Innholdsfortegnelse for April 6, 2017 i The New York Review of Books

La La Land a film written and directed by Damien Chazelle The day I went to see Damien Chazelle’s La La Land I was blissfully uninformed of anything about the film except for the fact that it was a musical and that some early viewers had been well pleased by it. My mood was dark for reasons both personal and public—the day itself gloomily overcast—and the mere word “musical” was enough motivation to walk in, with the hope of a few hours of mood- altering respite. Musicals had always offered as their minimum promise a small healing dose of unreal pleasure—an absorbing short- term residency— but that was quite enough. This one had the desired effect. I hadn’t expected Swing Time or The Gang’s All Here or It’s Always Fair…

Known and Strange Things: Essays by Teju Cole. Random House, 393 pp., $17.00 (paper) Teju Cole is a kind of realm. He has written three books—two exceptional novels and the volume of essays to be considered here—as well as many uncollected essays, interviews, newspaper columns, and a vast online oeuvre made up of skeins of tweets on fixed themes, faits divers, e-mail arguments, captioned Instagrams, mixed media exercises, and rants. At the moment he is credited with more than 13,000 tweets, 263,000 Twitter followers, 1,035 photos, and around 22,000 fans who officially like his Facebook page. Even in a time when many writers are enlarging their literary footprints by means of the Internet, he is a prodigy. There is a strong interconnectedness between the different parts of his work. Cole’s…

The Hatred of Poetry by Ben Lerner. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 86 pp., $12.00 (paper) Don’t let the boy just loaf about; If he writes verses, kick him out. —Martial (c. 40–c. 103) Poetry has been around forever. It predates literacy and perhaps even the gods, who, some say, were invented by poets. There are so many types of poems, ranging from the epic to the tiny haiku, that it took The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics 1,554 pages to list and describe them all. Though it has mutated over the centuries, with the lyric poem becoming in more recent times the favored mode of expression, it can still be defined as “language that sounds better and means more.”1 The miracle of poetry is that a three-thousand-year-old poem can…

Age of Anger: A History of the Present by Pankaj Mishra. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 406 pp.,$27.00 In Pankaj Mishra’s portrait of our age, most people are angry: the white working class of the American rust belt betrayed by the metropolitan elites, the young high school and college graduates clinging to part- time jobs in Europe, and the terrorists who lived in the Paris banlieues. All of these different manifestations of rage, Mishra argues, have a common source: resentment at a “modernity” that promises equality and freedom and delivers only the dog- eat- dog brutality and competition of neoliberal capitalism. It was Jean- Jacques Rousseau, Mishra argues, who diagnosed in the 1750s the resentment that has defined but also corroded the modern age ever since: An existential resentment of other…

Man’s Better Angels: Romantic Reformers and the Coming of the Civil War by Philip F. Gura. Belknap Press/ Harvard University Press, 315 pp., $29.95 Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism by Chris Jennings. Random House, 488 pp., $28.00 Utopia Drive: A Road Trip Through America’s Most Radical Idea by Erik Reece. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 346 pp., $28.00 Oneida: From Free Love Utopia to the Well-Set Table by Ellen Wayland-Smith. Picador, 310 pp., $27.00 We Are as Gods: Back to the Land in the 1970s on the Quest for a New America by Kate Daloz. PublicAffairs, 355 pp., $26.99 1. On a sunny August afternoon in 1851, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, after a picnic in the Berkshires and a leisurely smoke under the trees, decided, seemingly on impulse,…

The Idiot by Elif Batuman. Penguin, 423 pp., $27.00 Elif Batuman has generously bestowed her wit and intelligence and insight on journalism, and now, even more generously, on fiction. The Possessed, her 2010 collection of essays subtitled Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, is unforgettable, perhaps because it is so unpredictable. Part memoir, part literary criticism, part travelogue, the essays echo pleasantly in The Idiot, her first novel. Batuman thanks Dostoevsky in her acknowledgments, saying, “When it came to titles, and not just titles, what writer could ever touch the hem of your lofty garment?” I have not read Dostoevsky’s The Idiot since I took it off the school library shelf thinking it was a comic novel. Finally, fifty years later, I am right. Batuman’s novel…

“Keep the Damned Women Out”: The Struggle for Coeducation by Nancy Weiss Malkiel. Princeton University Press, 646 pp., $35.00 In encounters with undergraduates at Yale, where I teach, it occasionally comes up in conversation that until 1969, when 284 women were admitted to the class of 1973, Yale College was for men only. The response I get, from young women and men alike, is one of incredulity. We had no idea, they tell me. And indeed, why would they? Yale, along with the other Ivy League universities, admits roughly equal numbers of men and women today. At these schools, women run the student newspapers, play varsity sports, compete on equal footing for the most prestigious postgraduate fellowships. Women are serving or have served as presidents of more than half the…

Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? by Kathleen Collins, with a foreword by Elizabeth Alexander. Ecco, 175 pp., $15.99 (paper) A master of the short story that is all voice, Grace Paley was famous for having come down against the fiction of plot and character development because, as she once said, “Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.” In Paley’s stories the narrating voice—urban, ethnic, rooted in lived experience—is most often speaking directly to the consequences of that open destiny, which, once pursued, never fails to take its toll. In one story the narrator runs into her ex- husband whom she cheerfully addresses as “Hello, my life,” but then has an exchange with him that reminds her that “he had had a habit throughout the twenty- seven years…

On February 16, President Donald Trump defended his troubled administration, then all of twenty- seven days old, in a news conference. “I turn on the TV, open the newspapers, and I see stories of chaos,” Trump said. “Chaos! Yet it is the exact opposite. This administration is running like a fine- tuned machine.” In truth, the Trump administration in its infancy is creating enough blunders, scandals, and controversies to strain the resources even of large news organizations like The New York Times and The Washington Post. The disruptions come on with the suddenness of a summer cloudburst. Even as reporters rush to cover one storm, five others materialize. It isn’t easy to keep up. The purpose of Trump’s press conference was to distract attention from the withdrawal the day before,…