newyorker--2020-03-09--The Tragedy of Celebrity in Anne Enright’s “Actress”

Partway through “ Actress ” ( W. W. Norton ) , Anne Enright ’ s captivating seventh novel , the narrator , Norah , advances a theory about her mother ’ s rise to fame .
Katherine O ’ Dell , who died at the age of fifty-eight , the same age her daughter is now , was a grande dame of the Irish theatre .
Her four-decade-long career , which began in the nineteen-forties , brought her to Broadway , to Hollywood , to avant-garde productions of Bertolt Brecht and Samuel Beckett .
This ascendance , Norah insists , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ born not made , ” she aphorizes .
“ Whatever a star has , they had it all along.
” This notion has a charming simplicity .
In the face of celebrity ’ s special incandescence , perhaps there is no need for an origin story of mundanities like talent and hard work .
But these days the taxonomy of the famous has been expanding ever downward ( we have a Z-list now ) , and Norah ’ s formulation collapses under scrutiny .
Of course stars are made : it takes connections @ @ @ @ @ @ @ way to the top—and publicity to stay there .
This is part of why we have always found celebrities so transfixing .
“ The whole media construction of stars encourages us to think in terms of ‘ really , ’ ” Richard Dyer wrote in “ Heavenly Bodies : Film Stars and Society , ” his classic study of celebrity , from 1986 .
“ Really ” as in , What is she really like ?
It ’ s the simultaneity of constructed persona and real person that draws us in .
For @ @ @ @ @ @ @ years after her mother ’ s death .
A married novelist with two grown children—that is , with stories of her own—she is still drawn to the story of Katherine O ’ Dell ’ s making .
She isn ’ t the only one : Norah gets an e-mail , and then a visit , from a young doctoral student who is writing a dissertation that will offer her view of what Katherine was really like .
The student promises to engage with the actress ’ s “ radical subjectivity , ” to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ an agent in the world.
” She wants to know about things like Katherine ’ s “ sexual style.
” Norah doesn ’ t want to think about these things ; she suspects that they say more about the student than they do about Katherine O ’ Dell .
If fame is a mirror , for Norah the task of parsing resemblance is especially complicated .
Hours after the student leaves , Norah is still sulking about the cannibalization of her mother ’ s story .
Her husband , no longer able to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Why don ’ t you write it yourself ?
” Norah , who has published five novels , has yet to write the book she “ needed to write , ” the one “ that was shouting to be written.
” The following morning , she buys a ticket to London , where Katherine was born , and begins her accounting .
Enright , who is Irish , is drawn to stories about troubled families .
In “ The Gathering ” ( 2007 ) , her fourth novel , which won the Man @ @ @ @ @ @ @ home for her brother ’ s wake and tries to make sense of his suicide .
“ The Green Road ” ( 2015 ) tells of the Madigan clan , their fortunes and misfortunes over the course of three decades .
At the center of these households are mothers who are headstrong , capricious , impossible to please .
( In both books , a daughter gives her mother an expensive scarf , only to be cruelly rebuffed . )
Norah and Katherine form another tragic mother-daughter pair—their tragedy heightened by their proximity @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from the start that Katherine ’ s drama will end in a mental institution , after a strange and salacious incident in which she shoots a well-known producer in the foot .
And yet Katherine is also the heroine of Norah ’ s story ; the two are close , loving , in a way that Enright ’ s other mother-daughter pairs are not .
“ I want to think that nothing between us two ever went wrong , ” Norah says .
They sit together on the sofa for whole evenings at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cushion on her lap for my head , ” Norah recalls , “ and we smoked from the same pack , as though smoking were some kind of occupation.
” Katherine travels often , and her reunions with her daughter are “ astounding , joyous affairs , with dancing and presents.
” But Norah can ’ t be sure where the actress ends and her mother begins .
Katherine , she says , was a star “ not just on screen or on the stage , but at the breakfast table also.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ describes it , has the clichéd perfection of a movie set : “ The sun is coming through the window , the smoke from her cigarette rises and twists in an elegant , double strand.
” Her mother makes toast with marmalade , then takes three , maybe four bites .
To signal that she has finished , she does a “ little wavy-over thing ” with her hand .
Afterward , she might pick up the receiver of the beige wall-mounted phone , or natter on to young Norah , or to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ waiting under the table for crumbs .
There is always an audience .
When Norah is thirteen , her grandfather dies , and Katherine breaks the news to her “ like a good mother , ” caressing her hair and asking if she ’ s O.K .
“ She did it all so perfectly , ” Norah says .
“ I did not think , for a single second , that she might adore him the way that I adored her.
” If Katherine was only playing the role of parent , who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , we are told , made her first appearance onstage at the age of ten .
She played a crocus .
When , in 1939 , the war came to England , her parents—successful but itinerant stage actors—moved the family to Ireland .
Eight years later , Katherine was back in London , débuting in a play in the West End .
The show was a wild success .
The following year , now in New York , she was reborn as an Irishwoman .
Her accent , like her bottle-red hair and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ part of a carefully constructed fake .
It was her agent ’ s idea .
“ You are in America , ” he told her .
“ You can be anything you want to be.
” If the story of Katherine ’ s rise contains at least some element of mystery , the story of her decline is relatively straightforward .
Like the careers of countless actresses , its arc has everything to do with age , and , of course , with sexism .
“ In those days , when a woman @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the door , ” Norah says .
Katherine stars in a hit film in L.A. , but within a year she is pregnant out of wedlock and forced to retreat from the public eye .
She gives birth to Norah in Brooklyn , then travels incognito with her daughter back to Ireland , where the rest of her career will take place on the stage .
( Norah is never told who her father is .
Compared to the story of Katherine ’ s rise , the question of her origins strikes Norah @ @ @ @ @ @ @ her fame and desirability have already peaked .
She is only twenty-six .
The mother ’ s life is unravelling just as the daughter ’ s is taking shape .
As Norah chronicles Katherine ’ s experiences , we learn , intermittently , of her own .
She writes about unremarkable boyfriends and true loves , about the trauma of sexual violence and the boredom of middle-aged marriage .
The scenes spool ahead into the future and back into the past : she grows up in Dublin , buys a house by the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ heat it .
The voice Enright conjures for Norah is lissome and intimate .
She has an eye for the unexpected and exacting image : the British Embassy in 1972 , days after Bloody Sunday , “ the roof just a few blackened beams against a wet sky ” ; the funeral of her mother ’ s longtime housekeeper , in the mid-nineties , the family dressed in coats of “ the same lilac-coloured polyester.
” These images are associative and digressive , the way memory is .
The story is easy to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that may be part of Enright ’ s point .
Making a narrative out of the inchoate past inevitably entails selection—and perhaps some level of deception .
In charging her narrator with the task of excavation , Enright revisits the premise she used in “ The Gathering.
” Veronica , an affluent homemaker , tries to reconstruct her brother ’ s life after his suicide ; like Norah , she wants to write it all down .
She thinks she knows when things began to go wrong for him , but to explain @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , to before either of them was born .
Veronica ’ s story is made up mostly of what she can not know ; she reimagines what did take place or invents what might have .
Even events from her lifetime are cast in doubt .
Of the turning point she has identified in her brother ’ s life , she admits , “ I am not sure if it really did happen .
”

Partway through “Actress” (W. W. Norton), Anne Enright’s captivating seventh novel, the narrator, Norah, advances a theory about her mother’s rise to fame. Katherine O’Dell, who died at the age of fifty-eight, the same age her daughter is now, was a grande dame of the Irish theatre. Her four-decade-long career, which began in the nineteen-forties, brought her to Broadway, to Hollywood, to avant-garde productions of Bertolt Brecht and Samuel Beckett. This ascendance, Norah insists, was instantaneous. “A star is born not made,” she aphorizes. “Whatever a star has, they had it all along.”
This notion has a charming simplicity. In the face of celebrity’s special incandescence, perhaps there is no need for an origin story of mundanities like talent and hard work. But these days the taxonomy of the famous has been expanding ever downward (we have a Z-list now), and Norah’s formulation collapses under scrutiny. Of course stars are made: it takes connections or coincidences or both to find your way to the top—and publicity to stay there. This is part of why we have always found celebrities so transfixing. “The whole media construction of stars encourages us to think in terms of ‘really,’ ” Richard Dyer wrote in “Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society,” his classic study of celebrity, from 1986. “Really” as in, What is she really like? It’s the simultaneity of constructed persona and real person that draws us in.
For Norah, this paradox persists even twenty-five years after her mother’s death. A married novelist with two grown children—that is, with stories of her own—she is still drawn to the story of Katherine O’Dell’s making. She isn’t the only one: Norah gets an e-mail, and then a visit, from a young doctoral student who is writing a dissertation that will offer her view of what Katherine was really like. The student promises to engage with the actress’s “radical subjectivity,” to “de-iconise her and show her as an agent in the world.” She wants to know about things like Katherine’s “sexual style.”
Norah doesn’t want to think about these things; she suspects that they say more about the student than they do about Katherine O’Dell. If fame is a mirror, for Norah the task of parsing resemblance is especially complicated. Hours after the student leaves, Norah is still sulking about the cannibalization of her mother’s story. Her husband, no longer able to mask his irritation, asks, “Why don’t you write it yourself?” Norah, who has published five novels, has yet to write the book she “needed to write,” the one “that was shouting to be written.” The following morning, she buys a ticket to London, where Katherine was born, and begins her accounting.
Enright, who is Irish, is drawn to stories about troubled families. In “The Gathering” (2007), her fourth novel, which won the Man Booker Prize, the restless narrator returns home for her brother’s wake and tries to make sense of his suicide. “The Green Road” (2015) tells of the Madigan clan, their fortunes and misfortunes over the course of three decades. At the center of these households are mothers who are headstrong, capricious, impossible to please. (In both books, a daughter gives her mother an expensive scarf, only to be cruelly rebuffed.)
Norah and Katherine form another tragic mother-daughter pair—their tragedy heightened by their proximity to the stage. We are told from the start that Katherine’s drama will end in a mental institution, after a strange and salacious incident in which she shoots a well-known producer in the foot. And yet Katherine is also the heroine of Norah’s story; the two are close, loving, in a way that Enright’s other mother-daughter pairs are not. “I want to think that nothing between us two ever went wrong,” Norah says. They sit together on the sofa for whole evenings at a time. “She put a cushion on her lap for my head,” Norah recalls, “and we smoked from the same pack, as though smoking were some kind of occupation.” Katherine travels often, and her reunions with her daughter are “astounding, joyous affairs, with dancing and presents.”
But Norah can’t be sure where the actress ends and her mother begins. Katherine, she says, was a star “not just on screen or on the stage, but at the breakfast table also.” The scene at home, as Norah describes it, has the clichéd perfection of a movie set: “The sun is coming through the window, the smoke from her cigarette rises and twists in an elegant, double strand.” Her mother makes toast with marmalade, then takes three, maybe four bites. To signal that she has finished, she does a “little wavy-over thing” with her hand. Afterward, she might pick up the receiver of the beige wall-mounted phone, or natter on to young Norah, or to the ceiling, or to the dog waiting under the table for crumbs. There is always an audience. When Norah is thirteen, her grandfather dies, and Katherine breaks the news to her “like a good mother,” caressing her hair and asking if she’s O.K. “She did it all so perfectly,” Norah says. “I did not think, for a single second, that she might adore him the way that I adored her.” If Katherine was only playing the role of parent, who was she—really?
Katherine O’Dell, we are told, made her first appearance onstage at the age of ten. She played a crocus. When, in 1939, the war came to England, her parents—successful but itinerant stage actors—moved the family to Ireland. Eight years later, Katherine was back in London, débuting in a play in the West End. The show was a wild success. The following year, now in New York, she was reborn as an Irishwoman. Her accent, like her bottle-red hair and the apostrophe in her name, was part of a carefully constructed fake. It was her agent’s idea. “You are in America,” he told her. “You can be anything you want to be.”
If the story of Katherine’s rise contains at least some element of mystery, the story of her decline is relatively straightforward. Like the careers of countless actresses, its arc has everything to do with age, and, of course, with sexism. “In those days, when a woman hit thirty she went home and shut the door,” Norah says. Katherine stars in a hit film in L.A., but within a year she is pregnant out of wedlock and forced to retreat from the public eye. She gives birth to Norah in Brooklyn, then travels incognito with her daughter back to Ireland, where the rest of her career will take place on the stage. (Norah is never told who her father is. Compared to the story of Katherine’s rise, the question of her origins strikes Norah as uninteresting.) Katherine discovers that her fame and desirability have already peaked. She is only twenty-six.
The mother’s life is unravelling just as the daughter’s is taking shape. As Norah chronicles Katherine’s experiences, we learn, intermittently, of her own. She writes about unremarkable boyfriends and true loves, about the trauma of sexual violence and the boredom of middle-aged marriage. The scenes spool ahead into the future and back into the past: she grows up in Dublin, buys a house by the sea, can’t afford to heat it. The voice Enright conjures for Norah is lissome and intimate. She has an eye for the unexpected and exacting image: the British Embassy in 1972, days after Bloody Sunday, “the roof just a few blackened beams against a wet sky”; the funeral of her mother’s longtime housekeeper, in the mid-nineties, the family dressed in coats of “the same lilac-coloured polyester.” These images are associative and digressive, the way memory is. The story is easy to follow but difficult to reconstruct. But that may be part of Enright’s point. Making a narrative out of the inchoate past inevitably entails selection—and perhaps some level of deception.
“You can leave now. I really just needed you to unzip me.” Cartoon by Ali Solomon Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
In charging her narrator with the task of excavation, Enright revisits the premise she used in “The Gathering.” Veronica, an affluent homemaker, tries to reconstruct her brother’s life after his suicide; like Norah, she wants to write it all down. She thinks she knows when things began to go wrong for him, but to explain it she needs to look further back, to before either of them was born. Veronica’s story is made up mostly of what she cannot know; she reimagines what did take place or invents what might have. Even events from her lifetime are cast in doubt. Of the turning point she has identified in her brother’s life, she admits, “I am not sure if it really did happen.”
But Norah is a different kind of narrator, her mother a different kind of subject. Fame leaves a material trail in its wake. Norah visits the National Library to review her mother’s papers, cites photographs and newspaper clippings and Pathé newsreels. But documentary evidence contains its own fictions. Norah’s twenty-first-birthday party is preserved in a photograph in a newspaper spread: mother and daughter in a jolly crowd, leaning in around a cake. Images like these purport to be a record of spontaneity; we call them candids. But “it was all staged,” Norah says. Still, she finds that only when her mother is frozen in time can she bring her into focus. “The picture was such a fake,” she says. “But the years have made it somehow true.”
Are we reading the book that Norah’s husband urged her to claim as her own? Enright doesn’t say: the only evidence of a completed work is the pages in our hands. Every so often, the novel shifts into the second person. The addressee is Norah’s husband. In these sections, the mood is warm and tender, and Enright shows herself to be a careful observer of long-term monogamy—its uneven tempo, its alternating major and minor keys. “Even though I have dragged you from your dream, you are pleased to see me there,” Norah says, of waking her husband up in the morning. “It feels like forgiveness, every time.”
But her view of marriage is also unvarnished. “There were times,” she says, “whole years, perhaps—when you annoyed me, in one way or another.” She and her husband have blamed each other for their respective failures, witnessed each other’s bodies sag with age. It’s a candor that Norah struggles to seize when describing her relationship with her mother, and its effect is to render marital love more real and, in turn, all the more profound. With her husband she has built a relationship grounded in authenticity, a kind of anti-celebrity experience.
“Actress” moves toward the moment of Katherine’s desperate assault. The man she shoots is the “movie impresario” Boyd O’Neill; he survives, though he never quite heals. She has been working on a script, but when she offers it to O’Neill, he sends it off to be rewritten, cutting her out of the process. The aftermath of the crime has the air of another performance. Dragged away by the police, Katherine speaks in a “pretend language for two hours, interspersed with some phrases and slogans used by Republican elements.” Once she has been found guilty and sent to an asylum, the real Katherine seems to disappear completely, as if she never existed at all. “Most of the time,” Norah writes, “she was—I don’t know how to explain it—only incidentally my mother.”
It’s impossible not to observe this episode’s resonances with the broader reckoning taking place around issues of gendered power and powerlessness. In a recent essay on the men of #MeToo, Enright wrote of friends who, in conversations about inappropriate encounters with influential men, especially at work, spoke of feeling that “what was violated was not their body, but their gift.” Katherine, it seems, might say something similar of her experiences, in which her talent and ambition were marred by men more powerful than she was. But it would also be a mistake to reduce the novel to a parable of women’s empowerment by way of revenge. Being treated badly by men does not, in Enright’s telling, grant women carte blanche to mete out justice.
The doctoral student who visits Norah stokes her rage in part because she wants to make Katherine into a feminist hero. What her mother did to O’Neill was “very wrong,” Norah says. “She turned him into a fantasy, and then she attacked this fantasy,” blaming him for a lifetime’s worth of injuries. For Norah, who, above all, treasures authenticity, perhaps this is an essential crime: “Boyd was a real person, made of flesh and blood,” Norah says. Was her mother too fake to understand?
Toward the end of the novel, Norah has a recurring dream. In it, she finds a storage unit with her “mother’s ‘performance,’ whatever that might mean” inside. It contains autographed paraphernalia and many awards, “big lumps of glass or metal, heavy and often pointed, one of them so vicious we put it out in the shed for fear someone might get themselves impaled.” Norah wakes from these dreams to the truth that most of her mother’s belongings have been given away, sold, or tossed in the trash. She goes in search of one of her mother’s props—a ring she called her “black emerald,” a relic from her Hollywood days—as if to prove that Katherine is not just a dream, or a myth.
Norah knows she put the ring “somewhere safe,” but now she can’t remember where that is. Recalling all the “vital and very small” objects that her daughter, Pamela, had stashed away as a child—nail scissors, a single shoelace—she wanders into Pamela’s bedroom, rummages through her drawers and coat pockets. She doesn’t really expect to find the ring, but she stays in the room a little longer: she has retreated from the space of her mother’s performance and found something real. She texts her daughter, and their brief but sweet exchange—Pamela sends two heart emojis—forces Norah to sit on the bed to let her “love for her settle back down.” In this short scene, in the midst of loss, we glimpse how much she has gained: a bond with her own daughter that is perhaps sturdier, and truer, than anything she knew with Katherine O’Dell. ♦


newyorker--2020-03-09--Tomer Hanuka’s “Blown Away”

Tomer Hanuka’s “Blown Away”

The cover for this year ’ s Spring Style Issue is the fourth by Tomer Hanuka , an Israeli artist known for his striking use of color .
( Hanuka ’ s identical twin brother , Asaf , is also a highly regarded illustrator . )
Hanuka recently moved back to New York , from Tel Aviv , and we talked to him about his new studio , his process , and what he likes about working digitally .
We like the gestural quality of the woman ’ s pose .
How does body language factor into making an image @ @ @ @ @ @ @ gesture , just a line , and build a story around it .
There are so many rules about drawing anatomy , and sometimes you need to break all of them to make a pose work .
An image like this begins with a realistic sketch of a body , but in the end I want the physicality to disappear .
I want the reader to be left only with an idea or a feeling .
This image was done digitally .
Would your approach have been different if you had used a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I ’ ve been working digitally for fifteen years , so it ’ s hard to remember working with wet media .
It seems so romantic .
But I ’ m interested in color choices more than textural qualities .
When you work in digital media , your setup is like a color lab .
I can endlessly go through different color combinations—that takes up the lion ’ s share of my work time , just changing colors around .
You recently moved back to New York from Tel Aviv .
How do @ @ @ @ @ @ @ day in Tel Aviv would climax at the beach .
A similar day in New York would end in a dark theatre .
And the energy is different .
In Tel Aviv , it ’ s like we ’ re all cousins trying to survive ; in New York , it ’ s like we ’ re strangers who agree to respect spatial boundaries .
But , all things being equal , food is better in Tel Aviv .
Your studio is in the garment district , a historic area filled with showrooms @ @ @ @ @ @ @ shops .
Do you get a sense of the fashion world ’ s energy during your day-to-day life in the neighborhood ?
Yes , there is definitely a sense of industrious energy .
There ’ s a bronze sculpture by Judith Weller that I love—I walk by it every day .
It ’ s called “ Garment Worker.
” It depicts an older Jewish man with a yarmulke hunched over a sewing machine .
It embodies the story of immigrants at the turn of the last century , who worked in the neighborhood @ @ @ @ @ @ @ couldn ’ t have been more different , on good days , as I ’ m hunched over my computer trying to match colors , I feel like I picked up where he left off .
For more covers celebrating fashion , see below :

The cover for this year’s Spring Style Issue is the fourth by Tomer Hanuka, an Israeli artist known for his striking use of color. (Hanuka’s identical twin brother, Asaf, is also a highly regarded illustrator.) Hanuka recently moved back to New York, from Tel Aviv, and we talked to him about his new studio, his process, and what he likes about working digitally.
We like the gestural quality of the woman’s pose. How does body language factor into making an image like this?
I start with a gesture, just a line, and build a story around it. There are so many rules about drawing anatomy, and sometimes you need to break all of them to make a pose work. An image like this begins with a realistic sketch of a body, but in the end I want the physicality to disappear. I want the reader to be left only with an idea or a feeling.
To create the image, Hanuka experimented with different poses.
This image was done digitally. Would your approach have been different if you had used a different medium, say, watercolor?
I’ve been working digitally for fifteen years, so it’s hard to remember working with wet media. It seems so romantic. But I’m interested in color choices more than textural qualities. When you work in digital media, your setup is like a color lab. I can endlessly go through different color combinations—that takes up the lion’s share of my work time, just changing colors around.
You recently moved back to New York from Tel Aviv. How do the two cities compare?
A perfect day in Tel Aviv would climax at the beach. A similar day in New York would end in a dark theatre. And the energy is different. In Tel Aviv, it’s like we’re all cousins trying to survive; in New York, it’s like we’re strangers who agree to respect spatial boundaries. But, all things being equal, food is better in Tel Aviv.
Judith Weller’s statue is located on Seventh Avenue, between West Thirty-ninth and Fortieth Streets. Photograph by Tomer Hanuka
Your studio is in the garment district, a historic area filled with showrooms, warehouses, production facilities, and shops. Do you get a sense of the fashion world’s energy during your day-to-day life in the neighborhood?
Yes, there is definitely a sense of industrious energy. There’s a bronze sculpture by Judith Weller that I love—I walk by it every day. It’s called “Garment Worker.” It depicts an older Jewish man with a yarmulke hunched over a sewing machine. It embodies the story of immigrants at the turn of the last century, who worked in the neighborhood as machine operators. Though our circumstances couldn’t have been more different, on good days, as I’m hunched over my computer trying to match colors, I feel like I picked up where he left off.
For more covers celebrating fashion, see below:


newyorker--2020-03-09--Jordan Wolfson’s Edgelord Art

Jordan Wolfson’s Edgelord Art

In a recent Frieze article , the editors , trying to decide on the most important artist of the past decade , tossed around a number of names .
The list included O.W.A.s , or Older Women Artists , recognized after years of neglect ; it had Njideka Akunyili Crosby , an artist of the African diaspora , and Olafur Eliasson , who heralded the rise of immersive works conducive to selfies .
The editors , somewhat reluctantly , also discussed Jordan Wolfson , a thirty-nine-year-old sculptor whose work is emblematic of a chaotic , maddening , fearful time .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ animatronic pieces that he makes in collaboration with a Hollywood creature-effects studio in Glendale , California .
His creations are uncanny , mashed-up not-quite-humans , which perform “ scenes ” and deliver lines that Wolfson writes , often accompanied by a pop-music score .
Like memes turned loose from the laboratory of the Internet , they engage with the audience in unsettling ways , delivering contradictory and controversial messages .
“ Female Figure , ” which débuted at David Zwirner ’ s New York gallery in 2014 , is a silicone-skinned simulacrum of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in a platinum-blond wig , a white stripper outfit , and a beaky green-black witch mask .
After delivering a monologue— “ I ’ m gay / I ’ d like to be a poet ” —spoken by Wolfson , who is straight , the figure , which is transfixed through the diaphragm by a metal pole connected to a mirror , begins to dance .
While it vogues and twerks , a tiny camera hidden behind the mask , equipped with facial-recognition software , allows the figure to lock eyes with the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with itself .
Did the piece express misogyny , or a criticism of it ?
Homophobia ?
A veiled confession ?
It was impossible to say for sure ; Wolfson ’ s medium is plausible deniability .
One Frieze editor said , “ The politics were all wrong , yet no one could look away.
” Wolfson , who moves between New York and Los Angeles , has succeeded in creating event art that people , many of whom don ’ t typically go to galleries , line up to see .
An @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is an interesting strategy in art-making , ” David Zwirner told me .
“ If you ’ re annoyed , you ’ re not indifferent .
The work manipulates me , so I ’ m being triggered .
Transgression is key .
The only way to know you ’ re succeeding is if people are upset.
” The outraged responses , he says , are a dimension of the art .
Wolfson ’ s work is owned by cultural institutions and private collections throughout the United States , Europe , and Asia .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ presented a two-part Wolfson retrospective in 2016 and 2017 ; next year , he ’ ll take over the Kunsthaus Bregenz , the most important contemporary-art museum in Austria .
Supporters of the work see it as a melancholy commentary on a lonely , mutually enslaved machine future , and a reflection of the caustic cruelty of humans .
“ There is a feeling of something untethered to aesthetic values such as we know them , things like good taste , ” the painter David Salle told me .
“ I feel someone @ @ @ @ @ @ @ an idea and running with it in an uncensored way that might only be available to an artist in their youth , where self-criticality hasn ’ t kicked in.
” Detractors , of whom there are many , interpret Wolfson ’ s work as a noxious expression of privilege , casually appropriating pain he seems unlikely to have experienced personally .
In a field that prides itself on openness to transgression and cheek , he has attracted unusually pointed criticism .
“ Who Likes Jordan Wolfson ?
” a recent essayist asked , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ technically virtuosic production + shock + destabilizing juxtaposition + empty , judgment-less vision.
” The work is complicated by the matter of Wolfson ’ s personality , which ranges from syrupy , self-absorbed entitlement when he is feeling good to viciousness when he is not , with intermittent considerateness and situational charm .
“ One could describe Jordan in the most unflattering way possible , and it would be true , but none of it bothers me , ” Salle said .
“ You can be an extravagant narcissist and a nice , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” Wolfson ’ s closest friend , an artist named Joey Frank , told me that , in an astrology class he teaches , he lectures on Wolfson as the quintessential Libra .
When I asked him what that meant , Frank replied , “ How do you drown a Libra ?
You put a mirror at the bottom of a swimming pool.
” Like the Internet , which is Wolfson ’ s greatest source and muse , his work can be both inflammatory and affectless .
He refuses to make his intentions @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is like stumbling through a mirrored maze .
One New York collector told me that he considers Wolfson to be the perfect manifestation of the nastiest impulses of online life .
“ Like Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf in the eighties embodied street-art culture , that ’ s what he is with Internet trolling , ” he said .
The question , he added , is : “ How in control of it is he ?
” The first time I met Wolfson , three years ago in May , he asked me @ @ @ @ @ @ @ International Airport .
When I got there and called to arrange a rendezvous , he told me to circle while he went to another terminal .
His new girlfriend , Charlotte Day-Reiss , happened to be arriving on a different flight at the same time , and he wanted to plant a love note for her near her gate : a test of proficiency in the thought patterns of Jordan Wolfson .
Wolfson is pale , with dark , tousled hair , and full lips that he pooches out to Zoolander effect .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ oblivious .
Getting in the car , wearing a hot-pink Wolfgang Tillmans T-shirt and a pair of track pants , he immediately apologized for his shoes , high-fashion sneakers covered in fake graffiti which , in the company of a note-taker , embarrassed him .
“ This is the first time I ’ ve ever worn them , and it ’ s a little much , ” he said .
“ They ’ ll be good dirty.
” He called Day-Reiss to see if she had found the note—she had—and to issue an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ which she declined .
“ Even me asking my friend to come , if anything , it shows a little character weakness on my part , ” he said , performing introspection .
He promised I could talk to Day-Reiss “ if she became important , ” and asked me to drive him to a vegan restaurant .
He mentioned that he has a daily exercise and meditation routine , and , in what would be the first of many times , he told me that I should get a Tesla .
Last @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , he asked David Zwirner to offset his annual carbon footprint , and he posted the certificate on Instagram .
In art , though , Wolfson professes disdain for virtue-signalling and political correctness .
His hope is to make uncensored work that honors his intuition above all else : whatever pops into his brain , followed by tedious years of sorting out technical and production details with a team of collaborators .
On the plane , he had sketched a new animatronic sculpture .
“ It ’ s been in my head for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it out on my drawing pad , ” he said .
After lunch , we stood by my car on a busy street , as he flipped through the pages of a black hardcover sketchbook , past notes for a piece involving a biker jacket painted with a swastika , before arriving at a drawing of a box with articulated arms and hands , suspended by a length of chain from a robotic arm used in car manufacturing .
He was calling it the Cube , a “ body sculpture ” that would @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .

“Cube can play the floor like an instrument,” he said, pounding rat-a-tat-tat on the hood of my car. “Cube can play its own body like an instrument”—he patted his torso. “Cube can caress the floor.” He smiled. “Cube can rape the floor,” he said, holding my gaze—would I blanch?—as he put both hands down on the hood and mimed sex with my car. (At that moment, a parent from my kids’ school happened by, and shot me a perplexed look.) “Cube can beat the floor, right? Cube can be lifted up and spun and do, like, jazz hands.” His hands jittered excitedly as his face curled into a joker’s smile. “No, I’m serious, wouldn’t that be fabulous?”
For the nearly three years since that meeting, the Trump years, Wolfson has been in Glendale, working on the Cube, as the divisions and inequities and hypocrisies in American culture have become contested territory in the arts. The Internet offers an endless variety of images, from cats to beheadings, but Wolfson is making his work in an increasingly constrained cultural environment. Among younger audiences, there is a sense that art should serve as a moral guide, upholding decency in a world run amok. Arguments about a given artist’s right to material have become central to a work’s reception, and, in some cases, to its ability to exist. There have been protests, cancellations, anguished editorials. Canonical Western art works like Balthus’s schoolgirls and Gauguin’s Tahitian teen-agers are being reassessed and demoted.
With cancel culture in full swing, Wolfson seems like an obvious candidate. He managed his career skillfully in the twenty-tens, emerging with a reputation as an exciting (if irritating) provocateur; still, I wondered if he could survive the shifting sensitivities of the new era. “It’s a contemporary version of the Gauguin question, where we’re judgmental of the person’s behavior, but the person’s behavior is what generates and is inseparable from the subject of some great art,” the New York collector said. The idea of the artist as trickster and provocateur has a long history. But, with Trump providing what one artist called “a more interesting Jordan Wolfson in the news cycle,” perhaps the art world is tiring of the trope. Wolfson’s uncanny knack for spectacle might prevent his demise, but it could just as easily cause it.
In much of his work, which includes video, animation, wall pieces, and sculpture, Wolfson positions himself as a kind of sexy deviant; often, he creates alter egos—mischievous, nasty red-haired boys who dance in front of mirrors and vivisect themselves and pop zits and belittle women and speak with the artist’s bedroom voice. “People say my work is really dark,” he told me. “There’s nothing off-limits, no censorship, no bad.” He went on, “There were a lot of people, even in the art world, who said to me, ‘You better watch yourself. The art world is policed.’ ” He paused and batted his lashes thoughtfully, then resumed in a kittenish tone: “When you’re having ideas and then you’re being told they’re bad and then you’re having an inner censor telling you your ideas are bad, that’s no way to live. You’re a prisoner.”
Wolfson’s most uncensored, and most troublesome, performance may be himself. “He turns other humans into a prop for his dominance and forced intimacy,” the collector told me. Stefan Kalmár, the director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, in London, says that he once went to Wolfson’s apartment to conduct an interview, and the artist met him at the door in a T-shirt, boxer shorts, and one tube sock. “For two days, I was his shrink,” Kalmár told me. “I couldn’t put the bucket under his brain as quickly as he was leaking. Then he took a picture of me from the Internet and created a false Grindr profile with me as a German Nazi.”
For years, if Wolfson was not screaming in someone’s face, he was whispering, hot and toxic, in their ear. He would park in the handicapped spot, hit on your girlfriend, assail you with arguments for why your gallery should show his work. He affronted men and offended women. “It’s to extend his brand of Edgelord Art,” an artist who knows him well told me. “It’s almost laughably banal—another rich white person exercising their place in the world to do better at the expense of other people’s health. It’s by-the-book sociopathy. Sociopaths are people who regard people as objects.”
In 2012, Wolfson showed “Raspberry Poser,” a video in which he stars as a skinhead. Scenes of Wolfson lying down in a park outside Paris, bare bottom up, are intercut with sequences depicting a C.G.I. cartoon of the AIDS virus bopping through SoHo, into high-end design stores selling children’s furniture and expensive bathroom appliances. By one reading, the piece provides a devastating brief history of the disappearance of an artists’ community and the consumer temples that rose from its ashes. By another, it provides a tour of the neighborhood in which Wolfson aspired to live, and where he rented a top-floor loft in the summer of 2017. When I visited him there, he took me to a bathroom store similar to the one featured in the video, so he could price fixtures for the guest room of a hundred-acre farm he owns upstate. He left with a tear sheet for a two-thousand-dollar black toilet, whispering, in a campy New York accent that he said was a put-on of his mom, “Don’t put the nice toilet paper in the guest bathroom.”
Wolfson grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. His mother, Patricia Burrows, is a psychoanalyst; during the eighties, she counselled numerous AIDS patients. His father, Milt Wolfson, who has a theatrical-fabric supply business, also knew people afflicted by the disease. “Me making an art work with the AIDS virus doesn’t mean I like AIDS or think the AIDS virus is funny,” Wolfson told me. “It terrifies me. There were constantly homeless people you would see dying on the street of AIDS. There was my father’s best friend who died of AIDS. This was omnipresent in my life. My mother was coming home crying every night.” Another time, he said, “Gay people don’t own AIDS. When we witness suffering, we experience it by proxy.”
As a child, Wolfson struggled with dyslexia and attention-deficit disorder. In Manhattan, attending Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School—where, he told me, Barron Trump was a student—he felt special. When he was ten, his parents decided to move to their weekend house, in Fairfield County, and they sent him and his older sister to public school. “We moved to Connecticut, and I was disabled and I was, like, Jewish,” he says. Discovering that he could paint was his first experience of fluency, a promise of liberation from a feared future working in a video shop.
The Burrows side of the family was wealthy and cultured. In the early nineteen-hundreds, Patricia’s grandfather, an immigrant from Hungary who never learned to read English, founded a large linen-supply company that laundered towels and sheets for hotels; her parents collected art by Milton Avery, George Grosz, and Ben Shahn; Larry Rivers taught her mother to paint in the basement of the house on Long Island where she lived. In describing his family, Wolfson emphasized the reverence for art and artists. His mother’s brother, he told me the first time we met, is married to the writer Erica Jong. Becoming an artist wasn’t an act of rebellion; it was a way to secure his parents’ approval.
At Wolfson’s graduation from the Rhode Island School of Design, in 2003, his parents approached his favorite teacher, Mark Milloff. “They said, ‘We have money to send him to grad school, or he can go to Berlin,’ ” Milloff recalled. “They wanted to know, ‘Can he make it?’ I said there was no chance Jordan wasn’t going to succeed.” Wolfson moved to Berlin with his girlfriend. “She was RoseLee Goldberg’s daughter and Klaus Biesenbach’s assistant,” he told me. (Goldberg is a foundational figure in performance art. Biesenbach, a German curator, recently became the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, in Los Angeles.)
“I was psychotically serious about art, embarrassingly serious,” Wolfson says. In 2006, three years out of art school, he was included in the Whitney Biennial, along with Dash Snow and Dan Colen, close friends and collaborators whose expression of hedonistic downtown life formed the dominant aesthetic of the young New York art scene. “Jordan was between girlfriends,” Joey Frank says. “I went as his date to a lot of dinners. We saw Dan Colen and Dash Snow, and I remember Jordan being, like, ‘Those are the cool kids. We’re not going to say hi.’ ”
For the Biennial, Wolfson contributed a modest work, based on a film called “The Perfect Human,” by Jørgen Leth. Shot in black-and-white, Wolfson’s piece featured a sign-language actor, shown from the bow tie down, silently delivering Charlie Chaplin’s final speech from “The Great Dictator.” Polite self-containment ended with the title; Wolfson named the piece with the full text of Chaplin’s speech, nearly seven hundred words to forever flummox the catalogue department of any institution that might acquire the work. Thinking about this gesture, I keep returning to a nature-documentary image of an ant in the rain forest, overtaken by a parasitic fungus that bursts through its head in order to disperse spores. Wolfson was emerging.
“I still have a shitty reputation because of my twenties, because I behaved so badly,” Wolfson told me. “I was arrogant, I was rude, I was pushy with art dealers and competitive with other artists. I would say mean things, terrible. I was one of those—I hate to say it, but I was one of those guys, one of those people, really a problem. People thought I was a shit, a brat.” He forgives himself: he was suffering, plagued by career anxiety. He says, “I was not a relaxed young person. I would always hear, ‘You’re difficult! You’re difficult! So-and-So says you’re difficult, they’re not going to want to show you.’ I was difficult because I was in pain.”


newyorker--2020-03-09--The Peace Corps Breaks Ties with China

The Peace Corps Breaks Ties with China

On the morning of January 17th , shortly before I was scheduled to meet with a hundred and forty Peace Corps volunteers in Chengdu , the capital of Sichuan Province , there was an unexpected announcement that the China program was ending .
The Peace Corps had first come to the country in 1993 , and as a volunteer from the early years I had been asked to speak at an in-service training that the organization was holding in a hotel near where I live .
But by the time I arrived nobody was in the mood for nostalgia .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ were in their twenties , looked stunned ; some were red-eyed from crying .
At the back of the room , more than a dozen Chinese staff members stood with stoic expressions .
They had given up some benefits of the Chinese system in order to work for the American agency .
From the ceiling , somebody had hung a red propaganda-style banner , which proved that Americans could make their slogans every bit as tone-deaf as the ones in the People ’ s Republic .
The banner said “ Welcome to IST @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to See in the World.
” An American staff member greeted me with a pained look .
She said something to the effect that the tree she wished to have seen was a tactful announcement , but Senators Marco Rubio and Rick Scott , of Florida , had declared the closure of the China program on Twitter .
“ Rubio and Rick Scott wanted to take credit for it , ” she said angrily .
The Peace Corps has sent more than thirteen hundred volunteers to China , and the agency , which @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has always been viewed as removed from political spats .
The U.S. had never ended a Peace Corps program because of a diplomatic conflict , but the timing of the decision about China seemed suspicious .
The coronavirus had yet to come to widespread attention , and the Senators , who had previously expressed doubts about a Chinese trade deal , tweeted the day after President Trump signed a Phase 1 economic agreement with China .
“ For too long , Beijing has fooled organizations such as the World Bank and the World @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Scott chimed in : “ I ’ m glad the Peace Corps has finally come to its senses and sees Communist China for what it is : the second largest economy in the world and an adversary of the United States.
” Chinese hard-liners also celebrated .
In Guanchazhe , a conservative publication , a columnist named Pan Gongyu published a commentary , “ Farewell , Peace Corps in China , We Won ’ t See You Off.
” The title echoed “ Farewell , Leighton Stuart !
, ” a famous essay @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 1949 .
That month , the U.S. State Department had issued a white paper that , in more than a thousand tortured pages , tried to explain how America had “ lost ” China to Mao ’ s revolutionaries : “ This is a frank record of an extremely complicated and most unhappy period in the life of a great country to which the United States has long been attached by ties of closest friendship.
” In his essay , Mao derided American democracy as “ another name for the dictatorship of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ departure of John Leighton Stuart , the last U.S .
Ambassador to China under the Kuomintang government .
For years , the isolationist essay was part of the school curriculum , and many Chinese people recognize the ending : “ Leighton Stuart has departed and the White Paper has arrived , very good , very good .
Both events are worth celebrating.
” In Guanchazhe , Pan described the Peace Corps ’ s “ ideological and cultural export ” as another chapter in American failure : “ After twenty-seven years in China , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ raise wolves , ’ but ended up with a litter of huskies.
” He concluded , “ The Peace Corps has departed and the U.S.-China Trade Agreement is here , very good , very good .
Both events are worth celebrating.
” In the fall of 1996 , the Peace Corps sent me to teach English to college students in Fuling , a remote city on the Yangtze River .
I was twenty-seven years old , and I was joined by another volunteer , Adam Meier , who was twenty-two .
Not long @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Richard submitted an essay to my writing class titled “ Why Americans Are So Casual.
” Richard was skinny , shy , and bespectacled .
He had grown up in Fuling , and most of his classmates came from the Sichuanese countryside .
At the time , China ’ s population was more than seventy per cent rural , and only eight per cent of students went to college .
Adam and I were the first Americans to live in Fuling since the Revolution .
In his essay , Richard wrote , in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Peace Corps cohort known as China 3 .
The agency ’ s groups have always been numbered , perhaps because it implies a sense of mission .
The Peace Corps was founded by President John F. Kennedy , in 1961—the year of Saturn 1 and Sputnik 9 .
In the same way that the Apollo rockets went up in sequence , each Peace Corps cohort was intended to travel to a distant land , build on the work of its predecessors , then return home .
And , just like the rockets , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ endeavor .
It was inspired by “ The Ugly American , ” a 1958 novel that warned readers that the Soviets were doing a better job of grassroots work in the developing world .
The Peace Corps had three goals : to provide useful assistance to “ interested countries , ” to improve understanding of the United States , and to help Americans understand the rest of the world .
By the time I joined , relatively few volunteers were aware of these Cold War roots .
Time had moved on , or @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of “ The End of History and the Last Man , ” the 1992 book by Francis Fukuyama , who declared the triumph of Western liberal democracy .
In 1996 , the Peace Corps was sending volunteers to Russia , Poland , Bulgaria , and other former Soviet-bloc states that had supposedly transitioned to democracy .
China was the only Communist country that accepted volunteers .
Deng Xiaoping had welcomed the Peace Corps as part of his Reform and Opening strategy , but some Chinese officials weren ’ t convinced that Americans should @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
They referred to the program by a euphemism—Meizhong Youhao Zhiyuanzhe , or “ U.S.-China Friendship Volunteers ” —because the Chinese translation of “ Peace Corps ” had been tainted by years of Maoist propaganda .
The first three cohorts were small , which made it easier for the government to track us .
The curiosity of locals was even more intense .
Richard ’ s essay continued :

In part to keep the students as far as possible from “Survey of Britain and America,” Adam and I used whatever we could find as teaching materials. We brought photographs of family to class, and we made copies of articles from American magazines. When we received our absentee ballots for the 1996 Presidential election, Adam and I each gave a lecture on the U.S. political system to a section of senior students. At the end, we took out the ballots, allowed the students to inspect them, and voted.
The students became very quiet when I handed them my ballot. We were in a small, unheated room, packed with more than forty simple wooden desks. One by one, the students examined the piece of paper. By the time I retrieved the ballot and voted for Bill Clinton, the room was so silent, and they were watching with such intensity, that my heart was racing. Not long afterward, a Peace Corps staffer in Chengdu reported that college officials had called and weren’t happy about what Adam and I had done. But the college left it at that—such communication was often indirect.
The people who were farthest away seemed the most likely to perceive a threat. Students were thrilled, whereas our Chinese colleagues were curious but guarded. College administrators were warier, but even they were proud to have foreigners on campus. Opponents of the program tended to be at the Chinese provincial or national level.
The American reaction was the opposite. Recently, I talked with William Speidel, a Sinologist who served as the first Peace Corps China director, and he remembered the attitude of State Department officials. “They were overjoyed,” he said. “The idea that Peace Corps had a foothold in quote-unquote Communist China was really something.”
Speidel commissioned a linguist to design a course in Mandarin, and, in remote places, a hardworking volunteer could gain fluency in only two years, the length of a Peace Corps assignment. Many volunteers had studied pedagogy as undergrads, and often they returned to teach in U.S. classrooms. But there were others whose life paths were radically transformed. They became diplomats, civil servants, businesspeople, or scholars specializing in China. Today, twenty-seven former China volunteers, including Adam, work in the State Department, and there are others at organizations like U.S.A.I.D.
Journalists and writers were also common. Michael Meyer, a China 2 volunteer from Minnesota, went on to write three books about the country. In my cohort, three of us became China correspondents and authors. All told, former volunteers have published at least eleven nonfiction books about China.
I sometimes wondered how the situation looked to Communist intelligence analysts. In 1999, I moved to Beijing while preparing to publish my first book, about my experience in Fuling, and there was a period when I sensed that I was being watched with particular attention. There were strange encounters in my neighborhood, and a couple of former students back in the Fuling region reported being intimidated by security agents who showed up because of their connection with me. In Beijing, at a couple of government-sponsored events, Foreign Ministry officials sought me out with pointed questions: Why did you study English literature if you planned to go to China? Why did you teach in such an undeveloped place?
They clearly worried that teaching had been a cover for intelligence work, and they seemed baffled by the Peace Corps. The organization didn’t attract many people from élite backgrounds, and it paid volunteers about a hundred and twenty dollars a month. Speidel’s Chinese staff had been assigned to him by the government, so there was no question that some lines of information ran straight to security, along with the likely phone taps. But nobody from Peace Corps headquarters ever told me what I should or should not teach, and staff visited Fuling only twice in two years. At its best, the Peace Corps was an expression of American confidence: if you sent motivated young people to remote places and left them alone, good things were likely to happen.
Recently, I reminisced about the era with somebody from Fuling who is well connected in the Communist Party. He confided that the Fuling volunteers were supposed to be sent to Wanxian, another Yangtze city, whose name was eventually changed to Wanzhou. But officials were concerned that the city was too close to the construction site of the Three Gorges Dam, where Americans might learn sensitive information. So they pushed us a hundred and thirty miles upstream. Of course, I ended up writing about the dam anyway. And, after the Peace Corps finally got into Wanzhou, the organization posted a China 7 volunteer named Jake Hooker there. Despite having no Chinese background, Hooker learned the language to a remarkable level, and he proved that it didn’t matter who got sent downriver. In 2008, as a reporter for the Times, Hooker won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing how rural Chinese factories were exporting toxic ingredients for use in pharmaceutical products.
In 1998, during my last year as a volunteer, I didn’t notice two national developments that later proved to be significant. One was the system of Internet restrictions that became known in English as the Great Firewall. The other was a speech delivered by President Jiang Zemin, at Peking University, on May 4, 1998. Jiang’s words were hardly dynamic (“the future of the motherland is infinitely glorious”), but, more than twenty years later, if you say “Project 985,” many educated Chinese people recognize the reference to the year and the month of Jiang’s speech. The President called for the development of world-class universities, and this endeavor joined Project 211—the Chinese fetish for mission-oriented numerology exceeds even that of the Peace Corps. These programs involved university expansion and improvement, and they reflected a strategy that was hard for Americans to grasp: the idea that education and restriction could proceed in tandem.
During the period that followed, the country’s over-all growth was so intense that Peace Corps cohorts could be represented by micro-histories. The year that China 8 arrived, the country joined the World Trade Organization. By China 12, the Three Gorges Dam had been completed. China 14 was the Beijing Olympics. Between China 1 and China 16, the G.D.P. increased more than tenfold. When I taught in Fuling, the college had about two thousand students; by China 10, there were twenty thousand, on a brand-new campus.
In the classroom, even smaller histories showed how the system worked at the lowest level. One of my students, a poor boy who grew up on a farm, where his family planted potatoes, corn, and tobacco, took the English name Mo. Mo’s father had a third-grade education and his mother never attended school, but a village schoolteacher inspired Mo, who became the only boy from his class to test into college. In Fuling, he joined the Communist Party, and every summer he returned home to haul sixty-pound sacks of tobacco to market. When some of Mo’s classmates started giving themselves English surnames, he asked Adam and me for advice, which was how he became Mo Money. (Another China 3 micro-history was the series of prominent deaths that occurred in the span of six months and that, at least in my mind, are forever connected: Tupac Shakur, Deng Xiaoping, and Biggie Smalls.)
After graduation, Mo Money accepted a teaching job in his rural home town. Among the students was his younger brother. It was the community version of education by the bootstraps: somebody escapes the village to attend college, then returns and pulls up the others. For three years, Mo taught his brother and more than forty classmates, and his brother tested into the Fuling college, too. He entered as China 8 arrived. Of the four children in Mo Money’s family, three graduated from college, and all are now middle class.
When this happens at scale across a population of more than a billion, the effects are staggering. Mo currently teaches in a school in Chongqing, and recently I asked him what percentage of his graduating students from last year made it to university. “Every one of them,” he said. In terms of national statistics, the college-entrance figure—seven per cent for Mo’s year—is now forty-eight per cent.
The Peace Corps China groups started to expand with China 4, which was also the first cohort to include an African-American volunteer. There were significantly more women than men that year, and that became the general pattern. In 2014, the Peace Corps started allowing applicants to specify which country or region they wanted to work in, and China became a coveted assignment. Yung-Mei Haloski, a China 4 volunteer who later worked in recruitment and placement for the Peace Corps, told me that China was seen as a top priority. “I was always directed that the people who had the most skills should go to China,” she said.
By China 17, the Peace Corps was sending between seventy and eighty volunteers per year, and the program had expanded into undeveloped parts of Gansu and Guizhou provinces. But some volunteers went to Sichuanese cities that had become much more connected and sophisticated. Chengdu acquired the nickname Gaydu, because of a relative tolerance for gay culture that would have been unimaginable during the days of “Survey of Britain and America.” (“It widely spreads.”) With China 21, the Peace Corps sent a same-sex married couple for the first time.
Cartoon by Will McPhail Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
In August, 2018, Jody Olsen, the Peace Corps director appointed by President Trump, came to China to celebrate the program’s twenty-fifth anniversary. The Peace Corps hoped to move into even more remote places, and Olsen and Stephen Claborne, the head of the China program, met with officials in Beijing. The Chinese politely rejected the request. “The message was that they were happy with it the way it was,” Claborne told me recently.


newyorker--2020-03-09--Hubris and Delusion at the End of Hilary Mantel’s Tudor Trilogy

“ A Change of Climate ” wrenchingly dramatizes this theme .
Set in the nineteen-eighties , it unfolds the story of a British couple , Anna and Ralph Eldred , who were the victims of a horrific act of violence when they were newlyweds working for a missionary society in southern Africa , in the fifties—a crime triggered when Anna carelessly offends an employee .
( Mantel enjoys contrasting our desire to do good with the limits of our ability to comprehend the “ others ” whom we want to help . )
Now back in England , the Eldreds @ @ @ @ @ @ @ apparently normal and useful lives they lead—Ralph runs a family charity—are riven by fissures through which their past suffering rises to the surface , like a poisonous vapor , threatening to destroy the equilibrium they thought they ’ d achieved .
As for inauthenticity and inaccuracies , the misrepresentations that Mantel likes to expose aren ’ t of the anachronistic-chimney-stack kind .
What interests her are the half-truths , evasions , and self-delusions that people cling to , often at great cost , in order to get through their ( usually grim ) @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Mother ’ s Day , ” the social worker comes to see how her colleagues have chosen to delude themselves about the nature of the suffering and evil that they witness .
At the center of these books stands an unsettlingly opaque figure , a mentally disturbed young woman named Muriel .
At once malevolent and victimized , she represents another favorite theme of Mantel ’ s : the presence in life of an irreducible core of pain and unreason that resists any genial assumptions about the coherence or redeemability of the world @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the world , at least—a kind of progress , a meaning , a pattern , ” Ralph Eldred reflects in “ A Change of Climate , ” speaking for many of the author ’ s characters .
“ But where is the pattern now ?
” Small wonder that Mantel has returned so often to the supernatural— ghosts , in particular .
In many of her novels , the border between reality and unreality , sanity and madness , is as fuzzy as the one between past and present , truth and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ abuses her because she thinks she ’ s saving the girl from evil spirits that inhabit their house . )
Sometimes this shadow world of lurking evil turns out to be explicable .
In “ Eight Months on Ghazzah Street ” ( 1988 ) , Frances , an Englishwoman who has accompanied her engineer husband to Saudi Arabia , finds herself a virtual prisoner in their apartment complex , where whispered comings and goings on the stairs and in the hallways provoke a growing paranoia in her , a “ feeling that something @ @ @ @ @ @ @ range of vision.
” Her conviction that she has detected a criminal cabal operating out of the apartment upstairs is questioned by everyone around her until the truth explodes , with devastating results .
Frances is one of a number of Mantel ’ s female characters who must struggle to make themselves believed .
In other works , the border between natural and supernatural collapses under the pressure of unreason and suffering .
In what may be Mantel ’ s masterpiece , “ Beyond Black ” ( 2005 ) , a creamily luscious @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bizarrenesses and horrors it narrates .
Its protagonist is Alison , a morbidly obese medium who has to contend with some very real spirits , in particular a band of thugs led by a ghoul called Morris , who likes to lounge around her room playing with his fly .
The irrepressible dead torment her as mercilessly now as they did when they were alive : when Alison was a child , we learn , they raped and tortured her .
Mantel ’ s ghosts embody the histories that we can ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ referred with startling matter-of-factness to the presence of ghosts in her own life : “ When I was a child I believed our house was haunted , and so—worryingly—did the grown-ups.
” In a 2003 memoir called , unsurprisingly , “ Giving Up the Ghost , ” she writes of how , when she was seven , she witnessed something uncanny in the yard behind the family home : a ripple in the fabric of the afternoon , a disturbance in the atmosphere that , to her mind , had to do with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ recurrent figure of the ghost in Mantel ’ s works bridges two paramount themes : the lingering presence of the pasts we would forget , and the opacity of the evils , impervious to sense and impossible to “ pattern , ” that we suffer in the present .
The darkness of her themes and the rebarbative strangeness of the narratives in which she clothed them may not have won her international fandom , but they bespeak a genuine and bracing originality .
Astonished helplessness in the presence of unreason and cruelty was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ which she is most closely identified today .
In “ Giving Up the Ghost , ” she details the sufferings inflicted on her not only by the ignorant and vindictive nuns who taught her as a child , but also , later in life , by a long line of doctors who failed to take seriously a devastating chronic illness .
Starting in her early adolescence , Mantel displayed symptoms of what turned out to be a severe case of endometriosis , a condition in which cells that normally appear inside the uterus @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Her symptoms were dismissed initially as psychosomatic or signs of a psychiatric illness .
( Treated with antipsychotic drugs , she later experienced psychotic episodes . )
It wasn ’ t until she was in her twenties , when she did her own research and diagnosed the problem , that proper treatment began .
At university , Mantel studied law , and in her memoir she writes of having developed an interest in the question of where “ the powers of the state begin and end.
” During her illness , she @ @ @ @ @ @ @ found in that history an external correlative to experiences she understood all too well from her time in school and in the clinics .
“ I began to read about the old regime , its casual cruelties , its heartless style , ” she writes .
“ I thought , but I know this stuff .
By nature , I knew about despotism : the unratified decisions , handed down from the top , arbitrarily enforced : the face of strength when it moves in on the weak.
” From that epiphany resulted @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in 1979 .
( It wasn ’ t published until 1992 . )
“ A Place of Greater Safety ” is a work of historical fiction that entwines the lives of three leaders of the Revolution—Georges Danton , Camille Desmoulins , and Maximilien Robespierre—from their childhoods until their early deaths at the hands of the movement they created .
Mantel has recalled of her research , “ I had pressed the juice of meaning from every scrap of paper .
.
.
every note on every source , ” but the book ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that she hadn ’ t yet figured out how to balance “ history ” and “ fiction.
” Among other things , her characters too often do what characters in historical fiction are , mortifyingly , forced to do , which is to emblematize or give voice to entire currents in history or thought .
( “ Free thought , free speech—is that too much to ask ?
” ) What Mantel needed , but hadn ’ t yet found , was a historical period and a historical figure that could serve , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ further exploring the themes she ’ d always been interested in .
Where is the boundary between truth and lies ?
Where does the power of the state begin and end ?
Is it possible to break away from the past , and , if so , to what extent ?
How does the conflict between a modern trust in reason , on the one hand , and primitive ignorance and irrationality , on the other , play out in the lives of individuals and of nations ?

In an interview, Mantel referred with startling matter-of-factness to the presence of ghosts in her own life: “When I was a child I believed our house was haunted, and so—worryingly—did the grown-ups.” In a 2003 memoir called, unsurprisingly, “Giving Up the Ghost,” she writes of how, when she was seven, she witnessed something uncanny in the yard behind the family home: a ripple in the fabric of the afternoon, a disturbance in the atmosphere that, to her mind, had to do with “the nature of evil.” The recurrent figure of the ghost in Mantel’s works bridges two paramount themes: the lingering presence of the pasts we would forget, and the opacity of the evils, impervious to sense and impossible to “pattern,” that we suffer in the present. The darkness of her themes and the rebarbative strangeness of the narratives in which she clothed them may not have won her international fandom, but they bespeak a genuine and bracing originality.
Astonished helplessness in the presence of unreason and cruelty was what brought Mantel to the genre with which she is most closely identified today. In “Giving Up the Ghost,” she details the sufferings inflicted on her not only by the ignorant and vindictive nuns who taught her as a child, but also, later in life, by a long line of doctors who failed to take seriously a devastating chronic illness. Starting in her early adolescence, Mantel displayed symptoms of what turned out to be a severe case of endometriosis, a condition in which cells that normally appear inside the uterus grow outside it, causing crippling pain. Her symptoms were dismissed initially as psychosomatic or signs of a psychiatric illness. (Treated with antipsychotic drugs, she later experienced psychotic episodes.) It wasn’t until she was in her twenties, when she did her own research and diagnosed the problem, that proper treatment began.
At university, Mantel studied law, and in her memoir she writes of having developed an interest in the question of where “the powers of the state begin and end.” During her illness, she read extensively about the French Revolution and found in that history an external correlative to experiences she understood all too well from her time in school and in the clinics. “I began to read about the old regime, its casual cruelties, its heartless style,” she writes. “I thought, but I know this stuff. By nature, I knew about despotism: the unratified decisions, handed down from the top, arbitrarily enforced: the face of strength when it moves in on the weak.”
From that epiphany resulted the first novel that Mantel wrote, in 1979. (It wasn’t published until 1992.) “A Place of Greater Safety” is a work of historical fiction that entwines the lives of three leaders of the Revolution—Georges Danton, Camille Desmoulins, and Maximilien Robespierre—from their childhoods until their early deaths at the hands of the movement they created. Mantel has recalled of her research, “I had pressed the juice of meaning from every scrap of paper . . . every note on every source,” but the book’s more than seven hundred pages suggest that she hadn’t yet figured out how to balance “history” and “fiction.” Among other things, her characters too often do what characters in historical fiction are, mortifyingly, forced to do, which is to emblematize or give voice to entire currents in history or thought. (“Free thought, free speech—is that too much to ask?”)
What Mantel needed, but hadn’t yet found, was a historical period and a historical figure that could serve, naturally and organically, as vehicles for further exploring the themes she’d always been interested in. Where is the boundary between truth and lies? Where does the power of the state begin and end? Is it possible to break away from the past, and, if so, to what extent? How does the conflict between a modern trust in reason, on the one hand, and primitive ignorance and irrationality, on the other, play out in the lives of individuals and of nations?
As it turned out, she needn’t have strayed to Paris to find an apt topic. For—as the world knows by now—the hero of the work she embarked on after she published “Beyond Black” is Cromwell, the innovative statesman who helped drag England from the Plantagenet Middle Ages into the early modern era, remaking it as a bureaucratic state while battling entrenched class privilege and religious fanaticism: a man who tried to maneuver between ambitious ideals and stubbornly irrational realities and lost his head doing so.
Critics reviewing the first two novels were unanimous in their admiration for how “utterly modern” they felt, the way in which they conjured a “powerful hallucination of presence.” Although Mantel occasionally deploys archaic diction (“gralloched”) or syntax (“no man shall have a fowl in his pot but he pay a levy on it”) to suggest an antique milieu, for the most part the books feel so contemporary because their style, their themes, and their hero are, in fact, manifestly modern. At the office, Cromwell hatches an F.D.R.-like plan to use government spending on public works as a means of elevating the lower classes. (To no avail: “Parliament cannot see how it is the state’s job to create work,” he bitterly reflects.) At home, he’s just another successful middle-aged businessman, fussing over the details of Christmas festivities, lavishing gifts of jewelry on his wife and nieces, and—he was a garmento at one point—guessing the cost of someone’s outfit to the nearest shilling.
By means of deftly interwoven flashbacks, “Wolf Hall” traces the astonishing rise from lowly origins that helps make Cromwell an appealing protagonist for today’s audiences, a hero of glass-ceiling-shattering mobility. The son of a commoner, perhaps a blacksmith or a brewer, he was born probably around 1485, the year in which “Crookback” was defeated at the Battle of Bosworth Field by Henry VIII’s father—the event that ended the centuries-old Plantagenet dynasty and brought the Tudors to power. The teen-age Cromwell left home—some say to escape his violent father—and spent a number of years on the Continent, in Antwerp and Italy, where he learned about banking and trade. This education would help him nudge England away from the chivalric and feudal mindset of the medieval world and into the modern one, which, as Mantel has him think, is run “not from castle walls, but from countinghouses.”
“Wolf Hall” and “Bring Up the Bodies” embraced many of the author’s long-standing preoccupations. Each volume elegantly mirrored the other’s structure, a symmetry that foregrounded the ironies of history and the complexities of Mantel’s Cromwell. In the end, he’s yet another of her characters who’s trying to impose a pattern on chaos.
“I said not to touch it.” Cartoon by Liz Montague Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
The two books have the same basic plot: Cromwell’s ascent to ever-greater positions of power is contrasted with the downward trajectory of a queen against whom he connives. “Wolf Hall” tells the story of the ambitious minister’s scheme to bring down Henry’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon, who, after a quarter century of marriage, hadn’t borne the King a male heir—a crisis known as “the King’s Great Matter.” Catherine was set aside in 1533 in favor of Anne Boleyn, a move that necessitated England’s break from the Roman Church, which had refused to annul the King’s marriage to Catherine. A touching element of that first installment is an evocation of Cromwell’s loyalty to his beloved mentor, Cardinal Wolsey, the Lord Chancellor who fell from Henry’s favor for failing to achieve what his protégé eventually did.
“Bring Up the Bodies” raised the moral stakes and complicated the reader’s perception of Henry’s Lord Privy Seal—one of the many lofty titles that Cromwell eventually earned. Here, Cromwell smoothly engineers the downfall of the woman he’d gone to such efforts to see crowned. (Anne, it turned out, couldn’t produce a male heir, either.) Mantel skillfully sifts the immense and confusing historical record, finding moments that spotlight the moral cynicism that so often serves power. In “Wolf Hall,” the King’s ministers get wind of a rumor that, before she caught Henry’s eye, Anne had “pre-contracted” a marriage to a nobleman named Henry Percy—a quasi-legal arrangement that threatened the validity of her planned marriage to the King; Cromwell is shown bullying Percy into swearing an oath asserting that the pre-contract never existed. In “Bring Up the Bodies,” when Henry needs to get rid of Anne, Cromwell once again tracks down poor Percy, this time in order to intimidate him into retracting that oath—a hypocrisy at which Percy, to his credit, balks: “You made me a liar as I stood before God. Now you want to make me a fool as I stand before men.”
In Mantel’s presentation of Cromwell, this is all in a day’s work: a bookworm who reads Machiavelli, he doesn’t let niggling ethical and moral considerations get in the way of his prince’s grand agenda. The author’s early interest in the law bears fruit in a number of scenes in “Bring Up the Bodies” in which Cromwell is shown putting his legal and rhetorical talents to unsavory use. (Not content to rely on Percy, he and his associates levelled charges of treasonous adultery against the Queen and half a dozen courtiers, including her own brother.) Throughout the trilogy, there’s a chilling pleasure in observing Cromwell as he weaves verbal webs around his hapless prey. “You have no proof,” one of his aristocratic enemies incredulously exclaims during an interrogation. “All you allege is words, words, words.” But words are enough to make heads roll.
The fall of another character provided Mantel with a vehicle for revisiting an old theme. At the time of the split from Catherine and Rome, Henry’s Lord Chancellor was the scholar, theologian, and statesman Sir Thomas More, who was eventually executed for protesting the new religious and political arrangements that Cromwell effected. (The Catholic Church rewarded More with a sainthood.) In the acclaimed 1960 play “A Man for All Seasons”—later an Oscar-winning movie—More’s story was dramatized as a parable about heroic conscience speaking truth to brute power. But Mantel resists this appealing if sentimental interpretation. She makes More a symbol of a doctrinaire pre-modern mentality that baffles the forward-thinking Cromwell. During an imaginary conversation with More, he wonders:
Why does everything you know, and everything you’ve learned, confirm you in what you believed before? Whereas in my case, what I grew up with, and what I thought I believed, is chipped away a little and a little, a fragment then a piece and then a piece more. With every month that passes, the corners are knocked off the certainties of this world: and the next world too.
The next world: something else that Mantel does well in these books is to evoke the urgency of the theological and spiritual controversies of the era, which could well confound readers in a secular age. You never doubt why so many of her characters are willing to burn at the stake. (Her interest in religion and madness comes in handy here.) But, for the pragmatist Cromwell, whom she carefully portrays as being allergic to ideological extremes, such gestures are repugnant. “They deserve each other, these mules that pass for men,” he muses apropos of More and More’s great enemy, the Protestant William Tyndale, whose insistence on translating the Bible into English ended up sending him to the pyre.
There’s something familiar about the cruelly efficient machinery of state intimidation that Cromwell is shown operating so brilliantly. King Henry emerges as an all too recognizable type, a vain and unbalanced autocrat whose dangerously mercurial desires have to be managed by his skillful minister. And Cromwell often puts you in mind not so much of Machiavelli’s cool Realpolitik in the sixteenth century as of Stalin’s warped jurisprudence in the twentieth. “He needs guilty men,” Mantel’s hero thinks, as he hounds Anne’s alleged lovers into confessing. “So he has found men who are guilty. Though perhaps not guilty as charged.”
And yet Mantel slyly works to keep him sympathetic. (She’s not the first historical novelist to fall for her subject; older readers might think of Mary Renault and Alexander the Great.) To the end, Cromwell is presented as a flawed idealist. He is a distant cousin of one of the characters in “A Change of Climate,” who ruefully observes that “we set out with high ideals. . . . The things we wanted have not happened.”
Taken together, those first two volumes function as a dark diptych, a portrait of an increasingly haunted man who finds it ever more difficult to extricate himself from the moral implications of his sophisticated political maneuvering. From other things, too: he occasionally suspects that, as high as he has risen, he may be more like his thuggish father than he likes to admit—another past that proves inescapable.
“Bring Up the Bodies” ends in the summer of 1536, just after Anne’s beheading and Henry’s marriage to his third wife, Jane Seymour. That leaves the short but eventful remainder of Cromwell’s life still to be narrated. He was executed in July, 1540, for treason and heresy, after his enemies among the old nobility succeeded in convincing the ever more paranoid Henry that he was aiming to depose him and take the throne.
“The Mirror and the Light” does cover those years, but the tightly symmetrical trajectories that organized the first two volumes and generated their morals and meanings have gone. This book has to embrace a concatenation of major events, any one of which could be the matter of an entire novel. We get the popular uprising known as the Pilgrimage of Grace; the brief queenship of Jane Seymour, the birth of her son, the future Edward VI, and her death soon afterward; the selection of the German princess Anne of Cleves as Henry’s fourth wife, a match that was urged by Cromwell in part because of his desire to move England closer to the Protestant German states—and whose failure was to doom Cromwell himself. (Some things even he couldn’t manipulate: the King found Anne physically distasteful, and the marriage was annulled.) Henry’s unhappiness with the whole affair was a turning point in his relations with his chief minister, whose fall from power occupies the final section of the novel.