Innholdsfortegnelse for August 5, 2024 i The New Yorker

“Have you turned me on?” Gillian Anderson asked, as she walked swiftly from her trailer on the back lot of a studio in Calgary, swishing up the hem of the long woollen skirt she was wearing to check whether a microphone transmitter affxed to a leather boot was functioning. It was mid-June, and Anderson had been based in Alberta since May, filming “The Abandons,” a lavish new Netflix drama set in Oregon in the mid-eighteen-hundreds. Her boots were scuffed and grimy; the previous day, she’d been shooting scenes on horseback, on location in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies, in her role as Constance Van Ness, a flinty matriarch who has inherited, and substantially increased, the mining fortune made by her late husband. “It’s dust, dust, dust for days, and…

Martha got the knife away from her mother and shut her in the garage. The garage was not for cars; it had been converted by the house’s previous owners into what the broker called a “mother-in-law apartment.” Martha assumed it was called that because mothers were more likely to move in with daughters, and men were more likely to own houses. She wasn’t married, though, and her sister, Molly, who was, didn’t have a mother-in-law apartment in her garage in Los Angeles, where real estate was much more expensive than it was in Baltimore. Also, Molly was busy with her children and hadn’t spoken to their mother in more than a year. “Let’s take a break,” Martha told her mother. “You rest here.” “What are you going to do?” “I…

Godwin, by Joseph O’Neill (Pantheon). Mark Wolfe, the protagonist of this intricately structured novel, is a technical writer in Pittsburgh going through an emotionally turbulent spell. Amid upheaval in his workplace, Wolfe is lured by his English half brother—an aspiring soccer agent who is “a tornado of unreliability”—into a quest to locate a prodigiously talented young African player named Godwin before a rival does. Their effort leads them from England to France to Benin, and, ultimately, back to the U.S. Ruminative, digressive, and epigrammatic, O’Neill’s novel is both a hilarious picaresque and a series of meditations on family, ambition, colonialism, and the history of soccer. “Football is not predictable,” one character observes. “Life is not predictable.” Neither is this novel. Fire Exit, by Morgan Talty (Tin House). This striking début…

ON NORMAN MACLEAN I appreciated Kathryn Schulz’s evocative piece on the writer Norman Maclean, especially because of my acquaintance with him (Books, July 8th & 15th). I met Maclean in my second year of college, at the University of Chicago, in 1969, when I enrolled in a course called Poem, Poet, Period. He was slight of build, graying, chiselled—I’d say hatchet-faced. These were the harrowing years of recovering from his wife’s death. In class, he remained seated, spoke with his hands, and told us to “put pressure” on our prose. He taught us that writing was everything. When I was in graduate school, Maclean asked me to proofread “River” with him. He read aloud slowly, distinctly; I savored each word. A few pages into the story of his brother’s death,…

Whitehouse Farm stood in open fields, facing the bleak Essex salt marshes, its columned portico lit by the moon. It was a midsummer night, nearing 4 A.M., when a patrol car sped toward the property. Three police officers got out at the end of the driveway, and a silver car pulled up behind. The driver, Jeremy Bamber, was the twenty-four-year-old scion of a local farming dynasty; his parents, Nevill and June, occupied the Whitehouse. Bamber had phoned the police half an hour earlier to report a panicked call from his father. His sister, Sheila, had “gone berserk,” he said. Her six-year-old twin sons were asleep upstairs, and she had a gun. Two of the officers told Bamber to follow them. The Whitehouse lay around a bend, concealed by tall trees,…

There it was, hogging a huge swath of street,twice as long as the Civic parked beside it,relic of the jaunty middle centuryinto which lucky you and I were born,when no one thought of limits to earth’s bounty—white with red leather upholstery,red instrument panel, red steering wheel:a finned, preening Cadillac Seville,top down, as if to lure me in.I half thought you would show up with the key.If anything could have brought you homeit would have been that swank, outlandish car.Were you still alive then? I’m not surebut I know I waited; you didn’t come.…

It was an age of wonder. Young, free-spirited women in feathery dresses smoked in jazz clubs. Families gathered around big radio cabinets in their living rooms. The marvel of mass production enabled millions of automobiles to roll off assembly lines each year. In the nineteen-twenties, modernity was transforming America, ushering in prosperity, polyglot metropolises, and new norms around gender and sexuality. Perhaps most significantly, doubt was creeping into the citadel of religion. A crisis of belief, brought on by social and technological change, and by growing acceptance of Darwin’s theory of evolution, threatened Protestant Christianity, the dominant American creed. Fierce fights over the authority of Scripture divided denominations. A backlash was inevitable. The Ku Klux Klan experienced a renaissance, expanding beyond the rural South and into Northern cities, the Midwest,…

A few nights before the French took their final vote in this summer’s snap parliamentary election, Tiago Rodrigues, the director of the Festival d’Avignon, staged an all-night, adhoc rally against the far right in the Cour d’Honneur. This dramatic courtyard in the center of the Palais des Papes has been the festival’s marquee venue since its start, in 1947; audiences enter a steep stone box, open to the sky, with a massive performance area backed by one looming wall of the papal palace. Rodrigues, a Portuguese director, took the reins at the festival two years ago, and his “vision of the stage,” he has said, is a mixture of “the poetical, the political, and the personal.” This year, as the election approached, he declared that, if the nationalists took power,…

Finding pleasure in a heat wave requires sorbet-like entertainment—sweet and gossamer-light. It’s handy, therefore, that an Encores! revival of “Once Upon a Mattress,” the 1959 musical frolic, will transfer from City Center to Broadway. In “Mattress,” by the composer Mary Rodgers and the book writers Jay Thompson, Marshall Barer, and Dean Fuller, the beer-chugging, swamp-dwelling princess Winnifred must pass a certain pea-based test to marry the delicate Prince Dauntless. The first Winnifred was Carol Burnett, and Sutton Foster, here directed by Lear deBessonet, galumphs gleefully in Burnett’s footsteps; Michael Urie plays Dauntless, as a limpid-eyed ingénue. It’s all of summer in a show: Winnifred the laughing sun, Dauntless her melting ice cream.—Helen Shaw (Hudson Theatre; starting previews July 31.) ABOUT TOWN DANCE | Since 2021, five of New York City’s…

We’ve all walked into the barof a joke we’ll never get.Knock knock from the evangelicalsinviting you to pancakes.Knock knock from democracylooking for its key fob.Don’t open the door if the knobfeels warm. When all goes quiet,you’ll know the wolveshave you right where they want you.Some days, more than anything,I want my old bike back.Some nights, I switch on the porch lightto watch the bugs. It’s nice to have somethingbright and buzzing to gather around.Hasn’t the goal all along beento make an unforgettable sound?For Beethoven, the ringing in his ears never stopped.For Miles, there was no wrong note,only what comes next, and it’s hard not to fearwhat comes next. One summer, the emergencyis the butterflies vanish. The next,it’s nothing but smoke. What’s really scaryare miniature horses, pink ribbonsin their tails, prancing…

One of the earliest written accounts of a man being eaten by a shark is also the account of a shark in love. It appears in “History of the Wars,” an eight-book chronicle by Procopius of Caesarea Palaestinae, born around 500 C.E. Composed under the censoring eye of the Emperor Justinian, the work is mostly so dry that it would be easier to eat than to read. But among the encomiums on war is the tale of an oyster “swimming not far from the shore.” According to Procopius, “Both its valves were standing open and the pearl lay between them, a wonderful sight and notable, for no pearl in all history could be compared with it at all, either in size or in beauty.” As the oyster swam (Procopius does…

Until the mid-nineteenth century, opera was wedded to rhythm and rhyme. Librettists supplied composers with heaps of verse for arias and other vocal numbers, alongside chunks of prose recitative that allowed for interstitial exposition. The convention began to break down with Wagner, who expanded recitative to epic proportions. In 1867, the Russian composer Alexander Dargomyzhsky took a further step, setting Pushkin’s blank-verse play “The Stone Guest” almost verbatim. Mussorgsky followed with “Boris Godunov,” a Pushkin adaptation on a monumental scale. Thus arose a genre that became known as Literaturoper, because nothing officially exists until it is named in German. Composers did not need librettists at all; they could make direct use of plays and other literary properties. Two formidable prose operas emerged just after 1900: Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande,” a…