newyorker--2020-10-19--Trump’s Labor Secretary Is a Wrecking Ball Aimed at Workers

In July , word leaked that the Labor Department was rushing to enact a new rule that would more broadly define the term “ independent contractor.
” Such workers can be denied a minimum wage , overtime pay , and other benefits .
Shannon Liss-Riordan , a lawyer who has filed numerous lawsuits on behalf of Uber drivers and other “ gig workers ” classified as independent contractors , described Scalia ’ s proposed change as a “ gift to corporations.
” The effort also raises ethical questions , since several companies that particularly stand to benefit—including Uber , Grubhub @ @ @ @ @ @ @ In the cases that Liss-Riordan has litigated , Gibson Dunn has “ been the primary firm I ’ ve been up against , ” she said .
“ It should raise some serious eyebrows that the head of the Department of Labor is pushing a fast-track attempt to limit protections for gig workers , given that his law firm has been actively working through the court system to try to reduce the protections for these employees.
” The Labor Department is granting the public only thirty days to comment on the rule—typically , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ This is especially striking in light of a 2012 op-ed about the Dodd-Frank Act that Scalia published in the Wall Street Journal , in which he lambasted federal agencies for failing to “ listen carefully to what the public says ” before imposing a regulation .
In May , when the Labor Department issued a rule exempting certain retail workers who are paid by commission from receiving overtime pay , it acknowledged that the change was being implemented “ without notice or comment.
” A senior official in the Labor Department told me @ @ @ @ @ @ @ have been sidelined by political appointees .
In the past , the official said , field officers played an integral role in drafting new rules .
Today , many of them learn about rule changes only after the fact , from agency press releases .
Career officials have taken to calling the shadowy operatives now in charge the Ghost Squad .
Although some of Scalia ’ s rules may be overturned under future Administrations , the reversal process can take years , particularly if industry mounts court challenges .
As Liss-Riordan noted , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s always harder to undo it.
” In Herold ’ s complaint to the Office of Special Counsel , she alleges that Scalia removed her from the case in retaliation .
On August 28th , she learned that he intended to reassign her to fill a vacant position at OSHA .
Herold had almost no experience with the agency .
In response to Herold ’ s allegations , which were first reported by Bloomberg Law , a Labor Department spokeswoman told the Times that Scalia “ never had any communications with Oracle @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s litigation against the company.
” This is misleading .
A senior Labor Department official and two individuals with knowledge of the case informed me that Scalia appears to have communicated with Oracle through a former legal partner , who served as a go-between .
Another official with intimate knowledge of the case said that the former partner had called Scalia at home to discuss Oracle ’ s interest in a settlement—thus insuring that the exchange wouldn ’ t appear in government logs .
Herold ’ s complaint suggests that Scalia removed her @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Oracle but also for ideological reasons .
Patricia Smith , the Labor Department solicitor under Obama , told me that Herold had been notably “ aggressive and successful in obtaining liquidated damages ” from companies that violated labor laws .
Herold also had vocally objected to some of Scalia ’ s new rules .
The news of Herold ’ s transfer prompted Representative Rosa DeLauro and Senator Patty Murray to send a letter to the Labor Department ’ s acting inspector general , Larry Turner , requesting an investigation .
They wrote , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ involuntarily transfer Ms. Herold appear to be retaliation against an employee simply doing her job to enforce the law.
” ( The Labor Department spokesperson claimed that neither “ Scalia nor anyone in department leadership was aware ” of Herold ’ s 2019 memo “ prior to her reassignment , so there could not have been retaliation.
” ) In mid-September , the Office of Special Counsel requested that Herold ’ s reassignment be delayed for ninety days , having determined that there were “ reasonable grounds ” to believe that the Department @ @ @ @ @ @ @ personnel practice.
” On September 22nd , an administrative-law judge in San Francisco ruled that , despite evidence of significant disparities in pay at Oracle , the company had not engaged in intentional discrimination against women and people of color .
The Labor Department must now consider whether to appeal the ruling .
Unlike Trump , who also recently contracted COVID-19 , after months of mocking the value of masks , Scalia probably does not doubt that politicians should defer to scientific experts about the nature of the virus and how to prevent @ @ @ @ @ @ @ himself to be used as a prop in Trump ’ s anti-scientific crusade .
Several former colleagues of Scalia ’ s told me that he must be mortified by Trump ’ s stewardship of the pandemic—and by the President ’ s lack of sympathy for the more than two hundred thousand victims .
Then again , it ’ s not evident how much sympathy Scalia has for Americans imperilled by the pandemic .
One of the reasons the U.S. labor force has been particularly vulnerable to COVID-19 is that the U.S. is the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sick leave .
In March , Congress partially remedied this by passing the Families First Coronavirus Response Act , which guaranteed paid sick and medical leave to private-sector employees in companies with fewer than five hundred workers .
Several weeks later , the Department of Labor issued a rule narrowing eligibility for these benefits .
Under Scalia ’ s rule , employees can be denied paid sick leave if their employers determine that they do not need them to work ; no documentation is required to justify an employer ’ s decision .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ s law excluded “ health-care providers and emergency responders , ” Scalia ’ s rule also expanded the definition of “ health-care providers ” to include everything from companies that contract with hospitals to institutions where health-care instruction is offered .
As a lawyer , Scalia often accused federal agencies of overstepping their authority .
On April 14th , New York ’ s attorney general , Letitia James , sued the Department of Labor on similar ground , alleging that it had acted to deny workers crucial benefits that Congress had clearly intended @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by a recent audit of the Department of Labor , conducted by the Office of Inspector General , which found that the department had “ significantly broadened the definition of health-care providers ” in ways that were inconsistent with existing federal statutes .
On August 3rd , a U.S. District Court judge , J. Paul Oetken , struck down Scalia ’ s restrictions .
“ This extraordinary crisis .
.
.
calls for renewed attention to the guardrails of our government , ” Oetken wrote .
“ DOL jumped the rail.
” A @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a Scalia regulation , issued in March , that narrowed the circumstances in which businesses such as Amazon and McDonald ’ s could be held liable when their subcontractors violated workers ’ rights .
A coalition of seventeen states and the District of Columbia had sued the Labor Department , claiming that restricting the liability of “ joint employers ” would leave workers “ more vulnerable to underpayment and wage theft.
” Judge Gregory H. Woods , of the Southern District of New York , concluded—with a rhetorical swipe at Scalia—that the rule @ @ @ @ @ @ @ dispute showed that Scalia does not oppose all government regulations—just the ones that conflict with his pro-business ideology .
He ’ s fine with new rules that impose costs on workers .
As states have begun reopening their economies , employees have feared returning to workplaces that don ’ t appear to be safe .
In May , Bailey Yeager , a director at a human-resources company called SHRM , was asked for feedback about a proposal that she return to her office .
Like most white-collar employees , she ’ d spent @ @ @ @ @ @ @ home , in Alexandria , Virginia , where SHRM is based .
Yeager , concerned about infecting her two daughters , requested that she be allowed to continue working remotely “ until returning to work is both more widespread regionally and there is a decline in the metrics regarding cases/hospitalizations.
” She also asked to see SHRM ’ s plans for reopening safely , while adding that she was “ flexible ” about returning to the office .
Two weeks later , Yeager , who in recent years had received glowing performance reviews @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Three other employees who ’ d expressed similar worries , including two with preëxisting medical conditions , were also terminated .
Insuring that employees are not subjected to retaliation for engaging in certain protected activities is a key responsibility of the Department of Labor—in particular , of OSHA , which enforces the whistle-blower provisions of more than twenty laws .
During the Obama Administration , David Michaels established a federal advisory committee to strengthen OSHA ’ s whistle-blower program .
After Trump was elected , the committee was disbanded , and since then @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , despite many reports of workers facing reprisals for complaining about unsafe conditions during the pandemic .
A survey conducted in May by the National Employment Law Project revealed that one in eight workers “ has perceived possible retaliatory actions by employers against workers in their company who have raised health and safety concerns.
” The survey found that Black workers were more than twice as likely as white workers to have witnessed such retaliation .
After Yeager was fired , she contacted Bernabei & Kabat , a law firm that represents whistle-blowers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ behalf with OSHA , alleging that SHRM had terminated her unfairly .
( The company denies any impropriety . )
The complaint describes a conference call in which Johnny Taylor , the company ’ s C.E.O.
, outlined plans to “ outsource ” functions in departments where workers were resisting coming back to the office .
Taylor also mentioned that he ’ d spoken recently with a friend of his , “ the Secretary of Labor ” —who had been slated to be the keynote speaker at a SHRM event in March , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Yeager told me , an OSHA representative called her and pressured her to withdraw her complaint .
When she declined , the representative said threateningly , “ Are you sure you don ’ t want to withdraw it ?
” In May , Loren Sweatt , OSHA ’ s principal deputy assistant secretary , appeared before the House Committee on Workforce Protections and declared , “ You could not get a better spokesperson for whistle-blower protection than the Secretary of Labor.
” Three months later , an audit by the inspector general @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as whistle-blower complaints have surged during the pandemic , the agency has left five whistle-blower-investigator positions vacant , inhibiting OSHA ’ s ability to handle the caseload .
It appears that Scalia at least cares about how his tenure as Labor Secretary is perceived in Washington .
Several people I interviewed speculated that he nurtures larger ambitions , hoping to be appointed a federal judge and , eventually , a Justice of the Supreme Court .
At the same time , Scalia has gone to great lengths to please the clients he used @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Left out of Scalia ’ s cost-benefit calculations is the public good .
Nothing illustrates this more than his involvement in a tussle over a Department of Labor rule that required financial advisers to give clients advice about their retirement assets that was in their best interests .
Adopted in 2016 , after an exhaustive six-year process , the rule was designed to eliminate conflicts of interest that gave brokers incentives to push high-risk investments on elderly retirees , potentially costing them billions of dollars a year .
Scalia , then at Gibson @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ regulatory Godzilla , ” and he and others repeatedly challenged it in court , on behalf of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce .
Courts rejected those challenges four times , but Scalia finally won before the conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals .
Given Scalia ’ s role in overturning the rule , some assumed that he would recuse himself from the matter while serving as Labor Secretary .
He did not .
In June , the Department of Labor proposed a new rule , which is riddled with loopholes that , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ advisers to resume recommending products that yield high commissions for them while exposing retirees to risk .
This outcome doesn ’ t surprise Barbara Roper , the director of investor protection at the Consumer Federation of America .
The Secretary of Labor , she suggested , has , in effect , become the Secretary of Employers .
She observed , “ Secretary Scalia ’ s former clients should be very happy with him.
” ♦

David Weil, who ran the Wage and Hour Division of the Department of Labor during Obama’s Presidency, told me that other recent rule changes similarly harm low-wage workers. Scalia’s Labor Department has lowered the salary threshold for exempting employees from overtime pay (meaning that fewer workers receive it). Another altered rule gives restaurant owners more discretion over tips, making it easier to shortchange waitstaff.
In July, word leaked that the Labor Department was rushing to enact a new rule that would more broadly define the term “independent contractor.” Such workers can be denied a minimum wage, overtime pay, and other benefits. Shannon Liss-Riordan, a lawyer who has filed numerous lawsuits on behalf of Uber drivers and other “gig workers” classified as independent contractors, described Scalia’s proposed change as a “gift to corporations.” The effort also raises ethical questions, since several companies that particularly stand to benefit—including Uber, Grubhub, and DoorDash—are Gibson Dunn clients. In the cases that Liss-Riordan has litigated, Gibson Dunn has “been the primary firm I’ve been up against,” she said. “It should raise some serious eyebrows that the head of the Department of Labor is pushing a fast-track attempt to limit protections for gig workers, given that his law firm has been actively working through the court system to try to reduce the protections for these employees.”
The Labor Department is granting the public only thirty days to comment on the rule—typically, the comment period is sixty days. This is especially striking in light of a 2012 op-ed about the Dodd-Frank Act that Scalia published in the Wall Street Journal, in which he lambasted federal agencies for failing to “listen carefully to what the public says” before imposing a regulation. In May, when the Labor Department issued a rule exempting certain retail workers who are paid by commission from receiving overtime pay, it acknowledged that the change was being implemented “without notice or comment.”
A senior official in the Labor Department told me that its own experts and field officers have been sidelined by political appointees. In the past, the official said, field officers played an integral role in drafting new rules. Today, many of them learn about rule changes only after the fact, from agency press releases. Career officials have taken to calling the shadowy operatives now in charge the Ghost Squad.
Although some of Scalia’s rules may be overturned under future Administrations, the reversal process can take years, particularly if industry mounts court challenges. As Liss-Riordan noted, “Once something is done, it’s always harder to undo it.”
In August, Janet Herold, the Labor Department’s solicitor for the Western region, filed a complaint with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, alleging that Scalia had abused his authority by intervening to settle a 2017 Labor Department lawsuit. The suit accused the tech company Oracle of underpaying women and people of color; lawyers with the department’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs had determined that Oracle owed these workers between three hundred million and eight hundred million dollars in back pay. Oracle denied any wrongdoing. In recent years, the company has developed close ties to the White House. Safra Catz, the company’s C.E.O., served on the President’s transition team; in February, Larry Ellison, Oracle’s founder and chairman, hosted a fund-raiser for Trump. In the fall of 2019, shortly before the discrimination case went to trial, Herold learned that Scalia intended to settle it for between seventeen and thirty-eight million dollars—a sum that she considered far too low. She wrote a memo objecting to this intervention.
“If I buy this sweater, we’ll also have to buy a rustic little place upstate.” Cartoon by Kendra Allenby Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
In Herold’s complaint to the Office of Special Counsel, she alleges that Scalia removed her from the case in retaliation. On August 28th, she learned that he intended to reassign her to fill a vacant position at OSHA. Herold had almost no experience with the agency.
In response to Herold’s allegations, which were first reported by Bloomberg Law, a Labor Department spokeswoman told the Times that Scalia “never had any communications with Oracle or its attorneys concerning the department’s litigation against the company.” This is misleading. A senior Labor Department official and two individuals with knowledge of the case informed me that Scalia appears to have communicated with Oracle through a former legal partner, who served as a go-between. Another official with intimate knowledge of the case said that the former partner had called Scalia at home to discuss Oracle’s interest in a settlement—thus insuring that the exchange wouldn’t appear in government logs.
Herold’s complaint suggests that Scalia removed her from the case not only to benefit Oracle but also for ideological reasons. Patricia Smith, the Labor Department solicitor under Obama, told me that Herold had been notably “aggressive and successful in obtaining liquidated damages” from companies that violated labor laws. Herold also had vocally objected to some of Scalia’s new rules.
The news of Herold’s transfer prompted Representative Rosa DeLauro and Senator Patty Murray to send a letter to the Labor Department’s acting inspector general, Larry Turner, requesting an investigation. They wrote, “The Secretary’s efforts to involuntarily transfer Ms. Herold appear to be retaliation against an employee simply doing her job to enforce the law.” (The Labor Department spokesperson claimed that neither “Scalia nor anyone in department leadership was aware” of Herold’s 2019 memo “prior to her reassignment, so there could not have been retaliation.”)
In mid-September, the Office of Special Counsel requested that Herold’s reassignment be delayed for ninety days, having determined that there were “reasonable grounds” to believe that the Department of Labor had committed a “prohibited personnel practice.” On September 22nd, an administrative-law judge in San Francisco ruled that, despite evidence of significant disparities in pay at Oracle, the company had not engaged in intentional discrimination against women and people of color. The Labor Department must now consider whether to appeal the ruling.
In July, Scalia visited Columbus, Ohio, to take part in a panel discussion highlighting the benefits of the new U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement. A photograph of the event was subsequently posted on the Department of Labor Web site, showing him at a long table surrounded by members of JobsOhio, an economic-development agency. Everyone at the table was in business attire. All but one of the attendees—Scalia—had a mask on. Scalia also went maskless at a recent White House event supporting the Supreme Court nomination of Amy Coney Barrett. So far, he has tested negative for COVID-19; his wife, who was present as well, tested positive.
Unlike Trump, who also recently contracted COVID-19, after months of mocking the value of masks, Scalia probably does not doubt that politicians should defer to scientific experts about the nature of the virus and how to prevent its spread. Yet he has allowed himself to be used as a prop in Trump’s anti-scientific crusade. Several former colleagues of Scalia’s told me that he must be mortified by Trump’s stewardship of the pandemic—and by the President’s lack of sympathy for the more than two hundred thousand victims.
Then again, it’s not evident how much sympathy Scalia has for Americans imperilled by the pandemic. One of the reasons the U.S. labor force has been particularly vulnerable to COVID-19 is that the U.S. is the only advanced Western country without universal paid sick leave. In March, Congress partially remedied this by passing the Families First Coronavirus Response Act, which guaranteed paid sick and medical leave to private-sector employees in companies with fewer than five hundred workers. Several weeks later, the Department of Labor issued a rule narrowing eligibility for these benefits. Under Scalia’s rule, employees can be denied paid sick leave if their employers determine that they do not need them to work; no documentation is required to justify an employer’s decision. Seizing on the fact that Congress’s law excluded “health-care providers and emergency responders,” Scalia’s rule also expanded the definition of “health-care providers” to include everything from companies that contract with hospitals to institutions where health-care instruction is offered.
As a lawyer, Scalia often accused federal agencies of overstepping their authority. On April 14th, New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, sued the Department of Labor on similar ground, alleging that it had acted to deny workers crucial benefits that Congress had clearly intended to grant. This contention was affirmed by a recent audit of the Department of Labor, conducted by the Office of Inspector General, which found that the department had “significantly broadened the definition of health-care providers” in ways that were inconsistent with existing federal statutes.
On August 3rd, a U.S. District Court judge, J. Paul Oetken, struck down Scalia’s restrictions. “This extraordinary crisis . . . calls for renewed attention to the guardrails of our government,” Oetken wrote. “DOL jumped the rail.”
A month later, another judge struck down a Scalia regulation, issued in March, that narrowed the circumstances in which businesses such as Amazon and McDonald’s could be held liable when their subcontractors violated workers’ rights. A coalition of seventeen states and the District of Columbia had sued the Labor Department, claiming that restricting the liability of “joint employers” would leave workers “more vulnerable to underpayment and wage theft.” Judge Gregory H. Woods, of the Southern District of New York, concluded—with a rhetorical swipe at Scalia—that the rule was “arbitrary and capricious.” The dispute showed that Scalia does not oppose all government regulations—just the ones that conflict with his pro-business ideology. He’s fine with new rules that impose costs on workers.
As states have begun reopening their economies, employees have feared returning to workplaces that don’t appear to be safe. In May, Bailey Yeager, a director at a human-resources company called SHRM, was asked for feedback about a proposal that she return to her office. Like most white-collar employees, she’d spent much of the spring working from her home, in Alexandria, Virginia, where SHRM is based. Yeager, concerned about infecting her two daughters, requested that she be allowed to continue working remotely “until returning to work is both more widespread regionally and there is a decline in the metrics regarding cases/hospitalizations.” She also asked to see SHRM’s plans for reopening safely, while adding that she was “flexible” about returning to the office. Two weeks later, Yeager, who in recent years had received glowing performance reviews and several promotions, was fired. Three other employees who’d expressed similar worries, including two with preëxisting medical conditions, were also terminated.
Insuring that employees are not subjected to retaliation for engaging in certain protected activities is a key responsibility of the Department of Labor—in particular, of OSHA, which enforces the whistle-blower provisions of more than twenty laws. During the Obama Administration, David Michaels established a federal advisory committee to strengthen OSHA’s whistle-blower program. After Trump was elected, the committee was disbanded, and since then the whistle-blower-protection office has had no leader, despite many reports of workers facing reprisals for complaining about unsafe conditions during the pandemic. A survey conducted in May by the National Employment Law Project revealed that one in eight workers “has perceived possible retaliatory actions by employers against workers in their company who have raised health and safety concerns.” The survey found that Black workers were more than twice as likely as white workers to have witnessed such retaliation.
After Yeager was fired, she contacted Bernabei & Kabat, a law firm that represents whistle-blowers, which filed a complaint on her behalf with OSHA, alleging that SHRM had terminated her unfairly. (The company denies any impropriety.) The complaint describes a conference call in which Johnny Taylor, the company’s C.E.O., outlined plans to “outsource” functions in departments where workers were resisting coming back to the office. Taylor also mentioned that he’d spoken recently with a friend of his, “the Secretary of Labor”—who had been slated to be the keynote speaker at a SHRM event in March, before the pandemic struck. In July, Yeager told me, an OSHA representative called her and pressured her to withdraw her complaint. When she declined, the representative said threateningly, “Are you sure you don’t want to withdraw it?”
In May, Loren Sweatt, OSHA’s principal deputy assistant secretary, appeared before the House Committee on Workforce Protections and declared, “You could not get a better spokesperson for whistle-blower protection than the Secretary of Labor.” Three months later, an audit by the inspector general revealed that this was false: even as whistle-blower complaints have surged during the pandemic, the agency has left five whistle-blower-investigator positions vacant, inhibiting OSHA’s ability to handle the caseload.
It appears that Scalia at least cares about how his tenure as Labor Secretary is perceived in Washington. Several people I interviewed speculated that he nurtures larger ambitions, hoping to be appointed a federal judge and, eventually, a Justice of the Supreme Court. At the same time, Scalia has gone to great lengths to please the clients he used to serve as a corporate lawyer. Left out of Scalia’s cost-benefit calculations is the public good.
Nothing illustrates this more than his involvement in a tussle over a Department of Labor rule that required financial advisers to give clients advice about their retirement assets that was in their best interests. Adopted in 2016, after an exhaustive six-year process, the rule was designed to eliminate conflicts of interest that gave brokers incentives to push high-risk investments on elderly retirees, potentially costing them billions of dollars a year. Scalia, then at Gibson Dunn, assailed the rule as a “regulatory Godzilla,” and he and others repeatedly challenged it in court, on behalf of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Courts rejected those challenges four times, but Scalia finally won before the conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Given Scalia’s role in overturning the rule, some assumed that he would recuse himself from the matter while serving as Labor Secretary. He did not. In June, the Department of Labor proposed a new rule, which is riddled with loopholes that, among other things, would enable financial advisers to resume recommending products that yield high commissions for them while exposing retirees to risk. This outcome doesn’t surprise Barbara Roper, the director of investor protection at the Consumer Federation of America. The Secretary of Labor, she suggested, has, in effect, become the Secretary of Employers. She observed, “Secretary Scalia’s former clients should be very happy with him.” ♦
An earlier version of this article misstated Michael Felsen’s title.


newyorker--2020-10-19--In Love with the Louvre

In Love with the Louvre

What happens when we try to walk at night through museums we can no longer visit ?
A range of online virtual tours provides the possibility , but apart from physical problems of reproduction—the pixel resolution is inadequate , the movement glitchy and twitchy—the real difference is the loss of tactile and optical tension , the missing dialogue of aching feet and happy eyes .
Online , we float , ghostlike , down corridors , making giddy hundred-and-eighty-degree spins , with no querulous photographer from Toledo with a selfie stick to bump into .
Sit and know you ’ re @ @ @ @ @ @ @ insistence , and Walk and look while knowing you ’ re walking and looking is the more complicated Zen of the museum experience : the physical and the painterly , the squinting to see and the moments of transporting vision , have to go in tandem .
The work is there , actually there as a physical fact , which you could touch , if you were allowed to .
A book may be an object , but the Kindle edition of “ Hamlet ” is as much Hamlet as the ( no @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s portrait of Baldassare Castiglione exists at one specific point on the planet , and nowhere else , having begun in one nameable place and followed a track through time , owner by owner and wall to wall .
Reproductions reproduce , and they often do it well , but they can ’ t reproduce the sex appeal of museumgoing , the carnal intersection of one physical object with another , you and it .
It ’ s a thing , there ; you , a thing , here .
This truth is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ think about revisiting in our minds the Louvre in Paris , since its essential experience is enormity and intimacy , constantly colliding , on a scale unequalled by any other gallery in the world .
Closed for four months during the pandemic , the Louvre reopened recently , in a cautious , by-appointment-only manner ; but , like most of the great galleries of Europe , it remains off limits to still-tainted Americans .
As Mark Twain , the archetypal exhausted American tourist , noted when he visited in the eighteen-sixties , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the old masters , ” but the experience of its Grande Galerie—a corridor , not a room—is necessarily closeup .
Even the large and little rooms that spring off its sides hold out the possibility of an intimate encounter with the past .
You look—well , you would look , if you could get within thirty feet of it , past the bulwark of tourists for whom it is the destination of a European visit—at the gallery ’ s most famous picture , Leonardo ’ s “ La Gioconda ” ( the one @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Mona Lisa ” ) , and you see paint , crackle , a smile , a non-smile , a mystery , a woman , a remembered page of prose ( “ She is older than the rocks among which she sits ” ) , and , if you allow proximity to defeat familiarity , a genuinely weird , extraterrestrial portrait .
Had Leonardo come from another planet , as he sometimes seems to have , this would be a picture of its geology , its flora , and its queen .
Ten million @ @ @ @ @ @ @ before France ’ s lockdown in March , and no museum can become so crowded without cancelling its own purpose , or replacing it with another purpose—the purpose of a dutiful hajj , of having been there .
There are too many people looking to allow anyone to see .
Construction of the “ Grand Louvre , ” begun in the nineteen-eighties , with a new entrance hall crowned by the I. M. Pei pyramid , was meant to organize and order the overcrowding , but has only added to the exhaustion .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ pyramid in the summer without a trace of shade are tiring to look at , let alone stand in .
And , once inside , the physical act of buying a ticket and getting oriented is so extended that it makes the time between the urge to visit and the actual experience of a work of art punishingly long .
Nonetheless , the place is so big , so various , so filled with objects , and so beautifully disordered that there is still , especially off-season , a chance to infiltrate inside @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
A Saturday morning in one of the lesser wings—say , the Richelieu wing , opened in the nineteen-nineties—offers time alone with overlooked delights , like the sixteenth-century Flemish tapestries called “ Les Chasses de Maximilien , ” which include a bracing account of the Emperor out hunting with his dogs and horses and attendants and whippers-in on a winter morning , perfectly capturing the smoky , enveloping air of the Flemish woods while providing an extraordinary encyclopedia of canine types , some strange , some familiar .
Mysterious in effect , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ too , as James Gardner shows in “ The Louvre : The Many Lives of the World ’ s Most Famous Museum ” ( Atlantic Monthly Press ) .
No one knows why the Louvre is called the Louvre .
You would think that it has some relation to “ Lutetia , ” the Roman name for Paris , or the like , but not a bit ; the origin of the name is as opaque as the French love of Johnny Hallyday .
Even so , the name has stuck through the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ showplace .
The continuity the Louvre represents is the continuity of the French state .
Gardner relates the long story of the Louvre , starting around the thirteenth century , when it was simply a castle , through its elevation as a palace , and then , in the seventeenth century , its expansion into service as an office building for French royalty .
In those centuries , the building intersects art history only occasionally .
A kind of false spring occurred when François I seems to have bought pictures from Leonardo at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ paintings , including that smiling lady , which remain the nucleus of the collection .
It was a cosmopolitan collection—the French King , like many of his successors , displayed his power by demonstrating his taste , with the model of collecting as a form of exotic shopping already in place .
Pictures were also commissioned and displayed there .
Peter Paul Rubens ’ s seventeenth-century series apotheosizing the life of the mediocre Marie de Médicis as the Queen of France migrated into the royal collection early on , and remains both the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that is also pure toadying to power .
In the late seventeenth century , Louis XIV bought a tremendous number of pictures , but , as Gardner rightly says , he bought as a contemporary New York billionaire would buy , acquiring blue-chip names—then mostly Italian—without much evidence of distinct sensibility .
Still , one great picture after another did come into his personal collection for the benefit of France , including what is , for some people ’ s money , the single greatest picture in the Louvre , that Raphael portrait @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Raphael , the most talented painter who has ever lived , somehow compressed in a single frame all of the easy painterliness and understated humanity of Titian , while fixing , in Castiglione ’ s mixture of wisdom , intensity , sobriety , and wry good humor , the permanent form for the ideal author photo .
His account reminds us that we always make one era responsible for what belongs to the one before , and among the truths of French history is that we give the Revolution credit—or blame—for historical @ @ @ @ @ @ @ long before 1789 .
The great public-private spaces of modernity—the restaurants and cafés with their class- and caste-spanning crowd—were all nurtured during the Enlightenment , even if they blossomed after the Revolution .
Although the Louvre formally opened as an art gallery in 1793—the beginning of the Terror—the idea to make it so had begun half a century before .
The removal of the court to Versailles under Louis XIV , in 1682 , had left an enormous volume of unused space , and even more was created by the expansion of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ where the pyramid now stands .
The urge to turn the princely palace into a picture palace led , in the eighteenth century , to a series of exhibitions in the former royal residence—the kind of French salons that would , by attraction and repulsion , dominate French taste right up to the First World War .
The direction and planning of the incipient Louvre luckily fell into the hands of two remarkable fonctionnaires who , more than anyone else , are responsible for its character .
The first was the extravagantly named @ @ @ @ @ @ @ d ’ Angiviller , who was appointed the keeper of the king ’ s estates by Louis XVI .
As Gardner tells us , he was intent on establishing a museum in the Grande Galerie , and he went about the heroic work , through both architecture and acquisition , of turning a royal abode into an art gallery .
D ’ Angiviller ’ s dream was made real by an accident of finance almost impossibly ironic to imagine , given that the Louvre has , for more than a century , been @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The end of the American Revolution , we learn from Gardner ’ s history , helped finance the French museum .
Once the War of Independence had been concluded , the French government could start to collect on its loans to the American colonies , putting thirteen million livres in d ’ Angiviller ’ s hands .
He started collecting good pictures , not greedily and haphazardly , as prestige prizes , but with a modern kind of eye , devoted to filling gaps in the collection .
He sent his emissaries north @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the great Rembrandts that distinguish the collection—the humane and anti-idealizing artist not being at all an obvious choice to French aristocratic taste at the time .
D ’ Angiviller also renovated the Grande Galerie itself , envisioning a huge iron-and-glass skylight that would illuminate the arriving pictures .
He lost his job when the Revolution happened—he fled , for fear of losing his head as well—but the position of what was , in effect , museum director fell to an equally aesthetic and public-spirited conservator , Jean-Marie Roland de la Platière , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , he built on d ’ Angiviller ’ s efforts , with their implicit appeal to ever-larger audiences , and dreamed for the first time of a true museum : a synoptic collection telling the story of art-making in all its genres , available to everyone .
“ It should be open to everyone and everyone should be able to place his easel in front of any painting or to draw , paint , or model as he chooses , ” he declared .
When the Louvre opened at last as a museum @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in .
Roland , with his impeccable liberal credentials and democratic instincts , was one of the more pitiable victims of the countless pitiable victims of the Jacobin Reign of Terror .
Only months before the museum ’ s opening , he took off , afraid of the radicals .
Though he got out of Paris , his intellectual , spirited wife , an activist who belonged to the wrong families , biologically and politically , was arrested in the spring of 1793 by the Jacobins , and publicly beheaded in the fall @ @ @ @ @ @ @ learned that they had murdered my wife , ” Roland wrote ( in words Gardner doesn ’ t quote ) , “ I would no longer remain in a world stained with enemies.
” He committed suicide by sword thrust .
As the revolutionary chaos gave way to the military dictatorship of Napoleon , the Louvre was transformed in another direction .
Napoleon set out to loot the world for the benefit of the museum .
Of the assaults on Egypt and the Levant , Gardner writes that they “ may be unique @ @ @ @ @ @ @ their goals had almost as much to do with the acquisition of visual art as with the conquest of territory.
” In the inevitable French manner , there was even a bureaucracy of the piracy : a comité d ’ instruction supervising agences d ’ évacuation and agences d ’ extraction , which , Gardner says , “ essentially oversaw the removal of all portable economic and cultural assets from the conquered nations .
”

Roland, with his impeccable liberal credentials and democratic instincts, was one of the more pitiable victims of the countless pitiable victims of the Jacobin Reign of Terror. Only months before the museum’s opening, he took off, afraid of the radicals. Though he got out of Paris, his intellectual, spirited wife, an activist who belonged to the wrong families, biologically and politically, was arrested in the spring of 1793 by the Jacobins, and publicly beheaded in the fall. “From the moment when I learned that they had murdered my wife,” Roland wrote (in words Gardner doesn’t quote), “I would no longer remain in a world stained with enemies.” He committed suicide by sword thrust.
As the revolutionary chaos gave way to the military dictatorship of Napoleon, the Louvre was transformed in another direction. Napoleon set out to loot the world for the benefit of the museum. Of the assaults on Egypt and the Levant, Gardner writes that they “may be unique in the history of warfare in that their goals had almost as much to do with the acquisition of visual art as with the conquest of territory.” In the inevitable French manner, there was even a bureaucracy of the piracy: a comité d’instruction supervising agences d’évacuation and agences d’extraction, which, Gardner says, “essentially oversaw the removal of all portable economic and cultural assets from the conquered nations.”
What Napoleon did was turn his predecessors’ idea of a great picture gallery into one of the first instances of a truly encyclopedic museum—a horizontal treasury of the world’s wonders, hauled into a single city and placed under one roof. The French took the self-embracing Medici Venus from Palermo and the four horses from the façade of San Marco (which had previously been stolen by the Venetians from Constantinople during the horrible Fourth Crusade). Being French, they looted with terrific taste. Pretty much everything they took—from the “Laocoön,” in the Vatican, to the Egyptian antiquities—we would still regard as worth taking. It is de rigueur now to see this as the Enlightenment Armed, philosophes crashing in directly behind the armies on an imperial mission. But it was also the Enlightenment Awakened: for the first time in fifteen hundred years, Western Europe fully reclaimed Egyptian history as part of the inheritance of civilization, through Jean-François Champollion’s heroic deciphering of hieroglyphics, which Napoleon’s invasion made possible.
Much of the loot was sent back after the fall of Napoleon, but much remained, and the pattern of taking continued in subsequent regimes. Though many of the greatest pieces that arrived in the nineteenth century were purchased or donated, others were found in French archeological digs in poor or colonized countries and share in the common indictment of the exploitation of the economically weak by the economically strong. The Nike of Samothrace, the greatest mid-nineteenth-century acquisition, came to the museum because a French diplomat dug it out of the ground on the Aegean island of Samothrace and sent it to Paris. (The prow on which the statue originally sat was later retrieved and mounted on the museum’s steps.)
Does time turn loot into legacy? This is one of the great debates of our era, worth taking up. The point is foregrounded by the Greek government’s ever-hotter pursuit of the Parthenon Marbles in the British Museum, taken from Athens by Lord Elgin in the early nineteenth century, with what seemed to be official permission from the Ottoman administration. What is plunder and what is portable cultural material?
It is very hard to acquit any art museum of looting once one looks hard at the historical circumstances of acquisition. The great collections of European paintings in America were assembled, often by the dealer Joseph Duveen and the connoisseur Bernard Berenson, on something like the same unequal terms as the great archeological collections of Europe. Altarpieces were ripped out of Italian churches and palazzos with a disdain for their context equivalent to Lord Elgin’s—and at a time when Italy was as financially weak against American power as Greece had been militarily against English (and Turkish) power.
Indeed, the matchless American collection of Impressionist pictures in the Art Institute of Chicago would not be immune from the same reproach. We bought them, we protest, at a moment when the indigenous nation grossly undervalued them, which is exactly the same response that the British make against the Greeks. Yet the infirmities of the French state at the turn of the twentieth century, the argument might run, made the simple act of protecting the national patrimony politically impossible. Seurat’s perfect “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte,” which resides in Chicago, is an archetypally French painting, depicting a French scene, fully legible only in the context of French arguments about science, society, and Utopia. Send it back to Paris, the patrimonialists could demand, on the next plane after the one that brings the Elgin Marbles back to Athens!
In truth, it all depends on the transaction and the treasure. Bronze Age people, after all, passed art around the Aegean, in the path of trade and armies, quite as much as later people did. Some of the nineteenth-century takings obviously mark the kind of cultural circulation and hybridization that is not just essential to civilization but exactly what we mean by “civilization”; others really do trail the injuries of theft. The Parthenon Marbles are part of a still existent if damaged architectural whole, and the splendor of the Acropolis Museum is that it looks directly out on the original site. They ought to be returned. On the other hand, the Italian pictures at the Louvre represent the long-standing to-ings and fro-ings of art in European culture, a practice both loving and violently rapacious. Portable pictures are meant to move. Seurat in Chicago makes us all more Parisian. The Veroneses in the Louvre show us, in this sense, more historical truth than a Veronese in situ in Venice might. Portable pictures are inherently self-propelled, with the possibility of going elsewhere implicit in their making.
Cartoon by Ellie Black Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
As the nineteenth century wore on, fewer great objects found a home in the Louvre. But the most extensive building projects in its history took place in the eighteen-fifties and sixties, under Louis-Napoléon and the Second Empire. That nineteenth-century Nouveau Louvre is most of what the tourist sees today, in the Cour Napoléon surrounding the pyramid. Designed by a changing roster of official architects, in what was seen as a noble, Grand Siècle style, it makes the gewgaw glories of the Second Empire everywhere evident. Though made of the same beige limestone as the seventeenth-century buildings, the sculptural decoration of the Cour Napoléon is florid and pompous in a way that recalls the Sunday-matinée façade of the Opéra more than the low-relief severities of the Cour Carrée. Every surface is decorated with statues, so that, as Gardner writes, visitors waiting in line to enter the pyramid “cannot fail to notice that they are being watched by eighty-six stone figures, each about ten feet tall, that man the terraces of the first floor like some overdressed swat team.” The one great accomplishment of the Nouveau Louvre was to link the older Louvre with the Tuileries Palace, which closed off the courtyard to the west. But the palace was burned nearly to the ground by the Communards in 1871, in an anti-Royalist gesture made as the Commune fell. The fires reached the gallery end of the Louvre as well, saved only by heroic Paris pompiers.
The iron-frame buildings of the Nouveau Louvre—instantly identifiable by its proliferation of dormers and mansard roofs—became the most frequently copied architectural style in mid-nineteenth-century America. Here was the basis of “the General Grant style of every other Midwestern county courthouse,” as the wonderful social historian J. C. Furnas once wrote, “and a principal reason for many Americans’ sense of anticlimax when seeing Paris for the first time—so much of it looks like the insane asylum and Public School Number Eight back home.” Philadelphia’s city hall is probably the most imposing remaining instance of the shared style. The ruins of the Tuileries, which were visible through most of the eighteen-seventies, were left oddly unpictured by the great generation of Impressionists coming of age as artists at that time. The avant-garde painters, mostly radical republicans like Manet, regarded the ruins as an encumbering image of exactly the kinds of deadly Paris feud and fronde they were trying to leave behind.
Ignoring the ruins, those artists haunted the museum. The curious thing is that, for all the Parisian drama going on around it, the Louvre as a museum has been a remarkably stable institution. Very few things have entered the collection that stand above, or even very much alongside, its nineteenth-century acquisitions; the works that had arrived by 1870 are still its treasures today.
Nothing is more imperious than the academic insistence on how our tastes in art and music are reshaped by class conflict and social upheaval. But, when one looks at cultural history without prejudice, what is astonishing is how constant taste is. Hamlet’s advice to the players in 1600 is, pretty much thought for thought, what you would say to an acting company now: the straight actors shouldn’t ham it up, the comedians shouldn’t gag it up, and the more lifelike and credible the human behavior, the better. In the same way, an aesthete asked in 1900 to single out the most important works in the Louvre would have named the Leonardos, the Delacroixs, the Greek statuary, the Egyptian antiquities, and, perhaps, the French neoclassical paintings. The aesthete might have liked the insipid side of Raphael, the chubby babies and pious peasant Madonnas, more than we do, but that peerless portrait of Castiglione is an unaltered affection. More than a century later, the list is not very different. All that has changed is the warning labels: the old-style aesthete might have been warned that these hallowed presences are protective against the corruptions of modernity; we are warned not to miss their absences, all the persecuted or subordinated peoples not shown. It is the same kind of talk about the risks of mere visual pleasure, attached to a different kind of moral strenuousness. The pieties change, but the pictures don’t.
The greatest single transformation in the building and its purposes since the Second Empire dates to our own era, with Mitterrand’s “Grand Louvre,” completed in the nineteen-nineties. Gardner is, on the whole, kind to the architectural features of the I. M. Pei project, which certainly achieved its desired effect of making the Louvre a little more rational, if a lot less beautiful. (In the pre-Pei era, you entered more or less directly onto the great staircase and the Nike of Samothrace, a thrilling preface.) What Gardner regrets is the scale of the new mass tourism that the post-Pei Louvre invited, overlooking, perhaps, its central lesson. Despite Walter Benjamin’s famous insistence otherwise, mechanical reproduction, far from diminishing the aura of the original, vastly reinforces it. The more people have seen of the Louvre, the more they want to see it, just as the more baseball games you show on television, the more people come to the park. It’s also true that in a secularized society, where culture fills a role once played by faith, there is a persistent place for pilgrimage—even attached to penance, waiting outside in the hot Parisian summer sun for hours.
“The Louvre stands as an implicit reproach, a programmatic rejection of the art and architecture that the West favors today, with its asymmetries, its puerile rebellions, its clamorous proclamation of its own insufficiency,” Gardner insists. Must it? Certainly French modernism is impossible to imagine without the Louvre: Picasso and Matisse’s Orientalism is unimaginable without Delacroix, as de Kooning and Francis Bacon would be unimaginable without Rubens—borrowing his stylized armor of life drawing, the extravagant hooks and curves he puts in place of real human form. Wayne Thiebaud pulls into the twenty-first century Chardin’s mission of bringing a halo to ordinary edibles. Even the wilder shores of avant-gardism that Gardner seems to make reference to are often Louvre-linked, inasmuch as it took the Louvre to give the “Mona Lisa” sufficient renown to make Duchamp’s drawing a mustache on her something more than just an insult. And the Master of the Morbid Manner, Jeff Koons, is in spirit very much self-consciously emulating the deliberately overblown pneumatic grandeur of the kind we find in Rubens’s Marie de Médicis series. The Louvre seems far from finished as a fishing ground of form.
Meanwhile, the best way to revisit the Louvre at night is to do what Henry James suggested: shut your eyes and see it in your dreams. Such pleasures are real, if hard-won, and prove that memory creates a more virtuous virtual reality than virtual reality can. Ain’t nothing like the real thing, baby. For all the museum’s vainglory and dubious universalist pretensions, an earth without the Louvre on it would be an infinitely poorer place—a truth that we feel as strongly when we can’t possibly be there as we did in the now distant-seeming days when we could. ♦


newyorker--2020-10-19--Martin Amis’s Turn to Autofiction

Martin Amis’s Turn to Autofiction

He was mistaken .
The handwritten letter didn ’ t call him a bastard or a scumbag , didn ’ t denounce him for his past transgressions or warn of a coming defamation campaign : it went much further than that .
What it said , in effect , was that Martin Amis didn ’ t exist .
The story went like this : Phoebe and Martin had planned to spend the evening of November 1 , 1977 , with Martin ’ s father , Kingsley , the famous comic novelist , whose suite of debilitating hangups and phobias included @ @ @ @ @ @ @ house after dark .
( His second wife was travelling in Greece at the time . )
That afternoon , however , Martin , then twenty-eight years old and already the author of two acclaimed novels , received a frantic call from an old flame who was organizing a literary festival in the North of England .
A headliner had dropped out at the last minute : could he fill the empty slot ?
Martin gallantly jumped on the next plane to Newcastle , leaving Phoebe on her own to take care of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ two decades her senior .
She cooked him dinner and accepted his offer of a stiff drink , and then , as her 2001 letter tells it , he “ made a verbal pass ” at her “ that went on for half an hour.
” Meanwhile , up north , Martin was putting the make on his ex .
But the night was just getting started .
When Phoebe rebuffed Kingsley ( “ You ’ re Martin ’ s father !
” ) , he came out with an extraordinary revelation : @ @ @ @ @ @ @ father .
In December , 1948 , Kingsley and Hilly , his first wife , were spending the holiday season in a cottage near Oxford .
On the twenty-third , the couple had a blowout argument , and Kingsley , at the time a university lecturer , promptly stormed off to go see a student he ’ d been sleeping with .
Left alone for the holiday with a four-month-old baby ( Martin ’ s brother ) and desperate to exact revenge , Hilly summoned Philip Larkin , Kingsley ’ s best friend @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a crush on her .
Larkin arrived in time for Christmas Day , and was still there when Kingsley sheepishly returned , on New Year ’ s Eve .
Although he sensed that something had happened between his wife and his friend , Kingsley was “ frankly relieved because it sort of equalized the guilt , ” Phelps said in her letter .
Larkin left two days later , and after a tense interlude the Amis household returned more or less to normal .
Then they discovered that Hilly was pregnant .
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Larkin , a solitary misanthrope who despised children ( “ with their shallow , violent eyes ” ) , went to his death without knowing the truth .
Kingsley had sworn Phelps to secrecy .
She was telling Martin now only because his father—his pseudo-father—had died a few years earlier .
“ So bad luck , mate , ” she signed off , with sardonic glee .
“ Rather confusing , no ?
Still—not the milkman !
” The difference between autofiction and a “ loosely ” autobiographical novel , broadly speaking , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ new book and one he published ten years ago , “ The Pregnant Widow.
” Both tell the story of a middle-aged baby boomer looking back on a formative erotic encounter that took place in the nineteen-seventies , during the heyday of the sexual revolution .
In “ The Pregnant Widow , ” Keith Nearing , a literary critic and poet manqué whose biography bears more than a passing resemblance to that of Amis , believes that the largely disappointing trajectory of his later romantic life was determined by a long day in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ who , inverting the way these things had typically gone between men and women , used Keith as an object of gratification before brusquely casting him aside .
In “ Inside Story , ” Martin Amis , or the character so named , suffers a similar fate at the hands of Phoebe Phelps .
What distinguishes the two books is a matter not so much of candor as of the effect of candor .
Neither makes any bones about being drawn closely from the author ’ s life , but , whereas “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and unfailingly on-theme , “ Inside Story ” is more digressive and centrifugal , its freewheeling structure , which flits among memories nonchronologically , suggestive of what remembering the past is actually like .
The newly permissive society of the nineteen-seventies has been an abiding obsession for Amis , who was born in 1949 .
When he first tackled the subject , in the string of acidulous sex comedies with which he opened his literary account— “ The Rachel Papers ” ( 1973 ) , “ Dead Babies ” ( 1975 ) , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ —he was trying to make sense of the era ’ s rapidly shifting norms in real time .
“ There was a feeling that there were places to go that the English novel didn ’ t go , and was being too fastidious about , ” he later remarked .
These places weren ’ t just the bedroom and the lounge bar .
Amis , it was widely thought , had a major style , poised and supple and bracingly responsive to the chaotic energies of modern urban life ; it stood to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ major theme .
As he grew older , he seemed to feel what Larkin ’ s poem “ Church Going ” calls “ a hunger in himself to be more serious , ” and , although his ampler novels of the next two decades contained plenty in the way of ribald humor , they also found him grappling with increasingly weighty subjects .
In “ Money ” ( 1984 ) , it was the ravages of capitalism ; in “ London Fields ” ( 1989 ) , ecological collapse ; in “ Time @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the Holocaust .
These books established Amis as a literary giant of the late twentieth century , but he has struggled to find a foothold in the twenty-first .
Of the five previous novels he has published since the turn of the millennium , three are set in the past— “ House of Meetings ” ( 2006 ) in Soviet Russia , “ The Zone of Interest ” ( 2014 ) in Nazi-occupied Poland , and “ The Pregnant Widow ” ( 2010 ) in nineteen-seventies Italy , where Keith and his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ These books are hardly lacking in ambition or accomplishment— “ House of Meetings ” has been especially underrated—but the retreat into history seemed a concerning sign from a writer who for much of his career thrived on an up-close relationship with what John Self , the hard-living adman narrator of “ Money , ” calls “ the panting present.
” The post-2000 novels that do take place in the here and now— “ Yellow Dog ” ( 2003 ) and “ Lionel Asbo ” ( 2012 ) —are satires on contemporary England in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hyperbole , often found himself outdone by the culture he was seeking to burlesque .
Both books created what Amis once said his books had typically failed to create : a consensus .
And the consensus was distinctly unfavorable .
The embrace of autofiction in “ Inside Story , ” which Amis says will likely be his last full-length novel , could suggest a late-in-the-game bid for a piece of what Bellow once called “ the real modern action , ” a phrase that Amis likes to quote .
A new generation of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ an aging controversialist , the maker of certain inflammatory comments about Islam or euthanasia , rather than as the author of some of the most daring comic novels of the past several decades .
But he and his second wife , the writer Isabel Fonseca , moved to New York in 2011 , and early on in the book he promises that it will have “ a fair amount to say about what it ’ s like living in .
.
.
America.
” The book is addressed to an imagined young admirer @ @ @ @ @ @ @ me every now and then at least until about 2080 , weather permitting , ” Amis predicts ) , who , on the first page , is welcomed to the author ’ s elegant Brooklyn town house and promptly plied with whisky .
It ’ s a metaphor that Amis has long cherished .
He once praised Nabokov—his joint favorite novelist , with Bellow—as “ the dream host , always giving us on our visits his best chair and his best wine.
” Dinner and drinks with Amis , world-renowned wit and raconteur @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and it soon turns out that we ’ re not just there for the evening .
After showing us around and introducing us to his cat , he presents us with our own set of keys , as if to prepare us for a roman à clef .
Amis ’ s turn to autofiction may have been spurred by the latest millennial trend , but it ’ s a narrative M.O .
he ’ s been contemplating for some time .
In a 1983 profile of Bellow for the London Observer , he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ western literature is inescapably one of ‘ higher autobiography.
’ ” Authors like Bellow , he said , had grown weary of concocting stories , and were instead “ increasingly committed to the private being.
” Quoting this passage in “ Experience , ” he proposed that what lay behind higher autobiography was the assumption that in a world becoming “ more and more mediated , the direct line to your own experience was the only thing you could trust.
” That sounds a lot like today ’ s autofiction ( the novelty @ @ @ @ @ @ @ inflate ) , but one difference worth noting is that in the best works of recent autofiction the “ private being ” is itself profoundly and inescapably mediated ( and recognized to be so ) , whether by Twitter or Xanax or the distorting lens of ideology .
What makes , say , Ben Lerner such a powerful writer is the feeling you get from his books that the direct line to your own experience can ’ t be trusted .
His protagonists tend to present themselves as bewildered frauds and loners whose @ @ @ @ @ @ @ their contempt for themselves .
The Amis of “ Inside Story , ” by contrast , is enviably well adjusted .
No sooner have we taken a seat in front of the roaring fire than our host is telling us how much he loves his children , and vice versa .
“ You ’ re a very good father , Daddy , ” his elder daughter apparently once said , when she was eight or nine , and who is he to deny it ?
“ I ’ m incapable of embodying strictness @ @ @ @ @ @ @ need genuine anger for that , and anger is something I almost never feel.
” Instead , his “ destined mood ” —the mood that at a certain point in late middle age “ congeals and solidifies and encysts itself ” inside you—is one of slow-burning happiness , a buoyant wonder at the daily recurring miracle of existence .
Some readers will find this all deplorably smug ( a charge levelled at Amis on more than one occasion ) , but the self-pleased protagonist may be no more of a confection than the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has this great need to explode its own postures , ” Bellow ’ s protagonist Moses Herzog says .
“ It throws shit on all pretensions.
” To insist always on exposing your own pretensions , or those of others , is itself a form of pretense , Bellow suggests , and it is hard to go from “ Herzog , ” or “ Inside Story , ” to the current crop of millennial autofiction without suspecting that the latter ’ s self-flagellating tendencies betray more than a hint of sublimated self-regard .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ the thousand natural shocks that befell Amis in the mid-nineties—the collapse of his first marriage , the death of his father , the discovery that his cousin Lucy Partington , who ’ d been missing for more than twenty years , was a victim of the serial killer Frederick West—but it was also a work of considerable decorum and tact .
Few people are likely to view “ Inside Story ” that way .
A couple of hours after Martin first picks Phoebe up ( on a London street corner ) , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ What a very unexpected figure you have , ” he drawls at the sight of her naked body .
She replies , “ That ’ s what all the men are forever saying .
Tits on a stick.
” Never one to settle for a hand-me-down locution , Amis says , “ No .
.
.
Tits on a wand.
” Just wait until he gets a proper look at her vulva .
Young Amis is all yearning and reaching ; the senior Amis , all getting and having .
“ In @ @ @ @ @ @ @ called ‘ The World ’ s Hundred Most Alluring Women ’ ; and she came thirty-sixth , ” he tells us of his wife , Elena .
( Although the leading men in “ Inside Story ” appear as themselves , under their actual marquee names , the supporting cast of wives , children , and siblings are mostly rechristened , one of the ways in which the book gently insists on its margin of freedom from the real . )
In France , where Elena is due to receive a literary prize @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Amis is struck with an idea for what he calls a smirk novel .
“ What ’ s a smirk novel ?
” Elena asks .
A novel of “ unalleviated self-congratulation , ” he informs her , in which the author glories in his “ literary fame and stupendous success with women.
” For the title , he fancies a “ Rousseauesque intonation ” — “ Confessions of a Sexually Irresistible Genius , ” perhaps , or maybe “ Seer and Stud : His Confessions.
” As “ Inside Story ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ thing continues , it ’ s hard to shake the suspicion that the author is playing a taunting game of preëmption , puffing up his narrator so as to later tear him down .
When Phoebe ’ s letter arrives , about a third of the way through the book , it looks as though it ’ s going to pass like a wrecking ball through the gleaming palace of the Amis ego , inaugurating a story of existential free fall .
In “ Money , ” John Self unravels as he discovers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the pub landlord who raised him , but Fat Vince , the pub ’ s bouncer .
What comes of being told that your father is not the charismatic lady-killer Kingsley Amis but the girl-shy Eeyore Philip Larkin , who once described himself as looking like “ an egg sculpted in lard , with goggles on ” ?
In purely literary terms , Larkin is hardly a step down .
Amis is one of the poet ’ s most sensitive and eloquent admirers , and the pages on him here represent a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of criticism .
The question of just how closely the young Larkin hewed to his father ’ s admiration of Nazi Germany , on the other hand , acquires an unsettling personal dimension in light of Phoebe ’ s letter .
Soon after receiving it , Amis confesses to Elena that he ’ s getting “ cold sweats just imagining the horror of being a Larkin male .
”

September 12, 2001, was a hard day for many people around the world, but for Martin Amis, the celebrated English novelist and critic, it came bearing a surprise surplus of customized pain. Staring down what seemed like the sudden obsolescence of his life’s work (“the pointlessness of everything you’ve ever written and everything you’ll ever write”), Amis arrived at his London office that morning to find an unwelcome message on his answering machine. “I have something to tell you,” a long-estranged ex-girlfriend, Phoebe Phelps, announced. “It’s been bothering me for twenty-four years and I don’t see why it shouldn’t start bothering you.” When the doorbell rang a short while later, and someone handed him the promised communication, Amis, who had once betrayed Phelps with another woman, thought he had some idea of what lay in store.
He was mistaken. The handwritten letter didn’t call him a bastard or a scumbag, didn’t denounce him for his past transgressions or warn of a coming defamation campaign: it went much further than that. What it said, in effect, was that Martin Amis didn’t exist. The story went like this: Phoebe and Martin had planned to spend the evening of November 1, 1977, with Martin’s father, Kingsley, the famous comic novelist, whose suite of debilitating hangups and phobias included a fear of being alone in a house after dark. (His second wife was travelling in Greece at the time.) That afternoon, however, Martin, then twenty-eight years old and already the author of two acclaimed novels, received a frantic call from an old flame who was organizing a literary festival in the North of England. A headliner had dropped out at the last minute: could he fill the empty slot? Martin gallantly jumped on the next plane to Newcastle, leaving Phoebe on her own to take care of Kingsley, a reckless and compulsive womanizer two decades her senior. She cooked him dinner and accepted his offer of a stiff drink, and then, as her 2001 letter tells it, he “made a verbal pass” at her “that went on for half an hour.” Meanwhile, up north, Martin was putting the make on his ex.
But the night was just getting started. When Phoebe rebuffed Kingsley (“You’re Martin’s father!”), he came out with an extraordinary revelation: he wasn’t Martin’s father. In December, 1948, Kingsley and Hilly, his first wife, were spending the holiday season in a cottage near Oxford. On the twenty-third, the couple had a blowout argument, and Kingsley, at the time a university lecturer, promptly stormed off to go see a student he’d been sleeping with. Left alone for the holiday with a four-month-old baby (Martin’s brother) and desperate to exact revenge, Hilly summoned Philip Larkin, Kingsley’s best friend, who she knew had long had a crush on her. Larkin arrived in time for Christmas Day, and was still there when Kingsley sheepishly returned, on New Year’s Eve.
Although he sensed that something had happened between his wife and his friend, Kingsley was “frankly relieved because it sort of equalized the guilt,” Phelps said in her letter. Larkin left two days later, and after a tense interlude the Amis household returned more or less to normal. Then they discovered that Hilly was pregnant. The marriage had been chaste since November. Larkin, a solitary misanthrope who despised children (“with their shallow, violent eyes”), went to his death without knowing the truth. Kingsley had sworn Phelps to secrecy. She was telling Martin now only because his father—his pseudo-father—had died a few years earlier. “So bad luck, mate,” she signed off, with sardonic glee. “Rather confusing, no? Still—not the milkman!”
If all of this sounds suspiciously like the plot of one of Amis’s own black farces, that’s because, in some sense, it is. His new book, “Inside Story” (Knopf), in which we learn of Phelps’s epistolary I.E.D., is a novel that tells us it is “not loosely but fairly strictly autobiographical.” The narrator is called Martin Amis, and much of what he relates—about his life, his career, and his illustrious inner circle—is verifiably unmade-up. A triumvirate of real-life figures roams this elegiac volume. Christopher Hitchens, the journalist who was Amis’s oldest and closest friend, really did die, of esophageal cancer, in December, 2011; Saul Bellow, the novelist who became a kind of second father to Amis after they met, in the early nineteen-eighties, really did die, after a series of minor strokes, in April, 2005; and Philip Larkin really did die, also of esophageal cancer, in December, 1985. The three were given plenty of page time in Amis’s memoir, “Experience” (2000), to which “Inside Story” often feels like something of a sequel—or, at certain moments, a remake or a director’s cut—but a lot has happened in the twenty years since the first book appeared, and Amis clearly felt a duty, once again, to commemorate his departed comrades.
The difference between autofiction and a “loosely” autobiographical novel, broadly speaking, is the difference between Amis’s new book and one he published ten years ago, “The Pregnant Widow.” Both tell the story of a middle-aged baby boomer looking back on a formative erotic encounter that took place in the nineteen-seventies, during the heyday of the sexual revolution. In “The Pregnant Widow,” Keith Nearing, a literary critic and poet manqué whose biography bears more than a passing resemblance to that of Amis, believes that the largely disappointing trajectory of his later romantic life was determined by a long day in bed with a sexually ruthless partner, who, inverting the way these things had typically gone between men and women, used Keith as an object of gratification before brusquely casting him aside. In “Inside Story,” Martin Amis, or the character so named, suffers a similar fate at the hands of Phoebe Phelps. What distinguishes the two books is a matter not so much of candor as of the effect of candor. Neither makes any bones about being drawn closely from the author’s life, but, whereas “The Pregnant Widow” is tightly plotted and unfailingly on-theme, “Inside Story” is more digressive and centrifugal, its freewheeling structure, which flits among memories nonchronologically, suggestive of what remembering the past is actually like.
The newly permissive society of the nineteen-seventies has been an abiding obsession for Amis, who was born in 1949. When he first tackled the subject, in the string of acidulous sex comedies with which he opened his literary account—“The Rachel Papers” (1973), “Dead Babies” (1975), and “Success” (1978)—he was trying to make sense of the era’s rapidly shifting norms in real time. “There was a feeling that there were places to go that the English novel didn’t go, and was being too fastidious about,” he later remarked. These places weren’t just the bedroom and the lounge bar. Amis, it was widely thought, had a major style, poised and supple and bracingly responsive to the chaotic energies of modern urban life; it stood to reason that he should also have a major theme. As he grew older, he seemed to feel what Larkin’s poem “Church Going” calls “a hunger in himself to be more serious,” and, although his ampler novels of the next two decades contained plenty in the way of ribald humor, they also found him grappling with increasingly weighty subjects. In “Money” (1984), it was the ravages of capitalism; in “London Fields” (1989), ecological collapse; in “Time’s Arrow” (1991), the Holocaust.
These books established Amis as a literary giant of the late twentieth century, but he has struggled to find a foothold in the twenty-first. Of the five previous novels he has published since the turn of the millennium, three are set in the past—“House of Meetings” (2006) in Soviet Russia, “The Zone of Interest” (2014) in Nazi-occupied Poland, and “The Pregnant Widow” (2010) in nineteen-seventies Italy, where Keith and his friends are spending a summer vacation. These books are hardly lacking in ambition or accomplishment—“House of Meetings” has been especially underrated—but the retreat into history seemed a concerning sign from a writer who for much of his career thrived on an up-close relationship with what John Self, the hard-living adman narrator of “Money,” calls “the panting present.” The post-2000 novels that do take place in the here and now—“Yellow Dog” (2003) and “Lionel Asbo” (2012)—are satires on contemporary England in which Amis, a master of comic hyperbole, often found himself outdone by the culture he was seeking to burlesque. Both books created what Amis once said his books had typically failed to create: a consensus. And the consensus was distinctly unfavorable.
The embrace of autofiction in “Inside Story,” which Amis says will likely be his last full-length novel, could suggest a late-in-the-game bid for a piece of what Bellow once called “the real modern action,” a phrase that Amis likes to quote. A new generation of readers may think of him primarily as an aging controversialist, the maker of certain inflammatory comments about Islam or euthanasia, rather than as the author of some of the most daring comic novels of the past several decades. But he and his second wife, the writer Isabel Fonseca, moved to New York in 2011, and early on in the book he promises that it will have “a fair amount to say about what it’s like living in . . . America.” The book is addressed to an imagined young admirer (“You’ll be reading me every now and then at least until about 2080, weather permitting,” Amis predicts), who, on the first page, is welcomed to the author’s elegant Brooklyn town house and promptly plied with whisky. It’s a metaphor that Amis has long cherished. He once praised Nabokov—his joint favorite novelist, with Bellow—as “the dream host, always giving us on our visits his best chair and his best wine.” Dinner and drinks with Amis, world-renowned wit and raconteur, is certainly a tempting prospect; and it soon turns out that we’re not just there for the evening. After showing us around and introducing us to his cat, he presents us with our own set of keys, as if to prepare us for a roman à clef.
Amis’s turn to autofiction may have been spurred by the latest millennial trend, but it’s a narrative M.O. he’s been contemplating for some time. In a 1983 profile of Bellow for the London Observer, he argued that the “present phase of western literature is inescapably one of ‘higher autobiography.’ ” Authors like Bellow, he said, had grown weary of concocting stories, and were instead “increasingly committed to the private being.” Quoting this passage in “Experience,” he proposed that what lay behind higher autobiography was the assumption that in a world becoming “more and more mediated, the direct line to your own experience was the only thing you could trust.” That sounds a lot like today’s autofiction (the novelty of which some critics have tended to inflate), but one difference worth noting is that in the best works of recent autofiction the “private being” is itself profoundly and inescapably mediated (and recognized to be so), whether by Twitter or Xanax or the distorting lens of ideology. What makes, say, Ben Lerner such a powerful writer is the feeling you get from his books that the direct line to your own experience can’t be trusted. His protagonists tend to present themselves as bewildered frauds and loners whose contempt for society is matched only by their contempt for themselves.
The Amis of “Inside Story,” by contrast, is enviably well adjusted. No sooner have we taken a seat in front of the roaring fire than our host is telling us how much he loves his children, and vice versa. “You’re a very good father, Daddy,” his elder daughter apparently once said, when she was eight or nine, and who is he to deny it? “I’m incapable of embodying strictness,” he concedes. “You need genuine anger for that, and anger is something I almost never feel.” Instead, his “destined mood”—the mood that at a certain point in late middle age “congeals and solidifies and encysts itself” inside you—is one of slow-burning happiness, a buoyant wonder at the daily recurring miracle of existence. Some readers will find this all deplorably smug (a charge levelled at Amis on more than one occasion), but the self-pleased protagonist may be no more of a confection than the customary self-loathing one. “Modern consciousness has this great need to explode its own postures,” Bellow’s protagonist Moses Herzog says. “It throws shit on all pretensions.” To insist always on exposing your own pretensions, or those of others, is itself a form of pretense, Bellow suggests, and it is hard to go from “Herzog,” or “Inside Story,” to the current crop of millennial autofiction without suspecting that the latter’s self-flagellating tendencies betray more than a hint of sublimated self-regard.
The Martin Amis who greets us at the start of “Inside Story” is not the only version of the author circulating in the text. The sections on Amis’s relationship with Phoebe Phelps—the woman, we are told, who best encapsulates the “moronic inferno” of his love life in the nineteen-seventies—are narrated largely in a scolding third person, establishing a distance between the younger man and the older one telling his story. (In an interview, Amis has said that Phoebe is not a real person but, rather, “an anthology of various women.”) Young Amis is brash, ambitious, and effortlessly seductive—a portrait of the artist as a little shit—but after falling for Phoebe, a plain-speaking businesswoman seven years his senior, he finds himself out of his depth. This is part of her appeal. Spiky, vindictive, and unstable, Phoebe mocks him for his effete accent, flirts with other men, and imposes months-long “sexual terror-famines”; and Amis can’t seem to get enough. His sheer “carnal awe” soon blossoms into full-blown love, but love is something that Phoebe has come to the end of. When Amis pops the question, her answer is a hard pass. “I don’t want a husband,” she tells him. “This subject is now closed.”
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“Experience” was movingly forthright about the thousand natural shocks that befell Amis in the mid-nineties—the collapse of his first marriage, the death of his father, the discovery that his cousin Lucy Partington, who’d been missing for more than twenty years, was a victim of the serial killer Frederick West—but it was also a work of considerable decorum and tact. Few people are likely to view “Inside Story” that way. A couple of hours after Martin first picks Phoebe up (on a London street corner), the two are already going at it. “What a very unexpected figure you have,” he drawls at the sight of her naked body. She replies, “That’s what all the men are forever saying. Tits on a stick.” Never one to settle for a hand-me-down locution, Amis says, “No . . . Tits on a wand.” Just wait until he gets a proper look at her vulva.
Young Amis is all yearning and reaching; the senior Amis, all getting and having. “In the mid-1990s Vogue magazine ran a feature called ‘The World’s Hundred Most Alluring Women’; and she came thirty-sixth,” he tells us of his wife, Elena. (Although the leading men in “Inside Story” appear as themselves, under their actual marquee names, the supporting cast of wives, children, and siblings are mostly rechristened, one of the ways in which the book gently insists on its margin of freedom from the real.) In France, where Elena is due to receive a literary prize for a nonfiction book about the Roma, Amis is struck with an idea for what he calls a smirk novel. “What’s a smirk novel?” Elena asks. A novel of “unalleviated self-congratulation,” he informs her, in which the author glories in his “literary fame and stupendous success with women.” For the title, he fancies a “Rousseauesque intonation”—“Confessions of a Sexually Irresistible Genius,” perhaps, or maybe “Seer and Stud: His Confessions.” As “Inside Story” wears on, and this sort of thing continues, it’s hard to shake the suspicion that the author is playing a taunting game of preëmption, puffing up his narrator so as to later tear him down.