newyorker--2020-10-19--Jennifer Walshe’s Sublime Chaos

Jennifer Walshe’s Sublime Chaos

The Irish composer Jennifer Walshe nails down , better than any artist I know , the antic , raucous , confessional , sordid , semi-sublime texture of modern digitized life .
At the age of forty-six , she has established herself not only as a composer but also as an electrifying vocalist , a sly comedian and storyteller , a fertile maker of videos and visual art .
Yet she comes across less as an all-knowing mastermind than as a free-spirited instigator of happenings that threaten to spiral out of control .
One of the last live events I saw @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , in March , of her 2016 work “ EVERYTHING IS IMPORTANT , ” for vocalist and string quartet , at National Sawdust , in Brooklyn .
It ends with abrasive timbres on violin and viola , mournful sustained fifths on the cello , a chant of “ U.S.A .
!
, ” and shouts of “ Geronimo !
” When I first saw a video of the piece , at the end of 2016 , it struck me as an encapsulation of that year ’ s dark delirium .
Thinking back to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Walshe appeared alongside members of the Mivos Quartet , I hear it as a panicky prophecy of things to come .
Chaos is Walshe ’ s natural habitat ; she seems to revel in the insensate barrage of information that many of us struggle to tune out .
She has written that her work “ ALL THE MANY PEOPLS , ” from 2011 , addresses the following subjects : Walshe ’ s vast , vehement body of work also includes “ set phasers on KILL !
, ” “ XXX_LIVE_NUDE_GIRLS !
!
!
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ PEOPLE O.D .
ON PILLS/AND JUMP FROM THE GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE.
” The COVID-19 pandemic has not slowed her down .
In September , she presented a big new piece , “ Ireland : A Dataset , ” at the National Concert Hall , in Dublin , which meditates on Irish identity , myth , and kitsch .
What gives real heft to Walshe ’ s work is the narrative force that shapes the swirl of material .
Many of her large-scale creations take a decisive , emotionally charged turn in their final @ @ @ @ @ @ @ EVERYTHING IS IMPORTANT ” devolves into a funereal apocalypse ; automatic-weapons fire cuts short the zany stream of consciousness of “ ALL THE MANY PEOPLS ” ; in “ Ireland : A Dataset , ” absurdist skits give way to an atmosphere of remembrance and grief .
Walshe ’ s revelation of urgency and purpose is a good definition of what composers do , in whatever period and style : they lead us through labyrinths of sound , giving us the exhilaration of finding an exit , no matter how dark the terminus @ @ @ @ @ @ @ work in 2009 , when I received in the mail two CDs claiming to present scores by the avant-garde Irish collective Grúpat .
The group included a sculptor and a sound artist named Turf Boon , the inventor of an instrument called the Kuscheltiermarimbaphon , an array of stuffed animals to be struck with mallets , and the Dowager Marchylove , a drag artist whose compositions included “ Oh !
Tom Cruise !
” and “ The Wasistas of Thereswhere.
” All of them turned out to be alter egos of Walshe ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Grúpat Web site suggest satirical intent— “ Detleva Verens works to explore the spatialization of sound and the sonorousness of space ” —yet the music itself has a quietly entrancing aura , marked by Walshe ’ s fondness for drone-based minimalism .
One of her early collaborators was the late composer and sound artist Tony Conrad , a magician of hypnotically seething textures .
In 2015 , Walshe unveiled a sprawling archival project titled “ Aisteach : Historical Documents of the Irish Avant-Garde.
” ( Aisteach is Irish for “ strange ” or @ @ @ @ @ @ @ likes of the Guinness Dadaists , the Kilkenny Engagists , and the outsider artist Chancey Briggs , who launched “ a series of inevitably doomed attempts to put together Ireland ’ s first gay Brechtian cabaret showband in the 1960s.
” All this was fiction as well : Walshe and a crew of co-conspirators had invented not only compositions but also films , art works , sketches , and critical reviews .
“ Aisteach ” has been mounted several times as a gallery exhibition , and can also be experienced as a richly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ intent behind Walshe ’ s games and gags .
She has said , “ One thing that ‘ Aisteach ’ tries to talk about is : Who gets to curate ?
Who gets to choose what an artistic canon is and why ?
” The procession of female and radical-queer artists who make up “ Aisteach ” would hardly have been able to participate in Irish artistic life had they actually existed .
Walshe has contrived her own heritage , one that more closely resembles her own milieu .
This longing for a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a dream for the future .
An artist so attuned to virtual realms might have been expected to thrive in the online regimen that the pandemic has forced on the performing arts .
When I called Walshe at her studio , in London , though , she told me that she disliked streaming concerts and desperately missed the live arena .
Only reluctantly had she acceded to the reality that “ Ireland : A Dataset , ” which she began assembling at the beginning of 2020 , would have to unfold without a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ been able to spend an extended rehearsal period with the principal performers : members of the experimental vocal group Tonnta and the saxophonist Nick Roth .
The National Concert Hall also placed a sophisticated eight-camera setup at her disposal .
“ Ireland ” unfolds for most of its hour-long duration as a gleeful deconstruction of national cultural clichés .
The opening section exposes the fabrications that went into Robert J. Flaherty ’ s famous 1934 documentary , “ Man of Aran.
” Later , a pair of airheaded talk-show hosts demonstrate how to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Irishman , and a pair of airheaded Irish-American tourists seek magical emanations from ancient sites .
The skits veer into abrupt non sequiturs , recalling the surrealist comedy of Monty Python and Vic Reeves .
As the members of Tonnta speak and sing , they manipulate noisemaking devices , in the manner of an old-time radio play .
The score also includes a series of precisely notated musical interludes , which Walshe generated by feeding a motley array of audio samples—Enya , the folk band Dubliners , “ Riverdance , ” melismatic sean-nós @ @ @ @ @ @ @ results are at once nonsensical and oddly charming : Walshe seems to be suggesting that randomization can restore mystery to traditional material .
She applies similar A.I .
procedures on a somewhat confounding recent album , “ A Late Anthology of Early Music , Vol .
1 : Ancient to Renaissance , ” which reconfigures composers from Hildegard von Bingen to Palestrina .
The final segment of “ Ireland , ” different in tone not only from the rest of the piece but also from most of Walshe ’ s savagely anarchic output @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Walshe made with her mother to Malin Head , the northernmost tip of Ireland , in 2019 .
Looking down from the cliffs , the two saw a man clambering over the rocks below , and wondered whether he was in danger or trying to commit suicide .
Eventually , the man climbed to safety .
Walshe wove the memory of that “ white speck ” into a story about a sickly child who wants to see locations where scenes from “ Game of Thrones ” and the recent “ Star Wars ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , “ The child hadn ’ t believed that the alien lands were his land .
That these other worlds were here , in his home.
” The music , too , changes character : electronic tones gather into sustained chords and clusters , with the singers tracing fragmentary , ethereal melodies against them .
The sudden transformation of mood is heart-catching , and it elaborates one of Walshe ’ s favorite themes .
Even as she dismantles institutionalized Irishness , she remains fond of local legends : runes , standing stones , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ When I was younger , I wanted to run away from Irish identity , which at times can be so narrow and confining and politically problematic .
But it ’ s part of me , and it belongs to everyone here .
So I thought of a kid who has an intense relationship with Irish places because of the movies , which other people might say were a corruption of the precious aura .
We don ’ t get to decide that one experience is more authentic and privileged than another .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ own folklore.
” ♦

The Irish composer Jennifer Walshe nails down, better than any artist I know, the antic, raucous, confessional, sordid, semi-sublime texture of modern digitized life. At the age of forty-six, she has established herself not only as a composer but also as an electrifying vocalist, a sly comedian and storyteller, a fertile maker of videos and visual art. Yet she comes across less as an all-knowing mastermind than as a free-spirited instigator of happenings that threaten to spiral out of control. One of the last live events I saw before the pandemic shutdown was a performance, in March, of her 2016 work “EVERYTHING IS IMPORTANT,” for vocalist and string quartet, at National Sawdust, in Brooklyn. It ends with abrasive timbres on violin and viola, mournful sustained fifths on the cello, a chant of “U.S.A.!,” and shouts of “Geronimo!” When I first saw a video of the piece, at the end of 2016, it struck me as an encapsulation of that year’s dark delirium. Thinking back to the event in March, at which Walshe appeared alongside members of the Mivos Quartet, I hear it as a panicky prophecy of things to come.
Chaos is Walshe’s natural habitat; she seems to revel in the insensate barrage of information that many of us struggle to tune out. She has written that her work “ALL THE MANY PEOPLS,” from 2011, addresses the following subjects:
Lojban, a language constructed entirely according to the rules of predicate logic; the cast of Lohengrin; certain sections from Watt by Samuel Beckett constituting the first examples of process composition; The Public Enemy (1931) starring James Cagney; KRS-One; U.S. and British soldiers making cell-phone videos of themselves blowing things up and uploading the videos to YouTube; Even Dwarfs Started Small; Amazon.com message boards about vampire physiology; Dashboard Confessional; sferics; conspiracy theorist Francis E. Dec; detritus from video game voice-overs; Jackie Stallone; August Strindberg’s Inferno; Cymbalta Discontinuation Syndrome; a Hibernian version of “The Signifying Monkey” as response to the 19th century practice of describing/depicting the Irish as “simian”/apes; The Typing of the Dead; cult Irish martial arts film Fatal Deviation; the collective unconscious as evidenced by Google Autocomplete; Courage Wolf; 4Chan.
Walshe’s vast, vehement body of work also includes “set phasers on KILL!,” “XXX_LIVE_NUDE_GIRLS!!!,” and “THIS IS WHY PEOPLE O.D. ON PILLS/AND JUMP FROM THE GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE.” The COVID-19 pandemic has not slowed her down. In September, she presented a big new piece, “Ireland: A Dataset,” at the National Concert Hall, in Dublin, which meditates on Irish identity, myth, and kitsch.
What gives real heft to Walshe’s work is the narrative force that shapes the swirl of material. Many of her large-scale creations take a decisive, emotionally charged turn in their final minutes. The social-media cacophony of “EVERYTHING IS IMPORTANT” devolves into a funereal apocalypse; automatic-weapons fire cuts short the zany stream of consciousness of “ALL THE MANY PEOPLS”; in “Ireland: A Dataset,” absurdist skits give way to an atmosphere of remembrance and grief. Walshe’s revelation of urgency and purpose is a good definition of what composers do, in whatever period and style: they lead us through labyrinths of sound, giving us the exhilaration of finding an exit, no matter how dark the terminus.
Walshe was born in Dublin in 1974. Her parents, who came from working-class backgrounds and had passionate artistic interests, encouraged their children’s pursuits. Walshe played trumpet in Irish youth orchestras, then turned toward composition while studying at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Pursuing a doctorate at Northwestern University, in Chicago, she delved into American experimental traditions, discovering such unclassifiable composer-performers as Laurie Anderson and Diamanda Galas. You can detect traces of both artists in Walshe’s sensibility: Anderson’s deadpan irony, Galas’s shamanistic fury. Walshe never formally studied singing, but her voice has proved to be a formidable and flexible instrument: she emits pure tones and also raw noise; she slips into various popular styles; she assumes various accents, from Irish bard to California surfer girl.
I first encountered Walshe’s work in 2009, when I received in the mail two CDs claiming to present scores by the avant-garde Irish collective Grúpat. The group included a sculptor and a sound artist named Turf Boon, the inventor of an instrument called the Kuscheltiermarimbaphon, an array of stuffed animals to be struck with mallets, and the Dowager Marchylove, a drag artist whose compositions included “Oh! Tom Cruise!” and “The Wasistas of Thereswhere.” All of them turned out to be alter egos of Walshe’s. The jargon-ridden biographies on the Grúpat Web site suggest satirical intent—“Detleva Verens works to explore the spatialization of sound and the sonorousness of space”—yet the music itself has a quietly entrancing aura, marked by Walshe’s fondness for drone-based minimalism. One of her early collaborators was the late composer and sound artist Tony Conrad, a magician of hypnotically seething textures.
In 2015, Walshe unveiled a sprawling archival project titled “Aisteach: Historical Documents of the Irish Avant-Garde.” (Aisteach is Irish for “strange” or “queer.”) It honored the likes of the Guinness Dadaists, the Kilkenny Engagists, and the outsider artist Chancey Briggs, who launched “a series of inevitably doomed attempts to put together Ireland’s first gay Brechtian cabaret showband in the 1960s.” All this was fiction as well: Walshe and a crew of co-conspirators had invented not only compositions but also films, art works, sketches, and critical reviews. “Aisteach” has been mounted several times as a gallery exhibition, and can also be experienced as a richly stocked Web site.
There is serious intent behind Walshe’s games and gags. She has said, “One thing that ‘Aisteach’ tries to talk about is: Who gets to curate? Who gets to choose what an artistic canon is and why?” The procession of female and radical-queer artists who make up “Aisteach” would hardly have been able to participate in Irish artistic life had they actually existed. Walshe has contrived her own heritage, one that more closely resembles her own milieu. This longing for a different past becomes, by extension, a dream for the future.
An artist so attuned to virtual realms might have been expected to thrive in the online regimen that the pandemic has forced on the performing arts. When I called Walshe at her studio, in London, though, she told me that she disliked streaming concerts and desperately missed the live arena. Only reluctantly had she acceded to the reality that “Ireland: A Dataset,” which she began assembling at the beginning of 2020, would have to unfold without a live audience. Still, she had been able to spend an extended rehearsal period with the principal performers: members of the experimental vocal group Tonnta and the saxophonist Nick Roth. The National Concert Hall also placed a sophisticated eight-camera setup at her disposal.
“Ireland” unfolds for most of its hour-long duration as a gleeful deconstruction of national cultural clichés. The opening section exposes the fabrications that went into Robert J. Flaherty’s famous 1934 documentary, “Man of Aran.” Later, a pair of airheaded talk-show hosts demonstrate how to make yourself up as a bewhiskered stage Irishman, and a pair of airheaded Irish-American tourists seek magical emanations from ancient sites. The skits veer into abrupt non sequiturs, recalling the surrealist comedy of Monty Python and Vic Reeves. As the members of Tonnta speak and sing, they manipulate noisemaking devices, in the manner of an old-time radio play.
The score also includes a series of precisely notated musical interludes, which Walshe generated by feeding a motley array of audio samples—Enya, the folk band Dubliners, “Riverdance,” melismatic sean-nós singing—into an artificial-intelligence composing program. The results are at once nonsensical and oddly charming: Walshe seems to be suggesting that randomization can restore mystery to traditional material. She applies similar A.I. procedures on a somewhat confounding recent album, “A Late Anthology of Early Music, Vol. 1: Ancient to Renaissance,” which reconfigures composers from Hildegard von Bingen to Palestrina.
The final segment of “Ireland,” different in tone not only from the rest of the piece but also from most of Walshe’s savagely anarchic output, is inspired by a visit that Walshe made with her mother to Malin Head, the northernmost tip of Ireland, in 2019. Looking down from the cliffs, the two saw a man clambering over the rocks below, and wondered whether he was in danger or trying to commit suicide. Eventually, the man climbed to safety. Walshe wove the memory of that “white speck” into a story about a sickly child who wants to see locations where scenes from “Game of Thrones” and the recent “Star Wars” films were shot. A voice-over says, “The child hadn’t believed that the alien lands were his land. That these other worlds were here, in his home.” The music, too, changes character: electronic tones gather into sustained chords and clusters, with the singers tracing fragmentary, ethereal melodies against them.
The sudden transformation of mood is heart-catching, and it elaborates one of Walshe’s favorite themes. Even as she dismantles institutionalized Irishness, she remains fond of local legends: runes, standing stones, holy wells. She told me, “When I was younger, I wanted to run away from Irish identity, which at times can be so narrow and confining and politically problematic. But it’s part of me, and it belongs to everyone here. So I thought of a kid who has an intense relationship with Irish places because of the movies, which other people might say were a corruption of the precious aura. We don’t get to decide that one experience is more authentic and privileged than another. We should be free to make our own folklore.” ♦


newyorker--2020-10-19--“Nettle,” by Joy Williams

“Nettle,” by Joy Williams

“ What does she mean ?
” he asked the child beside him .
They were all sitting in their chairs .
On his other side was a window looking out on .
.
.
He could never remember what it was looking out on .
“ I wish she were pretty , ” the child said .
“ Shouldn ’ t she be pretty ?
” He told his mother what Miss Rita had said about the one who was destined to be lost .
“ That happens to be from the Bible , ” his mother said .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ Bible and repeat them to young children , or to anyone , for that matter , they ’ re nuts .
Don ’ t pay any attention to her.
” His mother frowned .
“ Of course , you won ’ t be going back there .
There are other schools , many schools .
Maybe when you ’ re older you can even go away to the school Daddy went to .
He really enjoyed it there.
” “ Maybe when I ’ m older , ” he said .
Once , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his mother had gone to Florida .
They went out in a fishing boat to the glittering waters of the great Gulf Stream .
His mother threw a half-smoked cigarette into the water as she reeled in a brightly colored fish that would fade to gray in moments .
“ It was a dolphin , ” he said .
His mother said , “ I have never fished in my life .
I would never fish .
They call them dolphins but they ’ re not the mammals .
They ’ re pretty @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sandwiches .
Use them in sandwiches.
” “ Good , ” she said .
“ It was a foolish thing to do , going off to Florida—Florida , of all places.
” His mother liked beautiful cars .
Before she met his father ( which was when he appeared as well , he thought , but before he was visible ) , she had one from the sixties that she cherished—a Jaguar .
She still had the manual for it , a large book with a hard black cover .
Everything about the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ detail—he particularly liked the wiring diagrams—but there was no picture of the actual car .
“ After I met your father , we traded it in for something sensible.
” “ That was my car , ” his father said .
“ My grandmother willed it to me .
I wrecked it .
Still feel awful about it .
It pains me to remember.
” “ You ’ re the spitting image of your father , ” someone said once , a friend of his mother ’ s .
He found the phrase @ @ @ @ @ @ @ repellent , ” his mother said .
When he visited his father in his room , they would sometimes listen to music .
It was the same bit of music again and again .
“ This is so lovely , ” his father said .
“ It ’ s somewhat incoherent , but that ’ s what keeps it from being too much to bear.
” “ Do you know what I mean by incoherent ?
” “ That ’ s all right , ” his father said .
His father was sitting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , his dark hair combed severely back .
The dogs weren ’ t permitted in the room anymore .
“ She worries too much , ” he said , feeling wise .
He wasn ’ t sure where to sit .
There was a window seat he ’ d always liked , with a faded cushion .
“ What happened to the tree ?
” he said .
“ They took that down years ago , ” his father said .
“ They lied .
Even the babe in arms lied .
They @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to this house was because of the tree , and then they took it down.
” The tree not being there troubled him .
With some effort , he brought it back .
“ Draw the curtain , will you , Willie .
Don ’ t think about it.
” He began telling his father about a story he ’ d read in English class .
“ When it was my turn for thoughts , I said I wouldn ’ t have the dog there .
The dog would be at home .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ she ’ d be told not to by the father .
They would shoot only as many ducks as they needed for Christmas dinner , not a whole boatload .
They would be merciful that way with the ducks .
It was terrible that they killed so many .
They killed ninety-two ducks .
They could and they did , instead of they could have and they didn ’ t .
That would be better .
The sea , the water , wasn ’ t punishing them but showed them no mercy , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ did , every day , what it had to do .
Near the end , that would be the same .
The father wouldn ’ t want to frighten the boys.
” “ Good Lord , they were teaching that story when I was there.
” “ They don ’ t teach it .
They assign it and then you present your thoughts.
” “ Rewrite the whole damn thing , Willie .
That ’ s my advice .
Everything ’ s got to be rewritten.
” “ I like that we go @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ Well , I ’ m quite a bit ahead of you , actually .
Or behind .
You could say that , too.
” He was not happy at the school , but his performance there was acceptable .
He was selected for various teams and given the equipment and instruction that enabled him to participate on those teams .
He was attracted to a boy with a white blaze in his hair , but so was everyone else .
The boy ignored him .
He had a crush on the headmaster @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was several years older .
Her face was broad and like a mask .
He wished that his own face could be like a mask .
He wondered if that was still possible .
With every moment , something was lost to him , to everyone , forever .
She wore bright-red , uneven lipstick and was known to be intelligent and a runner .
She ran daily for miles , in all weather .
Once , he asked if he could accompany her , run beside her , perhaps after supper , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and she laughed at him .
“ You need to have your meds adjusted , ” she said , making a small twisting motion with her hand .
Later ( though perhaps he had only imagined this ) , he told her that she reminded him of Miss Rita .
“ That ’ s funny , because I know Miss Rita well , ” she said .
Coldness ran through him .
“ What , she doesn ’ t like you or something ?
” She laughed again .
“ She liked you @ @ @ @ @ @ @ not believe in fate .
“ Then what do you call what happens ?
” he asked her .
Somewhere there was a photograph of Miss Rita ’ s class .
She was not in it—it showed only the children .
Sometimes he convinced himself that she had taken the picture .
Other times he was equally certain that it had been taken by a professional photographer .
Parents would pay for such photographs and believe they could remember much more than they actually did about the past .
If a professional had @ @ @ @ @ @ @ had left the room .
( Miss Rita almost never left the room . )
He showed it to his father .
“ Are you in this one , Willie ?
Don ’ t think I ’ ve seen this .
Must have , though , right ?
” “ Here , right ?
Why does your mother cut your hair so short ?
” “ Can ’ t outgrow them .
Any barber will tell you that .
What ’ s that in the cage .
.
.
Is that a cage @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bookcase .
A glass bookcase with doors .
It belongs to Miss Rita.
” “ Do you remember once , on my birthday , you asked what I wanted and I said a bodyguard ?
” “ I do remember that , Willie .
That was the year you got sick just before your birthday and we had to come and get you from school.
” “ It was just you , Daddy .
It was just you who came .
We drove back in the snow.
” “ It was a genuine @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his father said .
“ You ’ re right , I made your mother stay at home .
”

His teacher informed the class that her name was Miss Rita and they must always address her as such. She assured them that she would be guarding them all and that not one of them would be lost, except the one who was destined to be lost.
“What does she mean?” he asked the child beside him. They were all sitting in their chairs. On his other side was a window looking out on . . . He could never remember what it was looking out on.
“I wish she were pretty,” the child said. “Shouldn’t she be pretty?”
He told his mother what Miss Rita had said about the one who was destined to be lost.
“That happens to be from the Bible,” his mother said. “When people take words from the Bible and repeat them to young children, or to anyone, for that matter, they’re nuts. Don’t pay any attention to her.” His mother frowned. “Of course, you won’t be going back there. There are other schools, many schools. Maybe when you’re older you can even go away to the school Daddy went to. He really enjoyed it there.”
“Maybe when I’m older,” he said.
Once, when he was older, he and his mother had gone to Florida. They went out in a fishing boat to the glittering waters of the great Gulf Stream. His mother threw a half-smoked cigarette into the water as she reeled in a brightly colored fish that would fade to gray in moments.
“It was a dolphin,” he said.
His mother said, “I have never fished in my life. I would never fish. They call them dolphins but they’re not the mammals. They’re pretty, though. People put them in sandwiches. Use them in sandwiches.”
“I can’t remember Florida very well,” he admitted.
“Good,” she said. “It was a foolish thing to do, going off to Florida—Florida, of all places.”
His mother liked beautiful cars. Before she met his father (which was when he appeared as well, he thought, but before he was visible), she had one from the sixties that she cherished—a Jaguar. She still had the manual for it, a large book with a hard black cover. Everything about the car was described and illustrated in great detail—he particularly liked the wiring diagrams—but there was no picture of the actual car.
“Where is it?” he asked.
“After I met your father, we traded it in for something sensible.”
“That was my car,” his father said. “My grandmother willed it to me. I wrecked it. Still feel awful about it. It pains me to remember.”
“You’re the spitting image of your father,” someone said once, a friend of his mother’s. He found the phrase repellent.
“Well, it is repellent,” his mother said.
When he visited his father in his room, they would sometimes listen to music. It was the same bit of music again and again.
“This is so lovely,” his father said. “It’s somewhat incoherent, but that’s what keeps it from being too much to bear.”
He nodded.
“Do you know what I mean by incoherent?”
“Not really,” he said.
“That’s all right,” his father said.
•
His father was sitting up in bed wearing a black bathrobe, his dark hair combed severely back. The dogs weren’t permitted in the room anymore.
“Your mother worries,” his father said.
“She worries too much,” he said, feeling wise. He wasn’t sure where to sit. There was a window seat he’d always liked, with a faded cushion. “What happened to the tree?” he said.
“They took that down years ago,” his father said. “They lied. Even the babe in arms lied. They said the reason they were so drawn to this house was because of the tree, and then they took it down.”
The tree not being there troubled him. With some effort, he brought it back.
“Draw the curtain, will you, Willie. Don’t think about it.”
He began telling his father about a story he’d read in English class. “When it was my turn for thoughts, I said I wouldn’t have the dog there. The dog would be at home. She’d want to go but she’d be told not to by the father. They would shoot only as many ducks as they needed for Christmas dinner, not a whole boatload. They would be merciful that way with the ducks. It was terrible that they killed so many. They killed ninety-two ducks. They could and they did, instead of they could have and they didn’t. That would be better. The sea, the water, wasn’t punishing them but showed them no mercy, either. It did what it always did, every day, what it had to do. Near the end, that would be the same. The father wouldn’t want to frighten the boys.”
“Good Lord, they were teaching that story when I was there.”
“They don’t teach it. They assign it and then you present your thoughts.”
“Rewrite the whole damn thing, Willie. That’s my advice. Everything’s got to be rewritten.”
“I like that we go to the same school, Daddy.”
“Well, I’m quite a bit ahead of you, actually. Or behind. You could say that, too.”
He was not happy at the school, but his performance there was acceptable. He was selected for various teams and given the equipment and instruction that enabled him to participate on those teams. He was attracted to a boy with a white blaze in his hair, but so was everyone else. The boy ignored him.
He had a crush on the headmaster’s daughter as well. She was several years older. Her face was broad and like a mask. He wished that his own face could be like a mask. He wondered if that was still possible. With every moment, something was lost to him, to everyone, forever. She wore bright-red, uneven lipstick and was known to be intelligent and a runner. She ran daily for miles, in all weather. Once, he asked if he could accompany her, run beside her, perhaps after supper, after he had finished his assignments, and she laughed at him.
“You need to have your meds adjusted,” she said, making a small twisting motion with her hand. Later (though perhaps he had only imagined this), he told her that she reminded him of Miss Rita.


newyorker--2020-10-19--Who Isn’t a Sucker for a Foldout?

Who Isn’t a Sucker for a Foldout?

The book business is one of the few that the pandemic has helped , and last week Lisa Lucas , who runs the National Book Awards , announced the competition ’ s 2020 finalists .
Just before lockdown , earlier this year , Lucas participated in a more niche contest .
In March , she was one of three jurors who met one morning at Columbia University to select the fifty best-designed books of 2019 , for the 50 Books / 50 Covers competition , sponsored by AIGA , a professional association for design .
Joining her were Hilary Greenbaum @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Silas Munro , the founder of the design studio Polymode .
The three were selected by Michael Bierut , a partner and designer at Pentagram , who has dreamed up visual languages ( fonts , logos ) for Saks , the Times , the New York Jets , and Hillary Clinton .
Before the judging session , Bierut chatted about his experience as a former juror .
“ You ’ re not even comparing apples and oranges , ” he said .
“ It ’ s apples and oranges , kumquats , bananas @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” He talked about his work with Justin Timberlake on “ Hindsight , ” the singer ’ s “ experiential ” autobiography , from 2018 .
“ It was as pure an experience in translating a person ’ s personality into a book as I ’ ve had , ” he said .
A high point was brainstorming the section for one of the singer ’ s “ Saturday Night Live ” appearances .
“ He was in a video called , ah , ‘ Dick in a Box.
’ And there ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ like , the three-step process by which you actually .
.
.
” He trailed off .
“ We decided to format the pages in the style of assembly instructions for , like , an IKEA dresser.
” The Timberlake spread illustrates the twin tasks a designer often faces .
“ You ’ re usually either defamiliarizing the familiar or making the unfamiliar seem inviting , ” Bierut explained .
Book designers have a mandate : serve the reader , honor the author .
“ Don ’ t impose a bunch of showy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
He talked about being preoccupied by what a “ miracle ” reading is : “ The idea that we learn how to interpret these marks that have an arbitrarily assigned meaning , corresponding phonetically to sounds in English .
And , somehow , they line up into words , and sentences—and paragraphs and chapters and books !
” Upstairs , the jurors had already made first-round eliminations .
“ First you think , All books are beautiful !
I want them all !
” Lucas said .
“ Then you see the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ thousand times and realize it ’ s just a trend.
” The jurors agreed that a culture of encountering books online , removed from their physicality , was affecting book design .
“ One trend we ’ ve been seeing a lot of is overscale typography , ” Munro said .
“ These books are designed to be seen on Instagram.
” “ The type looks too big up close , ” Greenbaum added .
“ But it translates perfectly to social media.
” “ And then the cover ’ s too stiff @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Munro said .
“ You realize someone was approving this on an iPad.
” “ Art can get away with things that design can ’ t , ” Lucas said .
Her great-uncle was Chuck Harrison , the first Black executive at Sears , Roebuck and the designer of both the View-Master toy and the plastic garbage can .
“ What I love about my uncle ’ s design is that it ’ s so inclusive , ” she said .
“ That stuff was literally for everyone.
” Munro said that he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and the subtle ways in which aesthetic value can be encoded .
“ I ’ m in the middle of decolonizing the fuck out of the design curriculum , ” he said .
He teaches a workshop called “ Throwing the Bauhaus Under the Bus.
” “ We ’ re really questioning these lineages of European modernism , this perception that there ’ s one type of design that can or should speak to everyone— ” “ Well , ” Lucas said , “ ‘ Everyone ’ meant something very specific.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” Lucas said , “ and I can recognize the highbrow , contemporary cues : the hot-pink stripe , very simple and clean .
And I say , ‘ Ooh , that ’ s nice , ’ but if you ’ re growing up with a different set of cultural references that ’ s not necessarily what ’ s going to speak to you.
” Greenbaum said , “ Good design reaches beyond that audience and wonders , Who else ?
” Piles of books blanketed a long table in the judging @ @ @ @ @ @ @ focus , sounds of turning pages and muted appreciation ( “ Sucker for a foldout , ” “ Slee-e-e-k ” ) seemed to deepen the hush .
Lucas admired a guide to wine for its bright , friendly graphics .
“ This design doesn ’ t condescend , but it also doesn ’ t assume , ” she said .
Munro praised a slender biography that threaded interviews between expository passages .
“ It does unusual things with the placement of the headings , ” he said .
“ The reading order feels @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , it ’ s Jacob Lawrence !
” Greenbaum called , looking across the table at a book about the American painter .
“ I think he might have been , ” Greenbaum said .
“ Yeah , ” Lucas said , studying the cover .
“ Strong possibility this guy was good-looking.
” “ Oh , handsome !
” Munro said .
“ I thought you said he was cancelled.
” ♦

The book business is one of the few that the pandemic has helped, and last week Lisa Lucas, who runs the National Book Awards, announced the competition’s 2020 finalists. Just before lockdown, earlier this year, Lucas participated in a more niche contest. In March, she was one of three jurors who met one morning at Columbia University to select the fifty best-designed books of 2019, for the 50 Books / 50 Covers competition, sponsored by AIGA, a professional association for design. Joining her were Hilary Greenbaum, from the Whitney Museum, and Silas Munro, the founder of the design studio Polymode. The three were selected by Michael Bierut, a partner and designer at Pentagram, who has dreamed up visual languages (fonts, logos) for Saks, the Times, the New York Jets, and Hillary Clinton.
Before the judging session, Bierut chatted about his experience as a former juror. “You’re not even comparing apples and oranges,” he said. “It’s apples and oranges, kumquats, bananas, and, occasionally, an armchair.” He talked about his work with Justin Timberlake on “Hindsight,” the singer’s “experiential” autobiography, from 2018. “It was as pure an experience in translating a person’s personality into a book as I’ve had,” he said. A high point was brainstorming the section for one of the singer’s “Saturday Night Live” appearances. “He was in a video called, ah, ‘Dick in a Box.’ And there’s a verse that’s, like, the three-step process by which you actually . . . ” He trailed off. “We decided to format the pages in the style of assembly instructions for, like, an IKEA dresser.”
The Timberlake spread illustrates the twin tasks a designer often faces. “You’re usually either defamiliarizing the familiar or making the unfamiliar seem inviting,” Bierut explained. Book designers have a mandate: serve the reader, honor the author. “Don’t impose a bunch of showy, distracting moves,” he said. He talked about being preoccupied by what a “miracle” reading is: “The idea that we learn how to interpret these marks that have an arbitrarily assigned meaning, corresponding phonetically to sounds in English. And, somehow, they line up into words, and sentences—and paragraphs and chapters and books!”
Upstairs, the jurors had already made first-round eliminations. “First you think, All books are beautiful! I want them all!” Lucas said. “Then you see the thing you thought was so cute fifty thousand times and realize it’s just a trend.”
“Glitter and metallics,” Munro added.
“Neon.”
“Exposed binding.”
“Iridescent foil. Woo-hoo.”
The jurors agreed that a culture of encountering books online, removed from their physicality, was affecting book design. “One trend we’ve been seeing a lot of is overscale typography,” Munro said. “These books are designed to be seen on Instagram.”
“The type looks too big up close,” Greenbaum added. “But it translates perfectly to social media.”
“And then the cover’s too stiff. There are material things,” Munro said. “You realize someone was approving this on an iPad.”
“Art can get away with things that design can’t,” Lucas said. Her great-uncle was Chuck Harrison, the first Black executive at Sears, Roebuck and the designer of both the View-Master toy and the plastic garbage can. “What I love about my uncle’s design is that it’s so inclusive,” she said. “That stuff was literally for everyone.”
Munro said that he often talks to his students about access, and the subtle ways in which aesthetic value can be encoded. “I’m in the middle of decolonizing the fuck out of the design curriculum,” he said. He teaches a workshop called “Throwing the Bauhaus Under the Bus.” “We’re really questioning these lineages of European modernism, this perception that there’s one type of design that can or should speak to everyone—”
“Well,” Lucas said, “ ‘Everyone’ meant something very specific.”
“It meant German, French, and English,” Munro said.
“I walk into a Williamsburg bookstore,” Lucas said, “and I can recognize the highbrow, contemporary cues: the hot-pink stripe, very simple and clean. And I say, ‘Ooh, that’s nice,’ but if you’re growing up with a different set of cultural references that’s not necessarily what’s going to speak to you.”
Greenbaum said, “Good design reaches beyond that audience and wonders, Who else?”
Piles of books blanketed a long table in the judging room. As the jurors found their focus, sounds of turning pages and muted appreciation (“Sucker for a foldout,” “Slee-e-e-k”) seemed to deepen the hush. Lucas admired a guide to wine for its bright, friendly graphics. “This design doesn’t condescend, but it also doesn’t assume,” she said. Munro praised a slender biography that threaded interviews between expository passages. “It does unusual things with the placement of the headings,” he said. “The reading order feels both organized and disrupted.”
“Hey, it’s Jacob Lawrence!” Greenbaum called, looking across the table at a book about the American painter.
Lucas peered over Greenbaum’s shoulder. “Was he handsome?”
“I think he might have been,” Greenbaum said.
Munro groaned. “By who?”
“Yeah,” Lucas said, studying the cover. “Strong possibility this guy was good-looking.”
“Oh, handsome!” Munro said. “I thought you said he was cancelled.” ♦


newyorker--2020-10-19--“Instructions for Living,” by Erika L. Sánchez

It was the way summer hunted me : a sequence of instructions in the folds of a flower .
How do I explain the hatred of the sun , the terrible wonder of being alive ?
Fuck the fucking birds .
I looked to the sky to join the storms .
I couldn ’ t have imagined you , swift as the lightning I traced with my finger , a song scratched into a back .
I ached with the not-knowing .
On Mother ’ s Day I knelt and begged for something to help me .
Is that God @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Sun ” in the psych ward and everyone watched as I shook .
This is not true , I said .
The sun is already here .
Hope was slight as an eyelash .
How clean the sky— a cloud that posed as a spine .
There was no container for my despair .
In your face I saw a sequence of instructions .
When you touched me , I named the future : Be here .
Stay living .
I was running once .
Did I tell you how I wept like @ @ @ @ @ @ @ life bound into tricks .
The past is the past is the past .
An idea grown in the name of the obvious .
How a beloved becomes a stranger and a stranger becomes a beloved .
I can hate what is true , the thick beauty of it .
I am always in the school of the dead : a bracket , an aside , a reordering .
I tell you language is always a failure , a string waiting to be plucked .
A song you love and can not resolve @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rupture and rapture ?
Not even salt .

Audio: Read by the author.
It was the way summer hunted me:
a sequence of instructions
in the folds of a flower.
How do I explain the hatred of the sun,
the terrible wonder of being alive?
Fuck the fucking birds. I looked
to the sky to join the storms. I couldn’t
have imagined you, swift as the lightning
I traced with my finger, a song scratched
into a back. I ached with the not-knowing.
On Mother’s Day I knelt and begged
for something to help me. Is that God?
I played “Here Comes the Sun”
in the psych ward and everyone
watched as I shook. This
is not true, I said. The sun
is already here. Hope was slight
as an eyelash. How clean the sky—
a cloud that posed as a spine.
There was no container
for my despair. In your face I saw
a sequence of instructions.
When you touched me, I named
the future: Be here. Stay living.
I was running once. Did I tell you
how I wept like that? I saw a fox—
my life bound into tricks. The past
is the past is the past. An idea grown
in the name of the obvious. How
a beloved becomes a stranger
and a stranger becomes a beloved.
I can hate what is true, the thick beauty
of it. I am always in the school of the dead:
a bracket, an aside, a reordering.
I tell you language is always a failure,
a string waiting to be plucked. A song
you love and cannot resolve.
What’s the difference between
rupture and rapture? Not even salt.


newyorker--2020-10-19--“Letter,” by Tadeusz Dąbrowski

“Letter,” by Tadeusz Dąbrowski

Yesterday I sent you a letter .
And today on the phone you tell me you are pregnant .
I @ @ @ @ @ you greet me at the airport , you ’ re even lovelier than in my @ @ @ @ @ its way to you .
We build a house , our child grows , our @ @ @ @ @ few years of sweat and tears , in which we prudently pickle cabbage and gherkins @ @ @ @ @ In the coloring book of our life there are fewer and fewer blank spaces , @ @ @ @ @ we try to be precise , but even so we go over the lines .
@ @ @ @ @ matters , and our paths are ever deeper , they start to look like tunnels @ @ @ @ @ s on its way to you .
You ’ ll open it when it suits @ @ @

Audio: Read by the author.
Yesterday I sent you a letter. And today on the phone
you tell me you are pregnant. I pack up and return,
you greet me at the airport, you’re even lovelier than
in my letter that’s on its way to you. We build
a house, our child grows, our parents shrink,
then a few years of sweat and tears, in which we prudently
pickle cabbage and gherkins for the ever-colder days.
In the coloring book of our life there are fewer and fewer
blank spaces, the crayons grow shorter, we try to be precise,
but even so we go over the lines. We busy ourselves
with everyday matters, and our paths are ever
deeper, they start to look like tunnels. Meanwhile
my letter’s on its way to you. You’ll open it when
it suits you best.


newyorker--2020-10-19--Vaccines I’m Working On

Vaccines I’m Working On

Blues Vaccine : Gives you a small dose of the blues , so that later , when your woman leaves you , you wish her well and ask if she needs some gas money .
Venom Vaccine : Allows you to impress your friends on camping trips by letting rattlesnakes bite you .
Also , you can show up for a date with spiders on your face .
Researcher attempted to enlist his friend Don for testing , but Don chickened out .
Heebie-Jeebies Vaccine : Subjects ’ immune systems reacted well against the heebies but were ineffective against the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ !
Subject injected with vaccine was asked to name the capital of a certain state .
He started to answer but then became physically ill. Class-Reunion Vaccine : Your brain can trick you into believing that you look younger than most of your high-school classmates and should attend the class reunion .
This vaccine would prevent that .
Overdoing-It Vaccine : Another success !
Subjects were divided into two groups , with the placebo group continuing to overdo it while the vaccine group did just enough to get by .
Jack-O ’ -Lantern @ @ @ @ @ @ @ call a “ talk vaccine.
” In this case , you explain to a child that , no matter what he ’ s heard , a scary jack-o ’ -lantern can not come to life and chase you .
Hangover Vaccine : The holy grail of vaccines .
Despite years of study , little progress .
Anti-Prancing Vaccine : Disappointing results .
Vaccine actually increased the impulse to prance .
Researcher has come to suspect that the urge to prance may be unstoppable .
Werewolf Vaccine : Doesn ’ t prevent you from @ @ @ @ @ @ @ you more amenable to counselling .
Blubbering Vaccine : As men age , their immune systems are less able to resist sentimentality , and they cry more , like babies .
Ten older men were given the vaccine and were then asked to watch the scene in “ Old Yeller ” in which Old Yeller dies .
None of the men cried , and one old man even laughed .
Get-Down Vaccine : Prevents you from snapping your fingers and “ gettin ’ that rhythm.
” Mystery Vaccine : Not exactly sure what @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with increasingly large needles .
Enthusiasm Vaccine : Enthusiasm has afflicted mankind for millennia .
It is estimated that in Europe during the Middle Ages fully one-half of the population was enthusiastic .
The problem is that someone with even a slight case of enthusiasm can infect another person with a full-blown case .
Prospects for vaccine : slim .
Pseudo-Vaccine : Doesn ’ t really do much of anything , but comes with a coupon for half off your next vaccine .
♦

Blues Vaccine: Gives you a small dose of the blues, so that later, when your woman leaves you, you wish her well and ask if she needs some gas money.
Venom Vaccine: Allows you to impress your friends on camping trips by letting rattlesnakes bite you. Also, you can show up for a date with spiders on your face.
Researcher attempted to enlist his friend Don for testing, but Don chickened out.
Heebie-Jeebies Vaccine: Subjects’ immune systems reacted well against the heebies but were ineffective against the jeebies.
State-Capital Vaccine: Positive results! Subject injected with vaccine was asked to name the capital of a certain state. He started to answer but then became physically ill.
Class-Reunion Vaccine: Your brain can trick you into believing that you look younger than most of your high-school classmates and should attend the class reunion. This vaccine would prevent that.
Overdoing-It Vaccine: Another success! Subjects were divided into two groups, with the placebo group continuing to overdo it while the vaccine group did just enough to get by.
Jack-O’-Lantern Vaccine: An example of what I call a “talk vaccine.” In this case, you explain to a child that, no matter what he’s heard, a scary jack-o’-lantern cannot come to life and chase you.
Hangover Vaccine: The holy grail of vaccines. Despite years of study, little progress.
Anti-Prancing Vaccine: Disappointing results. Vaccine actually increased the impulse to prance. Researcher has come to suspect that the urge to prance may be unstoppable.
Werewolf Vaccine: Doesn’t prevent you from becoming a werewolf, but does make you more amenable to counselling.
Blubbering Vaccine: As men age, their immune systems are less able to resist sentimentality, and they cry more, like babies. Ten older men were given the vaccine and were then asked to watch the scene in “Old Yeller” in which Old Yeller dies. None of the men cried, and one old man even laughed.
Get-Down Vaccine: Prevents you from snapping your fingers and “gettin’ that rhythm.”
Mystery Vaccine: Not exactly sure what this vaccine does. Requires multiple injections with increasingly large needles.
Enthusiasm Vaccine: Enthusiasm has afflicted mankind for millennia. It is estimated that in Europe during the Middle Ages fully one-half of the population was enthusiastic. The problem is that someone with even a slight case of enthusiasm can infect another person with a full-blown case. Prospects for vaccine: slim.
Pseudo-Vaccine: Doesn’t really do much of anything, but comes with a coupon for half off your next vaccine. ♦


newyorker--2020-10-19--Rita Indiana’s Songs for the Apocalypse

Rita Indiana’s Songs for the Apocalypse

If I close my eyes and concentrate , I can recall what it felt like to go days at a time without considering the end of the world .
Now these thoughts are constant , the thrumming background noise of ordinary life , a vast and terrifyingly specific catalogue of horrors .
Smoke billows across the West , submerging our cities in a murky orange twilight ; more than two hundred thousand Americans die of a virus whose dangers half the country seems intent on ignoring .
The world ’ s most powerful democracy teeters , and children sleep in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ ve submitted willingly to mass surveillance and filled the oceans with microscopic plastics ; the climate refugees , it turns out , are us .
It all happened so fast , or at least it feels that way , speed being an essential feature of this bewildering era we ’ re staggering through—the relentless , furious acceleration of it all .
Surely this is part of the reason that , for the past several weeks , I ’ ve been listening to the Dominican novelist and musician Rita Indiana ’ s masterly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” on repeat .
The title song , which races along at a hundred and ninety beats per minute , is a frenetic , danceable soundtrack for this miserable moment , a song that transforms pain and worry into something plaintive , angry , and defiant .
Not every cut maintains this rhythm , but even the quiet ones have a certain urgency .
It ’ s no accident that Indiana calls “ Mandinga Times ” “ a songbook for the apocalypse.
” The album , the forty-three-year-old Indiana ’ s first in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Cabra , of the legendary Puerto Rican band Calle 13 .
When Cabra first approached Indiana about a possible collaboration , several years ago , she demurred .
She had left Santo Domingo and settled in San Juan , a self-imposed exile from the music industry and from a kind of fame that had drained her .
She ’ d achieved international recognition , but her notoriety at home made daily life intolerable : she couldn ’ t go anywhere in Santo Domingo without being asked for autographs or selfies .
In Puerto @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to writing , publishing three novels , including “ Tentacle ” ( 2015 ) , a gender-bending sci-fi story set in a near-future Dominican Republic in the aftermath of an environmental catastrophe , and , most recently , “ Made in Saturn ” ( 2018 ) , an acerbic comic novel about a flailing , drug-addled Dominican artist who is sent to dry out in Havana , so as not to embarrass his corrupt father in the middle of a political campaign .
Last year , Indiana felt ready to come back to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ done in the fall , just months after Puerto Rico ’ s most tumultuous time in recent memory , when two weeks of raucous street protests forced the resignation of the governor .
The political energy of last summer is evident on the album ; its songs , sung in the voice of Mandinga , Indiana ’ s gender-neutral alter ego , feel like anthems of discontent .
The finishing touches were applied after the world had shut down , making the album feel less like a warning about a dark but still @ @ @ @ @ @ @ documenting our current predicament .
But , like Indiana ’ s earlier music , and like her work more broadly , “ Mandinga Times ” is also an immersion in hybridity : it ’ s merengue with a heavy-metal heart ; it ’ s gagá mixed with thrash , reggaetón and punk , dembow , trap , and Middle Eastern melodies ; it ’ s love songs and battle raps and protest music .
When I asked Cabra to describe the album to me , he struggled .
To say that it was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ said .
In fact , each song was eclectic , diverse moods and styles alternating in a single track .
“ I find it hard to place Rita ’ s project within a genre , ” he said .
“ If I describe how her music sounds , I think that takes away its power.
” Indiana started writing young .
She was placing stories in a Santo Domingo literary zine in her late teens , and , at twenty-one , self-published a collection called “ Rumiantes , ” which was photocopied , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ She went to art school , but dropped out after a year , got work writing publicity copy and marketing jingles , and in 2000 , at the age of twenty-three , self-published her first novel , “ La Estrategia de Chochueca ” ( “ Chochueca ’ s Strategy ” ) , printing five hundred copies with money given to her by her boss .
Half the run was passed to family and friends , and the other half was sold .
For those who read the novel , a dark , gritty @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the nineteen-nineties , it was a jolt of something new in Dominican letters : not a political novel dealing with the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo , one of the bloodiest in Latin-American history ; not a Caribbean folktale , idealizing a rural past ; not an immigration novel , chronicling the alienation and struggle of a new life in the United States .
Instead , “ Chochueca ” was a novel about disenchanted teen-agers and their long nights of drug use and loud music .
It became a cult hit , endlessly photocopied @ @ @ @ @ @ @ young people who saw themselves in its pages .
When a copy of “ Chochueca ” found its way to the Puerto Rican critic Juan Duchesne-Winter , he was intrigued .
“ It was another language , another focus , ” he told me .
He invited Indiana to be a guest lecturer at the University of Puerto Rico and introduced her to the editor who would publish her next book .
That book was “ Papi ” ( 2005 ) , Indiana ’ s breakout novel , a pulsating , thrilling coming-of-age @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in awe of her wayward , charismatic , and dangerous father .
The violent worlds in which the father moves are only hinted at , and barely understood by the narrator , who is too young to be afraid , even when the reader is afraid for her .
Like Indiana ’ s first novel , “ Papi ” is saturated with pop-culture references , from horror movies to heavy metal to skateboarding—a section of the text is written as though it were video-game instructions—but perhaps the novel ’ s finest achievement is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Dominican dialect in the rapid-fire , stream-of-consciousness vernacular of a girl desperate to please her father .
It ’ s also a novel about masculinity and the theatre of it .
The performer , in this case , is Indiana ’ s own father , on whom the title character is based .
Indiana ’ s parents separated when she was seven months old , but he remained a presence in her life : flashy , magnetic , handsome , a womanizer involved in sometimes unsavory schemes .
After he moved to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and learned English in order to communicate with her half brother , who spoke no Spanish .
Indiana ’ s father returned to Santo Domingo for a time when she was seven , but when he ran out of money he left again , this time for New York .
Indiana was twelve when her father was shot and killed at a restaurant in the Bronx , in 1989 .
His murder was never solved .
Indiana ’ s life as a musician began in 2005 , at the launch of “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ book party was held at a local museum , where she remade the space , arranging the furniture to form a Mercedes-Benz logo ( a recurring symbol in the novel , a kind of aspirational totem ) and decorating the room with television screens showing videos of the inner workings of stomachs .
A hundred people or so were present when , instead of reading from the novel , Indiana performed two songs with an electronic band called Súperchin , singing improvised lyrics inspired by the book .
It may not have felt @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , but it marked her shift away from writing .
Over the next several years , as she moved to New York and worked a series of odd jobs , Indiana began to experiment with the music-editing software Audacity , and then with GarageBand , making beats and playing with loops , crafting strange , dense bits of electronica that she shared with friends .
In 2006 , she and a collective called Los Niños Envueltos put on a puppet show , “ Ready , ” a hallucinatory piece whose most important component @ @ @ @ @ @ @ also wrote and performed a song called “ La Sofi , ” which felt as though it could have been sung by the narrator of “ Papi ” : the lyrics are little more than a list of musicians—ranging from La Lupe to Fania All-Stars to Iron Maiden—that the narrator isn ’ t allowed to listen to .
There ’ s something mesmerizing in its simplicity .
The track was released on MySpace , and , through the inexplicable magic of the Internet , became a hit three years later , when it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Bastida , of the seminal Mexican punk band Tijuana No !
In 2008 , with the artist Raina Mast , Indiana formed a duo called Miti Miti , and released the EP “ Altar Espandex , ” a spare , playful album , whose songs feel less written than discovered , cobbled together from found sounds , bleeps , pops , and other sonic ephemera .
In one interview , Indiana said that she made the tracks by sampling an egg timer .
What was most attractive about music , Indiana told me @ @ @ @ @ @ @ chance to move beyond the sometimes limited , academic circles of literature and reach as many people as possible .
She ’ d never belonged in traditional literary spaces anyway , and these projects felt like an adventure .
Even within the strictures of popular music , she found room for formal experimentation , and , crucially , audiences were willing to accept her in ways that the literary establishment had not done .
Listeners will embrace all sorts of hybridity as long as it has a beat .
This was something she @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a child , sitting under her family ’ s grand piano while her great-aunt , the soprano Ivonne Haza , gave singing lessons to local bolero and merengue stars , such as Sonia Silvestre and Fernando Villalona .
She accompanied the same great-aunt to the opera and the symphony , but also knew all the romantic pop songs of the era by heart .
Later , after her father died , she immersed herself in metal and punk , at a time when those subcultures were anathema in the Dominican Republic .
( @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s most shocking scenes , the narrator is attacked by her own family , held down , stripped of her rock-and-roll T-shirt and jeans , and forced to dress in conventionally feminine clothes . )
But , even when she was a metalhead , Indiana still listened in secret to merengue , a genre of Latin dance music which , like metal , has a fascination with speed .
Indiana eventually pulled all these strands together with a band called Los Misterios , her first musical collaboration involving real instrumentation , as opposed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Indiana ’ s lyrics were full of dropped syllables , dense slang , and clever , surprising rhymes , with politics embedded in every danceable track .
The chorus of the song “ Da pa ’ lo Do ” sounds like a collection of nonsense , until you realize it ’ s actually “ Da para los dos , ” or “ There ’ s enough for both.
” The catchy song with the bouncy rhythm and the bright champeta guitar riff is really a meditation on the fraught relationship between the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Indiana and Los Misterios put out the instantly iconic album “ El Juidero , ” which made her , quite unexpectedly , a celebrity : La Montra was born .
The year of the album ’ s release , Indiana was nominated for a Casandra Award ( now known as a Soberano Award ) , the local equivalent of a Grammy , and at the after-party she kissed her girlfriend ( and now wife ) , the Puerto Rican film director Noelia Quintero .
She had never hidden her sexuality , but @ @ @ @ @ @ @ made her the first queer person to come out at the Casandras , and , as a result , she was subjected to a barrage of homophobic harassment , particularly online .
In this and other ways , fame was an uncomfortable fit for Indiana , but for two years she played the part of a pop star , performing at SummerStage , in New York , filling the National Theatre in Santo Domingo , being mobbed in the streets , her private life discussed on local gossip shows .
Then , in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ me that she wanted a normal life , after suffering a kind of creative exhaustion , an inability to concentrate , a creeping suspicion that people around her were treating her differently because she was famous .
She longed to do what monsters can not : disappear .
In Puerto Rico , what she had done for merengue—shape it , pound it , graft it , mix it , with no compunctions or doubts or hesitation—she began to do on the page , with the daring novels that have made her one of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ generation .
If this is true , the album ’ s closest thematic and spiritual predecessor is “ Tentacle , ” Indiana ’ s dystopian sci-fi novel .
The book opens with a startling image : Acilde , the maid to a Santería priestess , hears the doorbell ring .
She activates the security camera embedded in her eye , and sees a Haitian man “ fleeing from the quarantine declared on the other half of the island.
” The building ’ s security system detects an unnamed virus in the man , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
An automated voice warns the building ’ s residents to avoid the main entrance while the mess is cleaned up .
Reading that in 2015 was disturbing .
In 2020 , it takes your breath away .
In “ Tentacle , ” Indiana quickly dispenses with any romantic notions of the Dominican Republic as a Caribbean paradise .
On the contrary , the novel ’ s primary concern is environmental catastrophe : the country ’ s strongman leader agreed to store Venezuelan chemical weapons on the island , an arrangement that ended @ @ @ @ @ @ @ poisonous cache into the sea .
When the novel begins , the Caribbean is lifeless and inert .
The priestess owns a live sea anemone , an increasingly rare creature of immense value , and soon Acilde decides to steal it in order to pay for a dose of a magical elixir that will transform her into a man .
The new Acilde emerges as the island ’ s last hope , tasked with travelling back in time to avert the ecological disaster .
There is no nostalgia in Indiana ’ s novels @ @ @ @ @ @ @ their cacophonous narratives , as we watch familiar types in barely recognizable contexts , their foibles and flaws made even more absurd by the stakes of this dark future .
It ’ s Alejo Carpentier with the style of Philip K. Dick and the humor of Mark Twain .
Even a partial list of “ Tentacle ” ’ s concerns reads like a remix of contemporary nightmares : dictatorship and machismo , environmental collapse , biological weapons , drug abuse .
Add a discussion of gender fluidity , a rumination on the meaning @ @ @ @ @ @ @ you begin to understand the scope of the novel ’ s ambition and its heart .
“ Tentacle ” is a capacious and bracing read .

If I close my eyes and concentrate, I can recall what it felt like to go days at a time without considering the end of the world. Now these thoughts are constant, the thrumming background noise of ordinary life, a vast and terrifyingly specific catalogue of horrors. Smoke billows across the West, submerging our cities in a murky orange twilight; more than two hundred thousand Americans die of a virus whose dangers half the country seems intent on ignoring. The world’s most powerful democracy teeters, and children sleep in cages at its southern border. We’ve submitted willingly to mass surveillance and filled the oceans with microscopic plastics; the climate refugees, it turns out, are us. It all happened so fast, or at least it feels that way, speed being an essential feature of this bewildering era we’re staggering through—the relentless, furious acceleration of it all. Surely this is part of the reason that, for the past several weeks, I’ve been listening to the Dominican novelist and musician Rita Indiana’s masterly new album, “Mandinga Times,” on repeat. The title song, which races along at a hundred and ninety beats per minute, is a frenetic, danceable soundtrack for this miserable moment, a song that transforms pain and worry into something plaintive, angry, and defiant. Not every cut maintains this rhythm, but even the quiet ones have a certain urgency. It’s no accident that Indiana calls “Mandinga Times” “a songbook for the apocalypse.”
The album, the forty-three-year-old Indiana’s first in a decade, was produced by Eduardo Cabra, of the legendary Puerto Rican band Calle 13. When Cabra first approached Indiana about a possible collaboration, several years ago, she demurred. She had left Santo Domingo and settled in San Juan, a self-imposed exile from the music industry and from a kind of fame that had drained her. She’d achieved international recognition, but her notoriety at home made daily life intolerable: she couldn’t go anywhere in Santo Domingo without being asked for autographs or selfies. In Puerto Rico, she rediscovered quiet and returned to writing, publishing three novels, including “Tentacle” (2015), a gender-bending sci-fi story set in a near-future Dominican Republic in the aftermath of an environmental catastrophe, and, most recently, “Made in Saturn” (2018), an acerbic comic novel about a flailing, drug-addled Dominican artist who is sent to dry out in Havana, so as not to embarrass his corrupt father in the middle of a political campaign.
Last year, Indiana felt ready to come back to music. Much of the recording was done in the fall, just months after Puerto Rico’s most tumultuous time in recent memory, when two weeks of raucous street protests forced the resignation of the governor. The political energy of last summer is evident on the album; its songs, sung in the voice of Mandinga, Indiana’s gender-neutral alter ego, feel like anthems of discontent. The finishing touches were applied after the world had shut down, making the album feel less like a warning about a dark but still avoidable future and more like musical stenography documenting our current predicament. But, like Indiana’s earlier music, and like her work more broadly, “Mandinga Times” is also an immersion in hybridity: it’s merengue with a heavy-metal heart; it’s gagá mixed with thrash, reggaetón and punk, dembow, trap, and Middle Eastern melodies; it’s love songs and battle raps and protest music. When I asked Cabra to describe the album to me, he struggled. To say that it was eclectic was only half true, he said. In fact, each song was eclectic, diverse moods and styles alternating in a single track. “I find it hard to place Rita’s project within a genre,” he said. “If I describe how her music sounds, I think that takes away its power.”
In the Dominican Republic, Rita Indiana is known as the Monster, or La Montra, in the local Spanish dialect, where “s”es are purely voluntary. The nickname emerged from deep in the comments section of YouTube, when the video for her 2009 single “El Blue del Ping Pong” went unexpectedly viral and made her a star. While the name alludes to her outsized talent, Indiana has embraced every connotation of the word. “When people started calling me that,” she told me last month, “I was like, coño, I couldn’t have thought of a better nickname.” At six feet three, Indiana is not the sort of person who can go unnoticed. She’s lanky, androgynous, sharply angled, an unapologetically queer woman in a country with few openly gay celebrities. Her personality, she told me, was shaped by her inability to fit in: even when she was a child, no one quite knew what to make of her. She was beaten and bullied for her size, for her ambiguous gender.
“Move the heavens! Align the stars! Jen is running late for the dentist!” Cartoon by Ellis Rosen and Jerald Lewis Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
Indiana started writing young. She was placing stories in a Santo Domingo literary zine in her late teens, and, at twenty-one, self-published a collection called “Rumiantes,” which was photocopied, stapled, and distributed among friends. She went to art school, but dropped out after a year, got work writing publicity copy and marketing jingles, and in 2000, at the age of twenty-three, self-published her first novel, “La Estrategia de Chochueca” (“Chochueca’s Strategy”), printing five hundred copies with money given to her by her boss. Half the run was passed to family and friends, and the other half was sold. For those who read the novel, a dark, gritty snapshot of the Santo Domingo underground of the nineteen-nineties, it was a jolt of something new in Dominican letters: not a political novel dealing with the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo, one of the bloodiest in Latin-American history; not a Caribbean folktale, idealizing a rural past; not an immigration novel, chronicling the alienation and struggle of a new life in the United States. Instead, “Chochueca” was a novel about disenchanted teen-agers and their long nights of drug use and loud music. It became a cult hit, endlessly photocopied and passed from hand to hand among young people who saw themselves in its pages. When a copy of “Chochueca” found its way to the Puerto Rican critic Juan Duchesne-Winter, he was intrigued. “It was another language, another focus,” he told me. He invited Indiana to be a guest lecturer at the University of Puerto Rico and introduced her to the editor who would publish her next book.
That book was “Papi” (2005), Indiana’s breakout novel, a pulsating, thrilling coming-of-age story, told by a preadolescent girl in awe of her wayward, charismatic, and dangerous father. The violent worlds in which the father moves are only hinted at, and barely understood by the narrator, who is too young to be afraid, even when the reader is afraid for her. Like Indiana’s first novel, “Papi” is saturated with pop-culture references, from horror movies to heavy metal to skateboarding—a section of the text is written as though it were video-game instructions—but perhaps the novel’s finest achievement is its language, a virtuosic rendering of the Dominican dialect in the rapid-fire, stream-of-consciousness vernacular of a girl desperate to please her father. It’s also a novel about masculinity and the theatre of it. The performer, in this case, is Indiana’s own father, on whom the title character is based. Indiana’s parents separated when she was seven months old, but he remained a presence in her life: flashy, magnetic, handsome, a womanizer involved in sometimes unsavory schemes. After he moved to Miami, she spent summers with him, and learned English in order to communicate with her half brother, who spoke no Spanish. Indiana’s father returned to Santo Domingo for a time when she was seven, but when he ran out of money he left again, this time for New York. Indiana was twelve when her father was shot and killed at a restaurant in the Bronx, in 1989. His murder was never solved.
Indiana’s life as a musician began in 2005, at the launch of “Papi” in Santo Domingo. The book party was held at a local museum, where she remade the space, arranging the furniture to form a Mercedes-Benz logo (a recurring symbol in the novel, a kind of aspirational totem) and decorating the room with television screens showing videos of the inner workings of stomachs. A hundred people or so were present when, instead of reading from the novel, Indiana performed two songs with an electronic band called Súperchin, singing improvised lyrics inspired by the book.
It may not have felt like a transformative event at the time, but it marked her shift away from writing. Over the next several years, as she moved to New York and worked a series of odd jobs, Indiana began to experiment with the music-editing software Audacity, and then with GarageBand, making beats and playing with loops, crafting strange, dense bits of electronica that she shared with friends. In 2006, she and a collective called Los Niños Envueltos put on a puppet show, “Ready,” a hallucinatory piece whose most important component was music. That year, Indiana also wrote and performed a song called “La Sofi,” which felt as though it could have been sung by the narrator of “Papi”: the lyrics are little more than a list of musicians—ranging from La Lupe to Fania All-Stars to Iron Maiden—that the narrator isn’t allowed to listen to. There’s something mesmerizing in its simplicity. The track was released on MySpace, and, through the inexplicable magic of the Internet, became a hit three years later, when it was covered by Julieta Venegas and Ceci Bastida, of the seminal Mexican punk band Tijuana No! In 2008, with the artist Raina Mast, Indiana formed a duo called Miti Miti, and released the EP “Altar Espandex,” a spare, playful album, whose songs feel less written than discovered, cobbled together from found sounds, bleeps, pops, and other sonic ephemera. In one interview, Indiana said that she made the tracks by sampling an egg timer.
What was most attractive about music, Indiana told me, was that it gave her a chance to move beyond the sometimes limited, academic circles of literature and reach as many people as possible. She’d never belonged in traditional literary spaces anyway, and these projects felt like an adventure. Even within the strictures of popular music, she found room for formal experimentation, and, crucially, audiences were willing to accept her in ways that the literary establishment had not done. Listeners will embrace all sorts of hybridity as long as it has a beat. This was something she’d known intuitively since she was a child, sitting under her family’s grand piano while her great-aunt, the soprano Ivonne Haza, gave singing lessons to local bolero and merengue stars, such as Sonia Silvestre and Fernando Villalona. She accompanied the same great-aunt to the opera and the symphony, but also knew all the romantic pop songs of the era by heart. Later, after her father died, she immersed herself in metal and punk, at a time when those subcultures were anathema in the Dominican Republic. (In one of “Papi” ’s most shocking scenes, the narrator is attacked by her own family, held down, stripped of her rock-and-roll T-shirt and jeans, and forced to dress in conventionally feminine clothes.) But, even when she was a metalhead, Indiana still listened in secret to merengue, a genre of Latin dance music which, like metal, has a fascination with speed. Indiana eventually pulled all these strands together with a band called Los Misterios, her first musical collaboration involving real instrumentation, as opposed to pure electronica. Like her novels, Indiana’s lyrics were full of dropped syllables, dense slang, and clever, surprising rhymes, with politics embedded in every danceable track. The chorus of the song “Da pa’ lo Do” sounds like a collection of nonsense, until you realize it’s actually “Da para los dos,” or “There’s enough for both.” The catchy song with the bouncy rhythm and the bright champeta guitar riff is really a meditation on the fraught relationship between the Dominican Republic and Haiti.
In 2010, Indiana and Los Misterios put out the instantly iconic album “El Juidero,” which made her, quite unexpectedly, a celebrity: La Montra was born. The year of the album’s release, Indiana was nominated for a Casandra Award (now known as a Soberano Award), the local equivalent of a Grammy, and at the after-party she kissed her girlfriend (and now wife), the Puerto Rican film director Noelia Quintero. She had never hidden her sexuality, but, still, this gesture of affection made her the first queer person to come out at the Casandras, and, as a result, she was subjected to a barrage of homophobic harassment, particularly online. In this and other ways, fame was an uncomfortable fit for Indiana, but for two years she played the part of a pop star, performing at SummerStage, in New York, filling the National Theatre in Santo Domingo, being mobbed in the streets, her private life discussed on local gossip shows.
Then, in 2012, she quit. She told me that she wanted a normal life, after suffering a kind of creative exhaustion, an inability to concentrate, a creeping suspicion that people around her were treating her differently because she was famous. She longed to do what monsters cannot: disappear. In Puerto Rico, what she had done for merengue—shape it, pound it, graft it, mix it, with no compunctions or doubts or hesitation—she began to do on the page, with the daring novels that have made her one of the most significant Latin-American writers of her generation.
“I can’t wait to see the look on people’s faces when I tell them their meagre side salads were grown right here in Brooklyn!” Cartoon by Lila Ash Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
Eduardo Cabra, who produced “Mandinga Times,” told me that what surprised him the most about the project was that it sounded not like a second album but more like a fourth or a fifth. There was a line that could be traced from “El Juidero” through her books to “Mandinga Times,” as though Indiana’s novels represented stepping stones of artistic growth.
If this is true, the album’s closest thematic and spiritual predecessor is “Tentacle,” Indiana’s dystopian sci-fi novel. The book opens with a startling image: Acilde, the maid to a Santería priestess, hears the doorbell ring. She activates the security camera embedded in her eye, and sees a Haitian man “fleeing from the quarantine declared on the other half of the island.” The building’s security system detects an unnamed virus in the man, and, without warning, vaporizes him. An automated voice warns the building’s residents to avoid the main entrance while the mess is cleaned up. Reading that in 2015 was disturbing. In 2020, it takes your breath away.


newyorker--2020-10-19--Briefly Noted Book Reviews

Briefly Noted Book Reviews

His Very Best , by Jonathan Alter ( Simon & Schuster ) .
Evoking an era when decency and competence in the White House were expected , this biography makes the case for reëvaluating Jimmy Carter ’ s “ underrated ” Presidency .
The Iran hostage crisis and popular impatience with Carter ’ s “ eat your spinach ” leadership cut short his project , but Alter argues that he made a consequential mark on the country .
Carter defended the environment , reformed the civil service , concluded the Camp David Accords , and forever changed the federal bench @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of them , Ruth Bader Ginsburg , later said that her selection , in 1978 , was not “ in the realm of the possible until Jimmy Carter became president.
” Alter praises Carter ’ s moral rectitude and attention to detail , and laments that his tenure is so often seen as a lesson that high-mindedness rarely succeeds in politics .
Analogia , by George Dyson ( Farrar , Straus & Giroux ) .
This idiosyncratic history of “ the entangled destinies of nature , human beings , and machines ” charts @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Dyson sees digital computing , which relies on rigid logic and discrete bits of information , giving way to systems ( such as social networks and artificial intelligence ) that are influenced by the organic processes of nature .
Surveying the shifts of the past three centuries , Dyson describes lost analog technologies , such as the vacuum tube and the heliograph communication system used in the Apache Wars .
New analog systems , he suggests , presage a return to old ways , and , because we can neither fully understand nor @ @ @ @ @ @ @ forward is coexistence .
Shelter in Place , by David Leavitt ( Bloomsbury ) .
The protagonist of this satirical novel , a wealthy woman in her fifties named Eva Lindquist , decides to flee the Trump Presidency for Venice , a decision that upends her relationships with her husband and with her coterie of handsome young gay men .
Leavitt skewers the pretensions of rich liberals : Eva accuses her friends of living in a bubble while she bosses around her maid , and her husband tries to rescue a co-worker from @ @ @ @ @ @ @ she doesn ’ t want to be rescued .
When Eva and her privileged friends debate whether one can be both free and safe , her latest gallant retorts , “ Most people on this planet , we never feel safe and we never feel free.
” Ruthie Fear , by Maxim Loskutoff ( Norton ) .
Living in a run-down trailer in the rugged town of Darby , Montana , the title character of this début novel and her father are among the best hunters in the region , and also the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Ruthie struggles to find her place in a world of violence , devising “ her own morality based on the behavior of the animals she saw.
” Ruthie ’ s lawlessness makes her an acute observer of contradictions within herself and in the community , and Loskutoff uses tropes of the Western—vivid depictions of mountain landscapes and hunting scenes—to offer a subtle portrayal of poverty and class warfare .

His Very Best, by Jonathan Alter (Simon & Schuster). Evoking an era when decency and competence in the White House were expected, this biography makes the case for reëvaluating Jimmy Carter’s “underrated” Presidency. The Iran hostage crisis and popular impatience with Carter’s “eat your spinach” leadership cut short his project, but Alter argues that he made a consequential mark on the country. Carter defended the environment, reformed the civil service, concluded the Camp David Accords, and forever changed the federal bench by appointing women and minorities. One of them, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, later said that her selection, in 1978, was not “in the realm of the possible until Jimmy Carter became president.” Alter praises Carter’s moral rectitude and attention to detail, and laments that his tenure is so often seen as a lesson that high-mindedness rarely succeeds in politics.
Analogia, by George Dyson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). This idiosyncratic history of “the entangled destinies of nature, human beings, and machines” charts the arrival of a new epoch. Dyson sees digital computing, which relies on rigid logic and discrete bits of information, giving way to systems (such as social networks and artificial intelligence) that are influenced by the organic processes of nature. Surveying the shifts of the past three centuries, Dyson describes lost analog technologies, such as the vacuum tube and the heliograph communication system used in the Apache Wars. New analog systems, he suggests, presage a return to old ways, and, because we can neither fully understand nor control these systems, the only path forward is coexistence.
Shelter in Place, by David Leavitt (Bloomsbury). The protagonist of this satirical novel, a wealthy woman in her fifties named Eva Lindquist, decides to flee the Trump Presidency for Venice, a decision that upends her relationships with her husband and with her coterie of handsome young gay men. Leavitt skewers the pretensions of rich liberals: Eva accuses her friends of living in a bubble while she bosses around her maid, and her husband tries to rescue a co-worker from her messy life, only to find she doesn’t want to be rescued. When Eva and her privileged friends debate whether one can be both free and safe, her latest gallant retorts, “Most people on this planet, we never feel safe and we never feel free.”
Ruthie Fear, by Maxim Loskutoff (Norton). Living in a run-down trailer in the rugged town of Darby, Montana, the title character of this début novel and her father are among the best hunters in the region, and also the most miserly. After her mother leaves, Ruthie struggles to find her place in a world of violence, devising “her own morality based on the behavior of the animals she saw.” Ruthie’s lawlessness makes her an acute observer of contradictions within herself and in the community, and Loskutoff uses tropes of the Western—vivid depictions of mountain landscapes and hunting scenes—to offer a subtle portrayal of poverty and class warfare.