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MAR. 25, 2019




MARCH 25, 2019

6 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
15 THE TALK OF THE TOWN

Amy Davidson Sorkin on Brexit mayhem;
free speech with Bubba the Love Sponge;
new moons; Kathy Griffin’s comeback; many faces.
LIFE AND LETTERS

Alexandra Schwartz

20

Benefit of the Doubt
Miriam Toews reckons with her Mennonite origins.
SHOUTS & MURMURS

Don Steinberg

27

Disturbing Digital Coincidences

PERSONAL HISTORY

Kathryn Schulz

28

The Stack
A father’s ravenous love of books.
LETTER FROM LONDON

Ed Caesar

32

Bad Boy
The complicated life of the Brexit backer Arron Banks.
PROFILES

Joshua Rothman

44

What Lies Beneath
The layers of history in Peter Sacks’s paintings.
FICTION

Lore Segal

54

“Dandelion”
THE CRITICS
POP MUSIC

Carrie Battan

58

The synth-pop haze of Mike Lévy’s “Hyperion.”
A CRITIC AT LARGE

Hua Hsu

61

Lauren Berlant and the affective turn.
BOOKS

65

Briefly Noted
MUSICAL EVENTS

Alex Ross

66

New concertos by Thomas Adès and John Adams.
THE THEATRE

Hilton Als

68

“Kiss Me, Kate,” “Be More Chill.”
THE CURRENT CINEMA

Anthony Lane

70

“Hotel Mumbai,” “Ash Is Purest White.”
POEMS

Tess Gallagher
Angela Leighton

50
56

“Ambition”
“Pickpocket, Naples”
COVER

Mark Ulriksen

DRAWINGS

“Crazy Time”

Roz Chast, Lars Kenseth, Sofia Warren, Tom Chitty, P. C. Vey, Will McPhail, Karen Sneider,
Frank Cotham, Bruce Eric Kaplan, Victoria Roberts, Hartley Lin, Suerynn Lee SPOTS Annie Jen


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WINDHAM
CAMPBELL

PRIZES

CONTRIBUTORS

The Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Library at
Yale University congratulates
the 2019 prize recipients

Joshua Rothman (“What Lies Beneath,”
p. 44) has been an editor and writer at
the magazine since 2012.

Alexandra Schwartz (“Benefit of the
Doubt,” p. 20) has been a staff writer
since 2016.

NONFICTION

Kathryn Schulz (“The Stack,” p. 28), a
staff writer, won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize
for feature writing.

Ed Caesar (“Bad Boy,” p. 32) is the author of “Two Hours: The Quest to Run
the Impossible Marathon.”

Mark Ulriksen (Cover) is an artist
and illustrator. An exhibition of his
sports paintings will be up at San Francisco’s Modernism gallery starting
April 11th.

Angela Leighton (Poem, p. 56) is the author of, most recently, “Hearing Things:
The Work of Sound in Literature” and
the poetry collection “Spills.” She is a
senior research fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge.

Rebecca Solnit
Raghu Karnad
FICTION

David Chariandy
Danielle McLaughlin
DRAMA

Patricia Cornelius
Young Jean Lee
POETRY

Ishion Hutchinson
Kwame Dawes
WINDHAMCAMPBELL .ORG

Tess Gallagher (Poem, p. 50) will publish her latest poetry collection, “Is, Is
Not,” in May.
Alex Ross (Musical Events, p. 66), the
magazine’s music critic since 1996, is
the author of “The Rest Is Noise” and
“Listen to This.”
Lore Segal (Fiction, p. 54) is the author
of several novels, including “Half the

Kingdom” and “Her First American.”
Her new book, “The Journal I Did Not
Keep: New and Selected Writing,” will
be published in June.

Hilton Als (The Theatre, p. 68), the magazine’s theatre critic, won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for criticism. He is an associate professor of writing at Columbia
University.
Amy Davidson Sorkin (Comment,
p. 15), a staff writer, is a regular contributor to Comment. She also writes
a column for newyorker.com.
Leo Mirani (The Talk of the Town,
p. 19), a journalist based in London, is
the news editor of The Economist.

POSTSCRIPT

CULTURE DESK

Maggie Nelson writes about Carolee
Schneemann’s revolutionary career
and a day that she spent with the artist.

Jia Tolentino investigates the dance
company Shen Yun, which is so
ubiquitous that it has become a meme.

Download the New Yorker Today app for the latest news, commentary, criticism,
and humor, plus this week’s magazine and all issues back to 2008.
4

THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 25, 2019

LEFT: ERRÓ/COURTESY THE ESTATE OF CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN,
GALERIE LELONG, HALES GALLERY, AND P.P.O.W.; RIGHT: RAM HAN

THIS WEEK ON NEWYORKER.COM


THE MAIL
ROGER STONE’S TRICKS

I read with great interest Tyler Foggatt’s
reporting on Roger Stone’s teen-age electioneering days in Westchester County
(The Talk of the Town, March 18th). I
knew Roger in school—when he was the
president of the student council at John
Jay High School, I was the president of
the student council at the middle school.
In 1971, a year after Stone graduated, I
started examining a Westchester County
legislature race for a social-studies project, and discovered that Stone appeared
to be organizing churches as part of a
smear campaign against the incumbent, R. Bradlee Boal, a potential violation of the Johnson Amendment, which
prohibits nonprofit organizations from
endorsing or opposing political candidates. (Stone later told the Washington Post that his candidate, a Republican named John Hicks-Beach, was the
“dumbest politician” he had ever worked
for.) To my knowledge, my amateur reporting was the first investigation into
Stone’s involvement in shady campaign
activities, though certainly not the last.
Dean Corren

Burlington, Vt.

1
TAKING CARE

James Marcus’s recollections of his father’s final months illustrate the pain,
the poignancy, and the all-around helplessness of witnessing the suffering and
decline of a loved one (“Blood Relations,”
March 11th). Amid this poetry, unfortunately, is an all-too-common mischaracterization of palliative care, which Marcus describes as a signal, to patients and
to their families, “that the fight is over.”
Marcus’s father was offered hospice care,
a form of palliation that is generally reserved for people with a life expectancy
of six months or less, who are no longer
pursuing “curative” treatments. But palliative care can begin much sooner than
this. Palliative-care teams provide support to people of all ages who are suffering from serious illnesses. Some of these
patients have advanced diseases; others
are undergoing treatment that may help

them live well for a long time. Palliativecare teams work alongside other specialists to help a patient understand how an
illness is likely to progress, explore what
is most important to his or her quality
of life, and fully consider the benefits
and the burdens of different treatment
approaches. Palliative care is additive—
an extra layer of support—and it can
serve an essential function in the experiences of patients and their families.
Kate Meyers
California Health Care Foundation
Oakland, Calif.

THE RING
RETURNS
Through May 11

1
À LA MODE

In Helen Rosner’s article about contemporary Japanese food, she writes
that the French chef Paul Bocuse “pioneered what became known as nouvelle cuisine, a modern reimagining of
French cooking” (“A Season for Everything,” March 11th). It’s true that Bocuse is remembered as the figurehead
of this movement. But, when I interviewed him in the nineteen-eighties, he
took pains to distance himself from nouvelle cuisine. In another interview, in
2007, with the magazine Madame Figaro,
Bocuse, then eighty years old, explained
that, in the late sixties, he and twelve
other chefs—including Roger Vergé,
Raymond Oliver, and Pierre Troisgros—
had been considered the leaders of
the grande cuisine française, and that critics like Henri Gault, who coined the
term “nouvelle cuisine,” wanted to rebrand them. As a result, Bocuse’s mission—the innovative use of traditional
techniques, showcasing seasonal local
produce—became associated with an
élitist aesthetic, inaccessible to most
people. “La nouvelle cuisine,” he said,
disparagingly, “is all about the bill!”
Drew Smith
London, U.K.

The Met’s breathtaking production of
Wagner’s four-part epic is back, with

soprano Christine Goerke starring
as Brünnhilde in opera’s ultimate
theatrical journey.
metopera.org/ring

212.362.6000

•
Letters should be sent with the writer’s name,
address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to
Letters may be edited
for length and clarity, and may be published in
any medium. We regret that owing to the volume
of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter.
PHOTO: VINCENT PETERS / MET OPERA


MARCH 20 – 26, 2019

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

In 1938, George Balanchine choreographed dances for Vera Zorina in the Rodgers and Hart musical “I Married
an Angel,” and married her onstage. So it’s a cute bit of historical rhyming that Joshua Bergasse, the director
and choreographer of the City Center Encores! production of the show (March 20-24), recently married its star,
Sara Mearns (above). One of the boldest ballerinas at New York City Ballet, which Balanchine founded at City
Center, in 1948, Mearns is making her début in a speaking role. Angelic dancing shouldn’t give her any trouble.
PHOTOGRAPH BY PETER HAPAK


1

ART

“Epic Abstraction”
Metropolitan Museum
A desire to shake up received art history is more
than admirable today—it’s urgent for a future
of pluralist values. But this wishfully canonexpanding show of painting and sculpture from
the past eight decades effectively reinforces
the old status quo. The first room affects like a
mighty organ chord: it contains the Met’s two
best paintings by Jackson Pollock: “Pasiphaë”
(1943), a quaking compaction of mythological
elements, and “Autumn Rhythm (Number
30)” (1950), a singing orchestration of drips—
bluntly material and, inextricably, sublime. The
adjective “epic” does little enough to honor
Pollock’s mid-century glory, which anchors
the standard art-historical saga of Abstract
Expressionism as a revolution that stole the
former thunder of Paris and set a stratospheric
benchmark for subsequent artists. The show
takes the old valuation as a given without mentioning its vulnerabilities: rhetorical inflation,
often, and macho entitlement, always. This
perspective casts artists whose works reacted
against or shrugged off Abstract Expressionism as little fish around the Leviathan.—Peter
Schjeldahl (Ongoing.)

and Eero Saarinen; it’s a classic design, but,
owing to technological limitations in its day,
it wasn’t mass-produced until 2006. Starting in

1938, MOMA mounted an annual exhibition
called “Useful Objects,” which championed the
inexpensive and doubled as recommendations
for holiday gifts. No item had a value of more
than five dollars the first year; a decade later,
the limit was a hundred dollars. By the fifties,
the museum had established partnerships with
national retailers for the exhibited products,
from textiles to appliances, and, in the eighties,
it opened its own design store. In the current
show, the most compelling items are the everyday gems: Timo Sarpaneva’s cast-iron and teak
casserole, from 1959; the original Slinky, from
1945; and a collapsible wire basket, from 1953,
as graceful as a Ruth Asawa sculpture.—Johanna
Fateman (Through June 15.)

Ian Cheng
Gladstone
Meet BOB, a “Bag of Beliefs,” just
like you. Unlike you, BOB is a serpent, whose
existence plays out in real time (this is a live
CHELSEA

simulation, not a video loop), on a twelvefoot-high screen. An unpredictable number of
heads emerge from its inconstant skin, which
shifts, depending on the day, from pale orange
to crimson. This chimeric demon is made up
of “demons,” A.I. lingo for programs that kick
in under specific conditions. In Cheng’s show,
the condition is you, making offerings via a

free iOS app. Offered a mushroom or a piece
of fruit, BOB might eat it; offered a bomb,
BOB might escape or be killed. Has our hero
learned anything during its weeks-long saga of
death and rebirth? Hard to tell, but thrilling to
ponder. The entertainment industry employs
technology to numb minds; this brilliant young
philosopher-artist uses it to spelunk consciousness.—Andrea K. Scott (Through March 23.)

Charles LeDray
Freeman
The bite-size world of LeDray’s
miniature sculptures is the real world scaled
to thought—which, of course, must be compact
enough to fit into our crowded skulls. His subjects (clothes, a catcher’s mitt, a hotel key, tools, a
DOWNTOWN

IN THE MUSEUMS

“Lucio Fontana”
Met Breuer

ILLUSTRATION BY ROMAN KLONEK

The Italian artist is famous for the monochrome canvases, neatly slashed with knives,
that he made—or executed—between 1958
and his death, ten years later, at the age of
sixty-nine. This retrospective, curated by Iria
Candela, has a melancholy aspect: it is among
the last of the Met’s shows in Marcel Breuer’s

granite alcazar on Madison Avenue, which the
museum has occupied since the Whitney moved
downtown, in 2015. Conveniently, the chaste
brutalism of the Breuer building—finished
in 1966, the year that Fontana won the Grand
Prize for an Italian painter at the Venice Biennale—feels perfect for it, housing a period style
in period style. Despite pleasant surprises—
notably involving the artist’s lesser-known ceramic sculptures, which veer between figuration
and abstraction and can suggest the euphoric
neo-Baroque of a drunk Bernini—the show
has a droopy feel of avant-gardism left out in
the rain of subsequent history. So does a lot
of once radical twentieth-century art these
days, as myths of progress in culture complete
their long collapse and mystiques of innovation
gravitate from individual genius to corporate
branding.—P.S. (Through April 14.)

“The Value of Good Design”
Museum of Modern Art
The simple flask of the Chemex coffeemaker,
the austere fan of aluminum tines on a garden
rake, and the airtight allure of first-generation
Tupperware exemplify the democratic promise
of the Good Design movement in this edifying
survey, which highlights (although not exclusively) the museum’s role in its history. Also
on view—and among the winners of MOMA’s
first design competition, held in 1940-41—is
a molded plywood chair by Charles Eames

Last month, the incomparable Johanna Burton left her curatorial perch at the
New Museum to become the director of the Wexner Center for the Arts, in
Ohio. Her knack for harmonizing visual pleasure and vanguard ideas will be
missed. (An elegant writer, Burton enlists words in the service of art, which
sounds simple enough, until you consider how many curators do just the reverse.) Her swan song at the museum is a joyful and fierce one-person show,
“The Anthropophagic Effect” (through June 9), by Jeffrey Gibson, a midcareer Choctaw and Chippewa artist who puts traditional techniques (beading,
basket weaving) and materials (porcupine quills, birch bark) to firebrand ends.
Kinship, whether by choice or by blood, is crucial to Gibson, who understands
that objects accrue the most meaningful value in relation to people, not bank
accounts. Don’t be surprised if you walk into this fifth-floor exhibition, whose
walls are covered with rainbow tessellations of triangles, and see the artist’s
runway-ready riffs on ceremonial garments, which usually hang from the ceiling, being worn by his friends in an ad-hoc photo shoot. A tender selection of
crafts made by or belonging to Gibson’s family is also on view.—Andrea K. Scott
THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 25, 2019

7


soiled sidewalk, a beat-up pegboard) are infused
with needs, desires, histories, and dreams. Beyond the irresistible “wow” factor of LeDray’s
workaholic perfectionism, there’s a profound
delight in grasping the quiddity of a specific
mop or a lonesome cinder block. Even when
the works are fanciful (as when four garments
cling, with hints of desperation, to the corners
of a block of wood), they have the obduracy of
righteous Minimalism, defying associations with
the cute or the twee. In this show, LeDray inverts
his usual trope, in meticulous ink drawings, by
inflating antique bookplates until they’re nearly

a foot high. Magical.—P.S. (Through April 6.)

1
THE THEATRE

The B-Side
St. Ann’s Warehouse
Wooster Group’s “The B-Side: ‘Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons,’ a Record Album
Interpretation,” directed by Kate Valk, has a
sparse set, from which the actor Eric Berryman
addresses the audience in an earnest, formal
voice, explaining how he came to love and want
to adapt for the stage an LP of blues, work songs,
stories, and sermons. The album, “Negro Folk-

lore from Texas State Prisons,” was recorded and
released in 1965 by the folklorist Bruce Jackson;
now Berryman, helped by Philip Moore and
Jasper McGruder, performs its tracks for us,
one by one. The magic here is in Berryman’s
insistence on not merely covering the original
but delivering with exacting precision the notes
and timbres and tonal quirks of each of the
singers and storytellers on the record. Berryman puts his art in service of the past, bringing
a whole invisible host into the spotlight with
him. (Reviewed in our issue of 3/18/19.)—Vinson
Cunningham (Through March 31.)

Daddy
Pershing Square Signature Center

In this new play by the twenty-nine-year-old
Jeremy O. Harris (directed by Danya Taymor),
Franklin (Ronald Peet), a young black artist,
and Andre (Alan Cumming), a wealthy white art
collector, meet at a club, stumble back to Andre’s
mansion in Bel Air, and immediately begin a
psychologically unparsable relationship. Franklin has a big, potentially career-defining show
coming up; his deeply religious mother, Zora
(Charlayne Woodard), spurred by a holy—and
basically correct—hunch that he’s got sidetracked somehow, shows up, and a kind of war
begins. Franklin stands anxiously in the middle;

OFF BROADWAY

Peet plays him with a sorrowful strain that’s
sometimes difficult to watch. “Daddy” may
be an acknowledgment of the interpretative
peril in which Harris finds himself as an artist
given equally to melodrama and serious rumination—a bid to claim his right to subtlety and
ornament, spectacle and pain. (3/18/19)—V.C.
(Through March 31.)

Fiercely Independent
SoHo Playhouse
In Kathleen K. Johnson’s début as both a
playwright and a director, an unhappy couple
(Christopher M. Smith and Caitlin Gallogly)
agree to spend twenty-four hours in a hotel
room to talk through unspecified problems
in their marriage. On the plus side, this production has provided work for three actors

(including, most thanklessly, Jordan Sobel, as a
bellhop) who are doing what they can with the
script they’ve been given. On the minus side, at
the conclusion of seventy-five minutes of the
two main characters exhaustively describing
their feelings, almost nothing definite can be
said about them except that they like Chinese
food. How did they meet? Where do they live?
What are their jobs? Do they have interests?
Friends? Children? Politics? Histories? Fantasies? Ideas? The play’s refusal to say is almost
impressive.—Rollo Romig (Through April 7.)

Hatef**k
WP Theatre
Layla (Kavi Ladnier) and Imran (Sendhil Ramamurthy, of the series “Heroes”) meet sort-of-cute
during a party at his place. She is a literature
professor, he is a best-selling novelist; they share
a Muslim background and an aggressively cocky
confidence. Somehow overcoming painfully awkward banter, they embark on a relationship.
Yet the mutual hostility that underscores their
initial flirtation never entirely fades, fuelled by
their artistic and political relationships with
identity: Layla advocates for positive representations of Islam, whereas all the books by the
nonpracticing Imran feature Muslim terrorists.
Co-produced by Colt Coeur and the WP Theatre and directed by Adrienne Campbell-Holt,
Rehana Lew Mirza’s stilted drama does not even
deliver on its title’s in-your-face promise—a
scene in which Imran clumsily tries to put on his
underwear while cloaked by a sheet is weirdly
prudish. At least Mirza believes in fairness: the

two characters are equally lacking in nuance and
wit.—Elisabeth Vincentelli (Through March 31.)

8

THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 25, 2019

Isabelle Huppert stars in this drama by Florian Zeller, translated from the French by
Christopher Hampton and directed by Trip
Cullman, about a woman with an alarmingly
acute case of empty-nest syndrome. (Chris Noth
plays her preoccupied husband, Justice Smith
her too-beloved son, and Odessa Young the
son’s girlfriend, whom she loathes.) Huppert
is brilliant and often wickedly funny: scholars of body language should study the seemingly unlimited physical vocabulary she has
developed for conveying dissatisfaction. If
only this production could sustain the spell
it casts in its initial thirty minutes. The un-

ILLUSTRATION BY ANTONIO SORTINO

The collaborative theatre troupe the Mad Ones made passive-aggressive
banality hilarious—and even revelatory—in “Miles for Mary,” staged Off
Broadway last year and set at the excruciating planning meetings for a highschool telethon in the nineteen-eighties. (The period details, down to the
camel-colored telephones, were cringe-perfect.) The group returns, again
under the direction of Lila Neugebauer, with “Mrs. Murray’s Menagerie,”
which has a similarly clammy setup: it takes place in 1979, at a focus group
of parents for a children’s TV program starring a local Philadelphia jazz
musician. The show, starting previews on March 26, inaugurates the Greenwich House Theatre as a new downtown outpost of Ars Nova, the intrepid
Hell’s Kitchen theatre company that has helped launch talents such as Billy

Eichner, Bridget Everett, and Lin-Manuel Miranda.—Michael Schulman

The Mother
Atlantic Theatre Company


stable, paranoid rehashing of scenes is at first
thrilling, but the script delivers diminishing
returns as it devolves into clichés of French
femininity and madwomen. In the end, it’s another story about motherhood that only a man
would have written.—R.R. (Through April 13.)

CONTEMPORARY DANCE

1
DANCE

Aspen Santa Fe Ballet
Joyce Theatre
It’s rare for a touring ensemble to perform to
live music, and even rarer for a contemporary
troupe to do so—it’s too expensive, too cumbersome. But Aspen Santa Fe has come up
with a simple and elegant solution: a trio of
piano ballets, all accompanied onstage by the
excellent pianist Joyce Yang. In Jorma Elo’s
high-spirited “Half/Cut/Split,” the dancers
cavort, speedily, to Schumann’s “Carnaval.”
The surrealism of Fernando Melo’s “Dream
Play”—in which dancers appear to balance on
tightropes and fly—is paired with the spare

melodies of Satie and Chopin. And Philip
Glass’s looping motifs set a moody atmosphere
for Nicolo Fonte’s “Where We Left Off.”—Marina Harss (March 20-24.)

“From the Horse’s Mouth”
Theatre at the 14th Street Y
The latest subject of this series, which combines
reminiscence and performance, is a dancer and
a choreographer, but she’s much better known
as a writer. Deborah Jowitt has had one of the
most distinguished careers in American dance
criticism, and one of the longest. At the Village
Voice from 1967 to 2011, on her own blog since,
and in several books, she’s set a high standard
for putting dance into vivid words. The cast
celebrating her here includes such luminaries as Carmen de Lavallade, Valda Setterfield,
Douglas Dunn, and her fellow-critic Marcia
Siegel.—Brian Seibert (March 20-24.)

Sokolow Theatre
Actors Fund Arts Center

ILLUSTRATION BY DAIANA RUIZ

Anna Sokolow, whose choreography combined
social protest with the modern-dance equivalent
of Method acting, died in 2000. This troupe
tends her guttering flame. The current program
features her 1968 piece “Steps of Silence,” an
Expressionist evocation of the Soviet Gulag,

and the kind of intensely bleak work that is
rarely made anymore. There’s also a new reconstruction of “Three Poems,” which Sokolow
created for Juilliard students in 1973. Adding to
the historical interest is Valerie Bettis’s 1943 solo
“The Desperate Heart,” another kind of vintage
dance drama.—B.S. (March 21-24.)

Sylvain Émard
Schimmel Center
The Montreal-based choreographer Émard
made a splash a few years ago with his big,
messy work “Le Grand Continental,” a largescale piece conceived for amateur dancers and
set to a pop beat. (Imagine something like
an elaborate flash mob.) Now, in his solo “Le

There’s a rupture in the modern memory of Cambodia surrounding
the reign of the Khmer Rouge (1975-79), which murderously labored
to eradicate the past. Recently, the Cambodian visual artist Kim Hak
has tried to heal that rupture through his work, sometimes using photographs that were buried underground during the bad years. In “Cross
Transit,” at Japan Society March 22-23, the Japanese choreographer
Akiko Kitamura attempts something even trickier. In collaboration with
Hak, who provides narration and projected images, Kitamura strives to
confront that loss and trauma in dance, through the additional lens of
cross-cultural conversation. Six highly supple and agile dancers—some
Japanese, some Cambodian—move as if in response to Hak’s images.
They ripple and buckle, seemingly pulled in many directions. Often,
they collapse suddenly to the ground.—Brian Seibert
Chant des Sirènes,” the veteran dancemaker is
going back to basics, applying his pared-down
movement language to his own body. When the

piece premièred, in 2017, he hadn’t performed
in fifteen years; part of the dance’s subtext is
the vulnerability of the body as it submits to
the passage of time.—M.H. (March 22.)

Jonah Bokaer Choreography
92nd Street Y
The Harkness Dance Festival continues its
monthlong commemoration of Merce Cunningham’s centennial, presenting new works
by choreographers who once danced in the
Cunningham company. Bokaer, whose tenure
spanned from 2000 to 2007, was the youngest
dancer ever to join. In the years since leaving,
he’s been exceptionally prolific as a dancemaker,
demonstrating a taste for collaborations with
visual artists and an interest in his own Middle
Eastern origins. His new work features live
music by the guitarist-composer Alexander
Turnquist.—B.S. (March 22-23.)

STREB
Streb Lab for Action Mechanics
The shows that STREB Extreme Action puts
on at its Williamsburg headquarters (weekends

through May 12) have a carnival atmosphere,
and not just because eating and drinking are
encouraged. Will the Action Heroes, as the
intrepid dancer-acrobats are styled, collide as
they hurl themselves off a trampoline? Will

they get whacked by swinging cinder blocks
or huge metal contraptions? Probably not, but
they want you to cringe. Their newest machine
is the Molinette, a giant bar that revolves like
the blade of a windmill.—B.S. (March 23-24.
Through May 12.)

1
CLASSICAL MUSIC

“Music in Color”
Various locations
Music as vividly rendered and persuasively titled as Gabriela Lena Frank’s 2001 string quartet “Leyendas: An Andean Walkabout” makes
its vision apparent. In the coming weeks,
St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble performs three
movements from the piece—expect funereal
wails and wild, violin-driven romance—in
free concerts across all five boroughs. Excerpts from some of the composer’s more
recent works, and from “Clouds,” by Chou
Wen-chung, reveal Frank’s development and
influences; premières (one per concert) from
THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 25, 2019

9


New York Philharmonic
David Geffen Hall

AT THE OPERA

The baritone Matthias Goerne, in his final
appearances as artist-in-residence at the
New York Philharmonic, sings “The WoundDresser,” John Adams’s noble setting of text
from Walt Whitman’s account of tending to
fallen soldiers during the American Civil War.
Also on the program, Jaap van Zweden conducts Ives’s “Central Park in the Dark” and
Brahms’s First Symphony. After Saturday’s
performance, Adams curates a “Nightcap” at
the Stanley H. Kaplan Penthouse (March 23 at
10:30), which will showcase works by younger
composers he admires in performances by the
pianist Timo Andres and the Attacca Quartet.—S.S. (March 21 and March 26 at 7:30 and
March 23 at 8.)

In Wagner’s magnificent tetralogy “Der
Ring des Nibelungen,” the king of the
gods lies and steals in order to build a colossal castle, forcing his daughter Brünnhilde—a warrior of uncommon might
and integrity—to deliver him from the
consequences of his unchecked pride and
ambition. This season, the Metropolitan Opera brings back Robert Lepage’s
elaborately unimaginative production
of the fifteen-hour work, a costly affair
that required the stage to be reinforced
to withstand the weight of forty-five
tons of aluminum and steel. The dramatic soprano Christine Goerke, her voice
full of tensile strength, joins the run as
Brünnhilde in “Die Walküre,” on March
25, conducted by the elegant Philippe
Jordan. Goerke has a warm yet fearsome

presence onstage, and for some fans she is
this revival’s saving grace.—Oussama Zahr

Amanda Gookin
National Sawdust
The first edition of the cellist Amanda Gookin’s
Forward Music Project took on large-scale
issues affecting women and girls, including sex
trafficking and child marriage, but the second
edition, titled “in this skin,” pivots toward the
individual. Five female composers have written
new works for cello that channel their deeply
personal responses to such concerns as body
shaming, street harassment, and women’s rights
in Iran, drawing on experimental and multimedia techniques as wide-ranging as the subject
matter. Alex Temple’s “Tactile,” a piece about
“the erotics of everyday life,” uses ASMResque whispers and taps, and Paola Prestini’s
“To Tell a Story” manipulates audio from a
1983 interview with Susan Sontag. With its
husky sound, Gookin’s cello gives voice to these
fights and flights of the soul against projected
backdrops designed by S. Katy Tucker.—Oussama Zahr (March 20 at 7.)

Theatre of Voices
Zankel Hall
The splendid vocal quartet Theatre of Voices
and its director, Paul Hillier, are ideally suited
to the luminous austerity of works by Arvo
Pärt and David Lang, in a program that also
features the choral ensemble Yale Voxtet and

the organist Christopher Bowers-Broadbent.
Selections by Pärt will be performed in conjunction with “Songs from the Soil,” a so-called
visual poem by the Danish filmmaker Phie
Ambo, which follows the seasons on a biodynamic farm. Also on the program is the
10

THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 25, 2019

world première of a newly expanded version
of Lang’s “the writings,” a song cycle based
on scripture from the Tanakh.—Steve Smith
(March 20 at 7:30.)

“A Voice of Her Own”
The Brick Church
Dennis Keene’s choir Voices of Ascension
performs a chronological selection of predictably underexposed choral music written
by women, from contemplative monophony
by the medieval sage Hildegard of Bingen to
a world première by the genre-bending Bora
Yoon. This is no revisionist account—each of
the composers featured holds her own proud
place in musical history—but it is a corrective
to a male-obsessed canon. Is there a good reason that Lili Boulanger’s “Hymne au Soleil”
is rarely sung, that this is the first New York
performance of Cécile Chaminade’s fairy
tale “Ronde du Crépuscule,” or that Ethel
Smyth’s Mass in D Minor is eclipsed by lesser
works by men? It’s a relief to see the answer
ventured here: an emphatic no.—F.M. (March

20 at 7:30.)

Ecstatic Music Festival
Merkin Hall
Wye Oak, the dream-pop duo of Jenn Wasner
and Andy Stack, presents a set of new songs in
collaboration with the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, an ensemble that continually exhibits
versatility and gorgeous sound. The chorus
also premières a piece by Owen Pallett—a
violinist and composer whose work mixes
new-music and indie-pop inclinations—and
accompanies the gifted singer-songwriter
Alev Lenz, whose haunting track “Fall Into
Me” grabbed ears in an episode of “Black
Mirror.”—S.S. (March 21 at 7:30.)

In 2017, the august Hagen Quartet finally
premièred a long-delayed first clarinet quintet
by Jörg Widmann, a clarinettist of classical
brilliance and a composer with a radical approach to tradition. At Zankel Hall, Widmann and the quartet—founded almost forty
years ago in Austria by four siblings, of whom
three remain—give the work its U.S. début,
setting it against Mozart’s courtly, conversational clarinet quintet, which so intimidated
Widmann that he put aside his own piece
for nearly a decade. Six days later, the quartet returns alone to play pieces by Schubert,
Webern, and Beethoven.—F.M. (March 22 at
7:30; March 28 at 8:30.)

Anthony Griffey / Amy Owens
Morgan Library and Museum

The George London Foundation recital series
often pairs recent winners of its annual vocal
competition with more established singers.
Anthony Dean Griffey, who has used his poignant tenor to carve out a niche for himself
in English-language opera, sings arias from
“A Streetcar Named Desire” and “Susannah,”
in addition to an invigorating set of American art songs and ballads. Amy Owens, a
budding lyric coloratura soprano, offers a
hint of what’s to come with a rendition of
Zerbinetta’s virtuosic aria from “Ariadne
auf Naxos.” Fun and fluffy duets from the
worlds of Broadway and operetta top off the
program; Warren Jones accompanies on piano.—O.Z. (March 24 at 4.)

1
NIGHT LIFE

Musicians and night-club proprietors lead
complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in
advance to confirm engagements.

The Bad Plus
Village Vanguard
As momentous transitions go, it’s been a relatively smooth one for the epochal trio the
Bad Plus, which replaced its pivotal pianist
Ethan Iverson with the equally skilled player
Orrin Evans in 2017. A fine subsequent studio

ILLUSTRATION BY ALLISON FILICE

five composers coached by Frank at her farm
in California may give glimpses of her future.—Fergus McIntosh (March 19-April 7.)

Hagen Quartet
Zankel Hall


album, “Never Stop II”—which incorporated
original material from Evans—and absorbing
live performances have proved that the future
looks bright for this once iconoclastic and now
firmly entrenched ensemble.—Steve Futterman
(March 19-24.)

Alternative Guitar Summit
Le Poisson Rouge
In 1969, the Woodstock festival certainly
didn’t want for excessive rain or excessive
guitar-oriented bands. To celebrate the fiftieth
anniversary of that mammoth rock fest, Joel
Harrison, the program director of this annual
gathering, ropes in a slew of fellow guitar
visionaries, including Nels Cline, Brandon
Seabrook, and Ben Monder, to present their
own skewed takes on such figures as the Grateful Dead, the Who, and Ten Years After, as
well as Woodstock outliers like Ravi Shankar,
John Sebastian, and Richie Havens.—S.F.
(March 21.)

The Music of Van Morrison

Carnegie Hall
One doesn’t envy those tasked with covering the work of Van Morrison, whose sheer
vocal expressiveness renders the mission akin
to running up a waterslide. Yet this musiceducation benefit abounds with artists every
bit as individualistic as the tributee, among
them Darlene Love, Patti Smith, and Bettye
LaVette, who specializes in revisionist interpretations of baby-boomer standards. The
concert is the fifteenth edition of a tribute
series presented by Michael Dorf, who is
adept at wangling talent—and, on occasion,
luring the fêted to their feast.—Jay Ruttenberg
(March 21.)

TORRES
Le Poisson Rouge

Loco Dice
Avant Gardner

The music of Mackenzie Scott, or TORRES,
has a confessional, open-wound quality. Her
brooding electro-pop arrangements house raw
lyrics about trauma, spirituality, and—particularly on her 2017 record, “Three Futures”—sexual agency and unapologetic libido. “I am not a
righteous woman,” she purrs in a low, rumbling
voice a few tracks into the album; she quivers
with conviction as she sings, every word heavy
with brutal honesty.—J.L. (March 22.)

It can be difficult to play fist-pumping, populist techno without descending into glop,
but the Tunisian-born, Düsseldorf-based d.j.

and producer Loco Dice seems to do it with
ease. In the early two-thousands, with his
studio partner Martin Buttrich, Loco Dice
helped midwife the Berlin-centric strain
of techno dubbed, simply, “minimal,” and
his taste for freaky hooks has grown decidedly more pronounced since then.—M.M.
(March 23.)

Miho Hatori: Salon Mondialité
The Kitchen
No stranger to the quixotic, the onetime Cibo
Matto singer Miho Hatori spearheads a musical “imaginary, experimental TV talk show,”
featuring the guitarists Smokey Hormel and
Patrick Higgins. The concert is inspired by
Édouard Glissant’s writings on global pastiche, which Hatori links to the New York she
moved to in the nineties. Is the city evaporating in the face of extreme gentrification?
Perhaps. But on March 22, at National Sawdust, Hatori’s former bandmate Yuka Honda
fronts a similarly ambitious multimedia performance—a scheduling coincidence unimaginable in any other locale.—J.R. (March 22-23.)

Powder in Space
Good Room
The Japanese house-music d.j. and producer
Powder, born Moko Shibata, makes and
plays music that’s instantly recognizable—
dry and wispy, as her moniker indicates,
but also imbued with delight. Last month,
she issued “Powder in Space,” kicking off a
new mix series from Beats in Space Records,
run by the New York d.j. Tim Sweeney;
the set, which includes Powder’s limpid,

twinkling track “Gift,” is a highly replayable
showcase for her pastel-toned palette. Sweeney also plays at this release party.—M.M.
(March 23.)

EXPERIMENTAL ELECTRONIC MUSIC

José González & String Theory
Apollo Theatre
The Swedish singer-songwriter José
González broke into the indie scene with
a collection of hushed acoustic melodies,
including his 2006 cover of the Knife’s electro-pop track “Heartbeats.” His work has always been understated and beautifully spare,
often involving just light vocals and classical
guitar. Recently, though, he’s teamed up with
the experimental Swedish-German orchestra
String Theory and filled out his delicate
compositions with spirited arrangements,
imbuing the material with lush new life.—
Julyssa Lopez (March 21-22.)

ILLUSTRATION BY MVM

Optimo
Public Records
This weekend, the recently opened Gowanus
“hi-fi record bar” Public Records hosts a pair
of all-night d.j. sets that no serious dancer
should pass up. The sharp minimal techno artist Maayan Nidam plays on Saturday, March
23, with Friday given over to the Glaswegian
d.j.s JD Twitch and JG Wilkes, who formed

the duo Optimo in 1997. Their early-twothousands mix CDs “How to Kill the DJ Part
Two” and “Psyche Out” stand as models of
freewheeling eclecticism that command bodies
to move.—Michaelangelo Matos (March 22.)

There’s no use sticking Yves Tumor in any one genre—he expertly pulls
from all of them, with an ability to mold the familiar into something uncanny. The musician, who is based in Turin, Italy, revels in the indefinable:
in interviews, he circumvents questions about his origins with roundabout
non-answers, as if to echo the placelessness of his music. Some songs are as
clamorous as noise rock, and others are as delicate as ambient house. His
acclaimed album “Safe in the Hands of Love,” from last year, is serpentine,
winding an array of sonic influences around lyrics that brim with affection,
pain, and rage. The result both attracts and repels, tugging at the ear and
then redirecting it. At National Sawdust, he performs with a full band on
March 25, then returns the following night with the artist and designer
Ezra Miller for an immersive audiovisual experience.—Briana Younger
THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 25, 2019

11


1
MOVIES

Apollo 11
A copious collection of breathtaking footage of
the 1969 rocket launch, moon landing and walk,
and return home is chopped up, rushed through,
and edited down to near-banality in the director
Todd Douglas Miller’s brisk, superficial overview of the historic mission. Walter Cronkite’s

news reports serve as frequent voice-overs, as
when the astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins head to the capsule.
(The bright white of their space suits has an
eerie purity.) Images taken aboard the vehicle in
flight offer transcendent thrills that are quickly
intercut with (and undercut by) bland views of
Mission Control. Fascinating shots of hundreds
of scientists glued to rows of video terminals and
switchboards are reduced to mere wallpaper; the
work at hand remains a mystery. Miller tells the
story impatiently, hitting the high points and
leaving out contemplative wonder; only the

post-moonwalk docking and Earthward trip
play out in detail and at length. Thudding music
further distracts from the experience.—Richard
Brody (In wide release.)

Captain Marvel
Brie Larson, fully armed with humor and spirit,
plays Carol Danvers, a test pilot whose backstory reaches far into the heavens. She is also
known as Vers, for instance, and fights alongside the Kree as they battle the Skrulls: basic
stuff, for anyone properly schooled in Marvel
mythology. The movie, directed by Anna Boden
and Ryan Fleck, is less entertaining in its explosive set pieces than in its cheerful return to the
nineteen-nineties, and in the repartee between
Larson and Samuel L. Jackson, who is digitally
morphed into his younger self. The heroine,
with her dogged quest for identity and her
sprightly changes of location, becomes a kind

of intergalactic Jason Bourne, and she sets a fine
feminist example for humans and aliens alike.
With Ben Mendelsohn, Jude Law, and Annette

IN REVIVAL

Bening, who is typecast in the role of Supreme
Intelligence.—Anthony Lane (Reviewed in our
issue of 3/18/19.) (In wide release.)

Out of Blue
It’s no surprise that the books of Martin Amis
have put up so stubborn a resistance to being
transmuted into film. How do you summon a
visual charge that can catch, let alone surpass,
the busy force of his prose? The latest director
to make the attempt is Carol Morley, who turns
“Night Train,” Amis’s short novel of 1997, into a
mood piece, set in New Orleans. Patricia Clarkson, with a low-lidded gaze and half a smile,
plays Mike Hoolihan, a police detective who
probes the puzzling death of an astrophysicist
(Mamie Gummer) at an observatory. Persons
of interest include the scientist’s colleague
(Toby Jones), her boyfriend (Jonathan Majors),
and her powerful father (James Caan), although
the night sky, too, seems to be a contributing
factor. Viewers who like their mysteries to be
solved, rather than merely mused upon, should
prepare for bewilderment. The boozy score is
by Clint Mansell.—A.L. (In limited release.)

Tale of Tales
Yuri Norstein’s animated feature, from 1979,
makes a welcome return—not that anyone who
has seen it before is likely to have forgotten the
experience. Lasting less than half an hour, and
boasting the inward coherence of a poem rather
than the linear logic of a plot, it presents us with
various creatures—a baby, a wolf, a dancing bull,
and so on—as they lead us through scenes of a
Russian childhood. The film is far from ambrosial, with its strong whiff of alcohol and war, and
the soundtrack mixes car engines with lullabies
and tangos; nonetheless, Norstein’s capacity to
enfold and entrance the viewer remains undiminished by the years. His subsequent work, on
which he has toiled ever since, is an adaptation
of Gogol’s “The Overcoat.” Every fan will pray
that it may yet be brought to completion. In
Russian.—A.L. (3/18/19) (In limited release.)

The broad theme of BAM’s series “On Resentment” (March 20-28) gathers a wide range of daring movies, such as Spike Lee’s cultural-critical
comedy “Bamboozled,” the Filipino director Lino Brocka’s melodrama
“Manila in the Claws of Light,” and Brett Story’s conceptually bold
documentary “The Prison in Twelve Landscapes,” from 2016, which
considers the American carceral state as experienced in daily life outside
prison walls. Story’s film (screening March 25) follows a chess player
in Washington Square Park who mastered the game in prison; families
enduring the practical and financial burdens of a relative’s incarceration;
police harassment of black Missourians (including those in Ferguson);
and a California convict risking her life fighting forest fires. Throughout, Story finds that such agonies exert grossly disproportionate and
seemingly calculated pressure on black Americans. A historical sidebar

about the 1967 Detroit riot presents the subsequent militarization of
law enforcement against black communities as a publicly acknowledged
policy—and as a financial boon to some mainly white communities.
An empathetic observer as well as a probing analyst, Story suffuses the
film with grief and indignation.—Richard Brody
12

THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 25, 2019

For his first talking picture, from 1929, Josef
von Sternberg tells a luridly romantic tale of
a gangster’s cruelty and honor. The tall and
blocky George Bancroft plays the title role,
a New York crime boss who strikes his victims down with lightning force. He’s in love
with a young woman (Fay Wray) who’s tired
of underworld sleaze and leaves him for a
poor but honest bank teller (Richard Arlen).
Thunderbolt gets arrested while plotting to kill
his rival, yet continues to torment him—even
from death row. With streaks of shadow and
jolting contrasts of light to match the film’s
eccentric lurches between violence, comedy,
and onscreen musical performance (as well as
surprisingly prominent turns for a cat and a
dog), Sternberg evokes a nerve-jangling city
of macabre menace. He turns the limitations
of stiff early sound-recording techniques (as
later parodied in “Singin’ in the Rain”) into
declamatory acting styles and static images
of a starkly emphatic expressionism; he

builds to a frenzied climax of raving, ironic
grandeur.—R.B. (Film Forum, March 25.)

1
For more reviews, visit
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OH RATFACE FILMS/EVERETT

Thunderbolt


1
TABLES FOR TWO

PHOTOGRAPH BY FRANCES F. DENNY FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE

Marlow & Sons
81 Broadway, Brooklyn
Did any establishment define early-twothousands Williamsburg as perfectly as
Marlow & Sons? In 2007, in this magazine’s first review of the restaurant—which
is also, by loose definition, a bodega, peddling artisanal sundries, and a café—Lauren Collins described the aesthetic as “pure
ironic-nostalgic pastiche . . . something
like Ellis Island by way of Epcot.” Twentysomething creatives would flock to the
place, which just turned fifteen, for oysters
and speakeasy-style cocktails in the evening, then return, hungover, for breakfast
and third-wave coffee in the morning.
The menu, though, resisted mockery: it was straightforward and sterling,
changing frequently with the seasons
but anchored by unpretentious crowdpleasers like flaky biscuits, tortilla española, pâté, and the signature “brick

chicken.” The restaurateurs Mark Firth
and Andrew Tarlow (“Marlow” is a
portmanteau of their names)—who met
working at Keith McNally’s Odeon, and
first opened Diner, next door to Marlow—have always had a great knack for
finding and retaining kitchen talent,

using the success of each place to open
another. The Marlow mini-empire eventually included Roman’s and Reynard, in
the Wythe Hotel, plus a butcher shop–
grocery store, Marlow & Daughters; a
bar, Achilles Heel; and a wholesale bakery called She Wolf.
All have, remarkably, held strong,
although Tarlow bought Firth out of
the business in 2010 (Firth moved to
the Berkshires, where he runs a farm
and a tavern called the Prairie Whale,
in Great Barrington) and recently divested from Reynard and the Wythe.
The business even seems, as of late, to
be experiencing a revival, coinciding
with the return, last summer, of Caroline Fidanza, who was the original chef
at Diner and then went on to open the
dearly departed sandwich shop Saltie.
Fidanza, now the culinary director
of the whole restaurant group, must be
giving everything a nice, hard spit and
shine. Diner is as good as it’s ever been.
Roman’s is arguably at its best, especially
when you catch a Saltie-esque sandwich
at weekend brunch. She Wolf supplies

many of the city’s buzziest restaurants
with superlative sourdough. Most interesting of all, Marlow & Sons, under a
new chef, Patch Troffer, is undergoing a
quiet but distinctive identity shift. When
Tarlow asked Troffer—who moved from
the Bay Area, where he worked at Bar
Tartine and Camino, and whose grandmother is Japanese—what kind of food
he wanted to be cooking, he replied,
“Japanese-American farm food.”
And so it came to be that the brick

chicken, still impressively succulent and
golden-skinned, is served with shiitake
mushrooms and sweet potatoes that have
been roasted in koji, a mold that grows on
rice and is used to make soy sauce. A selection of pickles includes a tart wakame
kraut and a pear kimchi that strikes a
wonderful balance of unexpected sweetness and heat. The excellent, crispy yet
pliant sour-cabbage pancake, topped with
mayonnaise and fluttering bonito flakes,
is an okonomiyaki by another name.
Tuesday is Japanese-curry night, when a
supremely crunchy pork katsu comes with
a bowl of rice seasoned with house-made
furikake, shredded cabbage drizzled in
tonkatsu sauce, and, of course, a scoop
of creamy dashi-and-mirin-based curry,
punctuated with slippery whole turnips.
It’s a surprisingly successful transition,
which manages to infuse new life into the

place without sacrificing too much nostalgia. The décor—dark wood, salvaged
antiques, no tablecloths—is unchanged,
and, on a few recent evenings, the crowd
seemed to be composed of those same
twentysomethings, now in their thirties
and forties, discussing child rearing and
film rights. There are still oysters, and
strong cocktails, including one called
the Calpis Chuhai, made with a tangy
Japanese-style yogurt soda and shochu.
If, at the end of the night, the café (which
still serves roast-beef sandwiches and that
tortilla) has leftover cookies and croissants,
the staff will still parcel them into paper
bags for departing diners. But, first, order
the yuzu-curd tart. (Dishes $14-$33.)
—Hannah Goldfield
THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 25, 2019

13


“GAME-CHANGING.”
—Sy Montgomery, The New York Times Book Review (cover)

“A captivating
and big-hearted book
full of compassion and brimming
with insights about the lives of
animals, including human ones.”

—Yuval Noah Harari, New York Times 
best-selling author of 
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“I doubt that I’ve ever read a book
as good as Mama’s Last Hug….
Not only is the book exceedingly
important, it’s also fun to read, a
real page-turner….

Utterly splendid.”
—Elizabeth Marshall Thomas,
New York Times best-selling author
The Hidden Life of Dogs

“De Waal contributes
immensely to an
ethical sea
change for animals.”
—Barbara J. King, NPR

“Deeply affecting stories of
primates and other animals,
all dramas with great lessons for our own species.”
—Vicki Constantine Croke, The Boston Globe

W. W. Norton & Company
Independent Publishers Since 1923
wwnorton.com

THE TALK OF THE TOWN
COMMENT
LAST EXIT TO BREXIT

he lexicon of Brexit, the United
Kingdom’s buffoonishly mismanaged effort to leave the European Union,
includes technical terms such as “backstop” and “customs union,” as well as a
fanciful but revealing one: “unicorn.” It
has come to be a scornful shorthand for
all that the Brexiteers promised voters
in the June, 2016, referendum and cannot, now or ever, deliver. An E.U. official, referring to what he saw as the U.K.’s
irrational negotiation schemes, told the
Financial Times that “the unicorn industry has been very busy.” Anti-Brexit protesters have taken to wearing unicorn
costumes. “A lot of the people who advocated Brexit have been chasing unicorns now for a very long time,” Leo
Varadkar, the Prime Minister of Ireland,
said last week in Washington, D.C.,
where he attended St. Patrick’s Day celebrations. His visit coincided with a series of votes in Parliament that were
meant to clarify the plans for Brexit but
which did nothing of the kind.
Instead, the next two weeks will test
how deeply a nation can immerse itself
in self-delusion. As a matter of European and U.K. law, Brexit is set to happen on March 29th. Members of the
E.U. are frustrated because, even though
they have spent two years negotiating a
withdrawal agreement with Prime Minister Theresa May, Parliament has rejected it twice, most recently last Tuesday, which means that there is a risk of
a chaotic, off-the-cliff No Deal Brexit,
without determining new rules for trade,

ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDA

T

travel, or such basic matters as drivers’
licenses. On Wednesday, Parliament
passed a motion saying that it didn’t want
a No Deal Brexit, but—in an absurdity
within an absurdity—didn’t legally
change the deadline. On Thursday, May
got Parliament’s approval to ask the E.U.
for an extension. (Seven of her own Cabinet members voted against her.) But all
of the other twenty-seven member states
must approve it, and several have said
that they will not do so unless the U.K.
comes up with an actual plan for what
it will do with the added time. And should
the extension be short, or long enough
to allow a real reconsideration of whether
Brexit is even worth doing? The mood
of many European leaders was captured
by Mark Rutte, the Prime Minister of
the Netherlands, who said that he didn’t
see the point of just allowing the U.K.
to keep “whining on for months.”
The reasons for the M.P.s’ opposi-

tion to May’s deal are myriad, but they
tend to concern the Irish border, which
is why Varadkar has become a central
figure in Brexit. The U.K. wants a harder

border with E.U. countries than the one
that exists, but it also wants to maintain its current, open border between
Northern Ireland (seen as an inseparable part of the U.K.) and Ireland. Otherwise, it can’t fully uphold its commitments under the 1998 Good Friday peace
agreement, which put an end to the violent period known as the Troubles.
Until that conundrum is resolved, May’s
deal would keep the U.K. tied to the
E.U.; this is the “backstop,” and it enrages Brexiteers, who insist that the border can be dealt with by inventing new
technology. Varadkar called this notion
a faith in “magical solutions.”
There has been a failure, among Brexiteers, to see how Ireland has thrived as
part of the E.U.; with the principle of
free movement of people and goods fortifying the peace agreement and Dublin’s emergence as a business center, the
E.U.’s ideals of shared peace and prosperity have been realized there in a distinct way. At this point, Varadkar, who
is forty, gay, and the son of a doctor from
Mumbai and a nurse from County Waterford, has more clout in Brussels than
May does.
In Northern Ireland, Brexit has revived calls for independence. The same
is true in Scotland; both voted against
Brexit. There is also a sense of betrayal
among many young Britons, who grew
up with the expectation that they could
study, work, and build families across
the Continent, and now find that future
THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 25, 2019

15


being thrown away for the sake of national nostalgia.
There is a growing public campaign

for a second referendum, backed by an
assortment of Remain-supporting M.P.s.
Brexit has fractured the two main parties: many Tories feel that they no longer have an ideological home; Labour
has been further divided by charges of
anti-Semitism in its ranks. Labour’s official policy is now to support Brexit, if
not May’s deal, but the first priority of
its leader, Jeremy Corbyn, appears to be
to force a general election that would
make him Prime Minister. In February,
he indicated that he would back a new
referendum. Last week, though, when
Parliament finally had a chance to vote
on an amendment calling for one, he
instructed his M.P.s to abstain. The
amendment was defeated, but its advocates haven’t given up.
Indeed, M.P.s voted no last week on
every measure that suggested a specific

way forward, apart from delay. They
even voted against giving themselves
more power to put solutions to a vote.
They’re headed for more votes, including yet another one on May’s deal. Marina Hyde, of the Guardian, wrote that
the story of Brexit is one of “politicians
finding out in real time what the thing
they had already done actually meant,
then deferring the admission or even
acceptance of it.”
Those words should resonate for
Americans. The Brexit debate has been
marked by particular British eccentricities, but the tendencies it appeals to—

xenophobia, the belief in a lost, past
greatness—cross many borders. The adherents of such movements may see the
floundering of Brexit as a reason to rethink their assumptions—or, more dangerously, as proof that élites are conspiring against them. The populist dream
subsists in an increasingly troubled sleep.
Donald Trump has called Brexit “a

great victory.” Appearing last week with
Varadkar, however, he denied that he had
supported it; all he had done, he said,
was to predict that it would win. He recalled the moment: “I was standing out
on Turnberry”—his Scottish golf resort—“and we had a press conference,
and people were screaming. That was
the day before.” In fact, Trump arrived
the day after the referendum. He might
as truthfully have said that he saw a unicorn on the Turnberry fairway. He conceded that Brexit has gone badly, but he
didn’t think that there should be a second referendum: “It would be very unfair to the people that won. They’d say,
‘What do you mean, you’re going to take
another vote?’” But, as Trump will soon
be reminded, that’s how democracy
works: you don’t face voters just once but
again and again, as they come to see what
your promises amount to. And sometimes
the second answer is very different.
—Amy Davidson Sorkin

THE AIRWAVES
BUBBA THE LOVE SPONGE

battle in the free-speech wars had begun.
The nation has come a long way since

Schenck v. United States, which confirmed that the Constitution doesn’t
allow a man to falsely yell “Fire!” in a
crowded theatre. Social laws have proved
trickier. Can a man yell that pedophilia
involving a grown woman and a young
boy isn’t so bad, on a national radio show?
To answer that question, the country
may soon turn to the case of Love
Sponge v. Snowflakes.
The sponge in question is Bubba the
Love Sponge Clem, the host of the radio
show that Carlson liked to call. Clem,
who legally changed his first name to
Bubba the Love Sponge in 1999 (it used
to be Todd), likes controversy. He interviewed the porn star Stormy Daniels about her liaisons with Donald
Trump, way back in 2007. Roger Stone
has been a recent guest on his show.
When Hulk Hogan sued Gawker for
publishing footage of Hogan having sex
with his best friend’s wife—which the
best friend had arranged to record—
Clem was the best friend.
Lightning-rod free-speech cases have
often involved figures who are inconveniently unwholesome. The plaintiff in
Brandenburg v. Ohio was a leader of the
Ku Klux Klan, the ruling in the Citizens
United case protected the speech of cor-

porations, and Larry Flynt was the centerpiece of Hustler Magazine v. Falwell.
To this list, we may add Clem, who

has, in some quarters, been held up as a
free-speech icon for his footloose, sometimes vile radio segments. After the Carlson incident, the byline “Bubba Clem”
appeared on the op-ed page of the Wall
Street Journal, where Clem argued that
even contemptible sentiments should
be protected from the “speech police.”
He invoked Lenny Bruce and the theory of “benign violation”—that humor

ast week, old radio clips surfaced of
the Fox News commentator Tucker
Carlson saying some incendiary things.
From 2006 to 2011, Carlson had called
in regularly to a show in Florida, where
he described Arianna Huffington as a
“pig,” Oprah Winfrey as an “anti-man”
crusader who “hate[s] the penis,” and
women in general as “extremely primitive.” Iraqis are “monkeys” who should
“shut the fuck up and obey.” Carlson
also had positive messages. He spoke
lustily of Miss Teen South Carolina, saying, “She definitely looks eighteen.” And
he praised white men for “creating civilization and stuff.”
After the first clips were aired by
Media Matters, many advertisers abandoned Carlson’s show (including Just
for Men, the beard-dye brand; MyPillow remains). Carlson refused to
apologize. He argued instead that critics on the left have stifled the free flow
of ideas by policing what people “are
allowed to say and believe.” The latest

L

16

THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 25, 2019

Bubba the Love Sponge Clem


can’t exist without breaking taboos.
The other day, after finishing his
show, Clem agreed to participate in a
discussion about First Amendment
scholarship, over the phone, from his
studio in Tampa. He was joined by his
lawyer and one of his producers.
Clem said that he’d been reading up
on the law. “I’m probably more familiar
with landmarks, you know, like Falwell v.
Flynt,” he said. “I’m fairly up to speed.”
Did he believe that the Gawker case,
in which the outlet was effectively sued
out of existence for publishing a video,
has negative First Amendment implications? “You cannot confuse the First
Amendment with a privacy issue,” he
said. “The First Amendment doesn’t
give everybody the right to see or have
access to—or even in a newsworthy-type
deal to report on—footage that was in
somebody’s bedroom and was never
meant to be seen.”
Where would he rank the likes of

James Madison among free-speech heroes? “I’m sure our country’s forefathers should be thanked before Howard Stern,” Clem said. “But not in my
messed-up world.”
Clem was thrust into the speech battle on an otherwise normal Sunday evening, when he returned from a late dinner. “I live with my mom, by the way,
and my mom’s a big Fox person,” he
said. “She goes, ‘They’re trying to mess
with you and Tucker!’ I’m, like, ‘What?
What did he ever do?’” He added, “I’ve
had homeless people on who have said
very outlandish things, and nobody’s
writing about them.” Clem stayed up
that night reading Twitter—so late that
he slept through his 3 a.m. alarm, and
he skipped the show that morning. He
never sought to be a free-speech champion, he said, but he felt that he and his
friend were being unfairly attacked.
“I’m not nearly as brilliant as George
Carlin,” Clem said. “But I try to be kind
of a dumber, white-trash version of
George Carlin.”
Being a dumb, white-trash George
Carlin has its costs, such as being tried
on felony charges of animal cruelty, in
2002, after he had a wild hog castrated
and slaughtered on the air (he was found
not guilty), or, in 2012, when his plan to
“deep fat fry” the Quran was apparently
shut down by David Petraeus, then the
C.I.A. director.

Clem doesn’t argue with his critics’

right to lash out, but he is angry when
the barbs are anonymous: “I can go be,
you know, JimmyJam415 on Twitter, and
if I don’t like your articles I can say the
most outlandish things about you—‘I
caught him in bed with a goat!’” It is
the position of Bubba the Love Sponge
that accusations of bestiality are best
offered with one’s name attached.
Clem had a final thought, before
hanging up. “Don’t write this any other
way than you would,” he advised. “Just
fuckin’ let it rip.”
His attorney, Jeffrey E. Nusinov,
added his own counsel: “I’m just going
to say, in the spirit of Bubba, don’t even
let the editors see it.”
—Zach Helfand

1
SHINE ON
GOOD MORNING, MOON

he wish to turn night into day is
not exclusive to casino operators
and hedgehogs. Scientists in China recently announced a plan to replace
Chengdu’s street lights with an artificial moon—or illumination satellite—
by sometime next year. The fake moon
would reflect sunlight from across the
solar system, providing a glow roughly

eight times brighter than that provided
by the real moon.
If Chengdu—more than fifteen times
larger in area than New York City—can
do it, could New York? Could the City
That Never Sleeps upgrade itself to the
City That Knocked Sleep Upside the
Head? A call was placed to Roald Sagdeev, a physicist. “In principle, there
would be no technical difficulty to create such a moon in New York City,” he
said. “But it would be quite expensive.”
The moon would likely be made of an
aluminum- or silver-coated plastic, and
would orbit about three hundred miles
above Earth, or 238,500 miles closer than
the real moon. Louis D. Friedman
headed a NASA study on solar sails in
the nineteen-seventies. “The moon,” he
surmised, “would be manufactured with
ripstops in it, like you have with camping gear, so if you got a tear from a micro-

T

meteorite the tear wouldn’t propagate.”
How big a piece of shiny plastic are
we talking about? “When we did the
Halley’s Comet rendezvous mission, in
the late seventies”—a failed plan to have
a spacecraft monitor the celestial visitor—“the design was something like
fifteen kilometres in diameter,” Friedman
said. “I imagine that would just cover

Brooklyn.” No question: a moon for New
York would need to be yuge. And it would
need yuge support from residents. (New
Yorkers spend about half a billion dollars a year on blackout shades.)
“I worry that night is something that
people look forward to,” Richard Florida, an urban-studies theorist at the University of Toronto, said. “People are already concerned about light pollution.”
Deborah Berke, the dean of the Yale
School of Architecture, said, “My fear
is that a New York version would be like
the subway—creaky, old, and late.” Peter
Moskos, a former Baltimore cop who
teaches at John Jay College of Criminal
Justice, said, “It strikes me as a luminary
nightmare. The idea that more lighting
is better for fighting crime is wrong. Better lighting is better. If we could put out
pleasant candlelight and have people sitting outside at tables, that’s how you
make the city safe, in the Jane Jacobs
sense of getting people out on the street.”
Before a New York moon could be
seriously considered, difficult conversations would need to be had about its
draw as a tourist attraction, its effect on
wildlife, and the increased stress it would
put on parents getting their children to
fall asleep in a newly Scandinavianized
lightscape. “If this moon were more of a
decorative or holiday thing, there’s likely
to be more support,” Florida said. Berke
proposed a bipurpose, daylight-saving
orientation: “Between Thanksgiving and
Valentine’s Day, it would be up in the

sky from four-thirty to seven-thirty, when
it gets dark and depressing. Then, in the
summer, you would fold it up, flip it over,
and drop it down onto the side of the
East River and it could be a beach.”
It probably doesn’t help that a similar fake-moon plan devised by Russia
fizzled. In 1999, engineers tried to use
an orbital mirror launched from the Mir
space station to warm the country’s dark
northern regions with reflected sunlight.
The project was abandoned when the
mirror, an eighty-three-foot-wide sheet
THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 25, 2019

17


of Mylar, failed to unfurl and was incinerated in space, like a prom decoration
caught in an intergalactic bug zapper.
Five years ago, Martin Andersen, an
artist in Rjukan, Norway, successfully
lobbied his town, situated in a deep valley, to install three jumbo mirrors on a
mountaintop in order to bring a regular blast of sunlight to Rjukan’s dim
main square. Andersen is enthusiastic
about the New York moon concept. At
the very least, he said, “it would make
for some nice crime-scene photos.”
—Henry Alford

1

BACK TO ZERO DEPT.
AURA

he other night, the comedian Kathy
Griffin found herself in the back
of a black S.U.V. in Austin, Texas. Attendees of the South by Southwest festival sped by on electric scooters, threatening to mow down anything in their
way. “We’re going to mow someone
down ourselves,” she said. “I have a couple of names in mind, like Jeff Zucker”—
the C.E.O. of CNN. “If I see him—
straight to hell.”
Griffin, who is fifty-eight and has a
tangle of tangerine curls, was wearing a
polka-dotted dress. She had come to the
festival to shop a new film, “Kathy Griffin:
A Hell of a Story,” which recounts what
has happened to her since the day, in
2017, that a photograph of her holding a
ketchup-streaked mask of Donald Trump
that looked like a decapitated head went
viral. The photo was inspired by Trump’s
comment, after a Presidential debate,
that the moderator, Megyn Kelly, had
“blood coming out of her wherever.”
“Even though I don’t mean to defend
her, because she wouldn’t piss on me if
I were on fire, I still thought, Let’s do a
picture where there’s blood coming out
of his wherever and see if he likes it,”
Griffin says in the film. “He didn’t.”
According to Griffin, she underwent

arduous investigations by the U.S. Department of Justice and the Secret Service on suspicion of conspiracy to assassinate the President. CNN and Bravo
cut ties with her; she lost endorsement

T

18

THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 25, 2019

deals. Finding herself unemployable,
she went on a global tour (called “Laugh
Your Head Off ”) and got detained at
airports. Death threats streamed in. On
the bright side, she began doing a brisk
business in anti-Trump merchandise on
her Web site. (The fifteen-dollar “Fuck
Trump 80s punk mug” is sold out.) “My
No. 1 seller is mugs,” she said. “I heard
Bob De Niro bought one.”
Griffin financed “A Hell of a Story”
with about a million dollars of her tour
earnings. “As much as women are more
empowered now, it’s still six old white
dinosaurs that are the check signers,” she
said. “Even Shonda Rhimes can’t greenlight her own show, which is ridiculous.”
Netflix? “I don’t think they like me,”
Griffin said. She recently sent Ted Sarandos, the company’s chief content
officer, an upbeat e-mail, writing, “You’re
doing some really exciting things in
comedy; I’d love to have coffee with

you.” “It was so not me,” she said. “Normally, I’d be, like, ‘Way to miss the boat,
asshole—I’m making history.’” Sarandos did not reply.
Griffin’s S.U.V. pulled over. “Is this
the Amazon party?” she asked. Her assistant, Caleb Campbell, was behind
the wheel, and her publicist, Alex
Spieller, rode shotgun. Women wearing illuminated devil horns and halos
made out of pipe cleaners milled around
on the sidewalk. “I refuse to wear a halo,”
Griffin said.
“It’s for that new show,‘Good Omens,’”
Spieller said.
Griffin climbed down from the car

Kathy Griffin

and crinkled her nose: “I smell those
marihoochie cigarettes.” Bass boomed
from an unseen source. “Why is the whole
city thumping?” In a V.I.P. tent, Aaron
Hartzler, Amazon Prime Video’s senior
creative director, offered her a drink.
“No, thanks,” Griffin said. “I want to
know what this party is. Is Jeff Bezos
here? Is he mad?”
Hartzler laughed nervously: “I know,
right?”
“Because I like when he’s mad,” she
said. Hartzler explained that “Good
Omens” is a sitcom about the end of
the world, “based on a book.”

“I don’t read,” Griffin said. “I’m too
famous.” Spieller suggested moving to
the main party. “Celebrities? I just met
A.O.C.,” Griffin said. She had run into
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez earlier and
introduced herself. “She had a facial reaction,” Griffin said. “I can’t say if it was
good or bad.”
Out on the lawn, Griffin bumped into
the actress Michaela Watkins. She was
waving a Polaroid, the result of an electromagnetic “aura reading”—her aura
manifested as a hazy magenta cloud in
the photo. Griffin got in line to have her
aura read. A technician instructed her to
place her palms on a metal box. “If you
want to look at me, go for it,” he said,
readying the camera. “If you want to look
mysterious, doesn’t really matter. None
of those things affect the aura.”
“They don’t?” she asked, disappointed.
There was a flash, and a Polaroid
emerged. An amber nimbus bloomed
around Griffin’s head. An on-hand aura
“interpreter” took a look. “It is a big
fucking aura,” she said. “Very positive,
very curious.”
Griffin asked why hers was orangey
and Watkins’s was pink.
“Well, pink is very tender and loving,” the interpreter said.
A band launched into “Bohemian
Rhapsody,” and Griffin looked wearily

at her hotel, across the street. “How am
I going to sleep?” she asked. Back in
her suite, she and Spieller found Campbell sprawled on a sofa bed. “I had my
aura read,” Griffin said. “I could’ve told
them what my aura is. It looks like a
big drag queen. Can we say ‘drag queen’
anymore, or no?”
“You can say ‘drag queen’ for another
year, probably,” Spieller replied.
—Sheila Marikar


1
PARIS POSTCARD
POSTER BOY

rexiteers may worry that the European Union is turning the Continent into one big homogeneous Euroland, but in France the artist John
Hamon remains a distinctly domestic
phenomenon. It was well past midnight
on a freezing Friday by the time Hamon
parked his car under a no-parking sign
near the Place de la Bourse, in Paris.
In the back were an extendable pole,
cans of industrial-strength adhesive,
and a half-dozen posters printed on
plastic, each featuring a blown-up
French passport photo of a goofy-looking teen-ager with wire-rimmed glasses,
wavy hair, and what can only be described as a shit-eating grin. At the
bottom of the image, in capital letters,
were two words: JOHN HAMON.

It took five minutes for Hamon to
extract a poster of himself, slather it
with glue, and, using the pole, attach
it to the façade of a squat concrete
building—the headquarters of Agence
France-Presse, the wire service. The
following Monday, A.F.P.’s reporters
and editors may have noticed the poster,
but they would not have been surprised
by it. John Hamon’s face has been smiling down at Parisians from apartment
blocks, office buildings, and grands palais for nearly two decades.
Hamon’s ubiquitous picture of himself is the only work of art he has ever
produced. He justifies this on the
ground that “c’est la promotion qui fait
l’artiste ou le degré zéro de l’art”—“it is
the promotion that makes the artist
or the zero degree of art”—after Marcel Duchamp’s dictum “The spectator makes the picture” and the title of
Roland Barthes’s first book, “Writing
Degree Zero.” He has pasted tens of
thousands across the city, at least several hundred of which remain, a Kilroy for the twenty-first century. The
picture was taken when he was an
eighteen-year-old high-school student, in 2000; he started putting up
posters the following year. His cheeks

B

•
have since filled out, and a scraggly
beard covers them. He does not allow
himself to be photographed.

“If I put up my real face, it becomes
mine,” Hamon said, sipping a beer at
a late-night café near the Place de la
République, the potential vandalism
charges of the evening behind him. “I
want people to be able to appropriate
it.” Now thirty-six, he says he is not
recognized on the streets, but sometimes waiters, seeing his name on his
credit card, ask if he is the John Hamon.
“It’s not about me,” he said. “It is me
as an artist. Not me with my girlfriend.”
Hamon met his girlfriend, Tara
Kasenda, on Tinder, where his profile
was made up of various versions of his
poster. The day after he put up the A.F.P.
poster, he and Kasenda sat at a bistro,
as gilets jaunes clashed with gendarmes
nearby. “A month before I met him, our
professor was discussing him in class,”
Kasenda, a master’s student at the Paris
College of Art, said. “My first question,
when we met, was ‘Why are you on
Tinder? Is this part of your work?’ He
was, like, ‘Yes, I have to do promotion
on all the social-media platforms. But
also I am looking for a girlfriend.’”
In 2001, when Hamon got started,
guerrilla posters were a cost-effective

•

means of self-promotion. “I’m not
rich,” he said. He is coy when asked
how he earns money to live. (“A pact
with God,” he said.) “It’s not possible to buy a billboard, but if I could
I would,” he said. “But with Facebook
I pay maybe a hundred euros, and
maybe a hundred thousand see the
post.” He has a hundred and thirtyfour thousand followers on Instagram,
and he now uses the platform to sell
prints of his poster, for two hundred
euros. “Sometimes I think it is more
honest to pay for advertising, because
you have this freedom, and it is more
freedom than you have in a gallery or
exhibition.”
Hamon has inspired copycats, though
they are short-lived. “Sometimes someone does it for a month or a week or a
day and they see how complicated it
is,” he said. He has also inspired tributes. Posters picturing a Hamon lookalike with a carrot in his mouth and
the words “GO VEGAN” have started appearing around Paris. He has been collaborating with other artists on Instagram, who do versions of his posters.
“It’s not a problem for me,” he said. “I
don’t have a problem with vegan.”
“You’re not vegan,” Kasenda said.
—Leo Mirani
THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 25, 2019

19


LIFE AND LETTERS

BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT
A beloved Canadian novelist reckons with her Mennonite past.
BY ALEXANDRA SCHWARTZ

efore Miriam Toews can sit down
to write, she needs to walk. Something about the body in motion limbers
up the mind and suggests that it should
get moving, too. When she is working
on a book, she exists in a state of heightened suggestibility, as if everything she
sees and hears were hers for the taking.
In her twenties, when she went to journalism school to learn how to make radio
documentaries, she loved spending hours
with audiotape, a razor blade, and chalk,
seamlessly stitching together the voices
she had gathered, trying to keep her own
voice out of the mix. But she found that
she wished she could embellish, add thunder and lightning where there had been

B

only a gentle rain, and that is why she
writes fiction.
A few years ago, Toews was walking
around Toronto, where she lives, turning the idea for a novel over in her mind.
She had been thinking about it on and
off since 2009, when she read about a series of crimes that had taken place in a
remote Mennonite community in Bolivia known as Manitoba Colony. Mennonites belong to an Anabaptist movement that took shape in the Netherlands
during the Protestant Reformation.
Today, they number about two million

worldwide. Though most now live modern lives, they, like the Amish, have traditionally kept themselves at a strict re-

Miriam Toews writes irreverently of the sacred and the serious.
20

THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 25, 2019

move from the sinful world, and some
still do. Members of Manitoba Colony
aren’t on the electrical grid. They make
their living from farming, but they put
steel rather than rubber on the wheels
of their tractors, since rubber tires, which
move faster, are forbidden. Their first
language is Plautdietsch, or Low German, an archaic unwritten dialect that
dates back to sixteenth-century Polish
Prussia, where many of their ancestors
settled after persecution drove them from
home. After Prussia, they went to Russia, then to Canada, and then to Mexico and points south, not intermarrying
with the local population, leaving each
place when its laws or customs impinged
on their commitment to separation.
Toews learned that between 2005 and
2009 more than a hundred women and
girls in Manitoba Colony had been raped
at night in their homes. It took some time
for them to understand what was happening, because they had almost no memory of the assaults; they would wake in
the morning in pain, bruised, with blood
in their beds. Some colonists said that
the women were being attacked by demons sent to punish them for their sins.

They were suspected of lying to disguise
adultery. Then, one night, two men from
the colony were caught trying to enter a
house. Along with six others, they were
convicted of the attacks. They had sedated their victims by spraying them with
a cow anesthetic made from belladonna.
Toews, who is fifty-four, is one of the
best-known and best-loved Canadian
writers of her generation. She grew up
in Steinbach, a town founded by Mennonites in the province of Manitoba, for
which the colony in Bolivia was named.
(“Toews,” which rhymes with “saves,” is
as recognizably Mennonite as “Cohen”
is Jewish.) Her fiction has often dealt
with the religious hypocrisy and patriarchal dominion that she feels to be part
of her heritage, and with a painful emotional legacy, harder to name but as present as a watermark. Her father and her
sister both died too young, and she sees
a certain Mennonite tendency toward
sorrow and earthly guilt as bearing some
responsibility for their deaths. On the
other hand, she and her mother are still
alive. But for the vagaries of history,Toews
thinks, they could have been like the
women of the other Manitoba.
She had no interest in describing the
PHOTOGRAPH BY GRANT HARDER


crimes. She tried to imagine how the
women might have responded when they

learned the truth, but her own emotions
kept breaking in. She craved revenge.
She wanted the women to make the men
of the colony feel fear in their bones, fear
of being attacked, of being killed, of being
tortured or egregiously violated. Maybe
they could use the belladonna to knock
out the men and commit brutal—brutal what? The idea seemed hokey, not to
mention absurd. Mennonites are pacifists;
one reason they have moved so often
throughout their history is to avoid being
conscripted as soldiers. No matter what
had happened to the women, she knew,
they weren’t like her. They would keep
their faith.
Her characters began to speak to her,
almost as a chorus. She chose to let them
address one another instead, to ask the
questions she had and see if answers would
come. The women are eight members
from three generations of two closely
connected families, the Friesens and the
Loewens: mothers and daughters, grandmothers and granddaughters, aunts and
nieces, cousins. She put them together
in a barn loft. Their attackers have been
jailed, but the other men of the colony
have gone to post bail. The women have
two days to decide what to do:
Greta explains that these horses, upon being
startled by Dueck’s stupid dog, don’t organize

meetings to determine their next course of action. They run. And by so doing, evade the
dog and potential harm.
Agata Friesen, the eldest of the Friesen
women (although born a Loewen) laughs, as
she does frequently and charmingly, and agrees.
But Greta, she states, we are not animals.
Greta replies that we have been preyed upon
like animals; perhaps we should respond in kind.
Do you mean we should run away? asks Ona.
Or kill our attackers? asks Salome.
(Mariche, Greta’s eldest, until now silent,
makes a soft scoffing sound.)

The women argue with and shout at
one another, and joke and laugh. They
think about salvation, freedom, safety.
When they need a break, they sing hymns.
The teen-agers in the barn goof off, braiding their hair together and miming killing themselves from boredom. Their
choices are to do nothing, to stay and
fight the men for a more equal position
in the colony, or to leave. The colony’s
bishop has asked them to forgive their
attackers. If they don’t, he says, they will
be just as guilty in the eyes of God. They

have two lives to consider: the one that
they are living on earth and the eternal
one that they hope to spend in Heaven.
Toews called the book, her eighth,
“Women Talking.” It was released in

Canada last year, and will be published
in the U.S., by Bloomsbury, next month.
She likes the declarative simplicity of the
title. When people tell her they are surprised to find that her novel mostly just
consists of women talking to one another, she thinks, Yeah, well, I warned
you. Once, after a foreign publisher turned
down one of her novels owing to “a fatal
lack of plot,” she suggested that the phrase
be used as a cover blurb. In place of plot,
she creates pressure, steadily intensifying the novel’s atmospheric conditions
until it becomes clear that something
must either collapse or explode.
n a slushy, treacherous January afternoon, Toews was sitting on her
living-room rug, holding her grinning
six-month-old grandson, Austin, in her
lap. The house, a narrow Victorian in
Toronto’s Queen West neighborhood,
was in a comfortable disarray of throw
pillows and baby toys. Toews was young
when she had her children—Georgia,
who is Austin’s mother, and Owen,
whose daughter, Silvia, had just turned
one—and she has become a devoted
grandmother, eager to babysit. “I loved
being a mother,” she said. “I am a mother,
but I mean raising children. I know
that sounds so retrograde and bullshit,
but it’s true.”
Toews’s own mother, Elvira, faced
them in a recliner, holding a pile of books

on Mennonite history, their covers illustrated with bonneted, wide-skirted women
and men straining at hand plows. “We’re
all interrelated,” she said. “Literally. Let’s
see, how am I related to you, Miriam?
She’s my daughter, for one thing.”
“But my parents were second cousins,” Toews said.
“Her father and I were second cousins, so Miriam and I are second cousins
once removed!”
“Oh, that’s gross,” Toews said. Her
Canadian “O”s are as round as frying
pans, her voice musical and even. “I never
even thought of that.”
She pulled her straw-blond hair into
a loose bun, out of the baby’s reach. Toews
is Russian Mennonite, a slight misnomer; her Frisian ancestors arrived in Can-

O

ada by way of Russia, but they did not
intermarry, and it is easy to imagine coming across her pale oval face, with its
sharp nose and light, frank eyes, in a
Dutch portrait gallery. A decade and a
half ago, on the strength of her author
photo, the director Carlos Reygadas cast
her as the beautiful, spurned wife of a
farmer in his film “Silent Light,” set in
a conservative Mennonite colony in Mexico. Most of her role involved stoically
suffering in long, wordless closeups; the
scant dialogue was in Plautdietsch, her
parents’ first language, which she does

not really speak, so she learned her lines
phonetically.
There is a Plautdietsch term, schputting, for irreverence directed at serious or
sacred things. In conversation, as in art,
Toews is a schputter; she likes to puncture anything that has a whiff of pretension or self-importance about it. A few
years after her experience in “Silent Light,”
she wrote a novel, “Irma Voth,” about a
Mennonite teen-ager who gets involved
in a film shoot near her family’s farm in
Mexico. The director is given to grandiose pronouncements like “If you’re not
prepared to risk your life, then leave now”;
Irma, who serves as the Plautdietsch interpreter on set, cannily mistranslates the
script so that, when the obedient wife is
supposed to tell her husband that she
loves him, she instead says that she is
tired of putting up with his crap.
Lately,Toews has focussed her schputting on the city of Toronto, and her
neighborhood in particular—too aloof,
with its pet spas and hipper-than-thou
boutiques. “I think my friends have heard
me complaining enough about Torontonians not saying hi,” she said, but she
can’t help herself. The other day, as she
was brushing snow off her car, she had
yelled out a big, chipper “Hey!” to a
passerby who kept on walking as though
he hadn’t heard a thing, and she was
still annoyed.
She moved to the city ten years ago,
from Winnipeg, where she had spent
most of her adult life; her marriage was

ending, her sister, Marj, was sick, Georgia wanted to go to standup-comedy
school, and Toews needed a change of
scene. To this day, she feels like a traitor. “Nobody moves away from Winnipeg, especially to Toronto, and escapes condemnation,” she wrote, in “All
My Puny Sorrows,” her novel about her
THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 25, 2019

21


sister’s illness and death. “It’s like leaving the Crips for the Bloods.”
Elvira followed soon after. She lives
on the first floor of the house; Toews
and Erik Rutherford, her partner of nearly
a decade, live on the second. The domestic mood is that of an intergenerational
dorm, with Rutherford as the house chef,
and Elvira the resident sports nut; when
the doorbell rings, it plays “Take Me Out
to the Ballgame.” In “All My Puny Sorrows,”Toews describes a character based
on her mother as “a short, fat seventysix-year-old Mennonite prairie woman
who has lived most of her life in one of
the country’s most conservative small
towns, who has been tossed repeatedly
through life’s wringer,” yet who remains
“jovial and curious and delighted and
oblivious to snottiness.” Elvira is eightythree now, but otherwise little changed.
A few weeks earlier, a wheel had come
off her walker, and she fell in the kitchen
at night. While she waited to be discovered, she sang German hymns, including—to tell it made her laugh and
laugh—one with the verse “I won’t walk
without you, Lord, / not a single step.”

Over a lunch of butter-chicken rotis,
the conversation turned to Toews’s novels. An Elvira-like figure appears in
just about all of them, pragmatic, comical, full of good sense, though some
of these incarnations are more fictional
than others.
“I have no secrets left, and that’s O.K.,”
Elvira said. “I stand behind Miriam one
hundred per cent. She has a mind I don’t
have, and I know that. And with what
they call your coming-out story—”
“Coming-of-age story,” Toews said.
“‘A Complicated Kindness.’ ”
The novel, published in 2004, is narrated by sixteen-year-old Nomi Nickel,
who has begun to rebel against the repressive religious culture of her small
Mennonite town. It won the Governor
General’s Literary Award for Fiction and
became a best-seller, the kind of book
that gets assigned in school and included
on lists of novels that “make you proud
to be a Canadian,” and it turned Toews,
a niche, indie sort of Canadian writer,
into a famous one. It is a master class in
schputting; not even Menno Simons, for
whom the faith is named, gets away with
his dignity intact, and many Mennonites
took offense.
“I read that book from beginning to
22

THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 25, 2019

end,” Elvira said, “and I told her, ‘Well,
Miriam, it’s a good thing we’re Mennonites. At least you won’t get shot.’ ”
“But I was nervous,” Toews said.
Elvira brought up a friend who had
met a group of Steinbachers on a Mennonite heritage cruise to Ukraine. “All
he did was mention her name, and they
just erupted. ‘Miriam Toews tells lies!’ I
think I can actually be so bold as to say
that there is hatred against Miriam,
though what Mennonites don’t do is
confront you.”
“It was Marj who also really helped
me a lot, who told me, ‘Listen, people
are going to come after you, people will
be angry,’ ” Toews said. “She told me to
say this thing I’ve said for so long, and
so often, which is that it’s not a critique
of the Mennonite faith or of Mennonite
people but of fundamentalism, of that
culture of control. I wish that people who
felt that they were being personally attacked could step back and say, ‘Maybe
she is really talking about the hypocrisy
of the intolerance, the oppressiveness,
particularly for girls and women, the emphasis on shame and guilt and punishment.’ ” Her voice was catching. “We all
have a right to fight in life.”
“I knew people would talk about it,
even if maybe not to our faces,” Elvira
said, “and I didn’t want to just say, ‘Well,
you can like it or not like it, it doesn’t

matter.’ I wanted what, to me, would be
an answer, and I didn’t have one until I
went to one of Miriam’s readings in Win-

nipeg. There was my neighbor from
Steinbach, from when I was a kid. I said,
‘What are you doing here?’ And she said,
‘Elvira, when I knew that Miriam was
going to be here in person I decided, I’m
going. How could she write about how
I felt when I was growing up in Steinbach?’ And that was my answer, too.”
Elvira has the only landline in the
house; when it rings, it’s more often than
not an old friend from Steinbach, calling to let her know that another of their

cohort is gone. Later, upstairs and out of
earshot, Toews did an impression of her
mother on the receiver: “Oh, good. Oh,
good. What a relief that must be. He’s
with the Lord now.” She said, “I can sit
on the stairs and listen in on these conversations like a little kid at Christmas,
and think, Wow! Imagine that. That terror of death—they just don’t have it.”
hree days later, Toews was in southern Manitoba, driving from Winnipeg to Steinbach—“Shitville, as we
called it,” she said, staring grimly ahead.
It was fifteen degrees below zero. Snow
slithered across the lanes like smoke. The
sky was a blinding blue, the prairie a dazzling white. Parallel to the highway,
Maersk freight containers in child-bright
reds and blues rolled steadily down a train
track. Steinbach is forty miles from the

city; forty years, too, the joke goes. Although Toews had readily agreed to show
me around, she was feeling apprehensive.
“See that feed mill there, with all that
rigging?” she said. “There was one in
Steinbach that I would always pretend
was a ship, like I was living in some port
city and could sail away.”
We passed a sign for the Mennonite
Heritage Village—Toews used to work
there during the summer, churning butter for tourists—and one advertising the
manufacturing business founded by Elvira’s father. He had left the business to
his sons; his daughters had inherited a
comparatively modest fixed sum, and
had lived comparatively modest lives. “It
doesn’t matter to me, except that it was
unfair,” Toews said. Not long after Silvia was born, she e-mailed one of her
cousins to ask if he might give them
some good, solid windows from the company for the baby’s nursery, but he didn’t
oblige. “And Owen said, ‘Well, a lesson
in the patriarchy is more valuable for Silvia than a window.’ ”
In “A Complicated Kindness,” Nomi
Nickel skewers her town’s homogeneity: “We all looked pretty much the
same, like a science fiction universe.”
Steinbach has changed since Toews’s
day. It is now classified as a city—in Manitoba, any place with more than seventyfive hundred people can be—and has a
growing immigrant population. We drove
by a Mexican joint, a sushi joint, a tattoo parlor. Three years ago, Steinbach
hosted its first gay-pride parade; the

T