge
Perhaps there’s a frequency between uninteresting the characters find one an- farther away. Hitchcock’s trick is that
them that feels too close—and makes other. Freddy on Marilyn: “She worked the camera has physically moved back
him intent on keeping his distance. Per- people. She used people. She possessed from its subject while zooming in—
haps her own winky performances, her three modes of address. She was bossy, conveying a lurching disorientation.
awareness of the role she played in fan- she was demure, she was effusive. I didn’t Something of the sort takes place
tasy life, make her unavailable to star in like her. I didn’t get her. Her acting with “The Enchanters.” In the course
his. Through Freddy, we follow Marilyn chops and alleged va-va-voom hit me of a long, prolific, and galvanic career,
across the city in scenes that could have flat.” The real action arrives in “skull Ellroy has revisited the same scenes, the
been taken from Hitchcock’s “Vertigo”: sessions,” when characters deliver un- same characters, killing them off, reviv-
“There’s Marilyn. She’s done up movie- seasoned hunks of exposition to each ing them. Now, in this novel, he zooms
star incognito. Dark slacks, tight jumper. other over coffee. It’s Ellroy’s preferred in again, but what we experience most
Wraparound shades and Hermès scarf.” information delivery system: “You hit powerfully is blur, distance—and the
Marilyn remains fragmented and re- it on the head, doll. Marilyn always passage of time. The story seems to
moved, strips of celluloid; it’s only Freddy had a coterie of sycophants, brown- yawn away, as if it is happening in the
whose body heat we feel. nosers, and quacks calling the shots past, happening in his past. Yet he feels
for her, and telling her she was a ge- no less powerfully yoked, no less in in-
reddy was last seen in “Widespread nius. She was hooked on this quack exorable pursuit. What does a writer
F Panic” (2021), dangling in Purga-
tory, confessing to his crimes and hop-
shrink, who palled with this dyke drama
coach of hers, and they shot her up with
do with freedom? Caught in this nov-
el’s spirals, pulled deep, again, into the
ing for a more permanent placement. collagen, to pudge her up in the face. same grooves, one wonders: Is there
The Freddy we meet in “The Enchant- She moved into a house near Mari- such a thing?
74 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 18, 2023
peating no, no, no, as she held the small
bag toward me.”The boy refuses the for-
bidden fruit and, at least in his adult
memory, turns his attention to fortify-
ing his would-be Eden’s walls: “I remem-
ber a sleepless night, trying to keep the
dome intact with the pressure of my gaze,
though I probably slept for hours.”
Between the “I” who remembers the
sleepless night and the “I” who probably
slept for hours is another blurry border, on
both sides of which we find Ben Lerner.
He tells the story in his fourth collection
of poems, “The Lights” (Farrar, Straus &
Giroux). “All my favorite books,” Lerner
writes, “were about built spaces/shading
into wilds, worlds, Narnia through the
wardrobe/. . . Max’s bedroom becoming
jungle, Harold drawing the moon/ into
existence.” Those books, which he read
as a child and which now he reads to his
young daughters, suggest a model for
the kind of book he wants to be writing.
Lerner, a poet who has found a sec-
ond life as a novelist, has been attempting
versions of that book for nearly twenty
years. The title of his first collection, “The
Lichtenberg Figures” (2004), refers to the
branching patterns that can briefly ap-
BOOKS pear on surfaces after lightning strikes; the
implication was that the book’s sonnets
were evanescent records of contact, each
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS poem its own glass dome. In “Angle of
Yaw” (2006), Lerner began to experiment
The world-bridging poetry of Ben Lerner. with prose poems, not unlike the child he
describes in one of them: “If you make
BY KAMRAN JAVADIZADEH her a present of a toy, she will discard it
and play with the box. And yet she will
only play with a box that once contained
I nbook,
one of the longer poems in this
that glow looks literal:
ward the end of “10:04” (2014), Lerner’s
second novel, the protagonist (also named
Ben) is at a writing residency in Marfa,
derstood as “our own / illumination re-
turned to us as alien.” Once upon a time,
we read a novel and felt as though we
Some say the glowing spheres near Route Texas. In some kind of hallucinated scene, were in a poem; now we read the poem
67 he joins the ghost of the poet Robert and feel as though we’re in a novel.
are paranormal, others dismiss them as Creeley on an excursion to view the fa- Is there any difference, for Lerner,
atmospheric tricks: static, swamp gas, re- mous “Marfa Lights,” doesn’t see them, between the two? “The Lights” opens
flections and then writes a poem that includes with a poem called “Index of Themes”:
of headlights and small fires, but why dis-
miss those lines.
what misapprehension can establish, our But that poem, merely excerpted in Poems about night
own the novel, returns, like a long-discarded and related poems. Paintings
illumination returned to us as alien, as sign? about night,
toy, in “The Lights.” The narrator of sleep, death, and
They’ve built a concrete viewing platform “10:04” had gone to Marfa to work on the stars.
lit by low red lights which must appear
mysterious when seen from what it over- a novel about a fabricated correspon-
looks. dence between poets, but after writing The trick feels borrowed from autofic-
Tonight I see no spheres, but project myself these lines tells us, “I decided to replace tion, the genre in which Lerner’s nov-
els are often categorized: “The Lights”
thematizes its own making, generates
itself by describing the thing it will have
become. “Do you remember me / from
the world?” the poem goes on to ask,
before concluding:
It was important to part
yesterday
in a serial work about lights
so that distance could enter the voice
and address you
tonight.
Poems about you, prose
poems.
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“ ”
..........................................................................................................................
“Just tell them why you’ve chosen to run.” “He’s still orange.”
Matt Hindman, Tulsa, Okla. Eric Simkin, Torrance, Calif.
13 14 15
THE 16 17
CROSSWORD 18 19 20 21
A beginner-friendly puzzle. 22 23
BY ROBYN WEINTRAUB 24 25 26 27
28 29 30 31 32
ACROSS
33 34 35
1 Bat one’s eyelashes, say
6 Garments discussed in “Are You There
36 37 38 39
God? It’s Me, Margaret”
10 Film studio with a lion logo, familiarly
40 41 42
13 Unmanned craft sent to explore the moon
15 Tortoise’s opponent, in a fabled race 43 44 45
16 Not yet apprehended
16 Request from a dental hygienist 46 47 48 49 50
18 A narcissist has a big one
19 Southeast Asian nation once known as 51 52 53 54
the Land of a Million Elephants
20 Threw forcefully 55 56
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