The New York Review of Books - August 18, 2022

72 Pages·2022·58 MB·English

Jennifer Wilson: Simon Callow: Vivian Gornick: Jed Perl:
Pushkin’s Black Reinventions Greenwich Village Ornament and
Inheritance of Acting Radicals Discipline
Volume LXIX, Number 13 August 18, 2022
SUMMER ISSUE
Fintan O'Toole: Why Banning Abortion Is Bound to Fail
Zephyr Teachout: The Surveillance Economy
Alan Hollinghurst: Andrew Holleran's Solitude
Gabriel Winslow-Yost: The Gamer and the Game
Natasha Wimmer: Sergio Pitol's Eccentric Flights
Hari Kunzru: Socialism and Its Discontents
Gregory Hays: The End of the World

Contents
August 18, 2022
PI T CHF OR K
P OL I T IC S
6 ............................. Mark Danner We’re in an Emergency—Act Like It!
10 ...................... Alan Hollinghurst In the Shadow of Young Men in Flower
The Kingdom of Sand by Andrew Holleran
14 ......................... Jennifer Wilson The First Russian
Peter the Great’s African: Experiments in Prose by Alexander Pushkin,
translated from the Russian by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler and Boris Dralyuk,
and edited by Robert Chandler
17 ................................... Jed Perl The Power of Ornament
The Clamor of Ornament: Exchange, Power, and Joy from the Fifteenth Century
to the Present an exhibition at the Drawing Center, New York City
Catalog of the exhibition edited by Joanna Ahlberg
19 .......................... Fintan O’Toole T he Irish Lesson
21 ....................... Natasha Wimmer A t the Center of the Fringe
The Art of Flight by Sergio Pitol, translated from the Spanish by George Henson
The Journey by Sergio Pitol, translated from the Spanish by George Henson
The Magician of Vienna by Sergio Pitol, translated from the Spanish by George Henson
Mephisto’s Waltz by Sergio Pitol, translated from the Spanish by George Henson
The Love Parade by Sergio Pitol, translated from the Spanish by George Henson
24 ............................ Simon Callow Shape-Shifters
The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act by Isaac Butler
NICOLE HEMMER
28 ........................ Zephyr Teachout T he Boss Will See You Now
Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac PARTISANS
Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk About It)
by Elizabeth Anderson
Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire by Brad Stone
The Conservative
Your Boss Is an Algorithm: Artificial Intelligence, Platform Work and Labour
by Antonio Aloisi and Valerio De Stefano Revolutionaries Who Remade
32 .......................... Clare Bucknell ‘So Whimsical a Head’
American Politics in the 1990s
Dream- Child: A Life of Charles Lamb by Eric G. Wilson
35 ............................... David Cole The Supreme Court: Egregiously Wrong
36 ...................... Mónica de la Torre Poem
“Partisans provides a
39 ............................. David A. Bell Paris Transformed
whole new meaning to the
Dividing Paris: Urban Renewal and Social Inequality, 1852–1870 by Esther da Costa Meyer
41 .......................... Vivian Gornick ‘What We Want Is to Start a Revolution’ Reagan Revolution by
Hotbed: Bohemian Greenwich Village and the Secret Club That Sparked
Modern Feminism by Joanna Scutts focusing on the charlatans of
43 .................. Gabriel Winslow-Yost Exhausting All Possibilities the 1990s it spawned.”
The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe a video game written and designed
by Davey Wreden and William Pugh —JANE MAYER,
45 ............................. John Koethe Poem chief Washington correspondent,
46 ............................. Hari Kunzru Socialists on the Knife-Edge
New Yorker
American Democratic Socialism: History, Politics, Religion, and Theory by Gary Dorrien
49 ............................ Jorie Graham Poem
50 ............................. Jenny Uglow O ut of His Element “This is the best account
Audubon at Sea: The Coastal and Transatlantic Adventures of John
James Audubon edited by Christoph Irmscher and Richard J. King out there of what
53 ................... Christine Henneberg The Good Mother happened to the Republican
Linea Nigra: An Essay on Pregnancy and Earthquakes by Jazmina Barrera,
translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney Party in the 1990s.”
Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change by Angela Garbes
—RICK PERLSTEIN,
57 .............................. Ian Johnson Hong Kong from the Inside
City on the Edge: Hong Kong Under Chinese Rule by Ho- fung Hung author of Reaganland
The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir by Karen Cheung
Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong by Louisa Lim
Today Hong Kong, Tomorrow the World: What China’s Crackdown Reveals
About Its Plans to End Freedom Everywhere by Mark L. Clifford “Nicole Hemmer is both shrewd
64 ............................ Cintra Wilson D owntown Confessional and wise in her under-
The History of Bones by John Lurie
standing of the history of
67 ............................ Gregory Hays The Last Reversal
Apocalypse and Golden Age: The End of the World in Greek American conservatism
and Roman Thought by Christopher Star
The Next Apocalypse: The Art and Science of Survival by Chris Begley and the long-term influence
of right-wing media.
Partisans brilliantly explains
why Reaganism
gave way to Trumpism.”
—E. J. DIONNE JR.,
nybooks.com Ishmael Reed: Northern Racism and the Buffalo I Knew
Ian Bassin and Erica Newland: The Path to Indicting Trump author of Why the Right Went Wrong
Vicente L. Rafael: The Return of the Marcoses
Anna Shechtman and D.A. Miller: Cronenberg’s New Sex basicbooks.com
Nawal Arjini: The Failed Promise of India’s Democratic Architecture
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August 18, 2022 5
We’re in an Emergency—Act Like It!
Mark Danner
ment power between Americans and
their most private decisions and who
would fundamentally alter the way they
choose their leaders. Justice Clarence
Thomas in his Dobbs concurrence was
forthright enough to state the impli-
cations of that decision for the right
to contraception, same-s ex relations,
and marriage equality. The January
6 committee in its well- orchestrated
hearings has begun to bring home to
Americans the danger posed by the
Big Lie for the next presidential elec-
tion. Still, despite these clear signs of
a darker future, for many voters the
danger remains unfocused and distant.
Under the threat of this darkness,
Democrats have a duty to make
crystal clear to voters what is at stake
in November. In midterm elections
especially, Americans must be given
a persuasive reason to vote—a task
that is much harder for a party that
won the White House only two years
before. This year voters are apprehen-
sive about inflation and other lingering
effects of the pandemic and demoral-
ized that Democrats, with their narrow
majorities, have failed to achieve much
of what they promised.
But the January 6 committee, the
overturning of Roe v. Wade, and the
Uvalde school shooting have put stark
and frightening issues prominently
before the public, and if presented
clearly and persistently they have a
strong potential to drive voters to the
polls—especially younger voters, who
were so vital to the Democrats’ mid-
term gains in 2018, and who now, after
Democrats failed to pass their climate
agenda, desperately need a reason to
turn out. This election must be about
Illustration by Oliver Munday safeguarding the country they know
and the freedoms and rights they cher-
ish. Democrats from President Biden
Amid the blaring, pulsating hype of government to force women to carry this kind of authoritarianism or begin on down need to present these issues
American culture, every election is pregnancies to term—as more than to slow it down. If any election cried clearly and unapologetically:
routinely proclaimed the most import- half the states will likely soon do— out to be nationalized—to be fought
ant in our lifetime. Now the flood of but foreshadows a country in which a not only on the kitchen- table issues If you don’t want a government that
heart-s topping news this summer— state or the federal government can of inflation and unemployment but can force you to carry an unwanted
the Uvalde school massacre, the over- deny people contraception or indeed on the defining principles of what the pregnancy to term—vote!
turning of Roe v. Wade, the January the right to love or marry whom they country is and what it should be—it
6 revelations—has brought us face choose. By limiting the regulation of is this November’s. If you don’t want a government that
to face with an exceptional problem: firearms, the Bruen decision ensures It is no accident that the last time can deny you contraceptives—vote!
What if this one really is? What if this that increasing numbers of Americans, an election was fought this way was
time, like the boy who cried wolf, we including children in classrooms, wor- also the last time the party holding If you don’t want a government
find ourselves screaming that the shipers in churches, and marchers on the White House gained congressio- that can tell you with whom you
emergency is real—and no one pays the Fourth of July, will die in shoot- nal seats in the midterms. Following can make love and whom you can
attention? ings. By calling into question how the September 11 attacks George W. marry—vote!
The 2022 election will be the first votes are counted—or whether they Bush’s Republicans made ruthless
held in the shadow of an attempted should matter at all—the January use of nationalism and, above all, fear. If you don’t want a government that
coup d’état—a nearly successful and 6 coup and the persistent “Big Lie” “Americans trust the Republicans,” will do nothing to protect your child
still- unpunished crime against the behind it augur a country where the Karl Rove told his colleagues, to keep from a troubled teenager with an
state. It will be the first held after candidate fewer Americans voted for “our families safe.” Though terrorists assault rifle—vote!
a Supreme Court decision that not not only can become president (as had killed thousands of Americans on
only uprooted a half-c entury-o ld es- he did in 2000 and 2016) but can be their watch, the Republicans turned If you don’t want a government that
tablished right but that threatens the awarded the electoral votes of a state around and denounced Democrats can ignore the people’s voice at the
rescinding of other rights as well. And not as the choice of its people but of as soft on terror. To vote for Demo- polling place—vote!
it will be the first in which it is clear its legislature. crats—even for heroic veterans like
that, from Republican legislators’ re- This America of the future will be an Senator Max Cleland of Georgia, who If you don’t want a government
lentless efforts to change who counts ever more authoritarian place where had lost three limbs in Vietnam—was that will do nothing about rising
the votes, the very character of Amer- government maintains the right to in- to vote for Osama bin Laden. The ar- temperatures and the danger they
ican governance is on the ballot. tervene in personal decisions, even the gument was shameless, savage, deeply pose to all of us—vote!
American voters have not confronted most intimate—except when it comes unfair. It was anything but subtle. And
so grave a choice since 1860. Now as to firearms, in which case anyone, it worked. The president is in the strongest po-
then, two dramatically different fu- young or old, sane or unbalanced, can Two decades later the United States sition to define this choice, and then to
tures are on offer. By undermining go about as heavily armed as a combat is again at risk, not from foreign ter- do it again, and again, and again. After
the right to privacy, the Supreme soldier. The coming election can either rorists but from domestic extremists the way his predecessor dominated
Court’s Dobbs decision not only allows accelerate the country’s move toward who are working to insert govern- the news cycle, President Biden often
6 The New York Review
GROUNDBREAKING WOMEN
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s original
“Insights into our
vision for her foundational and
generation’s most iconic
unparalleled text.
female singer.”
“A breezy, colorful saga of Old
—Walter Egan, music “Luminous.”
Hollywood . . . and a touching
producer, songwriter, artist —Spin
romance between two fl awed,
magnetic personalities.”
“Essential.”
—Publishers Weekly
—New York Times
“Beautiful”
“Marion Nestle is one of the
—The Atlantic
most important voices in
the food world and in this
book she gets personal for This rich, colorful retrospective “The volume brings to light
the fi rst time.” celebrates the off beat, inspired, part of Cha’s achievement
and highly original artistic . . . Tantalizing.”
—Ruth Reichl, former editor of
Gourmet magazine career of San Francisco–born —Bookforum
painter Joan Brown.
www.ucpress.edu
August 18, 2022 7
seems a vanishingly small figure on the Democrats have never been short of
national scene. If Democrats are going ideas. What they lack now is credibil-
to succeed in nationalizing the elec- ity. Passing even the stripped- down
STORYBOOK ND
tion, he must become the proud and reconciliation bill addressing climate
ubiquitous champion of women and change, prescription drugs, and taxes
their personal freedom, of the right of would have helped enormously in per-
all Americans to love and marry whom suading voters to turn out by proving
they choose and to raise children in that votes for Democrats really do lead
safety, of their right to vote and see to a more equitable society that con-
their votes counted. It is not enough fronts existential threats. That in the
for Democrats to pray that the former present emergency and in the shadow
president will declare his candidacy of the midterms they could not muster
before November and thereby scare fifty votes to raise taxes on corpora-
their voters to the polls. President tions and the very wealthy—a wildly
Biden and other leading Democrats popular measure vital to the entire
need to persuade voters of the threat Democratic program—casts embar-
they face and paint a convincing and rassing doubt on their legitimacy as
forceful picture of how Democrats are a working- and middle- class party. It
going to meet it. risks hurting turnout among those
voters in the Democratic coalition
whom they have been struggling the
Delivering the message is only the most to attract—the very working-
beginning. Democrats must recog- class voters, polls suggest, least likely
nize that they have a grave credibility to be persuaded by the threat of the
problem. Despite significant accom- present emergency.
plishments, they made promises in
THE FAMOUS MAGICIAN EARLY LIGHT
2020 that they have not kept. They
by César Aira by Osamu Dazai need to face squarely the fact that for As I write, it seems that only the
many voters, especially younger ones, prescription drug part of the
A writer is offered a devil’s bargain: Three wide-ranging, marvelous Biden’s term—the disorganized flight reconciliation bill is likely to pass.
will he give up reading books in tales by Osamu Dazai, author of from Afghanistan to the interminable Reducing the costs of prescription
exchange for total world domination? No Longer Human. negotiations over his signature “Build drugs, if they accomplish it, will allow
Back Better” bill—has been little Democrats to argue that at least they
more than a debacle. Voters who were are beginning to confront the rising
drawn to the polls by his promises of cost of living. At the same time they
dramatic steps to reduce greenhouse must swallow hard and point to their
gases, to raise taxes on rich corpora- failures to pass measures on climate
tions and the very well- to- do, and to change and taxes, immensely frus-
provide universal child care and two trating as they are, to reinforce the
free years of junior college have seen larger point: to pass their programs
little more than endless talk. One can and to safeguard Americans’ rights,
natter on about the filibuster, but the Democrats need to retain control of
fact is when it came to many of their the House and to elect more senators.
domestic priorities, the Democrats If they do manage to pass other vital
could not deliver the support of even legislation before the election—for
the fifty senators their voters gave example, parts of the China compet-
them. In those cases, the system didn’t itiveness bill that invest in produc-
fail; the politicians did. Given this re- ing semiconductors here and reforms
cord, why should Democrats turn out to protect American democracy that
and vote? emerge from the January 6 commit-
It is not enough to respond to this tee—this will reaffirm that Democrats
question by drumming up fear about are determined both to produce and
THE ENGLISH UNDERSTAND WOOL SPADEWORK FOR A PALACE
what could happen if they don’t. Having protect American jobs and to safe-
by Helen DeWitt by László Krasznahorkai
disappointed their voters on so many guard a system under threat.
of their promises, the Democrats must Democratic voters must not only
A modern amorality play about a A joyful ode—in a single soaring,
state clearly and specifically not only fear what might happen if they don’t
17-year-old girl, the wilder shores crazy sentence—to the kinship of
what they will actually do if they are vote. They must believe that their lead-
of connoisseurship, and the power great (and mad) minds.
returned to power but how they will ers, once elected, can and will protect
of false friends.
do it. The model for this is Newt Gin- the country and its institutions. In the
grich’s Contract with America, which meantime President Biden badly needs
was critical to the Republicans’ historic to take specific executive actions on
capture of both houses of Congress climate that show voters genuine ur-
in 1994. Democrats need to make an gency and creativity. He also needs
explicit commitment that if they retain to work harder to remind Americans
control of the House and gain at least of the jobs his infrastructure bill is
two additional willing senators, they creating. In 2020 he campaigned on
will effect a “carve out” of the filibuster the promise to make government work.
that allows their Senate majority to Now he must convince voters again
pass bills inscribing in federal law the that, if given the tools, he can.
right to choose to end a pregnancy, to During the past months the specter
purchase contraception, and to marry of an increasingly autocratic America
whom one chooses. This vow should be has raised its head. Voters who cast
announced by the president and re- their ballots for Democrats must be
peated by candidates across the coun- in no doubt about what they are vot-
try. Democrats should proclaim their ing for: the freedom to love and marry
intention to cast these as their first whom they wish, the freedom to decide
votes when the new Congress convenes. when they want to bear children and
It is not difficult to think of other to keep those children safe from gun
THE WOMAN WHO KILLED THE FISH THREE STREETS
elements that might be added to a violence—and the certainty that they
by Clarice Lispector by Yoko Tawada
Democratic Contract with America: will go on having a real voice in choos-
gun safety legislation that closes ing who leads them. They must be re-
Four beguiling tales for children of Yoko Tawada—winner of the
background check loopholes and sets minded that these rights and freedoms
all ages. A surprising new facet of National Book Award—presents
a minimum age of twenty- one for pur- are at risk, that a very different future
Clarice Lispector’s genius. three terrific new ghost stories, .
chasing guns, bills that expand and looms. The most important election of
each named after a street in Berlin.
safeguard voting rights, and of course our lifetime is coming. The emergency
legislation that confronts climate is upon us. If we are truly to meet it,
change and that ensures that every we must first make bold to say so.
NEW DIRECTIONS • NDBOOKS.COM
American pays a fair share of taxes. —July 21, 2022
8 The New York Review
Ellsworth Kelly
Blue/Black/Red/Green, 2001
4-color lithograph
25 x 88 inches, 63.5 x 223.5 cm
Edition of 45
©2001 Ellsworth Kelly and Gemini G.E.L. LLC
[email protected]
August 18, 2022 9
In the Shadow of Young Men in Flower
Alan Hollinghurst
most often hiding within a capacious
first- person plural. Sometimes this
“we” seems to be an intimate group
of two or three friends, sometimes a
larger brotherhood of New York party-
goers and pleasure- seekers; at others
it sounds more akin to the essayist’s
“we,” speaking for a community, a
generation of gay men whose lives
had never before been chronicled and
celebrated in this way. What it is not
is the “we” of coupledom, of a settled
domestic state, though for the narrator
a lasting love is the ultimate goal of
the nights spent dancing and hunting
for sex— the blessed state that would
remove the need for going out in the
first place.
Dancer from the Dance is framed by
an exchange of letters between two
friends, one in New York, the other
in the “Deep South,” who has fled the
scene they both participated in. The
New York friend sends his country
friend the text of the novel we then
read—a device by which Holleran
seems to send a message between two
phases of his own life, and to gesture
clairvoyantly toward the long future
he would spend in Florida taking care
of his mother after a fall in 1983 left
her a quadriplegic.
The town- and- country dichotomy
is explored further in the later parts
of his second novel, Nights in Aruba
(1983), which ranges more widely in
setting than any of the others. Its
shape is clearly autobiographical,
Andrew Holleran; illustration by James McMullan spanning childhood on a cheerless Ca-
ribbean island where his father worked
for an oil company, military service in
The Kingdom of Sand olation? Was there a tiny chance he scabrous and minatory spirit, Holle- Germany, and adult years spent shut-
by Andrew Holleran. might embrace the freedoms of old age ran’s novel achieved something far tling between the watertight worlds of
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and launch out into some quite new more complex: a critique of a newly gay New York and closeted family life
258 pp., $27.00 area of interest? Or would he pursue to evolved world that was also a haunt- in Florida, which in the end exerts a
an even narrower and grimmer focus ing record of its appeal. It gratified stronger if more sedative charm. If
Andrew Holleran’s novels are so his study of the deprivations and ter- the reader, especially the starved gay Dancer from the Dance has a plot—
gloomily personal that you can’t help rors of advancing years, which made reader, with its beautiful depictions the mythic transit of a young man
worrying about him in the long gaps both The Beauty of Men (1996) and of romantic love between men, but it through a time and a place— in this
between them and wondering, since Grief such bleak and original testa- also confronted the burnout of lives second book there is already a sense,
he’s now nearly eighty, if there will ments? The answer is clear from the driven by the pursuit of pleasure, and of common as well to Edmund White’s
be another book at all. Sixteen years opening pages of his fifth novel, The sex above all— “doomed queens” in an autobiographical novels, that life itself
have passed since the last one, Grief, Kingdom of Sand, with their scrupu- “unreal city.” The world and time of the will be the plot, and that the author
a novella- length study of a man, very lous evocation of a roadside Florida story, though so close, are looked back is committed to the adventure of de-
like himself, mourning the mother who video store, and of the protocols and on as some barely credible dream too scribing it with no knowledge of how
has been for years the center of his humiliations of visiting it if you are fantastic to endure. The power of the the story will end.
emotional life. Teaching for a term in a lonely gay man in his seventies in novel lies in the strange personal chem- The three novels that have followed—
Washington, D.C., he looks for lessons search of sex: this will be Holleran’s istry by which Holleran is at once the The Beauty of Men, Grief, and now The
from historical figures. There is Henry most depressing novel yet. It also celebrator, the satirist, and the elegist Kingdom of Sand—a re really succes-
Adams, surviving for thirty- three years turns out to be his most touchingly of a defining epoch in our history. sive installments of a continuing auto-
after the suicide of his wife but never confessional, with a muted poetry of The nearly narcotic experience of fiction rooted in north- central Florida
mentioning her again, and Mary Todd place and season that lingers in the immersion in the book’s sensory and and evoking the narrator’s mother’s
Lincoln, from whose letters he gains a reader’s mind. emotional world is achieved in part decade in a hospital, her death, and his
more inward idea of a survivor’s expe- through Holleran’s narrative sleight of attempts to manage his lonely and un-
rience as her life unravels in the years hand. He has a notional first- person happy life after she’s gone. The Beauty
after her husband’s assassination. The Holleran had the ambiguous good narrator, of about his own age (mid- of Men, the most substantial and sus-
question of how to continue after a fortune to start out by writing a thirties), but with no name or history: tained of the three, is narrated in the
life- altering loss is examined but un- classic. Dancer from the Dance, pub- an observer who seems less a person third person but is so intimate with
resolved, and the narrator returns at lished in 1978, was the first literary than a device, the almost- invisible the thoughts and feelings of its central
the end to his solitary existence in masterpiece of post- Stonewall gay guest- as- narrator you might find in character, the forlornly named Lark,
Florida with a sense of his grief re- fiction, and a novel whose magic has a tale by Henry James, or who more as to read like a first- person narrative.
newed, and of gratitude for it. Grief, only deepened as the era it describes nearly perhaps resembles Fitzgerald’s Unlike White, who has become more
for him, is a way of not letting the dead recedes into the past. He had found Nick Carraway. As an “I” he dissolves colorful and exuberant with age, ex-
go: “Your grief is the substitute for himself with a brand- new subject: the altogether for long periods, presenting panding beyond autofiction into novels
their presence on earth. Your grief is glamorous tumult of New York gay life the story of his principal character, about the travels of Fanny Trollope or
their presence on earth.” If you have no in the mid- 1970s, the clubs, the bath- the beautiful young Anthony Malone, the spectacularly diverging careers of
one else, and you are, like Adams, “too houses, hot summer nights in a decay- with all the freedom and imaginative two sisters from East Texas, Holle-
young to die, but too old to start over,” ing city, which he conjured up in prose intimacy of third- person narration. ran has stayed faithful to the task of
grief offers itself as a new way of life. of rich precision and revelatory frank- Intriguingly, in view of Holleran’s defining an ever more circumscribed
How would Holleran, a master of ness. Where Larry Kramer’s Faggots, later practice, in which the first existence. In The Kingdom of Sand
melancholy atmospheres and painful published the same year, approached person will be a means of merciless he invokes Yeats’s “A Prayer for My
self-s crutiny, follow that study in des- the hedonism of the gay scene in a self- exposure, the “I” of this book is Daughter”: “I wanted to stay in one
10 The New York Review